It's now 2:15 in the morning on the night of the full moon just before Easter.  The leaves are well on their way to make the hillsides green here by the reservoir.  First day off after the work week.  Two naps.  The latter one after returning to the new apartment.  On the couch, I have the first dream involving the geography of the new apartment, dim in the dream, a child-like diorama.  The road to the west comes out of the woods, obscured by a curve, and trees.  Behind where we live there are paths uphill through the woods, secret paths almost, up the bluff and to the farmers fields and undeveloped lands above.  This picture, from the dream, is fanciful.  Two young women are walking on these paths, either for exercise or the relaxation of a mutual adventure.  Feeling like a creep here still, in the dream, alone, I am reluctant to interfere with them.  But they come nearer and I ask them where the paths go, and they answer, just as expected.  And there is a calm before night falls and the car's headlamps come, rarely as they do, in this countryside dream at the edge of a metropolitan area.


Don Quixote:  the first tale portraying the psyche, of how bold an adventure it is to go out into the world, to be amongst all its disorienting objects and paths, its roads, buildings.  No wonder the largest building, at the time, a windmill, is some sort of terrible giant to do battle with.

Tales from the first AA meeting.  One's own childish ridiculousness in the face of having to be an adult.


I have gone to see Mary Karr give a talk at the Arlington Central Library.  I meet friends there.  I hitch a ride back with them.   I was going to take the 45 minute walk through Clarendon to the Key Bridge in the moonlight, to orient myself, but I'm not going to pass up a chance to hang out with friends.  We get in the car to find a place to eat, a popular local barbecue place.  My friends are ordering.  I get an angus beef rib, collard greens.  I feel guilty getting a glass of wine, but my friend Anna wants a beer, and she's paid for dinner.

Driving back after barbecue at Rocklands in Clarendon, the subject of AA comes up again.  A chance to be an adult, a chance to know how you really feel about something, anything.

Another lesson from the talk:  people will project upon whatever encounter their own reality.   Maybe that lets me out of the whole business of being taking as a kind of "stalker" by the Upper West Side Princess who'd been barking at cab drivers and ordering bagels in loud busy shops since she was seven, as opposed to this hick here who does not particularly relish the competitions of the city life.

We all react differently to real events as they happen.  We record them differently in the our minds, we remember them differently.  Our own experiences warp the things that happen as they happen into the  reality of our own space time, the gravitational pulls that we all must have by virtue of being human.  Kurosawa did a movie about that.  What really happened?  And this is something Mary Karr the memoirist author brings up.

I myself was the small town country boy, or rather a boy of the old land, of old experiences that go back thousands of years.  The grassland, the forest, the weather, the shape of the country itself.  Living so, up on Ernst Road out there in the small college town of Clinton, New York, amongst the old independent family dairy farms, up by the marvelous hills and outlooks of Champion Road and Skyline Drive, Vernon, Vernon Center, Knoxboro, Oriskany Falls, Deansboro, it wasn't much of a stretch to conjure in the imagination the vague background of all stories told, Tolkien, Bible, those of American History...  The old patterns were still there, still in the air.

I had no clue, no clue how shrewd you really have to be in order to have a decent life.  For one thing you have to be competitive.   You can't be an innocent.  That would be sticking your head in the sand and hoping all bad things would go away.



My life now, what's left of it, seems to be about slow discoveries, minor victories.  The grocery store.  A walk past the reservoirs in the fresh afternoon heat to the Palisades Library to return Moby Dick and Dunkirk DVDs, to pick up a collection of Wendall Berry essays.  I begin to recognize neighbors of mine out here in this quiet exile at the Western edge of town.


Unfortunately for things such as career and fitting into the changing world, I regressed.  I had my role model of James Dean.  But rather than move to New York City in an attempt to be an actor, I sought out the country boy, the Jett Rink.  The small town.  Levis.  Cowboy boots.  Long drives through different towns, quiet and unappreciated, more or less left behind.  Farms and farm equipment.  The land as it was back then, before developments you had to buy into by definition in order to survive, the whole thing, the car, the commute, the office, the structure....  I should have celebrated the creative, the musical abilities, the wish to learn to sing out loud, to dance;  these are things that belong to the city, connections, other artists to collaborate with...

And yet, I didn't chose that.  I chose the most modest, the most purely spiritual (in a way.)  The things of the writer, of one who is always and ever adrift.

My astrology, of being born amongst people like Danny Kaye and Fellini and A.A. Milne and Muhammed Ali suggested that growing up would be very difficult, and possibly even tragic.  To become a bartender, to even enter into the idea of working in a restaurant, which I entered into innocently and with decent habits and with a great reluctance to talk to people.  Being a busboy worked for me.  You ran around all night.  It kept your mind from wondering back to all the things you messed up without having ever had any intention of messing up.  Isolation is a bad thing.


Then there are the things we conjure up in our minds, privately for the most part...  Spiritual thought, religious though without so much a habit of going to church.

The churches meant for you are writing groups and meetings like AA Meetings, and for Jesus types meeting over wine and gluttonous things with sinners and cigarette smokers, with the blind, with those who know not the mote, the beam, the dust in their own eye.  Brother, let me help you.  And yet it is a world where only an outstanding extreme type like a Jesus can really help you.

In the great backpacks of all the world, one hopes there are laptops on which to efficiently write memoirs upon, a hot spot WIFI for you wherever you are....

It had brought a lot to deal with, this last year in my own personally warped time and space...  "I deserve it, I guess," I said to myself,  "all those golden chances and golden years pissed away..."  The Erica, the Elena, the Smithie, the Holyoke future wife, the DeMotts, the Pritchards, the Calvin Plimptons, the good ways of starting out as a prep school teacher and moving on up from there, the local congressman's office my brother's drinking college buddy rowdy friends hooked me up with, but again, I piss away all I touch....  All I touch, except the farm boys, the country people, the chefs, the Huck Finn types...  the strange humble types...

The problem with the species, with all creatures, perhaps, is of having too much talent, such an impossible amount of talent, and each unique to itself.  And then rather than trying to harvest, to keep up with all that, rather than allow life to be a live performance we are forced into things.  Forced to divide.  Forced to tell other people to shut up.

Ugly people will tell you to shut up.  Ugly people will crush you, just as you hint of all the talents you might have, all the clarity of vision, the ability within to raise the creative dead...  The story of Jesus Christ, all over again.

The world has to be asked...  Have we lost the ability to care about other people, other creatures, other lives, other things?  What language do we have for such, when making good money and dealing with the city...  Why do people who actually really care end up going mad or living in monasteries?  Congratulate Dick Cheney on all his muscular Halliburton work and for making all his money, but where is his or Donald Rumsfeld's ability for empathy.  ("We kill the enemy humanely now," making it sound like the U.S. Military under such guidance as the Iraq Halliburton wars was a Buddhist gift, correcting errant schoolboys with a John Donne chide...)

Sometimes you have to (shut up completely) be quiet for a long time, to observe silences, in order to gain the language of caring and empathy.  A kind of death.  An understanding of all the suffering people must go through alone and in private and even when busy, when trying to live, when trying to do all one should do, all the things one wants to fulfill as far as a Godly life.  To be in the shut-up state, however dignified that may be, not showing off your wisdom and erudition, let's say, in the classroom, Modern British Poetry, is, in one way, to bow out of the competition of academia which, if you survived its sword dance, would have let you go on to be the great teacher you wanted to be.

It's hard to be empathetic from an airplane, though some of us, who people would probably call poets, are capable of.  Anyone with a job is going to have a hard time being that ultimate kind loving being of deep soul in tune with nature...  When I get a retirement plan sufficient, then I will do good works...

But by then those too are only about the money one has in cash reserves...  Philanthropic, as impersonal as anything is, as impersonal as the bank.


I was a good bartender, a good barman, because I cared.  I actually cared.  I still do.  I still enjoy it.  But, maybe, let me off the hook now?  Things to worry about...

There's a fallacy deep down in it.  A lie.


I do laundry.  I end up being up until the birds are singing and the first light.  I smoke an American Spirit after cutting the filter off, down the stairs and out onto the teak bench.  By now I've had a whole bottle of wine almost.  I call mom.  She's doing okay.  We compare notes on writing, on being a pack rat.

The voice is all, Mary Karr impresses upon us.    The voice holds a memoir together.

During her talk, a thought passes my mind, just as the thought, the impression, about Don Quixote.  Is the story of Jesus, and maybe in particular that of Holy Week's events, the memoir of humanity, a kind of a model, redemption, resurrection, a way to the better life...