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...