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...