So, I don't know where to start.  I was riding the old 1998 Bianchi Veloce here in the apartment's main room watching Father Barron's Life on Fire, the episode about Mary and her different forms and identities and her speaking with frightening angels and that sort of thing.

And then, all day Thursday, I'm tired.  And I can't get through to mom.  I try in the morning, from bed.  I try later, when I'm up with my tea in my little own personal fog.  I try her later in the afternoon after a shorter walk as it starts to rain.  I come back from the market, and I realize, from what is reported from Capitol Hill, that suddenly, I am very poor, destitute.

That's hard to take.  When you're fifty five.


But my thoughts, here, late at night, after falling into sleep after a bottle of wine, another serious and weighty phone call with my aunt, who gets me, whom I love, after the Merguez lamb sausages, as I toss and turn and get up, that part of being an artist, "being an artist," I'll put it in quotes, because it's a rough term, about something that's hard to locate, that part of that serious endeavor involves, very much, creating an atmosphere, a living atmosphere, that allows for art, for the spaces that make art, that allow art, whatever art that might be.

And I know this from Washington, D.C., that there are many kinds of art.  Peter Baker and his wife practice the art of journalism and reporting.  Mr. Hadley was  a National Security Advisor.  Madam Albright was, is, a professor, with an inquisitive mind.   The people who come in on a Sunday night, up at the low tables of the wine bar.  I encourage their memories, riffs.  Wine is an excellent background.  "The Pope said, okay, monks, I need some good wine..."  Mr. Ambassadors, two of them, at least.  Journalists.  Old Buzz Beler, the owner of The Prime Rib...

It was a very rich place to work, to do my job at.  And even better for the next step down, the echelon of accomplished degreed educated people of Washington, to whom I've sort of been a shrink listener priest bardic enabler.  Rich lives.  Myself, a largely selfless marker of other people's time and accomplishments, graduations, to which I am a priestly servant, enabler.   Like a flower arranger.

But that has been, or became, a large part of my own battle, as an artist, to set up a kind of politics that allowed for the deeper artistic vision to come forth.  I delivered, in my services, as much entertainment as anyone, in person, standing on my own two feet, has provided, honestly enough.  All of it live, all of it serious, all the humor real, such that people on television, as good and accomplished and professional as they are, should acknowledge, now that we are leveled by the times of the Corona-virus.

And, to be real, let us face it, to do such a good and noble thing, necessary to the artist and the soul within all of us. it came at a price.  What I myself missed out on.  Personal life, personal joy, starting a family.  A wife, kids.  Too late now.  Too late.  A halfway decent income, compared to what other people, shrewder, and more acknowledging the art of money, which too has it's psychic life within us, no.  Try to stomach all that.  Your own inability to protect your old mom in her vulnerable years...

So I find myself here.  Now.  In an apartment I can no longer afford, with many possessions in it.  No, I know, we cannot take all of it with us when we go that final adieu, but, you wonder, and you know, all the things you've touched and kept and enjoyed, where will they go.  Out in the street, perhaps.    You tried your best.  Then the Covid-19 came along, and the Trump Administration was a clear perfect disaster trying to handle it, a shame upon the whole world.  (Ruining my job, ruining so much of what so many people worked so hard to create, only to lose it all, because of Trump's poor and greedy politically hungry management.  He wanted rallies.  He didn't want to wear a mask.  He sent clear messages to his followers.)

But I did my job.  And how, the time is to reassess.