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...