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.