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.