Hateful old passive aggressive Patoola.  Therapy session:  Be wary of self-sabotage, be careful you don't see your successes as betrayal of your mother...  You've found a nice match, a new friend you like spending time with, in age and interest and temperament.  Situations are honestly frustrating you, tension at work from the unfairness of always closing...  Be careful, be wary of the aggressiveness comes out of frustrations, let it out in a beneficial productive way...

No wonder, then...

But I work, have a job, the one I've kept for fifteen years..  It's physical, emotional...

I took a wrong path in life.  I got mixed up, like, in that time of college, and post college...  that's the time you should go do it, but me,  I had my mom to think about, I wasn't quick in making any move, I ended up where I ended up...


So by the end of the week, even as the lovely musicians put on a great show, a whole crowd of people, even as the main guy sings out your praises, as the backbone of the whole place, the guy who makes it, strangely I'm in a strange mood, and as a bartender, working away, getting stuff done, wine tasted so people are happy, jokes, politeness, facial expressions, the whole myriad of give and take, you really do not feel like being in the spotlight, even if you are one of the main actors of the night, a character...  I'm not in revel mode, unfortunately, even though it seems I might project that appearance a little bit better.  Oh, he's speaking of the end of the night, when all musicians come and sing their songs of Babylon's rivers in this town which is new but old at the same time, bubbling, confused, but, the same stuff as ever applies just as always, kings, prophets, tales, jokes, prophecy, mumbo jumbo, tribal war, factions...

Oh, by the end of it all, Saturday through Wednesday night Jazz, closing every night, and some late nights there I'm not proud of maybe, but for the marketing aspect, adding to the known lore of The Dying Gaul as it is experienced and remembered, by the end of it...

I'm feeling, by the end of it, raw.  I feel depressed.  I feel like crying.  I clean up.  Let the hood cleaning crew out the back door with a free Sprite, hard working late night guys, part of a clean working industrial bistrot kitchen...  I eat the few bites of salmon tartar, which is just kind of simple and raw, not as elegant as it is up the street at the sister restaurant, while the busboy man, the man from Mexico, Manu, sweeps up, sighs, goes to take a dump in the men's room as a final comment on the night and all his physical efforts incredible over two floors...  The pig's feet, crusty and boneless are tired by the time I get them out of the over which has stopped heating up properly to 200...

Fuck me, the math, the report, the last paperwork, I'm beat and some low pressure system of manly lonesome funk has come over me.  It's hit my brow, and my shoulders were already drooped a bit from the heavy load...

The workweek ends the same way it starts, with a kind of American cowboy depression the likes of which the Old World, with the exception of Ireland, does not know...  ha ha.   What is there to do now, but get the Uber cab home anonymous, then to go and reflect, and it's hollow, not even a cat to go home to, but, you deal with it.

I had indeed pondered Kerouac in the period of landing at the new apartment out in the Palisades on the upper floor of the old three story G.I. type building near the reservoirs off of MacArthur.  I'm not going into the depths of any great literary criticism now, but to heed how one might have, as a reader, puzzled over Jesus's parables of the vineyard, as he struggled along with Kerouac and his own choices and actions over his own finite time.   (Jesus Christ, Jack Kerouac, take good care of yourself.  You're too brave!)

Those parables of the vineyard and the keeper, the owner, the son, the wicked servant, they strike me as literary lessons themselves, in that at least sometimes as a reader you have to read and return, read and return, and in your gut, yes, there's something there you see, but you don't really know what it is, what the kernel is, the point, the applicable meaning, so you keep reading, while the perception of what that meaning might be slowly simmers.

And indeed, one day that slow simmering might reveal some wealth of thought, some riches.

So, feeling nearly homeless and on the road at this new fresh juncture in my life, as I tried to make up for my juvenile irresponsibilities as such that had led me here, the new apartment, without the old shelter of good old George's house and all my books, I read Kerouac.  I read Kerouac, as if that whole reading thing had fallen out of the blue, against my will, and not on any whim, but very serious now, as I had no more juice to write with, too scared, and I needed an Old Master to consult with, and Dostoevsky was not around at the present time.

So, I came across his, Kerouac, having found again The Dharma Bums at my new local library, in this period of my whole library gone up in upheaval along with the rest of my life.  My own Kerouac books were kindly stored by a dear friend, the Scroll Version of On the Road, a red covered Desolation Angels, a Penguin Big Sur, a Visions of Cody, along with some others...  stashed away over in Virginia somewhere by the kindest of persons who was there, a good mystic Christian soul, when I had to move, actually had to move.

And even as I write, there is all of On The Road in mind, including the brilliant beginning, about an illness, his father's passing, etc., all very much to make you jump into this presence of mind that is the most simplest and basic and most effective writing way, which is to, in effect, light a campfire, one we can sit around.

I read Kerouac, picked up a used copy of the fire watcher book, by happenstance found On The Road again down in the basement laundry room...  And as ever, the mind goes back and forth.  Completely irresponsible, madman, partier, slacker, but also, some form of saintly monk when grasped on his own terms, thereby allowance of insight.

And here, having found yourself so devoted, even as you live life as life goes on, trying to take suggestions of friends and therapist and mom to heart, to do new things, to keep up with the good things, here you do find a sort of pay-off, and one that you wouldn't have really expected nor anticipated.

Saintliness and insights are never really found in careful preparation, nor in things that go in accordance with plan.  No.  These are things that happen on the road, not quiet planned, live, happenstance, a night one gets through, somewhat just barely, finally sneaking off back to bed where the rent has been paid.

The moments where there is a ceding of perfect control, when you're along for the ride with life, maybe even in a feeling of being far too exposed and open, drifting, swept up in the vagaries of life, it is here in such places and times that one will come upon the spirit and the meaning.  The things from which one will leave, and find that safe place, and say to himself, Depart From Me, Oh, Lord, for I am a sinful man.

And this is Kerouac's business, not that he always gets credit for it.  His spiritual endeavor is so front and center, so strong, that we too must recoil, wishing for someone to put the brakes on in this grade slide downhill into American fevered madness.  We feel the discomfort even from years and miles and miles away, life habits far away, reading material far away--Kerouac was a well-read individual versed in the life of letters, an interesting choice for a poor man in this era, the same era which gave birth to the G.I. Bill educational benefits--just by reading Kerouac!  And in doing so, facing some form of death, yes, along with poor Jack, poor Jack who has no idea where his next meal or place of rest and safe sleep might be, literally, as we read this in our great little schoolboy or fallen schoolboy sense, uncomfortable, yes, we get something.  And maybe even, through his light Kerouac, as fallible as any writer, Kerouac really is giving us access to The Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, just as clear as anyone might.

Just that we don't expect it so much, given all these characters, Dean Moriarty... To mention nothing of all the poor women involved, who too must be dragged uncomfortably, to saintliness.  A whole 'nother story, which other voice are better off at telling than I.


Again, saintly understandings come through that weird light, that strange very strange but powerful present moment.    There's St. Francis going to talk to this big scary mean wolf...  There's the Awakened One Buddha with this crazed elephant bearing down upon him in fury in a very real present moment...  These are things that happen live, on Live Television, in Live Time, just as if you were a bartender, just as if you were a bus driver, just as if you were a cop, dealing with, yes, like an old Irish Beat cop in a great American city like a Chicago, a New York, a Boston, the talk, the rapport, the contact is the key to keeping crime and weirdness down, and even maybe in going out an looking for it.  (Irish:  so good at being Beat Cops, so good at writing, poetry, music, and all the spirituality encapsulated, within, allowed to develop as they were, in Ireland.)


Thus, to me, the vineyard parables of The Gospels are themselves most clearly understood as being pictures of being out on the road, where things cannot be planned so well, where traffic, good and evil, whizzes by, pulling over and stopping sometimes, and sometimes, even you are mad enough to go along with the ride.


In the end I cannot condemn Kerouac, not at all.  I would rather celebrate him as some form of see-er visionary of real timeless eternal insight.



When people revile you, "god, what a piece of shit you are," that's when you are a saint.


The literary life?  Pretty much a curse, but it's something in the genes, something you have to figure out, after all the years...

So there's already 39 covers--meaning 39 customers, spread out into parties of two and four, six, five, whatever, showing up at different times, but mainly concentrated around the usual 7 PM dining hour--on the book when I get to work, but the downstairs people on a slow day shift who has already earned one point in the pool, and will make two by the end of the day, help decide that we only need three servers not four, one busboy, and the number is going up already by the time the door opens, and there are walk ins...  as far as what I can gather when my Monday night jazz night shift begins...   It's going to get crazy.  I see a familiar name for a seven top, a friend over the years.  She likes wine.

But I will not be able to get to her.  

Where's the boss?  Is he in the kitchen, directing traffic, expediting?  

And as I'm thinking of finally making it, at 9:15, with the band ending at 9:30, the guys come up the stairs smelling like weed and smiling, hey, man...  They want to eat.  They will be joined by other guys...  So much for an easy uncomplicated ending of silent dutiful peaceful cleaning.

The night, amongst many, you want to tear your hair out and almost try to, your shirt is soaked with sweat, the regulars...  what the f can you do, I'm sorry, I've done the best I can all these stupid years to get to you and give you and fast and as efficiently as I could all the good stuff that might be possibly available, and not a bad job, but tonight, f it, it's not possible, I've been totally undercut, I'm powerless, I'm sorry, this shit is too much...  I come over,  still I'm dong the best I can, but, look, look at what I have to deal with...

For my friend Mary, I did get them up and running, with a couple of tastes, oh, we will go with the Bordeaux.  Great.  Another couple joins them, with nice bottles of their own.  Corkage.  Damn, why didn't I save the good big Bordeaux glasses...  At the end, she says, please, taste them, okay, and eventually, as a reward for her patience, when she suggests a little taste of bubbly, fine, no problem, seven little glasses for the table, on the house.

Mary is sweet.  We go way back.  You should taste these wines...  A Nuit St. Georges, from 2009, yes, nice.  And then a big name Bordeaux, not a Cos, not a Margaux, hmm, what was it...




The problem with writing is always the same problem, the same problem the Amish and the Aboriginal might have with being photographed.  Shy people, artists, people who aren't drunk.  Strangers.

It's all there, in you, all of life's thousand battles historical and personal all bleeding together, but when you get home and can sit down, poof, none of it is right, none of it is right to write about.  It's oh-boy, what a mess.  It's oh-boy, what a stunning tragic stupid defeat, all of it pointless, all of it erotic and about love, and about the life you'd want to have lived, all in that short time when there are so many possibilities, but...  but...   but...

That's the closest you'll get to writing.  That's the pressure of air and gravity which makes breaking the natural limitations of the physical world, its electromagnetic energy continuum, impossible or everyone would be doing it, as everyone is already doing everything anyway, and you're the only jerk asshole imbecile who's not seen the light of taking life and living with it, getting coupled up with a beloved person you really enjoy of the opposite nature and sex, but the same, if you can overcome the  sound barriers of your own pain, your own shitty situation, the things dragging at you like your old shoes strewn across your carpeted floor...  Perceived psychological issues, whether they are there or not, time, time passing...

You only know.  The sense the creatures of the sea must have of being in the sea, of their element.  The sense the wordy minded creature has when time allows the return to thoughts, thoughts that must be turned, dug up, like potatoes, put away like silverware cleaned now, folded napkins...  No, I'm not the psycho...  The psycho stuff is spread through all, and now manifested in the situation of mankind, this crazed creepy particular juncture when the seas will rise and cover up the floors of cities where millions live...




Totally stupid and shy am I, to meet the world of "men."   Sound of Music.

I'm not the only writer of my age, pondering the fleeting gone experience of college, the concentration of various exciting people, smart, attractive, all brought together, to be fruitful, capitalized upon, not the time to make a glorious head case out of yourself...  but that's what you did...

I walk home, from work, home, such as it is, so it is.  I deserve that, not having made any effort to be a professional of any kind, and it's late anyway...  And there are thoughts that run through my mind, I'm hungry, I'd like to sleep, I'd like to relax, but the calculus of all that tells me I should have given up on my chosen profession as a night barman, unhappy milkman, full of wine  trade stories, and have embraced the world of those of the "Day Walkers..."  responsible people, who all can talk to each other, bit by bit, detail by detail, sharp factoid, useful considerations of all practical natures....

Every time you try to write something smart, you write something stupid and foolish and not worth showing.  This is the truth.


To write and to live is to pass through and beyond regret, and to see the new, and the love, the life, the possibility, all the good stuff caged and set free...


Then I wake up and it feels like I've given away everything for a song...  so the mind tells me...

Like I say, it slipped past me too, during my re-read of On The Road, the material surrounding The Holy Goof realization segment here in Part Three, Chapter Three, and I turned away from the passages after it, as I read them, when they go down to the jazz clubs there in Frisco, a final thing before they head back east...  Another bar, more madness, more of Dean sweating...  No, thank you, this is not the way to live.

And in some hindsight, a few weeks later, I begin to acknowledge what I might call a recognition of some Theosophical Reality, the faint background--to be turned up later, in reflection--of a kind saintly participation, as it were, an allowance for fated things, for the things of odd, perhaps not good, but recognizably human behavior of a complex sort, in all this sweaty listening to live jazz in the setting of Sal and Dean craziness.  I say that I, while I would rather say "we," recognize this sort of general mislead behavior that comes out of circumstances that have to do with one's situation of employment, or, here, unemployment.   Beatness...  We might have been there, in our not-so-neat lives...  and there is something saintly here, when the saint can get back to some place of home and peace and quiet, to reflect and to write.

There is, to my ear, a sweetness, sad though it may be, of Kerouac, and his own inner missing saint, allowing for all this.  In order to see something, to ponder it.  To come to terms with it.

No writer has forever.  This is what Kerouac went with.  This is the news he sent to press.


And certainly, it would be easy to dismiss.

I do not dismiss, knowing the cost of bearing experiences such as Kerouac, brave and bold writer of experiences here in Post WWII America, a homeless wandering that seem to fit his psyche, if he could have stopped to find the peace for the kind of continued spiritual reflections that might have gotten him there in the first place, whether that be regrettable or not.




I guess it's in The Power of Now, Eckhardt Tolle's little treatise on present spirituality.  There is the related tale of the monk, found in the literature here and there, in the little Book of Zen, of the monk's response to the vagaries of life:  "Is that so?"  The neighbors have a pregnant daughter, who, for convenience's sake, points to the monk as the father.  "Is that so," the monk says, hearing of the accusation, calmly.  "Yeah, and you can raise the kid, too!"  And this is what the monk, dutifully, does.  Later it turns out, no, she admits it was not the monk who did the siring, and apologetically, the grandparents take the kid back from him.  "Is that so..."

Yes, folks, THAT'S HOW IT GOES.   (More or less what the final chapter passage of On The Road says...  As "Dean, bent to it again...")


Having received a little bit of news the evening before, this on All Soul's Day, the day after our little Halloween festivities in urban suburbia, the writer found it not very easy to get up and go to work.  Feeling a kind of shame that can only come from offending the female of the species...  Was not aware, but learned about, through a managerially-led phone conversation explaining, after the little friendly catching up about this and that, the state of health of cats and bicycles and business, etc., of, in effect, there existing the state now, since the offense, of my presence no longer being required, nor welcome, nor friendly, basically.

I absorb this news, I suppose, as I toil away, thrown off the deep end into a nervous Saturday night at the old Dying Gaul Wine Bar.  The bar, to begin with, is reserved, from about 6 on, for a birthday party, finger food, wine, the food decided upon, but not what exactly the "Consumption Bar" will entail specifically.  (Fortunately, the husband had read the wine list...)  Which meant turning away from the bar's six or so stools, people who normally come on such an evening.  Putting me in an awkward spot.  The reservation list is full, and the wait list will have to be carefully choreographed out of a rush of incomplete message and changes made.

It's a long night, quite full, on up to the ending of dessert and coffee and calvados and final checks and then the final group of friendlies familiar at the bar who have their own tales of coming here.

I am able to eat some charcuterie at the end of it, and then the deluxe Italian sub with roast beef extra from the Korean market, before I'm able to pack it all in, do the paper work, clean up, gather myself and Uber home...

And the next day, what can you do. ..  "Is that so..."  You shrug, you go okay.  You get on with it.  Almost with some relief, a distraction swept away, an innocent understandable reaction from those more able to deal with the cold business of society's business dealings than you, that only reconfirms the living efficacy of the stuff that catches your eye, as things catch the eyes of the crow and the raven, collecting little bits of spiritual stuff in this life that we must pass through.   Pass through somehow.

And all those labels that haunt you, fuck up, drunken aggressor, bum-ness, beat-ness, what have they to do with you anyway, go in peace.

It had been a busy day, getting on the 1:10 PM D6 down to Dupont Circle for my annual physical, my old neighborhood, off the bus, walking up Connecticut Avenue past Zorba's, calling mom to explain where I am, and where she is, up to R, my old haunts, to see Dr. Patel, Miss Ellen, who talks to plants and preaches it, at the desk, explain to the doctor my little problems and concerns, we know the routine,  down to the basement to get my blood drawn, pee in a cup, blood pressure not so bad...   Then, to the Haircuttery for a quick haircut with a large busty African American woman who travels to Jamaica, lives in Baltimore, dressed as a witch, then over to PNC Bank to deposit a check to compensate myself for car rentals up to see mom and take her to doctor appointments and so forth, then catching the 3:40 bus, full, sitting in the back, to get back to catch my breath before running off in an Uber pool cab through traffic over to Arlington to join in with Betsy and her friends for Halloween.  I've dressed in a black suit, with a black fedora, some kind of generic costume, an Irish gypsy, an Irish poet of the kind The Pogues made tribute to when they dressed in their black suits, or maybe I'm an immigrant fresh to America to the Lower East Side, but she has a sort of canned pre-made disco 70's guy outfit, with wild curly wig, polyester disco shirt, bell bottom slip on pants, a good peace chain, sunglasses, so I change, obligingly into it, put on the mustache, have a little fun with it, sneak half a glass of wine from the fridge, and off we go.  My friend likes Halloween.  So do I.  I'm getting re-in-touch...


At 6 AM, after crashing over at my friend's pad, I walk back along Fort Myer Drive into Rosslyn, catching a red Circulator Bus for a buck across the river to M Street in Georgetown, and then walking westward along Canal Road, the stars still above in a clear dark sky, Big Dipper, handle upward.  Disconcerting walking along with the early traffic whooshing past me ten feet away, each with a gravitational pull, an independent field of physics relativity, zoom, zoom, zoom, whoosh, frightening as I cling to the edge of the woods that rise up to the bluff and the old University.   There's a big flood up ahead, inundating the sidewalk, and when a truck comes the water breaks up into the air in a giant splash wave, so I cut across to the slender brick median strip there at the turnoff to the University's parking garages, avoid getting soaked, dry feet and then up the old hill of Foxhall, then crossing to MacArthur and there was big rain last night and a real estate sign on a wooden post has tipped over on the sidewalk.


"Hateful old Dulouz me," as Kerouac says...  I may as well be a weed by the side of the road as far as the purposes of the city sit now, here in the very early morning not even light out as people go to work.  Bum without a clue, so it feels sometimes.

All Soul's Day...  Kerouac a road-side saint, hitchhiking meaning out of the meaningless not exactly earth friendly in the economic-engine culture of the great republic...  He would have keenly felt that exclusion, that isolation, that sense of not having a good job as for as economic standing, nor for societal understanding...  But then all the saints were in the same place, the place of adepts, who know, though not quite consciously, who know quite a lot about the spiritual realities behind the face of things, things that the people driving their new cars into the office to work might not want to focus on in their intent pursuit.

And today, a day of bringing the Gospels to life, and I'm walking along the road in an effort to get back to the apartment on the little hill to find some rest after calling mom.


The problem is people do not like the poor, considering them irresponsible.  The poor are an inconvenience.  They do not believe in the things you should believe in, so it seems.  They are idle.



At night, things are seen in context.  Halloween came and went.  Much ado about nothing?  Relax, Buddha and peace in all things, enjoy life, see the sights, visit, interact, but remember, after some fun, what you will go back to, what you shall go back to.

Mom calls around 9:15, as I'm sleeping, but I hear it, the throb of the cell phone.  They were through a hell of a storm too, up there, and it's very cold and windy, and mom gives me the usual about not being in her proper home, but up the road a piece, and if she were home...  But she's found her medicine, in her pocka'book, and she's being a good girl and taking one.  Good.   I go off to a deeper sleep, and when I finally wake, at 2 in the afternoon, I see she's called seven times around noon, and one of her colleagues has texted me about how upset mom  sounded...

I get up and find cold green tea in the refrigerator, and give her a call...  She's cold, it's freezing, the heat's not on.  I try to explain the thermostat to her...  The start of my day, proper....


Later on, after a walk, after a quick bite to eat after the little grocery store, I get a call from my old buddy.  It was back in June, when we all went to his wife's father's funeral up in Wheaton, the last time we spoke, as I recall.  I'm on the couch, more or less in taking a nap mode.  Hey, how have you been, and he's got a new pick-up truck, the story behind it...   And then, after the catching up, the conversation changes, and he announces it.  Now, to the problem.  Oh.  A says you were aggressive last time when you were leaving.  Oh.  Physical.  Took offense when you said it was her and not R. that night eons ago...

"Well, I...  she, I remember we went to the restaurant and we were talking about Kerouac.  Patriarchy, she says.  Okay.  But what about the beauty of Kerouac's prose, (there in the mountain climbing passages of The Dharma Bums,) but she just dismisses him, 'no,' as 'patriarchy...'  I guess I was trying to make up for that..."  But i know by it, this conversation.  Oh, yeah, I had a feeling.  I don't remember this "Leaving" part, I'm pretty certain I was just kidding around, but, yeah.   "Teddy I love your company, but..."

Okay.  I get it.  Oh, well.  That's how it goes.  That's how it goes on All Saint's Day, and poor Betsy finally texts me back, she's had a headache all day, is going to go to bed and not get up til tomorrow afternoon, and believe me, I understand.


Look.  You know.  You know I too have my doubts about Kerouac.  I know how easy it would be to find a path in writing toward the success of crafting a piece toward the audience, like a product, a product to tweak as far as market and sales and all that.  You could take any piece, write it out, then look at it, and then bring in the marketing department, and oh, here's how you should look here, and here's how you should look there, and here's how to say the political market correct thing to say that will warm people to you rather than offend them for treading on sensitive unpopular ground, that will assure them you are sticking to some tried and true expected cookie-cutter expression that fits a genre of some kind of "Lit."  Some kind of popular literary form  in which the writer ably goes through and ticks off the little boxes, all the popular psychology stuff, to be applauded as a "Tell All" kind of memoir.  Sure.  The prose darling of the day.  Okay, fine.

Then there are the artists who challenge what they themselves know or would want to hear and through an effort without hope of finding the predictable place in the predictable market take the risk of standing under the stars, walking alone, as everyone else is driving by, and put to it a place of reality as it is, the psyche, the hard stuff that we will always have to grapple with as a species with a  soul, a heart, a brain.

And then after you write, time enters a lonely phase.  Administrative tasks to attend to, health insurance renewal, laundry, a few bills to pay, ho hum.  No real desire as energy to go out on the town, would feel pointless anyway, except for Betsy, a few old friends, but most of my friendship time spent at the old Dying Gaul, and not up for that, certainly.

And really there's not much else for you to do than to pour yourself a glass of wine, after the little bit of inspiration you had earlier.

The phone calls, the phone calls, on the one hand they are distracting, on the other hand they are life. Yes, Mary came and took care of some things, good.

People ask me at work, how's your mom's cat...

Drinking a glass of wine relieves some of the monotony.  It will also bring, potentially, some exuberance...  A creative freedom of feeling...

Without the wine, this time would be too difficult by myself.  The night needs a little magic, a foreign touch, a sense of novelty.

Get the laundry ready.  Down the stairs.  Guitar tonight, maybe later...

Bob & Lynette comes by on the fucked up big party downstairs night Wine Tasting, when I have to parse out the St. Veran, they sit there at the bar, hi ted, and I don't feel much like waiting sometimes, but I hang in there.  Lynette pipes up, as I get him a Kronenbourg, and ponder what she might like as she ponders too, ultimately deciding upon a Manhattan, I read your Facebook about Kerouac...

Oh, yeah...  Yeah, the anniversary, 50 years...   And I lay out how I'm torturing myself reading On the Road, which comes to a boil for me...  "No, don't go down and see William Burroughs...  That's not a good idea!"  I reel from my own irresponsibility...  over all the years...  Why are you hanging out with such people?  Don't you have a plan?  (But unfortunately, artists never really have much of a plan, but that of creating, however they might fall into it, sometimes, like me, my art the humor that comes out spontaneously from dark places in the form of a magnificent and humorous hospitality... as I have found, time and time again, only rarely being unable to feel so burdened by the events of a particular shift that my powers of circumspection and wit deserting me...)  So, somewhat jokingly, I lay it out for them, the only two here at the bar, trying to catch up as we should...  Burroughs wife is a benzedrine addict...  It's just going to be weirdness.  They get it, they have kids who've turned out to be artists.  Chef.  Musician.  Writer.  Great parents.  Solid.  Responsible.  And I'm feeling low, but rise again to the occasion.  I admit my own lacking as far as planning, but Lynette dismisses the notion, and yes, I have been showing up here for years, to work, to work, to the bar, to wine tasting night, to many an other kind of a night...  And up comes Tombow, he'll be two at the bar for dinner, him and an old work colleague, Brian, I make him a French 75...

The fancy older couple is brought upstairs by L.m., sat at the front of the room by the windows, but then she of the couple decides she really likes the table in the back, which is of course the hardest to get to... why?  On wine tasting night, you do that to me, Jesus Christ...


The problem is not how little there is to write, the problem is how much there is...

When I met Betsy, again, I wanted to spend my time with her.  I wanted to stay up all night talking with her, to meet her out for lunch when I could, even with my mind stewing over work and money.

I walked down MacArthur to Foxhall, along the sidewalk taking me into Georgetown to cross Key Bridge.  Over the great bridge in the darkness, moon a sliver, underneath the Key Bridge Marriot, across the lanes of Lee Highway, and up the little urban skyscraper hill to Wilson Boulevard, and then it was not far at all to the nondescript Saigon Grill and Noodle to meet her.  I'd had a glass of Beaujolais, in a surreptitious Canada Dry little soda bottle, keeping to my right as night cyclists and careening electric scooters weaved by.   Over pho, hers vegetable, mine with top round and brisket and flank steak I had three glasses of Woodbridge pinot noir, we had a nice time, I paid the check, she took me back part way and I caught the Circulator Bus from Rosslyn back over the bridge, getting off at the first stop along M Street.  I attempted to rent a little scooter, but it felt dangerous and the pick-up on was very inconsistent.  With a need to use a bathroom, and not to pee, I made it up the hill to the Tombs, using the john, and then having one more glass of wine, and then I walked back along underneath the University up on the hill with the traffic zooming by, and then up the quiet hill and the long blocks along MacArthur Boulevard, coming in rather tired out and ready to hit the couch.

And then I was awake.  Unable to go back to bed.  So I pulled out On The Road, the copy someone left out in the laundry room, and like I say, it's easier to read, for me at least, after  you've struggled with getting to that Dean as Holy Goof passage in Part Three, when they are in San Francisco, planning to get back East.

For then the writing, Kerouac's, seems to better fall into a tradition, less about mad personal choices and irresponsible behavior, becoming a recognizable account, within the American Tradition, let's say, of writings of travel and adventure, like Melville, Twain, Hemingway...

I had some cheap Beaujolais in the rocks in a tumbler, and even pulled out my old book, and read from it, which is surprising in many passages, even to the author.  I'd passed out a copy of it here and there, and while there are parts I, in the attempt to get it finished and over with, over worked and things like that.  The narration getting just a bit ahead of itself, say, trying to sum up The Brothers Karamazov themes, when the action is not ready for it.

But I was reading, and it felt good, and I went back and forth a little bit, and of course Kerouac is laying down these magnificent lines, so rich in their offering of language and words put together gain in the way that fires up something inside of us.  And it was nice for me to have this reassessment of Kerouac in my own mind, not just oh, the drunk who ends up lonely and alone.

As if preparing for a next step, me, in life.  Putting a book behind me, a decent enough one, but assessing the cost of it, as it were, the cost of the time and the making of it.  I wouldn't say necessarily a wish to capitalize upon it, or monetize it, but to find a way of treating it as a kind of artistic professional accomplishment, now behind me, that would allow me to develop personally.

And then, tiredly, after speaking with mom again, having a nice conversation about New England Transcendentalist Literature, me maybe trying to ease Kerouac in with that, spiritually, I had a sip more wine and now went to bed in the early light, having assured her that Mary would indeed be coming with cans of cat food and groceries and wine if she needed.

And then I slept all day, even as the construction noise and the bachata music too loud and the shouting kept me ill and distracted from deeper sleep until the noise had somehow come to an end.

Well, shame on you, this is your day off, and this is all you can do with it and you don't even feel well, Jesus Christ, and I had felt earlier drinking the wine and reading, but one too many rounds in one day sort of a thing, can't you control yourself?

But I wasn't up for finding a barber shop, nor for getting out to the old movie theater CVS to charge up my metro card, the sky is overcast, and I managed yoga yesterday anyway, and now it becomes a matter of what to eat, and there are loads of laundry to do.

Somewhere, though, as a remembered thought from the early morning and the reading of one's own book, placed next to Kerouac, man, I begin to wonder, does one have to be his own sort of Neal Cassady Kerouac's friend character in order to generate the misadventures necessary for a narrative story line arch as they call it in creative writing classes...   And meanwhile I've become this fool who gets up at a late hour in the afternoon to get ready for work, work my five night shifts, struggle, etc., and don't even have the pay-off of any kind of a personal life of a consistent kind, except calling my mom many times a day...  and maybe two nights a week to meet Betsy out, but getting late for her or too early for me, though I will certainly make the lovely sacrifice...

And do I still write?  Do I still bother with it, except as some form of calibration bearing upon psychological health and balance...

I wake up with a heavy head and congested enough in my nose that a gag reflex kicks in, such that I spit up some bile then back on the couch.

Okay, it was a fine Transcendentalist thing to write such a book, as mine, and fine to keep on writing, but... can one sustain it...  is that even practical...