But as an addendum, I found you had to be careful, aligned, as far as how, as an artist, a writer, someone trying to bring some art into life, fearful of your irresponsibility all the while, as far as how you referenced the image of things Christian.  You had to remember the lightness, the sense of humor of the man he was, as I saw it.  You had to acknowledge his physical service as a man with a job, as a man who was a neighbor, a real fellow, a friendly guy, most likely, as he does not seem to be a stuck-up sort of prick kind of a guy.  Not the kind of a guy to put his middle initial out front, as an initial, and then "Jesus" and whatever his last name was.  He wasn't H. Jesus Christ, CEO of a health and wellness getaway kind  of a company based around the Lake of Galilee...

You could easily be weighted down by it, even mentioning him.  You could be insulting, irreverent, irrelevant.  And you don't want to do that with Jesus.

But just remember him as he was, the man and his habits.  To walk across a darkened lake at night, well, most people wouldn't be doing that, least of all at that hour.  It wasn't like it was a bit past dawn and he had his golf clubs.  He wasn't an engineer, constructing an aqueduct.

His life style begs questions of creativity.

The bus went right past me at 10 past 11.  I was late, but maybe I could still catch my fellow bartender, J, and my lawyer, and confidante, advisor in guitar tech, A, but even as I waved and ran out into the street, the bus driver kept on going, and made the turn onto Q, having a green light.  So I went back to the apartment, after asking the young couple with the UHaul rented truck up there on the gravel if they needed any help, took my coat off, wondering what to eat, and then I ended up figuring out to take the next one, bearing down on me now, in ten minutes, after the last disaster, just before midnight.  I'd done my taxes, was feeling very poor again, damn, credit card debt, the water to be turned off in the building the next day, and for morale's sake, for something to do, I was intent on getting to the Safeway for a grocery run.  I'd be going by the restaurant, not that the rest of them wanted me, given the way I worked hard but had too many friendly people coming by to take care of, but figured it would be dark at that point anyway, though not if I was working.

So I walked up the hill in the cold, got in through the doors, went through my list, got to the checkout line about 12:40, and I asked the guy at the checkout, the older gentleman, who is indeed a perfect well-spoken gentleman of old school really classy well-educated through public education, beautiful diction, grace manners, would done well at Harvard, I asked him if he'd done his taxes yet, mentioning how I'd bowed to Turbo Tax, just out of exhaustion and laziness, even though I didn't want to go there given their business practices of hiding how to file for free...  And the man, as he scans my items, "you know, I just started today."

I've put the heavy stuff first, and brought my own bags.  Cans of black-eyed peas.  Large sized carton of the house's Organic Chicken Stock.  Olive oil.  A bag of little carrots, celery, an onion, Merguez sausages, chicken thighs, ground beef.  Dish soap without Sodium Laureth Sulfate.  "The country has been handed over to the rich," he says, noticing the greatly diminished amount of any federal refund.  I noticed the same.  "I have fallen into the abyss," the gentleman says, and his literary nature, and his great generosity holds in my mind.

"I did my taxes, but each time I went through Turbo Tax I got a different amount.  My computer broke, and I don't trust doing it over the phone.  I'll got to the library tomorrow...  My girlfriend got interested.  Exceedingly interested.  She said, don't do anything 'til I come over."  In the meantime there's a nice kid who's come up behind me in line, how pure faced they are, no idea where he's from, and he knows exactly what we old men are talking about.  "I have fallen into the abyss," the gentleman says, and his literary nature, and his great generosity holds in my mind.

It's usually Mr. Bruce, Sir Bruce, in check aisle late night 7, but this man, whose name I cannot tell you, darker, older, larger, about the same height as Bruce and I, is different from anyone else, in the sense that we all are.  He's more the color of Louis Armstrong.  He looks solid, like he played football.  A coach.  A responsible leader.  He moves easily, and well, sharp.  He's the front of the house, here, the ambassador.  Once, I think the last time I was coming through, the man was easing along a difficult to deal with homeless woman type, almost apologetic, where he did not need to be.

By the time I leave the Safeway, I am thirsty again.  I could use a glass of wine.  I could go up the street, for a glass of wine at Breadsoda, then get a burger, or I could just save my miserable quarters and take the bus home with my two bags of groceries on a cold night.  I chose to walk down the hill, Manny and Olga's on the way, for, yes, a gyro, then catch the D6, finally, after shouting wearily at the night, west there back to the old Palisades.

So, I feel some relief once I get back.  It could have been worse.  I'm still bored, tired, lonesome, lost, all those things, but at least I'm ready for the water shut off.  And groceries.  The gyro is what the doctor ordered.  I wolf it down, bread wrap, white onion slices, tzatziki and all, delicious.

Jesus is sitting on the toilet, thinking about what he has to do to get ready to go to work.  He is sore.  It's toward the end of the week.  One more night.  He takes a hot shower.  The heat enters his muscles, making him feel better.  Jazz night.  Should be doable.


At the end I get invited out, down to Martin's Tavern with my friend.  Sure, it's the end of the week.  "I need to get out, why not..."  I have a bowl of Brunswick Stew.  We talk to Alejandro, how his mom has a cucina in a small city outside of Mexico City.  He's been at Martin's since he could barely speak English.  My buddy pays for the whole tab.  I stop at the ATM to deposit a check.  I get a beef shawarma at the late night Munchees, eat half of it overlooking the canal, walk a bit, talk with a guy outside of Clyde's whose ex-girlfriend just put down his dog, a chihuahua, and I share some of my wine with him, cross M Street, hail a cab home, pass out on the couch and wake with regrets, tired, more than expected, more than I should be.



Maybe he was just tired, from the steady burdens of physical work.   He doesn't go into a weighty explanation, at Nazareth, after he sets the scroll of the Torah down.  Just a quiet, now you have heard the prophecy fulfilled.    He says it out loud.  Half to himself.  As if uttering his own "E = MC squared."  It sounds like the townspeople, within earshot, first have to register what they've just heard, if they heard it well enough, what the young man quietly said.  And then, perhaps if he weren't so tired, he would not have gone on long enough to get him into trouble, but also tired of keeping his good mouth shut.



Then you feel isolated.  A day off.  Too tired to join in with anything.  Your concern seems to be food.  What's in the fridge...


So I got off the couch finally, took a hot shower, and bored out of my mind, not wanting to write anything, I went for a walk down to the bluff in the cold sunlight.  Robins hopped along the field.  The river tingled with a breeze, and I walked with the stick that had been cut cleanly, finding it in the grass.


Maybe he too was bored.  How many talents he had, but letting them be, while the main thing grew inside of him.  He's often out looking for something out in nature, observing how water cannot be stopped, walking carefully over the dried grasses laid flat by the cold over a marsh below a hill.   Finding a stick, cut from a young tree, finding it suitable in his hand, as if to shepherd.  Walking slowly, by himself, absent-mindedly, in a state of observation of how the natural world acts, the trees, the blue sky, the way the robins have come now to the field, proud in some way, taking a little run forward.

They are out in the boat, crossing the lake, and here he comes, walking on water, as if it were no big deal.

Is he even cut out to be a good leader?  He has charisma, certainly, but was never shouting at people telling them what to do.  His intelligence has its own unique form.  The Disciples even have to tell him what to do, as when the people who've been listening to him must be fed before they are sent back home.  Oh, yes, I suppose that's a good idea.  What do we have on hand?

He likes his wine.  As God does.  Give it to the poor.

And people, each and every one of them, except  maybe children sometimes, are extreme pains in the asses.  Always after money and supposedly desirable things like comfort and riches and ways to defeat boredom...  All of them having specific request lists...  No wonder God summoned up wine to calm them down a bit, so that they might interact with each other in an easy enough fashion.  Why not...  Each one of them little military generals, dictator kings and queens in disguise...

Jesus cannot even listen to the news.  He cannot even do all the work, which is like listening to the news, that is required to get a guy, so to speak, laid.   The news is irrelevant, given the whole which is nature, which is the world, which extends from that which is below our feet on out the most impossible furthest reaches...


He grows tired of this sort of exile.  A life solely led writing, as good as it is for catching in the wisdom of The Father, and all the lessons of nature, out there, readily had, there's something at least half unsatisfactory to it.  He knows so much.  He wants to test it.  Knowing the water now, will it hold him when he walks out upon it, collects his friendship with the fishermen, not even needing to teach, but just by being.  He wishes to share.

At the end of Monday night, not so busy, but the soreness has returned, as I make it out the door to catch the D6 bus down by the Duke Ellington School I am shuffling.  It was slow, but there is the mutual gratitude at the end of the night  when the musicians sit down to eat, after their set.  The late appearance of the Australian bass player, who has grown a beard, has dropped in to visit with Nathalie, the French clarinetist, who is playing the night's music with a young couple from Salt Lake.  (He plays an Italian jazz guitar quite well, and she is quite a bass player, finishing up her higher degree in performance. ) The man from Australia has played bass with Nathalie before, in her gypsy gadjo swing band, and he sits quietly in the corner.  I recognize him.  With his beard, he looks like he's been months at sea.  He comes and sits at the bar with me, after the other two have left.  We've conversed before about bass guitars, and music styles.  I have to encourage him to go say hi to his old bandmate, who, initially, does not seem to recognize him.

I get through the final clean up, and at the very end, well, careful about my wine intake now, I pour myself just a little Beaujolais, and a little more, about a glass in total, and off I go.

I get to the bus stop at Eliot Place and MacArthur.  I limp up the steps and in through the stairs up to the apartment and slump on the couch.  This is quite typical.  You come in over the finish line, the whole thing, and you need to collapse.  Hopefully you don't fall asleep, and then have to wake up later.  I'm going to pour an epsom salt bath, the thought is, and so I do.   And I'm still in pain and stiffness, as the water rises in the tub, so I open an inexpensive Chianti, 12.5 % alcohol, and pour some of it into a tumbler with ice to place by the tub, before stripping off my clothes.


And today, Tuesday, with the workmen playing their music loud, I am tired, and must get up and go in for Wine Tasting night.  I'm making the effort to stay hydrated, but the tea is the primary focus, just to wake up.  The radio outside the window, a man singing with an old style mini-orchestra, with the horn coloration of Latin America on top of the old band's 1920s Middle Europe sound, and the singer draws his notes out grandly, operatically, as if singing over great mountains, pulling himself open like  a great accordion to find all the wind he can for his bellows, as I try to sleep, dream a bit, wake up again, as saws buzz through small boards, and wooded pieces clack together  and a nail gun thumps in repetitions on a grey overcast day, and earlier it rained.

The stew I made, the night before, of grass-fed pre-cut stew meat from the Safeway, which acted suspiciously as I browned it, has turned out decently, at least in flavor, and in texture, but for some slight strange scum on top.   And it's a good pot of green tea, and a cup with the Ashwagandha powder stirred in has a pleasing effect.  The tree pollen has come, and my eyes itch from within.


Okay, so I gather myself and the Nalgene liter water bottle, sliced deli turkey wrapped in paper, and throwing my coats on, I get out the door quickly and down to the street to catch the 3:41 bus in-bound.  Full of students, and then by the hospital.  I get off at Wisconsin, by the gas station, and start walking up the hill.

I'm shy about haircuts.  It's been since Halloween, actually, four whole months almost, since the last. I check my watch, Four PM, sure, I got time, and there's this shop that's been there as long as I can remember, sitting across the street from the old Georgetown Cafe, sometimes called the PLO cafe, staying open all night.  There was a young man from Jordan I knew from up the avenue at the old restaurant block, and he always swore by this particular shop, Nello's, so, I decide, since the shop is empty, no one in the barber's chairs, I got time.

Sure, sure, sit down, says the man by himself, who is dressed casually.  This must be the guy.  He speaks at a hoarse whisper.  I put my coat down, and sit down in the chair before the man, as he gestures.  Tuesday Night's wine tasting makes me nervous.  Being tired, and having a strange sleep schedule, all makes me nervous.

The man is moving his shop up the street, it turns out, after being there thirty years.  I have come, it turns out, on his last day in business there.  There is a marijuana shop down in the basement, and the situations which have arisen have been hard on his business.  Of course, I say, of course.  Bad enough that crime is on the rise, that the news will not report this, the rise in muggings around the universities at this end of town.  Bad enough that the DC government, nor the DC Police Department are not responsive.

The reeking contents of the jars of weed, the pot smoke, rising...  this has driven away his business.  He has a wire bound notebook pad with names and numbers of his clientele written down, each to a line.  There are many elements to the downstairs business which are noteworthy in a bad way.  The thuggish proprietor, an obese Indian male.  One of the females in his employment, with her tattoos, is familiar with MS-13.  The two other girls say hi, but that one won't.

Then there is the landlord, and the building permit.  And the Police raid on the basement shop, and on the Used Book Store just up the street, which also was busted after turning into a weed dealing operation.  There is the story of the man being threatened by the weed shop's proprietor, and when the man reports it, the Police come and say, next time, we'll take you both in and arrest you.  This is what Georgetown has turned into.  No wonder respectable businesses shutter.  Weed shops.

The Police have raided the shop.  They collected evidence.  But, a week later, the shop is open again.  The weed shop does not bring in the best clientele to his hallway here, open to inner windows and open doorless thresholds.

Live in DC?  Good luck, the man is telling me, as he snips at my shambled hair's ends, slowly transforming my appearance, in a good way of course.  I'm a good listener.  I glance at my watch from time to time, as fifteen minutes turns into twenty minutes, then thirty.  I have to pee.  I have to be at work.  There's an eleven top coming up in the back wine room.  I have no idea what the night will bring.  Snip, snip.  He's a thoughtful barber.  He asks me who my friends were who used to go see him.  Zak, of course, Zak, he used to bring me pizza every time.  Lovely guy.  I used to warn him.  Be careful, be careful with the American women, and once you have children, then it is all about her family...  You're from Syria, things are different.  The barber and I reminisce.  While the troubles here continue.

It's not any better out in Maryland where he lives, with his wife.  Darnestown.  But this is near Gaithersburg, MS-13 out in plain sight.  Montgomery County now has to bear the cost of opening new schools for the gang bangers, teaching the children of thankless remorseless violent thugs.  "I am a democrat, but there comes a point..."


By the time I get up to work, walking hurriedly up the hill over the brick sidewalk, seeing the city where I live in a new sinister light, knocking on the door, my right eyelid is about to start twitching.  But, as I see, the bar is in decent prep, not so far from being ready to go, after some work and some adjustments, another shipment of ice arriving finally from the busboy just as the family meal of tilapia and rice is offered up.  The wine for the tasting, a chardonnay from Auxerre, just west of Chablis, with an interesting apple note, clean mineral substance, some vague note as a mushroom stem is a vague note, I have enough of, just need to put it on ice.

Again, warily, I walk the few quiet backstreet blocks from behind the restaurant over to the school, and then down to Reservoir Road where the bus is due in ten minutes, and the bus comes, purrs its slow, gasps to stop, the door opens, I'm on the bus, and then, sagging into a seat and pulled by the bus's forces, we are at my stop again, and I grip as he slows, braking quickly after a bit of gas pedal, and again, I walk up the stairs, open the door, collapse on the couch.


But after you're awake again, after you took the trash out, put it in the green bin, and took with you the little note, translated into Spanish, please don't play the music too loud, if possible, taping it to the door of the new apartment that has risen there, then it's hard not to want to open a bottle of wine, and then to have a glass, while the water pitchers filter the run tap water.  It's hard not to want to swell to your own thing, not to the very polite, very patient, long-serving, sometimes humorous task of waiting upon people, as much as that might have its own enjoyable elements to it, but to finally wish to do your own thing, to not be tired, and weighted down, to not have to be a nervous wreck below the surface, wondering where the next meal is coming from, even though you work in a restaurant.  You drink a glass of the red, and you're not messed with.  It's silent.  The floors creek under your feet, and you try to be careful of that, for the sake of the German woman downstairs who you met in a dream, facing her dislike of you, apologizing for the noise, and then the dream turning sexual quickly, so that you have to ask her to ease off so you don't come so dangerously to the edge, as you taste the embraces of her body, and then, unfortunately, waking up, sore still, having to go to work, worried about the phone call to check in on a lonely old mother just as crazy as you are.

It's George Harrison's birthday, he would be seventy seven, you find out on Facebook.  Hunter Thompson died today fifteen years ago.  It's Mardi Gras, headed inevitably into Lent.

You try your best, you know.  You put effort in.  You work as hard as you can, at least it seems that way to you, the main participant.  You lead a quiet life.  You fear it is misspent, sure, of course.  Of course there would be better uses for a man of your talent and all the education and gentle things invested in you.  But, there you are.  Four guitars.  Some books.  A kitchen you like.  Just enough money made to keep it all afloat.  You're awake sometimes.  You're trying to sleep sometimes.  Sometimes you make it, sometimes you don't.

The wine rolls down.  It too will have a cost, but now, it sure tastes good and feels good.


After work, yes, after work...  This is why people like dive bars with neon signs out front, so that no one can see them.

After work, after work, the true callings come.  The true meetings.  The almost sexual love, for being so quietly ecstatic, of Jesus and the fishermen, and Peter, in that burst of the new calling of the new church of the new way of being, a way of being promising economic change, of seeing an entirely new way to understand reality, not that it could ever be implemented in any practical fashion, this new way...

After work, a remembrance of the pure characters as you understood them in children's books, and even in Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit.  The good people were weather beaten and pure.  They probably had not, in today's parlance, "hooked up a lot."  They were other worldly enough to be rather completely economic oddballs.  Subscribers to a true economy, based on the identities they really belonged to, elves, dwarves, men, tree spirit beings.  Strider.  A grey man of a certain age, who knew the weariness of the road, but who knew it as the right moral place to be.  I forget the other names of all the pure human beings in such works as were given birth in a particular time when the world was burning.  The solid single focus of a man come out of bardic lore, true to the rocks and stones, and made able by the fibers of his being to stand there quietly at the ancient pub, and knowing the news of this ancient pub, knowing that this sorcerer claimant to power and rule somehow was either good or bad or a mix of good and bad.  And that such a man was at the pub, a man of such nobility to the very core that he was of a special thing, a special class of God's image being people, beyond worldly chatter and claim.   The pub was the place, where suddenly it would have dawned on him, what the world was now, what he would have to do to be a good and decent man and a strong warrior type, every vigilant, knowing too well that he was fodder for a storybook,  but that of being a very important one, and that he was brought upon here, this place, because he had always been a decent person, as many men fall, and try to stand on their feet after the fall, wobble, not knowing, never knowing really, if they themselves are good or bad.

All the Humphrey Bogarts and all the Gary Coopers...

All the Jimi Hendrix songs, about love and life, and dreams...


In the old days, it wasn't at all bad if you were quiet, if you were removed, or a mystery, reserved, as if you were knowing of some waiting time before some great unknown bad thing was about to come out and spread  over the face of much of humanity, untold numbers of persons sensitive and caring and concerned just like you and I.  You were waiting to be called.  Until then, you waited.

Now there are too many people for all of this.  Now they have to spend so much time and focus, just to get back to the little nest in the hive...  There are no pubs left, just malls now, with their take on a restaurant, an experience...  Say what you will of cities...


Robert Kennedy... was he the last of the old species, who quietly waited, reluctant, conflicted by many thoughts as to what the truly bad stuff was, as to where to even begin...  That was 1968.

The other night, my mom called me at work.  It twas Sunday night, and I had a few spread out through the wine bar.  "Is there something going on about John F. Kennedy," she asks me.  And I say, yes, yes, there is.  There is a great existential threat going on to our democracy, to that good old system....  "And did they catch the guy, Lee Harvey Oswald, or was it... what happened?"  I'm at work.  I'm fairly busy.  I'm back near the cutting board.  Above the old place of Bruno's old upstairs oven...  "Well..  it's never been proven one way or another...  The whole thing is so strange....  Can you believe that one guy, one alienated sort of schmuck was allowed to bring in a rifle to work, and just some lucky shot...  One lone nut...  With a lucky window, and he just wanted to make himself important...  or was it, you know, mom, he'd been down to Mexico City, Oswald, and he'd met up with Russians and Cubans, and obviously, the long game of the Russians is just to bring down our system, the heart of a government, the beliefs we might haver for a good and decent democracy...  There's supposed to be a woman from the Cuban embassy who was a girlfriend of Oswald, but there's no way of making her talk, and she hides, and she's very old now and won't talk about it...   I don't believe quite that the CIA had Kennedy killed, but...  "

And unfortunately, she, in her old Lear mind is perfectly on to something.  "Yes, mom, it's not the assassination of JFK now, but the threat to our democracy...

But what happened to Oswald, mom asks.   Well, you remember, you watched as he was in Police custody, down in Dallas, and they were taking him from one place to another, and Jack Ruby shot him, you remember...  So he could never talk.  And, well, Ruby never talked either.  I mean, the whole thing, the whole thing, just everything strange about it...

Sunday night.  Dinner service might appear easy, not much on the book, but a table of four decides to sit upstairs with you, back in the wine room.  They order cocktails.  A White Russian, requiring cream, the busser from last night did not stock any.  Dessert for the regulars over in the corner.  Just then, local regulars at the bar, a couple from Southern India, both with several higher degrees, royal enough to be given little tastings to match their evening's palates.  Then, right on top of that, as three cocktails sit out on the little bar mat, ready to be shaken, a man comes up from downstairs, soon joined by his date, their first.  A bottle of Malbec, drop off drinks, get the royal couple full glasses in decent wine glasses, cheese plate ordered...  take order for back table...

The night goes on, and just about 8:45, the young woman who was by on the eve of President's Day, who likes to drink with an Irish calling for it, comes and sits at the bar with a girlfriend of hers, to hash over the date she had to escape from from up the street...

Elizabeth is near by, so she drops in, and the date couple is drinking port after their dinner, and the night is going to drag on for the barman sore from a crazed Saturday night...



Somewhere in the mind, the optimistic voice of Father Barron comes out of the recesses of the mind from Word On Fire scenic Catholicism series of DVDs you have around the apartment...  "Jesus gets in your boat."

The same anxious waking at 4:45 AM, in bed as from the night before.  Just recently, taking to heart the advice from the neighborhood healer, Bronwyn, about the importance of hydration, at least 80 oz. of water every day.

You wonder, it comes out of the last people at the bar, the girl who is now kind of drunk all of a sudden, oh Jesus... and the old friend who wants company, and I need to hear her out about all the goings on with her job at the school where as an assistant principal she is being treated horribly by the principal...

The people, in other words, who make it so that I am worn out to the point of an apparent need for the glass of wine I don't really want.   Being left out on the Cross, as it were.

"Jesus...  getting into your boat..."    You've gone beyond the requirements of service at the bar.  Maybe you have a few checks left to drop off, credit cards to swipe.  Of course, you still have the report to do, and the final clean up and putting away of the wines in an orderly fashion, the juices in the cooler, but now, there is that time with at least one other person at the bar, a person to listen to.  And you're tired, so you sit down at take a small bite from the salmon tartar.  Running low on gas.  Sore again.  You pour yourself a little pinot noir from the Pays D'Oc to go with the flaked salmon flesh.

It's an extra.  You don't need to be doing it.  You could turn up the lights, shoo people away, turn cold on old regulars, pull out your smartphone and ignore them.  But you don't.  It's not just the job, it's not just the money.  It's something else.


So.  Then.  So, then you get up, up out of bed.  You don't know the day's purpose, beyond just trying to take care of yourself in a healthy way.  Yes, you'll go to work, straining at it, needing the hot shower and the little plans to keep things running.    You hope to make the Safeway at the end of the shift, but it is Jazz Night and you never know what will happen.

You have to leave the purposes up to something higher, the new life afforded by the practice of the Christian form...  along with the wisdom of Buddha to keep you in a state of discernment...


Even at the cost of self-disbelief, even at the cost of ridicule, at the cost of things suffered in the face of faith, it's better to have some energy and hope when getting up, even when nothing at all is clear, even in the cold of winter.  To find some self-confidence to birth some dignity to carry forward with the day, allowing, if it might, some purpose, higher, to come to you.  Clear-headed.

But by the time you got back to the thinking part, after the bar, after the work and sore things, it didn't make much sense, what you had been working on.  It all seemed juvenile.  Half-assed.  There were bills to pay.  "What a job..." you said to yourself.  "What a mistake ever to be a bartender."


I knew I had to be back for Saturday.  It was still cold out.  I didn't have much energy, though I managed to take a little walk over the bluff overlooking the still quiet Potomac, a parkway below me, and one in the distance on the far side, coming back to the little market run by the Korean woman with her sister who prepared the food orders, and the sister's husband who also manned the register and the lottery ticket counter.   I had some wine, made some dinner one night, ordered Chinese the next night, Saturday night, and found myself out of wine again, and I needed some more, so it seemed, so I went out, brought my keys on a secret mission, and returned in a cab with a fresh bottle, knowing it would make me feel like bloated and ill the next day, but in the meantime I was quite stressed out and needed something to calm me down, besides browsing erotic Pompeian images in a mix of boredom and lack of energy, sapped as I was, by the workweek, trying to find any energies I might have, or even if I still had any energies of any sort.



It was a stressful time.  Had been so for a long time.  And no wonder, what with the zoo jazz nights and weekend nights, and any night really, up at the wine bar of the old Dying Gaul had an easy potential to turn into in an instant, if it wasn't just a slow long night of long irritations that went on and on, another face to deal with.  Stress.

It had become a year since the big upset of the move from Decatur Place, a week short of it and my kindly Catholic friend Elizabeth the assistant principal and wearer of many hats as a mom and a care-taker of the elderly, who had arranged to stash the bulk of the library such as I could save over at a friends needed the books to be returned.  To add to my trauma, as it were.  The bulk of the library of spirituality had made it to the new apartment and its storage area down in the basement, but...

What had added to all that and the stress I was feeling over my old mom's situation up there an eight hour drive into winter and grey cold, was the lab report from my physical on Halloween, a GGT liver enzyme number of 90, something rather scary to me, given that red wine was really the only thing keeping me relaxed enough to keep up my little efforts of writing, along wth the bachelor housekeeping and quiet hermit life I was now pretty much stuck with.   If mom said things over the phone about being "wicked awful lonely," or 'said "but I'm not home," or wishfully misunderstood geography to ask me to come pick her up in the morning to take her home, or any of the other things she might say that hit like the turn of a knife inside you, I was feeling the same way, just perhaps a bit too overwhelmed to admit it.  Or just tired out, feeling a need for sleep, and sleep was not aided by my bedroom being beside a construction site as well as underneath the flight path of the great airplanes of airliners coming up still rising out of old Reagan National Airport, coming west along the river right in the direction of the old G.I. three story four rent controlled apartments where I had landed, by the grace of God.

In the old days, living on the quiet street, I could have stayed calm by going out on bicycle rides, sometimes long ones, sometimes closer by up and down some hills of expensive real estate.  I would have managed to avoid the stress of the conversations with my kindly landlord with his concerns for me.  I would spend time with my little kitty cat, Miss Kitty, the small spitfire tortoiseshell calico, or would do yoga in the spacious living room of the old apartment, spent time assembling a decent dinner.

But as a I took the bus in, feeling like Jonah, there on the old rattling rumbling D6 bus past the hospital and Georgetown University, I saw a kid, high school probably, running at a jog in the afternoon golden cold sunlight, with red and healthy cheeks the way I use to, the complexion of a young Prince Harry.

Earlier, just getting up, my sinuses congested, I had the urge to vomit, and that too was perhaps a symptom of the sore liver thing.  But I dutifully made my green tea, cooked some eggs straight up in the old Teflon coated fry pan as old as me, so that the yokes ran over the roast beef from the Korean market, already getting old.  No energy to make the next stew, just, yes, Saturday afternoon is your Monday morning.

And at the end of a very sorry night, as I'm writing up the list of wines for the new coworker to bring up from the cave, a familiar couple wandered in, out celebrating the anniversary of their meeting, and she is the proprietor of the small spa on the upper level across the street above the baguette place, who does acupuncture, and spa things like healing massages.  And as we talk and I reveal a little bit of it all, she says, "oh, you're dehydrated;  you need to drink eighty ounces of water every day...."


The couple who is sat at the first two seats of the bar, right as the night explodes with drink orders in all directions and my co-worker leaving me to deal with the nine-top out front...  "You're the hardest working guy in this town..." she says as they pay the check.

After the visit of the helper, and the call around 12:30 in the afternoon, her phone is off the hook, a busy signal.  Her smartphone goes straight to the answering machine without a ring.  I call her through the night, but get the same busy signal.

I eat the food I've cooked, I turn to rest on the couch, fall into a nap, later awake as light comes up between the blinds.

My smartphone rings, around ten AM.  I'm half awake, I see who's calling, yes, I answer, how are you...  "Okay.  It's cold out."  We have a little chat.  "No, I didn't work last night, no, Mary was there to visit you yesterday..."  "Well, I've tortured you enough."  "I'll call you later," I say.

I fall back into sleep, wearing eye shades.  And then the phone, on my bed, rings again.  It's about one.

Mom is very anxious and upset.  "I've got a big problem," she says.  "The cats aren't eating."  Oh.  "They're going to starve!"  All of a sudden, she is shouting.  "I don't have anymore cans!  What am I going to feed them?

Wait, what...  Mom, you only have one cat, and he's fine eating kibble.  That's what they were feeding him, he was happy with that.

"I'm always wrong, I'm always wrong, I'm going to kill myself."

Jesus, I knew it.  I knew.  She had been placid, calm, content, appreciative and happy with the book I sent her, a day early, before Valentine's Day, Shelby Foote's ode to Gettysburg.

I ask her if she has any wine.  I don't know! she shouts.  Uh, maybe look in your fridge, along the door...  Maybe there's some in the rack.  "I"m not the village idiot,"  I hear her sobbing in the distance.  She comes back to the phone.  "I'm going to kill myself."   She hangs up.

I go into the kitchen to look for some tea...

She is calling again.  I pick up.  She is sobbing again.  More of "I'm going to kill myself."

If I tell her to look in a particular place in her kitchen, the cupboard near the stove, where there might be a few cans stashed away.  More of the same...   "I don't know where I even am anymore," she sobs.

Mom, do you have any wine?  Maybe in the fridge, in the door, or in the rack, by the phone...  I know where the rack is!  There's a bottle of Beaujolais...  Have it on the rocks with a splash of Pepsi, like the Spanish do...



Later on, she calls again.  It's evening by now.  I've arranged a grocery delivery.  She was calm.  Around five.  Now it's another problem, how am I going to get home, is Mary coming over tomorrow.  Mom, it's midnight, don't call Mary now...

 I rest for awhile.  On the couch.  I get up and go to bed, hopeful of solid rest, sleep.  The workweek starts soon.  Then she is calling again.  People are stealing my clothes, she says.  Can you come by tomorrow and get me.  Yeah, sure, I'll come by tomorrow, I say.

It takes a long time, but I finally get to bed, just as light is coming, deep blue in the sky beyond the next apartment building and the elm tree on the avenue when I'm able to fall asleep.  The phone ringer on silent.


I get up, finally, Sunday after noon, my Monday morning...   The green tea, second steeping, left out over night in the old clay teapot is not very good.  I prepare some fresh tea, take care of a few dishes.  When I have a cup of fresh tea, chilled with an ice cube, I call her.  How are you, Mom.  "I'm not doing so well."  She sounds better than yesterday, at least.  "Yeah, I'm not doing so well myself," I mumble.

She hears the discouragement in my tone.   She still can't find any wine, only a little Beaujolais, lollipop juice, she calls it.

"Well, I gotta go to work."  It's about three in the afternoon.  I take my shower, shave, drink my tea, feed myself chicken curry, re-heated in the toaster over, fold a shirt, gather my things, get a few minutes of sunshine before the bus comes.

The bar is a bit of a mess, to be expected after  Valentine's Day, but still the disorganization is a disappointment.  I put things together, but right as the door opens, people are coming upstairs.   In syncopated rhythm.  Do they want a drink here, and then go downstairs?  Happy Hour 'til seven.  I say.  Terrible service up here, I mumble.  I've just got a text from my aunt about mom calling, with the usual jumble of things.  The bar closing itself takes a while.  I'm beat.  I need to eat.  A friend, Ashley, military employee, had come by the bar, watching my show of running around like a chicken.  The clock goes by.  We go down the street for cheese steaks.


I wake up the next morning with anxiety, awake, but not feeling like getting up out of bed.  I rest more, fall into sleep with dreams...  Wake again, still anxious.  The price for running my salon...  the good conversation about church going of various sorts is a heavy weariness.  Make my tea.  Call mom, she's probably out with her helper.  It's President's Day.  Back to work again.  Reheated Merguez sausages, tea, some water with lemon, the day starts to come back into focus.  Doable.  Worries over the American Express bill recede, and it's back to getting ready, and then off to work itself.

The Christian stuff never seemed to get in the way, creatively.  I'd been a decent student of Buddhism for as long as I can remember, and it always made sense to me.  But there was something personal I got from Jesus, in addition, somehow beyond what I could get out of the young prince who became the Awakened One.  I could get Buddha too, on a personal level, but the Jesus stories, the offer of parallels that would come upon me from time to time, is something that I identify with.  Just something I always got, from facets of my own life, ever since I went out into attempts of adulthood.  Jesus and his life reverberated in me, it seemed.  Friendly.  They were there when I was ready for them, mature enough, I suppose, like the whole string of the stories leading up from the Old to the New Testament.



What comes to mind in a given day?  Jesus has the persistence.  He rises above, and he teaches.  He gathers.  He goes on the road, to preach.  He speaks his parables.  I myself, barely could get over all the adolescent stuff that interferes with uttering anything so worthy.  Quiet actions, obscure, private efforts... nothing much upon the stage, but rife with possibility, for exploration.



And on another day, passing through the thoughts of the latter part of the Christian story, there's a deep intuitive sense:  if someone was nice to you, there was always that sense within, yes, soon enough, before you know it, it will go the other way.

And indeed, even being wary of all that, it would always happen, or so it would seem some days, the great rejection after a bit of approval, hell to pay for the good moment of peace.


All you could do, like my father before me, was simply ride it out, go take a nap, just to have some peace, to buy some time that the woman or whatever fact of life, the good that had gone bad, that the storm would eventually blow itself out.

And in the times after the storm, after being spied upon, when having your words, attempts at being helpful, turned, wrongly, against you, taken as offending, when all that would finally go away, you never forgot the storm.  The storm would come and go, would happen again, on and on.  No sense in getting attached to the notion of any lasting peace.

A good moment, with a desired person, or a necessary safeguard, a decent job, academic success, some promise of events to be pleasurable, or helpful, no, they always went the other way for me, after the initial promise of extended happiness.  Soon or later.  The way things end up.  This is the truth.

And so, I learned to never expect much, of any lasting good.  Nor do I, did I, expect any "forgiveness," any relenting.  Because such things do not happen.



"Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me..."  We all get that line.


Too much is written about the psychological.

Rest in the Christian archetype.


Like any writer, Jesus had to do the bulk of his work, his figuring, alone.  Perhaps that rarity, of the obscure workmanlike private figure made public, contributes to the popularity of his image in paintings.  To capture this rare bird, whose true work, at his Father's business, is itself a magnificent act, requiring a likened soul.   He was in touch with himself, with humanity, human nature.

“Contempt is a hard thing to bear.”



“But being struck and mocked by soldiers and taunted by strangers...  must have been difficult to bear...”

Father James Martin, Jesus, A Pilgrimage, as we reach the end of Jesus' life.


To my sense, the whole thing, the story of Jesus the Lord Christ, is ingrained so deeply within the human story, our own stories, it is the great archetype coming down to meet us where we live, to flesh out our own experiences with a tale that gives our lives shape and meaning.   We are never far from any of it, the Christian life.  We are never far away from the insights that nourish our mind, feed our creativity, our art, our will to live.

And we are, as well, never far from the rejections of the society people are wedded to as they survive.

We remember the torments, we bear them in our DNA, the sufferings, those of the Master himself, along with all the good things, the potential of people to listen and learn and receive the things of wisdom.

And to me, among the many vibrant colors and parts and pieces of the story, quietly crucial, are the women in it, being their part of the Christian story.  There is good and bad.  The station of Jesus speaking to the women of Jerusalem as he bears his cross, as well as the anointing...

When women have contempt for us, we sense it, the denial, the betrayal, the judgment, the crucifixion itself;  we sense the great habitual blindness of society when presented with the insight, the sensitivity of sacred holy truth... the great condemnation of the innocent man of Jesus Christ...

But also, there is the potential to be the witness of the divine Easter truth even unto the Apostles...

This, to my eye, is held within the beauty of the woman Mary of Magdala, who comes to the tomb early in the morning...  a complete learning, a final acceptance, an alignment with the just.

You can never be very far away from any of that, the memories of Christ's life, embedded down within your very being...


If there is good, causes seemingly for friendly happy moods, all of that will change, and dramatically.  This too we learn, from inside, from experience, from the realities of the everyday...

You have to have faith if you're going to write.  You have to, actually, have the faith of a Peter, to keep on with it.   You'd never find the words.  Never have faith in writing down the next sentence of a thought.    Never have faith in the purity of it, beyond all motives but the good, worthy.

You have to stay calm, not get distracted, or nervous.   You have to seek the simplicity of it.  The prayer in it.  The efficacy of prayer.



I've got last night's dishes clean and drying, laundry hanging neatly above the tub, work shirts on hangers.  Tea.  Dandelion tea for detox.  Oatmeal, with banana.

Inspiration.

Just as desire makes human life, a writer needs a great inspiration to rely on, down in the deep, something he can sense is there, a truth, a verity, that makes his work meaningful, possible, worthy.

This might sound silly, or self-evident.  It might sound contrary to the workmanlike habit of any writer, who needs more just to show up every day and sit down and write than for some airy faeries of inspiration to come visiting like an angel.

Kerouac, On the Road, the original Scroll version, represents an inspiration, speaks of an overarching one, seen clearly, and even, one could say, a Catholic one, a Christian one, perhaps not by coincidence.  For a writer must seek to transform his life, at least his understanding of his life and his own place, in order to see any purpose in tackling the possibilities of another few sentences strung together.

A Lazarus, coming out of a tomb...

Kerouac is inspired, famously, at face value, by "the mad ones," the incandescent firework kind of people, but deeper in the inspiration is quietly not unrelated to a sense of the Holy.



But yes, what work is there to do today...  The body is recovering from the work week.  The mind is blank, not directly feeling any inspiration, nothing immediately occurring to the fingers that write...

After reading James Martin, S.J.'s commentary on the story of Lazarus, fear of the old, the worry over the stench of the body, before the new life is called forth, the leaving behind of the wrappings of the old personality symbols... the pleasures, the thoughts, all things that make a person feel visible and real, when such things are of the old life, before the calling forth...  All that stupid old stuff, encumbered, false...

"Go live some life," my therapist tells me.

I tell her, through the screen of my iPhone, perched upward above the laptop, supported by a bottle of soda water, about my visit up north, to see my mom, in early February.   The weather...  of all my regrets, how they came in to haunt me heavily during the visit.  The failure at becoming a musician, a dance man, a theater type...  Talent is a difficult thing.  In the crush to be a successful English major, to address every poem or short story with understanding, the talents, the guitar, were hidden rather than developed.

Later, I wonder, at all the literary posturing and striving of back then, a search for a career, and perhaps, that was my gut sense, to focus on the one terrible talent with its odd place in life, somehow awkward, unwelcome, but necessary to the life of the mind, for the very purpose of leaving a record of thought.   You pay a price for a literary life.

"Go live some life," get out there, play early Beatles songs, play your version of U2, Forty...  Hank Williams...  Try some improv, or some amateur theater, she suggests...


After the session, I am tired.  Still sore from Tuesday night, could have used another hour of rest...  But I get to the bus, climbing up, beeping my metro card with a nod to the driver, then back and up to first seat on the back platform, slumping into my seat...

I get to work, and the bar doesn't look bad, and that helps, stocked well, organized.  With back-ups.  They'll benefit from my work Valentine's Day dinner service.  Through having to move, stand up and wait for my stop on the bus, from the walk up the hill by the old mansion on 34th rising above the grand trees and the sloping yard, high two storied white porch and mansion brick, the body warms up, and I'll be ready to move like Harold Lloyd, or Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin when the moment to move arises.  I come in through the basement, past the chef at his desk, past the pantry of the pastry chef, listening to his country music, the walk-in cooler and the linens shelf behind me now, up past the ice machine, mineral water boxes stacked after a drop off along with the soda six packs, the women of the kitchen getting ready for the salad stations...

Tilapia and rice, for the staff meal.  I get my plate ready, call mom from downstairs, and she picks up, so I take my plate upstairs and sit at the bar for a quick chat



The pace is fast, and efficient, none of the gaps that come from being over-seated opening up, but for a little crack here and there, manageable, a need for some wine explanations out on the first table of the wine room, table 60, an African gentleman, two ladies...  they go with Sancerre...  speak in amiable French at my little act...

And later on, after the dust is risen, and now in the proverbial air, my friend, a patron of the jazz, arrives for dinner, and she is here with an eye toward a belated celebration of my birthday.  She has a little present for me in a little classy gold-toned gift bag, with some appropriate wrapping paper within, what could it be.  You should open it now, she says.

And when I do, it's one of those German wine openers, immaculate brushed metal, with the two-prongs, and the simple pull handle once you get it seated.  I've never been able to get these ones to work for me, actually.   They are excellent, necessary for pulling out old corks that might crumble, as when opening a rare old Bordeaux...  And then she has brought out and placed on the bar before me a special shaped bottle of red, a Haut Brion, a 1999, at that.

Oh, man, you should'n't have, I mumble to myself...  I've got the bill ready for the kibbutz couple, regulars on Wednesday, but it can wait.  And so, I come around, to my friend, Leslie, you'll have to show me, walk me, through this.  But I do it myself, putting the longer prong in between cork and bottle neck, then the shorter end, and kind of back and forth until the prongs are in all the way, and now you swivel the cork around, and viola, it's moving, and then out it comes, hooray.  I've got the candle and the decanter ready to go, and by the end, there are indeed cloudy dregs, not much, but enough to stop pouring, and then I get the bill ready and swipe the card for my friends...  bid them well.  Ask what they're doing for the Valentine holiday...

Where's your glass, I pour her out a small amount, and then for myself, just a little.  Get her set-up for dinner...  Mineral water....

The boss comes by, Leslie offers him a sip, and they have a nice conversation about the old Bordeaux on our list....  "Do you have any Petrus," he asks her, as I run back and forth in and out of the bar.  The year of my birth, 1965, was not a good vintage, and neither was hers, but followed by good vintages, she tells me, a factoid humor.


Later on, I pull out my dish of veal cheeks, and sit down next to her, as the last two, a dear friend of mine and her second cousin, visiting from London--all Iranians are good at math, they tell us, and Leslie too is a mathematician of note--have all left.

Ted, it's in one of the Mitvot, after the story of Abraham, the mitzvah of hospitality...  Abraham is talking with God, and travelers come by, and Abraham interrupts, even, to be hospitable...

A good friend of hers, a nice guy, a jazz guitar local, a lawyer by profession, a kindly one, passed away suddenly at 66 last August, from cancer...  She tells me.  When one door closes, another opens, she tells me.  And I'm stupid enough, an oaf, turned around a few times in the maze of the jazz night service and the band's strange presence as sort of third-customers, to not quite get the implication, asking her.   The mind can do strange things.  I say, "yes, someone I haven't seen in months will pop into my mind, and then in a few days or so, boom, I see them coming up the stairs..."  She calls it "conjuring," and knows what I am talking about, through her own experience, and in the quiet at the end of the night, with cool jazz playing on the sound system, a note of good sense falls upon the existence of life as we know it.


Later on, it dawns on me....  This is what gets me about the proverbial Erica, the Princess of Cornbird from old college days so long ago, my failings at my true calling, how my hospitality toward another human being was lacking significantly, not that there were not mixed signals.

Imagine, at my first attempts at hospitality, I failed...

Then Sunday night, a couple, retired school teachers, on their way to the Dumbarton Oaks concert series pay me a visit to have dinner with wine.  They bought a copy of my book, and have brought a copy to sign.  Barry has come in just as the door opens as well, sitting at the bar, then joined by Michael and Dennis.  Familiar people, the wit comes out.  "Your hair is so long!”  I explain to them, well, I've been on the road a lot.  Michael's 50th is coming up early in March, they want to book the wine room, so I go to the reservation tablet...

Then Mimi arrives, to be followed by Carmen, friends of the big boss...  Oh, shit, here we go.  I'm sat also by a table in the corner, diplomats, a couple.  He sounds Belgian.  Goes for the mussel soup.

Then John and Vera.  Getting in before Happy Hour ends.  John, get a stool and pull it up to the bar, and Barry squeezes over as he takes his onion soup.  He's just had an operation to replace a bit of his humerus, another bone cancer tumor, with titanium.   The bar is full.  Another two, a couple, tall, slender throughout, elegant, Ethiopian.  And two young women, one a familiar face, pull up at the bar.  A few weeks ago, John’s elderly mother was due for eye surgery.  A lot came out between us, the difficulties...

Mimi orders an onion soup.  Carmen, I’ll have one too.  The soups come.  Carmen:  I didn’t order this.  She has half of it.  Too salty.  Africans like too much salt, she says, referring to the chef, jean baptiste, from Gabon.  Later, after pot au feu, she’ll go down and chastise chef.

(Jean Baptiste tells me the story later, when I enter through the basement a day or two later.  “Bruno is coming soon, eh?” she says to chef.  I do my best, he tells her.  He did not add any salt at all to the pot au feu, by the way)

So that's how it goes.  Full Moon night.  Mimi and Carmen like to hang out late.  Others have gone.  Like the boss would, Carmen rolls a cigarette.  I pull my piece of liver out of the oven, after the singing of Happy Birthday and the candle, sit down at the bar, pour out a little wine, and have some dinner.

Back behind the bar, the boss's lady friends praise me, how I entertain, at such a level.

The woman with the Irish background stays a little while longer.  We need to process the night anyway.  She tells me about a story about Martin's Tavern...

I try to walk her home, but by the time I catch up with her, as I walk on the street, she has her headphones in, and I don't want to cramp her space, she is at her front door, putting in the entrance code as I stand out in the street.  Okay, she got home okay.  I go the CVS, to put some more money on my Metro card pass.

And I wake up, a couple of times, then falling back into dream and waking again to the workmen making their noise, but still a strange mix of soreness, waking, tired...  I get up, find some tea, call mom, slump back on the couch.   I sleep more, dreaming again, and before two, at the normal hour for the night shift, I come back to life.

Earlier, before work, walking up from the closest bus stop to work, Mom is irritated.  You made me look for two hours...  But Mom, I just wanted you to keep your cell phone charged.  We got that done, I thought.   I explain where I'm going.   You should get a job that allows you to be a human being, she tells me.

Monday Night Jazz...

I am sore waking up from it...  Finally, waking at one, I give the body another half an hour before dragging up out of bed.

By two in the afternoon I am having my first cups of tea.  I guess I slept okay.  At least I wasn't bothered by too much noise or phone calls.  The muscles are stiff, the soles of the feet tight...


It shouldn't be like this, he says to himself.  Three very busy nights, lots of movement, circling around the dining room like a hunter.  He puts the dishes to soak, after climbing down the stairs to see if the shipment of green tea has arrived, nope, so he makes due with two bags of Twinings and a teaspoon of Matcha.

The bar crowd stays around, so the conversation goes on, and on.  Requiring thought and wit and improvisation.   Answering some questions offered by curious customers.  The boss sits with his wife and a friend of his wife's, squeezed in at the bar.  They sit just as the bar glassware washer machine emits the groan, announcing something has prevented the closing of the seal that holds the water, so you have to take out the rack, then reach in, on your knees, look at the mesh enclosure surrounding the plugging mechanism...

Why did you turn the light off, the one overhead the cutting board on top of the stove in the back corner of the bar, the ladies ask...  Well, it's just that sometimes I like it on, and sometimes I like it off, I shrug, demurely.  Just the mood.  No way of predicting it.  Then in a moment I explain sometimes the boss asks me to turn it off, for ambiance.  "I'm thinking of those customers out there, who don't want the glare as they dine..."  Lots of explanations for things.  Who knows.  But the ladies, one a songwriter, on top of being a lawyer and a Ph.D. in comparative lit, and the more erect one with a Burberry's scarf on, get the humor.


At the end of the night, Drew comes by, with a great story of real estate and zoning...  I finally get my dish of chicken curry, kept hot in the oven, and sit down.   Then I cannot resist the bread.   Goddamn bread, making my belly grow, a depth charge of weight gains.   Barbara joins the bar after the last kibitzing, encouraging me to get the guitar out before she goes.  At the end, from the safety of her home, she texts me that "You're Good."  Which sits in my mind as I waver in and out of sleep.  What a job...  You pay the rent, but who has the energy to go try and new job when they work you like that...


And on top of that, as if you weren't feeling guilty enough about opportunity and talents and how you should've kept taking French...  got a job where you wore a blazer at work... there's your old mom, up far away in the grey winter of Oswego...  A feeling of some helplessness...

Before the shower, a successful call to mom...  as stew heats up in the toaster oven...



How did it work, back in Jesus's day, this talent stuff...  Were there musician recording artists, and movie actors, and polished diplomats...

Were talents put into use being a study in human nature, its inherent goodness...

With people, back then, in an unselfish mode, moral codes were instituted, so that the sweetness of people would not be taken advantage of, that the anarchy of selfishness would not seize the day, with money, comfort, power, sex and intrigue, the pleasures of gambling and so forth.

And so with Jesus, so finely tuned to the wonderful talents of humanity, a sensitive eye is turned to bring fresh life and vigor to old commandment....

The layer of ice that came in the night before the snow blowing in from the North and the dark lake was as thick almost as the modern car window itself.  It covered the black Jetta he had rented.

It had taken time and effort, the car on defrost, to lift the ice off the windshield and then the side windows.  A corner might crack, then lift, and he could get it off in marzipan candy chips.  He figured out how to turn on the rear window defroster.  Meanwhile the snow was blowing.  He shyly stopped to gesture to the townhouse keeper handyman fix-it man Ben who was coming toward him with a snowblower along the walkways.  This sucks, I don't know why I stay here, for what...  four months of summer...


He got up early in the morning.  It was 14 out;  nothing more had accumulated.  He'd been awake for several hours, since his mom had called on her cell from downstairs...  He had turkey on sourdough with Poupon Mustard and Hellmann's mayonnaise, leaving half for his mom, had some tea with her as he ate on the couch with her after making her toast, and then he packed the car, said good bye, and it was too slick on the cement stoop for her to stand outside and wave good-bye, and he drove off.

The layer of ice still on the roof started to come off as he passed through the highway above Scranton.  Peeled away from the sunroof, flying off to shatter.  One piece hit the windshield of a pickup truck in the rear view mirror, but not causing any harm beyond the impact.


He had time to unpack the car, brush his teeth, fold a shirt for Saturday night at work, deciding to take the car back to the rental car garage in the hotel, and the Uber cab to work, driver by an older man, thin, hesitant at intersections, dropped him off at work at quarter to five, leaving him just enough time to set up.  But as he drove the car back, along Observatory Circle, and as he rode in the Uber down along the strip of Wisconsin Avenue, he felt the futility of all the years, his best, physically, wasted in the restaurants.   Nothing to show for it.  Still living a bit more than month to month.  Surviving.  The night, most likely, would not be much of an easy thing.  He anticipated a light amount of hostility from his co-workers.

In the end the shift wasn't bad.  A local celebrity, from a similar college as he, who had done well early in the on-line market of connected personal computers dropped in, and other friends, people he'd known over the years came in, along with all the chores.


In the distractions of visiting and caring for an aging parent for the week, his mind was different.  The idea, the concept, the purpose and the accuracy thereof, the appropriateness of his vision of the Lord Jesus, such as Jesus is, as someone not unlike himself, a capable worker at a basic trade, low in technology by modern standards, who would make the effort to be prepared, and recognized as a man with a job, this had receded.  It had receded as he went to work, his hands shaking ever so slightly, the nerves of the road, the nerves of a struggle immediately ahead, and of that struggle stretching on and only getting worse, these were thoughts that came to outweigh the other things as he returned to his life, his apartment, his job, having left his mother up north where the skies were gray, the clouds, the cold, the friendly people who always held the door for a neighbor...

Now it was make a quick stew with the meat before its too old, shower, shave, dress, what time is the bus coming had all come back to him, weighing at him.  On the bright side, before final prep, the chicken stew made the week before was still viable, and it even tasted good enough for him.  You never wanted to go to work without having eaten beforehand.  Even if there was a staff family meal.

He could feel the rattledness of old age, as he put socks on, ten minutes to go...

And then, visiting his mother...

It seemed to him the last most deepest talent, sadly, or sad, perhaps at the root of all, all the others somehow having been squandered to time.  Music, acting, whatever presentations of his self’s physical being as a speaking presence.  Girls, women, money.  “All pissed away...”
But maybe there was one gift still left, to somehow, like a physic or a mathematician, to apply.



The sports bar was noisy and crowded.  He didn’t want to go, but keep her entertained, too tired to grocery shop at 6.  Basketball, a war, shouting generals, muscular tattooed minorities...  like Vietnam.  The locals gathered, the local university, wearing of the orange.  A large kid next to us, yelling to make his voice heard over the weight of his rasp.



In such a situation one thinks most largely of all the lost opportunities, typically seen as the time of life when his own talents matched all the possibilities on offer, girlfriends, studies, careers...  he’d been too shy, introverted, keeping his talents hidden.  And thus falling into creepy situations he was better than.

And so he needed something positive to find within himself.  One last overriding completely unlikely talent at the base of them all.  After all, wasn't he good at self-inspection?

The pained gift of kindness, even to disastrous people...


Doing the dishes, looking out the kitchen window.  A Piliated woodpecker.  He called his mom.  Where’s my cane.  Oh, www, my ankle...  she got up from the old Eames chair, came to the kitchen.  He found the bird in the binoculars, and she saw the flash of red as he passed the glasses to her.

His way of thinking was completely different.  Ecological, beyond ecological...
As his father had taught him.


But, ahh, what can you do...  time has gone by, no longer slim...
Indeed, he’d done a great job hiding, putting away all his talents, times, chances.  The guitar.  Other less explored musical and rhythmic abilities.  And they weigh upon him as he rises.

Wisdom.  All a part of the terrible process of wisdom.

End of a five shift run.  Beginning with a crazed Saturday night, ending on a crazed Wednesday jazz night, full house, full bar, and Tuesday had not been easy either, as far as the pace and the physical effort.  I'd been thinking about going up to see mom with the few days off I had, but I was tired, and knew it was basically a good decision to not be trying to make that effort when I woke up.

But I woke up ashamed of myself, for such reasons, and after getting a quick call from mom, "rest some more and call me back later," she said, as I pulled myself out of bed and found a tee shirt, my green chamois shirt, my Adidas track pants, still with yesterday's socks on, after getting up and having cups of yesterday's tea, I looked through Facebook and related things on my iPhone, blankly waking up with wasting time.  I feel guilty about the distance, about not being able to go up and see her in such circumstances, but I'm tired.  Looking for direction.

Hot tea, fresh, is better than the third steeped pot of yesterday's tea, and I warmed some bone broth in a bowl in the toaster over, cut a lemon for hot water when the water came to boil.

It's too much, if work does that to you.  I'm even having trouble keeping my thoughts together, as if the string holding them together through the week has fallen.  On top of "sad, rather be elsewhere, but here I am, usual duties to do, and still taking my medication for the sinusitis."

Inspiration to what one was writing on the day before is distant.


And so when I woke, I made small prayers.  I called work to find that I could get some time off.


The road is the monastery, the great teaching.