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...