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.