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.