Everything in moderation, even writing. For the addictive personality types, writing is like drinking wine, it's liberating, it's soothing. A bardic familiarity comes over you, a sense of the comforts of the pub.
You can overdo it. You can be enchanted up into the animal sounds of prose... become overly focussed on a thing not economically viable nor worth doing. Enchanted to a stone in the current, as Yeats put it, creativity, the bold rebellious act.
All of this is hard to explain, and that's why I keep going on about it. You have to bring in your own life into it, to the extent that this life is predominantly one of the saint's, in as far as it is able to understand, at least understand the questions we all must thing about, the big "WHY?" of everything. At least in some versions, one way of thinking about things, anyway. I've since given up trying to be neat and orderly about it. The main thing is just simply to write.
To begin, at a place of being bowled over by your own shame... a sort of almost willful--so might it appear--disregard for taking care of worldly matters, a concerning matter in every way. To begin here is the way for other things to happen. At least you're reminding yourself you can put words together, have some form of satisfaction, leaving it simple as that.
Yes, but each of us, were we to explore the issues thereof, is made completely different, unique, from any other being, any other circumstances, a manifestation on the very outer edge of the explosion of created life. So can it be hard sometimes, to fit in. As if having to go back down a level after reaching for all the insights you attain at the higher...
Literature is populated by characters living on that outer edge. Melville's Moby Dick brings each character to the extreme ends, Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg. Shakespeare's people, exploring the edges of sanity often enough. Hamlet. Lear. We can follow their trajectories.
And unfortunately, as we develop into our own true unique distinctive selves, into our own form, all the way along, our values, I guess that's the word for it, come spilling out of us. Spilling forth, in a kind of happiness, a contentment, I suppose, a satisfaction. A natural bodily function of some animal pleasure. Just as the things we tried to match and bind to ourselves to at one point might now slough off, discarded, no longer important, for never having been appropriate for us on our path to the riches of self-discovery in the first place.
Some people are drawn one way, some in another, some to certain art forms, say in business, and some are drawn to expression.
We go by intuition, that’s all we got. We sense things, even if we have little chance of putting the true essence of experience down, well enough into words.
It's no surprise, at least for some of us, that when we venture out into the world as it is, (largely shaped by the workings of society, I guess you could call it,) we come back feeling like we got talked into something. Our pockets a little lighter, from playing the game.
We are, in our efforts to be and to exist, caught in an unfriendly in between, feeling done with the terms and conditions of the contracts we must follow to meet others, on the one side, and on the other, receiving precious little word from the sides of the saints and Jesus and all those people. Abandoned. Left to figure it out all by ourselves. Did they say enough, Muhammad and Buddha? Are we now burdened with having to come up with our own versions ourselves, for which we too must make some teeth cutting pilgrimage... Yet always having to ask ourselves if there is any meaning, any bearing upon the practical matters of living an orderly non self destructive and responsible life.
And how many people will you run into who really are discouraging... If Jesus can be said to have any human emotion, at least some of that of His own disappointment with a dull and unbelieving unimaginative generation of human being... Enough to make you wish you stayed home. If you get it, who gets you then? How long must He put up with this generation...
Oh faithless and perverse generation... how long must I endure you... Matthew 17:17
Each of us, a rare bird.
The CVS
depresses us.
Trump land.
In the myth, Kryptonite comes from the man’s own original childhood home. He can do anything and everything with his powers. But there is a catch. This is the self-criticism. It comes from within. It stops one in his tracks, makes you weak... The questioning, the momentary lacking of self-confidence, the slip into one's own vices.
The duty of another is fraught with peril, the Buddhists say. Full of danger. And in this world the people most like yourself are your mother and your father, in some cases more like one than the other. But as one comes from the female, these two selves were once inseparable until the proper term.
Dutifully, I call, after my little walk along the bluff above the old Potomac, in the golden light, finding a bee asleep legs up, perched upside down underneath a yellow flower. Porcelain berry vines coming over everything. I'm finally getting going looking at possible venues for freelance jobs, beginning with my interests, wine for instance, having written a couple of wine columns for the local, The Georgetowner, before they grew tired of my obtuseness. In the last column I wrote, I was going on about Dionysos and the Pirates, that old tale--I forget what wine in particular I was actually talking about--and I thought I had something, the column aligning with news of a horrible slaughter in Paris of more than 100 people, many of them at a concert, at the hands of Islamic extremist along a street of theaters, venues, cafes and bars and restaurants. But they simply never published it. Without a word to me. Okay. I had probably worn out my welcome in a similar column the one before, talking about how cows may seem alike but can have vastly different personalities.
Anyway, so mom has gotten home from a ride with her helper and out to eat somewhere, but she is flustered, her breath coming up, mom calm down. I need wine, she says. But she's having difficulty pouring herself a glass. I hate to do this to you. I know it must be hard on you. I'm sorry. But I'm having problems. Okay, so I calmly walk her through it, knowing that she has twist-off cap chardonnay. Now okay mom, now you just have to find a cup. Anyone will do. Take a coffee cup off the top of the microwave, who cares. While I'm walking her through this--it's about 6:15 in the evening, sundown time--she'll go away from the phone to look for a glass, let's say, and then I hear her in the distance calling my name, over again. Help, help. Help. And so on. Finally she comes back to phone, which I am speaking to her through, and she hangs it up. I call a couple of times, busy signal. Then she is calling. Okay, so that's good. I get her settled down.
Yes, she says. Everybody is having a tough time now. I know how you feel. Take care of yourself. Get something good to eat.
In these times of Covid-19, I try reaching out to people through social media in this isolation times, as I live alone. For then your own native creativity must still be expressed, and probably in new ways as an adaptation from the old way you managed it. No longer in front of people, listening from behind the bar, observing calmly that all things are in place and in time. I was shy at this initially. Little side projects, they seemed like. Probably a little Dutch Courage, i.e., wine, cheap wine, was involved. A little silliness to keep back the wolves at the door... On the edge of appearing foolish. A character...
Thursday. I'm slightly awake, 8 AM, mom calls. 11AM. 1:30 PM. 3PM. 5:30PM. I go meet my friend Drew down at Clyde's, deciding to walk down, for some calming exercise. Don't drink too much, I tell myself. We have a burger out there on the sidewalk as the sky turns into a deep clear azure blue sunset and first evening stars over the yon riverbank bluffs of Virginia, seen as the corridor of M Street dips and disappears as Canal Road after the bridge, a distant traffic light. He's good about jobs. You know where the jobs are? Construction. Lots of construction going on, he tells me over the satisfaction of the table and the wine. Sales. Long Fence. He mentions a possible job as a property manager for a local real estate company, maybe. Why didn't I think of these things years ago? More lucrative than my old wages, of poverty and no dates. Reasonable hours. Yes, you get up early, in the morning, that's where the sales happen. Not in the evening. People are too inconclusive later in the day. I'll think about it.
But I see, clearly in my mind's eye, here's a guy who gets laid. Why, because he does things. He gets off his ass in the morning, not worried about painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or for observing the 4 Noble Truths, the Eight Commandment keys of good behavior, the seven soulful ways you can fuck up, the twenty bad things of and of, the ten good ways, etc., He's figured it out. He'd be great at all the jobs out there he's telling me about. While I stand about and smile and be social, knowing I'm never like that. Thus here I am, too thoughtful, and though great in soul, perhaps, or bullshit, there is not the backbone of my being materially happy nor secure enough to be a good partner to anything, and now all I can do is look back at all the girls that could have been, sweet, very nice, beautiful each in her own way, and there's my beautiful stallion shape of maleness, alone every night, and alone and alone. Rising in the morning as I wake, for nothing. Mom calling.
So, we part, and I have to walk over to the PNC Bank ATM to put a check from my aunt in. And I'm still hungry, so I arm myself with a few shawarma wraps from the friendly late night place below M, eat one, start walking. Tired out. I succumb to ordering up an Uber. $15 down the drain.
The next day, man, I'm dejected. Boy am I. Mom has called again, confused. 3AM. Then past 5AM. What, mom? What? But I'm not in my place, I need someone to take me back to my home, a couple doors down, or up on the other side, up the road a piece. (And how much destruction has this my mom wh o have birth to me caused me so much bad stuff...) I can't even get out of bed. I'm totally fucked.
I draft the letter to the landlord, while the swirling colored circle haunts me, slowing down, making me wait, no teletype paper roll for me Jack under such circumstances, your connection just went shit...
I'm talking to mom when I see the boss is calling. I have to wait. I call hime back. He calls me back.
We want to open the wine bar again.
And maybe then I have a job again.
e
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