But maybe it's just too hard to be a writer now.  Too hard to go back and forth between the social and the private worlds.  The private allowed you time for the real work you felt you had to do, out of honor and spirit and for religious reasons.

But there was a hell of a cost for it.  Think of all the vulnerable people who have those late night jobs at checkout counters and so forth...  I became one of them.  Tired, at odd hour, leery of each other, but reaching out by some quiet politeness, to re-identify ourselves as human beings, capable of all things even if we have not succeeded in life by the norm.


I feel stupid and ashamed.  It could be construed I was sneaking around, avoiding humanity on days off, but I felt quite tired, and like Dostoevsky, I wanted the quiet time of the deeper night, three in the morning, which both worked with the circadian rhythm imposed by said job of physical struggle.  This was the time I'd find to grocery shop at the 24 hour stores, the Safeway across the street and a block up from work, and believe me that could be a long walk in the cold hungry night, and for other basic needs the Rite Aid, another walk long enough and dreary in the night, for things like toilet paper, soda water, laundry detergent and paper towels.  Somehow at this hour the sound of the laundry was less offensive, and more calmly I could sit down and try to work, not that I ever really did, but just that it helped to write.  And I could remember the kindness of late night people at work...

It felt that life had gone seriously off-track, and I didn't seem to know anyway to bring it back, such a person was I, disagreeing, not willing to join in so contentedly as do people who smartly know that it's simply wise to do so as far as actual life goes, the things most people want, spouse, house, kids...

Whatever the days I worked, it all succeeded in making me tired.

And in this late hours, of course, of course you wonder about your sanity, about your choices, about where it all is headed.  And further, it felt like you needed, that you deserved, even, a break, of some sort.

Who would want, in their right mind, to be up alone at four AM, working on their little projects...  But how else does it get done?

And perhaps only in such danger do things become clearer, even if you might not want to hear what being clearer is, realizing the very issues...  And you think, hmm, no wonder Dostoevsky wrote at night.  No wonder Dostoevsky penetrated beyond issues of civil authority in the murder story of old Karamazov.

No wonder he depicted Christ as a silent captive, kept in the dungeon by the powerful bishop inquisitor who identifies completely with the profane.  As in, "we have it better without you being here...'



As a boy going to bed I'd look down from the balcony, down into the living room, and there, always, was my father, sitting in his brown chair, with papers around him, reading, perhaps writing on a legal pad, and always after dinner 'til midnight, a good four hours anyway, and often a cat getting an ear rub next to him, one of the wolfhounds or the corgi by the firepot...  He'd put on the teaching performance during the daytime, up at the college, and then, now, he was doing the deeper matters of his work.

When you write you have to poking along, struggling, wading into new waters.  And whoever might come along and read what you might write on that one day, well, they might see blue colors when you are generally painting in orange colors...

There is enough out there to write about, just by existing.  And one could include in that the works of all the painters, from Giotto, and the early guys, to Van Gogh and Cezanne...  Art, art is spiritual, worth noting, as part of the struggle...  part of the path toward a better spiritual understanding, an understanding of the other.

Did they paint with massive doubts hanging over them?  With concerns about the coming crisis of the aging of their elders...

I wish I knew what the old man had been writing, his lesson plans.  His letters were always tremendously well thought and written, long hand with a felt tip pen...  I wish I could have shared him with more of my friends and more people, how sweet and great he was.



The night is self-correcting.  A load of laundry is for the most part done, just in need of being put away.  The time is precious when undisturbed.  And this is why I never go out.

What would I teach if I were a teacher?  I would teach about all sorts of things, no particular subject.  Probably not economics, but what does the great Void and the Universe and all its stuff really care about economics...



I'm not saying I'm a good writer.  I'm not saying I'm a useful writer.  I'm not saying there's much value for any sort of marketplace.  I'm not saying I deserve to be read.  But that is not why anyone writes, not if they are serious.

Some explore the daytime, and some explore the lonely nighttime.  They are both experiences to be had.  Facing yourself...

But somehow it was a tough week on the body, what with driving back from up north, Oswego to DC, back to work for one day, busy, then off two days, then out to dinner with amigos and then back to work for a hard Saturday night, then Easter Sunday night shift, the anniversary of my father's passing, the Monday jazz with my coworker bearing down on me and my pains, then off on Tuesday, then my buddy calling me saying I should come by, back to the wine bar, and meet the three young women from Paris the retired arbitrator gentleman has brought by.  And I wake up early in the morning feeling some sort of Kerouac panic, "old man, lonely, no family, and fat."  Thrown off, I guess.  Worried about adult stuff like jobs that pay the bills and aging mothers who are lonelier than I am, whom I am at least faithful about calling and visited her for birthday.  Well, I retreat to the bar rather than trying anymore to chat up the young women from France here for a business seminar, talking to my friend J the bartender who gives me a ride home at the end of the night.  Better to go out then stay in, but sometimes you can't really tell and maybe it's all the same misery anyway.

Early early in the morning I lay awake, get myself a fresh glass of double filtered water in the plastic Foxhall Smiles pint glass from the dentist, and crack open the book on the bed next to me, Kerouac, Big Sur, which is almost too much for me, delving into the horrors of alcoholism, and the only real bright spot beyond the touching stuff about Tyke the beloved cat back at his mom's in Long Island and the comfort Kerouac has giving us a bit of his Canadian French personal family talk like that of his dying father's groans is the bit at the end about seeing the Cross, after all his Buddhist readings, he sees the Cross there as clearly as he's ever seen anything, finding that remarkable.  The poems written to the sea soothe the harrowing read.

And why did I get into this foolish line of work anyway, the grey sky of April the fourth tells me, in its stillness before the wind picks up as predicted.  Yes, it is not easy when your work schedule gets thrown off, you feel jerked around.

But I have other books of Kerouac, his Book of the Dharma, and after warming a can of black-eyed peas, green tea, a chat with mom whose day is also cold and raw, and doing the dishes so that I have clean forks again and all the cups are clean except for the ones I am using, more or less, and the plates from the shelf where the cockroach was are rinsed in comforting hot soapy water, the spiritual life, with ETWN on in the background, and Mom too was just watching TV with Mother Angelika praying the Holy Rosary and I've lit some incense, Frankincense and Myrrh.  Not to be gross, saints in their little cabins such as Kerouac have their little encounters with the living creatures of the world like mice and spiders who go about their business in the outhouse...

Hungry, I eat, and yoga later on this odd day off before the winds come...  Otherwise I feel pretty useless, and that is how we are these days anyway, entranced by our little on-one devices, Google News, Facebook, emails, whatever else we might find out...

I'm in a bad mood at the start of work.   The walk through the woods was mild and sunny, and I did some yoga before, but when I get in I see them monkeying with the reservation pad, how are we going to fit all the parties in.  I bury myself in restocking, step by step.  When we're seated at the round table downstairs eating our baked chicken wings in rice, the young woman I'm going to work with pipes up, without much warmth, "I know how you are, Ted, don't offer any tastings until we get through things..." to which I respond, quietly, "Alina, I'm not an idiot."

Easter, and I have to be doing this kind of a thing, working Saturday night, and then back for Easter Sunday, the anniversary of my father's passing, then the rest of the week, and the scheduling server manager L tells me she had to put me on the schedule for the entirety of next weekend too.  Okay, whatever, but giving me off two of my usual shifts, which is fine.  I'll be tired enough getting through what lies before me.

The boss comes in, with jeans, shirt untucked, fashionable leather sneakers, greets my co-worker with pecks on both cheeks, and I'm already toiling away, surrounded by a full bar, and some woman, a regular, asking me if the veal special has butter in it.

Later in the evening, the boss comes up the stairs, and bids me good day, and we say, hum, yes, busy busy, that's good.  But a minute or two later, he says, hey, something about my shoes...  and I've been wearing my Brooks running shoes because rodents chewed through the laces of the other ones, and because my feet hurt.  He's right, but it doesn't help my mood much, at least it's getting toward the end of the night.

Easter dawns, without much meaning, so it seems.  No triumphant mood, and more one of "Fuck This."  Mom calls from up north, feeling very lonely.

I have a busser to help out, as the back room, the wine room, is full with two parties roughly at the same time.  And there's the bar, which needs attention from the start, an older African American couple who live out by Catholic University, who drop in from time to time, enjoyable people, and they are in for an early dessert and still wearing their observant finery.  The first party in the back turns out to be two sisters who grew up just west of Paris, and in their sixties, they are fun to talk to, and one mentions Muscadet, being introduced to it when she was five.  Asking about it, I tell her Hemingway liked it with oysters, as her story comes out.

My busser is helpful, but I've barely cleared the six-top when dinner, just fired, arrives, so I have to scramble for that, and my help seems one step behind for much of the evening.  He's been here all day, so I can't blame him, and he's a tireless strongman...  I've sent him home and think I've slayed the dragon when I hear the women downstairs speaking to the last arrivals, having called in a reservation, "yes, check out upstairs, it's very nice."  They are headed up the stairs anyway, even as it is just my friend and I, no one else, and I will just suck it up on Easter night.

They three turn out be nice, the daughter went to Mt. Holyoke, and for me it's either hate them or join them, as far as hospitality goes, and so I join them, and my friend the historian is telling excellent sketches from a night out down on 14th being kind to a mutual friend, a younger guy.

I reflect on his stories, how the Barbary Pirates moved in on the two women they were talking to, one sitting on the girl's jacket on the barstool chair when she gets up to go to the restroom, and showing off pictures of themselves with Secretary Mattis....

It's all about entitlement, such successes, so it seems to me.  It's not about who you are, but about how confidently you feel you deserve desirable things.  "The two Arab guys," presumably with enough money in their pockets to feel a fresh self-confidence, who think nothing of inviting the chicks to the Four Seasons or the Ritz for more expensive treats, have captured the day.

And me, poor old dumb fuck Tranowsky frets his time away carefully considering what he deserves and ends up living a monk's life, and one of service.  Dumbly staring down at his shoes as he scuffs them through the dust in the classic The Thinker pose of shyness, almost a stereotype...  Is it that he is now too careful, feeling old enough and weak enough despite his strengths to 'not bite off more than he can chew, and life is pretty precarious anyway...'  Thus tending bar, as if he doesn't even feel entitled even to write or to place much confidence in it or that it will ever pay off.

Mom calls back at the start of the shift, Easter evening, the light out on the trees across the street, pinkish white apple blossoms, the big old leaning elm that towers over the Boys and Girls Club parking lot with its new rubber green playing field in the distance and the stand of grand old Larches by the scholar's residences, and she has mellowed, considerably, having had a nice conversation with family members, and that's one more anxiety lifted, as I set up, careful to dress a little better and to try on a different pair of shoes taken from under the dresser, a pair of green suede Pumas.


One more shift, jazz night.  I drink the ginger water I brewed yesterday, make a pot of dragonwell green tea, sprinkle some flax seed, some astragalus, some schisandra powder, into my cup and refill it, diluting the taste away.  I've done a great job at work, my job, feeding the sense of entitlement that people have, generally more important people than I.  My body has its aches today, and a tired feeling   within, but the tea is helping.

And I wonder, what would I be like, what would life look like, were I to suddenly grow my own sense of deserving, being entitled to the joys and the abundance of the world rather than the stoic go-it-alone sense of things.  Still, though, I will try to keep enough energy after my shift to do some grocery shopping, a bit tired of the menu at the old Dying Gaul as far as the excitement of tastebuds go...


But what is the writer's entitlement...  A sense of having inherited an ability to discern some form of understanding of reality...  Perhaps his choice was not so much a lack of self-confidence, as it was perceived in the feminine world of many many options and suitors and opportunities for pretty girls.    A quiet sort of old man sense of deserving the act and the ability to write down the oldest and deepest truths...  to be a sort of Lincoln musing over, say, different sides of an issue both claiming divine will, and 'woe unto the world because of offences...'

Apparently it is a lonely station to occupy.  The opposite to the entitlement so plainly evident in the world and Washington, D.C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kerouac#/media/File:Jack_Kerouac_Naval_Reserve_Enlistment,_1943.png


Sometime after this photograph was taken, and after a car accident, Kerouac sort of lost it, according to the official Navy view, and they admitted him to the hospital for some form of mental issues, and headaches.  Later on, he would admit it would have gone easier for him had he not been such a wise guy in attitude.

His experience out on the sea, losing his best friend, his truest literary friend, Sampas, to the War, his early letters, annotated by Ann Charters...

Youth, into adulthood, a time of upheaval.  The face is a strong one.

And what put him on the path he would now take...

Dinner around 8, my oldest friends in town, my best friends, a couple--I knew them separately before they joined and married, one from the place I worked, in her neighborhood, and he from the bar he worked, the one my brother favored going to on weekends when I was off.  I bring the wine, three bottles, and they put out a spread of prosciutto and soft dark salami and cheese, and then, as it's Good Friday, scallops with fettuccine and a salad.  They are hard working, and organized, shop owners.  They know what they are doing.  Dinner is quite delicious.  I stick to wine, no hard stuff for me.  And when I leave, though I check a new wine bar out, I avoid ordering anything, and get in a cab.  An Ethiopian gentleman, we strike up a conversation.  I want to go see if my old chef friend is around, along with Johnny, a great guy I let down once when the two opened a restaurant more than twenty years ago in Adams Morgan.  The guy takes me up 18th Street, perhaps to milk the meter.  The display on the streets of Urban Babylon turn me off, and I find they, my friends, are not there.


But the writer runs a sort of risk when he goes out.  It's as if he has to control, carefully, best achieved by cooking for yourself at home, what he eats, making sure he gets enough.  Otherwise, it will end up being later and visiting McDonalds and ordering foolishly, and then having to drag himself back, by bus, or on foot.  And then to eat on the couch with the television on, and then to sort of pass out, and then to put himself to bed, and then to wake up feeling crappy.  Why, who knows...  A safe return, but waking to angst and anxiety, and the glass of water beside the bed.

There is fun with friends, and they are important people to talk to.  They know me very well, all my ups and downs.  They are fun.  They have cats.  Where they live is interesting and happening....


But Kerouac...  is there a relationship to his going out on the town to listen to mad jazzmen blow their horns and then to have that experience filter down and come out as writing, is this a measure to which the man might otherwise feel lost and lonely...  Is there a correlation...  An original feeling of lostness that came upon him as he gained adulthood...  Everyone else taking upon themselves a responsible adult life (except for other madmen.)

The direct line between the mountain climb of experience, and a different sort of take on a professional life, and the writing...  The direct line between the anxiety and the spiritual work of writing itself, and yes, for Kerouac, and for anyone else too, it has to go in a spiritual direction...

Is that why some of us pick out certain professional activities, that they bring to us the maximum amount of anxiety...  somehow mimicking the experiences of childhood getting amped up by adult behavior, the experiences of passing into adulthood with all your cracks and faults... that by facing such headless horseman coming behind you on the bridge you find eventually, hours later that you are through the danger, that you can then repair to go back home, tired, almost ready for sleep,

A sketch before work, green tea, some turmeric tea cooling, time for the shower, and then some yoga and off to work.  The friars of EWTN have visited the holy land in the background television sounds.  The Lake of Galilee is seven miles at its widest, and thirteen long.  The sun is out.

I take Kerouac as a hero, a strong one, a profile in courage.  At least by my own scaredy-cat pipsqueak standards...

And then, Good Friday...


One reads about the writing that comes out of the Creative Writing programs these days.  The imitation of writing that pays no homage, has no knowledge, to the body of literature the human creature has created, no deep root in tradition, no ability to read closely the old words, and of a style that has a self-important lack of need for actual skill, actual narrative work...  And I should talk...

(Found, via Facebook friend, Quillette.Com, "With stories like these, who needs talent," by Sandra Kotta, a four part series.)

But literature will always come back.  No matter what they try to do with it, with fancy theories, and the imposed tastes that discredit the great honestly of literary work trying to make sense of life and the human condition...  It, literature, real poetry, real prose, real thoughts, real issues, literature will always come back.  Because it is organic.  It is in me and you.

Through all our own winters, it is there, still live, still breathing, just a bit dormant, waiting to gather its forces when the time is right.


There'd been a night, thirty years ago, wintertime.  I was living at my dad's.  And I was helping out with Don Beebe, landscaping, and we had a little project to prune the branches lining the streets of Waterville, down the road.  A job in the cold time of year, and then you'd go back to the cab of the pickup, pour some coffee and talk a bit, waiting for lunchtime.  So I called my college princess, and it was not early in the evening, but probably around eleven at night, and it rings and she picks up the phone, and I ask her, "hi, too late to be calling?"  And all I hear is, after a pause, not a long one, "oh, god..."  and the voice drifts away from the phone, and I am a creep, and she hangs up.  And I do not call her back.  Who am I?  I'm some poor shit fallen college student who has no idea what he wants to do with himself.  Well, he wants to, given a good education in English literature, be a writer, but he doesn't know how to do this, to be a writer, and he barely has a job.

And so I remember the golden light of the sun, low, there that morning, the morning after, as we are sort of pointlessly  clipping back with branches with the long pole-pruners, pulling the rope, pruning, the cut branch falling to the freezing cold bluish white ground covered lightly with snow.  And, well, of course, I just accepted it all.

And I guess with that, I knew that I was in some sort of exile, and that I needed probably to go somewhere, I don't know, some adventure, some big city, where I would be lonely and suffer, in hopes of becoming a writer.



When I got to DC, after I stayed with college buddies, two different classmates, wearing them out I suppose, I found a place to live.  It was a big deal for me.  Foxhall and MacArthur, and I lived in a small house, one split down the middle into two, with a quiet porch and a backyard with a tub and  a garden in it,  living with two women, a younger one who's boyfriend had a mustache like Tom Sellick, and Sandra, who'd lived in Europe, was a good cook, worked in jewelry and who hung her italian fine lingerie drying on a special rack in the bathroom.  They had a cat, and they liked that I liked cats.  Somehow they fixed upon me to be their roommate, in their selection process, just to mix it up a bit, I guess.

I remember once walking with Sandra, I suppose we were down on M Street near the Four Seasons, walking along, summer day, not too hot, and she gently starts asking me maybe like what is my plan, my plan for life here.  And I'm a kid, twenty three or so, but not a man at all, with my busboy job and my temp job at the George Washington University Health Plan during the day, sleeping on the weekends until I gotta go run my butt off at the old original Austin Grill, running all night, listening to Marty Robbins White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation, and Hank Williams Why Don't You Love Me Like You Used To Do, being taken advantage of, running all the night so as not to feel lost and depressed and bereft over losing Princesses and direction in life...

And all I can come up with for her is Kerouac.  I want to be a writer like Jack Kerouac.

And she knows who, of course, Jack Kerouac is.   Hmmm.  Now is that much of a career choice...

She was very kind to me.  She helped me out.  She made soup for me with chicken and pumpkin and it was the best thing I ever had.  She cleaned up when I ate late night pepperoni pizza with my Grill buddies rom the old Adams Morgan Trio's and vomited in the hallway trying to get outside but not making it as the bathroom was in use...  She gave me a paperback copy of George Orwell's Down and Out in London and in Paris and played Tom Waits for me on the stereo in the living room.



But why, I wonder, would you want to be, want to be, a writer?  By choice.  Inspiration, sure.  But something organic.  Something within human beings...

And I also wonder, if it is not a bit insane to try to be a writer...  or is it a chicken or the egg sort of a thing...

One knows himself as a pip-squeak.  Ineffectual.  A good for nothing.  Good at nothing practical.  He hates to hear himself speak on recordings.  He's stopped wondering why women want little to do with him, beyond politeness and friendship.

He doesn't even know when he's going to write.  What he's going to write... absolutely no plan.  Doing it blind.

The things one has to write are quite boring.

So I went down there, walking, in a hurry, to arrive on the hour.  Down the hill, across R, down to the big avenue, crossing the other one, past the Cosmos Club, a light rain, the winter coat too warm a choice, then across Massachusetts and into the downtown.  I get to the corner of 19th and L.  Where are the food trucks?  And then I realize, oh, the appointment is for two not three, I should know this, what got into my head...  It's always been two, after it changed from eleven am.  I hate to let my nice therapist down.  She listens to me patiently, devotedly, looking, poor thing, for ways to help me.  My iPhone is out of storage space and acting funny, and it takes time for emails to load.  Oh, yup, she sent me one around 2:15, but it had not come at the time.  Standing there, I write her back.

Going to see mom, a week away, and then starting to write again, yes, kinda threw me off a bit.  And I have to go back to work.  But in a way, the week away, it kinda of cured me a little bit, reminded me of things.  And it is a sign of good health that I am writing again, and that I was writing so seriously that my mind arranged me taking a pass, unintentionally, well, I'd rather be writing then focussed solipsistically on hopelessness itself and all that bleak future stuff.

So I walk back.  Now with the clock ticking for another thing.  A few minutes, a bite of packaged turkey, a change of tee-shirt, sweated through and jackets, folding a Brooks Brothers button up shirt in thirds and pressing it into the pages of the legal pad, the legal pad which I used to have a different kind of faith in and use for.... and then back out, down in the other direction to the avenue with all its embassies, backed up traffic, Secret Service police cars, then finally through the woods, and up along Dumbarton Oaks, to the other big avenue, and back to work, the little yellow painted building with the blue awing, the first shift back, and right on time.  How have the kids left the bar;  I was worried, a concern in the mind for days now.  My return.  How painful will it be?

Out of soda water, of course.  The beer not stocked back up in the cooler so I have to get down on my knees and go fishing for the different ones on the shelf.  The wine restocking also lacking.  I see they've left me with one can each, Coke and Diet.  No fruit but two lemons.  Who knows what else, in my triage.  On top of the usual set-up.  Oh, boy, here we go, put the wines in the bins to chill with the old ice, grab a milk crate and down the two flights of stairs to the basement, and here comes the busboy at least, reasonably on time, he's got kids;  I take it in stride.  The Russian gal wakes up from her meditation in the quiet back room, and tells me stories of her grandfather, empathizing with my trip to go see my mom, even as the horse within me is pulling at the reins of it.


Then to the end of the night.  There's nothing I particularly want to eat off the menu.  I've lost the taste, the desire.  Nothing strikes my fancy.  Only utility, something for the stomach.  A plate of duck leg confit in the oven, and I'd rather have a cheap gyro from the late night pizza down the street.

My feet ache, even though I've worn the Brooks running shoes all night.  I can barely walk, get a cab home.  I have a glass of wine, finally take a bath, listening to a TV show about a great World War Two Japanese battle ship, the Yamato, the brain child of poor old Admiral Yamamoto...  Epsom salts to soothe and lacquer the skin with mineral protections.  It's five am before I'm settled, before I can fall asleep.

And today, up late, two thirty, waking from a dream, and my poor skinny butt along the base of the spine is raw and red from scraping against the tub, and I am still tired and achy.  The signs are clear.  You cannot do this much longer, my friend.

And after looking for it, concerned for hydration, I realize I've probably left my Nalgeen bottle, filled with homemade electrolyte water, in the lady's cab, nice African American lady, gracious, her brother a pastor down in Southern Maryland, driving a Honda Fit.

The realities of the working barman's life...

(And even Jesus I've let down, even in Holy Week, watching certain imagery to help myself relax before bed, committing adultery in my heart which doesn't want to but the body does, and anyway, a check on my health, male and otherwise, but sad.   Alone, an act which leaves you with little to say, your powers of writing empty, thus its sin, even though no good doctor could blame me.)

So, what are you going to do, for a life, for a job...

The writer cannot write.  He's terrible at it.  He shouldn't even bother.

And worse:  nothing to write.  Have farted around too much.  Too much radio, then calling mom.


You're too earthy to follow the regimentation, my mom tells me, when we talk of the church, much as I'd like to feel a belonging there.  Too many rules.

Like this town.  It's odd combinations...  Not offered much in the way of a career after all the hard work and the wasting of the best years of my life, as they call it.  The writer is not one for the city and all its so-called opportunities.  The writer doesn't care.  His nuggets of gold are found in self-reflection from his struggle.  He could be laboring anywhere.


Holy Thursday for old me, poor old Tranowsky...  The tired aches from work leaving me ready for a nap.  It's seventy seven degrees at the end of March and I need another nap, another dream, another Jesus lay down in the ropes to ponder what he needs to say to them all.  Jesus knows it's not writing (the things he is working on and saying), that he's a literary failure, too lazy to write a narrative account with believable fleshed-out characters, and having no desire to fictionalize real people, too tired from work to edit out whatever he has recently laid down on paper...

Out to the grocery store before they close at ten.  Hair still with epsom salts in it, and the body too old to give a fuck how I dress, just old green LL Bean chamois shirt over black tee shirt, Dockers chino type pants, stretch fabric, not too tight, sneakers.  A few things, half-heartedly in the bag, but not up for the bigger grocery mission perhaps at the midnight Safeway near the McDonalds, and a cheap bottle of wine, which might be okay over ice with lime.

And as I'm dragging the stuff home I end up wandering down Connecticut Avenue, walking along sadly from not having done any writing of any kind on my day off, I decide to go to my old haunt, since it is so nice out, and I have a craving for gyro meat, the little cheap Greek place, Zorba's, where I used to sit as a moony young man writing in his notebooks mooning over old girlfriend and wishing to convert his own sad life into a kind of Parisian Hemingway sort of a thing, appreciating the spirituality of the street, the passers by, the buildings, older style, brick, most of them, across the avenue, the quiet of the triangle part insulating you from the cars, the busses, the cop cars, and enough conversation, a place where young people go, on a limited budget, and still it's not cheap for me, just cheaper.  And so, bravely, looking like a bum, I go in and there's the guy.

Nice guy, like me, been there forever in the restaurant business, he's the manager.  And sometimes, you know, you get shy, and you don't go places because you want to remain anonymous, just in and out, not have to make the extra effort, and I, bad with names...  So it's hey man, how you doing, and what the hell why not I'm not hiding anything, I'm not kidding anyone anymore, life is tough, work is hard, and me with all my bad career choices (but solid, very solid and steady work effort, never calling in sick but a few times when it was really obvious...), and I cannot muster much happiness, but, yes, a gyro platter, yes, I'm starving actually (and by the time I get home I won't have the energy to cook anyway, even my simple way) and yes, why not, for $4.95 a glass of cheap Greek low alcohol  red.

I go in and wash my hands, get a glass of water, lug my reused grocery bags up and out onto the patio, find an unwobbly table, and he's given my a second glass of wine.  I didn't mean to milk the situation.  And I've found out his name, as a nice young couple comes back in and gives him a big thank you.  And his same is Saul.  How 'bout that.  And he says it the old way, two syllables, old school like in Old Testament tone.  I'm taking my tray out at that point.  Good.  I know his name, finally.  (And in this go-round he has fed me, at a reasonable and modest price, taken good care of me, given what he can do, rather than persecute, hey, that's good, you take what you can get.)

I wolf down the gyro glistening and with the tzatziki sauce on top, skip the pita bread below it, get into the fries, usually skipping all forms of potato due to the arthritic joint issues eating them causes, as I avoid dough to avoid fat belly, am happy, or not unhappy, the moon almost full, cracking atmospherically through the dark quickly moving enveloping clouds, and the salad is perfect as always, the best in town to my own humble tastes, just so with the red onion, fresh romaine, tomato sprinkled with oregano and little bits of pure white feta, even eat the black olive which I don't necessarily like.  And then, still very hungry, I go back in and order up a beef shish kebob.  Another glass of wine, why not.  Thank you, my friend, behind the counter, with mustache, our hair grayer now...  Saul.

And there it is, dinner, on Thursday, Holy Week, no disciples, no feet washed, no bread, but french fries and the very good consistent white rice along with the two little skewers and after the gyro meat, yes...  I finish my glass of wine, not having intended to splurge (though I am getting money back from the Feds this year), and I'm tired enough and I walk back home, up to R, past the old coffee shop patio where I used to sit with my legal pads with no luck writing, no story to tell, just my own little reflections and little birds to watch, sparrows picking at the sidewalk, and now at last, at least, it looks like we're through winter almost, one can go outside.

Back up the stoop, I barely have the energy to put the cold things away in the refrigerator.  It's almost midnight anyway, and I take the trash out, the recycling, pour myself a glass of water, and hit the hay.   And tomorrow it will be Good Friday.



To be a writer, yeah, you have to be a weirdo.  You can never go mainstream.  You're an outsider, almost even to your old former self.  Quite possibly a let-down as far as your family goes...

Sitting at home in the apartment, the quiet textiled living room, sitting in my father's old brown chair, I think of Doctor Torrey, old R.E.T,. the Theosophist, my father's mentor.

And for me, finally, some form of self-respect, as I come across a picture, Kerouac's Navy Reserve military induction sort of mug shot--he was about five nine, incredibly handsome, obviously French, a very strong face and a strong personality coming through, determined.  Some self-respect for having tried to be a writer, anyway, not necessarily a good one, no, nor one devoted enough to really get at it.  Enough to not take shit from anyone, and maybe I'll go tell them, look, we need a busboy, at least when it is Jazz Night, because I don't want to walk out of there crippled anymore...

No, I've not turned out the way I might have intended to be, but, still, you take your shot at it.  And maybe one day...

The wine thing...  I work in the business, sure...  But somehow I never really wanted to be a sommelier.

He walked like a soldier having returned from a war, at least how he might have seen it, as he walked downtown to the office on the fifth floor, the person to talk to, safely, a woman a good fifteen years younger.  Then, because he was still off, still outside of everything, disconnected, in his own process, because he hadn't figured out anything, even still, as a returning vet, he would go to the job, working the bar.  He was no longer excited about the job.  It had always been a matter of being okay once he got there, but he knew it too had its costs, its unfairness, placing him back in the trenches of shitty conditions, shift work, bad for the body.  But now, less and less.

It's a common theme.  Platonov, The Potudon River, a great example, saying very little.  Tolstoy, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Melville, Crane, they all played with the general idea...

Aeschylus, there is no bravery without realizing the suffering and the sadness as qualities of existence.