The silly thing was that every amateur artistic effort known to all the amateur artists around the world amounted principally and directly to be pretty much what the Buddha was doing under the great ficus religiosa tree, or what Jesus was doing in his peripatetic and picaresque wanderings around the big lake and the towns and all the characters within them, wishing to draw to himself all the other people who too secretly were amateur artists and thinkers of different stripes and shapes and sizes.  Buddha and Jesus were nice guys, they got other people, even if their own art efforts were half-baked, shy, feeble in voice as an untrained singer trying to hit a high note.  They went amongst awkward people.   People who needed a community.  They sensed that each of them stood on the verge of a breakthrough, and with a nudge perhaps these people they, Jesus and Buddha, went amongst, could be prompted into having their own weird and beautiful artistic moment of creativity, as they were enabled to occupy the present moment with the abundant and sufficient gifts within.

Their gift was a bold one, an offering to the world of community, of taking in all sorts various and sundry, all walks of life.  And the key to this was that all the world wanted to participate, out of having their own urge and willingness to attempt something artistic, even if callow and amateur and mawkish and unpolished and perhaps even offensive to better trained ears.

When I get up, and have the courage, I look at these postings.  Rushes, they are like, to be looked upon as film, raw and unedited, for what they caught and didn't catch.

There are still the great worries, condensing in the lone night as dew out of the sky, profound.  As if everything were coming together, the November election, my mother's health, possible eviction notice from not having a job, from not being employable at age 55, something I've left myself open to.  But those cheery thoughts subside, and there is the writing again to look at.  As Buddha says, good will follow after pure thoughts, and so I look for how to think pure thoughts, rather than evil ones.

Our life is shaped by our mind;  we become what we think.  Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it.
Our life is shaped by our mind;  we become what we think.  Joy follows a pure thought like a shadow that never leaves.  (The Dhammapada.)



I'm drinking my green tea, the gas on the stove working again.  My personal hotspot is giving me trouble again.  I never quite figured out how to get internet here, though I pay Verizon a monthly amount for a landline, no working phone jack.  Depressions make you irresponsible.

The Corona Virus Pandemic has come with different stages, globally, nationally, locally, personally.

There will be many more steps to go through, each one veiled, no control over it.  No way to get the mind around the shock, the misery.

Some of us are okay, sometimes, with the alone time, using it for something, we don't know quite what.   Meditation.  Thomas Merton might see it as putting out an ear for God.

I can't blame anyone for "not feeling comfortable," as my old acquaintance lets me know, wanting nothing to do with me.  Fine.  Not feeling comfortable having anything to do with me and my way of life, and all my mistaken paths.  Even I don't feel comfortable.  What if I have to pack up all my books and guitars and bikes and clothes, and the important papers, and the furniture...  what can I salvage?  Put it in storage?  Where?  How to pay for that?  No one would want me to be going through all this at my age, but that's how it is.  It's not always easy to be Zen.  And like a fool I still chase the supposed pleasures of life, as if I had no other option.  And thereby, wasting time.  Wasting years.  Wasting time away from the real joys of life, family, hard work, love, closeness, shared time.  Not alone time.

Only if you were "mentally ill" would you need "alone time," all that meditation, and all that exercise.

(Perhaps Siddhartha Gautama is the world's first admittedly open neurotic person.  Giving others the courage to follow in his path for mental, spiritual and psychological well-being.  The first person to say, "hey, what is this all about anyway..."   In doing so, grasping that which is, what we all have in common.)


The same way I felt before, looking for a career, and years go by.  Writing.  The old embrace of that which is unsatisfying about the human condition, of how we are not perfect academic scholars, perfect objects of love and desire, of how we somehow do not end up on the righteous career path we were cut out for, because of all the excess of things going on in our minds, the things we must cope and contend with in order to find out where our talents lie.

People like to portray themselves, if given the opportunity, as energetic, wise, smart, good at all things, policy, investment banking, perfect explication.  Perfection.  Human intelligence.

Dostoevsky liked the night.  He liked, at least in his fictional world, religious elders who had friendship for the rustic, the idiot, the simpleton, the sinful.  In his own fictional world, Dostoevsky was the idiot himself.

Within the Beatitudes, there are the Four Noble Truths.  Life is suffering.  Mindfulness, the ultimate cure-all, is not possible without compassion, kindness, understanding.

Jesus is an art form as much as anything else.  An inspiration for depictions of himself, for in himself, there is all of us, and what we are.

Wine holds compassion for us.  It lets us a breather away from our deeper problems.

The wind was blowing when I woke up on Friday, Good Friday, in a way that sucked my courage out, and I wondered about myself as I lay there.  Finally, I got up.  I had some tea.

Neither head nor body was feeling well, tired from the tree pollen.  I didn't feel like going to rent a car, I didn't feel like packing, I didn't feel like being up for the long drive.  At noon the wind quieted, but then it picked back up again.  I looked at the forecast.

Life takes bravery.  Jobs take bravery.  And here I am, writing, making myself more neurotic rather than less, doing a good job of not showing up.  "Oh, the years I've wasted.  Being a coward."

But it is a long drive.  And wind on the highway with the trucks in the mountains...  or maybe it is just that it is Good Friday.

You start to feel bad when you aren't working.  You feel like you are not protecting yourself, your own interests.  You feel foolish.  Fear and apprehension set in.  On top of the woozy head tree pollen feeling.  The fear of poverty and homelessness.

"Be a man," I'm sure my brother would say.  The wind stills, then returns with sudden blasts.

All you can do is try to write.

Things go through my mind quickly.  There are themes, but I have to be very quick to catch them.  I will remember them, but it's hard to get all of them down.  Something about time.  Something about the translation to a medium that other people might potentially see.  When the camera turns on, awkwardness comes forth.

Things run in currents.  Of late they have been involved with worries, a sense of insecurity.  I was paying rent.  Then the pandemic came along.  And suddenly it's more painfully aware, not having work itself to keep me occupied, my vulnerability here.  Where's all my stuff going to go, should I lose my income...

Income comes from career.  You can't mess around with those.  You have to be on top, and organized.  It's your career.   Go with what you're given, opportunity...  college.   Great teachers.  People to initiate in habit and in life.  Friends.  Go with them.  Treat them well and they will treat you well.

And I haven't always done that.  I've worked as a bartender;  it's intense sometimes.

I go and help mom out, but without a career, I can only do so much.  And now with no job...

How many calls from Mom today?  I got her groceries through Instacart.  The shopper waited for a fresh Southwestern Rotisserie Chicken, along with the cat food and the Saltines, the Pepsi, sharp cheddar cheese, a buffalo chicken quesadilla and a chicken caesar wrap.  Then mom starts to get impatient, calling back.   She says she has to keep the cat upstairs, otherwise he'll run away, and he's never lived her before, and I correct her, the cat knows where he is and what he's doing, where to go, how to get back, he knows.


But has a great sense of pointlessness arisen as I gain on meditating, in lotus pose or in corpse, or in tree, sometimes, the pointlessness of writing.  Is this giving part of the brain something it needs to do, as work, as an outlet, or is it rumination, weighing me down, as it were.  I don't know.

After the series of phone calls, mom inviting me over for dinner, and maybe I can take her home later, home home, her real home, it doesn't feel so great being alone.   Meditation is slow going anyway.  I unroll the yoga mat I take outdoors, here on the rug, do some poses, then some meditation.  But I am distracted.  The phenomenon of Tom of Finland's homoerotic art, an article found in NY Times, yoga and chakra being very intimate a part of physicality.  And, not that I did much, but I feel tired out again, waiting out what our fates are as far as unemployment, speaking of fearful things.

I've waited too long to do something with my book.   Ten years it has been.  I'm on the Jack Kerouac path, again.

So, wow.  Just wow.  Dad dying, moving out of George's, mom...  It's been a run.  And I spend time alone now, and that seems okay, absorbing.

Then the bill coming for the ER visit for my finger, five stitches, have to pay the deductible first, it seems.

And I would have made a great college professor, a kook.

The way to contentedness is not craving for anything.


The plumber has been in the building all week.  Getting the gas going again after a leak.  "A lot of people losing everything," he says.

The Covid-19 pandemic crisis came along, and I wondered if there was a single purpose to it for me, to confirm the wisdom of Buddha.

I put each part of Buddha wisdom through analysis, and the truth came resoundingly through.  On each and every level.

Tuesday night, I was studious, as I should have been in life, a scholar.  I read a book.  I sat in my father's old brown chair.  He sat in it night after night, reading, going through papers, grading his college student's papers, sometimes writing on a legal pad, often a cat by his side, a dog by, near the fire pot.  And so I went through this book in which I found resonance, Siddhartha's Brain, by John Kingsland.  

I saw a lot in it.  I felt so good, I didn't even want any wine.  I've long been examining what good wine does for me, and more and more I see the downside, the after effects, the side effect of finishing a bottle in my isolation.   Wine is a social drug.   You get on social media, think you're in touch with people, engage in witticisms.  

Yesterday, a big thunderstorm came through with Flash Flood warnings for the District of Columbia.   I stood on the patio between the small GI apartment buildings talking to the neighbors as the winds came up and the sky darkened and the rain started.   Afterwards, after the radar cleared, no more lightning, I went for a walk, raining and muddy enough so much it was not easy.  I wanted to go find a stream and the walk below the reservoir banks on the old trolley track path above the Canal got long and dull in a way, though all I wanted to do was meditate.  Finally I saw mist rising.  Planes came along skirting the clouds, coming in and out of view.  

When I got back, I was wet and tired.  I had to take my iPhone out of its Otterbox case and dry it out, and I didn't feel very happy, and, again, rather lonely as unemployment can make you.

I had a little bit of tobacco around, figuring it would make me less lonely, but I soon felt worse, more guilty, more lonesome, more seeing how I had betrayed everyone and how tenuous my perch on adult life is.   There is the family depression to deal with, seen in my mother's anxiety, my own habits...

I thought of doing some yoga, but when I tried it, indoors, on the carpet, I was not inspired, and creaky anyway.  I had to cook, what to cook, I asked myself, and so, there was a two day old glass of wine sitting out on the counter, and I had a sip, and then I finished that, and then I had some more, as I made chicken soup, cutting up a carrot, celery stalks, onion, heating olive oil with a dash of turmeric, ginger and cayenne, then bay leaf with the onions.  Then chopping another onion, to begin on a meatloaf.

That seems to be all I'm capable of these days, feeding myself, doing yoga.

But I had wine, and it didn't make me feel much better, and later I went for another walk, the sky clear again, around midnight.  Two deer stood and looked at me, still, from out in the field below the long bank dam of the reservoir, as I stood looking up at the Big Dipper.  And I saw again, the wish to relax in a glass of wine wasn't doing me so well, a kind of numbing that made me want more.  I got back, had another sip of wine, then put the bottle back in the fridge and said to myself, enough, that's it.

It's hard to look back at your own life and see how and where you have gone wrong.  I didn't want to be serving alcohol, I didn't particularly want to be serving meats, each a classic Buddhist what-not-to-do.  The mind needs to be clear and free, not make excuses by altering itself.

One can write, and go along with all one's illusions, but there's always the greater truth out there.


It seemed there was a point to it all.  A situation one went through in order to make connections.  There was my mother, calling often.  Guilt.  Then there was me, just hanging on in my apartment with all my treasures, and wondering about the next chapter of a professional life.

But I want a new chapter in life.  I wish to be a teacher, but of the big things, the things I have learned through my mistakes.

First, deal with depression and anxiety, largely through yoga and meditation.

It really isn't easy living alone.  I've tried it.

The poems from Pritchard's Modern British Poetry, which I took as a senior, still haunt me.  I didn't write the papers he asked of us.  What a snub.  What was I thinking.  After all he and my father and my mother had done to get me there...  I couldn't a paper on Larkin.  Or A.E. Houseman's famous poem.  I barely said anything in class.  Unlike myself.

But each time, each paper, each question, "what would say to Philip Larkin, or Yeats."  Well, you have to think about such things, and this takes a while.

And yet, I think they understood somehow.  I was going through something.  Perhaps, I'd observed something.  I don't know.  It's as if the beast were reluctant to give anything up, to divulge how the beast thought.  I have no idea.

Now, from reading Siddhartha's Brain, by James Kingsland, Harper Collins 2016, NY, the "default mode," steadied in the front of the brain, turns us into introspective mode, and the rumination can cause a worsening of mood.  This happens when we are not occupied with a task at hand, a job, numbers to figure out, a physical thing.  No wonder I tend bar then.  It keeps my mind occupied, fully, for a long time.

The lone writer needs something to do when living alone.  Or he will start to ruminate, and then risk making himself depressed.

My finger is too raw still, though the five stitches have basically been absorbed, for playing the guitar.  I do need to cook.  Earlier, I took a long walk in the rain, for sake of reflection.  I thought about my phone calls with mom for the day.

I hadn't had any wine the night before.  I'd been rather studious, sitting in my father's old professorial brown chair.  I read a good 160 pages, up 'til three in the morning.  It felt great.  Very satisfying.  I felt on a whole new track.   A new mission in life.

I figured this awkward time offered a period for me to think things through, quietly, in the background.

But then the next day comes, and you are still a human being, even if you think you've sort of figured out the proper moral tack to take today.  I tried to have a big yoga meditation day, but it just petered along.  I went for a long walk, getting my hiking sneakers wet and dirty, soaking through my rain shell, the old trolley path now mowed weeds and dirt through the clinging jungle, vines like ivy draped over everything, a plethora of growth along the sides of the path, and today, long puddles and boggy places.  A tiny frog, jumped out of one small pool with pebbles in the bottom now, and grass rising like rice shoots in rice patties, into the impenetrable undergrowth so dense in different blade of life and design and size, as great as any wall over made, and the little critter was safe now, though I admired him, or her, and the flashing memory of a tiny creature with two little legs going straight out back, a sudden jump.  Zip.

I like it out here in the Palisades.

Writing is ingenious, because it lets us use that "default mechanism," the turning inward of that "theory of mind," the comprehension of another's thought and feelings, to put it back to use and something that seems to suit its own work.  As if it needed to build walls and things, and keep things separate,  and every thing in little safe cottage or natural bower...  back to an older way.  A thing of mental habit, tribal, perhaps.

Thoughts in italics:  My mother is a depressive, though it’s hard to tell.  I guess that's why we stayed close over the years that come.  and she didn't really have anyone else helping her out and keeping her company after a certain point.  

And she had always wanted me to be an educator.  She wrote that in my The Education of Henry Adams, ...  Christmas of 1988, ...   “For the education of Theodore so that he may do the same for others”

The nights are hard to get through.

Like the Buddha says, you have to accept all sides of a thing.   And I have to accept the fact of all the things I passed by at college, being a drinker.  

I guess we naturally expect that all people will like us, because they'll see us as who we are.  Perhaps that is why people write.  The writer brings that sense, of understanding other people, to the table.  

You might as well admit, we all have art to bring to the table.

That's the jolt of learning that happens, when a teacher, or someone in the class, does something surprising and unique in the teaching of something.  That's when the lights go on.

But there is hope, there must be hope, in writing, for those of us who failed as students.


Perhaps we failed because of an abundance of our own words needing to get out of our brains.

"What if excess of love... enchanted them to a stone," Yeats wrote, of the Irish patriots of 1916.

An Emily Dickinson kind of rebellion, once a point was reached.  Hey, I can do this on my own.
Though it's always foolish for a writer not to read, finding reflections in the lights of others.

Writing is such a queer thing anyway.   How would you make a job of it anyway...

Sorrows will follow you, wherever you go.  Fodder for meditation.  Leads you to Buddha and meditation as a way to save.

Well, at least you have identified one of the major problems, the main professional issue...

But then you can lose the will to write.

Joan K. has died, my mother tells me over the phone.  I've been out for hours, doing my yoga in the grove of pines, then bike ride.  Up a hill.  Then down along the paved trail.  I hadn't been on it for years.  The grass pollen.  I wasn't feeling well, fuzzy in the head, when I woke up.  I lounged for a few more hours, and then I called mom.  "How are you doing," I ask embarrassed.  "Not so good," she said, quiet. and this was her story.

So, I don't know if there will be a service for her.  I don't feel good.

I walk across the hot street.  Heat index, 97 out.  Get some groceries, the reluctant cheap bottle of red.  Chicken salad.  A Perrier, a lime.  A can of tomato sauce.

Just as I get back, it's about 3:45, my brother, asking me to do a run over to his house in Georgetown, check on the mail, then over the Fed-Ex office.  He's encouraging me to find new work, a job.  I don't blame him.  "Get imaginative," he tells me.  Well, let me get going, I say.  The Fed-Ex office closes at 6 if I remember.  No real choice in this mission. in the city heat, a crowded Friday afternoon sidewalk to look forward to, walking the bike along to get to the side streets.  I gather my things in a courier bag.  Keys.  Water.  Bandana for a mask.  Down to the basement to get the mountain bike out of the laundry room, with the Kryptonite lock.  I get it by the front door.  I have to pump up the front bike tire, back up the stairs, another false start.


A day later.  So I work up the courage to call Mr. K, our old friends back in the old hometown.  And he answers the phone, and he's in a decent mood.  "Yes, Joan had a fall... "  Several hospitals, a significant hematoma.  Rehabilitation, stabilizing her blood chemistry.  She's at home now.

I explain a bit while I'm calling.  "Well, I wouldn't be sounding like this if that were the case."  He's a professional psychologist and an educator.

I spent a day and a half in a deep sadness thinking our old friend was gone.  No one to hear her sweet thoughtful voice anymore.  No more of the support she's provided for my mom since they had their first children at the same time.

And now I find she is still in the land of the living, as they say.  Thank god.   Wherever God is.

Loneliness piles on top of lonesomeness these days.  What will happen to all my things, I wonder.  It's a break from jobs on websites to go look for the comet.

It's a relief to get out of the apartment.  The voice of my mind reverberating in questions that turn unpleasant, "what brought you here, of all places and fates..."

The big failure of mine...   The drinking.  The playing when I should have been praying...  As my father said, when I went to see him teach a class in the science building.

Wild Turkey, as if I were Hunter S. Thompson.  Drinking a continuous thread through my college years, an attempt to be cool.  I did a lot of studying, but it began to slip here and there, who knows why...  Depression, or depression brought on by the effects of drinking...

And now I stand here stranded.  Literature and Buddhism are the things I find true today.  I meditate.  Better for you than writing, which is just rumination that causes more depression.  That's the cost of having a mind that can do abstract work.

And so I am in a spiritual condition, brought down by ill-timed cynicism had while being a college senior, trying to cut corners.  In rebellion and disagreement...  with what?  Professors explicating Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin poems?  To have studied Buddhism with Robert Thurman would have calmed me down, drawn me away from intoxicants.  I was immoral.  I hurt my father, the upright distinguished decent gentle professor.  And I don't know why.

I find myself paralyzed now.  There's no way back to the groves of academe.

My mom is falling apart, slowly.

I skipped the wine last night.  I'm proud of myself.  But that too hurts, in a way.  How do I start a new life?  What do I engage myself in, to any satisfaction...  Tending bar used to do it.

And so as a bartender, I was little more than a fool kid.  Pat me on the head.  Let me entertain you.  Put on a show.

I knew it all, subliminally, as I watched myself do it all.  Playing when I should be praying.  When I should be using my mind to read books and learn.

It's all depressing, when I look back at it.  The classic wrong profession, according to the Eightfold Path.  Immoral.  Intoxicants and the murder of animals...

There's that touch of Hemingway in the late chapters of A Moveable Feast, about how the wealthy petted him on the head, told him how what he was doing was so marvelous.

The tragedy of the artist who has mislead himself, is now like Jonah, hiding from God.

It's 90 out, but down under the grove of the pines it's pleasant.  There's a light breeze.  The pine needles are dry, still soft.  I do my yoga slowly, very slowly, focusing on alignment, upright posture, straightness, opening up body.  Straight lines aligning the energy centers from base to top.

It feels good.  Each pose gets tweaked, a little better, a little better.  Progress with all poses, and in the lotus.  I take a little walk afterward on the grass, barefoot, and then, back to the apartment.  This is good for my health.  Last night, I only had a few glasses of wine last night, over a spread-out period, so this simple act of going down to the bluffs to find a cool spot feels significant.


But I have the foolish years to live down.  A lot of wasted opportunity.  Try not to dwell on that.  Just try to get better.

Reading Vonnegut's thoughts last night:  Drinking gives you a spasm of happiness, but is overall destructive.  Sadly so.  Here I am, because of drinking.  The way the depressive, the natural writer, finds relief from pain.  Except it only causes more harm down the road.

So what do you do?

Well, you try to be good.  To not fall into the same old trap night after night, drinking a bottle of wine all alone in your apartment.  That's not a good thing to be doing, and your health comes first.

The monkish balance has its draw for me.  The yoga under the trees fits perfectly.  I don't even need a mat.  The pine needles are soft enough, wear some bug repellent, bring some water along.  You'll be good.



Waiting on Congress.  What are they going to do?  I feel like I've hit a low point.  I've been waiting on the restaurant business forever too, in that it hasn't helped my writing career, and indeed left me unfulfilled.


There were times back in college when I took getting intoxicated as a kind of sport.

But this was a huge betrayal of my father and mother.  By brother sort of encouraged me to take this tack, and I shouldn't have followed along with it.

As I lay awake at night, I wonder, to what extent did I cause damage to my brain, so that reading and focus and comprehension and concentration took a hit.

And then because of that mistake, of dulling my mind down, I fell onto a bad path in life.  My self-confidence sputtered.  I became reliant on the nightly beer.

I didn't take a class on Buddhism with Robert Thurman, I somehow missed the Dalai Lama.


I meditate now, again.  I should be looking for a job.  For a career...


I had not realized, being in it, how terrible lonesome the bar business was.  It was a huge mistake on my part, ever doing that.  I had quit my day job, a leap of faith into just working at night as a busboy, writing, thinking about what to do.  And then they, Austin Grill, offered me the job of day bartender.  And it went on from there.

I guess I was too ashamed to talk to my father openly about all this.  Which was also very dumb.  When my mom came to visit, she cried.  The restaurant business will break your heart.  Like it broke my parent's heart.  And I should have listened to her, too.

Writing too is a terrible and lonely thing to be doing.  And I guess I thought that the wine was part of the release, part of the inspiration's acting out.  It numbed the pain, while hardly fixing any bit about my life or helping it turn better.

The whole thing brought on a stream of bad memories.

This is a hard time to write.  The sense of needing to look for a job, concern over an aging parent, not to mention having to take a long look at one's own situation...  all caused by the sloth that is the writer's life....  Because I've made no decision, stood for no clear choice, not really entitled to anything more than a by-stander's career...



I'm feeling lost, without the bar to go to.  I admit it.  The space.  Fifteen years, your brain gets used to it.

And as far as the professional world goes, I am a child, an id, who feeds himself, goes for walks, but does little to help people out in the real world.  For that, yes, takes work.


The apartment is cluttered.  Books.  Piles here and there.  Some in boxes.  Not the energy to sort it out.

I clean out the bottom of the refrigerator and its bins, something having spilled, chocolate milk leaking out of a container while I was away two months.  Isolation is not fun.  Yeah, this is the consequence of the attempted living of a spiritual life, right...  There's no way to beat the system, the economic positioning of human beings...  You sit around with your books, drink some wine, great, but it's not going to get you anywhere.


I took a walk around last night, after writing down some of my thoughts, but even nature and the river at night had a useless feeling to it, a void.  As if to say, "who cares, go back to your own world, which obviously you have neglected..."

Write a resume, spring into action, serve in a school, be a clerk...  Rise above being an undesirable,  the uselessness of one who is little more than being a friendly guy for a profession.  Time is money, and opportunity, right?


Gradually, incrementally, I try to get used to the apartment again.  I try to be a human being again, back to before it all got hi-jacked, years and years ago, the restaurant business, and before, my own failures as a college student.  What can be salvaged...

I made friends with the trees again, and they had changed in two months.  The fields in the parks were mowed, and I walked barefoot in them again, and did basic yoga, warrior, tree, putting my feet up while lying on my back, and when side to side holding the legs together, good for the liver, and then a quick head-stand after sun salutations, as the mosquitoes, smaller than usual, and with more pronounced striping on their hind legs were starting in.  It contented me to be looking out over the river again, over at the Virginia side.  Another war of division going on.   A division less defined, but just as palpable.

Many emotional identifications come through me, and I had experienced many since moving in early in March in 2019, after living with good old G. for so long over there off of Embassy Row.  You have to let them come through you softly, and the yoga had opened up the channels.  I remembered the snow falling on the Elm Tree, the street wet, a bus going by, as I sat there waiting for the bus in the other direction coming so I could eat something.

Tonight, the pinot noir from Bouchard Anie et Fils, $12.99, 2018.  I felt less confused somehow.  Maybe life prepares you in steps, first this, then that, and when you're ready for the next thing, well, here it comes.




So, after three soaks in epsom salts, pressing down, a tiny chard of glass is finally raised out of the flesh of my heal, a week or so after.   Fresh blood come out, but not much.  I bandage it up again, go for a walk, gingerly stepping forward, out of the apartment.   The index finger, I can get away with a gauze pad taped over it.  But with the combination, both wounds on the left side, with the bandage care, it slows me down.  My finger is still slow, too thick to bend.

But I feel like a big bum when I wake up.  What to do?

I'm about the furthest thing away there is from being a professional writer.

I wouldn't have no obligation, I just thought it would behoove my enterprises to just let the old fingers sit down on a keyboard and take a nice long walk, broken up into pieces if necessary, as walking is good for me, even when you go slow.  Meditating.

If fact, in college, somehow I backfired and wanted to get as far away from writing as I could.

And so I sit here in front of my television, watching the Gettysburg Battle part of Ken Burns, taking it in as if this was my direct experience.

This failure to write led me to be a bit ostracized, even up there it happens,

What do you want to argue about today?  

The icing on the cake of being a bartender is that one day you will have to quit.  You don't really get to retire, unless you are the entrepreneurial type, because there is no retirement plan.  Now, you have to find another kind of work.   Teach sea shanties...

I guess that's how it goes.  Of course.  I've been pretty stupid.  So it seems.

The dishes have accumulated, so Sunday, my third day back, I take off the wrapped gauze bandage on my left index finger, find a rubber surgical glove and start the chore after pouring myself cold green tea, with water on the stove.  There is a great guilty feeling in living alone, and I am slightly shaking as I awake, first calling my mom, who seems to be okay.  I tell her it's okay to let the cat out.

My left heal hurts still, as I pad around the kitchen.  I've soaked my foot in epsom salts hopeful that whatever it causing it to ache will work its way to the surface.  I'm shaking as I crack the eggs down flat on a small plate then open the shells over the pan.

I've poured out the stale soapy water the dishes soaked in over night.  Black beans, a canned Chicken and Rice soup, a plate for reheated hamburger and one from the lamb sausages.  Cups, a few containers to recycle, kitchen tongs and a spatula.  I clean the dishes in stages.  I could almost shake my head at my little system here, the RubberMade Tub, the drying rack with the silverware slots having broken off.

I am uneasy.  Nervous.  It's been strange coming back here to the little apartment.  Sad.  I've dealt with it all by three trips up to my mom since Mid-March when the whole pandemic began.  First for her birthday, can't leave her alone for that.  Then Easter.  Then an appointment in early May that she mentioned.  I should be there for that too.  For her medications.  Maybe we can up the dosage of the Aricept.  I end up staying there for two months.  As it becomes one thing or another. Riots in DC.  The Covid-19 heating up, even showing up at the restaurant the week before I was supposed to go back to work.  Weather.  July 4th, just as Memorial Day, when we took a drive out to the Berkshires to visit with my aunt and her husband.  Taking it day by day by day.

And so, July 12, I am here and wondering what will happen to all of this, all my books, the tribal rug my brother's wife did not like, guitars, amps, enough furniture to fill the one bedroom out here in the Palisades.

When I had to go to work, I was drawn away, distracted from the serious problem of lacking a career befitting my education.  It was almost like I found every way to hide out, to bide time without solving any problems.  Then, I was out of work.  Unemployment came through, four hundred from the District of Columbia, and then a week or two later, six hundred additional dollars from the Federal Government.  But what happens after August First.

In the apartment, books are still in boxes.  Clean clothes are still left on the bed.  There's laundry down in the basement, the trash and recycling bins are out back.  Desks, chairs, a coffee table, a dining room table with matching Danish modern chairs.  Buddhas.  A kitchen full of cooking equipment.  And all in a clutter similar to my mother's apartment.  Where will all this go.

Feeling so isolated, my brain readjusting uncomfortably to the temporary lodging, I have wine and reheat a hamburger, from Stachowski's, in Georgetown.  I play my guitar, even with one finger still wrapped up.  I take a walk...


Vonnegut has a line, what the writing of his most famous book cost him in terms of time and anxiety, money too perhaps...   That there is one of the few stars in the writing night sky...

Then it got grim.   Not only was I laid off, because of the COVID, but then the federal addition to unemployment was used by the Republicans to shaft people like me.  Head on a pike at London Bridge because I didn't believe in their religion of the great Donald Trump, people like McConnell, Mark Meadows, Tea Party Freedom Caucus, and Mnuchin, famous as Steven the King of Foreclosures.




So yeah, now and again I just needed some sort of break, as it was hard to work on anything...  a resume?  That was a horror enough.  So I had a few books, Dark Nights of the Soul, Thomas Moore, or, simply, Dharma Bums, with such life saving beautiful prose, St. Raymond of the Dogs in Rocky Mount, NC, living with his sister and husband.  (Ray Smith being his name in the book.)

I didn't know, or no longer knew, where I stood, by that all important indicator of finances, and I didn't know where my mom stood, after all my helping her, with things, and so it was a real blind time, and then you added on to that, the virus...  Masks.  Calculations.  You didn't want to sleep at night, you didn't want to be awake in the daytime.

Another hour zooms by.  And you look at, in your minds eye, the pleasant friendships of couples, how they are easy with each other, and great friends and companions, not contesting armies...

So who ever thought reading Kerouac could contribute to sanity and an overall sense of truth and well being, go figure, in these political times, hearing from the most unlikely of all politicians, the fuck up, the fuck up like me, who went through so many days close to the edge, sad, crying in his sleeping bag, hitchhiking.  Much as that college graduate kid who went off to Alaska...



Sunday.  Phone calls start my day.  Mom calls.  I don't have much to say yet.

I wake up.  No job.  Feeling like a loser, not on his toes.  I didn't sleep well last night, and the ragweed is up.  It's hard to know what to do when you live alone, anyway.  It's long been a habit of mine, living alone.

This lesson has been coming a long time.  There's no way to hide it, no way to hide from it now.  It's like I knew this was coming, and it makes me nervous.

Mom calls again, with her little news, questions, what's new in the world, I don't know, I'm just getting up.  I finally get up.  I've just sat down with my fresh pot of Moroccan Mint tea and the phone is ringing, my friend B., the singer.  Looking out for me.  Not a great time in the day for me to chat, but she has information for me and support, I haven't spoken to her in a while.  I was just about to sit down and write out a few thoughts, but okay.  She's a friend.

As I'm speaking to my theater talky friend, Mom is calling again.  I keep B. on the line, and finally look at the transcribed message Mom has left me, begging for a fly swatter, dramatic as can be, as I talk with my friend.

The heat is oppressive again, humid.  Why is everything happening at once now...

It's my own fault I like to write before I have been beset upon by people, dragging words out of an anxious person who does not feel like talking.  I have to catch my breath.   I have to get my bearings.

The crisis has come.  I want to be a Buddha, but I need a job, and I'm running out of the money to balance everything.

Who wants to get up and write?  I don't.  But, I felt I should write, and perhaps I needed to.  There's something therapeutic about it.

No, I didn't do well last week.  Isolated here.  Into the wine, out of fear and other poor motivations and pressures, a lack of proper understanding.   Scrolling through endless websites, jobs that aren't right, and still, still waiting on Congress to do something.  Pressure.




At certain things, we find ourselves being a natural at them.  Things that in a larger sense humanity has within, a capacity for.  Yoga.  Meditation.  Music.  A little training, and off you go.

Writing is meditation.  A careful observation of the thoughts that run through our minds.  This is as passive as anything else as far as a process.  Thoughts, in phrases and fragments, come and go.  The trick is remembering the efficacy of the valid ones, the ones that hold up to, or reflect, Buddhism.  The ones that have a ring to them, the ones you sense fit in with the overall picture that you might add to, just a little, but which is already there, led by great minds before us.

And also the reading, the right kind of reading.  For which to find, one must be careful and specific, with an intent eye and ear.

This is why the process itself is perhaps the most interesting thing before the writer's eye.  Writing leads one naturally to spiritual affairs, to meditation, and on further, to Buddhist thought.  Quiet contemplation.

I'm convinced writing brings us somewhere.

I have become Don Quixote.


Okay, so...  Mom's alone.  I don't feel good about that.  I'm paying for an apartment that has become now hard for me to afford.  I pray to Jesus.  I pray through my chakras.  I don't have much in a 401k.  I've not worked hard enough.  I've squandered however many years I've had to build a career, a reasonable career.  I'm nothing.  An out of work bartender.  I feel very sad.  I feel like Jesus in the Garden, a lot of days.  I didn't want it to be this way, but that's what happened.



I try to look through jobs, content writing, editing...  These are news jobs, jobs for which one has to have experience.  This is not creative writing from the depths of the soul.  I"m not a man.  I make excuses.


Why, I wonder, as I stare at the night ceiling, having run out of sleepiness and also of wine, why did I not head into the world from Amherst College, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, ready to take on a prep school classroom, or New York City.

I was a lost saint, who found his way being the saint of hospitality, which I did with my own two hands and feet, starting as busboy.  I should have been reading...

I am ashamed of what I became in college.




Mom is stepping up her game.  I don't have a life.  Why don't I just kill myself.  But mom, there's wine there.  In the fridge, maybe, or the counter.  I hear her rummage a bit, doesn't come up with anything.  Nope.  But Mary brought you some.  Yes, but I'm not home! She shouts at me.






Jack Kerouac's quote about the poet and time...  "A poet is a blind optimist.  The world is against him for many reasons.  But the poet persists.  He believes that he is on the right track, no matter what any of his fellow men say.  In his eternal search for truth, the poet is alone.  He tries to be timeless in a society built on time."


What I did achieve in those long years useless to me was that I allowed for some space for the poetic.   Washington is a well-read town, usually too officious to be dabbling in poetry, and yet there is poetry all around us.  Lincoln's ghost, the ideas of the Framers of the Constitution...

But when it all went away, shut down, not enough outdoor seating for the old place, there I was, left behind, stranded, an unemployable everyman poet, tossed out of his own fictional Garden of Eden.

You never know how draining it is, all the outside words.  You want the news when you get up, you turn on the radio on the hour for the news.  You look at the weather report, on the icon on your screen.  You know the news is pretty bleak.  But if you engage too much, the words in your own head will be squeezed out of the central focus.

And with everything that's going on in the world, and Trump, and wildfires, and unemployment, it's harder to find any importance, much value, in the poetic mind and the work of tuning into it.

I was making a stew.  I had one bottle of wine, trying to control myself.  Thursday night.  Mom calls, and of course, I pick up.  And she starts on the "but I'm not in my home home... the real home is over two doors, up the road a piece," "yeah, mom, but I had Mary bring you wine to where you are now, so look in the refrigerator."  "But the cat won't come back," "yes, he will, he knows, you let him out he always comes back."  I ask her if she could find her pills.  Where are they?  Well, they should be there right in front of you.  Where?  On the counter... you know, between the toaster oven and where the cat eats...

This goes on for a while.  I've been spending the hours of the afternoon working slowly through web sites, on-line forms, looking for jobs.  I figure out each little step they want, that the machine wants, that the form wants, and then I get ahead, and forgot to hit the add button so that the information I saved is typed out.  The resume, to upload it, for the US Postal Service, it can't be in doc.x, so I figure out how to convert it, there in Microsoft Word.  All of this is very taxing on the brain and its verbal motor oil, and you can only get so far.  Keep going, sure, the next layer of making something work in the on-line world.

So at the end of conversation, I'm pretty fried.  And by the end of one bottle of my ten buck pinot noir, it's not enough.   I save a glass for dinner, but I know I don't have enough, and no back-up, except for the 2012 Beaucastel Chateauneuf Du Pape over there lying on its side on top of the Chinese chest my brother passed down to me.

Biden nails his speech, and I've had my delicious stew, with lovely chunks of potatoes in it, which I don't normally do given the arthritic factor.  And I'm tired, but I've been sitting around in this apartment getting lazier and depressed by my joblessness, and job applications, content writer, some kind of tutor and writing coach, and no wonder I liked the restaurant, because it was just simple, hard work, tired out, you ate your dinner, had a glass of wine, and you went home.

So, as I have been lazy about going down to Georgetown to check on the house, the pile of mail, the backyard summertime lawn, just to make sure everything is okay.  Nighttime, it is far easier, after midnight, to ride your bike down along the Canal Road highway coming down Foxhall and then underneath Georgetown University up on the high crumbling rock bluff with all its weeds.  The traffic is scary, coming at you only a few feet away, and then add the airplanes, and suddenly the sleek tall commercial buildings singing of jobs and hard work and shiny, four lanes of traffic, and people driving fast, in an urge to get somewhere.  Add bright hazy light and heat to that, no fun.  So in the night it's a relative joy to make the ride, and I get into the Western commercial district of Georgetown, sleepy in its own way, as if the shop spaces were too large for what they offer, cavernous, closed, intimidating, unless you have the huge self-confidence, like that of the young lady in overalls, maybe she was a Georgetown student, model pretty, who walked right into one of the clothing or fine furniture stores, (and I'm in my grubby shorts and cycling shirt with all the keys and phone and wallet in back pockets and courier bag), I get up the little hill by the old Little Tavern hamburg joint building, up to be even with the great university and further up JFK's old Federal style house on N Street, and I ride eastward, across Wisconsin Avenue, and a few more blocks and I pull up in front of the proud steadfast old farmhouse with the two floor porches on the side, lock my bike up across the street.  The key works, and I stumble in over the mail pile.

The lawn has lazily grown, high grassy weeds of old grain, a volunteer weedy tomato plant growing up out of the pebbles.  I pull the shed door open and get the heavy old mower out, first of all announcing my presence to any little creatures who might have taken up their habit here, push it around over the thick grass, pulling out falling sticks, and it's nice and cool out.  Back in the kitchen, with the big screen on to MSNBC's coverage of Joe Biden nailing his convention speech, there is nothing in the fridge, no beer, and with wine in the rack, I knew it, is nothing but fancy wines, and I'm not going to open a 2005 Margaux, so after taking a slice of American cheese out of its neat plastic wrapper, finding its beautiful astronaut texture there, folding it deliciously down the gullet, I remember there ought to be some decent sweet vermouth in the dining room liquor shelf, and okay, the nice Carpano, a little sip of that, mellow and vanilla creme soda, the cheaper on with orangey flavors, nice in its own simpler way.  I remember how Madam Korbonski, heroine of wartime Warsaw, introduced me to the summertime delight of Carpano Punt e Mes on the rocks in a tumbler, yum, just like Pepsi.  I go about the house, checking on the security system, beeping, a yellow orange light on, I sort the mail a little, some light bulbs are out, but everything seems fine.  A box to pick up, thrown over the iron gate by the delivery, slightly damp on the bottom, turns out to be good old Biden hats, and things, now out of the rain.

I have another slice of orange anatto American cheese, try a sip of port.  I watch tv.  I stand before the tall windows in spaces of the orderly uncluttered house with everything simple and spare and in its elegant place.

I don't want to ride back in the bright heat with the cars zooming by, and at this hour, I don't know how safe the towpath along the canal is, I'm sure it is, but...  so I pack up and make my ride back, back along the highway past M Street, and already, at first hint of blue light, cars are speeding along, exceeding the speed limit, I'm sure, and I click the bike into low easy gear and up the hill, beyond the old rusting trolley trestle, up past the bamboo forest and the cut bamboo that looks like its waiting to be bulldozed somewhere.  Cars come suddenly around the curve where I need to cross Foxhall, speeding up the hill, so I wait for the light to turn.

I lock the bike up, outside, unsling my courier bag, get back in, take a shower, and fall asleep and sleep well.

But there's really not much point in being a poet.  It's certainly not a job.  And I made that great mistake.  I can see why I thought I should be one, perhaps more so a poet of prose, in a Melville way, but it's all by ear, musical, anyway, words, when you write them down out of your head.  You wouldn't even expect it to pay the bills.

Even ten minutes of NPR, a few outside thoughts, and the line to mind gets staticky.  Then what that happens, it's a tough tug of war.  Keep going?  Are you done for the day?  Should you, as old Ernie put it, stop and let the well replenish itself over night...   Poetic thoughts go poof.  Watch a cat video on Facebook?  That's what Werner Herzog does.

At dusk I find out the back window in the bathroom, a male deer, later joined by a female at dusk. I watch them graze on the weeds and vines, flicking their ears against insect life.  But the male, I see that his velvet is hanging down from his antlers, like leathery rags that flap about.  As night falls, there are male deer now, sitting down now, in profile as they chew their cud.  I hear another plane coming into town, and the lights of it pass overhead with its whoosh, low, reminding me of 9/11.  Then another one comes over,


Coming back from the little market my heart pounds as I climb the stairs of the old apartment building with a small amount of groceries.





I cannot even describe this time.  It brought out all the lies I'd been living for the last 35 years, all the illusions, the fool's paradise I'd kept afloat until I couldn't.  The consequences being the loss of my possessions and my living space.  It was not an easy time to write, with an ever present unseen enemy of suddenly being out of work, out of luck, out of income, no money to pay the rent.  It was a very hard to write.  I forgot how.  But I needed to do it, despite it all, just for saving, for reassuring something inside me that I had to protect.

But I knew it all along.  I would need to make a transition, at some point, yes of course, I would have to grow up.

Today, what did I do.  I laid around in bed for a long time.  I just didn't feel like getting up, and that's hard to say.  I didn't feel any hope.  Over the course of the evening, speaking with an old school friend Darryl, from my old hometown, I drank red wine from 1.5 liter bottle of Sangiovese, 12%.  Then I heated up the oven and the iron pan and seared lamb sausages from the farmer's market, along with roasted broccoli, and then later a couple of hot dogs, while still drinking away.  Then I listened to the Democratic Party Convention on the radio, then I read some, then I looked at what I'd managed to do earlier in the day, applying for a couple of Whole Foods jobs, Safeway, then looking the possibilities of content writing on the website Indeed.com.  I could not find the form to fill out for being a substitute teacher on the DC Schools website, as hard as I looked.  I need to learn Zoom, I told myself.  The thought of tutoring scares me.  The scope of disaster, enormous and all my own fault.

To he who would write, beware;  it will be a disaster.  Get a job.  Lead a decent life.  Don't allow the shame to fall upon you.  Use your understanding of words to be an editor.


I'm mediating to Tara Brach, who is talking about bringing a smile to your eyes, the facial muscles, the heart, when I get a text from my aunt, who's going in for cataract surgery the next morning.  I give her a call, and then give her a run through on what I'm doing looking for a job.  I'm tired at this point, and speaking about job prospects and what you've been trying and how you've been taking it gets tedious to explain, though perfectly necessary, and so I start eyeing the one bottle of $10.99 Pinot Noir I bought across the street today in the little market under new Korean ownership.    Okay, it's time.  We have a nice conversation, including of how my grandfather started to see rats climbing the walls once they tried giving him antidepressants in the nursing home where he was laid up after his stroke, left side paralyzed.  He couldn't take pseudophed without similar craziness, which I avoid too.

But once you open a bottle...  I have slices of low-sodium chicken breast with a spread of hummus, and go back to the computer, looking at content writer job offerings, taking a grammar test for one I've applied for, which goes surprisingly smoothly.  I see all the flaws in the presented sentences.  This is easy for me.  It makes sense.

Later on, past everyone else's bedtime, I take a walk around the block down toward the bluff, but I say to myself "I'll never be happy now, because I've missed all chances at a normal life, wife, kids, all the usual of God's happinesses, giving grandchildren in my image to comfort my old mom in her tough old age, and who will look after me with comforts in my own old age..."  It's just another thing stacked up against me, the isolation of these times, the misery of lying in your bed looking up at the pattern of light through the blinds on the ceiling, unable to fall asleep.



I wake up feeling guilty.  Of course I do.  Mom alone far away.  Poverty.  Too many possessions.  Too much wine for too long, thinking I'd be a sommelier.

I want to meditate.

I spend much of the day on the bed, meditating, corpse pose.   There's nothing I really want to do, or feel I can do.  You can only take so much before you need to calm yourself and regroup.  I have some tea, even freshly made, but it doesn't inspire me.  The water wasn't hot enough, and I was light on the tea leaves.  It's raining heavily, Hurricane Isaias coming through as a tropical storm, wind up in the trees when I wake with the light.  I call mom, no answer, get through to her later, then go back to my meditations on the bed.  No room on the floor with the bike on the trainer stand.

I finally get up and take a shower.  Shaving off a week's growth of beard takes several passes, holding the razor under the water steadily after each swipe to clear the blades.  My prescriptions should be ready, so, I try mom again as I venture up the sidewalk past the reservoirs up the CVS in the old Palisades movie theater.  Dr. Patel called in, after my appointment Monday.  I'm standing in the line, after the woman in front of me, not so happy herself, the African lady finally coming back from the bathroom walking on one artificial leg, is just about through with her business.   And then the phone is buzzing.  Mom calling.  Yes, Mom, what should I do, everybody left, maybe I should just kill myself.  What should she do.  I'm not doing too well myself, I tell her.  I'm at the CVS.  Can I call you back in five minutes...

The pharmacist behind the second counter suggests I get a flu shot.  Sure, why not.  One more precaution for the times.  One of the prescriptions is ready, the generic Lexapro, at a slightly higher dosage.  The doctor forgot to call in the beta-blocker Propranolol which tames blood pressure and eases some of the body's reaction to anxiety.

As soon as I get out, I try mom's landline again.  No answer.  It's getting hotter now, sweat pooling under my cap, matting down my hair as I walk my loser self back along the reservoirs toward the little apartment, putting my mask up as people approach, under the elms.



The Buddhist thinking tells you to mediate upon your cravings, to observe them without judgment.  What do they feel like?  Where in the body.  I keep trying mom as I get into the apartment.  Taking off my linen shirt, the hat, my glasses, the mask, washing my hands.  The craving for wine starts in the chest, lower, near the solar plexus.  It's a desire to find some calm, with all the stress of the day that's hitting you in the gut, a weight that's pressing on you, extra,  on top of breathing.  Then you throw in the loneliness on top of that.

Just a little bit, on the rocks, with a good splash of soda water.  Just to calm down.  It doesn't feel good necessarily, with a few sips in, but it's a habit, an obsession, and in some ways, it works.

Then she calls, as I'm cooking the black eyed peas I soaked overnight, around 9 at night.  Again, it's the matter of whether she's in the right place or not.  Yes, you are mom.  The cat knows his way back and forth.  She'd put the phone down, per our agreement, to go out and check to make sure, looking at the number on the apartment townhouse complex.  I waited awhile.  Finally, I heard the kitchen door, not the front door, creak open, and then I hear her talking to the cat, asking him if this can works, after opening it up.  Then she goes away.  I hear her in a few more minutes calling my name, as if I were there in person.  Then I hear the phone go click.  So I try calling back, it rings, she picks it up, but doesn't speak to it, and then she hangs up again.  I call, it rings, but then I see she's calling.






When I get up, and have the courage, I look at these postings.  Rushes, they are like, to be looked upon as film, raw and unedited, for what they caught and didn't catch.

There are still the great worries, condensing in the lone night as dew out of the sky, profound.  As if everything were coming together, the November election, my mother's health, possible eviction notice from not having a job, from not being employable at age 55, something I've left myself open to.  But those cheery thoughts subside, and there is the writing again to look at.  As Buddha says, good will follow after pure thoughts, and so I look for how to think pure thoughts, rather than evil ones.

Our life is shaped by our mind;  we become what we think.  Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it.
Our life is shaped by our mind;  we become what we think.  Joy follows a pure thought like a shadow that never leaves.  (The Dhammapada.)



I'm drinking my green tea, the gas on the stove working again.  My personal hotspot is giving me trouble again.  I never quite figured out how to get internet here, though I pay Verizon a monthly amount for a landline, no working phone jack.  Depressions make you irresponsible.

The Corona Virus Pandemic has come with different stages, globally, nationally, locally, personally.

There will be many more steps to go through, each one veiled, no control over it.  No way to get the mind around the shock, the misery.

Some of us are okay, sometimes, with the alone time, using it for something, we don't know quite what.   Meditation.  Thomas Merton might see it as putting out an ear for God.

I can't blame anyone for "not feeling comfortable," as my old acquaintance lets me know, wanting nothing to do with me.  Fine.  Not feeling comfortable having anything to do with me and my way of life, and all my mistaken paths.  Even I don't feel comfortable.  What if I have to pack up all my books and guitars and bikes and clothes, and the important papers, and the furniture...  what can I salvage?  Put it in storage?  Where?  How to pay for that?  No one would want me to be going through all this at my age, but that's how it is.  It's not always easy to be Zen.  And like a fool I still chase the supposed pleasures of life, as if I had no other option.  And thereby, wasting time.  Wasting years.  Wasting time away from the real joys of life, family, hard work, love, closeness, shared time.  Not alone time.

Only if you were "mentally ill" would you need "alone time," all that meditation, and all that exercise.

(Perhaps Siddhartha Gautama is the world's first admittedly open neurotic person.  Giving others the courage to follow in his path for mental, spiritual and psychological well-being.  The first person to say, "hey, what is this all about anyway..."   In doing so, grasping that which is, what we all have in common.)


The same way I felt before, looking for a career, and years go by.  Writing.  The old embrace of that which is unsatisfying about the human condition, of how we are not perfect academic scholars, perfect objects of love and desire, of how we somehow do not end up on the righteous career path we were cut out for, because of all the excess of things going on in our minds, the things we must cope and contend with in order to find out where our talents lie.

People like to portray themselves, if given the opportunity, as energetic, wise, smart, good at all things, policy, investment banking, perfect explication.  Perfection.  Human intelligence.

Dostoevsky liked the night.  He liked, at least in his fictional world, religious elders who had friendship for the rustic, the idiot, the simpleton, the sinful.  In his own fictional world, Dostoevsky was the idiot himself.



It's 90 out, but down under the grove of the pines it's pleasant.  There's a light breeze.  The pine needles are dry, still soft.  I do my yoga slowly, very slowly, focusing on alignment, upright posture, straightness, opening up body.  Straight lines aligning the energy centers from base to top.

It feels good.  Each pose gets tweaked, a little better, a little better.  Progress with all poses, and in the lotus.  I take a little walk afterward on the grass, barefoot, and then, back to the apartment.  This is good for my health.  Last night, I only had a few glasses of wine last night, over a spread-out period, so this simple act of going down to the bluffs to find a cool spot feels significant.


But I have the foolish years to live down.  A lot of wasted opportunity.  Try not to dwell on that.  Just try to get better.

Reading Vonnegut's thoughts last night:  Drinking gives you a spasm of happiness, but is overall destructive.  Sadly so.  Here I am, because of drinking.  The way the depressive, the natural writer, finds relief from pain.  Except it only causes more harm down the road.

So what do you do?

Well, you try to be good.  To not fall into the same old trap night after night, drinking a bottle of wine all alone in your apartment.  That's not a good thing to be doing, and your health comes first.

The monkish balance has its draw for me.  The yoga under the trees fits perfectly.  I don't even need a mat.  The pine needles are soft enough, wear some bug repellent, bring some water along.  You'll be good.



Waiting on Congress.  What are they going to do?  I feel like I've hit a low point.  I've been waiting on the restaurant business forever too, in that it hasn't helped my writing career, and indeed left me unfulfilled.


There were times back in college when I took getting intoxicated as a kind of sport.

But this was a huge betrayal of my father and mother.  By brother sort of encouraged me to take this tack, and I shouldn't have followed along with it.

As I lay awake at night, I wonder, to what extent did I cause damage to my brain, so that reading and focus and comprehension and concentration took a hit.

And then because of that mistake, of dulling my mind down, I fell onto a bad path in life.  My self-confidence sputtered.  I became reliant on the nightly beer.

I didn't take a class on Buddhism with Robert Thurman, I somehow missed the Dalai Lama.


I meditate now, again.  I should be looking for a job.  For a career...


I had not realized, being in it, how terrible lonesome the bar business was.  It was a huge mistake on my part, ever doing that.  I had quit my day job, a leap of faith into just working at night as a busboy, writing, thinking about what to do.  And then they, Austin Grill, offered me the job of day bartender.  And it went on from there.

I guess I was too ashamed to talk to my father openly about all this.  Which was also very dumb.  When my mom came to visit, she cried.  The restaurant business will break your heart.  Like it broke my parent's heart.  And I should have listened to her, too.

Writing too is a terrible and lonely thing to be doing.  And I guess I thought that the wine was part of the release, part of the inspiration's acting out.  It numbed the pain, while hardly fixing any bit about my life or helping it turn better.

The whole thing brought on a stream of bad memories.



This is a hard time to write.  The sense of needing to look for a job, concern over an aging parent, not to mention having to take a long look at one's own situation...  all caused by the sloth that is the writer's life....  Because I've made no decision, stood for no clear choice, not really entitled to anything more than a by-stander's career...



I'm feeling lost, without the bar to go to.  I admit it.  The space.  Fifteen years, your brain gets used to it.

And as far as the professional world goes, I am a child, an id, who feeds himself, goes for walks, but does little to help people out in the real world.  For that, yes, takes work.


The apartment is cluttered.  Books.  Piles here and there.  Some in boxes.  Not the energy to sort it out.

I clean out the bottom of the refrigerator and its bins, something having spilled, chocolate milk leaking out of a container while I was away two months.  Isolation is not fun.  Yeah, this is the consequence of the attempted living of a spiritual life, right...  There's no way to beat the system, the economic positioning of human beings...  You sit around with your books, drink some wine, great, but it's not going to get you anywhere.


I took a walk around last night, after writing down some of my thoughts, but even nature and the river at night had a useless feeling to it, a void.  As if to say, "who cares, go back to your own world, which obviously you have neglected..."

Write a resume, spring into action, serve in a school, be a clerk...  Rise above being an undesirable,  the uselessness of one who is little more than being a friendly guy for a profession.  Time is money, and opportunity, right?


Gradually, incrementally, I try to get used to the apartment again.  I try to be a human being again, back to before it all got hi-jacked, years and years ago, the restaurant business, and before, my own failures as a college student.  What can be salvaged...

I made friends with the trees again, and they had changed in two months.  The fields in the parks were mowed, and I walked barefoot in them again, and did basic yoga, warrior, tree, putting my feet up while lying on my back, and when side to side holding the legs together, good for the liver, and then a quick head-stand after sun salutations, as the mosquitoes, smaller than usual, and with more pronounced striping on their hind legs were starting in.  It contented me to be looking out over the river again, over at the Virginia side.  Another war of division going on.   A division less defined, but just as palpable.

Many emotional identifications come through me, and I had experienced many since moving in early in March in 2019, after living with good old G. for so long over there off of Embassy Row.  You have to let them come through you softly, and the yoga had opened up the channels.  I remembered the snow falling on the Elm Tree, the street wet, a bus going by, as I sat there waiting for the bus in the other direction coming so I could eat something.

Tonight, the pinot noir from Bouchard Anie et Fils, $12.99, 2018.  I felt less confused somehow.  Maybe life prepares you in steps, first this, then that, and when you're ready for the next thing, well, here it comes.




So, after three soaks in epsom salts, pressing down, a tiny chard of glass is finally raised out of the flesh of my heal, a week or so after.   Fresh blood come out, but not much.  I bandage it up again, go for a walk, gingerly stepping forward, out of the apartment.   The index finger, I can get away with a gauze pad taped over it.  But with the combination, both wounds on the left side, with the bandage care, it slows me down.  My finger is still slow, too thick to bend.

But I feel like a big bum when I wake up.  What to do?

My left index finger is still wrapped with gauze, healing from five stitches ten days ago, the cheap wine key employed in haste breaking a chilled bottle of Beaujolais at the neck up at my mother's.  The ball of my heal has a dull ache, having stepped on a tiny piece of broken glass as I prepared my mother's kitchen floor to be mopped, soon starting to bleed.  I stopped the bleeding and got on to mopping.

Yesterday, finally, after two months, on a hot bright July day, I got on the road.

Today, I got up, early it felt, and dropped the rental car off, not wanting to know how much the bills was going to be.  I walk back.  Hot, a light breeze from the west as I walk toward Georgetown.


It's a lonely drive through Pennsylvania in such circumstance.  Mom calls as I'm descending from the high ridges down into Pine Grove, where I lose cell coverage in the pointed hills.  She's telling me about what she's reading, a new wish for some kind of spiritual work, but, as she says, she's crocked.  I get my Whopper Junior.  Put it down quickly, get back on 81, but her line just rings.

Past Harrisburg, I stop off of 15 in Dillsburg for gas at a convenience mart.  Gettysburg, it's just about dusk, and I'm tired of the road, and just feel a need to get back to the apartment, but I feel I owe it to myself to stop.

On the Taneytown Road, the first left takes me up a narrow wooded lane and there I am at the gap between the Round Tops.  I turn right slowly up the hill, a placard to Chamberlain’s Maine division.

I park the car.  A last adventure with it, costing me serious money now.  Here I am, looking out from Little Round Top.  Dusk.  My iPhone storage is full, so I have to resort to posting live on Facebook, panning the camera function from left to right looking west.  Harley-Davidsons pop and splutter in the distance.  There’s groups of people here, a boy wearing a Lincoln stovepipe hat, followed by heavy mother and daughters.  Home schooling she mentions, as she apologizes for passing as I have my phone out.



The problem with being creative, is that not only will your work be creative, but that you will be creative making problems for yourself, such as you would not if you went by the rules.




Back here, the apartment...   even walking around here, I feel a limit, I feel the boredom, the why be interested in anything in mid-July as summer turned into endurance.  It might have been slightly romantic to enjoy being able to walk around in the middle of a neighborhood that felt safe.  Lots of trees.  A bluff overlooking the storied Potomac, sometimes with a wine skin.  But now, I don’t know.

You can turn a corner sometimes.  Suddenly you're writing again.  Your dropping buckets down a cold natural well, sploshing into the cool deep, a bucket a water of out, slopping, having to strain for gold.

Then it may stop again.  Though humor is done by the ability to imitate things.  Buster Keaton imitated stunts, Harold Lloyd who had but one fully working hand, they imitated what they could see, as any other artist must, what they could envision.

I suppose I didn't bring the charger of my laptop, as if I did not wish to keep my writing up.  I didn't know I'd be there more than week.  I thought her MacBook cords would work...


Now that I was back in DC, my stomach was feeling weaker, and food didn't have so much appeal, but just to quench up the wine I felt like I needed, as a pain killer.  It had been a hot walk, all the way back from 14th and K.


McDonald's, a $2 double cheeseburger as a treat for the nerves in a hot parking lot in Scranton after getting through afternoon torrential rain, slowing, hazards on, danger of hydroplaning, getting back on 81, traffic slow, then, later, a Burger King in Ravine, Pennsylvania, then a quarter pounder at the Gettysburg one, just before ten.

And as I'm driving back with the Round Tops to my right now, and feeling too shocked and absorbent, I'm feeling sensitive, and as I go over the little ripply hills along the stone and other farmhouses of Taneytown Road.  A car is up behind me with lights, and I don't see how I really even want to go the speed limit of forty here.  With windows upon, the light exhaust piped roar, of a downshifting Harley, now I see the headlamps of three at least, but it's just the dusk of night falling into true night, eyes harder to adjust after all the light of summer from early dawn to late dusk, and so maybe no one minds speeding down a bit.

I look for the ramp onto 15 South, as the land is flatter, the speed limit 55 now, I strain a bit, looking for it, a sign to the right.  This drive is harder now, it seems, even as it is mellowed into an unflappable passage of yearly routine, listening to NPR, moods related the stories of narrative, just for company.

And what have I done, professionally with life...  Why have I not been in the classroom... as being a lawyer may have been somewhat unrealistic.

I wish sometimes I had not gotten into drinking beer.

Is it the sudden feeling of aging, as of one very close, the nervousness of elder vulnerability, all the good years behind you, why not a sexy siren son, "what are we doing for fun," mom asks.  "today."  The road feels harder.  The traffic behind me, more aggressive.  Could there be a way for communicating with each other, as we all drove along in the night.  As a child I thought of a sign you could put on top of a car, to signal, in polite verbal words, the thoughts one has.  If you're brain really wanted to say "shithead," then "shithead" would print up on the little marquee sign, lights spelling words, perhaps in neon, perhaps not.  Generally you might try to be polite, and that might work for a while.  Maybe you could communicate in a general good wishing way, but mainly because you had some sort of a poetic thought.  Or, as if to say, "hey, check that out."  Drivers from the front and back would see the taxi light graphic sign like sort of a message board.  Perhaps there could be a special channel that the driver could press, to send a verbal signal somewhere that it could dictated, typed out on the sign.  They can do that, so I'm told.

A sense of a space, that is what dementia is about, as much as anything.  Physically, you can not move so well in a space.  You hover, knowing not exactly which way to turn.  How could you stand a good chance at finding anything, a can, a hat, a bottle of water.

It just wasn't right anymore, not being there, but at the same time, a burden of a difficult person, very sharp, not always particularly polite in some ways.  Oh, if you're going to be morose, it will be catching, she nods, like an imagined queen of the tea room, or a cottage, as if in Ireland somewhere, as she gestures around with her hand.  I say this and whatever else I do out of knowing my love for her.


Thinking and writing, is like dreaming, and dreaming needs physical space, a sense of the room and all its objects as you passed through.   Dreams are very much a studying of space.

But the bartender, the tender of the wine bar, feels like life is suddenly meaningless, because there is no longer the space you've occupied for the last fifteen years straight like Gehrig.



But when you're feeling so lost, it's hard not to want to put a little buzz on.  Feeling utterly meaningless.  So, you have to get a buzz on and try to have a little taking it slow.

All this happens when you come to an unfamiliar place, or somewhere you've not been to for a long time.  This is what we strive for, when we find something new.


Books are space.  Each of them we remember as a physical object, knowing where to find a passage in the physicality of the book.  Visually, we remember our readings, being they visual in message as well as worded, a favorite childhood book from the different stages of childhood.

My mother has surrounded herself with the inner space of books.  I look at them spread across the floor, the ottoman, the old teak table.  Layers of books and New York Times sections.  Retreating into safety.

And still there is nothing to do up there but join her, sooner or later, when the wine has been poured.

Artists aren't the only ones who care about people who stay up to the wee small hours, but, they co-mingle.




There’s a lot in Twain.  And if you’ve run into people, looked at them fair and square, you know what Twain is writing about in his tales.  Creativity.  This is all the tension he needs.  The possession of those with free will to continue on with the imaginative creative stance, in the face of public disproval, the great lack of faith versus those who do wish for such examinations.

In Twain’s world creativity is natural, a given thing, like fresh water.  The narrator’s imagination reveals the natural intellectual devices, the wrinklings of native human species genius...

Huck goes down the river, with, of all people, Jim.  He is heeding the oldest of takes of moral conduct, recognizing the equality of a fellow being, rich or poor. Huck is already fairly established at being outside of normal polite society.  He has an alcoholic father, from whom he is escaping by going on adventure that is psychologically justified.

Being somewhat on the margins, it is no earth-shattering offense to normal polite society and the chamber of commerce if such a youth goes off on travels.  It might provide a little outside commentary, a chance for an outing of comic wit, at least a break from the norm.

Twain’s prose keeps us happy, content, entertained, amused.  We don’t have the burden of mid-life yet upon us, we don’t have to bring our own imaginative experience here.  We do not have to right away bear with the potentially profound and terrifying thought of the what if we ourselves were to do such a thing, picking up and moving out into the unknown like a railroad tramp.  We are content with the refreshment of an outdoor adventure, a camping trip in good strong capable hands, a clever narrator who will keep us filled in as far as what to see and how the campfire is doing.  The big river...  I’ve never done that.

Twain takes us in through a genial backdoor to bear witness to the hypocrisies of society...


Creativity, of course, is a private individual thing.  We might go about it genially, in our spare time, or not.  But we have within, always, this great potential, even hanging about us, like Jesus’s ability of drawing parables, or like an imagined higher and more refined being like ourselves but developed as if on planets far away, were we to operate on a plane of higher and purer wisdom.


As we know, it takes great amounts of time to get anything done, it takes great amounts of travels.  And, furthermore, no, you can’t really talk about any of it, not one bit, without being taken as a reckless crazy wild person.

And so, to be realistic, you have to grow to accept that someone near you, innocuous, might be going about a wonderful creative personal life, imaginative works one has no idea about.

But woe unto the world, the world cannot handle all the creativity...

And it is, after all, one of the great insults to snub the creativity of another, as long as it isn’t offensive, up there with the Rejection at Nazareth.  A failure of education.


So there I was, not doing so well, or so it seemed by acceptable standards of adult life. My mom, when I could not restrain myself for correcting her at dysfunction, hey, she would say, I’m 80.

What could I say, to anyone...  I’d wasted the supposedly best most vigorous 30 years of my life spent in the world of adult creativity.  Guess what, folks.  It left me with nothing.  We might all feel that way.


But Twain reminds us.  We are given the room to be creative.  We are out in lost channels of the wide river in heavy fog, disoriented in the current, spinning round.  A kind of creative self destruction or a reorientation.  We get to know ourselves better, and perhaps it is our burden that our own self is all we really know, even as we are lucky to get the surprises of generosity from other people, as their own individuality will allow.



I twist the current, falling, lost.  And in this sort of dream it comes to me, here, up at my mother’s, where I linger on my camping mattress, that the old Princess from that book I wrote, with all its strange echoes and connections and half-parables, takes up the same space, the identical psychological shape in my head as my mother.  In the same way, a lot of space, from all angles, so that one is left without a leg to stand on.  The vain attempt to work, even apologetically, with the otherworldly logic of the female mind.

Now as her memory fades so that conversation is weighted down by repetition, her moodiness and tirades of justifiable anguish and vulnerability, and I being stuck here in the same boat, the similarity between her and the old princess shocks me almosr.


And the long drive, to escape, long, charged itself, to a place that is uncertain, tenuous, is fraught.  How will I rescue myself, how will I find an answer practical but also suitable, bearable for the writer, who has too long sought to create himself, building up his own little self as a cottage industry, and now having been given the time away from toil, has wasted this time, taking up the duty of another, having to cringe at the weight, an adult reverting in old age to childhood and baby talk, and even the larger the weight of finding a way to provide a secure life for himself now in a changed world.

Between such heavy psychology presences, domineering, in need of constant placating to the point of my own dishonesty, how do I live, find my own way if I wrest myself free....


There is that tie from Ahab to Huck Finn.  The journey, the adventure for meaning, creative flights, the destruction of self, finding a deeper self as one becomes informed at the peak and pit of his lostness.

There’s a lot in Twain.  And if you’ve run into people, looked at them fair and square, you know what Twain is writing about in his tales.  Creativity.  This is all the tension he needs.  The possession of those with free will to continue on with the imaginative creative stance, in the face of public disproval, the great lack of faith versus those who do wish for such examinations.

In Twain’s world creativity is natural, a given thing, like fresh water.  The narrator’s imagination reveals the natural intellectual devices, the wrinklings of native human species genius...

Huck goes down the river, with, of all people, Jim.  He is heeding the oldest of takes of moral conduct, recognizing the equality of a fellow being, rich or poor. Huck is already fairly established at being outside of normal polite society.  He has an alcoholic father, from whom he is escaping by going on adventure that is psychologically justified.

Being somewhat on the margins, it is no earth-shattering offense to normal polite society and the chamber of commerce if such a youth goes off on travels.  It might provide a little outside commentary, a chance for an outing of comic wit, at least a break from the norm.

Twain’s prose keeps us happy, content, entertained, amused.  We don’t have the burden of mid-life yet upon us, we don’t have to bring our own imaginative experience here.  We do not have to right away bear with the potentially profound and terrifying thought of the what if we ourselves were to do such a thing, picking up and moving out into the unknown like a railroad tramp.  We are content with the refreshment of an outdoor adventure, a camping trip in good strong capable hands, a clever narrator who will keep us filled in as far as what to see and how the campfire is doing.  The big river...  I’ve never done that.

Twain takes us in through a genial backdoor to bear witness to the hypocrisies of society...


Creativity, of course, is a private individual thing.  We might go about it genially, in our spare time, or not.  But we have within, always, this great potential, even hanging about us, like Jesus’s ability of drawing parables, or like an imagined higher and more refined being like ourselves but developed as if on planets far away, were we to operate on a plane of higher and purer wisdom.


As we know, it takes great amounts of time to get anything done, it takes great amounts of travels.  And, furthermore, no, you can’t really talk about any of it, not one bit, without being taken as a reckless crazy wild person.

And so, to be realistic, you have to grow to accept that someone near you, innocuous, might be going about a wonderful creative personal life, imaginative works one has no idea about.

But woe unto the world, the world cannot handle all the creativity...

And it is, after all, one of the great insults to snub the creativity of another, as long as it isn’t offensive, up there with the Rejection at Nazareth.  A failure of education.


So there I was, not doing so well, or so it seemed by acceptable standards of adult life. My mom, when I could not restrain myself for correcting her at dysfunction, hey, she would say, I’m 80.

What could I say, to anyone...  I’d wasted the supposedly best most vigorous 30 years of my life spent in the world of adult creativity.  Guess what, folks.  It left me with nothing.  We might all feel that way.


But Twain reminds us.  We are given the room to be creative.  We are out in lost channels of the wide river in heavy fog, disoriented in the current, spinning round.  A kind of creative self destruction or a reorientation.  We get to know ourselves better, and perhaps it is our burden that our own self is all we really know, even as we are lucky to get the surprises of generosity from other people, as their own individuality will allow.



I twist the current, falling, lost.  And in this sort of dream it comes to me, here, up at my mother’s, where I linger on my camping mattress, that the old Princess from that book I wrote, with all its strange echoes and connections and half-parables, takes up the same space, the identical psychological shape in my head as my mother.  In the same way, a lot of space, from all angles, so that one is left without a leg to stand on.  The vain attempt to work, even apologetically, with the otherworldly logic of the female mind.

Now as her memory fades so that conversation is weighted down by repetition, her moodiness and tirades of justifiable anguish and vulnerability, and I being stuck here in the same boat, the similarity between her and the old princess shocks me almosr.


And the long drive, to escape, long, charged itself, to a place that is uncertain, tenuous, is fraught.  How will I rescue myself, how will I find an answer practical but also suitable, bearable for the writer, who has too long sought to create himself, building up his own little self as a cottage industry, and now having been given the time away from toil, has wasted this time, taking up the duty of another, having to cringe at the weight, an adult reverting in old age to childhood and baby talk, and even the larger the weight of finding a way to provide a secure life for himself now in a changed world.

Between such heavy psychology presences, domineering, in need of constant placating to the point of my own dishonesty, how do I live, find my own way if I wrest myself free....


There is that tie from Ahab to Huck Finn.  The journey, the adventure for meaning, creative flights, the destruction of self, finding a deeper self as one becomes informed at the peak and pit of his lostness.