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.