And somewhere along the line, being his own idiot, the writer discovers what the aboriginal and the Amish and the shyer types realize about photography of all kinds, that as soon as the light goes on, recording, the magic is lost, and the attempt to capture the soul of a thing or of a matter always goes far off, with very rare exceptions.  The writer realizes this about thoughts, as thoughts must come down to us as verbal things, and the words themselves will scatter whenever that microphone is dropped down into the mind for the purposes of recording all that valid self talk.  Poof.  Gone.  Gone forever.

So the metaphor of the hunter, who catches, let's say, words without necessarily having any approval, any agreement, any bow to such a will, rather taken, stolen, against the will of the words or the singer singing his old song, perfectly fine with it, simply practicing, until that moment when the capturing recording camera comes on.  Only the stolid, the most brave and seasoned of performers will allow for the bridge over the shyness.  None of the greats really want to hear their own voices, not Julie Andrews, not Jimi Hendrix...


So, the long drive, up one week, short notice, mom's old cat, deathly ill.  Going to the bathroom everywhere, not able to walk, not eating.  Oh, that's not good.  They gave me a night off, so I rented a car, and I drove.  Up Wednesday, arriving around 8 at night, a full Thursday with old mom, and then having to drive back, for Saturday is a work night, ragweed's got me very tired and down, driving back Friday afternoon into the night, finally dropping in through 270...

And next week, a couple of extra days to have off.  Cat recovering from the stroke, wobbly, but very hungry, and with her same vocalizations in the morning.  And there we are having a little wine after dinner maybe, when the helper announces that's it, she's done, a serious and pressing family health issue to attend to...  Oh, great.


Driving back, a new and better helper for mom found, darkness on the road...  lonesome.  Toward the end, an FM station out of Baltimore, WBJC, a movement of Mahler's Fifth, and then a Prokofiev, a final ballet, then a Puccini, The Chrysanthemum, soothing music for a Sunday night around 10:30 as the road stretches on from Gettysburg and into the rolling Catoctin and the Shamrock Motel and Inn in the hollow past the orchard and the vineyard and the pastures and the horse pens.

Let's face it, human beings are imperfect creatures.  And I suppose there are possibilities for the creation of some beauty, in art, in writing.  The process of sitting down and placing out all those pocketed dark thoughts and sad things.  The unfortunate thing is that you have to actually write all of them out.  "Where did that ten years go when I had a marvelous ride with Betsy driving out to our friends wedding, and we connected then, but somehow didn't stick fast, and ten years ago would have been better, a less burdened time..."

And with, on top of the administrative stuff, the drying out of the carpet from the drain upstairs in mom's bathroom, the monitoring of the cat's behavior, the finding of the new helper lady, spreading baking soda on the carpet, and giving mom a ride, a little lunch adventure.

No wonder the clear animal beauty in Hemingway...

This has to be the worst part of the ragweed season here.

I've opened the PDF on assertiveness from the email from my therapist.  It's night out, I'd like to go to bed, but it's necessary reading.

Mom is calling now.   And I barely feel like getting up out of bed, and I have to go work tonight.  Robbed of energies.

Is is that I've told her about my new friend, Betsy...

Mom throwing her manipulations at me, my ill mind thinks, a new depression to go along with the physical feeling...

No, I have not been assertive.  I've been passive.  I've not stood up.  And that's why, so it seems, my wants and needs are not so highly respected, secondary things in the family brew...

The phone rings at 3 AM.  I'm in a dream.  "But someone was supposed to come here...  Here I am all alone in this place...  What am I going to do about the cat?"

7AM.  10AM.  12:30PM.  "What am I supposed to do?  Isn't any body going to come and take me out to lunch.."

She calls at 2:30, apologetically.  I'm just getting up.  I feel like utter shit.  Saturday afternoon, my Monday morning.  "I'm sorry," she says.  She's feeling better.  I see in my reflection huge deep bags under my eyes.

Once, If I'd have been assertive, just once, came up with that just once, it would have been different with the old princess...

I get to work.  Painstakingly and without break, I set up the bar.   The windows have been left wide open.  The dayshift server, L.M., is taking a nap on the banquette.  I shut all the windows, from front to back.  I turn on the front window AC unit, a mini-fridge with a big white dryer type tube.  Humidity has entered, along with mosquitoes.  L. is back in the office.  I assume she has the window AC unit on back there too.  The thermostat on the main AC unit reads 77.  The AC unit above the entrance of the Wine Room, it beeps as I turn it on.

The door is opened, and the bar is well-set up for whatever will happen here on a Saturday night with a full reservation book.  (With one busboy.)  5:30, the door opens, and up the stairs right then a couple comes in, as I'm sitting at the bar, writing down the specials on the little paper pad that will fit in my breast shirt pocket.  I let a minute pass, before looking up at them.  Sir, can we take a table.  They've been looking around, admiring the Van Gogh Night Cafe mural on the wall as you come upstairs.  Oh, god.  Already....  Yes, that second table there is fine.  Server x, who will be working with me tonight, comes upstairs, four minutes later, after I bring them menus with a grunt.  "Ted." She says.  "No tastings tonight."  "I know.  Not an idiot.  I've been doing this job for years," I say, unable to keep my voice from raising.

Displeased, she waits on the table.  I hear the order, for two glasses of Bordeaux, and tap water, having to open the bottle.  Then she looks into her phone.

It will hit at seven.  At 6:30, the first party arrives, not we don't like the low table by the window, setting off a ripple effect of seating confusion, and then all the parties arrive in close sequence and extra ones at the bar.  And soon one is moving so fast and in all directions, water orders, cocktails, wine, specials, as to forget the invisible invader pulling full weight on the immune system...



Later, after her silently not appreciating anything about me for about a week of shifts, as I come in on a Sunday, server tells me, she was being sarcastic.  Oh, coulda fooled me.  But that's how it goes, and it's good to be friends again, the weight removed, "life's too short," as they say.

My bad.  5:30 on a Saturday evening, not always ready with sunshine.

Okay, it's the end of the week.  The last shift, a busy jazz night with the Satin Doll Trio.

J gives me a ride back, and I pass out on couch, leaving a small plastic container of curry chicken salad and a salmon tartar out in my backpack overnight.  I wake with a thick-headed feeling, puffy eyes.  Shave off scraggly beard of a week's growth in the shower.  Noon time.  Haven't been able to get through to mom yet, after several tries.  Red streak up her left arm, she mentioned, from the bee sting.

Okay, hard to be optimistic, is how it starts.  I don't get the chance to write much during the workweek.  Actually trying to be productive, do something with my life, my time, do something healthy, get out there
.

 

Tuesday, I am feeling bad.  I almost stay in, in bed, feeling horrible about snapping at the late night guys who came in after the door was locked, the waiter who works part time letting them slip in up the stairs, we'll only stay for one round, and then of course there's too much friendship not to appreciate their visit, until I just want to get home, want to start my new clean life with Becky's good yoga influence.

Yes, I started yelling, accused my friend of disrespecting my book...  couldn't find my cell phone, felt trapped, after I fed them some bread, an onion tart.  I was so almost out of there, had wiped off the bar, done the report...  But the political animal in me...  wanted to hear about their lives...  one from New York State, the Lake George area, or was it further north, his father a Fifth Grade teacher at the local public school, Ticonderoga...


That was Monday night, when I snapped, passive aggressively.  Tuesday was getting out to Arlington, meet Becky for Ginger Turmeric tea, ride with her down to her work place, see the glorious gym equipment and law students working out intensely, the quiet yoga class led by her...

Mom has called several times, Monday night, and into Tuesday morning, sounding like she was giving up on things, "bereft," as she put it.  Feeling horrible on all fronts, but with the afterglow of yoga and a quick bite with Becky, then getting to work, the Circulator free bus to Georgetown full of people, slowly dragging its way through the gritty city, past gleaming Washington Circle all remade and unrecognizable from when I first came to town, all the buildings, then down K, under the Whitehurst, and up Wisconsin, the shabbiness of Georgetown, closed business signs, and finally to some safety at the top of the old hill finally, where it is quiet, peaceful, predictable, actually, when taken in with the rest of the city...  The good job of wine and a good restaurant.  Get through the night, wine tasting, all the familiar people, get home safe, don't be foolish, get to bed.

And then, Wednesday, my usual biweekly session with therapist over the iPhone screen.

And what made me snap, start yelling...

Plenty to talk about with Dr. Heather.  I give her a quick wrap up of the last two weeks.

Assertiveness.  You're passive too long, unrealistically, and then it swings the other way, you snap.  Perhaps that reaction is a step, a beginning, an attempt to find the middle ground of a coherent reaction, an adult balance.

 The stress of sort of being gaslighted, mom saying she doesn't have anything to eat, after her lady was there to get her groceries and wine, "no, I don't want to hear about Barb..."  Very stressful.  Highly.  Crazy making.

It's a good session.  I'm getting out there, trying to curtail the bad habits and fight my way toward the good, the light of yoga, of my own practice under the trees, and being friends with Becky, her dance, her music, her good health and habits, as if far away from the restaurant world, and yet somehow it's still possible to schedule things and do things with her, a bite to eat, karaoke...  and she doesn't see anything wrong with my profession, as it's interesting, meet lots of people.


Wednesday night, I see him coming up the stairs, talking on his cell, wearing a linen shirt, by himself tonight, for the time being.  The same guy, of team late night Khaos, the same guy I snapped at.  I feel intimidated by him, cowed somehow.  I feel bad.  I know I should apologize.  As it turns out, he barely remembers the incident.  Remind me who I was here with, he asks me, diplomatically exploring the situation.  I'm too busy to do more than politely acknowledge him, take care of his immediate need, a green tea, "a splash" of wine.

Heather has told me I have upset his normal expectations.  We should at least address the thing, the issue, whatever it is.

We have a decent conversation dancing around the issue, perhaps, and I've been running around anyway, all night, moving at speed.   There's still plenty of things to do, the other server to dodge when he comes up with bottles to restock.  King of Khaos engages a couple in conversation, where you from, are you married, etc.   Have you ever cheated on your husband, oh, you're both from Ohio...  J comes up from downstairs, and they were busy too.  So the conversation bobs along in its own way, and I'm not all that much a part of it, the closer, still having to close.


Yes, there is stuff here.  And a decreasing amount of time to, as they say, "figure it out."

KoK, an Alpha type, proud of the number of pushups he can do, and not a shy person around attractive women, though not married, he knows, he's got it immediately figured out, how to drop in, implanting himself into the last night bar, at the time when I've just about had it, and need a little wine, say, on the rocks, just to cool down and have a little sugar.

Heather has told me, there are techniques, so I don't fall into my own excesses, so that I can remember my life and my problems and what I might want to be doing, like grocery shopping, or thinking of the next day.  There is the broken record.  Repeat, without variation, "if the door is locked, the bar is closed.  If the door is locked, the bar is closed."

And as far as my personal life, I could succumb to pessimism, easily enough, it's too late.  If I had worked on such things and love and personal happiness of relationships outside of work, I might have stood a chance...  That's what you get for being a professional.  Or were you otherwise distracted, depressed, caught in a living situation that was marked by a feeling of constant retreat, isolation, as if to recover physically from sort of burning the candle at both ends as comes with any job you have these days...


Memories of Monday night late, I put, by his request, Townes Van Zandt, Snowin' on Raton, on over the bar's sound system.  The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, came up earlier, gratifying.  There's a tall man with a grey beard talking about cycling up from lower New York State all the way up to Montreal, in 1976.  I take a swig of Minervois.  The Kermit Lynch 2015 young vines high-yield Gamay is tasting a bit rough, even on the rocks. The boys have a bit of Bordeaux.  I'll ring it in tomorrow with the cash they give me tomorrow.  It's getting later.

It's when I bring up my old book, with the Central New York State setting, with my new friend from this group, that KoK pipes up, joking, "oh, I've seen my ex-wife carrying around Ted's book (and other related bar people," and it strikes my ears as a bit of a dis. In the same way he talks about his mythical blog I keep up on, over the mythical bar life, part of it...  "I'd never rat you out," implying that he would prefer I leave him out of it, for professional reasons, sure, I get that.  Making me the bad guy, me the dirty one, me the one lacking morals...  when I'm the poor bastard who waits on people out of the good Jesus in his heart...

But yes, it's a pattern, my lacking as far as being able to be assertive.  Goes back a long ways.  Wasn't helped by my dealings with the Upper West Side Princess Virgo.  Wasn't helped by lots of situations.  And then you put a little tendency toward enjoying a glass of wine or a beer, a long-standing habit, that's not going to help.

No one wants to be written about.  To write about someone, anyway, is passive aggression, I suppose.

Ragweed season.   The air is nice on Saturday, and I'm up early, so I go do yoga outside, down under the pines.  I could use some cardio too, in my workouts, so I walk to work, having fallen in August heat into the habit of taking the bus.   I get to work.  And then I start feeling it.  Too much time outdoors.  The immune system's reaction to the tiny invader...  the difficulty of clear thinking.

Saturday night, a large party.  My female teammates are bossing me around. Normal traffic on a Saturday night is hard enough for the barman and his hospitality, his duties of hearing out the normal faces' narratives.  The party, in the back, a fifteen top, birthday of a special regular customer, a vocal instructor, her husband, a professor at Georgetown having passed away several years back.  Am I supposed to wait on them?  My job to set things up at the bar, the wine chilled, the mineral water in the cooler, a St. Emilion Bordeaux, a Vacqueyras blanc.  Silverware laid out in back-up.  I'm relieved when I see my co-worker drawing up sheets of paper to relay the order, who's getting what, appetizer, entree, down to the kitchen.  I should be confident that it will go reasonably smooth, but for the necessary lugging of things that comes at this volume, fifteen plates showing up from downstairs all at once, as you juggle, then cleaning the table, then doing it again, again, then the cutting of the cake, but we are understaffed.  I've had staff dematerialize in the middle of such things, at certain points, just when something comes up.

The party arrives, one by one, a young couple, drinks to start with.  Where they supposed to be at the bar for this stage of their event?  There is already one guy at the first seat of the bar, a regular from way back, from Southwest Virginia originally, and then the regular British couple--he's a professor of military history, lovely people to chat with, his wit different enough from USA type--occupy the last two seats...  The party begins to order drinks, and fortunately, LM is perfectly on top of things.  I've got the citrus fruit ready to go and margaritas are ordered, followed by red Dubonnet, mineral water, wine...  Other tables, diners, arrive, and I will go over and suss them out, best I can.  The manager L comes upstairs needing a Sazerac for downstairs.  I look it up in the cocktail book, needing the reassurance of the recipe.

Off-kilter, by the time a familiar face from way back days of yore wine tasting, a translator, an Englishman comes up the stairs, and another couple at the bar.  A woman comes from the room, to the bar, to tell me that someone's something is too salty, could you tell our server, and the server is nowhere to be seen, so that means it falls upon me, after I look around, feeling stressed.  So I come 'round and delve toward the back of the room, and the gentleman who ordered the Dubonnet has found the lobster bisque too salty, could I get another one, as the table thinks his is saltier than the others.  "Sir, it's all from the same batch, no?  Would you like something else?"  He thinks for a moment.  Well, he'll have the Ahi Tuna hearts of palm pequillo pepper salad, but extra rare, like sushi, okay.  I'm over at the other table, selling a bottle of wine, when the busman approaches me, "he says it's too overcooked."  Jesus Christ, goddamn it, I mutter.  So I go back there, Sir, that's as rare as we can do it tonight.  Which he accepts.  The Englishman, who's moved to Peru now with his wife, teaches me a new word, in Spanish, "corrado!" and the busboy chuckles, as I repeat it.


Fast forward, the party has paid, the others are paying and leaving, and soon there's the empty table, coffee cups, a stray dessert plate or two, remaining glassware, there on the table top table cloth long table extending all the way back to the window.  Fine.  It will be therapeutic to go back and clear, and I hear, "goodnight, Ted," from LM, "goodnight," and the door closes.  I'm still irritated (as fuck), but now it's all simple again, and just work, the gods no longer mocking my attempts to retain order at the wine bar, with other worries in the background, and feeling a bit punk from that old ragweed pollen.

There's a new wine, a Kermit Lynch, a young vines high grape yield wine from Morgon, good on the rocks too, maybe just a tad past its prime, but still good for mortal ailments.  And of course, as I polish the glassware from the dishwasher's cycle, and clean the rubber bar mats, and the neoprene, the cocktail shakers, the fruit tray, checking my iPhone for signs of humanity, I see that Sinead O'Connor has appeared on the the Late Late Show, performing Rainy Night in Soho with a large band almost an orchestra, and I put it on the sound system, after Ella Fitzgerald Pandora station has served us for the night.  And Becky, my beautiful yogini friend, I see, has sent me pictures from the dance gig she has done for a Bat Mitzvah over in Arlington.  Which helps me, a kindly, generally gracious but by habit a person distracted by negative thoughts, a nervous type in need of meditations, prone to old thoughts, stay present, and in the present.

And after a glass I get out my guitar and, finding it already in perfect tune, play along to the music, via YouTube, a fresh voice singing an old song.

The old writer wakes up feeling stupid and sorry.  Ill-equipped with logic, as he must be, to write.  Depart from me, Oh, Lord, for I am a stupid and sinful man, who knows not what he's doing, on top of that.  A worker, at least.  Good at something, but not quite sure what, even as he does it.

And yet, Lord, I am willing to try, even as hopeless and as unprofitable as this fishing today might be.  I have a new friend, besides.  She has your light about her, gets me out of the house.

Well, be thankful for a day off.  You'll be back to work tomorrow night, Saturday, and in the meantime you can take care of your body some.  Take the old dog out for a walk.   Ease this mood of chagrin, the sense that you've lived the wrong way for so long, obsessing about old and stupid things, curiosity that will never be rewarded...

Moroccan spearmint green tea, and also a fresh attempt at a bowl of Matcha, yes, should have got the bamboo whisk in the little tea ceremony kit...  Hot water with lime, a dash of Malden salt. turmeric.  Maybe a coffee over ice.  Maybe I need the hand on the pen upon the old notebook, to draw a list to catch remembering what a few things I might need.   Speed on the keypad is good, but supplement it...

We all have a sense of what heroes go through, Lord knows why they go through such things, in order to find their life...  That's how it seems.

Write out a shopping list, winnow down the thoughts passing through, to find a way into the day.  Actually, the coffee helps, dark vomity liquid that it might be.

You get through to mom on her landline in her kitchen, to offer the reassurance we all might need, what might happen today, Barbara is coming, to make sure there's enough wine in the house, groceries, a little cleaning up...  I remind her she has some Canale's wings and chicken parmesan in the fridge.  Cat food.  Winter is coming.  56 this morning, up there.

The day after Labor Day.  I'm up early.  Make coffee.  Make tea.  Do the dishes from last night's duck breast.  But feeling useless.  Is it the pollen?  What to do...

Hard to feel good about anything, sometimes.  A new career at 54?


So, time to get outdoors, despite the ragweed, with the yoga mat, walking down slowly past the Urban Ecology Center to the little grove of Small-Cone and California pines.  Lay out the mat, facing a tree, the air is soft and clear, nearby water bottle, in the shade.  Slow and easy, down dog, warrior, leg stretches, pigeon, plough, five-minute head-stand, and then I ease into lotus, and just as the leg and pelvic muscles start to twitch, the sun comes 'round the tree, shining down into the brain...  alighting upon the Third Eye, the pineal gland, if you believe in such things, the high chakra.  Surprisingly strong and comfortable, relatively.  That's an accomplishment, a step in the yoga path.  And as one closes in on bettering the pose, the benefits are noticeable, and one begins to see the power of the pose for purposes of stillness and meditation.


Becky comes by the restaurant, later on.  There aren't too many people at the bar, the conversations aren't overbearing, a few little extra tastes here and there.  She's in her exercise wear when she arrives, which I encourage.  Be comfortable, unpretentious here.  It's what she does for a living.  It's a good way to dress.

"Kitchen closing at nine," busboy M and then server LM come up and tell me.  No surprise.  A few last orders.  The dessert phase, tricky, tedious, but the Dumbarton Oaks scholars are happy.  "Good the boys are back in town," I tell them when they ask for the check.   A sip of Calvados for him, she's drinking tea, after Dover Sole, and after dessert of Apple Beignet.




Next day, My iPhone beeps as I wake up, a faithful customer wants to come in tonight.  Yes, I'll be there.  It's Jazz Night.  It will get busy.

And I see Becky has sent me a text, around nine, it's ten now.  "Come meet in Arlington for coffee/tea."  So, yes, good to make the effort, get out of your rut.  Too long I have not trusted in life's open possibilities.  Uber Pool.  Haven't even showered.

My long gestation period ends, but I'm already old.

I end up walking back from Arlington, getting my bearings.  And it starts to heat up, and by the time I get the old body back to the Palisades, I've sweat through my clothes.  And yes, no wonder, temperature "feels like" 97.  Finding the bridge, finally, then crossing over the river, into Georgetown, slow moving traffic on Canal Road, pavement heat, then at last struggling up the road, finding shade up the hill along MacArthur.  Inside, into the cool apartment, strip off clothes, into the shower to shave, going in to work early.  Could lay down for a bit, but not much time, Languedoc wine meeting at 2 at the restaurant.  I put on shorts, and head out to catch the bus into upper Georgetown.

It's a cool restaurant by daylight.  Downstairs, a soft Van Gogh ochre bistre color, like a Provence urn for sunflowers.  It's nice to be with the boss, here, during the daytime.  We greet the man who represents the wine promotion, trade stories.  I offer my old stories of Johnny Apple in his gingham checked stripe shirt over table 16 enjoying a Costieres de Nimes with a buddy on a Sunday night.  "The old buzzard French guys, they tell me, oh, Languedoc wines, they used those for our canteens..."

The French are subtle.  They like their secrets.  I keep it cool.  It's nice to see what they do here in the daytime.  There's hardly any business today, as far as diners, but, the boss and his right hand man, L., have things to take care of, administrative stuff, paper work, financial matters.

After a 401k meeting, it's Jazz Night...  A stream of regulars, familiar with both the live jazz and with me, requiring a certain amount of chit chat, a little special treatment...



This morning, I'm up at a decent hour, at least.  A little breakfast, I make a pot of tea, a small pot of coffee in the Bialetti.  Coffee is not Ayurvedically sound, but it feels good on a mind trying to figure itself out, as if coffee were some mineral that had taken on life, thus some form of energy.   Backed up with Moroccan Mint in the old clay tea pot.


But I think, if one were to attempt to distill writing, let's say, the point is to attain a perspective quite beyond ourselves.  That perspective lingers, somewhere, below or above, apart from the plain of the narrative surface, mysterious, and barely tangible.

When we come upon a moment in literature, a moment in a poem, say, that jumps out of the narrative with the offer of something suddenly wholly meaningful, it is as if we are gaining a perspective of the Universal sentient life form, even as it is ever-evolving.  Coming as if from deep space, as if by something that might remind us of the wild new possibilities of science fiction, of Vonnegut's Tralfamadorans, of a Buddhist utterance, a strange clear perspective beyond normal practical concerns...  a look from a point, through a lens, far far away from the normal focus of perspective.


Fitzgerald coming up with that marvelous last paragraph in Gatsby, the Dutch sailing settler gazing for the first time at "the fresh, green breast," of the New World unspoiled, still with all its trees and healthy greenery...  an ecological understanding of how we might fit in with the earth in some more harmonious way, and beyond that, all the way up and onward and into deep hyperspace itself, to be the Consciousness of the Universe looking back upon itself...  And how do these last words on the Gatsby story fit in anyway, this fade out, leaving the setting in the distance?

It can come in, or through, any form of writing, and probably as much as a surprise to the writer, unconsciously arrived at, as anyone else.



I call mom.  The cat has just shat outside the box again.

The "come see me before I die," stated in good enough Irish humor, "I need help."  Cat shit stinks.

I put a load of laundry, work shirts, in, first in cold to get whatever stains one can release from them before being set, old wine stains like the faded blood, like Lincoln's fatal pillow, never to leave.  I feel like a rat.  I'll have time to come visit at the end of the month, I tell mom.  But it's going to be hard to get away until then.  "What the heck am I doing here anyway?" thinks he who often feels quite stupid and ashamed, knowing he should be working at something, but what?

Fucking idiot.

To achieve the perspective of non-dualistic thinking is a step by step process each and every day, facilitated by the performance of household chores, like laundry, dishes, recycling, letting the mind wander, go back and forth...

And maybe you come to a perspective, admitting that you've never quite thought in that practical in accordance with logic and reward systems of economic value and desirable activities of a pleasurable consumer nature.  Indeed, maybe you suddenly realize that your own ways of thinking about things is like that of a proverbial alien life form, which is perhaps what you have to be in order to really truly get, say, Buddhist thought, Jesus thought...

Pained steps...  Self-recognition.  As they say of Jesus, warily, he speaks with authority, where did he get it, what right has he...  You'll say this about your own self, yes.



But anyway, I wrote all this, as I tried to get more serious, to find meaning, to find my way again after an unsettling move out on my own.

"In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world of sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear in their own way into the common dark of all our death..."  as Kerouac wrote.  Visions of Cody?

I do laundry, hang up the Brooks Brothers shirts on the shower curtain rod, the week catching up with me.  Still with the feeling of uselessness.

I wrote all this.  I just went at it, step by step, a take on the "road" aspect of life, even when you are not exactly on the road, but rather just staying put, conservatively even.

One true sentence, that's all you can do.  One true sentence as a talisman.  One small foothold for the mind to start the day in its own space, good or bad, meditative or not, troubled or calm.

Hemingway's "the horse smelled the water."

The man made coffee now on the gas stove, with the small Bialetti Iris espresso maker, then pouring the brewed coffee into a cup, dribbling, and then with ice cubes and one creamer from Korean deli.  He went and sat down on the old black leather couch from Decatur Place and opened the laptop, connecting it to the internet with the iPhone hotspot.

Light a stick of incense, worked yesterday, yeah.  Ragweed pollen and mold spores reported high.

And into the tangles of the mind...

One true sentence...


Sunday night, the eve of Labor Day.   The door opens and, after having polished the bottles of Amaretto and Baileys and the other liqueurs on the shelf, a stretch to reach, along the wall above the cooler and the computer screen, dusting, nothing is happening so I might as well go sit down up by the front window in one of the low pod chairs and take a pretend nap.

A few people trickle in and I rise and tell them to sit wherever they'd like, grab the menus and then a regular comes in and sits at the bar, telling me I look flustered.

It's a quiet night.  A couple comes in, and a neighbor, dear old Monika, has thrown a welcoming party for them, one I was unable to make because of working Saturday nights now, when I put two and two together, oh yes, I remember you (her) from a couple of Tuesdays ago, but I've not met him, and they're both Ph.D.s.  They're cool.  They like wine.  They hiked around Mt. Blanc for the their honeymoon, tasting the local wines along the way.  Sure, taste this, taste that, sure, here's some bread to chew on, a quick discussion, where allowed by the primness of fair service, of academic specialty...

What I'm worried about as the clock ticks on to 8:40 in the evening is the late crowd.  And in particular, the late diners, the ones who like to drink, particularly the ones who might remember our friend from the IMF.   It's been a year, this night the last I saw of him, quite a chap.

But no one comes in, I try the Dire Straits Pandora channel for a moment as homage to Uli, but I'm not into it, back to cool jazz Coltrane and the like, and I really don't even want a single sip of wine, and when the kitchen closes, it's not long after that I sneak downstairs and turn the button on the knob of the blue door.  The other door is open, still a few diners around, no biggie, but soon they are gone too.

I clean the bar, put the bottles away in the ice, we're closed tomorrow, I clean off the bar, organize things a bit, go through the little bit of paperwork--they're already done, the servers, downstairs, and A. throws out an invite to Flash, the techno music club, as she leaves after changing--do the checkout, and all I want to do is detox and get home and meditate.  As I'm doing the last bit, about to check on the bus schedule, D. from the last few nights...  I get a text, "too late for a glass of wine?"  Meaning he's probably close by.  "Yes."  With a bit of guilt, but yes.  By the time I text him back he's already up the hill anyway, on to Breadsoda.  But let's just pack things up, the cold cuts, the water bottles, into the old backpack, and get on with it, walk to the bus stop by Ellington school, no wine, no nothing, just get back to the apartment, hit the couch, take a goddamn nap...


I do take a nap, and then later I wake up, putter in the kitchen, put a load of laundry in, now that it's about 4:30 AM, trying to keep quiet footsteps, take a walk down to the bluff, overcast, decent air, the river there down below but hard to see and feel, but for the airs it channels.  Socks and colored underwear into the dryer now, and now, feeling lonesome and defeated, a slave to the bar and all its comings and goings, quite hard work, actually, both mentally and physically, chosen perhaps because the body's inherent dislike of lack of motion and boredoms, I summon up a bit of Chernobyl, having failed to really want to get into Rashomon at this our, and I break down and have a glass of wine from the open bottle of Loire Pinot Noir, the cheapest wine I could find at MacArthur Beverage.


And now, after rest and sleeping 'til three in the afternoon to recover from it all, I look out the window, as the AC whirrs its breaths steadily, I see birds fly over, gathering now in early September.  I have the night off, and the sky is grey, light milky opaque, the bricks of the adjacent small GI apartment building stony brown gray too and also opaque, stoically solid and utilitarian.


The mind wonders:  I have not fought for things.  I should have been braver, made a stand.  I should not have been shy, nor retreating, but jumped at many offers, sang out loud in Grease the musical, as my music teacher in junior high school recommended to me after seeing my crazy man rock music performance in the talent show...  I have stood up and fought, yes, I should have stood up already and made a stand for literature and poetry and moments of the mind.  But sadly, somewhere along the line I became a working man, lonely, isolated, being entirely stupid for having made the bargains with the devils one must make, so it seems, like to work at night and to be around drinkers and their voicings of bullshit every working day...

I was a coward.  I hesitated.  I was not the early bird, not early to bed, not early to rise, not a seizer of the day...

In choosing my line of work, I suppose I had some naive idea of Lord of the Rings Christianity, working where tribes of man came..

But what you get, the pains of old teeth, lonesomeness of interactions with strangers only, anonymous, of old not fully taken muddy shits from efforts to keep energy, various hungers, self-pleasuring late at night to check to see if one is still alive or not, a waste of vital energies.

And meanwhile the nuclear core, all the talents, all the music, all the song, all the recitations, all the acting, all the soliloquies following the dramatic action, lies fallow.

At least, a day of rest, no work tonight, thank god and labor unions.

Later, I get out for a walk to the trees with my yoga mat.  It's been a while.  The basics, easily enough remembered.

Walking, after yoga, is always interesting.  Muscles more deliberate.   The tight joints of the pelvis stretched out some, a tiny minuscule realignment.

Tree pose with trees is good.  A remembrance of posture.

When I get back to the apartment, leaving mosquitos but also the interesting glow and pink light of clouded sunset, I meditate, and then later, here I am, just bored with myself, time for a glass of wine.

Writers, just lonely males trying to make constructive with their self-centered thoughts...  Boring thoughts of the outmoded patriarchy...

I don't even want to write today, wasted the morning, the phone call to mom, checking in, across the street to the Korean deli...

How many bad decisions, growing and growing, in their effects upon my life.... I go and run errands.


Saturday night, not long after the door opens, a trio of Russians, familiar, come in from their walk in the woods behind Dumbarton Oaks down in the dell where trees are fallen, and the ladies have been bitten by mosquitos, Alla, an instructor in classical piano, Mikael, her husband, and Natalia, the widow of a diplomat... seventy or so, noticed by the male of the species.

Soon after their order, getting them first with the wine they might like, escargot, foie gras mousse, another order of escargot, the busboy is bringing up the sturdy booster seat for kids...  I get that table sat, get them kir royal to start with, Badoit for the table and the kids, she used to come here back when she was in law school at American, back in '98, live in New York now...

And then, oh, I see, from the reservation tab, the two low tables by the front window, the boss, wife, son, son's friend, will be dining with me tonight.  Great.  Deal with it.  Two bottles of mineral water, one still, one sparkling, out on the table, son and friend come in, no, they'll wait, no wine now, nice haircut, thanks, okay, and now the elderly foursome are sat at the quiet table way in the back.  It's a room narrow enough I have to aim myself into, careful with what I'm carrying, water, menus, to not bump into the chairs on one side, opposite the banquet, and the wine cellar presentation of the Bordeaux.

The boss has the good presence to take the order for his family with the little wireless tablet, no salad dressing for the wife, salmon not the normal menu way, but grilled medium rare... All I had to do was open the Minervois in the Bordeaux wine glasses brought to the table, and one rosé.  But it's still ground to cover, the child up front is sweet, a little girl, but making a mess, and one wants to get all their orders right down to the desert course, a scotch for the man, and then all the way past the bar back to the room with the elderly intellectuals having a light meal of onion tart and seared foie gras--one of them mentions a list of books to bring people up to date, one being Portnoy's Complaint, and a book with a word in the title like brave, as good if not a better book on the Holocaust than Anne Frank, one bottle of Cotes Du Rhone for the table, and then scurrying for the Pinot Noir from Auxerre for the table of two couples, both women expecting, I gather.

And then a few more people at the bar now that I'm trying to put a wrap on things in the dining room, eyeing the clock for potential kitchen closing early time, and you know, it's friends who show up now, and one just wants to talk, and one wants to eat, and again I check my watch as it nears 9:30.



Can't get out of there without a late night.  A need to take the edge of.  To have a chat with the neighborhood, who ever has come for a late meal or whatever...

I've always been susceptible to going off track with things, with bullies, with interesting people, and it becomes necessary, so it seems, for me to join in, and it starts easily enough, a little splash while the last dessert order is placed, it's ten at night anyway, and my fellow servers who worked the main dining room downstairs have since wrapped up.  But that's how I've always been, always dilly dallying at the temples of friendship and evil companions with whom one, in the expression of my grandmother, falls in with and has a good time...  but also leaving oneself open to valid criticism and also guilt, for making a parent wait for your silliness, or your teenage desire to smoke a bit of pot with the last fun people.


My friend, D., has come by both for a good dinner, after working all day as a builder contractor, and to check on me, as we ran into each other up the street from work the night before, I having made the mistake of dropping by quickly when my friend tending bar told me some old friends from Austin Grill days were asking about me, "cool," as he described.   I'd had a glass of wine, one, at Breadsoda, and saw him through the window at Wingos, as I was on my way to find something to eat, ending up at Z Burger, getting two doubles on my home.

I'd been tired all day, and had to drag myself up out of bed at 2:45 in the afternoon to get ready for Saturday Night Labor Day Weekend, the start of my work week.

I'm trying to do the paperwork, and in the dim light it takes serious effort, suddenly feeling very tired, almost needing to sit down.

"You want to go out for a burger, man?" my friend asks me after we've sat around talking to the neighbor Cathy, and I finally manage to pull it together, having a small bite of mushroom risotto.  "But you just ate."  "Yeah, desert."  D. and Cathy share stories from church, from the arch conservative Arlington diacese, to Cathy bringing "homeless people" to dinner at The Tombs on Sunday for prime rib dinner.


It takes me a long time to get everything cleaned and put away.  Organizational skills have gone out the window, and I'm feeling faint almost all of a sudden.  At this point in the evening, shaken by the long run of one shift, keeping the conversations going, also appropriate to service--it's all an art form, really--you don't know quite what to do with yourself, go home and hole up and find something as far as a TV series on your laptop, or to just walk up the street with your buddy in the fresh night air with no particular object more than a burger, maybe a beer.  I'm feeling paranoid now about ends of nights like this in such a moment.  We lost an excellent chap a year ago, and the Sunday night for dinner of Labor Day Weekend was the last I ever saw of him.

We have a beer at Breadsoda after wolfing down our burgers at the counter of the burger joint, the music is good, and the pretty girl next to us is vaping.


In the back of your mind, as you get your cab home, wondering if you've got everything, your mind tells you about all the things you should have done, all the things you failed to make happen, given all the opportunity and the way your family set you up to succeed and be a good person in this world now.  Surely you should have been an academic, a teacher...  not falling for the bullying, the have a drink you'll feel better...  followed by all the angst the next day...  the wish to clean your self, your system, your whole entire life out...

Yeah, actually not too bad today, as far as an energy level, and maybe I'll even have a little bit of time for yoga before work, but still, the long low level of chagrin one must feel, and the only immediate good thing, as far as being able to be a good boy today, is that it is Sunday, the day of the Lord, as it has come to be, out of the Sabbath keeping tradition.  I take my shower.


Poor Kerouac, he would have that sense of being led down a path, falling in with certain kinds, out of boredom, out of not being able to easily fit in anywhere else, anywhere normal, since his early days visiting the city and meeting Ginsburg and the crowd.  Mailer observes how Gore Vidal, creepy aristocrat rich man, ruined poor Kerouac, seducing, out of his grand well-bred Harvard egotism, the shy Catholic searcher, plying him with who knows what to get to his dead of despoiling, leaving Kerouac, one might gather, with some long standing creepy doubt bad memory uncertainty taking the simplicity from his man life.

Hard enough to go on the road, to suffer such as traveling with Neal Cassady, in the name of literature and letters, the life of the mind, hard unto a sensitive soul who probably just wanted to go to church on Sunday and be normal, normal enough so that all the great guilt he would have felt... ("They had Ph.D.s in guilt," Carolyn Cassady observed, of the two.)

Light some incense, Frankincense and Myrrh, maybe a little yoga and meditation before work...

And even managing a few poses, before getting ready for work.

Arm yourself, again, my friend, to go face that which is hard to face...