Tired on a day off, after all that, plus the strain of a busy wine-tasting night, again short-staffed.  They know I can handle it, but it raises frustration levels, and the good guy, a long lasting friend arrives when he can to help me out, just as I am nervously wondering about my set-up and worried for not having an orange in case someone orders an Old Fashioned, and already having to make martinis to spec.  Demoralized.  They hit me early.  Belvedere, shades of dirty...  Christ, have a glass of wine.


Day off number two, still tired, and feeling a personal winter setting on.  I left my Kerouac book and Sapiens up at mom's.  I find a pamphlet, a reprint of an old one, my Dad's, on Theosophy, and it's good reading. Mom's all alone up there.  What do I do?  After lazing around all day, I think of Biblical situations, Job, the Prodigal Son, Jonah.  Something is coming.  Perhaps it will be, in the long run, a good thing. A correction.

But in the meanwhile, having stayed in, being a good boy, there is not much juice for something to be squeezed out into written thoughts and accounts.  Perhaps it would be better to do some cleaning anyway, after the trip throwing your routine up in the air.  So it's time, time for that panacea of a nice light red wine, Pinot Noir, or Beaujolais, and I find some good jazz on the radio rather than listening to the News Hour about the latest shooting, a PTSD ex-Marine, shooting up college night in a place called Thousand Oaks out in California, 12 people dead.   Black-eyed peas over cold rice pilaf isn't so exciting, but something for the stomach.  Something to calm the anxious mind.  A bit of red wine.

I have never figured out anything better to do for a living other than being a Christian Buddhist, a Theosophist open to all forms of spiritual experience and expression.  You can only come across such a thing honestly, out of personal experience.   Of course you're going to be highly attracted to the female of the species, starting off.  And such attractions will cause you some of the greatest and long lasting of pains and heartache and forms of anger at injustice you will experience, or at least serve as an introduction to them.  I don't have Wake Up, Kerouac's life of Buddha with me, but, written within, a woman will always be presenting her physical self, enticing you.

And how could you live without that drive, and without that deserved fulfillment after you've fought and earned it and shown how good a householder you are on top of that, not just a moral pillar, a righteous and fair person.  And you, however, have a greater stronger instinctive drive besides the sexual, one toward wisdom, toward goodness, which causes you to understand the importance of the opposite of the sexual drive, that, in Buddhist terms, you must leave the wheel of suffering and constant desire, in order to find a true life, one of freedom.  Sad though all this may be.  Maybe it represents a fresh new starting point, a rebirth, a new line after all your struggles serving meat and booze and weapons of war and realizing finally that such isn't good, all of this letting yourself get bullied by the financial illusions of money and value in the world.

Beware, the Buddha tells us, as far as the Sangha community goes.  Just like all mortal people, they will want to exercise their powers, and this, they instinctively feel, is through the presentation of themselves as able vehicles of reproduction, of birthing the next generation and family.  If one were to resist their power trips, that person will be viewed as a threat, one to be bullied back into the space of male cooperation.  A woman's agenda, perhaps not always, is a mixed one, when the species falls into a situation of concentrated power, as often happens in the city.  Every message a male will send unto them will be received in the woman's mind as a mixed message, and the female quickly gets huffy.

God help the poor young fellow attempting to be a gentleman, respecting her from a distance as the feminist literature might say, 'treat her as an equal.'  God help the poor young fellow who listens to her literally, who does not take her protests as part of the mating dance.  Show any signs of confusion, even if it honest, and she will tear you apart, as much as she might admire your character.

These are lessons that take years, many, to learn.  And once having completed the course, I suppose it would be a bit difficult not to be wry or bitter about the whole thing.   Oh, one says, thanks so much for all those feminist lessons...  Those really helped, yeah right.


(You will all probably consider me a madman for saying all this.  But I know, I have seen it happen in the workplace, then, now, and again.)

What good did all that temptation do you?  Well, the thing is that probably, originally, with a wiseness beyond your own years, you saw through that whole show of temptation.  You didn't necessarily mean to, but you did.  And once you saw of the great illusions, unfortunately for your career as a future householder, you saw the others to all down the line.  The fakeness.  The falseness.  The act.  The insincerity.  The great lie.  Once expressed very well in a book called All Quiet on the Western Front.  The old pro patria mori line.  Sure, teacher, why then don't you go out and sign up?  People and their marvelous opinions they want to share with you.

Enough to make one an old jazzman.  A poor rebel, battling ill health to make his music happen.

Great art is not ironic after all things have been taken into consideration.  The Buddha statued in lotus position in meditative peace enlightenment is not ironic.  Jesus is not ironic.  Most Wyeth paintings are not ironic, picturing a happy life as if in a Coca Cola ad.


You see them at work.  The money changers in the Temple...

In the end there is Buddhism.  Treat all sentient beings with respect.  Don't tangle with women.


My own inner Civil War, fought up close and personal.  Some women kind.  Some women very kind. Many of them being absolute shits to me.  Bullies.  In my face.  Me the harrasser?  Au contraire, my friend...  Au contraire.