From Mother's Day Sunday special menu night shift onward it had been a week of stress.  I didn't need having to deal with a different menu limited to three choices for each of five courses, the regular menu unavailable.  And here, at 5:30, as the door opens, the first party, South American, six, arrives, and then following upon them, parties jammed in, sent upstairs, to the idiots, when such diners had intended to eat in the staid and easy comfort of downstairs, the main dining room, perfectly table-clothed, the kitchen swinging door right there, an ease of everything.  But when they come upstairs, a greater effort, leaf cutter ants, the great blind unpredictability for he who must control the feast, the random nature of when the next course might arrive, and if the table has been cleared of the empty plates of the last.  Food running, busboy, explanations, courses, dessert, regulars out of joint, discourse on wine, and not one soul in the wine bar's dining tables familiar...

I got ready to go visit my mom.  The real estate people were concerned about an episode or two, but in daily conversations, she seemed to be doing okay, for the most part.  The grass pollen had joined in with the tree pollen making me miserable and lethargic, drained of energy, and the last night of the work week with the Gypsy Swing band in the corner and the big consulting firm having a big wine dinner in the back room, I was feeling stretched and stressed by work on top of everything else.  People at work made a big deal about the new champagne in a white bottle, off dry.  Sure, it tasted good, but I had lots of things going on in my head.


Back where I rested, in this situation I was in, to relax, I tried to read, and I'd been making headway through Archbishop Sheen's The Priest Is Not His Own, but I needed something else, and Slaughterhouse Five fell into my hands.  The same old blue clothbound book of it that I'd read in tenth grade, and the book had cast its spell of wisdom over me, in a way I awakened to strangely as I read, and I said to myself, 'ah-hah, this is why I am where I am, and who I am now, and reason for the things I have tried to do, because of the wisdom of this book, which I absorbed as a child, but could not tell anyone about, because it took a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to be able to tell such things, and who am I, but that I get it.'  But that my family always got that anyone could enjoy and get Vonnegut's point.

Time.  The Tralfamardorians who abduct Billy Pilgrim express their view of time.  Not dissimilar to what I saw on PBS in a show on higher physics, relativity, that sort of thing, about how the space-time continuum might be looked at as a giant loaf of bread, and in theory one could travel through the devices of relativity, back and forth, into the future, back into the past, and take a slice of it anywhere.  The slices would be to travel in time, to return to moments that have already happened, or will come to be, because it's all relative anyway.  The space aliens tell the human being that time is as simple as being a bug caught in amber.  Life is in the Fourth Dimension as well where our days all exist in a present moment simultaneously.  Just that we can't experience it that way, because we feel ourselves to be creatures of the Third Dimension.  In each and every moment, we live a slice of the time space continuum.

I'm not a physics expert, or anything like that, but I do see myself as a simple believer, that the poetic mind can see things in the same light as the highest of science truth.  The poet, or even the hack writer, can have something to say about it all, as far as moments go, as far as offering great interpretations.


Imagine me, being taken as a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Whereas I really don't know what gives anyone any real authority in such matters, but except when they write such a thing as Slaughterhouse Five.  And books, these days, who knows what will get noticed, but to me, alas, quite regrettable, we have slipped into an era where war is not fought the old terrible way, but in the mind, in what constitutes the political realm of things.  A book is taken first as a political treatise, a show of unrepresented peoples....


Nowadays, at my age, now that he is old, the writer What's His Name takes naps to remember his thoughts, so that they might be in enough shape to write down.  Hay Fever certainly adds heavily to the feeling, as does a sense of one's own poverty.  So does the stress of work, the simultaneous duties of keeping conversations going at the bar, while also running all over the place to see to it that the parties of five in the back room are being well attended to, a completely different mode.  The regulars poke me as I'm doing all this.  Are you okay?  No, I'm not okay.  Grit your teeth, get through it, and then, at last, there is the final jostling, large bodies back and forth in my space behind the bar, in keeping up with the mad rush toward the end of the evening put on by those who will leave early, running about so much that they get in the way.

But if one can see the ghost of time such as it is, existing in a incredible gigantic sort of loaf of bread shape of space/time continuum, if one can get that, then perhaps there will be other ghosts to see, that come down the pike, in a way not unlike the events Dickens records in his Christmas tale.  The ghosts of adepts, who understand time themselves...  People like the Buddha, like the true Jesus Christ....  Probably like many of them, Adam, Noah, Isaac, Moses...  Here is the Ghost of Christmas Past, now, and now, here is the Ghost of Christmas Present....  And such ghosts attend all the little events of our lives, from getting onto school busses as kids, to graduations, to... all sorts and any matter of things.  The ghosts understand the whole, how each piece fits into the picture.  And it is not inappropriate that this remarkable tale of space/time is set around the meaning of Christmas as it too applies to time...


In the frozen amber of time that Vonnegut writes about, I, like Billy Pilgrim, am also caught in time, and almost always, I am caught in the act of hesitation, of uncertainty as to what to do, in what would be to other people awkward moments of silence when there should be talk or action.  I cannot explain these perpetuating instances away, except to speak of my own faults, my own inner understanding of fourth dimensional time I would rather not be instinctively privy to...  But I must emphasize this.

And I look at the people around me, and they do not operate by such a sense of time, knowingly, and in fact they see it a different way.  Time and moments are about sustained effort and progress, to a certain goal, retirement, the jobs of offices done with satisfaction.  The bug caught in amber in each and every strange moment of life and consciousness is not allowed to see things so, as much a matter of progress, and this is my perspective, as kind of missing Jesus who waits on people, listens to them, and they same sort of crap over and over again anyway...

But is seems, hard not feel guilty about, in time, actual time as it is conventionally recored, it seems, I am unable to do much.  Not much of action on my part.  No real use of the tool of a useful profession.  I go grocery shopping, to eat, to drink wine, I sleep a lot, make myself uneasily content by doing a few creative things on the side.  My art form is simple as walking through the woods, and also, largely, just coping with stress, which in and of itself is an art form.  It might well amount to very little, little more than just dealing with it, taking it straight, each day, evils sufficient.


All week my heart had pounded, and having to go to work and face people made me feel like vomiting, almost.  The barman is supposed to be Mr. Happy, and sometimes you can carry it off, but sometimes you can't.  All week was like waiting for a phone call, someone telling me I needed to pack up my mother's entire apartment, and do what with it...

All I could do was pray.  And I did pray.  I prayed to relieve the stress that had come down on my mother since getting her taxes in late.  I said Hail Marys.  I said Our Fathers.  I repeated them.  I watched EWTN instead of the stupid news, and I felt better.

Finally, pay day, I check my bank account, and my federal refund has finally come through, and that makes things better.




Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, Fourth Printing, 1969, page 94:

      The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel.  In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had.  He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in all the other Gospels.
       So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground.  There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought.  The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.




In my own amber, I am doing the usual.  There is some continuity, within, just the way things are, quite beyond the usual order and social conformity.  In my own amber, I am a sort of writer, misunderstood as far as scholarly worlds go.  I am in amber trying to achieve a sort of perspective, and one my mom has long told me about.  What my mother tells me about is a decent place, more of a career than my own, and it involves the process of reading, in all its magic.  Louise Rosenblatt... Why did I reject such things, so stubbornly, mistrustful of authorities of readership I really would have liked to have been great friends on good terms with.  I had found my calling, but then, as if some bitterness, lost it, lost track, fallen by the wayside, indeed quite horribly.  What can you do...

I will agree:  life's been nothing, but fucking around, for me...