But now I just feel like I'm losing it, and maybe I am.  DC unemployment may have run out for me.  Did work let them know somehow?

I'm in a tight space up here anyway with mom, and now I feel truly horrible.  I could lose everything in this.  For what?

And then there's the car.  Does it need a new catalytic converter?  Does it need to be towed there.  Will AAA do that for free?  My fault for hanging out with the wrong sort of people...

I'm not doing my job taking care of mom, that is true.  I don't know what to do with her. I don't know what to do with myself.

I call the mechanic when I get up Monday.  Yeah, you can drive it down, no problem.  Probably just a misfire.  Okay, and that makes us relieved. 

But in the meantime I feel less and less capable of coping with the real world.  Tax time.  The possible disasters that could wait anytime you take your old car to a mechanic.  What's going on with it?  You get out with spending twelve hundred bucks you're lucky.  

Mom is upstairs in bed, breathing old breath away, and I'm stuck being the caregiver now and what will happen to all my stuff now,  and it's a bid tedious dealing with her all day, just to survive yourself, it's too hard to find the energy to tackle anything that might come next...  Strange, how nature works....

Jesus was friends with uses and addicts and drunks.  They grew tiresome to him.  He couldn't take that aspect of them anymore.  Job has to deal with being Job.  Job can't escape, smoking some pipe of some sort.

But Jesus can form a sort of therapy community.  A program.  Include some Buddhist type Eastern wisdom.  

At two in the morning, everywhere, in a time zone, it is co-dependent time.  

And here I am with mom, mom upstairs.  She came down earlier.  I heard her coming and brought the cat in.  Fed the cat.  Gave her her pill. 

I've walked 4 miles today, coming back from Torbitts, after dropping the car off around 10:15 in the morning, me feeling like shit, low cash flow for us.  And another week, week number five of zero from DC unemployment.  Maybe it's done.  In which case I might as well through my whole life away.

Walking back into town from the waste land ash heaps of the big parking lots laid down in front of the shopping center, the Lowe's, the Home Depot, a tool shop, further on the fast food signs.  I'm hungry, I could catch a bus, Metro they call it, but it's one of those days you need something to do just to take things off of your mind.  Big time.  Who cares where you're walking, or how shitty it might by, walking up the long ramp past the dual shopping centers up over the bridge over the railroad line across the marsh, Ruby Tuesday's on the right, blank, Dunkin' Doughnuts, a cheap but classic motel a famous rock star could die in.  Then you see the two tower steam electric plant smoke stacks.  The steeple of St. Mary's, over there on the hill, and the green coming to the trees, mustard colors, green colors, fresh ozone from the lake as I walk on and on, and down the hill past the high school there behind little humble houses, Garafolla's, should I stop in for their classic cold cut sub, and later I regret it, because three guys from the Coast Guard come in with a special floating boat with a light aluminum shallow hull.  They were going to go down by the fort to berth their small vessel on their long-bed trailer.  One of the guys gives me a friendly wave and I wave back, as I walk past shops that have closed, knitting shops, several mechanic shops, and I feel bad about walking past all of them, because I have no job, no career future, no prospects, and I'm along all these poor old shops.  There used to be some prosperity here.   Sustaining shops.  Small mom and pop.  There's a Stewart Shop.  A Byrne Dairy, brand new and clean.  Ignored gas stations, a weird quiet all over, and I shlep in it on, a law office with a Maserati four door sedan, black, parked there in the corner on the next street up after Wade's Diner I've never been to, and the guy on the other side of Bridge Street pedaling up on a hybrid bicycle with a rigged trailer full of bags and bags of Okie piles of cans and bottles for the local recycling redeemer.  Enterprise car rental is across the street there, I've been past it already.  I slug on.  Then past the A & J music store brick building, the Thrifty Shopper, the Mexican restaurant, the Chinese restaurant, and depressed out of my mind and desperate I walk on and on, having wasted all my talents and I can't even take care of my old mom's finances.

I've got a ways to walk still.  Cars go by.  Organized people.  People just going about their business, in cars waiting to turn left lane into the Price Chopper.  God puts beauty in all people, attractive enough to make you in your individual mind want to make more people.  I've seen them all along the route as I walk on, solitary, alone, fucked, broke, lost all my shit, having been broken, and there's no point being a monk because you need a job, at least you could be a school teacher at the high school given all your talents.   Should I open a restaurant bistrot wine bar here, but no, it's such a mix here, too many ghosts, too many dead dying shops, shells of life in a town of what used to be in some old fairy tales, an economy good enough to support so many little bars and mechanic garages and that sort of thing, all the old structures here like old failing quietly old teeth.

What will happen with the car.  What to tell mom.  How much will it cost.  How many months more can we pay the rent here for her before having to go into her TIAA, at which point there will be a cost, a penalty.  And I have to go in and put the papers together for tax time.  

I stop in at the Big M after my long walk.  Naked, awkward, broke, broken mind, cold, trudging on, just trying to people please with a dying glow, and will the bus come, over here by the telephone pole outside here on West First Street, bus route 2D, but I can't find the paper bus route I brought, it disappeared along with everything else, and now I just limp five blocks west, five blocks north after crossing Utica Street by the usual glib easy Stewart gas station shop, lugging now another unnecessary rotisserie chicken and a small styrofoam of ground beef mixed with rice filling wrapped in cabbage Polish glumpki or whatever you'd call it, and now money is so low, lucky to have.

Erie, now I'm cold and sore but each step brings me back closer, nearer to the apartment townhouse mom has been in for how long who knows.  

I've got to make it up to Hawley, and I see the old po-polsko hill red brick church, but i'm weary blind now, and it's not going to be even any form of happy when I get back to mom's apartment, bearing a cooked rotisserie chicken, glumki, cat food cans, cheap protein black eyed peas that haven't been there at the Big M for a long time,...

Ellen Street.  What's the point.  I should just go die in the woods, the ambiguous stick woods self cluttered in my self cluttered career free life, what will they say, he was a good guy, a nice guy, our bartender man for years, but me, to me who gives a fuck.  I take the short cut down into the old railroad sunken path, cinder grit, old trash hewn over the sides to the fancy Cedarwood Townhomes, the mailbox that tells us nothing new, just another shitty piece of mail, and when I get in, finally, the front door, mom isn't happy, just displeased, where was I, you should have called, I've been waiting, where's the car, is it fixed, do you have a car, and she's hungry, starving she says, so it's a good thing I brought along the chicken.

She lets me take a nap, and I'm out and into dreamland, body dead to the world, upstairs, the green camping air mattress my only friend, sleeping on side after meditating on back, but then I'm awake again and vaguely hear her talking to herself, oh, and the cat, craziness such as I've been burdened with all my very life. 

wake up again.  do the death march of dinner, this time easy, a frozen pizza.  

And no one understood. 

I found a Gordon Lightfoot song, the one about the ship.