I find that once I'm up, a kind of waking nap, after the tea and the coffee, is useful to collect my thoughts.  It is hard to gather them when there is strife about.  It was hard to write anything before going into work to tend bar and listen to people, because where there are people there are voices, and voices are strife.  It was even hard to write on the first day off, as the strife had gotten down into your system, making me sad and weary, barely capable of walking down to the river and back, feeling very much alone.


If there is a movie shot I would like to do it would be an overhead, looking down on Jesus of Nazareth as he naps on the boat on the Lake of Galilee.  He is curled up in the ropes, and I would have him on his left side, his head resting, in profile of course, on the palm of his left hand, his right hand tucked in around him, a sort of grown-up fetal position, the position of thoughts and dreams in repose.  The ropes are around him, in a sort of nesting circle, strands of thought, tether of worldliness.  The boat is floating there in the water, and Jesus is thinking soundly and privately, and later on will refuse to be agitated until his disciples insist he wake, lest the ship be lost to the waves of the sudden storm.  (Or moonlight ripples, or music, or bawdiness.)



I am still feeling dull and tired, and thinking sad remembrances of young women who I should have befriended better back in the day, but for all the things one misreads in the strife-filled world unto which the peaceful and innocent have come, having to wake to the realities.

Patton's Third Army has been digging outside my apartment window, digging the foundation for the extension of the G.I. era apartment building steps east of my location.  Beep beep beep, the Bobcat bucket loader, backs up over the whoosh of two great engines.  Jesus Christ.  And I am on the very western end of this great city, just shy of where the reservoirs begin.  (A rain storm has come through, at last, at four thirty, but they keep on with the machinery.)  And I don't want to do anything tonight in particular, and would even like to stay out of the wine.  The thought of a bike ride along the towpath, out to where the river narrows, just beyond Chain Bridge, where the herons rook...  The thought of reading Pema Chodron, to rid one's self of bad habits...

To remember a dream, it helps to remain in the same position.  Shifting the body will shift away the whispy channel of dream memory, to be tactilely lost, surrendered to the thousand other things one might think about.

I too am trying to remember the Man of Peace and gentle kindness, the one who got stressed out by all the professional voices, people with real grown-up jobs that I wait on and chat with and listen to where I have no such professional a profession to count upon.  The knowledgable people, jockeying themselves professionally, as they are obliged and bound to do in such a town, loosened up by a cocktail, a glass of wine, the relief of sparring, of raising a voice, while I watch on, silently, attending to the many multi-tasked duties of waiting on bar and table...


Sleeping lightly, in and out, with all the tractor digging noises, moving from the bedroom to the old leather couch, I roused myself to call mom back around three thirty in the afternoon.  I took it easy last night, watched the first half of The Seven Samurai, the fates gathering them through twists and turns and tests, including the scene where the leader of the Seven has a monk shave his head.  I make tea, a bag of green and a bag of Tulsi in a large glass coffee cup, and a small coffee with the Bialetti.  (I had three glasses of Loire Cabernet Franc, twelve percent alcohol last night.  I moved some furniture around.)  I tend to the spider bite wound, healing slowly.

Then I take my nap of calming thought.   And in the calm I am able to write this small amount.


It is what I deserve, to suffer the old regrets about college and young women.  I drank.  I drank too much.  I drank alone.  I lived alone, rather than with my best friends, Jon and Randy, Jeffrey...  I deserve all this, and there must be some point to it.  Granted, to be such a writer I am in the wrong line of work, but that too is what I deserve, I suppose.

The "man of sorrows," why am I always so sad...