To be banal, I wake at 1:30, confronted by daylight in the living room.  Jazz Night, the great complication.  Make green tea, sausages under the broiler, chop collard greens to steam.

I think of Mark 3:21, the family going out to restrain Christ and bring him in, saying, "he's out of his mind."  Done beautifully in a pivotal scene in Corpo Celeste in the meeting of a girl headed for her confirmation and the priest of an abandoned mountain town, when she asks him, what does it mean, "Eli, eli, sabacthani…"   The Gospel's story tells, there was the pull of the crowd, all wanting miracles and cures, and the family pulling back, "scandalized" by Him.

I don't know why cooking has such a hold over me.  Restaurant shifts seem to make me always want a back up of protein.

Salinger later regretted, the film tells us, writing the famous book.  What kind of writing should one do in the world?  How to be expressive and personal, to convey the inner experience of humanity without exciting the crazies?  How to take from real life the juice and the crux of matters without interfering with other lives?

I am drawn to the simplicity of cooking, the chasteness of its sufficient creations, sausage, collard greens, onions, chased by a cup of the cooking water, the green tea put out in the cold between the screen and kitchen door.  Tomorrow, will be very cold, and a dentist appointment will remind me of mortality, the sort of fetal figure we are in the x-rays I always try to get out of, not wishing to see my skull as if it were Kennedy's or a glimpse of the funny blueprint the auras and the halos and the energies and the cross the body is formed around.

Great Author:  No, trust me…  Every day I wake up in a state of anguish.  That girl I can't get out of my mind, the stupid things I did twenty five years ago…  I don't know, I felt like we had a bond, psychic, physically telepathic.  But on earth, the real earth, I made this horrible series of blunders, out of shyness or arrogance, out of stupidity, out of foolishness, out of the typical college age drinking at the time…  And because of that the circumstance would be an accurate picture of what I did with all that opportunity.  I don't know what devils possessed me.  Maybe it wasn't a good idea to be an English major?  I don't know.       And even no one in my family was helpful.  "You stalked her."  Well, maybe that was true, but I really tried my best not to, because she was hard to read, one way or another, and when I held myself back, as if responding to the charge, those are exactly the times that I regret, the things that haunt me over and over…  Or, "you drank too much."  Well, I know that.  I don't think my brother's encouragement in that field was much a help.      Then it's over.  You move away, and I will say your, I mean mine, life goes nowhere, and the thing bleeds over onto everything else.  Relationships…  What the hell, can't I just get rid of it, can't I just forget about the whole thing?  Why'd I turn out to be such a bad kid?    Stalking her…  I brought her flowers at the end of the school year.  And at reunions I blew my chances being distracted by my selfish friends and acquaintances, such that the shame came over me again.  Reunions go by quickly.     I know, I'm not great at 'making things happen.'  That is how the world works, isn't it.  Just got to be pushy.  Being a New Yorker, she knew that.  And here was I some dumb hillbilly, son of a Theosophist biology professor out of the Nineteenth Century, gentle ideals.  I let him down too.  And I let the whole place down, fine as it is, a place of doing.   So every day, what do you do?  You get up, or try to, make green tea, maybe do a little yoga just to take care of the tradesman's body, eat a meaty breakfast and kind of just hole up, the writing bunker, the nocturnal life, trying to have a Zen space amidst the modern clutter of stereo, flat screen TV…   "Find what wind serves an honest mind…"  That's Donne, I don't know why it came to mind…   "Go and Catch a Falling Star?"  Kind of a misogynist poem, a modern might say.  I don't mean to offend anyone.  But I know somehow, like my Dad, I should have been a great educator, or maybe in some strange missing parallel universe sort of way, maybe I am, in a, well, ha ha, very subtle way.  And maybe, like a movie I just saw, an Italian film I found for free on late night cable, Corpo Celeste, there's that vision of Christ, from an old priest in an abandoned hill town, as someone tortured by the faithless completely unimaginative idiots, thus bringing to life His angered refrains about the generation, and also His great visible anger at the Temple.  That was, maybe now I get it, something my dad said to me, that Christ was not meek and peaceful, but that He came with a sword, angry at the current order.   Now I get it, Dad.  I shouldn't have gone meekly, even though that is a radical thought.  One that probably wouldn't get one very far anyway.  But then Christ, you know, being the Son of God, can't really control Himself…  Does that sound like too much self-justification, or, what do they call it, rationalizing?  I don't know.  But anyway, it seems in a way Jesus Christ can't really control his reactions.  Thus we almost want to shout at Him to be shrewder about saving Himself, and that's just one instance.  But this is the very source, the well of His wisdom, the things we keep, the words of His we save, the things He says to the Pharisees, the 'render unto Caesar' stuff…  So we can't really tell Him to be quiet or be a bit more cautious, or tell Him to maybe take a weekend off from it, with all this heavy prophecy stuff falling into place, "Jesus, you know, maybe it would be a better idea if we all went golfing this afternoon…"   Maybe that's what it was, in a way, even though the thought doesn't satisfy one very much in the face of palpable feelings of a severed life, one that, you know, should have gone this way, into all those successful things, but instead turned into agony… or a kind of service far more humble than one with any sort of Ego or self-pride would think much of.

Did Christ have a girlfriend and then He fucked it up?  (Some things even He couldn't control.)  And maybe even that soreness kind of drove Him, to be the sort of weirdo…  Within something here is the reason why I avoid social occasions and sit here in silence and attempt to write really what just comes to mind.  And it's not the happy 'blue-eyed' pleasant poetry of ways to happy thoughts one writes, with the hope of some romantic ending like you'd try to tack on at the end of a story that has no end.  It's not like cognitive therapy is going to come along and change me and transform the way my mind works, either, though I realize depression is exacerbated by certain fruitless activities that are often work-related.  "Good employee," crap.  "Come meet us out for a drink," yeah right.

So would I have a greater appreciation of a Kerouac, his radical nature, his belief witnessed in his work of how great profound wisdom can come from within, though maybe he was wrong for feeling that he needed to see all that craziness and all those Saturday nights and Dean Moriarty car rides.  But from him too people want a cuddly vision of something that will make them happy, and this is not what authors are really about, I'm afraid.  Kerouac's vision was great and noble and sad and meant to be closer to deeper reality than this world here we live in.  Maybe there could even be some moral commandments lying within?  No, that's probably a stretch.  Do we want our artists to be happy and contented types?  Would it discredit them in our eyes if we found them burdened by unhappy things?  "Why read that miserable bastard?  Let him go to sea on that miserable ship with Ahab."

Look at the crap that always sells.  Be virtual heroes and great sexy people living in a land of adventure, solving crime, saving the U.S.  Like the Devil himself, you might say, now that I think about it, speaking to Jesus, offering him glorious vision.  Jesus simply turns to him…  "Ouch," sayeth Satan, and is indeed obliged to go away.  Or maybe better, "you're right."

I know, it's not all bad.  Sometimes some radical things do get out there.  Inexplicably.  Maybe I'm just grumpy from having to work another Saturday night.  Am I entitled enough to think of Christian unhappiness and how that does change the world for the better?


Anything you write is going to be flawed.  Something about it will be barely tolerable.  A writer has no control over that, one good thought hidden in organic matter that then maybe needs to be discarded.  Even claims that the thought is good, those too are suspect.

Glorious writer's life…  Larkin was good at capturing that, the staring out of windows, the nighttime, the lethargy, the directionlessness, the bystander-to-life quality…  Freaky old English dude who understood himself.  And how in life, it's better to have a job than not have one.  Go figure that, a writer saying that, when he'd rather have six hours every day to ply his secret real trade, separate from the secretary with the beehive hair and the phone.  In the end, you have faith, because it's healthy, some strange animal core, like a wolf's thick skull, so that jaws could tear meat.   Larkin rode his bicycle to abandoned churches on weekends, with his overcoat.  Magnificent chap.  Honest.  Not lying in your face about all the crap and consumer stuff.  And it's like he invented a new form of writing, almost, went into territory even Shakespeare rarely entered, except in Hamlet, to which an inner voice says, 'well, hey, that's a little too weird, don't you think, admitting that;  they'll know it's you.'  Marvelous stuff, with a music about it.

Too tired to lift a finger today, sore, bit of a headache from the wine I drank when I came home, while I rode my bike on the stand in front of the television to ease the adrenaline out of my system.

It's the story within the book.  It's the story of how Salinger became a writer, the choice to be that, how that happened, the voice that permitted it.  That's his main choice, and the other things follow, the talent put to use, the work itself, the details of a story.  There's the embryonic quality to the early works, and a preservation of that in later ones.  Holden is the ontogenic.

That's the story I think every real artist of note has to tell:  why did I become what I did, in my own form of the ideal.  It would also include the discovery of the ability to write, or paint or sing (intuitively understood.)

For many reasons Salinger was a searcher, before, during and the long remainder of life.  I know the type.  The writer would gravitate toward sacred texts, but places himself close to the same level as far as the possibilities of what he's saying, either cloaked or less so.  Or he tries to absorb them.

The women in Salinger's life, wise creatures that they are, would see the pattern.  He tries this, he's a Buddhist,  then a Zen Buddhist, and then a Hindu Vedantic, while importantly keeping a character in a Jesus Prayer mantra.  He eats thawed frozen peas for breakfast, puts on his overalls, goes to his writing 'bunker,' works away, comes back, watches Lawrence Welk after dinner to dance with his lady.  My how he shifts around, one might think.  He's searching a lot, but he never lands on anything, but yet to his credit keeps on practicing, and hey, compared to the materialist values of the mainstream, there's a soothing aloe vera reality to him.

I'd put MacGowan in the same boat.  A guy who can sing.  So, he does it.

Writing, as I write in this semi-oral fashion here, is as it is for everybody, a product of brain chemistry, blood, the way our minds work.  For some the need to get up and write out all the drivel of thoughts and mental flickerings is like holistic medicine.  It readjusts the dopamine levels and provides relief to people who would otherwise venture toward depression, schizophrenia and other mental ills.

That's really the primary goal of it, so that you feel normal with yourself, that you find a place to vent out all that makes you anxious.

Now really, to include Salinger, what is a writer going to write about but about nervous breakdown stuff, propose a difference of values, go into areas of weirdness, talk about death?  If people can't do that together, he's got to anyway.  He went through the war, give him credit, saw things you and I would immediately sicken and faint at, be reduced to who knows what, as we are talking serious trauma.  "Oh, he wanted to hang out with little school girls."  "Oh, he writes about suicide all the time."  "Depressive."  Well, that's his job, to observe the human condition.  He was just braver, or more confident, than you or I.

So what if you had written something like a parable or a long short story like Salinger's famous book?  What if it was just as good, less voice, more direct thought, so that people wouldn't have to feel latched on to that voice that gets in their head, but then, maybe more like Melville, enjoy the quiet observational poetry, as our own minds get poetic when we go look at the sea.

It would seem the world was so exhausted from enthusiasm over The Catcher in the Rye, and then the great chase for its creator, that it would feel it had to ignore, for lack of energy, the books of like truths.

The authors, speaking as one, of such works as had to come out in that time, had to, broad in style, bridging East and West, would as well feel the same shallowness of the egotistical material culture, such at, as Salinger, would attempt to 'strip away ego,' or 'see the Cross,' as Kerouac attempted to see the Cross, for instance.  There would be the same inclining toward quiet, work space, hours of contemplation, ritual and routine that might leave little time for the active social life as Salinger once had in the great American city of New York.  He pulled away from that, by visceral reaction.

But then so did Dostoevsky before him, a lot of other thinkers too, not to pull away from the basic religious life of man and wife and family and a place to live and work to do, but to get away from distractions and all the people like the ones who bothered poor Kerouac, who demanded a piece of the pop image of the King of the Beats, and all that which wears out a face.

Only the most reverent and judicious of people really are allowed to be writers.  And the rest, the hangers on, the attempters, will, rather than consulting their own religious and moral identities, will cling on, and not be the best of neighbors protective, but want something for their own egos.

I get to work and upstairs at the wine bar it is as reported, 59 degrees inside, a cold winter evening outside.  Things are fine and warm downstairs in the main dining room, but upstairs the radiators have not been working, even though the thermostat is turned up beyond 85.  I take my coat off in the basement and attend to the problem, slipping in around an extra table stored near the ice machine, squeezing in through a door, to a tiny red button tucked away in the boiler room, nested between two sautered wire ends.  One almost needs a pencil tip to get to it.  I push on it, it clicks in, and the furnace immediately kicks in with a whoosh, gas fire, rising warm air.  Okay.  We have heat.

It's Jazz Night again, and despite the frigid air and icy sidewalks we are going to be busy tonight.  It will take a while, anyway, for the room to warm up.

Later, after we open, the boss comes in, stepping rapidly up the stairs.  Did you turn the heat on?  Did you check the thermostat?  (Not even hello.)  Yeah, I've only worked here ten years.  I tell him I pushed the little button.  You shouldn't have to do that, he replies.  He touches a pipe.  The heat is working now, I say, leaving it at that.  Ten minutes later, as a song on the bossa nova Pandora channel is winding down quietly into a fade, he turns up the sound system, so that the next song is blaring.   Vanessa comes over, 'it's too loud.'

Later on an old friend shows up, in from out of town visiting with pregnant wife.  The waitress has found a seat for them tucked back in the wine room.  Meanwhile, the bar has filled up, the boss's wife and her girlfriend have sat at the bar for dinner, the dining room is full, and two other groups of friends have just arrived, people I will have to chat with at a certain point.  He, old friend, was kind enough to sent me a postcard recently, the scene a French bistrot out in Denver.  "Oh, man, Ted, you'd love the place.  We had the onion soup."



In a way, I'm more clever than J.D. Salinger.  My coming of age school story never made me famous.  I can hide in plain sight, a bartender trying to get through a long night.  Just that it leaves me too tired to write somedays.  It leaves me feeling disgusted, or tired at least, with something, feeling fed up.  Perhaps it is essentially the same disagreement Salinger might have had, that basically most people love the world too much.  I can understand why he wouldn't have wanted any biographer coming knocking, any journalist, wanting a story to sell, a pitch for his own magazine and the ad commerce within.  A tiresome cult of personality hanging about him in every attempt to explain him, all tied back to the same system of judgment, of belonging, or not, to a tribe.

People come in, cling to me, to the extent that they find my reserved self useful to their purposes, to leave with a feeling of marking their territory, of having spoken intelligently off the cuff.  That is what they see in me, the sometimes jolly bartender.  "When did we see you last?"  Nothing to be bitter about, just life, just people trying to have conversation.  Conversations that will have to enter into, before they can be dispensed with, the egos we all carry around, not that there's anything completely finally wrong with that.  Just that it gets tiresome.  As Jesus found his disciples tiresome for their lack of faith.

Sin, I suppose, is a literary term, meaning it is a complex issue.  There is the discovery of a garden variety sin, like drinking too much or "jerking off"after a stressful shift, soothing at the time, but leaving one feeling strange and unhappy afterward, thus realizing the sinful nature in the excesses of the activity.  Along with sin, there is attached to it the question of dignity.  Sin compromises dignity.  One thinks less of himself, people think less of him.

But before complete condemnation, there is scale.  People like my old departed Polish neighbor, lady of the Warsaw Underground, understood things about human dignity, in the face of regime, Nazi, Soviet.  They would have a broader, or more direct, view on the issue's manifestation.  Did one, through youthful indiscretions, lose dignity, in the eye of others?  Or would judgment be a little more forgiving in a more encompassing historical view taking in the breadth of atrocities that deprive dignity from both subject and object?  Do people fall, irrevocably, for small things like momentary lapses and bad habits?  Or are the smaller more common garden variety daily excesses more forgivable given who and what we are, by nature, imperfect creatures, and also given the scale of crimes against humanity any century sees?

Such are literary matters, delving into the mistakes of life.  Twain brings to us Huck and Jim, searching for, and largely finding, a dignity that is not easily afforded them in slave-holding economic society.

Some of us are obliged to test others.  A young woman notes how a young man treats himself, to see if he carries himself with dignity or whether he sells him short and falls in with evil companions.  An important matter in choosing a mate.  To judge, too, is human nature.

But is all that hard to figure, sometimes at least?  Might we find a certain Zen in the recognition of the egotism in thoughts that take us out of the moment present before us?   As in cooking something in the kitchen would we not be able to rely on some form of intuition, as in sensing through smell that something is done, the nature of an act.