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...