Jesus;  on the rampart, tempted by the Serpent, talking to himself:

No, this was never about anything but me being myself.   "Jesus, the carpenter, the carpenter's son," is what I'm known as, in society, locally, maybe even regionally.  But it's more than that.  And anyway, the carpenter part is metaphorical.  First, because we can dismiss just about anyone by the claim to "know what they do for a living."  Oh, he's a cop.  He's a publican.  He's a Galilean.   He won't amount to much in this world as, say, the high learned priest, nor has been incarnated as a Roman Centurion in all his powers.

But me, he's a...  well, he's... that guy...

And the rest of the metaphor...   as wood comes from trees, we are given words.  Words can be placed together, fashioned just so, so that they fit together.  Words help us figure things out.  Words put well together are as a house built upon a solid foundation rather than shifting sands.


They can revile you, they can beat the shit out of you, they can fire you, but they can never take away your words, your own drawing in the dust.

They can never deny you, nor your access to the wisdom of the Father as one can know it in his own heart.

That is why I say to you, oh cunning serpent who knoweth the weaknesses of man, get thee hence away.  All you say, such things are nothing.  They are not the words we live by.  The words that have life unto themselves, such that they might heal the sick, raise the dead, put a man who casts nets to a higher purpose...  save one from the greatest humiliating fears...  No one has any use for you, but by distraction.  Get thee behind me...

The words, like I, are friend to all.  "No matter what path a man take, I am there to meet him."  Whether I am here or not, they will always come around, sooner or later, for I am the Truth, the Word, the Logos.




And Jesus felt rather guilty, in a way, for the kind of professional work he'd come to and lived with.  There were voices inside his head, should haves and could haves.  "You're a smart guy..."  But he knew his father's work, that work which his father did which was, truly an echo, earthly, of a Father in Heaven, if there was one, a teacher, a kind and graceful man, who didn't say much that wasn't of meaning and deeper meaning.

In the same, as son as father, on the one hand, "who would believe you..."  And on the other, well, of course, "the perceptive, those who have eyes, can see..."

Indeed, behind the scenes, his father's "tenure" had been called into question.  "We'll give a you a yearly contract, but...  It could have been disrespectful, humiliating, but that somehow this is the reaction of people who see themselves with powers to wield treat their fellow being, self-justified in their ways for feeling the power to lower some and to elevate others, to make another's life subtly miserable at work, particularly in contrast with those who "toe the party line."  (We all know the dynamic, the types...)   And a teacher, a true one, as his father was, will always be a distant thing, too much truth, in excess...

The most respectable man in the world, his father, and yet they add a misery to his life and to his family.   ( And all of this world pre-dispose, as if he needed it, Jesus to side with the people, as they were.  People in need of a teacher, and these people, fortunately, or unfortunately, are everywhere...  And if he were ever to get depressed, soon, or eventually, he would come across another human being, and just by a simple exchange, he knew his work again.

Indeed, Jesus had been ready a few times, to say, "screw this," about this job.  (Until he finally, gracefully found a kind of exit...)

There is a statue at the end of the old street close to where I used to live, along the avenue, St. Jerome the Priest in front of a Croatian embassy, commissioned by the Croatian Franciscan Fathers, by Ivan Mestrovic, 1954.

Saturday, very busy, Sunday night slow.  Monday night jazz, the musicians are in the door right at opening, and the boss's family is there at the end of the night, dessert, coffee.  Old Gene keeps me company.  And in the end, gives me a ride home, which oddly delights me and supports me, for I am lonely and tired out.

I wake up with a headache.  Again I had a few sips of wine, but no more.  The Tuesday wine tasting features a white and a red from Corsica.  The white is distinct.  The red is good.


Jesus was into cooking and the culinary arts.  Thus the miracles of loaves and fishes multiplied.  Perhaps he and the Disciples had figured it out.  As he was ahead of his time.  It takes a miracle sometimes, I'll tell you.


The barman's day begins in soreness.  Later on he will put on the antic disposition of a good mood as a server, and this cannot be sustained for the whole day with the shift on top consuming the majority of the energies of eight hours on your feet.  There's only so much to go 'round, no matter what.  And so it is not atypical for the barman to remember some of the things from the previous night with a certain loathing, for those who kept his good manner too long, and by a general sensibility resulting from that, a kind of loathing for humanity in general.  All this will work itself out, with the different stages of preparations and travel, with the humping up the stairs of what will be needed for the night.

Add on top of that morning mood of frustrations, add the duties of the amateur writer who knows not what he's really working on, just that he keeps at it, for reasons a bit beyond himself.  Add on top of that the administrative duties, the self-keeping and feeding, the soothing things.   The phone call to say, "it's okay," to a mother too far away.   The scintillating conversationalist of the evening, with the memory of customers old and new, over many years now, wishes for silence.  A relationship with no questions asked, no strings attached...

All of this meaning that he is, in the sense of Peter, a sinful man.

I guess I felt like it was necessary to go off in an opposite direction.  The talk was economy, technology...  But none of it enthused me.  I held fast to a job of physical labor, service, face to face contact, conversation in a meeting place.

But that path, it turned out, was very very old.  And if largely ignored in the daily struggles of the worker bee life of the city, working hard, playing hard, driving places, going to fitness places, the path was well-worn, omnipresent, just over there, and good tales about it from those who had gone on that path.

Just that it felt awkward.  New.  Contrary to the interests of one's best comfort and survival...


Jesus, the poet, the writer, the man who knoweth labors and the miracles that come out of them...


Eh.  Rough start.  It was slow last night at the old wine bar.  Two high powered regulars sitting in the corner, discussing the legalities of the impeachment trial, having a quiet dinner.  And two ladies at the bar, one a local librarian, one the owner of an art gallery down the street.  They've been to the sister restaurant, the new one, up the street.  They order a cheese plate, adding a fourth cheese, the Societé Roquefort, in addition to the Ardi Gasna from the Pyrenees, Cantal from the Auvergne, a cheese that dates back to Gallic times, and Sandy Creek.   And it turns out that one's ex-husband has passed away, two weeks ago.  Yes, I remember when they used to come in the two of them.  Tanqueray Gin martini, I say, yes.  We nod.    Yes, crying is welcomed at the bar, this being an Irish kind of bar, I tell them.

But anyway, slow...  I get out not long after ten, and end up making the walk home.  I reheat some chicken stew, take my meds, skip the wine entirely, and off to bed.


My poetry, metaphors, parables, pale in comparison, to the Lord's.

The story of the Lord, Jesus Christ, master of poetry, is concise, rather.  Compact.  The writers of the Gospels do a pretty good job, from what one can tell, recording, editing, putting together the anthology of Jesus, his life as a sort of writer, along with his "writings."  Actions are not far away from writing.

In our own lives, this match is not easy to achieve.   Our own actions, unless one were to put a lot of spin on them, aren't so great, nor so earth-shaking, nor memorable, easily fading into insignificance, in this, the great age of The Insignificance of the Human Soul, where nothing happens unless it is referenced by social media and a nifty visual to catch the distracted eye.  And we've made travel difficult anyway, even as we feel we've made it easier.


I suppose there was a time when I believed in my own acts as a bartender.  People would note my Christian kindness, my open table fellowship with all sorts.  I don't know what went wrong.  I was steady.  I listened to people when they had something serious they were going through.


And then, one wonders, you are moved on into a form of professional advancement.  You're to become an expert, a consultant.  All well and good.  Come on, move along, work your way up, you're in the wine world now, salesmanship.

But part of you holds back from that.  Wine is wine.  Even Jesus may have famously made a point distinguishing the good new wine versus the previous offering, but it's deeper than that.

In pursuit of wine knowledge, and an aura of professionalism, my energies were spent just so.

What I liked most about the wine service and the restaurant industry, besides the thousands of people I came across, was the good vibe of hospitality, the joy, the smile that comes out at the simple pleasure, satisfied curiosity over wine.

But I wondered, what was I actually doing;  one should know what they are doing, at your age... right?

And same thing with the writing...  "Where are you going with all this..."

You need the help and guidance from the true professionals in your field, your true work, your true profession...

And where does one go, to get all that?



In the end it was all the political, the willingness of people to take offense, to put to death not the criminal Barbaras, but the worst offender who spoke words...


On the radio, the typical cultural war squabble, God forsaken in identity politics.  I turn it off, to preserve the calm I can manage.  What was reduced by the world of technology to be, out of habit and daily practice in the world of sped-up information and distraction, to complete irrelevance turned out to be the only thing to save me.


There are a few things in the world which facilitate the creative process.  The Beatitudes...  By saying, "happy," as in "happy are the meek..."  Jesus is describing for us the true nature of the human experience, and in particular that of the creative, the artist of thoughts, who will experience such things in their truer forms from which others are more insulated against.  But the author is served better by looking at the truth rather than the escapism of the condition...

Such is the diet the artist lives on.  Poor, mournful, poor in spirit, meek, etc...

There isn't much to cheer you out in the real world, anyway.  One asks himself, do I have the right to be happy anyway, given who and what I am.  According to Jesus, the answer is yes, hopefully.

Put the water on.  The water comes to a boil as I talk to mom on my cell in the bathroom.  I take the tea water off as it whistles, pouring the water into a cup with a dandelion root tea bag.  There is some loose leaf dragonwell still in the bag, not much, powdery, but it will do, and I set the timer.  I've already poured out some chicken stew from the refrigerator into a bowl, the bowl into the toaster oven, broil, 225.

The tea is ready, my cell phone alarm buzzing, so I lift the strainer out, draining the little basket with the tea.  Later, the orange water kettle is empty, so I pour water from the Britta pitcher into it, and then I pour the water from the Pur water filter pitcher into the Britta water filter pitcher, and then I run the tap for a little while before pouring water into the top compartment of the Pur filter.  It takes time for the water filters, which are the replaceable ones, longer for the Pur.  There is a rust colored residue that builds along the slender rims on the top of the water filter pitchers where water might sit and dry.  

With breakfast warming, and mom settled down and prepared to accept that she is in her proper place, I sit down on the couch before the coffee table, putting my iPhone connected with the charger, and I open up my laptop and connect it via the iPhone's Personal Hotspot.  The toaster oven makes a tiny click of groaning expansion as the heating elements come on and off.  I live with the miracles of modern life and technology.

I made a conscious effort not to drink wine last night, even as I came in and plopped my body down on the old couch.  I tasted a few wines I was unfamiliar with, the Corsican wine we will be pouring for the complementary Tuesday wine tasting, and the Chateau Villars, a Fronsac, 2011, as the Italians did not finish it quite.  But just sips, and I even got to the grocery story on a cold night after the long Saturday night shift.  The last copuple, who were slow on leaving, along with the four Spanish women chattering on--I turned the lights up, I put on Irish music, and then  I finally turned even the Irish music off, eating a piece of calves liver, sitting at the bar even--but finally they all too left and I did the tip adjustment, put in the numbers for the tip out report, etc., poured the dishwasher, Jules, from Cameroon, a last glass of sparkling wine, pour la route, before he caught his bus, and I was out of there.

The night hadn't started out all that pleasantly, with an emotional old mother calling with her barbs and mysteries of her own misery, but I had missed the call, walking to work, distracted by running  into a neighbor, and when I called back the phone rang on or there was a busy signal...  Something she said, made me worried.  "A friend of mine died..."  Who?  Not a great way to go into work...  and everyone there in the servers, particularly A. with whom I will be working with, seems in a tight mood.  Hugo, the faithful old busboy, and Jean Baptiste, they are nice to me, and Marie Rein says hi...

I contact Mom's helper, in that time period when I assess the bar and its stock, wines into the buckets and sink to be chilled properly and white wines opened and ready to go to keep up the night's demands...  Yes, she'll be able to go and check in on mom, great.  I gather things, put them into readiness, I change...   As the shift nears lights camera action, 5:30, after we're fed our tilapia and rice and I finally get through to Mom around 5:20 as I'm brushing my teeth, good news, Joan K. hasn't died, and the poor beaten down old abandoned mother seems to be alright and the phone is working, so...  with that pressure off I tell my coworker A. that I "like working with Ivan."  "Well, he had to do everything," she says, meaning Wednesday's hectic jazz night, when we were quite busy.  Whatever.  "I wasn't feeling well," is all I say, after a pause.  I'm not going to take the bait.  I'm taking my antibiotic Amoxicillin-Clav and my Benzonatate cough pills, and when the door opens at 5:30 up the stairs comes the British couple and I've not seen the Mrs. in a while, and it's Chinese New Years.    We will be full up and running by 7.  Just keep moving, get the first customers down and a drink to start.  Get in the dig, and wait for the reaction, is how some people work.  But I know who I am, and that I work hard and do as good a job as possible.  There is my liver to take care of, and in the last few days, I've been doing well by that too.

I drink my tea, with a dash of Ashwagandha powder, and thank god for chicken stew which is tasting better now every day since I made it Thursday.

Every day now, I make a stew.   One has no fear, no worries, making a stew.  Give it time, follow simple steps, add the ingredients in their stages together...  The cut meat tells us when it is ready to be turned by when it no longer sticks to the heated pan.   Vegetables are cut under the eye of what will be a good size to savor in the spoon.  The vegetables sweat, releasing their moisture as their qualities and flavors concentrate.  The nose, simply, tells us when the taste of doneness is at hand.  

And there are tried and true methods, developed over time, handed down from beyond memory, the sear, the aromatics, the spice, the good use of wine as flavor stimulant...

The zucchini, added last to the pot, after the red wine, inexpensive Cabernet from the South of France, after the tomato sauce and the bone broth stock, is cut in larger pieces, as they will tender easily, and then, after the bubbling yields to steam, the pot is set.

The Bible is full of poetry, and poetry of the deepest sort.  How could a person raised in that tradition not want to try the writing hand in their own possession, and how could they long avoid those things which set alight their own creative eyes as they mulled their way through toil, so to get to the deeper things.

I had been ill since the holidays, I think, more or less.  I let the body fend for itself, nursing it when I could, but there was stress, there was Restaurant Week, and upon it came a hacking cough I could not get rid off.  Finally, a day off, to schedule, and then the next day to visit the proverbial doctor, the nurse practitioner, walking home finally, such as it was, with medicine.

And with the medicine, an antibiotic, one should not indulge too much in the fruit of the vine, and really, I needed a break from that too, such that I am now able to be up and not in too deep a state of gloom and worry, pressured by the march of work...

So too did the season allow me, in my illness, to embrace things that are hard, given our modern skeptic artificial intelligence what-is-your-password times...  I read Father Merton, and James Martin, S.J., I took out the DVDs of Father Barron's Catholicism series, for those who don't have the chance to travel to the Holy Land and the world's great churches.  I took quiet time, for myself.  I meditated.  I sort of prayed.  I was not feeling good, about anything, but sometimes, this is how it has to be, cloudy, before a picture clears and makes sense again in all its widespread elements.

I cannot see a single line or passage or sermon or parable Jesus is reported to have said without seeing a myriad of deeper meanings, and quite oddly and powerfully, they speak most directly, to my own mind, my own work.

Jesus, the son of the tekton, a tekton himself...  the son of a college professor of botany, and in this world, holy to some extent, a man of an open table "fellowship," not far away from a barman in this today world of the modern city's employment offerings...  no one in the modern city being that far from a publican, a sinner, a go-go dancer, an escort, a conniver, a lawyer, a person blind and sick, cut off, a prodigal son, a stress-out tippler, an arms merchant...

Hemingway liked the world of Europe, its cafe life, its fiestas and gatherings.  He understood men of hospitality, he understood bullfighters, and how they disliked the city traffic and noise as they went off to work.  He understood work, not in the least in that he understood it as the ground spring of the mental juices that yield their poetry, bright living flowers out of the dirt of manual labor and the work of fisherman.

The story of Jesus gathering his fisherman to do their poetic work is itself a poem of how the good thoughts, the ones we call "creative" ones, the ones that satisfy us, come into being, through the small faithful act of putting away the distractions to find the act of discerning the divine.  This tale alone catches us right there, and we must then follow.



The saintly, or at least good spiritual, in some ways, Catholic minds, are there in the writing world as much as anywhere...  The literary career, aptly viewed, is a spiritual one.


"But you still have to go off to work today, don't you..."

I know full well that I am a Prodigal Son.  And I have been preaching the wrong message, and must aim to correct myself now.

The second day off...  the weather is overcast, about 50.  My sleep schedule is disrupted by the illness.  There's a rotted onion in the trash can.  Early in the morning I take that out, and go for a little walk for fresh air down to the grove of pines.  Afterward I get back and rest some more.  I've made an appointment at the CVS Minute Clinic for the afternoon today, as the hack, the cough, the sinus congestion has continued, along with a lack of energy.  I'm up before noontime then, call Mom, get through, remind her that she is in the right apartment and that she'll be fine there, and that Mary is coming.  I tell her I'll try to come up and see her next week.  And then I start to tick through some things from the to-do list.

I send along the form the Humane Society sent along in PDF form for Mom to adopt a cat, I call around to find if some technician can come by and check the significant hum in her landline...  Soon enough, a shower, and then it's time to walk up the street to the CVS, past the Lab School and the Firehouse, to the old converted movie theater space to sign in at the kiosk for my appointment.  The weather is both warm and cold, and I heat up quickly under two jacket layers as I walk along, with my courier bag over my shoulder, restricting my breath, and soon I am overcome by a gag reflex, being unable to get a good breath in through my nose.  I stop at a tree, taking off my courier bag, opening up my outer coat.  I gag several times, heaving.  I blow my nose to clear it.

I have a book that's due at the library.  Thomas Merton's The Silent Life.  That will be included in my trip.

The doctor, a nurse practitioner, a young woman, takes me in after the wait, closing the office door.  A quick run through.  Sinusitis, it turns out.  I get my medications, the antibiotic, two pills for seven days, and pills for the cough as well.

By the time I leave the doors and make my way westward, past the abandoned Safeway, past the wine shop and Black Salt, the pizza place, Black Coffee, shuffling along now at just past four I don't have much energy after dropping off my books at the library front desk, having stopped at a bench outside to take my two pills.   I leave the library, after a quick peruse of the spirituality section, nothing jumping out at me.   I still have Father James Martin's book to torture myself with anyway.  Now it feels a good deal colder, but I will make the walk, and not bother to stop to eat anywhere, save some money.  I take the precaution of stopping into the wine shop, for a twelve dollar bottle of Loire Valley Pinot Noir, but without any pride and not much interest.  I try calling mom again, and she's left the phone off the hook, and maybe Mary is still there anyway.

And finally, after the walk, I climb the steps and in through the apartment door, to take off my coat and shoes, send a text to my aunt telling her that I made it to the clinic for antibiotics, try mom again, and then fall into a nap, disturbed by the pained cough, but hopefully better soon.  Ready for work tomorrow, for a Saturday night shift, closing, not really sure I'm up to it, I say, and I go off and sleep more deeply after reheating some beef stew I've made in the new Instapot my aunt has sent me for my birthday, a boon to my diet, particularly these days, needing the curative.


I'd mentioned my GGT liver enzyme level number to the young woman, the nurse practitioner.  Her alarm sticks with me.  How much do you drink a day?  Well, a bottle...  A bottle?  Yes, over time...

Antibiotic pills work better with no alcohol in the system, and I'm too tired and depressed to want any wine anyway.  As I've entered that "sick wolf to St. Francis" stage of life, when things are stripped away and the goodness of God comes shining, and when one realizes, yet again, but this time stronger, that life is not about happy things and entertainments and supposedly fun things that leave you with deeply mixed feelings afterward...

This morning, I wake, at a decent hour, and must occupy myself with little things until getting ready for work, later in the afternoon, around three.  I get up, have some green tea, some hot water detox tea, then a bowl of the chicken stew I made, reheated in a bowl in the toaster oven.  I write a little bit, consider my medications, make it down to the basement to put a load of colored laundry in.  It colors the day when you have to go to work later, the intensity of a Saturday night and there will be a large party back in the wine room at that inopportune hour of 7:30, fifteen people, leaving the old bartender  vulnerable between the bar and the main dining room...


Although I'd been talking to my therapist taking my tendency to retreat into my own meditative space, reading good things and grasping again, as younger people do, for the spiritual and spiritually meaningful things in life, I began to see that I was more right than wrong.  Sure, loneliness seems to suck sometimes, but this is what we have to face...


The relationship is with Jesus Christ, first, much more so than the church...  The first gives us so much, so creative...  Don't worry so much about the latter...  You could be your own church, I suppose, following the same...


After the nap, quick, not deep, with coughing's pains, and the shower, I see that time has passed.  I sit on the couch after the shower, sorting black tube socks for work.  Nike, UnderArmour, Adidas logo... They're pretty similar anyway.  The white elastic strands are curling now out of the Adidas, but they still hold up in shape, no holes.

Call mom, again, the phone is off the hook.

It had been all too easy, with all my failures, a strange steady poverty, the travels and cares, too easy to get into the wine and not want to come out.  I'm sure my energy took a toll.

And thus, because each human being is vested with a soul, built to conform and resonate to the image of God the creator of all things, each transaction with another is far richer than might be expected.  And that is why I chose the restaurant business as the form of interaction that would perhaps keep a roof of some sort over my head, along with enough independence to write and take walks in nature.

I quickly, immediately found out, as I was a shy barman nervous if not set up and well stocked, that people were deeper and far more interesting and complex and wonderful in a godly way, each person like a separate species as we might define the difference between the beaver, the woodchuck, the squirrel, the chipmunk, the field mouse, the mole...  Each person, when you stood and listened, was real.  And so you could never reduce any business transaction to simply that, there was too much going on, incredible witnesses to surviving, even if they just drank Budweiser, lived in some poor small studio apartment, let their old hair get too long, didn't even sleep in a proper bed, like old Fred, an accountant for one of the telephone companies whose wife had passed away...

Further more, what followed, was that any restaurant or gathering place was a success to the extent that it could be a sort of missing monastery.  What did the monks cook up today, as far as specials?  Everyone had worked hard, and now it was to come and pray and have a little bit of wine.  Customers, by participation, became the monks themselves, and so they felt that they themselves had come and did it, made the stock, split the wood to make the fire, selected the meat and carved and put together...  just as they had made the wine as if it too had come out of themselves...



I grew up in a monastery, now that I think about it.  It was up an old country road, simple in design, and my father and mother led the monastery, and there was me and my brother.

So I woke in the morning after my run of four intense shifts, from the end of Restaurant Week Sunday night with Ivan, and on through, tense days with coworkers, coughing, aching, with heartburn, but you get through it.  Assess tiredness with a sleep cycle disrupted...  make some green tea, wash the dishes while the tea cools in the tub in the sink.


Ancient wisdom.  I've always been drawn to it.  To unwind from the week I put on Father Barron's Catholicism DVD part one..  And it works on me.  You can't expect to be happy all the time, you learn in life.  And so I wake, feeling this.

Voice in head:  I work hard, throw my body under a train most every night, and what do I get from my co-workers...  At least the boss shook my hand politely before he and his wife departed.

I'm tired, but awake.  I make an attempt to call mom.

To tend bar is to wash away all smugness, along with any desire to write.  The whole thing is a spiritual lesson, a teaching.  It brings to the fore one's own sin, and that of others.  It brings to one all the lies of the the myth of happiness strived for and gained, as that will just dissolve away.  And yet there is always something of the true Christian life.  If one sits around and listens long enough, some good things might come out.

Kathy talks about working for the Shrivers, Special Olympics.  Taking the Shriver kids to McDonalds in the family Cadillac, reaching into her own pocket to pay for burgers and shakes because McDonalds does not take credit cards, spending five dollars.  She is called up to the house later, to the office, up in the elevator, down the hall, Eunice, giving her a twenty.  "But it was only..."  Take and give the rest where you think it might be needed, she is told.  "I remember that," she tells me at the end of a long night, after telling me of how as a nursing student at Maryland she'd be working in Baltimore, going into bars to find diabetics for their treatment...

Such sweat and unhappiness with the job in general proved it to be work, proved it to be tilling in the fields as monks do...

And I even came to see Kerouac as such a worker.

Maybe you better see humanity in libraries or in the classroom, where they are quiet, and open, studious...



St Bernard finds all this symbolized and prefigured in the Marriage Feast of Cana, which typifies the Christian life, and especially the life of monks.  We fill the waterpots with water, for "purification," when we are faithful to the austere observances of the Order--silence, fasting, vigils, psalmody, manual labor and ascetic purity of heart.  Then Christ himself comes, and by the action of His Holy Spirit transforms the water of our observance into the wine of charity.   We share the wine of charity with one another, our hearts burning with compassion and transported with spiritual joy, as we begin to discover Christ in one another.

Thomas Merton, The Silent Life, II The Cenobitic Life, Chapter Three, page 115...

Notes, From the wine bar:

Each night of service is completely different.  It should be, in accordance with God, because each human being is not an automaton, a number, but a soul, a rendering, by the Universe, of the image of God.

And so, two people are at the door, the tall blond red head guy, laconic, decent, and his lady, a couple who met at an Irish bar.  I've seen them before.  They like wine.  They like the things we offer at the old Bistrot of the Dying Gaul.  Which sparkling wine should we have?  Well...  I pour them a sip of both, the champagne and the flute maison.  And it turns out, they like the flute mansion, a brut sparkling from Alsace.  They start with an order of escargot, which arrive soon bubbling hot in their little iron pocketed dish, the aromas suddenly filling the air of the bar.  He orders a glass of Chinon.  She is curious about a few wines, so, sure, taste a little Muscadet, the Chardonnay is good too...  a taste of the Bandol rose.  Hala arrives.  She is going to save a seat for David, the Englishman, who will be traveling away, first to New York, then to England, then on to Morocco.  Hala sits at the end of the bar, and she liked the Cotes Du Rhone last time, and it works for her again.   I'm talking-to some people over by the front, or getting the musician's food ready, when I see Donna Rosen come in.  She likes to come on Tuesday, wine tasting night.  I suggest she taste the Bandol, as it's not often that this is on offer...  She likes it.  I'll take half a glass.  It's still happy hour, fine.  More Chinon.  David arrives.  He's been drinking Bordeaux, every time he comes.  But I pour him a taste of Rhone, a taste of Chinon, and it turns out, he likes the Chinon.  Hala has a glass of Chinon, too, sooner or later.

The band arrives.  Hot Club of DC.  I get their dinner order in.  Several more regulars, hopeful for bar seats come in, in quick succession.  One gets a seat.  The other, hmm, well, let's put him over on the closest table to the bar.  I don't push him.  He's come to wish me a Happy Birthday.  Thanks, Jim.  I pour him a little bubbly.  When I get back to him, after making Peter T. his usual Tito's martini, it turns out Jim like it.  Yes, I'll have a glass of bubbly.  Well, I'm not too busy, and I feel bad there's no bar space for him, so I come back to the table, coming out from the bar.  Taste the Alsace, taste the Rose too.  (He's been on grueling wine tours...)  He likes the first, the champagne.  I tell him the specials.  I think I'll hold off he says.  Cool.  I go back to the bar to tell the rest of the flock the specials, soup du jour, the sweetbreads app, the swordfish with tomato mango salsa and basil oil over spinach, nice thick peace of swordfish, looks good, and the venison, loin of venison with a madeira sauce served over sweet potato puree and green beans.   Ivan, the new guy, comes over... What if they want something else with the venison?  Well, just... you know, spinach... I'm busy.  It's a little tiring.  What's the liver served with?  I tell him.  Veg du Jour, mashed potato, the sauce, which is caper, tomato, black olive..  (I could have told him to "read what the menu says..."  but I don't.)

Lucia comes up from downstairs, delivers some dishes, looks around.  Kathy, the neighbor, the regular, with an instinctive sense of crazy nights, has joined in the bar, standing in the small space next to the bar mouth, next to Donna the wine aficionado who has ordered liver, doing a jigsaw puzzle on her tablet iPad.  What do I want to drink, she asks me.  At roughly the same time, one more regular woman, who comes in and out, and who has to find a place to live for herself and her two boys, as she pursues her new line of work as a baker...  She's from Singapore.  She's sat by Ivan, but comes up to the bar.  And what does she want?  Something red, she says.  Okay, fine...  I'm making Ketel Martinis up, no vermouth for another regular couple.

Lucia comes up to the bar.  Is this wine tasting night, she tells me, as a question, cold.

Her husband, the busboy, is downstairs.  I've been cleaning the glassware that I dirty, and keeping Ivan up and running, and dealing with other people.



I get orders in.  I juggle.  I  move my ass.  I twist and turn like a yogi, moving things along, dirty plates, glassware, table clearing, the mats for dining, also going through the washer.  Hala, being Lebanese--we had a nice conversation about Shemale's, up in that Foxhall Medical Building, what she gets, how the old man cooked of embassies and catering--calls my name out frequently, wanting something.  And all these people, it falls upon me, their barman, their humble shepherd, to catch up with, to suss, to share, to see quick pictures of snowmobiling in Montana with Buffalo, to hear that Jim went to Denver, for the holiday, to see his sister, and an old friend, that one, who "is not doing well."  (oh shit.)

Lucia returns to tell me again that it is not wine tasting night.   Yes, it's Ivan asking me questions night, I respond.  In the meantime, I've served the couple who likes jazz and David Shulmann and Quiet Life Motel, a bottle of Billecarte Salmon Brut Rose, and told them the specials, and kibbutzed with them briefly.  Good fun people.  Talk of the Spiritualist Church down there on Q Street.

It gets busier.  Just when I'm running and with two drink orders in my head and several more things on top of that and Hala, "Ted, Ted..."  Ivan is asking me for a lighter, for the candle on a creme brûlée,  so I look for it, opening the computer cash register, looking in the little cups here and there, and then, as the stove is lit to light the damn candle...  And then, with the creme brûlée on the bar, not far in front of the ice bin, a quiet Happy Birthday To You, rises up....  And then it goes around, picked up  by the room, and I sort of raise up from my bent over stance into the wind of it all, and look around, and nod, and the song will be over soon, and I"m caught off guard, and no time even to pour myself a drink really.

The boss's wife shows up.  Oh, great.  Dinner for them, too.  Fine.  Where would I find the wine, the Vivarais...  (Later in the corner by the bread oven I explain to him the significance of Kermit Lynch, the importer...)  Down in the cellar, Ivan, in the door, just to the left, four rows of bottles in, something like that...  He's a good guy, Ivan.  I like him.  People like him.  There's something comforting about him.  I'll let him go as soon as I can.  After he brings up the wine in a milk crate.  He managed to do a lot, and help me with a bunch of things.

Every night is different.

Kathy ends up late.  When I get her a Sambucca, the proper way, she asks me, do you know the significance of the three coffee beans...  and I have to shake my head, no, I'm too busy, and really I don't have time to spare with everything that's going on, called in this way and that way.

I get back to the apartment, Ubering in the cold with an Indian man in a Toyota van with the automatic sliding door, bringing home a container of chicken salad.  I have wine at back at the apartment.


I've dragged myself in, all through Restaurant Week, all through this week, barely able to talk without coughing.  Feeling like crap.  Sleeping all day, the shower to get me moving...  the bus in.  Talking to mom on the phone.  Marking a birthday alone, sick, on the couch, ordering delivery from Bambu....  Headaches, the cough interrupting my sleep, heartburn big time...

The Buddha, the Awakened One, was a true philosopher, a scientist seeing through the deeper nature of all things and on the nature of experiencing them.

Jesus Christ impresses one as having insights into the magic of a proper and holy life.  He understands how you have to live.  A coach.  It's hard to get him out of your mind.

Poverty, uncertainty, trying to keep up the energy to work your job and then have all the worries on top of that, yes, not easy.  A burden.  One he eases.  And he's about the only one to go on, a lot of the time, the only one who gives you hope, otherwise it's all failure.  And he fails too.  Which makes it better, and worse, real...

And then there's little point to writing.  Then it becomes a matter of conveying the truth of The Father.  Faith.  Practice.  Observance.

Monks do their thing quietly.  Away from the city's walls.

And all the things you think you might want, as it is popular to want them, it turns out those things have little to do with actual human dignity.

And that you yourself were working along at dignified things... just a quiet monk.

He hated electric lights, they say.  As if he knew, that one day there would not be the candlelight, for quiet monastic reflection, but that the electric lights would one day come to be in the form of screens, out of which one would draw as much distraction as good, in a way costly to the creative process, which is holy.  He was in his Karamazov phase, I would gather, his long religious pilgrimage in words.

It was as if he knew that one day the distraction would be great, and that the screens, the electricity, the lights, if you will, would  themselves be an eye, inhuman, staring, spying at us, having insinuated itself into all of life beyond the monastery and the quiet thoughts and spaces for them.



I went down to the see if I could see the Pope coming to visit St. Matthew's Cathedral.  Summertime, I had the morning off.  I walked down to Dupont Circle.  As it turned out he came up the side street, coming in from the west on Rhode Island Avenue, so I didn't see anything but for the crowds.

I got back.  I turned on the television to watch the Pope's Mass live on tv.  I hear a knock at the door.  Thump thump thump.  Quiet, but audible.

There had been talk of him taking me down to GW Hospital for my surgery, and epididemal cyst, an encroaching little lump.  Earlier in the day, exiting the old house, as I came down the stairs, Hey, G., he was coming up the steps from the basement with his wicker laundry basket.  My brother had called just a few days before, and it seemed like the thing to let him take me in, as he was, is powerful, and knew people down at the hospital.  Okay, fine.  Sure, sure, of course.

I'm watching the Pope, subtitled, and G. has a point to make.  He comes in.  He's standing in the living room.  What's the point?  he asks.  And now I see, he is unhappy, and maybe I'm unhappy too.  And he's right, in many ways.

Lets's just wrap this all up by the end of the year, okay.

My blood runs warm.   Oh, this again.

What are you going to do?

Well...  I think for a little bit.  Well, I guess I'm just a religions.  That's ...  ah...  what it's about, for me...  

I cannot reconstruct what I said. but it was something like that.  A shrug.  What do you want me to do?   I'll go off to a monastery or something...  A shrug, perhaps.   He repeats what he said earlier.  Great.  Summer.  G. is wearing khaki shorts.  Blame.  Shame.

I'm a writer, yes.  The situation is not ideal.  Here I am with all my books, and my possessions, the whole enabled thing.  I'm a contemplative.   Quite natural, that one can't really fall into a particular camp, but getting both Jesus and Buddha.  Almost a duty, not to take sides.

But that takes years, to really get it, the necessity for the quiet, for the forest...  poverty is no surprise. Manual labor, monkish tasks, no surprise.

An intuitive thing, to find the Christian pattern within, as something true and steady.  The work of the Father who sent me.  Not your own.  How could it be your own...

There's even a sense of humor to the Universe, how it manifests Jesus types in bums like me, who must grow more and more self-aware...  less self, more the grand oversoul, or whatever it is.  A life of quiet contemplation, even in unsuspected quarters...

The writing comes from beyond.  The thoughts worth catching come when you are occupied with a task.  You have to drill past personally concerning things, ego, selfish emotions, things that cloud the mind.  Gets harder as you get older.  Concerns become greater, stronger, omnipresent.  Buying the mental space is more difficult.



Being born is a miracle.


Much of writing is exploring a personality, personal experience.  But later you realize, since the writing is beyond, as far as any craft, happenstance, luck out of a dull effort to show up, that the larger portion comes from somewhere outside of you.

And this realization serves to propel you back to the deeper reality.  That it comes from The Father.

This is why one takes up monkish tasks, little duties that occupy the mind through engaging it in physical work and attentiveness.

No real artist should be so keen on the nature of the creature as it perceives itself to have a personality, or that the sensations it receives through the senses amount to more than a reminder of something beyond.

Let your work abide by the duties of the one who sent you...

The transmission.  From Tralfamadore.    The Transmission of the great knowledge, the great wisdom, from Tralfamadore, reaching across the Universes, is for, solely, "idiots."  Social outcastes. For people of criminal mind, but too sweet for any real significant criminal enterprises, nor any harm meant.  For all the people listed by Jesus in his little sermon on the hill.  For people who,  as Mr. Kurt Vonnegut put it, are like schoolboys still, in their minds, who spend an afternoon idly "jerking off and making model airplanes," which is to say, a private juvenile primate run-through game to prepare for love and war, rather than designing, say, nascent corporate empires.  The meek, the mournful, the sick, the poor tax collector, the sinners...  Regular folk.  Sometimes a disappearing species, given all the class wars and struggles.  More comfortably spotted out in the provinces, I suppose, having met my share of big city people.

The idiots, they know somehow that they should be teachers of some sort.  Their ideas and notions of the wisdom sort, such as they receive, are a little bit threadbare as far as logical thinking goes.   It's all in keeping with the laws of astrophysics, that it is only the idiots who get such things, having abandoned as much as they could practically in order to allow their own atoms to vibrate at the frequencies required.   Every morning, they get up, and their idiot DNA within, wires them up again, ready, solar stellar beings hearing the great hum.  Hum.



It is hard not to feel watched over when one is writing.  This must go way back.  Something beaten down into the DNA  of the species.  Perhaps mythologized, like the stories of the great flood, in what happened to poor old Jesus...  Western cruelty meets Eastern cruelty.


Sleet patters outside the apartment, pinging against the air conditioner window unit case.


Who would want a birthday in January anyway, but for a certain pride in envisioning his parents coping with the extra struggle of the extreme cold, getting the new babe home in the coldest of dark and deep blue starry light.  January.

Everyone has a cold.  No one wants to go out and celebrate anything at this point anyway.  Least of all you.   The couch.  In and out of rest, dreams.

And you've just gone through Restaurant Week, something jinxed about it.  One day left, one more night.  But the damage had been done.

And then too, even on my old birthday, on the couch, I dreamed of the Princess.  Some form of being welcome back in her life.  In her imagined Upper West Side apartment.  I'm visiting her, but she has written something down for me, that I find, by surprise.  I'm shocked.  I'm touched.  I cannot help but put a few words down on paper to commemorate this great acceptance, this great forgiveness.

Then, I wake, feeling sick. And I see mom has called me.

But all the man knew, or whatever you'd want to call him, all the man knew when he could finally be awake, after a run of troubled shifts of earthly Restaurant Week behind the bar, having maintained a fascia-like balance between regular and newbie, between familiar and foreign interloper, was that he was tired, worn down.  And good thing, then, to have a day off.  The first one, awkward, unhappy, he woke, started with yesterday's green tea chilled from the fridge in a reused wine bottle, then making some more, then turning on the over to preheat to 375 degrees, for the purpose of cooking the duck bacon he had found the night before in the Safeway after his long shift and cleaning up and organizing all alone, as he liked it...   That, as he knew, was the happiest part of the week, when he had finally gotten through all the labors they had asked of him, all the responses, all the actions, all the procurement and delivery, when he could put on some of his own favored music in the dimly lit bar-room, and let his mind wander, in as close as he could find to a state of peace in his apparently troubled world and life.

Then the transmissions could come again, unhindered, less interfered with.   The Pogues doing an old Irish song, or The Dubliners, or Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers...  now and again hearing a song less familiar, one about a Donegal sailor, a shipwreck, an icy angry sea...  Waltzing Mathilda...   Songs that took the focus off the grave habit of serious common to any town's business leadership and real estate deals, political dealings, bureaucracies, even as necessary as they might be...

There in the night he found again, alone, sipping some red wine, but not too much, a root of poetic power, more so than the discouraging lack thereof, potency rather than impotency...

And even on the sad day off, as his birthday approached, he with no plans for it, he knew he could spend at least a little bit of time sifting the airs for little bits and pieces, remnants of the great transmission that earlier fishermen, perhaps not unlike him, had honestly caught in their own nets, blind but willing, lucky, as, in Shakespeare's image, a blind man catching a hare.

In the meantime, he had a cough, which had been going on for weeks.  There was a pain of some tightness in his left shoulder when he reached out for something so.  The sun was not long for the sky, a light pale blue chalked slightly... as he puttered about, with tea, the duck bacon, the leather couch, his Adidas track pants, a tea shirt with the logo of the Tour de France, and his green chamois shirt from LL Beans, with a Parker Jotter ball point pen in his breast pocket.  He had not started the day vomiting from nasal congestion as he went to the small kitchen to hydrate, as he had earlier in the week as he struggled to get up.  Yes, it was damn physical the whole thing, having to absorb it, as he breathed through his nose over the sink, feeling almost half queasy all of a sudden.  The things you internalize...  "Yes, I'm getting too old for this.  There must be something else."

Maybe he would go for a little walk, here in this quiet part of town, where the transmission from Tralfamadore were more loving, present and lively, picked up by groves of pine on the bluff above the silent river.  Here there was some life, in the form of nature.  Here, the messages sent by the heavens to the earthlings were not already built up into sterile palaces of concrete and stone, codified, sterilized, institutionalized.  Here, out here, away from the pavement and commerce of many people in suits disappeared, fading out as the old ghosts of the living battles that had happened in their way, ghosts of Civil War soldiers who might have peered anxiously at their brethren stuck into enemy uniforms on the other side of the great river...  Here, at least it was quiet, not that anyone really likes quiet for all that long.

Yes, the body is tired, drummed upon by inconvenient tasks, but the spirit is willing.  Get thee near the river, before retiring to the old G.I. brick apartment house.



By the green ceramic tea pot with a bamboo motif, a small enamel silver Christian cross of a Byzantine style on the Ikea coffee table just beyond the laptop.  A tiny antenna, a receiver, a radio for the transmission...  Yes, perhaps there is a cost, a personal one, in hearing the great transmission, the little bits of messages received, frustrated by the poor reception, breaking up even as you might hear them... To be taken as fools, for at least we know we do not possess the logic now the words, but those we blurt out with so little to go on, scarce of an educated path or habit...   No wonder then that there are painters and people of music, craftsmen...


So, he bundled up modestly, with his older pair of sneakers on, left the apartment while there was still some light out to the west above the great wall of the reservoir's eastern bank, out beyond the tree tops of Virginia in the distance on the other side of the great river.  And indeed, the grass was still under his steps, and in the cold a woman was walking a dog, and looking at her phone screen.  He went further on, toward the grove of 100 foot tall pines, small cone, large cone, California...  different species who had all contributed to a nice soft bed of needles, then through the brush and onto the old trolley track, and as a plane flew overhead and the long lights of car lights proceeding both in and out over on GW Parkway, he looked up and saw Venus straight to what he took to be south, bright in the sky.

The problem, of course, lay in the difficulty of the transmission.

 The Tralfamdorans could do a perfectly apt sending of the signals,  the great transmission of universal wisdom.  but a problem, or a complexity of problems emerged, almost originally, and inexplicably.

The creatures of earth planet and its human beings were inherently configured to receive 100% of the transmission along with the inherent ability to perfectly understand and comprehend, and even possessed the gift of the ability to act in accordance with the wisdom of the perfect reality, perfectly seen.

But, who knows, things happen.  A short circuit, you might say, perhaps itself somehow inherent, came into the system, rendering it not very effective.  Full of static... A reboot couldn’t do it, as if a reboot were possible.

And with the frustration, it came that the most immediately natural thing to do was for the more sensitive of the earth creatures, who sensed the transmission from Tralfamadore, was to cope with the frustration, one that was wordless and, in a way, a token of the lost-ness of the original messages and media of wisdom obscured and interrupted.   In short, was that what came  about in this great pressure system of deferential, was the habit of art.  Art adopted by all creatures of the living planet earth, down to its very atomic and mineral structure...  Water came to dance, mountains of rock gave birth to great green floral pastures, reptilian life sprouted beauty and wings, sight and song...

Kittens played.  Rothko painted colorful paintings of a horizon rich as it should be understood, rather than just the cloudy sometimes blue urban sky as seen, scraped across by modern jet airplanes bearing drones of people going back and forth occupied with business matters.

It was known somehow, within the fiber of all earthly life, that all these transmissions should be coming.  Some may have received a good seventy five percent of the wisdom of the Tralfamadorans, but all bore the frustration of not the whole thing, obviously, getting through.

There was a great long era of great puzzlement, sure, of course.  One could look up at the stars in the night sky, know the transmission existed perfectly in the present, and yet, it seemed the Universe had hit the mute button.

Now and again an inkling would come through, eerie, prescient:  Kubrick, the weird obelisk in a strange science fiction movie from the earthling year 1968...  the gut sense, hearing a signal, even loudly, but the static...  the interference, or maybe the simple dumbness of human sensory organs so easily overwhelmed...

Or it could happen in something gutsy, original, a small rebellion against the agenda of the unhearing, such as Irish music, something many upright people would consider on a lark, coming about through a collection of irresponsible activities.

As if idiots were the best prepared to be able to hear the symphonic music being broadcast gently to human beings and all sentient beings...  themselves a humble mirror of life on Planet Tralfamadore...

Drunkards with Jesus in mind, Jesus who himself had made an apt and sensitive attempt of getting the great transmissions from Tralfamadore, walked home, at the end of their shifts, stood a good a chance as anything...



And even while all this was happening, hopefully being somehow worked upon and corrected, it was indeed all too natural not only for people to try their best to re-iterate what the signals were saying to them, good-hearted efforts and the like, but also for people to get quite self centered, to completely deny the entire messages of wisdom and Golden Rule sort of stuff... and whose job then became to deny completely that there was even anything being continuously broadcast down across the seeming universe from Tralfamadore to Earth.



And those who held that there was no such thing as any sort of such a transmission had to be very continuously on point—even though they heard it to, getting at least about 35% of it in spite of themselves—about a firm and consistent denial, one based widely in many aspects, dark-hearted, materialist, often technically and technologically oriented, lustful for the noises that might drown anything else, by creating a form of necessary constant attention to their own created problems  such as they kept creating in the constant illusion of time and the dawning of a new day they had no desire for but to manipulate and change, out of its original essence and being, making it theirs, thus doing everything possible to turn down the great radiant all encompassing spiritual power so that it might be barely heard, or that people should become so automaton, so misfocused, that they could be kept down.

The game on Earth became a big one, of distraction.  It became a task of obscuring the "thousand points of light," of a daily dismissal of the very things the clever Tralfamadorans had beamed down to Earth people, focused on people genetically pre-disposed to not be as deaf, folks like Jesus, like Buddha, the Awakened Ones, along with a whole cast of interesting people, varied in nature and in complexity like the light through a stained glass window, speaking of the nature of the odd gathering places of the Disciples, upstairs rooms, meeting places of publican and sinner, of the Pentecostal Feast, and other various sometimes sundry gatherings where people could let their guard down and forget the armor of interference of the current style.

I don't feel like doing anything but being still on the couch, but my friend Alina invites me out to Mari Vanna for the old Russian New Year.  "Lots of beautiful Russian ladies, you will feel better," she texts.  Okay, I take a shower, I get on the bus.


And today, that feeling again...  religious, I guess, you'd call it.

The Russian women are kind to me.  You are a kind man, one tells me, as I dance with her friend, who is older, my age.  You should pass on your genes into this world.  My new friend drops me off at the foot of Key Bridge.  She has to get home to Herndon.  I thought I'd feel like walking, but I get an Uber, it's too cold for a thirty minute walk at this hour.

My book will never be picked up easily by happy people, any more than All Quiet On The Western Front.  People who like happiness will pursue their happiness, without need for anything as depressing.  It is your own responsibility to find your own happiness, so why indulge in tales of failure at the endeavor?

Who needs Jesus to come telling us of our duty toward those who are suffering, as we too, in reality, are suffering...  Messiah to the truth of God's Reign over the earth, which we fail to heed at our own peril.

"The breaking into human history of the reign of God is not happening in some far-off time, or in some distant land, but right now, and Jesus is saying, not in some distant land, but before your eyes..."

James Martin, Jesus, a Pilgrimage.

I remember as a kid.  My brother and I camped out the summer night in the tent.  (An old Eureka two man tent.)  We had some beer.  We took a walk through the fields to the hill looking down on 12B, in the distance, where you could hear the sound of the tires along the road when a car came by with its headlights in the summer night.  And beyond, maybe you could make out by sight a little bit of the town.

The hillbilly, the country boy, the desire to make it to the lights of the city.  The heady feeling of the beer taking hold, and beyond, the adventure, girls, bars, people. things to do.


Hunter S. Thompson:  I'm a hillbilly, in other words, lazy.  Trying to get by being a writer.  Nothing else he had any qualification for.  Tried being a cab driver, but not a registered voter in San Fran long enough.


I get close to the end of my shift.  Not quite.  I have a sense I've done my job, lit small fires of hospitality in the brains of the good customers through the subtleties of engagement.  I've waited on a former Secretary of State, who asked who I was, what my role was, am I the owner, at the old wine bar of The Dying Gaul...  Unobtrusive, connecting on a Sunday night.

Thank you, Czech friends, I say at the end.  I tell them how we love Central Europeans, tell a quick version of our Polish neighbor lady who would invite us over when the moon was full to tell war stories from WWII Warsaw....  I emphasize the Irish side, friend of Bruno the Breton chef, whose tale I tell, while forgetting my Austro Hungarian immigrant grandparents on my father's side...

I get a flatiron steak, a special, rare, discounted it will be $20.  But I need to eat.  Later I'll go grocery shopping, but in the meantime it's the last night with the young person who'll be going off to Alaska for a month, taking a year off after graduating from Washington International School...  She's worked at both the restaurants, and the tradition, now and then, not every time, for her to play the guitar I keep in the office, singing her songs, and then her friend Maritza who used to work with us comes up the street to catch up.

After grocery shopping and getting home, the night is finally mine.  I put things away in the fridge, put a gluten free pizza into the oven, with sliced soy laced Safeway meatball on top, have some of that, feel disgusted with myself, have some cheap pinot on the rocks with soda...  Take a walk by the bluff, and listen again to Charlie Rose interviewing Hunter Thompson, 1997, seeing a fox up on the top of the bluff that wasn't bulldozed, a nice little grassy knoll with trees, looking down over the river.

It was a tough job.  Just the stream of people would finally drive you to have a sip of wine, the last kitchen guy coming up...  being the father priest of the restaurant, always there.  Then when you got home, you needed some artificial company, the soothing of wine along with a hobby like taking a stroll at night.  Or listening to some old interview of some crazy bastard talking about a dying art form.

I'm just going to stay in, order Chinese, boring, get over my cold, but my best and most understanding and things in common friend I have up the wine bar finally gets back to my text, another crazy night, short staffed, just too much.  So I hop a bus, walk a few blocks, and in up the stairs...    I help him clean up, bussing a few tables of leftover glassware...

We end up going down to Clyde's.  J. had a friend who worked there for a stint, and the Irish looking barman, a big guy with a blond red beard was buds with the guy.  "Ted built the wine bar," J. says.  A quiet compliment.  A glass of Sangiovese...  A steak frites, sub salad...

I sleep the next day, and sleep more, barely getting up till finally at four.


Reasons for a writer to be religious, Christian:

Feeling like Jonah.  Being ill.  Feeling sad.  Feeling ostracized.  Knowing that one has been a decent person, kindly, in his dealings with other people.

Within the gospel, the Christian story, the writer, a reject, has room, room to play with.  Hamlet is as Christian as anyone.  Polonius is a Pharisee, which additionally complicates his relationship with Polonius' children, Ophelia, Laertes...  He turns to words.  Excessive words, some might say.

The only way to redeem himself from his life as a bum writer and whatever job he maintains...


So, at the start of his shift, the beginning of a new week, Sunday dinner, heading into Restaurant Week, the bar set, mineral water chilled, fruit cut, olives out, dinner specials on hand, he fills the water pitchers.  Four stainless, two plastic, taller, ice from the bin first, then running the tap of the small bar sink til it runs cold, less lead, filling each of them.  The start of another shift, that’s all, after talking to his mom over the phone as he walked to work in four in the afternoon sunlight, a warm day.

Digesting the staff meal of fried tilapia, he digested with a taste of coffee standing over the cutting board on the stove.  The front door opened, then the click of the door knob opening as the unseen party filed into the main dining room downstairs.  No foot steps nor loud voices coming up.  A regular woman passed as he cut the foil of a Cotes Du Rhône, assessing the butter situation...  she says hello.  Good to see you.  She has rose glasses, he notices, as she passes by the bar again, returning from the powder room. Those are cool.  The optometrist, she explains, I’m light sensitive.

He sorts some wine glasses, beginning to feel normal again, back at work.  A couple, seemingly unfamiliar, wander in up the stairs.  He finds their reservation, explains it’s for downstairs, a two against the wall.  You’re welcome up here, but down...  more lively...  gestures a quick tour, the restrooms are up here...  They go off down the stairs, coats still on, thank you, and he’s alone again, sorts through the stacks of black woven plastic bread baskets with folded linen napkins.  Some have butter, small stains, wine droplets, some a worn feel.  He’ll put them through the wash, fold new napkins...

And then the first couple was sat upstairs, and he remembered he knew how to do this, easy as pie, once you went through all that, the emotions, the set-up physical and mental.  Yes, the woman said, they had been outside, in the garden, for much of the day.  Oh.  Yes, planting bulbs...  oh my father, he did too.

He’d been about to watch a new piece, putting together the seven minute flight of the plane that had been brought down...  imagine that... on his iPhone after looking up the new pinot noir on the Vivino wine app, but now, finally, let's get to it.  Nice people.  Good crowd.

So what job is there...  for a writer...   as an academic, you'd get fired before long...

And you have to remember, one side of the interpretation in reality has others.  What you noted yesterday is not the truth today, not the full truth, not the emotional truth.

Your hero on one day, say Hunter S. Thompson, who you researched through whatever you could find and watch on YouTube, viewed from another angle of the truth was not much of a grown up, was an angry aggressive person quite miserable to live with to those who would know, his wife...

And in your own self-wrought craziness and bad habits, your mother is not to be blamed, but a good influence, a sweet person.

We all have our own struggles.

And coming off a cold, I'm feeling pretty lazy, and too crazy to want to go out and be amongst people, even as this is what I need.  It's almost dusk now.  I need to get out of the house, for a walk, for something...

Don't be crazy.  Stick to the straight and narrow.  There's no such thing as a great writer, without it becoming very complicated.

Late at night, folks, this great American writer here, before you, has small experiences.  And because they are so small, little things in a sort of microscope of the normal reported activities and events, they too are worth reporting, for a suggestive educational scientific purpose, almost, or rather.  Small things.  An action that is a blend of memories, many of them, and the movements and physical stuff, getting up to go the bathroom, doing the dishes, making the tea, ordering carry out sushi, then downstairs to go get it, taking the recycling out, as I talk to mom and the phone, who manages to call in a decent mood and bright, and I try to tell her my own little bits of what Harry and Meghan are up to, their wish to retreat from royal public duties...

I watch some things, what I can find, Charlie Rose interviews, Conan, short pieces, longer more document type things, Hunter S. Thompson.

You try in life to avoid creating a big persona, a personality to live up to.  I think that's natural.  Like Emily Dickinson writes, in My Life had Stood a Loaded Gun in Corners ('til the oversoul or transcendentally realized being comes, the master...)  Let yourself at most imitate quiet things, things of tradition, the roots of things, the base musical or story core.   The template.  The old god story, except that they can be very explicitly wise and quoted, historically.  Just little notes of Jesus, a small application of his wisdom to whatever you do.

So.  Yes.  So.  On my own little 2001 space ship odyssey, I am quiet, a background type, a person who lets the rampant insult of Washington DC cramping of style just flow over, as I quietly tend bar and listen, hardly a personality to be seized upon, as if, in the end, no one would notice, but for that quiet smile, the laugh, the listening, to all the stories and to all the facilitated unwinding.   He was a blur, an affable person.  He appreciated us.  He bought us drinks from time to time.  he seemed to allow for an interesting crowd, perpetual, rotating, like a tv talk show or something...

As far as shifts, it was only a three day week.  Skip one because of the holiday breakfast, which was exhausting enough.  A luncheon, a dinner, for my schedule, my coworkers dressed up, more than I, who came in on the D6 bus from the very west of the town, Fogo De Chao, meat on skewers, gaucho style, good for the team, I'll need a nap when I get back, again on the D6, roughly a four hour trip....  And, of course, I'd been busy the night before it.

Three nights of long company through the whole shift at the bar, from 5:31 to 12:31...  Even if it's just two at the bar, three in the corner, four more coming up after dinner, regulars...  It all adds up, to a long swim.

And then, for Jazz Night, the betrayal.  They did the usual, oh, we're not so busy;  Server A. tells me that she'll be floating between two floors, oh and that also, save one seat for her friend from the club, N., is coming, at 8:30, save him one seat at the bar.  Not much investment in the set-up,  I'm covered with grumpiness and sweatiness, when the door opens, minutes after I'd brushed my teeth and tied a tie and found my pen and my little notepad of stapled scrap paper for the night's orders, a couple, who turned out to be Irish, I still had to order dinner for my mom from Canale's, delivery, in Oswego, snow, Mary the helper staying in on such a night...


The end of the week.  Today I am exhausted.  I try twice to get up.  Twice fall back to sleep.  Does anyone appreciate how exhausted I am...  Well, that's the problem of living alone.  No audience.  Just echoes.



Anytime there is any one you know, anyone the house knows, it's a double-edged sword, to say the least.  Good that they are there, of course, but this is extra to an already tweaked barman, stretched in his entertaining, on the spot since the door opened...  Stimulated by sharing the talk of the town...  Politics, entertainment news...  Travel tales... Holiday tales...  Exclamations, family history tales...   People are telling you tales of The Twenty One Club, or about visiting Ground Zero, the memorial, you listen...  You have a cheers with them...  You have to a have a little bit of Pinot on the rocks, for your soothe, your head, your spirit, to share, in these experiences you'll never have yourself.


And not exactly using all of his talents to their fullness...

Tired.  Just rather tired.  Should be able to get up and go to a day job, but somehow, because it is offered in the city, his own services, sweat and blood, there are takers, ring side seats...  Every time.  That's how it is.  Every single time.  Even if it's just two people, and then four coming up for an after dinner drink, while the two at the bar, an older couple, talk of taking care of a difficult aging mother with a cataract procedure tomorrow at noon...

Looking at distracting things, Facebook, Instagram...  looking up old chapters of life...

Remembering the bewilderment of the busiest time of night, cocktail drink making in one hand, four tabs to close out...

Fear.   One can be afraid to write, not wanting to share, for whatever reason.  Sensitivity.  Fear over one's own situation.

Genes.  They do strange things.  They play out live, in real time.  There's less control...

So, if I could tell a story.  The kid at college, whose family goes off in all directions...  Mom wants to be out on her own.  She needs to do something.  Get a life for herself, building it, step by step.  But there's a burden on the son.  She gets emotional.  The kid wants to go back to his old hometown, to his father's apartment, now that he's trying to figure things out for himself.   But his mother starts crying, in tears, can't you just stay for the night...  She needs help.  How many moves.  It's not for the father to do, anymore, and she brought about the split, holds some negative emotions toward him, and for his part, we all could have stayed together and there was money for her to go back to school and all that...

And in the meantime, the kid is going through his own life, the girl from the Upper West Side, him realizing his own peculiar habits, wanting to be literary, but not knowing how, other than to be a kind of rural poet...   Not so organized a battle, anyway.  What color is your parachute...  He feels handcuffed.  His own depressive tendencies, that prevent him from expressing side talents, music, teaching, being social, laughing, girls...  And now, unprepared as he is, how to make a living...


But you can't write any of that easily.  You still can't.  Not even today.  And today there's pretty much a scene of damage to survey.  And no real bright side, no helping hand to help him deal with his old mother now, old.  Getting a little feeble minded.   But still with all her offense honed...

What do you do?  Don't have a career, not really, nothing beyond the most basic, to fall back on.  Which he's already fallen back on, but not so great...

You don't want to write down any of that.  You don't want to share any of that, would you...

Botched it, fucked it all up...    Shame, spread round, every direction.  No matter what you do.

And some crude cross in your pocket, a Byzantine symbol of life's suffering in the every day, in the three dimensions of space and of time.

That's the start of your day.

It's not that bad, jus the way you start off.

Of course, writers are self-loathing.  Hard for then to find reward, any kind of ready gratification, beyond the act itself.  Rely on the connections, the rearrangements, the calls that run through the cells and the chemistry of the brain, to correct itself, to realign.  To get the serotonin to match up with the dopamine, to get the wine in the head back in balance, which comes from a fresh sip of insight.

 Jesus, one of the first writers.  There he is in his hometown.  Nazareth.  At the synagog gathering, whether it was indoors or out, whether they had resources then for a scroll or not.  He reads from Isiah.  And then he sits down.  And, being a writer, creative, penetrating, full of great imagination, he spouts off the logical implications, spiritually, of the reading of this piece in the great story of Isiah.  He's fine with it.  He has begun to teach.  This is his beginning.

And the townspeople, then as now, as no-one likes a writer, not the business man, not the socially integrated, not the obedient, not the follower, in need of dismissing, do not like it.  They will not, as the voices rise, turn out to stand for it.  No, not from this guy, even if he's family, even if he's a steady fixture of the community, as much, if not more, than anyone.

So, they seize him, take him to the cliff at the edge of town.   And they know what they are going to do, given this over-reaching, given this unconventional extra-talmud commentary...

He, Jesus, it seems, didn't want to do it either, to offer his thought, his extra two cents...  but, somehow, for reason, he goes for it, he must.

He passed through their midst.  I wonder if there was something in his demeanor, as he was a writer, barely capable of acceptance, of being kind to himself...   "Go ahead.  Throw me off the cliff.  You'd be doing me, and yourselves, a favor..."  Then, they saw that he was sincere.  Real.  And they might have mulled over, and pondered what he had spoken.

The Rejection at Nazareth.  Luke 4:16-30.  Father James Martin, S.J., tells the story in his book, Jesus, A Pilgrimage, a good resource, from the local library.


Show me then a writer who likes herself, himself.  who does not have to maintain a certain suspension of disbelief, a sense of humor, a kind of resignation to the thing of the task, as it appears as a unknown daily chore or torture...  A fatalist in an arid desert he can only abandon to...

"Well, stop that. Be kind to yourself.  Make humor out of it.  Count your blessings..." a  voice says...

January, self-loathing, rugged despair.  It's good to have a job to go to, the bar, people, conversation, keeping busy.  But the writer, who has not gotten away with being a writer, (as Hunter S. Thompson put it, in a conversation with Charlie Rose) is disgusted the next day.


Sunlight comes in through the windows as he lay on the couch, after initially getting up out of bed.  Awake, but with the cold, sniffling, coughing, he wants to get more sleep.  He takes a cup of yesterday's room temp second run tea.  The people: The Starlings, a couple, he's from a local Washington family, David, British, back from travels, poor hospitality up at the old country hotel he takes his family to in Vermont for the holiday.  The couple stays longer, after paying their check, talking with David, the eccentric sister in Goa, who lived in Kensington, with the young Indian man at business school just back from Houston, who has signed up for a job consulting with GE...

Then Drew comes in, meeting a couple he's just sold a house to, for dinner.  They'll keep me late.  Now, I'm just glad to have some company.


Keep a journal.  Just an artist's notebook.

You must have known something, or expected something, keeping the carbon copies, the records of all this correspondence, Charlie Rose is saying, over The Proud Highway...

He is up late, watching things on YouTube.  The sky is clear, a waxing Gibbous moon out, but, after the snow, it is too cold for a walk down to the bluff across the road.  A leftover Bergerac, muddy, too high in alcohol.  The cab, an Uber, cannot make the short-cut hill by the German Embassy, from Reservoir to MacArthur.   The nose is still running.  The cough.  He checks the air outside, prepared, but no, it's too cold, and soreness has already set in.  He had come in, sat back on the couch, carefully put his feet up, still with hiking sneakers on.  Merrill's.  Complete lonesomeness, what are you going to do, so he looks at his little iPhone computer screen, a piece on John Lennon's guitars, and then George Harrison's, interesting, the Gretsch Duo-Jet, the Country Gentleman, before that, a Czech sort of Stratocaster, miserable action, good pick-up controls..  They got together and played, they played out.  They were part of society, their art.  They were not loners, not solitary isolated types.  Then Hunter S. Thompson is wearing a plaid buttoned sport shirt, aviator sunglasses, sober, philosophical mood.  Charlie Rose reads him a letter, from the night of November, 22nd, 1963, from Woody Creek.  Fear and Loathing, a call to arms, for defense and fighting rather than literary magazines...

Writing was the only thing I could do.  I was kicked out of every job, evicted from every place he ever lived.  He moved somewhere to buy a place.  Woody Creek.

He would type out passages, from Fitzgerald, Hemingway, poems of Kerouac, to get the rhythm, the music, learning.  Hemingway prose, but also the model of Hemingway, which is, "to get away with it, being a writer."

The day is salvaged by the night, by, as my old mom puts it, the time to process...  You need to process.

I will go to work, taking the bus in, cold out, wind up.  I have to close the place, as always, friends playing jazz.  Hopefully no late night.  Off tomorrow, whatever good that will bring, or not.

I call my mom.  You're cold is better, she tells me.  I tell her about Hunter S. Thompson, and YouTube, as a way to cope with isolation...  There's a laptop there near your Eames Chair, mom...  He loved his mother.  Virginia Rae Thompson.

It is hard for writers to be kind to themselves.  Hard, then, to be kind to the whole project, to other writers.  Easy to put down.

The staff luncheon holiday party for the two restaurants downtown was behind him as he woke up, depressed, in early January.   He got up, used the john, put on his bathroom over tee shirt and boxer briefs, poured himself a cup of tea from the tea pot on the coffee table, went in to the kitchen to get the water on.  He poured water from the faucet after the tea kettle was on over a lit burner until it was hot, assembled some of the cups and the wine glasses and set them in the sink, allowing the water from the tap to get as hot as it would before filling the rubber made tub.  He threw away the tea leaves from the day before still damp in the strainer, pouring out the last of the tea from before into his cup as the water on the burner heated.  He started to wash the cups and a small pot and a few plates in the soapy water.  He went to the bedroom, brought his Fleshlight back to the kitchen, rinsing the ´pink sleeve with its anatomical shape, then rinsing it with rubbing alcohol, hanging it to dry vertically between the cold water knob and the faucet mouth in the sleeve, went back, poured out the hot water over the tea leaves, set the timer on his cell phone to three minutes.

Champagne tasting tonight.  He looked up the particular champagne on the web, for tasting notes, for the blend of grapes, cépage, blew his nose, which had been running days before, now a head cold, sipped his tea, and then his mother called.  Where he was in a pretty bad mood, she was not.  This was a thing to worry about pretty much every day, but today, fortunately, not bad, no threat of I should just kill myself, what else am I supposed to do...  And he would be going to work, just to have something to do.  Head colds throw you off, he thought.  They mess with your head, altering the wateriness of the brain...

He put a little bit of ashwagandha powder into his tea, stirred it, took a sip.  Ten years left of my working life...  what am I supposed to do.  Too late for any career now.  January.

He opened up a can of black-eyed peas, pouring them out into a small pot after warming olive oil with a dash of spices, a quick hiss.  He thought out a grocery list, more cans of black-eyed peas, olive oil, postage stamps...what else...

It was true, as the Eastern adepts made note of, self-pleasuring out of boredom to accidental release, took the energy out of you, another mistake, another sin.  But that was the night before, and he could rally, now awake as it rained outside the third floor blinds.  A token of bitterness lifted.  He could eat soon.  He rose to the kitchen to check on the beans as they bubbled away.  The incense was working over in the pot with the small norfolk monkey puzzle tree, frankincense and myrrh, calming, and he put on more water for the tea pot, pleased at his ability to control the blue gas fires of the burners.

He was actually up a little bit early, considering, before work's immediate need for getting there.  He did not have to cross the area of the downtown, no forty minute bus rides.   Going to work would be better than sitting home reading Thomas Merton or thinking of Jesus...

Avoid social media of all forms.  It bleeds in on you, before you write, leaves one overwhelmed with impressions and haywire thoughts.  It's within human nature not to be able to resist it, to not be shaken by it, coerced by it, finding contrary self-image...


So, I wake up, again with the cold, the same one, and it's back to work tonight.  Staff Fogo D'Chao luncheon party tomorrow, and I am sick...  I wake up feeling the same huge irresponsibility...  I call mom.  Who is very lonesome, so that I feel worse, rather, about myself, until she is feeling somewhat better, which takes some patience.  I ask about her wine supply, her food store.  Will Mary be coming by?  What about the new cat people have been talking about...  Well, I called the Humane Society...

Mom, could you keep an eye out for your pink iPhone?  "But I've been moved around so much.  I'm not in my home..."  Well, look around, I'm sure it's there somewhere...

But all seems dark and black this time of year, spurted out the other side of the holidays to our own problems.

I think of what I've read the night before, and it was a break at least from staring into my iPhone expecting something to happen.


The staff party...  I will end up having the night off.  I'll take it.

I'll mourn about not moving back to Central New York as I wake.   I'm at my Dad's, the little home with the garden he shared with Patricia...  Hilde and I...  We'd been up to the reservoir, an early summer night.  We're in bed.  Mom's moving day is here.  I'm up late.  She's crying.  I have to run.

Later, Hilde, I thought you would spread eagle me...

Mom is there over the sink, clinking cups around in soapy water, crying...  I'm sorry I'm late...

I have a runny nose today.  I should have put my foot down then.  I'd have had a happier life, children, a career.  A life closer to mom and dad...    Normalcy.

And then you wake up feeling not so hot, feverish, sore.  New Years Day off, followed by two days, and now a third, all full of worries.

Up on Tralfamadore, artists enjoy sexual relations (within the context of marriage), allowed to them by the spirituality of their work, consequently an appropriateness with the electromagnetic energies given.  Expert at achieving a comfort with artistic expression and working upon such things on a regular basis, the artists reach the inner sanctum.  Having bared their souls, a commensurate and appropriate award awaits.  Down here on Earth said relations are gained and practiced more through less spiritual pursuits, having more to do with the successful accumulation of financial and professional security in a world of crowded spaces.  And this is particularly true of metropolitan areas where art, theater, music are not the main thing, and even worse so where lying and PR are the thing.  Such places are, indeed, close to hell.

So it goes.

For the first time in a long time, I’ve gotten out to a coffee shop...  and to the library.  I find a couple of books in the spirituality religion section, a little book by Thomas Merton, The Silent Life, and Father James Martin’s Jesus, A Pilgrimage.  Wearily I’d gone out for a stroll past the reservoirs, stopped in at the Catholic Church, without much inspiration for long prayer, leaving without much inspiration.  The rain came.  Still no long reaching mom.  Tired of the wine selection at the little deli, the chicken salad, the cold cuts...  Ah, finally, Mom is calling.  She is still alive.  At the checkout, the nice lady suggests, after I ask about the yoga, that there is a Tai Chi class on fridays.  "lots of nice ladies..." she tells me.  She recognizes from before.  Both of us quiet flirts, bookishly.

To be so crass as to mention the word "porn," is, as in all Capitol cities, but those upon enlightened planets far away, where life forms existing have figured out that the spiritual truth and motive behind anything is first and foremost, if things are to work out smoothly, kindly, peacefully, appropriately, is frowned upon greatly.  And to frown, for citizens in towns of the former, is in turn good for their own social standing.  "How upright am I, that I am putting the theater of porn in its place as unholy and decadent."  Besides the avoidance of awkward conversation, there is, from the point of view of success, on Earth, much to be gained from denouncement of things any creature would actually consider healthy, normal and intriguing as an example of his or her own species creativity and healthy vigor.   And what this all sets up is an ever increasing and uncomfortable hypocrisy.

And resulting from this hypocrisy, strange talents emerge.  And then finally what happens is that the great adepts of the moral shallows, bombastic, full of tales of "good and evil" (when things are pretty much the same, as long as we're not murdering people, stealing from the elderly and children) eventually achieve supremacy in this order that far too many have agreed to cooperatively create.

The artist, the free thinker, is shunned.

Even Ancient Rome had some health to it, witnessed by the little village of Pompeii, which to them was probably their own version of launching themselves, their true selves, to a far away planet where pretty much everything was absolutely okay, even those acts considered most licentious back in the big city of self-importance.   Tralfamadore, indeed, where people, human beings, as they really are, are welcome.

And note what happens to those great systems of hypocrisy, once they fall:  after the pieces are picked up, after the bombed out bricks are piled to build, a new attitude comes.  Berlin.  Love Parade.  Techno.  Acceptance.  Celebration.  Back to the tiled offerings in the happy houses of Pompeii, which of course gets a bad wrap for being annihilated by a geography that was born into the very deep lusts and creativity of the entire Big Bang Universe itself.



Then later,  after a good nap, just shutting down on all the worrisome thoughts concerning all my failings and failures and what will happen next and all the lack of a real career stuff, sleep and meditation, I wake up enough to go to bed, but then doing so, maybe I look at my iPhone screen too much, I am awake again, and so I end up reading, even as I worry that I am not able to rest.

Strange, how the spiritual is just what the Prodigal Son requires.  The two seemed fated to connect.  How else would the prodigal, who never really had evil intentions, just susceptible to the addictive undisciplined nature of human beings, be able to strive on after falling so?


And I think, oh, god, what crap is this that I have written above...  There's too much risk now being a writer, as anyone can take the slightest thing you say and be offended by it.

But at least Father James Martin's travels in the Holy Land following the ways of Jesus is entertaining, as I worry about my aging mother, up there, all alone, far away, in her cluttered apartment, and mine is bad enough...

The writer's notebook:  a long series of thought experiments, science experiments, if you will.  An effort to find something meaningful.

I was over the thought that it would be entertainment, picked up as such, any kind of commercial success, really anything being beyond the effort to describe the attempt to live up to a spiritual life...  a way of protecting myself agains the hard-hearted, the dark, the cynical.

Mom calls early, rattling my boat.  I've been up late taking out the recycling, easing through the cleaning with a little Beaujolais on the rocks in a tumbler glass.  My voice is dry.  The phone is humming, her landline, though we tried fixing it, with new cables, a new phone, none of which worked.

The feeling pervasive over the holidays:  I'm caught out, my bullshit exposed, by both sides, brother and mother, it seems.

And I have little more than a Gospel to fall back on.  Even with all the noise going on.


I am lazy.  This is a fault.  My singer actress friend Barbara invites me out, Roaring Twenties night at the Phillips Collection, she has an extra ticket.  She's often inviting me out to theatrical performances.  I look at the clock, okay, it's around 12:30, I can write for a while, then get ready, all work no play...  but I don't write.  I don't get anything done.  I realize I should stay in, but I've already committed.  I've already morphed into another being, overly concerned with the ways of the world, dressed up as they are in the form of the temptation of a museum open happy hour sort of event, and this has warped me away from the Gospels.

I'm too shy really, to go out.  They said that about poor old Hemingway, really the shyest fellow you could encounter, and that's why he boozed it up, to put on some sort of broad grand personality.   Interfered with, he would be a complete grump.  Neither can I do it, I can't do it without wine.  I guess that's why I'm a bartender.  I can go out and stick to a script, then have one later...

Oh, I've got problems...  That doesn't help either.

Good fruit from good trees.  There's old Saul at Zorba's Cafe.  After taking the metro bus into the city, a gaggle of kids descending upon an empty bus, filling it to full capacity, unruly, big personalities all of them, everyone, phones and devices out, I'm rattled enough entering my old neighborhood, the place of my self-indulgent artiste-hood, where I would go sit in cafes pretending I was Hemingway, interested solely in the creative process and its logic, the magic of the spooky art, the occasional (or rare) gift of coming up with something out of the blue, something decent, so that you can tell yourself, yes, I did that...  all that, now I am borne back, uncomfortably, and Barbara hasn't arrived yet and I need a glass of cheap wine, good and Greek.

"I cannot blame anyone for the faults I see in front of me as a barman," I tell the darkened street, after seeing the woman play guitar and sing with her set-up outside the North Metro Station at Dupont.  People get tipsy, gregarious, they want to talk, they break boundaries, they over-talk.  Rare is there a drinking person so inherently polite as to be inoffensive to all.  I've seen it all.

The Phillips event is something of a waste of time, though not completely, because your inner Jesus lingers about you, like an angel.  It's nice to be amongst art, there a Grandma Moses in the conservatory, next to a Duchamp.  Barbara offers a ride home after I walk up her to my old street.   The whole thing, this old scene feels hollow, like a paper maché construction....  We go back to Zorba's, rather than Du Coin, after I stick my nose in, for a good cheap meal.  To deal with all I have to insulate myself with a few cocktails, and now, in the morning, afterward, what was once reality is now a kaleidoscope of things viewed cockeyedly with the drink.  But the Bees Knees or was it a French 75 tweaked with chamomile, it was tasted good.  And the Gascon white is always a good cheap clean hit.


I get up off the old leather couch, make my green tea, filter some water, think about the day.  Call Mom soon to see how she's doing, another failing of mine, not there in her area to help her out, to be there to take her out to lunch, lousy are sons.  "I'm not in my home," she tells.  "My home is a couple of blocks down.  It's too cold to walk.  Will you come pick me up?"  Mom, you are home.  I can tell you're at home.  We're talking on your landline.  See the elephants and the map of Ireland on the wall, that's your kitchen...  Oh, I guess it is.   Etc.



Someone invented happy hours and meeting places and other unhappy things tedious.  A church is fine, a bar's okay, as long as it's a pub...  but, the rest is unnatural.  Be out in nature.  Don't worry about going to supposedly entertaining events, but that our minds gnaw away at us, well, you'll never know who you might meet, maybe a woman you find rather attractive and fun...

But it never happens, because none of it is, at least in Buddhist terms, real.


Days off, I wish to immerse myself in Christian thought.  Finding the real intention behind any act.  If there is Christian intention, and Christian manner, than yes, things might work out okay.  But most of the things we do are selfish, and when we go out and be social we run the risk of going off completely misguided.

I did see the Rothko Room...  that was cool.  Sublime.  It is a nice museum, full of wonderful art.  I'm not going to knock the species with coming up with such a random thing as a museum with creative works within its walls.


The problem with life is when we are told that we are not Jesus.  That is our potential within us, the deep reality no one wants to really mention, that the individual really is Jesus Christ, or, to put it differently, on that level, his level.  Each time we meet, each time we go and do something, there is Christ within, waiting to come out.  But we laugh at such things.   "No, that could not be possible," we say, denying ourselves.  And so, through the natural processes of the artificial social world, the Christ within us gets very lonely and unmiraculous, does not shine the light as he should, and wouldn't know where to shine it anyway, because that's the way of the skeptical world.

To react to any world news:  well, what would you expect?  For it is not drawn into alignment with the billion hypothetical unselfish Christs that we are...

Who can blame anyone for not wanting to be a part of such a world...