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...