Saturday, June 30, 2018

Most writers do the bulk of their work before a certain age sets in.  At fifty your life is over, it's all epilogue now.

You run out of energy, out of the fire in the belly.  And to get done what you still can manage, you need medicine, you need good shape, you need wine.

A dream I have, in which I am a itinerant wine shopper.  The wines are Italian, and my tastes are French.  I've gone out looking for a good wine because of a sort of argument with my brother, who is having a nice dinner party attended by important well-to-do friends, his friends.  To make amends I go on this hike, which doesn't seem far at first, a way of cooling down.  "Don't go, you'll be missing out," one of his friends tells me, but I need some fresh air, some space to think.  So I'm wandering.  The wine shop is part restaurant.  There's a little patio out front.  I stop to talk, or linger, with my shopping bag.  I look through the wine shop, which is apart, in the back, or upstairs...  Racks.  The wines are unfamiliar.  Strong, jammy, high in alcohol.  I ask if there is anything similar to, say a Pinot Noir, from Burgundy.  The guy points a couple out.

More time has passed, I don't know doing exactly what, people, distractions, trying to help out another, confusion...  And then I know it's late.  I go back to the wine shop, except this time there is another guy, who, says, you know what, you are a freak, you act inappropriately, who needs a bum like you, get the hell out of here and do not come back.  I am surprised, feeling this unwarranted, what the fuck...  The original guy comes, lets me have two bottles, free, sorry, but he does not want me back either.   On the way out, a taunt from the second guy.

And then to get back to this place where my brother is with his dinner party, I am on a train.  Going through a city that is frozen in winter, ice everywhere, and then the train gradually darkens, and people quite down, the train car's lights dim, and then people are asleep, and by the time I get back, everyone has gone to bed, and the dinner party has been missed.


I take wine, red wine, French, low in alcohol, as a medicine.  Vonnegut, from whom I heard the thing about being done at age fifty in life and in writing, had his Pall Malls, like my grandfather.  I don't drink it quickly, I just sip it, and it relaxes me, and for a while it is calming and energizing, such that I can sit down and click and clack away with typing up words.  Nighttime, summer, in Washington, D.C.   An evolutionary loser.  A weakling.  A person with faults, and misdirections.  A James Bond movie is on in the background, just to provide the babel I am used to, so the animal doesn't get nervous.  Perhaps I should be listening to music, but alone, I crave some sort of information, as if so that I can pretend I'm learning something in one ear, as I write out of the central core.  Background chatter of the forest of the dark mind, as I shine a flashlight in and walk forward.


I have written here in this strange form, a journalist with reports of science fiction, as a sort of lecture, an oral history, as all writing must come back to the headwater, the spring of the bardic mind, where words are spoken, and every story, being an orality, is the story but capable of retelling, and different little changes.  As if one were a lecturer, granted a few liberties while explaining the lecture, the story.

The best and most filial stories, most faithful and with fidelity, are written not as writing but as talking, the speech of the mind.   The writer is the speaker.

Kerouac had written sketches exhaustively before putting it all together, The Scroll, the original typescript.   The overall spontaneity of On the Road was build of many pieces of spontaneity.  The oldest way of writing, of recording words.

Whatever you can bring back...  you try...  you get a little bit, then you get tired.

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Grand Inquisitor sketch:

All human-based systems will fail.  This is the lesson of Jesus Christ himself, the man who came from Tralfamadora to teach the human beings of Earth the wisdom of spiritual life.  This was His essential point, that subscribing to, conforming to, following the usual status quo of human society was utter folly, misguided.  And to prove it, he, as he knew, the human system would come and get him and kill him.  How about that for proving his point?

So here is someone, who brought the greatest teacherly wisdom that the consciousness of human beings could possibly understand on a good day.  He teaches us that each of us has within a gift, moral and spiritual, and capable of looking far beyond conforming to the usual selfish self-protective socioeconomic perception.   Each of us has antennae within that pick up the wisdom of the Universe, even if it comes from far away.

 The people, not so tethered to the great system of society and rulership, workers, sort of proto-union organizers, real people, responded, listened.

And those of the people who were more a part of the great human-made system, of course, they resisted.  "No, we are perfect, as perfect as can be," they said amongst themselves, though this is not quite recorded in the Gospels so much.  Their human made system was completely perfect, and indeed the proof of that was the very rewards of high status and importance and all things which protected them from coming to any harm.

So it is that the meek and the mournful, the poor in spirit, are the ones who are ready to receive the higher model of how human beings can continue to exist in harmony with the Universe.  They're happy because they get it, this thing that would otherwise be rather impossible, not to mention completely impractical, to comprehend, to even know where to begin with.

So yes, Dostoevsky was exactly one hundred percent right.  This is exactly what the Grand Inquisitor, the great archbishop, says to the re-captured Christ who has bumbled again upon the Earth.  You are ruining our, OUR, system.  And he is speaking for the Church itself!  The failure of the system meant to support the Lord Jesus Our Savior, the very system...

And Jesus says nothing, absolutely nothing.  Only in the end does he offer the Grand Inquisitor, a kiss.  A kiss reversed, sent back upon the betrayer.

The hack science fiction writer then had a taste from his glass of wine, the equivalent of a soldier lighting a cigarette, as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and my grandfather, Eddie White, had done many many a time, and not necessarily bad for the health, spiritual, mental, physical or otherwise.

And so doing, Dostoevsky, having travelled a bit himself upon the Earth and as a human being traveling in his own skin with all his particular self-made self-involved troubles, establishes a contact with Tralfamador, or Transfalmador, and all such spiritual places, realm where things have been figured out by letting them be, by letting them work things out through time and space and light, rather than attempting to impose that which never need be imposed...

Where did it happen?  Siberia?  Or when the authorities let him out, let him have some meager pension, back in the military...  Or when he, at dark hours, quiet and late at night, at rented apartments in Petersburg, took to writing again...  Almost the very thing that had gotten him into trouble in the first place.

Perhaps it took a child dying, a boy, a boy who had been born later in life, as if by miracle, the kind stenographer woman who saw something in the epileptic writer.  Shakespeare too had lost a son.  It took pain for the writer, to begin the process of Karamazov, beginning in the monastery Fyodor Dostoevsky visited, finding some meaning, some form of grace, some form of commitment to take all his notebooks of recorded conversations and self-conversations...  and thereby finding a way to communicate relevantly concerning the nature of the Beatitudes.


Wherever Jesus went in his life, he had a knack, a talent.  He had a great ability, as great, and maybe even greater than the rest of his miraculous powers, which continue to today, or attracting fellow beings to him and his life and his way.  Are those people too partly from Tralfamador?  May those people, like Peter and the original disciples, John, Andrew, James, Matthew, have been sensitive to the heavens of planets far away?  Might they have travelled once back and forth without remembering...  Where did the light which turned Saul into Paul originate?  What was that visitation like?

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Upon Tralfamador, as the radio signals of human beings on Earth caught in some in-between state, of sleeplessness, or anxiety, are picked up, there are the natural medicines.  Which, in turn, hopefully, are beamed back to those of here on Earth wanting.

There are the compounds in wine, which hold in the deepest corners of their molecular structure, tiny re-creations, microscopic microcosms of the Universe as a whole.  (To enjoy wine is better than watching The Weather Channel.  Or, rather, wine gives us perspective on all the tropes the professionals use to hypnotize us, with all the classic things, the cop, the beauty porn queen, lulling us all to a certain kind of sleep walking.  Wine puts things in perspective.)   Reassuring, as in each atom of the body, a reassurance, the teachings of all creation, as God saw to Create.  The point is not at all the alcohol, the spirit that came of tiny intelligences doing what they do for creative work, but the teaching, the realignment of the creature with its brain and nervous system with the gentle truth of all existence.

Wine, milder than ayahuasca, turns us into something similar to the plant world, back into, if you will, mobile trees and growing vines and dew-embracing grasses of cold sea island coasts.  Have faith, wine tells us, everything will be okay.  You just need to look at things a little differently, and not take things that unnerve you too seriously.  As the Dalai Lama says, things are not as they appear.


But there was never enough time to get done all he wanted to do.  Barely time enough to write a check for health insurance, requiring a focus... a need for shaving cream.  Travel plans, work schedule, credit card payments for trips up to see your old mom and take her to the doctor for some advice.

What you wanted then, the hack failure of a writer observed, was Jesus, and Jesus lives, lives on, literarily, figuratively, metaphorically, in wine, because He is the truth.  That's one of the things of the Eucharist, of taking communion.  The truth in bread and in wine.  Bread is easy.  It is the body.  But wine is the blood, and therefore it is in us, informing us.


Being in essence a Tralfamadorian makes you a nervous creature on Earth, and so you have to make contact, to sweep earthly things aside, and get back to the truth...  To get to the truth is done through writing, as much as anything else...  To get to the truth one really has to do the things of Jesus.  Like washing of the feet.  Like the waiting on people, essentially that was what it was, the Last Supper.  Like the energy, the laying on of hands...

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

You get to work.  You take the wines out of the main ice bin and into the sink, transferring the main ice to the sinks, then cleaning out the main ice bin.  Mineral water stocked.  Dining room set up, silverware backups ready to go.  The reservation sheet.  Lemons, limes, olive and cherry back-ups, iced tea, hot water for tea, coffee.  Butter and bread.  Pitchers filled with ice water.  The sound system.  A final wipe of the slate bar top.  Cloth napkins ready to wipe the glassware coming out of the bar glass dishwasher.

What would have possessed you to be a writer were it not for some act of faith...  That it was in the name of being a kind of priest, then it all made sense.  Your life would be on the constant order of sacrifice.  It would be little like the mainstream picture of life, family, duty.  It would be a life as one might imagine of a benevolent alien arriving from some faraway planet.

The things of higher wisdom, completely intuitive, come to the cultures of the world, and there amongst people they are adapted and regularized.  Institutions are set up, earthly ones.  Human.  Full of ego.

The only system Christ brought with him was that of the shepherd looking over his flock, going in search of the lost sheep, a fisherman saving human souls.  Upon this, a whole Church was built, with codified liturgical practicer and so forth.

It is always looking at things to wrong way to try to adapt to human systems.  Stay away and out of them as far and for as long as you can.   Whatever is true in a worldly way, be cautious of it, be wary of it.



He was a bartender because he was by preference or nature always working.  Even to have a social life was to be working hard, burdened with making sure everything went right.  He was a writer, too, because he was always working.  And when he was given a night off he did not take it naturally as a chance to go out and have fun but as a call to go back to the work of writing.  He wasn't good at it, but it was work to him, and for some stubborn organic reason, written in the genes of the particular kind of animal he was, he had, as long as he could remember, been at it.

It was now nine at night rather than three thirty in the afternoon when he rose off the couch and finally felt up for a shower.  Sitting on the toilet, with the hot water tap of the shower on, he listened to the sound of the water drop toward a bass octave as the water ran warm, then hot finally.  Unlike a water glass filled, with the note rising, for some reason, hot water likes a note lower as it pours than cold.

The night off had given him a chance to gain and hold for a moment a fleeing thought, that what he had done professionally had extended further the work he had put into his earlier book.  There was something ostracizing about being taken as an eccentric in college years, but over the years after that period written about he had gone further into the life of the servant exiled from the normal pleasures of a successful modern life.  His life was an impressionist portrait of the polite man behind the bar in all his native isolated inner life.  To reach certain material, it depends on your position, your walk in life.  And he could not be completely displeased with the position he had for the view it offered him, upon a humble working class.

Sacrifice, of course.  That's what life is.  A search for humanity.

But it was, it came as, a huge relief not to work.  The windows had been opened in the clear air of the previous night, and the pollen had come and gotten to him again.  The night before had been a hard run.


Perhaps there are psychological reasons for such a choice.  A fear of being hurt, a fear of intimacy and friendship.  But that acknowledgment could be theorizing, from a textbook, rather than reality, particularly for one who'd been immersed in the intellect of religion and spiritual thought from an early age...

The view of the restaurant worker, patiently serving from behind his bar, taking all comers, can be viewed academically, part of a sociological survey.  But that is not all there is to see.  Just as Picasso took to African and Asian influences in his art.  Just as the Impressionists took to seeing life as it actually is.  Life in the city.  Alienation.  The complete disregard for the emotional life of a neighbor humbly serving you with politeness on the part of the striving, the well to do, the normal city palate of people.

The man is not able to answer the dinner hour of normal people, nor their happy hour, and to do would put him out, put him into a prolonged period of attempted relaxation...

But the truth lies, less inhibited, in fiction, in fiction more so than straight factual telling.
If you could properly understand time, as the Tralfamadorans do, then you could be able to understand faith.  You could have faith.  You would not be crushed, put-down, run over by the pressing concerns of middle age.  You could take things in stride, as Jesus did, and even be able to implement your own sort of faithful plan.  You would know the foolishness of attempting to please two masters;  you would see things correctly.  And faith would be key.  The faith to embrace the fictional, the seeming fiction of Jesus Christ and all the wise thinking that comes from planets wiser than ours, tuned into by adepts and masters and wise men and women, captured, written down, put into philosophical form, as if in the very face of "real world reality, socio-economic, physical, political, militarily, technological, etc., etc., etc..


Sunday night, the ironic return to work, in the evening of the 7th day, a Sabbath to some.  Late afternoon.  I'm going to work.

Wait around, after the set-up, and no one shows up, but then a familiar couple, sweet retired folk, visiting from Oklahoma.  Tony and Claire.  They are surprised I remember them.  "It's easy.  You're my friends."  His usual, Makers and Sweet Vermouth, no bitters, no cherry, almost equal parts.  "As I get older, I like 'em sweeter."  She likes the glass of white burgundy, a VirĂ©, labelled as a Macon Village.  We catch up.  They look slightly older in the not exactly counted months, but they are in one piece, and he comes with her as she does business.  Bike rides in Montana.  We talk of Bourdain, and like me, Tony was devastated, had read every book.  Yeah, what a shock.  What great work he did, on television, for us lonely bastards drinking wine by ourselves, living uncomplicatedly after a shift.  We talk about Jim Harrison.  Doing our dishes, in other words, and resting.  Was it the Burgundy show, yes, with Bocouse...  I saw Johnny Apple once, down below, drinking a Costiere de Nimes...  The recognizable shirt...

The lady likes her red Burgundy.  Beaune wines in particular.  I recommend the Savigny Les Beaune over the Tollot Beaux Chorey Les Beaune.  The younger wine seems better to me.  I find the Chorey a bit muddy.  I run down to the cave.

And then the lull.  Nothing.  I find a book in the office, a little refresher on French Wine.  And it's good.  Very good.  Thorough.  The right blend of history, grapes, good wine, bad wine, over the years.  Bordeaux merchants blocking Rhone wines from seeing the light of day in London...  Roman history, papal history, Gallic war history...  The AOC...

And then, the DC ABRA inspector.  Downstairs servers come up, where are liquor orders for the last three years records...  None of us can find them in the dusty corners we look in, and just then, a regular couple not seen in a long time...



Finally, I get home.  Pretty exhausted from the wanes and the waxings, the slow slow slow and then the bump at the end which drives one to drink out of sheer rising nervousness and anxieties that make the heart palpitate and run.  Screeching inside, and I can only calm down after putting most things away after the dishwasher run, the busboy sweep, badgered by the rest, need to eat something good, a chicken curry at the end of the night, with whatever wine is open...

Home, I nap.  Want to sleep, couch.  Television on...  Neurotic, feeling trapped, worries about mom...



The Tralfamadorians...  They were amongst the wise beings from outer space who helped the human ape of rugged ape face become civilized, and one of their things was wine.  And cooking.  Good cooking.  And matching wine with cooking.  The Romans, it turns out, brought the big escargot they liked to Burgundy, along with the garlic and the parsley, and the herbs.  The local wine, planted originally by them, that became the tradition...

Human beings, wishing to cook, developed gastronomy.  This is one thing we can share, and not argue about, no wish to kill each other over parsley, a wine match, a braising technique....



He gets a day off.  He is tired anyway from the hectic pace of jazz night.  The trees in the distance wave their branches lazily in the still light.  The text, around one in the afternoon, waking him up, it's slow, you take the night off if you want, sure...  It's famous Wine Tasting Night.  Guilty, but exhausted.  Even after only two nights...  People expect him to be there, as he's been there for years and years, putting on the show...  Allergies to the pollen, tree, grass, ragweed...  He's felt this way for months now.  And the muscles are tight, weary from the night, and even his mind is dull.  I need to slow down, anyway, he says to himself.  I can't do this at this pace anymore.  I need help.  He knows he will miss friends, whose cycle it is to come see him;  he knows this deep down, and he is even psychic about it, predicting visitations from out of the blue.  "I was just thinking about you," he would say.   But he had to protect himself.  It had been hard lately, with his old mom sounding confused...

You pay too much attention to your body, his mom tells him.  Hmm.  Well...





Saturday, June 23, 2018

In the Tralfamadorian space ship which is a church, Time is understood.  It is represented spatially, along with the fonts of holy water, in the Stations of the Cross.  That is time, that is life.  One thing after another, like frames of a comic strip.  A crucifixion, on-going, each frame a different chapter.  There is no more accurate portrayal of time.  No better history, no better biography, no better representation of living in time.  Here, is the essence of human life and consciousness, one thing after another, and all of it basically similar.

And by no means, not to say it's all bad, not all terror, nor all a matter of suffering and eventual death.  But it flows, and one footstep of life is followed by another.  And this is why people, knowingly, are very careful to hedge their bets.  Their steps are taken carefully.  And this is why they will do things, certain things, like become accountants and tax collectors and consultants to the Roman Empire.

Of course the story of the Crucifixion begins, if you will, if there is a beginning, with the Last Supper, with Jesus' declaration of his impending doom, after his realization of it in the Garden.  And with the wine, which must be then taken seriously, not in vain, not simply the easy social beverage of laughter and forgetting.  There is meaning in wine, as it is also a representation of time.

But, of course, it all began before that, depending how you wish to look at it.  No part of the Christian story can be separate from the Cross.  The story of the Cross of Jesus Christ begins with his birth, his conception, on and on.  Each point of his life fits in.




In the Tralfamadorian understanding, that is our life too, each of us, the crucifixion of the being of higher dimension in the three dimensional world.  Well, once you realize that, things get better.  Then you are able to wisely chide yourself over your own habits, as Jesus does, explicating our sins, as if at a recovery meeting for sinful people.  And he was intimately familiar with sin as we all are, if anything more acutely sensitive, often a sad fellow from his own propensity for sin.... Once you realize the slow on-going Cross of being at least a four dimensional being stuck in a three-dimensional world, then you develop faith.  You get better at things, and then that knowledge, whether or not it's put into words, comes as a huge relief, actually.  Thus it always a matter of perspective, when you look upon your own misery.



There is always that pull.  There is the pull to belong in social things, but there is the pull away, drawing one toward seclusion, toward the desert, to quiet reflection, places where one is not drawn in to behavior lacking seriousness simply by being a social being.  One cannot serve two masters.  Thoughts are found as they are found, but must be gathered quietly.

There are of course, on Tralfamadore, the constant cycles people go through, that of sins personal, followed by forgiveness and redemption.  Like a moon cycle.  Inevitable.  A harmonious society, an equality, an agreement...


A quiet day after going out to visit a small gathering at friends.  Pizza, and later, on the way home, a McDonald's run, and so there is the dough hangover for the allergy sufferer in pollen season, a general lack.   He takes his pills.  He's got the night off.  He takes a shower, and shaves.  Tonight he will stay in.

The hack science fiction writer grown man-child of middle age and too much wine goes down to the store, the sort of farmer's market.  Every now and again there is a good wine.  There are half chickens, if one doesn't feel like cooking.  Ground buffalo.  Free range eggs.  Duck sausage.  Local vegetable produce.

He goes through the cashier line, talking about, learning from, the guy at the cash register, an African American guy whose father's name is Eric Amos, then over to the little bar.  There were three women, one familiar, good looking, a brunette in a red dress with a wheat beer, a carton of turkey and black bean chili, and the three are snacking off olives and goat cheese and flat bread.  They are talking of international improvement projects, Senegal...


On Tralfamadora, there are less worries about such things as economic tedium.  The economy is driven, at least in part, by the engine of sin and fun meets seriousness, forgiveness and redemption, day after day, hour after hour.  To run a stock change of these constantly changing values would quickly reveal, even to the sharpest mathematical and political and corporate business school minds, that all things even out, a collective zero.  Thus liberating the society to actually do things.  Like help people.  For all are involved in the classic inevitable all inclusive process of sin, one moment, followed by the most brilliant of goodness.

For they have, out there, on this nation planet, the model of Earth, no problem with really getting the wildest things that Planet Earth's religious traditions have recorded.  Which are, of course, originated in the visitors, from Tralfamadora to Earth, who are able to casually cross how ever many vast kalpas of light years and distances and atomic removal to appear quite alive and physically present in the most mundane of places.  Taking out the trash.  Doing laundry.  Grocery shopping.  Finding enough bottles of wine or other inspirations for the night's possibilities of a return trip to Jesus and Tralfamadora and Kurt Vonnegut and Buddha, Pali, Sanskrit, the Lankavatarra Scriptures.

On Tralfamador, the most mundane things are the most interesting, the most conducive to the light which is the light, which is the insight, which brings together time, space and light itself into one thing, the one thing which is not the Great Void, as spoken of by the Buddha.

As well as observing and revisiting the shit of planet Earth, in whatever century, the mass idiot things like The Third Reich, or ISIL, for instance, the foolish reactions, terrible actions of the most terrible sort done without the slightest of reflections, without the slightest understanding of time, and completely forgetting the Stations of the Cross.

Is it therefore not a surprise at all that the peoples who have, let's say, seen the greatest earth-bound-human-society-political-military-industrial imitations of true heavenly wrath, as noted by absolute gyroscopic balance upon the planets of the spiritual societies, get it.  They become wise, having seen this bloody bluster of the attempted re-creation, as if in a cinema, but with real bombs and airplanes and political subterfuge--theatrical, farcical, mechanical--of what some madman calls "God's Will,"as he is particularly given to see it.  And from such evil,  the utter comical fake, the complete lack of any attempt at justice, and its utter achievement of any lack of justice, love, and all those things of the spirituality of trees and the Universe...

How, say, the Polish and the Czechs must have the greatest right to laugh at the ridiculousness, of the Nazis, of the Soviets, were it not to hurt so much and have made so many lives that which they are not, disposable, trivial, unimportant, each a part of the underpinning of the whole.  Those societies which can take a drink, make love, have a laugh, continue to speak their own native language in all its fresh and childish beauty... The world and its history are full of such peoples... Real people, who get it.  Who, somehow, have received and welcomed visitors from places like Tralfamador.



The hack science fiction writer who had failed at writing and was now seeing himself stuck as a barman for the remainder of his sad life, had just opened the blue door, and nervous about the coming Jazz Night.  There would be a lot of moving pieces to it, going on all night, and everyone would be hounding him such that there would not be a spare moment.  At such a moment he felt tired, and it was easy to forget about his interesting friends from the far away planet, Tralfamador, sometimes called Tralfamadora, either way.


But here, yeah, no...  There is a great misunderstanding.

It is the very nature of the animal to be sinful, beautifully so, look at the success of fast food restaurants (though they serve a place for the hungered) and bars and trendy places. It is the creature to be sinful in enjoyment, enjoyment of temporary things, and then to fall into the inevitable realization, that pleasure is sin.  And once you've sinned, you want some form of redemption, of forgiveness, of admission, that one has done stupid things for momentary pleasure, then tried to whisk the whole thing away, but with an unease.  Redemption is hard to hold, as it is intangible.

This is how oil and all petrochemicals came about, buried long ago.  The sins of plant life.  The copious layers of plant pleasure, of rutting ferns sinking down into the mud of their own lust, then buried by the lusts of other layers of sinful creatures, on and on, millions of years, the rich rotting and compression...  Sin becomes an engine...  Sin, of such a sort, is organic.  And as Jesus says, it is not what goes in, but what comes out, whatever that means...

Thursday, June 21, 2018

The job, by the way, of waiting on people, as the hack science fiction writer did for an actual living, if that's what you could call it, was utterly ludicrous, ridiculous, if you stopped to think about it.  It was such an old thing, such a personal family thing, to even mention it alongside the thought of The Economy, or Industry, or a job, that such terms were utter silliness.   To regard the job as anything real was akin to reading the oldest of fairy tales and pretending that such things were real.  One can't even call it a job.  To get the job was to delve into the oldest of Gospels and Prophets, the oldest of holy people, the oldest of monasteries.  To think that people would do such a thing as a living, rather than as a refuge from the corrupted modern world wrought by Capitalism and the like, would be to see such people as lunatic.

To wait on people, as it turned out, was as good a way as any other one might think of, to understand a lot of things, such things as the puzzling and beautiful things Christ went on record as saying, as far as anyone will ever get to the meaning of such.

But one thing was that the people had no real idea.  They had no ability to reach that conceptual a level, and particularly about such a thing as the Christian act, the spiritual act, the enlightened Persian poetic idea of a server of wine as a spiritual being...  The world of the city was far too practical for taking time to make such imaginative leaps.

Just like the articles he'd written on wine for the local Georgetown newspaper...  Philosophical, metaphorical, but without any particular salesmanship, no here-you-need-to-buy-this, and eventually they, the editors saw this flaw hiding in his literary charm.

The problem, with understanding, on the deeper level, of the nature of time made him, besides his job, have a hard time getting anything done.  He wanted to write.  And this made him, by all outer appearances, though he tried to hide it all, a rather lazy being at doing the normal things, even as he was diligent about a reasonable set of things.  Groceries.  Wine shopping.  Making enough to pay for health insurance, and to attend his bi-weekly appointments, laundry, recycling, talking to his mom everyday however many times it took.

Was there a better explanation, for anything, beyond the will of Jesus, or the insight of Buddha, or Kurt Vonnegut, or the idea of a space ship landing in Washington, DC, slightly more secret and subtle and cleverly hidden as a mystical even than as portrayed in the famous movie from the 50s with Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal and the robot, The Day the Earth Stood Sill (1951.)  An alien landing was also in Gary Cooper in High Noon, in many children's books, in Robert F. Kennedy's funeral train, in many things.  The usual dusting off wise things sloughed off by space, confirming the deeper realities.

But the restaurant, or the quiet street and the quiet apartment  and the kind neighbors who admired eccentrics were also part of the space ship that had landed from a higher dimension that most people were too stupid to see. a carrot in front of their nose, what a way to live.  They were people who had been through interesting things too, and told a similar story, those who understood their presence as neighbors on the old quiet street near a natural spring.

Either you went by it all, the whole thing, or you rebelled, and accepted the other explanations, such as the Buddha might present, such as a crazy obscure marginalized writer of science fiction might offer.  Either you had a mind that had been through things, random things, human things, history, events, fire-bombing survival, world wars, economic wars, or you bought the whole Madison Avenue story....

So was it a liberation to see, as holy people have always said, that everything is set in its appropriate place, much like the pieces of a Swiss watch mechanism, as according to the will of a just God the father the son and the holy spirit.



The only direct comparison I can find now, as I look through certain history and notes, of the kind you will not find the general rules of interns in such a place as Washington, DC, is a certain Samael Aeon Weor, something like that.  A very mystical gentleman, in tune with all sorts of Kabal, Tantra, you name it.  His belief, much of it very strong and informative, has an odd codex, and, admittedly, to some of us it might mike sense.  The belief goes something like this:  the thing is, for the male, to never ever ejaculate, to never raise the demon to the holy caduceus snake and all the energy center chakras that run up and down the spine up to the holy parts, from tip of tail bone to peneal gland, etc. A busboy, his name, Don Eden, was the first one to introduce me to such a literature of philosophy. but it it began to make sense.  Practical.

Since then I have come to appreciate that a distance from such deep theories actually help one, such as myself, avoid falling into the things one is supposed to avoid, oddly enough.  If one were strict, I don't know, you'd get a little too rigid and nervous, and the things wouldn't happen, not this holy relationship of man and wife, intertwined, to raise the deepest and best powers of the priest.  The priest needs his garden of a woman, and they need to embrace, I forget, how many hours a day, each day of the week, so that the mystical fluids can concur and migrate the baser parts of the mind up to the heavens...  Something like that.

Did Billy Pilgrim achieve such things?  Where is Vonnegut now, to answer such questions, but that he too must have had some form of holy communion and had received a kind of priest ordination, such that he had thoughts of the clearest of all the American writers...
The hack science fiction writer, as I call him, had written a book, by the way.  It was called A Hero For Our Time, and it told a bit of life as he experienced it, but it was not a particularly readable book, nor, certainly, a marketable one, though one might have thought, perhaps, a young man's perspective at the dawn of the Me Too Era.  A sensitive kid, really, who was not particularly a take-charge aggressive type, and rather a bungler.

Life itself, in the age of Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, in human's obvious accelerating impact upon the planet Earth and its climate and environments, had become a science fiction.   So advanced have things become that the most outlandish of stories come from long ago, and not on some far away planet, nor some space ship traveling at the speed of light, nor on Mars, but on our own planet.  Science fiction could be more honestly and reasonably applied to the stories of Buddha, of the Old Testament and its prophets, of the New, and also of a whole tradition in the human being and the propensity for myth and systems of understanding day to day reality in a deeper form.

The hack science fiction writer, with only one actual book to his name, a pretend one at that, was by now fifty three, and the strains of many bar tending shifts week after week, without much a vacation, but for his own strange Dostoevsky night hours, had caused or created a certain sort of life, an odd one.  A very private one.  A sad one, in many ways.  But, he had a sort of vision.

The whole thing was rather like, I must admit, the story of a certain Don Quixote, as told by Cervantes.  The handless wounded old Spaniard concocted a tale.  And in the tale, a certain sort of noble character reads books, and reads them too well.  They are books of chivalry.  Old noble tales.  El Cid, tales of knights chivalrous, of ladies and round tables and the like, mighty foes, mysticism of the knight errant's journey..  Old Cervantes himself was a certain character.  And his take on a hack science fiction writer doing his thing was a storied tale, with an interesting angle.  One wonders if, even knows, of course, that he, Don Quixote, has twisted reality into his own noble tales.  To read  the whole thing, the very idea of meaning and reality has been tossed up in the air.  Perhaps one of the earliest recorded takes on Relativity.

The human creature, ever since evidence of the crudest art, has of course been capable of understanding all these things, such as we moderns have crafted into higher math and the poetry of the tiniest constituent pieces of even matter itself, for which there then has to be an understanding of dark matter, dark energy, on and on and on, just like the atoms in your fingernail which within have their own atoms, their own little genies, if you will.  The human creature was created in God's image, one just might as well say, and as soon as there were humans they were as knowledgable, as clever, as humorous, as circumspect, as ingenuitively curious as we are with all are modern accomplishments and scientific methods.

And here comes the necessary idiot, who looks the other way, and who sees truth, truths in different light.   Thus I call him, in this time and age, and in this culture, the hack science fiction writer.  To reduce this to a useful shorthand I will henceforth refer to him, for the most part, as that writer of the original work, loftily titled, playing from Lermontov, from Hemingway's early short story collection, A Hero of Our Time.  Jamie Tranowsky.  He is to credit.  He is to blame.  And while not a good writer, or a particularly useful one at doing the job of writing a readable book that would then give him the means to to write more books, his efforts, little musings here and there, in this form of science fiction, deserve some measure of respect, however you might be willing to measure it.


But I can not be so clear in this vision.  The highest of thinkers, such as Buddha, the Awakened One, regard the Self, in the sense of a fixed solid self, concrete, as utter illusion.  And we literary types must acknowledge that the collected thoughts in our heads often come from elsewhere, from things we've read, heard, somehow thought up out of unconscious echoes...  Was it his mind or my mind that crossed the street, carrying four bottles of wine, one for the night, one for reserve, two for the dinner one might be invited to, a plastic bottle of soda water, a hangar steak, a large zucchini, half a cooked chicken, thinking all its thoughts big and small, feeling increasingly sad after leaving the avenue with all its people doing social things.   He had a sense of work to do.  It would be cheaper, by far, to stay in and take care of his dinner and his wine.   And back home, he would finally have the satisfaction of doing his work, something he had indeed waited for patiently, serving the other cruel master, a physical brute who drove him to various edges on a nightly basis, even as he had to smile, grinning and bearing it, asked to play a song.

What can you do.

Was it in his mind or my mind what I seem to have forgotten in a moment of distraction.



If you understood time, would you know that you understood time.  Would you be conscious of that understanding...  Nope.  That's why they call it time.  Sorry.  We all still have to go through it.  But on some gut level, think, or at least suppose for sake of argument, let us say that we do understand time, even as our conscious minds fritter away about everything.

Consciously, you could only understand it mathematically, as in on a chalkboard, but not in any effective way.  You would still have to wait it out, for whatever was coming, and then, probably, you would have to deal with it, or accept it, or whatever, as far as any term that could be applied.

You know all along that your parents will die.  In understanding time, in the deeper sense, you might try to spend as much time with them as you can, balanced of course with your own direct personal concerns.  But you'll never be ready for the day when you find yourself standing just after that cusp, with the thought, "that is all you get."

If, if.  If you could understand time...  If you understood time, you could understand all things, all events.

To understand time, you must, the hack science fiction writer thought, appoint yourself as a sort of priest.  Then, as he imagined, one would be capable of deep understandings, ones that can never really be finally checked, but which might strike notes of theoretical beauty.  To be a priest would be, simply, to understand things like what Jesus was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount, and then, perhaps, to do one's best to take such things seriously, to not hide one's light under a bushel basket.

The hack science fiction writer's philosopher priest would grasp the state of being "poor in spirit," the spiritual poverty of the mournful, of the naked and and the powerless, who must rely on divine will, upon the will of God who maketh everything, who cannot be judged, who lays the foundations of the earth and the deep and the firmament, and all that sort of thing, powers way beyond us.

Such a priest could mull over things.  To have poverty of spirit then must be something of a relinquishment, a finding of a true balance, between God and Nature, between worldly draws and Christ and the Cross, between carnality and love's wisdom...


It made sense to the hack science fiction writer that he would end up in such a place, the bland waiting room on the fifth floor of an office building downtown near the corner of 19th and L Streets NW.  That's what you get for being a writer, a madman with a self-done haircut that his friend had taken upon himself to fix with his own electric trimmer before dinner on a Friday night.  "Dude, you went out in public looking like that?  Did you cut it with a rusty knife?  Did the guide fall off?  Yes...  We've got to go bald... you've got stripes on your head...  Well, my hair is thin..."That's what you get for not planning out an adult life.  Talk therapy, the suggestion of a mild antidepressant, comments intended to explore why one is powerless and petrified about life changes and responses to obvious needs.

The hack science fiction writer was ashamed of himself, the paunch of his belly from the pasta staff meals at the restaurant, from eating burger buns on the road trips to see his old mom eight hours away up through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Route 81, up through New York State with little break from the route, from the gluten free bread sandwiches which for a time seemed, along with mayonnaise and mustard, an answer of a reliable staple, a go-to breakfast, a convenient bite of protein when his blood-sugar and energy level sagged toward the last hours of work.  His haircut...  he looked like Van Gogh in the asylum at St. Remy now, after things went south with the townsfolk in Arles.  And there, on 19th Street, handsome young people, trim, in good shape, well-dressed even without their suit jackets as they strove toward lunch meetings with immaculate haircuts, looking the part of perfect and striving people, of the kind who would have safety and security, a place in the world, retirements and vacations...  Perfect people doing perfect things, with no craziness in their heads...

He is tired anyway.  An extra shift, picking up Saturday night, and each night was hard and complicated.  Father's Day...  Jazz Night, the late couple, a disaster of a wine tasting night left alone to cover the whole room front to back...  And given the night off, a huge relief.

The anxiety, he explains.  You get tired, irritated, you get very hungry, about to bonk, you get into the wine.  And he knows, that's no life.

In the office, he is bored.  Self-conscious.  Aware of his failings.  He wants to make changes.  But feels fatigued.  He wonders if she must be disappointed in him, his lack of direction.  Isn't that typical, womanly disappointment with the male of the species who seems incapable of growing up...

"You seem to have worn out your current position.  It's been good for you in many ways.  But...  You're good at adapting, at being a chameleon, but at a cost... to finding out what you want to be doing..."

Yes, finding himself wanting a glass of wine to calm the mind for sleep even as it starts to get light out....  Rising wearily, to go back to work again.

The need for change, but what, how, where?  "You tend to see change in pessimistic tones," she says. Obstacles is a word she uses.  He writes a check toward the end.  "Some kind of a solution is out there," she tells him.  "Like your haircut," she says, looking at him less professionally now.  "A problem solved, more or less.  A fresh start."

He gets a gyro up the street, quietly eating in with a culinary shrug, not exactly what he'd hoped for, as bike messengers hang out front with their gear hanging from belts and bags.  He walks very slowly, tired, back up through downtown and the circle, and up, at last, to the quiet street that is now a scene of tree work, much of the bamboo shaved down from the hillside, stumps bare, sawed off above the ivy bank, the truck with wood chipper, a large stump ground into a pile in front of the townhouse next to the Yugoslavian ambassador's carriage house...  The brand of the wood chipper itself, yellow, a trailer to the white truck with a hydraulic cherry picker bucket arm, is Vermeer.




The consequences of being a believer in science fiction, a writer trying to come out of his shell to tell the real experimental truths of the Universe...   To really step up to it, like Jesus did-- much to the chagrin of his own family-- to tell the truth about time.  Time is God's will.  Time is our own bodies given what they can do, but always teaching us something, even as we put suffering upon ourselves, additionally, as if by choice.

Guilt equals fear, equals shyness.  Equals awkwardness.  Did the saints experience that...


But you feel like a square peg trying to fit a round hole sometimes...  What if your meaning in life is different?  What if you don't really fit in with the conventional downtown office work stuff of Washington, DC...  The doctor acknowledges this...  that to an extent perhaps one doesn't need to fit in, so perfectly, to the conventional path...



I am one who has been crucified, the hack science fiction writer thought, tiredly, on a day off, not far from kitchen nor couch.  He still had the book, from which he had repeated this particular thought, from a chapter he had just read.  He was digesting slowly, The Priest Is Not His Own, by his side, on the bed sometimes, over on the Ikea coffee table by the leather couch, and it was the only thing that made sense to him, along with Kurt Vonnegut and Kilgore Trout and other such exercises.  Reading literature had been, as well, part of his own Cross...  How could one write as well as the greats, the professionals, the Hemingways, the Roths, all those writers who knew the world and could, even better, craft fiction of it out of their own heads and daily toils of mysterious processes?  There had to be something beyond all that prose, and now you had to find something readable, and like Raymond Carver said, sometimes you have to write yourself that which you would want to read.




Monday, June 11, 2018

But it is an innate feeling, something intuitive, something that would be with you always.

As you got older it begins to fit better.  You no longer find the need to look for reasons.  And the old reasons of earlier times, times when you might have expected a normal happy life in keeping with appearances, fade with increasing rapidity and duration.  You see when you think of the old girlfriend of should have would have and could have you know now, you know better, it's not going to last, having lost the desire, seen clearly the nature of reality, seen the nature of your own moods...

Time, time passing, aging, the things that come to pass concerning family, these do the job of bending down your shoulders in a pensive way as you go about your errands.  And all such things are only the match for the way you are.

In your maturity, one just gets comfortable.  You can begin to appreciate the quiet.  You regain the understanding toward your own qualities of mood as that which is the savor of the salt of the earth.  It becomes a comfort, a reflection of a better understanding of self.  And you can really start to live without envy, without wanting the things of other people's lives.

We are as unique into each other as all the wide variety of plants and animals of all the earth.  Our similarity is always there, being in God's image, and susceptible to God's laws of nature and the spirit.  But one life of the human being is vastly different from any man-made pattern or cultural style, vastly different from the Madison Avenue-generated catalog of happy endeavors, of shining attractiveness.  Those are all insufficient, the sexy images of advertising culture, of selling the being of God what she nor he needs.  (Catholicism can only attempt to keep up with such, to have energy equal to the negations of humanity.)  To expect one to be, to appear, "normal" by such a standard is too much to impose upon the natural health of a person living appropriately to humble divine image.


There is always that, not knowing what to write, not knowing what to say, not knowing where to even begin, for the writer.  No writer is immune from this potentially depressing condition, and grows into understanding it.  The writer, great or not, is not as bound to the mental realm of dualistic thinking, beyond masculine or feminine, beyond success or failure, good and bad, taking from the Buddha in this endeavor.

Sunday, June 10, 2018

Father's Day

You know...

My father figured out how to be an educator.  He fell into it perfectly.  And even had the G.I. Bill.

He ended up having a long great career, teaching many people.  Just out of his DNA, who he was.

And

I hope I have the DNA in me, to find some way to be a teacher like he.

Saturday, June 9, 2018

It would always take to the end of the Chef's visit for the main body of reserve be dropped for a moment.  The visit with open with the joy of his return and the promise of a glass of wine, the activity of friends joining him.  "Mister Ted..."  And in the last five minters, as I have the privilege of being behind the bar to keep him company over a last Stella before he heads to Dulles Airport, our bond is eternal and timeless thing.  He shows me pictures of his farm, the vineyard, the cork trees, the farmhouse, low like an Irish cottage but with tile rather than thatch for a roof, some interior renovations.  He encourages me to download WhatsApp, as he, after Cambridge Analytica, no longer on Facebook.  The two ladies I work with, approach me while he is there at this last visit to his bar, and they are insistent about me seeing something of the new computer system, the Jazz Night menu.  "Come on, really?" I say, standing up for myself once.  "Look, I pick up the slack for all the other bartenders...  Just please leave me be so I can enjoy the Chef's company for his last five minutes..."  The solid shorter one, "Ted, do you remember that book I gave you, yes, The Tools..."  "Yes, I know, Alina, face your fears as if they were a cloud... I know, but I just want to hang and talk to Bruno.."

And then the older one, into a reiki-like energy exercise thing from Japan, in her bovine sweetness drags me over to the screen, and I go, yeah, yeah, appetizer, entree, yeah, I think I get it...

And then with a hug, let us know if we can do anything to help (you with your mom)... and with an obvious respect for what I do, even if I am silly and foolish and temperamental at times, placing me on solid ground, as long as I wish, he departs and it has been a good visit, though I missed the early part of it visiting with mom.


The night of hearing of Bourdain's death, tired from going out into Georgetown the night before with an old girlfriend who is doing well now, walking, too much pollen, I put a shirt and pants on and go by Bistrot Du Coin around 12:30 at night.  I imagine there will be a gathering of chefs, and the guys worked for the DC Les Halles, and knew the man.  But even though they are supposed to serve dinner from a late night menu until one, the woman hostess tells me, sorry we are closed.  Okay.  There is one guy at the bar, and he is paying his check, and the stools are up on the table already.  And I am feeling very sad.

I walk down the avenue, past a homeless guy I sometimes nod to--he is vaping smoke, and smiling and I say hi, how you doing, man.  Back home in the apartment on the quiet street, I have a pack of ground lamb that will expire in a couple of days.  I pour myself a glass of wine and set to making a ground lamb version of Navarin,  given what I have in the kitchen, onion, beef stock, red wine, frozen peas, tomato sauce and paste, zucchini and squash, and rosemary and thyme and bay leaf plucked on my little sad walk back along R Street in the quietness of night, only one pedestrian passing as I climb the little cobblestone hill of 22nd.

Grease rises as I brown the lamb, but I make my headway through the improvised recipe in the order Martha Stewart gives me over my iPhone, and I hope for the best, bringing it to a splattering boil there in the green Crueset dutch oven, and then letting it simmer away as I drink a bit of Beaujolais, finding Anthony Bourdain On-Demand, in the Basque Country, and in Uruguay, and I cannot believe he is gone, and that his voice will utter no more, and no more of the fresh tales that always soothed me and interested me and were a pat on the back for what I do, both as a barman in a French Bistrot, and, and maybe more importantly, as an honorable attempted writing guy trying to prove his liberal arts education did not go to total waste.

It is a rug pulled out, from underneath many, I'm sure.


The writer has a private life.  There's  no way around that.   There has to be time for work.  And perhaps sometimes his work is largely to understand himself, to understand, why, why write, what's the point.

Friday, June 8, 2018

He was the odd combination, a literary man in the professional kitchen, at home with reading George Orwell, and in his writing on the order of literary criticism, along with getting out of his creative shell to talk, up close and personal, sharing ribald jokes with all walks of kitchen life.  He made thoughtful television that never failed to draw interest and attention and a satisfaction found in few places beyond Ken Burns.  His hybrid quality speak of our times, when talent and intelligence must take unconventional paths to find comfort in a life of hardship, for times when the innate character of the human being does not fit into the jobs the new economy provides.

He figured out the template, that of the classic writer, a person reflective and inward looking out, being out in the world with adventure.  He did it better than all of us, with far greater courage and willingness for the weariness of travel and risk and adventure...   Food and writing, dining and travel, in a considered and thoughtful fashion, written down and recorded as close to the actual experience you could get.  (None could blame him from a shift, in degrees, from writing to television;  he still wrote his own show.)

One in the restaurant business might have observed, that the ingrained experience of the stresses of each shift he had done as chef might have eventually made those other kinds of stresses, of travel and lonely hotel rooms, as ordinary, eventually toothless, a cause for humor, grist for the mill at least once one had a drink in front of him.  He must, and probably out of habit, put up with a lot of stresses, all along.  Restaurant people, nor anyone else for that matter, don't like to admit that the stress can catch up with you.

He, in his travels and culinary adventure, combined the literary, the thoughtful, with all the wonderful and immediate experience that everyone who's ever worked in a restaurant might know, the joy of good dining.

But so deep and fair to walks of life, an adept at cutting through bullshit, with a critical eye toward popular culture, broad as Dostoevsky (think about that) in his vision if not in literary verbosity, that, inevitably, deep down in the gut, one began to worry about him.  Tolstoy embraced the whole, and he hid his guns from himself.  Bourdain was never lacking when finding words to understand a culture, an encounter, a dinner with fellow beings and chefs and their families.

And as with the great Russians who walked in life, it is not too difficult to place Bourdain's work under the same overarching sense, really, of faith, into which all things fit in, the kind of thing we see in The Brothers Karamazov, or the grounding of the endurance behind Notes From the Dead House.  Bourdain might have placed his faith, conversationally, in other things, too snarky, and a New York realist without time for such things, to personally admit any religiosity, as might happen with the cynicism that enables fame.  Yet, he was an embracer of the Old School, wherever he might find it.  At least to this writer and his own peculiar perspective, too sensitive to long push it upon others in any insistent way, a believer in us all getting along, and keeping the dreamy silliness of his own faith private, more or less.

The man was well-read, in a liberal arts way, while having the courage to enter Culinary Institute of America after a year or so at Vassar.  He could reference Conrad and the classics, Fellini, a whole body of culture quite beyond that of American popular tradition.  He was a being endowed with all the characters of literature.

If he had such grace and kindness and hospitality, all of in on visceral level, a friend to so many, one had to wonder,  where did it come from, out of what deep pocket of private hell did he then grow above, making a phoenix out of the ashes of the previous.   What had he seen, what darkness did he come out of, to forget, that he had good will ambassador friendship for all people in all situations.


And one knew it himself intimately.  The need for quiet, for obscurity, for a walk in the woods while going to work to exorcise the demons, and then, even miserable, then setting up, getting everything in the bar ready to go, and then, after a staff meal, writing down the specials for the night on a little pad of handcut paper that fit in the breast pocket of your boring Brooks Brothers clean shirt which had been carefully folded in a legal pad notepad on the way to work on a bicycle, next to a ballpoint Parker Jotter pen.  What was darkness and drudgery and a sense of absolute uselessness, of rolling the heavy stone up toward the top of the long steep hill and then it rolling back down again and again, no retirement fund, and health insurance going up, and with each year a new need to do better... The stone will be pushed up toward the hill again.  All that became the most marvelous vessel of true hospitality, humor, candor, charisma... The basis of a way to read people, to get them, to interact, all of which brought a deep joy and a sense of well-being, a sense of no small accomplishment toward insuring peace would continue to reign in the world of good will and in there with present understanding and enactment of the great Tocquevillian Democracy of elbows and words rubbed in bars.

So much of what he said...  so true, so balanced, so relevant, so valid.

One of the days before I knew, I made a tea of muddled lime, sea salt, turmeric, and when I stirred the cup, as green tea steeped, the perfect yin and yang, the perfect image of the swirl of the universe in my cup.   And seeing that, one can only know that all in the great balance, good and bad, positive and evil, left and right, positive and negative, clockwise, counterclockwise, moon, sun, night day, drunk or sober, male female, mom, son, dad, daughter, brother, sister, intellectual, workman, all comes to some balance, and that is the only way I can now understand all that has been very positive, and helpful, a model, a way forward, even as he himself took  great risk of the jump into candid uncertainty and a new kind of being in the weeds, there would be an end, and the end has come to reckoning for this man, Anthony Bourdain.


"I've had a lot of good friends for a week," he said, speaking of his travels, as remembered now by Bill Buford on CNN's tribute that night.  That is the restaurant business itself, he would have known.  People pass through, and you are the spiritual as well as the physical messenger of the best friendliness has to offer. there at the center of the act of dining.  Many were his friends, but as great as friendship as he was, one wonders of his way of doing things, did he really have a match, a close intimate friend to reach mutually in good company beyond the frills of good blue cheese and port, of local rabbit stew and ramps, local wines....

Always first with the good spirit.  And now he has left this world without any of us really ever getting good interview of all his science, all his science fiction.  What a character, what a man.  He left us with a final answer.

Which is that no one can ever know another person.  All we can do is try.




Afterword:

Of course one had hoped he'd come to DC.  He'd sit at my bar briefly, have provencal vegetable soup, crusty boneless pigs feet, sweetbreads, veal cheeks, cassoulet, a good glass of Burgundy, an Isle Flottante for dessert.  He'd note that I too had some honorable literary attempt.  And I would reply that early work, just not focussed enough on what counts, tales of work.   We would have tasted a Pinot from the Loire.  A Languedoc, a Marcillac, a Madiran, a Morgon, a Clos des Mouches, a Bouche du Rhone iconoclastic red..


The report on him, and how he might have acted the last few days of his life.  Going beyond Thursday dinner, not showing up...  "He'd put everything into the shoot...  And then he'd go back to his room and isolate himself."  On an exhausting schedule, and, probably, too good a sport about it, too much susceptible to having a drink then, when he arrived.

And there was also what he had written earlier, or said in interview, or perhaps on his show (see, his natural skill, coming out of his being a real person), about even working as hard as he did, executive chef of Les Halles in New York, he was in debt, could not pay for health insurance, that when he was in the time of writing the mass of work that because Kitchen Confidential, first seen as an article in The New Yorker, he was a very worried person as far as normal concerns of rent, etc.

It could be argued that this form of life, a reader stuck in--imagine--a kitchen in New York City, was a perfect background for the pace of his television work, works of endurance, ease, personal pain, energy, exhaustion.
It's been a month, and I get on my bike and ride down there, down past M Street, past the construction site, then left onto the bike lane on L, up the couple blocks to 19th, take the U-lock off the mountain bike's handlebars, lock the yellow bike, take the helmet off and into my blue courier bag, across the street, in through the lobby to the elevator, up to the Fifth Floor.

Yeah, so I bring her up to date with my visit to my mom, the doctor appointment, the driver's license renewal, etc..  The clock ticks, I talk along with some form of purpose, an inventory of work and travel, the way things stand.

About thirty five minutes on, I'm talking about what might have been the plan, as they call it, what I wanted to achieve, where was I headed, subliminally or not.  So I mumble, leaning back on the beige couch looking up toward the ceiling then out the window to the left, back at her in her chair, her white shoes, pink nail polish.  She's still paying off student loans.  You do what's doable.  They don't effect your credit rating the way other stuff does...

The plan was to work a job, sort of like Melville, Conrad, Twain...  And then use that as the basis for writing...  An iceberg of experience.

But then come along all those talented writers who sit down and write and are so immediately good that they get published and receive acclaim.  Philip Roth, I bring him up, and also how I've outgrown Goodbye, Columbus to some extent.


You had a plan.  She says.  And it didn't work out the way you might have hoped.

You're petrified of making any sort of change...



Jesus, Buddha, they failed first time around.

The week goes on.  The night is very intense, very busy, straight running from six on, til midnight.  It is hard on the mood, a long day...  A friend takes me out to an art opening down in Georgetown...

Sunday, June 3, 2018

In the night, after staying in all day, and being completely unproductive, but for a nice texting conversation with a new Tinder hopeful, I try to read Roth, early Roth.  I peer into the early pages of Portnoy's Complaint.  The outstanding virtuosity, the humor, the gift of words, and the ability to present an alter-ego to explore the inquiry with sufficient candor...  Chapter Two, Whacking Off...  Bold.  More than a passing reference.

I get tired of it.  I switch back to Goodbye, Columbus, and that too begins to bore me quickly.  Maybe, like Roth himself admitted in recent years, one outgrows...

It's a scary time in my career, life in general.  In need of relaxation.  My own healthy physical Central European male reaction to imagery of women of all ages enjoying the hobby of anal sexual response. I take my time.  There is precedence in Kundera's work.

There is the new computer system to worry over, and also the late dinner facing the barman, the boss, a birthday party in the back room...  The last party, the last night in town.

Aside from the practice of checking on one's own health, a good idea at age 53, to make sure everything still works, I'm not urged to chronicle a fictional life in the way Roth, the master, has.  Another message keeps stealing in, that to be pleased, one must put aside, as in Luke, his life in order to gain it, to give up on his own selfishness and all the immature impulses...

Saturday, June 2, 2018

Philip Roth:
"Why is it that when they talk about the facts they feel they're on more solid ground than when they talk about the fiction? The truth is that the facts are much more refractory and unmanageable and inconclusive, and can actually kill the very sort of inquiry that imagination opens up."
--from THE FACTS: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)


So, even without divulging too much of my own life, and its embarrassments, in this venue, I have stuck far too much to the solidity of facts rather than the for the openings of fiction, and so have I, as Mr. Roth observes, limited the scope of writing.  Compelled to be reserved by such a public venue, originally intended as a field of literary criticism and that sort of thing, I've written about things that influence, that move, that effect the life of the mind, such as it is.

But no Roth am I.  

The inquiry I should have aimed for would have been freer, and fictional, and I've been too conservative for that.  I tried to allow for a kind of work to emerge without trying to shape it too much, to let it come forth.  And now I cannot make heads or tails of it, and I am tired of the set-up of its little tales.  Hospitality is in all of us, in the best of us, but one needs a job and the ability to make a living corresponding to where he lives, a career.





Friday, June 1, 2018

Yeah, so...  I'm back in D.C.  I go by the restaurant to take a peek at the new computer system for ordering, take a little test run at ordering, firing the main course, taking payment for checks, etc., and there are a lot of extra steps, as if the machine were spying on you.  I'm quite leery of it.  It seems a disheartening return, one more thing to make me, besides my age, outmoded.  Service in a  given night is down and dirty, and where the service might be as good and as elegant and hospitable as it can be, the new computer system scares and demoralizes me.

I am invited up to the sister restaurant for a tasting of wines from Portugal, the Alentejo.  Chef Dying Gaul texted me a personal invite to it yesterday.  I chose to walk up the old tobacco road as grey summer storm clouds gather and roll slowly billowing up in towers above, the old High Road, the early name, Wisconsin Avenue.  The hill climbs up, passing by, underneath its retaining walls, the Holy Rood (old Scottish for Cross) cemetery and then the block of the old restaurant where I as a fool, innocent and to be taken great advantage of to my own long detriment, first worked when I came to town and wasted the best twenty five years of my life pretending I was a writer while hanging out with characters of all sorts, fortune tellers, gran marnier restaurant people, barflies, crossword puzzle with margarita and lunchers, crazy liberal Texas journalists and Texas songwriter soundtrack, and real authentic Tex Mex.   I feel enormous sadness walking up past the shady old block, and make the sign of the Cross when I pass the physical location of the bar where I worked almost fifteen years....

The restaurants have changed since then, and now the star of the show is this I'm headed to, our sister bistrot, and I continue my walk up past the Cathedral and down to the left.  The strip joint, JP's, is gone, as is the old Grog and Tankard...


Up the road, I arrive.  A couple of the usual suspects, the chef, who is visiting from overseas with his wife, the chef of the bistrot, excellent, and then some wine friends file in, importers, reps, a young man from Cahors with an oenology degree from Bordeaux, the big friendly guy who is buds with Chef, a tower of a Basque. I'm introduced to a former somm from Taberna who is now a big and important importer of Spanish wines, and he has been enjoying the grape.  Chef--I've not seen him since November--greets me well, but soon distracted by the gathering evening, already into the wine tasting.  He is quite strong, a professional, French, and he can handle it.  He is suntanned, and wearing a light lime colored tropical shirt from Moschino, his style.  He's been out on his new farm, and is in friendly good spirits about his new endeavors.  He's always taken care of me.  He's a sweet respectful guy.  Today, he is enjoying himself, and he hands me a plate of proscuitto, a quick pleasure, here, generously, and immediately I see, I've never tasted better.  But the invite now, in retrospect, seems not as personal as it did originally as a text with a note of concern over how my mom is doing these days.  Chef has lots of people to talk to, and he's only in town to check on business for one week only.  Gallic reserve of the male variety is always there, to insure everyone's dignity.

Through the course of the evening, I sense myself not fitting in.  The French talk to the French in French, and stop to speak to me with the air of one speaking to a child.  The jamon is excellent, of the best I've ever had.  And the Chef F. brings out a plate of sweetbreads with thinly sliced chanterelle, out of this world.  I try the various wines, and my opinion is humored.  I taste one wine after another, talk with the wine reps I know, a little chitchat with the boss's wife's girlfriends, and so forth.  The Chef goes behind the line, with his knife out and a nice raw on the bone ribeye to slice into steak tartar, red, meaty, the perfect balance of consistency and flavor, served by a friendly waiter over crouton toast brought round on a platter.

And then, dinner will be served, and needing to eat, feeling like a freeloader, I join them for that hospitality, careful first to leave a twenty on the bar for the barman, and then later, one on the table as dessert is served, after I eat my steak, rare, and all the thin stick-sized pomme frites.  I'm seated next to a pleasant Irish lady who's tone is calm as an Irish lake on a still and sunny day, and she has long worked for the same importing company, and her brains are always good to pick for those of us in career uncertainty.  "It all comes down to reading people," she tells me, about her job.  They've taken of her Sancerre by the glass on our lists, and the replacement is more expensive and not as good, she confides.  Cool.

Toward the end, the chef peers up at the bar shelves and orders a calvados, "a man's drink," as he says, encouraging me to have one myself.  Previously, chef lights a cigarette.  There are still some customers in the house, down below in the dining room.  And soon another is passed around.  It is handed toward me, but the Chef says, no, Ted, then you just disconnect, and I nod in agreement.  He's right.  True, in the late night, after tending the bar and the diners, as the late new crew settles in to their indulgences I retreat to a distance, one night tuning up the house guitar in the front corner overlooking in avenue while they sat back in the room with the windows open.  Or, after running around all night, then some excitement, I am wiped out, retreating into my own head.  Things run strong these days, unpredictable.

Later, it is time for something else new, tequila poppers, a glass of Herradura silver neat with a splash of tonic, and then after palmed, slapped down against a table top so that it fizzes up and, here, your turn,  down the old hatch.  As a barman, purportedly, I do my duty, my share.  And the boys now--I worked one shift here a while ago, a year ago, more or less, and found it a little too much, went back to my usual gig--are getting toasty and talking shop.  A nibble in the kitchen, after a busy night, for them.  And beer.


Finally, now that we are toasty, it all breaks up.  I'd walked away earlier, feeling an alienation such that it was pointless to say goodnight to anyone, but I go back in.  Finally, the mood is to pack up, and outside with the two chefs in the humid air of one in the morning after a huge rainstorm, I get my Uber cab home, getting picked up in front of old CafĂ© Deluxe, one a hotspot of the northwest part of the town, but long since ceding its status, a shadow of its former popularity and status.  Which happens to all things that make a splash, whereas some of us have the karmic fate to be steady, consistent, reliable, good and professional.


And I am, this next day, afterward, again, hungover around the edges such that it creeps in, yet again, and in such a mood of the next day, I see myself, I look back at trying to be a kid belonging, there at the outskirts of the crowd, and everyone knowing I don't really fit in but by some haphazard quirk of fate....  I'm even more comfortable talking about that now, though, and there is the old Catholic line, that one can not truly love the world if he loves God and tries to do the right things.  Even while behaving badly and with the great self-disappointment that will come later, after the job of "partying" is done.

My presence in this line of work is not immediately clear, nor direct.  I've taken it as a path, upon which one could build a writing life, which would therefore require the solitude and quiet reflections necessary for the job, a kind of balance to grab whenever you could, to bolster up that belonging to the great adventure of waiting, truly, time passing, waiting on customers, dealing with the slippery crowd of the dining room...

It's not that I have ever faked work, the job.  I've always taken that seriously, with prep, with hard physical work and sped-up movement and agility.   I appreciate it as a profession.  But it is not all of who I am, nor, if you could clearly see it, what I am really up when I go in and gird my loins, setting up the bar.

In it, there is a kind of overarching faith, a belief in Christ's telling of parables...