Again, there was no winning, except the house, not this particular soldier.  Starting with the last night of Restaurant Week.  Ending with Barbara's Jazz Wednesday night, brutal.  Exhausted, the day off at the end of four nights, barely make it off the couch.  Finally, a shower, around eleven at night, an attempt to feel limber again.  No desire to recount a single story of it.  Ibuprofen.  Thoughts of a dry February, but that doesn't last, for the need of energy enough to cook dinner and pull a yoga stretch.

The therapy session was the interesting thing of the week.  Be honest.  Trust your own judgment.  Feel secure about your own judgment.  If something doesn't feel right, say so, mention it, start a conversation.   Trust yourself, acknowledge your own feelings, don't hide them.  And that opens up space.

And that may be the thing.  The great usurpation.  From going along with things, this is what you get, more of going along with things.

The night endured, listening to the singing, somehow not quite right.  The wish for a place to call your own shots.  Maybe even to play your own music, rather than enduring that of other's.  Something like that.

But I reflect on my chronic dishonesty, my lack of adult to ability to speak up, the tendency to go along with things, as if I would miss out if I didn't.  Then on the other side, the workaholic.

"Rock bottom, that concept has been debunked," she tells me.  And anyway, it's a matter of perspective.  I ask about Enlightenment.  "Same with the Ah-ha! moment."

Sounds like a scary place, she tells me, from her chair, that place of wanting to change, but being unable to.


I can't blame myself for wanting some time to myself after all that.  The guy who was loud a week ago Monday Jazz Night offers an apology.  He comes in with a group right as the door opens, and it being a full moon out, and just about every table reserved, I'm not too psyched about it.  They end up being very sweet, and even manageable, and incredibly generous, going through about eight bottles of Bordeaux.


I have always needed the time alone.  I have always needed the keeping of my own time.   My own hours.  And for me it is always the social that is the problem, as other people might not readily admit.  And the people who cannot spend time alone, perhaps they are less the kind that it is really worth spending time with.  That's something we can not readily admit, in this time of 'this great communal project of the internet and the corporate world of big tech,' and I will admit that I find time spent alone quite worthwhile.  Even that time, we need insight, and energy for.  And this is time we do not always respect in this culture of ours.

And other people's problems, well, what can you do, you really have your own to worry about.  It's that we get suckered into being nice.

That is the problem.  We seem obliged to to fall under the illusion that our customer acquaintances at the bar are our friends, and they can only know us from the context within which they see us.  And the problem is, that on your end, you've quite had it with that context, feeling a Lou Gehrig desire to pull yourself from the line-up.  None of this do they have any idea of.  You great them with a smiling face, and witty banter, and yet, they have no idea, no idea at all of what you go through.  Nice they would invite you somewhere, but the bourgeoisie have not the greatest inkling.  Their politeness is considerable, and welcome, but...


They respected me at work, as a hard worker, but also for all the shit I put up with.  Would it be okay, though, if I asked for my own life, after my years of service?  Not a lot to show for it, but, one can change, or at least try and welcome it.

God, no wonder Kerouac was a drunk, after all his exposure.  He earned his perspective, all he dealt with, the college athlete Catholic intellectual football scholarship kid strong enough to deal with Ginsburg, Corso, Cassidy, but the freshness of his view, his insight, had to come from all that time alone, reflecting, the notebooks, his mom's basement, Long Island, ultimately violated, the Kerouac pattern of letting himself misled and interrupted, and ultimately he had a kind of hatred and disgust for the Beatniks, the Merry Pranksters, ending up as, justifiably, a conservative, and, at the height of his game, a spiritual thinker you have to give credit to.

Then the bar personality I had to keep up became a kind of antithesis, not exactly, a wizened disguise in a world of fake and show, sham personality.

If he, Kerouac, had not had the rewards--and they were simple, and written long-hand in notepads, on the road, as much as type-written at girlfriend's apartments, insight, prose, and his bringing back that one tenth of it in writing is still enough to convince another person that this is writing, worthy of book form--he would not have written, written the things that are, of course, found in his works.


Trust your own judgment.  Be honest.  Thoughts that make you wonder about your supposed chosen occupation...

Bravery

But mental health, as far as acting along with the masses and big tech, is not an easy thing.  It's hard for a gloom, a slow burning panic, not to arise, to see that one has obediently kept up showing up for work, but without any plan at all, no vision at how to arrive at a steady place with solid footing, set-up for old age, or at least a monastery of some sort...

A dream of eating in the dining hall, taking advantage of the last offerings, but then, having to swim across big wave ocean to cross the courtyard back to class...  Why are my inner dilemmas cast so

A sense, of ever being dragged along, not doing something in accordance with the will, but for the writing.  Writing the personal art, betraying the individual quality of the being, unable to meet any standard but one's own, a necessary part of the miracle of making it through the day.  Hiding one's neuroses in a jar.

But a shower, and off to meet an old girlfriend at a museum.  And the strength earlier, the first day off, to go see the doctor about the jaw, the sore bite of Januarys.

Writings the way to clear the fog, to shoot a bullet through the cloud of panic and unease.  In the end you like your neurosis, it's all you have, an heirloom of mankind as he once stood, long long ago.

Write without thinking, let the gut command.  Vigilantly looking in the fridge, keeping up the stock of animal protein, always in need of what to eat.  Sausages, roast beef, sliced turkey, ground bison, a duck breast still with time.  Fresh green tea, enough to start the engine of the mind, the pills prescribed, and all the other nostrums, turmeric, cayenne, ginger.  Immodium.

Man is an earthy vessel, full of liquids, a need to calm them all, the inner tempest blowing at one's ship.

The cat fights off a stranger with her show, but less agile am I, full of groans and grumpiness.  How not to make an asshole out of yourself.

Ted Hughes should have said, everyone is a poet.  Maybe he did.

Put on a Scottish blazer, a decent shirt, Brooks Brothers, blue with burgundy stripe, and off to a museum to meet, a side of myself I rarely get to see.  She is a Virgo.

Thoughts and ideas float around within us, coursing through us, little ships in the body's vessels, making their long voyages, rising up from the body to the new world of the mind, a port to connect to.  Sometimes lost going around the dark rocky tips of continents where oceanic tides violently meet.  Their voyages are long, as in Moby Dick.  They come bearing riches from the sea and faraway lands not consciously understood, with nature's offerings, oil to light our lamps.  The barks are tiny, but strong and steady, curraghs off the West Coast, seemingly fragile, but able at sea, a part of the elements themselves.


I would suppose that Jesus had a way of dealing with people.  He himself had pondered, what would Jesus do?  Like all of us, he would have had to deal with people, but how, we might well wonder.  What could we learn from him.

 Jesus had a different way with people.  Non-conventional, his approach to friendship and brotherhood.  Is it as if he almost prefers certain types, sinful people, people excluded from the religious authority, lower people, the less prominent members of society, people at random.  There's a detachment, a secondary nature to what we might normally take as personal preference.

He was not a school teacher, nor an investment banker.  The authoritative view of the day was that he kept company with publicans and sinners, those of company less desirable.  Until you got to know them as people, without judging them.  Was anyone his friend?  In a way, all were, but it seems like he took each as a specimen, worth reading, worth saving.

It's not unlike he was a barman, as much as a minister, meeting people, attending to them, putting up with them.  And no so much a rebuking kind of guy, hardly any directing of them beyond asking them to come with him, fishers of men.  His sheep.  God's sheep, really.  What can you do?

He would have known the landscaping guy, the college professor, the hedge fund guy, the lawyer, the doctor, the government worker, the hairdresser, the real estate management person, the beer delivery guy, the busboy and the dishwasher and the waiter, the librarian, the computer programmer, the scientific, the engineer.  And while no longer hiding his own light, considerable, obviously, under a basket, how forward was he, how dominant, how bent on winning friends and influencing people?

It seems he was fairly nondescript, before it all happened.  His elders, indignantly surprised when he took it up, wanting to throw him off a cliff, the boy, gone mad, blasphemous as far as they could tell.



Ain't much point in writing.  Therapeutic.  That's about it.  Figuring your psyche, how crazy you might be, relieving the pressure of life, pondering your own seeming inability to fit in neatly, or all the gut reactions to things, such as you cannot control.  Blasphemous.  Lonely, without profession, but with some vague sense of the work to do, or what not to do.  The awkwardness of self-acceptance.



It's not him so much, who is not accepted, but the things he does, which are off-beat, off-putting.  Out of the ordinary, so much, a bit too revolutionary.

He's not this, nor is he that, it just seems he's sad with the world the way it is, the comprehension of deeper reality greatly lacking...  It's a lot even for him to comprehend, no wonder he takes naps.

But the thoughts come to him sweetly, like a friendly dog or cat coming up to you, or a bird.  What can you do?  You're not going to turn them away.  You've already done that, too often, not communed enough in the busy busy world.

His work is to proclaim the Gospel, as Fr. James Martin, SJ, might tell us, explicating MK 3:22-33.  Other work is secondary.  Indeed, his own family would have a hard time understanding him, as would the general authority overlooking society.  He might have a hard time understanding himself.  He might even see his own situation with some lack of comprehension, hard to support the lack of direction.  The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

Conventional conversations, conventional people, would they not have bored him, in a way, beyond providing him with character sketches, tales of experience.  He talks to angels, and the disciple can only look on, in wonder.


Seemingly clueless with women.

What is mental health?  Was he healthy?  What can we even begin to say about that?

I'd driven back from Oswego, stopping in Binghamton to visit a new friend in a writing program, I'd met her on-line, pushing on in the morning, Route 81 Southbound closed for a fatal accident, the detour of a line of trucks moving slowly over hill and dale in Pennsylvania's Endless Mountain region, made it to the street behind the restaurant with fifteen minutes to spare, going to work, the first night of Restaurant Week, live jazz on top of that, then finally at the end of it all, after driving eight hours, and working as many, I drove back to the apartment, unloaded, taking the car back to the rental across from the Shoreham Hotel.  Hemi Dodge Charger, I'd grown to like it, and there was less salt on it than the Camray I'd rented for the last voyage.  Then getting through the next two nights, the tricky wine tasting, Jeremy moving slowly, after I'd busted my ass pulling the wine all the way up to the bar, delivery day Tuesday, and then Jazz Night, the very busy, people popping up like termites, again and again.

A day off.  I got up at a reasonable hour, and walked down to the offices of the good Doctor Patel on R Street, on the other side of Connecticut, cold, but the sun out, blue sky, a hawk on top of the Decatur apartment building, hearing its cry, looking up.  And I saw, being in a reasonable mood, not as beaten down and fucked as I would be working the normal four nights closing, the town in a similar way to how Hemingway might have seen his towns, Paris, always from the perspective of the inveterate countryboy, marveling at its confluences, of the translation of the countryside and the natural world he knew from growing up, an outdoorsman, to the stone, brick and concrete, to the paved roads, the trees lining streets, many people coming and going, but still, light, weather, birds, nature always waiting to reclaim should one of us seriously fuck up...  I remember going down to the Starbucks patio with my notepad, and DC my little version of A Moveable Feast.  To a country boy, who almost returned to the country side and never came back after college, there was enough for the city to make its point that it was a city full of striving people and also the locals and also the people very much left behind.  Those who make it, those who are normal, those who don't get it anymore and give up.

I thought of Shane MacGowan, and Jesus too, the country boy in the city, always sticking to the old values, the way of seeing things that takes in that not all of the world is a city, but rather the vast majority is not and still needs to be accounted for and respected.   "Oh sweet city of my dreams, of speed and skill and schemes..."  The old dog track being torn down to make way for a car park, the tale of White City.  The city is a strange place, unfathomable if one could not see the nature in it.  My jaw had been full of pain, and I couldn't tell if I needed a goddamn root canal or if it was something in the weird popping joint of my jaw and so I went to go see my doctor, the consummate gentleman.  And walking down there I remembered how I used to go sit at the Starbuck's patio, whether or not I bought anything, my stomach no longer able to take coffee without acid discomfort, pulled out the old yellow legal pad and wrote pointlessly, except for the habit.  Writing notebooks--doesn't get much better than that, even if its drivel.  "Like Atlantis, you just disappeared from view, and the hare upon the wire, has been burnt upon your pyre, like the black dog who once raced from old track three..."  Not exactly ad copy, nor PR, nor an attempt to undermine the great democracy or promote anything in particular.



The countryside is values, something that will never leave you, your cells, your DNA.  A tree will always be a tree, and a welcome old friend in the strangeness of the city.

I cannot think of the Christian tale without considering that element of the country boy bringing the wisdom of nature, the innate parable quality to launch that comes out of having nature as an intimate friend deep in the psyche, the experience of being surrounded by, if not wild, trees, fields, countryside, animals.

I cannot think of the tale of MacGowan without picturing the farm in Tipperary, summers spent from childhood, contrast to London and the Barbicon tower apartment, the classic Irish thatched roof farmhouse, and the wild nature of country people.  Rainy Night in Soho always gets me, the lyricism of nature transforming the city into something sufficient and alive.  For reasons I do not know, the song rarely gets old for me.

What insight does that song bring, I'm not quite sure.  There's a wisdom in it, about love, I suppose.  And time.  "Now this song is nearly over.  We may never find out what it means.  Still there's a light that shines before me, and you're the measure of my dreams."

The model, I suppose, is stressed.  Lincoln came out of the great countryside, of Kentucky, of lost towns in Illinois, humble places, backwater.  Farm and animals.  Whatever the corporate lawyer he was for railroad companies, his fine house in Springfield, there is no city boy Trump playboy quality to him, and no helicopter, above the people, in which Lincoln ever travelled, having to sneak through Baltimore in disguise in a detached rail car to get to his Inaugural.

Interesting, then, that the country people should fall for such a man as Trump and his corporate promises, his flashy stance of strength and power, a manipulator.

The chefs I knew, they were all country boys.  Strong, resourceful, resilient.  Keeping long hours, enjoying their beverages.  They were French, and Swiss, or a lady from Jackson, Mississippi, educated at Radcliffe.   They made things happen, they worked hard, they kept things consistent.  They were hearty.  They all like music.

City people, stylish, smart as they are, well-educated, there was something they lacked.  And what they lacked fell into a spiritual quality, and that quality, with access, but their talents pointed in a different direction from those who get their music and words from nature.

City people will always be wondering, "where did you get this talent, where did it come from?"  It stumps them.  So they counter by promoting their own city sound, their city writing, their city style, but, to my taste, they miss out on the real authentic thing.  They miss the beauty of the traditional, in favor of the urban.  Nothing against that, the source of the urban is the country anyway.

edited, expanded

It had seemed like a long week, heading into the anniversary of one's birth.  And I had such matters to relate to my therapist when I went down to see her in the cold, walking to downtown Washington, D.C., down 19th, to M, where a fire alarm had shut down the big Staples there at the corner.  Usually there are food trucks there, but perhaps it was too cold for them to operate.

Again, they had left me pretty much alone to deal with Sunday, then Monday Jazz, no busboy, Tuesday night wine tasting, and I was so tired and worn out when a guy came in around 9:30, tall, bald, with a tie and a coat to scam me, claiming he was with Patton Boggs, and I should have said, hmm, let's call the non-emergency police to see if they can help get your door unlocked (since you claim to have lost your keys), that I gave him ten bucks just to get rid of him.  The last customer, a nice young lady, a quiet type, witnessed the whole thing as she ate at the other end of the bar.  But I guess the regular guy who came in loudly up the stairs with two not exactly quiet African American guys from work, just back from a trip overseas, proclaiming with loud laughter that these guys were his brothers, already intoxicated at 6:30, sort of wore me out.  The boss greeted him, and seemed not to notice the source of his joviality, and when I suggested that it might be best not to serve him, did not seem supportive, but rather to take it ad hoc.  I ignored them for a while, but eventually, served them.  They'd been drinking "Jordan Cabernet," he said, and I said, oh, sorry, and he said with the hand wave he has to servants, whatever is most like that.  So I bring out three, no four, one for Sir Charles, glasses and pour the Cotes Du Bourg 2014 Bordeaux we have, not bothering to use the big tall wine glasses, and when I clap for the band after their first number, quiet jazz standards, only then do they realize there is live music, and the tallest of the gentlemen nods, she has a lovely voice, and pretty soon they go over and sit down in front of the band, him and the regular guy.  (Later the singer tells me, that he was irritating the shit out of them, telling her, as she sang, that her heart wasn't into it, which she took exception to.)  Finally, it falls upon me, gentleman, can you please keep it down a bit, as their voices raise again, and boisterous comrade laughter rolls and reverberates.  They quiet down, but in two minutes, regular guy is using his snide sarcastic voice, "oh, we're sorry we came in with our boisterousness and interrupted your calm evening, you should give us a check so we don't forget," and then he turns to the girl who's joined them, I'm feeling tension, he says, referring to me I forget how, but by name.  I ignore his request, but soon I have his check up to date.  I've got some snails coming for them anyway, on the house, to get some bread and butter and food into their systems, and wouldn't want them to go to waste....


But it's all a scam, I tell my doc, that's what I was thinking about when I walked down here.  And the people who can deal with it, know that it's all a scam.  Later on she'll ask me to interpolate that into other matters, but she gets how tired I was, all the invisible patience that goes into my job in each and every moment of monitoring the whole thing, how, yes, give the guy ten bucks just to get him out of there.

There are other instances of my own behavior to bring up.  I turn into a jerk too, when I've had too much.  And I relate a little incident, trying to keep up with a new female friend, and how women see to have for more powers over verbal things and talking and making sense out of things, and how a man, male, can't really keep up past a certain point, and must indeed sit back on the leather couch with the remote in his hand, or, perhaps imbibe himself into a foggy enough state where the words just sort of flow over his tortoise shell, uh huh, honey, uh huh, except that, like my friend from the bar, I was being an asshole, and also employing a kind of humor that might embrace crude earthy terms, such as "banging," or "hand job," and the like, which I excuse from myself by saying (and believing) that this is my sort of imitation of my brother's sense of humor, and he can get away with it well, because he really knows how to talk to people.

"You don't do so well," she says, looking at me, "when you're following your brother's path."  Yes, I've tried that before and it doesn't work.   "That's not really you, not really Ted, to talk like that."  And so, yes, there is my behavior to examine.  And I am reminded of that writing book my new friend brought up, about writing, and how the big brother shut down of any weirdness in the younger is not unknown as a phenomenon.  And I wonder, maybe I am a bartender out of some subliminal desire to be, as I might see it, a man in the terms I would think of as my brother sort of having, a way to talk to him.  And maybe this is why I have failed at it all, because it's not me, not so much, at least not any more, and it's all kind of playing me and work is like that too.

So so, what else, after my meditative nap... after that long cold hard tired walk back from downtown, a gyro wrapped in my courier bag, and I eat it as it is, it its pita, though the dough will make by waist expand.

Mom calls, at different hours, to check if I'm okay.  And I tell her, I'm getting on the road tomorrow, don't have the energy tonight, as I depart from the Greek place.

My therapist has lent me, though, an additional thought to muse over, after her estimation that my moral compass is in good working order, that I might try to relax a bit, now and again, and not get so worked up that I get played, hmm.  Indeed.


I told my late night gal pal, who saw the scam go down, embarrassing me, making me feel frustrated and irritated by everyone now, even the two nice elderly ladies who leave after dinner and coffee, thanking me for my hospitality.  Let this sorry night end, I think, suddenly very sick of it, and I pour myself a glass of wine and pull my veal cheek over broccoli mousse dinner out of the over warm, 200 degrees, plopping down at the bar.  I recounted to the earlier story of the nice lady who told me that rather than therapy and Lexapro to keep writing and to find my way, I needed Jesus, the true Jesus, the things he said, (more than, say, the letters of Paul, a fallible interpreter.)  My friend observes, that she and I are aware enough and candid enough about the therapy process to be open and welcome about it.  That lady, she tells, probably has a lot of stuff swept under the rug, and that to suggest forgetting therapy is a bit like the religious right's attempt to convert gay people from being gay.

But I don't know, if I'd not caved in, listened instead to Jesus, had some moral spine, I would not have served the guy who bedeviled our Monday Jazz Night.  I relate all this, to my therapist, and she quietly absorbs it all.  We've been through this before, where I have difficulty setting my boundaries, have a hard time being aggressive, the bad guy, and say, well, yes, true, but it's hard when your waiting on people, having turned on the good guy, to suddenly switch to the bad guy.

I kind of shake my head.   Turning 53 tomorrow.  How do I become assertive, I ask her, (kind of like the lion in the Wizard of Oz.)  What's stopping you, she asks.  That's what I'm paying you for, I joke, but this is because the matter is a serious one.  Maybe you could look toward your family, she asks...  Hmm.

She had asked me to write my own horoscope for 2018, as her birthday falls into the same earth astrological sign as I, and I report, from some quick looks here and there, that because of Saturn being in a helpful spot (after all this Mercury retrograde period, a bad one) Capricorn can ease up a bit on being the typical workaholic, reaching out more, engaging new friends and the like.  And I hope it is so, because I've been a workaholic long enough.


It takes a while to digest the things you write.  Perhaps you find it difficult to look at them initially without cringing.  What was I trying to say?  But then, maybe a week later, maybe longer, maybe shorter, you can take a quick peek, and the thing is okay, worth relating, and maybe even helpful to that long process of figuring things out.


Walking back, up past the bank, where I deposited my Christmas bonus check from the old Gaul, up past the north Dupont Metro station, up by Zorba's, traipsing up past Comfort One Shoes, up to the familiar patio of the Starbuck's on R Street and then past the tea house, waiting, cold at the traffic light, taking note the final menu of Nora's Restaurant has been removed from the display box by the tasteful front door, shivering, a bit, come on light, change, all along I might have felt something break, or maybe change a bit.  I felt very tired, and had had too much wine the night before, and I felt very relieved not to have to go to work, that I could hit the couch, and, like the Mindfulness magazine in the office waiting room had suggested, meditate some, to change up that old narrative, for a new one.

Maybe I was just finally sick and tired, understanding I couldn't do it or didn't want to do it, and that to get out from underneath the beast holding me back, holding me down, I needed to rid myself of a few things, maybe that second Jazz Night, in an effort to get better, in an effort to change, to get off my back all the things that were playing my mind, my psyche, my body, and return in someway, to get back to that moral compass of decency, and who knows, maybe even the Judeo-Christian depths, valleys walked through.  Something I'd wished for, for quite a long time.

And yet, or also, when you're thinking of changing your life, for the better, for taking better care of yourself, you're seeing that your lifestyle, and therefore you mind, whether by effect, or by original cause, is not the healthiest.  You're admitting something to yourself, and, as we know, truth is hard to take.  Perhaps it was just all the unintended consequences of the job, the collateral damage, such as the strange hours of sleep, of the provocation of one's desire to drink.  How often, in the whirlwind, can you bad a way, and take a look with some perspective upon yourself and your issues, your matters and affairs.  All of these, and more, less spoken things, bring about feelings of fear, deeply enough.  Then, maybe, you can extrapolate that the underlying anxiety is part of a bigger one.  You ask for mercy, you ask for help, from whatever source, and the spirituality, that path of solid thinking left by, say, Jesus the Christ, as a way out, a way forward, clear, along exactly the very same lines of your doubt, your shyness and your fears and general uneasiness with yourself.



The thing about the scam part of the world, which falls into the category of human created things, is that it is to all a sign of maturity and adult responsibility to participate in the great scam.  People tend to test each other, as if to check on the idiot quotient of another, "how big an idiot are you?"  So there is the gaming quality to it all, part of flirtation, of healthy teasing.  If you are sensitive, too sensitive, or have too much youthful idealism or inherited integrity, then you are bound to fail, because it is clear that you will not make it as an adult in this world of fakes and scamming, of loud pretentious people who are born thinking that they deserve things of luxury and "solid values" and responsible behavior.  Those are the people for whom a little yoga in the morning after a hard night's work and rest is not enough.  Those are the people who've never really, to their own material benefit, have not asked themselves deep spiritual questions.  Then there are those on the other hand, idiots, like me, who haven't grown up, hamstrung as it were, as if stuck in a period of juvenile navel gazing.  We were tested, found to be lacking, lacking of that ability to perpetuate the scam.  A generous person with a hard time paying the rent, not really integrated into the city, its psyche, its ambitions, its dreams, performing some job that is really not much a solution to the problems of adult responsible life.   Girls test boys, to make sure they have practical bones within, to make certain that their lives won't end up as Christian or Buddhist disasters...

But you are out there, in life.  And you always have to be working on how to be killing two birds with one stone, as it were.  Sitting outside in the sun, writing, you are getting sunlight, vitamin D, crucial to the psyche.  And whatever you are writing at least feels like, in some way, some form of figuring things out, if only as a form of art, vastly indirect, but of a certain value system.

To that testing that happens in young adulthood, that checking if one has enough "self-confidence" to boldly participate in the economy as it is prescribed, there may be a reaction of youthful indignity.  "Why are you testing me so?  Why the harshness?"  And there is also a test of embarrassment going on--will you behave in such a way as to not embarrass me when you are tested so to see if you can be a productive adult, doctor, lawyer, banker, ad-man, professional...

A Christian martyr is hard to love, a shabby person, living in a cave, it doesn't really work these days, except as a person maybe to consult with from time to time.

But then there are those of us who sincerely hope that something good comes out of the two birds of imaginative acts with the respect to the spiritual, of finding one's work, of finding some form of earning a livelihood.   Time will tell.

In the meantime, take a look at all the scams that have been perpetuated, in the entertainment industry's sexual harassment pay to play, in the banking scandals of subprime mortgages, in politics, in the age of Big Tech, even the national defense.  Sports, Penn State, gymnastics.  People benefit, in the short term, from such things;  they earn proper livelihoods, and own real estate, unlike the honest hearted amongst us who toil way, paycheck to paycheck, the life of the American worker bee, not clever enough or demanding enough to take from others what is not theirs.

Forgive us our trespasses, the old saying goes.  Before waking we all have the potential to trespass, as a matter of learning, of growing up.  Hard to avoid.    And yet, we learn, and we forgive, knowing ourselves, our own hearts...  And when you see someone taking candy from a baby, you know, it isn't right, not at all.

To participate in writing, in words, in letters, costs nothing, nothing but the time put into it.  Nor is there naturally any charge associated to it, except for the fashions, and respect for the "ink stained wretch.."

rough drafts winter

Can one be a Christian (judeo-christian-muslim?), and still a bartender?

The physical effort is wasted.  Too much a depletion of energies, too little given.  A farce? gets too tiring, tiresome.  Can't be done without excess.  Where does it leave you?  That's why they call it work, I guess, giving up too much for way too little.  And yet, with its rewards, unquantifiable as they may be.  Friends, intimate knowledge, trust, respect...

DC, a spiritual place?  Too cold.  Calculating.  Too rational.  Too striving.  Mental habits, the opposite of the Christian message.


Writing is never a picnic, never a joy, never a thing to look forward to, never a thing of happiness.  Rather, more like a cataloging of the things that are not satisfactory.

There is wine to ameliorate the process.  There are naps, to alleviate the burden.  But there is never any happiness.

I'd have to look back on the events of the book I wrote, and the only interpretation I can put upon them, is to see a sort of spirituality going on.  A kind of Christian thing.  That's the only positive interpretation, and the way a most respected person interpreted its text.

Perhaps, you don't really want to apply the fundamentals of Christianity toward college dating, unfortunately.  That just makes you too good, too good to get that which you really want.  To be a success would from a romantic point of view be a complete failure as a Christian one, almost?  No, and yes.

As an adult, it would seem the victory of said Christian values would be incomprehensible, and remain so, almost particularly so by the light of the city, the need for financial prosperity to do everything successfully, like find a mate, provide for children, own property, to run a business for profit.  You have to see the provincial values a having efficacy.

But you have to give up on the attempt in order to gain.  You have to cease understanding, and take the leap of faith.  You have to change from rejecting your own values, from thinking them a failure, to change the light into seeing a success, in broader terms, less individual.  And for this you have to enter a strange territory, rather like that of being barely employed.

That you should or could at times feel so down, so lost, well, that's probably a good sign, as far as the holding on to the deeper values.  Values can never be quick and easy;  they can never be trite, nor easily unpacked, or loosely held onto with ease and worldly logic.

Values come like the breeze, the hillsides, the streams in the countryside, the weather you always knew, the familiarity of boyhood home.  (You wonder if city people, the successful, really can have any grasp of it in their daily focus, an even deeper mystery to them, obscured by the noise, the doings, the comings and goings.)

And Jesus is not necessarily in social work.  Nothing, really can he be, in the worldly way common to us. A Christian can only really spy in on the world as it is.   You have your gut instincts and that's about all.  It's all on a deeper level, of instinct and intuition and unknown sense.

Do you have to sell commercials, in this day and age, to broadcast the public television of the true life?  I mean, no wonder you can't find that occupation, there neatly in the book that lists all professions and job titles.  There is no concrete directional thing to bring up in the therapist's office;  it is all an art, inexplicable, a truth for artists and teachers more than professionals and corporate types.

It became clearer, my work, I suppose.  It was not, conventionally, to be a barman.  To offer up, conventionally, spirits, the cocktail, the fun and games, that would have be a lessening of the holy spirit, of the spirit of serving humanity, a serious business.  My work was not at all about being a barman, though it sort of worked.  That was the closest thing I could see as far as a way in the worldly place the city.  I hid what I did, under the guise, even to myself.

Nor did this impulse really have much to do with writing, such as it is, as it is conventionally known, of conventional successes, divided down into specific genres.  Except that there are, and will always be, words to wrestle with, ways to consider deeper reality, not just simply explain some narrative, fictional or otherwise.

And there is always that great frustration.  That matter of a job that pays the rent.   You must know the crucifying agony of uncertainty, the crucifying quality of life in the city, and one must suppose that this is what makes one able to belong to whatever might be described as the church.

Is it party of the cosmic comic nature of the Holy Spirit that the story of a college love story would speak to it as well.

And it would take a long time, a lot of sleep, for anyone, to leave the boundaries of the common understanding, to enter back into the spiritual realm, where such things are values, moreso than the usual self-protections...

But if you gain, finally, some self understanding, some acceptance of that which is not the slightest bit of the worldly logic, even if it took far too long, brought much aging and even mortality about loved ones, upon one's own body and teeth, was full of aches and pains and great periods of being absolutely lost...  than it is worth it, and the writer, an user of words, is in a good a place as any.


Christianity will always emerge from the pagan world.  That is its contrast, its beneficent but incomplete background, unaware of the higher reality.  From the Celts came the great monasteries to save the Christian faith.

Like solstice sunlight through Stonehenge pillar, the higher understanding of Christianity shines through the pagan world too briefly, with more a need to grasp, to maintain, to hold onto, to incorporate, in a way the pagan world, beneficent as it is, cannot pull off with all its distractions of survival.

With a guitar in your hands, and a song, you become a different man.  Transformed.  The greatly indefinable quality of Christianity in your presence.

From hereon, the writing drifts into wine-related sentimentality...

It makes it easier to know what you are doing, by knowing what you are not about as far as what you are doing.

Still, a mystery...


Saturday night, the dead of winter.    One needs the quiet.  One doesn't even wish for happiness, but just a quiet reflective time, peace, a freedom from the light entertainment that is selling sex like a commercial.  Better to watch CNN, Finding Jesus, Fact, Forgery, Fiction, which at least has a scholarly vibe to keep that part of the curious brain engaged.

You'll need the downtime, if you don't have the money to go out on the town for dinner.  You need the supplies at hand, and the time alone to pick things up around the house after the holidays.

Unhappiness is just something you have to deal with on a regular basis.  Just seems like all the people out there are up to stupid things, and anyway...  stuff to do...

The nine-top for the back room has not arrived yet, but for one.  A customer who has become a good friend is bringing project members by;  it maybe business related to defense contracting, which I can rant about on a given day, but over the years here at the Old Gaul, a deep and sincere friendship has arisen between us.  One, a large man, has come to the bar, preferring to my pleasure, the Cahors wine to the Argentine Malbec.  I talk to him about the menu, as local good friends meet for a chat, coming from nearby.  He spends his week working in DC, goes back to Florida on weekends.

I smelled a storm coming getting to work, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist when it's Jazz Night at the old Dying Gaul, to smell a storm brewing.  And by the end of it, I will be hurting, in need of wine, and sustenance, and friendship, and the zombie-sleep of drunkards when it's all over, waking enough to pee, and get another glass of water, to turn over a few times, remember a strange dream or two, but not enough of a wish to get up out of bed.

Earlier, I muttered to my friend, who will work alongside me, about Jazz Night.  "Yeah, the holidays, stressful.  I'm taking my Vitamin D..."  I tell him.  "Ted, you need to give out some Vitamin D," and I chuckle with good humor, and shrug, "yeah, you're right.  Sorry," I say.  That's probably what the whole entire front of the house staff probably thinks, seeing my depressed face come into work to set-up, often alone, with enough to do, needing a bit more help.  But then, that is the ritual that has always worked for me, the physical sorting out, the putting things together in their place for the crucial set-up, everything ready to go, 5:30 sharp, a lime to cut, fresh lemon twists ready to go, mineral water chilled, wines cold in their ice buckets.  Often left alone to do all this and to greet the first customers, which is fine and good.

A familiar face comes in, up the stairs, and she needs a table, for her and her husband, and I show her back to the four top table by the back window, and she is pleased.  The kids have now grown up a bit, away at college.  She is from Chicago, good taste, down to earth, polite, expecting good manners, but with a good enough sense of humor and a genuine care for fellow humanity.  The family would come in on Sunday nights, and I'd take care of them, and at one point she mentioned to me a weekly meeting group for the spiritual minded up at the National Cathedral, which I never made it to.

I ask her if she still goes, and she asks me if I'm still writing.  Yeah, I go see my therapist, and then I write, I say, implying some vague connection.  And then she makes clear, there needs to be a relationship with Jesus in all such matters.  "It wouldn't be faith if it were not tested," she tells me as we wait for her husband to arrive.  And I could get rid of the therapist, the Lexapro, and the Zen Buddhism, and consider deeply the words of the Gospels.  Church is okay, but too much based on the letters of Paul, which are not quite the same as what Jesus as recorded, she tells me.  Getting Jesus directly, as God is pleased in him, is the thing.  She emphasizes, again, the actual words of Jesus Christ, mentioning the Lord's Prayer.  I can say, sincerely, that I say it every day, at least once, and that I thought Pope Francis's attention recently to the "lead us not into temptation" part worth mentioning.   The real God would not lead us into temptation, she tells me.  It's just that we are weak, and I feel a bit guilty about this, must say, as I am now feeling awkward of my having mentioned D.T. Suzuki and The Training of the Zen Monk, embarrassing, as well as the mention of therapy, and so forth.  I do tell her, that yes, after my session, I'd go catch the Twelve Oh Five over there at St. Matthews, which I am proud of.  Yes, we are weak.  Boy, we are weak, and I feel responsible, or rather, irresponsible, for tempting people and making them weaker and less disciplined than they might be otherwise.

(On the other end, it might be said, that providing a place where people might talk freely, supported, is a good thing, in these terms of Christian life.  Who knows?)

Well, the night gets busy.  Very busy.  Very very busy.  Cocktails for my friend's table, French 75s, Tango Mango (without the mango), Last Word cocktail, at the time of the first hits of the rush, soon people lined up for space...  Regulars arrive, without reservations, and it takes a hustle to find them space and get them started out.


The night draws to a close with my friend coming up the bar, and I pour him a port, and a bit of wine for me, as would only be expected.  We go out for a drink, at not the holiest of places, for some "fun and dancing girls."  He'd been my friend for years before I told him I wrote a book, which he identified with very much.  There are similarities of experience, college days.

And so I sleep in.  Tired out anyway, from the party on Saturday for fifty, from the ropes of Sunday night by myself, from the staff luncheon at Fogo De Chao, from Tuesday night wine tasting, making it interesting for the regulars, and finally, the unstopping steam-roller cluster-screw of Jazz Night.

I've been a Buddhist, sort of, I've meditated, over chakras, I've read up on Zen, but perhaps in the end you need Jesus, your faith being tested.  How do you follow better?  How do you act better, in accordance with what the good quiet woman told me, at this vulnerable time of year, when another whole year of the grind dawns on you.  How do you become a better person, able to get up at a decent hour and bring goodness to the world, and "what am I doing now anyway..."

How do you get less chewed up by work, to put more time and energy into being a real true Christian, real and true?  And I'm not the only one in the restaurant business to walk that line.  To bear the serving of people, the personal torture than often resolves itself in becoming Born Again, and that sort of thing.  Seen it more than once.


When you drink, I suppose, even if you don't drink more than the allotted three glasses of wine in two hours with food, even then, it's hard to make decisions.  It's hard to break out of the rut.  Add on top of that, the prohibitive hours, hours prohibitive of doing something normal people would do.  You start to feel kinda like you're not good Christian folk...