So my back is sore so when I get up I take two advil, get some tea, a half a cup of leftover coffee from the fridge, last night it was Chinese food again, and so today I will have the energy to walk on a sunny day down to the Farmer's Market to get my meats so that I will continue to have energy.
I know it is stupid to write about this and about the making of meatloaf, but it was observed of Jimi Hendrix that he kept his guitar with him at all times possible, even while cooking bacon and eggs. He wanted to be the best guitar player he could be, and this was how he kept it up. Unplugged Fender Stratocaster in the loo, they would recall. He liked the sound there, the acoustics.
Well, anyway...
Walking there, of course, I call my mom several times, and she called at 8AM, spoke with her, then again, as I waited for the ibuprofen to kick in. I explain to her, again, why my back is sore, and she tells me that other people live through ragweed, basically to be a man about it, and just as she's about at the edge of a mood swing toward anger or whatever dark thing, the cat intervenes, as I can hear his little high pitched call to be let out. Should I? Yes, Mom, he'll come back. He knows. So when she goes to let him out, she says, hold on, don't go anywhere, but then she hangs up the receiver, fully at least, so it's not off the hook, and I got to get ready anyway for my trek. It hurts to put socks on. I have to roll back on the bed with my feet up in the air, though it's easier to put my running shoe sneaks on. I change my ragged tee shirt, trying not to look like a total bum for the well-heeled clientele at the Palisades Farmer's Market...
The nature of reality... This was what I have always been, being the son of my Dad, interested in. And so maybe this whole Covid virus thing is to be seen in some perspective as far as what it might allow me to be.
It's like people who have a sense of humor in this world. They have to curb it, otherwise they might interject, and while that might be funny, it would be considered inappropriate enough, at least in some circumstances, that one would get into trouble, and maybe even big trouble.
Capitalism, the whole system of it, has always been hard for me to embrace, as if I were blind to its basic logic. What other system is there that works out? We all are wary about the alternatives, Socialism, Marxism, Communism, and what kinds of political systems attached themselves in their power to such isms...
So I walk along, slowly, aiming myself gingerly up the sidewalk westward along the blue shining reservoirs with Canada Geese and ladies in casual walking little dogs and out with friends for a quick paced exercise walk, as I go carefully with my back and sort of down about feeling subjected to Mary Lincoln feminine maternal mood swings, and that would get to you too on some days, but it appears to be my lot in this life, as it is, and I keep on, crossing by the Lab School and then a firetruck comes up and turns to back up into the firehouse, and I'm almost at the CVS and maybe they have stamps.
And bravely I go, onward, into the land of pretty people, successful, owners, stylish, getting their produce and heirloom tomatoes and herbs, which I should have procured, but I'm low on patience and money these days, and I''m fairly single minded, though I do make a connection with a farm guy in a green tea shirt at the top of the hill as you turn around in the yellow taped one way line, friendly, and he has some plums which catch my eye. Then it's down the hill, past coffee woman, a woman with dumplings and Asian noodles, who tells me what she has left today, but I'm fixated on the meats, the lady at Groff. Farms with the big blue coolers full of frozen meats and so forth... $45 later.... She was a waitress once, and I tell her, yes, I used to be, after I apologize for "riding her" in my order, reminding her about the stew beef...
On the CVS, for stamps. Can't figure out the ATM. There's a nice young man at the counter, yes, they have stamps. No, you don't have to buy anything else. The manager, when he comes over and opens a cash drop drawer with a key to pull out one booklet of USA Forever flag stamps, nods very unenthusiastically when I ask him, through the guy at the counter if they might be hiring. At least it's in the neighborhood.
But I worked. I worked hard. For a long time. I exhausted myself habitually with work, physical in nature. Of course, yes, I could have been smarter, much smarter, and not pissed every opportunity away, but...
It's too damn quiet in this apartment, and I wonder, just how "Jesus or Buddha" you can be and get away with it.
So, I'm writing away. I've recovered, as best I can, after being in some sort of back pain the last four days or so, down, just on the right side of the spine, I determine as I do my yoga, inside, with the best effort I can muster. Some poses hurt more than others. Raising my legs, on the way to shoulder stand, painful, had to stop. Was able to do plough, somehow.
Then Mom calls. And we have a nice chat, around 8:45, but somehow it turns into one of those "you hate me, you despise me," kind of conversations. I was trying to tell her," look, mom, you had talents and you needed to use them. You can't compare yourself with someone else's life, because each of us are unique, different, that's how God made us." I tell her the story of how on the Steve Allen Show they wanted to do a dress rehearsal, for the whatever third time or so, a hundred technicians waiting, and Jack says, "no, Steve, I can't do it," more or less, and walks out. And when he, Kerouac, comes back, bam, he nails it. (You can kind of sense the earlier irritations he went through, them doubting him, as he held his artistic integrity whole... He knew how to do it. He had this sense of himself. The divine spirit, as we've talked about before, you might say.)
I thought things were going reasonably well. But then somehow Mom is telling me now how I've devastated her, and that's she's going to bed (but will probably not sleep.) I'm just a stupid woman. Other things. Jesus Christ.
Anyway, so that takes the wind out of my sails for a moment, after my day of the limping off like poor campaigning young JFK, climbing the stairs of tenement buildings in Watertown, one foot up, then drag the back one up, as I get my sustenance for another week.
Jesus was nice to everyone. A kind and funny guy, well spoken, insightful. Who could have a problem with Him? But that wasn't enough for some people. Because, as they found out in the Garden, you shouldn't pretend to know more than you can, you can't be so proud that you stop listening....
Sunday, September 20, 2020
I wake up from a dream on the old leather couch, head propped up on a pillow, in the quiet apartment. My father, at dinner. Family, my brother, the grandkids. He's the most beautiful of all of us. The star. And we know, in the dream, that he won't be around for ever, but he's so gracious, so kind, so soft spoken, all we can think is that we have him now, we have his light amongst us. While he is here. The table is prepared, a dream foggy supper.
We did not know this, when we headed out into the world, the world with its darkness, with its strife. With its pride and vanity.
He had come to bring his grace unto me. And I should never have moved away for all my futile endeavors, I remember this in my dream, dreams in which one has wisdom, and does not act like a fool fumbling against the control of the world such as it is....
I've not chatted with my old buddy Daryl, from my old hometown, in a while, a new old friend in Covid times, and we converse for hours, until about almost three in the morning. He's down on the South Carolina coast. "You just have the patience for it, that's why you're the one who keeps mom okay..." In the meantime, I eat some of my meatloaf, still warm from the oven, but in the meantime, I drink a bottle of wine. (Too much, in fact, on top of the ragweed lethargy, I'll find out the next day.)
The wine goes down easy. I was writing before, and had come to the end of my steam. I'm not a very patient person when my writing gets sidetracked. It seems to hurt. But if you've come to the end of your confessional booth time, you let the guard down. So, I listen carefully to my friend; he has good advice. He's a good sounding board. What's Peckham up to? His brother? McHenry? The Coe brothers. It begins to be a lot to absorb, and as I tire, in the wordy parts of the mind, the wine is increasingly soothing and relied upon. That's how the system works, the one you built. And it is natural that it gets overwhelmed from time to time, and the wine serves to numb and protect, the balance between the inner and the outer. You know how it works: you go along with it.
I'd been writing about how when I post something on social media I have a strange reaction afterward. Often, why did I post that? Making yourself so obvious, so in front of people has a backlash of shyness, though I'm not saying this with any clarity. Regrets. Giving out an in-road into guarded mental processes still on going and active. Exposure.
Whoever comes to Me, and hears My sayings and does them, I will show you whom he is like: He is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock...
Luke 6:46...
You are free of sin. Go in peace.
So, as the autumn solstice comes, and the Jewish New Year, too, and I nerve, the ragweed takes all my energies away, and I get up to go lay on the couch, if not back to bed. The couch is soft, softer than the bed's firm mattress and one day, as I try to get up it's like my lower back giving out on me. This is where I normally sit, hunched over like Jerome, the laptop on the coffee table before me, as I lean forward. But with this stiffness there is pain when I do this. A knot, tying up everything from neck down.
I go out to the little deli grocery store on Saturday, before it closes at 6. I walk down to the bluff, and when the people walk away, a mother, who was conducting iPhone work, and two daughters at play by the picnic table, I venture my headstand, and it works, easier than I thought. I limp back, slowly, and remember to take a shower, get the pollen off, important to remember. I get the yoga mat out, and it's slow, and painful, bending down to go into sun salutation, trying to touch my toes. Hard to do. Everything is interconnected. I can barely reach forward.
To get out of bed the last few days is like performing a shoulder roll, tuck legs in toward chest, roll on my side, get the feet down on the floor, lift with the legs. JFK, pain every day of his adult life. Could barely put his shoes on. My Amish rocking chair of bent wood is a help indeed for the soreness. I have to hold onto the arm rests to lift myself up out of it, but sitting and rocking in it soothes, and I avoid the old leather couch.
Friday, yesterday now, Mom had her helper Mary visit. Canale's for a late lunch. Around 8 at night, I get a call, "Not to worry you, but I think I might be having a heart attack... I just threw up." But she is brave about it. I'll go back to bed and we'll see what happens. I call her in a few minutes, we go through a few more symptoms...
I order Chinese, fall into long nap on the couch, wake at 5 AM... At 8, Mom is calling. Another mood. Angry at me. "I'm sick. Where are you? I'm all alone. Nothing to eat." There should be something in the fridge. "Help, help! Help!" I hear her call as she looks in the fridge, to see what's there. For a moment she is calm, speaking to the cat, letting him out, perfectly normal. But then, forgetting I'm on the other end of the receiver, she wanders off... Where are you? Crying...
I look at my phone and pull up the Instacart app, to have some groceries sent. I rest some more, back in pain, moving difficult. I lapse back into sleep. Woken by my aunt. So I get up.
Writing is painful every day. It's taking sore muscles and trying to work them out, so that they don't hurt anymore. Much like yoga.
As you get older, my age, say, fifty five, fortunately or not, it becomes more and more, perhaps even all, about the creative process, even if it is a strange personal one, your own odd-ball form. It's your own source of making connections, supporting the work of your mind.
The evils of the day are often enough, to ask for a glass of wine.
Later, after musing about Jimi Hendrix, one contemplates how badly his manager, Mark Jeffries, who managed The Animals, stole Jimi's hard-earned dollars. And then it became very hard for Jimi. He should have had been able now to enjoy the fruits of his labors at this point in his life. The guy left him with $20 in his London bank account. Tragedy followed Jimi along in life.
A Chinese dinner, delivered, here in DC, costs about $30. Tip on top of that. $5. Bottle of wine $10. Cannot bear my own cooking or black-eyed peas, or Boars Head cold cuts, nor hotdogs, another day, or not today. I need my energy to fight these battles, alone out here.
Why does genius get left with nothing... not that I'm one.
It's healthy, on the one hand, to divorce yourself from the things of Caesar, but...
This is where people start to, if not hate you, distance themselves from you, as if what you had were contagious... You're poor. This makes you an embarrassment, a weighty burden. Why can't you get along with the system. Why don't you want to work within it? We do, why can't you?
(and believe me, my father had the right wardrobe, a very proper man for his profession, which he performed with huge talent and beautiful grace... There's good in dressing well. It helps us understand each other, where we are coming from...)
Like Jimi, beautiful soul, wandering out from his homeland, his drinking parents, his old Indian grandmother up in Vancouver, how many thousand hundred acts of grace and genius and things like that did you perform... Look at it that way, for a moment, from a more Castles Made of Sand eternal point of view, if you'll allow.
"What is the kingdom of heaven like... I'll tell you what it's like..." A little, a beautiful little lesson squeezed in here and there, and in fact this is what people remember about you.
It's like a joke now, to bring Jimi and Jesus and the nature of the acts of intelligence together, a new way of looking at something.... a new way of thinking... a new way to use language, toward a new metaphor, such as the old thinking of the impossible is transferred into the realm of the possible.
It took the Aquarian Age from the thing to come back, more or less, the outer space science fiction Vonnegut was tipped off to, the return of the miracle, the return, in short, of the spirit of Jesus's spirit. Sort of. Maybe. In some poetic way, perhaps... Slaughterhouse Five, published in 1969.
Who can forgive sins, but God... But what is easier to say... Is it not just as easy to say, your sins are forgiven you than, say, get up and walk.
What have I to do with thee, Satan... That's another line you have to like. People pull shit on you, mess with you in their money poker faces...
Well, remember, but they're not doing the work you're doing. It's less within their frame of mind to get that work, isn't it.
And, as Jimi knew, sometimes they take what you have rightfully earned, your work in the vineyard, and leave you with jack.
They seemed just men. Perfectly ordinary in their mindsets. But... why does the system they play by leave you with nothing...
And now, of course, Jesus would be construed as creepy, going around, saying things like "arise, Tabatha, it's time to get up... She's hungry. Feed her." (From the dead, to life.) Yes, that was part of it, he simply creeped them out, the prominent risen members of society... That's the way to get rid of oddballs, call them creepy.
I lift myself up out of the rocking chair, getting my feet underneath me. Hope.
We did not know this, when we headed out into the world, the world with its darkness, with its strife. With its pride and vanity.
He had come to bring his grace unto me. And I should never have moved away for all my futile endeavors, I remember this in my dream, dreams in which one has wisdom, and does not act like a fool fumbling against the control of the world such as it is....
I've not chatted with my old buddy Daryl, from my old hometown, in a while, a new old friend in Covid times, and we converse for hours, until about almost three in the morning. He's down on the South Carolina coast. "You just have the patience for it, that's why you're the one who keeps mom okay..." In the meantime, I eat some of my meatloaf, still warm from the oven, but in the meantime, I drink a bottle of wine. (Too much, in fact, on top of the ragweed lethargy, I'll find out the next day.)
The wine goes down easy. I was writing before, and had come to the end of my steam. I'm not a very patient person when my writing gets sidetracked. It seems to hurt. But if you've come to the end of your confessional booth time, you let the guard down. So, I listen carefully to my friend; he has good advice. He's a good sounding board. What's Peckham up to? His brother? McHenry? The Coe brothers. It begins to be a lot to absorb, and as I tire, in the wordy parts of the mind, the wine is increasingly soothing and relied upon. That's how the system works, the one you built. And it is natural that it gets overwhelmed from time to time, and the wine serves to numb and protect, the balance between the inner and the outer. You know how it works: you go along with it.
I'd been writing about how when I post something on social media I have a strange reaction afterward. Often, why did I post that? Making yourself so obvious, so in front of people has a backlash of shyness, though I'm not saying this with any clarity. Regrets. Giving out an in-road into guarded mental processes still on going and active. Exposure.
Whoever comes to Me, and hears My sayings and does them, I will show you whom he is like: He is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock...
Luke 6:46...
You are free of sin. Go in peace.
So, as the autumn solstice comes, and the Jewish New Year, too, and I nerve, the ragweed takes all my energies away, and I get up to go lay on the couch, if not back to bed. The couch is soft, softer than the bed's firm mattress and one day, as I try to get up it's like my lower back giving out on me. This is where I normally sit, hunched over like Jerome, the laptop on the coffee table before me, as I lean forward. But with this stiffness there is pain when I do this. A knot, tying up everything from neck down.
I go out to the little deli grocery store on Saturday, before it closes at 6. I walk down to the bluff, and when the people walk away, a mother, who was conducting iPhone work, and two daughters at play by the picnic table, I venture my headstand, and it works, easier than I thought. I limp back, slowly, and remember to take a shower, get the pollen off, important to remember. I get the yoga mat out, and it's slow, and painful, bending down to go into sun salutation, trying to touch my toes. Hard to do. Everything is interconnected. I can barely reach forward.
To get out of bed the last few days is like performing a shoulder roll, tuck legs in toward chest, roll on my side, get the feet down on the floor, lift with the legs. JFK, pain every day of his adult life. Could barely put his shoes on. My Amish rocking chair of bent wood is a help indeed for the soreness. I have to hold onto the arm rests to lift myself up out of it, but sitting and rocking in it soothes, and I avoid the old leather couch.
Friday, yesterday now, Mom had her helper Mary visit. Canale's for a late lunch. Around 8 at night, I get a call, "Not to worry you, but I think I might be having a heart attack... I just threw up." But she is brave about it. I'll go back to bed and we'll see what happens. I call her in a few minutes, we go through a few more symptoms...
I order Chinese, fall into long nap on the couch, wake at 5 AM... At 8, Mom is calling. Another mood. Angry at me. "I'm sick. Where are you? I'm all alone. Nothing to eat." There should be something in the fridge. "Help, help! Help!" I hear her call as she looks in the fridge, to see what's there. For a moment she is calm, speaking to the cat, letting him out, perfectly normal. But then, forgetting I'm on the other end of the receiver, she wanders off... Where are you? Crying...
I look at my phone and pull up the Instacart app, to have some groceries sent. I rest some more, back in pain, moving difficult. I lapse back into sleep. Woken by my aunt. So I get up.
Writing is painful every day. It's taking sore muscles and trying to work them out, so that they don't hurt anymore. Much like yoga.
As you get older, my age, say, fifty five, fortunately or not, it becomes more and more, perhaps even all, about the creative process, even if it is a strange personal one, your own odd-ball form. It's your own source of making connections, supporting the work of your mind.
The evils of the day are often enough, to ask for a glass of wine.
Later, after musing about Jimi Hendrix, one contemplates how badly his manager, Mark Jeffries, who managed The Animals, stole Jimi's hard-earned dollars. And then it became very hard for Jimi. He should have had been able now to enjoy the fruits of his labors at this point in his life. The guy left him with $20 in his London bank account. Tragedy followed Jimi along in life.
A Chinese dinner, delivered, here in DC, costs about $30. Tip on top of that. $5. Bottle of wine $10. Cannot bear my own cooking or black-eyed peas, or Boars Head cold cuts, nor hotdogs, another day, or not today. I need my energy to fight these battles, alone out here.
Why does genius get left with nothing... not that I'm one.
It's healthy, on the one hand, to divorce yourself from the things of Caesar, but...
This is where people start to, if not hate you, distance themselves from you, as if what you had were contagious... You're poor. This makes you an embarrassment, a weighty burden. Why can't you get along with the system. Why don't you want to work within it? We do, why can't you?
(and believe me, my father had the right wardrobe, a very proper man for his profession, which he performed with huge talent and beautiful grace... There's good in dressing well. It helps us understand each other, where we are coming from...)
Like Jimi, beautiful soul, wandering out from his homeland, his drinking parents, his old Indian grandmother up in Vancouver, how many thousand hundred acts of grace and genius and things like that did you perform... Look at it that way, for a moment, from a more Castles Made of Sand eternal point of view, if you'll allow.
"What is the kingdom of heaven like... I'll tell you what it's like..." A little, a beautiful little lesson squeezed in here and there, and in fact this is what people remember about you.
It's like a joke now, to bring Jimi and Jesus and the nature of the acts of intelligence together, a new way of looking at something.... a new way of thinking... a new way to use language, toward a new metaphor, such as the old thinking of the impossible is transferred into the realm of the possible.
It took the Aquarian Age from the thing to come back, more or less, the outer space science fiction Vonnegut was tipped off to, the return of the miracle, the return, in short, of the spirit of Jesus's spirit. Sort of. Maybe. In some poetic way, perhaps... Slaughterhouse Five, published in 1969.
Who can forgive sins, but God... But what is easier to say... Is it not just as easy to say, your sins are forgiven you than, say, get up and walk.
What have I to do with thee, Satan... That's another line you have to like. People pull shit on you, mess with you in their money poker faces...
Well, remember, but they're not doing the work you're doing. It's less within their frame of mind to get that work, isn't it.
And, as Jimi knew, sometimes they take what you have rightfully earned, your work in the vineyard, and leave you with jack.
They seemed just men. Perfectly ordinary in their mindsets. But... why does the system they play by leave you with nothing...
And now, of course, Jesus would be construed as creepy, going around, saying things like "arise, Tabatha, it's time to get up... She's hungry. Feed her." (From the dead, to life.) Yes, that was part of it, he simply creeped them out, the prominent risen members of society... That's the way to get rid of oddballs, call them creepy.
I lift myself up out of the rocking chair, getting my feet underneath me. Hope.
Monday, September 14, 2020
Evil thoughts lead to the same sad outcome.
I end up vomiting, twice, in the middle of the night, feeling the burn of the vodka shot Hashem the waiter wanted me to have. I'd touched base with him earlier, when we first got there, making it clear to him I was a friendly. The one good thing about working in a restaurant. You get other people, and they get you, even when the restaurants are all they have. White shirt. Simple cheap black tie. Reading glasses. After all the patient kindness he'd shown the crowd, at the end of the night of the amateur belly dancers in the parking lot in front of the Moroccan kebab house by Telegraph Road, knowing I was in the restaurant business, etc., helping out taking in the chairs, he brought out a shot, in a shot glass, and I did my best to drink it.
We had gotten there early. Riding far out into Virgina, regrets in my head. The parking lot is bare, a few tables put outside, the sky promising neither rain nor sun. Well, what can you do, the hostess orders wine, a Vinho Verde, 9 percent alcohol. Hashem brings it out in an ice bucket, and I sit with my two lady friends, who are both students of belly dancing. The place, inside and out, is empty. The sky is overcast. We're not far from big highway roads, and I see a black guy in a 90's Mustang, all black, getting ready for the drag strip runs back and forth my friend told me about. A musician arrives. We meet Hassan, the jolly proprietor, grinning often, smoking an American Spirit. Calm as can be. Enjoying himself. Beyond there's a small simple white church building, low, no steeple, and a Hispanic family is gathering there in front for a cookout.
Trying to sleep the acid had risen in my gorge. The burn, a bit down, a pain one almost wants to tear at. I take a purple anti acid pill. I sip from a plastic soda water bottle. I lay down, and try to sleep, but up it all comes, or I predict it, ready to get to the toilet bowl in my pain and sorrow.
Hopefully not the final spout of Melville whale blood from the stricken, Kerouac, hemorrhaging in an afternoon in October, St. Petersburg, Florida, rising up from his chair and the TV on to Galloping Gourmet, vomiting. He never got to write up that horror, dying in the hospital that evening.
Larkin had his issues with the acidity, too. Was it a shot of whiskey that got him in the end, throat cancer patient?
Evil thoughts, that had come out of looking through the pictures on my phone, my now retired belly dancer friend, of when she was a young mother, from Facebook, had resulted in the invitation, in a roundabout way, so it seemed to me, by divine karmic law, and my acceptance of it, which was also because I was hungover, listless with ragweed. I'd been doing a retrospect on the passing girlfriends, not many of them, I've had here in DC, as I await my fate and think of how few would miss me in their busy lives I used to wait on. And then I'd posted on Facebook live one of my half silly literary wine tastings on Facebook, and that's how I came to be invited, it turns out, more directly.
My heart pounds. I don't sleep well. Acid burning my esophagus, heart burn.
I felt like shit anyway, from the ragweed pollen, not really congested, just down for the count, weak, no energy at all, why did I bother to go...
I deserve all this, I tell myself. And further self-talk: I'm disgusted with myself. The cloudy repetition. Not solving a single problem.
Going out with people, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. If you go out, your kitchen gets disorganized, dishes to do. Not enough food ready to be cooked.
Finally getting up, the day after, hungry, shifting stomach, I remember again I am not allowed to go outside during ragweed season, even wearing a mask. This is a terrible thing for a person who relies on nature, walks, trees, vistas, rivers, mowed meadows, brush, birds. But the ill feeling and the complete lack of energy, mental and physical is hard to comprehend, it truly is. Get up, find some tea, go back to bed. Where are the joys in that? There are many problems that come with being sensitive. First of all, not everything suits you, and further on than that, somethings are downright disagreeable, unbearable, and such circumstances, which one must always be on guard over and vigilant, one still finds it impossible to live a life in such a way as to perfectly avoid all bad things. And bad things come in many circumstances and dimensions and over many aspects of life, such that life ends up being very simple when the basic bad and unhealthy things are avoided altogether.
Loud offensive noises, forms of employment not meant for the soul of the sentient human being, so completely out of line with the character of humanity that it would be better to be a ditch digger almost. (I exaggerate.) Everybody likes coffee, I do too. It's part of American workman culture of lumberjacks with flapjacks and men who build tall buildings with girders of steel, with moms who get up and the get the family up and on their way and then themselves; it's part of European cafe intellectual culture, and all over those parts of the world that have their kingdoms and places of worship and palaces to honor such that everyone needs to work, Turkish, Arabic, Jamaican, Peruvian, Columbian, Mexican, Ethiopian. The only problem, a burning acid feeling an hour later deep in the throat where pipes should connect agreeably and move things down and onward, a heartburn one cannot ignore. First a good high, that gives one reason to get up out of bed, for a buzz, but that subsides to a jittery feeling that makes me wish I was a runner like back when I was a kid over the happy hills and simple country lanes. And now I'm just a great terrible bum and I can't even enjoy a cup of coffee, or orange juice, for that matter, or beer, or white wine, sparkling wine, and certainly any kind of harder alcohol, to be honest with myself. Nor anything smoked. It will burn, not in a spicy way, but in a wounding way. But do I ever learn!
I retreat to green tea and soda water. I'm not evolved to sit under fluorescent lamps filing the things of an accounting firm, as it just makes me severely depressed, and how can all those other people go about doing it, smilingly even, I don't get it.
A man being like me is a born loser, or born or loser. A malcontent about living the protection of the great woods behind. Railroads are fine. Churches and places of worship and libraries are fine. But now the whole idea of driving on crowded superhighways and tangled interchanges just to get somewhere for confused sake. Where are the guides, the ones who take one more gently by the hand and bring them along and show them, life in all its modern complexes of things that everyone seems to be quite happy doing, perhaps by habit, maybe not even happily, or certainly not happily, to help the individual--we are all vastly different, or at least fall into subcategories, like blood-type for instance, such that we don't all share the same cookie-cut things. And me, by writing, I'm finding a way to cope, to deal with my mind, my depression, and no one ever really tells the masses that, except a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., or through something that a person of that kind of sensitivity finds somehow inherent in works related to that need, something we might pick up on intuitively, reading from the sorry list of great writership, poor men and women who should be taken pity upon.
And before all this, before the great venture to the den of Mara's Bellydancing Troupe of the tiresome parking lot and the restaurant front, with dancers that might have invited me to enjoy various pleasures sensual and carnal or carnival or primeval, or whatever, I had made the grave mistake of putting myself out there on Facebook Live, giving a sort of hybrid spiritual and literary lesson invited by the element of worldly wine. And like a damn fool I waved the flag of my true "freak" colors, which would seem like a good thing to do, but which leaves you vulnerable, for the strange invites you might receive down the road. Oh, and don't be doing that in Washington, D.C., ambitious and uptight and military industrial and political complexed in nature, as you will attract other types who may not be part of that healthy and prospering mainstream, much as you might really enjoy such people, as Kerouac famously did, "the roman candle people..."
An effective form of censorship, economic, political, spiritual, on top of all the other current shibboleths, such that would make now just about every great book involving the soul's travels in this world to be found so offensive by such standards that none of them could be published without a great disavowal...
But what can I say, the wild fires raging and the heat and surreal orange smog and smoke skies invading places like Oregon and San Francisco, it felt like it fell upon me to bring out my old Kerouac deep life red with the orange letters and the simple yellow over-under lines, Desolation Angels, inscribed by my old mom to me, "To my angel! Love, Mom," to read from his account of being a fire look-out out there in the Cascades, as I tasted my two inexpensive French pinot noir, one from Pays D'Oc, one from Burgundy. To read from it felt like a balm to my sorrows and also the horrors of seeing what we are seeing from the West Coast and all the fires.
While we greatly enjoy sharing, and where I'm such a spot that I need a little bit of exposure or guidance from friendly voices, it might be good to remember, before going out on a limb, remember what Jesus said, "go and tell no-one," because then it will get weird and more complicated than it truly needs to be, unfortunately, and sometimes, even bad things come about from that simple good-natured act of sharing.
But you also, on the other hand, have to do something, such that you feel that it went okay, more right than wrong, maybe even well, even if you're no longer able to bother with preparation, just do it, just get it out there, doesn't have to be perfect. You have to be able to have a little bit of pride in something of your work, no? You have to have a good little feeling sometimes, before going back to heavy thoughts of how you've abandoned your mother, etc., etc.
Maybe Jesus is saying something akin to, "people always want to talk." But that talk is unnecessary, Jesus the things of Jesus, God the things of God, things are as they are, and that there's a genius that can open up when you things as they really are... Well, it's not like I'm doing any miracles here, nope. And while he was sensitive, neither did Kerouac, except that he achieved something that is one of the few lasting beacons out there, to my knowledge. My friends are exquisitely kind and gentle anyway.
Thoughts cannot be approached unless they are thrown down in all their complexity, and without a careful overview, people will nitpick, out of their own self-based points of view...
Well, I'll do the dishes from the last scraps of meals tolerated recently. Mugs of green tea and throat comfort tea and dandelion detox tea. I'll collect the shameful plastic soda water bottles that will now burden the earth forever, after my medicinal enjoyment... I'll prepare a meatloaf, and, since the canned white-meat Kirkland chicken proved to be too horrible (throw it away) to blend in with all the carefully chopped apple and red onion and celery and crushed walnut and lemon, a tuna salad. I should have applied to food stamps long ago.
Meanwhile, the one percenters have siphoned off 50 Trillion dollars from the American worker, and also so much transformed and changed the work place and the nature of jobs that jobs and labors no longer have much to do, much sympathy, for the nature of the human being, the human soul.
I end up vomiting, twice, in the middle of the night, feeling the burn of the vodka shot Hashem the waiter wanted me to have. I'd touched base with him earlier, when we first got there, making it clear to him I was a friendly. The one good thing about working in a restaurant. You get other people, and they get you, even when the restaurants are all they have. White shirt. Simple cheap black tie. Reading glasses. After all the patient kindness he'd shown the crowd, at the end of the night of the amateur belly dancers in the parking lot in front of the Moroccan kebab house by Telegraph Road, knowing I was in the restaurant business, etc., helping out taking in the chairs, he brought out a shot, in a shot glass, and I did my best to drink it.
We had gotten there early. Riding far out into Virgina, regrets in my head. The parking lot is bare, a few tables put outside, the sky promising neither rain nor sun. Well, what can you do, the hostess orders wine, a Vinho Verde, 9 percent alcohol. Hashem brings it out in an ice bucket, and I sit with my two lady friends, who are both students of belly dancing. The place, inside and out, is empty. The sky is overcast. We're not far from big highway roads, and I see a black guy in a 90's Mustang, all black, getting ready for the drag strip runs back and forth my friend told me about. A musician arrives. We meet Hassan, the jolly proprietor, grinning often, smoking an American Spirit. Calm as can be. Enjoying himself. Beyond there's a small simple white church building, low, no steeple, and a Hispanic family is gathering there in front for a cookout.
Trying to sleep the acid had risen in my gorge. The burn, a bit down, a pain one almost wants to tear at. I take a purple anti acid pill. I sip from a plastic soda water bottle. I lay down, and try to sleep, but up it all comes, or I predict it, ready to get to the toilet bowl in my pain and sorrow.
Hopefully not the final spout of Melville whale blood from the stricken, Kerouac, hemorrhaging in an afternoon in October, St. Petersburg, Florida, rising up from his chair and the TV on to Galloping Gourmet, vomiting. He never got to write up that horror, dying in the hospital that evening.
Larkin had his issues with the acidity, too. Was it a shot of whiskey that got him in the end, throat cancer patient?
Evil thoughts, that had come out of looking through the pictures on my phone, my now retired belly dancer friend, of when she was a young mother, from Facebook, had resulted in the invitation, in a roundabout way, so it seemed to me, by divine karmic law, and my acceptance of it, which was also because I was hungover, listless with ragweed. I'd been doing a retrospect on the passing girlfriends, not many of them, I've had here in DC, as I await my fate and think of how few would miss me in their busy lives I used to wait on. And then I'd posted on Facebook live one of my half silly literary wine tastings on Facebook, and that's how I came to be invited, it turns out, more directly.
My heart pounds. I don't sleep well. Acid burning my esophagus, heart burn.
I felt like shit anyway, from the ragweed pollen, not really congested, just down for the count, weak, no energy at all, why did I bother to go...
I deserve all this, I tell myself. And further self-talk: I'm disgusted with myself. The cloudy repetition. Not solving a single problem.
Going out with people, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. If you go out, your kitchen gets disorganized, dishes to do. Not enough food ready to be cooked.
Finally getting up, the day after, hungry, shifting stomach, I remember again I am not allowed to go outside during ragweed season, even wearing a mask. This is a terrible thing for a person who relies on nature, walks, trees, vistas, rivers, mowed meadows, brush, birds. But the ill feeling and the complete lack of energy, mental and physical is hard to comprehend, it truly is. Get up, find some tea, go back to bed. Where are the joys in that? There are many problems that come with being sensitive. First of all, not everything suits you, and further on than that, somethings are downright disagreeable, unbearable, and such circumstances, which one must always be on guard over and vigilant, one still finds it impossible to live a life in such a way as to perfectly avoid all bad things. And bad things come in many circumstances and dimensions and over many aspects of life, such that life ends up being very simple when the basic bad and unhealthy things are avoided altogether.
Loud offensive noises, forms of employment not meant for the soul of the sentient human being, so completely out of line with the character of humanity that it would be better to be a ditch digger almost. (I exaggerate.) Everybody likes coffee, I do too. It's part of American workman culture of lumberjacks with flapjacks and men who build tall buildings with girders of steel, with moms who get up and the get the family up and on their way and then themselves; it's part of European cafe intellectual culture, and all over those parts of the world that have their kingdoms and places of worship and palaces to honor such that everyone needs to work, Turkish, Arabic, Jamaican, Peruvian, Columbian, Mexican, Ethiopian. The only problem, a burning acid feeling an hour later deep in the throat where pipes should connect agreeably and move things down and onward, a heartburn one cannot ignore. First a good high, that gives one reason to get up out of bed, for a buzz, but that subsides to a jittery feeling that makes me wish I was a runner like back when I was a kid over the happy hills and simple country lanes. And now I'm just a great terrible bum and I can't even enjoy a cup of coffee, or orange juice, for that matter, or beer, or white wine, sparkling wine, and certainly any kind of harder alcohol, to be honest with myself. Nor anything smoked. It will burn, not in a spicy way, but in a wounding way. But do I ever learn!
I retreat to green tea and soda water. I'm not evolved to sit under fluorescent lamps filing the things of an accounting firm, as it just makes me severely depressed, and how can all those other people go about doing it, smilingly even, I don't get it.
A man being like me is a born loser, or born or loser. A malcontent about living the protection of the great woods behind. Railroads are fine. Churches and places of worship and libraries are fine. But now the whole idea of driving on crowded superhighways and tangled interchanges just to get somewhere for confused sake. Where are the guides, the ones who take one more gently by the hand and bring them along and show them, life in all its modern complexes of things that everyone seems to be quite happy doing, perhaps by habit, maybe not even happily, or certainly not happily, to help the individual--we are all vastly different, or at least fall into subcategories, like blood-type for instance, such that we don't all share the same cookie-cut things. And me, by writing, I'm finding a way to cope, to deal with my mind, my depression, and no one ever really tells the masses that, except a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., or through something that a person of that kind of sensitivity finds somehow inherent in works related to that need, something we might pick up on intuitively, reading from the sorry list of great writership, poor men and women who should be taken pity upon.
And before all this, before the great venture to the den of Mara's Bellydancing Troupe of the tiresome parking lot and the restaurant front, with dancers that might have invited me to enjoy various pleasures sensual and carnal or carnival or primeval, or whatever, I had made the grave mistake of putting myself out there on Facebook Live, giving a sort of hybrid spiritual and literary lesson invited by the element of worldly wine. And like a damn fool I waved the flag of my true "freak" colors, which would seem like a good thing to do, but which leaves you vulnerable, for the strange invites you might receive down the road. Oh, and don't be doing that in Washington, D.C., ambitious and uptight and military industrial and political complexed in nature, as you will attract other types who may not be part of that healthy and prospering mainstream, much as you might really enjoy such people, as Kerouac famously did, "the roman candle people..."
An effective form of censorship, economic, political, spiritual, on top of all the other current shibboleths, such that would make now just about every great book involving the soul's travels in this world to be found so offensive by such standards that none of them could be published without a great disavowal...
But what can I say, the wild fires raging and the heat and surreal orange smog and smoke skies invading places like Oregon and San Francisco, it felt like it fell upon me to bring out my old Kerouac deep life red with the orange letters and the simple yellow over-under lines, Desolation Angels, inscribed by my old mom to me, "To my angel! Love, Mom," to read from his account of being a fire look-out out there in the Cascades, as I tasted my two inexpensive French pinot noir, one from Pays D'Oc, one from Burgundy. To read from it felt like a balm to my sorrows and also the horrors of seeing what we are seeing from the West Coast and all the fires.
While we greatly enjoy sharing, and where I'm such a spot that I need a little bit of exposure or guidance from friendly voices, it might be good to remember, before going out on a limb, remember what Jesus said, "go and tell no-one," because then it will get weird and more complicated than it truly needs to be, unfortunately, and sometimes, even bad things come about from that simple good-natured act of sharing.
But you also, on the other hand, have to do something, such that you feel that it went okay, more right than wrong, maybe even well, even if you're no longer able to bother with preparation, just do it, just get it out there, doesn't have to be perfect. You have to be able to have a little bit of pride in something of your work, no? You have to have a good little feeling sometimes, before going back to heavy thoughts of how you've abandoned your mother, etc., etc.
Maybe Jesus is saying something akin to, "people always want to talk." But that talk is unnecessary, Jesus the things of Jesus, God the things of God, things are as they are, and that there's a genius that can open up when you things as they really are... Well, it's not like I'm doing any miracles here, nope. And while he was sensitive, neither did Kerouac, except that he achieved something that is one of the few lasting beacons out there, to my knowledge. My friends are exquisitely kind and gentle anyway.
Thoughts cannot be approached unless they are thrown down in all their complexity, and without a careful overview, people will nitpick, out of their own self-based points of view...
Well, I'll do the dishes from the last scraps of meals tolerated recently. Mugs of green tea and throat comfort tea and dandelion detox tea. I'll collect the shameful plastic soda water bottles that will now burden the earth forever, after my medicinal enjoyment... I'll prepare a meatloaf, and, since the canned white-meat Kirkland chicken proved to be too horrible (throw it away) to blend in with all the carefully chopped apple and red onion and celery and crushed walnut and lemon, a tuna salad. I should have applied to food stamps long ago.
Meanwhile, the one percenters have siphoned off 50 Trillion dollars from the American worker, and also so much transformed and changed the work place and the nature of jobs that jobs and labors no longer have much to do, much sympathy, for the nature of the human being, the human soul.
Friday, September 11, 2020
And on it goes. Wednesday, September 9, 2020, the news from Capitol Hill.
"Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather in barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them." Matthew 6:26
I talk with my therapist, Dr. Heather, who has moved to Rochester, over the screen of my iPhone, every other Wednesday, from 1:00 to 1:55. The last session I was calling from my brother's house. Today is the day. I really don't feel like it. I feel stupid. Irresponsible, any number of things, but there are things to talk about, as if showing up on cue. Action. Ragweed. I feel like shit.
Another round, but a slightly different one, of frustration dealing with mom last night over the phone, wanting more of my attention. The times have called out a variation in her usual litanies. They are getting more pointed, it seems. As they say in the restaurant business, and with the losing enterprises, one has not managed customer expeditions very well. (See, you bust your absolute ass for that business, when you have to, I suppose, but... what does it leave you with, but a lot of grist for the mill.)
I heat the oven up to 425. I put a tomato and a thawed piece of the frozen cod fillet from Safeway.
No good, surprise surprise, and I've grown tired of the Merguez, and the cauliflower crust pepperoni pizza tastes good at least, but the next day it is hard to pass, that vague unrest in the belly.
Therapy talk:
Why are you attached to your objects so much, like you were at the old house with G....
Well, it's family stuff, personal memories. My father's books. His chair.
Guitars. Bikes. Clothes I'm not ashamed of.
Therapy is tiring, tiresome. I don't look forward to the sessions. I'd rather be writing, I suppose.
So here I am now trying to make decisions...
Maybe you like the life of Joe Palooka-ville, she says, with an interesting twinkle, a dolphin boop or octopus throw of a quick chuckle, and a meaningful one. She was one of the ones who let me feel I wasn't a creep, or a second class citizen, or something like that.
The groceries are dropped off by a person from Instacart. It's a humid unproductive day, but I get some bills paid, submit my paperwork for a reduction on the ER bill from Oswego Hospital, and I also apply, after going across the street to the little market, for food stamps, which is called SNAP here in Washington, D.C. I make a turkey meatloaf, and it turns out I've been starved for the last few days, not getting enough to eat. As it bakes I ride the old steel frame Bianchi on the trainer stand, keeping myself occupied, though I wish I had television.
Then I'm up at 5 in the morning, so I pour some beer from the open tall boy Budweiser can out on the rocks and go for a little walk down to the bluff. There's a deer, alone, down on Eliot Place by the old white Chevy Nova, and I sing a little Moon River to show my peaceful intentions.
Finally, after pleasuring to see if the old rusty pipes still work, I get in some meditation and perhaps some rest. Mom calls around noon, and she wants to be doing something and is feeling lonesome again, but lets me go, so then I get up, pour a little tea and call her up. "Go find something fun to do," she tells me. Wow. Okay.
But I wake up in angst and dread, these days, proverbially looking over my back, and thinking of money and what a completely lousy professional set up I've stuck myself with, an impossible situation, unless one wanted to be a holy man.
Oh, believe me, I am valiant adventurer, and perhaps the chastest bartender there ever way, being a hard-working fool... But, as we all know, fucking, there's nothing like it, is there. Though the muscles can be practiced, from brain to bone.
When I wake up, it's oh this, and oh that. Why didn't I get a job at the whaling museum or something like that, rather than throwing it all away... everything. How sad. At least I should have stayed in Clinton, with my father, gotten a job at the college... but... due to my shame even back then, and the things inflicted upon me by tough cookies and a mean princess, leaving me such that I don't necessarily disagree with the little bits of so-called misogyny in Hamlet where he's in a bit of a mood... birds... ending with "get thee to a nunnery," though that is quite cruel, and nasty, so maybe. To write so, does not necessarily make Shakespeare anything other than what he is.
Well, so after I've written a little bit I venture giving Mom a call, and she sounds fairly happy immediately, as her friend Sharon, a sacred friend, Mom's teaching colleague was just by for a visit, and very kindly bringing Mom a piece of fried fish from Rudy's on the Lake. The cat is crying to be let out, shrill, high in pitch, and mom says, "wait a minute, I've got uouck (uck/ook) on my hand," perhaps grease from the paper bag of fried fish on a paper plate, or tartar sauce or something like that, and I tell her, when she comes back to the phone that there should be wine there, but then it starts to south after she asks if I can come by and have some with her, but "oh, you're in DC," right, I'm not just around the block. Mom, I have to get a rental car and pack a suitcase and drive for eight hours...
And once it starts going downhill, after I nudge her about taking her pills, she's getting sharp with me, and she's talked herself into it, yet again, and soon she's yelling at me, and telling me she has awful cramps and she has to go.
I go for a walk. The rain was pouring today, in waves, flash flood warnings coming over the phone, etc. I walk down to the bluff past the yard where the deer was last night, under my little grove of pines, then to the river overlook. There's a strange clacking buzz coming from one of the old Sugar Maple trees, a wet cicada trying to dry himself off, not quite able to. I make him embarrassed. But I'm embarrassed too, bug. I remember seventeen years ago, and I haven't accomplished much since.
"Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather in barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them." Matthew 6:26
I talk with my therapist, Dr. Heather, who has moved to Rochester, over the screen of my iPhone, every other Wednesday, from 1:00 to 1:55. The last session I was calling from my brother's house. Today is the day. I really don't feel like it. I feel stupid. Irresponsible, any number of things, but there are things to talk about, as if showing up on cue. Action. Ragweed. I feel like shit.
Another round, but a slightly different one, of frustration dealing with mom last night over the phone, wanting more of my attention. The times have called out a variation in her usual litanies. They are getting more pointed, it seems. As they say in the restaurant business, and with the losing enterprises, one has not managed customer expeditions very well. (See, you bust your absolute ass for that business, when you have to, I suppose, but... what does it leave you with, but a lot of grist for the mill.)
I heat the oven up to 425. I put a tomato and a thawed piece of the frozen cod fillet from Safeway.
No good, surprise surprise, and I've grown tired of the Merguez, and the cauliflower crust pepperoni pizza tastes good at least, but the next day it is hard to pass, that vague unrest in the belly.
Therapy talk:
Why are you attached to your objects so much, like you were at the old house with G....
Well, it's family stuff, personal memories. My father's books. His chair.
Guitars. Bikes. Clothes I'm not ashamed of.
Therapy is tiring, tiresome. I don't look forward to the sessions. I'd rather be writing, I suppose.
So here I am now trying to make decisions...
Maybe you like the life of Joe Palooka-ville, she says, with an interesting twinkle, a dolphin boop or octopus throw of a quick chuckle, and a meaningful one. She was one of the ones who let me feel I wasn't a creep, or a second class citizen, or something like that.
The groceries are dropped off by a person from Instacart. It's a humid unproductive day, but I get some bills paid, submit my paperwork for a reduction on the ER bill from Oswego Hospital, and I also apply, after going across the street to the little market, for food stamps, which is called SNAP here in Washington, D.C. I make a turkey meatloaf, and it turns out I've been starved for the last few days, not getting enough to eat. As it bakes I ride the old steel frame Bianchi on the trainer stand, keeping myself occupied, though I wish I had television.
Then I'm up at 5 in the morning, so I pour some beer from the open tall boy Budweiser can out on the rocks and go for a little walk down to the bluff. There's a deer, alone, down on Eliot Place by the old white Chevy Nova, and I sing a little Moon River to show my peaceful intentions.
Finally, after pleasuring to see if the old rusty pipes still work, I get in some meditation and perhaps some rest. Mom calls around noon, and she wants to be doing something and is feeling lonesome again, but lets me go, so then I get up, pour a little tea and call her up. "Go find something fun to do," she tells me. Wow. Okay.
But I wake up in angst and dread, these days, proverbially looking over my back, and thinking of money and what a completely lousy professional set up I've stuck myself with, an impossible situation, unless one wanted to be a holy man.
Oh, believe me, I am valiant adventurer, and perhaps the chastest bartender there ever way, being a hard-working fool... But, as we all know, fucking, there's nothing like it, is there. Though the muscles can be practiced, from brain to bone.
When I wake up, it's oh this, and oh that. Why didn't I get a job at the whaling museum or something like that, rather than throwing it all away... everything. How sad. At least I should have stayed in Clinton, with my father, gotten a job at the college... but... due to my shame even back then, and the things inflicted upon me by tough cookies and a mean princess, leaving me such that I don't necessarily disagree with the little bits of so-called misogyny in Hamlet where he's in a bit of a mood... birds... ending with "get thee to a nunnery," though that is quite cruel, and nasty, so maybe. To write so, does not necessarily make Shakespeare anything other than what he is.
Well, so after I've written a little bit I venture giving Mom a call, and she sounds fairly happy immediately, as her friend Sharon, a sacred friend, Mom's teaching colleague was just by for a visit, and very kindly bringing Mom a piece of fried fish from Rudy's on the Lake. The cat is crying to be let out, shrill, high in pitch, and mom says, "wait a minute, I've got uouck (uck/ook) on my hand," perhaps grease from the paper bag of fried fish on a paper plate, or tartar sauce or something like that, and I tell her, when she comes back to the phone that there should be wine there, but then it starts to south after she asks if I can come by and have some with her, but "oh, you're in DC," right, I'm not just around the block. Mom, I have to get a rental car and pack a suitcase and drive for eight hours...
And once it starts going downhill, after I nudge her about taking her pills, she's getting sharp with me, and she's talked herself into it, yet again, and soon she's yelling at me, and telling me she has awful cramps and she has to go.
I go for a walk. The rain was pouring today, in waves, flash flood warnings coming over the phone, etc. I walk down to the bluff past the yard where the deer was last night, under my little grove of pines, then to the river overlook. There's a strange clacking buzz coming from one of the old Sugar Maple trees, a wet cicada trying to dry himself off, not quite able to. I make him embarrassed. But I'm embarrassed too, bug. I remember seventeen years ago, and I haven't accomplished much since.
Wednesday, September 9, 2020
Labor Day. It's a sunny day, but I can't go outside with the ragweed pollen. I go to get wine across the street. Bill Giraldi, my new friend, an accomplished novelist who happens to live close-by--and I've just met him, dumb luck--is having a small dinner party over at his cool art and book filled apartment. There's good gin, and cheese balls and peanuts to start, a few people to meet.
The host gives me a quick tour. His girlfriend from a while ago used to hang out at the place where I was a bartender. And she knew a woman I was friendly with, from that time. We have a little man talk, as we look over the shelves. Salter, he tells me. I'll check him out.
There are books everywhere. There are paintings everywhere. My kind of a place. Cool chairs, furniture. Music. A Bengal cat male kitten, beautiful bright stripes. Friendly, rolling around, play attacking the party's guests, two men, two women, and then Mike, the blues harp player, joins us, as a beer, we all sit in the small living room.
The host is enjoying a Haydan Navy Strength gin and tonic with lemon and lime and a dash of Rose's. Sure, I'll have one too. Delicious. We go sit down. He's one of those people, as you knew him before, from a previous life. You look in another person's eyes. He brings out a vintage stereoscope with diorama two sides pictures of turn of the century scenes, one of Dancing Dervishes, in remarkable sepia three dimensions. Amazing. Also, a Chinese cemetery. Classical ruins from the classical world. I look at them. As the cocktail patter goes round. I touch base when I can. The bald guy was a bouncer at The Raven. Cool. Ann, my chef friend, used to go there.
All these objects of art, all this great stuff, I wonder, as the party talks music and where we're from, where did it come from... I ask him later. "Estate sales," he tells me. Oh. Well, it makes sense. There's a white leather Corbusier chair. All this stuff is awesome. My friend is a conservative, he's never smoked pot, his dad worked for the Company, and rather than get shipped off to Saigon during the war, he had the gumption to refuse, and ended up stationed in Paris.
I like art. I want to ask him about all this stuff.
Squid ink pasta, after garlic bread, and salad, and I've brought a Chardonnay from Pays D'Oc, a Provence Rose, and my usual Pinot Noir. The host doesn't drink wine, but the guests will. Gin and beer, and scotch. Fair enough. Mike, my harmonica blues harp friend likes the beer Bill served him. The crowd is very happy eating off of sturdy oval paper plates, while the cat roams and makes his light brigade attacks on his large friends. And something, just the best I ever ate, I gotta say.
Up on the wall, in the kitchen, a picture of Padre Pio, and I say, ahh, yes, there was a man who could handle a pandemic, and me and my new old friend, we get each other. I half remember later, our Padre Pio conversation, about the journalist who went to go check on him, and while pessimistic, came back fully convinced. That's where I'm at too, these days. Faith. It will get you through, through a lot.
I mean, you might like good people, or bad people, but there's a lesson, in each and everyone of them, painful as indeed it often is, longterm suffering, believe me, which is that you become attuned to friendship, to its nature, its essence. You have many many experiences, many experiments in friendship, even wearing your heart on your sleeve, but each one is a lesson, sometimes terrible, sometimes good. And it can be quite painful to look into people's eyes with your own. Yes, it can. But in the end, it leaves you sensitive, sensitive to the tune of a mountain air, a melody, a long forgotten song.
I can't think of a great book that isn't telling that basic story. How the hell does Ishmael become friends with this noble savage Queequeg, indeed, sleeping with him on the first night in that cold room in New Bedford where it all starts. How does Kerouac get along with Ginsburg, or Cassady? It's beyond all odds. They weren't just the peers you would have found down at the local firm, Joe, Mike, people you might play softball with on weekends... Something crazier, more human, deeper, a relationship from a thousand years ago, resuscitated from a peat bog, as all things are recycled by nature. Friendships don't always go so great. Then again, sometimes they do, if you're realistic, and have realistic Sangha expectations. Sometimes best kept privately, to yourself.
And the window nature of the eye, as when you look someone in the eye, and what you see.
Later, looking out for me, he tells me he doesn't drink during the week. Six pages every day, is his writer's rule. And it helps to get out of the house, yes, as a professional, I know. That used to be my rule of thumb, before I retreated to my little home monastery.
Watch yourself, be careful, he tells me, about the wine. (Save the drinking for the weekends, discipline...) He told me earlier I looked a bit depressed when we first met, in front of his beautiful '64 TR-4. But I was lonesome, and needed a friend, and tired of dealing with mom over the phone so many times, trying to help, but not able to, beyond those extraordinary visits... burdened down by not being able to help her, but then, you know... to have to hear her with her mantra, when I tell her to look into the fridge for food, for wine, and hear her talking to herself, "help, help, help..." and often crying, boo hoo boo hoo, sob sob sob, "I can't take it anymore, help, HELP, boo hoo,..." that's a lot to take.
But that's how it goes for all of us. And we all live alone, at the end of the day. The horror of it. That's how it goes. What did Vonnegut say? And so on. Was that it? Melville said it in other ways. In All Quiet on the Western Front, they are eating flageolet beans on the front, to start, as the shelling starts. Feed well, energy for the slaughter they will soon endure. Himmelstoss and his leg, his beautiful boots under the bed.
One has an uncanny memory for dates. I come up with them, sometimes, often, from I don't know where or when or how.
I get back to my apartment. I spent much of Labor Day earlier picking up a bit, doing laundry, and it shows. Guitars safe back home. I wake later, feeling reasonably sober, and read the first chapters of Desolation Angels, before going back to bed, then waking later, tired, hungover, feeling like crap, why, why.
It's the day after now. After the party. The world is back to work, I guess, I gather.
And for the first time, I begin to think, I don't need mom calling with her crap. I'm trying to save myself, and my things, and my life. The apartment is clean now, something that took me getting out of the restaurant work, to tell you the truth, and then not falling into the next round of obeisance.
After the wine, to keep calm, beer, even Budweiser, from a tall can, is better over ice.
Jack Kerouac liked to sleep outdoors in a sleeping bag, when he lived in Orlando, or in Rocky Mount. It was his thing. It's a good lesson, one would gather.
I don't want to like Desolations Angels any more than I have to, dammit, but just a paragraph in I'm pulled into its beauty, words higher than nature the supreme, even. Transcendent. Even in the sobriety before the drunken sleep and awful waking, I know I've found something absolutely sublime. An answer to that brutal world I saw down in Georgetown, hungry, tired, ragweed-ed, trying to fit in. Five hundred beautiful women of all ages all around my eyeballs, and then on M Street, black guys in open window Lexus playing some rap kind of music about "She's sucking my dick, sucking my dick," and there are children out amongst us, college girls, and that's sad, I'm sorry.
How can the world not be offering something better than that, all the baseness...
Mom calling me, jealous, putting it all out on the line, it's either her or me, and you are abandoning me...
Retreat to the Dharma, Kerouac on his fire watch mountain... the Celtic rhythm prose..
The host gives me a quick tour. His girlfriend from a while ago used to hang out at the place where I was a bartender. And she knew a woman I was friendly with, from that time. We have a little man talk, as we look over the shelves. Salter, he tells me. I'll check him out.
There are books everywhere. There are paintings everywhere. My kind of a place. Cool chairs, furniture. Music. A Bengal cat male kitten, beautiful bright stripes. Friendly, rolling around, play attacking the party's guests, two men, two women, and then Mike, the blues harp player, joins us, as a beer, we all sit in the small living room.
The host is enjoying a Haydan Navy Strength gin and tonic with lemon and lime and a dash of Rose's. Sure, I'll have one too. Delicious. We go sit down. He's one of those people, as you knew him before, from a previous life. You look in another person's eyes. He brings out a vintage stereoscope with diorama two sides pictures of turn of the century scenes, one of Dancing Dervishes, in remarkable sepia three dimensions. Amazing. Also, a Chinese cemetery. Classical ruins from the classical world. I look at them. As the cocktail patter goes round. I touch base when I can. The bald guy was a bouncer at The Raven. Cool. Ann, my chef friend, used to go there.
All these objects of art, all this great stuff, I wonder, as the party talks music and where we're from, where did it come from... I ask him later. "Estate sales," he tells me. Oh. Well, it makes sense. There's a white leather Corbusier chair. All this stuff is awesome. My friend is a conservative, he's never smoked pot, his dad worked for the Company, and rather than get shipped off to Saigon during the war, he had the gumption to refuse, and ended up stationed in Paris.
I like art. I want to ask him about all this stuff.
Squid ink pasta, after garlic bread, and salad, and I've brought a Chardonnay from Pays D'Oc, a Provence Rose, and my usual Pinot Noir. The host doesn't drink wine, but the guests will. Gin and beer, and scotch. Fair enough. Mike, my harmonica blues harp friend likes the beer Bill served him. The crowd is very happy eating off of sturdy oval paper plates, while the cat roams and makes his light brigade attacks on his large friends. And something, just the best I ever ate, I gotta say.
Up on the wall, in the kitchen, a picture of Padre Pio, and I say, ahh, yes, there was a man who could handle a pandemic, and me and my new old friend, we get each other. I half remember later, our Padre Pio conversation, about the journalist who went to go check on him, and while pessimistic, came back fully convinced. That's where I'm at too, these days. Faith. It will get you through, through a lot.
I mean, you might like good people, or bad people, but there's a lesson, in each and everyone of them, painful as indeed it often is, longterm suffering, believe me, which is that you become attuned to friendship, to its nature, its essence. You have many many experiences, many experiments in friendship, even wearing your heart on your sleeve, but each one is a lesson, sometimes terrible, sometimes good. And it can be quite painful to look into people's eyes with your own. Yes, it can. But in the end, it leaves you sensitive, sensitive to the tune of a mountain air, a melody, a long forgotten song.
I can't think of a great book that isn't telling that basic story. How the hell does Ishmael become friends with this noble savage Queequeg, indeed, sleeping with him on the first night in that cold room in New Bedford where it all starts. How does Kerouac get along with Ginsburg, or Cassady? It's beyond all odds. They weren't just the peers you would have found down at the local firm, Joe, Mike, people you might play softball with on weekends... Something crazier, more human, deeper, a relationship from a thousand years ago, resuscitated from a peat bog, as all things are recycled by nature. Friendships don't always go so great. Then again, sometimes they do, if you're realistic, and have realistic Sangha expectations. Sometimes best kept privately, to yourself.
And the window nature of the eye, as when you look someone in the eye, and what you see.
Later, looking out for me, he tells me he doesn't drink during the week. Six pages every day, is his writer's rule. And it helps to get out of the house, yes, as a professional, I know. That used to be my rule of thumb, before I retreated to my little home monastery.
Watch yourself, be careful, he tells me, about the wine. (Save the drinking for the weekends, discipline...) He told me earlier I looked a bit depressed when we first met, in front of his beautiful '64 TR-4. But I was lonesome, and needed a friend, and tired of dealing with mom over the phone so many times, trying to help, but not able to, beyond those extraordinary visits... burdened down by not being able to help her, but then, you know... to have to hear her with her mantra, when I tell her to look into the fridge for food, for wine, and hear her talking to herself, "help, help, help..." and often crying, boo hoo boo hoo, sob sob sob, "I can't take it anymore, help, HELP, boo hoo,..." that's a lot to take.
But that's how it goes for all of us. And we all live alone, at the end of the day. The horror of it. That's how it goes. What did Vonnegut say? And so on. Was that it? Melville said it in other ways. In All Quiet on the Western Front, they are eating flageolet beans on the front, to start, as the shelling starts. Feed well, energy for the slaughter they will soon endure. Himmelstoss and his leg, his beautiful boots under the bed.
One has an uncanny memory for dates. I come up with them, sometimes, often, from I don't know where or when or how.
I get back to my apartment. I spent much of Labor Day earlier picking up a bit, doing laundry, and it shows. Guitars safe back home. I wake later, feeling reasonably sober, and read the first chapters of Desolation Angels, before going back to bed, then waking later, tired, hungover, feeling like crap, why, why.
It's the day after now. After the party. The world is back to work, I guess, I gather.
And for the first time, I begin to think, I don't need mom calling with her crap. I'm trying to save myself, and my things, and my life. The apartment is clean now, something that took me getting out of the restaurant work, to tell you the truth, and then not falling into the next round of obeisance.
After the wine, to keep calm, beer, even Budweiser, from a tall can, is better over ice.
Jack Kerouac liked to sleep outdoors in a sleeping bag, when he lived in Orlando, or in Rocky Mount. It was his thing. It's a good lesson, one would gather.
I don't want to like Desolations Angels any more than I have to, dammit, but just a paragraph in I'm pulled into its beauty, words higher than nature the supreme, even. Transcendent. Even in the sobriety before the drunken sleep and awful waking, I know I've found something absolutely sublime. An answer to that brutal world I saw down in Georgetown, hungry, tired, ragweed-ed, trying to fit in. Five hundred beautiful women of all ages all around my eyeballs, and then on M Street, black guys in open window Lexus playing some rap kind of music about "She's sucking my dick, sucking my dick," and there are children out amongst us, college girls, and that's sad, I'm sorry.
How can the world not be offering something better than that, all the baseness...
Mom calling me, jealous, putting it all out on the line, it's either her or me, and you are abandoning me...
Retreat to the Dharma, Kerouac on his fire watch mountain... the Celtic rhythm prose..
Monday, September 7, 2020
I wake up shaking a bit. Nervous. Anxious. Mom called at 9, but I let it ring through.
Yesterday, in the morning, the Sunday before Labor Day, Wendy texts me, asking if I'd like to go to a little sidewalk cafe in Georgetown. Maybe I should have just pulled the usual monkish work-to-do in my little cell here, well, but it's good to get out and Wendy is wise and kindly. So. Fortunately she's in no great rush, because I need more rest before I'm ready to go and find clothes to wear in public. I get in the shower, think about what to wear, go back and lie down in bed for a bit.
We get there, and I told my mom I'd call her back, and when I have a chance, Wendy going in to see what they have because they are out of the croissant she ordered, I call mom, and mom is crazy with jealousy. I never get to see you. Glad you're having a good time. When will I see you? Before I die, or after, she shouts.
I'm not feeling so great about myself anyway, and while it always benefits us, particularly in lock-down times, to get out of our hypochondria and visit with people in public situations, I'm feeling overwhelmed and reluctant as far as being able to enjoy anything. I try to be present. I get my green tea, Wendy has a latte with art on the foam, some form of pastry. I am hungry, but I want to get to the farmer's market, to get some meat for the week. Anything dough will just add to my belly.
We walk around Georgetown in the sun afterward, the sidewalks crowded with normal happy people, students fresh back to town wearing their class finery. I follow her across M Street and down the hill, crossing busy K Street, down to the river, where lots of people are out enjoying the park in the light breeze in the clear late summer day. I follow Wendy up sidewalks at things she wants to check out, but am really feeling like an all-round miserable bastard, for any number of reasons. We get back up from K Street and the park by the river and the river itself, many boaters and kayaks and paddle boarders, walking westward under the girders of the Whitehurst, then up over the canal at the western end of all the Georgetown shops, through the alley, past the Labor Day weekend couples dining at Leopold, then to M, and across M, and into the cosmetics shop, which I stomach for a while, admiring the style of Georgetown pretty girls, then outside, calling my mom again, and she is not a pleasure to deal with, and as Wendy comes out with her bag, she says, "God, she is being so manipulative!" The call ends, mom hanging up, and when she calls back, embarrassed, I don't pick up. My parents don't do that, Wendy says.
"Guilt is the lowest of energy in emotions," she explains to me. Yes, that makes sense. We cross Wisconsin Avenue, then back to the south side of M Street as we walk eastward, there's a soap shop that smells nice, except it's all personal shopping at the tiny front counter now, no real browsing, so we walk up 31st, passed the old Post Office, I show Wendy my brother's house. Do you want to come in and see it? Sure, she says.
Then we walk back, to the car, I hope, and I'm feeling pretty tired, the ragweed, mom, the strange and interesting news I received via a magical new neighbor with a old rusted green Triumph TR-4 motorcar from 1964, who is a real writer, last evening as I was bumming around behind the old G.I. brick building apartment houses. Wendy talks about an old boyfriend of hers, a liar by habit. Yeah, I know, I say.
"You're a grown man. You have a live of your own. You do for her what you can..."
"You call her, you got her a new cat, you got her a helper, you spent two months with her... Tell her, 'Mom, look, I answer your calls every time, I look out for you...' You do a lot for her."
I'm hungry, I'm tired, and by the time I get back to my apartment, Wendy graciously driving me back out Canal Road and pulling over behind the bus stop, dropping me off, she gives me a few more words of yogic wisdom and how to deal, I get in, after waving good bye to my pretty friend as she drives away, after apologizing for being such a miserable bastard, no you're not, thank you, I get in and turn on the AC and reach for some sliced cold-cut chicken breast and pour out a little tea, and oddly enough, when I get her on the phone mom is doing well, in good spirits. Go figure.
I'm exhausted. My body is lead, and though the mind is active, I cannot move for a long while, and finally must even take a nap. Goddamn ragweed pollen, laying me flat out. I can barely feed myself dinner, after I wake up, and fortunately a can of black-eyed peas works.
I've moved before. It's not a lot of fun. Lost a lot of things, a lot of books. Art work, shoes, clothing. Things I had a sentimental attachment to.
And why DC? It's not like you're going to find any crazy people here, except on the margins... "Full of high school student council presidents, all trying to do well..." as a Russian friend would like to say.
So, I think of holding my own life together, and then there's Mom on top of that.
Yesterday, in the morning, the Sunday before Labor Day, Wendy texts me, asking if I'd like to go to a little sidewalk cafe in Georgetown. Maybe I should have just pulled the usual monkish work-to-do in my little cell here, well, but it's good to get out and Wendy is wise and kindly. So. Fortunately she's in no great rush, because I need more rest before I'm ready to go and find clothes to wear in public. I get in the shower, think about what to wear, go back and lie down in bed for a bit.
We get there, and I told my mom I'd call her back, and when I have a chance, Wendy going in to see what they have because they are out of the croissant she ordered, I call mom, and mom is crazy with jealousy. I never get to see you. Glad you're having a good time. When will I see you? Before I die, or after, she shouts.
I'm not feeling so great about myself anyway, and while it always benefits us, particularly in lock-down times, to get out of our hypochondria and visit with people in public situations, I'm feeling overwhelmed and reluctant as far as being able to enjoy anything. I try to be present. I get my green tea, Wendy has a latte with art on the foam, some form of pastry. I am hungry, but I want to get to the farmer's market, to get some meat for the week. Anything dough will just add to my belly.
We walk around Georgetown in the sun afterward, the sidewalks crowded with normal happy people, students fresh back to town wearing their class finery. I follow her across M Street and down the hill, crossing busy K Street, down to the river, where lots of people are out enjoying the park in the light breeze in the clear late summer day. I follow Wendy up sidewalks at things she wants to check out, but am really feeling like an all-round miserable bastard, for any number of reasons. We get back up from K Street and the park by the river and the river itself, many boaters and kayaks and paddle boarders, walking westward under the girders of the Whitehurst, then up over the canal at the western end of all the Georgetown shops, through the alley, past the Labor Day weekend couples dining at Leopold, then to M, and across M, and into the cosmetics shop, which I stomach for a while, admiring the style of Georgetown pretty girls, then outside, calling my mom again, and she is not a pleasure to deal with, and as Wendy comes out with her bag, she says, "God, she is being so manipulative!" The call ends, mom hanging up, and when she calls back, embarrassed, I don't pick up. My parents don't do that, Wendy says.
"Guilt is the lowest of energy in emotions," she explains to me. Yes, that makes sense. We cross Wisconsin Avenue, then back to the south side of M Street as we walk eastward, there's a soap shop that smells nice, except it's all personal shopping at the tiny front counter now, no real browsing, so we walk up 31st, passed the old Post Office, I show Wendy my brother's house. Do you want to come in and see it? Sure, she says.
Then we walk back, to the car, I hope, and I'm feeling pretty tired, the ragweed, mom, the strange and interesting news I received via a magical new neighbor with a old rusted green Triumph TR-4 motorcar from 1964, who is a real writer, last evening as I was bumming around behind the old G.I. brick building apartment houses. Wendy talks about an old boyfriend of hers, a liar by habit. Yeah, I know, I say.
"You're a grown man. You have a live of your own. You do for her what you can..."
"You call her, you got her a new cat, you got her a helper, you spent two months with her... Tell her, 'Mom, look, I answer your calls every time, I look out for you...' You do a lot for her."
I'm hungry, I'm tired, and by the time I get back to my apartment, Wendy graciously driving me back out Canal Road and pulling over behind the bus stop, dropping me off, she gives me a few more words of yogic wisdom and how to deal, I get in, after waving good bye to my pretty friend as she drives away, after apologizing for being such a miserable bastard, no you're not, thank you, I get in and turn on the AC and reach for some sliced cold-cut chicken breast and pour out a little tea, and oddly enough, when I get her on the phone mom is doing well, in good spirits. Go figure.
I'm exhausted. My body is lead, and though the mind is active, I cannot move for a long while, and finally must even take a nap. Goddamn ragweed pollen, laying me flat out. I can barely feed myself dinner, after I wake up, and fortunately a can of black-eyed peas works.
I've moved before. It's not a lot of fun. Lost a lot of things, a lot of books. Art work, shoes, clothing. Things I had a sentimental attachment to.
And why DC? It's not like you're going to find any crazy people here, except on the margins... "Full of high school student council presidents, all trying to do well..." as a Russian friend would like to say.
So, I think of holding my own life together, and then there's Mom on top of that.
Sunday, September 6, 2020
The moon is full, but I do not see it behind the cloud cover at 4:30 in the morning when I take a walk, barefoot, to the bluff on the Palisades.
I am languishing out here. I should be a journalist, interviewing people, but the shyness, the nerves get to me and too many bad habits.
I could solve my problems if I got a job.
Dreams. You have to go digging sometimes. What was that thought, half-remembered... How did thinking about St. Peter and Jesus softly in the background like some gentle incense help you get into the mode of remembering? How did the Ten Virtues of Buddha help you find a way through the cloud or clouds of thoughts?
I do some dishes to jog the mind by not thinking of what I should be writing. Make a second pot run for the tea leaves in the wire basket. Ragweed, a funny feeling in the head.
88 degrees out. 65% humidity. Feels like 98, the air is thick outside the windows.
Perhaps the world has become too technological for the Ten Virtues. The image of the statue of Buddha, melted, hollowed out bomb's flash of heat, obliterating face but leaving the recognizable form, praying Buddha in lotus, Hiroshima. Boom, and now the future of the Buddha is the Buddha of No Longer Of Any Consequence, bearing no longer any relevance or of any effect in this world we go on with, of no use whatsoever and not full of any truth, in terms of time and money and practicality, worth considering or thinking upon.
I've created this fake little world here, this fake little bubble, as if the world did not apply to me, as if I didn't need a job. Me and my Buddhas.
I search for jobs. I sign in to websites. I take on-line robot quizzes.
But, why, riddle me this, why is it, a coincidence, that many writers do take up an interest in things like the Dharma?
I get up after my mom calls.
Boy, this place is a mess. I say, padding into the kitchen to find some chilled tea in a plastic container. Living alone.
I dream of New York City. My brother and I use someone's bare apartment. It seems like it's the Upper West Side, the dreadful mean Princess's old family place apartment, left blank and white, sheets still on a simple bed in a bare room. It's a mystery where she, or the owners, the ones with rights to this convenient place went, leaving it abandoned. I've snuck in now, but it's cheaper than a hotel. And even here my brother meets me, and later charms a pretty New York girl, so that I go off to kill time alone. I'm in a windowed room and I see an older nosey woman who can see in, knows the owners of it, who are these strangers, she's aiming a camera, so I duck away.
I come in and out of sleep and wanting but being unable to get up. I was up much of the night, sipping of the Carlo Rossi jug Paisano wine. Around midnight I cook a Bolognese, added chickpea rotini pasta at the end.
"I wish I'd gone into banking," I tell myself as I lie half-awake. Then I wouldn't be in this spot. I lay half awake, waiting for the first call from Mom.
The day alone in the apartment drags by slowly again. I finally take a shower, to rouse myself. I shave in the shower. I find boxers after toweling my chest off. It's a humid day. I tend to the raw skin on my elbow, the rubbing alcohol burning before I apply wound gel and a bandaid. I get that from helping new neighbors drag a heavy sofa bed up the confined stairwell.
Yeah, what's the point of writing anyway? It just makes you lonelier, I think, as if to make a statement, though one I don't know enough about even after all the years to believe in.
Okay. Two or three worthless days as far as writing and other things go by. Perhaps the unconscious chores in the mind that come with being published.
Saturday, Mom calls, 9 AM. A little early for me. I call her back in an hour, I tell her, but then I don't get through.
When I do get through, she's in full I'm going to kill myself mode. I spend the next hour calming her down, telling her that hopefully Congress will act and that I'll be able to make it up, just that I'm not sure where I stand, or what to do. "Ted, you've been saying that..."
"Will I see you before I die?"
I'll try to come up this week...
I tell her I've been writing. "I've been done with staring at my navel for years now," she says. Sounding like my grandfather.
My second cousin saw that I'd been published in First of the Month, Benj DeMott's liberal pamphlet sort of thing from New York City--I put it up to share on Facebook--and reached out to me in my tough time. The surviving son of my favorite teacher, legendary English professor at Amherst College, my beau ideal.
Editors take a longer work, they make their choices, and the writer is simply happy to go along. Later, you wonder about the choices, as there are many directions in can all go in.
I would hate to bore anyone with all this, but it strikes me that there is so little warmth and kindness in the daily personal interactions of a city... small things become important. To get support from a sort of friendly and respectful person with whom you share a common thing with... replaces a lot.
"Which one proved to be the man's neighbor..." It's a good question. Jesus and the tale of the Good Samaritan. It wasn't the priest. It wasn't the Sadducee. It wasn't the high and mighty. It was the equivalent of a jazz musician who drank and smoked too much.
I am tired. I tell you, it takes a huge amount of innate energy, and bravery, and industry, to write. You cannot be tired going into it, either physically or mentally or spiritually. It's always stricken me as a long-distance game, like all the running and cycling and cross country skiing over the happy cowed hills with valleys below and perfect gentle rising slow ridges across from you I enjoyed as a kid in a perfect setting. Green valleys like outer countryside Britain. Edge of the Adirondacks.
You need places that protect your ears, giving you only the sounds of nature, if you really want to write and think and play your own music. Most people cannot help you with that, not at all, being full of sound and ego and wordy plans. That's the way it is. They have their thing, you have yours.
And there are many thoughts in the head about all the life choices you seem to have made in your own life. Thoughts like these can attach to philosophical things, Eastern wisdom, you name it, the imagination's playground.
These are times. They will be memorable, significant as they already are. And so it is essential to keep writing through them, a god-given duty, sacred.
But I must say, oddly enough, I feel that feeling, that feeling of being bit stupid, perhaps out of the awkwardness of sharing things that must necessarily be intimate, that old old problem of getting published. You're baring more of your soul than you want to. You can only go through with it if you sense some higher purpose, as if you might add a small modern footnote to a Psalm...
Later, after a series of digestive movements, perhaps involving the chick pea rotini sharing the same channels as the buffalo meat of the Bolognese, oh, and the dried plums of last night, along with an assortment of nuts, now it feels too quiet. It's Labor Day Weekend. The sky is perfect back to school blue. I'm all alone again.
I'm still sussing out the being published part of life. Where will it lead? Anywhere? Or does all getting such writing pieces out there just simply accomplish putting my own strangeness out there, an awkward thing, embarrassing. It is very weird to find one's works in print, as it were, suddenly. It's a shock. Someone else sees what you saw. Weird.
Even a minor publication invites the same terrible angst plague that Kerouac suffered. For as soon as you are published, you know you are open to every little potshot under the sun, every single atom of different stars, each person ready to say, "well, you know... you shouldn't say that, because..." And your own reaction is of course your original one, which is that there is sound and beauty in the form of thoughts and clicking fingers upon a typewriter pad, the sound of words on a page, able to convey to convey the world, the entire theater of humanity and our poor hours strutting upon a stage, king and fool upon the heath, such a thing is man, how noble in countenance, how like a God.
And he who publishes, is in a way, the Good Samaritan. Just like all those Gospel writers, and Paul, and Peter.
Of course. Of course it was hard on Kerouac. How could he possibly be accepted as such, a writer about nights of mad jazzmen blowing their horns and Dean Moriarty sweating madly, how hard it would have been for anyone to accept him, in the American Culture of The Modernity of the Twentieth Century, as who he was. The original New York Times review, by odd dumb luck, a simpatico reviewer, calls him Avatar, Avatar of the Beat Generation, but it wasn't a bad term for Kerouac. You couldn't read that book and deliver a clean spiritual discussion, from a professional point of view, just what exactly he was. You knew something was developing here. Through all the magnificent terms and kindness Kerouac used to write that book, On the Road. The whole attitude of the book and its treatment of people, friends, crazy or not, good or not, ending up well or not, was something deeper than the usual every day take out the garbage and go to work... Steeped in church, Catholic church, how to deal with the Neal Cassidy reactions, love, acceptance, forbearance, noticing.
The Christian story, follow it through, is the same as the Buddha's.
It is such a time, the kind that makes some things about life clearer in your head, truer. This is scary, exhilarating, fraught with mysteries of its own.
I came to conceive of writing as a better form of communication, an older one, more bardic, more devoted to wisdom, less to current detail. Better than talk. The lyricism of Kerouac, or Whitman, or Melville, meeting the crispness of brevity in key points in a phrase, a sentence... The sharp eye of Hemingway's spareness...
I am languishing out here. I should be a journalist, interviewing people, but the shyness, the nerves get to me and too many bad habits.
I could solve my problems if I got a job.
Dreams. You have to go digging sometimes. What was that thought, half-remembered... How did thinking about St. Peter and Jesus softly in the background like some gentle incense help you get into the mode of remembering? How did the Ten Virtues of Buddha help you find a way through the cloud or clouds of thoughts?
I do some dishes to jog the mind by not thinking of what I should be writing. Make a second pot run for the tea leaves in the wire basket. Ragweed, a funny feeling in the head.
88 degrees out. 65% humidity. Feels like 98, the air is thick outside the windows.
Perhaps the world has become too technological for the Ten Virtues. The image of the statue of Buddha, melted, hollowed out bomb's flash of heat, obliterating face but leaving the recognizable form, praying Buddha in lotus, Hiroshima. Boom, and now the future of the Buddha is the Buddha of No Longer Of Any Consequence, bearing no longer any relevance or of any effect in this world we go on with, of no use whatsoever and not full of any truth, in terms of time and money and practicality, worth considering or thinking upon.
I've created this fake little world here, this fake little bubble, as if the world did not apply to me, as if I didn't need a job. Me and my Buddhas.
I search for jobs. I sign in to websites. I take on-line robot quizzes.
But, why, riddle me this, why is it, a coincidence, that many writers do take up an interest in things like the Dharma?
I get up after my mom calls.
Boy, this place is a mess. I say, padding into the kitchen to find some chilled tea in a plastic container. Living alone.
I dream of New York City. My brother and I use someone's bare apartment. It seems like it's the Upper West Side, the dreadful mean Princess's old family place apartment, left blank and white, sheets still on a simple bed in a bare room. It's a mystery where she, or the owners, the ones with rights to this convenient place went, leaving it abandoned. I've snuck in now, but it's cheaper than a hotel. And even here my brother meets me, and later charms a pretty New York girl, so that I go off to kill time alone. I'm in a windowed room and I see an older nosey woman who can see in, knows the owners of it, who are these strangers, she's aiming a camera, so I duck away.
I come in and out of sleep and wanting but being unable to get up. I was up much of the night, sipping of the Carlo Rossi jug Paisano wine. Around midnight I cook a Bolognese, added chickpea rotini pasta at the end.
"I wish I'd gone into banking," I tell myself as I lie half-awake. Then I wouldn't be in this spot. I lay half awake, waiting for the first call from Mom.
The day alone in the apartment drags by slowly again. I finally take a shower, to rouse myself. I shave in the shower. I find boxers after toweling my chest off. It's a humid day. I tend to the raw skin on my elbow, the rubbing alcohol burning before I apply wound gel and a bandaid. I get that from helping new neighbors drag a heavy sofa bed up the confined stairwell.
Yeah, what's the point of writing anyway? It just makes you lonelier, I think, as if to make a statement, though one I don't know enough about even after all the years to believe in.
Okay. Two or three worthless days as far as writing and other things go by. Perhaps the unconscious chores in the mind that come with being published.
Saturday, Mom calls, 9 AM. A little early for me. I call her back in an hour, I tell her, but then I don't get through.
When I do get through, she's in full I'm going to kill myself mode. I spend the next hour calming her down, telling her that hopefully Congress will act and that I'll be able to make it up, just that I'm not sure where I stand, or what to do. "Ted, you've been saying that..."
"Will I see you before I die?"
I'll try to come up this week...
I tell her I've been writing. "I've been done with staring at my navel for years now," she says. Sounding like my grandfather.
My second cousin saw that I'd been published in First of the Month, Benj DeMott's liberal pamphlet sort of thing from New York City--I put it up to share on Facebook--and reached out to me in my tough time. The surviving son of my favorite teacher, legendary English professor at Amherst College, my beau ideal.
Editors take a longer work, they make their choices, and the writer is simply happy to go along. Later, you wonder about the choices, as there are many directions in can all go in.
I would hate to bore anyone with all this, but it strikes me that there is so little warmth and kindness in the daily personal interactions of a city... small things become important. To get support from a sort of friendly and respectful person with whom you share a common thing with... replaces a lot.
"Which one proved to be the man's neighbor..." It's a good question. Jesus and the tale of the Good Samaritan. It wasn't the priest. It wasn't the Sadducee. It wasn't the high and mighty. It was the equivalent of a jazz musician who drank and smoked too much.
I am tired. I tell you, it takes a huge amount of innate energy, and bravery, and industry, to write. You cannot be tired going into it, either physically or mentally or spiritually. It's always stricken me as a long-distance game, like all the running and cycling and cross country skiing over the happy cowed hills with valleys below and perfect gentle rising slow ridges across from you I enjoyed as a kid in a perfect setting. Green valleys like outer countryside Britain. Edge of the Adirondacks.
You need places that protect your ears, giving you only the sounds of nature, if you really want to write and think and play your own music. Most people cannot help you with that, not at all, being full of sound and ego and wordy plans. That's the way it is. They have their thing, you have yours.
And there are many thoughts in the head about all the life choices you seem to have made in your own life. Thoughts like these can attach to philosophical things, Eastern wisdom, you name it, the imagination's playground.
These are times. They will be memorable, significant as they already are. And so it is essential to keep writing through them, a god-given duty, sacred.
But I must say, oddly enough, I feel that feeling, that feeling of being bit stupid, perhaps out of the awkwardness of sharing things that must necessarily be intimate, that old old problem of getting published. You're baring more of your soul than you want to. You can only go through with it if you sense some higher purpose, as if you might add a small modern footnote to a Psalm...
Later, after a series of digestive movements, perhaps involving the chick pea rotini sharing the same channels as the buffalo meat of the Bolognese, oh, and the dried plums of last night, along with an assortment of nuts, now it feels too quiet. It's Labor Day Weekend. The sky is perfect back to school blue. I'm all alone again.
I'm still sussing out the being published part of life. Where will it lead? Anywhere? Or does all getting such writing pieces out there just simply accomplish putting my own strangeness out there, an awkward thing, embarrassing. It is very weird to find one's works in print, as it were, suddenly. It's a shock. Someone else sees what you saw. Weird.
Even a minor publication invites the same terrible angst plague that Kerouac suffered. For as soon as you are published, you know you are open to every little potshot under the sun, every single atom of different stars, each person ready to say, "well, you know... you shouldn't say that, because..." And your own reaction is of course your original one, which is that there is sound and beauty in the form of thoughts and clicking fingers upon a typewriter pad, the sound of words on a page, able to convey to convey the world, the entire theater of humanity and our poor hours strutting upon a stage, king and fool upon the heath, such a thing is man, how noble in countenance, how like a God.
And he who publishes, is in a way, the Good Samaritan. Just like all those Gospel writers, and Paul, and Peter.
Of course. Of course it was hard on Kerouac. How could he possibly be accepted as such, a writer about nights of mad jazzmen blowing their horns and Dean Moriarty sweating madly, how hard it would have been for anyone to accept him, in the American Culture of The Modernity of the Twentieth Century, as who he was. The original New York Times review, by odd dumb luck, a simpatico reviewer, calls him Avatar, Avatar of the Beat Generation, but it wasn't a bad term for Kerouac. You couldn't read that book and deliver a clean spiritual discussion, from a professional point of view, just what exactly he was. You knew something was developing here. Through all the magnificent terms and kindness Kerouac used to write that book, On the Road. The whole attitude of the book and its treatment of people, friends, crazy or not, good or not, ending up well or not, was something deeper than the usual every day take out the garbage and go to work... Steeped in church, Catholic church, how to deal with the Neal Cassidy reactions, love, acceptance, forbearance, noticing.
The Christian story, follow it through, is the same as the Buddha's.
It is such a time, the kind that makes some things about life clearer in your head, truer. This is scary, exhilarating, fraught with mysteries of its own.
I came to conceive of writing as a better form of communication, an older one, more bardic, more devoted to wisdom, less to current detail. Better than talk. The lyricism of Kerouac, or Whitman, or Melville, meeting the crispness of brevity in key points in a phrase, a sentence... The sharp eye of Hemingway's spareness...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
