So I order some copies of my book, not sure why, just to have them around I guess, I get them cheap, about four bucks a pop.  The box comes from Amazon, sitting there on the front stoop.  The package, looks like it's been opened.  The blue plastic tape has been cut, methodically, along the whole top and the sides of the top, and the top looks like it could have been opened, enough so that one could look in.  The weight a good ten pounds.  And the box has been closed back up with three strips of clear plastic wide packing tape from side to side.   The burglar or whomever must have been disappointed with such loot.  And when I open the box finally--the thieves had made this task easier--yup, nothing but the twenty two of my famous novel A Hero For Our Time, 265 pages, along with some brown packing paper snaking around, just as I'd ordered through CreateSpace, as if these little boxes of literature now completely outmoded, they might as well be mummified by now.  How's that for a chuckle.

And I am a bum.  Really.  I might be a nice one, but I am a bum.  A total bum.  It's bad enough if you're an artist, but to be a bum on top of that...  And where does one even look, to find the roots of it, where did I become a bum...


It's five in the morning, and the half moon is on the other side of cloudy forty two degree distant pond, robins are giving it a chirp, and soon a Postal Delivery truck will make a great thump over some hollow part of the streets below, and airplanes will take to the sky heading west.

And this is about the time, here now, in the hours when one takes out the recycling, and other such stupid things like preparing to make tuna salad and regretting that one had a cider at the grocery store, should have just gotten the groceries home and not felt so stressed out earlier when leaving the old and sacred house on the old and sacred street of stray and feral cats and other such small epiphanies of personal libraries and people with good histories and good taste and knowledge, readers, that I would habitually turn to the sad things that accompany life in this old town.  For various reasons of exile sensitivity, I could never get enough of other people's more famous misery.

Anything about Abraham Lincoln, be it a book about his melancholy, or Ken Burns Civil War series, of Abraham & Mary, A House Divided, a documentary I found, would do the trick, if you've ever lived in Washington, D.C., and felt its miseries.  Or, go and catch a funeral train, if not Lincoln's, Bobby Kennedy, or Jack's Kennedy Blue airplane touching down and rolling into the lights of Andrews...    Ghost stories.  Madam Korbonski heard crying through the wall of my bedroom early and dark in the morning when the Polish hopeful airplane crashed in Putin's Russia on the way to acknowledge horrors like Stalin's works of murder against the noble Poles in Katyn woods.

And why did I inherit the misery, but for the lack of kindness--I guess I wanted, out of family history, some sort of special treatment--received at Amherst, or was it that I've never had a happy turning out well relationship with any female of the species (cats and dogs, quite fine), and is that because of my crazy mother or more my own faults and being a bad boy who never figured it out, and who, again, is a bum.

With whatever energy I have after grocery shopping in the early evening, along with loose leaf tea and wine, I spend on cooking, searing chicken breast in the iron pan with left over ginger that was steeped in water with shallot, and then also searing some unhappy tenderloin, to be eaten later, sliced, boring.   And then I pass out on the couch, into the post dinner nap, in front of the television.

In the general state I am in, yeah, you don't really want to run into people, feeling ashamed about something.  I mean, you've tried honestly enough to be a writer...

But to admit that you are miserable in Washington, D. C., is to go against the general rule of presenting yourself as highly competent, and happy, and sometimes to be happy is to make other people miserable.

And this is why, perhaps, I am mystified, when I go down to the local market, which mimics a farmer's market and with beer, wine and cider, a deli counter, cooked chickens, fresh meats packed in plastic on cooler shelves, to see the influx of the young and funky and the hipster, people who might wish themselves to make their own cheeses and beer if they had the time, almost dressed for it, along with the handsome resuméd youthful people who still have time to figure out breeding and who already have dogs...

But here, by myself, a kind of misery, sometimes sleepy, sometimes awake, and happiness and contentment come through performing modest chores, mostly food-related.

Meanwhile, old mom sits up there by herself with all her books, in some form of lonely exile, but that she has a cat, and how did we let all this happen...

Later, today I will go back to work.


Somehow, as a creative, I have never favored collaboration.  More have I leaned to the general very private secrecy that is natural in writers, as writers are, alas, unable to share, but by writing, that saying something about the human condition, and, for that matter, perhaps the spirituality of the prophets.  Dr. King like Isaiah and Amos, I've read recently in the Times...  good to close a sermon with, as was his habit.  I cannot explain this, I just know it to be true.


(Getting ready for work, after the schedule change, comes almost as a relief.  JFK said he'd go nuts if he didn't have somewhere to go every day, and perhaps this is true.)

Oh, but the restaurant business, the odd hours, you never get to talk to anyone.  And this on top of the feeling that you're playing around when you should get serious, that all this is frivolous, even though it is work, definitely, leaving you exhausted.

Amos was a prophet.  He decided that himself.  He was not a professional at it, not a pleaser of powers that be, but an independent.  He was a believer in social justice, so it seems.

With that man, that man in the White House, our White House, the White House of, by, and for, the people...  the opposite of a man with any spiritual life...  and this is hard on people, and even in normal political situations much of the spiritual voice gets drowned out.  No?  The dialog is dragged so far in one direction, even to get back to the median, so that you could acknowledge the spiritual element of the created universe, so much static, and that's how he operates.

Like take King, Dr. King, in his last sermon, toward the end of it, talks of going to the Holy Land, and driving with his wife from Jerusalem down to Jericho, and it's a "winding, meandering road... really conducive for ambushing," a dangerous road that drops three thousand feet, and the question for him in his sermon is not about what happens to the person who stops to help out the man beaten by thieves, not about the I, but about the other, as The Good Samaritan in Dr. King's telling is, what will happen to the man if I do not stop to help him...

It's a remarkable speech to come across today.  About how Dr. King's thoughts were not what will happen to me if I do not stop to help out the sanitation workers, but about what will happen to them if he doesn't stop.

And some people, some men, of course, do not stop.


But we too stop, even the writer.  We stop to write of the neglected possibilities, to see ourselves not just in economic terms, but in terms broader.  Why do we exist?  For what?  Who but us will do the work that is God's work, involving God's thoughts...

Trump would not stop, but to toss paper towels to the victim of the mightiest of storm's wrath, in the photo op.  And get away with it, because he has already changed the dialog so far toward the materialist view, that we can barely conceive of an argument for doing better by the victims, as if he'd hypnotized us, numbed us, taken away our tongues...


You're not going to write unless you help yourself to write.  You're not going to write until you write down something small and seemingly inane, and then help out that idea.  You help it gain strength, and add some coherent structure to it.

Hemingway wrote his story, self-reflecting perhaps, about the Old Man and the Sea, a poor man, an old man, a fisherman, a man with a sort of tattered wisdom and very simple means and living.  Hemingway too could side with nature, with the poor, with the lone artist and his struggle, with the spiritual side of things, the deeper realities that makes things so.  He recorded things as they are.  He was one kind of a writer, and perhaps the times, his times, called for that.  His generations had wars to grapple with, to digest.  And in war there is the soldier's experience, and that's a good deal of what he brought to us, the horrible anonymity of destruction, people marching in lines their souls having been forgotten by any worldly authority.


Who thinks he can write when he wakes up...  what have I to write?  For I am a sinful man, even on a good day, or even at best.

But the writer has this vast body of soulful things to remember.  He sees people, potentially, purely, as souls, almost to the point where they become themselves anonymous, messengers of God in accordance with what they do.   The construct of the world bears him up when he gets to concerned with the microcosm of his affairs.

This is light, and it is hard to look at the brightness of the light sometimes.  The kind of impersonal touch that God and the Lord Jesus Christ brings to personal relationships...

If we, oddly, focus on the details of who people are in their individual circumstances--and everyone seems themselves as an independent individual and unique character, seeing worth in tooting their own horns and presenting themselves in terms of individual greatness and power--we lose their potential to come out and act in the spiritual way...

It is not "I" that writes...  And without sounding pretentious, Jesus is accurate and correct when he says it is His Father's business, that the things he is doing come out of the One who sent him.

Each person is a manifestation of the deeper reality, and the deeper stuff can be thought of as something beyond the personal, as it is the spirit which acts, to help, to do good things, to shine the light...

We don't blame Jesus for his impersonal quality, for his distance, his aloneness.   Sure, we don't want to see him as unfriendly and non-smiling...  but it seems it's almost as much the burden of individuality and ego's things that he lifts off people, and they are people weighted by their identity in society...

A sermon is a day's work, a moment of atomic energy translated, transformed into things very hard for us to grasp but made tangible.

The cult of personality, the pagan gods, they exist today too, but one can know better...  And this is why the hermit life isn't so wrong sometimes.  And what do we have to focus on these days, but the surface, the appearance of on-line life, the image...

There are reasons why we've been brought to where we are, and maybe the events and even the reasons behind why where we are where we are are personally sad and trying.  Lessons, such things are.  To know such gives one strength, strength to deal with scary things like uncertainty.  And maybe, perhaps, uncertainty is there for a reason, to teach you something which you have not been able to quite comprehend just yet, a puzzle, something to think over, and ultimately doing a good job of leading you to a better place.

But maybe it's just too hard to be a writer now.  Too hard to go back and forth between the social and the private worlds.  The private allowed you time for the real work you felt you had to do, out of honor and spirit and for religious reasons.

But there was a hell of a cost for it.  Think of all the vulnerable people who have those late night jobs at checkout counters and so forth...  I became one of them.  Tired, at odd hour, leery of each other, but reaching out by some quiet politeness, to re-identify ourselves as human beings, capable of all things even if we have not succeeded in life by the norm.


I feel stupid and ashamed.  It could be construed I was sneaking around, avoiding humanity on days off, but I felt quite tired, and like Dostoevsky, I wanted the quiet time of the deeper night, three in the morning, which both worked with the circadian rhythm imposed by said job of physical struggle.  This was the time I'd find to grocery shop at the 24 hour stores, the Safeway across the street and a block up from work, and believe me that could be a long walk in the cold hungry night, and for other basic needs the Rite Aid, another walk long enough and dreary in the night, for things like toilet paper, soda water, laundry detergent and paper towels.  Somehow at this hour the sound of the laundry was less offensive, and more calmly I could sit down and try to work, not that I ever really did, but just that it helped to write.  And I could remember the kindness of late night people at work...

It felt that life had gone seriously off-track, and I didn't seem to know anyway to bring it back, such a person was I, disagreeing, not willing to join in so contentedly as do people who smartly know that it's simply wise to do so as far as actual life goes, the things most people want, spouse, house, kids...

Whatever the days I worked, it all succeeded in making me tired.

And in this late hours, of course, of course you wonder about your sanity, about your choices, about where it all is headed.  And further, it felt like you needed, that you deserved, even, a break, of some sort.

Who would want, in their right mind, to be up alone at four AM, working on their little projects...  But how else does it get done?

And perhaps only in such danger do things become clearer, even if you might not want to hear what being clearer is, realizing the very issues...  And you think, hmm, no wonder Dostoevsky wrote at night.  No wonder Dostoevsky penetrated beyond issues of civil authority in the murder story of old Karamazov.

No wonder he depicted Christ as a silent captive, kept in the dungeon by the powerful bishop inquisitor who identifies completely with the profane.  As in, "we have it better without you being here...'



As a boy going to bed I'd look down from the balcony, down into the living room, and there, always, was my father, sitting in his brown chair, with papers around him, reading, perhaps writing on a legal pad, and always after dinner 'til midnight, a good four hours anyway, and often a cat getting an ear rub next to him, one of the wolfhounds or the corgi by the firepot...  He'd put on the teaching performance during the daytime, up at the college, and then, now, he was doing the deeper matters of his work.

When you write you have to poking along, struggling, wading into new waters.  And whoever might come along and read what you might write on that one day, well, they might see blue colors when you are generally painting in orange colors...

There is enough out there to write about, just by existing.  And one could include in that the works of all the painters, from Giotto, and the early guys, to Van Gogh and Cezanne...  Art, art is spiritual, worth noting, as part of the struggle...  part of the path toward a better spiritual understanding, an understanding of the other.

Did they paint with massive doubts hanging over them?  With concerns about the coming crisis of the aging of their elders...

I wish I knew what the old man had been writing, his lesson plans.  His letters were always tremendously well thought and written, long hand with a felt tip pen...  I wish I could have shared him with more of my friends and more people, how sweet and great he was.



The night is self-correcting.  A load of laundry is for the most part done, just in need of being put away.  The time is precious when undisturbed.  And this is why I never go out.

What would I teach if I were a teacher?  I would teach about all sorts of things, no particular subject.  Probably not economics, but what does the great Void and the Universe and all its stuff really care about economics...



I'm not saying I'm a good writer.  I'm not saying I'm a useful writer.  I'm not saying there's much value for any sort of marketplace.  I'm not saying I deserve to be read.  But that is not why anyone writes, not if they are serious.

Some explore the daytime, and some explore the lonely nighttime.  They are both experiences to be had.  Facing yourself...

But somehow it was a tough week on the body, what with driving back from up north, Oswego to DC, back to work for one day, busy, then off two days, then out to dinner with amigos and then back to work for a hard Saturday night, then Easter Sunday night shift, the anniversary of my father's passing, the Monday jazz with my coworker bearing down on me and my pains, then off on Tuesday, then my buddy calling me saying I should come by, back to the wine bar, and meet the three young women from Paris the retired arbitrator gentleman has brought by.  And I wake up early in the morning feeling some sort of Kerouac panic, "old man, lonely, no family, and fat."  Thrown off, I guess.  Worried about adult stuff like jobs that pay the bills and aging mothers who are lonelier than I am, whom I am at least faithful about calling and visited her for birthday.  Well, I retreat to the bar rather than trying anymore to chat up the young women from France here for a business seminar, talking to my friend J the bartender who gives me a ride home at the end of the night.  Better to go out then stay in, but sometimes you can't really tell and maybe it's all the same misery anyway.

Early early in the morning I lay awake, get myself a fresh glass of double filtered water in the plastic Foxhall Smiles pint glass from the dentist, and crack open the book on the bed next to me, Kerouac, Big Sur, which is almost too much for me, delving into the horrors of alcoholism, and the only real bright spot beyond the touching stuff about Tyke the beloved cat back at his mom's in Long Island and the comfort Kerouac has giving us a bit of his Canadian French personal family talk like that of his dying father's groans is the bit at the end about seeing the Cross, after all his Buddhist readings, he sees the Cross there as clearly as he's ever seen anything, finding that remarkable.  The poems written to the sea soothe the harrowing read.

And why did I get into this foolish line of work anyway, the grey sky of April the fourth tells me, in its stillness before the wind picks up as predicted.  Yes, it is not easy when your work schedule gets thrown off, you feel jerked around.

But I have other books of Kerouac, his Book of the Dharma, and after warming a can of black-eyed peas, green tea, a chat with mom whose day is also cold and raw, and doing the dishes so that I have clean forks again and all the cups are clean except for the ones I am using, more or less, and the plates from the shelf where the cockroach was are rinsed in comforting hot soapy water, the spiritual life, with ETWN on in the background, and Mom too was just watching TV with Mother Angelika praying the Holy Rosary and I've lit some incense, Frankincense and Myrrh.  Not to be gross, saints in their little cabins such as Kerouac have their little encounters with the living creatures of the world like mice and spiders who go about their business in the outhouse...

Hungry, I eat, and yoga later on this odd day off before the winds come...  Otherwise I feel pretty useless, and that is how we are these days anyway, entranced by our little on-one devices, Google News, Facebook, emails, whatever else we might find out...

I'm in a bad mood at the start of work.   The walk through the woods was mild and sunny, and I did some yoga before, but when I get in I see them monkeying with the reservation pad, how are we going to fit all the parties in.  I bury myself in restocking, step by step.  When we're seated at the round table downstairs eating our baked chicken wings in rice, the young woman I'm going to work with pipes up, without much warmth, "I know how you are, Ted, don't offer any tastings until we get through things..." to which I respond, quietly, "Alina, I'm not an idiot."

Easter, and I have to be doing this kind of a thing, working Saturday night, and then back for Easter Sunday, the anniversary of my father's passing, then the rest of the week, and the scheduling server manager L tells me she had to put me on the schedule for the entirety of next weekend too.  Okay, whatever, but giving me off two of my usual shifts, which is fine.  I'll be tired enough getting through what lies before me.

The boss comes in, with jeans, shirt untucked, fashionable leather sneakers, greets my co-worker with pecks on both cheeks, and I'm already toiling away, surrounded by a full bar, and some woman, a regular, asking me if the veal special has butter in it.

Later in the evening, the boss comes up the stairs, and bids me good day, and we say, hum, yes, busy busy, that's good.  But a minute or two later, he says, hey, something about my shoes...  and I've been wearing my Brooks running shoes because rodents chewed through the laces of the other ones, and because my feet hurt.  He's right, but it doesn't help my mood much, at least it's getting toward the end of the night.

Easter dawns, without much meaning, so it seems.  No triumphant mood, and more one of "Fuck This."  Mom calls from up north, feeling very lonely.

I have a busser to help out, as the back room, the wine room, is full with two parties roughly at the same time.  And there's the bar, which needs attention from the start, an older African American couple who live out by Catholic University, who drop in from time to time, enjoyable people, and they are in for an early dessert and still wearing their observant finery.  The first party in the back turns out to be two sisters who grew up just west of Paris, and in their sixties, they are fun to talk to, and one mentions Muscadet, being introduced to it when she was five.  Asking about it, I tell her Hemingway liked it with oysters, as her story comes out.

My busser is helpful, but I've barely cleared the six-top when dinner, just fired, arrives, so I have to scramble for that, and my help seems one step behind for much of the evening.  He's been here all day, so I can't blame him, and he's a tireless strongman...  I've sent him home and think I've slayed the dragon when I hear the women downstairs speaking to the last arrivals, having called in a reservation, "yes, check out upstairs, it's very nice."  They are headed up the stairs anyway, even as it is just my friend and I, no one else, and I will just suck it up on Easter night.

They three turn out be nice, the daughter went to Mt. Holyoke, and for me it's either hate them or join them, as far as hospitality goes, and so I join them, and my friend the historian is telling excellent sketches from a night out down on 14th being kind to a mutual friend, a younger guy.

I reflect on his stories, how the Barbary Pirates moved in on the two women they were talking to, one sitting on the girl's jacket on the barstool chair when she gets up to go to the restroom, and showing off pictures of themselves with Secretary Mattis....

It's all about entitlement, such successes, so it seems to me.  It's not about who you are, but about how confidently you feel you deserve desirable things.  "The two Arab guys," presumably with enough money in their pockets to feel a fresh self-confidence, who think nothing of inviting the chicks to the Four Seasons or the Ritz for more expensive treats, have captured the day.

And me, poor old dumb fuck Tranowsky frets his time away carefully considering what he deserves and ends up living a monk's life, and one of service.  Dumbly staring down at his shoes as he scuffs them through the dust in the classic The Thinker pose of shyness, almost a stereotype...  Is it that he is now too careful, feeling old enough and weak enough despite his strengths to 'not bite off more than he can chew, and life is pretty precarious anyway...'  Thus tending bar, as if he doesn't even feel entitled even to write or to place much confidence in it or that it will ever pay off.

Mom calls back at the start of the shift, Easter evening, the light out on the trees across the street, pinkish white apple blossoms, the big old leaning elm that towers over the Boys and Girls Club parking lot with its new rubber green playing field in the distance and the stand of grand old Larches by the scholar's residences, and she has mellowed, considerably, having had a nice conversation with family members, and that's one more anxiety lifted, as I set up, careful to dress a little better and to try on a different pair of shoes taken from under the dresser, a pair of green suede Pumas.


One more shift, jazz night.  I drink the ginger water I brewed yesterday, make a pot of dragonwell green tea, sprinkle some flax seed, some astragalus, some schisandra powder, into my cup and refill it, diluting the taste away.  I've done a great job at work, my job, feeding the sense of entitlement that people have, generally more important people than I.  My body has its aches today, and a tired feeling   within, but the tea is helping.

And I wonder, what would I be like, what would life look like, were I to suddenly grow my own sense of deserving, being entitled to the joys and the abundance of the world rather than the stoic go-it-alone sense of things.  Still, though, I will try to keep enough energy after my shift to do some grocery shopping, a bit tired of the menu at the old Dying Gaul as far as the excitement of tastebuds go...


But what is the writer's entitlement...  A sense of having inherited an ability to discern some form of understanding of reality...  Perhaps his choice was not so much a lack of self-confidence, as it was perceived in the feminine world of many many options and suitors and opportunities for pretty girls.    A quiet sort of old man sense of deserving the act and the ability to write down the oldest and deepest truths...  to be a sort of Lincoln musing over, say, different sides of an issue both claiming divine will, and 'woe unto the world because of offences...'

Apparently it is a lonely station to occupy.  The opposite to the entitlement so plainly evident in the world and Washington, D.C.

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...

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.