Wednesday, April 29.

My brother has an errand for me.  I must go down to his house when the men come with a trailer to carry his old Range Rover up to his house out on the Eastern end of Long Island.  It's a 2005, with more than 100,000 miles on it, and it wouldn't be good if I'm driving it up and it breaks down in the Greater New York area these days with the Coronavirus.  He tells me about his on Tuesday.  I was sort of expecting to know at some point generally what time the men would be coming by, so I can plan my day.

Do I do yoga outside?  Will I get the call at mid-day, or noon, or the afternoon, or later... I do down and read my book, Dark Nights of the Soul, down on the picnic bench overlooking the river.  It's a bit bright out.  A breeze picks up.

Going anywhere these days, you have to be ready.  For my brother's house, I'll need his house keys, and my key chain that has the key to my Kryptonite bike lock.  I'll need the right clothes.  I'll need a mask of some sort.  I'll bring my bottle of rubbing alcohol to wipe my hands off.  I'll need to bring my phone.  I'll need to bring my wallet, and there a few checks I might deposit at the bank ATM near Wisconsin and M Street.  I'll try to do some grocery shopping too.

Should I just go down there?  I text my brother around 1:30 in the afternoon.  "No, who knows if they're coming today."

Finally around 4:15 I come back to the apartment from the bluff.  I change into shorts for yoga, and am heading across the street when I get the call.  "They will be there in twenty minutes."  Okay, let me get on the road.  So now I go back in, and get ready again, a water bottle for the bike, no time to change, go down to the basement to pull the yellow mountain bike out, and off I go.  I'm halfway to Georgetown when my bandana face covering slips, and it's too windy to adjust it back.  By now the sidewalks have gotten a bit more crowded.  I dismount and walk up the steep cobbled hill to Prospect Street, where I find a road crew paving the street for the surrounding blocks with blacktop.  I get back on the bike, time running shorter now, and ride carefully past the elderly woman who steps out onto the sidewalk now, and get around her finally, and then to my brother's house, feeling a bit sticky by now.  I lock the bike up on the south side of the street, ease the blue courier bag off my shoulders, take my helmet off.

Let's see, he wants the beach floats, and a set of golf clubs put into his truck.  Okay, I'm loading the Range Rover up in the back hatch, and then Mom calls, telling me she needs me to take her back to her other house, and when is that going to happen?  This does not make me pleased, having to hold the phone up while I load up the back of the trunk...  Do I have the right set of golf clubs?

My phone is ringing with another call, so I ask mom if I can call her back...  It's the guy.  They can't get the truck with the sixty foot trailer down the street so I need to drive the truck over to, and he tells me the name of a place that rings no bell with me, so I have to look that up.  So, I guess we're good to go, and I start the old truck up and take her down around N Street, two blocks to Wisconsin Avenue then up a block, and ah, I see the guys with their heavy pick-up truck and the trailer with two cars on it already.  So I turn back onto Dumbarton, and up the next block, then up to O Street, then back left onto Wisconsin and pulling up behind the trailer.  I guess it wasn't that hard after all.  It'll just feels a little bit weird.

So, that's all it takes.  A slender kid comes up to me politely, black tee shirt, black pants, and there's another guy by the trailer.  Okay, so I pick up my cell phone from the console, look around, do I have everything...  I step back, oh, could you sign something, yes, sure, I sign.  I stand by another moment, but that's all it is, and I guess I have things to do, so...  The two men decide they want to switch the Range Rover up to the second spot on the trailer.  It doesn't take long for the kid to back up Mazda off the trailer ramp, and then up goes the Range Rover.  I cross the street, there's Peter Edelman and his wife Marion Wright coming toward me, but I'm not going to bug them.  I take a photo to send to my brother, and I walk away.

Back to my brother's house, in these awkward times, splashing rubbing alcohol on my hands again.   Call mom, but my temper isn't too long.  I walk the blocks over to Stachowski's butcher shop, then back to the big house, and then locking up and off again, the last errand to go the bank machine.  And then to ride the bike back up the hill.

Okay, so I lug myself and my bike up the hill.  Back to my bum life.


The next day I'm up.  It's been a week since I got back from visiting Mom, and time to vacuum and put things back into some order, which has not been done since the last shipment of boxes.  I need to make room for some yoga practice.

It's hard to look directly at the shape of life now.  Opportunities gone, years lost, nothing but a lackey in the restaurant business, having been taken for a ride, and how will I ever get back on course, so that I'll have a roof over my head when I'm old.  The price for my years of irresponsibility.


But my reflection, as I wait anxiously...  No one wants to wait.  And I look back at all the frustrations I must have caused people, girls in college, when I misread messaging and needed to be more forward, pushed myself a bit, pushed my luck, girls, academics, careers...  The frustrations I caused... Just horrible.  And I misread the resultant anger and frustration as well, and things just got worse.

This wasn't so much in the vocabulary of a country boy, I tell you.  I take my time at things.  And the world does not have time.  I might have thought I had time.  But, as it turns out, I don't.  I regressed back into some childhood, instead of pushing on, somehow.

Monday, April 27.

It's 2:45 PM, and I've been a sleepy goof-off trying to cleanse the wine out of my body, having drank to the stress and the worries and the uncertainties, things on my back, and all my long years of irresponsibility that have left me stranded here without any profession, and not even knowing what to do with the day, or even the rest of my life.

It wasn't supposed to be that way.

Well, so I start out my day, tell mom her helper will be coming, which eases her, and I give myself a little errand to do, to cross the street and to the little Korean-owned and run market.  The new couple is there.  I was hoping to see my friend Helen.  She told me she'd be around for another six months, helping the new couple with the operations and New York deli style sandwiches and so forth.  No, she is not there.  No Clorox Wipes either, but there's wine, Nicolas, $12.99 Pinot Noir from the Pays D'Oc, and I get some tuna salad, a half pound of low sodium Boars Head brand chicken breast sliced in white paper wrap, a carton of free-range organic eggs, and then my brother is calling me just as I cross the street.

So, yeah, this was something put off from last Friday, and it's been too damp to want to mow his lawn, but go and check on the house, and there's client checks and a few other things of importance to get off to them once I head down back west to the Fed-Ex shop, wiping my hands with rubbing alcohol at every turn, and then biking back on the klutzy mountain bike, locking it up again across from my brother's house, giving myself the little project of mowing the back yard lawn with his push mower, which is not easy, requiring a running start effort, and then only getting so far in the high grass, and you can't adjust the mower blade height up any higher, so it's a lot of back and forth, and you start by picking up the leathery fallen magnolia leaves and the little sticks, and weeds have grown.

A small bird, brown and compact, a House Wren, with a juicy bug in her beak, a lovely little thing, comes in and alights on the roof of the little attached shed with the woodpile and gardening tools inside, and then she goes around into a little rhododendron bush, surprisingly low to the ground, but as I pass and grunt, and take another pass only so far up the lawn or back or over some tenacious weedy grass, I do not see any nest.  I've left the door to the shed open, and I'm surprised when I see her return with another juicy bug with its tiny little legs sticking out that she swoops gently right inside the shed, like it was her shed, and I see her go down into the wood pile as I look for the long blade hedge scissor type clippers.  I might hear a little peep peep peep in there somewhere, but I keep her nest secret by not getting anywhere close, and she almost lets me walk in to the little shed while she is still hoping about.  I tell her why I have to come in, and it occurs to me that there is a little opening somewhere in the base board where the wood might have rotted just enough to allow a hole.  I feel she is friendly, somehow, and I know I could use that now.

Then I pull some of the grass up out of the white pebble border, shaking the turf clods out to leave the pebbles behind.  This exposes some earthworms.  And then later I go in and wash my hands, call mom to check in, reassure her that she's in her home, and explain that no, I won't be over for dinner tonight, and then I go back out front of the house and to turn the old 2005 Range Rover over to let it run for a while, and then, because there's plenty of parking, I take her, as the sun is out now, very pretty out finally, evening afternoon sun through the fresh green leaves of Georgetown side streets, for a little drive around the block to the south easing by Pamela Harriman's old house and a pretty young woman, Germanic perhaps, with dignified mien is walking a dog the size of a boxer and I just take a brief and very gentlemanly glance over to acknowledge her and she looks over at me just as I turn back to face the street before me, putting the old truck along, and very slowly coming to the stop sign at 31st and N, then back up to the next street, Dumbarton, and yonder the brick Gothic tower of Christ Church, and easing the thing slowly back into her spot in front of my brother's house, and then a slow walk over to the butcher shop, Stachowski, just before the line forms outside, for ground chuck, a couple of meatballs, half a pound of brisket pastrami, some frozen sausages, all of which are necessary, but making me feel guilty, as if I had no real place I felt steady solid about where I might dine on them, with my mother as such, all alone in Oswego where it is far too cold and grey, and this house where my brother lives and all the healthy people walking around, self-confident in their Georgetown existences, yes, I could easily grow accustomed to such a nice and proper setting, as if it would indeed somehow magically promote me into a career as a proper Washington Post journalist, or a Theodore Making of the President 1960 White interviewing Jackie, somewhere nearby, coming up with the insight, Camelot.


But then it's back to the old G.I. apartment, and I ride down to the K Street beneath the Whitehurst girders of steel to get on the paved Capitol Crescent Trail beyond the boat house and the old canal bridge ramparts, with my groceries heavily on my back in the messenger bag, weighed down and going very slowly in the glorious afternoon sunlight, and most people with masks on as they jog or rev up their pedaling, or run swiftly by.   Through the tunnel under the canal itself, and wearily and heavily back to the sidewalk for the steep pitch up that same old hill I came to tragically thirty eight years ago, what have I done with all those years, still renting the cheapest place I could find.

I park the bike in the basement, and drag myself back upstairs, in, dropping the weight of the courier bag, and putting away the groceries and my god the pastrami is irresistibly good and unlike anything I've ever had.

Boxes of books, from the big move, some of them pulled out.   That's how I live, a bit different from the professional life of Georgetown people...  I stuff a few more of the thick tender slices of sweetly smoked pastrami into my mouth and then figure I need to go out for a walk, but as I do, I discover a pain in my right knee, like my old Osgood Schlatter Syndrome, and walk gingerly on toward the reservoir and the bluff, but the light has changed already, clouds have come in, and it's gotten cooler out and I don't get very far and then walk back.


You cannot start the day of writing until you exhaust yourself with the concerns of administration and bill paying and great angsting worries about the future and all number of sadnesses, and have breakfast of yokey eggs and deli slices with turmeric and cayenne powder and your tea.  You have to find something real.  And this is why such a writing habit exists, to find the real of things, real and true to your heart and your eye and your gut, so that you can reorient yourself, so that you can begin again to put into words the things you and perhaps all other beings might be going through.

I stick my head out the bathroom window and a crow is passing by, above the trees, below the showery clouds, and the birds are reassuring.


My years of magical thinking...  thinking that because I wanted to be a writer I could be one...

But so it is, that real things make one able to see real things, that truths look for, and sustain themselves by, seeking other truths, other parts of the same truth, the same realities shedded by That Which Is, and perhaps we are all fools like I am.

The writer is, perhaps unfortunately, born a writer, this being his truth, whether he is good at it or not in the estimations that come on from other realities and exterior things.

And for it, there is no adequate training, no prior practice to make the present effort sufficient.

After mom is feeling better, after getting her lunch delivered, and then a round of groceries for later, delivered by Instacart on the way, I feel I can get out for a walk.  I chose to go down to the bluff, of course, in Merrill low tops to handle the wet grass.  Rain is predicted.  It's not warm out, but I'm snug enough in sweatpants, tee shirt, hooded sweatshirt, burgundy red rain shell my mom bought me from Murdock's in Oswego, NY, after I get walking a bit.

I have a call with my aunt, who is down in Leesburg, Florida, and everyone is in a holding pattern, not just me, with the COVID-19.  So.  I walk along the bluff, on the grass and dirt weed-edged path that used to carry the trolley from the city all the way out to Glen Echo, heading west, upstream.  By the time I get off the path, up some steep mud where you need to hold onto a tree and step over its roots and the rock, then down a narrow road that dips down to Canal Road, and then you're at Fletcher's Cove, and we've been on the phone long enough, and I get down by the old boathouse with the flood markings on the cement structure where you can rent a fishing pole or a little kayak or a bike or a canoe or a fishing boat or get a hotdog, tasty, in a bun for 2 bucks, 1972 being the highest mark, quite impressive, then I'm ready to head down to the river, but beyond the little stream, crossing over an old footbridge.  There used to be a mill here, a long time ago, but despite the old historic placard there is no visible evidence  of even a foundation, and the path is used by fishermen.


I'm walking forward, through the wet weeds and along the muddy path, past the Central American men fishing, wearing clothes you might buy in a shopping mall, a polo shirt, but sitting on rocks in the stream if not on the bank, casting, with fishing poles, and one pulls out an impressive catfish, and then Mom is calling me, and though I thought she might be okay, she is quite unhappy because the bottle of Simi is less than half full.  How many times do I go through it with her, "Mom, do you have a spare glass, maybe up by your bed, you could put that over an ice cube..."  "I"m not an idiot, why do you treat me like that," she says, her voice rising, sighing.  "There's a beer in the fridge."  "I hate beer."  Okay.

So I walk along, and finally I screw up the courage to text Mary, as we've gone back and forth, Mom and I, "Oh, don't bring Mary into it,"  but, even in my hopelessness, I compose a little text to our keeper, up in Oswego, and after my apologetic offering, I hear back her text that she would be happy to, thank god.  I try to call mom back now to tell her the good news, but she's left the phone off the hook.

I walk on.  There are, I'm guessing, juvenile turkey vultures, hopping about, smaller than the adult, a light colored band on their tips of their wings, and their little dinosaur Venetian mask kind of beak face is sort of cute, and I think there's maybe it's a Golden Eagle also in the branches above me, besides these  sort of playful comical vulture birds, and there is a strange kind of a very mild subtle, but noticeable high you get once you get away from paved roads and bricks and cement and exhaust smoke and piped water, coming from the green leaves, the trees folding you back in, welcoming.


I'm having a decent time.  I take some iPhone pictures of the light, the fishermen by the bank, looking at them from a distance, intending to include the finest details of the gathered cormorants drying out on the rock outcroppings.  

I walk back.  I see if Little China Cafe is open, but not, not this week, and I walk on, then Mom calls again, telling me she doesn't like the wine, so I tell her to drop an ice cube in it, but this too takes several phone calls and several tedious explanations, and why don't you give my brother a call, it's Sunday, family time, oh, no, I don't want to talk to him, we don't have a relationship, come on he's your son, you could ask about the weather out there, how the dog is doing, how is the dog doing, I don't know, why don't you call and ask him!, and so on, and even as I get back to my shitty little apartment building, she's calling again, do I put water in the glass, and I have to explain it all over again, pour some wine in a glass, put an ice cube in the glass, drink it...

So that all fucks me up, and I"m hungry anyway, so I have a little beef stew I made, heat some up, try to deal with my own shitty $12 Pinot, but it sucks too, and I finally fall into a heavy nap, and then again, my phone is ringing and it's Mom again, why...  Are you going to come and take me home, I, when will I see you again, are you coming by later, tomorrow?, do I have any wine here...   I try to explain, get a little curt, "I"m no good, I'm no good, " she says, and hangs up on me.

And this all, for some of us, sort of reminds us in bits and pieces and in ways of the principal drama we might have felt as a child growing up, in my case of how my mom was always anxious, not often calm, and how my saintly professor father finally raised his voice against it all.

I call her back, and she says, oh, I was cleaning out the litter box just now.  And I ask her if she can find her bottle of wine, and she says, oh, it's right in front of me.

She admits to being anxious.  "I can feel my mind doesn't work like it used to," she says.  "And I'm nervous about where I'm going to end up."

"Yes, Mom, we all feel that way, " say, and we talk a little while longer.  We are finally done with the day it seems, and ten phone calls at least, and settle in, and no wonder I like the night, and the pictures I took of the fishermen down by the river.

I mix up a turkey meatloaf, Ken Burns The Civil War on in the background, Antietam, and a lecture on Kerouac by Douglas Brinkley from a podium at UT, tuning in and out.   I eat well, but I drink too much wine, and wake up with that bad feeling in the morning, and need my rest.

And mom is cheerier when I reach her.  Her helper is coming.

For thirty years, I listened to people talking.  Then one day, the job, such as it was, disappeared.  And I had nothing to show for it.

I entered a dark night of the soul.

Writing, it's always there for you when you come back to it, like a dog who misses you.  I didn't want to be writing any more, but there it was, an old friend, a tool in the darkness.

My own dark night of the soul happened to coincide with my mother's issues.


The irony, in such a state as the world fell into, I found that I suddenly had no one to talk to.  All I had was the river bluff, a walk to take, yoga.  No talking to any strangers, as I had always been able to do.  It was an odd situation, and there was no real way to fight it.  Who would want to talk with an unemployed 55 year old who'd fallen from grace anyway...  a writer... an out of work neighborhood barman...  no decent folk would want any part...


But as I do my yoga and sit in lotus pose, in meditation, after mountain, tree, warrior, shoulder stand, plough, it's the judgmental quality of human nature that comes out, striking me as not necessarily worth subscribing to.  My own self-judgments have always haunted me, but, healthier to let them go, to let the judgmental go the path of the judgmental, people of the past, the scars and pain caused by them, not by me.


Drinking...  I loved the Jesus aspect of it.  But, but once you started, once you had one sip, then you had to keep it up, and then it was too much and you felt lousy the next day.  And you got sick and tired of being sick and tired.   You wake with a haze over the evening's conversation, a false agreeable mode you'd been in, sure...  Part of your inability to do much besides being a people pleaser.

Listen to your gut, my old neighbor, a psychologist offers to me, and he too is concerned with me and my welfare.  He reads Marcus Aurelius to me, stoic influenced stuff.  He shares with me a bit of his dinner from the pan on the stove, cooled down, Trader Joe's Fettucini Alfredo with grilled chicken breast strips, also from the frozen section, with the asparagus he cooked in.  And when you're drinking wine, your stomach needs something.  The pasta soothes.  He had an encounter with Tony Perkins once.  He remembers the Kennedy assassination for me, and how the city has changed in his lives here.  Mom calls in the course of our conversation.  "You need a protective armor," he says, gesturing toward his breast, as I mention my stress.


Mom has called, at 4:30 in the morning, to tell me that she is okay where she is, okay good, and then she calls again, at 9 AM, so that's how my day starts, with her sharp at me, I can't help it, because I ask her if she is keeping her iPhone charged, but she can't do that because "that's back at her real home and she's not there," and am I coming today to take her back there...  And I don't much want to get up out of bed and face the day anyway, even though there's a farmer's market just a twenty minute walk up past the reservoir, good eggs, good meats, I got my own significant problems though anyway, would be a possible definition.  What the hell am I going to do now, now that I don't have a job, and don't even want to be the touted wine expert, I don't care too much about that...

It's overcast anyway, and cooler, so yoga outdoors doesn't look like the top thing to be doing today anyway, and maybe I'll brush my teeth after a little chicken salad, a little tuna salad, both from the little deli, as I drink a fresh pot of green tea, yes.

A few books to read, maybe.

That's the lousy way I start my day, my whole life false, full of falsenesses, and I don't even want to deal with anybody, it seems like.  I wake up with the tea, and the phone rings again.   The cat has disappeared.  I tell her to look around, maybe he's sleeping up on the bed, given the weather.

I call her again, after several tries to get through.  Mom has found her cat, I discover, and after that, I need a nap.  The cat is wet.  She wants to towel him off, but he resists.  Yeah, cat's are like that.  I know, she says.


Maybe the thing is, I don't want to drink anymore, I don't know.  That's what my heart tells me some mornings, thump thump thump.

After the nap, I dial mom's landline, and this time she's not so happy.  No crackers in the house.  Only half a bottle of wine.  I gently ask her to look around, the check in the fridge, for food, wine...  She's losing weight she says, "because there's no food in the house!"

"I'll just kill myself," she says, and after I order her groceries on line, which won't come in these times for five more hours, and a Chicken Parm sandwich and wings from her local Dominoes for something more immediate, I foresee some wine in my future, after a walk on a dreary day...

And I'm a shitty writer with nothing to say.  Today and every day.

It's always something, these days.  It's always something.


I call mom back, after giving her time to eat.  She is a lot better, in a more cheerful mood, her voice energetic.

So, I drove up on Good Friday, making good time on the quiet roads, getting in about 10 at night, the stretch of the road up from Fulton along the river, and then, past the cemetery, the river again, over the dam, bright colored lights marking the waterfall by the power plant on the other side, up over the bridge, past the Big M, and over up the quiet town streets and Ellen Street and around the curve to my mother's apartment in the Cedarwood Townhouses.


I end up staying from Easter weekend on past the next, driving back on Wednesday, leaving at 4 in the afternoon, the road endless and lonely again, back to what?  What am I going back to, what am I leaving...  A double Whopper in Great Bend, just over the Pennsylvania border...


I take the car back downtown, driving down Canal, onto the Whitehurst Freeway, past Georgetown and the broad river, past the Kennedy Center and the Watergate below, onto K Street, and on into the inner innards of the city grid, to the little parking garage on 14th, just above L, shedding the car with the rental company.

And then I walk back.  Crossing 16th, the White House to the south, along K Street and onto Pennsylvania Avenue, past the JFK church, Trader Joes, might as well, no line at the moment, just a few things, then through the checkout line, then back to the street into Georgetown, over to my brother's house to check on the mail in his house, and then after all that, walking back, rather than taking his SUV, walking back along Canal Road, and back to the little apartment building and the quiet life therein, still with my bags strewn about and laundry to do, and paperwork, and general disorganization, cleaning out the water pitchers the night before, and the late night grocery run while I still had the car, unnecessary, a waste of time, spending 120 bucks, the strangeness of a Safeway now, up late, woken by the blast of a generator motor power washing something below outside my bedroom window, drilling through me before I could finally wake.


So now you're back.  A damp day, go down for a walk along the bluff under the new leaf trees, the grass clover and wet, the whole readjustment thing, not so happy.  The accomplishment of making a beef stew, at least, and the end of the first night back.


And the walk even down by the river bluff is dull, damp, overcast the sky, even with the little buttercups having come, even with the new leaves, and I don't even want to do a headstand, after the 1 PM meeting over Zoom with my co-workers...  enough to raise my anxiety, when will the restaurant ever truly reopen, not that this is what I should be doing for work anyway.  I feel a distance from my old co-workers now.  What part of me wants much to do with that job anyway...


In the morning, as I get up, here, in my apartment, or up at my mother's, the two of us poor people now, the voices in my head when I awake ask, what happened to me?  Where did I go bad, where did I go wrong?  Where did I become self-destructive?  What happened with all those innate talents I never used nor cultivated enough...  I think of the girlfriends I could have had, who are now doing decently and well, married, children...  Not having anything to do with old bum bachelors...


Thursday, Friday, and now it's Saturday.  Just after noontime, I get out the front door of the little building to check on the weather, and there's my friend the psychologist, George, out for a walk.  He's reading Marcus Aurelius.  "I'm an introvert anyway, so it's not so hard for me as it might be for other people," he says to me gently, after asking how I am.  He mentions Eckhardt Tolle, the past has fallen behind a curtain, the future we cannot worry about yet, and all we have is the present.  "Just write for yourself," he tells me.

So I'm out of the house, and I walk down to the bluff, warming up slightly as I walk along, a flannel shirt over a tee shirt, Adidas track pants.  The yoga is still within me, and the sun comes out through the clouds just enough, and the ground beneath me, the grass, the little chives, the buttercup universe, is warm, and all my poses come back to me, as good as before, and some even better.

The dark nights of the soul...

That's how Kerouac takes it, that's his path, that's how, that's where he starts.

"Anyway, I wrote the book because we are all going to die...  In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world of sweet attention, but now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me raw bed alone bed is stupid, with just this one pride and consolation, my heart broke in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord.  I made a supplication in this dream.   So in the last page of On The Road, I describe how the hero Dean Moriarty has come to see me all the way from the West Coast just for a day or two, we'd just been back and forth across the country several times, in cars, and now our adventures are over, we're still great friends but we have to go into later phases of our lives, so there he goes, Dean Moriarty, ragged in a moth-eaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walking off alone, and last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street, ahead, and bent to it again.  Gone.  So, in America, when the sun goes down, and I sit on the old broken-down old river pier watching the long long skies over New Jersey. and since all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now that children must be crying in the land where they let children cry, and tonight the stars will be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear...  The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks, and folds the final shore in, nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old.  I think of Dean Moratory, I even think of old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found.  I think of Dean Moriarty.  I think of Dean Moriarty."

I wrote this because I wrote all this.  That is, more or less, a kind of Kerouac explanation, like the beautiful end of On The Road, and the version he reads for Steve Allen on TV, which comes from Visions of Cody, actually, "I think of Dean Moriarty."  "Looking out over the old broken-down river pier..."  It's something you remember lines from, for its lyricism, a true poetic treat that might last you years.  And after reading the whole thing, this lyricism is welcomed by the poor reader who made it through, all the madness, all the meetings, all the crazy people.  The prose speaks of an effort, a great one.

One of the first pieces I wrote, as I came up with the idea of using this form, evokes the same river I go and stand over most days now, and still with the airplanes coming in and out.  The primeval life, the jungle growth, the river itself.

Now when I go out at night, it takes me about two, maybe three blocks along the sidewalks of my neighborhood before it opens up into a little meadow with good sized trees giving their protection.  The deer stand and watch me warily as I walk by, and half the time they don't run away, and sometimes one will barely even notice my passing, as I might be listening to something on my earbuds.  John Prine songs, after he passed, when I went and sat on a damp picnic bench and looked straight out over the full moon night river at the trees on the Virginia side as if I was watching the TV news.

Last night I brought my guitar, my Martin D-28 down in its case, along with all the wine I had left, in a Hemingway type Pamplona Iruna wineskin I believe my mom gave me as a gift once.  I put the capo on it, up at the ninth fret, to play a Lyle Lovett song, "If I had a boat..."  as I'd found a little clip on YouTube, of John Prine introducing the man about to play that song.   The Chianti, when I opened it a week before was undrinkable.  But somehow being open a week I was better able to get its thrust, an exotic spiciness, clove, chocolate, roots, coming through a slightly oxidized robe, not exactly pleasant, but drinkable, and all I had anyway.  I'd played a bit of the same song, around three AM, and the neighbor next door, fond of making his own noises and slamming doors and toilet seats, issued a complaint to my poor overworked friend Nell at the real estate company office, such that I got an email, about the third one over a year long period.  Could be worse.  So, I'm being a good boy, taking my beautiful guitar, the guitar of Hank Williams, and Elvis, and John Prine, and many many other a musician, down in its special molded plastic protective case on my walk with my wine skin down to play it so I won't offend anyone in this old building.

It's nicer to hear the wind blowing up in the old pines and the elms and the sugar maple, and when the wine tastes good, it tastes good.  Just like it feels good to write a sentence, to hold off for another day, the sense of all the things that could happen, and it's nighttime anyway, and so you let your mind rest in the form of the meditations that come with discovering sentences, one after another.  The whole world has gotten so complicated, so tight, so full of rules and orders and the things of common sense and practicality which one must follow, follow if you don't want you and your old mom to be tossed out on the street, with all your mighty piles of good books, but there still is that little chink of light that the caged will seek.

I have nothing important to say.  The wind is up, as it was earlier, when I took a walk at 4:40 in the afternoon, pulling and pushing at the small apartment building's windows.  I noted a limb of one of the big pines from about half way up had snapped off.  I stopped to snap off a small branch of the pine with its needles but the little branch was so green and wet still that it would not break.  Such pines have their ways.  The grounds are always soft under pines, more than the litter of needles might account for, as if pines had their own way of informing the soils around, a different kind of cooperative endeavor than that asked for by other trees and other forests.  Different personalities.

What is the river doing now?  There were ripples of waves on it earlier, rarely seen.  And now the moon, past two days full, is out my window, which faces south east.  The rabbit in it is looking upward, and the sky is clear black.

I am driving up to visit mom tomorrow.  I was over at my brother's house the day before, to go through his mail, to get the important things off to him, but even when I help, I feel inadequate, vulnerable in my adulthood, part of it from that long habit of just getting by, postponing, as a young fellow with some notion of being an important writer in his head would meander in some job, some job that gave him an excuse of gathering material.  I mow my brother's square of backyard lawn with the push mower, and it takes running starts to get through the thick overgrown grass and clover weeds.  Grass stains and sweat.  The heat of tree pollen on my face...


It's easier to be outside, I find.  In the small quarters of a one bedroom apartment's confines it is hard to take out any idea without it too feeling trapped, shriveled by the oversight of all the little tasks one should be doing, finances to work out, plans, resumes, job applications, new educations.  Bags to pack.  The agonies of Kerouac.


Of the writer's work, I tend to think that most would find it fair to ask, "What the hell are you doing?  What are you thinking?"  And you go about your meandering ways, picking up little bits of material even in a seemingly barren field.  What would you yourself know;  do you know of other fields, less barren?  You probably see them in other people's lives, but then again, they don't have the time.  Better served by reading.

What the hell are you doing?  You go for a walk, just to let a free thought come back, while letting it stay free.  Somewhere John Prine is hanging out out the back door of Armadillo World Headquarters, and telling a story of how you'd meet someone and talk music and end up spending a week there (but in the night, probably with a buzz of some kind, and a beer.)

So I do laundry, finding in the night a small spider running in fright on my bedspread, and unfortunately it could well be a brown recluse, and the scar of a bite from ten months ago is still on my left leg at the quadriceps, and I have to kill the thing, which I do not like to do, not one bit.  I sort some socks, and go back to the Tennessee episode of Ken Burns The Civl War, Shiloh.

You have to pack the little suitcase tonight, or tomorrow, before the road.  What else to take?  How long will I be gone?

The night is peace.  An allowance of an equilibrium, where thoughts are on the wind up in the boughs and branches.  I like the night to last.  Before the light of day comes rising, clomping up upon you, with things to do.  The quiet, to match.  At two in the morning, one still has some room.  I look up at the flat screen, a picture of open air tents where Grant and Sherman might have held their offices, a pine tree, an oak, chairs, grassland, smaller tents, private quarters, white, tables in the shade.  The photographer's lens has shut, just betraying a hint of a breeze swaying a distant poplar, upward through the pines.

I'm being irresponsible.

There's nothing you'll ever win as a writer.  No particular goal to achieve.  No summit to climb toward, but the one that is there every day along with everything else.  You'll win a few.  You'll lose far more.

This is the great peace you find at the opening passages of Slaughterhouse Five, that odd sense of purpose that came unexpectedly, serious, when the writer stops, to visit his old war buddy, as if to cash in on a war story, for the movie pictures, but the friend's wife comes in, as they drink their whiskey in the kitchen, to tell them the truth, of how they were just kids then, teenagers, jerks, more or less.  The simplest of admissions, "I'm going to write a book," and then on, from where it actually goes, not to the imagined great battle, the bridge of glory, the riches, the chicks, the perfect sense of justice of doing in the bad guy, but the rest, the real things, the sad unpreparedness of life's different points such as the writer has an eye for, expanding them so that they are real.

I can still tell my mom of the beauty of life.  She can still see it.  All that is still there, but weighed upon now.  And I must bring rubbing alcohol wherever I go, to wipe down things one touches, and one's hands, to make things antiseptic and clean.

The day started with good political news.  I called my mom to tell her.  And then I moved on to the shower, and then therapy session with Dr. Heather over the iPhone.  And then I biked down into Georgetown and up the hill to my brother's house, to go through his mail, to follow his instructions for the things he needs to be Fed-Exed to his house in the Hamptons.  Just as I get ready to ride my bike over to get it all sent off, this pile of mail and medicines, Mom's helper sends me a text.  She found Mom down on Ellen Street, around the corner from the apartment, out for a walk, as she was on her way over to visit and bring lunch.  I speak with her over the phone.  After the Fed-Ex store and success I bike back to my brother's house.  His lawn in back has gotten quite high.  It takes an hour to mow, with the push mower.  I get through to mom and she sounds okay, having a glass of wine in front of her.  There's a satisfaction in getting the lawn mowed.

I make a quick run to the butcher's, giving the proprietor a friendly wave, which he immediately returns (he's sipping a beer in the window talking on the phone), and get back up the hill and the quiet boulevard, wearily pulling my bicycle up, heavy, knobby mountain bike tires, the chain seizing and grinding.

I have some chicken salad, collapse on the couch, my face warm and sticky with pollen.  Too much exposure.  Too tired to cook a burger.

And I feel it the next day, the pollen.

I write my thoughts, to share them, to get them down, thoughts no one would want to listen to, things I cannot tell the people close to me without getting into a kind of interference pattern.  I get up late.  Feeling the wine from last night.  I am already running behind, it feels like.  The phone call from mom...  I'm a grown man.  I should be able to handle life, as such.  Frustration.

Okay.  To be such a writer as this is to be an eccentric.  It's actually lonesome and frustrating to be so, not a lot of fun.

But that's how it goes.  That's how it goes as we get back to nature.

I barely even wrote yesterday.  I was tired, got going around two in the afternoon.  Broad daylight in the afternoon does not have the nuances, the play of the light of the setting sun.  I walk, pick at edible weeds, drawn to them on the old path by the cricket-like sound coming from them.  I look carefully at the little stands of purple dead nettle, but whatever is making the sound is not to be seen.  Bees come to the little purple flowers that emerge above the edible green leaves, sustenance early in the season.  Things still to learn along the old green path that follows the old trolley line to Glen Echo.

You wake up and say to yourself,  god-damn, I blew it, I blew it all.  Why did I drop everything, become so lazy.  Amherst College degree... the world is waiting on you to do things, good things.  But I hide in my little life, as such.  A writer, as such, he too is a bum, unless he is a journalist of some sort, covering science, health, politics, the events of the globe...  These are the thoughts of too much wine, though it seemed like the right amount the night before with all the starry musings and the quiet deer.

So what do you do, when you got nothing...  When you are sad and alone.  When even a walk is tedious.

Well, you make yourself breakfast.  Fried eggs, sunny side up, after the first cups of tea, with sliced low sodium Boars Head chicken breast from the little brick townhouse market deli.

It is hard to bear the night without the wine.  The last phone call of the day with old mom puts me over.  And then once you start...  you keep going.  I am not leading an efficient life, no.  Living alone is not so grand.

I always had the bar to go to.  But now, no more.  Will I transform myself as into some form of focused religious type?  Would I be better off reading...  yes, today, quite probably.

But do not call or write me at this hour.  I am digging, digging vainly, into an earth that is not yielding anything.  And writing is not the only problem one has.  No, sir-ee.  I am not even getting anywhere.  It feels like I should go perform an act of faith, or kindness.  Go recruit a Peter, another Buddha's disciple monk.

I do not wish to sweep things over with the tints of joy we feel obliged to put upon every conversation.

It is cathartic, to write all this.  By the light of the next day, yeah, to write such is an effort to keep going, a successful one.  And the day after, here I am, with tea on hand, up by noon, ready to write, a therapy session over the phone coming up at 1 PM.

John Prine has died.  It was hard not to want to go down to the bluff under the full moon and listen to his songs, after taking out the trash and the recycling.  I sat on an old damp picnic table and looked out at the woods of the Virginia side of the great river, as if watching television.  I brought along the wine skin with the $10.99 Pinot Noir with an overly marketed label on it, at least it's from the South of France, and the percentage of alcohol is low.

A full moon, supposed to let you conceive of new things, new projects, seeds carrying in the wood, to declare fresh intentions to the new universe, to be strong and do it.  What this means, I don't exactly know, but I am thinking on it, thinking it through I hope.

It costs me, in terms of allergy symptoms, lethargy, to be outside, but I had to be outside, as if I needed to be taking my part in the crucial return of humanity to living in and with nature as much as it still can.  My imagination is fired up full-steam, the yoga is rigorous and expansive into better and better poses, holding them longer with increasingly good form.  I am intrigued by the light of late afternoon, energized by the golden rays that come late in underneath the last clouds of day.

Being out above the river's mystery sheds light on my own.

Green buds of thoughts, to match the leaves of coming Spring.

With the river, my own mysteries, why is my life just so, as it is.  Is it good I have no woman to go home to?  What is my journey?  Maybe everything is fine, as it should be, as it was intended to be.


Sunday morning, Mom calls early, waking me up.  I've been out in the reservoir bank meadow and all around on the bluff and by the deer, listening to Dylan, even sitting down and leaning on the rare old Sugar Maple up here, in the middle of the night, "Murder Most Foul," and when she lets me go from the phone call, I fall back to sleep and into bad dreams.  One of my friends, Drew, is caught up with by the law.  A set-up.  I  have to drive his car back from the golf course where he frivolously took us, before his legal past, or so the authorities have it, catches up with him.  And another bad dream, the details slipping away from the mind, as mom is calling again.   The call, with her questions, now that it's 11:30, "what am I supposed to do today," she asks, and then gets angry I'm not up, hanging up on me.

So, Jesus, I get up and pour a cold cup of tea from a wine bottle from the fridge, get her on the phone, and then with my nose stuffed up, in need of blowing my nose, suddenly as I drink my tea my stomach is upset, I can't breath, I need to throw up, not having woken up in slow enough, not stopping to take care of a few things, here in my lifestyle as such, after talking her through what to do with today.

Time is running.  I get dressed and on the bike for a run to the Sunday farmer's market.  It's an awkward temperature, do I need a coat, what little tables do I visit, what do I want anyway?

I get back, take my courier bag off and lock the bike up against the green metal pole of a parking sign behind the building, go in, put the groceries away, and not feeling so hot, having watched countless cyclists in their gear on fancy fast bikes, whizzing by, I go in, take off the coat, put the groceries away, two frozen blocks of ground beef, two packages for lamb sausages, a frozen quart of bone broth, an expensive piece of frozen black cod.  I fall without any more energy to muster, into a nap on the couch, not feeling so hot.  I don't even want to write anything.  Maybe I'm done writing.

I wake up finally with more energy around 4:30 and gather myself in shorts, college tee shirt and hooded SUNY Oswego sweatshirt, off to the bluff again, mom's phone off the hook as I walk down.  Eventually, late afternoon, the sun comes out again.  It's not the enthusiastic work out of the past two previous days, but it's a work out.  A three minute head-stand is better than none.  I take a walk in the sunlight.  I need to pee, but there are people out along the path.

When I get back to the apartment, the same deer I saw earlier eating grasses up on the hill is resting with her head up.  I have a little project in mind of hosing my mountain bike off from all the dried mud and dust it has collected on its frame and hydraulic brakes and the crummy old chain.

I think of Kerouac again, at Big Sur, where he has his stream, and Alf, the sacred donkey, and the deer becomes a kind of Alf for me, along with my yoga, along with my little poems I come across on this little edge of land and trees that give way just a little to nature, nature not pavement.

It's actually intended to be, and is, a book on healing.  Maybe he didn't do such a good job at all aspects of health and healing, bedeviled by a few consistent hangers-on, and of course the alcohol.  But at attempt, to heal a worn and sick soul, with the usual nature, water, air, sunlight, the crashing sounds of a sea below.



I call mom later, getting through to her, my 9:30 PM little happy hour after checking on my bike, washing it off,  and my deer friend still there in her quiet.  I read mom the little poem I wrote, "I came up an ancient city," musings on an old hollow tree stump.  A poem she was very pleased with.

I have dinner, with my little bottle of red wine, two healthy meatballs from Stachowski's, just a simple tomato sauce, and falling again to sleep on the couch.

I'm awake at four in the morning in the pitch darkness when my smart phone rings, Mom calling.  "What am I supposed to be doing..."  We talk for a while.  "But there were people here...  Am I losing it?  Should I just go back to bed?"  Yes, Mom, Mary will come later.  "But I don't need her.  Don't drag her into this..."  And soon, more or less, she realizes the conversation has either served its point or gotten pointless, and says she'll just go back to bed, after grilling me with the repeated question, "so, when exactly am I going to see you."  I explain to her that it's perfectly normal, that people used to get up in the middle of the night, for an hour or so, to go check on the livestock, or to go out and even say hello to a neighbor, such were towns and little city neighborhoods a long time ago, before the great compartmentalization of everything, everyone separate, blocking and blocked off from each other in a mechanized world, and it takes a lot of concentration to run machines, even just to get to work on time.



But I have to recover from her call, to regain my verbal balance.   I've bought some superglue to put back the little pieces chipped off the old green ceramic tea pot that evokes bamboo, from my old scholarly neighborly friend George who did a lot for me as he went through his own dark night of the soul, and I go through mine, not asking any questions yet about being out of work, as the whole world is, freed from the night shifts unhealthy and tiring ways, just trying to be healthy, to get out into the light, and figure, with this time, the little narratives in my psychological make-up.

Hospitality, in retrospect, I'm proud of all my efforts toward making people feel welcome and well-nourished.  There's nothing wrong with such a healthy thing.

And then, and now, for the dreaded first sentence.

Invited by a West Coast friend into a little Zoom happy hour sort of a thing around ten at night, after an afternoon in the sun on the bluff doing some excellent connected yoga.  Dialed in, as they say.  I hold my Lotus for an amazingly long time, plus two good headstands, one of them doing some upside-down walking, which is strenuous and kind of fun.  You should have fun, when you can, with yoga, throwing in a little imaginative variety into your poses.

But I'm not impressed with myself when I get up.  Too much wine, and the same old blah feeling, waking up at noon, and then in such a low state all the failures of life creep into your low mind like old water flowing downhill, so I get up, look for green tea and some carbonation, and something to eat.  I drank a lot of water yesterday.  That was good.  I made a good new friend, it seems.  That was good.  The day starts with a call from mom, "who's going to take me home?"

Today, though, it's overcast.  One feels foolish, stupid, prodigal.  Anxiety rises with you as you make tea.  "It must be because of some effort on my part last night to banish the dark thoughts, and whatever effort you make of numbing the mind with wit, supposed wit, the dark doesn't go anywhere, just waiting for you in the morning..."  I think, cleaning out some of yesterday's mugs and dishes with the Dobie Pad in the RubberMade little tub in the sink with nice suds.  Something's got your ire up, in this whole long story of mine akin to The Vanity of Duluoz.

"Such as it is with women, with girls, you can never fix the mistakes you make in real time, and to try and fix those mistakes, once made, forget it, you'll only made it worse and yourself into a creep by doing so, even if you're trying to be as noble as a person can," my thoughts go, as I brew the tea in the old green chipped-now pot.   And, "yeah, poverty, that's kind of the deal, part of the writer's exploration."

But I say, yes, things are prodigal in nature.   Back at my quiet little not quite miserable Ikea coffee table with its plexiglas top, wth my mug before me, a little cloud of Ashwagandha powder arises after I drop in half a teaspoon into my cup of tea.  And now I stir, letting my iPhone dial mom's home number on speaker phone.   Yes, there was the little mouse again, visiting like a shadow last night.  I try not to live like a slob, but there are little piles here and there of books, and books in boxes.

Maybe this whole pandemic disaster will increase the forgiveness ratio in humanity.


Out further in day, I take the trash out, the tall kitchen white garbage bag now about half full, beginning to present aromas, with thoughts of discouraging my little mouse friend from her nocturne visits.

A nice old friend on Facebook remembers me as quiet and understated, but very funny, that she had her friend had a crush on me during our high school play, Oliver.


The thoughts are still with my old habits of masochism, of not participating in life, being passive, submissive, retiring, when you should be out there using all your energies and talents...  but maybe it is the tale of one of those talents sort of seizing upon me, taking hold, a strange fascination...  The dark daimon of literary effort.

When you're young you can romanticize a low income as part of the moral and upright life.  But later on you'll begin to see that as laziness, as off-putting, as a foolishness, the taking of wooden nickels... life's wooden nickels.



You mature as a writer.  You converge with life, in your work, on small scale and on the larger.  Would I have thought it worth all the trouble, starting out, probably not.

I'm doing yoga now, every day I can, and I am amazed by the changes, all of it working on me.

This has been a fresh chance, a chance to focus, all coming about as a result of the COVID-19.  Creatively, I could take a shot at breathing again, might have saved my health too, because it all takes time, and energy, a lot of it.

Can one ever view his life on a purely spiritual terms, as in the reason and meaning behind your own full existence, which he can never consciously know.  Only in special circumstances.

Am I sorry?  I might have a lot, a lot to be sorry about.  You pick up the pieces, and it's all intense.

The problem is always the gift, the talent, the individual's basic and inherent nature.  And the gift, just as life itself, is a matter of the soul, involving the spiritual realm.

And so one needs the appropriate form in which to explore this, say, or call it, the daily adventures and journey of the soul within.   Such a thing has no patent, no copyright, no established ownership, but through the little personal models that have glimmered out of sensitive people and made it on to page.  An act of self-love.

My brother calls, to catch up on all this, the COVID.


One wonders, how of all creatures of nature, the birds, all of them know what they are doing, what their business is, what to do.  And we it seems do not.  We must be clever and professional.

But green thoughts bud in my mind.

And then just as I say that, as I've determined that I ought to go down the little meadow where the sun shines, with my hooded sweat and switching to shorts now, me doing my yoga routine in the sunlight.  And a really nice--he's over with young wife and nanny, two babies, got the hammock up, a guitar case on the picnic table, says hello.  A great conversation ensues in the sunlight, the river a sort of salamander green color, the clouds holding off for a bit.




When I was a kid, inventing as a literary project, I had this world after The Lord of the Rings.  We had to write a story in 10th grade for Mrs. Martin, and so I brought out this little playset of thoughts.  And my book, a little book, as it were the people on the good side of things, the good side in the great battle, ran something of a tavern, an inn, a meeting place, a pub.  The story started with the young sort of nascent hero bringing in a wagon with mead.  The wizard, of course, was the main man effective in the story.  And the evil power grabber person, the enemy, had left a stand of trees dead in the great forest, and Mrs. Martin liked the imagery, the symbolism.

And so that was always part of the story, the quiet friendly place where could come in off the roads and have beer, or wine, sit at a table, talk and strategize.  I don’t remember any particular touches to the menu...

I remember that she read my story out of all to the class, out loud, and I felt very good about it, my little tavern, with the evil power who took away the lives of living trees.


And then, thanks to my new friends, I felt accepted again, and did some of the best yoga poses of my life, including a Lotus Pose, keeping it solidly for longer than I ever thought I might be able to, there on the slight slope.  I was getting to know my body again.


With something still left in the well, I let now my writing day come to a close.

But what do you do, but in your boredom start writing again.   Even if it's dull, even to you, most dull.

"Your vitality is your destiny; it defines you and allows you to be creative.  It is your job to cooperate with it.  If you don't do your part finding a place for all your strength and promise, it will transform.  Instead of being receptive to the constant invitations to increase the life in you, you will start to be submissive to other people.  The object of your surrender will shift from life itself to a particular person or group of persons.  This shift in responsiveness creates a destructive patters known for decades in psychology as sadomasochism.

"The pleasure you would have received be being responsive to life reverses.  Now you may find pleasure in being disappointed, emotionally and physically hurt, or betrayed.  This is how I imagine masochism and why I think it is so pervasive.  It may be perceived in the tone of an interaction.  You're late for an appointment, and you berate yourself for habitual tardiness.  You could just take it as one of life's mishaps, but instead, you focus on yourself.  You can see in this example how egotism is part of the picture as well.  Instead of letting life happen, you imagine the scene as centering on yourself."

Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul, p. 241, Gotham Books, 2004


Well, that's what I read at night, after dinner.  Slowly steadily reading through the book that caught my eye the last time I went to the Palisades Library...

"Good god, that's me, to a tee," I say to myself.

And maybe this is why in a way it's like an act of faith, of "God," to let me this time to have away from the restaurant, the bar of wine.   What would I like to do with myself?

I don't mind at all the fact that I'm a nice guy.  But I can see how this played out in the relationships written of in my little Hamlet tale...

On the other side, there is the feature of living life, that it can be grim, that it is suffering, and that the main thing is to take away the things that make you understand other people, care for them, support them, in whatever way you can, and that is an unselfish thing, and the Buddha tells us anyway, that the Self is an illusion.

Meanwhile I am take the Padre Pio approach to this whole pandemic collapse of the modern world, and I am embracing my new humble friends of nature, the night fox, the bat at night fall, the mockingbird at dusk bringing out his repertoire, the river below, the trees bringing out sap and life again, the bald eagle.  Faith.  Along with prudent care and listening to scientific medical advice, the only way to get through a pandemic.

In a way I am as well set-up for all this as anyone, here at the edge of the quieted city...


One only has so much verbal gas in the tank for any given day.  You have to mete it out carefully, preserving, avoiding the desire to talk on the phone in the early part of the day, while still fresh.  You can coast your way in to some decent things, but you still have to be careful of distractions of the verbal sort.

So what have I not lived?  What have I not responded to?  The habit of submission, growing over the years...  It's not easy to think over.  I can see why some people would want no part of the submissive person I was, simply to avoid my disease, my pain, my bad habits, self-perpetuating.  Of course: run!

What do you do, now, to jump off the train, to escape from it.

Too nice to sit inside.  Time for yoga, to go do something.  Enough of the confessional.  Time to get out into the light, forgive yourself, move forward, and maybe, perhaps, things were simply meant to play out this way.

Wednesday, April 1st.

I've been tending the neighborhood barroom for thirty years...  It wasn't a good idea, but what do you do after all that?

Get the phone call with mom out of the way.  Mary will be coming later.  And maybe Mary can help her find her Wayne's Drug Store brown bottle of little light blue pills...

Should I be looking for a job?  What should I be doing with this time?  What sort of a job?  What is happening in the world anyway...

1400 NYC police have tested positive, I read today in blurbs.  Trump with the governors...

Do I have more tea?  Bagged tea, out of loose leaf.  On order. Stachowski meat run, duck liver pate, two meatballs, bright red ground chuck, yesterday, biking down to Georgetown ghost town in the rain to check on my brother's house.   Now, the sun is almost through the cloud cover...

I don't know what to do with myself.  

I'm no writer if I have these problems...  True, there is a lot going on in my head, and in the world.

Complete isolation doesn't help.  You'd think it would be a great time for a writer.  Nope.  Complete restlessness.  Reliant on unemployment...  will things ever be the same...


It gets harder to write.  The blank open space of the day, the isolation.   The great feeling of being nothing but a great big bum.

Yesterday, what did I do?  I took a long walk down to the river, speaking to my aunt over earbuds.  Overcast.  A little spray of green through the trees, the slender sycamores down on the flood plain...

It's the anniversary of Dad's passing.   My brother calls me as I walking back along the path above the river.

Further along my old buddy Dan calls.  We catch up.  The state of old bicycles.  The shop.  Their landlord being easy on them in these hard times...

This should be a time of scholarship, I should be reading Thomas Merton, but I have to attend a webinar on DC unemployment compensation, arriving at it after a quick download of yet another app from Four to Five PM.

Later I go out, after cooking hamburgers, down to the picnic benches with my guitar.  I've become obsessed with Bob Dylan's new song, "Murder Most Foul."

"Life can be pretty grim," I remember my father telling me as we rode down to the get the newspaper.    As a boy his mother was dying of tuberculosis.  A teacher would ask how things were.  "I learned that at a young age."

But I go down with my bottle of wine and drink with my guitar slowly strumming the chords, sitting on a picnic table by the old trees.



Thursday.  I wake up feeling poisoned.  Too much ten dollar pinot, my tolerance level too high, my habit too large and steady, so it feels.


There are the bad voices, a legion of them.  Selfish.  A bum.  You had all these opportunities, and you just slacked off, you withdrew.  What are you going to do now, at fifty five?  Doors are closed.  And now the Coronavirus epidemic.  So how does one even know, what jobs are out there, what jobs will be left?

I get to the CVS.  Passport photos.  A vain attempt to find a replacement dish drying rack for the kitchen.  Chocolate bars on sale.  Allergy pills.  No, no masks, no gloves, no hand-sanitizer, we're all out, the young man in his blue shirt uniform tells me, after I ask him about the passport photo.  No drying rack.  Two young women take my photo.  Are you ready, sir?  I stand there with my blue Brooks Brothers button down shirt, blue blazer, my hair getting long, only going to get worse.  The sound system is playing the ultimate music of innocence, 50s rock stuff, "Fools Walk In..."  The manager, talking the younger woman, a cashier, through the process, asks if I am satisfied with the photo, taken on a little point and shoot camera.  It all feels like an adventure, surreal.

Back outside in the sunlight on the boulevard, the wind has picked up.  I'll walk back along the reservoir, and crows are gathered on the reservoir's stone bank, holding in the wind, and up in the budded tree tops of the elms along MacArthur.

As I look back, it's like a nice little New England town out there, the church steeples, the firehouse, the old movie theater now the CVS.

Should have been a college professor.  But that would have been a fantasy, given the kind of student job I was doing senior year.  My father, a professional, told me that these days that's only for the thoroughbreds.  Being an adjunct is not an easy life.


Fifty five and out of work.
Just in time to be the biggest creep,
isolated, all alone.
No end in sight.

Mom's phone is off the hook.  I get out and do some yoga while the sun is still out, but not for long as soon a damp dusk sets in.

I get through to her as I stand on the bluff, and she's not doing too badly after all that worry.

I understood better when I got out on the little bluff a little after six o'clock in the evening.  The sun was out, a clear sky, and everything just a little bit greener and more full.  There were stretches of time where there were no airplanes in the sky overhead, and I did my yoga on the grass on the soft flat, looking over the river, the setting sun back up stream, soon sinking down behind the woods of Virginia.

Later on, after I'd finished, the sun having set, I watched a bat fly, wheeling and turning, rolling even, and I thought to myself, yes, this is the first day I've seen insects.

I understood things better now, after my head stand, the warrior poses, the sun salutations, the easy poses and the harder ones, the holding of tree pose after finally balancing in the wind.

I thought of Kerouac writing his poems, pomes of all sizes, listening to the whoosh and sounds of the sea crashing in at Big Sur.  Of course, that's what you do when the known modern world shuts down and leaves you with the birds and the nature, the winds, the arrival of the crows and the little flittering bugs that the bat was filling her hunger with after the length of winter.  Like him, I didn't have anyone around, and so it came to that, for me anyway, with my fool's little life away from any credentials one might strive for and better themselves by.  An out of work bartender, at fifty five, Jesus Christ.

Waking earlier with the kind of hangover from the wine that makes you not want to move, the yoga gave me something to tell myself good things and to feel healthy about.  I'd gotten down to the CVS even, earlier, for a mission to get the requisite passport photos taken.

Yes, on the one hand, where had the good years of my life gone, but for foolish unproductive spaces and things, else I wouldn't be just barely getting by with nothing saved up for any sort of future but more of the same.  How much can you change by being spiritual and thinking even the sweetest deepest thoughts you barely can understand yourself, out of your very human nature?  How much of the world can you change or understand?


There was silence in the sky, and I almost began to miss the airplanes as I worked out my poses, after finally getting through to mom as I walked down Elliot Place to my little grove of pines and the bluff, the wind rushing in from the west, speaking to her through my earbuds, iPhone in my SUNY Oswego sweatshirt pouch, as I reached my outstretched arms up to the sky, then bent over, asking each chakra and each vertebrae and muscle and tendon to release and open, impatient to get started with my yoga this late in the day (having squandered everything before one PM...)

I do tend to be emotional, which leads me then on to things like yoga, like reading up on Buddhist thoughts and D.T. Suzuki, the things of the Judeo-Christian...  reading up on the thoughts and lifestyles and techniques of the great poets and artists and musicians and deeper thinkers..  all that sort of a thing.  Is there a school for that?

But where will we go, any of us, after all this?  What will it be like when we come out of this?  Surely the air will have cleared, the water and sky cleaner and pure, at least were it not for the evil man in The White House Trump fighting any form of environmental protection there is, and who do I have for friends showing up right now, but the bald eagle, the heron, the cormorant, the mockingbird at dusk, the bat of wheeling twilight airs, the crows in the budding elms and along the reservoir....

In any neighborhood, of respectable hard-working driven homeowners, family people, what am I, my kryptonite thoughts run and go, what am I but a creepy loner, out there doing yoga, obviously honest about it, but isolated, not taking up any large space, but off in his own little world when lights are turned on in houses and people go into the kitchen for happy hour and to work on dinner and do what they do for their careers and professions, and everyone in need of the constant flow of information news.  One has the strange feeling this current time is ripe for isolating further those who were isolated enough already to begin with...

And those who are safe and entrenched will remain so.

And those of us who are lonely and poor, they will make due with the company of their wine...