"But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth..."


It is not easy for us to reach the ancient Eastern ways of thought, the non-dualistic thought, the intuitive earth-based logic that Western Rationalist thought has difficulty with.

In the Western world, every morning we wake and judge ourselves, not least as based upon our economic well-being and standing.

(Has the East itself has embraced the power and economic might, the ways of the modern Western Capitalism, perhaps by doing so, provoking an inevitable turn in the Western mind to see the err of its own ways...)


After the work week's efforts, its implicit terms, the hack writer wakes from his other life of the worker bee, and finding him not knowing what to think.  He has the gut sense of Buddha's truths, but has no immediate model by which to incorporate them, and if he did, what would he then do for a living and a future....  He cannot know or understand any of this.  How could he?


To embrace non-dualistic thinking would be then to see, the thingness of things, that the events that have brought you to where you are are not always to be labelled as mistakes, other such things as that.  Things are as they are merely because that's how they turned out.  And rather for searching, rationally, logically, analytically for the cause, for the mistakes that have led to a supposedly unhappy condition, turn the whole thing around, and think in a different way.  Meditate, compassionately.


So it is that Westerners have a hard time with Christian thought.  They can only find the term Socialism to describe Christian views and values.  No wonder, the Conservatives at EWTN, who are friendly with free-market capitalism,  do not like Pope Francis's general attitude, widely embracing, of the poor, of the divorced, of the LGTBQ community...


Mara, ruler of the world of Desire, appears to Siddhartha, to challenge him just before his enlightenment.  What right have you to claim freedom from my world of desire and temptation?  Who is your witness, your confirming partner in all this?

Facing all of Mara's powers, the Prince puts his hand down to touch the ground, the Earth has Buddha's witness, to say, I have a right to be here, at which point Mara with all his powers, vanquished, disappears.

The Sermon on the Mount...  the poor, the sick, the mournful, the poor of spirit, they have a right to be here.  The poor have a right to live.  The Western interpretation of the best of Eastern philosophy...

(The West has yet to live up to it.)



And the more I look at it, the more it is the same.  Blessed are the poor and meek and the ones who do not claim anything but the ground they stand on, the right to exist.  For the world to be as it is, as it was created to be, as it must be, the human being has this right to a life, a noble way, replete with the act of spirituality, enlightenment, love, nirvana, and so forth.

The Buddha touches the ground with his finger, and the earth reverberates.  He becomes one with all existence.


After his week of struggling, largely in vain, but with at least a small paycheck to show for it, with his chest cold exacerbated once again, taking his depression and sense of worthlessness and uselessness on a daily basis, not having to have seemed to find his way in the flow of life of the city, after a day of tiredness, the man rose early again, as he had a few days before.  For the mere fact that he was awake, as much as anything else.  His glasses again had light smears of Vapor Rub on them, and he took a pill for chest congestion, finished the pot of green tea left out, and brewed a fresh one.

He had dreams from deep naps the day before, and now it was light out, early, thunderstorms called for later in the day.

Remarkable, frightening, scary.   How else could you take The Sermon on the Mount, the right for the poor and the meek and the mournful and those feeling down about things to have the same entitlement to life as the over-achievers, as the city and its movers and shakers.   No wonder they strung him up, for threatening the very economic realities upon which the modern world was based on.  Jesus Christ.  They had the Cross for him, the city dwellers, the modern people, from whom taxes were collected to feed the Empire...

Buddha, the teacher, the story is happier, and more real.  Instead of dying on the Cross, his victory over the temptations to lead a decent life, Prince Gautama, formerly a wandering ascetic seeking wisdom, having taken the benevolent rice milk from the maiden by the river (in his own state of exhaustion) sits peacefully under the Boddhi Tree, understanding that here in this spot he will achieve what he has been striving for all along.   And it is earth-shaking.


There's not a lot to see, folks, in the life and daily events of a hack science fiction writer bent on grand spiritual enterprises.  He had turned on the flat-screen television beneath the hanging Irish rug of the Apostles, vaguely distracting himself with an eye toward the Weather Channel, mildly imagining a gentle pornographic Saturday Night Live kind of a skit, Hurricane Normal spinning red on a large screen behind a blown-dry woman dwarfed by weatherly events.

Stations of the Cross and the Holy Rosary from the Holy Land on EWTN, and the powers that be at EWTN were in the midst of a campaign against Francis the humble reformer and proponent of socialism, backing on their news shows a bishop of intrigue.   Negative emotions.  Maybe the Daily Mass would be untouched by such politics.


If you get the Buddha, and the Sermon on the Mount, you get a bit of a new lease on life.  Things that did not seem appropriate in the slightest are seen in a different and more forgiving light..  The poor worker beleaguered has a right to live a simple humble life.  And no one ever really said otherwise.  And really you lived that simple life, as best you could, as a way to prove, as it were, in your own small way, the strange and wonderful things Jesus said, the whole logic of it.  To understand what the Buddha is talking about...


It is as if for years you live in a church, or a monastery, or a temple, and do not understand what you seek to understand.  You sense the understanding as a birthright, from the tradition of your own father and his teachings, of your family, of those who become your family through the twists of life's fate.   You're going to feel stupid, like an imbecile, and ask yourself, "why didn't I get it?"

But these things are hard to get.  Give yourself some credit.  They are not easy things to get, and there are lots of pressures against them, and the vast majority wish not to take the things into daily life, but rather banish them from all daily conversations, which, of course, is very sad.

Actually, without knowing it, the things you had engaged upon, in this long strange trip of being a friendly barman and private sack of various moods and emotions, was a good a preparation as any.

The problem, now, emerged, what to do now?   How do you reform your life in accordance?  How do you gain an action based on The Sermon on the Mount and the words to the tax collector and to the Roman with the coin and the Pharisee and the fisherman.

The Buddha is far more prepared, to fish self and people out of the morass of dark emotions and negative thoughts.  No longer a panacea, but a cure...  A cure for fear and paranoia, as long as reality itself is willing...

And so, yes, the hack science fiction writer went to his therapist and talked as best he could.  The Sermon on EWTN was green-robed and lackluster, so it seemed.  And he wished to take a walk, as if to continue his rebellion against the known western world of capitalism and banishment of the spirit.




It was simply nice to get out into the woods, and I thought of something Vonnegut said in an interview, about the amount of anxiety that waiting out the writing of Slaughterhouse Five had caused him.   As if he'd had to wade into another world to bring something back.  And I knew how he felt.  And what he had brought back was, indeed, something special, something different.  In the interview he could laugh about it, but I had some idea where that jolliness might have come from.

In the state of anxiety that comes along with slowly figuring something out and putting it into some form of record, one can get into things, like wine, that ease your own nerves for a while.  But in the long run, wine, at least too much of it, is not good for your nervous system.  Thus it was good just to be walking quite slowly and meditatively, in the woods, the traffic and noise at a good distance, the creek running just fine nearby, the trees providing clear clean air and shade, and my trekking shoes feeling the ground.  I felt very light, as I would imagine a deer might, on tip toe, ready to spring away.  It was funny how the whole system worked, and I felt really good about my body, and maybe it was the sugar content in the little cans of V8 that, along with the dough, had put a belly on my slender frame.  I'd started doing yoga again, gone back to the Buddha truths, and I felt good, even as the city makes me nervous.

So, I said to myself, why, why would I do anything to my nervous system, realizing how now broadly it could see and sense, even into the Void, free from dualistic thought.  And I felt myself gaining in strength and direction to take positive steps.  Even as a writer has hardly any idea what to do with himself.



By the time I got back from the woods, stopping to talk to a grand dame in Kalorama with a  beautiful wild garden spreading everywhere, as dark storm clouds commanded with the sky to the west, I was very tired, and barely up for doing some yoga.  Meditation became a nap.  I took a shower, and made some scrambled eggs.  I called mom, as I had from the woods.  And then, in the afternoon, I went to bed for a nap, and ended up sleeping straight through, the body trying to shake the chest cold that had lingered.  It wasn't until two in the morning that I finally stirred, and yes, the ragweed pollen had come.

It had been a decent day, and I rose and did the dishes, tea cups, water glasses, the stainless steel bowl I'd mixed the eggs in and the small plate I'd cracked the eggs on and the pan, a small wine glass, silverware, spoons that had stirred in various nostrums into tea and hot water...  It had been a day of some relaxation and perhaps some epiphany.

No, I am not of the free-market capitalism reconciled with Catholic charity model, but rather of a school so "socialist" as to be revolutionary, I suppose, and I am not for revolt.  To implement a system would require a completely spiritual informing in all its directions.    And who could one trust with that?  I would say the Buddhists, more than the Christian, but Jesus is, so far, to my mind, the best interpretation of the Buddhist legacy, making it available for the dulled Western economic mind.

The Christians are good in that they believe in the value of human life, the individual.  But again, put in such Western terms, which are necessarily economic, the daily messages of news blighted with talk of the markets.

Kurt Vonnegut is right about the people of a midwestern town taking the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout as their DaVinci, having tired themselves out on real estate, automobiles, booze, sex, etc....

Vonnegut suffered his great anxiety, spoke with great humor and jolliness, for having spoken to the darkest aspect of humanity, its absolute dimness as to measuring the worth of the people in the world and how to take care fairly of people, its absolute blindness toward fairness and justice.  Humanity, such as it is now, will always make a scapegoat, make the Somali fisherman destitute without caring, not until that fisherman becomes a gun-wielding pirate.

It's really quite a shame.  And how much to blame is any old sect when they are screwed down by such global world wide all reaching completely invasive economic judgments, so that Buddhists can no longer be Buddhists.  One wonders, in whose economic interest is it to put all peoples against each other.

The mosque was originally meant to be the most inclusive and welcoming places in all the world, having given birth to a great religion with a great story, one of equanimity, looking to the positive of bringing a civilizing influence to a hard place in the world.

Now, because of petro-dollars and petro-politics, the mosque has been infiltrated by non-native pressures, not least, war on large scale, to say nothing of age old imperial efforts.

And in America now, who is the last free person?  Who is the last person trying to be free--whether it suits or is good for him--but the strange hack science fiction writer who believes in Christian messages, in Buddha, and in all the poor humble writers who have secretly taken it upon themselves to tell a few tales, the Twains, Hemingways, Turgenevs....  Vonnegut is correct.  Let that marinate in your mind.  A writer deserves, sometimes anyway, to be a Leonardo.

Thursday morning, late August.


It takes an hour even to begin to write.  A couple of touch-ups on the previous, then establishing yourself in the moment.



Wednesday afternoon:

He reads his August Horoscope off of his iPhone to his therapist, who is also a Capricorn.  Planetary strength is gathering in the Northeastern quadrant...  Return to what you started back in mid-March, under similar stars, Mars, retrograde Saturn...  And what was I doing in March, that I should return to...  Joseph, the feast day, the celebration of the worker, not as just a tool of pagan hierarchy, but an individual, a Christian soul of dignity and God and meaning...  Value, and worth.

And health, this is a good time for health, and he reads the horoscope, how this will be a good time for yoga, meditation practice, and detoxing the body...  And he has already started, getting back on track, he tells her.

Small steps, she tells him.  "You seem to get overwhelmed in making decisions.  When you seem to get ready to decide something, you'll then immediately talk about the merits of the opposing position, justifying the status quo..."  Yes, I cannot suddenly quit tending bar and become a yoga instructor...  "Start by taking a yoga class."  Small steps.

Yes, six shifts in a row is too much.  Painful.  We are in agreement that at the most four can be handled, such as things are.

He has to go back to work.  It will be slow, so he'll have to do it himself, basically.   He orders a lamb gyro over salad from the hot dog stand vendor, a Vietamese woman, who recognizes him coming, with his yellow bicycle and helmet.  He goes across the street and eats his breakfast in the shade, Starbuck's outdoor tables...  Nearby is a guitar in a case and a back-pack.  An Ethiopian woman has a suitcase on rollers, just sitting there.

Coming in, before readying himself for the ride to his shift, his Polo shirt is soaked.  He takes a serene nap, twenty five minutes, so I'll be a little bit late, that's how it goes...

He gets through the night, has a glass of wine spread out over the end of it, with a rare hangar steak over spinach and a Madeira sauce.  He bypasses the busy bar with the college kids back up the street. He is happy to get home, and he lies down on his yoga matt without even taking a shower and he is too stiff to move.  Eventually gets himself to bed.  A glass of water.


Corollary to Buddhist thought:   If you are hurting yourself, then you will be hurting others, you will be hurting the whole...  The glass of wine, this is hurting you...  Take good care of yourself.  There are enough routing little chores to do back home, just like you do all night at the bar, while you still have time.


Writing is work.  Slow and painstaking, a chore...  Writing is not glorious.  It is stuff for a working man.  Paul put-up tents.  Joseph as a jack of all trades carpenter.  The Romans initially threw the Christians to the lions, disobedient as they were to their rules of corporate work conduct and religious practice...

He takes his green tea, a cup of hot water with lemon and sea salt, a dash of ginger and turmeric powder.  Sticky, needs a shower.  Sits cross legged on a pillow, laptop before him on a low wooden breakfast-in-bed table left years ago out on the street on trash night.

Be kind to yourself...  Celebrate.  Just as you are.

Late August, Washington, D.C.

Tuesday morning, before work:

The hack science fiction writer had refrained from unreasonable indulgences at the end of work shift, Monday Jazz Night at the old Dying Gaul's wine bar.  An excellent trio led by a man playing guitar, saxophone and flute, singing, hitting his foot on a floor-friendly tambourine, Eric Preterre had played to a meager crowd.  People were in a relaxed mood, and there were no loud intrusions in the later part of the evening.  The hack writer was recovering from a long night the night before on top of a busy Sunday night, so it goes, and as he had awoken earlier on Monday, nervous, anxious, depressed, not even wanting to rise nor feeling up for anything more than a pint glass of water, in a state of exhaustion, finally able to go back to deeper rest, so was he awake early on Tuesday, after sleeping some four hours or so.


Summer:

There had been the trees and their pollen, then the grasses, pollen on top of pollen, and finally was the rise of the weeds, copious, growing everywhere that was not paved to top it all off, to cover the city and its places with redolent and opulent green growth, as if their own right to Springtime had come, as crickets chirped, sawing away politely in little invisible hollows in the vegetation, as cicadas droned electrically invisibly in trees, calling back and forth in orchestra sections at the hand of some unseen conductor who had no need to make show of himself nor baton gesture.  It all worked, and the weeds, many of which had already begun earlier to vine over everything within reach, had come again, to insure that the processes which had buried themselves in layers of healthy mucky deposits would continue, even as human beings tried to suck the earth dry, in order to produce fire and dust and worse things upon the planet's waters, airs, winds and surfaces, watched over by the trees.



For now, late August it was very quiet.  Gone were the big flashing powered motorcades of Harleys and fully armed black Suburbans preceding the long black bullet proof limousine chambers of wheels, all prickly with guns, sunglasses, if that was the mood of the car's principal inhabitant, representatives of Halliburton and big industrial policy, would emerge from the woods and come down the hill of the long avenue of Embassy Row, roaring away with sirens and lights wailing.  Ferrying the Vice President through the town and up to the Capitol Building.  On a bad legal day for Trump the big green helicopters were called into action, rumbling overhead, more activity even than usual, into the night, he remembered from the week before.

And the weeds would continue to grow, the crickets kept it up, and after the tree pollen and the grass pollen, there would be the ragweed pollen.  Crabgrass, weeds thick of stem and leaf shape rising into the thick humid air of morning, as he took a walk just at first blue light, down to the bank, calling his old mother as he did so, to send her some cash.

He was awake, and again he was anxious, but he was going to endeavor to not be ashamed of himself, nor paranoid, nor angry at himself for his failures, he was going to go out into the city early morning as trucks rumbled and early joggers set about on the avenue sidewalks.  Unlike Sunday, the night before, he had not hurt himself too badly with the wine, the dehydration.  He'd ordered himself a decent dinner.

It seemed to him like he was having a kind of invisible dialog, with his therapist as if in her office (which lacked a proper traditional lay-back couch), where he would be the next day, a bit too early.

He felt like he was finally absorbing the wisdom of a good neighbor.  Don't be ashamed of yourself.  Don't get angry and take it out on yourself, with too much wine to quiet the anger and frustrations and voices of deep fears and feelings of uselessness.   The efforts to mask it all might have worked better before, but now, those efforts had morphed into feelings of poisoned mood in their aftermath.  He, in so doing, was not following his own path to happiness, and even in shame, he was awakening, or attempting to awake, to get over the awful fears and anxieties that made it hard for him to get out the door of a place without wishing to slink away and hide, even from his own moods.


As he walked, his thoughts:

Throughout historical time we get only snippets of the truth from the good teachers.  A sketch to follow.  The flowering of Christian enlightenment comes briefly and passes into a political system run by bosses who must protect and continue, power to reinforce.  Jesus and his teachings remain, to inspire good-hearted people, but in becoming a system, as much hard work and sacrifice....

Yoga.  The Buddha's strange teachings.  The flowering of India...  The travel of the Noble Truths...

Coming from the other side of it, the side of innocent ignorance or, rather, unawareness, not exactly taught to think or believe so, there is us.  Some will take it upon themselves to take that personal journey of life as the opportunity to live life happily to a standard, family and home, kids.  And then there are some of, stranger flowers, more rare, who seem to sense that it is their personal duty to live a life that itself will bring us upon a path toward the enlightenment things, regarding that as the serious stuff, that we must all go through prodigal state, the pleasure palace, the trials of Biblical Jonahs and Abraham and Moses and so forth, to come upon, through life's errs and mistakes, something that saves us, that protects us, that works, works for the self, and in so doing, probably the rest of us too, were we to the time to stop and think.

And who am I, loutish G.I. Joe, hardworking country boy, not always in tune with his own sensitivities and sensibilities, a product of American culture, cowboys and James Dean, Ernest Hemingway, the Protestant work ethic, capitalism, the democratic politics belief system, as if all that would save all of us, and the planet and life.  But no, it is more complicated, and one must feel very sad when he realizes how he himself has been, despite occasional effort, a real ignoramus, just simply not serious about Noble Truths and the Paths that rise up to meet you.  One has pursued, even if not even really half-heartedly, merely struggled along, knowing his own dissatisfaction with the material set-up of inherited modern culture.

Taking short-cuts and panaceas.  To get by.  And he knows, even, within, that the conventional is quite unsatisfactory.

And he finds himself in the now, in the present all of a sudden.  Probably still with a  job to go, a physical thing, but, I don't know, slightly wiser, maybe.  And the only guide is the Noble Truths and the Eightfold Paths, and the strange words of Jesus on the Mount, and a handful of other things, perhaps made note of by our ancestors.

Thought sketch:


It is like being a prison, working that job, particularly more than four shifts per week, or at least when you were sick, not feeling well.  You wondered how it must all be worth it.   Great place to ply my trade, could not have been more perfect, but at the end of the week, three days exhausted.  Sleep.  No social life at all.   Turned inward, sexually, intellectually, spiritually.  Sexuality becomes self-erotica, auto-erotica, and, so it goes, homo-erotica in its very essence.  At least it doesn't cause you any trouble, and it's safe.

There is a further benefit, in that the drive we term sexuality is the same flow that any yogi or yogini feels coming up through the chakras along the spine, from base at the tail bone up through all seven of them and to the top, the seat of consciousness.  There is the Buddha in my Tibetan statue holding upward in his left palm a pine cone sort of a thing with seven, perhaps eight, layers rising gracefully to a point at the top, as his right hand reaches down beyond his right knee to touch the earth, as his justification, as his witness, "here, Mara, and your legions of tempting devils and fears and emotionally preying show of thunder and arrows and demons, I belong, perfectly fine."

This, at least for some of us, the enlightening power of sexual energy and pleasure, drawn to do the work of physical and mental health.


Out there at the restaurants and the markets, on the sidewalks, there are the people who have other people to talk to, and they are in synch with each other, and they act in such a way that makes you feel further excluded.  Their style is in, yours is out, they belong, and you don't.

This is why I've always favored a kind approach to strangers, non judgmental.  The attempt to be the Good Samaritan, at least in the form of paying attention to other human beings.



Well, you wrote a book.  The book as its moments, some humbly decent prose here and there.  But when you don't have time for it, those achievements are far away and strange, intangible.

And all you have left to turn to, is the Buddha.  Much of the terminologies of understanding popular life, or is the popular understandings of life that I mean, such terms are completely inadequate and unjust.  Not only are the dualities we must stick to, attractive/not attractive, sexy/not sexy, wealthy and responsible to the world/not wealthy, nor responsible to the world, right/wrong, thoroughly out of place in the deeper Buddha understanding of the world, they are judgmental and vastly inaccurate to ever mutable life and one's own travels through the ever-changing river of life and time and space and mental activity and psychological reactions.  And people who would push clear judgment and emphasize the rightness (of themselves) and the wrongness (of others), is, like calling the hard work of the news reporter honestly trying to develop a view and some truthful consideration, reinforce the opposite of thoughtful and workable reactions.



Mind you, I went into the workweek, having returned from a not easy visit with my lovely old man who lives with her cat, too far away, I vowed to be good, I even had one night without any wine at all.    And still I was good, even at work, though I succumbed to be convinced by the girls at work to go to the Russian place where there is Karaoke on Wednesday nights upstairs, which I should not have done, though being a good sport, as it took away from my efforts to practice the Noble Truths and Eightfold Path, out of some strange thought it my mind that it would be nice to lay eyes upon some hot Russian chicks at the end of one week.

I needed to make some money, though, to pay off another round of missed wages and car rental and groceries for mom, etc.  What can you do.  I went back to work, and that was the schedule, and Restaurant Week was timed with the usual hacking summer cold that comes with the ups and downs waiting for the arrival of ragweed season.  I went back to work, selling dinners of meat and serving to people whatever intoxicants they are legally allowed as they wish.  Whether or not this is simply life and the middle path the Buddha spoke of,  as long as moderation is preached, who is to say...  Would I rather be leading hikes and spiritual retreats, yes, but here, just so, there are the lessons of life in this job I do amidst the life in this crazy world.


At one point does karma allow one to, in effect, depart from the world, so to speak, to sit under the Ficus Religiosa Tree, and achieve our own little form of great understanding and acceptance, I am here, the Earth is my witness, and I have a right to be here.


What was it that Hemingway wrote, about how we are broken, that we are strong in the broken places, that we are not defeated...  It's a thought not far away from Buddhist thought.  Realize you are broken, that all is burning, that life is change, miserable, until we learn to accept the present moment as it is.

Getting out of DC.

You have to take something like Massachusetts Avenue, or take the streets through upper Georgetown, Q, to Wisconsin, there at the light, right turn, left turn, then a few blocks, then another left turn, Reservoir Road, past Georgetown University Hospital, then down, French Embassy on the right, then up the hill, residential, then after Foxhall, German Embassy, downhill, Lab School, crossing left, down onto Canal Road, which leads to ...  Cabin John, Clara Barton Parkway, and that is another way to get to the Beltway, then to, cutting over lanes, the 270 spur, then up that way, still, then on 270 itself...  Onward, toward Frederick, Maryland....

Rising, the road, too long, finally reaches a ridge, a scenic overlook without restrooms, then finally, the Blue Ridge in the distance, the road turns a few times and descends, and after the first glimpse of the farmhouses and farmland and barns of this fertile valley coming down the hill you will cross an innocuous creek for which there is a corresponding Civil War battle.  A creek which runs heavy in the summer rains.

Then when you are past the construction north of Frederick, where once there were only farm fields, corn in July, now vast vast spreads of townhouses, now on both sides of the road, so that now there most be cloverleaf ramp and overpass exchanges, the road leads on into the Catoctin.

Route 15, which then turns to the left, embraces a ridge to the left, then goes on, drops down, rises again, and after Thurmont, where hills like the Basque Country, breast shaped, rise, then you are in the beautiful farmland of knobs of orchard and vineyard, and one of the most scenic vistas of the whole route up to see Mom in Oswego.  Many hours to go.  Gettysburg.  Harrisburg.  Eventually the turnoff left into the mountains, the road climbing, truck route, heavy loads dragged uphill in the right lane, contending with the pace of trucks.

Then you're in the mountains.

Thought sketch:

It was the weekend of Restaurant Week, and Friday night was the start of six straight night shifts for me, and I had a cold.  A  hacking cough in the night, hard to get up, and each night at work busy busy.  Boss happy and engaged.

The routine:  get up, take a pill for the cough, out of cough syrup.  Green tea, shower, heat up breakfast, and each day feeling like calling in sick.   The great relief, then, of getting through the night's shift and the time for a glass of wine to ease the mind and body.

And after it all, after tending to a business meeting dinner, former Deutsche Bank guys now in the aircraft business, and having a drink with them, I feel I might deserve stopping off up the street to cap off my week, see my buddies at Breadsoda, and maybe the college kids will be back to liven the place up a bit, where I immediately run into a friend of mine, a former somm I know through our restaurants.  Waiting for my ride home finally I speak with a homeless guy, tall,with strange green eyes and no teeth left, from Maine, just out of prison, a brief chat of homeless woes and the impossibility of reentry into society...  I guess I was looking if there was anything open to find a bite to eat at such an hour, on that old block where I worked long and hard.  I am glad when my ride pulls up, after learning he killed a man, in Portland, that his family has disowned him.  I put a frozen pizza in the oven when I get home, and it is good to have a job, and even a job one likes.

So, finally a day off.  I sleep and I sleep.  And what an odd life.  I finally get up just as the light is leaving the sky, hot shower, yoga, and by the time I get to the market, where young folks and cyclists and people coming from yoga relax outside, it's almost ten o'clock, closing time, and now I have no friends to hang out with, and groceries to get home, and not much money to play around with anyway.  The town, late August, is dead anyway...


But it is evident, what a strange strange life.  And given that, who, who? would enjoy dating or being married to such a person, well intentioned and kind as he is, and even, who really could hold up to being his friend.

It is no small wonder then, that one might pick up a book like Moby Dick, of which I have several copies, and find the native American friendship that Melville believed in, the great mixing pot of life and the world, introduced to us in the cold drizzling weather of November when Ishmael, choosing to go find the watery part of the world, ends up sharing a bed with Queequeg, a random savage type person from a land very far away.  Amazing how they lived in the Nineteenth Century.

And like Melville, I too am a stubborn sort of guy.  Someone who will stick to that strange sea voyage kind of a life, in search of a home somewhere amongst real humanity as it is.  I have no idea whatsoever how I became such a person, but I guess it was always running in my blood, the adventure of meeting the people of the world, which is probably why I cried and remember the funeral of Louis Armstrong as it was expressed by the New York Daily News that day, with an overhead shot of his Cadillac hearse, surrounded by the respectful, as they took him to his final rest in Queens, a man who played and played, and wouldn't leave the stage up til the very end, despite doctor's warnings, old Satchmo, good will ambassador of jazz, who my grand parents met once in a New York hotel in their travel lust.

Yes, there are the different lights of people that one finds in the course of experiencing humanity, and all people have the light, you just have to look for it sometimes.  But I am one who felt you should always, as a duty, show your light, and that this is given through hospitality, even, or particularly, to perfect strangers.  The light of people who struggle to bring you hospitality and graciousness even in the difficulties of their own lives...

These are the important people to me now...  the ones who share.  Could perhaps this be what Kerouac is speaking about, when he discusses the Roman Candle People, the person in himself..  Mad enough to be your friend, without much of an economic equation model imposed upon it.

This is why I feel emotional about Bourdain's passing.  He was one of those good will ambassadors.  His sketches of towns and the dining life therein...  works of art and friendship out of the random.


In the morning, the lonesome restaurant worker's workweek, the odd early hours of waking when the body has no intention of getting up, and less ability, awake, with nothing to do, but live in the body, because one is so lonely, so isolated from the broad pattern of society and its wakings and so forth... well, you're out in the ocean...

I have worked pretty hard.  I don't do it quite to the extent my body, perhaps could, not that I would so much even mind that--I like my job, I might even love it.  My job releases to me the ability to see the world in a way to comprehend the tribal behavior and character of the humanity I come across.  My world is not far away from the world Caesar might have written about in Gallic Wars.  Indeed, the people of the world are quite tribal on all sorts of levels, macro and micro.  And in old D.C., I've come across a lot of them, whatever "a lot" means, and perhaps it is a Biblical term as well as a practical one.

However many millennia we might survive, the tribal identities are in our blood, a good reason to rail against the cookie cutter approach to life, as that goes against our grain, as blues men, jazz men, French restaurant people, rebels, the "inchoate masses..."

Why does one write... who knows...


Anthony Bourdain... Nice guy.   A gentleman of the world.  A nice guy.   A searcher.  What got him?  The pending news of a pay-off to protect a person he deeply cared about?  His last show from Rome, manly, fatherly, husbandry, very tender...  Great literature of film, in an hour episode.  Argento is a beautiful woman inhabiting a great soul...  as you would expect from a filmmaker...


As a worker, you find you cannot control the times you can enjoy good deep sleep.  You are awake, why, what to do, who to talk to, when you need a guitar, yoga... Totally out of synch with all of striving humanity of D.C.

Kerouac was close with his mom.  She picked up work in a shoe factory when he knew he could not work anymore, feeling he rather needed to go across the country, to follow jazzmen and the roman candle people, to follow poets and the spiritual.  The railroad work as a brakeman was dangerous and exhausting.  She takes care of his cat when he is away.  Leo, Kerouac's father, has passed away, and there is no one else.

Ginsburg, "even Ginsburg," is surprised at the way they talk to each other, mother and son.  "You old smelly fish cunt," he calls her, something like that, perhaps in the dialect of the French Canadian.  While Kerouac touches the sacred in all his family relationships, the actual word, indicative of their relationship, is, here at least, not far from profane.

These terms of personal dialog are certainly not the only picture to be had of their generous relationship, one of understanding.  But the candor here, which all family members deserve of each other, is something.




There are times, my friend.  There are times when the normal lexicon of American cultural terms seems negligible as far as pertaining to actual life.  One that stands out, the concept of loneliness.  In cultural terms such a thing is to be banished, and yet, the reality behind the label is not far away from longer deeper truth, Buddha truth...

To go see the therapist is exhausting.  It takes away, steals the impetus of creative thunder, out of having to share what's on your mind.  Perhaps it's like an agent;  at a certain point you realize one would be beneficial.  But whatever you talked about, be it a sort of writing project, a spiritual project, having been shared it's harder to find the same enthusiasm and to get back on track...

I wake up from the dream on my bed, a light blanket over me, my arms folded across my chest, a hand close to the heart.  I have a summer cold, awake earlier hacking a cough, and on my back there is less pressure on the lungs.

In the dream I am struggling to get back ready for college.  Dorm set-ups.  I'm trying to get my class schedule straight and get to class.  This year I want to be a good student.  I want to do the readings and participate.

And she is there along with me in the audience of one of the classes I am trying to take, to not be pulled away by distractions and people who ask favors of me to help them with this and that.

It seems the dream has allowed me to return, to have succeeded in getting there, back to the college life.  And having seen in her in class, now that we all are back, in the dream I am calling her.  I want to tell her that I want so much to be friends with her, that I can be kindly toward her, that this would mean a lot to me.  For I am the vessel of God's Love for her.  That it would be inappropriate to be any other thing, or act not in keeping with that love.  I am hoping we can meet in the dining hall, now early in the school year, to get things right and straight, from the start.  Yes.

And then I wake up.  With all the foolish actions stuck in my own history, who knows why we put on such acts, egotistically...

I have failed.  Failed to be the vessel of God's love for her.  Failed as a student.  Failed to be a good person, why?  I have been false.  Diverted.


Life is the result of those failings, of those actions, of whatever rebellion...  You cannot go back and correct it all.  All the acts you put on, who knows why, the drinking...

Day One of Restaurant Week.

I've got a cold.  I take a Buddhist moment getting ready for work.  I pack my courier bag, water bottle, reheated chicken sausages in case the staff meal is no good, etc.  I'm running a bit late, so I sent a text to my co-worker who'll be up at the bar tonight, Jazz Night.

I get to work just as the skies open.  MR opens the front door, I park my bike down in the basement next to the washer dryer and the vegetable cooler indoor walk-in, head back, Jesus Christ look at the reservation list.  F is running late.  He won't be in 'til six.  Jesus Christ...  Martin can go up and help you 'til Francis comes...  Okay...

Upstairs, I take off my wet clothing.  I have dry socks and boxer briefs in my courier bag and they are dry still, so I change, back behind the bar, as Hugo moves the furniture around for Jazz set up, the band in the corner, sorting out the sink ice bins for the chilled wines, full with back up, ready for ice, ready to go.  I calm down, what can you do, can't be mad at the kid, he's making that long drive back from Ithaca...  I've set myself up well enough the night before, the mis-en-place, the back-up silverware at both stations, the seven top is only drinking...  I write down all the reservations, ten of them, back upstairs, ready for it, water pitchers full, one for the band on top of the radiator stand.

Then it comes, then it happens, and you're in for the ride.d



There's always something that pushes you over the edge, and tonight it's table 57.   I ask my coworker, did they get their entrees?   Finally the guy comes up to me, uh, it's been about an hour...  Oh shit, let me go check...   The bar has been busy, full, not that I much feel like entertaining...  It's Restaurant Week, I tell them all.   I snap a bit at one of the regulars who's asking for his check...  Give me a fucking minute...  I've been downstairs, which is empty but for one table, and perfect calm.    I fired that an hour ago....  Too much, it's too much...


Such a night...  After they all left, the band, the last few guys hanging out at the bar, Francis who had come late...  The last table with the lost entrees to track down threw me, and then I felt bad I raised my voice in that moment of frustration...  I ate my sweetbreads appetizer, poured myself a glass of Beaujolais...  After a break I stood back up and went through all the credit card payment slips, putting the tip amounts into the system, tedium.  Another glass of wine.  I did the checkout report, calculated to tip out for the busboy, took the paperwork up the hallway to place on the office desk, and there was my guitar, so I brought it out in its case, then went back down to the basement to bring my bicycle back up, ready to go.  The dishwasher and salad station woman still cleaning the kitchen...

Wine and music, the only thing to wash down such a night...

And today, the host of Tuesday Wine Tasting Night does not have to work, given the schedule this week...

In life there are patterns.  To life, there are patterns.  There are biological forms.  The botanist makes note of shape and texture...

And one would suppose that beyond our own biped biological human form, even beyond Jungian archetype, there forms made note of, first in literature, particularly in spiritual literature.  Observations, ones that sometimes prove uncanny in their resemblance to our own states of being in life...  Musing on a neighbor's life, one sees himself.  Musing on a writer's life, a spiritual life, from story or reality, one sees himself.

The Buddha...  As a young prince, entitled toward every pleasure, he took a ride with his charioteer outside the walls of his father's kingly castle, and there, he saw it, sickness, decrepitude, death, the basic forms of suffering that are so evident upon seeing them firsthand.  How could such things prevail in this world he thought he knew by his own experience?  So the story goes.



The hack science fiction writer had returned from visiting his aged difficult mother, and of course, he returned to his job behind the bar.  He'd gotten in about eleven the night before, parked on the street, unpacked his traveling gear, his clothes and shoes and jackets and the medicines and the toiletries, returned the rental car to the parking garage, the night before.  After the long drive, eight hours or so, the last two in the darkness of night, he felt he had needed some wine, to sooth the pain and the nervous system's befuddlement at the whole thing...  But his first night back, he avoided even the slightest drop of wine, and when he returned to the apartment after his shift, he had enough energy to do some cleaning and sorting, to put away the clean garments and set aside the laundry in small piles...

The thought had come across him that he was not of the "right profession" as far as the Buddha's Eightfold Path, that because the job came with the offer of wine and other intoxicants, with the pleasure of good dining, it was rather the wrong thing to be doing.  If that was what he was doing, and as the night grew longer, he was more susceptible to a need for calm, and even worse, given the sort of people who would come in later in the evening...



The hack science fiction wrirer had done his best from winter on through spring and a good part of the summer to be Christian minded and Christian believing and following, and wore his Byzantine Cross with a new stainless steel chain he'd purchased with his mom, but now in his life the moon of Buddha Wisdom was coming up, and he felt he'd sort of worn things out anyway, as far as being a devoted Catholic toe-ing the party line, and there had been another Bishop sex scandal involving pressure and boys and anyway, the old book of his father's, from the London Buddhist Lodge, had served as reading material on the road, even though his mom, drinking her coffee above him over in the corner Eames chair talking to the cat as he tried to sleep, tired by worsening grass allergies and travel, the long drive through the torrential rain, even as she picked the old thing up and pronounced it, quite negatively, as "hooey."  He had turned over on his green Thermarest mattress as he rested in his REI Travel Down mummy bag and pondered, this woman and her belief system, and then his own, as his body lay down unwilling to move.

It was not hooey to his father, nor his mentor, old Dr. Torrey, and it was not hooey to him, and has he thought about it now, back in his own space, it occurred to him that many of the things he would in states of morning depression deeply regret, were in fact sings of a nascent philosopher following the path, whatever the path was, and Buddhism had a lot to do with it, perhaps more so than a pure belief in Jesus as other people seemed to believe in Jesus.

It occurred to him now as he read, that all he had to do, was do a bit more of the follow through.  Yoga.



We all are patterned to fail the first time around, even with many attempts.  Siddhartha made many attempts, and for a long time he was an ascetic, to the point of suffering and extreme and even starvation.  And then some others work to it as gluttons and wine-drinkers and friends with the wrong sort of people...  How far away is the story of the Prodigal Son, how far away the story of Jonah, and Abraham, and Moses, how far away are those stories from the story of the failing would be seeker as he narrows in, through his own experiments and failures, on the true pith of life...


The regrettable thing is the widespread focus on the wrong things, with the illusions and the appearances...

With all the nuances within, why not take the time to focus on the self;  why not focus not on the outer appearances and all the things that come received by the world around us through its particular materialistic focus, but on the worlds within ourselves, as might be apprehended through yoga and meditation and considerations of the Buddhist path...

Rather than being sold on everything and trying to belong, one could remember his own life and karma...  And if one did, who knew, what could open up, what sort of vague memories, largely a peace with all living things and the earth one felt from time to time, when not distracted and stressed and preoccupied...

It had taken him, the hack science fiction writer, a long time, and a good amount of mental suffering, to realize the truth of self-reliance, of Buddha's enlightenment...  It takes false starts, errors, vast mistakes.  But now and again, you remember a bit of it.  It takes maturity, it takes time...



It is an unlikely measure, to go against all the things built up by society in the world, to back away from all that, to see life as a more intimately available creation.   You find you need nothing outside of yourself, that after all incarnations you are ready to enjoy life as it, yourself just as you are, without the things that lie outside the life.

But there is no choice.  Absolutely no other choice.

(Thus the evil of constant invasions into the natural curiosity of the thoughtful mind, news, the screen, dating apps, the constant news stream, the constant temptation of the outer upon the inner, made ever worse by profit minded egos attempting to conquer and change the world with no thought as to what that world would then be like for the human being...)


Thus, you can say goodbye to being a certain kind of writer, out to please a certain audience.  The audience is that within.  You can say goodbye to the one seeking pleasure and satisfaction outside the self...  Mara's Temptations...


Life is terribly sad if you look at, no way around.  (Though joy may by found in the present, in the transitory nature of life...)

He opened to kitchen door to the porch so that the fly would see the light of day, and soon the fly was on the screen, obeying the law of light, and then he had only to open the screen door, and out went the fly.  As he heated the bone broth in a small pan, he let an incense stick of Frankincense and Myrrh and soon he was calm and feeling positive about things, such things being that he had to get to work and then take Jazz Night as it came...  There wouldn't be much time for yoga.


To mount such an expedition as climbing the mountain of the night shift all alone--you had to have been mad--you needed equipment, much as in those old books on mountain climbing expeditions he read as a kid with their lists of gear, how much rope, stoves, tents, etc.    Things you needed:  a therapist, an antidepressant, vitamins and other nostrums, a Fleshlight, any improvised device to bring vibration to the prostate, a mirror to help foster some self-love and esteem, acceptance, a Light Box and an Ott Lamp, strong light lamps for winter blues, green tea, sausages, iron pans, green tea... a bicycle and a courier bag to get back and forth.

It is a bright part of literature when a writer takes it upon himself to tell the story of The Buddha.  Kerouac does a great job, being quite  a student.  Hermann Hesse.