So, Jesus wrote a book.  The problem was, no one really would want to read the whole thing.  Well, it wasn't that so much, it was just that if people read the book, they would feel weird.  It would kill all their usual joy.  So, if they were to come back to talk to this nice guy Jesus, there would be a problem, in that they just wanted fun and happiness and the usual, not too deep, not too much a think about things in depth kind of a matter.  Jesus, the buzz kill.  Jesus, the tiresome.  Jesus, who has put a damper on our relationship.  It was fine until he shared his literary achievements with us.

It was pretty much this half assed situation, where the old polite Jesus who had a job and a recognizable place in society, but had revealed the complications of living, of being a human being, with some sense of the deeper truth, of such things like mortality, etc., etc., where Jesus felt a need to do something new, which would of course entail leaving that sort of place he had inhabited, thoughtful, kind, but unable to tell the truth, smiling for the sake of the usual economic stuff.

What Jesus wrote was akin to the very opposite of all commercials.

Two nights into a shortened week, the barman, and he's already thrown way off.  Way off.  Tired.  What's Thanksgiving...  Just another reason to be lonely.

"Don't keep people late tonight, eh, Ted," the boss says, tersely.  The busboy expressed concern when he asked me, coming into the shift, how late the people stayed the night before.  Oh, I don't know.  I was so tired I took a nap, I tell him.  "That's late," he says, in such a way as to express disapproval.  That's how my shift starts out.  After all I do, I'm the bad guy, giving away the house.  A couple had come in after kitchen closing, and the downstairs server set them up with a cheese plate.  Now I'm blamed for the step halfway up the stairs to the bar not being fixed yet.  A thick rubber pad to be glued, blue.

Looking back at a shitty night, and a late couple coming in,  the Uli people coming in at a bad time, mourning him, here from Germany, his high school girlfriend.  Goddamn.  Jeremy coming late, I've got to do the goddamn set up all by myself, me opening the wrong Bordeaux, stressed, setting up fro the private birthday dinner party.   (The private party turns out to be its own story...)  Then the stupid stream of wine night, and then, shit, the night wouldn't give up, not until I climbed on top of it, like on a safari, outlasting them, a bottle of Chinon as a cudgel.

Called upon to share a few tales about our friend for those who loved him.  The late cheese plate couple, it turns out, have come from a dinner party of a regular of ours who lives in a big house around the corner from us.  Earlier I shrink their wine tastes, down to the old middle of the plate Chinon.   They're cool.  The guy is a cyclist.  Doesn't take long to be friends.  And, Mr. Boss, from a business point of view, not only had he purchased a gift certificate for our neighbor, he's asking about having a dinner party for his Fiftieth.



Yeah, Happy Thanksgiving.  Wednesday night, the most complex band, Hot Club of DC.  Five dinners for them.  Drew wants to get them a nice Bordeaux, like the Mongravy, Marguax he had before with Kyle and all late night.   I've got an open Canon Fronsac, only a sip out if it or two.

No, I won't keep them late.  And then Doctor A. comes in for the last half hour sitting quietly, having a glass of bubbly, cool.  He gets it.  He takes in the guitar jam session.  Then later, some guitar talk, John McLaughlin playing a Fender on Spanish Key on the album Bitches Brew over the bar's speaker system.

It's been a night, clearly a strain on me, to be kind.  It's the eve of Thanksgiving.  Hi, happy Thanksgiving, the neighbor couple says, says the couple that comes in at 5:40.  The second one, as they come in early, brusquely, "what do ya want..."  (aka, fuck you too.)  But still, I manage to be hospitable.  The first I speak of, she does holistic medicine across the street. the later couple, again I resurrect my gracious humanity by the skin of my teeth.  Eve of Thanksgiving.  A travel day.  If not, a day to feel very sad and lonesome for not traveling.  You're fucked either way.  Visiting mom the week ago doesn't do it on Thanksgiving Day.

Don't keep people late.  Okay, bro.  Boss leaves without saying good night when we still have a long ways to go.

On the ropes, now you let the night become part of the shitcake blur, the first few innocent sips of wine, richly deserved.

But we have fun, me trying to drown him in champagne, me in leftover Beaujolais Nouveau, after a small bite of salmon tartar.  Watching Manuel figure out how to cut a new blue rubber step, glueing it down.  I shine my iPhone light down on him so he can see better what he's doing, needs to cut it again, but the glue won't set for awhile, so no big deal as he pulls it off, to cut its forward end so its snug as a step.  Doing so, the top of my iPhone screen looks like it's about to fall off, and the little home button key floats up inside, detached from its place above a metallic button.

The good doctor wants to take me up the street for this lavish bite to eat at Breadsoda.  They might still have a chili dog at this hour, a good one.  So we walk up there.  I don't have the strength to go to he Safeway for last odds and ends for a proper Thanksgiving dinner.  I have one glass of pinot and talk to my old bar buddy Matt, largely about our mutual friend, who is now dead.  No, they closed the kitchen, shoot, that's how it goes.  There aren't many young women here, contrary to my hopes.

I figure out later, the quickie burger place is open up the old shitty avenue, about five doors up from where I used to torture myself as a bartender at the old Austin Grill under the EAT sign.  For way too many years.  I get a cab home with a double hamburger wrapped in foil in a paper bag.  I eat it whole, bun and all, sitting there in front of the television, a green towel on top of the Ikea coffee table.  All the experiences of life washed away like Days of Wine and Roses...


If you ever write something down, for whatever reason, amusement, vanity, ambition, the wish for a new career, one more spiritual, less of a physical burden, or simply just to process, you will find out the inadequacy of words.  Truth and reality are things that cannot be expressed, and if they could be, it would by only out of human err.  For every side of everything, there is a yin side, and then also, coexisting, the yang opposite.   And even if you got both sides, the terms you worked so hard for themselves would complete fall short and fail, out of the basic universal non-duality in the existence of all things.

Blind shadow work is what we do.

And after realizing all that, maybe it's now then that you can retire from the writing game.  Without a hint of smug self-satisfaction, but knowing, in some way, that you've told the story of the undefinable of yourself, as if, on a good day, you were working on a form, a negative space into which reality could thence be poured into and moulded quietly.  The secret being, to the mould, that there is nothing there, empty, to be filled by the precious substance of thoughts beyond thought.

I get to work five minutes early, walking through the woods then up past Dumbarton Oaks.  Up early, now I am tired when I find out there is a private party in the back room, wines selected, on top of that the new Alsace pinot blanc for the Tuesday Wine Tasting Night, things to lug up the two flights of stairs from basement cave to the wine bar.  And the bar, as happens when I'm not around,  gone to see mom for a week, is messy, poorly stocked, the beer in confusion, the sink dirty with last night's fruit, the sodas in sloppy disarray, something odd about the rail liquor in the bar bench's rail well.   Disheartening.  Busboy will not be here on time, as always.  And my guy, as always, he too won't be in to help me deal with the customers, coming in from Annapolis, and now close to Thanksgiving, he will be in even later, for which I do not blame him because he will show, he is a good worker, and good moral support.

5:30, door opens, still haven't cut lemon and limes, still looking for a few last stands, regular walks in.  He's back from New York City with restaurant tales.

Then the expected twelve top comes in, ordering cocktails, and then some other regulars, and the handsome couple, a large imposing bearded soft spoken Frenchman with his date, a stylish New York type, blond, spirited, I've got them with a bottle of Chinon, on twenty percent discount, along with seared foie gras and a charcuterie plate.  My friend and coworker arrives, just as things are getting dicey, Old Fashioned, Stoli and soda with lemon and lime, a Tito's martini, shit, no one stocked that, Makers and Ginger, wine shrinking for a second couple arriving, then a few others.  A regular couple, a man with ties to Louisville, comes in with a young woman, but I am too busy to greet him, as I cut an orange.  The Makers and Ginger I make is too strong, the lady asks me to dilute it.  And then old familiar couple comes in to join to birthday party.


At the end of it all, changing back into street clothes on the back landing of the wine room, I lean back like the fallen and, on my back, fall asleep, there with the lights still on, and the old anger of restaurant dreams of unjust shifts.  I wake, it's three thirty five AM, shit, gotta get home, a few final plates to take down to the kitchen.

Earlier, in the unpredictable jumble of walk-in regulars, friends of the man who passed away suddenly.  They have brought me a memento from his house, a tall statue from Africa, dark wooden, a stylized female lifting a drinking vessel.  I put it up on the bar.  I was thinking we might put it here at the restaurant, near the bar, for a way for those who knew him to remember him.  It looks a little unsteady on its base, the statue.  Point them to their table, get some flute glasses ready...  In placing the wooden statue back its bag and into a safe corner, despite my effort to be gentle, falls apart at the top, two pieces detaching from the main structure, the left arm at the shoulder, and also, worse, the head.  A surprise to everyone.  Great.  Sorry.  Just back from the road, feeling a little rattled tonight, the sinking feeling of being pulled down with each arrival, and my coworker tied down by the complications of the familiar group in the back room.  Chaos.


I talk to my Uber driver at the end of the night, now at Four in the morning.   You don't make money at this anymore, he explains.  The impatience of the gig economy.  He finds nice hotels, the bathroom in the lobby, a warm clean place to do your business.  Out at the airport, the company has porto-potty stalls, set up for them, filthy.  Stalls for animal defecation.

Eh.  I don't know...

After returning the white Nissan Altima to the hotel garage, I walk up Calvert, the Omni Shoreham across the street, past a few sleepy restaurants lazily smoldering with the last customers, up to Connecticut Avenue, not much of interest here, Mr. Chen's Organic having closed, then across the bridge high above Rock Creek Park, the parkway, and the horse stables of the Park Police, traffic obeying the turn offs, planes following each other in to the great metropolis blinking in the dark distance of night that is no longer night.  The Chinese embassy building at last nearing completion beyond the chain link fence and the closed in wooden walkway, a recently opened high level sushi restaurant hints of its interior only in the neatness, the stepping stones, the small flags of the patio, its zen front door.

Down past aging hotels, down the hill, and there, on a cold night clear, after all the rain and snow in the upper half of Pennsylvania Route 81 making it slow nervous going, a gibbous moon out, the chill of stars, there is the familiar African American woman seated on a lower stair of the St. Margaret's Episcopal Church.  She too has become a familiar part of my tiring routine of the drive back to Washington, D.C. from up North visiting with Mom.   I think it was last time I gave her the single dollar I had in my pocket, and I joked with her about how oh that will get you far in this town, and she laughed too.  I put a couple of bucks down on the step of her stoop, and she has an Indian blanket draped over her shoulders, and she's just finishing a cigarette.

It's cold, I'd like to get to the grocery store or get some take out Ka Pow, or test my resilience against the temptations of the Bistrot at the corner, where the chef is kind to me, a brother in this business, and I sit down for a little company, good to see you, how you been?

Her father was a Pentacostal minister, so she had a clean if restrictive and regimented youth, church everyday, the world full of evil to be disengaged with, heavy dark garments...

She looks, I would say, a familiar genotype to Louis Armstrong, or to my old friend Herb, mayor of Glover Park, and indeed she has roots in New Orleans and, when she can, cooks in that fashion.

The doors of the foyer of the sheltering church will open at 5:30, but there will be drugged-out hostile homeless men there first, whom she avoids, and the church doors open at 6:00 and they should let women in early so they don't have to deal.   There is a security guard lady from the building across the street, she has friends at the Hilton, and there is a young Bolivian fellow who comes out ofter and smokes a cigarette.  Her name is Brenda.



Returning, it's not easy, but there is quiet to be had.  There is another cold to fight off, the animal flustered,  in the strange routine of helping mom out with her bills, her kitchen, her apartment...  moral support, some odd hours.

Coming in from the road, a seven hour drive accomplished over more than eight hours, including pit stops, the jitters from the bumps of narrow Massachusetts Avenue in rush hour, after coming in with the flow outward from the city backed up all the way to before Frederick, the string of headlights in the darkness outlying the primitive old hills, sirens, flashing lights, firetrucks, emergency crew trucks, the blue flashing light bursts from police cars, and the many lanes of your own traffic to be vigilant over in front and behind, as everyone is racing in to find their narrower roads...  Bumpity, bumpity, over the four lane avenue, up to carefully negotiate the circle of American University, which now takes the steely nerves of a jet pilot, then downhill, apartment buildings, the side lane given to parked cars, down past the woods, then up past the church and the synagog, somewhere up to the left the Cathedral, but the focus being on following the traffic light signals to get across Wisconsin, then the last downhill stretches past the Vice President's Naval Observatory, the British Embassy, the Brazilians, the Italians, then over the bridge, the last few blocks and the left turn, click click lick...  the parking of the car close against the curb of the dirt bank, I get in, use the john, run the water a bit, open the bottle of Kermit Lynch Beaujolais there in the fridge.  After all that, a glass of the red soothes, Jesus Christ, not to take his name in vain.


I'm cold by the time I get back from my chat with my homeless person friend.  She's offered me some good spiritual advice.  Of course I'd lugged my little roller suitcase in, the other bags, shoes, toiletries, the water supplies, cold weather gear.  I open a small carton of chicken bone broth, heat it up and go off to bed leaving the wine to be.


When I wake, still in the morning, as has been the pattern up at Mom's, I self-talk remark to myself, how warped and twisted my life has been these years, the night shifts to support a strange intermittent habit of self pride and the egotistical nature of writing.  And the night shifts are probably the worst part of it, so bad that the wine becomes a crutch, and then you get up late, not having much enthusiasms for the whole thing...


Do you know what 'ego' is, Brenda asks me, after we talk a bit about favorite Scriptures, Job, Daniel, bitter herbs, they ate dandelion root back then, and after my the straight man answer, she reveals it, "Easing God Out."  Asked about my favorite scripture, having expressed my familiarity with Job and Jonah and the story of the Prodigal Son, my answer, "uh, when Peter says, 'depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man,'" her expression tells me, no, fool, that doesn't count...  To be overly anxious about things is to sin against God.

She is optimistic.  People have been kind to her before, and soon, she hopes, she will find a good place to live.


I tell her what I do for a living.  She doesn't seem to find anything wrong with it.  People love that Europe stuff, she tells me, Harry and Meghan, Elizabeth...  Get on TV blah blah blah, here's what goes with this...  She jokes about Gordon Ramsey's TV haircut, Beetlejuice hair... she says, turning away and letting out a good laughing.


This morning bits of the lady's wisdom sifts through the mind.  To listen, to hear, the advising word of God, you need quiet.  Yes, that makes sense.  "Listen to the voice inside yourself, and that's God, too," she tells me, more or less.  "Listen to your breath."   She mentions yoga, and after she elaborates, I offer, yes, there might be some Buddhism in all that, too.


If you were a perfect sceptic, I wonder if you'd hear the old resonance.

But I dislike waiting around to get ready for a night shift.  Take a shower, some yoga.  Walk to work.

I feel stupid these days.
How could you not.
I cannot rest, nor find
smooth burrow in which to read.
My books, my dad's books,
and mom has hers too.

The wine is medicine against
such chill.
the inner empty burn of
lonesomeness.
Three AM.
Dishes and laundry to do.
Maybe a spot of bachelor vacuuming
to get the pumpkin seeds
and the glass broken in the dark
tidied away.
Doomed to walk the night,
to "fast in fires" like Hamlet's father's ghost.
Self-entertainment,
when the television's blue light glow
gets to you.
One can understand why criminals
and Ernest Hemingway would light a fire
against such times.

Who is it who gives professors
the right to prattle on their wisdom
when mine, of no subject but
the earth and the salt in us
the sweat, the closed down sleep
of rocks, goes flying by in the wind.
A bird no one sees.

Most genius is
never realized.
It takes a special effort,
a situation, the right kind
of a guy, a lifestyle,
mark my words.
No care for hour nor light
but knowing that all comes from within,
that the creature can pick up any old thing
and make it work,
an old guitar, a toothbrush, a pen,
a broom.

All one has to do
is dream
is dream and care for all one meets,
his old mom, his old dad's books passed on,
even the work he does, as no one sees it so,
the work of heirs of holy men.

Tired on a day off, after all that, plus the strain of a busy wine-tasting night, again short-staffed.  They know I can handle it, but it raises frustration levels, and the good guy, a long lasting friend arrives when he can to help me out, just as I am nervously wondering about my set-up and worried for not having an orange in case someone orders an Old Fashioned, and already having to make martinis to spec.  Demoralized.  They hit me early.  Belvedere, shades of dirty...  Christ, have a glass of wine.


Day off number two, still tired, and feeling a personal winter setting on.  I left my Kerouac book and Sapiens up at mom's.  I find a pamphlet, a reprint of an old one, my Dad's, on Theosophy, and it's good reading. Mom's all alone up there.  What do I do?  After lazing around all day, I think of Biblical situations, Job, the Prodigal Son, Jonah.  Something is coming.  Perhaps it will be, in the long run, a good thing. A correction.

But in the meanwhile, having stayed in, being a good boy, there is not much juice for something to be squeezed out into written thoughts and accounts.  Perhaps it would be better to do some cleaning anyway, after the trip throwing your routine up in the air.  So it's time, time for that panacea of a nice light red wine, Pinot Noir, or Beaujolais, and I find some good jazz on the radio rather than listening to the News Hour about the latest shooting, a PTSD ex-Marine, shooting up college night in a place called Thousand Oaks out in California, 12 people dead.   Black-eyed peas over cold rice pilaf isn't so exciting, but something for the stomach.  Something to calm the anxious mind.  A bit of red wine.

I have never figured out anything better to do for a living other than being a Christian Buddhist, a Theosophist open to all forms of spiritual experience and expression.  You can only come across such a thing honestly, out of personal experience.   Of course you're going to be highly attracted to the female of the species, starting off.  And such attractions will cause you some of the greatest and long lasting of pains and heartache and forms of anger at injustice you will experience, or at least serve as an introduction to them.  I don't have Wake Up, Kerouac's life of Buddha with me, but, written within, a woman will always be presenting her physical self, enticing you.

And how could you live without that drive, and without that deserved fulfillment after you've fought and earned it and shown how good a householder you are on top of that, not just a moral pillar, a righteous and fair person.  And you, however, have a greater stronger instinctive drive besides the sexual, one toward wisdom, toward goodness, which causes you to understand the importance of the opposite of the sexual drive, that, in Buddhist terms, you must leave the wheel of suffering and constant desire, in order to find a true life, one of freedom.  Sad though all this may be.  Maybe it represents a fresh new starting point, a rebirth, a new line after all your struggles serving meat and booze and weapons of war and realizing finally that such isn't good, all of this letting yourself get bullied by the financial illusions of money and value in the world.

Beware, the Buddha tells us, as far as the Sangha community goes.  Just like all mortal people, they will want to exercise their powers, and this, they instinctively feel, is through the presentation of themselves as able vehicles of reproduction, of birthing the next generation and family.  If one were to resist their power trips, that person will be viewed as a threat, one to be bullied back into the space of male cooperation.  A woman's agenda, perhaps not always, is a mixed one, when the species falls into a situation of concentrated power, as often happens in the city.  Every message a male will send unto them will be received in the woman's mind as a mixed message, and the female quickly gets huffy.

God help the poor young fellow attempting to be a gentleman, respecting her from a distance as the feminist literature might say, 'treat her as an equal.'  God help the poor young fellow who listens to her literally, who does not take her protests as part of the mating dance.  Show any signs of confusion, even if it honest, and she will tear you apart, as much as she might admire your character.

These are lessons that take years, many, to learn.  And once having completed the course, I suppose it would be a bit difficult not to be wry or bitter about the whole thing.   Oh, one says, thanks so much for all those feminist lessons...  Those really helped, yeah right.


(You will all probably consider me a madman for saying all this.  But I know, I have seen it happen in the workplace, then, now, and again.)

What good did all that temptation do you?  Well, the thing is that probably, originally, with a wiseness beyond your own years, you saw through that whole show of temptation.  You didn't necessarily mean to, but you did.  And once you saw of the great illusions, unfortunately for your career as a future householder, you saw the others to all down the line.  The fakeness.  The falseness.  The act.  The insincerity.  The great lie.  Once expressed very well in a book called All Quiet on the Western Front.  The old pro patria mori line.  Sure, teacher, why then don't you go out and sign up?  People and their marvelous opinions they want to share with you.

Enough to make one an old jazzman.  A poor rebel, battling ill health to make his music happen.

Great art is not ironic after all things have been taken into consideration.  The Buddha statued in lotus position in meditative peace enlightenment is not ironic.  Jesus is not ironic.  Most Wyeth paintings are not ironic, picturing a happy life as if in a Coca Cola ad.


You see them at work.  The money changers in the Temple...

In the end there is Buddhism.  Treat all sentient beings with respect.  Don't tangle with women.


My own inner Civil War, fought up close and personal.  Some women kind.  Some women very kind. Many of them being absolute shits to me.  Bullies.  In my face.  Me the harrasser?  Au contraire, my friend...  Au contraire.

My father had looked at a piece of my writing a long time ago.  An American Adam, was a phrase he used for what he perceived of my endeavor at poetry or what-have-you, what I was telling, what I was talking about.

And I suppose without fully realizing it, my efforts here could be described as an attempt at, as silly as it sounds, spiritual journalism.  And I would put Kerouac, or much of his work, into that category, by the way, his telling of the Buddha's story, Wake Up, a sort of background, an inner spine to his other works...



The eve of Halloween...  I need to go see my mom.  The endeavor of renting a car from Enterprise up the street near the Omni Shoreham, packing, and then the question of the timing of the long drive.  Halloween is slow at the Dying Gaul wine bar, typically, too close to Georgetown Halloween hooliganism.  There's nothing on the book.  I get in about five from the hassle of traffic on Massachusetts as college age people, young women in full bloom peruse the avenue's embassies in provocative and enticing outfits.  But I achieve a decent enough bar set-up, building on the set-up I did with my own two hands the exhausting night before.

I eye the staff meal down in the kitchen as I try to get hold of mom on the phone.  (Turns out she'd turned down the ringer on her landline, I find out later.)  Chicken joints hacked into small pieces, in a kind of sauce, I finally have little stomach for.  Wings are okay, good even, but this meal, after so many repeats of it, even the Buddha might say, "nah, I'm not that hungry.". Back in the day we'd get whole chicken, good for a breast man.  I get hold of mom, and at five thirty, we are ready to go.

The waitress server has an outfit for Halloween.  A party to go to at a club catering to the Russian community, down on Connecticut Avenue downtown.  "You want me to close for you, so you can drive up to see your mom?"  I should have said, yes, that would be extremely helpful, but I need the money.

And then after the boss shows up, held up by bridge traffic, we let her go.  She had called him three times earlier in the day, asking if she could have it off.


And then the night gets busy.  The boss sits with his wife for dinner, just as I'm sat with the  last string of people, as the downstairs servers have gone home.  A couple, of high maintenance, wants to sit in the back room, taking the table in the middle of a fourteen seat room.   Another couple comes in at nine, after working on kitchen renovations.  The boss is eating with his wife sharing a bottle of Bordeaux when friends, an older couple from down the road take a seat at the bar, and I recall suddenly that Halloween is their anniversary.   So, of course, a splash of champagne, and they order dessert, and soon the five sitting at the bar, as I run around, are talking of what to do and see and where to stay in Paris, including a gentleman at the end, whom I later let finish the Marguax the boss didn't finish.  I'm running out of paper on my little pad, and it's a great rush to get in orders by kitchen closing, which the kitchen, told by the downstairs servers that it's not busy, and I have my hands full, and busboy is partly attending to wanting to get his own side work done downstairs so he can go home sooner rather than later.  I'm there 'til midnight.  And I don't want to drink, and am half thinking of leaving straight from work.  But I'm shaking driving home, and it's dark out, and I am fried, physically and emotionally, and the wine does its job, two glasses of Pinot Noir once I am back, ready to load the car parked out on the quiet street.  It calms me down, yes it does, and I need such medicine for all I face now in life at age fifty three going on four.  Lincoln made it to fifty six, and it didn't let up on him until his final weeks.

I lay down in bed, with iPhone alarm set for a forty minute nap, and I take a little bit longer, and by six forty five, I'm showered, ready to go, a splash of green tea, water bottles full, a quick gluten-free turkey sandwich down the hatch, the phone charged, etc.


So, there we go, up Massachusetts, up around the traffic circle at American University, and in the darkness I stop for a jogger in the cross walk, and he waves, thanks.  Up the hill, Ward Circle, and onward toward River Road, up another hill and over it, and the light behind me and to the East is starting its blueish glow in the rear view.  Past one bit of construction that confuses me on River, I get honked at, but then I am taking the slow rounded slope onto the Beltway, and it is not quiet at this hour, but I am able to merge, left, left, and then again left, and again, to make the split to the 270 spur.  Going forward now, Northwest, cruising along okay, but coming toward me in the other direction, miles upon miles of headlights, merging lanes, traffic at a standstill, and what are we doing to this earth we live on and unto ourselves....

There's a ground fog, low on the banks and fields of the Monocacy River, the land left to nature, as I drive on to Frederick.  The same mist on the fields that have survived the rapacious town home development and highway overpasses as I drive north east along Route 15...


And then it's the usual... the push on past Round Top little mountains in the distance of Gettysburg, the sun out over rolling Civil War country, old Pennsylvania type barns of brick and stone bases and wooden rafters, beams, siding...  Corn.  Earlier the beautiful passage through the Catoctin...

Stopping at the shopping mall south of Harrisburg, to use the restroom at McDonalds and gas from the Giant gas station...  Clouds to the North, looking just like the mountains of the Blue Ridge, moisture in the clouds I will be passing through.

Then onward, onto the PA Turnpike to skirt eastward around the city along the Susquehanna and the military storage warehouses, over the river, fog, the toll plaza, and through the city and onto 81...

81 splits off after the flats and farms and uncertain commercial lots, one for car auctions, and heads into the mountains, soon rising, and here the trucks in the right lane to face the climbing roads...

I get through to mom at some point, as I ease down into Scranton, looking for the 76, the toll road worth every penny, a direct route without traffic that drops you finally back onto 81.  NPR is playing a piece about the long history of political activism in sports in particular the NBA.

Just get here safe, Mom tells me.

I forget where I ate my double quarter pounder no cheese with knife and fork.  Harrisburg, I suppose, just as they switched over from the breakfast menu.

Yes, we will go to the Press Box when I get there, due in about 2:30 to Oswego...


I am relieved coming in the door.  The kitchen is not so clean, and there is a garbage smell lingering.  There are fruit flies this year, in my house too.  An open cat food can on the counter, and in the fridge, but she is still there with us, and spry even at almost 80.  She's been having her moments of confusion.   But over dinner, she is lucid and happy, a good conversationalist, and later we talk about what's going on in my job.  After the nap from eating and drinking so early, we have a grand chat about how Buddhism is true to these very times.

Stories from work about the people who do say, 'I'm very sorry for your friend,' and those who say nothing, absolutely, about it, as if it were something unpleasant to sweep to the side, to not look at as we consume.  They knew him too.  They spoke with him too.  They exchanged chuckling remarks too with him over dinner and wine at the bar later on in the night.  Coldness in people's hearts, I see.  This is all about making money, as if, as if...  Rather than the humanity of the thing, for the Christian minded, for the Buddhist, and for those of Islam who understand that wine can be, according to Issa, a medicinal important to the mathematics of being alive with a mind and all.  Oh, well.  Maybe it's a cultural thing.

It's a wonderful conversation over the dinner table at one in the morning.  We talk about her taking her medicine.  She might have, according to a recent visit to the ER, which pains me to mention, a UTI, and we are going to see the doctor down in Fulton tomorrow, after an earlier appointment with the lady from Social Services, oh boy.

Write this down, she tells me, as I describe the long Fellini horror of all those trucks and busses and cars and vehicles with human souls in them stuck in the unmoving traffic on 270 motionless from Rockville and further back down the line into DC or the Beltway, madness.  Those long lines, that is where our spirit of economic competition and selfish look out for number one economically have led us to.  It's amazing it still even works, strung out more and more on the most ethereal of economic vapors of promise, as if technology of the high will save us somehow rather than destroy.

And I tell my mom, it is because I am naturally gifted at what I do, ostensibly, bar tending, on the outside, to appearances, that bring the people back to me, so that they, many, are driven to say aloud, behold the man, you are very very good at what you do.  As I along the same lines, tell them, well, I'm not sure exactly what I do, but that I see the same on the other side of the bar.

And earlier, as the door opened, as I stuffed check presenters with the little fliers about next weeks wine tasting and jazz nights, etc., and the little sign up for our email, sitting, then going down, I'll be right back, I'm going to check in the basement closet if there are any more water glasses to be had, a few odds and ends that will at one moment make a difference, smooth rather than monkey wrench stop, when I come back and settle in, after she, my co worker, lets leave it at that, has poured him his first glass, I am down on my knees rising from the cooler having restocked a few finishing touches, I rise and ask him, 'hey, sir, where you coming in from today..."

And it turneth out that he hails from Texas, from around Dallas.  Well, I've been to Austin and the Hill Country, granted, a long time ago.  Love Texas hospitality, friendliness, music, food, culture, story telling...  And soon enough we are having, me and him, just, a great conversation.  He did go to UT.  Now he's in investments, reasonably happy.  He's tall and thin, and looks Texan, indeed, from Scotch Irish.  His wife is out of town.

His father had a car dealership back in the day.  Plymouth Chrysler...  He and his brother grew up on the lot, and you learn a lot in such a place, and I know this from my mom's kind mechanic up North....

I'm about to go out of mind with fear and anxiety, but in such a state, there are no beams in the eye between myself and good Bill from TX.  My coworker dutifully goes about the few other tables, officiously, covering the bases.  The man's father kept a local guy around, a helper, whom he'd sometimes fire on Friday, but the guy would come back on Monday, and what the hey, African American guy, named LD.  Lawyer Dallas.  And he says, funny you would ask me that, and all the question that led up to us discussing life's essentials in an eery way...

Yeah, man, I'm Irish, thus it's hard to tell the difference between being a mamma's boy and the literary parts of story telling...  And all the rest.  The bardic wine glass of life...  He gets it, and even with the shade of grey different from, say, 60 to going on 54, there ain't much difference.  And I knew he's the one who can offer more advice upon this life stuff.

Hey, as long as you like what you're doing, that works.  Who's to say...

I could get tired of that message, but yet, it works, still, somehow, though the uneasy and sometimes horrible truths to stomach have forced me toward a Buddhist view, which is to say, a Christian view, and maybe even Islamic, depending what cultural lens you are using.  You don't discriminate against me, I won't discriminate against you.

The man from Texas is the reason I want to stay this night, just to complete the cycle of conversation, as is due to any Christian mind, to get closer to that which one sees when he puts away childish things, sees through the glass, no longer speaking as a child, being a child, but becoming "a man."  I need these days at the old Gaul to remind myself of the meaning of my work, valid as the work of any professionally qualified therapist, and really much finer and better than that dreary exercise of sitting in offices in some miserable city of some miserable empire....



Elaine Pagels, scholar of The Gnostic Gospels, not a stranger to tragedy, son and husband lost within a year, is on Terry Gross, Fresh Air, as I endure traffic crossing from Indian Town Gap on the last marches to Harrisburg.  At the rest stop there, westward, on the in ramp, a tractor trailer has had to pull off to the inside, ripping up the green turf of November, tires sunk in deep.  To merge back into traffic from the exit of the rest stop is difficult to make stopping here a bad idea.  And further up ahead, a tandem tractor trailer has spilt a pile of hay, still green and moist, as if a giant insect had excreted it, as if in some Japanese monster horror film.  As I approach, slowed, the turned-over truck's body and chassis are more evident.  They have just hauled off the cab, a Mack, older than you usually see these days, white paint, bent frame, driver compartment crushed in atop at the driver's side, and hard to tell which side of the highway from which it came even by the tracks here in the field median.  Slowed, on this last approach, one looks out the driver side window onto the median, and there is lots of detritus.  Deeply dug earth exposing dirt tire tracks telling stories of crashes.  Bits of plastic, cracked of in the explosion of vehicles.  Dead deer, cut in half, crushed, ripped into small pieces, or whole, dying broken within.  Coyotes, even hawks.  Lots of road kill the whole way.  One thinks he grows immune to it but each sight of a deer sagged in death or cut horrible apart, carnage, hurts one to see.  Why are we doing all this, one wonders.   And even more deer all along, all along this long route of eight hours driving.  Is all this straw?  Why?  Bedding or fodder?  Farm transport?   Old grass, still green and moist, aged, now spread out across the space between north and south double lanes of 81...

Elaine Pagels returning to life, praying, meditating with the Trappists...  And coming upon the oldest texts of the early Christian life, and gospels heretical quoting Jesus saying that one must bring out that which is within, and that if you do not bring out bring out that which is within, that which is within will destroy you....  And Jesus, a Buddhist, more or less, "lift a rock and I am there, I am there when wood is split, I am there..."   It turns out she knew Jerry Garcia when she was a high school student.  A friend of hers died, in fact, in a car accident that Jerry was in as well, and Jerry went through the windshield.  Grateful Dead, no wonder.



Shake the dust of the offending town in which thou art unwelcome off thy feet, Jesus tells us.  The Buddha would have said, more or less, the same.  For therein shall be a good lesson, a learning, the lotus flower of wisdom.

It's been raining at least lightly, misting, the entire route, from Oswego on down.  I stopped to take a nap at the rest stop near Whitney Point.  After nine hours I am closing in on the Beltway, and in this traffic I decide not to take the usual turn, which involves a sharp merger to the right to get onto River, but instead take Old Georgetown Road, which confuses me in the dark with all the lights.  Slow going.

It's about quarter of seven when I get in to the basement of the restaurant, coming in through the back door, changing into a shirt suitable for work.  The main dining room is already two thirds full, and upstairs at the bar it is busy too, and an old friend is waiting for my arrival at the first seat the bar, a man who cycles, in great shape, biked up some of the great cols of the Tour in the Alps, and who has read my book.  I do not like running late to work, and the bar lacks a good set-up, no fruit cut, no mineral water in the cooler, the popular whites Sancerre and Macon Village not backed up so well either.

Later, the next day, at the end of the trying jazz night akin to being dunked in a river, I find out my server friend, the one with her costume who left early Halloween night gives me credit for only half a shift.  Come on.  All the times I let her come in late, no problem, giving her a full shift on our little checkout report...

Time for work.  Tired today.

I have neglected the Dharma.  That's an easy thing to do here in the USA.

What have I missed, what have I missed.

A thousand million thoughts, even in a single day, carried on the blood.


So I went out for a walk, heeding the advice given to Type O people, aerobic exercise.  I'm weary, still feeling the wear and tear from the week.  Evening rush hour traffic along the avenue, headlamps, taillights, noise, the Cameroon Embassy receiving finishing polish after a long vacancy and long construction period, past the Irish Patriot statue, Chinese diplomat staff walking up alongside, I take the quiet route, up 24th Street, which has a nice dark quietness to it, angling away from Mass. Ave. into the finer homes of Kalorama, then up the hill, past Tracy Place, past the corner garden, up past the Sultanate of Oman, unprepared to see a Halloween skeleton hanging from its flagpole, a little much I think, then to the road that goes past the New England sea captain house, down past Ivanka's house, then down to the EU Embassy and the road block, then the mighty tree and the mosque lit for evening prayer.  I am walking slowly.  I hate to walk past any house of religious or spiritual service or house of prayer, but I am out following doctor's orders, and off over the bridge, crossing it, then down onto a patch of grass that drops down into the park's woodlands along the streams.  Ten yards away from the street, a safe feeling, the road's jumble hushed and forgotten behind me as I walk on grass.

In the darkness to my right, above the drop off down to the creek flats, in a sort of clearing beneath the edge of the rising forest, a lone deer, lying down in the tall grasses, her head up, looking at me, ears picking up the broadcast, motionless.  But not for the light color of her face I might not have noticed her.  I stop, and sit down, and she remains there, looking at me, still.  Hello.  I sit there a few minutes, and then I carefully rise and go about my walk.  Down the hill, and onto the sidewalk, then crossing the street before I shall turn around and head back.  There is a Washington party in a grand house with a big picture window revealing an oil painting, and the party is just breaking up, an elderly couple waiting for the Uber, a black Camry, the old lady, hunched over with a cane, announces to her gentleman.

The street rises to the corner, large mansions now, behind fences, and then down into the woods below Woodlawn Terrace, a street closed off for construction.  I've made it further than I might have expected, and now it's time to head back.  I used to bike a lot down here on my road bike, even at night with my flashing lights and headlamp, taking the steep hills ion repeat under the street lamps, not much traffic down here.   Up I come, quietly up the long meadow by the tree line, here and there a good sized stand of trees where the lawn is mowed.

The deer is still in her spot, just as I left her.  Facing to the side, up the slight slope, I sit down on the grass.  I whistle the theme from High Noon, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling, to her and she remains still.  Then I give her a little Ode to Joy.  A man I see in the woods as I go to work, on the other side of the great avenue, who had never said a word or acknowledged me in anyway, hat and gloves, shorts in the cool weather, once responded to a benign comment that there was a deer who did not mind if you sang to her, close, not far from the path, and I took that to heart.

I lie back on the grass, looking up at a milky sky, and even with the sound of the rush hour and the road, oddly I smell the earth in a way I have not upon my evening walk seeing how far humanity has come and how still there are the woods and the sounds of the night, the call of the bat, a distant owl.  And when I rise, I get up slowly, nodding to the lone deer.  And I walk away, back toward my life, and the avenue and the light from headlamps approaching me.  Before the sidewalk, I turn back.  The deer has come out, stepping slowly, and she bows her head, to sniff the earth where I lay.  And I wish I'd brought an apple or something to offer her, next time.  I stand watching her, and she raises her head to scratch her flank with her nuzzle.  I walk down a few steps toward her, then stop.  She tiptoes slowly back to her bedding place, having to point her legs to accomplish the necessary gangly motions, curling back down.

The full moon has come out low in the sky as I walk back along the high bridge, poking up from behind the damp curtain of cloud.  I walk back to the quiet street.

Where to start, where to start.

It was all about the adrenaline.  He'd fallen for the job, because it kept him active.  Continuous motion for eight hours plus.  And the adrenaline always fired, even as he groaned his way to walk and through the mis-en-place crucial set-up, always extensive, the building of castle walls to last through the evening through the last wave of invaders.  The adrenaline always fired, just about when the first customer came in, and hopefully he'd gone through his list and gotten everything in place down the last extra lemons and limes, the hot water for tea, folded cloth napkins for the glassware, terrycloth towel bar rags to wipe down and also to keep his hands dry, one through his belt worn behind him, as he often washed his hands.

And when they were all gone, after the busy hectic night, controlling what could be controlled, toward the end, the glass of wine tasted pretty good, particularly by the end of the week as he completed his last duties, the cash-out report, the last wipe-down of the slate bar top that had born his hands and the work of his hands for fourteen years now, he could have a moment of perfect peace, the top of the mountain finally reached, and no particular need to leave after clocking out, but to enjoy, even alone, the view from the summit.


The adrenaline.  As a Type O blood type, he had come to realize the need was not for stimulants, like caffeine, nor alcohol, but for ways to naturally harness the flame of the blood lest it push his mind too much, to walk it all off at the end of the night.   Emphasis on the importance of aerobic exercise, the calming influence of yoga...

After four nights of it, the human being was tired.    The throat was dry, and lethargy had set in.  Bed was a nice warm cave, extremely comfortable for the old body that had done so much without so much realizing it.  The hunt, just like a big cat, the stalking, the movements of stealth, and then the attack, the lunge, the wild chase, the final closing the distance and the take down.  The big cat needed rest.

It was hard enough, hard enough even understanding this about himself.  Who could blame the non-type Os, the officious farmer type As, the Mongol horde city dweller omnivore running roughshod, no real issues to deal with, a vinegar eater, for not intuitively getting it...  An A would be perfectly happy eating legumes and being a vegetarian.  The Mongol B was too ruthless to worry about his own body.  Such strategies would not work for an O, not for a day, not for a momentary lapse.

High strung nature itself, to blame...

Washed up upon this alien shore of modern life.  The body craved physical activity, projects for the hands.  Even reading could be difficult.

He had read voraciously as a child.  But then, somewhere in college, to his surprise and consternation, it suddenly became hard to read, and hard to read quickly.  He wished to physically feel, to sense each word, and it was this that caused him to leap up at the art of the early Hemingway short stories, boyhood up in a vanishing Michigan of Twain dreams and nature writing.  The physicality, jumping up off the page...  A museum rendered in words, a safari in an Eliot poem hiding in plain sight...

The body.  That is all we know.  The body.  Its ways of motion.  And thus each living being able to take somewhat decent care of himself is, by wits, a doctor.  And perhaps when you are such a doctor, for your own make-up, your year and model number, then you are adapted to render forth from it, out of the inner glow, the inner light, the engine room, the furnace, the invisible agreements that keep the blood flowing, a doctor of your own, if you will, your own church.


He woke with an uneasy memory.  A memory of drinking days, wasted years.  The Austin Grill.   A wild man, unsupervised but by other restaurant people and barkeeps.  A man craves for his tribe, and at the end of the dayshift, grab a bite to eat, and then friends come in, a tribe, and so you stay and have a beer.

Now such days made him sad.  Wasted years now witnessed by this career, or rather lack of one.  It did not help the big cats to hang out so, in such company of such a tribe.



It occurs to him, a continuous sense of it running all through his adult life, that the judgments rendered against him were essentially unfair.  Those who judged him, one way or another, were not taking the larger more intimate full picture of this human being washed up upon an alien shore.  And their habits of judgment were set within a group of behavior that had created notions of property, mine, not yours, my land, not yours, my wealth, not yours, that had created things like the Nazi, the Stassi, the Gestapo, the KGB.  There simply exist people who take great relish in the power trip of calling out other people for their sins, finger pointers, accusers, the mis-intrepters of the fundamentally well-intentioned kind generous healthy human being.  The human being is au fond an animal, thus prone to hi-jinx, to getting into places and situations, perhaps out of boredom, where it is not always best for him to be.  But can you blame the individual for that?  Can you blame the animal for that longing need to pace for miles and miles in the jungle of the night, indeed burning very bright...

We give the animal who would naturally roam unencumbered a key to a certain set of things given financial value in society, allowing the beast to participate in trade, quite blindly, but for the very shrewd and the accusative types, the cop mentality.  The proverbial fox in a henhouse... what to do?  A very sad situation.


How else could you explain the harshness in the air, the electricity of hatred and charges...


What is it that ails you, O Lazarus?

I am man of cravings, O Lord.  I crave death.

No, you don't.  That's nonsense, Lazarus.  You're  a good man.  It's just your blood type.  And who can help that, my friend...  Go howl at the moon.  In good health.

But of my literary career, O Lord, what should I do...

Eh.  Don't worry about it.  Less worry the better.  As with all things, as with the bird and the bird's nest, nature takes care of itself, knowing what to do in time.  Rely upon thy natural sense to figure things out.  In the meantime, what can you do but go for a walk, underneath the stars, which also take care of themselves.  I went out to the desert for forty days, knowing nature would take care of everything.

And Jesus, and within him all the other prophets, their spirits and their history, came up out of the woods, wearily walking up the steep paved road and out onto the bricked sidewalk in front of the mansion with its gardens.  With all his concerns and having to go to work, distracted, bored by the continuous pressure, he saw a fancy woman up ahead, with her hat and her coat, clever style, and her brindle brown dog.  And Jesus sayeth unto himself as he saw the dog, and the sun on the grass between the brick sidewalk and the road, commanded the dog, please, oh yes, yes, that's it, take a nice shit, dog, yes....  And Jesus looked at the dog, and began to smile, and the dog walked up past one small planted tree, and then drew himself down, the dog, haunched down and the lady and the dog and Jesus knew what was coming, and indeed soon in a few steps there was that volcanic warm turd smell of bound weeds, dirt, warm mud decay, jungle and earth, and the lady was now reaching down, her hat with a fancy visor that was a sort of trademark for the fancy ladies of such a neighborhood, with a plastic bag to contain such a warm loaf little log of differing soft textures of hot poop dog shit.  And Jesus knew he had commanded it.


And Jesus smiled.  His first real miracle of will.  He'd never really tried it before.  But, it was a bit fun, actually.



And then, later at work, they had figured a way to staff the evening so that he didn't have to close.  He stayed at the bar, after clocking out, eating his salmon tartar.  There was a couple at the bar, he was friendly with, and an older couple.  He gave them each a copy of his book, the roman a clef.


As he was about to leave, changing out of his work shirt and shoes in the office at the end of the restroom hallway, he heard the old busboy Simon Peter talking shit about him...  "Why he don't go home right away."  And Jesus felt a need to explain, as he came out of hiding, why he'd lingered, having a friendly conversation with his old friend, the 87 year old gentleman of Nubian color skin, who had sat with a fun elderly woman with whom Jesus flirted with, "I've know that guy for 25 years....  Maybe thirty..."  And then he left, down the stairs, out the door, across the avenue, and into the  night.  And how many times had he closed the place so that the others could go home earlier than he, unselfishly.

He walked home, along the mansion walls, along the park where the light pollution was less, then by the cemetery gates and the iron fence along the brick sidewalk from which he could look down and see the still tombstones guarding the memory of the dead at night, perfectly quiet, and before he knew it, he was crossing the curved bridge with the Buffalo at both ends and up past the Turks and up past the circle with the general on horseback, holding his hat back, immortalized in a moment of calling forward, leading his troops.  And then the quiet street, and up the steps, quietly unlocking the door.


Walking the same path to work, coming through the woods from Massachusetts Avenue down to the stream and then up the long paved steep road with the garden wall above the stones of a drainage path where chipmunks lit about into holes in the stone's mortar, out onto the brick sidewalk, past the famous miracle of the shitting dog, he stopped for a moment, the afternoon sun over the big houses of Upper Georgetown, looked down and saw something that looked like a hair clip.  He reached down to it, and there it was, the silver tie clasp his mother had given him for Christmas a few years before, upside down against the brick wall, waiting for him, and how it got there, who knows, but that the man went past there going both to and fro, to work, back home.

This Be Fiction.


First of All.

First of all, first of all, let me tell you, that indeed, I am a momma's boy.  At this late age, late in the game, I'm coming to grips with that, and of how I've spent my life.  The problem is, you see, that she was the one who taught me to read, even when I was four and didn't want to read, there with Richard Scarry and the help of drawings I liked and Huckleberry, the cat, who was me.  And then I got it, and reading what not so bad after all.

Drew I did, a lot.  But eventually, the words themselves came to replace the drawing, after they had trained my eye, to awkwardly pick up what there is in writing.

Mom's home has always been a pile of books, everywhere, and my own disheveled piles of books, glorious as they are, are getting to be the thirty-years-earlier version, even creeping on my bed now, as her bed has been overrun.



And so, and so...  my problem is one of self-acceptance, and perhaps it always has.  I go do yoga out with my mat in a garden on top the flag stones warmed by the October sun.  My guts groan.   My lower back is sore still, but a shoulder stand and a better plough today than yesterday.  I am off today.  I do not wish the phone to ring.  I enjoy the peace found in yoking the body and the self within to yoga.

Light layer of cotton clouds move in on the sunshine, and I go back inside with my mat, to refresh my cup of muddled lime, turmeric and sea salt, hot water.

Self-acceptance...  what does that look like?  What does that mean for an old mamma's boy who can't keep up with the silverback gorillas, male and husbands, providers, neat lives, striving men and women adapted to the city and the information age, to the subtle call-out of the little guy on his falsehoods of livelihoods and career self-lies...

What does that mean as one works himself, his body, limbs, chakras, spine into better balance and tune...  What do all these books about mean, if I had the clarity that has to be reinforced somehow has a habit, in quietude, peace and quiet...

What if... what if I were allow myself the space to be myself, to not try to fit in with places and people with whom I don't belong, trying half-heartedly, knowing subconsciously that the act is not me, and no wonder they keep the illusion that is me at a distance, not seeing the deeply sensitive god-forbid-male and the spirit within the act.

Fitting in, is so automatic, of course, these days, the culture wars, the culture police...

How to admit after years and years of act, hey, friends, this isn't really me.

Yes, one day with my mother old I went and did yoga in the back in the garden and saw fresh inner life wanting finally to come out.  I remembered being comfortable as I had been when I was a kid, reading, drawing....


There is something about that old pose, the Lotus.  Strength is a good word for it.   Personal, inner, steady in the flux of the world.  Not pandering to a crowd.



I have always trusted my mother.  But she, because of her childhood and what she saw, her parents coming home from the restaurants, drinking and fighting, is anxious, hard to work with, questioning the motives of others, even as she is politically astute.  High strung.

Immediately after college, I was just about her only help, when she went off to grad school, out on her own.  And without knowing it, this troubled me, depressed me some, enough so that I never really had the energy to start my own career or life.  There was Hilde from my hometown, who I was in bed with at my father's, but I had to go help my mom move from one apartment to another in a different town, showing up late, with her crying over the kitchen sink.

"She's sucking the life out of you," my brother would tell me.

And indeed, psychologically I go around with a caution toward engaging with women.  And if that is so, then the rewards for being an adult, if you don't find a mate, for love and comfort, are decreased, and so the desire to get the grown-up professional life that goes along with that.


Work then becomes like the carrying of the Cross, or a retreat into the Buddhist monastery.  And along with that a sense, the inevitable spirituality, at least in the effort to find something worthy of it all far beyond financial renumeration.

In the old days, people grew up together, in lives that had traumatic things seen up close.  Death was seen up close.  19th Century stuff.  Reflect on Kerouac's life, poor little Gerard, the Merrimac flood that took his father's printing business, his father's illness, death lived up close, as it was for my own father whose mother died of consumption in an upstairs room.

So do authors retreat into childhood and adolescence...  And thus were generations upon generations of us susceptible to the joys of literature, Biblical stories, novels, stories.

Whereas now one wonders if we don't rather tend to put a clean hands-off electronic distance between ourselves and stories of note and sad immeasurable things.  Life prepared us for the great irrationalities known through myth and retold.  And now our myths are Apple, Google, Amazon, robots, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and checkout stands.

And things written down, in the effort of clarity, are laughable pursuits these days, like this.


I get home, first night of a new week.  I read Larkin poems.



But what can you do?  Try to find some meaning in life...

Poor old dreary O'Leary...

My mind is shit as I wake.  Have to go rent the car for the trip up to mom.

What are these stones, these bones
Of which I am built...  are they alive
As much as me?
Just as I am, too?
Wise enough men tell me it is so,
That even the atoms of the deepest
thickness of our bones
change themselves out for
Fresh ones,
As if ordering carry out.
New, no need to do dishes.
One more thing we exchange,
in constant flux,
with the world,
the universe, the stardust around us.
But in my hand, even,
along the knuckle,
here they are, old high crags
And mountain tops,
And undersea continental shelves,
Or old plateaus pushed upward, left
There when all else got washed away.

I went and did some yoga in the backyard.  Mid-October.  Sunny.  Blue sky.  My lower back stiff and compressed, slowly going into the simple basic easy poses to take at one's own pace...  the satisfaction of receiving the sun's rays and the beauty of daylight.  Back too tight for a fully reaching Plow pose, but a good headstand.  Muscles work together, though for the practitioner yoga is always a welcome mystery.


Of many yoga poses one feels strong in the Lotus.  The back is straight, chakras aligned.  A warmth going through the pelvis and gluteus.  The torso has a sudden fresh strong feeling brought over from Warrior Pose and Tree.    The serpent flame is lit, keeping the nervous system invigorated, as it can only be by motion and body alignment and bodily activity.


The lotus flower of translucent reality shines through.  Perhaps there is no God, a personal bearded guy in the sky, in particular, but yet still, and always, there are wise people, ones who can express that which seems fictional, is like a fiction, like all things human beings must believe in to cooperate in systems, religion, government, banking, tribe, nation, but which is in keeping with the deepest and truest understandings we are capable of in considering our greater reality as living in this existence we share.

To tell, to speak of, deeper reality, one will never be paid, never be rich upon financial terms for doing such work, but yet will be rewarded, in kind, only asking for a modest occasional understanding, along with a basic sense of what is right and true and good.


Tending bar, aside from its physical delivery of all things of a good dinner, had the deeper, the spiritual element, the serving of a fundamental need we must include in all standards of life.

Tending bar was a good thing.  A thing of the Mohammed's welcoming and inclusive community Mosque as originally intended, no judgement, no requirement of particular belief in order to find belonging.

Tending bar might have even been exactly what I'd been looking for in life, though, like yoga, it remained strange and refreshing.


In a way it was gratuitously easy to be nice to people, to smile and have fun with them, to allow for some irreverent humor.  The old Dying Gaul was the perfect place for it.  In that I always had great faith in.  John F. Kennedy's a place to go to every day, to not go crazy.

The humor and hospitality combined with the precise motions and movements of keeping bar, of keeping water glasses filled on the tables, clearing plates, pouring wine, making the occasional gimlet or martini, comedy of physical and verbal kinds mixed with a mild non-violent martial art...  Only the tediousness of trying to get everyone in and out of the bar's mouth, its opening out on the dining room, complicated by the passing on of dirty plates and the dishwasher needing to be door down and open to clean the next load of glassware coming out warm and in need of being wiped with cloth napkins.

At the end of the night dodging the busboy as he huffed and puffed, sweeping up, taking out the bottles in the recycling bin, the trash bag, the dirty linens, as quickly as he could.  Included in the list that things that made me nervous, as nervous as the arrival of the late night people...


Growth in anything has the potential to be of the organic kind, the growth of a sapling into a tree.  I figured so when I left one restaurant life and moved on to another more personal one.   Does the living being in the state of evolving through growth and increasing in maturity know particularly where that might take him?



The original homo sapien, a forager, had many talents, much expertise, great dexterity, knowledge of his world on an intimate basis.   On top of that, he was in decent shape, and nor did he have too many possessions to weigh himself down.

The restaurant was the closest kind of a life to that, that I could find, for better or worse.  I found this inherent honesty toward the original and still living creature that had evolved, having evolved in a natural setting.

I'd say by my birth, in 1965, this original creature was about to go through changes to the world which would bring great stress to him.  That's why I looked up to Shane MacGowsn, as a vestige, a surviving member of those original talented human creatures, before we all got industrialized..:

Crap:

I guess some days you write in a state of uncertainty as to whether or not you've said the thoughts that pass through the brain.  Did I say that, or maybe I didn't...

Perhaps some day one will look back at their work and see it as a state of being "on the road."

The bar is like a river.  It's never the same, always flowing.  You put your foot in it, but it is change as much as it is the same.  No mood is the same.  No conversation, no spark of hospitality is ever the same.

I have an affection for restaurant people.  Chefs.  The front of the house people.  I felt a need;  I wanted to help them out.  And I thought, perhaps in being able to help them out, in whatever small way  I could, I would be then closer to discovering the things of deeper meaning and that sort of a thing.


After work I went to the Safeway.  I'd been on the road for a week, visiting with mom, helping her out.  The downstairs server had told me she would be floating between to the two floors, and I was busy from the moment the door opened, and held back from doing certain last minute things on account of being bitched at by the boss for getting frustrated one night and lightly punching the door to the bar closet a week or so before toward the end of the shift, the downstairs person leaving me to be.  She took it upon herself to tell the boss of my failings.  We were short staffed that night.  And then here we are, again, unprepared for the surprises of a night, the walk-ins, and the place is filling up and it's jazz night.  My back is sore from being compressed in the car, and too many potatoes.  My server helper is gone, from what I can tell, about 9:30, at which point my credit card tips haven't been entered and there is everything left to clean and still miles of glassware.  I'm there 'til 3:00 AM putting the bar back together after my week away,

My Uber friend turned out to be Liberian.  We have a good chat.

Somewhere along the line I've learned that some people take to being helped out.  And there are other people who are less gracious, more expectant perhaps.  And who knows which kind of person one is himself.  Perhaps there are people, perhaps like me, who are so intent on helping other people out that they are so stubbornly independent that they have a hard time asking.  Thinking, I mean, it's a given.  Of course people need to be helped out!  Don't be so selfish...

To paraphrase Wilde, no great artist ever sees things as they really are.  If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

When the barman needs it, his friends come to him to support him.

The chef's friend, lovely lady from Cote D'Ivoire, an artist, comes to help me mourn the sudden passing away of the long time regular.  She reinforces the support the chef has for my place at the old bistrot.  We talk about reading the Old Testament.

The moral support of work shines on me again.  You put so much into it, she tells me.  It's your bar. Give the chef a call.

And I feel better about things, having found the Biblical dignity of working the God's vineyard, administering to His vines.

I turn on the Bose to listen to the radio for work, news on Trump's politics, winning the next battle, his focus, and it is all bad parenting, very bad.


With Carman, late at night, playing guitar as a tribute to Uli, I returned, in the Fall, to the Bible.  To the spirituality of work, by which I mean.  And for the first time in a long time, I took breaths without as much fear and generalized anxiety.  I had found the essence of my job, and as I say, it was one hundred percent a spiritual practice, which sometimes, blinded by concerns, we do not see.

I suppose such things can only come through stress and journeys...

Dear Lord, one true sentence.


It is raining, lighter now, and over the hills with orange and yellow and still some green in the trees, I can hear a football game announcer, and then as I walk in the parking lot, The National Anthem.  It's roughly one thirty in the afternoon, and I've been trying to get on the road, leaving my mother's town home apartment, to drive back to Washington, D.C.  In my own clutter and hers, I cannot find my second pair of eyeglasses, the ones with the James Dean clip-on sunglass lenses, horn-rimmed, the black RayBan case my heavier pair, graduated distance to reading, came in.  I have to drive south, a long ways, the highway.  Into the sun as it lowers in the afternoon sky as I race toward Harrisburg,

I went back into the house several times, mom telling me, get on the road already.  I'm better at packing now, an LL Bean canvas large tote bag, a rolling suitcase, my green air mattress, a backpack. I have it all, but when I look through the rental white Malibu I cannot confirm I have this pair of glasses.  My lower back hurts.  I'm not looking forward to being on the road seven hours.  I was thinking of driving back yesterday.

The day before, as the doctor recommended, I took mom down to Wayne's drugstore to get her a flu shot.  The local Rite Aid was out of the Shingrex vaccine, and I needed the second part of it, and so I asked, and they said, at the counter, sure, no problem.  Mom was in the room getting her flu shot, then the guy asked me in.  He loaded up the needle, mixing two liquids from small vials.  "You're going to be feeling flu-like symptoms," he said.  My arm hurt the first time around.  The second one is different, he explained, as far as the body's reaction, having been primed by the first part of the vaccine.

We walked out into the day and continued on to the Port City Deli there on the main street, the wind gusting off the lake.

And the next day, I woke up aching all over and not wanting to move.  Not the day to be driving.  One more day with Mom, why not.  She kindly lets me retreat to my air mattress, my coat over me, after lunch, and I fall asleep.  Sleep has not been easy up here.


In helping me look for my eyeglasses case, Mom, coming over to the car in her bathrobe as the rain started up again, was bent over going through my thitngs.  "Oww!   God damn it"  Her finger tip is bleeding.  I feel my posture sag.   Yes, I know what had happened. my toilet kit, my Harry's razor.

Back in the house, a paper towel over her index finger.  At the sink.  I pour some rubbing alcohol on another paper towel, and this hurts her.    Oww ow, ouch!  And the blood is still coming, not dramatically, but enough to make a presentation.

Somewhere in all of this, as I go out to walk it off, as she tells me, as I am about to yell out something, as she sits in her old Eames chair... Mom, keep it elevated.  Keep the pressure on...  I find my glasses case, hiding in the side door low compartment underneath the driver's armrest.   Yes, of course.  Found it.  I bring some witch hazel over with the roll of paper towels.  It still hurts her fingertip to the touch, but not as much.  Her eyes still widen.  She has a book of Seamus Heaney in her lap, spirited to her, along with the long thin tortoiseshell calico part siamese cat.  I administer a small glass of chardonnay in a tumbler.  You're right mom, you are taking this all very well.  And the walk helped, even if it was a sad one in a sad parking lot in October with the rain and the sound of local football game.

Look on the bright side, we got a lot done.  But I feel sad, the first time she's not coming out to wave to me good bye as I drive away, waving back, eyes filling up.  She is, after all, a lovely person, even as she is.


An hour later, I am out of the rain, driving, listening to NPR, about illegal shark fishing in El Salvador and the related human trafficking...  pulling into the rest stop over looking a beautiful valley parallel to the highway.  Stiffly, getting out of the car.   I call her, on her cell, she picks up.  It's better, but still oozing.   Shit.  I go in and use the restroom.  There are two young African American woman behind a folding table, raising money for the local cross country team.  I put a dollar bill in the cup, say thanks, go look at the large map with the you are here.  Beautiful part of New York State.  Beautiful streams and rivers, the Otselic...  I look back over to the young ladies, as them where their meets are.  Johnson City...  I ask them about the river valley I saw once, and yes, they ran at Whitney Point recently.   "Yeah, I ran cross country...  Meet days made me very nervous.  Just wanted to hide at in the back of the bus and vomit..."   "Yes, the competitions are fast!"  and we all laugh.



At fifty three, 
no more winning for me.
A conscientious objector to the race,
one who'd rather just run, as he did as a kid,
over the high and rolling hills of farm country.
I'm one who'll never catch up, too far behind,
even at such pace.

I'm sure somewhere,
it's written in the genes, in code.
The younger brother goes behind to take care
of mom.  Intrinsically, he values hers,
the books upon the shelf, the cat,
the clutter, the attempt at writing,
a life of letters.
The older brother, far far ahead now.
Your own fault, or flaw,
and now it's come to this.

One true sentence...  Poor old Hemingway.  It sounds like the thought of one trying to survive.  If he can write, then he can continue, the old circular process of surviving for writing, and also by writing.


Few knew how hard it was, carrying the entertainment of the dining room and the bar going for four straight night, then on top of that your friends and connections, on top of that the late night people, sitting there, expecting entertainment out of an exhausted creature, who then must turn to wine to bear the ending of the night.

Jesus, of course, loves them all.  But on the day off he is done, he cannot even get up out of bed, hardly to get a glass of water.    His mood is low.    His problem is one involved with being too kind, with the natural good mood that comes out of him when he is around people, oddly enough.

The expression of selflessness, the same as the Buddha's recognition of the illusion of self...

The Christian's sense that Jesus is always there to forgive, always there to save... deeply embedded, that there is always Jesus... omnipresent, omnipotent... just as the simplest and most pure reality...



Non duality.  "Father, why doest thou forsake me..."  is the same as  "I had it in me all along..."

I had written some, and then I'd listened to some music, and then I grew bored.  Jeremy had texted me from work, so I got engaged with that, and yes, maybe let's meet for one at Du Coin.  I'm only going to have one or two, and after that, fine, I'll get back and cook the duck breast I'd bought earlier at the market.  I walk down the street, past a small party gathered outside, then down, past the Quaker Meeting House construction site, across the avenue at the crosswalk, then behind Du Coin then around and in through the front door, the bay cafe windows open to the street.

There's my friend, fellow barman, still young and youthful, lean and strong, handsome, seated with the proprietor at the usual round table.  The proprietor, Michel, is enjoying duck breast himself, crusted darkly on the outside, reddish pink evenly within, a bottle of Bobby Kacher imports Costieres de Nimes rosé before him on the table, and he takes a Leffe goblet glass and pours me some, and we sit for a good talk.  "Good cabbage," he says, "Excellent," lifting a fork, and I see it is cabbage, not turnip.  "Well, let's close the kitchen, eh," he says.  Soon he is smoking a narrow cigar.  Talk of Panama.  Stories about his first days as a waiter in New York, unfamiliar with martini terminology (coming from Switzerland, a place where martini means sweet vermouth), breaking a bottle of chardonnay in the ice bin after pouring a glass, old Tony the bartender, who eventually grew to like him.  Yup.  I remember dropping a plate of enchiladas on a guys back thirty years ago, who luckily was not burned.  Yup, that's how you start.  The manager gave him a complimentary tee shirt and bought their dinner.

I eye the man's dinner, the magret sliced thinly.  I've been low on funds lately, don't like to splurge.  The kitchen is about to close anyway, don't want to be that guy.

Then the Chef comes in, and let's go to Russian House, uh oh, okay...  And we all go.  The adventure of a Friday night, meeting a mutual friend at the bar there.  Baltica beer, no. 7, and then a round, chilled shots of fig vodka, at least low in alcohol, appearing on the bar...  Stories, how to season steak...

I tip the barman what I would have spent on a decent dinner at the bistrot.   He's a Ph.D, from Western Massachusetts in Slavic religious history.  I feel I know.  Nights like that.



When seasons change, there is a day you rest the entire day away.  Silence.  Peace.  This is something writers like to do, to lay quietly and think of nothing.  Meditating.  Focus on a chakra.  No wish even to read anything.  A day of quiet, as if to detox from all the experiences of the week.  Jesus going out into the desert to find the pure thoughts of literary critique.  This might sound as exaggeration, but there is the same thought to it, to eliminate all the distracting things from one's mind, and it is no surprise that Satan comes with promises, each of a different sort.  Hunger, fame, sex, power, money.  Ease in this life.  No need to have to cook for one's own self.


But we needed the stories from up at the bar.  We needed a tale to tell in order to tell the larger one, somehow.  We needed our little toy soldiers and our little imaginary game in order to absorb the truth of reality, which we can never know anyway.  The lesson of death.   The death of a man beyond a friend.  The death of a symbol.

I had thought earlier of just going out and playing guitar, my Irish songs, Pogues songs on a street corner...  But I don't get much of a chance to talk to Mr. Jeremy, and it is good to be in his presence.  He's logged a lot of trustworthy solid hours, and I have the sense he is going somewhere, native smarts and capable practicality to apply and learn.  He's been out on a farm lately, where the farming is real, as real as the culling of chickens and turkey.  He has a source of goat milk.  He and the chef enjoy talking things like this over, and would that I had better powers of concentration.

The death in the Dying Gaul family has been hard to come to terms with, as if our friend were about to reappear, coming up the stairs in a Polo shirt with his blazer and jeans, looking for a good dinner, first a glass of champagne and a seat at the bar.

It gets later and later, and when we get out of the old Russia House I think of going across the street to the Rite Aid for a frozen DiGiorno sausage pepperoni green pepper mushroom onion pizza, but am dissuaded and walk home, alone, back up the street, duck sausages to heat up, a dinner I should have eaten a while ago.


The next day, the Fall Equinox and sleep and rest, talking to my old mom twice on the phone when she calls.

What one does not like is hypocrisy.  And yet in this world we get messages, such as, "just trying to see if we can all get along," and then receiving the opposite.  I suppose I am fortunate not to be a New Yorker, as much as I would like to be one in an ideal world.

Over dinner, the proprietor talks privately of his opinion on the Me Too movement, the Call Out culture...

Jesus came back from the desert, back from his detox, back to Galilee, his hometown.  There in the synagogue, and he offers up a reading from Isaiah, with certain implications, prophecy fulfilled, and the locals who know him just so aren't ready for it.  What he has offered them is a kind of literary criticism as much as anything else.

"Tadzio, write about the street."  This was something the old Polish lady would often say to me.  "Write about the street."  There were cats, and former generals, and the perfect general's wife.  There was Jean at the corner with her yew bushes overgrown in a good way, her Persian cat, friendly at night, Popeye, and her Chow dogs, more mysterious as to their moods.  There were her memories, and I was building some myself, but it takes a long time.  It takes a life.


Write about the street.  One true sentence.  I do not literally write about the street, because I do not enough about it to say much intelligent or worthy, beyond the animal life, the feral cats, the mailman, the friendly UPS guy who once dropped off a package from Martin Guitars to me, saying this was a happy delivery.

I wrote what I could of the bar, the restaurant, but even then, even on that street there really was not enough to write about.

Write about work, Tadzio, she would also say, people are interested in that.

The picaresque, the road of life, for the wanderer, the spiritual seeker.

Uli is gone now.  Still impossible to believe that all our communing are history now.  We had always seen something in each other, a friendliness, a kind person, a stand up guy (on his part.)  A true soul.

The saint is gone, and leaves the rest of us behind, to deal.


My friend Kirsten, bound for mission in Liberia, amongst the poorest of the world's poor, brings by a handsome Irish woman, who once was put in the trust of Shane MacGowan, back in 1993, for her interview at Oxford, in London.

The guitar, with some encouragement, finally comes out, after all have left but one couple, sweet people, she a professor from Georgetown who will give a lecture on Gandhi, he a big guy who flies C130s, I kid him he looks like Randy Quaid.  I sense kind people intuitively now.  As if being able to tell a robin from a red squirrel.  I see it.  And if people are kind, it's a fun thing, and the business of life and money will be kept a bit separate from such interactions.

So I pour a little bit more Viré, white Burgundy, for my friends at the table after their dinner, and myself a little more Beaujolais to channel the music of Shane MacGowan.

The guitar is out, and the ladies have sweet talking voices, one German, and one with her Irish lilt.  She lives in Argentina now, with her German husband.  Kirsten and Emily.  Kirsten, a regular, along with her economist husband, from Portugal, come in quite often with the Kapers, elderly Dutch, a prominent the environment and global climate change, global warming.

It takes me a little time to switch modes.  The first song effort will be a dud.  I softly riff the opening chords of Lullaby of London, finally take up taking up the first lines of lyric.  "As I walked down by the riverside, one evening in the Spring..."

Later on, she joins me singing Rainy Night in Soho...

Direct flights to Ireland, go to a musical festival, she tells me.


Uli, his last night alive, I wonder if he went to Du Coin.  He mentioned something about it, the last night I saw him, the eve of Labor Day.  I took a long pointless walk, got some groceries at Glen's I probably didn't even cook...  Just to save money, feeling broke...

Our own chef's best friend, a chef owner himself, shoots me a text, he's over at the bar.  I was going to stay in, but my friend Jeremy is behind the bar, and there's still time to get dinner.

Talk of how to properly do a Partanegra ham.  The story of Les Trois Canard, D"Artagnan, her comeback after a recall... Chefs know a tremendous amount.   One needs a desiccator, but actually you need two to make it profitable.

I've always respected that.

Yannis, a strong well built man, very generous of spirit, from Valence originally, came of age in the old days of New York restaurants, working 'til 3 AM, back at 7 AM.  He has the confidence of a man who came once to a country whose language was foreign.  He's here with his nephew.  He asks me to pick a good wine.  We open a simple Beaujolais.  This is good.  Put it on my check, please, he tells Jeremy.  I wasn't quite feeling up for it, hadn't even showered, but it's good to be in good company.


And today is the first day, a chance to get caught up.  I take my medication and various health tonics, and proceed to take care of the backlog in the kitchen.  Tea cups in the rubber made tub in the sink.  The last of the fruit flies have grown fat and not so crafty.

One true sentence...

It has not yet arrived.  Perhaps I would prefer to do some organizing.

Just want to be normal...  Keep work separate from social life...

One true sentence.

It was raining hard.  Sunday afternoon, heading back to work for the first time since hearing the news of the sudden passing of my friend, the regular customer, Sunday evening being a weekly ritual.  The creek was high up to the green banks, a pipe was blasting water upward into the stream.  I walked with my college umbrella, golf-sized, purple and white, my heavier Brooks Gore-Tex running shoes.  Down into the woods, the path up ahead a channel of sitting water, then down across the bridge over the stream and up the long steep paved road.  My trudge to work, my warm-up for the lugging and the set-up.  The message on my phone, call me when you can, his ex wife, mother of his son, a familiar face.  I call her back.  He did not suffer, the paramedics said.  It happened suddenly, the hand brake on the car going as he took out the trash.  I explain when I last saw him, that Sunday night, before Labor Day.  She had gone up to where the son was a freshman, giving the news to him with the Dean and the Chaplain...

I walked onto work, changing out of my clothes, even my underwear.  Soaked through.  The kitchen folks are solicitous, sorry about your friend, and yeah, he'd been coming here a long time.

I'm a bit off.  A handsome couple comes, as predicted in the reservations to sit by the window.  Easy.  Order of escargot to share, then the kidneys in mustard sauce.  Tracking down hot bread from the busser.  Two glasses of Bordeaux.  Dinner followed by one creme brûlée and then another one.  Amicable.  The regular guy arrives as I begin with fumbles, mumbling the specials.  Chatting at the end of the bar.  Hold on a second.  It's taking my brain a bit to open the Bordeaux bottle and pour out two glasses.  Maybe it's the ragweed.

Then another arrival, newly habituated to the Gaul, then his date, they sit at a table.

(Beethoven piano concerto number five, the Emperor...  )

Another couple, a regular, coming up the stairs, as three ladies sit down, and which is the driest wine, so, tastes of Sancerre and Muscadet, sitting at the bar, as I fumble to make cocktails for the arrivals next to Mr. Chatty.  Old Fashioned, Manhattan... is the order.  What should I make it out of?  You pick, as if I might have an opinion, I go with rye, and again my brain struggles, to muddle, orange peel, breaking a glass on the first effort, and the mood feels kind of dreary to me.   A food order as I struggle to put together whiskey cocktails...  conversation...  Talk of Hemingway. .  what's your favorite...   Uhm... early short stories...  Big Two Hearted River, I guess...

Oh, we're out of salmon tartar, as the busboy comes over to help me cut bread.  The dishwasher is full of clean glassware, still warm from the cycle, and it would be nice to get some help with that rather than bread cutting...

Then an order for whiskey couple...  Okay okay...

Then the arrival of a Trans.  Who also is a talker, so you've got two conversation efforts going at two different ends of the bar...

When entertaining it is hard to do it without effort, without trying to do well.  I try to pull back, but that is not easy.

The departed, he always came on the late side, and often we'd been keeping the kitchen open just for his order, the last order, appetizer, entree...

My mother tells me, he must have needed to talk to you, she says when I call her.  You're doing a good job with all this...

And I'm there late, having an educational chat with the trans woman who is a lawyer, a year into her transition into womanhood.  It is the being penetrated that is the source of her pleasure.  She'll be having another operation soon.  She wants to be married to a man who treats her as a woman.

I'm there, late again.  But not too late, and an Uber driver, a guy from Lahore who understands the economic predicaments of service jobs and aging, gives me a ride home, pleasantly, and I go straight to bed without even looking at my phone.  No Thai lady boys, instead, Philip Larkin, gems like High Windows, and The Whitsun Weddings....


And in the morning, when I wake, I say to myself, you know, it would be nice to live a normal life.  Go to work, function as an economic unit doing his job, make money for the house, go home, and perhaps not even bother to write anymore.  Just have somewhere to go everyday, to not go crazy, to not encourage the late stayers..., to get home early, and rise and live another day, enjoying being alive as best as one can.

Mom calls, quite frustrated with her loneliness.  Who cares, she asks, almost hanging up on me, after I encourage her with the thought that her errand in the car is doable, despite her fears of traffic and misdirection.

Later, after returning, with wine, she is feeling better.  A different person.  My angst settles back down to manageable levels.  One wishes he had help in such things.  She wishes the same for herself.

Not a good way to start the day writing.  A wasted hour and a half, as if time were wasted, not our karma....


After Jay's call, from Colorado, at the end of his shift, at two in the morning, waking up again, I tell him what's happened to our friend.  He's working at two restaurants now, since he moved to Denver.  He's planning another trek.  People still ask about you, Jay.

"I'm sorry, man.  I know he was your friend."

Later on, still awake, I have a bit of wine.   Boys from places far away, Buddhist countries, pretending to be girls, to fill up the time before falling back to sleep.


A zoned-out kind of a day, cooking shows, America's Test Kitchen on in the background.  Overcast, drizzling after the monsoon rains the night before.  I clean out the green tall kitchen wastebasket with Lysol spray and then soapy water.  The fruit flies that had found the contents of the trash bag depart into the cool dank air out on the back porch.  Laundry to do.  No work tonight.  Too much ragweed pollen yesterday, in the woods.  Walking along the path, I was probably covered from head to toe.

Death makes one more of a Buddhist.  The only way to deal with things.

The hard days of writing...  Days of pretending.


Tonight I'm drinking a Bouchard Ainé et Fils $11.99 Pinot Noir, Pays D'Oc.  I had some earlier out on the patio of Glen's Garden Market after my groceries for the workweek.  My experiment with black-eyed peas had familiar results.  It was good to take a break from animal protein, but...  I made sure I found some flax seed at the store, for additional fiber.



The man moved his hand down, to the right of his father's brown chair to the pine wine box that he had taken from work to be a sort of book stand or book shelf or side table.  Chateaux Gontey, 2010.   Nails in it.   Perfectly made.  Like a Japanese Zen temple.  A coffin for all the greats, Mastroianni, preferable to the ornate Christian metal caskets sold at funeral homes, why?  A pine box.  He liked the feel of it.  Wine should be enjoyed out of a tumbler.  Served cool,  and sometimes with a lime in it. Maybe a dash of bitters.  But the lime went well with the tannins.  Bourdain, shaman of the night, friend of Dostoesky, and Hemingway.


There is nothing wrong with a little wine, once you are a writer.  And I have no problem with the night.

I found a little tree to look at, sipping my wine, as a way of remembering my friend.  Bats wheeled in the hurricane remnant sky above apartment buildings, moving with the airs, reminding me of summer carnival rides that spin people around.  My friend.  Few people out on the patio.  I stare down at my iPhone and scroll through my blog.

I will go back to work tomorrow night.  One of the night's he would, by tradition, if in  town, not traveling in Africa, Cabo Verde, the Gambia, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, always come.  The other staff would ask, if things were slowing down, if he was coming.  Perhaps they could close the kitchen at 9 rather than 9:30, to start cleaning up, save on labor costs.


It is the provenance of great men that they come to know pain.  And I'm sure, we all do, in the final analysis.  We might smile and joke, but deep down we know pain, and while it's good to get out into the town and see other human beings of our own species, to reflect upon more than to necessarily interact with, it's also necessary to maintain a private sphere, a protective shell to keep around our thoughts so that we might harvest them and their fruits--a very serious business--and preserve them somehow.  Workers in the vineyard.  Protective of the fruit, so that when the vineyard's owner shall return we have done our jobs and not been wicked and wasteful.  We all know, wine is good, and it's nice not to run out of it.  A grand ennobling thing.


Mom has always been a pain in the ass.  Excitable, emotional, high strung.  Lincoln was born, grew up a bit, lived a bit, had a girlfriend or two, one of whom dying of the milk sickness, and then he met Mary.  She was bright and charming, a political asset.  As a teen, she was the precocious friend of Henry Clay.  Before she became Mary Lincoln and the whole town of Springfield knew of Mary Lincoln and her suffering husband.  Karma.  No wonder I never got married.

The arguments she'd start in cars on long trips, emotional operas of unhappiness.  The way she'd yell at my father, you're a failure, you're a failure.   Or when we were out in the car, a fire whistle going off, it's our house, our house that's burning.  Jesus Christ.  That's how I grew up.

Leaving me, like Ted Hughes, susceptible to craziness in mate and match.

And it's not her fault.  Now she calls herself a failure, because she cannot find the key to the mailbox, lets the bills pile up, expirations, cannot get her cable television back on-line.

I look down at the hairs of my arm.  A kind of fur.    The knob of bone on the outside of the wrist, where arm meets hand.  My arms are more tanned than my legs.   My hands are paws, but I can do things with them.  Type, play guitar, operate a knife, fold tee-shirts and old beat-up Brooks Brothers work shirts that let the evening light cover for their stains and inkspots, frayed thread.

I am broke again.


I remember that cold old chapel, with its window panes, stone stairs, old Yankee ironwork and Wyeth lines, Johnson Chapel up at Amherst on the hill, the little vulnerable college, an honest place, a separate place.   That was a start for me...

Why, one must ask himself, do we have connections to other men.  How do we feel them in our bones?  Why are we able to enter into their molecular chemistry, as if their ghosts sit kindly over us, protective, guiding.  As if to smile, as if to say, you got the point I was making, not in the details, but in the overview, because you, kid, are a good student, a good thinker.



I wonder, Lincoln...  ahead of his time.  He would not have minded a sorrowful song.  He would not have minded watching Ken Burns, and the old mellow bluegrass songs.  All that would have been in keeping...  That's life, he would have said.   Song of the Mountains, on PBS.  And if he were here today, the idiots on Fox would say, imagine, the man is supposed to help the free world and there he is listening to bluegrass on public television at 4:22 in the morning...  It is the unaffected, who make good music.  Bluegrass gospel singer Judy Marshall sings a song that goes with all the Civil War waters around these parts and that long drive up through Frederick and Harrisburg and Gettysburg, in order to get away from here...  the Northerner in Southern parts...



I often tell people, tourists at the bar, when they ask about the town, Washington, D.C., right down the road, Lincoln, the fucker would go to the cemetery just down the street, to view Willie's body in the middle of the night.



The connectedness.  That's the thing.  The thing for a writer.  Connecting things is not entirely the work of the conscious mind.  This is the reflection of a well-written piece, and I think something not entirely well understood, not about writing, not about my book, not even about known works such as Moby Dick.   The connectedness.  The melding in of a book with the logic of the Universe....