"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...