Fear.   One can be afraid to write, not wanting to share, for whatever reason.  Sensitivity.  Fear over one's own situation.

Genes.  They do strange things.  They play out live, in real time.  There's less control...

So, if I could tell a story.  The kid at college, whose family goes off in all directions...  Mom wants to be out on her own.  She needs to do something.  Get a life for herself, building it, step by step.  But there's a burden on the son.  She gets emotional.  The kid wants to go back to his old hometown, to his father's apartment, now that he's trying to figure things out for himself.   But his mother starts crying, in tears, can't you just stay for the night...  She needs help.  How many moves.  It's not for the father to do, anymore, and she brought about the split, holds some negative emotions toward him, and for his part, we all could have stayed together and there was money for her to go back to school and all that...

And in the meantime, the kid is going through his own life, the girl from the Upper West Side, him realizing his own peculiar habits, wanting to be literary, but not knowing how, other than to be a kind of rural poet...   Not so organized a battle, anyway.  What color is your parachute...  He feels handcuffed.  His own depressive tendencies, that prevent him from expressing side talents, music, teaching, being social, laughing, girls...  And now, unprepared as he is, how to make a living...


But you can't write any of that easily.  You still can't.  Not even today.  And today there's pretty much a scene of damage to survey.  And no real bright side, no helping hand to help him deal with his old mother now, old.  Getting a little feeble minded.   But still with all her offense honed...

What do you do?  Don't have a career, not really, nothing beyond the most basic, to fall back on.  Which he's already fallen back on, but not so great...

You don't want to write down any of that.  You don't want to share any of that, would you...

Botched it, fucked it all up...    Shame, spread round, every direction.  No matter what you do.

And some crude cross in your pocket, a Byzantine symbol of life's suffering in the every day, in the three dimensions of space and of time.

That's the start of your day.

It's not that bad, jus the way you start off.

Of course, writers are self-loathing.  Hard for then to find reward, any kind of ready gratification, beyond the act itself.  Rely on the connections, the rearrangements, the calls that run through the cells and the chemistry of the brain, to correct itself, to realign.  To get the serotonin to match up with the dopamine, to get the wine in the head back in balance, which comes from a fresh sip of insight.

 Jesus, one of the first writers.  There he is in his hometown.  Nazareth.  At the synagog gathering, whether it was indoors or out, whether they had resources then for a scroll or not.  He reads from Isiah.  And then he sits down.  And, being a writer, creative, penetrating, full of great imagination, he spouts off the logical implications, spiritually, of the reading of this piece in the great story of Isiah.  He's fine with it.  He has begun to teach.  This is his beginning.

And the townspeople, then as now, as no-one likes a writer, not the business man, not the socially integrated, not the obedient, not the follower, in need of dismissing, do not like it.  They will not, as the voices rise, turn out to stand for it.  No, not from this guy, even if he's family, even if he's a steady fixture of the community, as much, if not more, than anyone.

So, they seize him, take him to the cliff at the edge of town.   And they know what they are going to do, given this over-reaching, given this unconventional extra-talmud commentary...

He, Jesus, it seems, didn't want to do it either, to offer his thought, his extra two cents...  but, somehow, for reason, he goes for it, he must.

He passed through their midst.  I wonder if there was something in his demeanor, as he was a writer, barely capable of acceptance, of being kind to himself...   "Go ahead.  Throw me off the cliff.  You'd be doing me, and yourselves, a favor..."  Then, they saw that he was sincere.  Real.  And they might have mulled over, and pondered what he had spoken.

The Rejection at Nazareth.  Luke 4:16-30.  Father James Martin, S.J., tells the story in his book, Jesus, A Pilgrimage, a good resource, from the local library.


Show me then a writer who likes herself, himself.  who does not have to maintain a certain suspension of disbelief, a sense of humor, a kind of resignation to the thing of the task, as it appears as a unknown daily chore or torture...  A fatalist in an arid desert he can only abandon to...

"Well, stop that. Be kind to yourself.  Make humor out of it.  Count your blessings..." a  voice says...

January, self-loathing, rugged despair.  It's good to have a job to go to, the bar, people, conversation, keeping busy.  But the writer, who has not gotten away with being a writer, (as Hunter S. Thompson put it, in a conversation with Charlie Rose) is disgusted the next day.


Sunlight comes in through the windows as he lay on the couch, after initially getting up out of bed.  Awake, but with the cold, sniffling, coughing, he wants to get more sleep.  He takes a cup of yesterday's room temp second run tea.  The people: The Starlings, a couple, he's from a local Washington family, David, British, back from travels, poor hospitality up at the old country hotel he takes his family to in Vermont for the holiday.  The couple stays longer, after paying their check, talking with David, the eccentric sister in Goa, who lived in Kensington, with the young Indian man at business school just back from Houston, who has signed up for a job consulting with GE...

Then Drew comes in, meeting a couple he's just sold a house to, for dinner.  They'll keep me late.  Now, I'm just glad to have some company.


Keep a journal.  Just an artist's notebook.

You must have known something, or expected something, keeping the carbon copies, the records of all this correspondence, Charlie Rose is saying, over The Proud Highway...

He is up late, watching things on YouTube.  The sky is clear, a waxing Gibbous moon out, but, after the snow, it is too cold for a walk down to the bluff across the road.  A leftover Bergerac, muddy, too high in alcohol.  The cab, an Uber, cannot make the short-cut hill by the German Embassy, from Reservoir to MacArthur.   The nose is still running.  The cough.  He checks the air outside, prepared, but no, it's too cold, and soreness has already set in.  He had come in, sat back on the couch, carefully put his feet up, still with hiking sneakers on.  Merrill's.  Complete lonesomeness, what are you going to do, so he looks at his little iPhone computer screen, a piece on John Lennon's guitars, and then George Harrison's, interesting, the Gretsch Duo-Jet, the Country Gentleman, before that, a Czech sort of Stratocaster, miserable action, good pick-up controls..  They got together and played, they played out.  They were part of society, their art.  They were not loners, not solitary isolated types.  Then Hunter S. Thompson is wearing a plaid buttoned sport shirt, aviator sunglasses, sober, philosophical mood.  Charlie Rose reads him a letter, from the night of November, 22nd, 1963, from Woody Creek.  Fear and Loathing, a call to arms, for defense and fighting rather than literary magazines...

Writing was the only thing I could do.  I was kicked out of every job, evicted from every place he ever lived.  He moved somewhere to buy a place.  Woody Creek.

He would type out passages, from Fitzgerald, Hemingway, poems of Kerouac, to get the rhythm, the music, learning.  Hemingway prose, but also the model of Hemingway, which is, "to get away with it, being a writer."

The day is salvaged by the night, by, as my old mom puts it, the time to process...  You need to process.

I will go to work, taking the bus in, cold out, wind up.  I have to close the place, as always, friends playing jazz.  Hopefully no late night.  Off tomorrow, whatever good that will bring, or not.

I call my mom.  You're cold is better, she tells me.  I tell her about Hunter S. Thompson, and YouTube, as a way to cope with isolation...  There's a laptop there near your Eames Chair, mom...  He loved his mother.  Virginia Rae Thompson.

It is hard for writers to be kind to themselves.  Hard, then, to be kind to the whole project, to other writers.  Easy to put down.

The staff luncheon holiday party for the two restaurants downtown was behind him as he woke up, depressed, in early January.   He got up, used the john, put on his bathroom over tee shirt and boxer briefs, poured himself a cup of tea from the tea pot on the coffee table, went in to the kitchen to get the water on.  He poured water from the faucet after the tea kettle was on over a lit burner until it was hot, assembled some of the cups and the wine glasses and set them in the sink, allowing the water from the tap to get as hot as it would before filling the rubber made tub.  He threw away the tea leaves from the day before still damp in the strainer, pouring out the last of the tea from before into his cup as the water on the burner heated.  He started to wash the cups and a small pot and a few plates in the soapy water.  He went to the bedroom, brought his Fleshlight back to the kitchen, rinsing the ´pink sleeve with its anatomical shape, then rinsing it with rubbing alcohol, hanging it to dry vertically between the cold water knob and the faucet mouth in the sleeve, went back, poured out the hot water over the tea leaves, set the timer on his cell phone to three minutes.

Champagne tasting tonight.  He looked up the particular champagne on the web, for tasting notes, for the blend of grapes, cépage, blew his nose, which had been running days before, now a head cold, sipped his tea, and then his mother called.  Where he was in a pretty bad mood, she was not.  This was a thing to worry about pretty much every day, but today, fortunately, not bad, no threat of I should just kill myself, what else am I supposed to do...  And he would be going to work, just to have something to do.  Head colds throw you off, he thought.  They mess with your head, altering the wateriness of the brain...

He put a little bit of ashwagandha powder into his tea, stirred it, took a sip.  Ten years left of my working life...  what am I supposed to do.  Too late for any career now.  January.

He opened up a can of black-eyed peas, pouring them out into a small pot after warming olive oil with a dash of spices, a quick hiss.  He thought out a grocery list, more cans of black-eyed peas, olive oil, postage stamps...what else...

It was true, as the Eastern adepts made note of, self-pleasuring out of boredom to accidental release, took the energy out of you, another mistake, another sin.  But that was the night before, and he could rally, now awake as it rained outside the third floor blinds.  A token of bitterness lifted.  He could eat soon.  He rose to the kitchen to check on the beans as they bubbled away.  The incense was working over in the pot with the small norfolk monkey puzzle tree, frankincense and myrrh, calming, and he put on more water for the tea pot, pleased at his ability to control the blue gas fires of the burners.

He was actually up a little bit early, considering, before work's immediate need for getting there.  He did not have to cross the area of the downtown, no forty minute bus rides.   Going to work would be better than sitting home reading Thomas Merton or thinking of Jesus...

Avoid social media of all forms.  It bleeds in on you, before you write, leaves one overwhelmed with impressions and haywire thoughts.  It's within human nature not to be able to resist it, to not be shaken by it, coerced by it, finding contrary self-image...


So, I wake up, again with the cold, the same one, and it's back to work tonight.  Staff Fogo D'Chao luncheon party tomorrow, and I am sick...  I wake up feeling the same huge irresponsibility...  I call mom.  Who is very lonesome, so that I feel worse, rather, about myself, until she is feeling somewhat better, which takes some patience.  I ask about her wine supply, her food store.  Will Mary be coming by?  What about the new cat people have been talking about...  Well, I called the Humane Society...

Mom, could you keep an eye out for your pink iPhone?  "But I've been moved around so much.  I'm not in my home..."  Well, look around, I'm sure it's there somewhere...

But all seems dark and black this time of year, spurted out the other side of the holidays to our own problems.

I think of what I've read the night before, and it was a break at least from staring into my iPhone expecting something to happen.


The staff party...  I will end up having the night off.  I'll take it.

I'll mourn about not moving back to Central New York as I wake.   I'm at my Dad's, the little home with the garden he shared with Patricia...  Hilde and I...  We'd been up to the reservoir, an early summer night.  We're in bed.  Mom's moving day is here.  I'm up late.  She's crying.  I have to run.

Later, Hilde, I thought you would spread eagle me...

Mom is there over the sink, clinking cups around in soapy water, crying...  I'm sorry I'm late...

I have a runny nose today.  I should have put my foot down then.  I'd have had a happier life, children, a career.  A life closer to mom and dad...    Normalcy.

And then you wake up feeling not so hot, feverish, sore.  New Years Day off, followed by two days, and now a third, all full of worries.

Up on Tralfamadore, artists enjoy sexual relations (within the context of marriage), allowed to them by the spirituality of their work, consequently an appropriateness with the electromagnetic energies given.  Expert at achieving a comfort with artistic expression and working upon such things on a regular basis, the artists reach the inner sanctum.  Having bared their souls, a commensurate and appropriate award awaits.  Down here on Earth said relations are gained and practiced more through less spiritual pursuits, having more to do with the successful accumulation of financial and professional security in a world of crowded spaces.  And this is particularly true of metropolitan areas where art, theater, music are not the main thing, and even worse so where lying and PR are the thing.  Such places are, indeed, close to hell.

So it goes.

For the first time in a long time, I’ve gotten out to a coffee shop...  and to the library.  I find a couple of books in the spirituality religion section, a little book by Thomas Merton, The Silent Life, and Father James Martin’s Jesus, A Pilgrimage.  Wearily I’d gone out for a stroll past the reservoirs, stopped in at the Catholic Church, without much inspiration for long prayer, leaving without much inspiration.  The rain came.  Still no long reaching mom.  Tired of the wine selection at the little deli, the chicken salad, the cold cuts...  Ah, finally, Mom is calling.  She is still alive.  At the checkout, the nice lady suggests, after I ask about the yoga, that there is a Tai Chi class on fridays.  "lots of nice ladies..." she tells me.  She recognizes from before.  Both of us quiet flirts, bookishly.

To be so crass as to mention the word "porn," is, as in all Capitol cities, but those upon enlightened planets far away, where life forms existing have figured out that the spiritual truth and motive behind anything is first and foremost, if things are to work out smoothly, kindly, peacefully, appropriately, is frowned upon greatly.  And to frown, for citizens in towns of the former, is in turn good for their own social standing.  "How upright am I, that I am putting the theater of porn in its place as unholy and decadent."  Besides the avoidance of awkward conversation, there is, from the point of view of success, on Earth, much to be gained from denouncement of things any creature would actually consider healthy, normal and intriguing as an example of his or her own species creativity and healthy vigor.   And what this all sets up is an ever increasing and uncomfortable hypocrisy.

And resulting from this hypocrisy, strange talents emerge.  And then finally what happens is that the great adepts of the moral shallows, bombastic, full of tales of "good and evil" (when things are pretty much the same, as long as we're not murdering people, stealing from the elderly and children) eventually achieve supremacy in this order that far too many have agreed to cooperatively create.

The artist, the free thinker, is shunned.

Even Ancient Rome had some health to it, witnessed by the little village of Pompeii, which to them was probably their own version of launching themselves, their true selves, to a far away planet where pretty much everything was absolutely okay, even those acts considered most licentious back in the big city of self-importance.   Tralfamadore, indeed, where people, human beings, as they really are, are welcome.

And note what happens to those great systems of hypocrisy, once they fall:  after the pieces are picked up, after the bombed out bricks are piled to build, a new attitude comes.  Berlin.  Love Parade.  Techno.  Acceptance.  Celebration.  Back to the tiled offerings in the happy houses of Pompeii, which of course gets a bad wrap for being annihilated by a geography that was born into the very deep lusts and creativity of the entire Big Bang Universe itself.



Then later,  after a good nap, just shutting down on all the worrisome thoughts concerning all my failings and failures and what will happen next and all the lack of a real career stuff, sleep and meditation, I wake up enough to go to bed, but then doing so, maybe I look at my iPhone screen too much, I am awake again, and so I end up reading, even as I worry that I am not able to rest.

Strange, how the spiritual is just what the Prodigal Son requires.  The two seemed fated to connect.  How else would the prodigal, who never really had evil intentions, just susceptible to the addictive undisciplined nature of human beings, be able to strive on after falling so?


And I think, oh, god, what crap is this that I have written above...  There's too much risk now being a writer, as anyone can take the slightest thing you say and be offended by it.

But at least Father James Martin's travels in the Holy Land following the ways of Jesus is entertaining, as I worry about my aging mother, up there, all alone, far away, in her cluttered apartment, and mine is bad enough...

The writer's notebook:  a long series of thought experiments, science experiments, if you will.  An effort to find something meaningful.

I was over the thought that it would be entertainment, picked up as such, any kind of commercial success, really anything being beyond the effort to describe the attempt to live up to a spiritual life...  a way of protecting myself agains the hard-hearted, the dark, the cynical.

Mom calls early, rattling my boat.  I've been up late taking out the recycling, easing through the cleaning with a little Beaujolais on the rocks in a tumbler glass.  My voice is dry.  The phone is humming, her landline, though we tried fixing it, with new cables, a new phone, none of which worked.

The feeling pervasive over the holidays:  I'm caught out, my bullshit exposed, by both sides, brother and mother, it seems.

And I have little more than a Gospel to fall back on.  Even with all the noise going on.


I am lazy.  This is a fault.  My singer actress friend Barbara invites me out, Roaring Twenties night at the Phillips Collection, she has an extra ticket.  She's often inviting me out to theatrical performances.  I look at the clock, okay, it's around 12:30, I can write for a while, then get ready, all work no play...  but I don't write.  I don't get anything done.  I realize I should stay in, but I've already committed.  I've already morphed into another being, overly concerned with the ways of the world, dressed up as they are in the form of the temptation of a museum open happy hour sort of event, and this has warped me away from the Gospels.

I'm too shy really, to go out.  They said that about poor old Hemingway, really the shyest fellow you could encounter, and that's why he boozed it up, to put on some sort of broad grand personality.   Interfered with, he would be a complete grump.  Neither can I do it, I can't do it without wine.  I guess that's why I'm a bartender.  I can go out and stick to a script, then have one later...

Oh, I've got problems...  That doesn't help either.

Good fruit from good trees.  There's old Saul at Zorba's Cafe.  After taking the metro bus into the city, a gaggle of kids descending upon an empty bus, filling it to full capacity, unruly, big personalities all of them, everyone, phones and devices out, I'm rattled enough entering my old neighborhood, the place of my self-indulgent artiste-hood, where I would go sit in cafes pretending I was Hemingway, interested solely in the creative process and its logic, the magic of the spooky art, the occasional (or rare) gift of coming up with something out of the blue, something decent, so that you can tell yourself, yes, I did that...  all that, now I am borne back, uncomfortably, and Barbara hasn't arrived yet and I need a glass of cheap wine, good and Greek.

"I cannot blame anyone for the faults I see in front of me as a barman," I tell the darkened street, after seeing the woman play guitar and sing with her set-up outside the North Metro Station at Dupont.  People get tipsy, gregarious, they want to talk, they break boundaries, they over-talk.  Rare is there a drinking person so inherently polite as to be inoffensive to all.  I've seen it all.

The Phillips event is something of a waste of time, though not completely, because your inner Jesus lingers about you, like an angel.  It's nice to be amongst art, there a Grandma Moses in the conservatory, next to a Duchamp.  Barbara offers a ride home after I walk up her to my old street.   The whole thing, this old scene feels hollow, like a paper maché construction....  We go back to Zorba's, rather than Du Coin, after I stick my nose in, for a good cheap meal.  To deal with all I have to insulate myself with a few cocktails, and now, in the morning, afterward, what was once reality is now a kaleidoscope of things viewed cockeyedly with the drink.  But the Bees Knees or was it a French 75 tweaked with chamomile, it was tasted good.  And the Gascon white is always a good cheap clean hit.


I get up off the old leather couch, make my green tea, filter some water, think about the day.  Call Mom soon to see how she's doing, another failing of mine, not there in her area to help her out, to be there to take her out to lunch, lousy are sons.  "I'm not in my home," she tells.  "My home is a couple of blocks down.  It's too cold to walk.  Will you come pick me up?"  Mom, you are home.  I can tell you're at home.  We're talking on your landline.  See the elephants and the map of Ireland on the wall, that's your kitchen...  Oh, I guess it is.   Etc.



Someone invented happy hours and meeting places and other unhappy things tedious.  A church is fine, a bar's okay, as long as it's a pub...  but, the rest is unnatural.  Be out in nature.  Don't worry about going to supposedly entertaining events, but that our minds gnaw away at us, well, you'll never know who you might meet, maybe a woman you find rather attractive and fun...

But it never happens, because none of it is, at least in Buddhist terms, real.


Days off, I wish to immerse myself in Christian thought.  Finding the real intention behind any act.  If there is Christian intention, and Christian manner, than yes, things might work out okay.  But most of the things we do are selfish, and when we go out and be social we run the risk of going off completely misguided.

I did see the Rothko Room...  that was cool.  Sublime.  It is a nice museum, full of wonderful art.  I'm not going to knock the species with coming up with such a random thing as a museum with creative works within its walls.


The problem with life is when we are told that we are not Jesus.  That is our potential within us, the deep reality no one wants to really mention, that the individual really is Jesus Christ, or, to put it differently, on that level, his level.  Each time we meet, each time we go and do something, there is Christ within, waiting to come out.  But we laugh at such things.   "No, that could not be possible," we say, denying ourselves.  And so, through the natural processes of the artificial social world, the Christ within us gets very lonely and unmiraculous, does not shine the light as he should, and wouldn't know where to shine it anyway, because that's the way of the skeptical world.

To react to any world news:  well, what would you expect?  For it is not drawn into alignment with the billion hypothetical unselfish Christs that we are...

Who can blame anyone for not wanting to be a part of such a world...