Wayne Kilgore, descended from Irish bards, at last was free.  Even as he was almost about to shout at his aged mother, as she sat there in her Eames Chair (throne), glowering at him, in a way that Kerouac too might have shouted at his mother, according to a Ginsberg interview,  (dialect French Canadian, Joal?, "you smelly old fishcunt.")

They were, earlier, or just before, in the kitchen.  He was sorting out the groceries.   And again she had confused him with his honorable father.  "Has the semester started yet," she asks him as he brushes past her, trying to keep her refrigerator organized.  “So where are you going after this?”  And he had to explain all over again, that he worked in a restaurant, and things there were quite uncertain, why, because of the pandemic...  he really didn’t have a job anymore, not that it was much of one to begin with.  He hadn't a chance not to sit down with any space for his thoughts yet.  And his explanation gets heavy handed.

She was up in a huff.  About his tone.  It makes me want to kill myself..  She got up and sat down in the living room, in her chair.  Then she went on, went on, I’m no good, I’m no good, I wish I were dead, and he shouted at her, finally, but quickly, to shut up and went into the kitchen away from her to make chicken salad from the breasts he’d baked two nights ago.

She would soon forget anyway.  She picked up Dylan Thomas Collected Poems with entitled airs.  Has other things to do than deal with her servant.

He went back to the kitchen and sliced into the cold chicken breast, peeling off the skin, on the one ready useful cutting board.


Wayne Kilgore felt an inner need to write.  He had things to chew on.  And he wasn’t getting  much space from his elderly mother.  Studying him from her chair as he sat on the couch sorting out his uncomfortable morning thoughts.  Did you sleep well?  What are we doing for fun today... Do you have any reunions coming up...


Just as everything was happening, humanity had divided, naturally, itself on all its archetypal lines and distinctions, and in certain cases, depending, even though all and each by now were an inextricable mix, the bardic mentality versus the cop mentality...  all of which we stumble upon, as sea mammals to an Irish rocky cove with stones upon which we would warm ourselves, in other words, by surprise, and quite incidentally.


Wayne Kilgore, even as all things of his struggled workman life were falling apart, had been, in a way , set free.  Now it was 1:39 AM, and he wanted some space.  He heard her get up.  To the bathroom from her bed in the cluttered bedroom.  Stiffly coming downstairs from the bathroom quietly saying, help...  help...  help... In a pitiable childish voice.


He was thinking.  Two nights ago.  The Princess had messaged him, after the book he wrote...  But now, again, just like before, she was declaring herself uncomfortable, insinuating that he was stalking her again, as he as he checked in afterward, and it had gone downhill from there, each time he wrote, politely, in friendship, literary respect.

So, he was thinking.  The attachments we create in our mind in order to make narrative arts really have nothing, or very little, to do with the original people we associate these attachments with.  Let them go.  Free of the projected light of the theater created by your own neuroses, your own desire to shout back at the family members who have shouted their own way through life’s attendant miseries.

He groaned inwardly as he heard her wake after midnight and come downstairs.  He spent a little time with her in the kitchen as she poured herself some Pepsi and ate a saltine with a swipe of almond butter.  There was mushroom pizza in the fridge.  The beer wasn’t settling with him well,  he’d just been reading about Kurt Vonnegut’s mother’s death, barbiturates.

He went back to the couch, hiding his attention in the new book, a compilation of Vonnegut thoughts on writings.  He monitored her, by the sounds in the kitchen.  Okay.  No one is here.  No one wants to talk to me, okay....  He heard her belch, with childish amused entitlement.  Talking to herself.  Singing quietly to herself.  She sat down and tinkled in the hall bathroom without sliding the door shut.

The people we attach the mind’s own fictions, Jesus is more real.  Free from selfish neuroses.


In the morning he lounged before getting up, giving himself time to think.  Which is not the same as writing.  He didn’t want to get up and come down.  She wouldn’t let him sit down to write, without the huff, the heavy sigh.   He felt slightly better.  Soon he would have to go back.  It would take a long time for the wine bar to get back to normal.

The next step of life seemed like a simple meaning of life sort of thing, a spiritual revelation, an invitation to a deeper truth.  And he should also be looking for a job.

He thought about the people in the town up here, by the big lake.  Somehow people up here weren’t angry, less of the guarded professional of the urban.  Friendly, not about to accuse the innocent of unclean motives.  Not about to put a person down, for nothing.  Judgmental.

It was already turning into a gift, a freeing insight, his old friend’s great duscomfort at even being in a friendly text about literary matters.  City people for you.  Good luck with that.

Now, despite it all, he was writing again..