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.