I have not written in a long time.

We live somewhere between fear and self-confidence.

The staff party, I slid away, with a quick wave to the young woman behind the bar, and one staff member from the other restaurant, as the party picked up, dancing, the music loud.  I'd gotten away with a watered down glass of wine, some calamari, a small portion of marsala, a meatball and a half.  I'd not slept well the night before, even after my work shift, and I suspected the night with the chef at Russian Home and then the Golden Palace with my chef friend, as innocently as it had begun was having its usual toll on my mental and physical health and energies, even as the solar eclipse reigned in my sign, signifying impetus for changes...

I got back after taking the metro--part of me wanted to walk all the way back from 7th Street, as Lincoln might have, if it were night mabye--got in and took a nap and the nap grew heavier and heavier in the cold under a blanket.  Four hours later, I woke, and it was dark out and I wasn't even hungry, groggily putting in a load of laundry.  And then I lazed around, after the sense from the luncheon of being in a foreign place, not knowing what I was even doing there.  They are your friends, your co-workers, they keep you out of trouble.  I watched the beers go down around me, smiled awkwardly, avoided the dancing, called my mom amidst the noise in the adjacent large empty dining room, looked at the vintage pictures of immigrants from Italy and so forth, the old country, used the john, and departed into the January air alone, as I always do, not partaking in the continuation....  The Chef wasn't drinking, tolerating it all on a day off, a few people had left already...  I didn't have it in my to want to stay...


So, the new year, and what direction to take...  I'd ordered incense, frankincense and myrrh, but it hadn't come yet, and I had an on-line chat with a woman I'd not met yet, but who seemed cool, and then later, after a cold walk on the avenue around ten at night, messaged a woman out in the Bay Area, a poet, who'd gone to school with me.  Our messaging coincided with my viewing of adult pleasure, vintage German, a man at play with two women, BBW in the parlance of porn.  And guiltily I enjoyed myself, who knows why I was in such a mood, but that I'd been under some stress-- while messaging her, and she made a joke observing multi-tasking, when I mentioned that yes it is too cold in DC, and that we have to keep warm somehow in this low winter months...   One can be open with a poet.  The sun rises and the sun sets, and we are who we are...  Having a voice on the other end of the line allowed me to prolong my enjoyment.

My horoscopes seemed rife with positive changes, forward steps, and maybe one is to be open with people, even when it is frightening, even when your old self-confidence has been stomped upon repeatedly, even when you are feeling quite guilty about what you are doing, but for the physical pleasure of it.  Baby steps...


The staff party happened to be on Orthodox Christmas, and our friend had been to the church up Massachusetts Avenue, and we had all talked about how Orthodox priests not only tend to be married, or can marry, but have to be married.  The reminder prompted me to check in on the system.

The conversation had been really wonderful with the woman I'd chatted with before, touching on exercise, depression, spirituality, Catholicism, and it felt like I was on a roll by the time I got a ping from Messenger from my San Fran poet friend.



And I knew, somehow, I needed to change, to move on, forward, to not be called to be involved with the usual entanglement, all the illusions of the tangible and observable world.  So tired, sick even, of having to go through with it all, even as much as I, in the words of a friend, did my work with a tangible love...I wanted to go off, away, into a desert of some sort, a place of reckoning.


I felt a fresh need to be free.