But we all are created by God, each of us an individual, each of us unique.

So I'm not feeling well, a subtle but noticeable tremor, a small difficulty in aiming my fingers at the keyboard being how nervous and anxious I am these days.  I went for sort of restaurant job interview at the old Irish place way out there in Glen Echo, though they really didn't have a job for me, so I had a Guinness, and then nursed another, talking with the couple over in the corner, preppy, typical native Northwest DC prosperous Jesuit couple.   The musicians are supposed to start soon, so I have one more, then get the Uber car back, $13 more spent.

The debates are on, so I settle down into the couch, watching it on my iPhone, having meatloaf for dinner.

And so discouraging are the debates and this Trump building himself up as a strongman as the times, according to him, need a strongman, and perhaps he really is intent on creating such an environment, the strongman prophesying the thug militias that will come forward to lift him up and put all other life down. 

I give up on it after making it a good way through, I can't watch this, and I go and lay down in bed and fall asleep but then I wake up about 3:00 in the morning, and anyway, there's laundry to do, the light colored jeans that got pretty much ruined for polite wear, dirt ground into the knees, have been soaking on and off, now in the tub, have begun to smell of mildew, and I have a pile of black socks and colored boxer briefs and tee shirts, so why not, since I'm up anyway...  Get my quarters, down the little stairwell, I leave my detergent, Tide Free, down there...   the clean old basement in the cinderblock iron held basement of old G.I. apartment buildings nice and simple.

So I crack open a Guinness, having had wine earlier with dinner, and pour that over the rocks as I sit up and watch a documentary (shared with my small bloodline of writer friends who seem to allow us getting each other) about Jack Kerouac's famous visit to Big Sur, so chronicled, (recoiling from all the troubles of fame we all know so well now) and what else to say...  I'm up 'til about 5:30 in the morning, not that I want to be, it's just that I'm awake, just as the light is getting blue out, would that it would only stay that way, so low-key and friendly to star watchers and dreamers and dopey kids with fantasies on their minds, and I don't like the day so much anymore, but, as it seems, have come to prefer the night, if I must be honest with you, it's quiet, for one thing, and if the President of the United States is such an insane madman wanna be dictator fascist, if that's what all our noise has created, holy shit, what's so wrong with me having a little wine and musing poetically for a bit, thinking of Jack Kerouac as all the great bugs of earth that are still here breathe their song in and out, tiny whistles, tiny instruments of reed or string, and played with such a tender steadiness as if to keep all of humanity nice and calm, a symphony, from which one might deduce the weather, for if it were colder, you might just hear one of the little guys nearby going "twenty, twenty, twenty," slowly, just that I don't have a job and who the hell knows what's going to happen with everything these days.



Right now it's a steady cheep cheep cheep as if they were little kids practicing their violin bow strokes, but faster, back and forth.   (And they have smaller little maestro cricket bug katydid musicians who are so stable and subtle that they fill in the blanks in between the other's sawing, errr, err, errr, peep peep peep peep, adding an almost unnoticeable syncopation, or background, so that no wonder, no wonder humanity found it pretty natural to organize into Gregorian Chants and Orchestras of Beethoven and Mahler, and Gamelon, and drums, and The Beatles...  Does their physical shape, their physical abilities of movement dictate that they produce this music, but they must want to, indeed.) How do they know that?  How do they know that night time is their time, that now it's autumn under a full moon and where exactly are they anyway, invisible fairy people of the original neighborhoods where the tall biped monkey chimp came and built stuff, bricks, pipes, electricity, wires, walls, doors...  ripping up everything in the meanwhile, oh god.  (and to this day, the airplanes fly over, whooshing their strange reality over everything, and no wonder Kerouac felt he should just go camping, or retreat to the hills of San Fran and beyond, poor old beautiful kind thoughtful sensitive Jack, wearing the difficulty of all that, all that as your only profession, being so, and verbal, preserving, by deep proper instinct, oh that need we all have within us, to do things like clean dishes with soapy hot water and make stews, peel the carrots, chop them along with the celery you put under the sink to wash, the onion, always onion, and then the Christlike miraculous transformation of a stew.  Made easy by your lovely sweet saintly retired school teacher aunt who thoughtfully gave you an Instant Pot for your birthday, a necessary element of any Zen monk monastery, or mountain peaceful cabin where you can sit and hear if you tune in... the sounds of nature and the world, before the airplanes fly and the trucks start rolling and the whole mad town trying to get somewhere so that someone can save his or her own life, or something like, "just do what you're told and you'll be okay, and you'll have health insurance, and paperwork to fill out."  Shit.  No escape from that.  The Beat writers, the real ones, the real movement, was right in all that.  Tho' it cost them, some more than others.  Neal Cassidy wasn't a shit, totally, he was a sweet nice guy, and he and Kerouac were rather remarkable friends, brothers even, and we don't know, as it's hard to summon up all their letters and correspondence, except, you feel it.  They both were great.  It was a meeting to be remembered, noted, a point of life, and probably, too, the ups and downs of later on...

Back at the restaurant, we'd serve a beautiful meal.   Really incredible good quality stuff, a good value too.  (Not that fancy restaurants go overboard with portions, leaving me hungry, most of the time.  At least when I was working.  I'd wolf down a cassoulet, or the veal cheeks, or the chicken curry, right quick.)  Beef Bourguignon.  Braised Cheeks Osso Bucco.  Cassoulet.  Soups made of magnificent stocks, salads made of interplaying texture things, even veal tongue in a sauce Gribiche.  Crusty Boneless Pigsfeet, on a plate, with a mustard onion sauce....


Well, the next day I finally get up, lazy again, feeling weird, ragweed again, and so I place a call to mom and don't get through and then mom calls me, and she is rough and not happy with me.  I just keep waiting....  She's become like my wife, oye, and she lets me have it as far as what good I am.  You used to be on the ball, she says.  Ouch.  And she's exactly right.

DC, you're always in DC.  Yes, mom, Mary is coming, she should be with you soon.

And even I know this can't go on too much longer, and Jesus, winter is coming, the days are already October, and what have I done, looking for a job, but not doing shit about it really.  I should have applied to Amtrak maybe.  I dunno.  I'm just stuck.  So stuck.  And now, what to do with my stuff, all my books, my whole life, which might be a lie...

I wasn't a bad man.  I just had a sense of humor.  So deep a one that not everyone gets it.  And if they don't, shyness takes over.  A subtle, as is earned in the restaurant business, waiting sometimes passively on people, as old Boon, the Laotian prince, my introducing wizard to French wine and service, would say sometimes, recounting a story, toward the end,"fuck you too," said with a laugh with a gesture of his calm princely hand.  Up yours, buddy.  And then he'd smile, more privately. "My team always wins."  And then he'd rinse and wipe off his wine glass with a bar linen towel napkin, same as the ones for the table, but the ones that came in from the linen service with imperfections, little stains and such, use those to wipe all the glassware as it comes out of the machine that groans and moans watery up and down back and forth over and under, as if to say, I got you.

Meanwhile, Simon is down in the basement, at the little chef's desk and the desk chair that showed up one day out of the alley, someone throwing it away, but still of use.  Maybe he'd be enjoying a cheap Clint Eastwood type cigar, but he was always gracious and never ever seemed to get tired, very rarely, with his beautiful round Cameroonian head.  Hey, Simon, what are the specials tonight...  And the door is already open, a vice grip of trying to get everything ready and prepared.

Oh, the long line of great gentleman, coming through the old Dying Gaul, they weren't always as verbal as you might like, or too deep into Spanish, not English, but they would communicate just fine none the less, as I went rummaging in their vegetable cooler for lemons and limes, an orange for good measure, something the other bar people would get lazy about, oh, well, must have forgot, along with all the other things I had to restock, soda water, tonic water, pineapple juice, a back up rail vodka, Tito's, fill the olive tray ready, don't be a jerk, come on, man, don't leave me with an empty row of a particular beer...  You know you went through a bunch of Stella, some Leffe...

Say what you will of the job, it was always real.  And the old garage, where dry things would be stocked, and big plastic containers and the to-go boxes and the big plastic galleons of industrial cleaners for the machines, god knows, my skin protesting in January from all that, a crack on my right thumb, the one that takes the drying towel inside a wine glass to get the soap residue out, ahh, the life of the wine professional being professional.  Everyone was great.  I have to say.  Manager, owner, godfather boss, dishwasher ladies low and sturdy from Salvador, the great busboys...

And the funny thing, if you know a few people in the restaurant business in DC, you will find out you know other people.  Oh, Sea Catch, yes, Don Jose was my man on Sunday.  And I miss the guy.


But the meatloaf doesn't sit well the next day,  I don't know.  Or maybe it was the stout, which seemed like a good Irish storied escape, over the mountains...  After the rain comes I tried to joke with the mandolin player, it's pouring rain but under a tent they are okay, so I say, "Rainy Night in Soho," as a request, but nothing, flat, barely the slightest acknowledgement... Is this how old and crazy I am now?  Come on, you don't know all I have to deal with, my musical background...

I chalk it up.  Oh, this is DC for you.  What can you expect.  Fuck it.  Hardly the vibe of the old Bohemians meeting in 1953 in Greenwich Village.  Come on, man.  I got street cred.  But no.  Zero.  Nada.  I even poke the guy with a beard, young dude, gently in the back, his shoulder.  Completely inoffensive.  "Did you like that..."  by which I mean, my song request, but it's all lost on everyone, them, the musicians, the girlfriends, the rain, the stupid restaurant which is blank now, erased of that connecting juice that is so real and vital, hospitality, friendship, reaching out, etc.   Nothing.  Not a word.  So, okay, I'm just a drunk, I guess. And I would have liked to have had the deviled eggs with smoked salmon and then an Irish cheeseburger, but.. it's cost me enough to get here and it will cost me to get back, and I don't see anyone offering me a ride.


Jack, Jack, you know, being alone, even in the cabin, it's not a good idea.  It certainly sounds like a good idea, but you're instantly going to get lonely as anything, and you're going to have to entertain some of the old poisons, just at a level more controlled, and where is your typewriter anyway.  Jack Kerouac, incredibly smart guy.  A man with the music in him.  The soul.

Oh, hell.  What are we going to do.

But there is a theme here.  My friends.  Kerouac.  Nature.  Exposure to the elements.  It's not like they had Club Med invented for him.   He was hard on himself, spartan, stoic.  Could he have written ad copy?  Run a bookstore?  Nah.  I think he would have been okay with some parts of the restaurant business, but soon he would have bowed out, bored, no, this is not for me, you have offended The Holy Spirit, and he had every right to.  Mind you, an incredible athlete, bulked with muscle, built perfectly for sturdy bursts of Breton speed, and with an intelligence that just wouldn't fit in with any boundaries but its own ones, vast, horizonal, arched to the sky, the circumspection of so much road.  A sleeping bag.  Sleeping on the floor.  A rough driver, but one taking you somewhere, a mountain adventure, across the mighty rivers of the north and the south, shouting poetry to the moon full.

His little touches, those in his prose, gestures of politeness, of the old meanings with which humans used to speak to each other.   Each one of his books, great as they are, can be tedious at points....  No, Jack, don't go down there...  But who can stop him.  On The Road is difficult.  Dean driving.  Dharma Bums is difficult.  He's alone again, stuck in some rail yard.   Desolation Angels, difficult.  Big Sur...

He wrote prose.  This is the way we all really want to talk to each other, before conversations get interrupted and distracted and derailed by and in the back and forth.  Egos, everywhere, and ego thinking imbedded so far in us in our attempt to survive just another day or longer, we too get caught.   We want to be, simply, present.  Like an animal.  Hello, deer.  (Two bucks I saw, almost face to face, on my little walk to the river bluff...)

Oh, but who cares, really, anymore...  Kerouac knew, sensed at least, his writing was a fight for survival, and so, he ran.  Just like I used to run over the hills of country roads in New York State, farmland, before it got too developed, etc., but we won't go into that now.



But oh Kerouac, he felt the big shame just like I do, and I won't say I'm better at it than he.

If one were to have real faith, what would he do?   Well, it would be hard to top Jesus at what he would do, some of us being prone to the Christ Complex,  but faith would be to write, to join your own sort of a monastery, one of truth and writing and the athletic grace of prose in the mind, the stunning sprint, the long turn around the track's curve toward the homestretch and you're still motoring, pumping away and god it feels good.

The recipe for life is not less art, it is for more art.  Art to pour into starving mouths in need of water and wine and sustenance and resurrection from the dead...


To pull something out of the dank and Celtic depressions that come naturally, like a load of shit or coal or rock one must bucket away in paining shovels, this is easier when the subject is allowed to sit down and write for a bit, I kid you not, no joke, it's good therapy.  Do not hold it against a crippled man that he needs someone of faith to come along and to simply, rather simply say, you are freed from your sins.  Go write a book.  Take some time off.  Stop worrying.  Spend time with friends.

I have to say, a Guinness, extra stout, $12.99, across the street for a six pack, tastes pretty good while crickets chirp secretly and boldly, calming our own blood flow veins with their medicines pulled out of the ground, rising a beneficial beneficent herbal and mineral dust out of the dirt, so that we too might come back after living through another winter.  The Guinness, poured into a wine glass, is actually a nice thing, not just a sort of legend joke.  It's creamy.  Malty.  It deglazed the pan before a beef stew pretty well, I must say.  (Maybe the crickets are saying, "potassium, magnesium, iron, oh, and they will need carbon and old buried iodine too, how much work, yes, we have to do.")  Mining for the sake of their old friends, and you know they watch us, and probably care for us.  I followed a monarch butterfly around today in the afternoon sun, a gorgeous creature, we played, almost, hide and seek.  Tell me there is no intelligence in such, a wish almost to show the glory of gliding, just get your wings up like this and you can do it, said the butterfly.  And up and around, and dropping down, then resting, then rising up, so he went, very entertaining, even if I was in just about the worst mood possible with many burdens and a seeming inability to do some stupid paperwork after all that effort I put into, looking for a job.

Right now the bugs have changed slightly, their tempo.  They are rolling a wheel around, quick quick quick, as if they suddenly realized, oh, shit, there is a project we must do, and they all join in.  But wait, there is a maestro conductor who is now slowing things down, reminding everyone that it is 4:58 AM, and that, well, we will need to pack it up here, and disappear, us jazzmen and jazzwomen, and just by that small syncopation, if you were listening, you would hear the subtle change in tempo, just as God and the Universe and Thou Art That Which Is, wanted you, wants you, to.  Idiot or not.  Or maybe there's an old Native American ghost over your shoulder, seeing that you are hungry and benevolent and need to be fed of the spirit.

All the people who are intent on doing things, maybe they too should stop and listen, to the bugs.  Not that it would directly help, but for sanity's (whatever that is) sake.

The moving world is so hard to keep track of.  Try jumping back into that stream when you have fallen out, and you will see how change keeps changing and changing, and someone's trying to get rich, or, maybe just do their job so that they have a salary...  so they can eat, but it's not great, in fact it sucks.


A children's book can be written in about fifty good sentences, much like a Hemingway story.  A good one, both counts.  The horse went to the water.  Captain Jim saw the pirate ship in the cove.  Fishing in the swamp...  Huck has a new friend.  I saw Dean round the corner in his moth eaten overcoat he'd saved for the frigid temperatures of the east.


"I don't need to please anyone but myself," I finally say, in my mild Eureka moment.  No more trying to please impossible virgins and mood swing women, bless her poor soul.  Just do what I can.  Sorry I won't be away earlier like everyone else, because madmen need to sleep too, when they can.


How are you going to make it as a writer, kid, man, man child...?  But that's not exactly it.  It's the act.    It's the process.  It's the work of the exercise.  It's, yes, also about whatever beauty you mind find in discovering a voice.  That's the thing to share.  Like landscaping.  Like pruned hedges.  I work.  You work.  It's a way to talk, across walls and over boundaries and in between, because we can never really talk to each other all that well, coming out of the surface of being and not the depth...