Standing on the sidewalk on the sunny side of the street, accentuated by the faded ochre yellow of the closed antique store, they looked a bit like hatless cops, lawmen, in pressed black with white collars.  They came to the restaurant, and took two cocktails before heading down for dinner.  The news of Francis saying 'who am I to judge' was fresh as the sunny air, low humidity.  The tall one with a clean Roman haircut could not have known my literary interest in clerics, the true clerics of higher education, and seemed to draw within, as if suspicious of whom he should reveal sides of himself to, a flash of 'what are you looking at, boy?'  Perhaps it was an unholy thought on my part that cops like to speed.

One might have sensed, without prying, their look around, a cautious 'what does this all mean.'  Was now the issue out and they could be themselves?  What did it mean as far as law and order?  What does this mean about our own individual openness while we go about our business?  They dined downstairs by the window and I had no way to engage them in friendly chat, except when they came upstairs looking for the mens room, and the older guy seemed mellow, not completely unFrancis like as he passed by, the upstairs embroiled in a busy jazz night.

"They," generally speaking had elected him, using better judgment.  Some, previously, speaking out about corruption, had been exiled to the embassy in Washington to while away their time with easy dinners in acceptable restaurants.  And one wondered where any may have stood now, as far as exile.


A day later my shift was again drawn out.  Seeking a bit of exercise I took my bike up the hill, past the neighborhood where I used to work, wishing to take a look at a restaurant friends, former coworkers, had fixed up and taken over.  I was recognized, beckoned in.  Wishing only to taste some wine, I was offered a house-made limoncello, which, in camaraderie, I downed with my friends, 'to success.'  And then enjoyed a glass of Tempranillo and the conversation.

The next day, I feel it, nap extra before the shower before work.  Who am I to judge.

The night is full of sounds of creatures along the quiet street, each one a miracle of life.
I've had a night like this before, the world full of hope again.
I touch everything gently, and slowly,
and the stars are above me, behind my back.
This is summer, a steady throb says somewhere,
as if breathing, gently as well, smiling somehow
even without expression but the proximity to a tree,
the touch of a stem, everything in place.
There is a fountain on the street,
steps to climb up to the filling basin,
the lion's head and the pool.
The simple fact,
that life is harder
much harder
without
love.

Please note:  When I write these pieces, they are an exploration of the world within my own self, and they are references to the experiences of my own nervous system and spinal column, my own individual yoga reaction, my own emotions about my own emotional and spiritual life.  In no way are they an attempt to claim anything about other people's lives.  Again, these posts are about what I go through, more or less, imagined or not, my own shortcomings.  They aren't meant to support intolerant views, and I say this because as I write I write without editing initially, in order to get slippery thoughts and dreams down on paper first.


Matters of orientation, personal detail, completely aside, I've come to support a kind of "conservative" mystical almost "Catholic" view (non judgmental and supportive about what works for people) on the holiness of matrimony (letting individuals decide for themselves what constitutes such a deep relationship that suits their needs.)  I can say this having failed at it, failed to foster it, to bring it.  I say this as a one who knows the unnatural darkness of bachelor life.  (Must be my job, bar tending.)   I wrote a book about how I failed at it, in fact, and I should not have failed at it.  It was a young people thing, a case of misunderstandings, insecurities, mixed messages, tension.  It may not be cause of poetry on the order of a Ted Hughes Birthday Letters, but failures have consequences none the less.  And I suppose they make you appreciate the good in life that comes along that themselves turn out to be treasures.

For years I wondered what was wrong with me, why I couldn't get anything together, didn't have the energy I should or the vision or the drive, living passively, feeling in general a bit beaten.  While it stared me in the face, I didn't know the effects of deprivation.  I wrote, yes, about the whole thing, which was cathartic, and a good thing in some ways.  Writing is spiritual, and so it is good.  I honored the sense of loss that I felt.  But I wonder how much of the things I did were self-medicating, attempts to get brain chemistry back to that feeling, even as it was just an inkling, of selfless love and communions tender.  I worked in a restaurant, just to be around people, to feel part of a family.  I had many friends who like myself found some escape by drinking together at the end of a shift.  There was art, and humor, and discussion, but there was also a huge space of wasted time.

Love, the spiritual force of the Universe, comes through you anyway, even as you are acting misguidedly, displaced from occupying its true seat.  (That only takes a small amount of intelligence to figure out.)  It doesn't go away.  It lies and waits to become active again, a force engaged again in the world, as if it needed water like a garden.  And it has a way of being engaged in the work you do, so if you brought some kind of love to a place of work, then nothing is completely wasted.

Naturally you become sensitive at people's self-medications.  It becomes a concern when people don't allow themselves to be driven by spirituality and love.  You see an attempt to divide people from their force of love, as if to conquer them.

But nothing can be done as an adult without the health of marriage (again, however you might personally define it) or the goal of it.  Nothing can be seen clearly without it.  One cannot go through the days without the good health the relations of marriage bring, I've come to believe.  And it is hard to put the cart before the horse, to put success and achievement before that which itself is transforming, life-changing.  Marriage is part of the calling, any calling.

So there seems to be a Catch 22, that to entertain the possibility of marriage you must be successful to begin with.  The hungry unwitting victim who suffers the lack of relationship, sort of doesn't realize what's missing, struggles and strains to keep up and fit in, has less chance at finding a relationship to sustain him.  The only option seems to be to find other poor but intelligent people sensitive enough to the lot of human suffering, other people with a sense of the innate dignity in the human being.





And this may be why when we go on the internet looking for something of interest, some answer to quench something, we're often left with that empty feeling, as if flipping channels on a television with nothing good on.

As much as it brought me to questions about my own judgment, as in why did I over enjoy the Martinique rhum the musician brought by, and thoughts, insights of the Chekhovian of life, or on other days the Dostoevskian, or the Dickensian, what-have-you, I was always left with good thoughts, small nuggets of inspirations that came with the brief encounters with fine people at the bar.  As with other things, it was a matter of opening one's eyes and seeing the good material of life before you.

We hadn't seen our good friend, V, in a long while.  By late fall it will be a year since he lost his daughter to brain illness.  He will be taking a long trip soon, with ashes and family.  He kept us posted, did not come for a long time, as he and his wife used to come quite often, squeezing into open spaces at the bar on wine tasting night and jazz night.

We've always talked about Eastern thought, Buddhism, wherever it might come, let it dovetail somewhere somehow into bar talk, be it through Beethoven's own availability to texts, imagined or not, or Schiller's, imagined or not, or in the slightly liberated talk of friends who wonder, now that they are settled with good fortune.

The night, the moon just tipped past full, the bar's waters placid, the boss not unhappy with business given such doldrums, the heatwave having passed, our good old friend, retired, tips in with some focus to talk to his friend.  "Perhaps Buddhism is your attempt at rationalization at where you are now...  {your job}  But, at least you have a steady income, even if it isn't much."  We've long talked about writing.  I like his candor now, with the same friendliness always offered between.  He made a few comparisons, with other  people's situations, and I was content with the time flowing through, that our friend Jim would get his dinner and a glass of wine likable to him, that the older couple my comrade will wait on magnificently like a college professor will arrive, order, get their dinner and wine.

It's a tricky thing, to toss high ideas around.    They can burst like balloons, fall in pieces, something to sweep up later.  It's a good sign people can talk about such things.  But the thought of rationalization, yes, one has to admit that possibility.  And that is, indeed, eye opening.  And, quite possibly, working in a restaurant requires a daily battle of rationalization.

It takes our other old friend at the bar.  He comes up the stairs slowly.  He sings, he arbitrates.  He says we should just put all this race stuff aside, quite well.  We smile and chuckle, and talk about his magnetism.  Like our other discusser, he has a hangar steak, and a glass of Pic St. Loup.  We two are alone, almost, when he leaves.  We'd just talked of knee replacement.  "Ted, you're an awfully nice guy.  Thank you," Jim says, turning to me, holding his hand out, as if he remembered some of our finer moments of sharing and entertainment and that time when people relax and recoup their winds.

I remember now, how talking once with V about Buddhist scripture, Lankavatara, or was it the Diamond Sutra, an off-hand comment of mine, attempting to interpret.  I was being funny, and you probably had to be there:  Indians talk a lot, are very verbal people.  Which happens to be true of V and his lovely kind beyond kind wife.  Which makes them interesting people to wait on sometimes, maintaining a fixed complex conversation when things get busy, when loagy servers move like blinded water buffalo also wanting to converse, when things get very disjointed, an arriving salad or soup is a miracle, an entree beyond immediate hopes while other stuff goes down.  So the great verbal verbosity of the Buddha comes sometimes in a nugget, believable or not, and it really is, I suppose, a rationalization of the life you know and created for yourself.  Who will ever know?

I do get tired sometimes--I'm sure we all do--of these pocket philosophical rants.  I get tired of my own voice throwing the ball back against the wall as it bounces to never really solve anything.

But it's not for one to think, but do.  Even if it feels like failure sometimes, backed by rationalization.

Toward the end of a long jazz night, pestered by the ADD server, the busboy slow, the walkie talkie not working properly, the cluster f of everyone coming in, filling up the tables, in a thirty minute period, having received the last high roller customers, who ordered a Pur Sang, a sauvignon blanc of absolute purity, one strong note of grapefruit, and in the final period of feeding the band, The Bitter Dose Combo, and being left to float along with the bar patron's final dance party, I remark that I should cease such work (the extra-terrestrial admitting, practically, that he's bad for earthlings, without so intending) and go off to Divinity School, and which point a gentleman, retired military, with a glass of Chateauneuf Du Pape in hand, asks if I believe in God.  (Someone, a very nice woman, had just helpfully suggested an Episcopal institution, and I shrugged and explained I was a child of the Sixties, a Theosophist, a Buddhist, all of that 'sort of.')  I put on The Pogues, "Streams of Whiskey," in attempt to get rid of them all, but only lose one couple over in the corner doing the courtship talk.

There are days when I feel myself burning.  It's all my sins and bad decisions, a morning feeling that everything I touch turns.  I feel like Fredo Corleone, not that the guy doesn't get a bad rap somehow, a weak completely fallible guy who both falls into complete sin and faithfully, unique amongst the family, believes in God, and who, if you remember, is the one person who supports Mikey's decision to join the Marines.  I go for a walk, muttering to myself all the while about work, about how I'd like to call in sick, sick, that is, of jazz night, all the while thinking too of preparing myself for the dreary expectancy of wine tasting night.  Well, that's why they call it work.

We are burning, Buddha says.  We are all burning.  Does this mean that we are going through time, constantly changing all the time, or does it connote a kind of purifying fire?  I don't know.

Everything people do is fallible.  And because a church is a thing of people, then it too is fallible.  And the Church, facing empty pews, the rise of social mediums that leave it behind, seems to be admitting this a little bit, that it is indeed fallible, as I listen to some sermons from Virginia Theological Seminary, excellent ones by the way.  And then, too, there is the difficulty of belief when they intone "God," as I find it hard to believer that this notion of God is a figment of the fallible.  I believe in the goodness of the message.  And I do believe that at least in someways we all are, indeed, 'broken,' though this requires a deeper poetry of the mind to entertain.   And in a way, I might believe in God on some days, but it's hard for me to keep it up the way they, the Church, must go about it.  The Buddha addresses this intelligently.

I will go off to another night of work, another completely fallible evening, where all things are slowly burning.

If you are going to be a thinker, with some impulse to teach, you're going to run into the strangeness of projected truth.  It's like finding out that, after all, to be masculine and heterosexual in the most helpful and appropriate way involves being comfortable with your feminine side.  It's like finding out that it is actually okay and good to be passive, that there was good reason behind that, healthy reasons, meant to foster good oxytocin.  The problem was feeling impinged upon by societal attitudes as much as anything, in thinking there was but one way to go, to be super masculine, domineering.  Maybe that works for some, but not for all of us.

This where primitive societies might outdo us, by allowing for myth and ritual, so that the spiritual is combined in all facets of life.  Do we have myths that may be applied to any modern job?  The mythical marketer?  The website of Valhalla?

I guess the Odyssey speaks enough to us.  But it would be nice to make a broader segment of the population feel less the uselessness of jobs or their own attempts at participation, and this is done in light of higher truth.  No wonder young people find satisfaction in organic small scale farming.

Maybe one worthy effort would be to make people feel useful on their own, basically as they are.  That is what religions try to do anyway.