Sunday night, straight home, straight to bed, no energy to grocery shop.

And into Monday, waking early, "too early."  I brew a pot of tea in the beautiful old well-worn ceramic tea pot crafted to resemble a stalk of bamboo and turn on EWTN to catch the 8am Mass.

But it's early, and the mood has within it a bit of anguish.  The voice reminds me, as is its habit, of all the opportunities of flirtation and affection with the girl thirty years ago, combined with all the present problems, poverty, mom's aging, professional confusion of the profoundest kinds, and after the Mass I go back to bed again to warm up, to rest the weary body that does not feel like moving.  Black-eyed peas and brown rice, just enough breakfast to still a vinegar stomach, last night's attempt at dinner, a grilled seafood salad, which left me hungry anyway.

Too sensitive to handle even the normal back and forth between boys and girls... What the hell was my problem?  And why did I drink that year, thirty plus years ago, beyond the encouragement of the big boys who told me it was desirable.  (Doubly hard on a sensitive kid.)

I roll over, feeling rather down, and look through recent postings of writings here.  I've come to them with a wish to edit them, to eliminate the little touches of craziness and paranoia, worldly worries, unnecessary outpourings of anxiety, typos, things that need clarification, etc., etc..

Well, I guess this is what you do with your time if you're "trying to write, trying to be a writer."  Perhaps the mental state is a necessary motivation...

There is work involved in reading and in writing.  And even in reading the Gospels, the Acts, the Letters, or the things of Fulton Sheen, you need some time spent working things out on your own.

It is in my own work that I find, oddly and unexpectedly, this morning, anyway, with work to go to hours later and this strange time being up in the air, waiting for the hour, a measure of peace and calm, and maybe a touch of contentment, enough to soothe me.  Such that here I return to this little body of work of no proportued purpose...  How can I record the dialog, the sense of finding a way, the sense of finding purpose in some largely unknown and quite largely mysterious presence of things that Catholic minds and Christian thinkers go on about.

After brushing my teeth Mother Angelica is talking, "Let Not Your Hearts Be Troubled," a show taped back in January 9, 2001.  Sin, hanging about us like tobacco smoke, and we might get so used to it that we almost don't notice it.  And I know what she's talking about it, having come home from the old Austin Grill reeking, and my clothes reeking, not just from the tobacco, but the metals and chemicals...

And my sins stink upon me.  Yes.  This woman, she was was, she is wisdom.  Doubt can increase faith, she is saying to a call in caller.   St. Francis de Sales...  "You act on faith."  the opposite of temptations...  "Help my unbelief"  "... Don't worry about temptations;  they always act in the way of the Lord...  Hypocrisy is everywhere these days...  God loves me, God loves you, and after that, nothing matters..." I like Mother Angelika.

So I guess that's what happened to the sensitive kid.  He was too sensitive, too moody, not straight enough, and he was sinful.  And now, yes, he is wishing to do better.  Old things come up and make him sad, make him almost strike his own breast, as if to say, look what I did, and look at me now, because of it all.

But that's not the end of the story;  it can't be.

Having faith and saying a prayer, I hope to get through the night, the night as it is long and exposed to sin, further exposed it you let it, if you let yourself...

Anguished thoughts based upon the past lead to anxieties, lead to panic, lead to sin, and so through writing it out, a little calmer, a little quieter...


I gather all along I wanted to be a religious sort of a writer.  This was the stuff that always spoke to me, as really it's in every book, this struggle, one way or another.  I didn't know what was my religion, no, but, you know, I tried when I could, I explored when I could.  We all can get derailed by burdens and work and things, let alone bad habits...

The leaf blower next door has stopped, and now there is a car horn alarm beeping away...



But does not the whole thing sound...  a little bit improbable?  That one should pay any amount of attention to it, would that not almost be a cause to pour oneself a glass of wine...  I suppose that it is a classic enough and well-recorded response.   Lord, depart from me...  I am a sinful man (as he knows down in his guts.)  What right would I have tarrying with you, Lord....  Would it be that picking up this Cross of belief would strike one as a terrifying distraction from responsibilities...  Who would believe us being honest in such an endeavor, not mistrusting us for attempting to run away from adult life...

Our sins, in reality, wear down our bodies, not just our souls.  And we become sad.  And we should not be sad, but rather be joyful.

Does the sadness come from knowing that we must depart from where we are doing what we are doing...  Does the sadness come from seeing through the shams of life and work, the lip service we perform, monkeying around to no serious good ends, playing idiot congenially enough.

And as Mother Angelica says, sin is all around us.  There rising above a farm, a beautiful farm, a roadside billboard verging on the pornographic.  We grow immune to the smell.

Concupiscence, they call it.  How sin sticks to us, like beasts moving through a thicket...  How we cannot avoid it, them, the sins.  Horrible.  And saddened to see this, we have difficulty of understanding, of looking back at ourselves and seeing the real true goodness in our own hearts, drowned out by consumerism and the beasts of salesmanship and belonging to the commercial economy.  No wonder it's difficult...  Hard, a situation in which one needs the horse's blinders to keep to the goal...

Did Jesus, the Christ, Himself, you wonder, grow so desperate to the point where he couldn't take it anymore, had to do something, something to get away from all the noise and sounds, all the sin and sinners that had become an indistinguishable jumble all mixed together, merging, unable to see even an end of any of it.

I don't want to be brainwashed into anything more than you do.  But sometimes, at certain points in life, the creature of the human being needs medicine.

But the dreams and the ramblings, strike one more and more as vanity, having the air of a tongue too liberated getting things off his chest.  By the light of the daily Mass, better to see the positive, to see the guidance, to not dwell on things but to move forward, to grow.  What have I that is worth saying that isn't but a vanity...

The Good Lord got me up to today, and though I started in gloom I found my way, first to the living room in time for Sunday Mass on EWTN, and on to a slow reviving.  And later, calling mom, lo, she has found her hearing aids, both of them, in the silverware draw;  they'd been in disappearance for months, in amongst the forks (which puzzles me, having done her dishes and putting them away, about a month ago.)  She even went down to the drug store to get fresh batteries, and she got to Big M for chicken and a Sunday New York Times, and it is a cold day up there, rainy, and there were even snow flakes.

And my poor old saintly mother gets it, through this pleasant phone call, as I've been staying indoors and resting the entire weekend.  Stop torturing yourself, she says, when I tell her about an old vulnerability and watching The Owl and the Pussycat.  "You do it in style.  But stop it, that's what I did, and I found I had a lot more energy."  Amen to that.

Even Dostoevsky, retired the mad dreams of murdered horses (C & P) and converted them to the sweeter, far, dream of Alyosha there with his Elder, called to the Wedding at Cana.

Sunday, properly, is a day for worship and classical music, and after televised Mass (I know, I know...) my newly Catholic television offers a performance of Rossini, Petite Messe Solonnelle, beautifully presented by a Leipzig orchestra...  And for a time I remember being home with my father reading the Sunday Times and the old Fisher stereo playing classical music...  Rossini has a simplicity to it, almost basic, the hand of a primitive inspired, but quite a thing when assembled together.  Relaxingly moving...  and it takes my mind off of things, just as the homily from the kind EWTN Father....  which itself was about finding purpose in being part of the vine of Christ.  There is a logic to Rossini, and what a pleasure in the mind to say, like someone suddenly opening his eyes to the learning process and a good teaching, "oh, yes, I know... I know where he is going, going with these lovely lines interplaying with each other, vocalist, string section, drum, low tones punctuated...  the violins leading us along, telling us to come and follow, lest we get too much choir...

And after my illness, my body sending up red flags to my immune system against the perceived invader  of foreign proteins, I take the metaphor, resolving to overlook the physical reactions one cannot help, and quietly, to be at least a bit more saint-like.  As saintliness is our deepest reality, whether we choose to see this or not...

I suppose it helps the day or two before there was a little piece about a quiet nun in Krakow, Poland, Faustina Kowalska, a saint, who minded the door and the kitchen, as this was the skill set she had.  She only told the holy visions she was receiving to her priest, quietly going about her business...  Sometimes this feels like, in this modern world, the only skills one has, to greet people, to serve them food.  (Which is my own resumé....)  To make that work seen as included within the realm of higher purpose, simple as it may be, and work none the less, makes it a whole lot easier to face on a Sunday afternoon that has been your Monday morning as long as you can remember.

You're going to kill yourself being a writer anyway, trying to succeed on terms foreign to you.  Why not turn it to good use...

Bishop Sheen writes, from back in days where the Priest was your therapist, that depression and mental illness comes from lacking purpose (higher purpose).  And also guilt, unresolved, and there's enough of that to go around to, and sometimes it's how I start my days.  Well, I wish I'd read that earlier...  Initially, in the morning, rising, hard to see that there is a higher purpose in the higher purpose, something able to translate down to this make-a-buck do-what-you-gotta-do world, even with all its comforts that few around the world can even share or wonder at...

If you can see yourself well enough, as you go about your tasks, I guess that is a thing that gives you things worth mentioning.

And now my stomach is asking of me...  And on the tv screen the conductor, Ricardo Chially, is seen to be enjoying himself in taking part of the marvelous creation of Rossini's, written five or so years before he passed away, a kind of crowning of his faith (after all those operas.)

Easier it is to be happy and content, rather than sad and kicking yourself.


If you are a saint, perhaps it is that you are not good at anything else, really, in the professional sense, and maybe even in the personal.  Would you agonize over your own sins?  Probably more so until you realized the path you were on, the direction in which to turn.

But this year the tree pollen is very high, by all counts, and at the same time, grass pollen, and from my walk of ten blocks or so in the night, to the Safeway on 17th Street, I sleep and sleep and rest all day, and even into the night, not moving.

There are dreams.  Dreams of being on a date with a girlfriend, but the place I've chosen to locate a home and all my stuff in an abandoned woody place by the river and the road which climbs through the woods, and then there is a court procedure of law, in which old faces I have worked for in the past  come out more to accuse me than to allow that I was just looking for somewhere to put guitars and books and kitchen stuff and things...  I would try to talk, but the procedural mood and the mood of the antagonists will only allow so much, and they have already taken hold of my things.

I wake, blearily and tired.  It's two in the morning.  Looking at my Facebook feed, something from the New York Times, about how people who suffered as children with anger and violence of parents see anger in many forms of approach.  Is this, the childhood, why I have to say, always compensating, X, I'm not angry at you, I'm just trying to help you.  Let's throw some of this stuff out so we can see better what we have...

I am thirsty.  And hungry in a lazy way.  To cook means more dishes, and the potential for more of the large water bugs to appear on kitchen counters...  And why does the thought of even having a girlfriend fade so far away and it is pollen season and I feel like hell.

No wonder, then, that some of us, Irish, or what have you, Zydeco, would become musicians...  To play songs to soothe mothers who've gone crazy, who do not respond in normal easy ways, thank you dear...  We are made sad, right out of the gate, to begin with.  And if we cannot catch the tide of youthful optimism of our college days brethren, if we go out on our own into the desert, there is not much of conventional happiness to keep us, to keep us sane and happy and well-fed.

The head is swimming in this plant confusion, a thick layer in between us and what we see.

I can see why Shane MacGowan sings, why Jack Kerouac writes...  The traumas passed down, traumas steeled into you, and this is why Kerouac's picture of Naval induction holds such terrible spirituality, from seeing Little Gerard die, and his father's printing shop wiped away by the Merrimac flood...  Leo's slow death...  The real shit of life.  Craziness.

And who in such a spot wouldn't fear work, but that it keeps us busy and keeps us amongst other people as crazy as ourselves.  The choices we would make then, to liberate work into a free tribal acceptance, that we who have gathered are not the sane ones striving in their material security of suburb and enclave of the well-to-do and the rising to it.  But we are the poor the diaspora, trying to fit in, but who find, once we accumulate a small modest body of material goods, as instructed to by the mass culture, that we cannot afford to keep them, that we cannot not even find a place for ourselves that will last us into old age.

(And to me, this is why we need some form of social housing, some form of balance, that menial workers who are poor can live amongst society as a whole, such as society strives and earns compensations thousands of times multiplied...)


Most people can assume the hamburger the thing to eat, whole with its bun, or with the spaghetti along with the meatballs, or the pizza, the toppings along with the filling crust.  And yet, I cannot.  Not without a belly gross and full, puffed and bloated, a spare tire around the midsection.  Why is this?

"Go moan for man..."

The first choices of my adult life, of course, I got them all wrong.

The drinking, I got that wrong too.  I got the whole job thing wrong, and I got the writing thing wrong.  And it was all a big mistake, falling in with bad influences-- that's how it goes.

And then, I began to hope, to think, to learn, to, perhaps, see.  It takes a long time.  The priest...  Sacrificial.  Will never fit into the world.  His heart broken, his hands scarred, this is how he has to come to the task.

You are conditioned by society to think that you should fit in.  (Which has been amplified by having to deal with the task of dealing with personality on-line.)  How much time and energy spent...


I am grateful for the life of health and employment, location, profession, etc., that I have.

The week, the tree pollen, the final day of work, getting myself up with anxious reluctance to go off on my bicycle downtown to the hustle and bustle to see the therapist.  My head woozy, a shower, and then going down into the city alien.  Talk for forty five minutes about sad things and concerns, great, write a check, call Mom, and then on to work.  One last night of the week, and it will be hectic enough.

So that by the time I got to the day off, wiped out.  Well, you feel a bit crazy... wanting to turn it all off, to get back to the quiet sacred space which you yourself have to create...

Because you feel a certain way, does it mean you have the gift, the sad gift of being able to tend to the sheep?  Was that not my job as it was, just that the task of being the shepherd got so buried under so many layers, the worries of work in a city, a young person confused by the thought of beginning a career, needing a place to live and a job...  I was not feeling very soothed...  Rather heartsick.  And i reflected, that this was how I'd been feeling for a very long time.  A buried calling, hidden in current modes...




But the old temptations still have a hold on you.  And they are exacerbated by and added to by the ease of information and imagery, by the device in the hand.  They are exacerbated by looking for relaxation in the middle of the night alone, obsession and distraction.  Ill, I'm in and out of rest and dream.  In dreams there are planes rising above but losing their hold on the sky, failing and then, not far away, crashing, the fallen nose of the fuselage to the west facing me as I talk on the phone with my mother, the sirens just starting to wail.  In another dream, later, my favorite teacher, Mrs. V., a beautiful woman, my sixth grade teacher, whom I lost touch with, a meeting, and I wake aroused.

Tired, I become a sort of automaton, wishing to compensate for the week.  I know enough to stay in, to rest, to keep it simple.  Avoid, avoid, avoid, but to grocery shop.

It is temptation to turn to the television, for distraction, for news for the latest on Trump, sickly fascinating, revolting at the same time.  It is a temptation to look up many many things of the secular world and its art and its entertainments down the rabbit holes of lit screens.  The old obsessions, once healthy explorations, seeking of possibilities...  are now old distractions to the taste, and serve little purpose, but to recall sadness, sin, stupidity.  Even much of the stuff about writers and their histories, their stories, their techniques, I feel myself outgrowing, as if, more and more, all human beings are equal, subject to the same pattern of need.  If they write about that, fine, maybe I can read it...

The sadness that comes from life as it is, that sort of verging on things falling apart, is part of an education, a real one, immediate, of things proven somehow satisfactorily in the mind to be true enough.


But then, if you upend the set assumptions, then what...

And you are still a writer.  And writing still has a role in all this, the series of epiphanies and slower more humble realizations.

Like an actor, playing a role, the writer has to put in his imagination...  to use it to bring to life the things that are written...  such as "poverty of spirit."  What does that mean, anyway... something to meditate over.

Popularity, riches...  we look for this, trying to market ourselves.  But this doesn't work with the priest's way.  His is not a public relations campaign.


I'd done it all wrong.  I was confused, as young men thrown out into the culture without enough guidance tend to be.  I was stoic enough, I minded my own business for the most part...  I'd wanted the same things that mass culture tells us we all need, I suppose, even as I looked out the windows at night at work, knowing that the sacrifices of work weren't getting me very far, and not only in a material way...

And it was fortunate that I had the background I did have, and that I was coming from an experience of heartbreak, of broken expectations, and then the rawness of the world, trying to make a living without much of a clue.  They all tell you, go and make your fortune, to have things, people, girls, people listening to you...

But that is not the real You...  How do you match up the real essence of who you are, and your background, sweep aside the past as learning, to find a good fit for yourself and all the talents that you still seem to have, even if they are merely ones of some sort of strange candor.

Oh, forgive me, o Father, o Lord, I got it all wrong.  And then I did not know I had it all wrong, that I had not the right way to see things.  What I was afraid of most was in fact liberation...

One has to come to know that poverty, of spirit, and of the things that follow from that, is desirable.

That's not the logic of the new technology, where we can look up what interests us there in a jiffy...


I write such things as a response to a half-joking worry that enters my mind in different ways.  There is the fear that the Millennial has mastered the tools, the weapons for the fight, of the day, facile with the fast and brief expressions, that the hosts of podcasts do not always seem so well equipped with diction and background.  And they are succeeding with their successes, and the young now carry the day.  What are they missing?  My thoughts are that the things worthy of communicating, at least the things I have taste for, have an old way about them, and that, further, it takes a kind of wisdom, a period long in reflection, slow maturing...  And I myself am probably as guilty of being irresponsible and not serious and a bit sloppy when I am measured against the generation that preceded me, which must be old now.  I am the last of the Baby Boomer generation, brought up with a sense of fairness, group effort, of sharing communities, a collective that seeks that all boats should rise, rise together, democratically.

Rain came heavily in the night very early and into Friday morning as I lay there.  It was a day of fits and starts, and because I'd slept so, off and on, napping, sometimes dreaming, and another heavy nap, feeling a bit demoralized, I woke, finally, called mom again, and rather than writing, I picked up the little book I've been reading, Bishop Fulton Sheen, The Priest Is Not His Own, to the chapter on what spiritual poverty, to be poor in spirit, as in the first of the Beatitudes... And it is comforting.  And it makes a lot of sense, speaking to me where I am now.

Later, since the tree pollen has been put down by the rain, I rise from the reading couch, take a shower, dress, and when I get outside with my soft plastic grocery bags now at eleven at night I find I have the energy to march down to the Safeway on 17th.  Another week is coming, and I need to be armed for it, so that I do not fall into the wine.  The Safeway is uninspiring.  A strange squat man with a big belly is looking over the prepared cold-cuts, packaged baloney.  And as he puts a package of shrink-wrapped sliced baloney, he exclaims aloud, "I don't know," as a cry and a moan.

The Owl and the Pussycat is on the local PBS station, and because, maybe, because, it's about, you know, a writer, and a part-time hooker, George Segal and Barbara Streisand, I fall into a tale of New York, and in its entertainment it makes me sad and I think about the past and spirited New Yorker girls who are quick of mind and feet.  And I get into the wine again, after I eat my McDonald burgers, avoided the roll, and the burgers welcome after the length of the walk and the last stop of the Rite Aid for allergy pills and nasal spray and small cans of V8 and cans of soda, and I lose my momentum spiritually, and raise myself to do the laundry in the quiet of the night.

And there is a particular line from the movie, when a friend of entertainer played by Barbara Streisand, herself an entertainer, shows up at the Doubleday book shop on 52nd where George Segal works, and she explains to him that he must never talk to her again, never see her, never have anything to do with her... but that she is down at the diner at Rikers and 3rd eating a ham sandwich... and he runs all the way.  And I had that sort of thing spoken to me myself.  A couple of times, and each time was magnificent and stirring...  but I guess I was too sweet to act as I might have wanted to, you know, during the beginning of the whole time...  It was almost serious back then, 1986, 'you say one more word to me and I'll go to the Dean...'  I should have caught the flirtation earlier along.


I am lad from the countryside, of high and happy hills.  Of woods and stream, pastures, farms and houses with their roots far from those of others houses and farms.  The efforts of walking the land, and in bicycling, and, in the winter, in skiing cross-country Nordic fashion...

And due to my particular upbringing, Baptized, but outside the Church, I am an outsider by habit.  A natural preference for retaining the Church where it is in nature and in the people one might come across, on the school bus, workmen my mother was always polite and generous with when they came, in school, in summer jobs working at McDonalds, mowing lawns on my own, and the college grounds crew.

A good priest is tired, indeed, at the end of the day, and the Archbishop points out that Christ Himself made converts when he was very tired too.  And perhaps there is some glimmer of that, were I to let it out a bit better, in work as it is now, but for the obvious sins of it and the lack of seriousness...

Sunday night, Monday night, Tuesday night...  the point is just to write.

God picks us out to do what we do by our DNA.  The entire universe of living rocks and atoms, and big bangs, and space, and voids, and dark energy, and then our own combination, that of flora and fauna, and then on top of that being built on God's image, to look back at the Universe with our own consciousness...

Somewhere in the night Monday going on to Tuesday, I pull an old stiff blue, the family copy, of Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children's Crusade.  I flex its old binding, gently, and begin reading, and it comes back to me.

Just write.  By the time he was writing that book he'd taught at Iowa.  He'd had a successful professional life, babies who became grown sons, a house on Cape Cod, a little daughter...

And he and his friends, for the life of them, they cannot remember more than a glimpse about the firestorm of Dresden when they were p.o.w.s.

Okay, and then it's going on the third shift Tuesday, wine tasting night, blah blah blah, at least one table, two women, seated at 56 by the bar express enough interest to receive the bottle discount of fifty percent, ordering dinner too, of the Saumur 2016 Chenin Blanc, a good wine but a hard sell.. The regulars at the bar express no interest in it, and it turns out into a gab fest, but with me the bullfighter trying to lead the bulls into some form of decisions as they talk, and eventually they do, and at last the bar is full... A touchy conversation about doing business in China between our Englishman friend and a lady who does business there turns out friendly, and she has lamb, after snails, after he had the parsnip soup, and after that, the trout.  Along with a glass of Muscadet, and she, telling stories of meeting Mandela, back when she was a journalist, my favorite red.  And we all become friends, even as the bullfighter sort of gives up.

The day had started with a call about Mom.  The maintenance guy in touch with everyone where Mom is, she had lost her way and needed a guy in a pick-up to get her back...  Oh, that's not good.  My head spins, I rest on it, talk to mom, sounds like she's doing okay, then I call her again after some rest, getting close to work, and then, on the way to work, and then at work, encouraging her to order to go from the Italian not far from her townhouse...

This is all strange.  What does it mean?

Well, my friend, you can imagine, by the time I get home after that day, I am put out, exhausted, I've been on my feet and talking for hours, the staff meal wasn't good and I had the runs anyway and had to take an Imodium, it was a struggle, as work is, and when the Uber guy drops me off, in the rain, exhausted, straight to bed.

Now, I am too afraid to admit all this.  Anxiety is high.  Even mom tells me to relax and have faith, even as I am trying to explain to her that she is home, that she doesn't need to move her cat nor her clothes nor her books to 'the other place.'

Some of us, yes, need wine to quell our unease.  And imagine, what Kurt Vonnegut Jr. went through in the Second World War.

I want to say, to my therapist, look, if you can help me as a friend, that would be great.  That would be the Christian thing to do.  But sitting here as a petrie dish...  my shit isn't going to change.  I do more effective work than you do, young lady, just that nobody gives me credit.  I need a sabbatical, because my shit isn't changing that much.

But every house is a church, just like it was in the earliest of Christian times.  And maybe this is one of the little self-evident points that comes out of reading the first chapter of Slaughterhouse Five, the protective wife, wanting old men not to tell glorifying stories of heroic battle, but rather, a woman wanting no more war, no more killing, ever...

This is the falseness we assign to the world, that a home is not a spiritual abode.  Or that offices too are void of the affection of our hearts for real things of love, life and peace, instead of obsession with the stupid foolish aggressive jousting contest of the miserable economy and the bleak blank blackness of its heart, the empty black hole soul, sucking us all in.  ...

Good for the mind to be back at work.  Work serves its purpose, keeping your mind occupied.

Work, remember, is spiritual.  Work expresses, as does the rest of our lives, the savory of the salt of humanity.

Individuals do work, this kind of work.  Corporations, just by dint of no corporation (except, one supposes the Holy Church) possessing a spirit, only possible through the miracle of Christ, can not, by nature, do this kind of work.  (Unless they should become super informed...)

The church is the example of the provision of work for us who inhabit the earth.

That's I suppose why I found my line of work, how I found my line of work, how I performed my tasks, of feeding His Sheep, the nourishment of bread and wine.

I know that I could be, particularly by those with corporate rule mentality, lackadaisical in my choice of jobs.  Anyone, on the other hand, coming to inspect, would see that I do keep myself busy and work as best as I can, and that it takes a toll on the energy and the body, and that by the end of the night, I surely knew, my work is done for the day.

Now, was it always a good choice to be in the restaurant business?  Was it perfect?  Did it not be conducive to not the best of choices of activities?  Was it pure?  Was it as good as the church?  No, quite probably not....

Work comes from the earth, as does fairness.  (The rest is schemes.)

Having that understanding, that one is a priest in his work, that people come to him with spiritual need (even if this function goes unseen and unrecognized) helps one, me, keep focus.



In the course of human history, it makes sense who comes before who.  The Buddha comes before Jesus Christ.  Buddha does not exactly receive the full revelation, but lays groundwork.  From the deep perspective, a worldly connection, as there is with Abraham, Moses, and so on.

Listening to my father's CD of Gregorian Chants, I do a bit of yoga, to get the toxins out and the body working, before heading off on the bike...

One of those days, you just sleep.  Even though it's the crowning day of your weekend, and the sun is out, you sleep.  Feeling poorly.  You don't even know why.


Raoul Julia is playing Father Oscar Romero on EWTN.  A random thing?  Or the kind of awakening you need, some distant note of music speaking about sacrifice.  The timing of which and the message and even the people depicted seems on key.  What has this to do with me, you say, rationally.  But, of course, I like it though, very much, and it is comforting.  It gives me reason to live.  It is beautiful.  That, my friends, is love, and a life well lived.  To be such as the good Father.

Sacrifice...  Yes.  That's what it's about.  I didn't even know.  I'd spent the night alone, not deserving to go out.   A fresh copy of Fulton J. Sheen, The Priest Is Not His Own.  Who am I to read this... I've had the skepticism, the modern liberal arts distance.  I go to bed..  only to wake up hours later.  I have a beer, and start reading, and, you know, it all begins to make sense.

In the old days the priests attended sacrifices.  But then, in Jesus, the priest becomes the sacrifice.  How true.

Where was I sort of mildly crucified...  When was I rejected the third time, a homecoming college reunion...  Leave her alone, the friend of hers said, and I didn't have a leg to stand on.   And so I had to leave the town, and leave my attempt, so that it would, in the distance of time unknown and unhappy, fade away, to be a thing petty and earthly.

That's how I took up work in the world, by being miserable.  And the job of tending bar is a sacrifice and a burden and thing of service with little in return.  It would have been wiser if I'd gone straight into priesthood, but, of course, I didn't.

A good shepherd lays down his life for the flock.  John 20: 19-31

I've always seen the writer has having something direct, a study of Jacob's Ladder, perhaps.

But the world of power and the city, that world does not get it, that we are as sacrificial lamb here in order to be who we must be on high....

The sacrificial lamb knows how miserable things are.



The good Lord wakes me without my wanting to, and prepares me for work.  Green tea, brewed yesterday.  Make a chicken salad from what's left of the rotisserie white meat.  Bone broth.  The tree pollen is listed as very again.

The truth, it seems, is harder than you want it to be.  Stunningly so.  The priest's life is a sacrifice, heart breaking, in order to join up with that greater truth...

Five straight, closing every night.  High tree pollen.  End of it, miserable.    Wifi internet down at home.  Thoughts barely captured, tales hinted at, flee now into the distance without being recorded.  Negotiations with Earthlink, to get up and running again...

There were some insights, not written down, scribbled on a legal pad, notes of thought, sketches, but not the actual writing.  Five days later, I forget much of them, and I've lost the particular juice and energy they had, such thoughts when they were fresh.  And there is a certain surprise at how wiped out the body is after it all.


I thought, I think, of Madam Korbonski.  She always served to clear the air, to realign my mind with the important.  My neighbor.  My full moon night companion.  My neighbor of elegance and infinite class.

I am a bartender because I write.  I write because I am a bartender.  At work, I do not have the time to tell people what's going on with me, and nor would it be completely appropriated.  I am ninety five percent, at least, a listener...  To be engaged with the thousand little tasks that fall upon a barman means that you can never really answer a question, never really tell your own thoughts, your own story.  You're the adult in the room.  Always in a rush.  But the will and the wish to communicate, of course, why am I there anyway?  Just that I'm a better listener than a talker showing off all my stuff.  And showing off all your stuff, that is the battle today, isn't it...



I've worked Saturday night, very busy, and then with friends coming it at the end, who dragged me, not against my own will, but in friendship, out to Breadsoda for a couple of drinks I didn't need. Talk with an old archeologist buddy, then excessive late night burger ordering...  Huge hangover next day and it's Sunday.  Sleep 'til the time you have to get up.  And Sunday, always with its own set of problems, and by Monday, the pressure and the wear and tear is setting in, that which you cannot refresh yourself from, and I pour myself now, after the kitchen has closed and the musicians have packed up and been fed (thanks to me), a little bit of Beaujolais, over ice, with a wedge of lime, splash of soda.  Jacques Pepin would say the same, "I think I deserve a glass of wine now," after cooking something.






The next day, it's going to be a complicated night.  Frantic set-up.  My true friend in all this, Jeremy, will join me after driving in from Annapolis.  But he will not be here until I have my set-up done and the door opens.  Wine tasting chaos.  Familiar faces wanting to talk, tell the stories of their travels.  Sunny weather.  Private party in the back room, meaning we will be full.  I don't have time to talk.

At this shitty time of life, just when you are realizing you're never going to have your own family...

Do I want to be in such a state where I must reach for the glass of wine for soothing relief?  Well, after five plus hours of running around having to respond to situations, that glass is logical, and it works.  That's the job.  That's the price of my being a success at it.  It's not easy this job.

Wednesday night, my last shift of the week, even crazier, pounding waves of people to seat, to deal with, to get the water and the wine, the menu, the specials, eventually the order... and a thread through it, mom calling.  I have time to answer her first call, which is related to her mind coming up with crazy things that come out of her jealousy, but at Nine at night I do not have the time, though I should have...  (A sink was back-up, it turns out, overflowing.  Just like the ladies room upstairs behind the bar at the Old Dying Gaul, twice in fact, this very evening, the busboy twice upstairs with the mop bucket, not helping matters any.  Even the boss had to get involved.)


I remember, the old Polish lady telling me stories when I came over and joined her in her front room. Tadzio, you're a writer, you are a writer, she would tell me.  But of course, she had a very storied life. In 1939, she was just entering university.  From what I recall, Pani Korbonska, Zofia, she was studying to be a Chopinist, a pianist at Jagellonian University.  But then, of course, the Nazis came.  And I'm pretty sure she had a story, of how one day the Nazis came, lined up the entire faculty.  The faculty had not bowed to the Nazis with oaths of loyalty, made a vote to stand up against the Nazis.  Perhaps it escalated.  But, the day came, and they were lined up, including her piano professors, and shot.  That was not the only story she had, by any means.  There were many of them.  We had our wine, a little cheese, a little foie gras pate, and she would tell me stories.

There you have it:  the horror of life, life as it is at home, all you know, having to face powers that are stronger, wealthier, mightier, more energetic and organized, who wish to wipe you away.

"Homo Sovieticos," that was a term my old journalist friend used from time to time.  Looking it up, the term has a certain connotation.  But it is a term which could use being expanded upon, so to address things the Nazis did, things the Soviets did, yes, but also the person of modern high tech literate efficiency...

But I'm just an old barman, who's made a small bit of a last stand, a quiet hero of the old custom of bringing people together, to meet randomly in person, rubbing elbows...

The day off, I get a very late start.  Mom tells me her sink story.  And then my brother calls.  Mom sounds confused, yes.  See what Medicare will do...  looks through various options for assistance...  " I retreat to bed, not feeling well anyway.  Feeling rather overwhelmed.  Caught in the middle between two strong and similar personalities.  Leaving me with no desire to do anything.  There is no immediate need to get out and grocery shop.  The clock is already ticking on my weekend.  But, first, rest and rest, and then more rest.

I reflect on how people act here in D.C.  Those who want to grow in stature and power, they like to use the devices of criticism.  To minimize the other, to put the other in a box imposed upon them.  If they keep putting you down, they see they will gain an upper hand, undercutting you.



The writer, in his glory, shuffles about.  He sorts through the refrigerator, tossing unhappy loose ends and old steak and cooked chicken out.  He puts a load of laundry in.  He puts things back in their piles.  Recycling.  The dishes in the tub with hot soapy water.  Tired, in need of wine, hungry, poor, too many books, too much paperwork about, things unresolved, and yet you have to take care of the immediate, the tea, the phone call home to mom.

On television, always important in our lives.  You cannot now write without mentioning it.  Ever since Cronkite looks up at the clock to tell us that President Kennedy is dead.  There is a CNN series on papal history.  I find amusement in following the story of the wartime Popes, Pius the 11th, Pius the 12th, under the Nazis.

It's an interesting history.  Popes.  Pretending.

What we go through is the story of what Christ goes through.  And what we see in our parents, we see Joseph and Mary.  Mary has her characteristics.  And they do not always fit so easily into the modern world of humanities cleverness...  Jesus has her in mind in the things he speaks.

The day starts out with the familiar chagrin.  Time to write.

Let's see, yesterday, down to see my therapist an hour early so she could make her own doctor's appointment, and then after draining myself in such an appointment, a slow walk down the long blocks from 20th and on to 25th to the Trader Joe's for a good deal on olive oil, almond butter, meat and other basics.  By the time I tramp back up the hill to the Spanish Steps, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, with the weather and the sun in and out of clouds, I'm exhausted.  Put away the groceries, the wine an IMF guy from Rome told me I should try, onions, chicken breast, ground beef, spinach, fresh mozzarella, and then off to a heavy nap.

For a writer to talk forty five minutes to and with a therapist is difficult.  You'd want to talk about what you're writing now, and you allude to it, but if you want to keep writing, you better keep it private.  If you talk it, it will vanish away.  Every writer knows this.

So, you talk about the things on your mind, things that are weighing you down, things that are up in the air...  things that make you feel sad...  You avoid, as much as you can, the subjects you are writing about, even how it's going.  On the one hand you are obliged to tell her that you've regained your sense of better purpose, that you are writing.  But even to tell another person that it might be going well can be lethal to the processes.  You shouldn't have said anything, but you probably did, even as you tried to address it as obliquely as you possibly could.

But funny, that the tree pollen should take your energies away.  A walk should be good for you.  Seeing the therapist should feel good for you.  I was glad I didn't have to work that night, my usual Wednesday night, the second jazz night of the week.  There seemed many reasons to go straight to bed, physically, spiritually, mentally, psychologically...

You know when you have the energy and the moral strength to write.  Therapy, however, can leave you feeling weak as a kitten.  And in this weakened state, as I rested, then later at night after I'd gotten up, cooked dinner, watched TV, obsessed over old cycling films from the 1970s, Hell of the North, about the race from Paris to Roubaix over the old cobblestones and WWI fields, one about Eddy Merckx, riding my old Bianchi on the trainer stand as I did so, I felt an old weariness seeping in, making me feel rather sad.  A feeling from the past that has stayed with me a long time.

The chagrin.

Up at my mom's, cleaning her kitchen at night, she's gone upstairs to her cluttered bed to sleep in front of the television, I listen to an NPR piece from the podcast Hidden Brain entitled The Lonely American Man.  Which basically tells you, as you knew all along, that the male of the species, he too gets swept with emotions, swept up, bowled over, a very rich personal life of emotions and responses and the like.  Things a boy or a man might try to express in some way, in art if not in person.


I'm too tired even to write this.  Who wants to be, you know, overly sensitive...

But writing is bit by bit, piece by piece, a foothold, a toehold, a fingerhold, up you climb.  And sometimes you have to stop and catch your breath, maybe reflect a little bit, who knows...  It gets you dirty, and it stresses you to go through certain passages.  Just like climbing a mountain.  From the perspective up on the side of the mountain, sometimes you do not know which way to go, up or down.


I explained it to her, without taking up much of her time, about the writer's dilemma.  Perhaps getting back into writing with a fresh start after visiting my old holy mother and all her crackpot bookish life, my DNA, was the subliminal reason I'd gotten confused with the time of day and missed my appointment.  I'd missed it because I'd been focussing on writing and a new state of good health.  As if I was making a choice to explore my states of being through my own writing rather than through sitting habitually in an office for forty-five minutes figuring out what to say, little family gripes, life problems and career stuff and mother stuff with a kindly young woman professional...

And to reflect, I had made some gains writing, I thought, anyway.  I'd sensed, finally, the Void the Buddha talks about.  Writing made me feel better, giving me a sense of purpose...  I'd been chipping away at my theoretical modeling of Jesus as a writer and the writer inspired by Jesus Christ.

But what is it, in your own experience, that makes you feel down, that makes your back curve and your shoulders slump...  A familiar feeling, and people train it into you, and it becomes a habit, so that when they see you, rather than being kind, they say to themselves, "oh, this guy...  let's bully him a little bit...  because we can... and it's fun, sort of..."  A feeling that makes it hard to receive help from other people reach your potential.

And all the while when people, young folks, are taking this habitual way with you, there is something inside of you.  While you long for kindness, you at least know justice and just behavior.  Which in some cases provokes silence as a response.   Passivity.  Sacrifice.  Spiritual explorations...

If you could understand, better, that one thing hanging over you, a sort of perceived mistreatment (and maybe you largely misunderstood it, being caught in the great confusion of the romantic modes of youth, boy meets girl, country boy, city princess), than you could stand up a little straighter, not walk around with a subtle shame hanging over you, having its way with you whenever it wanted to.  Then you could think of the success of Jesus Christ casting out such demons and all things which make you freeze, shy away, lack the confidence to take up without quavering and angst...

So that you could say to your fellow beings, "you know, I want to help..."



The human being is a wonderful instrument of writing.  Whales would write if they could.  Writing is a celebration of humanity, shared, self-owned, accompanying....

Take the beam from thine own eye...

As far as we could tell, as far as my own individual state of mind, my therapist and I determined that my own bad feelings toward myself and within myself had something to do with, as the Dr. described it, an instance or instances in which "she treated you like a low-life."  Whether or not "her treatment" was in anyway justified on its own would be at least somewhat apart from its psychological effects, for what it undermined, what it contributed to, all the ways it made me feel negatively about myself...


Yeah, how could you not feel like the biggest idiot walking around half-aimlessly after a therapy session.  How could you not feel like the biggest stupidest idiot sitting around, awake at an early hour with time to spend somehow on something before you gather up yourself and your things and find a way to work and then work your shift.  How?  Downtown, people are busy with work, or out to lunch, or walking back to their hotels.  They belong.

Then walking back from Trader Joe's with two paper grocery bags and a bottle of Greek olive oil in my courier bag, it's late afternoon and people are out exercising.  Past the closed swimming poor building, school has just gotten out.  Walking across the pasture below the P Street bridge a man is walking an energetic dark English Bull Terrier bitch puppy, and a young woman with a ski team jacket, Whiteface, gives me a sympathetic smile after her initial look at me as she passes downhill to join a man by the stream facing away, smoking, who then hands to her what he is smoking.  A pretty girl skips across 22nd at Q Street and a bus goes by, and you feel low and out of place and weighted down.  Good for you for not taking a cab, but you're getting tired now, and you have to cross Massachusetts now, and then the hill gets steeper.  The boring routines of men of middle-age trying to take care of themselves and live simply within their own means...  No wish to do anything social now, but just absorb the therapy session, tired out and in need of a nap.  Relief at the top of the hill, all level ground from here, new sidewalks.


The Susumaniello wine my friend has recommended me, from Puglia, is not my tastes.  And nor is the five dollar Chianti, though at least it is dry.  I get on the bike on the trainer stand and sort it out.   Pour any wine over ice with a wedge of lime, a splash of soda water if necessary...

The assessment, the judgment, upon any writing cannot come from others.  Thus is it a bit demoralizing to be in a position of looking for approval from another person.  And so it is when I sit there in an office, wondering out loud of it's worthwhile to continue with my own disposition toward writing, as far as mental health goes.  The judgement of writing is placed in where it comes from.  One learns this and the confidence will follow.

Jesus drank wine and communicated with ghosts and spirits.  Wine was not a sommelier thing for him.  He communed and communicated.  Ancestors, wisdom, the deep spiritual depths...  It was a way for him to relax, to calm himself.  Wine was simply palatable or not.  What mattered was that it was a spiritual beverage, a clear sign of God's covenant and His support of human joy, not just work all the time.  Wine was a way to quiet down certain humanified parts of his mind, to return to nature, the birds, the trees, the water, the ground, the smells and feelings and all that of the communions not visible to the eye.  Wine was going home, and even sometimes almost like sitting at the left hand of Abraham.  Sometimes it made you sleepy, as with all things, good and bad, but...


They wouldn't have known what to do with him, of course not.  Maybe it's not so much that they were bad men, trying to trip him up, simply, though there was a lot of wickedness in their behavior toward him, but that they did not understand him.  He was too much of a genius for them.  It wasn't his original intention, by any means, to be a genius, to confound grown responsible men, and he strenuously avoided doing so.  Go and tell no one;  just let me teach.

And a teacher is always generous with people.  He's not there to make them feel stupid, to tell people they are wrong, no.

When he gets into lesson mode, he speaks in parables and with thoughtful phrases aimed at the ignorance, the closed habits of their minds.  There's that Pharisee in the third row, aggressively stupid, and Jesus turns him around with the story of the Good Samaritan.

And he's teaching what needs to be taught.  We don't need algebra at this particular point, we don't need grammar or a science lesson, we need the true real pith of opening up minds, to relieve them of the burdens of ignorance.

Live the simple life of a teacher and you will be okay, and everyone will be okay.

And this particularly says a lot about the kinds of empires that try to rule over us and tax us, (which is done in many ways, sometimes by fostering the greed of bankers who make so much money they leave the rest of us workers behind) govern us.   Let a bad man have too much power, look out...

Everyone gets so hyped up about the perfection of an incorporated system, that's the time we need a Jesus Christ.


(Still, they don't know what to do with him.  What would he have thought about the whole religious structure built up in his name?  Okay, sure, thank you for keeping my words and deeds alive, but, you know, keep it fresh, keep telling parables, keep on people being ignorant, hard-hearted, evil by not being good, by being covetous, etc.  It's about the spirit of teaching, not bowing down to an authority who has a more direct line on my suffering.)

Writing is not a convenient thing.  It's distantly akin to the rugged troubles that prophets go through meeting with burning bushes and God's voice on mountains, with traversing long walks to find disciples.  The timing is not convenient.  That it does not pay is inconvenient.  That you need another job to support yourself is inconvenient.

Of course, it goes without saying, it was a terrible burden upon the man, Jesus Christ, and probably all those around him, being so sharp and feeling all things so mightily.  Maybe being amongst publicans and sinners was a relief for him, from being a prophet, a special one, high strung.

But slowly, but actually as long as I can remember, it became a different age.  Men wore their ties not simple old school like Bobby Kennedy or Eisenhower, tied straightforwardly, but there came to be a crease just beneath the knot, as if suddenly men wanted to show off that they were strong as well-dressed European power brokers, king-pins.  And at the same time, slowly, again, and unnoticeably, the smart younger generation, intellectual, clever, up to date, began ending their statements with the inflection of doubt or question, as if to ask, "am I right?" even when they were stating known things that they had studied and reached conclusions.  And also at the same time, people interviewed on television on news shows suddenly adopted manners of speech like "look..."  or "listen."  As if all had been given a handbook about how to communicate effectively, as in a 'winning friends and influencing people' sort of a guide.  It was like everyone was talking dumb to each other, or putting on a show with ties even more powerful than respected men of good upstanding behavior from the days of good and decent men.  Something creepy was going on.  And many were participating in it, or affected, or effected, by it.

It all reinforced the notion, to me, anyway, that a lot of things had become a show, and that since substance and quiet ties and even statements from intellectuals who had carefully considered everyone but seemed to have no final convictions, and a new kind of pandering showmanship on the part of trusted journalists, that all this opened up the path for the great showman, the great hollow man, the great profiteer posed as flag-waving patriot.  And it was all disgusting.

Hmm, and it is a relief to not have to put on the act of sommelier...  the extra work of talking up wines...

The day starts with mom calling.  I'd risen, around one, after being up in the early part of the morning to write, then going back to bed for the second half of sleep...  I've retrieved some cold green tea and gone back to the bedroom to get my iPhone...  We chat for twenty minutes or so, each on our cell phones, each struggling to hear the other, my voice dry and cracking still, and mom lonesome.

"Girls just want to have fun."  And I am too boring for girls who just want to have fun.  That's the truth.




But then, after thinking all this, you then stop and say, okay, thank you, mind.  Thank you for thinking all these things about my psychological make-up and all such things that one might approach through logic.  Thank you, mind, I will make due note of what you say, and I will go back to trusting my heart for what matters and for the things that I might "should" be doing...

Being an earthly representative of Christ and the Saints and the Prophets before them, the writer works through peace, through a tranquility that almost has to be guessed at, existing, like the physicists models of reality, in theory, and therefore real by being proven not wrong, a useful model.  And in his quiet place, a fortuitous thing will happen, and the true mind will stop with its mutterings of complaints and received ideas, and start to again to do its work.

A flock of birds, twenty of them or so, cedar waxwings, have taken to the great old Elm tree over the neighboring yard with its magnificent crown rising evenly over the yards.  It is in blossom now, and the birds flick about, in a gentle and relaxed fashion, sociably pulling with their beaks at the fresh leaves in the afternoon sunshine, plucking their sustenance.  Remarkable they appear through an old pair of binoculars in perfect focus, their markings observed in fine detail, the mask around the eyes, the tiny bit of crimson tucked away in secondary feather, their little oriole-like caps.  And the writer calls his mother on her landline, as she has always encouraged my birdwatching.  I am tired still.

Peace is vital.  Peace is the message itself.  The birds have peace now in the Spring.  Their movements from branch to branch might remind one of thoughts sent by nature through the mind, alighting here and there, plucking the fruit, the berry, the blossom of thought, not needing to know anything specific or particular, just the balance of nature, as they themselves balance, winged and comfortable, supported just so, even as the most modest of slowest of breezes sends a ripple through the lake-surface of the leaves.  The writer is always at peace, in order to do his work.

I go check on them, and the waxwings are still there.  They are quiet, a peepful song whistle, a calm bird.  The robins have joined the scene observed in the back yards, ruffling along the ground, in the leaves, the camellia blossom petals half fallen now.

It is the artist's prayer, of daily bread, that inspiration and revealing things will come through the everyday routine.

Even without a pattern, there is a pattern.

Back from my mom's, my work schedule at the bar was off and on.  I'd worked an impossible night, not my usual, Friday, a downstairs wedding buyout, Saturday expected to be back for another beating, be given the night off, was still dragging when I came in for Sunday night, another wedding party buying out the main floor of the bistrot, then back for Monday jazz night, and then, the kid wants to switch with me, so, I do not need to show up for the usual Tuesday night wine tasting I'd been doing, placed in charge of, for years, and will work instead Thursday, and then Saturday.

At then of the night, the gypsy swing in my ears all night, poked, and prodded, big bodies moving about behind the small bar, the waitress hovering over her cell phone by the cash register computer terminal, the bull in a china shop busboy who likes to do, and does, everything fast, and then the waiter from downstairs up to deal with the back room, all in and out.... toward the end a retired couple, he, a retired IMF economic scholar, she, in public relations and event planning, German, organized--they organize wine travels in Europe, and he writes a wine blog--mention a tasting of Finger Lakes wines down at a new wine bar down on 9th Street.  And I consider giving it a go, but by the time I get things organized the way I, at least, would like to find them tomorrow, and eat my calves liver, blue, reheated in the oven, with spinach, pepper and red wine sauce, it's getting on that hour of not being worth it.

The Uber driver who picks me up, a deaf man, picks up one young woman down in Georgetown, and then another on the West End, and then, gratefully and tired, and not having been drawn into anything too adventurous that turns out to be just another snare and a delusion, I just take off my clothes, brush my teeth, not even bothering with any wine, and go off to bed and lights out.

But it is tempting, after you've been knocked around, and this is your job anyway, hustling over wines by the glass, wines by the bottle, sparkling wines, whites, rosés, seven reds by the glass, dinner to be served, three courses, professors and administrators in the back room, aye, you get thrown off, and think, well, maybe I should, since this appears to be my profession, and let's go see what the young and mighty are up to down there on 9th Street.

The truth is, on a Monday night, despite lavish visions of industry people meeting up over Finger Lake Cab Franc, a list of quirky interesting wines, the place would surely be packing up anyway, and I've been on that side far too often, 'we're not keeping you, are we?'   And bed feels very good, and so does sleep.


Logic tells you to go one way, breaks down the issue.  The heart tells you other things.  Logic tells you, "it might be good professionally...," and then, "but it might be too late."  And then the heart, also talking to you, and more lasting, and truer, "first, get home, and take care of yourself, there are dirty dishes in the tub in the sink," and then, after waking at the odd hour of just-before-dawn, fearful, and anxious and different shades of heart-sick, as happens to the nervous creatures who write, the heart asks, "but what good can you do in the world?  you're not doing anyone much good, maybe, are you?"  And the heart must answer itself and say,"hmm, you have a good point, you might be quite right."  But then the heart brightens, and the head, with its logic, keeps up with all this, as if both were hoping for the same simple calm, as if to say, "hey, it's okay, take the day off;  sufficient in the evil thereof."  The heart brightens, and praises you for your simple good decision not to confuse following the Christian path with going down to 9th Street and ending up spending money you don't have and too late anyway.

And, more to the point, the heart says, now that you are displaying, at fifty three years of age, a certain maturity to take better care of yourself, and this notion of "fun," a misleading one, be damned, what you can do now, really, is "be not afraid."


What good is there to do in this world?  Is it not good to find the simple way to assuage fears and anxieties and heartsickness, and an ache in the left arm?  Is that not a lasting good thing?  Well, cheer up.  You were nice to people.  They were brave enough to come see you, and you did your usual thing of treating them well and calmly, friendly, a little chit chat, a little wine to taste...

The head of logic comes back at you then, maybe, a little.  Good in the world, this is done through actual work.  Like school teaching.  Like, being a cop.  Like, being a lawyer.  Like, being a professional, as the professions are the thing that help the world.  Sore tooth, go see a dentist.  Terrible rash, go see the doctor.  Etc.


But the heart is always going deeper, and it has a need to speak up, even just tiny, even if just very faint and distant.  The heart needs to impress upon its own logic.  The still small voice only the prophet can hear.  The heart must itself convey the terrible struggle an Abraham or a Moses must go through, as one of its lessons, one of its athletic skills.

And there is fear.  There is always fear.  And shyness.  The human being of flesh and blood wants to hide, out of shame, when God's angels voices come calling.  The human, so low sometimes, so mistaken, so capable of murdering and then saying, "my brother? no, I haven't seen him..."

What have I to write today?  I have no special inspiration.  I've cleaned the big green Crueset dutch oven casserole of the beef tomato red wine onion ragout the idiot made the previous early morn, leaving it in the oven at 250 degrees to cook slowly, the sides caramelized with a dried reduction residue, after transferring the contents into a pyrex dish.

But isn't that funny.  "Be not afraid."  As if to say, maybe you are not quite so far off as you might think.

Your habitual sense of your own strangeness, having always been taken as a kind of individual, private, an eccentric stuck stubbornly in his own ways... your saintliness hidden in occasionally loutish behavior and other seeming irresponsibilities...  that sense of your own strangeness, private, and individual, that too makes you feel a bit afraid, always having to bridge the awkwardness to other people.

Poor Jesus Christ:  I have to walk over the water to go see them again.  They're going to think I'm strange again.  But I have to do it.  I have to do it this way.  Sure, they'll be frighten, agitated, confused, not comprehending.   But that, precisely is my little test for them, and let's see how they do with it...  The teacher, rabbi, cannot help it.   Wist ye not I was at my father's business.  Ye of little faith. 

And the usual startled reaction to Him, He would have come now to expect... remembering His own town people wanting to throw Him off the high hill...

He has his mysterious ways.  He lets us think outside the anxious traps we have fallen into.  Isn't that how you get adults to learn, by taking down their panic concerns.

And that He does so, is quite touching.  It reinforces the lesson.  That He would risk being such an oddball to come approach us like a ghost, doing that which is just about as strange as you can get, walking around on water.  The guys, the men, the human beings, the mortals on the boat, they are more important than he;  He is just a teacher, and they are the ones who have to live in society and make a living to stay married and have their families, and keep a bank accounts.  Whereas He is noble, different, undefinable, as much a mystery as quantum physics is.  How sweet and beautiful and richly funny it is that these people, the people of his time actually had the amazing and broad imagination to register all this that He was saying, first of all, and then even begin, as they really did, understand it.  Remarkable!  It's even like an afterthought, the miracles, the loaves and the fishes, the hearings...  The miracles were, are, secondary to the powers of His teachings and the commensurate powers of normal people like them, like you and I, unchanged, unchanging for thousands of years, the same creature endowed with the same "godlike" powers.  Completely amazing people, they were, stopping to listen, to ponder, to record even, the Sermon on the Mount.  Amazing.

Nowadays a writer seeks fame, an agent, publicity professionals and grooming editors, marketing strategies, as if life itself depending on such things.

But this Jesus Christ guy, you sense He is breaking free now, He is opening out himself, after years of absorbing wisdom and marking His place...

Jesus should be able to open a wine bar anywhere.  And be sort of like Dionysos, sitting calmly, the pirate's tethers having loosened, and now grapevines climbing the masts and the sail beams, and wine flowing from vessels.  Clientele would not throw him off.


And so, how do we ourselves accomplish good in this world of ours?  When there are such masters as he, and even such masters as those who, like Peter, or anyone with eyes and ears, just not those professional urban urbane nay-sayers who are supposed to be doing the job, yours and mine, when there are such masters, where and how do we, in our time, in our own times, begin?  How do we go and begin and take up the work which is good?  How do we hold ourselves up to those standards, which seem themselves so impossibly high that we've already broken a thousand times the commandments of them, sinned so many a time, as if to be stuck being permanently irresponsible, no way to start fresh over again, clean, renewed into a non-sinful way...


But Jesus... now that is faith and confidence.  And no one to bring him down with worries.  He walks on water.  Maybe this makes him hard to deal with.  But who else can you turn to, sometimes.

It wasn't a busy night... There was another wedding party downstairs.  They were all along one long table downstairs, there must have been thirty of them, and they were just getting their entrees when I came in the door after my walk through the woods.  Cold.  I went upstairs, to hide, to get set-up, to hang my coat up and take off my courier bag, and I was feeling very sad, sad like I was at the end of the road, really, with who knows exactly what.  The implosion...  Boom, you burst forth like the Big Bang, and then, the nuclei of your own atomic life, always shaking, always the protons whizzing around, quick as faery sprites, everywhere and nowhere, firefly-like, the atom of you gets colder or more brittle, or tired, and it just starts to draw back in to wherever it came from.  Back to a cold heart that once had been a warm one.   (And if you're lucky, the light that comes out of this slow red giant dying, alone, is like the music of Beethoven coming out, as the cluster grows dark like embers of a fire...  Ode to Joy...)

The cab home.  I slump in the door, after leaning back almost dead like Hank Williams in the Toyota of an African gentleman, strip off work clothes, and straight to bed.


But it's not appreciated as much.  That the barman, a fellow with actual human exposure to random humanity, a studier of primate behavior, is really a scientist... But just that he's awfully stuck in his job.  No one respects him for the work he is doing, actually doing...  He's the Shakespearean studier of life...  As human beings were made just for such a roll.  If colleges and universities were really good, they would immediately go out and hire such people, to sit alongside the professor, to say, yes, this is true, and this is why it's true, and how it's true....  Here is what Philip Larkin is saying, and here is why, sadly, beautifully, amazingly, it is true.

It was harder and harder not to view the work by which this human being derived a livelihood out of as wasteful, too much one way or another, strange, physically stressful, joyful, exhausting, all of it, just too much now that you were middle aged.

But look at it, like a sort of circle...  On one side, at a point perhaps, of our pie, the scientists are agreeing that it all came about with The Big Ban.  At another part of the great diameter of the circle there are thinkers of religious thoughts, and they will basically tell you that Self is an illusion, that we live in the greatest of Voids, as the Void is always there beyond all that appears as the things of existence--you know, deeper truth sort of stuff--and that, as the tradition of Judaeo Christianity seems to say, if you interpret it so, care-ing-ly, kindness runs through all...   At yet another point upon the circumference, there are the artists, or, rather, people who do not see other people as so stuck in the conventionally appointed roles, but much wider, broader, whole realms of possibility where you can morph into something else, like one day be a poor kid without a mom and then soon someday become The Beatles singing love songs the whole world loves and appreciates wisely....  This, to me, anyway, is why "Hemingway is not an asshole."  He's a sort of natural scientist.  Does he get it right?  Well, who knows, but at least, he is trying.  The world will look back at him five thousand years and more from now and look at him, moreso than a lot of science coopted to make for tech savvy things, and regard him as a scientist, in that most rare of sciences, Anthropology.

If we were good anthropologists, we'd stop in out tracks and shake in our boots, and we'd look upon a lot of things as horrific.  We'd jump in oceans and embrace the whale and the octopus..

The Son of Man, well, he's at some sort of center there in the chart diagram... his sad face bringing it all together, the scientist, the painter, the writer, the musician, the lover, the bartender, the teacher, the road crew men, the chef...

The Son of Man, his science, that is the scary formidable stuff...  Because you know it's all true.  The rich man cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven and truth, he is mired in ego and business dealings, and has little awareness of the kindness that flows through us all, the great river...  And such a shunted world, we only give little pieces, little breadcrumbs, just a little bit so to allow for a decent preacher here and there, but not too many...

True as the Big Bang, agreeing with, all the stuff of Jesus and the art He places through his artists, all artists, upon the earth...


But you know as well as I do, the heartbreaking qualities of life, the inexplicable mixture that seasons life so, the potential for great happiness on the one hand, and then all the stuff on the other hand, and the fact of life that when you're a poor old guy a good glass of wine and cooking are things that make you happy...  the realities, shall we say...

Ah well, I've lost my train of thought, but just to say, grist for the mill.  Grist for the mill, Old Dickens...


Feet are ugly, my friend.  They touch the earth, surely as the rhino's hoof, the donkey's, the cat's paw, the dog's toes, the pads of things that walk upon pads, the feet of herons, and somehow fish do not have to touch the ground, no need for feet have they, but they can go belly down against the bottom... no problem.

But Papa, how did the Universe come about?  How did life come about?  How did the stuff we stand on, the stuff we breath, the depth we see...  All of it, why?

And I was tired, and had long lived to sort of stoically hide my emotions.  Even as I trust them, even as I feel quite obliged--and, really, happy in a way--to follow them, to explore them, to live the heights and depths, and all the things that catch you and come upon you in the middle of the night, when you suddenly awake, in the middle of things, heart pounding sometimes...

And really, I was in one of those very dreary weary moods...

Well, it's all because of kindness.  Kindness is the feeling, that's when you're with... you know, the whole thing.  The Big Bang is the kindness, like all the good works that people do, how much they care, how much they want good for the world...

It was this explosion of kindness, really.  Out of nothing, boom, everything, and it's a big everything, full of the most minute details, the biggest range, from sand grain to pebble, to river stone, to mountain, to space, the kind we live in and move about in...

And kindness is the living force that remains, or, rather maybe, had something to do with it all.  The kindness and love we feel for things is the same as the winds that were blowing when the whole tiniest of tiny things went BOOM.

Kindness is expansive, isn't it?  It's capable of everything.  It always has room for more, energy for more.


I think that's how my little sermon worked that night.

That night, I'd felt it, atop all the frustrations of work, how the restaurant somehow hangs together, somehow lives... Really the greatest of mysteries...  I mean, look at the world.  Look at how selfish and despots take things of people being together in some strange and seemingly haphazard ways...  The whole thing could go to falling apart and bitter acrimony quite quickly, under the strain.  You'd want to scream and shout at your coworker sometimes trying to make it all happen, but, you see the customers, like at a wedding, all pretty, nice young men and women, and you just want to do the best for them.

This is the awful great physical miracle of the Wedding at Cana, the first one.  (I tried not to choke up...)   Dostoevsky has digested it for human consumption, the poor bastard.  (And I'm keeping some of these thoughts to myself, and not sure exactly what I'm sharing, what I'm keeping hidden...)  God wants joy, human happiness, Dostoevsky gives us.  God wants people to be happy.  Thus, the wine.  And they were poor people, here, and they love wine, because it's one of their few real happy things.  God loves people.  Kindness is flowing throughout.  Maybe that speaks of the nature of all miracles themselves, the impossible kindness...

I'd been so exhausted, the whole thing of having your gas pedal pushed down by other people, other things.  I'd been willing to do it all, because of kindness and wine, human happiness, joy, my own small spectator part of it...

Well, actually, I was a scientist, living in my great scientific clutter, all the people coming and going, the thousand million bits of conversations in my scientific life as a barman putting up with it all... riding the bucking bronco.

In the end you only say a little bit to a child.  I'm both sure and not sure what I spoke to her about it all.   But I think, I hope, I got my point across, both to myself as much as she.  That strong flowing wicked wind we must ride upon, that flows through our chests and our stomachs and in all the hollow spaces of our bodies, through the tops of our hands as well as the cups of our palms, through the tops of our feet as well as the part of us which, like the animal, touches the ground, balancing us, touching the earth.

And when you have deep truth to tell a child, you wonder, you know, why this sudden burst of understanding which I am allowed....

And you, I, we, all of us bear scars about this, the times we betray our own little minerals of understandings about the whole thing, by which I mean everything.  The time we spoke up to someone else, hopefully, hopefully spoke, and we said, or hope we said, well, this is what I did, because what's it about anyway...

And whenever the truth sort of bursts through us like light, light we are somewhat obliged to make look like normal conversation, not to scare anyone, not to bring up other little truths, like, oh, we all are dying too, which you might not want to do, like, on vacation...

We all have moments when we, all our wisdom, gets overlooked, or...  missed, or even disrespected... There you are, having gone on the big family vacation, and you are looking up at the Milky Way there above the Atlantic Ocean in Maine, less light to pollute this the best part of being on vacation here, where you can really see, like, the scale of things.  "The stars...  we are the consciousness of the Universe looking back at itself..."  And I'd even read as much, a nice little book, so I felt some sort of footnoteable confidence, and it wasn't even a weird thing to say...  But you know the response...  We've all heard it.  The damp towel.  Don't be an asshole...

But you and I, and poor Fredo Corleone even, we can grow a little understanding of all the amazing things blowing within us.


Sometimes I wasn't so happy doing my primate work at the bar.  It was too much work.  Physically grinding.  But there was Stephen Hawking with his ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, beating him down, and he was a chap and put up with it.  It was my anthropological library, my body of memory, my field of study.   But it was hard.  And I knew I had lots of wise things to tell children, just not sure how much it would do for them, just that it was truth, the truth, and the truth, as they have always said, from the Big Bang onward, the truth will set you free.


Is it sad to know all these things?  Well, it's just kindness.  Kindness lives in acts, in frog's eyes, in birds...

So the schedule had given me two of my usual nights off, the nights I am expected to be there, so that I would fill in over the busy Friday and Saturday night.  And this throws me off, and it's even a relief to be walking through the warm woods with the sun out and cherry blossoms and water in the stream, and mom has called a few times already, asking what the plan is...  Going back to work.

But it is not a joy when I arrive.  The kid didn't bother to restock.  And the whole downstairs main dining room has been 'bought out' for a wedding party, and so the busboys are luging the taller tables up from the basement, and putting away the teak cubical coffee tables that normally serve as tables up at the wine bar.  The same with the chairs.  And this is bad, because it's going to get very full, and people dining with the subtle expectations they have eating downstairs on tablecloths, and not this experiment in service ad hoc that it a night at the wine bar.

It's one of those nights, like the old days, when you just keep moving, keep moving quickly, taking the night bite by bite, doing what's immediately necessary before you, a dessert order, relaying a coffee tea order to the busser, keeping the dishwasher running through as all the glasses are either dirty or piling up, almost completely out of wine glasses, clearing tables, taking orders, twisting, turning, reaching...  with no idea of what's going on, just keeping doing it.

So I am exhausted when it is all over.  And the night had been too busy, dodging people, reaching, etc., always something to do, more butter dishes, more bread, what the hell is going on, I don't get the chance to pour myself much electrolyte water, but, when I finally had time, wanted a more numbing beverage, pinot noir on the rocks when I finally had some time to catch my breath, and mom calls again, sounding a little confused, who is picking her up, no one is telling her the plan, does she need to move to the other house...  I do my best to soothe her over my cell out on the front street when there's breathing room after the desserts and checks...

I get home, take my work shirt off, and sag down on the couch with the television on, and soon cannot move, not even to get up to go to bed more properly.  Around 5 AM I'm awake enough to brush teeth and go to bed, but I cannot now go right to sleep, so I check on a few things, like bank account, like my American Express statement.  Worries.  The inner worrying voice tells me, I've waited too long to make the changes I really need to make, to find a job that doesn't kill me, a career path, etc., and now mom is falling apart, so it seems.  I've tried, the voice says, and it hasn't, of course it hasn't, gone that well for me, and I know this, and am trying to rethink the whole reasons why.


Later, with Kerouac and New York on my mind, I dream of the princess.  We have a harmless meeting up in her big city, and she's friendly, solicitous even, and helpful, and generous taking me around, finding good stuff to eat.  It turns out she has an illness.  Her fingertips are disappearing, withering away, incomplete ends that aren't so much fingers anymore, strange, and I realize that's why she's wearing a sort of a scarf kind of a thing, to protect them.  She is getting treatment, but I admire the saintly way she's dealing with this strange disease...  She too is a saint, dealing bravely with the strange conditions of being alive, holy mother.

And also, another chapter of the dream, more or less, that I show my wine bar customers that I am, indeed, carrying a Cross, even beneath my humor and my charitable cheer, and when I wake and meditate, there is the Cross within too, blueprint of our nervous systems.  It's okay to be dramatic in dreams.

When I wake, I find that I do not have to work.  Thank god.  I am out of gas.  I turn over and rest more.

And in fact, so put out I am by the awful night holding down the fort, that I don't move off the couch, and my fears about the place are fueled, and there's no real good mood to be had, and then mom calls again, and then after that I want a glass of wine, from a chilled bottle of Beaujolais...  And I've been famished, going through various leftovers...and still, rehydrating, still, not feeling any energy...



You're not having fun anymore, my mother tells me, the next day, as she calls for the second time, around noon, so finally I get up.  I carry the cell phone into the kitchen, find a small mason jar of chilled green tea, patiently going through the whole, this is where I am, but I have to move it all and the cat over to the other place...  Mom, no, you just need to go down to get wine at...  We talk, I ask her if she's still watching the Masters, or if, in her wine shortage last night if she made a vodka v8 for herself, if it came to that, and I forget to tell her about the BBC piece I saw dramatizing poor Dylan Thomas coming to New York...  I manage to mention, in my groggy state, I rode my bike indoors, that it's just the start of the season, that Paris Roubaix was today...  Yes, the bike will be fun, once I get back in shape...

Yes, a shrink told her this once, you're not having fun anymore...  And your father wouldn't know fun if it fell on him, (though it turns out he did know how to have fun...)

Well, well, it's not so bad.  I'll slowly wake, drink my water with baking soda and good salt, and the salt of the earth shall have its savor and I'll go off to work, get set-up, no matter how the kids left it, and then the Sunday regular people will come, early and late, to talk of hip replacements on the horizons, and retirement, and other things, and the pace, hopefully, will not be that of a one-winged coat-hanger, and I'll get peaceably through the night shift, avoid the tree pollen exposure, earn my little share of the tip pool with my three shifts this week, they kind of screwed me on that...  And I will work then Monday, and then Tuesday, and then Wednesday I'll wake at the proper time and remember the proper time of my therapist appointment, and after that I will not have to go to work, and that is fine, they're putting me on Saturday instead of Wednesday Jazz Night and that is fine...

The nice couple, middle aged as I, a few years older, who got engaged at the Gaul one Paris Roubaix evening--Cancellara won it that year--might come by, and things will move forward into the week.

But a lot of thought goes into all this waiting and serving on people.  A lot goes into hospitality.

Listening to NPR, as I ponder going off to work, I learn it's poetry month, and they are talking about Walt Whitman.

So I order some copies of my book, not sure why, just to have them around I guess, I get them cheap, about four bucks a pop.  The box comes from Amazon, sitting there on the front stoop.  The package, looks like it's been opened.  The blue plastic tape has been cut, methodically, along the whole top and the sides of the top, and the top looks like it could have been opened, enough so that one could look in.  The weight a good ten pounds.  And the box has been closed back up with three strips of clear plastic wide packing tape from side to side.   The burglar or whomever must have been disappointed with such loot.  And when I open the box finally--the thieves had made this task easier--yup, nothing but the twenty two of my famous novel A Hero For Our Time, 265 pages, along with some brown packing paper snaking around, just as I'd ordered through CreateSpace, as if these little boxes of literature now completely outmoded, they might as well be mummified by now.  How's that for a chuckle.

And I am a bum.  Really.  I might be a nice one, but I am a bum.  A total bum.  It's bad enough if you're an artist, but to be a bum on top of that...  And where does one even look, to find the roots of it, where did I become a bum...


It's five in the morning, and the half moon is on the other side of cloudy forty two degree distant pond, robins are giving it a chirp, and soon a Postal Delivery truck will make a great thump over some hollow part of the streets below, and airplanes will take to the sky heading west.

And this is about the time, here now, in the hours when one takes out the recycling, and other such stupid things like preparing to make tuna salad and regretting that one had a cider at the grocery store, should have just gotten the groceries home and not felt so stressed out earlier when leaving the old and sacred house on the old and sacred street of stray and feral cats and other such small epiphanies of personal libraries and people with good histories and good taste and knowledge, readers, that I would habitually turn to the sad things that accompany life in this old town.  For various reasons of exile sensitivity, I could never get enough of other people's more famous misery.

Anything about Abraham Lincoln, be it a book about his melancholy, or Ken Burns Civil War series, of Abraham & Mary, A House Divided, a documentary I found, would do the trick, if you've ever lived in Washington, D.C., and felt its miseries.  Or, go and catch a funeral train, if not Lincoln's, Bobby Kennedy, or Jack's Kennedy Blue airplane touching down and rolling into the lights of Andrews...    Ghost stories.  Madam Korbonski heard crying through the wall of my bedroom early and dark in the morning when the Polish hopeful airplane crashed in Putin's Russia on the way to acknowledge horrors like Stalin's works of murder against the noble Poles in Katyn woods.

And why did I inherit the misery, but for the lack of kindness--I guess I wanted, out of family history, some sort of special treatment--received at Amherst, or was it that I've never had a happy turning out well relationship with any female of the species (cats and dogs, quite fine), and is that because of my crazy mother or more my own faults and being a bad boy who never figured it out, and who, again, is a bum.

With whatever energy I have after grocery shopping in the early evening, along with loose leaf tea and wine, I spend on cooking, searing chicken breast in the iron pan with left over ginger that was steeped in water with shallot, and then also searing some unhappy tenderloin, to be eaten later, sliced, boring.   And then I pass out on the couch, into the post dinner nap, in front of the television.

In the general state I am in, yeah, you don't really want to run into people, feeling ashamed about something.  I mean, you've tried honestly enough to be a writer...

But to admit that you are miserable in Washington, D. C., is to go against the general rule of presenting yourself as highly competent, and happy, and sometimes to be happy is to make other people miserable.

And this is why, perhaps, I am mystified, when I go down to the local market, which mimics a farmer's market and with beer, wine and cider, a deli counter, cooked chickens, fresh meats packed in plastic on cooler shelves, to see the influx of the young and funky and the hipster, people who might wish themselves to make their own cheeses and beer if they had the time, almost dressed for it, along with the handsome resuméd youthful people who still have time to figure out breeding and who already have dogs...

But here, by myself, a kind of misery, sometimes sleepy, sometimes awake, and happiness and contentment come through performing modest chores, mostly food-related.

Meanwhile, old mom sits up there by herself with all her books, in some form of lonely exile, but that she has a cat, and how did we let all this happen...

Later, today I will go back to work.


Somehow, as a creative, I have never favored collaboration.  More have I leaned to the general very private secrecy that is natural in writers, as writers are, alas, unable to share, but by writing, that saying something about the human condition, and, for that matter, perhaps the spirituality of the prophets.  Dr. King like Isaiah and Amos, I've read recently in the Times...  good to close a sermon with, as was his habit.  I cannot explain this, I just know it to be true.


(Getting ready for work, after the schedule change, comes almost as a relief.  JFK said he'd go nuts if he didn't have somewhere to go every day, and perhaps this is true.)

Oh, but the restaurant business, the odd hours, you never get to talk to anyone.  And this on top of the feeling that you're playing around when you should get serious, that all this is frivolous, even though it is work, definitely, leaving you exhausted.

Amos was a prophet.  He decided that himself.  He was not a professional at it, not a pleaser of powers that be, but an independent.  He was a believer in social justice, so it seems.

With that man, that man in the White House, our White House, the White House of, by, and for, the people...  the opposite of a man with any spiritual life...  and this is hard on people, and even in normal political situations much of the spiritual voice gets drowned out.  No?  The dialog is dragged so far in one direction, even to get back to the median, so that you could acknowledge the spiritual element of the created universe, so much static, and that's how he operates.

Like take King, Dr. King, in his last sermon, toward the end of it, talks of going to the Holy Land, and driving with his wife from Jerusalem down to Jericho, and it's a "winding, meandering road... really conducive for ambushing," a dangerous road that drops three thousand feet, and the question for him in his sermon is not about what happens to the person who stops to help out the man beaten by thieves, not about the I, but about the other, as The Good Samaritan in Dr. King's telling is, what will happen to the man if I do not stop to help him...

It's a remarkable speech to come across today.  About how Dr. King's thoughts were not what will happen to me if I do not stop to help out the sanitation workers, but about what will happen to them if he doesn't stop.

And some people, some men, of course, do not stop.


But we too stop, even the writer.  We stop to write of the neglected possibilities, to see ourselves not just in economic terms, but in terms broader.  Why do we exist?  For what?  Who but us will do the work that is God's work, involving God's thoughts...

Trump would not stop, but to toss paper towels to the victim of the mightiest of storm's wrath, in the photo op.  And get away with it, because he has already changed the dialog so far toward the materialist view, that we can barely conceive of an argument for doing better by the victims, as if he'd hypnotized us, numbed us, taken away our tongues...


You're not going to write unless you help yourself to write.  You're not going to write until you write down something small and seemingly inane, and then help out that idea.  You help it gain strength, and add some coherent structure to it.

Hemingway wrote his story, self-reflecting perhaps, about the Old Man and the Sea, a poor man, an old man, a fisherman, a man with a sort of tattered wisdom and very simple means and living.  Hemingway too could side with nature, with the poor, with the lone artist and his struggle, with the spiritual side of things, the deeper realities that makes things so.  He recorded things as they are.  He was one kind of a writer, and perhaps the times, his times, called for that.  His generations had wars to grapple with, to digest.  And in war there is the soldier's experience, and that's a good deal of what he brought to us, the horrible anonymity of destruction, people marching in lines their souls having been forgotten by any worldly authority.


Who thinks he can write when he wakes up...  what have I to write?  For I am a sinful man, even on a good day, or even at best.

But the writer has this vast body of soulful things to remember.  He sees people, potentially, purely, as souls, almost to the point where they become themselves anonymous, messengers of God in accordance with what they do.   The construct of the world bears him up when he gets to concerned with the microcosm of his affairs.

This is light, and it is hard to look at the brightness of the light sometimes.  The kind of impersonal touch that God and the Lord Jesus Christ brings to personal relationships...

If we, oddly, focus on the details of who people are in their individual circumstances--and everyone seems themselves as an independent individual and unique character, seeing worth in tooting their own horns and presenting themselves in terms of individual greatness and power--we lose their potential to come out and act in the spiritual way...

It is not "I" that writes...  And without sounding pretentious, Jesus is accurate and correct when he says it is His Father's business, that the things he is doing come out of the One who sent him.

Each person is a manifestation of the deeper reality, and the deeper stuff can be thought of as something beyond the personal, as it is the spirit which acts, to help, to do good things, to shine the light...

We don't blame Jesus for his impersonal quality, for his distance, his aloneness.   Sure, we don't want to see him as unfriendly and non-smiling...  but it seems it's almost as much the burden of individuality and ego's things that he lifts off people, and they are people weighted by their identity in society...

A sermon is a day's work, a moment of atomic energy translated, transformed into things very hard for us to grasp but made tangible.

The cult of personality, the pagan gods, they exist today too, but one can know better...  And this is why the hermit life isn't so wrong sometimes.  And what do we have to focus on these days, but the surface, the appearance of on-line life, the image...

There are reasons why we've been brought to where we are, and maybe the events and even the reasons behind why where we are where we are are personally sad and trying.  Lessons, such things are.  To know such gives one strength, strength to deal with scary things like uncertainty.  And maybe, perhaps, uncertainty is there for a reason, to teach you something which you have not been able to quite comprehend just yet, a puzzle, something to think over, and ultimately doing a good job of leading you to a better place.