After seating at now the third table, way in the back (where it's 'quiet') away from all customers but a no-nonsense diplomat three top finishing a one course meal, as the busboy makes 'an extra hot small cappuccino' the slender woman is insistent upon down to the temperature, as she talks to her friend, an easy-going Mapplethorpe-era gay man who has visited us before pleasantly, having found the quiet she wished away from other customers, she tells him, 'just go with the flow.'  She won't even look at me when I come by, as if I too were a great cause of anxiety and disturbance.  With her cappuccino, no she doesn't want water, but a Diet Coke.  Okay.  When I come back she is talking about her relationship with her daughters.

The contradictions one sees waiting on people, observing them up close...

Ahh, Sancho, but some days, and after a long week, I feel like I have failed at everything.  What got into me?

Is it the bad habits of my co-workers?

What causes this stagnation?

Sancho, had I known then what I know now, I would have been doing yoga, breathing in through each chakra in every pose attempt, letting the breath of life come hissing in like sea water, filling me through each, filled, like a sea cave, and then the wave allowed back out.  Had I known that, I would have been calm before all things, and I would have seen the difference between the false attempt at finding the inner life and the real ones.  I would not have been illusioned, I would have been calm, known what to react to, and how.  Would I have known.

The inner life, yes, at least one like me deserves some credit in the world, as the people of the world can focus on the outer things.  But I have that within.


The great knight errant took a drink of wine after his shift.  Then to continue his conversation.

"Sancho, I know, I can look like quite a fool sometimes.  This I know.  I know reality myself, believe it or not.  When I tilt my lance at windmills, thinking they are monstrous giants, I know they are not that, not exactly, nor, I suppose, approximately.  Nor in fact, perhaps.  But, I know, there is an inner space, and in the inner space, is it not true, true for everyone, that something like a windmill cannot really be a frightening foe?

"I, for instance, have stepped upon an airplane heading, via Charlotte, to New Orleans.  The door closed, and I had only slept an hour getting ready...  Was I not trapped, the door closing, and I in the rear stomach of the flying snake, held by the hands of some evil magician who took me upon the air as if it were water?  And everyone with me seemed to think it was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, pulling out their laptops or their happy attitudes, playing along, as if to make my frightened misery even worse for the lonely quality to it...  How do they see it, as if it were nothing but a bus in the sky, though for me a bus can be a scary enough trip, but at least down to earth....

"I know, Don Sancho, that these things are strange, but they are part of reality, because they are so by speakings from the inside.  And to address such thoughts, I believe, is to embrace the old method of Socrates and Aristotle, that by questioning, including, taking in the vast circumferant possibilities, we might find a path, an arrow, a strike, at truth.  Is that not the point of literature anyway, to back up, and to broaden the lens, then, having taken in the large landscape with its bogs, its mountains, its fields and forests, its rivers, its sky, its depths, that then we might come in, focussing...

"A school teacher, a good old friend of my retired aunt, speaks of what it's like today.  The dreadful literal quality, a completely corporate model... teach to the test, the test, the test...  Good God...  Who wants to learn like that, under those conditions, the teacher already strained, in a vice, while the administrators who come up with the prison attitude drive away in fancy cars...  And he, good man, described it, something like sticking Aristotle's head in the dumpster...  Or did he say, the toilet...  'Socratic method? God, what is that?!'

"And Sancho, take the world of the literary, of the agents here in this town, how the inner life of my own windmills and foolish adventures can never even appear on the radar of their selling plan, because, of course, 'books must sell.'  Well, 'tis true, they must, but, we must give a chance to the most pointless of heroic books without earthly meaning and only questions and unsatisfying ends, victories of another world.  To protect the inner values the creature was once known to have, yes, that is a worthy end, but nowadays it always has to be sold as something, packaged...

"Inner values, they get laughed at more and  more.  'Can you make money off of that?  Because, obviously, we need money...'

"Alas, Sancho, the great inner art of hospitality, she is lost quite often enough...  And the Son of Man hath nowhere to lay his head, security an ever-departing demon, running off to some distant horizon I know not of.  Whereas the people who travel around in airports, at the beckon of the Great Sorcerer's laptop biddings seem quite fine with the world they create, to which they retire safely to at night.

"Well, I guess the book I sort of wrote, or is it a sort of book, the principle quality of it, the scaffolding behind its picture, is Quixotic.

"Yes, Sancho, people can lie dormant for years, until finally the thoughts within take shape as if suddenly becoming obvious.  Then they sprout.  Perhaps kind of like our Savior.  What was he doing all those years--yoga I would imagine--and then suddenly he was coming up with all these deep thoughts, and of course people were wondering, where, how, did he come up with this stuff...

"And maybe he would say something like, 'oh, well, I was just writing, you know, whatever came to me...  No particular shape, just the obvious truth, though yes, I suppose they are deeper truths than normally considered in daily language usage, the how-are-you-doing and what-can-I-get-you-to-drink sort of thing.  You just wake up to the insight that the world is a forum, or that it can be, so try to squeeze a few thoughts in to its large picture wherever you can.

So, yeah, Doctor...  I guess the yoga is helping me...  At a certain point, you have to relax.  Like...  think that maybe things worked out for the best, or that this is just the way life works...  Maybe it some way it's just better the way things played out.   More realistic.  More appropriate.

I mean, from my end, I see the way people can turn out.  Yes, they're married, and have children, but, in a town like this, you have to buy into a lot, or be rich already.  And I've always been poor.  I've always looked for the spiritual in things.  Not into the big image thing.   Not into being a pain in the ass to waiters.  I know, you have to provide, if you want a family, but that's not the way my life has turned out, and I guess I accept that for what it is.  I didn't have the big ego, something you need if you're being practical.

And then, well, accepting things the way they are, you move on, and you just try to get better and live healthy and get your prana flowing and your chakras unblocked.  Be honest with yourself.  Healing.

And when I do this yoga stuff, it's like your drawing an inner mandala over your chakras, three dimensional.

And that's similar to what an artist is doing, like Giotto, making a two dimensional surface come alive with a three dimensional representation.  Finding the inner reality.  The act of art, taking a two-dimensional icon figure and breathing life into it, gravity, shade, shape, human emotion, mirrors, perhaps, the act of Jesus who brings out that which is within for people to see.  That's what the halo is about, the geometry of an awakened mind...

So when you're doing yoga and you find a chakra and you open it and feel it, draw some intersecting axes toward the center point, you're awakening to the inner dimensions, and then the fact that this flow is the real you, the Atman, the soul.  And from doing that, the baggage drops away, doesn't it.

Well, here I am, fifty, and to tell you the truth, I've never figured out what to do for a profession.  Because I've been caught up in Ego.  I guess as a writer you have to tell a story, and a story involves egos, but...  it's a futile exercise until you find your own way to move on.  Rather than latching on the next ego's story.

So what I need, Doc, is a job.  Something that will give me a sense of a retirement plan or a place to live, even if it may be too late to accomplish any form of security of the kind known around here...

Yeah, I guess I got my own life to worry about now...  And trying to figure out what it is I want to do with myself, all that sort of stuff that you're supposed to figure out right when you get out of college...

I was blocked.  What can I say.  I had internalized.  And now, every day, with yoga, I get better, opening the channel through all the energy centers, and I diminish that old ego and all its stuff.

The story of the Prodigal Son ties in neatly, Doctor.  It's a story of the ego.  You can be led by it;  look what happens.  You go and squander everything.  And  then finally after all that, you return.  To your father and brother, to your true self, your true Atman nature.  You return to the way of the Universe, to abundance rather than scarcity, to a better place psychologically.

That was my problem.  Not that this was what I was intent on...  Not that I even was ever that much of a big egomaniac.  In fact, I don't think I was.  I was a pretty agreeable guy, a bit shy.  Not a particularly big ego, strangely enough, by most people's standards.   But the ego comes out.  It comes out when you don't want it to.  Because it has to protect itself, against the real truth, which we can only see by being very much in touch with our deeper imaginations.   Hard stuff to talk about.  But the ego makes you act out, in a way different from the way you want.  And it's your own ego that's the hindrance, the most frustrating thing, a cloud that hangs over you.  No wonder.  It defends itself, makes you do dumb things against your own interest.  What is it defending?  Itself.

And then the habitual way leads you to a certain kind of approach or habit, also subtly reinforcing the ego.

This is why one has to go think long and hard.  Why Jesus went out into the desert, or Buddha went through his ascetic starve-himself period.   It's like you have to cleanse yourself.

Maybe that's why I wrote that book, to kind of lay it all out for myself, like, what went wrong, what would I do differently now, how would I see things...  What is the ego?  What is me?

But, you still are living in that state, even if you don't see it, where your true self can find its way.  And, of course, the way things are isn't as bad as you've been making them out to be.  It's just your ego, again, hanging crepe, being habitually dramatic.

So things are reasonably okay, I guess.  Just have to make the best of things.  Live and learn.  Maybe it all works out, because you have to learn these things the only way you can, by going through them.

So when is it ego?  When is it the real you?  The real you goes with the flow, right?  But it has to be healthy and do healthy things...  You have to recalibrate your perceptions and your habits, I guess....

The universe is healing who I really am.  It's telling this entity I am to let go and be content.  To find good things that way.

But struggling against the beast of ego, I can see why I'm not very social on my days off...

It's nice to wake up not feeling so down about everything, you know...  Like not dwelling on the past, and thinking, well, truly thinking, things work out.  Takes something to get you there....

That's what you'd want a story to be about, you know...  The real potential in human beings, what they could become if they shed their egos, to be their true, like, yoga Atman selves.    What would that look like?  Happy ever after?  Something from Madison Avenue on the cover of a Brooks Brothers Catalog?  No.  I don't think so.  But still, even with all the poor suffering that might be involved with bucking the trend to be the big success, economically, professionally, maritally, even with all that, maybe a human being can flourish and be something, something like Jesus was...

Christianity bears a subtle warning, don't try this at home, does it not?  Don't want to end up like Him...  The Bhagavad Gita tells us to fight back, take the yoga path, and that's better than just sitting there hiding under the bed, go out and slay, the yogi way.

But how do we imagine what that enabled freed person might look like?  We'd have to trace him back to his roots, watch him grow, and then, yeah, wait and see, what kind of person he turns out to be.  It's like it would have to be expressed in art, in some form of biography, but one with a claim as to what that biographical history might represent, how to interpret, how to interpret 'the Idiot,' or, whoever he is...  (Was poor old Van Gogh up to that, before the cadmium got to his nervous system?)



Barrooms are, of course, places of ego.  That's what makes them so troublesome.  The peddling of the bad influences, the supposed pleasures...

And the story of what happens to Christ, it's like a real-time account of all the egos...  Egos, egos, egos.  No wonder we all have to side with Him.  And maybe He is telling us that these battles do play out in real life, that they are real.  That you are called to join the battle, by being the real person.

But, you know, as I think about, as an aside here, where was he as a young man?  How did he manage  the keep a low profile?  What was he up to, what was he like?  There have been sketches in various Gnostic gospels, but, maybe he was away in India or something...   What was he like as a student, ha ha ha...

I wrote that book, embarrassing as it may be, as a way to reinforce a young person, to help them identify insecurities, so that young people wouldn't have to go through the kind of pains I went through in the phenomenon of young love.   I wrote that book to help young people feel that it was okay to be themselves, shy, awkward, ineffective, frustrated as they try to grow, to show that being overly thoughtful and idealistic are growing conditions and pains normal to the process.  I wrote that book to show what the young animal is like at that stage.

The book ends as it does, characters leaving the town, to leave silent the space they will inhabit.  The book leaves out the years of wandering and lack of happiness and any sort of lasting satisfaction.  That's how life is sometimes.  One moment you're at a great school, and the next you're struggling to get by.  I would hope it is of some service to humanity to raise a note of caution, a way to avoid making the mistakes of youth and indirection, the mistakes that happen when a young person is trying to find himself.


The first day off I do yoga, and then a slow walk up Massachusetts Avenue and past the mosque and over the bridge to where there is a pasture that slopes down to the eastward side.  Today there are the stalks of dandelions in seeding stage, the grass richly green in the late afternoon sun.  I reach it.  The ground is soft as I walk over it, and there is a quiet away from the road.  I walk down very slowly, robins hopping about, and down to the stream, by a dirt deer path, and out on the park trail along the creek that will lead me along a nice stretch and to the bridge I stop and look down from, the small fish, alewives, slipping around each other like eels in groups of ten and twenty.

No, I'm not that much of a tough guy.  That act can only get you into trouble, and here in this patch of nature I can be the idiot I am, able to think freer than the sidewalk along the embassies can allow.

Happy are the insecure, for they will find security when they wake up and realize it's okay to be insecure, less the need to hide from it with varying strategies.  The strategies will one day not work, and one day you'll find yourself facing that.   On the good side is the work you've done, glossing insecurity over less than is generally done.

I would sit somewhere and look over the stream and the woods, or even lay down in the grass, but I will have to make my walk back and by the time I do get back I will be hungry, having skipped breakfast to do yoga.  And the yoga was worth it.

One can get the sense sometimes that you can try to fit in, but that it's either not all that worth it or that it cannot honestly be done.  One does it for monetary reasons, sure, but...

After all the insecurities and all the pains of not belonging, of existing around edges, of not seeming able to really get what you are supposed to do, the way you're supposed to live your life, indeed, you do find a feeling of being welcomed by the quiet things of God and prayer and Buddhas.  And that's what gets you through, while allowing you to still be honest with yourself.

And that's a lesson hidden within all of us, encoding us so that one day we might come to see that.  Thus the seeming strange ways of our earlier paths, the strictness of them, the way we can only be detached from our own fond wishes some times.  The mind that knows deeper wisdom leads us even then in happy days of youth.  As the Buddha says somewhere, it matters not what path one take, I am there to meet him or her.




Well, I suppose I've been at fault, treating the world as a place of scarcity rather than abundance.  Hiding out from life.  Letting nights slip away into the ego's own wishes, enduring, not trusting the wisdom of Atman self.  Afraid to make the moves I needed to make, say good bye to bad habit.  Thinking that's all there was.  Hiding out.  Feeling guilty.  It was my own attitude.  Not trusting.

Well, doc, there's always that one last Falstaff in the room, a person you have affection for, a mutual loyalty.  Okay, I'll have a drink.  These things happen at those gates where information is exchanged in public.  And maybe I needed to nurse the end of a busy wine night into the music and the Beaujolais, then go home and play Van Morrison's "Stranded" on the guitar.

But then there are restaurant impossible computer last-party kitchen-closing dreams, 'where the fuck is this new part of the menu on the screen,' and the kitchen is already closed, and you're trying to put this last rush of jazz night together, and you can't do it. and then you finally almost got it then accidentally erase it.   Then waking around two, ugh, no real time to work on the chakras and the prana...

And I think of Chekhov's long story, My Life, where this guy is an unemployable bum and his aged father strikes him hard with his old muscles for screwing up one more (final) job situation.  And how can I ever trust my own judgment when I missed the obvious gestures of peace from the girl I loved and should have married back in college but I was so busy with my own gloom and my own sort of bad student literary path, or some sort of ego thing...

And I even got cross with my lovely old mom about computer passwords on such on the way to work...  Yes, it's good to be through a real week of feeling very low.  Maybe it was all that yoga, trying to unblock, that did it.  Maybe one of my lower chakras has been messed up ever since then..

And I want to write her, you know, like, a letter to fully apologize to her and her friend, to explain, to say, well, at least I'm in therapy...  Sorry about the whole thing, my misreading things, my recalcitrant egotistical stupidity, my sado-masochism, my unfriendliness, my lack of male grace, my...  lack of humor and kindness and compassion, and I'm the one who ended up suffering so much because of it all, stupid kid...

How could I, how can I, not repeatedly cringe about the whole thing.  And that being the basis for all my decisions henceforth, the final gloomy Beethoven writer thing, to seal my fate of not making decisions, thinking I could beat the system you cannot beat...

Well, maybe if I listen to Pema Chodron talking about compassion and tonglen practice, maybe...  I'll get to a better place than I've been in the last 25....  Breath in the hot heavy air of your own suffering, which is everyone else's suffering, and then, and then, Ode to Joy...



But you get through the week, whatever, it's always there, the colossal failure, the breach in life...  I don't know...  It must mean something.  Something Buddhist.  Maybe some sort of drama of the Universe, or some lesson about ego and projecting your own ego, which is a false thing, upon a situation, thus not being able to see it as it is.  Maybe the ache is also some cry of an ego trying to dominate the true Self, tell it a story, where the Self is, of course, whole and perfect the way it is.

So then what do our lives mean?

I medicated myself again with Beaujolais after they all had left.  (It's only twelve percent;  you can't do too much damage.  It gives you something to nurse on, while I eat my hamburger...)  Am I just going to stand there alone in my misery with all the clean-up work left to do?  My body began to hunch over, gloomy, after all the rush rush rush, all the running and doing.  Then it does indeed feel like my spiritual quest has been hi-jacked, that I'm reading from a script different from my own, and that's probably what I was doing back in college, the script of my brother's way in the world, which, as we see, doesn't work so well for me.  The drinking...  As if I was telling myself, 'this is what you are supposed to do, right?'  Well, I'm built more sensitively than that, I guess.

So then, you realize, you have to do yoga.  You have to do a daily practice.  Writing is far less important.  Your health has to come first.  And then maybe you stand a better chance of knowing your self, tuning out the ego, getting back to your own thing...

I'm being overly dramatic.  But that seems a part of expressing what you need to get out there on paper, not so internalized and tied up...


It all makes you wonder, doc, like, how could you be so stupid, so utterly foolish as to act against your own fondest wishes, as if you were intent on destroying everything, if there weren't something within you that you absolutely cannot trust.  And that must be the ego, according to the literature.  So then what do you listen to?  I mean, you always try to follow your heart, but why doesn't that work out so neatly?

It's like those times in life when you are standing there looking at yourself stand there and go through things, things which are completely separate, alien, a kind of sleepwalking, from the things you want to be doing in the world to be who you are...  Who is this person, figment of people's imagination, the self has fallen into, people pleasing... tolerating every last one of them the people who come and bring their own worlds with them, and yes they say nice things about you as the babel on, but what does any of it have to do with you, their drama, the deals they make, the travels they take, their quest to go meet chicks or play in a band, or unwind...  You really need a shell.  That's how it ends up:  pull up the draw bridge, fill the moat, don't engage.  Let the egos fly around like so many bats trapped in a room, flapping about, confused, hearing themselves talk as if it lets them echolocate.   Eventually they will find the open window, when you don't engage with them anymore.  Old Jesus was right...

The pain is your path, they say.  Be open to it.  Breathe it in.  Have compassion for yourself, and then you can give it to others, and there are other people out there just like you.

So maybe that's where I'm at.  Youthful insecurities in that arena of first love, like, how to give young people who go through such things a positive direction...  Good for self-confidence, that sort of a thing.  It's like there should be a Jesus for such a thing, who comes along and heals the young people, because you have a chance when you're young.

One only knows that to share is to lighten the load that humanity must bear.

I always feel a bit lighter after this modest form of publishing, leaving an inner thought here where I can find it later.

Without a huge amount of enthusiasm I will head off to wine tasting.  But it's not about the wine.  It's about the basic compassion, part the kind Dostoevsky writes about in Karamaov, Alyosha's dream, the feast at Cana, an Orthodox Godly wish for humanity to find joy, and also part the compassion even a middle-aged barman can muster.  Does it matter the specifics of the wine?

Oh, sure, blah, blah, blah, this grape, that grape, this sensation, that one, a balance, an earthiness, a bit of history...  But it's about more than that.  It's about the context.  It's about a year in the life of grape vines on a particular place on earth...

in the 'scribblings' category:

As I recovered from the week, taking a long slow walk through the woods and down by the stream and then back along Massachusetts Avenue, later on, the final bare bedrock truth seemed to dawn over me, the truth of suffering being the foremost universal reality of the human condition.

Knowing that, we no longer make our foolish attempts to escape or ease this fundamental fact of life.

I came down with the sense of the lie I'd been leading...  Was I not almost banging the drum of escapist pleasure, I wondered.   There was real human stuff that needed airing at the pub, but I was not making anyone any better.


And now at 3 AM I'm having a glass of wine, in moderation, realizing that it does not end suffering.  In fact, it probably adds to it, as any escapist pleasure does.  It leaves me unimpressed, as taste, as medicine, as calming properties go.


I have the feeling of shirking responsibilities as I wake.   The bar has been my way of serving humanity, and now I realize how immoral my duties have been in the scope of things.

Is it that we fall out of some wish to suffer the pains of the rest of humanity?  Do we cast pearls before swine when we do not protect our energies, letting them out to any taker?  I recall a very painful past episode, wanting to go to a party at reunion, traveling from DC to Boston, and then out to Amherst.  And on the way to the party, not wearing glasses or contact lenses, I ran directly into a bunch of rowdies, jocks celebrating.  Come on, have a drink with us.  And the cost for that drink, for the shooter handed to me has been quite steep, quite horrible, haunting.   I left myself open, I guess.  I acted in a way I was not, a lie to myself, hard to forgive for all it cost me in morale and the other possibilities inhabited in the peace I wanted to form with a particular person.  "Leave her alone," her friend yelled at me, and I shrank and departed, only to get worse, and then the next day was ashamed, too much to explain nor ask for forgiveness.  I felt boxed in.  I was use to discouragement and unhappiness, which was what I knew, and I did not fight.

Christ seems big into suffering, and he does so on behalf of humanity.  Could he have taught without his own suffering?

The creative act of writing is indeed properly a kind of navel staring, for which it is maligned.  What is wrong with being attuned to the basic energies in the body?  Why do we look outside for story, when the story is what happens internally.  Indeed, the chakra responsible for sexual relationships is the same as for creativity.

One writes for the big things, the big understandings, the things that will help with life.

Strange that the ones we would fall for, quietly, chastely, in so-called love with, attached to our own emotions regarding them, are the ones who bring us most directly to suffering of the deep personal inescapable sort.