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.