One true sentence, so I write down, "Jesus Christ."

It's nighttime.  Again, 3 in the morning.  For some reason I have Woody Guthrie's "This land was made for you and me," in my head, but in a low range.  I'm about to research it, on the web, or Youtube, or whatever.  It's a three chord song.  That's all you need.

And here she comes again.  Down the stairs.  To ruin my creative vibe.  She came down an hour ago.  

But no, it had not been so much fun or an adventure, tending bar that year, nor the year before it, not the year before that one either, nor as simply living as a barman who was off duty some times and writing as a way of self-therapy.  There was always the possibility of the panic phone call from my demented mother saying that she was not home, that she needed to get back to her real home, or that why was she all alone, or that there's no food, and no wine here.  Everybody else avoided being directly in this awkward place, and even before those troubles that came and grew, myself the only one who would call or be called by her, or go visit, or pay her much attention, even before all this, there had been my own living situation, one which I should never have accepted, but which also had grown increasingly awkward, and my friend the landlord's insistence that he knew what I really did at night, and that I should come right out and admit that I was inclined to be some form of homosexual, even as he was a terribly sweet man, a lonely man, a man I was friends with, and we got each other on many many good levels, and he did much for me, though of course that all evaporated after a long slow fraying of the strands that hold such ropes together.  He was kind, though, always, even when being strange and hard to deal with, not wanting to let me go if I came up and had a drink with him, an awkward pause as I went down the stairs and looked for some words to close the door by, and he knew, as our friendship grew tragic, that I was, as he put it, "under a lot of pressure."

But it was the phone calls, the Mary Lincoln mood swings, the crying anxiety, the volatility, of the calls as I tried to get to work the best way possible, early, to deal with extra things that might, as they often did, come up, let alone the phone calls I might get during my shift.  And I'd do my best, feeling quite guilty of course, when she would say I'm home but I'm not home and I need someone to take me to the house up the road a piece, and I tell her about the things she could see because she was in her kitchen, and there was the inexpensive painting of elephant mother and child, a picture of her grandmother, the mirror her own mother had purchased and passed on, a sign of the better life, the dining room table, now in the kitchen by the landline phone, the old chairs that went with it, furniture my parents purchased together up in New Hampshire after they got married.  

It was less of a strain on my nerves, even as I required monkish long hours to scrape the surface of whatever creativities I might find within to soothe myself, giving that up too, along with my old apartment with my stuff in it, after I'd moved out, finding myself suddenly on my own.  Except that now, I could also be interrupted, now in person, or face a possible hard time from her if I took some time for myself, a walk, a drive in the car without her to make me nervous, and all of it dragging down my verbal and mental energies.  No fun, not much of it, anyway, unless I was occupying certain regions of my brain with the making of a stew, dish duties endless, a project like coping with the mold on the cinder cement block basement walls from the water that came in from above.  

And like living in the Palisades, access to the quiet bluffs and the California Pines, a little breath grove with the soft needles I could do all my yoga on, t

he river below, an easy 35 minute walk to work on a bus line....  my outlet was also, in addition to writing and trying to read, the latter having become difficult for me, as the guilt of my past as a fallen college student haunts me, still, was wine, and I was by this point quite familiar with wine, and I'm not the only one either, in that particular boat, except that I was pretty much a loser, an increasingly weird and old bachelor with his own ways so engrained in him, the hours he kept, despite a constant self lecture from more prudent voices in his head, "you're burning the candle at both ends" type of thing, alone, and the best thing about my life was that I had, at least, no children to try and support.  Great.

My humor of course turned more crass, as the stuff of a healthy male female relationship faded from me as my lack of resources dwindled down in a pained way.  Well, you have your health, they tell you.  But the isolation will drive you mad, and there seemed no more possibility of any love story fitting to my tastes anyway, as much as Catholicism might reassure you.  So they told me, my more upwardly mobile bar characters...  I was the crass one.  Okay, I admit it. That's how it goes.  But I'd still smile and repeat what I heard from the busboy man, "mucho carné," when an attractive female of the human species passed by, back and forth to the upstairs bathroom at the old Dying Gaul.

So what was I telling you...  the mind gets distracted quite easily these days, tired.  Up here at mom's, I find another thing, like how she puts the toilet paper roll's feed coming from the inside, against the wall, rather than rolling down outside from the top so you can find the end in the darkness rather than fishing for it, and I can't help when I suddenly yell out, something like "stupid bitch," so unhealthy I have become I'm afraid.

Recycled anger, not walking enough, trapped here, wintertime, dried out, half dead.

But I suppose, or rather, this is what I thought, when I looked back at my old life.  There at the bar.  There in the midst of the city.  And my thought sort of ran, or runs, like this, that in order to. be successful, to carry on your military campaign of being a student council president (I was once one myself, but of a class of about 180, and I wasn't very aggressive, and soon learned I was terrible at the job in the fibers of my DNA), to do that in Washington, D.C., or any place like it--and you may feel quite free to completely disagree, as that's all we seem to be able to do these days--what you had to do, if you wanted to be like that, was to take absolutely zero risk.   Yes, you might have taken a risk taking out a shit ton of grad school loans, but to do such a thing would wed you to a job and a career, and that's what everyone did and still does.  Very rational after all.

But there was no risk to such a life.  You were caught, by then, if you did that.  You're life was, at best, scripted, in a good way, sure.  Plenty of leeway for success, because it was the success of everyone else, therefore you were supported in whatever you did.

But some of us, to live like that were to bring on a rather steady case of liquid diarrhea.  You just couldn't fucking handle it, to be quite honest, not in any of the places the forms of such had seeped into like a poisonous kind of water always on the floor, getting your shoes wet.  Even if your co-workers had great lean fine asses and red hair, and to them you were, in the bars up on the Hill, James Bond.

Without the foot soldier barman who kept Robert Shoffner, great food critic of the Post, happy, would there be the early recognition, of course there would be, but you helped with your own two hands, 

Without my efforts to get the old wine bar upstairs there at the Dying Gaul up and running and a steady cash cow from my giving my life's blood to it, and all my friends told me, you need a share in that, given what you've done, without those efforts, there would not be a second restaurant up the road, at least in some sense.   My sincere appreciations, taught by friends through the connections that were there, that had come together, let me understand what Chef Francis, old friend of Bruno, could do, after the left the ambassador residence job.   I wasn't about to partner with him, I didn't have the time, the energy..

Even in the city, you really felt that there was no one who had ever taken a risk, never thought of a reinvention more aligned with a soul within.  It was all about, as it will be until this poor old planet dies finally under our selfish morbid weight, the resume, the C.V.   A horrible insult to deliver, but, one asks, where is the soul these days.  (Biden, yes, thank god.  Perhaps the system works after all.)

In a town where no risks are taken, you get lazy.  Imagination is squeezed, narrow.  Blood out of it.  No room for it, not here, anywhere.  The bar was a last stand.  The native American's revenge upon the invading race, of karma.  Your women will eat you alive.  They cannot be women anymore.  Men cannot be men anymore, unless they are selling everyone else out.  Everyone criticizes every one else to the most minutest detail.

The leg of lamb.  I under-cooked it, considering the thermometer, or the placement of it, like everything else in mom's apartment, a bit of a mess a bit off, and rare lamb in such a form is not that appetizing.  Lamb chops I have overcooked often enough to be that sad.  This time I didn't have the rosemary or the fresh thyme like I wanted, but dealing with your mother any grocery shopping is nerve-wracking.  The thermometer at 130.  I let it rest.

Irish style, or Navarre... And now, a stew the fatty pieces.

are there any good interesting people, outside of the restaurant business, still there? 

the successes of their careers has dulled their minds.  and good for them.  dead personalities. too often playing a role.  which they did to be successful, very diligent, very hard working, very get up early and work all day and deal with the shit, except for why?

The most boring people, who would show you in a phony way how interesting they were, through lines of exalted happiness, or cleverness, or smug self-reliant success of which they were not reaping the rewards quite yet, though they already were, while the rest of us starved.  words out of their mouths were dead, though they thought themselves interesting, enough to not listen, blinded.

None of us are interesting, or worthy of a single thought beyond our own little mouthed childishness.  

So after Kerouac, and those efforts, I went back to Hemingway, and both of them carried a lot of traction, and both of them stood up, one way or another, to proclaim and work.  And what they did, each of them, was, is, glorious, such that there is no real place for a' many of us to stand, and even walk where we want to be, without them.

Myself.  A poor bare college grad. Visiting my brother, Inman Square, he's making a success out of his life, has a motorcycle, Thunder, a Honda 500, something like that, dark green gas tank.  I've gone out to the UMass Boston campus, the JFK Library, via the T.  And I ask them, as I get in, I'd like to see a little bit of a manuscript from Islands in the Stream.  Well, they are rather tight-assed with me.  They don't give a shit.  I, as a visiting idiot, have three choices here.  They let me, give me, so that I can look at it, a copy of some scribble, Hemingway's, pursuant to my interests, and it's some strange scrawl pen on paper sketch, Dillinger, gas station, rum running, boat, I can't make much out of it, but it's a very preliminary sketch of his, just hanging out there.  Still, weird, strange, nonsensical, but, the word scribble of EH.   I got back to Cambridge.  I got off at the wrong T Station and walked back toward Harvard Square.  I forget where we were supposed to meet.   And then I even see my beautiful brother coming toward me with his cold beautiful sullen face, sunglasses, not looking at any peasants, just driving forward on his great motorcycle.  No smile. Grim sullen cool, like Eastwood.  Hmm, I say, maybe he didn't have the greatest of days. 

So I walk back, all the way back, thinking my little poetic thoughts as I walk past all these houses of the successful, and in order to protect myself from the lavish kings of success had in every way, money money, lucrative time, just don't be an idiot, don't be a dope, just use your college degree and connections and culture to its good extent.

I'm ready to tell my brother, by the time I finally get back to the door, another mile I've walked today, for walking is already good, and guess what, he's disappointed with me, like I fucked up his whole life, and I try to tell him, but I saw you so beautiful, and I was there, in the Harvard Square, but then I realize, his cold cool look was aimed at me, the loser, the defunct, the idiot, the fool kid who cannot be responsible, who did not do what he was supposed to do, as an adult, who has a supreme talent for not being where he should be at the right time, even though I thought I had a good memory for such things.

So he won't talk to me, too disgusted with me for my lack of timely meetings, and who knows indeed what good plans I might have fucked up, it's all my fault, for the extra dilly dally, over there at the Ernest Hemingway manuscripts that I think so rightly are kept here, at I.M. Pei's JFK library, and let alone all the interesting things any school boy might find down below, in the museum of Jack and Bobby, all f them, and I never tell anyone about how I went to the great beautiful library of my favorite most sensitive and poetic of presidents next to Lincoln and was allowed to look at, up on some second library balcony floor, some weird disjointed and unconnected but beautiful hand-made 8 by 11 page scribble, as far as I could tell, of Ernest Hemingway's.  A tidbit.  I had not badge to show, no scholar tag.  Clearly, they just didn't want to talk to me.  Or maybe I should have asked.  But their coldness, that said something to me, an anathema to what I might have hoped for.  There was no bar here, no porno Paris artistic tits and ass for sculptors or lesbians of the time back then, with their Modernist collections.

And then I sort of realized, as a quite young adult inkling, that my brother was in no way, or at least not exactly, like my father, though I do believe that both of these men had taken issue with the way I'd lived so that I'd failed with what I should have been doing.  Yeah, that's how it goes. Dad was gentle, always got the musician I wanted to be....  he liked my writing.  My brother, he wanted to be mad at me, and like my mother, always looking for tension, an excuse, to attack.   Bless me Father for I have sinned.  Accuse someone else, that's good too, fuck you.

It always meant the world to me, not to be waited on, to order, etc, but that the chefs, the French ones, got to know, got to respect me...  Le Caprice, who remembers that place?  

The one true sentence, 

how lame you have to be, to live in