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.