You have to fight on several fronts. You work at writing when you can, work a job when you have to. There is also the mental front, finding the morale to keep writing. Occupied so, a social/sexual life becomes, in absentia, your religion, something spiritual, artistic, educational. Yes, the lines of Corinthians about love long suffering speak to the pains and longings and sufferings associated with marital stuff and being alone. No way around it, a basic reality written into existence.

Somehow, innately, you believe a wife, a partner, should appear, become a part of your life, a spiritual helper who takes care of you, your psyche's needs, your physical needs, keeps you in tune, and of course, vice versa.

The Muslim, may be, creates a society, a social order in which there are strict rules aimed at making this marriage happen, as restrictive as it may sound to the great variety of the individuals comprising the human species. In the West, may be, it's some form of economical law, older than Rome, that imposes upon you who you'll marry, how you will behave as a human, your attitude, your rank, what you can get away with, the sort of confidence you'll be allowed.

And where does love, or 'love,' fit in? You remain in your slot, as assigned by social forces, and maybe, hopefully, shining heavenly amorous stuff beams down on your existence, okay with Jesus, okay with Allah. (Maybe Buddha is too ascetic for this sort of thing.) There is the Gnostic too, the thoughts of Samael Aun Weor on the Tantric energy kept in tune through the magic of marital unions. Obviously, there are spiritual grounds for making sexual love a gift of heaven. For the sake of popularity, no religion would want to deny the joy and pleasure of it. A religion must address and make room for the concept of love.

And yet, sometimes it is the case where lovers seem the most impractical creatures, a story often honored in literature, by the way, and often as tragedy. True love versus economic condition, versus strict societal lines, versus authoritarian religious law. Negativity and bad attitudes can arise from within, and bleed out on to innocent selves.

Jesus, one enduring model of love and all it stands for, is crucified through being taken at face value, as an empire, a tyrant, would take any number of minor troublemakers who seem to cause discord and unrest in a colony. "No, forget all your words, your acts, your deep and beautiful sermons and teachings, you are being taken away," the powers of empire say, taking a prophet as a criminal against social order. (A political prisoner often has a deep love to profess and hold, like the Decembrist is a lover of Russia and her people, against the cold face value judgments of a tyrannical Tsar.)

It happens on all levels. You become your job. By face value, you are pretty much just a barman, let's say, stuck in weird hours, isolated often, not so set. We are individuals, very much so, but society can wield a force deeply judgmental, so much that it may even condemn itself and its own, as happens in a World War One. Yes, Lincoln was right. The modern battlefield is full of meaning, far beyond whatever Nationalist terms that might be said, extending completely and fully to the heart. Those who love life die by the dozens.

You get older in the meantime, and maybe you feel less energy to fight, to fight the stereotype imposed upon you (as you go about doing God's work.) The job exhausts, leaves whole days you wish not to move.

Shakespeare wrote about this stuff, the heart that knows a lovely truth but encounters the lies and selfish manipulations of the power hungry. And yes, the lady doth protest too much, finding herself torn between very practical offerings of safety and that which could be, could be, the real stuff.

They beat Christ, they mocked him, even as he loved and turned the other cheek. He carried his cross without much of a word, and he may well have wondered, 'why? what crime have I committed?' If he had somehow lived, what might his attitude have been like? He may well have gone into some form of seclusion, tolerating, every now and then, time with trusted friends, but kept himself obscure, disguised almost, shaken from nerves at remembrance of the whole thing.

Dostoevsky had the grounds for epilepsy by the time they let him out. But, for a creative man, creative seeds were planted, the clay for Karamazov, once he'd written out his experience of prison and madness. More grist for the mill, the Universe cooperating with a creative soul, nudging him on toward the big topics at the root of all. A house divided against itself cannot stand, but undivided, strangely, it's pretty darn stable and can handle a lot thrown at it.


I wonder this is one of the worst things I've written.

Money, lastly, in this jumbled piece, I've forgotten to include, can be the same as vanity. Some people perform plastic surgery on their money, and maybe it grows. Jesus was right, and poetic, with that line, 'render unto Caesar the things...' The age has proven it. To the benefit of the vain, to the detriment of the retiree who ably served society all his life, to the devastation of pensions... robbery, really. Knowingly, it was vanity that led to where we are. And, as we still love our own vanity, we still have Wall Street pulling the same crap, which puts pressure on American companies so that they must go overseas, and basically leaving a lot of victims in its wake. Madoff, well, he's just an example, and you can blame him no more than anyone else who participates in the vanity of money.

It's six am. I managed to go out and get some groceries done. I took a nap after dinner, one hard to wake up from, and now it's a weird hour again. One a barman is familiar with, a time for thinking about the absence of a rosy future a lot of people in the world have, not just America.