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.