At nighttime, you know everything is weird.  You know the horse picks up his guitar, unbeknownst to anyone, and secretly plays, muffled away.

The dreamer dreams, the neighbors are skeptical, the rent is nearing due, you're cooking on the stove.

The new apartment, everything is weird.  Today I learned that the local Safeway is closing.

On the good side, I made it to the local library, freshly renovated.  I got a library card.  That's pretty good for an idiot, for one in my state.  They have DVDs, in case you're feeling lazy.  Who could resist an old favorite, Gregory Peck, Moby Dick.  Who could resist, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Armageddon In Retrospect.

On the good side, after a talking to from the boss after leaving the place a mess--I must have rebelled, or just got tired, after entertaining good old friends, you know, those people who you become sincere friends with, just by waiting on them, but deeper than that, let the glassware go, etc., --I had a good long bike ride, squeal in the brakes mountain back down to the towpath of the C & O Canal, all the way out to Great Falls overlook.  They don't let you take your bike out on the over-look, a boardwalk through a very rare ecosystem, a foremost example of that ecology.

It's lonely out here, definitely, but on a Friday evening I have things to do.  I'm taking care of an apparent spider bite on my left thigh.  It looks like something with two fangs got me, and I have no memory, or feel of any pain, except now looking at it.  And whenever I bandage up something, or get anywhere near Neosporin, my skin reacts, as it does to other things.  My skin does not like being treated.  My skin gets claustrophobic, or something.  It riots.   The special island area above the magnificent channels of water that is the Great Falls Overlook, is known to be a wonderful haven for the Black Widow Spider.  Did one follow me home on my yellow bike, or in my spandex bike shorts?

The library hurts almost.  It is good to be close to it.  All the years I've not been able to get to a library and see, visually displayed, all the different books and resources.  I've been an ignoramus.

I get the bags of groceries back, catching the D6.

I never imagined things would end up this way, but here I am, a monk.  Here I am isolated.  Here they don't like when I modestly amplify my voice and my Martin D28 at 3 in the morning.

What else?  The move didn't go so well.  They told me the truck was full.  But my book cases...

Good God.  No book cases.  Imagine that... on top of all I lost, the other little things.

And when you move, particularly after being somewhere for twenty years, you can't find anything, not even a hat.


So, I get to the doctor, on top of other things.  The therapist.  Lexapro sweats that made me wonder how much of a wino I am....

Antibiotics for the bug bite.  It will get better.  Later, after work, there's a tinee-tiny spider who has, by the two knobs of this unfamiliar bathroom sink, roped in a tick, looks like, the kind that are small and black and not full of blood, the kind that you can crush easily almost with a pop.  She has got it.  Immobilized.  She has venomized it, it can't move, it's her victim now, and she will pick the right time to suck the life juices from it, perhaps the very tick creature that bit me.  I have always liked and respected spiders, and I wish they could understand that I like them as much as I do, given that they don't want to mess with me any more than I want to mess with them.  Sometimes on winter nights, well, there's one up a wall in the kitchen, and you approach, say hello, and they turn and look at you with their thousand little eyes, their little legs expressing curiosity, I hope, more than hostility or fear, and I think you can make friends with them.  Who knows.

So, thank you, little spider, here in this foreign lonely lonesome apartment with no working phone jacks, with creaking walls, and not much happiness, such that it has not been much of a joy to think of unpacking anything, except when you have to.

The dead husk, the shell of a small tick dangles from the spider's scaffold, and the spider has adjusted to my turning of the knobs of the faucet, not moving far.

It's now 2:15 in the morning on the night of the full moon just before Easter.  The leaves are well on their way to make the hillsides green here by the reservoir.  First day off after the work week.  Two naps.  The latter one after returning to the new apartment.  On the couch, I have the first dream involving the geography of the new apartment, dim in the dream, a child-like diorama.  The road to the west comes out of the woods, obscured by a curve, and trees.  Behind where we live there are paths uphill through the woods, secret paths almost, up the bluff and to the farmers fields and undeveloped lands above.  This picture, from the dream, is fanciful.  Two young women are walking on these paths, either for exercise or the relaxation of a mutual adventure.  Feeling like a creep here still, in the dream, alone, I am reluctant to interfere with them.  But they come nearer and I ask them where the paths go, and they answer, just as expected.  And there is a calm before night falls and the car's headlamps come, rarely as they do, in this countryside dream at the edge of a metropolitan area.


Don Quixote:  the first tale portraying the psyche, of how bold an adventure it is to go out into the world, to be amongst all its disorienting objects and paths, its roads, buildings.  No wonder the largest building, at the time, a windmill, is some sort of terrible giant to do battle with.

Tales from the first AA meeting.  One's own childish ridiculousness in the face of having to be an adult.


I have gone to see Mary Karr give a talk at the Arlington Central Library.  I meet friends there.  I hitch a ride back with them.   I was going to take the 45 minute walk through Clarendon to the Key Bridge in the moonlight, to orient myself, but I'm not going to pass up a chance to hang out with friends.  We get in the car to find a place to eat, a popular local barbecue place.  My friends are ordering.  I get an angus beef rib, collard greens.  I feel guilty getting a glass of wine, but my friend Anna wants a beer, and she's paid for dinner.

Driving back after barbecue at Rocklands in Clarendon, the subject of AA comes up again.  A chance to be an adult, a chance to know how you really feel about something, anything.

Another lesson from the talk:  people will project upon whatever encounter their own reality.   Maybe that lets me out of the whole business of being taking as a kind of "stalker" by the Upper West Side Princess who'd been barking at cab drivers and ordering bagels in loud busy shops since she was seven, as opposed to this hick here who does not particularly relish the competitions of the city life.

We all react differently to real events as they happen.  We record them differently in the our minds, we remember them differently.  Our own experiences warp the things that happen as they happen into the  reality of our own space time, the gravitational pulls that we all must have by virtue of being human.  Kurosawa did a movie about that.  What really happened?  And this is something Mary Karr the memoirist author brings up.

I myself was the small town country boy, or rather a boy of the old land, of old experiences that go back thousands of years.  The grassland, the forest, the weather, the shape of the country itself.  Living so, up on Ernst Road out there in the small college town of Clinton, New York, amongst the old independent family dairy farms, up by the marvelous hills and outlooks of Champion Road and Skyline Drive, Vernon, Vernon Center, Knoxboro, Oriskany Falls, Deansboro, it wasn't much of a stretch to conjure in the imagination the vague background of all stories told, Tolkien, Bible, those of American History...  The old patterns were still there, still in the air.

I had no clue, no clue how shrewd you really have to be in order to have a decent life.  For one thing you have to be competitive.   You can't be an innocent.  That would be sticking your head in the sand and hoping all bad things would go away.



My life now, what's left of it, seems to be about slow discoveries, minor victories.  The grocery store.  A walk past the reservoirs in the fresh afternoon heat to the Palisades Library to return Moby Dick and Dunkirk DVDs, to pick up a collection of Wendall Berry essays.  I begin to recognize neighbors of mine out here in this quiet exile at the Western edge of town.


Unfortunately for things such as career and fitting into the changing world, I regressed.  I had my role model of James Dean.  But rather than move to New York City in an attempt to be an actor, I sought out the country boy, the Jett Rink.  The small town.  Levis.  Cowboy boots.  Long drives through different towns, quiet and unappreciated, more or less left behind.  Farms and farm equipment.  The land as it was back then, before developments you had to buy into by definition in order to survive, the whole thing, the car, the commute, the office, the structure....  I should have celebrated the creative, the musical abilities, the wish to learn to sing out loud, to dance;  these are things that belong to the city, connections, other artists to collaborate with...

And yet, I didn't chose that.  I chose the most modest, the most purely spiritual (in a way.)  The things of the writer, of one who is always and ever adrift.

My astrology, of being born amongst people like Danny Kaye and Fellini and A.A. Milne and Muhammed Ali suggested that growing up would be very difficult, and possibly even tragic.  To become a bartender, to even enter into the idea of working in a restaurant, which I entered into innocently and with decent habits and with a great reluctance to talk to people.  Being a busboy worked for me.  You ran around all night.  It kept your mind from wondering back to all the things you messed up without having ever had any intention of messing up.  Isolation is a bad thing.


Then there are the things we conjure up in our minds, privately for the most part...  Spiritual thought, religious though without so much a habit of going to church.

The churches meant for you are writing groups and meetings like AA Meetings, and for Jesus types meeting over wine and gluttonous things with sinners and cigarette smokers, with the blind, with those who know not the mote, the beam, the dust in their own eye.  Brother, let me help you.  And yet it is a world where only an outstanding extreme type like a Jesus can really help you.

In the great backpacks of all the world, one hopes there are laptops on which to efficiently write memoirs upon, a hot spot WIFI for you wherever you are....

It had brought a lot to deal with, this last year in my own personally warped time and space...  "I deserve it, I guess," I said to myself,  "all those golden chances and golden years pissed away..."  The Erica, the Elena, the Smithie, the Holyoke future wife, the DeMotts, the Pritchards, the Calvin Plimptons, the good ways of starting out as a prep school teacher and moving on up from there, the local congressman's office my brother's drinking college buddy rowdy friends hooked me up with, but again, I piss away all I touch....  All I touch, except the farm boys, the country people, the chefs, the Huck Finn types...  the strange humble types...

The problem with the species, with all creatures, perhaps, is of having too much talent, such an impossible amount of talent, and each unique to itself.  And then rather than trying to harvest, to keep up with all that, rather than allow life to be a live performance we are forced into things.  Forced to divide.  Forced to tell other people to shut up.

Ugly people will tell you to shut up.  Ugly people will crush you, just as you hint of all the talents you might have, all the clarity of vision, the ability within to raise the creative dead...  The story of Jesus Christ, all over again.

The world has to be asked...  Have we lost the ability to care about other people, other creatures, other lives, other things?  What language do we have for such, when making good money and dealing with the city...  Why do people who actually really care end up going mad or living in monasteries?  Congratulate Dick Cheney on all his muscular Halliburton work and for making all his money, but where is his or Donald Rumsfeld's ability for empathy.  ("We kill the enemy humanely now," making it sound like the U.S. Military under such guidance as the Iraq Halliburton wars was a Buddhist gift, correcting errant schoolboys with a John Donne chide...)

Sometimes you have to (shut up completely) be quiet for a long time, to observe silences, in order to gain the language of caring and empathy.  A kind of death.  An understanding of all the suffering people must go through alone and in private and even when busy, when trying to live, when trying to do all one should do, all the things one wants to fulfill as far as a Godly life.  To be in the shut-up state, however dignified that may be, not showing off your wisdom and erudition, let's say, in the classroom, Modern British Poetry, is, in one way, to bow out of the competition of academia which, if you survived its sword dance, would have let you go on to be the great teacher you wanted to be.

It's hard to be empathetic from an airplane, though some of us, who people would probably call poets, are capable of.  Anyone with a job is going to have a hard time being that ultimate kind loving being of deep soul in tune with nature...  When I get a retirement plan sufficient, then I will do good works...

But by then those too are only about the money one has in cash reserves...  Philanthropic, as impersonal as anything is, as impersonal as the bank.


I was a good bartender, a good barman, because I cared.  I actually cared.  I still do.  I still enjoy it.  But, maybe, let me off the hook now?  Things to worry about...

There's a fallacy deep down in it.  A lie.


I do laundry.  I end up being up until the birds are singing and the first light.  I smoke an American Spirit after cutting the filter off, down the stairs and out onto the teak bench.  By now I've had a whole bottle of wine almost.  I call mom.  She's doing okay.  We compare notes on writing, on being a pack rat.

The voice is all, Mary Karr impresses upon us.    The voice holds a memoir together.

During her talk, a thought passes my mind, just as the thought, the impression, about Don Quixote.  Is the story of Jesus, and maybe in particular that of Holy Week's events, the memoir of humanity, a kind of a model, redemption, resurrection, a way to the better life...

I had worked very hard, physically, each week, before, during and after the big move and the visit to Mom for her 80th.

This week I worked five shifts, closing Saturday through Wednesday nights.  Thursday, I slept all day, fielding calls from mom, fighting off a cold with massive rest.  Along with the antidote to poison, which is writing.

Trust me, folks.   It works.

Comedians, otherwise happy people, lead the positive changes of society.  Comedy welcomes the variety of human life, the possibilities;  comedy opens up the acceptance, comedy lets us embrace the new.  Comedy expands our understanding of the other.  Comedy lets us join in on the fun.  Comedy opens us up enough to try to enjoy life, even when it has its grim faces., even when we are alone.



Miguel was in the slim corner back by the stove and the silverware drawer, the napkins and the back ups.   It's 8:45 at night, Wednesday, and he's come up to run food and to take away the dishes the server and I have brought back from tables.  He's back.  There's a pile-up of dirty glassware, a certain desperation in the constant changing out of things that is the restaurant night's life to the servers.  He's doing his thing, maybe he needs to catch his breath, maybe he's tired out.  Frantic points of the evening, he comes on through, picking up the dirty dishes we've piled up after scraping them off into the garbage can on top of the three black milk crates below the rail of bar and the sinks.   He's doing his job.  You can't ask better.  But, why this set up?  Why keep H. at home, so that we would have a busboy on both floors...  We could surely use one.  Why do I have to work like this every night?


I had been having strange sweats at night, I thought due to the wine.  I took a day off of the SSRI Lexapro and immediately the perspirations ended, no waking up with my tee shirt soaked.   And that was one depressing thing off of my plate, that I wasn't going through alcohol dependency.  I guess your brain and your body can only take so much poison.


The worst thing you can do is forget your writing, to neglect it.  That just doesn't work.  Back to the natural stuff.  Let the body and the godly stuff within it take care of itself.

I know this is crap writing, obtuse bullshit, but it has to be done.  It's the only way some of us have of being calm.  Like birds have to sing out.


Somewhere along the line, as I was off line, this old blog hit 200,000 visits.  Many of them specious, no doubt, but some of them real, I hope.

So, you wrote one book, and look at the cost of it, personally.  Why in God's name would you even think of writing another one?

Yet, writing is what your mind is on when you finish the work week.  Thus, to finally be excited (buy) by the time off. All the submerged that has waited patiently.  The personality freeing itself from distortion and physical toils of tending bar, working night shifts.  They were not easy shifts.  They never are.  Often left alone, the bistro's staff concentrating on the downstairs, the busboy floating through occasionally, but more to do his things, like cleaning silverware rather than help out directly, not taking care of the most urgent things in the rolling triage.

The old book you wrote--it largely added to the old scars, the old reconsiderations of what one should have better done, the old haunting hindsight that came in a more clearer and adult regard toward the misunderstandings of youth and the more difficult to read of the species on the one hand and the more confused and indisciplined of the species on the other, girl versus boy.

By the overly personal nature of the material, and by the anxiety inherent in attempting to "be a writer," I had developed some bad habits out of the ruts that had led to the writing of the first book anyway.

The interesting thing, perhaps, is what a perfect failure the first book was, the progenitor, the finger of God down to this Adam.  It is a black hole.  No light would escape from it, as far as any outsider might have made of it, beyond a very rare compliment.  "Solid effort," was the best I got, from friend.  Otherwise, no recognition of it whatsoever.

Of course, my father got it.  He understood it better than I did.

But recognition not what a writer craves anyway, beyond the satisfaction of creating a black hole, one of the greatest of dramatic phenomenons of nature, the black hole, I mean.  Black holes reveal something about the nature of everything.    First novels, romans a clef, do not, at least directly, but rather by their example, by their phenomenal existence, by their essence of showing "That Which Is."  The black hole is intruded upon, paparazzi-ed.  It was just being a black hole, as nature demanded of it.  And that might well be painful, a painful act of artistic creation and originality.


Black holes are in art as well as space.  No artist can know what his/her work can mean.  Rothko.  Shane MacGowan signing, "now this song is nearly over;  we may never find out what it means..."  All the plotless works of art and writing that youths give out to the world, flowers in their own right.



Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.  Stonewall Jackson.


The problem with a novel, with writing a book, is that it suggests that something else must come next.  And until one sits down--this is the problem, the monk's problem--and hashes that out, then one doesn't know what the hell to do with himself.  The mind haunts itself, buys trouble, dwells on all the personal mistakes, goes in a direction.   And all that needs to be controlled, disciplined, like a wayward soldier.  You have to put it to work.


This is the gift of Slaughterhouse Five, given by the species tulip, Mr. Kurt Vonnegut.  The amorphous inner dialogs of this writing business...  The true personas involved:  the soldiers, Billy Pilgrim;  the hack science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout;  the bleeding over of the fiction of Kilgore Trout and his remarkable insights into the reality of Tralfamaudorans.

"Discipline, my friend," my mind shouts at me now, all the time.  It is no answer that I am working, that I am dragging myself to work, there, or coming back from there, or recuperating, heavily, or in uneasy sleep and rest disturbed by the sounds of the modern world.  Everywhere.

Your  father is dying.  You are in the Safeway after a meeting at work.  The piece of fish you buy, going through the checkout line in disorientation, will be there later, in the fridge, when you return, a week later.

I am watching Ken Burns now, having dined finally in a state of relaxation with one of those Americana dishes of ground beef or buffalo in a tomato sauce with herbs, over rice, though pasta would be preferable, but for the weight gain of wheat.  It is now almost seven in the morning.

"If there is a worse place than hell, I am in it."

And since his time, it has only gotten worse.

If you are in pain and suffering, what you come to find out is that no one really has the ability to care.  People are too busy.  In enormous pain, all you can do, like Lincoln, is get off a quick quip.  And even then, people will be too self-absorbed, and, not to blame them, too busy surviving, busy dealing with their own problems to even begin to relate to your own suffering.  Rather they will keep you in the same place they have always had for you, the habitual.

Attachment is what it is.  A place for them to come to,  to talk about all their own stuff.  You are little more than a familiar point in their routine, a friendly territorial mark on their way through their own affairs.   "How can I continue to use you," their thoughts go.    Your guts might be falling out, but they are not disposed to care, beyond your patience and your entertainment value.

Only if you are Lincoln will they stop to record what you say, if you are lucky and important enough.

Gregor Samsa woke up as a giant insect, and not a pretty one, one morning, one morning of recognition.  An insect we all tend to loath and fear, the large cockroach, suddenly there, flicking on the kitchen counter, in the bathtub, climbing behind the garbage can...

Do not mistake your own humanity, the work of your tolerance, kindness and sympathy for what the consumer customer wants.

To them, you are just a widget, an application even, in their lives.  There is little wonder about how such devices came about.  Usefulness, ease, impersonality, removal, the divorce from one's own humanity, the collective shallows...

A sign that there will always be war amongst human beings.


That is what I realized, one morning, as I woke, perspiring in stress, uneasy, having been tossed out of the old apartment of twenty years.  And what the hell was I doing anyway, in this life, in such a job as "neighborhood barman wine soothe."   The move had gone poorly.  No room on the twenty six foot truck for the bookshelves, they told me, truck is full, suddenly.  It was snowing.  Bye bye old house, old friend, old memories, old objects of art.

It all hit me at a weak point, when I needed time to travel up to check on my mother, an eight hour drive away, as she slowly held it together and fell apart at the same time.


The sweating continued.  What could I do at the end of every shift to ease the tensions, left alone by the rest of the staff  but have a glass of wine, maybe a bottle.  Go home to the new apartment, write nonsense after an epsom salt bath, worrying about everything.



The pieces of life are very hard on a person.  They are completely most difficulty hard to pull together, to reconcile.

...painfully dragged out, dragged out in such a way as to show one his own great foolishness all along the line, all the way through, when the pieces of this prince that one once was have shredded into pieces, each, like plastic bits, embarrassment, the shameful self consciousness of a great talent treated with the greatest of neglect and stupidity.



The great writer, fanciful, a steadfast and honest traveller of hyperspace and theosophy, the attempted observer of the most clearest and deepest actions of a christian and buddhist servant, found himself misused. As if it was all a joke now, like he was pretty much a corpse now, having once been alive.   Where were one's children?  Wife, family?  Where a career?  Where a useful use of that goodly education he had known so well and purely through chapel windows reading poetry carefully with large and tender old men much like his own father?  Where the subtlety, all the years he'd helped his mom out on her feminist way of literacy, letter writing, history...  The great writer had blown all that like a clown, and even Conrad couldn't tell a tale of how strange that all felt, how even old friend's customary chat seemed now like part of the great betrayal, unwitting, of letting all his family down, all their work, all their labor, all their achieved comfort, and  yes, now what...


It's Tuesday.  I won't have much help.  The weather is finally nice, agreeable, even warm.   They have opened the regular door to the restaurant, not just the blue door.  The door in between:  I hear it click shut.  It's early.  I just opened it.  Now it's closed shut again.  No flow, no light, no "great, this restaurant has upstairs and downstairs.  No, wow, cool, even airs passing, friendliness up and down."

So, I the klutz go downstairs, after hearing the door click shut, the one between the dining rooms.  "Look," I say, "if the weather is nice, there's no reason to close the door...   I've been here twenty years, the door is always open."  But my friend, she has the eye on me again.  "I've been here two years, and the door is always closed."  Okay, great.  I have offended her.

But, through the night, the door stays open.  Only in inclement weather, do we need to shut the door.  When it's so cold or so hot...  Come in through the blue door, the main front door closed, heater or AC blasting...

Shitty staff meal.  A bit of chicken on some end of bone, rice soggy with potato, later, after the shift, not the beginning, no time to eat, a bit of ginger in it.  Not inspiring.  What did we taste?   A rose Bordeaux.....