The old blood type kicks in when I go out at night.  The old blood informs me going out as a cooperative effort, a hunt.  I watch people.  I wait for something to happen.  The people talk to each other as they drink beer.  On the sidelines, I'm left out.  That's okay.  There's the communal feast, sure.  But still, one is waiting for the hunt to happen, for an animal to spring out, then for the chase.  I size up people in terms of being immediately helpful to that end.  Your bartender, of course, who has control over the technology of the evening.  The big friendly Nigerian American guy named Silas at the door, he'll come in handy.  But the crowd is one of self-focussed individuals, no pause taken to reflect.  They live in a city and tolerate it quite well, thus what they drink (cocktails and beer) and the nature of their attention.  They have moved on from the hunt, making a better way of making a living, agreeing with the empire, knowing the latest modes of fitting in, having figured out Uber whereas I will end up walking home on a cold night with my Ben's chili burger sub tucked under my arm in a brown paper bag, wrapped safely with foil, many blocks, I don't know why except out of some animal pride or sense of the need for the walk, the exercise, a sense of grounded location.

Pretty young people spill out of Brixton as I make my way home from seeing Sturgill Simpson at the 9:30 club.  There are cabs on U Street.  After the show, my friends departing, the night is mainly just standing around with a glass of pinot noir in hand at Satellite, the crowd young and well appointed, hair cuts, glasses, shirts and sweaters, evening wear almost.  I watch a show on the television above the bar about the Duran Leonard matches and the only young lady I speak with is the bartender.  Elsewhere, I'll try some other place next time.

I get home and the native dumbness of the hunter returns as he eats the night's kill in its modern wrappings of dough, American cheese, mayo otherwise avoided for health reasons.  If there were energy left a native curiosity would raise itself, poking curiously through something, maybe even a book, or a guitar, not unlike a higher crow, what's this about, what does it tell me, there's something familiar here and satisfying.

The chase, the hunt, the communal effort has been co-opted.  I falsely see in my blood's imagination a hunt and medicate myself with wine, attempting to belong, a mimic of adrenal response that takes me over without asking or telling, such that secretly, or not, I get giddy or silly or morose.  And I realize perhaps that my professional reaction, to be a hunter bartender leading the evening's chase is not an accurate way of looking at things.  I'm being used.  Perhaps it's like the samurai say to each other at the end of Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, 'the farmers always win,' and there they are, the farmers, singing happily in springtime as the warrior protector is buried, their life going onward.

It had been a long week at work, the grind of closing too late, and I felt tentative and in a bad mood.  I had things to mull over with my therapist, Dr. H.:

I don't know, Doctor, it's like I've self-deprecated myself into this strange existence.  That put-down voice is inside my head...

The data collectors, the techies, have all this self-confidence from the world they've created to their specs.  That doesn't make them good or really anything that they do good, in any sense of the term.  Look at that Times article about the college girl and her mentor at Stanford... They are as blank of morals as their work is.

And I'm this poor Cinderella guy, living with the selfish step sisters...  And I take put-downs too seriously...  I wake up remembering an episode...  I dunno, maybe the wine that gets me through the end of the night brings me down the next day, such that I wake up replaying in my mind stuff from years ago.   Like, 'she's come to the dining hall after I brought her flowers the last time, and she's offering an olive branch,' but I was negative and self-defeating... didn't live in the moment, didn't express my values.  Hindsight...  I'm sure she had a full list of grievances about me too, a whole list, and that's why she was obliged to be the way she was, because those mistakes were a disappointment to her and she had to get them out of her system...  I don't blame her at all.

And that sense of screwing up all my chances with the beautiful princess and being haunted by that doesn't help my feelings of self-worth.

End of the week I can barely go get a haircut.  Draining to have to deal with people, like it's too complicated, or I'm so...  I don't know what... feeling a sense of, I dunno, futility, I guess.  Like it's all just futile.  Everything you do, can never be enough, so why not just get it over with, quit everything, find another way...  change all your assumptions, change...  It's like going out at my age;  what's the point?  I'm a nice guy, I talk to strangers, I'll make friends with the bar people, but clearly I don't fit in, wherever I go.

No, I don't need any put down.  I got enough poor stuff going on in my own mind.  Fragile, I guess.  So vulnerable you don't even want to know...  Life's hard, man.  Does anyone show mercy?  Does anyone take pity, without making it seem like a great affront to the whole system of humanity, a coddling of weaklings...  And all along you sense this core reality of incredible illogical kindness toward everyone and everything, this poor Christian thing inside of you...  And maybe that's what Jesus is talking about like when he says The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head...

And maybe Jesus was this incredibly nice guy, good sense of humor, kind of like a really good bartender...  Or else the disciples would have gotten mortally bored, fed up with him... He had to keep their attention, their friendship going; 'c'mon, guys, let's go into town, see what's up...'  You can almost hear a working class carpenter's sense of humor, 'we got bigger fish to catch,' or 'render unto Caesar.'  Lincoln didn't speak in the deep ponderous baritone the early talking movies show, but rather he had a sort of higher register to it, which lent itself to his sense of humor...  He wasn't some talking statue of perfect morality;  nor was old Jesus.



My phone vibrated.  And here's another email from some marketer, some website I did some Christmas shopping on and now the great computer in the sky pokes me, 'hey...'   When I was expecting, instinctively, human contact, a voice that could care, or simply say hi, maybe even a conversation.  I find it kind of jarring sometimes...

Then I go off to work and hear about everyone else's problems...  They never ask, how are you...  I told a couple who came in Sunday with their little daughter, I've known them for a while, 'yeah, I'm seeing a therapist;  I hear everyone's problems and then I go home and have no one to talk to but the History Channel...' and the guy says, 'it's a zero sum game.'  Yes, meaning that what goes in has to come out somewhere.

But you know, maybe what the Buddha thought is true.  After a while, you sort of lose yourself.  Everyone has problems, cancers, surgeries, stuff...  The problems of another, that line sort of blurs, becomes a sort of communal thing.  And that sort of spills out onto the way I approach say going out, or even going out into the world.  It's not about, like, happiness, or trying to make the most possible fun out of a night.  How can you?  There's suffering somewhere, maybe nearby...



Yes, Doctor, on one side, the good side, there is love from Corinthians, Buddha, Jesus, and on the other side there are the data harvesters, who are trying to bend us to the data they see of us, as if the data were all of us...  They take and sell the all information there is about us.  But behind all that, and for more important, is the fact that we love, and what we love, our only true reality...  All of them get rich quick with some great way to spy on us, to make us insignificant, to make our humanity into numbers...  And given their fascination with numbers they make the things that are complicated and deeper and harder to say and more from the soul than one's shopping habits less significant, less valuable, more the lone voice in a sea rather than a voice representative of all people, like in the way Nelson Mandela was.




Maybe the whole thing with the princess transpired the way it did was because of my loyalty to my mom.  I mean, Hamlet has a loyalty... He certainly hasn't forgotten his mum, and he's trying to save her, as much as anything else...  And I think of my sweet humble intelligent mom who goes through her own bouts of moody things and anxiety and discomfort, and I know myself all those things, now that I'm old enough to know, like, how scary, profoundly, life can be.  A loyalty to your mom is a loyalty to her way of life, her sweetness, her Andrew Wyeth painting quality...  poor tender brave strong thing, struggling on, and she got a Ph.D later in life, figured out a way to survive...  I would have participated in that anyway...  Did it get in the way of other things?  I don't know, hard to say...

Doing yoga you reach down into the tenderest parts of the self, and that's why it puts you back on even keel...  It can hurt to look down into the tenderest parts of yourself, your weakness,  your shyness, your vulnerability, your nakedness...  And maybe that's how you feel deep down when you meet someone you really like, like this great vulnerability comes out of you, like a flower to show another, hey, I'm really here for you, this is me, who I am...  Being vulnerable, yeah, you get hurt, and then you act stupidly, or insecurely...

And there is that yoga ring to Jesus, like when he says take this, this is my body, about the bread, and that this wine is my blood...

You get through the work week and you've done things and you've gotten out of touch with that simple vulnerable creature.  You don't know what to do with him.  You've disappointed him.   It takes bravery to bare him before other people.  How could we not have this side to us, the very fact that we have a behind part, a back of the head, a back, that defines us as vulnerable...  I guess gay men might tend to be more in touch with that vulnerability...

I guess there are parts of being a bartender that are in touch, or in keeping, with the Yoga Buddha Jesus you, but it's hard sometimes.  Maybe the work discourages you sometimes....  But it's not inherently bad work, I mean, to show a kind of serving kindness to people who come...

I guess you get afraid of that vulnerable thing inside you, like it's not going to protect you or help you fit in with the world and the powers that be...  Stands to reason, fear...  But then you're no longer willing to be a student of life, because to be a student takes a lot of vulnerability and openness and trying things out...

Maybe it's that scary thing, vulnerability, that we are afraid of, that we malign.  The ability, which includes the ability to be depressed, maybe thats the truer self that is our salvation.  But maybe it's hard to go through, being vulnerable, being that geek we're afraid of being... It is a higher state.  It just doesn't appear on the radar of... like, how to operate in society and look happy and all...

Who else but an artist would see The Taming of the Shrew?  Who else but a stupid stuttering artist would write such a thing?


For whatever reason I find these entries taken over by sketches of a dialog between a writer and his therapist.  Philip Roth hit on the formula, originally, in Portnoy's Complaint, after a good steeping in therapy.  I suppose it's kind of an underlying template behind much of the writing attempt through history, its history...  And here in the safe confines with the therapist, the writer finds a dialog and thus feels the need to capture the verbal quality of it, which might not seem immediately to be the best way to write, something the reader must understand about it.  Hopefully the writer reaches a sort of hypnotic mode in which the voice can come out.  Maybe similar to how Huck Finn's voice came out, or how Kerouac opened up, or Melville, with poetic spontaneous (though carefully woodshedded) prose.

To the reader I must apologize over the personal nature.  This writer finds this format a good a sketchpad as any, readily accessible out on the roads of life.  I've long had the sense that it eases one's aches and pains to write, that one needs to get stuff written down, that it helps to have a record to look back at.  And we all can sense that the process involves with grappling with personal stuff, not in a way to be obsessive, but as a way to cure and work on things and move on as best one can.

Did one fall into various traps because of the overly literary mode of the brain, which then necessitates further entrapment in the convoluted mind?  Shakespeare sketches out Hamlet, a person who thinks too much, who is permeable to all sorts of information, but who maybe is not so good on action?  Or, looking at it another way, maybe the thoughts of a depressive like Lincoln are in a long run more justly conceived and accurate, whatever that might mean...

One takes his pains to the office and sits in the chair and tries to talk, to speak of things, wondering why things are so.  What causes?  What underlying habit of looking at things is worth realizing as a pattern, so that he can maybe change or control, or draw some courage and benefit from?   It's a cloudy process, into which light sometimes shines, and sometimes like the sun.

We are all innocent creatures, to the large part (I mean, putting aside all of history and current killings and wars and such), not to be blamed so much for the patterns we fall into, because they come about. Each individual carries standards of how to be treated, and one individual wanted things differently than the way your intuition or foolish head presented them.  Maybe to that individual, your way of proceeding in matters revealed certain flaws or shortcomings, and a storm blows up, hard to control.

Doctor, I had this dream.  I go back there, to college, some sort of summer reunion sort of a thing.  And I see her, and I meet her, and we talk, and we talk amicably.  Instantly.  Getting along.  Understanding each other.   There's not the usual tit for tat domino effect thing, instead, there is peace.  We have a nice time, we're friends again, and all the silliness is beside, gone us.  And the best thing, as we take a walk, through the wild preserve saved by the college that stretches away to the south into the rolling hills, into the grassland, and birds come, like ruffed grouse or something, flying in and picking through the grass, they too, one young, one older, mature, and the birds are almost friendly, willing to communicate in their own way with their human neighbors....  And she tells me that she spent summers on a farm in, I dunno, western New York or Pennsylvania, camp and she knows birds quite well, a naturalist...  She knows what kind of bird these are.  We finally have this peace, this, I dunno, love, this understanding, totally different, no more war, just totally awesome...  And this great ecological space opens up away from the campus back on the hill where people can walk and have these deep conversations just like the ones I always wanted to have with her.  And you can look back at the college and it truly looks like this brick Greek temple to learning, philosophy, reading, fairness...

Finally, peace, love, the meaning of love...  There's a little bump, my slight awkwardness picking up someone's newborn boy, you know, how you're supposed to support the baby's head, which I know but do a little clumsily, I guess I got a little cocky, but we're in touch, we're talking, the way we always should have...  I could almost tear up at the beauty of it...

And then of course you wake up and it's time to go to work.

"Maybe the dream shows that you're making your own inner peace with it."

There were all these robins up in the tree branches when I walked up my street this morning, a whole flock of them.  And there was always a bird in motion while some stayed still, incredibly even... Maybe there's something ecological or environmental about the dream, like we end up sharing the same values deep down, inexpressible, natural...

"Well, you can look up the image of birds in the meaning of dreams.  But you say there's not the usual contention in the dream.  This is a new thing?"

I have these dreams periodically, in which she shows up.  I'd say gradually they've gotten more developed as far as the achievement of peace and happiness between us.  Like a slow progression.  Often times they end when the good thing is just starting.  In this one I seemed to walk further into it, having a solid way to reach her if she goes away....  And like we are talking it all over and forgiving each other and just getting on with enjoying the present....

In previous installments, I get there, but she's nowhere to be seen, or we see each other but don't talk, maybe get close to talking, but I let the chance slip away.  Something like that.  The whole landscape there, but not happening....

"I know what I said to you earlier, I forget exactly, about it had an impact on you."

Yes, when you said she was treating me like I was some sort of low-life or something.  That did, yes. That was the first time I could see that side of it really.




I walked home peacefully afterward, back up through Dupont Circle, past the bums.  Maybe I felt less pained.  I recalled the different themes of the session.

We'd talked about me and my book.  "Sounds like you tend to put up a road block when you have a chance to share your work.  Either you're self-deprecating, or you shut down."

Yeah, but it's like Emily Dickinson, the admiring bog...  That's not who you write for if it's going to be any good.  And it has to be personal, too, not just written for the style or the tastes or the wants of the times you live in.  Later on it becomes literature.

"But the woman mentioned your book (from reading the article about you)..."

Well, next time.  Build a relationship.  I don't want to be that guy 'here's my book' to every girl who comes in...

"Well, there's a happy medium in between, and you could say, a standard answer, 'well, it's out there on Amazon,' rather than giving away free copies, 'and if you get a chance to read it, I'd be curious about what you think, over a glass of wine.'  Not everyone is going to like it.  Not everyone likes me."

Really, I find that hard to believe.

"No, some clients just don't like me and they don't come back."

Oh.  Yes, you're a real back stabber.  Machiavelli.  Such a bitch.

One thing that got me through the week was this PBS thing on Shakespeare, actors talking about the plays, and I'd never read The Taming of the Shrew.  But it's been something we've been watching in different forms, like Spencer and Hepburn, all along.  Yeah, it was his first, a comedy, but you know, serious...

I thought for a moment...  I...  Maybe there's this voice somewhere, I'll locate it in the general realm of big brother, that says, 'don't be an asshole.'  Don't be an asshole for sharing, or for even writing, or for the whole stupid system you've got going, having never grown up...

"Who is being the asshole here?"

Yes, we all accuse others of our own worst faults.



I feel a bit like Lincoln, as I imagine him, as I walk home.  (Sad, you know, but in a strange way, complex...)  Having a sort of steady hurt upstairs that never really goes away.  Knowing that 'woe unto the world because of offenses' on a deep level, how people on earth squabble, each, both sides, thinking they 'are doing God's will.'  And here's Lincoln, the poet philosopher, looking in curiously over this general pervasive situation, like vain McClellan who doesn't move and do the thing when he needs to, or the self-centered guys who end up in his cabinet, talents playing off each other in Lincoln's wise set-up, because that's just how people are, maybe particularly the talented.  How could you not avoid a war with so much economic stuff tied into the issue, as moral a one as you'd like to see it, indeed it is a moral issue, but...  The economic stuff just being the practical of the world.  People should love each other, yes, on a moral level, that's just the right thing, but there are, we can't forget them,  practical issues, careers, economic security, forward motion, status, social mobility...  Things of human pride, not for bad reasons.  Love, like the birds of the environment, like the honey bee, well, that stuff gets stepped upon, there being crude oil to deliver...

And you can say, I'm innocent, I'm not a bad person, but you too are involved in the struggle for survival.

I recalled more, the session's earlier conversation, putting Dupont Circle and Connecticut Avenue  behind me, turning past the clothing store.

So what do I have to lose, saying to people who seem interested in the overall conversation about literary matters and mental health and writing, here's my book.  I've already been ostracized, more or less.  I already live like a rat, surviving, making a living in the bar, night shifts.  And there never seems any value in a literary work this day and age, and if it had any people would go on the internet and pirate it, like my boss does with his Kindle.  There was a piece in the Book Review, Weiseltier, about Google and stuff...  The artist no longer receives any compensation...


I got home, put some rice in the cooker, thought about taking a gentle nap before work.  Birds had never appeared in any of these dreams in which I sorrowfully encounter her hoping for the best and some form of redemption, and going on the Google search Dream Moods I read they are a positive sign.  Liberation.  Joy.  Harmony.  A weight lifted off the shoulders.

Love going wrong, it proved a consistent theme for Shakespeare, a place he could really break out his tool kit and craft with ease, at times hidden, but always close to the center, ready to be interpreted as the main part of any thing, Hamlet, The Winters Tale, Lear, perhaps because it is, if we were to admit it to ourselves, our own central theme.  The reason we watch a film, say, The Sound of Music, whatever.  We want, we need a mirror held up to the way we fall in love and continue to love, because that's what we want, what we all want, deep down, and sometimes we feel prevented from getting to that love we want, for whatever reason, practical matters, dumb choices...

I took a nap, and went to work, spending much of the night dodging my burly coworkers behind the bar as we struggled to serve wine and food, clear tables, wash glasses, get all the people who show up quite unpredictably sat at a clean table as a gypsy swing trio played on, joined later on by a violinist whom I brought a bottle of sparkling water to, remembering him from before.



But it's nice, at least, I think, as I take my mind out for its morning walk to sniff around and do its dog things here and there, to think that I share some values with people.   Maybe I principally locate such now in the form of my kind young woman PhD. therapist who does yoga, apart from its native sources, some living, some not.

And I had the sense of myself being like a sort of modern Huckleberry Finn navigating the big river of life, my life apart from that of the folks up on dry land with their certain certainties, their towns, their slaves and slave owners....  And within I had my own sort of haphazard navigation system, an innocent, sort of, young fellow with thoughts on his mind bestowed upon him by good education, but, being liberal artsy, not necessarily of much real value in a world of hard work and the legality of fine print and what entities can get away with if they have a lot of money.

Twain's wife, being proper, could not always allow her husband's earthy observational modes, as if they were puerile or indecent, not for polite society, crass.  Tame and forward thinking as the passages she edited out might be today.

That's why I write of this tiny postage stamp of life, a writer seeing a  therapist.  All the voices of Shakespeare, matured yet or not, are within us.  To write them out so that those voices might be satisfied with having their place, their moment to be heard, is a healthy psychological exercise, a necessary one for the well being of the person, the individual, the entire species.  And that's why I do not get those who make literary enterprises exclusive, to be had, entertained, only if one is of a worthy elite saying things the proper way.  The work is there for all to do, and if not do, share in, thus the popularity of The Beatles.  Never have I been one for the literary snobs who make a living putting other people down, for lacking poetic grace or what have you...  Larkin wasn't a snob.  In England, that most literary of places (besides Ireland), there are pubs.  Where people talk.

It's like those people with the nice Porsche, sleek, expensive, and they'll look down on you because you don't have more than a bicycle, and to them it's like you don't even belong to society, part of the great  'unwashed masses.'  They claim the big house and the self-centered woman, and this says something about them.   If you really knew writing, were intimate with its process, you would know it's far more like riding a bicycle, in the wind and the rain, a humbling experience, a thing of inner rhythms you're compelled to repeat in a circle, another circle.  To write is much like having to tend bar for a long time, and Joyce captured this.  It's a lot of standing around listening to people talk and ramble on and puff and strut, to finally get to a mode in which they share something personal, like impending major surgery.  Who will the mighty have to tell, besides family, but their fools.  And maybe, anyway, it is the least of these, the ones who only have a bicycle, who are greater in the eyes of the Almighty or That Which Is, and anyway they are better for the environment such as it is these days...  Jesus spoke in parables, and he was the best writer of all.

I mean, on the other hand, sure, I love a good educator...  Nothing wrong with a discerning mind explicating literature.

Yes, maybe one day it will be us, Lear out on the heath with his wise fool...




But as far as the dream goes, the one of peace and birds, of psychological liberation, maybe there comes an admission of who you are.  Face it.  I'm not the guy with the Porsche.  I'm the guy with the bicycle.  I am of the temporarily comfortable poor.  I barely provide for myself, at least in comparison.  What would I do, what could I do, to support a family.  I've always been a seeker, a searcher, a person prone to spiritual explorations that to another would be a pure waste of time.  It's an embarrassing spot to be in.  To make the claim that 'things didn't work out' by one set of terms allows for other sets of terms.  And anyway, you try to move on, best you can.

There are millions of people like me, writing away uselessly in this format, and one makes no pretenses.  Obscurity.  Insignificance.   Of no commercial value whatsoever.   An open notepad, a convenient way to preserve and record thoughts that run through a particular mind, an outpost of consciousness.  So admit who you are, not in a great spot, but then who is.  You do your yoga, eat appropriately, enjoy wine for its antioxidant qualities, stay healthy, read a book that you find interesting.  What to do for professional development, I really don't know.  I tend bar, and get by, in many ways, I suppose, a let-down perhaps, given the chances and opportunities I was given but did not take up.

Might as well be mowing lawns, though at least I'm handy as a barman, a good chatter, a sort of indefinable job description, just that well, he seems to belong there, or he's that guy there, you know, with the wine...  And not like I'm going to receive any great commission...  though I do believe in things like the WPA, the good of providing the dignity of suitable work for those society no longer pays.

Foxes have holes; artists bare the soul.  Maybe that's what he meant when he said he had nowhere to lay his head.

"It doesn't come free," Ethan Hawke is saying, on Charlie Rose.  He is speaking of actors he's seen, Robin Williams, one moment on camera in action, a comic jag, then off camera over by the refreshment table  by himself, draw into himself, solitary.  He speaks of the seriousness of Philip Seymour Hoffman.  "It doesn't come free."  There is the brightness, followed by the depression normal to creative people.  Hawke speaks of finding balance, writing about it, the creativity of acting, the return to normal life not so neat and clean, so clear.

Hemingway's early romp, the In Our Time story collection, it's midsection, the story of My Old Man, the kid whose father is a jockey at Longchamps, brilliance, fame or notoriety, wisdom, then death on the track...

He lay on his side, his head cupped in the palm of his left hand on a pillow.  He felt a sensation, that of the motion, the steady roll of the earth in space.  A distinct feeling, one almost akin to flying or swimming in a moving current.  The motion had a distant silent hum to it.  Invisible ethereal particles flew past his own form, an intangible mineral atomic wind.  How could much be achieved in action?  The matter would be more about thinking, achieving a perspective.  Through which then one could make a small appropriate action.  The fault was in the thought that there should be action beyond attending to basic matters of food and shelter.  He wasn't really for wine, but nor was he against it.  It's not what goes in, but what comes out of a man that defiles.   But yes, a fair amount of his current practice was unnecessary.

Hemingway was the shyest person you'd ever meet.  It took strong women sensitive to his talents to advance him and protect him.  How to get a story out of him?  That he took care of, in his own way, just through addressing basic fears, child support, death, growing up into a responsible adult, one after another, his subconscious going through a checklist.

Action for Hemingway, despite the image making and the PR that would come later, was simple and mindful as an activity, like watching a fire burn, squeezing orange peels into it to see the colors of the flame change.  The bluster about war and safari and big fish came as later accidents of a man bored, losing some of the vitality of his philosophy in the face of life's complications, if one could put aside his physical restlessness, his need for movement, nature, hands on rods and guns, boats, horses...

Action is the chimera, the illusion...

Facing north as he lay on his side the world seemed to continue its drifting, northward it seemed, as if one was on a boat headed toward a far horizon, speeding very fast or was it going very slow and steadily.  And then he found calm, in this perspective.  Such that he too was shy and too gentle, vulnerable in the way a child would not dare to be, too much of a kind of idiot.  Far out from the world where ego and bluster and prideful actions where such things are counted as counting.  He thought of Lincoln's famous dream of being on the prow of a ship, for indeed the man had achieved some perspective in life to know that it all was moving, that all was relative.  Reassuring somehow.  Nothing needed be done except ending the war, the bloodshed, along with legal equality, along with putting things back into place.  A need for silence after the great statement of the world reacting so violently and thoroughly to an incremental measure of change.

For every action, an equal and opposite reaction, but how could one know how powerful or mighty the initial action might be, as all things are relative as far as perspective, thereby to gauge what might follow.  Best to sit calmly after rocking the boat so, as it were.  Hope fondly, pray fervently.

Yes, it must have been interesting to be there in the rented room in Paris where Hemingway worked, squeezing orange peels into the fireplace to see the reaction.

And so it is that the most revolutionary things, when you stop to think and see them then as such, are, like sayings of Jesus, very simple and ordinary almost.  Happy are the meek and the mournful and the poor with time on their hands and not enough opportunity to be engaged in profitable activities as they are put in a position in which they must think philosophically, maybe even write down a few things for the sake of clarity, as an exercise in mental health.  Because all you have in the end is that you're stuck in your own perspective, in your own head, so that you will, in turn, realize the great relativity of perspective and of how everything is in motion.

So why get worked up about anything...  All you are, can be, is a friend to the human species and see its presence in others and perhaps even in plants and trees and maybe even inanimate objects (as conventionally viewed) alive in mineral and atomic life just as we are but with different karma.



Is it that you have to learn, through long measure, how to ignore people?   Is that what Lincoln learned in his baths of public opinion...

To properly be a bartender you have to be philosophical.   In a world bursting at the glowing screens of information, what can one know but a way of looking at things.  And as far as wine goes, I operate by knowing I know very little.  If I'd claim differently, expose me as a fraud.  Go read Eric Asimov's Wine School column.  I frame things simply.  A human being rises up, an expression of himself, with an experience or a humble dish of food in front of him, and the wine rises out of the earth to meet him.   Put on an even plane, there can be harmony.   Take a bite of salmon tartar, or a mushroom sautéed in herbs, and take a sip of wine thy hostess has provided you.  Slice into a good steak with a hint of lemon or thyme to cut the muskiness, take another sip.  What happens, take note, with the combination of taste and the tactile experience.  It's going to taste pretty good, and this is our bodies telling us something, leaving us with the sense of appropriateness, the occasion, the wine, the dish.  We're employing the same senses the more sensitive sex uses to select a mate of complementary immune system.  This is how a chef works, comparing and contrasting.  This is how the ancients came up with good medicine.  Rosemary, it turns out, is good for our hide.  As my botanist father observed of my making green tea, it's all like a tincture.

I've been lucky to stumble upon some amazing wines.  I'm thinking of a purity of expression, the crazy pure grapefruit note of the famous Pur Sang Pouilly Fumé, or the pineapple note of the famous Chablis Kermit Lynch the importer writes about.    There is no manipulation, no note of oak or overdone fruitiness, no vanilla, no mocha.  If oak was used, there's an appropriateness to not interfere with that fruit note that the vine and the earth provided when tended by the good vigneron who lives in some harmony with nature and a growing season and the earth he or she tends.

How about the reassuring dry cherry and dark fruit campfire in a decent Bordeaux, warming the leather, the rocks underneath and the surrounding cedar and pine pitch?  How about the warm picnic by the juniper and rosemary bushes, a bee buzzing its way through flowers, offered by a Mourvedre from the Languedoc, a wine made of that tricky dark thick-skinned varietal?  A good wine reminds one of the purity of sound of a seasoned musical instrument, each a shard from the original Big Bang.

Some days you want a wine redolent with garrigue, and other days you want a mud puddle in a rainstorm, reeds to hide in.  Some champagnes, I'm told, are appropriate for a cabin in the forest as fall comes, and some are best with summer days.  As for honoring the learning process, find an importer you like, whose ethos you trust, and travel somewhere new.  And after it all, you might want to settle down and just enjoy a good Pinot Noir.  It would be nice if it were a Clos Des Mouches, from a stonewall enclosed vineyard which bugs visit happily, a most refined and filtered kind of water, with strawberry essence perhaps.  The grape is so sensitive that one would gather that if there were a Chinese restaurant down the road, the resulting wine would have hints of soy sauce and Szechuan spice.  Pinot Noir can even tell you what you are thinking sometimes.  Perhaps the grapes on the vine go through the same kind of creativity that we do, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, unpredictable, yet steady over the growing season.  And along with their neighbors from Beaujolais, as we draw closer to gastronomic capital of Lyon, they are generally low in alcohol, twelve percent typically, and agreeable with a wide variety of foods.

But also remember, who is drinking this wine?  I am of the opinion that certain wines are more appropriate to certain people given their basic body chemistry, blood type for instance.  And I'll speak more specifically about having the type O blood of the Universal Donor.  White wine, and certainly champagne, are too acidic.  Wines high in alcohol, which may seem heady and pleasant, can wear corrosively at the pipes, in addition to causing one to say foolish things and depressions the next day.  Now if you have Type A blood, you can do fine with white wine, and after all, you're descended from wise farmers tending the land, as opposed to the wilder hunter gatherer remnant of humanity, the Type O, whom one might reasonably take pity upon.  Type B, descendent of Mongol Hordes, forget it, you can drink and eat anything, shrewdly adapting anywhere, even a city.  AB, I haven't gotten that far to say much.

The body has its sensitivity, and of course it's best to not ignore the feedback it gives you.  So yes, basic rules that must meet the basic rules of cooking and wine pairing.  I might like to enjoy things marinated in vinegar and a pleasant rosé from Provence where they don't cook in the heat of summer, a red wouldn't do, but I have to limit myself, sticking to more caveman offerings.  That's just the way it is.






The motor was revved at good rate all through the week, and by the end of the fourth night the busiest of all, there was too much adrenaline in the system to go to bed.  That's just the way it is.  I got out the guitar and began to learn a Sam Smith song, Stay With Me, as it grew light out.  I wanted to write, but could not face a previous entry's passage without wincing, in the way one winces at a sink full full of dirty dishes, the overly personal stuff of life.

This week I reflect on a Ted Hughes poem from Birthday Letters.  The story of it is of finding a fox cub up for sale or adoption, and being a country lad of course he imagines the path presented, of bringing the fox cub home to his new wife.  In the end he doesn't, and the line at the poem's end is "the marriage had failed."  Leading one to ponder of his own similar failings, to be the good animal husbander.  One's own inherent wildness, the proclivity to write as a way of coming to terms with adrenaline and issues...  The difficulty of fitting in with the modern world's concrete rhythms and rules...

Failure as a husband in a marriage, how so?  For being a writer, for entertaining the wild thought?  Or for not following through, for not bringing the cub and its stink of fur home for safekeeping?  Is it something a writer should simply admit, for being who he is, not a good provider and protector, etc., etc.  A failure of his moods and mind inherent in his way of thinking too much?  The failure to settle down and do anything productive or predictable as he pursues...  The failure to play by the script, the failure to find satisfaction...  The knowledge of his own awkwardness, his own craziness, his middle of the night hours, his lack of earthly accomplishment...  His tentativeness and nervousness, excitability toward the things he encounters...  Who's the better husband, Hamlet, the poet, who drives poor Ophelia crazy, or Claudius the usurper?