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.