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....