But the real writing is never going to get done here.  I’m either hungover, franticly worried, or having to deal with mom.

I wake up in a panic with the headless horseman chasing me, every day.  It's like a joke those more organized than I, in life, in everything, are playing on me.  I find a moment's peace, working on my singing at night, after the bar, where my friend Mike, the local energetic guitar player, and his sister, who's flying back to Eastern Oregon tomorrow, after a month's stay, they have an elderly mom too, Irish, tell me I have a beautiful voice.  What?!?  I can't barely carry a tune.  But I played before them, and their mom, and my mom, old Irish songs, and they saw it and heard it.

I'm out for a walk.  I slept in, too hungover to move.  When you go out to the bar where I meet my friends, like Michael, they don't have any wine of note, so I get cider.  But it's big shot in the arm, to hear they liked my singing and that I, most difficult thing of all, have a voice.  So when I get home, I say, well, I have to practice, and the Olympics opened tonight, so...  They did a beautiful version of John Lennon's song.  Imagine, of course.  So, it's not easy, I have to look up the words, but I work on it.  Not much good, but I work at it.

And the next morning, when I wake, around one in the afternoon, when I hear mom calling above, hello, hello, is anybody here, I need help, help... that sort of shit, on and on, I find myself still feeling fairly full of wine in my blood, and I really don't feel like getting up and functioning, I'll tell you.  I was up til what, six in the morning, just out of my rhythms, a long held thing, a steady habit, the cat don't mind it, I find peace away from mom, what's not to like about peace & quiet, even though of course you always pay for it.

But it became such a joke, I finally said, okay, you want me to be a worthless drunk who has to deal with mom, hey, fine, I'll do that, because that is the only way, once you boil it all down.

I'm walking up by the power station, finding the water even higher now.  The beaver have capped off the structure of their dam beautifully and brilliantly, and with their eye (and their own inner level) always working.  There is a cage structure, so first the built up the front side, then they build up the sides, working with the mesh intended to thwart them.  And then, after the last great rain storms, downpours really, they have done something I didn't anticipate.  They put a cap on the whole thing, a roof over the big pipe, to finish.  And the water level, even as I am still intoxicated in my blood, but wanting to be rid of it, even so, just wanting to disappear from the face of the earth, I see the water is higher now than ever.  It's come up to the road.  It's come to the gravel raised bed of the power station...

The phone rings.  Guess who.  Yes, mom, I know where you are, I know where the cat is...  I'm out for a walk, I'll be back soon.  (And to make me even more downhearted and crazy and disgusted and unhappy, as soon as I turn the corner on my stupid slow walk back along with tiger Lillies past their bloom, and pink sweet pea and garlic wild scapes and little chamomile flowers and daises of the field, there she is in her same outfit as yesterday waiting for me on the stoop.  Oh, bother.). 

Tania, a new and great friend, an old friend, a friend from the Universe who has always been there though I just didn't know about it in my limited circumstances stuck with the same old greedy fools, were I to grow impatient, of the late night bar, I've been cut off from all these great spirits of planet Earth.  Anyway, Tania has sent me a message, by text, on your phone, there is a friend of hers singing jazz tonight at Canale's.  I'm walking back, having gotten mom's call, and I get through, I get transferred to the hostess stand, the phone rings again and again, seven eight nine times, okay, they must be busy....  I'm in a fog anyway.  I take a look at mom's main bank account, and there's forty bucks in it, great.  I know her social security check hasn't come in yet, and the other check, $800, hasn't come yet.  But still...

I go back in and try to keep her happy.  I'd like to write.  I'd like to have a moment.  She stares at me, after I get her some bone broth.  She looks at me.  She stares at me.  I look into my phone.  I'm hungry, I'm desperate, the last thing I want to do is go out to dinner, because it costs money.  Mom, I'm going to take a shower, okay.  Just to feel better.   Creepy bitch.  Leave me alone.  That's how I get sometimes. 

I go take a shower.  After, I doddle a bit, in her old office, just trying to find that one true sentence, and I'm almost there, I almost have it, I do have it, but then she's calling Ted Ted Ted hello hello is ANYbody here, is anybody here, her voice rising in panic.   And I can't take it anymore, this funny cruel joke playing on me.

Mom, look.  Could I just have two minutes.  Two minutes is all I want.  Can I have that?  Can I have two minutes.

Everyone here hates me.  I'm no good.  I'm no good.

Oh Jesus..  

So there's no other choice.  Okay mom, I'll take you for a ride.  

I put on a tee shirt.  My aunt has finally called to check in.  She's out celebrating with her dear old friend at The Red Lion, a birthday party, 76th for Yvette.  Every now and then when I get desperate, I text her, please, could you just call mom and talk to her for like two minutes, is that too much to ask...  (Again, craziness and too much wine has gotten to me, the anxious stuff.) 

But then mom turns it psychological again.  Why did I even bother.   "My mother always said, everyone would hate me.  I'm no good.  My sister, she has everything, she's happy.  I'm a failure."

Oh Jesus.

Get the stupid old bitch into the car.  I could take her out to jazz.  But, "it's too hot, it's too cold, the music is too loud, I can't go up those stairs."  I want to keep it simple.

We drive along the lake.  I look at the gas gauge.  Mom isn't quite hungry enough to go to The Press Box.  We drive right by Canale's Restaurant, old, classic, since the 1950s, where the music will be in the courtyard.  I ask her.  I'd prefer to go to The Press Box, she tells me.  Okay.  Easy.  Cheap as you can get.  Shock looking at her bank account.

We get there.  After the drive.  It's busy.  It'd be a nice night to sit outside.  But, the outdoor seating is full, and I'm already feeling guilty enough about not pushing for Canale's and the jazz out in the courtyard.  

No open tables outside, or indoors on a Saturday night in Oswego at 6:15.  I almost shouted at her as we came to the door, mom, in or out, I don't know, okay, we're going in.   Our server friend, manager, lays out our options.  I gather she would have heard me raise my voice in frustration, at mom, "in or out."  So, yeah, the bar's fine, thank you.

We sit at the bar.  And we end up having a decent time at least towards the end when a gentleman joins us.  I'm feeling horrible about missing Tania, the open sky courtyard, her jazz friends, but, here's a man who reads, who travels, who documents covered bridges, down almost all of them in New England, retired special-ed BOCES teacher, a man who knows how to work.   Great conversation.  He's been reading American authors of the 1950s, Henry Miller, Hemingway, he even, I find out later, has a soft spot for Kerouac.

Turns out he likes Confederacy of Dunces, which cuts too close to the bone for me.  He tells mom the story, of how John Kennedy Toole finally sort of gave up, and how his mother tirelessly kept sending the book around.  I've had four glasses at bar over dinner, mom's had two.

By the time we get toward home, Canale's, the musicians are packing up, Tania is gone.  We sit and have a glass of wine, and the hospitality is really there for us.

The husband of the singer comes over, recognizing mom from twenty years ago,   They sat on the environmental committee together.  He's written a book about following the old farm harvests in America. He's heading back to Key West.  Second literary conversation we've had today.

When his wife joins us at the table, I ask her if she sang "Satin Doll."  She's tired, she says, just wants to go home. Hasn't sung out in public for a long time.  "I just sang three sets of jazz standards."  She answers, somewhat curtly, completely understandable.

Writing is a series of poor personal choices done and continued every day.  You didn’t fight for what you wanted.  Guess what; you end up with nothing.  Wake up to the sober truth.

I cower and wait as I hear her stirring, above me.  The sound of the toilet flushing, her heavy hiking sneakers clomping across the bathroom floor above the kitchen here.

I don’t want to go out to any pub today. Some yoga would be nice.

Bah, look at your life, what a bum.  The rebel gets beaten out of you, for sure.

Mom left her role as a calm good mother and wife, abandoned her post when I was 16, and then, of course, I had to follow suit.  I'll show you...

I start the day trying out some yoga.  I've heard her clomping around a bit, but then she didn't come downstairs, so, okay, I'll give it a shot, outdoors, easy.  I do some warm-ups, gentle standing alignment standing up straight, taking breaths, arms up straight, stretching, and then later reaching for a sun salutation.  Stretching out the spine, leaning over, deeper and deeper, releasing tightness holding you in little known inner places, lower back coming out of hip bones, each breath bringing you closer and longer.  

Then mom comes out.  I pick myself up from pigeon pose, and go over to her, what's up mom, how you doing?  "Are we going out to Collocca today?"  She stares up at me.  (A place representing fun to her.  the place we were yesterday.  over there.  where we saw the people and we went with them.  we were there yesterday...)  Mom, that's a long drive, and I don't feel like wine yet.  And if we go out there I'll have some wine.   I don't feel like having any wine now.  "But we don't have to have wine..."  Mom, it's a vineyard.

She sits down, on the neighbor's back steps.  I move away back across the yard, where she's less in my face.  Next up in my sequence is the headstand, and I get set up and up I go.  

And when I come back down and soothe myself into the counter pose tucked in a child pose ball with my face down on the earth.  "Did you hurt your neck," I hear from the distance.  "are you okay?"  I mumble something into the ground.  

Mom, I'm doing my yoga, do you mind...  

You'll do whatever you want to...

Mom, it's good for me.  It helps me.

Inside.  Later, I check in on her.  The pressure has not gone, worse maybe.  She's glowering head down on her Eames Chair, not even reading anything.  Selfish.  Jealous, an encapsulation of all the bad emotions a body can have.

Then it occurs to me, she's confused.  She goes and sulks in her chair.  Not looking up.

Mom, what do you mean by Collocca?  

Garbled answer.  She's not clearly describing anything like a vineyard, using vague term, where we saw the people...

This is when I wonder, in my twisted anxious hungover tired brain, why is I’m not getting more help.

All my life's work, gone to try to take care of my mom, gone to shit.  Gone to complete utter destruction.  And the others simply stayed away.  A choice they made.  I was the stupid one, the fool, seeming to pick up the slack in her life, when we should have pushed her to get a boyfriend to take care of her, rather than me.  And to me it all seemed like my miserable fate from the very beginning.

I barely want to get up from my air mattress anymore.  It's dark in the basement anyway.  Not healthy.

I come up the stairs.  Mom shouts "HELLO?" as I come out of the hallway bathroom.  

"Alright, I quit.  I'll just kill myself..."  her patter from the living room.

To try to punish her or reprimand her just backfires anyway.  It's all I can do not to raise my voice at her.

"Lots of jobs out there," she says, reading from the newspaper.  Four cat dishes already today, a knife with almond butter smear out on the counter.

My career has long been a thing of professional and economic ruin, what's the point of going on now...  I break jumbo eggs carefully over the small teflon pan after the butter melts.  Add water, just a little bit, cover with the stainless pan.

And why is that so...  What depressed me so mightily, the thing I knew I'd be left to deal with.

Double barreled misery.  No job, no real career to speak of...  And then mom.  What am I doing, where am I going, where am I going to end up...  

Today I was able to go the bank, then the grocery store, then the wine shop, and each time the interior of the car heats up.  There’s particulates in the sky, smoke from the great terrible forest fires out west here in late July.

I'll never have a family of my own.  So sad.  How easy it all happened.  The saint fails.  What do I have to look forward to...  I'll never have a girlfriend.  I wish I'd known what I was doing, struggling along, not doing well.  Just by being a drunk, no success at writing, generally being regarded as a creep, well, or if not exactly a creep, just a greatly inadequate male, poor, never having his stuff together, thinking too much importance over art.  All the talent I threw away, after the rejection "at Nazareth."  My great misunderstanding of society thinks about the individual.  The individual does not exist, outside of relationships.  "That's no life." The stone that the builders rejected will always be the first corner stone, but that doesn't do you much good now, does it.

I'm writing shit anyway.

Mom shuffles around.  I can't write.  Second time in the kitchen in five minutes.  Does she know she's driving me crazy?  At least she's using mouthwash now.  

The $9.99 Montepulciano tasted like overripe dirt, a disappointment.  I'll go back to Pinot Noir tonight.

With writing you have to keep chipping away at it.  Every little bit, the attempt to throw out a rope and lash in the thoughts on your mind.

But all of this I write, going through such things here, it’s really about my own fault, my own creeping alcoholism that has gone on so long it has just kept going all these years, with the wine now, with the cheap decisions, the betrayal, the youthful lonesome punk damaging his brain.  That’s whose fault it all is, my own.  And at least I’m granted being allowed to come back here and help my old mom out, to be as gentle as I can as she’s losing it.

The alcohol for me is really about all I gave up, let pass by, as I stated she and aloof and pretending I was wonderfully creative, from within, without teaming up with anyone…

And then it’s shame for me, on me.  People pleasing.  The bullshit of late night wine and poetry… its later-Kerouac emptiness.  The man-child attempt to soothe the anxiety of his childhood.  I suppose this condition is more normal or prevalent than one might think, making me not far away from a regular type troubled guy, but that I wasted a good head start, opportunities few are given.

Mom is either bored or over stimulated.  This makes her harder to deal with.  My getting up late doesn't help, though she is not getting up early these days either.  

I have failed, all my adult life, and failed at this writing thing too.  I now have one last chance to help my mom get through mid stage dementia with some grace, and hopefully I can stay kind to her.  I pray for sleep, and for kindness.

On the other hand, being a good standing familiar shepherd to get people through daily reality, as the Buddha and Jesus do, in an off-handed way (am I using the term right?), with a little wine and comfort, there's something to be said for that too.

I gather it was just the years of panic from her phone calls when I'm at work, about to tend bar, that will throw you off and make you crave the wine at the end of the shift...  On top of other years of her stirring up panic and stress with her Mary Lincoln carrying on, shouting at my father, "you're a failure, you're a failure, you're a failure..."

But you can't bring any of this up with her now, she'll just get angrier, harder to handle, something...

The Irish have a sensitivity to ghosts.  In the broad sense of the term.  The ghost can be the soul, all the actions of a close family member, and that family member, your grandfather, let's say, can pass down his soul pattern, the rut he lived in, haunt you with it, wreck your life just like he did with his own, his soul's effort, poetically, let's say, to share the family burden, "get to work, young man..."  You should have tried to better protect yourself, or run, but it hit you full blast, as it did no one else, so that you now find yourself more and more living out his life, the anger back and forth between himself and my mother, the look for an escape when you have none.  

That's what scares me, the ghosts.  You might think it's bullshit, but I don't.

I've had anxiety and performance anxiety ever since senior year of college.  I gave up musical performance.  And my life contracted, getting smaller and smaller.  

I can perfectly understand this great era of mental health awareness, Prince Harry on Oprah, admitting his drinking to cope with the pain, Naomi Osaka, and now Simone Biles, just today, for whom it would seem to be taken for granted to be able to fly through the air and stick a landing. 

This is why I'm not a great joiner in with things, all the anxiety, and then, if you don't do anything about that, naturally, it will get worse, and you'll withdraw further into your hole.

It's the anxiety that has made me into a singular lone creature, an isolated writer.  

Back in previous life I could cope with it, by welcoming people to the great dinner party at the restaurant.  And even in that, my joining-in-with-people muscles atrophied.  I could have joined in with investment bankers selling 401k plans to poor restaurant people like me.  I could have been part of a team.  

But something spoke up in me, a sort of subtle wish to be welcomed by a Jesus or a Buddha into the circle, the team, the Sangha, the prosperous happy society of morning commutes.  It's not been the healthiest of mental lifes.  I've retreated far too often, rather than going forward.  Take dancing.  I love to dance, and I can do it free style to music played, and I enjoy it, but I have no ability with the close to close dancing out of the movies, the choreographed movements, the steps of a waltz.  That speaks right up my own alley of private fear, feeling bad for not knowing how to salsa, having been too shy for too long, being unable to come up with the admission that I need for someone to teach me.

Because I haven't been good, and bold enough, about making choices, this is where I am now, here, with my old mom, my own future uncertain, foggy, but with tasks at hand.  Shame on the prince, for turning out to be such a bum, almost even a drunkard.  And imagine how I might feel now, here, having blown everything you're supposed to do, not even being a schoolteacher for kids.

And all this is why I've gravitated toward yoga, mediation walks, to find calm within, self-acceptance.

I go do some yoga as the clouds gather into whishy whooshes of the thunderstorm coming in from the northwest off the big lake.  Twenty minutes ago, heat and sunlight come to meet my rising and then bending Sun Salutation, but now a cool has come.  Light droplets touch me as I stand in mountain pose, legs, feet spread apart, then into down dog, still, after years of doing, still figuring out as a way to stretch the spine, primarily, "worry about the feet touching the ground and straight legs later," my friend Betsy the yoga person tells me when I tell her about my weird ankle soreness.  I open some windows back inside, swiping the counter off from crumb and drop of cat food, touching on my Moroccan Mint tea, and soon its time, as the heavy droplets first come to the stoop, time to give mom her daily pills, regimen against dementia.

There's more broken people in the world than not, and some of being brave is being so enough to admit the cracks in you.  Not everyone in the world can have a decent life, not every human soul is not undisturbed by things out of their own control on this earth, with all the things that happen.

As a child I always felt I recognized a basic level even amount of intelligence spread throughout.  There's a smart kid in everyone.  The cat is smart in his cat form, the bird just so, everything knowing what to do, way better, it seems, than us poor noggin' heavy human forms.  And even insects, I see it in them too.  And if I were a teacher, I see the smart creatures in the bad kids, the literary gift to a London Punk MacGowan.  And I also know that many seemingly dumber, more ill at ease in a classroom kind of kids are way way more successful than I am.  They have wife, kids, grown up now, they own houses and have jobs, whereas I seem to get more and more anxious all the time.

Yes, maybe it turns out that Amherst College wasn't so good for me at allowing certain self-confidence to develop.  There were factors, but it always hurts us deeply to get ostracized and misunderstood, at the formative brink of adulthood in particular.  

So I stand with Jesus, and listen to His Sermon on the Mount, about who has a right to be "happy."

She came down again and asked me again if we were going out "Coloooka," rhymes with Bazooka, again with her 1940s gangster Mike Bove, (sounds like Bovie), a business associate of my grandparents in the diner days.  Up there with the way she says, I wrote about this earlier, broth, "buh-rot'th."  Or the way she says, like a child, the word soup, "szoooop (huh), a breath on the end.  Lots of baby talk from her, or childish talk.  But given that, "huh huh huh, you know what my friend Helen Brown said, 'it's wicked not to have fun,'" I endure, sip my tea, present an alternative, you know, the two library books we took out, her's a large print of Joe Biden's treatment of the sad losing of his eldest son, myself, the story of Jesus Christ told in art from the National Gallery, maybe we can go the public library again.  {I thought I wrote this down, but between the edits I'm able to do on my iPhone's access and the laptop's, I get confused sometimes, with my the wifi not always working...}

So between the bands of rain, I get out for a little walk, up to check on the beaver dam construction.  Frogs jump unseen, ploop, into the water.  The beaver have laid fresh green shoots over the top.  The red winged blackbird, who initially instructed out warning calls, is bored as I walk my way back, hidden in the reeds, calling a simple two note, .  A catbird sighs.

Mom is calling.  I don’t know if my meditation walk has succeeded.

I feed her a second meal of the day, again, the sliced turkey, but now with thinly sliced red onion, tomato, fresh mozzarella, along with the Genovese Basil the neighbors sent over to us after I, we, sent them over a bottle of French Pinot Noir, kind enough to let me know that such a wine was right up their alley.  And mom sings how I know so well to make things beautiful and tasteful, I should look into doing it for a living.  Yes, mom, yes.  Sure, yes, that's a good idea.  Yes, I wish I'd gone and tried to be a chef earlier.

(What's haunting me from those early days is the liquor I used to get into.  Shameful.  Drinking alcohol, without blessing it somehow and praying for protection, leads your soul and your energies to be distracted, so that you don't end up doing the work you're supposed to be doing.  It might not be actual spirits waiting at the mouths of bar & grills, to leap on you;  people, believe me, are distracting enough, bent on it, enough Dean Moriarty out there to take you on a hell bent trips with their weird energy, and your own soul is so lost now, given being browbeaten and taken away by everybody else's distracted idea of a good time, that you, tired out anyway, fold and go along with it, as I now have to do here with my own poor old mom.)

We go out to get our errands done.  At the end yes we need copies for the key to the front door. Everyone at the hardware store fits in, has a place to be, a job even.  It hits me when we get back.  I got nothing.  I don't have a job.

By the time I get her through dinner, a turkey meatloaf I left in the oven too long, even at 325 degrees, because of a nap, I'm still so exhausted I rinse the dishes, take her for a ride, then retreat to the basement, sack out, and even as I sleep I feel the body taking care of itself, cleansing it from its pains from all our exertions at the bar, which would be fine if we could actually support them.  At least that's how I feel.  My heart beats funny, as I rest, a sickness, devil coming out of me.

I have never once figured out how to fit in, how to belong, how to have a place, one to put me on any sort of footing.  To work in a restaurant as a front of the house bartender is to simply be a cheater, a go-along.   How could he not be.  

True, maybe you hold a line, of decency and brotherhood...  I don't know...

No wonder Shane MacGowan sings that lovely old song, Lullaby of London.  "May the ghosts that howl 'round the house at night, never keep you from your sleep.  May they all sleep tight down in hell tonight, or wherever they may be."  It's the truth.  Spirits are all about.  And if you don't take charge, and try to command them, they will take their pound of flesh, and everyone is possessed one way or another, except the real monks and so forth.  Don't be distracted.  Don't end up being so mislead, haunted.    That's a bar, isn't it.  Complete distraction, with some pleasure added, feeding your tummy and whatever else, a show your brain can work on, thinking its writing poetry.

But I thought it was going to be women only, mom tells me as we drive down to pick up some wine for dinner with mom's two colleagues, B & T.  She's disappointed that I will be coming along, angry to the point of hatred.  "You'll take over.  You always do."  I'm driving, Fifth Street to stop or cross at the light at Utica Street, which leads eastward to the southern bridge over the river and the canal lock.  Mom likes her rides.  Stop for the newspaper?  She's not really talking to me.

Mom, they wanted us to both come.

We get back, after a short drive down to the marina and the lake overlook.  It's hot out.  Hurry up and wait.  When are we going?  I'm hungry...  All day I've been telling her, six o'clock mom, six o'clock.

I get her some soup, Campbell's low sodium chicken noodle, just the broth.  She says broth like a 1940s gangster, making me wonder who she might have sat next to the old diner when she was the prettiest little girl.  Soup.  She says that in a funny way too.  It goes way back.  A little girl, the darling, listening to people talk when she is given a bowl of soup.  Before it went south, the losing of the diner, the hard economic straits after the decent successful time. 

I never really heard too much from my father about his family.  Most of it was Doctor Torrey.  Ray Ethan Torrey.  Professor (doctorate from Harvard) of Botany.  There was The Depression and all, of course, the movie matinee double to hide from child problems...  There were the hard grim things, the basic tales, but they disappeared under the force of my father's achievements, in World War II radar weather research out in Provincetown and in Texas.   Calling the weather at Arkansas air field flight training airport.  Issued rifle and helmet for the invasion of Japan, then they drop the bomb, just in time.

Mom has been wearing her light pink denim jeans for at least a week, and they are dirty.   There have been bits of mail, offers from the Sierra Club, and toothbrushes, their heads wrapped in toilet paper, sticking out of her back pockets.  Worn without a belt.  Standing unsteadily in the hallway in the way.  Now we get back.  45 minutes or so til we'll be leaving.  I ask or plead with her, or rather suggest, mom, here's a nice dressy pair of pants, purple blue and they'll go with what you're wearing...  I brought them downstairs where they were draped over the upholstered easy chair.  She goes off crying, "you make me feel like I'm worthless!" storming away upstairs in tears.

If I tell her she might change, no, I don't have any clothes here, she tells me.  Mom, what are all those up stairs in your bedroom...  They're not mine, she says.

The dinner party, four of us, goes smoothly.  I probably talk too much.  These women are wise.  I should learn from them.

I take a nap when we get home, tired out by the 14% ABV Rioja T served.  And when I wake up I mess around, get into the wine again, the 12.5% Loire Pinot going down easy, then play guitar down in the basement, and then next day I don't feel much like getting out of bed, and anyway...  what can I do for a career now at this point in my life, and this guitar playing thinking I can sing is a pipe dream that cycles in with my bad wine habits alone at night quietly going out of my mind but trying to not realize or really cope with that.  Just like my mom, my singing sucks.  Stop, I've been told.  Just like, famously, her.  I wouldn't want to get up and face her, but feeling the usual wine after effects and dehydration makes that worse.  I'll hear her above me, the chair creaking into the rafters above my dark basement chamber, and then she'll start to bellow, louder and louder, and playing on my guilt and duty.  "Help, oh, help...  get up you lazy bums.  Ted, ted, where are you...  oh help."

The family problem.  Which then in its turn makes for the next round of family problems.  

I look at her like she's crazy.  But now I realize I look at myself, and I'm crazy too, and hardly am I scholar about anything, at least she's made a career as a college professor, and what do I got...

And next day, I mention, as I come to the light and try, mom, Mary is coming tomorrow to take you for lunch and a haircut.  

You always spring these things on me.  You're bossing me around.  I'm tired of IT!

Mom, uhm, there's a business card with the date written in, I told you last week.  

More huff.

Finally after dinner I go down to the basement for some quiet darkness.  I've had enough wine.  We've got mom's sister on the phone, she called, that was nice at least.  Floods here and there, the Housatonic...

I go do something not worth a word just out of boredom and too out of it to go a bar and for what anyway...  

I come back, cook another dinner, meatballs, sausage, wine to scrape up the good stuff, Rinaldi provides a sauce.  The terror of being unemployed and without a discernible career seeps into my night, and I have dry woodchuck cider made of pear with no added sugar, and I drink for a bit of a relaxed time, and then I drink to quell the terror.  And even listening to Thomas Merton, who also like a beer or an ale, or a cider, he sounds like a creep too, talking about how if you love with your heart your prayers are open to God, "see," he says, as if he were a Humphrey Bogart Duke Mantee version of himself, with, I must admit, good moments, like, don't feel you need to read all the research on the Psalms, just enjoy them...  

Creepy anxiety grows.  I'm not even doing a good job taking care of her anymore, grit my teeth silently in her company.

What's Ted got to do?  He's not doing anything with his life...  he can deal with it.  What else does he have going on...

But that's not fair for me to say...

But who am I to be, to even try, to be capable of restoring mom her majesty to her original glory, when I'm the only one sucked down into her disaster.  I'm not the one.  I'm the one with the poor but fair Lynn blood of melting pot character immigrants.  Kerouac's distant relatives lived there.

And every time we go out, oh, look at the car, I like that blue.  What a nice car that is...  (Yes, I don't even have one of my bicycles here...)  What a nice house that is...  (I'll never own one, even the most modest.). 

"I hope they're paying you for this," she'll say, now and then, like when I'm toiling away at the stove or a tub of dishes.

I check in on mom after eleven in the morning.  Mary is coming to pick her up at 11:45.  Lunch and a hairdresser appointment down in Fulton, so I'll have three hours to myself.  I'm feeling pretty drained, and by the time I get her out the door, answering her last flurry of questions, I have some tea.  I decide to to do some yoga outside in the backyard.  They just mowed it earlier in the morning, and the sun is muted by cloud cover then breaks free, but still not too hot.  The ground is a bit damp anyway, and my yoga shorts get wet bottomed.  But it's the first time I've been able to do yoga in a long time.  I'm ginger and careful with my left ankle, as I move in and out of pose.  Headstand is easy after a few warm up down dogs.

I take a shower, and then it's two already, after the meditation poses done carefully knowing I have need of them.  Then do I run out across town to pick up the bank records I requested, which would put my return close enough to three in the afternoon when Mary, not wanting to leave her alone, will drop her off.  So I stay, put together a load of laundry, and given my energies today this is about I'll manage, and then I hear the outdoor door open and then here they are, carrying a to-go box.  Back already, fuck.

Did you miss me, mom asks.  Three hours goes by pretty quickly, I say.  She says she's tired.  Well, why don't you go up and take a nap.  Maybe I'll do that.  She asks for a glass of water.  I pour it for her and follow her upstairs, losing my patience, I don't what's gotten into me the last few days...  By the bed she fumbles with her shoes, while I stand there patiently but wanting to yell.  Then at last I'm able to get around her, and put the glass of water down on the little table by her bed.

Then I go do my errand, driving across the town eastward in the busy three thirty in the afternoon traffic and left past the Price Chopper and the T J Maxx to the Compass Credit Union office where they are very polite. 

When I return, opening the door, the place is cool with the AC on, and it's quiet also.  I'd go for a walk, but it's hot.  Tiredness hits me and I go down and take a nap.

My friend Adam from open mic night was going to bring his band out to Fairhaven, but he lets me know, by text, that he's not going, and I'm relieved anyway, I don't feel like bringing my crap music out in front of people I don't know, at least not without having a few, but then I got to drive back, so anyway...  T & B are taking mom to the concert series in the park by the lake.  I could just let them take mom and have a break, but they are wise and maybe they'll end up being helpful.

Taking mom there, even as a group, isn't too much fun, and in her folding chair, she gets grumpy about us talking behind her.  So when I get back finally, and heat up a frozen pizza because she's hungry, and that's her choice when I present her the options, I see there is no escape.  And I indulge in the thick dough pizza myself, and then have two more slices from the heated pizza on the cutting board.  A nap and then I wake up at two in the morning, and yeah, I'm going to have some wine.

I find What Happened to Kerouac on the screen of my laptop through Amazon Prime.  And it has better fidelity than the one for free on the YouTube.  The bottle of Pinot Noir, half full is soon gone, so I drink mom's chardonnay over ice.

But what a mess this all is.  You look for a little self time and sanity and a project to get your head into, but then it's the same thing the next day, an old woman who's acting now like a petulant child.

There was yoga yesterday, but now it's back to full time with Claire.  

There's always something about the mothers of the great wisemen.  Buddha's mother dies after bearing him from her side.  Mary, a special case.  They are special, unconventional.  

I should train her better.  Get up and out the door, and go find a place to do some work, some looking for a job...  But I find myself at the kitchen table, the counters cluttered, silverware and dirty cat dishes in the little tub that I banged around in anger and frustration the other day.  You don't fit into society when you don't have a job.  No one is going to date you.  You shouldn't even bother with it. (You don't exist, except as a congenial shadow in the grocery store, with mom out in the car for the sake of entertaining her.)  Just go back to being the saint, the one who doesn't fit in, who keeps a meagre diary of gruel, steady, boring, but there, not even an interesting pace to it, just the usual.  The pit you're falling into, to write about.  A little chess game with pill bottles, turmeric, milk thistle, vitamin B, ashwagandha powder as I absorb dandelion tea and dragonwell, as mom futzes with the piles of books on top of newspapers and books on top of those, already hoarding two of the three JFK special Parker Jotter clickable ball point pens I ordered through Amazon along with a good sized bag of Moroccan Mint tea.  The cat comes in after mom comes and causes commotion, and I help her feed him with the cans she already has opened I put away in the refrigerator, and she chides me for "being cheap."

I organize things a little bit, as I attempt to reveal through writing the deepest basic truths of reality, which might be that there is nothing to really reveal, nothing earth shattering, nothing particularly interesting, just life itself in its dribs and drabs.   Life as life is, nothing interesting really, just the day to day, dealing as best you can with the moment to moment, the present right in front of your nose.  Writing is about as interesting as watching the little rainbow wheel turn while you're trying to figure out a clerical on-line form and then how to pay for it.

"Can't people put the goddamn toilet seat down," mom the boss says as she clomps into the kitchen in her Keens, hunched as she is, ready to issue a few directives about her things, jeopardizing my own motions, as when she hunches over the sink twiddling with the drain catch when there's a tub of four plates, five dirty cat food dishes, silverware, the spatula I used last night for dinner before we went to the public jazz band performance...

A mist comes, a light drizzle.   She worries about the cat being outside.  "A wet cat, well...  that's no fun."  Mom, it's not raining out...  When she asked me what my plans were, I shrugged, well, I need to go grocery shopping.  It's obvious to each of us that the cat food can situation is low.  I take the large paper grocery bag of recycling out to the recycling bin, cat food cans, cider cans, soup cans, a few wine bottles, some odds and ends and at the front door, then she asks, "Can I help, what can I do to help, you never ask for help," or some such nonsense, and I shrug, mom, I'm just going to take out the recycling...  I cross the parking lot, and god I'm in a terrible mood.  

I come back, and pick up four more wine bottles and a stupid clear plastic bin they put greens in from the grocery store, and back to the bins in the parking lot.

You don't mind if I don't come along.  Not at all mom. 

I'm slow at grocery shopping, a journey of many constant assessments.  I'm so glad to hear she will not be, and willingly, coming along.  I'm tired out anyway, but off I go.  Straight to the grocery store.

Later, sitting in the parking lot after getting some wine my aunt calls, and I remember it's Farmer's Market Thursday, where the town shuts down the Main Street.  Good people watching.  But I'm distracted, I feel distracted all the time now, it seems, unless it's late in the day finally, with mom in bed, nighttime.  At any moment I could get into an accident, because of it.  Thus the difficulty of shopping when mom's waiting in the car, or worse, if she follows me in.  Everywhere.  Everything.  You can't remember a thing, and then you're also facing choices, expiration dates, different thing that shy people find hard to contend with, how to approach, gracefully, taking the other human being, there behind the deli counter, into consideration.  The pain of asking for, yet again, another "light half a pound of low sodium turkey breast, please."  Painful.  After a while of dealing with this, you see why Europeans are so practiced.  They go to the market every day, to pick out the choice of seasonal vegetables, the best of this or that, and I've become, out of disuse and ill mental health, to be too shy to pick out what I want, and now I have a teetering old mother behind me, half entertained, half ready to become nasty and mean.  I park the car, down on Bridge, jaunt into Wayne Drug, with its classic neon sign, to get some allergy pills, maybe cotton balls if they have them, and, because I'm being brave, I ask the check-out guy if I might speak to the pharmacist, no big deal, and he says, yes, she'll be with you shortly, go have a seat over there at the consultation desk, okay, cool, thanks.  She's nice, she's given me and mom shots before, and though I'm stressed enough I have problems putting words together, like sebhorheac dermatitis, she's kind, and shrugs, about the skin tags, little bumpy things, not much we know what to do, hydrogen peroxide?  There is a thing they sell, at the Walmart, a "skin tag remover kit," but again, who knows.  Still, I'm glad I asked, and I'm glad I went through with the drill, and without mom getting grumpier in the car as she waits.  I stand and shrug, "oh, the curse of being blond haired and blue eyed," (which she is too), so I smile and thank her.  

Over dinner, the meatballs in sauce I made a day ago, it gets difficult again.  I can't find anything to talk about with mom, and admit my frustration that she can't remember the jazz band we saw in the park last night...  So it quickly degenerates again, into "you hate me," and in my mind I'm asking, god, can't anyone else help me out here...

What the hell are you doing in there?  HELLO!?  Is anybody there?  

Yes, Mom, I say, reluctantly going over to the living room from the kitchen as I absorb some bitter green tea from the fridge, get ready to soak the dishes.  

She comes to the kitchen and lets the cat in, as I'm running hot water.  I'm never coming here again.  Nobody here.  Nobody here who'd talk.  She goes back to her chair, crunching on a saltine.

Where the cat went, I don't know.  Just as well.  He doesn't tolerate the clanking of silverware in the tub.  I wash the dishes, including the meatloaf pan, and I see him back under the larch trees in the shade across the mowed grass.  

So as I heat another can of Progresso soup with added bone broth and find ham and cheese to put on the frozen Paleo bread to heat and then toast, I call mom in.

I was watching an Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown from Japan, accompanied by Masa Takayama into the rustic Japanese countryside last night, tired of the Tour, even the time trial through St. Emilion.

I feed the cat.  Oh, God, what a beautiful cat, mom says, after letting him out.

It was a pouring rain when we went out to the Press Box on a Saturday night, rain running down from the eaves like a Kurosawa film, a captive waiting list of groups ready for dinner as we sat at our booth by the opening to the kitchen and the inside waitress station, pitchers of ice water, the screen computers for ordering.  I endure it, a dull piece of fried haddock.  I resort to dabbing it with the soybean oil laden tartar sauce and have a second Woodchuck cider, alarmed at its sugar content.

And by Sunday, I've had it.  I can't even face mom.  I take my shower and sneak out through the backdoor to do the usual grocery shopping, the Sunday New York Times, without her bugging me on the way and then by waiting in the car pouncing on me as soon as I get back, "what took you so long, see anybody you knew?"  Well, just the usual people at the checkout counter and the deli counter.  It's hot out, AC on full in the car, and I drift over to the health food store, for gluten free soy sauce, forgetting to get decent salt, wishing somewhere along the line I'd tried being a chef.  

But it frightens me that I don't want to have anything more to do with her, cringing at her passing by overhead, running water, all the things you hear in the basement, back and forth, opening doors, calling for the cat, looking for imaginary people and myself hiding.

And all my own bad habits that I've knitted too solidly in my 56 year old life to change at all...

Was it the pornography I made use of last night in my ill laziness not even wanting to play the guitar amidst all the clutter, that has made me ashamed, or is it the damp cinderblock mold in the basement where I hide out getting into my lungs, or is it the dread of high summer when there is no turning back.  

And so, I slept.  I napped before dinner after my walk up to the National Grid station, I heated the Turkey American Chop Suey, microwaved spinach for dinner, and then I didn't even feel up for a ride taking mom along and went back downstairs and disappeared again and rested for another three hours.

Bukowski, most pictures of him he looks fairly beat up and middle aged fifties, so maybe a ripening is involved.

Isolation is not good.  Mom is right about that.  Were that there were bars for older people...

 Saturday afternoon.  I awake with the usual sleepy yucky feeling about going upstairs.  If I can write about all this, I'll be okay.  Writing is only a few doors away from a monk's life of perfect prayer, maybe, sometimes.  It's not too far away from meditation.  You're putting your own thoughts out on paper, which is to have a chance to look them over and say, oh, well, they're just thoughts, mental events, that kind of a thing.

I took mom down for a ride after dinner into the town.  I hear live music, a guitar player singer at Water Street, the little park off First.  Pull over park.  I get mom out and we walk down to the river and around the new Riverfront building, coming along the clean new sidewalk to the bottom end of the venue on the river side.  Mom cannot resist going up to any dog and dog owner she sees.  Oh, what a nice dog.  Asking repetitive questions, getting the sex of the dog wrong, but what can I do.  Mom's talking with a husky puppy of four months, when one of her colleagues comes up and calls mom's name, Claire, how are you, long time...  Later we sit with them when a table opens up, the four of us, Barb and Tanya, mom, me.  I went back to the car to pour us out a little wine in the vessels of water I brought, but mom got angry with me for abandoning her seated on the raised border's slate platform under a bush in this little trip, and she's right.  But to find a place for her to sit, agonizing.  She's complaining about her legs.  But at the table, for a little while, while a large boned and fleshed man sings in a clear voice nice gentle songs for the occasion, and he's very good.  He sings an Amy Winehouse song quite calmly and naturally, "stop makin' a fool outta me..."  The crowd sits attentive, swaying, and passers by put cash bills in his cup.

Tanya takes me aside.  "How are you doing?  Are you okay?  We've been meaning to check in with you..."  They know.  Sharon has kept them up to date, but I'm impressed they get it, as if they understood the personality play here, which does not work out to my benefit.  I'm taken by surprise.  A sympathetic voice here, people who'd like to help out.

I get mom back, feed her some more, as she doesn't remember dinner, but I've kept everything warm on the burner and the curry chicken wings over sliced onion in the black iron pan.  But she has slipped into a verbal mode of some babyish talk self-pity, and this is added on to her sense of my frustrations with her, though she is unable to apologize for anything, but "sorry I can be difficult sometimes...  Obviously you're mad about something I did."

No, mom, I just need some space.  "We all do," she says.  I'm going out, and after finding a chamois shirt for the colder air, out the backdoor I go and across the wet long and around the building to the parking lot and the little old Corolla.  There will be some live music still to be had over at the pub overlooking the marina.  And it turns out to be fun and I run into Mike the guitar player and then later other friendly people guys, musicians, as the night goes on and I sip cider over ice in a plastic cup, standing by myself largely.  

I fear I've done something that makes our team, mom and I, less desirable when we go out, say, to The Press Box.  And my open mic performance having to play, unwittingly, before them out at the vineyard, the whole family, could only add to that, at least in my head.  They know something, can see through my lack of any employment or options, skills they would understand.  Two insane people stuck on their own drifting isle that passes by late in the afternoon or early in the evening.  My sad frustrated face bravely coping, enduring, as she has her glass of wine and I occasionally have a soda water, and sometimes two glasses or even three of Chianti.  

So anyway, the night drags on, more people I have met once or twice come by, random friendliness...  And then I get back in the old Corolla and drive back home slow and careful.

And the next day, I wish I never drank or caroused like the way I do, as a continual evening habit taken into the night with no one special in my life.  

I wonder.  Does the Buddhist need to cut the musician out from himself?  However, David sang Psalms, right?

Some people, females, smarter and kinder and wiser than males, know when to sense their own discomfort with something.  "I'm just not comfortable with this," they'll say.  And every time I hear that, I say, to myself, "Oh."  How could I learn to recognize?  How could I learn to say it, "no, I'm not really comfortable doing this..."  How do you define this sense of comfort and discomfort.  I've always thought, well, you just have to deal with it, but now I see how many times I've lied to myself, to feel better for the moment, while the nagging voice of something somewhere was shying away, wishing to go somewhere else, even if that other alternative place was pretty lonesome.  

The monk, again.  Comfortable with meditations often enough.

So there's mom staring at me should I pass through the hallway from the kitchen, looking at me like a hawk.  I offered her a plan to go out to Canale's the vintage '50s Italian around the corner, my friend Mike playing, but when I call, as much to my relief as anything, they have a party of 25 in the bar, and so the place is sold out, the rain steady through the coming evening.  Mom, do you need to find something to do?

When are we leaving?  (I mentioned we'd go to The Press Box later, quietly, slinking in and out.)

(Ugh.)  Not for a few hours mom.  I'm going to go for a walk and take out the recycling.   You could call someone...

I never know what to do.  I'm walking on eggs when you're around.

Are you kidding me?  I'm the one walking around on eggshells here.   (Fuck it.  It's not worth it.  I've got the tub of dishes done.  I go back to the kitchen, to reflect on why close relatives won't call her directly, if so going through me, which I find tedious.  But I guess I am the cruise director here.)

Comfortable.  I hope there is a fine place in heaven or hell for all the people who aren't comfortable with something that you yourself might regard as a basic duty.

But it's always going to be hard to write unless you set yourself free.  Mr. Lyle Lovett wrote that song, "kiss my ass, I bought a boat, I'm going out to sea," about, as in this case Tonto in relation to Lone Ranger, about getting free from the oppressions that you're own unique being senses clearly enough.  Music does set you free.  I play down in the basement, and after mom's gone off to bed.

Me, I've always been a creep, long as I can remember, or get taken so.  A little too quiet, squirrelly, awkward by comparison to the main branch.  And then you stick me in this miserable situation, throw my life up in the air...  anger.   Friends far away.

 But how can I feel anything but shame when I wake up and find myself with such a headache from the night before... from what, cider.  I must have mixed in something else.

How pathetic I am.

Bright moments late at night, pretending I'm JFK reading his speech about poetry and power, the one at Amherst, a month before Dallas.  I think, I believe, that I am eloquent at night, and all the would have been and could have and should have beens come out, I mean, at least find yourself a suitable career or profession, we all need to make money and support ourselves.  

Not getting anything done here.  Mom needs my help and I'm failing her.  I shout at her when I have to explain something too many times, and that's a cheap shot.  My failings.

It's weird when you see things differently from the main.  It's not a good feeling.  It's waking up with great anxiety.  But it's also keeping some sort of truth you see in mind.  You can't put it into words, so you try again and again, a wavering fish swimming elusively in the mind.

Mom's not feeling so well today.  She's in bed with her books.  My headache is going away, but I feel useless.  Why and how did someone who can understand and recite a JFK speech end up as a bartender...  Irish genes, the liveliness of the public house?

But how do you find your way to been a tee totaler again...  just so you don't wake up in shame and headaches and then waste the day completely.

It's like you've been destroyed once, and then you need to bring back your confidence level, but can't find anywhere solid to base that self-confidence on, because everything melts away when you try to look for an accomplishment of some sort.  It's cringe-worthy every single place you look...

So, on what solid ground can you find, to build a foundation, and then to build a house undivided against itself upon...

By the time I've fed mom, who comes downstairs wanting some soup as I get out of the shower, my verbal capacity for the thoughts in my head has been disrupted.  She goes upstairs, but then come downstairs saying something about needing to go home.  But mom, this is your home.

Then all accounts of the anxiety I'm swimming in are still with me.  

Concentration for a writer...  writing is concentration.  Reeling in the loose thoughts, after the fishing has been disturbed.  Mom groping for an understanding of her own situation.  I calm her with the promise of a ride.

Empty the dehumidifier bucket container, bringing it upstairs, pouring it out in the toilet bowl.  

Mom, soup.  Slice red onion and tomato, sliced turkey, but I'm getting sick of deli turkey.  But you can't have mayonnaise, because of the soybean oil...  Grocery store list?  Mom seems calm enough.  I have to go down to the bank to pick up five years of records for the Medicaid application. 

The Post Office too.  It's hot out, eighties, muggy.  

I was up late, early into the light of the morning playing guitar on the basement steps.  I'm getting better.  Folk songs.  

To be a saint is a subtle and secret thing.  You might not even realize it, even though you are acting like it and carrying through, onward, with it, whether you know it consciously or not.  To do so and be so is automatic.  It’s been a pattern your whole life.  And saints, by the way, can be short tempered.

But you are not fully a saint until you have been tried, by circumstances, then the self knowledge awakens.  But even that is simply part of the natural world, like the weeds with flowers that grow unrestrained out in a field, or by a rural road, on the land cleared decades before for the high power lines.  Just like Jesus said, of the lilies of the field, perfect raiment.  It is the most natural thing for you to be a saint.  Just the basic reality behind being human.  You don’t have to do anything in particular.  

It’s simply a matter of the subtle intelligence of the insight.  Then you will see it.

Lincoln had to deal with Mary…  this was part of what made him a saint, along with all the other grim…

This is a day of dreading taking mom into the dentist.  Impressions, for partial dentures, after long neglect.  And the teeth preserve the architecture of the face...

Every day is some form of dread.  

The morning is small.  I get up, come upstairs without really feeling like it, empty the carafe I pee in.  I let the cat in, hearing him call through the door.  

The dentist hangs over me, and when she comes downstairs, to encourage her to take a shower, I tell her what's up.  

Get her soup. slice of turkey.  She finally goes upstairs, but where's the bathroom?  Mom...  Where do I take a shower?  Mom!

She's in there forty five minutes at least, and it's close out, so I come upstairs, sadly watch another Tour de France stage ruined for me, and wait, and then finally say, through the door, mom...  I need to get in there...  

I can't find my bra.  I can't find my glasses.   

Finally, I shout, "Help me OUT!" pounding with my fists against the wall above the stairs.  Help me out!

You're sick.  You need to go see a psychiatrist.  You're a sick sick man.

So the saint is not much of a saint today, though the casting process for dentures goes reasonably well.  

The return to the dollhouse of your own childhood experience, the claustrophobic reliving of it, the sense of treading on eggshells, the volatile explosive quality of the matriarchal, making you nervous about everything except going out for a long walk.  Cross country skies, a bicycle, running,

Too anxious to sit and study a language.  Better to be assigned something physical.  Where you don’t have to make decisions, you just do, and in the moment.

Either you go against this imposing figure, or you go with it, a tyrant of your own, imposing your crazed demands upon the figures of the world…

I come up the unfinished wooden steps from the basement, mom is in her Eames chair, picking cat hairs from a dark corduroy pullover.  "What can I do for you?"

I go up and check what's going on with the television coverage of the Tour, they climb, climbed by now, the Tourmalet.  Upstairs, I pull off enough from the roll of toilet paper to honk my nose.  "Hello?!?" she cries in raised panic.  "Are you alright?!?"  Yes, mom, I'm okay.  "What?!?"  Mom, I'm okay, I say, further down the stairs and she looks over at me.

I go past her.  What can I do for you, she asks again.  I don't know.  What can you do?  Make you a cup of coffee? 

Overheard in the kitchen, as I go up and face the day:

"What the hell are you doing in there?"

"Someone stole my cane."

"I need some scissors."

"Oh, my nose, my nose..."

And the inevitable:  "What are we going to do for fun today..."

The water in the kettle is getting along on the back burner.  I have chilled green tea.  I'll make some detox tea.

Mom comes into the kitchen.  

Is someone going to take us for a ride?  Have some lunch, mom.

Oh, something smells good.  Soup.  (She says soup in a particular way.  As if in a dialect.  Childish.) 

Did you sleep well last night?  Are you going to talk to anyone today?  Guess not.

She doesn't remember anything about the open mic at Collocca.  (I sang two Pogues songs.  Two Lyle Lovett songs.)  It wasn't much fun.  The whole Canale family was there, just back from the Cape.  New baby boy.  I try to leave them along.

Well, you know what Helen Brown said.  

Yes, mom, I know what Helen Brown said.

"It's wicked not to have fun."

I get her her pills out of the plastic pouch.  A small glass of Pepsi.  I come back to the table.

"You had a wonderful time last night.  I can't wait to go back."

"The drive out there is a little much for you.  You can't handle when I drive over forty..."

"I thought it was a lovely night.  You did a good job."

No one clapped.

They didn't know you.  Those people all knew each other.  I had a good time.   

I don't say much.

"It's so much fun having a conversation with you.    Pepsi Cola hits the spot.   I think you did a great job last night.  You were a hit."

Thanks.

So what are we going to do for fun today...  

Not much.  Okay, we'll go and get the newspaper as soon as I put some pants on.  But I'm going to eat my breakfast.

You men have all the power.  I'm just a stupid woman.  She picks at her teeth with the tweezers out of her pocket.  I need a dog.  You're no fun.  

The Canale woman said something nice.

I didn't know the Canale were there.  

Yes, the woman came over and said hi to you.

You're coming up in the world.  Did they ask you when you were coming back?  I'm sorry you don't have any other woman to go with...  besides stupid awful me.  Not worth talking to.  Well, I'm not wanted here.

Okay, mom, but first I'm going to have you rinse your mouth out and brush your teeth.

"I've been brushing my teeth and taking care of myself since I was five years old."

"Are we going to join the people we were with last night? "

Yes, mom.

"Then I need to change into something..."

Okay, mom, put your toothbrush back with the others right there.  You might want a lighter top.  It's hot out.

By the name I am not going to allow anyone to pull any of my teeth.  ...  I've been taking care of myself for twenty thirty years.  (leaves kitchen.)  Everyone here hates me.  Wish I were dead.  Are we just going to sit around here all day...  Itchy.  I don't do itchy.     Oh, shit.  (Burps.)

I put the expired chicken breast cutlets still in their frozen packaging into the tall white kitchen trash bag, knocking drain catch over it.  (If I get the trash together that's a small triumph.)

I'd over to help but you'd snarl at me...  (More small self talk.)  Coughs.  Help, I'm choking to death and no one here cares...

NPR weather forecast in background.

Oh, I wish I were dead.  No, I don't.  Shut up.  (Thumps on book cover.  More sybilant whispers.  Sighs.  help help help.  Well, are we going to get going or are we going to rot.  Help.  Guess we're going to rot.  Okay.

I feel like I have assumed a sort of caricature role, something out of a Richard Scarry What Do People Do All Day, like Glip and Glop, the house painters, or Sven the farmer, a sort of loser, out of Kafka, from another different country.  Schtompisch is how my own mind renders the name of this character.  "My name is Jan Jansen, I live in Wisconsin, I work in a lumber mill there."  Thank you, Kurt Vonnegut.

I remember the host of the open mic, Steve, a bald guy, a guitar player I met the other night, telling me as I was getting my legs under me up on the small gazebo stage, "don't embarrass your mother," as I was explaining my sunglasses, like Father Guido Sarducci.  Okay, I put away the sunglasses and went through several dragging songs.  Killing the vibe.  "I've been loving you a long time..."  Right.  "May the wind that blows from haunted graves..."  Right.

Bangs book closed.  Slaps newspapers.  

I've brushed my teeth.  I notice a pain underneath my right shoulder blade that I did not have before.  Must have been trying to do two things at once.  

I go upstairs, a quick look at the Tour, as they near the top of Tourmalet, shrouded in mist, newspapers being stuffed, I hear from the announcer Phil Leggit, under jerseys for the descent.  The roads are dry but the fog isn't, he tells us.  I go over the tub and splash some warm water from the spigot on my face.  I turn off the TV to save energy and go back downstairs.  I take an Advil, and a milk thistle tab, on top of a dissolving B 12.  Still without my tee shirt off, I hold a washcloth dabbed with hydrogen peroxide on a skin tab, a Jesus spear-mark on my side.  Ha ha.  Down to the basement for my wallet, turn the dehumidifier back on. 

Mom has brightened, sensing my readiness.  "That's a nice outfit," she says.  "You did good last night."

Thanks.

Are you getting ready for something, she asks as I wrap my ankle brace around my left ankle, preparing for working the clutch.  Yes, mom, you've been complaining the whole last hour about not doing anything.   I've been reading.  I'm always happy reading.  This Abraham Lincoln stuff...

I lace up the Keen hiking shoe.  "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, this mighty scourge of war might speedily pass away..." I half shout at her.  She's been reading about the Second Inaugural, a recent book.

How much time do I have...  I don't want to be holding up an important man like you, she observes.

Walking over to the bathroom in the Keen shoes she never takes off...  "I should be getting back to my animals, back home...  Instead of sauntering around with you!"

The great amorphous equalizers, frustration, disappointment, fear, stress, hatred, eating away at your humanity, your capacity for kindness and care, patience, tolerance, whatever great saintly ambitions and desires you ever might have had… disappearing, cast into the wind and vanished years, to reflect upon, or even forget.

Back after the ride… a walk in the park on a hot day, lunch under the awning of the old tavern from the barbecue stand, the breeze along the big river… back home.  The credit card was not left behind at the vineyard, in a rattled pocket.

I calm myself watching the Tour riders spin along, the descent of the Tourmalet, sunny, after the high mountain cloud, and on through twisting valley roads along the river gorge, over the arched Napoleon Bridge, on through the beautiful old spa town leading to the final climb, to Liz Ardiden, switchbacks nestled in the town, stone walled.

 I've got the dishes soaking at noon, hot soapy water, I've made the green tea last night, so that's ready, and just when I think I'll have a moment, after doing some of the dishes--mom will object to the noise of it--to get them out of the way, down she comes and into the kitchen.  I thought I heard water running, but no, she hasn't taken a shower, her hair in greasy strands, and as every time, I mention it, and she tells me I'm making her life difficult.  But as she comes in, she asks me, do you have any food for starving people, yes sure, I do, would you like some turkey or I can make you some soup.  "Whatever's easy," she says.  I bring out the supermarket ziplock bag of turkey from a couple of days ago and she opens the bag while standing at the counter.  Mom, here, have a seat.  I get out the bag of pre-washed romaine lettuce. 

For conversation I show her the photographs my sister in law has posted on Instagram, mom's grandkids with their maternal grandparents, everyone having a happy time.  I inwardly cringe when I hand over my phone and she looks into it and puts her finger on the screen.  I demonstrate how to scroll through it, left to right, and she is curious and interested.  I've heated the soup up with added bone broth and she has slurped and gurgled at it a bit, holding left hand under her right hand as she raises the spoon to her mouth.  She mangles the names of who is who, and I correct her.  "Well, I never see my grandchildren...  Do I have his number over at my home?"  Yes, mom, it's right here.  I'm getting antsy and irritated, and now she's scrolling downward, coming across an earlier photo of my brother testifying explanations to Congress on C-Span, and she says, "Oh, look."  Yes, mom, he does look like your side of the family.

I suppose I was going to write something, but it gets garbled in my head, and now mom is getting testy again, okay, I'll get out of your hair, jabbing me with that, making it a fault of mine.  I never have any fun.

Mom, I don't have much fun either.  

And in fact, I no longer think that having fun, materialistically speaking, is really all it's cracked up to be.

I had a line in my head from earlier.  I have made a study of Buddhist truth by making many many mistakes, being studious about them, a real scholar, almost, of personal mistake making.  I would move now to simplify life.

I had a decent time meeting some musicians after the band had packed up at the little outdoor bar down by the marina that calls itself an Irish pub.

True that musicians like the dark hours of the night, the creative opportunity.  These guys are further along in musical careers, and I'm glad to meet them.  It's late by the time I park the little old Corolla in the parking lot, and the cat comes up to me from an unexpected angle, from the north west end of the parking lot when I turn to see him trotting toward me in a light gallop.  He's the reward for the night.

The cute sexy chicks all seemed to be in the black Jeep SUV crawling over themselves with a confident young strong African American man at the wheel when I pulled in the Byrne Dairy to see if they had any of the late night cheeseburger offerings my new musical guy friends had mentioned.

"If you wish to take shamatha all the way to its ground, however, it requires a supportive, serene environment, good diet, proper exercise, and very few preoccupations. The necessary internal conditions are minimal desires, few activities and concerns, contentment, pure ethical discipline, and freedom from obsessive, compulsive thinking."  B. Alan Wallace.

I'm back downstairs after the shower and shave.  Should I just sneak out, not take mom out on the tedious grumpy ride to the newspapers and the grocery store...

Whatever fleeting form of happiness you might find, it seems to me, you have to be going along with it, having your wine, etc., in order to be in the mood for it.  Then you're in the mood for it, but have to maintain this, "sure, I'll have another one, you guys are my buddies," with another round.  So when you get home finally, you have to ask yourself if it was really all that worth it.  Yes, you came into contact with human beings you'd never spoked to, that's all good, but... as far as your own life and the shape you want it to take, it gets thin then.

The mysogynistic scene from Hamlet, from Act 3 Scene 1, comes to mind for a reason separate from the dramatic intent:

... for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them...  I have heard enough of your paintings well enough.  God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another.  You jig and amble and you lisp, you nickname God's creatures and make your wantonness ignorance.

You get tired of the show, of all this that is supposed to be fun, and you have to return to your own consciousness at the end of the day, your own awareness, regretting your foolishness.

You have your wine, it sings you its songs, you jig and amble and you lisp, you nickname God's creatures and make your wantonness ignorance.  The Bard is speaking not so much to poor Ophelia, but to himself.  Out of experience, and wisdom.

Listen to the stupidity on the radio, even on Public Radio.  It's the same thing, marketed at you in different ways.  

Hamlet, the beginning of the same scene:

I am myself indifferent honest but yet would accuse myself of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me.  I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.  What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?   We are arrant knaves all--believe none of us...  Let the doors be shut upon him that he may play the fool nowhere but in's own house.

The mind does not really need any new information, it's all a distraction anyway, boiled down.  The dumbest things are spoken in front of crowds, played along by the mildly enraptured crowd’s response.  (As Trump knew and mastered.)  Even Live Wire.

This is why I like the characters from Seven Samurai, the elevation of the Confucian monk traveling on the road.

7/10

But writing, I think it's just been a sort of safe place for me to go, a place where I could go, or had to go to knowing that I had messed my life up.   It represents a place where I can think things over a little more carefully.  It's a safe quiet place away from big egos, away from the professional pains of not having a profession.  It's a way to be a kind of monk.  It is nerves.  

When you get up the first thing one does is worry.  What should I be doing with myself to be productive?  What should I be doing for my longterm financial health, my mental health, my physical health.  Most people try to solve this more or less directly.  

But the writer is a philosopher, one without a guide.  A youthful personality, lost in his own faults.

No shouting, no yelling, no demanding personalities derailing your own peace, no names, no accusations.  No demands.  

But if a writer stays here, then he must build higher walls of personal defense, and ultimately must seek out a refuge from the anxieties that well up from within.  Buddhist meditation come to mind, seated in Lotus Pose, or a walking meditation, or laying in Corpse Pose.  

Then the irony.  Later in life, after fruitless work, you find yourself with King Lear, your own mother.  You are pulled from the safe place, you can barely get back to it, the clock is ticking, and you are running. The clock is ticking, and you're already behind.  Way behind, and you can't avoid realizing it, every moment.

I took her to the library yesterday.  We got library cards.  

Oh, shit, here she comes down the stairs whispering to herself.  What can I do...  Looks like a decent day outside.  I'm up before noon.  I only had cider last night, and not many of them, and no wine.  My health already feels better.

Small battles.  Where is my ankle brace...  I brace myself for her entry, and what to tell her.  The weather looks decent out.  I'm tempted to get up, close the lap-top and go hide.

This is where I add the image of Jesus on top of the Buddha and yoga practices.  

When I was with my father, I always felt like noble, like a king.  Not talked down to.  Not bossed around.

She comes downstairs, first going outside.  She has her explorer canvas hat on, wide brimmed, with a strap for the wind.  Then she comes into the kitchen, first looking into the bathroom.  "Oh," she whispers, noticing me at the table, "a big guy..."  Sometimes she talks about the children, the little kids that are present here in her own mind, sometimes they need feeding.    She turns the switch on for the light and the fan, but I hear her whispering to herself, "oh, shit," other little things, and then she wobbles over and looks out the back door, picking up a roll of toilet paper as she passes back toward the front door.  I hear her sighing from the living room, then more whispering sibilantly, as if she were talking to the cat.  I hear her tearing at papers, then "Jesus Christ," then she's dragging herself back up the stairs with the copper bracelet running along the railing.  

Hmm, strange she has not demanded anything of me.  Should I have offered to feed her...  She didn't even say much, hardly anything to me.  Did her spirit respect mine at what I was doing?  Last night was we watched the Tour passing by the vineyards and geologic features and the green of the South of France she was wishing she'd travelled more.  "But mom, you don't fly..."  "I'll never get to Paris now," she says quietly. 

I can't walk over to the mail boxes at the corner of the parking lot without feeling conflicted.  But the blood needs to move, to wake.  A walking meditation.  I put my socks and the brace and my Brooks running shoes on, and look out the back door at the sunlit yard with red and white clover blossoms and yellow birdsfoot trefoil arising from the grasses.  Yes, I could see wanting to get out of here, to go somewhere, anywhere...  Is there some where, some form of love between a son and his mother left anywhere?

I entered into all of this foolishly, without necessary preparation.  It has psyched me out, an uphill battle, subtly worse every week. 

I walk out with an odorous tall white garbage bag to the dumpster, the light bright on the parking lot, the grass greener out front, then to check the mail box with the little key in my pocket.  The strong young man, wearing athletic shorts is walking two tan boxer bull terrier mixes, one male, one female, I think, and the dogs smile and look over up at me as they cross the parking lot down below to show their happiness socially as I walk back along the townhouses on the sidewalk.  I straighten my posture, and think of Jesus.  The mind’s pictures of him, or Him, absorbed from Giotto frescoes and the vague sort of literary literate images that come to us.  Images that sort of dully shine within our own bodies and beings and in the mental self mirrors we hold up before us, all of it vague, general, half formed if at all.  But can we ever live up, we say to ourselves, if we even have the time to ponder such things even in a stunted abnormal life.

Okay, mom, antsy, getting huffy after our breakfast, let’s go for a ride.

A dish of coffee ice cream, the newspapers, then down to the lake blue under a clear dome with boats in the marina and out further on the surface.  Mom wants to finish her ice cream, before going out on the walk, holding on to it, even then taking it with her out of the car, cane in the other hand. 

Should we make the drive out 104 west than north, up toward Pulaski, to Spy Island?

We walk further along the park path on the bluff looking down.  I watch the pontoon boat leaving the marina out for the Light House Tour.  I sit with her at the park benches she chooses.  It’s close to three teenage girls sunbathing on a towel.  An older woman comes along with a small doggie on a least.  Shiatsu Yorkie mix, cute.  What a nice dog, mom says.

Wearing out, okay, mom, let’s go to the Press Box…

When I get her back, she’s “you hate me.  I wish you didn’t hate me.”  “I’m going to kill myself.”  “If you’re sick of me, I’ll just leave.”

I go quietly out the back door and to the car.  I guess to get a 6 pack of cider, stay out of the wine…

I go and park and do a headstand 5 minutes looking upside down at the lake.

 The impossibility of everything here...

The impossibility of our being able, between myself and mom, put together, making a good decision that makes both of us happy.

Tuesday, early July, the Sixth, or so.  Tour De France in the background.  I'm feeling it about the prospects of my life, future employment, health care, now that I've beginning to show cracks, so when we get there it's hard for me to do more than glower over what ever I'm supposed to be enjoying, taking a peek at my phone screen for some kind of contact...

I've done nothing with my life, no teaching, no scholarship, only misguided things, and without a career of any sort, I'm pulled into the family black hole.  

Wednesday.  I take a shower, shave.  Towel off.  Downstairs in my underwear--mom is dozing--I pull my pants on, light, made of nylon, the same ones I've worn every day here after the winter left.  I put a bandaid on, finding one in the medicine cabinet, a nice fat one, for the chafing spot on the back of my ankle, then a sock, a thin one, then the velcro black ankle sleeve with the two strips that secure after wrapping, for a brace, then the Keens hiking boot so I don't step in any wet spot on the floor, and then just as I'm about to write, got the laptop out, ready to go, just these dull and stupid weary quick thoughts of no particular note, down she comes after the water runs in the bathroom pipes upstairs.  I'm feeling discouragement.  

But I know I will work with it, do a little better today, be kinder to mom.  

But first, soup.  

I add bone broth and the pulled chicken tenders I cooked two days ago into the small pot of Campbell's Chicken Noodle, low sodium.   Get the sliced turkey breast out.  Slice a small red onion, and a tomato, and bring a bag of romaine lettuce over to the table.  

I bring up a picture of the happy couple, my aunt and her husband of four years, from a Facebook posting. There smiling and lovely in their wedding finery.  I find a few pictures from my iPhone photo library.  Mom and Mr. B on the porch of the Red Lion Inn.  That had come up when I reminded mom of the phone call last night, the anniversary.  "Where are they going next?" mom asks.  Well, they're not really going anywhere, just out to dinner...  They're going to the Red Lion Inn tonight, for their anniversary...

Then it starts to go bad again.  I used to live near there, she tells me.  I'd like to go there before I die.

Well, we'll go out and see them at some point.  But I have to explain, it's not as easy as going around the corner.  A cat sitter.  The five hour drive.  

Well, she says, implying I'm making things complicated, more than they need to be.

There's the Toyota air bag recall.  There's the dentist.  There's my own health concerns, including the latest, a sore ankle I'm slowly getting over, skin barnacles...  

The box wine, I got up late.  I was up til past 4 in the morning, after the naps I took.

Mom sits in her chair, after lunch, after I got her to rinse her mouth out then brush her teeth, which she resisted.  She gets huffy about doing so.

 A ride.  First Ellen to Hawley to Erie, to 5th Street then across Utica, pit stop for the newspapers.  A dish of coffee ice cream for mom.   A quick chat with the woman at the counter, as usual.  Down to Bridge Street, then west for a few blocks, then a turn onto Liberty north toward the lake, around the circle, mom talking about how they are building something "over on the other side of town."  (Mom, I don't know what you are talking about.  I can't think of any pier over there).  Over the Breitbeck Park, but it's windy, and mom says she's cold so we go back to the car.  Then the view from the high bluff.  And it looks like she's not lobbying for anything, so okay, up 1st and into the parking lot of The Big M, and I remember my grocery list, tell mom I won't be long, in I go, make my rounds...  

When I get back to the car, mom has found the little advertisement from the humane society, a kitten, "Sarah," a long hair who indeed looks cuddly.  But I'm feeling pretty down, for various reasons.  "But that's a fifteen year commitment..."  Which is met with her retort, "you always say no."  And she turns away from me in the car, the silent treatment.  Mom, I've put my life on hold, I don't have a job, I don't have health insurance, I don't have a future to speak of, what?   And you tell me all I do is say, "no."  

By the time we get home, yeah, even I can't face the stuffed peppers with tomato sauce in the carton, nor the rotisserie chicken.  At least I didn't get any sliced turkey, as that is wearing thin too.  Maybe we should just go to The Press Box...

I'll try to watch the Ventoux stage later.  The first one I've expressed much personal interest in watching.  This ain't like childhood anymore.  

She's upstairs, she departed over my no to the kitten, the fifteen year commitment, to the dog, etc.  And with my ankle still sore hampering just about every pose I use for meditation and health I feel the walls closing in.  There's the rotisserie chicken, there's the three stuffed peppers, but I don't feel like presenting them as some form of dinner, and I can't take a walk now, so let's give it some time and just go to The Press Box later, I'll get a burger, glass of wine, mom will have her salad with grilled chicken, we'll be out of the house, mom can interact, I can too, a nice waitress and I can show how polite, how I still am a gentleman despite it all, saying please and thank you sincerely and making eye contact, grateful for everything now, as if I were indeed a prisoner about to be sent away, and nor will I cross professional impersonal lines, I'm too old and she's too young anyway, and people here are old, married, with children running about, with grandparents, or on dates, or with other units that won't invite in an extra proton neutron into the nuclear atom of their own...

Get back home.  I get to watch the Ventoux stage, after futzing with the cable box for a good twenty minutes to get it to send the cable single, NBC Sports Channel...    They're descending through this crazy road pine forest over tan soil roads into old Provence towns, twists and turns, they've already climbed the mountain once in this coverage.  It's soothing.  I get bored with it.  but I keep watching.  Riders going down the hair pin turn road and into the straighter part pedaling along, then tucking on the rivet of the saddle.  Okay, tired out, shot, beat, just about half dead, mom, etc., so I go back downstairs, the cat follows me, I let him out, I go down to the basement.

I take a meditation nap, a decent long one, just incapable of doing anything right now, not finding mom's last five years of IRS Tsx forms, no, just turn on the dehumidifier and rest, blank rest, thought of chakras, a vain attempt to penetrate the boredom with facebook or some other media thing...  No.. 

Then around midnight, I'm awake again.  The Tour should be on, but it's a rehash of Stanley Cup on the channel, so...  I just want more wine at this point, back down to the kitchen, the ankle brace chafing, rip the damn thing off.  

I'm about to light some incense to clear the air.  Mom comes downstairs as I'm getting into the little distraction of The Chosen, episode intrigue you sort of have to follow.  Back and forth to Jerusalem and the camp by the big lake.  Jesus is working his way up to the Sermon on the Mount, this season, apparently.  Well, mom, what do you want, I say, talking to her as if she were a child now, one hard of hearing.  Okay, stuffed peppers, okay...  reheat in ceramic dish in toaster oven 350.  

Maybe she starts in.  Why am I so miserable?  Well...  

We're sitting down now at the table.  Well, Mom.  What made me depressed, when I had my shot at things... hmm.  What I remember is you yelling at my dad, "you're a failure, you're a failure..."  

Well, I'm sorry you didn't have a happy childhood.

Thank you for apologizing. That helps.

But you hate me.  You're trying to destroy me.

No I'm not.  You don't need to get defensive.  I'm glad you apologized.  It's the way families are, the genes...  you got it from my grandfather.  so it goes.  

But you hate me.  You're trying to destroy me.

No, mom.  That's the response of a narcissist.  You know what a narcissist is, right?

Yes.  I   know.  what   a narcissist is...

Okay, well, anyway.  I know it's hard being isolated.  I know it's hard when you're retired.  I find it's those little exchanges with people at the gas station, the grocery store, just little stories you share back and forth, that help.

I don't understand what you're talking about.

Do you want me to heat up your stuffed pepper some more?

No.  It was good.      But I'm not hungry anymore.   You hate me...

I try to bring up, well, that's just life, that's just family.  You know, you and son number one butted heads from six months.  

She doesn't engage.  It's just more of my insulting her now, from the look on her face.

"Look, this is life.  I'm not insulting you, I'm just saying that this is the way people are.  It's in their genes...  And this is why some of us like religious things, because it reminds me of a greater will, something beyond your own self..."

She's not buying it.  The things I've said, maybe I shouldn't have said them, are still sinking in into her old mind.

"Mom, you apologized.  That's all I needed.  We're good now."

She goes off, out of the kitchen.  Not looking back.

Later she comes and stares at me, standing like a ghost.  "You make me want to commit suicide."

I clear the dishes.  

I go back to watching season two episode 5 of The Chosen.  Jesus building his ministry.  It seems to help, even though I've gone Buddhist and yoga, except for the sore ankle.  

For all his beautiful prose, Kerouac ends up unhappy, just another guy who didn’t fit in.  And hey, he didn’t even try, after a few fits and starts.  He was a quitter.  Quitters get what they deserve.  The bottle.  A readership that doesn't support camping trips anymore, and for him, the burden of fame.

Thursday.  I sleep in the next day.  It’s rainy anyway.  I was up too late, and by the time I wake it's afternoon.  I come up the stairs, hearing mom creak in her old Eames chair through the basement beams.  Earlier she sounded okay, like she was handling being alone okay.  

Do you want to go to The Press Box, she asks me, quite hopefully.  "Mom, we were just there last night..."  Blank stare.  Crestfallen expression.

It's going to rain, mom.  Thunderstorms.  Let me get you some of the salad you had last night, and we have rotisserie chicken too.  So I get her some of that.  Yeah, supposed to last for a while, maybe an hour or so...  And indeed, it's pouring out.  I get her a glass of wine.  Her two daily pills.

If we go to The Press Box it will just start up all over again.  Can I avoid having a glass of wine?  Now that I've made a stand I feel myself weakening.  I don't even want to face the good hard working people of Oswego, is part of it.

Look mom, I'd like to entertain you, but I have some work to do.  (What, I don't even know anymore).  She looks at me.  Maybe it will clear up.  But I still have a life to lead, and things to do.  (Dishes at least.)  You've got books to read.  

But you came here today.  Let's be social.

Mom, I've been here every day since November.   I'm sleeping on an air mattress down in the basement.  I'm living out of a suitcase.  She stares at me.  I didn't just come here.  

I feel like I'm adrift, floating again, not knowing anything anymore.  A stand still.  I soak the dishes from last night in the tub with hot soapy water, after tossing some things out from the refrigerator.  Turkey meatloaf, probably still good, but tired of looking at it, plus the clutter.  I get her a little glass of wine.  I slice off a little more from the breast of the chicken, still tender, as she picks at the soggy salad from dinner last night.  "I can't take that clanking," she says from the kitchen table, as the water pours and silverware lightly touches against a plate.  The dirty cat dishes add up quickly, along with the tea mugs.

"I'll just go into the other room so you don't have to look at me," she says, sternly rising from the table and aiming toward the short hallway past the cellar stairs door and the sliding door little bathroom.  "You hate me."

I look at the radar on my phone screen.  Yes, a few more bands coming through, I made the right call, even as I feel guilty and she's gone upstairs in misery.  Maybe she'll forget.  

Work.  Who am I kidding...  Some Jesus I am, not even knowing what to do with himself...  I alternate, between the chilled teas, one the Dragonwell green, the other dandelion detox.  Still with the feeling of the fermented grape in me, shame.  Honestly, I don't know what to do with her anymore.  It's day by day.

Amherst grad and all you can manage to do is do the dishes and sort out the fridge, cook something to eat tomorrow...  Shameful.  But what can you do.   

The cat is bored, meowing at me quietly.  I've shown him the open back door several times, but he stays put with the rain two feet in front of his nose.  No wonder he can kill so many creatures, including the mink from a few days ago I should have taken a picture of before tossing into the bush.  He is a well fed animal.

Care-taking for family...  It will change you.  It's not a grand spiritual quest.  It's a trip to nowhere.

Or so it feels like some days.

But enough of that.

Creativity makes its daily demands on you.  And if some days it is too much, there is wine to go with small chores, like cooking, to set the wheels free to spin.

You have a hard time letting go of it.