I myself would have wondered why.

It just seemed to help.  Getting through the usual roadblocks when you awake, awkwardly, not knowing at all what you are doing, why you are doing, and think what you need to say on paper.

The visions of the minds of the Old Testament, why not sit in on their jam session, observe how they do it, see how they saw the major issues of the day.  What did they think of?  How?  Why were they obsessed, if you will, with equipping the understanding of, with, the One God.

Why, and how, would it help the modern writer to sit in with the ways of Jesus Christ, the way he thought, put depths into words...

Is this something we resort to when things aren't going very well, seemingly, when the path you've been on seems to have not revealed its true self, its purpose, its satisfactory meeting of life's great problems...

What should I do for a career, how do I pay the rent in this town, how do I save for the future, how do I take care of mom, how do I save myself...


Waking up, you clutch the iPhone, looking for something within it.  Some kind of information.  You're not sure what.  Is there anything you need to get back to in the triage of the day?

Easy to turn the television on, with the same excuses.  What do I need to know, The Weather Channel, weather, yes, that is important.  And yet it's already bombarding you with cultural messages, brain-washing you, lulling you, overwhelming you, so that any idea you might have on your own seems rather dumb now.

On EWTN it's coming out too slow.  You're hungry, thirsty, in need of breakfast.  Dirty dishes in the sink.  Green tea, bone stock warmed up in the toaster over.

If you're a writer, well, this is it.  This is the stuff you really have.  You don't need to go off looking for fancier more interesting things.   The mind is cubism.  Capturing one thought would be enough to be art, a worthy study.

But what right would I have to think myself a connoisseur of Old Testament prophets, of the Parables...

And why does writing feel like you're sort of sneaking around.  Hiding out.  From the bedroom to the kitchen, retrieving the glass of water by the night table, a pint glass, along with retrieving your eyeglasses;  multi-tasking, things in piles first, to then be sorted or made use of or taken care of to be more properly put away later;  sometimes the objects make it first half the way, as if that too were part of a process, something the mind saw the overall purpose of, the entire process in its grasp, even as you do not consciously think of it.    Is this the way some minds work?  Is this the way my mind works...

But if if finally came down to it, after all the things you wrote, what you might have within you, in your wildest dreams as a writer, wise, why not shoot for the highest mark, the coolest groove...

Why not aim for the example of examples, the real true distillation of words with meaning.

(One thought comes, and others will follow.   The hard thing is to not get distracted.)

Even Jesus, as a writer, would say, in essence, it is not me, it is my Father's business, it is from the Father.


And so I turned to what I thought would be the real things to write about, the things that I would mull over if I were, finally, a great writer.  A Dostoevsky, a well-read Lincoln,.  Converted.  Of a different mindset than the one you had to at least be capable of mimicking in order to stay relevant and make sense to anyone...


The secular world is worn out for the writer.  It doesn't offer enough, it's not interesting enough, at least not without its better counterpart, the life of the Church.  You can come upon this realization, as I did, a bit late in life.  Well, you knew it was always there.  You became well-read in Eastern spirituality, the philosophy of the Buddha, did the yoga, meditated, but even that, where does it lead you?   The Christian myth can be taken apart and analyzed by the scientists of myth and ritual, things that go way back, in history, in the psyche, but just as a way of thinking, you had to find the Judeo-Christian tradition working for you.

Taking in the mysteries, and working with them, prayerfully, it turns out working for you better than modern therapy treatment...

There are other things to do than mastery of the sophistications of the modern world, with all its great culture, its technological offerings...  Those things take up your time, but for what?  A career, you think, yes...  But that might not hold out forever...

As a writer you have no choice, I think, being in my own situation.  It was the way, there was no other.



Sophistication, moving to a city, etc., you thought chicks would like you better...

You can read Hemingway two ways...  either as a model for sophistication, worldliness, or, the other way, as one of simplicity, of going back to simplicity...

I knew there was to be a meeting at the restaurant at 3:30, and I found myself half awake around ten in the morning, made my tea, called mom who had texted...

But the body is not ready to go, and I am now getting texts from the kid, who wants me to cover his shift.  And this is irritating, and distracting, because it throws the mind into the necessity to make a decision, when none should have been asked of, but of what the first true sentence might be, where to start of this so-called writing process.  Every third Saturday, it seems, he has some sort of a problem, hey, can you help me out.  Either it's something for his little brother, cousins visiting from New York, or he's sick, or injured, and this morning it's bad shrimp and food poisoning.

So, I have to go there anyway, and maybe I'm up for it, or maybe not.  A little money is always good. You'll be going up to see your mom soon.  But still, the legs are tired, the body is tired, the mind might be awake, and I'm doing the best I can talking to mom on the phone giving her a weather report, what does she need today if she is able to get out of the house...

I take a nap, and fall asleep, and then, I get up, shower, fold a work shirt, just in case, and off I go.  On foot, through the woods, thinking I need the sunlight and the exercise...


The meeting is not about anything at work, really, just about a new ballot initiative, about tips and minimum wage.

But the meeting starts out, when we all are seated around the table we eat at, the boss asks me, what is this about, and he hands me a copy of a check, a closed check from two weeks previous.  The young lady, who had her rehearsal dinner with us, a friend of the boss who is overseas, was generous and appreciative, as a lawyer would be to an old bartender, and left a tip of one hundred dollars.  I shrug, what can you do?  It's plain there was a charge for her drinks.

Well, well, the meeting ends, about nothing else than the ballot initiative to which we need to make our view clear that we do not want the abolishment of tips...  I leave quietly out the front door and I do not have the energy, after stopping by the public library in vain to look for a spirituality section, to go to the grocery store, nor to make the fuss of hailing a cab of some sort, and so I walk back down through the woods and up again back out onto the avenue of embassies lining in a row.  Well, the sun is out anyway.  The tree pollen, maybe I'll have to pay that later, but it's pretty out.

By the time I get back, it is still light out, but I am cold, feeling rather tired, and my stomach is aching.  It is easy to drift off back into a good three hour rest, and not much writing today, though lots to say, just that it all got pissed away, distracted.   Awake at 11 PM, reheat a Bolognese with gluten free pasta, have a little wine, but again, bored, unhappy with the boss, who had also scolded me when Wednesday Jazz World Bank night was blowing up even at 7:15, "you two should be able to handle it," but the kid is going at his own pace, arriving a half an hour late, "I'm going as fast as I can," I tell him.  And I am.  Mom texts me again around 5 in the morning.  Her television cable hookup, tricky at best, isn't set right, there is the clock change, and she is cold and lonely and it is dark.  I have a couple of chats with her over, have another splash of wine, and down in the basement I put in a colored load, with enough energy to transfer socks and underwear and colored tees into the dryer.


I've helped build up a crowd of regulars, and that involves taking care of them from time to time, and not all of it rational, and sometimes as instinctive as the woman Mary who anoints Jesus' feet with costly spikenard.

But ah, so much for my little church without walls, my little Christian work up upon the second floor dining room.  So much for the Holy Spirit.  Eat something, take another nap, and go off to the beginning on another work week, Sunday evening with the clock change throwing everyone off.



And then, a fresh perspective.  Things become small, details, in the larger story of the old book.  You took things too seriously, but then the burden is lifted.

Is it as if you have an inner little brother, a sort of idiot you have to take care of.  A holy goof.  You're a bit wiser, and you have to help him out, spiritually, because he is spiritual.

It's like the girl.  You obsessed over her, or at least that's who another person might describe it, the thing they would say about it.  It was a painful thing, too random, unconsidered actions...  If prone to a moodiness, it kind of haunts you.  But then, finally, it becomes a detail.   It no longer touches you, because you are no longer the person, that person who such things would bother.  The things that matter more are the message you send, the overall message.  Your message is one of decency, respect, an inclination toward Christian act.

Your kindness, that's what matters.  You didn't need her after all.  Just like you didn't need the stone turned into bread, nor to be placed on a high temple, nor to rule the world.  You didn't need that.  All you needed was to write your own spiritual biography, as a means of figuring things out, so that, when finally wise and wizened, you could go on keeping doing the wrong thing.

The poor thing, in her fitting in to a sophisticate world, full of action and ideas and things to do, she ignore the important thing, the things of kindness.  She didn't see the divine being within you, and that might be as much your own fault as hers, but, so what, it doesn't matter.

Or is it that you think you've arrived, when the only real bosom you can ever long rest upon in peace is that of Abraham...

The death of Jesus on The Cross, being crucified, was a shameful thing, the priest in the day's homily mentions.  And there is shame in our things too, like the shame over the way it ended with the girl, like the shame of having to go find a shameful job...  Like not being able to pay your bills, shameful.  But Jesus did not shy away from the heightened shame, to make a point about our own grievous sins, and how they too are forgiven, just so.

And in my own shame, The Cross does offer the cure, to cure to failed literary and professional enterprises.  Cheer up, it was never about that, those things.  The literary effort was just a kind of a dreary training so as to keep a particular kind of journal that one would day reach a maturity of perspective.  The work I did was to the purpose of me being able to see within the basic desire to provide comfort for the people of the world, a true lasting comfort...

Passion is a very hard thing to explain to people.  Christ remains the best example of a man following his passion, even up until the physically grisly end.  But he has to follow it to the end, so that there would be meaning, and so that there would be resurrection, that all the words of all the prophets from the Garden of Eden on down would have the living life they deserve.  Like you'd water a plant.

And the Passion, yes, this is a sad thing, a heavy thing sometimes, not just the beauty of clarity and sunshine and the warm day, but of people being mean, accusatory, uninformed, rash, harsh, putting their own sins upon you to distract themselves from their own.

Poor Old Kerouac, he had it too, bringing the scroll into the room of the publishing house, and even Bob Giroux looking at him and it...  You have offended the Holy Spirit, Jack Kerouac said, and he picked up the box with the scroll manuscript of what was to be On The Road, and left.

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.