G'damn, all's I want to do is close down jazz nite, let's just have a quiet easy end of the night, no pushing the kitchen with late night orders, and then, even as soon as I get to work, Ali is bringing her Brazilian friends in, a group, for dinner, just about as late as you can get...  I want to get home, pack up, I gotta get on the road to go see my mom.  I need to pack.  It was hard enough to wake up and get to the car rental after the last few nights, wine tasting, etc., me feeling all this dread about me and nerves, the sense I'm about to lose everything, thanks to being a wine drinker all these years and the stupid restaurant business and being a barman and having been taken on so many rides you don't even want to care to know, and just as things seem maybe they could calm, Mr. K comes in, with his suit, his immaculate tie, there's no room at the bar, he wants to introduce me and I look blankly and people from a far away country, god, can't I just get a break here...  But I suck it up, as A and I are cranked into busy just at that evil hour when the kitchen is supposed to be closing, I shrink their chaos drinks, one old fashioned, two rose, the other young lady...  Melissa, FEMA, as opposed to Khaos other one, I get the drinks, and I'm hustling, targeted, strategic,  breathing in and out, taking my time to think and get organized before I mobilize on such a position back there in the goddamn wien room, I got them happy, but oh fuck other regulars have just shown up, lovable people, just that I've bled a lot already,...

So weird.  The  Brazilians leave, Ali, being Slavic, leaves me with the impression I have done, or am doing, something wrong...  We've ridden the last long hour and half, the downstairs waiters having left long ago now after their easy and orderly night...  Mr. Khaos invites one more of his women friends by, "is the door locked," he goes downstairs, let's her in, and this upsets some sort of equilibrium I don't know about, and now it's all even more chaos, and he comes back with the big tattooed heavy bearded guy in an orange tee shirt, and they want a Lagavulin, or some sort of Islay, and I look at 'em, as I have many times, and it's the usual prosaic collection of malts, I don't give a shit, fine, he wants the one for $21 a pop, fine, it's going on his check, all the misery he's put me through when I had other peaceable things to be going and doing...

Thoughts, they come at you, too fast.  And who knows why, why on one day you should have this thought, and one day another, all, as if inspired, coming out the deep pool of idle rest.

So when you get up, have several phone conversations with your mom far away as you wake up, go make tea, look into Facebook, seeing reactions to the picture and the video you posted, then take into account work, upcoming travel, finances, immediate needs for the day, like wine and food and library returns...

You have some sense of the thoughts that have emerged out of the blankness.

I write not to write, directly, say, as in a way of achieving anything that might have the kind of merits which deserve publishing, but rather to explore the process as a teacher, as for what a look at the process, one's own personal process, would do.

And in the same vein, the writer is also exploring his own psyche, which is what he has to go on, a far as coming up with any sort of history that would allow for a narrative to show and not so directly tell.

Again, it's hard to be able to sit down without panic, but it has to be done.

My thoughts seemed wrapped around the thought of we do we listen to, who do we respect, when it comes to those acts and opinions that fall into the realm of the spiritual.  Whom do we listen to in a world where clout is (increasingly) materialistic, economic...  Would we, do we bother to listen to anyone whose claim is less money, more thought, more eye to the whole being of group existence of all creatures and sentient beings of this manifested universe.

Teachers often fail the first time around.  And then if you add on top of that the nerves of being this spiritual teacher, it's not easy.

There are all sorts of charges people throw around these days, and this didn't just happen yesterday.  I remember thirty years of it, the painful charges that come from city people to those who bring them the grace of the countryside...


I sit and listen to people talk about their novels, these days....  It's not a game to me, it's not a marketing project, it's a serious matter that cuts to the core of our being, you realize, once you've grown in stature, as they say...

Eh, maudit, they will always try, without meaning to even, pull the rug out from under you.  They fit in, you don't.  They can afford living.  You yourself can afford a walk in nature, a simple meal, a bottle of wine, not a lot beyond that, anyway, superfluous...  And one should know this, in dealing with any topic, really.   Separating the spiritual and the important from the unimportant.   Sustenance, remember what sustains you and it will sustain you all along.  Perhaps to realize just what that is, you have to be in various spots, various jams, unhappinesses....

Comes the deep despair of mid-week.  Two hard nights, Father's Day, Sunday night, and then Monday Jazz Night hot and busy, no relent to the end.    Tuesday, I get up, shower, manage a few slow dispirited yoga stretches as workmen come and go, and then off to Tuesday Wine Tasting...

Wednesday night, I'm tired, dragging myself in for Jazz Night, and Jazz Night is always a bitch.  Mark Congdon, an old wine rep friend of the old Dying Gaul comes in, early, by himself, bolstering my spirits.  I wondered if he might be coming in with Roland who's moved out west.  Mark, here for a social visit--he's hooked back up with the boss again for his importing company carrying a French gin--goes out back into his car, bringing in three bottles of French wine, red, natural wine, strangely dry, dark and earthy, lovely surprises... Okay, something to look forward to.  I'm not going to turn away the chance of a taste when this my business.  As Mark points out, Why aren't you a wine rep?  Well, maybe you don't like driving around..  He has a nice life for himself, wife, two kids, plays in a band on weekends...  I have one more shift to get through, then I'm off for a few days, and then in a week, driving up to check in on mom...


Thursday, the first day off.  12:40 metro bus back into town, getting off at Dupont, up Connecticut in the blazing unprotected pavement reflected light, through my old neighborhood and past the Starbuck's patio where I'd sit with yellow legal pad scribbling away like dissatisfied Hemingway, to get blood taken for the Lyme Disease test.  Hopefully going smoothly.   My thoughts wish to get back to Buddha and Kerouac, but there's this thing to take care of.  Hot, but still a breeze, puffy blue clouds, the leaves are fresh still, tender with moisture, a happy kind of green before they too get leathered by the season of working for the tree, the tree that is connected to the earth and all of us.


Slowly and surely I discovered that the Princess, in real life, was not the great person I thought.  I found her increasingly strident, judgmental, a pusher of identity politics.  There were excellent reasons I didn't get any closer to her, it just took me a long time to see them clearly, even as I saw them well enough.

And I guess I am, as a friend will come and comment, about the Paternalism in Kerouac's prose, of that school, where people need to respect and listen to each other...  No one would want to bring up the subject...  The roles we play, who should listen to whom, the lack of spirituality...

I don't know if I could ask anyone to explain it, but every time when my mom was harsh, telling my dad, my spiritual teacher, he was a failure, or attacking him with her frustrations, with her, I'm sorry, feminist point, a class cannot be called "Plants and Man," it must be inclusive, and how terrible it was anyone should do such a thing...  yes, I'd sort of had enough of such kind of feminism.  Saying this, knowing full well my mom is one of the few who get me, and having been through her own long education, which was by no means complete when she was coming out of her emotional anxiety childhood issues and yelling at my father so, no wonder I'm single, my mother is my spiritual instructor in her way too.  Where my father was a scientist about it all, my mother was, is, a writer about such things...

So when Erica Kornbbbb starts shouting at me, and she a feminist, what could I do?  What could I do in the face of such attack, but do the same dignified thing my father would do, which was answer as he could, then go lie down and rest for a while, 'til my mother's Mary Lincoln craziness wore off finally, she quieted down, and, as usual, went about his own dignified way, not betraying much, a man of joy, a lover of the theater of life, of biology, cellular life, plants, and of teaching itself...

Mom a great teacher too.  You can see how my fate was solidified, cast...


But the job, if the money is such that you are protractedly unhappy, well, that's telling you something....  Worrying all the goddamn time ain't a lot of fun.  If a job reject you, despite all the energy and effort and commitment, well, to hell with it, face the fact it doesn't work, and strike off on your own, yes sir-ree.



After the blood sample drawn, I drop by Glen's Market, to use the john, peruse the shelves.  The original plan, get back on the D6, west bound now, back west to the Palisades Library to drop off a few things.  But then there's the pretty girl I saw in the Rite Aid who works there, and I'm getting hungry, and I need to hydrate, so a quick bite, and i end up having a nice conversation with this young lady as she adjusts a display.  She makes beer.  She's cool.  Happy to talk to me.  We talk about hops a bit.  What's it like working here?  Are they hiring?  The service industry is exhausting, yes, isn't it.  She's getting out of it.  School for mortuary science...  She mentions she has a boyfriend, and this makes talking with her more comfortable.  She's beautiful.  I told her as much in the old Rite Aid, mumbling as I looked for spider bite bandages and she was in the makeup aisle that she was perfect to begin with...  And, thank god about young women today, they aren't about to saw your frigging head off for an honest complement as you, the male of the species, bravely holds his guts together trying to cope.

My mind goes through things as I eat from a plastic container their curry chicken salad.  Let's see, the visit to mom's upcoming.  I need to get a metro card pass, easier than trying to feed two bucks into the slot underneath the bus driver as you climb on, readying your body to deal with riding on such a large machine.  CVS?  Well, I'm near the Dupont Metro Station, I'll just do it there, and then hopefully it won't be too long to catch the D6 bus on P Street to get back to the Palisades.

I just get in, back to the apartment, mom calls, feeling down and lonely, and so am I.  Throughout my day I've been calling, calling about 7 times...    Then we are both better, after she's had her harangue, I don't blame her, and I've said my part.   She's reached that part of the day, being "wicked awful lonely" and not knowing if anyone is going to come and meet her for dinner, and what about "the kids."   I call as early as I can, so she doesn't reach such a point.  After all this and being thrown around by the bus starting and stopping, swinging and turning,  on top of the patience the bus requires, I slump down on the bed to meditate, a two hour nap, waking to go for a little walk down to one of the picnic tables on the bluff beneath the trees overlooking the great river, upstream from the town such that you have to look directly downstream to see the buildings of the great city.

I have some wine when I get back to the new apartment, the one I wonder still if I am able to afford with summer doldrums coming to the restaurant, out here on the fringe, the pastoral quiet end of town, which I like, as if I am again connected to all the thinkers, writers and philosophers who needed trees and grass and nature more than the city and its bustle and all its people who walk past, ignoring you, thinking you're strange...  There's duck breast to cook.  I have a DVD to watch again, about Lance Armstrong, with a good dose of cycling lore along with the doping tales.  A good thing I have wine.  And at the end of my nice little dinner, not too bad being alone as long as you can take care of yourself and prepare for the next immediate step, having a little space, even if lonely, I have some chocolate.

Off to bed, after half a bottle of remaining wine, Loire Pinot Noir, a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, some cold cuts for a bite to eat, then a few sips of single malt, or was that last night, but then I don't sleep so well, as as the light comes up, around 5:30 in the morning, my windpipe is aching from acid things I've poured down it, refluxing, sore, raw, an injured spectator...  And in the early morning light, awake, the body just lying there, still tired, oh, yeah, the memorial service for old Jim, father of my buddies wife, A., of D. and A., way the hell up in Wheaton, but I've committed myself.  I toss around, now it's five forty five, now it's six o five, I've committed myself, yes, and now am figuring out in my mind, yes, the bus outside on the street will take me downtown to 13th and K... walk from there, and finally, very bravely, a tired infantryman, I get up, after my cell phone alarm goes ringy ding, take my shower, put some clothes on, a little cold green tea, a bite of turkey slice, and out onto the avenue, and as soon as I get to the bus stop along come grandmother, daughter, and little granddaughter, and a baby, out from one of the buildings...  in some disarray, loud, and when the mother, who dines on a chicken leg as she waits, go backs to the building, and then grandma, who has pushed the baby carriage starts screaming out, shouting, 'motha' fucka'' quite loudly, and I slouch further into my blue blazer, having called my own mom for some encouragement, which she brings, and I need it.  Yes, it's the right thing to do.  Nobody wants to go to memorial things like this, but they are your friends...


After much anguish, trying to participate, while my own problems of livelihood fester before me, and I'm really not doing a good job figuring any of this out, and having been up so, and having to witness from the passenger seat, the mighty nightmare that a spread out urban plan of unending capitalism, even with all the clean churches and the synagogues, of 16th Street pass by with their great edifices, all the way up, up through Temple Heights and Silver Spring, and of course my friends are savvy to the real estate business, the core of everything really, the best most finest part that I get to share the bench seat of my best friend's blue 1993 Dodge Ram simple barebones pick-up for the ride both ways, talk about the bigger truck he uses for deliveries hitting bumps on larger roads like these highways everywhere and getting "the death shakes," the steering wheel shaking all of a sudden, the axle below, the whole truck, yikes...  I finally get back to the apartment, as night falls, and it's been a long day, I try mom's landline once more, and plop down onto the old worn leather couch after checking for spiders...

So that's a day of sitting around in an Irish pub far away from the normal routes, making conversation, but mostly just listening like a dumb kid, not having much to say amongst all these people who have greyed hair and responsibilities and home ownership and adult life.

After we get back, with A's brother and sister in law, walking back out into the hot sun down to K Street again, A tells me quickly that no, Kerouac's prose is not beautiful, no, just "Patriarchy..."  "Not even the mountain climbing scenes..."  "No."  She says, cutting off the conversation.  I tend to get treated as being an idiot somehow, a man full of problems, and then I see I deserve it, but there it is, always growing, the difference between people, between the way I am, here, struggling to get back on track on a day off, and the people who, as adults, by now have found their path and their rewards system which laws can't take away.

Two orders of mussels, two burgers, one steak tartar, it's happy hour, the waiter is miserable, professional, not in the mood, not knowing if we are out of town idiots or what, people come in all stripes.  A happy hour pinot noir, from Oregon, here at whatever belgian downtown frenchy is 9 bucks, could be worse, and the ladies want rose...  The waiter is kind enough to allow us a burger, from the happy hour menu...  Later, A reports I was flirting with him.  No, the guy was miserable, I say, I've been there.  That was the same thing why the girl at the hostess stand talked to us about the chef's little empire...  cause I asked her how she was...  Believe me, a human being appreciates that, being a waiter, what have you...  Believe me.

I take a long nap on the brown recluse spider leather couch.  I've got a trip up to so see mom coming up, and feeling tired and vulnerable as such, another day has gone, without enough burn-out therapy such as yoga and walks and quietude.


Through another monstrosity of a day, so it felt, or feels now, or was in at the time, or perhaps as well in retrospect, and I'm not helping myself out enough, and now the final day of my weekend will come after I sip an armagnac, after a beer and a bit of ham that needed cheese or something, after I go to bed...

It takes a huge amount of energy to write.  It really does.  All the details?  Each is a minefield.  You'll never get all of it, or even a little.   That's one reason, yes, I like Kerouac prose.  The man was a story teller, he worked hard at it, and I suspect between being part Indian, Canadian, French, Canuck, a person who didn't speak in English really 'til he was six or seven... "eh, maudit," he was instinctive in his word choices.  He almost wrote the On the Road piece in his French?

It is because your friends love you, the best they can, the best as they can remember in this world, that they make fun of you.  Obvious, you cut your own hair, the guide the buzzer trimmer falling off...  Or that you 'flirted' with the waiter.  (I asked him how he stayed slim, as his response, no eat the dough...)  They are probably just trying to nudge you toward a way of living in more perfect union with the economy, the real estate situation, the employment of gainful ways...  That sort of thing...

And you, you with your strange own little atomic core, sensitive to the right and wrong of the world.

Goddamn, you really can't blame people for being who they are.  You don't know their struggles, the things that set them off.  Of those things, one can only guess, even as the best kind of friend you can be, which is why I write these lines, and this crap in general, why I write anything.

When you're telling me, yelling at me, informing me, instructing me, you don't know what I've been through, the voiced memories in my head, all a mix of beauty and everything fine and also all the unsettling things we have to process and deal with from dealing with the constant surprises of capitalism....

Wake up with that old feeling of uselessness.  Even the cabdriver, from Pakistan, probably, tells me, no wife, no kids, that's no life.   And that would be too much for me to handle now anyway.  What a bum.  How could I not be in a constant panic mode?  The words of the therapist echoing within, you're living in your own little world of unrealities...  You're unable to leave these spaces on your own, until you practically get kicked out.

But as a Buddhist, you can't dwell on the past.

My book is so personal, that makes rejection that much harder...  the therapist notes.

Well, yeah, but that's the only way to go about doing it.

I look at the clock, feeling trapped, when's this going to end?

That's the only way you can do it, is to make writing deeply personal, I've always felt anyway.  I guess that's hard to explain to people, and maybe particularly to therapists who will go then and accuse you of living in your own little world and that sort of thing.

That must be what Madam Korbonski was talking about, Tadzio, never see a shrink, she told me, directly, specifically.  Well, I should have listened, or rather, that's how you always learn.  Alas.

I could have been writing, finding my own therapeutic voice within which leads on eventually to have a sort of Buddhist perspective, which in turn lets you not bemoan so much all the waters under the bridges of life and all the girls you could have married if you hadn't been so stupid and had seen other options than working in a goddamn restaurant as a goddamn barman.

You have to respect the person you are...

You're going to wake up with that chagrin anyway, and you just have to take it apart like a very complicated instrument and just meditate upon it.  Your father's son.


It had always been hard to explain it to her.  She was, after all, a woman, a practical being, and now, good for her, a baby.  But to try to explain that the book and the person were one, and that this was even my main point of such a book, and that the book would, in a way, sort of predict, if that's the word, the heroism of the creature, and even garner pieces of shit book reviews that totally missed the whole point with their nitpicking little critiques.

This is why Kerouac is such a hero, as if it had all dawned upon him too, in his many shy travels and not so shy, and in all his meditations and travels across the country.  He didn't need to go that far, but he got it.  Hemingway, yes, it took him to much later in life, and his unconscious kicked up The Old Man and the Sea, for that too would be the mirror of his life in that same spooky way.

And if you know such things like that, then the details of the world become less important.

What I worry about is that it might come to look like that in the end you really didn't care about anything, in the manly husbanding sense of the term, taking care of things that family members out to attend to.  Deeper reality, deeper reality, that's all well and fine, but you have to act, you have to do, there are no excuses, how can there be.

But you have to hand to the Buddhists, as they have an instinctive science for getting it.  Time, space, all the stuff of the most modern particle physics and Relativity and all that.  And the Buddhists get that while there may be some medicinal things in the world with benefits it is a fact that idle pleasures will soon be followed by chagrin and disappointment, leaving the hollows of escapism.  No, you didn't meet any chicks...


So, eventually, any form of writing becomes a sort of prescience.  It vanishes into theory and contemplation of some very deep things.

And the so-called masters of the literary world, they will always be saying, "yeah, right, kid," putting you down and down, not thinking that you could possibly get something they don't get, with their "cop mentality," as poor old sweet Jack Kerouac might have said.

In the back of my mind, the mind wanders...  Should I go across the street to the Korean market to get tuna salad or maybe also the curry chicken salad, or the Boar's Head roast beef or the pastrami...  And what were your sins last night, of dancing at the club Flash to Spanish DJs, and then the fifteen dollar cab ride home...  And the writer has to sort of just let such mental things sit where they are and proceed anyway, call your mom, keep trying her landline, her iPhone is out of juice again...  And then you notice another airplane up overhead rending the sky apart with a roar and then some mechanical sound of a distant pump for the construction foundation project just out the window...

And who would have thought that I would find myself having such an attitude towards sexuality, "it's not worth it."  Unless, unless, it's really love, which is understanding and compassion.


So I get out onto the little patio between the two of the G.I. apartment buildings, and I'm doing yoga and finally get mom on the landline to talk with her and ask her about her haircut and she's very pleased with her haircut but can't find her cell phone, it's there somewhere, probably near the Eames Chair underneath a newspaper or a Henry James, and then the little old Argentine woman with her bright red lipstick and Sixties bandanna scarf, "Come, Please, Come, Emergency, Emergency," so I tell mom I'll call her back, and down into the lady's apartment where there is a steady healthy trickle of water coming down from her bathroom ceiling, the lamp fixture leaking out a rusty colored sort of water, and this has happened to her before, but in the dining room on the Saturday afternoon before Easter, and I get on my phone and call the landlord, and hopefully there's a plumber at this hour, 4:40 in the afternoon, and the nice young man from the second floor comes down to pitch in with moral support and finding a sort of bucket to catch the water.  She had passed me earlier as I working my way toward plough pose, not long before.  I'd just gone up to get bug spray and back, even with the breeze the first of the Tiger mosquitos with their little striped legs have found my legs...

She wants me to call the plumber myself as I look for the water main shut off valve, which I do, and Joe, Jr., answers, yeah, we'll be there in five minutes...

There's a signed picture of President and Mrs. Kennedy on the wall and plenty of furnishings and do -dads and old school Latin touches of quality.  She's worried her wine is low, a Clos Du Bois Cabernet, and indeed her bottle is empty, and I tell her I'll get across the street and find her a bottle, not to worry, she just has one glass with her dinner.

And much of my yoga thoughts go out the window, but I return and find warrior poses easy and then headstand and then with a pretty decent full lotus, though it gets you feeling a bit stretched too far.  In all the commotion my good thoughts, poof, have sort of disappeared, and I now have a mission, and a few groceries to buy anyway from my lady friends across the street not far away, though I don't want any wine.  Japanese whiskey the night before, a single malt, and I'm not feeling too bad today anyway...

But somehow, in my thoughts, there was a small realization about my point of view of how a lot of life and mating game is a bit of a lie for some of us, though now I can't quite clearly remember why, though that's just how it strikes some of us, and me too.    Fortunately, it seems, I never fell into that trap of the perpetual lie, if you will, of being more of a provider than I in fact am.  Sure, I too want good company and a marital life, but, there just seemed a lot of work to otherwise be done, though I was a dumb hick sucker and was greatly taken advantage of when left to my own auspices to move to the city, in this case, DC.

There are certain battles in life you sort of have to fight on your own home ground.

So life feels fated out if you will, made to adhere, or cohere, with the stories of the great spiritual people, like Prince Gautama, like poor old Jesus.  Through focus, life becomes like the book, and I remember when the simple wooden casket of John Paul II was out before the doors of St. Peter's, the wind came and blew, turning the pages of the great book upon the casket, and I thought the imagery spoke.  Your life, lived so, becomes part of the great book written by God or the Universe or the Buddha-verse or the book of the Big Bang...  Am I an idiot for thinking so?

Light golden in the afternoon June sunshine and green grass and trees along the Palisades and fields.  Groceries for me, cold cuts, etc., banana, and a Nicolas Cabernet for her and I show her it's a twist-off and I'll come have a glass of wine and she can tell me about the pictures on her wall, and the plumber man is just coming out and sitting down on the steps as he writes out his work ticket, a leaking toilet tank up above, nothing unsanitary, and I ask him if I may  how he learned his trained and it was a neighbor who took him on for weekends when he was in Twelfth grade, and by twenty-three he had his own business here in DC, and his son will replace him as his head is silver now too.

There is in the great book the story of the Prodigal Son, and of course as a young man one does not know and seeks out life's pleasures of wine, "women," and song.  Of course.  But sooner or later, probably later, you and I realize something about pleasure, and believe you me, a little bit of sex can cause a huge and lasting and almost cancerous amount of pain, let me tell you.

The best, I would imagine, a saintly understander of all things, would have a gentle sense of humor about things, about life, life in general.  Enough to see all the sadness wrapped around those supposedly fun things you never want to do again as long as you live, my friends.


I walk down along the mineral breeze blue water of the reservoir westward toward the Palisades public library.  Farming, a collection of poems by Wendell Berry, is a day overdue, on hold by another book lover, and I walk slowly reading the hundred pages of poetry, finishing up with a sore back around dusk, then taking a walk up streets beyond the library where I have never been and one has a block of parkland.  Beyond is Battery Kemble Park, up 49th street and it's a beautiful night but I better get on home, with beautiful farm poems, making sense to me.    I should have been a farmer.  I'll never be able to live down those years when I came to town, falling, flopping almost, into the restaurant business, Austin Grill...  Wasted years, years of hard habits.  Pretty much wanted to crawl into a hole after all that, after the harshness of rejection on different fronts as I attempted to make my own way, with burdens.  Was hard to think straight for me back in those days, and of course all that time you run around on fool's errands not looking out for your own, they are going to come and cost you, yes they will.  I was always a natural at being kind to people, I suppose, sort of knowing in my bones what it's like to be an outsider, to be overlooked;  it can't be too surprising I ended up in such a job as a faithful neighborhood barman putting in my physical efforts.

I've always been a happier creature with physical work to do anyway, where you body does the thinking, the dealing, the planning, the execution, without having to be on a pained conference call or without some institution treating you as a digit.  In retrospect, and reading Berry's poems and stuff, I wish I'd been a farmer...  And not tortured my family by being so lost and making bad decisions of the kind that would financially haunt me the rest of life, no joke.

Farmers, they read the book of life, too.  They see it, they get it, all through the seasons, they get it.  A writer, I might venture, is a farmer of that book which is of life, you know what I mean?

And so the writer cannot be afraid of the book and what it says, even if it tells him in rather mystical and difficulty translated words that a kind of road, a kind of homeless time, a kind of space open for him the desert, a life with very little to weigh him down is what the adepts who see deeply into things have come up with.  And Kerouac, too, if you read his life, which is of course his life's work, or is it the other way around....

But you can see, sometimes, why an artist type might have this over-arching sense, "look, people, I'm not that bad a guy, in fact, despite my many faults, which I do not hide, I'm a good person, in fact, as far as values, and caring, and it's not really all one hundred percent my fault that I am struck down do poor now after my years of toil, the ones where many take care of business, work hard, build something up.  My mind, well, it didn't quite work that way...

Tonight, I'm not fearing any man, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that night, somehow sensing that he was on the brink of becoming as the great book writes such a life.

And when I was a busboy, I can still hear Natalie Merchant singing while I worked, while the Ten Thousand Maniacs played, "Hey, Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother,  and the tears she cried, for none other, than her little boy lost in our mad world that hated, and dared to drag him down, her little boy, creative, he took his words from madmen, steaming cafe flirts, hip flash swinging madman, howling at night," as I ran about, clearing tables and running bus tubs around...

But the enormous pains that come from dealing with all those people who are not writer, who think that writer should simply conform...

So, let's see.  Therapist Dr. Heather is moving to Rochester.  Two weeks ago this past Tuesday was when I found out.  Chef was in town, didn't have much time to think.  So I get on the bus for this what could be our final wrap, unless there are more pros than cons with the on-line therapy over the laptop.  I didn't think of any graceful parting words as I went into it.  The usual, pulled and pushed by the bus's G Forces in a tiresome way, walk from 23rd to 19th.    In and up through the elevators, fifth floor.   Okay.

So I begin with my tale of finding support, a condemnation of the bad book review from Kirkus Indie MFA playbook...

But my "I'm doing okay, with that, writing, nature meditation walks of peace, yoga..."  quickly evaporates.  The subject changes.  I've been living in my own little bubble, my own private little world, hiding out, retreating....  A pattern.  Of not going out and meeting your goals, not taking risks, not doing the work, as if I am too afraid...

She mentions the period of tumult.  She mentions the harshness of the Princess to beat back my efforts to open up and come out...  The hypercritical nature of people shouting at you when you want to be understood...  Trying to fit in is not easy.  Thus did I stay at my old place, as uncomfortable as it was, because the creature took it as "home."

There is a lot to learn from that, indeed.

How do you feel coming downtown here, she asks.  I don't know...  It just feels like its being out of touch with nature, everyone focussed...


Wednesday night with Satin Doll is the usual bugger.  The pop keeps coming.  I'm there 'til one, not easy, a long clean-up.  Sebastien appears at the bar, bald headed, suntanned from his triathlon training...

Thursday, okay the spider wound is healing, thanks to the dermatologist and Mupirocin hypoallergenic antibiotic cream and simple sterile pad held by cloth bandage tape.  But I need to get down for the appointment with my primary doc which I snagged the day before to get a Lyme Disease test.  The bus, dropping me off at Dupont.  I get there at 2:05, sign in, take my seat next the plants.  And I know full well, that the woman in her blues down in the lab in the basement leaves early, but I wait it out without saying anything.  Then, finally around 3 okay I can go back now.  First the intern, then the doctor, yes, sounds good, but she's gone home.  Darn it, poor old tired fool, Tranowski, dragging himself down there after waking from a long night, blood pressure high in his veins, and he's too polite to say anything, even knowing full well...

Why did I come here, down to my old neighborhood...  Glen's Market patio is full of interesting people having their meetings, a four o'clock beer or coffee...  and poor old Tranowski is chagrined, calling his mom, as it is that time of day, and already nervous about it while waiting for the doctor and the room with the high bench with the white paper on it.  And 'why does this always happen to me..."  I was sitting reading my library book, Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hahn and jotting a few lines in my yellow wire-bound legal pad with its pages stained from the wine bottle that came open when I tried to catch a bus, feeling the wetness as I tried to feed my wrinkled old two one dollar bills into the machine slot...  Fortunately the pages held, not sticking together, and I put my blue courier bag through a gentle wash that night, wishing I'd had more wine...  But, I knew I should say something, I knew it.

I make it up to the Rite Aid.  I put both of the two Cambridge Writing Pads with their blue covers into the plastic shopping bin.  Cool.  At least it hasn't been a total waste.  They're having a deal on V8 juice too.  Back to Glen's to shop, for some protein, and then to the tea house for some calming Moroccan Mint green loose leaf tea, and then hiking with heavy bags down past Zorba, the Metro, crossing Mass Ave to P Street.

Tired, not looking forward to being jostled by the bus, but it gets you there.  The bus comes.  And I can ruminate now further, how easy it is to be disqualified from good things, from convenient things, from helpful things, from good experiences, just for no more reason than a tendency to be shy and too much "polite."

And that one knew full well what could well transpire, the failure of getting done the thing you wanted to get done, this is another, even heavier, layer of misery and chagrin and hurt.   Ridiculous old pieces of meat, "hairy bags of water," as someone in Dharma Bums puts it, waiting around in a waiting room...


The world is suffering, indeed.  And I too am like a child trying to distract myself from it, though various escapes, to hide away from the pain of living.

I get in, put the little package of ground bison, the half dozen eggs, the duck sausages, the drinkable yogurt and the broccoli into the refrigerator and boil water for tea, make the tea, have the lamb gyro over salad from the downtown street vendor Vietnamese lady who says hello my friend in her particular happy little song way, and then it's nap time.

Now, my friend from work is encouraging me to go out and catch some Spanish DJs downtown (Flash) and it turns out I was able to get myself on the guest list through a new connection thanks to the Chef's visit here.  And Jesus is feeling very lonely again, and though he knows there is no escape from suffering, that one should not try to hide, he feels the need to go out, have a glass of wine or a few beers...

I always found it heroic, just to go tend bar.  It always made me anxious, nervous.   There was a lot of action to it.  You were always having to go grab something, realizing something needs restocking.  In effect, you soon get caught up in it, in the tasks at hand, and you forget.

I'd done that, starting out as a busboy, when I first came to town.  Running around, which kept my mind off things.


But it just gets scarier.  My irresponsible decision to be a heroic writer...

You can only hope the Universe has a way of making the most natural things work out.


You aren't a hero, you can't be, unless someone, maybe even you, has done something stupid.  Mistaken.  Off.  Sometimes it's other people's mistakes, like war, and you're just stuck doing it, going off to it.   Then it can be your own dumbass thing.  A bad choice.

A hero is up against something.  Maybe he knows what it is, maybe he doesn't.  But I've always found, the most important thing to be, a life lesson I learned a bit late, is to be at peace, to be at peace with other people, to be peace, in your actions, in your words.

I was able to carry off all that pretty well, and I had a good job to do just that.  It happens to be the only way you can do it, turns out.  I found out early on, even.  You have to be at peace with things you might otherwise not wish to be at peace with.  There are all sorts of characters who will habituate a restaurant bar.  And yes, you have to suffer them.  Often benign people who otherwise you wouldn't have met in your life, but shared a mutual respect with.  Me being a kid amidst a gathering of French chefs, a club owner...  People who like electronic music...

And as I grew to some form of maturity in the job, perhaps less so in life, I realized over again how heroic it was, what a struggle it was, and how I faced a grim future life, never an owner, always a renter, uncertain, never able to retire on top of all the other facets of normal life I could not enjoy at this age of my life...

That's what I always saw in the writers I liked, the kind I was drawn to, the heroic quality.  Wordy heroism.  And this in a world where the next moment is not always expected or predictable.

I do my little hour of yoga out on the slate flat stone patio.  Chef Bruno has been in town.  Three thirty AM one night, including clean-up, ant the last night up at the strip club with Bruno's chef buddy Y., a lovely large generous man.  I'm doing okay on a Tuesday, beautiful weather, not hot nor sticky, eating a couple of Hebrew National hotdogs with a bit of the chili I made.  Not as good as down at the boat house when you are hungry on a day off...

Reading the beautiful passages from Dharma Bums of climbing Mount Matterhorn with Gary Snyder...


I've always felt a sense of doom, I don't know exactly why...

We were chatting on-line.  She, in Paris, a professor of architectural history, had ordered a copy of my old book, A Hero For Our Time.  She mentioned how she liked my dad in the book.  She referenced a passage in the book where it's summertime.  Dinner conversation.  About how science became an instrument of corporate profit.  I mentioned to her how the Kirkus Indie review, for which I paid $400, completely misread that passage.

She looked up the review.  She didn't like the review.  She found it belittling.  She found it ridiculous.   "You should get that incredibly idiotic review of your book off the internet.  It is so awful and inappropriate.  What a crock of shit.  Here in Europe there are laws against that kind of shit."

Interesting, I thought.  I was taking my sad first day off walk alone down the path through the trees below the reservoirs, up on the bluff over looking the canal and Canal Road.  The previous day, I'd been to the wine tasting up at La Piquette, the sister restaurant, wine from Portugal, along with a St. Pourcain chardonnay blend, an Aligoté, an Apremont, a Macon Village, and Bruno's Alentéjo, then the reds, a Gaillac, a Gamay from the upper Loire, an Oregon pinot noir, Bruno's red.  After the tasting we'd had lunch, a beautiful paté, salmon tartar with avocado, a taste of skate wing for me, beautiful food.  I'd hung around and had dessert and more sips of wine.  I got myself back to the apartment in the DC muggy heat via two city bus routes.  Small independent wineries.  The hands of the old father farmer, Ed Addiss explained, individual personal wines from the earth, tended to by humanity.

But that much wine, and the rest to get you through the night after you wake up again at midnight after the tasting, leaves you down and tired the next day, and there are enough reasons for that anyway, so let's just take a walk down to the picnic table and have a walk if you're up for it.  Bring along your Thich Nhat Hahn, Being Peace, and your notebook, and, having lost your old Nalgene on the bus somewhere, a canteen of water.  Oh well.

So I'm walking along, I'm reading this on my iPhone from my new old friend in Paris.  I had shrugged it off, that review, unflattering, oh well.  What do you expect..  It all seemed like a set-up anyway.  I had attempted to be a dutiful citizen writer and submit my work appropriately, just as one dutifully attends writer's conferences where you can find them...

Yeah... so.  I'm walking along.  Walking is better for thoughts sometimes anyway, than sitting hunched over a notepad like St. Jerome, trying to get a word down.  And I guess as I walk along hearing the birds, looking at the grass beneath me and the dirt trail, the trees around me, a larger picture, I guess you could see, emerges, if one could say such a thing.

I thought of the whole pattern of belittling that seems to follow along in the book I wrote and the experiences therein.  The shitty book review from the shitty Kirkus kid, putting himself up by putting my work down, his cleverness, his MFA brilliance and understanding of literary laws stomping down on my plain homespun natural craft...  well, that just fit into the whole pattern of belittlement.  Institutional belittlement, for lack of a better term.

The institution, academic, is obliged by its laws to come down on the poor creatures that nature creates and nourishes herself, as a way of making the individual conform to a way of doing business. The institution is represented by more than one voice, many really, each voice capable of executing the rules of the institution.  One day, the professor whose lens has narrowed, one day the girl and all her girlfriends who treat you like a low-life weirdo.  (Low-life, the term my therapist used to help me understand.)  The institution tells you, "you're crazy."  What can you do?

And even if you're hurt by that judgment, even as it brings to you a deep pain you have to struggle with itself, the institution considers that it is not within your individual rights to be upset, after all given the great logic of the institution and its judgments...

So, you try to be a good boy.  You shrug.  Oh, well.  That's how it goes.

So I continue with my slow sad walk along the grass and a dragonfly buzzing here and there.

It will always be that way.  There will always be that tension.  The individual must represent himself and his connection to the earth and his way of seeing nature with a loving connected heart.  This is in Twain, in Kerouac, in Jesus, too, the need to represent the individual truths of humanity.  Huck and Jim on the river, outside of, escaping, society at large as it is.  Early Hemingway Michigan stories.

All the put-downs you'll internalize along the way.  All the quiet dignity of working away at a job that is not exactly fully connected to the talents of the individual within.

I get a hot-dog from the little old green tin shed where they rent the boats and kayaks down at Fletcher's Boat House and I walk along slowly in my hiking Keens and long pants and the shirt my mom got me at Murdock's in Oswego and mull all this over looking over the still river, the fish jumping now and again in big circles though it is hard to see them, the ducks making their soothing quacks as they motor along.  And for me these lonely times down by the river, there's a sense to them of being felt similar maybe to forty days out in the desert.  Even here not that far from the commuting cars above on Canal Road heading out of town at rush hour.


A person and his text, they merge after a while.


I began to wonder, how much I had put up with, underestimating myself as a writer.


There are lots of things to do in the world, lots of distractions, but you have to protect yourself, you have to protect your creative side.  This is actually rather tricky.  As a writer you feel you need some material, some action to report, but in my line of work this often means collateral damage, feeling like crap mentally and physically the next day...

The great thing about Slaughterhouse Five:

The writer has finally ceased to be a writer.  Now he's just telling.  He has dropped it all.  Now it's just a story, unguarded.

The generic soldier is not the hero, the writer is the hero.




Not all of us have stories such.

The habit continues.



I lost so many books in that move.  With me somewhere, somewhere disappeared.  So many books I, in the rush, just threw in the recycling bin.  Turgenev, the Gentle Barbarian.  A biography of Dostoevsky, by the guy, not that you're ever going to actually read that...

I wake up in the new apartment.  It's hot.  80 out.  I turn to my iPhone screen, looking at my email, then I look at Facebook.  I turn on the window unit in the living room.  This is how I wake up.

The day seems pointless, to begin with, and I'll be glad to get back to work tomorrow, but first must deal with today.

Bigelow green tea, 3 tea bags to a pot.  Call mom.  Don't get through.  And then I do, FaceTime.

After two I've begun to wake up a bit better.  I get some dishes done.

Of course, the interest in Buddhism.  As a writer, one who never really has a day off from it, whether I show up or not, of course you'd take an interest in how the mind works.

But the mind can be an awfully tedious thing to be dealing with.  You're never going to be done with writing, and in a sense you'll always miss the target.

You need to take the blood pressure down a bit.

Here you are in the apartment.  The best part of it is getting outside.  Go for a walk.  And it turns out to be nice out.  I walk down under the reservoirs.  Rather than down to the river and the canal, I venture up to Black Coffee, the independent coffee house, just to sit outside on the boulevard, writing in my notebook, like old time's sake.  Coffee seems to help the notebook practice, the memory, the access.

I make it to the Palisades Library.  Books jump out at me.  Nick Hornby, he's clever.  I see Dharma Bums, can't resist.  Over in the biographies, Karl Ove Knausgaard's Spring.  Nothing in particular over at the spirituality section, nor in the DVD video section, and I have books out already.  It just feels good.  

Back near the coffee shop with my books in my backpack, I call mom to tell her the good news.  My books got all quite jostled in the move.  No book shelves here and still in boxes.  Mom sounds good.  We're both crazy.  But we get each other.

By the time I get back to the apartment, it being very nice out, I feel the need to get out for a ride along the canal.



They were intuitive, back then in college, calling me "Farmer Ted."  That's what I look like as I look at my thickened middle-aged face before getting into the shower, starting off the work week at 2:30 PM on a Sunday afternoon.  I make a small Bialletti cup of coffee.  There's some Chinese to polish off.  There's an ache within, a groan, a go-moan-for-man kind of a thing, as I ponder in the back of my mind how I've always been drawn to outdoor gear and durable clothing and hiking trails.   There is a sense of that in Kerouac, the homeless wanderer, who then must face the authoritarian attitude of the Fifties, where the police are not about to let you be just anywhere for no good economic reason.

Showered, I begin to gather my work things.  Courier bag or  back pack?  A bartender is not all that different from a farmer...

I don't want to listen to the news anymore, my thoughts on NPR at 3:03 PM.  I don't feel that hungry, but reheated Hunan beef from the small place down the street tastes pretty good.  I need to fuel up anyway.  The staff meal omelette...

It makes me feel rather sad that I respect Dharma Bums and poor old bound-to-be-broke Kerouac.

It is hard to get ready for work.  There will be a forty minute walk, I might as well get there earlier.   I'm fifty four.  I'm not doing anywhere near well-enough.  There are always a few extra minutes you need, getting ready.   Feeling like a bum...