https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kerouac#/media/File:Jack_Kerouac_Naval_Reserve_Enlistment,_1943.png


Sometime after this photograph was taken, and after a car accident, Kerouac sort of lost it, according to the official Navy view, and they admitted him to the hospital for some form of mental issues, and headaches.  Later on, he would admit it would have gone easier for him had he not been such a wise guy in attitude.

His experience out on the sea, losing his best friend, his truest literary friend, Sampas, to the War, his early letters, annotated by Ann Charters...

Youth, into adulthood, a time of upheaval.  The face is a strong one.

And what put him on the path he would now take...

Dinner around 8, my oldest friends in town, my best friends, a couple--I knew them separately before they joined and married, one from the place I worked, in her neighborhood, and he from the bar he worked, the one my brother favored going to on weekends when I was off.  I bring the wine, three bottles, and they put out a spread of prosciutto and soft dark salami and cheese, and then, as it's Good Friday, scallops with fettuccine and a salad.  They are hard working, and organized, shop owners.  They know what they are doing.  Dinner is quite delicious.  I stick to wine, no hard stuff for me.  And when I leave, though I check a new wine bar out, I avoid ordering anything, and get in a cab.  An Ethiopian gentleman, we strike up a conversation.  I want to go see if my old chef friend is around, along with Johnny, a great guy I let down once when the two opened a restaurant more than twenty years ago in Adams Morgan.  The guy takes me up 18th Street, perhaps to milk the meter.  The display on the streets of Urban Babylon turn me off, and I find they, my friends, are not there.


But the writer runs a sort of risk when he goes out.  It's as if he has to control, carefully, best achieved by cooking for yourself at home, what he eats, making sure he gets enough.  Otherwise, it will end up being later and visiting McDonalds and ordering foolishly, and then having to drag himself back, by bus, or on foot.  And then to eat on the couch with the television on, and then to sort of pass out, and then to put himself to bed, and then to wake up feeling crappy.  Why, who knows...  A safe return, but waking to angst and anxiety, and the glass of water beside the bed.

There is fun with friends, and they are important people to talk to.  They know me very well, all my ups and downs.  They are fun.  They have cats.  Where they live is interesting and happening....


But Kerouac...  is there a relationship to his going out on the town to listen to mad jazzmen blow their horns and then to have that experience filter down and come out as writing, is this a measure to which the man might otherwise feel lost and lonely...  Is there a correlation...  An original feeling of lostness that came upon him as he gained adulthood...  Everyone else taking upon themselves a responsible adult life (except for other madmen.)

The direct line between the mountain climb of experience, and a different sort of take on a professional life, and the writing...  The direct line between the anxiety and the spiritual work of writing itself, and yes, for Kerouac, and for anyone else too, it has to go in a spiritual direction...

Is that why some of us pick out certain professional activities, that they bring to us the maximum amount of anxiety...  somehow mimicking the experiences of childhood getting amped up by adult behavior, the experiences of passing into adulthood with all your cracks and faults... that by facing such headless horseman coming behind you on the bridge you find eventually, hours later that you are through the danger, that you can then repair to go back home, tired, almost ready for sleep,

A sketch before work, green tea, some turmeric tea cooling, time for the shower, and then some yoga and off to work.  The friars of EWTN have visited the holy land in the background television sounds.  The Lake of Galilee is seven miles at its widest, and thirteen long.  The sun is out.

I take Kerouac as a hero, a strong one, a profile in courage.  At least by my own scaredy-cat pipsqueak standards...

And then, Good Friday...


One reads about the writing that comes out of the Creative Writing programs these days.  The imitation of writing that pays no homage, has no knowledge, to the body of literature the human creature has created, no deep root in tradition, no ability to read closely the old words, and of a style that has a self-important lack of need for actual skill, actual narrative work...  And I should talk...

(Found, via Facebook friend, Quillette.Com, "With stories like these, who needs talent," by Sandra Kotta, a four part series.)

But literature will always come back.  No matter what they try to do with it, with fancy theories, and the imposed tastes that discredit the great honestly of literary work trying to make sense of life and the human condition...  It, literature, real poetry, real prose, real thoughts, real issues, literature will always come back.  Because it is organic.  It is in me and you.

Through all our own winters, it is there, still live, still breathing, just a bit dormant, waiting to gather its forces when the time is right.


There'd been a night, thirty years ago, wintertime.  I was living at my dad's.  And I was helping out with Don Beebe, landscaping, and we had a little project to prune the branches lining the streets of Waterville, down the road.  A job in the cold time of year, and then you'd go back to the cab of the pickup, pour some coffee and talk a bit, waiting for lunchtime.  So I called my college princess, and it was not early in the evening, but probably around eleven at night, and it rings and she picks up the phone, and I ask her, "hi, too late to be calling?"  And all I hear is, after a pause, not a long one, "oh, god..."  and the voice drifts away from the phone, and I am a creep, and she hangs up.  And I do not call her back.  Who am I?  I'm some poor shit fallen college student who has no idea what he wants to do with himself.  Well, he wants to, given a good education in English literature, be a writer, but he doesn't know how to do this, to be a writer, and he barely has a job.

And so I remember the golden light of the sun, low, there that morning, the morning after, as we are sort of pointlessly  clipping back with branches with the long pole-pruners, pulling the rope, pruning, the cut branch falling to the freezing cold bluish white ground covered lightly with snow.  And, well, of course, I just accepted it all.

And I guess with that, I knew that I was in some sort of exile, and that I needed probably to go somewhere, I don't know, some adventure, some big city, where I would be lonely and suffer, in hopes of becoming a writer.



When I got to DC, after I stayed with college buddies, two different classmates, wearing them out I suppose, I found a place to live.  It was a big deal for me.  Foxhall and MacArthur, and I lived in a small house, one split down the middle into two, with a quiet porch and a backyard with a tub and  a garden in it,  living with two women, a younger one who's boyfriend had a mustache like Tom Sellick, and Sandra, who'd lived in Europe, was a good cook, worked in jewelry and who hung her italian fine lingerie drying on a special rack in the bathroom.  They had a cat, and they liked that I liked cats.  Somehow they fixed upon me to be their roommate, in their selection process, just to mix it up a bit, I guess.

I remember once walking with Sandra, I suppose we were down on M Street near the Four Seasons, walking along, summer day, not too hot, and she gently starts asking me maybe like what is my plan, my plan for life here.  And I'm a kid, twenty three or so, but not a man at all, with my busboy job and my temp job at the George Washington University Health Plan during the day, sleeping on the weekends until I gotta go run my butt off at the old original Austin Grill, running all night, listening to Marty Robbins White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation, and Hank Williams Why Don't You Love Me Like You Used To Do, being taken advantage of, running all the night so as not to feel lost and depressed and bereft over losing Princesses and direction in life...

And all I can come up with for her is Kerouac.  I want to be a writer like Jack Kerouac.

And she knows who, of course, Jack Kerouac is.   Hmmm.  Now is that much of a career choice...

She was very kind to me.  She helped me out.  She made soup for me with chicken and pumpkin and it was the best thing I ever had.  She cleaned up when I ate late night pepperoni pizza with my Grill buddies rom the old Adams Morgan Trio's and vomited in the hallway trying to get outside but not making it as the bathroom was in use...  She gave me a paperback copy of George Orwell's Down and Out in London and in Paris and played Tom Waits for me on the stereo in the living room.



But why, I wonder, would you want to be, want to be, a writer?  By choice.  Inspiration, sure.  But something organic.  Something within human beings...

And I also wonder, if it is not a bit insane to try to be a writer...  or is it a chicken or the egg sort of a thing...

One knows himself as a pip-squeak.  Ineffectual.  A good for nothing.  Good at nothing practical.  He hates to hear himself speak on recordings.  He's stopped wondering why women want little to do with him, beyond politeness and friendship.

He doesn't even know when he's going to write.  What he's going to write... absolutely no plan.  Doing it blind.

The things one has to write are quite boring.

So I went down there, walking, in a hurry, to arrive on the hour.  Down the hill, across R, down to the big avenue, crossing the other one, past the Cosmos Club, a light rain, the winter coat too warm a choice, then across Massachusetts and into the downtown.  I get to the corner of 19th and L.  Where are the food trucks?  And then I realize, oh, the appointment is for two not three, I should know this, what got into my head...  It's always been two, after it changed from eleven am.  I hate to let my nice therapist down.  She listens to me patiently, devotedly, looking, poor thing, for ways to help me.  My iPhone is out of storage space and acting funny, and it takes time for emails to load.  Oh, yup, she sent me one around 2:15, but it had not come at the time.  Standing there, I write her back.

Going to see mom, a week away, and then starting to write again, yes, kinda threw me off a bit.  And I have to go back to work.  But in a way, the week away, it kinda of cured me a little bit, reminded me of things.  And it is a sign of good health that I am writing again, and that I was writing so seriously that my mind arranged me taking a pass, unintentionally, well, I'd rather be writing then focussed solipsistically on hopelessness itself and all that bleak future stuff.

So I walk back.  Now with the clock ticking for another thing.  A few minutes, a bite of packaged turkey, a change of tee-shirt, sweated through and jackets, folding a Brooks Brothers button up shirt in thirds and pressing it into the pages of the legal pad, the legal pad which I used to have a different kind of faith in and use for.... and then back out, down in the other direction to the avenue with all its embassies, backed up traffic, Secret Service police cars, then finally through the woods, and up along Dumbarton Oaks, to the other big avenue, and back to work, the little yellow painted building with the blue awing, the first shift back, and right on time.  How have the kids left the bar;  I was worried, a concern in the mind for days now.  My return.  How painful will it be?

Out of soda water, of course.  The beer not stocked back up in the cooler so I have to get down on my knees and go fishing for the different ones on the shelf.  The wine restocking also lacking.  I see they've left me with one can each, Coke and Diet.  No fruit but two lemons.  Who knows what else, in my triage.  On top of the usual set-up.  Oh, boy, here we go, put the wines in the bins to chill with the old ice, grab a milk crate and down the two flights of stairs to the basement, and here comes the busboy at least, reasonably on time, he's got kids;  I take it in stride.  The Russian gal wakes up from her meditation in the quiet back room, and tells me stories of her grandfather, empathizing with my trip to go see my mom, even as the horse within me is pulling at the reins of it.


Then to the end of the night.  There's nothing I particularly want to eat off the menu.  I've lost the taste, the desire.  Nothing strikes my fancy.  Only utility, something for the stomach.  A plate of duck leg confit in the oven, and I'd rather have a cheap gyro from the late night pizza down the street.

My feet ache, even though I've worn the Brooks running shoes all night.  I can barely walk, get a cab home.  I have a glass of wine, finally take a bath, listening to a TV show about a great World War Two Japanese battle ship, the Yamato, the brain child of poor old Admiral Yamamoto...  Epsom salts to soothe and lacquer the skin with mineral protections.  It's five am before I'm settled, before I can fall asleep.

And today, up late, two thirty, waking from a dream, and my poor skinny butt along the base of the spine is raw and red from scraping against the tub, and I am still tired and achy.  The signs are clear.  You cannot do this much longer, my friend.

And after looking for it, concerned for hydration, I realize I've probably left my Nalgeen bottle, filled with homemade electrolyte water, in the lady's cab, nice African American lady, gracious, her brother a pastor down in Southern Maryland, driving a Honda Fit.

The realities of the working barman's life...

(And even Jesus I've let down, even in Holy Week, watching certain imagery to help myself relax before bed, committing adultery in my heart which doesn't want to but the body does, and anyway, a check on my health, male and otherwise, but sad.   Alone, an act which leaves you with little to say, your powers of writing empty, thus its sin, even though no good doctor could blame me.)

So, what are you going to do, for a life, for a job...

The writer cannot write.  He's terrible at it.  He shouldn't even bother.

And worse:  nothing to write.  Have farted around too much.  Too much radio, then calling mom.


You're too earthy to follow the regimentation, my mom tells me, when we talk of the church, much as I'd like to feel a belonging there.  Too many rules.

Like this town.  It's odd combinations...  Not offered much in the way of a career after all the hard work and the wasting of the best years of my life, as they call it.  The writer is not one for the city and all its so-called opportunities.  The writer doesn't care.  His nuggets of gold are found in self-reflection from his struggle.  He could be laboring anywhere.


Holy Thursday for old me, poor old Tranowsky...  The tired aches from work leaving me ready for a nap.  It's seventy seven degrees at the end of March and I need another nap, another dream, another Jesus lay down in the ropes to ponder what he needs to say to them all.  Jesus knows it's not writing (the things he is working on and saying), that he's a literary failure, too lazy to write a narrative account with believable fleshed-out characters, and having no desire to fictionalize real people, too tired from work to edit out whatever he has recently laid down on paper...

Out to the grocery store before they close at ten.  Hair still with epsom salts in it, and the body too old to give a fuck how I dress, just old green LL Bean chamois shirt over black tee shirt, Dockers chino type pants, stretch fabric, not too tight, sneakers.  A few things, half-heartedly in the bag, but not up for the bigger grocery mission perhaps at the midnight Safeway near the McDonalds, and a cheap bottle of wine, which might be okay over ice with lime.

And as I'm dragging the stuff home I end up wandering down Connecticut Avenue, walking along sadly from not having done any writing of any kind on my day off, I decide to go to my old haunt, since it is so nice out, and I have a craving for gyro meat, the little cheap Greek place, Zorba's, where I used to sit as a moony young man writing in his notebooks mooning over old girlfriend and wishing to convert his own sad life into a kind of Parisian Hemingway sort of a thing, appreciating the spirituality of the street, the passers by, the buildings, older style, brick, most of them, across the avenue, the quiet of the triangle part insulating you from the cars, the busses, the cop cars, and enough conversation, a place where young people go, on a limited budget, and still it's not cheap for me, just cheaper.  And so, bravely, looking like a bum, I go in and there's the guy.

Nice guy, like me, been there forever in the restaurant business, he's the manager.  And sometimes, you know, you get shy, and you don't go places because you want to remain anonymous, just in and out, not have to make the extra effort, and I, bad with names...  So it's hey man, how you doing, and what the hell why not I'm not hiding anything, I'm not kidding anyone anymore, life is tough, work is hard, and me with all my bad career choices (but solid, very solid and steady work effort, never calling in sick but a few times when it was really obvious...), and I cannot muster much happiness, but, yes, a gyro platter, yes, I'm starving actually (and by the time I get home I won't have the energy to cook anyway, even my simple way) and yes, why not, for $4.95 a glass of cheap Greek low alcohol  red.

I go in and wash my hands, get a glass of water, lug my reused grocery bags up and out onto the patio, find an unwobbly table, and he's given my a second glass of wine.  I didn't mean to milk the situation.  And I've found out his name, as a nice young couple comes back in and gives him a big thank you.  And his same is Saul.  How 'bout that.  And he says it the old way, two syllables, old school like in Old Testament tone.  I'm taking my tray out at that point.  Good.  I know his name, finally.  (And in this go-round he has fed me, at a reasonable and modest price, taken good care of me, given what he can do, rather than persecute, hey, that's good, you take what you can get.)

I wolf down the gyro glistening and with the tzatziki sauce on top, skip the pita bread below it, get into the fries, usually skipping all forms of potato due to the arthritic joint issues eating them causes, as I avoid dough to avoid fat belly, am happy, or not unhappy, the moon almost full, cracking atmospherically through the dark quickly moving enveloping clouds, and the salad is perfect as always, the best in town to my own humble tastes, just so with the red onion, fresh romaine, tomato sprinkled with oregano and little bits of pure white feta, even eat the black olive which I don't necessarily like.  And then, still very hungry, I go back in and order up a beef shish kebob.  Another glass of wine, why not.  Thank you, my friend, behind the counter, with mustache, our hair grayer now...  Saul.

And there it is, dinner, on Thursday, Holy Week, no disciples, no feet washed, no bread, but french fries and the very good consistent white rice along with the two little skewers and after the gyro meat, yes...  I finish my glass of wine, not having intended to splurge (though I am getting money back from the Feds this year), and I'm tired enough and I walk back home, up to R, past the old coffee shop patio where I used to sit with my legal pads with no luck writing, no story to tell, just my own little reflections and little birds to watch, sparrows picking at the sidewalk, and now at last, at least, it looks like we're through winter almost, one can go outside.

Back up the stoop, I barely have the energy to put the cold things away in the refrigerator.  It's almost midnight anyway, and I take the trash out, the recycling, pour myself a glass of water, and hit the hay.   And tomorrow it will be Good Friday.



To be a writer, yeah, you have to be a weirdo.  You can never go mainstream.  You're an outsider, almost even to your old former self.  Quite possibly a let-down as far as your family goes...

Sitting at home in the apartment, the quiet textiled living room, sitting in my father's old brown chair, I think of Doctor Torrey, old R.E.T,. the Theosophist, my father's mentor.

And for me, finally, some form of self-respect, as I come across a picture, Kerouac's Navy Reserve military induction sort of mug shot--he was about five nine, incredibly handsome, obviously French, a very strong face and a strong personality coming through, determined.  Some self-respect for having tried to be a writer, anyway, not necessarily a good one, no, nor one devoted enough to really get at it.  Enough to not take shit from anyone, and maybe I'll go tell them, look, we need a busboy, at least when it is Jazz Night, because I don't want to walk out of there crippled anymore...

No, I've not turned out the way I might have intended to be, but, still, you take your shot at it.  And maybe one day...

The wine thing...  I work in the business, sure...  But somehow I never really wanted to be a sommelier.

He walked like a soldier having returned from a war, at least how he might have seen it, as he walked downtown to the office on the fifth floor, the person to talk to, safely, a woman a good fifteen years younger.  Then, because he was still off, still outside of everything, disconnected, in his own process, because he hadn't figured out anything, even still, as a returning vet, he would go to the job, working the bar.  He was no longer excited about the job.  It had always been a matter of being okay once he got there, but he knew it too had its costs, its unfairness, placing him back in the trenches of shitty conditions, shift work, bad for the body.  But now, less and less.

It's a common theme.  Platonov, The Potudon River, a great example, saying very little.  Tolstoy, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Melville, Crane, they all played with the general idea...

Aeschylus, there is no bravery without realizing the suffering and the sadness as qualities of existence.

Speaking creatively, seems to me, the idea of being a great writer, a writer "better" than another, is a fallacy.  First of all, such a judgment can only be subjective, a matter of taste.  More importantly, a writer can only write by being honest with himself.

Does the morning start reasonably?  How did the making of the dragon well green tea go?  Did you put in a spoonful of ground flax seed?  Did you brew at the same time hot water with muddled citrus, turmeric fresh and turmeric ground, a touch of astragalus, a tiny pinch of salt?  Has your mother called already, when you were awake but the body was unwilling to get up, when you wanted to first wake up some, and even get the first few lines of thoughts down on paper?  What are the days appointments?

The bar job waits for later, somewhat ominously, but you deal with the awkward waiting.  A therapist session at 3 pm.  Do you really want to pick up tomorrow night's shift from the kid who wants you to cover it?  You'll see him tonight at work, after your break of eight days.  In a way you feel too old for it.  It's not like you're sitting behind the bar reading the newspaper;  you're moving constantly, from start to finish.  All too easy not to eat enough, to get dehydrated, to bonk as they do if they are not careful in a long bike race...

How will I get my body downtown to 19th St. NW and L Street.  Showers are possible.  Will I have an inclination to do a few yoga stretches before I eat a bit of breakfast.


The things of the writer are the things of journalism.  That is what they/we do.  As a college boy I came up with a wish to explore seeing Ernest Hemingway in this light, a kind of abandonment to the textural textual truths and realities of life that he enables the presence of a narrative, of a new form of connecting the odds and ends and the happenings of life.  Of course no one paid any attention to it at the institution, and nor did I care much about that academic slight.

The writer must go deeper into reality then it is normally perceived, as we piece through the information that might be presented to us as being important.  And to do this, I suppose, we must go through phases.  Say for a period we take one tack upon it, soaking up all we can, putting this into particular terms.  Sometimes, metaphorically, it is through Christianity.  But other times it might be through Buddhism, or Zen, or a Hindu tradition.  Sometimes it is through Milan Kundera, Kurt Vonnegut, Yeats, Eliot.

But you are there at the feeding.  The feeding point of the mind, even as you go through the things of the laundry and the dishes, the unpacking from trips, the assessments of the bookshelves and the piles on the desk, with NPR and ETWN on in the background.

Hemingway was an artist, always working on his cubist viewpoint of summoning reality through a Cezanne-like painting, like a sketch, the old house in the dusty scrubland distance of Provence, creating prose with a similar effect, less is more, the light is right, you can sense the weather and the landscape.  Included in his cubism, of course, the things he ate and drank, the conversations of artists at the cafés.  Did he know the effect?  Did he plan it, or rather did he learn a way to convey much through a seemingly sparse little sketch.  Bringing to us the boys in the apple orchard up north, then them talking by the fire, pretending they are drinkers, considering Chesterton's works, gives us things we get intuitively;  and the light captured in one little story (of the In Our Time collection, his early prose) will reflect off that of another.

In our journals, and even to honor the thoughts therein, we must accept we go through phases, as if waving different flags, say, metaphorically, that of the Civil War, or that of the Polish Underground of the Second World War, of the Irish rebel.  We have to honor the skipping around as itself a form of the mind's natural cubist perspective-gatherer.  We have to honor when we lose the trail, or no longer find the inspiration, or look back on pieces we've wrote, long ones we were once quite dedicated to even, with embarrassment.  We must sweep the old aside sometimes, to look at the new.


Of course, a writer can be recognized for dogged determination, for accomplishments of an energetic sort, for endurance, for preserving through political conditions and life's circumstances, for taking forward, like Conrad, like Dostoevsky, like Chekhov, like Melville, like Kerouac, the nobility of the human spirit and mind in the face of difficulties and hardship, as in all who believe in literature and in literature as a common property, available to all.  And the tale of a survivor, who truly is abandoned to the circumstances of life, might be simple, very simple, almost rudimentary, even almost childish.  The focus on the task, viewed as a personal history, remarkable...  The transformative power of writing, of working on a piece...

How could there be literature without such things, as struggles, etc.  It would take, there would have to be, some form of enormous stupidity, almost, a great misreading, or some vestige of an old national character, Polish stubbornness, Irish contrarian spirit....  some form of not really being able to belong so much to the computerized world, to Homo Sovieticos, the productive robot, the person shaped by the labors of the Industrial Age and the politics of big oil.


How will time work out?  How possibly will things work out?  Will I have time to do yoga and then make scrambled eggs before I must go march down there, having left my bike back in the basement of the restaurant....  How will I escape my being a loser of a certain age, having passed on all the opportunities to do "things."

Writing attests to the condition that it is up to you, that sometimes only you will see the things inside yourself, the good things, the positive things, the potential.  And for some of us, the only way to find that is through writing, writing more than the other things.

Sometimes you write;  sometimes you pray.  And sometimes they become the same.

I actually said this long ago.  Writing is praying, treating the later works of Hemingway.  It seemed too mystical at the time, therefore unscholarly, or not what DeMott wanted, even.

Somewhere beyond the woods, tucked gently into the folds of the land below the rising profile of the Holyoke Range, lay my family's old house, the house of my childhood.  It was a small split-level with a brief uphill driveway and white birch trees my tall father had planted on either side.  There had been a lot of farmland back then, tobacco leaves hanging in the long dark barns of the humid flats of the valley, fruit and vegetable stands by the sides of the road with bushels of apples and ears of corn.  I remember that safe feeling of being strapped into a toddler seat in the back of the blue Volvo station wagon, looking at my mom's pretty auburn dark brown hair, the warm-smelling fields going by in the summer, lit by sun, hearing the murmurings of daylight as I went to sleep, earlier than anyone else.

We'd go past the old house when we came back to visit in the summertime to see the Gregorians.  Each year it seemed a little smaller, a little more closed, a little more private, as if the closer you came the farther away something went.  The bushes and the woods had grown up all around, leaving it little like I remembered as a kid who passed freely between the three clean yards of ours and the neighbors.  

The grass was stiff under my steps.  I walked back toward the dorms.


I'd received an email from a friend of mine, a retired diplomat--I know him and his wife from the bar, going back a long way--who'd read my book, proposing I improve my visibility to local readership, something about the D.C. Library and the Library of Congress promotion of such, and there was a form to fill out, with a deadline very soon, and so I filled it out, as best I could.  I couldn't figure out how to upload a picture of its cover, selected from the options Amazon's CreateSpace self-publishing wing gave me in 2010, and went digging through the pictures on my laptop, handed down from my brother, on it pictures of my father laid out in the funeral home, pictures of my cat, Miss Kitty, the birth of niece and nephew, all my travels back and forth to see mom, college reunion sentimentality, to find a picture I'd taken of it out back on the railing in the sun.  The form asked for a three paragraph sample, thus the above, and I even included the link to the Kirkus Indie Review which didn't have the best things to say about my efforts beyond that they were "ambitious."

DC Author Festival.  The rainbow wheel spins from something going on in the computer, the fan comes on, heating up, and I wonder if I've filled out the form correctly.  It was easy enough to do, though, and not much really to worry about, even were I to be selected, without knowing much about it.  I've been to literary conferences.  I've attended the awkward little workshops on unnatural things.  And I prefer to not be involved with such people, for the most part.

If I don't have to tend bar, I'd prefer to do something that helps me write, or maybe even try to write something, which is like fishing on a cold day.


Holy Holy Holy, I would like to be.  I might like to get down to Saint Matthew's for the 5:30 Mass on this Tuesday of Holy Week, right now, but Mom calls, as I wake from a nap in dank cold afternoon.  I've spoken to her around 11 AM, but it's time for another call, and she must be as lonely as I am after our visit, contentious as it was at times.  First on the cell, but that cuts out, and then on the land line.  Which takes energy.  The night shifts leave me up in the air, because you have to be prepared for them.  To get up too early isn't always good given what you have to do, at least to my tastes.  And to tell the truth I can only get so far with that sort of thing, the actual practice as it is commonly practiced.  Would I like to go to confession, or would I like to receive Holy Communion, would I like to see the people who are observant Catholics, yes, perhaps, but in the meantime, it seems the literary persona within which has shaped itself over the years mainly under the radar has a certain system, certain habits.  And from having gone down a path so far, particularly as a literary person intent on leaving the best record of thoughts he could, you cannot change certain things, but can only continue.

So why should I be afraid of my version of being who you are...   I've worked at it long enough.  I'm old enough.  It is through the light that shines through the prisms of eccentric people that we see the truer light colors of who we are.  If you have your own style, well, accept it, don't get depressed, don't put yourself down, just roll with it.

I'd like to be so, a good Catholic, but I wonder, and I don't think I can do it, except by not doing it just so.  There's always that taste, of too much dogma.  A kind of dishonesty viewed from my own tastes of who I might like to hang out with and in what kind of situation.  In the end, the spiritual honesty has to come through the writing, it seemed to me.  That's the Jesus I came to know, or the way I saw the prophets or whoever they were, these strange holy men who listened to voices and the fires in bushes, that sort of thing.  They didn't know what was going to happen, did they, when they followed their gut.

In the end you do not fear writing.  It is the thing you do not fear, after all your fears.  Writing does take a lot of patience, certainly.  But you cannot fear it.  It's a way to conquer all other fears and worries, because, as a human being, you have to take all things in stride.

MacGowan wrote Rainy Night in Soho in some state of mind listening to ghosts.  And maybe your mom slowly reveals to you her own process, listening to the same.

I got on the road about 1:30 in the afternoon.  I had woken slowly, but managed a last round of things to help mom out organizationally, cooked sausages that would have gone to waste with peppers and onions, watched the cat on the table as she stalked our plates, stepping with long gingerliness over the various piles of papers...  The heat was on, and I took a shower, and occupied myself with a few more things, such as trying to figure out what was going with the three or four email accounts of hers, why, for instance she could receive emails from one on only one of her devices...

We took a short walk in the wind, a much warmer day, down to the little pond she had now named after her deceased neighbor JoAnne, and I felt very sad for being short with her over various matters of imperfect organization, my attempt to put like things with like things, and her, 'hey, I'm retired...'   I hoped I hadn't missed all her holiness now, her gentle way, her books, her intellect, in my desire to see them all lined up in neat piles and in book shelves, and how long would it take to organize her anyway...  And realizing that this was my own worst fault, reflected back on me.

Vacuuming around her bed and under her night table and lamp, saltine crumbs, organizing, like with like, finding old empty orchid pots from the Price Chopper, one for batteries, one for change, one for the mechanical pencils she's taken to, one for all her colored handle scissors.  Who needs to watch the news, the repeated stories taken on an irrelevance.   Her office is another situation altogether.  The bed has piles of books I would like to put into little piles, but it would upset her, taking something away from her which she values...

Though I was doing my best, and working on it through prayer and meditation, still...  I was not being as sensitive as I might have wanted to be, at least until we finally opened the wine and relaxed over dinner, three times at The Press Box, once at Canale's, once my attempt to cook lamb for dinner where we talked about my father's passing, of her grandfather's final heart attack, my guilt at not being there when my dad succumbed to the final, brief, illness in the hospital in Utica...  The birthday dinner with dear colleagues down in Baldwinsville goes well, after her nerves.



The sun was out, the sky clear, and I did not have to go straight to work.  There would be enough hours left of daylight to get me most of the way.  I drove and I drove, stopping for little pit stops, the rest stop near Whitney Point, and then the one after the traffic of Scranton-Wilkes Barre, then the one just above Harrisburg, not the easiest traffic with all the trucks to merge back onto 81, then the last gas stop, right before Mount Saint Mary's College, finding the barbecue place had just closed...  "We're closed, hon," the woman sweeping the humble dining room tells me after I stand at the counter for a couple of minutes.  Just as dusk, and then the road lonelier, dark, random, blind with the lemmings coming back through Frederick, then up over the hill past a Civil War stream, and back into Washington, D.C., via River Road, slipping onto Massachusetts Avenue and up past American University, slow and careful now and back to the little quiet street.

Take the car back after emptying my bags and stuff, and then two triple cheeseburgers from the McDonald's Dollar Menu for three dollars each, putting the bag into my coat pocket, and over the long gloomy bridge past the new Chinese building complex and down the last dreary hill by the Hilton, a peek into the windows of Du Coin, dead, one person, facing away at the bar, and on foot, tired, back to the quiet of apartment life alone.  And after the end of a long day, behind the steering wheel, and all the ups and downs, and all the thoughts, the thoughts of new perspectives by the small discoveries of going back to your mom's, therefore your home, spiritually, your place of renewal, there was a bottle of Beaujolais and I opened it, after the first bites, cutting into the small burgers, saying to myself, this is not going to be enough, with knife and fork, avoiding the buns, but hungry enough to scrape off the last of the rehydrated onion bits, the two cheeseburgers gone even before one glass of wine...  So it goes.


And being overly dramatic, in your mind, trying to figure out this life stuff, you look at your life as it is.  You didn't even want the wine, but it soothed, medicinally, and you were alone, protected from rambling on like an idiot to anyone in your relaxation.

A Mass came on EWTN in the background, the good Father reminded us that Mother Angelika had passed away two years ago to the day.

You must, I suppose, first realize you have nothing.  All you have is this little stream of writing, called by some sort of bogus modern technological term that would offer little explanation of it.  And after such a trip, with its long drives, its frustrations, its dealings with difficult personas, its easing of a mother through her birthday, you feel a bit tired, sure.  And it is a relief not to have to, immediately, go back to that job you have, which itself gives you next to nothing, but a modest income, no provisions for the future but Social Security, how do you stand it all...  Well, you like it once you get there, there is something spiritual about it, it lets you keep up this writing stuff, and there is the wine, which is both good and bad, very good and very bad and all things in between, such that it is very nice not to have to peddle it, driving one's own thirsts up to the roof levels.

What do I have, I ask myself, but very little.

But, on the other hand, it always seems like you're learning something, really just through the processes of one's own mind, not from that job, not from any particular experience, but my long careful deep thought and considerations.

And what you do have, in Holy Week at least, is a realization of the great almost impossible sensitivity of the Lord Jesus Christ, that holy man who comes through the storied books, the Gospels and their recollections...

It might not be so much that he knows everything, as in, being able to read the future, but just that he, He, is so very attuned, so very sensitive, so open to the vast world beyond humanity's usual protective gear and stupid talk, beyond their blusters and vocalizations, their small attempts to find a safe protected perch in this life in this world.  He is so much so, that he really can rewrite, as if, or embellish, as if, or explicate in thorough completeness all the stories of all the major figures and prophets that are in the tales already written of in The Old Testament, speaking of the entire learnings and teachings of the Judaic Faith.

Would it be a little shocking to him, this small minor obscure poetic writer who takes all this upon himself, such so that he moves beyond literary craft to really see things.  He sees things so much and so clearly, that he himself no longer even writes.  Rather, he writes through his sayings, through his parables, through his observations and even his actions.  Which are recorded, because obviously and instinctively to the minds of everyone around him, he has something to say.

He is a teacher, even called a rabbi, but he does not belong to exactly nor neatly fit in to the tradition as it is practiced.  His understandings go beyond, even as they are completely in tune.

And he is remembered, amongst many things and many reasons, for shedding light on who we are, on what we are like, on what would be the truest form of our good health and sanity.   This is his message, directly, through the indirect.


There are all kinds of terms for it.  The heart of Jesus...  Mary is a 'virgin' because she like him is fully sensitive.  No part of the crassness, of the usual understandings put forth to explain humanity...
She has an imagination, as her son will.

 As I take my bags in, turn the power strip back on to regain television and wifi, a cockroach, red, large, is there on the top of the old dishwashing machine, creeping under a black foil bag of dragonwell green tea, left, as it was empty.  I had done my best to leave things clean in the kitchen before my departure a week ago.  I'd taken the trash out, leaving only the recycling bottles.

The kid has texted me asking me to cover his Thursday.  I'm due back at work Wednesday.

The guitar.  They are made of pieces of wood.  Some are solid.  Some are hollow.  An old Hohner Strat, beat up, strings on ash, what's not to like.  Look at the strings as they come metal over the bridge, then down into the tremolo body, miracles of engineering put together.  I wish I could sing better.

It stands to reason that the writer cannot write as he might want to, every day.  The mind is drawn away by real and serious things, and when touched by duties, the voice turns inward, quieting down, back to the root.  A writer is a writer through being the human being, through suffering, through experiences of all kinds in all ways.  That which is cause for silence of the pen and word is the same as that which is the source of the flourishing, the rebirth.  The winter of worry and cold examinations and wind will turn again, and again, into the spring.  The writing is created, an organic thing.  It can only come through us, without so much of our own management;  otherwise it would always flow, and only be a thing of commerce, which it cannot ultimately be.


After the long trip, the continuing thought, upon the sensitivity, the dexterity, the rich emotional life, that which gets less notice in the mass culture, in the hyper masculine culture, in the culture of communications bought and sold, as if to be bought and sold were the main purpose of that which is dredged up as thoughts put into words...

There are the rough-hewn originals, which serve to guide the way, seeds planted.  And then there are the newer takes, necessary for their freshness, to bring the original heirlooms back to the market to see the light of day again, alive, vibrant, fresh and ripening.

There is the Old Testament, and all the stories thereof.  And then there is the New, and the stories therein, as well, each with a hint of reinterpretation, of explanation, explication, a re-expressing.

Do not covet another man's wife.  That will become an understanding of the sin of visual adultery, envisioned adultery, simulated just so as the best of technologies allow...

Oh, that does not apply to me, one says.  And then you see that it does.

The car, a hybrid Ford sedan, is rented, the bags are packed, a week off of work, good weather to drive North.  A safe trip, and celebrate Mom's birthday well.  Kindness of neighbors priceless, and pre-road jitters break with the sun shining through.

It must be that I do not travel well.  I find it hard to write then.  The suitcase lies open, anticipating the trip to the North Country...

So you go out, have a few Guinness with the crowd at James Hoban, having a bite to eat, fish n chips and a mini shepherds pie, and then on the way home stopping by the Subway for a footlong roast beef, stopping to eat the whole thing on a chair in front of the Starbucks.  Cute young lady.  Her friend, gay, joins us toward the end of the night, gets us shots of Jameson.  The crowd had thinned by then.  Earlier I'd helped a girl who'd lost her ID outside of The Front Page...

Going out seems to match one's inner turmoil.  It helps you pass the time, when you are in awkward state.  It will be hard to write while visiting up with old mom.  And it helps your mind breath a bit.  The unnatural quiet of staying in for two days, granted, necessary for reasons of organization, doesn't seem to help one stay in a mood to write long enough to find the 'hook,' the musical phrase, the 'one true sentence.'  Going out engages your energies in a beneficial way.

But traveling.  The essence of not knowing what you will find.  One more shift to apply my anxious nerves to.

It was not an easy town to write in, fearful of one's own candor.

But then you lose the connection.  You don't feel it.  It's just another day.  Some form of plans to make.  You don't know what.  Do you have enough green tea...  You want to protect your time, use it wisely, not give it away.  You don''t know what to do, really.

Let's see.  Needs:  green tea.  Soda water.  meat.  vegetable.  car reservations.  v8.  Take care of the body.  Do the laundry.

And nothing comes, and this is scary.  You seem to have lost an energy.  A train of thought.

You can only gather that you have said your piece, your peace, that that's it, and you now have to move on to another thing.  Look for a job, a real job.

Ah, but it's a dreary day out anyway... St. Patrick's Day, should I be out and about in all that?  Nah.  Got the trip to go see mom to get ready for.  And too many loose ends here anyway.  At my age, I don't travel well until I am actually traveling.


But you have to wonder, where does the writer's block come from...  It's as if there's something you wish to address, but something, as if a devil, Satan, is stopping you from uttering.  It's like the experience of an intrusion, like an unwanted advance, the experience of being pushed into something you didn't want to do is hanging over you.  Peer pressure.  Nerves.

And really the only treatment, some form of kindness, some form of spiritual advice...  Forgiveness.

One writes to express the good things, holy things, spiritual things...  things which often do not receive the translation they deserve in this world.  The writer owes it to himself to protect the writing space.

It's hard to write, it is.  And somedays, you're just taking blind stabs at it.

In dreams you are fighting the current.  Or, at least, you are in the current.  The current is pulling at you, and you have to go along with it, perhaps without judging whether this situation of being in such a current is a good thing or a bad thing.  The current is vague in the dreams, but ever present.  The situation of being in the current prompts dreams to appear.  The dreams are the best we have as a means of understanding the current that pulls on us.  Strange.  Thoughts we hold to us are stripped off in the circumstances of the river.  We had them, and then they are floating away.

Later we pull ourselves up on the bank, still wet with sleep.  Thinking awhile we remember little bits of those thoughts, of how the mind within the brain within the skull became like an atomic structure, with the electrons swirling around, sometimes lazily in rings as in the classic diagram of the atom, sometimes firing about unpredictably as in the model of the uncertain principle, sometimes outlining cat-scan type slice-throughs.  In building our little models of understanding reality we only have ourselves as a mirror, as a frame of reference, and each scientific theory holds within a poem about our own nature.  As we fell toward sleep, warmth, relaxation, the self-observations that allow the distance that then allows sleep to happen as it wells up from the warm body.


Kundera writes of his father dying.  (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, is it?)  His old man, who speaks no more, who was a musical conductor, is sweating every night, under an effort, the effort of riding on horseback, having to go far far away.  Every night he will make this journey, in his sleep, on his way toward dying.

Who knows where writing comes from.


Then the business became serious and far-reaching.  It became interesting.  It began to, sort of, hold together, to connect all things.

When you are young you feel you have time, and so you write things which aren't so serious, with only flashes of seriousness here and there.  But then, slowly, surely, you get older, and then more and more you reach the point of understanding of having less time, less time to work with, to play with.  And then you start becoming more serious.  You could turn down then the other uses of time...  You have to remain focussed and vigilant at all necessary times, and for this purpose you can seek entertainment on your own, as it comes to you in your atelier, your laboratory, your study, your conservatory, your recording studio, your news room.  Rich is life around you, a garden for thought.

Even in the most serious, there is humor, room for fun.  For sorts of things like song and dance.  Because you are at work, and the things of work consist of getting the job done, from start to finish.  Later, at night, toward the end, you bring out your own guitar, and the musician picks it up and marvels at it for being a good guitar.  He plays it some, a Buck Owens song, A 11, and then you get to play it a bit, and he likes your ringing style.  Cool.  Sacred.  Fun.  And you earned it, too.


To become a writer is to enter into one's own self-appointed monastery.  There is always work to do, always cause for silence and reflection, for music, prayer.  Even wine, and the daily bread, is work too, for the soul, to understand.  Joy is work, as well, as much as the hardness of confused toil of limited fruitfulness.

It is one's own choice, how productive he shall be, a matter of realizing the power of devotion.

By the time you get it, you're almost an old man.  Your father has passed away.  Your mum is old.  You are going through your final growth spurt, out of some dignified joke from the pineal gland.  Finally filling out.  And it was a tiring growth spurt, full of sleep, and hormones, profound hunger, and life always leaving you a bit short, such that it was hard to feel you were on your feet.

And why did you not take up a career in music, so long ago, when you were fresh and young, and able to play with jazz men and rock and all kinds of music...  What got you down?  Who told you you shouldn't put that music first...  that way you expressed yourself...  And why now, should a man middle aged look back so...

The day off comes, the physical hurdles cleared.

I'd been reading the Gospels for a while now, years, and the line about hiding the light under the bushel stuck with me.  Without knowing it, the attempt to write in this venue with its accessibility via smartphone and web, I don't know, I guess it came out of that.  Or was supported, fostered...

The question was posed, theoretically, why not then just take to writing "live."  Why be scared of the thoughts that come, the muscular efforts to wriggle within the old skin, to break free of the old shells of limitation.  Cracking free and out of the old leaves creatures vulnerable.  Their new hides are vulnerable, sort, before they harden.  Birds must come out of shells, just with the strength to match their obstacle; and then, even more vulnerable, they will face the next stage of the nest, parental warmth, feeding...

And so each thought was delicate, new-skinned, soft, embarrassing almost.  This is nature, what can you do, but live with it, perfect in its imperfections..

We had come upon an age, you know...  when even holy people would not be able to recognize themselves.  A Mary would not know she was Mary, almost.  Or, rather, she would be discouraged from the self-knowledge, so revolutionary, so radical, so out of this world and unexpected and miraculous...  As if her very DNA would be discouraged from the power of its own inner transformations of self-realization.

And the same with humble Joseph, the old husband "carpenter."  Same with everyone.

Not exactly that they'd be watching the news but just the sediment of two thousand years of skepticism would float down upon the species and its collective mind.  The Christian advancement of the Old would be met with a backlash, so that all miracles, all words and commands from God through angels and Himself would be nullified by the rational.  And the entire DNA of the species would reflect his reptilian retreat from the light, as if not wanting to be out in the light, feeling too vulnerable and with every assumption known by daily survival would be shaken.

I had started, without really knowing it, my little project of reading the Gospels fully and more carefully, in the spirit of giving something a chance.  I began it in moments of leisure, following my truer interests on the gut level, that I feared I would have to seriously pay for down the road.  I dabbled, but I kept it up.  I did not know what, if anything, would come of it.  There was an established pattern in it, the obvious literary quality, the obvious nature of the Gospels being something we all should be familiar with, and also the tradition you could sense in any good writer, in any good person good at public statement.  The old records of Lincoln laid out on the couch reading from the Book of Job...  Obviously, as good as anything to read, and, well, maybe even better, who knows.

And I had sort of begun to outgrow all the things you should read, if you had the time, to have a rough muster of literary history, parts of it, like say, the history of the novel, or any particular stylistic approach or advancement of prose, say, Joyce, or Flaubert, or of the subtle changes in material, aimed more to include the peasant, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, or the angle of perspective on the human condition in Chekhov's great heart.  Things like that.  Kerouac...   Twain.  Bookshelves... piles... Kundera's essays...  Shelves full of Hemingway.

You sort of reach the stage, of "well, now what...  Is that all there is..."

Then I suppose there is the next stage, the philosophical discussion of mind from the old doctors of such things, the Eastern mind...  What do the mental habits of the Buddha, let's say, have to add to all this bulk and body of reading from Shakespeare down unto Yeats, then Larkin...  Ted Hughes...

And then you wear that out too.

And but for a few things, a few tiny kernels, you've worn out even the things you wrote or would write.  No, you're not even going to write about the job you have, the work you do, the things you know.

As if you knew, as in all along, there were bigger fish to fry, bigger fish to catch...

And all this, of course, you only had the roughest of inklings, and would, as is the modern style, dismiss the best of the good as childish, prattle, baby talk almost.  Like talking of Bigfoot, or UFOs, would be the closest comparable thing...

Except for something growing within you.  A strange thing.  Kind of like a plant, a small tree within, a Caduceus of some sort, strengthening within, and strengthening you along with it.

O, but who am I, who am I, but a sinful man.  A man with few chances left, a man of certain age, whose attentions must turn, yes... but with no clue, as it were.  As if living in something like a lack of hope for anything but simply trudging on...  Not quite, no, just that that could be the mood sometimes, something you'd never really accept, because as a human being you would not accept such a death sentence of hopelessness, a thing quite against our very nature.


I guess I'd been trained through a long pattern of scruffy encounters.  Encounters haphazard, not ever fully realized, always somehow rushed, or clipped short, edited, censored by the great illnesses of the soul known to the modern, the Totalitarian, the selling of our own time, the rise of the great master of advertisement, marketing and distraction, the legion of serpents sent by a certain one, "eat from this tree of knowledge, and it will give you powers..."

Who would ever know the truth of these scruffy rough encounters, whose scruffiness was quite well-mirrored by my own appearances through the age of my years, my comings and goings, shirt becoming untucked, collar, life, organizations askew, but for running the barroom as tightly as my strengths and endurance humanly allowed...



But Lord, what blasphemy, the whole of the Old Testament and the New contains, so it would seem... Oh... Yes, but this is the best we know, can now, as of yet.  And its words have garnered the attention and full respect of many a very strong and independent mind of great intelligence...  This craziness of finding the Word of God.  "What is it anyway, a myth like those of the colorful minded Greeks..."

And how could I know, anyway, God...  What can I do but take the leap.


What is His Covenant with us, His low beings down here?  What if we do, indeed, do, or attempt, humbly, to do His work?  What is His work?  How would we know it...

Do not hide your light under the bushel basket, He tells us.


How can you not feel strange.  Still, we are in that mode of hiding ourselves from the Lord, as in the Garden, having messed it all up.  How could you not feel like here you are and you've worked hard, but you've messed up and your boss somehow knows this.  Even our own family, even the holy one, wished to restrain His Son...  "Quiet him down.  Tell him to tell his friends to go home.  Tell him to stop, and resume, after a time of restraint, to apologize and start back living a normal life..."  Yes, we understand he was bored with his previous career choices...  We hope that, with time, he will turn to familiar normalcy.  Maybe try to get him the hope of a book contract, keep him happy in the meanwhile, working on a fictional piece, "my time as a savior."  Stories with a touch of his old good humor, clever boy, kind of like old poor Yorick, to put the table a' laughing...


"It's a big world without."

"Yes, but it is a big world within, as well."






Following the old pattern, the Old Testament, the Prophets, the Gospels, was the best way around the interference pattern.  I could not condition nor control as well as I wanted to the mind's processes in a more effective way.  Even yoga, even meditation, mindfulness, even emotional outburst, nothing stood a candle to the great opening up.  Nothing opened the potential like the old stuff.

For a writer it was indeed like getting rid of the many unclean spirits, the ones that did you no good when you had that time and were brave enough against all one's other condition to write.

Looking for the word, the logos of God, shining in the sky just on a normal day, like those of barren afternoon in Lenten March, even in the most mundane things, opened up matching potential.  If you looked so, and granted this to your DNA, that you could grow and change, even at a late age, even at the age when maturity has arrived and beginning to over-ripen, as it were, then you were open to a new growth.  Well, it's true that old vines make the best wine, sure...  But...

It helped you get over that sense that there was something else you should be doing, a better way to conduct and protect yourself.


I saw myself less and less as a writer.   The writing was only a form to communicate.  One form.  It balanced others.  There was a satisfaction to it, and, just like talking to someone, it was tiring, and you knew your limits.  It let you keep a record.  Who knows the purpose of that, but... keeping a record.

But following the old pattern, that of the Old Testament, the Prophets, the Gospels, for a writer was the best way around the interference pattern of those parts of the mind I could not condition nor control as well as I wanted to.  For a writer it was indeed like getting rid of the many unclean spirits that did you no good when you had that time to write.  It helped you get over that sense that there was something else you should be doing, a better way to conduct and protect yourself.




You wake with the familiar sadness.  That's about all you can call it.  You cannot know if anyone else experiences the same thing, but by a general sense, a way of reading the people you encounter.

Where does it come from?  Why are you its custodian, its flag bearer...


But He would have been of the sadness too.  For knowing everything.  The virgin birth, the whole story of His parents...  The way things would unfold for Him, because of His knowledge, His complete understanding..

How can you and I even face up to that?  What an admission it would seem to be.

Yes, you could go to a doctor with your health insurance your employment allows you, "Doctor. what can you do for this?"  And you could take some form of treatment.

But ask yourself, would that really be helping me?  Would that really be helping other people?

And the answer is, no.  Because there is the pain of living, the fact of suffering.  Like any marriage is supposed to be, the acceptance of the bad with the good, in sickness as well as health.  And any partnership, any work you must undertake, it will be steeped in the same, the suffering, the misery, the pain, the condition of being left alone and to suffer in the garden with sorrow.  There will be the effect of those people around you who, believing it should all be about happiness and forward progress and activities that are culturally or professionally enriching, will go about business with a much lower body of knowledge and understanding.  They come, they go, they come, punch in, do what they feel is their job, allowing themselves the things of happiness, and then they get tired and leave the master to close the shop down, all on his lonesome.  They have an economic understanding, of what to give, shy of all, in order to receive the sustaining compensation, and it is no deeper than that.

But the wise cannot escape from the deep mysteries, the body of pain and unhappiness and great uncertainty.  What balm, what anointing oil, is there for that, and such things?  That is the burden of knowledge, if one would truly be a teacher, a good shepherd for the Lord's sheep.

The relationships that are real are acknowledgments, in their acts, of that pain, in each act.   As if sorrow itself were the truer form of happiness, contentment, pleasure, whatever a culture might put up as a term for that which is comfort for the tested mind.

Sin is a word, as sorrow is.  Waking up, yes, there are your sins right there.

Mother Angelica intones the Holy Rosary in the background as you have your tea.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name.  Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.  Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.  And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.  Amen.

Glory be to the father, and to the son, and to the holy spirit.   As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.  Amen.

O, my Jesus, forgive us our sins.  Save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of Thy mercy.

Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope, to thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve;  to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears;  turn, then most gracious Advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this, our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb Jesus.  O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary!  Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.  Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered unto Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried;  He descended into hell;  on the third day He rose again from the dead;  He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from there He will come to judge the living and the dead.  I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.  Amen.


And then, to relief, the Mass comes on the television, as I write, sitting over on my father's old brown chair, next to the chair of Madam Korbonski's home next door.


There was a wedding I went to, that of my brother's.  The ceremony was beautiful, and fun, of Jewish custom.  Then the wedding party departed to the memorial to Thomas Jefferson, where the sun came out and pictures were taken on the steps.  And then we went back to the Mellon Auditorium, and it had been transformed into the place of the wedding feast.  I was dreading my toast, as I had no clear idea of how to say what I felt.  The night before my toast at the Rehearsal dinner had gone decently well, reconstructing how Jack and Bobby might have talked, grunting to each other in perfect understanding and love.

But this night, the other part of life in Washington, the figure of Lincoln, alone, on a horse, in the rain, as we all come upon our reality here alone and without cause for great direct happiness, and this I mixed in the scene from The Brothers Karamazov, The Wedding at Cana, Dostoevsky's recreation of the first miracle of the wine, for human joy...  I was almost cut off, and the wedding director woman seemed to find my effort laughable, though my girlfriend, Sasha, hugged me, proud and pleased.

Later I would find that the Catholic spirit would approve, of my attempt to interject the spiritual into the fine celebrations...

I myself would have wondered why.

It just seemed to help.  Getting through the usual roadblocks when you awake, awkwardly, not knowing at all what you are doing, why you are doing, and think what you need to say on paper.

The visions of the minds of the Old Testament, why not sit in on their jam session, observe how they do it, see how they saw the major issues of the day.  What did they think of?  How?  Why were they obsessed, if you will, with equipping the understanding of, with, the One God.

Why, and how, would it help the modern writer to sit in with the ways of Jesus Christ, the way he thought, put depths into words...

Is this something we resort to when things aren't going very well, seemingly, when the path you've been on seems to have not revealed its true self, its purpose, its satisfactory meeting of life's great problems...

What should I do for a career, how do I pay the rent in this town, how do I save for the future, how do I take care of mom, how do I save myself...


Waking up, you clutch the iPhone, looking for something within it.  Some kind of information.  You're not sure what.  Is there anything you need to get back to in the triage of the day?

Easy to turn the television on, with the same excuses.  What do I need to know, The Weather Channel, weather, yes, that is important.  And yet it's already bombarding you with cultural messages, brain-washing you, lulling you, overwhelming you, so that any idea you might have on your own seems rather dumb now.

On EWTN it's coming out too slow.  You're hungry, thirsty, in need of breakfast.  Dirty dishes in the sink.  Green tea, bone stock warmed up in the toaster over.

If you're a writer, well, this is it.  This is the stuff you really have.  You don't need to go off looking for fancier more interesting things.   The mind is cubism.  Capturing one thought would be enough to be art, a worthy study.

But what right would I have to think myself a connoisseur of Old Testament prophets, of the Parables...

And why does writing feel like you're sort of sneaking around.  Hiding out.  From the bedroom to the kitchen, retrieving the glass of water by the night table, a pint glass, along with retrieving your eyeglasses;  multi-tasking, things in piles first, to then be sorted or made use of or taken care of to be more properly put away later;  sometimes the objects make it first half the way, as if that too were part of a process, something the mind saw the overall purpose of, the entire process in its grasp, even as you do not consciously think of it.    Is this the way some minds work?  Is this the way my mind works...

But if if finally came down to it, after all the things you wrote, what you might have within you, in your wildest dreams as a writer, wise, why not shoot for the highest mark, the coolest groove...

Why not aim for the example of examples, the real true distillation of words with meaning.

(One thought comes, and others will follow.   The hard thing is to not get distracted.)

Even Jesus, as a writer, would say, in essence, it is not me, it is my Father's business, it is from the Father.


And so I turned to what I thought would be the real things to write about, the things that I would mull over if I were, finally, a great writer.  A Dostoevsky, a well-read Lincoln,.  Converted.  Of a different mindset than the one you had to at least be capable of mimicking in order to stay relevant and make sense to anyone...


The secular world is worn out for the writer.  It doesn't offer enough, it's not interesting enough, at least not without its better counterpart, the life of the Church.  You can come upon this realization, as I did, a bit late in life.  Well, you knew it was always there.  You became well-read in Eastern spirituality, the philosophy of the Buddha, did the yoga, meditated, but even that, where does it lead you?   The Christian myth can be taken apart and analyzed by the scientists of myth and ritual, things that go way back, in history, in the psyche, but just as a way of thinking, you had to find the Judeo-Christian tradition working for you.

Taking in the mysteries, and working with them, prayerfully, it turns out working for you better than modern therapy treatment...

There are other things to do than mastery of the sophistications of the modern world, with all its great culture, its technological offerings...  Those things take up your time, but for what?  A career, you think, yes...  But that might not hold out forever...

As a writer you have no choice, I think, being in my own situation.  It was the way, there was no other.



Sophistication, moving to a city, etc., you thought chicks would like you better...

You can read Hemingway two ways...  either as a model for sophistication, worldliness, or, the other way, as one of simplicity, of going back to simplicity...

I knew there was to be a meeting at the restaurant at 3:30, and I found myself half awake around ten in the morning, made my tea, called mom who had texted...

But the body is not ready to go, and I am now getting texts from the kid, who wants me to cover his shift.  And this is irritating, and distracting, because it throws the mind into the necessity to make a decision, when none should have been asked of, but of what the first true sentence might be, where to start of this so-called writing process.  Every third Saturday, it seems, he has some sort of a problem, hey, can you help me out.  Either it's something for his little brother, cousins visiting from New York, or he's sick, or injured, and this morning it's bad shrimp and food poisoning.

So, I have to go there anyway, and maybe I'm up for it, or maybe not.  A little money is always good. You'll be going up to see your mom soon.  But still, the legs are tired, the body is tired, the mind might be awake, and I'm doing the best I can talking to mom on the phone giving her a weather report, what does she need today if she is able to get out of the house...

I take a nap, and fall asleep, and then, I get up, shower, fold a work shirt, just in case, and off I go.  On foot, through the woods, thinking I need the sunlight and the exercise...


The meeting is not about anything at work, really, just about a new ballot initiative, about tips and minimum wage.

But the meeting starts out, when we all are seated around the table we eat at, the boss asks me, what is this about, and he hands me a copy of a check, a closed check from two weeks previous.  The young lady, who had her rehearsal dinner with us, a friend of the boss who is overseas, was generous and appreciative, as a lawyer would be to an old bartender, and left a tip of one hundred dollars.  I shrug, what can you do?  It's plain there was a charge for her drinks.

Well, well, the meeting ends, about nothing else than the ballot initiative to which we need to make our view clear that we do not want the abolishment of tips...  I leave quietly out the front door and I do not have the energy, after stopping by the public library in vain to look for a spirituality section, to go to the grocery store, nor to make the fuss of hailing a cab of some sort, and so I walk back down through the woods and up again back out onto the avenue of embassies lining in a row.  Well, the sun is out anyway.  The tree pollen, maybe I'll have to pay that later, but it's pretty out.

By the time I get back, it is still light out, but I am cold, feeling rather tired, and my stomach is aching.  It is easy to drift off back into a good three hour rest, and not much writing today, though lots to say, just that it all got pissed away, distracted.   Awake at 11 PM, reheat a Bolognese with gluten free pasta, have a little wine, but again, bored, unhappy with the boss, who had also scolded me when Wednesday Jazz World Bank night was blowing up even at 7:15, "you two should be able to handle it," but the kid is going at his own pace, arriving a half an hour late, "I'm going as fast as I can," I tell him.  And I am.  Mom texts me again around 5 in the morning.  Her television cable hookup, tricky at best, isn't set right, there is the clock change, and she is cold and lonely and it is dark.  I have a couple of chats with her over, have another splash of wine, and down in the basement I put in a colored load, with enough energy to transfer socks and underwear and colored tees into the dryer.


I've helped build up a crowd of regulars, and that involves taking care of them from time to time, and not all of it rational, and sometimes as instinctive as the woman Mary who anoints Jesus' feet with costly spikenard.

But ah, so much for my little church without walls, my little Christian work up upon the second floor dining room.  So much for the Holy Spirit.  Eat something, take another nap, and go off to the beginning on another work week, Sunday evening with the clock change throwing everyone off.



And then, a fresh perspective.  Things become small, details, in the larger story of the old book.  You took things too seriously, but then the burden is lifted.

Is it as if you have an inner little brother, a sort of idiot you have to take care of.  A holy goof.  You're a bit wiser, and you have to help him out, spiritually, because he is spiritual.

It's like the girl.  You obsessed over her, or at least that's who another person might describe it, the thing they would say about it.  It was a painful thing, too random, unconsidered actions...  If prone to a moodiness, it kind of haunts you.  But then, finally, it becomes a detail.   It no longer touches you, because you are no longer the person, that person who such things would bother.  The things that matter more are the message you send, the overall message.  Your message is one of decency, respect, an inclination toward Christian act.

Your kindness, that's what matters.  You didn't need her after all.  Just like you didn't need the stone turned into bread, nor to be placed on a high temple, nor to rule the world.  You didn't need that.  All you needed was to write your own spiritual biography, as a means of figuring things out, so that, when finally wise and wizened, you could go on keeping doing the wrong thing.

The poor thing, in her fitting in to a sophisticate world, full of action and ideas and things to do, she ignore the important thing, the things of kindness.  She didn't see the divine being within you, and that might be as much your own fault as hers, but, so what, it doesn't matter.

Or is it that you think you've arrived, when the only real bosom you can ever long rest upon in peace is that of Abraham...

The death of Jesus on The Cross, being crucified, was a shameful thing, the priest in the day's homily mentions.  And there is shame in our things too, like the shame over the way it ended with the girl, like the shame of having to go find a shameful job...  Like not being able to pay your bills, shameful.  But Jesus did not shy away from the heightened shame, to make a point about our own grievous sins, and how they too are forgiven, just so.

And in my own shame, The Cross does offer the cure, to cure to failed literary and professional enterprises.  Cheer up, it was never about that, those things.  The literary effort was just a kind of a dreary training so as to keep a particular kind of journal that one would day reach a maturity of perspective.  The work I did was to the purpose of me being able to see within the basic desire to provide comfort for the people of the world, a true lasting comfort...

Passion is a very hard thing to explain to people.  Christ remains the best example of a man following his passion, even up until the physically grisly end.  But he has to follow it to the end, so that there would be meaning, and so that there would be resurrection, that all the words of all the prophets from the Garden of Eden on down would have the living life they deserve.  Like you'd water a plant.

And the Passion, yes, this is a sad thing, a heavy thing sometimes, not just the beauty of clarity and sunshine and the warm day, but of people being mean, accusatory, uninformed, rash, harsh, putting their own sins upon you to distract themselves from their own.

Poor Old Kerouac, he had it too, bringing the scroll into the room of the publishing house, and even Bob Giroux looking at him and it...  You have offended the Holy Spirit, Jack Kerouac said, and he picked up the box with the scroll manuscript of what was to be On The Road, and left.

After work, day one getting over the aches, letting the body recover, then there is the next day, letting the mind recover.  The gyroscope is spinning, realigning, setting one straight again and upright.  First was the body sore and tired, and then, so is the mind, the voice, the thoughts, from the effort to sustain the good thoughts through the workweek's hustle.  Both physical and mental energies, but importantly spiritual energies have been put to the effort of matching the work to be done.  The spiritual energies too need a bath in salts to get back on track.  Which might mean, hmm, maybe I'm in the wrong line of work, too indirect, too blocked, too contrary.

But then you look out at the world and its gainful professions, and you see no other real better place within it, the secular world...

And still it is cold out, with tree pollen, and there is no energy for the walks in the wood.

One tries his best to deal with the secular world, to live in it, to match it, to follow, to keep up with it.

(In the midst of that, there are dreams to remember.  Why do we dream?)

More and more you ask yourself, though, why?    Really, is it for me?  What does it offer me?  Do I abide by the logic of the secular world...

Or rather, is not there another gift within you, an important thing, that makes the effort to work within the secular world like a creature out of its element...  Kindness of the deep sort does not fit in with the model of the modern health insurance business;  believe me, I tried.


And so things come to pass, on this path of realization, encounters with the honest self.  The main observation is the fake, the falseness of human behavior.

Jesus did not glow, shimmering, clad in white, upon the mountaintop at the Transfiguration in just one day right off the bat.  It seems he has to work up to it.  He has to take the steps of correcting people, of showing them the obviousness of what he can see.  It takes the telling of parables.  It takes building the temple up, piece by piece, to understand, from foundation on up.

The world he encounters is, despite its best intentions, despite all its learnings, and its laws, one of pettiness, rote law abiding without the law brought to live in real life.  And it would seem, Jesus has a list, to encounter, to go through things one by one...


But even then, even with all the rest, then there is the work of all the good information to take in, to sup at the table of the banquet, freely given, of God's love and wisdom, sustaining us, healing us.  And this is full work too, a day that wants for no distraction, how sweet its water tastes.

One is left again, in the chasm between the two worlds, but closer to the holy, and further away from the secular is a pleasant change, a welcome balm.  Each little period of days off you work your way up toward the far hill, and with each little hike toward it, the air is pleasant, salubrious, and your muscles are working again toward something rich with spirit and meaning.

Now, the body needs to be fed again.  The cold-cuts from the Safeway, despite their best intentions, taste of preservative chemicals and unnatural texture, why...  is that necessary?  The roast beef was okay, but still.  The food from the secular world, not the spiritual world of that from God.


The body is sore and stiff, after the recuperative rest.  One's molecules, the atoms, the little dynamo genies of energy of which we are comprised, are beginning to fire again, after this long period of interminable work that required the great patience, the patience of the enslaved and in Babylon.  And that firing is a good thing.  Come out, come out, Lazarus of deadened flesh, rise from the worldly tomb they stuck you in," here lies Lazarus, whatever he did."  Take off your burial garment.  Laugh with me and be joyful, taste the sweet fresh air that rejuvenates all of us poor folk.  Come and taste the wonderful feast the Lord hath prepared for you (in need of no Yelp review...)  Let the still warm waters bathe you.

And there is lots for Lazarus to say, reawakening.  He has been, for his part, dreaming enough that he might grasp this new light of the spiritual, non-secular, this burst before him of white life giving energy...


Here you can reawaken, cast off all the admonitions, the nitpicking accusations that you are not following the law to perfect little order, that come from the controlling sort of people who are not willing to leave their precious earned spot on the secular hill and its city.  Here all the laws are easy and friendly, beneficial, obvious, supportive, and one can only follow them with deep renewed appreciation.  In their attack upon you, they knew not the fullness of your being, your actions, your intent.  Humorless, blinded, that they went after you is rather funny.

Yes, even Moses had too much wine and had to be put to bed, but after all that, and you can't blame him.  That's the human heart for you.  Better to have human heart than none.  The people who enforce such laws, who accuse others, of course, they are only responding to their own sins known deep in their own hearts, the staining lack of morality covering their beings in an unpleasant way, such that there is much anger.

What do the old people, worn down by their own immeasurable day in day out workweeks and lack of proper rest, need but to be brought back to the spiritual?  We cannot give them new bones and new brains.  No wonder they are addled, having lived so long in their separate secular world prisons, without getting that which is necessary and sustaining, only getting it in small amounts, and even then probably arguing with themselves and their own logic of how best to defend themselves...  The lack of that support which is pure faith, even as that faith is the furthest thing from self-protective rational thought.

Sad it must make you to witness their frailty, their infirmities, their dotard confusions from years of leaning on the wrong support.  But rejoice, they were healthy enough to get so far, intact, and they must obviously had known that which supports, the real life of love for fellow humanity amidst all the toils they did even as they were not made to do.  The being, made after God, was not meant to be a prison guard, a humorless bureaucrat, an angry clerk, a futile pounder of hard rock and stone, and lastly not made to upstart nor correct the holy law of divine order and health of creation.  People were not meant to pollute the waters of life with toxic compounds made in a laboratory to our own grievously short-sighted ends.

And so to heal them, one needs to wipe away a lot of falseness.  Sin, we call it.  Sin of being the proponent of an "Ism."  Nazism, Fascism, whatever the particulars...  nothing more than words in the end, though the words can bear deeds terrible and cruel beyond all proportion... Isms accusing others of their own predominant fault...  Isms created to begin arguments...

Only he who knew all such things would offer support to the poor and the troubled, to the infirm and the weak of mind, for otherwise he would have fear of being useless, of doing more harm than good, not the good shepherd.

Sleep the gentle just sleep of the holy child tucked in the safe bosom of the Father.  He who does not act to gather causes then to scatter.


I spend much of days off with kitchen related things.  Exercise means going out in the cold to gather some groceries for dinner.  The secular pleasure of going out to dinner is less a joy, only a necessity.

At night I took refuge from work and its pains in the early morning with an old children's book of ours.  I'd ordered another copy of it from the old book sellers of Amazon, wishing to give it as a gift to my niece and nephew, but the 'very good condition' copy that arrived has a musty feeling to it, and with its inked in dedication, I thought I'd better just hang on to it.  Brian Wildsmith's Illustrated Bible Stories as told by Philip Turner.  There's just something nice about a book you grew up with, and at various times in your more mature life, returning to it has been a good balm for soreness of all forms mental, physical, of the heart, of the soul, of the agitated blood.

The tree pollen has come forth, and in the beam of a flashlight or a bicycle helmet lamp, the grains of it are visible and granular, coming down like a very fine precipitation, particles afloat riding sideways and down in the breezes of nighttime.  Sneezing, puffy eyes, itches of the sinus.  And you can plainly see, buds on trees, the first of the flowering pink ornamentals here and there, the peek out of the magnolia, and the rose-like offering of the Camellia tree out even in the cold that has returned after two very warm days when no one needed a jacket.


An old book in one's sickbed, with brief text and pictures colorful and evocative of ancient times in the holy lands.  Adam and Eve.  Cain and Abel.  Noah.  Abraham and Isaac.  Jacob.  Joseph.  Moses.  Joshua.  Samson.  Samuel.  David.  Elijah.  By the waters of Babylon.  Beautiful stories.  And with the paintings of watercolors with the line structure of ink drawings that depict these stories in prismatic color, so do the old stories tell us of our light, broken into the different colors in all their shades.

And it dawns upon one, in an hour of need and the dissatisfactions that come even when we are giving of our good efforts, this is our story.  This is my story.  I am part of this.  Part of that long history of the communion of the human spirit, ready, hearing the voice of the One God.  Part the tale of our part of the bargain with God, the Commandments.  The difficulties borne, the history of a people, wandering, besieged, battling...  There is no New if there is not this Old.  The Old is what we all are coming from, and somehow, as dumb as it might sound, it is good, very good, to know.  And I say to myself, yes, I remember.  For there is morality, moral lesson, the things of every adult maturity as far as making good decisions and doing the right and the good within these old pages, here of childhood, from 1968, the publisher's date, when I was three.

So, this is why I have acted the way I have acted.    There is the element of the prophet in our lives and their little insignificant life stories.  The same struggles.  The same awakenings, at odd lone moments when little seems as alive as the stars far away, to the holy good of God.



There you are yourself, in some sort of biblical situation, out in the desert, an exile, wandering, much like the people of the tribes themselves, subject...  And while you work away in slavery, still, there is something going on, something good, and it has to do with your own particular talents.

And here you are awakening to the old stories, the true deeper reality, found not to be the one of solely in the Buddhist sense, accomplished lotus style, or of the wisdom of the Zen monastery, but that of a collection of special people, who are caught in the act of realizing a positive reality, not simply a negative reflective one, (such as 'thou art that which is.)  There is something real behind it all, and real reasons to do things.

Then your own story comes into focus.  Everything is taken in stride.  If you came afoul of certain people, so what?  If a particular girl didn't work out, so what?  The true nature of your purpose as a human being had not come forward to you yet;  it was not made clear what it was.

The special talents of particular individual men are made for the times in which they must find themselves in.  A holy light, a star, shines over them, in time, marking their coming into their maturity, as to when they are ready for the deeper understanding, the one that makes all other things fall of as meaningless.

Interestingly enough, the standing up requires none of the special acts we might take as one bearing upon such.  A liberal can only be so much of a liberal fighting for every liberal cause before imploding into meaninglessness.  The ways of joining the religious order might seem promising, but that might not be the only way, nor necessarily the best, nor necessarily better than going it out on your own, communing yourself with the soul and its realities. A hard obscure path, one no one was witting of, could be far better, perhaps.

The old stories have a commonality, in that they are of a story that shows a new leader, a new kind of leader, to be called for.  The established leadership has become stiff, inflexible, unseeing...  And along comes a man, maybe even not even yet a man, not quite, unexpected, different, wise in a way that is not of previous wisdom's canned vintages.

What would this, what does this, look like...  It would on the one hand fulfill prophecy and the subtle pattern.  Recalling a steady theme that has not been honestly recreated in a legitimate fashion.  Like that of The Shepherd, the being gentle and wise who can overturn the mighty Pharaoh, by knowing "God's Will."

But no man, as such, can describe himself, but by the words of others.  Higher words.  Better interpretations.  Wisdom.  The acknowledgment of all the hard work, toil, exile, or rather, of all those things that make for that which feeds a true spiritual life of leadership and insight.

One can only take an almost joyous solace in rejection of a people who have lost all sight of the righteousness of the judgments of the Lord, who have conflated their own as if to make a marketplace, a business culture out of the temple that is justice.

God will judge.  He will judge you and I.  It will not be left up to the economy, nor to money and material riches.  It will not be the judgment of your neighbors, your classmates, the popularity contests, the tastes of those who hold themselves up as being so gifted as to discern the human heart through appearances.  The low will be raised, for their willingness to serve, for their patience, for their steadfast belief that the transient opinions of people mean little compared to being aligned with God and the Holy Spirit.

The Old Testament is the vines from which the grapes spring forth, upon which they are nourished by the water that falls as rain and the sun that shines and the earth itself, rooted in a hard stoney existence in otherwise barren soil.  The New represents the wine, which comes forth out of the tenderness of man, his understanding of the divine and divine processes everywhere as yeast and fermentation and the maturing of the juice.  Wine is the symbol of this carrying on...



But it is a judgmental world we live in.  Perhaps it's on a shallow level, the judgment which is the meat of the banter of a city and its pecking orders.  They'll hit with a cudgel and then express surprise at the hurt, and that you are the one at fault for being hurt.  Maybe particularly in intimate matters.

I'd seen enough.  I'd even lived a life not that far off from Jesus, as much as you could get away with unnoticed, and it was something no one even wanted to notice, and the thought of it even being possible would never have crossed their minds.  It was easy to go along unnoticed.  As if good was not even visible anymore, should it arrive and pass by in front of you...