My father had looked at a piece of my writing a long time ago.  An American Adam, was a phrase he used for what he perceived of my endeavor at poetry or what-have-you, what I was telling, what I was talking about.

And I suppose without fully realizing it, my efforts here could be described as an attempt at, as silly as it sounds, spiritual journalism.  And I would put Kerouac, or much of his work, into that category, by the way, his telling of the Buddha's story, Wake Up, a sort of background, an inner spine to his other works...



The eve of Halloween...  I need to go see my mom.  The endeavor of renting a car from Enterprise up the street near the Omni Shoreham, packing, and then the question of the timing of the long drive.  Halloween is slow at the Dying Gaul wine bar, typically, too close to Georgetown Halloween hooliganism.  There's nothing on the book.  I get in about five from the hassle of traffic on Massachusetts as college age people, young women in full bloom peruse the avenue's embassies in provocative and enticing outfits.  But I achieve a decent enough bar set-up, building on the set-up I did with my own two hands the exhausting night before.

I eye the staff meal down in the kitchen as I try to get hold of mom on the phone.  (Turns out she'd turned down the ringer on her landline, I find out later.)  Chicken joints hacked into small pieces, in a kind of sauce, I finally have little stomach for.  Wings are okay, good even, but this meal, after so many repeats of it, even the Buddha might say, "nah, I'm not that hungry.". Back in the day we'd get whole chicken, good for a breast man.  I get hold of mom, and at five thirty, we are ready to go.

The waitress server has an outfit for Halloween.  A party to go to at a club catering to the Russian community, down on Connecticut Avenue downtown.  "You want me to close for you, so you can drive up to see your mom?"  I should have said, yes, that would be extremely helpful, but I need the money.

And then after the boss shows up, held up by bridge traffic, we let her go.  She had called him three times earlier in the day, asking if she could have it off.


And then the night gets busy.  The boss sits with his wife for dinner, just as I'm sat with the  last string of people, as the downstairs servers have gone home.  A couple, of high maintenance, wants to sit in the back room, taking the table in the middle of a fourteen seat room.   Another couple comes in at nine, after working on kitchen renovations.  The boss is eating with his wife sharing a bottle of Bordeaux when friends, an older couple from down the road take a seat at the bar, and I recall suddenly that Halloween is their anniversary.   So, of course, a splash of champagne, and they order dessert, and soon the five sitting at the bar, as I run around, are talking of what to do and see and where to stay in Paris, including a gentleman at the end, whom I later let finish the Marguax the boss didn't finish.  I'm running out of paper on my little pad, and it's a great rush to get in orders by kitchen closing, which the kitchen, told by the downstairs servers that it's not busy, and I have my hands full, and busboy is partly attending to wanting to get his own side work done downstairs so he can go home sooner rather than later.  I'm there 'til midnight.  And I don't want to drink, and am half thinking of leaving straight from work.  But I'm shaking driving home, and it's dark out, and I am fried, physically and emotionally, and the wine does its job, two glasses of Pinot Noir once I am back, ready to load the car parked out on the quiet street.  It calms me down, yes it does, and I need such medicine for all I face now in life at age fifty three going on four.  Lincoln made it to fifty six, and it didn't let up on him until his final weeks.

I lay down in bed, with iPhone alarm set for a forty minute nap, and I take a little bit longer, and by six forty five, I'm showered, ready to go, a splash of green tea, water bottles full, a quick gluten-free turkey sandwich down the hatch, the phone charged, etc.


So, there we go, up Massachusetts, up around the traffic circle at American University, and in the darkness I stop for a jogger in the cross walk, and he waves, thanks.  Up the hill, Ward Circle, and onward toward River Road, up another hill and over it, and the light behind me and to the East is starting its blueish glow in the rear view.  Past one bit of construction that confuses me on River, I get honked at, but then I am taking the slow rounded slope onto the Beltway, and it is not quiet at this hour, but I am able to merge, left, left, and then again left, and again, to make the split to the 270 spur.  Going forward now, Northwest, cruising along okay, but coming toward me in the other direction, miles upon miles of headlights, merging lanes, traffic at a standstill, and what are we doing to this earth we live on and unto ourselves....

There's a ground fog, low on the banks and fields of the Monocacy River, the land left to nature, as I drive on to Frederick.  The same mist on the fields that have survived the rapacious town home development and highway overpasses as I drive north east along Route 15...


And then it's the usual... the push on past Round Top little mountains in the distance of Gettysburg, the sun out over rolling Civil War country, old Pennsylvania type barns of brick and stone bases and wooden rafters, beams, siding...  Corn.  Earlier the beautiful passage through the Catoctin...

Stopping at the shopping mall south of Harrisburg, to use the restroom at McDonalds and gas from the Giant gas station...  Clouds to the North, looking just like the mountains of the Blue Ridge, moisture in the clouds I will be passing through.

Then onward, onto the PA Turnpike to skirt eastward around the city along the Susquehanna and the military storage warehouses, over the river, fog, the toll plaza, and through the city and onto 81...

81 splits off after the flats and farms and uncertain commercial lots, one for car auctions, and heads into the mountains, soon rising, and here the trucks in the right lane to face the climbing roads...

I get through to mom at some point, as I ease down into Scranton, looking for the 76, the toll road worth every penny, a direct route without traffic that drops you finally back onto 81.  NPR is playing a piece about the long history of political activism in sports in particular the NBA.

Just get here safe, Mom tells me.

I forget where I ate my double quarter pounder no cheese with knife and fork.  Harrisburg, I suppose, just as they switched over from the breakfast menu.

Yes, we will go to the Press Box when I get there, due in about 2:30 to Oswego...


I am relieved coming in the door.  The kitchen is not so clean, and there is a garbage smell lingering.  There are fruit flies this year, in my house too.  An open cat food can on the counter, and in the fridge, but she is still there with us, and spry even at almost 80.  She's been having her moments of confusion.   But over dinner, she is lucid and happy, a good conversationalist, and later we talk about what's going on in my job.  After the nap from eating and drinking so early, we have a grand chat about how Buddhism is true to these very times.

Stories from work about the people who do say, 'I'm very sorry for your friend,' and those who say nothing, absolutely, about it, as if it were something unpleasant to sweep to the side, to not look at as we consume.  They knew him too.  They spoke with him too.  They exchanged chuckling remarks too with him over dinner and wine at the bar later on in the night.  Coldness in people's hearts, I see.  This is all about making money, as if, as if...  Rather than the humanity of the thing, for the Christian minded, for the Buddhist, and for those of Islam who understand that wine can be, according to Issa, a medicinal important to the mathematics of being alive with a mind and all.  Oh, well.  Maybe it's a cultural thing.

It's a wonderful conversation over the dinner table at one in the morning.  We talk about her taking her medicine.  She might have, according to a recent visit to the ER, which pains me to mention, a UTI, and we are going to see the doctor down in Fulton tomorrow, after an earlier appointment with the lady from Social Services, oh boy.

Write this down, she tells me, as I describe the long Fellini horror of all those trucks and busses and cars and vehicles with human souls in them stuck in the unmoving traffic on 270 motionless from Rockville and further back down the line into DC or the Beltway, madness.  Those long lines, that is where our spirit of economic competition and selfish look out for number one economically have led us to.  It's amazing it still even works, strung out more and more on the most ethereal of economic vapors of promise, as if technology of the high will save us somehow rather than destroy.

And I tell my mom, it is because I am naturally gifted at what I do, ostensibly, bar tending, on the outside, to appearances, that bring the people back to me, so that they, many, are driven to say aloud, behold the man, you are very very good at what you do.  As I along the same lines, tell them, well, I'm not sure exactly what I do, but that I see the same on the other side of the bar.

And earlier, as the door opened, as I stuffed check presenters with the little fliers about next weeks wine tasting and jazz nights, etc., and the little sign up for our email, sitting, then going down, I'll be right back, I'm going to check in the basement closet if there are any more water glasses to be had, a few odds and ends that will at one moment make a difference, smooth rather than monkey wrench stop, when I come back and settle in, after she, my co worker, lets leave it at that, has poured him his first glass, I am down on my knees rising from the cooler having restocked a few finishing touches, I rise and ask him, 'hey, sir, where you coming in from today..."

And it turneth out that he hails from Texas, from around Dallas.  Well, I've been to Austin and the Hill Country, granted, a long time ago.  Love Texas hospitality, friendliness, music, food, culture, story telling...  And soon enough we are having, me and him, just, a great conversation.  He did go to UT.  Now he's in investments, reasonably happy.  He's tall and thin, and looks Texan, indeed, from Scotch Irish.  His wife is out of town.

His father had a car dealership back in the day.  Plymouth Chrysler...  He and his brother grew up on the lot, and you learn a lot in such a place, and I know this from my mom's kind mechanic up North....

I'm about to go out of mind with fear and anxiety, but in such a state, there are no beams in the eye between myself and good Bill from TX.  My coworker dutifully goes about the few other tables, officiously, covering the bases.  The man's father kept a local guy around, a helper, whom he'd sometimes fire on Friday, but the guy would come back on Monday, and what the hey, African American guy, named LD.  Lawyer Dallas.  And he says, funny you would ask me that, and all the question that led up to us discussing life's essentials in an eery way...

Yeah, man, I'm Irish, thus it's hard to tell the difference between being a mamma's boy and the literary parts of story telling...  And all the rest.  The bardic wine glass of life...  He gets it, and even with the shade of grey different from, say, 60 to going on 54, there ain't much difference.  And I knew he's the one who can offer more advice upon this life stuff.

Hey, as long as you like what you're doing, that works.  Who's to say...

I could get tired of that message, but yet, it works, still, somehow, though the uneasy and sometimes horrible truths to stomach have forced me toward a Buddhist view, which is to say, a Christian view, and maybe even Islamic, depending what cultural lens you are using.  You don't discriminate against me, I won't discriminate against you.

The man from Texas is the reason I want to stay this night, just to complete the cycle of conversation, as is due to any Christian mind, to get closer to that which one sees when he puts away childish things, sees through the glass, no longer speaking as a child, being a child, but becoming "a man."  I need these days at the old Gaul to remind myself of the meaning of my work, valid as the work of any professionally qualified therapist, and really much finer and better than that dreary exercise of sitting in offices in some miserable city of some miserable empire....



Elaine Pagels, scholar of The Gnostic Gospels, not a stranger to tragedy, son and husband lost within a year, is on Terry Gross, Fresh Air, as I endure traffic crossing from Indian Town Gap on the last marches to Harrisburg.  At the rest stop there, westward, on the in ramp, a tractor trailer has had to pull off to the inside, ripping up the green turf of November, tires sunk in deep.  To merge back into traffic from the exit of the rest stop is difficult to make stopping here a bad idea.  And further up ahead, a tandem tractor trailer has spilt a pile of hay, still green and moist, as if a giant insect had excreted it, as if in some Japanese monster horror film.  As I approach, slowed, the turned-over truck's body and chassis are more evident.  They have just hauled off the cab, a Mack, older than you usually see these days, white paint, bent frame, driver compartment crushed in atop at the driver's side, and hard to tell which side of the highway from which it came even by the tracks here in the field median.  Slowed, on this last approach, one looks out the driver side window onto the median, and there is lots of detritus.  Deeply dug earth exposing dirt tire tracks telling stories of crashes.  Bits of plastic, cracked of in the explosion of vehicles.  Dead deer, cut in half, crushed, ripped into small pieces, or whole, dying broken within.  Coyotes, even hawks.  Lots of road kill the whole way.  One thinks he grows immune to it but each sight of a deer sagged in death or cut horrible apart, carnage, hurts one to see.  Why are we doing all this, one wonders.   And even more deer all along, all along this long route of eight hours driving.  Is all this straw?  Why?  Bedding or fodder?  Farm transport?   Old grass, still green and moist, aged, now spread out across the space between north and south double lanes of 81...

Elaine Pagels returning to life, praying, meditating with the Trappists...  And coming upon the oldest texts of the early Christian life, and gospels heretical quoting Jesus saying that one must bring out that which is within, and that if you do not bring out bring out that which is within, that which is within will destroy you....  And Jesus, a Buddhist, more or less, "lift a rock and I am there, I am there when wood is split, I am there..."   It turns out she knew Jerry Garcia when she was a high school student.  A friend of hers died, in fact, in a car accident that Jerry was in as well, and Jerry went through the windshield.  Grateful Dead, no wonder.



Shake the dust of the offending town in which thou art unwelcome off thy feet, Jesus tells us.  The Buddha would have said, more or less, the same.  For therein shall be a good lesson, a learning, the lotus flower of wisdom.

It's been raining at least lightly, misting, the entire route, from Oswego on down.  I stopped to take a nap at the rest stop near Whitney Point.  After nine hours I am closing in on the Beltway, and in this traffic I decide not to take the usual turn, which involves a sharp merger to the right to get onto River, but instead take Old Georgetown Road, which confuses me in the dark with all the lights.  Slow going.

It's about quarter of seven when I get in to the basement of the restaurant, coming in through the back door, changing into a shirt suitable for work.  The main dining room is already two thirds full, and upstairs at the bar it is busy too, and an old friend is waiting for my arrival at the first seat the bar, a man who cycles, in great shape, biked up some of the great cols of the Tour in the Alps, and who has read my book.  I do not like running late to work, and the bar lacks a good set-up, no fruit cut, no mineral water in the cooler, the popular whites Sancerre and Macon Village not backed up so well either.

Later, the next day, at the end of the trying jazz night akin to being dunked in a river, I find out my server friend, the one with her costume who left early Halloween night gives me credit for only half a shift.  Come on.  All the times I let her come in late, no problem, giving her a full shift on our little checkout report...