So, when I get up I come down the stairs, and mom is there in her chair, and I don't want to deal with her, and I go in and pour out a cup of the green tea I made last night, Best Yet tea bag green tea placed overnight in the fridge.  I am revived, the depression of facing another useless day without a point to it, just stuck biding my bloody time up here with 82 year old mother eating your life right in front of you, that depression and the legion of feelings of different kinds of tortured uselessness, slowly lifts, and the energy rises.   I have some dandelion tea as well, and call mom in to the kitchen to share with her last night's chicken fajita leftovers.  Fascinating, I know...  She puts some guacamole on her plate, along with the thin now toughened chicken cut into strips along with the caramelized onion and pepper, and even with a good amount of it on her plate she dips back into the guacamole little container, and I say mom you've already got guacamole on her plate, and she gets up, shouts, you're always correcting me, throws down the paper towel napkin on the floor and storms out the back door.  Which doesn't last, because the wind is up and shaking the poplars around before a band of rains come through.  I've stashed a cup of coffee away still in its Stewart Shop cup with the plastic lid, and it tastes delightful and provides a small but noticeable soothing buzz.  I just read an article, you know, one of those stupid ones from news feeds you get on your phone, but I can see why coffee helps ease away depressions and that sort of thing, good for you health in general, but for the heartburn acid, and I talk to mom a little bit about it as a topic of conversation, and her outburst is forgotten, retreating into normalcy of the general lousy background I'm dealing with up here.

But anyway, to figure out one's issues.  If you could diagnose what you are doing wrong, then maybe there are ways to try, modestly, and with the limitations of the situation, your age, your own ruined finances, to try to fix them, to try and be more normal rather than less.  

Now I've lived my whole life under this strange situation, call it what you will, an overbearing inconsiderate selfish overbearing mother.  But at least she figured it out.  She realized you have to join with other people in the organized groups that exist in society, in graduate school, for instance, joining with basically like-minded other people on a general special interest--reading, books, let's say, book collecting, teaching reading--to use your talents in the real world.

The writer would be smart to join an outfit, a group, a professional calling revolved around writing of some sort.  And this is not always easy to figure out.  

We take bites over our small plates and the paper containers of carry out, and I sip from my three beverages, and I encourage, after she's eaten, her to take her pills, the two of them, in the little plastic packet from the white Medication Regimen box from Wayne Drug Store here in Oswego, great place.  There was a fight yesterday when I woke up from a nap as a delivery man was dropping off the prescription I called the doctor's office for, anticipating the long drive we can hopefully make, something to keep her calm at highway speeds so she's not howling at me like an anxious and perturbed cat the whole five hours...  I almost had to pull the little white bag from her hands as she sat on the couch, placing it atop the fridge and out of reach.  

So now my karma has come to haunt me, all those years I spent time alone scribbling away without a good reason and much to my own professional and financial detriment.  

I come down from the shower, with the intent that I might write a little bit and then we'll go for a ride, the main entertainment for her.  She asks me a few questions as I gather my thoughts to spill them out for good or bad on the page, calling from the other room.  First, what's the date today.   She's reading, again, the newsletter from the local book store, the blurb about having their 23rd anniversary party back in mid May.  Well, Mom, it's June 14th.  Did we miss it?  Yes, April, May, June, yes we're in June, so we missed it, but we were just there, and it wasn't it a big deal missing it.  Then a few minutes later I have to repeat myself.  

Then it's "how is Pam doing..."  Okay, well, we just talked to Sharon, and Sharon told us the other day when we were on the phone that Pam is even busier now, after she has announced her intention to retire.  Sharon said a lot of people are in shock and reaching out to her, etc., etc., etc.  "So you're saying that I shouldn't call Pam," mom says, trying to get something at me.  No, mom, that's not what I said...  More manufactured anger.  Maybe I'll just sneak out of here and write in the parking lot of the Stewart Shop over a cup of coffee and not have to deal.

But she subsides as I type away, feeling better now that I'm showered, feeling I might be getting a handle on at least some of the issues revolving around my depressed moods and lack of purpose and my sense of things as they stand in real time real world situations.  Like my professional one.  As I have been like Cervantes been more or less kidnapped, as he was off on the African coast, or, sent off to prison, as he was later on sent to prison for failure to pay taxes, that sort of a thing.  "What the fuck have I done wrong..."  And there are many answers, but the main one, probably an offshoot of having to work at night, physically, with my body performing many tasks of lifting, moving, pouring, and talking when appropriate to do so, mainly listening, sprinkling in a little bit of levity as an honest Shakespeare clown, that I was ever too exhausted to be able to get up and really move to be part of the rhythm of normal every day life.

Bad choices that had little to do with the talents I was half familiar with and ready to cultivate, and yet even then taking up some exile in crap clerical office work, night time as a busboy, but never with people I really might have shared much with, but that I would have met a lot of people, from all walks of life, as they say...  And in doing so, I tossed all my talents and my skills, I tossed them away, tossing away the resume point that I was a college graduate of a fine New England Liberal Arts college.  

Mom seems to forget our little unpleasantness and comes into the kitchen after pooping in the side bathroom fortunately having slid the door shut.  

I told her about the deer the cat and I experienced, and how the deer, a doe gracefully watched myself holding the cat in my arms as if it half puzzled her, how I spoke to her about how beautiful she was and how happy we were to have her visit as the dawn brought light to the grass, the cat having been under the larger spruce tree as she came along on tiptoe along the edge of the lawn meeting the green brambles and high weedy things and honeysuckle, poison ivy, and when I called him he was happy to jog over from his post as if her presence had alarmed him somewhat.

"Books, books, books..." Hamlet mutters as he assumes his antic disposition, and you can hear in that the bard himself, "what does one to with the verbal part of the brain, what the hell good does it do you, what can you, how can you put it to good enough use so that you'll be a leader rather than a drop out bum..."  Or maybe it's "words, words, words," but similarly, along the same lines, is how I read it anyway.

I should have worked in a book store.  I wish my books were organized, and I wish that this sea of books tossed all around were organized as they deserve to be, books on book history with other such books, Emily Dickinson books with other Emily Dickinson books and biographies and commentaries, her women's history books with their group, all in one fantasy of an organized book shelf.  I wish I could.  Would that be a start, a prevention from further self-harm...

Okay, I quit.  I'm no good.  Help, help, I hear from the other room.  But I've just read, that no matter what you might add to a glass of water, whatever you add will not do anything to break apart the hydrogen and the oxygen atoms, a metaphor for the purity of mind, via B. Alan Wallace, whose path I crossed years ago but did not take advantage of, as if I held him in some sort of suspicion in my provincial small town mind.  He'd come back from being a Buddhist monk of the Tibetan school, a friend of the Dalai Lama's...

Help, she sighs, exhaling, drawing it out.  Then into "I've had it, I've had it."  Then, I think I'll go kill myself, I don't know.

This is the price for not having joined in with fellow beings, with thinking that you were different, as if better, on a different trip than the rest of them.  Should have joined the Sangha...  or something.  The restaurant work a trial and tribulation, all of it, and its resulting angst, completely unnecessary and I should have just asked for, as mom does now, over and over again, asked for help.  Except I didn't.  

The futility of it all, but that this is life.  But why have been sacrificed... answer me that.

I take mom along with me for the basics.   The convenience store, the newspaper, a cold cut sub, a scoop of coffee ice cream, and I forget to get a cup of coffee, but we're already on to the next stop, the Big M, a few more things, Pepsi, toilet paper, cider for me, easier on me than wine, then by the lake, then back home, easy enough, except I need to find a career, this is just a waste of my time, and I suppose this is why I write, because I always waste time, it's what I do...

Hamlet is beset with what the Buddhist call “mental afflictions,” as well as real ones.  In the end he keeps the pure clarity of the mind…