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...