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.