In through the first sliding door, still laid with matts for the winter and the wet and the wind, in past the plastic bottle and can and glass recycling machine, then in through the second automatic door, where the grocery carts are parked in nested formation, and then through the door inside the small old supermarket, the newspapers stacked to the left, the little blue grocery baskets to the right as you head in past bread on the right and then the peanut butters...  There's a little raised booth where a manager's assistant sits, where you buy cigarettes, other transactions, and throughout, if you look, the old market is trimmed and decked with touches of old Oswego and the train station motifs throughout, if you're not too lost in yourself.  I go through and look at grocery items.  Does something speak to me?  Is there a psychic bend in time to which direction I am bent in, buy bacon today, oxtail or short-ribs for a stew, sausage, what else do I need, on top of the strictly normal functional things, the cold cuts, the fried chicken to keep mom's stomach happy when I go for my walk when she's started into the wine already.  Spinach in bags, pre-washed, onions in little red fiber net basket, nodding to markets long ago, old brakeman's lamps hanging above the checkout counters, toy trains along high shelves for decoration, framed pictures of the old town in old photographs back in its magnificence, large old brick buildings on both sides of the great wide river feeding out into the port, mills, grain elevators, small factories, before the evil destructions of Urban Renewal.  How many could have lived in the old Nestle plant complex down the road in Fulton, poor also beautiful Fulton...

And Mom is already on me, "Jesus Christ," banging angrily at her yesterday's newspaper when I come up or down from my hiding sleeping place, coughing and hacking, some bad air in here after so many years, maybe the foundational leak under the front door staining the cement blocks...  She'll be angry and dissatisfied with me all day, as I keep her, as she sees it, in the car when I go in to do the minor Shopping of the Groceries Station of the Cross, so that she can use it for leverage when she says, "well, what are we going to do now,"  just in the way she says, "Well, I'm just a stupid woman, what would I know..." 

The cough, the great cough.  It's not fun.  No simple way to clear it now.  Dry air?  Mold?  Failing lungs?  Some organ growing with a cancer within to push in on things...  I try.  I heat water, I make my tea, I try to demure, outside, clear the upper breathing...

Every day a battle.  With an economic cold hard reality behind it all, and because of hers, my own.  Family are the ones who will crucify you.  Looking the other way.  

At night, the creepy things mom murmurs, before she goes to bed, again, unhappy with me, the queen displeased, as she leans back on her bed, barely enough room for her little old body, piles of books and papers about to slide (they keep me company, she says, adding to my sense of all the lonely abuse she's withstood, as much my fault as anyone's), "I can find a new husband," really mom. And adding a little dig.  "One that likes me."  It's not enough I've found her her cat, told her that this is indeed, her home, "no, I"m up at the other place, and it's too cold to walk home."  She murmurs on.  "You hate me," she might be saying, and I do, she's right.  Not that I ever meant to.  And I empathize with her too, of course.  I did my best, she says.  I don't deserve this.  Yes, you're right mom.  

Maybe I could get some help. From somewhere.  The Void.  From the rich worlds of the I don't care people.  To whose world I can't get back to.  Pretending to have seen too much, in my own head of judgmental too kind to others nonsense.

The day starts and ends in the same way.  I go back to a nap, a light sleep, hiding again, before I can sneak a few hours to myself.

Stories of the Irish.  

My grandfather, hard-working chef, working more than one job to get by and take care of family, breaking his body down, slowly, bit by little bit, unfiltered cigarettes, my aunt has an "Aunt Jean" story, as my mom is lucid around 7:30 before the dinner I've worked on, simple, easy, is ready...  It's Thanksgiving, and coming down from Beverly in from Danvers--mom must be away at college at UMass by now--they show up at Aunt Jean and Jimmy's, four in the afternoon.  "Jean, when did you put the turkey in the oven," he asks, as they come in the house.  Everyone is hungry, probably.  Aunt Jean hasn't even put the bird in the over at this point...

And maybe sometimes it is better to have a rough job, the one my grandfather Ed worked, one that involves a kind of thinking deeper than the business set mind.  "Work smarter," they say, but, what good does it do the Earth, this planet...  to work smarter, not harder.  

I run the dishwasher through, two nights and days worth, I suppose, after dinner, and getting mom wrangled and set, something on TV I can watch for a little while, a reality show about homesteaders, Swiss immigrants, who came to Alaska to escape Hitler and the Nazis.  

After a few hours rest, around 1 in the morning, I sneak past a snoozing mom on her bed, I need to get up, write a bit for my own sanity, as it's been one of those days when it closes in, mom sinking down into her condition, you don't even have any time to think of old slights and shitty people, 

So I come downstairs, having moved from the grievous basement's cold darkness, a towel hung over a PVC pipe tube to block the light of the front, the southwestern little low to the ground window, having moved upstairs again, on the same level with mom.  The upstairs bathroom.  I have a narrow space for my sleeping gear, but, maybe it will be okay, with earplugs at the ready.

I cough some.  And then the need to vomit comes, so I stand outside the kitchen on the back stoop, trying to clear my passages, but up it comes, thickly, it will not wait.  I can't make it back to the bathroom, which has its own close airs, no clear air coming from the sea, so out it must come, over the little railing into an overgrown little place, a weed bush of a tree.  Oh fucked up days of fucked up days, and by now, a year away, how will I ever get back now, how will I not be marked, by my own insane out of polite society customs, being the Scape Goat in life....  Thick glop.  Here comes the Wild Mike's pizza I took from frozen into life last night late, sharing with mom, adding fresh mozzarella and banana peppers from a jar for a nice tang.  And up comes the wine colored things from the bottom of the stomach, of a system, an animal, trying to breathe, trying to escape from all his own bad choices day after day, trying to be a good Jew, a good Christian, a good whatever. 

But how will I ever be employed again, and I'll never make enough money to have anything but rented, on the way to, perhaps sooner rather than later,

a final resting place.

It was warm for a bit, then it got colder again.  The wind, 25 to 30, hurt.  

I thought mom's hair appointment was today, and that made us both nervous and mom was fishing around upstairs in her drawers doing nothing from what I could tell, just looking blindly in drawers, fiddling with this and that, and then with the visit this week from Saint Elizabeth coming all this way on the shitty road, the road so lonely, both ways, no one giving a fuck, and my own holy middle european monk father saying even, "I wouldn't wish this drive on anyone."  Cold darkness, shit coal mine territory after all the farmland of beautiful Cana home of New York State before the land changes to a natural boundary south of Binghamton's beginning of rivers going different ways and the valleys breaking up in a foreboding way, this way, the hard ground of Pennsylvania, a long no-man's land extends before you with a cruel road too.  The publicly available radio will be in and out as far as things that sustain, though one could always go to Country Music beyond the occasionally but sort of rarely useful preacherman Jesus radio on the low college station end of the dial, all the way to Harrisburg, get across the river, and finally Gettysburg, with the Round Tops right there, sustaining breasts of history after the wilds.  Ground to rest on, after all the struggles, please let me stop here, but you have to go on, and on, toward the worst part of this disillusioning drive that reveals so much about the American Economy.  

God Bless Joseph R. Biden, Jr., President of these United States of America, who knows these towns, lived in, knew the heritage, the difficult lives of Harrisburg, after Scranton and Wilkes Barre and and and Hazleton, the Burger King in Ravine off 81, preferable to, at least different from the next stop, another McDonald's as you drive out of the last danger of the mountains unto the flats that lead to a western leading road of tedium even through beautiful country farmside, past Fort Indiantown Gap...  tricky rest stop you don't want to stop at because it's too hard and suicidal to try to merge back on...

And Trump just came in, to satisfy their justifiable sense of displacement, the things the Hedge Fund guys and the Koch Brothers and all the One Percent so don't give a fuck that the Confederate Flag still at rest stops and gas stations and McDonalds in the back of Ford F150s.  

But I won't go on about such.  

draft sketch 3/26/21

What they don't tell you in a city or in any town is that everything under the economic sky is, in its own way, subsidized.  And there I was, a dumb kid working my ass off in the DC restaurants for pennies, anesthetized by what once were the classic affordable democratic pleasures of company and dining and a bit of a wine that go back to the beginning of us. 

Sure, there were enormously accomplished people, finely educated beyond being just having learned how to think, and learn, but onward and upward into law degrees and so forth and then the training of a career.  And one would naturally kowtow to such people, to not quite grovel before them, but in a way to eventually befriend them, by doing so ultimately realizing that, in a way, they were not so far from your own level, or rather, than your own level, when you got down to it, was not far away from theirs.

What a city holds out for its elite is class snobbery.  You put yourself up by putting other people down, and ordering them around.  The squeaky wheel gets the oil.  The complicated pain in the ass gets the attention.  The people who put down others, abrupt, self-important...

But guess what, folks?  The system, their system, doesn't work so well without its peons, people regarded as being stupid, or poor in their own making of important choices.  Then it's too many chiefs and not enough indians.  

And I'll tell you, every now and again, you hear it, how they, the upper people, regard us, the lower people.  Attitude.  They have to look down on anything you do, if it is not useful to their own interests and means, as being the things of a rube, of an innocent fool.  The book you wrote cannot be any good, because they have better houses and cars and bank accounts whereas you have none of that.  

The snobbery gets manipulative, and the poor and disgruntled, squeezed endlessly, their jobs sent overseas, a working person's place in the economy marginalized into gig worker peondom, all for the sake of the profits of the One Percent Goons and their corporate share holders, who cares, as long as profits are up, as long as our stocks are up.  And you see, oh, look at the great tax break the politically entrenched rich folk, supportive of their "law and order," look what that did to our national and general economic underpinnings.  A basic sucking of money, earned wages and benefits, out from all classes below the upper ones, and into the upper ones.  

Oh, gee, and who made extra extra billions during the pandemic, a time of coming together in national crisis, of collective mobility for the common good, who but the billionaires who were already billionaires.  Shameful.

This was, this type of snob thing, by the way, was never the culture in the French Bistrot where I put in my time.  Bruno, and all he hired to manage and partner with, but he in particular, was a socialist deep down.  And as Godfather of now two restaurants, feels a responsibility to his staff, staying open in hard times.  (though living in some form of material comfort, fine things of a decent living standard, befitting gentry.)

The places where I worked came with an all for one and one for all attitude in the fiber, in the core of the job, the shift drink at the end of the night.

It’s mom's birthday of turning 82 years old.  I think Truman died when he was up there like that.  

The writer by himself is cannon fodder.  But he has to stand up for himself and his own work.  He must refuse to accept that his work is not subsidized as all things are.  He has to make a sort of political planting of his flag.

After her birthday, the second Moderna shot.  We make a deposit at the bank just over across the bridge over the river under the overcast sky.  I take her for a look at the lake, and then to the Big M.  At the counter, stuffed peppers. Yes, after getting mom shot number two, I think we’ll celebrate with three of them.  Make sure your mom drinks lots of water, a kind woman to my left says, after her experience of fever and bed.  The woman behind the counter:  knocked a neighbor of mine out for four days.  In the parking lot now, the wind has picked up seriously.

Back in the car.  I want a Texas Hot, my says, firmly.  The opening of Rudy’s by the lake has been anticipated.  There’s a newspaper blurb.

I’ll make you one at home.  No!  I want one at Rudy’s.  You always ruin everything!  So now we gotta drive back town, west, past the university along the lake.

Oh Jesus, it’s opening day.  You have to go through the whole system.  But I relent.  I park the little old car across the street from the place.  Mom gives it her best to give directions to me, peppering me with questions, "are they open? what does that sign say?  are you calling them?" on and on.  So I'm standing outside the car, and she's as grumpy as she was in the pharmacy, truly angry at me, why do we have to do this, where were you...  Now she's telling me "it's cold.  Shut the door."  I'm waiting, and finally a voice answers, a young woman, and I thank her, give us our order of a two Texas hots, a side of Texas hot sauce, a Center sandwich, which refers to the thick cut of of the fried haddock.  I wait outside, the sun is coming out finally.  Then they call me, and I go down across the street and wait in another line, where a few people are standing with beeping devices assigned to them.  (I should have just gone to the head of the line, but I'm rusty at this.  It was the same way last summer, the first pandemic seasons.)  I look back up at the car and mom comes out of the passenger side and then gets in on the driver side.  I wait and finally I come back across the street with a little cardboard tray in a paper bag, and inside, on paper plates, wrapped with foil, our sandwiches with lemon and tartar sauce and ketchup packets, a few napkins, not enough.  Usually we sit down by the lake, but with mom telling me it's too cold one moment and then warm the next, I figure it will be easier if we go eat at a picnic table, just us two.  With a little bit of sunlight on us, now at 2:30 in the afternoon, and mom's bitching about the details of this and that, and there in the distance below is the long flat surface of the lake beyond the rocky shore and the picnic tables and gull laughing as he stands on the top of the roof, celebrating the season's opening of french fries and other chicanery and food thievery and good smells and people and kids and dogs happy with eating and the garbage bins, looking for diners with less than watchful eyes.

We finally get back to mom's apartment, taking a little ride along the lake, past mysterious old abandoned wooden cottages almost out of Russian woods and such.  I'm keeping her hydrated, but she gets angry with me anyway.  She goes upstairs for a nap.  It came on all of a sudden, she tells me later.  

Earlier I'm in the drug store aisles looking for an NR41 little tiny coin-like battery for the automatic quick-read thermometer.  Now, finally some satisfaction, having opened the little clear plastic and cardboard paper packaging to see if the little hearing aid battery sized thing would fit the device, nope, then just returning it and purchasing the same damn thing, after taking a mini course in battery labelling, I take mom's temperature, beep, and then when ready, a triple beep, voila, 98.4...  Everything made in China.  Flashback of mom irritated with me in the car, on one hand saying how she's not the village idiot, perfectly capable, I have a Ph.D., I gave her a mask to wear earlier as we left, for the Covid plague times, but by the time we get to the drug store she doesn't have it, can't find it, and so I pull out the spare I brought along, Mom, put on your mask, we have to put on our masks before we can go in, but she holds out, because it's windy she says, holding out until we're in the first of the double doors, yes...  She marches in now, with her mask on, somewhat cockeyed, past a man, an older gentleman with a large bandaid on his right jaw bone, a kindly elder guy, and she says something like, oh, here's a decent fellow, unlike that man I came in with...  All the way, get her in the chairs set out for this purpose of the vaccine shots at the pharmacy counter aisles, announce ourselves with the vaccine card,   

The whole thing here like this on a daily basis, "you treat me horribly," mom tells me.  I'm not the village idiot!

I grunt and groan, bearing the burdens of a beast, a stock animal like the oxen, the ass, the horse, pulling the plough forward, getting bitched at the whole way.  I have my little fantasies of being a young man coming out of college to find all his talents at his beck and call, an actor, a writer, a guitar player, a musician of jazz, rock n roll, you name it, I can do it again, down in the basement, broadcasting to the entire world through my iPhone recordings of myself.   Escapism, hiding, staying up late when the witch goes back to her upstairs apartment, before she comes down and demands something of me, what are we doing today, what's next, where are you going next...  And instead of wishing to work in daylight, I want to hide in daylight, resting.

And sometimes I'm so exhausted by a single day's efforts of keeping her happy while doing all my duties, I can do nothing but retreat to my puffy green air mattress, to lay back quietly maybe under a warm blanket, going back to the mother ship, the spiritual home of the spiritual traveller, the Adept, the soft warm welcome of return to the space ship, and glowing within the energy of all the chakras all lined up like lights around the edge of the flying saucer...  Home, my friends, let us go home and reflect upon that world we were just in, the human world, the world of suffering beings who do not get it, ignorant to the great Truths.

And sometimes when I'm walking along a road, somewhat wearily, but hopefully, pretty young married women in the vehicles assigned to them for all they do, like a Jeep wagon, an SUV, a large used to call them station wagons but now they are higher up on the level of the great manly pickup trucks here, these pretty hard working wholesome women with beautiful faces, smiles break out on their faces while I'm taking my long slow walk along the shoulders of roads that once were only farm service roads, roads to deliver trade and goods back and forth to the port city town.  Why they smile, sweetly, with an empathy too dislocated to find in DC, what do they see, a young man grown into mid life manhood of sadness, after much strange work of his own, attempts of entrepreneur ship, my kindly face a blur, a waif of an old historical image, as I walk along, pensive of the stick trees along and the wet shoulder of the road spots, do they see a Kerouac, or a wandering still surviving lost disciple of a great Holy Man of Jesus or Buddha or Mohammedan roads...  He's probably taking care of an aging relative, all alone, for they, the nice family people here who have people to talk to on phones as they walk their own exercise walks, more vigorous than mine, less perhaps an exploration on the surface of this strange planet, such they might think.  He deserved kindliness, they say, even if he might be a bit of a lost bum.  Their sweetness passes at 35 mph, and I feel it tangibly, a surprise as it passes, and the Lord from Above says sweetly to me, these people up here along this lake, they get it.  Even as the churches here slide quietly into quiet dusty mote strewn light shaft through stained glass window airs within their pews, fixed and solid, air in the furniture grounded to hold on to in times.  How crazy it is here.  People are nice.  

The nice people here, if on their own, and not distracted, by small crowds or duties, what have you, maybe they get why the space ship landed here and the metal door opened and I came down the ramp, to make the Earth stand still with my humble stumble bum-ness.  

On the green air mattress I am traveling through spiritual space and time and finally figuring out why the things of life are, in the absence of my father, my true saint fallen into the world whose face shines out of some old ikon of Slovakia or old Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his own Turners Falls up in Montague up along the Connecticut River in Western Massachusetts sainthood while his mom died of TB, off to the WWII service, then back to Mass Aggie, but not as a horticulturalist, but as a botanist, with R.E. Torrey as a mentor, leading into the Theosophical...  That saint who did so much for me, and I failed being there when he died.  Kissed his forehead and touched his cheek, just like Kerouac found he needed to do when he looked at his father's body after all the struggle and the sickness.  A clip of hair, from that man who held you close, did so so much for you, let you bloom in your own way under his gentle botanical guidance, knowing that I too would suffer, as I always understood, once, as I cried, the neighbor girl Anna having seen a ghost go by out her window in a house just down the road from us, my spooked Sunday morning tears--even then my brother was too cynical and rational to be bothered with things of questionable validity--telling my dad in the driveway, as we backed out, to go down and visit the bakery and get the holy Sunday New York Times, that perhaps these spirits here were already here, before we came, and that is their world first, and not ours, most correctly, to a child in the passenger seat up front privileged, with his benevolent mono-god his own Father, my tears lifting, the realization descending of a higher truth, and I felt my father smile, and his rugged saintly happiness, a man who'd been through a lot of shit (and also good stuff) by then, in a gentle exile.

You can only know this, even as you did as a young man, with the authority of years of wanderings under your belt.  

I wanted to write in my own given natural way, the way I talk, in the manner in which thoughts come to my mind.  I didn’t care about any particular literary endeavor, successful or not.  I wanted to capture speech, American thoughts, ways, in the way Twain did.  Kerouac.  An ear for the music in words.

As I’ve said before, I got tired, I am tired, of being the people pleaser.

And I regard whatever work I do as a spiritual endeavor.  Keeping bar, landscaping. 

And now finally, writing.

Kerouac was serious about the term Beat having its origin in the Beatific, in the Beatitudes, in his strong sense of the people he encountered, jazz men, drinking bums in alleys...  An attitude that gives way to a way of focus, a filter to all experiences, putting them in perspective.

You can never be realized about a thing into you are truly willing to pursue it.  

So, I stay up late, after receiving my own first shot of the Moderna vaccine for the Covid-19 Corona Virus, 2020, 2021, ongoing.  I took a nap after the shot, in mom's living room with the afternoon sun rolling its rays in on me through the front window, again returning to the mother ship, the holy time traveling spacecraft that gets our souls around through countless kalpas of time and worlds, and happily, too, Mom was upstairs and being quiet.  I'd checked in on her, flipped around the channels to see what was on PBS and TCM playing the director's cut of Lawrence of Arabia at 4, gave her soup and then water, taken her temperature several times, once 100.4, then back down in the normal range, maybe it was the two Bayer Aspirin I gave her.  My homemade electrolyte recipe, a dash of good salt, a sprinkle of baking soda in a quart of filtered water...  I went for a tired walk later, after taking her for her usual daily drive, now in the afternoon with the sky losing its sunlight and becoming a bit more dank of cloud covers, the drive the usual affair of cheap wine, a newspaper, a few back-ups for the kitchen, cans of cat food, up the road, under the power lines, warm enough to sit on the guardrail by the entrance of the power grid transfer station, the swamp to my back, dried hearty ragweed stalks still with their blooms intact, so I could write on my iPhone a little bit, just to get down a few thoughts...  Hitting the buttons on the inner tape recorder, back to when I walked into the Five Points, crowded with college kids happy in the warm weather, and the guy just to the left, looks like a boxer, asking me if I'd like to taste a sweet white or a dry red, and as a professional courtesy I accede and bow, to taste from a little tiny red plastic cup, it's a New World style, Argentine, Mendoza Cabernet, 10 percent off, not my style, but it's actually more subtle than I thought it'd be, but here I am, on a mission to get the 2019 Bolla Bardolino in the 1.5 liter size, and I'm being a people pleaser yet again, as if I felt obliged to give up my whole life to make one lost sheep happy, and he adds a little tale about how he was a bartender at the Crown Plaza, the famous circular hotel at the foot of Syracuse University's hill, and just east of the raised highway of 81 as it passes through, and how he got a little tired of the grumpiness of drunks at 2AM, and now puts a lot of milage on his car, and we talk of the importer he works for, and they have DeBouef in their portfolio...  back to mom and the car, into gear, off we go in our little Japanese tank to swing by the lake...  So I'm sitting there and the high power lines way way up are humming away in the air, and there is the Beatific peace I was writing of here in earlier parts of my thoughts and the drafts I try to capture them in, like a spider's web, or a fisherman's net, of an eel run, the Beatific sensibility now shining over everything, telling me that it is in fact okay to be sort of miserable, because that's what it's all about, not the consumerism, beyond the simple things you need truly...   Gulls cry like cats, Geese bark like dogs as they come in low, perfect aircraft for the airs of God, and maybe in certain old parts of my brain I think of the little poem I wrote for Mrs. Martin's 10th grade English class I think it was, "I strum the strings on my guitar, and I go free, away from here.  And over trees and through the wood, away from things I understood."  Not bad.  She read it aloud to the class, and I felt that nice soft feeling of being responsible for something good, though I dunno, it just came through me, just a moment of clarity, honesty, finding a path, inspired by something...  All there in this ostensibly dreary setting about a mile or so from the shores of Ontario, the electric steam plant's two huge towers of smoke stacks, here in rushy weeds where the low parts are wet and muddy, a few gravel paths here and there, but somehow I find it all quite inspiring, upon this day where I got mom her second vaccination shot, struggling with her for her to put on her mask and sit there, the whole day, like I may have said, sort of a very minor Station of the Cross, including the opening day at Rudy's scenic by the lake as you eat your beautiful soft rolled moist haddock sandwich, and then the charred almost Hoffmann's hot dog with the Texas hot sauce laid upon it just so, the lake changing colors as you look at it out to its distant edges as the planet's lake meets the horizon beyond which you cannot see, there at the picnic table under the trees with everybody on opening day going, "how does this go, go to the window to order with cash, call them, or go on their ordering website, with credit card in hand to read off all the little numbers... now what do I do..."  God, show me the way.  I take a little short walk up past the first little pond there to the right, with the sort of cage fence they needed to prevent the beavers from damming up the pipe going under the road, and I see more Beatific things, and I hear, as we first heard yesterday, the sounds of the peepers, the little tiny frogs or tree frogs that come together to produce a beautiful chirping harmony that makes you feel like the trees are wiggling and stretching out their rooty toes to go dancing in the night, to stretch the sun in in gathering branches, ticklish little buds coming out now, the birth of leaves and pussy willow soft things.  We need to keep hydrated, so let me fold from my duties as the cook here, and order Chinese soups and chicken wings and dumplings from Food Chow City II, just over the bridge, but they deliver...  Yes, make this night a little bit easier.

I end up getting up and staying up late after dinner, to write down my thoughts in the night after putting on my orange rubber gloves to gather and soak the dishes before filling out and finishing the great loading of the dishwasher, but like clock work mom is angry with me again, even only after two glasses of wine, even after the first sip, over dinner, I can't even remember now what we ate, the Chinese food I guess, get her up to bed, with a glass of water and aspirin at the ready after the day turned bad and mom is talking to herself, they all hate me, bastards, and no Lawrence of Arabia on tv.  

Everything is neither good or bad, but thinking makes it so, Mr. Shakespeare.  (And Kerouac's girlfriend, first wife, when they escaped NYC to train up back to her home in Grosse Point, he'd go into the bathroom and lock to the door and read The Bible and Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Bible, for four hours at a time, and no one could use the bathroom, neither she nor her sisters.)

And Jesus Christ was there at the dawning hour of the great enlightening thought, that life is in its very essence inclusive of suffering, of what feels like suffering, of what is suffering, and then so firmly ennobling that suffering to give it redemption, raising it into "happy are the meek and the mournful..."

Ahh, but feeling the effects of the vaccine, or from having simply stayed up too late fooling around with my little writings and inspirations, sipping away at the wine, I don't jump off my pleasurably crinkly air mattress down in the cold basement.  Feeling wiped out, in need of sleep and hydration, a break from my intense little old stubborn foot and cane-stomping charge, I rest more, but that totally back-fires, for when I hear her now loudly calling out fluid riffs on "Help!", rising up the stairs, it's obvious she's been into the wine, by fits angry, expansive, proud and spiteful, and too much in general to handle and I haven't even had my tea cold from the fridge yet.

The only advantage of this, on a windy day, winds of 30 mph, is that after I feed her a piece of toast with chicken salad, she's in the bag, and will soon go off to sleep, though one cannot be 100 percent certain thereof, so I might as well heat in the microwave a little bowl of soup with one wonton dumpling in it, and humor her a small pour of a little bit more wine from the box into a glass with an ice cube in it.  She protests that she wants a ride, so I say, okay, sure, but by the time I come down from using the john and checking on the upstairs, yes, she's fallen into an upright nap on the little sofa with the cat along the top of it, and I check in on her a few more times, then with my coat on, with my hat, I slink out the back door, starting the car, checking the mail, the car has revved up and then down low again, all warmed up, and I go back up to peer in through the front window, and no, she is not still on the couch, and when I quietly open the door, I sense she has gone up to bed, and I have a nervous sigh of relief.  Maybe it's the vaccine.

And when I drive out and run my errands, find some chardonnay with a lower level of alcohol to it, get an easy little dinner for us from the Port City Cafe, stop by the Stewart Shop for a newspaper, by the time I get back, she is indeed asleep in her place on the edge of the bed with the piles of books haphazardly strewn to her right as the television gives out CNN news.  A lot of thought has to go into these little dinners and meals I feed her.  I was going to do fish sandwiches again, but decided against it.

Who is to know, who is to say, when unhappy thoughts get in our way.

The tension here.  No wonder I feel like walking on eggshells with her around.  The readiness of her to charge me with some unfairness, some slight, some nastiness, even as I get up to investigate the kitchen at the start of my day, and I must go into the living room to answer her questions, and if I say anything with candor, Mom, have you been into the wine... then she even gets worse angry at me.  And no way to claim, look mom look at all the things I helped you with over the last few days...  In her mind she was perfectly appropriately sweet and well-behaved, not a short tempered so & so.

I have things to give other than a glass of wine and French Fries over a bar and to a table.

But then I get mom on my back, this kitchen is a mess!  Or telling me, like I'm her husband, that we are through, or that she'll kill herself, you'll be done with me soon, I won't be around much longer...

Then again, think of the layers of life, but now through the focus of the Beatitudinal approach to our experiences of everyday life and events...  The light from the object you are studying is broken up by the prism into its component lights and energies, and then, Oh, I see...

sketch 3/12/21

It is necessary that I must distract my mind if I can begin.  Maybe I'll find something to watch on the computer, something to do with my background interests.  Guitars and music, a broad category to chose from, the technical equipment, lessons of how to play a Beatles song, a video of an old band, or maybe a poet, Larkin reading, or some sort of travelog, an Irish monk's place.  The life of a musician.  The Civil War era people.  The history of wine.  Mountain climbing, the Eiger, Everest, K2.  The tiger.  Kerouac's rise and decline.  Jesus on the Sea of Galilee, travels of the Buddha.  I confess to being stuck sometimes, the same things.  Sometimes I sit through things of questionable factual background.  JFK.  Giotto.  

Jesus had a pre-existing condition.

Cooking helps sometimes.  The building of a stew.  Sear the meat.  Enter the onion, the vegetables to follow, then the wine to deglaze, and then the adding of the stock.

The more I get distracted, the better.  This lets the inner wheels turn.

The awful rule a writer must live be, courting things different from the facts of reality.  A lotus eater, tranquil, forgetful, distracted from real life.  The writer needs it.

As the distractions go, so goes life.  More and more, something like Thomas Merton, a Desert Father for advice, in this land where I am stuck, no answer to anything, everything leaving one caught in a trap.

Draft 3/13/21

 Another Friday evening that has no meaning.  No cause for any Happy Hour, but rather a questionable first sip of low alcohol red wine while mom dithers in the background, wandering, coming into the kitchen where I sit to get a couple of saltines, then another trip in, to feed the cat, then a trip to the bathroom leaving the sliding door open, then back into the kitchen again to find herself more chardonnay, mumbling to herself a narrative throughout.

I'm having a crap day.  I didn't do well holding back my anger in the morning, coming down the stairs, there's mom in her chair, reading, the kitchen a mess, dirty cat dishes on the floor, an open can left out, the cans of cider I left out by the sink, the jar of almond butter open on the counter top...  Mr. Grumpus, she calls me.  I tried to avoid the wine last night, but yeah, again I was up late, to have some form of miserable peace in the night, as if I were studying something, and the cider wasn't doing it, so I had some box white wine, actually not bad from the Bota Box people.  I can gather the wine isn't so good for me and my mood the next day, but then again I can't quite tell given how things are now, thrown up into middle aged limbo. I was watching some YouTube pieces about monasteries again, one out by a river at the edge of barren desert edge in New Mexico, and then one about Trappists in some large monastery out in Iowa, where they make coffins out of the wood from their forests, oak, elm, pine.  They aren't, the coffins, the simple pine box with the characteristic shape that widens out above the narrow feed end, then after the shoulders and folded hands, narrower at the head.  Like the one John Paul II rested in in St. Peter's Square with the great book open upon it, pages turning in the wine, or like the simple one they put Mastroianni in, if I remember correctly.  Dignified.  The ones the Iowa Trappist make are hand made of course.  Rectangular, with side panels cut for some touch of decoration.

Well, I'm quite tired of her presence, but the sun's out, and after my shower, and feeding her some sliced turkey breast--she dirties two plates, then goes into the living room with a bit of cheese and the slice of turkey to eat without any plate.  "You don't do a fucking thing," is what my mind is saying.  "At least I do the dishes," I express to her when she complains about my morning moods.  

Anyway, I end up taking her along for the errands in the old Corolla silver grey.  Down to the western end of town, 5 Point liquor store to get some wine, across the road from the McDonalds, the steam plant smoke stacks rising in the distance at the edge of the lake.  We go for a quick ride to the lake overview, and you can really see the curvature of the globe the earth and the waters sit upon.

Up Second Street, the old movie marquis is lit up, a fresh development here, the lettering saying Tom, and below it, Jerry.  Up past Mohawk, taking the rear entrance into the Big M parking lot.  The sun is out still. Fried fish dinner offered at the deli counter hot bar.  

Then later, westward again, out 104 to the turnoff, the road leading you South over the fruit valley farmland to the Rice Creek Nature Center, where the waters are higher than normal, geese in a thawing estuary, and I regret not being a scientist like me dad who gave me all the encouragement one could ever ask for and yet I failed at that.  There are nice birds at the sunflower bird feeders hanging from their shepherd's hooks, a bluebird, a gold finch, chickadees in lively flight.  We have a nice moment, and then we drive back.  Then the kerfuffle of getting mom, the New York Times and her book in, and she's still wearing her sunglasses, leaving her regular glasses in the glove compartment, as I take the wine and the groceries in and wait for her to follow me up the stairs to 35 Cedarwood, so I go back, put her glasses case from the car in and on her Eames Chair, but by the time I get to the kitchen I forget where I placed them, look through pockets of the winter coat, can't find them, ahhhhh!  Then she's mad at me, so there goes the nice day, but I don't have much of a care about that and having forgotten canned cat food at the store, I drive back down, then go for a walk in a cold descending wind at twilight.

Later, after I get in the above scribbling, I heat what's for dinner, clam chowder and the fried fish from the market, heating the chowder on the stove with a dash of milk, the haddock in the toaster oven with some chili, a local tradition.  We get through dinner, and I get mom off to her bed and the tv and the cat, then I go back down and soak the dishes, check my email, etc., pour myself a little more wine, The Maltese Falcon in on Turner Classic, and then I go back and load the dishwasher up with the soaked plates, as the cat ventures outside while the wind blows 26 miles per hour.  And I'm full and tired and full of hateful thoughts anyway.

So I ease my night with some wine, a mass produced one, by Bolla, a Bardolino, which is light.  

I talk to a coworker about work, and he sends me some texts that are snapshots of how things are there.  I feel far away, I tell you.  I feel less like an unemployed piece of shit.  Several customers, amongst my favorites reach out to me, an email from Bob and Lynette Harris, a message from Pete Thompson, saying they all miss my presence there.  A bit of 'it's not the same place without you," because I've been there long and steady, faithfully.  For years.  To mine own financial detriment, but I was there when no one else wanted to take care of mom.  

So what am I?  A child?  How can I fail so badly at making a living?  Art was not worth it, writing, music, too many nights in a roadhouse were a crime, a blasphemy almost....

I try to find the right blend of distraction and attraction.  Perhaps a great writer, a Vonnegut, a Tolstoy, could create the necessary spell of distraction within their own creations, so that the deeper thoughts could come through as a coherent system previously unknown, doubted even, even internally until it might come out.  Distant planets of Tralfamador with higher forms of realized Christian spirituality, visited by Billy Pilgrim, hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, or elaborate tales of Princes and Princesses and court intrigue against a backdrop of the Napoleonic campaign to Moscow, the love story of Tolstoy, as Levin, and his courtship of his wife, the wholesome bookend in Anna Karenina.

Probably the same reason I liked tending bar with all the interesting talk and people and conversations, the distractions that let the Holy Wheels turn, through their seasons, to the end of considerable creative moments, whether they are caught on record or not.

Mine, lost to time.  No one stood to record a mutual heroic life.  Underrated.  Quiet.  Hung about with the sting of New York City rejection from a phantom princess all happening at the tender age when depressions come to adults.  The tragedies of a gifted mind, a jerk of all trades, master of none.  A weed growing in a lost place.  Yet still, with a human soul.  And perhaps as good of an idea as anyone else about how to approach the great matter of life.

The stone that the builders rejected will always be the first cornerstone.  So they 

The Bardolino tastes better now that it's been open for hours in its larger bottle, six hours.  Mom has relented, visiting once, briefly, having a cracker, not willing to brush her teeth or use mouthwash, and quickly, for her, back to bed.  

The cat is calmer now too.  It's 25 out, with winds continuing.  The sky clear to the stars.

Outside, the cold feels like heat in the summer, in the way it caresses you intimately all over your body.  

Mom comes down again, just when I thought it was safe.  Eventually I placate her with the chicken salad I made last night.  Oh, she always hates mayonnaise, can't have any mayonnaise on her club sandwich, but how she like it.  Without pear or apple, no strange herbal touches on my part.  Finally, she goes back.  She had sat in her chair before, talking about her books there.  I don't get it, she says.  Earlier I saw Sherwood Anderson on the ottoman but I'm not sure if that's what she's looking at. 

 By the first day of Spring, March here, two fingernails have those painful breakaway torn open edge cracks in them, hangnails?, and both thumbs have small fissures on the outside edges just to the side of the nails.  Doing anything with my hands is painful and awkward.  So finally I go with mom on our daily errands to get some of the versatile dish soap made without the chemical additive of Sodium Laurel Sulfate.  Sudsing agent.  Toothpaste with that in it will put wintry cracks on the sides of my mouth where the upper and lower lips meet.   Of course mom doesn't do the dishes.  She'll dirty two plates than eat her slice of turkey right off the counter top.  She'll feed the cat in one dish with one can, then open another can and use another dish.  I know how to feed my cats, she says.  On top of the cat dish she used an hour ago.

So then over to the Five Points for wine, then on to Raby's Ace Hardware, everything neatly arranged, looking for some heavier rubber gloves that won't leak after washing dishes with them in the hot soapy tub three times.  Back in the parking lot, I pass a white SUV, the driver with two chihuahuas.  Mom wants to go look at them, the sun is out, I tell mom it's okay, if we keep our distance, so we look from a distance and still the little dogs go crazy and the driver looks at us like she's saying what kind of fucking idiot are you.  

Then back into town for the groceries and the newspaper.  I drop mom off, lug the groceries in, and then I say, mom, I'm going out for a walk.   Fields near the Rice Creek Field Station.  Big red barns.  Fallbrook.  First time I've tried yoga in a long time.  I do some poses in the sun, the obvious usual ones.  I can't get into my headstand, which distresses me.  I'm careful about planting my the top of my head in cradled hands, elbows just so far apart, I walk up with my legs to where my spine is close to straight, but when I push up with the legs, nothing happens.  Barely, into my lotus, it all just sucks.  There is moss by the stream, soft areas, not so muddy like little mounds of poop.

I take out the camera function on my iPhone, takes some pictures of trees, bare, in sun and shade, old barns, rolled hay.  Getting closer now, to the apartment, I take some pictures of the Lazerek whole operation.  I'm thinking about the woman I saw sitting outside Cheap Seats sports bar across from the McDonald's, first day of Spring, happy hour, golden sunlight, and up ahead there are blackbirds up in the bare sugar maple tree, and then mom is calling.  

When I get in, she's telling me what a nice guy I am, and how kind I am to come by, and "I won't take up too much of your time..."  So gentle she is now, right.  She reads from a intro biography of Emily Dickinson to The Collected Poems, beginning with mention of the very important letters of the day, Emily writing to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and she drones on, in her dry with gutteral spittle voice, barely holding the sentences together, but proud of her knowledge....  I order Chinese for us, soups with dumplings to hold us through the horrible dry apartment paper dry air.  

And by the time we're done, I can't bare it anymore, she says, okay, just a little more wine and I'll go off to bed, it's bad manners to leave the table, by the time she gets upstairs to her bed, she is talking again, they hate me, bastards... oh, help, nobody cares, yelling almost, again, and I'm heavily on my air mattress soon enough, God give me rest.

I knew it as soon as she was happy with me when I came in the door.  I just had to wait for it.  You're bored with me, she'll say now and again.  Or, well, someone has to talk, because no one else is talking...

In the end there is no such thing as love, nothing but a childish thing.  We endure each other, that's about it.  I wrote a book that had some attempt at love, but yes, it was all bunk, romantic.  

I don't miss DC.   The people there aren't nice.  Except for the musicians, and even then.  It's heart breaking.  Every being is commodified now, taken as a soulless unit.  And anyone who doesn't want to play part to this disgrace is regarded as a creep, a loner, the outsider, a person to be used, taken advantage of.  

The inability to say no.  The inability to ask for what you want...  The abuse, of allowing other people to run your life.  Thus was I prepared for, and reminded by, by Creepy Old Guy and a whole flock of bar customers.  People coming in on me riding me.  People who won’t leave.  An offer of some kind of friendship, but with a penetrating bind.  It’s a feeling of being abused, one that, like a sexual abuse as a child, goes down deep in your spirit, placed in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.

Sunday comes and it’s a sunny day.  I catch Betsy’s yoga class over the Zoom, just taking mental notes from my tired spot on the air mattress, moved down now into the basement now that it’s warmer.  Then an hour of rest, then up to face mom in the kitchen daylight.  

Take a quick shower, then ride with mom down together to get the newspaper in the nice little rusted old Corolla.  A cup of coffee, a sandwich.  I get back to the car, she wants a scoop of coffee ice cream, okay.  A ride down by the old fort, to see the lake.  We’re looking at a War of 1812 placard, strike up a nice conversation with a guy, turns out he’s from Arkansas, up here working on the yearly shut down they do, down at the nuclear plant.

I take the car dipping down along the boatyard of the port, and up we drive by the Press Box, people outside on the red stained deck...  mistake.  Can’t we go...  no, mom.  She thumps the paper and then turns away from me looking out the window.  We are crossing the bridge in the bright light, blue river streams below us.  What’s up, mom.  There’s nothing to say, she tells me.

Oh Jesus I had plans...  I’m seeing the blue sky and this air, and God I need another walk at Fallbrook and another crack at yoga, but I turn the car around.  I get her out of the car after three attempts, two times finding the back windows down.  Then mom wants to bring her T.S. Eliot book in.  We get up, but then there’s a wait and some kerfuffle and mom has gotten on this thing about the conversation we had with the nice man over at the fort...  Then quickly our table is ready...  So we go in, another afternoon spent trapped in the relative darkness of a dining room with the threat of the impulse to have one drink just to get through it..  and there’s little old mom right to my left as we sit by the bathrooms...  we are through, she says to me, after I try but fail to be happy...

Later on, as I sit there at the table, I go to my phone to file my weekly unemployment claim, but it doesn’t go through, a message of my benefits expired.  Which is a feeling beyond description.  Later, taking a walk, oh, it’s been a year, the DC system wishes me to refile, to go through what I did before, a series of pages with click yes or no... some of it auto-fill and some not.

The man in black by the lake, “I made some bad choices in my life,” he says, when mom asks him when he’ll retire.  Never.  Me, too.

I walk up the moraine hill in the fresh 5 PM sunlight.  The moon showing in the blue zenith, up above me and the high power lines by the grid station sector.  What if my unemployment doesn’t go through?  But then theres the man in black, he gets it, he labors away in to dying breath...  And what am I doing anyways, but having to go back in and deal with an old woman sitting in her chair... I should go get some wine for myself.

I’ve made a connection on Tinder with a little girl with a pretty face.  She’s funny at least.

And my old friend from the bar wants to bring her demented 82 year old mom and 12 year old daughter up for Spring Break for a change of scenery, as if I feel like entertaining now...

Misery of the human condition.

By now I almost feel I’ve parted ways from the old life of people pleasing, of letting people even kind ones walk over me, which was my job, but for what?  I could count, I remember, on a happy jocular patient spirit coming from within, myself showing up, but then to go home, without any worthy relationship beyond friendship I had much taste for.  Waiting on people, waiting, and waiting on them, till it was all I knew, then mom calling me hours after I’d fallen asleep, myself saying aloud, oh no, when I heard the ringer going off.

Then there’s my stuff, the things I am responsible for, but have no place to put...  my old life... fake.  People I always had to estimate through my own professional calculations, and on that regard I am not such a pro, but how could you be in such an atavistic environment as a bar...

The city tries to tell you too many stories, niches filled with dull stories of salesmanship, and you look underneath them, and there is often very little, just another lonesome entity trying to make up a story of themselves...  And those better at lying, at manipulation, at abusing fellow beings in their own creepy ways will come out better...

But who am I?  I’m too messed up on my own to be able to move forward with what attracts me.  There’s always something big, a monster, in the way.  The feeling that if I acted it would only go wrong, horribly, anyway.

 And then there is nothing that is good nor bad.  There are the facts of life.  Rejection.  Failure.  Struggle.  Persistence.  An education.  There is no plan, but that of God's.  There are simply people wise enough to realize the situation.  I care about nothing.  I care about everything.  There are the steps in life, 'tis all.

Everything and I are lost.  Everything and I are found.  In so called defeat there is the great success.  In the sorrow comes the laugh and joy.

Mom is a buzz kill.  I've set up the cooking of sausage with peppers and onions.  I've made a chicken salad from yesterday's rotisserie from the little friendly supermarket.  

I go and check on her.  Instantly the creativity is gone away.  Vanished.  The mood, the inspiration.

It happens every morning, too, or my version thereof.  Mom comes down.  Every single harbored thought, gone, chased away, fleeing the egos.  

But there is no point to writing, say, fiction, for me...  It's all about the long trip of riding out one's own psychological events and doings.  What was true one day is no longer true the next.

Perhaps that's why I adopted this awful insignificant form here.  Mom will be down soon.  I'll be obliged to listen to her will and her mood today.  I don't want to, but that's what will happen.  I got out of bed, hey, that's not bad.  It's not twenty out.

It's St. Patrick's Day.  Okay, so I'll take her for a drive, on the way to do the usual shit, the wine--I'm out of cheap low booze Italian red, plus there's nice people, women my age, who work there--and a run through the supermarket...  But I drive west, as the weather's not bad, the sun trying to come out through a high lake-cloud haze, over the steep hill past the water tower along to the three way intersection, the bottle can recycling place, the low muck farms on either sides of the road, and up around the bend, and behind the trees on the left there's a large bird, maybe an eagle, I thought I saw huge wings and the carrying of sticks.... then up the hill and over the hills the narrowly spaced trees of the forest tight together, then down past a swamp to the main road south, Oswego Center.  We take a left, and then a sharp right, and then over around the curve to a beautiful preserved old farming and natural area, across Rice Creek over the newly built short bridge, and then we park by the barn and I get her out of the car and we go for a slow walk down to where we can see the creek running clear below us.  The sun is out.  There's a woman with nice wide hips wearing high English muck boots on the other side of the creek walking in a field with two large terriers...  It feels good out here.  The grass field behind the long barns that serve for events might be suitable indeed for yoga when the weather gets just a bit warmer.  

Then onward, and mom telling me she doesn't know how long her bladder is going to last, so, we go down to the Rice Creek Field Station, the pristine new building of cool glass, and we put our masks on, and I take her in, down the long hallway, and she's telling me she's surprised by how many rules they have, like changing the sign on the bathroom door after sanitizing the hands, etc.  There are stuffed birds and snapping turtle and foxes, frog skeletons, a beaver skull, a snow goose, an owl, a few voles...  We're looking at the table with the newsletters and branded coffee cup and hat, and a woman, a professional, an academic, comes in and by us, and offers to help us with anything if we need.  No, we're good, I guess.  Mom's retired from the college and used to be on the board whatever you call it.  So we nod to each other, nice to come down here, mom needed to use the facilities, nice day, etc., and she goes up the hallway.  

As she's going away, I ask her, "are you a botanist?"  And she hesitates just a second, turning back, and says, yes, I am.  Oh, cool.  Yeah, my dad, I nudge mom implicating her too, he was a botanist too.  Old School G.I. bill.  Taxonomist.  He ended up at Hamilton...   Oh.  I grew up in Clinton, actually.  Cool.  I ask her, where'd she do her Ph.D., in what, alpine plants...  

A wistfulness has come over me, when I remember prowling the halls outside of dad's office in the science center, and the conversation comes to a masked end, and I take mom gently out to the car.  We drive past a funky little cool spot, the sign says, Acupuncture, and there are Buddhist symbols in the years of the old house.  There was a guy with a smile when we waved as I try to point out the sugar maple sapping going on across the road.  Should have said hello.

But on we go, and by the time we get into town, yeah, it is St. Patrick's Day, after all, so why not go to the Press Box...  risky, stupid, I know, but I'm desperate to keep mom entertained, and while I mentioned how bad I feel, having passed up so many lives and studies like botany that would have led to decent and productive and scientific field studies...  ahh, regrets...   No, mom, to tell you the truth I'm not happy with myself, in fact I'm quite ashamed of myself.  But people like you, they respect you...  Yeah, but inside I feel like the biggest creep...

We get to the Press Box.  I get a Guinness.  Mom her wine.  I'm hopeful, thinking we can get in and out, then we'll go by the grocery store, we'll get home with the newspaper, I'll make a beef stew, but it starts to go in that direction where Mom begins to be sort of stomping happy, "I never have fun," she says.  Then she'll look over the booth table at me.  "Look at all these people having fun, and we're the only miserable people here...  If you want to leave, just go do it.  If I'm making you miserable, just go.  I'll find my own way home."  Mom...  I hang on, finish a lovely burger on marble rye, Reuben style.  Mom picks at her own corned beef sandwich, too much mayo, she says, I should have known...  Damn.  So, I'm stuck again, trying to bouy up her mood, my own sinking, listening to her stories about the old diner, and at least there's Irish music going on, and I know she'll be crazy on the ride back home and in fact, she will be, but that's later.

There are long tables now, handsome young men, children, wives, everyone wearing some green, a day off almost, happiness, beer, all around, the kids running about reasonably.  Why are they happy and we're not, mom asks.  Well, look mom, those are families, husbands and wives, you know... Mom doesn't get it.  Later, she'll say some things that will creep me out about what she might think our relationship is about, with her, I'll find a new man, and my constant Mom, I'm your son, then leaning, banging my head against the nearby brick wall my side of the booth, so that she might get it, when she asks me again, if I've been to Ireland.  She smiles at people who don't smile back at her as far as I can tell, the older man with his wife and another couple, he's wearing a green knit Tam O'Shanter hat, at the booth behind me.

And we are invisible to the rest, except the kindly staff, the waitresses meeting our needs, because we are truly miserable.  And it doesn't help me to look around and see a world full of normal lives, happy family social gatherings, free of angst and hatred and aggression and judgment and strife and murderous thoughts, all around us. 

It's gotten louder, and to continue my attempts at conversation, with all the few bits of charity I have left, I move over to mom's side of the booth, to tell her again, yes, we all went to Ireland together, yes, isn't Irish music great, yes, and here, do you remember where we went earlier, down by Rice Creek, pulling out my phone to show her...  

Why did I do it to myself, and I go hide on my green air mattress, too wiped out and terrified by her vocalizations to want to watch The Quiet Man, now playing on TCM, for the scenery at least.  I fall asleep, and into dreams again.

 But there are always other ways of looking at things, happier ways, more productive ways.  Stop blaming people for the choices you make, the situations you endure.  You must be getting something out of them.

No need to go full scale pessimism.

I wake from restaurant dreams.  Women who asking me for a taste of something, back over at their table.  Famous people come in, I recognize them.   But where are the glasses?   Eisenhower sits at the service area of my old bar layout at the original Austin Grill.  I have General Eaker come sit with him, or maybe it's Truman.  We are all friends in this timeless world, all more or less appreciative of our efforts, which with time, the passing of time, are now seen in some strange mathematical almost form of significance.  Maybe Milan Kundera is one of these floating through the dream, I no longer know.

W. Bush, Governor Whitman, Albright, go up the stairs, I wave them in, and nod, I'm quietly, not over going my bounds, a buddy, can say, "hi. good to see you." And for doing this for years, they too nod, to a friend.

Kathy picks me and mom up in her car when we are stranded, she recognizes me.  Touching my heart with her quiet kindness.  It was getting dark out.  We were downtown somewhere, almost losing each other, and she came along, getting the situation immediately, taking us back.

It's a very deep animal sleep.  So deep I cannot almost get out of it.  I am finally putting things together as a writer, deep in my own subconscious, deep with all this stress.

Boss has called two nights ago.  No, Ted, you cannot be a caretaker for you mum.  You'll go crazy, you'll get lost, it's not healthy for you.  They have realized this in France, through however many two thousand centuries of studying things and politely appropriately acting upon them.

Fuck dude, you're right.

But those are only words...

I feel groggy.  The air is dry up in the office full of paper where I sleep.  I'm wake up with a hacking cough, then have no energy to get up.  It's sunny out, but I feel how cold it is through the walls, "feels like" temperatures of 5 degrees.  Mom isn't squealing too much, so I rest, in and out of a similar dream, as if with different chapters.  

I'm supposed to be pouring champagne for someone, but there isn't any that's been stocked.  On and on.  You know people, you're friendly with them, you want to give them good service, a bit of an education, but...  you're overrun.   That's how it goes.

Mom and I are doing okay, and she even gives me some space, staying up in her bed.  The clock change... I'm down in the kitchen, starting on the dishes.  The Revere Ware pot I heated up the chicken stew in last night, is clean, no residue on the sides, but it needs hot soapy water.  The silverware, and the cat food dishes, I put the smaller things in a stackable way in the rubber made tub, spraying with the hose attachment to get rid of the small yucky things.  Then hot water, a good dash of dish liquid, I have my gloves on, tight, yellow, as the cracks on my thumbs have come back painfully needling me in their dryness.  I've got the dishwasher door down, I'll use that as a drying rack.  Get the tea cups and mugs going.  Okay, this will work.

I put my hunting shoes on and cross from the shade to the sunlight, bearing the bird feeder to hang.  The fresh air and the direct light helping with my grogginess.  It feels like I've been fighting off a cold, or some other blow...  what will I do if I get called back to work now?  The winter's not been time to do much around this apartment, much as I'd like to, every day a little battle.

Mom's still upstairs, after I check the mail out front.  I've made a pot of tea.  Oh, there's some bacon I cooked a good few days ago, sprinkled with the good spices, yes, I can reheat these in the toaster over to get the slices and the ends well done and crisped up enough so that mom will like them.  I'll serve them with some sliced turkey, sliced beefsteak tomato, a touch of mayo...  She comes down, in a decent mood, that's what we do.  She's happy with my little deconstructed BLTs.  My belly does not need any more dough anyway.   I ate enough Zatarain's jambalaya rice last night, late, with two hot dogs to cheer my late night peace with mom in bed, probably interfering with my rest, but hey...

The day has no plan.  The boss called a day or two ago.  I'll take mom for a ride.  The clocks have just been changed and the sun is out and the sky is blue.  Get mom to the car.  We're heading out the door, then, goddam, where's my iPhone...  so she's waiting outside and I'm still groggy looking for my phone up and downstairs, and she can't figure it out, though I thought I hit the unlock button on the electronic key fob...

We drive down, I pick up the wine for the next day or two, then on to Big M, a short grocery list, pick up a rotisserie little bird, New York Times, a lemon, a lime, another little bag of pre washed fresh spinach, I don't feel like the stew again, and while we're driving back, mom is "how about we go to the press box.  I'll write you a check when we get home."  No, mom we can't afford it.  I get her back, the car in the parking lot, she's fumbling with her sunglasses, where'd she put her normal reading ones...  I try to help her, but she snaps, "don't you touch me, you bastard," all of a sudden, and I apparently am primed too and shout at her, fuck you too...  Get the groceries in.  Mom tediously makes it back in up the steps.  Sits in the chair, not speaking to me.  I put the stuff away.  Coat zipped back up, I need a walk, even if it's freezing.  And I'm feeling pretty down.  The cat jumped out fo the house as we came in, and I go sit down on the steps down to the parking lot catching some rays from the sinking sun, and the ginger boy cat comes and and rubs up against me, butting his forehead into me, and I give him a good nuzzle or whatever you want to call it.  Rubbing his back, down to the tip of his tails as he marks me as a friend out here.

I come back in, and I'm almost about just to take a hide from mom nap with a little juice glass with some Bardolino in it, when I do the math and figure out it's easier to relent, okay, let's just go out and down to the fucking Press Box, with all the lugging of mom around, but she makes it to the car without the cane, and we have masks and spare masks.  I'm going to need some wine when I get there, glass of Chianti, seven eight bucks a pop...   And when dinner comes, I don't care anymore, I take mom's chicken fajita tortillas and fixings and make my self a fish taco with the coleslaw on top, sweet, gooey, soft, some crunchy, and mom perks up too, and what a great thing a restaurant is.  People are nice to you, there's community.  It's up there with the great monotheistic religions as far the great spiritual inventiveness of the creature.  How could we not live in society without a watering hole, a pub, a sports bar, a bistrot.  Food and drink, a friendly server, a college kid.  Strong men are in town, one with a Civil War long dark brown beard, with strong tattooed arms on him looking like a movie character over in a booth, as I sit with my back against the olden time looking stove in the corner at the two top.  The young woman who fills the pint water glasses, not our server, comes over, and I ask what she's up to, and she's at the college here, and what's she studying, political science, oh great, I just came from Washington DC, and she adds that she wants to go into diplomacy eventually, and I say, well, I used to wait on the guy who's negotiating peace with the Taliban, and Madeline Albright, "you're Czech? we like Czechs here, they like their wine..."  and I ask her what languages she's going to pick up, and she says, German, and I go, enshuldinginsie Bitte, and she says, she hasn't learned any yet, and that she's also going to study Arabic.   Cool.  She goes away with her water pitcher, and mom tells me that I'm good with people.

There are good things to the restaurant business, from working in them my best productive up and coming and then fading and down years as I grew in wisdom.  Unlike construction, you don't have to live on the road throughout the working year in hotels.  

But there are those nights too amongst the olive trees at night, troubled about the higher powers forsaking you, Gethsemane style, Old Testament prophet style, brutal shit, the world falling out from beneath your feet, God I'm fucked, style.  There's no happy answers, no easy answers, and your own mind will even add to it all, perhaps through the very and possibly troublingly flawed concept of spiritual journeys and the like, leaving people like me and perhaps even Jesus lumped into the category of the Shakespeare Clown along the edges of the tapestries of human drama and strivings and tragicomical comical tragedies, sort of like wise children with an almost better sense of ever-earthy humor and perspective.

You do have to ask yourself the grim questions, some of them professional in nature, what do you want to do with your life now, where do you want to live, maybe the city just wasn't the best place, the most suitable to your nature...

Oh, but we're all adaptable...  aren't we?

Those of us who invented the restaurant, and who tried to represent it, to bring it forward in it's most purest form, the miracle of the good dish, the good wine, all of it making humanity a bit happier and at home with themselves, to make it the most pure form, beyond all touch of that world of Yelp ratings, etc., who with flesh and blood, tooth and nail, back, foot, a family tradition, a certain Old World temperament, there tends to be sacrifice in it all.

And a certain point in life, hmmm, it is worth it?  Don't I prefer being outside, to feel the sunset upon my flesh...

Between the years of 25 and 55, boy, I served a lot of food and beverage.  I was there, the regular guy behind the bar, for whole neighborhoods in their play, and the small mistakes I made still bring anguish to me, the look on a woman's face when I tentatively said, I'm afraid I shouldn't serve you, taking her for a crazy we'd dealt with in recent memory, except it wasn't her, and that one sheep, to loose, to see the look on her face as she left with her company or her party or her date, (I'm sure they served her when she got to the table) is enough to convince me about the one lost versus the other ninety nine, let me tell you, twenty five years later, I still see her face.

But I put my body and soul into incalculable margaritas, frozen, one the rocks, specially hand made, tacos al carbon, fajitas, enchiladas, burritos, queso, salad...  corn soup.  "Corn Shzchup!" as Jose Andres, then Jose Ramon would say with his bespectacled little brother many moons ago, margarita in hand at the bar, with Rob Wilder there to escort him.

Then I served wine and just about the best kind of French cooking you could find, I have to say, and that food too having come out of a sort of dream I had, from old Don Quixote like cooking books and guides to Paris bistrot guides from the 1950s...  a rare book found at McMurty's, before it was a fancy garden shop and then a Brooks Brothers and then nothing...

And oh, all the characters, the entire world coming to the doorstep.  Buddhist monks in town with the Lama, unannounced, coming in their saffron robes and sitting at the back round booth at the old Austin Grill back by the kitchen doors, and one had an instinctive with to wait on them, this informing me too of the wisdom of life you cannot put into words or text books, more meant for greater books, books full of chapters of the greater truths that sit below the consciously logical explanations, things which the practical people, like the older brother will often come along and explain the rational logic, thereby dismissing the bulk of all you stand for, or much of it, why you felt the need to bow before these peaceful quiet men who came out of a sort of business man shuttle van.  They had a handler.  I couldn't really explain to them that not long before Joe Ely and a bunch of scruffy looking road musicians had come in to dine at the same table... near the same time, these robed and shaved head gentlemen ordering iced tea and burritos, some even with beef, and I felt obliged to tell them that the refried bean burritos have a good amount of pork lard in them, and that the black beans were vegetarian, and they still ordered the regular ones, and even a beef burrito, and maybe even a chicken chimichanga.  Monks gone wild...

But you know, no boss every really comes up to you and says, Ted, fucking Ted, beautiful Ted...   Business manners decree that they are obliged to walk past you, almost not wishing to see the details of what your generous Christian Buddhist Jewish I won't dis-include Muslim or Hindu or any savage habit of hospitality might venture to include.  Going into the office.  They the managers and the owners have stresses beyond what I could even ever imagine.  So it could only be a little footnote.  No one is perfect.  Let's not get sentimental.

But of course no one can depart far enough from their own, their own egos, their own sense of adding to the greatness of life, the wish to sit in the front rows of any night...  The quiet monks of the world will gather and go about their work anyway.

I remember the quietness of all the faces I was allowed to soothe.  Uli.  

Tears inside from all that time, and all the genuine love back and forth.  One day I will go back.

But, what it comes down to is far more not the brute way of life, the aggression, the selfishness, the force of clever business instincts and doings that make life what it is and can be for all of us, speaking as a community.

And now I am getting to be a crazy old man, there's a Francis of Assisi in our communications, the only thing that matters now.  I see it, the deeper level, the way I talk to the cat, put some hydrogen peroxide on the little bumpy scab he has near his neck, applied with a paper towel as he's at the back door wanting to go out.  Right side of neck, near shoulder blade.  I sit and let it soak on him and he starts to purr, getting that I am soothing his small wounds, and thank god it's not a tick anyway, and he has had his rabies vaccine.  

Early March.

It really bugs me not having a job, not knowing what to do with mom.

I'm wearing earplugs now, as a top round roast is now at 325 degrees after the ten minute sear at 450.   Mom is talking to herself in the living room.  I haven't worked in almost a year.

This is dinner, I don't know, one of these Covid-19 nights that bleed into each other, even in memory.  Served with the roasted onions, potato, sweet potato, a pan gravy I'm not impressed with.  I cut the end pieces for mom.

It happens slowly, bit by bit, someone taking over, ruining your life.  And then you see it was a river, strong and wide with an inevitable current, pulling you along.  You didn't know you were in the river.  Every one else was a bystander.   It took you when you had no natural defenses.  A little bit here, a little bit there.  A temper tantrum you should just have walked away from, as it didn't mean anything anyway, just sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot.  Signifying nothing.  "I'm lonely.  I'm so lonely."  Well, that's the life you chose, you should have said.  And one saw that coming, even long enough before that.

The invisible well-meaning chokehold, that takes away from the life that was given unto you... your old father, so sweet, good in every way, and her, your mother, turning into your grandfather, her father, of course, and I, the sucker, stuck with it, the kind to her well-meaning son...  right.

Saturday, before, I get up late.  I really don't want to do much with her today.  It was a pitched battle getting her in to have her first vaccine shot.  It's sleet early in the morning, pinging on windows and sideboards, then it's rain, then it gets clearer, but still, I don't want to get up.  I get hungry eventually.  And I forgot to put my earplugs in.

At night, after the roast, and the retreat after dinner, I wake up at 1AM.  At nighttime there is peace.  There is no mom, how can I help?  hello?! I wish I were dead, every five minutes.  She is up safe comfortable in her bed, perched along the edge of the bed.  Hopefully she will stay there.  The moon is full.  The cat is out.  I've washed the dishes and pans of dinner, along with the cat food bowls, glasses...  I've thrown some things out, from the fridge.  I've swept the floor.  I've cleaned the counter top.  

Most things I look back at now with complete regret.  Not having a job to have a family, wife, children.  Suddenly, it seems, that happens, and yet it happened every day.

It's probably why I'm too shy to fully display my talents without feeling weird, conscious that I must have to deal with mom until the end of her life, in some way.

She comes down around 4 in the morning.  I hear her come down and whisper talk to herself in her chair.  Ten minutes later she thumps into the kitchen.    How are you doing, mom.  "Not so well.  Oh...  I'm hungry.  There's not any food here."  Mom, look in the fridge.  I get her some cheese.  She's placed her slippers on the countertop I just cleaned an hour ago.  I cut a thin slice of three year-old cheddar, an individual packet of two premium saltines before her.  She eats them together with the cheese, not using the plate I put in front her, but the countertop itself.  Then she wants more saltine crackers.  There's an open sleeve of them, so I bring those over.  She stands and crinkles the plastic foil the crackers are in, as if to further torture me.  I can barely stand it.  What are you doing, she asks.  Trying to be creative, I guess, I answer.  What are you working on?  If I knew I couldn't say.

Later, the cat comes back in.  I feed him from a can, the second half.  Then he gets up on the table, via the chair.  This is all very amusing, all of this, but I enjoy when the cat comes near.  He comes up on the table and talks to me after she's gone back upstairs.  He nuzzles me after I pet him.  I play with his paws.  He's pleased with me, licking my arms above the wrist.  

He stands comfortably before me.  The profile of his skull as he looks away, strong, sturdy in its structure, from which he looks out of, remind me of my grandfather's profile, my mom's.   The child, in old age, a strong skull, standing to eat, not caring anymore if she burps out loud, proud of it.  That's what you become.  A survival mechanism.  A brunt fortress shrinking into itself.

But what a shit I am.  An utter piece of shit.  Capable of nothing.  

There are times you simply run out of writing.  You don't want to look at anything you've written recently.  You can not extricate yourself to any platform of observation that does not support cringing.

Looking at the backdoor here, letting the cat out, the moon, full yesterday, clouds drift past quickly from the south west, leaving me feel like I am on a sailing ship, but one going nowhere.

The perceived failings of your life, no children, no adequate job to return to, really very painful... The Days of Wine and Roses your life has turned into.  No amount of lyrical prose can be a substitute for people, for family, for support.

I should never have done the things I've done, should never have asked myself to do them.  So I drank, in order to deal with the job, the work, the dealing with mom.

The Christian fairy tale...  it's not doing it for me today.  Mom creeping around.   7 PM, I get into the wine finally.  I took her out to lunch, around 3:30 at the old Press Box.  I had hot water with lemon, a bowl of chicken vegetable soup.  Mom had her Kendall Jackson and "Mary's Salad," with chicken.  The organic Chilean wine was good to me last night, no hangover.  I went out in the night and brought back a double quarter pounder and two filet o' fish.  There was depression in the morning, certainly.

But I know I'm not using my talents well.  I'm not speaking in public, explaining things to people.  Now it's too late for all that, beyond participating with the chatter at a bar.  

I sleep a lot these days. The days tire me out, easily.  My ears are tired.  My tongue is tired.  My nervous system, from holding up a person slowly falling.

The writer is the last person in humankind who is original.  Beyond many of the influences of modern life and economy.  The writer, naturally, would prefer to return humanity to the basics, to early days, ecological days, olive oil, wine, the simplicity of a communal meal, the natural garden in the rhythms of the countryside.

The writer is a Tralfamadorian.  There's not much hope for him.

In the night I have wine, perhaps too much.  And the next day, yes, I am hungover, with a headache, which is a blow, because I'd thought I'd found a way to get around that issue.  I sleep in.   We do the usual, go for a ride, an errand, the grocery store, I set up a stir fry, and even though I've fed her a fried chicken wing, she gets drunk and angry pretty quickly.  How can I help, she calls from her chair, to me in the kitchen.  I've got one earplug in.   You hate me, she says. Then quietly to herself, I don't care.  Then, I want a dog.

I text my aunt, maybe, if she had the energy, now at 7:30, probably past their dinner hour, she could talk to mom over the phone as I cook dinner.  I can't help getting involved in it, there's always helpful information, back and forth in Covid times...  I've got everything ready to go for the stir fry, just the iron pan to heat.

It gets worse after dinner.  Bastards.  They all hate me.  Help.  Someone.  Oh, help... I am going to get a Cocker Spaniel.

Finally, after I go hide, she comes up the stairs to her bedroom and the cat and the television.

I've been turning to watching silly things on Amazon Prime and YouTube and so forth, things about the Bible and the life of Jesus.  In one I find some beautiful scenes from the Holy Land.  Sprengeri Tulips in the hills above Pella where Jesus went for the forty days after the Baptism by John, provided with a cave, a nearby spring.  It's not the desert.  It's lush and green and full of natural wild flowers.

Sedative in the night for a foolish man for whom now everything has gone wrong.  Gone to ruin.

Unable, even to write.  

 I load the dishwasher, the second loading, which seems to work, soak all the dishes from the cat food dish to the cutting board and the dinner plates, a mixing bowl, a pot, soak all that in the yellow Rubbermade tub, in hot soapy water, then go through it quickly, brushed off quickly with a pad, then down into the dishwashing machine to the left of the sink, the racks rolled out for you, these in the top, these in the bottom, silverware...  By the time you've taken the dirty things out, scrubbed them off, then placed them in the racks, and before that, using the virgin soapy water to clean what you might more immediately need, or not want to scar, as wine glasses can be ruined, so I've heard, by putting them through the cycle the dishwasher with its chlorine washes, the chef's knife--I ask mom to put the Pepsi away, as a little project, and she takes the beautiful sharpened chef's knife made by Hoffritz, and she uses it to cut those little plastic six pack ring holders, which prompts me to shout, NO!, have respect for the Chef's Knife, and she goes I can't do anything right, they hate me, I'm never coming here again, as she exits the kitchen, from a previously decent mood, to go, again with some more things, then opening the front door and stepping out, I'm not following her, and then in a few seconds she is back in...  I clip the things with the scissors, which I keep clean, as she'll scissor anything in front of her now, bacon, a slice of pizza...

It's nighttime in the forbidden safety zone.   I'm waiting to be bombed at any minute, except she had too much wine earlier.  The things you cook are never that great.  You're bored as you look at the plate you serve yourself.  You see the faults... thus the beauty of set recipes to follow, rather than the made-up ones.  

I'm hungry, so there's a Hoffmann's hot dog, a sublime beautiful thing, to reheat in the toaster oven, as I ponder the Jesus Christ, Old Testament, New Testament film work documentaries I find.  

It's hot now, in a small oven proof oval plate, the olive oil helping, and now for some mustard and a pickled banana pepper...  15 minutes at 325.  Excellent.  They know how to make a sublime hotdog up here.  Syracuse.

Shame on me.  I never studied with masters,  I never advanced beyond my troubled college degree.  I was a rebel...  that sort of a thing, a non compliant type, for which one pays until his dying days.

There's a bit of Judas in all of us.  About 1/12th.  That makes sense.  The cat purrs heavily now that I've let him out into the deep cold night, and back in again.  He's the Sphinx again, as I watch in the background a documentary that offers a Google Earth sort of live earth map of the Holy Land.  The towns you've heard of, not sure of how to pronounce...  Then the cat is quiet, pensive again.  He senses my brain waves, and he's listening in now.  What are you going to do for a job, both of us ask me.  He gets it, he totally gets it.

Nazareth, yes, I think it's in the video, up on the top of a hill, thus the Rejection there, where they like him first, but then take him as a blasphemer, and gather to throw him off the ridge, except he walks through their midst.  

The cat is keeping vigil.  

Two to Three AM goes by very quickly, in the blink of an eye.

I go for a walk while the sun is still out.  With the Northwest Wind blowing along exposed parts of the road, even with the orange light of the sun as I come down the hill along the road scrubland woods too dense and tangled to see through, an unhealthy forest too crowded to offer any great specimens but a sort of low untended and Posted woods, no trespassing, why would one want to except to dump something or level it all and build another house, it's cold, and I'm tired when I get in, feeling ready for a nap.  But I push on, pouring mom a glass of wine, along with some saltines with almond butter and slices of cheddar on top.  These last few days have been very depressing, again, waiting on muddle-headed idiot Republican Senators, and I don't even feel good any more about my life's direction, such as it was, beyond its own simple old world appeal, a server of wine, a poet, a sort of missing holy man to the community, a preacher of the good wines, not the bad ones.  Even as I go back to the Portuguese box red wine, hopefully made in a scale that allows for the native yeasts as opposed to the replacing of those by the genetically modified yeasts of industrial production...

If I say something is blue, mom tells me it is green.   Feeding the cat causes strife between us.  As an old barman I find it very difficult to take inefficiency in a kitchen task.

After dinner and the long nap to hide from mom's noise, still I am depressed, almost too much so to pick up a book and read.  First of all where?  There's no chair for me, without going out my way...  A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders' sort of master class on writing and the economical form of the short story.  I barely have the energy at first, lying there on my air mattress head propped up on a pillow with the door closed ...

I can't even think straight these days.  The trap is closing in around me.  Even if I move from DC, where will I go?  How will I have time to pack up my apartment when I can't leave mom alone?  How can I look for a job?  Where should it be, this job, all my things...  

 Short stories, or rather the point of them, are sacred to me.  I used to read a lot of them.  Chekhov, in particular.  I've always found his stories speaking to me, speaking to me of reality.

In one sense, why waste this energy, unless these are actual people, or composites thereof, or of something in your own deeper truer self.

You could use your own self, your own direct experience, as you perceive it, as a long on-going sort of short story, episodic perhaps, pointless, maybe, but, you hope, of use somehow for the solidarity of people like the people you know.

In the laws of the Big Bang and Holy Cosmologies of long traditions East and West, it would feel somehow, to the naked scientific eye and gut sense, that the real stories of people's life have significance too, and that in our own lives we are living out something that bears upon the wholeness of our condition, or to put it another way, the holiness of our life stories and the things of the heart, the efforts we might make, toward such ends.  Such things come forth.

Therefore it might seem to be a good but misplaced effort to read of people of fiction that inhabit the Russian Masters of this trade, and their followers, down through Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, De Maupassant, Twain, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Carver, you name it, be the written stories and accounts be long and multi-chaptered, or short, quick, severe.

It is not necessarily a joy to tell one's own stories, as they will depict the assemblage of characters found in Chekhov, let's say, the lonely schoolteacher with her dreary thankless life, the landowner in the provinces going to pot with idleness and wine...  Dostoevsky's old insomniac tutor, who's story is, found, when they go through his quiet papers, to be the survivor the Dead House, the gulag, speaking out of Dostoevsky's own experience.

It might be significant, then, that you might ask the question, well, where does it all lead you?, the conscientious reader and living being, experiencer of life, where can we meet all people of all paths of life at a center point?  Our own dreadful foibles, our own dreadful wastrel life habits...

Chekhov, having tuberculosis of the fatal kind, did not live long enough to venture thoughts beyond his stories and his travelogues.  Others, like Dostoevsky, found a sneaky way out, not unwarranted, perhaps, having his own dramatic life experiences, the loss of a son, his epilepsy, his need to seek out something, as along the lines of a career crowning character from his last book, Alyosha Karamazov, the monk here, youngest brother in the sprawling tale of family misery.

There is inspiration for such stories, of the crafted and detailed diamonds of the short story or long short story or short long story craft.

Done correctly, the writer leaves behind his (her) notes on the individual human being and soul as well, in the myriad of combinations and variations, as if conducting a botanical catalog perhaps with added horticultural notes.  

I've been called back to life by George Saunders' latest, a masterclass in the short story, even as I read the beginnings of it, the analysis of "In The Cart," by Anton Chekhov.