Monday.  Start by making a pot of tea.  "What should I be doing with myself..."  You've lounged enough on the couch.  You'd gone out for a walk in the night, heard the murmurs of frogs in the muck, a sound you hadn't heard before, coming as it does up through the fog.


Sunday, a friend wants to check in with you, meeting you for a walk, just as it starts to drizzle.


We get out to the little mowed meadow above the river.  The grass is wet, sparse, muddy in places.  "It's nice up here," she says.

We go on a few more paces. "Well, I read your book."  She'd wanted to take me out for a dinner and wine, her bartender, for his birthday, belatedly, just before the whole Coronavirus Pandemic blew up.  I'd mentioned it, or someone at the bar had, one jazz night, she'd asked about it, so when I went I brought along a copy.

She observes the autobiographical nature of it.  "So, here's this nice guy, spiritual, kind...  but why does he get so smitten with this girl who's just terrible to him, who's an awful human being... I don't get it.  Why does he persist?"



"Yes, I went to therapy for that," I tell my friend.  "'She treated you like a low-life...'" my therapist said, I tell my friend, who has long been a good collector of wines, Bordeaux, not to cellar, but to enjoy, before they turn and oxidize.  We go back to talking about old wine shops, the characters at the Mayflower, which sat down near the intersection of M Street and New Hampshire Avenue.  There was a parking garage below, and the wine buyer guys had a rock band that played there sometimes.  This was back in the 80s...

"Anyway, beyond her being a Helen of Troy, I don't see any reason why such a smart person--you're more sophisticated than a country bumpkin--would spend another thought on her..."

I can't argue with my friend.  Yes, it was a big old waste.  And on top of that, I have to agree with her, I was a goof-off my senior year...  yeah.

Basically, yes, writing that book was a useless endeavor, beyond the mere literary practice of it, a younger person making a study of how books end up written, by blind inch by inch, memories, that sort of thing, a transcription of a mood, even then, barely remembered, thus becoming, essentially, fiction.  Unless it were to serve as some sort of confession, otherwise it's largely useless, and perhaps those confessions are in order sometimes, unconsciously at least.

The path is muddy, the sky, overcast.  The sprinkle of showers have stopped.  My friend's loafers are wet, but she says its not a problem.  What are we doing here anyway, I might wonder, today.  At ten o'clock at night, over the bar, after the jazz show, fine, we're all having some wine, this is the protocol we are used to, but now, us, the paths, people walking dogs, trees budding, the reservoirs, cyclists passing by, different levels of athletic seriousness...

It's painful to think about.  Painful to think a lot on a lot of things right now.  "The bum you became...  for what...  All transcribed with journalistic accuracy," I think to myself.   A conversation to match the mood, the damp sky and all the world thrown up to uncertainty, and with me finding myself up a little too early, having stayed up too late playing an old guitar on Facebook Live...  and not much direction to go in, now.  And not even wanting to read my little collection of spiritual sorts of books, as if they too would lie to me.  Wine that numbs the pain and insulates against the isolation, not feeling so hot the next day, in the morning.


It's always hard to talk about art, particularly the art for which you yourself are responsible for.  No fun at all.  People view your work through their own experience, their own prism, their own value systems, their sex, their perceptions, their sense of self, all of that...  They read what they will into things.  I've had many different reactions from readership of the general, friends I know.  And like myself, most people don't want to touch it, but to make some admission that it is a work of a writer of some kind of skill.


And the next day, waking alone, as always, it's again hard for me not to see myself as a bum, who has made no contribution to society, not done much of anything helpful.  During our walk, as we come back up Elliot Place there by the reservoir, my friend tells me to not be down on myself.  I know you're not going to take this to heart, but you're not a fuck-up.  "In Europe, being a professional like you are at what you do is a very respected occupation."  Oh, yes, I know.  Thank you for reminding me, I say.

(And it does all boil down to what you do as a job, how you earn money.  All the rest hidden, not called into effect and effectiveness...  For which I've not set myself up for well, so it does seem.)



The night before, after the day of the walk with my friend, remembering my yoga, I watch The Seven Samurai.  I'd mentioned it to her and she laughed.  After a long Sabbath celebration, she and her family tried to watch it, but found it impossible.  But I find it entertaining, at least in all its detail, and in the scenes, and the characters too.  I make it on from the gathering of the samurai, to the arrival at the village.  On to part two, the preparation of the little village with its running streams ever-trickling in the background, steep wooded mountains around, interesting old huts and fences, little foot bridges, the old mill, and I watch, on to the commencement of the battle.  It takes my mind away.  I have some wine.  Then I go out for a walk.  Coming upon the strange light from the fog, the trees hanging there in the air visible.  There's a strange light behind the Urban Ecology Center, as if a UFO landed.  No one out at 2:30 AM on an early Monday morning, still dark out.  The houses are asleep.

Down in the canal below, as the trees stand starkly enshrouded in mist, in the warm air, a mysterious sound, faint, but carried through lengthwise down there.  It's a sound like I heard Tibetan Buddhist monks chant once at Amherst.  Or like a contented cat, knowing it's about to be fed her breakfast.  The sound has the element of a comic cartoon spring, sort of like the vibrations of a  Jew's Harp.  The old bullfrogs are waking from the muck, carrying along their song of deep night.



But this is, with all that's going on now, a Dark Night of the Soul.  And any endeavor. any emotional pull will have along with it a dark side.  You'd like it to be all peaches and cream with the pretty girl, but it doesn't work out that way, in fact serving as a welcome mat to a long dark painful place, a place one should be honest about.

Darkness, once it comes, and it comes naturally, is already within us anyway, comes to stay.  You don't get rid of it, at least easily.  You can only transmute it.  Which is perhaps why I took years of time and effort to write out a somber book with Polish and Irish touches.

And then it became very hard to write.

I drove up on a Friday, the first week, picking up the rental car as rumors flew about a Presidential Act calling in the National Guard to close down interstate travel.  I'm in an Uber.  I check the web, a rumor, proven to be false.  All the rest stops on Pennsylvania closed, an eery silence on the roads.  In Ravine, where I stop, just as the road climbs into the mountains, I use the restroom.  Not even any appetite for a Whopper, a double, sandwich only.  A trucker man reaches out to me as I look at the Burger King counter.  Through the big notch, four hours in, on time.  At Great Bend, I pull off the road to use the restroom of a convenience market gas station, and they've got Portopotties lined up outside.


On Thursday, I drove back, leaving at 4:30 PM, hard to part with my old mom, wondering whether or not I'd brought the Coronavirus to her doorstep.  I also felt I needed to get back, to process the mail related to the unemployment benefits.  My head turned over many thoughts, almost all of them dark, and the only hopeful thing I saw was that perhaps I'd gotten her back on track with her medicine, the one for her memory.

I pulled into DC around midnight.  I unpacked the car, pulling out the opened bottle of ten dollar Chianti from the night before, eventually falling into an uneasy rest and finally, sleep.  Then a very anxious day, worrying my head over whether mom was displaying any symptoms, wondering if it might be better to keep the rental car just in case.  She mentioned being sore.

Up at mom's, a coworker had called me to tell me that she might have been exposed, since meeting a doctor friend of hers who had been exposed.  Great...  Calling her later, trying to make my mind up for a next step, what to do, her ache was only in her shoulder, a slight relief.


I also had a job interview lined up, and summoning my courage I drove the rental black Toyota down and across Key Bridge and onto Wilson Boulevard to slowly make my way through what I knew as familiar, until it wasn't familiar anymore, coming upon my destination, Total Wine, a retail shop occupying the first floor of the modern recently constructed office building, circling the block, figuring out the parking, guiltily calling my mom again.  I went in for my interview, early.  The young woman, tall, was kind to me, easy going.  They weren't offering much, a cashier position, to meet the current business model of on-line and curbside.  With social distancing, there wasn't to be any real wine recommendations happening.

I found a convenient Enterprise car rental office to drop off the car, and near the Ballston Metro, I caught a Metro bus back along the line into town, back to the DC side of the river, from where I could shuffle home.  The bus took many turns that confused me.  I lose my direction in Virginia.  There are, on the other hand, a good amount of conveniences, but anyway, I slogged back up the old hill, the same one I'd stared at when I first came to town in 1988, made it to the friendly little Korean market for some cold cuts, 70 percent rubbing alcohol, a small container of tuna salad, a bottle of soda water, walking back slowly to the little apartment, with khakis, blue blazer...  Why haven't I gone to more job interviews, to better myself, my station.

Later, I went and did some yoga at dusk up on the little bluff, relieving the pressure from my visit.  Is she more forgetful, more repetitive, harder to deal with in general?


I look at the jobs I seem eligible for.  Not pretty, it is.

Mom, over dinner, asks me, so what are you working on.  So I begin with a few sketches.  I talk of how Kerouac, in putting up with the Neal Cassady people of the world, was effectively being a good Christian.  She likes this, but then her mind turns.  "You need to find something solid.  You need to make something happen."  She starts crying.  "I've done you a great disservice," she says, sobbing out front of the apartment.   "I could kill myself."  I try to reassure her that I'll make something happen, to save myself, effectively.

Eventually, the conversation is forgotten, swept away by the next day, the next long ride somewhere, to the shores of the great lake, Ontario, here.  In the wine that is essential with lunch and dinner, even for me, maybe particularly so.

Over dinner, again, a conversation comes up.  "I've been telling you for thirty years to believe in Ted, to think good thoughts.  Who knows what you could do?  You could promote all the bands you know, up here in Oswego," and again, I turn away from the conversation, feeling a sadness deep down.

What happened to me?  I reflect on the Sondheim Fresh Air Birthday interview, how, again, I could have studied acting, and singing too, and been a song and dance man.  But I got depressed that year, late 1986, and my inability to write papers had been building, falling into some childish juvenile spiritual ideas, of how things happen in accordance with great unknown and unseen laws divinely and fatefully ordained, in a way of being appropriate.  So, no, I didn't get the girl, all my talents did not be put to use, the musical ones, the ones that come out of being reasonably attractive or even good looking almost like a minor movie star...  I did not become a college professor, nor even a high school teacher.  And instead, so it seems, I've greatly failed, and can't even take care of my old mother now, let alone even myself.

Such are the things of talent, talents squandered.  I've tried to read wise books, to the extent I have the energy for.

And all of it has led me to where I am now.   Waiting on unemployment.

"You never ask for help," mom's voice, echoes in my head.

Yes, the dark thoughts.  And what do you do with them, you push them away, and move onward.

Writing is just like yoga.  Once you get the hang of it, a few poses, the basic vocabulary to expand from in variation, it's a matter of you going and doing it, alone, at your own pace, you, your body, the wisdom of your body, the drama of bringing muscles and bone into a pose.


I liked restaurant people.  They were people you could always talk to, who always said hi to you, who would not dismiss what you were going through, if you were to share it with them, beyond the communal burdens shared.  They would be the ones to get it.

I, for a long long time, have been telling people, quietly, not upfront, or loudly, how hard the job of being a barman was, once you added it all up, the collateral damage, the hours, the strain, the way you felt the next day, mind awake, body unwilling, the constant strain of talking to people, even when they were friends.  I was a good bartender because I knew, if I was going through so much, then I would treat them gently, not speak out of turn too much.  A talky bartender, self-focussed, is irritating.  We are all guilty of it, I'm sure, but practice restraint.  If they ask you how things are going, and you go, "Oh, my old mom, she calls a lot..."  they get it.

I didn't even get it myself, 'til I was, against my wishes and will, laid off, to the extenuating circumstances of the Covid-19.

I found daylight.  I found energy, peace of mind.

I took my usual walk along the river bluff and the trees and the grass, and no, I wasn't a misanthrope for wanting to do so, but rather it was my own natural rhythm.

I read pieces of my own writing I'd not had any time to handle even.  Freedom.

It was no joke, but rather insightful, whenever people asked me about how my writing was going and I were to mention Cervantes, his years of being kidnapped, debtors prison...  or Dostoevsky and his Siberian exile...  The fancy folk with bankroll, they wouldn't listen to long or deep to that, a subtle very polite, oh, look boy, just be quiet and do your job, if you're not going to become an actor or something more obviously useful to me in a way I don't feel guilty about...

I exaggerate.  But those were the pains.  You cannot dismiss them.  I've lived through them, so far.  It's not my own fault, nor my habits, that the job was rough that way, in all ways.  A real damper on life.

The thing about life is that it is--what's the right word--oddly ideal.  Appropriate.   Events in life bear a match to the soul of the individual.

In this regard, at least, all people, have an intelligence, equal.  It is not always easy to see this.

And for such reasons, the narratives arts, just so, are rewarding.  In and of their own reasons.  You can at least, perhaps without even knowing it, ask the right questions.  No one will tell you whether you are doing so or not;  on this you are alone, unless I suppose you consider the best of analysts of the psychological realm, or the better sources, original, of the spiritual wisdom that has trickled down so for to the species in the last, oh, 10,000 years, perhaps, who is counting but your own little mind anyway.  A freak just like the rest of them.

Who is to say who is wiser, the chef, the bus driver, the old construction guy you talked to yesterday?  Your own conscious mind, the part you have to meditate over to clear, who can call you bad names, grifter, wino, bum, sinner, man-without-a-plan, even if no one else does.   What are you doing with yourself, anyway, you constantly ask yourself.  And any break in life's labors, in a job, invite the other voices to come over you, and it's bad enough anyway, I suppose, for those who drift, artistically minded, believing in the deeper pervasive wisdom of the Universe and God that runs through everything, but which is by nature undefinable...

The weather changes.  One needs to get out for a walk.




First day of Spring.  All of a sudden, it's getting warmer.  I'm doing laundry, preparing for the trip to see my old mom for her birthday, coming up Monday, today is Thursday.  I step out on the little patio to get some sunlight and check on the weather.  It is indeed different out, the little trees budding out their leaf, and while the sky is opaque, there is light in it.

Looking up at the old Elm tree by the sidewalk in front of the steps, I see a Blackhawk helicopter, pushing its way westward, upstream.  You see it flying with its nose down, tail slightly up, and side doors open, I think, but it strikes me as looking like a glum bird, depressed by its automaton drill or mission.  Yeah, what can you do...  Crazy times, uncertain times.  What will happen to all my stuff, and to me, even.  I look at jobs, create a resume on one of those on-line sites, Indeed, but who am I trying to offer myself to, to sell my credentials to anyway?  The Amazon job, the Whole Foods personal shopper?  Safeway?

It occurs to me I like those who work in grocery stores.  Maybe that's a job.  But I have to go see my mom first.  Whether technically a good idea or not, it seems good, spiritually.



So I put on sweatpants, sweatshirt, head down to the bluff while the sun is up still.  And again with the yoga, no mat, bare feet on the grass.  The slow intimate stretches, each with their drama, commence with patience and the slowest of moment. The sun is the, above the gray forested ridge one cannot see beyond, and still bare, faint brushstrokes of wispy minimalist buds.  Beyond the pond-green river’s flat surface I can make out people using the trails.  Honeysuckle.  Mountain pose, sun salutation, easy Wai Lana yoga, shoulders spreading, reaching...  Plow, headstand, pigeon again, headstand and then pulling myself into a full lotus I’m able to hold and chakras aligning with each breath.  I note that the hillock I’m on is almost even with the banks of the reservoir to the west.   John F. Kennedy enjoyed the view downstream on the other side of the great river.

There is a heightened sense of the three-dimensionality of the natural world, the trees closer, the ones further, and all in fresh vividness.  The ground is somewhat muddy in spots.  I smell again the wild garlic shoots, and observe from up close the variety of ground cover, from soft rosemary seaweed like shoots, the great varieties of clover-like things and all the grasses.

I think of Jack Kerouac, his elusive moments of elusive epiphanies, and he, the old star athlete, who could still run at a very good clip, even his later years of too many bats, he would have gotten all of yoga, as he got the headstand and how good it was for body and for mind and spirit too.

The job, I observed, had me cowed.   Physically.  The women I worked with were, had to be, strong people, strong minded, strong physically.   And sometimes it felt like to me, and this is part of my psychology, they had me in a corner, out of which I had to apologetically go about the business of getting my job done, accepting their attitude and opinions, a sort of just shut up and do your job and get through it.  And then when after they had gone home and I was closing, some relief from the bosses.


And so without it, in this uncertain break of the pandemic outbreak, I got to know my body again.  And when I went to bed, then was awake early, I would be able to get up out of bed, at 6 AM.  And again, as I might have once been able to do, I was able to just sit down and write, letting things sort themselves out.

I was back doing yoga, outdoors, a necessary back-drop of inspiration on some organic level I both could and could not, on a deeper level, explain.  The yoga was sore and slow.  And I wondered, as I groaned my way through the old poses, "what have I done to my body over the winter?" feeling ashamed of myself.  Yes, maybe there had been some stresses taken up and in, internalized.  My left shoulder, tight.  My belly, in the way.

Doing yoga helps you control your appetites.  It aids you in seeking what to do with yourself as the world swirls around you, as you seek a quiet place, to take it day by day, not hurting yourself nor anyone else.

The whole city, it seemed to me sometimes, was full of domineering types, people of logic who had found it necessary to shut themselves, to compartmentalize, to put themselves, as we must, separate from others.  Which made them not very conversational.  There were of course the people of the proverbial other side of town, service people, like the ones waiting out there on the same bus line as I, in their hospital blues, their crossing guard jacket and pants, security guards.   And there I was, in the middle.  Like my mom, able, and fond of starting up conversation wherever possible and potentially friendly.

I'm waiting for the bus and an older local gentleman in dusty blue, reflective vest, hardhat, boots, ambles by, returning back up the sidewalk with carry-out soup.  I'm trying to get into work, as the boss has asked me to come, to write some copy describing the different dishes, to promote the new delivery and carry-out trade.  "Nice day," the older gentleman offers, walking by slowly.  "Yeah, I'm a bartender, laid off, nice to see the daylight actually."  And he stops.  "Oh, yeah, I was too," he says.  Mm-hmm.  "I was an owner, of a club."  "Oh, man."  "Yeah, co-owner, for years...  a club.  We had four floors...  I got tore-up every night."  "It's hard not to," I nod, smiling, having found another soul on a hard day, not as sunny as the day before.  I ask him where he's working.  "I'm up at the corner." He's a quiet man.  He speaks slowly, formulating, putting his words together.    "I got to work.   Old man, have to."  "Yeah, you'd probably go nuts not working," I say.  "Good day to you," my new friend says, walking quietly, steadily away.  "Oh, are the busses running today," I say, frustrated with waiting, when already I could have simply walked and been there already.  Is it a Saturday metro bus schedule?  "Yeah, they've been running, all day."  "Thanks."

I get back to the apartment, feeling a bit depressed.  I'll be happy with my little blurbs and subtle polite tweaks of copy describing crusty boneless pig's feet, braised veal cheeks, salmon in potato crust, and other dishes, and how The Dying Gaul, after twenty-six plus years on Wisconsin Avenue, in the perfect neighborhood for it, is now on Instagram, as well as Facebook.  I'd walked back, talking to my aunt, and as soon as I got in, eyeing the couch for a little nap before the next effort, Mom calls again, again a little confused, "Eh, I'm not doing so well..."  But I'm gentle with her, as I putz in the kitchen, getting some hot water going again for an herbal tea, Moringa, or Dandelion Root, perhaps.  I patiently hear her out.  Maybe she's not been perfect about taking her vitamins and her little pill.  I feel I really should go visit her, though I know I should be looking for a job as well, and earlier in the day have gone through several websites, with new log-ins and passwords, and data-entry, and even a test, taken on my smartphone that determined I would not be good at grocery shelf stocking, a story I tell her, getting a chuckle out of her.  I've never even had a resume.  Shame on me.  I try to rectify this.  I have been very lazy, quite lazy about all this.   It's just that some of us don't always know what we are to do, what we need to do, what we should be doing, in the course of a day, and with a large enough of a psychological fault-line, that we think we might occupy ourselves fruitfully doing something completely on our own, like this, like writing, like "being a poet." Etc.


Well, it's overcast, rain will come later, and not particularly warm out, not in the friendly way it was yesterday, but I have a hooded SUNY OSWEGO sweatshirt on, Adidas track pants, and I don't even need a yoga mat anymore, I'm just going to go up on the bluff and do my yoga, and hopefully at least a headstand.  The workout of yesterday evening's yoga out in the late light of afternoon, a soft green day, with golden light in the clouds breaking through, and people out walking in couples and with dogs, some ambling in a jog along the old grassy trail that once was the streetcar trolley line out to Glen Echo, is still tight and sore in my muscles and joints and ligaments and all that.  I make a little joke to myself as I groan, straining at the weight of holding my arms at straight--remember when you were a kid and could run around so easily with arms outstretched pretending to swoop like a bird? well, it ain't so easy now, at least, at the beginning of the uncertain season--that I can call his "oh fuck this hurts" yoga.  It's very slow anyway.  I'm groaning away, and then it's mom on the phone again, but it's easier to reassure her this time, "you're okay, you're in the right place, there's wine there, things will be okay..."  We have another chuckle over something.  She's feeling pushed around.  Yes, we all feel that way, those of us low on the totem pole, with all the strain of uncertainty on everyone's minds, sure.  And I get now, how hard it is indeed to put words together, when there are so many in one's head to begin with...

Eventually it starts to sprinkle.  The fabric of my workout pants is too slippery for my foot to be planted on the inside of the opposite thigh under the crotch, sliding away each time, and unlike yesterday, having accomplished reasonably auspicious tree poses, it's not happening today, as I stand again barefoot on the clover chive grass looking down at the Gettysburg Battle Tree like trees, with the green murky river sinking into its own quiet mood, and the planes keep coming, as if on an invisible string extending all the way out west, with their landing gear down, going in my perspective so slowly that I'm reminded of a child playing with little toy car, rolling it along, just so.  Ah me...

I'm in lotus pose, the early in the season version, and I pull the warm hood over my head, and indeed I am a pretty good monk these days.

It's colder now, and dark enough now to appreciate the light of the street lamps.  The funny little friendly Jack Russel is sitting up in the window of a newly renovated house, and I limp along, all my connection muscles feeling pretty tight and pulled away from their usual lazy habits, and it takes some effort to walk the two blocks back to the avenue, then across the street, and reaching into my pouch pocket beneath my rain shell, to get my keys out.

I'm about to figure out a quiet bite to eat for dinner after all that,and from speaking to the boss as he hungrily ate his plate of rice, mushroom and spinach in the quiet of the backroom with the lights off, and as I relax some, the next apartment has a bass thumping going on.  I pour a glass of wine, and I get out the guitar, and I'm beginning to wonder, that perhaps glasses of wine put is into such a foreign place, that we exaggerate in our minds our own talents, even as we now are loosened up enough by that wine to woodshed, to go through, like the mockingbird, our little repertoires of song.

And anyway, from listening to all the birds as I settled into an okay I can do this yoga mood over up on the bluff, a robin precisely picking suddenly with beak into the grass just there not even deep, and up the bird pulls a worm, three inches long, and the bird takes it up like a strand of spaghetti, zup, listening to the birds, one hears where language came from.  A bird over on a wire somewhere, sings, "I miss You!" happily, sliding the note up playfully in emphasis.  Like the nice girlfriend I once had.



All the mad wino Shakespearean clown and hero and foil talents the human race thinks it has...  I stay up a bit, playing guitar and practicing my singing, still trying to find my voice, and when I wake, early I wonder, will the neighbor complain to the landlord, I tried to be quiet, I really did.

It's hard to not have a glass of wine, sometimes.  Does it do one any good, in the longer frame of time, or the next day?  Does it make you more efficient--perhaps not, but, a thing sent by God, as a gift from nature, a way of traveling vicariously, well, yes, hard not to, given the pressures on people, you, me, the poor people at their wedding...

So, in the confusion, I get up.  The light is fresh and early still, and I move my body, sore from the first yoga exercise of the year, over to the couch, as I feel depressed again, as one always does, getting up when it might appear he has not done much with his life.  "Oh, I should have persisted, dealt with that acting class;  I always liked reading poems and Shakespeare characters aloud..." he remembers, the instructor playing a game of tag on the first class, putting him out as the scapegoat before everyone, as he didn't want to play tag.

I hit the couch, dozing a little bit more, and then, well, I take in last night's teacups from the coffee table into the kitchen as the water heats in the kettle, transfer the herbal tea brewed in the old teapot into an empty Perrier bottle, set that up for a pot of Dragonwell green tea.  Van Gogh once wrote that he had recipe, how it helped to have a glass of beer and a good piece of bread in the morning to assuage the dark thoughts, the open spaces an artist faces, in solitary uncertainty, but still with that inner drive, "go paint."

Time the tea, now it's made, and oh it tastes good, refreshing to the cellular level of the body.  Life's not easy, when you're shy, no, none of it.  My skin is dry.  Tea in green mug, sprinkle of flax seed, half a teaspoon of Ashwagandha root powered.  In the distance, first the buzzing grass haircutter of the weedwhacker, and then the whirr of the dreaded leaf blower not far away to the east, revving, and an airplane joins in overhead.


"If you didn't work at night all the time, you could have a life.  You could meet your buddies at 5 o'clock, for cocktail hour, you could do a lot of things," she tells me as I walk down the little pasture below the great earth wall of the reservoir in yesterday afternoon's remembered sunlight.  Yes, that would be nice.

When I got back to the apartment, was just about to sit down to write after my impromptu yoga session, Mom called, to check in, and I tell her about my craving to do a headstand after talking with my gentle aunt.  "Was she helpful," Mom asks, a bit dismissively, with her typical jealousy sprinkled in.  "Yes, she was."  "Was I?"  Yes, Mom, of course, you were the most helpful of all, when we talked in the morning, and you told me to take it all in stride and how the silence of retirement kinds of things is actually nice, nothing to be afraid of, a chance for books and thoughts, reading, the world of writings, yes.

And Mom has a strange holiness about her, where all the difficulties of living with her own anxious bright mind have been transmuted into a deeper understanding, an embracing combination of dark and light.  I get her from her, this half-curse

After writing, trying to, to capture the birds and the evening light and the headstand, and the deeper understanding of my attraction to The Seven Samurai, I found the quiet again, in which to cook.  I find a duck breast in the refrigerator, from my effort to shore up life against the madness of the times, to shop in the busy Safeway on Sunday night, after my shift, a little bit tipsy.  I score the fat side with the good chef's knife, lay it down in the old cast iron pan, medium low, the fat renders.  Later with the remnant of the fat in the pan still I break apart a head of broccoli, spread out neatly, and into the oven at 350 until the gentle fresh essence rises, and then I look and the little heads have become bright green and sweaty, ah yes.  And my body is more pleased with the broccoli than with the duck breast.  Hmm.

I have only one glass of wine, maybe a little more, in a begrudging nod to the old ingrained habit, but I don't even have much of a taste for it.  I go back to reading my book, Dark Nights of the Soul, by Thomas Moore, "A Guide To Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals. "  And soon, I'm tired enough to go to bed.


"Cut him out in little stars..."  From the great theater of Shakespeare bids us to wonder about our own being...  how did we come out of little stars, what heavenly fate oversaw our coming into existence, our being, the person we become...

The great actor has not hid his or her talent under the bushel basket.  But some go beyond, beyond the actor's artistic craft, to have something of another claim, the higher craft of comprehending existence in a way that bridges everything, art and science, the reasons for existence, together.  Of course we are shy of doing that, beyond mere hints of representation, often in the form of art.

Being a barman is harder than it looks.  You have to take good care of yourself.  This little break might be helpful indeed.

As the first day of not having a job came into evening, St. Patrick's Day, I come to the little bluff, talking with my aunt with my earbuds in, and then afterward, in need of quiet time to absorb everything, I have a craving for doing a headstand.  How long has it been, I can't remember.  The ground is soft enough, the light coming across the river above the bluff on the other side.  I'm wearing jeans, Merrill hiking shoes.  I try one while still on the phone, but it doesn't get far, and there's the tangle of the wire and the lack of concentration.

So now it's the big moment, can I still do one, and this time I line things up more carefully, the base of the forearms planted so, hands cupped to hold the  back of the crown of the head, then tiptoeing in carefully and closer, the spine almost vertical now, and then after being able to tiptoe hardly any further, pull the thighs in, let the pelvis roll the sacrum backwards, the belly tightens, the knees raise, and then the shins are coming forward as they elevate.  And I can do it again, and the spine straightens out, and then the adjustments, pulling in and upward with the buttocks, and here I am, ready even for a few minutes of it.  A Blackhawk military helicopter skims the grey clouds upside down, below the river now, and below and in the fluff of cloud, the light is shining again with some gold, and the only thing is the little twig that is beginning to dig into my right forearm, which begins to hurt, so I have to pull out of it, feet back to the ground.

I do another one, marvelous.  A ladybug traverses and then up a stalk of chivy grass blade, and this is a good way to look at the world, and maybe particularly when that world has turned upside down.  I can hold this pose a long time, a satisfying feeling.

God, it feels good to be doing the yoga again.  There is clunky soreness in the body, but surprisingly the old pose are remembered well enough, even in street clothes and without a yoga mat.  There's a family with a daughter, tossing the ball around.   I think of Kerouac the fire-watcher, and his fondness for pulling his own headstands, and five minutes too, great for the circulation and the phlebitis he was prone to.  And I can do that five minutes, as well.  I still can, to my surprise.  The child pose, hunching over, is almost more of a strain.

Doing a tree pose before the old mulberry tree near the picnic bench is enlightenment of tree detail and the imparted lesson of tree balance, and somehow despite the soreness I can get the object of these poses, unwinding with them, and I feel like a quiet Zen monk again, flexible, getting strong again, after a great period of winter cold and stress and too much work and too much worry.

Thoughts of The Seven Samurai pass through my mind, and I say to myself, there's a bit of each one of them in each of us.  There's the drunken caricature one, Mifune, there's one in every crowd; and in order to deal with the considerable stress of tending bar where I do, there is some of that in how you get through the night, being a little silly toward the end perhaps, along with the stoic head samurai with the poker face and all the rest, as they are called upon.  Maybe that's a bit of how they see me at work, the boss and the girls who run the place who let me close the place every night.  Oh, he's worth it, I guess they say, lightly shaking their heads while I yortle with customers of late night, and chat with the jazz musicians.


I take of my shoes, and hike up my pants a bit, grassed stained, and pull myself into various other recognizable poses, warrior, headstand, plough, pigeon, the one that's good for your liver, and a few repeats too for good measure.  God, I feel light again, and after all my long battles, and truly lonesome times, I can maybe catch hints of another kind of a life, or, at least, a healthy break from the nightshift routine.

And there's birds.   All kinds, morning doves, of course, two on the phone lines.  A Mockingbird graces upon a tree landing in through the ivy as if coming back onto an aircraft carrier, and then after hidden traipses, comes back out on the brach, silent, in profile as I do my yoga, and then finally, and tentatively, he starts to go through his routine, very quietly, workshopping it, woodshedding it, just like me with the sore left shoulder too tight.  The male cardinal comes with a bright zap of warning.  Another kind of a call and I look up into the tree above me as I walk barefoot across the grass and oh, there it is, a little redhead woodpecker inspecting the layout of his mission.  There are robins hopping along the ground, and up again near the street, a grackle, solitary, small lets go a whistle.  And over in the mulberry's higher branches, one with a high pitched little trombone glissade upward or was it downward also in a whistle, more cheerful, less lonesome, less introspective than the grackle with his pointy feather ends around the neck.  Daffodils still out and by the entrance to the field of the Urban Ecology Center there at Eliot Place.

Earlier on my mental health walk, the crows were chortling and gurgling primitive word calls to each other as they lined up along the trees high above the chainlink fence of the reservoir banks.

God, how nice it is to get up in the morning, have a reasonable day, get out in the sunshine, and then have a time around dusk to go for a stroll, to relax at day's end, as people do, not just heading in to work.

Not bad for someone who was so completely discouraged, by the perpetuity of the difficulties to the job of being the friendly neighborhood barman scapegoat who gets ears filled beyond the brim every evening, one way or another, god, can't you just leave me alone now, when I sit down finally to eat something, you start saying toward the end, when people are warm and fuzzy and of an affectionate quality you would like to have too, or a line cook comes up on Sunday night, a bit tipsy himself.

Ahh, that's why that old film as its resonance, to the old barman samurai, who is now down on his luck, lucky if he can afford some rice...

The nightshift will make you so disgusted with yourself and everything, and in your anxiety for a decent living and survival, you blame yourself, and you look down on yourself, and many forms of unhappy things, fearful of abandoning a post so much that life passes you by in great foolish foolhardiness, and for being taken advantage of, all, the stupid kid thought, many years ago, so he could write.  And his mother cried at that, knowing full well, having watched in her parents.