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.."