At the end of Monday night, not so busy, but the soreness has returned, as I make it out the door to catch the D6 bus down by the Duke Ellington School I am shuffling.  It was slow, but there is the mutual gratitude at the end of the night  when the musicians sit down to eat, after their set.  The late appearance of the Australian bass player, who has grown a beard, has dropped in to visit with Nathalie, the French clarinetist, who is playing the night's music with a young couple from Salt Lake.  (He plays an Italian jazz guitar quite well, and she is quite a bass player, finishing up her higher degree in performance. ) The man from Australia has played bass with Nathalie before, in her gypsy gadjo swing band, and he sits quietly in the corner.  I recognize him.  With his beard, he looks like he's been months at sea.  He comes and sits at the bar with me, after the other two have left.  We've conversed before about bass guitars, and music styles.  I have to encourage him to go say hi to his old bandmate, who, initially, does not seem to recognize him.

I get through the final clean up, and at the very end, well, careful about my wine intake now, I pour myself just a little Beaujolais, and a little more, about a glass in total, and off I go.

I get to the bus stop at Eliot Place and MacArthur.  I limp up the steps and in through the stairs up to the apartment and slump on the couch.  This is quite typical.  You come in over the finish line, the whole thing, and you need to collapse.  Hopefully you don't fall asleep, and then have to wake up later.  I'm going to pour an epsom salt bath, the thought is, and so I do.   And I'm still in pain and stiffness, as the water rises in the tub, so I open an inexpensive Chianti, 12.5 % alcohol, and pour some of it into a tumbler with ice to place by the tub, before stripping off my clothes.


And today, Tuesday, with the workmen playing their music loud, I am tired, and must get up and go in for Wine Tasting night.  I'm making the effort to stay hydrated, but the tea is the primary focus, just to wake up.  The radio outside the window, a man singing with an old style mini-orchestra, with the horn coloration of Latin America on top of the old band's 1920s Middle Europe sound, and the singer draws his notes out grandly, operatically, as if singing over great mountains, pulling himself open like  a great accordion to find all the wind he can for his bellows, as I try to sleep, dream a bit, wake up again, as saws buzz through small boards, and wooded pieces clack together  and a nail gun thumps in repetitions on a grey overcast day, and earlier it rained.

The stew I made, the night before, of grass-fed pre-cut stew meat from the Safeway, which acted suspiciously as I browned it, has turned out decently, at least in flavor, and in texture, but for some slight strange scum on top.   And it's a good pot of green tea, and a cup with the Ashwagandha powder stirred in has a pleasing effect.  The tree pollen has come, and my eyes itch from within.


Okay, so I gather myself and the Nalgene liter water bottle, sliced deli turkey wrapped in paper, and throwing my coats on, I get out the door quickly and down to the street to catch the 3:41 bus in-bound.  Full of students, and then by the hospital.  I get off at Wisconsin, by the gas station, and start walking up the hill.

I'm shy about haircuts.  It's been since Halloween, actually, four whole months almost, since the last. I check my watch, Four PM, sure, I got time, and there's this shop that's been there as long as I can remember, sitting across the street from the old Georgetown Cafe, sometimes called the PLO cafe, staying open all night.  There was a young man from Jordan I knew from up the avenue at the old restaurant block, and he always swore by this particular shop, Nello's, so, I decide, since the shop is empty, no one in the barber's chairs, I got time.

Sure, sure, sit down, says the man by himself, who is dressed casually.  This must be the guy.  He speaks at a hoarse whisper.  I put my coat down, and sit down in the chair before the man, as he gestures.  Tuesday Night's wine tasting makes me nervous.  Being tired, and having a strange sleep schedule, all makes me nervous.

The man is moving his shop up the street, it turns out, after being there thirty years.  I have come, it turns out, on his last day in business there.  There is a marijuana shop down in the basement, and the situations which have arisen have been hard on his business.  Of course, I say, of course.  Bad enough that crime is on the rise, that the news will not report this, the rise in muggings around the universities at this end of town.  Bad enough that the DC government, nor the DC Police Department are not responsive.

The reeking contents of the jars of weed, the pot smoke, rising...  this has driven away his business.  He has a wire bound notebook pad with names and numbers of his clientele written down, each to a line.  There are many elements to the downstairs business which are noteworthy in a bad way.  The thuggish proprietor, an obese Indian male.  One of the females in his employment, with her tattoos, is familiar with MS-13.  The two other girls say hi, but that one won't.

Then there is the landlord, and the building permit.  And the Police raid on the basement shop, and on the Used Book Store just up the street, which also was busted after turning into a weed dealing operation.  There is the story of the man being threatened by the weed shop's proprietor, and when the man reports it, the Police come and say, next time, we'll take you both in and arrest you.  This is what Georgetown has turned into.  No wonder respectable businesses shutter.  Weed shops.

The Police have raided the shop.  They collected evidence.  But, a week later, the shop is open again.  The weed shop does not bring in the best clientele to his hallway here, open to inner windows and open doorless thresholds.

Live in DC?  Good luck, the man is telling me, as he snips at my shambled hair's ends, slowly transforming my appearance, in a good way of course.  I'm a good listener.  I glance at my watch from time to time, as fifteen minutes turns into twenty minutes, then thirty.  I have to pee.  I have to be at work.  There's an eleven top coming up in the back wine room.  I have no idea what the night will bring.  Snip, snip.  He's a thoughtful barber.  He asks me who my friends were who used to go see him.  Zak, of course, Zak, he used to bring me pizza every time.  Lovely guy.  I used to warn him.  Be careful, be careful with the American women, and once you have children, then it is all about her family...  You're from Syria, things are different.  The barber and I reminisce.  While the troubles here continue.

It's not any better out in Maryland where he lives, with his wife.  Darnestown.  But this is near Gaithersburg, MS-13 out in plain sight.  Montgomery County now has to bear the cost of opening new schools for the gang bangers, teaching the children of thankless remorseless violent thugs.  "I am a democrat, but there comes a point..."


By the time I get up to work, walking hurriedly up the hill over the brick sidewalk, seeing the city where I live in a new sinister light, knocking on the door, my right eyelid is about to start twitching.  But, as I see, the bar is in decent prep, not so far from being ready to go, after some work and some adjustments, another shipment of ice arriving finally from the busboy just as the family meal of tilapia and rice is offered up.  The wine for the tasting, a chardonnay from Auxerre, just west of Chablis, with an interesting apple note, clean mineral substance, some vague note as a mushroom stem is a vague note, I have enough of, just need to put it on ice.

Again, warily, I walk the few quiet backstreet blocks from behind the restaurant over to the school, and then down to Reservoir Road where the bus is due in ten minutes, and the bus comes, purrs its slow, gasps to stop, the door opens, I'm on the bus, and then, sagging into a seat and pulled by the bus's forces, we are at my stop again, and I grip as he slows, braking quickly after a bit of gas pedal, and again, I walk up the stairs, open the door, collapse on the couch.


But after you're awake again, after you took the trash out, put it in the green bin, and took with you the little note, translated into Spanish, please don't play the music too loud, if possible, taping it to the door of the new apartment that has risen there, then it's hard not to want to open a bottle of wine, and then to have a glass, while the water pitchers filter the run tap water.  It's hard not to want to swell to your own thing, not to the very polite, very patient, long-serving, sometimes humorous task of waiting upon people, as much as that might have its own enjoyable elements to it, but to finally wish to do your own thing, to not be tired, and weighted down, to not have to be a nervous wreck below the surface, wondering where the next meal is coming from, even though you work in a restaurant.  You drink a glass of the red, and you're not messed with.  It's silent.  The floors creek under your feet, and you try to be careful of that, for the sake of the German woman downstairs who you met in a dream, facing her dislike of you, apologizing for the noise, and then the dream turning sexual quickly, so that you have to ask her to ease off so you don't come so dangerously to the edge, as you taste the embraces of her body, and then, unfortunately, waking up, sore still, having to go to work, worried about the phone call to check in on a lonely old mother just as crazy as you are.

It's George Harrison's birthday, he would be seventy seven, you find out on Facebook.  Hunter Thompson died today fifteen years ago.  It's Mardi Gras, headed inevitably into Lent.

You try your best, you know.  You put effort in.  You work as hard as you can, at least it seems that way to you, the main participant.  You lead a quiet life.  You fear it is misspent, sure, of course.  Of course there would be better uses for a man of your talent and all the education and gentle things invested in you.  But, there you are.  Four guitars.  Some books.  A kitchen you like.  Just enough money made to keep it all afloat.  You're awake sometimes.  You're trying to sleep sometimes.  Sometimes you make it, sometimes you don't.

The wine rolls down.  It too will have a cost, but now, it sure tastes good and feels good.


After work, yes, after work...  This is why people like dive bars with neon signs out front, so that no one can see them.

After work, after work, the true callings come.  The true meetings.  The almost sexual love, for being so quietly ecstatic, of Jesus and the fishermen, and Peter, in that burst of the new calling of the new church of the new way of being, a way of being promising economic change, of seeing an entirely new way to understand reality, not that it could ever be implemented in any practical fashion, this new way...

After work, a remembrance of the pure characters as you understood them in children's books, and even in Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit.  The good people were weather beaten and pure.  They probably had not, in today's parlance, "hooked up a lot."  They were other worldly enough to be rather completely economic oddballs.  Subscribers to a true economy, based on the identities they really belonged to, elves, dwarves, men, tree spirit beings.  Strider.  A grey man of a certain age, who knew the weariness of the road, but who knew it as the right moral place to be.  I forget the other names of all the pure human beings in such works as were given birth in a particular time when the world was burning.  The solid single focus of a man come out of bardic lore, true to the rocks and stones, and made able by the fibers of his being to stand there quietly at the ancient pub, and knowing the news of this ancient pub, knowing that this sorcerer claimant to power and rule somehow was either good or bad or a mix of good and bad.  And that such a man was at the pub, a man of such nobility to the very core that he was of a special thing, a special class of God's image being people, beyond worldly chatter and claim.   The pub was the place, where suddenly it would have dawned on him, what the world was now, what he would have to do to be a good and decent man and a strong warrior type, every vigilant, knowing too well that he was fodder for a storybook,  but that of being a very important one, and that he was brought upon here, this place, because he had always been a decent person, as many men fall, and try to stand on their feet after the fall, wobble, not knowing, never knowing really, if they themselves are good or bad.

All the Humphrey Bogarts and all the Gary Coopers...

All the Jimi Hendrix songs, about love and life, and dreams...


In the old days, it wasn't at all bad if you were quiet, if you were removed, or a mystery, reserved, as if you were knowing of some waiting time before some great unknown bad thing was about to come out and spread  over the face of much of humanity, untold numbers of persons sensitive and caring and concerned just like you and I.  You were waiting to be called.  Until then, you waited.

Now there are too many people for all of this.  Now they have to spend so much time and focus, just to get back to the little nest in the hive...  There are no pubs left, just malls now, with their take on a restaurant, an experience...  Say what you will of cities...


Robert Kennedy... was he the last of the old species, who quietly waited, reluctant, conflicted by many thoughts as to what the truly bad stuff was, as to where to even begin...  That was 1968.

The other night, my mom called me at work.  It twas Sunday night, and I had a few spread out through the wine bar.  "Is there something going on about John F. Kennedy," she asks me.  And I say, yes, yes, there is.  There is a great existential threat going on to our democracy, to that good old system....  "And did they catch the guy, Lee Harvey Oswald, or was it... what happened?"  I'm at work.  I'm fairly busy.  I'm back near the cutting board.  Above the old place of Bruno's old upstairs oven...  "Well..  it's never been proven one way or another...  The whole thing is so strange....  Can you believe that one guy, one alienated sort of schmuck was allowed to bring in a rifle to work, and just some lucky shot...  One lone nut...  With a lucky window, and he just wanted to make himself important...  or was it, you know, mom, he'd been down to Mexico City, Oswald, and he'd met up with Russians and Cubans, and obviously, the long game of the Russians is just to bring down our system, the heart of a government, the beliefs we might haver for a good and decent democracy...  There's supposed to be a woman from the Cuban embassy who was a girlfriend of Oswald, but there's no way of making her talk, and she hides, and she's very old now and won't talk about it...   I don't believe quite that the CIA had Kennedy killed, but...  "

And unfortunately, she, in her old Lear mind is perfectly on to something.  "Yes, mom, it's not the assassination of JFK now, but the threat to our democracy...

But what happened to Oswald, mom asks.   Well, you remember, you watched as he was in Police custody, down in Dallas, and they were taking him from one place to another, and Jack Ruby shot him, you remember...  So he could never talk.  And, well, Ruby never talked either.  I mean, the whole thing, the whole thing, just everything strange about it...