It's a lonely drive through Pennsylvania in such circumstance. McDonald's, a $2 Value Meal double cheeseburger as a treat for the nerves in a hot parking lot in Scranton after getting through afternoon torrential thunderstorm downpour rain, slowing, hazards on, danger of hydroplaning on 276, then getting back on 81, traffic slow, big hot softly dark clouds glowering up above in their war cry of summer in the hot light.
Later in the afternoon, Mom calls as I'm descending from the high ridges down into Pine Grove, where I lose cell coverage in the pointed hills. She's telling me about what she's reading, a new wish for some kind of spiritual work, but, as she says, she's crocked. I get my Whopper Junior. Put it down quickly, get back on 81, but her line just rings.
Past Harrisburg, I stop off of 15 in Dillsburg for gas at a convenience mart, car lights on now, a brightness under the gas pump awnings, and inside.
Past Harrisburg, I stop off of 15 in Dillsburg for gas at a convenience mart, car lights on now, a brightness under the gas pump awnings, and inside.
On the approach to Gettysburg, flat farm fields giving way to a different geology. It's just about dusk, and I'm tired of the road, and just feel a need to get back to the apartment, but I feel I owe it to myself to stop.
On the Taneytown Road, the first left takes me up a narrow wooded lane and there I am at the gap between the Round Tops. I turn right slowly up the hill, a placard to Chamberlain’s Maine division.
I park the car. A last adventure with it, costing me serious money now. Here I am, looking out from Little Round Top. Dusk. My iPhone storage is full, so I have to resort to posting live on Facebook, panning the camera function from left to right looking west. Harley-Davidsons pop and splutter in the distance. There’s groups of people here, a boy wearing a Lincoln stovepipe hat, followed by heavy mother and daughters. Home schooling she mentions, as she apologizes for passing as I have my phone out.
Night falls. I get a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, sitting on the hood of the car in the parking lot closest to the cemetery where Lincoln spoke, looking off into the last light sinking beyond the ridges.
And as I'm driving back with the Round Tops to my right now, and feeling shocked and vulnerable, I'm feeling sensitive, and as I go over the little ripply hills along the stone and other farmhouses of Taneytown Road. A car is up behind me with lights, and I don't see how I really even want to go the speed limit of forty here. With windows upon, the light exhaust piped roar, of a downshifting Harley, now I see the steady headlamps of three at least, but it's just the dusk of night falling into true night, eyes harder to adjust after all the light of summer from early dawn to late dusk, and so maybe no one minds speeding down a bit.
I look for the ramp onto 15 South, as the land is flatter, the speed limit 55 now, I strain a bit, looking for it, a sign to the right. This drive is harder now, it seems, even as it is mellowed into an unflappable passage of yearly routine, listening to NPR, moods related the stories of narrative, just for company.
Is it the sudden feeling of aging, as of one very close, the nervousness of elder vulnerability, all the good years behind you, why not a sexy siren song each day, or just girlish, the brightness of wanting to be alive, "what are we doing for fun," Mom asks. "Today." The road feels harder. The traffic behind me, more aggressive.
On the Taneytown Road, the first left takes me up a narrow wooded lane and there I am at the gap between the Round Tops. I turn right slowly up the hill, a placard to Chamberlain’s Maine division.
I park the car. A last adventure with it, costing me serious money now. Here I am, looking out from Little Round Top. Dusk. My iPhone storage is full, so I have to resort to posting live on Facebook, panning the camera function from left to right looking west. Harley-Davidsons pop and splutter in the distance. There’s groups of people here, a boy wearing a Lincoln stovepipe hat, followed by heavy mother and daughters. Home schooling she mentions, as she apologizes for passing as I have my phone out.
Night falls. I get a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, sitting on the hood of the car in the parking lot closest to the cemetery where Lincoln spoke, looking off into the last light sinking beyond the ridges.
And as I'm driving back with the Round Tops to my right now, and feeling shocked and vulnerable, I'm feeling sensitive, and as I go over the little ripply hills along the stone and other farmhouses of Taneytown Road. A car is up behind me with lights, and I don't see how I really even want to go the speed limit of forty here. With windows upon, the light exhaust piped roar, of a downshifting Harley, now I see the steady headlamps of three at least, but it's just the dusk of night falling into true night, eyes harder to adjust after all the light of summer from early dawn to late dusk, and so maybe no one minds speeding down a bit.
I look for the ramp onto 15 South, as the land is flatter, the speed limit 55 now, I strain a bit, looking for it, a sign to the right. This drive is harder now, it seems, even as it is mellowed into an unflappable passage of yearly routine, listening to NPR, moods related the stories of narrative, just for company.
Is it the sudden feeling of aging, as of one very close, the nervousness of elder vulnerability, all the good years behind you, why not a sexy siren song each day, or just girlish, the brightness of wanting to be alive, "what are we doing for fun," Mom asks. "Today." The road feels harder. The traffic behind me, more aggressive.
Could there be a way for communicating with each other, as we all drove along in the night. As a child I thought of a sign you could put on top of a car, to signal, in polite verbal words, the thoughts one has. If you're brain really wanted to say "shithead," then "shithead" would print up on the little marquee sign, lights spelling words, perhaps in neon, perhaps not. Generally you might try to be polite, and that might work for a while. Maybe you could communicate in a general good wishing way, but mainly because you had some sort of a poetic thought. Or, as if to say, "hey, check that out." Drivers from the front and back would see the taxi light graphic sign like sort of a message board. Perhaps there could be a special channel that the driver could press, to send a verbal signal somewhere that it could dictated, typed out on the sign. They can do that, so I'm told.
And now I'm tired, up the long hill climbing out of Frederick, 270, and through more rolling land, and finally the awkward Beltway maneuvers, past the River Road exit, at last, Clara Barton Parkway, east along the big wide stream of the river to the right, bluffs to the left, and the air changing and now only 40 mph or so, which soothes. Two lanes. Three at the access of Chain Bridge, almost there, waiting at the light, as devils speed, flying toward and past me in the dark night.
Back here, the apartment, even walking around here, I feel a limit, I feel the boredom, the why-be-interested-in-anything in mid-July as summer turned into endurance. Before, it might have been slightly romantic to enjoy being able to walk around in the middle of a neighborhood that felt safe. Lots of trees. A bluff overlooking the storied Potomac, sometimes with a wine skin. But now, I don’t know.
You can turn a corner sometimes. Suddenly you're writing again. Your dropping buckets down a cold natural well, sploshing into the cool deep, a bucket a water of out, slopping, having to strain for gold.
Then it may stop again. Though humor is done by the ability to imitate things. Buster Keaton imitated stunts, Harold Lloyd who had but one fully working hand, they imitated what they could see, as any other artist must, what they could envision
A sense of a space, that is what dementia is about, as much as anything. Physically, you can not move so well in a space. You hover, not knowing exactly which way to turn. How could you stand a good chance at finding anything, a can, a hat, a bottle of water.
It just wasn't right anymore, not being there, but at the same time, a burden of a difficult person, very sharp, not always particularly polite. "I'm just a woman, what would I know..." Oh, if you're going to be morose, it will be catching, she nods, like an imagined queen of the tea room, or a cottage, as if in Ireland somewhere, as she gestures around with her hand. I say this and whatever else I do out of knowing my love for her.
Thinking and writing, is like dreaming, and dreaming needs physical space, a sense of the room and all its objects as you passed through. Dreams are very much a studying of space.
But the bartender, the tender of the wine bar, feels like life is suddenly meaningless, because there is no longer the space you've occupied for the last fifteen years straight like Gehrig.
When you're feeling so lost, it's hard not to want to put a little buzz on. Feeling utterly meaningless. So, you have to get a buzz on and try to have a little taking it slow.
All this happens when you come to an unfamiliar place, or somewhere you've not been to for a long time. This is what we strive for, when we find something new.
Books are space. Each of them we remember as a physical object, knowing where to find a passage in the physicality of the book. Visually, we remember our readings, being they visual in message as well as worded, a favorite childhood book from the different stages of childhood.
My mother has surrounded herself with the inner space of books. I look at them spread across the floor, the ottoman, the old teak table. Layers of books and New York Times sections. Retreating into safety.
And still there is nothing to do up there but join her, sooner or later, when the wine has been poured.
Artists aren't the only ones who care about people who stay up to the wee small hours, but, they co-mingle.
Then it got grim. Not only was I laid off, because of the COVID, but then the federal addition to unemployment is now up in the air. Congress. The religion of the great Donald Trump, waiting for Mitch McConnell, Mark Meadows, Tea Party, Freedom Caucus, and Mnuchin, the King of Foreclosures.
So yeah, now and again I just needed some sort of break, as it was hard to work on anything... a resume? That was a horror enough. So I had a few books, Dark Nights of the Soul, Thomas Moore, or, simply, The Dharma Bums, with such life-saving beautiful prose, St. Raymond of the Dogs in Rocky Mount, NC, living with his mother, his sister and her workmanlike husband. ("Ray Smith" being Kerouac's name in the book.) James Kingsland's, Siddhartha's Brain, a support to which I am indebted and referring to often these days.
I didn't know, or no longer knew, where I stood, by that all important indicator of finances, and I didn't know where my mom stood, after all my helping her, with things, and so it was a real blind time, and then you added on to that, the virus... Masks. Calculations for everything of the new calculus. You can't sleep at night, you have no desire to be awake in the bright hot daylight of busy people.
Another hour zooms by. And you look at, in your minds eye, the pleasant friendships of couples, how they are easy with each other, and great friends and companions, not contesting armies...
So who ever thought reading Kerouac could contribute to sanity and an overall sense of truth and well being, go figure, in these political times, hearing from the most unlikely of all politicians, the fuck-up, the fuck-up-like-me, who went through so many days close to the edge, sad, crying in his sleeping bag, hitchhiking. Much as that college graduate kid who went off to Alaska... Into the Wild.
Sunday. Phone calls start my day. Mom calls. I don't have much to say yet.
I wake up slowly, out of whatever dream. To no job, to feeling like a loser, not on his toes. I didn't sleep well last night, and the ragweed is up. It's hard to know what to do when you live alone, anyway. It's long been a habit of mine, living alone. And now it's even worse.
This lesson has been coming a long time. There's no way to hide it, no way to hide from it now. It's like I knew this was coming, and it makes me nervous.
Mom calls again, with her little news, questions, what's new in the world, I don't know, I'm just getting up. I finally get up. I've just sat down with my fresh pot of Moroccan Mint tea and the phone is ringing, my friend Barbara, the singer from our little wine bar jazz night theater. Looking out for me. Not a great time in the day for me to chat, but she has information for me and support, I haven't spoken to her in a while. I was just about to sit down and write out a few thoughts, but okay. She's a friend.
As I'm speaking to my theater talky friend, Mom is calling again. I keep kindly Barbara on the line, and finally look at the transcribed message Mom has left me, begging for a fly-swatter, dramatic as can be, as I talk with my friend.
The heat is oppressive again, humid. Why is everything happening at once now...
It's my own fault I like to write before I have been beset upon by people, dragging words out of an anxious person who does not feel like talking. I have to catch my breath. I have to get my bearings.
The crisis has come. I want to be a Buddha, but I need a job, and I'm running out of the money to balance everything.
Who wants to get up and write? I don't. But, I felt I should write, and perhaps I needed to. There's something therapeutic about it.
No, I didn't do well last week. Isolated here. Into the wine, out of fear and other poor motivations and pressures, a lack of proper understanding. Scrolling through endless websites, jobs that aren't right, and still, still waiting on Congress to do something. Pressure.
At certain things, we find ourselves being a natural at them. Things that in a larger sense humanity has within, a capacity for. Yoga. Meditation. Music. A little training, and off you go.
Writing is meditation. A careful observation of the thoughts that run through our minds. This is as passive as anything else as far as a process. Thoughts, in phrases and fragments, come and go. The trick is remembering the efficacy of the valid ones, the ones that hold up to, or reflect, Buddhism. The ones that have a ring to them, the ones you sense fit in with the overall picture that you might add to, just a little, but which is already there, led by great minds before us.
And also the reading, the right kind of reading. For which to find, one must be careful and specific, with an intent eye and ear.
This is why the process itself is perhaps the most interesting thing before the writer's eye. Writing leads one naturally to spiritual affairs, to meditation, and on further, to Buddhist thought. Quiet contemplation.
I'm convinced writing brings us somewhere.
I have become Don Quixote, my old head troubled into the insanity of believing in true chivalrous spiritual wisdom.
Okay, so... Mom's alone. I don't feel good about that. I'm paying for an apartment that has become now hard for me to afford. I pray to Jesus. I pray through my chakras. I don't have much in a 401k. I've not worked hard enough. I've squandered however many years I've had to build a career, a reasonable career. I'm nothing. An out of work bartender. I feel very sad. I feel like Jesus in the Garden a lot of days. I didn't want it to be this way, but that's what happened.
I try to look through jobs, content writing, editing... These are news jobs, jobs for which one has to have experience. This is not creative writing from the depths of the soul. I"m not a man. I make excuses.
Why, I wonder, as I stare at the night ceiling, having run out of sleepiness and also of wine, why did I not head into the world from Amherst College, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, ready to take on a prep school classroom, or New York City.
I was a lost saint, who found his way being the saint of hospitality, which I did with my own two hands and feet, starting as busboy. I should have been reading... using my mind, educating.
Mom is stepping up her game. "I don't have a life. Why don't I just kill myself." But Mom, there's wine there. In the fridge, maybe, or the counter. I hear her rummage a bit, doesn't come up with anything. Nope. But Mary brought you some. "But I'm not home!" She starts to cry. Some days the phone calls go better than others.
Jack Kerouac's quote about the poet and time... "A poet is a blind optimist. The world is against him for many reasons. But the poet persists. He believes that he is on the right track, no matter what any of his fellow men say. In his eternal search for truth, the poet is alone. He tries to be timeless in a society built on time."
What I did achieve in those long years useless to me was that I allowed for some space for the poetic. Washington is a well-read town, usually too officious to be dabbling in poetry, and yet there is poetry all around us. Lincoln's ghost, the ideas of the Framers of the Constitution...
But when it all went away, shut down, not enough outdoor seating for the old place, there I was, left behind, stranded, an unemployable everyman poet, tossed out of his own fictional Garden of Eden.
You never know how draining it is, all the outside words. You want the news when you get up, you turn on the radio on the hour for the news. You look at the weather report, on the icon on your screen. You know the news is pretty bleak. But if you engage too much, the words in your own head will be squeezed out of the central focus.
And with everything that's going on in the world, and Trump, and wildfires, and unemployment, it's harder to find any importance, much value, in the poetic mind and the work of tuning into it.
I'm making a stew in the Instant Pot. I have one bottle of wine, trying to control myself on a Thursday night. Mom calls, and of course, I pick up. And she starts on the "but I'm not in my home home... the real home is over two doors, up the road a piece," "yeah, Mom, but I had Mary bring you wine to where you are now, so look in the refrigerator." "But the cat won't come back!" "Yes, he will, he knows, you let him out he always comes back." I ask her if she could find her pills. Where are they? Well, they should be there right in front of you. Where? On the counter... you know, between the toaster oven and where the cat eats... There over at the other house... Okay, Mom.
This goes on for a while. I've been spending the hours of the afternoon working slowly through web sites, on-line forms, looking for jobs. I figure out each little step they want, that the machine wants, that the form wants, and then I get ahead, and forgot to hit the add button so that the information I saved is typed out. The resume, to upload it, for the US Postal Service, it can't be in doc.x, so I figure out how to convert it, there in Microsoft Word. All of this is very taxing on the brain and its verbal motor oil, and you can only get so far. Keep going, sure, the next layer of making something work in the on-line world.
So at the end of conversation, I'm pretty fried. And by the end of one bottle of my ten buck pinot noir, it's not enough. I save a glass for dinner, but I know I don't have enough, and no back-up, except for the 2012 Beaucastel Chateauneuf Du Pape over there lying on its side on top of the Chinese chest my brother passed down to me.
Biden nails his speech, and I've had my delicious beef stew, with lovely chunks of potatoes in it (the carrots soft and yielding onion bits) which I don't normally do given the arthritic factor. And I'm tired, but I've been sitting around in this apartment getting lazier and depressed by my joblessness, and job applications, Content Writer, some kind of tutor and writing coach, and no wonder I liked the restaurant, because it was just simple, hard work, tired out, you ate your dinner, had a glass of wine, and you went home.
But there's really not much point in being a poet. It's certainly not a job. And I made that great mistake. I can see why I thought I should be one, perhaps more so a poet of prose, in a Melville way, but it's all by ear, musical, anyway, words, when you write them down out of your head. You wouldn't even expect it to pay the bills.
Even ten minutes of NPR, a few outside thoughts, and the line to mind gets staticky. Then what that happens, it's a tough tug of war. Keep going? Are you done for the day? Should you, as old Ernie put it, stop and let the well replenish itself over night... Poetic thoughts, go poof. Watch a cat video on Facebook; that's what Werner Herzog does.
At dusk I find out the back window in the bathroom, deer, a buck, later joined by a female at dusk. I watch them graze on the weeds and vines, flicking their ears against insect life. But the male, I see that his velvet is hanging down from his antlers, like leathery rags that flap about. As night falls, there are male deer now, sitting down now, in profile as they chew their cud. I hear another plane coming into town, and the lights of it pass overhead with its whoosh, low, reminding me of 9/11. Then another one comes over,
I cannot even describe this time. It brought out all the lies I'd been living for the last 35 years, all the illusions, the fool's paradise I'd kept afloat until I couldn't. The consequences being the loss of my possessions and my living space. It was not an easy time to write, with an ever present unseen enemy of suddenly being out of work, out of luck, out of income, no money to pay the rent. It was a very hard to write. I forgot how. But I needed to do it, despite it all, just for saving, for reassuring something inside me that I had to protect.
But I knew it all along. I would need to make a transition, at some point, yes of course, I would have to grow up.
Today, what did I do. I laid around in bed for a long time. I just didn't feel like getting up, and that's hard to say. I didn't feel any hope. Over the course of the evening, speaking with an old school friend Darryl, from my old hometown, I drank red wine from 1.5 liter bottle of Sangiovese, 12%. Then I heated up the oven and the iron pan and seared lamb sausages from the farmer's market, along with roasted broccoli, and then later a couple of hot dogs, while still drinking away. Then I listened to the Democratic Party Convention on the radio, then I read some, then I looked at what I'd managed to do earlier in the day, applying for a couple of Whole Foods jobs, Safeway, then looking the possibilities of content writing on the website Indeed.com. I could not find the form to fill out for being a substitute teacher on the DC Schools website, as hard as I looked. I need to learn Zoom, I told myself. The thought of tutoring scares me. The scope of disaster, enormous and all my own fault.
To he who would write, beware; it will be a disaster. Get a job. Lead a decent life. Don't allow the shame to fall upon you. Use your understanding of words to be an editor.
I'm mediating to Tara Brach, who is talking about bringing a smile to your eyes, the facial muscles, the heart, when I get a text from my aunt, who's going in for cataract surgery the next morning. I give her a call, and then give her a run through on what I'm doing looking for a job. I'm tired at this point, and speaking about job prospects and what you've been trying and how you've been taking it gets tedious to explain, though perfectly necessary, and so I start eyeing the one bottle of $10.99 Pinot Noir I bought across the street today in the little market under new Korean ownership. Okay, it's time. We have a nice conversation, including of how my grandfather started to see rats climbing the walls once they tried giving him antidepressants in the nursing home where he was laid up after his stroke, left side paralyzed. He couldn't take pseudophed without similar craziness, which I avoid too.
But once you open a bottle... I have slices of low-sodium chicken breast with a spread of hummus, and go back to the computer, looking at content writer job offerings, taking a grammar test for one I've applied for, which goes surprisingly smoothly. I see all the flaws in the presented sentences. This is easy for me. It makes sense.
Later on, past everyone else's bedtime, I take a walk around the block down toward the bluff, but I say to myself "I'll never be happy now, because I've missed all chances at a normal life, wife, kids, all the usual of God's happinesses, giving grandchildren in my image to comfort my old mom in her tough old age, and who will look after me with comforts in my own old age..." It's just another thing stacked up against me, the isolation of these times, the misery of lying in your bed looking up at the pattern of light through the blinds on the ceiling, unable to fall asleep.
I wake up feeling guilty. Of course I do. Mom alone far away. Poverty. Too many possessions. Too much wine for too long, thinking I'd be a sommelier.
I spend much of the day on the bed, meditating, corpse pose. There's nothing I really want to do, or feel I can do. You can only take so much before you need to calm yourself and regroup. I have some tea, even freshly made, but it doesn't inspire me. The water wasn't hot enough, and I was light on the tea leaves. It's raining heavily, Hurricane Isaias coming through as a tropical storm, wind up in the trees when I wake with the light. I call mom, no answer, get through to her later, then go back to my meditations on the bed. No room on the floor with the bike on the trainer stand.
I finally get up and take a shower. Shaving off a week's growth of beard takes several passes, holding the razor under the water steadily after each swipe to clear the blades. My prescriptions should be ready, so, I try mom again as I venture up the sidewalk past the reservoirs up the CVS in the old Palisades movie theater. Dr. Patel called in, after my appointment Monday. I'm standing in the line, after the woman in front of me, not so happy herself, the African lady finally coming back from the bathroom walking on one artificial leg, is just about through with her business. And then the phone is buzzing. Mom calling. Yes, Mom, what should I do, everybody left, maybe I should just kill myself. What should she do. I'm not doing too well myself, I tell her. I'm at the CVS. Can I call you back in five minutes...
The pharmacist behind the second counter suggests I get a flu shot. Sure, why not. One more precaution for the times. One of the prescriptions is ready, the generic Lexapro, at a slightly higher dosage. The doctor forgot, so the African lady tells me, looking hesitantly into her computer terminal screen, to call in the beta-blocker Propranolol which tames blood pressure and eases some of the body's reaction to anxiety.
As soon as I get out, I try mom's landline again. No answer. It's getting hotter now, sweat pooling under my cap, matting down my hair as I walk my loser self back along the reservoirs toward the little apartment, putting my mask up as people approach, under the elms.
The Buddhist thinking tells you to mediate upon your cravings, to observe them without judgment. What do they feel like? Where in the body. I keep trying mom as I get into the apartment. Taking off my linen shirt, the hat, my glasses, the mask, washing my hands. The craving for wine starts in the chest, lower, near the solar plexus. It's a desire to find some calm, with all the stress of the day that's hitting you in the gut, a weight that's pressing on you, extra, on top of breathing. Then you throw in the loneliness on top of that.
Just a little bit, on the rocks, with a good splash of soda water. Just to calm down. It doesn't feel good necessarily, with a few sips in, but it's a habit, an obsession, and in some ways, it works.
Then she calls, as I'm cooking the black-eyed peas I soaked overnight, around 9 at night. Again, it's the matter of whether she's in the right place or not. Yes, you are mom. The cat knows his way back and forth. She'd put the phone down, per our agreement, to go out and check to make sure, looking at the number on the apartment townhouse complex. I waited awhile. Finally, I heard the kitchen door, not the front door, creak open, and then I hear her talking to the cat, asking him if this can works, after opening it up. Then she goes away. I hear her in a few more minutes calling my name, as if I were there in person. Then I hear the phone go click. So I try calling back, it rings, she picks it up, but doesn't speak to it, and then she hangs up again. I call, it rings, but then I see she's calling.
When I get up, and have the courage, I look at these last few Covid-Diary blog postings. Rushes, they are like, to be looked upon as film, raw and unedited, for what they caught and didn't catch.
There are still the great worries, condensing in the lone night as dew out of the sky, profound. As if everything were coming together, the November election, my mother's health, possible eviction notice from not having a job, from not being employable at age 55, something I've left myself open to. But those cheery thoughts subside, and there is the writing again to look at. As Buddha says, good will follow after pure thoughts, and so I look for how to think pure thoughts, rather than evil ones.
Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it.
Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Joy follows a pure thought like a shadow that never leaves. (The Dhammapada.)
I'm drinking my green tea, the gas on the stove working again. My personal hotspot is giving me trouble again. I never quite figured out how to get internet here, though I pay Verizon a monthly amount for a landline, no working phone jack. Depressions make you irresponsible.
The Corona Virus Pandemic has come with different stages, globally, nationally, locally, personally.
There will be many more steps to go through, each one veiled, no control over it. No way to get the mind around the shock, the misery.
Some of us are okay, sometimes, with the alone time, using it for something, we don't know quite what. Meditation. Thomas Merton might see it as putting out an ear for God.
I can't blame anyone for "not feeling comfortable," as my old acquaintance lets me know, wanting nothing to do with me. Fine. Not feeling comfortable having anything to do with me and my way of life, and all my mistaken paths. Even I don't feel comfortable. What if I have to pack up all my books and guitars and bikes and clothes, and the important papers, and the furniture... what can I salvage? Put it in storage? Where? How to pay for that? No one would want me to be going through all this at my age, but that's how it is. It's not always easy to be Zen. And like a fool I still chase the supposed pleasures of life, as if I had no other option. And thereby, wasting time. Wasting years. Wasting time away from the real joys of life, family, hard work, love, closeness, shared time. Not alone time.
Only if you were "mentally ill" would you need "alone time," all that meditation, and all that exercise.
Siddhartha Gautama is the world's first admitted and openly neurotic person. Giving others the courage to follow in his path for mental, spiritual and psychological well-being. The first person to say, "hey, what is this all about anyway..." In doing so, grasping that which is, what we all have in common.
The same way I felt before, looking for a career, and years go by. Writing. The old embrace of that which is unsatisfying about the human condition, of how we are not perfect academic scholars, perfect objects of love and desire, of how we somehow do not end up on the righteous career path we were cut out for, because of all the excess of things going on in our minds, the things we must cope and contend with in order to find out where our talents lie.
People like to portray themselves, if given the opportunity, as energetic, wise, smart, good at all things, policy, investment banking, perfect explication. Perfection. Human intelligence.
Back here, the apartment, even walking around here, I feel a limit, I feel the boredom, the why-be-interested-in-anything in mid-July as summer turned into endurance. Before, it might have been slightly romantic to enjoy being able to walk around in the middle of a neighborhood that felt safe. Lots of trees. A bluff overlooking the storied Potomac, sometimes with a wine skin. But now, I don’t know.
You can turn a corner sometimes. Suddenly you're writing again. Your dropping buckets down a cold natural well, sploshing into the cool deep, a bucket a water of out, slopping, having to strain for gold.
Then it may stop again. Though humor is done by the ability to imitate things. Buster Keaton imitated stunts, Harold Lloyd who had but one fully working hand, they imitated what they could see, as any other artist must, what they could envision
A sense of a space, that is what dementia is about, as much as anything. Physically, you can not move so well in a space. You hover, not knowing exactly which way to turn. How could you stand a good chance at finding anything, a can, a hat, a bottle of water.
It just wasn't right anymore, not being there, but at the same time, a burden of a difficult person, very sharp, not always particularly polite. "I'm just a woman, what would I know..." Oh, if you're going to be morose, it will be catching, she nods, like an imagined queen of the tea room, or a cottage, as if in Ireland somewhere, as she gestures around with her hand. I say this and whatever else I do out of knowing my love for her.
Thinking and writing, is like dreaming, and dreaming needs physical space, a sense of the room and all its objects as you passed through. Dreams are very much a studying of space.
But the bartender, the tender of the wine bar, feels like life is suddenly meaningless, because there is no longer the space you've occupied for the last fifteen years straight like Gehrig.
When you're feeling so lost, it's hard not to want to put a little buzz on. Feeling utterly meaningless. So, you have to get a buzz on and try to have a little taking it slow.
All this happens when you come to an unfamiliar place, or somewhere you've not been to for a long time. This is what we strive for, when we find something new.
Books are space. Each of them we remember as a physical object, knowing where to find a passage in the physicality of the book. Visually, we remember our readings, being they visual in message as well as worded, a favorite childhood book from the different stages of childhood.
My mother has surrounded herself with the inner space of books. I look at them spread across the floor, the ottoman, the old teak table. Layers of books and New York Times sections. Retreating into safety.
And still there is nothing to do up there but join her, sooner or later, when the wine has been poured.
Artists aren't the only ones who care about people who stay up to the wee small hours, but, they co-mingle.
Then it got grim. Not only was I laid off, because of the COVID, but then the federal addition to unemployment is now up in the air. Congress. The religion of the great Donald Trump, waiting for Mitch McConnell, Mark Meadows, Tea Party, Freedom Caucus, and Mnuchin, the King of Foreclosures.
So yeah, now and again I just needed some sort of break, as it was hard to work on anything... a resume? That was a horror enough. So I had a few books, Dark Nights of the Soul, Thomas Moore, or, simply, The Dharma Bums, with such life-saving beautiful prose, St. Raymond of the Dogs in Rocky Mount, NC, living with his mother, his sister and her workmanlike husband. ("Ray Smith" being Kerouac's name in the book.) James Kingsland's, Siddhartha's Brain, a support to which I am indebted and referring to often these days.
I didn't know, or no longer knew, where I stood, by that all important indicator of finances, and I didn't know where my mom stood, after all my helping her, with things, and so it was a real blind time, and then you added on to that, the virus... Masks. Calculations for everything of the new calculus. You can't sleep at night, you have no desire to be awake in the bright hot daylight of busy people.
Another hour zooms by. And you look at, in your minds eye, the pleasant friendships of couples, how they are easy with each other, and great friends and companions, not contesting armies...
So who ever thought reading Kerouac could contribute to sanity and an overall sense of truth and well being, go figure, in these political times, hearing from the most unlikely of all politicians, the fuck-up, the fuck-up-like-me, who went through so many days close to the edge, sad, crying in his sleeping bag, hitchhiking. Much as that college graduate kid who went off to Alaska... Into the Wild.
Sunday. Phone calls start my day. Mom calls. I don't have much to say yet.
I wake up slowly, out of whatever dream. To no job, to feeling like a loser, not on his toes. I didn't sleep well last night, and the ragweed is up. It's hard to know what to do when you live alone, anyway. It's long been a habit of mine, living alone. And now it's even worse.
This lesson has been coming a long time. There's no way to hide it, no way to hide from it now. It's like I knew this was coming, and it makes me nervous.
Mom calls again, with her little news, questions, what's new in the world, I don't know, I'm just getting up. I finally get up. I've just sat down with my fresh pot of Moroccan Mint tea and the phone is ringing, my friend Barbara, the singer from our little wine bar jazz night theater. Looking out for me. Not a great time in the day for me to chat, but she has information for me and support, I haven't spoken to her in a while. I was just about to sit down and write out a few thoughts, but okay. She's a friend.
As I'm speaking to my theater talky friend, Mom is calling again. I keep kindly Barbara on the line, and finally look at the transcribed message Mom has left me, begging for a fly-swatter, dramatic as can be, as I talk with my friend.
The heat is oppressive again, humid. Why is everything happening at once now...
It's my own fault I like to write before I have been beset upon by people, dragging words out of an anxious person who does not feel like talking. I have to catch my breath. I have to get my bearings.
The crisis has come. I want to be a Buddha, but I need a job, and I'm running out of the money to balance everything.
Who wants to get up and write? I don't. But, I felt I should write, and perhaps I needed to. There's something therapeutic about it.
No, I didn't do well last week. Isolated here. Into the wine, out of fear and other poor motivations and pressures, a lack of proper understanding. Scrolling through endless websites, jobs that aren't right, and still, still waiting on Congress to do something. Pressure.
At certain things, we find ourselves being a natural at them. Things that in a larger sense humanity has within, a capacity for. Yoga. Meditation. Music. A little training, and off you go.
Writing is meditation. A careful observation of the thoughts that run through our minds. This is as passive as anything else as far as a process. Thoughts, in phrases and fragments, come and go. The trick is remembering the efficacy of the valid ones, the ones that hold up to, or reflect, Buddhism. The ones that have a ring to them, the ones you sense fit in with the overall picture that you might add to, just a little, but which is already there, led by great minds before us.
And also the reading, the right kind of reading. For which to find, one must be careful and specific, with an intent eye and ear.
This is why the process itself is perhaps the most interesting thing before the writer's eye. Writing leads one naturally to spiritual affairs, to meditation, and on further, to Buddhist thought. Quiet contemplation.
I'm convinced writing brings us somewhere.
I have become Don Quixote, my old head troubled into the insanity of believing in true chivalrous spiritual wisdom.
Okay, so... Mom's alone. I don't feel good about that. I'm paying for an apartment that has become now hard for me to afford. I pray to Jesus. I pray through my chakras. I don't have much in a 401k. I've not worked hard enough. I've squandered however many years I've had to build a career, a reasonable career. I'm nothing. An out of work bartender. I feel very sad. I feel like Jesus in the Garden a lot of days. I didn't want it to be this way, but that's what happened.
I try to look through jobs, content writing, editing... These are news jobs, jobs for which one has to have experience. This is not creative writing from the depths of the soul. I"m not a man. I make excuses.
Why, I wonder, as I stare at the night ceiling, having run out of sleepiness and also of wine, why did I not head into the world from Amherst College, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, ready to take on a prep school classroom, or New York City.
I was a lost saint, who found his way being the saint of hospitality, which I did with my own two hands and feet, starting as busboy. I should have been reading... using my mind, educating.
Mom is stepping up her game. "I don't have a life. Why don't I just kill myself." But Mom, there's wine there. In the fridge, maybe, or the counter. I hear her rummage a bit, doesn't come up with anything. Nope. But Mary brought you some. "But I'm not home!" She starts to cry. Some days the phone calls go better than others.
Jack Kerouac's quote about the poet and time... "A poet is a blind optimist. The world is against him for many reasons. But the poet persists. He believes that he is on the right track, no matter what any of his fellow men say. In his eternal search for truth, the poet is alone. He tries to be timeless in a society built on time."
What I did achieve in those long years useless to me was that I allowed for some space for the poetic. Washington is a well-read town, usually too officious to be dabbling in poetry, and yet there is poetry all around us. Lincoln's ghost, the ideas of the Framers of the Constitution...
But when it all went away, shut down, not enough outdoor seating for the old place, there I was, left behind, stranded, an unemployable everyman poet, tossed out of his own fictional Garden of Eden.
You never know how draining it is, all the outside words. You want the news when you get up, you turn on the radio on the hour for the news. You look at the weather report, on the icon on your screen. You know the news is pretty bleak. But if you engage too much, the words in your own head will be squeezed out of the central focus.
And with everything that's going on in the world, and Trump, and wildfires, and unemployment, it's harder to find any importance, much value, in the poetic mind and the work of tuning into it.
I'm making a stew in the Instant Pot. I have one bottle of wine, trying to control myself on a Thursday night. Mom calls, and of course, I pick up. And she starts on the "but I'm not in my home home... the real home is over two doors, up the road a piece," "yeah, Mom, but I had Mary bring you wine to where you are now, so look in the refrigerator." "But the cat won't come back!" "Yes, he will, he knows, you let him out he always comes back." I ask her if she could find her pills. Where are they? Well, they should be there right in front of you. Where? On the counter... you know, between the toaster oven and where the cat eats... There over at the other house... Okay, Mom.
This goes on for a while. I've been spending the hours of the afternoon working slowly through web sites, on-line forms, looking for jobs. I figure out each little step they want, that the machine wants, that the form wants, and then I get ahead, and forgot to hit the add button so that the information I saved is typed out. The resume, to upload it, for the US Postal Service, it can't be in doc.x, so I figure out how to convert it, there in Microsoft Word. All of this is very taxing on the brain and its verbal motor oil, and you can only get so far. Keep going, sure, the next layer of making something work in the on-line world.
So at the end of conversation, I'm pretty fried. And by the end of one bottle of my ten buck pinot noir, it's not enough. I save a glass for dinner, but I know I don't have enough, and no back-up, except for the 2012 Beaucastel Chateauneuf Du Pape over there lying on its side on top of the Chinese chest my brother passed down to me.
Biden nails his speech, and I've had my delicious beef stew, with lovely chunks of potatoes in it (the carrots soft and yielding onion bits) which I don't normally do given the arthritic factor. And I'm tired, but I've been sitting around in this apartment getting lazier and depressed by my joblessness, and job applications, Content Writer, some kind of tutor and writing coach, and no wonder I liked the restaurant, because it was just simple, hard work, tired out, you ate your dinner, had a glass of wine, and you went home.
But there's really not much point in being a poet. It's certainly not a job. And I made that great mistake. I can see why I thought I should be one, perhaps more so a poet of prose, in a Melville way, but it's all by ear, musical, anyway, words, when you write them down out of your head. You wouldn't even expect it to pay the bills.
Even ten minutes of NPR, a few outside thoughts, and the line to mind gets staticky. Then what that happens, it's a tough tug of war. Keep going? Are you done for the day? Should you, as old Ernie put it, stop and let the well replenish itself over night... Poetic thoughts, go poof. Watch a cat video on Facebook; that's what Werner Herzog does.
At dusk I find out the back window in the bathroom, deer, a buck, later joined by a female at dusk. I watch them graze on the weeds and vines, flicking their ears against insect life. But the male, I see that his velvet is hanging down from his antlers, like leathery rags that flap about. As night falls, there are male deer now, sitting down now, in profile as they chew their cud. I hear another plane coming into town, and the lights of it pass overhead with its whoosh, low, reminding me of 9/11. Then another one comes over,
I cannot even describe this time. It brought out all the lies I'd been living for the last 35 years, all the illusions, the fool's paradise I'd kept afloat until I couldn't. The consequences being the loss of my possessions and my living space. It was not an easy time to write, with an ever present unseen enemy of suddenly being out of work, out of luck, out of income, no money to pay the rent. It was a very hard to write. I forgot how. But I needed to do it, despite it all, just for saving, for reassuring something inside me that I had to protect.
But I knew it all along. I would need to make a transition, at some point, yes of course, I would have to grow up.
Today, what did I do. I laid around in bed for a long time. I just didn't feel like getting up, and that's hard to say. I didn't feel any hope. Over the course of the evening, speaking with an old school friend Darryl, from my old hometown, I drank red wine from 1.5 liter bottle of Sangiovese, 12%. Then I heated up the oven and the iron pan and seared lamb sausages from the farmer's market, along with roasted broccoli, and then later a couple of hot dogs, while still drinking away. Then I listened to the Democratic Party Convention on the radio, then I read some, then I looked at what I'd managed to do earlier in the day, applying for a couple of Whole Foods jobs, Safeway, then looking the possibilities of content writing on the website Indeed.com. I could not find the form to fill out for being a substitute teacher on the DC Schools website, as hard as I looked. I need to learn Zoom, I told myself. The thought of tutoring scares me. The scope of disaster, enormous and all my own fault.
To he who would write, beware; it will be a disaster. Get a job. Lead a decent life. Don't allow the shame to fall upon you. Use your understanding of words to be an editor.
I'm mediating to Tara Brach, who is talking about bringing a smile to your eyes, the facial muscles, the heart, when I get a text from my aunt, who's going in for cataract surgery the next morning. I give her a call, and then give her a run through on what I'm doing looking for a job. I'm tired at this point, and speaking about job prospects and what you've been trying and how you've been taking it gets tedious to explain, though perfectly necessary, and so I start eyeing the one bottle of $10.99 Pinot Noir I bought across the street today in the little market under new Korean ownership. Okay, it's time. We have a nice conversation, including of how my grandfather started to see rats climbing the walls once they tried giving him antidepressants in the nursing home where he was laid up after his stroke, left side paralyzed. He couldn't take pseudophed without similar craziness, which I avoid too.
But once you open a bottle... I have slices of low-sodium chicken breast with a spread of hummus, and go back to the computer, looking at content writer job offerings, taking a grammar test for one I've applied for, which goes surprisingly smoothly. I see all the flaws in the presented sentences. This is easy for me. It makes sense.
Later on, past everyone else's bedtime, I take a walk around the block down toward the bluff, but I say to myself "I'll never be happy now, because I've missed all chances at a normal life, wife, kids, all the usual of God's happinesses, giving grandchildren in my image to comfort my old mom in her tough old age, and who will look after me with comforts in my own old age..." It's just another thing stacked up against me, the isolation of these times, the misery of lying in your bed looking up at the pattern of light through the blinds on the ceiling, unable to fall asleep.
I wake up feeling guilty. Of course I do. Mom alone far away. Poverty. Too many possessions. Too much wine for too long, thinking I'd be a sommelier.
I spend much of the day on the bed, meditating, corpse pose. There's nothing I really want to do, or feel I can do. You can only take so much before you need to calm yourself and regroup. I have some tea, even freshly made, but it doesn't inspire me. The water wasn't hot enough, and I was light on the tea leaves. It's raining heavily, Hurricane Isaias coming through as a tropical storm, wind up in the trees when I wake with the light. I call mom, no answer, get through to her later, then go back to my meditations on the bed. No room on the floor with the bike on the trainer stand.
I finally get up and take a shower. Shaving off a week's growth of beard takes several passes, holding the razor under the water steadily after each swipe to clear the blades. My prescriptions should be ready, so, I try mom again as I venture up the sidewalk past the reservoirs up the CVS in the old Palisades movie theater. Dr. Patel called in, after my appointment Monday. I'm standing in the line, after the woman in front of me, not so happy herself, the African lady finally coming back from the bathroom walking on one artificial leg, is just about through with her business. And then the phone is buzzing. Mom calling. Yes, Mom, what should I do, everybody left, maybe I should just kill myself. What should she do. I'm not doing too well myself, I tell her. I'm at the CVS. Can I call you back in five minutes...
The pharmacist behind the second counter suggests I get a flu shot. Sure, why not. One more precaution for the times. One of the prescriptions is ready, the generic Lexapro, at a slightly higher dosage. The doctor forgot, so the African lady tells me, looking hesitantly into her computer terminal screen, to call in the beta-blocker Propranolol which tames blood pressure and eases some of the body's reaction to anxiety.
As soon as I get out, I try mom's landline again. No answer. It's getting hotter now, sweat pooling under my cap, matting down my hair as I walk my loser self back along the reservoirs toward the little apartment, putting my mask up as people approach, under the elms.
The Buddhist thinking tells you to mediate upon your cravings, to observe them without judgment. What do they feel like? Where in the body. I keep trying mom as I get into the apartment. Taking off my linen shirt, the hat, my glasses, the mask, washing my hands. The craving for wine starts in the chest, lower, near the solar plexus. It's a desire to find some calm, with all the stress of the day that's hitting you in the gut, a weight that's pressing on you, extra, on top of breathing. Then you throw in the loneliness on top of that.
Just a little bit, on the rocks, with a good splash of soda water. Just to calm down. It doesn't feel good necessarily, with a few sips in, but it's a habit, an obsession, and in some ways, it works.
Then she calls, as I'm cooking the black-eyed peas I soaked overnight, around 9 at night. Again, it's the matter of whether she's in the right place or not. Yes, you are mom. The cat knows his way back and forth. She'd put the phone down, per our agreement, to go out and check to make sure, looking at the number on the apartment townhouse complex. I waited awhile. Finally, I heard the kitchen door, not the front door, creak open, and then I hear her talking to the cat, asking him if this can works, after opening it up. Then she goes away. I hear her in a few more minutes calling my name, as if I were there in person. Then I hear the phone go click. So I try calling back, it rings, she picks it up, but doesn't speak to it, and then she hangs up again. I call, it rings, but then I see she's calling.
When I get up, and have the courage, I look at these last few Covid-Diary blog postings. Rushes, they are like, to be looked upon as film, raw and unedited, for what they caught and didn't catch.
There are still the great worries, condensing in the lone night as dew out of the sky, profound. As if everything were coming together, the November election, my mother's health, possible eviction notice from not having a job, from not being employable at age 55, something I've left myself open to. But those cheery thoughts subside, and there is the writing again to look at. As Buddha says, good will follow after pure thoughts, and so I look for how to think pure thoughts, rather than evil ones.
Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it.
Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Joy follows a pure thought like a shadow that never leaves. (The Dhammapada.)
I'm drinking my green tea, the gas on the stove working again. My personal hotspot is giving me trouble again. I never quite figured out how to get internet here, though I pay Verizon a monthly amount for a landline, no working phone jack. Depressions make you irresponsible.
The Corona Virus Pandemic has come with different stages, globally, nationally, locally, personally.
There will be many more steps to go through, each one veiled, no control over it. No way to get the mind around the shock, the misery.
Some of us are okay, sometimes, with the alone time, using it for something, we don't know quite what. Meditation. Thomas Merton might see it as putting out an ear for God.
I can't blame anyone for "not feeling comfortable," as my old acquaintance lets me know, wanting nothing to do with me. Fine. Not feeling comfortable having anything to do with me and my way of life, and all my mistaken paths. Even I don't feel comfortable. What if I have to pack up all my books and guitars and bikes and clothes, and the important papers, and the furniture... what can I salvage? Put it in storage? Where? How to pay for that? No one would want me to be going through all this at my age, but that's how it is. It's not always easy to be Zen. And like a fool I still chase the supposed pleasures of life, as if I had no other option. And thereby, wasting time. Wasting years. Wasting time away from the real joys of life, family, hard work, love, closeness, shared time. Not alone time.
Only if you were "mentally ill" would you need "alone time," all that meditation, and all that exercise.
Siddhartha Gautama is the world's first admitted and openly neurotic person. Giving others the courage to follow in his path for mental, spiritual and psychological well-being. The first person to say, "hey, what is this all about anyway..." In doing so, grasping that which is, what we all have in common.
The same way I felt before, looking for a career, and years go by. Writing. The old embrace of that which is unsatisfying about the human condition, of how we are not perfect academic scholars, perfect objects of love and desire, of how we somehow do not end up on the righteous career path we were cut out for, because of all the excess of things going on in our minds, the things we must cope and contend with in order to find out where our talents lie.
People like to portray themselves, if given the opportunity, as energetic, wise, smart, good at all things, policy, investment banking, perfect explication. Perfection. Human intelligence.
Dostoevsky liked the night. He liked, at least in his fictional world, religious elders who had friendship for the rustic, the idiot, the simpleton, the sinful. In his own fictional world, Dostoevsky was the idiot himself.
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.
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. Because it will. It does.
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.
This is a hard time to write. The sense of needing to look for a job, concern over an aging parent, not to mention having to take a long look at one's own situation... all caused by the sloth that is the writer's life.... Because I've made no decision, stood for no clear choice, not really entitled to anything more than a by-stander's career...
I'm feeling lost, without the bar to go to. I admit it. The space. Fifteen years, your brain gets used to it.
And as far as the professional world goes, I am a child, an id, who feeds himself, goes for walks, but does little to help people out in the real world. For that, yes, takes work.
The apartment is cluttered. Books. Piles here and there. Some in boxes. Not the energy to sort it out.
I clean out the bottom of the refrigerator and its bins, something having spilled, chocolate milk leaking out of a container while I was away two months. Isolation is not fun. Yeah, this is the consequence of the attempted living of a spiritual life, right... There's no way to beat the system, the economic positioning of human beings... You sit around with your books, drink some wine, great, but it's not going to get you anywhere.
I took a walk around last night, after writing down some of my thoughts, but even nature and the river at night had a useless feeling to it, a void. As if to say, "who cares, go back to your own world, which obviously you have neglected..."
Write a resume, spring into action, serve in a school, be a clerk... Rise above being an undesirable, the uselessness of one who is little more than being a friendly guy for a profession. Time is money, and opportunity, right?
Gradually, incrementally, I try to get used to the apartment again. I try to be a human being again, back to before it all got hi-jacked, years and years ago, the restaurant business, and before, my own failures as a college student. What can be salvaged...
I make friends with the trees again, and they had changed in two months. The fields in the parks are freshly mowed, and I walk barefoot in them again, doing basic yoga on the bare ground, the grass, the pine needles, the little bluff, wherever would have me, warrior, tree, putting my feet up while lying on my back, and when side to side holding the legs together, good for the liver, and then a quick head-stand after sun salutations, as the mosquitoes, smaller than usual, and with more pronounced striping on their hind legs were starting in. It contents me to be looking out over the river again, over at the Virginia side. Another war of division going on. A division less defined, but just as palpable.
Many emotional identifications come through me, and I had experienced many since moving in early in March in 2019, after living with my good old friend and neighbor landlord for so long over there off of Embassy Row, though it doesn't help me now, in fact the opposite. You have to let them come through you softly, and the yoga had opened up the channels. I remembered the snow falling on the Elm Tree, the street wet, a bus going by, as I sat there waiting for the bus in the other direction coming so I could eat something.
So, after three soaks in epsom salts, pressing down, a tiny chard of glass is finally raised out of the flesh of my heal, a week or so after. Fresh blood come out, but not much. I bandage it up again, go for a walk, gingerly stepping forward, out of the apartment. The index finger, I can get away with a gauze pad taped over it. But with the combination, both wounds on the left side, with the bandage care, it slows me down. My finger is still slow, too thick to bend.
The problem with being creative, is that not only will your work be creative, but that you will be creative making problems for yourself, such as you would not if you went by the rules.
There’s a lot in Twain. And if you’ve run into people, looked at them fair and square, you know what Twain is writing about in his tales. Creativity. This is all the tension he needs. The possession of those with free will to continue on with the imaginative creative stance, in the face of public disproval, the great lack of faith versus those who do wish for such examinations.
In Twain’s world creativity is natural, a given thing, like fresh water. The narrator’s imagination reveals the natural intellectual devices, the wrinklings of native human species genius...
Huck goes down the river, with, of all people, Jim. He is heeding the oldest of takes of moral conduct, recognizing the equality of a fellow being, rich or poor. Huck is already fairly established at being outside of normal polite society. He has an alcoholic father, from whom he is escaping by going on adventure that is psychologically justified.
Being somewhat on the margins, it is no earth-shattering offense to normal polite society and the chamber of commerce if such a youth goes off on travels. It might provide a little outside commentary, a chance for an outing of comic wit, at least a break from the norm.
Twain’s prose keeps us happy, content, entertained, amused. We don’t have the burden of mid-life yet upon us, we don’t have to bring our own imaginative experience here. We do not have to right away bear with the potentially profound and terrifying thought of the what if we ourselves were to do such a thing, picking up and moving out into the unknown like a railroad tramp. We are content with the refreshment of an outdoor adventure, a camping trip in good strong capable hands, a clever narrator who will keep us filled in as far as what to see and how the campfire is doing. The big river... I’ve never done that.
Twain takes us in through a genial backdoor to bear witness to the hypocrisies of society...
Creativity, of course, is a private individual thing. We might go about it genially, in our spare time, or not. But we have within, always, this great potential, even hanging about us, like Jesus’s ability of drawing parables, or like an imagined higher and more refined being like ourselves but developed as if on planets far away, were we to operate on a plane of higher and purer wisdom.
As we know, it takes great amounts of time to get anything done, it takes great amounts of travels. And, furthermore, no, you can’t really talk about any of it, not one bit, without being taken as a reckless crazy wild person.
And so, to be realistic, you have to grow to accept that someone near you, innocuous, might be going about a wonderful creative personal life, imaginative works one has no idea about.
But woe unto the world, the world cannot handle all the creativity...
And it is, after all, one of the great insults to snub the creativity of another, as long as it isn’t offensive, up there with The Rejection at Nazareth. A failure of education.
So there I was, not doing so well, or so it seemed by acceptable standards of adult life. My mom, when I could not restrain myself for correcting her at dysfunction, hey, she would say, I’m 80.
What could I say, to anyone... I’d wasted the supposedly best most vigorous 30 years of my life spent in the world of adult creativity. Guess what, folks. It left me with nothing. We might all feel that way.
But Twain reminds us. We are given the room to be creative. We are out in lost channels of the wide river in heavy fog, disoriented in the current, spinning round. A kind of creative self destruction or a reorientation. We get to know ourselves better, and perhaps it is our burden that our own self is all we really know, even as we are lucky to get the surprises of generosity from other people, as their own individuality will allow.
I twist in the current, falling, lost. And in this sort of dream it comes to me, here, up at my mother’s, where I linger on my camping mattress, that the old Princess from that book I wrote, with all its strange echoes and connections and half-parables, takes up the same space, the identical psychological shape in my head as my mother. Unpredictable. The Princess, not good for my self-esteem... In the same way, a lot of space, from all angles, so that one is left without a leg to stand on. The vain attempt to work, even apologetically, with the otherworldly logic of the female mind.
Now as her memory fades so that conversation is weighted down by repetition, her moodiness and tirades of justifiable anguish and vulnerability, and I being stuck here in the same boat, the similarity between her and the old princess shocks me almosr.
And the long drive, to escape, long, charged itself, to a place that is uncertain, tenuous, is fraught. How will I rescue myself, how will I find an answer practical but also suitable, bearable for the writer, who has too long sought to create himself, building up his own little self as a cottage industry, and now having been given the time away from toil, has wasted this time, taking up the duty of another, having to cringe at the weight, an adult reverting in old age to childhood and baby talk, and even the larger the weight of finding a way to provide a secure life for himself now in a changed world.
Between such heavy psychology presences, domineering, in need of constant placating to the point of my own dishonesty, how do I live, find my own way if I wrest myself free....
There is that tie from Ahab to Huck Finn. The journey, the adventure for meaning, creative flights, the destruction of self, finding a deeper self as one becomes informed at the peak and pit of his lostness.
These days it takes the train a longer time to leave the station. There are the hindrances, torpor, depressing thoughts to overcome. I got up and it was cool out. I put a tee shirt on, socks, my newer Brooks running shoes and made it out in the morning light for a walk around the block. The river is high, and deep milk chocolate smooth up the green branches on the other side, up to the tops of its banks. I haven't felt very chipper as we all wait for Congress to negotiate with the hard-line Republican senate over the supplemental unemployment benefits.
I get back, turn the air conditioner back on, half some slices of pastrami. And it takes a big effort just to get the old stick-free teflon pan to crack open three eggs and cook them sunny side up. I take in cups of yesterday's second run green tea, but none of it leaves me with anything but a wish to meditate.
I could feel bitter, where I have left myself, my own choices, my acts, all things like that.
Many great books start with Jonah's situation. Moby Dick's preacher sets the tone early, in New Bedford.
A part of my brain threatens to flash time-machine memories, the perceived significant moments, that encroach upon the work of writing, as writing can strike the brain as idle time, a time of not being fully engaged with any sort of work. The default mode takes us into rumination. But the other part of the brain fights back. It is in a fight for its health. A fresh pot of tea helps. It's difficult work, much like fighting against a current.
You were a good person to be in the restaurant business. But it had its misguidedness, its excesses, even without intending any. A mistake in life. A bad choice, given that there are much more useful ways to serve your fellow human beings than show your sad old pretty face in wry humor before those you serve, as if to claim being a good sport in life, when we all are trying to survive.
Meditating takes me back into groggy rest, than sleep, and these are hindrances too, but the body needs rest. The attempt to get back onto a nine to five schedule has failed me once again. I don't know how to be a part of that world, I'm afraid. It frightens me with its traffic and daylight. Though this is not a great attitude to have.
But how can all this happen to us? I wasn't greedy. I worked hard enough. I was steady and loyal, and brought in a customer following, as best as one can. I charged people for drinks. I suggested them for what to get off the menu or the daily specials. I pushed the sweetbreads. I pushed the fish specials, with sincerity and belief. I told many stories about how things were done, the beauty of duck confit's slow long processes down there in the kitchen. A ship, a bastion of old school French cooking, stocks that bubble away all night with all sort of trimming and end of herb or vegetable or bone or onion skin. I'd make hearty wine recommendations, and tell them my stories of serving this particular wine. Great with the kidneys in the mustard sauce. Perfect with crusty boneless pigs feet, and the cassoulet. "Try the veal," we like to say here, I'd joke, like a mobster place, recommending the braised veal cheeks osso bucco style. Or the nice seared medium rare calves liver, Provencal style, with black olive, caper, tomato. A seafood special to tell them about.
We took care of people. It was truly a respite from the office for many, a doorway to home, or an alternative. A pleasant break. An adult playground where learning still happened, where dialog presented itself, slowly or quickly, boringly routine, or not, who knows what you'll find. One can only take so much news these days.
If I don't keep writing, there is hardly any way I can deal with it. The failures to contain all this, which could have been done, had they followed the Obama playbook. No one I know wanted this new guy, the Trumper. Now look what he's done.
And then it was like I felt I lost the ability to write, or rather I began to see how dire my employment prospects truly were after all my years of fooling around working as a bartender. All my years of playing, not being serious. The only real work was a half-assed attempt at writing, amateur stuff, completely. Honest self-explorations, perhaps, but useless.
But not all of us know how to act as professional breadwinners and adults. I don't know why this is so.
What a week.
The spiritual stuff, that angle on life, you can wear that out. You can get yourself to a point where you really don't know what to do with yourself. It's like Don Quixote, your head gets soft.
And nothing much to report. Waiting on Congress, for the crucial Federal unemployment addition to DC. The Republicans are talking 200 instead of 600 bucks per week, and that's not good if you're trying to pay DC rent. And now it's been pushed off 'til next week. I've applied for an overnight grocery team member at Whole Foods. I've done an application for a tutoring company, an online interview. My resume still sucks, half formed. I am sad, depressed. My mom calls from time to time. Says kind things. I feel guilty. What am I doing here anyway... There's not much, it seems to put down on my resume. Shamefully.
And now I see clearly where thirty years in the restaurant business as a bartender with no plan has left me as far as being employable. I feel it in my bones, too.
What's in a day? Scroll through Facebook again. Check a couple of job suggestion web sites. Scroll through at all the things I'm not qualified for. Well, I didn't listen. I wasn't a good kid. I have been dulled down.
I've worn out my thoughts. My therapist suggests maybe perhaps I should move out of DC.
Moving hits me psychologically. An old theme. I've barely unpacked things here, after the move from the old house, where I had space and bookshelves fit for a king. Moving... It's like being ostracized. And there's a cop element to it, too, the old "move along," if you escape being evicted.
So what have I done this week... Linger in bed and on couch, as the window air conditioner chugs along, wondering how I'll ever get out of this mess... Job descriptions are quite daunting, foreign to me. I'm an organizer on the ground, there's lots I've done, create a little friendly community where all are equal, but that's nothing you can really point out and put down on your piece of paper.
I took walks. Slow ones. I did yoga. I ate a combination of black-eyed peas and black beans on a Saturday night, and after a walk to the farmer's market, and then back, all sweaty, and then down to the pines for yoga, waiting the return of Mitch McConnell and the Senate to decide my fate, on a hot day, doing my yoga things began to move, gaseous, unsettled, such that I calculated I should use the woods behind the Urban Ecology Center building, careful to take a good handful of large leaves from the Paper Magnolia tree, soft of the underside to help doing nature's bidding out in nature, which I was careful about, succeeding, leaning up against a chainlink fence after removing my flip-flops, yoga shorts, boxers... Relieving myself, "doing that which no other man could do for him," a large green katydid cricket alighted upon my calf, looking up at me studiously, not budging. My bowels relieving, moving away with a step to the side for the last, then peeing as I squatted. Finally, having cleaned my bottom off well, I whisk away the cricket, as it seemed very intent on me, as if I were it's great tree god of human shit beckoning it to come forth out of the green to present itself, put my boxers back on, then my shorts, then my flip-flop sandals, and still no one around. I felt a lot better, too.
That was as exciting as my week got. And then on a Friday night just sitting around, after a walk around the neighborhood in the noontime drizzle, the first cool weather in a long time, then to say hi at the little Korean Market for some pastrami and sliced chicken breast, a bottle of ten dollar pinot noir from the south of France. A nap, out of a lack of anything else to do, not feeling productive, anxiety levels skyrocketing, try to just be quiet, let it blow away if it can. Then another walk, longer. The grass wet, along the old trolley track. I move over to the side, putting my mask back on, as a couple with dogs comes toward me, then a tall woman, lithe and attractive like a model jogs by from behind me. She gives me a thank you wave as she passes, and she jogs up ahead and I go along at my own slow pace. It's been difficult of late. Just to keep moving. Later, she passes me the other way, just as a man without his shirt on runs by very fast, as I stand off the trail in the higher weeds.
The night. I cook a filet of black cod from the Farmer's Market, kept in the freezer from months ago. Turmeric, ginger, cayenne, flakes of salt and a quick modest grind of pepper. I put the old Bianchi on the trainer, the bike tire tread lifting off in one spot, flap flap flap, as I pedal the wheel rolling forward over the rolling bar. I get HBO's Chernobyl series going on my laptop, which starts to heat up, then the little wheel on the screen spinning round and round, the screen frozen, so I have to work at it, putting the old laptop in the freezer to cool off at one point. I manage to keep entertained. Later I read from Visions of Cody, not the dialog parts, and yes, Kerouac has his style, his schtick, and it feels a little transparent to me. Except that he creates a style, a way of talking that you can only do by writing. The writing of his way is very close to the mind, to speech, but translated, in a way that couldn't be done in normal talking.
And when I get up, finally, and make tea, have a bit of cold sliced low sodium chicken breast from the little deli, I realize I am a bum, nothing but a big bum. A lot of that has had to do with drinking, which causes missed opportunities and great regrets and a kind of dishonesty. Yes, memories of college, just messing around instead of all that priceless reading and priceless classes I could have done or taken. There's the pull of a Christian glass of wine, but that can be dangerous too, a slippery slope.
Sensuality is one of the five hindrances. I know it all too well. And the other ones too. In addition to Sensory Desire, as I suppose the senses must be attached to something one finds desirable, there is Ill-Will, there is Sloth-and-Torpor, there is Restlessness-and-Worry, and also, Doubt. Yes. "The food of delusion," as the Buddha said.
I almost feel afraid of myself, as I sit here, like how it would have been easy to lounge in bed, and I did that long enough anyway. Yes, it is scary when you realize that you really are a bum, given all you could have been.
When I call my mom, for the second time today, now that it's about one or so in the afternoon, and when I tell her I'm feeling this way, a recognition, she immediately tells me, "no, you're not a bum, you're a very polite person..." and other kindly things.
Perhaps Kerouac drank in order to find, or create, some kind of adventure. You could, when drinking, kind of make up a story, fall into adventure and mis-adventure, you could meet crazy people who were also drunk and going about things in an uncontrolled fashion. And I know. I have fallen myself, in with bad people, as I grew up out in the countryside where less advanced and enlightened views and prejudices, and other bad habits, can take hold.
There was, of course, another side of him, the studious side, delving seriously in the Dharma, knowing his terms and his sutras, and being able to apply them. But, he would lapse.
How's being a good Buddhist going to save me, I wonder... I say to myself. I could use some improvements as a person in this world, in society as well. To be less distracted...
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.
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. Because it will. It does.
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.
This is a hard time to write. The sense of needing to look for a job, concern over an aging parent, not to mention having to take a long look at one's own situation... all caused by the sloth that is the writer's life.... Because I've made no decision, stood for no clear choice, not really entitled to anything more than a by-stander's career...
I'm feeling lost, without the bar to go to. I admit it. The space. Fifteen years, your brain gets used to it.
And as far as the professional world goes, I am a child, an id, who feeds himself, goes for walks, but does little to help people out in the real world. For that, yes, takes work.
The apartment is cluttered. Books. Piles here and there. Some in boxes. Not the energy to sort it out.
I clean out the bottom of the refrigerator and its bins, something having spilled, chocolate milk leaking out of a container while I was away two months. Isolation is not fun. Yeah, this is the consequence of the attempted living of a spiritual life, right... There's no way to beat the system, the economic positioning of human beings... You sit around with your books, drink some wine, great, but it's not going to get you anywhere.
I took a walk around last night, after writing down some of my thoughts, but even nature and the river at night had a useless feeling to it, a void. As if to say, "who cares, go back to your own world, which obviously you have neglected..."
Write a resume, spring into action, serve in a school, be a clerk... Rise above being an undesirable, the uselessness of one who is little more than being a friendly guy for a profession. Time is money, and opportunity, right?
Gradually, incrementally, I try to get used to the apartment again. I try to be a human being again, back to before it all got hi-jacked, years and years ago, the restaurant business, and before, my own failures as a college student. What can be salvaged...
I make friends with the trees again, and they had changed in two months. The fields in the parks are freshly mowed, and I walk barefoot in them again, doing basic yoga on the bare ground, the grass, the pine needles, the little bluff, wherever would have me, warrior, tree, putting my feet up while lying on my back, and when side to side holding the legs together, good for the liver, and then a quick head-stand after sun salutations, as the mosquitoes, smaller than usual, and with more pronounced striping on their hind legs were starting in. It contents me to be looking out over the river again, over at the Virginia side. Another war of division going on. A division less defined, but just as palpable.
Many emotional identifications come through me, and I had experienced many since moving in early in March in 2019, after living with my good old friend and neighbor landlord for so long over there off of Embassy Row, though it doesn't help me now, in fact the opposite. You have to let them come through you softly, and the yoga had opened up the channels. I remembered the snow falling on the Elm Tree, the street wet, a bus going by, as I sat there waiting for the bus in the other direction coming so I could eat something.
So, after three soaks in epsom salts, pressing down, a tiny chard of glass is finally raised out of the flesh of my heal, a week or so after. Fresh blood come out, but not much. I bandage it up again, go for a walk, gingerly stepping forward, out of the apartment. The index finger, I can get away with a gauze pad taped over it. But with the combination, both wounds on the left side, with the bandage care, it slows me down. My finger is still slow, too thick to bend.
The problem with being creative, is that not only will your work be creative, but that you will be creative making problems for yourself, such as you would not if you went by the rules.
There’s a lot in Twain. And if you’ve run into people, looked at them fair and square, you know what Twain is writing about in his tales. Creativity. This is all the tension he needs. The possession of those with free will to continue on with the imaginative creative stance, in the face of public disproval, the great lack of faith versus those who do wish for such examinations.
In Twain’s world creativity is natural, a given thing, like fresh water. The narrator’s imagination reveals the natural intellectual devices, the wrinklings of native human species genius...
Huck goes down the river, with, of all people, Jim. He is heeding the oldest of takes of moral conduct, recognizing the equality of a fellow being, rich or poor. Huck is already fairly established at being outside of normal polite society. He has an alcoholic father, from whom he is escaping by going on adventure that is psychologically justified.
Being somewhat on the margins, it is no earth-shattering offense to normal polite society and the chamber of commerce if such a youth goes off on travels. It might provide a little outside commentary, a chance for an outing of comic wit, at least a break from the norm.
Twain’s prose keeps us happy, content, entertained, amused. We don’t have the burden of mid-life yet upon us, we don’t have to bring our own imaginative experience here. We do not have to right away bear with the potentially profound and terrifying thought of the what if we ourselves were to do such a thing, picking up and moving out into the unknown like a railroad tramp. We are content with the refreshment of an outdoor adventure, a camping trip in good strong capable hands, a clever narrator who will keep us filled in as far as what to see and how the campfire is doing. The big river... I’ve never done that.
Twain takes us in through a genial backdoor to bear witness to the hypocrisies of society...
Creativity, of course, is a private individual thing. We might go about it genially, in our spare time, or not. But we have within, always, this great potential, even hanging about us, like Jesus’s ability of drawing parables, or like an imagined higher and more refined being like ourselves but developed as if on planets far away, were we to operate on a plane of higher and purer wisdom.
As we know, it takes great amounts of time to get anything done, it takes great amounts of travels. And, furthermore, no, you can’t really talk about any of it, not one bit, without being taken as a reckless crazy wild person.
And so, to be realistic, you have to grow to accept that someone near you, innocuous, might be going about a wonderful creative personal life, imaginative works one has no idea about.
But woe unto the world, the world cannot handle all the creativity...
And it is, after all, one of the great insults to snub the creativity of another, as long as it isn’t offensive, up there with The Rejection at Nazareth. A failure of education.
So there I was, not doing so well, or so it seemed by acceptable standards of adult life. My mom, when I could not restrain myself for correcting her at dysfunction, hey, she would say, I’m 80.
What could I say, to anyone... I’d wasted the supposedly best most vigorous 30 years of my life spent in the world of adult creativity. Guess what, folks. It left me with nothing. We might all feel that way.
But Twain reminds us. We are given the room to be creative. We are out in lost channels of the wide river in heavy fog, disoriented in the current, spinning round. A kind of creative self destruction or a reorientation. We get to know ourselves better, and perhaps it is our burden that our own self is all we really know, even as we are lucky to get the surprises of generosity from other people, as their own individuality will allow.
I twist in the current, falling, lost. And in this sort of dream it comes to me, here, up at my mother’s, where I linger on my camping mattress, that the old Princess from that book I wrote, with all its strange echoes and connections and half-parables, takes up the same space, the identical psychological shape in my head as my mother. Unpredictable. The Princess, not good for my self-esteem... In the same way, a lot of space, from all angles, so that one is left without a leg to stand on. The vain attempt to work, even apologetically, with the otherworldly logic of the female mind.
Now as her memory fades so that conversation is weighted down by repetition, her moodiness and tirades of justifiable anguish and vulnerability, and I being stuck here in the same boat, the similarity between her and the old princess shocks me almosr.
And the long drive, to escape, long, charged itself, to a place that is uncertain, tenuous, is fraught. How will I rescue myself, how will I find an answer practical but also suitable, bearable for the writer, who has too long sought to create himself, building up his own little self as a cottage industry, and now having been given the time away from toil, has wasted this time, taking up the duty of another, having to cringe at the weight, an adult reverting in old age to childhood and baby talk, and even the larger the weight of finding a way to provide a secure life for himself now in a changed world.
Between such heavy psychology presences, domineering, in need of constant placating to the point of my own dishonesty, how do I live, find my own way if I wrest myself free....
There is that tie from Ahab to Huck Finn. The journey, the adventure for meaning, creative flights, the destruction of self, finding a deeper self as one becomes informed at the peak and pit of his lostness.
These days it takes the train a longer time to leave the station. There are the hindrances, torpor, depressing thoughts to overcome. I got up and it was cool out. I put a tee shirt on, socks, my newer Brooks running shoes and made it out in the morning light for a walk around the block. The river is high, and deep milk chocolate smooth up the green branches on the other side, up to the tops of its banks. I haven't felt very chipper as we all wait for Congress to negotiate with the hard-line Republican senate over the supplemental unemployment benefits.
I get back, turn the air conditioner back on, half some slices of pastrami. And it takes a big effort just to get the old stick-free teflon pan to crack open three eggs and cook them sunny side up. I take in cups of yesterday's second run green tea, but none of it leaves me with anything but a wish to meditate.
I could feel bitter, where I have left myself, my own choices, my acts, all things like that.
Many great books start with Jonah's situation. Moby Dick's preacher sets the tone early, in New Bedford.
A part of my brain threatens to flash time-machine memories, the perceived significant moments, that encroach upon the work of writing, as writing can strike the brain as idle time, a time of not being fully engaged with any sort of work. The default mode takes us into rumination. But the other part of the brain fights back. It is in a fight for its health. A fresh pot of tea helps. It's difficult work, much like fighting against a current.
You were a good person to be in the restaurant business. But it had its misguidedness, its excesses, even without intending any. A mistake in life. A bad choice, given that there are much more useful ways to serve your fellow human beings than show your sad old pretty face in wry humor before those you serve, as if to claim being a good sport in life, when we all are trying to survive.
Meditating takes me back into groggy rest, than sleep, and these are hindrances too, but the body needs rest. The attempt to get back onto a nine to five schedule has failed me once again. I don't know how to be a part of that world, I'm afraid. It frightens me with its traffic and daylight. Though this is not a great attitude to have.
But how can all this happen to us? I wasn't greedy. I worked hard enough. I was steady and loyal, and brought in a customer following, as best as one can. I charged people for drinks. I suggested them for what to get off the menu or the daily specials. I pushed the sweetbreads. I pushed the fish specials, with sincerity and belief. I told many stories about how things were done, the beauty of duck confit's slow long processes down there in the kitchen. A ship, a bastion of old school French cooking, stocks that bubble away all night with all sort of trimming and end of herb or vegetable or bone or onion skin. I'd make hearty wine recommendations, and tell them my stories of serving this particular wine. Great with the kidneys in the mustard sauce. Perfect with crusty boneless pigs feet, and the cassoulet. "Try the veal," we like to say here, I'd joke, like a mobster place, recommending the braised veal cheeks osso bucco style. Or the nice seared medium rare calves liver, Provencal style, with black olive, caper, tomato. A seafood special to tell them about.
We took care of people. It was truly a respite from the office for many, a doorway to home, or an alternative. A pleasant break. An adult playground where learning still happened, where dialog presented itself, slowly or quickly, boringly routine, or not, who knows what you'll find. One can only take so much news these days.
If I don't keep writing, there is hardly any way I can deal with it. The failures to contain all this, which could have been done, had they followed the Obama playbook. No one I know wanted this new guy, the Trumper. Now look what he's done.
And then it was like I felt I lost the ability to write, or rather I began to see how dire my employment prospects truly were after all my years of fooling around working as a bartender. All my years of playing, not being serious. The only real work was a half-assed attempt at writing, amateur stuff, completely. Honest self-explorations, perhaps, but useless.
But not all of us know how to act as professional breadwinners and adults. I don't know why this is so.
What a week.
The spiritual stuff, that angle on life, you can wear that out. You can get yourself to a point where you really don't know what to do with yourself. It's like Don Quixote, your head gets soft.
And nothing much to report. Waiting on Congress, for the crucial Federal unemployment addition to DC. The Republicans are talking 200 instead of 600 bucks per week, and that's not good if you're trying to pay DC rent. And now it's been pushed off 'til next week. I've applied for an overnight grocery team member at Whole Foods. I've done an application for a tutoring company, an online interview. My resume still sucks, half formed. I am sad, depressed. My mom calls from time to time. Says kind things. I feel guilty. What am I doing here anyway... There's not much, it seems to put down on my resume. Shamefully.
And now I see clearly where thirty years in the restaurant business as a bartender with no plan has left me as far as being employable. I feel it in my bones, too.
What's in a day? Scroll through Facebook again. Check a couple of job suggestion web sites. Scroll through at all the things I'm not qualified for. Well, I didn't listen. I wasn't a good kid. I have been dulled down.
I've worn out my thoughts. My therapist suggests maybe perhaps I should move out of DC.
Moving hits me psychologically. An old theme. I've barely unpacked things here, after the move from the old house, where I had space and bookshelves fit for a king. Moving... It's like being ostracized. And there's a cop element to it, too, the old "move along," if you escape being evicted.
So what have I done this week... Linger in bed and on couch, as the window air conditioner chugs along, wondering how I'll ever get out of this mess... Job descriptions are quite daunting, foreign to me. I'm an organizer on the ground, there's lots I've done, create a little friendly community where all are equal, but that's nothing you can really point out and put down on your piece of paper.
I took walks. Slow ones. I did yoga. I ate a combination of black-eyed peas and black beans on a Saturday night, and after a walk to the farmer's market, and then back, all sweaty, and then down to the pines for yoga, waiting the return of Mitch McConnell and the Senate to decide my fate, on a hot day, doing my yoga things began to move, gaseous, unsettled, such that I calculated I should use the woods behind the Urban Ecology Center building, careful to take a good handful of large leaves from the Paper Magnolia tree, soft of the underside to help doing nature's bidding out in nature, which I was careful about, succeeding, leaning up against a chainlink fence after removing my flip-flops, yoga shorts, boxers... Relieving myself, "doing that which no other man could do for him," a large green katydid cricket alighted upon my calf, looking up at me studiously, not budging. My bowels relieving, moving away with a step to the side for the last, then peeing as I squatted. Finally, having cleaned my bottom off well, I whisk away the cricket, as it seemed very intent on me, as if I were it's great tree god of human shit beckoning it to come forth out of the green to present itself, put my boxers back on, then my shorts, then my flip-flop sandals, and still no one around. I felt a lot better, too.
That was as exciting as my week got. And then on a Friday night just sitting around, after a walk around the neighborhood in the noontime drizzle, the first cool weather in a long time, then to say hi at the little Korean Market for some pastrami and sliced chicken breast, a bottle of ten dollar pinot noir from the south of France. A nap, out of a lack of anything else to do, not feeling productive, anxiety levels skyrocketing, try to just be quiet, let it blow away if it can. Then another walk, longer. The grass wet, along the old trolley track. I move over to the side, putting my mask back on, as a couple with dogs comes toward me, then a tall woman, lithe and attractive like a model jogs by from behind me. She gives me a thank you wave as she passes, and she jogs up ahead and I go along at my own slow pace. It's been difficult of late. Just to keep moving. Later, she passes me the other way, just as a man without his shirt on runs by very fast, as I stand off the trail in the higher weeds.
The night. I cook a filet of black cod from the Farmer's Market, kept in the freezer from months ago. Turmeric, ginger, cayenne, flakes of salt and a quick modest grind of pepper. I put the old Bianchi on the trainer, the bike tire tread lifting off in one spot, flap flap flap, as I pedal the wheel rolling forward over the rolling bar. I get HBO's Chernobyl series going on my laptop, which starts to heat up, then the little wheel on the screen spinning round and round, the screen frozen, so I have to work at it, putting the old laptop in the freezer to cool off at one point. I manage to keep entertained. Later I read from Visions of Cody, not the dialog parts, and yes, Kerouac has his style, his schtick, and it feels a little transparent to me. Except that he creates a style, a way of talking that you can only do by writing. The writing of his way is very close to the mind, to speech, but translated, in a way that couldn't be done in normal talking.
And when I get up, finally, and make tea, have a bit of cold sliced low sodium chicken breast from the little deli, I realize I am a bum, nothing but a big bum. A lot of that has had to do with drinking, which causes missed opportunities and great regrets and a kind of dishonesty. Yes, memories of college, just messing around instead of all that priceless reading and priceless classes I could have done or taken. There's the pull of a Christian glass of wine, but that can be dangerous too, a slippery slope.
Sensuality is one of the five hindrances. I know it all too well. And the other ones too. In addition to Sensory Desire, as I suppose the senses must be attached to something one finds desirable, there is Ill-Will, there is Sloth-and-Torpor, there is Restlessness-and-Worry, and also, Doubt. Yes. "The food of delusion," as the Buddha said.
I almost feel afraid of myself, as I sit here, like how it would have been easy to lounge in bed, and I did that long enough anyway. Yes, it is scary when you realize that you really are a bum, given all you could have been.
When I call my mom, for the second time today, now that it's about one or so in the afternoon, and when I tell her I'm feeling this way, a recognition, she immediately tells me, "no, you're not a bum, you're a very polite person..." and other kindly things.
Perhaps Kerouac drank in order to find, or create, some kind of adventure. You could, when drinking, kind of make up a story, fall into adventure and mis-adventure, you could meet crazy people who were also drunk and going about things in an uncontrolled fashion. And I know. I have fallen myself, in with bad people, as I grew up out in the countryside where less advanced and enlightened views and prejudices, and other bad habits, can take hold.
There was, of course, another side of him, the studious side, delving seriously in the Dharma, knowing his terms and his sutras, and being able to apply them. But, he would lapse.
How's being a good Buddhist going to save me, I wonder... I say to myself. I could use some improvements as a person in this world, in society as well. To be less distracted...
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