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....
No comments:
Post a Comment