It’s been a tough August for the author, who calls himself a “literary outsider: “This is a hard time to write. The sense of needing to look for a job, concern over an aging parent, not to mention having to take a long look at one’s own situation… all caused by the sloth that is the writer’s life…. Because I’ve made no decision, stood for no clear choice, not really entitled to anything more than a by-stander’s career…” He dares to face facts of mid-life, yet he’s not locked on self-laceration…
My left index finger is still wrapped with gauze, healing from five stitches ten days ago, the cheap wine key employed in haste breaking a chilled bottle of Beaujolais at the neck up at my mother’s. The ball of my heel has a dull ache, having stepped on a tiny piece of broken glass as I prepared my mother’s kitchen floor to be mopped, soon starting to bleed. I stopped the bleeding and go on to mop.
***
Then it got grim. Not only was I laid off, because of the COVID, but then the federal addition to unemployment is now up in the air. Congress. The religion of the great Donald Trump, waiting in vain for Mitch McConnell, Mark Meadows, Tea Party, Freedom Caucus, and Mnuchin, the Foreclosure King.
***
So yeah, now and again I just needed some sort of break, as it was hard to work on anything… a resume? That was a horror enough. So I had a few books, Dark Nights of the Soul, Thomas Moore, or, simply, Dharma Bums, with such life saving beautiful prose, St. Raymond of the Dogs in Rocky Mount, NC, living with his sister and husband. (Ray Smith being his name in the book.) James Kingsland’s, Siddhartha’s Brain, a support to which I am indebted.
I didn’t know, or no longer knew, where I stood, by that all important indicator of finances, and I didn’t know where my mom stood, after all my helping her, with things, and so it was a real blind time, and then you added on to that, the virus… Masks. Calculations for everything of the new calculus. You can’t sleep in the night, you have no desire to be awake in the bright hot daylight of busy people.
Another hour zooms by. And you look at, in your minds eye, the pleasant friendships of couples, how they are easy with each other, and great friends and companions, not contesting armies…
So who ever thought reading Kerouac could contribute to sanity and an overall sense of truth and well being, go figure, in these political times, hearing from the most unlikely of all politicians, the fuck-up, the fuck-up like me, who went through so many days close to the edge, sad, crying in his sleeping bag, hitchhiking. Much as that college graduate kid who went off to Alaska…
***
No, I didn’t do well last week. Isolated here. Into the wine, out of fear and other poor motivations and pressures, a lack of proper understanding. Scrolling through endless websites, jobs that aren’t right, and still, still waiting on Congress to do something. Pressure.
***
Okay, so… Mom’s alone. I don’t feel good about that. I’m paying for an apartment that has become now hard for me to afford. I pray to Jesus. I pray through my chakras. I don’t have much in a 401k. I’ve not worked hard enough. I’ve squandered however many years I’ve had to build a career, a reasonable career. I’m nothing. An out-of-work bartender, perhaps never to be employed ever again but in some strange job. I feel very sad. I feel like Jesus in the Garden, a lot of days. I didn’t want it to be this way, but that’s what happened.
***
I try to look through jobs, content writing, editing… These are news jobs, jobs for which one has to have experience. This is not creative writing from the depths of the soul. I am not much of a man. I make excuses.
Why, I wonder, as I stare at the night ceiling, having run out of sleepiness and also of wine, why did I not head into the world from Amherst College, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, ready to take on a prep school classroom, or New York City.
I was a lost saint, who found his way being the saint of hospitality, which I did with my own two hands and feet, starting as busboy. I should have been reading…
***
Jack Kerouac, about the poet and time… “A poet is a blind optimist. The world is against him for many reasons. But the poet persists. He believes that he is on the right track, no matter what any of his fellow men say. In his eternal search for truth, the poet is alone. He tries to be timeless in a society built on time.”
What I did achieve in those long years useless to me was that I allowed for some space for the poetic. Washington is a well-read town, usually too officious to be dabbling in poetry, and yet there is poetry all around us. Lincoln’s ghost, the ideas of the Framers of the Constitution…
But when it all went away, shut down, not enough outdoor seating for the old place, there I was, left behind, stranded, an unemployable everyman poet, tossed out of his own fictional Garden of Eden.
You never know how draining it is, all the outside words. You want the news when you get up, you turn on the radio on the hour for the news. You look at the weather report, on the icon on your screen. You know the news is pretty bleak. But if you engage too much, the words in your own head will be squeezed out of the central focus.
And with everything that’s going on in the world, and Trump, and wildfires, and unemployment, it’s harder to find any importance, much value, in the poetic mind and the work of tuning into it.
***
Biden nails his speech, and I’ve had my delicious stew, with lovely chunks of potatoes in it, which I don’t normally do given the arthritic factor. And I’m tired, but I’ve been sitting around in this apartment getting lazier and depressed by my joblessness, and job applications, content writer, some kind of tutor and writing coach, and no wonder I liked the restaurant, because it was just simple, hard work, tired out, you ate your dinner, had a glass of wine, and you went home.
***
But there’s really not much point in being a poet. It’s certainly not a job. And I made that great mistake. I can see why I thought I should be one, perhaps more so a poet of prose, in a Melville way, but it’s all by ear, musical, anyway, words, when you write them down out of your head. You wouldn’t even expect it to pay the bills.
Even ten minutes of NPR, a few outside thoughts, and the line to mind gets staticky. Then what that happens, it’s a tough tug of war. Keep going? Are you done for the day? Should you, as old Ernie put it, stop and let the well replenish itself over night… Poetic thoughts go poof. Watch a cat video on Facebook; that’s what Werner Herzog does.
At dusk I find out the back window in the bathroom, deer, a buck, later joined by a female at dusk. I watch them graze on the weeds and vines, flicking their ears against insect life. But the male, I see that his velvet is hanging down from his antlers, like leathery rags that flap about. As night falls, there are male deer now, sitting down now, in profile as they chew their cud. I hear another plane coming into town, and the lights of it pass overhead with its whoosh, low, reminding me of 9/11. Then another one comes over,
***
I cannot even describe this time. It brought out all the lies I’d been living for the last 35 years, all the illusions, the fool’s paradise I’d kept afloat until I couldn’t. The consequences being the loss of my possessions and my living space. It was not an easy time to write, with an ever-present unseen enemy of suddenly being out of work, out of luck, out of income, no money to pay the rent. It was a very hard to write. I forgot how. But I needed to do it, despite it all, just for saving, for reassuring something inside me that I had to protect.
But I knew it all along. I would need to make a transition, at some point, yes of course, I would have to grow up.
To he who would write, beware; it will be a disaster. Get a job. Lead a decent life. Don’t allow the shame to fall upon you. Use your understanding of words to be an editor.
***
The Buddhist thinking tells you to mediate upon your cravings, to observe them without judgment. What do they feel like? Where in the body? I keep trying mom as I get into the apartment. Taking off my linen shirt, the hat, my glasses, the mask, washing my hands. The craving for wine starts in the chest, lower, near the solar plexus. It’s a desire to find some calm, with all the stress of the day that’s hitting you in the gut, a weight that’s pressing on you, extra, on top of breathing. Then you throw in the loneliness on top of that.
Just a little bit, on the rocks, with a good splash of soda water. Just to calm down. It doesn’t feel good necessarily, with a few sips in, but it’s a habit, an obsession, and in some ways, it works.
Then she calls, as I’m cooking the black-eyed peas I soaked overnight, around 9 at night. Again, it’s the matter of whether she’s in the right place or not. Yes, you are mom. The cat knows his way back and forth. She’d put the phone down, per our agreement, to go out and check to make sure, looking at the number on the apartment townhouse complex. I waited awhile. Finally, I heard the kitchen door, not the front door, creak open, and then I hear her talking to the cat, asking him if this can works, after opening it up. Then she goes away. I hear her in a few more minutes calling my name, as if I were there in person. Then I hear the phone go click. So I try calling back, it rings, she picks it up, but doesn’t speak to it, and then she hangs up again. I call, it rings, but then I see she’s calling.
***
When I get up, and have the courage, I look at these last few Covid-Diary blog postings. Rushes, they are like, to be looked upon as film, raw and unedited, for what they caught and didn’t catch.
There are still the great worries, condensing in the lone night as dew out of the sky, profound. As if everything were coming together, the November election, my mother’s health, possible eviction notice from not having a job, from not being employable at age 55, something I’ve left myself open to. But those cheery thoughts subside, and there is the writing again to look at. As Buddha says, good will follow after pure thoughts, and so I look for how to think pure thoughts, rather than evil ones.
Our life is shaped by our mind we become what we think. Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it.
Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Joy follows a pure thought like a shadow that never leaves. (The Dhammapada.)
***
The Corona Virus Pandemic has come with different stages, globally, nationally, locally, personally.
There will be many more steps to go through, each one veiled, no control over it. No way to get the mind around the shock, the misery.
Some of us are okay, sometimes, with the alone time, using it for something, we don’t know quite what. Meditation. Thomas Merton might see it as putting out an ear for God.
I can’t blame anyone for “not feeling comfortable,” as my old acquaintance lets me know, wanting nothing to do with me. Fine. Not feeling comfortable having anything to do with me and my way of life, and all my mistaken paths. Even I don’t feel comfortable. What if I have to pack up all my books and guitars and bikes and clothes, and the important papers, and the furniture… what can I salvage? Put it in storage? Where? How to pay for that? No one would want me to be going through all this at my age, but that’s how it is. It’s not always easy to be Zen. And like a fool I still chase the supposed pleasures of life, as if I had no other option. And thereby, wasting time. Wasting years. Wasting time away from the real joys of life, family, hard work, love, closeness, shared time. Not alone time.
Only if you were “mentally ill” would you need “alone time,” all that meditation, and all that exercise.
Siddhartha Gautama is the world’s first admittedly open neurotic person. Giving others the courage to follow in his path for mental, spiritual and psychological well-being. The first person to say, “hey, what is this all about anyway…” In doing so, grasping that which is, what we all have in common.
***
The same way I felt before, looking for a career, and years go by. Writing. The old embrace of that which is unsatisfying about the human condition, of how we are not perfect academic scholars, perfect objects of love and desire, of how we somehow do not end up on the righteous career path we were cut out for, because of all the excess of things going on in our minds, the things we must cope and contend with in order to find out where our talents lie.
People like to portray themselves, if given the opportunity, as energetic, wise, smart, good at all things, policy, investment banking, perfect explication. Perfection. Human intelligence.
Dostoevsky liked the night. He liked, at least in his fictional world, religious elders who had friendship for the rustic, the idiot, the simpleton, the sinful. In his own fictional world, Dostoevsky was the idiot himself.
***
Waiting on Congress. What are they going to do? I feel like I’ve hit a low point. I’ve been waiting on the restaurant business forever too, in that it hasn’t helped my writing career, and indeed left me unfulfilled.
I had not realized, being in it, how terrible lonesome the bar business was. It was a huge mistake on my part, ever doing that. I had quit my day job, a leap of faith into just working at night as a busboy, writing, thinking about what to do. And then they, Austin Grill, offered me the job of day bartender. And it went on from there.
I guess I was too ashamed to talk to my father openly about all this. Which was also very dumb. When my mom came to visit, she cried. “The restaurant business will break your heart. Like it broke my parent’s heart.” And I should have listened to her, too. Because it will. It does.
Writing too is a terrible and lonely thing to be doing. And I guess I thought that the wine was part of the release, part of the inspiration’s acting out. It numbed the pain, while hardly fixing any bit about my life or helping it turn better.
The whole thing brought on a stream of bad memories.
***
I’m feeling lost, without the bar to go to. I admit it. The space. Fifteen years, your brain gets used to it.
And as far as the professional world goes, I am a child, an id, who feeds himself, goes for walks, but does little to help people out in the real world. For that, yes, takes work.
***
I took a walk around last night, after writing down some of my thoughts, but even nature and the river at night had a useless feeling to it, a void. As if to say, “who cares, go back to your own world, which obviously you have neglected…”
Write a resume, spring into action, serve in a school, be a clerk… Rise above being an undesirable, the uselessness of one who is little more than being a friendly guy for a profession. Time is money, and opportunity, right?
***
The problem with being creative, is that not only will your work be creative, but that you will be creative making problems for yourself, such as you would not if you went by the rules.
Creativity, of course, is a private individual thing. We might go about it genially, in our spare time, or not. But we have within, always, this great potential, even hanging about us, like Jesus’s ability of drawing parables, or like an imagined higher and more refined being like ourselves but developed as if on planets far away, were we to operate on a plane of higher and purer wisdom.
***
As we know, it takes great amounts of time to get anything done, it takes great amounts of travels. And, furthermore, no, you can’t really talk about any of it, not one bit, without being taken as a reckless crazy wild person.
And so, to be realistic, you have to grow to accept that someone near you, innocuous, might be going about a wonderful creative personal life, imaginative works one has no idea about.
But woe unto the world, the world cannot handle all the creativity…
And it is, after all, one of the great insults to snub the creativity of another, as long as it isn’t offensive, up there with the Rejection at Nazareth. A failure of education.
***
There is that tie from Ahab to Huck Finn. The journey, the adventure for meaning, creative flights, the destruction of self, finding a deeper self as one becomes informed at the peak and pit of his lostness.
***
These days it takes the train a longer time to leave the station. There are the hindrances, torpor, depressing thoughts to overcome. I got up and it was cool out. I put a tee shirt on, socks, my newer Brooks running shoes and made it out in the morning light for a walk around the block. The river is high, and deep milk chocolate smooth up the green branches on the other side, up to the tops of its banks. I haven’t felt very chipper as we all wait for Congress to negotiate with the hard-line Republican senate over the supplemental unemployment benefits.
***
You were a good person to be in the restaurant business. But it had its misguidedness, its excesses, even without intending any. A mistake in life. A bad choice, given that there are much more useful ways to serve your fellow human beings than show your sad old pretty face in wry humor before those you serve, as if to claim being a good sport in life, when we all are trying to survive.
***
But how can all this happen to us? I wasn’t greedy. I worked hard enough. I was steady and loyal, and brought in a customer following, as best as one can. I charged people for drinks. I suggested to them what to get off the menu or the daily specials. I pushed the sweetbreads. I pushed the fish specials, with sincerity and belief. I told many stories about how things were done, the beauty of duck confit’s slow long processes down there in the kitchen. A ship, a bastion of old school French cooking, stocks that bubble away all night with all sort of trimming and end of herb or vegetable or bone or onion skin. I’d make hearty wine recommendations, and tell them my stories of serving this particular wine. Great with the kidneys in the mustard sauce. Perfect with crusty boneless pigs feet, and the cassoulet. “Try the veal,” we like to say here, I’d joke, like a mobster place, recommending the braised veal cheeks osso bucco style. Or the liver.
We took care of people. It was truly a respite from the office for many, a doorway to home, or an alternative. A pleasant break. An adult playground where learning still happened, where dialog presented itself, slowly or quickly, boringly routine, or not, who knows what you’ll find. One can only take so much news these days.
If I don’t keep writing, there is hardly any way I can deal with it. The failures to contain all this, which could have been done, had they followed the Obama playbook. No one I know wanted this new guy, the Trumper. Now look what he’s done.
***
And then it was like I felt I lost the ability to write, or rather I began to see how dire my employment prospects truly were after all my years of fooling around working as a bartender. All my years of playing, not being serious. The only real work was a half-assed attempt at writing, amateur stuff, completely. Honest self-explorations, perhaps, but useless.
But not all of us know how to act as professional breadwinners and adults. I don’t know why this is so.
What a week.
The spiritual stuff, that angle on life, you can wear that out. You can get yourself to a point where you really don’t know what to do with yourself. It’s like Don Quixote, your head gets soft.
And nothing much to report. Waiting on Congress, for the crucial Federal unemployment addition to DC. The Republicans are talking 200 instead of 600 bucks per week, and that’s not good if you’re trying to pay DC rent. And now it’s been pushed off ’til next week. I’ve applied for an overnight grocery team member at Whole Foods. I’ve done an application for a tutoring company, an online interview. My resume still sucks, half formed. I am sad, depressed. My mom calls from time to time. Says kind things. I feel guilty. What am I doing here anyway… There’s not much, it seems to put down on my resume. Shamefully.
And now I see clearly where thirty years in the restaurant business as a bartender with no plan has left me as far as being employable. I feel it in my bones, too.
What’s in a day? Scroll through Facebook again. Check a couple of job suggestion web sites. Scroll through at all the things I’m not qualified for. Well, I didn’t listen. I wasn’t a good kid. I have been dulled down.
I’ve worn out my thoughts. My therapist suggests maybe perhaps I should move out of DC.
Moving hits me psychologically. An old theme. I’ve barely unpacked things here, after the move from the old house, where I had space and bookshelves fit for a king. Moving… It’s like being ostracized. And there’s a cop element to it, too, the old “move along,” if you escape being evicted.
***
I took walks. Slow ones. I did yoga. I ate a combination of black-eyed peas and black beans on a Saturday night, and after a walk to the farmer’s market, and then back, all sweaty, and then down to the pines for yoga, waiting the return of Mitch McConnell and the Senate to decide my fate, on a hot day, doing my yoga things began to move, gaseous, unsettled, such that I calculated I should use the woods behind the Urban Ecology Center building, careful to take a good handful of large leaves from the Paper Magnolia tree, soft of the underside to help doing nature’s bidding out in nature, which I was careful about, succeeding, leaning up against a chainlink fence after removing my flip-flops, yoga shorts, boxers… Relieving myself a large green katydid alighted upon my calf, not budging. My bowels relieving, moving away to the side for the last, then peeing as I squatted. Finally, having cleaned my bottom off well, I whisked away the cricket, as it seemed very intent on me, coming out of the green to present itself, put my boxers back on, then my shorts, then my flip-flop sandals, and still no one around. I felt a lot better, too.
***
The night. I cook a filet of black cod from the Farmer’s Market, kept in the freezer from months ago. Turmeric, ginger, cayenne, flakes of salt and a quick modest grind of pepper. I put the old Bianchi on the trainer, the bike tire tread lifting off in one spot, flap flap flap, as I pedal the wheel rolling forward over the rolling bar. I get HBO’s Chernobyl series going on my laptop, which starts to heat up, then the little wheel on the screen spinning round and round, the screen frozen, so I have to work at it, putting the old laptop in the freezer to cool off at one point. I manage to keep entertained. Later I read from Visions of Cody, not the dialog parts, and yes, Kerouac has his style, his shtick, and it feels a little transparent to me. Except that he creates a style, a way of talking that you can only do by writing. The writing of his way is very close to the mind, to speech, but translated, in a way that couldn’t be done in normal talking.
And when I get up, finally, and make tea, have a bit of cold sliced low sodium chicken breast from the little deli, I realize I am a bum, nothing but a big bum. A lot of that has had to do with drinking, which causes missed opportunities and great regrets and a kind of dishonesty. Yes, memories of college, just messing around instead of all that priceless reading and priceless classes I could have done or taken. There’s the pull of a Christian glass of wine, but that can be dangerous too, a slippery slope.
Sensuality is one of the five hindrances. I know it all too well. And the other ones too. In addition to Sensory Desire, as I suppose the senses must be attached to something one finds desirable, there is Ill-Will, there is Sloth-and-Torpor, there is Restlessness-and-Worry, and also, Doubt. Yes. “The food of delusion,” as the Buddha said.
I almost feel afraid of myself, as I sit here, like how it would have been easy to lounge in bed, and I did that long enough anyway. Yes, it is scary when you realize that you really are a bum, given all you could have been.
When I call my mom, for the second time today, now that it’s about one or so in the afternoon, and when I tell her I’m feeling this way, a recognition, she immediately tells me, “no, you’re not a bum, you’re a very polite person…” and other kindly things.
***
Perhaps Kerouac drank in order to find, or create, some kind of adventure. You could, when drinking, kind of make up a story, fall into adventure and mis-adventure, you could meet crazy people who were also drunk and going about things in an uncontrolled fashion. And I know. I have fallen myself, in with bad people, as I grew up out in the countryside where less advanced and enlightened views and prejudices, and other bad habits, can take hold.
There was, of course, another side of him, the studious side, delving seriously in the Dharma, knowing his terms and his sutras, and being able to apply them. But, he would lapse.
How’s being a good Buddhist going to save me, I wonder… I say to myself. I could use some improvements as a person in this world, in society as well. To be less distracted…
***
So, after three soaks in epsom salts, pressing down, a tiny chard of glass is finally raised out of the flesh of my heel, a week or so after. Fresh blood come out, but not much. I bandage it up again, go for a walk, gingerly stepping forward, out of the apartment. The index finger, I can get away with a gauze pad taped over it. But with the combination, both wounds on the left side, with the bandage care, it slows me down. My finger is still slow, too thick to bend.