I am.  I am male.  Fifty years old.  Of uncertain future.  I am a writer.

The longest night of the week, the longest shift, I end up riding down the big breathtaking slope of Wisconsin Avenue from the plateau of The Dying Gaul and the neighboring garden and medieval library toward the river, Georgetown laid out before me.  I go down to the river.

I taxi on my bike on the boardwalk in front of the waterfront restaurants.  I cross paths with a woman shrouded by a sweat suit top.  Is she homeless?  I say hi, explaining who I am, why I'm here, after the storm, after a barman's shift, to look at the river, and she speaks with understanding back to me.

Later, after I look in at the hot new restaurant I am getting stories of, its windows dark, its vibe somehow tangible, laid naked in the night for the kind of establishment it is in its heart, an illusion of pleasure bitter in its core--I exaggerate some, in Buddhist mode, and there is nothing inherently evil about serving up a good dining experience to people who feel like getting out of the house, and perhaps I speak more of the service end of things here--that I finally lay my old road bike on its side, take my helmet off, and sit down overlooking the river across at Roosevelt Island, hoping for some sense of why I should be here, in this town, why I should like the old river, the Potomac, itself, why I should find myself here, why or where I might find some primeval taste of nature here after my long shift that began early with real estate agents and ended up with CFOs who, after dinner, always want one more drink, one more drink.  "Can I buy you a drink," such men ask, peering at you, looking for a way in, a crack. "I don't know if you remember me..."  Oh, yes, I remember you.

Giant steps sit above the river itself.  The rats come from the park and take their way down the steps and along them, down to the river, where ducks sleep at four in the morning and small driftwood comes down through the ripples after the big rain, after the strange light in the sky after the big thunderstorm and its torrents.

What do you think of talking to therapists, I ask, of the woman I passed by earlier, who has found some sort of quiet on the same steps above the river.  They drop off so that you would not know there are any steps beyond the drop.  I saw her slip down into the space earlier, next to the bushes, and wondered if she was, indeed, homeless.  Was there something a little unsettled, a little wide eyed, a little cautious, yet still able to handle a stranger...  I'd hoped to present myself as harmless, just another soul in need of nature.  And when I finally sit down, not far away from her, after talking to the ducks in their own language, my presence is accepted, from 12 or so yards away, too much equipment with me to be a threat.

They can be quite corrosive.  What can they do to really help you, how can they change you?  Studies show it's good to have a dog, or go for a walk, and these things change your brain and make the chemistry for happiness.  What can a therapist do?   They waste your time.

You know what?  I agree.  After getting through a long shift, I agree.  I was resourceful and industrious to get to this spot.  I dealt with people for ten straight hours.


"How do you feel about rats," the woman asks me, looking over at me.  I guess we are on the same big step, three above the waterline, after talking about photography.  You could count all the ripples on the river, here diagonally to the other side, the light cast by the tall office buildings of Roslyn.  "What don't they turn the lights off," I ask.  "There are people working in them still."  "Oh, right. Yeah, journalist, financial workers..."    The rats are us.  They are not our enemies, I've got no problems with them here by the river.   I don't go into work, that if they were to run across my feet, just saying,  in any place of work, that might be disconcerting.  But they don't do that.  Here they are. It's summer's first days.  They know how to drop down the steps, holding on, reaching down, then flat away.  They do not come toward neither me nor her.  I see the silhouette of sleepy female ducks curled on the last step platform just an inch above this placid boring slowly moving sea that is as far across as it can be.  The mud of that little island that is a break, a fresh breath, closed in upon by city lights.

This is not my town.  I add to it as much as anyone, maybe even more.  I've found a small niche in it, a place to live, temporary one as they are for all of us.  I speak of Maya to my new friend, who is involved with the legal professions.  I conclude she is not homeless as I might have suspected.  She might seem a little wide eyed, but it turns out she is Canadian.  I have a bottle of wine in my bag, but no corkscrew, and she doesn't drink anyway.  But, as they say, the world we see is a projection, an appearance to us based on a collective subconscious we all share, and, in addition to that, spiced by our own individual subconscious.   Why do I feel this is not my town?  Why do I suddenly sense, or rather it slowly dawned on me, as I stood outside the great blank night dull windows of Fiola Mare, that this is not my town, not my match, nothing to do with my own subconscious, but that it makes me always a friendly outsider ready to greet people at its gates, welcome them, but that it makes me one of the better conversationists in the town, though an unsung one...  I make the town something else than it is, almost as if it were a college town, or some great city where all people spoke to each other evenly and happily, as rarely happens.  I've got all the basic ingredients for such at my beck and call, at my reach, and after expanding out my rays of light, still, thank you very much, I go home after it all, a creature of the night, still wide awake, and people being happy with what I do, their little quiet Mother Theresa of the barroom, they wouldn't want me to fly away.  Even as I might bore them by my appearance, and make them ask, "what's he doing here still..."

Well, it's not like I have a girlfriend after all this, not one I know about.  And the nearest local restaurateur is basically not the nicest guy in the world, but in it for himself, entertaining as he might immediately seem to be.  Do I want to spend my money there?  No.  I'd prefer to go back to the weird, to the peace that strangers even might find overlooking the river, one male, one female, in the quiet dark of night.

I'm not such a bad guy.  I always and ever will approach people gently, not wanting to bother them, but there for them, ready for a conversation, if they too are alone.  That's a lot of life.  Alone, or able to offer friendliness to a stranger.  That's what, one might gather, they don't get in the war-edge torn parts of the world, even though they would but can't break out.  Make one tribe wait on the other.  Make that tribe go and wait back on the first.  That would fix things.  Nelson Mandela once told a story saying as much to friend of mine, Jeffrey.

There are some people--is that the way to say it?  There is a mode of what people do now, one that makes certain people look at what I do, that kind of gentle bridging of the gap between cultures and strangers and minds, and ask, something like, "why don't you have any self-confidence?"  That was a jarring moment of my life.  I suppose I had to write about it, being unable to change my dumb-fuck-ed-ness.  That's what you get.  Able to talk to anyone, to meet anyone on the path, and you get that.  Like, what are you doing with your own life/  Are you weak?

I never took that as a sign of weakness.  Being humble and agreeable, and, that final high talent that goes unsung, being able to, god forbid, wait on people, meet then in and out, strangers, weirds, drunks, normals, high and mighty, low and pensioner, even other restaurant people, who are able to say to the dismissive, 'we have families too.'

I guess, coming on the train, sad, mourning, lost, I pictured Washington DC as the town of, say, someone like Bobby Kennedy's sort of a ghost if you had to build the consciousness you'd want.  Or maybe that of Lincoln, and his ghost, who too might come sit over the river the middle of the night after one of this mid-atlantic swamp thunderstorms.

I don't know what I was thinking.  I came, I arrived.  It's been the same ever since, not much headway, a place to live, best friends asking me, what I'm going to do with myself...  Where you gonna live when you're old?


The week has ended.  The last shift, busy, was the least tricky of all.  I get home, on bike, and start the laundry.  My hands smell like Shout, after spraying the inner collars of Brooks Brothers shirts and the spots of stains that might have fallen upon them.  There is wine.  Red.  Chinon.  There is the red road bike on the stand for a fifty minute roll.  There is memory of the yoga class on Sunday morning outside, the soreness gone by now, very early Thursday morning.  It was very hot before.  Now the air is clear, and here, on the quiet street, with the earthen bank, in the early light, there is a vague memory of camp ground and trees rising from dirt and undergrowth.

I have all the windows open, the fans on of air conditioner window units to help.  I turn the lights off of the vestibule.  The neighbor, upstairs, will wake, soon enough.  I have no desire for an encounter, to have to explain the far bounds I've reached in my service to humanity, and even to him it might make little sense.  The city, at 6:20 AM, has begun to move, and I hear a truck sail by whistling through the wind down on Massachusetts Avenue below, moving eastward.  A bird with two note punctuation sings from a tree.  I've watched a bit of a Herzog thing found on Netflix about fur trappers in the taiga, Siberia, and it made me want to adjust.

At the end of the week, flashes go by.  I have memory of a Siberian Husky type of dog running along the fur trapper's snowmobile over the frozen river from day into night, not ceasing to run.  How can I explain that to people.  I remember the first sort of tap on the shoulder of the very first customer of the week as I sat and wrote the chef's dinner specials out on my little pad of paper.  Listening to everyone's talk, being their therapist, their ear, certainly takes so much energy.

I'm told of certain things, on Monday and Tuesday, and I forget what they just were, though I remember who told them to me.  I still am attached to the idea that our blood-types have so much to do with not only how we should eat, what we should watch out for as far as health issues, what exercise we might best engage in, but in how we think, what we are attracted to.   No way around it:  a type O will think differently than an A, than a B.  Literary critics are too confined to acknowledge the basic physics of literature.  To wit, my type A economist friend--what you expect from him--can only squash my humorist enthusiasm for the life of the Taiga Siberian fur trapper with immediate discouragement that goes with being of the Agrarian phase of humanity, all in good humor.  "Where are the museums, the culture, the jobs..." he asks.  He's a man of good humor, some of it sarcastic, so, sure, that was my point, get a chuckle out of life, that brief moment of a broader view from our little dugouts of life.  It doesn't get far with him at his hour of day, even with a glass of champagne, an onion tart, and a glass of Bordeaux trickling down into him as he resides quietly over a cheese plate.  "Maybe if you had a really good wine cellar..."  I can totally see his point.  But the beauty of being in nature, and being self-dependent in it, seems to hang in my vision as I bring the work part of my foolish week to a close.


The copy of The Bhagavad Gita sits on my bed cover still, after buying it at Kramer's after my little Monday morning therapy session.

What was Jay telling me, what was Jay saying...  telling me what I might do with my life now that it is here where it is....

There is no doubt to me, Hemingway, to me, certainly a Type O, needed action to write.  He needed to write, and so he needed activity and things to do, places, weather.  Because of that he needed to write.  He needed the material, and then he needed, or rather, enjoyed, simply, the prose.  There is still lots of discrimination against such people who have to live life that way, action on the one hand, experience the bridge, prose, thought, digestion in the mind on the other.


A writer has as much a chance as anyone to make some figurings on the nature of reality, sort of like Einstein, or the Buddha.   How can nature be aligned so that the inner world is perfectly reflected by the outer world in this strange trip of ours called life?

It was Wednesday, Mary's live gypsy swing loud from the corner, a 14 top going away party for a JAG friend heading off to Bahrain, Jeremy and I got to talking about service.

I started on the topic earlier, describing the treatment a former World Banker turned fancy restaurateur on TV gives her servers, the browbeaten looks.  There's something missing from her model.  She pays a secret shopper to tell her the obvious, though, being a paid professional he puts in a way that justifies his own position and the need for it, rather than getting to the root of the problem, which is her own attitude, the suggestion she might develop a fresh respect for her staff.  What do you tell people in such a position anyway.  "Work with us and you're set for life..." the owner of a meatball restaurant seems to suggest as he tries to boost morale, numbers down.   A satisfactory answer only for so long, as I would well know from my own experience.

Jeremy has mentioned a coworker having an off-night, the guy who comes late from time to time, a bit  ODC, all over the place, vocal sometimes.  "It's very hard to be consistent," I was telling him, "so, you got to come up with a reasoning behind it.  It's an intellectual challenge to come up with the will and ability to do it."  We talked about the hospitality, the real stuff, that keeps us going.  "Yeah, I was a bit off yesterday lunch.   (A big customer) came in with a chick he used to date, wasn't so happy with me.  He had a gift for her and put it right on the table where I couldn't really see how full his wine glass was...  'Just leave it on the table so I don't have to track you down,' he said."  Yup, Monday morning, the blues, the why am I doing this, what's my future going to look like, what should I be doing for a better life, all those questions seeping in, and the putting on of a brave face almost in spite of it all.  "It's hard to come back in after a few days off," I mumble, relieved to have gotten the 14 top sat and the bubbly poured.  Team work.  It's fun working in a  busy restaurant with good people.

Later, a good hour or two later, he looked back at me and said, as we stood together in the bar mouth, my taking dirty plates from his hands to wipe the food scraps off with the silverware on them into the trashcan, stack them in some order from larger on the bottom to smaller sometimes in different piles, "There's no short-cut to hospitality(/good service.)"

 "Yes, exactly."  I smiled and washed my hands in the sink with a squirt of liquid Dove hand soap.  Yes, there is a fascinating intellectual issue at the heart of good service, the actual wanting to do it, putting aside your ego sometimes.  Putting aside sometimes, the 'why don't I have a social life...'  The problems in the mind that stack up like dirty plates.

The issues as they are presented to you can seem so substantial.  They can come as pressing social engagements, shoulds and shouldn'ts, claims, responsibilities, restaurants, events one should go to in hopes of meeting someone, rings to kiss, things to do because everybody's doing them...  And then there is the peace of Buddha and meditation, the calm presence in the present moment, one that leads to question some of the solidity of the world as it might appear to us, pressing upon us.

We have the guru,  the inner one, the outer ones we know from reading about, to guide us.  And there, after tending four pretty busy shifts, there is, again, the ikon, of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.  And, one wonders, is this picture the culmination of the focus of the Christian story.  After all the wisdom, the miracles, the story of old prophecies fulfilled is the man himself, as if 'at last.'  Here he is in this ripe moment, good coming out of good, still, in this time of possibilities, before the realization of the bread that will be broken and the wine which is his blood.  The simple culmination of a wise life, not for any particular reason, not for any particular scriptural point to fulfill by letter, but simply to be who he is, to be, as the Buddhist might say, even that, simply, 'which is.'

Turn the world around and see it as it is.  Be 'that which is.'  Avoid the psychosomatic illnesses that come from believing too much in the solidity of appearances.  Be the man joyfully waiting on people.  Because it's your thing.  What took you so long.  There is nothing wrong with you the way you are.

That is the lesson.  You are perfectly fine the way you are, and the one waiting on people is doing very well in fact.


Of course he liked his disciples, his friends, his co-workers.  He liked hanging out with them.  Their core truth was the same of his own.  He enjoyed their banter.

No one is a prophet...  Is it a cliché, or does it offer a statement on consciousness?  (Who would even want to approach the hot potato old statement?  Book reviewers do not like when you touch cliché.)

To be in touch with a deeper level of consciousness, as you might simply get just from studying Buddhism or participating in mediation, or practicing yoga, would that not almost put you into a sort of different relationship to the normal debates about current affairs....  "Hawk or dove, what do you do with Putin:, is there not a direct correlation between the lack of capitalism and vast amount of poor people in South America and here you've got the Pope saying this..."  Such points have a validity, they deal with the world we live in, but maybe to you personally there might be more to it all than that.  Your attitude toward them could put you in a different place than that of your 'home town.'

Deeper consciousness... that would strike as being irrelevant to the topic of conversation the pundits are arguing about.  And the people of the town turn on their television sets and listen to their side of the arguments, both is you're lucky, and then internalize it.  And you with your Buddha thoughts... you're the child at the dinner table, the eccentric artist doing what you do as long as you feel you have the right to it, even as that wears thin.

Each town has a distinct feel.  New York, of course, is different from Washington, DC, which is entirely different than New Orleans, on and on.  Paris is one thing, Rome is another, they all have their sort of moods.  That's the way it goes.

But then with the United States, and elsewhere, there is mass media.  The press is essential to democracy.  Mass media, we all watch the Weather Channel, can kind of bleed over the minds, the common commercials we all see, the personalities we engage with remotely...

Is it that the voice that comes from the subconscious depths doesn't seem to immediately fit anywhere.  How does it become part of the culture, the way Fellini's dreams became?  How do you shape your own individual identity in the conversation of identities?  If you're not conspicuously from any conscious pattern, GI Joe, an investment banker, a wine guy, keeping within the limits of what is currently expected from you...  Where does James Joyce fit in to that;  how would you define him, and what was he doing, and what is the point?  Same for Yeats.  And yet, ultimately, those guys had a home, somewhere in Ireland, figuratively or literally...

When does the inner spark catch?  How?  When is it not relegated to the sidelines...

My father's gentle ghost...

But what does it mean, 'let us be fishers of men?'  What does the image, of nets, fish caught in them, pulled from the water, what does it mean?

It means being taken to a new level of consciousness, a new understanding of what it is to be conscious and how that works in the world, how that works as far as the reality we create out of it, how we perceive the dream our senses tell us.

There is something active about it.  Through deep meditation we begin to see that the world is a projection of the collective subconscious.  What we think, if we could go down to that deeper level below what is normal conscious thought, effects the way the world is.  Mother Theresa, perhaps, was one of those deeper thinkers as far as consciousness goes.  What do we see, how do we see, if we are in tune with such a vision, and how does that effect action, how does that effect the world, how does that effect the way we see the world...

If you were in tune with the deeper, arriving at it through, let's say, meditation, or Buddhist or Hindu thought, you'd see the world as a vehicle for your own hospitality toward other beings.  You'd see the world as a place to be kind.  There would be a certain passive quality about you, because you were busy taken with the thoughts and understandings of true nature.

People of conventional thought, people not in touch with the possibilities of their own consciousness, they can be so tedious, so in-it-for-themselves...  They think they have bright ideas and want to push such things over on all our souls.  They might be good at the body politic, but how frequently do such people ever come up with something that is useful rather than detrimental to the whole.  A wiser person might try to bring some shred of good into the world of politics, but the men of conventional conscious thought will beat even that shred into insignificance.  (What deeply good thing ever seems practical?) Purely selfish and self-serving.  And to them, of course, there's perfect logic.   "We need all the drinking water we can so we can run our mining operation and make money and 'create jobs.'  Then, once we've mined all the stuff that makes us money, the pit we've created will be a vast toxic lifeless thing until our own saddened little planet melts into a weary sun."  Great.

It's quite difficult to explain.  How is it possible that our thoughts could shape the world we live in...  Isn't thinking the most passive and useless of all our activities...  Conventionally viewed.  What good will sitting in lotus position and meditating do the world?

Even Jesus Christ the great guru does not attempt it directly, and probably nor would he, given his deep understandings of all things.  So he comes up with this perfect image, the net, the silvery fish all swimming around, pulled out of the normal existence of water and survival as such.  To me, or to another who meditates, the image presents a picture of the mind.   How you have to still all those thoughts up there in the net of the conscious mind, all saying this and that, all those voices, to go into a state of presence, in touch with the body, in touch with nature, in touch with the vibrant chakras.

I think "render unto Caesar" smacks of that.  The trivial nature of the world of created empires and big egos, how petty in contrast to the power of our own consciousness if we stopped to realize and began to explore it.  The same thing is being said when he looks at nature, the birds, the plant life...

No wonder they crucified him, this man of such incredible hospitality and kindness.  Their little pea minds just couldn't get, they didn't have eyes to see.  And the act of killing him is perfectly emblematic of what they were doing with their whole entire lives, which is to kill out any aspect of the deeper consciousness, that which may be even beyond the collective subconscious.  The murder of a perfectly natural harmonious-with-who-we-are sort of a thing...  Deeper spiritual consciousness of the kind that in turn, once tuned into, goes back out and shapes the world?  No, they didn't want anything to do with that, happy selling chickens in the temple.  It's all a cosmic drama, the story.  It can be depressing if you don't look at it the right way, I would imagine.


What would we say to a higher-minded being, a Jesus, today, in the present?  Would we say, oh, I'm sorry, sad life you got, Mister.  Here's a Banana Republic catalog so maybe you can buy some nice clothing and be in style and that way you'll have a better chance meeting chicks...  That would just make him sadder.  Why not make him happier.  By saying, oh yes, we can do that do.  We can fish for men too.


(He would have gotten a chuckle out of the Great Inquisitor scene.)



This year, I've burned a lot of incense, drank hot water with lemon to start the day, marketers and politics having taken over my personal email in-box and hardly ever something personal except for Facebook, listened to meditation music from YouTube like "Indian background flute music," did a good amount of yoga, meditated, saw a therapist on Mondays a bit too early in the day but still worth it.  Looking for a better direction in life, tired of the ego persona my professional life labeled me with.  Life took me through equal parts hopelessness and vision.

I watched TV shows about restaurants in New York that didn't quite get the fundamentals of hospitality to varying degrees as they attempted to build their empires when I came home after a long shift, people in my hair a large part of the night.

Nature abhors a garden, my father would say.  A lesson the botanist's son learned the hard way.

A friend makes note of something.  I do not know her well, but she poses concern over one more Big Brother World thing, facial recognition.  Why were we all so silent, why did we just go along with it all, she poses.

The world as we perceive it is a projection of our collective sub-conscious.  Instances like this make you wonder, what if more people thought deeply, what if more people meditated...  What if the more immediate layers of human consciousness, individual and collective, were more influenced by the voice of the deeper?  Would that deeper consciousness allow for such?

Now so beholden to system, bidden by economic forces, need to keep everything up in the air, people will go along with the model of 'prosperity' rather than question in the slightest.

The bar, given its faults, is one of those front lines of the collective sub-conscious.

Back from the therapist, a new watch-strap from a nice guy with a watch store on Dupont, then a haircut at The Haircuttery from a nice lady who must leave after me to get back to Upper Marlboro for dialysis as she must do three times a week.  We talk of the Pride Parade.  "I teared up.  I said to myself, Michelle, why you tearing up, but I was, I was indeed."

I take a nap, snooze it for a half an hour, shower, eat, fold a shirt, write this, get ready to go to work, Jazz Night number one.

Saturday, my sort of day of sabbath, yoga, meditation, limiting sensory input, before going back to work on Sunday...  But there's a baby shower, and after yoga it's what I can do to get down to 9th Street, to a bar even, by four.  She's a great friend, one of the peaceful people, and carrying a bambino, she's not been at the wine bar very often, and if so, just a sip.  Breaks up, I bow out, find my bike still locked up around the corner, head back across town.

Coming back, of course, at 14th Street, just past six, I encounter the road block of the pride parade.  There would be much to note down, and write about, much to sketch.  What stands out, as I wait, and head south before I can head west, I see two rather attractive young women sitting on a stoop in front of Eto watching the parade.  They are wearing rainbow colors.  And I see one has a tiny tattoo on her tricep, of two white unicorns.

It's a nice thing to watch.  Nice to see people happy in DC, a young guy says, as I make my way through.

I get home finally.  I feel a bit tired from the heat.  It was a bit tiring talking to strangers at the shower on that day slated for the recoup you did not really get to do, thanks to the after-effects of the work week, in particular the last live jazz night.  Then, home alone, it kind of hits.  "Why didn't you say anything.  You might have known the brunette from meeting her at the bar once..."  Ah, shit.  I slump on the couch, fall into the kind of nap depressives take.  I wasn't dressed for it.  The mind goes on though.  When is your time?  Maybe you're too old already, sad thought.

The encounter with egos...  leaves you marked, the placid waters disturbed, so try to get calm again.

Why am I slated to learn these things, about ego, about what life might have been like for Jesus as far as suffering and his ability to feel the goodness pass out of him...


There is the spirit being within us.  Beneath all the layers, remaining within even with all the things we mess up.  Who gets up fresh, more or less, and starts a new day.  Not always an easy person to find nor believe in nor have much hope for.  But, it, he, she, persists.

Confusing, trying to come upon this persona of the spiritual being.  Seas of vulnerability must be crossed.

The ego comes in many many guises.  Benevolent, well-meaning ones in addition the lesser.

To encounter the astral self is, one would gather, a strange experience initially.  Finding one's self suddenly free of motives.  After many years.  Wondering how you look for all the wear and tear, but finding a pristine quality...  As if one had needed to go through all of that.

It can sound a little crazy from the conventional perspective.  But you know it as, finally, a direct path through life.  Free of motives.  Free of beliefs, of the old reactions.  Peaceful.

The gain of perspective, even on one's own friends...  The old shared interests are dull compared to the shine of the spirit, the lightness it gives you.  Bit by bit, vision grows, perspective on one's own habits, coming from a deeper level, unbidden by logical thought.  Giving yourself the power to change your habits.  Make your own personal choices.  Not as easily persuaded.  Avoid distractions and interruptions, your private peace primary.

What is my spiritual path?  Why do I feel coopted?  I began to see it was the drinking.  The injurious quality of it...  Jesus was a wine-bibber, but mainly to experience contact with suffering.  I know my own suffering.



I tie now the old feelings of inadequacy in with the drinking.  In with the job I took when I knew not what to do with my life.  Selling myself out.  I self-medicated, depressed.  The job hurt.  You needed a drink after it.  But the awareness, of how all my bigger problems were drinking related, outgrew the  reaction of blind habit.  'Good wine is a necessity of life for me," Jefferson says, but I don't know about that in the larger context of Atman, the eternal soul.

But when I began to regularly practice yoga it become evident how the old ways did not work for me.  The old drinking friends did not work for me, much as I liked them, listened to them.  But there was a real fear in facing them.  They made me nervous.  The best response to them was a non-response.

Self-protection became the name of the game.  Getting out of there as easily and as a soon as I could. No Satan dressed in pleasant clothing.  Get thee behind me, ego Satan.

What made me popular now seemed a liability.  As if they knew my weakness.  They all knew where to find me.

One becomes aware of the great vulnerability when you become aligned with the spirit that is within, the eternal being.

I'm a creative.  I knew what to come up with.  I knew where it was all headed.  I knew what the issues were, amongst them being the top-heavy presence of ego in the world.

I do my yoga, hoping the spirit will lift.  It's Sunday afternoon.  Time to go back to work.