Sketch from Early December...

So, I have failed.

I have a glass of wine.  Another day alone.  Can't afford to go out.  Don't want to tire myself out anyway.

There's a cooked turkey in the fridge.  I burned the gravy taking a nap, getting into the wine a little early, keeping a lonely mom company over the phone.

I am a failure.  I should just quit my job.  It's too late to do anything else already.  Not many left in my corner.  Time for a change.



I dream of visiting a mythical Amherst town of my childhood.  There are playing fields of my youth, streams, hills that rise to small beautiful wooded mountains.  To see the old places is emotional and comforting, and I see that I should have never left, that such a town is more my speed, more than the city with its wide busy impersonal roads.  I should have known it.

Ingrained in mythology as much as the Flood, the sad tale of leaving the forest for the agrarian settlement, and it only gets worse after that for the nomadic hunter gatherer.

I came to the city, and in my state, everything went wrong, everything a lie, out of one foolish decision, which was to go into the restaurant business.

The wine is a crutch to my moods these days.  And I am in the wrong business for a Buddhist.

For the Buddhist, failure is to single and limited a term.  Failure could be, in a way, understood as a successful grasp of reality, but it does not feel that way in America....


Round about early Saturday evening, I start to feel normal again.  A huge effort to go out into the rain for tea, groceries, Rite Aid.  Pouring rain.  Sidewalks are slippery wet, the cars speeding by kick up great sprays of water along the curbs, I almost slip on dog fecees on the street, lugging four bags full.

The ancient wild man retreats.