Halfway through the week, preparing for shift three, tiredness has come to the body, normally, to be expected.   The body sleeps longer, the moments turning over on to the side waiting for more become more frequent.  Time spent rehashing the previous nights;  just when you think it's over, the quiet Monday Jazz Night with The Bitter Dose Combo playing, the French guy and his two Argentine buddies come up after dinner.  The musicians are packing up.  Louie Armstrong is working on Pandora.  Oh, shit, here we go.  The French guy knows me.  I see an unopened bottle of Rosé from Provence sitting out on the table.  They order three espressos, after a woman, a nephrologist, it turns out, from India, orders one, having sat down with them.  They are the only ones here.  One of the guys is a wine importer.  "I love people," I hear my French friend tell the lady.  He tugs on her shawl.  I go over into my corner by the stove and have a bite of paté.  It's that time, the stomach growls.

The French guy asks me to open the bottle, so I do, sure.  He's cool  He is a nice guy.  I just don't ever get to do the late night oyster happy hour at Old Ebbitt, nor do I enjoy going to the strip club up the street.  "Have a glass with us please," he says, as I open it, to his left before coming around to his right to pour.  "Smell the bubble gum," he says, raising the glass he's tasting from for me to smell as I lean over, and then he smiles, eyes wider, holds out his hand, recognizing me.  I shake his hand.  Two nights ago, the night ended on a sour note.  The loud guy previously content to sit at a table, what a nice change, away from the bar comes to the bar to use the presence of our friend who eats quietly alone on Sunday nights as an opportunity to begin his harangue on the underfunding of NATO and how Germany will end up being swallowed up by Putin's new Russian world order.  And where it starts out kidding, soon enough, in a passive aggressive way, out comes a condemnation of all peace lovers, who, unsupportive, somehow, of the American military, were asleep on the morning of September the 11th, blindly enjoying the pleasures of an easy life, unappreciative of their defenders. Used to this, the engagement to such is minimal, and so our conservative friend seeks to find a piece of music to play on his smart phone above the sound system, which is quietly going through its Dire Straits shuffled no surprises playlist.  Friend of loud guy remembers suddenly The Lemon Pipers.  I clear my friend's dinner plate, an Italian overture at a  Beef Bourgignon, let him eat a last bite of bread and butter, a splash more wine, and prep an espresso.  It's been a fairly busy night.  It ends with the words of Jesus hanging silently above, "how long must I endure this faithless and perverse generation..."

And so I get up late before Tuesday the wine tasting night, take an allergy tablet, Tyrosine, astragalus and one ibuprofen for good measure, green tea with carefully stirred ground chia seeds, unpleasant if it clumps in the bottom of the cup.

"A lonely thinking heart that makes no show/ is to a woman but a kind of ghost."  A line from Donne, taken me many years to really get, the thought of how stupid I was so many times coming to me not of my own will.  And Jesus, look where I am now.  Well, could be worse.


Then I wake on a premature day off, a switch in the schedule, and like the Larkin poem, 'think of being them,' I feel I stuck in a dirty apartment, a strange person, not knowing what to do with himself, no where, really, to go.  Drive eight hours to see my mom?  The bathroom is full of dust.

I remember a helpful conversation with my accordionist friend, who is also the son of college professors.  He talks of how his father is hounded at a conference, little free time.

My early foray onto the internet leaves me wondering what to do about replacement shaving razors.  I stare out into the fog of it, not knowing what to do, and an hour has gone by.  Did I forget how to be a person, or how to look the part?  Might as well do some laundry.

The Buddha tells us that it's all, in a way, a dream.  And that might imply that things are already set up decently enough as they are.  So would it be surprising, naturally, when people fight against the stream, because then they are removing themselves from the dream, in which things get ironed out anyway in accordance with the greater logic of it all.  Why fight? Find something mildly pleasing, some natural thing, a bike ride around Hains Point in the moonlight, fighting the wind one way, with it coming back, not making a big splash, not doing anything violent, just basically going with the flow.  Just to get here is ninety nine percent of the effort, to be incarnated as such in this life in this world, and the rest is simply behaving, doing good things, spreading kindness and light.  That's why I never get the cold aggressive type;  'what are you battling against?  what are you going to win? what are you going to conquer?  Then what?'

Sure, unaware, or not getting it, yes, we do a lot of dumb shit, this is true.  We get puffed up, egotistical, think we're competing in something more than a simple competition with the self to be the best you can be.  And even writing, it's just a sport, something we do to keep in shape, keep the electrical flow running around in our heads, a working of a particular muscle group...

I came back from my night ride, feeling good, fall into a nap on the couch after showering.  I should have eaten dinner, but I nodded off, and when I wake up, at 1 AM, there's  an open bottle of Chinon in the fridge from the night before, a tumbler poured already on the top shelf, and so I dutifully figure I'll drink it, not let it go to waste, and then the good feeling begins to recede into a kind of confusion, which happens when you turn on the TV.  I end up drawn into a Bergman film, Frannie and Alexander, and by the time the good uncle passes away after playing Hamlet's father's ghost and the pretty young mother marries the sanctimonious priest and things get creepier and creepier there with the priest, I was spooked.   And here's the ghost again, appearing to the boy, and the priest is a real bastard, his house is a dungeon.  And that's the kind of shit that will get to you.  Damn, why did I ruin the good vibe I had going, having earned it being a good boy, exercising?   I had woken back up feeling pretty stiff, still with laundry to do, so chalk it up to my imperfections.  I get to the ending of Bergman, things turning out for the kids better than I thought at one point, I eat my hamburg patty and brown rice, beat off, shower, and go to to bed.

There remains my honest regret, worth exploring in a psychological sort of way, I think, about turning into a bad student my senior year in college.  I don't know what possessed me, made me sort of bite the hand.  A good part of it was my growing difficulty with the large amounts of time I spent on an English paper, the demands of finding the fitting answer.  The point was to write a paper, and yet I somehow just gave up on them.  It was all unnecessary, because it was something I was good at.  Did the writer part of me somehow feel offended by the process I saw going around me in English class, the freshman kid comparing something to Wilfred Owen to show off that he knew about Wilfred Owen?  Or was it on the other hand something going on within me, maybe dealing with the perceived rejection I had made up in my own mind from the girl I liked?  I know I was bored, a bit unengaged, and I drank more, thinking that was part of being a writer like Hunter S. Thompson with your own view on things.  A grown man looks back at such chances, such opportunity, and no wonder now your life is fucked up and your still around drinking and never even started any career as you should have had, so no wonder if my older brother thinks I'm a freak.

Maybe it's that when you are stressed and nervous and not getting enough social reinforcement, that year I was a senior, not enough positive feedback, and wondering what to do with yourself after graduation and only having this incredibly unrealistic dream of being a writer, what to do with that, maybe, yes, you don't always do the right thing, retreating, not responding.

My father tried to steer me toward being an environmental scientist, and I should have put aside my games and taken the path he suggested.  But somehow, I was too possessed being an English major and all that that implies.  

But one hopes that the body is in the process of learning what's good for it, what's good for you personally, so that you shit well, don't have joint pain or acid reflux, that you take care of yourself like you'd take care of a your dog, taking him out for walks, letting him sniff and piss in nature, keep him watered and fed, socialized with other dogs on occasion.  As if you were to learn too late in life, how to take care of such things, to do yoga and meditate and get in your bike rides and read books so that you didn't feel imprisoned.  And the thought grows, if I didn't have to tend bar, that is if I made a living as a writer, as an intellectual, or as some sort of sage advisor through words, then I wouldn't be drawn to drown out the sound of the stress within, thus throwing my body and mind out of balance again.

The Buddha's wisdom though to me holds some water, and I observe people fighting reality, being stupid, that I can take some heart and say, oh well, at least I was passive, more or less...  And nothing has to make sense necessarily, you just have to admit it and get it down on paper, because who knows, maybe there's a reason behind it all, who knows.  Write it out, bit by bit, pained as it may be.

Who are we, what are we, what's our purpose being here anyway?  And all the people seem to not want to be alone in life, but really it's not so bad, at least for some of us.  My gut has always been seeing all those people who are trying to belong somewhere, putting on some sort of act so that they will belong, whereas life really can be pretty simple, just that self-interested asshole types are always proclaiming "me me me," the illusion of self shit that turns your stomach.   You'll have your friends, enough of them, coming out of the blue as it might seem, as is all part of the dream, part of finding the happiness and peace out in nature riding your bike in the woods along the stream thinking your thoughts.

Yes, I will admit to my own confusion, the perfect confusion of conscious thought when this is not the real serious part of our true thoughts, the truth of how we think and feel, which we can only very rarely come across, and to be healthy, I think you need to keep that flexibility about yourself, to not fall into a conscious sense of knowing what you are doing because of this and this and this... which keeps yourself guessing sometimes, not a very happy feeling looking at it one way.  Yes, it would be far more satisfying to say, ah yes, here is what I am thinking, for my conscious mind, through its rigor and seriousness has concocted my way and made it safe and secure and profitable and look how happy I am, look at what I have to show for my efforts.  An argument the deeper mind can never really directly question, perhaps unfortunately.

Yes, I don't want to be freak;  I want things to show for it after all my efforts;  I'd like a respectable career, life, please the family and make it proud;  I don't want to be the asshole;  I want to fit in too.  But I also don't want to be one of the sheep, blindly accepting the things we all seem to accept even without knowing what truly really is happening and how it will all turn out the way we are going, such as it is.

Hey, I'll be the first to admit it:  I don't know what the hell I am doing with my life.  I can admit to feeling led astray, to feeling like I've made absolutely no decisions in life.  I hardly know what to do with the energy and daylight of a day off, except really just to carry on and live healthy.  Go grocery shopping, go buy tea or Book 2 of Knausgaard, a bottle of wine just in case, do yoga, meditate, I have no idea, but some of it will happen.



And then I wake up again with a headache, an empty bottle of Pays D'Oc Pinot Noir next to the kitchen sink, it's already mid afternoon, the bike on the stand in the living room from a late night indoor ride, and it's like, "what the fuck.'  And I think simultaneously of my falling into the excesses of high school rock bands and also the last substantive conversation I had with my father, and also what the neighbor said back in those rock band high school days about how I should be led by a stricter hand, and look where the fuck I am now.  I step out on the back porch to empty the water that has dripped out of the air conditioner unit into a plastic flower box and it's ghastly hot out, Jesus Christ.  I take the bike off the stand.  Do I walk down to pick up the mountain bike my best friend Dan has for me down at his shop?  It needs an inner tube, so I'd walk, I guess, and maybe swing by the Whole Foods, but certainly not for meat or anything perishable.  Dan's friends are having a party to which I seem to be invited.

Yesterday was spent taking an online course and then the certification test for alcohol awareness and server training, every two years, how long did it take?  Enough of questions that seem to abide by the own personal logic of whoever designed the test, so enough worries while finally taking the test, multiple choice, but confusing ones amongst very very easy ones.  I end up getting a 92 on it, at 2 or 3 AM after a post grocery and dinner nap.  At least I am stocked up on green tea.  If I go to a party tonight, it will start around 8, and I will then have to start drinking, but if I stay home alone, well, maybe I'll just read and live a monk life but then regret not being social, and tomorrow it's back to work anyway so I'm already a lame duck.

Wild Man, never be a Wild Man, though you can't help it if you have a certain kind of Type O blood flowing in your hairy skinned veins.  Yes, I look around, too many neglected books to want to go to a party tonight, and I feel the ragweed allergy, though the reports I check first thing say today is low and I did shower after a lame outdoor bike ride at dusk the night before.  And when are the thunderstorms going to come?

Green tea, thank god for a nice well-made pot of green tea, a full strainer of Dragon Well, timed three minutes, and things aren't so bad maybe.

There must be a Larkin poem about embarrassment.  (Or maybe to an extent, all of them are about it.)  Perhaps it's that one with the line about sitting around and getting "half drunk at night" from High Windows.  And this writer must admit to the same thing, the embarrassment of waking up sore, dry-mouthed, fuzzy, having enjoyed a bottle of Beaujolais after a long night at work as he rode his bike on the stand, PBS in the background, and then not only exercising his leg muscles but those which connect the hands to the brain's inner recesses, yes, that freeing feel of the particular joy of getting at one's thoughts.  A small portion of these entries are written at night when the glass of wine comes out, and like Hemingway said of Faulkner, to paraphrase, you can kinda tell, down to the sentence, where the man started drinking.  For the main part, for the record, the writing here is done in sober daylight, though often enough with a vague sense of some embarrassment somewhere in the mind, a kind of a why-don't-I-have-a-life-and-career kind of a thing. And yet that embarrassment is balanced, though the specifies of embarrassing things always remain, with that next day sense of the necessary freedom in the moment that comes with the pleasurable feeling, the detachment from the night shift's pains, from the inadequacies of the televised offerings.

In the long terms, it has to be reckoned with, one supposes, the night's liberation through wine, good or bad, maybe both, maybe bad, maybe good.  Eventually, yes, maybe it would be better to stop, but most reasonable people I come across seem to think it an allowable pleasure, the social lubricant, the Jeffersonian necessity, a bit of natural relief from the unsettling qualities and things of life.  Perhaps it is that a glass of wine provides some of us a medicinal ease from the overbearing self.  Then no wonder that an artist, who works through a mode of selflessness, itself a relief, would be drawn.  While it seems extreme to invoke "the doors of perception," making us think of Jim Morrison or Shane MacGowan, perhaps there's a way to enjoy the same thing without excesses, aided, combined, in tune with the spirit of the meditations which let us ease a mind overburdened by the demands of a concrete fixed self.

A passage from Knausgaard, My Struggle, from page 399 of Book One, about drinking:  "I loved it, I loved the feeling, it was my favorite feeling, but it never led to anything good, and the day after, or the days after, it was as closely associated with boundless excess as with stupidity, which I hated with a passion.  But when I was in that state, the future did not exist, nor the past, only the moment and that was why I wanted to be in it so much, for my world, in all its unbearable banality, was radiant."  This comes in a part where the narrator and his brother are dealing with the fallout of their father's alcoholism, but a reader will sense a certain personal weight that goes beyond the storytelling, and remember the claim very early in the book that the narrator no longer drinks, a subject treated evenly, without obsession, allowing a recollective take on youthful abandonment of school years and garden variety embarrassment and 'pleasures.'  The deep seriousness of this writer, strong, well thought, with conviction, gives one pause over the matter, indeed.

There was the fact of my own job, the way I pay the bills, working in a wine bar, something I am not sure of just how embarrassed I should feel about it.  Did old deeply embarrassing things have a claim to my trajectory to keep me in embarrassing things, even if I might wish to reform?   To really quit would necessitate a quitting of both job and habit, not to mention necessitate major adjustments to the relationships I had with so many excellent people, though, on the other hand was a life with such an amount of solitary time some form of masochistic self-punishment I could wonder.  If I did quit, yes, maybe then I could, like Knausgaard--or a whole list of writers, Raymond Carver on it--gain the seriousness I needed to grow, a fresh honesty toward 'supposedly fun things I'll never do again.'

We all handle it differently, and big brother may enjoy his martinis just fine while little brother must be careful and stick to the eased comfort of low alcohol light reds in the safety of his own home, a boost while doing housework, more effected in his adrenal reaction and his moods, his behavior, better off simply exercising to cope with boredom and ennui.   It could be said that drinkers, in the backs of their minds, all have a bit of unease, uncertain of the reaction in the person next to him, thus all the hearty reassurances, the "I love you, man," and all the heartfelt talk of recognizing a brother which is itself excitable and which leads most often admittedly nowhere the next day, that happens in public houses.  It could be good, it could be bad;  an attitude of necessary toleration seems concurrent with social order.  The creature responds with some fascination, as if catching a glimpse of some lost wildness in the species with all its attendant preening and grooming.

"Just write, man, write," is the best advice given to any writer, and that writer, to do so, must turn, perhaps uncomfortably, to the topics that are really on his mind, those close to home.  (A fellow writer passes on a bit of wisdom toward becoming popular, which is to write something of LGBT experience, maybe falling in love with a woman who is a man, that sort of a thing, but more personal, of course.)  The writing is about taking the thoughts in one's own head, not being judgmental initially.  One truly is a journalist covering one's own search for a life, for meaning, the search, the struggle.  It might be quite meaningful to say, to write down, "today, I did yoga," if properly read., so why not?



Oh shit it was busy, busy, fucking busy, and after I changed into my shorts and put on my running shoes there sitting on the steps of the wine room I lay back and fell into a nap.  It was two when I found myself there on the floor below the air conditioner, but the good thing was that I was basically ready to just throw my courier bag over my shoulder, turn the lights off, make sure I had everything, cell phone, wallet, punch in the code on the digital alarm unit down by the front door, wedge my bike outside onto the street, lean it against a traffic light pole, lock the door, put my keys in the bag, put my helmet on, turn on the bike lights and ease my way home, fortunately not a lot distance, and most of it downhill and of course not heavy traffic, the occasional bus or cab along the section of Q Street over the bridge, then finally uphill up the cobble section of 22nd Street leading up to the Spanish Steps fountain and upstream up the little street to my comfortable pad.

But it always happened that way, how after I helped the musicians lug their equipment back down the stairs at the end of the night out to their humble cars, always partaking in some musician's stories, music information, locker room talk, learning something every time, much ground covered, and good spiritual talk, the muscles in my back and those in my legs would begin to seize up and feel like lead, so that the last part of my chore work took effort, not helped by being alone and needing good music or something to keep me company.   Yes, it was a lot of effort, to get through jazz night, jazz night in particular, as if from the burden of wearing too many hats and the room filling all at once so that the whole night would be a scramble, seating, menus, drinks, explanations, orders, arrival of the dishes, the wine orders, then the cleaning of dishes, then the entrees, and so on, the snarl of coffee orders and dessert and the dinner order for the band all happening at once as the tempo rose and rose, shit, such that by ten, really, or upon delivering the band's dinner, it was impossible not to catch your breath.


I've never been much of a joiner, never much for the unquestioning mainstream, too full of Hamlet-type questions and carefully considered and inspired poetic flights for such an easy intake.  It's not smart, but it is the way I am.  I'm not about to go join a pick up volleyball game, much as I might eventually enjoy such things, as if there were a wall, a wall called 'my life.'  I had therefore to devise many ways to preserve my sanity doing what I was doing, and I knew somehow that I had to follow things to a rightful conclusion, which basically meant that I would keep on writing, come hell or high water, until I wasn't writing anymore.

I sometimes think, and this needs space, to think about it, reflection, a lens, about those of us who one day are children and one day some form, at least, of politician.  America, being the experiment, Magna Carta, English law in its background, the principle of religious freedom, supposedly, an act which took a lot of balls and work...

A politician, in the working sense, considering how the ideal of a democracy might work... is a person who's talked to many many people.  That's it.  That's the definition.  All ye need know.  Lots of experience, of the blank sort.  The picture of Lincoln departing from Springfield, Illinois, comes to mind.  He's standing there, in a white suit?, in front of a high beamed particular house with its fence around it, and there's the whole town around him.  His life had been around people.  In a time when you couldn't avoid it, but to do it to his extent, his openness, from tavern partner, postman, surveyor, anywhere you go, reading, backward and forward, you find a Lincoln amongst people, and you, reader, given all your sophistication and doubt and cynicism, know what this writer means.

Why do I use the term politician?  What has it come to mean, anyway?  What does it mean?  What's the use, what's the secret soulful vision within that lets us function in this strange realm imposed upon us, through email and now a  prying through the news and a careful sustenance of one's own sensibilities, and perhaps a subscription to Reader Supported News, or NPR, or the BBC, or just as broad a net as you can cast, but really, importantly, based on your own sense of history, your own one, that comes from your guts, your own sense of people, human character, and that character displayed by individuals.  Really, if you put your mind to it, you can tell who is a shit and who is not, and given basic study of humanity, it seems that, by committee, as Lincoln himself might have said, hopefully, on a good day, 51% of the people will  make  a , what?  what can you even call it now, given the confusion, FOX Five will come and attack it with their whatever subterfuge crap, the people will understand, listen and do the right thing, which has no party, no cut out allegiance, certainly not to Wall Street, certainly not the Industrial Complex that a decent man Ike twitched at, they will do the right thing, eventually.

"I have seen many towns and many faces, and I have talked to many many people."  This is the poem of someone who would offer us truth out of confusion, without any agenda but basic sensible things, things involving the basic environment each, all of us, live in, all the time, from moment to moment, year to year.

"I have talked to many people,  I have met them face to face.  I've talked with them, awkwardly, of course, but we tried to get comfortable at least, lose some of the ego, and I would hope to be an example of that, 'look, here, I am with you,'  And I, the better, the broader, the more democratic, more the hick who fancies circumspection, takes all the professionals who make their money as a priest ultimately would take a confession."

But it is that vigor that that kind of person, who's sat and listened to everyone he can, who can keep it all together, keep all of us relaxed as we can, and when we're relaxed, at least we are not in war.  That is the essence of the moment and the meaning.


I would bet McGovern was a far better man than Nixon for all the people he'd come across and listened to.  I would applaud both Jack and Bobby for their instinctive immersion in a country's people and a country's problems.  The rest, the icy professionals,  stay sequestered, work with special interests, an automatic part of their personalities.

An Obama type  is meant to campaign against things like Citizens United--the most clever and insidious misnomer ever created, as it must be applied to and live in a cynical world of monetary power--and yet once elected must begin the fight to be reelected, rather than taking on a deeper moral issue.

From  Times Magazine blog essay by Karl Ove Knausgaard, "I Am Someone, Look At Me," June 10, 2014:

"This childish need to be exalted, which became uglier and more pathetic the older I grew, and which, based on what I’ve written so far, it doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to realize was nourished by shame and self-hatred, now suddenly met its opposite, for what I discovered when I began to write my first novel was that I could disappear in my writing. The self, and all the difficulties and pain associated with it, vanished. I had always disappeared when I was reading — that was almost the whole point of reading for me, to be no one for a few hours. Now it happened while I was writing. To disappear in that way, to enter a state of selflessness, is something I believe every musician, painter, actor, director and writer knows. It lies at the very base of creation. Like no other medium, literature is able to break the boundaries erected by society. It speaks with a voice influenced by all the other voices of time and literature. The paradox is that fame, which emphasizes the individual, is so closely linked to selflessness, which is the obliteration of the individual — that the desire to be seen is so closely linked to the joy of self-concealment."

This speaks volumes, to me at least, of catching a funny looking skinny creature staring back at you in a mirror;  it speaks of the liberating mode of art, a mode escaping that awkwardness of your own self and actions;  and I suppose there's also something Buddhist about it, related to the technique of meditation.  And if you let it, the observation allows an explanation of a lot of things, why you did you what you did, somewhat related to the Scandinavian attitude Knausgaard's piece makes reference to, or why you ended up as a bartender, escaping yourself for a while, often having it directly reinforced how people carry around their selfish self-based illusions, like the remodeling of a kitchen in no one ever cooks in, the dating experiences, the projects, the careers, to which, seriously, one might indeed want to say, who gives a shit...

Yes, it is a struggle, to find a way of thinking about the present situation you find yourself in as a kind of 'middle path,' to see the good in it as well as recognize the danger of it, to see the wholesomeness of wine, coming from the earth, representative of a terroir, a medicine that enhances the dining experience, while knowing the personal danger of it, to see the good of being employed around good people, while knowing the isolation that can only be treated with exercise, yoga and mediation, to see the good the raw material of the interaction for a stimulated mind, as well as how the long duties of it channel away the energies in a  way very far from the writer's idea.

And the world is cliquish, everyone falling into their camps, wishing to belong, and those with clout, like Bill Gates, funding his own vision of public education with the use of big data.  And the wise are because they know the truth of 'no self,' of the illusion that can only be the force and will of a strong self intent on conquering a corner of the world.

Labor Day out for a ride in the Park.

The long slow miles, I think of what Russell the Muscle was telling me as I rode alongside the master one quiet August evening, that is the way to build the legs, the serious and honest way, which is by putting the muscles to the task, sticking with it, making it routine as work, and then nature will take care of itself.  You even want to get out more and more, you know how good it is for you, and with the activity and the repetition of rides, the confidence grows.  On all levels.  You have the confidence to get on the bike and get to the Park, Beech Drive.  You have confidence to be able to get through traffic, to take a main street when the sun is sinking, 34th, rather than the backstreets above the Cathedral and crossing Porter.  You have confidence to take hills, to click into a big gear, finding yourself with fresh power uncoiling out of the thighs and the quadriceps.  You feel comfortable on the bike.  Loose, flexible, responsive.  You want to ride on, all night, the air cleared by a thunderstorm.

That's what you cannot forget as a writer.  You can't forget the long slow miles, the reaching in to find what you can find, and then you almost feel shameful about it, how you've not been writing, then the feeling of a pointlessness.  There's no trick to finding power and speed and direction;  you have to go out and do it, and you also have to read the things that you find are good, so that you can have confidence in another example of how it's done and what constitutes good.  But you get pulled by various duties, work sucks you in, depletes your energy and your will and your optimism, the agendas of other people, and then the discouragement comes, my first book is total shit, I'm nothing but a jerk off, I'm going to die lonely, destitute, unachieved, my stuff out in the rain, my face is ugly with seriousness, looking like a lawyer when all I do is spread mirth as a comedian then go home alone and sleep and wake in vacuum, and how many years have gone by already?

I talk to my mom on Labor Day and I find solace talking with her.  Jim Morrison is wrong:  we don't want to fuck our mothers, anymore than we want to kill our dad.  Where would you be without your protector, the kind tree of a man who was always there, always caring, even as I did many dumb things in Clinton summers in an effort to be social, whereas he was always quiet and studious and hard working an organized.  Your mom gives you love.  And there is that way that life takes, the personal chemistry of who you yourself are, all your interests, all your reactions.  Life is a matter of finding all of this out, how your wired, how to support your basic reactions to things, your perceptions.  That particular chemical signature of personality, and you find it in various ways coming from your parents, and as you grow older you are more and more able to pinpoint and recognize, as if seeing through the obscuring clutter and details of daily life to find the core, even as it  might have been staring you in the face.  And this is a process and a duty that is completely left up to you to figure out, to recognize, to move upon.  There's a good chance that other people, maybe even all of them, are bound to miss, caught up in their own lives.

You thought of jerking off, enjoying a bit of Hairy Erotica, real women, not actresses of professional pornography's inflation, tattooing, falseness, scriptedness, plastic soullessness, buff muscular people with little originality but who show up at the office, make a joke, drink a cup of coffee and go about business quite like accounting.  Vintage Danish, an art form of the Seventies, reflecting the culture of a people with a matter of fact view, that yes, people jerk off in the night when the neighbors can't see you, and be happy about it, it's good for our long-spined simian bodies and for releasing all the industrial chemicals and fear hormones that make us sick if we don't relax.  Eat cheese, drink a beer, walk down a street, have sex, it's all normal.  We also like to use this as a lever of ridicule upon our fellows, the cruelty of imposing upon a natural process no odder than a bird building a nest or a toad's hop.  And that jerking off had nothing to do with your mother.  It may have had something to do with finding a look in a woman, somehow coming from a photographic image on a computer that conveys a particular look of acceptance, one aimed closely at your own persona, maybe even a look of admiration.  I see in one the look I found on a Czech woman years ago, her understanding of me as a writer, making love to me, even taking me down one summer day to L Street to have my four wisdom teeth yanked, for which I, a gagger, had to put under.  I woke, she took me back, we made love to ease the pain, and I told her my father had called, betraying his emotion when he wished me, assuringly, well, his baby boy.  How sweet, how moving, how transcendent of him.  As if to say, "I know what you go through, and I know it's not easy, and I know America is not the same place of opportunity is was for me, somehow, but all of that hard to comprehend."  What made the animal aroused was the woman's face, the look, the sweet soft "I get you, what you are about," and nothing can replace that, and if you don't have a lot to show for yourself, this vote of confidence means quite a lot.  She lowered herself upon me and I felt at last amongst kinfolk.  The sense that we could bounce up out of bed and then go visit with my dad in the Root Glen gardens.

My mother is a purely literary person.  She needs no accolade, no great recognition.  Her psychic life is built upon the dues a literary person pays for the life of the mind in books.  She has too many books, a clutter of newsprint, a protective wish to put aside the harping mail, the advertisements, the complications of officious insurance offices and bills.  She, like I, can be truly shaken by turning on the TV, or checking her email and finding Nancy Pelosi addressing her directly with some strong admonishment, truly upsetting a strong capable woman in her mid-seventies who has survived a fair amount of shit.

Her father's life was channeled away, the oldest son enlisted in the family business of diners, a talented writer, and when he had a family rebelled in a way I cannot imagine but which involved some ugly things my mother as a child witnessed, and I have empathy for all involved.  How it hurts, how it truly hurts for some of us not to have a literary life of some sort, to have thoughts always have stuck in your craw even as you want to move them along, capture them in some way.  A chef running a business is not one with a lot of time for literary things, even as the stories pile like the flooding river (in a Raymond Carver story I once read about the slow guy who starts a fish farm in big barrels, Dummy, gurgling with unknown emotion as he looks down into them.)  I saw the tail end of his life, and he was proud to have a house and take care of things, and the same word-agile bloodtype ran in his veins.  And there were things I knew about myself I found in him, the same wild streak enjoyed in company, and one time when I mumbled to him, on a visit, underneath the awning the flagstones, how I felt stupid about my haircut, he said softly and deeply, unexpected out of a gruff man who could look at you very directly and ask "what are you doing with your life, get a job," he said "we all feel that way somedays."

The result of which, that childhood, let her make a break, then get caught, and then, to save her own life, having saved it in one way by finding a place away from the traps her father had fallen into, break free, and there were first the notebooks, the small stenographer ones in her neat handwriting, piles of them, working something out, the long slow miles.  Everything about her life has been literary, her special karma to fall into the one or two classes taught by Ted Hughes at UMass, 1959, Romantic Poetry, for her to marry my dad, but particularly in her own career when midway through life she found a way to be a literary intellectual in matters of literacy.  In that context, then I understand why she came a little bit early to Amherst when I was going through my graduation throes.

She wrote the long slow literary miles without giving up hope, and lined it all up, and wrote a great book.  A book, a life which reinforces me, so that I keep up with the belief against a good deal of hope, such that I recognize why I like to read, how I like to read, what I like to read, and inverse about then what comes out in written form.  And that can all be daunting when you are trying to get by.

Knowing yourself, that makes it a whole lot easier to understand where your own particular chemistry leads you as far the people who might make up your own personal life.  Why pound your head against a wall, attempting to make a literary person out one who refuses to be such a thing.  Close, maybe, but different enough, or not without a strong sense of the ancestral background.  And even if you think for years how you fucked it up, maybe you didn't.  I like to listen to Shane MacGowan singing, I think of the Pogues when I play guitar a good part of the time, and that's just who I am, as far as chemistry allows.