But really, to continue on from above, or below, the words that are meant for the cutting floor are not the important ones, those lines that serve to vent our minor complaints about the lives we ourselves have created for ourselves.  Granted, we need the courage to face them, to get them out there.  They are not as serious, or as meaningful, as the ones of deeper thought, the ones that grow upward out of the roots of earthly complaint and sore assessment.

The deeper thoughts, like the Shroud image, like the angel informing one of the pattern that could be construed as a non-bleeding stigmata, are the important ones, the beautiful ones, sustaining us.  The ones into which all little writer details about guitars and whatever other objects will come to rest in, leaves upon a tree...

And like unto the word of Jesus himself.  Considered thoughts, balanced, worked upon, honed, precise as metaphor, the parables, the important stuff.  Even as we think we cannot possibly ever use them or bring them into any sort of practical purpose or use.  Thus, our sleeplessness.  The great awkward fear over how to use ourselves for the best...


"But you're a writer, if that, and what good is that for the world?  If you are moved so, then go work in a soup kitchen, or a hospital.  Enough of the fantasy.  Go and earn a living, how about that, my friend."

silently within.  obscure thoughts:

But Jesus was a writer, a wordsmith.  And His stuff was about the human condition.  He has values, ones that are helpful to us, like about materialism, fairness...  Uhm, spirituality, well, obviously.  The words are fresh, full fields of interpretation and science.   Engaging. 

It's not bad to try writing, if only out of some youthful idealism, as you make your raw way into the world.

"But writing can be a huge waste of time and effort.  Navel staring.  Postponing what you really need to be doing as a grown-up, caring for self and supporting family....  Irresponsible.  Leading to no practical good in this world that you have to make it in.  Might be okay for the college student, but grow up.  You're not young anymore.  That ended a long time ago.  A long time ago."

There is no response to such things.  How can there be...

The mind works with different logic, I'm afraid.  Until you're thrown into debtors prison or bad things happen, but by then, in that logic it's too late to do anything anyway;  you needed to start a real career ages ago.

It's a different logic.  The problem is the human being, in God's image.  That's the problem.  It's a sad problem, yes no doubt.  That we have to be closeted.  That our being must be exploited in some commercial fashion.  Working in a bar.  Teaching in a school.  Selling so many widgets.  What would Jesus do?  Where would he fit in?  As if he could ever be commercialized...


My problem is not depression, so much.  It's anxiety.  It's troubled waters.  The nerves that come with running through the modern check-list, of what I should be doing, what do I need to do.

And there are things you cannot change.


The innocent attempt to meet spirituality halfway though, perhaps it soothes more than it disturbs.  Perhaps it helps you with personal habits, with getting home without responding to the aggravating ends of Jazz Night evenings jerked-around.  It helps when you get home, too tired to do anything but go to bed, without getting into the wine.


But what would He do for a job?  Who would assuage his anxiety, his occasional terrors?  Who would take care of him?  Who would understand him?  Who would join him?  Who would help him understand the practicalities of the world, of society, of empire and local taxes?  Who would employ him?  What would ever be a professional about?

Stupid questions.

Fear is a terrible thing.  Hemingway liked to write about it.  How bullfighters legs would shake uncontrollably.  Courage, his subject.  At all things.

So you meditate, exercise, talk to a therapist, and so on.  Who knows, maybe even go to a church one day.

"Are you gay?"

I get that from time to time.  "No, just a Christian, or a Theosophist, Buddhist, something like that."

That's always the way it goes, for Christians.  A secret society.  The awkwardness.

It was necessary, the societies, the Christian label.  The defining.  What is now not so necessary, as doing yoga alone taming the muscles at home is a Christian act like those of Francis and the sick wolf.  Knowing who are is reassuring.  A self-knowledge that brings one calm, protection from the exploitation of the mind.    A way to basically know good from bad, right from wrong, even as that is always a hard thing to know, to ask of your own intentions, gentlemanly as they are, basically...

These days one is a private citizen, and Jesus, remaining who He is, is more a general presence, less tribal, less ossified, less structured.

That takes a lot of energy to say, a lot of anxious time.  But all of that leads you, in a way.  An abandonment of the cheap sell-out.

Waking after a restaurant dream, the kind that make one say to himself, what a shitty job.  It takes place in a strange amalgam, perhaps a new improved renovated Austin Grill, but also a touch of the Dying Gaul, the customers who come in, early...  You don't know where anything is.  To get dressed for your shift is completely awkward, the restaurant doesn't even look open when you walk in, it's disorganized, too big, an extra floor you find strange, distant, ashtray buckets, hallways with restaurant clutter...  The ordering system is strange, the bar unhappy.  It's not run right, personality is lacking, everyone distant, a mill...  You want to get out of there as quickly as possible.

And you have to go to work tonight, Valentines Day week, Sunday night to start out the week, with a strange cough.  Low on money, a death in the family, but one you can't attend to properly with the distances involved.

The last two weekends, if you can call them that, you haven't had the energy for anything social, turning down dinner with old friends thrice.  A lot of bed time.  Cold, dank, February unstopping rain.

And all of these, as dreams are, become sort of throwaway thoughts, acknowledge, and now, to move on.


The stigmata comes, if that's what it is, in a gentle way.  A divine being of image comes.  And this is why the popular pictures of Jesus are soothing.  The white billowing robe, the abundant hair, the gentle face, masculine with beard, sort of 'soft' eyes, wisdom, decency, kindness...  You lay there, meditating, between sleep and waking, hands folded across the chest, and the being is much a mirror image of you, informing your physical construction, matching your appearance, changing it slightly, as it always has, the sad kid, over all the years, which you've struggled hard to grasp the meaning of.  You feel it, the Christian image, in the palms, deep in the cup, as if within the palm there were invisible unknown instrument that one might manipulate as a hand to do things for humanity, for the world.  As if within that cup of the open palm there was an additional dexterous instrument, capable as much as the fingers of doing things, in a subtle way of energies and powers.  Almost magical, but for the proper word, holy perhaps, in this world that falls apart on us, broken, making it necessary for this Jesus of our collective minds come forward.

The image begins to feel like one embossed on candles, like the Shroud of Turin's work of art, mirroring your bone structure and brow and cheek.  It hovers above you until you realize it is part of you, a pattern within.  It is your being.  That's why you don't always fit in so well.  Your own peculiar kind of faith, interpreted.  You sleep mutely underneath it as it mirrors you.  You wonder, how would you possibly ever use it.

And so, perhaps, practically, it makes you nervous, for all the things you'd wish to achieve, the way you'd like to act in the world, the kind of person you'd like to be.


There was a homeless guy once, who used to irritate you outside a small Safeway, as you went in to purchase cat food, cleaning supplies, bagged spinach, packaged sausages, V8 juice.  Larry, sometimes you'd give him a banana as he'd asked, or a buck, and sometimes he was drunk and sometimes snarlingly so, as if you were his particular oppressor and the reason of his downfall.  Reasonably old, bow-legged, with a limp...  Sometimes he'd be talking to the big gentle guy from the check out counter, the one who, when the National Enquirer cover showed the colors of Brad Pitt's hair changing with his different girlfriends, said, "man, that boy's got too much time on his hands," and Larry would be in a jocular mood.  And once he said to you, as you passed, burdened, with plastic bags and other things more general and within, "don't be afraid of your own goodness."  And you paused for thought.


And this is what the figure of the gentle stigmata that subtly comes to you on a Sunday early morning hours before you really have to get up and physically,  as you only know how, to go and face the music (that is driving you crazy) in this town of Washington, blah, that it is somewhat like the rays from the angel hovering over St. Francis in his cave that he receives in the palms of his hands, as he looks upward toward heavenly light in a painting from more classical times.  Bernini?  (Bellini, St. Francis in the Desert, ca 1476-78.)  Or better yet, Giotto, Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, ca 1295-1300.

Your goodness, your image...  what do you do with it?  What a problem you've become.  But that old image hanging around you, speaking to you as you pass with brow furrowed at the world, engaged, distracted, weary, wasting your energies trying to belong in the world.  You can't hardly even speak to anyone anymore, in these terms society gives you, as if this Shroud of Angel were Huckleberry Finn speaking in language polite grown-ups take as impolite.  There is no real job they can give you to fit your predilection, your usefulness, as if those jobs were cookie cutters imposed upon you, missing the whole, chopping off almost half a torso of the figure, and a leg, just not being able to focus in and connect with the whole, such as they are, these templates.  St. Francis wouldn't even touch money.

You take a warm shower, hot enough to loosen the deep phlegmatic, ease the muscles of shoulder and lower back, the hot water seeps in through the cellular openings down into the deeper layers of tissue and body.  Everyone has to work.  And you are, thanks to the self-help book, practicing gratitude and love projected.

But you might as well talk to a cat about such things, as people are barely able to see it, to get it, this image that comes to you gently, informing your spirit and helping your growth by shining  a light.

And you were tired with the same worn-out thread-bare material again and again, the same old situation, as a writer, tired out, sometimes with too much wine to numb down the lonesome hours and ways of not-connecting.  How  can you connect with someone if you're not even being yourself?  Stop trying to meet them on their terms, boring, Washingtonian, materialist, consumerist, warped off the path of true humanity living in the world.  Obsessed unfortunately with the entertainer who came to power to wreck the fair great democracy, as it is.  This mythical town of Notgettinglaid...


Walk to work, slowly, along embassy row, then into the woods, calling mom on the way.


At the end of the night, even after cleaning up, the checkout report, the tension of the night seems only to build, solidified into something you yourself must physically take home, like a bundle of some sort, wood collected, to dry out.  The tensions of the evening, gracefully ridden through and over, but now, present again rather than dissipating as they might logically would.  Done early, the chance to hit the Safeway, stock up on the cold cuts and gluten free breads to get you through the week.  The Uber ride home seems only to increase tensions...

But He wouldn't be human, if he didn't feel tension, and even the worst sort of angst and worry, which naturally, in the story, is of course in the sort of quiet place at night, one that might seem like a haven, the garden, but which is his place of agony, of all the sad hard things that come with being mortal.  Hard to relax, to just simply relax in such a place...  The pain of the body, from work, and the realization too that things would be more miserable even if you didn't work, if you didn't have a job to focus on, fixate, get swept up in.

It's like a full shift is so intense, that even going home you cannot be sheltered from it, no relaxation.  TV, dishes, exercise...  Sleep, finally, but the anxiety is never far off, or not until the week has worn you out physically, into submission.  The awareness that you are not growing up, that you are not acting like an adult, and that by now it is too late, thanks to your stupidity, your penchant for wasting time...

Really, thank god one has a job even.  To not be dragged off to work, what would one do?  A retreat from time to time, sure, maybe even forty days, or a silent retreat, but otherwise...  Good to have enough cash to be able to rent a car to go see your old mom eight hours away, not frequently enough.

The night closes as I walk back over the bridge, Connecticut Avenue, the wind blowing, a light spray of the rain that is going to pick up, eating a double Whopper, bun and all.  The end of a date, traffic coming toward me, one slow step at a time.  I caught a bus at Van Ness, but it turned to Adams Morgan and I decided to get out.  A good day, in that I get out with an old girlfriend to see the Cubist paintings at The Kreeger.  Dinner was nice at her apartment, a Langhe Rosso, Thai from downstairs, the original Blade Runner, comfortable, but now I just want to get home, tired, and tomorrow is work and it is Restaurant Week, the last night, but still a major hurdle.  The night before, a belated birthday dinner over at my brother's, the grappa at the end...  Nights I start into the wine earlier than usual.


Dreams, strange dreams.  I make chicken stock, but in vain.  It will all get thrown out.


Sunday night, miserable.  Downstairs gets a busboy.  M is the food runner.  A has the phone, seating parties as they come, finding space.  By the end, I just want to get out of there.   Let the downstairs closing server wait for the kitchen guys to finish cleaning up.  Sebastien comes up to keep me company, just as the last customers leave.  Restaurant Week strangers standing around put you in a mood, and the last thing you want is regulars.    Leave me alone, eh.  So Sebastien is sitting now at the end of the bar, where we put the clean glassware, wiped clean from the washer, onto mats.  He always sits there, right in the way, even when you've told him.  So he's droning on, about the same things he always talks about.    He is moving, to Virginia Beach.  I should come with him.  And finally, checking in on the kitchen, I pour a half glass of Beaujolais.  Talking to people takes a lot of energy.  You've been doing it all night long, at the bar, and you've about had it.

Even our stellar soldier, the nice young lady from Mongolia, sweet, strong, steady, is angry with how we've been staffed tonight.  The short end of the stick, and we've been clearing all the tables, stacking the dirty plates, picking them up off the low tables, or taking them back from the narrow back room, needing a long reach, a lot of work, sore muscles tired out the next day.

February.  What can you say.  I find myself in the same pattern.  Up late, then trying to sleep, after sleeping most of the first day off, and then, the second day off, still, immune system off, exhausted, cough, sleep, a mood to match, low.

So I find myself watching Moonshiners.  An addiction to Tinder and Bumble.  Swiping, like it's a video game.  Five minutes later, is anything new on Facebook.  In my loneliness...  Google news.  But, I am tired, and the immune system is fighting something unknown, flu shot under the belt already.

 I read The Tools, by Phil Stutz and Barry Michaels.  As suggested by a co-worker.  The tools themselves make a bit of sense, self-help sort of way. But I watch Jimi Hendrix youtube stuff.  Documentaries. Guitar talk.  How to play Little Wing.  Fender Hendrix Strat reissues, that's another two or three hours.

The whole story of the man himself, while he had many lovers, people who appreciated him, there is the side of how taken advantage of he was.  Very sad.  The people who managed him, really just buying and selling him, sending the money off shore.  Such that by September the 17th, 1970, he was rather depressed, and with a sense that powers were working against him, murderously, as if it were Shakespeare's time.  The last few concerts, Isle of Wight, the shit show in Germany, the audience mad at him, and Jimi, "I don't give a fuck.  Boo me if you want..."

But to a writer, it's tone.  It's the way you grab the neck, the way you strum, the way your fingers clamp, aim, moving around.  The solid thunk, such as only the independently minded guitar player, as Hendrix was, would produce.  Tone, tone, tone.  You see it live, a player integrated, become at one, with the instrument.  A separation that is the uniqueness of a player's tone.  Hendrix had it.  He had a sound.  It's in his fingers, his strumming hand thumb, but also, in him.  Unmistakeable.  Original.


There are stories, when he went to New York after, what they call, the Chitlin' Circuit, played no longer with the Isley Brothers, but with Little Richard.  But there in the background, too flamboyant.  He wins a talent show in Harlem, one assumes at the Apollo, but he's fired by Little Richard, has to pawn a guitar, and he ends up downtown in the Village, playing the Whiskey A Go Go, something like that.  But, he has no place to live.  According to the story, he ended up sleeping in alleys there sometimes, with rats running over him.  And cockroaches, at one point, "took his last candy bar."

There was he discovered.  Women loved Jimi.

Kundera thinks of Jimi Hendrix from time to time.
Jimi, the man needed to play guitar, thus betraying how you and I really feel.  The need to play, to have a guitar, to strum it, to sleep with it.  Hands that need to do something.

It takes to the third day off, and you end up sleeping 'til four in the afternoon, unable to move the body, at my age.

And this is the hard part, waking up late but not feeling tremendously guilty about that, and sitting down to write.  As if writing would be any help for you, practically speaking.  In this situation you're in, looking for a better job, a saner life and lifestyle.  What's so great about writing anyway?  Perhaps sitting home alone in the evening is not conducive to the creative juices.

Wake up with the usual sadness, as to what one's own life has amounted to.  Thoughts of a grocery list.  Tea.

Lack of skill.  Groggy.

Our only chance in this great depression economy, to become vaudeville entertainers, pub singers, unpaid authors...


Operate out of the notion of abundance, not scarcity.  That's where I went wrong with girls and sex.  Fuck being a gentleman, kid.  They don't want that.  Nor do you.

I began to think that men and women are not able to understand each other directly.  Women may  think that might be possible, but men know otherwise.  Just the way it is.  The only thing that allows them to understand each other are noble indirect ways, in the context provided by larger causes, social cooperation, communal health, spiritual life, literature.  An animal cooperation can come about, as in penguins raising their own, but otherwise man and woman might as well be speaking to each other in mutually foreign languages.

And ultimately, women, like men, will, reluctantly, realize this to be true, women being accepting, as men must be too.  Fathers.  Brothers.  Friends,  People who have to deal with the difficult, the enemy they would rather love, all the people they have missed knowing in history with no chance but a smell of their ghosts in the time space of the imagination.

Men who seem able to speak to women are doing so by employing a language of commercialism and market savvy.  And as a consequence of this particular focus, which is largely away from the human experience, they make themselves more attractive to women, by their economic smarts.  Men who find this ability will then have be less able to find their own authentic selves, and they will have a harder time speaking with other men.  Other men will regard them as shrewd, but lacking as far as good company.  The men gifted at women talking will have cooperated themselves into a corner, making a bargain to gain the things they want, houses, children, careers, etc.

And this is how society works.  Those who speak with authenticity are left with a hard row to hoe.  The clever continue on with their genetic natural selection as shaped by the economy.

The truest forms of communication are those that welcome a kind of third party into the room that has been agreed upon, a belief in a higher power, most likely and most effectively.  God's plan is for men to do men's work, and for women to do women's work.  Whatever that may be, springing naturally from the two quite different creatures.

It would be cliché to say that women may be patterned in their own way by the economy.   Perhaps their maternal instinct predisposes them to speak of fairness.  Which sounds good.  On paper.  But all creatures are not created equal on an equal plane.  A cat is a cat, a dog, a dog, and a bird is a bird, as the inner genies of their DNA, shaped in an agreement between the inner and the outer, have created, by the divine powers that make such things so.


Only in moments of great retrospect are the vast differences in male and female communications understood.   By then it's probably way too late for the individuals, now separated by time and space, to ever be reconciled.

And so the man is left looking for, basically, a pious and God-fearing woman, devoted to her own powers and the powers of the male.   Old School.



After she'd express her displeasure, for whatever I'd done, or hadn't done, or done clumsily, or done something she might have found embarrassing, after a curt dismissal, then she would appear, passively, at a distance, like a hawk in a tree, or a cat, as if to watch or surveil, as if to express some strange kind of animal kinship that crossed the species, unable to express herself in words or in any other way but a kind of acknowledgment, a show of creaturely respect.  She was up in the tree, a falcon or an owl, and I was on the ground, unable to reach or tame, having as I saw it failed at it.

Good material, is about all you can say.  Take Shane MacGowan, The Pogues, "The Curse of Love."

I can take 'solemn pride' in the fact that never imposed, that I did not overextend my own will, my own language, my own forces, my own understandings upon her, that different creature.   Perhaps there is truth to the old adage, that if you love something the instinct is to set it free.

Anyway, as you get older, you realize mortality, old age, the difficulty of doing the laundry and going out to buy toilet paper and wine, green tea, immodium, dinner, depending on energy.  No wonder, the painkillers found in Tom Petty's system.  Perhaps the restaurant business is merely realistic, that it will beat you down, and leave you with Saturday night, not to party, nor to socialize, but for basic errands.

When I go out to grocery shop, out upon the avenue, I think of Shane MacGowan, think of him wandering, distant, observant, songs in his head, Irish, a drinker, not feeling well, but the songs in his head, like rain falling.  The lights of the avenue, the cold, the windows of shops, the faces, things being there, things closing, smell of steak in passageways.


But there are, at the bottom, all of us, and we respond, as a creature, to stimuli, to art.  This is the rather unexpected popularity of the music of the people, pop, blues, rock, Irish, skiffle, Beatles, jazz.  Art takes us back to a common conversation.


Each of us is a different creature from the rest, a separate species almost.  We all try to get along, but it's 100,000 different species of howler monkeys, whales, dolphins, orcas, cows, rats, birds big and small.  For us not to accept that about the next human being, how complicatedly different he or she must be from our own selves, well, this could be the subject of Singing In The Rain, or anything really.


My mom tells me she can deal with winter, because her boys go out and play in it, dig in the drifts, remembering winters past.