You have to be, how to say this, relaxed as a writer. Because you're going to find yourself thinking some strange ideas. Spooky ideas, maybe. Spooky, but not quite in the sense of Steven King, whose seriousness toward his work leads him rightly to his own sense of spookiness and appropriate horror infliction.

It is, as we know, not so easy to be relaxed. Stuff to worry about. Guilt, maybe. Thoughts of the lack of retirement plan. Memorial Day Weekend comes along; you take what you can get.

There is perhaps a small opening of the doorway to the unconscious that happens in a public house, in a restaurant bar. People let down their guard at the end of the day, they have a glass of wine, they start to talk, they listen to Miles Davis. The barman waits on them, facilitates matters, makes people comfortable. The setting makes people feel welcome, like it is their place, where their names are known, where the conversations build upon previous ones, remembered, along with new stories. It is what it is. It is not the library of the philosopher king, it is not the place of dialog at Socratic levels, it is not The White House nor the IMF, nor is it 30 Rock, maybe thankfully so. Else where would one escape the rational heavy lifting that goes on.

And there, in the back of minds, minds that wander forward, perhaps there is an entertainment of ideas beyond the norm.

How does the world, in the broadest sense, operate? For some, the answer to that question is an interesting one, that makes a certain amount of sense: There is a certain appropriateness to the way things are, based upon something we might term karma; There is a reason behind, say, the people who are our parents, uniquely gifted to raise just such a soul as you with a certain set of talents. There is a reason behind the situations we find ourselves in, even in the people we come across, as if we had been through things before with them. Yes, it is all poetic thought, this kind of speculation, but, maybe if you let it, the view makes, as said before, some sense.

All of which might give us a sense of wisdom, a way to find kindness for the people we come across in our lives. Who knows, maybe there is a reason 'why,' why the particular neighbor life on your own little street in the world offered you, that neighbor a source of wisdom and excellent company, whose support one is still reckoning after her passing.

Maybe sometimes the appropriateness takes hold, sometimes it reflects another way and goes off into space. What can you do, but try, hoping to succeed at what feels right.

And so, there we are in a place where we have a chance to see that unconscious stuff come out a bit. Perhaps we can say to ourselves, as we relax there for a moment, 'you know, all this is perfectly appropriate, just so, and isn't it all, in a way, strangely wonderful and fantastic, and really no one need lift much of a muscle, because the right things will happen, if we are kind and simply let them.' (This was not the thinking in Bin Laden's public house years back.)

Lincoln must have been torn. From his own time spent at the mouth of the oracle cave of the great unconscious, he sensed slavery was an evil, legalistically, constitutionally, on top of all its other myriad of horrific evils, as that's what you get courting one evil. Slavery on the one hand, but, come to find out, secession and civil war on the other hand. As if by God's hand, the war came. A vast amount of bloodshed, economic disaster, bitterness everlasting. Maybe it didn't have to be that way.

We try to battle our problems in a so-called logical way. But being unable to control everything, we get lost in mazes of logic, the best and the brightest lost in ever-worsening conundrum. And the Buddha, who knew the perfect appropriateness of everything, taught that war would only lead to more war, and to the conqueror comes the conqueror.

Anyway, back to the spookiness.

I think no less of a MacGowan than I do a Kennedy. The process is the same, maybe with more of a poetic understanding than we'd normally like to admit. Morality is found in inhabiting the stuff of the past. MacGowan inhabits a song about an Australian kid sent off to Galipoli, or of a lost soul of the streets of Soho. A broader understanding than one's own. A process of channeling, which is really, just understanding another day on earth.