Bruno got down to the bottom of Trevallon Blanc 2013 after his friends left and I came around the other side of the bar now that it was closed and sat down with my bowl of pea soup.  He talked about his farm, forty acres in Alentejo, Portugal.  There was the wine he had brought with him, his wine.  He showed me pictures of the interesting things he'd done there.  We talked a little about his wine.  His wine consultant not having enough time for him...  He showed me the mock-ups for a wine label for his red.   We talked about his handyman, how they built a long stone wall together, projects...

 Then he went off down the stairs and out into the night, to Du Coin to catch his friend Yannis for the Beaujolais Nouveau Party, he wasn't going to stay there long, twenty minutes maybe, wanted nothing to do with a tightly packed room anyway, and I was tired and needed to clean up and put things away, as it had been a long night with the bar full of The Hot Club of DC piping away in the front corner.

I packed up my little bit of stored food stuffs and my nalgeen water bottle, put on my coat, made the call for an Uber and soon enough I was back at the apartment to unload, unpacking a small container of curried chicken salad and a paper fold over some sliced roast beef, and to be done with the week, cracking open a Pale Ale and catching up with stupid things on the internet, and then I went for walk, around four AM.  My cough was still there, entrenched, but I needed some fresh air.

I walked down to the bluff over looking the great river's dark blank space below and the trees on the other rising bank, escaping what I could of the light pollution, taking a walk along the old trolley track trail clearing underneath the cool clear sky.  There might be deer out in the season, there was a big fox I saw up from the bottom of the hill beyond the maple tree a week before, the fox sitting there upright surveying his territory until he got wind of me and dashed away into the bush.  I walked along, below me Canal Road under the street lamps, the stone wall, the dark canal...

I'd found a YouTube of Prince performing Purple Rain from 1983, one of the first performances, for a benefit in Minnesota, and so I walked along under my trees listening to it all.   Doing the best I could to get away from the lights of neighborhood and city, the wild animals invisible and quiet, remembering Bruno talking of how there on the farm how he sees shooting stars every night.


A strange year, moving, losing many things, like the old family canvas Eureka two man tent my brother and I would camp out in on summer nights in the yard, lots of books, doodads, little historical things, spices, vitamin supplements, glassware, plates, cookware, the move coming on short notice out by early march, finding out around my birthday in January...  a life of twenty five years on the same street, well, that's how it goes, and then mom's condition, the mind's frailties...

Things which would indeed lead you to reflect upon your own use of things like wine when you are all alone and the hour is odd.   Relaxing must be good for part of you, but there are health consequences, as we all know.  And I just felt isolated, and then you look outward from your own deeper nest of feelings and about where you live, mentally, spiritually, in words and thoughts and memories, and you do see the kind of individual places an artist can end up, through their rebellion against those things which put aside the making of art, deeming it impractical and not of much use...

Everybody, everyone, is creative, and just to survive, swell, they have to be creative, I'm sure.

But there are some, the ones who have a certain kind of a reaction to the things that you come upon in the stages of life...  Rebellion, it might look like, slovenliness, but that too just a thing of a concentration upon artistic expression, on the expression of what it is to live.

Would there be some sense that one would enter into relationships for a larger reason, a trust in that the relationship will be inspiring to the creative drive...

I got to thinking on my own forms of participation in the artistic realms of writing and music, the study of literature as it is made, the study of religious stuff, and how they all might apply to each other, but the side arts too, the ones we may end up spending far more time at anyway.  My art of creating a barroom of people, a regular moving wave of thoughtful people...

I thought of myself as an old school guy, a creator of a community, even if looked down upon for all things come with it.  Bachelorhood.   Weird hours, the physical effects...

Were you ever married, the chef's friend, a restauranteur asks me, blushing I thought...  No, I...  I try to explanation, like how exhausting the job is and who would have me anyway.  I tried to tell him, before wandering off tangent, back to the restaurant business, as if that were life, mutual restaurant friends, owners, relating how hard it is to keep a place staffed these days...

Gorgeous, as always, he offered, with a bro hug before he left and I stayed.



I think it perfectly normal that, in the end, we try to recreate the social experiences we had, when we are alone.  I think it perfectly normal to ruminate over them... to do a retake on the chemistry of the social event, the talk, the look in the eye...  that particular mysterious things we have with another person.


And sometimes that takes a lot of space.

I take my walk not with wine, but with a little bit of Guinness Stout in my bidon.  Is that part of it, that one just drink something relaxing in order to think for a moment, outside of all responsibilities...