Okay, cheer up a bit.  It's not sunny out, but you'll be going to work soon enough, and you worked a full five shifts last week, so that's good, in fact it wasn't that bad, now that you're staying hydrated.

Writing is multi-tasking.  On the one hand the tea is being prepared, and a little chicken broth warming up on the stove.  There's mom to call, to check in on.  And while you didn't go out, and even ran out of wine, but didn't open the saved bottles, the Beaucastel from 2012, the 2008 Caymus Cabernet, the last of the wines your father sent you..  You got some good stuff done around the house, not in bad shape for the week ahead, knock wood.

Blood Type.  I put in a small bit of astragalus powder into my green tea, steeped last night.  I like the taste of it, and its effect, placebo or not, helps with the aches and pains of waking.

A Mass on tv in the background, at noon, instead of the Gregorian.

And lo, the priest is talking about the Transfiguration.   Jesus takes Peter and John and James up the hill, 3 disciples, and prepare for Elijah and Moses.  There up on the  mountain.  (What does rising from the dead, mean, the apostles wondered, after J told them, keep it quiet until I do...)

But the Mass is just one part of the morning's multi-tasking.

DIY electrolyte water to brew up out of filtered water, baking soda, salt from the marsh... 1 liter to half a teaspoon of baking soda, half a tablespoon of salt...

And Jesus restrained himself, hid his divinity in his humanity...

Arch Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, manifestation of glory, but not a full manifestation of his divinity...
"The glory that shown around Jesus as the temple of God,... a natural expression of the inherent loveliness of... Christ veiled his divinity with humanity..."  The Lord is pulling aside this thin veil...  The divinity within is not so hidden in him that we have to dig...

Fr. Anthony Mary, MFVA...  I like him, this guy, his gentle bedside manner in our lives.  His voice is pleasant, and his singing is seamless with the Mass and its spirit.  A friend, accepting you.

Talk of Origin's thoughts on the matter... The six days of creation, the seventh day of rest.  Lent, a season of retreat...  Entering into full communion...


I wonder how much politics are effected by blood type...  How we might naturally argue with eau other...

Jesus is the source of love, faith, and joy...
Incorporated into his dying and his rise, that's what we encounter in Baptism...
Straight ahead through the cross, the only direction.

We get scandalized by the resurrection...  To Peter, you must not get in my way...  Don't tell anyone until after I rise from the dead...  It strengthened their faith.

"As the cross came nearer, his glory became nearer, and burst through..."  Father F..J Sheen...

We get scandalized by Jesus upon the Cross...


Kerouac wrote he sees the Cross in moments toward the end of Big Sur, horrible story of his descent, alcoholic...

Writing has to be multi-tasking, to realize work and aging parents, to realize the Cross, and its beauty in our lives, which we are asked to go to, and through, to find direction, the only way...

And so I sketch, and roughly sketch, from the man's sermon, on this the second Sunday of Lent...  Misquoting, not attributing with any proper scholarship here.


Blood Type, perhaps that is why I have certain caveman views in life, ones that you have to keep close to the chest sometimes...  So do I not exactly engage when those of Type A blood, the farmers, go on with their own farmer point of view;  they can be vegetarians quite happily...  Nor do I engage with the omnivore Mongol herd blood of the B people, because while I can get them, they don't always get me.  JFK was type O.  He could speak to a lot of people, without managing to offend them.  The ministers down in Houston, Texas, even though he was so nervous that he shook, they got him, as a kind of universal donor in his understandings of things, and they had to agree with him.  ABs are friendly, more or less, from what I can tell...

Faith to the A is in the town and the fields, and the grain storage house.  Faith to the B is mastering and conquering city walls and taking what you can...  Faith to the O is the meat of the hunt, a life of action.

And so the O understands the blood of the Cross, deep down, the small aches the barman feels from taking up his own Cross, serving the bread and wine...

Now the Cross, that's up there with the deepest, the highest form of understandings we will ever upon this Earth attain.  One doesn't dismiss it, either.

Like you or I, people will say petty things about us, perhaps, sometimes, as people will speak good and bad of all things, depending, but, you cannot say that much bad about anyone who thinks, at least, of the Cross sometimes, thinks of it as a thing of direction in life, so that one might gain passing through it, metaphorically.

Do we need to nitpick at the details of how we are placed upon our own Crosses to then bear?  Are those even sins if they bring us to the Cross...

I think, as long as we get that state of affairs, of the Cross in this life, we are doing alright, as students of life and the spirit.

Probably not a very good thing for us, going up on the Cross, upon the daily uncertainty, the mystery of the future shrouded before us in the form of death...


Indeed, writing is multi-tasking.  A full room to work, as if you were indeed a waiter, and you never know where the resolution of wisdom's full meal might come from, from what direction...  In one ear, the dishes for the most part have been tackled with soap and hot water in a tub in the sink, drying now, in the other year, you call your mom.  See if she's seen any of the Olympics, or if she got her New York Times for this Sunday, gas in her car from the easiest mini-mart gas station, the Stewart Shop at Utica and 5th...  And in other ears, unexpected things, unpredictable thoughts, voices from the community...

Thousand layers of geological thoughts in the relative moment, feelings of almost wanting to cry, but somewhere also knowing that this is what saves you, makes you comparable with all life and humanity.  Finding writing, finding that process, that will always make you a bit happy in some way, as will motion, the clock ticking down to that time you'll brave walking out the door, getting to work, on foot, call a cab, the bicycle left at work out of cold weather and laziness...  And it's only Sunday night, can't be all that bad...

The Soviets, they were always good at swaying people negatively, sowing discord, having vast political agreements far too shifting in shape and in practice and in every other direction know to man but the most obvious and most done frequently and to our comfort;  That is their global import to us, the global trade agreement accomplice found.

I wake up feeling stupid, as I often do.  Mom is calling, and I should be up anyway.  Even though I cooked, made certain I ate reasonably well, the wine of last night leaves me feeling dehydrated, so it goes.  Talking with a friend who leaves near Wilmington, NC over the phone, maybe that threw me off, as talking on cell phones does.  So I'm sitting now in my father's old brown chair, laptop before me, drinking my green tea as the old guts gurgle.

But the Gregorian chants are back on the sound system, carrying the ambience of church space echoes to the monks singing, and I am calm again, because I know I am writing again.  I am writing again to keep in shape, to keep the exercise going, and I know that somewhere within there are things to say.  And I have succeeded in being quiet so far, pulling myself away from my iPhone 5, Google News, Tinder, Facebook, the usual emails, mostly political in nature.  It's a day off, and for reassurance sake I will be back to work tomorrow, with a grocery list today, and the slightest twinge of a distant headache.  It is overcast, about fifty here, and the rain is coming in from the west soon and it will be a lasting rain shower.

But we all, I suppose, wake up with the awkwardness.  Being responsible, most have work to think about, family things to do, and groceries and other activities of entertainment to see to.   But I am single, as I have, I suppose, always been, to match the solitary pursuit of explicating the mind's juices, the inspirations of its decent good health.  (Unless I am crazy and no one is directly telling me so, and actually the therapist seems to think I'm pretty sane, and if anything, might let my moral compass guard down from time to time, but honey I don't know about that, because I am a sinful man.  Thus it be a comfort that early on in the great story of the Testaments Noah, having reached the ark's destination lands, has much wine and has to be put to bed, a little rowdy, maybe, by his sons.)  If I were responsible and prepared for this adulthood better I would be closer to mom up there in Oswego, so it would not have to be a major project of an eight hour drive, renting a car, getting at least one of two extra days off from work...

We all wake up with this awkwardness, wondering about ourselves.  I've tuned in earlier to the Weather Channel--mom talks about a lot of rain across the country--and notice that television programming makes you wait for it, slips in a good share of commercials, ones you've seen before, each mesmerizing and hypnotic in its own way, like the red Range Rover climbing the impossible steps of some great foggy Chinese Wall like a ski jump.  And that's how were are inside ourselves, having to wait, and all the sort of commercial like things in our own minds come bumbling up, distractions to persuade you against getting too deep, or in too deep.

Like the chants, the spiritual voice comes through.  It's a reality of the mind, stated in familiar questions, that is there, and it will come again and again, a bit louder, each time, and then it becomes the voice of reason to you, more or less.  It takes faith to listen to it.  The still small voice in the desert of life...

And can one hear it, can you hear it, can I hear it.  Like the commercial, worries of great impractical ventures oppose it.  Be responsible.  Or go do something.  Buy something.  See something.  Take care of something practical.  (Chores can actually be good for the mind attempting its tuning in on a voice.)

Easier for the camel to venture through the eye of the needle, then for the man distracted by his own wealth, to enter into the thought processes of Heaven, it is said, and Jesus, the great teacher, said it, and there it is.  And there are other lines of his, telling us not to focus on worries so much, look rather to the lilies of the field or the raiments of the sparrow, of those things that neither reap nor do they sow.

Perhaps the most responsible and wisest thing is to tune in, to listen to the voice, still and small, there for you on a day off, rich company, as you find your footing again to live the day.


But what does this all tell us?  It tells us of the distractions, the distracting things, and you begin to wonder if your old brother sort of nailed down security, all the focus and energy that goes into that, is really, for you personally,  transmuted into something else, quite different perhaps.  Maybe even no less responsible when taking into account one's own attempt at doing that which is of good health.


Of course there is even craziness that bears.  Those closest to Jesus take him for quite out of his mind, such that they really feel they must come and restrain him, for he's already quite out of hand.  Already, and Jesus is here in what sounds like the early parts of his career, the way the account of the Gospels present it...  Villagers of his own home town take him as a blasphemer, and move to toss him off the precipice of the hill the town sits on, protected, as if to throw him the barbarian forces that might try to mount their very hill to desecrate all that they hold sacred...

So, that's how you start your day, eh, knowing that, more or less you have to be "crazy" in some sense.  Not looking at art in a museum, but strangely, going about making your own, hmm.

Strangely at home are these thoughts of the road, picaresque as they are, those of a wandering teacher who has no set home, no real set career.  Jesus is not a dental technician, nor is he certified to be in public school education.  He is doing something that people have a hard time finding a label for.  Wait, he's the carpenter, right?  The carpenter's son...  He's not a rabbi, as such are recognized officially.

What's he even saying?

Seems like he's trying to find himself.  Which any artist would find recognizable, most of them, having to work at it.   Perhaps he's spent those years trying to marshall various unknown talents, practice applicable skills of some sort.  Maybe he's trying to gather his own self-confidence, even, even he, to do what he has this instinct, this noncommercial drive for....

Maybe it's a bit too late for him.  To late for him to do something other, something practical, that something else he seemed like he always wanted to do, had the potential for, but either too lazy or distracted from.

And now he's trying something very mighty and impossible, really....  What is he thinking...

You kinda gotta feel for him, at least if you're of the American mindset.  Poor guy. What's he going to do with himself, now.  Now.  Truly, his left hand doesn't know what his right hand is doing, he says as much, directly.  But somehow, he seems okay with that, as if it were a necessary state of being...

It might even seem that he doesn't get a lot of help in it, either.  There's of course the disciples...  Maybe he picks them up largely just for company.  But it's not like he's getting direct recommendations or directions from above.  There is only that instance, in the garden up on the hill, the Transfiguration, when two mighty holy beings, prophets, appear, as angels seem to appear..   Other than that it's more or less intuition, on his part.  Backed up by a careful remembering of his own story, so that it matches up with the prophetic texts, poetic accounts that seem to harbor potential for the future that is now, in synch with the very things going on, today, a week ago, or when he was a boy, the important moments in life.

He has doubts too, somewhere.  Fears.  But this is precisely where he needs to be.


It always feel like you fail when you attempt to write.  You're left with a sad feeling, almost.  You've accomplished nothing.  The Buddha failed to convince at his first sermon.  Hemingway called it "the artist's reward."  You feel like eating something and taking a nap.  You feel shy and stupid, and feel like retreating rather than sharing...




I go out to gather the things of my grocery list.  First, to the Rite Aid, then the little market.  When my father was dying there was a wine tasting given by a professional, Pascal, who showed us how the professionals do a tasting, the things they look for, the marks they make on a sheet of paper.  I called the hospital, spoke to a nurse, and they were putting in a IV for antibiotics.   Afterward I went across the street, in a kind of a fog.  I went to the new Safeway there.  I remember I bought a piece of fish to cook for dinner.  He died about four or five hours later.

I feel the same sort of awkwardness, as I shop, remembering.  Mom is faraway, and when I call her she asks me I she will be seeing me soon or even later today, and I explain, well, no, mom, I have to work tomorrow, it's the start of my work week.  

I've gathered the things of my list, made reasonable choices at the grocery store, not forgetting toilet paper and the purple pill, the pedialyte, the soda water, V8 in little cans, and a little box of baking soda.  Food, you have to have all that to back you up when the workweek comes, you don't have much of a choice in that.  Fresh eggs, another steak, some ground bison, leafy greens in a plastic little box, and there's a cute girl behind the counter who smiles at me as I look over the counter, figuring I'll just grab a roasted half chicken so I don't get caught out should I not feel like cooking tonight, immediately.  The lonesomeness sinks in, and the sort of wall that grows up, that limits you, almost by something like politeness.  You'd want to go say hi to her after missing the initial reaction, shy.  And now it seems the old feeling, not wanting to be a creep, not be creepy, like that old charge that hovers over you, when really you've been as quiet as Clint Eastwood, independent, strong, silent.

"Farmer Ted," they used to call me back in college.  How did they know?  Friends closer to me dubbed me the Feral Ted Beast, and also, Medieval Doctor Theodorik.  But there he is again, the person unsure of himself, easygoing when it's his own chance to serve people, but now, wanting to get back and write down a few more things.  And that you carry the groceries back home alone, well, that's just how it goes.  What is Saturday night anyway...

Hammond Street, mom remembered earlier today, the third-floor walk-up in Lynn, where she lived when she was little.  There was an icebox, with the big block of ice the man would bring up the stairs.  Her father had run into some situation making it necessary for the small  family to move back in with his mother-in-law.  My mom's maternal grandmother, there is lore about her home cures, which started us on this conversation when I asked my mother if she was drinking hot water with lemon to loosen up the congestion.  One of Nana Hill's cures, mom tells me, sautéed onions, placed on the chest of the sick, makes sense, the onion fumes, the warmth...  They were Irish, could not afford the doctor...

I have wine back home.  I have hydration.  There's laundry to do, and it doesn't feel like there would be much point in going out anyway, having already spent enough, and some of it probably, stuff I don't really need, but that balances out the other things I don't really need. 

It was a stressful week anyway, mom sounding awful, but finally getting to a doctor, first time in twenty years probably.  She sounds better now.  

In pondering my own state of mental affairs... I find myself oddly content in spirit.  What in particular has helped, beyond a fresh attempt to stay hydrated with electrolyte water and magnesium, I/he wondered....  But definitely, no longer a need for the pill, and feeling a lot better without it, and better spiritually and psychologically not to have to think the ability to have a good mood and spirits is dependent upon on outside source.

Writing is a natural human state.  It never surprises me that people who like the natural world like to write, to take care of their own inner menagerie, to let the beauty of the forest, seemingly random but not, reflect into their own deepest personal life.  Particularly amongst the pioneers of the various forms and epochs of writing.  Hemingway liked fishing and anything else to get himself outdoors, any excuse.  A hand deft at depicting a tree and sheep, like Giotto, is an important artist.  Jesus out in the desert, he will always have an eye for the natural world and the richness of its metaphorical possibilities in his little parable tales, indirect, a teacher hunting that which will soothe all our pains...

The monks sing Gregorian Chants, calm canticles of inner work being done, the most natural way at going about keeping calm...  Like a chef knows how to cook, a master of the basic elements of heat and technique...  Practicality emerges, the things that work come out and are repeated.  These are the things a barman knows, intuitively.


And then, that winter, the prisoner started feeling better.  He had more energy.  His shifts of labor were easier, less draining, less exhausting.  It wasn't food so much, as water.   Beyond that, I don't know if there was anything in particular, he just took the choice of beginning to feel relaxed about things.  No point to deep anxiety, drive it away, like Satan, get thee behind me...  Enjoy the present.  Do practical things.  Open the wine, pour it, offer them sustenance, serve it, the bread and wine, that's all there was to it.

How did Jesus become Jesus?  He took it upon himself.  He did it, quite practically.  A healer because he knew what sickness was.  Just do the thing the easiest way, as God The Father gives you and me powers to do so.  What is easier to say to the man with the withered hand, he asks the professionals, who are necessarily skeptical and controlling, bullies really, leaning in on the good busy work of the teacher they were envying and accusing of their own worst worst sins...  Psychologically sick sick people, the Pharisees and the Sadducees...

How to cure the sick and angry wolf within,
how to turn it into a bird,
Francis asked of himself.

Think less Crime & Punishment.  Think of Alyosha, Alyosha Karamazov,
and the old Russian monk...

The prosperous, he could not help feeling, the ambitious, he could sometime feel their judgment upon him.  "A barman, for God's sake, what a wasting of life...  Frivolous and low, full of bar floozies and busboy talk of tits and ass and such crudeness...  Not high and elevated and pertinent in conversation to this our modern world which we here in the city have striven to attain as a place of obtaining and building power so thus we might control the policies of the land over our chosen people..."

Who is this chump upstart, the power bullies ask, failing to even so much as remember the prophecy (the medicine) of he who would come and heal, the Once and Future King...  We will not even acknowledge his work, but regard him as an Idiot.

Jesus the barman, feeling better, more relaxed, accepted the medicine.  The medicine was only offered to him, in such a town, through that which the ages have called pornography.  In such an age, now offered up and thousand thousand "sinful women" and Mary Magdelene.  He enjoyed being anointed by them, and to their virtual hands and breasts and beautiful feminine faces, he reached the climax, the metaphorical parable of spiritual enlightenment and thousand insights building, cooperating, all tugging together, relaxing that manly part of himself through which was reached the depths of his energy being and all the million thoughts of his mind.  Taking a few Chinese herbs, he could allow such relaxation to happen on a daily basis, twice, even more.  And strange to himself, he did not feel completely out of it and with no energy to even talk to anyone let alone wait on them, no longer was he feeling drained, but rather, much energized, relaxed, his blood pressures down...

President Kennedy, a good Catholic with rosary beads, told us he needed it, at least, once a day, otherwise he would have a headache....  Jesus Christ and Mary the sinful woman...

But the bullies and the power greedy would always try to hit you right there were you lived, and call you unholy, a low-life sexual harasser of women young and old, inappropriate.  The whole bullying culture, a claustrophobic den of spying upon the thoughts and wishes of the real people with human heart and soul, trying, really, seriously, to take you down, at any cost really.

Funny how that was viewed as one way of Empire to crucify you.  How they loved that potential and possibility always at, as they perceived it, their side, the weapons of sanctimony...

In so doing, revealing, if you only opened your eyes in the simplest of fashion, revealing their own Achilles Heal, their own great weakness, the weapon of their accusations, the source of their power, to deny you any right at all to think, to act, to be true.

And thus their creepy fetishes, and their fetishes about who gets how much money for how much pandering and how much complete sell-out of the human spirit.   Their form of Soviet Gestapo Communist secret police power and detention, no way to slip around their long black cars spying on those still real enough to not wish to be tagged and microchipped and set into their great system of rewards handed down.  Render Unto Caesar.

Yes, delusional, they called you.  That was the word they used when you had the temerity to deny the charge of your harassing, your professing of your good spirit, your good intention, your wisdom, your circumspection, and all those polite gentlemanly things.   Guess what, the accusers are not such good sports of gentlemanly kind.  Indeed, they hate the true gentleman, regarding him as a pointless completely ineffective person...

And those simple conversations, plain, down to earth, incredibly revealing of the shared glory of God's spirit in us, like that from the other night, the Roman, whose grandfather made wine and encouraged him to enjoy it, which he did, as a five year old, one finger.  And when you became ten, you were poured two fingers in the glass, and by fifteen, the full glass, and he enjoyed it.  The Chinon has a metallic taste to him...  Such conversations... what point did they have in this world for grown up people...

Sad, yes, the poor young man had been very saddened by the whole thing, by the priests giving him the shoulder, by the girl who felt it her stake to be aligned with the bullies and was one herself just for the sake of being so self-important as to find herself able of bullying and even finding it humorous and pleasurable in a way, until she could go back unto herself and her womanhood, her nature as God The Father created her and women.

But here he was now, not at thirty three, but fifty three, twenty years later, and finally saying unto himself, you know, I don't need this awful burden to be carried around anymore.   And then, there he was, standing there ready to go in his bar with its well-rubbed and cleaned slate pub bar top, with little more than a wine key (a sturdy one) and his pen (a Parker jotter ready to go with a click of the thumb at a second's notice, and suddenly he felt like the happiest man, the most in tune with the true powers that be, like those not of this shat upon empire with its top shithead, not those goons, but the power of God, Universe, That Which Is, the entire created thing of perfect wholeness and physical and spiritual incontrovertible law...

Almost naked, as far as being armed.  And part of him could say to himself, as such expressions are always applicable, Gospel words, Behold The Man.  The man, gentle and thoughtful and poetic and peaceful and artistically mined, within....

Here he was with his wine key, and his humorous wine prattle, his deeper knowledge of the heart of people, neighbors, regulars, familiar faces from a year ago and an engagement party, coming back to him, his way of speaking with them, not of himself, but of them, enjoying the humor of the job, even when impossibly in the weeds...  And he was now, as if all of a sudden, like a young man again.  And behold, he might have said to himself, from having climbed out of a darkness, deep, one familiar to us, look at my contentment, my satisfaction, my sense of being in the right place, the right time, the right timing, and all of this powerful stuff of recognition of all the processes that are working now, right now, and forever, in the world, I am whole again.  And real.

And no Satan of whatever form, serpentine or not, can come along and bully us with his bullying thoughts, putting you down, telling you to grow up, be a man.

It was all perfect.  And how goddamn almost funny to realize it now, the true meaning of the acts of all those years attending to people, their self-perceived beverage needs...  That took the sting out of being suddenly old and with a grey beard.  That took the sting out of the countless acts of bullying subtle and not.  The bully is never really the primary reality of any human being, for man is fundamentally good, just needs to be reminded of it sometimes, preach forgiveness, judge not, as all of it here upon this earth is a lesson, a place of learning the true father and the true spirit of love aimed at us and precise, miraculous, really, a miracle of miracles....

If the salt has not the savor, what's the point then?  And the salt has not lost its savor, has it now.

Holy Magdelene, Holy Mary, holy Zoey Holloway, holy Mother Angelica of EWTN...  Non prosecutorial, willing to let their womanly hands perform good works upon you and receive them in turn.  Was it all before a sort of pissing match, juvenile tit for tat, "you go first, then I'll follow..."  Youths not allowing themselves to match up at an agreed time to give and share, to take holy communion of the bread and wine....

By-gone era, years and years ago, ancient trade route history...

"Hail Mary Magdelene, full of grace, of a thousand hand jobs and cum shots on tits and face, smiling, the Lord is with thee..."   (But for the commercial corporate inauthenticity that hangs about most of it, porn...)  No, that's not exactly in the literature.  Better not say that, as they'll come again for you in their self-righteousness...  Maybe the good Slavic church has spirit more conducive to God's ways and in such intimate matters...  Rustic, earthy, more a hayride than the recent pope's red slippers...

That's the problem, women blank to their womanhood, losing their feminine souls to act in accordance with the shallow riches and materialism of the bully culture preaching at you all the time, from which a kind of pub really is the best form of escape, a kind of private house, a safe lodge for the Resistance, the infant Church which must always be brought to life, to life in the present, made real, true, meaningful, caring and carrying...


Later on:

Surprises me not, the Buddha had his parable of the string.  Sitar, guitar, fiddle, makes no difference...  Speaks of the practicality of playing a musical instrument, which is of course something you do with your own two hands...  And this speaks of everything, of being able to understand each individual human being immediately.  Of human nature.  Needs no words, no scholarship of note, no higher degree...  The string, in tune, which is when the vibration of one thing matches the waves of others...

And every human being within, a Buddha, able to understand everything about another person's soul, if we left ourselves to be so direct about learning.

I think somehow of Lincoln having be snuck through Baltimore... to get to DC...  Even Lincoln who would never shy away from a wrestling match, a fight, even, once, a duel.  And he had to put up with that news bit, like he was a sneak, hiding out...  weak and afraid.  And that just wasn't fair.  People were only doing that, FOX News bit, to make money and sell scandal rags, and I mean, come on, was he not...  he didn't deserve that, in any way, all his goddamn life.    And then he knew he would have to die publicly, with his back turned, vulnerable with his wife, some little shit sneaking up behind him and one little ball shot into the back of his head, defenseless.  And if the shot had not gone of, if the little jerk's derringer had misfired, boy, that would be another chapter of history, having six four dignant Lincoln suddenly indignant, not afraid of swords either, would have thrown him over the railing...

Makes you think Good Old Jesus had the same DIY spirit of The Beatles...


And Big Boy Donald....  the very opposite of the DIY prairie boy...

The weather here was warm for a couple of days, into the seventies, the first one sunny.  Today will be in the fifties and raining steadily by the time I get myself ready for work.  Mom is feeling better, taking her antibiotics.  She is sounding better, and has enough energy to consider going out to Bame's to get some wine and to the Big M.  I hope she can find some bone stock, as even the carton-kind seems to help.

Writers are independent kind of people.  They do not like being told what to do.  Lawless peoples, like the Irish, make for good ones, stubborn enough, independent, fixed upon the passion of an idea and the meanings of it.  They understand how their craft, their process works.  Turning on the television, even that, even the Weather Channel, even the seemingly minor is an imposition upon the free mind, blocking the thoughts to gather enough to be rendered out of the inner silence.

I see my mother this way now, her wild spirit, her independence, her impatience, her feistiness, the fact that she does not travel well, is too nervous to be driven on highways, her inabilities to stay focussed in a grocery store for an extended period of time...  all of this, put together, points to a certain kind of spirit that enabled, that pushed her, to be an excellent writer of an excellent book, that which came out of her Ph.D thesis, Reading and Writing Ourselves Into Being.

Writing still, even in this day and age, the modern time, the coming of the Holocene, is an organic process, the inspirations for which cannot be reduced into commercial viability and the profit motive or anything else so logical, so bound to rule.  Even my father, a great scientist, yielded to the fact that that there is no ultimate non-creative explanation of the creature, and considered that there has to be poetry to the human understanding of the world and its phenomena.  Genies, he used to say, you might was well say it is all genies at work when your science entered microbiology and the world of things atomic and conceptual things like DNA.  What did Goethe ask, something like is chemistry physics, or is physics chemistry (I don't have it right.)  Ponder that.  Is biology a matter of physics, or is physics a matter of biology...

By miracles of nature, by miracles of the peculiar circumstances that arise when human personalities and realities get together, my mother, holy, a writer, arose, just so.  And the tale of her experience is an interesting one, a story of the human spirit, of redemption and all such good things like that, the outsider who came out and shined.  Lovely.  And you cannot tell her what to do, and that remains, a healthy thing.

By the same math, the same opposition and rubs of the human character and personality, of offending things and relationships agreeable and sometimes now, so did my form come into some form of wise being.  

The human being lies, wittingly or not, at the center of all the art forms and forms of spiritual life and forms of social life.  It is hard for him or her to naturally distinguish between them, to not view the wide field of human talents for such a myriad of ventures as a totality.  Inspiration is what matters, the good feeling, the feeling of participating in creativity, culinary, visual, musical, worded, athletic, tribal, political, choreographed, cave-painted, rune-ed, conversational, personal, private, public, communal.  This is why it must be nice to live in New York City, but also why it is nice to find a community organically, a collection of specimens as one might come across by a river bank or a stream with its bed, the agreement of nature that allows trees to share and balance in the light, as if dancing in slow form beyond human observation.

And in this comedy of us trying to feed, cloth, and take care of ourselves, where it is the taste of some to take their own work as of greater monetary value to society out of some urge not quite democratic, approving less of those who take it upon themselves to display the natural homegrown down-to-earth generosity of deep spirit, who are willing to create what they will create by, basically, their own rules, does indeed yield beauty worth telling about, and things useful to us.


Such is life that the stakes are always raised.  (The cradle of humanity has escalated into modern-day Syria, etc., etc.)  The rule-makers impose.  And the artist, naturally, will rebel from rules.  There are even some who apply art to rules, seeking justice, equality and words befitting our condition.  The artist has his own sort of science, the acknowledgment of structure, rules, applicability, pattern, natural organism.  No scoff-law he, but one in search of the ultimate peace that brings life together.

After all the crazy years, with the understandings that hydration and electrolytes, proper rest and nutrition, can bring, I saw my job as rather perfect and praiseworthy, and I understood with some appreciations as to my unexpected bravery toward it, how I never shied away from it, but went and took it, knowing somewhere down deep inside, that I was doing the right thing.  And I could only hope for the help and the will, the good health and endurance to keep on at it.

I am not one who will ever pooh-pooh the magic of writing.  I am not one to turn away from the incredible plasticity of the ever-changing mind.  The river of it constantly brings down new things within it, upon its currents, and who are we to turn away...

I find some happiness in all this.  I find within myself a contentment, a happiness I never would have expected, and had not remembered really having since I was a kid.  Those who wanted me to follow their rules, well, I just couldn't do that very well.  And the artist does not like that imposition, much as one might have wished for different outcomes here and there...  Could I have put my stubborn quality aside?  I might have wished to, but particularly when you are a student, learning, exploring, it doesn't seem to work that way.  And so, to be effective, you humbly take up your arts, and you endeavor to in some way put them out on display, even as they make little sense at the time, beyond deep down.


The Robin Said

Is it what we fight against
that defines us just as much,
as the things we like to remember and 
hold dear and think about,
things maybe you would not necessarily
bring yourself to understand.
Your blood is defined by the city, Mongol, cheekboned,
and mine is by the countryside, Irish,
of mistakes you would never bring
yourself to have made.
Constraint is not the country boy's thing.
The excesses of nature are his to taste,
yielding prairie goodness,
the medicinals we knew and used long ago,
before the the forest was cut and paved.
You have your rules, and your own forms of art,
and dreams, and I shall not trespass
nor impose.
This beautiful love for life
and happiness so sweet
can hardly be borne, but that it must,
it is me, who I am.

Early in the evening the band, three musicians, John P on bass, local legend, Rick on arch top guitar, Renee vocals, are sitting around, first at the bar to have a little bread and a cup of hot water for the singer, then at low table closest to the corner where they are set up.  They are due to start playing at 6:30, but the only customers are a couple of young people at the bar, who did go to work on President's Day, and a guy we've seen before who choses a Bordeaux for a glass to start, and then when his date shows, a bottle of wine from the list, and they haven't taken to their table yet also near the band.  The first wine we agree upon to look for, a Syrah heavy Clos Des Mures from the Languedoc turns out we're out of, so I bring up from the cellar Z Wine Gallery import's Rasteau, a great value wine in the Chat-du-Pape region, decanting it for them.  "It's going to fill up soon," I tell the band.  And the quiet before the storm makes me nervous.  Reservations to seat, walk-ins, complications, and the busser Hugo hasn't taken much of an interest in set-up up at the bar here, leaving me to do it, and the server my friend is looking down at her iPhone back behind the bar nearby texting in Russian, as if everyone was preparing to being bored and standing around and getting in the way rather than be accurately useful.

And then, we get hit, and our fishing lines are speeding out after this fleeing harpooned whale of attempted dinner service, and even the boss sees we're busy and pitches in, helping us out with the glassware.  And here we are, madness again.  Good for business.  Hey.  Old friends, who had their rehearsal dinner are back at the last table, furthest away for the bar, to be joined by a third, so I bring them, when I can, a little wine magic to shrink their therapeutic need, as the chaos mounts.

So distracted am I that I forget to fire the bass player's salmon entree in time for the first break.  The band waits around, asking for it, and I do a little explaining, and "fucked if I know, soon hopefully.." will the dish arrive.  "Sorry.  We got hit all at once..."  This happens in the melee that is Jazz Night.  Last night was no goddamn picnic either for the barman left alone to run the whole room  by himself on Sunday night before the Federal Holiday, and it would have been nice if the boss had come in that night.  He is being helpful tonight, but everything is a mad scramble, bread, butter, water, the next round, interrupted by attempts to help deliver everything, and everyone in each other's way, the server demanding an ice bucket when that is not the first thing on the barman's triage list of things to do immediately and quickly and now.  A woman I've not even seen come in addresses me at the restroom end of the bar, poking her head through the urn of dried reeds, asking me to ask the singer to sing Happy Birthday for her husband, right at this wrong time.  A group is gathering at the mouth of the bar, first four, now eight, blocking the short way around to the back room tables...


Mom, elderly, approaching 80 years of age, has a cough that is deepening, and has told me that she wishes she had a thermometer.  I gently ask her, as I walk to work, if she's attended to the usual, cat food, mom food, chardonnay...  She's getting a tiny bit foggier about bills maybe, from the holiday onslaught, and when she calls about eleven fifteen in the night as I put the bar back together and put things away in the cooler, she is again confused about where she is and why, and isn't there another place closer to Oswego, and does she need to put her cat in a carrier in the car to get there, and I always tell her, of late, no, mom, you're already home, you don't need to go anywhere.

To great relief though, the cough, as she has bronchitis, she tells me, has warmed her up to the thought of seeing the doctor her friends have been suggesting.  And when she calls in the morning still with a cough, with an email to her friends, they are on it to take her to the doctor, to the urgent care office attached to the good woman Doctor Ram they know so she'll be able to get taken care of.  This is still fairly early in the morning for me, but I feel a great gratitude to my mom's friends, true to faith in the helping out of others, even putting the academic department meeting aside.  Lent is a good season, isn't it.


Perhaps part of the strain of the job of barman such as it is, beyond the physical, the weary leg muscles clenching at movements, the tiredness that comes out of the endurance, whether or not you sleep well, is the clash, the inevitable rub from the real job of ministering to people, listening to them, greeting them and their issues to talk over, the putting them at ease with familiarity and comfort, and that more practical, I suppose, arena of secular commerce, the things done to get the job done and the sales in the financial books, the credit card charges sorted out, the wine poured equals wine sold and on the check...

I found that it was easier when I kept the sight on spiritual part.  That just made it simpler and clearer and also worth doing in this world where we much search for meaning.


I was not, in certain ways, prepared to join in with the practices of what we might regard as mainstream Christianity.    It would not have occurred to me coming out of college as I was that I would be immediately ready for anything like a monastery...


Before work, waiting for news from Mom, I find Ed Sheeran Castle On The Hill comforting.  Artists I suppose are not the most utilitarian of people.  But they give us art, they help our spirits, they soothe  our memories and bring them good meaning.  Music and good songs get us over the bullies in our lives, the grump grandfather who tells you, more or less, get a job, the elder who tells you, shouts at you, grow up... as you are the wrong one, very wrong, when you bring up an old incident from your personal life, the delusional quality of trying to put any reasonable agreeable spin as such tales of fucking up adolescently, isn't that the whole point, to learn something, and then put it into song, so that your spirits lift and you can stay happy, as happy as when you're listening to an old early Beatles song, before they too grew up a little bit too much, ossified in adult seriousness, their humor turned a bit.

It is always good to remember where you came from, the rolling countryside of song and poetry...

That's were college started to disagree with me a bit.  The seriousness, the striving, the wishes upon the minds of my friends to go into investment banking, the legal profession, more so than humoring the whims of their own imaginations and spirits...  Whereas I immediately began to miss the dumb things we did as young folks out in the small town countryside and returned as soon as I could.

And those who also have been bullied, or have that sense, that awareness of how the bully is always ready to strike, those are the ones who get you, who care for you, who love you as a brother and support you and your life's meaning, AMEN.

Again, the mind has changed, much different than it was the day before.    Yesterday, the "Monday morning" gloom of returning wearily, not feeling so hot, back to work.  And then once the set-up is done, a bit of the staff omelette, the tie is tied, the door opens, and then it turns into a very busy night, the boss's son with a six top to start the evening, and then we start filling up.

Back room full, the wine bar full, not a moment free.

It is happier to be back working. It puts me in a better mood, after three sick days after Valentine's Day.

The spiritual of serving recovers after the exploitation of Ash Wednesday and the normal serving of people whatever they might want, replaced by the fancy fixed price menu, the whole thing or nothing, everything booked.

And just when I'm finally finished, the regular is about to put his coat on and depart after his espresso--he came in when I was on the ropes of the evening, dealing with the last parties, hoping the busboy will come up and put away the dirty glasses--organize the plates--I haven't gotten much help tonight--a guy from the neighborhood opens the door, looks up, climbs the stairs, and he'll want a glass of wine.  He's an interesting guy to talk to.  He's from Philly, Rob, works with the local university, a blend of the dour and practicality, somber and friendly, quiet but talkative, and he's been out in Dupont for good Belgian sour beer, and, making his way home, wants a glass of wine now at 10.   I pour him a couple of sips, to remind which he likes, the Beaujolais or the Bordeaux.

Hey, are you trying to close up? he asks.  Yeah, I am.  I could just say, you know what, yeah, it's been a hard night and I just want to get out of here.  But something about it, spiritually it would be the wrong thing to do, to not let him talk, relax in a setting, hear him out.  I've not had a thing to drink, but, since he's having some, I chose to join him with a glass.  Seemed the Christian thing to do.  We talked over the things of music and concerts, life and jobs, a brother who's had a stroke, about moving back to Southern New Jersey, football.

NPR replays a Fresh Air interview of Mr. Rogers.  A man who helped young people.  A man who took classes at a Presbyterian seminary in New York while working for children's television.


Waiting around for the time to prepare for work, monitoring the news and the weather, writing is amateur, mostly pointless.  Not the time for great inspirations after being beaten up by the vagaries of the week.   Laundry, dishes, bleaching the kitchen counter of iron water stains.  Mom calls, with the strange experience of hearing loud voices at night.

Work becomes more and more the point.  It has to be refined, taking the good of work, the part you are comfortable with, and then personally with one's own life, developing that for the betterment.



But the true reflection, the true talent, is about our ability to be spiritual.  That is our gift.  We are capable of it, highly so.

That's why I chose a path that was not here-to-fore explicitly organized or religious.  I wanted a true spirituality, a real seeking, a real abandonment to the spiritual laws of God and His humanity, meeting the events of life with hope of finding their context and meaning.

It had been a long hike, and now in the boat he was laying comfortably in the ropes with a blanket over him and sailcloth.  He was tired and his muscles were stiffening, tightening within joints and about him, and everything told him to rest.  He drifted in sleep, vaguely hearing the thunk of the occasional oar reverberating against the wood and the water, the sound of the blade patiently in the sea's lapping currents.  The creak of the mast, the stiffening of ropes, the sounds of the air.  The corner of his mouth was wet and he remembered a dream, wiped his mouth his hand and went back to sleep.  Beneath him, the sea, and all its fishy creatures, heard through the bottom of the boat.

It takes a long time to think of things.  They will only occur to you with age.  The Brothers Karamazov did not occur to Dostoevsky as a young man.

Then on top of that you have to get your writing muscles in shape.  Which is hard when they have not been well put to use of late.

To a writer, everything is game.  The things he would write about, or say, naturally, are too much for other people, probably, for one thing, because they worry about you.

The Gospel of Mark, 3:23-33, well explicated by Fr. James Martin.

You know, the one where his family "went out to restrain him, for people were saying, 'He has gone out of his mind.'"  (And they believe the same.)

There are the things you cannot tell family.    And so it is that you come to live amongst the good disciples.

"He's free.  And that makes him both effective and dangerous."  Father Martin.

I wrote a book in order to express something.  But when we do so, we find our imaginations going further than we might have originally intended.  We go to a place that only we ourselves understand, and then, from that point, there is help from the divine, in faith.  We go from the particular, to the universal, from daily events to the meaning behind them.  And each step of life offers us important clues.  We have to accept them, as best we can.

The writer has to look beyond the events.  He has to have faith.  That one day the meaning of the events he has depicted will become meaningful, as there are layers of an onion to be peeled.  Certain events have to happen, and from them, comes understanding.  Woe unto the world because of offenses.  Lincoln liked that line.

The faithful must still be engaged in the world and its business.   And things will come about, naturally.  The kinds of things that are of strife and misunderstanding between people, largely out of differences of temperament.

It is a long process.  Why should it take so long?  We cannot obsess over events, but must move on from them, taking the course toward meaning, to finding the meaning of events, which I suppose come through analogy and parable, as the template of the Gospels lays down for us, both in form and in meaning.  There's a long time of digestion, I suppose, the chewing over of things.

And one supposes, at least, that this all has something to do with growing up.

Of course, one comes upon such things through his own mistakes, his own errs.  Material granted to us for being who we are.  Which is why we do not judge others, because you cannot learn and grow without making mistakes, sometimes publicly, embarrassingly.  It is a matter of character, that such mistakes come, for what they will elucidate out of you.  Daily bread.


The old (or rather middle-aged) writer sat around.  Why he was too lazy to go to church, who knows, or maybe he was shy.  Maybe he was working on something.  When asked about it, he might have said, 'oh, well, the church is really all around us, and one simply has to do his work;  going to church everyday--nothing all against it, in fact I always enjoy it, mightily so--is not for everyone given their schedules.'

I suppose he had been tested, in ways invisible, as we all shall be.  There was no sign of his having been sent to some Siberian-like prison, no experience like that, but there was a sense that he had sort of fallen out, fallen into a kind of exile, which either encouraged or allowed or made it so that he by habit kept somewhat to himself when he was not called to go his job, what they would call his day job, which we do not really need to go into all that much, beyond that it was trying in many ways, at least physically, but also mentally, a kind of, a form of persecutions financial and otherwise.

He did not really have an prospectives, as people would commonly think about them, in any career sense, and thus he was doomed to pursue the path he had somehow set himself upon at a young enough age.  So to speak.  It's never too late, as they say.  Let's just say he had not found anything particularly lucrative or sustaining a model of security.  But, he had words, and upon a daily basis, one can only see that they, the words, seem to be sustaining for him.  Such odd birds we all are, all of us.  I suppose his father had left with him some teaching, that he was to pursue that which he found natural, a notion based upon, as the old man might have said, the meaning of the liberal arts education.  And such he had received, though he might not have seemed to, upon initial inspection, seem to have mixed perfectly well with it.  But, people liked him, as a young man, and put up with his particular wry form of grumpdom well enough.

Perhaps it would be within the bounds of fairness to conjecture that there were not so many who understood him, fully understood him, but for a few exceptions.  A kindly retiree had taken him once years ago, as one might take in a feral kitten, as the man we speak of here had fed several litters of feral cats, before giving up on the project, satisfied that he had tamed one cat, a slight orange female who had recovered from a limp only to one day disappear, perhaps in a city roundup involving traps, sadly enough.  Friends had given him his own little calico kitten from a feral litter and the two of them had had an excellent relationship, for a good fifteen years, until rectal cancer overtook her good feline health and spitfire ways.  Like himself, the man was from a very kind family, and kept a good faith himself, as each faith is an individual matter.

And so, one comes across the pile of his writing, first out of curiosity, but then with some engagement, and then finally with some enjoyment as to the meaning he derived out of events such as happen to us as well besides the unlucky.  He took reasonable care of his own health, took his vitamins, and did other things to maintain himself in his own private fashion, as if he were unafraid of being alone for the most part, then took to red wine when bored with himself, the writing mainly done for the day.

What do we make of the Old Faith?  How do we live with it, live within it, explore it, handle it, humor it, practice it, walk with it, read with it?  Does it come before us, or after us?  Are we organically bound to finally flower into it after coming blindly out of roots in the ground?  Mysterious matters, indeed.  Are we fated toward it when we are born?  Does it even help us when we come upon the things that draw us out and into what we might argue to be great works of literature, the "sudden flooding wind " of Dostoevsky's crowning accomplishment of  The Brothers Karamazov, its roots in the exile of labor prison camp.  Would we rather not be so drawn?  Or does it come finally as a relief, as an inevitable thing that one can finally not distract one's self from or run away from.

I know the man liked his writing time.  The practice had grown with him, I gather.  Like the green flannel shirt he wore on a regular basis during the colder seasons, to work, at home, everywhere, a simplification of life, not unlike the monk's begging and his bowl of rice and his tea.  Live frugally, without much show, and do not overemphasize the self nor the illusions of it being separate and as tangible as we might like to think, out of a desire for pleasure beyond simple satisfying things.  He did it privately, without saying much about it ever, without ever claiming to be something along the lines of being a professional about it all, a journalist, a novelist, what-have-you.  He simply meandered along his way, like a stream content with its way through the forest and the stones, old enough with its habits to allow all seasons to pass, leaves, born green, waiving up to the summer, then falling as litter.

Well, there were bound to be certain disagreements which might have rose, I say in a chuckling manner, betwixt himself and the society he marginally lived in.  Being so bound to the devices of the day, it might have been, on the other hand, somewhat refreshing to come across him, different, like finding a snow leopard, not to cast him with too much romance.  Many would have expected his company to be dull and dungeon-like, cold, but when engaged, he was friendly, and with a sense of humor that bounded up the higher levels without oppressing us as a loud noise might.

He liked naps.  As did Jesus, though there are not any paintings I can think of the Lord taking a good nap curled up in the ship ropes.  A habit good for the taxed mind, and good for the stress, a kind of meditation.  Another man might have suggested to him, being of different mindset, that he would be better off reading Investors Business Daily, but what can you do;  hard it is to change people, sadly enough, I guess.   Is a criminal a criminal being born that way, or of his nurture, or both, or is it a matter of what is called karma...

There was something Quixotic about him, by which I mean, as the old knight had taken to reading obsessively books on chivalry, something about  the writing process might have weakened, or softened, his mind and his basic level of sanity, enough to allow a man much like the writer to become, well, more than he was through certain works and flights of fantasy.  Does Quixote shine a light of some sort back upon Old Cervantes himself?

But I digress.

His notebooks tell their own story, not that I necessarily approve of it, or of them.  Perhaps I should have simply thrown them into the recycling bin before, before something happened of an inexplicable nature.  I make no judgments upon his sanity or otherwise.  To his credit, I suppose, he stayed in the game, as long as he could, before moving on, as we do sometimes.



Verily, I say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone:  but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.
John 12:24-26

Dostoevsky used it himself.

But there is truth in it.  Truth in the sense that one moves on.  The point of the story was not about the  details, about getting the girl, so to speak, but about human society, about the soul.  About the ego.  About those things which you let go of, as the lesson within, as the reality of the situation, dictates.

When you're young a lot of it is acting.  Boy and girl like each other, but each puts up an act.  Only at rare moments do they drop the act.  No longer compelled.  I tried to capture that in the book I wrote, because that's what I felt, that's what I remember from those days.  As if college was a lesson in physics, as physics pertains to how the human creature acts when being in society.

Humphrey Bogart, meets Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman...  The act is a sign of freedom, of intelligence, of candor, honesty.

(One can only say this crudely.  There are not the best terms, yet, for it.  There are words for the opposite, and people get paid handsomely to write the words which would sell all this out.)


Your own intelligence is native.  Passed on from the ancestors, from the animals, from your own human uniqueness.  You have to respect your thought processes as they are, accepting them by letting them grow, or stay, wild.  The mind is never--would never--need a commercial to tell you its efficacy, its beauty.  You are in it.

(Not like the advertisement for AI.)

Hemingway was prone to suffering great boredom (and, probably, anxiety and angst.)    He was attracted to war and restaurants and barrooms, things that offered a refuge for the wildness he felt within, like the fishing expeditions to wildness and rivers.

The loser gets through Valentine's Day night.  The odd night, the different menu, no space at all for leeway.  Upstairs we sell about $7000.

Fear and shame.  No future in the restaurant business.  And I've spent a lot of time at it, making it a sort of pseudo-career.  The mistake was in not moving somewhere else.  Why DC?

What direction to turn in?

A couple's dinner entrees were taking too long, because I got distracted and forget in the melee to fire main course.  She says, could we have a cheese plate, so I hit 'fire cheese.'  Manuel delivers it.  You need to ring in the cheese plate, he tells me.  Sure.  Boss comes up an hour later directly asking me about it.  We are working hard, quite hard (and we worked hard the night before.)  There is not a spare moment.  It's not like I'm standing around doing nothing.  Later, the other waiter, oh, we're supposed to charge for that?


Anyway, it's all survived, and now is the time to write shitty pointless things.  The day off.  No story to tell.

Some day soon, mom will not understand where she lives.  And I do not know what to do about it.  If I move to Oswego, what would I do?  What skills have I?  What career will I have when I grow up?

In Oswego, they are accepting.  There seems to be enough of each element in a town.  Just what would I do?  Where would I live, beyond Mom's basement.  How's that for a Kerouac story.


But that's the way it goes.  Circumstances will lead that way.  Even well-intentioned people, fearing embarrassment, protecting what they feel must be, in self-interest, protected, will crucify you.  Jesus will always be offended by the profiteering in the temple.

And some of us realize that basic state, sensing it, sooner rather than later.

It's just the way.  Ash Wednesday is usurped  the commercial.  You can't blame anyone.  Nor is there anything necessarily wrong.  Just that inside, privately, the focus should be on other things, in your own mind at least.

A retreat from the world is not a bad thing.

But there is prophecy in life.  A kind man from a  good family gives you refuge.  That's not nothing.

Entrust your cares to the Lord, and He will support you.  Sinners through grievous fault, our sins will always come out.

But the way the sins rebound and reflect upon others, sometimes good comes out.

In the desert of Lent, we grow closer to the Lord.

And so, in Lent, on Valentine's Day, I stood before people, performing the tasks they ask of me, with ample set-up and ammunition for whatever the night might want, back-ups of chilled bubbly, and lots of labor, taking the stacks of plates of dishes consumed from the waiters at the mouth of the bar, placing them down in neater stacks after scraping off the remains into the wastebasket, the silverware into little plastic quart sized containers.  The busser food runner who brings the dishes will take the dirty plates back down the stairs to the dishwasher below us in the kitchen here in our little ship.

But I stand before people, and they have little idea.  I do my job well, and only occasionally mention that I am a writer, or that I'm still writing, and even more rarely would begin to speak of what I might be thinking of in that form which addresses thoughts in written form.  That world of mine, begun naively, childishly, but with inspiration, training, and background profitable, from parents and sibling, through college, is a secret life, obscured, hidden in plain sight, in the upstairs room serving, after all, wine and bread and lamb with the blessing of others of good will and thought, in the big city of a nation's judgments, power, law, the center of its might, its self-importance, its intentions.  (Ad to that what you wish.  The city does not escape the test of the old patterns.)  The scholars' son.

I even suppose that my old novel, roman a clef, fictional memoir of literary form, too serves as some form of cover, and thus is not of worth until all would be viewed from a certain perspective.  Any attempt, it seems, to create something of popular and commercial value has no point if not so backed-up, supported by the real true intentions, as such can only grow organically within.

And why would writing serve such a purpose?  Why, indeed.  Because that act is always supportive of the deeper mind, of the inner reality, of the mandala, of the stigmata, of the Cross, of the chakras and the Buddha mind, but for some of us I suppose clearest in Christian form given the arrangement of our atomic structure and the events around us and their deeper meaning.  That is why it is a beautiful process.  The left hand knows not what the right is doing;  perhaps it is in some way textually appropriate that we write now with two hands on the keypad, left and right.  Right and wrong.  Sinful and holy.  Unknowing, and known.

What can you say to the people there on the other side of bar?  You have to talk in their terms, with a cruelly short amount of time before being interrupted by one thing or another, not least the talky customer less prone to hold his tongue and his place in the importance of the spiritual life.

In this Lenten season I catch a Mass, the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word, celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass from Our Lady of Angels Chapel in Irondale, Ala. on TV.  And it helps, and it is beautiful.  And I am returned to wholeness after the mess of Valentine's Day with the loud insistent jazz musical blowing in our ears enough that we would wish for earplugs.  I feel less stupid. I feel less confused.  The Lord be with you.

I guess, I gather, you have to wade through the valley...

So is the book I wrote ever less and less important, not the true point, but as an exercise to get rolling, really, perhaps little more.  Faith in constructing an emerging narrative, that eventually, it would come about, as it might in a Chekhov story, or Dostoevsky.

Knowing where you are going, where you are headed, helps the journey out immensely.  If you don't know where you are going you will be prone to much confusion.  Blind, or blinded, or lost, you know not the purpose, nor the direction, and you will go around in circles.  You'll drink too much wine to hide the feeling within of lostness and searching, of enduring the darkness of the journey's point.

(St. Catherine of Siena looks like an interesting person.)

For awhile the feeling of laziness departs, and one can almost live again, having a good sense of himself in the clutter of the world.


Eventually, I found, they would come to me.  It might take time, but eventually they would drop their guard, their protections of an enjoyed and reasonably profitable life, come and confide in me of their real life, their health, their inner thoughts.


The stigmata is about energy, electrical energy flow...

Manuel and I took the Indonesian couches down from the wine bar through the dining room and into the basement.  He was drilling the screws of table pedestals on to table tops for two.  There were two extra tables downstairs next to the copper bar, and three extra deuces up in the front of the wine bar near where the band will play, and then having done what we could do, departed our separate ways into the night around 1:30 in the morning.


And I wake up feeling like an old barn on Valentine's Day.   Stone and old wood, littered with straw.  Bones overlaid with muscle, the ache from a thousand motions, of pouring wine, serving, clearing plates, running, wiping off the glassware.  And again, one is left awake but not so willing to move, not even to do yoga, and a retreat to a place to lay down and meditate is called for.  The mark of Ash Wednesday, a television broadcast from Rome, the Papal Mass, like a cross, reminds me too of the stigmata, the image within the body, as we are reminded be our better purposes.

Horoscope for Capricorn, reads today:  Are the targets you are aiming for ones you have set yourself or ones that have been set for you by other people?  If, as the planets indicate, it's the latter then it's time to break free and regain control of your life.  Not later -- right now!

Is it Valentine's Day, or is it Ash Wednesday, rather.  Who are the sheep that must be loved and defended?

Valentine's Day, polite and anonymous, delivering the romantic dinner...  Now, I wait for it, and write useless words, looking forward to when my labors are done after the long night, the jazz offending our calm with its volume, throwing off the muscle memory echolocation.  It all strikes one as a postponement of the acts one is working on...

The Christian in me rouses me, and I pour a cup of yesterdays Moroccan Mint, mix in a little bit of Astragalus powder, and before I've seen that Karl Ove Knausgaard has done a piece on going in search of Turgenev in Russia in the New York Times, and today relatives will bury our Aunt Jean, old Auntie Jean-Jean, my mom's Aunt, with her good nature and all her stories, up by Lynn in Swampscott, a journey too far to take my old mom to, on top of the awaited week of Valentine's Day at the old Bistrot of the Dying Gaul and the special fixed price menu.


Is it depressing, being outside the church, the not belonging...  The original, He dealt with it.  It made his work less bound by strict custom.  He could heal and do good work, even on Valentine's Day.  Well, a day set aside for love, the celebration of love, after all, why not.

EWTN, the basic church of Santo Stefano, from the Twelfth Century, whose bells rang, by themselves, when Francis died, in Assisi, a good place to meditate and pray, a small treat for the distracted...

Would Jesus fully understand the fullness of his acts of generosity, or for Him were they more or less instinctive, no need to think them over, the ponder the logic of how they might fit in to polite society's normal way of doing polite business, marriages, professional friendships, community, and the like...

Awake, the awkwardness of existence, of being a conscious being, waiting to prepare for the shift, the big night, the last one of this guy's workweek.  What fuel to take in for the night...  What tea to brew, what nostrum to take.

A lament for the human race, a lament for all who say worthless things, not taking into account the sorry state of our perpetual affairs.  For all the kids who in love make dumb mistakes, that is human.  For all the people who do dumb thoughtless things, or who do not do the things they should, lamentations, as memory serves properly to remind us of things we wish we'd done differently, had a little more time for...

But really, to continue on from above, or below, the words that are meant for the cutting floor are not the important ones, those lines that serve to vent our minor complaints about the lives we ourselves have created for ourselves.  Granted, we need the courage to face them, to get them out there.  They are not as serious, or as meaningful, as the ones of deeper thought, the ones that grow upward out of the roots of earthly complaint and sore assessment.

The deeper thoughts, like the Shroud image, like the angel informing one of the pattern that could be construed as a non-bleeding stigmata, are the important ones, the beautiful ones, sustaining us.  The ones into which all little writer details about guitars and whatever other objects will come to rest in, leaves upon a tree...

And like unto the word of Jesus himself.  Considered thoughts, balanced, worked upon, honed, precise as metaphor, the parables, the important stuff.  Even as we think we cannot possibly ever use them or bring them into any sort of practical purpose or use.  Thus, our sleeplessness.  The great awkward fear over how to use ourselves for the best...


"But you're a writer, if that, and what good is that for the world?  If you are moved so, then go work in a soup kitchen, or a hospital.  Enough of the fantasy.  Go and earn a living, how about that, my friend."

silently within.  obscure thoughts:

But Jesus was a writer, a wordsmith.  And His stuff was about the human condition.  He has values, ones that are helpful to us, like about materialism, fairness...  Uhm, spirituality, well, obviously.  The words are fresh, full fields of interpretation and science.   Engaging. 

It's not bad to try writing, if only out of some youthful idealism, as you make your raw way into the world.

"But writing can be a huge waste of time and effort.  Navel staring.  Postponing what you really need to be doing as a grown-up, caring for self and supporting family....  Irresponsible.  Leading to no practical good in this world that you have to make it in.  Might be okay for the college student, but grow up.  You're not young anymore.  That ended a long time ago.  A long time ago."

There is no response to such things.  How can there be...

The mind works with different logic, I'm afraid.  Until you're thrown into debtors prison or bad things happen, but by then, in that logic it's too late to do anything anyway;  you needed to start a real career ages ago.

It's a different logic.  The problem is the human being, in God's image.  That's the problem.  It's a sad problem, yes no doubt.  That we have to be closeted.  That our being must be exploited in some commercial fashion.  Working in a bar.  Teaching in a school.  Selling so many widgets.  What would Jesus do?  Where would he fit in?  As if he could ever be commercialized...


My problem is not depression, so much.  It's anxiety.  It's troubled waters.  The nerves that come with running through the modern check-list, of what I should be doing, what do I need to do.

And there are things you cannot change.


The innocent attempt to meet spirituality halfway though, perhaps it soothes more than it disturbs.  Perhaps it helps you with personal habits, with getting home without responding to the aggravating ends of Jazz Night evenings jerked-around.  It helps when you get home, too tired to do anything but go to bed, without getting into the wine.


But what would He do for a job?  Who would assuage his anxiety, his occasional terrors?  Who would take care of him?  Who would understand him?  Who would join him?  Who would help him understand the practicalities of the world, of society, of empire and local taxes?  Who would employ him?  What would ever be a professional about?

Stupid questions.

Fear is a terrible thing.  Hemingway liked to write about it.  How bullfighters legs would shake uncontrollably.  Courage, his subject.  At all things.

So you meditate, exercise, talk to a therapist, and so on.  Who knows, maybe even go to a church one day.

"Are you gay?"

I get that from time to time.  "No, just a Christian, or a Theosophist, Buddhist, something like that."

That's always the way it goes, for Christians.  A secret society.  The awkwardness.

It was necessary, the societies, the Christian label.  The defining.  What is now not so necessary, as doing yoga alone taming the muscles at home is a Christian act like those of Francis and the sick wolf.  Knowing who are is reassuring.  A self-knowledge that brings one calm, protection from the exploitation of the mind.    A way to basically know good from bad, right from wrong, even as that is always a hard thing to know, to ask of your own intentions, gentlemanly as they are, basically...

These days one is a private citizen, and Jesus, remaining who He is, is more a general presence, less tribal, less ossified, less structured.

That takes a lot of energy to say, a lot of anxious time.  But all of that leads you, in a way.  An abandonment of the cheap sell-out.

Waking after a restaurant dream, the kind that make one say to himself, what a shitty job.  It takes place in a strange amalgam, perhaps a new improved renovated Austin Grill, but also a touch of the Dying Gaul, the customers who come in, early...  You don't know where anything is.  To get dressed for your shift is completely awkward, the restaurant doesn't even look open when you walk in, it's disorganized, too big, an extra floor you find strange, distant, ashtray buckets, hallways with restaurant clutter...  The ordering system is strange, the bar unhappy.  It's not run right, personality is lacking, everyone distant, a mill...  You want to get out of there as quickly as possible.

And you have to go to work tonight, Valentines Day week, Sunday night to start out the week, with a strange cough.  Low on money, a death in the family, but one you can't attend to properly with the distances involved.

The last two weekends, if you can call them that, you haven't had the energy for anything social, turning down dinner with old friends thrice.  A lot of bed time.  Cold, dank, February unstopping rain.

And all of these, as dreams are, become sort of throwaway thoughts, acknowledge, and now, to move on.


The stigmata comes, if that's what it is, in a gentle way.  A divine being of image comes.  And this is why the popular pictures of Jesus are soothing.  The white billowing robe, the abundant hair, the gentle face, masculine with beard, sort of 'soft' eyes, wisdom, decency, kindness...  You lay there, meditating, between sleep and waking, hands folded across the chest, and the being is much a mirror image of you, informing your physical construction, matching your appearance, changing it slightly, as it always has, the sad kid, over all the years, which you've struggled hard to grasp the meaning of.  You feel it, the Christian image, in the palms, deep in the cup, as if within the palm there were invisible unknown instrument that one might manipulate as a hand to do things for humanity, for the world.  As if within that cup of the open palm there was an additional dexterous instrument, capable as much as the fingers of doing things, in a subtle way of energies and powers.  Almost magical, but for the proper word, holy perhaps, in this world that falls apart on us, broken, making it necessary for this Jesus of our collective minds come forward.

The image begins to feel like one embossed on candles, like the Shroud of Turin's work of art, mirroring your bone structure and brow and cheek.  It hovers above you until you realize it is part of you, a pattern within.  It is your being.  That's why you don't always fit in so well.  Your own peculiar kind of faith, interpreted.  You sleep mutely underneath it as it mirrors you.  You wonder, how would you possibly ever use it.

And so, perhaps, practically, it makes you nervous, for all the things you'd wish to achieve, the way you'd like to act in the world, the kind of person you'd like to be.


There was a homeless guy once, who used to irritate you outside a small Safeway, as you went in to purchase cat food, cleaning supplies, bagged spinach, packaged sausages, V8 juice.  Larry, sometimes you'd give him a banana as he'd asked, or a buck, and sometimes he was drunk and sometimes snarlingly so, as if you were his particular oppressor and the reason of his downfall.  Reasonably old, bow-legged, with a limp...  Sometimes he'd be talking to the big gentle guy from the check out counter, the one who, when the National Enquirer cover showed the colors of Brad Pitt's hair changing with his different girlfriends, said, "man, that boy's got too much time on his hands," and Larry would be in a jocular mood.  And once he said to you, as you passed, burdened, with plastic bags and other things more general and within, "don't be afraid of your own goodness."  And you paused for thought.


And this is what the figure of the gentle stigmata that subtly comes to you on a Sunday early morning hours before you really have to get up and physically,  as you only know how, to go and face the music (that is driving you crazy) in this town of Washington, blah, that it is somewhat like the rays from the angel hovering over St. Francis in his cave that he receives in the palms of his hands, as he looks upward toward heavenly light in a painting from more classical times.  Bernini?  (Bellini, St. Francis in the Desert, ca 1476-78.)  Or better yet, Giotto, Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, ca 1295-1300.

Your goodness, your image...  what do you do with it?  What a problem you've become.  But that old image hanging around you, speaking to you as you pass with brow furrowed at the world, engaged, distracted, weary, wasting your energies trying to belong in the world.  You can't hardly even speak to anyone anymore, in these terms society gives you, as if this Shroud of Angel were Huckleberry Finn speaking in language polite grown-ups take as impolite.  There is no real job they can give you to fit your predilection, your usefulness, as if those jobs were cookie cutters imposed upon you, missing the whole, chopping off almost half a torso of the figure, and a leg, just not being able to focus in and connect with the whole, such as they are, these templates.  St. Francis wouldn't even touch money.

You take a warm shower, hot enough to loosen the deep phlegmatic, ease the muscles of shoulder and lower back, the hot water seeps in through the cellular openings down into the deeper layers of tissue and body.  Everyone has to work.  And you are, thanks to the self-help book, practicing gratitude and love projected.

But you might as well talk to a cat about such things, as people are barely able to see it, to get it, this image that comes to you gently, informing your spirit and helping your growth by shining  a light.

And you were tired with the same worn-out thread-bare material again and again, the same old situation, as a writer, tired out, sometimes with too much wine to numb down the lonesome hours and ways of not-connecting.  How  can you connect with someone if you're not even being yourself?  Stop trying to meet them on their terms, boring, Washingtonian, materialist, consumerist, warped off the path of true humanity living in the world.  Obsessed unfortunately with the entertainer who came to power to wreck the fair great democracy, as it is.  This mythical town of Notgettinglaid...


Walk to work, slowly, along embassy row, then into the woods, calling mom on the way.


At the end of the night, even after cleaning up, the checkout report, the tension of the night seems only to build, solidified into something you yourself must physically take home, like a bundle of some sort, wood collected, to dry out.  The tensions of the evening, gracefully ridden through and over, but now, present again rather than dissipating as they might logically would.  Done early, the chance to hit the Safeway, stock up on the cold cuts and gluten free breads to get you through the week.  The Uber ride home seems only to increase tensions...

But He wouldn't be human, if he didn't feel tension, and even the worst sort of angst and worry, which naturally, in the story, is of course in the sort of quiet place at night, one that might seem like a haven, the garden, but which is his place of agony, of all the sad hard things that come with being mortal.  Hard to relax, to just simply relax in such a place...  The pain of the body, from work, and the realization too that things would be more miserable even if you didn't work, if you didn't have a job to focus on, fixate, get swept up in.

It's like a full shift is so intense, that even going home you cannot be sheltered from it, no relaxation.  TV, dishes, exercise...  Sleep, finally, but the anxiety is never far off, or not until the week has worn you out physically, into submission.  The awareness that you are not growing up, that you are not acting like an adult, and that by now it is too late, thanks to your stupidity, your penchant for wasting time...

Really, thank god one has a job even.  To not be dragged off to work, what would one do?  A retreat from time to time, sure, maybe even forty days, or a silent retreat, but otherwise...  Good to have enough cash to be able to rent a car to go see your old mom eight hours away, not frequently enough.

The night closes as I walk back over the bridge, Connecticut Avenue, the wind blowing, a light spray of the rain that is going to pick up, eating a double Whopper, bun and all.  The end of a date, traffic coming toward me, one slow step at a time.  I caught a bus at Van Ness, but it turned to Adams Morgan and I decided to get out.  A good day, in that I get out with an old girlfriend to see the Cubist paintings at The Kreeger.  Dinner was nice at her apartment, a Langhe Rosso, Thai from downstairs, the original Blade Runner, comfortable, but now I just want to get home, tired, and tomorrow is work and it is Restaurant Week, the last night, but still a major hurdle.  The night before, a belated birthday dinner over at my brother's, the grappa at the end...  Nights I start into the wine earlier than usual.


Dreams, strange dreams.  I make chicken stock, but in vain.  It will all get thrown out.


Sunday night, miserable.  Downstairs gets a busboy.  M is the food runner.  A has the phone, seating parties as they come, finding space.  By the end, I just want to get out of there.   Let the downstairs closing server wait for the kitchen guys to finish cleaning up.  Sebastien comes up to keep me company, just as the last customers leave.  Restaurant Week strangers standing around put you in a mood, and the last thing you want is regulars.    Leave me alone, eh.  So Sebastien is sitting now at the end of the bar, where we put the clean glassware, wiped clean from the washer, onto mats.  He always sits there, right in the way, even when you've told him.  So he's droning on, about the same things he always talks about.    He is moving, to Virginia Beach.  I should come with him.  And finally, checking in on the kitchen, I pour a half glass of Beaujolais.  Talking to people takes a lot of energy.  You've been doing it all night long, at the bar, and you've about had it.

Even our stellar soldier, the nice young lady from Mongolia, sweet, strong, steady, is angry with how we've been staffed tonight.  The short end of the stick, and we've been clearing all the tables, stacking the dirty plates, picking them up off the low tables, or taking them back from the narrow back room, needing a long reach, a lot of work, sore muscles tired out the next day.

February.  What can you say.  I find myself in the same pattern.  Up late, then trying to sleep, after sleeping most of the first day off, and then, the second day off, still, immune system off, exhausted, cough, sleep, a mood to match, low.

So I find myself watching Moonshiners.  An addiction to Tinder and Bumble.  Swiping, like it's a video game.  Five minutes later, is anything new on Facebook.  In my loneliness...  Google news.  But, I am tired, and the immune system is fighting something unknown, flu shot under the belt already.

 I read The Tools, by Phil Stutz and Barry Michaels.  As suggested by a co-worker.  The tools themselves make a bit of sense, self-help sort of way. But I watch Jimi Hendrix youtube stuff.  Documentaries. Guitar talk.  How to play Little Wing.  Fender Hendrix Strat reissues, that's another two or three hours.

The whole story of the man himself, while he had many lovers, people who appreciated him, there is the side of how taken advantage of he was.  Very sad.  The people who managed him, really just buying and selling him, sending the money off shore.  Such that by September the 17th, 1970, he was rather depressed, and with a sense that powers were working against him, murderously, as if it were Shakespeare's time.  The last few concerts, Isle of Wight, the shit show in Germany, the audience mad at him, and Jimi, "I don't give a fuck.  Boo me if you want..."

But to a writer, it's tone.  It's the way you grab the neck, the way you strum, the way your fingers clamp, aim, moving around.  The solid thunk, such as only the independently minded guitar player, as Hendrix was, would produce.  Tone, tone, tone.  You see it live, a player integrated, become at one, with the instrument.  A separation that is the uniqueness of a player's tone.  Hendrix had it.  He had a sound.  It's in his fingers, his strumming hand thumb, but also, in him.  Unmistakeable.  Original.


There are stories, when he went to New York after, what they call, the Chitlin' Circuit, played no longer with the Isley Brothers, but with Little Richard.  But there in the background, too flamboyant.  He wins a talent show in Harlem, one assumes at the Apollo, but he's fired by Little Richard, has to pawn a guitar, and he ends up downtown in the Village, playing the Whiskey A Go Go, something like that.  But, he has no place to live.  According to the story, he ended up sleeping in alleys there sometimes, with rats running over him.  And cockroaches, at one point, "took his last candy bar."

There was he discovered.  Women loved Jimi.

Kundera thinks of Jimi Hendrix from time to time.
Jimi, the man needed to play guitar, thus betraying how you and I really feel.  The need to play, to have a guitar, to strum it, to sleep with it.  Hands that need to do something.

It takes to the third day off, and you end up sleeping 'til four in the afternoon, unable to move the body, at my age.

And this is the hard part, waking up late but not feeling tremendously guilty about that, and sitting down to write.  As if writing would be any help for you, practically speaking.  In this situation you're in, looking for a better job, a saner life and lifestyle.  What's so great about writing anyway?  Perhaps sitting home alone in the evening is not conducive to the creative juices.

Wake up with the usual sadness, as to what one's own life has amounted to.  Thoughts of a grocery list.  Tea.

Lack of skill.  Groggy.

Our only chance in this great depression economy, to become vaudeville entertainers, pub singers, unpaid authors...


Operate out of the notion of abundance, not scarcity.  That's where I went wrong with girls and sex.  Fuck being a gentleman, kid.  They don't want that.  Nor do you.

I began to think that men and women are not able to understand each other directly.  Women may  think that might be possible, but men know otherwise.  Just the way it is.  The only thing that allows them to understand each other are noble indirect ways, in the context provided by larger causes, social cooperation, communal health, spiritual life, literature.  An animal cooperation can come about, as in penguins raising their own, but otherwise man and woman might as well be speaking to each other in mutually foreign languages.

And ultimately, women, like men, will, reluctantly, realize this to be true, women being accepting, as men must be too.  Fathers.  Brothers.  Friends,  People who have to deal with the difficult, the enemy they would rather love, all the people they have missed knowing in history with no chance but a smell of their ghosts in the time space of the imagination.

Men who seem able to speak to women are doing so by employing a language of commercialism and market savvy.  And as a consequence of this particular focus, which is largely away from the human experience, they make themselves more attractive to women, by their economic smarts.  Men who find this ability will then have be less able to find their own authentic selves, and they will have a harder time speaking with other men.  Other men will regard them as shrewd, but lacking as far as good company.  The men gifted at women talking will have cooperated themselves into a corner, making a bargain to gain the things they want, houses, children, careers, etc.

And this is how society works.  Those who speak with authenticity are left with a hard row to hoe.  The clever continue on with their genetic natural selection as shaped by the economy.

The truest forms of communication are those that welcome a kind of third party into the room that has been agreed upon, a belief in a higher power, most likely and most effectively.  God's plan is for men to do men's work, and for women to do women's work.  Whatever that may be, springing naturally from the two quite different creatures.

It would be cliché to say that women may be patterned in their own way by the economy.   Perhaps their maternal instinct predisposes them to speak of fairness.  Which sounds good.  On paper.  But all creatures are not created equal on an equal plane.  A cat is a cat, a dog, a dog, and a bird is a bird, as the inner genies of their DNA, shaped in an agreement between the inner and the outer, have created, by the divine powers that make such things so.


Only in moments of great retrospect are the vast differences in male and female communications understood.   By then it's probably way too late for the individuals, now separated by time and space, to ever be reconciled.

And so the man is left looking for, basically, a pious and God-fearing woman, devoted to her own powers and the powers of the male.   Old School.



After she'd express her displeasure, for whatever I'd done, or hadn't done, or done clumsily, or done something she might have found embarrassing, after a curt dismissal, then she would appear, passively, at a distance, like a hawk in a tree, or a cat, as if to watch or surveil, as if to express some strange kind of animal kinship that crossed the species, unable to express herself in words or in any other way but a kind of acknowledgment, a show of creaturely respect.  She was up in the tree, a falcon or an owl, and I was on the ground, unable to reach or tame, having as I saw it failed at it.

Good material, is about all you can say.  Take Shane MacGowan, The Pogues, "The Curse of Love."

I can take 'solemn pride' in the fact that never imposed, that I did not overextend my own will, my own language, my own forces, my own understandings upon her, that different creature.   Perhaps there is truth to the old adage, that if you love something the instinct is to set it free.

Anyway, as you get older, you realize mortality, old age, the difficulty of doing the laundry and going out to buy toilet paper and wine, green tea, immodium, dinner, depending on energy.  No wonder, the painkillers found in Tom Petty's system.  Perhaps the restaurant business is merely realistic, that it will beat you down, and leave you with Saturday night, not to party, nor to socialize, but for basic errands.

When I go out to grocery shop, out upon the avenue, I think of Shane MacGowan, think of him wandering, distant, observant, songs in his head, Irish, a drinker, not feeling well, but the songs in his head, like rain falling.  The lights of the avenue, the cold, the windows of shops, the faces, things being there, things closing, smell of steak in passageways.


But there are, at the bottom, all of us, and we respond, as a creature, to stimuli, to art.  This is the rather unexpected popularity of the music of the people, pop, blues, rock, Irish, skiffle, Beatles, jazz.  Art takes us back to a common conversation.


Each of us is a different creature from the rest, a separate species almost.  We all try to get along, but it's 100,000 different species of howler monkeys, whales, dolphins, orcas, cows, rats, birds big and small.  For us not to accept that about the next human being, how complicatedly different he or she must be from our own selves, well, this could be the subject of Singing In The Rain, or anything really.


My mom tells me she can deal with winter, because her boys go out and play in it, dig in the drifts, remembering winters past.