I find that once I'm up, a kind of waking nap, after the tea and the coffee, is useful to collect my thoughts.  It is hard to gather them when there is strife about.  It was hard to write anything before going into work to tend bar and listen to people, because where there are people there are voices, and voices are strife.  It was even hard to write on the first day off, as the strife had gotten down into your system, making me sad and weary, barely capable of walking down to the river and back, feeling very much alone.


If there is a movie shot I would like to do it would be an overhead, looking down on Jesus of Nazareth as he naps on the boat on the Lake of Galilee.  He is curled up in the ropes, and I would have him on his left side, his head resting, in profile of course, on the palm of his left hand, his right hand tucked in around him, a sort of grown-up fetal position, the position of thoughts and dreams in repose.  The ropes are around him, in a sort of nesting circle, strands of thought, tether of worldliness.  The boat is floating there in the water, and Jesus is thinking soundly and privately, and later on will refuse to be agitated until his disciples insist he wake, lest the ship be lost to the waves of the sudden storm.  (Or moonlight ripples, or music, or bawdiness.)



I am still feeling dull and tired, and thinking sad remembrances of young women who I should have befriended better back in the day, but for all the things one misreads in the strife-filled world unto which the peaceful and innocent have come, having to wake to the realities.

Patton's Third Army has been digging outside my apartment window, digging the foundation for the extension of the G.I. era apartment building steps east of my location.  Beep beep beep, the Bobcat bucket loader, backs up over the whoosh of two great engines.  Jesus Christ.  And I am on the very western end of this great city, just shy of where the reservoirs begin.  (A rain storm has come through, at last, at four thirty, but they keep on with the machinery.)  And I don't want to do anything tonight in particular, and would even like to stay out of the wine.  The thought of a bike ride along the towpath, out to where the river narrows, just beyond Chain Bridge, where the herons rook...  The thought of reading Pema Chodron, to rid one's self of bad habits...

To remember a dream, it helps to remain in the same position.  Shifting the body will shift away the whispy channel of dream memory, to be tactilely lost, surrendered to the thousand other things one might think about.

I too am trying to remember the Man of Peace and gentle kindness, the one who got stressed out by all the professional voices, people with real grown-up jobs that I wait on and chat with and listen to where I have no such professional a profession to count upon.  The knowledgable people, jockeying themselves professionally, as they are obliged and bound to do in such a town, loosened up by a cocktail, a glass of wine, the relief of sparring, of raising a voice, while I watch on, silently, attending to the many multi-tasked duties of waiting on bar and table...


Sleeping lightly, in and out, with all the tractor digging noises, moving from the bedroom to the old leather couch, I roused myself to call mom back around three thirty in the afternoon.  I took it easy last night, watched the first half of The Seven Samurai, the fates gathering them through twists and turns and tests, including the scene where the leader of the Seven has a monk shave his head.  I make tea, a bag of green and a bag of Tulsi in a large glass coffee cup, and a small coffee with the Bialetti.  (I had three glasses of Loire Cabernet Franc, twelve percent alcohol last night.  I moved some furniture around.)  I tend to the spider bite wound, healing slowly.

Then I take my nap of calming thought.   And in the calm I am able to write this small amount.


It is what I deserve, to suffer the old regrets about college and young women.  I drank.  I drank too much.  I drank alone.  I lived alone, rather than with my best friends, Jon and Randy, Jeffrey...  I deserve all this, and there must be some point to it.  Granted, to be such a writer I am in the wrong line of work, but that too is what I deserve, I suppose.

The "man of sorrows," why am I always so sad...

There is now a lot to worry about.  I get back to the apartment on MacArthur after doing my four shifts.  They are as long and intense as any of the shifts when you put my schedule together and compare that with the others.  Tonight, I was lucky enough to have the energy to force my body over to the Wisconsin Avenue Safeway around 1 AM.  Bruce, my friend at the late night check out aisle number seven informs me of the announcement I hear coming in up the escalator, the closing of the registers for twenty minutes to run the numbers.   Yes, I have plenty of time, and I will take my time, that's what I feel like, and anyway, with the medicine I have diarrhea to take care of in the utilitarian restroom, before walking down the aisles to find cold cuts, things that will get me through my three days off here, now that the Palisades Safeway has gone belly up empty, closed, done.  After having been open since 1944, something like that.

Sunday was not at all easy, my first day of the week.  The elder chief of the busboys' son, first communion, and so I'm on my own, and it gets very busy, and lots of regulars, familiar faces to entertain.

Mary Bierworth, why did I not kiss you better when we played spin the bottle back in Clinton, four hundred years ago.  You were eager, I was shy.  The early self esteem problem with girls who just want to have fun, don't you get it, idiot...  Her father was my fifth grade teacher, maybe that had something to do with it.  If I remember, she was sort of dating a friend of mine.

Monday, slow, the singer of the trio, coming in to cover a no show musical group, and she's just about to call it off, we're all tired, when one of her friends comes in, and then, ten minutes later, a couple, to celebrate a birthday, so there's my night, add another two hours, thanks a lot, great.

Tuesday, the wine tasting.  Slow, slow, slow...  But this is what bars are for, such as they are, before they too become bygone, a lot culture, persecuted, replaced by something that looks like them but is not the same.  The professionals talk on and on, academics, history, philosophy, music, jockeying to make their points and hold forth.

I'm eyeing how the paying of rent is  coming along, here at this new place.  It will be hard if I cannot afford it.

The strange wound from the spider bite is healing, but very slowly, so that's a thing, twice a day.  Every day, twice, soap and water scrub in the shower, then hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol, tea tree oil, then Neosporin, to which I may be allergic to, add some sliver wound gel, and then a bandage over it, and maybe it is healing, after the two week run of antibiotics.  One more thing about this apartment, on top of the early welcome of the repaving of the rough above my head up here on the third, top, floor, on top of the big excavation behind the adjacent old GI apartment building, beep beep beep, every time the Bobcat digger backs up, and the bigger bucket digger, yellow, tractor like.   And each noise, I found out earlier today, had a perfect tonal syncopation, or rather dissonance, the airplane whooshing overhead, the tractor digging, the Bobcat, loading the dirt on to a truck, and me going quietly crazy.  Yes, this is what it's all come to, my years of sadness and toiling in the restaurants because of my sins, my being a Jonah unwilling to repent and follow the instructions of the Lord...

One used to think, oh, I will be respected when I am more mature, older.  But this does not feel to be true.  It is the young, the ones with adaptability and the new intelligence, who garner the respect, the ones who fit in.  The old ones, like me, at 54, rather than being respected, they're looking at you, looking at you with the thought that you will wear out soon enough.

You did not conquest the girl when you had the chance, and it is precisely this waiting around, as tender and as sweet as it may have been in its intentions, all that is just stupid crap like the things you sweep up at the end of the night off the barroom floor, the bread crumbs, the french fry, the wine bottle foil, the beer cap, the dirty linens.  And then, like always and everywhere all throughout entire creation, you are left alone, alone, alone.

And only by, only through, the expression of this great loneliness that comes to the thoughtful and the sad, the wistful, the poet, only then, baring the heart, can, I suppose, you reach another human being or two...

My mom, always supportive, always the one who gets me, the kid who wanted to be a writer, not so much an academic, but a writer...  Whereas she became an academic, quite successfully, and in her scholarly prose.  But where has this all led us, led me, but to be, here, with a back up against a wall... and a tough physical job, one like the samurai of Kurosawa's Seven, who cannot win.


Most often, the best I can do to survive is to make certain I have food stuffs, supplies, cold cuts.  I would wish to be a vegan.  Ham and salami to chew on when it's late, that's how it goes.  Keeps up with the wine, the wine of peace at the end of a week of toil, when you need to switch out to a completely different kind of work.

Most of what any writer is going to write includes a good amount of crap anyway, just sounding off...

Down on the tow path west of the boat house, along the canal, where turtles float heads up, beaks above the water, their limbs balancing them still, where the bullfrogs are bassooning, near sunset, there is a paved road down to a cut through the rock slabs, out to a point in the river where it is narrow and where the fishermen come at this time of dusk.   The paved path has a half inch of water standing on it many places, and out at the end of it, a platform overlook of poured cement, and when I come to the end of the path, there are herons.  First, just a few.  But then, many.  They rise from the boulders and rock slabs just up the bend on this near side of the river, across from the steep bluff and the fine homes up top on the Virginia side, first a few of them, lifting up, and then as turkey vultures and large ravens wheel down, suddenly a whole flock of herons lifts up into the sky, some down river, some up river, some higher up into the sky.   They hover as they rise, and then the birds become horizontal, their legs behind them, their necks tucking their head back against their winged shoulders, riding the stream of the great river, the chasm of rock.

On the platform there is a man leaning over the cement railing of the high platform above the rocks, and he too has a bike.  He's in blue pants, and a blue shirt, in work shoes despite his bike being a decent one for a commuter or a bike messenger, an old blue ten speed, 14 actually, a decent saddle, hipster handlebars.  He's looking out over the river and I do not disturb him.  He is drinking a tall boy Heineken, silver, marked with green.  His beard, close cropped, grey, his face dark, handsome, strong, his eyes clear, a man well proportioned, his bike leaning against the parapet, he surveys the great river.

I'd been trying to write earlier at the coffee shop up on MacArthur, but in a kind of gloom known on the first day off, I knew, even as it was getting hear sunset at 8 PM in early May, I needed a bike ride. Mom had come to visit, and my brother had even driven her back, but I was feeling sad.  Sad and irresponsible, a loneliness, replays of the past, wishing I could grow up without having wasted so many years, and what is tending bar anyway but a huge waste of years kowtowing, cowed by the system.

"Lots of herons out," I said to the man, and he replied in kind, "oh, yes."  Here, with the narrows, and the water, as he put it, turning brown and dark, the current at its strongest in this chute, the fish can come no further up the river, he explains.  Not the shad, nor the stripers.  He looks around.  "Been coming here for years," he tells me.  We look together upstream.  "See, that's smog, way up there.  It used not to come 'till June or July, but that's pollution.  "See the brown in the trees," he says, looking back over the rocks that impede the river, from which small trees, sycamores, poplars, oaks, looking almost akin to mangroves in a way, but on land, growing only so tall as the shallow soil will allow on the rocky outcrop, "that's where they're dying."  Indeed, there is die-back in their branches, many of them.  "That's how we breath.  If the earth can't breath anymore, how can we..."

I look around some more, and the herons are still about, perfect instruments of the air, and so are the larger black birds, and there, two more fishermen come to join the half dozen scattered about with their poles.

I talk bikes with the guy a little bit.  He got this one for seventy five dollars.  "Also got a single speed."  The blue bike he has is an old road bike, and I can't make out the brand, maybe a Gios, but not.  A rugged short beard, white grey over his dark skin, his features Caucasian as much as African, or African American, in his worn inside out package courier company emblem work shirt with holes along the neckline, he is someone who should be cast in a film production.

He takes a tug off his beer.

See, people catch fish and they leave them up on the rocks here.  That's the smell here, he explains to me.  Catch 'em, throw them back in the river, that's nature's way.

Best time to fish, right now, right now and early morning.  The park rangers will catch you, if you don't have a permit, and they'll lock you up.

I wish I had some wine, you know, like the old Tour de France, I tell him, referring to the bottle holding capacity of the three back pockets of any cycling jersey.

"It's good to talk to you, sir.  I was feeling a bit lonely."

"Why feel lonely?  You got your own company.  I never feel lonesome, I got my company and the Lord up above.  I used to drink the hard stuff, get in trouble.  But now I just drink the beer."  He finishes the last sip, dribbles the can over the wall, then a minute later crushing the can quite flat with a single boot stomp.

A man comes with two medium sized black dogs friendly with poodle fur, and the man I've been talking to is pleased and asks the owner questions.


I rode up a bit further, past a few more locks, and a lock keepers house small and warmly lit and an older couple out reading on rocking chairs, sharing the evening.  I rode back.  Closer to nature, the inevitable as we grow older and closer to our ultimate destiny.  The bugs are out now, and I'm glad I have my glasses on.


Huck and Jim.  Somewhere along Huck's growing up.

At nighttime, you know everything is weird.  You know the horse picks up his guitar, unbeknownst to anyone, and secretly plays, muffled away.

The dreamer dreams, the neighbors are skeptical, the rent is nearing due, you're cooking on the stove.

The new apartment, everything is weird.  Today I learned that the local Safeway is closing.

On the good side, I made it to the local library, freshly renovated.  I got a library card.  That's pretty good for an idiot, for one in my state.  They have DVDs, in case you're feeling lazy.  Who could resist an old favorite, Gregory Peck, Moby Dick.  Who could resist, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Armageddon In Retrospect.

On the good side, after a talking to from the boss after leaving the place a mess--I must have rebelled, or just got tired, after entertaining good old friends, you know, those people who you become sincere friends with, just by waiting on them, but deeper than that, let the glassware go, etc., --I had a good long bike ride, squeal in the brakes mountain back down to the towpath of the C & O Canal, all the way out to Great Falls overlook.  They don't let you take your bike out on the over-look, a boardwalk through a very rare ecosystem, a foremost example of that ecology.

It's lonely out here, definitely, but on a Friday evening I have things to do.  I'm taking care of an apparent spider bite on my left thigh.  It looks like something with two fangs got me, and I have no memory, or feel of any pain, except now looking at it.  And whenever I bandage up something, or get anywhere near Neosporin, my skin reacts, as it does to other things.  My skin does not like being treated.  My skin gets claustrophobic, or something.  It riots.   The special island area above the magnificent channels of water that is the Great Falls Overlook, is known to be a wonderful haven for the Black Widow Spider.  Did one follow me home on my yellow bike, or in my spandex bike shorts?

The library hurts almost.  It is good to be close to it.  All the years I've not been able to get to a library and see, visually displayed, all the different books and resources.  I've been an ignoramus.

I get the bags of groceries back, catching the D6.

I never imagined things would end up this way, but here I am, a monk.  Here I am isolated.  Here they don't like when I modestly amplify my voice and my Martin D28 at 3 in the morning.

What else?  The move didn't go so well.  They told me the truck was full.  But my book cases...

Good God.  No book cases.  Imagine that... on top of all I lost, the other little things.

And when you move, particularly after being somewhere for twenty years, you can't find anything, not even a hat.


So, I get to the doctor, on top of other things.  The therapist.  Lexapro sweats that made me wonder how much of a wino I am....

Antibiotics for the bug bite.  It will get better.  Later, after work, there's a tinee-tiny spider who has, by the two knobs of this unfamiliar bathroom sink, roped in a tick, looks like, the kind that are small and black and not full of blood, the kind that you can crush easily almost with a pop.  She has got it.  Immobilized.  She has venomized it, it can't move, it's her victim now, and she will pick the right time to suck the life juices from it, perhaps the very tick creature that bit me.  I have always liked and respected spiders, and I wish they could understand that I like them as much as I do, given that they don't want to mess with me any more than I want to mess with them.  Sometimes on winter nights, well, there's one up a wall in the kitchen, and you approach, say hello, and they turn and look at you with their thousand little eyes, their little legs expressing curiosity, I hope, more than hostility or fear, and I think you can make friends with them.  Who knows.

So, thank you, little spider, here in this foreign lonely lonesome apartment with no working phone jacks, with creaking walls, and not much happiness, such that it has not been much of a joy to think of unpacking anything, except when you have to.

The dead husk, the shell of a small tick dangles from the spider's scaffold, and the spider has adjusted to my turning of the knobs of the faucet, not moving far.

It's now 2:15 in the morning on the night of the full moon just before Easter.  The leaves are well on their way to make the hillsides green here by the reservoir.  First day off after the work week.  Two naps.  The latter one after returning to the new apartment.  On the couch, I have the first dream involving the geography of the new apartment, dim in the dream, a child-like diorama.  The road to the west comes out of the woods, obscured by a curve, and trees.  Behind where we live there are paths uphill through the woods, secret paths almost, up the bluff and to the farmers fields and undeveloped lands above.  This picture, from the dream, is fanciful.  Two young women are walking on these paths, either for exercise or the relaxation of a mutual adventure.  Feeling like a creep here still, in the dream, alone, I am reluctant to interfere with them.  But they come nearer and I ask them where the paths go, and they answer, just as expected.  And there is a calm before night falls and the car's headlamps come, rarely as they do, in this countryside dream at the edge of a metropolitan area.


Don Quixote:  the first tale portraying the psyche, of how bold an adventure it is to go out into the world, to be amongst all its disorienting objects and paths, its roads, buildings.  No wonder the largest building, at the time, a windmill, is some sort of terrible giant to do battle with.

Tales from the first AA meeting.  One's own childish ridiculousness in the face of having to be an adult.


I have gone to see Mary Karr give a talk at the Arlington Central Library.  I meet friends there.  I hitch a ride back with them.   I was going to take the 45 minute walk through Clarendon to the Key Bridge in the moonlight, to orient myself, but I'm not going to pass up a chance to hang out with friends.  We get in the car to find a place to eat, a popular local barbecue place.  My friends are ordering.  I get an angus beef rib, collard greens.  I feel guilty getting a glass of wine, but my friend Anna wants a beer, and she's paid for dinner.

Driving back after barbecue at Rocklands in Clarendon, the subject of AA comes up again.  A chance to be an adult, a chance to know how you really feel about something, anything.

Another lesson from the talk:  people will project upon whatever encounter their own reality.   Maybe that lets me out of the whole business of being taking as a kind of "stalker" by the Upper West Side Princess who'd been barking at cab drivers and ordering bagels in loud busy shops since she was seven, as opposed to this hick here who does not particularly relish the competitions of the city life.

We all react differently to real events as they happen.  We record them differently in the our minds, we remember them differently.  Our own experiences warp the things that happen as they happen into the  reality of our own space time, the gravitational pulls that we all must have by virtue of being human.  Kurosawa did a movie about that.  What really happened?  And this is something Mary Karr the memoirist author brings up.

I myself was the small town country boy, or rather a boy of the old land, of old experiences that go back thousands of years.  The grassland, the forest, the weather, the shape of the country itself.  Living so, up on Ernst Road out there in the small college town of Clinton, New York, amongst the old independent family dairy farms, up by the marvelous hills and outlooks of Champion Road and Skyline Drive, Vernon, Vernon Center, Knoxboro, Oriskany Falls, Deansboro, it wasn't much of a stretch to conjure in the imagination the vague background of all stories told, Tolkien, Bible, those of American History...  The old patterns were still there, still in the air.

I had no clue, no clue how shrewd you really have to be in order to have a decent life.  For one thing you have to be competitive.   You can't be an innocent.  That would be sticking your head in the sand and hoping all bad things would go away.



My life now, what's left of it, seems to be about slow discoveries, minor victories.  The grocery store.  A walk past the reservoirs in the fresh afternoon heat to the Palisades Library to return Moby Dick and Dunkirk DVDs, to pick up a collection of Wendall Berry essays.  I begin to recognize neighbors of mine out here in this quiet exile at the Western edge of town.


Unfortunately for things such as career and fitting into the changing world, I regressed.  I had my role model of James Dean.  But rather than move to New York City in an attempt to be an actor, I sought out the country boy, the Jett Rink.  The small town.  Levis.  Cowboy boots.  Long drives through different towns, quiet and unappreciated, more or less left behind.  Farms and farm equipment.  The land as it was back then, before developments you had to buy into by definition in order to survive, the whole thing, the car, the commute, the office, the structure....  I should have celebrated the creative, the musical abilities, the wish to learn to sing out loud, to dance;  these are things that belong to the city, connections, other artists to collaborate with...

And yet, I didn't chose that.  I chose the most modest, the most purely spiritual (in a way.)  The things of the writer, of one who is always and ever adrift.

My astrology, of being born amongst people like Danny Kaye and Fellini and A.A. Milne and Muhammed Ali suggested that growing up would be very difficult, and possibly even tragic.  To become a bartender, to even enter into the idea of working in a restaurant, which I entered into innocently and with decent habits and with a great reluctance to talk to people.  Being a busboy worked for me.  You ran around all night.  It kept your mind from wondering back to all the things you messed up without having ever had any intention of messing up.  Isolation is a bad thing.


Then there are the things we conjure up in our minds, privately for the most part...  Spiritual thought, religious though without so much a habit of going to church.

The churches meant for you are writing groups and meetings like AA Meetings, and for Jesus types meeting over wine and gluttonous things with sinners and cigarette smokers, with the blind, with those who know not the mote, the beam, the dust in their own eye.  Brother, let me help you.  And yet it is a world where only an outstanding extreme type like a Jesus can really help you.

In the great backpacks of all the world, one hopes there are laptops on which to efficiently write memoirs upon, a hot spot WIFI for you wherever you are....

It had brought a lot to deal with, this last year in my own personally warped time and space...  "I deserve it, I guess," I said to myself,  "all those golden chances and golden years pissed away..."  The Erica, the Elena, the Smithie, the Holyoke future wife, the DeMotts, the Pritchards, the Calvin Plimptons, the good ways of starting out as a prep school teacher and moving on up from there, the local congressman's office my brother's drinking college buddy rowdy friends hooked me up with, but again, I piss away all I touch....  All I touch, except the farm boys, the country people, the chefs, the Huck Finn types...  the strange humble types...

The problem with the species, with all creatures, perhaps, is of having too much talent, such an impossible amount of talent, and each unique to itself.  And then rather than trying to harvest, to keep up with all that, rather than allow life to be a live performance we are forced into things.  Forced to divide.  Forced to tell other people to shut up.

Ugly people will tell you to shut up.  Ugly people will crush you, just as you hint of all the talents you might have, all the clarity of vision, the ability within to raise the creative dead...  The story of Jesus Christ, all over again.

The world has to be asked...  Have we lost the ability to care about other people, other creatures, other lives, other things?  What language do we have for such, when making good money and dealing with the city...  Why do people who actually really care end up going mad or living in monasteries?  Congratulate Dick Cheney on all his muscular Halliburton work and for making all his money, but where is his or Donald Rumsfeld's ability for empathy.  ("We kill the enemy humanely now," making it sound like the U.S. Military under such guidance as the Iraq Halliburton wars was a Buddhist gift, correcting errant schoolboys with a John Donne chide...)

Sometimes you have to (shut up completely) be quiet for a long time, to observe silences, in order to gain the language of caring and empathy.  A kind of death.  An understanding of all the suffering people must go through alone and in private and even when busy, when trying to live, when trying to do all one should do, all the things one wants to fulfill as far as a Godly life.  To be in the shut-up state, however dignified that may be, not showing off your wisdom and erudition, let's say, in the classroom, Modern British Poetry, is, in one way, to bow out of the competition of academia which, if you survived its sword dance, would have let you go on to be the great teacher you wanted to be.

It's hard to be empathetic from an airplane, though some of us, who people would probably call poets, are capable of.  Anyone with a job is going to have a hard time being that ultimate kind loving being of deep soul in tune with nature...  When I get a retirement plan sufficient, then I will do good works...

But by then those too are only about the money one has in cash reserves...  Philanthropic, as impersonal as anything is, as impersonal as the bank.


I was a good bartender, a good barman, because I cared.  I actually cared.  I still do.  I still enjoy it.  But, maybe, let me off the hook now?  Things to worry about...

There's a fallacy deep down in it.  A lie.


I do laundry.  I end up being up until the birds are singing and the first light.  I smoke an American Spirit after cutting the filter off, down the stairs and out onto the teak bench.  By now I've had a whole bottle of wine almost.  I call mom.  She's doing okay.  We compare notes on writing, on being a pack rat.

The voice is all, Mary Karr impresses upon us.    The voice holds a memoir together.

During her talk, a thought passes my mind, just as the thought, the impression, about Don Quixote.  Is the story of Jesus, and maybe in particular that of Holy Week's events, the memoir of humanity, a kind of a model, redemption, resurrection, a way to the better life...

I had worked very hard, physically, each week, before, during and after the big move and the visit to Mom for her 80th.

This week I worked five shifts, closing Saturday through Wednesday nights.  Thursday, I slept all day, fielding calls from mom, fighting off a cold with massive rest.  Along with the antidote to poison, which is writing.

Trust me, folks.   It works.

Comedians, otherwise happy people, lead the positive changes of society.  Comedy welcomes the variety of human life, the possibilities;  comedy opens up the acceptance, comedy lets us embrace the new.  Comedy expands our understanding of the other.  Comedy lets us join in on the fun.  Comedy opens us up enough to try to enjoy life, even when it has its grim faces., even when we are alone.



Miguel was in the slim corner back by the stove and the silverware drawer, the napkins and the back ups.   It's 8:45 at night, Wednesday, and he's come up to run food and to take away the dishes the server and I have brought back from tables.  He's back.  There's a pile-up of dirty glassware, a certain desperation in the constant changing out of things that is the restaurant night's life to the servers.  He's doing his thing, maybe he needs to catch his breath, maybe he's tired out.  Frantic points of the evening, he comes on through, picking up the dirty dishes we've piled up after scraping them off into the garbage can on top of the three black milk crates below the rail of bar and the sinks.   He's doing his job.  You can't ask better.  But, why this set up?  Why keep H. at home, so that we would have a busboy on both floors...  We could surely use one.  Why do I have to work like this every night?


I had been having strange sweats at night, I thought due to the wine.  I took a day off of the SSRI Lexapro and immediately the perspirations ended, no waking up with my tee shirt soaked.   And that was one depressing thing off of my plate, that I wasn't going through alcohol dependency.  I guess your brain and your body can only take so much poison.


The worst thing you can do is forget your writing, to neglect it.  That just doesn't work.  Back to the natural stuff.  Let the body and the godly stuff within it take care of itself.

I know this is crap writing, obtuse bullshit, but it has to be done.  It's the only way some of us have of being calm.  Like birds have to sing out.


Somewhere along the line, as I was off line, this old blog hit 200,000 visits.  Many of them specious, no doubt, but some of them real, I hope.