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...