Jesus is sitting on the toilet, thinking about what he has to do to get ready to go to work.  He is sore.  It's toward the end of the week.  One more night.  He takes a hot shower.  The heat enters his muscles, making him feel better.  Jazz night.  Should be doable.


At the end I get invited out, down to Martin's Tavern with my friend.  Sure, it's the end of the week.  "I need to get out, why not..."  I have a bowl of Brunswick Stew.  We talk to Alejandro, how his mom has a cucina in a small city outside of Mexico City.  He's been at Martin's since he could barely speak English.  My buddy pays for the whole tab.  I stop at the ATM to deposit a check.  I get a beef shawarma at the late night Munchees, eat half of it overlooking the canal, walk a bit, talk with a guy outside of Clyde's whose ex-girlfriend just put down his dog, a chihuahua, and I share some of my wine with him, cross M Street, hail a cab home, pass out on the couch and wake with regrets, tired, more than expected, more than I should be.



Maybe he was just tired, from the steady burdens of physical work.   He doesn't go into a weighty explanation, at Nazareth, after he sets the scroll of the Torah down.  Just a quiet, now you have heard the prophecy fulfilled.    He says it out loud.  Half to himself.  As if uttering his own "E = MC squared."  It sounds like the townspeople, within earshot, first have to register what they've just heard, if they heard it well enough, what the young man quietly said.  And then, perhaps if he weren't so tired, he would not have gone on long enough to get him into trouble, but also tired of keeping his good mouth shut.



Then you feel isolated.  A day off.  Too tired to join in with anything.  Your concern seems to be food.  What's in the fridge...


So I got off the couch finally, took a hot shower, and bored out of my mind, not wanting to write anything, I went for a walk down to the bluff in the cold sunlight.  Robins hopped along the field.  The river tingled with a breeze, and I walked with the stick that had been cut cleanly, finding it in the grass.


Maybe he too was bored.  How many talents he had, but letting them be, while the main thing grew inside of him.  He's often out looking for something out in nature, observing how water cannot be stopped, walking carefully over the dried grasses laid flat by the cold over a marsh below a hill.   Finding a stick, cut from a young tree, finding it suitable in his hand, as if to shepherd.  Walking slowly, by himself, absent-mindedly, in a state of observation of how the natural world acts, the trees, the blue sky, the way the robins have come now to the field, proud in some way, taking a little run forward.

They are out in the boat, crossing the lake, and here he comes, walking on water, as if it were no big deal.

Is he even cut out to be a good leader?  He has charisma, certainly, but was never shouting at people telling them what to do.  His intelligence has its own unique form.  The Disciples even have to tell him what to do, as when the people who've been listening to him must be fed before they are sent back home.  Oh, yes, I suppose that's a good idea.  What do we have on hand?

He likes his wine.  As God does.  Give it to the poor.

And people, each and every one of them, except  maybe children sometimes, are extreme pains in the asses.  Always after money and supposedly desirable things like comfort and riches and ways to defeat boredom...  All of them having specific request lists...  No wonder God summoned up wine to calm them down a bit, so that they might interact with each other in an easy enough fashion.  Why not...  Each one of them little military generals, dictator kings and queens in disguise...

Jesus cannot even listen to the news.  He cannot even do all the work, which is like listening to the news, that is required to get a guy, so to speak, laid.   The news is irrelevant, given the whole which is nature, which is the world, which extends from that which is below our feet on out the most impossible furthest reaches...


He grows tired of this sort of exile.  A life solely led writing, as good as it is for catching in the wisdom of The Father, and all the lessons of nature, out there, readily had, there's something at least half unsatisfactory to it.  He knows so much.  He wants to test it.  Knowing the water now, will it hold him when he walks out upon it, collects his friendship with the fishermen, not even needing to teach, but just by being.  He wishes to share.