So it is in, and through, the Beatitudes that we find “the map,” the way to Jesus, the way to embrace fully that which is completely a story, completely a myth, also a history, also a penetrating psych-scientific study and teaching of how to attain intellectually and physically a spiritual life, the way, in other words.  (Credit to The Chosen Series for putting these phrase, a Map to find Me, into the Beatitudes episode culminating Season Two.)

The cat has gone outside again.  It’s four AM, and I watch him tread his paws over the lightly frozen ground, disappearing into the darkness of a cloud covered night.

We all make our pilgrimage as children, trying to be men, women.  Our own path of spiritual support, which comes to be the single most important and meaningful thing to us.  To the greater meaning, we can only be ignorant.

This is the pained thing, the path, its great length through time.  We cannot come to its conclusion, its greater meaning, before we are ready.

It is an incredible and unbelievably difficult and trying path to be on.  To listen to the order of heaven, god, truth, reality, ...  It might also smack of madness, for its risks, for its otherworldliness.

Joseph, a good father who must, as all good mortals, pass way.

And Jesus is the one who reveals the reality of existing in the universe.  Not to exclude any other path, the ancient wisdom of Eastern thought...

The myth shows us the way, a map, to whatever it is we chose to strive for.

As a writer, maybe it's harder to fake who you are.  If you end up doing yoga and reading Genesis and that's all you can do, that's how it goes.  

Mom comes down, after I write two sentences.  She sits down at the table, I get her her two morning pills. Did you sleep okay...  She examines an empty box of museum painting holiday cards.  She is concerned about the cat being out, reaches her hand, her right hand, to the top of her head to pick at around at it.  She makes little observations.  The refrigerator is very full, she says.  I'm making soup for her, the usual can of Progresso, tear up some chicken, from fried chicken breasts today, add stock, spices.  I need to get to the River's End Bookstore.  She wants to go for a ride too.  Mom, it's cold out.  The way she clears her throat irritates me, perpetually.  Do you want to take a shower, Mom?  It's too damn cold.  But you just said that it's too warm already when I asked you if I should turn the heat up.  She opens a can for the cat, he eats it.  You're scaring him, she tells me.  Soon he wants to go back out.  I feed him another spoonful from the open can, he mushes the bits up against the side of the dish, licking up the liquid gravy and some of the bits, abandoning the rest.  He's calling to be let out now, on top of mom going on.  She looks through her purse.  She brought it down last night, when she came down for a slice of pizza.  

I get through the dishes, sip on a chilled paper cup of Stewart Shop coffee from the fridge, take care of some emails, write out a card for Ben the maintenance guy, and low on money as we are $40 is generous, but I feel guilty about that, and then as winter night comes with cloud cover I go up to change out of my sweats and put my trusty pants on, with belt, wallet, mask, either to go for a walk in the light, or to get down to the grocery store, so I check in on mom who was lobbying for a ride earlier.  No, she's comfortable in bed.  I sit in her chair, text my friend Betsy to catch up, on yoga, on the Christmas holiday, and she's flying back to DC from Utah, and in the background mom's talking to herself, stirring, and down the stairs as I am in mid sentence composition.  And she's hungry.  Oh, but not that hungry.  Oh, I don't want to disturb you.  My voice rises, mom, what do you want?!  Okay, pizza, so I put my energy on hold and heat up the oven for 425, Paul Newman cauliflower crust pizza...  Okay, calm down, you can do this.  She's on the couch still.  The cat has observed me head into the kitchen, so he hops down from being next to her on the sofa and out he goes.  Where did the cat go?  Then she's singing Silent Night in her out of tune tone deaf way, so I vanish back into the kitchen's relative refuge.

She'll go around all day looking at random pieces of paper, packing slips, old mail from the Toyota Takata Airbag recall, oh uh, we're in trouble, Ted, Ted, are we in trouble... So I leave the kitchen, over to where she's sitting in her great chair...  I look at the two pieces of mail, one a promise of rates for an extended car warranty, and the recall note.  Mom, we already took care of this?  I'm not so sure.  Mom, remember driving down to the Toyota dealership in North Syracuse off of 481?  No, she doesn't remember...

No wonder I've become addicted to looking into my iPhone for the communal minds of distant cyber friends for some relative sanity, Instagram.  (If not worse.)

Is this my home?  This is a nice place.  But I left some things back at the other house.  Okay, mom.

It gets exasperating.   This spiritual journey to pained adulthood.

Okay, pizza's ready, mom.

She rises from her chair.  I'm coming.  I don't have an airplane, ha ha ha.  

She comes in.  Where are the people?  Mom, it's just us.

I ask if her if she wants some "roast beef," from the standing rib roast from Christmas dinner leftovers.  No, I'm fine.  How about a small piece.  Okay, she says, as if she doesn't remember saying no.  I've brought the horseradish sauce over, as an alternative to the hot gravy way I've served it with the last three nights.  She smacks her lips as she eats the cut of pizza picking it up with hand, her mouth looking like a monkey's as she chews with her broken teeth.  She spreads some horseradish sauce on the bit of crust she's picked on.

Well, I offer, I never thought we'd get through all that roast beef, I say.  (There's more in the freezer, plus the bones.).   

It ends with I won't come here again, after she says, no, my house is over that way.  This is the last time.

She observes her mother's mirror, there to my left on the wall before the old dining room table here in the kitchen, cluttered.  I should write a story about my mom's mirror, she says.  Well, why don't you.  You have to get in the...

I suggest, as I mention my going out to get groceries, that she rinse her mouth out, and she quickly gets angry with me.  I will not be bossed around.  She slams down her glass when I ask her to take her pill.  I call it pill for a her bones, though it's a mild tranquilizer.  I move her little wine glass closer to her, asking if she'd like more.  She immediately bangs the glass down where it was before.

Do you want a B-12?  I've had enough with your pills and being bossed around.  Well, I'm going to take one.  Good for you, she snoots.

So, what's up for the rest of the day...  Did you cut your hair last night?  It looks good.  So what are going to do...  Mom, I told you I'm going to the grocery store.  Oh, fun.  She compliments me on my shirt.  L.L. Beans, I tell her.  Mr. Beans has outfitted a lot of good men...  and women too.  What a nice bracelet that is.  Is it gold?  No, mom.  Copper.

She rises to clean off her plate, the pouring some water on it, then checking on the back door and here comes the cat.  Oh you’ve been out all this time…  poor kitty.

Okay mom.  I leave her picking at her scalp.  It’s damn cold out there.  Yup.

I find the card and envelope with 2 twenty dollar bills, and as I walk out and start the car to warm the engine.  My spine straightens.

And on my grocery list, wine, and maybe cider too...

I go the grocery store, after the wine store, where I leave embarrassed from having asked the stalwart woman if she's been boosted yet, and to hide my embarrassment I listen to her agreeably as she tells me she is a healthy person, and that everyone she knows who's had the shots has gotten sick, and she hasn't gotten sick yet.  At the grocery store I repeat my parking lot joke, looks like a good night to ge drinking down by the river.  And here to I embarrass myself, and no one really gets my "living in a van down by the river," because you shouldn't really joke about such things.

Then later, after four glasses with a nice young woman bartender at Bistro 197, I go out across to the east side, where there's a bar that serves food late.  I was just going to leave, but the woman bartending there was nice enough to come over and check on me, so I have a shitty California fruit bomb cab in a plastic cup full of ice, but the whole crowd is for Trump.  The night gets increasingly weird when an older guy asks if I want to smoke any weed with them, no thanks.  I avoid the weed, but strike up conversation with a large man who looks vaguely like Albert Finney, but Polish American.

As I drive away the kid in the hoody is up in a maple tree where the older guy, slender, who was also wasted, I should never have said hey to him as he got his jack and coke and passed by, he's talking to the kid up in the tree, whereas going to the car I was pretty sure he was talking to himself, in a drunken rant.

In the morning, I'm wakened by our meals on wheels friend's knock, and also Ben the maintenance guy's call at the same time, as he needs to come and measure for the new dishwasher, who comes and goes curtly, and the poor woman has to see me with my hair stuck out to the side looking like a crazy man, and I can't explain to any of these people about the Covid symptoms, for which I was careful about wearing a mask last night.

I take some cough medicine, but the sweetness of it quickly brings on a feeling of a hollow stomach.  I open a fresh seltzer water, regretting the plastic of it, and release a bit of the demon airs from last night being a fool.  I feel stupid again.  But I get in a few Nadi Kriya and attempts to roll my core stomach muscles back and forth, exhaling through opposite nostrils on the back steps of cold concrete, coughing, releasing mucus so I can breath again in the dry heated cluttered apartment air.

And down in the basement I continue with the kriya practice and the breathing pranayama variations and breath counts and holds, after the mantra as I sit crossed legged and I begin to feel decent again, and after the silent mantra Ham Sa I'm feeling on my way into Shavasana corpse pose, and I feel that Jesus is just one to call attention to how we can be, as the proverbial "Son of God/Man," to be as if at the center of the universe, the center point where the Big Bang came, but also stretched across the whole thing like a vast blue light energy field with cores of other light.  The chakra opening chant had set up a very pleasant vibration, almost like those Tibetan monks I saw once at Amherst, who can make one note, but let other notes drone from deeper within their vocal chambers sympathetically. 

And so it can seem to me, how my years were not completely wasted, as I did explore mediation throughout the years back in the old apartment in the house on the quiet street, as Jorge harassed me but was sweet and kind enough as well, as much as I wish those years back and consider them wasted ones now as I say.  

I was getting in touch, dialing in with the deep...  It's a nice long relaxing breathing lightness thing, letting the muscles sink away from the bones, as if something that needed to gradually sink down to the soft sea floor and find comfortable and safe bedding had drifted down just so, and the old bones could too.  And I had in my deeper heart center mind meditation reconciled Jesus and Buddha and the wisdom of the yoga traditions.  Proper action, as the Bhagavad Gita tells us.

The cat comes in, proudly, as chickadees swim just so through the honeysuckle bushes coming away from the brief visit to the neighbor Bonnie's lard bird feeder.

And when will mom come down...

It's not an easy assignment to write out the spiritual experiences of mediation, morning Sadhana inspiration...

It is a burden, to be responsible, dutiful to the journal, to its honesty, to its reflection of your human thoughts.

Early December sketch

 So, gradually, bit by bit, I became a bum.

"Thanks," is the first thing I hear, after the cat nudges the door open to mom's old study where I try to sleep and balances along a cluttered shelf.  That's from mom, across the small hallway, on her bed.  Thanks.  As in Thanks a lot, offered with the usual.  I guess I'm not making her very happy.  She was on the warpath when I was asleep, waking to hear her. "hello, is anybody here, where is everybody, Ted?  Ted?"  She quiets down for a while.  In the night I get her the pill, but I'm exhausted still.  She doesn't push me about how she's starving.  Can you take me home tomorrow?  Mom, you are home.

I get the old chilled tea out, gunpowder green, sit down, find a place of peace, not easy, within, think of how to approach my being behind in my yoga teacher training certification class.  Behind on the homework, the lesson plans, the agility with teaching the poses.   In truth, I haven't been doing much yoga.  If I get to the morning sadhana spiritual practice in this gloom and uncertainty, that's pretty good.  If I get to study from the book, that is good too.  If I get to read, The Bhagavad Gita, more power to me.

I get a bit done.  I sprayed the wall with watered down bleach last night.  The fan and the dehumidifier...  But what do we have to do, to keep mom pleased.  I'm glad she's still in bed, but..  I've done the dishes.  I've rehearsed a thematic opening and then a centering for yoga class, and then taught myself through a few warm up poses and then asana.  But I still feel a fog over me.  I had two ciders with dinner, somehow enough to make me want to go up and rest, and a nap here turns into sleep.

I had a dream of Chef Bruno the other night.  I had a dream of having a college age girlfriend, as if I was back in college.  Outings to old reservoirs in the woods.  And I'm not certain that mom arrives even in these dreams to spoil the party.

"What is it that is not serving you anymore," one of the adult spiritually questions the Yoga Man Todd asks of us when we fall down into corpse pose.  "What if you let that go, let someone down...  How badly do you want change...  What are you willing to do for it..."

Do I take her to the bookstore?  Do we run out to Ontario Orchards for a Christmas tree?  Is she going to demand to be taken out to eat...  If so, where?  And if so, will I have a glass of wine, which then leads to another and general strife.  Maybe I should just escape now, and study somewhere.  But that would leave her all alone...  She can't feed herself intelligently anymore.  Thanks.

There's the drive down to Washington, DC, for Christmas...  Try not to let that hang over your head, or that you'll be going back to your old apartment...  Will you ever move back there?  What can you salvage...

Almost 11 and mom hasn't stirred yet.  The cat's been in and out several times since 7:30.

I walk around on eggshells, nervous, almost shaking a bit.  I look at my old Jesus face in the bathroom mirror as the fan whirs, inseparable from the light, after brushing my teeth and putting ten percent hydrogen peroxide on some skin barnacles.  Is the cat due for a rabies shot.  Maybe it would be nice to take a walk by the river, but perhaps for now I should just get out into the sunlight, over to the old beaver saga power grid transfer station, where they re-dug the water way to beaver proof it.  I make some dandelion tea.

Maybe I should just let her have her way today.  Lunch at The Press Box, fine, I don't give a shit.  I just won't drink.  Homework later.

I'm an old bartender.  I don't have any advice to give out.

I'll look at my phone, but there will not be anything interesting, beyond a friend's post on Facebook, or Instagram.

About 11:45 I go up and check on mom, and she's there sitting at the side of her bed.  I ask her if she's hungry.  Sure.  I go down and open a can of Progresso Chicken Noodle soup, adding a small carton of decent chicken stock, the store out of bone broth, a shake of ginger, cayenne, turmeric, a pinch of ground flaxseed, a dash of seaweed salt, cutting into the bone in chicken breast I baked last night in onions.  

Well, Mom, would you like to go get a Christmas Tree out at Ontario Orchards... It's a nice sunny day, not too cold, not too windy.  She snipes at me.  Asks me irrelevant questions.  Are you still in school?  Yes, mom, this is your home.  The mirror, the map of Ireland.  Nana White.  Well, I've lived here before.

She's less kindly to me as I get her out the door, after finding her the right coat, her gloves, her hat, her cane.  She pauses as she stands out on the sidewalk in front of her steps.  Mom, the car's right there, I say, pointing to it.  I'm not the village idiot, she shouts back at me.  Ten times smarter than you, she adds, quietly as I open the car up.  

Really mom.  Do you want to get a Christmas Tree or not...  She pretends to get out of the car.  I look at her.  Up to you...

We get on the road.  Over the hill down past the muck farming fields, up the next hill and over, down to turn left onto Seven South.  Right on Twenty West.  Down along the marsh of dead flooded trees, a habitat for duck and geese, beaver...  And soon, after mom asking me to slow down again, going about 40, we pull up to the intersection of 104.  Ontario Orchards just by, past the old school house and the small brick church, a large parking lot and nursery, the barn building where you'll find produce, Christmas ticky tacky, frozen meats, lots of apples, pet food, plant material, garden stuff, potted plants, vegetables, chocolate, aged cheddar cheese, baked pies and breads.  Potatoes, squashes, onions, scented soaps, cat nip.

Out in the lot we have a leisurely walk over to the trees, after I wait for her to talk to herself and finally unhook her seatbelt, bundled up there in her coat, finally opening the door and stepping out.  There are only a few Balsam Firs left, way too big for the car's back seat, too big & heavy for me to handle.  The rows of trees, there are some Douglas firs in the size I'm looking for.  And I have done my chants earlier, so I'm feeling fairly calm about negotiating her through the market part with its many aisles.  I get her in through the door, holding onto the receipt tag from the tree as the man is cutting a fresh end to take water. She hovers once inside the door, so I have to guide her forward.  

Go pick out some apples, mom.  I'm looking for almonds, dates, catnip (the cat looking depressed, picking up on mine, hurt by our yelling at each other).   The tree.  A simple wreath for the front door.  Get her back, feed her something, maybe go do some homework.  Or maybe just write.  Get away from dementia town.  Laptop.  Get some sunlight sitting at the McDonald's like table.  

I don't feel up for any homework, but at least I'm moving independently.  Mom wanted to come along.  I told her NO.

Sketches, pre Christmas 2021

You try to live a life working on the meaning of life.  You wait on people, fair enough.

But you end up taking care of your old crazy Mary Lincoln volatile mom.  Broke.  Running out of money to pay for basic things, like rent.  And a job after all this?

So you end up soaking the dishes, getting the silverware done that you'd washed yesterday but didn't rinse, just left in the sink the morning after you cooked dinner and served mom and then got so tired you had to disappear, pretending to do homework, reading at least, but doing nothing, so disheartened.  And the next day is a big doctor's appointment.  But we can't really be getting on the road until just after two, and it's noon now and you've fed mom, so you take her for a little drive into town, a cup of coffee ice cream, a New York Times she won't really read, a look over the lake, the sun is out.  Skip the bookstore, to buy a book for kids or to shepherd her around the store, waiting for her, no real time for that, just a grocery store run, quick, and then the wine store, being out of white for her and red for me.

I get her down to the doctor's office, down in Fulton, a nice drive along down the west side of the river reflecting the winter sky, then over the bridge, and not too many hysterics from mom.

We need to up her dosage on whatever we can up, the memenda, and maybe, well, something to mildly tranquilize her.  She talks one story to the doctor, and I slip in the truth, my perspective anyway, where I can.  I think he gets it.  Dr. Ouano.  

But goddamn, I'm feeling grim the next day.  The hour of yoga anatomy with Ellen Saltonstall was fascinating, about fascia.  And in the night, with wine, I think of how all the writers in the world were motivated by this strange enveloping muscle holding organ that goes in bands through all of us.  The fascia has moods, is effected by them.  Any writer worth his salt knows motion, physical activity, the knowledge of holding a tool, an axe, let us say, or a wine bottle and the opener, the lifting of cases, the motion of running.  The writers knew, know, the secret of keeping the fascia happy, and of how bands from the forehead go over the head and down hour back and through your legs, and all the way down to the bottom of your feet.  And inactivity is no good for these fibers.  Motion is necessary.  Kerouac the fullback.  Hemingway the hunter.

So I get the tub with hot water and soap, get the batch of the silverware dipped and rinsed, all of it feeling the silverware rack of the dishwashing machine that does not work here, waiting to be replaced, and then I proceed with the rest.  Then tossing a few things from the fridge, packing the tall trashcan liner bag full.

Mom slept on the couch again.  In her coat.  I had to take her out to The Press Box, as a treat she insisted upon, though by that point I had time constraints.  Coming up the stairs from the basement she is bent over, head on her hands and forearms.   But I let it slip, mom, you need a shower, you haven't taken one in more than two weeks.  There's shit on your pants.  She denies it.  From two weeks ago when you had to poop against the dumpster outside Bame's.  

I go up the stairs and look back, to use the upstairs bathroom as she uses the downstairs.  She's looking for her cane.  She sees me looking at her.  You're a fucking creep, she tells me.  And I am.

I go back down to sleep more, or just hide.  Got a headache.  Can't deal.  Summon the courage later to face the day and the dishes, and the rest.  The bookstore?

I feed her, I get her out for a drive, around 3 in the afternoon, we go get a newspaper and her cup of coffee ice cream, then down for a view of the lake.  The old lighthouse reflecting the sun.  Quick swing through town, First Street, then to The Big M, quick run, okay, we'll take a quick trip to the book store, but we can't stay long.

I put two chicken breasts in the oven with some quickly cut onions and I make the meeting, Cheryl, for a tutoring session.

But it is no fun to have the time to write, rather a curse.  A time of being unable to make any decisions.  Of being stuck.  The argument when we got home, when I tell her, look, be thankful, I took you out to the bookstore, I told you I had a meeting.  Oh, you're so important.  You have a penis, I just have a hole...

What?!?  (Disgust.).   Look, mom.  You were a professor, you had meetings too.  Anyone still working has meetings to go to.

So I stew around with what to do with mom for the day.  I've done the dishes.  Let the cat out on a prowl in the back yard before it rains.  It's not warm out.

After my meeting, which takes my head away from mom, who's carrying on upstairs, with large long OOOHHHHs and other cries, so that I have my aunt call her just in time, and my tutor asks me, "is your mom okay," as I get completely distracted with the directions I'm supposed to be giving for The Four Essentials, Open, Engage, Align, Expand.  I need to work on my language for the poses anyway.

I get through the hour.  I don't how dedicated to yoga I can be.  I'm making it hard for myself, psyching myself in a lot of ways.

But after we're through dinner, I've had it with mom.  

There's no way around it, I need to go to graduate school.  Brother calls.  Maybe it's too much for her to be driving all that way, then not being in her home with her cat, disorientated as she is.  Will the pills, the new dosage, help?  Will there be a tranquilizer for her?  Take care of her teeth, or get her hearing aids.  I tried to press the point about her anxiety, as did her colleagues.  The doctor is listening to her, yes, but I get my points in...  We went to The Press Box that night...

I'm trying to look past, or around, my misery.  I deserve it.  What did I do with that nice kid, but become the Prodigal Son, had, been had, by everyone and every thing...

And I'll never have a chance at a girlfriend or any fun or happiness like that ever again, not at my age and state.  That's what you get for being a writer...  a bum...  I get the internet, the web, friends on Facebook far away, in all senses of the term, unreal.  Horror.   Dark thoughts.

But my job has been good for the fascia, at least.  Constant motion.

Other than that, I've never achieved a thing.  I"m ashamed of myself.  How could anyone else likes me...  And I know my situation...

Mom is quiet til mid morning.  I sneak a peek in at her, she's reading, okay, cool.  I can go work on my yoga practice and my homework.  There's the whole decision too about driving her down to DC to see her grandchildren.  I could go by my old apartment...

After making soup for her, a nice onion soup color from the onions baked with the chicken breast, I get her to change out of the jeans she's been wearing for three weeks now, telling her I'm doing a colored wash.  I'm also working on the Cologuard stool sample process, and of course you don't want to get that wrong.  Set up the little tray under the toilet seat, then the white sold plastic bucket with the screw on tight lid, and also a strange Q-tip type thing you swab through the shit you just took, to cover the groves at the end with poop matter.  I've been careful to take a probiotic and also some fiber, but the shit doesn't come out as neatly as I'd hoped.  Well, anyway...  I shave, I take a shower, after sealing the whole thing up.  

It's cold, rainy, I head out, taking out the trash, and with my poop box all sealed up under my arm in the cold blustery wintry mix rain.  I'm not happy about anything anymore.  There is no more happiness.  I'm not even confident about doing well in yoga class.  To earn the heart affection of a woman, you have to be capable of doing something, like, being a school teacher.  Competent at it.   A man about it. 

No wonder, no girlfriend...

But as soon as I get my laptop out, after coming back, concerned she might be hungry, from my yoga homework--I saw a pretty young woman working the barista job at a little coffee booth in Canal Commons, having forgotten my laptop earlier after dropping off my Cologuard Poop in a Box, just as soon as I sit down to write, after putting a tray of stuffed peppers, gluten-free spaghetti and potato gratin for mom, just as soon as I sit down to write, mom comes down from upstairs, talking to herself, sighing, talking to herself more.  Just as sure as the ghost she's been in my life, pouting and sighing, always with the big volatile explosive reaction, all my life, since boyhood, putting on all the lights back on Ernst Road after I came home late from necking with Hilde in high school, on my way to being a local rock star with the Chevy Malibu station wagon with faux wood paneling.  Everyone else was drawing away from her, just to spare themselves the craziness, patient as my father truly was, an honorable man, my brother just finding a way out and away and off I go, bye.   I wanted my father's life.  Not hers.  She'll still lampoon anyone for "never doing anything fun."  And her defense against that, of course, is ugly.  Do you placate her?  Or, maybe you just begin to hide, let the cat deal with her.  Your father, he didn't know how to have fun... 

So speaketh Claire.

Every day is an ordeal here.  I hope the dosage change helps.  I hope they can come through...

Disgust is my feeling every day.  And of course mad at myself for having fallen into this trap.

I wake up foggy, and I have to get mom down to the hospital for a bone density scan.  She's out cold up on her bed.  I touch her toes, and a twitch, but she's still deep asleep.  Finally I wake her, and the first thing she says, she asks me if I've come to try to kill her, Jesus Christ mom.   Mom I'm sorry to do this to you, but the next appointment isn't until February.   I bring her up a chilled Pepsi.  Downstairs, I get her a slice of pizza, eyeing the clock.  The appointment is at ten.  They ask you get there fifteen minutes early.  Okay, we'll just try for our best.   Old lady wrangling.  On top of Christmas open mess of of all the possibilities of what might be needed ad infinitum.  Presents?  What kind of presents or price range?  Ship, mail, or are we going down there in person, just so other people can see where we are at with mom...  But that's eight hours on the road... 

But on certain days I become aware of my true horrible college failures, and if I'd put just more effort in and not been such an obstinate contrarian and if one of my professors might have caught it, and asked me what I needed, instead of letting me dangle...  Drinking to rid myself of all the bad feelings...  as if to put them away, hide from them.

And I need to put out another book, morally, just to show I was wrong, that you shouldn't go drink your way through college or whatever I did, and offer some sort of pained correction over the lessons learned about the illusions I've lived under...

You made a choice, my aunt says, to stay at that bar with all those interesting people, no need to be ashamed of that, you still have a life to live..

But I need to express to someone where I'm at, how I'm struggling.  Like a confession.  A correction.  A rock bottom I've hit, finally unable to hide it from myself or anyone else.  But then there's mom on top of me, squeezing me all the time unless I simply escape.

But you'd thought what you wanted, what you'd hoped for, the chance to write, to not have to drag your sorry ass in to the bar to work like a dog until you were completely beat and do it four straight nights, after cruel earlier Tex Mex Restaurant shifts, night, day, night, day.  Sunday night, typical of your love hate relationship with the whole thing.   The day you wanted to stay home, the sabbath, and in the same the night you hold court.

To have to sit home, or wherever you are, on the roads of life, and have nothing much to do BUT write quickly becomes a nightmare more than an opportunity, a deep look at your ugly old lazy self who, unlike all other adults, hasn't gotten a single thing together.  And the boring life you previously wrote about has just gotten, seemingly anyway, even more hollow, devoid of all the normal things of male human life, the job that is a career, having your own family, passing on that most precious thing of all, your genetic codes and the traditions of your parents.

I do have the yoga to lean on.  A therapy for all those years not being good to myself, just hanging in there.

A few days have passed since I last wrote.  I got the booster, it didn't even hurt, down at the Kinney's drug store near the McDonald's and the Quik Mart gas pumps, the intersection at 104 just this side of the university and the electric plant's huge stacks, and I didn't think much of it and went for a cup of coffee.  At night, not enough water either, and rather getting into the wine, just feeling desperate and behind and incapable on my yoga teacher training course.  And the next day feeling increasingly achy and tired through the day...

I gutted it out, my heart almost breaking at my lousy job of being a student.

And is spirituality any good for you in this world, or does it just get in the way...

I'm not even Dharma Bums St. Jack of the Dogs in the chapter of Nin's house in Rocky Mount, North Carolina...

And so I try to get distracted, after I've cooked breakfast and gone to the grocery store and kept mom entertained some, then lunch, then dinner, and dishes all the way through, and the constant battle to keep the kitchen organized...  I attempt to distract myself so that my mind can work.

Mmmm k.  The way mom says okay.  She uses a sharp knife to spread the almond butter on saltines.  She doesn't want the cat out at night.   There are small open bottles of Pepsi by her bed,  by her chair, on the counter, on the kitchen table.  

She comes down and wants a bite to eat.  I give her a pill for her memory and focus.  I heard her stirring upstairs, just as I sit down to write.   Then she's calling my name in the living room.

Am I your mother?

So I tell her I'll cook a pizza, the frozen cauliflower rice crust kind, with some ham and sliced red onion, but it will take a few minutes, and she's asking me, so, are there any interesting plans for later today?  No!  

So later after it's cooked, I go up and call her down.  I put a slice in the toaster to heat it just a bit, and present it to her, and soon enough she's using scissors to cut it, having failed with the sort of sharp knife.   and then she's staring at me as I'm half watching YouTube for a good classic samurai film, then finding Lester Young jamming some bluesy jazz, and she's looking at me, anything new in the world, usually people talk at the table, is that a song, so I raise my voice, yes, Mom, it's Lester Young from 1944, raising my voice and she gets angry at rises from the table.  Don't forget to brush your teeth, mom.  Don't forget to wipe your ass, she counters.  I feel a bit bad, but frustrated enough to just shrug, oh well.  Off she goes.

But it's enough to destroy the mood.  

 Christmas Eve.  

I went over to the Throop's house the eve of Christmas Eve, and fortunately, almost psychically I brought along my guitar. 

A welcome break.  I lead them into Like a Rolling Stone...  it's a good jam.

I remember how my father would handle it, her expositions, her rants, her tirades, her takeover of our peace and happiness, taking us back to the picture of her childhood seen through her childhood mind, now acted out upon us.  I felt so sorry, so sympathetic, when he'd take to the bedroom in the afternoon, to lay on his back and close his eyes, and just let it rest, let it pass away.

And now I find myself doing the very same thing, feeling an exhaustion, even from just spending two hours with her.

That's how I grew up.  Expecting all of that, as normal.

And so when I met a girl in college, who pursued her New York City scorched earth policy against my sensitive benevolence, putting her fireworks and unpredictability, virtual schizophrenic duplicitousness then blaming me, and then when she'd done that marvelously, then she softens... but by then I have enough self awareness and self respect to know that she's evil, no good for me, so I avoid her, to what I would later see as a chance, one that I missed.  Great.

So the whole thing is bogus.

hard for me to be a man anyway, when the burden of mom living off on her own came down squarely on me just as I was going through my senior year at college...  blah blah blah.

Mom's crying out on Route 5, because her car has broken down.  No body else going to help her.

Unwrapping presents, or, rather, cutting open the heavy paper sealing tape on the Amazon Prime boxes, giving gifts, rather, Mom opens her first one, struggling to open first the box, and then the gift bag within.  Over on the couch, I cringe, trying to write off an email to my little yoga group, and I cannot form sentences in my mind as mom continues with her circular rambling talk.  The first gift, or maybe the second, after the body lotion from her grandkids, Kiehl's, is the new book in hardcover, the latest biography on Sylvia Plath.  I might have grumbled my exasperation, and then after enjoying the book and reading off the picture captions, oh, we need to go to Cape Cod, I haven't ever been to Cape Cod..., suddenly her face drops.  Earlier she'd asked me, "did she kill herself," well, yes, mom, it was a cold winter and she was alone with the kids and with the gas ovens back in those days, you could do that, so it was sort of a fluke as much as anything...  But now she's turning on me.  You gave me this book, you want me to commit suicide, she suddenly shouts at.  Mom, I didn't get you that book.  Chris did.  She's a writer, she was married to Ted Hughes, you know, so you can round out your history of him...

Brother calls with family.  That goes well.  Everyone is Covid shy these days.  Everyone has a story, too.

Another Amazon box, and this time it's the biography of Ted Hughes.  I shrug.  Sorry about the theme.  Writers are miserable people in general.  It's like a possession.

(Later she's mumbling on to herself over his pictures like she's talking to him.  Stay out of trouble.  Handsome...)

She calms down later.  We have some chip dip, onion, with small curd cottage and cream cheese, Nana's recipe.  Potato chips. 

I go out for a walk.  Not far, just to get out of the house and let my back straighten and my shoulders going up for a change. 

As far as I see it, the roast, a huge one, sure to give us plenty of leftovers, needs to sit out to come to an even temperature, and I don't feel a lot of happy energy to get the roast going.  I'm just putting it in over the onions I've sliced into the big Lodge iron pan.  Mom comes into the kitchen, looking concerned.  Is dinner ready.   No, I'm sorry mom, I'm not very organized today...  I'm sorry.

I end up making her some soup to calm her, and she goes back into the living room.

She comes back and stares at me...  No, not yet.  How much longer...  Oh, half an hour anyway, then I have to let it rest.

I get her some, and then she's talking to herself in her chair over her books, and I go up for a nap and conk out, then I come down later and do the dishes.

The day after Christmas I wake at 1 in the afternoon feeling empty and hollow, with a tight cough deep in my chest, a pain I've never felt before, and too exhausted and fall back to sleep after taking a pee and drinking some water.  I was up watching Russell Crowe in Noah, and after my Christmas alone with mom, who wonders, "where are the people?"  What people?  We talked to x and y, and Sharon can't do anything...  I see the grey murk clouds of winter sky... don't get up really til after two, but something is up with my lungs, and who knows now, Omicron...  It was a long day, two bottles of pinot noir down in 12 hours...  that's too much.  Why can't I quit, I'd like to...

And Noah was a righteous man, where the rest were wicked, and God sent a great flood to wash away the evils thereof.

Mom comes down.  At least I had the energy to do the dishes last night.

I heat a slice of pizza for her.  What's the plan today?  What's on your agenda?  Did you sleep well?  3 times.  

Again, I make soup for her.  Again she comes down after I've stirred after my nap as I'm doing yet another round of dishes and carving up the remainder of the standing rib roast and putting some of it away in the freezer, well-wrapped up.

I'm getting impatient with her, but she has enough kind words, it's a hard holiday, very tiring.  And after I ask her how the plate of food I've put in front of her, and she says, snootily, "fine..." dismissively, the same thing she did to the apple pie my sister in law cooked from scratch at Christmas dinner at my brother's house a few years ago, and he blew up at her too, just as I want to now, but I let it slide, slide past, just ignore it, Sanskrit chants...  She'll go to bed soon, she's got her pills down, just gotta get her to do her rinses and then brush her teeth, which she always finds a way to resist, and she complies with me and goes off to bed, though she might well stir in the night, as she did last night to the point where I shouted at her.

I found that I needed to remind myself what a woman is.  I looked at things at night I felt a bit ashamed of.  Even then I'm scarred, not finding anyone, to be all that nice, either out there in unfortunate addictive cyber world, or in on line dating.  And I can't blame anyone.   

Mom reminds me, "you hate me."  You hate women, she tells me.  

Oh, what a fine example you are, Mom.  

It takes whole blank hours of the quiet nighttime late hours to relax. Sad, I suppose, but that's how it is.

And finding myself too old to connect as I had been able to for so long with anyone, as if cast out, I thought of Noah, and of God.  I thought as an ineffectual man in a fallen and wicked world, to entertain a fantasy at least, briefly, as I knew not which direction to turn to.

The things the old people in the oldest of tales, they went through things.  Things painful to take.  And so they took to coming up with stories, out of their own experiences, of course, to symbolically express a sense of the deeper things they knew to be going on.  Could all of humanity be wicked, so wicked, evil and violent so that they, we, ruin the whole face of the earth of God's Creation...  Only a great flood could do justice, justice itself.  And one, only one, that's all it takes, along with his family, one family, were enough.

But it's not that bad.  It's just how I am tested, and finally become a man, as they say, an adult.  I see her later, all by herself, the cat at her bed, as she watches television, after I wake from my nap, feeling lousy again.

The pressure had left off a bit, and Christmas was retreating from the calendar.

Okay, she comes down from the bedroom to the kitchen, checking the bathroom, "toilet seat down," as if she does anything to clean here, she takes a bottle of Pepsi from the refrigerator.  And then, thank god, she leaves.  I hear her pulling a couple Kleenex tissues out of the box as she goes, and then her feet, as always, in her Keen hiking shoes, back she goes.

October '21 sketch

 Core wounded identity, the enabler. 

Placation.

Mom is an interference pattern.  I regain calm through meditation.

I wake up with a bit of a headache.  From the Bota Box Cabernet Sauvignon from two nights ago, probably.

I get my morning sadhana in at least.  Then fall back into a nap, after a terrible sleepless night of anxiety, realizing all my sins.  The time just totally wasted. 

The day before mom pleads with me.  She's a nervous wreck.  The only thing she'll settle for, she says, is to go to The Press Box.  She says she's just realized that her mother is dead, and says that this place is not her home.  We were just there, last night, mom, I tell her.

But every day, no, I don't know what to do with her.  I hide by sleeping late, until her shout rises, "Hello?!" or some other expression.  "I'm hungry!"

I drag my self up or down the stairs depending where I slept to the kitchen, worrying about what to do feed her.  

Will I ever work again?  What happened to my literary life?  My mind is clouded.  Anxious.  I had cider last night, maybe four cans.  A headache lasting from two days ago.  From the Lexapro?  The cheap box wine?  Mold in the cellar?  I treat the flea problem down in the basement, not with the fogger bomb I purchased from the hardware store, but the peppermint clove oil spray I sprayed over the concrete floor after moving my bedding up to the second floor.  I left the fan on in the heating air conditioning system and I'm upstairs watching the television with mom after giving her evening pill and the strong fumes come through the vents, prompting her reaction, "you're trying to kill me..."  I crack open a window, go down and click the wall unit to fan from On to Auto.   Later I soothe myself listening to Todd Norian, Shanti Mantra, music from YouTube.  And I can understand why I like the night, a break from her constant consciousness.  

I wake tired and anxious, and the green tea, while giving me some pep, makes me more anxious.  Mom suggests we order a big pizza as I check in on her first thing, rising from my air mattress when she lets out a shout.  There's a cauliflower crust pizza, Price Chopper brand, in the freezer, so I go down, turn the heat on--pouring rain earlier coming down heavy with a Northwest wind--and then get the oven preheated to 450, have some tea.  

Later, when mom asks, after she's had what she will eat from the slice I give her, giving me her pepperoni, what might we be doing later, I tell her, well, it's Sunday, we'll go get the newspaper and take a look at the lake, the waves will be up, and she says, "whoop-tee-shit," and inwardly I wince, taking the blow with a slight inward bow, my shoulders sinking just a little bit more.  With the wind up there's a small boat advisory from the weather service, waves 6 to 9 feet up toward the mouth of the St. Lawrence.

With the rain I go down to the basement and lift the water collection pan out of the back of the dehumidifier and jostle it up the stairs to pour out in the toilet.  I take a shower.  

The duty of another is full of peril, I remember, one of my father's sayings.  The duty of another is full of peril.  Let that sink in, here in this situation.  My failed literary career.  At least I should have gone into the academic side, somehow, too hard to make anything come out of your writing.

It's hard to do anything, fearing interruption or attack, hearing her creep down the stairs, hello, is anybody here?

Yoga, or at least a sadhana session, would be good today, but it's hard to concentrate enough once both mom and I are up.

Mom makes me nervous.  That's nothing new.  Feels like I'm standing around with my dick out in the open.  I take a propranolol, half a tablet. 

That feeling, nothing is ever good enough.  Unless everyone gets into the wine, for a temporary reprieve. 

I was meant to be a teacher, literature, that sort of thing, analyzing poetry.  But I went into the restaurant work, so I could write.

To ease my nerves, I get the big pot out, with butter and olive oil over the burner, to sear a link of sausage, then the meatballs, then the onion and pepper, then a splash of wine, then all back into the pot and then make a tomato sauce.

Mom comes down, I pour her some wine, as she asks for it. 

Later, the pot simmering now, I go in to the living room to check on her.  So how are you, she asks me, from her chair.  "I'm a bit anxious, I say...  my career."  "A state career?"  No, mom, just a career in general... I don't want to go back to bartending.  

"You better not have done that to my son," she says, when I suggest I'm unhappy, over yesterday's newspaper.  Peak foliage the back page of the front section says.  

 Light flurries in the night, and when I wake I see some blue sky, looking from the pillow on the floor up to the front, western facing windows, thin, if there are any clouds, grayness to the east, but the sun is out, and mom is snoozing on the couch next to the orange cat, wearing her bathrobe, over her clothes, still wearing her hiking shoes.  I walk past, take a cup of tea from the fridge, back upstairs to hide for a little while longer, then I hear her stir, so I go back down and take care of breakfast, a slice of Stewart Shop cheese pizza.  It's classic and very good, kind of a doughy junk Central New York baker's almost bread dough hearty pizza, quite delicious, not too thick, greasy cheese crust.  Could become a habit.  Addictive.

It goes okay at first, as I have my tea and then sliced turkey at the table, as I look over at her.  She's sweet enough, but after several times of telling her that we are invited over to Barbara's for dinner, Sharon will be there, what time, because she's with her son down in Florida, no mom, it's Tania's son who is in New Mexico, Barbara's joining Tania down there for the winter, so this is the last little dinner we'll have with them for a while...  

Mom indicates she finds the Tuesday dinner thing a little boring.  I'd rather stay here with my books, she says.

But, Mom,  you like going out.  It'll be good for you.

I've already told her, where, when, what time.  She's called me a loser, a woman hater, a sadist, any number of things this week, with the enforced closeness of the holiday.

If I mention anything to the effect of, you're ruining my life, mom will come right back, you don't have a life!  That's not my fault, that's yours!  No one likes you.  Okay, mom...

Okay, I'll take her for a ride.  Just to see the lake, get some sunlight on our bodies.  Stewart Shop for the newspaper, a drive along the lake by the loop road past the university, the Big M, home, hopefully.    

I'm worn out already.  She's pretended not to know where the sink is when I ask her to brush her teeth.  She's asked me again, and then again, and then again, what time, where... is it today?

I could just take her back, but okay, she tells me she wants to go out, for lunch, though it's 4:30, okay, fine, we'll swing by The Press Box, and the frozen peas will keep the sliced turkey bread cold enough for the hour, and then we'll go back

We pull in, finally, worn out again, into the parking lot of Cedarwood Drive Townhomes.  Help.  I can't hold it, my intestines.  I hustle her around the parked SUV, to the steps, two sets of them, pulling at her arm.

Soon, I hear her squatting on the toilet, squirts of liquified shit.  And now, help. help, Ted, Ted, I need to vomit.  So I bring over the big stainless steel bowl.  Pepsi.  So I get her a Pepsi, and later a glass of soda water to wash her mouth out.

I get her upstairs finally.  By her bed I find a package of rolled Kleenex around a half a baked potato and a piece of the chicken breast I cooked a few nights ago, still rolled up, on the window sill.  Who knows what happened.  I've eaten the same things she's eaten over the last few days.  I don't know.

I avoid Black Friday, and Cyber Monday.  If you allow your concentration to be distracted, you miss your line to the Collective Unconscious, the play of thoughts and the sudden reality of objects of art, thought and creativity that are like a stream to feed off, water to sustain us.  Caravaggio.  Vs. the iWatch.  

I'm too tired to write anymore now.  I'm not even happy enough.  I want to sleep, but lie awake.  I want to hide.

The cat is proud.  Mom is proud.  They all want , insist upon, their own thing.  Noisily.  To be fed, to go out.  And I'm fucked.

Mom is still feeling queasy by the time I could get over to our normal recent Tuesday night dinner engagement with mom's colleagues over at Barbara's house off of 104 near the university, a quiet ranch on a quiet street, and I'd stay home and stew in the usual things, and on top of yoga homework due soon and not even touched.

I stay later and it turns out to be a session of therapy for me, about how mom's anxiety is getting worse along with the dementia, when I'm not around to drive her back and forth she keeps asking for me.  Barbara tells me her mother was put on Ativan and it worked wonders.  

So today, after a yoga sadhana, the first one in more than a week, clearing the congestion in my nose, the nadi kriya to develop, the Sanskrit chants, the pranayama breathing and further meditations, completed after getting mom some soup, as she's helpless now about feeding herself.  Down in the basement. It's not a bad place after all, though I can't quite tell if putting up a plastic sheet to cordon off my yoga mat end in front of the washer and dryer with the space heater like a radiator but with hot oil circulating in it.  The air is pretty dry now, another issue for trying to breath.

I make an appointment two weeks out for mom to check on her medications down in Fulton.

Later she has the large picture book of Audobon bird prints, taking in the beauty of it.  She sits in her chair looking over the egret in its print habitat, reminding me of Wyeth realism.  I pass by her a couple of times, checking on her as I do the dishes.  "That's very irritating, that sound," she calls regally from her chair, so I open the door to the cellar as a baffle, wearily proceeding with the dishes, the soup bowls, the pot, the chat dishes, the mugs, the assortment of small glasses used not long ago for Pepsi, water, her wine.  I venture past her, to see if she's taken the two pills from the morning which she refused to take.  Ahh, a bluebird, I say, as I pass, to go upstairs to empty the upstairs bathroom paper trash can, and she responds in a haughty tone, "Eastern Bluebird," correcting me.  Okay, mom.  

After the dishes are done I come by and there she is tucking her pills in to her pocket, the little pockets of her jeans.  So we go through, no, if you put them in your pocket you'll never take them.  I know my body! Okay, don't take them.  You're a cruel bastard.

Again she finds the recall notice for the Toyota airbag recall, and again I have to tell her, no, mom, remember when we took care of that?  I bring out the invoice from the dealership.  See, here's what it says.  Remember driving back?  But by now, I'm a piece of shit, not to be trusted, and she's getting aggressive, so, I take my yoga notebook and flee, taking yoga notebook binder and laptop, heading down to the Stewart Shop.  It feels weird at first, but everyone is encouraging me to get out of the house and not worry about it.

But the stuff has all been getting to me.  Kerouac was a writer and when he died his estate was worthy, oh, about 95 bucks, so I hear in a documentary about his presence and life in old mill town Lowell.  Later valued at what, ten million?

And not only that, he ended up so terribly unhappy, on top of the alcoholism, his mother having crowded any other life out of him, after the death of brother Girard, the saint he could have used, his father, never to have a wife, kids, a normal home life, a house, a job, though he did work a job on the railroads and other American jobs along the way.  Am I, will I ever be, ready for marriage, with a job and all that, or am I too warped already, permanently.  But you would be obliged to try, if you could.

I too was an anomaly in my work career, which lasted til I was 56 or so, before breaking apart taking care of mom.  Weill all the paperwork we could have never moved mom anyway.

The ladies observe me getting close to finishing the bottle of French pinto noir I brought alone as 6 in the dark evening turns into 9 at night.  I tell Barbara, the doctor tells me my liver is fine, and she says, Ted, that's kind of a low bar, with a chuckle.

Coming away from it l come down with a cold, no surprise from visiting at dinner with college professors.

After escaping mom’s afternoon accusations and unpleasantness, at the Stewart Shop, in the dank cold of 5 o’clock, I feed her a cursory dinner, offering her chicken tenders, fried chicken breast, a cold cut sub, or a slice of two day old buffalo chicken pizza.  My headaches, my body is sore, I can hardly breath through my nose, I don’t even want any wine at all.  I endure the table as long as I can, which isn’t long. She’s trying to argue, or talk about something and go upstairs for an hour turns out nap.  I’m awakened by frantic calls for help, doors opened and closed.

The children, she cries, we’ve got to do something for the children, for Christmas.  We need to get a tree.  We need to get presents.

Mom, your children have grown up.  …

But it's useless.  I've made it til past 9 PM on December 1st, but now just looking for something to make this all bearable, I twist off the cap of the $10.99 French pinot noir, pour it over some ice, and go hide down in the basement.  And hopefully, she'll stop yelling help, at some point go upstairs to bed so that I don't have to hear her creak away all night in her Eames Chair.

I have a headache, but it helps.  I take another Tylenol.  I have yoga homework to get done, at least review the poses and so forth, but inspiration for that is rapidly dwindling.  I have a cold.  I tried to do some work, and at least got some writing in down at the Stewart Shop, but the grocery store errand took it out of me.  My joints ache, a feverish feeling that I've had all day worsens, as mom sits on the couch and ends up sleeping there, refusing to take her nightly pill, the meantime.  Okay, fine, Mom.  I'm never going to try to give you another pill.  Good luck with that.

Later on there's a news story, a writer, a female, who chronicled a horribly traumatic rape as a college student at Syracuse University.  5 months later she's walking and sees a guy, a black guy, thinks it's him, goes to the police.  I think I know those neighborhoods between the University up on the hill, and then winding down below the Carrier Dome down to South Salina Street, where mom lived as a grad student in an large Italianate on the upper floor, while the ghetto blaster cars rolled by.  The man, picked out by the Prosecutor, not the man she picked out of the police line-up, she later identifies, in her situation, and he's sent down the river.  He comes up for parole, but each time, five times or so, he insists on his innocence, so rather than being freed, if he had admitted to it, he spends the full sentence behind bars.   And then it's no better when he's out.  No possibly of any job.  He's shunned by his own community.  He's welcome to a very small number of people's houses, 10 or so, others won't even let him in.

Finally, a producer of the movie version of her book, sees the glaring inconsistencies, comparing the actual with her written story of the trial, with the script, approaches a private investigator to handle it to find a way through.

Here comes mom down the stairs.  I told her I had some pot-roast cooking.  Down the stairs she comes, hello... hello... hello, is anybody here... coming through the living room, past the couch.  hello?  Louder now.  Dinner is ready, spinach too if she wants anyway.  

Too sick to do anything for a day or two, fever of 100.  

Friday evening, the yoga weekend module thing starts up again, 7 PM.  Please, let's just get through this, get what we need to get, wine, groceries, so forth, I'll get some time, maybe start to catch up on the homework I wasn't able to look at.

She's insistent, needy enough, to demand going out.

Debacle.  I get her a pizza, to go, so she can have something to eat on when I'm doing yoga, but as it arrives she wants some.  Mom, you just said you were stuffed.  I've just packed up the last of her chicken fajita along with some Cole slaw from my fish dinner in the to go box.  I've put our plates aside, neatly stacked, silverware together, easy to take away.  I want to get out of there.  She wants her taste of pizza.  Almost just to defy me, I wonder.

Okay, here. I put the box in front of her, lift the lid.  She can't figure out how to lift the lid.  I help her open it.  Okay, mom.  Give her my fork.  The box open now, she takes fork and knife to it, cutting into several different slices, from one side to the other, haphazardly.  Mom... what?  I want a crispy piece.  

Mom, look, I have a class.  We have to go soon.  There's your wine.  

She tries reaching over the box, to get to her wine glass.  She can't do it.

She raises her voice at me, so the crowd can hear.  "I'm no good.  I'm no good!" she shouts.  You hate me.  

People are looking on now.

She ends up hatefully telling me I'm pressuring her and that she needs to use the restroom.  Okay, fine mom.

She comes back, without her cane.  I look at her.  Mom, it's okay, you can go back in and get it.

Behind, the four-top of retired aged women having a Friday night dinner, three of them, at least, drinking, parallel to us, over my shoulder, one appearing to have tea, or maybe a hot toddy.  I notice one of them is going to the lady's room, but as I'm encouraging mom to go retrieve her cane, green aluminum with a matching green rubbery handle, I hear behind me, sir, sir, so I turn around.  Our friend is going to go get it for you.  Which is kind, and good, but adds to the shame of the drama.  The scene we are has ruined their Friday night, I'm sure.  They probably take me as being the true lowly shit.

I thought it was all going okay, earlier.  I'm just trying to get her through dinner.  It didn't help that chatty Terry with the white goatee who plays some of the open mics here comes by even as we're at the back table by the brick wall of the old freight house by the gas stove with the fake logs but real heat, and I'm enjoying the music, came by to check in and tell us of his pending knee replacement and earlier eyelid surgery and other things, and we're eating and mom is getting irritated, and not engaging, and she probably can't understand a word he's saying.

Just get through this, and then I can get in with 15 minutes to spare, and get, at least, a decent start to the class.

I'm buying wine later, after The Big M.  There's a guy giving wine tastings, and I would slink by him, but I get a good vibe from him.  At least see what he's offering. Oh, a Montepulciano, cool. And guess what, it's pretty delicious.  Though I was draining Guinness over the bitter Friday placate the bitch dinner.  I have a nice chat with him about wine importers, working with them, etc., it's a pleasant moment for me.  Sean, from Fulton.  He studied, marketing, at Oswego.  I like the importer's taste.

I get out to the parking lot, after passing a hot chick, tall, and I say hi, and she gets it, and says hi back.  She could hear the goddamn you're pretty but I'm burdened by some serious shit now, my wistfulness, hope-gone deal with mom, no one else will, vibe, and when I get back to the old Toyota she's not there.  Darkness.  I don't even have the car door light on the right setting so the light turns on.  What the fuck...

Okay.  So.  I look around.  Will I need the car?  I look across the street.  Toward Big M.  I look east, toward the river, I look west.  I look by the tree at the corner of the parking lot, 2nd Street.  Good god, has she wandered off, crossed the road?  Where could she be?

I go take a little walk through the parking lot, and then in the car lights, I see her, with her navy short purple overcoat on, pulled up, I think, I hope, her jeans down to below her knees, leaning forward, her back almost against the dumpster.  I see the pale flesh of her thighs in the headlight lamp light from the liquor store parking lot.  A squirt of shit, followed by another.  I can't tell if she's reaching her left hand around to her wipe her shitting as her right hand holds her pants up.   

She's...  I walk over toward her.  To shield the scene from the light.  She's fishing for crumpled Kleenex in her pockets.  Are her hands clean?  

I go back to the car.  Box of tissue paper in the glove compartment.  There's a full one somewhere in the back seat, but I can't see it.  Rattled, I can't get the car overhead light to turn on.  She's still shitting when I get back.  Her hat fulls down on the used tissue paper she's wiped with.  

I pick up her hat.  I take her by the arm, back to the car.  I open the door for her.  Pull out the bottle of hand sanitizer.   Squirt it over her hands, which she dutifully holds out for me.

I get her back in.  By the time I tune into yoga class I'm fifteen minutes late.  

After the true ordeal of the weekend's classes--I haven't done my homework, running a fever, exhausted, joints aching, mom demanding, haven't turned in the written asana pose assignment, have lost touch with what we are supposed to be doing, losing sleep over it all--okay, let's go out to dinner.  Even if it's cold and dark, and raining on and off.  Maybe we can call my nephew, mom's grandson, from our booth at Canale's, if they're not too busy and we can get a booth, whatever, they are nice.

I have my 20 minute teacher training practice session to live down.  Even the boss cut me off.   Early.

I think the team realized I was having major troubles with this yoga teacher training, with all the language-ing you have to do through the poses, a musical scale, a script to put into the motions and actions of the yoga poses, step by step, and even remembering what you're supposed to be doing.

Mom dogging me everywhere I go, no wonder I hide down in the basement where there's obviously some airborne mold or something that makes me feel like my lung tissues are fighting something.  Or just appearing, I'm starving.  Or, I'm so lonely.  Kill myself.  

Or I'm down in the basement, trying to follow along with the class.  And I have to hear her above me.  The  intensity of the feeling.  Ohhh, help...  HElLO?!  Creaking in her chair.  Self-important.  Unwilling or unable to feed or entertain herself, so she acts, bellowing like a king from Shakespeare, bring me the map there!  I am Lear!  Nothing is happening here!  What are we doing for fun today?  What are you doing next?  Where are you headed?  Any summer plans?  Mom, it's winter, the beginning of Winter!

All I can think about is groceries.  How can I be prepared...  cold-cut turkey, frozen pizza, maybe a fried chicken breast to pull apart after getting rid of the fried crumble of skin, to shred into a pot over a large can of super market non MSG soup with added broth, hopefully bone broth.    Eggs.  V8.  Cans of tuna I have not used to mix for a tuna salad, with Hellmann's mayo, lemon, chopped celery, parsley.  

The teacher practice came at the end of the day, at the very last, where I was so worn out with stress I didn't care anymore.  Fried.  I'd listened to all the presentations, and done my best to comment.  I'd paid attention, followed along with all the poses.

So when it's my turn, after rising at 6 AM, now it's 4:15, and I've had mom to deal with, take your pills, no, please, I'm losing my will and energy and focus.  

And so when I try to tell my story of why we should connect, how do we do this, how do we apply to the theme, in this case of CELEBRATION, and to, specifically, the Fourth Essential of Expansion, radiate out from the Spanda center, etc., just telling the story of the theme, which I desperately wanted to do correctly, I've flubbed it, unable to read my handwriting, confused, and I can't quite tie in reading Edward Arlington Robinson's poem, Mr. Flood's Party, in that classroom with the rippled Chapel windows where Frost himself taught, the loneliness of poor old Eben Flood, how one cannot have a party all alone, and how, maybe, if you do yoga, you can really understand and experience that there are Multitudes within, that No Man is an Island, as Donne said, that within us are genies whirling around in atoms, and within those atomic particles, more genies, and all down the line, and that if we realize this we don't feel along.

But as I muddle through explaining to this artificial class where everyone is looking at you, the poses, a sequence I didn't even have time to plan, as I get cut off by the Master, now we are picking apart my theme.  "You have to do it quickly, simply.  Get them engaged."  And it all feels dumbed down to me instantly, but that's how you learn.  You get hit by the bamboo pole.  Okay, fair enough.

I look at the computer zoom image of myself. Ashamed.  I thought I'd do slightly better.  That's how it goes, though.  I understand.  I am lagging behind.  My habits as a poor student are coming out.

And then, so it goes, as I've had to devote attention and time to monitoring the refrigerator's temperature, by the time I get mom home from Sunday night dinner, get mom in the house, after she tries to charm her way with a man she's been asking me about, Mom, no, he's not familiar, he just looks like Chatty Terry, because of the goatee, but I can't restrain her and she goes over to the table, and I hear a chuckle, but then, as I go over to pull her back in, they are from in town for a funeral.  

I wake up in the early hours, down in the basement, not feeling well, lungs in pain, and that feeling of now shower stickiness.  I have a cider, there's nothing  left to do at this hour, besides take a shower, drink a can of cider.  And after the shower I need something to relax, after also doing the dishes, and checking the freezer and refrigerator temperatures, wearing a bathrobe, I'd like to write, about how I got called out, the Master a good humored sweet guy so you don't mind him having the powers of discernment.  Okay, my statement was not so concise.  

I put on a little show, on my iPhone to record, the samurai monk I've always wanted to be.  I put on being Lord Kikushiro, from The Seven Samurai, as if he was your yoga teacher for the day.  I have fun with it.

But later on, my little performance, while winning a nice complement, is deemed to be offensive.  My new friend the restaurant guy even himself doesn't see how my references to the Shakespearean quality of the a great work of art have any bearing on the specifics of our facebook group discussion.  Okay.

Okay, fine.  I can imagine who the complaint came from.  A person who has kept her dog Fluffy's body in the freezer for the right moment of funereal dispatch.

And so I'm left alone again.

Friday, with a bundle of nerves, I sneak out the house.  The air is dry.  My heart is in my throat.  Mom is up in on her bed.  I get the car packed, and proceed to the library.  I need to escape, and yet I feel guilty the whole way.  Over the bridge.  A very grey day.  I find on open kiosk.  The wave of anxiety, this grey winter morning, dissipates slightly, but I could still jump out of my skin.  I ponder my future, what I'm doing here.

I am behind in my homework for the yoga class.

It's almost too still here in the library.

I've escaped the gravitational pull of all mom's worries.  I've become skeptical of the basement.  The mold, the mildew.  The breathing problems.  Will I ever have a job ever again...

 I've suffered through another day, just like the one before.  The ups and downs of my mother's dementia.  There were the phone calls.  Is my mother there?  No, mom, that was me who left the dinner table and I said I'll do the dishes later, I need a nap, feeling a cold coming on if I don't get some sleep, and I how I get her out her laptop so she can see Claire the Scottish Deerhound win best in show at the National Dog Show broadcast on Thanksgiving, figuring it will keep her entertained, just a five minute clip, then hopefully she'll be quiet and go on up to bed, as I am suggesting she do.  I've already repeatedly explained applicable local events such as Sharon's nephew Mario's pneumonia and how he's been taken up to Schenectady and how he's responding to the treatment there in a favorable way.

She's up for another few hours, as my nap turns from ten minutes for digestion on my left side upon my air mattress upstairs in her old abandoned study full of papers into an hour and beyond, unable to muster myself upward.  I find it quite exhausting dealing with her, her detachment.

She began whimpering before we'd even left Oswego, with the big river to the left as we head south, to Sharon's house past Baldwinsville to the south, climbing up the hill with the green of the golf course, dampened by the drizzle into grey, off we go to Thanksgiving dinner, lucky to have a gracious hostess preparing the entire meal, mom's old colleague, they go back to grad school at Syracuse University, she starts in, "please slow down."  Mom, I'm going the speed limit, here in her 2003 Toyota Corolla, 35 mph.  And at this point, after I point this out, I must admit, I push down on the accelerator gas pedal just a big.

Soon it will be shrieking.  And the whole way, almost, I chant my Sanskrit chants, while she bellows on, hurling devilish insults at me, as the rain streaks down the windshield, as the farmland farm's pass, ups and downs, cows free to move in and out from the muddy yard back to their pen, the hills changing from north south drumlins and moraines, into the valleys of my youth to the east, the skies changing too, the gloom overhead of Oneida County...

And damn if I don't feel tired every day and nighttime is my only escape, my imposed way to avoid her, resting, such as this morning, my morning around 2 in the afternoon, when the door was thumped upon and the doorbell rang, I come down, and it's two guys in black coats almost like trenchcoats, Mormons, and I haven't even had my morning tea, Jesus Christ.

Mom questions about them, after I politely humor them and express the hospitality of interest, as any decent person would.  Mom says something crazy in front of them, two guys, clean like FBI agents might be, after I say, "I can't even afford one wife," and I roll my eyes at her response, and they can grasp this strange situation of mine.  Later on, as we drive to get the groceries, after the break of a few days, as the darkness comes and the sleety snow picks up, walking down to Erie Street, bareheaded, walking together on the side walk past a house with a Trump sign.

Just keep writing.  That's all you can do.

No great artist ever sees things as they are, wrote Oscar Wilde.  If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

And like Dostoevsky, once he had experienced some things in life, we lived and worked at nighttime, getting up around 1 in the afternoon.

I too lived at night, not having much beyond my own distilled perspective, mom boring the hell out of me. Coming down, coughing, and what relatives do, older ones in particular, becomes disgusting.  On top of the same clueless conversation bytes.

And that's where I get my point of view from, from artists.  Not necessarily a good thing, not at all. But that there is inherent symbolism available to any one curious of his own life.

Things have become too boring for me to chronicle anyway.  The number of shirts you threw into a suitcase when I came up;  mom's reaction when you only want a brief word with her, you walk away, okay, and she says, "hello?!"  The constant blahs from trying to drink away your own troubles...

Things to boring to mention.

After another day of exhaustion--they seem to add up, on top of winter's coming with a light covering of snow, with the ice, with the cold air blasted by a western wind--I make a pot roast.  If I con't seize the nighttime, the comforting dinner to be picked upon for a few days, getting better each day, will never happen.  Mom is quiet upstairs.  I haven't been able to administer her nightly pill.  I woke up from my heavy nap, tried to slink past her bedroom door, taking a quick peek in, yes, the cat is there, that's good, but she calls, HELLO?  Shit.  I go in and sit down, and see what might be on television, between the BBC, PBS, the news channels, TCM, classic movies, History Channel, nothing inspiring.  I'm barely awake, groggy, unable to talk.  And she cannot hear what I am saying, she's telling me I interrupted her sleep, I say, Mom, I was just slinking by your door, I didn't want to bug you, but she can't hear what I am saying, and then it gets to being an argument, with her telling me that I "hate women," and it's just getting worse, okay, I bow out, and she stays, and thank god.

Pizza from the Steward Shop friendly people.  In addition to the sandwiches, tuna salad on marbled rye, cold cut Italian combo, worthy for later use, maybe on frozen pizza.    It's winter time, you need calories, even if it's dough, cheese, sausage, tomato sauce, on bread.

I start the post roast process.  I've got the things I need.  It will let me process things, and maybe I can clear my mind and get ready again for the yoga course.

Kerouac and his mom...  Left no room for a relationship with any other woman...

Kerouac, a recluse, he wanted to do his work, 

and my own life is so formless now... I can let the cat in the door, pick him up and give him a hug in my arms, then put him down so he can crack his teeth with moist interest over the new kibble I've poured him, and then say his word to me, in peeps and purrs and and three syllable talk then hearty wheezy purrs of remembered happiness, his nails on the linoleum of the kitchen floor as I pull him lightly holding on to his tail as he brings out his cat jaws more wheezes of cat pleurae, tail up now, rubbing against my leg, looking for all his pleasures, while most of mine have gone away.

He mews his "MEH!" as I get up to open a can for him, then he goes and looks up at the back door, and how come I have time for this, for recording the small things of life, so gone off chart a writer can get, just through trying to keep his chops up, but the chops distort his way of looking at life, as happens with all artists, they go crazy.

So I pour myself a little more wine, even at 4:26 in the morning, wondering what to do with the rest of my consciousness that was so sleepy and unproductive all day, but that it needed rest, lots of it.

Might as well play a little guitar and call it a night, before mom gets up to terrorize me.

The thing about writing is, that if you keep at it, it can lead somewhere, just that you don't know where it will or would lead, or if at all.  The listening to the sirens singing?  Your own human flaws that you might then share with another being?  

Then you find yourself at 5 in the morning, a time most people balk at, go to bed, sleep two hours, but at the point where the log jam of your mind connected might free itself.  This is yet another problem in the great insignificance of the addictive pleasures of trying to make an art, and one out of thin air and thin wisdom.  The first bottle of pinot noir is a tune up, as was the phone call to an old buddy, the most forgiving friend you have

By the time you are in the creative channel's flow, most people, to be responsible, need to go to bed.  This the stories of artists, the Caravaggio's of the world, not easy to fit in.

 I write at night now.  I got out of my yoga class, feeling like a weirdo, like I'd failed, having to do one of those dreadful teacher training sessions which I feel no good over.

At night, about half the time, mom goes upstairs to bed, where she'll sleep on her bed, cluttered with books and papers and junk mail from animal nature rights organizations and credit cared offers...   The other half of the time she won't go upstairs, she'll fall half asleep on the couch, her arm with the cat, cooing over him as he snoozes and dreams about going out at night in the back yard under the full moon.  

Like in yoga class I hear her creak in the old Eames type leather and wood chair above me, and at least at night she is quiet, sleepy, but it still makes me incredibly nervous to hear her just a floor away from me.  Few things are pleasant with her, full of her accusations toward me.  I ask her to come to the kitchen to listen to the phone messages her sister and Sharon Kane have left her, the former from the road, heading south on from the Berkshires away for winter in Leesburg Florida, the latter with a sad realization of Sharon's nephew sweet Mario, who, on top of some form of Down Syndrome has sleep apnea and now pneumonia, so that he is destined for a long hospital stay, a long road, as she put it over the landline phone line.

But Mom is irritated immediately, and just by playing these messages for her as she hunches over at an odd angle from the table, a refusal to behave, picking at her head, greasy now from lack of a shower, matted curly, like JFK spiral death operating or morgue table hair but not blood, just old lady greasy hair her great logic disdaining circular defeating conversations, by the time you get back to the first point or premise that first point has changed, called into question, as if I had brought it up to accuse her over something, by habit now. 

She is angry at me now.  I wanted to put Sharon on speaker phone.  Mom says, Hi Trish, when the phone line is picked up. no, mom, you're talking to Sharon, and mom's fragile enough where I can't interrupt.  To her credit she has a nice conversation, an attempt at soothing for Sharon, who's deeply rooted dry humor is well rooted in family and spirituality, but mom is so forgetful now, that when I ask the conversation's points, which I've gathered by listening, and mom has no answers, vague terms.  The people will be...  coming together... in in the place over there, so ...  so...  it's hard to...  a child...  like that.   Mom, what did Sharon say?  Does he still have pneumonia?  What hospital, has he had surgery yet?  

Then Mom is mad at me again.  On top of this the cat Yellow Fellow is meowing at the top of his lungs, establishing eye contact with me then looking up at the door hatch handle, the outer storm door, mom will rattle, but he knows the doorknob too, and I am wrung out from being too late trying to do yoga homework up in the early morning before the late unable to fall asleep after appeasing mom after the long Saturday session taking her out to Famous Real Canale's, where I ended up having three glasses of Chianti, and mom having another through some mistake which I did not pass on for the server, so I microwave a meals on wheels tray of reconstituted mashed potato and meatballs in an almost but not quite Swedish gravy with a little pocket of steamed cafeteria vegetable.

She commends the potatoes repeatedly.  Mom, you want so more meatball, and she comes back to a little more.  I remain vaguely suspicious about the meatball texture, is this rice, no?, is it milky bread crumb chunk with this plastic softness, but it's still a welcome meal and I don't have to dig around in the fridge to reheat the ragu tomato usual beef and sausage and reheat in a smaller pot and then deal with the dishes and so forth, and by now I've pleased the cat by letting him free out into the wet damp dark, and now mom is a crybaby about that, "now I've lost my cat," and on and on it goes, the whirlwind whirlpool tornado-ed winds of old age meets poor lone son trying to deal with it all, in face of Eiger wine grumpiness.

 And then as strangely and haphazardly as they had begun, my years behind the bar came to an end.  The random fact of my Covid unemployment stretching on into the not so random fact of my mother's need for care as she struggled with dementia in the eightieth years of her life, a well lived scholarly one, now fading into clutter and disarray.  I made dinner for her, lunch, took her out to dinner, did all the cooking, the grocery shopping, the errands, the bills, the keeping of medications and doctor appointments, and of course the duties of entertainment, the most tedious of all in many ways, taking her daily rides, at which point she would do her best to insist that we go out somewhere for lunch, or dinner.  And by that point in my life my own nervous health had taken a battering. 

A thing which had begun long ago, as happens to children, just like her, who are asked to be more adult than they should be, in order to deal with life, with this thing we call consciousness.

But it had, I suppose, in some way, been a glorious run, I have to say, ending perfectly for my cultural observations, having grown out of a Tex Mex neighborhood rather vital restaurant, at a decent price range, to life as the barman, a position earned out of professional respect, at a rather fine and professional, and vital too, French Wine Bar Bistrot in Washington, DC, affectionately known as The Dying Gaul.

And then.  During Covid.  Where there still was not the eager business to go rub Tocqueville-ian shoulders, between all classes, as we had before, when all that was gone, when I had been laid off again, I got the call, mom is in the hospital, and they won't let her go, until you come.  To take her home.

One day, Election Day, upon which the nation voted out the dark and evil times of Trump, of greed, of the gutting of all things that should be in the canon of the great American Democracy, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, general happiness, and voted in a good man, President Biden, I packed a bag or two, remembered my laptop, my D-28 acoustic guitar, loaded up one of the Enterprise Rental cars I had relied on, locked my apartment not knowing how long I'd be gone, and drove up to get mom out of the hospital, and there was no going back.  Leaving a lot behind. With no source of income to pay for its rest, now that I'd been kicked out of George's house, but my old job's unemployment...

It could not have occurred to me fully, but basically all I had, besides the things in my G.I. issue one bedroom apartment on Reservoir Road, was the work mainly entered here as dispatches from the road, from, rather, my point of view as a place where I met people from all over the world.  And I had those memories, of African chefs, diplomats French and Afghan, German economists, Latin American bankers, Arab World and Middle Eastern and Far Eastern journalists, in addition from all tribes of American culture, political and otherwise, my fond experiences waiting on people far away and upon journalists.  Nights, of live jazz, the musicians who became my friends, my own Tuesday Night Wine Tastings I'd bone up on, slowly learning the ins and outs of French wine through my wine company representatives who came to help me.

Any kind of music, we could have talked about, from Cape Verde Islands, to Madagascar, so on.  

At points my writing was fiction that struck as too personal to want to share, and though my road was dull and in one place, it was all I had, to mine for material.  My poor blog, such as you read it here, of dubious value, but as a way of keeping, as Robert Bly the poet is quoted alluding to on the NPR station radio for his obituary, your boat afloat in the storm, by persistence which allows credit, at least some credit, as many boats flounder.  Give people credit, simple poets, just trying to keep up with words and life and love for their people.

Whether or not chronicling my own shaking insanity as my boat came to the bigger waves of life's storm, requiring sudden maturity and grown up responsibilities such as I had interpreted differently, and yet basically the same, as earlier.

No one can really touch their own lives, or tell its story, its stream of stories all that well, to be sure, and writers tend to be a sorry lot, full of vanity and laziness, selfish declarations of independence, a tribe of irresponsible people, more about the Quixotic symbolism of life rather than life itself, believing themselves well enough full of shards of Shakespearean characters and experiences, of poetic moments worth sharing somehow, even if poorly, to a crowd of people not always so full of readership.

With poor shaking frustrated and scared hands he, the middle-aged writer, turns to attempting to marshal his sloppy field notes together somehow.  Give your poor old nervous system a break, the Universe was saying, you can leave those old duties behind, even as you walk out upon a surface of a new life not fully solidified in any apparent and pleasing to the confidence sort of way.  Even as the bulk of daily conversations betrayed the look within at the insanity shared in all character's true inner selves, tales told by madmen, full of sound and fury and signifying only a glimmer of a reflection of meaning, as found in yoga and the like, the long work to gain, or feign, some sort of wisdom worth the paper it is printed on.

Ophelia, Lear, everyone loses it in the end, sooner or later.  There's a lesson in it.

September Fiction of 2021

 It’s the psychological response, the baggage from dealing with her for years politely and patiently.  Headstrong, she pushes me for a response, for an acquiescence.  If not directly, through an arsenal of vocalizations I have been trained to internalize.  What pleases her.  My explanations don’t matter.  Rather than face her, I hide.  Because I don’t have anything to do that’s not based around her, so it would, from her point of view, seem.

And indeed, all I can do now is barely take a yoga course, keep the errands together, serve meals, organize the appointments, barely write anymore.

She can’t help it.  Now more than ever.  A victim, like we all are, of our moods.

But she remains who she is, in need of a social life.

She is a toxically nervous person, ready to brew up anxiety at any moment.  “You’ve ruined the evening,” she says, if I appear to be impatient as we come up the final concrete steps to the apartment after going out to dinner.

This has probably left a scar over my life, and certainly I could have gotten myself better organized to find a better career than joking around, wasting years drinking with a bunch of waiters and the lonesome, (a situation from which I wonder if I will never be able to recover from) without the baggage of her demands on my attention, on top of my own anxiousness.

My impulse now is to hide from her, to meditate, and the first thing she does, the first thing out of her repetitive mouth,  "what are we doing for fun today," to me, sets the whole thing up.  If I don't please her, then she will explode on me, eventually.  Or we'll get through a few things, than as we are heading home, after an hour ride, and groceries and the wine shop, "oh, are we going straight home?..." her little body and her big head tensing up at the thought of it, winding back up again, the string of the bow pulled back.  Anger.  Dissatisfaction.

The feeling of shame and unworthiness, the diminishment, keeping me from blossoming, from stepping forward.  

She takes her stance, she's always right, the boss, the complainer.  The counter is wet, she tells me, as she comes down in the middle of the night to wander to the back door and stand at the countertop where she eats Saltines with almond butter, from where the cat is fed from the opened cans.  Yes, Mom, I just did all the dishes, then I wiped the counter off with soapy water, and I just wiped it with a Clorox Wipe to sanitize it.  Well... she says, leaving that hanging.  She doesn't like how I'm telling her what I accomplished, the suggestion of the work I've done that she is unable to notice.  Well, don't give the cat any poisons.  I won't, mom.  I wrap up the full tall kitchen plastic garbage bag out of the can.  She goes back to look out at the dark from the kitchen door, with the outdoor light on, underneath an orb spider's web.  "I wish I were dead," she says.  I repeat it.  "I wish you were dead."  How dare you!  Mom, that's just the message you're sending out to the Universe, and I can hear it.  I'm just repeating it so you hear how it sounds.  I don't want to hear it either.

Not saying a word, beyond, I'm never coming here again, she gets ready to walk back upstairs, thinking in the hallway by the bathroom sliding door.  I call after her, mom, how are you, do you need anything.   I'm sorry, that's just what you said.  She walks away.  Okay, fine.

We have to start. Somewhere.  I have things to do.  My life’s work is not disposable.  We have to start, somewhere, out of this rubble.

I go up the stairs from the bedding in the basement across the floor.  It's a new moon.  A chance to get some work done, to get a good pattern going again.

I get mom to take her pills.  I heat up a slice of pizza for her, and I make a fresh pot of green tea, sliced turkey on an Ezekial sprouted-grain English muffin with onion and tomato.  

With the new moon you have to start in and work.

Maybe writing isn't work.  Maybe it just a way of keeping sanity.  

Mom can't remember that we went for a ride, along the lake, with the wind blowing.  What are we doing for fun today?  Well, mom, I have some work to do.  Besides keeping clear of ragweed pollen…

What do you have to do for work, she half scoffs at me, emphasizing, "you."  Poor you, the slouch.  Maybe she's right to think of me as such, though I didn't start out that way.  

Well, mom, actually, I have a long list.  

I cough, the chest congestion loosening.  Take you to the TB clinic.  She sits at the table now, lowering.  Getting ready to pick at her head.  She'll go into the living room to her Eames Chair.  I'll blow my nose, and hear her slap the newspaper or the book, making a huffing noise if I make any such a clearing noise.

Okay, mom, don't forget to brush your teeth.  Who left you in charge of my teeth!  Well, if you don't want to have to go to the dentist...

I take my laptop from the shelf below the counter, having brought my mugs downstairs.  I'm going to go down to the basement and do a bi of work, mom.

"I’m ROTTING!" she shouts at me, after me as I rise from the table to pour out some lemon water tea into one of the morning cups, green in the other, to wake up.

Mom, have patience, relax, don't get angry with me and later we will go out for a drive.

That's all I do is be patient! she says, raising her voice.  Okay, mom, please, give me twenty minutes...

Yes, you're rotting, right, I say to myself, down in the basement, thinking of where my own life may be headed.

I have to be careful even of what I say.

(And later, out for the obligatory ride I'm not so very happy about, she does not even remember her aggressiveness, about her saying that she's rotting here, how she shouted at me...)

There's always an element of fear, being who you are.  You feel that people are looking over your shoulder at you, and maybe indeed they are.  I should have established rules, when I got here in November, carved out the time for myself in the daytime.  

I  should have, a long time ago, listened to the general rules of decent hard working society, not engaged at all in any solitary solipsistic pursuit of creativity, art, journal, what have you...  I was stubborn, and now I see why everyone shook their heads at my foolishness.  I know they are right now.  I can never be happy at this point.  Too poor.  Too much water and years under the bridge, energy and vigor tossed away...

I can understand her anger, but that just makes it worse.  I must draw up a list of things to do.  Get going in a new direction.

Just taking some time for myself is helpful, even if it's only the fifteen minutes of writing this palaver.  It helps push away the thoughts that I am a complete bum and all that sort of thing for needing to write.

Ever since I found myself thought of as being inappropriate with the Princess, finding the New York City crowd at college a bit rough...  It's a hard thing to get over.  I'll always feel guilty, and bad, and of course it's all my own fault, how can it be otherwise.  You never get over it, really.  More on that later, about how my psychology was already set up to seek a lack of selfless intimacy, of rejection.

 

A shame that had already started, already bleeding over into issues of intimacy and self confidence.

So, down in the basement.  It's better to hide, to get away with making tea and then duck back down and not even engage with her.  Put a package of peanut butter and cheddar orange anatto colored crackers for her out on the counter.  You hungry mom?  No.  Okay.

Down in the basement, at least you can peacefully write out, mentally, a grocery list.  

But my mind is thick today, from yesterday's ragweed, and staying up chatting over wine with an old friend, Jennifer, about her New York City stuff with Con-Ed, NYFD, the Polish super who gives her a hard time, the flooding, the smoking power strip, the refrigerator not cooling saga, the smell of the Raid the Dominican maid treated it with to kill the fruit flies… Again, not much energy to hold my head up.  I've done nothing in life, I have nothing now, and nothing is hard to build upon.  

At least it's raining today, that will help, washing the ragweed pollen out of the airs, tamping it down, as I pursue my little writings here, wasting the talents I have, or might have once had, but falling into a Buddhist state, so I thought, of passivity, that the Universe would all help me be what it intended me to be.    Except as I fend off mom every day I get pretty depressed, and life is all washing away, like a departing wave running back out, receding with the tide, and what have I accomplished...  nothing.  The hopeful piping plover birds of life running to the edge of the foam, picking with their beaks down, then running back with the surf, without being fully understood at the time.  And this is true of the last however many days... the ragweed effect.  Crucifying.  

And then I feel bad for not getting anything done amidst all the distractions.  The Toyota Airbag recall.  Seeking out a doctor locally who might take Medicare, how long has it been, I could use the blood work and checking on a few things, a tender sort of lump in the breast tissue.  The Medicaid application and the lawyer.  Sweeping the floor.  Playing out at an open mic night, just to have something to do, beyond the constant mom, the solitary confinement?  The grocery store?  But the head feels full.  And just then I hear mom flush the upstairs John, the water rushing through the PVC pipes here, and so she'll be coming down the stairs above me, the slow measured creaking.  And I can't face her quite yet.  She'll flush the toilet again, and usually a third time too.  Maybe the cat will come downstairs to be fed, to be let out.  She'll probably call my cell phone.  

I feel like crap.  

My blog, this thing, it gets about 35 views a day, over the last week.  Who knows who reads it... Friends.  At least I met a number of good people while I toiled away behind the bars.  

Take up being a travel writer, was the suggestion of a young woman who wrote a book by the title, "Behind Bars."  About being a youthful attractive female bartender in New York City. 

At least mom is not calling out yet, and I hear her in the kitchen.  It could be worse.  

But why.... why can I not solve my problems...  It was wise all those years in DC, not having a girlfriend, who I would have had to abandon.  At least the Universe let me play that one right, but a hell of a way to think.

I call, from my cell, up from the basement to check in with her in the kitchen a floor above me, hearing the chair creak at the table, and she is actually calm and even okay.  Oh, I’ll be alright, she says, when I tell her the nice person from Meals on Wheels came.  I just had some cheese & crackers, she tells me. And she gets I’m not feeling so hot, and when I suggest to her that she takes her pills, laid out earlier on a little paper plate, she asks me to hold on, and takes them for me, down the hatch.  Thanks, mom.  (A different story from last night.)  She has that old warm Irish familiarity sound, and that's good.

So you’re not feeling well?  No, the wind yesterday… at least it rained today.  Yes, and soon it will get cold again.  Yes, Ted, you’re not living in a perfect world, she says and we both manage a chuckle.  Back to be the old friends we always have been.  Okay, I’ll see you soon.  I might be upstairs, she says.  Yes, I know where to find you.  Are you warm enough?  Yes, she says with a smile, but this sweater is itchy.

I hear her go to the front door, “here, kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty,” rattling the storm door handle, then repeating the call, like the Bedouin women in Lawrence of Arabia watching their husbands in the red valley ride off to battle on their steeds and camels, calling their high pitched shrill war cry.

The cat’s paws click soft across the floor with the tips of his kitty nail claws making his own little statement as the world carries on, school back in session, everyone back to their offices and their trades.

And I’m vaguely proud of myself for choosing a wiser way to engage her while remaining helpful so as to not completely waste this hour and moment.

Just to not have that pressure, on top of all the other pressures of my general situation…. It feels like a huge relief, even if temporary.  

I guess as I went off to college, in mythical Amherst, I felt some call to be however I could a writer.  This causes me chagrin and great embarrassment.  Not to be tried, if you aren't an aristocrat, already a success at writing, or an exemplar of the issues current to the times, not to attempt if you are not professional organized in the language of the economy and the commerce of the land.

My life had stood, a loser’s, in corners, loaded, until the owner, the overlord, the great soul, the owner took me up and away, putting me to use finally.  Maybe that’s a piece of what Emily was saying. 

Do you have to be in a situation in order to get it, that state of affairs, one you never wanted to have to see.  But the offence cometh, as Lincoln, her contemporary, wrote.

I go up and make a second steeped pot of tea from the long dragonwell leaf.  Empty my little container that I use for comfort while hiding in the basement.  Mom is quiet, upstairs, not acting up.  When will I have the courage?  Yesterday didn’t go easy.

If we go out to the open mic, there will be wine… The vineyard out in Fair Haven.

And the news, no more unemployment to add to things, and getting mom anywhere isn’t easy.  

She knows we are leaving soon, I have the guitar in the case, out to the car… We’re about to turn onto Route 7 to head west efficiently when she tells me she needs to go to the bathroom.

We go out there, mom on me, slow down, slow down! please slow down! anxious from the start, and then a half an hour later there's the winding road on the other side of the bay, and I miss the road, in my nerves, turn around, and then we're coming up the gravel drive with the vines on both sides of the road and the pond.

But I notice, a compliment I put out there feeling the relief of arriving too late to play at the big barn open mic night here, having ditched mom, having found acceptable wine and something to eat, and hospitality, has sort of soured half of the new friendship, in that the woman singer of my new friend thinks from what I said, off hand, but ill aimed, not with the meaning she thought, is pushing me about how and if I really am attracted to her.  She's a school teacher.  I made a little friendly joke about how kids like their teacher teacher.

I get up and play anyway, but I can feel the nerves pushing me, and mom has spilled my first glass of wine anyway, etc., so I get into the habit of going back to the bar to get myself another pinot noir, then I get up and play, first 40, U2, as an incantation, a challenge to my singing, and then a song about ghosts howling about the house at night, a Pogues song, and then another Pogues song, the one I play like a mantra, about a Rainy Night in some city place when you're a kid from rural Ireland and life is going crazy on you.  Not all of which I finish, before talking to the small crowd with my nerved up jibber jabber.

It takes a lot of pressure, to get us out there, for me to unhappily get mom and the guitar case out from the car and settled after the tedious drive, and mom won't remember the drive back in the night, you're going too fast, melting down, in an ugly way, including my gut reaction, unskillful, and then me drinking more and hiding.

The terror of having no more unemployment funds hits.

I consider signing up for an extended yoga class.  That helps.  A little project to think on and dream about, maybe carry it as far as you can, despite the odds and the cost, which is what it should be, no more, no less.

But the pressure...

Take care of yourself, your center first, and then you'll be able to help your mom, yoga man, founder of Ashaya yoga, coming highly recommended to me, Todd Norian says.

I get through Friday, then Saturday at The Press Box I don't even want to touch the glass of Chianti I ordered, only have some over the rocks before we leave.  But later on with the oven cleaning project and a need for some space I open a twist off Pinot and have some, idle humor, The Death of Stalin on Netflix, after I'd curiously already started on some silly sketches of me doing my Russian character which I do with the wine, waiting for the EZ Off oven spray to sink in.  I was putting a frozen pizza in the oven, after adding pepperoni, fresh mozzarella, sliced onions, fresh basil, but as I went to put it into the oven somehow I spilled it, this is two nights ago, and I did indeed yell with frustration there in the middle of the night, defeated by allergies and circular arguments and conversations with mom running in my head and knowing I need to make a drastic change, hopefully the Tantric yoga theory...  When I retrieved the crust and the basic set up from the still hot oven, did my best to clean up the fallen pepperoni, etc., spilled everywhere, when I build up another pizza, turn the oven back on, smoke comes pouring out of the door of the stove, so I turn it off.  I'd already put the fire detector alarm thing outside, taking it down from the wall.  There was an earlier incident when the class pan I was cooking a meatloaf which cracked while in the oven, and the leftover spill residue at 425 temperature sets off the detector anyway

I wake with horrible regrets.  With all my college boy knowledge, having studied with Henry Steele Commager and Benjamin DeMott, Pritchard, Sofield, Kateb, and so on, complete luminaries in their fields, how did I end up not even bothering with trying to educate other people, at least in a public high school, or something like that.  And look at where the country, our nation, is headed now, into a disbelief that government can do anything for you, and on from one lie to an even bigger one and a bigger one beyond that, that elections are rigged.  

Mom is contentious as I get her something to eat.  "I'm just a stupid woman, what would I know," she says, when I try to explain to her how yesterday was 9/11, and that my brother might be coming up for a high school reunion, just the same weekend my intensive yoga course is to begin. 

So I wake, and the only thing I can conclude is that it's the wine, the drinking, the over the years wasted treading water in the stupid bartender world, nothing to show for it, nothing.  No longer placed in the training of intellectual pursuits and the refinement of knowledge, instead, the life of a beast.

But I wonder, the rolling ball of shame and guilt that got me here, led me along all this while, the feeling of never being right, never being good enough.  It's as if I've been subjected to something, a kind of slow long-lasting abuse, telling me that the things I do as a human being incarnated in this world are somehow wrong, quite wrong in fact, if I were to be making the decisions of a perfectly led life of perfect choices...  

The things that undermine your own self-confidence, that lead you to accept the abuse of creepy people who say creepy things about the things you do.  While professing to have your best interests at heart, they undermine you, picking away at the created being you are.  

(Or maybe they see, albeit while still being creepy, a Truer you, the one that could be freed from the burdens of the judgmental...)

And so any moment of drama, in life, in family, is the manifestation of your inner psychological make up and all the battles therein.  

We are broken as we enter the world, in order to be conscious.  My childhood recurring dream on the long smooth straight road, suddenly broken…  monstrous forms looking down in upon your brokenness..  Dreams that remind me of the real life endings of James Dean and President Kennedy.  Descending the long desert Paso Robles straight highway, the perfect eggshell silver Porsche Spyder low open racing car running perfectly below you, the comfortable cockpit, the hum of the engine, the roll of the wheels along the smooth road, an open sky above, arid flat lands stretching out below, hills in the distance, then suddenly, reaching the valley, the car coming toward you turning in front of your way, not seeing you… The perfect open Kennedy-blue Lincoln limousine… then laid out on the leather upholstery seat, consciousness of life waning within a broken skull.  I wake as a child in pain, psychic, and then also strange recurrent leg pains.  Life is not always a joy, it asks of you, it tortures you to endure, doesn't it, you find out even as a kid.

And when we wake again, clearer, one sees all the things that have kept him in a place of shame, the lens he is given to see through and interpret life with, that his own intimate wishes aren’t allowed without judgment and interference, intrusion.

I get goaded into taking her to the usual dinner place, after shopping for the groceries.  We're back in the townhome apartments, the usual parking space.  She stays in the car, uptight, entitled, her thick head held up, the AC on, with her newspaper, as I go in and put things away in the fridge, the sliced off-the-bone turkey breast, the chicken tenders, the lemon and the spinach.  Cans of cat-food, liter of soda water, I leave in the shopping bag.  Her Pepsi. Back out to the car, after peeing.  Off we go.  “You left me right in the direct sunlight,” she comments.  What took you so long?

We get there, bearing her aimless walk along the covered deck, to the door as the waitresses bring the trays in and out.  We get sat, Chardonnay for mom, who expresses that oh she’s ready for it, heh heh heh.  Ha ha ha.  I’ll have a soda water…  food arrives, as the couple, retirees we’ve befriended come in.  We’ve spoken about meeting up for dinner soon.  Okay, I’ll have a glass of wine.  That’s how it happens.  Now I am performing again.  Caught up in it, just as I am when I tend bar.  Put on an act and everyone will be happy.  And then I can do all my own little lies and bad habits, escapist dopamine seeking…

I feel shame, the great discomfort over this little old strong out of control personality, pushing me quite beyond what I feel comfortable with…

I have a second glass.  The fish fry piece of haddock is dry, tough.  Another squeeze of lemon, a brush of the institutional soybean oil tartar sauce, mom content with chicken fajita, but puzzled by it, asking me if I'd like some, no, I'm okay mom… We make plans with our friends, dinner later in the week.  Later I'll find out he went through the riots at Attica.  PTSD.

I get mom home.  After two glasses of wine, though, I’m beat.  Drunk, more than I should be, feeling my immune system compromised further. Hide from her… pass out in the basement with the dehumidifier churning away.  Feeling intoxicated, the sweet rotted fruit of the grape now in my system until my tired body can process it as I sleep, passing through fitful states of dream, intimacies with dreamed females I know immediately upon wakening, I’ll never enjoy, and why exactly I don’t know.

And when I wake, what joy will there be, when wide awake at midnight, out of synch.  Dishes from earlier.

Low self-esteem, the continual need to drug myself, to please away the ones who participate in my shame.

How I manage to hold it together now I do not know, but that I’m drawn toward yoga, just to breath.

Take the leap of faith into the strange alien career of the yogi?  Meditate while my own earlier life falls away along the years it ate up?

I pour a glass of Montepulciano.  I’m reading my yoga book.  I clean the kitchen, the fridge, the clutter, the dishes.  I read more, heat up a hamburger Jacques Pepin style, read.  Usually I’d finish the bottle, but I stop.

Restless back to my cave for sleep just before it gets light out.

There’s an open mic night out in Sterling, but I am changing my focus, in order to get to a better place.  There’s certainly nothing wrong with music.  There’s nothing wrong with wine.  But that I’ve used it so long to mask my guilt, my shame, my unhappiness, my inhibitions to perform as I might really want to, and maybe now I just want to be a bit healthy, save a deeper part of myself through studying yoga, and not just go along all the time, often with people who may seem friendly, but don’t have my interests at heart.

On the other hand, boredom is threatening, pressing in, leaving me without a purpose near or far.

Yoga.

Thursday dinner, I can’t bring myself to face mom til the afternoon, to get her ready.  What time?  What time…. What to wear…

I enjoy myself.  Mom’s in her little zone…

Friday… again to the regular place.  We have to sit at the bar, mom and I… We get through our ordering, and the first glass of wine, and the guy next to us, a slender man from the town down the road, his wife is tending to her dying parent over at the hospital.  One over from him there's a hearty guy, inform out of town, working at installing control equipment at the electric power plant.   I end up drinking a shot of Tito’s vodka with him later.  He's a Polish American man from Queens, and we talk of Polish history and stuff, and here I go, poisoning myself again in my great inability to make a clean un-rattled decision, one not pulled down upon by large angry demanding personalities.

Mom finds her peaceful saintly mode talking to the cat.  Turning from her contention with my services as entertainer, dishwasher, chef...  "Such a good kitty, such a good kitty, oh, such a good kitty..."

The confusion time of “sundown” coming earlier now, when her mind turns to insisting that her home is over there, a few houses up, up the road a piece, she can’t walk home now in the dark, where am I staying tonight.  And if the cat is out, as is his want, he falls into it too.  Mom, I say softly, he’s just outside, out back on the neighbor’s stoop.  He’s fine, he knows how to get home…  But this contradicts her, and she starts sobbing, why do you do this to me.  I look at her.  It’s not her fault.  I get up from the table and call him, and I hear him raise his little meow of acknowledgment, taking his time as he comes into the light.  Then I’m holding him, and bringing him to mom, and immediately her crying stops, cooing to the cat.  But then switching back into a lesser form of panic mode.

And I get more use to how I see things always through my shame, always with the devil’s voice, “come on, why don’t you join in…”

Through the lens of shame every choice is difficult.  Intimate wishes only meet with pain, by the habit pushed on you.  You do things to reinforce rather than break from…

Until kindness comes along.  My father having departed, and he too took me as a failure, I'm afraid, as one of a more Bohemian kind of a lifestyle, a country club drinker after my initial great seriousness as a student when my reading slowed, a momma's boy, stuck realizing the burden, turning to the family weakness for the soothing drink and the social hour.

I try to get psyched up for some yoga, down here in the basement. It’s not the same as venturing out into the yard to do my routine, before the ragweed pollen…

The rest of the weekend goes by.  I drive mom by the lake, a beautiful mid September day, warm, golden, an Eden of Green and blue water, well kept houses, or the attempt at least, as we get angrier and angrier with each other, worries in my head, waiting to go to the six o'clock party I have no idea what it will be like, except it's a home art gallery and they are Facebook friends through the open mic circuit.  Mom gets grumpy at it, I drive her home, I go back there, meet a nice gal from Iraq.  Then the great Porchfest, except mom can't handle it.  She doesn't get it.  "When are we going to eat?"  "I don't know how long my bladder can hold out."  She looks around as we sit in chairs, and I admit, it doesn't feel right.  Okay, but let's at least try.  I get her back in the car, with the folding chair, and the beverages.  We're getting a late start on the musical acts that started at 1 PM.  It's an even more beautiful day, and this all feels awkward.

We get down to a good spot where my friends are playing, on the front step piazza of a grand Italianate kitty-corner to the main green space park here, but we barely catch the last two songs.  We go through the embarrassment of saying hi, and then I get mom back o the car, about a block and a half.  "My heart is hurting!" she shouts at me.  And I try my best to get her across the street, almost pulling at her.  Frustrated, I take her home.  She wants to go the usual sports bar place, but I'm feeling almost livid, for having to miss out.  I have a child to deal with now.

Monday, I wake up, the party's over.  Mom's bank account is low.  I haven't made a decision about the yoga class, and should have registered Friday.   I was up reading late one of the assigned books, but it strikes me, what is yoga but a cult, at least the way it might lean here.  Tales of the ashram.  The guru, acting within his own cultural standards, having affairs…

The fleas came in over the course of a cooler and then a rainy day, as I was assessing whether or not to try to go to the vineyard for open mic night, taking mom along, and it was Yom Kippur.  I'd neglected to find the cat's flea collar, and I'd just read about the Fipronil chemical in the Frontline you put on the cat's neck, between the shoulder blades at the base of the skull after parting the fur, so he can't twist around on lick.

In the night, out of desperation, I found a lower grade of flea and tick treatment, Advantage II, without the Fipronil of Frontline and the potential for nerve damage, guiltily squeezing it out carefully at the base of the cat's skull then disposing the little plastic vial wrapped in newspaper.  The next day I fought with mom and found some flea powder for the carpet upstairs where I slept in mom's study some nights, as ragweed season went on and on.  The cat hadn't even joined me for more than an hour one night, but then I was catching them between my fingers and drowning them holding them down in a mug of water, taking a pleasure in it.  The same was true of the basement, where he had come down the stairs to prowl and have some company, lying stretched out beside me on the little throw rug carpet on the cement floor right next to the air mattress  as I fell asleep.  There I could catch them too and drown them, but also press them into the cement floor.  

This was all a distraction, and finally when it was Thursday, after consulting with my yoga friend Betsy over the phone as she came back from a family wedding out West, an expert, the night before, when I had to decide, so, I did, I signed up for the 32 hour class, with the potential of continuing on, for more money of course, into a two hundred hour teacher training course in Ashaya Yoga out of West Stockbridge, Mass., via the computer and Zoom.  But I felt stupid about that too, buyer's regret, my usual half assed effort, a bit too late, disorganized, but at least moving forward now.

And in a day or two, after all that thinking and not being able to make a decision, then finally doing so, really feeling poorly in my head, I attended the first evening.  And while skeptical at first, but still with a very positive feeling about the man who's founded this branch of effective yoga, who told me, look, you'll be able to do a better job and taking care of your mom if you go through the course, the chanting, the showing up for morning asana, the healthier lifestyle...  And for the first time in a long time, I felt what it was like to really engage, by choice, given my sense of self, in the world, challenging myself, taking a course, which was quite a hard thing to do.

Siblings are simply different.  Like the Buddha's choice, one becomes a wise ruler king, very organized, always busy, and the other becomes, follows, the other path of spiritual sort of leader, if you will, the dutiful initially reluctant but scientifically inclined individual who strives, after seeing all the suffering in the world, that to become awakened to the true nature of reality is the way to go.  There's no real misunderstanding, or contention, it's simply how nature works itself out, hopefully for the better, as the Universe, Creation, God/Goddess, powers that be, have your back and everything is as it should be when you open your eyes.  A great appropriateness.

That's just how it goes.

The first full day, a sunny Fall Saturday, taking the class down in the basement, there were three sessions, first chantings in seated position after breathing pranayama exercises, then the silent mantra, then a break, then serious pose work, then another break, and then even more pain.  As mom creaks upstairs in her Eames Chair, making me nervous...  By the end, and after  getting dinner on the table, mom made no objection to my taking a little bit of a nap, and indeed I went up and laid down for a long time, until it was well past becoming dark out as my muscles sorted it out.  At least I felt good about myself waking up early and seeing the dew on the lawn as the sun rose up over the poplar trees and bushes and other woody things after the cool night.

All that dissatisfaction had worked its way in on me.  Unemployment for the pandemic period had come to end, and I felt good about nothing.  But at least there was the yoga and the Non-Dualist Shivastic Tantra helping me out with a message of acceptance, even as nothing made sense, or looked right, and all those years I had wasted so lazily and shamefully not applying myself, and now look what I got, nothing, a liability to myself and family...

The restaurant too is a betrayal, unless I suppose you're the chef or the proprietor.  35 years like that, before beginning to finally, at this very late hour, apply myself, get up early with the dewy school Autumn light.  It's you betraying yourself, really, playing before a crowd, part clown, but working away at a real job...  but a huge waste for all your talents.  The drinking, my own pain numbing betrayal, not wanting to face cold reality, putting it all off another year, however artistically…

The only thing to salvage from it, for me, I don't even know, not sure...  The wine tasting?  The talking to people but that all disappears and no one remembers anyway, leaving you alone out in the cold without anywhere to go, nothing to fall back upon but family...  because you didn't take care of yourself, and it just got worse and worse and worse...

The first day after the weekend yoga classes, waking sore, pain wrapping the shoulder muscles, stiffness in the strings of the legs, tightness, not unlike the feeling of waking from a busy night at the bar...  what hit me, a train or a bus?  The head still woozy.  

I do my chanting of mantra after warm up of five basic yoga poses as recommended by Ashaya Yoga and Todd Norian, who I've come to immediately like very much.  Then the silent mantra, as I sit crossed leg on the pillow, Ham Sa, then the pranayama exercises, as mom makes her calls upstairs, help, I need help, oh, where are you bastards, help...  But by the tone I can tell, it's just her drama, and she's probably had a little taste of wine.  I hear her in the kitchen, doing something with the toaster oven, beep beep beep, who knows.  

It's lonely today without the group, being put through the paces, even if it is on the computer screen via a Zoom meeting.  It's not the same, as I attempt to engage with the spirit, to find some peace of mind to proceed, after the clarity of the yoga spiritual weekend.

I feel hollow.  Bereft of the community that was growing, the engagement that was set.  

I made toast last night for mom, with cheese, then a slice of tomato, then a little dab of fresh mozzarella and a basil leaf, heating again, when she came down at five in the morning after her earlier unhappy wandering.  Delicious, she said.  For the second straight day, after the yoga I was so sore and exhausted that I fell into long sleep naps, retreating from the pain all over my body, surrounding my bones in a vivid way.

Start a yoga journal, a new day.  Make your notes about finding your self-esteem, stepping away from the habits of being overly humble.  

The stone that the builders rejected becomes the first corner stone.  You would never be set upon the spiritual path if that were not to happen to you, if something didn't go not quite according to plan or to the normal expectations.

And knowing this, I fear what the rest of the story might be, as the metaphors are there, the old tales, The Rejection at Nazareth, his old townspeople taking him to the edge of the bluff the town is built upon to cast him off, even his own family trying to restrain him...  The Buddha's first four fellow mendicants shake their heads at His first teaching.  

Failure is painful.  But you have to accept.  You have to grow.

Up in mom's room, as I get organized for the day, I see the credit card we use, and the clear plastic that protects my driver's license, removed from my wallet, and no wallet to be seen.  And to prove that I am no guru I begin to get worried, and then frustrated, and then angry, as I look around at mom's piles of books, some of which were already stacked there, some of which seem to have slid off her bed.  I get impatient, mom, it's no joke to lose your wallet.  I'm sorry.  I put it in a safe place.  So safe we can't find it now.

Ten minutes later I find it there on the carpet, not far from the one I put down some flea powder on a few days ago, under a local newspaper from two days ago on the carpet by her chair in the living room.

And what's this Tantric spiritual thing anyway...  And if you don't become a scholar on a particular path into academia, using your mind at least, what do you go and do with your spiritual elements?  

I don't have a plan.  Everyone wise and accustomed to the practical ways of the world knows this.  

The women in my support group, one a pretty woman from up near Toronto, who works as a therapist in a hospital trauma unit, god bless her, shares the story in our break of how her mom passed away a couple of years ago, after suffering from chronic illness, which the mother contracted bearing her as a child, and so she too knows how to be a people pleaser, low self esteem.  And when I said, oh, I feel so bad for all my bad behavior and f-ups and not being a college professor like I was cut out to be, she sweetly offered, "we are in the right place right now," and that it was all meant to be so that I could be here with the other good people finding a balancing spirituality in the yoga as led by Todd Norian.  Who in a way, vaguely reminds me of my father, having the lines of a Central European in head shape and body and mannerism.

We all have a story to tell, is the point.  If he hadn't been betrayed, then again, he wouldn't be where he is now.

I didn't realize how lonely I feel, not having a group of like minded people as the yoga course...  I missed that boat, of belonging, trying to fit in with everyone else, trying to cater to whomever should come in, on hand and foot, literally.  

As far as a good group to belong to, moving forward together, challenged, working, brains forming new connections, new synapses over new languages, new friends, with mutual interests.  Who knows, the theater!  Marine ecology, law school into whatever, working at a publishing house...  I missed it all.

But I got distracted.I folded, and called my work as a barman a sort of missing spirituality, without much of a pay off, a use of patience, and that can only go on so long.  

The restaurants sort of ran out for me as allowing me a peer group, after the first years of being in it.  That hurts to look back on it, and see that I was never really at an equal standing, too full of humility, thinking that was what Jesus was, is, about, when you have to be a leader, present yourself with the self esteem necessary to find your path and not just go around with the victim ego, the ego of least accomplishment.

Mine is a profound problem, added all up, and maybe that's a good thing the problems are so wide spread and inclusive.  It has to come to that, to come to this, I guess, as it does for many, before they can honestly assess their lives.

Okay, so...  I'm still sore.  After the wallet crisis I sit in the kitchen for a little bit.  All the Pepsi bottles partially empty, from her bedside table, I've brought downstairs.  I'll dump them out down the drain, unless they still have fizz, and then in a paper bag to collect for the five cent deposit.  The fruit flies Drosophila are getting fat now and lazy, sitting upon the lip of any glass that contained wine, hovering about in the corner by the red open plastic mesh bag of local onions on the counter by the spices and the teas and cutting boards and plates for hot pots to be set down upon.   I'll put fly paper up later.  They seem too smart for that now, as they are still elusive, the fat little wise fruit flies.  

Mom's dropped off head back a bit into a nap, after her morning wine and the frozen pizza she took it upon herself to cook in the toaster oven in toaster mode, instead of 14 minutes in a 425 oven, and the cheese top I see is browned indeed.  A kind of hard tack, but she has eaten some of it.  There's a tumbler with white wine in it on the table by the chair.  There's a cup or two of it out here in the kitchen, prowled over by the fruit flies, and I put them away in the fridge.  An open can of cat food, with the thin lid placed back on top of the contents.  And I feel hugely disoriented, as if the new island you'd finally reached after years of struggle and being lost out at sea, after spending a time walking upon its solidity, enjoying a sense of destination, as if it had all disappeared, vanished into thin air.

But yet, I did my chants.  And the silent mantra.  And the pranayama breathing techniques, and the few  basic poses, five of them, that set you up for seated meditations, cranking my body along against the great soreness pervading my entirety.  

Anyway, I've got my grocery list for the early part of the week, and I've made polite contact with the local printing service owner to print up the manual from the yoga teacher, available later in the week, and I've discovered what I'm afraid to be the last of the checks from Mutual of Omaha for the additional income of $800 each month in the mail box, better late than never, on my little barefoot walk along the front of the townhomes out in the light.  

Again, I've fallen into the why bother mode, what am I doing here anyway, but keeping mom entertained as best I can.   Groceries.  Newspaper, an errand or two.  Take care of the additional problem of the week, like the fleas...  Not much energy.  Wait until mom starts to protest enough about how she never has any fun, okay, mom, I give up, I take her out to dinner.  And that's what ends up happening, after a quick run to get some aduki beans at the health food store, getting the usual, "how long are you going to take..."

So we get to The Press Box, the north end of a beautiful old store house from back when Oswego was full of railroad tracks and brick mills and store houses and commerce, lumber, salt, corn starch, all sorts of things.  I aim mom, yes, mom, bring your cane, yes, up the ramp, along the patio, under the overhang that's been there ever since the building came into being.  A few new faces, young ones, college girls, ushering us in.

We sit at the little two top in the back right corner, by the raised platform the wood stove sits upon, after being greeted by the eldest daughter of the boss, who just had a ten and a half pound baby boy four months ago.   

And it occurs to me.  Why weren't her psychologists more helpful?  How could they not see it?  

It's like it took me the pain of doing yoga to see it myself.  How as a child, a little kid, she felt, in her own words, responsible for her mother's well being when her father would come in.  "I'd stay up nights..." she says, and I've heard the stories many times.  "in order to protect her from him..."  The conversation started about what a brute my grandfather was, sometimes, frustrated, as he was, knowing himself to be talented, missing out on the great call up to World War Two because of his eyesight and his feet, never getting to be the journalist he wanted to be...  

Mom, that's not a role you should have had as a child...  How old were you?  Six, seven?  

It went on for years.  I'd stay up at night.  Protecting my sister.  Waiting for him to come home at night...

No wonder.

You should never have had to deal with that.  Didn't your shrink help you with that?  What did she do?  

So once you see it, you can't not unsee it.  All the frantic panic, all the carrying on, all the emotional volatility, the complete inability to relax or to not try to control after the slightest upset to her wished plans for the day...  The huffing, the sighing, the banging, the clomping of feet, the hysterics, the clutter, the hoarding, all trying to control the beasts of her childhood.  Her sort of dismissive pass on her sister, "she got everything, my dear sweet sister..."  

And now I see it, yes.  And how if not burnout I've finally reached a place, "no, this is not healthy for me."  I don't need to be pushed all the time, thrown into that sense of impending disaster and drama...

What was missing, I suppose, was my understanding, my sympathy for her, which too has been exhausted in these circumstances.  Worn out like a cigarette down to the burnt butt ash end.  

She can't help it, but that fact doesn't offer much help to me, because she is still and will be hard-wired just so to the very end, the creature of panic, of a growing aggressive male-like vigilant dissatisfaction.

I look at her over my burger, no bun, her lemon pepper chicken with zucchini and wild rice, her glass of white, my glass of reluctant red with a glass of ice on the side.  And I see all the defensively aggressive things she says, "oh, did I hurt you..."  "you hate me," for what they are, coming out of that hurt scared child of many emotions.  I can say now, "mom, you're only saying that out of the situation you were placed into in your childhood." 

And all the positive things she tries to offer me on the ride home, oh you're such a good driver, are out of a fake placation habit, a wishful smoothing the drama over but knowing it will come again, as it does almost every night so that she has to stay up.  Oh, you're such a good driver... Oh, I don't how you're doing it, but you're getting us there...  I get her inside, and go for a nap down in the cellar after taking care of a few things, noting the dirty plates from the earlier part of the day, sitting in the RubberMade tub.  

Yesterday evening, Tania Ramalho is moving to Alb., New Mexico, a little acknowledgment of our friendship, mom's former colleagues.  I bring wine, we have some of Sharon's banana chocolate cake.  Spiders.  Deborah Stanley leaving.  How is New Mexico.  I ask, can we do anything to help?  The moving truck comes tomorrow at one.

Mom keeps repeating the same thing, over and over, about if any of them will be the next president of the college.  No, mom, they are retiring.  They aren't interested.  My temper grows short as we drive back in the dark.  No more unemployment.  What do I do with my stuff, my apartment.  Barbara, showing me the yoga room accommodations down in the basement, she says to me, the situation is not sustainable.  She's the ordered logical one in the relationship.   It's easier to drive a moving van up Route 81 in October rather than wintertime.  Yeah...  She's right.  I'm not sure I can go back there, to my old DC life, which then leads to the question in this unending series of Catch-22s, what would I then do for a living...  But she's right.  None of this is sustainable.

So I get up, even facing the helping friends move, taking mom along, of course, they are her friends.  What do with any day?  It's always a problem.  I take mom for a ride, I get errands done, we see the old Fort and the Lake, we see the big red ship parked at the cement end of operations, we go back through town, the Paul's Big M little supermarket, then back close to the townhomes, near the junk guy who took us on the great four wheel open buggy ride through the swampy areas to show us all the wildlife, who has had to clear out a pipe, a dead baby beaver in it, so that the basement won't flood, just past him the power relay station where the beavers had dammed up the pipe under the railroad tracks, the big pipe replaced with a bigger one...  We walk back to the car, "I used to walk here when I was a kid..." she repeats, we get back to the parking lot, and mom says, oh, I thought we'd go out to some nice little place for lunch.  I don't even answer.  The end of the month is coming.

It's important.  I do my chanting, namah shavaya, my breathing and puffing exercises, "skull scrubbing," which is actually a fine description of it, who would have known, after stretching the basic stretches, and it just has such an effect, a positive one.  Breath in, breath out, Ham Sah...  Then five minutes to relax into corpse pose...

Thou art that which is, an individual, indistinguishable, part of the Universe, turning back on itself to discover the beauty of its own creation...

After lunch on Wednesday, the 29th of September, after I get my sadhana calming routine in, we go over to Tania and Barbara's house over by the university to help with the packing.  Moral support.  Mom brings her book along.  We get there about 2:30. 

As the truck gets packed, mom spends time inside on the cushiony couch, with her former colleagues, who now that, politely, she repeats herself, quite often.  I engage with the men, Barbara's son, in particular, a musician and a master of the recording studio.  

Leaving, mom feels a neediness.  "I've messed up my life, I should have been engaged with them," the bustling energetic group that doesn't sit around just reading books and talking to herself all day long.   Well, mom, I think to myself, you're 82 now.  You've made your choices, you've lived your life.

And every day I feel forced to placate her, and can't get anything done.  She says she needs to go out to some little place for lunch...  Okay, Mom.   The Press Box is closed, so we try the hotel restaurant, sitting at a booth near the bar, a new menu...  Mom is extra fragile today.  She looks at the menu, stymied.  She reads off the entree page.  Cajun Chicken fettuccini...  Mom, that's a pasta dish.   Fried seafood platter...  No, I want the Grilled Alaskan Salmon.   Okay, mom.  Don't rush me.  I order our wine, there's no way, it seems, I can go through this without a little juice.  Did you order food?  No, mom, I ordered wine.  Broiled seafood entree....  I read her the description, not changing the words at all, just reading them out loud, taking a glance over at the bar, a pretty woman with her back to us, with her boyfriend and two other males having beers.  

You hate me.  Later at the rest room she leaves her cane in the stall.  I have to go in and help her retrieve it.  I used the men's room, came out, find her wandering in the lobby...  I couldn't find the restroom, she says, angry at me.  Mom...  I ushered her in the outer door of the Ladies Room.  She couldn't make it through the inner door.  Four five glasses of wine later, we depart, full of animosity toward each other, but for a few breaks in the clouds.

Today, Thursday, September 30, James Dean Death Anniversary, Mary is taking mom down to Fulton for lunch at the Half Moon Cafe and then the hairdresser.   I get a three-hour break, but I have to get us to 11:45.  I'm up, get yesterday's dishes done.  Make a pot of green tea.  I'll be able to get back downstairs and do the sadhana in peace.  Mom comes downstairs, still wearing her clothes from the last two days, a petticoat with a trailer.  She doesn't want any Pepsi this morning.  Mary's taking her out and she doesn't want any liquids to fill her bladder...

I had an inkling yoga would save me, would get me through the whole crisis, as long as I could do it.  

Signing up for a class was a great idea, in fact, but with days off, and having to come back to the reality of mom's constant presence, is as much as a downer as the yoga is positive and life-affirming, changing.

Mom is so full of sound as sits downstairs.  She picks up the paperback E.B. White little book of essays.  The cover has fallen off.  The first fifteen pages are detached.  She picks it up.  Mom, it's falling apart.  I take care of my books!  Mom...  So what if it's falling apart.  We're all falling apart.  Mom, you have lots other books to take with you if you want.  Why did I leave it out, even out, out on the couch where she could see it.  The disagreement breaks the short spell of my being able to tolerate her company.  True, I am jumpy.  The rent is due.  I don't have a job, nor a career, and she thinks she has is bad, take a look at me, sweetie.  The funds in her bank account sink lower at the end of the month now.  

Be careful for what you wish for, Dharma Bum.  You'll end up like Kerouac in his mom's basement, trying to protect himself from the craving appetites of the world, in the way you have construed it, not as a scholar, living as a rough peasant, fooling.  Fooling yourself, when you should get serious and really read the Bhagavad Gita and get serious about it, what a human being is supposed to do, become a soul in soulful being, everything in this life on borrow, no need for any extra sensual stimuli which would only distract us and lead us to be around other people, craven types, who we have the craving for pleasures in common with and end up being led to highly unfortunate lives, instead of investing in knowledge and learning with the one earthly life they have here.

Don't be a writer.  Be a leader.