The job, by the way, of waiting on people, as the hack science fiction writer did for an actual living, if that's what you could call it, was utterly ludicrous, ridiculous, if you stopped to think about it.  It was such an old thing, such a personal family thing, to even mention it alongside the thought of The Economy, or Industry, or a job, that such terms were utter silliness.   To regard the job as anything real was akin to reading the oldest of fairy tales and pretending that such things were real.  One can't even call it a job.  To get the job was to delve into the oldest of Gospels and Prophets, the oldest of holy people, the oldest of monasteries.  To think that people would do such a thing as a living, rather than as a refuge from the corrupted modern world wrought by Capitalism and the like, would be to see such people as lunatic.

To wait on people, as it turned out, was as good a way as any other one might think of, to understand a lot of things, such things as the puzzling and beautiful things Christ went on record as saying, as far as anyone will ever get to the meaning of such.

But one thing was that the people had no real idea.  They had no ability to reach that conceptual a level, and particularly about such a thing as the Christian act, the spiritual act, the enlightened Persian poetic idea of a server of wine as a spiritual being...  The world of the city was far too practical for taking time to make such imaginative leaps.

Just like the articles he'd written on wine for the local Georgetown newspaper...  Philosophical, metaphorical, but without any particular salesmanship, no here-you-need-to-buy-this, and eventually they, the editors saw this flaw hiding in his literary charm.

The problem, with understanding, on the deeper level, of the nature of time made him, besides his job, have a hard time getting anything done.  He wanted to write.  And this made him, by all outer appearances, though he tried to hide it all, a rather lazy being at doing the normal things, even as he was diligent about a reasonable set of things.  Groceries.  Wine shopping.  Making enough to pay for health insurance, and to attend his bi-weekly appointments, laundry, recycling, talking to his mom everyday however many times it took.

Was there a better explanation, for anything, beyond the will of Jesus, or the insight of Buddha, or Kurt Vonnegut, or the idea of a space ship landing in Washington, DC, slightly more secret and subtle and cleverly hidden as a mystical even than as portrayed in the famous movie from the 50s with Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal and the robot, The Day the Earth Stood Sill (1951.)  An alien landing was also in Gary Cooper in High Noon, in many children's books, in Robert F. Kennedy's funeral train, in many things.  The usual dusting off wise things sloughed off by space, confirming the deeper realities.

But the restaurant, or the quiet street and the quiet apartment  and the kind neighbors who admired eccentrics were also part of the space ship that had landed from a higher dimension that most people were too stupid to see. a carrot in front of their nose, what a way to live.  They were people who had been through interesting things too, and told a similar story, those who understood their presence as neighbors on the old quiet street near a natural spring.

Either you went by it all, the whole thing, or you rebelled, and accepted the other explanations, such as the Buddha might present, such as a crazy obscure marginalized writer of science fiction might offer.  Either you had a mind that had been through things, random things, human things, history, events, fire-bombing survival, world wars, economic wars, or you bought the whole Madison Avenue story....

So was it a liberation to see, as holy people have always said, that everything is set in its appropriate place, much like the pieces of a Swiss watch mechanism, as according to the will of a just God the father the son and the holy spirit.



The only direct comparison I can find now, as I look through certain history and notes, of the kind you will not find the general rules of interns in such a place as Washington, DC, is a certain Samael Aeon Weor, something like that.  A very mystical gentleman, in tune with all sorts of Kabal, Tantra, you name it.  His belief, much of it very strong and informative, has an odd codex, and, admittedly, to some of us it might mike sense.  The belief goes something like this:  the thing is, for the male, to never ever ejaculate, to never raise the demon to the holy caduceus snake and all the energy center chakras that run up and down the spine up to the holy parts, from tip of tail bone to peneal gland, etc. A busboy, his name, Don Eden, was the first one to introduce me to such a literature of philosophy. but it it began to make sense.  Practical.

Since then I have come to appreciate that a distance from such deep theories actually help one, such as myself, avoid falling into the things one is supposed to avoid, oddly enough.  If one were strict, I don't know, you'd get a little too rigid and nervous, and the things wouldn't happen, not this holy relationship of man and wife, intertwined, to raise the deepest and best powers of the priest.  The priest needs his garden of a woman, and they need to embrace, I forget, how many hours a day, each day of the week, so that the mystical fluids can concur and migrate the baser parts of the mind up to the heavens...  Something like that.

Did Billy Pilgrim achieve such things?  Where is Vonnegut now, to answer such questions, but that he too must have had some form of holy communion and had received a kind of priest ordination, such that he had thoughts of the clearest of all the American writers...