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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


And so.  And so on.

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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


And sometimes that takes a lot of space.

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

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

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

I tell her about my thoughts at night.

No, you can't think that way.   You need your energy just to deal with the day before you...

But journal entries are just that, journaling.   I need a narrative structure, to not waste the time and energy...

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has it been busy tonight?

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No wonder, then...

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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



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


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

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

But I will not be able to get to her.  

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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


And certainly, it would be easy to dismiss.

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




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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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


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



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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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