It's 90 out, but down under the grove of the pines it's pleasant.  There's a light breeze.  The pine needles are dry, still soft.  I do my yoga slowly, very slowly, focusing on alignment, upright posture, straightness, opening up body.  Straight lines aligning the energy centers from base to top.

It feels good.  Each pose gets tweaked, a little better, a little better.  Progress with all poses, and in the lotus.  I take a little walk afterward on the grass, barefoot, and then, back to the apartment.  This is good for my health.  Last night, I only had a few glasses of wine last night, over a spread-out period, so this simple act of going down to the bluffs to find a cool spot feels significant.


But I have the foolish years to live down.  A lot of wasted opportunity.  Try not to dwell on that.  Just try to get better.

Reading Vonnegut's thoughts last night:  Drinking gives you a spasm of happiness, but is overall destructive.  Sadly so.  Here I am, because of drinking.  The way the depressive, the natural writer, finds relief from pain.  Except it only causes more harm down the road.

So what do you do?

Well, you try to be good.  To not fall into the same old trap night after night, drinking a bottle of wine all alone in your apartment.  That's not a good thing to be doing, and your health comes first.

The monkish balance has its draw for me.  The yoga under the trees fits perfectly.  I don't even need a mat.  The pine needles are soft enough, wear some bug repellent, bring some water along.  You'll be good.



Waiting on Congress.  What are they going to do?  I feel like I've hit a low point.  I've been waiting on the restaurant business forever too, in that it hasn't helped my writing career, and indeed left me unfulfilled.


There were times back in college when I took getting intoxicated as a kind of sport.

But this was a huge betrayal of my father and mother.  By brother sort of encouraged me to take this tack, and I shouldn't have followed along with it.

As I lay awake at night, I wonder, to what extent did I cause damage to my brain, so that reading and focus and comprehension and concentration took a hit.

And then because of that mistake, of dulling my mind down, I fell onto a bad path in life.  My self-confidence sputtered.  I became reliant on the nightly beer.

I didn't take a class on Buddhism with Robert Thurman, I somehow missed the Dalai Lama.


I meditate now, again.  I should be looking for a job.  For a career...


I had not realized, being in it, how terrible lonesome the bar business was.  It was a huge mistake on my part, ever doing that.  I had quit my day job, a leap of faith into just working at night as a busboy, writing, thinking about what to do.  And then they, Austin Grill, offered me the job of day bartender.  And it went on from there.

I guess I was too ashamed to talk to my father openly about all this.  Which was also very dumb.  When my mom came to visit, she cried.  The restaurant business will break your heart.  Like it broke my parent's heart.  And I should have listened to her, too.

Writing too is a terrible and lonely thing to be doing.  And I guess I thought that the wine was part of the release, part of the inspiration's acting out.  It numbed the pain, while hardly fixing any bit about my life or helping it turn better.

The whole thing brought on a stream of bad memories.