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.