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.