I see the art in it, but I get sad reading On The Road now.  The misled.  The great unproductive.  Bad decisions, willfully chosen.

I'm not the only writer led astray for the sake of, for the need for, lyricism, I say to myself, turning the book face down on the bed, but picking it back up again, "oh, now they're driving down to New Orleans to see William Burroughs, a strange chapter indeed, the whole thing...  the drug addiction, the madness, the lack of control..."


I turn to a yoga book I found at the library.  Kino MacGregor, The Power of Ashtanga Yoga, reading therein about the history of yoga and also its benefits.

I sip a Nicolas Pinot Noir, as I do so, being awake at this hour, attempting to entertain myself in the hours of sleep and then waking after the work week's vicissitudes.  I read about the conscience of a responsible yogi, about going vegetarian, about Ayurvedic diet...

I try to find a place in On the Road to read from, but every passage I pick it up, it's the bleak waste of time, so it seems to me...  Which hits home, I gather, as I know it all myself, misdirected, misguided, along for a ride, tho' in my case, trying to make a living while keeping something creative going.

I wake up to the phone call from Mom.  Yes, dad died nine years ago...  "Am I being abandoned..."  No, mom.  I'm coming up to see you soon.  I was just there.  "There's no food, no wine."  I convince her to look around a little bit.  She finds a bit of both.

I'm still tired.  The last of the siding is going up, but after lunch break now, out comes the radio blasting whatever that music is, cumbia, bachata, merengue, repetitive guitar chords spelled out note by note, the same single note guitar sound in each song after song, string by string, singing over the top, the same predictable rhythm...  some sort of weird marching music, ant like.  I put in ear plugs...

I read through the beginning passages of the yoga book as it describes a sequence of poses and the mechanics of each pose.  Lift the sacrum, pull down the shoulder blades, expand, flex the quadriceps while the hamstrings stretch...  To do a pose is to wring out the poisons accumulated through living that sit within the body like sediment, like plaque.

Another nap, and then I get out to the field by the Urban Ecology Center out in the sun, flat enough for the yoga mat and go through my usual poses and some difficult ones new to me, rotated triangle...

Ending up with a good five minute plus headstand in the breeze, and then a solid lotus pose.  When I stand I can barely walk, but it's good, you can feel it, progress.


I reflect on the week.  Funny how we get accused by the others of their own worst faults.  That is a two way street, yes, but if you step back, you see it, you see the connectivity, you see how angry people are, how they make your life miserable, temporarily, at least, while not seeing their own behavior that's even worse and more demoralizing to the human being.


Somewhere, I think there is a place for such writing as this, a kind of journalism that catches how people act around each other, a recording, maybe it's yellow journalism, maybe it's small potatoes, things no one wants to hear or might care to ponder out very much, a sort of detailed note taking about human behavior, and maybe so, if such were established, if we had the talk of the ever observant person wise to how people actually act, say, out on the street, or in a bar, well, maybe we'd be better at getting the truth of a person, say, a Trump, as Trump was observed by bar people to be cheap, a tight wad, a big spender only if he thought there was a chance he might get some action...  how he was the shitty miserable to deal with person who wanted to talk about himself, and this after only a Coors Light, maybe two, tops.  If bar people had spoken, come out as a tribe, telling their truth--and their truth portrayed the man in the light, revealed, as he is, not a nice person, nor a good person, nor a genuine thoughtful honest person, nothing of the like, just in it for himself,who cares--if that truth had come out, the bartender's Middle Earth Elf Union had spoken out, "this, Pennsylvania, is the asshole you will be getting, if you vote for this lying chump in it for himself and greed and megalomania and bullying...."

It was left, however, to journalists of a journalist sort of profession, and they could not talk the truth enough, covered the aberration of Trump as a phenomenon, gave him air time...