This is a madhouse.  The cat was yowling in the night as I slept, falling to sleep early, not long after mom finished her slice of pizza, wrapping the rest of it with wax paper.  Where's my bedroom?  Will you be up to watch TV later, sure.  But I'm worn out and tired, and I fall to sleep even as the TV is loud. 

Later, around 3:30 in the morning, I wake up, and the problem is now that we can't find the cat in this madhouse.  She must have let him out.  The lake effect snow is coming down now, heavy, and there's a guy running a snowblower along the sidewalks.  Finally, the cat comes back to his little stoop and I let him in.  I heat a leftover slice for mom, who says she can't see out of her glasses they are so dirty.  Okay.  I'm feeling pretty twitchy, and so I crack open a can of cider and do the dishes, so I'll have some clean soapy water for all the cat dishes, the wine glasses, the people dishes.

Mom goes back up to bed.  There's some paperwork I need to get done.  The bill of the car insurance.  Checking her TIAA and the bank accounts.  And fortunately, they are holding steady.  

One writers for the glory and purpose of God.  That's about all one can say at the end of the day, and in the meantime I have the downstairs bathroom where the cat box is to sweep out.  Paper and used toilet paper rolls mom saves, smaller bags.  Keep moving.  I clear the refrigerator, let the cat out, get him back in, cook some bacon in the oven with the Lodge iron pan lined with tin foil in batches, 400 degrees in the oven.  Fill out the paperwork and seal the envelope.  Oh, thank god.  Some space finally.  Wasn't feeling well yesterday after a bottle and a few extra glasses of Beaujolais over a twelve hour period with a long nap in the middle to get through my birthday.

And Joe Biden will be elected today, and so the nerves are still up.  I was for a long very interested in inaugurals and Presidential history, but as I slacked off and dropped out in my moodiness at the end of my college days, my odd insights to Hemingway's later work as a kind of prayer, an abandonment to the textual truths of life, exemplified by The Dangerous Summer, Islands in the Stream and A Moveable Feast, work of intuitions rather than scholarship, marked by fine prose and evocations, a picture of humanity at the level of the human being's natural mind, well, I put aside all my JFK knowledge and remembered history and speeches, also all my Lincoln tales and words and letters, his speeches too of course, committed at least somewhat to memory, as poems must be remembered line by line, well, I put that aside, along with my Henry Steele Commager history books, Kenneth Clark's Civilization, the rudimentary beginnings of cultural histories and PBS, all that I put aside politically, to aim for the cultural things.  The Irish poets.  The Buddhists.  The Christian stories.  The Bible.  Shakespeare.  Then the restaurant business got its hold on me, took me for a ride.  And I went along.  And much of it was good.  Except it was irresponsible.

I go out to the car, placing the pizza box from Cam's in the recycling.  Sweep off the old Corolla, 3 inches or more of light snow.  Coming back from the mailbox I run into Ben the maintenance guy, just getting out of his car, new to him, a 2008 Chevrolet, which too has stories.  He's sad for Trump.  I don't contradict him.  He pulls on a heavy black Carhart Jacket with broad yellow reflective stripes over his work hoodie.  He's holding a Stewart Shop coffee cup.  He goes to his little shed to warm up, before coming out with snowblower.

But even as Trump flies off in Marine One and lands at Joint Andrews...  to tell a few more last lies to cap it off as he grins, white teeth...  made for television, I feel private feelings too deep and too worried and anxious enough to crack open a cider to deal with the daylight.