Sunday, July 22, 2018

The weekend, apart from a lovely dinner with an old friend starting a new life after the passing of her husband, and the accomplishment of laundry and dishes, has been pretty much a waste.  The workweek left me exhausted, and Saturday, heavy rain the entire day.

It is not until 6am that I finally have any chance too write, but one takes what he can get, and has a glass of wine.  Don't take work too seriously.  How can you anyway.

A chance to read Knausgaard on Turgenev.

It is true, and learned from the highest of minds, that life is suffering.  And I have no idea how much more suffering one's own little stake of life will see.

Talented people are very lazy.  And they are quiet.  They do not wish to exacerbate, but rather get home safe and find a moment conducive to the oddities of their own.

No one can ever grasp the talents hidden in another being, and as with oysters, and creatures, who cannot speak to us directly themselves, I prefer talents raw, as if out of a great unrehearsed peasantry, spiritually minded so as to find their native gifts.  Who taught the bird to sing?  Who taught me to be a good barman?  In all its confusing and exhausting and contentious angles.

At six in the morning I am tracing the Buddha's thoughts back to the initial irritated and craving amoeba, seeking a sense of purity, as if looking for an excuse out of such a Hamlet-show of a job.  How much it costs, personally.  And yet, there is something to be said for it.  It is, as cruel as it is, real.

Alas, there is no better way, to meet people and to get their stories.  And I, a member of the intelligencia, must look to a likened style of understanding, the eye of an anthropologist stuck in himself.  Of course, this was sad, that there was no better way to come upon people in their own habitat, to get their stories,

As a venerable musician explained to me, as I asked him about where he grew up and what it was like back then, the main thing was that you could walk.  You could be home all day, stopping to look at things, that no body, as if trying to protect a neighborhood , would stop you, thinking you were weird.

In a dream I go back to the old hillsides where I grow up.  It's summertime, the corn is high, the green is at its most impossible richness.  And now it's getting closer to dusk, but the light is strong, and making shadows to show the depth of these valleys and all their pockets.  I must be getting on soon, dinnertime.  I linger, taking photos with my phone.  I cannot stay long.

Thursday, July 19, 2018





They come in late, just before the kitchen closes, after the working people, decent folk,

have worked hard all night, very hard, from the beginning.  Just before five hours

of absolute running, chaos, they come in.

Adding three hours to the night,

Such that when I finally get home

after sorting it all out

I am stuck in the second rush of adrenaline to get through it, there at ten

when I finally accepted my spiritual duty,

now at four in the morning still agonizing.

And I have a long way to run, a long way to pace like a wild animal,

in defense of myself.  Just to calm down,

which is impossible.  The Leopard in me must pace on for miles

in the jungle of the night.



It's five in the morning, and to feel like a normal human being, all alone at this hour,  there is water heating, ready for (gluten free) pasta.

Toward the end of his trout entree, I am finally able to tell my friend, his summer vacation time coming, "life is suffering."  That's what we are here to learn as students.  The universal lesson on life.  You know that, I know that.  It's the lesson we get as living beings.  I nudge my still-standing chin in the direction of the people in their queer animal state, making noise.  "My view on pleasure."

There is always the suffering part of any pleasure, come later or sooner, in or out.  I can hear myself in all their talk, me thinking it was, once upon a time, fun to be so... Alcohol increasing the desire but lessening the ability...  booze having its way, picking the brain, in an enjoyable way.   The intoxicated find themselves having great verbal abilities, masters of conversation, masters of wit.

And to see now, somehow I get it now, the misery evident in people trying to enjoy themselves, it is unnerving to see.

These are moments when you realize you must help people understand the Buddha's lessons.  Your only real job ever is to help out fellow beings.


Is it worth mentioning, that life is suffering, as Buddha said..  It might not help you so much, as a writer.  For then writing too would be miserable, at attempt at pleasing one's own self, another illusion.

Monday, July 16, 2018

I can perfectly empathize with the old Roman fascination.  What comes out of our lower end openings is self-montored as any aspect of our health.  Was our bowel movement complete?  What was the clean-up after it like?  Probiotics make things neater.  Fiber produces its own shapely results, satisfyingly tubular, a working-out of the things taken within our own individual systems.  How was said volume expelled, enjoyably, suddenly, comfortably, with relaxation, with burning or not, such we keep track of.

Coffee, an enjoyable high, produces burning, as does hard alcohol.  Green tea soothes, and for some systems sparkling water.

The curiosity has a healthy outlet, not that any of it is habitually included in discussion.

Dogs, honest creatures, express interest in each other in their own native way.   The usual check of a colleague will reveal who the dog is, where the dog is from, what the dog's diet is about, how the dog's health is, and even what the dog's mood is.

As with any interest in health, the human mind turns to its usual focus, the sexual.

Saturday, July 14, 2018

The war, the war...  It had all become a war.  War on the television.  War in everyone's minds, war broken out in every part, every aspect of public life.  Economic war, war of words and opinion, war against the psyche...  War spilling out everywhere.  Winners made at the cost of making losers, real losers.


He remembered, in dream, his kind father.  He remembered the Chevrolet station wagon, red with simulated wooden panel.  A Malibu.  He remembered the space-ship like campus, of cubical concrete units with large picture windows and brightly colored blinds, yellow and orange, the campus where his father taught, laid out on the land just so.  His father, the perfect kind gentleman, who'd call him when he was running late, or lost.  In the dream he knew his father's kindness toward him, and wanted to be kind back, to acknowledge it all, the gentle peacefulness.  In the dream he had gone to get groceries to bring them back, and then they would all have dinner together.

All the things that had happened since then, the war...  The war of people your own age dismissing you, dismissing your father, as if to say, "I do not know the man."  People not wanting to believe in you, not giving you the benefit of the doubt, but rather crucifying you with their little opinions, each like a nail, each like a small blow, binding you to something you did not want.  There was too much passive about you, not enough standing up for yourself, in retrospect, not known at the time.

So you fell, you lowered yourself, you humbled yourself...  Down to the point where at least people seemed to appreciate you...  What could they not like about you, waiting on them hand and foot, smiling, listening, laughing at the joking.

But that too, like everything else in the great misreading, the lack of comprehension, the lack of seeing that it truly was a war, in which there were awful consequences coming your way, was a big mistake.

And all along, you kept within the knowledge of Tralfamador and its perfect justice.  You remembered hyper-space, that bird's nest from which we all are sprung from...


Hemingway was correct...  Only in the mornings would you be able to be back in contact with such things, before all the noise of lives led...  Only then could you tell what was shit writing and what was not.  Only then would you, could you, have faith again in those glimmering tiny thin spider strands that lifted you up, connections to the whole of the reality of the created Multiverse.

The connection was not easy to maintain.  It was hard.  It was hard enough to cut out some private space of peace to believe in it, all those marvelous things that mystics understood, inklings of which had informed the better angels of earthly governing systems.  It was hard to find a little old book, What Is Buddhism, from the London, The Buddhist Society, first published 1928, and believe a word of it.

It was hard to recognize how one himself had been rejected, just like Jesus, just like Jesus who was a teacher, just like Jesus taught.  They wouldn't get you.  They would hurl their own misunderstandings, their own clever figuring-out-the-war at you.  To figure out how to save themselves, they had to be able to turn you in, to shun you, you weren't good enough.

But, you had your private moments, your moments of faithful peace.  Hemingway, and other men who had seen war, and women too, took these little breathing spaces with the meaning to them that they were the occasion to write.  Whatever writing was.  They did it.  Mystics.  You had to be crazy, you had to be a fool...  A sick sense of humor...


People went about their business, participating, they could claim unknowingly, in the war.



The soccer stadium...  That had all been tainted.  Ever since the Romans had dragged the Celts through the streets, ever since warriors had been put to fight to the death in the Colosseum, ever since putting Christians to be torn apart by beasts in a ring...  Ever since the public gathering spaces had been co-opted by men like Hitler, great Olympic stadiums...   The horror of the Nuremburg Rallies.

But the Tour, men on bikes going through the countryside, this was more like a healthy challenge, an escape...  The countryside, farm houses, small individual towns, vineyards, fields, forests, hills and mountains and streams were the backdrop...


You had to be a gentleman, an improbable person, a so-called intellectual (detached, absent mined, impractical), to get it, to know where, on a hunch, to look.  Egghead.  Ichabod Crane.  The great otherworldly intellectual being whose true mind was so far elsewhere, so completely beyond the horizons of normal matters...

Your father had to walk in you, live within you, again.  You had to remember him, to not forget him, to channel him and his gentle way and his voice...

You had to be the collector, the curator, of all the improbable and impractical ideals and all the spiritual musings and wanderings and beliefs that come to the human imagination, sometimes as they had through whatever means, in whatever guttural expressions...  You had to keep all this stuff with you, and for that, you had to be reasonably private, not to appear too outlandish...


The man made himself a cup of coffee in the small Bialetti, as his mother did.  He remembered the coffee in the morning with her from the visit, before they'd go for a walk where the great overhead electrical wires met the expanses of nature, wetland, birds...   The coffee was a way, a means, to be in contact with Tralfamador and Hyperspace, and all higher minds like that of Jesus and the Buddha and Noah, and Moses, and Abraham, and David who could travel with its vastness and wisdoms...  To rise above the war state on the Planet Earth and the mistreatment of its creation, the wild animals, the flora and fauna, all all the supposedly inanimate parts of it so horribly misunderstood, minds not taken into account...  The rape of ocean and bedrock, of water, of forest and plain...  Of all of God's carefully wrought creatures made just so...




Sketches:

There is, finally, a curative power to the Tour de France.  The offer of a restoration.  A heart sad, not wanting to do anything in particular, not feeling any sense of fruitful direction...  There is always exercise.

Back on his bike, two days in a row.  Thirty-five minutes indoors with his old celeste blue-green Bianchi on a trainer stand while the Tour rode through Brittany on the television, working up a good perspiration.  He did some yoga, slowly in poses, careful of his posture, stretching.  It had been a long time.  No accounting for where the belly had come from, beyond the dough...  Mayonnaise with soybean oil, the attempt to make sandwiches with gluten free bread...

Back from a week's visit with his mom, two nights back into work.  He could feel his mood improving as he rode.  Terrible job.  He had to fight back.  To save himself.  Don't be a puddle anymore, you have things to fight for, he tells himself.  So you must get back into shape.



When you are a waiter, in any form, you must be patient.  You can only respond.  You can only take charge when it is busy.  Or, you have to fill up the time some other way, cleaning, talking, educating.  It did not seem like a very good job for him.  He'd long been passive in life, under some notion that the Buddha and Jesus Christ would approve of some form of passivity, as long as it was true and enlightened.  Now it all seemed to him like a bad way to go about the business of living.  A blocking of all the native energies...  that then came out in a chase, against his will, rather than taking charge, leading a pack with all his brilliance.



Driving back.   Eight hours.  Straight to work.  Heat.  Traffic.  The suburbs.  Nature paved for roads for arrogant striving spiritually-blind Northwest Washingtonians.  Wine tasting night.  Afterward, unpacking at the apartment, then taking the car back to the parking garage, and, finally, a cab home, and straight to bed.

He was learning, finally, his habit of being passive was indeed a very bad one.

An advertisement came on as he spun his legs around against the resistance, comfortable on the saddle.  In life one must run with Sasquatch, or run from Sasquatch, and Sasquatch was going to catch you.

Fifty-three years of age, and the hack science fiction writer had no idea what to do with himself and his life.  What could he do, initially now, but bring himself back into shape, to turn away from bad habits.  The hack science fiction writer was feeling completely useless now that he was back to his quote unquote own life.


Before the drive, the last two customers at the bar...  The Anatolian woman, who could suddenly be drunk, turning on a dime.  They had a thing for each other, not acted upon.  Then the witness who had come, as it to watch it all in your own embarrassment, the waitress downstairs calling again and again, 'some one wants to come in for a glass of wine.'  The door is locked.  But here he is, his girlfriend out of town, wanting to see if I want to go out drinking.  Counting money, walking the lady down the stairs, hailing a cab, as she teeters.   The long drive on his mind, don't fuck up, don't fuck it up, your mom needs you.

He woke at 6, got up, packed, showered, was on the road by 7.  Easy out of DC.  River Road to the Beltway, then the split to 270...    After Harrisburg, through the mountain gap and rising, discovering the comfort of a Nissan Altima at speeds over 85...  Taking the bull by the horns, and coming into Oswego earlier than expected, less than seven hours later.  A couple of lucky breaks.  Good weather.  A good day, finally.   A day taking charge, built upon a night at the bar without being goaded into everybody's late night drinking buddy...  Taking life by the horns again, not afraid of himself and all his collective decisions.


Up early in the mornings in Oswego.  Coffee.  Walking with mom to the road, and then past the two houses, then around the gate of the power grid, the wetland.  Frogs croak.  Tiny fish the size of a finger in the first little pool, tinier offspring visible in the sunlit murk, cattails, red winged blackbirds calling, little green herons...  The sky above the power lines strung from the power plant south into the country faintly buzzing.  The power station there in the middle of Siberian nature...  And out in the country, the world opening up, a proper horizon for the mind, and with it a spiritual refreshment.

We walk along.  Mom puzzles over her mother's passing.  She could have come back, maybe.  Would have had more of a chance to work things out.  She'd been sedated...  They let her go...  "It would be nice to have another go, another word, another chance to talk with her, to tell her I love her.  I miss my mother."  We walk on.  The cattails are high.  Raccoons have dug out turtle eggs, empty and white, soft, by the side of the road.  An occasional splash in the green algae on the pond.



There are the things we do not understand nor comprehend, that leave us in mystery and some dissatisfaction, no explanation, no closure.  These are things--one can only guess--that lead us forth, spiritually, to understand the whole as best we can.  This is the point of Job, more than his travails and suffering, that he simply cannot know the creation, the wisdom of God's work.

Mysteries, the heart's unanswered questions, some longing, some nostalgia, these are gateways.  There is the life one wants, and then the heartbreak, the falling apart, and then, after all that, after the recovery, after the acceptance, after the quietly reached equilibrium not necessarily one of satisfaction, there is the life that happens, then, afterward, happening as it does.  Messy, incomprehensible.  Without solutions, beyond acceptance of things that don't stand to make for happiness, in your own estimation.


Gravity, a classic example... how could it be understood, even imagined, even to place a term upon such a basic assumption?  The scientists persisted with their mathematical poetry, then to discover a continuum of space time energy gravity light life...  Imagine, trying to understand gravity.  Who created it?  How?  What does it mean?

On our own level, the Chekhovian open-ended endings of life...  A species that tends to be incapable of leaving satisfactory answers, accountings for its momentary whims and desires and deeper callings, particularly over issues big for the heart and the morale...

The spiritual being is the idiot.  Like nature, not to be consumed and sold.  He must be an idiot.

Jesus spoke in parables.  By doing so, he is acknowledging that which must needs be the great impenetrable mysteries, the things that lead us to understandings beyond our own, beyond ourselves...  Only available to understanding through comparisons, even as his comparisons are, indeed, guided, weighted...




Monday, July 2, 2018

It had been a frightening and disheartening time, with the stresses of mustering hospitality on top of all that.  He was hitting the wine a bit too much, and that wasn't good.

Meaning...  put a wine pub in a nursing home?   

He had derived meaning from writing, the kind of meaning in life that we need, but life itself seemed to be imploding around him, and he was sick with worries...

The Christian yardstick for meaning...  wait on people who need it, the sick, the poor, the elderly, the mournful...  All are sick at heart, in some way...



I lay on my back, taking a nap, having been awake early and having to go back to work later on, in the darkened bedroom.  In my mind I was floating in the deep darkness of hyper space.   This is how beings like Jesus Christ travel, shepherding, enjoying all the life forms on the many planets.  I could imagine him there up ahead, smiling at children and little animals, a cat rolling around on its back as he passed.  I was enjoying myself there in deep hyper space too, and I pushed the thoughts from my mind about how the body would wake later, go to work, hopefully not be goaded into too much wine at the end of it by the last demands of the show put on and the people dealt with.

Jesus himself over-indulged when he first came to Earth.  "I'm a wino," he would tell people.  "Gluttonous, a wine-bibber..."  Thus his trepidation at the First Miracle, mixed feelings.  But he got his mother's point, about wine being the essence of the created universe..

I felt free of Earth based systems, the addictions pushed upon you through addictive means, the glowing screen.  I felt happy resting and floating out in hyper-space/time with Christ like beings who understood everything, and I could sort of tag along.

Xyz had kept me there late, one guy eating his onion tart with knife and fork, carefully moving the crusts over to the side of the plate, keeping the guys in the kitchen there, the kitchen waiting patiently for me to fire his entree, a flat iron steak special with peppercorn sauce, salad and fries.  I sipped my cheap pinot noir in a rocks glass, then ate my pigs feet and escargot as he ate his steak.

I had spent a good number of years waiting on the addicts of man-made Earth bound benighted systems...

Sunday, July 1, 2018

To tell you the truth, the hack science fiction writer, call him Jack Dulouz, or Tranowsky, or Kilgore Trout, or any personality that mystical men have taken upon themselves, obviously with embarrassment, sometimes with efforts of branding, probably secretly ashamed, so ashamed that they must bury their own personalities deep within great works of the most existential kind, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn...  telling the truths they know of the world through subterfuge, spies upon themselves released through the act of writing as best they can....  To tell you the truth, the hack science fiction was tired of his job of enacting the life of a Christian as best he could.  He was tired of something, or many things, and felt often like crying.  He was tired of the physical aspect, the waiting on people.

He was tired of the war, he was tired of millions of self-important people all trying to be louder and more correct, he was tired of all the people he knew through work who did not give two shits about his life, his future, his well-being, at least practically speaking, not that it fell on them to provide him pension when they had no extra.  It even took one of the mathematical economist types to drive the point home, to explain to him, what he already knew, how totally unprepared for a decent life he was, one night in the bar up the street at the end of the week.  He was tired of the ironies of his friends keeping him late, when he was tired and hungry.  He was tired of co-workers who left him the lurch, and it had all become boring and uninteresting.  Something he should have seen, or rather, knew, a long time ago.  Such is life.  And what he longed to do might have belonged to a great Russian short story, to just walk away, to walk away with your backpack and the basics, just to walk back home, even though, of course, there really was no such thing.

For most it's simple.  Go out and socialize.  Try belonging somewhere.  At least get out for a walk.  Do something healthy.

How would he walk home, anyway?  Would he walk all the way up Route 81 through Pennslyvania in the hero epic poem movie of it?  Would he walk up a grassy dirt road, and cross a stream, and then see the village in the distance...  If only...  There was no such place, beyond his mother's apartment complex way up there.  To do so anyway would have instantly represented the greatest of failure, and one is not supposed to fail in life.

Would he don a white robe and a staff and go out walking, to teach...

It was all so incomprehensible.  This was the primary feature of the whole mess.  Every step had been wrong.  What could you do now?

Some of us are simply incapable of being happy.  We go on, and on and on, but eventually it catches up with you.  Then you realize, you'll never be happy, truly happy.  It's too late.

The day comes when you realize this, your own fault, nobody else's, and this makes it hard to reach out.  Makes it hard to feel any belonging.

Providing others with happiness fills the hole in your life "where your own joys should be."  Of course, that's the restaurant business....

So, in preparing to make any change, you have a sense that it will only bring more of the same...

Is there some great flaw in you, which makes you this way...  Writing, therefore, is some kind of a pose.  There are some satisfactions to it, but it is too self-derived.


It was one of those days, and fortunately they do not happen so often.  It all felt real enough.  As an excuse, sort of to avoid everything, after talking with his mom several times and each times feeling lonelier and a bit more desperate, he needed to get out of the house.  The neighbors were having a little party, and this was an excuse to go get a bottle of Burgundy to bring over.  The town's hockey team had finally won the Stanley Cup, and they had dogs, cocker spaniels, and were friendly once you got to know them.  Avoidance.  So he gathered his courage and walked down the street with his courier bag slung over his shoulder, with a notebook, with a very old paperback copy of Cats Cradle, out in search of some form of meaning in this modern world of the city he had crashed down into without a clue, a Tralfamadoran, feeling, as soon as he had arrived, very very lost.

By now, as his guts felt a bit queasy, wanting to get rid of something, he could laugh at all the changed he'd seen.  He could, for instance, remember having a lemonade in a place you stepped down into when he first came to town, frustrated immediately with his professional prospects and the process of finding a job.  Since then, the place had been, after the little Mediterranean cafe, for a long time a lurid sex shop.  Tourists and people visiting the town for conventions, staying up the street, would stop and look down at the array of offered products, shampoo bottles of lubricating liquids, dildos, leather shorts and bustiers with studs, cat'o'nine whips, colorful condoms and that sort of thing all laid out on display there in the window just above street level.  Most recently it had fallen into a more lucrative business, that of doing people's fingernails, and people would go down in and have their nails done by teams of Thai people with a good eye for making money, at all hours.

So it was a relief, after sitting for a moment to catch his breath, briefly pulling out his notebook at the sidewalk cafe patio of the Starbucks there were long ago he had a habit of working so, so it was relief to go back, dump off his bags, take a shower to remove the grubby feeling, and go awkwardly over to the neighbors, were one would be able to forget himself in making conversation tying in to where people were from, which always seemed like a good topic.  Many tangential things could come out of talking to someone and finding out where they were from.  Oh, Detroit, yes, cool.   "Terry Sawchuck," he'd say, working in a little factoid, relieved, and generally interested and quite happy to get out of his own skin and all his wearisome issues.  Irresponsibility, a game of pretend.  But what else can you do sometimes, what else can you do, as your whole world of socioeconomic livelihood goes up in flames and you don't even know how to get out.

The party was so much fun, that after rose wine, crisp and grapefruity, tater tots that he thought for all he could tell might little bay scallops or something by their texture, and a bite of fried boneless chicken wing, and conversation that had nothing to do with his life or Tralfamador or anything else in particular, he left with a friendly smile, as any intergalactic being would, one who knows that all atomic structures are friendly, and relieved to find their mirror images as the crafty creator of the Universe and all things had managed to do in so many infinite and countless forms of variation, from stalks of bamboo to neighbors of Chinese ancestry and cocker spaniels, to people who could talk intelligently about politics, about, let's say, the crucial swing vote of the mush heads who would believe anything you told them, he returned to the apartment, put a spray of spot remover onto a spot on his tee shirt, took off his pants and went to bed, as it had all tired him out.

He was feeling very shy and nervous about everything, and this is stressful and he needed the rest, and felt to sleep immediately.

Yes, yes, all the people who feel they do not belong, there are many of them.  And it's a fair thing for them, considering that all the elements they are built of down to the deepest level of their atomic composition and all the things that make them tick are very strange and miraculous and things that, as far as any science truth can tell, originated, like everything else, with the Big Bang, and all the stellar events that came after that.  Each of us needed supernovas to happen--and they did, eventually--so that the building blocks of our bodies could be atomically forged and crafted just so.  The Buddhists know that there is an animate form of Carbon as well as an inanimate form of Carbon.  (Perhaps what it takes is a good talking to, for the animate form to arise from the stone form before you, thus the story of Lazarus, the story of "hey, just talk to people and it will all be okay," another form of the Golden Rule, which is itself a rule because we are both good and bad at it.)

So.  Why the darkness, the amateur hack of a science fiction writer wondered to himself as he rose after his initial Biblical rest, wondering to himself, now what the hell do I do.  The day had been very hot, and nighttime was a relief, no one could argue, and it was quiet, and there were a few laundry piles to consider anyway...

It is shocking and horrible to feel the loneliness that people must feel.  We know this better with age.  The blank terror of feeling being alone, that drives you, and certainly the business of making horror movies and the dramas of like things.  MacBeth doth murder sleep, Shakespeare knew, knowing himself, the terror, the need for some form of diversion...

But there are beautiful little things to take comfort in.  Bookshelves.  If we didn't have bookshelves, books would pile up all over the place, on dining room tables, counter tops, even on beds.  The Universe is created just so, and books are created just so, that we have a way of stacking them in a rather beautiful and friendly way.


The bursts of creativity that come from the human animal are rather wonderful, and worth trying out and experimenting personally with.  How did The Beatles come about?  Songs we all wanted to sing, and they were the ones who got together and did it.  They coalesced.  They became a planet, four kids from Liverpool.  "Rock and Dole," they called it, because they were living on the courtesy of the state, on a form of welfare, which was very helpful as they were getting their act together, John and Paul, living on the dole.


Zog, a character fleshed out by a Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., came to Earth with vital information as to how to save the planet and to cure cancer and other such things, but he got brained with a golf club when he tried to save people from a burning house.  And so on.  That's life on this planet for you.




Literary criticism became fiction, and fiction became literary criticism.  Fiction, and poetry, too, realized that this is what it had been all along.  The consciousness of the Universe looking back on itself.  Truly, the secret was, one didn't need, at least always, at least if there were very patient human readership, people who were kind enough to sense on a gut level that you'd been at it a long time, this trying-to-write business, for whatever reason, why green is green and blue is blue, and sort of deserved a small measure of being listened to...  The secret was that one didn't always need a fancy story line and the puppet shows of things happening in front of childlike eyes, nor a narrative...  Not to the extent we might have thought anyway.  What we needed was a cave, a rocky face to draw things on, and the writer could provide such a cave, so that then people could go into it and draw their own pictures, having the courage to go down into a cave and draw an animal, a magical one, a frightening one, a large one, a fast one, a mysterious one, a beautiful one, a one you could eat if you could bring one down.

Every day the mind changes and presents us with new things, moods, thoughts, the whole bit.

And this is why the soldier's walk home up the old path, Platonov's Potudon River, was an act worth writing down.  There was something going on in the soldier's walk.  The soldier's walk, and the act of recording it, was a form of literary reflection, of literary observation and critique, explanatory.



He woke, like we all do, in the middle of the night, about four in the morning.  It was still dark out.  It would grow to light outside in an hour or so, but still it was that pleasant depth of night and the moon, directly to the south, but not full was there in the backyard hiding behind a tree.  He had an urge to have a glass of wine, to feel calmer about things.   A little pinot noir on the rocks, with soda water, just to soothe. Addict of the glowing screen, his instincts were, not to look out upon a farm, a small gathering of livestock, but to bring his iPhone in front of his face there in bed with his head propped up on a pillow, and open the Facebook App, as it was called, and thereby a stream of information would come, and he was, like everyone else, completely addicted to it, and this addiction was changing the world and outmoding a lot of what he knew and relied upon.  Soon some idiot would invent a bar that showed up at your door, or something like that.  The restaurant would show up at a minute's beckon with poor people to cook and wait on you very politely, in whatever circumstance.  And elderly people, not so clever, would languish, left alone, until some form of guilt arose in their offspring, who would then look at their little lit screens and order up for them a robot to keep them company.

Yes, indeed, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and Jeff Bezos, the king of the new global economy was moving in, around the corner.