The big failure of mine...   The drinking.  The playing when I should have been praying...  As my father said, when I went to see him teach a class in the science building.

Wild Turkey, as if I were Hunter S. Thompson.  Drinking a continuous thread through my college years, an attempt to be cool.  I did a lot of studying, but it began to slip here and there, who knows why...  Depression, or depression brought on by the effects of drinking...

And now I stand here stranded.  Literature and Buddhism are the things I find true today.  I meditate.  Better for you than writing, which is just rumination that causes more depression.  That's the cost of having a mind that can do abstract work.

And so I am in a spiritual condition, brought down by ill-timed cynicism had while being a college senior, trying to cut corners.  In rebellion and disagreement...  with what?  Professors explicating Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin poems?  To have studied Buddhism with Robert Thurman would have calmed me down, drawn me away from intoxicants.  I was immoral.  I hurt my father, the upright distinguished decent gentle professor.  And I don't know why.

I find myself paralyzed now.  There's no way back to the groves of academe.

My mom is falling apart, slowly.

I skipped the wine last night.  I'm proud of myself.  But that too hurts, in a way.  How do I start a new life?  What do I engage myself in, to any satisfaction...  Tending bar used to do it.

And so as a bartender, I was little more than a fool kid.  Pat me on the head.  Let me entertain you.  Put on a show.

I knew it all, subliminally, as I watched myself do it all.  Playing when I should be praying.  When I should be using my mind to read books and learn.

It's all depressing, when I look back at it.  The classic wrong profession, according to the Eightfold Path.  Immoral.  Intoxicants and the murder of animals...

There's that touch of Hemingway in the late chapters of A Moveable Feast, about how the wealthy petted him on the head, told him how what he was doing was so marvelous.

The tragedy of the artist who has mislead himself, is now like Jonah, hiding from God.