So let's see...  Let me warm up first.  I've just come in off the road, more than eight hours driving, and I pull in by the old G.I. apartment building.  I left at 4:30 in the afternoon.  By the time I get my bags and travel stuff inside to unpack, park the rental red Hyundai sedan over in un-zoned street parking by the Urban Ecology Center, and crack open a can of ale, it's 1:30AM.

I drove up Saturday or was it Sunday evening, arriving about 10:30 in the night.   And now, back home in the apartment I am alone.  Entirely alone.  This is the way I have lived, ever since I moved in to George's grand house after the apartment I shared with my brother.  Which means I have failed in life.

I'd sent an email off to the landlord.  If I'm lucky I might pay half rent for the next six months, that's about it.  This was Friday, before getting ready to leave.  That would be about the best I could do, roughly equal to the cost of a storage unit for all my things, my books, my bikes, guitars, odder cooking things, my closets of clothes, winter gear, plus all the costs of moving.  The cost of being in true limbo, not knowing where to land.

Then just after that, sending out the email, two hours later, the boss calls out of the blue.  Maybe come back to work next Friday, if you're still in town.  It's going to get cold out, and maybe we can open the wine bar again...

Okay, sure.  Sounds good.

So now I need to go see mom.  I had to keep putting off, expecting that eventually there would be a deal for a Stimulus Package, so I could plan it out.  But, on and on that goes, McConnell and his band of self-righteous Senate Republicans of the most obstructionist kind are blocking all efforts to pass a new stimulus package, while every economist in the world agrees it should have been done months ago, as far as averting lasting damage to the economy.

I rent a car for Saturday noon, Enterprise, 14th and L.   In the morning, I get a call.  They're overbooked.  I made the booking late last night, and their computer system took it, but they are short on vehicles, meaning they don't have a car for me.  Okay.  I don't feel like moving much anyway.  I'm not packed.

Sunday, I make it down to Budget at 19th and L.  I get back and finish packing, and all this takes a while.   I'm finally on the road by 3:30.

Canal Road, then onto the Beltway, then merge left to get on 270 Northwest to Frederick....  Once I get through Frederick, the traffic eases, the road opening up, through the Catoctin.  Gas south of Harrisburg.  And onward.  In the mountains, at Ravine, PA, I opt for the truck stop Burger King for an early dinner of a Double Whopper, no cheese, then back on the road.

Past 10PM, I'm through Syracuse, which first appears past the long curve descending to Nedrow and the Indian Reservation.

I arrive, parking in the quiet lot.  I take a few bags in, one with the wine in it.  I find the door unlocked.  Stepping in, there is a stench.  Cat shit?  A dead animal?  Something severe in the fridge?  Has a rodent creature died the heating duct?  There are tiny fruit flies.  There are regular flies.  

Mom comes down the stairs, after I've already started trying to tidy things up.  She has to ponder for a moment who I am... how are you, mom, you look good, I say.  Poor thing, like all of us.

I stopped at the Burger King in Fulton.  $2 chicken nuggets, a fish sandwich, Whopper Junior...  I open some wine I brought up.  There is some white, but not much.  We sit at the table.  She has a couple of the lukewarm chicken things.    Later I run out for a six pack of Labatt’s Blue at the Stewart Shop.  That will help me get on with the cleaning.

I’m back and sorting out the refrigerator and the pile of dishes left in the sink. I take out a full trash bag, carefully tying its odors in, out to the dumpster.  It’s five in the morning when I get to bed.

Mom has not been taking her medications, this is clear.  Repetitive.  Did you sleep well, five minutes later, same thing.  I find one drug store brown prescription bottle by her bed in her disaster of a bedroom.  The other I call in.

The next day I manage to get up fairly early.  Forecast for rain.  Clouds.  52 degrees out.  I write up a grocery to-do list on a 3 by 5.   I take mom on a ride out down by the lake.  Then the stops we have to make.  Getting her Aricept at Wayne’s Drug Store, original neon sign out front...  Then the grocery store and the wine shop.  

I pick up some chicken tenders for a little lunch, to tide us over before The Press Box for an early dinner, wine, wings, a burger, something chicken for mom.

I get Mom home after dinner, but she is nauseous again.  Oh, there's nothing more I hate than vomiting, she says, as I bring over the mixing bowl coopted for use as a bedside puke bucket, which I then go empty in the bathroom toilet.  She was ill yesterday morning, the first day of my visit.

I turn to faith.  That's all I have now.   I have left.  That's all I ever had.

And how difficult it is for any of us even to have faith.  Buddha himself had to have faith, faith in his heretofore unheard of and unimaginable strange logic, such as no one had ever seen before.

Few of us learn much, or much to leave behind, about having and keeping faith.  If any writer could discover such, that would be a marvelous achievement.

The first day back is not easy.  The first time I have to get ready for work in a long time.  I have to take the rental car back, and I'm running behind, as I have to set the bar up.  I'm finally in the car, taking it back to 19th and L to the Budget Rental parking garage, and through a series of missed turns and one-way streets concentration being difficult, I make it back.  I pull carefully across the sidewalk and down into the garage, nodding at the Ethiopian guy, and down several levels, following the signs, down another level, and there's a guy before me, and I guess this is it.  He comes around to the driverside window and asks me to read off the odometer, and the fuel level, poor tired old guy, slender, in jeans, dyed blond hair, and I see on my phone in the darkness, do I have everything, that mom has called, twice at least.  I haven't had time getting ready, etc., yet today.

 I get out of the garage into the light of downtown, but she doesn't pick up when I call back.  The food trucks aren't lined up, so I get an overpriced gyro, stuff it in my courier bag, drink some water, go to K Street to find a bus. 

I'm waiting, and now my phone is buzzing, and it's Ben from the townhouses, the paramedics are here with your mom.  She's been going into other people's apartments again, and someone called.  He turns the phone over to the paramedic.  Once we've come, and she's in this state, we can't just release her, we have to take her in.  So I tell the guy that Mary her helper should be coming any minute, so I call Mary and then call him back, and he seems satisfied.  They'll wait for Mary.

I take the red Circulator bus, free, about five people on it, a young African woman, an older DC bum type, another guy, an older woman who gets on through the front door, not understanding, up to work, getting off by the public library after the bus takes us down along K Street before heading up Wisconsin Avenue.

Hugo I see up ahead of me after I cross and come up the sidewalk, bustling about over the new outdoor seating tables behind the cement balustrade blocks set out into the curbside lane.  "How are you, Mister," he calls, without missing a beat, having barely seen me, from what I could tell.   "Lotta work, man," he says.

Chef JeanBaptiste is there at the open door to greet me, and it's good, very good to see my old friends.  I get upstairs to the bar, and there's a lot of work to do, and I'll have to figure out what I need as I go along.  I start lugging things up.  I'll need a full load of mineral water, and all the reds we pour, sodas, bar garnishes have disappeared to, I see as I look in the cooler.  I wish I got in earlier.  I clean the ice bin, and start running things through the dishwasher.  Most surfaces are clean, just that the old stuff is in a jumble.

Mary texts me, after I try several times to call mom's landline.  "I'm taking your mom out for a drive.  She's fine."  I hope we don't get kicked out.

So I work my first two shifts back.  Then I'm tired for a couple of days.  I try to get outside, one day sunny, late in the afternoon, but the ragweed has come back.  I find out I've qualified for Medicaid.  

I did some grocery shopping after my shift Saturday night, but I'm hungry, and even though I'm just about broke I order cheap Chinese food delivery.  I'm starving.  I'll need my energy for what cometh next.  Then I settle in for the night, not knowing what's going to happen to anybody, and feeling bad for mom being alone.

I wake up late today, this day, Wednesday, and in the afternoon, checking my emails, I read, the Wine Bar is now open Tuesday through Saturday night, and "Ted your favorite bartender is back."  And this too is news I have to absorb.  Ahh, I say to myself.  What does this mean.  The clocks will be changing soon, meaning I won't have but a little light of day's sunshine to play with.  Five shifts?  I used to barely be able to do four, but things are a little different now, the set-up.

The world writes itself.  We do not need to embellish upon it all.  Writing is necessary unto ourselves and gives us the dignity of a work to do, but I wonder if it is unnecessary beyond the lessons of faith are observed, the lessons we are rewarded with for our travails.  In my view, Kerouac understood this.

Out sitting at a picnic table I felt too overwhelmed to add much thought to it all.  I'd been up the night before watching a new series, The Chosen, and I told myself I'd hold onto this moment of faith and perseverance as long as I comfortably could, even as I thought of how I should have spoken to the pretty young woman I've been wanting to say hi to, as we both made it to the last patches of golden sunlight a few days ago in this field here by The Urban Ecology Center.  I was sitting away, out in the field, but the sun went behind the tall pines, so I moved closer to her, asking her "May I borrow your sunlight," and she was friendly and smiled, "be my guest," she said, which was witty, and I sat down before her ahead of her, and went about my lotus pose, and when I stood to do my tree pose she was gone.  Dumb ass me.

Ahh, but it had been a long summer.  And sometimes you felt like dark things, hard to take it, everything coming at me, but day by day, I kept the faith, thanks to wine in the evenings and Jack Kerouac, and a few spiritual type of readings here and there, a little Jesus, a little Buddha, each in turn, then mixed together, and I thought less of buying some rope, which I wouldn't do anyway, I promise.

Just as I'd thought the eve before this small break in the clouds, I'd thought of faith.  And now faith was telling me about what I had observed being back at work the first two nights in seven months, that there is wrapped within bar-tendering a higher calling.  If I were to try to write about that I would or might wear it out so I'll tread carefully, it was just that faith, with a good dose of the Jewish and the Christian stories of faith, helped me see the appropriateness with the way the world had arranged my life, and that I just needed to see the good of it.  The very good.  The good of everything about it.  One doesn't always get a lot of support in life, us people of faith, but from our faith.  Good thing we have it.  Because to the rest of the world, as we all know, even I, it's all about the mighty dollar, and believe me, now I realize, the larger economy.  After thirty years in the restaurant business I found it not at all easy to pivot, and there I was in my depressed state, isolated, not working, either helping mom out up north 400 miles away, or here, meditating, praying...  

Therefore there was something indeed appropriate to my return to my real-life job and my livelihood.  I'd put a lot into it over the years.  I'd cultivated the garden of the Lord and the vineyard, and I'd put in just about the best effort I could have greeting people with kindness and letting them in, being a good lover of neighbor.   There could be no solution anyplace else.  No Jesus, now you're going to be selling software, and you'll make more money anyway, a lot more, nothing like that.  I'd grown Biblical, if you will, like I had become some sort of  a vine that had grown and sunk its roots down into poor soil, worked hard physically and certainly sweated through many a shirt, scared, on the edge sometimes, but always a job to go to.

The sky was grey, and even on a nearby picnic table the day before a crow right above me, directly above me, had cawed and cawwed, and kawed again, with a tiny little guttural giggle purring clicks thrown in, and of course I thought of Poe, but the bird of blackness in branches right over my head seemed comfortable with me, and they are smart, recognize us as individuals, observe us just as we observe them, and sometimes even spiders jump up on me, but anyway...  (I made a joke of it to a woman who asked me if she needed to put her dog on a leash, and she said, oh, I saw that...)  The sky was grey again, and the hopes for the appearance of the sunshine girl dropped and dropped, and why did I pass up my opportunity.  But I could see the world clearly again, and felt myself to be in the right spot.  Starlings, or Grackles, were gathering on the high mown lawn banks of the reservoir, ready to gather to do their murmurings, shimmering, as if the camera of thine eye was shaking...  But I felt like, my mother speaking to me, I felt, your (meaning me) time has come.   This is not the voice of your tormentors, the ones who ask you many many questions, without telling you any truth.

.

I could see the world fresh and new and alive, and it was as if, as the old saying goes, my time had come, and that I had to go back to the life my mother has always approved of, beyond all others, my sweet life as the quiet first miracle wine guy.  So don't be too hard on yourself.

Oh, things the summer had taught me.  And you can really leave things up to the way they happen, to the way God gives them to us.  For these sufferings, too, are our friends.  Each a kind and gentle lesson that will mature you has a man, as a human being.  And then you have far less of worries in this world.  And oddly enough, one barman does indeed stand a chance to be as noble as Lincoln or whomever, in that he will finally get the cadence and the meaning of all the old stuff.  In fact one of my occasional but decent customers, Andy, a New Yorker, was by with his wife for dinner on Saturday night.  We talked about Kerouac, and he himself knew a famous old professor who'd taught the man as a kid.  (Not the best student, but a really nice guy, the old teacher says about old Jack.)  We also talked about The Book of Job.  And it was good, to be back chatting with my old friends and acquaintances...  Where were you when I laid the cornerstones of the foundations of the world....  And his whole business, taking students on travels, shot all to hell.

And all the good old rare stuff comes back to me, the real stuff from people you won't get anywhere else, having administered a truth serum and a decent meal, and a nice place to dine, pleasing music in the background, the sharing of life, even to this hovering idiot of a mad Irishman Austro-Hungarian Po-lock.  

Yes, it made sense.  I had to be re-manifested back at the holy Wine Bar of The Dying Gaul.  And what did I have to live for anyway, such as it is, no wife, no kids, having tended to mom pretty long but not done, so if the damn thing of Covid-19 gets me, it does.

Ye shall know them by their fruits.  Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit;  but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

Matthew 7:16-20

I don't know, it felt like I had to go through all this anxiety and doubt and concerns of having all my stuff out in the street to feel like I was making a home out of this humble apartment and my place here by the palisades of the great Potomac River.  You could sit in a field on a picnic bench and watching the cycles of nature and seasons, like nowhere else in DC.

After talking to my aunt and then my friend from with Jazz Nights at the Wine Bar, Leslie, I'm wiped out, so I sleep for a bit.  The phone calls drive me into the wine, when I should or might be writing, for the same reason that writers are the people for whom writing is very hard, taking a great effort, grappling with the deeper truths that of course we can never consciously know.  Then I am up, and finish the half bottle of wine, and open another one, and it tastes good, and I have some black-eyed peas with hummus and some cold cuts before I go to bed, but again, the next day, as is the unfortunate pattern I feel rather ill from the wine and the dehydration, and also depressed, or down, as too will always happen, such that I feel rather tired and sore and mope around.

As soon as I get writing, building up a little head of steam, mom calls.  Up and down, and 40 minutes of trying to answer her question what should I do now, and I try to explain to her about the three Wayne's Drug Store pill bottles I've taped to the counter right in front of her, to the left Mom, to the left, but she can't do it, and asks why I'm being so cruel to her, such a prick, so mean, I have never been treated so in all my life even by my mother, I think you're trying to destroy me,  etc., etc., etc., spaced over two calls.  Then a third, ending with, after I tell her, yes, just go off to bed mom, tomorrow is another day and Mary will be coming in the afternoon.   I love you, she says, not that it matters, I love you too mom.  Good night.  Then I go crack open a tall boy can of Labatt Blue from my travels up north.

And so, things end where they started, with my reading books from the library in a spiritual vein, Jesus, A Pilgrimage by our friend James Martin, S.J.  And that's about all I got left anyway, life too complicated to have much time for a pretty girlfriend, I'm afraid, and me back to working nights at the old Dying Gaul.  The beer feels watery, which is maybe why it's good, you can't hurt yourself sipping away on one.

But the apartment feels like home now, after all that, after all the ups and downs and waiting for Congress and all that bad habit of doom scrolling on Facebook.

Letters & Correspondence

Everything in moderation, even writing.  For the addictive personality types, writing is like drinking wine, it's liberating, it's soothing.  A bardic familiarity comes over you, a sense of the comforts of the pub.

You can overdo it.  You can be enchanted up into the animal sounds of prose... become overly focussed on a thing not economically viable nor worth doing.  Enchanted to a stone in the current, as Yeats put it, creativity, the bold rebellious act.

All of this is hard to explain, and that's why I keep going on about it.  You have to bring in your own life into it, to the extent that this life is predominantly one of the saint's, in as far as it is able to understand, at least understand the questions we all must thing about, the big "WHY?" of everything.  At least in some versions, one way of thinking about things, anyway.  I've since given up trying to be neat and orderly about it.  The main thing is just simply to write.

To begin, at a place of being bowled over by your own shame... a sort of almost willful--so might it appear--disregard for taking care of worldly matters, a concerning matter in every way.  To begin here is the way for other things to happen.  At least you're reminding yourself you can put words together, have some form of satisfaction, leaving it simple as that.

Yes, but each of us, were we to explore the issues thereof, is made completely different, unique, from any other being, any other circumstances, a manifestation on the very outer edge of the explosion of created life.  So can it be hard sometimes, to fit in.  As if having to go back down a level after reaching for all the insights you attain at the higher...

Literature is populated by characters living on that outer edge.  Melville's Moby Dick brings each character to the extreme ends, Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg.  Shakespeare's people, exploring the edges of sanity often enough.  Hamlet.  Lear.  We can follow their trajectories.

And unfortunately, as we develop into our own true unique distinctive selves, into our own form, all the way along, our values, I guess that's the word for it, come spilling out of us.  Spilling forth, in a kind of happiness, a contentment, I suppose, a satisfaction.  A natural bodily function of some animal pleasure.  Just as the things we tried to match and bind to ourselves to at one point might now slough off, discarded, no longer important, for never having been appropriate for us on our path to the riches of self-discovery in the first place.

Some people are drawn one way, some in another, some to certain art forms, say in business, and some are drawn to expression.

We go by intuition, that’s all we got.  We sense things, even if we have little chance of putting the true essence of experience down, well enough into words.

It's no surprise, at least for some of us, that when we venture out into the world as it is, (largely shaped by the workings of society, I guess you could call it,) we come back feeling like we got talked into something.   Our pockets a little lighter, from playing the game.

We are, in our efforts to be and to exist, caught in an unfriendly in between, feeling done with the terms and conditions of the contracts we must follow to meet others, on the one side, and on the other, receiving precious little word from the sides of the saints and Jesus and all those people.  Abandoned.  Left to figure it out all by ourselves.  Did they say enough, Muhammad and Buddha?   Are we now burdened with having to come up with our own versions ourselves, for which we too must make some teeth cutting pilgrimage...  Yet always having to ask ourselves if there is any meaning, any bearing upon the practical matters of living an orderly non self destructive and responsible life.

And how many people will you run into who really are discouraging...  If Jesus can be said to have any human emotion, at least some of that of His own disappointment with a dull and unbelieving unimaginative generation of human being...  Enough to make you wish you stayed home.  If you get it, who gets you then?  How long must He put up with this generation...

Oh faithless and perverse generation...  how long must I endure you...   Matthew 17:17

Each of us, a rare bird.

The CVS 

depresses us.

Trump land.

In the myth, Kryptonite comes from the man’s own original childhood home.  He can do anything and everything with his powers.  But there is a catch.   This is the self-criticism.  It comes from within.  It stops one in his tracks, makes you weak...  The questioning, the momentary lacking of self-confidence, the slip into one's own vices.

The duty of another is fraught with peril, the Buddhists say.  Full of danger.  And in this world the people most like yourself are your mother and your father, in some cases more like one than the other.  But as one comes from the female, these two selves were once inseparable until the proper term.

Dutifully, I call, after my little walk along the bluff above the old Potomac, in the golden light, finding a bee asleep legs up, perched upside down underneath a yellow flower.  Porcelain berry vines coming over everything.  I'm finally getting going looking at possible venues for freelance jobs, beginning with my interests, wine for instance, having written a couple of wine columns for the local, The Georgetowner, before they grew tired of my obtuseness.   In the last column I wrote, I was going on about Dionysos and the Pirates, that old tale--I forget what wine in particular I was actually talking about--and I thought I had something, the column aligning with news of a horrible slaughter in Paris of more than 100 people, many of them at a concert, at the hands of Islamic extremist along a street of theaters, venues, cafes and bars and restaurants.   But they simply never published it.  Without a word to me.  Okay.  I had probably worn out my welcome in a similar column the one before, talking about how cows may seem alike but can have vastly different personalities.   

Anyway, so mom has gotten home from a ride with her helper and out to eat somewhere, but she is flustered, her breath coming up, mom calm down.  I need wine, she says.  But she's having difficulty pouring herself a glass.  I hate to do this to you.  I know it must be hard on you.  I'm sorry.  But I'm having problems.  Okay, so I calmly walk her through it, knowing that she has twist-off cap chardonnay.  Now okay mom, now you just have to find a cup.  Anyone will do.  Take a coffee cup off the top of the microwave, who cares.    While I'm walking her through this--it's about 6:15 in the evening, sundown time--she'll go away from the phone to look for a glass, let's say, and then I hear her in the distance calling my name, over again.   Help, help.  Help.  And so on.   Finally she comes back to phone, which I am speaking to her through, and she hangs it up.  I call a couple of times, busy signal.  Then she is calling.  Okay, so that's good.  I get her settled down.

Yes, she says.  Everybody is having a tough time now.  I know how you feel.  Take care of yourself.  Get something good to eat.

In these times of Covid-19, I try reaching out to people through social media in this isolation times, as I live alone.   For then your own native creativity must still be expressed, and probably in new ways as an adaptation from the old way you managed it.  No longer in front of people, listening from behind the bar, observing calmly that all things are in place and in time.  I was shy at this initially.  Little side projects, they seemed like.  Probably a little Dutch Courage, i.e., wine, cheap wine, was involved.  A little silliness to keep back the wolves at the door...  On the edge of appearing foolish.  A character...  

Thursday.  I'm slightly awake, 8 AM, mom calls.  11AM.  1:30 PM.  3PM.  5:30PM.  I go meet my friend Drew down at Clyde's, deciding to walk down, for some calming exercise.  Don't drink too much, I tell myself.  We have a burger out there on the sidewalk as the sky turns into a deep clear azure blue sunset and first evening stars over the yon riverbank bluffs of Virginia, seen as the corridor of M Street dips and disappears as Canal Road after the bridge, a distant traffic light.  He's good about jobs.  You know where the jobs are?  Construction.  Lots of construction going on, he tells me over the satisfaction of the table and the wine.  Sales.  Long Fence.  He mentions a possible job as a property manager for a local real estate company, maybe.   Why didn't I think of these things years ago?  More lucrative than my old wages, of poverty and no dates.  Reasonable hours.  Yes, you get up early, in the morning, that's where the sales happen.   Not in the evening.  People are too inconclusive later in the day.  I'll think about it.

But I see, clearly in my mind's eye, here's a guy who gets laid.  Why, because he does things.  He gets off his ass in the morning, not worried about painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or for observing the 4 Noble Truths, the Eight Commandment keys of good behavior, the seven soulful ways you can fuck up, the twenty bad things of and of, the ten good ways, etc.,  He's figured it out.  He'd be great at all the jobs out there he's telling me about.  While I stand about and smile and be social, knowing I'm never like that.  Thus here I am, too thoughtful, and though great in soul, perhaps, or bullshit, there is not the backbone of my being materially happy nor secure enough to be a good partner to anything, and now all I can do is look back at all the girls that could have been, sweet, very nice, beautiful each in her own way, and there's my beautiful stallion shape of maleness, alone every night, and alone and alone. Rising in the morning as I wake, for nothing.  Mom calling.

So, we part, and I have to walk over to the PNC Bank ATM to put a check from my aunt in.  And I'm still hungry, so I arm myself with a few shawarma wraps from the friendly late night place below M, eat one, start walking.  Tired out.  I succumb to ordering up an Uber.  $15 down the drain.

The next day, man, I'm dejected.  Boy am I.  Mom has called again, confused.  3AM.  Then past 5AM.  What, mom?  What?  But I'm not in my place, I need someone to take me back to my home, a couple doors down, or up on the other side, up the road a piece.  (And how much destruction has this my mom wh o have birth to me caused me so much bad stuff...)  I can't even get out of bed.  I'm totally fucked.

I draft the letter to the landlord, while the swirling colored circle haunts me, slowing down, making me wait, no teletype paper roll for me Jack under such circumstances, your connection just went shit...

I'm talking to mom when I see the boss is calling.  I have to wait.  I call hime back.  He calls me back.

We want to open the wine bar again.

And maybe then I have a job again.

e

But I must keep my chops up.  Even in such a precarious position.  Covid-19 pandemic going on for at least nine more months.


Steve sends me a message.  Saw your wine chat.  Hey, if you're having a tough time, hurting, I got some work for you if you want.  Sanding doors, stuff around the house.  Odds and ends.  Let me know.

Ah, but my back hurts now.  I can hardly walk, hardly put my shoes on.  With the ragweed I was barely able to get off the couch, and that's how I threw my back out.  But I'd like to help, once I'm feeling better.  Steve's out of town over the weekend.   Monday I don't hear from him, and I have other things to worry about at the moment.

Tuesday, okay, yeah, if you can come by and pick me up, great.  Good, I've got some doors for you to sand.  "You'll like woodworking."  Yes, I think I will.

I haven't done any work in months.  I'm not feeling great about anything.  I could easily stay on the couch.  Away from people.

But he texts me back, gives me an ETA, and I get ready, sitting out front on the bench.  Nerves.  I don't feel well.   A woman from the rental office parks a car across the street.  She comes up the stairs, without acknowledging my presence to put a lock box for a prospective new renter by the front door of 4573.  I should say hi to her, but I don't.

His Suburu wagon pulls up.

Steve sets me up out on his porch, with a mask, a couple of power sanders, for the frames, a wooden block with some fine sandpaper, for the indented detail of the wood panels.  He shows me the drill.  Mom calls.  Again.  Okay, Mom.

So, I get the hang of it.  Back and forth, feeling with my barehand.  Occasional splinter, as I let my sense of touch guide me where I need to go over the wood more.   I keep going.  Steve comes out to check on me.  Yeah, that's good, man.

I turn the door over and do the other side.  And then I'm working on another door.  Moving it along, but trying to be careful at the same time.  The Zen of the wood grain.  Before and after sanding.

We take the doors in his house and up the stairs.  Ready to be repainted.  He shows me some other things we can do later on.  He goes on and errand.  Bill, the contractor, who is also complaining about the ragweed allergies, goes about in shorts, without a shirt.  There's some smoked chicken and some brisket in the fridge.  Help yourself.

Steve's gotta go to the hospital later.  Visit a friend.  Stage 4 liver and stomach cancer.  I walk back to the apartment after he parks.  I get in, climb the stairs, put the key in the door.  I take off shirt and pants, and socks.  I sit back on the couch for a bit, catching my breath.  Talk to Mom on the phone.  I reheat some meatloaf in the toaster oven, using the last of the fried rice to help mop up the grease.  I polish that off, easily.  I bring the plate back to the kitchen.  I get back to the couch and fall into a long nap with the light on, too tired to read, and then I can't sleep later on, and I don't have any wine.  Then the night is full of terror for me.  I finally fall asleep, round first light.



The next day.  Mom calls, early for me, and I deal with her, the mood swing, the hanging up on me, the call back.  "What's new in the world...."  I stumble out into the kitchen with her on the phone, and find some tea I brewed the night before, in a plastic quart container, the kind used for food storage back at the restaurant.  I put on the bathrobe, and a grey chest hair gets caught deep in my throat.  I gag.  Mom, ....  I"ll call you back, and then I go vomit.  And I didn't even drink anything last night.  It's high allergy season.   The passages are blocked upon rising.

I have a session with the therapist.  She's in town, but I was outdoors on a porch all afternoon, and I might work later.  Not wanting to take a metro bus downtown.  No energy for the bike.

Steve texts about ten minutes after I'm done.  I ride my bike over.  A lot of it uphill.

I get there.  Catch my breath.  Drink from my water bottle, after taking my helmet off.  It's cooler today.  I rummage in my courier bag for my mask.

We look at the side and the front.  Pink white gravel-sized rock.  The pile, back on the side of the house, by the brief driveway.  The stone needs to get around to the front of the house, and to the other side of the front steps, the other side of the porch where I was sanding yesterday.

First, I clear the mulch away.  Down on my knees after raking it away from the house.  I pick up the mulch now, lifting it into a large heavy-duty dark garbage plastic garbage bag.  Don't overfill the bags.  Then we unroll the black mat and cut a piece to put down the ground where the pebbles will be spread, to keep the weeds down.  Cutting the mat to shape in front of the porch and by the steps.  Sanding was satisfying.  Pretending to be building a Japanese Buddhist temple.  Today, a zen rock garden.

Then I start with the rocks.  Shoveling them into a heavy plastic five-gallon bucket, about a quarter bucket each trip.  Picking up the bucket.  Coming alongside the house, pouring it out.  Small buckets.  I'll be in continued pain the next day anyway, so don't overdo it, I tell myself.  I find it easier to get down on my knees to shovel the rocks into the five gallon bucket, as if I were spooning them in, and Bill brings me a towel for my knees when I ask him if he has any knee-pads.  I stand up carefully.  I swing by the smooth barked magnolia tree.  I pour out the rocks.

One load after another.   A third of a bucket, less maybe.  Then standing, then lifting, then carrying along the side of the house and around in front of the porch.  The sun lowers over the row houses, then it sets, a few last loads, then some clean-up.

Steve comes back from the hospital errands for his friend.   Then he has to go again, more errands.  Okay.  Finally, I'm tired.  I have some brisket.  Bob has to go to Home Depot.  I'm just about to finish my meal, microwaving the scalloped potatoes Bob made, lovely, when Steve comes back.  I sit with him, he goes to the fridge and cuts me and him some of pork loin he made.  We chat some.  He brings out a salad, Boston lettuce, a balsamic vinaigrette.  I don't even ask for a drink.  He reaches for a little packet of salsa from Taco Bell, and I try one too.  The pork loin is a little much for me, and I really don't eat pork much anymore, but I finish what's on my plate.

The moon is up as I cross the street.  Steve goes over to a house a few doors over, reminding the millennial kids to pick up his old gas grill.  I ride the bike home.  My legs are dead.  I take off my dusty clothes, my pants, still wet, knees covered with dirt.

Again, no wine in the house, no where nearby still open.  I change out of work clothes.  I rest, sleeping some on the couch.  My back is stiff again as I rise to get into bed.



One more day of it.  I'm sore.  I don't feel like getting on the bike.  I go across the street for a few groceries, carrots and onion and celery for stew.  Some stock.  One bottle of wine.  I'm early.  The woman proprietor smiles when she sees me.   (I keep thinking she has a few more gray hairs each time I come in, this business new to her.)

I get ready, and get on my bike, and ride, very slowly, along the sidewalks past the university hospital, then up into Glover Park neighborhood.  I go up the alley, walk the bike up the last steep ramps.

Bill asks me to do a little task, taking screws out of the ductwork, so he can "blow it out."  He gives me a Mikita drill sort of thing to remove the bolts, to open up the panels, and up the ladder to the attic go I.  I brought a plastic cup for the bolts.

Then I'm down on my knees vacuuming up dust and grit off the cardboard laid across the floor.  Mom calls again.  I'm busy.  Oh, I know you're a very important man, she says.  I turn the shop vac back on again.

Then I'm breaking up extra pieces of drywall and sheet rock, with an exacto knife, and then tossing the squared pieces into garbage bags, again, not too full.  I'm getting tired.  The last thing I do, more or less, is cut the mat to the left of the porch, where I brought the rocks up to be even with the front steps.  Just enough from the pile to cover the other side of the porch, and now it looks good.  Just like the rest, I had cleared out the plot, taking out the weeds, leaving it ready for the mat.  There were just enough rocks to cover all we wanted.

I have a quick bite to eat.  Then I ride the yellow mountain bike back.  I pass the place in the alley where my friend was pinned by the car.  But there's a teenage kid looking out the back window at me, as I look down the sloping driveway.  But, yes, this is where it happened.  Just more than a year ago.

I heat up the meatloaf again, with the last of the Chinese fried rice, call it a day.  Wake up later, read the ending of The Dharma Bums.


I take Friday off, and Steve is busy.  Bill has gone off in his old beefed-up Chevy pickup truck up to New Jersey and then Northern Connecticut.

And Friday night, reheating the chicken-wing stew, unexciting, I made in the night.

Within the beast, the animal, there is the inherent need for soothing.   Deeply ingrained, upon which the calming effects of wine play across.

I wasn't going to do anything over the weekend, except avoid going outside, but my friend who lives nearby follows up on his invite on Saturday, if you're up for a burger out at the Irish Inn at Glen Echo, meet me behind the building around 7 o'clock.  I've been lazy and hungover all day, not done shit, but the timing is good, and I have time for a shower.  The pleasures of a Guinness, are not lost in this fraught and scary world.  It's hard to resist the inner Irishman sometimes.  Plus some literary minded company.  I haven't picked his brains enough about Iowa, the writing program.  

On the way we pass by a white-haired gentleman seating with two women at a white-clothed dinner table by the entrance, the confidence this is his place.  He looks up, nods, good evening, some form of welcome.  I spend a moment establishing how we know each other, The Dying Gaul wine bar, Bruno, etc., and his memory lights up, and I kid about coming down to play my guitar to play some Irish songs.  My buddy's inside already, so I nod to Christy, and I go in and sit down with him.  Burger or fish and chips...  Guinness, sure.  The pints arrive.  Cheers.  The waitress comes back.  Sure, we're ready.  Two burgers.   I'll have mine the same, medium rare, but with the salad (instead of fries.)

So, the burgers come, open top bun, red onion, healthy tomato, lettuce, we work out he needs fries too, what he asked for, not just the cole slaw, and the busboy food runner, not a wonderfully cordial person, comes back with fries, quick enough.  Cool, cheers, everything is just as it should be.  By myself I might avoid the roll, but it's a nice soft potato roll and Bob dresses his and cuts it in half, and I follow suit, a little bit of ketchup, then the red onion, then the leaf of lettuce, then the tomato.  

Bob was down by the riots, having to run like everybody when the Trumpian guards marched forward to clear LaFayette Park.  Great burger, particularly when you haven't been out in a long time, and you allow yourself to include the whole bite, burger bun included.  Our pints our empty.  He nods.  Sure.  The young woman, black tee shirt, comes by, she's just the right amount of nice, and Bob says, as he orders his Guinness, I'll have a shot of Jameson too.  I think a minute.  Yes, I'll have one too, please.

It's quiet.  The main action is outside, but I'm happy to be inside, and I can chat with my writer buddy, a successful novelist, and both of us looking for the same, the next thing.  How to survive.  Food stamps.  Will any more federal aid be coming?  And we are stuck where we are.  

On our way out, Bob suggests, hey, go talk to him about getting a job here...

 But that's another whole saga...  a whole 'nuther saga, or, rather, just a small part of the saga, looking for work, trying to find myself, trying to find my own work, etc., etc.

Now it is Sunday.  The day you are writing is always the most difficult day to do it.  The day you can manage to come up with the least, the fewest of words, the emptiness of content.


Within the beast, the animal, there is the inherent need for soothing.   Deeply ingrained, upon which the calming effects of wine plays across.

And that perhaps is where the problem starts.  If it always helps you, then what?  What if you actually like it, if it does indeed bring peace, relief, even joy, enough energy so you can bear cooking dinner alone, not just giving up...


"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."  Thomas Mann.

But we all are created by God, each of us an individual, each of us unique.

So I'm not feeling well, a subtle but noticeable tremor, a small difficulty in aiming my fingers at the keyboard being how nervous and anxious I am these days.  I went for sort of restaurant job interview at the old Irish place way out there in Glen Echo, though they really didn't have a job for me, so I had a Guinness, and then nursed another, talking with the couple over in the corner, preppy, typical native Northwest DC prosperous Jesuit couple.   The musicians are supposed to start soon, so I have one more, then get the Uber car back, $13 more spent.

The debates are on, so I settle down into the couch, watching it on my iPhone, having meatloaf for dinner.

And so discouraging are the debates and this Trump building himself up as a strongman as the times, according to him, need a strongman, and perhaps he really is intent on creating such an environment, the strongman prophesying the thug militias that will come forward to lift him up and put all other life down. 

I give up on it after making it a good way through, I can't watch this, and I go and lay down in bed and fall asleep but then I wake up about 3:00 in the morning, and anyway, there's laundry to do, the light colored jeans that got pretty much ruined for polite wear, dirt ground into the knees, have been soaking on and off, now in the tub, have begun to smell of mildew, and I have a pile of black socks and colored boxer briefs and tee shirts, so why not, since I'm up anyway...  Get my quarters, down the little stairwell, I leave my detergent, Tide Free, down there...   the clean old basement in the cinderblock iron held basement of old G.I. apartment buildings nice and simple.

So I crack open a Guinness, having had wine earlier with dinner, and pour that over the rocks as I sit up and watch a documentary (shared with my small bloodline of writer friends who seem to allow us getting each other) about Jack Kerouac's famous visit to Big Sur, so chronicled, (recoiling from all the troubles of fame we all know so well now) and what else to say...  I'm up 'til about 5:30 in the morning, not that I want to be, it's just that I'm awake, just as the light is getting blue out, would that it would only stay that way, so low-key and friendly to star watchers and dreamers and dopey kids with fantasies on their minds, and I don't like the day so much anymore, but, as it seems, have come to prefer the night, if I must be honest with you, it's quiet, for one thing, and if the President of the United States is such an insane madman wanna be dictator fascist, if that's what all our noise has created, holy shit, what's so wrong with me having a little wine and musing poetically for a bit, thinking of Jack Kerouac as all the great bugs of earth that are still here breathe their song in and out, tiny whistles, tiny instruments of reed or string, and played with such a tender steadiness as if to keep all of humanity nice and calm, a symphony, from which one might deduce the weather, for if it were colder, you might just hear one of the little guys nearby going "twenty, twenty, twenty," slowly, just that I don't have a job and who the hell knows what's going to happen with everything these days.



Right now it's a steady cheep cheep cheep as if they were little kids practicing their violin bow strokes, but faster, back and forth.   (And they have smaller little maestro cricket bug katydid musicians who are so stable and subtle that they fill in the blanks in between the other's sawing, errr, err, errr, peep peep peep peep, adding an almost unnoticeable syncopation, or background, so that no wonder, no wonder humanity found it pretty natural to organize into Gregorian Chants and Orchestras of Beethoven and Mahler, and Gamelon, and drums, and The Beatles...  Does their physical shape, their physical abilities of movement dictate that they produce this music, but they must want to, indeed.) How do they know that?  How do they know that night time is their time, that now it's autumn under a full moon and where exactly are they anyway, invisible fairy people of the original neighborhoods where the tall biped monkey chimp came and built stuff, bricks, pipes, electricity, wires, walls, doors...  ripping up everything in the meanwhile, oh god.  (and to this day, the airplanes fly over, whooshing their strange reality over everything, and no wonder Kerouac felt he should just go camping, or retreat to the hills of San Fran and beyond, poor old beautiful kind thoughtful sensitive Jack, wearing the difficulty of all that, all that as your only profession, being so, and verbal, preserving, by deep proper instinct, oh that need we all have within us, to do things like clean dishes with soapy hot water and make stews, peel the carrots, chop them along with the celery you put under the sink to wash, the onion, always onion, and then the Christlike miraculous transformation of a stew.  Made easy by your lovely sweet saintly retired school teacher aunt who thoughtfully gave you an Instant Pot for your birthday, a necessary element of any Zen monk monastery, or mountain peaceful cabin where you can sit and hear if you tune in... the sounds of nature and the world, before the airplanes fly and the trucks start rolling and the whole mad town trying to get somewhere so that someone can save his or her own life, or something like, "just do what you're told and you'll be okay, and you'll have health insurance, and paperwork to fill out."  Shit.  No escape from that.  The Beat writers, the real ones, the real movement, was right in all that.  Tho' it cost them, some more than others.  Neal Cassidy wasn't a shit, totally, he was a sweet nice guy, and he and Kerouac were rather remarkable friends, brothers even, and we don't know, as it's hard to summon up all their letters and correspondence, except, you feel it.  They both were great.  It was a meeting to be remembered, noted, a point of life, and probably, too, the ups and downs of later on...

Back at the restaurant, we'd serve a beautiful meal.   Really incredible good quality stuff, a good value too.  (Not that fancy restaurants go overboard with portions, leaving me hungry, most of the time.  At least when I was working.  I'd wolf down a cassoulet, or the veal cheeks, or the chicken curry, right quick.)  Beef Bourguignon.  Braised Cheeks Osso Bucco.  Cassoulet.  Soups made of magnificent stocks, salads made of interplaying texture things, even veal tongue in a sauce Gribiche.  Crusty Boneless Pigsfeet, on a plate, with a mustard onion sauce....


Well, the next day I finally get up, lazy again, feeling weird, ragweed again, and so I place a call to mom and don't get through and then mom calls me, and she is rough and not happy with me.  I just keep waiting....  She's become like my wife, oye, and she lets me have it as far as what good I am.  You used to be on the ball, she says.  Ouch.  And she's exactly right.

DC, you're always in DC.  Yes, mom, Mary is coming, she should be with you soon.

And even I know this can't go on too much longer, and Jesus, winter is coming, the days are already October, and what have I done, looking for a job, but not doing shit about it really.  I should have applied to Amtrak maybe.  I dunno.  I'm just stuck.  So stuck.  And now, what to do with my stuff, all my books, my whole life, which might be a lie...

I wasn't a bad man.  I just had a sense of humor.  So deep a one that not everyone gets it.  And if they don't, shyness takes over.  A subtle, as is earned in the restaurant business, waiting sometimes passively on people, as old Boon, the Laotian prince, my introducing wizard to French wine and service, would say sometimes, recounting a story, toward the end,"fuck you too," said with a laugh with a gesture of his calm princely hand.  Up yours, buddy.  And then he'd smile, more privately. "My team always wins."  And then he'd rinse and wipe off his wine glass with a bar linen towel napkin, same as the ones for the table, but the ones that came in from the linen service with imperfections, little stains and such, use those to wipe all the glassware as it comes out of the machine that groans and moans watery up and down back and forth over and under, as if to say, I got you.

Meanwhile, Simon is down in the basement, at the little chef's desk and the desk chair that showed up one day out of the alley, someone throwing it away, but still of use.  Maybe he'd be enjoying a cheap Clint Eastwood type cigar, but he was always gracious and never ever seemed to get tired, very rarely, with his beautiful round Cameroonian head.  Hey, Simon, what are the specials tonight...  And the door is already open, a vice grip of trying to get everything ready and prepared.

Oh, the long line of great gentleman, coming through the old Dying Gaul, they weren't always as verbal as you might like, or too deep into Spanish, not English, but they would communicate just fine none the less, as I went rummaging in their vegetable cooler for lemons and limes, an orange for good measure, something the other bar people would get lazy about, oh, well, must have forgot, along with all the other things I had to restock, soda water, tonic water, pineapple juice, a back up rail vodka, Tito's, fill the olive tray ready, don't be a jerk, come on, man, don't leave me with an empty row of a particular beer...  You know you went through a bunch of Stella, some Leffe...

Say what you will of the job, it was always real.  And the old garage, where dry things would be stocked, and big plastic containers and the to-go boxes and the big plastic galleons of industrial cleaners for the machines, god knows, my skin protesting in January from all that, a crack on my right thumb, the one that takes the drying towel inside a wine glass to get the soap residue out, ahh, the life of the wine professional being professional.  Everyone was great.  I have to say.  Manager, owner, godfather boss, dishwasher ladies low and sturdy from Salvador, the great busboys...

And the funny thing, if you know a few people in the restaurant business in DC, you will find out you know other people.  Oh, Sea Catch, yes, Don Jose was my man on Sunday.  And I miss the guy.


But the meatloaf doesn't sit well the next day,  I don't know.  Or maybe it was the stout, which seemed like a good Irish storied escape, over the mountains...  After the rain comes I tried to joke with the mandolin player, it's pouring rain but under a tent they are okay, so I say, "Rainy Night in Soho," as a request, but nothing, flat, barely the slightest acknowledgement... Is this how old and crazy I am now?  Come on, you don't know all I have to deal with, my musical background...

I chalk it up.  Oh, this is DC for you.  What can you expect.  Fuck it.  Hardly the vibe of the old Bohemians meeting in 1953 in Greenwich Village.  Come on, man.  I got street cred.  But no.  Zero.  Nada.  I even poke the guy with a beard, young dude, gently in the back, his shoulder.  Completely inoffensive.  "Did you like that..."  by which I mean, my song request, but it's all lost on everyone, them, the musicians, the girlfriends, the rain, the stupid restaurant which is blank now, erased of that connecting juice that is so real and vital, hospitality, friendship, reaching out, etc.   Nothing.  Not a word.  So, okay, I'm just a drunk, I guess. And I would have liked to have had the deviled eggs with smoked salmon and then an Irish cheeseburger, but.. it's cost me enough to get here and it will cost me to get back, and I don't see anyone offering me a ride.


Jack, Jack, you know, being alone, even in the cabin, it's not a good idea.  It certainly sounds like a good idea, but you're instantly going to get lonely as anything, and you're going to have to entertain some of the old poisons, just at a level more controlled, and where is your typewriter anyway.  Jack Kerouac, incredibly smart guy.  A man with the music in him.  The soul.

Oh, hell.  What are we going to do.

But there is a theme here.  My friends.  Kerouac.  Nature.  Exposure to the elements.  It's not like they had Club Med invented for him.   He was hard on himself, spartan, stoic.  Could he have written ad copy?  Run a bookstore?  Nah.  I think he would have been okay with some parts of the restaurant business, but soon he would have bowed out, bored, no, this is not for me, you have offended The Holy Spirit, and he had every right to.  Mind you, an incredible athlete, bulked with muscle, built perfectly for sturdy bursts of Breton speed, and with an intelligence that just wouldn't fit in with any boundaries but its own ones, vast, horizonal, arched to the sky, the circumspection of so much road.  A sleeping bag.  Sleeping on the floor.  A rough driver, but one taking you somewhere, a mountain adventure, across the mighty rivers of the north and the south, shouting poetry to the moon full.

His little touches, those in his prose, gestures of politeness, of the old meanings with which humans used to speak to each other.   Each one of his books, great as they are, can be tedious at points....  No, Jack, don't go down there...  But who can stop him.  On The Road is difficult.  Dean driving.  Dharma Bums is difficult.  He's alone again, stuck in some rail yard.   Desolation Angels, difficult.  Big Sur...

He wrote prose.  This is the way we all really want to talk to each other, before conversations get interrupted and distracted and derailed by and in the back and forth.  Egos, everywhere, and ego thinking imbedded so far in us in our attempt to survive just another day or longer, we too get caught.   We want to be, simply, present.  Like an animal.  Hello, deer.  (Two bucks I saw, almost face to face, on my little walk to the river bluff...)

Oh, but who cares, really, anymore...  Kerouac knew, sensed at least, his writing was a fight for survival, and so, he ran.  Just like I used to run over the hills of country roads in New York State, farmland, before it got too developed, etc., but we won't go into that now.



But oh Kerouac, he felt the big shame just like I do, and I won't say I'm better at it than he.

If one were to have real faith, what would he do?   Well, it would be hard to top Jesus at what he would do, some of us being prone to the Christ Complex,  but faith would be to write, to join your own sort of a monastery, one of truth and writing and the athletic grace of prose in the mind, the stunning sprint, the long turn around the track's curve toward the homestretch and you're still motoring, pumping away and god it feels good.

The recipe for life is not less art, it is for more art.  Art to pour into starving mouths in need of water and wine and sustenance and resurrection from the dead...


To pull something out of the dank and Celtic depressions that come naturally, like a load of shit or coal or rock one must bucket away in paining shovels, this is easier when the subject is allowed to sit down and write for a bit, I kid you not, no joke, it's good therapy.  Do not hold it against a crippled man that he needs someone of faith to come along and to simply, rather simply say, you are freed from your sins.  Go write a book.  Take some time off.  Stop worrying.  Spend time with friends.

I have to say, a Guinness, extra stout, $12.99, across the street for a six pack, tastes pretty good while crickets chirp secretly and boldly, calming our own blood flow veins with their medicines pulled out of the ground, rising a beneficial beneficent herbal and mineral dust out of the dirt, so that we too might come back after living through another winter.  The Guinness, poured into a wine glass, is actually a nice thing, not just a sort of legend joke.  It's creamy.  Malty.  It deglazed the pan before a beef stew pretty well, I must say.  (Maybe the crickets are saying, "potassium, magnesium, iron, oh, and they will need carbon and old buried iodine too, how much work, yes, we have to do.")  Mining for the sake of their old friends, and you know they watch us, and probably care for us.  I followed a monarch butterfly around today in the afternoon sun, a gorgeous creature, we played, almost, hide and seek.  Tell me there is no intelligence in such, a wish almost to show the glory of gliding, just get your wings up like this and you can do it, said the butterfly.  And up and around, and dropping down, then resting, then rising up, so he went, very entertaining, even if I was in just about the worst mood possible with many burdens and a seeming inability to do some stupid paperwork after all that effort I put into, looking for a job.

Right now the bugs have changed slightly, their tempo.  They are rolling a wheel around, quick quick quick, as if they suddenly realized, oh, shit, there is a project we must do, and they all join in.  But wait, there is a maestro conductor who is now slowing things down, reminding everyone that it is 4:58 AM, and that, well, we will need to pack it up here, and disappear, us jazzmen and jazzwomen, and just by that small syncopation, if you were listening, you would hear the subtle change in tempo, just as God and the Universe and Thou Art That Which Is, wanted you, wants you, to.  Idiot or not.  Or maybe there's an old Native American ghost over your shoulder, seeing that you are hungry and benevolent and need to be fed of the spirit.

All the people who are intent on doing things, maybe they too should stop and listen, to the bugs.  Not that it would directly help, but for sanity's (whatever that is) sake.

The moving world is so hard to keep track of.  Try jumping back into that stream when you have fallen out, and you will see how change keeps changing and changing, and someone's trying to get rich, or, maybe just do their job so that they have a salary...  so they can eat, but it's not great, in fact it sucks.


A children's book can be written in about fifty good sentences, much like a Hemingway story.  A good one, both counts.  The horse went to the water.  Captain Jim saw the pirate ship in the cove.  Fishing in the swamp...  Huck has a new friend.  I saw Dean round the corner in his moth eaten overcoat he'd saved for the frigid temperatures of the east.


"I don't need to please anyone but myself," I finally say, in my mild Eureka moment.  No more trying to please impossible virgins and mood swing women, bless her poor soul.  Just do what I can.  Sorry I won't be away earlier like everyone else, because madmen need to sleep too, when they can.


How are you going to make it as a writer, kid, man, man child...?  But that's not exactly it.  It's the act.    It's the process.  It's the work of the exercise.  It's, yes, also about whatever beauty you mind find in discovering a voice.  That's the thing to share.  Like landscaping.  Like pruned hedges.  I work.  You work.  It's a way to talk, across walls and over boundaries and in between, because we can never really talk to each other all that well, coming out of the surface of being and not the depth...

So my back is sore so when I get up I take two advil, get some tea, a half a cup of leftover coffee from the fridge, last night it was Chinese food again, and so today I will have the energy to walk on a sunny day down to the Farmer's Market to get my meats so that I will continue to have energy.

I know it is stupid to write about this and about the making of meatloaf, but it was observed of Jimi Hendrix that he kept his guitar with him at all times possible, even while cooking bacon and eggs.  He wanted to be the best guitar player he could be, and this was how he kept it up.  Unplugged Fender Stratocaster in the loo, they would recall.  He liked the sound there, the acoustics.

Well, anyway...

Walking there, of course, I call my mom several times, and she called at 8AM, spoke with her, then again, as I waited for the ibuprofen to kick in.  I explain to her, again, why my back is sore, and she tells me that other people live through ragweed, basically to be a man about it, and just as she's about at the edge of a mood swing toward anger or whatever dark thing, the cat intervenes, as I can hear his little high pitched call to be let out.  Should I?  Yes, Mom, he'll come back.  He knows.  So when she goes to let him out, she says, hold on, don't go anywhere, but then she hangs up the receiver, fully at least, so it's not off the hook, and I got to get ready anyway for my trek.  It hurts to put socks on.  I have to roll back on the bed with my feet up in the air, though it's easier to put my running shoe sneaks on.  I change my ragged tee shirt, trying not to look like a total bum for the well-heeled clientele at the Palisades Farmer's Market...


The nature of reality...    This was what I have always been, being the son of my Dad, interested in.  And so maybe this whole Covid virus thing is to be seen in some perspective as far as what it might allow me to be.

It's like people who have a sense of humor in this world.  They have to curb it, otherwise they might interject, and while that might be funny, it would be considered inappropriate enough, at least in some circumstances, that one would get into trouble, and maybe even big trouble.

Capitalism, the whole system of it, has always been hard for me to embrace, as if I were blind to its basic logic.  What other system is there that works out?  We all are wary about the alternatives, Socialism, Marxism, Communism, and what kinds of political systems attached themselves in their power to such isms...


So I walk along, slowly, aiming myself gingerly up the sidewalk westward along the blue shining reservoirs with Canada Geese and ladies in casual walking little dogs and out with friends for a quick paced exercise walk, as I go carefully with my back and sort of down about feeling subjected to Mary Lincoln feminine maternal mood swings, and that would get to you too on some days, but it appears to be my lot in this life, as it is, and I keep on, crossing by the Lab School and then a firetruck comes up and turns to back up into the firehouse, and I'm almost at the CVS and maybe they have stamps.

And bravely I go, onward, into the land of pretty people, successful, owners, stylish, getting their produce and heirloom tomatoes and herbs, which I should have procured, but I'm low on patience and money these days, and I''m fairly single minded, though I do make a connection with a farm guy in a green tea shirt at the top of the hill as you turn around in the yellow taped one way line, friendly, and he has some plums which catch my eye.  Then it's down the hill, past coffee woman, a woman with dumplings and Asian noodles, who tells me what she has left today, but I'm fixated on the meats, the lady at Groff. Farms with the big blue coolers full of frozen meats and so forth... $45 later....  She was a waitress once, and I tell her, yes, I used to be, after I apologize for "riding her" in my order, reminding her about the stew beef...

On the CVS, for stamps.  Can't figure out the ATM.  There's a nice young man at the counter, yes, they have stamps.  No, you don't have to buy anything else.   The manager, when he comes over and opens a cash drop drawer with a key to pull out one booklet of USA Forever flag stamps, nods very unenthusiastically when I ask him, through the guy at the counter if they might be hiring.  At least it's in the neighborhood.

But I worked.  I worked hard.  For a long time.  I exhausted myself habitually with work, physical in nature.  Of course, yes, I could have been smarter, much smarter, and not pissed every opportunity away, but...


It's too damn quiet in this apartment, and I wonder, just how "Jesus or Buddha" you can be and get away with it.


So, I'm writing away.  I've recovered, as best I can, after being in some sort of back pain the last four days or so, down, just on the right side of the spine, I determine as I do my yoga, inside, with the best effort I can muster.   Some poses hurt more than others.  Raising my legs, on the way to shoulder stand, painful, had to stop.  Was able to do plough, somehow.

Then Mom calls.  And we have a nice chat, around 8:45, but somehow it turns into one of those "you hate me, you despise me," kind of conversations.  I was trying to tell her," look, mom, you had talents and you needed to use them.  You can't compare yourself with someone else's life, because each of us are unique, different, that's how God made us."  I tell her the story of how on the Steve Allen Show they wanted to do a dress rehearsal, for the whatever third time or so, a hundred technicians waiting, and Jack says, "no, Steve, I can't do it," more or less, and walks out.  And when he, Kerouac, comes back, bam, he nails it.  (You can kind of sense the earlier irritations he went through, them doubting him, as he held his artistic integrity whole...  He knew how to do it.  He had this sense of himself.  The divine spirit, as we've talked about before, you might say.)

I thought things were going reasonably well.  But then somehow Mom is telling me now how I've devastated her, and that's she's going to bed (but will probably not sleep.)  I'm just a stupid woman.  Other things.  Jesus Christ.

Anyway, so that takes the wind out of my sails for a moment, after my day of the limping off like poor campaigning young JFK, climbing the stairs of tenement buildings in Watertown, one foot up, then drag the back one up, as I get my sustenance for another week.


Jesus was nice to everyone.  A kind and funny guy, well spoken, insightful.  Who could have a problem with Him?  But that wasn't enough for some people.  Because, as they found out in the Garden, you shouldn't pretend to know more than you can, you can't be so proud that you stop listening....

I wake up from a dream on the old leather couch, head propped up on a pillow, in the quiet apartment.  My father, at dinner.  Family, my brother, the grandkids. He's the most beautiful of all of us.  The star.    And we know, in the dream, that he won't be around for ever, but he's so gracious, so kind, so soft spoken, all we can think is that we have him now, we have his light amongst us.  While he is here.  The table is prepared, a dream foggy supper.


We did not know this, when we headed out into the world, the world with its darkness, with its strife. With its pride and vanity.


He had come to bring his grace unto me.  And I should never have moved away for all my futile endeavors, I remember this in my dream, dreams in which one has wisdom, and does not act like a fool fumbling against the control of the world such as it is....



I've not chatted with my old buddy Daryl, from my old hometown, in a while, a new old friend in Covid times, and we converse for hours, until about almost three in the morning.   He's down on the South Carolina coast.  "You just have the patience for it, that's why you're the one who keeps mom okay..."  In the meantime, I eat some of my meatloaf, still warm from the oven, but in the meantime, I drink a bottle of wine.  (Too much, in fact, on top of the ragweed lethargy, I'll find out the next day.)

The wine goes down easy.  I was writing before, and had come to the end of my steam.  I'm not a very patient person when my writing gets sidetracked.  It seems to hurt.  But if you've come to the end of your confessional booth time, you let the guard down.  So, I listen carefully to my friend;  he has good advice.  He's a good sounding board.  What's Peckham up to?  His brother?  McHenry?  The Coe brothers.  It begins to be a lot to absorb, and as I tire, in the wordy parts of the mind, the wine is increasingly soothing and relied upon.  That's how the system works, the one you built.  And it is natural that it gets overwhelmed from time to time, and the wine serves to numb and protect, the balance between the inner and the outer.  You know how it works:  you go along with it.


I'd been writing about how when I post something on social media I have a strange reaction afterward.  Often, why did I post that?  Making yourself so obvious, so in front of people has a backlash of shyness, though I'm not saying this with any clarity.  Regrets.  Giving out an in-road into guarded mental processes still on going and active.  Exposure.


Whoever comes to Me, and hears My sayings and does them, I will show you whom he is like:  He is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock...
Luke  6:46...


You are free of sin.  Go in peace.


So, as the autumn solstice comes, and the Jewish New Year, too, and I nerve, the ragweed takes all my energies away, and I get up to go lay on the couch, if not back to bed.  The couch is soft, softer than the bed's firm mattress and one day, as I try to get up it's like my lower back giving out on me.  This is where I normally sit, hunched over like Jerome, the laptop on the coffee table before me, as I lean forward.  But with this stiffness there is pain when I do this.   A knot, tying up everything from neck down.

I go out to the little deli grocery store on Saturday, before it closes at 6.  I walk down to the bluff, and when the people walk away, a mother, who was conducting iPhone work, and two daughters at play by the picnic table, I venture my headstand, and it works, easier than I thought.  I limp back, slowly, and remember to take a shower, get the pollen off, important to remember.  I get the yoga mat out, and it's slow, and painful, bending down to go into sun salutation, trying to touch my toes.  Hard to do.  Everything is interconnected.  I can barely reach forward.


To get out of bed the last few days is like performing a shoulder roll, tuck legs in toward chest, roll on my side, get the feet down on the floor, lift with the legs.  JFK, pain every day of his adult life.  Could barely put his shoes on.  My Amish rocking chair of bent wood is a help indeed for the soreness.  I have to hold onto the arm rests to lift myself up out of it, but sitting and rocking in it soothes, and I avoid the old leather couch.


Friday, yesterday now, Mom had her helper Mary visit.  Canale's for a late lunch.  Around 8 at night, I get a call, "Not to worry you, but I think I might be having a heart attack...  I just threw up."  But she is brave about it.  I'll go back to bed and we'll see what happens.  I call her in a few minutes, we go through a few more symptoms...

I order Chinese, fall into long nap on the couch, wake at 5 AM...  At 8, Mom is calling.  Another mood.  Angry at me. "I'm sick.  Where are you?  I'm all alone.  Nothing to eat."  There should be something in the fridge.  "Help, help!  Help!"  I hear her call as she looks in the fridge, to see what's there.  For a moment she is calm, speaking to the cat, letting him out, perfectly normal.  But then, forgetting I'm on the other end of the receiver, she wanders off...  Where are you?  Crying...

I look at my phone and pull up the Instacart app, to have some groceries sent.  I rest some more, back in pain, moving difficult.  I lapse back into sleep.  Woken by my aunt.  So I get up.


Writing is painful every day.  It's taking sore muscles and trying to work them out, so that they don't hurt anymore.  Much like yoga.




As you get older, my age, say, fifty five, fortunately or not, it becomes more and more, perhaps even all, about the creative process, even if it is a strange personal one, your own odd-ball form.   It's your own source of making connections, supporting the work of your mind.

The evils of the day are often enough, to ask for a glass of wine.


Later, after musing about Jimi Hendrix, one contemplates how badly his manager, Mark Jeffries, who managed The Animals, stole Jimi's hard-earned dollars.  And then it became very hard for Jimi.  He should have had been able now to enjoy the fruits of his labors at this point in his life.  The guy left him with $20 in his London bank account.  Tragedy followed Jimi along in life.

A Chinese dinner, delivered, here in DC, costs about $30.  Tip on top of that.  $5.  Bottle of wine $10.  Cannot bear my own cooking or black-eyed peas, or Boars Head cold cuts, nor hotdogs, another day, or not today. I need my energy to fight these battles, alone out here.


Why does genius get left with nothing...  not that I'm one.

It's healthy, on the one hand, to divorce yourself from the things of Caesar, but...

This is where people start to, if not hate you, distance themselves from you, as if what you had were contagious...  You're poor.  This makes you an embarrassment, a weighty burden.  Why can't you get along  with the system.  Why don't you want to work within it?  We do, why can't you?

(and believe me, my father had the right wardrobe, a very proper man for his profession, which he performed with huge talent and beautiful grace...  There's good in dressing well.  It helps us understand each other, where we are coming from...)

Like Jimi, beautiful soul, wandering out from his homeland, his drinking parents, his old Indian grandmother up in Vancouver, how many thousand hundred acts of grace and genius and things like that did you perform...   Look at it that way, for a moment, from a more Castles Made of Sand eternal point of view, if you'll allow.

"What is the kingdom of heaven like...  I'll tell you what it's like..."  A little, a beautiful little lesson squeezed in here and there, and in fact this is what people remember about you.

It's like a joke now, to bring Jimi and Jesus and the nature of the acts of intelligence together, a new way of looking at something....  a new way of thinking...  a new way to use language, toward a new metaphor, such as the old thinking of the impossible is transferred into the realm of the possible.


It took the Aquarian Age from the thing to come back, more or less, the outer space science fiction Vonnegut was tipped off to, the return of the miracle, the return, in short, of the spirit of Jesus's spirit. Sort of.  Maybe.  In some poetic way, perhaps... Slaughterhouse Five, published in 1969.

Who can forgive sins, but God...  But what is easier to say...  Is it not just as easy to say, your sins are forgiven you than, say, get up and walk.

What have I to do with thee, Satan...  That's another line you have to like.  People pull shit on you, mess with you in their money poker faces...

Well, remember, but they're not doing the work you're doing.  It's less within their frame of mind to get that work, isn't it.

And, as Jimi knew, sometimes they take what you have rightfully earned, your work in the vineyard, and leave you with jack.

They seemed just men.  Perfectly ordinary in their mindsets.  But...  why does the system they play by leave you with nothing...


And now, of course, Jesus would be construed as creepy, going around, saying things like "arise, Tabatha, it's time to get up...    She's hungry.   Feed her."   (From the dead, to life.)   Yes, that was part of it, he simply creeped them out, the prominent risen members of society...  That's the way to get rid of oddballs, call them creepy.


I lift myself up out of the rocking chair, getting my feet underneath me.   Hope.

Evil thoughts lead to the same sad outcome.

I end up vomiting, twice, in the middle of the night, feeling the burn of the vodka shot Hashem the waiter wanted me to have.   I'd touched base with him earlier, when we first got there, making it clear to him I was a friendly.  The one good thing about working in a restaurant.  You get other people, and they get you, even when the restaurants are all they have. White shirt.  Simple cheap black tie.  Reading glasses.  After all the patient kindness he'd shown the crowd, at the end of the night of the amateur belly dancers in the parking lot in front of the Moroccan kebab house by Telegraph Road, knowing I was in the restaurant business, etc., helping out taking in the chairs, he brought out a shot, in a shot glass, and I did my best to drink it.

We had gotten there early.  Riding far out into Virgina, regrets in my head.  The parking lot is bare, a few tables put outside, the sky promising neither rain nor sun.  Well, what can you do, the hostess orders wine, a Vinho Verde, 9 percent alcohol.  Hashem brings it out in an ice bucket, and I sit with my two lady friends, who are both students of belly dancing.  The place, inside and out, is empty.  The sky is overcast.  We're not far from big highway roads, and I see a black guy in a  90's Mustang, all black, getting ready for the drag strip runs back and forth my friend told me about.  A musician arrives.  We meet Hassan, the jolly proprietor, grinning often, smoking an American Spirit.  Calm as can be.  Enjoying himself.  Beyond there's a small simple white church building, low, no steeple, and a Hispanic family is gathering there in front for a cookout.


Trying to sleep the acid had risen in my gorge.  The burn, a bit down, a pain one almost wants to tear at.  I take a purple anti acid pill.  I sip from a plastic soda water bottle.  I lay down, and try to sleep, but up it all comes, or I predict it, ready to get to the toilet bowl in my pain and sorrow.

Hopefully not the final spout of Melville whale blood from the stricken, Kerouac, hemorrhaging in an afternoon in October, St. Petersburg, Florida, rising up from his chair and the TV on to Galloping Gourmet, vomiting.  He never got to write up that horror, dying in the hospital that evening.

Larkin had his issues with the acidity, too.  Was it a shot of whiskey that got him in the end, throat cancer patient?


Evil thoughts, that had come out of looking through the pictures on my phone, my now retired belly dancer friend, of when she was a young mother, from Facebook, had resulted in the invitation, in a roundabout way, so it seemed to me, by divine karmic law, and my acceptance of it, which was also because I was hungover, listless with ragweed.  I'd been doing a retrospect on the passing girlfriends, not many of them, I've had here in DC, as I await my fate and think of how few would miss me in their busy lives I used to wait on.  And then I'd posted on Facebook live one of my half silly literary wine tastings on Facebook, and that's how I came to be invited, it turns out, more directly.

My heart pounds.  I don't sleep well.  Acid burning my esophagus, heart burn.

I felt like shit anyway, from the ragweed pollen, not really congested, just down for the count, weak, no energy at all, why did I bother to go...


I deserve all this, I tell myself.  And further self-talk:  I'm disgusted with myself.  The cloudy repetition.  Not solving a single problem.


Going out with people, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.  If you go out, your kitchen gets disorganized, dishes to do.  Not enough food ready to be cooked.



Finally getting up, the day after, hungry, shifting stomach, I remember again I am not allowed to go outside during ragweed season, even wearing a mask.  This is a terrible thing for a person who relies on nature, walks, trees, vistas, rivers, mowed meadows, brush, birds.  But the ill feeling and the complete lack of energy, mental and physical is hard to comprehend, it truly is.  Get up, find some tea, go back to bed.  Where are the joys in that?  There are many problems that come with being sensitive.  First of all, not everything suits you, and further on than that, somethings are downright disagreeable, unbearable, and such circumstances, which one must always be on guard over and vigilant, one still finds it impossible to live a life in such a way as to perfectly avoid all bad things.  And bad things come in many circumstances and dimensions and over many aspects of life, such that life ends up being very simple when the basic bad and unhealthy things are avoided altogether.

Loud offensive noises, forms of employment not meant for the soul of the sentient human being, so completely out of line with the character of humanity that it would be better to be a ditch digger almost.  (I exaggerate.)  Everybody likes coffee, I do too.  It's part of American workman culture of lumberjacks with flapjacks and men who build tall buildings with girders of steel, with moms who get up and the get the family up and on their way and then themselves;  it's part of European cafe intellectual culture, and all over those parts of the world that have their kingdoms and places of worship and palaces to honor such that everyone needs to work, Turkish, Arabic, Jamaican, Peruvian, Columbian, Mexican, Ethiopian.  The only problem, a burning acid feeling an hour later deep in the throat where pipes should connect agreeably and move things down and onward, a heartburn one cannot ignore.  First a good high, that gives one reason to get up out of bed, for a buzz, but that subsides to a jittery feeling that makes me wish I was a runner like back when I was a kid over the happy hills and simple country lanes.  And now I'm just a great terrible bum and I can't even enjoy a cup of coffee, or orange juice, for that matter, or beer, or white wine, sparkling wine, and certainly any kind of harder alcohol, to be honest with myself.   Nor anything smoked.  It will burn, not in a spicy way, but in a wounding way.  But do I ever learn!

I retreat to green tea and soda water.  I'm not evolved to sit under fluorescent lamps filing the things of an accounting firm, as it just makes me severely depressed, and how can all those other people go about doing it, smilingly even, I don't get it.

A man being like me is a born loser, or born or loser.   A malcontent about living the protection of the great woods behind.  Railroads are fine.  Churches and places of worship and libraries are fine.  But now the whole idea of driving on crowded superhighways and tangled interchanges just to get somewhere for confused sake.  Where are the guides, the ones who take one more gently by the hand and bring them along and show them, life in all its modern complexes of things that everyone seems to be quite happy doing, perhaps by habit, maybe not even happily, or certainly not happily, to help the individual--we are all vastly different, or at least fall into subcategories, like blood-type for instance, such that we don't all share the same cookie-cut things.  And me, by writing, I'm finding a way to cope, to deal with my mind, my depression, and no one ever really tells the masses that, except a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., or through something that a person of that kind of sensitivity finds somehow inherent in works related to that need, something we might pick up on intuitively, reading from the sorry list of great writership, poor men and women who should be taken pity upon.



And before all this, before the great venture to the den of Mara's Bellydancing Troupe of the tiresome parking lot and the restaurant front, with dancers that might have invited me to enjoy various pleasures sensual and carnal or carnival or primeval, or whatever, I had made the grave mistake of putting myself out there on Facebook Live, giving a sort of hybrid spiritual and literary lesson invited by the element of worldly wine.  And like a damn fool I waved the flag of my true "freak" colors, which would seem like a good thing to do, but which leaves you vulnerable, for the strange invites you might receive down the road.   Oh, and don't be doing that in Washington, D.C., ambitious and uptight and military industrial and political complexed in nature, as you will attract other types who may not be part of that healthy and prospering mainstream, much as you might really enjoy such people, as Kerouac famously did, "the roman candle people..."

An effective form of censorship, economic, political, spiritual, on top of all the other current shibboleths, such that would make now just about every great book involving the soul's travels in this world to be found so offensive by such standards that none of them could be published without a great disavowal...

But what can I say, the wild fires raging and the heat and surreal orange smog and smoke skies invading places like Oregon and San Francisco, it felt like it fell upon me to bring out my old Kerouac deep life red with the orange letters and the simple yellow over-under lines, Desolation Angels, inscribed by my old mom to me, "To my angel! Love, Mom," to read from his account of being a fire look-out out there in the Cascades, as I tasted my two inexpensive French pinot noir, one from Pays D'Oc, one from Burgundy.    To read from it felt like a balm to my sorrows and also the horrors of seeing what we are seeing from the West Coast and all the fires.

While we greatly enjoy sharing, and where I'm such a spot that I need a little bit of exposure or guidance from friendly voices, it might be good to remember, before going out on a limb, remember what Jesus said, "go and tell no-one," because then it will get weird and more complicated than it truly needs to be, unfortunately, and sometimes, even bad things come about from that simple good-natured act of sharing.

But you also, on the other hand, have to do something, such that you feel that it went okay, more right than wrong, maybe even well, even if you're no longer able to bother with preparation, just do it, just get it out there, doesn't have to be perfect.  You have to be able to have a little bit of pride in something of your work, no?  You have to have a good little feeling sometimes, before going back to heavy thoughts of how you've abandoned your mother, etc., etc.

Maybe Jesus is saying something akin to, "people always want to talk."  But that talk is unnecessary, Jesus the things of Jesus, God the things of God, things are as they are, and that there's a genius that can open up when you things as they really are...  Well, it's not like I'm doing any miracles here, nope.  And while he was sensitive, neither did Kerouac, except that he achieved something that is one of the few lasting beacons out there, to my knowledge.  My friends are exquisitely kind and gentle anyway.


Thoughts cannot be approached unless they are thrown down in all their complexity, and without a careful overview, people will nitpick, out of their own self-based points of view...

Well, I'll do the dishes from the last scraps of meals tolerated recently.  Mugs of green tea and throat comfort tea and dandelion detox tea.  I'll collect the shameful plastic soda water bottles that will now burden the earth forever, after my medicinal enjoyment...  I'll prepare a meatloaf, and, since the canned white-meat Kirkland chicken proved to be too horrible (throw it away) to blend in with all the carefully chopped apple and red onion and celery and crushed walnut and lemon, a tuna salad.  I should have applied to food stamps long ago.


Meanwhile, the one percenters have siphoned off 50 Trillion dollars from the American worker, and also so much transformed and changed the work place and the nature of jobs that jobs and labors no longer have much to do, much sympathy, for the nature of the human being, the human soul.