Early in the evening the band, three musicians, John P on bass, local legend, Rick on arch top guitar, Renee vocals, are sitting around, first at the bar to have a little bread and a cup of hot water for the singer, then at low table closest to the corner where they are set up.  They are due to start playing at 6:30, but the only customers are a couple of young people at the bar, who did go to work on President's Day, and a guy we've seen before who choses a Bordeaux for a glass to start, and then when his date shows, a bottle of wine from the list, and they haven't taken to their table yet also near the band.  The first wine we agree upon to look for, a Syrah heavy Clos Des Mures from the Languedoc turns out we're out of, so I bring up from the cellar Z Wine Gallery import's Rasteau, a great value wine in the Chat-du-Pape region, decanting it for them.  "It's going to fill up soon," I tell the band.  And the quiet before the storm makes me nervous.  Reservations to seat, walk-ins, complications, and the busser Hugo hasn't taken much of an interest in set-up up at the bar here, leaving me to do it, and the server my friend is looking down at her iPhone back behind the bar nearby texting in Russian, as if everyone was preparing to being bored and standing around and getting in the way rather than be accurately useful.

And then, we get hit, and our fishing lines are speeding out after this fleeing harpooned whale of attempted dinner service, and even the boss sees we're busy and pitches in, helping us out with the glassware.  And here we are, madness again.  Good for business.  Hey.  Old friends, who had their rehearsal dinner are back at the last table, furthest away for the bar, to be joined by a third, so I bring them, when I can, a little wine magic to shrink their therapeutic need, as the chaos mounts.

So distracted am I that I forget to fire the bass player's salmon entree in time for the first break.  The band waits around, asking for it, and I do a little explaining, and "fucked if I know, soon hopefully.." will the dish arrive.  "Sorry.  We got hit all at once..."  This happens in the melee that is Jazz Night.  Last night was no goddamn picnic either for the barman left alone to run the whole room  by himself on Sunday night before the Federal Holiday, and it would have been nice if the boss had come in that night.  He is being helpful tonight, but everything is a mad scramble, bread, butter, water, the next round, interrupted by attempts to help deliver everything, and everyone in each other's way, the server demanding an ice bucket when that is not the first thing on the barman's triage list of things to do immediately and quickly and now.  A woman I've not even seen come in addresses me at the restroom end of the bar, poking her head through the urn of dried reeds, asking me to ask the singer to sing Happy Birthday for her husband, right at this wrong time.  A group is gathering at the mouth of the bar, first four, now eight, blocking the short way around to the back room tables...


Mom, elderly, approaching 80 years of age, has a cough that is deepening, and has told me that she wishes she had a thermometer.  I gently ask her, as I walk to work, if she's attended to the usual, cat food, mom food, chardonnay...  She's getting a tiny bit foggier about bills maybe, from the holiday onslaught, and when she calls about eleven fifteen in the night as I put the bar back together and put things away in the cooler, she is again confused about where she is and why, and isn't there another place closer to Oswego, and does she need to put her cat in a carrier in the car to get there, and I always tell her, of late, no, mom, you're already home, you don't need to go anywhere.

To great relief though, the cough, as she has bronchitis, she tells me, has warmed her up to the thought of seeing the doctor her friends have been suggesting.  And when she calls in the morning still with a cough, with an email to her friends, they are on it to take her to the doctor, to the urgent care office attached to the good woman Doctor Ram they know so she'll be able to get taken care of.  This is still fairly early in the morning for me, but I feel a great gratitude to my mom's friends, true to faith in the helping out of others, even putting the academic department meeting aside.  Lent is a good season, isn't it.


Perhaps part of the strain of the job of barman such as it is, beyond the physical, the weary leg muscles clenching at movements, the tiredness that comes out of the endurance, whether or not you sleep well, is the clash, the inevitable rub from the real job of ministering to people, listening to them, greeting them and their issues to talk over, the putting them at ease with familiarity and comfort, and that more practical, I suppose, arena of secular commerce, the things done to get the job done and the sales in the financial books, the credit card charges sorted out, the wine poured equals wine sold and on the check...

I found that it was easier when I kept the sight on spiritual part.  That just made it simpler and clearer and also worth doing in this world where we much search for meaning.


I was not, in certain ways, prepared to join in with the practices of what we might regard as mainstream Christianity.    It would not have occurred to me coming out of college as I was that I would be immediately ready for anything like a monastery...


Before work, waiting for news from Mom, I find Ed Sheeran Castle On The Hill comforting.  Artists I suppose are not the most utilitarian of people.  But they give us art, they help our spirits, they soothe  our memories and bring them good meaning.  Music and good songs get us over the bullies in our lives, the grump grandfather who tells you, more or less, get a job, the elder who tells you, shouts at you, grow up... as you are the wrong one, very wrong, when you bring up an old incident from your personal life, the delusional quality of trying to put any reasonable agreeable spin as such tales of fucking up adolescently, isn't that the whole point, to learn something, and then put it into song, so that your spirits lift and you can stay happy, as happy as when you're listening to an old early Beatles song, before they too grew up a little bit too much, ossified in adult seriousness, their humor turned a bit.

It is always good to remember where you came from, the rolling countryside of song and poetry...

That's were college started to disagree with me a bit.  The seriousness, the striving, the wishes upon the minds of my friends to go into investment banking, the legal profession, more so than humoring the whims of their own imaginations and spirits...  Whereas I immediately began to miss the dumb things we did as young folks out in the small town countryside and returned as soon as I could.

And those who also have been bullied, or have that sense, that awareness of how the bully is always ready to strike, those are the ones who get you, who care for you, who love you as a brother and support you and your life's meaning, AMEN.

Again, the mind has changed, much different than it was the day before.    Yesterday, the "Monday morning" gloom of returning wearily, not feeling so hot, back to work.  And then once the set-up is done, a bit of the staff omelette, the tie is tied, the door opens, and then it turns into a very busy night, the boss's son with a six top to start the evening, and then we start filling up.

Back room full, the wine bar full, not a moment free.

It is happier to be back working. It puts me in a better mood, after three sick days after Valentine's Day.

The spiritual of serving recovers after the exploitation of Ash Wednesday and the normal serving of people whatever they might want, replaced by the fancy fixed price menu, the whole thing or nothing, everything booked.

And just when I'm finally finished, the regular is about to put his coat on and depart after his espresso--he came in when I was on the ropes of the evening, dealing with the last parties, hoping the busboy will come up and put away the dirty glasses--organize the plates--I haven't gotten much help tonight--a guy from the neighborhood opens the door, looks up, climbs the stairs, and he'll want a glass of wine.  He's an interesting guy to talk to.  He's from Philly, Rob, works with the local university, a blend of the dour and practicality, somber and friendly, quiet but talkative, and he's been out in Dupont for good Belgian sour beer, and, making his way home, wants a glass of wine now at 10.   I pour him a couple of sips, to remind which he likes, the Beaujolais or the Bordeaux.

Hey, are you trying to close up? he asks.  Yeah, I am.  I could just say, you know what, yeah, it's been a hard night and I just want to get out of here.  But something about it, spiritually it would be the wrong thing to do, to not let him talk, relax in a setting, hear him out.  I've not had a thing to drink, but, since he's having some, I chose to join him with a glass.  Seemed the Christian thing to do.  We talked over the things of music and concerts, life and jobs, a brother who's had a stroke, about moving back to Southern New Jersey, football.

NPR replays a Fresh Air interview of Mr. Rogers.  A man who helped young people.  A man who took classes at a Presbyterian seminary in New York while working for children's television.


Waiting around for the time to prepare for work, monitoring the news and the weather, writing is amateur, mostly pointless.  Not the time for great inspirations after being beaten up by the vagaries of the week.   Laundry, dishes, bleaching the kitchen counter of iron water stains.  Mom calls, with the strange experience of hearing loud voices at night.

Work becomes more and more the point.  It has to be refined, taking the good of work, the part you are comfortable with, and then personally with one's own life, developing that for the betterment.



But the true reflection, the true talent, is about our ability to be spiritual.  That is our gift.  We are capable of it, highly so.

That's why I chose a path that was not here-to-fore explicitly organized or religious.  I wanted a true spirituality, a real seeking, a real abandonment to the spiritual laws of God and His humanity, meeting the events of life with hope of finding their context and meaning.

It had been a long hike, and now in the boat he was laying comfortably in the ropes with a blanket over him and sailcloth.  He was tired and his muscles were stiffening, tightening within joints and about him, and everything told him to rest.  He drifted in sleep, vaguely hearing the thunk of the occasional oar reverberating against the wood and the water, the sound of the blade patiently in the sea's lapping currents.  The creak of the mast, the stiffening of ropes, the sounds of the air.  The corner of his mouth was wet and he remembered a dream, wiped his mouth his hand and went back to sleep.  Beneath him, the sea, and all its fishy creatures, heard through the bottom of the boat.

It takes a long time to think of things.  They will only occur to you with age.  The Brothers Karamazov did not occur to Dostoevsky as a young man.

Then on top of that you have to get your writing muscles in shape.  Which is hard when they have not been well put to use of late.

To a writer, everything is game.  The things he would write about, or say, naturally, are too much for other people, probably, for one thing, because they worry about you.

The Gospel of Mark, 3:23-33, well explicated by Fr. James Martin.

You know, the one where his family "went out to restrain him, for people were saying, 'He has gone out of his mind.'"  (And they believe the same.)

There are the things you cannot tell family.    And so it is that you come to live amongst the good disciples.

"He's free.  And that makes him both effective and dangerous."  Father Martin.

I wrote a book in order to express something.  But when we do so, we find our imaginations going further than we might have originally intended.  We go to a place that only we ourselves understand, and then, from that point, there is help from the divine, in faith.  We go from the particular, to the universal, from daily events to the meaning behind them.  And each step of life offers us important clues.  We have to accept them, as best we can.

The writer has to look beyond the events.  He has to have faith.  That one day the meaning of the events he has depicted will become meaningful, as there are layers of an onion to be peeled.  Certain events have to happen, and from them, comes understanding.  Woe unto the world because of offenses.  Lincoln liked that line.

The faithful must still be engaged in the world and its business.   And things will come about, naturally.  The kinds of things that are of strife and misunderstanding between people, largely out of differences of temperament.

It is a long process.  Why should it take so long?  We cannot obsess over events, but must move on from them, taking the course toward meaning, to finding the meaning of events, which I suppose come through analogy and parable, as the template of the Gospels lays down for us, both in form and in meaning.  There's a long time of digestion, I suppose, the chewing over of things.

And one supposes, at least, that this all has something to do with growing up.

Of course, one comes upon such things through his own mistakes, his own errs.  Material granted to us for being who we are.  Which is why we do not judge others, because you cannot learn and grow without making mistakes, sometimes publicly, embarrassingly.  It is a matter of character, that such mistakes come, for what they will elucidate out of you.  Daily bread.


The old (or rather middle-aged) writer sat around.  Why he was too lazy to go to church, who knows, or maybe he was shy.  Maybe he was working on something.  When asked about it, he might have said, 'oh, well, the church is really all around us, and one simply has to do his work;  going to church everyday--nothing all against it, in fact I always enjoy it, mightily so--is not for everyone given their schedules.'

I suppose he had been tested, in ways invisible, as we all shall be.  There was no sign of his having been sent to some Siberian-like prison, no experience like that, but there was a sense that he had sort of fallen out, fallen into a kind of exile, which either encouraged or allowed or made it so that he by habit kept somewhat to himself when he was not called to go his job, what they would call his day job, which we do not really need to go into all that much, beyond that it was trying in many ways, at least physically, but also mentally, a kind of, a form of persecutions financial and otherwise.

He did not really have an prospectives, as people would commonly think about them, in any career sense, and thus he was doomed to pursue the path he had somehow set himself upon at a young enough age.  So to speak.  It's never too late, as they say.  Let's just say he had not found anything particularly lucrative or sustaining a model of security.  But, he had words, and upon a daily basis, one can only see that they, the words, seem to be sustaining for him.  Such odd birds we all are, all of us.  I suppose his father had left with him some teaching, that he was to pursue that which he found natural, a notion based upon, as the old man might have said, the meaning of the liberal arts education.  And such he had received, though he might not have seemed to, upon initial inspection, seem to have mixed perfectly well with it.  But, people liked him, as a young man, and put up with his particular wry form of grumpdom well enough.

Perhaps it would be within the bounds of fairness to conjecture that there were not so many who understood him, fully understood him, but for a few exceptions.  A kindly retiree had taken him once years ago, as one might take in a feral kitten, as the man we speak of here had fed several litters of feral cats, before giving up on the project, satisfied that he had tamed one cat, a slight orange female who had recovered from a limp only to one day disappear, perhaps in a city roundup involving traps, sadly enough.  Friends had given him his own little calico kitten from a feral litter and the two of them had had an excellent relationship, for a good fifteen years, until rectal cancer overtook her good feline health and spitfire ways.  Like himself, the man was from a very kind family, and kept a good faith himself, as each faith is an individual matter.

And so, one comes across the pile of his writing, first out of curiosity, but then with some engagement, and then finally with some enjoyment as to the meaning he derived out of events such as happen to us as well besides the unlucky.  He took reasonable care of his own health, took his vitamins, and did other things to maintain himself in his own private fashion, as if he were unafraid of being alone for the most part, then took to red wine when bored with himself, the writing mainly done for the day.

What do we make of the Old Faith?  How do we live with it, live within it, explore it, handle it, humor it, practice it, walk with it, read with it?  Does it come before us, or after us?  Are we organically bound to finally flower into it after coming blindly out of roots in the ground?  Mysterious matters, indeed.  Are we fated toward it when we are born?  Does it even help us when we come upon the things that draw us out and into what we might argue to be great works of literature, the "sudden flooding wind " of Dostoevsky's crowning accomplishment of  The Brothers Karamazov, its roots in the exile of labor prison camp.  Would we rather not be so drawn?  Or does it come finally as a relief, as an inevitable thing that one can finally not distract one's self from or run away from.

I know the man liked his writing time.  The practice had grown with him, I gather.  Like the green flannel shirt he wore on a regular basis during the colder seasons, to work, at home, everywhere, a simplification of life, not unlike the monk's begging and his bowl of rice and his tea.  Live frugally, without much show, and do not overemphasize the self nor the illusions of it being separate and as tangible as we might like to think, out of a desire for pleasure beyond simple satisfying things.  He did it privately, without saying much about it ever, without ever claiming to be something along the lines of being a professional about it all, a journalist, a novelist, what-have-you.  He simply meandered along his way, like a stream content with its way through the forest and the stones, old enough with its habits to allow all seasons to pass, leaves, born green, waiving up to the summer, then falling as litter.

Well, there were bound to be certain disagreements which might have rose, I say in a chuckling manner, betwixt himself and the society he marginally lived in.  Being so bound to the devices of the day, it might have been, on the other hand, somewhat refreshing to come across him, different, like finding a snow leopard, not to cast him with too much romance.  Many would have expected his company to be dull and dungeon-like, cold, but when engaged, he was friendly, and with a sense of humor that bounded up the higher levels without oppressing us as a loud noise might.

He liked naps.  As did Jesus, though there are not any paintings I can think of the Lord taking a good nap curled up in the ship ropes.  A habit good for the taxed mind, and good for the stress, a kind of meditation.  Another man might have suggested to him, being of different mindset, that he would be better off reading Investors Business Daily, but what can you do;  hard it is to change people, sadly enough, I guess.   Is a criminal a criminal being born that way, or of his nurture, or both, or is it a matter of what is called karma...

There was something Quixotic about him, by which I mean, as the old knight had taken to reading obsessively books on chivalry, something about  the writing process might have weakened, or softened, his mind and his basic level of sanity, enough to allow a man much like the writer to become, well, more than he was through certain works and flights of fantasy.  Does Quixote shine a light of some sort back upon Old Cervantes himself?

But I digress.

His notebooks tell their own story, not that I necessarily approve of it, or of them.  Perhaps I should have simply thrown them into the recycling bin before, before something happened of an inexplicable nature.  I make no judgments upon his sanity or otherwise.  To his credit, I suppose, he stayed in the game, as long as he could, before moving on, as we do sometimes.



Verily, I say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone:  but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.
John 12:24-26

Dostoevsky used it himself.

But there is truth in it.  Truth in the sense that one moves on.  The point of the story was not about the  details, about getting the girl, so to speak, but about human society, about the soul.  About the ego.  About those things which you let go of, as the lesson within, as the reality of the situation, dictates.

When you're young a lot of it is acting.  Boy and girl like each other, but each puts up an act.  Only at rare moments do they drop the act.  No longer compelled.  I tried to capture that in the book I wrote, because that's what I felt, that's what I remember from those days.  As if college was a lesson in physics, as physics pertains to how the human creature acts when being in society.

Humphrey Bogart, meets Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman...  The act is a sign of freedom, of intelligence, of candor, honesty.

(One can only say this crudely.  There are not the best terms, yet, for it.  There are words for the opposite, and people get paid handsomely to write the words which would sell all this out.)


Your own intelligence is native.  Passed on from the ancestors, from the animals, from your own human uniqueness.  You have to respect your thought processes as they are, accepting them by letting them grow, or stay, wild.  The mind is never--would never--need a commercial to tell you its efficacy, its beauty.  You are in it.

(Not like the advertisement for AI.)

Hemingway was prone to suffering great boredom (and, probably, anxiety and angst.)    He was attracted to war and restaurants and barrooms, things that offered a refuge for the wildness he felt within, like the fishing expeditions to wildness and rivers.

The loser gets through Valentine's Day night.  The odd night, the different menu, no space at all for leeway.  Upstairs we sell about $7000.

Fear and shame.  No future in the restaurant business.  And I've spent a lot of time at it, making it a sort of pseudo-career.  The mistake was in not moving somewhere else.  Why DC?

What direction to turn in?

A couple's dinner entrees were taking too long, because I got distracted and forget in the melee to fire main course.  She says, could we have a cheese plate, so I hit 'fire cheese.'  Manuel delivers it.  You need to ring in the cheese plate, he tells me.  Sure.  Boss comes up an hour later directly asking me about it.  We are working hard, quite hard (and we worked hard the night before.)  There is not a spare moment.  It's not like I'm standing around doing nothing.  Later, the other waiter, oh, we're supposed to charge for that?


Anyway, it's all survived, and now is the time to write shitty pointless things.  The day off.  No story to tell.

Some day soon, mom will not understand where she lives.  And I do not know what to do about it.  If I move to Oswego, what would I do?  What skills have I?  What career will I have when I grow up?

In Oswego, they are accepting.  There seems to be enough of each element in a town.  Just what would I do?  Where would I live, beyond Mom's basement.  How's that for a Kerouac story.


But that's the way it goes.  Circumstances will lead that way.  Even well-intentioned people, fearing embarrassment, protecting what they feel must be, in self-interest, protected, will crucify you.  Jesus will always be offended by the profiteering in the temple.

And some of us realize that basic state, sensing it, sooner rather than later.

It's just the way.  Ash Wednesday is usurped  the commercial.  You can't blame anyone.  Nor is there anything necessarily wrong.  Just that inside, privately, the focus should be on other things, in your own mind at least.

A retreat from the world is not a bad thing.

But there is prophecy in life.  A kind man from a  good family gives you refuge.  That's not nothing.

Entrust your cares to the Lord, and He will support you.  Sinners through grievous fault, our sins will always come out.

But the way the sins rebound and reflect upon others, sometimes good comes out.

In the desert of Lent, we grow closer to the Lord.

And so, in Lent, on Valentine's Day, I stood before people, performing the tasks they ask of me, with ample set-up and ammunition for whatever the night might want, back-ups of chilled bubbly, and lots of labor, taking the stacks of plates of dishes consumed from the waiters at the mouth of the bar, placing them down in neater stacks after scraping off the remains into the wastebasket, the silverware into little plastic quart sized containers.  The busser food runner who brings the dishes will take the dirty plates back down the stairs to the dishwasher below us in the kitchen here in our little ship.

But I stand before people, and they have little idea.  I do my job well, and only occasionally mention that I am a writer, or that I'm still writing, and even more rarely would begin to speak of what I might be thinking of in that form which addresses thoughts in written form.  That world of mine, begun naively, childishly, but with inspiration, training, and background profitable, from parents and sibling, through college, is a secret life, obscured, hidden in plain sight, in the upstairs room serving, after all, wine and bread and lamb with the blessing of others of good will and thought, in the big city of a nation's judgments, power, law, the center of its might, its self-importance, its intentions.  (Ad to that what you wish.  The city does not escape the test of the old patterns.)  The scholars' son.

I even suppose that my old novel, roman a clef, fictional memoir of literary form, too serves as some form of cover, and thus is not of worth until all would be viewed from a certain perspective.  Any attempt, it seems, to create something of popular and commercial value has no point if not so backed-up, supported by the real true intentions, as such can only grow organically within.

And why would writing serve such a purpose?  Why, indeed.  Because that act is always supportive of the deeper mind, of the inner reality, of the mandala, of the stigmata, of the Cross, of the chakras and the Buddha mind, but for some of us I suppose clearest in Christian form given the arrangement of our atomic structure and the events around us and their deeper meaning.  That is why it is a beautiful process.  The left hand knows not what the right is doing;  perhaps it is in some way textually appropriate that we write now with two hands on the keypad, left and right.  Right and wrong.  Sinful and holy.  Unknowing, and known.

What can you say to the people there on the other side of bar?  You have to talk in their terms, with a cruelly short amount of time before being interrupted by one thing or another, not least the talky customer less prone to hold his tongue and his place in the importance of the spiritual life.

In this Lenten season I catch a Mass, the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word, celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass from Our Lady of Angels Chapel in Irondale, Ala. on TV.  And it helps, and it is beautiful.  And I am returned to wholeness after the mess of Valentine's Day with the loud insistent jazz musical blowing in our ears enough that we would wish for earplugs.  I feel less stupid. I feel less confused.  The Lord be with you.

I guess, I gather, you have to wade through the valley...

So is the book I wrote ever less and less important, not the true point, but as an exercise to get rolling, really, perhaps little more.  Faith in constructing an emerging narrative, that eventually, it would come about, as it might in a Chekhov story, or Dostoevsky.

Knowing where you are going, where you are headed, helps the journey out immensely.  If you don't know where you are going you will be prone to much confusion.  Blind, or blinded, or lost, you know not the purpose, nor the direction, and you will go around in circles.  You'll drink too much wine to hide the feeling within of lostness and searching, of enduring the darkness of the journey's point.

(St. Catherine of Siena looks like an interesting person.)

For awhile the feeling of laziness departs, and one can almost live again, having a good sense of himself in the clutter of the world.


Eventually, I found, they would come to me.  It might take time, but eventually they would drop their guard, their protections of an enjoyed and reasonably profitable life, come and confide in me of their real life, their health, their inner thoughts.


The stigmata is about energy, electrical energy flow...

Manuel and I took the Indonesian couches down from the wine bar through the dining room and into the basement.  He was drilling the screws of table pedestals on to table tops for two.  There were two extra tables downstairs next to the copper bar, and three extra deuces up in the front of the wine bar near where the band will play, and then having done what we could do, departed our separate ways into the night around 1:30 in the morning.


And I wake up feeling like an old barn on Valentine's Day.   Stone and old wood, littered with straw.  Bones overlaid with muscle, the ache from a thousand motions, of pouring wine, serving, clearing plates, running, wiping off the glassware.  And again, one is left awake but not so willing to move, not even to do yoga, and a retreat to a place to lay down and meditate is called for.  The mark of Ash Wednesday, a television broadcast from Rome, the Papal Mass, like a cross, reminds me too of the stigmata, the image within the body, as we are reminded be our better purposes.

Horoscope for Capricorn, reads today:  Are the targets you are aiming for ones you have set yourself or ones that have been set for you by other people?  If, as the planets indicate, it's the latter then it's time to break free and regain control of your life.  Not later -- right now!

Is it Valentine's Day, or is it Ash Wednesday, rather.  Who are the sheep that must be loved and defended?

Valentine's Day, polite and anonymous, delivering the romantic dinner...  Now, I wait for it, and write useless words, looking forward to when my labors are done after the long night, the jazz offending our calm with its volume, throwing off the muscle memory echolocation.  It all strikes one as a postponement of the acts one is working on...

The Christian in me rouses me, and I pour a cup of yesterdays Moroccan Mint, mix in a little bit of Astragalus powder, and before I've seen that Karl Ove Knausgaard has done a piece on going in search of Turgenev in Russia in the New York Times, and today relatives will bury our Aunt Jean, old Auntie Jean-Jean, my mom's Aunt, with her good nature and all her stories, up by Lynn in Swampscott, a journey too far to take my old mom to, on top of the awaited week of Valentine's Day at the old Bistrot of the Dying Gaul and the special fixed price menu.


Is it depressing, being outside the church, the not belonging...  The original, He dealt with it.  It made his work less bound by strict custom.  He could heal and do good work, even on Valentine's Day.  Well, a day set aside for love, the celebration of love, after all, why not.

EWTN, the basic church of Santo Stefano, from the Twelfth Century, whose bells rang, by themselves, when Francis died, in Assisi, a good place to meditate and pray, a small treat for the distracted...

Would Jesus fully understand the fullness of his acts of generosity, or for Him were they more or less instinctive, no need to think them over, the ponder the logic of how they might fit in to polite society's normal way of doing polite business, marriages, professional friendships, community, and the like...

Awake, the awkwardness of existence, of being a conscious being, waiting to prepare for the shift, the big night, the last one of this guy's workweek.  What fuel to take in for the night...  What tea to brew, what nostrum to take.

A lament for the human race, a lament for all who say worthless things, not taking into account the sorry state of our perpetual affairs.  For all the kids who in love make dumb mistakes, that is human.  For all the people who do dumb thoughtless things, or who do not do the things they should, lamentations, as memory serves properly to remind us of things we wish we'd done differently, had a little more time for...