To Jesus the higher consciousness was a regular everyday thing.  An accessible thing.  His training was, if not exactly, much like the writer's, sitting down at a certain time and applying himself to words.  Seeking in his own mind the way he saw things, much in the same way he'd learned from both his parents to respect one's own impressions and deeper sense about other people.  For other people, if you study them, and judge them not, are bare and naked, transparent in many ways, despite their acts of hiding, their psyches and their souls and their psychologies and their inhabiting demons--whatever you want call them--basically evident, present to the powers of vision.  Each person, a slight shade different, a particular peculiar mix, each unique, so that reading them indeed could take up lifetimes of study.  And to be found amongst them a few people who were, or who could be coaxed into being naturally calm, which was the goal.

So could Jesus be able to cure their different problems, with hardly a word, a simple phrase, but one which, the way he put it, the way he spoke, the way he looked at them, the way he bore himself, by the clarity of his iconic face and acts, a gesture of the hand, was no longer passive, but an active cure.  Something the world always lacks, because the world is cowardly, as I would know.

Enough to get through a shift of people, possessed with shards and particular and sometimes legions of evil spirits of all stripes of selfishness, cockiness, pride, cleverness.  Enough to get through a night of that without making any visible or noticeable effort to correct them and cleanse and cast out.  Just by enduring you were doing a good amount toward it.

But to be perfectly honest, of course, you were a participant in the same as they.  You had, were subject to, the same kind of vanities, the same selfish wishes, the same hungers and thirsts, the same anxieties, the same wish for safety, security, to save your own ass and, to crudely put it, get a piece of another.  You didn't want lesions springing out on your skin or suffer the fate of Job.  You too wished to numb down the awkwardness of being on the right path, the path that might not make much immediate sense in terms of the wisdom of the world, toward the wisdom of God.  You too wished to take the challenge of trying to fit in with the logic of worldly wisdom, and desired not to be foolish.

You find you didn't quite belong so well.

So there needed to be an inkling, then a measure, then a cup of change.  You had to put away the habit of stupefying yourself, the habits of yes-men...  You had to, in short, be you.  You serving as your basic support system, of course with the good support of the spirits of your family and good friends.  After all, humanity is good, a good rather than a bad influence.  And sometimes it conspires and gathers as a particular flock in order to, by some collective wisdom and collective mind, teach you things, teaching by example, in a good way.  Maybe one learns best by mirroring them, as one can, through one by one exchanges, to feel them out, as they say.

There is Jesus and people of less consciousness have gathered around him.  Crows would get him better and be wiser and have knowledge of the earth and the ways of God, on equal terms, really, but here's this confused flock of humanity about him, but at least now with opened eyes and ear.  How to interpret all the human cawing?

I guess that's sort of when you put books behind you.  I mean, you never do.  The higher mind might direct you to pick up a poem, or have a thought about how Hemingway was an ecological thinker before it was barely thought of, or pick up on a cold night Corinthians.   Which says it's okay to be doing the same labors you were doing when you came to see the light.  Which holds that it is okay to accept what powers you do have toward good things, be they teacherly, prophetic, interpretive, curative, what have you.

And how long would it take to write something good, something you wanted to express?  Time almost vanished.  You'd look up at the clock and an hour had gone by, but that was almost immaterial, little to do with you, having found an envelope of some sort, away from time.  The voice had come, and you felt pleased about what you were writing and all the connections forming before your mind.  The voice was aided, yes, by another, say the slight irreverence of Saramago, and in other ways it had deeper sources, as natural born writers come upon in their wanderings, like Melville going down to the waters.  Drummers had played drums, all sorts of them, and now you were the drummer, smoothly enough, despite your worries of having little rhythm.

In the act of writing, peace had come about you.  Like you were Emerson out in Nature.  How could you not feel simultaneously shy and open about it, gentle, available, as if you'd sat down and a beautiful woman had sat down right next to you with an open ear and atomic proximity such that you'd already started to blend with her in a virginal way that who knows might lead to other things, though of course you would always be practical about such things, right?


And then the thought would return to you, distractingly, 'oh, but what are you going to do with yourself today?'  Well, I skipped the wine last night, for the first time in a long time, that seems a good start.  Nor was I gluttonous.  A kale salad with pumpkin seeds in lemon and olive oil.  Later, one lamb sausage with a bowl of five day old brown rice.  Falling asleep on the couch after finishing Corinthians I, very cold outside.  There had been a run of weeks requiring covering an extra shift, long Saturday nights even, and the snow had allowed a rare night off earlier, so finally a chance to be alone and think, letting the wheels spin in the sanctity of home, finally being able to reflect, to catch up.  Initially, boredom, a sense of not knowing what to do, but this corrected itself.



Really, how often does one have the chance, to do it, to be it, to be the real you, vessel of the higher.  You learn to grab it where you can, when you can.  Distractions aside.  The example shows that you can.  For if Jesus could do it in that hard time when people got crucified, if Herod didn't get you first...  He managed to thread the needle.  Maybe that's why he is such a legend, such a success, the epic times he lived in, and perfectly placed at crossroads, crossroads of time, peoples, geography, ideas, empires, religions...  Rising from obscurity, so it seems.

For our times we'd have a savior, a thinker to go with them as he went with his.  He'd be an infinitesimally small character unnoticed on the sea of ones and zeros, unattached to anything.  Obscure, he would take his fellow beings somewhere, somewhere they could heal and ponder the fate of the planet in private, not having to worry, a safe haven matched to their faith, the faith that somethings can be done about changing the attitude of the human being to make for a personal ecological ethos to arise, in stark contrast to nations, like China, and multi-national profit minded corporate entities to destroy the environment feeding an artificially created need sold to human sheep who are just trying to get by in the world.  Or just more importantly, to change the consciousness away from that illusion of self that causes much selfishness, toward...  what?

He would personally have a small sphere of influence, physically, temporally.  He'd be trying to get by just like the rest of us.  No panel would he sit on.  No faculty rank.  Just him, son of man, lower case.  He'd be fully human.  To solve skin problems or mechanical issues, he'd go to the Google machine search engine, like anyone else.  Then, after googling 'dry flaky redness eyebrows,' he'd be off like anyone else to the RiteAid to peruse the labels of dandruff shampoo, wary of sodium laureth sulfate.

Oh, sure, he'd have a good background for it, scholarly parents of a particular sort, steeped in, I don't know, thoughtfully considered systems of spiritual and religious thinking, and basically just being allowed to get it as a seven year old, no stumbling block put in his way, to understand that maybe indeed this is their world, the spirit world, that they were here first and we just come to it, as he explained tearfully to his father as he prepared to back out the old Volvo station wagon up the pebbly drive to drive down to the town to pick up the Sunday New York Times, and how he remembered seeing a deep sort of pleased sense radiating quietly from his papa.  Such that they would always be able to have conversations of a theosophical sort, about the spiritual man who keeps getting reincarnated, the same guy showing up every so many years, Moses, Buddha, Jesus... same guy.  He'd know the basics of what Zen is, or what a Noble Truth might be, familiar with vaguer things like Tree of Life imagery.

No, it wouldn't be a book, like the kind you find on a best-seller list next to Dan Brown, or even a book in the book store, bound by two covers front and back, such a person would write.  It would be like a mild sort of revelation, that disciple type people would be drawn to and draw satisfaction and pleasure from, so that they would assemble their own sort of oral gospel in their own minds, and strangely, already finding it--at least the outline--mainly there already, just in need of awakening or support, encouragement.

They would know simply, by being able to look out the back window of an apartment and seeing birds rise across a snowy sky, allowed to notice such a phenomenon on its own terms, with greater presence, distraction removed.  Feeling that sense of 'oh, this is us,' more than before, whereas before such things were more separate and leave the birds to worry about their own and I'll worry about my own.  Connection.  Diffusion.  Peace.  Clarity of mind.  Closer to the haiku and the proverb and the poem.  They would feel it in themselves, and accomplished it themselves.  Like the continual discovery of sexuality and its sensations, only they can do it for themselves.

Just a vague sense, perhaps, like one gets from a good country song.  "Hmm.  Guy's onto something..."  Like we get from Dostoevsky.  And the rest, of the understanding, at a deeper more intuitive level.

Worrying will not increase or add on a day to life.  We can apply ourselves to that which can apply ourselves.  A good teacher leads us towards the things we can apply our minds too.

Sure, maybe sometimes there's the prodigal aspect to it, of, say, smoking weed and listening to Pink Floyd, but by and large, we're good at what we engaged by.  A worthy sign.  Are we all going to become chemical engineers to live in suburban houses, absolutely nothing against such people who might be so?   Certain things make certain minds tick, and Jesus is the perfect example.

Were we to enter into the higher consciousness we would see beyond, and we would be at peace with things.  We would become relaxed and calm, in need of little.

Is there perhaps something of that tendency in the Prodigal Son, a consciousness high enough to be at peace with going down the familiar path to ruin, seeking earthy pleasures.  When he's worn himself out, no money left, nowhere else to go.  But he is worthy of being welcomed, because with an instinct towards the higher vision he saw that even the prodigal path would be part of a great overall lesson.  He gets more credit than his brother, because his brother, staying home, has not made the same effort to expand and raise the spiritual level of his mind through explorations in the world and life experience.  Maybe such prodigal failings are just the thing to ignite the fires of redemption...


I wrote and I wrote.  Stabs at things.  Attempts to corral thoughts, relationships...  And I was lost.  Adrift.  A good exercise in finding a voice, sure, but not amounting to anything in particular, not more than a notebook.  Really just a sign of a necessary work habit, not unrelated to a pile of sawdust, part of a frame.  What would synthesize it all, what would bring it together?  When, over what, would the work really begin?  I wondered.

Higher consciousness.

This is what Jesus is after.  A vision of the human being as more than a unit of production, occasionally allowed a little wine by the authorities to feed and numb some pains.

Of course his vision is regarded as a threat.  He's taking everyone along with him toward that higher consciousness.  Of course the authorities, who've reached a status quo to maintain, let's not rouse any rebels, everything's fine, they are going to jump all over him, immediately.

And the quality of a higher consciousness is such that simply it sees the higher, sees the great spiritual potential, the awesome spiritual capabilities, the peaceful enlightenment....

Hard-hearted.  Calcified.  Blind.  Seeking a sign.  Why would you need a sign?  It's all right there in front of you, within you, standing here before you...

And some people get it.  The kind of people who are sick, poor, miserable, outcastes, mourning the way things are going now.  (I remember America before the Conservative Reagan backlash, tossing the mentally ill out into the streets, cutting partnership programs of state and private cooperation, nothing free about education, meaning there's money to be made, everywhere.  Yes, Reagan was all for gutting the jewel of the California free university system...  His spawn live on.)

And people are not inherently selfish.  How could they be?  They are higher beings, in tune with nature.  If they act not in accordance with their truer nature, of course things will go afoul.

The Buddha is the vehicle, the ferryman to get you across to the other side, the boat of philosophy and tenets to be abandoned once across.  Higher consciousness, the mind opening to the vastness of space and time, once you've got there, you don't need Buddha anymore, just gratitude for an old friend of humanity...

If you had attained higher consciousness, yes, the old laws would be alive and perfectly obvious.  Your morality would be perfectly awakened.  You'd see appropriateness perfectly.  Not having to ape any manners...

But to them, who only see money, the way to make it, the way to use it, in everything, the ultimate purpose, what is Jesus doing?  Really quite a lot of nothing, if anything, giving stuff away, and that stuff is undefinable!   Can we stick advertisements on his white robe?   Oh, look, it's Jesus with ads for tires and car insurance on his back, waving and smiling to the crowds, as he holds a little girl who previously was not breathing but who is now smiling sweetly too.  Look at the crowds;  great placement!

But,  Jesus, doing a lot of nothing.  If anything getting in the way of the way we do things around here, a good market for animal sacrifices down at the temple, he almost messed that up royally enough, and then the taxation bureau and the regulatory commissioner would be out of work.

Jesus' point being that such things don't help you achieve much in the way of real enlightenment.

What is enlightenment, though?  Who is it intended for?

Well, it's for the people who are smart enough to realize the situation they are in, really a necessary balm for all the anxiety of life, the extra anxiety the powers that be put into the system trying to hypnotize the masses, another facet of human nature, to make other people anxious, unfortunately, a tool-ish show of strength beyond animal childishness.  Quickly does mankind go off into the Satanic in these contests of strength and aggression.

It's for people like me, people susceptible to existential crisis, people who are feeling a deep anxiety.  And the deep anxiety itself is informing you.  The old way doesn't work, of going to work, getting through a shift earning a few measly dollars that will never see your body into old age, drinking wine to forget the basic ills.

I'm very sore.  That's where Jesus is coming from.  This informs his gentleness.  His kind touch, his easy sense of humor and just words, the path he takes in life, healing and preaching to other people.

Did some national endowment fund him to speak in a breathy voice, each line charged to the maximum with sound byte emotion as old photographs played on the screen?  A TV show that would then still be a the voice of the basic corporate consumer attitude, okay, it's still good to go out and buy stuff...  Nothing ever too crazy.

There were the houses that let him in.  The only act of philanthropy that comes to mind is the guy who lends him his own tomb.  Though, I don't know, perhaps there was some sort of cooperative sponsorship that goes unsaid behind the loaves and the fishes appearance.  The local tourism board.  Maybe it was like a fireman's field day chicken barbecue, a good time people needed given cruel kings and empires and hopeless rebellions.  Saturday Night Live.  Put it on air, then let's see what happens, an experiment in live TV.  The Olympics.  Sponsorship will come.

But all Jesus says is take nothing with you and go to the houses that let you in.  (Let us not blaspheme the miracles of loaves and fishes he pulls off through his higher vision and consciousness.)  That's the only way you can really do your work, not having to worry about all the other stuff, just the worker getting paid for the real valuable work that he's doing.



The mind still hurts, doesn't seem to know what it's doing.  There was respite yesterday coming home from the grocery store, talking to mom on the phone and finding a miraculous draught of robins in a holly tree picking the red berries, and I stood there being natural and they were like chickens around you in a barnyard except they flew like hummingbirds, hovering, doing acrobatics and cooperative motions, plucking the berries.  One bent forward and reached around underneath with perfect aim to get a berry.  Right up until when I pulled my phone out carefully to take a picture they all flew off, disappearing, except for a last handful of stragglers up above Florida Avenue in a weary looking oak tree, where there had been many many.   These are not dumb animals.  Are they like the Amish, not liking their pictures taken?

I went home after that, put the groceries away, moved the load of whites to the dryer and took a nap.


But I've never found any real satisfying answer in the things of this world, except love of course.  I'm just the sorry person who admits that state of affairs.  Buying stuff and beach vacations doesn't going to do it, for the most part, not so much fun.  Though I do very much like the Martin D-28 I bought myself a couple years ago.  It is nice to see the stars standing on a beach at night looking up, humanity's lights and junk and consumerist houses behind you out of sight for a brief moment...

If I'd been a family man, I don't know, I might have tired of the competition and the attempt to blind one's self from the pain we must face to be better, to be truly helpful to our fellows and all the creatures...  Not been able to be the kind of teacher I knew I had to be...

Well, I gather it's nice to be able to understand your own motivations.  And maybe the very problem, when your standing in front of the mirror wondering what your worldly image is telling, saying against or in terms of a backdrop of magazine pictures of the happy life floating around in your mind,  the very problem is consciousness, being born into it, a sort of adept, in a humble human non-magical fly-around-in-the-sky able-to-drop-in-on-various-centuries kind of a way (which can only be a metaphor of higher consciousness, a vision, naturally psychedelic.)  That's the problem, the gift of higher consciousness, and that is found within, in your own self.  And maybe that's the meaning of Corinthians 13, an understanding that takes some of a long time.  Now I am face to face, truly seeing that there is such a thing as a higher consciousness, a miraculous thing, a thing that enables one to look back on life and be okay with things.

That's the remarkable thing, the thing that makes you feel better.  And this you can't consume.  You can't just go on up to that place in the Berkshires and shell out a couple thousand.  Whatever you are going to achieve you're going to find within.  And it comes free, and you must give it away free, end of story.  Kripalu, I mean, not that there's anything wrong with such explorations...

I'm from Amherst.  I was born there, the Holyoke Range rising above my childhood bed from the front window, singing its seasons.  I left, I went to school there.  How could I not be some form of enlightened, and that is the deeper meaning of education behind it all, why the farmers went through all the trouble, to build a campus by which you could look through a prism, as Emily Dickinson did, into Nature, transcendent.  Yeah, how could I not be.  Not my fault.  Just my karma.  What am I doing in Washington, D.C., I wonder...



Now of course it's obvious, it goes without saying, Jesus would never accept a position of power, the Satanic temptation, but he does accept the authority of the high consciousness of his father, who of course begets him in a moment of highest tantric consciousness, the only thing that can allow the true seed to pass on.  Then the son's growing life is simply a matter of realizing who he really is.  Yes, note how Satanic men can become for worldly domination, intimidation...  That's what current history shows, any day of the week.

That's what makes it a great myth, but it's also true, the great discovery of finding within that you are indeed cut of the cloth of high Jesus consciousness...  Of course the careerist religious authorities, who have put their own time in, studying the law, over and over, and doing their own difficult tasks which have their place indeed, of course they're going to be a bit taken aback by this newcomer who springs with authority, a natural wordsmith, a compelling speaker, quick with his wit.  A son realizing his father...

Worldly versions of that too, there are, like Kennedy, the patriarch, and his sons...  Lincoln, without a supportive father, a self-made man, he's doing something along the same lines, developing the great wisdom within along with his legal and professional pursuits.  Mankind is a mix, a kaleidoscope of an inner reality...  Where did William Blake get the authority to make high art, despite being poor?  Where did Daniel Day Lewis get the authority to play Lincoln?  Or any writer to write something striving to be good?  Within...

All it takes is a little support, a little push in the right direction, a day off from the usual toils...

Change is organic;  it comes from within.



The finest things much be approached gently, circumspectly.... This is to make as certain as it can be that the venture undertaken is not one of domination, power, a bid for the rulership of a fiefdom, cleric of a cult...  The prophets one should accept, and indeed have great respect for.  Just be wary of their worldly interpreters, especially when they amass influence and power and start commanding their subjects around to do to add to their power.

I take a walk around the block, to get the last of the day's sun as it passes behind Embassy Row.  Robins are digging around in the bank, rooting for insect as I come back up my street.

Higher consciousness, the stuff of Transcendentalists, a problem to the world, is the only solution.  Higher consciousness, the stumbling block to the status quo, but the natural healthy rights of humanity, and indeed the only solution to all the world's troubles, climate, wars, poverty, by simply changing the attitude, the arrow of causation's direction.  We are not to consume, stuff our faces, use the world and all its things for personal wealth and advancement.  The world is to teach us.  The world is to show us higher consciousness, that we might learn, and then start to live in peace with the way things are.

Adulterous generation, exactly.  Believing life is a matter of consumption, take what you can, use...  Rape the forest if no one stops you;  sell her to the highest bidder, and then move on the next one...



I guess it would be hard, in some ways, for him to be around people.  People with all their demons and depressions, their lack of faith toward the single pursuit of high consciousness, tripping over themselves...  Passers by, he would have felt their issues in a blink of an eye.  A sensitivity he picked up from his mother as well as his father.  (His mother would be a bit more blunt about it:  'he's a creep,' she would say, and he would humor the angles.)  It was a good exercise for him to do yoga in his own privacy, meditating, restoring the energy flow.  Calming, centering, so that you knew again that which was good practice apart from that which was a scheme, an egotistical act based on an illusion, a passing fancy in which greed or gluttony or intemperance showed itself.  This happened, no different from anyone else, just that he had his practice, and had somehow always been sensitive, able to contact the higher realm, without so much being aware of it, as it came naturally to him, and seemed rather like a part of his awkwardness around other people, such that indeed he wished to drink to bring himself toward the level he knew as well as anyone else if not better, a lower one.

The drink seemed to protect him, disguise him, ease his way through the streets of life.  It gave him an act, one that had evolved toward the better over the years, just as his mood had slowly improved and steadied itself, after the confusion... 

But now as he wrote more, thought more, practiced more, it was become increasingly clearer and self-evident, what sort he was.  The salted kind.  With some chance of savor still.  Did he still have time?  The scholar's son, a better translation than the standard 'carpenter's.'  Obviously something scholarly there, even as a boy.  Even then, authority, ease, comfort.  A knowledge of levels of consciousness.  From the root to the crown.

Shyness too came naturally, as it's not a world one necessarily wants to stand out in.  Rather adopt the lingo, the assumptions, the habits...  Always a good listener.

It was indeed a creative endeavor, every day, being his own version of that which he did not wish to admit.  You could be a great guy, sure, the kindest, the wisest, up there in the percentages anyway, but that didn't necessarily make you fit in or even be a good boyfriend.  Maybe a good therapy patient.  Maybe a good reader of books.  But every day, every hour, really took creative effort, work, and of course, naturally, it could be very tiring.  Until you began to realize and admit, or see simply...

The creativity was always there, if you sat down, quietly, or let the wheels spin while you tidied up a corner of the house or dusted, laundry still spinning in the dryer down in the basement, and more or less accepting now a quiet Friday night at home with flannel Dickies on, a light growth of beard, the humidifier working again, the Facebook password issue solved finally.  How the left hand doesn't know what the right is up to.

Of course it took a lot of creativity to go to work, fairy tales full of it, but then he liked restaurant people, Henri, the French guy who would soon be set to retire...

Got through jazz night.

Everyone comes in at once, around seven.  There's a group--of the kind that will want separate checks--convening at the bar, meaning the poor bastard waiter, who has not been encouraged supportively by the team, is going to be  bogged down like a surrounded army back in the wine room.  I'm trying to shed my persona of wine therapist.   A lady has called my name already several times as I attend to triaged duties, and observes that I am in a bad mood, which really doesn't help.  People have sat themselves, entitled, pleased with the show of their own vanity;  table reservations are juggled.

Got through it.  Really needed a good dose of Beaujolais on the rocks with soda in a tumbler, I mean, just to deal with the last bunch of people, Salvadoran restaurant owners, who leave their table in the back to sit at the bar, and who thankfully just want beer.  Wish I spoke Spanish.  Attending to the night, I am drained.  For Lent I promise myself to cut out that last bunch of drinkers provoking me into the sauce, but I must compromise here on the night of Ash Wednesday.  Limit the self-damage, get home on the bike on a pretty cold night.

And today I wake not at a bad hour, feeling more energetic.  Return to my humble artist notebook.  Dostoevsky sat and listened to people and wrote out loads of dialog to get their patterns, drawing faces and sketches in the margins.   Schoolboys.  The general public viewed from a park bench.  Women.  Men.

I have to clean up, edit, a few things of what I've written, just to better get what I'm trying to say.  I'm listening to the way I talk, the way I talk to myself, the way I talk in my own head.

And the worries always return, why the job I have...  It wasn't a choice.  I mean, the self-righteous people love to say that, 'the choices you made,' pointing a finger at you, telling you how much opportunity you have wasted...  reasonably worried about you sometimes, sure...

The pain returns when I start a new entry.  What was I thinking about, when I got up?

Oh.  Yes, back to Jesus, as every reader has tired of hearing about, maybe, no, not really do, would I think that...

Treasures.  "For where you treasure is, there your heart will be also."  Luke 12, Matthew 6.

Sad, why am I sad?  Because I feel like what I do is of little worth?  Tired of printing out a check at the end of a transaction, the party paying, putting a tip on the dotted line...  There's something missed.   I am regarded as compensated.  What more can you ask for?  It's work.  Just like everybody else...  That's how the system works.

And then I sit down and write, yes, in my own fashion, to my own satisfaction, spiritual and otherwise, a calling, an avocation.  It feels, as I stare at the screen of my MacBook Pro laptop (this is written in silver letters on the black edge below what I am typing out, like I am staring out of a deeply befuddled darkness, one I must inhabit, looking out of, for a necessary clarity.  Will the next thought make things a bit clearer, I don't know...

Next paragraph.

No, that didn't go anywhere.

When I became a man, I put away childish things.  I looked through a mirror darkly...  Then face to face...

In real time you cannot really know what you are writing.  You take a stab at it.  One thing might lead to another.  My feet hurt.  I've done my job.  I feel ready to move on, and yet, there is ministering to it, but, I don't know...

Writing is scary.  Life is scary.  How will things ever work out?  What are my sins of laziness and distraction and childishness?   How to atone?

I took too much wine, to get the mind and body through the valley of death, through the heart of the world, to ease the pain and the lack of a listener at the end of the night, the end of the week.  Too many hats to wear up at the bar of Dying Gaul.  I managed to do a little yoga when I got home;  maybe that's the way out of this unhappy state...

I need to change the way I see.

Treasures looked at reflexively, as to the effect they take upon the heart, yes, that is a clear thought for a cold day.  Look to the heart.  Look to your core values.  What do you care about, when work calls and drags you in to the arena?  What a sad thing, being dragged so, what a tiresome thing...  A place of sin...

Jesus loves sinners, of course, they are the sick people, exactly the ones he needs to cure.  But they obviously get to him.  His anger is directed at the scribes, the Pharisees, the religious authorities, but something has built up his ire.  It sounds like the people who have gathered in his barroom he is getting tired of.  Something that runs deep, that causes him pain, that leads him to speak not just of individuals or walks of life, but a generation...  The salt of the earth, people, have lost much of their defining qualities.

'I'm tired of you and all your egos.  All your self-protective little stances, the smug careerist things that make me sick.  Your self-promotion, your tiresome self-centered way of seeing things.  Blindness, everywhere.  Consumerist.  Pawns of an empire's economy.  Receivers of catalogs in the mail.

'I knew eventually it would get to me, in a way I could no longer stand.  Not that I am at all happy over it.

A few good people here and there, or a little part here and there within the good ones.   Tolerable.  Welcome.

The satisfied diners...  Wanting an experience...   Eat good decent food that agrees with your system, drink good wine with it, if you have to.   Food that's not been manipulated with additives, that has as decent a morality to it as possible.   And  remember always the spiritual context that broadly encompass the little details, the deeper purpose of a human gathering.  The details, those with 'high standards,' do I really care?  I'm tired of you and your selfishness.   'This pinot noir tastes funny.'  It's not corked.  It's perfectly fine.  A lady from the table jams the glass up at me, like I've brought them something poisonous.  Is the mushroom fricassee buttery, she asks me, as if it is my trial.  Venomous people, who wave, subtly, the threat of the bad review.

Grown tired of it, seeing through it, what awaits for me?  The monastery?  The desert?  The high place?  Homelessness?  Ridicule as a false prophet with too many heady claims?

Go take a walk.  Get it out of your system.  You'll get to the grocery store and feel better about yourself.  You're tired.  Two nights are demanding enough.  Cruel even.  Take up the cross, yes, one knows about that.

Foul generation which seeketh a sign...

Nitpicking customers.


This is one of Dostoevsky's lost characters, an idiot, a middle-aged student who is not in school.  Out of the lost pages of a lost notebook, one that is merely a background, an iceberg's underpinning.

Where does indignity come from?  From whence sprung the natural authority?  Through what steady acts of goodness and toleration?

Go and catch a falling star...  find what wind serves to advance an honest mind.  (Donne)

What we are in search of is higher consciousness.

But I think, Doctor H., that this Sturgill Simpson songwriter musician guy has reminded me of something, like the psychology of an artist, the mode of you enter into to be able to make art.  He may have achieved some of his perspective through interesting means of a psychedelic nature, but he's obviously a natural at it, so good for him.  He's a solid guy.  '...all changed the way I see...  the myth that we all call space and time...'

What Jesus is talking about, to take up your cross, and lose thyself, in order to gain life, maybe that's essentially the same thing...  You get there however you can.  That's the context I'd like to see things in.

Not the 'let us all be professionals with higher degrees, wisest of the wise, cleverest of the clever' mode of this town, which I do not seem to have much ambition.  (Maybe I'm just tired after my shifts, too tired to read, dumbed down by popular habits, whatever... )  But the 'taking up the cross' as I have to, or am rather left to, define for myself...  as something having to do with art and higher thought, a better reading of people, that's what I think I'm better at.  That sort of mode, which really takes effort to sustain...  Taking up the cross, why not, if it works for you, seeing it that way.  Not for some earthly treasure of, wow, like a number one seller, but a real book, a real account, something worth reading because of its deeper bearing on the struggles a human being goes through...

That's where you can lose the courage, to get lost, to get distracted, and not properly read people's souls, the things that bug them, lead them astray, the artificial things like wealth, or prominent righteousness 'free of sins.'  Work, you get distracted.  You get pulled in too many directions.  You can't really focus on how much a guy's drinking, 'cause you're running around putting out fires, trying to serve dinner...

That's all you can do, is be pure to yourself, to not cheat yourself into believing some mainstream conventional view...   That's the best thing for your health.  You're not writing The Bartender's Guide to Dating, but something a lot deeper, and not built around a business model package sort of a thing, 'hey, I got this great idea, and it will have bullet points...'

I mean, you really have to see people in the kind of context you find in a great work of literature like The Brothers Karamazov, or The Idiot.  I do find Dostoevsky one of those points of contact between the spiritual world and the world of literature.  It's almost like he's conducting a science experiment...  The sinful old man, Dmitri the willful one, Ivan the intellectual sceptic.  Seen through the prism of the intuitive Alyosha the monk practicing under the elder mystic Zossima.  Mysticism must be a good kind of drug, and it's passed on to Alyosha as the old monk is lying in state, the dream of the wedding at Cana...

Which I once babbled on about in a misguided toast, embarrassingly enough at my brother's wedding, as it kind of was not in perfect tune with official Washington and fine weddings.  Yeah, that old Fyodor was a remarkable guy, with something that is within the realm of a good sense of humor but which is also a deep deep perspective, coming from his own lion's den.  It could all slip over into a cartoon sort of thing, like the sinner gambler drinker, the femme fatale, the skeptic, the precocious schoolboy, but he doesn't let that happen.  You keep reading...

How do you support those things, the good things you find resonating within?  You've got to be true to yourself.  That's the preaching.  That's what you have to tell the heathens.   The way to life.  Not just comfort.  The way to an artistic life pondering more than just the stuff that seeps into our day through all the cracks.  Not the stuff our minds worry over being selfish, but the deeper stuff you can't explain...  And for me the only way to grasp for such stuff is to sit down and write.  At least that facilitates it.  It's a process, one I can lose faith in from time to time if I'm not doing it.

You take up your cross and look at life nakedly, take its blows, reflect, write...  And then, I hope, all the real things open up, and you're good.

Of course, you have to make a living.  Who knows which one is a better one, musician or bartender... Musician, or lost writing flailing about, hoping to be, like, Dostoevsky in his maturity...

Not writing my thoughts down, I lose myself, I get lost, I...  I don't support myself and I fall in with the pack doing their thing which is different from my thing.

And you know as well I as I do, if you don't find support, you get depressed and then you start down that road replaying the past and wondering why all this not great stuff has happened to you when really all of it is only in your mind, exclusively, where else would it be.  Fuck it, people don't like you, don't get you, don't try to understand you, well, you move on down the line.

And I find this Sturgill Simpson guy tremendously supportive.  Turtles All The Way Down.

{I felt like singing it there in the office there in the great Tower of Babel office building, but refrained.  Nice lady, she gets it, doesn't turn on the overhead fluorescent light tubes...}

Yeah, I've been laughed at for my pursuits, my pretending to be Dostoevsky, or you know, the kind of necessary life of sin you need to sample if you're going to come out an artist.  I got real lost and confused at a certain point in my life, and it's taken me, still taking me, a long time to get it remotely together, I guess....

And this town can be so selfish, you know, I remember this guy who owns a few bars and restaurants came in back when I worked at Austin Grill, treated me like I wasn't even there, head barman, been there fifteen years and the guy sees right through me.  Then he drove off in his fancy Land Rover.  I wouldn't want to hang out in his restaurants anyway...

Here the fuck I am, in broad day light, I've heard it all, seen it all, waited on everyone from the low on up to the mighty, all with a lot of real generosity toward everyone, and I'm not a total slouch when it comes to being able to talk about things, books, movies, art, and to this fat cat important guy, big success, I'm a lackey.  Okay, buddy.  You go do your thing and I'll go do mine.

That's this town for you.

I guess it's like trying to chase something you're never going to catch.  Counterproductive...  We all think we'd like, for purposes of self-protection and social belonging and status, to be high and mighty, but once you put on those lenses, well, there's a tendency, at least, to see things wrongly and be disrespectful of humanity...   In the way a humble artist cannot be...  It's weird, but it's like a law almost, and only the most circumspect of men and women can get around that...  Like Lincoln, who had a background, who even was a tavern keeper for a short stint, long enough in some lost town... Once you measure something you've changed its value...  I look at them like, 'you've never jerked off?  well, maybe it'd be good for you...  You've never been lost, felt discouraged, poor, lazy?  Well, maybe that's missing out on the larger amount of human experience...'



I guess in the end you are your own lost sheep, the one of one hundred, your own shepherd, your own prodigal son, your own source of paternal love and wisdom.  Stories dramatize, the old ones, what goes on in the psyche, and Abraham's story of having to pledge a sacrifice of his son has the same ring to it as Jesus' words to take up the cross, prepared for sacrifice.  You find yourself, you save the best loved part of you, I guess through making art, through being kind to people along the way, to follow your sense of the illusions of space and time.

Anyone who has been in therapy knows it's torture.  There's the weird place you start, discombobulated, fresh from walking down the street, worried where you left your ATM bank card, in a pocket, at a Karamazov bistrot tavern with your friends, fellow sinners, goddamn, hope they don't steal my accumulated wealth of $6000...  And you're supposed to talk to a professional, who therefore by definition is to some extent faithless and blind, like, out of the box, like a race horse, or a great dog risen from a fireplace library stand with pipe smoking master to go trot  your deepest thoughts out, when really all you want to do is pee and if, god willing, the bowels want to work, drop a nice warm shit out into the cold and snowy world, then to be wrapped up by the drying airs of the atmosphere and rendered into the same harmless dirt we came from and to which we shall return.

Ain't that a mouthful.  And your therapist, being a professional, does not have, like you a runny nose, an unshaven face, hair sticking up from being pulled out of a winter hat...

So what do you talk about, having discovered on the way your bank card is not in your wallet, and no checkbook, so you dig into wallet, what the f., into your courier bag which has, admittedly, been handy, scrape up, $25, you know, for the copay...

Okay, ten, nine, eight, seven six, the poor woman is waiting for you to say something meaningful, or just to start, and, first of all, you are distracted.  Why, because the night before was the night after Valentine's Day, but incorporate with President's Day, day off for most people, and, you know, like the date night for those who didn't want to do it on the actual day....


So I start, greyhound I am, with Sturgill Simpson, I think, a wise move on my part, because, goddamn, the guy brings meaning to me like no other.  I'd seen his NPR piece and 'learnt' about him, but, I'd forgotten... shit I deal with makes it happen.

Drink of wine... "Marijuana, LSD, Psilocybin, DMT, but love's the only thing that's ever saved my life..."  Well, I'm not going to go into the lyrics, so my approach is talking about this guy and how his family was coal miners in Eastern Kentucky, and, like, their one day off was a Saturday night....   This guy is legit.  He hit a wall.  He met a woman who cared and saved him and told him fuck you don't suck at it, you're going to drive you or me crazy so why not write some songs...

By this point, early, I could tell my therapist was fatigued with me.  And reasonably, taking a yoga teacher training course...

So okay, I'm grasping for things to say...  And she's looking at me because it's her job to study my strange illness, to ask pointed question, but, I guess, the fish has to go swim its rounds before coming back to the boat or whatever makes sense.

(Walter Brennan would have been good as Lincoln, by the way.)

Random stuff I talk about.  I'm grasping at straws.  I'm distracted by lost bank card, she's got enough on her mind, so it goes...

Should I explore a bit with mushrooms?  I've never done psychedelics.  Pot, sure.  Maybe wrecked my ambition.

"Well, if anything, marijuana, I wouldn't worry about it.  Neuroplasticity..."

But, I've said it often, you know, music is music, and 'people just put in boxes,' as Shane MacGowan says.  It's all related.  Blues, soul, Irish music, skiffle, bluegrass, Elvis rock'n'roll, cajun, conjunta, jazz, hard country, soft country, new country, Lyle Lovett, Hendrix, a song is a song.  A Clash song can be played country.

And that's where I'm getting to my point.  Great literature.  It's all played on a simple stringed instrument that someone made at home, doesn't need to be a Stradivarius, just needs to be good, like a Martin is pure of tone and you're singing like you want to sing.

This speaks of the finest literature that is.  And it might be almost obvious, basic, simple.  It might seem crude almost, like a puppet show.  But, here are the greats.  What do they talk about?  They are, you know, willing to be so stupid and obvious and basic and straight.  Like Dostoevsky.  The Brothers Karamazov.  He's opening up the pages of the Gospels.  He's pulling out new stories, new embellishments, and they can be quite complex, but the story is basically the same, the healings, the sufferings, the sicknesses, the pride, the honor, the relationship between man and woman, father and son, it's all there, in both.  The big questions about the world, about sin, daring to take on the meaning of life if there is one.

And that's country music.  That's blues.  That's classical music.  That's molecular Newtonian Einstein physics and chemistry.  That's what rock n roll is, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, Mahler, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong...  Hank Williams.

And that's why separate, you know, the wheat from the chaff, from worthy readings and the rest.  There is, ultimately, the literature, the great stuff, which really speaks of the problems we have, the morality we need, the faith we must keep...

But it's simple basic stuff to write a book, and Dostoevsky shows us this, in his own convoluted way. There are characters, basically human, sinful, a mix of things, in need of the Gospels.


This is, however, embarrassing things to bring up in front of your therapist, like what it might mean to 'take up the Cross,' like what it might mean to act upon faith, no longer quibbling.  She lets me talk, silently, then asks how I'm doing as far as relationships go.

And the next day, after being allowed to stay home with my sore feet due to the snow storm, but still having kept odd hours, I wonder about faith and what it means to have, to implement such a thing, and I feel embarrassed, as perhaps Jonah must have before getting serious.  I soak my feet in a tub with epsom salts and let my mind not worry too much about the coming shift, how to get there, what I'm doing with my life personally and professionally in the bright light of day.

Tending bar has always made me a bit nervous, the pre-game at least, and that's why I always set myself up pretty well.  But there's the voice in the back of your mind wondering about your professional development, your future, where you're going to end up, things which getting through a night shift does not solve.  For the time being, I make my pot of green tea, cook burgers simply under the broiler and prepare to shower and otherwise get ready.

Wine.... in the good book it is either good, new or old, and by implication, not so good.  To go on about it longer, in the eyes of the eternal is, as Robert Parker would know, is like going on about stereo equipment.  Yes, sure, there are finer points, but this is not helping my sign of Jonah spiritual crisis as I get ready to face, as I've faced for twenty five years, a shift behind a bar.  Okay, sure, what's to worry about?  You're in control, of some things anyway.  You are doing some form of priestly good, listening to people talk, hearing them out.  But...  much of it you see is misbehavior...  And this leaves one with a  nagging conscience.  Which serves me right...

In mild desperation to be calmer I do a plow, a shoulder stand, a headstand, to get the chi back up toward the top.

Well, okay, at the end of the week, you know, trying to keep myself happy, and I suppose suffering through that gap between wanting not to be selfish but still being attached to the world I thought about the expression, 'take up the cross.'  I mean, obviously it had its import back in the day...  But there's a  Buddhist element to it, and in context yes it follows the statement that one must lose himself...  Wouldn't that be great.  We'd not have to worry about all the stuff we're supposed to worry about...

And that's the thing about artists.  They see what is plainly before you.  Like, say Giotto;  here's a three dimensional person portrayed, with shadow and form, as it might look on a flat surface.  It's something staring you in the face, and it is a point relating to psychology, anxiety, worries...  And Jesus is demystifying something for us here.  And he says it himself, don't let people, i.e. legal minds and hypocrite technocrats get in your way.

What does it mean?  We're not quite sure.  How seriously, to what extent?  From the time when the Romans put people on the stake, stavros, the Greek word for it, to our time...  I wondered if there might be a better translation of the word, cross, but it does seem like what he was talking about.  Maybe he did mean something essentially Buddhist, though a bit dramatic.  Lose the self...  Don't get distracted by all the stuff...

But you have the message to teach.  There's the sign of Jonah, who was told to preach to the Ninevites, who did not, trying to run away from his duty going on a ship, who then gets swallowed by the whale, who prays, and then released on dry land to go preach what he was supposed to to the heathens of how to repent.  Interesting that Melville uses it as a theme in his maturity.  Go and preach the gospel;  that's taking up the cross, losing thy self, to redeem a foul, wicked adulterous generation.

And maybe that's how I kind of feel about a night of tending bar.  I should be preaching to them, but I'm neglecting my duty, letting them carry on, you know...  Maybe that's why I'm depressed.  I listen to all their life stuff with great kindness with type O blood passed down so many generations, and I know they are sick, but I have not preached as they require, and perhaps rather have I added to their sins.

Neuro plasticity, yes, the mind is always being flooded with one thing or another... The thing is to be less distracted, to grow up, to become moral, truly moral, not just letting any old thing happen or doing whatever you want...

But Jonah is a launch for Melville.  The journey amongst the heathens and the nations of the world....  represented by King Ahab's three harpooners.  I suppose it ends with Job, I mean, that's what he calls himself, right?, in the beginning, saved, floating on Queequeg's coffin with the Pequod sinks and the whale, the wrath of God dragging Ahab away into the deep.  We don't get from Melville the preaching except that here's what happens when you don't repent.  Maybe that he wrote such a beautiful deeply literary book was his own effort to be 'Biblical,' to be just, to be deeper than whatever was comparable to the crap on television and mass culture, the willingness to forget the old moral laws...

That's the frustrating thing, I suppose.  How to preach, what to preach, what laws to obey, how to obey them, where and how to see the difference between what is good and right and proper and that which is not, as we try to live like normal human beings.  Jesus is the classic example, duh, as he, I dunno, kind of acts normal.  Meaning he's not stuck in rigid tradition, hard-hearted, set, so self-proud as to become hypocritical....

The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, I guess.

But where I went to school, you know, people can be... not the most humble of folks.  And I know the people who sort of saved me life, if you will, are people like my buddy Dan.  Helpful people.  Not snobs.  I ain't ashamed of the restaurant business.  It throws me off, maybe, sometimes.  I wonder if college didn't in some way ruin a fair amount of my creativity, because there's something that squelches creativity, that makes you want to make money, be ambitious, not a hillbilly rebel who's comfortable with himself.  Taken me a long time...  to not be... thinking I was wrong for everything... that I was trying to fit in where I didn't belong, learned to be comfortable with myself.

The old blood type kicks in when I go out at night.  The old blood informs me going out as a cooperative effort, a hunt.  I watch people.  I wait for something to happen.  The people talk to each other as they drink beer.  On the sidelines, I'm left out.  That's okay.  There's the communal feast, sure.  But still, one is waiting for the hunt to happen, for an animal to spring out, then for the chase.  I size up people in terms of being immediately helpful to that end.  Your bartender, of course, who has control over the technology of the evening.  The big friendly Nigerian American guy named Silas at the door, he'll come in handy.  But the crowd is one of self-focussed individuals, no pause taken to reflect.  They live in a city and tolerate it quite well, thus what they drink (cocktails and beer) and the nature of their attention.  They have moved on from the hunt, making a better way of making a living, agreeing with the empire, knowing the latest modes of fitting in, having figured out Uber whereas I will end up walking home on a cold night with my Ben's chili burger sub tucked under my arm in a brown paper bag, wrapped safely with foil, many blocks, I don't know why except out of some animal pride or sense of the need for the walk, the exercise, a sense of grounded location.

Pretty young people spill out of Brixton as I make my way home from seeing Sturgill Simpson at the 9:30 club.  There are cabs on U Street.  After the show, my friends departing, the night is mainly just standing around with a glass of pinot noir in hand at Satellite, the crowd young and well appointed, hair cuts, glasses, shirts and sweaters, evening wear almost.  I watch a show on the television above the bar about the Duran Leonard matches and the only young lady I speak with is the bartender.  Elsewhere, I'll try some other place next time.

I get home and the native dumbness of the hunter returns as he eats the night's kill in its modern wrappings of dough, American cheese, mayo otherwise avoided for health reasons.  If there were energy left a native curiosity would raise itself, poking curiously through something, maybe even a book, or a guitar, not unlike a higher crow, what's this about, what does it tell me, there's something familiar here and satisfying.

The chase, the hunt, the communal effort has been co-opted.  I falsely see in my blood's imagination a hunt and medicate myself with wine, attempting to belong, a mimic of adrenal response that takes me over without asking or telling, such that secretly, or not, I get giddy or silly or morose.  And I realize perhaps that my professional reaction, to be a hunter bartender leading the evening's chase is not an accurate way of looking at things.  I'm being used.  Perhaps it's like the samurai say to each other at the end of Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, 'the farmers always win,' and there they are, the farmers, singing happily in springtime as the warrior protector is buried, their life going onward.