After work, day one getting over the aches, letting the body recover, then there is the next day, letting the mind recover.  The gyroscope is spinning, realigning, setting one straight again and upright.  First was the body sore and tired, and then, so is the mind, the voice, the thoughts, from the effort to sustain the good thoughts through the workweek's hustle.  Both physical and mental energies, but importantly spiritual energies have been put to the effort of matching the work to be done.  The spiritual energies too need a bath in salts to get back on track.  Which might mean, hmm, maybe I'm in the wrong line of work, too indirect, too blocked, too contrary.

But then you look out at the world and its gainful professions, and you see no other real better place within it, the secular world...

And still it is cold out, with tree pollen, and there is no energy for the walks in the wood.

One tries his best to deal with the secular world, to live in it, to match it, to follow, to keep up with it.

(In the midst of that, there are dreams to remember.  Why do we dream?)

More and more you ask yourself, though, why?    Really, is it for me?  What does it offer me?  Do I abide by the logic of the secular world...

Or rather, is not there another gift within you, an important thing, that makes the effort to work within the secular world like a creature out of its element...  Kindness of the deep sort does not fit in with the model of the modern health insurance business;  believe me, I tried.


And so things come to pass, on this path of realization, encounters with the honest self.  The main observation is the fake, the falseness of human behavior.

Jesus did not glow, shimmering, clad in white, upon the mountaintop at the Transfiguration in just one day right off the bat.  It seems he has to work up to it.  He has to take the steps of correcting people, of showing them the obviousness of what he can see.  It takes the telling of parables.  It takes building the temple up, piece by piece, to understand, from foundation on up.

The world he encounters is, despite its best intentions, despite all its learnings, and its laws, one of pettiness, rote law abiding without the law brought to live in real life.  And it would seem, Jesus has a list, to encounter, to go through things one by one...


But even then, even with all the rest, then there is the work of all the good information to take in, to sup at the table of the banquet, freely given, of God's love and wisdom, sustaining us, healing us.  And this is full work too, a day that wants for no distraction, how sweet its water tastes.

One is left again, in the chasm between the two worlds, but closer to the holy, and further away from the secular is a pleasant change, a welcome balm.  Each little period of days off you work your way up toward the far hill, and with each little hike toward it, the air is pleasant, salubrious, and your muscles are working again toward something rich with spirit and meaning.

Now, the body needs to be fed again.  The cold-cuts from the Safeway, despite their best intentions, taste of preservative chemicals and unnatural texture, why...  is that necessary?  The roast beef was okay, but still.  The food from the secular world, not the spiritual world of that from God.


The body is sore and stiff, after the recuperative rest.  One's molecules, the atoms, the little dynamo genies of energy of which we are comprised, are beginning to fire again, after this long period of interminable work that required the great patience, the patience of the enslaved and in Babylon.  And that firing is a good thing.  Come out, come out, Lazarus of deadened flesh, rise from the worldly tomb they stuck you in," here lies Lazarus, whatever he did."  Take off your burial garment.  Laugh with me and be joyful, taste the sweet fresh air that rejuvenates all of us poor folk.  Come and taste the wonderful feast the Lord hath prepared for you (in need of no Yelp review...)  Let the still warm waters bathe you.

And there is lots for Lazarus to say, reawakening.  He has been, for his part, dreaming enough that he might grasp this new light of the spiritual, non-secular, this burst before him of white life giving energy...


Here you can reawaken, cast off all the admonitions, the nitpicking accusations that you are not following the law to perfect little order, that come from the controlling sort of people who are not willing to leave their precious earned spot on the secular hill and its city.  Here all the laws are easy and friendly, beneficial, obvious, supportive, and one can only follow them with deep renewed appreciation.  In their attack upon you, they knew not the fullness of your being, your actions, your intent.  Humorless, blinded, that they went after you is rather funny.

Yes, even Moses had too much wine and had to be put to bed, but after all that, and you can't blame him.  That's the human heart for you.  Better to have human heart than none.  The people who enforce such laws, who accuse others, of course, they are only responding to their own sins known deep in their own hearts, the staining lack of morality covering their beings in an unpleasant way, such that there is much anger.

What do the old people, worn down by their own immeasurable day in day out workweeks and lack of proper rest, need but to be brought back to the spiritual?  We cannot give them new bones and new brains.  No wonder they are addled, having lived so long in their separate secular world prisons, without getting that which is necessary and sustaining, only getting it in small amounts, and even then probably arguing with themselves and their own logic of how best to defend themselves...  The lack of that support which is pure faith, even as that faith is the furthest thing from self-protective rational thought.

Sad it must make you to witness their frailty, their infirmities, their dotard confusions from years of leaning on the wrong support.  But rejoice, they were healthy enough to get so far, intact, and they must obviously had known that which supports, the real life of love for fellow humanity amidst all the toils they did even as they were not made to do.  The being, made after God, was not meant to be a prison guard, a humorless bureaucrat, an angry clerk, a futile pounder of hard rock and stone, and lastly not made to upstart nor correct the holy law of divine order and health of creation.  People were not meant to pollute the waters of life with toxic compounds made in a laboratory to our own grievously short-sighted ends.

And so to heal them, one needs to wipe away a lot of falseness.  Sin, we call it.  Sin of being the proponent of an "Ism."  Nazism, Fascism, whatever the particulars...  nothing more than words in the end, though the words can bear deeds terrible and cruel beyond all proportion... Isms accusing others of their own predominant fault...  Isms created to begin arguments...

Only he who knew all such things would offer support to the poor and the troubled, to the infirm and the weak of mind, for otherwise he would have fear of being useless, of doing more harm than good, not the good shepherd.

Sleep the gentle just sleep of the holy child tucked in the safe bosom of the Father.  He who does not act to gather causes then to scatter.


I spend much of days off with kitchen related things.  Exercise means going out in the cold to gather some groceries for dinner.  The secular pleasure of going out to dinner is less a joy, only a necessity.

At night I took refuge from work and its pains in the early morning with an old children's book of ours.  I'd ordered another copy of it from the old book sellers of Amazon, wishing to give it as a gift to my niece and nephew, but the 'very good condition' copy that arrived has a musty feeling to it, and with its inked in dedication, I thought I'd better just hang on to it.  Brian Wildsmith's Illustrated Bible Stories as told by Philip Turner.  There's just something nice about a book you grew up with, and at various times in your more mature life, returning to it has been a good balm for soreness of all forms mental, physical, of the heart, of the soul, of the agitated blood.

The tree pollen has come forth, and in the beam of a flashlight or a bicycle helmet lamp, the grains of it are visible and granular, coming down like a very fine precipitation, particles afloat riding sideways and down in the breezes of nighttime.  Sneezing, puffy eyes, itches of the sinus.  And you can plainly see, buds on trees, the first of the flowering pink ornamentals here and there, the peek out of the magnolia, and the rose-like offering of the Camellia tree out even in the cold that has returned after two very warm days when no one needed a jacket.


An old book in one's sickbed, with brief text and pictures colorful and evocative of ancient times in the holy lands.  Adam and Eve.  Cain and Abel.  Noah.  Abraham and Isaac.  Jacob.  Joseph.  Moses.  Joshua.  Samson.  Samuel.  David.  Elijah.  By the waters of Babylon.  Beautiful stories.  And with the paintings of watercolors with the line structure of ink drawings that depict these stories in prismatic color, so do the old stories tell us of our light, broken into the different colors in all their shades.

And it dawns upon one, in an hour of need and the dissatisfactions that come even when we are giving of our good efforts, this is our story.  This is my story.  I am part of this.  Part of that long history of the communion of the human spirit, ready, hearing the voice of the One God.  Part the tale of our part of the bargain with God, the Commandments.  The difficulties borne, the history of a people, wandering, besieged, battling...  There is no New if there is not this Old.  The Old is what we all are coming from, and somehow, as dumb as it might sound, it is good, very good, to know.  And I say to myself, yes, I remember.  For there is morality, moral lesson, the things of every adult maturity as far as making good decisions and doing the right and the good within these old pages, here of childhood, from 1968, the publisher's date, when I was three.

So, this is why I have acted the way I have acted.    There is the element of the prophet in our lives and their little insignificant life stories.  The same struggles.  The same awakenings, at odd lone moments when little seems as alive as the stars far away, to the holy good of God.



There you are yourself, in some sort of biblical situation, out in the desert, an exile, wandering, much like the people of the tribes themselves, subject...  And while you work away in slavery, still, there is something going on, something good, and it has to do with your own particular talents.

And here you are awakening to the old stories, the true deeper reality, found not to be the one of solely in the Buddhist sense, accomplished lotus style, or of the wisdom of the Zen monastery, but that of a collection of special people, who are caught in the act of realizing a positive reality, not simply a negative reflective one, (such as 'thou art that which is.)  There is something real behind it all, and real reasons to do things.

Then your own story comes into focus.  Everything is taken in stride.  If you came afoul of certain people, so what?  If a particular girl didn't work out, so what?  The true nature of your purpose as a human being had not come forward to you yet;  it was not made clear what it was.

The special talents of particular individual men are made for the times in which they must find themselves in.  A holy light, a star, shines over them, in time, marking their coming into their maturity, as to when they are ready for the deeper understanding, the one that makes all other things fall of as meaningless.

Interestingly enough, the standing up requires none of the special acts we might take as one bearing upon such.  A liberal can only be so much of a liberal fighting for every liberal cause before imploding into meaninglessness.  The ways of joining the religious order might seem promising, but that might not be the only way, nor necessarily the best, nor necessarily better than going it out on your own, communing yourself with the soul and its realities. A hard obscure path, one no one was witting of, could be far better, perhaps.

The old stories have a commonality, in that they are of a story that shows a new leader, a new kind of leader, to be called for.  The established leadership has become stiff, inflexible, unseeing...  And along comes a man, maybe even not even yet a man, not quite, unexpected, different, wise in a way that is not of previous wisdom's canned vintages.

What would this, what does this, look like...  It would on the one hand fulfill prophecy and the subtle pattern.  Recalling a steady theme that has not been honestly recreated in a legitimate fashion.  Like that of The Shepherd, the being gentle and wise who can overturn the mighty Pharaoh, by knowing "God's Will."

But no man, as such, can describe himself, but by the words of others.  Higher words.  Better interpretations.  Wisdom.  The acknowledgment of all the hard work, toil, exile, or rather, of all those things that make for that which feeds a true spiritual life of leadership and insight.

One can only take an almost joyous solace in rejection of a people who have lost all sight of the righteousness of the judgments of the Lord, who have conflated their own as if to make a marketplace, a business culture out of the temple that is justice.

God will judge.  He will judge you and I.  It will not be left up to the economy, nor to money and material riches.  It will not be the judgment of your neighbors, your classmates, the popularity contests, the tastes of those who hold themselves up as being so gifted as to discern the human heart through appearances.  The low will be raised, for their willingness to serve, for their patience, for their steadfast belief that the transient opinions of people mean little compared to being aligned with God and the Holy Spirit.

The Old Testament is the vines from which the grapes spring forth, upon which they are nourished by the water that falls as rain and the sun that shines and the earth itself, rooted in a hard stoney existence in otherwise barren soil.  The New represents the wine, which comes forth out of the tenderness of man, his understanding of the divine and divine processes everywhere as yeast and fermentation and the maturing of the juice.  Wine is the symbol of this carrying on...



But it is a judgmental world we live in.  Perhaps it's on a shallow level, the judgment which is the meat of the banter of a city and its pecking orders.  They'll hit with a cudgel and then express surprise at the hurt, and that you are the one at fault for being hurt.  Maybe particularly in intimate matters.

I'd seen enough.  I'd even lived a life not that far off from Jesus, as much as you could get away with unnoticed, and it was something no one even wanted to notice, and the thought of it even being possible would never have crossed their minds.  It was easy to go along unnoticed.  As if good was not even visible anymore, should it arrive and pass by in front of you...

The evening starts out, tiredly getting off the tarmac for a rosé wine tasting.  There are four 2016 Cotes de Provence rosé wines open, who knows why, one to push, another to compare it, and then one from up the road in Aix...  The early regular guy starts up a conversation with the guy at the end of the bar, in from out of town, who has opted for a Kronenbourg to start with.  Public policy history Ph.D guy talking with money guy early on about where the economy is headed.  Timber.  Chinese in Vancouver.  Robots.  Mobility of jobs training robots.  Training robots...  this is where the economy is headed as far as the money is concerned.  That and whatever the Chinese are up to, exporting inflation.  Pensions companies must pay out now the retiring work force of another era.  I can't really keep track of it all, sitting parties of walk-ins here and there, the woman who wants a quiet table, six young female med students in for the tasting without a reservation, two of them familiar.  They will end up ordering one cheese plate.  Another two for dinner in the corner, and then the reservation for the back room arrives, six young moms.


Later, as snow falls, the night comes to a close. It took a lot of energy to set it all up, and now, to put it all away, breaking it down, with the knowledge that tomorrow, a particular sort of very popular act will make Wednesday Jazz very full and hectic. So busy, so much running around my muscles are tightening up, and my legs, I can barely walk.  I'm tried my best to stay hydrated with electrolyte water, a can of low sodium V8, an order of pig's feet I snarf down while some guys talk of real estate over dessert and the last of their white Bordeaux.  I've brought in a sort of sandwich of gluten free bread, Safeway Deitz and Watson roast beef dressed with a little cayenne and slices of white onion, and I'm so hungry it doesn't matter.

Calves are beginning to clench up.  The late wet snow falling in big peaceful steady flakes on the quiet of the street and the brick sidewalks on the Dumbarton Oaks side.  I'd like to walk home, but I am hobbling.  I summon Uber pool.  Guy picks me up, in a small Chevrolet SUV, listening to jazz, then down to Georgetown.  A couple of young women getting out of a shift, Hispanic just like our own kitchen at the old Gaul.  Georgetown University is on Spring Break, so they got out a little early, they explain. They work at one of those places, &Pizza, a chain, one of those places getting ready for the robot, making these young ladies jobs superfluous.   The driver remembers when the &Pizza spot used to be the old restaurant of Georgetown legend, Au Pied Du Cochon, the din of its late night service having disappeared into its high ceiling long ago.  "Yeah, I grew up here, and I remember, my dad would wake up in the middle of the night, and come wake me up, 'son, you hungry, I''m hungry,' and we go down and eat, at like two in the morning.  Oysters Florentine, that's what I used to get."

You must be tired, I say to my companion in the back seat.  I worked tonight, I tell her, and I can barely walk now.  My feet hurt, she says, and we all nod.

I get in the door, aching all over, stiffening, cold, miserable, one more night to go, and this one, a big one.

Oral History Project, continuation, 3/5/2018, Sunday into Monday

Interviewing one's own internal private personal Keith Richards, around 5 AM:

Well, it is like a war.  Tending bar like that, people wanting to talk to you, you wanting to talk to people, brother comes in with family, wife's birthday, you might be pissed at him for his mean streak, but it's all cool when they get there.  Felt rather like shit.  Walked through the woods, and the tree pollen, busting out all over me, but it's some sunlight, and it's fresh air, and in the woods the wind is not dragging at you, that mean wind of city avenues, and big egos, channeling Mother Nature's beautiful flows into something sinister, noisy, and the cars are running along, and the sirens, and thank god you've turned off the sidewalk after the bridge and into the woods.

But every damn shift is like a war.  It takes all your physical energy, it really does.  You fight in pain, your bloody hands are cold and can't move, so that when you get to work and try to take your trusty old wine opener to cut the foil off the top of a wine, so that you can get at the cork easily--and you have to make that cut nicely, like a surgeon, no ragged edges to cut your dry fingers open--it's rough as hell, and it almost hurts, and you think, shit, I think I'm too old for this job if just opening a bottle of wine hurts like that.

Well, after this parade of needy people, entertained, entertaining, you somehow think it will lead somewhere, all this work, that of being a rock n roll legend, well, then you got to get home.  Bicycle you left, the lightest one, you try riding that home and goddamn it's cold, the wind's hitting you in the face, your ass, your crotch, the whole pelvis and the back are hurting, and you say, just get me closer to home, you come up past the Turks, you can barely take it and just walk the rest of the way with the bike, and then goddamn by the time you get in the door, groaning, cold, you don't even want turn on the tv in the cold, you just go to bed.

Later you wake up.  Wars, for reasons physical, emotional and spiritual, can not be fought without a healthy dose of pain killer.  Wine, and a good amount of it.  

I mean, you know, the old Bible stories are exactly right, the right thing to listen to.  That's where blues comes from, all songs, all music, really.  The constant war, the constant battle, the constant back and forth between the prophets and the warrior kings, on and on, and on.  Exile, the desert, dealing with shitty people...  Murdering...  There's a great resonance in them.  And so I watch a little bit of some series called The Bible, a History Channel production, where all the actors are told to scream at the top of their lungs, half of the sounds of swords being pulled out of their sheaths, and that new bloody sound that's popular now, of cutting through the viscera, the fascia, human flesh and organs, throats, and the sound men have added a moist quality to it, like to make the sound of blood being spilled, and then roars of battle and on the next guy for our little king of the tribe, metal against body.  

It's no wonder, you know, look through history, Lincoln loved reading the Bible, all the prophets, and kings, the battles and such, shit laid to waste and all that...


I guess that's what I liked about my job, in a way.  It was physical.  It hurt.  It made you stiff with aches, neck, back, made you feel weak as a kitten.  Made you just feel sick, in need of a warm blanket and a dark place.  It was as close as you could practically get, being a nonviolent type, the restaurant business, to war, marshaling all your lines of soldiers, ammo, back up...  No one ever saw that, that ice berg depth work of getting ready to go, as it to answer any question, any shift in the battle.


That's why we grant the old Stones guitar player with that laugh of many cigarettes a kind of prophet status.  These are the old prophets come again.  

People, you know, you wait on them, they can turn on you, they can turn into pricks quite quickly, or they can sit around and spend a long time lingering, and you wonder, what the hell are they doing...

But it's a war, constant battle, the quest for kingly leadership, lonely, wanting a prophet...

And the people of DC, goddamn what a draining bunch of jerks they are, not so much who they are or how they act and talk, but for all their ambitions...  Some way they can find a safe job that doesn't hurt, that won't kill you, that doesn't make you broke and homeless and your children dead, that doesn't make your people enslaved.. Good luck to them and their degrees and their higher careers...

I feel like I know where I stand... Not a profiteer...

No fucking wonder, when they got back to their tents after a day's work, after a nice nap, you got your guitar and your bottle of wine, and who gives a ....  what hour it is....

Keith Richards was once a nice little boy.  Great family.  Soulful people.   And still, a nice guy.

But war, you know, you fight when you have to fight.  Then you sleep when you can.  You eat when you can, whatever you have.  You have a rough idea of when you have to fight again.   Are you ready, will you be, in so many hours, who know.  But the battle goes on and on.

You just got to get used to it, and not care, not get upset by it...  



Anyway, after chopping a lot of ego heads off, and dealing with marauding infidels, rival powers, the boy needs some guitar and some wine, if he can't have some wifely company at 6 AM before going back to bed to face another day...


But it all is perfect.  The perfect interplay of the people in your life, the circumstances.  You just have to be enough of a saint to realize all that.

Abstain, even from fears...  Even fears, unnecessary to us.  A sinful indulgence, resulting from a lack of faith...  This is what I tune into when I finally get up, a priest with a Jamaican accent and a Southeast Asian name.

Tired today.  A lot of rest.  Not feeling so hot, still.  The cough is holding, and I reflect on how tired the body has been, in an atypical way, in that I'm up early, awake, but not much energy, and little desire to exercise, to go for my favorite walk in the woods.

Mom calls, and she is coping with the blizzard that came.  She calls later than noon, around two, but my mind has attempted to be vigilant when she calls in need of someone to talk to.   Last night I tried to help her get her cable up and running again, so she could see the Weather Channel's pictures from the New England coast, the seas blowing up over the rock seawalls last evening, then on her iPad.  TV helps her.  More snow came.  I encouraged her to order out from Canale's, just down the street from her, and today there are leftovers, and fortunately enough wine.

A dream:  Mom and I go to New York City.  There is a grand department store with a sort of zoo in it, live animals, and a fancy wrought metal staircase, of work that reminds of the old elevators in Europe that rise through the staircase.  Going through the department store (I remember not looking at a single item) one could cross through the great city from one main side to the other, as if it were like a great tunnel.  Out on the street, it is impossible to find a particular person, a princess type, a needle in the haystack, in such a great city of many many many people.  I find parking on the street.

My horoscope today, says, good causes are crying out, "crying out for someone with your skills, especially your talents for communication, so get involved and find ways to help make the a better place.  You CAN make a difference, Capricorn, IF you start today."




Forty days and forty nights he was alone.  Meaning, without a woman.  Meaning, a long time.  Comes with the job.  And Jesus did not mind it.  He was already whole, and had no use for Satan to tell him otherwise what he might need, as he had it all, the real stuff...

A reflection on the Garden of Eden.  All fruit was good, (except that at the very center of the garden), and we were innocent, unashamed to look upon each other, naked without lust and desire.   There was no creepiness, no hidden lustful meanings in our speech and in our actions.  We had no desire to know everything.  We had enough.  We did not need to self-critique ourselves, to say, we should be more this, or more that.  We were fine and perfect already.

Is it possible, can we take another by the hand and go back to that.


But lust and vanity get in the way of that.

(I seem to lack imagination today.)

Fear, fear of not fitting in...  To hell with not fitting in.  To hell with fearing you might look odd for being strong enough to be true to yourself.  That's the harder thing, not the easier thing.  That's the sort of thing you need to join in, the resistance to the main body of culture and vanity, the wish for more and more, more security, more fear, more pleasure, more material things....

Look at him, Jesus;  he wasn't fearful, he didn't mind being sad at all, sadness or none of that being anything to fear, rather a gift.  He knew what was coming to him, and even with that he didn't have fear...  He didn't seem to mind being alone...  things like this were treasures.

What can you do today, my friend...  you can look at things such that it's not all a disaster, but rather something to the contrary, a way toward grace and kindness and love, and those good things, those things which are not necessarily a part of this world we live in, but must be engaged in, like forgiveness of sinners like ourselves, misguided youths who are honestly repentant of their err of their ways....

Start today, yes.  Today.  Right now.



When you start to look for, to examine, to question, to see the sinful nature you have been in contact with, not attempted to run from, it suddenly becomes a rather rich garden.  From two dimensional words it becomes three dimensional and more, vivid as it could be, personified by persons in multiple ways, over and over.

Is it necessarily bad to be there, seeing all that?   It is not what goes into a man that is sinful, but what comes out of him, Jesus says.

But in seeking to know anything, you should, rather like a scientist, go and seek it, examine it, keep observational records, check in on it, so as to describe in your own working scientific knowledge...

Then you sort of think to yourself, "Man, I've seen it all."  (And maybe that's what Kerouac was up to, describing all the madness he saw firsthand, or, if not the madness, the humanity of people, the base character...)  That is the knowledge I was seeking, you say to yourself.

Songs of experience.

What better way is there, but to be a barman server in a major city of a nation whose faith is teetering.


Thus, the instructional nature of Jesus.  He had a lot to do as far as teaching us, as far as awakening, instructing, inspiring, tending us.

Mother Angelica:  Politicians are not my shepherd.  Jesus is my shepherd.  Good point.  We should not confuse the two.  One is meant to be the ultimate leader, to inform, and the other is or can be a rank business man of great ego.


It would have been hard for a young man, a college graduate, to come out as an all-knowing Christian form of a person.  If he had said, "wist ye not, I was at my father's business," everyone would have laughed and laughed at him.  Or they would have presented to him some very stiff options.  It was better for that young man to try it on his own, to follow the path of wisdom...

(About "feminists":  it is possible that they are New Age-ers.  Pagans.  Obviously it depends on the self definition, the broader definition of the term.  Does it make one stubbornly unable to accept the wisdom of Christian thought?)

Believe me, the trends of the educational world I encountered was a strange one, slanted in a way to accept everyone and all behaviors, about law, laws about upholding the laws of perfect equality...  Kafkan, worse than Quixotic... The elites justifying by making sure that we all must help out the minority, and thereby justifying themselves as elites.  Which other people considering themselves just as worthy will of course come along and set themselves against, in argument and in war.  The battle to be the top of the food chain, deciding how to give out their own form of justice.

I wanted to break free from it.

Psychic.  The realization that within events, meaning...  a pattern, the opportunity for reflection...

Rejection, reconciliation.  Joseph, sold by his brothers...  If the pattern is embraced, it is liberating, freeing...  The Mass of March the Second, this year, 2018, EWTN.  Fr. John Paul, the homilies, (available YouTube.)

Old Testament read with eyes illumined by faith in the New.  Typology.

Jesus Christ comes to fulfill every prophecy, every last encounter and figure...

God's vineyard... (especially Isiah.)  bountiful blessings sent to the people of Israel, the image....

Vineyards all around Galilee.  The owner not necessarily the tender, tenants entrusted to take care of that vineyard...

God, the vineyard owner, is patient;  justice with his mercy...

And the prophecy, now by Jesus saying these words, is fulfilled, the story complete, reconciled, a just ending.

Free us from preoccupation with our needs in this Lenten time.  Jesus sustains us.


How could you not be sad in this world, in this life, in this broken state of physics.  Physical existence, such that one day must somehow come to an incomprehensible end, each and all of us.

What did he not say yesterday, he wondered.  Another blizzard up in New York State.  Where people are nice.  Not concerned with style, not with the presentation of their own selfish identity, look at me, look at me, childish music played loud...

An expiation of our sins, did God send us his son.  Then what are we?  We too participate in that,




When I was immature, I dated an older woman, pleasant, giving, a good sense of humor.  We drank French wine, travelled once to Maine, put together dinner from time to time.  She was a professional explicator of Old World culture, and I felt pleased by her knowledge, and wished to learn more.  Wine, food, perfume, art, old customs, history (focussed on France), her interpretation in the editorial introduction to each issue was good and excellent writing.

But on the dark side, and who can blame her, she would raise her doubts about my future, such as it was, or would be.  Go to law school, get a Ph.D.  Who can blame her for her maternal concern, as she had aging parents to cope with and aid, and was not a mother, nor now a wife, as she had been once married.  Once in the video store in the old neighborhood I wished to break free from, she quipped to me that I looked like someone they'd just let out of a home, a home for certain types of people ill in the head, or going through something.  And I did not take it as any particular insult, because, yes, I get broken people, I get Christ's people.  Blockbuster Video did not offer any recessional hymn, after you'd picked out your entertainment for the evening.

Eventually, the rejection aspects mounted, and one grew tired, simply, worn out.  She began to take issue with my manner of speaking, as when I would use the phrase "cooking up," which she did not like, a phrase for the unsophisticated, but which the good Father Leo Patalinghug uses, here cooking and sharing in Ohio, on EWTN television, Savoring Our Faith.

And now, yes, one does look for reconciliation, and, as with people by and large, really, one looks toward marriage as a form of that, redemption, a coming back to home and family.

And if one were to reach maturity, what would one look for, in a spouse, a comely woman with good heart and a sense of the spiritual, a sense of how we all are not perfect, no, not really at all, but broken and in need of love and forgiveness.  She would accept you as you were, a poor man, stepped over by the rich man, by people with good haircuts and nice shoes, people with hands not roughed by manual labors, sophisticates with excellent taste beyond the simple function of things that are nutritional and good for us and easing of our burdens and our own little disasters.

She would radiate to you a kindness, a forgiveness, a gentle touch, and she would take you in the way ...  in the way the women of note in the Gospels take Jesus Christ.  Not telling you, "you're an asshole, grow up," like a big brother might, rejecting you, but kind, very much so, kind to the body of your soul in the way rest is, sustaining you in your work, such as it, misinterpreted often enough, the easy case to make, the degenerate bartender stooping to the crass level, harassment, ribald joking, the lowest common denominator.

No, you are a prince, a prophet, for who you are in your real form of existence, as you were baptized, somewhat reluctantly by a certain Father Lane, who was not perfectly pleased with my parent's Catholic attendance record, as the story goes...




It started out as a long day ahead of me, and as a detail, to get down to my therapist, Dr. H.W., down at 19th and L, I had to make it out the front door and across the freshly laid concrete of the sidewalk there before me.  The men, with reflective yellow vests, hard hats, thick work pants, boots, knee pads, were just then smoothing it out and putting the final groves into the wet concrete.  The hour was such that I needed my bicycle to get there in time, and the only bike handy was the red one, the top end road bike, and the fellow who helped me by reaching out for it to take it the curb, commented in Spanish English that it was nice (and light.)  And then they laid out a dark grey two by four and I Wallenda-ed over it to the other side, thanking them all.  And then I was on the bike.

There were something to go over with my professional friend and listener, after she explained that her office policies had changed slightly to insure she would be recouped should anyone be more than ten minutes late, and I was not an offender, a just so you know sort of thing.

So I had somethings to talk over, feeling the clock ticking, and so I got to work, laying it out, quickly and efficiently.  Feeling better, a lot better, actually, now that I'm drinking electrolyte water, taking magnesium... A death in the family, a bridge to lost histories of Irish arrivals upon this land, in Lynn, of third floor walk-ups, and grandmothers who did what they had to do, with wisdom of home cures and such and such, unable to afford the doctor...  An attempt on my part to sort out an old issue within the community of my Facebook friends from the old days of my restaurant work...  My sense that there is a home cure for everything, and that I didn't need the Lexapro, indeed had quit it cold turkey without any brain flashes of the unpleasant kind they warn you of...  Mom's vulnerability up there by her lonesome self...  There was lots to talk about.

She looked at me, "sounds pretty chaotic."  We'd skipped the last session two weeks before on account of my having to go in early for goddamn Valentine's Day, a good call actually.   She looks at me and mentions, as I'm reeling all this off, that I seem a bit more keyed up than usual.  The word she used, I forget, something that implied...  Hmm, well, I'm just trying to get my money's worth, this stuff going on, and I'm trying to have the energy to get it out there, after this running the modern city gauntlet, construction, traffic lights, more construction, pedestrians crossing against the light, the weather cold again, in an unpredictable way, and then there will be Jazz Night to cope with before the week is over and we are already pretty tired, but hanging in there...


But you wonder it yourself, "how could anybody like me," given the way I am, given the way things are...sort of as the logical and practical and wise elder side of the family is telling me.

The days of one's firing, we talk about that, the same old embarrassing thing, but of how really it was just rejection.  Rejection as people will simply do, who knows why, out of a wish to protect some business interest, some law of legality less than real morality overseeing our situations...

One brings up such things, because there is a point, a typology to them, and unto us.  The stone is rejected.  That's the way it goes.  Even the cornerstone, even the best one, as Jesus himself is, will be, rejected, quite severely.

And rejection preys upon our minds, doesn't it.  Good material.  And rejection simply and finally is not the case, not the whole story.  Or, how to see it?  If rejection comes, there will be its better counterpart, lovely, not painful, accepting, valuing, nurturing...

And perhaps I do not need my kind therapist anymore, but, as they say, have Moses and the Prophets to listen to, even when I am Job, even when I am Jonah, even when I am Lazarus, covered with ulcering sores, untouchable, despicable to human eyes...

It's a funny thing.  Finding your own salvation, or at least the hopes thereof, sinner that I am, through act and through inaction, all of that, in finding your own salvation you are doing that good thing, which is finding the light, the way, for others to follow and do the same.  And you are even yourself not at all original in all this, how could you be?  You are merely a reader, therefore a scholar, of much of what needs truly to be known.

How does the media, by the way, how does big data track you when you write about such things as salvation?  Will an ad pop up somewhere on a device, partially disguised, 'get thee down to Mass at 12:05 at Saint Matthew's Cathedral,' 'Peter, father of the church, the real story... get it here.'  Someone's probably willing to sell you a picture of Jesus, and I hope, that if I were to spend money so, it would go to a good cause anyway...

Prophecy, typology... where do you fit in?


Perhaps one cannot be "psychic"/able to foresee future events and circumstances without looking backward, without having read what comes before...


Earlier on, earlier on...  there was the princess.  Who wouldn't want a pretty girl, a sophisticate, a New York City actress type...  My footing remained in the country, at the stage of life, God's country, rolling hills, Central New York, the forests and the streams, the small college, the fields with dairy cattle, my parents...  (My brother had gone off to make his fortune in the city.)

But about such people, advanced, assured, extremely intelligent, well schooled, verbally precocious, argumentative, a lover of issues and sides, there was a put-down side, a side with its hatred of natural things, of male ways.  I wanted to, I suppose, awaken her from all that, the kind of selfish spiritual deadness...  These are not the days of the heights of your powers, though, when you're receiving your rejections from the powers that be, the scribes, the Pharisee system of meritocracy, such that you come to expect rejections on all fronts, not just one, as if they too were written in stone, the rejections.

The bird, the tree, the blade of grass, the water in the stream, they would never reject you though, so as long as they all seemed reasonably healthy and steady, well, you could deal with things.

I could not awaken her.  I failed, as I deserved to, being full of sin, not so certain I would ever amount to much, the way forward highly obscure and scary, unhappy, disheartening.  I tried.  But by the inner Jesus nature of the spiritual being inside, you're a meek sort, not one to push people.  You have your parables, waiting for you somewhere, but they are not quite there yet.  Parables come when there is rejection in the air, and this was secretly, without you even knowing, where you future would lie.

In that odd old thing called the Parable.

The Parable teller seems to know certain things.  He will be familiar with phrases such as "and then it came to pass..."  That sort of not-quite-mastery of time and the things that will come, that even a fool can see coming, almost a fool.

Parables are fun, a good literary exercise.  Gentle little proofs;  you're not beating people over the head with anything.  People will taste the correctness within them, without having a negative psychological reaction (for the most part), without getting huffy because they didn't come up it with themselves.  And there's a secret quality to them, like an old Zen saying, of correcting people, guiding them, without them seeing it but that they came to the conclusion themselves under their very own powers of thought.  And the parables also have a way of showing, of bringing out, the goodness of things, things we might put-down and dismiss, as if we blew life back into them, as if we accepted again the beauty of their real presence in life in this world, the sparrow, the poor man, the lily...  the wheat and the chaff.

The modern publishing industry would not even wish to bother with the parables.  They are too self-evident, too self-realizing, too powerful, too subtle.  Can't really make a buck off of such things.  Which again leaves the teller of the parables safe and sound, no one really wanting to come and steal something from him.  Want my job here in the vineyard tending the vines?  Here, take it... Try it out and tell me you want to keep at it.

At the beginning of March a cough had gotten somewhere established within.  There was a sort of cold tiredness hanging over you each day.  You felt hungry.  Not enough energy to go out food shopping though.  A strong wind came.  Your reserves were low.  You knew again the work week of four nights was sufficient to put you down for at least two days, a third day necessary just to care of yourself...


But one day, perhaps the teller of the parables would see something that no one else had.  Hear something fresh.  Remarkable.  The seeming idiot speaks, and with a sense of what might even be called prophecy, or something rather interesting, at least.  Powers of sight opened by eliminating a sort of inner resistance, inner interference, such that seeing out further, clearer, whatever it is that is to be seen would come closer, less obscure, as if for its own part to match...  The light shining out now, no longer hidden, then the light shining back.

It would require a special sort of person, yes and no, to be able to see so clearly.  First, a very front row seat on sinful behavior.  He could not be, say, a college professor, nor a banker.  A recognized pillar of society,   He would not be of the professionally high ranks, so that he could not really be taken down and disgraced with much to lose.  He would be an oddity.  A puzzle of an educated young man but without the seemingly appropriate profession.  Seeing with perfect clarity the faults, the hiccups, the marginal, the not quite shameful, the whole range of gluttony, idle laziness, envy, passion...  And calm would he be, more or less, in the midst of all that, those storms of human nature.  A sense of humor.

A princess, upwardly mobile, educated, for her you'd be just about the last thing she'd want to have anything to do with.  Even your own patience with yourself would be pretty much worn out by the time you really started gaining on understanding.  So it is.

When one waits on all the people of all the nationalities, you have an idea of how the world works.  Some peoples come early and talk incessantly when you would rather have a moment to collect your thoughts.  Some are so efficient at being waited on, such professionals, that one fears being impolite or slow or slightly off.  Some take their time, and speak in shrouded mystery as to what they might like.   Some are quite used to being waited upon.

One could have, if one had wanted to, understood the entire history of the world, economically, politically, as the seeds of everything were there before you, all acts, all behaviors, all the things within and about the clever creature of will.  It really was a great job, a great biological study, observations, little judgment, an Audubon gallery of portraits if one had been patient and tireless enough.  Inexplicable primates, eyes bright and wide eyed, the habits from ancestors who lived in trees...  wanting to get in their words in...  much as birds.

And indeed you might develop your own little theories.  One bearing upon blood types.  What makes conversation more seamless in certain situations, interactions.  An O can talk anyone, I suppose, but find the other blood types a bit tedious, hard to reach.  A people, for him they were difficult.  Often quite humorless.  Distracted?   They always put things in their own terms, that of the successful farmer, striving away, storing grain.  They were always right.  And then there were the type B people, masters of manipulation, skilled at turning any subject into a conversation completely to suit their own sophisticated urban survivalist understandings, too formidable to tangle with, impossible to talk to if you were an O.  The Bs want to intrude into your creative process, to storm its walls, burn them, kill its women and children, in order to, as they see it get to you, and thus, themselves.  If they can't kill you and burn down your village, they will use techniques of embarrassment.  ABs are rarer. An oddity of evolution, not enough research, to judge or see where they are when they are honestly themselves.

It all left you with the impression that the  higher blood types of evolution got you as much as you might get a cat that brought you gifts, little animals half alive, collected from nature and brought to your doorstep. The best they could offer you was a sort of "hmm, thank you... (I guess.)"  And you have brought them something holy and beautiful, and for all your efforts it can only seem that they do not get the offering.


Looking at it, I think it always seemed to me that there was a real sort of psychic understanding of The Old Testament.  Jesus could bring out the deeper references, incorporate them in parable form.  And I have the impression that his parables are themselves a psychic quality in the old light that they shine into our lives, the deepest meanings of our own little events and interactions.

I woke today, with a headache, and the Mass' homily was about the tale of Lazarus the beggar and the wealthy man who end up dying at the same time, finding themselves at the opposite ends of the chasm between heaven and hell.  The man who had just about every material comfort is suffering in anguish in hell, and above the poor man who suffered, comforted by dogs who licked his wounds in life and little more, is sitting with Abraham.  As the father of the homily, a Dominican, Father Peter Cameron, explains it, one man offered comfort, a servant, while the other, well... , was more concerned with other things than being kind to his fellows.

There is no shame in being the poor man...

The things you tune into, as if by chance...  Not that they are perfectly and directly and concretely applicable, made for any sort of perfect comparison, but just that these thoughts generate other thoughts, and ones which are comforting.

Being rejected, the homilist points out, is a great gift, an opportunity, a freedom, a means to see the light...  Being rejected, one is more broken, and when we acknowledge our own brokenness, the more people will listen.  And I can see that.  And it matters not how one is rejected, becoming just a detail, insignificant, but for the lesson and the brokenness.


It was something the boy wondered about as he listened to father telling him about the symbolism of Brother Ass, Christ's journey to Jerusalem, that Jesus knew reality so well that he knew future events.  Being so cool as to see the future, to know there was an ass waiting to bring him, this had its impression on a youthful boy from years ago, remembered.  Dad and his own rare Jesus-like parables, gentle, kind, understanding, learning, no judgment...

The Gospels seem to have that awareness, of looking back at the old stories, now with a consciousness as to what had been created with such accomplishment, all the old tales of Moses and Abraham and the prophets.  What did it all mean?  And now suddenly, not only were we capable in our own homage and reverence, able to see the old stories with vivid life and fresh very direct applicability to our own affairs and souls...  Now we could see the present almost itself the fulfillment of prophecy, as Jesus says about his own day.  And he does so, primarily to teach us a lesson, the way to see the important over the unimportant.  And then, by doing so, almost as an afterthought, there could be a prescient way to see events coming, which you could do so because you understood deeply and intimately the reality of those events of long ago important and written down...

The old stories are very real to us, a distillation of all that is now before us.  The stories help us seeing, getting, grasping, the larger point.

Having such a father, an accomplished instructor of plant biology, a teacher in every sense, the point of life was deeper, a reality behind reality, a way to look at all things.   And so do you try to interpret, to find out the greater lessons that might be offered you, say, rejection, rejection when you like a girl but she doesn't seem to like you back so much, rejection in the form of the termination of a situation such as one's gainful employment in the business which is ostensibly your career, your livelihood.

The old saying, wist ye not I was at my father's business, that always seemed to apply to life.


I never even looked at myself as a writer.  Writing was just a way to record thought, to work on them, to workshop thoughts before the intellect and the soul, to see if they worked or held water.

I never really even looked at myself as a barman.  It was something beyond that.  I was very conscientious about it even, the details, the particulars, the restocking, the knowledge, all that pertained to the service end of delivering in timely fashion to people.  I quite outdid myself at it.  I worked hard.  I'd get home exhausted.  But there was a reality beneath all that.  It did not show up on the bottom line, or in any specific spreadsheet calculations from the numbers people, except that it was obvious the business wasn't so bad, and that people who came tended to return.  Whether or not I got any particular specific special reward or security beyond that shared with everyone...


By interpolation, then, do we sometimes project forward, to conclude that life is such.  You never really look at it as life, conventionally, the make yourself happy kind of a thing.  No, it's more about the spiritual journey, as they say.  About those things which you accidentally encounter, run into randomly, sometimes through 'mistake,' and then find meaning in, water to walk in, and then on.  A certain kind of detachment for the spiritual to shine through in spiritual time...

Would it even be, anymore, once you had opened thine eyes and seen more truly (ever a process), about the profession, about making the living...  Would it be about that directly, in light of the tale Jesus tells the fretting Pharisees about Lazarus the beggar and the man of wealth, and all those old stories retold...

People might have told me, "you have so many talents, why do such a job?"  Made you wonder, yes it did.  But perhaps you looked beyond the unnerving specifics, and you saw, at least, the human dignity in the task, in keeping it alive.  Old school.


The old barman was a man who spent a day off alone with his thoughts.  If there was something that caught his eye, a show on public television, he sometimes teared up, inexplicably.  Each week had been full of hard effort, and offered the fruit of many tales.  Little tales, not with any particular point, more the capture of a little mystery, or a question that one could not easily answer, or easily take a side on, a stance, right or wrong, good or bad.  Things in general and on the whole were far too confused and confusing.  And you knew you only had your gut reaction, and even that could never quite explain, as no one can ever really explain himself.  There were a few guitars around, but things to do, and an aging mother to worry about, and anyway, there was tasks to complete in this simple unostentatious life.  Trash, recycling, cooking, wine to drink, sleeping and forms of rest.  No time for much else.  And if the weather wasn't great, he tended to stay in.

Good taste... what does it mean?

It took the frailty of his one surviving parent, a mother loved deeply with no question, no choice in the matter, for him to be able to listen fully to the simplicity of his own opinions...  It could have, on the one hand, driven him mad, this last vulnerability of the distant thunder of glimmers of anguish, an anguish that itself was immediately transmuted into beauty of love, life, its particular personal memories.  No longer did the old barman's mind tend to run toward all the things of regret, or of other people and their opinions, as much of all that was only imaginary anyway, shifting sands.  All one could accept was the final peace.  Not all the fears, horrible, lonesome, fears of the worst sort of failures there could be, homelessness, addiction, the loss of everything, the great inability to be able to actually protect yourself, your life, your history, your health, in the long run.  The great futility sense that came down upon you with thoughts of no pension, no way to ever retire, no way to provide an aging self any security whatsoever...  Shit, why not take a glass of wine, the sweet potato in the oven now, an unexpired steak waiting for season in the refrigerator when ready...

Cooking, so basic, so easy, so beautiful, on the very top end of a human body's needs, like sleep, going to the bathroom.  Ingredients from the earth, blessed by God's covenant.   A grass fed steak, onion, greens...  

And yet, in his own thoughts, a bum.  A let down.  Failure at the great body of things that most people in the great metropolis survive upon...  resume, technical skills, software murmurers, specialists, all of their successes squeezing out the little guy not willing to sell out his brethren by facilitating the great computer chipping, the ultimate surveillance already come upon us irrevocably, such that each of us will be tracked with droves, our movements recorded by face recognizing cameras...

What does one do...  when one's values have grown off in their own separate tribal direction out away from the others.... what does one do, when the oldest of Bible stories speak to you, find a new land, having a hearing for the word of God, as it were... a wish to go to a new land, Abrahamic.  And the old voice, "too late for me."  Who even remembers the values I have...  Indeed, I have to tell them to my therapist, who is quiet and mystified, or simply a passive listener, but with the bias of the times, he who cannot belong is crazy, a medical case.

You must return, return to the old land, to the oldest of stories....


The man cooked, in his own fashion.  Two of the four grass fed beef patties from the Safeway to cook or waste, the sweet potato with a rub of olive oil and sea salt, the iron lodge grill pan skillet...  And wine, indeed, is in the vessel, first the left over Beaujolais, chilled from the cooler, and then, the Chinon.  Jesus liked wine with his feasts, part of salon, his intellectual muse when he supped and served the fishermen of man...  The wine reminds you of the vintage, brought to proper season.  

So many deep resonances in all the stories old.  He who serves, and he who is merely a barman in some town real, pouring his little tastings to entertain the people who come in, particularly the ladies, but really all people.  

Abraham's sacrifice, the death of a dog long ago, Spring break from college...  put to sleep, and we buried her... up there on Ernst Road above the old property.