Alan Watts describes anxiety as a feedback loop.  A feedback loop, when the receiver, like the pickup of an electric guitar or a microphone, gets too close to the speaker playing its signal, resulting immediately in a high-pitched hum, howl or screech.  (A comparable thing happens when a television camera is pointed at a monitor.)  The mind plays a memory, the brain plays a thought back to itself, amplifying it in its corridors and pathways, 'til it becomes a thought no longer but a loud noise lacking meaning, something that needs to be turned off.  Thus the practice of clearing the mind with meditation.

Wine-tasting night, a good chalky Sancerre, an easy-going and interesting Pinot Noir from the Loire, a Tourraine, imported by Winebow.  I walk my bicycle through the damp woods as a drizzle falls.  The colors of the woods remind of the strange Bois du Boulogne whipping scene in Belle Du Jour, the misty air of a French forest.  The thought goes through my mind that wine is to be enjoyed, today a perfect day, Fall heading into Winter, the story of one growing season, of the years of a grapevine rooted in its soil in a particular place, left to the whims of nature (unirrigated as New World creature of artifice wines often are), all the elements of terroir, of all creatures witnessed in a glass.   Wine is not to be hoarded, rare, expensive, in a cellar, no, there is something quite spiritual about it, and so, as I find later as the customers come in, a glass allows one to scratch the surface of life, to open up some.  And often, I find, people are the same as me, that they too know the tyranny of an overthinking mind, that they too have seen therapists, that they too know an array of people with an array, the spectrum of mental states and issues.  And then the refreshing talk, which happens over a simple quite enjoyable and drinkable glass of good old 2011 Beaujolais imported by Wine Traditions of Falls Church, VA., is interrupted by the talk of the wine consumer.

And this talk, of winemakers I've never heard of, fancy, with price tags, fine wines I'm sure, eventually, luckily, itself fades as a food pairing is made, Bordeaux with Veal Cheeks, Ventoux with Calves Liver.   Talk of what children are up to, family geographical history, Texas.

A woman makes a nice point, earlier, just the two of us in the bar, about putting her cellphone on airport mode.  She's a property manager.  The phone rings often.  She likes to mountain bike out in nature on weekends.

With my own rudimentary understandings, with the legacy of parents that place certain kinds of books upon one's expanding bookshelves, interests that awaken, recede, come back strongly again, with my own experience of almost twenty five years behind a bar, yes, why not;  I stand just as good a shot as anyone of being his own particular sort of Zen practitioner.  And thus, whatever I would write, really would be the geological record of a pursuit of some earned wisdom, not unlike that found in a therapist's office, or in a book such a professional might recommend.  And find along the way, a Zen guide to my own form of sanity, something to share, something going beyond the specific details of crafted cocktails and all that stylish rot.  Wine does not go out of style, and nor does food, nor does wisdom and good mental health.

I wanted to report to you, doctor, that after I wrote and got to work, I dunno, maybe I'm a bit manic, because I felt good.  I went about set up, and the other guy is always late on Monday and there's the laundered seat cushions to put back on all the furniture at the wine bar, jazz set up to do, stocking, but I felt good about myself.  I felt solid, I felt grounded.  I said to myself, well, people don't change;  one a nice guy, always a nice guy, you simply can't change that.  And that's an artist for you, willing to take a stream of people and observe them through the close act of waiting on them, pretty smart actually.  Life kind of made sense again, and I felt like I'm starting to write again, so that's pretty good.

A lady came in, a tricky person, not seen her in a while, and yeah, she's a bit tipsy, a bit out of focus, slow with her hand movement.  I gave her a sip, not a glass, of the Beaujolais as she requested with a  slight slur, as I studied her a bit, just to confirm my suspicions.  How much did you have to drink?  Well, probably more than the three Stellas she told me.  The music's playing now and the waiter is sitting a few more people and taking over the reins after I got 'em started.  And this woman, not from America, is kind of like I'd imagine a fanned out cobra rising up from the other side of the bar ready to strike, kind of coming up and staring at you and sort of purr-hissing, words drawn out, have you seen my leather skirt?  And I try to make conversation.  She's out of work.  Watery eyes.  Well, I cut her off.  I don't  want anything bad to happen to you.  Wow, good to have values, to carry them out, to not feel so ashamed of a situation that you try to gloss it over, hide it, contain it from the other customers.  No, just do what you should do.  And the waiter came over later and I said, yeah, I cut her off.  Of course, she's a bar fly, mentioning some of the old bars of Dupont Circle.  Did you..., he asks.  No way!   She's a handful, always drama, no way.

I read in that book you gave me, that we are a continuation of our parents, and there's a point where you mourn less and that you sort of pick up what they were.  Like my father.  I listen to an Alan Watts lecture and I think in the deep alternative way he kept, and there I am, living on with his values, which before, in mourning I've been a bit too chickenshit to do much with.   I mean, I've thought going off to a retreat at a monastery, but Dad was very much in the world, and his spirituality was high, high as anyones, but calm...  And I think he would tell me, keep on writing.  You have real work to do.  Good work.  Good for people.  Good to take away their illusions.  Good to keep them open to less materialistic ways of thinking.

And that's what I value in literature, not that it's great writing put up on some untouchable pedestal.  No not at all.  But that it's true, accurate, real, that in it you've lined up a few things people should consider.  That's why people have written.  That's why they make art.  Giotto on down.


Values, the higher, the more thoughtful, the more careful they are, they are harder to understand, and you can carry them latently for years, not knowing exactly why.  Yeah, sure, you get little inklings, like when you read something about Buddhist thought, like the 'illusion of fixed self,' or like how it's better not to be possessive and materialistic about things, about relationships, desirable things and activities and people...  But that can still be kind of abstract until you can look back at something you've been doing all along over the years and see how non-materialistic, how wise really, even if you didn't think so good of yourself.  Well, maybe you think bad things when you're not living up to your values.  Of course. it makes sense.  Never have I wanted to be possessive in a relationship.  Maybe I wish it weren't so, but it ain't in me.  And I suppose I have to find a way to live by that, and to make it normal, my normal anyway, hard to picture in the mind's eye of popular culture and all its stuff.

I guess it's hard to trust things, maybe even yourself sometimes.  Because we've all been disappointed.

So I got myself down there, to see the Wyeth, before it closed, and I don't go see exhibits as a consumerist, to check off I saw this, I saw that, El Greco, Giotto, Da Vinci.  I know what it's like to be an artist.  I know what it costs.  I know the benefits.  And here's his painting of his old man's studio and then his own.  And the Mall, the day after the day after Thanksgiving, is crowded, and yeah, I'm feeling lonely, having barely gotten myself down there, with some trouble, as if against the stream, and literally so with my mountain bike...  The exhibit is crowded.  And I know these paintings.  I've been to the old house in Rockland.  My mom has the book Christina's World.  I commune with the paintings, Wind from the Sea, and see that, yes, as they are saying, there is something abstract to them.  Even with the literal touches, the shaft of sunlight on pieces of straw in the barn, there is something heightened, deepened about the experience of the present moment, for one a freezing of time, but more than that, a deep look into the real realities of things.  There's a shadowy black cat looking up at you from the bedspread of Christina's bed on the ground floor because she couldn't climb the stairs.  Paintings of old rooms in old houses.  In one he's looking down on the Kuerner farm, past dusk, and there's light coming from a window of the farmhouse down below, and he wrote that he senses a shadow of the man's movement, and in that movement the bare spirit of him.  And the one, Spring Fed, you're looking at this trough like basin where the water pours continuously filling, and beyond cows in spring light, and the pasture rises beyond that, and the note says that Wyeth's father, N. C., died not far away from it, killed by a train hitting his car, 1945.  There's others of his toy soldiers, and that legacy of his father's work, Robin Hood, Treasure Island, illustrations....  a kid would have the imagination to position the soldiers just so, and suggest a war going on.

And then I'd had enough, I wanted to stay, but it was time to get going, groceries, ride home, get a bottle of wine and some meat and stuff, vegetables, Whole Foods.  Then home, and home alone, and that's what it felt like, so later I wandered out, called my friend Dan, ended up having a glass of wine upstairs with my neighbor, going to bed.  And the next day I had to drag myself to work, my Monday morning...  But finally by the end of the night, I'm kind of dragged into being convivial, go have a splash with the old Holmgrens who can't get up the stairs, two nice couples at the bar to talk to, taste wine with...  And I even got out at the end of it, after taking off all the seat covers to be laundered, down to 14th Street for a couple glasses of wine (Chianti, 12.5% alcohol) and a little chat, could have pursued a young lady I struck up a conversation with but had to get home...

And now I've began to digest going down to see the Wyeth...  I put my values into action, the demons came, and I faced them, and I'm thankful for that, for the book you gave me, doctor.   It reinforced me.  I've always appreciated Wyeth.

But after finishing my first book, yeah, I fell into a slump, not feeling so good about myself, you know, the usual voices in my head, and maybe not even that proud of it, because it's a bit of a memoir, and you don't want to, you know, invade people's privacy...

"There are literary people who know how to figure that stuff out.  Look at the new memoirs coming out."

Like Cheryl Strayed...

"Yes, exactly, and that's being made into a movie..."

Yeah, Kerouac changed all the names and they made him get signed release forms, something like that.


I remember a paper I wrote, my final one for my best teacher, Benjamin DeMott, and I chose a passage from Islands in the Stream.  The assignment was about cultural studies, about what was going on culturally in such an event, and I kind of missed the whole point of the assignment, pretty much intentionally, because I had a deeper point I wanted to make as if beyond contemporary culture in which I should have analyzed the image of Ernest Hemingway in popular culture.   So there I was, the last class I would ever take there, and I chose to make a study of the artist, what he does.  A man is looking up at his cat up in an avocado tree, writing that down, being fully in the present, the meaning of the cat to him personally...  but still in the present moment, going deep into it, talking to the cat...  And this is Hemingway's portrait of an artist.  The cat is doing cat things.  The man is watching the cat, in so doing being an artist.  And in this act, what the man was doing, I said, was praying.  Maybe I didn't know quite what I meant, praying.  Like, is the old fisherman in fishing praying for the big fish, which then comes, but then he must get it back to shore after catching it and killing it?  Is the prayer answered?  Is that story he wrote, Old Man and the Sea, then a prayer which comes close to the truth when Hemingway the old writer goes back to Spain for this legendary duel between bullfighters, too big a story to drag back, to edit down...

But, yes, that's it.  Prayer.  That's what an artist is doing, being fully in the present moment.  That's why we like coffee shops, because we can be out of the house with just enough stuff going on, this actually happening, a woman walking by wearing Laboutine high heels, sparrows, the proprietress of the tea shop arriving and then talking with her employee out on a bench, two guys at a table over there sketching out a restaurant menu...  That's Hemingway, being alive in the present moment, like here's what it is to be standing on the bridge looking down at fish.

And that's what an artist is doing.  That's what I did in writing a book.  You're getting at deeper reality, the meaning of things beyond the day to day events.    And this is Zen practice.  And you know all those voices can hit you, chimerical monsters coming out of past memories, all the stuff you make up in your own head, as if wanting a story line, but here you are fully in the present free of all that, observing.

Artists can be a certain way, they're generous people.  maybe not always, but Mastroianni, he was a mensch, he loved to stay up late cooking with his girlfriend.  He was generous enough to feel all torn up about Catherine DeNeuve...  Full of humanity, the guy.  And he could play a lowly waiter.  And to take up such a role, that is within the provenance of the artist, to do such a thing, because an artist is often a deeply spiritual person.

What matters about art is not the fuss about style and whether it's good or bad by some new standards, no, what matters about art is whether or not it's true, whether it's accurate...


All these young people want to write, well, that's a good thing, they want to be spiritual.  Nothing wrong with that, even if Fox News would make such people out to be stupid fools.  Be an avatar to them?  Explain what it's about?  Well, I don't know, maybe you let them figure it out, but help them along the way.

Novel sketches continued.

But, doctor, there are good days, but there are also bad days.  Maybe it's a sign I'm heading in a better direction, trying to take control of my life, the demons come out.  So, yeah, the days you wonder:  What good have I achieved, in my selfishness, my attempt at writing books, my attempt at being a Dostoevsky or a Shakespeare, what good have I done but destroy a family, bring my unmanly unhappiness to it...  You try to not hide your light under a basket, but in so doing, what have you achieved?  Your creative effort is a negative thing almost.  What can it be but a shame alongside the creation of happy little children with a safe roof over their heads?  While I struggle back and forth, back and forth...  to write, to not write, and what we all need is a good job, employment.  What do I have to show for it?  Nothing.  Nothing at all.  Might as well be honest with myself.  I've been lazy.

Days when you think, I've spent twenty five years, more, being completely unproductive.  It's like I don't know how to be around other people...  I'm stricken by a sense of the great awful meaninglessness of my life.  You know what I mean?  And this Zen Buddhist stuff doesn't always help, I'm afraid to say.

I don't know, I guess I'm just confronting the meaninglessness of life in a restaurant.  I observe it.  I'm tired of lying to myself.  I don't do any good for people.  Or is that too harsh?  I don't know anymore. To make you work on Christmas, that just kills the idea that the job really has any meaning.

Who knew what one had for values...  We think that other people would understand us without words, but we have to explain, explain our vision, and sometimes they are so nascent, so fresh and not yet fully taken to form, still not knowing what direction they might take, even yourself...  Okay, so you've  read The Brothers Karamazov, then what.  So what?

I dunno, doc, I feel sometimes at the end of my rope, I just don't know what to do and I'm pretty sick of not having any meaning in my life, just showing up at that job.  It's been years coming;  I don't think I can do it anymore.  I can't face the loneliness anymore.


I'm trying to work things through.  I even got my sorry self down to see the Wyeth exhibit before it closed.  Crowded, and you feel stupid being alone, when everyone else is with family, every guy is walking with his girlfriend on the Mall.  Every adult male has a family...  And that book is right--the demons come out as soon as you try to start steering your ship in the right direction...  Yes, it almost hurt to go see my old friend Andrew Wyeth.  That old house in Maine...  The Pennsylvania farm house, his dad's studio, his own little schoolhouse studio...  The bareness, the vibe that comes out of such soulful alive places...  I can't compete with the good common sense of small government Republican kids on Fox News talking with Huckabee;  they're not going to understand the Buddhist nuances behind what to them is liberal anti-patriotic foolishness.  I need to find my place, like Wyeth did.   A bar might be the closest thing in a city to the Olson House with Christian and Alvaro, but...  I don't know.  Less and less meaning do I take from the exercise, the grunt work.  It's become more a mental ward, where depressives shuffle about amidst a happy Hispanic staff with their music and families and cell phone Facebook stuff, a cold French boss who runs the business quite well, but has a purpose in his life, his own family, meaning, unlike me.

But yeah, the demons come out, man, do they.  Waiting on a Saturday, walking in the woods, "on call."  Just walking in the woods to not go out of my mind or retreat back to bed.

Kerouac, yes, he was Buddhist enough to sense the constant changing within.  I think of my failures, almost every morning when I try to get up.  I wake up, wondering what's happened to my life, why me, and that's why I read up on Zen and listen to Alan Watts, to know I'll change, or that life's appropriate somehow when you understand it on a deeper truer level, so let go of anguish.  I write to hang on to positive directions, for the sense that I'm figuring something out, something that will help me find a way.  And while my first book, yeah, maybe was helpful, it didn't answer all the problems of my world, and I almost felt, well I do, feel ashamed to put it out there, as I think Wyeth would almost be, paintings of intensely private emotions, yeah, almost abstract.  Zen, now that I think about it.  "Let go;  you can't hold on to any fixed self, it will always change;  we come as waves, which means part of it is life, and the rest in not being alive..."

Yes, the demons come out, and so you write, because that seems to help.

But what are my values?  Am I allowed to follow them in the current state?  Haven't I betrayed them all.  No teaching job.  No wife.  No kids.  Where am I, lost...  That's how my how thoughts run sometimes.

But Doctor, maybe that's the problem of courtship, or the kind of thing I went through with that person, that girl, was that you become separated from your values.  Some of the insecurities still mess with you at that stage of life, college days, particularly with this last unexplored new area...  I mean you know yourself as this deeply kind person, would do anything for anyone, indeed love for all people, but then you fall into this back and forth, this tentative mode where insecurities come out, and you get hurt by what a person says, and so you walk away and harbor that kind of 'well, if that's the way you're going to be, well fine, fuck you' thing, and that's not how you want to treat her in any way, but you're too close to it and you perceive hurt feelings.  You have nothing but kindness for this person, but she got a little bitchy with you when you brought her flowers and you end up, I dunno, withdrawing, holding off on your gifts, on your light, on all the nice things you want to do for her and share with her.  You don't know how to read her, and so you retreat.

And then that starts a process of being separated from your values, and perhaps that's the source of the greatest depressions.  You were sort put in a trap, and where you know you've found an outlet for the highest form of kindness a person can express and find fulfillment in, I don't know, you get separated or confused and you start to act out, get angry, get self-destructive, don't follow through on things that you really want, feeling like 'oh what the hell's the point anyway...'  And because of so many little go-rounds, back and forth, kindness, retreat, dismissiveness, that sense begins to bleed over a lot of things.  A cynicism...  And then you might find yourself looking at yourself like 'what's happened to you, my friend, what has happened to you...  You used to be so bright, so engaged, so self-confident and in tune with your values.

It's like she becomes your enemy, and then a lot of people follow suit, like ostracizing you as the weirdo.   "What the fuck did I do?  Can't you see?  I'm not a bad person, I don't have evil intentions, I want to help you, I want to be good to you..."  And by the end of it all you're looking at yourself, "what the fuck happened to you?"

And that's I guess why I stuck with writing so long, because I had this sort of vision of an infinitely gentle infinitely suffering thing, something that could only find expression in literature, much along the lines of The Brothers Karamazov, which shows the real good in people, the real unselfish quality, of wise Alyosha with his schoolboys making peace amongst them, and that iconic picture of the Christ found in The Grand Inquisitor passage, a Jesus who says nothing to his accuser and tormentor, above such things.  Do the good have to be martyred?  No, of course not, but you kind of feel like one who intends to be good is in for a lot of suffering as he formulates his lesson plan to teach the world, a world that does not maybe even want teaching...

And from a practical stand-point, what does a good person have to offer anyway, as far as a solid mate.  No, you have to be entrepreneurial in this world, like Joseph P. Kennedy the father, figuring out how to make good money and support a family.

It's like you fall into a daze.  Don't you know who I am?  Don't you know who my father is and the things I stand for in life?  What do you say to your accuser?  You clam up.  Time passes and you make  few more efforts, but those feel like they got shot down too, so you develop this hair-trigger, self defeating at the mere hint of rejection.  Maybe this was the sort of thing Lincoln was subject to, the ship of his values running up against the rocks of life.  As strong a man as he, even.

And in the mode of being, kind to everyone, well, I'm sorry, but you get distracted.  You'd like to focus it all on her, but, there are lots of people in the world.  There are always 'the least' of us.  You'd want so badly to focus just on her, but there's a lot of noise, a lot of pulls off in different directions.  You end up doing stupid shit too.  Wasting your time on swine.

Maybe, doctor, that's why you become a writer, because it's the only pure world, though of course that is not very satisfying, that the Brothers Karamazov thing happens only in the realm of the book, that you can't teach that in the world so much.  You'd be tossed out of the classroom anyway.  Teach math and computer science.

Funny, you know, the first adult thought you have is that in a way everyone is a scholar, in their own way.  You respect people's native curiosity.  Maybe they don't read books like the way you do or did, but there's something going on, even if it gets misguided or wasted.  And then from that sense of the scholarship in everyone, you come to spiritual ideals, that which too everyone responds to, has some sense of.

Values, yes.  I have values.  I had values.  But you also get lost.  Maybe that's just the way life, being the world, inherently is...  I don't know.

Sad, not knowing what to do with yourself, just a walking blank kindness, maybe that is Jesus, or whoever, Buddha, the situation you just described, feeling you aren't able to do anything, as if you had your hands tied behind you, told to keep quiet, stuck in a prison where no one sees you.

Values, that seemed like a silly almost ridiculous question at first...

Maybe there's a reason Dostoevsky portrayed men and women as extreme, crazy, vixens, madmen...  This quality is part of his palate, his spiritual world expressive of his version of Christianity...

Therapy sketch:

So last time we talked about values.

There are two sides to them, during courtship, definitely.   One side with integrity, but the other must not be so honest, perhaps even lying as she considers and judges a potential mate.  There will be some extremely mixed messages, a swing between poles.  And the male has to simply hold on, stay optimistic and eventually win his way back to her after the initial encounter.  Or, he doesn't, which is his fault.  She could all along have been his to lose, but, he didn't capitalize on his opportunity.  Or, he ended up not working out for her for whatever reason.  And then, if she does chose a mate, basically the old suitor she will exorcise from her realm, wiping him off the map, performing murder on his memory, on the possibility of any interaction.

Yeah, in my state after that, I did not go into the publishing world as I should have.  I didn't do anything, really.  I took whatever job came my way, like I never even tried, never stood up for who  wanted to be or who I was or where I came from.  From the night at the Beach Party, she acted bored with me, my haircut was too short, blah blah blah, 'it's chemistry,' she said, yes, I told her, it is chemistry, I'll see you later, and I then got up...  She lingered at the party.  I got a cigarette and talked to a few regal young women a year above me, and ignored I her seeing her in the corner of my eye.  You're going to be that way with me, fuck you.

Maybe it was in my genetic code, poetically speaking, some kind of old school gallant Austro Hungarian way of courtship, since outmoded, not responsive enough.  And anyway, I was realizing how complex the human creature is.  Being honorable her rebuffs stung.  I should have simply ignored them, not been such a gentleman.  Then it all began to unravel.  The rejection got to me.  But it's not his place to protest unfairness.  You go on.  Stoic.  I was a fool kid from the country.  I did not know about rejection.   I'd never experienced... well, I take that back, I had experienced it before, but not at such a professional level, ha ha ha.  Not such a gang effort as it came to be.

Kindness from the male part is not the same as courtship.  And that leaves some of us to take increasing reliance on the claim of spirituality, decent morals, realistic decency toward other beings.  All of which does not necessarily make for a great mate and protector and the most glorious of bird's nest and plumage.

I guess that's why I become a writer, seeking a redress of grievances through being a moral decent person with some integrity, and so of course, being some form of Judeo-Christian Theosophical kind Buddhist type, as a writer, that's the kind of thing for me to explore, exploring the kind of person who go wait on the lonely leper in us all.

Maybe that's just a juvenile reaction, yeah, as if all people would be kind to each other in the world.

But yeah, sure, integrity.  Of for whatever other reason I'm here.  And I think that one of the reasons why people fall into writing is because your like this guy with an older brother always looking over what you do, a stern voice telling you to not be weird, do this, don't do that, you know, kind of putting you down, and things in life are always complicated.  Because you're nice to your mom and call her a lot doesn't mean you're a momma's boy.  Because you write poetry doesn't impune anything against your manhood, quite the contrary.  And I know from these sessions, you know, anyway, that there's always the voice even in your own head, criticizing, bringing up some account, 'oh, you're worthless, a loser, people don't like you, what have you done with your life... '  And those are demons maybe even a writer has to especially battle with everyday.   Just like I pretty much every day remember her surface level put-down or the old story of 'me fucking it all up with her.'  Stuff which might be true, but which one has to move on from in order to live a fulfilling life.

And you what, I'm finding out, after I've meditated and become mindful and stilled all those voices, that... well, you can always be proud at least of being decent to other people, friendly, to all walks of life, high and low, the high need it too, even as they might look down their nose at you initially, they need kindness too.  How tough it's been, quite often, Jesus Christ, to go do that job, but that self of inner mindful clear sky consciousness would always jump up and be kind to people and engage with them as I had time to, and even if it was awkward, try to ask or express something, something like 'hey, we're human, we all share, it's good stuff, even if it's partly bar talk, sometimes full of too much gesture...'

That's what this writer learned, even with all the voices in his own head, telling him all the things that makes you down about the day and where you are and all the missing engagement in your own life, the structure of your own life stuck around the night shift rut...

You know, the last night came to end, the Pandora wasn't working on the sound system so I had to go looking for the music on the iPod in the closet there at the bar mouth, the busboy coming in and out the linebacker waiter with plates, and the bar is a bit full, nice people, kind of boisterous, a bit drunk and happy at 11:15, Bolivia, Columbia, the military hospital regular guys, one of them knocking Obama (I did not engage, even my mind), and I've played Brubeck and Toussaint, Bryan Ferry, and Roxy Music won't play, so I put on Abbey Road.  "You never give me your money...  Here Comes the Sun...  Boy, you're going to carry that weight...  And in the end, the love you take..."  All those beautiful brief sketches of songs... that seem to come out of, I dunno, somewhere, all the life experience, bunking together while they played the Hamburg strip club...  Some of it has a sort of Lennon violence, yelling in it, but it's more or less like those early songs, like "And I love her," coming back in a deeper kind of poignant form, their last album, a kind of balance before they parted.  That is art, that album.  And it stilled the beast in the barroom last night, yes it did.  "Old and magic feeling..."  "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."  What else is music for?

And today I got up early.  I didn't dwell on goddamn jazz night beating the crap out of me, no, I got up and wrote and expressed my old values, without going down that dark hole of beating myself up with mind, rehashing the past...


After the session was over and a chore of procuring animal protein and green vegetable and eggs was accomplished I walked home, and I sang to myself,  "she was a girl in a million my friend, I should have known she would win in the end...  although I look and I act like a clown, beneath this mask I am wearing a frown...  I'm a loser, I'm a loser."  Yeah, what can you do.  Go home and meditate.  When you're a younger brother, it's a bit of a habit to listen to the voices.

But I knew my mind was always a bit wilder, less tame, less of the agricultural settling of the human species, therefore smarter, not that it always does you much good to be smarter in that way, a wolf compared to a dog, a mountain lion rather than the kitty cat complacently resting by the radiator.

Creativity, the Zen Buddhist says, the height of artistic expression is selflessness.  Which we might take to mean that mindful higher consciousness that's able to look down at our thoughts and mental processes.   Saying, as Hamlet does, "these are actions that a man might play, but I have that within which passeth show.'  I have that within which passeth show.

When I can move and get up on Sunday after the Saturday nightshift at the bar, a Lyle Lovett song is playing in my mind, "let's have a hand for that young cowboy, and wish him better luck next time, somewhere later up in Fargo, or somewhere farther down the line."  A slow start, and then, boom, the downstairs second seating is backed up, people are deciding to eat upstairs, the boss with the reservation pad and the phone in his hand is figuring out how to fit everyone in.  Drinks at the bar while your table waits.  A couple decides to sit at the bar, moving from a table too low, looks through the list, I let them taste the Bordeaux by the glass, a 2011 Cotes du Bourg, no, need more cab, gets a 2010 St. Julien.  Okay.  A tall man is hovering over me at the bar, as busboy, waiter and myself equally scramble to clear a table, reset, seat a five top of GW girls, deal with another couple, and another, get them sat and squared away, and the tall man wants "a bottle of Pinot Grigio."   Hmm, well, that's Italian, we are French, try this, a Pinot Blanc from Alsace, and here's a Muscadet;  man choses Muscadet, goes sits, gets up with date, sits in back room, no, not right either, ends up at couch, the table moved from now seated with another couple.  St. Julien, Lalande, decanted, their food ordered, then an old friend of the chef, a dentist, an Ethiopian princess, sits at bar with two equally regal friends, but unfamiliar with their new servant, I get them squared away.  He wants a light wine, a Malbec.  Okay, I pour him a Malbec.  In the midst of this our friend who came in originally on Wednesday jazz night comes back with a report on his conference and sits at mid bar.

The night scrambles on, picking up tape speed, the bar is being fed, amidst the chaos of plates which must be cleared, scraped off, then rudely stacked on milk crates under the bar's rail pours, desserts, coffees, walkie talkie beeping, pick up pick up....  Another bottle of Left Bank Bordeaux, a St. Estephe, is ordered by the gentleman of the couple, and by now, a glass for our new friend, and let's share.  The liver is excellent, the talk is good, wandering over Europe and the Middle East and graduate schools, etc.  "Don't go to Iran;  it's not a good place."  Friend reciprocates, asks me to pick out a good Bordeaux, and I chose a good value, a 2010 Cotes Du Bourg, a surprisingly good offering to a Left Bank drinker, decant that, boom boom, all good.  The evening is winding down.

Cut, fast forward to midnight, bar closing time.  Original man of couple is now hanging on, we have to go do something with our new friend, come over, lets open something from the cellar...  orders a greyhound.  Wife leaves after champagne.   Man is focussing, leaning in, wanting to buy me a drink.  I told them earlier, don't get me started, I'm an animal.  New friend chuckles.  Then the talk starts, about opening that $1600 bottle of '93 Petrus.  "Can you give me a discount, a better price," the now tipsy man is asking me.  "Call your owner."  Some time passes.  "No, I think it would be wasted on us at this hour, and we'd need to decant it anyway."  "Well, pick something else out that we should have, the best we have."   I stare at the list.  "I dunno, I'm kind of happy with my simple little glass of Beaujolais..." I mumble into the dust of the night.  Jesus Christ, can't this night just come to a clean end.  The tipsy man queries me, hunching somewhat as not to sway his vision.  Why, exactly, am I'm not opening the great wine at this past midnight hour.  Drunkenly and directly, the calculating part of his mind, he is looking directly at me.  "Why not?"  Awkwardness.  Meanwhile, "What's so good about it," conference friend is asking, then coming gallantly to my defense.  "What a good man, not pushing overpriced wine on you," he says with the right chuckle and pleased smile. Yeah, I tell them, look, it's after midnight.  I don't want to serve, the employee handbook does not allow it.

Finally I get them out the door.  Yes, we'll all have a drink up the street.  That works, except I have to go along with them, the local guide, pass the problem on to the next bar, and the guy isn't driving.  The drunkenly engaged conversation, the egos out, and I hook up with an old friend I've not seen in two years, and we have lots to chat about, and his new girlfriend is very nice.  Night comes to an end eating a burger with my conference friend, seated out in the cold wind on steps next to the old Austin Grill, the original, where I worked and tended bar a long time.  Across geography and life, I have established a kind of brotherhood with this guy, and that's cool, and as a bonus we stayed out of Good Guys.  "Hope the other guy got home okay."  "Yeah."  And then it's time, finally, for a cab ride home.  I wake up on couch in the morning, stiff, left my contacts in, socks on, as the light comes up, lye, before putting the stiff body properly under the bed covers, setting the alarm for the shift tonight.

Getting up an hour later, I muster my energy.  Ah well, what can you do.  The night ended without incident.  I do the dishes, sweep and mop the floor to a YouTube about Zen practices and tea ceremonies.  Do you wonder about your values, do I really want to be doing this, the awkward thing of keeping people in control when their judgment goes, when the night passes on into the obligations of the ritual of having engaged in conversation, wine shared, talk of the state of the world.

Taking a page from the Eckhardt Tolle playbook, I light a stick of sandalwood incense, cook some Merguez sausages under the broiler, sliced sweet potato in the oven, take a hot shower to loosen things up, a few poses of yoga and then it will be off to work, this time more with a cop mentality toward that late hour when the drunkenness comes out.


And such are the problems, in my case a habit of people-pleasing, an overextension of hospitality, a giving in to the hunger for the numbing pleasure of the drink, which itself is a facet of ego.  The ego wants more to drink, in its battle between good and bad thoughts, tending to heighten both in the perception.  Grand gestures.  And I would sometimes fall into that myself, rather than keeping my head clear so that the simple mindful consciousness that makes no judgment would continue to shine through.  And once bitten by it taste, it seems like the best option is to continue on with the exploration of an evening.

After assuaging all the bad thoughts I could come up, rehashing the past, the self-name calling, I would end the night in some form of numb state apart from the self, escaping away from the basic inner value I've always and ever meant to uphold.  That can be a hard thing to sustain sometimes, when the wolves seem at the door, to simply uphold your upright conscious fully awake and aware presence in the moment.  Things can tweak you, get you nervous.  And so, oddly, being a proponent of the light of consciousness, attempting in some way to formulate it as a profession, or part of a profession, or simply a leading voice somehow over all the choices one makes in life on a daily basis and over time, I could find myself vulnerable, alone and afraid.

The odd sense, what are you doing with your time?, you can't just sit and meditate all day, such things would prey upon my days and make me depressed, the thoughts of the mind and all its voices, and I wished to hide out and sleep through it, and often enough I wasn't much feeling for getting up out of bed anyway out of the things I'd done in the night to escape the lonesomeness.  Yeah, and in a way, I had almost worked against my values, of promoting the high consciousness and presence in the moment out of all my worries, sometimes first of all to give people good service and respect and all that stuff, bending over backwards to be their therapist, their confidante, their company in the night as they stared into cellphone screens and took things very pessimistically, humorlessly, literally, burdened by things.  And my bright natural innate conscious presence would shine over their distractions, engaging in bright conversation, a touch of self-deprecating humor.

Believe me, I know what it's like to be preyed upon by the bully in the mind, by all its demons that jump out and go "HUH!" and try to scare you as best they can.  "Buddha, Jesus, where are you, come and save me, be a model," you cry within, and then, as if like your own father's voice in yourself, the recollection that you yourself are Buddha and just need to remember it.

But the voices from the night shift before, if I were over-tolerant, and allowed things to go on too long, the voices would be transmuted next day to sit hauntingly upon my spirits.  "Oh, I shouldn't have done this, I shouldn't have done that, I was just trying to placate them all so they'd leave but that was self-defeating..."  Well, at least I was working on it, from time to time, putting the rough math together, this equals that.  As they say, respect yourself.