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.