The barman is left isolated and alone at the end of the night.  Five straight, including two of live jazz, and one complementary wine tasting...  And then, the day off.  I'm talking on the phone with my brother about holiday and travel plans, and work calls, leaving a message, call me back.  So, when things are wrapped up, I call work, the manager on duty, L.  Do they need me for Saturday, maybe.  But it's not about that.  On the tip sheet, I left a question mark on the tip out amount for the busser.  At the last meeting, I'm pretty sure, the agreement was, one busboy for up and down, 20 percent from server tips up and down.  A busy night, even the waitress admitted we could have used a busboy for our own floor.  Well, L. is not happy about the question mark I left.  The previous jazz Wednesday from last week, the musicians excruciatingly loud, yes, I quipped a lonely little remark on the reservation list as I turned the paperwork in, I thought in good enough humor, the simple word, "disaster."  I guess it was not taken well.  I have hurt some people, deeply enough, with said habit, my lonely late night isolated comment upon the night's affairs, as I eat my veal cheeks with the pasta, not the vegetable, as I have tried to, but not the way the dish was intended to be enjoyed.  Five nights, I've engaged a lot of people, many strangers more or less, with my good humor.  But yeah, maybe before I leave, after running around just so, hungry, I have a bit too much wine.  "It has to stop.  Your comments are deeply offensive."  Well, yes, I agree, a meeting would be good for morale (where we can talk about these things, with less embarrassment.)

Yes, I guess it added up for them.  M. leaves at 8 in the evening and still gets a point (credit for a shift) when I am there hustling, working 'til midnight.

The call ends.  Oh.  Great.  I was looking forward to a useful evening, but, coming from work, where I carry my weight, so I think anyway, this is not a good set up for a Zen evening.  And yeah, in light of the phone call's words, it all seems to look kind of futile, the effort I make.  And then having been an asshole and hurt people on top of that, to add shame.  I poured myself an early glass of Beaujolais.  You're cut out for bigger and better things, mom says.

I talk to mom.  You do more than your fair share, there, she says.  That must gall you some.

When I went to dinner down at old friends, pork butt and beans from the Creuset, I didn't bother mentioning it.  But work had always been a place I earned my keep, worked hard, engaged, politely greeting up, talking to them, what kind of wine they liked, a little explanation of the menu, not just a blank "do you have a reservation..."  So, if one in my position were to feel less comfortable, then the gains are not as rewarding for that simple sense of satisfaction, deeper down, of doing the job the way I thought it should be done, as such jobs are open to interpretation and wit.   Like remembering the guy who came in months ago.

Nothing like friends to help you see your own craziness.  And at the end of it, I get on my bike, stop for a couple of burgers at Shake Shack, giving one to the homeless guy across the street, even though he's not making so nice with everyone with his rant, and still hungry, McDonalds.  Sleep, and then getting up late, as usual, moving to the couch by the window from the bed, but still falling into dreams that by now I have forgotten about in my unease to start the day late.  On my work schedule.


Down in Bladgen Alley the young people are like ghosts.  Or I am a ghost to them.  Arriving, I see a tall young man with everything that is the look, long beard, short hair, tall black combat boots, blazer over black tee shirt, black jeans, the attitude as he waits for his young woman to retrieve her bicycle.   But ghosts they are, used to being in close quarters with other people but engaging anonymously, only with their own group.  Pods of people from agricultural units joined in an agreed upon collective without word, cell phones out.


In the end, a night off, I get a kind a kind text from L., with the boss's blessing to have an extra busboy on jazz nights.  I feel like a pain for having been the trouble to behind it all, but the waitress had the same thought as me.  I feel bad enough not being around to help my mom, up there alone where she's retired.  That big sense of not having figured things out, as one should, as an adult.  Health insurance is going up significantly.


And then the clocks change.  Getting ready for work, I scout out the television for the weather, but the Weather Channel on Sunday afternoon is playing Why Planes Crash, and on the news, another mass shooting with many deaths, at a church somewhere in Texas.  The extra hour is merciful, to the body starting the work week, but soon, as the wine bar opens, it will be dark.  I turn off the television.  Human made systems will fail, be they aeroplanes, or guns and gun laws, and even churches.



Wednesday, a week later, there is a busser for the main dining room downstairs, and there is one for us up to, for jazz night.  It turns out to be a very busy night for all of us.  And at the end of all, I see the two servers have dipped out their busser twenty five percent, just as we do upstairs.  That's the agreement, as far as I know.  The question mark I put on the tip sheet was precisely about that, the agreement that both downstairs and upstairs will tip out twenty percent when the busser is shared between two floors.

It would not be important to write down.  The dream, after five nights of work, closing every night, busy nights full of entertaining, job well done, of returning to a campus.  There is a reunion going on, a return, as if I am redoing my senior year, another try, and my friends are there too, but they are keeping up with adding information and sophistication, whereas I am learning, or attempting to, through the experience, as if I were filing it all away in hopes of gaining some form of wisdom.  I am back trying to figure out the dining halls.  There are stands, shops, places serving food, charging money, and then there are the free college dining halls, serving the specials of the day, and ones serving sandwiches based on one's preference.  I am walking.  There are many new contours, hills, stands of woods, rocky outcroppings, that make it obvious that the campus was carved out of pasture and countryside, places I have not seen.  I cannot seem to figure out my schedule of classes.  I want to badly, but it doesn't seem to be happening.  I spend a lot of time walking, and there are many vistas, a war memorial on a distant wooded hillside ridge.  Fog and mist, light.  Remarkable and interesting old buildings from the 19th Century that I have not noticed before, made of brick.  There is a concert to welcome the new school year, a famous band in name, modernized, with many unrecognizable musicians.  I see Roger Daltrey over there, but not Pete Townsend.  Unfamiliar music, modern, funky.  Walking around I come across military equipment and vehicles.  And during the concert there is a show of military fireworks that strike me as dangerous.  I am wandering.  I have doubts that I will fit in enough, after my experiences in the real world.  I belong, by pedigree, and temperament and native intelligence, and yet, I don't belong, as seems usual for some of us.  Outsiders.

Beyond the campus, to the east, beyond the hills where I lived as a child down in the valley, beyond those green pasture towns, there is an interesting steep hill where I would like to hike, just north of a town center where there are restaurants and shops and large grocery store and a department store.  It's a small mountain, lovely to climb.  It draws me, a kind of national park or nature preserve.

Toward the end of the dream I am coming down a hill, circumnavigating the outside of an event, and there is a gentleman from the college, a communications person, who greets me, telling me he appreciates the notes, the letters, I've written to him (as amateur as they are.)  I am embarrassed by these efforts, but he is kind and I fill up.  My oldest surviving professor friend, WHP, has grown a beard, and looks a bit like David Letterman does with his own beard.  He is still teaching, and friendly to me.  He beckons to me, come over here, and he greats me quite warmly.

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.