The workweek draws to an end with a party in back ordering cocktails as the trio playing Brazilian genre jazz, with the singer making her efforts at pitch and Portuguese, at a volume level that throws off my concentration, big time, and the server is ordering drinks complicated to begin with but I can barely hear her.  The boss's family is sitting at one of the low tables, and I've been at it since five thirty and don't have much smile left.   It all started soon after the door opened, engaging with the two older men who are a couple, particular shapes to their heads, who used to come often but have just driven down from their new home in Ontario, Canada, who both want a nice glass of gin, one with tonic, one with water, no fruit, after their 500 miles of road.  Early on, and while my coworker has disappeared somewhere, Marie Reine comes up with a party to sit in the back, and they want cocktails immediately.  Okay, so I go back there, still smiling.  Yes...  She wants gin and tonic with lots of lime, okay, fine, and he wants a gin martini with olives, okay, and then after two young people join them the older guy is up at the bar with such a manner that I must acknowledge him in a minute, yes, I know, they too need cocktails, like, yesterday...  Alina, could you please go and get their order, which turns out to be one flute maison and a Manhattan on the rocks, and already I have to concentrate, but that's how the night is going to be on this final day of Mercury Retrograde, communication breakdown, blips and burps, and teamwork difficult.


The day started with mom's helper calling, to tell me mom is "drunk," and she puts her on the phone, around 12:30 just as I'm getting up to figure out the first tele-session with my therapist who's moved away to New York State.  After the session I take a nap--mom is sleeping now anyway--shower, have some green mint tea, get to the little Korean deli across the street before the bus comes for a roast beef on rye, and when I get off the bus at the stop closest to work, by the playing fields for the Catholic girl's school near Georgetown University, I realize I've forgotten my new Nalgene water bottle with my homemade electrolyte water, probably on the bus, distracted, I pulled the yellow chord but the little usual bell did not sound nor did the Stop Requested sign light up, wondering if the driver was going to stop, and generally tired from the week and not feeling too happy.


At the end of the night, around 1 AM, too beat to hit the Safeway for groceries and ground hamburger, slipping the rent check through the door just a few doors down, I get my Uber driver, and he drops me off, and sadly I walk back down to the bus stop to see if there's any chance I left my new Nalgene blue water bottle there, but nope.  I pour myself a glass of wine, have a piece of feta left over from the Gyro the other night, Saturday night, find some Irish whisky, and go for a walk around the block, to stand for a moment under the trees.  It's slow, I open my shirt up, just shaking it all off.  When I get back there's something on Facebook, a link to rare photos from the Vietnam War Era, and along with Ann Margaret entertaining, there's a GI with an open Playboy with the caption, away from home, soldiers needed to keep their sanity however they could.  Yup, I get it.  A bit of self-pleasure to soothe the end of a day in the trenches.


My first day off, I sleep.  I get up, call mom, around one, she's fine, go back to bed and sleep a deep muscle-bound afternoon sleep from which I cannot move, above the noises of the construction below, the workmen banging away on the wooden frame on top of the poured concrete foundation, the sound of the nail gun's bullets.  "Bah, this job," I say to myself in thoughts, that's what I get for being an idiot, being around booze and wine, for not making choices resembling any sort of plan...  "  But, at least, I am off today.   The cupboard is bare, and I'm needing hydration, and it's hot out, as it has been for many days in a row.  "Drinking wine is hiding away in your own little world, and all the while a waste of intellectual and other talents," my mind tells me, echoing the words of my therapist about my tendencies to live in my own little non-reality world.  And other such bitter thoughts, but at least my head doesn't headache and I feel rested enough that the mind seems to be working again after the five night shifts.

I hope to get to yoga soon enough, I remind myself, so I brew up hot water, in a cup with lemon, ground ginger and turmeric, a crack of pepper and a light dash of salt.  Then a fresh pot of Moroccan Mint, steeped three minutes, as I look at the Hispanic workmen laying fresh flagstone with a string to guide them, mixing a cement mixture by hand, one man on his knees pounding down on the laid slate stones with a rubber mallet.


There's a glitch on my laptop, as far as the tele-session with Dr. Heather goes.   It worked in practice, but now the little camera will not respond to my turning it on, and it begins to heat up anyway soon.  The important thing is for her to see me, and she tells me I must be tired, having to cope with aging mother stuff from afar.  And there seems to be no real answer to it, for her stuff and my stuff and I just went through one move, and that's enough to turn you into a Zen Buddhist with his Lotus pose.  I describe my yoga practice, and it's a good one.

In the office, as I change into my work clothes, I reach mom, and actually she is fine, quite fine, and says the whole thing was exaggerated, to make her look bad, tongues wagging as they do.  Okay, fair enough, and I am relieved indeed, and no sense going into it any deeper.

On another front I tell my therapist that my old girlfriend, from many years ago here in DC, how she came by the bar, and how I was actually quite relieved to find that she's found a professor boyfriend somewhere, and that she herself has gone back to therapy to get through the childhood issue of her father leaving mom and her sister...  "Are you relieved," as in "are you sure about that," Dr. Heather asks, yes I am.  And then I mumble about the young woman I know through old Nate, who does yoga, she's cool, in great shape, maybe I'll have the energy to go to Karaoke in Arlington with her one of these Thursdays...  Ah, but the whole mom thing doesn't put me much in the mood, nor does five shifts keeping up to make ends meet here at the new apartment after all those years with good old George, a mensch.    And this is the first year I haven't watched the Tour de France on television for a long time.   The years I spent out in Rock Creek Park on a road bike, going out past the Mormons, out past Grosvenor, out to Garrett Park and turning back around, Beech Drive the whole way, and sometimes out into Potomac via Falls Road, a taste of country side I surely enjoyed, away from the strip malls and the city's avenues full of traffic and other hassles.


And then a breeze comes in through the open window above the three workmen speaking familiar sounding Central American Spanish as they trowel and scrape and cut rock with a little hand-held spinning blade, to fit and pound with the mallet, overseen by the third, sitting down on an unfurled roll of sod, then tossing bits of broken concrete over where there needs to be some fill, "cabron," and light laugher, and more talking as a plane whooshes over head, and I have to think about what I need to get to eat this evening.  And somewhere in the city the young and good looking and the gregarious are sitting down for happy hour, striving successfully, staying within the narrow lines of the contemporary tech urban economy, and not necessarily thinking too deeply about it all, but not me.  I'm not on their schedule.

I need some exercise anyway.

I remember telling my therapist in our little video chat over my iPhone how I can only take so much of reading all the Buddhist stuff, and all the yoga, good to do, but you get enough of it, it seems sometimes, but it's also self-protective.  As if leaving a bit of yourself safe, even when you are feeling isolated, feeling the need to be out amongst company in the city's life.

I put some pants on and cross the avenue to the Korean market for sandwiches, a hero, a roast beef with horseradish, a small container of curry chicken salad, some sliced roast beef for extra, though I try my best to avoid bread, I need my energy anyway.  I talk to the two women by the counter, one who makes the sandwiches, and one at the register, with whom I've become friendly with.  "Your husband (an older fellow with thick glasses, and more halting English skills) taught me how to say thank you (in Korean) but I've forgotten."  I take a little piece of DC Lottery paper to write it down.  Kum Sa Ham Ni Da, I spell out as she looks over, and it translates as thanks to god, she tells me, and bows, and I bow too, and back across the street with my bottle of wine and supplies.  I feel shy, vaguely ashamed of myself, somehow, is one feeling, on the first day off.  I'll go do some yoga, I decide, while it's still light out, under my California Pine friends over by the path above the canal.  I need to conquer some of the unhappy thoughts and the sense of isolation and the sense that my life is going nowhere...

How to rejoin the stream of human beings...  How to join in with the people who can sit and have their earned conversations with their peers, as I wait on them...  Currently impossible, given my job and its schedule...



After the market, sandwiches put safely away in the refrigerator I put my yoga shorts back on, a tee shirt, the remaining Nalgene water bottle, insect repellent, yoga mat, down the place where the ground is level and soft underneath the high pine trees, getting near dusk now, planes with their landing gear down coming in overheard, some coming very fast, and I get my mom on the phone after a couple rounds of messaging with an old girlfriend living in California's Redwood forests, a re-kindled artistic friendship wherever it might go, and now under the trees going through my yoga poses, and getting to a meditative enough place in my mind where some negative thoughts harbor, I begin to feel normal again, almost.


And it dawns on me.   Ents.  Tolkien had been to the Great War, seen the trenches, brutalities unspeakable.  (He wasn't the only writer, either, who came out of the experience, who would later pay homage to nature, one way or another.)  And what he eventually brought forth from such dark troubled times is the ecological imagination found in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.  A reimagining of human consciousness and the interaction with nature, a reimagining of the human persona.  Yes, perhaps it seems a little bit fanciful, tree-like beings with human attributes and mobility, things like that, but what if you could construe the human being as an unselfish character, not out for gain, standing something like a tree in his occupations, asking for not much more than the basics in return, instead of playing the whole ecological disaster game of "me first," but rather, standing as the tree stands, at peace, with harmony with the ground below, the sky above, the creatures of the air, its neighboring fellow trees, its roots solid down below.

There must be something to it, so deep and intuitive, that we can barely grasp, our lives connected to the lives of trees...

I do my yoga, sun salutation, warrior, plough, attempting lotus pose, but then remembering pigeon, after my five minute head stand, and lotus goes much better, and the trees are above me and the sky turns pink glowing out in the west as the planes come in from far away with their lights on.  The trees render forth their benefits upon me and I meditate.

And like a tree, I too stand over conversations, occasionally participate in a fortuitous kindly one, but generally just stand and listen with basic response as necessary.  I don't get paid much to do it, nor do the trees.

Going through the condensed form of ecological disaster that war is, guns, bombs, shells, the modern way, perhaps the experience allowed the human being to think back, to consider a more ecological way of living.  It might seem fanciful, overly imaginative, a waste of time, at first, looked at coldly, this business of talking to and with trees, but hey, what's so wrong about it.  Malory took to the mountains, Tolkien took to the imagination of literary possibilities, rife with imagery and symbolism, good versus evil.  And in literature, such an awakening, such a breaking free of the industrial age rut, at least in the private imagination, was possible. and right could be distinguished from wrong, as far as how to treat the elephant or the wild land and the oceans themselves.


Buddhism is not the easiest thing to grasp.  Large portions of it can seem quite counter-intuitive, or counter to the logic of economic progress.    Buddhism I find personally to be quite a pain in the ass, and in some ways I wish I'd never heard about it, never had been bitten by its curiosities. You're born into this world, into a family, and for their sake and your own, deal with it;  enter into the battle, fight, drive 80 miles an hour in traffic to get to an economic destination, everyone else is doing it, you don't want to be left behind, because that is no good, my friend.  Or, a compromise, perhaps, if such a thing is possible, between Buddhist thought and the world of consumer consumption.   You gotta eat something.  You gotta live somewhere, somewhere to put your stuff...  Best you can do, a separate peace, on your day off, but that gets lonesome quick, unless you are in control of the mind, which, yes, happens to be another thing the Buddhist tends to preach, meditation, in other words...

Buddhism is torture.  What's its payoff?  Hopefully some form of Tantric enlightenment, for all your troubles and the pains of sitting cross-legged in Lotus pose.

And yoga?  It seems to help control the appetites one gets, the cravings.