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.
Saturday, January 27, 2018
Friday, January 26, 2018
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 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?
Thursday, January 25, 2018
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
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.."
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.."
Saturday, January 13, 2018
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 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...
Thursday, January 11, 2018
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...
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...
In a dream I tell my brother the story of Buddy Holly. His father ran a refrigeration repair company. I have a hard time not tearing up when I tell him the story how he was tired of freezing in the long bus rides on his tour in the deep of Wisconsin winter. So he rented a plane, to get to the next gig. Unlike Buddy Holly with his music, the kid flying the plane didn't know what he was doing. The plane did not get far, crashing down into a frozen cornfield. They found Buddy Holly's glasses in the field, years later.
I cannot help but think of the war profiteers as I lay awake at night. Dick Cheney would be a good example. Long a fan of unfettered executive powers and secret dealings, favoring, guess who, oil companions and defense contractors, he put into play the privatization of the nation's defense functions. The revolving door, from the big oil/defense corporations, to the corridors of the nation's power, became the pattern. All of which facilitates the selling of arms, profit, profiteering, favoring the share holder's bottom line. And guess what, behind all this, not even an attempt to pursue the best thing for people and countries far and foreign, no desire to do well, to do the right thing, to actually help people in far-off countries beset with problems, no attempt to understand and then act in a beneficial way. Nope, just start a war, preferably one that will go on forever. Sell munitions at $6 million a round, Lockheed Martin, and send in Halliburton to do whatever it is that Halliburton does, energy related.
But it didn't use to be that way. The nation had to be convinced, to do that right thing, even in World War Two, and not all were convinced that fighting Hitler's war machine was a good idea. A great vaguely distantly volunteer effort to fight arose, to protect the free world. It was the right thing to do, morally, a good argument could be made, was made, and men, and women, signed up to fight, and possibly to die.
And toward the end of it all, the reconstruction effort in Europe, Eisenhower, a general himself, warned America and Americans, to be wary of the Military Industrial Complex, the mighty power grab of the mighty. Famous enough, the retiring President, old Ike, a good man of good will to the world, a thoughtful man, his speech before Congress.
So, what is foreign policy now? How is it not tainted by the profiteers, by the Cheney, the Rumsfeld, the misled W. Bush, all a matter of good economics, growth charts, as Robert F. Kennedy once warned us of what the great GNP also included, weapons hired for murder. What do we have as a common crime, a legacy, arrogance? And Saddam, he would have died of prostate cancer anyway, something like that... Foreign policy for the share holder and his cronies.
And what did our friends, as once they might have been, from that other part of the world, but grasp that the war, the upsetting of old balances and borders and old tensions, this war imposed upon them by the foreign power was not about people, but about money, a simple matter of bigger profits. And as the general attack against their way of life, they would attack in like matter, economically, as 9/11 was a strike at the American economy, soon to be felt in every airport, etc., etc.
Truth is simpler than it's made out to be in grasping.
Yes, jobs, the argument can always be made, defense contracting equals jobs, but still..
Later in the day, recovering from the paranoia of the workweek and its conscientious labors, I call my mom, mentioning the nice visit from my defense contractor buddy who comes to town now and then. Always clear on things, a good check, she offers, "someone's gotta protect us." And this, yes, is true.
I cannot help but think of the war profiteers as I lay awake at night. Dick Cheney would be a good example. Long a fan of unfettered executive powers and secret dealings, favoring, guess who, oil companions and defense contractors, he put into play the privatization of the nation's defense functions. The revolving door, from the big oil/defense corporations, to the corridors of the nation's power, became the pattern. All of which facilitates the selling of arms, profit, profiteering, favoring the share holder's bottom line. And guess what, behind all this, not even an attempt to pursue the best thing for people and countries far and foreign, no desire to do well, to do the right thing, to actually help people in far-off countries beset with problems, no attempt to understand and then act in a beneficial way. Nope, just start a war, preferably one that will go on forever. Sell munitions at $6 million a round, Lockheed Martin, and send in Halliburton to do whatever it is that Halliburton does, energy related.
But it didn't use to be that way. The nation had to be convinced, to do that right thing, even in World War Two, and not all were convinced that fighting Hitler's war machine was a good idea. A great vaguely distantly volunteer effort to fight arose, to protect the free world. It was the right thing to do, morally, a good argument could be made, was made, and men, and women, signed up to fight, and possibly to die.
And toward the end of it all, the reconstruction effort in Europe, Eisenhower, a general himself, warned America and Americans, to be wary of the Military Industrial Complex, the mighty power grab of the mighty. Famous enough, the retiring President, old Ike, a good man of good will to the world, a thoughtful man, his speech before Congress.
So, what is foreign policy now? How is it not tainted by the profiteers, by the Cheney, the Rumsfeld, the misled W. Bush, all a matter of good economics, growth charts, as Robert F. Kennedy once warned us of what the great GNP also included, weapons hired for murder. What do we have as a common crime, a legacy, arrogance? And Saddam, he would have died of prostate cancer anyway, something like that... Foreign policy for the share holder and his cronies.
And what did our friends, as once they might have been, from that other part of the world, but grasp that the war, the upsetting of old balances and borders and old tensions, this war imposed upon them by the foreign power was not about people, but about money, a simple matter of bigger profits. And as the general attack against their way of life, they would attack in like matter, economically, as 9/11 was a strike at the American economy, soon to be felt in every airport, etc., etc.
Truth is simpler than it's made out to be in grasping.
Yes, jobs, the argument can always be made, defense contracting equals jobs, but still..
Later in the day, recovering from the paranoia of the workweek and its conscientious labors, I call my mom, mentioning the nice visit from my defense contractor buddy who comes to town now and then. Always clear on things, a good check, she offers, "someone's gotta protect us." And this, yes, is true.
Thursday, January 4, 2018
Stupid thoughts fill the mind, distractions are myriad, the iPhone is clutched, but it's time, time to write. Put Facebook aside, the Google news, Tinder... The Weather Channel in the background, NPR, the background coffeeshop chatter...
If you were a superstitious type, Irish, prone to ghostly and half mystical thoughts, you'd wonder if you'd been played by your grandfather's dark soul, as if his presence in your life dragged you down into the DNA of his life... skeptical of scholars, a man of the school of hard knocks, the restaurant business, viewing his sensitive grandson wishing for a poetic life as laziness, go get a job. He'd stifled you on the Easter night you'd met the beautiful princess, and that you didn't pick up the phone and call her that night proved to be something to rue over. And so was a young college graduate dragged down into a certain kind of a life, a bitter quality, an unfriendly quality to it, and the kid had no defenses against the old man's DNA of life.
I read such a theory somewhere in the gnostic works of a Samael Aun Weor. It made a certain amount of sense. How one could fall to such thing, unprotected, vulnerable, a strong minded dark old man there in the room with you... The sins of the grandfather are visited upon the grandson... Not something the logic minded would lend credence to, but in a way, it makes a certain amount of sense, particularly if you've lived it out, sort of scratching your head. Which is not to speak ill, necessarily of your grandfather, but just a note upon the human condition, fallen nature, sins, bad behavior.
A surprise as I get to work. The busboy, from Cameroon, announces he is quitting. This is his last day, this the first jazz night shift, a Wednesday, early in January. I'm leaving, he says, after his embrace, affectionate enough. I like the guy. Why, Jonah? I want to be at peace. I am not at peace here. Everybody talks, Jonah, you didn't do this, Jonah, you didn't do that. Nobody is perfect. Nobody.
This does not appear to be good news. Those doomed to work upstairs, at the Gaul's so called Wine Bar, have benefited from having our own busboy on these difficult and tedious Jazz Nights. Not a shared one, paying more attention to the affairs of the main dining room, visiting now and again to drop off food or take dirty plates downstairs...
Johan prays over the corner, by the cutting board on top of the stove, in his native language. He is a Jehovah's Witness, quietly. He will not tell me anything, just some vaguely stated words about how someone he won't name is 'very powerful,' and that one has to watch himself, and that the boss knows everything that happens in the restaurant. Of course. That Jonathan is no longer at peace here, that he just wants to work in peace, is interesting.
It's snowing now, blowing down at a fifty degree angle in the street lamps of quiet S Street as a DC police car saunters around the lot of the Boys and Girls Club parking lot. "Not good for us," says Jonah as he heads down to change out of his work clothes, to bike home, as I might bike home too, unless laziness overtakes me. I'd like to get to the Safeway, but I'm running out of gas. I go down and talk to him down in the basement for a moment, but he doesn't have much to say. He has thick sweat pants on over his muscular legs. I put Michael Jackson on on the Pandora as he did the last part of setting up the tables, but a part of him had already gone, and after singing a few lines, returned to praying, eyes clothes, standing upright in front of the cutting board, which seems now to me like a shrine of some sort, and the literary part of the mind cannot help but somewhere think of Melville's Queequeg praying in his own language before his own idols.
Then later, I follow him out in the street, still in my work shirt. He's locked his bike out on the avenue. He gets on his bike, turns its flashing taillight on, and rolls away without looking back, without saying a word. His shouts from the bottom of the stairs announcing his departure, the flashing lights of the bicycle headlight shining up the stairs of to the wine bar, calling out my name are a thing of the past, and I watch his departure in the cold silence, nary a car or a bus or a cab on the street. Maybe I was his Judas, the one who let him down, though I cannot remember anything in particular, supportive, and it rings as a relief to me, that he told me about how he had expertly opened bottles of champagne, like I showed him, at a holiday family gathering.
And I myself, not so happy there, as they come late and leave early, leaving me, the closer to drift with the last duties. I'm close to being my own boss, sure, I like that part, but I'll have a glass of wine there, and the next day, wake up exhausted.
It seems, or perhaps one wonders about it, there is an efficiency with which the family patterns are passed on, one could call it the family craziness. One wonders if perhaps it's not a bad thing that society organizes people, giving them structure, and too bad there are the eternally rebellious amongst us, yet to be bred out of us, better sense prevailing, the ability to join the rank and file and the army coming as redemption. One thinks of Larkin's line, your mom and dad, they fuck you up, they might not mean to, but they do, and throw in a little extra, just for you, shines out in a new light in moments of introspection.
I look at my little piles in the kitchen, the recycling, in a double grocery paper bag, wine bottles, tomato sauce cans, plastic containers, the Rubbermaid tub for dirty dishes, the drying rack, the stove, the sort of clutter of spices and the toothbrush upon the counters, the little can for green tea. I look at the small pile of books upon the bed, slowing growing, until one day, it will be like hers. I try to keep the paper and bits of cardboard moving along, and also, the plastic bags and empty meat wrap. Just like my mom, headed her way. There is a beauty to it. I think of Wyeth, Christina's World.
And who knows when, why, or what, we shall write. And errands even on a cold day seem welcome, the list drawn up, green tea, razor blades, rubber dish gloves, a charging cable, meat, vegetable, soda water, wine. Small anxieties as I bundle up, make the last annotations to the list, skin moisturizer. And the genes, the DNA within, comes up with an old Beatles song, "she was a girl in a million, my friend. I should have known she would win in the end."
If you were a superstitious type, Irish, prone to ghostly and half mystical thoughts, you'd wonder if you'd been played by your grandfather's dark soul, as if his presence in your life dragged you down into the DNA of his life... skeptical of scholars, a man of the school of hard knocks, the restaurant business, viewing his sensitive grandson wishing for a poetic life as laziness, go get a job. He'd stifled you on the Easter night you'd met the beautiful princess, and that you didn't pick up the phone and call her that night proved to be something to rue over. And so was a young college graduate dragged down into a certain kind of a life, a bitter quality, an unfriendly quality to it, and the kid had no defenses against the old man's DNA of life.
I read such a theory somewhere in the gnostic works of a Samael Aun Weor. It made a certain amount of sense. How one could fall to such thing, unprotected, vulnerable, a strong minded dark old man there in the room with you... The sins of the grandfather are visited upon the grandson... Not something the logic minded would lend credence to, but in a way, it makes a certain amount of sense, particularly if you've lived it out, sort of scratching your head. Which is not to speak ill, necessarily of your grandfather, but just a note upon the human condition, fallen nature, sins, bad behavior.
A surprise as I get to work. The busboy, from Cameroon, announces he is quitting. This is his last day, this the first jazz night shift, a Wednesday, early in January. I'm leaving, he says, after his embrace, affectionate enough. I like the guy. Why, Jonah? I want to be at peace. I am not at peace here. Everybody talks, Jonah, you didn't do this, Jonah, you didn't do that. Nobody is perfect. Nobody.
This does not appear to be good news. Those doomed to work upstairs, at the Gaul's so called Wine Bar, have benefited from having our own busboy on these difficult and tedious Jazz Nights. Not a shared one, paying more attention to the affairs of the main dining room, visiting now and again to drop off food or take dirty plates downstairs...
Johan prays over the corner, by the cutting board on top of the stove, in his native language. He is a Jehovah's Witness, quietly. He will not tell me anything, just some vaguely stated words about how someone he won't name is 'very powerful,' and that one has to watch himself, and that the boss knows everything that happens in the restaurant. Of course. That Jonathan is no longer at peace here, that he just wants to work in peace, is interesting.
It's snowing now, blowing down at a fifty degree angle in the street lamps of quiet S Street as a DC police car saunters around the lot of the Boys and Girls Club parking lot. "Not good for us," says Jonah as he heads down to change out of his work clothes, to bike home, as I might bike home too, unless laziness overtakes me. I'd like to get to the Safeway, but I'm running out of gas. I go down and talk to him down in the basement for a moment, but he doesn't have much to say. He has thick sweat pants on over his muscular legs. I put Michael Jackson on on the Pandora as he did the last part of setting up the tables, but a part of him had already gone, and after singing a few lines, returned to praying, eyes clothes, standing upright in front of the cutting board, which seems now to me like a shrine of some sort, and the literary part of the mind cannot help but somewhere think of Melville's Queequeg praying in his own language before his own idols.
Then later, I follow him out in the street, still in my work shirt. He's locked his bike out on the avenue. He gets on his bike, turns its flashing taillight on, and rolls away without looking back, without saying a word. His shouts from the bottom of the stairs announcing his departure, the flashing lights of the bicycle headlight shining up the stairs of to the wine bar, calling out my name are a thing of the past, and I watch his departure in the cold silence, nary a car or a bus or a cab on the street. Maybe I was his Judas, the one who let him down, though I cannot remember anything in particular, supportive, and it rings as a relief to me, that he told me about how he had expertly opened bottles of champagne, like I showed him, at a holiday family gathering.
And I myself, not so happy there, as they come late and leave early, leaving me, the closer to drift with the last duties. I'm close to being my own boss, sure, I like that part, but I'll have a glass of wine there, and the next day, wake up exhausted.
It seems, or perhaps one wonders about it, there is an efficiency with which the family patterns are passed on, one could call it the family craziness. One wonders if perhaps it's not a bad thing that society organizes people, giving them structure, and too bad there are the eternally rebellious amongst us, yet to be bred out of us, better sense prevailing, the ability to join the rank and file and the army coming as redemption. One thinks of Larkin's line, your mom and dad, they fuck you up, they might not mean to, but they do, and throw in a little extra, just for you, shines out in a new light in moments of introspection.
I look at my little piles in the kitchen, the recycling, in a double grocery paper bag, wine bottles, tomato sauce cans, plastic containers, the Rubbermaid tub for dirty dishes, the drying rack, the stove, the sort of clutter of spices and the toothbrush upon the counters, the little can for green tea. I look at the small pile of books upon the bed, slowing growing, until one day, it will be like hers. I try to keep the paper and bits of cardboard moving along, and also, the plastic bags and empty meat wrap. Just like my mom, headed her way. There is a beauty to it. I think of Wyeth, Christina's World.
And who knows when, why, or what, we shall write. And errands even on a cold day seem welcome, the list drawn up, green tea, razor blades, rubber dish gloves, a charging cable, meat, vegetable, soda water, wine. Small anxieties as I bundle up, make the last annotations to the list, skin moisturizer. And the genes, the DNA within, comes up with an old Beatles song, "she was a girl in a million, my friend. I should have known she would win in the end."
Tuesday, January 2, 2018
Do you ever get that feeling, this just isn't my town. That feeling, put down well in the old expression, no one is a prophet... Do towns have a kind of DNA? This is the creative side of it, this set of people... Each town has its imagination, its own codified way of getting things done, its own limitations on what can be done. New York is different from Washington, D.C. You have to find your niche, or live in obscurity. You have to fit in. And fitting in is fragile.
The old stories, of the Testaments Old and New, they too are a form of entertainment. A tale told to keep an individual from getting too gloomy, as happens when one is entertained.
Otherwise, boredom sets in. The old stories seem the best remedy, alongside good humor, an antidote for that feeling. Any big city is a kind of Jerusalem. An original home, but potentially a place of persecution, a place of strange valuations placed upon certain activities.
The kind of story the individual finds interest in is as much a product of their own DNA. There are news people specializing in China or politics, and then there are comedians, who might be said to have a broader range, as educators potentially do.
What does one wish to occupy one's imagination with?
This is the problem the writer faces. What interests him or her enough to express an effort in. What subject matter, and how to express it?
No wonder, then, writers suffer from boredom. No wonder, the gravitation toward a soothing glass of wine, to let the wheels spin, to find the story where there seems hardly a breath of one. The time, a mood relaxed and not distracted enough, to find a thread of coherence.
You can't really blame Hemingway for his flung adventures. Not a government bureaucratic clerk was he. Boredom. Need for open waves of the Gulf Stream, open land for camping.
The collection of writers, Saramago, Kerouac, Pio Baroja, whoever you might name, comes across as a group of eccentrics. That's how they work. The common denominator might be that they have a strange sensitivity toward story. Always looking for, able to absorb, the tangent detail from life, like Hemingway brings in True At First Light's posthumous tales of interactions with the Masai, pictures not often found in general reading. That a writer is instinctively careful, particular about his exposure, makes sense, whether it suits him well or less so.
Faulkner's example, the small town, the one county, sufficient, filled with all the archetypes known to humanity... each form of disciple.
The sense of humor in Gospel, the accent of Galileans... Larry David written all over that... I swear, I don't know him.... And Jesus, a nice guy, really not wanting to be angry with Peter, joking with him...
The sexual identity of a person--their soul. Not to be messed with.
And so the main battle of the writer, which is to find the story/the stories. This is why the writer is tenacious about holding onto story, the personal history, things like that. True engagement is rare, can easily go wrong. The connection... the most important human thing.
The genius of reality TV, Moonshiners, to remind the city dweller of a local community, tangible.
I never really had any clue of what to be doing as a profession.
The old stories, of the Testaments Old and New, they too are a form of entertainment. A tale told to keep an individual from getting too gloomy, as happens when one is entertained.
Otherwise, boredom sets in. The old stories seem the best remedy, alongside good humor, an antidote for that feeling. Any big city is a kind of Jerusalem. An original home, but potentially a place of persecution, a place of strange valuations placed upon certain activities.
The kind of story the individual finds interest in is as much a product of their own DNA. There are news people specializing in China or politics, and then there are comedians, who might be said to have a broader range, as educators potentially do.
What does one wish to occupy one's imagination with?
This is the problem the writer faces. What interests him or her enough to express an effort in. What subject matter, and how to express it?
No wonder, then, writers suffer from boredom. No wonder, the gravitation toward a soothing glass of wine, to let the wheels spin, to find the story where there seems hardly a breath of one. The time, a mood relaxed and not distracted enough, to find a thread of coherence.
You can't really blame Hemingway for his flung adventures. Not a government bureaucratic clerk was he. Boredom. Need for open waves of the Gulf Stream, open land for camping.
The collection of writers, Saramago, Kerouac, Pio Baroja, whoever you might name, comes across as a group of eccentrics. That's how they work. The common denominator might be that they have a strange sensitivity toward story. Always looking for, able to absorb, the tangent detail from life, like Hemingway brings in True At First Light's posthumous tales of interactions with the Masai, pictures not often found in general reading. That a writer is instinctively careful, particular about his exposure, makes sense, whether it suits him well or less so.
Faulkner's example, the small town, the one county, sufficient, filled with all the archetypes known to humanity... each form of disciple.
The sense of humor in Gospel, the accent of Galileans... Larry David written all over that... I swear, I don't know him.... And Jesus, a nice guy, really not wanting to be angry with Peter, joking with him...
The sexual identity of a person--their soul. Not to be messed with.
And so the main battle of the writer, which is to find the story/the stories. This is why the writer is tenacious about holding onto story, the personal history, things like that. True engagement is rare, can easily go wrong. The connection... the most important human thing.
The genius of reality TV, Moonshiners, to remind the city dweller of a local community, tangible.
I never really had any clue of what to be doing as a profession.
sketch 10/14/2017
The first day off is marked with some sort of pain, the body very tired, wanting rest, not too chipper. The second day starts in shame that is overcome, eventually. It's a day to mend the spirit, to return to non-dualistic thinking. The green tea drinker experiments with coffee, reluctant to read what is written the day before, but for the psychological progress of it in the depressed and not bookish enough state. Words, I need words. Was there a dream had to bring out as a starting place...
The city is full of illusion. Better to go back where there are books, the primary thing.
I lack action these days.
It feels like you have to hide your real self, she said, my therapist.
Yes, that's what I do tending bar. It happens less when I'm writing.
It is not fun being broke. It is not fun knowing where you are going to end up, a living, a career, a profession, even where to live. The whole D.C. experiment... I stood up for the right things, I wasn't selfish as far as my job...
I talk to my wine guy down on Dupont. The wine rep report, sommeliers of the new sort pick out a strange list, orange wines, natural wines, wine rep helps them out, then three months later, somm and the wine list are gone, replaced. Yes, many new bars, but many new bars closing. Mockingbird Hill closed, not a huge loss, in my opinion. Were the banks giving out money to open all these places? I found the place a bit tedious, weighed down by the sherry only theme. And even there is so much wine out there, too much, too many little companies...
But after so many years humping it in the restaurant, cannot make the market's rent... Five shifts? Can't really do it anymore. Stuck with the shifts I am stuck with. Difficult enough.
Really, a year of difficult thinking, as if one's own mind on its own weren't bad enough.
So, I had often thought it was my version of Siberian prison. A la Dostoevsky...
The writer is one of those souls who does not know what he is doing with himself. There is not a lot of thought given to profession, beyond the writing.
Allergies again. I feel like crap. Slept all day. Nap on couch. Earlier I speak to my mother about all the stuff I have, too much stuff. Pani Korbonska's Encyclopedia Brittanica. I take out the W for wine.
The body is human. You write when you can write. It's a boring routine. I go and get some wine. It's Saturday night, I got up very late. I will not allow myself to go out, because I'm broke, more or less, not enough money on hand even to get of D.C. There is nothing worth writing about at the moment. Tberapy has led me on to think on shame as a pattern. Do I tend to place myself in situations which are shameful to my authentic self? As a sort of martyr? As a bartender, I am at best partially seen. Too much noise, too many things to do for me to even open my mouth. Do I do that in order to write? On the day off, how far do I even get with this writing....
Writing is a strange process. You never know. You have to write shit. You have to get out the list, all the items.
The city is full of illusion. Better to go back where there are books, the primary thing.
I lack action these days.
It feels like you have to hide your real self, she said, my therapist.
Yes, that's what I do tending bar. It happens less when I'm writing.
It is not fun being broke. It is not fun knowing where you are going to end up, a living, a career, a profession, even where to live. The whole D.C. experiment... I stood up for the right things, I wasn't selfish as far as my job...
I talk to my wine guy down on Dupont. The wine rep report, sommeliers of the new sort pick out a strange list, orange wines, natural wines, wine rep helps them out, then three months later, somm and the wine list are gone, replaced. Yes, many new bars, but many new bars closing. Mockingbird Hill closed, not a huge loss, in my opinion. Were the banks giving out money to open all these places? I found the place a bit tedious, weighed down by the sherry only theme. And even there is so much wine out there, too much, too many little companies...
But after so many years humping it in the restaurant, cannot make the market's rent... Five shifts? Can't really do it anymore. Stuck with the shifts I am stuck with. Difficult enough.
Really, a year of difficult thinking, as if one's own mind on its own weren't bad enough.
So, I had often thought it was my version of Siberian prison. A la Dostoevsky...
The writer is one of those souls who does not know what he is doing with himself. There is not a lot of thought given to profession, beyond the writing.
Allergies again. I feel like crap. Slept all day. Nap on couch. Earlier I speak to my mother about all the stuff I have, too much stuff. Pani Korbonska's Encyclopedia Brittanica. I take out the W for wine.
The body is human. You write when you can write. It's a boring routine. I go and get some wine. It's Saturday night, I got up very late. I will not allow myself to go out, because I'm broke, more or less, not enough money on hand even to get of D.C. There is nothing worth writing about at the moment. Tberapy has led me on to think on shame as a pattern. Do I tend to place myself in situations which are shameful to my authentic self? As a sort of martyr? As a bartender, I am at best partially seen. Too much noise, too many things to do for me to even open my mouth. Do I do that in order to write? On the day off, how far do I even get with this writing....
Writing is a strange process. You never know. You have to write shit. You have to get out the list, all the items.
a sketch. 5/1/2017
I liked the physicality of the job, and that's what it was, the whole thing, from getting there, on bike and foot, through woods, to the putting all the wines that needed chilling in the places they needed to be, stocked in cooler, in bucket, in the sink plugged with a champagne cork, the reds, plenty of back-up, mineral water, beer, soda, I was a true engineer of beverages. And thus I was ready to deliver them, along with silverware, menus, bread warmed when in an oven with butter, and all the while, really the main point, besides the relaxation the wine allowed people, conversation, for those who wanted it, and judicious around those who were not of such need. So I wore many hats, many roles, one to this person at the bar, some to others.
That's what it was, that was what happened all night long, til the early hour I asked for a busboy man's help, until I was left alone and had, my energy fading as quickly as the last footsteps went away down the stairs, to do all the last physical lifting and carrying, up and down myself.
No need to add tension to a barroom. It should be like a pub, a salon, literary talk, an ease, a place free of consumerism, trends, and hollow things. Yet, oddly this is what many establishments are built on. The old and venerable long standing places having that karma of deserving that tenure we all crave so badly in this world of flux.
One thing the bar does not like, like the feline who buries her scat, is that sense of being watched, monitored, observed. The same tension a writer has, to be candid and truthful of observation. And thus to publish anything is necessary, but also the great risk, what if I show what I have upon my sleeve, and this is Hamlet, the need to tranquilize with words, to stab that busybody watcher behind the curtain with all his life's wisdom, when there is none that really applies but that of their own world and not your own necessarily.
That's what it was, that was what happened all night long, til the early hour I asked for a busboy man's help, until I was left alone and had, my energy fading as quickly as the last footsteps went away down the stairs, to do all the last physical lifting and carrying, up and down myself.
No need to add tension to a barroom. It should be like a pub, a salon, literary talk, an ease, a place free of consumerism, trends, and hollow things. Yet, oddly this is what many establishments are built on. The old and venerable long standing places having that karma of deserving that tenure we all crave so badly in this world of flux.
One thing the bar does not like, like the feline who buries her scat, is that sense of being watched, monitored, observed. The same tension a writer has, to be candid and truthful of observation. And thus to publish anything is necessary, but also the great risk, what if I show what I have upon my sleeve, and this is Hamlet, the need to tranquilize with words, to stab that busybody watcher behind the curtain with all his life's wisdom, when there is none that really applies but that of their own world and not your own necessarily.
Monday, January 1, 2018
Oh, the holidays...i
Snapshots:
On the way back, stopping in Ravine, PA, for a Double Whopper (no cheese), french fries, a chocolate shake. I have fries, and potatoes in general, very rarely, wanting not to get that aches in the joints of the extremities, as happens with blood type O. But they offer some form of salty comfort, and I eat the Whopper whole, the bun included, though I normally, for the sake of my waistline, indulge in bread. A chocolate shake, like the hot chocolate I got at the last rest stop in New York, will keep me alert. I've driven up to get Mom, days before Christmas, driven her back to DC on Christmas Eve, going straight to work after dropping her off at my brother's, and the day after the day after Christmas, getting off of work, I drove her back to Oswego, to the three feet of snow that fell the night before, and this, after helping her with a new car battery, her furnace, her groceries, cat food and wine, this is the last leg. I have to be back for work New Years Eve, and I don't feel up to that drive, two hours too long, and going straight to the wine bar for a long night. I like Whoppers, but there is not much happiness and joy in my system as I pull back onto Route 81, getting lucky with the traffic in the short merging lane, for the final three hours, Harrisburg, Route 11/15 through the Gettysburg farmland, down to Frederick, 270 to the Beltway, lanes of traffic to cut across to get onto River Road... Not much joy at all. The Mid-Atlantic has always felt a bit foreign to my brain. My place will be a bit of a mess, with all the holidays, and not much time to take care of the usual things.
And let's face it. I have failed. I am a loser, a fuck-up. A nice guy, sure, sometimes, a decent barman, friendly neighborhood guy, but as far as my own life goes, an ongoing disaster. An artist, frustrated, I suppose I'm not the only one.
In times less stressed, you know, you tell yourself and your therapist, in one of those positive attempts toward living life, that you are over your obsession, that you aren't still mentally fixated upon that object that in the therapist terms is a situation of wanting a different outcome from the same old behavior, from expecting an end of the pattern of misery. But in the rare mix of the Christmas holiday and the pagan Solstice, in that rare blend of soulful good spirit toward all things human, including yourself, including those you've trespassed against, the spiritual nature of the holiday, and the negatives like the days of short daylight, stressful shifts when you feel the rest of the world relaxed and on holiday, stressful travels of nine hour drives into unknowns of weather and traffic, endurance of muscle, stressed-out passengers clenched as whiteouts fall upon Route 81 around Lafayette, south of Syracuse, the finances, in the nighttime, this is the perfect recipe, the perfect recipe to remember all the instances of regretful behavior and actions from some thirty years ago.
Yes, you thought, or you sort of hoped, that you could turn a page and be over whatever you'd call them, feelings, sentiments, physical reactions, memories, remembered reactions, images of the brain. You might have thought, 'enough,' or "I'm over her," but you come upon the rub that this is really not true. Do you really want to admit this to yourself? It sneaks up upon you, again, now again, and it tells you the bad news that you have, quite simply, and in bold letters, not lived your own dreams.
It's like, the crowd told you to shut-up, just about everyone, and rather than making the effort of fighting back, you slinked off, feeling ashamed of yourself.
But why? Why, the shame? And this is hard to unpack. It seems a complex issue is at play, involving just about everything, a totality.
Like all people, within, you have a great personality. Everything you could hope for. Wit, friendliness, a real happiness around other people, selfless wishes for them to do well. Well-spoked, once reasonably well-read, informed, with a good basic sense of things, and not too shy to make the effort to speak your mind.
But what happened? What the fuck happened? Why did you retreat, and get all private about things? The musical elements, skilled enough, the talents of the stand-up, in the native intelligence? Why did you chose the haunted house up on the hill away from campus, rather than your best friend's room group down on campus that senior year? Some stupid ill-advised wish to be overly introspective, thus not using your great gifts of friendliness and engagement... And there was the drinking, encouragement to the supposed romance of it...
These are not the thoughts one is supposed to have on New Years Day. The conventional wisdom is, think positive, healthy, freedom from regrets...
But is the artist right, the collective of U2, "nothing changes/ on New Years Day..."
You can never really get that far away from your true nature, and this philosopher, through experience, speaks that you can never turn away from your good wishes to fellow humanity. You cannot stop that, turn it off, when the perfect girl perfectly meant for you gets completely frustrated with you, had enough disgust in your own general direction and your "lonely thinking heart that is to a woman/ but a kind of ghost" (John Donne) that she went and married some other guy, some other guy who admittedly would be a far better provider than the disorganized Buddhist Jude-Christian overly sensitive depressive coward who did not follow his own heart even as he promised himself he was making every effort to...
So now what? As they say.
This life as it is, based on some sort of endurance, the heartbroken misery of carrying on, as the Irish soul seems drawn to, out of instincts of great candor and self-honesty, some fascination with the human condition, set off from the attempt to being encouraged to doing better for yourself. Life a matter of hard work, endurance, the low life of someone less capable of planning for the morrow, a belief in quiet toughness, coupled with some sort of monastic spirituality ingrained deep in the DNA as much as the desire to sin.
I take the rental car back to the parking garage. It's black body is covered with white salt roadspray. I walk back over the Connecticut Avenue bridge, back to the house, take a hot shower, SNL and off to bed.
Recollections of NPR, interview with Broadway Producer, of Rent, Hamilton... The new form of musical, telling our stories, with our music.. I missed that line of work somehow. And entertainment is important, keeping us distracted and positive. Never underestimate. The ability of the made up world, day dreaming, to keep us insulated from the horrors of our own lives, to distract us during long drives.
New Years Eve shift leaves me tired. The boss says, kill the balloons before you go, and while I relay it on to my co-workers, take some home to your kids, I don't have the energy, pulling them free and tying them in the corner. To pop them all seems like a waste.
And New Years Day, not much energy. I get out for groceries, just enough to make a chili for dinner and cold cuts, gluten free bread, fresh eggs, to keep me going into the workweek. It is cold here too, and seems like a danker kind of a cold than up there in New York State, and it hurts. Pay my American Express bill. The new Brooks Brothers shirt worn on New Years Eve has red wine and blood stains on it, foil cuts from opening wine, is treated with Shout and soda water, preparations for a load of whites, work shirts.
Snapshots:
On the way back, stopping in Ravine, PA, for a Double Whopper (no cheese), french fries, a chocolate shake. I have fries, and potatoes in general, very rarely, wanting not to get that aches in the joints of the extremities, as happens with blood type O. But they offer some form of salty comfort, and I eat the Whopper whole, the bun included, though I normally, for the sake of my waistline, indulge in bread. A chocolate shake, like the hot chocolate I got at the last rest stop in New York, will keep me alert. I've driven up to get Mom, days before Christmas, driven her back to DC on Christmas Eve, going straight to work after dropping her off at my brother's, and the day after the day after Christmas, getting off of work, I drove her back to Oswego, to the three feet of snow that fell the night before, and this, after helping her with a new car battery, her furnace, her groceries, cat food and wine, this is the last leg. I have to be back for work New Years Eve, and I don't feel up to that drive, two hours too long, and going straight to the wine bar for a long night. I like Whoppers, but there is not much happiness and joy in my system as I pull back onto Route 81, getting lucky with the traffic in the short merging lane, for the final three hours, Harrisburg, Route 11/15 through the Gettysburg farmland, down to Frederick, 270 to the Beltway, lanes of traffic to cut across to get onto River Road... Not much joy at all. The Mid-Atlantic has always felt a bit foreign to my brain. My place will be a bit of a mess, with all the holidays, and not much time to take care of the usual things.
And let's face it. I have failed. I am a loser, a fuck-up. A nice guy, sure, sometimes, a decent barman, friendly neighborhood guy, but as far as my own life goes, an ongoing disaster. An artist, frustrated, I suppose I'm not the only one.
In times less stressed, you know, you tell yourself and your therapist, in one of those positive attempts toward living life, that you are over your obsession, that you aren't still mentally fixated upon that object that in the therapist terms is a situation of wanting a different outcome from the same old behavior, from expecting an end of the pattern of misery. But in the rare mix of the Christmas holiday and the pagan Solstice, in that rare blend of soulful good spirit toward all things human, including yourself, including those you've trespassed against, the spiritual nature of the holiday, and the negatives like the days of short daylight, stressful shifts when you feel the rest of the world relaxed and on holiday, stressful travels of nine hour drives into unknowns of weather and traffic, endurance of muscle, stressed-out passengers clenched as whiteouts fall upon Route 81 around Lafayette, south of Syracuse, the finances, in the nighttime, this is the perfect recipe, the perfect recipe to remember all the instances of regretful behavior and actions from some thirty years ago.
Yes, you thought, or you sort of hoped, that you could turn a page and be over whatever you'd call them, feelings, sentiments, physical reactions, memories, remembered reactions, images of the brain. You might have thought, 'enough,' or "I'm over her," but you come upon the rub that this is really not true. Do you really want to admit this to yourself? It sneaks up upon you, again, now again, and it tells you the bad news that you have, quite simply, and in bold letters, not lived your own dreams.
It's like, the crowd told you to shut-up, just about everyone, and rather than making the effort of fighting back, you slinked off, feeling ashamed of yourself.
But why? Why, the shame? And this is hard to unpack. It seems a complex issue is at play, involving just about everything, a totality.
Like all people, within, you have a great personality. Everything you could hope for. Wit, friendliness, a real happiness around other people, selfless wishes for them to do well. Well-spoked, once reasonably well-read, informed, with a good basic sense of things, and not too shy to make the effort to speak your mind.
But what happened? What the fuck happened? Why did you retreat, and get all private about things? The musical elements, skilled enough, the talents of the stand-up, in the native intelligence? Why did you chose the haunted house up on the hill away from campus, rather than your best friend's room group down on campus that senior year? Some stupid ill-advised wish to be overly introspective, thus not using your great gifts of friendliness and engagement... And there was the drinking, encouragement to the supposed romance of it...
These are not the thoughts one is supposed to have on New Years Day. The conventional wisdom is, think positive, healthy, freedom from regrets...
But is the artist right, the collective of U2, "nothing changes/ on New Years Day..."
You can never really get that far away from your true nature, and this philosopher, through experience, speaks that you can never turn away from your good wishes to fellow humanity. You cannot stop that, turn it off, when the perfect girl perfectly meant for you gets completely frustrated with you, had enough disgust in your own general direction and your "lonely thinking heart that is to a woman/ but a kind of ghost" (John Donne) that she went and married some other guy, some other guy who admittedly would be a far better provider than the disorganized Buddhist Jude-Christian overly sensitive depressive coward who did not follow his own heart even as he promised himself he was making every effort to...
So now what? As they say.
This life as it is, based on some sort of endurance, the heartbroken misery of carrying on, as the Irish soul seems drawn to, out of instincts of great candor and self-honesty, some fascination with the human condition, set off from the attempt to being encouraged to doing better for yourself. Life a matter of hard work, endurance, the low life of someone less capable of planning for the morrow, a belief in quiet toughness, coupled with some sort of monastic spirituality ingrained deep in the DNA as much as the desire to sin.
I take the rental car back to the parking garage. It's black body is covered with white salt roadspray. I walk back over the Connecticut Avenue bridge, back to the house, take a hot shower, SNL and off to bed.
Recollections of NPR, interview with Broadway Producer, of Rent, Hamilton... The new form of musical, telling our stories, with our music.. I missed that line of work somehow. And entertainment is important, keeping us distracted and positive. Never underestimate. The ability of the made up world, day dreaming, to keep us insulated from the horrors of our own lives, to distract us during long drives.
New Years Eve shift leaves me tired. The boss says, kill the balloons before you go, and while I relay it on to my co-workers, take some home to your kids, I don't have the energy, pulling them free and tying them in the corner. To pop them all seems like a waste.
And New Years Day, not much energy. I get out for groceries, just enough to make a chili for dinner and cold cuts, gluten free bread, fresh eggs, to keep me going into the workweek. It is cold here too, and seems like a danker kind of a cold than up there in New York State, and it hurts. Pay my American Express bill. The new Brooks Brothers shirt worn on New Years Eve has red wine and blood stains on it, foil cuts from opening wine, is treated with Shout and soda water, preparations for a load of whites, work shirts.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
