It really isn't easy living alone.  I've tried it.

The poems from Pritchard's Modern British Poetry, which I took as a senior, still haunt me.  I didn't write the papers he asked of us.  What a snub.  What was I thinking.  After all he and my father and my mother had done to get me there...  I couldn't a paper on Larkin.  Or A.E. Houseman's famous poem.  I barely said anything in class.  Unlike myself.

But each time, each paper, each question, "what would say to Philip Larkin, or Yeats."  Well, you have to think about such things, and this takes a while.

And yet, I think they understood somehow.  I was going through something.  Perhaps, I'd observed something.  I don't know.  It's as if the beast were reluctant to give anything up, to divulge how the beast thought.  I have no idea.

Now, from reading Siddhartha's Brain, by James Kingsland, Harper Collins 2016, NY, the "default mode," steadied in the front of the brain, turns us into introspective mode, and the rumination can cause a worsening of mood.  This happens when we are not occupied with a task at hand, a job, numbers to figure out, a physical thing.  No wonder I tend bar then.  It keeps my mind occupied, fully, for a long time.

The lone writer needs something to do when living alone.  Or he will start to ruminate, and then risk making himself depressed.

My finger is too raw still, though the five stitches have basically been absorbed, for playing the guitar.  I do need to cook.  Earlier, I took a long walk in the rain, for sake of reflection.  I thought about my phone calls with mom for the day.

I hadn't had any wine the night before.  I'd been rather studious, sitting in my father's old professorial brown chair.  I read a good 160 pages, up 'til three in the morning.  It felt great.  Very satisfying.  I felt on a whole new track.   A new mission in life.

I figured this awkward time offered a period for me to think things through, quietly, in the background.

But then the next day comes, and you are still a human being, even if you think you've sort of figured out the proper moral tack to take today.  I tried to have a big yoga meditation day, but it just petered along.  I went for a long walk, getting my hiking sneakers wet and dirty, soaking through my rain shell, the old trolley path now mowed weeds and dirt through the clinging jungle, vines like ivy draped over everything, a plethora of growth along the sides of the path, and today, long puddles and boggy places.  A tiny frog, jumped out of one small pool with pebbles in the bottom now, and grass rising like rice shoots in rice patties, into the impenetrable undergrowth so dense in different blade of life and design and size, as great as any wall over made, and the little critter was safe now, though I admired him, or her, and the flashing memory of a tiny creature with two little legs going straight out back, a sudden jump.  Zip.

I like it out here in the Palisades.

Writing is ingenious, because it lets us use that "default mechanism," the turning inward of that "theory of mind," the comprehension of another's thought and feelings, to put it back to use and something that seems to suit its own work.  As if it needed to build walls and things, and keep things separate,  and every thing in little safe cottage or natural bower...  back to an older way.  A thing of mental habit, tribal, perhaps.

Thoughts in italics:  My mother is a depressive, though it’s hard to tell.  I guess that's why we stayed close over the years that come.  and she didn't really have anyone else helping her out and keeping her company after a certain point.  

And she had always wanted me to be an educator.  She wrote that in my The Education of Henry Adams, ...  Christmas of 1988, ...   “For the education of Theodore so that he may do the same for others”

The nights are hard to get through.

Like the Buddha says, you have to accept all sides of a thing.   And I have to accept the fact of all the things I passed by at college, being a drinker.  

I guess we naturally expect that all people will like us, because they'll see us as who we are.  Perhaps that is why people write.  The writer brings that sense, of understanding other people, to the table.  

You might as well admit, we all have art to bring to the table.

That's the jolt of learning that happens, when a teacher, or someone in the class, does something surprising and unique in the teaching of something.  That's when the lights go on.