All you can, the best you can do, is to humanize yourself, to continue on with the processes that follow from education.  (To the Buddhist, the 'thatness' of things and people.)   This is what Paul, for instance, was doing, when he stopped persecuting and took up writing his letters.  It's as if he had always wanted to write, to think about the deeper things, like charity.  It's as if he wanted to be generous, rather than accusatorial.  Perhaps he surprised himself, the hidden riches of the human mind when applied to being human.

Other people will not always care, so it seems, if you yourself humanize yourself, if you become 'a mensch.'  Other people will not even seem to notice.  Maybe they make it seem like your deep humanity is simply their due.  A customer could easily say, well, your polite service, kind, is what you are being paid for, not thinking far beyond that, as they turn back to their phone, 'buy, buy, sell, sell, what were you saying, honey?'  The great skeptic.

It can be in every fiber of your being, to follow through with the great humanity residing within, waiting to be cultivated, to flourish.  But it is also easy to forget about, easy to sweep aside in favor of more comfortable things, more selfish things.  And it is hard to convince oneself that one is even doing a remotely capable job of it, that one can even do anything that would amount to much at it.  "For all that work, but a drop in the bucket have I produced."

"Playground fairness, that is the best we can achieve," the cynic.  "And rules of fairness were meant to be broken, by the strong and the crafty."

But humanizing sees humanizing.  A step toward potential helps one see the greater possibilities, which then lead one to self realization.  Even if it goes on unseen, unnoticed....

There is little purpose to writing.  It's all like the koan, a use of words differing from the practical.

It's getting on to that crucial point of the evening, when things could either calm down or get even busier.  Tillery, a legend of the DC music scene has launched into full Satchmo voice, What a Wonderful World, as the boss looks on, standing near the bar mouth, around 9 PM, having ordered his supper.  An eight top is sat in the back room, academics from the local university.  And the band, and the vocalist in particular, have become loud.  The bass, a red Sire Jazz Bass style, is thumping away, and Tillery is in full voice.  The dining room is full enough, a birthday to get ready for on table 50, all forms of mop-up, coffee, dessert, check presentation, payment processing are coming down the pike steadily, and the newly sat 8 top is ordering cocktails, Tito's dirty martinis, Bullett Old Fashioneds, Rye Manhattans up, Sapphire and tonics, a couple of wines too, as the server A reaches underneath me as I prepare the cocktails by the ice bin to retrieve a wine chiller bucket from below the sink.  Cocktails require focus.  And while the band started on softer notes, the singer with a husky soft style, now the music has created vibrations coming from all corners, noticeably messing with my innate abilities of echo-location and navigation.  The room has changed completely, into something foreign.  And in this state, men can get desperate.  I am joined at the bar by two older gentleman, and I do not have much to tell them.   And here it comes, Funny Valentine, and now Tlllery has summoned operatic volume and technique, showing off a bit, his pipes, and the tables, being unable to do anything else sit in rapt attention.  Jesus Christ.  All I can do not to throw down everything and depart out the front door.

But the musicians and the people here are largely friendly, and I empathize with them, perhaps a bit too much.   I pour the gals on the low table nearest to the bar, 57, who have enjoyed a bottle of Argentine Malbec, a taste of Bordeaux, to represent the old French style, and they smile receptively as I explain that Jazz Nights makes a barman very thirsty.   Water for the eight top.  The server is not built to reach the far side of the long table in the wine room, no.  The ladies, elderly, on the first of the tables in the wine room closest to the wine bar and the music, have had it, asking me to box up what they have not finished, and two cappuccino, one decaff, one regular, okay.

The boss's food comes up on the busboy's hands, salmon citrus app and mushroom fricassee, wondering where it is going, S8?, and I look at the dishes and say, must be B-----'s.  And around this time, I remember, yes, I have green earplugs in the change pocket of my Levis, and I stop, roll up one tight, pull up the lobe of my right ear, work it in the ear canal, hold it for a second with my index finger as it expands, feel it tight enough, and again, the acoustic environment changes, in a strange way, less the direct notes, more the strange thumping echoes coming from all and every direction.  And yes, goddamn, I think it's about time for something soothing, a glass with a bit of ice, a little red wine, slices of lemon, lime and orange, splash of soda, yes, it is time.   It was time an hour ago.


At the monastery, a day off.  The sleep aid put me into a good sleep quickly upon my return.  Back to D.T. Suzuki, Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk, back to whatever YouTube might have on the subject if I am not up for reading.  The sun is out.  I sweep the back deck clean of leaf and cat hair clinging bundles, fnding the body of a bumble bee beneath the air conditioning unit, its head oddly separated neatly, a dry curled up state for one of nature's miracles in death.  Having swept and dislodged he dry cat hair vomit, desiccated and tight, adhering to the deck's wooden planks, having shaken out the door mat and the small rug, I unroll the yoga mat and attempt a few poses.  Shoulders weak, pained, stiff in up dog.

It takes a monastery and the accumulated wisdom of spiritual literature to get, fully, the true nature of charity.  Charity demands the spiritual good, one of the higher points the mind can attain in its quest to understand the nature of reality and being alive.  Charity.  Doing good for no discernible logical reason, other than to be supportive of that which is also good, either in giving or receiving.  Charity, lived, is a lesson, and a beautiful thing, almost mathematical in its reach.   Emanating from which a good dose of mental health, a reassurance in the deeper logic of the world as it was created, perhaps itself out of charity, charity for all.


The bumble bee
did not receive
our charity.

I wish I had saved its body, but fishing through the plastic trash bag full of dusty detritus, leaves, unwound spools of clinging light grey cat hair it proves elusive to find.

Wist ye not, I was at my father's business.  That in and of itself is a lesson.  That the good will feel obliged and compelled, driven really, fully occupied by and with, the deeper truth, that wisdom which would explain why the celestial globes hang in the sky, day into nighttime, on and on, the sun shining upon us, warming us on cool autumn days.

One could gather that the pesticides and the spreading of chemicals seemingly beneficent of our own way in the world, our own industrial patterns, are not good for the earth, not the insects, not the bumble bee.

And charity is what it comes down to.  As contrary as that might be to business school logic and the shareholder's alternate realities of profit fantasy.

Either you're built that way, or not.  Either we in general are built that way, or not.  To receive charity, to give it.  To extend it from ourselves and the neighbor and the traveling stranger on out to the old seemingly inanimate objects of our own lives, that sometimes acquire dust in corners, but remind us of the different phases of our lives, like the old Citizen watch found behind the restaurant where one worked a long time ago, deriving the energy to keep ticking by the rays of the sun.  Like some of the old vessels that came from Madam Korbonski's life, a stoneware water pitcher with a blue cat figure on  it made in Finland, or an old Polish enameled casserole serving dish with lid and base.

After a four day break from illness, the monk must return.  Hopefully he is recharged, in energy, vision and in habit.  The apartment is cleaner than it has been.  One could see how with the visit from chef Gordon Vercingetorix and his late night courts at the Old Gaul, the barman in the crosshairs would be a bit worn, the effect cumulative.  But each is responsible for his own habits.

The quiet of the days off, much of it with no more energy than to lay about and meditate, the return hopes for more tidiness and better cleaner habit, to not be fired up by what happens at the bar, to not get worked up, nervous, poked, prodded, all those things that aren't good for you.


My father probably sensed in me that in his son he had a kind of old man, an old soul, who'd come to him for the reasons of the deep reality.  One on his way to being a kind of monk.

But I admit the usual nerves heading back.  I'd left my bike, Dennis the late night denizen gave me a ride back to the apartment.   Walking, the sunlight, the woods, would be a good way to ease back into it.

But if all you are doing is describing the world as it is, you are not accomplishing very much.  This is the sort of benign deficiency of some forms of journalistic reporting.  Necessary, perhaps, but  in a way ultimately distracting, unnerving.  Not a matter helpful to personal health, mental health.  The concerns of the worldly are overwhelming, and in a way similar to to the processes that make familiarity breed contempt.   This is the distinction between journalism and literature, along certain subjective lines of thought, perhaps, not that there is any clear line of separation.  Otherwise, how could we account for our own personal unhappiness with material things, despite our best efforts to do that which they call work.

The situations we find ourselves in come as the situations which represent our own personal unsolvable Zen koan to solve...

Word fatigue.

Words were not always meant to apply to the conventional life.  There is that sense to Zen koans.  Words allow us to reach beyond convention, beyond the mental trends of the day, beyond the bullying of the words that come to us impersonally, barraging us, on screens.  People use words, of course, to bolster up living the conventional life, and so the words are not very weighty, materialist, an outfit to wear, a topic for distraction, do this, do that.  To find the real words, one must go digging.

Beyond the conventional life.   Buddhist thought.  Perspective.  Vast kalpas of time.  Worldly empire and fortune, kingdoms, coming and going, flashing by.  Mountains come, mountains go.  Renounce the idea of stability, solidity.  Thought patterns are the same.  Leave the mode of dualistic thinking behind.  Reach beyond, for truth.

The words.  The words come like rain.  On asphalt, on sidewalk, on brick, on country tarmac roads.  First a drop, then two more.  The bricks are dry, hot sometimes.  Sometimes, humid.  Then the rain comes, as it will.  Snow, sublime, falling, covering itself.  Acts of nature.  Weather.

My father said, and I did and did not understand at the time, being young, bad money drives good money out of the market.  At 53, I have a better sense of what he might have meant.

The Zen Buddhists have a sense of how life is remorseful, properly.  Store up treasures, and they will be gone.  The bar evening is okay, smooth, some sense of decorum, and then one person, strange, in the corner, facing away.  Then two more.   Then another.  Interactions.  The night quickly gets strange, bizarre.  I go downstairs, for a little break, and my coworker says, "hey, wasn't that Dennis who just walked in."  Oh, noooooo, I say.  Shit.  Should have locked the door.

You have some wine, to ease the night's awake, finding some energy to cook, the television a bit more interesting.  And then the next day, you pay for it, lack of energy, depressed mood, of course.

You find a nice girl, you like her, she likes you, but then a moment's inattention, or a frivolity, and then she is gone, gone for life.   A stupid misunderstanding at an age where words are still important, truthful, not gainfully used to manipulate, to get your own way.  One guy comes along, more attentive, shrewd, takes all your poem away.  Sure, you made your own errors, gross stupidity.  Dumb stuff.  But that wasn't what the being wanted to have happen, at the time anyway.

You work hard.  People take advantage, pushing you into something the market affords but which you cannot.  What a favor.


The old writer liked to lay on his side, particularly when he was feeling ill, allergic, or low in energy. Maybe he should get a haircut, or do something productive, but there he was, awake, and the words would come to him, quite on their own, like Groucho talking almost.  The old writer did not give a shit what people thought of him any longer, nor of his writing.  Lying so, he wondered if a babe in the womb, yes, must, sense the effect of words, hear them distantly, like changing light.  Some words would provoke different sensations.  It was all very interesting.  The child could sense them, already quite curious, wanting to be a part of them.  Sometimes, laying there, so, curled up almost, he thought of Jesus lying in the ropes, napping.   How words came to him, having faith in them.

The stories told, of the vineyard, and the worker, and the vineyard owner, those are put in monetary terms, how even the last will be taken away, in the admonishing tales Jesus relates.  In the Buddhist understanding, the tableaux seems broader, more expansive, and human things very little.


"It often happens that some kind of crisis is necessary in one's life to make one put forth all one's strength in solving the koan," Suzuki writes in his preface, reflecting on his own time in the Zen monastery.  "To solve a koan, one must be standing at an extremity, with no possibility of choice confronting one.  There is just one thing which one must do."

Like the koans themselves, these words seem to lie out the outer edge of conventional understandings, as are many of Dr. Suzuki's kernels, such as on the spiritual lesson of charity, the two-way anonymity that supersedes favoritism, insuring the deeper meaning.  (These days more resources are spent on the technology of virtual reality, as somehow it seems to pay off, even, or perhaps particularly, in Japan, than on the value of teaching of words that lead us to a deeper understanding and appreciation of nature and reality.)  Would the busy Wall Street Banker, the lawyer, the lobbyist of some special field be concerned with the magnificent greatness of a koan, I don't think so.  (Preferring the virtual reality of his own bank account and the politics thereof...)


I gather I remember how a Foucault, a Chomsky, makes the point about how words are used effects our reality, our political reality.  But this seems a lesson, for me anyway, that takes time to grasp.  Probably because I am naive, an English major, a student of poems, sacred texts, fiction, places, contexts in which words get their due, which no one can then take away.

But meditating on shame, how shame seeps in to what one does as a job, say, waiting on people--there's nothing wrong with that, if you can take it--or what one makes as income, compared to the successful happy Joneses of Contentment Lane and happy children striving forth like their parents, perhaps that is one way to attempt to try to walk up to that monastery and knock on the door to see what happens.  Then go back and read that part in Corinthians again often read at weddings, about love, as it is, in words' estimation.


(Every one can do it, get words, if not distracted, I suppose.  "It matters not what path a man take," the Buddha says.)


The old writer lay back, and then on his side.  Meditation.  How it is that it is hard for me to be happy?  Well, it is written in Buddhist scripture that one must "cultivate the sense of humility and remorse by reading books and sayings left by the Buddha and the Patriarchs."  I could say, look where words have gotten me, he thought.  But is there a better option, a truer one?  To not be so happy is just to be realistic I guess, a sign I'm attempting to do some work, such as it is.  Words should not pander...


The book I wrote, I've come around to see a certain kind of Zen in it.  The Chekhov ending.  My dad wrote me an excellent letter in his hand writing, that the character here is a Theosophist, and that he's "doing a pretty good job at it."  I had a harder time seeing that, when he wrote that letter, seven years ago, or so, but I knew what he meant.  I knew from whence he was coming from...  I'm happy with that.  I'm content with that...

Yeah, you think you're stronger than you are.  You put up with what you feel you can put up with, but it is not neat, it is not clean.  There is the fog, minor variant of the fog of war.  There is collateral damage.  There is the unpredictability.  And when you're killing yourself just so you can have health insurance, too clouded by the battle even to know any better, one week blending into another, two days off slept through, more or less, well, maybe you should do something about it.

A good soldier, you put up with it.  Your boss tells  you, it's not that bad, it's all more or less fair.  But life ticks by.


Shame is the motivator.  That's what you have been getting to the bottom of, in therapy, mentally, physically.  You've done your job in other people's adventures, and now it's time to start, anyway, to move on.  And you begin by protecting yourself, realizing the burden you can carry, healthily.


Maybe lots of writers are driven by shame.  It's something that they must overcome, and this is the subliminal story, the finding of grace, for that odd being who knew he or she had to write.  To overcome that particular shame of being that sort of village/family idiot, the person who cannot fit in, who must express themselves, venturing into strange places the more successful would strenuously avoid and consider it the worst kind of defeat to even be part of.   Those are areas which I have been to, the odd spaces you never in your lifetime thought you'd end up being a part of.


Give the guy some credit for studying primate behavior up close.  That in the long lens will be how my work will be seen.  Not unlike a Jane Godall.  That was the point of the work.  The point was not to drive myself into the ground

Animal Reunions on PBS.

 Do we face shame out of the strength of our mother's love...  Primitive, archaic, of a psychological depth, of a biological depth that can not rationally be understand, fully.


Sickness is healing.  Purifying.  Clarifying.  A break from.

The era of touch screens.  Still sick, the day off comes, what to do.  Slept all day yesterday, and today, awake early, not feeling well, but not knowing what to do.  I cannot resist poking on to Google news, nor Facebook.  The Presidential train wreck, hubris, egotism, hypocritical, lashing out at any perceived slight...  The devices match, and the bizarre desire to know something in the vacuum of words or arranged activity finds its mark, time and mental energy frittered away.  We asked for it, and we got it, just what we deserved with our hits and rapt curious zombie attention.

Sins merge, become all the same, sexism, nationalism, bigotry, environmental degradation, selfishness...  the quest for power, for security, for strength that does not exist as such at all, beyond to that which is freely given to the world anyway.

An email from First of the Month.Org saves me from plunging into the superficial.  Perhaps I can return to Suzuki's The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk as I lay on the couch with a vague headache.  I was never that happy here in this veil of city life, not knowing what to do with it.

There are many senses to bring into play, and many deeper understandings, quite away and apart from the logical and the practical.  People, when sensitized, can sense things about other people, and feel some sort of bond, even if the economic practicalities of the situation would laugh at you, like an old folktale.

One wakes up in the same situation he has always woken to.  Life.  A feeling of disability, a lack of energy or comprehension of serious matters of the professional world.

Zen comes to mind.  The answer is in no answer.  Almost the same thing as what I learned in Benjamin DeMott's English 11, taking apart a poem to see what the deeper thing was so that you could answer questions about it.  The closest thing one could get to a direct understanding, the questions, asked, then answered.  As close as you could ever get to the poem's mind.

I just feel really stupid these days.  Is this in part due to my own bored addiction, my laziness, letting my mind wander the easy dull path and not the inner focussed one.

And yet, looking upon the news, a constant parade of garden variety human ridiculousness.  If anything, the zen buddhist urge to retreat from such noise, to concentrate on the important stuff, rings truer and truer as an effective way to practice living.

The mind, the attitude, these things change a thousand times a day.  Therefore you wonder if you can trust these flights of mind and fancy and mood.  It's all just panic, needlessly so.  And the modern world of commercial materialism and progress is profoundly unsettling enough to poke and prod our poor minds into all kinds of things.

None of this is new.  All of this is known.  The sound of one hand clapping.


Perhaps it is when you are feeling really stupid that simply must turn the matter around.  Fateful it is that you are not wrong.  Rather you are in that ballpark the confines and fences of which are never really known, not through the intellect, but perhaps simply by being born, itself not an easy thing, but a natural one.

Less Biblical, "go forth and multiply"--it's not that simple--and more of Zen mind.


The world is made sick.  The individual sickness of Harvey Weinstein, figure of media power, bleeds out upon others and the innocent.  One recent news piece described his condition as one of self-loathing, and I'm coming around to seeing that.  His sickness is not that of some dumb college kid's heartache trying the romantic dance out for the first time, but of a power grab, of intimidation and damage inflicted upon perceived rivals.  The sickness of Anthony Weiner fits in there too somehow, somewhere on the power ego chain.  The sickness of such individuals makes us readily self-protective, even where perhaps we are as weak as ever.

 Accusations hit the mark too late.  Those flourished early as practice in adolescence are more mini acts of trying on power and ego, to some extent.  Do we go on with accusations, or do we see the light?  Take the beam from thine own eye.

But that is harder to put into words.  The worst evils, remember, are done in the name of domination, not in the name of peace.

Powerful lessons take a long time to absorb.  The mind, the ego, still plays tricks on you, meddling in the past, disturbing its peace, its form of the real education we receive be living life.  The rain falls on the just as well as the unjust.

Fear and cowardice is, perhaps, as much a sickness as aggressive coercion.  Everyone wants to be at peace, victim and victimizer.  A mind clean and clear, not burdened with the thought formations that are based upon illusions of the solid fixed self.

It is hard for the fearful of mind to stand up for peace.  Like they've had to be in a room with a bully, either expectedly or unexpectedly.  No one is really clear from such illnesses, and that's why the mental habit of finding peace and koan is of use.

I am sad today, what's new, and feeling lonely.  I have slept through the whole day.  I called in sick, after vomiting in the metal trashcan by the bed.  I'd taken ibuprofen, a sip of pedialyte, soda water, water from the glass on the little blue bedside table, gone into the kitchen for a sip of V8, a tentative bite of quinoa, a tablespoon of cough syrup.  I had a hot headache, a cough, aches and chills the days leading up.  After getting up to empty out the bucket of liquid content of a wine like color, rinsing my mouth out, a quick brush of the teeth, I go back to bed and curl up under the comforter, praying I don't have to work tonight, the last of a four shift run, jazz night's peculiar swarm of requests to be entertained.  My brother's supposed to call.  I send a text into work, and an hour or so later, it's confirmed through the boss, via a text from my friend L who works the day shift and makes the schedule.

My brother has done well with life in the city.  He has excelled, I would say, knows how to be self-confident, knows how to get what he wants, knows how to be serious, and what not to take seriously, I suppose, as far as the things of the spirit and the psyche go.  He is of blood type B, the blood type of my broad cheeked boned father, rest his soul, the blood of the Mongol, adept at adapting to the conditions of city life and strife.  He'd called me yesterday, to check in, but I was wearily getting ready for work, calling him back from the woods I pass through.  "Are you working Saturday?"  "Well, I'm on call.  I don't know."  "Can you make us a reservation for four at our table...  if you're working (he implies.)"  Okay, I'm getting off easy.  I don't feel up for a substantive talk.  And that's part of the reason I am tucked under the blankets trying to find a comfortable way to lie still, in and out of dream and thought and the memory of things as they happened with the old girl, the Princess, of many times I didn't have the bravado to follow through with her.  And when you're sick you think of comforts, like a hug, and so I think of that time I went by her suite one sunny after noon early in the school year.  I'd noticed she'd been wearing a long skirt, split up the side, wanted to complement her on it.  Her roommate let me in, while speaking on the phone, and then she herself came out, said hi, and then turned and walked back across the mailroom and down the stairs to her room, and I was too stupid, too callow, too seriously minded, too emotional, to follow her glide away, as I should have.  Things you think about.  Things you think about when you are not feeling well and subject to depressions.

I on the other hand have not done well in the city.  And yes, it's sad.  Quite sad, in fact.  So that every day is quite sad.  So the thought of how a little bit of erotic tension could have had some small relief, really on many occasions, there more than thirty years ago, rises up from now and then, and always clouded by my blindness, foolishness, stupidity, you name it.  Healthy relief in that little battle of subtle communications at the gut level as are uncontrollable.  Even back then, I guess, I was weighted  down.  Weighted down by something only in the last few years I've sought to perhaps isolate.  As if you could fix a broken watch through isolating a piece of it.

I am from the type O blood, as is my mother, the Irish side.  Temperamental.  More in need of the fine tuning of returning to old ways that were ingrained in the human body long before the city came about, even before agrarian times.  Way before the modern diet came about passed on from the city, even more so than the farm table as far as influence.


When you sick and lying there listless, head and other parts of general ache, exhausted, run down, there is a chance to cleanse yourself from the habit of looking at the iphone, Google news, Facebook, Mail, headlines, whatever else.  That was not the way thirty years ago.  My father's era, certainly as an educator, his diction and habit of intellectual information went back, back at least as far as the Nineteenth Century, as up to date as he was with the Science Magazine articles of the current time.


I pull out an old book, a rare book.  D. T. Suzuki's The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk, originally published in 1931.  It has pictures in it, drawn by a fellow who knew the ways of life in such places as the Zen Monastery.  As a young man he lived as a monk.

I ponder, maybe that is the way, to seek the silence, the meditation, to renounce the pain of sexual bodily desire and other such desires...  Maybe those old cats knew something...


Mom called around 4:30, having woken from a nap.  I need to go visit her.  It is one in the morning now.  I turn on the television to watch the news.   The Zen monks live light.  A bowl for rice, a rob, leggings, sandals.  As a young man, Suzuki would walk through the night, thirty miles, to visit his mom on weekends when he was teaching English.  Like my own father's, his father passed away when he was young, about six.  My father saw him once, speaking at Johnson Chapel, elderly.