So, if you're week is strange, and out of synch with the normal rhythms of daylight rather than jazzmen, isolated, so will be the days off, the days of recovery and groceries.

You get in off the bus, crash, wake up, have a glass of wine around 4 AM to have the energy and the calmness to start looking in your brain's thought juice, as all the memories of all the faces that have dropped by, friends old and new with whom one has interacted with either five minutes or twenty five years, random visits, regular ones, made a friend of, shared the awkwardness of life's moments and the strange what-am-I-to do-now gut sense, best captured in books of wanderings like Moby Dick, or All Quiet on the Western Front, or in the Gospels about Jesus traveling and his words and his acts all a strange development to an incomprehensible to the sensibilities death on the cross...  all of it flashes through your mind, the last week, the memory of remembered things rising in a way sudden and surprising....

Even the next day, after a long decent sleep run of three or four dream sequences, followed by another one later on the couch after eating a drawn-out sandwich of Boars Head, slice by slice, roast beef with thin slices of Bermuda onion, dipping the same knife into the prepared horseradish on German health bread organic 100% rye.

I never knew how to be a journalist.  The details one has to record are always slippery, and if one thing is examined in truth, then another layer emerges, strange connections, another thing;  how can a a story that remains truthful to its subject, say, a day in the life of John F. Kennedy, not end up with an examination of the poem he would quote, Frost's Two Paths Diverged in a Wood and And Miles to go before I rest..., the constant and completely shifting recognition of non-duality...

I can only journal about the things that I know, and I think they are fair enough, honestly come upon given the un-planning disorganized nature of the being put to work with bureaucratic things to oversee as well.

Kerouac had something right about Jazz.  That a good horn going on in the forefront most top three background of the mind could set free the thoughts, particularly the thoughts of a prose writer, wishing for his imagination and its connection with the rest of the thinking mind to have some inspiration, a work-out partner, if you will, some freedom with which to go and do the actual work, as a woodsman must approach the first log of the day, needing firewood or some other wooden usefulness...

At some strange time then, out of sheer frustration of being put away from it, you let go a bit.  And it's not good to tackle down or be overly critical of this spirit, this artistic urge, the wish to catch a thought like a fish in an ever-moving stream..


My grandfathers and grandmothers worked in the restaurant and bar business.  I've always seen it as exactly the same kind of work a writer does.

Go and catch a falling star, catch with child a mandrake root, to catch a decent sentence, that's all you can do, what it's built of, made of.

The best teachers would be practitioners of their art, except that they don't have time but to go on explaining without chance of explicitly teaching, their trade one of the Universe, but not of the economy but for the enlightened parts of it.

One is often drawn to the creative process.  Places, habits...  A kid who loved to draw all the time becomes a part of the restaurant bar business, something hugely more interesting and varied than the insurance clerk office downtown...