It was one of those rides, just good to get out there.  I had to push myself to get out, time on my hands, overcast but the rain holding off, Rock Creek closed to motor traffic on a Saturday.  Late enough in the day, sleepy August, just get there and have a ride along the stream, maybe out as far as East West Highway, maybe not.  I get to the last set of gates closing off traffic after going over the hump, enjoying getting up to speed on the flat straightaway after the boost of the downhill, and that's pretty good, maybe just head back.   A slender deer watches me pass from the side of the road before bounding off.  The Weather Channel promises the rain won't even be a threat 'til 9, but there have been a few sprinkles.  The occasional guy on the time trial bike, a few slow peddlers, a walker, a jogger, couples with labs enjoying getting wet in the slow waters of the creek, dead branches over the gap above the stream bed.  Make the little climb, cross the traffic, and then it's all downhill from here.  Good enough ride, not fast, but healthy, and let's not dawdle, get home, there's probably some things to do, life to figure out.


Crossing Broadbranch, careful with the few cars coming through, glide into the parking lot, slow, I almost put my chin in my hand, meditatively, like The Thinker statue, which you can do on a bike, easily enough as elsewhere, and then steer forward onto the little walkway paved path that leads back to the old stone mill barns at the bottom of Tilden.  Which is where, coming the other way, I figure out just as I pass, and have to think about it, inconspicuous, in a pair of normal shorts, wearing slip on sneakers, with a small backpack, wearing black framed eyeglasses and yes, a helmet, a cap underneath, and riding a simple sturdy serviceable Surly bicycle is the greatest cyclist of all time.  Seen from time to time at this hour on a Saturday taking a relaxing spin after the famous 10AM ride that becomes out in Potomac a very fast paceline, as I take my ride back in.

I roll on for a moment.  Jesus, that was him, wasn't it.  So, I turn around.  And by the time I get back through the sleepy parking lot and cross Broadbranch again, I've caught a glimpse of him up the road.  Who knows, maybe I can catch him.  Slowly gaining on the figure ahead, who is taking it easy, yes, the powerful calves, the tattoo, it is indeed Sir Lancelot, though you had to be smart to figure that out.   Rolling up carefully alongside over the hump of the stone bridge, I nod and speak out over the wheels, "I thought that guy back there looked pretty fast."  And having spoken to him before over a Whole Foods fish counter, about what he's riding these days, I have a sense of how he talks, he says something like hey, back to me, and then, hearing what I said, "which guy?"  So I point to him, "this guy."  "Nah, I'm not that fast."

We get to talking, as we roll along, as is comfortable and customary at this spot in the road, though he could step on the gas pedal if he wanted.  It's a lazy Saturday, early August, the stream is running, the air is still, the sun's not beating down on us, it's quiet, and few in the road.  It develops, as I explain a bit of my cycling friendships and local knowledge, that the man is at least for the time being not that into bike racing.  He had a crash.  I'm sorry about that.  It's just about getting out there, and long slow miles, maybe even going out along the towpath, and camping.  Yeah, man.  That's how I feel too.  And perhaps, a thought, he is so no longer into racing and competition, that he is slightly reluctant to give up his anonymity.  I tell him my story of the other day, of the pace line flying past me and I bumped along the ruts of the road, keeping my line.  Interesting, that the great cyclist had in a way abandoned the old identity, not wearing an old team cycling kit or even cycling shorts.  I ask him about bike shops, compare experiences, and he endorses the good people who care about cycling down at The Bike Rack.

It's all a blur, he says, about his years as a competitive cyclist who could beat anybody, whole fields of racers.  We pedal up the road, not lifting the pace.  13 or 14.  Which is how I rode in his company, ten years ago with my serious cycling friends, coming back in from Grosvenor on Beech Drive, the recovery ride, a ride I was quite happy with, and seeing up close, for the first time, the physique of a world class cyclist, the massive hamstrings, the fibers of muscle in the calves, the quadriceps.   Back then, no helmet.

Yeah, I say, patting my stomach, I'm trying to get more Buddhist about the wine.  I'd like to get rid of that.  "Looking at statistics, we're not doing so bad," he says.  I explain, yeah, I've done the writer thing, blah blah blah, but it's really about doing it for its own reasons.  He had a blog.  He's a good writer.  I enjoyed his observations.  There was good humor in it too.  He's been on hikes, up and down, ten miles, keep you in shape.  He likes the Billygoat Trail.

It turns out, as we reach the same place where I turned around before--I might have thought he's go on and scoop up more miles--that he's allowed himself to become more of a fan, more aware of its history.  Hey, me too.  We talk about the bad days of doping, '93, '94, when everyone started using.  Paris Roubaix is a good one to watch.  And somewhere along the road, his thought that the best thing, which he really enjoys, will always enjoy, the long slow miles, the simple beauty of it sinks in, agreeing with the world as it is and the trees of the forest that lines the road on both sides.

Back in the park, he pulls over to use the restroom.  Hey, great talking to you;  thanks for riding with me.  A rolling Tour de France style handshake.  Then the road is before me again.  Over the bridge, across from the picnic area I pull over and use the restroom, and respond to a text from my old college buddy out in LA as he comes through, raising an arm, and I raise an arm.  I get back up to pace, and I see him take a right at the intersection, to climb through the woods.  Yeah, that's a good idea, and I size up the pace of a limo bus that's taking people back and forth from the tennis tournament from parking lots, turning up the road and beginning to climb.  And there, climbing, I am dropped, the road going silent before me.  Give the man the space he needs.  Yes, it's about getting out there.



By the time I get home, eat some leftover roast chicken, a kale salad, starving, and then shower, I am again comfortable with myself.  I am also very tired, only a tomato with basil and olive oil for breakfast.  I lay back on the couch to read, and fall into a good nap, slightly conscious but not moving.  Then I read a bit.  The thought occurs to me somewhere back on the road that I wished I participated in a healthy job, like school teaching, or maybe like him, a store of good nutrition at least.  A good coach.

Finally about One AM, I have what's left of a bottle of Pinot Noir, one glass, but a mistake, and so then, lonely, I go out and slowly ruin the good feeling with a few more glasses of wine as the body craves with thirst, satisfactory only when I can share a bit of being a barman with another good barman in the pub down on 17th, and then, two double quarter pounders with cheese, both like disappearing like nothing, and I walk home, silently, and go to bed.  And today, a sort of sad feeling prompts me to write what I could not write before, before I gather myself for work, Sunday night, my Monday morning.



A great cyclist, like my friend of the road, needs a lot of open space.  The strength comes from lots of miles.  There is primarily the comfortable ease and grace of that power, that what would require of anyone else lots of effort to maintain and look a lot rougher.  And the same with the writer.  The writing comes from a self-comfort in the process, as if easily tossed off, no problem.  That only comes also from lots of miles and roads up and down.

The Buddha's background, his training, was yoga, at least in no small part, a way to strengthen the body beneficially, by taking advantage of the muscular tension inherent within, using the body itself as a complete gym, toning through the simple exercise of poses, taking care of all the body's inner functions along the way, opening the circuitry of its latent energies.  That its origins rest in the observation and imitation of different animals strong at certain things to thus strengthen the human body makes sense.

Pick up your arms, hold them out straight for a while, yeah, you see what I mean.  Who needs weights?

Toned and limber, prone to deep thought, for years working with this muscular tension stuff, the Buddha saw tension as a greater backdrop of our construct of reality.  How do we use tension, he might have wondered, how might we use it better, how might we understand its significances, just as yoga had come along and used inner muscular tension for improvement?  What would the implications be?

There must be tension.  We all need to eat and take care of our needs.  But how to strengthen the mind, to make it finer, healthier?  How might we develop the mental equivalent of physical well being, flexibility and strength?   How might we use the mind as an instrument to educate and enlighten itself from within?  How might we put the mind to holding poses, poses good for it, healthy?  How might we lead the mind to crave the healthy things and not the low level poisons?  How might we lead the mind to establish a healthy base, a balance in this thing of control of self and wild desire and appetite?

And so to keep the no longer necessarily limber and agile body of the adult through the poses of yoga, to keep the similarly burdened less flexible mind of the adult stuck in stiff habit there came the innocent and inspired devices of mediation to help the individual live a healthy life.

It was an intelligent and considerate approach to the problem all human beings must face as individuals.  And just as yoga is based on the ultimate reality of our physique, the facts of arms and legs, hips and spines and necks and all things that connect, so is Buddhist meditation appropriate to the form of human mind.


So must the writer explore the tensions within his own self, the family vacation's hurled thoughts, the preoccupations and obsessions, the thoughts of insecure futures, in order to gather them, to gather himself and quietly master them as they need to be, all of it more or less intuitive, with a little bit of help from something much like Iyengar's manual of poses.  As if to waken a wisdom from within, to lighten a fresh sense of well-being.

And now for a headstand.



Understand tension and its source, and onto a more balanced life.  Understand tension from the perspective of self-control and one stands to do things for healthy non-egotistical reasons from the small choices and hopefully to larger ones.

This was stuff I know I needed, after the tensions of the work week followed by the tension of being alone and feeling adrift.

Feeling good in my fresh Road ID kit, I venture on to the park, stopping calmly on the small road in the woods to pull the lax chin strap of my helmet tight.  Past the Cathedral, past Porter, crossing Reno at the light at the bottom of the hill, crossing Connecticut and dropping down the steep hill of Tilden, taking the road by the Czech Embassy, stopping to fill a water bottle.   Through the parking lot after passing along the creek, past the mill, onto Broadbranch, then turning onto the climbing S curve of Grant.  It's time for some hills.  The forest, the horse pasture with picnic tables, beautiful evening.  Crossing Broadbranch, the great hill of Brandywine where I used to do reps, then back up into the park again, then dropping down the windy road out onto Beech Drive by the Park Ranger Station, along the stream as a treat.

I slow down carefully at the intersection, seeing a strong cyclist, a tall man come through.  I turn and follow the road.  On a bit, along the stream, I find myself closing on him, coming up behind.  He's not intent on going as fast as he could.  Maybe he's spinning the lactic acid away, or maybe, it will occur to me later, he's waiting for something.  I want to push it a bit, to gain speed, but I know he is far stronger than I, and don't find an opportune point to pass him, with traffic coming the other way, so I relax at 23 or 24 mph and draft off him.  There is a differential of speed, a tension of following.  Something is going on.

At a curve I sense something ghostly coming up behind me, and along comes, without warning, a pace line of the serious team cyclists.  Each set of legs is ripped, and there's that particular sound of a carbon fiber wheel set, the whir of a high end carbon fiber road bike, and they are doing about thirty.  One, two, three pass me, and they keep coming, more riders, cranking away, and with the curves and the curb on my right it is disconcerting, really fairly scary to be enveloped by the forceful peloton coming up behind me, passing me, just to my left.  No one with any personality beyond their single focus.  No time for 'yo, what's up.'  Silence.  The road is tight, aggressive.  I've not been in a pack in a long time, and it seems to be throwing off my direction at this speed.  NCVC, local velo club team kits.  I'm finally passed by the last of them as we come up on the Olmstead stone bridge over the creek, two tight curves.  The whir of the spokes departs up ahead of me, the craziness of the slipstream's turbulence abiding in leftover focus tilting with the road.  Not one shout or whoop.  Complete focus.

By the time I am toward the end of Beech where it meets Broadbranch, I turn onto the shortcut sidewalk, and am back at the foot of the S curve just in time to see them above, bending forward out of the saddle as they climb, flying.  I did a hill climb once with my friend Dan when he rode seriously.   And I got dropped right away.  I did my best.  Catching them on the way back, going downhill, I got dropped again.  Not my thing, riding in such tumult.  That time, having survived, I went off for a fifty mile ride alone, and felt great.  My attitude different from these serious guys with serious muscles competing with each other.

The peloton safely up the road, I hope, without embarrassment I lolligag my way back up the hill.  I can tell the yoga is helping.  I feel comfortable on the bike.  The new Giordana bibs and jersey with the black, white and orange of Road ID, hey why not, Bob Roll wears one, feel good too.  Ignoring the evidence of being slow, I feel good, like I'm finally filling out at age 49, the way some do at 18.  Beautiful evening, one more lap, a sprint, jacking it up to 27.8 mph for a run along the stream, leaves me soon popped, and I reflect I was wise not to pass the initial serious cyclist guy who strikes me as a kill joy anyway next time I cross paths with him up by the barns.  Is he the guy Dan used to ride with, who looks a bit like Mario Cippolini, a mature gentleman who'd rip your legs off, an executive of some sort, a guy who makes money.  I climb back up making little switchbacks in the wide private road by the Czechs, and then finally, I'm topping the big hill of Tilden, relieved.

Muscular tension, yes, that's what we feel, in the Buddhist handbook way of looking at things.  We objectify things, responding to our surroundings, somethings desirable.  For the muscular guys with huge thigh and calve muscles, going fast in Rock Creek Park is desirable.   Stomping on the pedals, hitting the climbs, speed, agility, not crashing, being in excellent shape, and some friendly competition to get the adrenaline flowing, bravo to these guys on their own terms.  It must be fun.  I've had a taste of it, and it is fun.

When you meditate, you find calm.  You do see what the Buddhist is talking about, the basic suffering inherent in experience, seeking muscular relief like sex is muscular relief.  It's a great ride.  No wonder we find it desirable.  And yet, somehow with all the worrisome stuff going on in the head, the meditation works as nothing else does.

I wake up a bit hungover again, having fallen into the soothing bottle of Chinon from the night before with the steak and rice and the television.  I might have gone out, but it was One AM before I really felt like moving, and I had a whole batch of cycling laundry to care for anyway.  Loneliness can be a problem.  It can lead to more wine.  I watch a show, My Wild Affair, after catching up the war action in Gaza, a family raising a baby black rhino named Rupert, who looks like a big strong pig.  It costs too much to go out anyway, and I'm unless I'm with my friends from work, it's always unsatisfying.

It is an interesting observation, about this muscular tension we seek to relieve.  I've seen it for years in the restaurants, the seeking to fill a need, a hunger, with something tasty, desirable, combined with a group of other appetites, social, sexual, for pleasure in general.  And having sought relief, rather than calm itself, more or less innocently as I put back the wine to sooth the trouble of cooking and eating dinner alone, today I feel a bit down, the after effect.

The Buddha offers another way of looking at it.  There is a way to back away, to gain some will power.  Through meditation, through the experience of experiencing things, through waking to the dream of existence, we gain something.  The violence with which we seek out the stuff of self begets violence.  Some seem to like living that way.

Meditating, I return to calm, and must observe the lesson that life is, if we make it, through following through with the tension and the desire, suffering.  And if more people meditated, the world might be now in a better place.

I'll never be as fast as those guys, but maybe I don't want to be.  Is that lack of a competitive attitude, or the showing of some deeper wisdom, innate, but still hard to come to terms with.




Today I head out to the nearby hills beneath the Shoreham and the Finnish Embassy as dusk approaches, and I don't seem to be going very fast.  I take the hills, steep ones, but on a recovery ride you just want to go slowly, and I take the mental space to think about muscular tension.  I guess some of us, whether we would want it or not, are more predisposed to see this great I-want-to-say final point of Buddhist thought, that we set things up in such a way of tension and relief.  I've known it myself:  you work hard, and then toward the end of the night you have a glass of wine, put things away, go home.  Tension presents itself in many ways, sexually, psychologically, sensory, all begging for relief.  But by nature, some of us are never really keen on the competitive aspect of life, kind of like Ferdinand the particular bull.  By nature, some of us have an inkling that everything, understood conventionally, means tension.  And thus we are prompted to think at a deeper level about experience.  Why do we experience things so, we ask ourselves, and such questions lead to ponder the nature of self and where it all fits in.  Is the set-up of self equal, or in some way related, to the tension we create out of thin air?  Where will that tension lead us?

Passing the huge houses, with gates and fences, a collection of small castles with an ordinary large house thrown in here and there, I see the tension, the tension that must be there to have such a big house, the house meant as the relief of such tension, the hard earned, the competition.  But having been created out of tension, one wonders if that tension ever really goes away.   And here I am, pedaling, out for a slow workout, taking in the available wildlife and scenery that could overgrow everything in time.  In time I'll be glad to roll home to my own apartment, where I will calmly meditate after I get something to eat and do my best to live in the moment.




The main point of any life is that you can meditate.  And thus are there no regrets.  There is the fault of conflict, of muscular tension, the reply to which being that one must be a teacher.  To say to other people, you can meditate, you can do the perfect yoga for yourself, just as you can fold a napkin.  Something you can do even if you've had a glass of wine.  Something to pull you back into focus.  And then even all the travails of life are good, the best thing, for teaching you the need for the necessary calm that is not selfish.

Waking in a kind of a strange fog...

Decent writing should leave an event open to interpretation.  One day you might see things one way, the next the other, maybe even as opposite.  Complexity.  Then you've achieved more, getting more of the truth in, the truth ultimately undefinable.

If something is strongly proclaimed, it may well be crap.

Writing is an odd thing to be doing.  But there must be something natural about it, and rather than condemning its practitioners to ranks of deviancy, we treat it as an art form, something worth study, even if we're not sure why, other than that people seem to do it, to be drawn to it.  Is it because of certain psychological situations, or a certain kind of reaction such as a youthful rebelling?  Perhaps the writing came out of a strange coincidence, as maybe indeed such an act deserves...  as if to deal with a fluke happening, something strange.  Should we get judgmental about the origins of writing?   Is it part of a healing process?

But it is an odd act.  Roth's understanding that writing is an act of offense to family life, completely selfish I will leave to his sharper accomplished mind.  But you could say, Mr. Writer, you've accomplished nothing with your life;  you've not tried anything, not made an effort, sat in your room analyzing, but what comes of it all?

Chekhov included a darker opinion of artists in his vision, often quite directly dismissive, seeing the idle frivolity of it, the indecency...  To include the different sides of all things, the masculine, the feminine, the positive, the negative, is sign of a thinker's vitality.

Yeah, you kind of need a bottle of wine, of the low alcohol sort, when you get home from doing Free Wine Tasting night with the busboy downstairs for the greater part of the evening.  I go through a lot of glassware when entertaining, a way of keeping the customer occupied when I'm spread thin.  A bottle of Chinon and an indoor bike ride while there are still Tour de France highlights available through the cable box.

And the next day, having one more dragon of a shift to defeat after doing pretty much every night from Friday through Tuesday alone, the demon of jazz night with an 11 top back in the wine room, what do you write about?   About the fragility of young love, easily disturbed or subverted, and yet the impossible durability of the same, neither a convenient quality but what-can-you-do, it all must mean something, maybe that one needs to abandon dualistic understandings, hot and cold, because everything simply is?  Do you write about an aging king, fresh to a new frailty who sees suddenly in a trusted servant the wisdom, steadfast brotherly love and depth he's missed all along, carrier of valuable true things?   Do you write about the whale quality of people, how some people are soothing to be around, pleasant, swimmers of deep calm old waters, who express things with less sound?  Do you write down the thoughts your 83 year old self-confident distinguished African American gentleman friend shared with you at the end of the night when you walked with him down the steps and out to his car, about how "it's all about her;  it's not about you," advice to the lovelorn, how you take a step, see if she wants more, take another step...  "You're too timid."

Well, you're up out of bed, rising later the last few days, less time for yoga and meditation.  We all need a trade.  These days, one could do worse than what I do, which is an ancient thing, predating psychiatry and even medicine.  An interesting journey in the modern world.

We are indeed in an awkward spot.  The moment you say something, it's no longer true.  It's the same thing as light.  You see it as a particle it acts like a wave.  Thus it is necessary to return to good old school 'stamp collector' science, the taxonomy of the botanist, how leaves are related by structure.  Things are a reflection of That Which Is.  A certain necessary poetry to science.

And so there is a certain truth, even as we don't know what to make of it, to something that like Hamlet reaches so deeply and accurately into the human experience, incredibly painful as it might be to watch, young love going awry, Ophelia's madness after Hamlet's feigned, or the story of King Lear.  Plays which themselves might be about the futility of naming things.  An actor should never get smug on Charlie Rose about playing such roles, never think for a moment, "I am so n so, successful experienced Shakespearean actor," because then you are missing something, grown facile.

Seeing Coldplay sing "You're a Star," it could kind of get old, at least by itself, after awhile, the beautiful love story of anthem rock, as it works less and less as you grow older, more like carrying on what would be impossible to carry on.   The preference grows for duality, to show how that love is mixed with other things, more realistic things, even as it might endure.  That's an honesty better on the system.

"The crap I used to write," MacGowan says, before the stuff of real Irish music came.  "The Auld Triangle," Brendan Behan's song of imprisonment is probably not a song of courtship and fun, but it might better describe what a relationship might really go through taken as a whole.  "A terrible beauty is born," Yeats writes, and it rings truer.  You want to love with the greatest passion;  you also want to go run and hide, never to be seen again.

I am reminded of a scene from a presentation of The Singing Detective, the BBC one with Michael Gambon, a strange Larkinesque beauty to it.  Is it the singing detective himself, stricken with a horrible skin condition, or is it the old man in the hospital, struggling to say something and then who finally says it, then again, louder.  "Asshole!"  A moment of Shakespearean truth.  A kind of 'why don't you be nice to me' honesty to it.


We go to school, we study liberal arts, in order to have a personality, to be, in effect, more honest.  It's served me well as a bartender, though a vast untapped reserve, full of words.  One hopes that's still a good thing in today's world.

It is the end of July.  My own kitchen floor is looking a little grubby, a special breed of greasy dust inhabiting the air.  And in the restaurant on such a Sunday night a cobweb could grow.  The frozen yogurt shop is busy until 10, but we, given the business and the reservations make the call to close the kitchen at 9.

"Mr. T will be coming in tonight, I know it," I tell server V who is working alone downstairs after already working the day shift, when I arrive to work at 4:15. Yes, that would be perfect.  Agonizingly slow night, then Mr. T comes in right before the kitchen closes, has his Manhattan, orders three courses, and everyone in the kitchen is staring at each other.

I have a pleasant man, 57 years of age, with an impressive goatee, who turns out to be from Belgrave, an engineer who went to medical school and became an anesthesiologist.   He's been to Baux de Provence, the beautiful village perched on Bauxite rich cliffs where they have excellent local wines, and he opts for the rosé we have by the glass, which is from nearby Aix.

A father daughter couple come in and sit at a table near the front windows and have an easy Sunday night dinner.  The daughter would be age appropriate to date, but for the fact I've done nothing with my life, and the father at a good ripe age is in great shape and there is good conversation, the two at ease with each other and the state of life.

And then H, busboy, downstairs, who's running my food shouts up at me, hey.   Hey what?  I ask, as soon as I find a neat break in the conversation with the gentleman.   Kitchen closing at 9.  Okay.  When the gentleman, who has earned a life, and who's having problems finding a house in Northern Virginia before it gets snapped up, finishes up with our talk of soccer and where to send his rower son to college, departs, I clean the floor of the wine refrigerator, underneath where the fruit brandies and the Lillet and the juice store'n'pour containers rest overneath, taking bottles out, Windex, bar rag.  Medicine is getting very corporate these days, the man was saying.

A chocolate mousse to share for dessert, talk of John Oliver's take on Net Neutrality, and father and daughter depart, seeming to appreciate my effort to be friendly but not intrusive, as an idiot can be a little hyper in such a situation over making conversation.  The place is empty, and now the final minutes are ticking down, the nervous hour.  I'm rearranging furniture, after putting the place settings back in the low mahogany table's drawers, putting things in order for tomorrow night's jazz.  I look out at the street.  Foot traffic, again, in to have some yogurt.  No one interested in a nice glass of wine.  My own preaching, backfiring?  The digital clock on the Aloha computer screen turns silently to 9:00 PM.  Safe, or so you think...

Gathering some things, the few dishes that have piled up on a milk crate below the bar rail, placing a white cloth napkin over them, I head downstairs, turn the knob of the door to the main dining room with its customary click, and there is Mr. T, sipping his Manhattan, and of course he sees me, and raises his arm high, "Tim!  Hello."   I may have dodged the bullet, but at 9:08, V has not.  "Tim," he explains, "I got here just in time and ordered right away," he says, explaining why he won't be keeping me company 'til midnight upstairs, singing along to the sound system.  I typed Mahler into the Pandora's brain and created a new late night station for such a purpose, and I also dug up a few Jacques Brel CDs I'd burned with some appropriately slow and philosophical maybe even morbid and depressing songs, beautiful on some days, indigestible on others to certain mindsets.  "I'm having the catfish," Mr. T says proudly, and I help out by pouring him a dose of Pouilly Fumé from the half bottle he's ordered from the ice bucket.  In the kitchen folks are staring at each other.  There is a piece of uncooked catfish filet out on the cutting board.  "I have no social life," the chef explained to me last week.  "Just shoot me, please," V says quietly to me, as I look guiltily into her brown eyes.

But what are you going to do?  You're an upstairs guy who doesn't do downstairs.  I change, back into cargo pocket shorts and the white tee shirt I came in with.  I bring down my check out, which feels weird, as the downstairs people come up and hand me the checkout paperwork and cash a good while before I leave on just about every single shift I've worked in ten years.  I finally go to fetch my bike from the basement, after we take a group self picture with Mr. T's new iPhone.  I notice Mr. T has on some shiny patent leather white slippers for shoes.  As I bring my bike up Mr. T says, "Tim, I want to give you something," reaching into his purse.  I ignored him before, but he insists, saying "Now Tim I think I've mistreated you before," handing me a folded twenty.  "Be careful about your bike," he says, meaning, be safe, but also don't let it get stolen.

I slip away into the night eventually, around 10:30 without a sip of wine.  I'm going to get home and watch the final stage of the Tour, and ride my bike indoors.  I roll up, and the upstairs neighbor looks out from his lit high window where he's sitting at his desk, and taking off my helmet, the headlamp on it turned off, I give him a wave, and enter my flat and close the door.  (My brother thinks me entirely pompous for using the word, flat, but it's a good quick word, and that's what it is.)  I did not need one more person, it turns out, and I turn on the TV and thank god for Bob Roll, and there is Vincenzo Nibali standing shyly on the podium, a beautiful moment as they play the national anthem of Italy, which must be a tradition at the final ceremony of the Tour.

But it's lonesome after all the noise, though I have no business going out.  And fortunately I have a bottle of Beaujolais to open, though I wish it was chilled.  It takes me some time to get organized enough to get on the bicycle.  I get the television adjusted and begin my workout and the sip of wine eases the fact that I am totally unprepared for the future, as if I were living still in a college dorm, not the slightest idea about what to do as far as real estate, a living situation for coming golden years.  And the thought is never far away, what a disappointment I always am for women, getting sucked into situations like with my grandfather on Easter night, people I spend time with too generously, people like the pot smoking high school buddy who appeared to need in his middling squalor a friend, people like Mr. T, all the sort of people you end up knowing without selfishness or an agenda to protect yourself with.  (I was never arrogant enough to be a professional intellectual.)  I deserve it, being stuck alone, a bottle of wine and an indoor bike ride the only thing to sooth the deep unease that must be mixed with some gratitude for it not being worse.

Joseph Mitchell too, I think as I ride, would have known loneliness.  There is in him somewhere, the piece about Old McSorley's Ale House, a line about the drink "insulating" an older person against the loneliness of night.  And that is what it does, as I drink my mild bottle, waiting for the Tour to come on again, watching on interesting piece about a director of low budget horror type films, beautiful eloquent rapturous films about zombies and such and big cats that stalk the night.

You'd really like to cry sometimes, but forgetting how, well, you go on.  And thus, meditation is very important, the only real way to control the mind, the wine's benefit now making you slightly more depressed and stuck on thoughts then you might otherwise be.



To find your own natural style, that is actually the hardest thing for a writer to do.  It takes time.

The barman's bedeviler is an entertaining guy, with impeccable shoes and a tweed jacket, who lives out in the country with horses and dogs.  He'll eat dinner downstairs with his party, then just as you're finally getting rid of the last people after dinner service in the bar, he will, remembering earlier times, late nights, cigarettes, relaxing with the lights down low with chicks, indulging in his taste for Jameson's with a good hearted audience for his stories, come to haunt.  He likes to tell stories in which he, a practical man, tells people 'to suck my d...' all told with a smoky voice accented by the mastery of English across the sea.  The people of a certain island, a U.S. territory, sit around and scratch their balls.  The two young ladies chuckle.  I chuckle.  He would not have come up here if I weren't here.  The young man, who ordered the round of drinks, puffs from an electric cigarette, and thankfully there is talk of another late night hangout.  I feel a bit bad I've jacked up the lights and turned the music down, the candles up except for the one on their table in the corner, saying to myself, 'no, no, please no...' as I run the bar mats through the dishwasher.   The cook comes up stairs and offers me a Salvadoran butter cookie, and I pour him a glass of Bordeaux, and I remark on the cool festive Hawaiian-like shirt, sent to him by his sister in Gabon, and the fedora on his shaved head.  He's going out to meet some cook friends.  "Where's yours," he says politely, so I pour myself a small amount of Chinon, the first of the night, even as I grit my teeth somewhere, mildly.  I take a sip, and ask him if he has any grey hair yet.  Yes, he does, on his chin.  The charming devil over in the corner is making a hyperbole over recycling a certain rubber item.  JB asks for his check, quietly, proudly, sadly giving me his credit card.  There may well be some tequila in his future, tonight with his friends, in Georgetown or up on 18th Street.  I give him a bro hug before he goes;  the restaurant has been through some changes lately, the departure of a chef.

Soon, our guest the dominant male asks for the check.  "Put a hundred percent tip on it," he says, thanking me for my late night friendly tolerance, my joining in with the late nights (for which he always paid the check.)  Stories, great ones, the joy of being regaled, indeed, it has its pull.  And I feel a bit guilty, for not switching back into the old mode.

The downstairs manager had come up an hour earlier and simply said his name.  I looked at her, preoccupied with tying a few loose ends up.  She describes him, his drink.  "Oh, merdre, he popped into my mind a few days ago."  "You shouldn't have thought about him," she smiles.  "He wants to come upstairs."    Maybe if I hadn't have known it would have been better, but when you've been jerked back and forth in the summer's mix of slow-slow-slow and then a pop, jesus-christ-just-let-me-go-home.

The Uber is here, the young man says, and by the time I find the man's credit card underneath the low Indonesian pod chair, run downstairs and catch him getting into a Lincoln Navigator with the chicks and the guy, he is my friend again.  And later, alone, not very happy, a bit rattled, too lazy to go buy rice across the street at the Safeway, I eat a small dish of salmon tartar, putting the capers aside.  The end of the night is a vulnerable time.  Ah, just get me home and I'll ride my bike indoors to the Tour's last time trial (and the huge powerful mastodon legs of the World Champion at the event) my mind says, and that is what I do.

I get my ride in, a good sweat, with a few glasses of wine from an opened bottle in the fridge, shower, go to bed after a bowl of rice and some rye crackers with almond butter, and wake up feeling a bit lost, adrift, the bad influences, my weaknesses playing in my mind.  The Tour rolls into Paris and onto the Champs-Élyseés.


After a shower I look down somewhat glumly at the yoga mat, without my contacts in, the day getting sweaty, as if it were a diving board, and I go through my basic routine, the inversions to wake the third eye and put one in a better mood, along with the triangle, the half moon, the warrior, finally a headstand before the meditation that time before work might allow.  I think of Joseph Mitchell, some of the best writing I've ever read, haunting in a good way, the courtly man from North Carolina who came to New York as a police reporter, who wandered all New York near and far, writing pieces for The New Yorker.   He captured New York, now a very old New York, before it all changed, before its realness was lost, drifting away, taken over by the uniform stamp, as if writing of unicorns in a time when once they were quite real.  His own story, whatever it was, he never really told, though it gave him a deep enough soul to serve as recording material for much of humanity and human experience in its diverse realms, something you might say, if you had to, tender about him.  Perhaps he alluded to it here and there.  We may never really know.

If I should write a book maybe it would be like the inverse of Mitchell's walks to distant cemeteries and humble territories, or his feet, one might imagine, bumped by rats on the ships he may have explored to write a piece about rats on ships.   It would be of a slow and steady barman, who mildly, self-editingly, recorded a bit of the life that came past him, though of course, the great bulk of it lost into the obscurity of even a decent memory.  It would record all the unannounced guests, and maybe some of his own random memories, like that of bringing flowers once to a girl at the end of a school year, standing in the door, feeling suddenly the height of his throat above the floor of the hallway in which he stood, looking at the girl look up at him before he nodded and tucked the box back under his arm and walked away into the rain.  "Okay.  I won't write you," the young voice said, and yet everything he would ever write about be for such mythical eyes, as if to present her too the flowers of experience.  Scraps here and there, like MacGowan's.  It would not be good as Joseph's Mitchell's, but might explain a few things none the less before they too were lost to modernity and all its rules and means, to carry on the human story with the mighty pen.

The worst devils, as Melville may have once explained to the original Queequeg at his altar, are the ones who tell you not to write.