Well, okay, at the end of the week, you know, trying to keep myself happy, and I suppose suffering through that gap between wanting not to be selfish but still being attached to the world I thought about the expression, 'take up the cross.'  I mean, obviously it had its import back in the day...  But there's a  Buddhist element to it, and in context yes it follows the statement that one must lose himself...  Wouldn't that be great.  We'd not have to worry about all the stuff we're supposed to worry about...

And that's the thing about artists.  They see what is plainly before you.  Like, say Giotto;  here's a three dimensional person portrayed, with shadow and form, as it might look on a flat surface.  It's something staring you in the face, and it is a point relating to psychology, anxiety, worries...  And Jesus is demystifying something for us here.  And he says it himself, don't let people, i.e. legal minds and hypocrite technocrats get in your way.

What does it mean?  We're not quite sure.  How seriously, to what extent?  From the time when the Romans put people on the stake, stavros, the Greek word for it, to our time...  I wondered if there might be a better translation of the word, cross, but it does seem like what he was talking about.  Maybe he did mean something essentially Buddhist, though a bit dramatic.  Lose the self...  Don't get distracted by all the stuff...

But you have the message to teach.  There's the sign of Jonah, who was told to preach to the Ninevites, who did not, trying to run away from his duty going on a ship, who then gets swallowed by the whale, who prays, and then released on dry land to go preach what he was supposed to to the heathens of how to repent.  Interesting that Melville uses it as a theme in his maturity.  Go and preach the gospel;  that's taking up the cross, losing thy self, to redeem a foul, wicked adulterous generation.

And maybe that's how I kind of feel about a night of tending bar.  I should be preaching to them, but I'm neglecting my duty, letting them carry on, you know...  Maybe that's why I'm depressed.  I listen to all their life stuff with great kindness with type O blood passed down so many generations, and I know they are sick, but I have not preached as they require, and perhaps rather have I added to their sins.

Neuro plasticity, yes, the mind is always being flooded with one thing or another... The thing is to be less distracted, to grow up, to become moral, truly moral, not just letting any old thing happen or doing whatever you want...

But Jonah is a launch for Melville.  The journey amongst the heathens and the nations of the world....  represented by King Ahab's three harpooners.  I suppose it ends with Job, I mean, that's what he calls himself, right?, in the beginning, saved, floating on Queequeg's coffin with the Pequod sinks and the whale, the wrath of God dragging Ahab away into the deep.  We don't get from Melville the preaching except that here's what happens when you don't repent.  Maybe that he wrote such a beautiful deeply literary book was his own effort to be 'Biblical,' to be just, to be deeper than whatever was comparable to the crap on television and mass culture, the willingness to forget the old moral laws...

That's the frustrating thing, I suppose.  How to preach, what to preach, what laws to obey, how to obey them, where and how to see the difference between what is good and right and proper and that which is not, as we try to live like normal human beings.  Jesus is the classic example, duh, as he, I dunno, kind of acts normal.  Meaning he's not stuck in rigid tradition, hard-hearted, set, so self-proud as to become hypocritical....

The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, I guess.

But where I went to school, you know, people can be... not the most humble of folks.  And I know the people who sort of saved me life, if you will, are people like my buddy Dan.  Helpful people.  Not snobs.  I ain't ashamed of the restaurant business.  It throws me off, maybe, sometimes.  I wonder if college didn't in some way ruin a fair amount of my creativity, because there's something that squelches creativity, that makes you want to make money, be ambitious, not a hillbilly rebel who's comfortable with himself.  Taken me a long time...  to not be... thinking I was wrong for everything... that I was trying to fit in where I didn't belong, learned to be comfortable with myself.