Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Blogger had logged me out of my account as the holidays arrived.  I had zero energy to be wrangling with passwords on top of gifts and the vagaries of a physical job.  There were tasks weighing on me, going up to pick up mom and bringing her down, work over the holiday nights, then after the family celebration at my brother's, getting her back and then making it back to work, which I managed to do, just barely.  And then you begin to clean up after the holidays, after all that time on the road...

"It is not easy being a saint," I said, at one point, and my mom said, "write that down, that's a good start to a book right there."

I used to write in legal pads, with a Parker Jotter ball point pen, and while I liked the privacy of the notebook, there is something to be said for typing it out as far as a way to access the mind's stuff.  Blogging is not the same thing as the illuminated manuscript, the Book of Kells, but, if it's what you got, it's what you got.

So, I pack up mom into the car, say goodbye to my brother's family.  My brother helps me with getting mom into the rented Nissan Rogue, and when I get in, she's in tears, "I see so little of him."  I roll down the window as we pass his front steps, and sternly he waves me on.  After everyone had left after the Christmas feast of rib roast, turnip, potato, after cleaning the dishes, putting away the nice porcelain, my brother and I sit at the kitchen table, a Brandy and Benedictine for each of us, some jokes.  We talk.  He emphasizes the thing he often tells me, that he doesn't care, he does not care, and, later, the day after Christmas, a dump truck pulling up behind me, and men shouting, I can see it on his face as I drive away, above the construction noise, right, on 30th, then down to busy M Street, then out west out of Georgetown to the quiet Palisades.  "Get me out of here," I say to myself, passing all the weary material store fronts promising this or that.  I still have to go get some things from my apartment, on the way anyway, and then on the road.  I am relieved by the point we are back in the quiet of my new neighborhood.

We stop at Gettysburg, for some fresh air, after Christmas Day and Night and the big dinner had come and gone, first to the McDonald's at the edge of the old battlefield, and then for a quiet slow drive around, Longstreet's position there on the right, then down through a dell, then up to the Roundtops, looking down on The Slaughterpen and the boulders of Devil's Den below, reading the informative National Park Service placards.  The air, clean and the sun out, making all the dried grasses the dominant textural color, and mom in her long purple overcoat, is deeply effected by it, and then we get back on the road, getting into Oswego just before Nine PM, looking for something to eat and a glass of wine, Canale's just about to close and no one paying a word of attention to us, so we to the good old Press Box, which is quiet too, but open till Ten, for the usual, glasses of wine, chicken wings, a burger for me, fajita for her, and when we got back to the house there finally, I came in and saw that the cat has passed away, laid out near the old Eames Chair, half of her body on a green towel we will have to throw away later, her body not cold yet, still a gleam in her eyes...

I was going to leave Saturday afternoon, but after some wet vac rug-cleaning after the poor old cat's passing and mom beginning to cry, about how sad I was at lunch, or depressed, not wanting the visit to end this way, we had the left-over homemade Canale's fettucini and meatballs and some wine for dinner, then I crashed, then I got up early and got on the road, nervous about everything, but able to put it all together, on the road by 8:15 AM, having to be at work at 4:30PM, as I listen in on an NPR story about The Battle of the Bulge, and before that, an interesting piece from Studio 360 on Kubrick's 2001.

There had been feelings of despair, and I soldiered through them, and I dropped off my suitcase and canvas shoe-bearing tote-bag, and managed to make it to work.

Reflections, too personal to share.


There is some truth, one discovers, to Jesus' take upon the rich man, that it is poorer folk who end up providing most of the love and care for those in need.  The eye drawn to the things of wealth is less likely to find within a heart that reaches out in kindness.  The materialist professional of the modern city returns to his prominence, apparently accustomed to caring little more for another being than to find a way to use him for an unwanted task.

These things must be observed up close, personally for us to see them, to be able to make sense of them.   A general commentary, an observation, hardly worth noting given the way the world works, but yet, revolutionary.  Re-arriving at something you'd long pondered, took as some sort of truth, and yet now it rings out of the Gospels with expansive applicability...  And all of a sudden the light broke into a way you could see it, the basic truth by which to make sense out of just about every human interaction you'd had with the people you've encountered over the years.


I too have material sin...I suppose, things I do to counter, to put away, to forget the strains, the thoughts of bad choices...  wine, to numb the pains mental and physical, late night soothing after the crowds leave, after dodging everyone trying to do their jobs in and out of the small bar space...  hedonism.  Behold a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber, and those who sit in the foremost pews, the prominent respectable citizens of model lives (viewed from the exterior)  would be quick to point out my ridiculousness, my poor behaviors, my friendships with the sinful and the crass, my indulgent propensities... my use of language unsuitable for polite company, all of that.


What emerged into the observational mind was the realization of a vast hypocrisy, a deeply seated willing capability of cruelty on the parts of those acting on economic privilege, with the desire for material benefit.  Church is not for the poor people, though it helps them too, but really for the wealthy, to remind them of something.

My back hurts, strained by a very busy and bitter night up at the wine bar, the rookie 18 year old server coming upstairs finally to help us out, dodging, anticipating, delivering drink order, taking food orders, keeping the bar checks straight.  I have to go in early, to get the bar ready, decorated with balloons, for New Years Eve, serving another special menu.   Another long dragged out night...

Another night I have some wine to ease the pain of standing before people, getting them what they want out of the offered choices...  I'm told the kitchen is closed by the time I want to order something.    It's a long day, the jazz trio doing the countdown for us.

I pack up hastily at the end of New Years Eve shift to join the boys, down to Martin's Tavern after it all, a Guinness.  At this point, people do not care much about the bartender, a sturdy flush cheeked man, but more about their drinks.  My boys give me a ride back to the apartment.


We don't get the miracles.  We don't get much from Jesus.  We don't get the solutions to our problems.  But we do get something.


"As long as you have your integrity..." my mom offers, still rendering good advice for me, even as I am poor, too poor to help her out any better than I can.

And so I fail, fail by the ways of the world, but still making the good fight, to be right.

The thoughts come now as a rain storm, as weather, random, a wind first, then the first physical touch...  I remember the night before, two true nice men who seat at the bar here before me for the New Year's Eve dinner, familiar, one an Irish face, white hair, Irish kindness, and John, from Louisville, Kentucky, they've come down from Grosvenor, we weave in and out of conversation as the night picks up, the big Russian kid moving slowly, getting in the way, a man of not many words--he wants to be let go early, because New Year's Eve is a big thing for Russian--and amongst things Louisville is Thomas Merton, and on top of talking of food and travels, this too is a hit, a silent retreat, yes, maybe some day, wouldn't that be nice.

Maybe I have emphasized the wrong thing, thinking it honorable to work, a sloppy disconcerting disrupting waste of good energy, sometimes, pearls before swine, kindness to people who do not really need it, who are intent on a product to consume, an opiate, a physical pleasure, the release of the verbosity of the mind.  So one thought goes.

People from humble places, with less the distractions, they get it, and somehow as you grope your own blind way out in this world, when you need it, I hope, I suppose, they find you, you get a bit of their light too, when your own gets dimmed.  And you can say, yes, I was right all along, not a fool to have struggled through the reading of A Seven Story Mountain, and all the spiritual stuff we can say, "but oh, that's crap, it don't get you anywhere..." about, but which is there as a help, even just to flag your disappointments in life, from not getting the memo, grab what you can of that which is offered up...  Because we are all fools, sometimes, or at least I am, maybe because of believing in things in the first place...

Sometimes you get shy, fearing that now, because of all the mud tossed upon your light, and your own submission to such treatments, because of all your failures, people won't recognize you, or that if they do, they might be horrified by your current appearance...

Our own living-out-imitations, our impersonations of Jesus or Buddha, are of course laughable, but, still, you have to follow the mind where it goeth...

Our own lives begin when we say, when we admit, "I'm nothing but a bum."  To get it, we have to be such.  We have to go through that, in order to awaken, and it's a hard place to admit to anyone, not solely for fear of how another person might react.  Deep down, they get it too, of they don't, then they are hard of heart and hypocritical, and need more time and karma to bring them by.

The reason we go through loneliness and suffering, anxieties, rejection...  so that we too would get it in our time.   And to say as much is to keep the writer's job, to the extent that he might have any science, medieval, or other, that you will always keep your song, even if other people might not get it, or let you play it, or be willing to listen.

It's New Years Day when I see my brother comes up on my phone ringer.  I pick up.  A small chorus of children's voices, Happy New Year, Uncle Teddy...  Then my brother takes over the phone, "how was the ride back..."  Hm, hum, yes, yes, well, this and that...  "You should take that photo down... (of mom's deceased cat, I put on Facebook, as a tribute to a fine cat and life in general, and to that old 19th Century familiarity with death and its poetry, and to its mysteries...)  You knew that cat was dead, right...   If he were present physically, I would be staring at his broad cold face.  Yes, I knew.  "Did you take a picture of mom together with the dead cat?" he asks.  "Sure," I tell him, "in the rocking chair, just like Psycho."








Monday, December 30, 2019

Sketch:

But I couldn't really explain, satisfactorily, any of it.  Buddhism.  Nothing is really all that explainable.  Not the successful people, not the Princess... They were just a sort of symbol of a falseness I couldn't pinpoint.  She herself was wise enough to tell me that it was more that I was obsessed with her than anything else, and I suppose she was correct, that she had become a kind of symbol to me, to my way of thinking.

It's hard for us Westerners to think in Buddha's terms.  Kerouac had his struggle with it.  He advanced the thought, but to do so was not easy at the time, as we all get effected by our surroundings, the thoughts a society maintains to perform its colonizing.   The terms of conventional thought do not, it turns out, so easily apply to each and every circumstance.  Take your mom, your old departed dad, taking the aging, take yourself...  In particular, start with the mind of the aged.  You could call it dementia, or is it just rather the mind revealing itself?

Why are some of us born, fated, to think of deeper reality even as life goes on around us?

For some, the entire point is yoga, but yoga, to the Buddhist, is to help one attain moments of peace and calm, some enlightenment perhaps...

The main human emotion:  suffering, distraction, depression, dissatisfaction.   This is realistic to accept.  To attempt to hide from that strikes the adult as useless.

Saturday, December 14, 2019

Well, you outgrow things.  That's how it goes.  Maturity.  Hard-earned, only through time and experience.  The clues are out there.  And sifting, slowly, through reality in all its bits and pieces, you come upon a kind of information that relieves, that explains, that shows out who people are, shows what is or was at work in a situation.

I had never thought of her as harsh, but other people saw it, and where I just shrugged, that's life, eventually, well, I saw it too, her ability to take exception, to make vast charges of a cultural conspiracy, one generally based on a kind of militant Virgo dislike of white men, as white men are inherently corrupt and party to the great racist structures that exist to tear down all that is feminism.  I had been in her cross hairs, and it was an unpleasant place to be, irksome, tedious, crazy-making, maddening.  You couldn't win.  I wrote about it.  Mind you, I have nothing against her.  I still would consider her a friend, it just that it is I am quite thankful I am not part of that thing with her anymore. We were both kids back then.  You can't blame young people, for such mistakes, you forgive.  Except that with her, in her world view, there could never be any forgiveness.  Whereas I believe, though I might be lazy for doing so, forgiveness is what it is all about.  Anyway...  I have my own problems, much the same perhaps, but just not involving her anymore.  I woke up.  Finally.  Don't be so hard on yourself.  And thus, I don't think of her anymore, or at least not in the same way, as, so I have said, my life has moved on to quite more distinct and serious problems that have nothing to do with anything as frivolous as trying to please anyone external, anyone like her, with her fancy city life and imperious being.

And these days, given the great speed-up, and the consequent removal of much of actual life, the way we used to live it, in common places, on common ground, over landline telephones that had not the scope of the personal cellular computerized phone, unfortunately, or fortunately, you come across the mind of other people, old acquaintances...  Just through the way it all works, through a sort of agreed upon spying, a sort of odd presentation of personal thought and private life over the new phone lines...  as if we were all going back to the insect life, droning on through the trees in summer like electric current.

Anyway, that is my long introduction to the current moment, to memories of the experiences of the last week.  Which, in my case, are out on the sailing ship in the watery part of the world that is my little eye on the restaurant business, hospitality, they call it, for that is what it truly is, an odd legacy of an ancient world, an ancient agreement, where, in which, one comes to be waited on, to have a desirable meal served to them in a pleasant way, with the addition of having the choice of being able to ignore the basic spiritual message potentially in the server serving, or to participate, to gain through that subliminal message, one not for away from the heart of the basic Buddhist activity...   You feed me, present me a bill, I pay the bill, I put a tip on top of that, and in the payment, the monk's food bowl is filled.

It was a miscalculation on my part.  To be a part of that.  But, so was it a miscalculation on the behalf of Ishmael...

So there I am, Tuesday night wine tasting, and it's getting quite busy.  They could have had Jeremy come, but no, and now it's full downstairs, the regulars are having 'round the bar, I'm taking the overflow...  the old one busboy, shared up and down...  And then the Tributaries of Chaos team arrives just as about the ship is about to take on Cape Horn's treachery, and I'm familiar with about 90 percent of all the people and in most cases knowing them quite well and having waited on them for years, with years of mutual stories shared of paths joined, how could you not and be doing your job.  The waiter server barman who gave a shit...  Who become a repository, a guardian of all this mutually added to body of personal contemporary history...

And in the midst of it all, on top of two nice phone calls from mom, uh, mom, yes, I'm at work, it's pretty busy...  (damn, I forgot to decant the bottle of Bordeaux for 43...)  On top of that, a message from the doctor, Dr. Patel, finally, getting back to me here in December on the results from my physical and the jarring LabCorps report item about my GGT level....    So, there's his message, which I have figured out, because I'm completely too busy and engaged in all the conversations and the traffic flow and do they want dessert or more to drink and if so what, and how to make it happen, and this while I'm running around like a silent film comedian with Keaton-like stunts.

Then throw into that mix the return of old friends, a community celebrating its connections, on top of that, here come along the holiday, Christmas...  Travel, presents...


And then Wednesday, after all this, too much...  It gets to be a late night, for the reward of a small easy going friendship...


Then from that, from all that, then dropped down late at night, in the early morning, to finally slump on the old leather couch. and after four nights, just lying there still is a nice thing, a pleasant reward completely sufficient to itself, along with something easy to find to eat.  I figure I have Ken Burns, The  Civil War dvd ready whenever I might like to view it for the thousandth time...but, on top of doing Vonnegut schoolboy afternoon things, as he put it, "jerking off and making model airplanes," I've had this bent toward the Lankavatara Sutra, and you can find D.T. Suzuki's introductions and summary of its basic point easily enough, acknowledging the insufficiencies of language...  And that also, or maybe this is the main point, don't get ahead of yourself trying to impose any artificial understanding or value judgment, because you're just going to make yourself frustrated and sad that things aren't working out, such that you're a financial genius with lots of people beckoning to your powers... societal rewards of security and friendship and thing that are far away (and yet maybe not) from the monkish life...  So you just have to go at things with some sort of positive, as best you can, attitude...



Good karma or bad karma...  who knows...


Friday, December 13, 2019

But as a writer, your true mission has something to do with figuring out the true nature of reality.  I mean, that sounds funny, or pompous, or lots of things, but you have to throw that out there.  This is why I occasionally study something like D.T. Suzuki in the Lankavatara Sutra, his commentary on how words are as a reflection of the moon on water, something being in the water that holds the reflection, the words being the reflection, but not the moon itself.

Somewhere in the night, as I watched a bit of The Deer Hunter, thinking of the constant sad efforts of writing, I had a kind of a thought, which is thus:  if the pace of nature is accelerated, as if we were arrogant enough to think that its natural course could be sped up, manipulated, disaster comes.  Hitler, speeding up the rate at which anything man-made should be powerful more than it is...   an imbalance against the natural democracy, the equality of human endeavor...   The inherent risks of nuclear reactions...   The human era manipulation of natural species...    And this is why I, if anything, have tried to slow things down in life, even as life has gotten ahead of me.

One cannot speed up the process of writing.  One cannot hide in substances that manipulate the mood.  One has to take it slow, and easy, or risk becoming another unrealistic venture.

Slowing things down, you dodge some bullets that way...

But, you get tired of listening to yourself, your own head.  And recording down every thing that happened takes enormous energy...

Thursday, December 12, 2019

So I  went down to the laundry room after taking out a small plastic grocery bag of recycling under a full moon behind whispy sheep clouds,  and just sort of sadly taking out the load of dark laundry from the washer, placing each item into the dryer after giving them a light shake before tossing them into the side loading drum.  My mother had called, after a number of earlier calls on my day off.  It's nighttime, about almost 9, and she tells me, I just read a very good book, a very well written one, by a younger person.

I had brought up a copy for her shelves, and maybe one for the local bookstore, when last I visited, so I could guess what she was talking about.  I was sort of waking from up from a nap, looking at my iPhone again, at Facebook as if something were about to happen on it.

She sounded good.  More lucid and directly present than before earlier in the day, and she sounded happy with the discovery.  "You are a writer.  You're a very good writer.  Just, I don't know, the little touches... We'll talk about it."

Yeah, we'll have some time when we drive down...  You're book is excellent too, mom, the writing...

Oh, not as good as yours...

And I felt happy, in, as Hemingway says, a simple way.

Its a really good book, she says.  Too bad work got in the way.

Yeah.


Later, I dreamed we were up on the old road.  The old road sloping down to the neighbors, then sloping further than that.  I was walking down with my mom, only to find that the neighbors were have a fancy party sort of visit going on.  And then later my father is walking up the road, in his style.  He is old in the dream.  He takes a nap, almost there in the road, such is aging.  I want to take a picture of him.


Inconvenient, my father says, in his quiet way, about the book not ever getting any attention.  Later in life, he could be stern.
"It's your art form," people began to tell me, mid December, as I worked my way through busy nights, left to my own devices on suddenly busy Tuesday night wine tasting, on Jazz Nights too busy, with big parties back in the wine room, the barman left to cover the bar and the front tables, one busboy between floors, running food, taking the stacks of dirty plates from the milk crates under the bar rail down through the main dining room and back through the two way swinging kitchen door, too busy just doing that to do more or be more attentive to little needs like lack of spoons...  By Wednesday, pretty fried, and a warning from the doctor concerning the liver...

Then the day off, in the monk's solitary quiet, tiredly awake, drinking green tea, and the attempt to get back toward some useful enabled form of writing out my thoughts, such that they could be gently kept, a wild baby from nature brought into society and civilization...  with quiet Buddhist thoughts about the shortage of language to arrive at anything accurate, easily truthful, the inability of dualistic conceptions to describe anything if one were to try to do so.

The animal wants to stay away from words, particularly the random, the words and messages of other human interests, reference points, speech, just in order to find his own thoughts, hiding, flirting, dashing away into the woods frighted by the possibility of discovery...  And the physical burden of four nights, two long, two exceptionally long, just to put the bar back in clean order after scrambling to provide all that might be asked for... from sparkling wines to specific cocktails...

And people telling me, seeing me uncharacteristically without much humor all of a sudden as I fret to bring them what they want, pulling in their orders out of the chaos, remembering to put them in through the computer screen's ordering system, two onion soup, positions one and three, after the charcuterie, and the wine order, and taking payment with credit card swipe from another table with the other hand, then turning to entertain the folk at the bar...  telling me that I work hard...

And the nice woman at the end of the night, whose husband is home sick, and she used to run a jazz program for the Smithsonian...   "This is your art form, you make the place happen..."

And I'm too tired to be embarrassed by the praise, as I am still even at my age, figuring out what it is that I am doing, what I should be doing, where to go, by understanding where I am now.

Accept yourself as an artist as a psychologically healthy thing to do, thou art that which is.

It was only because of the judgment of whether or not a thing is good or bad, rather than just accepting things as they are in their own nature, that makes one feel down.  A therapist will emphasize the negative feelings, when actually you have within a brilliant way of coping with such things.

And actually, you begin to see the positive, revealed over time, the extremism of other people, the Princess crying "racism" where none exists.  Who would want to live with that?  I wouldn't.  (Her reaction to the Peloton ad, decrying that a Northern European looking male should be present with a 'non-white' woman?)

I had found a way, natural enough, of surrounding myself with the decency inherent in people, when I needed them.  The artist had created a little shell to protect himself.

Give me the simple and decent people, the kind Jesus had a fondness for, for the people who represent the great genetic variety of humanity, each one different once viewed from personal perspective, having gotten to know them a little bit.

Ask yourself any question...  am I effective, or not effective?  am I helpful, or not?  It only matters the perspective from which one choses, really...


The day off, I venture out for a walk around the block.  The great river, laid bare, at dusk, the little market for a sub.  Chon Pam, or Jom Pam, or Jhon Bam, or add heseyo at the end to make the wish Good Evening more formal, as if addressing a respected elder.  Joh-eun Bam.



Tuesday, December 10, 2019

The traffic outside on the street and the planes above flying beneath a low cloud cover sound like a strange wind, broken, sped up, slowed down, gaseous.   The body is sore.  I will rest some more before getting up and making tea.  We are through two nights so far, Sunday and Monday night jazz.  It will rain this evening, starting when I go in, and the report for the rain turning to snow after midnight.  The light is subdued today.

I got home about 1:30, after catching the D6, riding up at the side seats in the front of the bus, the lone passenger until I tell the woman driving the long bus that the next stop will be good for me.

I get in, work my way toward bed time, a glass of wine.

In a world of attachment, where do you begin?  The inadequacy of words...

I am already too distracted today, from listening to the news on NPR, to write today.  One external thought leads to another, and soon you have forgotten yourself.  You return to waking thought experience, the light coming in early...

Attachment.  Happens easily.  You get carried away, and then comes the harder task of reducing the attachment and its hopes.  Back to the Zen, back to the quiet, the so-called monastery, back to reality. There's not much money to be playing around with anyway keeping up with social lives, with people who do things, who find happiness in little adventures.

The stoic keeps on working.  It is not unlike the Buddhist monk going round a village with his bowl, giving lessons on the deeper nature of reality in exchange for a bit of rice.

Work is very busy.  It distracts me from sorrows.

Attachment.  You watch it happen.  The mind begins to jog toward the unreal, the imagined.  And then, for one reason or another, the fantasy is interrupted, ended, that's how it goes, there you are walking alone the river bluff under the trees, worrying about your old mom and about your job, and about the career that never happened and now "too late," but those things too have attachment to them and what the world needs now is the proper perspective, the reality that Buddhist thought ultimately offers the being.

It is that my life is completely hollow, that of a total loser?   My life is just as much an experiment as anyone else's...  I have been a cretin, I have been a slob, I have committed deadly sins.

But to remember, each time one's life is driven out from the sort of illusion that they might have fallen into and under, there is the waking up, the coming out the other side.

Did ye not know, I was amongst the worst...

The minutes drag on, before work.  Leftover Chinese, on top of the Dragonwell tea with a dash of ashwagandha and schisandra powders.  I vacuum the apartment, the little fur the bathroom collects, the carpet rug beneath the coffee table where one eats, writes, has tea.  A little chore helps the clear the mind to remember that from which it was distracted.  That has always been so for me.

Nerves before work.  Nerves not being able to get hold of mom on the phone.  I'll be too tired to do much when I get home from work after midnight.  I get through to mom finally, telling her it's quiet alright if she has a glass of wine now.

You cannot be healed without understanding the disease within, without understanding how it works all through everything.



i get to work.  I set up, having left myself in good shape from the night before.  And then, it gets busy.  Very busy.  And then it gets crazy on top of that.

Monday, December 9, 2019

Haven't had much time nor energy to be "creative," by which I mean, writing the crap I write here.

But it soothes somehow.  Even when you got nothing.  Even when regret is the first impulse of the day.  Work past that.

The soles of my feet are stiff and sore when I wake.  I walk to Georgetown, having been summoned by my brother without much notice to come down early to my nephew's birthday party, to drive my niece in the Range Rover back to the house;  she has the flu, contagious.  Inwardly, I grown.  I don't enjoy driving the truck through the narrow streets of Georgetown particularly with church-going traffic.  Then later, after an hour and a half or so, I will drive my niece back, and miss the party I was to go to earlier anyway.  Thanks for the help.  Sure.  I'm tired, from sleeping too much in the depressions of my own quiet solitary weekend in which I miss the visit of an old friend in town.  I walk up to work, knowing what a lovely time it was being with my niece, as she went about her school business.  Something grounding about being with young people, the peace they keep, the steadfast focus.


The trees over the river on both banks are bare now, the taller buildings of Arlington, VA, exposed now, naked their structures of right angle and clean-cut economic value.  A solitary Friday afternoon walk, as the sun nears setting over the ridge to the south, the parkway exposed, and I'm still sort of hungover from the date I fell for and the fool wine consumption to get through the foreign feeling and being questioned, sized up by my politically-involved acquaintance.  Just another dumb thing I've done.  The falseness of attachment.


And going to work, too, Sunday evening, my Monday morning, I feel stupid too, and lacking in energy, preparing for the tediousness of setting up, and I'm there now and already putting the bar into place and getting ready for the annual visit of the lady who brings in a dozen or so art curators and museum directors, notes of a vague hostility toward me as the sort of outsider left alone upstairs, being in such a weary mood before the door opens, wondering what I have to deal with, never predictable.  Down to the basement, to get a fresh supply of olives.  Restock the maraschino cherries. Finding cocktail shakers left out over night, still wet and sticky.  An update on the rodent wars from the boss, as he brings up a reserve coat rack for the fancy people of art.  L(M) will do the party, the boss tells me, much to my relief.  "Yeah, that's how I should have turned out, being an art critic, or something.

It all passes, my energy, relieved, improves, and after closing the place down and the lights all off, I set the alarm code, and out to get some groceries with a little list in my pocket, up a block and a half at the Safeway monster.  Then with many bags, giving my simpatico Uber driver a V8 can from my haul, I lug my stuff in, tea, cheese, cold cuts, hummus, lentil soup, bone broth, black-eyed peas, magnesium and B12 tablets, groaning as I mount the stairs of the apartment building.

I plop down, after doing the dishes in the rubber made tub finally, and my mind turns to Shane MacGowan's upcoming performance on RTE Irish television, Fairytale of New York, and the story of the creativity behind it.  They watched Once Upon A Time In America, taking in its Morricone soundtrack, back then on the tourbus, their first trip to America...  There is something that transcends or bypasses conventional language story-telling meaning to the lyrics...  I too could not do it without something like wine.


To write, as such, is a barren craft, as if it were fishing in waters devoid of anything worth catching.   You get the bones up first, then embellish with sinew and organs.  No wonder the first animal beings of nature are so strange and ugly in shape, in need of evolving.  Nature traces its path even for the poor wandering writer.

Writing too, whatever story might yield from any of it in any way, must be done with the same circumspection toward language as the Buddha noted.   In that the human mind has a great tendency to place all sorts of judgments, often dualistic in nature, this is good, that is bad, when in reality no one thing has any more significance than its own chaos, its own unpredictability, its own refusal to abide by exterior terms and values.

This is what the poor devil the honest writer is born unto.   And any writer that would attempt to nail down any concrete notion, such as happy or sad, will have missed the mark of what reality is comprised of.

This is what the work, the role of the writer is ultimately that of a Buddhist, and strangely, the things of his own life begin to fit into that tradition...

It's a scary realization, that in his best efforts what he was at all along was to embrace the crucial tenets of Buddha thought, all of which themselves are scary to the mindset, as a divorce from the meaning in terms like good and bad.

Friday, December 6, 2019

We had made a connection, Tinder, the kind of pseudo-connection one gets here, okay, when I was up at my mom's in the storm, and she seemed nice enough, my other friend had stopped responding to me as she had before, and after my therapy session my Tinder friend messages me that she would be at an event at the performing arts school near my place of employment, that maybe she could drop by, so I went in early, set-up as best I could, so that if she dropped in I might have a moment to talk.

I was busy setting up anyway, and the first customer came in right at the door opening at 5:30, and then I get a text, her letting me know she ran out of time and had to get downtown to meet clients for a dinner in Chinatown.   There I was behind the bar and when she texts if I'm free the next day, I made the mistake of telling her I had it open, and there I am in Mr. Please People mode, with those early regular customers who like conversation, you have to pay attention to them, and she, via text, invites me out to Capitol Hill for a drink and then a live Moth Radio Hour at the old theater there.   The old bait and switch...  I'm distracted enough.  I text back, okay.   And immediately, I feel guilty, stupid about it.

Jazz Night, quite busy, hectic, doesn't stop, keeps coming, a final table of the boss's Frenchie friends at the last table, a late joiner, a birthday to celebrate with a chocolate tart at the end...  and the whole night seemed pretty short staffed for a full house and jazz night with the additional five customers of the band of gypsy swing musicians...


I wake up rather tired, conscious at noon, but beat, and to get across town for 5:30, which will take an hour, well, that doesn't leave me much of a day, and I don't have the energy for it anyway, this date, except I've foolishly agreed to it.

So I get there finally after the heroic Uber ride with a man from Ghana who tells me the story of "ritual money," a sort of voodoo practice, as I sit there agreeably in the front seat of his Camry, beholding the glories of DC rush hour through the windshield, the back and forth, changing directions, over Memorial Bridge just to turn around and go back over it to finally get to a clean road up to the Hill...

I get to the place, a new restaurant.  I sit down, order a glass of wine from the genial waitress, and we talk for a bit.  She sizes me up.  I shrug inwardly and go with it.  Small plates, I have a third glass of wine over our expensive little appetizers, and we have to get to the theater.  There at the theater, a ticket for $15, I get more wine, served in little plastic cups to sit through it.  I get animated.  I know the guy telling his story.  I know a few other people in the crowd, even out here on The Hill, far away from my old barkeep gigs.  I get friendly when I drink, and then I drink more.  That's entertainment.

And then we are standing outside finally and she is very disgusted with me, telling me off, and I am feeling tired, unsteady, confused as to where to find my Uber ride.  Sad but true.  I do not know these streets.


And today, another day is wasted, and it's Lankavatara Sutra all over again.

And something too seems to have happened with my friendship with Becky, who is busy anyway with all her training and working-out routines, energized by her detoxing, texts back, "what would you know" about the things she is doing, her response to my little effort to be cheery and applauding her most recent efforts, in the midst of a very busy night via text.  Okay, she's right.  What would I know, these days.  What would I know about workouts, bike rides, yes, shame on me, I've not been out doing my yoga under the pine trees after it turned cold.


The therapist tells me that, like before in the days just after college, in the attempt to help my mother out I am limiting my ability to help her out effectively, a negative feedback loop, Jesus Christ, and here we all are.    And this too is unreal, as the cookie cutter standard by which I am compared with doesn't apply so well to the actual life situation, another irrelevance.

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

I was merging from I-270 onto 495 South when the text came through, and when I got over to the far right lane finally to get onto River Road to get into Washington, the traffic was slow enough so I could pull it up, after all the driving, back from Mom's,  "You don't need to come tonight, we will see you tomorrow, Thanks."  The Waze app was telling me I'd be due in at the old Gaul around 5:22, up on the center screen of the small rental SUV.   I'd been staring at it since 9:30, that and the road itself. My anxiety levels had been high the whole time, both from what I was leaving, and for what I was going into.  Wine Tasting Night without proper set-up.  Nothing without a proper set-up.

And me being the whole let-down,  the disappointment, the squanderer of people's faith and opportunity.  And now why had it all happened...


But you're almost shaking by the time you pull the car over in front of the apartment, after double checking, I'm here, are you sure you don't need me tonight.  The app had told me I'd get in at 4:30, but with each pit stop the estimated time of arrival went up.  There had been a big storm down from New York State into Pennsylvania along the whole route, and I had to call in on Sunday night, telling the assistant to the manager, I wasn't going to be able to make it.  Every tree branch along the route, covered to the tip with a layer of snow and in some higher places along the ridges glassy with ice, pine trees sagging with snow, the Northeaster Winter Storm Ezekiel, touching upon those returning from the Thanksgiving Holiday.

I took my suitcase and two duffle bags in, went out for a walk around the block, stopping at the store, returned, had a few spoonfuls of some chilled quinoa and black-eyed peas from a bowl in the fridge that I'd had six mornings ago and took a nap on the old black leather couch in the quiet, waiting for the traffic to die down before taking the rental car back to Calvert Street near the Omni Shoreham.  Tired.  Too tired to write.  Thoughts too weighty and deep to wrestle with.



Depression is a contagious thing.  It comes from the beloved, family members, people uniquely like you.  It comes along with anxiety, it comes along with your own bad habits, the ones that come from an ill chosen peer group, the other depressed self-medicating high school friends fallen in with.


The trip had been rough.  The approach of the holidays.  Travel.  Looking for a car key in the haystack of Mom's Bermuda Triangle of stuff, old family objects, memorabilia.  Books.  Piles of books.  On the bed.  Academic piles, clothes piles, old vinyl camera cases, plug in chargers.   The old cat.  Not finding the car key.

I put a load of laundry in, socks, the Levis and the green chamois shirt I've worn for the last week straight.  A cooked chicken breast, with some broccoli, covered with Kirkland tomato sauce and the Korean market's house-made fresh mozzarella, into the toaster oven at low temperature, Ken Burns Civil War, "Universe of Battle," pulled up on the screen before the couch and the low Ikea coffee table.

I wake up the next day.

Thoughts.  Just thoughts.  Not having worked the last four nights, I have some energy.  Awake at a reasonable hour, but without much inspiration.  I've not written in weeks.

Write, I tell my mom.  Keep a notebook.  It will help with all the thoughts.

Weird energy, waiting for the therapy session over the iPhone screen.  Then I will shower and get read for work.

Sunday, November 24, 2019

What helped was that both jobs were a continuation of the other.  If you were to take the job as a whole, properly, as one job, then you saw it.  It almost deserved a title.  But you did not see that looking at either of the particular jobs, the neighborhood bartender, the quiet writer trying to get as close as he could to nature while living near a city, such as fate had allowed, not until you saw them together, as one.

The job had something to do with being a moral being.  Part of it was, indeed, The Gospels, or a vague version of them, or perhaps of other lessons, sutras and so forth, a kind of monkish waiting on people, literally, first hand, a pouring of wine, an offer of bread, a wit over what exactly to eat, then scraping the plates clean at the end.   The writing part, which in many ways had gone bust, belly-up, was a facet of the same spiritual inspirations, and such is not odd, if one takes in the basic drives of literature and those who write it, from Kerouac to Tolkien, Twain, the ancients, the bards, the commercial bards...  And they too had to mix the physical, the grunt work, the beating of the pavement, or whatever it is that becomes one's own personal situation, the talk, the deposit of paychecks and the writing of checks, in order to get to that magic quiet time that always offered itself up for them as something alluring, gentle, and good, and kind and somehow, one knew, quite useful, and quite honorable, even though it was just a quiet unseen thing, a thing familiar with the gush of car tires along a rainy street at night, or a dark tree trunk wet with rain while walking out free at night before going all back to it...

(One would hope that such a definition would apply;  perhaps to make it applicable would be one of those acts we perform when reading fiction, an actual acceptance in the imagination's true depths of the belief of, say, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Tralfamadorans, the space aliens of higher spiritual realms in Slaughterhouse Five...)

It was a job.  Some job.  Just as all of us and them, self-appointed, self-appointed, just as Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway...  Jack Kerouac... the true free writers of America, in search of escaping the fake, the overly bright light...

And there should be a title for it, a job title, a description, something like a governing term, taxman, publican, judge, state attorney general, sheriff, soldier, officer...

And as any of those, you delegated.  You delegated, but you also did a lot yourself, seizing upon the possibilities latent in the job with your own two hands. to make something of it, a community, people able to talk to each other, to share the town they were in.  You delegated to the French guys, because they ran a great tight ship...  It was not that you delegated, it was that you participated in what they did.  They were in the institution.  You needed to be part of something.  Once there, you did as best you could.  And I closed the bar, every night I worked, I made it a bar.

There was, of course, a great humor, to tying to the two apparently completely different tasks together...  There was a great leap of the imagination to do that.

But what do you do?  You stand.  You stand where you are.  You've burned enough bridges, or rather, abstract possibilities possible, no longer now possible, so they, also imaginary, say...  There's no going back to the idle times of being a good happy student fulfilling all his professor's directions to a T.


And so.  And so on.

I was never a good writer, not good enough to be a stand alone one.  But what I did, it had certain underpinnings, and they were not revealed, without some embarrassment, without some fear of getting too personal with a customer, such as to share the book you wrote, about going through what really seems to the male mind as the biggest worst most complete failure there can ever be, meeting a great person, a woman, and somehow turning it into a disaster.


As such, with dual duties, with other duties, it is the pursuit of trying to make a living.  There is not much time for writing.


But there is time for honest writing.  For unadorned, maybe pointless sometimes, prose of some sort, some admission, some sort of spiritual journal one was occasionally allowed the energy to add to, not being a person of perfect energy....


Why did I chose Washington, DC...  It seemed there was a role here...  Was that available in New York?  I'm nor sure.  For then you'd fall, lost, as James Dean was lost, into a commercial kind of a role...  Actor.

The honest truth is, there are no roles that aren't just acts, not necessarily bearing upon the total reality at all.  So do the greatest rise above, as long as how they effect the world, a JFK, an Ellington...




Thursday, November 21, 2019

Bruno got down to the bottom of Trevallon Blanc 2013 after his friends left and I came around the other side of the bar now that it was closed and sat down with my bowl of pea soup.  He talked about his farm, forty acres in Alentejo, Portugal.  There was the wine he had brought with him, his wine.  He showed me pictures of the interesting things he'd done there.  We talked a little about his wine.  His wine consultant not having enough time for him...  He showed me the mock-ups for a wine label for his red.   We talked about his handyman, how they built a long stone wall together, projects...

 Then he went off down the stairs and out into the night, to Du Coin to catch his friend Yannis for the Beaujolais Nouveau Party, he wasn't going to stay there long, twenty minutes maybe, wanted nothing to do with a tightly packed room anyway, and I was tired and needed to clean up and put things away, as it had been a long night with the bar full of The Hot Club of DC piping away in the front corner.

I packed up my little bit of stored food stuffs and my nalgeen water bottle, put on my coat, made the call for an Uber and soon enough I was back at the apartment to unload, unpacking a small container of curried chicken salad and a paper fold over some sliced roast beef, and to be done with the week, cracking open a Pale Ale and catching up with stupid things on the internet, and then I went for walk, around four AM.  My cough was still there, entrenched, but I needed some fresh air.

I walked down to the bluff over looking the great river's dark blank space below and the trees on the other rising bank, escaping what I could of the light pollution, taking a walk along the old trolley track trail clearing underneath the cool clear sky.  There might be deer out in the season, there was a big fox I saw up from the bottom of the hill beyond the maple tree a week before, the fox sitting there upright surveying his territory until he got wind of me and dashed away into the bush.  I walked along, below me Canal Road under the street lamps, the stone wall, the dark canal...

I'd found a YouTube of Prince performing Purple Rain from 1983, one of the first performances, for a benefit in Minnesota, and so I walked along under my trees listening to it all.   Doing the best I could to get away from the lights of neighborhood and city, the wild animals invisible and quiet, remembering Bruno talking of how there on the farm how he sees shooting stars every night.


A strange year, moving, losing many things, like the old family canvas Eureka two man tent my brother and I would camp out in on summer nights in the yard, lots of books, doodads, little historical things, spices, vitamin supplements, glassware, plates, cookware, the move coming on short notice out by early march, finding out around my birthday in January...  a life of twenty five years on the same street, well, that's how it goes, and then mom's condition, the mind's frailties...

Things which would indeed lead you to reflect upon your own use of things like wine when you are all alone and the hour is odd.   Relaxing must be good for part of you, but there are health consequences, as we all know.  And I just felt isolated, and then you look outward from your own deeper nest of feelings and about where you live, mentally, spiritually, in words and thoughts and memories, and you do see the kind of individual places an artist can end up, through their rebellion against those things which put aside the making of art, deeming it impractical and not of much use...

Everybody, everyone, is creative, and just to survive, swell, they have to be creative, I'm sure.

But there are some, the ones who have a certain kind of a reaction to the things that you come upon in the stages of life...  Rebellion, it might look like, slovenliness, but that too just a thing of a concentration upon artistic expression, on the expression of what it is to live.

Would there be some sense that one would enter into relationships for a larger reason, a trust in that the relationship will be inspiring to the creative drive...

I got to thinking on my own forms of participation in the artistic realms of writing and music, the study of literature as it is made, the study of religious stuff, and how they all might apply to each other, but the side arts too, the ones we may end up spending far more time at anyway.  My art of creating a barroom of people, a regular moving wave of thoughtful people...

I thought of myself as an old school guy, a creator of a community, even if looked down upon for all things come with it.  Bachelorhood.   Weird hours, the physical effects...

Were you ever married, the chef's friend, a restauranteur asks me, blushing I thought...  No, I...  I try to explanation, like how exhausting the job is and who would have me anyway.  I tried to tell him, before wandering off tangent, back to the restaurant business, as if that were life, mutual restaurant friends, owners, relating how hard it is to keep a place staffed these days...

Gorgeous, as always, he offered, with a bro hug before he left and I stayed.



I think it perfectly normal that, in the end, we try to recreate the social experiences we had, when we are alone.  I think it perfectly normal to ruminate over them... to do a retake on the chemistry of the social event, the talk, the look in the eye...  that particular mysterious things we have with another person.


And sometimes that takes a lot of space.

I take my walk not with wine, but with a little bit of Guinness Stout in my bidon.  Is that part of it, that one just drink something relaxing in order to think for a moment, outside of all responsibilities...



Monday, November 18, 2019

We are driving out to Fairhaven, as mom wants to go for a ride and have a little adventure.  I'm not convinced there will be any place to eat, but she has faith, and I relent, though I will be driving back to DC later, seven had a half hours on the road in the darkness, then take the rental car back.  I've had a persistent cough the whole trip, finally finding cough syrup at the Big M, patiently going through my grocery list while mom is home with the cat.

Did you sleep well, she asks, several times, earlier.  No, I didn't, and it is hard to wake up, but I brought green tea loose leaf and that helps, though the thought of how the day will transpire is getting me down.

I tell her about my thoughts at night.

No, you can't think that way.   You need your energy just to deal with the day before you...
But journal entries are just that, journaling.   I need a narrative structure, to not waste the time and energy...

I wake up with mom calling.  Talk her in off the ledge, over a series of phone calls over a landline that has a significant hum to it.

Try to get time off from work.    Go up to check on her this week.

Lankavatara.  Remember the Lankavatara Sutra.   Nothing is real.   Only the teaching that nothing is all that real.  If you try to make something seem real, more than it is, the illusions of it will come out.

Halloween is not real.  Old friends are not that real either, as they will have differences with you as well that make the friendship pointless now.  You yourself are to blame, for taking things real, when they are not.

Results from physical:  cholesterol high, 200 range.   GGT, 90, high.  Monocytes (absolute), high.



So it's not really enough, the way things seem to go, to be done with work late Wednesday, early Thursday morning, and then to be going back to work Saturday night.  But it's Friday night, I'm not biting off more than I can chew, I'm having a few Goose Island IPAs and I get the guitars out, plug in the Epiphone Casino, the Shure Microphone.  Practice a bit.  Turn up the old Lab Series amp...  It's gotta come out, somehow.  The creativity needs to come out.  I'm mindful of the hour.  There's a knock on the door, I think, so I unplug, and to my surprise it's not the guy next door telling me to cool it, but the downstairs neighbor, sweet kid, married, with his Yamaha rosewood six string.  We jam out.  One of the first nice things about living here.

Tim goes back downstairs to his wife, and I get an order for Chinese in just in time.

Later, I wake up, anxious.  All my stupid fault.

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Hugo is running around kitchen close at nine, he's taking the bread away, saving it for the kitchen to make toast.  Close at nine.  Everyone, the kitchen is closing at nine.  It was busy enough earlier.  We dealt with it.  Then everyone, with the exception of one couple, just sort of sitting forgettably over in a corner watching the band play, the singer crooning, the accordion easing in an out, the bass studied. He's ripping plastic garbage bags up out of their containers, both recycling and food trash waste, and just then, after the beginning of his mad gorilla act, up the stairs comes just the group that I had mentioned just minutes earlier to the gentleman busman.  And he had joked back to me, mentioning the name particularly associated with the late night, the chaos.

And just now, up the stairs they come, smiling.  One of the guys comes up to the bar, smelling of smoke, hey man and wants a handshake, I can't do it.  I turn back to the light over the stove and the cutting board for the bread on top of it.  A defeated boxer.  They switched the game on him, in the eighth round.  You  know what this means.  This means I'll be driven to the wine again, and goddamn, wasn't I good earlier, but now these people, smiling at me.  My friends, in fact they are my friends...

Okay guys, kitchen closing at nine.  I shout the specials at them over them.  The stoner guy always wants to deliberate...  The woman says, we can do this.  Nine O'Clock, I remind them.  It's 8:56.

"I told you."   The busboy man too is spooked, by my prediction, my clairvoyance, and by his own.   "What I say come true," he says, as he had mentioned the name, Rumpelstilsken, standing with me in the bar's space, with our backs against the cooler, looking out into a middle distance, as if we were looking at the edge of a great impenetrable forest, trying to read it.

"We came for your lovely personality," the woman says, a sort of in the ballpark of a guilt trip kind of a quip.  You've just added three hours to my night.

Even A. chuckles when I tell her, quietly, behind the bar, "I'm going to down the stairs out across the street and stand on the corner and yell at the top of my lungs.  I hope you don't mind.  Then I'm going to come back in like nothing happened."  

I get their order in.  Two salad with frisee, lardon, quail egg, one salad endive, one salmon tartar, then followed by cheese plate, liver, but not provencal, just red wine sauce, and the chicken curry....

Has it been busy tonight?

Uh, no.  (We dealt with it, earlier.  Full bar, on our asses early.  Then they all left, and we all said to ourselves, let's just pack up and go home.  We were busy over the weekend, blood coming out of the ears...)

So now you're stuck.  Now you're caught.  Off to the inevitable conclusion, they even choose to smoke some weed, and by now I don't care, there's a rat walking by my feet, and I'm, for the first time, abandoning my mother for her doctor's appointment down in Fulton, a fact which will dwell on my increasingly over serving, clearing plates, serving, clearing plates, get the damn dessert order in with these stoners...  "There were crystals in the mint ice cream and in the vanilla last time," I'm told.


The apartment really was a palazzo.  It wasn't bad at all.  It had a nice breakup in size.  My brother's tribal rug comforted the living room.  Things were still in boxes, as if to get shipped somewhere yet known.

We all  need some lovin'  I sing to myself as I clean up afterward.  I mean it only as a song, like a nice Early Beatles lyric.  How we all get so shy over the years...  We all need.  It's such a hard shell to break, after years.  To reveal all that would be a more intimate act than anything bodi

kkjm on the radio tonight.  A, as dj, m.r. controlling the wires, H on percussion.

little jokes and sayings race through my mind.  Hey Joe plays in the background.  I'd like to play Hey Joe now, on guitar...  Have I abandoned mom, her next doctor's appointment..

To make a proper Old Fashioned, I would have go down out back the kitchen and play poker for an hour, before thence coming back with some corn liquor.

Praise, very kind, from Phil and Julia, really kind, after talking about God's Covenant...   about how I bring people together.  There was Pete, who just got married, who on the right...  P and J, joined by Anjna with great pictures of her two sons for Halloween, the younger dressed as a Raj umbrellaed by his brother servant.  Charles.  Fitting him in too.  That was earlier.

It's not easy.  Stone-mason's work.  Physical, mental, an art form.  Psychological services of a high sort.   But do you get paid for it, other than the tolerance of friends who show up and see you, busy, busy, you fit them in, it feels good for everyone, that's the way it works, stress and relief, stress and relief.


Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Hateful old passive aggressive Patoola.  Therapy session:  Be wary of self-sabotage, be careful you don't see your successes as betrayal of your mother...  You've found a nice match, a new friend you like spending time with, in age and interest and temperament.  Situations are honestly frustrating you, tension at work from the unfairness of always closing...  Be careful, be wary of the aggressiveness comes out of frustrations, let it out in a beneficial productive way...

No wonder, then...

But I work, have a job, the one I've kept for fifteen years..  It's physical, emotional...

I took a wrong path in life.  I got mixed up, like, in that time of college, and post college...  that's the time you should go do it, but me,  I had my mom to think about, I wasn't quick in making any move, I ended up where I ended up...


So by the end of the week, even as the lovely musicians put on a great show, a whole crowd of people, even as the main guy sings out your praises, as the backbone of the whole place, the guy who makes it, strangely I'm in a strange mood, and as a bartender, working away, getting stuff done, wine tasted so people are happy, jokes, politeness, facial expressions, the whole myriad of give and take, you really do not feel like being in the spotlight, even if you are one of the main actors of the night, a character...  I'm not in revel mode, unfortunately, even though it seems I might project that appearance a little bit better.  Oh, he's speaking of the end of the night, when all musicians come and sing their songs of Babylon's rivers in this town which is new but old at the same time, bubbling, confused, but, the same stuff as ever applies just as always, kings, prophets, tales, jokes, prophecy, mumbo jumbo, tribal war, factions...

Oh, by the end of it all, Saturday through Wednesday night Jazz, closing every night, and some late nights there I'm not proud of maybe, but for the marketing aspect, adding to the known lore of The Dying Gaul as it is experienced and remembered, by the end of it...

I'm feeling, by the end of it, raw.  I feel depressed.  I feel like crying.  I clean up.  Let the hood cleaning crew out the back door with a free Sprite, hard working late night guys, part of a clean working industrial bistrot kitchen...  I eat the few bites of salmon tartar, which is just kind of simple and raw, not as elegant as it is up the street at the sister restaurant, while the busboy man, the man from Mexico, Manu, sweeps up, sighs, goes to take a dump in the men's room as a final comment on the night and all his physical efforts incredible over two floors...  The pig's feet, crusty and boneless are tired by the time I get them out of the over which has stopped heating up properly to 200...

Fuck me, the math, the report, the last paperwork, I'm beat and some low pressure system of manly lonesome funk has come over me.  It's hit my brow, and my shoulders were already drooped a bit from the heavy load...

The workweek ends the same way it starts, with a kind of American cowboy depression the likes of which the Old World, with the exception of Ireland, does not know...  ha ha.   What is there to do now, but get the Uber cab home anonymous, then to go and reflect, and it's hollow, not even a cat to go home to, but, you deal with it.

Monday, November 4, 2019

I had indeed pondered Kerouac in the period of landing at the new apartment out in the Palisades on the upper floor of the old three story G.I. type building near the reservoirs off of MacArthur.  I'm not going into the depths of any great literary criticism now, but to heed how one might have, as a reader, puzzled over Jesus's parables of the vineyard, as he struggled along with Kerouac and his own choices and actions over his own finite time.   (Jesus Christ, Jack Kerouac, take good care of yourself.  You're too brave!)

Those parables of the vineyard and the keeper, the owner, the son, the wicked servant, they strike me as literary lessons themselves, in that at least sometimes as a reader you have to read and return, read and return, and in your gut, yes, there's something there you see, but you don't really know what it is, what the kernel is, the point, the applicable meaning, so you keep reading, while the perception of what that meaning might be slowly simmers.

And indeed, one day that slow simmering might reveal some wealth of thought, some riches.

So, feeling nearly homeless and on the road at this new fresh juncture in my life, as I tried to make up for my juvenile irresponsibilities as such that had led me here, the new apartment, without the old shelter of good old George's house and all my books, I read Kerouac.  I read Kerouac, as if that whole reading thing had fallen out of the blue, against my will, and not on any whim, but very serious now, as I had no more juice to write with, too scared, and I needed an Old Master to consult with, and Dostoevsky was not around at the present time.

So, I came across his, Kerouac, having found again The Dharma Bums at my new local library, in this period of my whole library gone up in upheaval along with the rest of my life.  My own Kerouac books were kindly stored by a dear friend, the Scroll Version of On the Road, a red covered Desolation Angels, a Penguin Big Sur, a Visions of Cody, along with some others...  stashed away over in Virginia somewhere by the kindest of persons who was there, a good mystic Christian soul, when I had to move, actually had to move.

And even as I write, there is all of On The Road in mind, including the brilliant beginning, about an illness, his father's passing, etc., all very much to make you jump into this presence of mind that is the most simplest and basic and most effective writing way, which is to, in effect, light a campfire, one we can sit around.

I read Kerouac, picked up a used copy of the fire watcher book, by happenstance found On The Road again down in the basement laundry room...  And as ever, the mind goes back and forth.  Completely irresponsible, madman, partier, slacker, but also, some form of saintly monk when grasped on his own terms, thereby allowance of insight.

And here, having found yourself so devoted, even as you live life as life goes on, trying to take suggestions of friends and therapist and mom to heart, to do new things, to keep up with the good things, here you do find a sort of pay-off, and one that you wouldn't have really expected nor anticipated.

Saintliness and insights are never really found in careful preparation, nor in things that go in accordance with plan.  No.  These are things that happen on the road, not quiet planned, live, happenstance, a night one gets through, somewhat just barely, finally sneaking off back to bed where the rent has been paid.

The moments where there is a ceding of perfect control, when you're along for the ride with life, maybe even in a feeling of being far too exposed and open, drifting, swept up in the vagaries of life, it is here in such places and times that one will come upon the spirit and the meaning.  The things from which one will leave, and find that safe place, and say to himself, Depart From Me, Oh, Lord, for I am a sinful man.

And this is Kerouac's business, not that he always gets credit for it.  His spiritual endeavor is so front and center, so strong, that we too must recoil, wishing for someone to put the brakes on in this grade slide downhill into American fevered madness.  We feel the discomfort even from years and miles and miles away, life habits far away, reading material far away--Kerouac was a well-read individual versed in the life of letters, an interesting choice for a poor man in this era, the same era which gave birth to the G.I. Bill educational benefits--just by reading Kerouac!  And in doing so, facing some form of death, yes, along with poor Jack, poor Jack who has no idea where his next meal or place of rest and safe sleep might be, literally, as we read this in our great little schoolboy or fallen schoolboy sense, uncomfortable, yes, we get something.  And maybe even, through his light Kerouac, as fallible as any writer, Kerouac really is giving us access to The Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, just as clear as anyone might.

Just that we don't expect it so much, given all these characters, Dean Moriarty... To mention nothing of all the poor women involved, who too must be dragged uncomfortably, to saintliness.  A whole 'nother story, which other voice are better off at telling than I.


Again, saintly understandings come through that weird light, that strange very strange but powerful present moment.    There's St. Francis going to talk to this big scary mean wolf...  There's the Awakened One Buddha with this crazed elephant bearing down upon him in fury in a very real present moment...  These are things that happen live, on Live Television, in Live Time, just as if you were a bartender, just as if you were a bus driver, just as if you were a cop, dealing with, yes, like an old Irish Beat cop in a great American city like a Chicago, a New York, a Boston, the talk, the rapport, the contact is the key to keeping crime and weirdness down, and even maybe in going out an looking for it.  (Irish:  so good at being Beat Cops, so good at writing, poetry, music, and all the spirituality encapsulated, within, allowed to develop as they were, in Ireland.)


Thus, to me, the vineyard parables of The Gospels are themselves most clearly understood as being pictures of being out on the road, where things cannot be planned so well, where traffic, good and evil, whizzes by, pulling over and stopping sometimes, and sometimes, even you are mad enough to go along with the ride.


In the end I cannot condemn Kerouac, not at all.  I would rather celebrate him as some form of see-er visionary of real timeless eternal insight.



When people revile you, "god, what a piece of shit you are," that's when you are a saint.


The literary life?  Pretty much a curse, but it's something in the genes, something you have to figure out, after all the years...

Sunday, November 3, 2019

So there's already 39 covers--meaning 39 customers, spread out into parties of two and four, six, five, whatever, showing up at different times, but mainly concentrated around the usual 7 PM dining hour--on the book when I get to work, but the downstairs people on a slow day shift who has already earned one point in the pool, and will make two by the end of the day, help decide that we only need three servers not four, one busboy, and the number is going up already by the time the door opens, and there are walk ins...  as far as what I can gather when my Monday night jazz night shift begins...   It's going to get crazy.  I see a familiar name for a seven top, a friend over the years.  She likes wine.

But I will not be able to get to her.  

Where's the boss?  Is he in the kitchen, directing traffic, expediting?  

And as I'm thinking of finally making it, at 9:15, with the band ending at 9:30, the guys come up the stairs smelling like weed and smiling, hey, man...  They want to eat.  They will be joined by other guys...  So much for an easy uncomplicated ending of silent dutiful peaceful cleaning.

The night, amongst many, you want to tear your hair out and almost try to, your shirt is soaked with sweat, the regulars...  what the f can you do, I'm sorry, I've done the best I can all these stupid years to get to you and give you and fast and as efficiently as I could all the good stuff that might be possibly available, and not a bad job, but tonight, f it, it's not possible, I've been totally undercut, I'm powerless, I'm sorry, this shit is too much...  I come over,  still I'm dong the best I can, but, look, look at what I have to deal with...

For my friend Mary, I did get them up and running, with a couple of tastes, oh, we will go with the Bordeaux.  Great.  Another couple joins them, with nice bottles of their own.  Corkage.  Damn, why didn't I save the good big Bordeaux glasses...  At the end, she says, please, taste them, okay, and eventually, as a reward for her patience, when she suggests a little taste of bubbly, fine, no problem, seven little glasses for the table, on the house.

Mary is sweet.  We go way back.  You should taste these wines...  A Nuit St. Georges, from 2009, yes, nice.  And then a big name Bordeaux, not a Cos, not a Margaux, hmm, what was it...




The problem with writing is always the same problem, the same problem the Amish and the Aboriginal might have with being photographed.  Shy people, artists, people who aren't drunk.  Strangers.

It's all there, in you, all of life's thousand battles historical and personal all bleeding together, but when you get home and can sit down, poof, none of it is right, none of it is right to write about.  It's oh-boy, what a mess.  It's oh-boy, what a stunning tragic stupid defeat, all of it pointless, all of it erotic and about love, and about the life you'd want to have lived, all in that short time when there are so many possibilities, but...  but...   but...

That's the closest you'll get to writing.  That's the pressure of air and gravity which makes breaking the natural limitations of the physical world, its electromagnetic energy continuum, impossible or everyone would be doing it, as everyone is already doing everything anyway, and you're the only jerk asshole imbecile who's not seen the light of taking life and living with it, getting coupled up with a beloved person you really enjoy of the opposite nature and sex, but the same, if you can overcome the  sound barriers of your own pain, your own shitty situation, the things dragging at you like your old shoes strewn across your carpeted floor...  Perceived psychological issues, whether they are there or not, time, time passing...

You only know.  The sense the creatures of the sea must have of being in the sea, of their element.  The sense the wordy minded creature has when time allows the return to thoughts, thoughts that must be turned, dug up, like potatoes, put away like silverware cleaned now, folded napkins...  No, I'm not the psycho...  The psycho stuff is spread through all, and now manifested in the situation of mankind, this crazed creepy particular juncture when the seas will rise and cover up the floors of cities where millions live...




Totally stupid and shy am I, to meet the world of "men."   Sound of Music.

I'm not the only writer of my age, pondering the fleeting gone experience of college, the concentration of various exciting people, smart, attractive, all brought together, to be fruitful, capitalized upon, not the time to make a glorious head case out of yourself...  but that's what you did...

I walk home, from work, home, such as it is, so it is.  I deserve that, not having made any effort to be a professional of any kind, and it's late anyway...  And there are thoughts that run through my mind, I'm hungry, I'd like to sleep, I'd like to relax, but the calculus of all that tells me I should have given up on my chosen profession as a night barman, unhappy milkman, full of wine  trade stories, and have embraced the world of those of the "Day Walkers..."  responsible people, who all can talk to each other, bit by bit, detail by detail, sharp factoid, useful considerations of all practical natures....

Every time you try to write something smart, you write something stupid and foolish and not worth showing.  This is the truth.


To write and to live is to pass through and beyond regret, and to see the new, and the love, the life, the possibility, all the good stuff caged and set free...


Then I wake up and it feels like I've given away everything for a song...  so the mind tells me...

Like I say, it slipped past me too, during my re-read of On The Road, the material surrounding The Holy Goof realization segment here in Part Three, Chapter Three, and I turned away from the passages after it, as I read them, when they go down to the jazz clubs there in Frisco, a final thing before they head back east...  Another bar, more madness, more of Dean sweating...  No, thank you, this is not the way to live.

And in some hindsight, a few weeks later, I begin to acknowledge what I might call a recognition of some Theosophical Reality, the faint background--to be turned up later, in reflection--of a kind saintly participation, as it were, an allowance for fated things, for the things of odd, perhaps not good, but recognizably human behavior of a complex sort, in all this sweaty listening to live jazz in the setting of Sal and Dean craziness.  I say that I, while I would rather say "we," recognize this sort of general mislead behavior that comes out of circumstances that have to do with one's situation of employment, or, here, unemployment.   Beatness...  We might have been there, in our not-so-neat lives...  and there is something saintly here, when the saint can get back to some place of home and peace and quiet, to reflect and to write.

There is, to my ear, a sweetness, sad though it may be, of Kerouac, and his own inner missing saint, allowing for all this.  In order to see something, to ponder it.  To come to terms with it.

No writer has forever.  This is what Kerouac went with.  This is the news he sent to press.


And certainly, it would be easy to dismiss.

I do not dismiss, knowing the cost of bearing experiences such as Kerouac, brave and bold writer of experiences here in Post WWII America, a homeless wandering that seem to fit his psyche, if he could have stopped to find the peace for the kind of continued spiritual reflections that might have gotten him there in the first place, whether that be regrettable or not.




I guess it's in The Power of Now, Eckhardt Tolle's little treatise on present spirituality.  There is the related tale of the monk, found in the literature here and there, in the little Book of Zen, of the monk's response to the vagaries of life:  "Is that so?"  The neighbors have a pregnant daughter, who, for convenience's sake, points to the monk as the father.  "Is that so," the monk says, hearing of the accusation, calmly.  "Yeah, and you can raise the kid, too!"  And this is what the monk, dutifully, does.  Later it turns out, no, she admits it was not the monk who did the siring, and apologetically, the grandparents take the kid back from him.  "Is that so..."

Yes, folks, THAT'S HOW IT GOES.   (More or less what the final chapter passage of On The Road says...  As "Dean, bent to it again...")


Having received a little bit of news the evening before, this on All Soul's Day, the day after our little Halloween festivities in urban suburbia, the writer found it not very easy to get up and go to work.  Feeling a kind of shame that can only come from offending the female of the species...  Was not aware, but learned about, through a managerially-led phone conversation explaining, after the little friendly catching up about this and that, the state of health of cats and bicycles and business, etc., of, in effect, there existing the state now, since the offense, of my presence no longer being required, nor welcome, nor friendly, basically.

I absorb this news, I suppose, as I toil away, thrown off the deep end into a nervous Saturday night at the old Dying Gaul Wine Bar.  The bar, to begin with, is reserved, from about 6 on, for a birthday party, finger food, wine, the food decided upon, but not what exactly the "Consumption Bar" will entail specifically.  (Fortunately, the husband had read the wine list...)  Which meant turning away from the bar's six or so stools, people who normally come on such an evening.  Putting me in an awkward spot.  The reservation list is full, and the wait list will have to be carefully choreographed out of a rush of incomplete message and changes made.

It's a long night, quite full, on up to the ending of dessert and coffee and calvados and final checks and then the final group of friendlies familiar at the bar who have their own tales of coming here.

I am able to eat some charcuterie at the end of it, and then the deluxe Italian sub with roast beef extra from the Korean market, before I'm able to pack it all in, do the paper work, clean up, gather myself and Uber home...

And the next day, what can you do. ..  "Is that so..."  You shrug, you go okay.  You get on with it.  Almost with some relief, a distraction swept away, an innocent understandable reaction from those more able to deal with the cold business of society's business dealings than you, that only reconfirms the living efficacy of the stuff that catches your eye, as things catch the eyes of the crow and the raven, collecting little bits of spiritual stuff in this life that we must pass through.   Pass through somehow.

And all those labels that haunt you, fuck up, drunken aggressor, bum-ness, beat-ness, what have they to do with you anyway, go in peace.

Friday, November 1, 2019

It had been a busy day, getting on the 1:10 PM D6 down to Dupont Circle for my annual physical, my old neighborhood, off the bus, walking up Connecticut Avenue past Zorba's, calling mom to explain where I am, and where she is, up to R, my old haunts, to see Dr. Patel, Miss Ellen, who talks to plants and preaches it, at the desk, explain to the doctor my little problems and concerns, we know the routine,  down to the basement to get my blood drawn, pee in a cup, blood pressure not so bad...   Then, to the Haircuttery for a quick haircut with a large busty African American woman who travels to Jamaica, lives in Baltimore, dressed as a witch, then over to PNC Bank to deposit a check to compensate myself for car rentals up to see mom and take her to doctor appointments and so forth, then catching the 3:40 bus, full, sitting in the back, to get back to catch my breath before running off in an Uber pool cab through traffic over to Arlington to join in with Betsy and her friends for Halloween.  I've dressed in a black suit, with a black fedora, some kind of generic costume, an Irish gypsy, an Irish poet of the kind The Pogues made tribute to when they dressed in their black suits, or maybe I'm an immigrant fresh to America to the Lower East Side, but she has a sort of canned pre-made disco 70's guy outfit, with wild curly wig, polyester disco shirt, bell bottom slip on pants, a good peace chain, sunglasses, so I change, obligingly into it, put on the mustache, have a little fun with it, sneak half a glass of wine from the fridge, and off we go.  My friend likes Halloween.  So do I.  I'm getting re-in-touch...


At 6 AM, after crashing over at my friend's pad, I walk back along Fort Myer Drive into Rosslyn, catching a red Circulator Bus for a buck across the river to M Street in Georgetown, and then walking westward along Canal Road, the stars still above in a clear dark sky, Big Dipper, handle upward.  Disconcerting walking along with the early traffic whooshing past me ten feet away, each with a gravitational pull, an independent field of physics relativity, zoom, zoom, zoom, whoosh, frightening as I cling to the edge of the woods that rise up to the bluff and the old University.   There's a big flood up ahead, inundating the sidewalk, and when a truck comes the water breaks up into the air in a giant splash wave, so I cut across to the slender brick median strip there at the turnoff to the University's parking garages, avoid getting soaked, dry feet and then up the old hill of Foxhall, then crossing to MacArthur and there was big rain last night and a real estate sign on a wooden post has tipped over on the sidewalk.


"Hateful old Dulouz me," as Kerouac says...  I may as well be a weed by the side of the road as far as the purposes of the city sit now, here in the very early morning not even light out as people go to work.  Bum without a clue, so it feels sometimes.

All Soul's Day...  Kerouac a road-side saint, hitchhiking meaning out of the meaningless not exactly earth friendly in the economic-engine culture of the great republic...  He would have keenly felt that exclusion, that isolation, that sense of not having a good job as for as economic standing, nor for societal understanding...  But then all the saints were in the same place, the place of adepts, who know, though not quite consciously, who know quite a lot about the spiritual realities behind the face of things, things that the people driving their new cars into the office to work might not want to focus on in their intent pursuit.

And today, a day of bringing the Gospels to life, and I'm walking along the road in an effort to get back to the apartment on the little hill to find some rest after calling mom.


The problem is people do not like the poor, considering them irresponsible.  The poor are an inconvenience.  They do not believe in the things you should believe in, so it seems.  They are idle.



At night, things are seen in context.  Halloween came and went.  Much ado about nothing?  Relax, Buddha and peace in all things, enjoy life, see the sights, visit, interact, but remember, after some fun, what you will go back to, what you shall go back to.

Mom calls around 9:15, as I'm sleeping, but I hear it, the throb of the cell phone.  They were through a hell of a storm too, up there, and it's very cold and windy, and mom gives me the usual about not being in her proper home, but up the road a piece, and if she were home...  But she's found her medicine, in her pocka'book, and she's being a good girl and taking one.  Good.   I go off to a deeper sleep, and when I finally wake, at 2 in the afternoon, I see she's called seven times around noon, and one of her colleagues has texted me about how upset mom  sounded...

I get up and find cold green tea in the refrigerator, and give her a call...  She's cold, it's freezing, the heat's not on.  I try to explain the thermostat to her...  The start of my day, proper....


Later on, after a walk, after a quick bite to eat after the little grocery store, I get a call from my old buddy.  It was back in June, when we all went to his wife's father's funeral up in Wheaton, the last time we spoke, as I recall.  I'm on the couch, more or less in taking a nap mode.  Hey, how have you been, and he's got a new pick-up truck, the story behind it...   And then, after the catching up, the conversation changes, and he announces it.  Now, to the problem.  Oh.  A says you were aggressive last time when you were leaving.  Oh.  Physical.  Took offense when you said it was her and not R. that night eons ago...

"Well, I...  she, I remember we went to the restaurant and we were talking about Kerouac.  Patriarchy, she says.  Okay.  But what about the beauty of Kerouac's prose, (there in the mountain climbing passages of The Dharma Bums,) but she just dismisses him, 'no,' as 'patriarchy...'  I guess I was trying to make up for that..."  But i know by it, this conversation.  Oh, yeah, I had a feeling.  I don't remember this "Leaving" part, I'm pretty certain I was just kidding around, but, yeah.   "Teddy I love your company, but..."

Okay.  I get it.  Oh, well.  That's how it goes.  That's how it goes on All Saint's Day, and poor Betsy finally texts me back, she's had a headache all day, is going to go to bed and not get up til tomorrow afternoon, and believe me, I understand.


Look.  You know.  You know I too have my doubts about Kerouac.  I know how easy it would be to find a path in writing toward the success of crafting a piece toward the audience, like a product, a product to tweak as far as market and sales and all that.  You could take any piece, write it out, then look at it, and then bring in the marketing department, and oh, here's how you should look here, and here's how you should look there, and here's how to say the political market correct thing to say that will warm people to you rather than offend them for treading on sensitive unpopular ground, that will assure them you are sticking to some tried and true expected cookie-cutter expression that fits a genre of some kind of "Lit."  Some kind of popular literary form  in which the writer ably goes through and ticks off the little boxes, all the popular psychology stuff, to be applauded as a "Tell All" kind of memoir.  Sure.  The prose darling of the day.  Okay, fine.

Then there are the artists who challenge what they themselves know or would want to hear and through an effort without hope of finding the predictable place in the predictable market take the risk of standing under the stars, walking alone, as everyone else is driving by, and put to it a place of reality as it is, the psyche, the hard stuff that we will always have to grapple with as a species with a  soul, a heart, a brain.

Friday, October 25, 2019

And then after you write, time enters a lonely phase.  Administrative tasks to attend to, health insurance renewal, laundry, a few bills to pay, ho hum.  No real desire as energy to go out on the town, would feel pointless anyway, except for Betsy, a few old friends, but most of my friendship time spent at the old Dying Gaul, and not up for that, certainly.

And really there's not much else for you to do than to pour yourself a glass of wine, after the little bit of inspiration you had earlier.

The phone calls, the phone calls, on the one hand they are distracting, on the other hand they are life. Yes, Mary came and took care of some things, good.

People ask me at work, how's your mom's cat...

Drinking a glass of wine relieves some of the monotony.  It will also bring, potentially, some exuberance...  A creative freedom of feeling...

Without the wine, this time would be too difficult by myself.  The night needs a little magic, a foreign touch, a sense of novelty.

Get the laundry ready.  Down the stairs.  Guitar tonight, maybe later...

Bob & Lynette comes by on the fucked up big party downstairs night Wine Tasting, when I have to parse out the St. Veran, they sit there at the bar, hi ted, and I don't feel much like waiting sometimes, but I hang in there.  Lynette pipes up, as I get him a Kronenbourg, and ponder what she might like as she ponders too, ultimately deciding upon a Manhattan, I read your Facebook about Kerouac...

Oh, yeah...  Yeah, the anniversary, 50 years...   And I lay out how I'm torturing myself reading On the Road, which comes to a boil for me...  "No, don't go down and see William Burroughs...  That's not a good idea!"  I reel from my own irresponsibility...  over all the years...  Why are you hanging out with such people?  Don't you have a plan?  (But unfortunately, artists never really have much of a plan, but that of creating, however they might fall into it, sometimes, like me, my art the humor that comes out spontaneously from dark places in the form of a magnificent and humorous hospitality... as I have found, time and time again, only rarely being unable to feel so burdened by the events of a particular shift that my powers of circumspection and wit deserting me...)  So, somewhat jokingly, I lay it out for them, the only two here at the bar, trying to catch up as we should...  Burroughs wife is a benzedrine addict...  It's just going to be weirdness.  They get it, they have kids who've turned out to be artists.  Chef.  Musician.  Writer.  Great parents.  Solid.  Responsible.  And I'm feeling low, but rise again to the occasion.  I admit my own lacking as far as planning, but Lynette dismisses the notion, and yes, I have been showing up here for years, to work, to work, to the bar, to wine tasting night, to many an other kind of a night...  And up comes Tombow, he'll be two at the bar for dinner, him and an old work colleague, Brian, I make him a French 75...

The fancy older couple is brought upstairs by L.m., sat at the front of the room by the windows, but then she of the couple decides she really likes the table in the back, which is of course the hardest to get to... why?  On wine tasting night, you do that to me, Jesus Christ...


The problem is not how little there is to write, the problem is how much there is...

When I met Betsy, again, I wanted to spend my time with her.  I wanted to stay up all night talking with her, to meet her out for lunch when I could, even with my mind stewing over work and money.

I walked down MacArthur to Foxhall, along the sidewalk taking me into Georgetown to cross Key Bridge.  Over the great bridge in the darkness, moon a sliver, underneath the Key Bridge Marriot, across the lanes of Lee Highway, and up the little urban skyscraper hill to Wilson Boulevard, and then it was not far at all to the nondescript Saigon Grill and Noodle to meet her.  I'd had a glass of Beaujolais, in a surreptitious Canada Dry little soda bottle, keeping to my right as night cyclists and careening electric scooters weaved by.   Over pho, hers vegetable, mine with top round and brisket and flank steak I had three glasses of Woodbridge pinot noir, we had a nice time, I paid the check, she took me back part way and I caught the Circulator Bus from Rosslyn back over the bridge, getting off at the first stop along M Street.  I attempted to rent a little scooter, but it felt dangerous and the pick-up on was very inconsistent.  With a need to use a bathroom, and not to pee, I made it up the hill to the Tombs, using the john, and then having one more glass of wine, and then I walked back along underneath the University up on the hill with the traffic zooming by, and then up the quiet hill and the long blocks along MacArthur Boulevard, coming in rather tired out and ready to hit the couch.

And then I was awake.  Unable to go back to bed.  So I pulled out On The Road, the copy someone left out in the laundry room, and like I say, it's easier to read, for me at least, after  you've struggled with getting to that Dean as Holy Goof passage in Part Three, when they are in San Francisco, planning to get back East.

For then the writing, Kerouac's, seems to better fall into a tradition, less about mad personal choices and irresponsible behavior, becoming a recognizable account, within the American Tradition, let's say, of writings of travel and adventure, like Melville, Twain, Hemingway...

I had some cheap Beaujolais in the rocks in a tumbler, and even pulled out my old book, and read from it, which is surprising in many passages, even to the author.  I'd passed out a copy of it here and there, and while there are parts I, in the attempt to get it finished and over with, over worked and things like that.  The narration getting just a bit ahead of itself, say, trying to sum up The Brothers Karamazov themes, when the action is not ready for it.

But I was reading, and it felt good, and I went back and forth a little bit, and of course Kerouac is laying down these magnificent lines, so rich in their offering of language and words put together gain in the way that fires up something inside of us.  And it was nice for me to have this reassessment of Kerouac in my own mind, not just oh, the drunk who ends up lonely and alone.

As if preparing for a next step, me, in life.  Putting a book behind me, a decent enough one, but assessing the cost of it, as it were, the cost of the time and the making of it.  I wouldn't say necessarily a wish to capitalize upon it, or monetize it, but to find a way of treating it as a kind of artistic professional accomplishment, now behind me, that would allow me to develop personally.

And then, tiredly, after speaking with mom again, having a nice conversation about New England Transcendentalist Literature, me maybe trying to ease Kerouac in with that, spiritually, I had a sip more wine and now went to bed in the early light, having assured her that Mary would indeed be coming with cans of cat food and groceries and wine if she needed.

And then I slept all day, even as the construction noise and the bachata music too loud and the shouting kept me ill and distracted from deeper sleep until the noise had somehow come to an end.

Well, shame on you, this is your day off, and this is all you can do with it and you don't even feel well, Jesus Christ, and I had felt earlier drinking the wine and reading, but one too many rounds in one day sort of a thing, can't you control yourself?

But I wasn't up for finding a barber shop, nor for getting out to the old movie theater CVS to charge up my metro card, the sky is overcast, and I managed yoga yesterday anyway, and now it becomes a matter of what to eat, and there are loads of laundry to do.

Somewhere, though, as a remembered thought from the early morning and the reading of one's own book, placed next to Kerouac, man, I begin to wonder, does one have to be his own sort of Neal Cassady Kerouac's friend character in order to generate the misadventures necessary for a narrative story line arch as they call it in creative writing classes...   And meanwhile I've become this fool who gets up at a late hour in the afternoon to get ready for work, work my five night shifts, struggle, etc., and don't even have the pay-off of any kind of a personal life of a consistent kind, except calling my mom many times a day...  and maybe two nights a week to meet Betsy out, but getting late for her or too early for me, though I will certainly make the lovely sacrifice...

And do I still write?  Do I still bother with it, except as some form of calibration bearing upon psychological health and balance...

I wake up with a heavy head and congested enough in my nose that a gag reflex kicks in, such that I spit up some bile then back on the couch.

Okay, it was a fine Transcendentalist thing to write such a book, as mine, and fine to keep on writing, but... can one sustain it...  is that even practical...