https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kerouac#/media/File:Jack_Kerouac_Naval_Reserve_Enlistment,_1943.png
Sometime after this photograph was taken, and after a car accident, Kerouac sort of lost it, according to the official Navy view, and they admitted him to the hospital for some form of mental issues, and headaches. Later on, he would admit it would have gone easier for him had he not been such a wise guy in attitude.
His experience out on the sea, losing his best friend, his truest literary friend, Sampas, to the War, his early letters, annotated by Ann Charters...
Youth, into adulthood, a time of upheaval. The face is a strong one.
And what put him on the path he would now take...
Dinner around 8, my oldest friends in town, my best friends, a couple--I knew them separately before they joined and married, one from the place I worked, in her neighborhood, and he from the bar he worked, the one my brother favored going to on weekends when I was off. I bring the wine, three bottles, and they put out a spread of prosciutto and soft dark salami and cheese, and then, as it's Good Friday, scallops with fettuccine and a salad. They are hard working, and organized, shop owners. They know what they are doing. Dinner is quite delicious. I stick to wine, no hard stuff for me. And when I leave, though I check a new wine bar out, I avoid ordering anything, and get in a cab. An Ethiopian gentleman, we strike up a conversation. I want to go see if my old chef friend is around, along with Johnny, a great guy I let down once when the two opened a restaurant more than twenty years ago in Adams Morgan. The guy takes me up 18th Street, perhaps to milk the meter. The display on the streets of Urban Babylon turn me off, and I find they, my friends, are not there.
But the writer runs a sort of risk when he goes out. It's as if he has to control, carefully, best achieved by cooking for yourself at home, what he eats, making sure he gets enough. Otherwise, it will end up being later and visiting McDonalds and ordering foolishly, and then having to drag himself back, by bus, or on foot. And then to eat on the couch with the television on, and then to sort of pass out, and then to put himself to bed, and then to wake up feeling crappy. Why, who knows... A safe return, but waking to angst and anxiety, and the glass of water beside the bed.
There is fun with friends, and they are important people to talk to. They know me very well, all my ups and downs. They are fun. They have cats. Where they live is interesting and happening....
But Kerouac... is there a relationship to his going out on the town to listen to mad jazzmen blow their horns and then to have that experience filter down and come out as writing, is this a measure to which the man might otherwise feel lost and lonely... Is there a correlation... An original feeling of lostness that came upon him as he gained adulthood... Everyone else taking upon themselves a responsible adult life (except for other madmen.)
The direct line between the mountain climb of experience, and a different sort of take on a professional life, and the writing... The direct line between the anxiety and the spiritual work of writing itself, and yes, for Kerouac, and for anyone else too, it has to go in a spiritual direction...
Is that why some of us pick out certain professional activities, that they bring to us the maximum amount of anxiety... somehow mimicking the experiences of childhood getting amped up by adult behavior, the experiences of passing into adulthood with all your cracks and faults... that by facing such headless horseman coming behind you on the bridge you find eventually, hours later that you are through the danger, that you can then repair to go back home, tired, almost ready for sleep,
A sketch before work, green tea, some turmeric tea cooling, time for the shower, and then some yoga and off to work. The friars of EWTN have visited the holy land in the background television sounds. The Lake of Galilee is seven miles at its widest, and thirteen long. The sun is out.
I take Kerouac as a hero, a strong one, a profile in courage. At least by my own scaredy-cat pipsqueak standards...
Saturday, March 31, 2018
Friday, March 30, 2018
And then, Good Friday...
One reads about the writing that comes out of the Creative Writing programs these days. The imitation of writing that pays no homage, has no knowledge, to the body of literature the human creature has created, no deep root in tradition, no ability to read closely the old words, and of a style that has a self-important lack of need for actual skill, actual narrative work... And I should talk...
(Found, via Facebook friend, Quillette.Com, "With stories like these, who needs talent," by Sandra Kotta, a four part series.)
But literature will always come back. No matter what they try to do with it, with fancy theories, and the imposed tastes that discredit the great honestly of literary work trying to make sense of life and the human condition... It, literature, real poetry, real prose, real thoughts, real issues, literature will always come back. Because it is organic. It is in me and you.
Through all our own winters, it is there, still live, still breathing, just a bit dormant, waiting to gather its forces when the time is right.
There'd been a night, thirty years ago, wintertime. I was living at my dad's. And I was helping out with Don Beebe, landscaping, and we had a little project to prune the branches lining the streets of Waterville, down the road. A job in the cold time of year, and then you'd go back to the cab of the pickup, pour some coffee and talk a bit, waiting for lunchtime. So I called my college princess, and it was not early in the evening, but probably around eleven at night, and it rings and she picks up the phone, and I ask her, "hi, too late to be calling?" And all I hear is, after a pause, not a long one, "oh, god..." and the voice drifts away from the phone, and I am a creep, and she hangs up. And I do not call her back. Who am I? I'm some poor shit fallen college student who has no idea what he wants to do with himself. Well, he wants to, given a good education in English literature, be a writer, but he doesn't know how to do this, to be a writer, and he barely has a job.
And so I remember the golden light of the sun, low, there that morning, the morning after, as we are sort of pointlessly clipping back with branches with the long pole-pruners, pulling the rope, pruning, the cut branch falling to the freezing cold bluish white ground covered lightly with snow. And, well, of course, I just accepted it all.
And I guess with that, I knew that I was in some sort of exile, and that I needed probably to go somewhere, I don't know, some adventure, some big city, where I would be lonely and suffer, in hopes of becoming a writer.
When I got to DC, after I stayed with college buddies, two different classmates, wearing them out I suppose, I found a place to live. It was a big deal for me. Foxhall and MacArthur, and I lived in a small house, one split down the middle into two, with a quiet porch and a backyard with a tub and a garden in it, living with two women, a younger one who's boyfriend had a mustache like Tom Sellick, and Sandra, who'd lived in Europe, was a good cook, worked in jewelry and who hung her italian fine lingerie drying on a special rack in the bathroom. They had a cat, and they liked that I liked cats. Somehow they fixed upon me to be their roommate, in their selection process, just to mix it up a bit, I guess.
I remember once walking with Sandra, I suppose we were down on M Street near the Four Seasons, walking along, summer day, not too hot, and she gently starts asking me maybe like what is my plan, my plan for life here. And I'm a kid, twenty three or so, but not a man at all, with my busboy job and my temp job at the George Washington University Health Plan during the day, sleeping on the weekends until I gotta go run my butt off at the old original Austin Grill, running all night, listening to Marty Robbins White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation, and Hank Williams Why Don't You Love Me Like You Used To Do, being taken advantage of, running all the night so as not to feel lost and depressed and bereft over losing Princesses and direction in life...
And all I can come up with for her is Kerouac. I want to be a writer like Jack Kerouac.
And she knows who, of course, Jack Kerouac is. Hmmm. Now is that much of a career choice...
She was very kind to me. She helped me out. She made soup for me with chicken and pumpkin and it was the best thing I ever had. She cleaned up when I ate late night pepperoni pizza with my Grill buddies rom the old Adams Morgan Trio's and vomited in the hallway trying to get outside but not making it as the bathroom was in use... She gave me a paperback copy of George Orwell's Down and Out in London and in Paris and played Tom Waits for me on the stereo in the living room.
But why, I wonder, would you want to be, want to be, a writer? By choice. Inspiration, sure. But something organic. Something within human beings...
And I also wonder, if it is not a bit insane to try to be a writer... or is it a chicken or the egg sort of a thing...
One knows himself as a pip-squeak. Ineffectual. A good for nothing. Good at nothing practical. He hates to hear himself speak on recordings. He's stopped wondering why women want little to do with him, beyond politeness and friendship.
He doesn't even know when he's going to write. What he's going to write... absolutely no plan. Doing it blind.
One reads about the writing that comes out of the Creative Writing programs these days. The imitation of writing that pays no homage, has no knowledge, to the body of literature the human creature has created, no deep root in tradition, no ability to read closely the old words, and of a style that has a self-important lack of need for actual skill, actual narrative work... And I should talk...
(Found, via Facebook friend, Quillette.Com, "With stories like these, who needs talent," by Sandra Kotta, a four part series.)
But literature will always come back. No matter what they try to do with it, with fancy theories, and the imposed tastes that discredit the great honestly of literary work trying to make sense of life and the human condition... It, literature, real poetry, real prose, real thoughts, real issues, literature will always come back. Because it is organic. It is in me and you.
Through all our own winters, it is there, still live, still breathing, just a bit dormant, waiting to gather its forces when the time is right.
There'd been a night, thirty years ago, wintertime. I was living at my dad's. And I was helping out with Don Beebe, landscaping, and we had a little project to prune the branches lining the streets of Waterville, down the road. A job in the cold time of year, and then you'd go back to the cab of the pickup, pour some coffee and talk a bit, waiting for lunchtime. So I called my college princess, and it was not early in the evening, but probably around eleven at night, and it rings and she picks up the phone, and I ask her, "hi, too late to be calling?" And all I hear is, after a pause, not a long one, "oh, god..." and the voice drifts away from the phone, and I am a creep, and she hangs up. And I do not call her back. Who am I? I'm some poor shit fallen college student who has no idea what he wants to do with himself. Well, he wants to, given a good education in English literature, be a writer, but he doesn't know how to do this, to be a writer, and he barely has a job.
And so I remember the golden light of the sun, low, there that morning, the morning after, as we are sort of pointlessly clipping back with branches with the long pole-pruners, pulling the rope, pruning, the cut branch falling to the freezing cold bluish white ground covered lightly with snow. And, well, of course, I just accepted it all.
And I guess with that, I knew that I was in some sort of exile, and that I needed probably to go somewhere, I don't know, some adventure, some big city, where I would be lonely and suffer, in hopes of becoming a writer.
When I got to DC, after I stayed with college buddies, two different classmates, wearing them out I suppose, I found a place to live. It was a big deal for me. Foxhall and MacArthur, and I lived in a small house, one split down the middle into two, with a quiet porch and a backyard with a tub and a garden in it, living with two women, a younger one who's boyfriend had a mustache like Tom Sellick, and Sandra, who'd lived in Europe, was a good cook, worked in jewelry and who hung her italian fine lingerie drying on a special rack in the bathroom. They had a cat, and they liked that I liked cats. Somehow they fixed upon me to be their roommate, in their selection process, just to mix it up a bit, I guess.
I remember once walking with Sandra, I suppose we were down on M Street near the Four Seasons, walking along, summer day, not too hot, and she gently starts asking me maybe like what is my plan, my plan for life here. And I'm a kid, twenty three or so, but not a man at all, with my busboy job and my temp job at the George Washington University Health Plan during the day, sleeping on the weekends until I gotta go run my butt off at the old original Austin Grill, running all night, listening to Marty Robbins White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation, and Hank Williams Why Don't You Love Me Like You Used To Do, being taken advantage of, running all the night so as not to feel lost and depressed and bereft over losing Princesses and direction in life...
And all I can come up with for her is Kerouac. I want to be a writer like Jack Kerouac.
And she knows who, of course, Jack Kerouac is. Hmmm. Now is that much of a career choice...
She was very kind to me. She helped me out. She made soup for me with chicken and pumpkin and it was the best thing I ever had. She cleaned up when I ate late night pepperoni pizza with my Grill buddies rom the old Adams Morgan Trio's and vomited in the hallway trying to get outside but not making it as the bathroom was in use... She gave me a paperback copy of George Orwell's Down and Out in London and in Paris and played Tom Waits for me on the stereo in the living room.
But why, I wonder, would you want to be, want to be, a writer? By choice. Inspiration, sure. But something organic. Something within human beings...
And I also wonder, if it is not a bit insane to try to be a writer... or is it a chicken or the egg sort of a thing...
One knows himself as a pip-squeak. Ineffectual. A good for nothing. Good at nothing practical. He hates to hear himself speak on recordings. He's stopped wondering why women want little to do with him, beyond politeness and friendship.
He doesn't even know when he's going to write. What he's going to write... absolutely no plan. Doing it blind.
The things one has to write are quite boring.
So I went down there, walking, in a hurry, to arrive on the hour. Down the hill, across R, down to the big avenue, crossing the other one, past the Cosmos Club, a light rain, the winter coat too warm a choice, then across Massachusetts and into the downtown. I get to the corner of 19th and L. Where are the food trucks? And then I realize, oh, the appointment is for two not three, I should know this, what got into my head... It's always been two, after it changed from eleven am. I hate to let my nice therapist down. She listens to me patiently, devotedly, looking, poor thing, for ways to help me. My iPhone is out of storage space and acting funny, and it takes time for emails to load. Oh, yup, she sent me one around 2:15, but it had not come at the time. Standing there, I write her back.
Going to see mom, a week away, and then starting to write again, yes, kinda threw me off a bit. And I have to go back to work. But in a way, the week away, it kinda of cured me a little bit, reminded me of things. And it is a sign of good health that I am writing again, and that I was writing so seriously that my mind arranged me taking a pass, unintentionally, well, I'd rather be writing then focussed solipsistically on hopelessness itself and all that bleak future stuff.
So I walk back. Now with the clock ticking for another thing. A few minutes, a bite of packaged turkey, a change of tee-shirt, sweated through and jackets, folding a Brooks Brothers button up shirt in thirds and pressing it into the pages of the legal pad, the legal pad which I used to have a different kind of faith in and use for.... and then back out, down in the other direction to the avenue with all its embassies, backed up traffic, Secret Service police cars, then finally through the woods, and up along Dumbarton Oaks, to the other big avenue, and back to work, the little yellow painted building with the blue awing, the first shift back, and right on time. How have the kids left the bar; I was worried, a concern in the mind for days now. My return. How painful will it be?
Out of soda water, of course. The beer not stocked back up in the cooler so I have to get down on my knees and go fishing for the different ones on the shelf. The wine restocking also lacking. I see they've left me with one can each, Coke and Diet. No fruit but two lemons. Who knows what else, in my triage. On top of the usual set-up. Oh, boy, here we go, put the wines in the bins to chill with the old ice, grab a milk crate and down the two flights of stairs to the basement, and here comes the busboy at least, reasonably on time, he's got kids; I take it in stride. The Russian gal wakes up from her meditation in the quiet back room, and tells me stories of her grandfather, empathizing with my trip to go see my mom, even as the horse within me is pulling at the reins of it.
Then to the end of the night. There's nothing I particularly want to eat off the menu. I've lost the taste, the desire. Nothing strikes my fancy. Only utility, something for the stomach. A plate of duck leg confit in the oven, and I'd rather have a cheap gyro from the late night pizza down the street.
My feet ache, even though I've worn the Brooks running shoes all night. I can barely walk, get a cab home. I have a glass of wine, finally take a bath, listening to a TV show about a great World War Two Japanese battle ship, the Yamato, the brain child of poor old Admiral Yamamoto... Epsom salts to soothe and lacquer the skin with mineral protections. It's five am before I'm settled, before I can fall asleep.
And today, up late, two thirty, waking from a dream, and my poor skinny butt along the base of the spine is raw and red from scraping against the tub, and I am still tired and achy. The signs are clear. You cannot do this much longer, my friend.
And after looking for it, concerned for hydration, I realize I've probably left my Nalgeen bottle, filled with homemade electrolyte water, in the lady's cab, nice African American lady, gracious, her brother a pastor down in Southern Maryland, driving a Honda Fit.
The realities of the working barman's life...
(And even Jesus I've let down, even in Holy Week, watching certain imagery to help myself relax before bed, committing adultery in my heart which doesn't want to but the body does, and anyway, a check on my health, male and otherwise, but sad. Alone, an act which leaves you with little to say, your powers of writing empty, thus its sin, even though no good doctor could blame me.)
So, what are you going to do, for a life, for a job...
The writer cannot write. He's terrible at it. He shouldn't even bother.
And worse: nothing to write. Have farted around too much. Too much radio, then calling mom.
You're too earthy to follow the regimentation, my mom tells me, when we talk of the church, much as I'd like to feel a belonging there. Too many rules.
Like this town. It's odd combinations... Not offered much in the way of a career after all the hard work and the wasting of the best years of my life, as they call it. The writer is not one for the city and all its so-called opportunities. The writer doesn't care. His nuggets of gold are found in self-reflection from his struggle. He could be laboring anywhere.
Holy Thursday for old me, poor old Tranowsky... The tired aches from work leaving me ready for a nap. It's seventy seven degrees at the end of March and I need another nap, another dream, another Jesus lay down in the ropes to ponder what he needs to say to them all. Jesus knows it's not writing (the things he is working on and saying), that he's a literary failure, too lazy to write a narrative account with believable fleshed-out characters, and having no desire to fictionalize real people, too tired from work to edit out whatever he has recently laid down on paper...
Out to the grocery store before they close at ten. Hair still with epsom salts in it, and the body too old to give a fuck how I dress, just old green LL Bean chamois shirt over black tee shirt, Dockers chino type pants, stretch fabric, not too tight, sneakers. A few things, half-heartedly in the bag, but not up for the bigger grocery mission perhaps at the midnight Safeway near the McDonalds, and a cheap bottle of wine, which might be okay over ice with lime.
And as I'm dragging the stuff home I end up wandering down Connecticut Avenue, walking along sadly from not having done any writing of any kind on my day off, I decide to go to my old haunt, since it is so nice out, and I have a craving for gyro meat, the little cheap Greek place, Zorba's, where I used to sit as a moony young man writing in his notebooks mooning over old girlfriend and wishing to convert his own sad life into a kind of Parisian Hemingway sort of a thing, appreciating the spirituality of the street, the passers by, the buildings, older style, brick, most of them, across the avenue, the quiet of the triangle part insulating you from the cars, the busses, the cop cars, and enough conversation, a place where young people go, on a limited budget, and still it's not cheap for me, just cheaper. And so, bravely, looking like a bum, I go in and there's the guy.
Nice guy, like me, been there forever in the restaurant business, he's the manager. And sometimes, you know, you get shy, and you don't go places because you want to remain anonymous, just in and out, not have to make the extra effort, and I, bad with names... So it's hey man, how you doing, and what the hell why not I'm not hiding anything, I'm not kidding anyone anymore, life is tough, work is hard, and me with all my bad career choices (but solid, very solid and steady work effort, never calling in sick but a few times when it was really obvious...), and I cannot muster much happiness, but, yes, a gyro platter, yes, I'm starving actually (and by the time I get home I won't have the energy to cook anyway, even my simple way) and yes, why not, for $4.95 a glass of cheap Greek low alcohol red.
I go in and wash my hands, get a glass of water, lug my reused grocery bags up and out onto the patio, find an unwobbly table, and he's given my a second glass of wine. I didn't mean to milk the situation. And I've found out his name, as a nice young couple comes back in and gives him a big thank you. And his same is Saul. How 'bout that. And he says it the old way, two syllables, old school like in Old Testament tone. I'm taking my tray out at that point. Good. I know his name, finally. (And in this go-round he has fed me, at a reasonable and modest price, taken good care of me, given what he can do, rather than persecute, hey, that's good, you take what you can get.)
I wolf down the gyro glistening and with the tzatziki sauce on top, skip the pita bread below it, get into the fries, usually skipping all forms of potato due to the arthritic joint issues eating them causes, as I avoid dough to avoid fat belly, am happy, or not unhappy, the moon almost full, cracking atmospherically through the dark quickly moving enveloping clouds, and the salad is perfect as always, the best in town to my own humble tastes, just so with the red onion, fresh romaine, tomato sprinkled with oregano and little bits of pure white feta, even eat the black olive which I don't necessarily like. And then, still very hungry, I go back in and order up a beef shish kebob. Another glass of wine, why not. Thank you, my friend, behind the counter, with mustache, our hair grayer now... Saul.
And there it is, dinner, on Thursday, Holy Week, no disciples, no feet washed, no bread, but french fries and the very good consistent white rice along with the two little skewers and after the gyro meat, yes... I finish my glass of wine, not having intended to splurge (though I am getting money back from the Feds this year), and I'm tired enough and I walk back home, up to R, past the old coffee shop patio where I used to sit with my legal pads with no luck writing, no story to tell, just my own little reflections and little birds to watch, sparrows picking at the sidewalk, and now at last, at least, it looks like we're through winter almost, one can go outside.
Back up the stoop, I barely have the energy to put the cold things away in the refrigerator. It's almost midnight anyway, and I take the trash out, the recycling, pour myself a glass of water, and hit the hay. And tomorrow it will be Good Friday.
To be a writer, yeah, you have to be a weirdo. You can never go mainstream. You're an outsider, almost even to your old former self. Quite possibly a let-down as far as your family goes...
Sitting at home in the apartment, the quiet textiled living room, sitting in my father's old brown chair, I think of Doctor Torrey, old R.E.T,. the Theosophist, my father's mentor.
And for me, finally, some form of self-respect, as I come across a picture, Kerouac's Navy Reserve military induction sort of mug shot--he was about five nine, incredibly handsome, obviously French, a very strong face and a strong personality coming through, determined. Some self-respect for having tried to be a writer, anyway, not necessarily a good one, no, nor one devoted enough to really get at it. Enough to not take shit from anyone, and maybe I'll go tell them, look, we need a busboy, at least when it is Jazz Night, because I don't want to walk out of there crippled anymore...
No, I've not turned out the way I might have intended to be, but, still, you take your shot at it. And maybe one day...
The wine thing... I work in the business, sure... But somehow I never really wanted to be a sommelier.
So I went down there, walking, in a hurry, to arrive on the hour. Down the hill, across R, down to the big avenue, crossing the other one, past the Cosmos Club, a light rain, the winter coat too warm a choice, then across Massachusetts and into the downtown. I get to the corner of 19th and L. Where are the food trucks? And then I realize, oh, the appointment is for two not three, I should know this, what got into my head... It's always been two, after it changed from eleven am. I hate to let my nice therapist down. She listens to me patiently, devotedly, looking, poor thing, for ways to help me. My iPhone is out of storage space and acting funny, and it takes time for emails to load. Oh, yup, she sent me one around 2:15, but it had not come at the time. Standing there, I write her back.
Going to see mom, a week away, and then starting to write again, yes, kinda threw me off a bit. And I have to go back to work. But in a way, the week away, it kinda of cured me a little bit, reminded me of things. And it is a sign of good health that I am writing again, and that I was writing so seriously that my mind arranged me taking a pass, unintentionally, well, I'd rather be writing then focussed solipsistically on hopelessness itself and all that bleak future stuff.
So I walk back. Now with the clock ticking for another thing. A few minutes, a bite of packaged turkey, a change of tee-shirt, sweated through and jackets, folding a Brooks Brothers button up shirt in thirds and pressing it into the pages of the legal pad, the legal pad which I used to have a different kind of faith in and use for.... and then back out, down in the other direction to the avenue with all its embassies, backed up traffic, Secret Service police cars, then finally through the woods, and up along Dumbarton Oaks, to the other big avenue, and back to work, the little yellow painted building with the blue awing, the first shift back, and right on time. How have the kids left the bar; I was worried, a concern in the mind for days now. My return. How painful will it be?
Out of soda water, of course. The beer not stocked back up in the cooler so I have to get down on my knees and go fishing for the different ones on the shelf. The wine restocking also lacking. I see they've left me with one can each, Coke and Diet. No fruit but two lemons. Who knows what else, in my triage. On top of the usual set-up. Oh, boy, here we go, put the wines in the bins to chill with the old ice, grab a milk crate and down the two flights of stairs to the basement, and here comes the busboy at least, reasonably on time, he's got kids; I take it in stride. The Russian gal wakes up from her meditation in the quiet back room, and tells me stories of her grandfather, empathizing with my trip to go see my mom, even as the horse within me is pulling at the reins of it.
Then to the end of the night. There's nothing I particularly want to eat off the menu. I've lost the taste, the desire. Nothing strikes my fancy. Only utility, something for the stomach. A plate of duck leg confit in the oven, and I'd rather have a cheap gyro from the late night pizza down the street.
My feet ache, even though I've worn the Brooks running shoes all night. I can barely walk, get a cab home. I have a glass of wine, finally take a bath, listening to a TV show about a great World War Two Japanese battle ship, the Yamato, the brain child of poor old Admiral Yamamoto... Epsom salts to soothe and lacquer the skin with mineral protections. It's five am before I'm settled, before I can fall asleep.
And today, up late, two thirty, waking from a dream, and my poor skinny butt along the base of the spine is raw and red from scraping against the tub, and I am still tired and achy. The signs are clear. You cannot do this much longer, my friend.
And after looking for it, concerned for hydration, I realize I've probably left my Nalgeen bottle, filled with homemade electrolyte water, in the lady's cab, nice African American lady, gracious, her brother a pastor down in Southern Maryland, driving a Honda Fit.
The realities of the working barman's life...
(And even Jesus I've let down, even in Holy Week, watching certain imagery to help myself relax before bed, committing adultery in my heart which doesn't want to but the body does, and anyway, a check on my health, male and otherwise, but sad. Alone, an act which leaves you with little to say, your powers of writing empty, thus its sin, even though no good doctor could blame me.)
So, what are you going to do, for a life, for a job...
The writer cannot write. He's terrible at it. He shouldn't even bother.
And worse: nothing to write. Have farted around too much. Too much radio, then calling mom.
You're too earthy to follow the regimentation, my mom tells me, when we talk of the church, much as I'd like to feel a belonging there. Too many rules.
Like this town. It's odd combinations... Not offered much in the way of a career after all the hard work and the wasting of the best years of my life, as they call it. The writer is not one for the city and all its so-called opportunities. The writer doesn't care. His nuggets of gold are found in self-reflection from his struggle. He could be laboring anywhere.
Holy Thursday for old me, poor old Tranowsky... The tired aches from work leaving me ready for a nap. It's seventy seven degrees at the end of March and I need another nap, another dream, another Jesus lay down in the ropes to ponder what he needs to say to them all. Jesus knows it's not writing (the things he is working on and saying), that he's a literary failure, too lazy to write a narrative account with believable fleshed-out characters, and having no desire to fictionalize real people, too tired from work to edit out whatever he has recently laid down on paper...
Out to the grocery store before they close at ten. Hair still with epsom salts in it, and the body too old to give a fuck how I dress, just old green LL Bean chamois shirt over black tee shirt, Dockers chino type pants, stretch fabric, not too tight, sneakers. A few things, half-heartedly in the bag, but not up for the bigger grocery mission perhaps at the midnight Safeway near the McDonalds, and a cheap bottle of wine, which might be okay over ice with lime.
And as I'm dragging the stuff home I end up wandering down Connecticut Avenue, walking along sadly from not having done any writing of any kind on my day off, I decide to go to my old haunt, since it is so nice out, and I have a craving for gyro meat, the little cheap Greek place, Zorba's, where I used to sit as a moony young man writing in his notebooks mooning over old girlfriend and wishing to convert his own sad life into a kind of Parisian Hemingway sort of a thing, appreciating the spirituality of the street, the passers by, the buildings, older style, brick, most of them, across the avenue, the quiet of the triangle part insulating you from the cars, the busses, the cop cars, and enough conversation, a place where young people go, on a limited budget, and still it's not cheap for me, just cheaper. And so, bravely, looking like a bum, I go in and there's the guy.
Nice guy, like me, been there forever in the restaurant business, he's the manager. And sometimes, you know, you get shy, and you don't go places because you want to remain anonymous, just in and out, not have to make the extra effort, and I, bad with names... So it's hey man, how you doing, and what the hell why not I'm not hiding anything, I'm not kidding anyone anymore, life is tough, work is hard, and me with all my bad career choices (but solid, very solid and steady work effort, never calling in sick but a few times when it was really obvious...), and I cannot muster much happiness, but, yes, a gyro platter, yes, I'm starving actually (and by the time I get home I won't have the energy to cook anyway, even my simple way) and yes, why not, for $4.95 a glass of cheap Greek low alcohol red.
I go in and wash my hands, get a glass of water, lug my reused grocery bags up and out onto the patio, find an unwobbly table, and he's given my a second glass of wine. I didn't mean to milk the situation. And I've found out his name, as a nice young couple comes back in and gives him a big thank you. And his same is Saul. How 'bout that. And he says it the old way, two syllables, old school like in Old Testament tone. I'm taking my tray out at that point. Good. I know his name, finally. (And in this go-round he has fed me, at a reasonable and modest price, taken good care of me, given what he can do, rather than persecute, hey, that's good, you take what you can get.)
I wolf down the gyro glistening and with the tzatziki sauce on top, skip the pita bread below it, get into the fries, usually skipping all forms of potato due to the arthritic joint issues eating them causes, as I avoid dough to avoid fat belly, am happy, or not unhappy, the moon almost full, cracking atmospherically through the dark quickly moving enveloping clouds, and the salad is perfect as always, the best in town to my own humble tastes, just so with the red onion, fresh romaine, tomato sprinkled with oregano and little bits of pure white feta, even eat the black olive which I don't necessarily like. And then, still very hungry, I go back in and order up a beef shish kebob. Another glass of wine, why not. Thank you, my friend, behind the counter, with mustache, our hair grayer now... Saul.
And there it is, dinner, on Thursday, Holy Week, no disciples, no feet washed, no bread, but french fries and the very good consistent white rice along with the two little skewers and after the gyro meat, yes... I finish my glass of wine, not having intended to splurge (though I am getting money back from the Feds this year), and I'm tired enough and I walk back home, up to R, past the old coffee shop patio where I used to sit with my legal pads with no luck writing, no story to tell, just my own little reflections and little birds to watch, sparrows picking at the sidewalk, and now at last, at least, it looks like we're through winter almost, one can go outside.
Back up the stoop, I barely have the energy to put the cold things away in the refrigerator. It's almost midnight anyway, and I take the trash out, the recycling, pour myself a glass of water, and hit the hay. And tomorrow it will be Good Friday.
To be a writer, yeah, you have to be a weirdo. You can never go mainstream. You're an outsider, almost even to your old former self. Quite possibly a let-down as far as your family goes...
Sitting at home in the apartment, the quiet textiled living room, sitting in my father's old brown chair, I think of Doctor Torrey, old R.E.T,. the Theosophist, my father's mentor.
And for me, finally, some form of self-respect, as I come across a picture, Kerouac's Navy Reserve military induction sort of mug shot--he was about five nine, incredibly handsome, obviously French, a very strong face and a strong personality coming through, determined. Some self-respect for having tried to be a writer, anyway, not necessarily a good one, no, nor one devoted enough to really get at it. Enough to not take shit from anyone, and maybe I'll go tell them, look, we need a busboy, at least when it is Jazz Night, because I don't want to walk out of there crippled anymore...
No, I've not turned out the way I might have intended to be, but, still, you take your shot at it. And maybe one day...
The wine thing... I work in the business, sure... But somehow I never really wanted to be a sommelier.
Wednesday, March 28, 2018
He walked like a soldier having returned from a war, at least how he might have seen it, as he walked downtown to the office on the fifth floor, the person to talk to, safely, a woman a good fifteen years younger. Then, because he was still off, still outside of everything, disconnected, in his own process, because he hadn't figured out anything, even still, as a returning vet, he would go to the job, working the bar. He was no longer excited about the job. It had always been a matter of being okay once he got there, but he knew it too had its costs, its unfairness, placing him back in the trenches of shitty conditions, shift work, bad for the body. But now, less and less.
It's a common theme. Platonov, The Potudon River, a great example, saying very little. Tolstoy, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Melville, Crane, they all played with the general idea...
Aeschylus, there is no bravery without realizing the suffering and the sadness as qualities of existence.
It's a common theme. Platonov, The Potudon River, a great example, saying very little. Tolstoy, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Melville, Crane, they all played with the general idea...
Aeschylus, there is no bravery without realizing the suffering and the sadness as qualities of existence.
Speaking creatively, seems to me, the idea of being a great writer, a writer "better" than another, is a fallacy. First of all, such a judgment can only be subjective, a matter of taste. More importantly, a writer can only write by being honest with himself.
Does the morning start reasonably? How did the making of the dragon well green tea go? Did you put in a spoonful of ground flax seed? Did you brew at the same time hot water with muddled citrus, turmeric fresh and turmeric ground, a touch of astragalus, a tiny pinch of salt? Has your mother called already, when you were awake but the body was unwilling to get up, when you wanted to first wake up some, and even get the first few lines of thoughts down on paper? What are the days appointments?
The bar job waits for later, somewhat ominously, but you deal with the awkward waiting. A therapist session at 3 pm. Do you really want to pick up tomorrow night's shift from the kid who wants you to cover it? You'll see him tonight at work, after your break of eight days. In a way you feel too old for it. It's not like you're sitting behind the bar reading the newspaper; you're moving constantly, from start to finish. All too easy not to eat enough, to get dehydrated, to bonk as they do if they are not careful in a long bike race...
How will I get my body downtown to 19th St. NW and L Street. Showers are possible. Will I have an inclination to do a few yoga stretches before I eat a bit of breakfast.
The things of the writer are the things of journalism. That is what they/we do. As a college boy I came up with a wish to explore seeing Ernest Hemingway in this light, a kind of abandonment to the textural textual truths and realities of life that he enables the presence of a narrative, of a new form of connecting the odds and ends and the happenings of life. Of course no one paid any attention to it at the institution, and nor did I care much about that academic slight.
The writer must go deeper into reality then it is normally perceived, as we piece through the information that might be presented to us as being important. And to do this, I suppose, we must go through phases. Say for a period we take one tack upon it, soaking up all we can, putting this into particular terms. Sometimes, metaphorically, it is through Christianity. But other times it might be through Buddhism, or Zen, or a Hindu tradition. Sometimes it is through Milan Kundera, Kurt Vonnegut, Yeats, Eliot.
But you are there at the feeding. The feeding point of the mind, even as you go through the things of the laundry and the dishes, the unpacking from trips, the assessments of the bookshelves and the piles on the desk, with NPR and ETWN on in the background.
Hemingway was an artist, always working on his cubist viewpoint of summoning reality through a Cezanne-like painting, like a sketch, the old house in the dusty scrubland distance of Provence, creating prose with a similar effect, less is more, the light is right, you can sense the weather and the landscape. Included in his cubism, of course, the things he ate and drank, the conversations of artists at the cafés. Did he know the effect? Did he plan it, or rather did he learn a way to convey much through a seemingly sparse little sketch. Bringing to us the boys in the apple orchard up north, then them talking by the fire, pretending they are drinkers, considering Chesterton's works, gives us things we get intuitively; and the light captured in one little story (of the In Our Time collection, his early prose) will reflect off that of another.
In our journals, and even to honor the thoughts therein, we must accept we go through phases, as if waving different flags, say, metaphorically, that of the Civil War, or that of the Polish Underground of the Second World War, of the Irish rebel. We have to honor the skipping around as itself a form of the mind's natural cubist perspective-gatherer. We have to honor when we lose the trail, or no longer find the inspiration, or look back on pieces we've wrote, long ones we were once quite dedicated to even, with embarrassment. We must sweep the old aside sometimes, to look at the new.
Of course, a writer can be recognized for dogged determination, for accomplishments of an energetic sort, for endurance, for preserving through political conditions and life's circumstances, for taking forward, like Conrad, like Dostoevsky, like Chekhov, like Melville, like Kerouac, the nobility of the human spirit and mind in the face of difficulties and hardship, as in all who believe in literature and in literature as a common property, available to all. And the tale of a survivor, who truly is abandoned to the circumstances of life, might be simple, very simple, almost rudimentary, even almost childish. The focus on the task, viewed as a personal history, remarkable... The transformative power of writing, of working on a piece...
How could there be literature without such things, as struggles, etc. It would take, there would have to be, some form of enormous stupidity, almost, a great misreading, or some vestige of an old national character, Polish stubbornness, Irish contrarian spirit.... some form of not really being able to belong so much to the computerized world, to Homo Sovieticos, the productive robot, the person shaped by the labors of the Industrial Age and the politics of big oil.
How will time work out? How possibly will things work out? Will I have time to do yoga and then make scrambled eggs before I must go march down there, having left my bike back in the basement of the restaurant.... How will I escape my being a loser of a certain age, having passed on all the opportunities to do "things."
Writing attests to the condition that it is up to you, that sometimes only you will see the things inside yourself, the good things, the positive things, the potential. And for some of us, the only way to find that is through writing, writing more than the other things.
Sometimes you write; sometimes you pray. And sometimes they become the same.
I actually said this long ago. Writing is praying, treating the later works of Hemingway. It seemed too mystical at the time, therefore unscholarly, or not what DeMott wanted, even.
Does the morning start reasonably? How did the making of the dragon well green tea go? Did you put in a spoonful of ground flax seed? Did you brew at the same time hot water with muddled citrus, turmeric fresh and turmeric ground, a touch of astragalus, a tiny pinch of salt? Has your mother called already, when you were awake but the body was unwilling to get up, when you wanted to first wake up some, and even get the first few lines of thoughts down on paper? What are the days appointments?
The bar job waits for later, somewhat ominously, but you deal with the awkward waiting. A therapist session at 3 pm. Do you really want to pick up tomorrow night's shift from the kid who wants you to cover it? You'll see him tonight at work, after your break of eight days. In a way you feel too old for it. It's not like you're sitting behind the bar reading the newspaper; you're moving constantly, from start to finish. All too easy not to eat enough, to get dehydrated, to bonk as they do if they are not careful in a long bike race...
How will I get my body downtown to 19th St. NW and L Street. Showers are possible. Will I have an inclination to do a few yoga stretches before I eat a bit of breakfast.
The things of the writer are the things of journalism. That is what they/we do. As a college boy I came up with a wish to explore seeing Ernest Hemingway in this light, a kind of abandonment to the textural textual truths and realities of life that he enables the presence of a narrative, of a new form of connecting the odds and ends and the happenings of life. Of course no one paid any attention to it at the institution, and nor did I care much about that academic slight.
The writer must go deeper into reality then it is normally perceived, as we piece through the information that might be presented to us as being important. And to do this, I suppose, we must go through phases. Say for a period we take one tack upon it, soaking up all we can, putting this into particular terms. Sometimes, metaphorically, it is through Christianity. But other times it might be through Buddhism, or Zen, or a Hindu tradition. Sometimes it is through Milan Kundera, Kurt Vonnegut, Yeats, Eliot.
But you are there at the feeding. The feeding point of the mind, even as you go through the things of the laundry and the dishes, the unpacking from trips, the assessments of the bookshelves and the piles on the desk, with NPR and ETWN on in the background.
Hemingway was an artist, always working on his cubist viewpoint of summoning reality through a Cezanne-like painting, like a sketch, the old house in the dusty scrubland distance of Provence, creating prose with a similar effect, less is more, the light is right, you can sense the weather and the landscape. Included in his cubism, of course, the things he ate and drank, the conversations of artists at the cafés. Did he know the effect? Did he plan it, or rather did he learn a way to convey much through a seemingly sparse little sketch. Bringing to us the boys in the apple orchard up north, then them talking by the fire, pretending they are drinkers, considering Chesterton's works, gives us things we get intuitively; and the light captured in one little story (of the In Our Time collection, his early prose) will reflect off that of another.
In our journals, and even to honor the thoughts therein, we must accept we go through phases, as if waving different flags, say, metaphorically, that of the Civil War, or that of the Polish Underground of the Second World War, of the Irish rebel. We have to honor the skipping around as itself a form of the mind's natural cubist perspective-gatherer. We have to honor when we lose the trail, or no longer find the inspiration, or look back on pieces we've wrote, long ones we were once quite dedicated to even, with embarrassment. We must sweep the old aside sometimes, to look at the new.
Of course, a writer can be recognized for dogged determination, for accomplishments of an energetic sort, for endurance, for preserving through political conditions and life's circumstances, for taking forward, like Conrad, like Dostoevsky, like Chekhov, like Melville, like Kerouac, the nobility of the human spirit and mind in the face of difficulties and hardship, as in all who believe in literature and in literature as a common property, available to all. And the tale of a survivor, who truly is abandoned to the circumstances of life, might be simple, very simple, almost rudimentary, even almost childish. The focus on the task, viewed as a personal history, remarkable... The transformative power of writing, of working on a piece...
How could there be literature without such things, as struggles, etc. It would take, there would have to be, some form of enormous stupidity, almost, a great misreading, or some vestige of an old national character, Polish stubbornness, Irish contrarian spirit.... some form of not really being able to belong so much to the computerized world, to Homo Sovieticos, the productive robot, the person shaped by the labors of the Industrial Age and the politics of big oil.
How will time work out? How possibly will things work out? Will I have time to do yoga and then make scrambled eggs before I must go march down there, having left my bike back in the basement of the restaurant.... How will I escape my being a loser of a certain age, having passed on all the opportunities to do "things."
Writing attests to the condition that it is up to you, that sometimes only you will see the things inside yourself, the good things, the positive things, the potential. And for some of us, the only way to find that is through writing, writing more than the other things.
Sometimes you write; sometimes you pray. And sometimes they become the same.
I actually said this long ago. Writing is praying, treating the later works of Hemingway. It seemed too mystical at the time, therefore unscholarly, or not what DeMott wanted, even.
Tuesday, March 27, 2018
Somewhere beyond the woods, tucked gently into the folds of the land below the rising profile of the Holyoke Range, lay my family's old house, the house of my childhood. It was a small split-level with a brief uphill driveway and white birch trees my tall father had planted on either side. There had been a lot of farmland back then, tobacco leaves hanging in the long dark barns of the humid flats of the valley, fruit and vegetable stands by the sides of the road with bushels of apples and ears of corn. I remember that safe feeling of being strapped into a toddler seat in the back of the blue Volvo station wagon, looking at my mom's pretty auburn dark brown hair, the warm-smelling fields going by in the summer, lit by sun, hearing the murmurings of daylight as I went to sleep, earlier than anyone else.
We'd go past the old house when we came back to visit in the summertime to see the Gregorians. Each year it seemed a little smaller, a little more closed, a little more private, as if the closer you came the farther away something went. The bushes and the woods had grown up all around, leaving it little like I remembered as a kid who passed freely between the three clean yards of ours and the neighbors.
The grass was stiff under my steps. I walked back toward the dorms.
I'd received an email from a friend of mine, a retired diplomat--I know him and his wife from the bar, going back a long way--who'd read my book, proposing I improve my visibility to local readership, something about the D.C. Library and the Library of Congress promotion of such, and there was a form to fill out, with a deadline very soon, and so I filled it out, as best I could. I couldn't figure out how to upload a picture of its cover, selected from the options Amazon's CreateSpace self-publishing wing gave me in 2010, and went digging through the pictures on my laptop, handed down from my brother, on it pictures of my father laid out in the funeral home, pictures of my cat, Miss Kitty, the birth of niece and nephew, all my travels back and forth to see mom, college reunion sentimentality, to find a picture I'd taken of it out back on the railing in the sun. The form asked for a three paragraph sample, thus the above, and I even included the link to the Kirkus Indie Review which didn't have the best things to say about my efforts beyond that they were "ambitious."
DC Author Festival. The rainbow wheel spins from something going on in the computer, the fan comes on, heating up, and I wonder if I've filled out the form correctly. It was easy enough to do, though, and not much really to worry about, even were I to be selected, without knowing much about it. I've been to literary conferences. I've attended the awkward little workshops on unnatural things. And I prefer to not be involved with such people, for the most part.
If I don't have to tend bar, I'd prefer to do something that helps me write, or maybe even try to write something, which is like fishing on a cold day.
Holy Holy Holy, I would like to be. I might like to get down to Saint Matthew's for the 5:30 Mass on this Tuesday of Holy Week, right now, but Mom calls, as I wake from a nap in dank cold afternoon. I've spoken to her around 11 AM, but it's time for another call, and she must be as lonely as I am after our visit, contentious as it was at times. First on the cell, but that cuts out, and then on the land line. Which takes energy. The night shifts leave me up in the air, because you have to be prepared for them. To get up too early isn't always good given what you have to do, at least to my tastes. And to tell the truth I can only get so far with that sort of thing, the actual practice as it is commonly practiced. Would I like to go to confession, or would I like to receive Holy Communion, would I like to see the people who are observant Catholics, yes, perhaps, but in the meantime, it seems the literary persona within which has shaped itself over the years mainly under the radar has a certain system, certain habits. And from having gone down a path so far, particularly as a literary person intent on leaving the best record of thoughts he could, you cannot change certain things, but can only continue.
So why should I be afraid of my version of being who you are... I've worked at it long enough. I'm old enough. It is through the light that shines through the prisms of eccentric people that we see the truer light colors of who we are. If you have your own style, well, accept it, don't get depressed, don't put yourself down, just roll with it.
I'd like to be so, a good Catholic, but I wonder, and I don't think I can do it, except by not doing it just so. There's always that taste, of too much dogma. A kind of dishonesty viewed from my own tastes of who I might like to hang out with and in what kind of situation. In the end, the spiritual honesty has to come through the writing, it seemed to me. That's the Jesus I came to know, or the way I saw the prophets or whoever they were, these strange holy men who listened to voices and the fires in bushes, that sort of thing. They didn't know what was going to happen, did they, when they followed their gut.
In the end you do not fear writing. It is the thing you do not fear, after all your fears. Writing does take a lot of patience, certainly. But you cannot fear it. It's a way to conquer all other fears and worries, because, as a human being, you have to take all things in stride.
MacGowan wrote Rainy Night in Soho in some state of mind listening to ghosts. And maybe your mom slowly reveals to you her own process, listening to the same.
I'd received an email from a friend of mine, a retired diplomat--I know him and his wife from the bar, going back a long way--who'd read my book, proposing I improve my visibility to local readership, something about the D.C. Library and the Library of Congress promotion of such, and there was a form to fill out, with a deadline very soon, and so I filled it out, as best I could. I couldn't figure out how to upload a picture of its cover, selected from the options Amazon's CreateSpace self-publishing wing gave me in 2010, and went digging through the pictures on my laptop, handed down from my brother, on it pictures of my father laid out in the funeral home, pictures of my cat, Miss Kitty, the birth of niece and nephew, all my travels back and forth to see mom, college reunion sentimentality, to find a picture I'd taken of it out back on the railing in the sun. The form asked for a three paragraph sample, thus the above, and I even included the link to the Kirkus Indie Review which didn't have the best things to say about my efforts beyond that they were "ambitious."
DC Author Festival. The rainbow wheel spins from something going on in the computer, the fan comes on, heating up, and I wonder if I've filled out the form correctly. It was easy enough to do, though, and not much really to worry about, even were I to be selected, without knowing much about it. I've been to literary conferences. I've attended the awkward little workshops on unnatural things. And I prefer to not be involved with such people, for the most part.
If I don't have to tend bar, I'd prefer to do something that helps me write, or maybe even try to write something, which is like fishing on a cold day.
Holy Holy Holy, I would like to be. I might like to get down to Saint Matthew's for the 5:30 Mass on this Tuesday of Holy Week, right now, but Mom calls, as I wake from a nap in dank cold afternoon. I've spoken to her around 11 AM, but it's time for another call, and she must be as lonely as I am after our visit, contentious as it was at times. First on the cell, but that cuts out, and then on the land line. Which takes energy. The night shifts leave me up in the air, because you have to be prepared for them. To get up too early isn't always good given what you have to do, at least to my tastes. And to tell the truth I can only get so far with that sort of thing, the actual practice as it is commonly practiced. Would I like to go to confession, or would I like to receive Holy Communion, would I like to see the people who are observant Catholics, yes, perhaps, but in the meantime, it seems the literary persona within which has shaped itself over the years mainly under the radar has a certain system, certain habits. And from having gone down a path so far, particularly as a literary person intent on leaving the best record of thoughts he could, you cannot change certain things, but can only continue.
So why should I be afraid of my version of being who you are... I've worked at it long enough. I'm old enough. It is through the light that shines through the prisms of eccentric people that we see the truer light colors of who we are. If you have your own style, well, accept it, don't get depressed, don't put yourself down, just roll with it.
I'd like to be so, a good Catholic, but I wonder, and I don't think I can do it, except by not doing it just so. There's always that taste, of too much dogma. A kind of dishonesty viewed from my own tastes of who I might like to hang out with and in what kind of situation. In the end, the spiritual honesty has to come through the writing, it seemed to me. That's the Jesus I came to know, or the way I saw the prophets or whoever they were, these strange holy men who listened to voices and the fires in bushes, that sort of thing. They didn't know what was going to happen, did they, when they followed their gut.
In the end you do not fear writing. It is the thing you do not fear, after all your fears. Writing does take a lot of patience, certainly. But you cannot fear it. It's a way to conquer all other fears and worries, because, as a human being, you have to take all things in stride.
MacGowan wrote Rainy Night in Soho in some state of mind listening to ghosts. And maybe your mom slowly reveals to you her own process, listening to the same.
I got on the road about 1:30 in the afternoon. I had woken slowly, but managed a last round of things to help mom out organizationally, cooked sausages that would have gone to waste with peppers and onions, watched the cat on the table as she stalked our plates, stepping with long gingerliness over the various piles of papers... The heat was on, and I took a shower, and occupied myself with a few more things, such as trying to figure out what was going with the three or four email accounts of hers, why, for instance she could receive emails from one on only one of her devices...
We took a short walk in the wind, a much warmer day, down to the little pond she had now named after her deceased neighbor JoAnne, and I felt very sad for being short with her over various matters of imperfect organization, my attempt to put like things with like things, and her, 'hey, I'm retired...' I hoped I hadn't missed all her holiness now, her gentle way, her books, her intellect, in my desire to see them all lined up in neat piles and in book shelves, and how long would it take to organize her anyway... And realizing that this was my own worst fault, reflected back on me.
Vacuuming around her bed and under her night table and lamp, saltine crumbs, organizing, like with like, finding old empty orchid pots from the Price Chopper, one for batteries, one for change, one for the mechanical pencils she's taken to, one for all her colored handle scissors. Who needs to watch the news, the repeated stories taken on an irrelevance. Her office is another situation altogether. The bed has piles of books I would like to put into little piles, but it would upset her, taking something away from her which she values...
Though I was doing my best, and working on it through prayer and meditation, still... I was not being as sensitive as I might have wanted to be, at least until we finally opened the wine and relaxed over dinner, three times at The Press Box, once at Canale's, once my attempt to cook lamb for dinner where we talked about my father's passing, of her grandfather's final heart attack, my guilt at not being there when my dad succumbed to the final, brief, illness in the hospital in Utica... The birthday dinner with dear colleagues down in Baldwinsville goes well, after her nerves.
The sun was out, the sky clear, and I did not have to go straight to work. There would be enough hours left of daylight to get me most of the way. I drove and I drove, stopping for little pit stops, the rest stop near Whitney Point, and then the one after the traffic of Scranton-Wilkes Barre, then the one just above Harrisburg, not the easiest traffic with all the trucks to merge back onto 81, then the last gas stop, right before Mount Saint Mary's College, finding the barbecue place had just closed... "We're closed, hon," the woman sweeping the humble dining room tells me after I stand at the counter for a couple of minutes. Just as dusk, and then the road lonelier, dark, random, blind with the lemmings coming back through Frederick, then up over the hill past a Civil War stream, and back into Washington, D.C., via River Road, slipping onto Massachusetts Avenue and up past American University, slow and careful now and back to the little quiet street.
Take the car back after emptying my bags and stuff, and then two triple cheeseburgers from the McDonald's Dollar Menu for three dollars each, putting the bag into my coat pocket, and over the long gloomy bridge past the new Chinese building complex and down the last dreary hill by the Hilton, a peek into the windows of Du Coin, dead, one person, facing away at the bar, and on foot, tired, back to the quiet of apartment life alone. And after the end of a long day, behind the steering wheel, and all the ups and downs, and all the thoughts, the thoughts of new perspectives by the small discoveries of going back to your mom's, therefore your home, spiritually, your place of renewal, there was a bottle of Beaujolais and I opened it, after the first bites, cutting into the small burgers, saying to myself, this is not going to be enough, with knife and fork, avoiding the buns, but hungry enough to scrape off the last of the rehydrated onion bits, the two cheeseburgers gone even before one glass of wine... So it goes.
And being overly dramatic, in your mind, trying to figure out this life stuff, you look at your life as it is. You didn't even want the wine, but it soothed, medicinally, and you were alone, protected from rambling on like an idiot to anyone in your relaxation.
A Mass came on EWTN in the background, the good Father reminded us that Mother Angelika had passed away two years ago to the day.
You must, I suppose, first realize you have nothing. All you have is this little stream of writing, called by some sort of bogus modern technological term that would offer little explanation of it. And after such a trip, with its long drives, its frustrations, its dealings with difficult personas, its easing of a mother through her birthday, you feel a bit tired, sure. And it is a relief not to have to, immediately, go back to that job you have, which itself gives you next to nothing, but a modest income, no provisions for the future but Social Security, how do you stand it all... Well, you like it once you get there, there is something spiritual about it, it lets you keep up this writing stuff, and there is the wine, which is both good and bad, very good and very bad and all things in between, such that it is very nice not to have to peddle it, driving one's own thirsts up to the roof levels.
What do I have, I ask myself, but very little.
But, on the other hand, it always seems like you're learning something, really just through the processes of one's own mind, not from that job, not from any particular experience, but my long careful deep thought and considerations.
And what you do have, in Holy Week at least, is a realization of the great almost impossible sensitivity of the Lord Jesus Christ, that holy man who comes through the storied books, the Gospels and their recollections...
It might not be so much that he knows everything, as in, being able to read the future, but just that he, He, is so very attuned, so very sensitive, so open to the vast world beyond humanity's usual protective gear and stupid talk, beyond their blusters and vocalizations, their small attempts to find a safe protected perch in this life in this world. He is so much so, that he really can rewrite, as if, or embellish, as if, or explicate in thorough completeness all the stories of all the major figures and prophets that are in the tales already written of in The Old Testament, speaking of the entire learnings and teachings of the Judaic Faith.
Would it be a little shocking to him, this small minor obscure poetic writer who takes all this upon himself, such so that he moves beyond literary craft to really see things. He sees things so much and so clearly, that he himself no longer even writes. Rather, he writes through his sayings, through his parables, through his observations and even his actions. Which are recorded, because obviously and instinctively to the minds of everyone around him, he has something to say.
He is a teacher, even called a rabbi, but he does not belong to exactly nor neatly fit in to the tradition as it is practiced. His understandings go beyond, even as they are completely in tune.
And he is remembered, amongst many things and many reasons, for shedding light on who we are, on what we are like, on what would be the truest form of our good health and sanity. This is his message, directly, through the indirect.
There are all kinds of terms for it. The heart of Jesus... Mary is a 'virgin' because she like him is fully sensitive. No part of the crassness, of the usual understandings put forth to explain humanity...
She has an imagination, as her son will.
As I take my bags in, turn the power strip back on to regain television and wifi, a cockroach, red, large, is there on the top of the old dishwashing machine, creeping under a black foil bag of dragonwell green tea, left, as it was empty. I had done my best to leave things clean in the kitchen before my departure a week ago. I'd taken the trash out, leaving only the recycling bottles.
The kid has texted me asking me to cover his Thursday. I'm due back at work Wednesday.
The guitar. They are made of pieces of wood. Some are solid. Some are hollow. An old Hohner Strat, beat up, strings on ash, what's not to like. Look at the strings as they come metal over the bridge, then down into the tremolo body, miracles of engineering put together. I wish I could sing better.
We took a short walk in the wind, a much warmer day, down to the little pond she had now named after her deceased neighbor JoAnne, and I felt very sad for being short with her over various matters of imperfect organization, my attempt to put like things with like things, and her, 'hey, I'm retired...' I hoped I hadn't missed all her holiness now, her gentle way, her books, her intellect, in my desire to see them all lined up in neat piles and in book shelves, and how long would it take to organize her anyway... And realizing that this was my own worst fault, reflected back on me.
Vacuuming around her bed and under her night table and lamp, saltine crumbs, organizing, like with like, finding old empty orchid pots from the Price Chopper, one for batteries, one for change, one for the mechanical pencils she's taken to, one for all her colored handle scissors. Who needs to watch the news, the repeated stories taken on an irrelevance. Her office is another situation altogether. The bed has piles of books I would like to put into little piles, but it would upset her, taking something away from her which she values...
Though I was doing my best, and working on it through prayer and meditation, still... I was not being as sensitive as I might have wanted to be, at least until we finally opened the wine and relaxed over dinner, three times at The Press Box, once at Canale's, once my attempt to cook lamb for dinner where we talked about my father's passing, of her grandfather's final heart attack, my guilt at not being there when my dad succumbed to the final, brief, illness in the hospital in Utica... The birthday dinner with dear colleagues down in Baldwinsville goes well, after her nerves.
The sun was out, the sky clear, and I did not have to go straight to work. There would be enough hours left of daylight to get me most of the way. I drove and I drove, stopping for little pit stops, the rest stop near Whitney Point, and then the one after the traffic of Scranton-Wilkes Barre, then the one just above Harrisburg, not the easiest traffic with all the trucks to merge back onto 81, then the last gas stop, right before Mount Saint Mary's College, finding the barbecue place had just closed... "We're closed, hon," the woman sweeping the humble dining room tells me after I stand at the counter for a couple of minutes. Just as dusk, and then the road lonelier, dark, random, blind with the lemmings coming back through Frederick, then up over the hill past a Civil War stream, and back into Washington, D.C., via River Road, slipping onto Massachusetts Avenue and up past American University, slow and careful now and back to the little quiet street.
Take the car back after emptying my bags and stuff, and then two triple cheeseburgers from the McDonald's Dollar Menu for three dollars each, putting the bag into my coat pocket, and over the long gloomy bridge past the new Chinese building complex and down the last dreary hill by the Hilton, a peek into the windows of Du Coin, dead, one person, facing away at the bar, and on foot, tired, back to the quiet of apartment life alone. And after the end of a long day, behind the steering wheel, and all the ups and downs, and all the thoughts, the thoughts of new perspectives by the small discoveries of going back to your mom's, therefore your home, spiritually, your place of renewal, there was a bottle of Beaujolais and I opened it, after the first bites, cutting into the small burgers, saying to myself, this is not going to be enough, with knife and fork, avoiding the buns, but hungry enough to scrape off the last of the rehydrated onion bits, the two cheeseburgers gone even before one glass of wine... So it goes.
And being overly dramatic, in your mind, trying to figure out this life stuff, you look at your life as it is. You didn't even want the wine, but it soothed, medicinally, and you were alone, protected from rambling on like an idiot to anyone in your relaxation.
A Mass came on EWTN in the background, the good Father reminded us that Mother Angelika had passed away two years ago to the day.
You must, I suppose, first realize you have nothing. All you have is this little stream of writing, called by some sort of bogus modern technological term that would offer little explanation of it. And after such a trip, with its long drives, its frustrations, its dealings with difficult personas, its easing of a mother through her birthday, you feel a bit tired, sure. And it is a relief not to have to, immediately, go back to that job you have, which itself gives you next to nothing, but a modest income, no provisions for the future but Social Security, how do you stand it all... Well, you like it once you get there, there is something spiritual about it, it lets you keep up this writing stuff, and there is the wine, which is both good and bad, very good and very bad and all things in between, such that it is very nice not to have to peddle it, driving one's own thirsts up to the roof levels.
What do I have, I ask myself, but very little.
But, on the other hand, it always seems like you're learning something, really just through the processes of one's own mind, not from that job, not from any particular experience, but my long careful deep thought and considerations.
And what you do have, in Holy Week at least, is a realization of the great almost impossible sensitivity of the Lord Jesus Christ, that holy man who comes through the storied books, the Gospels and their recollections...
It might not be so much that he knows everything, as in, being able to read the future, but just that he, He, is so very attuned, so very sensitive, so open to the vast world beyond humanity's usual protective gear and stupid talk, beyond their blusters and vocalizations, their small attempts to find a safe protected perch in this life in this world. He is so much so, that he really can rewrite, as if, or embellish, as if, or explicate in thorough completeness all the stories of all the major figures and prophets that are in the tales already written of in The Old Testament, speaking of the entire learnings and teachings of the Judaic Faith.
Would it be a little shocking to him, this small minor obscure poetic writer who takes all this upon himself, such so that he moves beyond literary craft to really see things. He sees things so much and so clearly, that he himself no longer even writes. Rather, he writes through his sayings, through his parables, through his observations and even his actions. Which are recorded, because obviously and instinctively to the minds of everyone around him, he has something to say.
He is a teacher, even called a rabbi, but he does not belong to exactly nor neatly fit in to the tradition as it is practiced. His understandings go beyond, even as they are completely in tune.
And he is remembered, amongst many things and many reasons, for shedding light on who we are, on what we are like, on what would be the truest form of our good health and sanity. This is his message, directly, through the indirect.
There are all kinds of terms for it. The heart of Jesus... Mary is a 'virgin' because she like him is fully sensitive. No part of the crassness, of the usual understandings put forth to explain humanity...
She has an imagination, as her son will.
As I take my bags in, turn the power strip back on to regain television and wifi, a cockroach, red, large, is there on the top of the old dishwashing machine, creeping under a black foil bag of dragonwell green tea, left, as it was empty. I had done my best to leave things clean in the kitchen before my departure a week ago. I'd taken the trash out, leaving only the recycling bottles.
The kid has texted me asking me to cover his Thursday. I'm due back at work Wednesday.
The guitar. They are made of pieces of wood. Some are solid. Some are hollow. An old Hohner Strat, beat up, strings on ash, what's not to like. Look at the strings as they come metal over the bridge, then down into the tremolo body, miracles of engineering put together. I wish I could sing better.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
