I hear mom above me, footsteps in the kitchen. She remembers to let the cat in, calling him, then happily as he comes along, and then as she feeds him. "What a good kitty, what at good kitty..." At noon I will get her her pills. She goes back upstairs, and I'm groggy still, down in the basement, to hide, and then I hear the knock on the door from the nice Meals on Wheels lady, Nicole, who's become a sort of friend. She's happily married. Small town, her son worked at the deli counter. Okay, so I go up the stairs, sleepy, barely manage a word to her, she asks how we're doing, I shrug, and she's got a lot going on, she says, so. Okay, so, put the two trays with the milk cartons away in the fridge, still in the clear plastic bag. Okay, still waking up. Why... why can't I get up earlier... Why didn't I ever do an internship, or take a class...
I sit out on the back stoop in the sunlight, the leaves of the poplars fluttering in the breeze, drinking cold green tea from the mug. Yoga would be good. A little walk to wake up.
I bring mom, reluctant to engage with her, her pills from the clear little plastic packet. She's propped up on her pillow, reading. CNN is on. I passed the cat, who is sound asleep on the couch. "Are you going to take me out to lunch today? A ride?" No, mom, we really don't have the money for that. "I have money." No, you don't really. "You're taking me to lunch today." I'm going to go do some yoga, mom. I slip away, sauntering down the stairs.
To be a grown man without a career is unacceptable.
I make a little pot of coffee, something I don't often do. Pour it on ice in a cup.
I do my yoga, finishing with a good 5 minute headstand, careful to land down on my right foot, and the left ankle gingerly seems capable of the bend down of the foot underneath as the body is tucked into child's pose. Corpse, under the shade of the two spruce trees, after starting my sun salutation, table, camel, etc., in the sun, then seeking the shade for warrior poses, ankle holding up again. Shoulder stand, plough, then finally into a decent full lotus, plenty of time to align the chakras within.
I haven't been bothered, so I go around the end of the building for a walk, and there's mom sitting on the front stoop. How you doing, mom? Who are you? Are you Ted? Yes, mom. She looks at me. I walk over to her. There are more productive things to be doing than to stand on your head, she says, dismissing the work of the previous and precious forty minutes or so. Okay... Well, what's the plan today? Uhm, well, let's go for a ride at some point. And then later your friends are going to take you to the concert...
This upcoming event, around seven this evening, has got her riled up. She wants me to come along. Well, Mom, I've got some friends who've invited me to something. Who, she says, suspiciously. Oh, just some guys we met at the thing over at the big barn, the open mic... Where is it? I don't want to tell her. She can't handle the speeds of the drive.
Anyway, we are thinking about how and when to get out to Lee... And this too is a stresser for her. It's enough to make me feel sick to my stomach too, on top of everything else, but that's probably because we need a break from each other...
"Well, I know I'm not wanted here. When you're ready to talk to people... let me know, you miserable stinking rotten bastard," she says getting up from the breakfast table. Earlier she asked, what to people do on such a lousy day, the rain falling lightly. I told her I needed to write some poetry. Do you write poetry? Do you show it to anybody?
She goes and sits in her chair. This is so fucking boring, I can hear her say. An occasional slap on a book or a newspaper, like the tail of a miffed cat.
I was feeling very (or pretty) stressed yesterday. I had mom lined up to be picked up by Barb and Tania for the outdoor jazz concert in the park by the pavilion, leaving at 7:15. She's asked me over and over again. What time are they coming, and finally I write it down on a 3 by 5 card. I get her some slices off the rotisserie chicken, and not hungry myself, am headed out the door, I finally resolved, to catch my friend Adam and his band play a place called Turtle Cove out in Fairhaven. I kept on 104 by mistake, but enjoying the liberated speeds mom will raise great protest over. Adam had invited me out, an open mic. I didn't feel I had anything up my sleeve, practicing some outside with the guitar back over behind the spruce trees drinking dry cider on the rocks. Two of them, and one for the road, to get in the mood, I tell myself.
It's a beautiful later in July evening with the corn reaching tasseled maturity, six foot tall, across the hills. Roadside places offering brisket, and sausage, meats, produce, firewood and other little country offerings.
I get back up to 104a, and take it into Fairhaven that way, and soon after several broad sweeping curves the old Toyota takes quite well, and then I'm sitting with my buddies, and it's a cool spot on the water.
This morning I feel ashamed of it all. I brought McDonald's back with me, two double quarter pounders and even a Big Mac, I share with mom when I get in. She called. But it was a drunken trip, that scares me now. And I don't think I played very well, nor anything memorable, up on the stage at the end of the night. So I stew in that, raise to get mom her morning round of the two pills, and then she comes downstairs for breakfast. Now she's pounding on her book. "Kill myself. Fucking boring." The cat has come back in. Yesterday there was a commotion in the high mint along the back of the townhouse by the air conditioning. The grey striped cat of the neighbor had cornered a juvenile rabbit. I heard it squeak out the back window getting mom lunch with sliced red onion, tomato, fresh mozzarella, as we were discussing planning a trip to go see her sister out in Lee. I let the cat out, and he ends up killing it, flaying it alive, a horrible sight, out there, as we eat our little lunch and worry. The things a drunk does, checking to see, oh yes, the guitar case is here, and I remember seeing my wallet on the passenger seat of the car, because I paid for the burgers at the drive thru here. I slept fitfully, but at least I'm still alive.
The Buddhist concept of no solid fixed self encounters difficulty with drinking and all its involved encounters. The no solid self will get lost, easily, distracted, misled. Maybe even in trouble.
That’s all I get to write, and it’s off to the car for a ride to entertain mom. I get mom to the car, and the rain is falling harder. A van with Amazon pulls up, man goes out with box to 33, the new neighbors. Is that for us? No, mom. That’s not our stoop. I go back in to get the umbrella. And now it’s pouring.
Okay, what direction are we going in…. Newspapers first. At the convenience store, pouring out, even harder, and cool air, not a summer monsoon type.
By the lake, where rides and bandstand have been set up.
Grocery store, you okay mom? In I go.
Then a drive, south along the river. Wet coats when we get back. Exhausted feeling.
Down in the basement, Corpse pose, in the early morning, trying to draw in from the damp air energies to the Chakra centers. What is spirit anyway? Some creative one side of the brain thing. The right brain, more intuitive, paradoxically not so focussed on words... but creative concepts.
People wiser than I came up when the understanding of the energy centers and the map for them in the body. Wiser than I, they emphasize the quiet, breathing, listening to the breath, nothing else, just being there in the moment, when, for me, the memories of a million ghostly spirits and all the regrettable things I’ve done being carried away, then having to go back down the stairwells of our trespasses sneaking away, swirl around me. My lack of self control, all my bad behaviors mounting upon me, making me pay…
And the meditation serving to remind me, or reinstalling the good I was once capable of, had I but applied myself, protecting myself against all the bored spirits that will take you for a joy ride…
To think that distraction its very self was my profession, my job, even. Bartender. What a fool. On top of the clock ticking and the calendar pages, the months, the years in a kind of isolation.
Where is home now, anyway… Soul searching…
I turn over onto my right side, head on hand on pillow, old position of the depressed sleep since college days, falling into a dream of trying to gather my things.
I wake up on my left side, hearing mom creak in her chair above me. “Hello,” she says, reflexively, at something, and feel that so sick of being myself who I have become now feeling. If I go upstairs, she’ll be on me. What are we doing for fun today.
What have I become…. The first thought of the day. I was a young prince, mild, inoffensive, I played the bass in orchestra, I was in the student council. What happened to me, or was it just my foolish listening to rock n roll, the rebellion. I wasn’t the dominant mage type, but I was competent, some talents here & there, good at some things…
She comes down a second time in the quiet of the night, in an hour's time. She goes to the back door to check on things, as she says. The cat I let him out a half an hour ago. Oh, poor cat, I'm sorry... I’m so sorry, she says to the cat, as she calls him, about to rummage for a can of cat food.
I can't handle it anymore, another intrusion, so I raise my voice, standing up to leave the room toward the front door, "enough with the tension, the cat is fine being outside, I don't need the drama," I find myself shouting at her, which not only breaks the spell but casts us all, each of us, including the cat, into a deep sudden worry. Oh my god. Something's going wrong within me here. Not only the loss of the humor of an SNL skit about The Godfather, played by John Belushi, in group therapy, but then the whole evening of my trying to find some free artistic space, and maybe a chuckle, humor as medicine.
The cat is scared by my shouting, retreats to the living room's safety. Mom freaks out, you've ruined my evening, and she goes, of course, upstairs. I will not tolerate this, she said. This is over. I will never get back to sleep now. I will never trust you again.
But it's not important anyway. In fact, that I think I need to be doing so is completely self-indulgent.
Never try to be an artist. It is not possible to try to live frugally as possible in the USA. No matter how you might feel inclined, it's not going to be a healthy life for you trying to "be a writer." No way. Be a school teacher. Get up early and regularly, don't mess around, don't embrace the night life and musicians, don't be foolish. Let all that art stuff go. Just let it go.
You go looking for fun, but often what fun consists of is tension. You take in the tension, and then you need to work it out, feeling the need for art. Better than that dreadful feeling of nothing going on, right?
There seems to be too many choices here, but all of them wrong, all of them half failed already.
Mom is calmly reading upstairs, which surprises me. She came down earlier, and I gave her some soup, Campbell's Healthy Choice Chicken Noodle--at the label, the listed ingredients, I cringe, still, at least no MSG--and she had some, and then she said, well, I'll leave you alone, after asking me four times, did you sleep well, and with that I seized the chance to not worry about writing, but to go and do yoga in the backyard, quick, figuring the time constraints, and still, "what am I going to do with her, take her to the HarborFest Summer Bash... or out to Sterling Nature Center? Is it possible to avoid going out to eat?"
Last night we tried to repeat the pleasant time of Thursday night listening to the music down in the park, a shared plate of chicken tenders and home-cut fries, ten bucks, and little glasses of wine at six bucks a pop. Last night was Friday night, and of course, with the weather improved, clear, sunny, the town was out in full, and by the time I parked the car and walked mom down along the road to the pavilion, there's hardly anywhere to sit, I didn't bring a fold-out camp chair, the only picnic table bench, where the characters, some of them looking a bit crystal meth rough, are kind enough to allow mom to sit, as I keep an eye on her, Mom, come slide back this way... and they're out of the wine at the booth, and the best option seems to be Blackberry wine slushies, at ten bucks each. We get back home, and I'm exhausted and feeling poisoned by the wine slushies and need a nap, just a disheartening day with mom's back account running low and here it is time to pay the rent.
Feeling too much as a bewildered chicken shit, the only guy in America without a job, a plan, nothing but all those years of tending the bar behind me, what good did that do, feeling too anxious to go check in with Attila who's still being quiet upstairs.
A battle of wills, the doer, the Aries, versus the quiet industrious Capricorn, a homebody. The relationship that has led my life to be so. Or maybe I'm just placing the blame on her force.
I used to form my close relationships over the bar, which is different than the normal way. Trying to be everybody's friend. Which is not how adults operate, of course. What fate will "everybody's buddy" come to, but a low one. The guy people came to drink and eat with, and drink some more.
This is the writer's notebook that every writer must keep. This is mine. I publish them, these little pieces, because it makes it easier for me to read the published ones, rather than the draft ones, which I have to save anyway, while working on them, before letting them go.
It will be, by nature, repetitious, redundant.
I go upstairs and give mom her midnight pill, Memantine, a substitute for Namenda, 5 mg., a little pink one. Her bed is strewn with books and all sorts of things, in a way that saddens me, and the cat still finds a way to sleep in this little landscape of bouldery books and landslide rock shelf hardcover piles with clothes and mail. I have to awaken her, but not from too deep a place of sleep. I make a small attempt to find her remote, as the TV is off, but I don't see it being obvious anywhere, so, as to not further frustrate myself, okay, I slink back down the stairs.
To see one's loved ones aging, and then to see it too about yourself in the pictures you took at the Summer Bash HarborFest/Quest Fair, seeing your own face now as the camera is turned toward you to capture the image behind you...
But no, Jennifer Sandbridge is right, you can't think that way. You have to turn it around, as Buddha did, as Jesus did.
And then I realized, sort of all at once, that I'd been doing it all wrong. My fault was that I had no goal, and therefore everything had to be relevant to me, I needed to respond. A peculiar personality trait. Being unable to do the basic hippocampus division of things. Good, useful, a tool for forward motion toward the successes we all need to secure to eat and have a roof over our heads, procreation... or, an obstacle.
I let other people's will come before my own. Depressed and unprotected, misery deepening.
Addicted people lie to themselves. The lies the lies, they all mount, and mount. Micro lies. Macro lies. And they are hard to distinguish, even the truth from the lie.
Sure, I'm helping mom out. Yeah.
And my own sacrifices mount.
I take time away from them, pretending it's not so. That I'm not absolutely fucked, as they say. I have a cider at night, play the guitar for the audience of friends on YouTube.
Oh, sure. I'll read The Brother's Karamazov, "unless a kernel of wheat fall to the ground and die, it gives forth no fruit," (whatever, however it goes), study the inspirations Jesus Himself must have felt within, pray like Buddha, then I will achieve something noteworthy and good, true enough to bring back to the rest... I thought, once upon a time, these were noble aspirations. The very seat and seeds of creativity.
Nope. All Rothko ended up painting, in the end, black.
All you get stuck with is shit. And a prison's misery. No one else wanted to deal with, wanted to drive back and forth with her in the car, or by yourself, the only one with an active working attention.
The chenopod pollen hits. I'm woozy, out of it, exhausted, feel quite unable to face anything. I had cider last night, again was up til it got light out. I'd done yoga yesterday, outside, a walk early, to check on the beaver dam by the power relay station, then one later with mom in the late afternoon by Rice Creek, the barns and fields of Brookmore, used by the university. The meatballs and sausage I cooked last night, the burner was set on low, but when I come down it's hot, as if it were on a tick past medium, bubbling away the pot, and I smell come charcoal bitter burn to it. Vulcanized. But I don't have much energy, at all, in fact, plus there's the thought of trying to get mom ready for the road trip to see my aunt, which would include laundry, packing her, food for the trip, and so forth, on top of the Delta variant of Covid-19. I get mom her pills around 12:30, explain to her that I don't feel well, and go down and fall asleep for another two hours. Time is going by quickly. Mom wants to go for a ride. It's August now, which scares (the shit out of) me.
It's a big mistake, it seems, to read up on Buddhism and such things, Sutras, Alan Watts lectures, The Sermon on the Mount. It seems like a set-up, where you'll end up in some place where it's all you have left almost. You have to give up on attachments, accept that you'll never have any children, or that you'll never be employed, truly, again. You'll end up throwing your life away, the amicable easy going one who end up with nothing.
And the truth has come out late in mid-life, about all the lies I've been telling myself over the wine, and then having no means to protect my own interests, and even mom doesn't care.
Mom asks me to stop and talk with her for the fourth time today. Talk to me, she says, please, I'm so lonely. Mom, I'm waking up, I'm not feeling well, will you give me some space, please. I sit on the Ottoman, and try to give her one of those, "look, here's the kind of a thing I'm going through these days..."
"You're a mess," she says, looking at me sternly, from her chair, her eyes narrowed into cold slits of dimness. I'm wondering if I don't see some swelling happening again along her jaw. The teeth issue again.
I come down from the shower and having dressed. "I'm getting impatient..." I hear her say. At least she's dropped the cruelty and not caring, for the moment. She easily forgets the moods she'll pass through and the tantrums. "I am impatient." Mom, you were born impatient, I say as I walk past her. No, she offers, it's just the men I get mixed up with, ha ha ha.
But I've woken up with paranoia. The credit card issued with mom's information. How did that happen? (Later, after dinner, after she goes upstairs to read on her bed in front of the TV I get the piece of mail I got from First Union Bank, about the credit card we have nothing to do with, and go up and have her sign it, which she quizzes me about, sternly.)
The trip out to Lee has us both riled up. I don't know if I can do four or five hours driving with her pleading and pleading, crying, "slow down! You're going too fast!" And when the ragweed, or whatever it is, hits, it's always a shock to the head and the energy.
Oh, please, could something happen, I hear her say, as I get some soup ready for her, again with bringing the sliced turkey breast out.
Later, back after the ride along the lake, along the college, back into town passing over the heights over the lake, blue, the book store, the grocery store. Dishes to wash. "Can I help," she calls, from the living room, and I try not to blow my stack. I've been careful about not being outside long, and if so, with a mask on. The shower made me feel quite a bit better, but the ciders the night before to keep calm, yeah, I drink water, green tea and dandelion tea, taking it easy.
I get dinner set, the bone in chicken breast, squeeze of fresh lemon, oregano, dried parsley, Irish Sea salt, a dusting of lemon pepper, on top of three onions cut up in the old iron pan, Idaho potatoes, cut in half, sweet potato in the smaller iron pan. I go down and take a nap on the air mattress, and I feel a tickle on my arm and there's the good rather large wolf spider, all black, seen on last night, huge, on the cement block wall where the rain comes and dampens, leaving effluviant stains. Right up close to my left arm, where the sheet is crumpled up at the side of the thin ThermaRest NeoAir mattress, and fortunately not biting me. The spider runs off quick, just a little ways, stopping, and I shoo it off further by advancing a sneaker toward its position, and it runs off in the direction of the stairs.
I avoid drinking over dinner, and later on. Dinner has its rough spots. I have to explain things over and over again, and it gets tiresome, after hours of it. Yes, we had a nice time at the book store, I try, groping for something sustaining. I took her down to the Summer Bash at the park by the lake, Thursday, then Friday, then Saturday, cheap wine... There's the mail thing, the new local library library card, renew the first two books we took out a month ago. Dinner's dishes. I go upstairs to coax mom into taking her nightly pill, but she's instantly angry at me for waking her, "a strange man in her bedroom..." Waking people up when they're trying to sleep is a terrible terrible thing, she tells me. Okay, sorry mom.
A few nights ago, down in the basement on the air mattress, I looked through a picture book, art from the National Gallery, art through the centuries, Venice, Rembrandt, portraying the chapters of the life of Jesus Christ. It calmed and relaxed me. I woke up in a decent mood, after a decent night's sleep, the will to go on.
When you are forced to do a kind of deep dive into your own life, all of it, you're coming up upon a need for the presence of all that which is truly radical in the spiritual life we speak about. First of all your rampant mistakes, your self-misguidedness, your own pursuit of all the sad illusory things. And then, with all of this before your own sad eyes and heart, you have to ask, why. Jonah, Gautama as he sees pain, because you cannot see pain in other people if you avoid seeing it in yourself...
What's the point, you might ask.
Well, it's salvation, some form of it, for all sentient and human beings, isn't it? I'm not original in saying this. You could, if you were perfect, avoid that, couldn't you? Or at least you could wisely and through thrift and hard work and diligence and a minimizing of mistakes and foolish behaviors, just focus on doing the best you can and try to get around that.
The planet wells with suffering, and the people in it, upon it, dealing with it. Mom repeats herself, well, at least it's not snowing--mom, it's august--I can't remember ever seeing snow here--okay, mom.
Mom, can you think of some clothes to bring, if we can make it out to see Trish?
I've been moved around so much, my clothes are over there, a few houses over.
But there's, I've seen some clothes in your bedroom, just upstairs...
Talk breaks down.
Excruciating.
I pick at my sweet potato. Can dinner end soon enough, so I can just do the dishes and go hide. Mom likes the onions from the pan. I'll pull the meat of the chicken breast off the bones, scrape the pan and the onions, the leftover oil into a bowl, doesn't have to be a big one. I'll put the still hot potatoes in another, cover. Can I do that yet, yes. Mom wants to save her half of a half of a potato. Okay.
Okay, I'll get out of your hair, she says.
Shamefully, after doing what I can, spot wipe clean the miraculous air mattress, try out the library card registration, sorting the refrigerator, in case we are able to get on the mighty road, I open a bottle of the Frenchy $11 Pinot Noir, sipping it slowly, preparing lemon water for the morning, for detox. Who knows what the morrow brings, sufficient to the day, the evil thereof. The men at the bookstore serving as father confessors and repository of information.
Once I was egged on, at a dog show, to steal a golf ball, as it landed on the green below us. I threw the golf ball down on the green, not far away from where it had landed, as men shouted at me, upset. I had to run away. My brother laughed.
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