Well, doc, there's always that one last Falstaff in the room, a person you have affection for, a mutual loyalty.  Okay, I'll have a drink.  These things happen at those gates where information is exchanged in public.  And maybe I needed to nurse the end of a busy wine night into the music and the Beaujolais, then go home and play Van Morrison's "Stranded" on the guitar.

But then there are restaurant impossible computer last-party kitchen-closing dreams, 'where the fuck is this new part of the menu on the screen,' and the kitchen is already closed, and you're trying to put this last rush of jazz night together, and you can't do it. and then you finally almost got it then accidentally erase it.   Then waking around two, ugh, no real time to work on the chakras and the prana...

And I think of Chekhov's long story, My Life, where this guy is an unemployable bum and his aged father strikes him hard with his old muscles for screwing up one more (final) job situation.  And how can I ever trust my own judgment when I missed the obvious gestures of peace from the girl I loved and should have married back in college but I was so busy with my own gloom and my own sort of bad student literary path, or some sort of ego thing...

And I even got cross with my lovely old mom about computer passwords on such on the way to work...  Yes, it's good to be through a real week of feeling very low.  Maybe it was all that yoga, trying to unblock, that did it.  Maybe one of my lower chakras has been messed up ever since then..

And I want to write her, you know, like, a letter to fully apologize to her and her friend, to explain, to say, well, at least I'm in therapy...  Sorry about the whole thing, my misreading things, my recalcitrant egotistical stupidity, my sado-masochism, my unfriendliness, my lack of male grace, my...  lack of humor and kindness and compassion, and I'm the one who ended up suffering so much because of it all, stupid kid...

How could I, how can I, not repeatedly cringe about the whole thing.  And that being the basis for all my decisions henceforth, the final gloomy Beethoven writer thing, to seal my fate of not making decisions, thinking I could beat the system you cannot beat...

Well, maybe if I listen to Pema Chodron talking about compassion and tonglen practice, maybe...  I'll get to a better place than I've been in the last 25....  Breath in the hot heavy air of your own suffering, which is everyone else's suffering, and then, and then, Ode to Joy...



But you get through the week, whatever, it's always there, the colossal failure, the breach in life...  I don't know...  It must mean something.  Something Buddhist.  Maybe some sort of drama of the Universe, or some lesson about ego and projecting your own ego, which is a false thing, upon a situation, thus not being able to see it as it is.  Maybe the ache is also some cry of an ego trying to dominate the true Self, tell it a story, where the Self is, of course, whole and perfect the way it is.

So then what do our lives mean?

I medicated myself again with Beaujolais after they all had left.  (It's only twelve percent;  you can't do too much damage.  It gives you something to nurse on, while I eat my hamburger...)  Am I just going to stand there alone in my misery with all the clean-up work left to do?  My body began to hunch over, gloomy, after all the rush rush rush, all the running and doing.  Then it does indeed feel like my spiritual quest has been hi-jacked, that I'm reading from a script different from my own, and that's probably what I was doing back in college, the script of my brother's way in the world, which, as we see, doesn't work so well for me.  The drinking...  As if I was telling myself, 'this is what you are supposed to do, right?'  Well, I'm built more sensitively than that, I guess.

So then, you realize, you have to do yoga.  You have to do a daily practice.  Writing is far less important.  Your health has to come first.  And then maybe you stand a better chance of knowing your self, tuning out the ego, getting back to your own thing...

I'm being overly dramatic.  But that seems a part of expressing what you need to get out there on paper, not so internalized and tied up...


It all makes you wonder, doc, like, how could you be so stupid, so utterly foolish as to act against your own fondest wishes, as if you were intent on destroying everything, if there weren't something within you that you absolutely cannot trust.  And that must be the ego, according to the literature.  So then what do you listen to?  I mean, you always try to follow your heart, but why doesn't that work out so neatly?

It's like those times in life when you are standing there looking at yourself stand there and go through things, things which are completely separate, alien, a kind of sleepwalking, from the things you want to be doing in the world to be who you are...  Who is this person, figment of people's imagination, the self has fallen into, people pleasing... tolerating every last one of them the people who come and bring their own worlds with them, and yes they say nice things about you as the babel on, but what does any of it have to do with you, their drama, the deals they make, the travels they take, their quest to go meet chicks or play in a band, or unwind...  You really need a shell.  That's how it ends up:  pull up the draw bridge, fill the moat, don't engage.  Let the egos fly around like so many bats trapped in a room, flapping about, confused, hearing themselves talk as if it lets them echolocate.   Eventually they will find the open window, when you don't engage with them anymore.  Old Jesus was right...

The pain is your path, they say.  Be open to it.  Breathe it in.  Have compassion for yourself, and then you can give it to others, and there are other people out there just like you.

So maybe that's where I'm at.  Youthful insecurities in that arena of first love, like, how to give young people who go through such things a positive direction...  Good for self-confidence, that sort of a thing.  It's like there should be a Jesus for such a thing, who comes along and heals the young people, because you have a chance when you're young.

One only knows that to share is to lighten the load that humanity must bear.

I always feel a bit lighter after this modest form of publishing, leaving an inner thought here where I can find it later.

Without a huge amount of enthusiasm I will head off to wine tasting.  But it's not about the wine.  It's about the basic compassion, part the kind Dostoevsky writes about in Karamaov, Alyosha's dream, the feast at Cana, an Orthodox Godly wish for humanity to find joy, and also part the compassion even a middle-aged barman can muster.  Does it matter the specifics of the wine?

Oh, sure, blah, blah, blah, this grape, that grape, this sensation, that one, a balance, an earthiness, a bit of history...  But it's about more than that.  It's about the context.  It's about a year in the life of grape vines on a particular place on earth...

in the 'scribblings' category:

As I recovered from the week, taking a long slow walk through the woods and down by the stream and then back along Massachusetts Avenue, later on, the final bare bedrock truth seemed to dawn over me, the truth of suffering being the foremost universal reality of the human condition.

Knowing that, we no longer make our foolish attempts to escape or ease this fundamental fact of life.

I came down with the sense of the lie I'd been leading...  Was I not almost banging the drum of escapist pleasure, I wondered.   There was real human stuff that needed airing at the pub, but I was not making anyone any better.


And now at 3 AM I'm having a glass of wine, in moderation, realizing that it does not end suffering.  In fact, it probably adds to it, as any escapist pleasure does.  It leaves me unimpressed, as taste, as medicine, as calming properties go.


I have the feeling of shirking responsibilities as I wake.   The bar has been my way of serving humanity, and now I realize how immoral my duties have been in the scope of things.

Is it that we fall out of some wish to suffer the pains of the rest of humanity?  Do we cast pearls before swine when we do not protect our energies, letting them out to any taker?  I recall a very painful past episode, wanting to go to a party at reunion, traveling from DC to Boston, and then out to Amherst.  And on the way to the party, not wearing glasses or contact lenses, I ran directly into a bunch of rowdies, jocks celebrating.  Come on, have a drink with us.  And the cost for that drink, for the shooter handed to me has been quite steep, quite horrible, haunting.   I left myself open, I guess.  I acted in a way I was not, a lie to myself, hard to forgive for all it cost me in morale and the other possibilities inhabited in the peace I wanted to form with a particular person.  "Leave her alone," her friend yelled at me, and I shrank and departed, only to get worse, and then the next day was ashamed, too much to explain nor ask for forgiveness.  I felt boxed in.  I was use to discouragement and unhappiness, which was what I knew, and I did not fight.

Christ seems big into suffering, and he does so on behalf of humanity.  Could he have taught without his own suffering?

The creative act of writing is indeed properly a kind of navel staring, for which it is maligned.  What is wrong with being attuned to the basic energies in the body?  Why do we look outside for story, when the story is what happens internally.  Indeed, the chakra responsible for sexual relationships is the same as for creativity.

One writes for the big things, the big understandings, the things that will help with life.

Strange that the ones we would fall for, quietly, chastely, in so-called love with, attached to our own emotions regarding them, are the ones who bring us most directly to suffering of the deep personal inescapable sort.

The effect of the nights seem to grow exponentially.  The last night is the hardest, Wednesday night Jazz, a.k.a., "the cancer," and the hardest to recover from, and even though I get a bike ride in (on the trainer stand), I don't feel so hot Thursday, twinges of headache from mixing too many wines.  Anxiety, pessimism, gloom, to varying extents, a sense of trying to run from the wrath of God, or of being swallowed up by the Leviathan, of having fallen off a cliff, of being so far outside of normal society that you'll never be let back in.  This is what happens after four nights of tending bar, even when the nights go fairly smoothly, with pleasant customers;  it's still all around drinking, even if it's all around eating dinner.

How am I going to get out of there, the last one in the restaurant, eating his dinner, with getting into the wine?  How am I going to get home, and not want another?  And then, how am I going to wake up not feeling depressed and anxious?

I desire to explore spiritual pursuits.  I'm not going to fit in anywhere if I would try to be social.  It's only hours away from most people's happy hour, and I'm still rehydrating, pondering breakfast.  It's a fast four shifts, long hours when preparation and unwinding are considered, four days of rest, get ready for work, go to work, finally come back home.  Not much else.

And so...  what?  Dishes.  Laundry.  Recycling.  Trash day.  A couple of yoga related books my therapist has suggested have arrived.  A light rain is falling.  Now it is heavy, straight down.  After the fourth night, the household chores seem insurmountable.  But... take one thing at a time.

The thought, needing to stop drinking.  But how could I do that with the job I have?  Impossible.  Therefore, to save yourself, you must quit.  You're not even happy with the job anyway.  It's the fear of the unknown that is stopping you.  That and a need for money, not having much.  Or is it the true desire one must gain, to not accept anymore, but to change.

Drinking is a loaded issue, when you consider, when you think of how college could have gone differently...  But I had that mysterious issue, the time spent writing papers, the time spent reading...  Obsessive, depressed?  I grew negative, pessimistic, and all the while feeling I had something to say.

Well, then you go and say it, and then what?  Self-published works, where do they go?

I'm not even able to write anything today.  As is staring at some fundamental problem without understanding...

I manage to do the dishes, cook lamb sausages under the broiler, take a shower, then out for a stroll under a dark sky, walking very slowly, almost a walking meditation.  Up California from Massachusetts, up the hill to Connecticut Avenue and its view of the Hilton and the city down below, then finally down to Glen's where quite a social hour is going.  I get my meats, onions, a piece of farmer's cheese, a quart of chicken stock, pay at the register, and then slip away out the door.  People are drinking beers, wine, eating pizza and whatever else.  People are sitting outside at the picnic tables, but not ready to join the party I head home and this too feels sad.  As if the job that allowed such things to happen does not allow me to enjoy the benefit of the service myself.


I lay in a state of semi-sleep on the couch for a long time, hours, after my return.  When I wake, I take up one of the books my therapist has recommended, Living Your Yoga, by Judith Hanson Lasater.  The lessons, the exercises within, remind me of something I've fallen out of touch with.  I lay in corpse pose, for the recommended twenty minutes, and when I come out of it, yes, what I've been missing all these years, which is compassion for your own self, faith in your own self, in acknowledging how difficult life is, and how brave one has to be, in fact, already is.  So, let that be a lesson to those of us, taken by the throes of the tyrannical mind.

And I saw that I was in the perfect place to administer compassion, and mainly, yes, to myself.

That this would be difficult for a bartender, who practices compassion on a daily basis to others, would not provide it for himself, seemed meaningful and indicative, and so, I began to endeavor to do it for myself, which is a lesson to all of us.

But I cannot wake without a sense of regret of a night's adventure.  After work I go join my buddies for a wind-down glass.  The talk is good.  It's good to have a friend, we share some red wine.  And today I wake up late.  A good conversation about Catholic school education, the spirituality inherent in all learning (which is not well respected these days as it should be, a thing crucial to education), but I'd be hard-put to assemble a narrative of the evening, but that we sat in front of television I don't remember while one buddy talked on Skype to a young lady in South America in the far room behind glass doors.  The bike ride home, uneventful, required calm concentration.  I pull up my street with the sense of having been out too late, shoulda' just gone straight home, put my road bike on the stand, got in a slow roll, had my two glasses of Beaujolais...  And where do such late-night conversations go?  Except that they are useful, you have to admit, and these guys are your friends, and shop-talk is necessary.  And they are at that hour in which you've finished up work, where it's good to sit back on a couch and listen.  Yeah, man, I get it.  But, when you're in a rut, you need to think outside the box.  Which is perhaps why it feels reasonable to light incense when I get home finally.

Is it that a Kerouac has less that sense of maybe-I-should-be-doing-something-else-with-my-life that hits once responsible old schoolboys.  Having less that sense the doors to the narrative are open.  Whereas others of us might wait for that final cleaning up of one's act, finally, a clean Coltrane going down to the studio to record A Love Supreme...  We feel too much guilt over current palliative habits to set our creativity free.

In the space between falls a job.  Falls the facts of life.  Falls the individual who is a good guest but ultimately stays on a bit too long after his dinner and makes you nervous.  And there was enough angst over getting things done in a shift that, yes, a little calming medicine is necessary.

But the puzzle in the train of thought here seems to be that there is plenty enough evidence of school-boy guilt in Kerouac's work.  There doesn't seem to be much self-reflection, Hamlet-like questioning of self, in Neil Cassidy.  And there obviously needs to be some for the lot of us wanting to be part of a respectful respectable useful society...

Take this back to my own job, which seems harmless enough, but it can seem the job for weak men, weak men who are at a loss of what better to do with themselves, not bold enough to try a few different things before settling...  I do my job, well enough, and people have a civilized time, a bottle of wine for four, appetizer, entrees, coffee with dessert.  Respectable people, who, in turn, thank me and call me Sir for my little helpful acts and good hospitality that cannot be faked.  The musicians, who play the jazz for us, I am good friends with.  We're all in this together, no I in team.

But where falls in, after reading Buddha's words and the Gospels and Corinthians and letters from your old Dad, after listening to JFK and RFK, and Roosevelt, where falls that sense of the right way, the moral way, the respectable way, the way that is not fraught with the sense of cumulative missteps, of things like 'not standing up for yourself,' and things like that.  Too many bad influences, not enough studious reading, and all of this catching up with me at some point.

And Kerouac, yes, he definitely had the circumspection, here and there, in Desolation Angels, in many passages here and there where he is really really trying to be good, to be a good boy, clean, living in harmony with nature, his cabin with good nutrition, a good little system.  But, but, but...  We know how he ends up.  Even when he sings lyrically, is it in Dharma Bums, at the end, "a new life for me."  Alas.

Bringing us back to Shakespeare, where, by dint of dramatic structure, there are too many characters and situations not to allow the final circumspection, even if a character is helpless to do anything but recognize, too late...

Lincoln never was much of a drinker (though all they had back his the days as a young man was bourbon whiskey, and ale, and he had enough example of relatives gone mad to be careful.)  A sip of wine, maybe, at dinner, to be a polite political figure.  And he did not have, as a result, so many sins as some of us, to live down.  Though he did, it seems, have that illness, melancholia, a state of blues he could not help, clouding his mind, making thought painful.  The lists of wine and booze had for his inaugural parties, along with the roasts and the oysters, are quite long, and ample, but for the crowd, for lesser men, not he.

Put a vice in place, yes, maybe indeed, it becomes a crutch.  When you could be out doing more useful things as the world turns...

Alas, it is not the barman's place to get as cross with the self-indulgent as he would like to be, from the boss's perspective, nor the client who comes in regularly and spends.  Or, one day, does he get sort of fed up, my father's temple of learning you have turned into a crass place...

It retrospect it was a good conversation, my pal Ray talking about his education at Damatha High School, his class in religious traditions inclusive of the wide range, not even any emphasis on Catholicism.  And I'm able to do my yoga after the shower, after writing.  And perhaps after such considerations, the ability to act to the sort of values and morality you'd really like to inhabit and exemplify, maybe becomes more possible, more supported.

Must one know the sickness inside himself to surmount it, curing it...

Every day, same problem.  What to write, how to write, why...  Do you feel up for it, or should you just go back to bed and wait 'til it's time to go to work.

Two shifts in.  Carrying the night while the other guy, without much enthusiasm for Monday night jazz, hides in the back room reading on his iPhone.  There are only a meager few reservations for the night, as if something was up.   The keyboard player comes up to the bar after the customers are gone, and we talk about the Baltimore riots, his memory of the one in DC after the assassination of Dr. King.  How terrible and counter-productive.  "You didn't make the laws, but you have to respect them."  The old nightclub and jazz corridor, which provided jobs and entertainment for the locals, laid waste...  "When did the Howard Theater finally reopen?  Three years ago..."  Ouch.

Then the musicians are gone, their equipment loaded, a decent dinner enjoyed in the corner, the last plates to clear back downstairs to the silent kitchen empty under fluorescent lights, the dishwasher's stainless steel counter and sink there inside the door under the hanging sprayer tucked away for the night, the dishwasher's metal levered doors open, laid bare.  I'm cleaning up, knock on the door, it's old server., coming from his first shifts at the new job down the road where he's already making good money, serving fish table-side.  I make him a Beefeater martini and he has an excellent story about a staff meeting...  Do not question management, be positive, do not break stuff.  A slide show.  Do not be the problem, be the solution.  Work smarter, not harder.  (Yes, I remember the two-faced clichés of a particular management team...  The truth is:  Respect the staff, treat them as adults, professionals, an asset, and then the staff would care, do the right thing.)   The meeting departs, heavy tables are lugged in to set up for a private party. "Five round tables," one manager says.  This is done, with much jee-hawing, chairs and tables..  And after all this is down, as opening time is drawing nigh, "no, no--one long table," says higher manager, looking at a spec sheet, so they have to redo it all, switching everything out.

The talk moves to what I've been up to.  Some great travel tales.  The attitudes of people from other countries, the things they go through.  And then talk turns to my lack of decent earnings, lack of retirement plan and all the usual forms of security.  Old server talks me through it.  "Promote yourself, do your own classes, or get a job teaching at prep school, which you can do a lot longer than what you're doing now."  And he is right, of course.  Care and concern from a world-wise good-at-reading-people older brother type for yet another of one of those younger brother types, who's very smart in some ways, but doesn't have it together, might end up out on the street...
"They'll let you teach that class, into your seventies, and you wouldn't have to be subversive about your message..."  (I'd explained my little sermon about the psychological and spiritual benefits of sitting your butt down every day to write.)

But everyday, same problem.  What to write, how to write, why?  For what purpose.

In the old days's tradition, as Coomaraswamy points out in one of his essays, a masterpiece was simply a measure of a workman's competence in the standards of the guild.  You'd done enough of them, and now you could make a good quality ceramic pot or altarpiece.  Now the term sounds to us a bit more elevated.  A masterpiece sounds like a thing beyond normal human capability, a marketing term for that which surpasses all other standards.  Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, gold standards, beyond the norm, genius, yes, masterpiece, but for the rest of us, yeah, keep plugging away.  Who's the guy on PBS with magic of oil painting, with the neat tricks that make mountains and then lakes and then trees and then a rail fence and a cabin appear, techniques abused to the point of humor to decorate the wall above the bed in hotels like the one I recently stayed in in Chinatown, such that all trees had the same downward droop as the tropical pines and the mountains all had the same blue El Capitan lump but pushed together like books on the shelf there in the background by some heretofore unseen (and implausible) trick of geology, but the domicile of this kingdom having some nice verandas under an awning roof where indeed one might stay in good vaguely Chinese comfort...  Yes, whatever you want;  it's your world to create.

But we still live in the shadow of things like the earthquake disaster in Nepal, and in the sober light perhaps the term 'masterpiece' is viewed closer to its original scale.

Writing, yes, I try to focus on writing, and not my lack of security for old age, my misplaced reliance on Social Security benefits.  I write and put aside the reminder I get from the wine-reps, you should have left this job yesterday;  how old are you?  Fifty.  Fifty?  (Expression, hidden:  you are fucked.)  Dude, get out now;  be a teacher.

I think of Job.  Job, were you around when the foundations of the world were lain?  Uh, no...  No, I wasn't, as far as I know.

But I should be a teacher.  That does sound better than slogging through another twenty five years of shifts then having nothing at the end of it to show.

Onward I go, crafting my yellow journalism, the ends of my shifts presided over by somber judges who drive a weak man into the Beaujolais...


Incense burned, two sticks, one of Nag Champa, one of Sandalwood, over the usual sadness I expand around and attempt to put in place, the scented smoke unable to reach the poor sweet shaken Buddhist Nepalese survivors of earthquake nor the rubble of their old temples,  I think of how I'd rather inhabit one of those old age airy ink mountain prints, suggestive like calligraphy is, minimal in scene, evocative of weather and mist, waterfall, a monk's abode, a bird on the wing, all deeply satisfying in a strange way, than the lush green, blue and gold luxury of the hotel painting, if I had to chose.

I stand up, the hunched posture straightens a bit from having written and the glance at the clock that says the mysteries of actual time draw close to when the person you have chosen to be gets ready for work.  A leaf blower revving in the distance.


As I shower, loosening up under the hot water, I am reminded of a golden restaurant of the past, now departed, from years ago in this professional career.  I can still hear the new management team's leader, shouting to us one through the hot stale air of a sunny Saturday morning about sexual harassment, and he, the worst perpetrator of the very thing.  I remember the original management, a small slip of calendar page with the old Tao wisdom on it, ending with "the best leader of all is the one of whom the people are barely aware of;  and when they succeed, the people say, look at what we have accomplished all by ourselves."



I almost have to wonder, driven to the thought by logic, that if a writer relies heavily on the management of marketing his, or her, works, then you stand the risk of being a product of that marketing.  But if you write the simple truth...

And by the time I get back from therapy, in the lay-over between the Sunday night and the Monday night shift, I'm a bit talked out.  I've made a run to Glen's Market on the way home, and thinking parts are fading a little bit, and maybe there will be a nap involved.  I had to empty at the cooler of all the bottles for some plumbing to be done last night, and I'll try to get in earlier than usual.

Every day, Shane MacGowan draws a mandala, a circle, a horizontal and a vertical line for axes.  He believes it orients his day, that of a self-described nut for things spiritual, at least at the time of writing/being interviewed by his wife for A Drink With Shane MacGowan.  I think I know the feeling.  Maybe you do too.

My point to the good doctor is that there are enormous psychological and spiritual benefits to the act of writing.  What to do with it beyond that?  Do you get an MFA in fiction writing to be around other nervous writer types?  Does writing have to be commodified like everything else?  Is it in your life for you to make a living at it, or is something you might quietly preach about.

I watch a movie version of Kerouac's later novel Big Sur.  I flinch watching it.  I've read the book enough times to know what will happen next and the general tone of it, a harrowing trip into breakdown and alcoholism.  Yet at the end of it you have the sense, in the book at least, that when he the writer returns from the adventures to the safe isle of writing, then he's going to be okay.

Why is that venturing out into the modern world and the egos and personalities attuned to surviving in that modern world is so troublesome for some of us.  Is it blood-type, or something else constitutional?  You sit down and write, it's like you're able to navigate again;  you don't sit and stew, things picking at you relentlessly.

First it was an unnamed need.  In someways, there wasn't much support from it.  Either you read and analyzed, or you took a creative writing class, the two separate.  The act was viewed as a duty of scholarship.  Not a jumping off point for one's own writing process, your own life as a writer, even as that proposition stares one in the face with each and every line.  Like a child watching an adult walk.  But the act of the classroom, which anointed literature as being something okay and healthy, good even, still amounted to the basic truth of  reading the works of other people who'd gravitated toward the process, for their own sanity and intuitive health.  Even Hemingway, remembering his vigor and health.

I myself was drawn in by the simplicity of Islands in the Stream, (posthumous, from Hemingway's notebooks) the writer's own version of Zen, a recording in intimate detail, for posterity, of the little regular things of everyday life, accounted for, aligned, so that the person would know where to find them the next day, reassured.  The textures of life recorded, along with the habits of the house pets, the cat, his boat, the sea, the fishermen and the places they ate, and again, peeling oranges and putting the peels into the flames to watch the fire, in this case driftwood, turn colors.   The act of writing seemed immediately to quell the anxiety.  It had some antidotal property, rejuvenating, calming, salubrious, cleansing, a breathing out of stale air in order to get fresh air in.

Is the point of it to be a professional, to get good at it, write fiction, have an editor, produce a book for the marketplace?  Or isn't it rather a bit more organic than that.  More an inherent human need, an extension of biological function.  Something that keeps us from going off-track (like Kerouac quite dramatically does in Big Sur--and we know the experience exists within the realm of possibility.)

If you write, it stands to reason, you have all that better a chance to listen to your inner voice, your inner self, and know a bit better how to act, what you need, what a realistic attitude would be..  If I'd taken up writing earlier in a supported way, I might have done a few things differently.  I might have been calmer, and reacted better, more attuned to my own heart, less stung by superficial critique and illusion.  Calmer, more positive.  Less self-destructive.

And yet, instincts told me I needed to write.  Early on enough, but not knowing how or what exactly to write about.  To write, you need experience, right?  You need to drive a nitroglycerin truck across the Yukon, take in first hand a civil war, travel to exotic places...  Otherwise, what possibly would we have to write about, that anyone else would want to read out of anything more than politeness, tolerant of your solipsistic doldrums not worth recording.

Yeah, but I took an immediate liking to the simple stuff, like Nick setting up his camp, or Kerouac surviving on the road day by day.  These were the sort of textures I liked.  Aren't we camping out every day, in life itself....  Are not we all hanging by a thread...


Those of us who write, and who write well, might simply be those who need the process more.   Writing acknowledges the need to slow things that happen quickly down enough to be assessed (still at the intuitive level where things must be assessed), the need to see out of the dense clouds of their own psyches and daily moods.

Perhaps the modern urban monastery of one's own writing practice isn't such a bad thing.