Easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them… said the man named Adler. Though who among us can really take credit for our great or our insipid thoughts? As if they were ever our own. As if they began with us.
And the Vulnerable Man said there must be a deeper meaning in these experiences. I’m not on the correct path gotten off track and finding peace within myself and then just do it, he said, just do it. There must be a deeper meaning to those experiences… and the man named Thoreau wrote them down, Gleanings, he called them, or what time has not reaped of my journal.* And there’s something like GONZO journalism in all of this… “written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story using a first-person narrative. (Wikipedia)” I don’t know what the point of any of this is I don’t know what is life life LIFE and I don’t know if there is a deeper meaning in any of it though I am a thinking man and why would that part of me have evolved? But you see if there is no meaning the power I possess to make my own remains but I walk the line in the middle I swear no allegiance to the meaning nor the meaningless I am my own subject I report on myself and leave it for someone else to decide. I’ll just keep writing my little stories. I think I’m done with greater principles… I have my own and live by them my little family and I because they are all I have. Though I could do better by them. But there’s no more advertising. Just live and write live and write. …in the evening, the few scrannel lines which describe my day’s occupations will make the creaking of the saw more musical than my freest fancies could have been…*
So it’s something like inner truth that meaning exists within… and maybe there alone. I wish for my life to escape the horrors that can befall humanity and do… violence and war… to avoid such insufferable plights. Though the words are no better nor worse for whatever may or may not befall them so long as they are true. A certain kind of true that originates not with the stars but behind the eyes that see them. Oh yes. The writer alone knows what is true. Even the lies hold the truths they bury, preserving them for the microscope of posterity.
Who is not tired of the weak and flowing period of the politician and scholar, and resorts not even to the Farmer’s Almanac, to read the simple account of a month’s labor, to restore his tone again?... If our scholars would lead more earnest lives, we should not witness these lame conclusions to their ill-sown discourses, but their sentences would pass over the ground like leaded rollers, and not mere hollow and wooden ones, to press in the seed and make it germinate.*
And I pack up my journal and slide it into my bag and change my shoes and grab my keys and I’m on my way to let the electrician into the restaurant on the hill overlooking the bay then in and out of corn and soy and over a couple hours across the big bay bridge and into Baltimore where I roasted Amish mushrooms and put them onto sourdough toast with a spoon of whipped ricotta and later when the good gentlemen in the kitchen arrived I showed them how to recreate it. And I prepared crudite and cannellini bean hummus and agrodolce meatballs and hamburgers and tofu katsu burgers and French fries and scallops with cilantro gremolata and chocolate chip cookies for a wedding welcome party of 85 with the help of a very good sidekick she is self-reliant and works very well alone and perhaps I slowed her down. And up and down the stairs in and out of the different rooms I took everything in not a detail missed though many ignored no no too many hills and none of which I’d choose to die on no no in time I will take Thoreau’s leaden roller to smooth them over all at once. And I wrote notes for my Tuesday orders—Amish cheeses and heavy cream and sweet onions and sugar and dayboat scallops and herbs etcetera etcetera. And I walked up the stairs from the event and into the Cocktail Room glimmering candles beneath chandelier light and the bar stools were taken and the long communal tables were full and the marble tables flickered with conversation yes there was that hum of a restaurant doing something right and I rolled up my knives and grabbed my bag and bid the gentleman in the kitchen farewell and disappeared into the night weaving in and out of city streets and highways and over the big bay bridge and through the fields of dried corn and soy back to the restaurant on the hill overlooking the bay. And a light was shining from within it illuminating the dark and I unlocked the door and goodnight, I said, and switched it off and stood there for a long moment in the darkness and heard the hum of a restaurant doing something right and I smelled the wood fire and I thought of all the times before when I stood in a restaurant with sawdust and power tools and wires hanging from walls and ceilings and this time will vanish and I don’t find myself trying to speed it up no best not to. Goodnight, I said again, bonsoir mon cheri, my dear, my love.
*Quotes Henry David Thoreau
Bravo!! (clapping)