But then, you know, the humanity of people, you're reminded of it when you look into their eyes, talk to them a bit.  Then, yes, you say to yourself, well, this is what I do.  I don't go out.  This is going out for them.  For me, it's merely who I am.

When you join in you become part of the broken world.  Less is the chance you are stepping outside of it to look for the real answers to the problems it sets up.  You hear stories from the broken world, but you have to return to your own solid ground, to that which has no motive.

No worldly logic will do.  No worldly solution.  No worldly ambition.

There are good notes in any evening, that come along when you need them.  "Has anyone told you how good you are at your job today," the nice lady asks me, observing my chit chat with the mid-bar pair, talk about a French tall ship, the Hermione, arriving at Old Town.  (I had mentioned the successor of the Edmund Fitzgerald parked over the winter at my mom's harbor up in Oswego, waiting to make the St. Lawrence passage in spring before the last voyage to Houston to be cut up for scrap iron.)  I thank the nice lady and tell her I appreciate the good word, having probably ruined the surprise of a signed book for my retiring dentist, my blabbing like an idiot earlier in the day.  "You have so much humanity, the way you get people to open up."  Thank you, that's really nice.  And that is the benefit of my job, not always seen by me.  Humanity.  "Yeah, but no retirement plan," I say.  "You don't need one.  You could do this anywhere."  "Yeah, but when we professional bartenders get together, we say 'any idiot could do it.'"  "That's what we say in the mortgage business," the kind lady counters.

A broken world it is, and it drags me down into it.  Today I am shot.  The inner benevolent energy drained out of me.  Twinges of headache, the stupid feeling of not being up out of bed before three.  The memory of taking in the newspaper and turning off the front stoop lights.

One night of too much wine can easily lead to another.  I put down the guitar and join Jeremy for a steak at Du Coin when he gets down with his shift.  The next day, two days after, again I get up late.

But it is a broken world.  And the thing about my job, I'm on the front lines.  That's bar tending for  you.  You're on your own front line of great danger as well.  But you're on the world's front line.  In a broken world.  And you're the guy giving out compassion.  Compassion to sinners.

And you know, this sounds kind of silly, I mean, like, to compare, but I make note of this because, obviously, Jesus was on the front lines.  He met people where they were.  They didn't have to go to the temple to see him, though, yes, he did teach there.  But that's not our complete picture of him, just keeping it to a temple.  His good stuff is out on the road.  Healing people.  A sermon from a hilltop, convenient so they could see and hear him.  The lakeside.

The front line is dangerous.  You can get dragged down, swept along into foolish things that will mark your life, when you don't know the nature of the world.

Jesus didn't have a woman, a wife, a girlfriend.  To hug or hold him or cook him dinner when he came home at the end of a long day.  Think of it, Jesus, and even he doesn't have a girlfriend.  No healing hand to touch him and hold him and tell him he's okay, a little bit of support, the comfort to truly be himself in a comfortable place.  He went to the city, to be, effectively, in the hospitality industry.  Bread, wine.  A few good words.  A friend of poor fishermen, the publican, the whoever.

It's a broken world, and the people in it are lost sheep.  Why is it broken?  Exactly?  I don't know, there are probably many ways to say it.  Ego?  Chakras out of whack?  Selfishness?  Materialism?  Drunkenness?  Pleasure seeking.

I know drunkenness, though I try not to, more and more these days.  I've fallen to that voice of Satan.   So often, and at such absolutely crucial points...  I would almost even not fight at this point against it anymore...  The horrors wreaked upon my life, the broken relationship...  But I can only then admit that I know the world is broken, and that worldly logic is not going to fix it.  Personally, I know this.  Quite well.

But there is a will, albeit a fallible one.  The will is there, an inner reality, an inner voice.  It preaches compassion, shows it to all, but at a certain point it matures, realizes better what it must do.  It does not help the world to maintain the illusion.  It is not good for your own health, as you've known a long time from personal experience, waking up hurting and sad, tired.  Sometimes you have to participate, but finally you cannot ignore the lessons you've learned.

We know what happened to Jesus, as that story is told, a lot of emphasis on the brutal aspect of the world he lived in.  Barbaric.  Some people seem to suggest that he did it so we wouldn't have to.  Have to fall to that fate...  He died so we don't have to.  So they say, whatever it means, comforting.

Every day I get up and there's that depressing voice.  Reminding me of how I failed, how I wasn't a man, how a girl was just being a girl, how, despite your great feelings for her and the appropriateness of the match, I dunno, doc, something came between something.  Something came between me being me, doing what I wanted, the way I wanted to be.  And it was doubt, some form of it, some...  something.

And the book I wrote, well, it's true, it's ending is realistic, there are some Christian parts to it, and some thought in it, but because he doesn't get the girl in the end, that makes it ultimately a tale of moral failure, of human weakness, or just the possibilities of character, good and bad, in the human being.  Or how a mind can mess with you, make you do hugely counterproductive things.

The front lines are scary.   There's always someone to wear you down, have a drink.  Have a drink with me.  And then I keep on, unable to stop, and the next day, there's the bad voice again.

I know, some people would tell you that it is they who are on the front lines.  Like soldiers, cops, city schoolteachers.  Sure.  Economic business leaders, providing jobs.  Even those who are creating the latest newest restaurant bar whatever.  Front lines are we.  Sure.  But  I guess that's not how I see it, Doctor, not in my experience.

Maybe that means I can finally move on.  I would hope.  But then I wouldn't be on the front lines.  I wouldn't be there for the sheep.

It's strange.  Here we are at the culminating point in history, given so many gifts of Relativity, great art, and who is here at the middle of the drama playing out, but some guy who wasn't the best student from a certain professional angle, who know has to tend bar the rest of his life....

Well, I got through the night, Monday, Jazz Night number one, with Satin Doll, a trio, my friends.  It's a sleepy night.   And then right toward the end, with the kitchen about to close, it gets a bit more complicated.  Get the band's dinner order in, their cop friend shows up...  Send the waiter home.  Clean up after the water leaking down from the ceiling in the big summer rain.

I take a bottle of Pinot Noir home with me.  The first few sips right there at that stressful hour of waiting to get the last dessert orders, oh, here come five people in from Nebraska, be their wine shrink, the first few sips taste pretty good.  There's a pleasant law school professor at the bar by herself, I ask her about her sister's wedding on the Jersey shore, so a little sip of Beaujolais, a sip of the Pinot, one of the Chinon, what's the mood tonight...  Then at that hour, it tastes pretty good.  I pull out a little Tupperware container with Merguez sausages wrapped in wax paper, munch on them, right when the stomach pangs suddenly hit.  They taste fine cold.  Cut in half I can down one piece in between this and that.  The busboy sweeps, I try to clear the last dinner plates, he's got his little system, the floor mat has expanded, producing a bump.  We're in each other's way.  Law professor H wants maybe something sweet, a dessert wine perhaps, after her plate of the vegetable du jour.  She had an omelette at home, and here a glass of chardonnay.  She likes the Jurançon I recommend.  Late harvest, deep color.  Met the guy who makes it once at a tasting.  His father was a wine-maker.

I put the red road bike on the stand, put on cycling shorts, got the remote within reach, the History Channel, the twenty-four hours after the Kennedy Assassination, then the same on Pearl Harbor.  There was a pretty girl I could have had a nice stroll with I noticed when I stopped to look over Rock Creek Parkway from the Massachusetts Avenue bridge.  The one Sunday I've had off exclusive of travels in a long time, and she had a book with her.  I turned to walk down the grassy field and she kept straight.  Idiot.

Somedays you wake up feeling, or thinking, what a big jerk you are.  How you messed up everything.  You feel cowed, cowed.  Twenty five years later, I still feel cowed.

I cling to yoga today.

Writing, one might well conclude, is a thing for depressives, depressives working out their thoughts.  It might be largely about just getting things out of the head, down on paper, something a bit satisfying about that process.  As if you were menaced by unknown creatures at the edge of a wood and wished to know each one and where it was as you made the dark journey.

The whole point of sexuality, looked at it from one way, is primarily the enlightening quality of it, the sacred quality, the healing quality, the bringing together of two halves.  In the highest being it is not directly procreative, and it really serves a far different purpose.

And when people are denied this basic bread of life, as they do in a world that commodifies and trades and elevates those who are skilled bargainers, who are necessary people who attach external rather than internal values upon a thing, the denied people become very vulnerable, they take a big knock.  Christ, all I wanted was a kiss, and she makes it impossible.

And in particular, a young man, at a certain stage at least, is highly vulnerable.  He knows intuitively the beauty, the great spiritual joy of contact with the one he obviously desires.  The external value systems, though, tend to bleed over innocent souls reaching for each other.

I do yoga, the depression lifts,  I can go face another night in the slow crucifying that is hospitality.  And hopefully, hopefully, I will feel some sense of hope and not succumb.

I've stated the notion crudely, but there's something to it.  The world we see as such is a creation of something within, a figment of our imaginations.  It is perceived as it is perceived because it is the projection of a collective subconscious.  New York City is what it is because many individual consciousnesses have made it so, along with the greater collective.  Yes, of course, made it what it is "with their own two hands," all the labor and thought that built it and keep it running and make the corners of it what they are.  Arduous work indeed.  But the phenomenon, according to the yogi, is deeper than that.  There's something about the phenomenon that is the product of the ego we project upon it.

Going out doesn't seem to work for me anymore.  I was feeling unsettled after the taking in the deep soulful Beau Biden funeral, chewing on something.  (My mom tells me I probably needed to stay in and absorb and read the Bible rather than go out and talk of the usual scuttlebutt.)  Best friends invite me over for dinner;  sure, who wants to spend a Saturday night alone.  I grab a couple of bottles of a light Kermit Lynch red from Cheverny, a Loire blend of pinot noir and gamay, from my shop off Dupont and make my bike lane journey down to 10th.  A DC Brau before dinner, the red with it.  I swill it down pretty good.  I'm chastised rightly so for a juvenile comment, and find myself, now that I do yoga, a slight bit too much.  We part ways, I go check out a bar to see what the young folks are up to, I have to rye ales, sneaky at 7%, sitting at the end corner of the bar away from the front door.  A mid-level consistently fresh attractive young crowd, a scene, not a pub, too much busy for the barmen to talk.  And I realize after two that I'm pretty much gotten what I will get out of it.

I wake up thirsty, not feeling up to getting out of bed and starting the day.  The alcohol has thinned the type O blood in the veins enough that the heart is rapid.  Not this again.  The guilty feeling.  Going out doesn't seem to work for me anymore.



When I have meditated, started the day with my own thoughts, then worked on them, as I do now, but also in yoga, getting aligned, then doing the spiritual part of the work, the city streets are alien to me. Two nights ago, I go for a midnight walk.  On the hill by Mitchell Park on S Street, I see the Big Dipper through the clouds high above the trees.  I walk further on, eastward, past the front steps of Russia House, past the second story of the Royal Palace, on, toward 18th Street.  I get as far as 16th.  I've seen enough.  The Maya world.  Chi Cha Lounge hookah parlors, bouncers, misplaced ID problems in Stetson's, the line at Local 16.  I may have intended to get as far as 14th, walk down it, then back on R.  But I wish I'd stayed on Massachusetts Avenue, the quiet of Embassy Row, absorbing nature rather than confusion and people's presentations of how they see and make themselves up to be.  What I see out where the bars are does not agree with what I seem to be able to see from the deeper levels of consciousness, and all this I see as it is makes me sad, as if it all were, secretly, tawdry, a hill or pit of beasts sluggishly fighting each other almost.  Well, I knew it was going to be a spiritual test, a consideration of this business of Maya, the projection of egos to shape the world as it is.  And yes, Maya looks exactly like Maya ought to, and it does not make me happy.

I beat a retreat almost, at my own slow pace, getting across Connecticut Avenue at S Street, then up the quieter street.  And I feel no failure not in meeting anyone, and good to get home.

So as I sit the next night in Lost & Found it comes to me again, Maya, the place of illusion, and the beer is not harmless, and the pretty girl in a long black gown with low heels on is having a gin and tonic and she's about to leave anyway, so that's my cue to escape.

And today I wake, feeling, yeah, kind of like I've messed myself, why this pattern, what to do about it.   Hard sometimes, fighting against the biddings of the lesser levels of consciousness.  No wonder I've made a point recently of  doing yoga and got in tune with deeper thoughts and feelings.

Where does that leave you?  Are there any sort of establishments where drink is served where it is about the deeper consciousness, where it does become thoughtful, considered and considerate?

The familiar sadness sits upon me today:  what have I done?  why did I go out rather than just meditate?

I'm not the drunk, I'm just a bit stressed currently, a bit lonely.  My vision just seems a bit different.  As you would naturally expect from a man who's turned fifty.  I guess you have to try things, for too long, to develop, in a negative, the picture of what you want in life.  Maybe the deeper vision, because of its depth, simply, is a lonely spot, when everyone else is simply trying to make a buck with the way things are and how they are.  I think of Eric Clapton's Lonesome Stranger "I have crawled/ down dead-end streets/ on my hands and knees."  Dead-end streets, yes, dating sites, apps, bar scenes, so much of it hollow, as if one were the only one honest in them, honestly saddened, honestly look past all the egos to offer a real person, a mensch, in all his vulnerability.  I've been down those streets, being human, and I find soon enough I'm not getting anywhere.


Over the dinner table's peace and quiet, good conversations I listen to like a kid amongst adults, as I've not yet figured out the basics of a prosperous life, I hear, initiated by a very intelligent British journalist, "starting a church is the only way to make money here in America anyway."  Is that it, asking people to donate?


If you're a poet must you first enchant people with a particular kind of image, the lining up of poetic lines with persona with life as it is led, say like Ted Hughes.  Or does that stuff just come out of the deeper explorations, the Jungian dreamer explorers, whatever, of the imagery of subconscious.  Hughes, many times, takes it straight from the animals, owls, fox cubs, crows.  And I can see now why maybe I ended up at the zoo staring at tiny blue frogs, a lounging seal, a prowling Sumatran tiger, because the animals are natural;  they know how to do their thing.


Heading home, one night last week, too late, I stopped to take a picture of the St. Jerome statue, wet with rain.  A man driving with an older woman passenger pulled up alongside.  Ostensibly, they asked for directions to The Diner, which I explained, but they lingered, waiting for something, some form of being hit on, solicited for who knows what.  I was polite to them, and finally they drove away, and I went speedily home.  People lead neater lives than I do, I'll give them that.  And last night, yes, straight home I should have went, I knew that at the time.

Is drinking, then, necessarily deluding?  It seems at least, at certain times, it is.  Maybe that's why some of it leads to more of it.

Balance, we all seek balance.  I slowly recover from the night of extra beer, and end up reading about "root awakening" on a site dedicated to the principles of yoga, Aum Love Tantra.


Jesus, as was Gautama Buddha, was human.  He drank wine.   He suffered pain, physical, mental, spiritual.  This makes teachings all the more real, accessible to us.  He came up with his wisdom sitting in his own living room (probably with the TV off.)   That he is so human makes him all the more accessible to me, I'll say that.

I get a whole lot more out of tending bar than I do going to one, for the most part.  In truth, I feel awkward at most social situations.  I'd rather be serving, welcoming the stranger, finding the shared, the common, the humanity.  I've often thought how imperfect a job it is, how susceptible it leaves me to the bad influences within and without.  I know that it is a good spiritual practice to be able to find wholeness alone.  As that is a spiritual practice, so too must being the sometimes noble host wherever you can find yourself in that role.

Not a Beau Biden am I, no such accomplishments, not, as it is, the good family man he was.  This was something I had to absorb while watching his funeral and listening to eulogies.  I sort of felt the need to look back on my life and see how little I've tangibly accomplished.  Yeah, we look up to that which is outside ourselves, and see people with better haircuts.

And yet, and yet...  That seems one of the lovely lines of Fellini.  Look at History Channel, providing us with tastes of this and that to fulfill something.  Ancient Aliens.  Reenactments of the life of Jesus (which are good, to my tastes, anyway until we get to the bloody parts, at which point they become highly discouraging and depressing.)  Don't we sometimes look at our TV sets hoping something would come out of them.  Maybe Bobby Kennedy, himself back from the dead.

It's not what you do, it's the love you put into it.  And to this end, tending bar is not the worst of things, by any means.

But the world, the city, everyone, to some extent, potentially, is ego-fixated.  And deeper thinking is achieved only through seeing through the ego.

If you had a vision that came from being free of ego even you would have a hard time understanding it and putting it into recognizable terms.   Even to yourself it would seem strange.

And the corollary to this is that particularly to the individual wrapped up and attached to ego, the vision will be dismissed.


The world is crafted by the collective take on it.  Washington is Washington, and it becomes so every day.  There is little change, just more fruit from the tree of the collective mind.  Now and again, a subtle change perhaps, but still most of it, nearly all of it fulfilling the vision everyone seems to have of Washington.  The people who come here find it a fit, then make the place more of what and how they see it, of what they project upon it.   Self-fulfilling prophecy.  Ego brings them to fit in to the uses patterned by bigger egos, finding a place to belong.

The other choice is to look beyond, deeper, past the collective subconscious... through deep meditation... becoming less a part of the mainstream's conceptions.

The John F. Kennedy era:  so different in its imposition of a consciousness.  Different from what took hold in Nixon's, and that in turn, far different than Reagan's, and then from that into the W. Bush years, the Cheney influence.  Look at the difference.  The deeper mind, uniting the world through a deeper level of shared consciousness, compared to the shallowest layers of the ego running the mind, the knee-jerk response, the Halliburton wars, the "Patriotism."  Not exactly the eye on top the pyramid.  Each had/has their fruit. The Kennedy era brought forth the Peace Corps, the honest showdown in Cuba over Russian missiles  when it had to, principles standing.  Bush One led to Bush Two, somehow, the egotistical reaction that led to more egotistical reaction, the great opposite of Buddha's principles.  Saber-rattling begets more saber rattling, and before you know it, everyone is at it.

I watched all this take effect in DC.  I saw the town change.  I saw the kind of minds that came.  All you can do is plant seeds.

It was as if new layers of ego were added, piled on top, thickening as a crust over the deeper reality of shared humanity, not unlike the way Hitler added the Nazi ego, his own, his friends.  All it takes is a few.   The people with less an ego don't stand much of a chance.  That's the insidious thing.  The scary thing.

I was a bartender.  I had no idea why.  No idea what I was doing in DC.


The Beau Biden funeral, the eloquent President's eulogy, restores my hopes.  I go for a long walk, all the way to the Zoo.  I see fish of the Amazon, grey seals, an otter, lions, a Sumatran tiger, and then the long walk home.  I took the same route, I remember, a long time ago, when I got dumped.

But my mind still aches from the unresolved, the things that seem to have left me treading water the last twenty five years.  If I'd resolved them I could have cleanly moved on, one way or the other.  The weight of it turns me away from being happy enough to be able to spend time with family.

That makes some of us more disposed to meditate on the collective subconscious.  Not being man enough to put things past me, out of my mind.

As I wake after the fourth night shift in a row, I can tell I've been through the work week.  My neurotransmitters have been worn down, as they get tending bar, the piqued mind responding to a night's demands and then some, for just a bit too long, and why keep faking it.  The social is mixed in, throughout the evening, but in context the mind sees it as work, and of course it is.  I wake to find the mind returned to the boy and girl and college, another episode, Christmastime, the last sociology class in the music building's amphitheater, where she sat, how he sat at the end of the row on the carpet floor, wanting to sit next to her, should have gotten up off the floor, gone down the row and sat with her, and all would have been forgiven in Christmas spirit and peace would have come.  But instead, "look at where I am now."

The music, of Jazz Night number two, was good.   Brazilian, and at the close of the kitchen, the band's dinner being brought up, the singer's friend of friends' main course has not been fired yet in the confusion of the closing innings.  Shit.  So I fire it.  And then that will make dessert late.  Oh, well, it all works out.  Our regular friend has a kind word for me about my weekend soon arriving.  "We all get in ruts."  Go and try and have some fun.  Do something different.  Start a Meet-Up group.  Hard to meet people our age and with the same interests...  "I get in a rut myself, from time to time."  Oh, yes, I know I do.  I hear you, man, I hear you.  He may have sensed my lack of immediate enthusiasm and I'd just taken the last food order of the night, the Brazilians in the corner, not ones to show up early, five soup spoons to share.  When the waiter deals a large party in the back room, then the barman has to be on patrol over the dining tables, an established pattern.  The waiter had the German ambassador, a 14 top, last night, and tonight it was a dozen mom's of young children...  The waiter can leave.  The barman stays, and there's always something that happens to him after that "can I get anything for you," and the resigned "no, I'm good."  Always something to demand attention, and because of it, the heightened need for your own glass of wine as the last bit of electrical energy gets taxed.

The night before it was drunky "I'm a beach girl" mom with another mom having dinner, about to move back to South Carolina, coming up to the bar to chat with everyone else.  (The attending Secret Service agents had commented to the waiter about her earlier, after she spilled water on the floor.)  One thing precipitates another, just enough of tipsy bar crowd left to egg on, to feel like something's being accomplished when one drinking person meets another, as if they were long lost friends with projects to resume, cards exchanged, as if...  The atomic spin-offs of the intoxicated mind...  Things don't get better around drinkers, they get worse.

I'm serving dinner to the band, having kept the singer's crusty boneless pig's feet warm in the oven, with the salad transferred to another plate.  I start clearing her friends table of the cheese plate slate, the wooden charcuterie round, let someone take the last of the seared foie gras, cold by now, but still good.  I am almost done.  There is no late-night crowd, no wanderers.

Then up the stairs comes the traveller, without a smile on his face.  He's had to move to another living situation today, and the job he'd hoped for, so he could line up an apartment, 'no dice.'  He'd finally gotten fed up down at the waterfront, getting into it with the busboy who kept pushing, pushing, but might wish it'd had been a neater exit as far as apartment hunting goes.  He sits down and looks at the new Bordeaux and the open St. Emilion.  You want a beer?  I dunno.  Try some Bordeaux, I say, giving him a glass.  You must have missed Ray, he was just getting out of here.  I walked down, didn't see him.  We were wondering what you were up to.

Dessert for the Brazilians in the corner table by the front windows.  The tall bass player hangs out, his bass in its zip-up case, the amp with a cover on it.  It's the anniversary of the older couple, so after the mousse and the bruleé come from upstairs (as I'm talking with my friend about how to get out of the rut, as there is a Wisconsin Avenue one, a Connecticut Avenue one...) I bring over a celebratory splash of sparkling rosé, five of them.  The younger guy at the table helped out with playing small percussive instruments, the thing with the sand in it that you shake, very well.  They receive the house's offering with a nice celebratory fanfare, hooray, however they say it.   Cheers.  Flute glasses are raised.  (Their Rhone red bottle is empty anyway.)   The singer joins them, and I pour her another glass of Pinot Blanc, and she is happy, and the boss has signed her up for another date.  "Thank you so much," she says in her soft, restrained purring way.

Back at the bar...  "Maybe I'll go out to some dude ranch in Montana."  I think of some encouraging things to say.  Finding the restaurant where one belongs is a very particular thing; it has to be a match, almost a spiritual things.  "Well, I could pull a few shifts up at this pub my friends know."  Just stay positive.  Don't let that ingrained negative voice take hold, is what I've gotten out of therapy.  "I knew re-entry to the States was going to be rough."

My friend sits quietly.  The Bujan (a Cotes du Bourg) is the best, he says.  You want to work in a wine shop?  Nah, they don't make any money.

"I'll feel better when I get my own living situation down."  True.  You can pick up shifts here, tell 'em you work here.  Yeah.

"How are you," he asks, as I pull the last bit of the night together, send the busboy home without having to wait for the Brazilians to leave.  Would I feel better if I were just alone at this point?  One more guy to monitor, make sure he'll get home okay for various reasons, the great blank space of the night waiting outside the front door.  Leo Dan's Brazilian Pandora station plays through its list, and I wonder if this might be making my friend a little nostalgic for the time he was at the World Cup, far away from old DC.  He's picky about his music.

"Yeah, I got a buddy in Seattle."  I heard through the grapevine the possibility of his going back there, one way ticket.  "I could stay with him.  Except he's a bit of a freak.  And it might come to blows..."  The clouds of that feeling of being trapped, nowhere to go, lower over the bar, over the bottles, over the bright light over the cutting board above the stove used to warm the countless baguettes we burn through madly in a night, out of the long brown-paper baker's bag, into the oven to get hot and soft and crisp on the outside, into a little basket lined with a folded napkin with a ramekin of butter, over the last bit of paper work and the dishwasher with its glassware.  "I could get a car, go back to my dad's, then I could get into Charlottesville, save up some money..."

What happened, to my burn-out generation, who've ended up in restaurants and uncertain living situations...  What educational discouragement got to us, what turn of the economy...

The Brazilians depart into the night.  The singer follows, thanking me generously one last time, looking at my friend at the bar, then back at me.  A final flirt would have ben nice.

"I've been depressed a bit lately."  He gets up and goes over the over and pulls out a morsel of baguette bread.  It's probably pretty dry by now, but he cracks off a piece above the recycling bin and gnaws on a hunk, then another bit, then throwing the remainder in the trashcan.  I do the paperwork, then retrieve a plate of pig's feet and its sauce from the oven, still warm, could use to a bit warmer.  I'd offered him some, but no thanks.

He rises and pulls his jacket on, pulls a cap over his head, his long hair about his neck.  I'm going to get going.  Okay, man, remember it's all a spiritual thing.  Jesus was a smart guy and he didn't have anywhere to stay either, I offer, as a sort of barroom perspective chuckle, look on the bright side, if there is one, or at least, "take it easy."

And then I am left alone to gather my things.  Down to the basement to get my bike.  Change out of my clothes.  Hopefully beat the rain.




Awake now, the day after, sipping hot water with lemon and some smokey tea the boss shared with me reminding me of our recent ridge-tip camping trip and our good talk of yoga's transformative powers in the bright early light after the windy night gusting over our nylon tents, I take an L-tyrosine and 5-HTP and a B-12 for the nervous system, an Ashwagandha for the pollen and remind myself of the yoga to look forward to, the day off.   Time to light some incense and crack open a window, let the egos disperse.

When you're stuck in a rut, it's like your chakras don't want to light up.  Too much damp.   You can't convert things into the spiritual lesson, as that seems beyond your grasp.  The demons sloughed off of others have caused you unrest.  And then maybe it's time to go for a walk.

I take a soak in epsom salts, shower off, shave, am able to do a bit of yoga without much energy, but at least there is some flow.  It takes some patience, some effort, some deep breaths.

Four night shifts is a good deal harder than three, like earthquakes, exponential, and I did not feel good going in yesterday.  The yoga was a lot better yesterday, so at least I was aligned.  Though I was late to work, I beat me co-workers by a good few minutes.  Today, the down mood is disturbing.  Something I thought I shook, but then I remember, how I only worked three shifts the last week, thanks to Memorial Day.

There's a nap, there's a hamburger with sweet potato and onion and a call to mom, there's another nap, a text from the traveler, 'I've been cooped up all day and need to get out;  what are you up to? feel like doing anything,' there's a low key walk up to the bridge on Massachusetts Avenue and back right before the day's sunset at the miraculous 8:27, and then another series of naps, and then around midnight the creature is awake again.  Take the trash out, the recycling into the bin out front, gather the laundry, vacuum, mop.  History Channel movie about Jesus on the laptop.  Fuck, I need at least one glass of wine, much as I would like to meditate.

Wine at home, alone, seems okay.  There's not all the egos around, the self-importance.  A glass gives you energy to do the little household tasks.

Monday, 11 AM, I see my therapist.  I trace out the Amherst English department good and bad.  The initial good, followed by the less, and the knocks to a college professor's son's self-esteem, which leads to the girl problems.  Which, yes, leads to, at my therapist's prompting, and I don't need it much, to see a link to my own professional self-esteem.

She asks me about my experiences at the Bethesda Writer's Center.  Do you ever talk to writers, about your writing?  I think of the workshops I've been to.  Their talk of the characters having 'through lines,' i.e., what does this person want, what does that person have in mind...  Show, don't tell.  "This bit of dialog isn't working for me, because no one in this situation would say that."  Don't get me wrong;  helpful things come out of workshops.  But for me, something missing.  Why do you write?  What in the spirit prompts you to go deeper or put it down.  If you knew, or know your own, why, then you could write one off like Larkin.  And you probably know, somewhere, your own reasons.  Which you can only discover by writing.  In the course of doing so, you might feel a bit like an early Christian, the same inspiration, the same separateness, a sense of being taken as outlandish.  Yes, as per the writing seminar I just missed up at the National Cathedral memoir writing, spiritual writing, the seeking of how you truly feel about something in your own words and experience, is 'counter-cultural.'

Back from my session, the steaminess of Washington DC in the summer under my skin, I meditate in corpse, and a half hour later admit to the need for a nap.

Another shift, under my belt, and then today I am mortal again.  The thirst overcame me in the final inning of Monday Jazz Night, a late hit at the bar, regulars to check in with and juggle, a return of late night Russian lady who's come in with two friends new to the place for dessert, coffee, a glass of malbec, finally leaving peacefully after a bit of 'oh, I'm drunk again, ha ha ha.'  I play the rope-a-dope, skimming along the surface rather than being drawn in, nervous previously grated.

I close up, in the company of my coworker buddies, and then we go up the street to their little rented house on a corner for a night cap and the different mental landscape of a parlor for shop talk.  The final story of the waterfront mess, a shoving match with the aggressive twenty year old El Salvadoran kid who pushes into you, then threatens you.  Then there is a downpour, and I must wait 'til it subsides.  It turns out to be a nice slow ride home.  That's the key to strength in anything, going slow, letting the muscles have a chance to commune in their motions.

And so of course, halfway into the week, such as it is, today I am mortal again.  Would rather seek the answers in that inner world of deeper consciousness found in meditations rather than the outside the outside the outside world and all its offerings.  What a luxury that would be.

Yes, I ate bread, with some cheese José the busman brought back from El Salvador in the throes of hunger at the end of the shift.  I feel it in my knee, in other joints, even in ear wax.  The memory of an almost disconcerting thirst, mediated by keeping to the Chinon and then a final Guinness once safely home with a  roll on the bike on the training stand, why does it take so long to unwind....


The early Christians, gathered in what looks to be a barroom, low key.  Wine to ease the tensions, to help the therapeutic flow, of opening one away from the fetters, the concerns, the veil of the material world.  Humanity ever circling, but not quite grasping.  The barman waiting for the end of the night to come, to go home in peace.

It is a bit disconcerting, to the uncentered, a bar lined with tipsy people, chirping at him like birds.  It makes me wonder, subliminally, if the godly beauty of the creature, both male and female, just as they are, has not been lost along the way, now a need for drastic things, bizarre transformations...