Have I ever really understood the concept of work...
Okay. Yesterday. Took the bus down to see Heather, my therapist, 12:10 bus, slowly makes its way, hot downtown. Confident strivers on the sidewalks... In through the doors to the lobby to the elevator bank, up to the fifth floor. She has an announcement, as I sit down on the couch facing her chair. She's moving back to New York State.
I tell her about my yoga and my nature walks. I tell her I am feeling like a natural out in the new apartment out in the Palisades by the reservoir. There were initial misgivings and hardships, but it seems to be slowly working out. And it's good to be out of that situation of uncertainty. The move was difficult, but now that I'm here and can just get out for a walk, things are better. Work's okay.
Then up to Dupont Circle, stopping at my street vendor Vietnamese lady who serves the Syrian Halal lamb gyro across the street from the National Association of Broadcasters building. Spicy? Yeah, sure. Thank you, my friend. I put a buck in her plastic tip cup.
Up to see Patel my primary care doctor for a follow-up on the Brown Recluse Spider bite on upper leg. No, it's not infected. Hmm, they look at it. Sending me on to a dermatologist. Go get a box of Tegarderm clear plastic bandages at the Rite Aid, up there in my old neighborhood. An attractive young woman in short shorts in perusing the make-up aisle. I recognize her from Glen's Market, probably has a boyfriend. "You don't need any of that. You're perfect already," I saw, passing her quietly, and she says, "thank you," friendly enough. "Do you still work at Glen's? I moved out of the neighborhood, and I miss it." "Oh, no. Yes, I stopped for a while but I'm back now." "Good." I go downstairs to find my bandage supplies. Yeah, the clock is ticking now, and I gotta get a bus to work, and man, it's hot out.
By the time I get off the D2 bus from Dupont, carrying my lamb gyro over salad, the sauce dripping out from the foil topped with the plastic lid into the plastic bag, I'm pretty tired. Tuesday was wine tasting night, and it was busy from the get-go, ending up with a mutual friend of Julian the old sommelier and wine buyer for the Four Seasons who's relocated down to Florida. This fellow owns wine shops in the Boston area with his family. He's in with his wife. They take a bottle of the Minervois from Z Wine Gallery we're tasting tonight. I persuade them to go for the veal cheeks finally. It took several visits back to them and a fair amount of talk. And at the end of their meal, no dessert to cope with, just put the wine in a paper bag, Rodolfo catches me up on how Julian is doing. And about Italian wines. Now you have to go up into the high piedmont to get a good old school red, not ridiculous in alcohol.
Now, as I eat my halal lamb at the bar in the darkness with the AC units tweaked as best they can, the office door open, the wine room unit temperature adjusted down to 69 degrees from 74, I am hungry. I'd held off on eating, hoping I could get the blood work down for a physical, but the lady downstairs to take the blood had gone home already anyway. I try mom's phones, without getting through. I rise and start setting up. Replenish the Pigoudet rose, get the spoons out where they need to be for the ten top coming, take the wines out of the main ice bin and into the tub and the sink plugged with the champagne cork, just so, back-ups ready to go should the crowd by into the Sancerre tonight, etc., yes, tired, but if we just get a good set-up mis-en-place done, well, that will be out of the way when the demands start coming in.
The bar fills up, Jim, the early guy, retired, just back from Berlin and Hamburg. Okay, talk wine and things in general with him. Then the local couple--he's from the UK, Manchester--who've I not seen since the big match, and they're expected a third, and she's into wine. Two Ketel Ones with olive... menu, set-ups... Keeping up the patter is tiring, and now people are arriving, look up their reservations on the iPad, okay, seating them, etc. Thank god I had Monday off. Tuesday wine tasting will do it to you bad enough, and now, we've still got hours and many smiles and small politeness to go through, there's a woman by herself at the bar, a Takoma Park kind of person, Jim's still there, okay he's ready for his salmon now, the ten top is seated and ordering a few cocktails now though the server my friend who's just back from an electronic music festival in Detroit...
A last couple comes in, they met here. And another woman who comes by herself late on Wednesday, and she's found a new guitar, from a pawnshop out in Charlottesville, and Julia, a publicist, who travels to Shanghai for work, she's all set up at the end of the bar too. And we will talk now, catching up, how have you been, long time no see, what have you been up to.. I'm tired, irritations are rising, and I need a little Beaujolais on the rocks in a tumbler to see me through the higher altitude camps of this long climb now.
Conversations, kept, held together, brought together at the six or so seats at the bar, fifteen years and more...
A. and I sit down at the bar at the end, and I eat my spinach after the half of an apple tart she saved for me. A little bubbly for her, a little more red for me. When you're tired like this, the body likes its wine somehow. The energy to get home. We're overdo for a talk. I'd put up something on Facebook about Uli's empty chair, his birthday missed. I'd commented on my post about aching from head to toe, about how you get in a cab and go home alone at the end of all to an empty place, what's the point of all this... But, this is still a very good place to work if you have to be in the restaurants...
I wake up late the next day. Feeling it. Embarrassed. I try calling mom. I'm on the phone setting up an appointment with the dermatologist when an incoming call rings and leaves a message. And it turns out to be Life Alert, but I get through to mom, and she's fine, just wicked awful lonely and where are my sons. She's had a glass of wine. Paramedics are on the way, so I call them back. They want her to call back in person. I try a three way call, the dispatcher is satisfied now, she'll try to call off the paramedics if it's not too late, but they come anyway. The cat set the button off, it seems.
I take a long slow walk on the path, now mowed, under the reservoirs, down to the river. The fish are jumping, the herons are flying low over the river, skimming it. There are two old red rowboats with fishermen standing in them, casting their lines in the water.
Sometimes it's just lonely down by the river. It starts to rain. I walk back, admitting to myself the power of the depressions that get into your system. And I wonder at some of the causes, looking back, of the double bind a girl can put you in, so that you feel bad in every way you possibly could. You bring her flowers and you're a jerk. You back off and you're a jerk. You're the male, it's up to you, you get twisted round in every way.
You've been a million different creatures, sentient beings, in this long continual life. You've been sand. You've been a tree. You've been a dragonfly. Everything in the book, everything under the sun, and here you are as a human being and you can't get it right. And never even let off the hook...
Chalk it up to being a weird person from the start, a lover of nature, an ancient type who fits less and less in with the modern world...
Thursday, May 30, 2019
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
It's somewhere in between, at this hour. A long walk to the river, after I woke, after a long shift full of lasting aches, a solitary Memorial Day, perhaps as one should to commemorate, then a long nap, and then awake at 1 AM, and now it's past 3 AM.
Kerouac found refuge in a public library in California. He found Dwight Goddard's Buddhist Bible.
The writer will always be an outsider, a contrarian. He will always be Sam Clemens' Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, in pursuit of a path a bit off, different. He may be a proper gentleman, courtly enough, considerate, but also prone to juvenile delinquency, not the best of rule-followers. Independent. Like Dostoevsky was to his time and place, or Turgenev, or Chekhov, too I suppose. Flaubert. Proust. When we read them we might not realize how radical they might have been once upon a time.
Fortunately there is something about the species we are that we recognize things in common with these types. We know them to have the same deep questions and urges that we all have within, reflections of the energies of the collective unconscious.
More often than not, a writer's task is to translate. To bring the things that he or she finds worthy of reading, and putting them into practice. Like a crow, the intelligent and curious creature, able to identify with all sorts of beings, is always a collector, and always willing to vocalize something he finds important, bright shiny objects worth consideration. (Hemingway was a great magpie, holding on to old theater tickets and the like...) Of course, there are the things humanity finds, the spiritual accounts of our existence here in our time on the Earth, after being, as the Buddhist tells us, first gas, then rock, mineral, single celled, a plant, a tree, all made out of the same stuff of an evolving on-going creation, even the stars contributing to us atomic elements born in their furnace fires, the increasingly complex atomic structures that too give birth to life and its basic composition.
Reading, of course, is an act of translation. How to take the high ideals and understandings of an all comprehending awakened Buddha and put this into meaningful use in daily life, even as a creature prone to grave errors.
In reading the different Buddhist writers on Buddhism, Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hahn, I had a sudden inkling emerge, that I hadn't been all wrong in my life and its path. For instance, it does after all take huge considerations over a very serious matter to bring children into this world. And I have somehow managed not to. Are all of us cut out for the serious responsibilities? What will, what should we pass on down.
Thoughts are organic, as much as trees are. As TNH writes, it is very important that an oak tree remain an oak tree...
(I find the news less important, unfortunately, more a distraction from the necessary calm that one needs to sustain in the circumstances of existence. It doesn't help, the advertisements, blared too at us, out of necessity...)
I suppose that the translations we make out of the traditions of thoughts beautiful show up in our own examinations of life and the world around that a writer engages in, in whatever pace or volume he can...
The problem arises that one might realize the nature of distraction, the wide spread habit to avoid useful meditation. Music. Drinking. The spending of energies in unhealthy ways... And this makes me look at my so-called profession in different light, the light of mindfulness, the state of being not dulled, not distracted, but awake to the fundamental conditions of living beings.
This and many other towns make a living in distractions, a good way to make a buck. The focus is turned away. And yet still on a day off people will still go down to the river for recreation, for nature, for peace and family...
Kerouac found refuge in a public library in California. He found Dwight Goddard's Buddhist Bible.
The writer will always be an outsider, a contrarian. He will always be Sam Clemens' Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, in pursuit of a path a bit off, different. He may be a proper gentleman, courtly enough, considerate, but also prone to juvenile delinquency, not the best of rule-followers. Independent. Like Dostoevsky was to his time and place, or Turgenev, or Chekhov, too I suppose. Flaubert. Proust. When we read them we might not realize how radical they might have been once upon a time.
Fortunately there is something about the species we are that we recognize things in common with these types. We know them to have the same deep questions and urges that we all have within, reflections of the energies of the collective unconscious.
More often than not, a writer's task is to translate. To bring the things that he or she finds worthy of reading, and putting them into practice. Like a crow, the intelligent and curious creature, able to identify with all sorts of beings, is always a collector, and always willing to vocalize something he finds important, bright shiny objects worth consideration. (Hemingway was a great magpie, holding on to old theater tickets and the like...) Of course, there are the things humanity finds, the spiritual accounts of our existence here in our time on the Earth, after being, as the Buddhist tells us, first gas, then rock, mineral, single celled, a plant, a tree, all made out of the same stuff of an evolving on-going creation, even the stars contributing to us atomic elements born in their furnace fires, the increasingly complex atomic structures that too give birth to life and its basic composition.
Reading, of course, is an act of translation. How to take the high ideals and understandings of an all comprehending awakened Buddha and put this into meaningful use in daily life, even as a creature prone to grave errors.
In reading the different Buddhist writers on Buddhism, Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hahn, I had a sudden inkling emerge, that I hadn't been all wrong in my life and its path. For instance, it does after all take huge considerations over a very serious matter to bring children into this world. And I have somehow managed not to. Are all of us cut out for the serious responsibilities? What will, what should we pass on down.
Thoughts are organic, as much as trees are. As TNH writes, it is very important that an oak tree remain an oak tree...
(I find the news less important, unfortunately, more a distraction from the necessary calm that one needs to sustain in the circumstances of existence. It doesn't help, the advertisements, blared too at us, out of necessity...)
I suppose that the translations we make out of the traditions of thoughts beautiful show up in our own examinations of life and the world around that a writer engages in, in whatever pace or volume he can...
The problem arises that one might realize the nature of distraction, the wide spread habit to avoid useful meditation. Music. Drinking. The spending of energies in unhealthy ways... And this makes me look at my so-called profession in different light, the light of mindfulness, the state of being not dulled, not distracted, but awake to the fundamental conditions of living beings.
This and many other towns make a living in distractions, a good way to make a buck. The focus is turned away. And yet still on a day off people will still go down to the river for recreation, for nature, for peace and family...
Sunday, May 26, 2019
He was a nice guy, who'd taken me in after my brother bought a condo after we'd lived together in a one bedroom basement on the street for ten years. The guy had been through a hard time. I was friendly with his sister, a sweet quiet woman who approved of my interest in the feral cats of the street. Her cancer had returned. He'd sent me a nice card with a sailing ship on it, when I had to put down Arlo the cat who got sick from the feline leukemia. I moved in, depressed, saddened by the end of a chapter, and I had a new cat at this point, Miss Kitty. Dan and Anna had gotten her from a feral litter in the backyard of their original fixer upper on Mozart. She fit in my hand when I first took her home, a tortoise shell calico, runt of the litter.
My new neighbor was very good to me. We were both quiet guys. And we'd go about our monkish lives. I worked the bar at a place called the Austin Grill back then. I really just wanted to--as I still do--collect information and write about it, or just write, but wasn't moving so fast at it, and a copy boy runner job at the Washington Post, even those were rare back then in the early 90s. He'd save me articles, leaving them out for me, one of a large picture of Lance Armstrong riding up the road to Sestriere, in the 1999 version of the Tour de France.
It was still the quiet street, and rather than move into the basement, he suggested I take the first floor. And there was good in that we could be here together. Looking out for each other, even from different planes.
But then, around the edges, things got to be a little bit weird. I called him once in his office, a friendly check in. "Are you hard," he asked me. Once I was visiting with him upstairs, early on, and he confided to me that we were like two prisoners, together here. He was embarrassed, but wanted to suggest that we could ease each others burdens, in an intimate way. Oh. Okay. I don't blame him. That's just the way it was. And I write, as one always does, merely as a way of shining a light and trying to find some form of "truth."
And then came the "I know what you do," implying he knew of a colorful nightlife, sexual in nature, all takers, speaking with a certainty, my secret homosexual wild insatiable pleasure. There were now rumors around his place of work, in this small town of Washington, implying something about me, and in some way about him, so he said. "I know what you do." Sure. Meanwhile I'd probably been at some shitty old dive bar, after my shitty and grueling shift, for which I never got enough thanks, Austin Grill, next door at the old Grog & Tankard. We couldn't afford to go to JP's the strip joint, too loud and too much stress anyway. The Grog had live music, and some of it was actually quite legendary. Ben Andrews. Rest his soul.
He'd frequently be quite a guy, kind, he had a sense of humor... But there seemed a lot at stake, my being there... And I couldn't afford to move. I had this job, as a bartender, and I figured it let me maintain my position as being some sort of writer, figuring out something along the lines of Buddhism.
And then later on, much later, I didn't really know what to make of it all. I tried to get out, as he suggested I should, but then he would be very kind again, retracting... then changing his mind again. The gentle guy, a kind person, a decent man who, after all, was trying to help me out, had helped me out financially, no doubt about it, but then changing his mind, as it were... We had the Tour together, our old Celeste Bianchi bicycles, our calico cats, our interest in spiritual matters. Read the Psalms, he would write in his notes to me, and he meant it. He had an impressive and quite real interest in the Great War; he'd been to the Somme. Ypres. He'd make a pilgrimage just about every year, and he'd always send me a post card and then tell me about it when he got back. He'd been through things with the family deaths left at his doorstep.
And then he retired.
Toward the end, he helped me buy a guitar, an Epiphone Casino, not the Gretsch I might have secretly preferred, but a decent hollow body guitar--for that Beatles sound--at a good price. By the time it arrived, around the July Fourth holiday, with my mother just coming into town, he calls me upstairs, after a knock on the door. Because of me, he implies, his family has disowned him, alienated. Again, I must leave. He looks at me, somehow satisfied, perhaps it seemed to me, of putting me on the spot, just so I cannot much enjoy my mother's visit. I have to listen to him now, because he's talking about my future, which is now suddenly very real, after all this lull of literary accumulation, piles of manuscripts, beautiful notes we'd write back and forth... Our mutual following the Tour, the Tour de France.
Before that he had offered to help me with a small surgery, offering to take me down to GW Hospital. My brother calls and insists, having connections at the hospital. He's coming up from the basement with his laundry basket. The Pope is in town, I'm heading out to try to go see the Pope down by Saint Matthew's. I explain it to him, how my brother wants to take me in. "Fine, fine," he says. Later that day, I'm back and watching Pope Francis's homily when the knock on the door comes... "Let's just wrap all this up by the end of the year," he tells me.
Finally, it all came to an end. And then I was out on my own. Without much time to prepare for a big move after living where I'd been for twenty years....
I do my yoga now. There is sun again now. I take long walks, down to the great river, and sometimes out along the old towpath along the canal.
Just about the nicest fellow, a teacher, a most gentle being. But I don't talk to him anymore. So it goes.
We all deserve forgiveness. We all must take care.
My new neighbor was very good to me. We were both quiet guys. And we'd go about our monkish lives. I worked the bar at a place called the Austin Grill back then. I really just wanted to--as I still do--collect information and write about it, or just write, but wasn't moving so fast at it, and a copy boy runner job at the Washington Post, even those were rare back then in the early 90s. He'd save me articles, leaving them out for me, one of a large picture of Lance Armstrong riding up the road to Sestriere, in the 1999 version of the Tour de France.
It was still the quiet street, and rather than move into the basement, he suggested I take the first floor. And there was good in that we could be here together. Looking out for each other, even from different planes.
But then, around the edges, things got to be a little bit weird. I called him once in his office, a friendly check in. "Are you hard," he asked me. Once I was visiting with him upstairs, early on, and he confided to me that we were like two prisoners, together here. He was embarrassed, but wanted to suggest that we could ease each others burdens, in an intimate way. Oh. Okay. I don't blame him. That's just the way it was. And I write, as one always does, merely as a way of shining a light and trying to find some form of "truth."
And then came the "I know what you do," implying he knew of a colorful nightlife, sexual in nature, all takers, speaking with a certainty, my secret homosexual wild insatiable pleasure. There were now rumors around his place of work, in this small town of Washington, implying something about me, and in some way about him, so he said. "I know what you do." Sure. Meanwhile I'd probably been at some shitty old dive bar, after my shitty and grueling shift, for which I never got enough thanks, Austin Grill, next door at the old Grog & Tankard. We couldn't afford to go to JP's the strip joint, too loud and too much stress anyway. The Grog had live music, and some of it was actually quite legendary. Ben Andrews. Rest his soul.
He'd frequently be quite a guy, kind, he had a sense of humor... But there seemed a lot at stake, my being there... And I couldn't afford to move. I had this job, as a bartender, and I figured it let me maintain my position as being some sort of writer, figuring out something along the lines of Buddhism.
And then later on, much later, I didn't really know what to make of it all. I tried to get out, as he suggested I should, but then he would be very kind again, retracting... then changing his mind again. The gentle guy, a kind person, a decent man who, after all, was trying to help me out, had helped me out financially, no doubt about it, but then changing his mind, as it were... We had the Tour together, our old Celeste Bianchi bicycles, our calico cats, our interest in spiritual matters. Read the Psalms, he would write in his notes to me, and he meant it. He had an impressive and quite real interest in the Great War; he'd been to the Somme. Ypres. He'd make a pilgrimage just about every year, and he'd always send me a post card and then tell me about it when he got back. He'd been through things with the family deaths left at his doorstep.
And then he retired.
Toward the end, he helped me buy a guitar, an Epiphone Casino, not the Gretsch I might have secretly preferred, but a decent hollow body guitar--for that Beatles sound--at a good price. By the time it arrived, around the July Fourth holiday, with my mother just coming into town, he calls me upstairs, after a knock on the door. Because of me, he implies, his family has disowned him, alienated. Again, I must leave. He looks at me, somehow satisfied, perhaps it seemed to me, of putting me on the spot, just so I cannot much enjoy my mother's visit. I have to listen to him now, because he's talking about my future, which is now suddenly very real, after all this lull of literary accumulation, piles of manuscripts, beautiful notes we'd write back and forth... Our mutual following the Tour, the Tour de France.
Before that he had offered to help me with a small surgery, offering to take me down to GW Hospital. My brother calls and insists, having connections at the hospital. He's coming up from the basement with his laundry basket. The Pope is in town, I'm heading out to try to go see the Pope down by Saint Matthew's. I explain it to him, how my brother wants to take me in. "Fine, fine," he says. Later that day, I'm back and watching Pope Francis's homily when the knock on the door comes... "Let's just wrap all this up by the end of the year," he tells me.
Finally, it all came to an end. And then I was out on my own. Without much time to prepare for a big move after living where I'd been for twenty years....
I do my yoga now. There is sun again now. I take long walks, down to the great river, and sometimes out along the old towpath along the canal.
Just about the nicest fellow, a teacher, a most gentle being. But I don't talk to him anymore. So it goes.
We all deserve forgiveness. We all must take care.
There is the river.
The river has a resonance with us,
down in our unconscious. The river carries meaning.
Let us cross the river and rest under the shade of the trees, the dying soldier's last words.
Twain gives us such moments. The flux of the river. Huck and Jim are separated on the river at night, with all the mysterious channels, the weather... A fundamental experience to all creatures, that of loss, lostness, along with the need to locate, to call out in the night... One of the great Buddhist moments of American literature.
And when they have relocated each other, found each other, the raft, Jim, Huck, all together now, Huck, the young fellow must dismiss all of that, the great feeling of lostness, friendlessness, people-less-ness, complete bare nakedness... Feeling the suffering that all creatures, deep down, really have, replete with anxiety, fear of tomorrow, angst for the past, a distance from all good old days, as if there was indeed some drunken old father from which one had to hide from, so much so that you'd fake your own death... Huck, feeling all this makes a joke, telling old Jim that surely this must have all been a dream... And Jim looks down at the raft, full of litter from the flooding river.. "I was most heartbroke, and all you can do is make a joke on old Jim," something like that.
No one writes clearer than Thich Nhat Hahn.
The river has a resonance with us,
down in our unconscious. The river carries meaning.
Let us cross the river and rest under the shade of the trees, the dying soldier's last words.
Twain gives us such moments. The flux of the river. Huck and Jim are separated on the river at night, with all the mysterious channels, the weather... A fundamental experience to all creatures, that of loss, lostness, along with the need to locate, to call out in the night... One of the great Buddhist moments of American literature.
And when they have relocated each other, found each other, the raft, Jim, Huck, all together now, Huck, the young fellow must dismiss all of that, the great feeling of lostness, friendlessness, people-less-ness, complete bare nakedness... Feeling the suffering that all creatures, deep down, really have, replete with anxiety, fear of tomorrow, angst for the past, a distance from all good old days, as if there was indeed some drunken old father from which one had to hide from, so much so that you'd fake your own death... Huck, feeling all this makes a joke, telling old Jim that surely this must have all been a dream... And Jim looks down at the raft, full of litter from the flooding river.. "I was most heartbroke, and all you can do is make a joke on old Jim," something like that.
No one writes clearer than Thich Nhat Hahn.
Saturday, May 18, 2019
And somewhere in our minds, below, past, underneath the shell layers of our own sorrows and protections, there are the things we remember of the collective.
And a writer is good and lucky and a talent if he can lodge something, land something, find something and place it just so carefully into that great collective unconscious.
For me now, this is Twain, as I reinvent my own life, with his great adventure of Huck and Jim along the river. Along the river with all its majesty, its cautions, its dangers, its ever-changing night and day and weather and channel... of which I bite off a modest sample in my fear, my great unaccustomed partial fright coming back along the towpath in darkness of night, the sounds of the river off to my right, a near full moon above the trees...
How many times that book comes back to me... How much truth it has to offer of our condition...
How many times that book comes back to me... How much truth it has to offer of our condition...
Then the surprising horror, the shock of speeding lights way up ahead, floating in space, above the darkened tow path which has frighted me in its own way, in equal parts to the feeling of belonging somewhere again... The Beltway, the raised highway leading to the American Legion Bridge, built over an old lock, its gate forgotten in the darkness. Speeding cars and trucks zooming along not bound to this dank earth I am riding wearily upon, careful of smooshing tiny toads and small frogs.
But these things, which are a channel to the realm of the deeps of consciousness, they come only, and naturally, from renunciation... Renunciation, to many of the species a completely baffling thing. Not, denunciation, but a retreat from self-importance...
Get on a bike and cycle up any back road in NW DC and you will find the unending plethora of mansions of all shapes and styles and sizes. Me, I read Richard Scarry, What Do People Do All Day, and there was Huck the cat, looking out an upper window, as if he could afford it, trying out the profession of "poet."
On the third day off from work, I am finally up at a reasonable hour, somewhere around 10:30 in the morning, not bad for an old dog barman circus elephant. I go down and open the front door of the small apartment building to see what the weather is like. The new slate flagstones, on a slight downhill incline, between two functionally similar buildings... why not... it's quiet, and no one to pass nor gawk at me as I try to unroll myself into a few good easy yoga poses. And after that, I need a walk, another long one, down to the river, down to the towpath. The yoga has been very good, lotus pose a little strain on the lower part of legs, but some form of perspective encountered...
Down along the towpath, and the sun comes out more now from the clouds, which have begun to be humid. I'm wearing a backpack, but I trot myself into a jog pace, though that too hurts like lotus pose... And I make my way, slowly but surely, out under Chain Bridge, and then to the cut off path cut through the rock slabs, paved, to the narrows above, and there's my friend from before, with his old blue bicycle. I wave to him, and go sit out on some rocks above the cement platform where he stands looking over the parapet, and he waves back, though I wonder if he remembers me, as we all do. I sit for a while, look through my back pack, look at a text of pictures my aunt has sent me from Rockport, idly shoot another iPhone video of the grand river and its current over the rocks...
Well, on my way back, who knows where I'm headed, I go up on the parapet. You have your fishing pole with you today. It's tied along the top tube of his old blue bicycle with black line. He had an old red backpack today, and like last time, his tee-shirt, different, has a small hole or two in it up around the neckline. His chinos, not the blue work pants he had on last time weeks ago, are impeccably clean, a light fabric.
We watch a young Asian man pull in a small fish. "Shad," my friend tells me. "Too many bones." There's the guy taking the fish on a rock, to clean it. He slices off a filet-like cut, not very big. Then he cuts it half, and now he's using it for bait, and back into the water with a hook.
The spawning will be over soon, my friend tells me. His beard is white, and it's hard to hear him perfectly over the sound of the river now. Too choppy to fish today, he tells me. I was out, biked up to Great Falls and back, I tell him, but I forget the peepers and the Copperhead and coming back at dark. The river was high, about all I managed to tell him.
When I take my leave, splicing that in the watching of the man catch the fish, clean it, use it for bait, before I go on my way, he reaches out to shake my hand, which I wanted to do anyway. Ted, I say. Tommy, he says, and I step carefully back down past the Central American family with their two ladies and the two boys swimming in the safe channel the kayakers use to get back onto land, and the small tide seems to be going out so I can get back to the towpath, but who cares if I get my hiking sneakers wet at this point.
I try some jogging, coming back in toward the bridge overpass of the Capitol Crescent Trail, back to the boat house, and it is a long slog. I'm wearing the UVA Cavaliers hat someone left at work, to cover my balding head, and a young fellow with a black diamond mountain bike offers a related term. He's putting on sunscreen lotion as I go into the men's room and come back to top off my water bottle at the fountain there. We chat a bit. Nice kid. He reaches out his hand and I shake it too, passing on his sunscreen. Finally back up on MacArthur I have an expensive cup of coffee and try to write my thoughts out, but they aren't so easy to be found.
Get on a bike and cycle up any back road in NW DC and you will find the unending plethora of mansions of all shapes and styles and sizes. Me, I read Richard Scarry, What Do People Do All Day, and there was Huck the cat, looking out an upper window, as if he could afford it, trying out the profession of "poet."
On the third day off from work, I am finally up at a reasonable hour, somewhere around 10:30 in the morning, not bad for an old dog barman circus elephant. I go down and open the front door of the small apartment building to see what the weather is like. The new slate flagstones, on a slight downhill incline, between two functionally similar buildings... why not... it's quiet, and no one to pass nor gawk at me as I try to unroll myself into a few good easy yoga poses. And after that, I need a walk, another long one, down to the river, down to the towpath. The yoga has been very good, lotus pose a little strain on the lower part of legs, but some form of perspective encountered...
Down along the towpath, and the sun comes out more now from the clouds, which have begun to be humid. I'm wearing a backpack, but I trot myself into a jog pace, though that too hurts like lotus pose... And I make my way, slowly but surely, out under Chain Bridge, and then to the cut off path cut through the rock slabs, paved, to the narrows above, and there's my friend from before, with his old blue bicycle. I wave to him, and go sit out on some rocks above the cement platform where he stands looking over the parapet, and he waves back, though I wonder if he remembers me, as we all do. I sit for a while, look through my back pack, look at a text of pictures my aunt has sent me from Rockport, idly shoot another iPhone video of the grand river and its current over the rocks...
Well, on my way back, who knows where I'm headed, I go up on the parapet. You have your fishing pole with you today. It's tied along the top tube of his old blue bicycle with black line. He had an old red backpack today, and like last time, his tee-shirt, different, has a small hole or two in it up around the neckline. His chinos, not the blue work pants he had on last time weeks ago, are impeccably clean, a light fabric.
We watch a young Asian man pull in a small fish. "Shad," my friend tells me. "Too many bones." There's the guy taking the fish on a rock, to clean it. He slices off a filet-like cut, not very big. Then he cuts it half, and now he's using it for bait, and back into the water with a hook.
The spawning will be over soon, my friend tells me. His beard is white, and it's hard to hear him perfectly over the sound of the river now. Too choppy to fish today, he tells me. I was out, biked up to Great Falls and back, I tell him, but I forget the peepers and the Copperhead and coming back at dark. The river was high, about all I managed to tell him.
When I take my leave, splicing that in the watching of the man catch the fish, clean it, use it for bait, before I go on my way, he reaches out to shake my hand, which I wanted to do anyway. Ted, I say. Tommy, he says, and I step carefully back down past the Central American family with their two ladies and the two boys swimming in the safe channel the kayakers use to get back onto land, and the small tide seems to be going out so I can get back to the towpath, but who cares if I get my hiking sneakers wet at this point.
I try some jogging, coming back in toward the bridge overpass of the Capitol Crescent Trail, back to the boat house, and it is a long slog. I'm wearing the UVA Cavaliers hat someone left at work, to cover my balding head, and a young fellow with a black diamond mountain bike offers a related term. He's putting on sunscreen lotion as I go into the men's room and come back to top off my water bottle at the fountain there. We chat a bit. Nice kid. He reaches out his hand and I shake it too, passing on his sunscreen. Finally back up on MacArthur I have an expensive cup of coffee and try to write my thoughts out, but they aren't so easy to be found.
Friday, May 17, 2019
Yeah, no...
The first day off is never easy. Made notable by feeling poorly, tired, wrung out, on top of being out of synch with everyone. Don't feel up for an hour trip up to the Rockville Metro to meet an attractive 65 year old Iranian woman... dealing with my own issues, worrying about mom, who it turns out just went for a benevolent walk with her neighbor from the townhouses, who has just retired from the nuclear power plant.... I'm sorry, I have the spider bite wound to tend to, Domeboro will help, and I need some food in the pantry, as every night this week was crazy busy enough to prevent me from going to the Safeway after work... I need wine too, after my long first day off nap--I suppose I could have rallied, bus to metro, metro stations many, to be there at seven, as I thought was possible in the throes of the last hours of Wednesday night jazz, yeah, sure... And now it's another woman on this planet who despises me and I'm the biggest loser creep, etc... But that night, rather than going out for glory and a date, I do make it to the Wisconsin Avenue Safeway, around midnight, and I needed to. A hundred bucks worth of cold cuts, meatballs, grass-fed beef, rice pasta... It ain't easy, this moon shot, this barman trying to be an astronaut, a shepherd, a listener of conversations, attempting to be a writer of literature up there far away in the deep sky... And I've already begun the damage, just having a glass of wine, in order to have the energy, even, to get on the bus back toward the Georgetown Safeway... Calling Mom again, around eleven at night...
So, the next day... Again, the body trying to find some semblance of a regular schedule, sleep--post shower, wound treatment--around four in the morning, then awakened by the construction noise at eight in the morning, the Bobcat, BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP, then the back hoe digger engine..
Two PM I wake, Jesus, what have I missed, look at my phone, see if mom's called... Yup, unfriended by new Bumble friend... bye bye. Women I wish to like always end up hating me, without exception. And then slowly gathering energy to get out of the building and over to the playground with my back pack, yoga mat, bottle of water, phone, wallet, hat, etc., looking for a level spot to do all the yoga I have not done in a long time. And each pose is hard, and my heart beats strangely to tell the tales of abuse and heaviness. But I manage. Sun salutations, down dogs, spine stretchers, shoulder-stand, head-stand, warrior poses, out in the sun, feeling toxic still. I'm in my own corner of the playground, not in the way, and there is a stand of beautiful old Elm trees to provide shade here above the tennis courts of Q Street and the playgrounds of The Lab School building and the rec center. But, as nearly always, I'm feeling like I'm a big creep, somehow, I don't quite know why, just for not fitting in, not having bought into the plan, not having a plan, etc., however you might want to put it.
Yeah, none of this life here in DC has been much of a lasting fun, just more like a service, to I don't know who or what, really.
But with a text to mom's helper, and a phone call with mom, it looks like I can get back to the apartment, change, and get out for a bike ride, a long one, on the mountain bike, down along the canal on the smooth towpath, packed dirt, the hum of tires, the sounds of nature, Six PM, dusk.
And then I'm free for a time. The canal is low by the boat house, an odor of dead fish, but up along further there is water. The turtles paddle, holding themselves steady, and then there are more turtles, and more, and some like huge mastodons, the huge snappers with their great shielding leather backs. Out past Chain Bridge, passing over the towpath, the water has come all the way up the paved path in the rock cut... No sense heading down the paved path now, not when it's under four inches of water to begin with. I get back on the yellow mountain bike. And the river is high all the way... I stop to look at it when it appears again the towpath traveler.
I find the river where it is close by the towpath, visible through the underbrush and the trees, the grasses rising softly on muddy banks, I dismount the yellow mountain bike to go watch the river up close, and I pull out my iPhone to take videos of the current, the trees out in the river current, standing still, leaves, trunks, birds coming by. Something like Kurosawa, or his dreams, his cinema, I see in all this, how the river now has widened, and running high, so that the trees out there, slender poplars still holding a few upper leaves, have their feet in the water, so to speak.
Further up, the air changes, the rocks come out, the locks and the lock keepers houses change, the river then is suddenly below you on the left side going out, down, coming round in a great chasm, and further up, finally, the sign, the overlook of the Great Falls of the Potomac... It's near dusk getting here finally, and the torrents are roaring, filling every channel here, as you pass over the boardwalk. Not many here now, so I walk my bike over the bridge boardwalk over the natural sluices, then wooden with railings to protect the ecosystem... Few are here now, there's not a lot of foot traffic. I walk my bike onward after taking cell phone video...
After I make it out to the platform overlooking the great river and its falls, I turn back. The moon has risen, I see. I get back on the bike and swing out onto the path, just a little further, to the park, maybe there's a hamburger left... the old tavern.
And now it is dark out. I press the top of the headlamp attached to my helmet to turn it on. There are peepers, tiny, and small frogs, out here on the path, and I do not want to run over them. And then a small snake before me, to dodge. A small copperhead, about a foot long, and just up further, a baby one, more slender than a pencil, maybe four inches long.
My headlamp flashes, telling me about its battery life, and now with the orgy of peeping in the dark canal below me, I cannot go fast... Frogs and little toads, I exclaim out loud and swerve every time I nearly hit one, as they are small, motionless, and come up suddenly in my the head beam. The moon, almost full, seems to shift position with regard to the path and places along the river where the moonlight shines over the glass flat surface, and my brain has a hard time figuring out how that might be, one moment to the right, and then just on a little later to the left.
And now as darkness falls, it suddenly, or it dawns on me soon enough, does not seem like a good idea to be out now on this path in the darkness, the snake prowling in my mind still, swerving to miss another little amphibian too close to mountain bike tires, and who knows what else is out there. Is there a bridge to a road that is well-lit, the disorienting noises from the canal bed, peepers and bull frogs all the way.
Finally, up ahead, a couple of strange lights, which turn out to be walkers, or joggers... Finally I am closer back toward Fletcher's Boathouse. Some wear blue light bands across their front, some with headlamps, first just a few, and then a steady stream of them. "Is this a full moon thing," I ask. No, it's an event. Okay. Fifty miles in twenty hours, they're headed out to a canal lock with a proper name. They are talkative, most of them, as they pass, but it is too dark to engage as we pass going opposite ways.
I come out of C & O park, crossing the road, walking the bike up the sidewalk where the road is narrow. After the long flat ride, I take MacArthur just up a ways west to Chain Bridge Road, which is one of the steeper paved climbs one can find, passing first an old cemetery on the left up past the first curve, and then up, up, past Battery Kemble Park, and it's ten o'clock at night by the time I get to the top of the climb with all its fancy houses along the way.
The yoga, the exercise, the hydration, the nature along the river, all has helped. The curing detoxing powers of nature, good for the mind to return to the noises of nature and birds and the river and the bullfrogs. This is what I need. Very much.
Women I like in the wrong way will always hate me. They are too difficult for my poor drained body and soul, I who must put his energy into quiet meditation, yoga, and being a nature boy. And who am I anyway, with all my bad career choices, my rebellions, my years and years of being an idiot, often enough an idiot seeking his own soothing in wine, too much wine. It's all I can do to take care of myself, and this makes for a stupid and lonesome life.
A cautionary tale, and a message of hope...
The first day off is never easy. Made notable by feeling poorly, tired, wrung out, on top of being out of synch with everyone. Don't feel up for an hour trip up to the Rockville Metro to meet an attractive 65 year old Iranian woman... dealing with my own issues, worrying about mom, who it turns out just went for a benevolent walk with her neighbor from the townhouses, who has just retired from the nuclear power plant.... I'm sorry, I have the spider bite wound to tend to, Domeboro will help, and I need some food in the pantry, as every night this week was crazy busy enough to prevent me from going to the Safeway after work... I need wine too, after my long first day off nap--I suppose I could have rallied, bus to metro, metro stations many, to be there at seven, as I thought was possible in the throes of the last hours of Wednesday night jazz, yeah, sure... And now it's another woman on this planet who despises me and I'm the biggest loser creep, etc... But that night, rather than going out for glory and a date, I do make it to the Wisconsin Avenue Safeway, around midnight, and I needed to. A hundred bucks worth of cold cuts, meatballs, grass-fed beef, rice pasta... It ain't easy, this moon shot, this barman trying to be an astronaut, a shepherd, a listener of conversations, attempting to be a writer of literature up there far away in the deep sky... And I've already begun the damage, just having a glass of wine, in order to have the energy, even, to get on the bus back toward the Georgetown Safeway... Calling Mom again, around eleven at night...
So, the next day... Again, the body trying to find some semblance of a regular schedule, sleep--post shower, wound treatment--around four in the morning, then awakened by the construction noise at eight in the morning, the Bobcat, BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP, then the back hoe digger engine..
Two PM I wake, Jesus, what have I missed, look at my phone, see if mom's called... Yup, unfriended by new Bumble friend... bye bye. Women I wish to like always end up hating me, without exception. And then slowly gathering energy to get out of the building and over to the playground with my back pack, yoga mat, bottle of water, phone, wallet, hat, etc., looking for a level spot to do all the yoga I have not done in a long time. And each pose is hard, and my heart beats strangely to tell the tales of abuse and heaviness. But I manage. Sun salutations, down dogs, spine stretchers, shoulder-stand, head-stand, warrior poses, out in the sun, feeling toxic still. I'm in my own corner of the playground, not in the way, and there is a stand of beautiful old Elm trees to provide shade here above the tennis courts of Q Street and the playgrounds of The Lab School building and the rec center. But, as nearly always, I'm feeling like I'm a big creep, somehow, I don't quite know why, just for not fitting in, not having bought into the plan, not having a plan, etc., however you might want to put it.
Yeah, none of this life here in DC has been much of a lasting fun, just more like a service, to I don't know who or what, really.
But with a text to mom's helper, and a phone call with mom, it looks like I can get back to the apartment, change, and get out for a bike ride, a long one, on the mountain bike, down along the canal on the smooth towpath, packed dirt, the hum of tires, the sounds of nature, Six PM, dusk.
And then I'm free for a time. The canal is low by the boat house, an odor of dead fish, but up along further there is water. The turtles paddle, holding themselves steady, and then there are more turtles, and more, and some like huge mastodons, the huge snappers with their great shielding leather backs. Out past Chain Bridge, passing over the towpath, the water has come all the way up the paved path in the rock cut... No sense heading down the paved path now, not when it's under four inches of water to begin with. I get back on the yellow mountain bike. And the river is high all the way... I stop to look at it when it appears again the towpath traveler.
I find the river where it is close by the towpath, visible through the underbrush and the trees, the grasses rising softly on muddy banks, I dismount the yellow mountain bike to go watch the river up close, and I pull out my iPhone to take videos of the current, the trees out in the river current, standing still, leaves, trunks, birds coming by. Something like Kurosawa, or his dreams, his cinema, I see in all this, how the river now has widened, and running high, so that the trees out there, slender poplars still holding a few upper leaves, have their feet in the water, so to speak.
Further up, the air changes, the rocks come out, the locks and the lock keepers houses change, the river then is suddenly below you on the left side going out, down, coming round in a great chasm, and further up, finally, the sign, the overlook of the Great Falls of the Potomac... It's near dusk getting here finally, and the torrents are roaring, filling every channel here, as you pass over the boardwalk. Not many here now, so I walk my bike over the bridge boardwalk over the natural sluices, then wooden with railings to protect the ecosystem... Few are here now, there's not a lot of foot traffic. I walk my bike onward after taking cell phone video...
After I make it out to the platform overlooking the great river and its falls, I turn back. The moon has risen, I see. I get back on the bike and swing out onto the path, just a little further, to the park, maybe there's a hamburger left... the old tavern.
And now it is dark out. I press the top of the headlamp attached to my helmet to turn it on. There are peepers, tiny, and small frogs, out here on the path, and I do not want to run over them. And then a small snake before me, to dodge. A small copperhead, about a foot long, and just up further, a baby one, more slender than a pencil, maybe four inches long.
My headlamp flashes, telling me about its battery life, and now with the orgy of peeping in the dark canal below me, I cannot go fast... Frogs and little toads, I exclaim out loud and swerve every time I nearly hit one, as they are small, motionless, and come up suddenly in my the head beam. The moon, almost full, seems to shift position with regard to the path and places along the river where the moonlight shines over the glass flat surface, and my brain has a hard time figuring out how that might be, one moment to the right, and then just on a little later to the left.
And now as darkness falls, it suddenly, or it dawns on me soon enough, does not seem like a good idea to be out now on this path in the darkness, the snake prowling in my mind still, swerving to miss another little amphibian too close to mountain bike tires, and who knows what else is out there. Is there a bridge to a road that is well-lit, the disorienting noises from the canal bed, peepers and bull frogs all the way.
Finally, up ahead, a couple of strange lights, which turn out to be walkers, or joggers... Finally I am closer back toward Fletcher's Boathouse. Some wear blue light bands across their front, some with headlamps, first just a few, and then a steady stream of them. "Is this a full moon thing," I ask. No, it's an event. Okay. Fifty miles in twenty hours, they're headed out to a canal lock with a proper name. They are talkative, most of them, as they pass, but it is too dark to engage as we pass going opposite ways.
I come out of C & O park, crossing the road, walking the bike up the sidewalk where the road is narrow. After the long flat ride, I take MacArthur just up a ways west to Chain Bridge Road, which is one of the steeper paved climbs one can find, passing first an old cemetery on the left up past the first curve, and then up, up, past Battery Kemble Park, and it's ten o'clock at night by the time I get to the top of the climb with all its fancy houses along the way.
The yoga, the exercise, the hydration, the nature along the river, all has helped. The curing detoxing powers of nature, good for the mind to return to the noises of nature and birds and the river and the bullfrogs. This is what I need. Very much.
Women I like in the wrong way will always hate me. They are too difficult for my poor drained body and soul, I who must put his energy into quiet meditation, yoga, and being a nature boy. And who am I anyway, with all my bad career choices, my rebellions, my years and years of being an idiot, often enough an idiot seeking his own soothing in wine, too much wine. It's all I can do to take care of myself, and this makes for a stupid and lonesome life.
A cautionary tale, and a message of hope...
Thursday, May 16, 2019
Talking was part of my job.
It's Mother's Day. I'm going in on the bus, just barely catching it. The schedule was off. I left the bus stand just this side of the reservoirs, giving up, thinking I'll have to walk it, then the bus comes round the curve, and I run back to the road, and stick my arm out, and the bus driver sees me, and I run after it, and going fast I catch it. "I wouldn't have stopped, normally," the driver tells me as I load two bucks in through the tight slot. Okay, I'm on the bus at least.
The night goes on from there. It's going to be busy. Ten top, five top, four top, another five top, what? Who's going to help me out. The boss and his wife and son are going to have dinner up at the bar...
But my job involves talking. And the first people through the door, right at five thirty one, Ken and Julia, are old friends. Had their wedding reception here, a nice couple. I have to lose the emotional, how I'm feeling, feeling down, and just start talking to them. "How's it going," they ask, sensing my down spirits, gingerly. "Oh... " And well, as usual, I got no choice. To talk. To talk. To listen. And it works. They're going to China, where she's from, for a wedding in a couple of weeks. Ken's brother has just landed in Rome, for a quick priest vacation, come to find out, after I ask. Need another cassock? You got it. Driving to Cleveland, or Syracuse, it takes it out of you at our age. Ken's working with TSA. I made them a French Martini, and explain to them, folks, no regular menu tonight, just the prix fixe for Mother's Day. Which looks great, actually.
Sunday night, stress, Mother's Day. The ten top in the back. How's all this going to work out?
Then Monday, coming in early to set up for a Bordeaux importer wine tasting. Moya. Gaby. Straight into Monday Night Jazz with the Bitter Dose Combo. My co-worker, upbraided, spoken to by the boss over an issue involving tip-out, goes into the corner in tears, drinking peppermint tea to calm herself down, right as it gets busy. You think I don't want to break down and start crying with this shitty poorly compensating job and all the other shit that's going on in my life? Well, honey, at least you can cry, and she does, with real wet tears.
Tuesday, a private company buys out the upstairs wine bar. Railroad Safety conventioneers, drinking Cotes Du Rhone, beer, finger food, cheese, charcuterie. Starts to break up around ten, but then the remaining circle in on the bar. A guy from NYC orders a double Macallan 12, offers, kindly, to buy me one too, so I pour myself a little tumbler of Beaujolais, just for cheers sake. He's looking for liver music. Ultimately I end up bringing out my guitar from the office.
Wednesday, back to jazz night with Barbara. More stress, another long night. I'm reminded it's graduation weekend...
And then, suddenly, the week is over. The week is over and I am alone. Sleep is off, weird. Neighbors come in at four AM, waking me up. And then I look at my cell phone, and then I am awake, even with the thought of relaxation. I finish the half bottle of Kronenbourg left in the fridge. Around six AM, I call mom, finally getting through to her after two days or so without phone contact, first because I'd left my iPhone, again, in a cab, distracted, and then for her not answering the phone.
The spider bite wound is still strange, and itching, the therapist, Dr. Heather, has cancelled, a relief, I've missed my beloved aunt's birthday on the day I worked a double and then some, and finally, here on Thursday, the first day off, CVS for bandages, etc., trip to the library, I fall into a groggy nap, all afternoon, after this getting up early.
Then I don't have any way, and I don't have any groceries, and I can't make the Bumble first date up in Rockville...
I dunno, so much unhappiness... why?
I wasn't meant for certain things, I suppose, we know that. I wasn't meant for, as D.H. Lawrence put in a short story, about a railroad guy, if I remember, "a woman of imperious mein," the Upper West Side, the over achiever... even if there really is no other place to be than New York City, and even Kerouac lived there, with a girlfriend, which is where he cobbled together all his early sketches of job life and Neal Cassidy and his years of toiling and toiling in jobs like parking cars and on the railroad and crazy projects like driving cars across the country for the benefit of their owners... into the long night of prose and the "help" of benzedrine... the manuscript, a great testament to America, or anywhere, of that which is called On the Road, poor old beautiful shy Jack Kerouac...
I am cooking a steak in this strange hour, over cooking it, and across the street is a beautiful open field, but that there's no one to share it with, except the moon, almost full tonight...
Did Kerouac wonder, this now must be my time... This is the time, and by means I find...
And he let loose with the words of his voice. Great running back that he was. Glue of a community...
There's no choice but to get into the wine, to have enough, to let loose, after the long sleep after the long toil of recompensing job detail...
I just... yeah... I never knew it would take so much lonely time, not just alone time, not just peace and quiet, but the real non engagement of other people... And I suppose this is what provokes the artist to become a.... I don't know, spiritual type, I guess... a monk, a pastor, a priest, a whatever... when no one will talk to you about anything...
It's Mother's Day. I'm going in on the bus, just barely catching it. The schedule was off. I left the bus stand just this side of the reservoirs, giving up, thinking I'll have to walk it, then the bus comes round the curve, and I run back to the road, and stick my arm out, and the bus driver sees me, and I run after it, and going fast I catch it. "I wouldn't have stopped, normally," the driver tells me as I load two bucks in through the tight slot. Okay, I'm on the bus at least.
The night goes on from there. It's going to be busy. Ten top, five top, four top, another five top, what? Who's going to help me out. The boss and his wife and son are going to have dinner up at the bar...
But my job involves talking. And the first people through the door, right at five thirty one, Ken and Julia, are old friends. Had their wedding reception here, a nice couple. I have to lose the emotional, how I'm feeling, feeling down, and just start talking to them. "How's it going," they ask, sensing my down spirits, gingerly. "Oh... " And well, as usual, I got no choice. To talk. To talk. To listen. And it works. They're going to China, where she's from, for a wedding in a couple of weeks. Ken's brother has just landed in Rome, for a quick priest vacation, come to find out, after I ask. Need another cassock? You got it. Driving to Cleveland, or Syracuse, it takes it out of you at our age. Ken's working with TSA. I made them a French Martini, and explain to them, folks, no regular menu tonight, just the prix fixe for Mother's Day. Which looks great, actually.
Sunday night, stress, Mother's Day. The ten top in the back. How's all this going to work out?
Then Monday, coming in early to set up for a Bordeaux importer wine tasting. Moya. Gaby. Straight into Monday Night Jazz with the Bitter Dose Combo. My co-worker, upbraided, spoken to by the boss over an issue involving tip-out, goes into the corner in tears, drinking peppermint tea to calm herself down, right as it gets busy. You think I don't want to break down and start crying with this shitty poorly compensating job and all the other shit that's going on in my life? Well, honey, at least you can cry, and she does, with real wet tears.
Tuesday, a private company buys out the upstairs wine bar. Railroad Safety conventioneers, drinking Cotes Du Rhone, beer, finger food, cheese, charcuterie. Starts to break up around ten, but then the remaining circle in on the bar. A guy from NYC orders a double Macallan 12, offers, kindly, to buy me one too, so I pour myself a little tumbler of Beaujolais, just for cheers sake. He's looking for liver music. Ultimately I end up bringing out my guitar from the office.
Wednesday, back to jazz night with Barbara. More stress, another long night. I'm reminded it's graduation weekend...
And then, suddenly, the week is over. The week is over and I am alone. Sleep is off, weird. Neighbors come in at four AM, waking me up. And then I look at my cell phone, and then I am awake, even with the thought of relaxation. I finish the half bottle of Kronenbourg left in the fridge. Around six AM, I call mom, finally getting through to her after two days or so without phone contact, first because I'd left my iPhone, again, in a cab, distracted, and then for her not answering the phone.
The spider bite wound is still strange, and itching, the therapist, Dr. Heather, has cancelled, a relief, I've missed my beloved aunt's birthday on the day I worked a double and then some, and finally, here on Thursday, the first day off, CVS for bandages, etc., trip to the library, I fall into a groggy nap, all afternoon, after this getting up early.
Then I don't have any way, and I don't have any groceries, and I can't make the Bumble first date up in Rockville...
I dunno, so much unhappiness... why?
I wasn't meant for certain things, I suppose, we know that. I wasn't meant for, as D.H. Lawrence put in a short story, about a railroad guy, if I remember, "a woman of imperious mein," the Upper West Side, the over achiever... even if there really is no other place to be than New York City, and even Kerouac lived there, with a girlfriend, which is where he cobbled together all his early sketches of job life and Neal Cassidy and his years of toiling and toiling in jobs like parking cars and on the railroad and crazy projects like driving cars across the country for the benefit of their owners... into the long night of prose and the "help" of benzedrine... the manuscript, a great testament to America, or anywhere, of that which is called On the Road, poor old beautiful shy Jack Kerouac...
I am cooking a steak in this strange hour, over cooking it, and across the street is a beautiful open field, but that there's no one to share it with, except the moon, almost full tonight...
Did Kerouac wonder, this now must be my time... This is the time, and by means I find...
And he let loose with the words of his voice. Great running back that he was. Glue of a community...
There's no choice but to get into the wine, to have enough, to let loose, after the long sleep after the long toil of recompensing job detail...
I just... yeah... I never knew it would take so much lonely time, not just alone time, not just peace and quiet, but the real non engagement of other people... And I suppose this is what provokes the artist to become a.... I don't know, spiritual type, I guess... a monk, a pastor, a priest, a whatever... when no one will talk to you about anything...
Friday, May 10, 2019
The thing about professionals, is that it takes them longer to warm up. It takes a hell of a long time for them to warm up, to get into the mode, to feel it part of their blood stream. As an amateur contender, you have to be tough too, but in a different way; you have to work a job: and since you have a job, and a perfectionist, or a scientific truth seeker, or dead on tuned in poet. The job gives you limited hours and limited energy. I guess it might be the social life that goes, first.
So, I wrote earlier today, about five in the afternoon, it's 11:30 at night, the rice cooker has cooked its bowl, I got a bike ride in on the canal, and even up Chain Bridge Road, a climbing road, up beyond a cemetery to the left, then finally Battery K. Park, then up again further, the road like the Pyrenees, and finally I saw (thunder &) lightning in the distance while the planes came in, as if sliding down an invisible string from far far in the distance, only a headlight, let the mountain bike turn and back down slow enough so the brake, the one front one, workable still, having lost pressure, doesn't squeal, I'm back safe before the storm comes, and the old Bianchi is on the trainer...
But that is warm up.
The poem of the night:
It goes like this, somewhat. It is necessary to go through an awful, complete heartbreak. That's where you know your talents were burned and which ones. And so, the talents have to go deeper, down, more wild, more inspired... More musical, more poetic, more stream of consciousness, less rational, more mythic, more gut, less logic... more soulfulness, less control, more heartbreak, less happy, but for those ones you dig out of the dirt, or find, tortured, alone, self-conscious as the next creature in the stream.
An oppressed people can understand a lot, and even clap at gutsy songs.
So, I wrote earlier today, about five in the afternoon, it's 11:30 at night, the rice cooker has cooked its bowl, I got a bike ride in on the canal, and even up Chain Bridge Road, a climbing road, up beyond a cemetery to the left, then finally Battery K. Park, then up again further, the road like the Pyrenees, and finally I saw (thunder &) lightning in the distance while the planes came in, as if sliding down an invisible string from far far in the distance, only a headlight, let the mountain bike turn and back down slow enough so the brake, the one front one, workable still, having lost pressure, doesn't squeal, I'm back safe before the storm comes, and the old Bianchi is on the trainer...
But that is warm up.
The poem of the night:
It goes like this, somewhat. It is necessary to go through an awful, complete heartbreak. That's where you know your talents were burned and which ones. And so, the talents have to go deeper, down, more wild, more inspired... More musical, more poetic, more stream of consciousness, less rational, more mythic, more gut, less logic... more soulfulness, less control, more heartbreak, less happy, but for those ones you dig out of the dirt, or find, tortured, alone, self-conscious as the next creature in the stream.
An oppressed people can understand a lot, and even clap at gutsy songs.
I find that once I'm up, a kind of waking nap, after the tea and the coffee, is useful to collect my thoughts. It is hard to gather them when there is strife about. It was hard to write anything before going into work to tend bar and listen to people, because where there are people there are voices, and voices are strife. It was even hard to write on the first day off, as the strife had gotten down into your system, making me sad and weary, barely capable of walking down to the river and back, feeling very much alone.
If there is a movie shot I would like to do it would be an overhead, looking down on Jesus of Nazareth as he naps on the boat on the Lake of Galilee. He is curled up in the ropes, and I would have him on his left side, his head resting, in profile of course, on the palm of his left hand, his right hand tucked in around him, a sort of grown-up fetal position, the position of thoughts and dreams in repose. The ropes are around him, in a sort of nesting circle, strands of thought, tether of worldliness. The boat is floating there in the water, and Jesus is thinking soundly and privately, and later on will refuse to be agitated until his disciples insist he wake, lest the ship be lost to the waves of the sudden storm. (Or moonlight ripples, or music, or bawdiness.)
I am still feeling dull and tired, and thinking sad remembrances of young women who I should have befriended better back in the day, but for all the things one misreads in the strife-filled world unto which the peaceful and innocent have come, having to wake to the realities.
Patton's Third Army has been digging outside my apartment window, digging the foundation for the extension of the G.I. era apartment building steps east of my location. Beep beep beep, the Bobcat bucket loader, backs up over the whoosh of two great engines. Jesus Christ. And I am on the very western end of this great city, just shy of where the reservoirs begin. (A rain storm has come through, at last, at four thirty, but they keep on with the machinery.) And I don't want to do anything tonight in particular, and would even like to stay out of the wine. The thought of a bike ride along the towpath, out to where the river narrows, just beyond Chain Bridge, where the herons rook... The thought of reading Pema Chodron, to rid one's self of bad habits...
To remember a dream, it helps to remain in the same position. Shifting the body will shift away the whispy channel of dream memory, to be tactilely lost, surrendered to the thousand other things one might think about.
I too am trying to remember the Man of Peace and gentle kindness, the one who got stressed out by all the professional voices, people with real grown-up jobs that I wait on and chat with and listen to where I have no such professional a profession to count upon. The knowledgable people, jockeying themselves professionally, as they are obliged and bound to do in such a town, loosened up by a cocktail, a glass of wine, the relief of sparring, of raising a voice, while I watch on, silently, attending to the many multi-tasked duties of waiting on bar and table...
Sleeping lightly, in and out, with all the tractor digging noises, moving from the bedroom to the old leather couch, I roused myself to call mom back around three thirty in the afternoon. I took it easy last night, watched the first half of The Seven Samurai, the fates gathering them through twists and turns and tests, including the scene where the leader of the Seven has a monk shave his head. I make tea, a bag of green and a bag of Tulsi in a large glass coffee cup, and a small coffee with the Bialetti. (I had three glasses of Loire Cabernet Franc, twelve percent alcohol last night. I moved some furniture around.) I tend to the spider bite wound, healing slowly.
Then I take my nap of calming thought. And in the calm I am able to write this small amount.
It is what I deserve, to suffer the old regrets about college and young women. I drank. I drank too much. I drank alone. I lived alone, rather than with my best friends, Jon and Randy, Jeffrey... I deserve all this, and there must be some point to it. Granted, to be such a writer I am in the wrong line of work, but that too is what I deserve, I suppose.
The "man of sorrows," why am I always so sad...
If there is a movie shot I would like to do it would be an overhead, looking down on Jesus of Nazareth as he naps on the boat on the Lake of Galilee. He is curled up in the ropes, and I would have him on his left side, his head resting, in profile of course, on the palm of his left hand, his right hand tucked in around him, a sort of grown-up fetal position, the position of thoughts and dreams in repose. The ropes are around him, in a sort of nesting circle, strands of thought, tether of worldliness. The boat is floating there in the water, and Jesus is thinking soundly and privately, and later on will refuse to be agitated until his disciples insist he wake, lest the ship be lost to the waves of the sudden storm. (Or moonlight ripples, or music, or bawdiness.)
I am still feeling dull and tired, and thinking sad remembrances of young women who I should have befriended better back in the day, but for all the things one misreads in the strife-filled world unto which the peaceful and innocent have come, having to wake to the realities.
Patton's Third Army has been digging outside my apartment window, digging the foundation for the extension of the G.I. era apartment building steps east of my location. Beep beep beep, the Bobcat bucket loader, backs up over the whoosh of two great engines. Jesus Christ. And I am on the very western end of this great city, just shy of where the reservoirs begin. (A rain storm has come through, at last, at four thirty, but they keep on with the machinery.) And I don't want to do anything tonight in particular, and would even like to stay out of the wine. The thought of a bike ride along the towpath, out to where the river narrows, just beyond Chain Bridge, where the herons rook... The thought of reading Pema Chodron, to rid one's self of bad habits...
To remember a dream, it helps to remain in the same position. Shifting the body will shift away the whispy channel of dream memory, to be tactilely lost, surrendered to the thousand other things one might think about.
I too am trying to remember the Man of Peace and gentle kindness, the one who got stressed out by all the professional voices, people with real grown-up jobs that I wait on and chat with and listen to where I have no such professional a profession to count upon. The knowledgable people, jockeying themselves professionally, as they are obliged and bound to do in such a town, loosened up by a cocktail, a glass of wine, the relief of sparring, of raising a voice, while I watch on, silently, attending to the many multi-tasked duties of waiting on bar and table...
Sleeping lightly, in and out, with all the tractor digging noises, moving from the bedroom to the old leather couch, I roused myself to call mom back around three thirty in the afternoon. I took it easy last night, watched the first half of The Seven Samurai, the fates gathering them through twists and turns and tests, including the scene where the leader of the Seven has a monk shave his head. I make tea, a bag of green and a bag of Tulsi in a large glass coffee cup, and a small coffee with the Bialetti. (I had three glasses of Loire Cabernet Franc, twelve percent alcohol last night. I moved some furniture around.) I tend to the spider bite wound, healing slowly.
Then I take my nap of calming thought. And in the calm I am able to write this small amount.
It is what I deserve, to suffer the old regrets about college and young women. I drank. I drank too much. I drank alone. I lived alone, rather than with my best friends, Jon and Randy, Jeffrey... I deserve all this, and there must be some point to it. Granted, to be such a writer I am in the wrong line of work, but that too is what I deserve, I suppose.
The "man of sorrows," why am I always so sad...
Thursday, May 9, 2019
There is now a lot to worry about. I get back to the apartment on MacArthur after doing my four shifts. They are as long and intense as any of the shifts when you put my schedule together and compare that with the others. Tonight, I was lucky enough to have the energy to force my body over to the Wisconsin Avenue Safeway around 1 AM. Bruce, my friend at the late night check out aisle number seven informs me of the announcement I hear coming in up the escalator, the closing of the registers for twenty minutes to run the numbers. Yes, I have plenty of time, and I will take my time, that's what I feel like, and anyway, with the medicine I have diarrhea to take care of in the utilitarian restroom, before walking down the aisles to find cold cuts, things that will get me through my three days off here, now that the Palisades Safeway has gone belly up empty, closed, done. After having been open since 1944, something like that.
Sunday was not at all easy, my first day of the week. The elder chief of the busboys' son, first communion, and so I'm on my own, and it gets very busy, and lots of regulars, familiar faces to entertain.
Mary Bierworth, why did I not kiss you better when we played spin the bottle back in Clinton, four hundred years ago. You were eager, I was shy. The early self esteem problem with girls who just want to have fun, don't you get it, idiot... Her father was my fifth grade teacher, maybe that had something to do with it. If I remember, she was sort of dating a friend of mine.
Monday, slow, the singer of the trio, coming in to cover a no show musical group, and she's just about to call it off, we're all tired, when one of her friends comes in, and then, ten minutes later, a couple, to celebrate a birthday, so there's my night, add another two hours, thanks a lot, great.
Tuesday, the wine tasting. Slow, slow, slow... But this is what bars are for, such as they are, before they too become bygone, a lot culture, persecuted, replaced by something that looks like them but is not the same. The professionals talk on and on, academics, history, philosophy, music, jockeying to make their points and hold forth.
I'm eyeing how the paying of rent is coming along, here at this new place. It will be hard if I cannot afford it.
The strange wound from the spider bite is healing, but very slowly, so that's a thing, twice a day. Every day, twice, soap and water scrub in the shower, then hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol, tea tree oil, then Neosporin, to which I may be allergic to, add some sliver wound gel, and then a bandage over it, and maybe it is healing, after the two week run of antibiotics. One more thing about this apartment, on top of the early welcome of the repaving of the rough above my head up here on the third, top, floor, on top of the big excavation behind the adjacent old GI apartment building, beep beep beep, every time the Bobcat digger backs up, and the bigger bucket digger, yellow, tractor like. And each noise, I found out earlier today, had a perfect tonal syncopation, or rather dissonance, the airplane whooshing overhead, the tractor digging, the Bobcat, loading the dirt on to a truck, and me going quietly crazy. Yes, this is what it's all come to, my years of sadness and toiling in the restaurants because of my sins, my being a Jonah unwilling to repent and follow the instructions of the Lord...
One used to think, oh, I will be respected when I am more mature, older. But this does not feel to be true. It is the young, the ones with adaptability and the new intelligence, who garner the respect, the ones who fit in. The old ones, like me, at 54, rather than being respected, they're looking at you, looking at you with the thought that you will wear out soon enough.
You did not conquest the girl when you had the chance, and it is precisely this waiting around, as tender and as sweet as it may have been in its intentions, all that is just stupid crap like the things you sweep up at the end of the night off the barroom floor, the bread crumbs, the french fry, the wine bottle foil, the beer cap, the dirty linens. And then, like always and everywhere all throughout entire creation, you are left alone, alone, alone.
And only by, only through, the expression of this great loneliness that comes to the thoughtful and the sad, the wistful, the poet, only then, baring the heart, can, I suppose, you reach another human being or two...
My mom, always supportive, always the one who gets me, the kid who wanted to be a writer, not so much an academic, but a writer... Whereas she became an academic, quite successfully, and in her scholarly prose. But where has this all led us, led me, but to be, here, with a back up against a wall... and a tough physical job, one like the samurai of Kurosawa's Seven, who cannot win.
Most often, the best I can do to survive is to make certain I have food stuffs, supplies, cold cuts. I would wish to be a vegan. Ham and salami to chew on when it's late, that's how it goes. Keeps up with the wine, the wine of peace at the end of a week of toil, when you need to switch out to a completely different kind of work.
Most of what any writer is going to write includes a good amount of crap anyway, just sounding off...
Sunday was not at all easy, my first day of the week. The elder chief of the busboys' son, first communion, and so I'm on my own, and it gets very busy, and lots of regulars, familiar faces to entertain.
Mary Bierworth, why did I not kiss you better when we played spin the bottle back in Clinton, four hundred years ago. You were eager, I was shy. The early self esteem problem with girls who just want to have fun, don't you get it, idiot... Her father was my fifth grade teacher, maybe that had something to do with it. If I remember, she was sort of dating a friend of mine.
Monday, slow, the singer of the trio, coming in to cover a no show musical group, and she's just about to call it off, we're all tired, when one of her friends comes in, and then, ten minutes later, a couple, to celebrate a birthday, so there's my night, add another two hours, thanks a lot, great.
Tuesday, the wine tasting. Slow, slow, slow... But this is what bars are for, such as they are, before they too become bygone, a lot culture, persecuted, replaced by something that looks like them but is not the same. The professionals talk on and on, academics, history, philosophy, music, jockeying to make their points and hold forth.
I'm eyeing how the paying of rent is coming along, here at this new place. It will be hard if I cannot afford it.
The strange wound from the spider bite is healing, but very slowly, so that's a thing, twice a day. Every day, twice, soap and water scrub in the shower, then hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol, tea tree oil, then Neosporin, to which I may be allergic to, add some sliver wound gel, and then a bandage over it, and maybe it is healing, after the two week run of antibiotics. One more thing about this apartment, on top of the early welcome of the repaving of the rough above my head up here on the third, top, floor, on top of the big excavation behind the adjacent old GI apartment building, beep beep beep, every time the Bobcat digger backs up, and the bigger bucket digger, yellow, tractor like. And each noise, I found out earlier today, had a perfect tonal syncopation, or rather dissonance, the airplane whooshing overhead, the tractor digging, the Bobcat, loading the dirt on to a truck, and me going quietly crazy. Yes, this is what it's all come to, my years of sadness and toiling in the restaurants because of my sins, my being a Jonah unwilling to repent and follow the instructions of the Lord...
One used to think, oh, I will be respected when I am more mature, older. But this does not feel to be true. It is the young, the ones with adaptability and the new intelligence, who garner the respect, the ones who fit in. The old ones, like me, at 54, rather than being respected, they're looking at you, looking at you with the thought that you will wear out soon enough.
You did not conquest the girl when you had the chance, and it is precisely this waiting around, as tender and as sweet as it may have been in its intentions, all that is just stupid crap like the things you sweep up at the end of the night off the barroom floor, the bread crumbs, the french fry, the wine bottle foil, the beer cap, the dirty linens. And then, like always and everywhere all throughout entire creation, you are left alone, alone, alone.
And only by, only through, the expression of this great loneliness that comes to the thoughtful and the sad, the wistful, the poet, only then, baring the heart, can, I suppose, you reach another human being or two...
My mom, always supportive, always the one who gets me, the kid who wanted to be a writer, not so much an academic, but a writer... Whereas she became an academic, quite successfully, and in her scholarly prose. But where has this all led us, led me, but to be, here, with a back up against a wall... and a tough physical job, one like the samurai of Kurosawa's Seven, who cannot win.
Most often, the best I can do to survive is to make certain I have food stuffs, supplies, cold cuts. I would wish to be a vegan. Ham and salami to chew on when it's late, that's how it goes. Keeps up with the wine, the wine of peace at the end of a week of toil, when you need to switch out to a completely different kind of work.
Most of what any writer is going to write includes a good amount of crap anyway, just sounding off...
Friday, May 3, 2019
Down on the tow path west of the boat house, along the canal, where turtles float heads up, beaks above the water, their limbs balancing them still, where the bullfrogs are bassooning, near sunset, there is a paved road down to a cut through the rock slabs, out to a point in the river where it is narrow and where the fishermen come at this time of dusk. The paved path has a half inch of water standing on it many places, and out at the end of it, a platform overlook of poured cement, and when I come to the end of the path, there are herons. First, just a few. But then, many. They rise from the boulders and rock slabs just up the bend on this near side of the river, across from the steep bluff and the fine homes up top on the Virginia side, first a few of them, lifting up, and then as turkey vultures and large ravens wheel down, suddenly a whole flock of herons lifts up into the sky, some down river, some up river, some higher up into the sky. They hover as they rise, and then the birds become horizontal, their legs behind them, their necks tucking their head back against their winged shoulders, riding the stream of the great river, the chasm of rock.
On the platform there is a man leaning over the cement railing of the high platform above the rocks, and he too has a bike. He's in blue pants, and a blue shirt, in work shoes despite his bike being a decent one for a commuter or a bike messenger, an old blue ten speed, 14 actually, a decent saddle, hipster handlebars. He's looking out over the river and I do not disturb him. He is drinking a tall boy Heineken, silver, marked with green. His beard, close cropped, grey, his face dark, handsome, strong, his eyes clear, a man well proportioned, his bike leaning against the parapet, he surveys the great river.
I'd been trying to write earlier at the coffee shop up on MacArthur, but in a kind of gloom known on the first day off, I knew, even as it was getting hear sunset at 8 PM in early May, I needed a bike ride. Mom had come to visit, and my brother had even driven her back, but I was feeling sad. Sad and irresponsible, a loneliness, replays of the past, wishing I could grow up without having wasted so many years, and what is tending bar anyway but a huge waste of years kowtowing, cowed by the system.
"Lots of herons out," I said to the man, and he replied in kind, "oh, yes." Here, with the narrows, and the water, as he put it, turning brown and dark, the current at its strongest in this chute, the fish can come no further up the river, he explains. Not the shad, nor the stripers. He looks around. "Been coming here for years," he tells me. We look together upstream. "See, that's smog, way up there. It used not to come 'till June or July, but that's pollution. "See the brown in the trees," he says, looking back over the rocks that impede the river, from which small trees, sycamores, poplars, oaks, looking almost akin to mangroves in a way, but on land, growing only so tall as the shallow soil will allow on the rocky outcrop, "that's where they're dying." Indeed, there is die-back in their branches, many of them. "That's how we breath. If the earth can't breath anymore, how can we..."
I look around some more, and the herons are still about, perfect instruments of the air, and so are the larger black birds, and there, two more fishermen come to join the half dozen scattered about with their poles.
I talk bikes with the guy a little bit. He got this one for seventy five dollars. "Also got a single speed." The blue bike he has is an old road bike, and I can't make out the brand, maybe a Gios, but not. A rugged short beard, white grey over his dark skin, his features Caucasian as much as African, or African American, in his worn inside out package courier company emblem work shirt with holes along the neckline, he is someone who should be cast in a film production.
He takes a tug off his beer.
See, people catch fish and they leave them up on the rocks here. That's the smell here, he explains to me. Catch 'em, throw them back in the river, that's nature's way.
Best time to fish, right now, right now and early morning. The park rangers will catch you, if you don't have a permit, and they'll lock you up.
I wish I had some wine, you know, like the old Tour de France, I tell him, referring to the bottle holding capacity of the three back pockets of any cycling jersey.
"It's good to talk to you, sir. I was feeling a bit lonely."
"Why feel lonely? You got your own company. I never feel lonesome, I got my company and the Lord up above. I used to drink the hard stuff, get in trouble. But now I just drink the beer." He finishes the last sip, dribbles the can over the wall, then a minute later crushing the can quite flat with a single boot stomp.
A man comes with two medium sized black dogs friendly with poodle fur, and the man I've been talking to is pleased and asks the owner questions.
I rode up a bit further, past a few more locks, and a lock keepers house small and warmly lit and an older couple out reading on rocking chairs, sharing the evening. I rode back. Closer to nature, the inevitable as we grow older and closer to our ultimate destiny. The bugs are out now, and I'm glad I have my glasses on.
Huck and Jim. Somewhere along Huck's growing up.
On the platform there is a man leaning over the cement railing of the high platform above the rocks, and he too has a bike. He's in blue pants, and a blue shirt, in work shoes despite his bike being a decent one for a commuter or a bike messenger, an old blue ten speed, 14 actually, a decent saddle, hipster handlebars. He's looking out over the river and I do not disturb him. He is drinking a tall boy Heineken, silver, marked with green. His beard, close cropped, grey, his face dark, handsome, strong, his eyes clear, a man well proportioned, his bike leaning against the parapet, he surveys the great river.
I'd been trying to write earlier at the coffee shop up on MacArthur, but in a kind of gloom known on the first day off, I knew, even as it was getting hear sunset at 8 PM in early May, I needed a bike ride. Mom had come to visit, and my brother had even driven her back, but I was feeling sad. Sad and irresponsible, a loneliness, replays of the past, wishing I could grow up without having wasted so many years, and what is tending bar anyway but a huge waste of years kowtowing, cowed by the system.
"Lots of herons out," I said to the man, and he replied in kind, "oh, yes." Here, with the narrows, and the water, as he put it, turning brown and dark, the current at its strongest in this chute, the fish can come no further up the river, he explains. Not the shad, nor the stripers. He looks around. "Been coming here for years," he tells me. We look together upstream. "See, that's smog, way up there. It used not to come 'till June or July, but that's pollution. "See the brown in the trees," he says, looking back over the rocks that impede the river, from which small trees, sycamores, poplars, oaks, looking almost akin to mangroves in a way, but on land, growing only so tall as the shallow soil will allow on the rocky outcrop, "that's where they're dying." Indeed, there is die-back in their branches, many of them. "That's how we breath. If the earth can't breath anymore, how can we..."
I look around some more, and the herons are still about, perfect instruments of the air, and so are the larger black birds, and there, two more fishermen come to join the half dozen scattered about with their poles.
I talk bikes with the guy a little bit. He got this one for seventy five dollars. "Also got a single speed." The blue bike he has is an old road bike, and I can't make out the brand, maybe a Gios, but not. A rugged short beard, white grey over his dark skin, his features Caucasian as much as African, or African American, in his worn inside out package courier company emblem work shirt with holes along the neckline, he is someone who should be cast in a film production.
He takes a tug off his beer.
See, people catch fish and they leave them up on the rocks here. That's the smell here, he explains to me. Catch 'em, throw them back in the river, that's nature's way.
Best time to fish, right now, right now and early morning. The park rangers will catch you, if you don't have a permit, and they'll lock you up.
I wish I had some wine, you know, like the old Tour de France, I tell him, referring to the bottle holding capacity of the three back pockets of any cycling jersey.
"It's good to talk to you, sir. I was feeling a bit lonely."
"Why feel lonely? You got your own company. I never feel lonesome, I got my company and the Lord up above. I used to drink the hard stuff, get in trouble. But now I just drink the beer." He finishes the last sip, dribbles the can over the wall, then a minute later crushing the can quite flat with a single boot stomp.
A man comes with two medium sized black dogs friendly with poodle fur, and the man I've been talking to is pleased and asks the owner questions.
I rode up a bit further, past a few more locks, and a lock keepers house small and warmly lit and an older couple out reading on rocking chairs, sharing the evening. I rode back. Closer to nature, the inevitable as we grow older and closer to our ultimate destiny. The bugs are out now, and I'm glad I have my glasses on.
Huck and Jim. Somewhere along Huck's growing up.
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