One true sentence... Poor old Hemingway. It sounds like the thought of one trying to survive. If he can write, then he can continue, the old circular process of surviving for writing, and also by writing.
Few knew how hard it was, carrying the entertainment of the dining room and the bar going for four straight night, then on top of that your friends and connections, on top of that the late night people, sitting there, expecting entertainment out of an exhausted creature, who then must turn to wine to bear the ending of the night.
Jesus, of course, loves them all. But on the day off he is done, he cannot even get up out of bed, hardly to get a glass of water. His mood is low. His problem is one involved with being too kind, with the natural good mood that comes out of him when he is around people, oddly enough.
The expression of selflessness, the same as the Buddha's recognition of the illusion of self...
The Christian's sense that Jesus is always there to forgive, always there to save... deeply embedded, that there is always Jesus... omnipresent, omnipotent... just as the simplest and most pure reality...
Non duality. "Father, why doest thou forsake me..." is the same as "I had it in me all along..."
Friday, September 28, 2018
Saturday, September 22, 2018
I had written some, and then I'd listened to some music, and then I grew bored. Jeremy had texted me from work, so I got engaged with that, and yes, maybe let's meet for one at Du Coin. I'm only going to have one or two, and after that, fine, I'll get back and cook the duck breast I'd bought earlier at the market. I walk down the street, past a small party gathered outside, then down, past the Quaker Meeting House construction site, across the avenue at the crosswalk, then behind Du Coin then around and in through the front door, the bay cafe windows open to the street.
There's my friend, fellow barman, still young and youthful, lean and strong, handsome, seated with the proprietor at the usual round table. The proprietor, Michel, is enjoying duck breast himself, crusted darkly on the outside, reddish pink evenly within, a bottle of Bobby Kacher imports Costieres de Nimes rosé before him on the table, and he takes a Leffe goblet glass and pours me some, and we sit for a good talk. "Good cabbage," he says, "Excellent," lifting a fork, and I see it is cabbage, not turnip. "Well, let's close the kitchen, eh," he says. Soon he is smoking a narrow cigar. Talk of Panama. Stories about his first days as a waiter in New York, unfamiliar with martini terminology (coming from Switzerland, a place where martini means sweet vermouth), breaking a bottle of chardonnay in the ice bin after pouring a glass, old Tony the bartender, who eventually grew to like him. Yup. I remember dropping a plate of enchiladas on a guys back thirty years ago, who luckily was not burned. Yup, that's how you start. The manager gave him a complimentary tee shirt and bought their dinner.
I eye the man's dinner, the magret sliced thinly. I've been low on funds lately, don't like to splurge. The kitchen is about to close anyway, don't want to be that guy.
Then the Chef comes in, and let's go to Russian House, uh oh, okay... And we all go. The adventure of a Friday night, meeting a mutual friend at the bar there. Baltica beer, no. 7, and then a round, chilled shots of fig vodka, at least low in alcohol, appearing on the bar... Stories, how to season steak...
I tip the barman what I would have spent on a decent dinner at the bistrot. He's a Ph.D, from Western Massachusetts in Slavic religious history. I feel I know. Nights like that.
When seasons change, there is a day you rest the entire day away. Silence. Peace. This is something writers like to do, to lay quietly and think of nothing. Meditating. Focus on a chakra. No wish even to read anything. A day of quiet, as if to detox from all the experiences of the week. Jesus going out into the desert to find the pure thoughts of literary critique. This might sound as exaggeration, but there is the same thought to it, to eliminate all the distracting things from one's mind, and it is no surprise that Satan comes with promises, each of a different sort. Hunger, fame, sex, power, money. Ease in this life. No need to have to cook for one's own self.
But we needed the stories from up at the bar. We needed a tale to tell in order to tell the larger one, somehow. We needed our little toy soldiers and our little imaginary game in order to absorb the truth of reality, which we can never know anyway. The lesson of death. The death of a man beyond a friend. The death of a symbol.
I had thought earlier of just going out and playing guitar, my Irish songs, Pogues songs on a street corner... But I don't get much of a chance to talk to Mr. Jeremy, and it is good to be in his presence. He's logged a lot of trustworthy solid hours, and I have the sense he is going somewhere, native smarts and capable practicality to apply and learn. He's been out on a farm lately, where the farming is real, as real as the culling of chickens and turkey. He has a source of goat milk. He and the chef enjoy talking things like this over, and would that I had better powers of concentration.
The death in the Dying Gaul family has been hard to come to terms with, as if our friend were about to reappear, coming up the stairs in a Polo shirt with his blazer and jeans, looking for a good dinner, first a glass of champagne and a seat at the bar.
It gets later and later, and when we get out of the old Russia House I think of going across the street to the Rite Aid for a frozen DiGiorno sausage pepperoni green pepper mushroom onion pizza, but am dissuaded and walk home, alone, back up the street, duck sausages to heat up, a dinner I should have eaten a while ago.
The next day, the Fall Equinox and sleep and rest, talking to my old mom twice on the phone when she calls.
What one does not like is hypocrisy. And yet in this world we get messages, such as, "just trying to see if we can all get along," and then receiving the opposite. I suppose I am fortunate not to be a New Yorker, as much as I would like to be one in an ideal world.
Over dinner, the proprietor talks privately of his opinion on the Me Too movement, the Call Out culture...
Jesus came back from the desert, back from his detox, back to Galilee, his hometown. There in the synagogue, and he offers up a reading from Isaiah, with certain implications, prophecy fulfilled, and the locals who know him just so aren't ready for it. What he has offered them is a kind of literary criticism as much as anything else.
There's my friend, fellow barman, still young and youthful, lean and strong, handsome, seated with the proprietor at the usual round table. The proprietor, Michel, is enjoying duck breast himself, crusted darkly on the outside, reddish pink evenly within, a bottle of Bobby Kacher imports Costieres de Nimes rosé before him on the table, and he takes a Leffe goblet glass and pours me some, and we sit for a good talk. "Good cabbage," he says, "Excellent," lifting a fork, and I see it is cabbage, not turnip. "Well, let's close the kitchen, eh," he says. Soon he is smoking a narrow cigar. Talk of Panama. Stories about his first days as a waiter in New York, unfamiliar with martini terminology (coming from Switzerland, a place where martini means sweet vermouth), breaking a bottle of chardonnay in the ice bin after pouring a glass, old Tony the bartender, who eventually grew to like him. Yup. I remember dropping a plate of enchiladas on a guys back thirty years ago, who luckily was not burned. Yup, that's how you start. The manager gave him a complimentary tee shirt and bought their dinner.
I eye the man's dinner, the magret sliced thinly. I've been low on funds lately, don't like to splurge. The kitchen is about to close anyway, don't want to be that guy.
Then the Chef comes in, and let's go to Russian House, uh oh, okay... And we all go. The adventure of a Friday night, meeting a mutual friend at the bar there. Baltica beer, no. 7, and then a round, chilled shots of fig vodka, at least low in alcohol, appearing on the bar... Stories, how to season steak...
I tip the barman what I would have spent on a decent dinner at the bistrot. He's a Ph.D, from Western Massachusetts in Slavic religious history. I feel I know. Nights like that.
When seasons change, there is a day you rest the entire day away. Silence. Peace. This is something writers like to do, to lay quietly and think of nothing. Meditating. Focus on a chakra. No wish even to read anything. A day of quiet, as if to detox from all the experiences of the week. Jesus going out into the desert to find the pure thoughts of literary critique. This might sound as exaggeration, but there is the same thought to it, to eliminate all the distracting things from one's mind, and it is no surprise that Satan comes with promises, each of a different sort. Hunger, fame, sex, power, money. Ease in this life. No need to have to cook for one's own self.
But we needed the stories from up at the bar. We needed a tale to tell in order to tell the larger one, somehow. We needed our little toy soldiers and our little imaginary game in order to absorb the truth of reality, which we can never know anyway. The lesson of death. The death of a man beyond a friend. The death of a symbol.
I had thought earlier of just going out and playing guitar, my Irish songs, Pogues songs on a street corner... But I don't get much of a chance to talk to Mr. Jeremy, and it is good to be in his presence. He's logged a lot of trustworthy solid hours, and I have the sense he is going somewhere, native smarts and capable practicality to apply and learn. He's been out on a farm lately, where the farming is real, as real as the culling of chickens and turkey. He has a source of goat milk. He and the chef enjoy talking things like this over, and would that I had better powers of concentration.
The death in the Dying Gaul family has been hard to come to terms with, as if our friend were about to reappear, coming up the stairs in a Polo shirt with his blazer and jeans, looking for a good dinner, first a glass of champagne and a seat at the bar.
It gets later and later, and when we get out of the old Russia House I think of going across the street to the Rite Aid for a frozen DiGiorno sausage pepperoni green pepper mushroom onion pizza, but am dissuaded and walk home, alone, back up the street, duck sausages to heat up, a dinner I should have eaten a while ago.
The next day, the Fall Equinox and sleep and rest, talking to my old mom twice on the phone when she calls.
What one does not like is hypocrisy. And yet in this world we get messages, such as, "just trying to see if we can all get along," and then receiving the opposite. I suppose I am fortunate not to be a New Yorker, as much as I would like to be one in an ideal world.
Over dinner, the proprietor talks privately of his opinion on the Me Too movement, the Call Out culture...
Jesus came back from the desert, back from his detox, back to Galilee, his hometown. There in the synagogue, and he offers up a reading from Isaiah, with certain implications, prophecy fulfilled, and the locals who know him just so aren't ready for it. What he has offered them is a kind of literary criticism as much as anything else.
Friday, September 21, 2018
"Tadzio, write about the street." This was something the old Polish lady would often say to me. "Write about the street." There were cats, and former generals, and the perfect general's wife. There was Jean at the corner with her yew bushes overgrown in a good way, her Persian cat, friendly at night, Popeye, and her Chow dogs, more mysterious as to their moods. There were her memories, and I was building some myself, but it takes a long time. It takes a life.
Write about the street. One true sentence. I do not literally write about the street, because I do not enough about it to say much intelligent or worthy, beyond the animal life, the feral cats, the mailman, the friendly UPS guy who once dropped off a package from Martin Guitars to me, saying this was a happy delivery.
I wrote what I could of the bar, the restaurant, but even then, even on that street there really was not enough to write about.
Write about work, Tadzio, she would also say, people are interested in that.
The picaresque, the road of life, for the wanderer, the spiritual seeker.
Uli is gone now. Still impossible to believe that all our communing are history now. We had always seen something in each other, a friendliness, a kind person, a stand up guy (on his part.) A true soul.
The saint is gone, and leaves the rest of us behind, to deal.
My friend Kirsten, bound for mission in Liberia, amongst the poorest of the world's poor, brings by a handsome Irish woman, who once was put in the trust of Shane MacGowan, back in 1993, for her interview at Oxford, in London.
The guitar, with some encouragement, finally comes out, after all have left but one couple, sweet people, she a professor from Georgetown who will give a lecture on Gandhi, he a big guy who flies C130s, I kid him he looks like Randy Quaid. I sense kind people intuitively now. As if being able to tell a robin from a red squirrel. I see it. And if people are kind, it's a fun thing, and the business of life and money will be kept a bit separate from such interactions.
So I pour a little bit more Viré, white Burgundy, for my friends at the table after their dinner, and myself a little more Beaujolais to channel the music of Shane MacGowan.
The guitar is out, and the ladies have sweet talking voices, one German, and one with her Irish lilt. She lives in Argentina now, with her German husband. Kirsten and Emily. Kirsten, a regular, along with her economist husband, from Portugal, come in quite often with the Kapers, elderly Dutch, a prominent the environment and global climate change, global warming.
It takes me a little time to switch modes. The first song effort will be a dud. I softly riff the opening chords of Lullaby of London, finally take up taking up the first lines of lyric. "As I walked down by the riverside, one evening in the Spring..."
Later on, she joins me singing Rainy Night in Soho...
Direct flights to Ireland, go to a musical festival, she tells me.
Uli, his last night alive, I wonder if he went to Du Coin. He mentioned something about it, the last night I saw him, the eve of Labor Day. I took a long pointless walk, got some groceries at Glen's I probably didn't even cook... Just to save money, feeling broke...
Write about the street. One true sentence. I do not literally write about the street, because I do not enough about it to say much intelligent or worthy, beyond the animal life, the feral cats, the mailman, the friendly UPS guy who once dropped off a package from Martin Guitars to me, saying this was a happy delivery.
I wrote what I could of the bar, the restaurant, but even then, even on that street there really was not enough to write about.
Write about work, Tadzio, she would also say, people are interested in that.
The picaresque, the road of life, for the wanderer, the spiritual seeker.
Uli is gone now. Still impossible to believe that all our communing are history now. We had always seen something in each other, a friendliness, a kind person, a stand up guy (on his part.) A true soul.
The saint is gone, and leaves the rest of us behind, to deal.
My friend Kirsten, bound for mission in Liberia, amongst the poorest of the world's poor, brings by a handsome Irish woman, who once was put in the trust of Shane MacGowan, back in 1993, for her interview at Oxford, in London.
The guitar, with some encouragement, finally comes out, after all have left but one couple, sweet people, she a professor from Georgetown who will give a lecture on Gandhi, he a big guy who flies C130s, I kid him he looks like Randy Quaid. I sense kind people intuitively now. As if being able to tell a robin from a red squirrel. I see it. And if people are kind, it's a fun thing, and the business of life and money will be kept a bit separate from such interactions.
So I pour a little bit more Viré, white Burgundy, for my friends at the table after their dinner, and myself a little more Beaujolais to channel the music of Shane MacGowan.
The guitar is out, and the ladies have sweet talking voices, one German, and one with her Irish lilt. She lives in Argentina now, with her German husband. Kirsten and Emily. Kirsten, a regular, along with her economist husband, from Portugal, come in quite often with the Kapers, elderly Dutch, a prominent the environment and global climate change, global warming.
It takes me a little time to switch modes. The first song effort will be a dud. I softly riff the opening chords of Lullaby of London, finally take up taking up the first lines of lyric. "As I walked down by the riverside, one evening in the Spring..."
Later on, she joins me singing Rainy Night in Soho...
Direct flights to Ireland, go to a musical festival, she tells me.
Uli, his last night alive, I wonder if he went to Du Coin. He mentioned something about it, the last night I saw him, the eve of Labor Day. I took a long pointless walk, got some groceries at Glen's I probably didn't even cook... Just to save money, feeling broke...
Our own chef's best friend, a chef owner himself, shoots me a text, he's over at the bar. I was going to stay in, but my friend Jeremy is behind the bar, and there's still time to get dinner.
Talk of how to properly do a Partanegra ham. The story of Les Trois Canard, D"Artagnan, her comeback after a recall... Chefs know a tremendous amount. One needs a desiccator, but actually you need two to make it profitable.
I've always respected that.
Yannis, a strong well built man, very generous of spirit, from Valence originally, came of age in the old days of New York restaurants, working 'til 3 AM, back at 7 AM. He has the confidence of a man who came once to a country whose language was foreign. He's here with his nephew. He asks me to pick a good wine. We open a simple Beaujolais. This is good. Put it on my check, please, he tells Jeremy. I wasn't quite feeling up for it, hadn't even showered, but it's good to be in good company.
And today is the first day, a chance to get caught up. I take my medication and various health tonics, and proceed to take care of the backlog in the kitchen. Tea cups in the rubber made tub in the sink. The last of the fruit flies have grown fat and not so crafty.
One true sentence...
It has not yet arrived. Perhaps I would prefer to do some organizing.
Talk of how to properly do a Partanegra ham. The story of Les Trois Canard, D"Artagnan, her comeback after a recall... Chefs know a tremendous amount. One needs a desiccator, but actually you need two to make it profitable.
I've always respected that.
Yannis, a strong well built man, very generous of spirit, from Valence originally, came of age in the old days of New York restaurants, working 'til 3 AM, back at 7 AM. He has the confidence of a man who came once to a country whose language was foreign. He's here with his nephew. He asks me to pick a good wine. We open a simple Beaujolais. This is good. Put it on my check, please, he tells Jeremy. I wasn't quite feeling up for it, hadn't even showered, but it's good to be in good company.
And today is the first day, a chance to get caught up. I take my medication and various health tonics, and proceed to take care of the backlog in the kitchen. Tea cups in the rubber made tub in the sink. The last of the fruit flies have grown fat and not so crafty.
One true sentence...
It has not yet arrived. Perhaps I would prefer to do some organizing.
Monday, September 10, 2018
Just want to be normal... Keep work separate from social life...
One true sentence.
It was raining hard. Sunday afternoon, heading back to work for the first time since hearing the news of the sudden passing of my friend, the regular customer, Sunday evening being a weekly ritual. The creek was high up to the green banks, a pipe was blasting water upward into the stream. I walked with my college umbrella, golf-sized, purple and white, my heavier Brooks Gore-Tex running shoes. Down into the woods, the path up ahead a channel of sitting water, then down across the bridge over the stream and up the long steep paved road. My trudge to work, my warm-up for the lugging and the set-up. The message on my phone, call me when you can, his ex wife, mother of his son, a familiar face. I call her back. He did not suffer, the paramedics said. It happened suddenly, the hand brake on the car going as he took out the trash. I explain when I last saw him, that Sunday night, before Labor Day. She had gone up to where the son was a freshman, giving the news to him with the Dean and the Chaplain...
I walked onto work, changing out of my clothes, even my underwear. Soaked through. The kitchen folks are solicitous, sorry about your friend, and yeah, he'd been coming here a long time.
I'm a bit off. A handsome couple comes, as predicted in the reservations to sit by the window. Easy. Order of escargot to share, then the kidneys in mustard sauce. Tracking down hot bread from the busser. Two glasses of Bordeaux. Dinner followed by one creme brûlée and then another one. Amicable. The regular guy arrives as I begin with fumbles, mumbling the specials. Chatting at the end of the bar. Hold on a second. It's taking my brain a bit to open the Bordeaux bottle and pour out two glasses. Maybe it's the ragweed.
Then another arrival, newly habituated to the Gaul, then his date, they sit at a table.
(Beethoven piano concerto number five, the Emperor... )
Another couple, a regular, coming up the stairs, as three ladies sit down, and which is the driest wine, so, tastes of Sancerre and Muscadet, sitting at the bar, as I fumble to make cocktails for the arrivals next to Mr. Chatty. Old Fashioned, Manhattan... is the order. What should I make it out of? You pick, as if I might have an opinion, I go with rye, and again my brain struggles, to muddle, orange peel, breaking a glass on the first effort, and the mood feels kind of dreary to me. A food order as I struggle to put together whiskey cocktails... conversation... Talk of Hemingway. . what's your favorite... Uhm... early short stories... Big Two Hearted River, I guess...
Oh, we're out of salmon tartar, as the busboy comes over to help me cut bread. The dishwasher is full of clean glassware, still warm from the cycle, and it would be nice to get some help with that rather than bread cutting...
Then an order for whiskey couple... Okay okay...
Then the arrival of a Trans. Who also is a talker, so you've got two conversation efforts going at two different ends of the bar...
When entertaining it is hard to do it without effort, without trying to do well. I try to pull back, but that is not easy.
The departed, he always came on the late side, and often we'd been keeping the kitchen open just for his order, the last order, appetizer, entree...
My mother tells me, he must have needed to talk to you, she says when I call her. You're doing a good job with all this...
And I'm there late, having an educational chat with the trans woman who is a lawyer, a year into her transition into womanhood. It is the being penetrated that is the source of her pleasure. She'll be having another operation soon. She wants to be married to a man who treats her as a woman.
I'm there, late again. But not too late, and an Uber driver, a guy from Lahore who understands the economic predicaments of service jobs and aging, gives me a ride home, pleasantly, and I go straight to bed without even looking at my phone. No Thai lady boys, instead, Philip Larkin, gems like High Windows, and The Whitsun Weddings....
And in the morning, when I wake, I say to myself, you know, it would be nice to live a normal life. Go to work, function as an economic unit doing his job, make money for the house, go home, and perhaps not even bother to write anymore. Just have somewhere to go everyday, to not go crazy, to not encourage the late stayers..., to get home early, and rise and live another day, enjoying being alive as best as one can.
One true sentence.
It was raining hard. Sunday afternoon, heading back to work for the first time since hearing the news of the sudden passing of my friend, the regular customer, Sunday evening being a weekly ritual. The creek was high up to the green banks, a pipe was blasting water upward into the stream. I walked with my college umbrella, golf-sized, purple and white, my heavier Brooks Gore-Tex running shoes. Down into the woods, the path up ahead a channel of sitting water, then down across the bridge over the stream and up the long steep paved road. My trudge to work, my warm-up for the lugging and the set-up. The message on my phone, call me when you can, his ex wife, mother of his son, a familiar face. I call her back. He did not suffer, the paramedics said. It happened suddenly, the hand brake on the car going as he took out the trash. I explain when I last saw him, that Sunday night, before Labor Day. She had gone up to where the son was a freshman, giving the news to him with the Dean and the Chaplain...
I walked onto work, changing out of my clothes, even my underwear. Soaked through. The kitchen folks are solicitous, sorry about your friend, and yeah, he'd been coming here a long time.
I'm a bit off. A handsome couple comes, as predicted in the reservations to sit by the window. Easy. Order of escargot to share, then the kidneys in mustard sauce. Tracking down hot bread from the busser. Two glasses of Bordeaux. Dinner followed by one creme brûlée and then another one. Amicable. The regular guy arrives as I begin with fumbles, mumbling the specials. Chatting at the end of the bar. Hold on a second. It's taking my brain a bit to open the Bordeaux bottle and pour out two glasses. Maybe it's the ragweed.
Then another arrival, newly habituated to the Gaul, then his date, they sit at a table.
(Beethoven piano concerto number five, the Emperor... )
Another couple, a regular, coming up the stairs, as three ladies sit down, and which is the driest wine, so, tastes of Sancerre and Muscadet, sitting at the bar, as I fumble to make cocktails for the arrivals next to Mr. Chatty. Old Fashioned, Manhattan... is the order. What should I make it out of? You pick, as if I might have an opinion, I go with rye, and again my brain struggles, to muddle, orange peel, breaking a glass on the first effort, and the mood feels kind of dreary to me. A food order as I struggle to put together whiskey cocktails... conversation... Talk of Hemingway. . what's your favorite... Uhm... early short stories... Big Two Hearted River, I guess...
Oh, we're out of salmon tartar, as the busboy comes over to help me cut bread. The dishwasher is full of clean glassware, still warm from the cycle, and it would be nice to get some help with that rather than bread cutting...
Then an order for whiskey couple... Okay okay...
Then the arrival of a Trans. Who also is a talker, so you've got two conversation efforts going at two different ends of the bar...
When entertaining it is hard to do it without effort, without trying to do well. I try to pull back, but that is not easy.
The departed, he always came on the late side, and often we'd been keeping the kitchen open just for his order, the last order, appetizer, entree...
My mother tells me, he must have needed to talk to you, she says when I call her. You're doing a good job with all this...
And I'm there late, having an educational chat with the trans woman who is a lawyer, a year into her transition into womanhood. It is the being penetrated that is the source of her pleasure. She'll be having another operation soon. She wants to be married to a man who treats her as a woman.
I'm there, late again. But not too late, and an Uber driver, a guy from Lahore who understands the economic predicaments of service jobs and aging, gives me a ride home, pleasantly, and I go straight to bed without even looking at my phone. No Thai lady boys, instead, Philip Larkin, gems like High Windows, and The Whitsun Weddings....
And in the morning, when I wake, I say to myself, you know, it would be nice to live a normal life. Go to work, function as an economic unit doing his job, make money for the house, go home, and perhaps not even bother to write anymore. Just have somewhere to go everyday, to not go crazy, to not encourage the late stayers..., to get home early, and rise and live another day, enjoying being alive as best as one can.
Sunday, September 9, 2018
Mom calls, quite frustrated with her loneliness. Who cares, she asks, almost hanging up on me, after I encourage her with the thought that her errand in the car is doable, despite her fears of traffic and misdirection.
Later, after returning, with wine, she is feeling better. A different person. My angst settles back down to manageable levels. One wishes he had help in such things. She wishes the same for herself.
Not a good way to start the day writing. A wasted hour and a half, as if time were wasted, not our karma....
After Jay's call, from Colorado, at the end of his shift, at two in the morning, waking up again, I tell him what's happened to our friend. He's working at two restaurants now, since he moved to Denver. He's planning another trek. People still ask about you, Jay.
"I'm sorry, man. I know he was your friend."
Later on, still awake, I have a bit of wine. Boys from places far away, Buddhist countries, pretending to be girls, to fill up the time before falling back to sleep.
A zoned-out kind of a day, cooking shows, America's Test Kitchen on in the background. Overcast, drizzling after the monsoon rains the night before. I clean out the green tall kitchen wastebasket with Lysol spray and then soapy water. The fruit flies that had found the contents of the trash bag depart into the cool dank air out on the back porch. Laundry to do. No work tonight. Too much ragweed pollen yesterday, in the woods. Walking along the path, I was probably covered from head to toe.
Death makes one more of a Buddhist. The only way to deal with things.
The hard days of writing... Days of pretending.
Tonight I'm drinking a Bouchard Ainé et Fils $11.99 Pinot Noir, Pays D'Oc. I had some earlier out on the patio of Glen's Garden Market after my groceries for the workweek. My experiment with black-eyed peas had familiar results. It was good to take a break from animal protein, but... I made sure I found some flax seed at the store, for additional fiber.
The man moved his hand down, to the right of his father's brown chair to the pine wine box that he had taken from work to be a sort of book stand or book shelf or side table. Chateaux Gontey, 2010. Nails in it. Perfectly made. Like a Japanese Zen temple. A coffin for all the greats, Mastroianni, preferable to the ornate Christian metal caskets sold at funeral homes, why? A pine box. He liked the feel of it. Wine should be enjoyed out of a tumbler. Served cool, and sometimes with a lime in it. Maybe a dash of bitters. But the lime went well with the tannins. Bourdain, shaman of the night, friend of Dostoesky, and Hemingway.
There is nothing wrong with a little wine, once you are a writer. And I have no problem with the night.
I found a little tree to look at, sipping my wine, as a way of remembering my friend. Bats wheeled in the hurricane remnant sky above apartment buildings, moving with the airs, reminding me of summer carnival rides that spin people around. My friend. Few people out on the patio. I stare down at my iPhone and scroll through my blog.
I will go back to work tomorrow night. One of the night's he would, by tradition, if in town, not traveling in Africa, Cabo Verde, the Gambia, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, always come. The other staff would ask, if things were slowing down, if he was coming. Perhaps they could close the kitchen at 9 rather than 9:30, to start cleaning up, save on labor costs.
It is the provenance of great men that they come to know pain. And I'm sure, we all do, in the final analysis. We might smile and joke, but deep down we know pain, and while it's good to get out into the town and see other human beings of our own species, to reflect upon more than to necessarily interact with, it's also necessary to maintain a private sphere, a protective shell to keep around our thoughts so that we might harvest them and their fruits--a very serious business--and preserve them somehow. Workers in the vineyard. Protective of the fruit, so that when the vineyard's owner shall return we have done our jobs and not been wicked and wasteful. We all know, wine is good, and it's nice not to run out of it. A grand ennobling thing.
Mom has always been a pain in the ass. Excitable, emotional, high strung. Lincoln was born, grew up a bit, lived a bit, had a girlfriend or two, one of whom dying of the milk sickness, and then he met Mary. She was bright and charming, a political asset. As a teen, she was the precocious friend of Henry Clay. Before she became Mary Lincoln and the whole town of Springfield knew of Mary Lincoln and her suffering husband. Karma. No wonder I never got married.
The arguments she'd start in cars on long trips, emotional operas of unhappiness. The way she'd yell at my father, you're a failure, you're a failure. Or when we were out in the car, a fire whistle going off, it's our house, our house that's burning. Jesus Christ. That's how I grew up.
Leaving me, like Ted Hughes, susceptible to craziness in mate and match.
And it's not her fault. Now she calls herself a failure, because she cannot find the key to the mailbox, lets the bills pile up, expirations, cannot get her cable television back on-line.
I look down at the hairs of my arm. A kind of fur. The knob of bone on the outside of the wrist, where arm meets hand. My arms are more tanned than my legs. My hands are paws, but I can do things with them. Type, play guitar, operate a knife, fold tee-shirts and old beat-up Brooks Brothers work shirts that let the evening light cover for their stains and inkspots, frayed thread.
I am broke again.
I remember that cold old chapel, with its window panes, stone stairs, old Yankee ironwork and Wyeth lines, Johnson Chapel up at Amherst on the hill, the little vulnerable college, an honest place, a separate place. That was a start for me...
Why, one must ask himself, do we have connections to other men. How do we feel them in our bones? Why are we able to enter into their molecular chemistry, as if their ghosts sit kindly over us, protective, guiding. As if to smile, as if to say, you got the point I was making, not in the details, but in the overview, because you, kid, are a good student, a good thinker.
I wonder, Lincoln... ahead of his time. He would not have minded a sorrowful song. He would not have minded watching Ken Burns, and the old mellow bluegrass songs. All that would have been in keeping... That's life, he would have said. Song of the Mountains, on PBS. And if he were here today, the idiots on Fox would say, imagine, the man is supposed to help the free world and there he is listening to bluegrass on public television at 4:22 in the morning... It is the unaffected, who make good music. Bluegrass gospel singer Judy Marshall sings a song that goes with all the Civil War waters around these parts and that long drive up through Frederick and Harrisburg and Gettysburg, in order to get away from here... the Northerner in Southern parts...
I often tell people, tourists at the bar, when they ask about the town, Washington, D.C., right down the road, Lincoln, the fucker would go to the cemetery just down the street, to view Willie's body in the middle of the night.
The connectedness. That's the thing. The thing for a writer. Connecting things is not entirely the work of the conscious mind. This is the reflection of a well-written piece, and I think something not entirely well understood, not about writing, not about my book, not even about known works such as Moby Dick. The connectedness. The melding in of a book with the logic of the Universe....
After Jay's call, from Colorado, at the end of his shift, at two in the morning, waking up again, I tell him what's happened to our friend. He's working at two restaurants now, since he moved to Denver. He's planning another trek. People still ask about you, Jay.
"I'm sorry, man. I know he was your friend."
Later on, still awake, I have a bit of wine. Boys from places far away, Buddhist countries, pretending to be girls, to fill up the time before falling back to sleep.
A zoned-out kind of a day, cooking shows, America's Test Kitchen on in the background. Overcast, drizzling after the monsoon rains the night before. I clean out the green tall kitchen wastebasket with Lysol spray and then soapy water. The fruit flies that had found the contents of the trash bag depart into the cool dank air out on the back porch. Laundry to do. No work tonight. Too much ragweed pollen yesterday, in the woods. Walking along the path, I was probably covered from head to toe.
Death makes one more of a Buddhist. The only way to deal with things.
The hard days of writing... Days of pretending.
Tonight I'm drinking a Bouchard Ainé et Fils $11.99 Pinot Noir, Pays D'Oc. I had some earlier out on the patio of Glen's Garden Market after my groceries for the workweek. My experiment with black-eyed peas had familiar results. It was good to take a break from animal protein, but... I made sure I found some flax seed at the store, for additional fiber.
The man moved his hand down, to the right of his father's brown chair to the pine wine box that he had taken from work to be a sort of book stand or book shelf or side table. Chateaux Gontey, 2010. Nails in it. Perfectly made. Like a Japanese Zen temple. A coffin for all the greats, Mastroianni, preferable to the ornate Christian metal caskets sold at funeral homes, why? A pine box. He liked the feel of it. Wine should be enjoyed out of a tumbler. Served cool, and sometimes with a lime in it. Maybe a dash of bitters. But the lime went well with the tannins. Bourdain, shaman of the night, friend of Dostoesky, and Hemingway.
There is nothing wrong with a little wine, once you are a writer. And I have no problem with the night.
I found a little tree to look at, sipping my wine, as a way of remembering my friend. Bats wheeled in the hurricane remnant sky above apartment buildings, moving with the airs, reminding me of summer carnival rides that spin people around. My friend. Few people out on the patio. I stare down at my iPhone and scroll through my blog.
I will go back to work tomorrow night. One of the night's he would, by tradition, if in town, not traveling in Africa, Cabo Verde, the Gambia, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, always come. The other staff would ask, if things were slowing down, if he was coming. Perhaps they could close the kitchen at 9 rather than 9:30, to start cleaning up, save on labor costs.
It is the provenance of great men that they come to know pain. And I'm sure, we all do, in the final analysis. We might smile and joke, but deep down we know pain, and while it's good to get out into the town and see other human beings of our own species, to reflect upon more than to necessarily interact with, it's also necessary to maintain a private sphere, a protective shell to keep around our thoughts so that we might harvest them and their fruits--a very serious business--and preserve them somehow. Workers in the vineyard. Protective of the fruit, so that when the vineyard's owner shall return we have done our jobs and not been wicked and wasteful. We all know, wine is good, and it's nice not to run out of it. A grand ennobling thing.
Mom has always been a pain in the ass. Excitable, emotional, high strung. Lincoln was born, grew up a bit, lived a bit, had a girlfriend or two, one of whom dying of the milk sickness, and then he met Mary. She was bright and charming, a political asset. As a teen, she was the precocious friend of Henry Clay. Before she became Mary Lincoln and the whole town of Springfield knew of Mary Lincoln and her suffering husband. Karma. No wonder I never got married.
The arguments she'd start in cars on long trips, emotional operas of unhappiness. The way she'd yell at my father, you're a failure, you're a failure. Or when we were out in the car, a fire whistle going off, it's our house, our house that's burning. Jesus Christ. That's how I grew up.
Leaving me, like Ted Hughes, susceptible to craziness in mate and match.
And it's not her fault. Now she calls herself a failure, because she cannot find the key to the mailbox, lets the bills pile up, expirations, cannot get her cable television back on-line.
I look down at the hairs of my arm. A kind of fur. The knob of bone on the outside of the wrist, where arm meets hand. My arms are more tanned than my legs. My hands are paws, but I can do things with them. Type, play guitar, operate a knife, fold tee-shirts and old beat-up Brooks Brothers work shirts that let the evening light cover for their stains and inkspots, frayed thread.
I am broke again.
I remember that cold old chapel, with its window panes, stone stairs, old Yankee ironwork and Wyeth lines, Johnson Chapel up at Amherst on the hill, the little vulnerable college, an honest place, a separate place. That was a start for me...
Why, one must ask himself, do we have connections to other men. How do we feel them in our bones? Why are we able to enter into their molecular chemistry, as if their ghosts sit kindly over us, protective, guiding. As if to smile, as if to say, you got the point I was making, not in the details, but in the overview, because you, kid, are a good student, a good thinker.
I wonder, Lincoln... ahead of his time. He would not have minded a sorrowful song. He would not have minded watching Ken Burns, and the old mellow bluegrass songs. All that would have been in keeping... That's life, he would have said. Song of the Mountains, on PBS. And if he were here today, the idiots on Fox would say, imagine, the man is supposed to help the free world and there he is listening to bluegrass on public television at 4:22 in the morning... It is the unaffected, who make good music. Bluegrass gospel singer Judy Marshall sings a song that goes with all the Civil War waters around these parts and that long drive up through Frederick and Harrisburg and Gettysburg, in order to get away from here... the Northerner in Southern parts...
I often tell people, tourists at the bar, when they ask about the town, Washington, D.C., right down the road, Lincoln, the fucker would go to the cemetery just down the street, to view Willie's body in the middle of the night.
The connectedness. That's the thing. The thing for a writer. Connecting things is not entirely the work of the conscious mind. This is the reflection of a well-written piece, and I think something not entirely well understood, not about writing, not about my book, not even about known works such as Moby Dick. The connectedness. The melding in of a book with the logic of the Universe....
Friday, September 7, 2018
For awhile I stare at the Weather Channel, tea cooling in a mug, a hurricane shown in red, eggplant shaped, brewing south of Bermuda, another toddler in a car death, moderate weed pollen, flooding in the Midwest, wildfires in California, air quality okay. What to make of my day. Yesterday not incredibly productive, but nor was it anti productive, absorbing strange sudden incomprehensible news, the passing of a friend from up at the bar... a guy I know, knew, who got me, an older brother manqué, to the extent such things are possible.
The television cannot show the holes left in life, nor the old towns one once lived in, now largely memory, no place to stay. To stay.
Suddenly.
Late summer. Humid. Not quite as hot as days before, earlier this week. Overcast. Showers and thunderstorms expected. To the kitchen, back, peering again at the television, as if something is about to happen. A fruit fly flits past the screen of my laptop, which is getting hot already. Tropical downpours over the weekend. I am off today. I fill the Pur water filter pitcher with tap water after topping off the Britta filter from the Pur pitcher, running the garbage disposal with hot water after washing yesterday's few dishes, a pot, two mugs, water glasses. The little pouch of turmeric is right in front of me, finally, after looking for it. I stir some into the hot water mug with lime. None of this is usable prose.
Lucia called me from the restaurant around 9 last night. They had heard the news. Perhaps tomorrow night, we will gather, toward the end of the night, to remember our friend.
Who knows what we will come up with today, Kurt Vonnegut... In light of events, life now, at this age, is all about correcting, about living a simple healthy life. I take my Lexapro tablet, and then the Propranalol. Get those down while I drink my tea and hot water, before I eat, so I don't get the shits, liquid coming out at the far end of my guts. Yoga on the forecast today, the body having recovered from the wear and tear of non stop Jazz and non stop Wine Tasting, both nights with fourteen tops in the back room, a special menu, wine to pour, water glasses, plates to lug away back, around the bar, into the bar, down on the milk crates after swiping them off into the garbage, silverware into the plastic quart containers in the bins below the sinks with the ice and the wine. The same bus tub model as when I first came to town thirty years ago. Still, this is progress.
And how many men in the America, Mr. Jack Kerouac, are trying to take their eyes off the pretty Weather Channel lady's abundance in red dress... And maybe, somehow, she senses this aspect of the show, as intelligent, as capable, as perfectly professional as she is, the selling of weather with a little sexy sexy. Attractiveness, they call it, which is itself a great illusion, finally.
The world is full of conflicting things, the great mix of science and commercialism and the unavoidable sex drive of the creature, and by being there and lasting it out and growing and becoming a part of the culture, The Weather Channel, with its pioneering Local On The Eights has won. And so, for now at least, has Trump. And Twitter, and Facebook. And we are addicted.
Writing is about transition. The necessary transitions that keep with the evolution of the human being and the capacity to be a spiritual creature.
And then my thoughts are disrupted. My old longtime friend passed away not for any health-related thing, as I might have expected, but because of a tragic accident. Naturally, thoughts go out. It is all I can do to go take a long walk down into the woods and by the stream, calling my mom from the sandy bank with the plane trees level above the creek...
Later on, a pouring rain comes. Added to the news of death.
And yet, quietly within, there is some kind of acceptance. That's all you can do.
"The readiness is all," it's said, in Shakespeare, somewhere toward the last act of Hamlet. Readiness means connectedness, the facility to connect ourselves with other human beings, make friends out of them, even in their craziness, even as we pass through the gritty jumbled chaotic Penn Stations of life, feeling like Ellis Island immigrants.
The television cannot show the holes left in life, nor the old towns one once lived in, now largely memory, no place to stay. To stay.
Suddenly.
Late summer. Humid. Not quite as hot as days before, earlier this week. Overcast. Showers and thunderstorms expected. To the kitchen, back, peering again at the television, as if something is about to happen. A fruit fly flits past the screen of my laptop, which is getting hot already. Tropical downpours over the weekend. I am off today. I fill the Pur water filter pitcher with tap water after topping off the Britta filter from the Pur pitcher, running the garbage disposal with hot water after washing yesterday's few dishes, a pot, two mugs, water glasses. The little pouch of turmeric is right in front of me, finally, after looking for it. I stir some into the hot water mug with lime. None of this is usable prose.
Lucia called me from the restaurant around 9 last night. They had heard the news. Perhaps tomorrow night, we will gather, toward the end of the night, to remember our friend.
Who knows what we will come up with today, Kurt Vonnegut... In light of events, life now, at this age, is all about correcting, about living a simple healthy life. I take my Lexapro tablet, and then the Propranalol. Get those down while I drink my tea and hot water, before I eat, so I don't get the shits, liquid coming out at the far end of my guts. Yoga on the forecast today, the body having recovered from the wear and tear of non stop Jazz and non stop Wine Tasting, both nights with fourteen tops in the back room, a special menu, wine to pour, water glasses, plates to lug away back, around the bar, into the bar, down on the milk crates after swiping them off into the garbage, silverware into the plastic quart containers in the bins below the sinks with the ice and the wine. The same bus tub model as when I first came to town thirty years ago. Still, this is progress.
And how many men in the America, Mr. Jack Kerouac, are trying to take their eyes off the pretty Weather Channel lady's abundance in red dress... And maybe, somehow, she senses this aspect of the show, as intelligent, as capable, as perfectly professional as she is, the selling of weather with a little sexy sexy. Attractiveness, they call it, which is itself a great illusion, finally.
The world is full of conflicting things, the great mix of science and commercialism and the unavoidable sex drive of the creature, and by being there and lasting it out and growing and becoming a part of the culture, The Weather Channel, with its pioneering Local On The Eights has won. And so, for now at least, has Trump. And Twitter, and Facebook. And we are addicted.
Writing is about transition. The necessary transitions that keep with the evolution of the human being and the capacity to be a spiritual creature.
And then my thoughts are disrupted. My old longtime friend passed away not for any health-related thing, as I might have expected, but because of a tragic accident. Naturally, thoughts go out. It is all I can do to go take a long walk down into the woods and by the stream, calling my mom from the sandy bank with the plane trees level above the creek...
Later on, a pouring rain comes. Added to the news of death.
And yet, quietly within, there is some kind of acceptance. That's all you can do.
"The readiness is all," it's said, in Shakespeare, somewhere toward the last act of Hamlet. Readiness means connectedness, the facility to connect ourselves with other human beings, make friends out of them, even in their craziness, even as we pass through the gritty jumbled chaotic Penn Stations of life, feeling like Ellis Island immigrants.
Thursday, September 6, 2018
I felt proud of my job, somehow, walking slowly to it, on a hot day, enjoying the cool of the woods, then past the brick walls of Dumbarton Oaks... turning right, passed the cool glass of Philip Johnson museum of round pods, the shade of the spruce, the old brick house with the gate, walking along the fence the forest below, then past the cottage, then the final stand of larches before the parking lot and the avenue.
"What do you hope to achieve... Expecting a different outcome..." was my therapist's reaction to my joining twitter, and finding a follower.. skeptical as I told her, following an old acquaintance perceived as a friend, her following me back. Oh, it's no big deal. We share the same politics, I said, shrugging it off. Pro-environment. Anti-Trump. She looked at me. We were near the end of the session. I'd done what I could at that point. I wrote a check and slipped out the door.
Every day the worker must go to work. For the writer, no different.
People have been doing physical work since Adam's time, and so too have they been playing with words. I found my own life and my jobs no different. There was an accepting pride in it, at a molecular level, and endeavored always to do it as best I could. I wasn't above manual labor. I like working with my hands. Opening wine bottles, keeping a bar tidy. I might have felt sad I wasn't, say, teaching, inspiring young minds, but for me, that's where writing came in. Writing is as important as the physical work. I get paid for the work at the bar. The writing has a pay-off all its own.
There are brighter minds out there. Sophisticated, good on the important issues of the day. Sometimes, I check in on them. And then will I go back into my own seeming childish way of viewing the world, having imagined myself as a sort of simpleton, village idiot. Not willing to be part of the great argument, the great political culture wars of the day which have grown very dire and loud and polarized in singularly depressing ways, having created one of the most divided and unhappiest of times.
To my tastes, as much as the sophisticate might take on an issue, eloquently state a position, have the right things in mind as far as equality, be quite clever and a wordsmith, yet somewhere lurking within eventually emerges a hypocrisy. The deeply embedded hypocrisy is perhaps no one's immediate fault, but rather a measure of what can only be corrected with the proper thought, proper speech, proper action, proper occupation, proper vocation, such as the Buddha observed two thousand five hundred years before us. Behaving properly, with proper conduct, we would refrain first from the behavior, say, being outspoken of opinion, offering a judgement, quickly and with such a confidence...
Indeed, before observing the beam, the dust, in the eyes of another, first take it out of your own.
I went to work feeling liberated, later that day. I'd had a bike ride to start the day, thirty five minutes, a good sweat, I did some yoga, very satisfactorily. And then, as I walked to work, a hot day, but not bad for the humidity, only around fifty percent, I felt a whole genre of illusions being dispelled. At first I felt sad, as if I'd hoped that a conversation with an old friend could be pursued in the spirit of friendship and good humor. After the initial social media acceptance, I had, upon getting up finally, found myself blocked. I felt stung. There I go again, being a creep, being taken as a creep. Oh, well.
And this is about writing, even in social media form; this is where I live. Rejection of politely meant efforts hurts.
But with the yoga and the meditations and the Buddha in place, I felt good enough, healthy enough to shrug on my way to work. I had created it all, in my mind, and now, feeling decently and in good health, I found a new power, and one aimed at dispelling it all.
It was still, in some world of communications that never happen, necessary to apologize for my blundering foolishness, offering up a silly poem regarding my old friend's quip about her hair color. It had, apparently, not being well-received, imagine that. It was not intended to be trolling, nor to be offensive, nor to make something out of nothing.
Attempts to address such awkwardness with humor are in untouchable arena. Fault has an all-reaching abundance. The innocent is proven guilty. And too often the ostensibly proper will jump on the bandwagon of accusal.
At a stage in life, one begins to wonder. Why should I need the approval of any external influence? And one largely created in my own mind, anyway. How silly the whole thing! And why should I need to look toward anyone for approval, or to continue on with my diminishment of self. Why should I look badly upon my efforts of hardwork and making a room full of people and wine bar regulars feel welcome, content, accepted. Why have I become the wrong-doer?
Only in the eye of the artist, forward thinking, not bound so to the law and order of cop mentality, will the offender be seen as the innocent one, the good and decent man.
Indeed, because of the strive for sophistication, some people end up standing for the very opposite thing you do. And what can you do but continue to accept yourself and your efforts as valid and self-driven.
And why get worked up about anything related to social media anyway...
Judge not, lest ye be judged.
And yet judgment is emphasized.
It had been ordained, as if a long long long time ago, at the very creation of things in the great burst, that I would live such a life and ultimately become. I don't know exactly what, but something along the lines of a Buddhist, a Christian, a thinker of Theosophical tradition...
It was not an easy night. Georgetown University, a fourteen top in the back room. A jazz trio, singer, keyboard, bass... Temperature at the wine bar around 79 degrees.
But yeah, I get it... Who wants to be involved with other people... when lives are full of the tragic and complexities... Who necessarily wants people cast off in the past back in their minds again... Knowing people hurts.
"What do you hope to achieve... Expecting a different outcome..." was my therapist's reaction to my joining twitter, and finding a follower.. skeptical as I told her, following an old acquaintance perceived as a friend, her following me back. Oh, it's no big deal. We share the same politics, I said, shrugging it off. Pro-environment. Anti-Trump. She looked at me. We were near the end of the session. I'd done what I could at that point. I wrote a check and slipped out the door.
Every day the worker must go to work. For the writer, no different.
People have been doing physical work since Adam's time, and so too have they been playing with words. I found my own life and my jobs no different. There was an accepting pride in it, at a molecular level, and endeavored always to do it as best I could. I wasn't above manual labor. I like working with my hands. Opening wine bottles, keeping a bar tidy. I might have felt sad I wasn't, say, teaching, inspiring young minds, but for me, that's where writing came in. Writing is as important as the physical work. I get paid for the work at the bar. The writing has a pay-off all its own.
There are brighter minds out there. Sophisticated, good on the important issues of the day. Sometimes, I check in on them. And then will I go back into my own seeming childish way of viewing the world, having imagined myself as a sort of simpleton, village idiot. Not willing to be part of the great argument, the great political culture wars of the day which have grown very dire and loud and polarized in singularly depressing ways, having created one of the most divided and unhappiest of times.
To my tastes, as much as the sophisticate might take on an issue, eloquently state a position, have the right things in mind as far as equality, be quite clever and a wordsmith, yet somewhere lurking within eventually emerges a hypocrisy. The deeply embedded hypocrisy is perhaps no one's immediate fault, but rather a measure of what can only be corrected with the proper thought, proper speech, proper action, proper occupation, proper vocation, such as the Buddha observed two thousand five hundred years before us. Behaving properly, with proper conduct, we would refrain first from the behavior, say, being outspoken of opinion, offering a judgement, quickly and with such a confidence...
Indeed, before observing the beam, the dust, in the eyes of another, first take it out of your own.
I went to work feeling liberated, later that day. I'd had a bike ride to start the day, thirty five minutes, a good sweat, I did some yoga, very satisfactorily. And then, as I walked to work, a hot day, but not bad for the humidity, only around fifty percent, I felt a whole genre of illusions being dispelled. At first I felt sad, as if I'd hoped that a conversation with an old friend could be pursued in the spirit of friendship and good humor. After the initial social media acceptance, I had, upon getting up finally, found myself blocked. I felt stung. There I go again, being a creep, being taken as a creep. Oh, well.
And this is about writing, even in social media form; this is where I live. Rejection of politely meant efforts hurts.
But with the yoga and the meditations and the Buddha in place, I felt good enough, healthy enough to shrug on my way to work. I had created it all, in my mind, and now, feeling decently and in good health, I found a new power, and one aimed at dispelling it all.
It was still, in some world of communications that never happen, necessary to apologize for my blundering foolishness, offering up a silly poem regarding my old friend's quip about her hair color. It had, apparently, not being well-received, imagine that. It was not intended to be trolling, nor to be offensive, nor to make something out of nothing.
Attempts to address such awkwardness with humor are in untouchable arena. Fault has an all-reaching abundance. The innocent is proven guilty. And too often the ostensibly proper will jump on the bandwagon of accusal.
At a stage in life, one begins to wonder. Why should I need the approval of any external influence? And one largely created in my own mind, anyway. How silly the whole thing! And why should I need to look toward anyone for approval, or to continue on with my diminishment of self. Why should I look badly upon my efforts of hardwork and making a room full of people and wine bar regulars feel welcome, content, accepted. Why have I become the wrong-doer?
Only in the eye of the artist, forward thinking, not bound so to the law and order of cop mentality, will the offender be seen as the innocent one, the good and decent man.
Indeed, because of the strive for sophistication, some people end up standing for the very opposite thing you do. And what can you do but continue to accept yourself and your efforts as valid and self-driven.
And why get worked up about anything related to social media anyway...
Judge not, lest ye be judged.
And yet judgment is emphasized.
It had been ordained, as if a long long long time ago, at the very creation of things in the great burst, that I would live such a life and ultimately become. I don't know exactly what, but something along the lines of a Buddhist, a Christian, a thinker of Theosophical tradition...
It was not an easy night. Georgetown University, a fourteen top in the back room. A jazz trio, singer, keyboard, bass... Temperature at the wine bar around 79 degrees.
But yeah, I get it... Who wants to be involved with other people... when lives are full of the tragic and complexities... Who necessarily wants people cast off in the past back in their minds again... Knowing people hurts.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
Capricorn workaholic doesn't know what to do with himself on an imposed day off, Labor Day. The structure in his life gives him a social life at work he never has to plan for, takes enough energy. Moving slowly he ends up taking a walk after a visit to the pharmacy for a refill of escitalopram. It's warm out, towering clouds, should have brought along sunglasses. He wears a light backpack, holding on to his Nalgeen water bottle, khaki shorts, baseball cap, notebook and reusable Glen's Garden Market black shopping bag tucked in his backpack, a good boy scout feeling.
It's a long slow walk. Lonesome, feeling badly for falling asleep before doing his paperwork checkout at work. A bad feeling, a feeling of having done something stupid for which he is accountable like that will re-duplicate itself as he rides his bike home late, guiltily, at 4:30 in the morning, takes in some erotic imagery of "Russian Moms" to relax and liberate. But he felt drained and unable to put a sentence together at the writing table, after his mom calling with questions, waking him up, questions for which there are no easy answers, the next morning, while his throat stood dry.
Unable to right, not feeling like yoga, nor the indoor bike ride, vaguely hoping for an invite to the proverbial Labor Day picnic for normal people, working people, families, city friends of similar stature and economic ability... He feels the lonesomeness again.
Kurt Vonnegut, paraphrased, from interview: I just wrote what I had to write. No writer can control that. You write what's in you. And for some of us, fortunate ones, there is a market for what you write. But there are many great writers who fail, no market for what they write... They end up destitute.
So, anyway, without much energy, I take my slow walk, up into the big houses of Kalorama, stopping to admire the Sultanate of Oman's mansion of similar style to the White House, then left, down past the big house Bernstein the developer brought down piece by piece from its coastal New England town, reassembled beautifully on a lot with a picket fence, down past the Obama Residence, a blond woman watering out front. Crossing the street to the other side of Jared and Ivanka, Secret Service in a blue unmarked van parked facing uphill to be reasonable obvious. Past the mosque, over the bridge, crossing the wide avenue, and down into the cool woods. The ragweed is out, but I needed a walk, not having any mysticism today, feeling quite bland.
We do not always directly nor consciously understand things as they are. "Things are not as they appear," a good Buddhist line. Then you take the time to be grateful. Grateful for your job. Grateful for being as you are, single. Grateful for where you live, and the odd perfection of your neighbor, as far as the very essence of things, an understanding, as between monks in an order, up to the same civilizing end at a dark time, perched at the edges of so-called civilization as it rots of its own influences and mediums. Your own planes and tall buildings wielded against you. And every Muslim I've come across quite friendly and inviting.
Passing the Islamic Center, no hawks today, my shoes heavy and cumbersome, I watch a butterfly float downward. A handsome couple comes toward me, she in hajib and blue robes. "Would you like to come in," the gentleman asks me. "It's beautiful."
"Yes, I have been inside. It is beautiful." He looks back at me, in friendship, but I'm feeling tired, have several long blocks left to go, haven't had any breakfast, need to get to the grocery store... "Gotta go get dinner," I say. But I feel bad about that, almost instantaneously. The invite of a friendly stranger, something you should never turn down, and the silent woman, who smiled also, was a good sing of fortuitous events to come. I will try to go back sometimes, and wait around this time of day.
Back from Glen's, a half chicken, consumed quickly enough, then sinking down into the television.
The uncanny wisdom of others, of neighbors, of the peoples and individuals who fall into our lives, they all have meaning, the Universe speaking, teaching, just so, with perfect appropriateness...
Kilgore Trout: The life of a writer is an awkward one. What is he working on? Who told him he was allowed to have such time to put forth the effort...
The writer therefore does not have very much to go on. And no one will really give him very much. Indeed, faith and good teachings are tiny atomic things at birth, and it takes a lot of faith to grow a tree. Intuition. The development of skill equivalent to a man of the bush traversing an arid area tracking prey or seeking a destination, a direction... And unfortunately, the longer you suffer from this condition native to humanity, as Jesus out in the desert fasting from all outside influences and input from the outside, the better you are it. True, logically, and in reality, if you have faith.
Do you write for the gaining of the strange skill you cannot explain to anyone (without them taking you as bizarre), or do you write just to achieve some egotistical accomplishment of a work of art, a story suitable to literary standards of the day. Bye, bye, admiring bog, Emily said, as she drew her carefully honed powers about her...
Twain's odes to writing celebrate something every human being can observe: that the writer must live a life as close as possible to the original native life of the wild human being, to find the things that we would all recognize, the basis for morality, spiritual, the ability to be as one should be, to find appropriate things. So are certain writers completely at odds with cities and polite society. And who but a Capricorn, lacking a regard for socially defined behaviors, would be better at that. And who better but one who has the blood type O, whose health must define him as so, in need of aerobic exercise, certain dietary practices which predate the settling down of humanity... fresh unto the world as Adam and Eve.
The story is recorded in Luke, the return of Jesus to Nazareth and his neighbors. For his take, they turn into a pack with an Old Testament "who are you to be quoting Isiah so..." gathering around his wildness, to capture him. They take him away, to cast him from the high place, the cliff above the town. Wildly, without a word recorded of it, he slips through their midst, away to safety, almost like a wild creature, as wild creatures are hard to catch. Luke was not close enough to the pack to record the quiet words, the micro conversation he might have engaged them in, briefly, that may have caught them off guard, similar to his fashion at the stoning, the quiet word of Jesus Christ.
The wild man being the civilized one... An old theme of literature, and maybe the best one.
It's a long slow walk. Lonesome, feeling badly for falling asleep before doing his paperwork checkout at work. A bad feeling, a feeling of having done something stupid for which he is accountable like that will re-duplicate itself as he rides his bike home late, guiltily, at 4:30 in the morning, takes in some erotic imagery of "Russian Moms" to relax and liberate. But he felt drained and unable to put a sentence together at the writing table, after his mom calling with questions, waking him up, questions for which there are no easy answers, the next morning, while his throat stood dry.
Unable to right, not feeling like yoga, nor the indoor bike ride, vaguely hoping for an invite to the proverbial Labor Day picnic for normal people, working people, families, city friends of similar stature and economic ability... He feels the lonesomeness again.
Kurt Vonnegut, paraphrased, from interview: I just wrote what I had to write. No writer can control that. You write what's in you. And for some of us, fortunate ones, there is a market for what you write. But there are many great writers who fail, no market for what they write... They end up destitute.
So, anyway, without much energy, I take my slow walk, up into the big houses of Kalorama, stopping to admire the Sultanate of Oman's mansion of similar style to the White House, then left, down past the big house Bernstein the developer brought down piece by piece from its coastal New England town, reassembled beautifully on a lot with a picket fence, down past the Obama Residence, a blond woman watering out front. Crossing the street to the other side of Jared and Ivanka, Secret Service in a blue unmarked van parked facing uphill to be reasonable obvious. Past the mosque, over the bridge, crossing the wide avenue, and down into the cool woods. The ragweed is out, but I needed a walk, not having any mysticism today, feeling quite bland.
We do not always directly nor consciously understand things as they are. "Things are not as they appear," a good Buddhist line. Then you take the time to be grateful. Grateful for your job. Grateful for being as you are, single. Grateful for where you live, and the odd perfection of your neighbor, as far as the very essence of things, an understanding, as between monks in an order, up to the same civilizing end at a dark time, perched at the edges of so-called civilization as it rots of its own influences and mediums. Your own planes and tall buildings wielded against you. And every Muslim I've come across quite friendly and inviting.
Passing the Islamic Center, no hawks today, my shoes heavy and cumbersome, I watch a butterfly float downward. A handsome couple comes toward me, she in hajib and blue robes. "Would you like to come in," the gentleman asks me. "It's beautiful."
"Yes, I have been inside. It is beautiful." He looks back at me, in friendship, but I'm feeling tired, have several long blocks left to go, haven't had any breakfast, need to get to the grocery store... "Gotta go get dinner," I say. But I feel bad about that, almost instantaneously. The invite of a friendly stranger, something you should never turn down, and the silent woman, who smiled also, was a good sing of fortuitous events to come. I will try to go back sometimes, and wait around this time of day.
Back from Glen's, a half chicken, consumed quickly enough, then sinking down into the television.
The uncanny wisdom of others, of neighbors, of the peoples and individuals who fall into our lives, they all have meaning, the Universe speaking, teaching, just so, with perfect appropriateness...
Kilgore Trout: The life of a writer is an awkward one. What is he working on? Who told him he was allowed to have such time to put forth the effort...
The writer therefore does not have very much to go on. And no one will really give him very much. Indeed, faith and good teachings are tiny atomic things at birth, and it takes a lot of faith to grow a tree. Intuition. The development of skill equivalent to a man of the bush traversing an arid area tracking prey or seeking a destination, a direction... And unfortunately, the longer you suffer from this condition native to humanity, as Jesus out in the desert fasting from all outside influences and input from the outside, the better you are it. True, logically, and in reality, if you have faith.
Do you write for the gaining of the strange skill you cannot explain to anyone (without them taking you as bizarre), or do you write just to achieve some egotistical accomplishment of a work of art, a story suitable to literary standards of the day. Bye, bye, admiring bog, Emily said, as she drew her carefully honed powers about her...
Twain's odes to writing celebrate something every human being can observe: that the writer must live a life as close as possible to the original native life of the wild human being, to find the things that we would all recognize, the basis for morality, spiritual, the ability to be as one should be, to find appropriate things. So are certain writers completely at odds with cities and polite society. And who but a Capricorn, lacking a regard for socially defined behaviors, would be better at that. And who better but one who has the blood type O, whose health must define him as so, in need of aerobic exercise, certain dietary practices which predate the settling down of humanity... fresh unto the world as Adam and Eve.
The story is recorded in Luke, the return of Jesus to Nazareth and his neighbors. For his take, they turn into a pack with an Old Testament "who are you to be quoting Isiah so..." gathering around his wildness, to capture him. They take him away, to cast him from the high place, the cliff above the town. Wildly, without a word recorded of it, he slips through their midst, away to safety, almost like a wild creature, as wild creatures are hard to catch. Luke was not close enough to the pack to record the quiet words, the micro conversation he might have engaged them in, briefly, that may have caught them off guard, similar to his fashion at the stoning, the quiet word of Jesus Christ.
The wild man being the civilized one... An old theme of literature, and maybe the best one.
Monday, September 3, 2018
Back to work, an unpredictable evening, the eve of Labor Day. The bar picks up late, good conversations on Otto and Charlemagne, China giving Gambia soccer stadiums instead of useful electricity, a young couple, second year med school, various sages. By the end of it, I'm tired, lay back on chairs in the wine room, and fall into a two hour nap. It's suddenly four in the morning, and the computer has shut down and I can't figure out how to do my checkout report, oops.
And today I wake up and I have misplaced my seriousness, and the only creative consolation is a couple of posts from Father James Martin, one about Francis's return, a sermon on Jesus's response of dignified silence to the pack the townspeople become in the story of Luke when they take him up to a high place to cast him off after the perceived blasphemy of his reading from Isiah. His hometown.
And one on Flannery O'Connors private letters...
But I feel empty and sinful somehow.
It's hot. The ragweed pollen is high. One had hoped the day to be productive, but something in me has been thrown off, from the day before... I'm feeling like a fake and phony again.
The sermon on EWTN... I trust the station far less now after recent events, but the sermon for the daily Odom Mass on workers, on Genesis, on work itself'--we are not simply cogs in the big wheel of society, but meant for a relationship with the divine.
It is as if all the chuckling and good humor and bandied wits, generous talk of wine, has taken something away from my own dignity, as if I had cheapened something, some relationship...
Yesterday, facing going back to work, in a state of significant angst, tough as it was, was a better day for the writing. Somewhere along the line, listening to my friend's woes as to finding a condominium that suits him and his commute has left me feeling vulnerable. My little play job, not cutting the muster...
Sufficient to the day the evils thereof. This is true...
I was happier yesterday looking on-line for saffron robes and simple monk slippers...
I watch the Mass with all its shiny doodads and pomp, the singing, something slightly precious, quite Western, showy, glitzy, a production produced like theater. Why do we go through all that... And yet, the lessons of a Sermon are supportive, indeed...
The workman somehow feels guilty, inadequate at his job, wishing to show up again. Labor Day interrupts my schedule, somehow irritating me, but I will take it. I hope I entered all my tips in on the system before it shut down. The job is not serious enough, serious enough given the background you were given, professors, professionals, highly educated... I am a bum.
There is something akin to being psychic gained from years of tending bar. You sense, maybe, a bit more, of people's hearts, their interests... You can read people, not just in terms of service.
But there are some people who are as clouds, dark clouds, and they seem to frown on your psychic abilities, begrudge your power to read their hearts. They were frowning and unhappy, concerned about wealthiness and schemes and material things, and when you turn your attention upon them, they grow even unhappier. I guess it makes sense.
It had often occurred to me, when a person appeared in my thoughts, as if one had not seen them in awhile, and then that evening they appear. Strange. Sometimes a year or two's absence.
I dismissed the strange power not exactly well-described by the term "psychic," or "mind-reading." But increasingly, as I aged, I began to note it more and more, accepting it as it was. I took my walks in nature with a caring eye, I did my yoga quietly and slowly, carefully at home, I kept up with my little writing exercises that constantly threatened to fall as wet duds...
In my alone time I would think back, and notice, and I felt like I was a kind of a puzzle piece that could now connect with increasing ease with people, different people, and whatever was on their minds or in their daily plan. The power had developed, or, simply, I noticed it more and more. A gift for something not easily described. A sensitivity.
It seemed to make me extra careful around people. I might have come off as shy or reticent. Perhaps I was tentative, explorative, about the mammal brain's innate ability. Perhaps most people just don't turn it on. In the literature Jesus has such powers finely tuned, strong, infallible. He has faith in this ability. It is the proverbial equivalent of walking on water.
Don't hold it against the young who are shaky in the legs, colt-like, with the innate facility, the sonar sense of vibrations and the micro-events on people's faces and in their eyes.
The thing was to use this power well, to the benefit of humanity, in whatever small limited way, limited spatially, etc...
It struck me as wasteful when people blocked these inner powers out with manipulative concerns, with worldly and financial ambitions foremost on their minds.
The Laws of the Prophets are greater than those of any national democratic system.
Buddha, friends with Jesus...
The Lexapro and the other vitamins would bestow upon my system a humor of diarrhea. And this was not so fun when you had to get yourself to work, biking, walking through the woods...
And today I wake up and I have misplaced my seriousness, and the only creative consolation is a couple of posts from Father James Martin, one about Francis's return, a sermon on Jesus's response of dignified silence to the pack the townspeople become in the story of Luke when they take him up to a high place to cast him off after the perceived blasphemy of his reading from Isiah. His hometown.
And one on Flannery O'Connors private letters...
But I feel empty and sinful somehow.
It's hot. The ragweed pollen is high. One had hoped the day to be productive, but something in me has been thrown off, from the day before... I'm feeling like a fake and phony again.
The sermon on EWTN... I trust the station far less now after recent events, but the sermon for the daily Odom Mass on workers, on Genesis, on work itself'--we are not simply cogs in the big wheel of society, but meant for a relationship with the divine.
It is as if all the chuckling and good humor and bandied wits, generous talk of wine, has taken something away from my own dignity, as if I had cheapened something, some relationship...
Yesterday, facing going back to work, in a state of significant angst, tough as it was, was a better day for the writing. Somewhere along the line, listening to my friend's woes as to finding a condominium that suits him and his commute has left me feeling vulnerable. My little play job, not cutting the muster...
Sufficient to the day the evils thereof. This is true...
I was happier yesterday looking on-line for saffron robes and simple monk slippers...
I watch the Mass with all its shiny doodads and pomp, the singing, something slightly precious, quite Western, showy, glitzy, a production produced like theater. Why do we go through all that... And yet, the lessons of a Sermon are supportive, indeed...
The workman somehow feels guilty, inadequate at his job, wishing to show up again. Labor Day interrupts my schedule, somehow irritating me, but I will take it. I hope I entered all my tips in on the system before it shut down. The job is not serious enough, serious enough given the background you were given, professors, professionals, highly educated... I am a bum.
There is something akin to being psychic gained from years of tending bar. You sense, maybe, a bit more, of people's hearts, their interests... You can read people, not just in terms of service.
But there are some people who are as clouds, dark clouds, and they seem to frown on your psychic abilities, begrudge your power to read their hearts. They were frowning and unhappy, concerned about wealthiness and schemes and material things, and when you turn your attention upon them, they grow even unhappier. I guess it makes sense.
It had often occurred to me, when a person appeared in my thoughts, as if one had not seen them in awhile, and then that evening they appear. Strange. Sometimes a year or two's absence.
I dismissed the strange power not exactly well-described by the term "psychic," or "mind-reading." But increasingly, as I aged, I began to note it more and more, accepting it as it was. I took my walks in nature with a caring eye, I did my yoga quietly and slowly, carefully at home, I kept up with my little writing exercises that constantly threatened to fall as wet duds...
In my alone time I would think back, and notice, and I felt like I was a kind of a puzzle piece that could now connect with increasing ease with people, different people, and whatever was on their minds or in their daily plan. The power had developed, or, simply, I noticed it more and more. A gift for something not easily described. A sensitivity.
It seemed to make me extra careful around people. I might have come off as shy or reticent. Perhaps I was tentative, explorative, about the mammal brain's innate ability. Perhaps most people just don't turn it on. In the literature Jesus has such powers finely tuned, strong, infallible. He has faith in this ability. It is the proverbial equivalent of walking on water.
Don't hold it against the young who are shaky in the legs, colt-like, with the innate facility, the sonar sense of vibrations and the micro-events on people's faces and in their eyes.
The thing was to use this power well, to the benefit of humanity, in whatever small limited way, limited spatially, etc...
It struck me as wasteful when people blocked these inner powers out with manipulative concerns, with worldly and financial ambitions foremost on their minds.
The Laws of the Prophets are greater than those of any national democratic system.
Buddha, friends with Jesus...
The Lexapro and the other vitamins would bestow upon my system a humor of diarrhea. And this was not so fun when you had to get yourself to work, biking, walking through the woods...
Saturday, September 1, 2018
I start the day with a walk, wending through the back streets of Kalorama, to the avenue, over the bridge, down into the woods. I go at a very slow pace. Today I steered a young couple visiting from Hungary from taking the wrong road down to the paths of the Rock Creek Park, stopping them so they didn't have to dash across four lanes of traffic. I'm going the same way, cross the bridge with them, point out the dirt path along the stream below, and then I let them go on their way, this old dog a little slower than they, after my giving of directions and possible walks.
I call my mom, as I stand overlooking my favorite part of the stream, a sandy bank with plane trees twenty feet above the surface of the creek, and she's doing well, and I can start, the thoughts that came slowly.
Murakami goes for a run every day, giving him discipline to take up the endeavors of the novel. If I were to undertake anything more ambitious, than this slow walk down into the cool fresh airs of the woods I might not get as far as the stream and the little bridge and the paths through woods and weeds. The water is different in the creek today, cloudier, up a bit. Anything more ambitious and I would fall down at it, and there it all is, nature, ready to accept me. Funny how that works.
The slow-poke makes his way back, stopping to observe two hawks perched, closely together, mates, on the very top of the mosque's minaret, at the very top of the crescent moon.
I take the back way home, up past the grand pink Spanish villa, now a road block, the E. U., up Tracy Place past Jared and Ivanka's home, past Ted Kennedy's house, Robert McNamara's. At the corner I slow, the allow a Secret Service agent escorting a young child pass, peer for a moment up the street to see how the garden at the corner is today. Closer, I stop by St. Jerome, the statue in front of the Croatian Embassy, and he reminds me more and more of my father. Greatest Doctor of the Church. Bronze statue by Mistrovic. Of course, the little markers of one's neighborhood, when many have passed and good still remains, neighbors.
My problem is that I am a Buddhist. I am a Buddhist and a Christian. Therefore, in my father's terminology, I am a Theosophist, a believer in the Perennial Philosophy that probably all religions speak of through their own terms. Always was, always have been. Forward and backward. What can you do. Living in Buddhist time.
There were earlier efforts. I wrote a book. I wrote a book because I am a Theosophist, one looking for himself in the vast expanses of America and American life, a life that is in flux, always changing. Perhaps I was not so consciously aware of that, but that was the reason why. And I went through a fair amount of heartache and low moods, and memories to struggle with. I wrote a book in order to survive, to find a way forward. Because in life, there are few clues, beyond the career cues and the bank account...
But to simply write, say, a book that is recognizably a book, in trade terms, no longer gets me going in the morning.
If that's all it was, a commercial endeavor, then I'd fall into the old trap, of inappropriate work, that which comes when the focus is on base things, economic free-market capitalism. For that and by that regard, the common regard for what and how deep reality is, I am a fool, an idiot, not quite knowing what to do, but show up for work, a job of physical, mental and verbal behavior (as, for some of us, a job should be, a balance, as it is something we might well have to do for the rest of our lives, and it might as well be good for the health.)
That's the problem. Getting up. Starting the day. Using it to some good end, when you have no good idea of what you are or should be doing. The simple act of writing. Plain, bare, monkish.
But to do that, just that, you have to be looking in the right direction. And perhaps, living in Washington, D.C., and sort of subconsciously trying to keep up, I was thinking of it all wrong, where that direction might indeed be.
Walking along, in the morning: thought of conversation with woman who'd been to Botswana with The Peace Corps. Over the bar we'd brought up JFK. "What a visionary, so ahead of his time," she says as we chat from my end of the bar to hers. (She had put together some clips to show people... President Kennedy, the inception of the idea of The Peace Corps.)
He lived in pain, after a certain point, every day of his life. My thoughts as I walked down the street in the shade of the trees, mansions, embassies, ambassador's residences on both sides. Jack. Every day of his life. And these were not mild pains. Even as far back as 1946, hobbling up flights of stairs in the tenements, first one step up, then the back leg, his first campaign. Grueling. Asked if he might want some help, no, thank you, he would say, politely, I'm fine.
I often walk past the old buildings, aged mansions, often with paint peeling, a vacant front door locked against time, front awnings rusting, cracked glass and wrought iron, weeds grown up, ghosts of old regimes and systems of government power. Back in the early '60s, such buildings, embassies, ambassador residences, chanceries, would have been well-kept, optimistic, striving, clean, vibrant. The old days.
Does it take a certain amount of pain in life, like Jack's... to see things a little bit more clearly than the next person... as if to realize, "we are all in pain, great pain, one way or another." Vonnegut's anxiety, Kerouac's lonesome stranger, Hemingway, really, name one pioneer who had no persistent inner pain. Pain leads to poetry.
But imagine, everyday, at the center of you, your very spine...
If you understood pain, if pain, mental, physical, psychic, or otherwise, was your companion every day, it would be easier to absorb the vicissitudes, the tragic news, of life.
The bar is a tragic space. Gallows humor, black humor, Irishman, immigrant, African American... It is never far from such reflections, the death of a parent, a friend, a pet, ill health, decline, the fucked-up-ness of the world... A drink held in one's paw, a right to drink, a companionship set up there... a fellowship of the ailing.
Walking along, or later, doing yoga and meditating...
It is not just the air and the water and the earth that is polluted, now, it is our minds, it is our speech, it is our actions, it is our spiritual life, our political lives, our personal lives... polluted by the polluting spirit, make a buck....
What better time for a Buddhist revival...
There are days I don't mind so much being alone. Buddhist thought requires lots of space and concentration. Working at night can be disorienting, so I need to adjust, too. It takes three days, usually, to find my way back to a writing space where I can at least slightly understand what the shape of things might be, what I might be working on.
"But aren't you sort of being worthless, just sitting around being Buddhist?"
After a shower to get the pollen of the woods off, I did my yoga, working up a good sweat, and later as I meditated I thought of how far away we've gotten from Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, that something like right speech and right action and right behavior might not be such a bad aim after all. Think what it could do for a pub, a barroom, a wine bar.. Make things a lot easier.
The world is so full of bad ideas. And the worse the idea--take World War One--the bigger it is pumped up, it seems. Take Donald Trump, emblem of the biggest ideas in America, the tycoon, the supposed "Economic Powerhouse," the "builder of America." "The Entrepreneur," to which we must be apprenticed to. The idea that our co-workers, as immigrant as ourselves, are the enemy, taking jobs meant for us, not them...
The big ideas come. And only in time shall the Earth see the fruits of such things.
Have I, too, had, at a younger age, big ideas, attempts at entrepreneurial ways, grand love stories that end with a singing of Ode to Joy? Have I not found that ultimately they were false. Vain. Childish. Typical. Romantic. Illusions. to be stripped away, as transparent as the sadness of any pleasure palace.
However, the core of a person is Buddha and Buddha truth, and this is what survives, old shells sloughed off, molted out of, which is a beautiful thing. False selves, once thought to be you, just part of the bundle, the skandhas of human existence.
The big ideas, the really big most stupid ones, like the Industrial Revolution and its exploitations, like Colonial sins of slavery and imposed hardship, are a relief, as they turn us away from really having to ponder our existences, our truer realities. Then we don't have to think, but just be dumbed down puppets.
The big ideas stand in contrast to the simple freedom of the Zen Temple or the monastery, whereupon one is freed from having to think and buy and earn and get along with the whole craziness and the ecological nightmare.
Before taking a shower before work on the eve of Labor Day, having failed again to get back to school, I look at my old Lincolnesque face in the bathroom mirror. To be a writer one must come upon an awful tragic fate, the birthright of being born into a reality that one must finally understand, a great correction or a realization, though all of this is hard to put into words. These are fates we live through, because we are writers and used to such things. Melville focused on this with the odd and interesting character of Ahab, and Ahab is glorious, played by the noble Gregory Peck in the movie. The great tragic truth is noble and awakening, and it takes a long long time to get there, but once it is there it is present, present in the now the mystics talk about, as we can change neither or present nor our past, but live with it, make the best, keep a good attitude, be of good cheer.
Ahh, but it's not your fault, this great grand Kerouacian loneliness. It is the way the Universe, the thing of Truth, made you, with such a sensitivity as your inheritance, your true character as it is revealed in space and time and continuous just as space and time is continuous, exactly so. And each little event in life, each little turn in the road, often lonesome, with particles of this and that blowing around, often invisibly, is made sense of through being, of course, a whole, an entirety, a complete thing.
As a kid you start drawing. Then, one day, you largely put that down, and look of other things. And then, in your teens, you come upon the great human endeavor of writing. It just seems to fit. What can you do. You will not write that well, but, you learn, and you keep your own high innate standards as best you can. And like a sea voyage, the work progresses. Perhaps you don't sense the progress of this until you sense the end, vaguely, a coastline far far away, but there somewhere. That end might not be the final end, but it holds truths just like death holds truths, both in and out of our own spheres of comprehension.
You knew, all along, what the right thing was to do, and there will little sign posts along the way, teachers, if you will, who teach you through the examples of their own lives, just like Jesus, Rabbi, teaches us, and in the same way like the animal pets in our lives teach us, through the generosity of their existence, their being, their creatureliness.
I call my mom, as I stand overlooking my favorite part of the stream, a sandy bank with plane trees twenty feet above the surface of the creek, and she's doing well, and I can start, the thoughts that came slowly.
Murakami goes for a run every day, giving him discipline to take up the endeavors of the novel. If I were to undertake anything more ambitious, than this slow walk down into the cool fresh airs of the woods I might not get as far as the stream and the little bridge and the paths through woods and weeds. The water is different in the creek today, cloudier, up a bit. Anything more ambitious and I would fall down at it, and there it all is, nature, ready to accept me. Funny how that works.
The slow-poke makes his way back, stopping to observe two hawks perched, closely together, mates, on the very top of the mosque's minaret, at the very top of the crescent moon.
I take the back way home, up past the grand pink Spanish villa, now a road block, the E. U., up Tracy Place past Jared and Ivanka's home, past Ted Kennedy's house, Robert McNamara's. At the corner I slow, the allow a Secret Service agent escorting a young child pass, peer for a moment up the street to see how the garden at the corner is today. Closer, I stop by St. Jerome, the statue in front of the Croatian Embassy, and he reminds me more and more of my father. Greatest Doctor of the Church. Bronze statue by Mistrovic. Of course, the little markers of one's neighborhood, when many have passed and good still remains, neighbors.
My problem is that I am a Buddhist. I am a Buddhist and a Christian. Therefore, in my father's terminology, I am a Theosophist, a believer in the Perennial Philosophy that probably all religions speak of through their own terms. Always was, always have been. Forward and backward. What can you do. Living in Buddhist time.
There were earlier efforts. I wrote a book. I wrote a book because I am a Theosophist, one looking for himself in the vast expanses of America and American life, a life that is in flux, always changing. Perhaps I was not so consciously aware of that, but that was the reason why. And I went through a fair amount of heartache and low moods, and memories to struggle with. I wrote a book in order to survive, to find a way forward. Because in life, there are few clues, beyond the career cues and the bank account...
But to simply write, say, a book that is recognizably a book, in trade terms, no longer gets me going in the morning.
If that's all it was, a commercial endeavor, then I'd fall into the old trap, of inappropriate work, that which comes when the focus is on base things, economic free-market capitalism. For that and by that regard, the common regard for what and how deep reality is, I am a fool, an idiot, not quite knowing what to do, but show up for work, a job of physical, mental and verbal behavior (as, for some of us, a job should be, a balance, as it is something we might well have to do for the rest of our lives, and it might as well be good for the health.)
That's the problem. Getting up. Starting the day. Using it to some good end, when you have no good idea of what you are or should be doing. The simple act of writing. Plain, bare, monkish.
But to do that, just that, you have to be looking in the right direction. And perhaps, living in Washington, D.C., and sort of subconsciously trying to keep up, I was thinking of it all wrong, where that direction might indeed be.
Walking along, in the morning: thought of conversation with woman who'd been to Botswana with The Peace Corps. Over the bar we'd brought up JFK. "What a visionary, so ahead of his time," she says as we chat from my end of the bar to hers. (She had put together some clips to show people... President Kennedy, the inception of the idea of The Peace Corps.)
He lived in pain, after a certain point, every day of his life. My thoughts as I walked down the street in the shade of the trees, mansions, embassies, ambassador's residences on both sides. Jack. Every day of his life. And these were not mild pains. Even as far back as 1946, hobbling up flights of stairs in the tenements, first one step up, then the back leg, his first campaign. Grueling. Asked if he might want some help, no, thank you, he would say, politely, I'm fine.
I often walk past the old buildings, aged mansions, often with paint peeling, a vacant front door locked against time, front awnings rusting, cracked glass and wrought iron, weeds grown up, ghosts of old regimes and systems of government power. Back in the early '60s, such buildings, embassies, ambassador residences, chanceries, would have been well-kept, optimistic, striving, clean, vibrant. The old days.
Does it take a certain amount of pain in life, like Jack's... to see things a little bit more clearly than the next person... as if to realize, "we are all in pain, great pain, one way or another." Vonnegut's anxiety, Kerouac's lonesome stranger, Hemingway, really, name one pioneer who had no persistent inner pain. Pain leads to poetry.
But imagine, everyday, at the center of you, your very spine...
If you understood pain, if pain, mental, physical, psychic, or otherwise, was your companion every day, it would be easier to absorb the vicissitudes, the tragic news, of life.
The bar is a tragic space. Gallows humor, black humor, Irishman, immigrant, African American... It is never far from such reflections, the death of a parent, a friend, a pet, ill health, decline, the fucked-up-ness of the world... A drink held in one's paw, a right to drink, a companionship set up there... a fellowship of the ailing.
Walking along, or later, doing yoga and meditating...
It is not just the air and the water and the earth that is polluted, now, it is our minds, it is our speech, it is our actions, it is our spiritual life, our political lives, our personal lives... polluted by the polluting spirit, make a buck....
What better time for a Buddhist revival...
There are days I don't mind so much being alone. Buddhist thought requires lots of space and concentration. Working at night can be disorienting, so I need to adjust, too. It takes three days, usually, to find my way back to a writing space where I can at least slightly understand what the shape of things might be, what I might be working on.
"But aren't you sort of being worthless, just sitting around being Buddhist?"
After a shower to get the pollen of the woods off, I did my yoga, working up a good sweat, and later as I meditated I thought of how far away we've gotten from Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, that something like right speech and right action and right behavior might not be such a bad aim after all. Think what it could do for a pub, a barroom, a wine bar.. Make things a lot easier.
The world is so full of bad ideas. And the worse the idea--take World War One--the bigger it is pumped up, it seems. Take Donald Trump, emblem of the biggest ideas in America, the tycoon, the supposed "Economic Powerhouse," the "builder of America." "The Entrepreneur," to which we must be apprenticed to. The idea that our co-workers, as immigrant as ourselves, are the enemy, taking jobs meant for us, not them...
The big ideas come. And only in time shall the Earth see the fruits of such things.
Have I, too, had, at a younger age, big ideas, attempts at entrepreneurial ways, grand love stories that end with a singing of Ode to Joy? Have I not found that ultimately they were false. Vain. Childish. Typical. Romantic. Illusions. to be stripped away, as transparent as the sadness of any pleasure palace.
However, the core of a person is Buddha and Buddha truth, and this is what survives, old shells sloughed off, molted out of, which is a beautiful thing. False selves, once thought to be you, just part of the bundle, the skandhas of human existence.
The big ideas, the really big most stupid ones, like the Industrial Revolution and its exploitations, like Colonial sins of slavery and imposed hardship, are a relief, as they turn us away from really having to ponder our existences, our truer realities. Then we don't have to think, but just be dumbed down puppets.
The big ideas stand in contrast to the simple freedom of the Zen Temple or the monastery, whereupon one is freed from having to think and buy and earn and get along with the whole craziness and the ecological nightmare.
Before taking a shower before work on the eve of Labor Day, having failed again to get back to school, I look at my old Lincolnesque face in the bathroom mirror. To be a writer one must come upon an awful tragic fate, the birthright of being born into a reality that one must finally understand, a great correction or a realization, though all of this is hard to put into words. These are fates we live through, because we are writers and used to such things. Melville focused on this with the odd and interesting character of Ahab, and Ahab is glorious, played by the noble Gregory Peck in the movie. The great tragic truth is noble and awakening, and it takes a long long time to get there, but once it is there it is present, present in the now the mystics talk about, as we can change neither or present nor our past, but live with it, make the best, keep a good attitude, be of good cheer.
Ahh, but it's not your fault, this great grand Kerouacian loneliness. It is the way the Universe, the thing of Truth, made you, with such a sensitivity as your inheritance, your true character as it is revealed in space and time and continuous just as space and time is continuous, exactly so. And each little event in life, each little turn in the road, often lonesome, with particles of this and that blowing around, often invisibly, is made sense of through being, of course, a whole, an entirety, a complete thing.
As a kid you start drawing. Then, one day, you largely put that down, and look of other things. And then, in your teens, you come upon the great human endeavor of writing. It just seems to fit. What can you do. You will not write that well, but, you learn, and you keep your own high innate standards as best you can. And like a sea voyage, the work progresses. Perhaps you don't sense the progress of this until you sense the end, vaguely, a coastline far far away, but there somewhere. That end might not be the final end, but it holds truths just like death holds truths, both in and out of our own spheres of comprehension.
You knew, all along, what the right thing was to do, and there will little sign posts along the way, teachers, if you will, who teach you through the examples of their own lives, just like Jesus, Rabbi, teaches us, and in the same way like the animal pets in our lives teach us, through the generosity of their existence, their being, their creatureliness.
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