Monday.  Start by making a pot of tea.  "What should I be doing with myself..."  You've lounged enough on the couch.  You'd gone out for a walk in the night, heard the murmurs of frogs in the muck, a sound you hadn't heard before, coming as it does up through the fog.


Sunday, a friend wants to check in with you, meeting you for a walk, just as it starts to drizzle.


We get out to the little mowed meadow above the river.  The grass is wet, sparse, muddy in places.  "It's nice up here," she says.

We go on a few more paces. "Well, I read your book."  She'd wanted to take me out for a dinner and wine, her bartender, for his birthday, belatedly, just before the whole Coronavirus Pandemic blew up.  I'd mentioned it, or someone at the bar had, one jazz night, she'd asked about it, so when I went I brought along a copy.

She observes the autobiographical nature of it.  "So, here's this nice guy, spiritual, kind...  but why does he get so smitten with this girl who's just terrible to him, who's an awful human being... I don't get it.  Why does he persist?"



"Yes, I went to therapy for that," I tell my friend.  "'She treated you like a low-life...'" my therapist said, I tell my friend, who has long been a good collector of wines, Bordeaux, not to cellar, but to enjoy, before they turn and oxidize.  We go back to talking about old wine shops, the characters at the Mayflower, which sat down near the intersection of M Street and New Hampshire Avenue.  There was a parking garage below, and the wine buyer guys had a rock band that played there sometimes.  This was back in the 80s...

"Anyway, beyond her being a Helen of Troy, I don't see any reason why such a smart person--you're more sophisticated than a country bumpkin--would spend another thought on her..."

I can't argue with my friend.  Yes, it was a big old waste.  And on top of that, I have to agree with her, I was a goof-off my senior year...  yeah.

Basically, yes, writing that book was a useless endeavor, beyond the mere literary practice of it, a younger person making a study of how books end up written, by blind inch by inch, memories, that sort of thing, a transcription of a mood, even then, barely remembered, thus becoming, essentially, fiction.  Unless it were to serve as some sort of confession, otherwise it's largely useless, and perhaps those confessions are in order sometimes, unconsciously at least.

The path is muddy, the sky, overcast.  The sprinkle of showers have stopped.  My friend's loafers are wet, but she says its not a problem.  What are we doing here anyway, I might wonder, today.  At ten o'clock at night, over the bar, after the jazz show, fine, we're all having some wine, this is the protocol we are used to, but now, us, the paths, people walking dogs, trees budding, the reservoirs, cyclists passing by, different levels of athletic seriousness...

It's painful to think about.  Painful to think a lot on a lot of things right now.  "The bum you became...  for what...  All transcribed with journalistic accuracy," I think to myself.   A conversation to match the mood, the damp sky and all the world thrown up to uncertainty, and with me finding myself up a little too early, having stayed up too late playing an old guitar on Facebook Live...  and not much direction to go in, now.  And not even wanting to read my little collection of spiritual sorts of books, as if they too would lie to me.  Wine that numbs the pain and insulates against the isolation, not feeling so hot the next day, in the morning.


It's always hard to talk about art, particularly the art for which you yourself are responsible for.  No fun at all.  People view your work through their own experience, their own prism, their own value systems, their sex, their perceptions, their sense of self, all of that...  They read what they will into things.  I've had many different reactions from readership of the general, friends I know.  And like myself, most people don't want to touch it, but to make some admission that it is a work of a writer of some kind of skill.


And the next day, waking alone, as always, it's again hard for me not to see myself as a bum, who has made no contribution to society, not done much of anything helpful.  During our walk, as we come back up Elliot Place there by the reservoir, my friend tells me to not be down on myself.  I know you're not going to take this to heart, but you're not a fuck-up.  "In Europe, being a professional like you are at what you do is a very respected occupation."  Oh, yes, I know.  Thank you for reminding me, I say.

(And it does all boil down to what you do as a job, how you earn money.  All the rest hidden, not called into effect and effectiveness...  For which I've not set myself up for well, so it does seem.)



The night before, after the day of the walk with my friend, remembering my yoga, I watch The Seven Samurai.  I'd mentioned it to her and she laughed.  After a long Sabbath celebration, she and her family tried to watch it, but found it impossible.  But I find it entertaining, at least in all its detail, and in the scenes, and the characters too.  I make it on from the gathering of the samurai, to the arrival at the village.  On to part two, the preparation of the little village with its running streams ever-trickling in the background, steep wooded mountains around, interesting old huts and fences, little foot bridges, the old mill, and I watch, on to the commencement of the battle.  It takes my mind away.  I have some wine.  Then I go out for a walk.  Coming upon the strange light from the fog, the trees hanging there in the air visible.  There's a strange light behind the Urban Ecology Center, as if a UFO landed.  No one out at 2:30 AM on an early Monday morning, still dark out.  The houses are asleep.

Down in the canal below, as the trees stand starkly enshrouded in mist, in the warm air, a mysterious sound, faint, but carried through lengthwise down there.  It's a sound like I heard Tibetan Buddhist monks chant once at Amherst.  Or like a contented cat, knowing it's about to be fed her breakfast.  The sound has the element of a comic cartoon spring, sort of like the vibrations of a  Jew's Harp.  The old bullfrogs are waking from the muck, carrying along their song of deep night.



But this is, with all that's going on now, a Dark Night of the Soul.  And any endeavor. any emotional pull will have along with it a dark side.  You'd like it to be all peaches and cream with the pretty girl, but it doesn't work out that way, in fact serving as a welcome mat to a long dark painful place, a place one should be honest about.

Darkness, once it comes, and it comes naturally, is already within us anyway, comes to stay.  You don't get rid of it, at least easily.  You can only transmute it.  Which is perhaps why I took years of time and effort to write out a somber book with Polish and Irish touches.

And then it became very hard to write.

I drove up on a Friday, the first week, picking up the rental car as rumors flew about a Presidential Act calling in the National Guard to close down interstate travel.  I'm in an Uber.  I check the web, a rumor, proven to be false.  All the rest stops on Pennsylvania closed, an eery silence on the roads.  In Ravine, where I stop, just as the road climbs into the mountains, I use the restroom.  Not even any appetite for a Whopper, a double, sandwich only.  A trucker man reaches out to me as I look at the Burger King counter.  Through the big notch, four hours in, on time.  At Great Bend, I pull off the road to use the restroom of a convenience market gas station, and they've got Portopotties lined up outside.


On Thursday, I drove back, leaving at 4:30 PM, hard to part with my old mom, wondering whether or not I'd brought the Coronavirus to her doorstep.  I also felt I needed to get back, to process the mail related to the unemployment benefits.  My head turned over many thoughts, almost all of them dark, and the only hopeful thing I saw was that perhaps I'd gotten her back on track with her medicine, the one for her memory.

I pulled into DC around midnight.  I unpacked the car, pulling out the opened bottle of ten dollar Chianti from the night before, eventually falling into an uneasy rest and finally, sleep.  Then a very anxious day, worrying my head over whether mom was displaying any symptoms, wondering if it might be better to keep the rental car just in case.  She mentioned being sore.

Up at mom's, a coworker had called me to tell me that she might have been exposed, since meeting a doctor friend of hers who had been exposed.  Great...  Calling her later, trying to make my mind up for a next step, what to do, her ache was only in her shoulder, a slight relief.


I also had a job interview lined up, and summoning my courage I drove the rental black Toyota down and across Key Bridge and onto Wilson Boulevard to slowly make my way through what I knew as familiar, until it wasn't familiar anymore, coming upon my destination, Total Wine, a retail shop occupying the first floor of the modern recently constructed office building, circling the block, figuring out the parking, guiltily calling my mom again.  I went in for my interview, early.  The young woman, tall, was kind to me, easy going.  They weren't offering much, a cashier position, to meet the current business model of on-line and curbside.  With social distancing, there wasn't to be any real wine recommendations happening.

I found a convenient Enterprise car rental office to drop off the car, and near the Ballston Metro, I caught a Metro bus back along the line into town, back to the DC side of the river, from where I could shuffle home.  The bus took many turns that confused me.  I lose my direction in Virginia.  There are, on the other hand, a good amount of conveniences, but anyway, I slogged back up the old hill, the same one I'd stared at when I first came to town in 1988, made it to the friendly little Korean market for some cold cuts, 70 percent rubbing alcohol, a small container of tuna salad, a bottle of soda water, walking back slowly to the little apartment, with khakis, blue blazer...  Why haven't I gone to more job interviews, to better myself, my station.

Later, I went and did some yoga at dusk up on the little bluff, relieving the pressure from my visit.  Is she more forgetful, more repetitive, harder to deal with in general?


I look at the jobs I seem eligible for.  Not pretty, it is.

Mom, over dinner, asks me, so what are you working on.  So I begin with a few sketches.  I talk of how Kerouac, in putting up with the Neal Cassady people of the world, was effectively being a good Christian.  She likes this, but then her mind turns.  "You need to find something solid.  You need to make something happen."  She starts crying.  "I've done you a great disservice," she says, sobbing out front of the apartment.   "I could kill myself."  I try to reassure her that I'll make something happen, to save myself, effectively.

Eventually, the conversation is forgotten, swept away by the next day, the next long ride somewhere, to the shores of the great lake, Ontario, here.  In the wine that is essential with lunch and dinner, even for me, maybe particularly so.

Over dinner, again, a conversation comes up.  "I've been telling you for thirty years to believe in Ted, to think good thoughts.  Who knows what you could do?  You could promote all the bands you know, up here in Oswego," and again, I turn away from the conversation, feeling a sadness deep down.

What happened to me?  I reflect on the Sondheim Fresh Air Birthday interview, how, again, I could have studied acting, and singing too, and been a song and dance man.  But I got depressed that year, late 1986, and my inability to write papers had been building, falling into some childish juvenile spiritual ideas, of how things happen in accordance with great unknown and unseen laws divinely and fatefully ordained, in a way of being appropriate.  So, no, I didn't get the girl, all my talents did not be put to use, the musical ones, the ones that come out of being reasonably attractive or even good looking almost like a minor movie star...  I did not become a college professor, nor even a high school teacher.  And instead, so it seems, I've greatly failed, and can't even take care of my old mother now, let alone even myself.

Such are the things of talent, talents squandered.  I've tried to read wise books, to the extent I have the energy for.

And all of it has led me to where I am now.   Waiting on unemployment.

"You never ask for help," mom's voice, echoes in my head.

Yes, the dark thoughts.  And what do you do with them, you push them away, and move onward.

Writing is just like yoga.  Once you get the hang of it, a few poses, the basic vocabulary to expand from in variation, it's a matter of you going and doing it, alone, at your own pace, you, your body, the wisdom of your body, the drama of bringing muscles and bone into a pose.


I liked restaurant people.  They were people you could always talk to, who always said hi to you, who would not dismiss what you were going through, if you were to share it with them, beyond the communal burdens shared.  They would be the ones to get it.

I, for a long long time, have been telling people, quietly, not upfront, or loudly, how hard the job of being a barman was, once you added it all up, the collateral damage, the hours, the strain, the way you felt the next day, mind awake, body unwilling, the constant strain of talking to people, even when they were friends.  I was a good bartender because I knew, if I was going through so much, then I would treat them gently, not speak out of turn too much.  A talky bartender, self-focussed, is irritating.  We are all guilty of it, I'm sure, but practice restraint.  If they ask you how things are going, and you go, "Oh, my old mom, she calls a lot..."  they get it.

I didn't even get it myself, 'til I was, against my wishes and will, laid off, to the extenuating circumstances of the Covid-19.

I found daylight.  I found energy, peace of mind.

I took my usual walk along the river bluff and the trees and the grass, and no, I wasn't a misanthrope for wanting to do so, but rather it was my own natural rhythm.

I read pieces of my own writing I'd not had any time to handle even.  Freedom.

It was no joke, but rather insightful, whenever people asked me about how my writing was going and I were to mention Cervantes, his years of being kidnapped, debtors prison...  or Dostoevsky and his Siberian exile...  The fancy folk with bankroll, they wouldn't listen to long or deep to that, a subtle very polite, oh, look boy, just be quiet and do your job, if you're not going to become an actor or something more obviously useful to me in a way I don't feel guilty about...

I exaggerate.  But those were the pains.  You cannot dismiss them.  I've lived through them, so far.  It's not my own fault, nor my habits, that the job was rough that way, in all ways.  A real damper on life.

The thing about life is that it is--what's the right word--oddly ideal.  Appropriate.   Events in life bear a match to the soul of the individual.

In this regard, at least, all people, have an intelligence, equal.  It is not always easy to see this.

And for such reasons, the narratives arts, just so, are rewarding.  In and of their own reasons.  You can at least, perhaps without even knowing it, ask the right questions.  No one will tell you whether you are doing so or not;  on this you are alone, unless I suppose you consider the best of analysts of the psychological realm, or the better sources, original, of the spiritual wisdom that has trickled down so for to the species in the last, oh, 10,000 years, perhaps, who is counting but your own little mind anyway.  A freak just like the rest of them.

Who is to say who is wiser, the chef, the bus driver, the old construction guy you talked to yesterday?  Your own conscious mind, the part you have to meditate over to clear, who can call you bad names, grifter, wino, bum, sinner, man-without-a-plan, even if no one else does.   What are you doing with yourself, anyway, you constantly ask yourself.  And any break in life's labors, in a job, invite the other voices to come over you, and it's bad enough anyway, I suppose, for those who drift, artistically minded, believing in the deeper pervasive wisdom of the Universe and God that runs through everything, but which is by nature undefinable...

The weather changes.  One needs to get out for a walk.




First day of Spring.  All of a sudden, it's getting warmer.  I'm doing laundry, preparing for the trip to see my old mom for her birthday, coming up Monday, today is Thursday.  I step out on the little patio to get some sunlight and check on the weather.  It is indeed different out, the little trees budding out their leaf, and while the sky is opaque, there is light in it.

Looking up at the old Elm tree by the sidewalk in front of the steps, I see a Blackhawk helicopter, pushing its way westward, upstream.  You see it flying with its nose down, tail slightly up, and side doors open, I think, but it strikes me as looking like a glum bird, depressed by its automaton drill or mission.  Yeah, what can you do...  Crazy times, uncertain times.  What will happen to all my stuff, and to me, even.  I look at jobs, create a resume on one of those on-line sites, Indeed, but who am I trying to offer myself to, to sell my credentials to anyway?  The Amazon job, the Whole Foods personal shopper?  Safeway?

It occurs to me I like those who work in grocery stores.  Maybe that's a job.  But I have to go see my mom first.  Whether technically a good idea or not, it seems good, spiritually.



So I put on sweatpants, sweatshirt, head down to the bluff while the sun is up still.  And again with the yoga, no mat, bare feet on the grass.  The slow intimate stretches, each with their drama, commence with patience and the slowest of moment. The sun is the, above the gray forested ridge one cannot see beyond, and still bare, faint brushstrokes of wispy minimalist buds.  Beyond the pond-green river’s flat surface I can make out people using the trails.  Honeysuckle.  Mountain pose, sun salutation, easy Wai Lana yoga, shoulders spreading, reaching...  Plow, headstand, pigeon again, headstand and then pulling myself into a full lotus I’m able to hold and chakras aligning with each breath.  I note that the hillock I’m on is almost even with the banks of the reservoir to the west.   John F. Kennedy enjoyed the view downstream on the other side of the great river.

There is a heightened sense of the three-dimensionality of the natural world, the trees closer, the ones further, and all in fresh vividness.  The ground is somewhat muddy in spots.  I smell again the wild garlic shoots, and observe from up close the variety of ground cover, from soft rosemary seaweed like shoots, the great varieties of clover-like things and all the grasses.

I think of Jack Kerouac, his elusive moments of elusive epiphanies, and he, the old star athlete, who could still run at a very good clip, even his later years of too many bats, he would have gotten all of yoga, as he got the headstand and how good it was for body and for mind and spirit too.

The job, I observed, had me cowed.   Physically.  The women I worked with were, had to be, strong people, strong minded, strong physically.   And sometimes it felt like to me, and this is part of my psychology, they had me in a corner, out of which I had to apologetically go about the business of getting my job done, accepting their attitude and opinions, a sort of just shut up and do your job and get through it.  And then when after they had gone home and I was closing, some relief from the bosses.


And so without it, in this uncertain break of the pandemic outbreak, I got to know my body again.  And when I went to bed, then was awake early, I would be able to get up out of bed, at 6 AM.  And again, as I might have once been able to do, I was able to just sit down and write, letting things sort themselves out.

I was back doing yoga, outdoors, a necessary back-drop of inspiration on some organic level I both could and could not, on a deeper level, explain.  The yoga was sore and slow.  And I wondered, as I groaned my way through the old poses, "what have I done to my body over the winter?" feeling ashamed of myself.  Yes, maybe there had been some stresses taken up and in, internalized.  My left shoulder, tight.  My belly, in the way.

Doing yoga helps you control your appetites.  It aids you in seeking what to do with yourself as the world swirls around you, as you seek a quiet place, to take it day by day, not hurting yourself nor anyone else.

The whole city, it seemed to me sometimes, was full of domineering types, people of logic who had found it necessary to shut themselves, to compartmentalize, to put themselves, as we must, separate from others.  Which made them not very conversational.  There were of course the people of the proverbial other side of town, service people, like the ones waiting out there on the same bus line as I, in their hospital blues, their crossing guard jacket and pants, security guards.   And there I was, in the middle.  Like my mom, able, and fond of starting up conversation wherever possible and potentially friendly.

I'm waiting for the bus and an older local gentleman in dusty blue, reflective vest, hardhat, boots, ambles by, returning back up the sidewalk with carry-out soup.  I'm trying to get into work, as the boss has asked me to come, to write some copy describing the different dishes, to promote the new delivery and carry-out trade.  "Nice day," the older gentleman offers, walking by slowly.  "Yeah, I'm a bartender, laid off, nice to see the daylight actually."  And he stops.  "Oh, yeah, I was too," he says.  Mm-hmm.  "I was an owner, of a club."  "Oh, man."  "Yeah, co-owner, for years...  a club.  We had four floors...  I got tore-up every night."  "It's hard not to," I nod, smiling, having found another soul on a hard day, not as sunny as the day before.  I ask him where he's working.  "I'm up at the corner." He's a quiet man.  He speaks slowly, formulating, putting his words together.    "I got to work.   Old man, have to."  "Yeah, you'd probably go nuts not working," I say.  "Good day to you," my new friend says, walking quietly, steadily away.  "Oh, are the busses running today," I say, frustrated with waiting, when already I could have simply walked and been there already.  Is it a Saturday metro bus schedule?  "Yeah, they've been running, all day."  "Thanks."

I get back to the apartment, feeling a bit depressed.  I'll be happy with my little blurbs and subtle polite tweaks of copy describing crusty boneless pig's feet, braised veal cheeks, salmon in potato crust, and other dishes, and how The Dying Gaul, after twenty-six plus years on Wisconsin Avenue, in the perfect neighborhood for it, is now on Instagram, as well as Facebook.  I'd walked back, talking to my aunt, and as soon as I got in, eyeing the couch for a little nap before the next effort, Mom calls again, again a little confused, "Eh, I'm not doing so well..."  But I'm gentle with her, as I putz in the kitchen, getting some hot water going again for an herbal tea, Moringa, or Dandelion Root, perhaps.  I patiently hear her out.  Maybe she's not been perfect about taking her vitamins and her little pill.  I feel I really should go visit her, though I know I should be looking for a job as well, and earlier in the day have gone through several websites, with new log-ins and passwords, and data-entry, and even a test, taken on my smartphone that determined I would not be good at grocery shelf stocking, a story I tell her, getting a chuckle out of her.  I've never even had a resume.  Shame on me.  I try to rectify this.  I have been very lazy, quite lazy about all this.   It's just that some of us don't always know what we are to do, what we need to do, what we should be doing, in the course of a day, and with a large enough of a psychological fault-line, that we think we might occupy ourselves fruitfully doing something completely on our own, like this, like writing, like "being a poet." Etc.


Well, it's overcast, rain will come later, and not particularly warm out, not in the friendly way it was yesterday, but I have a hooded SUNY OSWEGO sweatshirt on, Adidas track pants, and I don't even need a yoga mat anymore, I'm just going to go up on the bluff and do my yoga, and hopefully at least a headstand.  The workout of yesterday evening's yoga out in the late light of afternoon, a soft green day, with golden light in the clouds breaking through, and people out walking in couples and with dogs, some ambling in a jog along the old grassy trail that once was the streetcar trolley line out to Glen Echo, is still tight and sore in my muscles and joints and ligaments and all that.  I make a little joke to myself as I groan, straining at the weight of holding my arms at straight--remember when you were a kid and could run around so easily with arms outstretched pretending to swoop like a bird? well, it ain't so easy now, at least, at the beginning of the uncertain season--that I can call his "oh fuck this hurts" yoga.  It's very slow anyway.  I'm groaning away, and then it's mom on the phone again, but it's easier to reassure her this time, "you're okay, you're in the right place, there's wine there, things will be okay..."  We have another chuckle over something.  She's feeling pushed around.  Yes, we all feel that way, those of us low on the totem pole, with all the strain of uncertainty on everyone's minds, sure.  And I get now, how hard it is indeed to put words together, when there are so many in one's head to begin with...

Eventually it starts to sprinkle.  The fabric of my workout pants is too slippery for my foot to be planted on the inside of the opposite thigh under the crotch, sliding away each time, and unlike yesterday, having accomplished reasonably auspicious tree poses, it's not happening today, as I stand again barefoot on the clover chive grass looking down at the Gettysburg Battle Tree like trees, with the green murky river sinking into its own quiet mood, and the planes keep coming, as if on an invisible string extending all the way out west, with their landing gear down, going in my perspective so slowly that I'm reminded of a child playing with little toy car, rolling it along, just so.  Ah me...

I'm in lotus pose, the early in the season version, and I pull the warm hood over my head, and indeed I am a pretty good monk these days.

It's colder now, and dark enough now to appreciate the light of the street lamps.  The funny little friendly Jack Russel is sitting up in the window of a newly renovated house, and I limp along, all my connection muscles feeling pretty tight and pulled away from their usual lazy habits, and it takes some effort to walk the two blocks back to the avenue, then across the street, and reaching into my pouch pocket beneath my rain shell, to get my keys out.

I'm about to figure out a quiet bite to eat for dinner after all that,and from speaking to the boss as he hungrily ate his plate of rice, mushroom and spinach in the quiet of the backroom with the lights off, and as I relax some, the next apartment has a bass thumping going on.  I pour a glass of wine, and I get out the guitar, and I'm beginning to wonder, that perhaps glasses of wine put is into such a foreign place, that we exaggerate in our minds our own talents, even as we now are loosened up enough by that wine to woodshed, to go through, like the mockingbird, our little repertoires of song.

And anyway, from listening to all the birds as I settled into an okay I can do this yoga mood over up on the bluff, a robin precisely picking suddenly with beak into the grass just there not even deep, and up the bird pulls a worm, three inches long, and the bird takes it up like a strand of spaghetti, zup, listening to the birds, one hears where language came from.  A bird over on a wire somewhere, sings, "I miss You!" happily, sliding the note up playfully in emphasis.  Like the nice girlfriend I once had.



All the mad wino Shakespearean clown and hero and foil talents the human race thinks it has...  I stay up a bit, playing guitar and practicing my singing, still trying to find my voice, and when I wake, early I wonder, will the neighbor complain to the landlord, I tried to be quiet, I really did.

It's hard to not have a glass of wine, sometimes.  Does it do one any good, in the longer frame of time, or the next day?  Does it make you more efficient--perhaps not, but, a thing sent by God, as a gift from nature, a way of traveling vicariously, well, yes, hard not to, given the pressures on people, you, me, the poor people at their wedding...

So, in the confusion, I get up.  The light is fresh and early still, and I move my body, sore from the first yoga exercise of the year, over to the couch, as I feel depressed again, as one always does, getting up when it might appear he has not done much with his life.  "Oh, I should have persisted, dealt with that acting class;  I always liked reading poems and Shakespeare characters aloud..." he remembers, the instructor playing a game of tag on the first class, putting him out as the scapegoat before everyone, as he didn't want to play tag.

I hit the couch, dozing a little bit more, and then, well, I take in last night's teacups from the coffee table into the kitchen as the water heats in the kettle, transfer the herbal tea brewed in the old teapot into an empty Perrier bottle, set that up for a pot of Dragonwell green tea.  Van Gogh once wrote that he had recipe, how it helped to have a glass of beer and a good piece of bread in the morning to assuage the dark thoughts, the open spaces an artist faces, in solitary uncertainty, but still with that inner drive, "go paint."

Time the tea, now it's made, and oh it tastes good, refreshing to the cellular level of the body.  Life's not easy, when you're shy, no, none of it.  My skin is dry.  Tea in green mug, sprinkle of flax seed, half a teaspoon of Ashwagandha root powered.  In the distance, first the buzzing grass haircutter of the weedwhacker, and then the whirr of the dreaded leaf blower not far away to the east, revving, and an airplane joins in overhead.


"If you didn't work at night all the time, you could have a life.  You could meet your buddies at 5 o'clock, for cocktail hour, you could do a lot of things," she tells me as I walk down the little pasture below the great earth wall of the reservoir in yesterday afternoon's remembered sunlight.  Yes, that would be nice.

When I got back to the apartment, was just about to sit down to write after my impromptu yoga session, Mom called, to check in, and I tell her about my craving to do a headstand after talking with my gentle aunt.  "Was she helpful," Mom asks, a bit dismissively, with her typical jealousy sprinkled in.  "Yes, she was."  "Was I?"  Yes, Mom, of course, you were the most helpful of all, when we talked in the morning, and you told me to take it all in stride and how the silence of retirement kinds of things is actually nice, nothing to be afraid of, a chance for books and thoughts, reading, the world of writings, yes.

And Mom has a strange holiness about her, where all the difficulties of living with her own anxious bright mind have been transmuted into a deeper understanding, an embracing combination of dark and light.  I get her from her, this half-curse

After writing, trying to, to capture the birds and the evening light and the headstand, and the deeper understanding of my attraction to The Seven Samurai, I found the quiet again, in which to cook.  I find a duck breast in the refrigerator, from my effort to shore up life against the madness of the times, to shop in the busy Safeway on Sunday night, after my shift, a little bit tipsy.  I score the fat side with the good chef's knife, lay it down in the old cast iron pan, medium low, the fat renders.  Later with the remnant of the fat in the pan still I break apart a head of broccoli, spread out neatly, and into the oven at 350 until the gentle fresh essence rises, and then I look and the little heads have become bright green and sweaty, ah yes.  And my body is more pleased with the broccoli than with the duck breast.  Hmm.

I have only one glass of wine, maybe a little more, in a begrudging nod to the old ingrained habit, but I don't even have much of a taste for it.  I go back to reading my book, Dark Nights of the Soul, by Thomas Moore, "A Guide To Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals. "  And soon, I'm tired enough to go to bed.


"Cut him out in little stars..."  From the great theater of Shakespeare bids us to wonder about our own being...  how did we come out of little stars, what heavenly fate oversaw our coming into existence, our being, the person we become...

The great actor has not hid his or her talent under the bushel basket.  But some go beyond, beyond the actor's artistic craft, to have something of another claim, the higher craft of comprehending existence in a way that bridges everything, art and science, the reasons for existence, together.  Of course we are shy of doing that, beyond mere hints of representation, often in the form of art.

Being a barman is harder than it looks.  You have to take good care of yourself.  This little break might be helpful indeed.

As the first day of not having a job came into evening, St. Patrick's Day, I come to the little bluff, talking with my aunt with my earbuds in, and then afterward, in need of quiet time to absorb everything, I have a craving for doing a headstand.  How long has it been, I can't remember.  The ground is soft enough, the light coming across the river above the bluff on the other side.  I'm wearing jeans, Merrill hiking shoes.  I try one while still on the phone, but it doesn't get far, and there's the tangle of the wire and the lack of concentration.

So now it's the big moment, can I still do one, and this time I line things up more carefully, the base of the forearms planted so, hands cupped to hold the  back of the crown of the head, then tiptoeing in carefully and closer, the spine almost vertical now, and then after being able to tiptoe hardly any further, pull the thighs in, let the pelvis roll the sacrum backwards, the belly tightens, the knees raise, and then the shins are coming forward as they elevate.  And I can do it again, and the spine straightens out, and then the adjustments, pulling in and upward with the buttocks, and here I am, ready even for a few minutes of it.  A Blackhawk military helicopter skims the grey clouds upside down, below the river now, and below and in the fluff of cloud, the light is shining again with some gold, and the only thing is the little twig that is beginning to dig into my right forearm, which begins to hurt, so I have to pull out of it, feet back to the ground.

I do another one, marvelous.  A ladybug traverses and then up a stalk of chivy grass blade, and this is a good way to look at the world, and maybe particularly when that world has turned upside down.  I can hold this pose a long time, a satisfying feeling.

God, it feels good to be doing the yoga again.  There is clunky soreness in the body, but surprisingly the old pose are remembered well enough, even in street clothes and without a yoga mat.  There's a family with a daughter, tossing the ball around.   I think of Kerouac the fire-watcher, and his fondness for pulling his own headstands, and five minutes too, great for the circulation and the phlebitis he was prone to.  And I can do that five minutes, as well.  I still can, to my surprise.  The child pose, hunching over, is almost more of a strain.

Doing a tree pose before the old mulberry tree near the picnic bench is enlightenment of tree detail and the imparted lesson of tree balance, and somehow despite the soreness I can get the object of these poses, unwinding with them, and I feel like a quiet Zen monk again, flexible, getting strong again, after a great period of winter cold and stress and too much work and too much worry.

Thoughts of The Seven Samurai pass through my mind, and I say to myself, there's a bit of each one of them in each of us.  There's the drunken caricature one, Mifune, there's one in every crowd; and in order to deal with the considerable stress of tending bar where I do, there is some of that in how you get through the night, being a little silly toward the end perhaps, along with the stoic head samurai with the poker face and all the rest, as they are called upon.  Maybe that's a bit of how they see me at work, the boss and the girls who run the place who let me close the place every night.  Oh, he's worth it, I guess they say, lightly shaking their heads while I yortle with customers of late night, and chat with the jazz musicians.


I take of my shoes, and hike up my pants a bit, grassed stained, and pull myself into various other recognizable poses, warrior, headstand, plough, pigeon, the one that's good for your liver, and a few repeats too for good measure.  God, I feel light again, and after all my long battles, and truly lonesome times, I can maybe catch hints of another kind of a life, or, at least, a healthy break from the nightshift routine.

And there's birds.   All kinds, morning doves, of course, two on the phone lines.  A Mockingbird graces upon a tree landing in through the ivy as if coming back onto an aircraft carrier, and then after hidden traipses, comes back out on the brach, silent, in profile as I do my yoga, and then finally, and tentatively, he starts to go through his routine, very quietly, workshopping it, woodshedding it, just like me with the sore left shoulder too tight.  The male cardinal comes with a bright zap of warning.  Another kind of a call and I look up into the tree above me as I walk barefoot across the grass and oh, there it is, a little redhead woodpecker inspecting the layout of his mission.  There are robins hopping along the ground, and up again near the street, a grackle, solitary, small lets go a whistle.  And over in the mulberry's higher branches, one with a high pitched little trombone glissade upward or was it downward also in a whistle, more cheerful, less lonesome, less introspective than the grackle with his pointy feather ends around the neck.  Daffodils still out and by the entrance to the field of the Urban Ecology Center there at Eliot Place.

Earlier on my mental health walk, the crows were chortling and gurgling primitive word calls to each other as they lined up along the trees high above the chainlink fence of the reservoir banks.

God, how nice it is to get up in the morning, have a reasonable day, get out in the sunshine, and then have a time around dusk to go for a stroll, to relax at day's end, as people do, not just heading in to work.

Not bad for someone who was so completely discouraged, by the perpetuity of the difficulties to the job of being the friendly neighborhood barman scapegoat who gets ears filled beyond the brim every evening, one way or another, god, can't you just leave me alone now, when I sit down finally to eat something, you start saying toward the end, when people are warm and fuzzy and of an affectionate quality you would like to have too, or a line cook comes up on Sunday night, a bit tipsy himself.

Ahh, that's why that old film as its resonance, to the old barman samurai, who is now down on his luck, lucky if he can afford some rice...

The nightshift will make you so disgusted with yourself and everything, and in your anxiety for a decent living and survival, you blame yourself, and you look down on yourself, and many forms of unhappy things, fearful of abandoning a post so much that life passes you by in great foolish foolhardiness, and for being taken advantage of, all, the stupid kid thought, many years ago, so he could write.  And his mother cried at that, knowing full well, having watched in her parents.

This is a writer's life.  The first day after being laid off.


I'd been at the new apartment a year.  It had seemed daunting to get that far back at the time when I moved, in sad uprooting circumstances which I could have predicted but was somehow unable to do anything about.  A year in, I'd begun to accept the place, through many of my things, books in particular, remained in boxes.  The best part was the nature around it, the birds, trees, the bluff, the grasses, the light, the field just this side of the reservoir.

And then the coronavirus hit. And then the restaurant closed.  Which prompts big questions in life.  It would have taken a Kerouac or another poet to understand my behavior, how, when laid off, my first instinct was to write, a way to get back to myself, a traditional way to figure out what might be done, even if nothing much is done but a sort of waiting it out.

But what drastic thing should I do, and how can I afford to move, and where should I go, or should I just stay here and hunker down...  Fix my habits a bit, without the physical burden of the restaurant shift always a tick too long.

Do I surrender all my things?  That was one thought.

One feels ashamed of himself, a sad bum.  Phone calls and passwords at new sites are daunting.  Energy is low.  One needs something hopeful.

To get some light into the situation, just after nine in the morning, I call my mom.  "Get some good writing out of this," she says.   She has adapted to the silence of retirement, she says, which is not all true, but I'll take that now optimistically as an underlying core.  "Take it as a little vacation.  Eat well, sleep well," keep the wine stocked.  My thoughts on the holiness of life and the sacredness of creation, the Christian-observed beauty that applies to all people and creatures and those of The Beatitudes comes back to me, even as the sky is grey.

My mood lifts from thoughts about this 55 year-old loser who is otherwise unemployable...  who needs a day job now, now, now.

After walking down the day before into Georgetown in my attempt to quell a great depressing uncertainty with the task of returning a teapot via the UPS Store, and some other errands, I have a new look at my little perch here.  I am reminded of the quietness of the Palisades.  There isn't the mad rushing traffic of highways, nor the bustle of the traffic coming off and onto the great bridge across the Potomac River, nor the crumbling bluff of weeds and old rubble and buttressing stonework of the old canal bridge, that must look out over such a sight every day.  The price one pays is the airplanes overhead out here.  Here it is quieter.  This is not ideal, but acceptable.  And I always have my little five minute walk to the little pine trees like Kerouac had his Dharma Bums St. Jack of the Dogs moments down in North Carolina with his sister, Nin, in Rocky Mount.


The morning now, after the night of being laid off, the restaurant closed, I go to the kitchen, with enough energy now to look through the refrigerator to throw things out, emptying plastic containers of stale leftovers and tuna salad remains, still making an effort to recycle.    I pour the hot tap water into the Instant, fresh liquid soap after it's soaked for at least a day now, scrub it out from the last beef stew I made, save the sturdy plastic quart containers, scrub the silverware finally, and all into the rack stacked to dry out.


There's a zen to things.  I don't mind that.  Feeling a bit better now.

Then it all went poof.

An unemotional call from the boss, you don't need to come in tonight, and I might, probably will, close it down this afternoon.  He did sound sad.  Two weeks?  I'm estimating a month, if we have the right leadership.  Gulp.  I'll apply for a small business loan, to give you guys a week's vacation...

Later, I look at the clock.  The call received at 11:42, lasting about three minutes.

The writer's weird bad wish comes true.

All my stupidity.   Being too long in this business that never offered any real security...  A man will be forced to change his ways.

This is all my fault, to be in such a situation, the large voice says.  I knew I should have been doing better for myself, living in my own creepy little bubble world, pretending I was getting by and using my talents toward good employment.  "My lifestyle, paying me back."  So it goes.  The mind.

This will mean change.  I have to change.  I have to get a real job.  No joke this time.   But will that register...


I had a dumb errand to do, and I'd been postponing it.  The returning of a tea pot with the style of old Japan and tea ceremonies, which came not in the 1000ml size but in 600ml and with the stainless steel tea infuser.  Otherwise, I liked it.  But I gathered myself and just to get out in the sun and trudge along, down MacArthur, along the long boring sidewalk underneath Georgetown University with the river and Arlington, VA to my right as the path sneaks along against the traffic, to take my stupid little teapot into Georgetown to the UPS store, and the poor Georgetown students waiting in line to ship their clothes home, onward from that, past Martin's Tavern, a few people out at tables, then to the bank to put through a few checks, then to the old musty post office for stamps, and then to the CVS for laundry detergent and whatever else I can find to help fight the COVID-19, hopeful of catching the D6 back to the little apartment of another failed year's time, then waiting, then should I go by work to get my shoes, see who's there, from the back it's locked and I'm too tired to go around, the lights are off anyway, so back to the bus stop, but I miss the bus and walk all the way back with my feet about to hurt, lugging laundry detergent.  I get back, have a bit of pastrami, fall into a nap, not having solved any problems, and out in the tree pollened air too long.

There are certain things you can face on the day it happens.

Nice fresh-faced kids of Georgetown University, handsome, ready to be adult, mature, ready and with a plan to go out there and do things in the world...  Jesuit competence.

I slink along, baffled by it all.   A large three liter jug of Tide, Free and Gentle, in my backpack, and the planes still roaring overhead.

There's the strange man again, at the bus stop, by Little Kids School.  He's puffing on a smoke, and talking to himself, in a performance, "who you talking to?  are you talking to me," but I know now he's reachable, that he's headed out west on the same bus as I, as much as he is speaking what might be aggressive gibberish.  I catch his eye.  The bus schedule is in confusion today.  Saturday schedule. Not coming up on my app.  "Did the D6 go by?"  "Uhm, not yet.  The short one went by.  The D2."  It's almost like Monty Python.  He has some good black Timberland style boots on.  When he speaks with someone who is in the routine, perfect calm.  As to the bus driver, when observed.  And restraint while on the bus, no legion of voices.  Are the voices attacking his psyche?  Is it a show of some sort?  There's a talent to it.

It had been some cold night, after work, and I was waiting there at the same stop, by the gas stations. And it was a frightening show, for the weary just trying to get the bus home, humbly enough.  But I thought then of Jesus, no problem with the man of many voices and one eye slightly askew.  Jesus felt that he too had completely messed up his life, as far as leading a usual typical the, do the best you can, etc.

The man retreated to the wall, quieter now, under his hat, and I felt sorry for being abrupt with him, as if I felt I'd had to interrupt one of his voices to get to the main one, without the proper "hello, excuse me sir,  how are you today, would you happen to know if the D6 is running..."    He goes back to smoking weed, and it's a good smelling weed of good quality, I can tell.

My year on the old D6.  Going to work for a final shift, the man usually seen on the eastbound, with his dread-lock Rasta leather bulbous hat, is outside of his old red BMW four dour sedan, sounding old.  I almost say hi to him, but there are things on my mind, and it's cold out still.

And the whole thing confused me too, just like no one knows what to do on a 9/11.  Sleepwalking.

Do I go by work?  I'm not too many blocks away.  Pick up my leather sneaker shoes?  Say hi to who ever might still be there...

I end up walking home, all the way.


So what do I do?

The night of Michael's Fiftieth Birthday Party arrives, 14 people in the back room, already set with a table cloth, on a Tuesday in early March, wine tasting and bottle discount night, the tasting wine a chardonnay from Limoux in the Pays D'Oc.  I'm told, by Leelee, after she rises from her mid-shift nap quiet time back on the banquette in the wine room, largely pregnant, that Jerome has called in sick, that there will just be us, the two servers tonight.  The boss will help out with the party.  I groan, quietly and inwardly.

And here we are in the first real week of the Corona Virus Covid-19 melt down.



The next day I am awake early again, don't really feel like getting up, have jazz night to look forward to, and I get up in this limbo feeling bad somehow about the night before, short staffed, and I brew a pot of Dragonwell Tea as I always do.  Bah, what to do with this day...  I sip my tea.  Mom's phone is off the hook, okay, well, at some point...

I take an allergy pill, a Benadryl, that's all I have at the moment, and finally, later on, the sneezes subside, and I dress and go out for a walk.  It's not warm out, and the sun is muted by sheep sort of clouds, breaking through now and again, and after crossing the road, and getting my feet out into the field, walking toward the river bluff, I begin to feel better.  Tired, I walk slowly.  In a state of I don't know.  But I persevere, make it to the little soft grove of pine trees, then eastward along the yard, sinking, and then rising again, looking down at the blades of grasses, little colonies of shoots, such as I saw under the moonlight after a long Monday night shift.  The river is a sort of green color, the daffodils have come out in strength.  The sun shines, shines on my body, and I begin to feel better, just walking slowly.  "We need 'ya, we need 'ja, we need 'ja," a bird, a cardinal, female, signals up in a tree, peeping after sending her bright message to the day lit world, and then a small light colored dog held on a leash by a small old woman from East Asia barks seriously out of his mind from twenty yards away at me, and I stand in the narrowed clearing and wait for them to pass out of range, before I walk along the path of the old trolley tracks back westward parallel to the river.


A strange job, sometimes, often, a kind of professional purgatory, and one says, "wasted years."  And then adds, "oh well, must be in my genes, all of this," though it does not feel always like a well-mannered and elegant place to be, being the son of college professors, no, the night shifts, the life you fall into.  There is a studious quality to it.


I'm going to pass back up to the avenue and visit my friends at the little market, get some cold cuts, turkey and roast beef, a small plastic container of curried chicken salad, a dozen eggs, kleenex, a roll of paper towels, a roll of toilet paper for back-up, but to the east, as I'd planned my walk as I pause my walk at the top of the little hill, seeing the steeples of Georgetown University, and the skyscrapers of Rosslyn in the distance, a crew of men outside the modern house have a team of leaf blowers going on high, so I go back, west, back toward the Urban Ecology Center and up through the field.



In God's image.  What is a human being anyway?  Have we forgotten, as the landscaping crew makes its noise and a contractor of the gutted square brick roofless house with the flexible construction fence around the dug-up yard talks with a woman who is presumably the owner, turned away from me near the portopotty as I watch life, not having much of a one, waiting around, for a therapy session over a smartphone, then back to work, should probably go in early, things to straighten out from the long and complicated evening of Michael of Dennis and Michael's fiftieth, and my friend Purnell showing up late after nine for a bit to eat as I keep it together, harried, as I've been for much of the evening.


What is "man," a human being, anyway, what is the creature, what does being in God's Image mean, and all of that seems forgotten as the urban area, cars stopped below me in single file in bound on Canal Road, bustles, insidiously, to my mood as I walk, though gradually I am indeed refreshed by the sunlight and the slow movements of walking my flesh and bones and tired musculature and my potbelly from too much dough since Monika's little neighborhood party, the little quiches I ate as I enjoyed wine and a conversation with her.

I'm going to feel tired, at some point, before work, in need of a nap, but I don't know when.  God give me an easy night.  And please let there be enough business so that we can make some money and stay afloat in this business, no one knowing really what's going to happen...



I take a little nap, setting an alarm for the therapy session at one PM, which I don't have much enthusiasm or desire for, just another conversation, basically just me trying to help out another human being through the great pretense that we all belong to this world of business.  And I get a text from the boss, "not busy, you can stay home, thank you."  I am tired, and not feeling well.  The tree pollen has gotten to me.  Fine.  I'll miss a point of the tip pool, which doesn't strike me as fair, but that's how it goes.  I worked hard last night.  Meanwhile the tip pool is watered down by the absence of the daytime busser, who had a heart attack, so that now there are two servers claiming a point toward the tip pool, (and on Monday, the total gratuity amount was $80 for lunchtime.)  Oh, well.  What can you do.  Not anyone's fault.

Was the boss catching my frustration, observing it on my face as I cut some bread for one of the front tables, amidst the confusion of administering the potential wine tasting, getting the birthday party's wine order psyched out, the first cocktails for the first to arrive...  He pitched in, took the order for the party, saw it through, poured out the magnum of Roederer Champagne, helped run the food, so eventually I have nothing to complain about, but just that it was a confused night of service, who is doing what, many different directions, and the busboy is busy with something downstairs...  "Did you get their coffee order yet," he asks, and I'm just back from the two-top in the corner, a woman I've slowly made friends with who visits from time to time, sorting out their coffee and dessert and after dinner drink order combined as I also deal with Purnell and his wife, their dinner order, having presented a little round of tastings.  "No, I haven't."  I say this with more calm than what I might have mustered earlier.  There's an end somewhat reasonably in some distant sighting.

There is evil in the world, no doubt, I conclude, as I tiredly sift through the little things I come across on the social media pages of my sensitive and intelligent virtual friends.  The Catholic vibrations have been coming at me steadily, and I come across a little piece on Padre Pio and his stigmata (on a website Aleteia English), and it leads one to other little articles about how to pray and so forth.  Well, who am I to deny such things as the efficacy of prayer and little stories of those who were good at it.  Good medicine anyway, good for the faith that enables one with the calm to make it through times of trouble and uncertainties for the mind to angst over.  A suspension of disbelief.


Life is a great confessional, and there are any number of things to confess.


Truly it is good to have the night off, though it is not a comfortable one.  I am indeed ready for resting on the couch, falling asleep.  The allergy could go further, allowing for the Covid-19 to find its way in.  And beyond this, the thing has arrived, spreading this way.  A fit of sneezing comes over me.  It's Wednesday.  I'm supposed to back at work Sunday.  But what will business be like?  What will happen to my livelihood?  And if I am ill, should I be going on the road up to see my old mom at the beginning of the week after the next for her birthday?   A contagion not to be passed to the elderly, by all reports.


I dream on the couch.  A regular customer, I'm out with him, and we've gone for a drive, over the old hill from my old hometown, across to another valley, as if going to Deansboro, or Vernon Center, Knoxboro, a little town first up on the high ground, the top of the farmland, but then dropping down into the village at the valley floor, a town like in the Pyrenees, with ample water running through it, and little cafes, all of which surprising me, and interesting, and we find a place to park, but I feel like there is something devilish to this customer of mine, a good friend, in that I should be spending the time I have up here checking in and taking care of my old mom who raised me all this way.  There are distractions in life;  and you give an inch, a mile will be taken, and there you are, helping to find parking, knowing you're in for it, the lunch, the swindle, the chatting up of the locals and the dames in the little surprisingly urban local spots on into nighttime in supposed pleasure and humor, all the while, feeling an irresponsibility growing not lessening.

One coughs.  My god, is this it?  Are my lungs feeling fibrous now?  How will I pay the rent?

Yes, so after another bout of long rest on another day off, waking in the middle of the night, I allow my curiosity to take hold, and where it was Miles Davis on PBS, The Birth of Cool, my mind is following Padre Pio on to a YouTube search for his story.  Churchmen lead uncluttered lives, and I can't even find the thermometer I thought I had here at the new apartment, not that it seemed to work very well, as I remember.

The priesthood, viewed in times of trouble, rises forward to the professional eye, a way for males of less worldly ambitions, being of a more patient disposition toward somethings inspirational in nature, as if they stood as natural interpreters, with less patience for being stuck somewhere in bureaucracies but feeling themselves inherently clever enough to rise through and upward, a way for the male of the species to be useful even when he might not naturally be, given him a bestowed honor from within and without which he could not otherwise have...

Dostoevsky, yes, as any writer knows, the man hated electric lights.  He liked the dark quiet hours of night.  Candles.  Perhaps he didn't even like the bustle of harsh daylight, particularly in cities.  He did not like, in other words, time, the immutable inevitable relentless passing of hours, so that just when one had achieved some calm moment of peace and flow of inspirations and meditations, then daylight had to come knocking, and the sound of carriages and voices and shouting, all the activities that must be done, the taking out of trash, the daily puffing up of the self-important people with self-important cars driving in, calls, shouts, machine noise...  And here, Dostoevsky, a nervous man, a sick man, an ill man, a man whose liver hurts, found a need (after the death of his little boy) to seek out the priest man in the monastery, an act of faith.  From which is taken the sketches that flesh out with meat and bone the final point of all his work, Karamazov.  A flooding wind, as he puts it, in his author introduction, at the release of his chops.


You cannot worry, you cannot let anxiety get the best of you, you just have faith to keep.  The lesson of Padre Pio, as it seems to be at this hour, in this time.

The Super Moon had brought with it strong emotions, mini tempests of anxieties while lying awake early in the morning, a general difficulty in finding calm.  Getting to work had been difficult, full of weariness and heavy emotions no customer really, arriving later once the wine bar was open, would have imagined.  The sun was out higher now with the clock change, and off the bus I walked up past the fire station over the newly laid brick sidewalk with the sand still spread over to sink in finally, and I thought of who would be coming in and what the night would bring and how I should set up.

I'd walked home the night before, Sunday night, thinking of Sam the Man, the DJ at the front room, The Gold Room, who had passed away earlier in the week, the news just getting out.  I would have wanted to pay some visit of homage, but money was tight, and I was tired, as Sunday night, despite all appearances, turned out to be busy, and long, too, and even emotionally demanding.

And fortunately, the first people in the door and up the stairs, except the quiet two-top, a man and a woman having some sort of catch up from a previous business relationship, sitting far in the back room so to not be bothered, were the two musicians, David, and Tillery.  I had the John Coltrane station playing, mellow, and once Tillery had taken out his cornet out of the case, and blown a few notes, as David returned with more of his equipment, then looking out the window across the street at the bright green soccer field tucked this side of the woods, remarked quietly about the innocence of the kids across the street, absorbed in their game, far from adult burdens...

I was up at the wine bar all by myself, and sure enough, the bar itself was soon full, my saving one seat for my friend, Leslie, an investment strategist, who I'm sure was having quite a day as I put out a little reserve sign on the dining mat laid over the slate bar top.  And then in odd syncopation, along came more people without reservations, here and there, and I had to hustle, and dodge, directing traffic, coming out of the bar mouth as the musicians gathered to re-water on their first break, to get out to the little tables, trying to read people, Ambassador Towell in by himself, to catch the music, asking me straight out what the soup of the day was, Sweet Potato, fine I'll take it, and then I tell him the entrees, and he'll take the Flounder a la Nage...  and red wine tonight...  The other couple, they're just hear for dessert really, after I seat them, following them with menus as they consider where to sit, and later, a big man in a suit with his girlfriend and another young lady, whose birthday it is, gives me crisp directive orders right out of the box, as I squeeze the three of them into the two open bar spots, hopeful that the other seats will open up soon, and I have two little tastings of three glasses out for the two at the bar and for Mr. Ambassador, and I'm trying to keep them straight, tell specials, etc., ...

Whooof, and finally, after the Eastern Turkish woman who can be problematic over the drink, after I try to hustle the bar clean, feeling my energies drop, "where's your drink," she asks...  uh-hum, and I bang around taking the ice out of the big Veuve Clicquot orange plastic wine bucket and then the other sink, and putting everything through the dishwasher, and the busboy man hustling behind him to take out the trash as I summon the three plates of dinner for the jazz trio...  finally, they all go into the night, and no more strain about keeping the different conversations in some form of continuity, I send a text off to my brother inquiring about the health of his lovely old chocolate Lab bitch, as I had received a call earlier, a sad call, from my mother, telling me Ella is bleeding from the nose again, oh boy, not good, not good.

And so are my anxieties a bit tweaked as I sit down finally to have a bite of the flat-iron steak with spinach, Beech mushroom on top, being a soothing addition...

I am compelled to take some time after all this to set the bar back up, as tomorrow is going to be busy, a 15 top  back in the wine room, Micheal's 50th birthday party, Dennis, on top of Tuesday night wine tasting...

I get an Uber, too late to catch the D6, and by the time I get in the door, yes, it's a good idea to go take  a little walk, across the street, down across the field with the brooding high dam of the reservoirs, just to get some fresh air, walk it off under the moon.  A deer darts out from by the Urban Ecology Center building, bounding easily with a bit of a back and forth wobble viewed from behind.

I pass under the pines and then toward the moon again, along the long yard of grass, little dark circles of new grass tendril leaves rising out of the dry flat grass, up to the bluff, and as I come around the deer, a male closer to me is rummaging through the leaves, and a last plane comes in flying downstream above, crossing over me right under the moon.  I sit down and talk to the deer, and the deer with his short antlers keeps his little efforts neck down, undisturbed by my proximity.  My footsteps in approach were slow and heavy, the human creature obviously sore, not up for any hunt, and indeed, as I might fancy, giving out such an honestly serene vibe that of course the deer has accepted the inter-species friendship, and his girlfriend deer, further up the hill sequestered behind a bit more brush and honeysuckle tangle scrub with vines, keeps up the same quiet rummaging, also undisturbed by my presence by them under this full moon called a Crow Moon, a Sap Moon, or a Worm Moon, and anyway a Super Moon.  I take a little sip from my repurposed little Canada Dry club soda bottle canteen.  And as they depart back toward the low schoolhouse like building this side of the reservoir's bank, I am following them, back to the apartment, for shower and bedtime, after a little bit of almond butter over little slices of packaged fresh mozzarella.


Those friendly with witches and the other passers on of ancient earth-related nature wisdom who I've come across on Facebook have offered a good explanation of all these ups and downs, the verging tears, and ruffled anxieties, of this full moon, but these missives of explanations are also helpful.  There will be new purpose and an energizing effect brought about by this moon's passing us up above as it raises tides and does its thing.  And oddly, in a strange way, although they all might have sloshed around in their basins, the customers tonight were oddly peaceful, as if worn out by it all.  It had been a bad day, the worst since 2008 for the stock markets, and all minds were grappling with the new realities brought by the arrival of the new Corona-virus, as just blocks away, Christ Church down in Georgetown had suspended its operations after the rector, returning from a conference, tested positive.


By the light of early morning, with work ahead in the evening, uncomfortable hours to wait for it, things are, of course, anxious again, and I have no idea what to do with myself and feel like hiding under the blankets.  But I get up, and I take in some tea, open up my smartphone to examine the writings leading up to this moon and before, over the events that have shaped whomever I have been over the last weeks over the months of late winter, and really wonder what I am indeed doing with my fine self.  I think of my brother and his dog, his family, the house, I think of my mom, whom I call.  I think of the nice lady in last night who invited me out to dinner before, a while ago, and now that is coming soon.  My throat scratches, allergies still, tree pollen count high.  What do I have for breakfast, make another pot of tea.


I had some thought, passing through my mind like observing a particular constellation in the sky, of the book I wrote, and where it fits in, the whole personally story behind it.  And then, as you know, the attempt to place some measurement upon such things through the spiritual wisdom that has gained upon one, for the time being.  And one has to be reminded of a process.

And this process, as it works in nature, amounts to a sloughing off of an old personality, and in Christian thought, it's a bit more serious.  One is about to, potentially, go through a potentially awful process of losing a self, a personality, a selfish minded thing, on to something else, the only picture of which we have is of a vague new way, but one full of, I suppose, accuracy, of realistic behaviors...  A new light, allowing us to step forward somehow, even as we worry about all things, all things practical, all things pertaining to the living of life.  And who knows.  Who knows?  Who knows...




In the night, by the deer, under the moon, even hemmed in by the small two-lane highway of Canal Road below me, lit brightly enough, and cars and service vans passing, by the canal, and beyond the river the divided highway of G.W. Parkway, and then on the other side by the settlement of quiet houses and beyond them the apartment buildings and the small row houses this side of MacArthur, the thoughts of peace and peaceful vibrations, at the end of this missing poet's workday night, were brightened and heightened by the full moon's light.

And today we are back on earth again, with work to do, and with the sins of my own slothful selfishness and years given up, gone by, days of wine and roses, returns.  It helps to write them out a little bit.


Leave that old self behind, the one whose actions and behaviors can leave you dejected for the things you missed.  But on the other hand, honor that self which went through the difficult process of preparing itself to be less selfish, more selfless, more aligned with the will of a poetic heavenly father who sees all things through to the good.  Fardels bear.



Yes, as a barman, you do have to make peace with everyone.  You're going to have to deal with them anyway.

I was feeling like just staying on the couch, Saturday, the last day of my weekend.  My eyes were puffy, itching, my sinuses were feeling the reaction the tree pollen.  I had my mom on the phone.  "Ted, these people like you, and they care for you."  Yeah.  "Go see them.  Put on a jacket and go."

And I was glad I did.  My old friend Monika's pad, there on Montrose Walk.   The vibe of a Berlin art gallery, perfectly clean, dimly lit.  Large modernist painting, Deibenkorn and Rothko came to my mind.  A Bang and Olufsen CD player...

After everyone else had gone, the fancy real estate woman, Jake the photographer, the last people, I sat down with Monika, after we walked around her condominium, examining the expression of a hanging bamboo segment shower hung form the ceiling in the back room, overlooking the garden, Harry's piece of art on his old desk, a piece of a particle accelerator, blue, metallic pipe, half, opened, and a picture then of Monika's mother, a framed photograph, from Berlin, their lives, 1940 or so, a painting of her brother, as a boy, who was gunned down in the Ukraine during the war, at age 18...  We sat and talked, catching up, there in the front room on a black leather couch, Harry's chair opposite.

Ted, you're such a part of the community.  You don't know how much you mean to people.

Eh, I can never tell, if they want to get rid of me...

No, Ted.  They wouldn't want to do that.

But she knows my finances, and why I do it, because I'm a writer.  She's one of the truly rare people who really get that people need to make art.

The clock passes, now nearing ten.  Do I have enough wine at back in the apartment.  I have another mini-quiche. Some grapes.  Some lightly candied cashews.  I break down and have one of the crescent shaped powdered light almost flaky butter cookies, made originally to celebrate the Ottomans being pushed from Vienna.  I have some more California Mumm, I have some of the fancy real estate woman's California Cabernet.  Yeah.  I'm not even sure which glass is really mine anymore, but it is great to catch up, after my efforts to politely converse with strangers at a party, all of it enjoyable.  Obviously all the neighbors have got it figured out.  Law firms.  International lives.

But, misery hits these lives of neighbors too.   The architect, a father, going blind.  A nice young man who worked at the World Bank, from near Lake Como originally...  I believe I met him, a handsome friendly man with a beautiful young brunette wife, just after he had returned from Vietnam with a good case of food poisoning, such that he could not have any wine.  The neighbors heard his pain as he died.


Tragedy strikes.  Monika smiles plaintively in her empathetic way.   Oh, Ted, can you imagine...

In Japan, the elderly go up in the mountains.  We talk a little bit of what it might be like, to go that way.  Some people just stop eating, she tells me.  Their body gives up the will to live.  Three weeks, they are gone, but it must be so hard on the people around them.  Yes, as you near freezing to death, you feel warm at the end...    Harry, his heart gave out.

She tells me about her relationship with his children.

Her dear friend, Crystal, a doctor back from Berlin is not so much worried about the new Corona Virus, but of the rise of the right, the hatred of foreigners coming in...

Earlier we had looked at a bookshelf of hers.  I noted the D.T. Suzuki.  There was a little book by a German philosopher, and she had read it for classes during her school days.  About the Zen of Japanese archery.  Simply concentrate on the target, and the arrow will hit its mark.   Yes, what to focus on...  I wish it worked that way with co-eds, with the Princesses of college days, and it would have, had altruism been put aside, replaced by simple open-eyed focus.

Oddly enough, earlier in the day, thinking of making my great rebellion, after napping on the couch and falling into dreams with women from the past in them, dreams of uneasiness, failings, I'd picked up the little paperback which I'd enjoyed back in January cold, Thomas Merton's The Silent Life, which had since grown impenetrable.  Attempts had been made to open up the thing, but it wasn't easy, a desert, brambles, and I didn't see the monastery nor Jesus on his own retreat as I tried to read with my mind wafting like smoke through various topics, food, finances, how much wine, health, the possibility of becoming energetic enough to start exercising again...  I hadn't even written anything, not in weeks, nothing, on top of a long what seemed to me a dry spell, adrift...

And Father Merton of how, in true reality, it can only be the will of The Heavenly Father coming through me, of the One who sent me...  And this always being my own problem, as if indeed something had made me predisposed to find it very difficult to have enough of a will to impose upon other people with my own wants and desires.  As if everything good should happen naturally.

And there I was, getting dressed--I'd already showered and shaved the night before, who cares--with some comparably decent clothing with a tweed Harris jacket over a purple checked shirt and light grey sweater... getting ready for the five o'clock afternoon bus in to town, where I would get off at Wisconsin Avenue, then walk up the hill, with my old surplus trench coat on.


Monika insisted, we take her VW Bug to drop me off.  I'll drive there, then she will be able to drive herself back.  Back at the apartment now, I don't know if I'm hungry or not, but it might be worth it, to get some Chinese carry out now at 11 PM, inexpensive, can't hurt, just more money spent.

I have a sip of wine and wait for the delivery man.



I wake up in the middle of the night, as I clock it.  4 AM.  Anxious.  Wide awake.

The apartment is small.  It's not a long walk from the creaky bedroom through the living room into the kitchen.  Dishes from the previous night beef stew with plenty of onion, almost as an onion soup still in the RubberMade little  tub.  I get the hot water going, and with some reluctance pour out some wine from a large liter and a half bottle, Italian, 12 percent, not bad chilled and then poured on the rocks.  Getting the tedious dishes done, and cleaning the top of the stove, the brain gets the small signal of some sense of accomplishment, the good effect of getting out of the house lingering.

I remember Father Merton again.  Calmer now.  Yes.  There is truth there.   Even as I am awake, turning the galley kitten's overhead light off, lighting a candle.  Dostoevsky hated electric lights;  they made him nervous.  Candle light, indeed, much better and soothing.


And then I can say to myself, well, we only write to put down our quest for the things that are practical, that keep us up and running, the things that make sense to us, that have the effect of easing the ticking heart...

Father Thomas Merton the great writer is correct.  We ourselves do not necessarily know on our own what is selfish and what is not, wha is the will and the tasks of the selfless realization of a longer deeper more far reaching will than the kind we feel exposed to.  Yes, this and that would have been great, an honorable life well-led, but...  It is a will beyond, when things go right, the only way they can finally go right.

As a writer, sure, of course, you are going to learn a lot about will.  The self will try, attempting to write, and will largely get nowhere, but for a few exercises, staring at the open blank space of the page, mirror of the blank space of the mind where any thought is quite too elusive to capture with the will, such that you can only bring back sad words, lonesome words.   And sometimes it will seem that  those written thoughts which come from following the greater will are empty, void of anything significant and interesting to the any other human being.  But then, you wonder again, and the longer view comes into focus again.

You make some unlikely friends in this world, if you let things happen.