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.