When one waits on all the people of all the nationalities, you have an idea of how the world works.  Some peoples come early and talk incessantly when you would rather have a moment to collect your thoughts.  Some are so efficient at being waited on, such professionals, that one fears being impolite or slow or slightly off.  Some take their time, and speak in shrouded mystery as to what they might like.   Some are quite used to being waited upon.

One could have, if one had wanted to, understood the entire history of the world, economically, politically, as the seeds of everything were there before you, all acts, all behaviors, all the things within and about the clever creature of will.  It really was a great job, a great biological study, observations, little judgment, an Audubon gallery of portraits if one had been patient and tireless enough.  Inexplicable primates, eyes bright and wide eyed, the habits from ancestors who lived in trees...  wanting to get in their words in...  much as birds.

And indeed you might develop your own little theories.  One bearing upon blood types.  What makes conversation more seamless in certain situations, interactions.  An O can talk anyone, I suppose, but find the other blood types a bit tedious, hard to reach.  A people, for him they were difficult.  Often quite humorless.  Distracted?   They always put things in their own terms, that of the successful farmer, striving away, storing grain.  They were always right.  And then there were the type B people, masters of manipulation, skilled at turning any subject into a conversation completely to suit their own sophisticated urban survivalist understandings, too formidable to tangle with, impossible to talk to if you were an O.  The Bs want to intrude into your creative process, to storm its walls, burn them, kill its women and children, in order to, as they see it get to you, and thus, themselves.  If they can't kill you and burn down your village, they will use techniques of embarrassment.  ABs are rarer. An oddity of evolution, not enough research, to judge or see where they are when they are honestly themselves.

It all left you with the impression that the  higher blood types of evolution got you as much as you might get a cat that brought you gifts, little animals half alive, collected from nature and brought to your doorstep. The best they could offer you was a sort of "hmm, thank you... (I guess.)"  And you have brought them something holy and beautiful, and for all your efforts it can only seem that they do not get the offering.


Looking at it, I think it always seemed to me that there was a real sort of psychic understanding of The Old Testament.  Jesus could bring out the deeper references, incorporate them in parable form.  And I have the impression that his parables are themselves a psychic quality in the old light that they shine into our lives, the deepest meanings of our own little events and interactions.

I woke today, with a headache, and the Mass' homily was about the tale of Lazarus the beggar and the wealthy man who end up dying at the same time, finding themselves at the opposite ends of the chasm between heaven and hell.  The man who had just about every material comfort is suffering in anguish in hell, and above the poor man who suffered, comforted by dogs who licked his wounds in life and little more, is sitting with Abraham.  As the father of the homily, a Dominican, Father Peter Cameron, explains it, one man offered comfort, a servant, while the other, well... , was more concerned with other things than being kind to his fellows.

There is no shame in being the poor man...

The things you tune into, as if by chance...  Not that they are perfectly and directly and concretely applicable, made for any sort of perfect comparison, but just that these thoughts generate other thoughts, and ones which are comforting.

Being rejected, the homilist points out, is a great gift, an opportunity, a freedom, a means to see the light...  Being rejected, one is more broken, and when we acknowledge our own brokenness, the more people will listen.  And I can see that.  And it matters not how one is rejected, becoming just a detail, insignificant, but for the lesson and the brokenness.


It was something the boy wondered about as he listened to father telling him about the symbolism of Brother Ass, Christ's journey to Jerusalem, that Jesus knew reality so well that he knew future events.  Being so cool as to see the future, to know there was an ass waiting to bring him, this had its impression on a youthful boy from years ago, remembered.  Dad and his own rare Jesus-like parables, gentle, kind, understanding, learning, no judgment...

The Gospels seem to have that awareness, of looking back at the old stories, now with a consciousness as to what had been created with such accomplishment, all the old tales of Moses and Abraham and the prophets.  What did it all mean?  And now suddenly, not only were we capable in our own homage and reverence, able to see the old stories with vivid life and fresh very direct applicability to our own affairs and souls...  Now we could see the present almost itself the fulfillment of prophecy, as Jesus says about his own day.  And he does so, primarily to teach us a lesson, the way to see the important over the unimportant.  And then, by doing so, almost as an afterthought, there could be a prescient way to see events coming, which you could do so because you understood deeply and intimately the reality of those events of long ago important and written down...

The old stories are very real to us, a distillation of all that is now before us.  The stories help us seeing, getting, grasping, the larger point.

Having such a father, an accomplished instructor of plant biology, a teacher in every sense, the point of life was deeper, a reality behind reality, a way to look at all things.   And so do you try to interpret, to find out the greater lessons that might be offered you, say, rejection, rejection when you like a girl but she doesn't seem to like you back so much, rejection in the form of the termination of a situation such as one's gainful employment in the business which is ostensibly your career, your livelihood.

The old saying, wist ye not I was at my father's business, that always seemed to apply to life.


I never even looked at myself as a writer.  Writing was just a way to record thought, to work on them, to workshop thoughts before the intellect and the soul, to see if they worked or held water.

I never really even looked at myself as a barman.  It was something beyond that.  I was very conscientious about it even, the details, the particulars, the restocking, the knowledge, all that pertained to the service end of delivering in timely fashion to people.  I quite outdid myself at it.  I worked hard.  I'd get home exhausted.  But there was a reality beneath all that.  It did not show up on the bottom line, or in any specific spreadsheet calculations from the numbers people, except that it was obvious the business wasn't so bad, and that people who came tended to return.  Whether or not I got any particular specific special reward or security beyond that shared with everyone...


By interpolation, then, do we sometimes project forward, to conclude that life is such.  You never really look at it as life, conventionally, the make yourself happy kind of a thing.  No, it's more about the spiritual journey, as they say.  About those things which you accidentally encounter, run into randomly, sometimes through 'mistake,' and then find meaning in, water to walk in, and then on.  A certain kind of detachment for the spiritual to shine through in spiritual time...

Would it even be, anymore, once you had opened thine eyes and seen more truly (ever a process), about the profession, about making the living...  Would it be about that directly, in light of the tale Jesus tells the fretting Pharisees about Lazarus the beggar and the man of wealth, and all those old stories retold...

People might have told me, "you have so many talents, why do such a job?"  Made you wonder, yes it did.  But perhaps you looked beyond the unnerving specifics, and you saw, at least, the human dignity in the task, in keeping it alive.  Old school.


The old barman was a man who spent a day off alone with his thoughts.  If there was something that caught his eye, a show on public television, he sometimes teared up, inexplicably.  Each week had been full of hard effort, and offered the fruit of many tales.  Little tales, not with any particular point, more the capture of a little mystery, or a question that one could not easily answer, or easily take a side on, a stance, right or wrong, good or bad.  Things in general and on the whole were far too confused and confusing.  And you knew you only had your gut reaction, and even that could never quite explain, as no one can ever really explain himself.  There were a few guitars around, but things to do, and an aging mother to worry about, and anyway, there was tasks to complete in this simple unostentatious life.  Trash, recycling, cooking, wine to drink, sleeping and forms of rest.  No time for much else.  And if the weather wasn't great, he tended to stay in.

Good taste... what does it mean?

It took the frailty of his one surviving parent, a mother loved deeply with no question, no choice in the matter, for him to be able to listen fully to the simplicity of his own opinions...  It could have, on the one hand, driven him mad, this last vulnerability of the distant thunder of glimmers of anguish, an anguish that itself was immediately transmuted into beauty of love, life, its particular personal memories.  No longer did the old barman's mind tend to run toward all the things of regret, or of other people and their opinions, as much of all that was only imaginary anyway, shifting sands.  All one could accept was the final peace.  Not all the fears, horrible, lonesome, fears of the worst sort of failures there could be, homelessness, addiction, the loss of everything, the great inability to be able to actually protect yourself, your life, your history, your health, in the long run.  The great futility sense that came down upon you with thoughts of no pension, no way to ever retire, no way to provide an aging self any security whatsoever...  Shit, why not take a glass of wine, the sweet potato in the oven now, an unexpired steak waiting for season in the refrigerator when ready...

Cooking, so basic, so easy, so beautiful, on the very top end of a human body's needs, like sleep, going to the bathroom.  Ingredients from the earth, blessed by God's covenant.   A grass fed steak, onion, greens...  

And yet, in his own thoughts, a bum.  A let down.  Failure at the great body of things that most people in the great metropolis survive upon...  resume, technical skills, software murmurers, specialists, all of their successes squeezing out the little guy not willing to sell out his brethren by facilitating the great computer chipping, the ultimate surveillance already come upon us irrevocably, such that each of us will be tracked with droves, our movements recorded by face recognizing cameras...

What does one do...  when one's values have grown off in their own separate tribal direction out away from the others.... what does one do, when the oldest of Bible stories speak to you, find a new land, having a hearing for the word of God, as it were... a wish to go to a new land, Abrahamic.  And the old voice, "too late for me."  Who even remembers the values I have...  Indeed, I have to tell them to my therapist, who is quiet and mystified, or simply a passive listener, but with the bias of the times, he who cannot belong is crazy, a medical case.

You must return, return to the old land, to the oldest of stories....


The man cooked, in his own fashion.  Two of the four grass fed beef patties from the Safeway to cook or waste, the sweet potato with a rub of olive oil and sea salt, the iron lodge grill pan skillet...  And wine, indeed, is in the vessel, first the left over Beaujolais, chilled from the cooler, and then, the Chinon.  Jesus liked wine with his feasts, part of salon, his intellectual muse when he supped and served the fishermen of man...  The wine reminds you of the vintage, brought to proper season.  

So many deep resonances in all the stories old.  He who serves, and he who is merely a barman in some town real, pouring his little tastings to entertain the people who come in, particularly the ladies, but really all people.  

Abraham's sacrifice, the death of a dog long ago, Spring break from college...  put to sleep, and we buried her... up there on Ernst Road above the old property.