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.