Author:  Yes, I wasted years, playing along with the whole myth of 'being a writer.'

Buddhist monk:  Perhaps there is something flawed, in the end,  about putting the reality of life into terms.  Nirvana cannot be grasped by words, by thoughts, by the mind, but only through the clear consciousness beyond self.  Spiritual insight.

I'm sure it's tempting, maybe a fundamental need, to put things into words.  Maybe it is even a good exercise.  Used in the right way.  But 'writing,' to put a term on it, is part of the heaps, the skandhas that would lead us to believe we are a self of independent thoughts and senses and apparent form.   It is through these forms that we come to realize the teaching of Buddha at its most basic, dukkha, suffering, the unsatisfactory quality of existence, and then freedom from it.  But until we are able to reach that, there is, as I'm sure you know, self-medication against the continual vacillations of mood.

Author:  That I am familiar with.  But the one thing I will say is that, yes, at gut level I found this to be the human condition, in general, behind the make-up and the show, and I guess that's why, if I could rationalize a reason out of it, why I fell in with restaurants and bars, with service people, with customers, people in need of company.   And it was all quite a show, quite an ant farm, you know, those glassed in little colonies of ants that tunnel through the sand, they don't make them anymore, sparing ants such a life.  But oh god, the years I tossed away.  What a great great shame.  I'll never be able to make anything of my life now.

BM:  Well, you were learning what we all must learn, in order to evolve.  Take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, as you can, but, become a Buddhist, meditate, take a step back.

A:  Evolution is in order, I'm sure.

BM:  Yes, it's natural, where a thoughtful person ends up.  Otherwise...

A:  You're just making matters worse.   Yes, believe me, I know that.  Somehow I didn't see it, you know, caught up in it all, trying to solve my problems...  I could cry.

BM:  That's probably what Siddhartha probably said to himself at some point.

It's a nice day out, my Sunday, so I go off to my brother's house to take his Lab for a nice walk up to the park, throw a little ball, pick up a nice poop, and then spend the afternoon visiting and dinner.  My niece and I decide to draw up a list for a vacation.  I write things on a piece of paper with a  crayon, first on the list, 'bathing suit,' which I saw carefully and slowly, 'because we're going to bath in the sea.'  The list grows, interest wanes slightly, and my niece suggest we go find some tape, because, of course, we need to tape our list shut, now that we've drawn a scribbled beach sunhat on the back side in green.  So, she leads, and we walk down to the kitchen and find some tape in 'the junk drawer.'  And four, five, six, seven pieces of tape later, most applied diagonally, not counting the throw away sections of tape, my niece seems satisfied.

Later on my bro explains to me that 'remember, you're the uncle (the adult) and she's the niece, and if you're not careful, temper her plans with some adjustment, she's going to take control with her suggestions.'  Which I gather might explain my general psychology and reason to see a shrink.  Yes, indeed, growing up the baby around some Irish domineering types, I can see that.

I am too easy going, in a world in which people management and some craftiness is required, largely so everyone doesn't turn out looking like an ass.  I've been an agreeable yes man, I've taken things young women say at face value, gone on my bumbling way at other times, and this tolerance or arrogant shy laziness to face other people, individual wills, is probably why I am where I am, a barkeep going on a large decade without a lot to show for it.  Yup.  You have to impose your will sometimes, not just be meek and turn the other cheek.

But there is the influence of my gentle father, Theosophist, Buddhist, professor of plant biology, who was gentle, kind, but stern when he needed to be.  Having seen his immigrant mother die of tuberculosis at home as a boy, learning that 'life can be pretty grim' (as he once confided me when I was young, when we drove into town to get the New York Times on a sunday), he had a certain distance from emotions, a tolerance for other's emotional outburst that came from deep within, which I suppose, temperamentally I was more drawn too, though of course I have my sins.

An interesting combination.

I read about Voidness and Nirvana, which can only be represented by admitting we have no terms for any of it, not even one.  All we have is the spiritual insight of clear mind of the Universe we are.  Maybe that's why people enjoy me as a barkeep.  I am that absence of terms, that lack of show, that amorphous kind person who is still semi-intelligent enough to crack a joke.

Well, you meditate and realize, "that's the thing:  It's the ego, that's what's causing all the unhappiness, and it's an illusion."  And looking around you, it's all about the ego!  The market economy modern "Western World" must of course cling to that consumerist ego as driver of the economy, creator of "wealth and prosperity."  All based upon this great illusion that has no deeper reality. Thus, wars are fought, empires stake claim, individuals get greedy, strife and conflict happens, money made, money lost, bitter struggles to dominate life...  All missing the point.  And yet, we don't seem to know any other way to make it happen, as if everything got away from us, so long ago, so many population booms ago, so many changes of social structure that we're stuck in our addiction and all the ways that enable, allow and continue it.  We squabble over politics, based on selfish concerns.

So, take a moment to do some good yoga, then sit cross-legged, incense lit, candle flickering before Buddha, proceed to meditate.  And then you realize, "ah-ha, This! This is what I always wanted to do with my Friday evenings, something good for you, something which gives you will-power and perspective, the perspective necessary to see the path and do the things you really need to do."  A small step forward, maybe, but earth-shaking in its own little way, changing the way you see things.  And it beats sitting and staring at your iPhone waiting for something, some message.  It lets you see the things of illusion which you are enslaved to.

The insight strikes you as an exact flip of what inculcated common sense tells us.  Unless you're an educator (and even then...) your professional identity only serves to feed the chain of egos.

Personally, I know.  To always be listening to that little figure of your ego seated at your temples, a little friend telling you what to do, very much like you were a bartender and the ego was a customer subtly persuasively demanding things to which you feel you are obliged by some duty to fulfill, it just doesn't work.  And being a person inclined toward a general kindness can make you more rather than less self-indulgent, indulgent to the ego's biddings.  There's always the ego-driven person who wants to do stuff. and though, yes, stuff can be nice and enjoyable to a point, simplicity wins in the long run.

Maybe you break out of it by slowly patiently doing yoga, incorporating that with readings, then discovering this great distance between "the real you, the real clear mind" and this little voice constantly bugging you, discovering further the littleness, the small-mindedness of that voice, its foolishness.  And hopefully you get to a place, to a state where you don't have to listen to the little pestering voice.   You see the great exaggeration wherever it crops up, and it crops up everywhere, in consumer society, but also in the very way we think.

It might not seem earth-shaking, but the perception brings a sense of peace and calm.  It helps you judiciously deal with people who are relatively more assured that they who their egos say they are, which in some ways in inevitable of them if they have lots of stuff, have 'worked hard,' 'done lots of things,' want this and that, have become a particular professional identity entitled to certain things.

It helps you sort everything out.  It buys you some self-protection.  It buys you some maturity.  But it is radical, quite so, and probably not popular amongst city people who have so much at their beck and call, so many things to do, so many options.  You have the Buddha on your side, at least.


I guess we hope or expect to find within ourselves an individual talent, something that sets us apart.  That would be a life, relying on your own unique talent.   But perhaps that's not how things get done, how novels get written.  Perhaps any work has to reject that perspective of a fixed self, of a strong ego, of individual conquering, of all the things we feel we deserve as individual egos.

The night found me experimenting with buckwheat flour, an honest attempt at pizza dough after the walk down to Whole Foods on a beautiful clear cool Thursday evening.  And while I'm down there, sure, along with a basil plant, yeast, fresh mozzarella, vine ripe tomatoes, soda water, I pick up a bottle of Pinot Noir.  I like the lower alcohol wines these days, this one from the Pays D'Oc.  And when I get home, yes, I open it, shower to get off the pollen, the feelings of great general disappointment at my own life, then start the dough process with yeast, then mixing it in and letting the whole thing rise on a warm stove.  I cook for myself, a lot, eat out as little as possible, and occasionally try an experiment.  Like the Cornell Fireman's Field Day chicken cook out recipe I tried earlier this week grilling out on a hot afternoon, trying to nostalgically duplicate that smell from boyhood summers and Fourth of July.

A writer is a person in between.  He sincerely wants to practice Buddhism and meditate and be calm and not drink any alcohol whatsoever.   But alone, recuperating from some long shifts at work, sore, feeling depressed, attempting to cook for himself, for energy as much as anything else, he has some happy juice.  And perhaps this represents a basic inability to step forward, not having the courage, the moral fortitude, to just say, you know what, that's it, I quit, I'm getting away from wine (and the rest of it), goodbye.  But the follow through, pretty good sometimes, isn't perfect.  To the mind, a complete ban seems a little severe, no?

You acknowledge the good that you have done, the cutting back, the distancing from the knee jerk, "time for some wine now."  That's been good.  But after you do the tidying up, the dishes, the groceries, the laundry, and the exercise, more important, you made no advancements.  You frittered away Friday by sleeping in, because you are lazy and still a little tiny bit foggy, not clear in the head. And this is a waste.

This vacillation is evident in Keroauc, life and works.  It didn't help him when people came knocking on his basement window as he wrote, "King of the Beats, King of the Beats...  Let's party with the King..."  His work, of course, is peppered with spirituality, and he'd been a serious reader of Buddhist literature.  But when we read him in Dharma Bums (I think) and he says at the end, lyrically, "a new life for me," alas, we know it's not true.  He's stuck in a rut.  No references to get him out.  The same thing happens in Big Sur, trying to be a good boy, but falling to temptation, and then really going through a horrible alcoholic episode, that he faithfully recounts, at one final point, he swears, seeing "The Cross."

Don't want to play by all of society's rules?  Well, pretty soon you're going to be your own worst nightmare, nothing but a goddamn bum.

Meditation is the thing.  Through meditating calm is achieved and life's surroundings will improve.  And with that in mind it comes to me how when I wait on people, particularly those who've already had a drink, ego comes forward, a person's false construct to which he has clung to in order to be 'who he is,' in order to be 'a success, with family and property,' an adopted identity of mannerisms and its own (tedious) sense of humor, not that that ego personality is not affectionate or friendly.  The ego jumps out of their eyes and mouth and the person within, whatever, however we might construe their true 'self,' has receded, as if entranced by the show of this ego, this mirror, this projection of 'who I am.'  And so you have to--or rather I often enough find myself in this situation--dance and duck and dive around this bestial ego that is trying to nail you down as well in the same way, "oh, what is he?" claiming to know in the same ego terms.  Is that why people get clinging and touchy in wine bars?

I feel tired after a walk around the block, and fall into a long nap, feeling the pollen again.  Napping is good, causing no harm.

I got home at 1:38, or that was when I turned the TV on, to come down after my night behind the bar. You can't just come home after work and fall right asleep.  I have a little Beaujolais to chase some feta and fresh mozzarella.  Still hungry.  At work I waited 'til all had gone to eat the salmon tartar I ordered.  I reheated the food I brought in the oven at behind the bar (ground organic beef burger, grilled peppers, brown rice) rather than waiting 'til I got home so that I wouldn't be kept up too late digesting or wake in the middle of sleep.  After I ate I looked out the window at the downpour heavy rain.  I did the last few tedious things to close out the shift, put the checkout with the money in the manager's office, changed out of work pants, went down to the basement to get my bike.  The rain had stopped, little shafts of mist rose from the blacktop, and the air smelled sweetly of pollen and weedy basil.  Over the Buffalo Bridge the street lamps of Rock Creek Parkway below shone into expanding cones of watery air.

The hospitality is gone now, behind me, the smiles, the jokes, the graciousness, the conversation, the eye contact, the genial hand gestures, and I sit around alone waiting to be sleepy enough for bed.  I made no notes on the day, watch an episode of Bar Rescue, and then the Dave Chappelle Show, with many commercials, nothing on PBS, beyond old sunken D-Day equipment with its own sad watery grave stories, the body not wanting to move.   Two nights back at work after my stay-cation, two nights interacting with people, doing what I do, good people, entertained.  I didn't want to go back, but I went back, and I did a good job, but it all feels hollow, see-through, or rather, seen-through.


And today I wake up from them feeling down, wishing to be out in nature somewhere...  And I find my depression coalescing around the friend of my father's who encouraged me to get into environmental studies a long time ago, another opportunity I shrugged at.  The man did a lot for Massachusetts wetlands preservation.  I could have played a small part doing something useful for humanity, and made a life studying nature, as I was meant to, but instead I was selfish, a slave to the emotions of pop culture, to the Black Monk nihilism of fancying myself a writer as if I had something to write about, as if there were a purpose to it.  I know intuitively that the wine from last night, which really didn't seem a lot (and no esophageal burn from a mellow Beaujolais of 12% alcohol) has inclined my chemistry to feeling down and hopeless, but still I have to get through this afternoon, after a lazy nap which turned out to be sound sleep, and on to a better mood.

But this is all conscious thought, of not much worth.

I call mom as I walk up Massachusetts to the sanctuary of the weedy species-invaded slice of forested nature that exists at the edge of Rock Creek Parkway and the tamed stream itself of man made rock banks with sewer run-off pipes as rush hour traffic heads north out of town.  "Put that energy into finding a class to take, or a retreat," my wise mother tells me.  Okay.  On the wild side of the creek I walk along a dirt path and stop at the small footbridge to look down and look down at the brown snake resting motionless on top of the pile of branches and dead tree trunks, a park bench submerged topped with twiggy detritus on the upstream side of the pilings, and as I walk up its gentle rounded slope a green heron skims in overhead and lands, wings spread, on a branch above the water.  I heard two of them overhead, calling each other as I crossed Sheridan Circle after my long night with my ignoramus coworker, close to home on my bike, and looked up in time to see one following another in the honeysuckle perfume mist.  Maybe this bird is one of the same?  I watch the bird for fifteen minutes or so as it moves closer to the water, taking interest in something in the weedy silty bank.  Runners come and go, and cyclists blow through a bit too fast, one road biker silent without warning I could have easily turned into, intent on his status amongst cyclists.  The bird has a pointy beak and feathers that stick out behind its head, its cap, an aerodynamic accent for the speed with which it strikes forward.  I leave the bird watching down into the brown water.  People consume exercise and get very serious about it.  Only two people, women, stop and query me about the bird I watch.

Interesting that some atoms, such as carbon, have a karma of their own, which determines whether or not they come to constitute organic or inorganic materials, making up the bird or the stone.  I walk slowly along the path, trying to more conspicuously look not like a troubled strangler type when women walk or job by, and I am looking at nature anyway, at leaf form, or the way wild grasses are growing upright, like a head of hair, on top of an overturned tree's rooted stump of intertwined roots and stone and hardened dirt.  I stop and sit on my old decaying log meditation spot uphill over the feeding stream that comes down from behind Dumbarton Oaks, and as I've walked here I've thought about how the efforts to calm and assuage the mind, through wine last night, have resulted in a kind of backfire, the mind less controlled through the abeyance to it of calming it artificially, today the mind everywhere, difficult, and in a bad mood, so to speak.  I need to meditate, and maybe do plow and headstand and shoulder-stand.

From its writing in 1973, thereabouts, there is a line from Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard as he's leaving the last outer towns of region of the Crystal Monastery of remote Nepal, after having crossed many high ridges and difficult passes and paths, as he realizes, on the trek back to civilization, that he's leaving the last stands of the old faith, that mankind has entered a dark age as far as its spirituality.  Are some of us left in such an age as isolated candle flickerings of faith as the modern world drives by intent on its worldly missions without carrying along much deeper thought beyond their own struggle for material comfort and profit?

I still feel like hell by the time I slump home, but, probably, better.

I remember, from last night, my boss, sitting next to his wife and a few of her friends at the bar as he ate his trout and talked to a friend of mine with whom he shares an interest in sailing, telling the man, responding to the jokes the man was telling, kidding me indirectly, "it's a very hard job, being a bartender... " He let the statement hang in the air.  "You look at the bottles (on the shelf) and they talk to you.  I did it once.  They look good.  Beer, schnapps, beer, schnapps...  I put on some pounds, and I was twenty.  You don't see many fifty year old bartenders who drink shots of Gran Marnier."  He wipes up some sauce from his plate with a bit of bread.  I like my boss.  I've seen the guys who did the Gran Marnier at close range, yes I have, the thing back in the day in Georgetown.

I say this for other bartenders, for other people who've fallen into odd work, night shifts.  It's hard.  It colors the rest of your life in a thousand different ways.  You're nice, exceedingly kind to just about everyone who comes in, but when you go out in public, no one knows you, and they don't care, and they won't stop to be kind for a moment--why would they, how would they know?  Thus one can see why Gehrig, even Gehrig, was shy and had enough self-doubt to go back into dugouts and almost cry sometimes, because as much as anything he knew the entertainer's life of isolation even though it wouldn't seem so isolating, even though it seemed he all the friends in the world he would possibly want, an adoring wife, though of course she would have felt the same isolation.  Gehrig would have been stuck being friends with Ruth.

I am a surviver of a strange kind of gulag, one of unhappy people who entertain, one of the Gran Marnier drinkers, who tolerate ignoramus co-workers.

Static, static everywhere...  Where does mass culture end and the person's mind begin?  Wake up and try to avoid it.  What do I need today?  What do I need to check in on?  Pick up baseball tickets over in Georgetown?  Go grocery shopping--yes, but where, and what on the list?  Yoga, and meditation, surely, just like dishes and a load of laundry, careful to keep the pollen level low.  Walk to grocery store, or ride bike?  The pressing in of information, news, weather, reminder of the job...

What escape is there from popular desires, from the unquestioned habits and accepted behaviors of belonging, from the ticking of the clock?  To indulge in one popular release, leads to other, more wish to have wine, being out on the town, and all of that, you know, it's like a mass lie, a mass agreement, 'oh, this will do;  it's the best we can do;  try it, you'll like it,' and then everybody participates in it, primarily to belong, to fit in, to acclimate, to be social, to have a bit of fun along with work.

And yet all that provokes great anxiety.  Or is it that I feel completely uninvested, lacking sincerity when I try to fit in or do the popular things, always the lithe little voice in the back of the head, you'd rather be somewhere real, in tune with the deep truth of reality which in our world can be best described as agreeing with Buddhist thought.  There never was a heavy fixed self, so why make big impossible plans for it, be the great lawyer, the business person (unless you could really fit such activities into a meaningful pursuit of the Dharma.)

A little bit of camping gear arrives, and while I'm happy with it, the insulated sleeping mat, the mummy bag, the water reservoir, the water purifier, the backordered REI Quarter Dome 2 tent--yes, I like stuff too, maybe in the way the crow does, shiny objects, curiosities--there's an element of 'a child's game' to it.  Reading on the web has lead me this morning, to read up the Kagyu Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, in particular on Taking Refuge (in the Three Jewels--Buddha, Dharma, Sangha) and, well, becoming a Buddhist.  It seems a pretty drastic thing to do, but maybe otherwise you'll to be left always facing discontentment, and somehow persuaded to do things you really honestly don't want to do, as if lacking a language, a way to propose, to say no, to say 'here's what one really should be doing now, forget all that society stuff, none of it is all that satisfying anyway.'

Try to find a connection outside of family, the life you already have, and even were it great and intimate, would not it be undermined by my own packings, my own lack of security, profession, real estate, etc., unless other people were miraculous too, like your mom.  Or would it not be undermined by your own timid weakness to offer in real understandable terms the truth behind human activities...

Well, draw up a grocery list.  You need to eat, healthily, as that much has been established.


So much of stuff spoken of in social barrooms is details, is a lot of strutting of unimportant things.  If people could check their egos at the door, that would be nice, but most of the time they sit and wait their chance to do what everyone else does, me me me.

The past, it turns out, has worked out just fine.  I wrote a book from the heart, and its overall effect, missed by the professional reviewer, has a point, which is to downplay the importance and the sway of emotions...

A few days off and I haven't even written anything.  I've been for walks in Rock Creek Park, Thursday in the rain, Friday, Saturday, scrambling up the outcrop rocks above the creek and the stream that comes down through the woods to feed it where I saw a red squirrel scoot under the footbridge, cheeping at me, two notes, disappearing into the rocks then reappearing several more times, two more notes, drawn out, as if we were playing a little game, and then he finally scampers away unseen, maybe across the stream under the fallen tree.  I know that meditation is helping, helping me gradually clear my deeper mind, and slowly, gradually improving my surroundings with calm.  On my way to the woods I speak to my mom, and we talk about books and the list serve for the society of the history and preservation of reading materials and books.  She's found a book that lists what Melville read, and I have a twinge of regret for not having read any Melville in a long time, regret for allowing myself to be dumbed down in my work, but also a crack of light that holds out reading as a part of salvation that might even give me some career direction.

It was a decision to make, meaning it wasn't easy or self-evident to stay home, not take the train up to Amherst for a little get away.  I cancelled the train reservation and got caught up on rest, and slowly the pain in my neck and shoulders eases away.  "Was it all about going to see so'n'so who treated you terribly," my mom asks, and honestly, I can say no, though it is nice to meet again quality women from old college days, safe to admit a mutual crush from years ago now that they are married and with kids and jobs.  It's a place to visit, far less light pollution, stars, gentle old campus, tree specimens, view of the Holyoke Range, the quiet, and of course, just to get out of DC, the swamp.  The Friday morning came, and I just wasn't up for it, eight plus hours on the train, and with old family friends busy with grandkids visiting, no room at the inn for that extra night, the spiritual check-up...  I will visit again sometime.  And interestingly enough, I felt no regret for not going, and maybe chalk that up to meditation, the calming of thoughts that race in the mind that can drag one off like wild horses.

Calm is not found having to go off to tend bar, and I finally get in some good yoga and a lotus pose.  I lay back in corpse and I feel the energy flowing, the inner breadth coming up through the anus, all up the spine, and for the first time in a while the energy flows through the neck vertebrae up to the third eye, as if something there had been blocked, as if the body hadn't been so connected as it should with the mind, the higher intellect of insight.  Maybe it was a twist of the neck catching a cup about to fall out of a kitchen cabinet that pulled something, initially.  Is that what can happen in life, the failure to connect and have an intellectual conversation, the thing one longed for, a simple meeting of the minds, and that not having happened, a blockage.

And this is the healing thing about, say, the Buddha, the meditation, the reopening of the scarred channel, the blockage melting away in the warm inner steamy rising light of all the five elements (if that is correct to Tibetan Buddhist understanding), wind, fire, water, earth...  Away, illusions of self;  stop blocking life here on this earth in this special time, the gentle wise being that comes by making no claim on anything, just, yes, being.

But we were all caught up in duality, even as part of our youthful intellectual careers, the qualifying of things, the putting of things into specific terms, heeding the dualistic distinctions, the careful papers of history, textual analysis, geological detective work this on top of that.  This was the very stuff that would lead us on to handsome careers in the law, the careful parsing of terms.  Always, the mental definition, this is such a thing.

Some of us, though, rejected that and listened to deeper things, not that we necessarily got much credit for it, but rather the opposite.  What is the writer up to anyway?  What does it mean when one captures all the textual details of life in this world, the coffee cups, the dirty blinds (T.S. Eliot's "dingy shades in a thousand furnished rooms"), the rust-hued gin and tonic with bitters that a Hemingway self-stand in takes pleasure in in a later work, his cat sitting in avocado trees hunting bats, or Paradise Lost's scene, Adam and Eve, bare to the Levant and Ponent Winds, expelled from Eden turning to words finally.  What does it all mean, a young and impressionable mind might ask...  And a young person can do this, be pure enough of mind to read on a deeper level, even as they may be pushed to be more technically critical like a scientist's dissection, (as if such properly lent itself to any science beyond what the writer had invested in the original, indeed, as the writer is saying, clearly, 'here's my science.')

Too bad we did not study Buddhism then and there.  It would have made a lot of things clearer.  Perhaps such stuff has to do with the kind of education my father practiced as an educator, as a cleric, putting things not into egotistical terms, but freeing them from that, even from academic egotism itself.

Learning about Darwin's Theory of Evolution, versus the Creationist, a useful exercise of scientific method and scientific history, a good tune-up on critical thinking, yes, a good thing to do, of course.  But in another sense, what difference does it make, once having mastered the theory of Natural Selection, what difference might it make to our own lives directly, but almost be a side issue, like Buddha's story of the person wounded with the arrow.  Get to the matter of curing the person wounded with the arrow, directly, not by asking who shot the arrow and what that person was wearing.


I find now and then a little break, a clear moment, a freedom from defining things basically, to take a short cut, good or bad.  Having already entered into that mindset, there is good and bad with respect to 'me,' there's no escaping constantly wishing to put terms on everything.  "This was smart, that was stupid."  And what you long for, without realizing it, is freedom from that.