But who would want to wake up and want to write, but for something cathartic about it, to come to psychological peaceful terms with the things that gnawed at you in the night.  What sort of excuses could you come up with to explain your behavior?  Why were you such a jerk to that girl?  How, in what terms, could you possible apologize?

There is something rotten in Denmark, which is the stiffness of it, the lifelessness.  Hamlet is dimly remembering a distant past of humanity, before possessions and property, before such heavy terms and titles were placed over everything.  Yes, the court is quite an organization, but it's all based on show, and if not show, aggression.  Puppets.  Hamlet is very much a Christian figure.  Render unto Caesar that which is appropriate to him, usurper of real humanity.

You write to try to figure something out.  Why were you so removed from yourself, from your own interests?  Why could you not save yourself and create a relationship with the one you wanted?

Who wants to think of such things, or write about them?  Society bores you.  Great.  So you write a play depicting what you sense and see, after a long career as a playwright.  You don't really want to participate in society somehow.  You like the players, people on the fringe, taverns, the communal spirit of the theater.  The play is the thing, to catch the conscience of the king indeed.  Of all the institutions.  Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  A blip of cosmic dust over soon enough, passing on.  All the acts, pretending something.

Not the happiest stuff to think about.  There is love and friendship.  But the fear is of turning into another institution.

But we are all so vulnerable.  Men in particular.  They can easily fall apart.  They can be left turning to art and music, as if their lives depended on it.  Unable to find happiness anywhere else, but by drilling into artistic bedrock, chipping away at a block of marble with some vague sense of form.

I want to forget about her.  I also want to be forgiven, I suppose, understood.  A bit of redemption.

Because I don't know what I'm doing with my life.  And she would have been a reason to live and have a life and a job, and a place to come home to, so that then you could know what to do with a day.  Without that you really don't know what you're doing.  Not the slightest sense in your consciousness of what you're supposed to be doing, but for a flash now and then, a kind of empathetic understanding of the creature, or maybe a wish to be an anthropologist, or move to New York and be a musician with whatever meager talents...

Drilling on through unyielding bedrock, and almost wishing you had a place to go like the bar, or a great hike somewhere.

The great unseen almost obscene vulnerability of a human being, male or female, an honest relationship based on a balance, on the improbable meeting of two lonely minds with a sense of trying to do something.

I use my memory of her as a jumping off point, mysterious ground to launch a new understanding of the creature and the society he keeps.  I would have nothing without that, probably, though, no, that's not true because of my own family.  The more you love someone the more vulnerable you are, and maybe the more vulnerable you are the more you act like you're a tough guy like Bogart's Rick.

Who is real, in the end, but someone like Jesus, who, in a way, has nothing to do, nothing to do as far as a job or a place in society, no home, just the deep wise thoughts that come, a lonely figure, who asks now and then if anyone gets it.  As if part of what he was saying was that he didn't want to talk about such things either, just live a normal life;  but as a sort of psychologist or psychic medicine person who knows the pain we all go through, he's obliged to prepare the herbs of reality.  For which drugs serve only as a natural metaphor, a meme, a word for, a kind of model, not the least for revealing that things are not as they appear to be (nor are they otherwise.)  Sex, writing, highs, walks in nature, listening to a friend's music, eating thy daily bread, they are all of the same inner peace.  The things we crave, as we ourselves crave being like Jesus and Buddha.

That's where Shakespeare is, at least in Hamlet, with his 'foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.'  Or Ahab in Melville, 'strike through the mask.'  A glimpse of what else might be, or is that too, madness?  Enough to make you want to jump up and run off into the woods.  And a thing you must hide, really, when walking down the street.

You do want love, a relationship, but there's not a damn thing conventional about a real one, anymore than mortal minds could have thought up sex and its beautiful instruments but of course through some poetic ideal picture, in which case we do create sexual love whatever it means, a tantric one you would gather...  An intuitive understanding that needed no words, a picture of the highest things possible.

Of course you feel lost without your father.  Of course you do.  Hamlet.  Jesus speaking of his own source of wisdom, which does not come from himself, but through him from the father.

I guess you have to ask people to not think of you conventionally, that you, nor really anyone, is cut out for the conventional.  How do you explain that?

You would probably need disciples in such a situation, disciples, and wine, to keep you from going mad..

He'd been to visit the weekend before.

I'd worked my week, had a long night at the end of Wednesday shift, staying out with pot smokers, biking home late.

Getting up late on Thursday, had set up a date with a lady of Gautamalan nobility, when I got a call, your father's gone to the hospital.

And I callous, sort of said, as I picked up pho and a bottle of wine, the floors and the paint and the bathroom finally having been done, inviting the lady by, oh, he'll be alright.  I walked past the statue of Marek standing tall and nobly, there were buds on the trees.  

That morning around eleven we slept together again and then I got serious about calling St. Luke's.

Tonight, busy, the wine tasting night for the guy who's gone away.  Talk and talk.  I'm busy, the waiter must go, forgetting he was to go out to dinner with his gal, not his fault he works two jobs.

My love of my old man showed to her, that girl in college, the princess, for he was a guy  beyond compare, in all ways.

And yet I'd fucked it up when he came to visit, first one weekend I was trying to get my thesis together, professionally, then off to Maine, and then the next, Parent's Weekend.  Her parents must have come.  She brought me a James Dean poster, because I'd earned it, but I did not put it all together, and so I let everyone down. 

I spoke to him around twelve, the nurse put me on.  His color had been good before, and the doctor's report from his own was good around 11 the night before.  I feel awful, he said, in his own voice.  And then he said something like he had to go, and I said bye, as the other line of my cell phone began to beep, after he'd said, bye.

Compassion, yes, that would be a thing I'd write about.

Two nights the fuck-up managed, to stay out of the wine.  And then he was reminded, it was, after the shellfish tower, the shared steak, burger and rueben late after the shift at Old Ebbitt, it was the 'french toast' shot the barman offered up at the end, as a gesture, that made one feel like hell.  Part of it was forgetting to be leery about trusting going out so late, after a shift, when he should just go home, but for the pathetic social life and the kind offer of an elder always good soulful company and the man in need of company before some serious tests up at Hopkins...  Yes, gallant co-worker reminded him of the parting shot, the free one, the one that made him feel like shit, sweating under his blankets as he waited for the alarm clock call at 2 PM...

Sunday night, not so bad, passed.  Monday night jazz, almost enough to tweak one back into it, but again, refrained from, the first sip, the first glass, the oh well but you need a glass with your solitary plate of food at the end...  And then a hectic Tuesday, a stiff back from pulling out of the headstand in an awkward way, the complexity of free wine tasting and bottle discount night celebrating the return of a good man from his travels in South America...  The sip from an opened Vacqueyras with the liver  provencal as the last ladies from the continent left.  No more than that, but when he got his flesh home on the bicycle, there was an open bottle of Pinot Noir from Friday night ticking its time away in the fridge.  He needed to relax.  The PBS show about cancer interesting enough.  The bathwater poured with epsom salts, a Virgin of Guadalupe candle set on the bathroom radiator, and the wine tasted good.

edited, augmented, to be divided

I found, in my fallen state, a diet appropriate to my blood type, and as a consequence, health in simplicity.   I cooked simply seasoned ground grass-fed beef under the broiler with onions while sweet potatoes with ginger, cayenne and cinnamon, roasted in the oven.   As the cooked meat rested I wilted leafy greens in the hot iron pan.

I biked, or walked, through the woods to work and saw hawks eating their catch on wide limbs of the trees of Dumbarton Oaks park.  I'd worked my shifts, having created a pub of my little bar.  I had little money, less to worry about.  I wrote to keep myself calm and kept in shape doing yoga.  I tried to minimize possessions to useful ones.  I recycled and tried to keep my usage of resources low and simple.

While wine provided a return to an archaic way of fostering community, I began to take a more considered view on my own habits, work-related as they were.  I'd feel the depression the next day after the night of giving way to my thirst.  I'd sleep fitfully, waking to a pounding heart, the body trying to rid itself of toxins.  I'd wake feeling lost.  I'd think of my mistakes, my sins of the past.



"Alcohol promotes an inflated sense of verbal facility at the same time that it lowers the boundaries to social cueing... A further brutalization of culture."  Terence McKenna.  Language of the Unspeakable, part 1/6, found on youtube.




Hamlet has this affinity for the players.  They represent the feminine, coming to the male dominated court of aggression.  Thus, the play his its deep resonance within our subconscious.  We sense the usurper, the imposing of male domination.

Is there a bit of Shakespeare saying that he personally feels lost unless, like Hamlet embracing the players, their egoless sensitivity, he writes, putting on his own play.  Like Hamlet fighting against something hard to define but physically present.  Hamlet is sensitive to the bluster of Claudius, the drunken tradition 'better honored in the breach...'  Hamlet doesn't try to dominate anyone.  He doesn't put the sword through his enemy when he has a chance, and this could be a noble thing, as the King is, after all, saying his prayers.  In terms of the male-dominant Western World Hamlet is known as unable to make up his mind, something of a wuss, rather than just a person being the deeply sensitive being that he is, not having bought into the Madison Avenue image of 'a man.'  Thus there is his amazing soliloquy about the nobility of man, how like a God, just as he is naturally.  The play is an amazing grasp for terms we stand to lose, in constant danger of being run over, quelled, outside the agenda.

Hamlet's father's ghost recites his sins, condemned to fast in purgatory flames.  A familiar feeling that might be to those caught trying to figure things out.  Hamlet, as well, must admit his own irrevocable deep insensitivity toward Ophelia the feminine aspect of the play, a sin which can only be dramatically resolved by his own death.  There is an eery parallel, we sense, between the sins of the father and that of the son, and one might conjecture, the sin of not embracing, not listening, not honoring the female.  (Which is perhaps why Gertrude is not so unhappy with her new husband.)

And there is, of course, as a musician might observe, an incredible tone ringing in Hamlet, the play.  Out of the writer's inner personal neuroses and issues, from which writers must, regrettably, write....  The tone in the speech of the ghost, in Hamlet by himself...

These almost feel like a writer trying to vet, trying to work through, on a pathetically daily repetitive basis, issues, issues with girls, issues with having not properly honored a princess nor his own father, even as such things might never been, of course, his intention.  What happened?  What fell down in the way of a young man doing the decent thing?  What cloud in his head or bad habit caused him to defeat himself and his fondest wishes?  All the stupid emotions, 'all the shocks of flesh that man is heir to...'  All the misunderstandings, portrayed, cataloged, so laid out in Othello, in Lear, in The Winter's Tale...

And writers are not so lucky to be able to escape from the omnipresent reality of their own stuff, their own errs and mistakes, are they, (but I suppose through miracles.)  Like Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters "falling out like a fruit, complete" (as he writes to Heaney explaining the unavoidable), the mind's eye must digest, deal with...





Have compassion, my therapist says.  Don't call yourself a creep, because you know your intentions were good.  Ruminate over the negative feelings you harbor toward yourself, rather than thinking of her so much.  Have compassion for yourself.

But there is always another session required.  No, no, it was all me, my bad.  My name is mud.  She was kind enough to me, though in a coded way, such that a fool would miss, and I was the one who did not respect her.  What was it?  My unconscious anger at something?  The depressive effects of self-medication?  The social post-frat party milieux?  Clouded vision?  Wild stubbornness?  Deafness?  Negativity?  The great mistake in never sitting down with the other to talk?  What was that about--some kind of shyness?

It seems that if you start out thinking of higher things, higher reality, a meaning, a purpose to life, everything alive, with soul, why do you end up with the greatest need of all to be able to forgive yourself, to find compassion for yourself with your self.

It's as if you think of Jesus Christ or Buddha or a Shaman, or Shane MacGowan or the Zen master, if you begin, then eventually you will very much need their aid.  If you think of yourself as a writer you will very much need to write, and never really get ahead of the game to your satisfaction.  Is it better to never think of such things in the first place?  Does Shakespeare infect us with the issues of a mortal mind?  If you read Ernest Hemingway you're going to be stuck needing him and Big Two-Hearted River kind of separate peace;  if you find solace and light in Larkin, you'll need to keep reading him.

If you read Job and Jonah then you have need for them.  But if you have a girlfriend, then, that will be all that you need.

What is it that makes us harsh and exacting to those we love, consciously or unconsciously?  What compels us to ruin our bright little lives for the sake, as it were, of higher thought and deeper understanding, and the kind of fresh higher consciousness that runs in defiance of the prevailing culture?  Who knows.

The fool mistake we all make when we invest our work with higher meaning... I've done it all, over the silly job of greeting people in a pub and pouring them drink and nourishment while music played, and even with writing.  The writing must be cathartic, I suppose, a simple bodily function, an inner tube of some purpose and then an outlet valve, that must be done on a daily basis, until it not work anymore.

She played with me rough and beautifully, as I tried to play with her the same way.

So Moses comes along, climbs his mountain, and comes back with the rules for an agrarian clearly property-ownership-based society.  A previously nomadic people caught in a desert, looking for a home, for good land, having a need to settle.

Jesus comes along many years later to help us get more realistic toward the human creature, that basically a lot of what we do, now that we've settled down into walled cities, is sin, that really a man commits adultery a thousand times a day, that the society based so rigidly on building up riches isn't so hot, that a humble return to the communal spirit and naive goodness of those whose illusions of society have been pulled away from them is a realistic approach.  Deemphasis on fire and brimstone sin bashing, rather a simple approach, 'it's what comes out of you, not which goes in, which defiles.'

Even the religious authorities, who guard, interpret, execute all the laws, are subject to the greater sins of being hard-hearted, hypocritical, selfish, arrogant, overly rigid, unrealistic.  Not loving thy neighbor, nor taking the Lord of goodness and charity as important.  Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, he tells them.  Ouch.  It's as if he is saying that we must accept the nomadic quality of the creature, that goodness and righteousness is found on the road, maybe even provided by the good kind-hearted Samaritan, as if such people were an unlikely source of anything good in the collective viewpoint of the day.

It's as if we must go further and further back to the earliest of campfires, to the sharing of the kill, to the things that can happen when the moon is full, and find a decency and an innocence and a remarkable mind capable of beautiful things.  And there find, or rather remember, the qualities that will get us through the next thousand years on the planet.

Who is it that we let determine the value of a person as far as allowing them to have an efficacious life?  Based on what they do 'for a living?'  Indeed, you might get suspicious, why there are so many lawyers in the city, struggling to keep the rules in place by making new ones.

Who else do we have but the artists, writers, dancers, painters, musicians, film-makers, to set the way forward as far as reasonable values?  Or perhaps someone who takes all such things into consideration, but putting them all together by dint of understanding the common depths from which such things rise from.  And that person, almost by definition, would have to stand outside the norm of 'how society works,' have to suffer the great devaluation of the human being...  A person not able to fit in so well in any particular pre-made box.  A kind of scapegoat as far as the way, the mode, by which he can garner his knowledge.


I go to a hockey game, invited by neighbors.  The arena, a world of male dominance, beer the drug of choice, flashing lights, the cheered-for scuffle on the ice as a moment of real stuff and aggression, the importance of scoring, getting the puck into the net...  Leading me to reflect on a society that could be matriarchal.  I think of the importance of the women as anointer, as the choice maker, empowered to pursue what she wants to pursue, a strong woman.

I dunno, doc, it seems like when I visit family I cannot help remember her.  All the times I messed it up, when she was waiting for me.  It's like I didn't stand up for my own little family, all the good things it did raising me, all the work that went in to me.  I foolishly threw it all away over a course of a year and a half or so.  I loved her.  And yet I couldn't make peace between us.  I couldn't understand the part of the cycle that was rejection, her expression of dissatisfaction with me.  I couldn't see that as part of her waiting for me to fight for her, to be clearer about my heart's desires.

So there it is.  Like all the support my family had provided me, and as soon as I'm out on my own I act disrespectfully toward all that care and nurturing and the good parenting bringing out my talents.  It's almost like I was possessed...  Or I had some stupid quasi-religious idea about passivity...  leaving everything up to fate.  I'd put forth, and then I'd retreat.

And all you want to do, of course, is be respectful, to do what women tell you to do.  But I won't bore you with how I was a perfect fuck-up at every possible turn.

I tried to express myself.  I will say that at least.

Maybe I was needy.  Too needy, easily hurt.  Maybe I was self-medicating too much, yeah.  Which is of course not very impressive.

But I had all the talents I needed, along with all the opportunities, and I messed them all up.

That's how I could go about thinking.  I could see the vulnerability, of how I didn't make grandchildren happen for my mom to give her joy in her old age.  Irresponsible, all of it.

I will say, my mom points out maybe I wasn't cut out to be doctor-lawyer-banker-MBA.  That might be true enough.  It's kind of her to forgive me for being who I am.

And I do see a great wisdom in how my mom lives, which defies the way the world wants us to live now.

But here I am at fifty, struggling with this burden, which on a good day I interpret as some vision of deeper consciousness, an understanding of humanity that you can only really come upon yourself.  Not something they're going to teach you.

The first clue was an understanding of a diet appropriate to my own system.  We aren't all meant for the same mass-produced diet.  We get allergies.  Our guts go funny.  Our joints ache.  Our stomach and our pipes hurt.  We don't feel full.  Lots of things.

Yeah, back here on my own territory, I guess I torture myself less.

But I do believe in the primary importance of the matriarchal, and even what got me into trouble was being too obedient.  It would have been more psychologically healthy to, as they say, stand up for myself.  Then I wouldn't have had to waste all these years thinking about her, like when I wake up depressed, sore from the night shift.  That's just a part of the healthy way you have to think if the world's going to survive.  Women are more nurturing, closer to nature, less ego.  And I suppose that's why, ironically maybe, it stings so badly when we get rejected by them.  Indeed, it hurts.  It causes great physical and mental pain, like a sword going through your brain.  You have to walk it off, to let the sting ease away.  And that was part of my problem.  Because then I'd be too late, she'd have gotten impatient with me and seen it as a crucial lack of 'self-confidence,' as the modern world might interpret.  Stand up confidently for what you are doing, even if it is burning up fossil fuels, extracting them from the ground, polluting irrevocably everything you can get your hands on.  BE CONFIDENT!

In contrast to that, take Joyce.  I'd say he embraces more the feminine.  Writing words.

Or Jesus.  Happy are the mournful.  Maybe because they're the ones with some ecological sense, a spiritual sense, like it's easier for the poor man to enter the narrow gate than the man chortling over his riches, his selfish successes.  Happy are the meek, because they don't overdo it all so as to burn up every resource as one day we shall find out about.

In a way I wish I'd never heard about that, but, on the other hand it's wisdom.  And it also seems that nothing good comes without a deep cost, without a struggle.  I suppose that's why there are heroes and epic poetry cycles.  The poor hero going through all this life voyage stuff, the strange sights, the encounters.  The Greeks understood about ecology, they just had to put it in terms of cyclops and sirens and whatever else...   Enron.  Halliburton.  Koch Brothers.   Selfish people everywhere not giving a shit.

I dunno, maybe you finally realize the whole world is your mother.



Maybe we have to realize that we aren't the smartest of creatures.  We think we're smart.  But what do we know, like, about what's going on on the planet?  Then we should shudder.

Do we have to go through all these struggles to learn something?  Do you have to take up the cross of suffering for the betterment of the whole?  Looks like we do.  But at least then we can deny the blind following of convention.

I try to call my mom every day.  Does that make me a mama's boy?

I guess you've got to look forward, you know.  Nice young lady who comes to sing and play gypsy swing took the time to give me a few pointers on singing.  Very pretty, in fact.  So it was like a triple pleasure...

I guess that's the thing, to be open to learning from the feminine principle...

And all the tremendous stupidity, Doctor, of trying to follow my brother's sort of dominant beer drinking ways, the frat boy legacy, it's all cost me a good amount, when that was never really me.  Sad, yes.

But I guess you live through it, and finally see the light, far later on.

There is within us a kind of memory, of an archaic past, imbedded within us, the kind of a life we all led as we as a species flourished, as our brains expanded, as we developed language and art.  Living now in modern world, we live in a mix.  It can be sensitizing, as when we remember and reflect on nature, and it can be desensitizing, which happens to us when we try to cope with certain facets of modernity.

The vision, the deeper intuitive memory, which cannot lend itself to any commercial packaging beyond its own nature, comes across as spiritual vision.   The intuitions can be labeled sometimes the stuff of religion, perhaps depending on the force that seems to accompany their visions.


The loaves and the fishes has a ring of a communal effort, as if the crowd silently chipped in and shared what they had out of their own pockets with the rest as the baskets were passed.  Jesus Christ, when told his family is waiting for him, responds that those who join him are family, beyond the particular blood relationship, as if to further put the point across of how we are to live in this world to make it all work out.  It sounds like he's being a jerk to his loved ones, lessening the importance of the family unit which raised him, etc.


The intuitive memory of our history does not necessarily need the heaviness of religion.  It could be a memory within that strikes a chord, say as Shane MacGowan recalls his extended family gathering in a Tipperary farm house on a Saturday night to play and sing all night.  Or when someone finds something familiar and grounded about tending bar, as if remembering the communal of the hunt effort, the run of adrenaline.  Or as one remembers a society led by the wise female rather than the strong male calling all the shots, as in myths of modern advertising.   In our deep past we outgrew, for a time, the primate habit of male dominance and pecking order, lived communally, everyone embraced for their individual ability, a point posited by ethnobotanist psychedelic thinker Terence McKenna I've come across on youtube.

Gut thinking is often communal.  I find it bent often enough toward the exploration of consciousness of which literary endeavors come from.

And this is the sort of thing I think about, to mull over with my therapist, that deeper sensibility, hopeful that there is indeed such a thing within us, that we might bond over.  Offering a way for us to understand the foolish and stupid things we do in life, like not approaching the pretty girl at a reunion football game obviously waiting for me, me feeling stung or pessimistic by her hanging up on me the night before, well within her rights.

By the time we've stopped to find terms for something, often enough, we have fallen away from the reality of the present moment into the realm of male domination.  We need to help each other find peace with each other beyond and before the placement of terms by which to understand.  Then we can see the very deeply flawed practice something, like fracking, for instance, is.

Writers are  those who must write, who must look to find terms that are in tune with reality, and their work is often a struggle.  One doesn't envy Ted Hughes in many ways.

A sketch before work.