tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49920934138832163992024-03-18T22:47:17.048-07:00DC Literary OutsiderThoughts from an obscure literary life. Your average joe as literary critic, writer, poet, social commentator, cultural observer, barman, wine enthusiast, Irish-Polish American.DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.comBlogger1629125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-90441320753785524712023-09-09T03:30:00.003-07:002023-09-09T03:43:42.560-07:00<p> 9/8</p><p>Before I went off to bed, way too late, when the faithful should be rising to say their prayer chants, I've had the wine to help me relax my strained mind, to cook bacon for sandwiches for mom tomorrow, to cook myself the hamburger from the Finger Lakes farm where the cows are grass fed and just the fat signals one to take one's fill, in three balls in the small black iron Lodge pan, also for the morrow. I go to bed reflecting on Romapada Swami talking of the incredible journey Srila Prabhupada made to come to the US in his seventies from Calcutta to bring the Krishna Consciousness movement, a great act of faith of many dimensions. But I also must ponder his being demeaning to women, for all he accomplished in transmitting with scholarly fidelity what the tradition had passed on, most respectfully, to him.</p><p>It takes me a while to feel sleepy, and I think the mantra of Hare Krishna silently as I lay there on the mattress on the cement floor of the darkened basement, only the too bright LED light next to me along with the cell phone screen if I can find it, with mom two floors away from me, with the dehumidifier running its condensation coil churnings of breath, and I suppose I fall to sleep that way, but again wondering about my life, and how can I possibly rejoin the workforce, have a job, take care of myself, I just don't have a clue, if I should stop dreaming or sleeping, or simply being shut down and quiet, and have to start thinking again. Becoming a multifarious Shakespearean character or myriad thereof. Hamlet's father confined to fast in fires until all his evil deeds are burnt away, or any number of them, Bill knew it all, everything, everybody, and he put it into words, raw, as he knew, and he got it all true.</p><p><br /></p><p>Mom is going into the bathroom, keeping her conversation with her image in the mirror, oh, hi, are you here too, ha ha, with a shirt wrapped around her waist for underwear, as I see as I stand at the top of the stairs, coming from my tee cups and kitchen plans. Two pairs of pants here and there on the floor, I see here at the top of the stairs where I have set up a kind of tank trap to keep her upstairs and not pester me, and it seems to be working. I move the little rubber table, I got the cat's hairball goop on it leaking from its toothpaste tube, out of the way, and I say, okay, look mom, you're wearing a shirt around your waist, and she tells me, so what, she doesn't care if people think she's however she sees fit, okay, but mom you need to... lets get your booties off. She's sitting on the toilet about to pee, but I come in, wearily say, hi, mom how are you, convince her to remove the puffy booties one by one and put her old feet like claw toe nails in through the leg openings of the Depends precautionary underwear one by one, so she's got them the right way on, and pulled up toward her knees, which went okay, she didn't yell at me, so... I go into her room and find a pair of jeans, look at the size of them, okay, 10, I think these will work.</p><p><br /></p><p>My first thoughts rising acknowledged, have acknowledged in coming to consdciousness, this situation, as I lay in the darkness, then hearing the cat calling to be helped out, then the gets the doors open and tells me his needs from the stairs, as I think of going yet again on Amazon for just some simple elastic waist or draw string sweatpants for her, perhaps with enough sort of finish to them that she can get away, given that people are understanding around here in restaurants, with out in public. Oh, shit. I must endure another day here, completely open ended and crazy and deprived of normal friendship. Abandoned. That's how it goes.</p><p><br /></p><p>It's a grey day, cooler now in early September. These should be my favorite months, I say, Kerouac October swelling through the maple land. Poplars out back. I get the cat fed, he thanks me, then I let him out, after spooning wet can food into his dish three times, I get the hot water going as the kettle water starts its sighs of heating, not having any inspiring amount of tea in mason jar fridge. The riding lawn mower makes a pass by, and its awful noisy, and I think how Derrick, the fix everything guy, looks a bit like Kid Rock, but heavier, larger, short hair... basketball long gym shorts, baseball cap, cigarette, a distant man in his own man world, and I go back to my own thoughts after lifting the white faded outdoor rubber chair upon the back stoop so he can pass through with the red riding mower, giving him enough trouble with the sprawling tomato plants. </p><p>Make mom her BLT, cluttering struggle to find space on the counter to bring it all together, then bring her a cup of water with ice cubes so she can take her pills, and there's mom on the bed in a reasonable mood, not immediately pestering me about when she's going to be taken home because this isn't her home, one sock on, the other in the bathroom, putting on her minimal sneaker shoes with the velcro band, light pink and light grey, and she asks me, showing some gratitude, if they're paying me well, and I say no not really. She asks me if I'm going to have any fun today, and I say no, I'm just going to try to do some work, what kind of work, and I say, I'm a famous writer, from some bitter source of humor within, then emphasizing that she too is a writer, the curse of literary talent, what can you do, and she tells me in different words how she wants me to have fun in my life too and I think of a couple girls, women, who I would very much enjoy being with in any way shape or form or station or situation, but that though I am and have always been a person of faith, hopefully a man about it, I wish I had some job or comfort of future compensation to go with this situation, I mean, and that's in addition to finding some nice girl, of whatever age, with recognizable interests and a good influence, unlike my own self upon myself, and the bottle of wine at night that helps at night but not in the morning. </p><p><br /></p><p>I go and check on her, the dishes still soaking, as I cut a lemon into wedges, the kettle on the stove again, the click of the knob and the coil itself. Blankness. Should I find the courage to cancel mom's AT&T finally? I tried to do it earlier, but they came back with an offer of a very inexpensive phone, but she's past that now, as all this continues to make me very nervous here, waiting around, not knowing what the hell to do with myself. </p><p>I try... but I don't have her passcode, even though I have her social security number, so... I'm told by the nice African American woman Michelle that I need to go down to an AT&T store... I thought I did this earlier, but was enticed back with the offer of a replacement phone for her, for twenty bucks a month, but with a two year commitment. The passcode is numerical, four to eight numbers, something like that... Go down to the store with your power of attorney... Maybe I should just stop paying the bill. </p><p><br /></p><p>So I've been uneasy all day. I've had a good exchange with my new friend Jennifer. I come out of the shower, and then mom has woken up and she's holding her hand on her crotch and saying she's wet. No peeking, she says, as I open the door to look for my cell phone. Mom, I've already changed your underwear once today...</p><p>Well, if you hadn't had anything to eat all day, she says, quite angry with me in her accusation, mom, I fed you two hours ago, a BLT.... and some sweet potato fries... It's all my fault.</p><p>She's reaching for the new pink pants, but I try to get her to put on an old pair of denims, the Oompa Loompa pants handy... We're not going out today, which in a way is a relief to know... One question solved. </p><p>But then after I bring her a reheated in the toaster chicken Napoli sandwich from Rudy's, minus the marinara sauce, she denies that her pants are wet. I go around the corner to figure out how to change the batteries in the remote, which I succeed at, but it still doesn't work, so I unplug the box and meanwhile mom's saying, what the hell are you doin', and then something about she wants to be home, not here, so here we go again, and the countdown on the screen is taking its sweet time. Science Friday is on the NPR station, but nothing is soothing today. As I'm waiting, mom telling me I broke the tv, I see the cat out the window under the healthier of the two hemlock trees, in his spot beneath the low branches. What are you looking at, mom asks me. </p><p>Mom's crinkling the small Real Sugar Pepsi can as I see that the tv is working, and it probably wasn't the batteries that were the issue, but the remote was a pain to slide open and I'm not feeling like a raging success today as the cat calls to me in his little high voice for food. Two creatures who cannot communicate with me, that makes. Trying to figure out what they might want, when, cued mysteriously, dealing with their now particular personal habits of interaction. There's nothing I really, or we, need at the grocery store, but out of boredom I might try going out to the Price Chopper at some point, for a little bit greater variety that have. The cat meows at me, looking at me like he might come closer and head me with his little head on my leg, more food, there's more in that can, but when I get to my feet from the chair at the kitchen table that was once our dining room table back on Ernst Road, he moves to the door, and he goes and licks his chops and looks intently, scanning the horizon for movement and the other cat. I've put the television on to PBS, and it's a cooking show, so she won't have to ask herself too many questions about the news and such. </p><p>Fasting, I crack open another Polar Seltzer, perhaps regretting the lime flavored 12 pack with the green can, take in another sip of lemon water with a good dash of powdered ginger, turmeric, and I guess I need to meditate now somehow, though I really feel like lying down and weeping. Very tiresome not to be doing anything, to feel trapped. I don't even have the energy to do the dishes now, so discouraged. </p><p><br /></p><p>I rise from my nap in the basement, turn the knob of the dehumidifier back on, reverse clockwise from behind, then go up the stairs, hearing the toilet flush and the water rushing through the pipes. I better... SO I go up and check on her, and she looks up at me as she gets back to the bed, sorry about the big disaster here. She has a shirt that resembles a long johns fabric shirt dyed in shades of purple, earlier around her waist, now tucked into the pink tee shirt she wore to the doctor's office two days ago. Did she spill water? Did she pee her pants? First she says the pants are soaking, but also maintaining that her depends is not so dry, and she opens her legs to put a palm on the crotch as I turn away. Where's my husband? I look back her. Don't tell me he's dead too, she almost cries out. I go into the bathroom to investigate, see if there are any clues. Is Ted dead? No, mom, he's your son, and I'm Ted, I say, back in the room. She lifts the little now empty can of Pepsi at me from the little side table. Earlier, when dropping it off I bumped slightly into her foot, and she cried out as if I'd stepped on her toe. How would you like to be flat on your back and someone hit you, she says with a look. Yeah, I didn't think so, she said. </p><p>I've come back with a Fresca, nice and cold in the can. This seems to placate her, though it's not Pepsi. </p><p>Earlier I was looking at the to go menu of the new Sushi Restaurant on Bridge Street near the Wayne Drug and across from the bookstore. My mind is blank from ragweed still, and I'm having problems grasping things almost, so it's a relatively nice moment of the day for me to sort of half daydream about sushi and poke bowls and go slowly over the options. I've brought the grey jeans mom has gotten wet, and as I venture a sniff at them, maybe it is in fact just water, not pee. Who knows what happened. She's managed to put her pants on, a new pair, as I turn away, when she says, please don't be grumpy with me... I'm negotiating my way around the big plastic storage been I've put across the mouth of the stairwell to slip around it, and I hear her, happy for the time being, say, you know we all love you. </p><p>I've been to the mailbox, wearing my mask, and a baseball hat, find out as he yells out from his truck that Chuck is going off to pick up his son, after he gets his truck inspected, running late. I've finally dumped out all the bottles of wine with just a little sitting in them, from the fruit flies, and I see the little bodies as I pour the old wine out into the stainless steel sink with some satisfaction, before washing them down the drain, then soon putting all the bottles in a shopping brown paper bag, to take them out to the recycling, where I come across Maureen, Elliot's lady, in golf gear. I've just got a package delivered from the Amazon guy, and when she applauds the arrival of something new, and I explain it's the real sugar Pepsi, for mom, you know, not refined sugar, just about the same price as I'd find out at the Price Chopper, I say with a shrug. They do have good hummus out there, but... There's not a lot of variety here, she says. She opens the trunk to do a check on golf bag things, and we get into a brief talk about the limited options here, when she lived in the Bronx there were all sorts of food options, bodegas with fresh deli selection, on and on, stuff you just can't find here. Like the people here, she says. Not much variety.</p><p>I get the dishes washed finally, wearing the blue gloves in the hot water, as the cat is back under his tree, crouched comfortably surveying the yard from the other side after cleaning. It's almost six so I need to eat something, one of the three hamburgs I cooked last night into the toaster over at three fifty with the remainder of the sliced tomato on top. Dishes rinsed and drying, a little bit of avocado oil mayo wrapped in two leaves of romaine. It's good, and I take it in my hands off the plate and eat it standing in my dullness. And after finishing it, I don't know, I'm still hungry, so... the hot dogs from the health food store were pretty good last night, so...</p><p><br /></p><p>I hear the door creak and her footsteps. Huh huh, she chuckles, not much, she says, responding to her own friendly question. I don't know what I want to be doing either, ha ha ha. Shall we go sit down now? I take the little boxes of Pepsi cans out of the cardboard Amazon box. Almost shrugging. I just called to the cat, opening the door and look across the yard at him and he gets up and comes jogging over, calling back, and he'll take up his stand on the back stoop before coming in the door. </p><p>In such moods, I don't even want to go out and face anyone. Don't want to burden the new sushi restaurant on a Friday night with the students back in town, didn't want to even bother with a haircut downtown, nothing. A glass of wine, I think of, but...</p><p>I go to the foot of the stairs, but not in plain view listening in on her. Something about not wanting to die, which I think has something to do with the heavy bulk blocking her from coming downstairs, la ti da, she says, who doesn't want to live I'm going to go sit down over there, she says, coming out of the front room cluttered to the gills her old office. My heart rises when I see her hand close to the banister, but she passes on forward, not noticing my presence. Chuck is seen out the window his little tow-head blond son pulling a little black suitcase behind him. </p><p>I didn't do much yesterday. I went down to see Mr. Ron Clark my therapy guy, Mary's husband, down at 8th and Utica for a session of chatting. One five minutes away, really. It all comes down to me not having a job, that basic reality, that ship sailing farther and further away from me each living moment as I curl up and deny reality here, but all the while trying to fathom how to deal with it. And at the end, he said, maybe you're starting to think more of placing your mother somewhere... And I kind of nodded, and it was good to chat. Before that I'd been to the Wayne Drug Store, for a pill cutter device, some B12 for mom, shaving cream without sodium laurel sulfates, antacid tablets, also... Then the grocer store, for soda water, a box of cat food cans, a bag of onions and lemons, then to the wine store, in and out, back home, wearing a mask. Well, actually, that would have done it, plus going out at night to look at sky descending upon us here with a storm and lightning rolling in from the south.</p><p>She's there on the bed propped up on a pillow with the little yorkie doll, how you doing mom, and she's looking at the BBC news on PBS with the volume down, G20, she says, reading the crawl. I'll take a little bit of food, she says, but no, I know you're busy, it's okay mom. I've got a slice or two of the cauliflower crust pizza to bring her. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>It's now almost 6 AM, and I'm in the living room before the light comes up, having awakened at 3, and I hear her get up and then her peeing, the tinkle in the water of the toilet bowl in the bathroom at the top of the stairs, followed by through open door five second toot of gas, then her saying, not too bad, and I remember now I have three four pairs of her pants in the washing machine below my feet as I sit in Mom's old Eames Chair. </p><p>I've got a pot of adzuki bean and garbanzo in a curry with pumpkin seed toast the spice on the stove simmering, a fresh pot of Dragonwell...</p><p>Romapada Swami is recounting how Prabhupad prepared himself to come and preach to the Americans, English speaking, with the writings of the Vedas that say we have nothing to worry, enter into any battle of meaning, because it is for the purpose of the meaning of your engangement only, not the outcome you need to be concerned with, so if you need to go act like Jesus and saint upon wait upon the publicans and the sinners and the whores, that's just life so you might as well accept that's part of us, our reality, our DNA, and even of Jesus' own self, who in a way is a sinner to talking up or down to the priests gathered at the steps of the temple, but mom is sighing and whispering to herself in my distant sonic awareness... It's awfully hard not to be tolerant and kind to people... </p><p>I hear mom tearing off a piece of toilet paper, and then at least four two line utterances of iambic pentameter, with additional asides thrown in, academic footnotes to the current moment of her 84 year old time. She's there. She might be silent, but she's still there, and I hate ragweed season because it ends up costing me if I just go out for a walk. </p><p>John of the Cross imprisonment, Dark Night of the Soul for your prose, just like Francis after the war with the other hilltop town, held for a year in malarial cell with barely any light through prison window, and not enough interest as usual in watching the Vuelta taking on the Pyrenees scenic climbs up mountain passes unto the Tourmalet. Cervantes. And the sounds of the fellow prisoner... the sighs and light moans and plotting hisses of words to bring up to the winds of a heated kettle, or to let them go. I think of her heavy body. Thick legs. The way she decides to rip up the special pee catching Depends underwear, why... </p><p>Ted, just be done with it, the family members say, put her for her own good in a home up there. Or is this simply the voice in my own head, me trying to read them, rightly, then please them...</p><p>Kerouac in all seasons liked to sleep outside in his sleeping bag, roughing it, by standards, as it were. </p><p>I go in and check on the beans I've made still bubbling away more or less at the right bubble. Actually beautifully delicious, I find, after all my steps of organic and intuitive care. Prasadam, they call it, blessed food blessed by intention, by thought, and care, and the overseeing of spices. Better to my taste not to involve the spoiled to my taste flavor of ghee, just go with olive oil, pumpkin seeds, cayenne, ginger, a bay leaf, turmeric, curry powder, oregano, dried basil, cumin, some dried chopped dates, a few Roma tomatoes from the garden itself, salt, pepper, ground clove. Food and dining is what will save the world. Nutrition. The hippie approach. I'm a carnivore still, but... Satisfying, in flavor. Goes in and down in a light way, maybe that this life too, of sustenance, is not all that real also, just like our own lives. </p><p>Make mom a toasted cheese and then almond butter sandwich on sprouted grain Ezekiel bread from the fridge, as I add garbanzos to my pot mix of black eyed peas and adzuki beans. </p><p>There's nothing to fear. Wisdom will come. Help spread it. Natural.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now she is back on the bed, a towel over her waist and legs, and breathing again with in and out of true sleep, as I place the cheddar and almond butter sandwich cut into four and see the empty plastic film wrapper of orange Keebler peanut butter crackers just to the side of her as she sleeps face up, glasses still on. It gives me satisfaction to the turn the lamps off, leaving the light on in the bathroom for her to navigate if she needs to. </p><p>I can go back downstairs now, knowing again a small amount of satisfaction. </p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-27001959930061252252023-09-04T10:45:00.003-07:002023-09-04T10:45:59.305-07:00<p>9/4</p><p>Jesus couldn't keep them all straight, the disciples. The usual impossible mix of contrary and competing qualities and habits, even those related to the very intimate matters of character related to the spirit within and the teaching. There was a portion in all of them that could betray, but even that betrayal would or could be out of many many ways and means and things. Choices. What could you do? Such a myriad of things that it was rather easy for Jesus to quip, three times before the cock crows, embracing the world's range of infinite possibilities that would then come true. Could be for any number of things. </p><p>And in the same he loved them all, as a teacher would, older, in some sense of the term, than they. </p><p>That's why Jesus had striven for maturity, wisdom and experience of life, in every and all things. He had given up much of his youth for this blind ambition of one standing as a full fledged teacher. Now I'm old. And I don't like that either. What bride would take me now, at my age, Jesus pondered, with a sadness. And he could have had that, and beautifully and happily. But. Where had the years gone?</p><p>Having a dependable trade in his pocket had defied Jesus for a long time now. Sure, he could make ends meet, sort of, not really, in any lasting sense, with his trade of words and parables and understandings and recognizing the sinner in all people with kindness and in judiciously helping them, aiding them, with a few wisely chosen words, certainly helpful for their own ability to face daily existence. Yet, he wondered, what about himself, though. Surely, it was rewarding, to align words, to put them in such an arrangement that they reflected the truer nature of the vibrations that had wrought the world and made it all exist, just as it was, down to every atom and particle and inner resonance to the great tune.</p><p>It's like what Kurt Vonnegut said, to the folks at the Paris Review. What we need is a reading public, to, essentially, support all us bums who go about musing about life as it really is, not some soap commercial, as is the expression, perhaps, about commercials, maybe from Papa Kennedy, selling Jack to the nation. </p><p><br /></p><p>I make a fresh pot of tea as I get up. There's some in the mason jar, but it has a bitter taste from my forgetting to time the steeping of the leaves from yesterday, distracted by mom in the other room driving me crazy. It's early for her to be up, but I hear the heavy footsteps, and at the top of the stairs, the open door of the bathroom there, windowless, with the tub behind the shower curtain, no window in there, above the kitchen, I see the purple heather sweat pants lying on the floor, not folded, just its own pile. And on the bed, as I stand there with a BLT on Ezekiel toasted, fresh tomato, romaine leaf rinsed and dried, and Hellman's Olive Oil Mayonnaise, still with goddamn soybean oil in it for filler that fills and adds weight to you, just a little, as she requests, bacon extra crispy, and just the slightest hint of mayo, to a waitress, there she is, head on the pillow, a towel over her waist, bare legs, thick and peasant like, and I can see the Depends she has on, to the extent that she is even wearing them, are torn and inside out, which I keep at bay as far as the mind. It would be time to shower her, high time, as always now. </p><p>Soon some tomato, a little chunk, is on her shirt, and I venture to put the Baily's glass mug she likes, with ice water in it, now on the second trip up to tend to her, so she can take the first of the three morning pills, the tranquility one, what's it called, Venlafaxine.</p><p>I look out the window, the white doily curtain on the door, looking out at the golden rod evenly decorating the stand of ragweed at the back edge of the lawn with yellow. The cat is doing his cleaning, his head bobbing as he sits, or stands, tall to clean the white of his chest and orange fur of shoulder, patiently and actively and systematically. Back down in the safe quiet of the kitchen. A little pot of coffee from the Bailetti a little Labor Day treat as the wind sighs outside through leaves that have performed their chlorophyll operations and given us good oxygen all season long as they lean into the wind of shorter days of daylight and the cooling off of early September in its wisdom. </p><p>Mom, in her own opinion, is perfectly fine, nothing wrong it all with not wearing pants, with being a slob. When I shooed her upstairs, she didn't even want to go into her own room last night, what a mess, as she cried foul over what a bastard I was for making her go, get off the couch, but I'm comfortable here, no, mom, it's better for you... why? And then the agony of the stairs, oh, my knees, I can't do it, oh, my back, you bastard, why are you making me do this. </p><p>I'll tell you agony, you stupid selfish bitch, Jesus muttered to himself. The agony of being born and alive, even with all its joys. Via Dolorosa. Holy Mary, Mother of God. Pray for us Sinners, now, and at the hour of our death.</p><p>Her obliviousness to deal with for another day. The blind wants... What are going to be doing today... What are we doing for fun...</p><p>And already, Jesus is feeling behind. Behind on his writing. Behind on his meditation, always a toss up in the morning's light, too bright at first. A sun salutation series, slowly, and then twists with legs apart to stand in a warrior's pose to support the trunk in its rotation outward on one side, then pulling through and doing a series on the other side, and then the cobra shoulder's back to improve the attitude for the day, upward not downward, preparing for sadhana, and breath to bring back positivity of attitude.</p><p>And these are the sufferings that one has to bear. My father and his sister had to endure their mother, sturdy woman, who had supported them all through it, running her private speakeasy, dying slowing from the tuberculosis, as the Depression gained steam of permanence through the land, then FDR stepping up, to curb the greed of Men. </p><p>Break down the little box of Woodbridge four pack of little cans of Chardonnay. The bottles of her wine go back and turn even in the fridge. The year of things placed carefully enough on a surface, but then the things falling, tumbling off somehow. The clutter. Hard on even a yogi's balanced aim. Bottles of beneficial pills, mason jars of tea, cans and dishes for cat food, the on-going dish operations, the stove with its iron pans and kettle, a mini pot thing to measure cups and to hold the strainer when you pull it hot out of the iron Japanese black tea pot made in China with its zen. </p><p>One Prilosec down the gullet, hopefully not, but probably, breaking the fast, the stomach best left empty of substances before the various exercises of breath and kriya practices. </p><p>I write the posts, daily, pretty much, but I don't post them on the blog publicly any more it seems. A writer needs a certain privacy to gather the first of the four movements of his Ninth, or whatever the number of the symphony he is writing. The cloak of silence, so as not to be disturbed by outside opinions, as outside opinions are welcome, otherwise one wouldn't know if he even as an audience, and it would probably be the greatest percentage something blind like Artificial Intelligence cribbing your style. Feed it all into the great mouth of the infinite number capability, the biggest and finest card trick joke, to make it seem like the computer is actually capable of writing, even one sentence, which of course it isn't. </p><p>Contract the belly in from the diaphragm back to the spine, pushing the prana, energy, life, breath, up, up the spinal passage of nerve energy, up through the neck and into the skull's head caverns, past the eyeballs and the sinuses and other sensory elements of a person's body. Sadness and depression not mattering for shit anymore. Breath. </p><p>Then a great exhale, leaning forward, before resuming a straight back as you sit however you sit, exhaling, and then as you rise back straight breath slowly like poured water or oil drawn slowly down into the lowest of the bottom chambers for air of the belly, then expanding the floating ribs outward in all directions 360, then upward to the tree tops of the lungs to flutter in the light within. Then hold. 40, 50, 60, 70 seconds, sharing with all the cells, the blood pulling a little switch that rejuvenates it on a cellular level, and the slow waves of light sort of flowing pleasantly over the head in a kind of inward swoon, then, hold, release and then get all the old air out, for another fresh ocean running into the sea cave.</p><p>Grim, to watch a woman cough her lungs up, helpless. Chickens in the backyard. Empty glass beer bottles from the speakeasy home brewed days in the back that all four children will remember cleaning, another whole operation. </p><p>Then, the counted breaths in, sitting up straight. And mantras to chant, Aum... followed by a series of Sanskrit words to intone deep from where the resonant sounds we are able to make come from. </p><p>Stagnant, in ragweed season. Doesn't pay to go out and get the exercise of a long walk in, no. </p><p>The white tea pot of lemon water nearing empty. Cut a fresh lemon, kettle full enough of fresh filtered water from Mulligan tap filter to the Britta pitcher change the filter every three months. Get the seeds out on the little cutting board, doesn't have to be quite perfect. Still feels like there's nothing to do here. Sad. Go check on mom again, bring her the one hearing aid. </p><p>Only half a bottle of wine last night, after dealing with the insanity of mom for the day. The Seroquel half a tablet powdered up into coffee ice cream didn't seem to calm her that much, though it did the day before, but maybe she was tired from all the appointments last week.</p><p>And what pill can I take... brainMD gaba calming support, maybe a propranolol. yeah, why not. Vegetable cellulose and whatever else won't break a fast, necessarily. Not that I would know. </p><p>Fresh water for the cats dish, and a sweep of the floor. </p><p>Ahh, can of soda water, the first one, left by the laptop for a bit, an hour, longer, so a fresh replacement, by the sink, lid rinsed, go take a pee. Can of soda water, kinkajou, kinky jew, word sound, rinse the top off, crack open, miracle, soothing fix washing down, letting the stomach in the belly have its word on a Labor Day Monday of blank calendar. </p><p>If I show this to people, what will they say.</p><p>Them's that have eyes, let them see, thems that got ears, let them listen. Bubbles, fizz, fresh can of Polar Premium Seltzer to lift the mood, all will be alright. </p><p>A sweep of the floor wouldn't hurt. Bits of cat foot, and one of those little plastic sort of wire things that holds a triad of new socks in a packet on sale at TJ Maxx. Did I take my GABA pill already, I forget. Is it worth it to show one's face... to what? Another monkey baboon showing its own red ass. A little spoon end of ashwangandha powder in my tea, I like the taste anyway. A cup of Tulsi tea to brew along with the fresh pot of lemon water. A lot of seeds in this lemon, here on the bamboo wood or whatever it is cutting board....</p><p>St. Francis, he did not betray me. He got it. Copacetic. Rebuild my church. He did. And he didn't really say, build a big church in my memory. The little broken masonry falling down ones where the ones he liked to inhabit. Everything is broken. Buddha, everything is on fire. </p><p>Change the water in the cat's bowl. Does he prefer it washed, or just rinsed out. Cat spit adheres to bowl for dry food after two visits to his own little cup of worldly sorrows and personal maintenance. Hydration. Good for you. Likened unto a plant, the kingdom of heaven. Don't forget to water it. Don't oversleep the tea leaves or there'll be bitterness.</p><p>Kitten scratching at the screen, the animating force of life. Chuck has his mailbox keys now. He's off to Walmart, with his son, unseen as I run out with hat and KN95 mask and barefeet down to the parking lot, suddenly invigorated by being outside, friendship restored after hanging out with him too late fresh back in town.</p><p>Scrap it all, who gives a fuck. It is Nora who saves the manuscript of Ulysses from the flames, dear woman. </p><p>Lots of seeds in this lemon. Patience. Paper bag of recycling, cans, largely, getting full to the top. Lemon water steeps now. A pile swept together on the floor, carpet could use a vacuum. Boston Fern, a little water, same with the little stone pine. The wine hampers the meditation. Jesus did not mention this in performing the first miracle. Are those mom's footsteps, yes... Better go and head her off before she comes downstairs, maybe get her into the shower on the chair...</p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-64381648184758449462023-08-31T10:15:00.001-07:002023-09-08T08:46:11.160-07:008/30/2023<p> 8/30</p><p>I listen to myself drink the lemon water as I stand over the sink. Another day of doctor appointments for mom. </p><p> Calm I say to myself.</p><p><br /></p><p>My day starts at 10:30. The alarm on the phone was set for 9:45, but I give myself a little extra. The realities of the day weighing on me, and Sherry, who I spent the night with 35 years ago, between a Friday night shift and a Saturday day shift, where she lived down in Georgetown off of Q Street in a sort of apartment for young women. I didn't know what I had at the time. I'd lost everything already.</p><p>I have a mason jar of green tea to work down as I wake up and go upstairs after making the BLT for mom. I see her jeans, the short leg ones, Oompa Loompa pants I call them, on the floor in the bathroom, along with a pair of dirty wet Depends lying on the floor. I bring her the sandwich, but there she is now in the bathroom sitting on the can blankly. Same striped socks she's been wearing now for a week or more. I have to go through it all step by step. She retracts her usual knee jerk reaction, oh, my feet, they're ticklish, your hurting me, but I get her socks off, one of them wet, and put her feet into a fresh pair of Depends, seeing her long ugly toenails, thickened with fungus, balled up feet. My grandfather had bad feet.</p><p>Then she's sitting on the bed. I'm trying to get us out the door by noon, but I'm beginning to wonder now. She's absently-mindedly eating her sandwich bit by bit, and she still hasn't put pants on. So it's a big fight to get her pants on, and her zip up fleece jacket, is on inside out.</p><p>I end up having to yell at her and grab her by the arms to get her to realize we need to go. </p><p>But we get there.</p><p>I need to sit down she says, as she gets downstairs, her pants zipped but not fastened, don't touch me, she shouts as she comes down the stairs. I get her out the door, and it's windy out. Easy down the stairs, very carefully now. </p><p>It's a fight to get her into the car, and I know the clock is ticking. 48, down to Fulton, skies overcast, rain earlier, and maybe some more coming later. The end of August in the air, and just a few twinges of color at the edge of maple leaves. The ragweed high in bunches mixed with golden rod. </p><p>I get her in the door just about 1 pm, fifteen minutes late. </p><p>Waiting room. First nurse comes to get mom to put her chin on a bar and look into a machine. Then back to the waiting room. Then another machine to go to, and do similar things, and mom is complaining the whole way through of her neck hurting and could you hurry up. </p><p>I attempt to assist. I push the rolling chair in behind, looking down at her matted hair. He doesn't know what he's talking about, she says. Get away from me. Don't touch me. I back in to the brightly lit hallway, feeling the softness of the institutional carpeting, good for yoga. I let the woman, a nice sort of heavy-set woman, a mother of four, proceed. She won't sit still. She keeps closing her eyes. The woman calls another woman, also heavy set and in blue nurse attendant smock, in to help. Do you make a lot of money for this, mom asks her. It's going slowly today. We're supposed to get across down, really just over the river, to Fulton Prime Care, overlooking the curve in the road where the railroad tracks came through, the big old brick Nestle plant that made the town vital, with factory houses all round. Do you see a green X, the woman asks mom. I see some lines... Yes, look at those, dear. Finally, either they give up or they get the four pictures they need. Back to the waiting room, mom wanting to stop and talk to everyone along the way. </p><p><br /></p><p>Driving down, flickers of visual memories processed in the brain, two white rubber lawn chairs in a green yard 'neath two pines in a yard as Ellen Street curves to meet 48. The garage door of the hydroelectric brick plant close to the falls is open, and looking in I see the green metal turbines standing, then the road rises with the golf course sloping down to the left of the road with a line of hemlock, pine, tall evergreen, a flag flying by the country club main hall at the top of the hill beyond the green, and above that a bulbous water tower with cell phone antennae wired on top of its silver metal. The river below on the left, trees, more trees. Americana the whole way. Beautiful. I switch from NPR to the classical music station, and Bernard Hermann's score for Vertigo comes on as the clock nears the hour, and in Minetto, passing the boat landing and the Stewart Shop and the World War Two bridge past the brick mill building and the lock dam, an old hydroelectric plant, onward, we're already late now. Mom sitting on the bed, refusing to get up, or to understand the nature of doctor appointments and how they're good for you, pleading with her, and no, I'm fine staying here, it will all work out, after I've put aside her plate on the cable box and put her shoes on, after asking her to pull her pants up. There's a triangle garden tucked neatly in a grove of trees where they rebuilt the small bridge over a marsh. On into Fulton. </p><p><br /></p><p>Then we go back to the waiting room until we're called again, and it's the woman who was helpful, Shannon, like the river, yes, she's Irish, and in this room we're now in after we rise again from waiting, mom sits in the optometrist exam chair and given eyedrops, and then asked to look and read back the lines. Each of these rooms visits is running long, protracted, delaying things. </p><p>Back to the waiting room, and mom says she needs to pee, the whole room hearing it, and someone's in the bathroom, so we wait, and there's a woman mom asks her, so where did you go to school, and it turns out west of Rochester, Victor, NY, and once upon a time perhaps she was a pretty farmer's daughter, and now she's waiting somewhat uneasily in a room full of other aging Americans, the man with a sort of hunting camo jacket with his wife, he has shorts on and you see the vertical knee replacement scar, and later mom tries to talk to him, and he's polite, says he's doing fine, how are you, but ignores her next attempt at questioning. I take mom into the restroom. I'm waiting for her when the Caribbean skinned blend of humanity comes to the open doorway to call us, as the doctor is ready, as she takes the measurements he will later mumble and enter them into the laptop. </p><p>I'll come back in five minutes and now a sort of desperation has come, regarding the 2:15 across town with mom's primary care doctor, Dr. Oauno. Bernadette is her name, as I get mom out after having her wash her hands, having to take a used paper towel out of her hand, we have to go now mom, and in the hallway, I say outloud, after mom says something, oh, that's... is that Portugal, Fatima? Oh, yes, that's Lourdes... why... </p><p>In the final office, there's the lean white coat doctor, Dr. Spitzer, and he asks mom to uncross her legs in the examination chair so he can shine a light and look at her eyes, I don't want to hurt you. Does anyone want to kill you, she asks him. You'd have to ask my wife, he says. Where did you go to school. Syracuse, he says, having nothing of it. </p><p>Bernadette comes back in and I get mom's water bottle out of her way. I think I just wet my pants, mom says, and I go out in the hallway, and say to myself, but outloud, NOoooo. </p><p>It's 2:12 now, and I call Fulton Prime Care, to see what to do. I thought we could get there, but... The woman at the other end of the line understands, Dr. Oauno has a full day of appointments, so, no, after 2:30 he doesn't have any availability. I'm still monitoring what's going on the exam room. Shining a light in her eyes after sweeping the lens thing on the arm back away. It turns out we have a 1:45 physical planned next week anyway. First she says he won't have anything for a month out, so it's good to hear. </p><p>I go back in and the good doctor, who reminds me of Henry Fonda, and sounds like him, says there's only the slightest sign of macular degeneration, the lenses look good, everything looks good, we don't need to see her for two years, and I say that is fine. Eye drops as needed, after I try to stutter out some small concern, pulling the non-prescription little green eye drop bottle Refresh out of my shirt pocket. Mom tries to talk to them more. Okay, mom, let's go to lunch now. Where are you taking me, I hope it's the most expensive place...</p><p>Bernadette, tall, mom always comments on her hair, what nice hair you have, smiles at me in the hallway, as I kind of sigh in my body, have a nice lunch, she says, and you have a nice lunch too, I say, playing along with the big joke this all is. How long have you worked here, mom asked her earlier, 19 years. I think of that later. Do they pay you well? I don't know, she says, and I sort of chuckle at that. I've looked at the poster photography... It's all from New York State, one of the girls told us earlier. </p><p>Okay mom, come along, and past the checkout window women and the eye glass display of all sorts of things I'd like to look at and past the two openings to the waiting room, and the old people smile at me as we go, for taking the time and having the saintly patience. It's all going as fast as I can process, but there's a note of relief as I get mom to the door as she keeps up her tirade, jackass, you don't know what you're doing, and it's all a grand cosmic play of male female in the universe. </p><p><br /></p><p>Was it her having to fast before yesterday's trip to get a blood sample that did it?</p><p>The bacon cheeseburger American cheese with ranch wrap, a green tortilla wrap, rather than romaine, as I might have been thinking, as I order mom a Pepsi, and then her usual grilled lemon pepper chicken with wild rice and zucchini, myself a soda water yesterday about 3:30 at the Press Box, was pretty good, and I had a few of the onion rings, I got for them for mom. Then taking her along to see the new pedestrian pier, than a walk out to Breitbeck Park, where she sat at a picnic bench and took a dried tree leaf structure apart as I walked a little further to look out over the vast lake, careful with my mask on still, and hat, after we met Toby the dog, a Shitzu blend, with a young man who had just moved from Grand Junction Colorado who turns out lives on Polock Hill. </p><p>Mom asks him repeatedly where he found the dog. I want a dog, she says. Originally he was going to be my mother's dog, but I decided to get away from my family and move her, and they say, take something you love along with you, he says in a sort of almost Southern or Western drawl. Do you have a wife, mom might have asked him at some point, and there's a slight awkwardness, but it's cool, we've made friends and he's a neighbor. I don't want to give him the wrong idea. Oh, yeah, Polock Hill, the church there, St... uh, St. Stephan's... we live over at the Cedarwood Townhomes. I know where that is, he says. </p><p><br /></p><p>When we get back, from the rain on 48, as mom eats a packet of annatto colored peanut butter crackers, her mood improving, making me wonder if this was all, despite my feeding her, an episode of low blood sugar, we get in and she takes to the couch, soon enough falling into quiet. </p><p>I go out to the store to pick up a rotisserie chicken and a few other things that seem dutiful enough after getting mom home and she didn't even question not going out to lunch. </p><p><br /></p><p>Now at 3 in the morning she's still on the couch almost 12 hours later after our appointment and our failure at the second one. The cat came in, he's next to her, and she's leaned over on him. </p><p>When we got in, not ten minutes back, she looks up at me and says, that was fun. I look at her. I look her in the eyes. Seriously. Are you being real? Fun? Are you kidding me? I let it drop. I let her snooze off, make another pot of tea out of the same leaves. </p><p>I called the car mechanic shop about the slight oil leakage, the drip on the strut, as I've looked underneath the car, an awkward angle, to find the plug, not seeing any drip, and finding from above the oil filter down there in space between the radiator and the oil pan, but there's definitely a drip and I've put newspaper underneath the car, with little rocks found in the parking lot so the wind won't take them away, seen the rainbow mark of water drop on the pavement, yes, something is going on. I give him the quickest of sketches about the discovery, mention we were there on the 11th to get inspected and then the oil change, which isn't a bad idea and I wasn't at all sure when we were due... "It could be a number of things..." He's a cool guy, I enjoyed hanging out in his shop with the girl who was his niece, helping organize the old garage storage area to the left, the east of the shop as it faces out on 104 out near the farmland where now there are fields of solar, the niece also working at a stable, and I ask her about horses and their demeanor. Thoroughbreds versus regular horses I forget the words, and her Arabian is more flighty than the usual regular horse, a draw horse or something like that. The man at the shop, who has taken over the shop from mom's long time friend and political difference of opinion, Mike, aka Mr. Torbitt, who became my friend too, is a sturdy fellow too, mustache, strong, well educated, and spoken, taking everything in easy stride, there was a minivan with a blown head gasket and I saw him shake his head, no, I'm booked solid and that's a big job, and later said, the guy isn't going to make it back to Alexandria Bay, or was it Watertown, well, he found the appointment from the previous service, and tells me, oh, bring it by, how about Friday afternoon, and I'm grateful. Sharon is going to take mom for the day, I hear, and I have an appointment with Ron my therapist friend, Mary's husband, but I think, why am I telling him about my Friday appointments, talking on almost like a woman. Well, if he knew what I'd been through and eaten silently without much expressed verbal complaint out loud, yeah, he's a man who gets stuff. The real world.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-91300526269281713122023-08-14T04:22:00.005-07:002023-08-14T05:16:36.030-07:00The Year was 1965.<p> 8/14</p><p>The year of this musical hit, Prabhupada's Pattcha Tattva Mantra, was, and is,1965, at least in the sense of the year of his arrival in the U.S., from India, when he came to set up shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.</p><p>The same year The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction (I Can't Get No) hit the charts and dominated the airwaves and even the thinking of many a young man, once young, including me. The depths of the heart were looking for the light, and along came Mick Jagger singing on TV, and the world, for better or worse, was hooked. A spectacle. Who knows that the older people thought at the time, they kept it to themselves.</p><p>Things that happen in the world on the year of our birth might be said to have a significance somehow. Why did the great Divine send off a vibration of the great dream to look back at the Great Self of Creation, picking a particular and highly appropriate time and situation.</p><p>My mother was born in 1939, in March, the later half, the year Hitler ran the Nazis into Poland, the year Ted Williams came up from the Minors to take up playing for the Boston Red Sox, her hometown, and in fact her father, a chef, who may or may not have had some humble connections, brought her to his last game, in 1960, on a drizzly day, when he hit the greatest of towering home runs in his final at bat, circling the bases, and refusing the gesture of tipping his hat.</p><p>Philip Larkin, in England, in that famous year, 1965, was hitting his stride too. Writing poems like Going Going Gone, considering the pollution of the marshes as the Northern England economy discovers consumer materialism, having left the small stone churches to rot and for bicycle rides, all of which too would be a part of the ethos and the realities of the world one lives in. Poems with a wry empathy for those doomed to sit on park benches, "nothing to love or link with..." And he was the perfect Egghead, a librarian bare to mockery in another society that would come, but did okay in his day. </p><p>JFK had been shot down in the motorcade, a year, two months and few days before, a few days early, scrawny, with poor skinny legs, I was taken from my mother's womb by Cesarian Section on what I imagine was a cold morning of a cold day when the sky was deep blue purple that night in the small house up the quiet street with the Holyoke Range comforting us, the South Amherst Common with its ice rink. Politics has never been the same since, his speech at Amherst College, about the corruption of power, and the healing offered by poetry and imagining and thinking, becoming part of the strange legacy of the Transcendental Town with its hills of Emily Dickinson's. An Eden, of sorts. My brother remembers Tommy James and the Shondells, Crystal Blue Persuasion, playing on the blue Volvo station wagon to go pick up dad from the science halls over at UMass. Amongst the early words I tried to utter, to clarify the world, before we moved away, in 1968, was, turned out to be, Flower Car. Apparently, somewhere around the Common, perhaps, or along one of the many fine old roads, there was a VW Bug with flower stickers on it. </p><p>What else... 1965... The Vietnam situation thickens, develops a kind of cancer, by human reaction to the action of other humans... Politics, votes, the M'uhlutu'ary, which indeed had one the war against Facism, but now had less of a reason to exist in a productive fashion, after the Marshall Plan, I suppose, to give a quick and unnecessary sketch of History. There were protests against the war in the old town, Amherst, where people gathered under the great trees of the Common near the churches, my aunt remembering them well.</p><p><br /></p><p>The man, once a boy, who heard those songs, who was largely defeated by society and its shaping, not able to quite fit in, having played too well along with it, and given the many gifts and talents he could have developed, spent to far too long and too much on the fool songs of This World, as charming as they might be, to play upon a lyre and sing and laugh along to with friends growing up.</p><p><br /></p><p>And finally, after 60, almost, years later... one discovers the songs he should have been listening to, as once Tibetan Buddhist Monks had come to the auditorium of the Musical Building and chanted, multiple notes, almost like a triad, deeply vibrant, came from the throats of their shaved head saffron robed faith.</p><p>From the year, of his birth, something one should not exactly ignore, if he's looking for meaning, if that would do him any good, 1965, the world having inherited much faith and literature and theater and a fine tradition of music. One comes new to the world, innocent, a babe... and it can take a very long time to grow up, as I suppose he would listening to Jacques Brel, and less and less to the mind blowing moment in Pop Music when Keith Richards steps, with heavy click on a Fuzz Pedal, a new thing, to sound like the saxophone, plays that simple rhythmic three note riff, up, then back down again, while Charlie Watts clicks away almost with jazz beat, but driving, and the whole thing comes together, and Bill Wyman thumps away at the thick strings of the bass and Brian Jones plays perfect blues licks with tasteful and knowing interjection. </p><p><br /></p><p>One fine day comes, metaphorically, when you realize it's not about all that, Getting Satisfaction as opposed to No Satisfaction, when the song turns, and must honor the realities of old age, sickness and death, of the finite being who must go with all the grace he or she can muster to face such days. The importance of the day itself rises, in addition to the original year, and the importance of the Mantras themselves, better in Sanskrit, for effect by the nature of how the language works on the body and the mind becomes a life boat, a way home. </p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-13263432385811366732023-05-20T13:48:00.003-07:002023-05-28T10:53:37.473-07:00<p> A sketch for Julie (the loss of her Werner)</p><p>A therapist will tell us to avoid letting your own life be narrowed; broaden out, volunteer, find fresh new activities, gardening, hiking, write for an ecological outfit for free, make new connections.</p><p>And then there's life. Particular phases of life. I find myself inhabiting my mother's basement, as a peaceful place to go where it is quiet and spacious, not cluttered with academia detritus and books and papers. </p><p>And one can look back at life, and test the past, and find unexpected disappointments therein. Things didn't work out in the happy golden autumn freshman bright way. The relationship bonding with a mate didn't happen. One can even torture himself. The recording Walkman a friend hall mate borrowed for basketball practice and broke, didn't even bring the broken thing back to you, shrugged it off, sorry, without replacement. I played in bands back then. One cassette tape recording from the summer before, taped to a wall in a kind of fraternity house. A gift from my mom, proceeds from the house. All the voices one could have recorded, a career in oral history that never was, voices and ancestral stories lost to the mists. Keep the batteries fresh in your answering machine, so the recording of your dad's voice will last beyond him. What do you do? The shrew you ran into, couldn't read so well, bright, but... etc, a real piece of work, toxic, dismissive, angry. Just as I was a disappointment to her, apparently. What's supposed to be good for you, advancing your life, turns out the other way, it doubly hurts and causes pain of a lasting sort in a world of comparisons in every venue. The things you learn the hard way, feeling shame upon yourself.</p><p>But then you look back, as I do. I remember my father speaking of his mother's tuberculosis. "Life can be pretty grim," he once said, when we drove into town to pick up the New York Times, relating a story of a schoolteacher back then checking on him. With TB one coughs her lungs up as they deteriorate, the digestive system is eaten up too.</p><p>And if not that, something eats the brain, if the cancer hasn't gotten through you already, shutting off life's flow within in particular spots spreading throughout. A blackness coming to the mind, or the spirit, so that you can no longer lift life and limb. </p><p>While Kerouac writes beautifully of Fall in New England alleyways, and sets a trail we follow of his own spirituality, there is behind it all, unseen, an awful subtext of life being rather saddening and unsatisfactory. He took refuge in the common man, people of Lowell and Lynn, the alley bums of San Francisco, the Bohemians of New York.</p><p>It that enough, to make a life?</p><p>Even one's own vices don't work past a certain age. The heart-rate soars when trying to sleep it off. And all the things your therapist warned you about sort of come upon arrival. </p><p>I think of Larkin sometimes. Many of lines might occur, but "fools in old-style hats," comes to me, from This Be the Verse. "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." "But they were fucked up in their turn," by the ones who came before them, everything in turn.</p><p>With no way forward and no way back, it's like the world, in at the broadest most universal sense, is asking of you to turn inward, to find the glories in the meditations that bring your spine back up straight, your chin parallel, your shoulder blades back and hugging your ribcage as you take the deepest of breaths from bottom to top and out again then inflate. Exhale. The inner light of the chakra system. </p><p>Not much to go on, huh. Or is it enough. A quiet changing of the equation, the sense of it building over time, yes. Over the subtext we all share, successful or not. </p><p>It's a rainy day here. I make mom a BLT on Ezekiel bread, the cat's in, and as I do my sadhana, down in the basement, I hear the steps up to her room creak from her weight just so. Not like yesterday where she berated me every time I passed through the living room, and I don't remember starting it that day. I'll go down and finish up with twenty minutes of silent mantra, if I still can, and then a quick shavasana, and there's a beauty in all that. She took two of her pills, the main ones for her condition, though not the calming one. I'm trying melatonin gummies on her, and last night I stayed up too late with cans of cider, beer too much for my pipes. </p><p>We're all waiting around, not ready for the tragedy to happen, but it will, and when it does, maybe it's a good thing, in some small way. </p><p>Maybe in that way, acceptance, you learn to love again, the meek, the frail, the broken people dragging on you, a broken heart mends, feeling better the next day. A half an hour, not chewing your guts out. </p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-44650021442516209272023-03-27T23:51:00.005-07:002023-04-08T19:52:51.051-07:00<p> 3/27</p><p><br /></p><p>Sunday, cold, but the sun was out. I get a decent sadhana in, silent mantra, then my round of Maha Mantra, then yoga outside on the mat, on the walkway, facing the sun. I try headstand on mat on green grass over damp dark earth, three times, no, then move mat to the sidewalk, and that flat surface works better. I count. I count to 120. I count to 120 again, and then beyond, I'm still counting, but the wind comes up and I've done what I can, and this time I want to focus on the recovery pose accompanying headstand, child's pose, which does its work, real work, relaxing the back of the rib cage and the organs within after the holding in of upward.</p><p><br /></p><p>I go in and mom comes down, again, and sits on the couch. I made her a sandwich earlier, very tedious, and she won't take her pills without a big protest, stop bossing me around, so today, after a horrendous dinner after the ride on Cemetery road, across 104, then along the big pond wetland of Rice Creek before it winds its way out the big lake in the distance, before her manipulations on my pity for her, she wants to go out for dinner, oh, wherever you'd like is fine, today I'm just going to leave her alone. I hear her talking to herself, as she does when she looks in the mirror, and of course her footsteps, but last night she was telling me that she can take care of herself, doesn't need any help, then asking me every five minutes how come I look so miserable, you hate me, you hate me, don't like it?, there's the door. And the other table, one man with a dark sweatshirt from the local church, St. Paul's Catholic, on the east side, a party of six, are dining, able to ignore us. She has trouble trying to handle her chicken, lemon and artichoke dinner, whilst I have Fish Italiano, wisely ordered with a side of gluten free penne, tomato sauce to save my palate from boredom, and finally, over entrees, I don't even want it, but I'm trying to be more of a sport as her voice rises at me, and then asks me, again, and then again, and then again, so, what's next for you, where are you going next, I order a class of Chianti, and I don't even want it, but I'm trying. I too have my doubts about going full Krishna consciousness, even though at this point, it makes indeed perfect sense. I reach over to take the steak knife that came with her dinner, to cut the chicken breast into pieces she can then take with the fork.</p><p>Honor, dishonor, happy things, miserable things, that's all the dualities of life, and you just weather it, it's all the same anyway, while inwardly you vibrate with ever growing consciousness of Krisha. With his divine help, friendship, and guidance, reading from the proper lineage. </p><p>I reflect back on the highlight of the day, Sunday, cold, but sunny, windy, walking, barefoot, up the hill, the road perfectly smooth, as they spray a salt solution, rather than spreading crystals, or, as the used to, sanding in the winter. I'd taken mom for her drive, back around through the town, I'll get you a Sunday New York Times at the Big M, and when we get back to Erie Street, mom's aren't we going to go out for lunch, making it clear that she will not like going straight home, and I don't even know what to cook her anyway... Okay, fine. Continue the birthday celebration, except now, it's no fun, and even worse than the first. She's looking at me, and I know I'm miserable. So, my chakras aligned I do my best to address it honestly, the next time, the next round of where are you going next, how's your writing, where are you headed...</p><p>Well, Mom, as it becomes clearer to me in my own head, I start. You and I have different approaches, different ways of thinking about things. You believe in academic learning, in footnotes and references, and studiousness, and that's great. But that's not me. I am comfortable with--I try to find a way to explain it, so I think... received learning, passed down learning. And that's spiritual, about belief, and faith, and that's just not your thing, I explain to the creature across from me in the booth. And I listen to her with another round of contradictory observations. Oh, they've done a nice job with the place, the architecture, the decorations. Oh, but they have a ways to go... I look at her. Mom... I was in the restaurant business, she says. </p><p>When the waitress, a friendly woman, dark hair, has waited on us many times over the years, comes over, mom says that embarrassing thing, "we're easy." No, you are not easy. Later I tell her how I used to immediately distance myself with a bit of despise at the insult. I'm a professional, I can deal with whatever you throw at me. It's like the guy who tells you, and women, lawyers, who play ultimate frisbee have told it to me to over the years, along with a lot of other types, "I'm a good tipper." Yeah, right buddy. So I waste my breath a bit, how I was really in the restaurant business, not just a kid taking ice cream orders at the Howard Johnson's, as if mom was a real on her feet waitress like her mother was... and how I took a dislike to such people, even if it was a joke, and she's said it many times. Oh, we're easy, huh huh huh. The way you express yourself to a server is with eye contact and grace and body language and complete calm acceptance, for the gifts they will bring. They're professionals, you're paying them. </p><p>So this is going on, and I go through the misery of ordering for her, asking her in a stage voice what kind of dressing would she like, Caesar, or crumbly blue, along with her baked potato, as I sip my soda water, and I say, well, mom, you're just not a faithful person, a church goer, a believer, and she can accept that. So, mom, if I explain to you what I'm up to, that I live in the present moment, which is all we got, get up, pray every day, do my chanting and my yoga and then write, that's the day right there, isn't it.</p><p>Meanwhile in my own mind, horrors face me. What will I ever do for gainful employment after all this... I'm ruined, just as I always have been, as an adult. My father's way, as Keats says, education is the process of remembering what you already know, awakened from within. </p><p>Happiness, joy, of the kinds that doesn't come within, I don't have much of that. On top of the shames of my own choices... Jesus Christ doesn't really have material happiness and joy, now does he, Holy Week, coming. I look at her. I wanted to take her to Joanne the neighbors funeral around the corner at St. Stephen's, but she got terribly antsy, and we ended up, sadly, at Rudy's telling ourselves whatever... They were bringing the coffin in up the steps out of the black Cadillac hearse when we drove by, and over on the back side passing the large parking lot, we even missed the figure of Sharon going in, who would later tell us how it was beautiful, with singing of Irish songs and Oh Danny Boy. I'd made the drive the night before even, and gotten us up in time, and then I guess I chickened out, or didn't want to do anything but read how to placate her, causing myself trouble of a deep unhappy guilty kind.</p><p>Don't like me, there's the door, she says again. You hate me. I can take care of myself. Yes, mom, think you can take care of everything, figure it all out with any help, and here you are being the greatest burden and drag on me I almost wish, from conventional stand-point that I'd never been born. Stupid stubborn bitch staring at me and moving her silverware around on the table like she's in control of everything, everything at her mastery and command and her references, and her I'm a woman, or, the other way, I wouldn't know I'm just a stupid woman, or, you have a penis, and on and on.</p><p>Finally, as I seek out the tomato sauce's comfort over the gluten free penne, I stare out at the wall behind her four booths away, a tan stucco, been there for every, terra cotta, warmer than a Bistrot's tobacco smoke wall yellower color with a faint nod to Provence's warmth and Garden of Eden vegetation. What are you look at, she demands of me. I sit up straight now, from yoga practice. I am capable of slipping into a meditation light or deeper.</p><p>But it feels okay to sort of plant a flag, to figure it out, how I am happy with A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's translation, the Bhagavad Gita As It Is, marvelously clear with Sanskrit and then phonetic Sanskrit with each term broken down and defined, and then the commentary of Purport. What's going on, who is saying what to whom, who is speaking, what does this name term mean for Krishna, as the name terms slip around a lot, such that without a guide it's very easy to get puzzled, and then baffled. </p><p>I regret the wine as I drink it. It's not making me anymore jovial in the slightest, plus it represents many a problem and wasted year of my pathetic life of seeking out learning in the less common way for those of us who have tried to deal with academia in tangential ways at least. </p><p>But we've learned, because I asked her, if she'd been working out or running, she says, oh, I'm running, and I get it, but she adds how her eleven year old, they've been going back and forth to the hospitals in Syracuse, and in another trip over to our table she tells us that her daughter woke up paralyzed, but that she is relearning how to walk. Oh, wow, thank you for letting us know, I try to say, as gently as I can. Yeah, I'm doing my yoga, I add, as if I have ever had a problem as severe as paralysis, though I have read how serious back nerve issues have been healed through Tantra yoga, not that have ever fully experienced that real lovely thing of a man and woman bringing their chakras together in communing harmony of intercourse. </p><p><br /></p><p>I needed a nap when I got in, and, as I'd blocked her from sitting on the couch by the two guitars in their cases, offended she went upstairs with her coat on, and soon as asleep, I hid in the old office on my green camping air mattress, and fell asleep just out of stress. </p><p>Waking again, dryly, fogged a bit, but gathering myself to read from Chapter Two, verse by verse, saying the Sanskrit terms to hear them better, then reading the commentaries, which do add a lot to one's understanding of the Holy Book of Krishna Consciousness. In the Eames chair, the dishes gathered in the sink. Illusions have rested upon me, for so many years, distractions, but now it's all clearer. </p><p>But still in despair, even after a good Sadhana day and yoga and the good walk up the hill and back, the water seeming to rise on the sides of the road, as the beavers are up to something, around 4 in the morning I find the cold bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, just for, I don't know, something to give some form of comfort as my life falls totally apart. By God's will.</p><p>And, at 2:26, here she comes, my way, down the stairs and to the kitchen talking to herself with commentary.</p><p>And I'm angry. And as I later regret, when she comes towards me my voice rises in anger, though she doesn't remember telling me any of the things I am now repeating to her. I said that?</p><p>And when I finally apologize and calm down a bit, as goes up the stairs with a packet of peanut butter crackers and an oat bar... she tells me I'll regret this, and I say, yes, I know I will. But the outburst came, and maybe it had to come, though I am not proud at all, but rather ashamed. </p><p>Maybe it was the moment she caught me in, the latent two beers in my system, the short hours of sleep, the weather, I don't know, she probably won't remember it anyway.</p><p>As she goes back upstairs, mom, would you like a sandwich, do you want me to get you a Pepsi, she says, I want you not to shout. And she is the calmer one. Great. Her, you hate me, settles uneasily into the air, and now what do I do. Go for a walk?</p><p><br /></p><p>Fortunately the anger in my throat dissipates. I think of cooking some fried eggs, but as I make mom a turkey, lettuce and guacamole sandwich I realize I'm very hungry, and when I take the plate with it upstairs, cut into fours, she says, I can't eat all that, so... </p><p>A headache comes. Along with a wave of weariness, and whereas yesterday was a good day, as far as reading, and yoga, and mantras, and the readings of the night before, today the clarity is gone and clouds and drizzle have come.</p><p>I make myself a sandwich too, mindful now of how the turkeys suffer, knowing what's going to befall them, so as I finish my plate, I pick up each little shred of turkey breast flesh. </p><p>Jesus was a good sport in all this, maybe that's why he took the wine they gave him, or why he made it himself to keep the people at the wedding gathering at Cana happy, as the Lord loves human happiness. </p><p>But when it leaves you, at 58, now you just feel stupid, anti-social, trapped in worse chemistry than you had before, the old hangover. And it was even quite clear to me that I didn't want to drink at all, not when I drove the car straight rather than taking the left up Hawley towards the Cedarwood Townhomes. The depression, the feeling sad about everything that is the after-effect suffering of trying to please yourself individually. </p><p><br /></p><p>The neighbor two doors down, not unattractive, utters her first words to me in months, as I go back out the door after getting mom in to retrieve my iPhone, her dog, a black German Shepherd bitch scuttling over to sniff me, "Sorry," she says, and I say, oh, no, I like your dog, but she probably doesn't hear that as she closes the door with the dog back in, and her little boy there in the mix. I think she thought I was a creep. I cleared her Jeep station wagon SUV off of snow, early in the winter, maybe that was being too friendly. Or maybe it was because sometimes when I get home, after peering in through the front window to see if mom has taken over the couch in the living room, then if so I traipse along the back of the row of townhomes, coming in the back door. I always give her space a wide birth, so I don't know.</p><p>And today I hear her speaking to a girlfriend who brought her own kids over in her own white Jeep the same, about Mike, and about how it was a pointless conversation... I would have stayed and liked to hear more but, ah, not my business, though there is some entertainment value in it, I suppose, or to see if I might strut my own plumage, ha ha ha, I don't think so. I thought we were friends last Fall, and I took the dog for a decent long walk, at least one poop, to the watery area and back... We were sitting out on our front stoops then, and she offered to bring the dog over to meet mom, and I thought that was nice, and she asked me about yoga at least once, and I told her, yeah, it helps me from going crazy and she understood.</p><p>The garbage truck comes around and bangs the dumpster up and over and then back, and I took two boxes out of the cellar this morning, and one large one yesterday from an old printer. </p><p><br /></p><p>I take my pills, one Wellbutrin, and the BrainMD capsules and soon start to feel better.</p><p>Why has Catholicism retreated in the light of the Bhagavad Gita....</p><p><br /></p><p>What do I know, I don't know anything. There's nothing in us, we have to get back in contact with the source.</p><p>I go for a walk. Was it the one glass of wine to deal with mom over dinner at Canale's? The two beers in the middle of the night? </p><p>The world of alcohol's imaginative un-reality. Hemingway grandiose destroyed but not defeated kind of stuff.</p><p><br /></p><p>Later my rain coat damp on the inside and my left toes feeling damp in my hiking boots, I go down to the store. Grey, still drizzling. A sea-gull screeches overhead the parking lot shiny and I tighten my belt, go, "oh fuuuck," to myself, it's that kind of a day. </p><p>Inside I do better, have a talk with George the manager guy, who has quit the diner because he has everything including his truck paid off, and got himself a 1985 reissue MG, black, of a 1952, with the fender running board style. He sold his big Yamaha roadster motorcycle, the arthritis in his hip flaring at every ride. Just some human interaction is all you need.</p><p>And I feel I am not good enough, not pure enough, am headed for such a disaster that reading the Bhagavad Gita won't really help so much.</p><p><br /></p><p>I leave the market, the parking lot, onto the main road, through the four corner traffic light intersection, the YMCA old armory building and the Dunkin Donuts, the lights along route 48 on the other side of the river as grey dusk falls and night comes, pulling in to the parking lot just past Bame's, to park, shop for wine.</p><p><br /></p><p>3/28 Two in the morning.</p><p>After a fitful nap, trying in half my mind to read mom, if she needs anything, half to leave her alone, and then the other moments just trying to take care of myself, give myself some space.</p><p><br /></p><p>I am reminded of what Dostoevsky wrote in Notes From the House of the Dead. How the smartest most highly intelligent men he met were those on the inside, society's deemed criminals, and indeed some of them had done acts horrible enough, but he saw them brightly. They were on the inside, too smart really for anything else. Rich not in academic learned knowledge of the kind you sit and study for and then are graded, and then round after round, constantly adjusting, but those who must run forth into learning wherever they can, right in front of them, from life, from the occasional nuggets of wisdom they find in the stream. People who don't fit in, who gave up on rules and tiresome obedience to the order of artificially constructed modern societies, because they couldn't stand, couldn't tolerate, not longer than a short enough time span to be cast out. Rejected. Pushed away, with no option but to do something else, spur of the moment, disagreeable as they are, but in some way realizing that they too must fit in somewhere, and so, as a last option, they find criminality. </p><p>Dmitri Karamazov, who is innocent of the murder of the father, though he is charged and found guilty and sent away, is one of those brave rash men who cannot fit in, burning brightly through their clenched teeth with the fire that God imbued and entrusted them with. Because society tends to want people to conform, it leaves no room for them, and so they live desperate lives, ones of passion, as passion guides them as much as bright intellect. </p><p>Thus the passion of their patron saint, Jesus Christ, who too is taken as a criminal, outsider to society, even as he is its most central insider, as if at the beating heart of all humanity and all human ventures, such as he sees with the same passion. There is the miracle of the first, the wedding at Cana, the youngest brother Alyosha experiences at the wake, the body of the Elder Zosima, in dream. The happy miracles, but there are the sad ones that are true as well. The rejection, the sadness, the brutality... The first miracle seems but a candle, even as it might provide some form of safety and support.</p><p>Notes from the Dead House brings forth a wide variety, a cross section of a humanity far away in geography, ancestral position, and time, but a range of the same people you might still find in Mother Russia and the greater part of that world, the handsome young pious Chechnian, who takes interest in Gospel readings, all sorts, forgotten to me, but for the vignettes of the imprisoned of the Siberian labor camp of the 1870s or whenever it was. The Christmas play, put on by the prisoners. The card games, the unfortunate cycle of the smuggling of vodka and what it does, bit by bit, until the crazy are crazed and then blow like fuses. </p><p>The criminal, waiting to become the holy man, the holy man, waiting to become the criminal... It is a good thing that God has allowed us to be in touch now with other cultures, that we might find our own, ourselves, in what was foreign, strange, interesting, compelling, and now guiding us.</p><p>How strongly I do not even want to touch anything that changes my mind, and yet, just one disastrous evening, unprotected, with no place to put her so that I might get a break and she might have some social pleasure without me and my misery and my fading life juice. </p><p>The grocery store and the buying of supplies, including meats, and then a stop on the way home for that anesthetic, I agree it's not facing the problems of life squarely, but one has to eat, has to rise from the drying out nap and wish to find some energy in order to cook the ground beef, or whatever, of the pan of bacon for mom's sandwich for the next day, just to keep moving, the soothing wine. It does not work, out of the house. The imprisoned must feed himself, alone, not ask for help. </p><p>Eating a hamburger, having some wine, in a tumbler, over two large ice cubes for each, topped with soda water, listening to a lecture on Krishna consciousness over the computer, for a moment I can catch my breath.</p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-35236690785457687482023-03-21T12:53:00.001-07:002023-03-21T12:53:14.148-07:00Anyone still read this?<p>TESTING</p><p><br /></p><p> 3/21</p><p>The monk, HH Romapada Swami, is speaking over at 2 in the afternoon over at Rice Creek Field Station. I get there and Dolly as prepared chick pea stew and a salad of ice berg lettuce. She has a vegetarian's body, and is the mother of a three year old. She hands me a plate with some cake, very graciously, and I see my friend over there who is an MBA student visiting with the Syracuse Mantra Central house contingent. Real sweeties, as people from India quite often are, maybe as a rule.</p><p>I've never had any goals, or ones so vague that there is no clear road map, but to, what?, write every day. The writing is market is such, it's not a job, it's a side duty, at the cost of other things.</p><p>I'm upstairs dreaming of being a bad misguided college student again, thinking it's all about me, and that I'm so cool. Hunter S. Thompson. Acting like I don't give a fuck. My brother comes up to me and says he saw me passed out drunk under a tree. There's a sequence where I arrive too late to the dining hall, not even capable and responsible enough to </p><p>Honor and dishonor. Cycles. Like the weather. Like women.</p><p>I fed mom baked gluten-free chicken tenders. With hummus and pesto dipping sauces in small amounts on the plate I bring upstairs for her. </p><p>It's my birthday, where is everybody, where are my mother and father? When are we going home? That's what I get when I get home from the grocery trip after my initial foray into the world for the Hindu Krishna meditation lecture. </p><p>I interrupt the flow by asking an off topic question, which he is kind enough to field. I thought it interesting, but now I see, to my embarrassment and mild horror, how foolish it was to ask, bringing in a topic I heard him speak over in a recent YouTube lecture.</p><p>On Nirvana, and the materialism of the moment. On how to deal with negative emotions. And mom's birthday is coming up. I haven't gotten her a card yet. I think I need another doo-dad for her. Will this be her last here?</p><p>I heard her go downstairs in the middle of the night, around two in the morning. Calling for the cat, who heard me go downstairs after my first round of sleep, so to put the pot of beef ragout in spaghetti sauce out own the back stoop to cool off, and fortunately it didn't burn on the bottom there on the electric range of unpredictable burners. Maybe I'm bad at pleasing girlfriends with birthday gifts because my own mother female constant presence is so anxious and hard to satisfy, unpredictable in other words. </p><p>I think of my embarrassment at my own voice and question before the monk I feel like Kerouac's red face in front of D.T. Suzuki. </p><p>So I come down about 8:30 in the morning for a start on the day amidst all my bad habits and patterns and laziness and misguided misdirection, to sort out the dirty dishes from yesterday. </p><p>Quietly I start with the dishes, after finding the two jars of green tea second steeping in the fridge, and carefully sorting out back from the right sink to the left to be scraped of detritus, before going back to the right with the silverware on the bottom to fill with soapy water now that most of the grease has been removed, the little bits of dried cat food, the muck from cooking on the wooden spoon and the spatula I used to flip the chicken tenders and the Oreida crinkle cut French fries mom didn't even want.</p><p>After an argument rising over her concern for the children, getting her some water, and then asking about her hearing aids after she asks me, What?, three times... I get her to go upstairs, go check on her, bring her a cheddar cheese and almond butter sandwich and a piece of dark chocolate...</p><p>And I haven't even done my sadhana, though at least the dishes are clean and drying. Oh, mental pain and minor lasting anguish constantly begging at you... </p><p>How can I ever go free from such shame of being too kind and open and agreeable to people, to let them lead me around in my life, a weak person.</p><p><br /></p><p>But at least I've found some new fresh impetus and direction, even if I was forced to go back to eating meats and drinking wine and being worn out too much to be mindful, just plod forward. </p><p><br /></p><p>I can only think of the madness and the brokenheartedness within the writer. That's why the meditation and the sadhana and the spiritual practice and study and imaginative thought are so important in this loneliness we experience. </p><p>By 12:20 I rise from my shavasana to cool down.</p><p><br /></p><p>We too have our eyes looking down at the ground like the horse.</p><p>We feel the ground below us, and our limbs and muscles immediately respond. </p><p>Beneath our eyes the worlds of the past fade away, sinking slowly, smaller and smaller, gradually. </p><p>Our eyes feel, feel the light, feeling the distance, let things pass.</p><p>We are running now, after the past has faded sufficiently to not hold us back</p><p>so that by running and reconnecting with our motions of inward spins</p><p>we heal ourselves, mend the broken heart and the troubled mind, and our throats ruffle a neigh from deep within the chest. An exhale, to comfort, a self-hugging, support. We shake the back of our long neck, toward the height of the base of the skull to shake it all free, what's in our head, so we can see.</p><p>Ahead, in the distance, growing larger and moving slowly, like colored clouds coming toward us, spreading out to welcome us, to sooth with the quiet of the cooler woods' protections ahead, our home. No need to crouch, we leap forward.</p><p>Then we turn, after we are comfortable and calm, confident with our motion, and our eyes are raised, as they were by the spreading clouds that came and were the leaves of the trees and the cool and warm fluttering comfort alive with life. We leave the woods, to our right, running left, back in the open space's edge.</p><p><br /></p><p>In shavasana, new sensations open, the fascia, I relax it all over, down the back from the top of the head, down the spine's run, down through the legs and up the feet and then back up the front, up the throat, to the head again. The shoulders open to comfort.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>By the end of the day, with far too much to think about, the left bands on the back of my neck are sore and tight, pulling my body to the side to hold the pain and the head up from it, until I can no longer bear writing at the kitchen table, nor the chair, and must go lie down. The pain is frantic, and I must rest. </p><p><br /></p><p>Like Kundera's father, depicted as laboring on a horse in his travels toward the birth of his end, no longer able to speak, I watch my mom going through the rainbow lights, and she sleeps, because it must be exhausting, and I'm so rattled by her I shout at her about her hearing aids, and this isn't good. </p><p>I could cry, to tell you the truth, and there's the to-do list, on top of pleasing her in the few little ways I can, straining over each.</p><p><br /></p><p>The sun is half out maybe. I stand at the door and feel the wind, before checking the mail, my hiking shoes on, and I need the three layers still and the heavy black knit hat for a walk, needed to quell the anxiety of mom's birthday in two days, am I prepared, what will we do, what will happen?</p><p>I think of the hill up to the water tower, still a receding bank of snow covering the side of the road, so I opt for no traffic, the two beaver lodges on either side of the access road to the power substation and the railroad tracks and the wetlands under the high tension power lines. The road ends and I'll walk along the tracks, avoiding the puddle and the mud dug up by tire track wheels, and I listen to Jonathan Roumie recite the Sorrowful Tuesday Mysteries of the Holy Rosary with its five mysteries and it's run of ten recitations of the Hail Mary, with one Our Father for each mystery and a Glory Be to the Father prayer, and then a Fatima Oh my Jesus. My sorrow in the garden is on a hill overlooking the mechanical electricity of the chain link fenced-in substation itself, standing looking back on it before dropping down the bank to the road cul de sac. Mom was fast asleep on her bed with the plate on her lap still. The cat is probably under the desk in mom's old office.</p><p>Walking back on Ellen Street finally, after reading the top of the hill and the water tower, May the Lord's peace be with you, and at least I've gotten a walk in with Christianity after my sadhana this morning. What to do now, in the hours before tentatively heading to the library for the second of Dolly's public invite events featuring the Swami HH Romapada, disciple of Prabhupada, the man, the great sage, who brought Hare Krishna to the United States of America with humble beginnings. The latter so tuned to Krishna, God, that he, I find on YouTube, spits at sexuality. </p><p>From the road, passing the last houses, the one where the guy died, then the big white one set off the road, then the small weather beaten one, I come to the filled in railroad track ditch where as Charlie tells me there used to be an iron bridge, the slope muddy and deep tire tracks, coming down the slope carefully in the middle where the field grass still hangs on. The back way to the townhouses. </p><p>My mood is not much better, but I'm trying, and mom, when I go check on her, says oh, some sunshine, and then she falls back into the breath of sleep, not feeling my presence in the room and I go back to the kitchen, in bare feet again, the heat on, turning on the Bose to RVO, then taking out the celery stalks from the fridge, to assemble a tuna salad, mainly to soothe myself, as cooking does. I pull the stalks of a bunch of parsley from the water, shake, pull the leaves off the stalks, pad them dry with a napkin before cutting. Neither Krishna nor Prabhupada would approve of the violence that goes into the can of tuna fish and the habit, but I'm not feeling so good about myself anyway, and even the sense of going off to the library to attend a lecture feels like neglect. The phone's weather app blips silently, light rain in twenty minutes. </p><p>And Sharon coming at ten tomorrow morning wishing to help me box up and throw out and sort and all that is weighing on me unhappily, as is the 3 pm with Sally my counselor. Is that the toilet flushing upstairs now I hear?</p><p>The knife makes chop noises on the sturdy plastic yellow cutting board and I remember Oscar and German, the working line cooks from Salvador back in the kitchen of the original Austin Grill. Years ago. Guys with children. </p><p>I look in the refrigerator after finding mom in a good mood upstairs. After several efforts and cord plugging, I get the television to work, and she requests a turkey club. There is violence written all over the refrigerator, and after bringing mom her sandwich, the bacon cooked, toasted on top of the Ezekiel bread, and asking her if she wants to go the Hare Krishna talk with the monk at the library, nah, I find myself very hungry and make myself a turkey romaine and tomato slices sandwich, having the cutting board right there, and with mayonnaise, with olive oil, not just soybean oil, it tastes too good.</p><p>I'd gone in yesterday to the talk with too much ego, too much pride, too much thinking I'd figured it out and would become a devotee, looked after, sheltered by Krishna himself.</p><p>Face it, I'll never figure it out. I get too nervous, anxious, too much a realist with his habits that walk the line. </p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-88208698346978847672022-05-13T23:11:00.002-07:002022-05-13T23:11:44.480-07:00<p>3/25/2022</p><p><br /></p><p> So finally around 3:30 in the afternoon, without wanting to, with a twinge of a headache from mixing sweet "sangria" cider with a bottle of Chianti, while finding some peace and entertainment watching Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris at the kitchen table, disturbed at the end by mom's arrival to the table, and feeling like the biggest loser there is, of course through my own poor choices solely to blame, and bad habits, without even trying my hand at being an actor, waking up miserable not wanting to move, I come downstairs.</p><p>Mom is in the bathroom with the fan on behind the sliding door. The cat has been crying, shut down in the cellar behind the door just opposite. I've been waiting, hoping mom would hear, or figure it out, as I hear her open the front door and look out. But she hasn't. I open the door and the cat sticks his head out, pissed off by the way he looks up at me, what the hell. I open a can for him, mom's still in the bathroom with the fan whooshing away, I pour some cold tea, some lemon water, text my aunt to celebrate her husband Barry's birthday, try to call him, get a doctored up cauliflower crust pizza into the over. Mom's story will change many times, but the first thing she does, sitting down at the table and looking at me, what's on the agenda today... I tell her I have work to do. Yoga, writing, and I do. First thoughts out of the morning mind are good to gather before forgotten.</p><p>But I feel like a bug on a hot surface in the sun anyway, as if it weren't hard to get up out of bed anyway, in these circumstance, not enough to worry about my own life and trying to plan a way so that this doesn't all end in perfect homeless disaster... A career? A new one at 60?</p><p>Being the prince of peace doesn't work for mortals, not as a career.</p><p>And maybe Marlon Brando isn't such a good role model.</p><p><br /></p><p>I know I'm too old for anything new, old dog, who worked too long, too willingly, should have rebelled, was a sucker for all the nice people, and gave the best part of his life to it, missing all things life, his father, being a helpful presence in his mom's life, etc.</p><p><br /></p><p>Tantra is the only thing that can save me now. So, after mom huffs off to the living room to sit with a book after I go upstairs and get her new one, the Margaret Atwood essays, having taken off the book cover so she won't be talking to the dust jacket author photo for an hour, then telling me later that something is wrong with the woman, after her initial enthusiasm. The War in Ukraine goes on. Can we make for greater peace through pranayama, calmed nerves, mantra chants, nauli kriyas... </p><p>I can hear mom whispering away with her sss sounds, quietly intoning, then louder, is my mother here?, then going back. I remind myself not to cower and allow my shoulders to hunch and slope forward, and the yoga in the school chair works pretty well for spinal alignment.</p><p>I am no literary genius. I'm just putting some words down, to get back into the labor of it, the feel for the fingers across a MacBook Pro keyboard.</p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-88580675779796958412022-05-13T23:10:00.002-07:002022-11-01T19:43:10.083-07:003/24/2022<p>I'm up til 6 being a fool writing on, looking at Kerouac reading to an added jazz backdrop of sound. </p><p>I get up at 1. Tiptoe down the stairs. God. Mom is down in the living room sitting in her Eames chair. </p><p> I heat up pizza for her.</p><p>She complains about taking her pills. What are these pills for? Why do I have to take them... I plead with her. I hear her call me a bastard. I walk out the front door.</p><p>I go outside and do my yoga sadhana, Mantra chant, pranayama, sitting cross-legged on a slope of grass out the front door. </p><p>Chuck rolls up in his Jeep, the newer one. He had to go back and get his keys off the keychain from the '98 out in Scriba. He's got to go through the National NAZE for bridge repair resurfacing elimination of lead paint to qualify for his new job. </p><p>That's a big hole in your car, a lot of rust. Do you take it to the carwash? There's a lot of salt on the road. It doesn't look good to him. Maybe somebody can Bondo it. The rocker panel, looks like it's hanging by a thread. Not good. Maybe it's not worth fixing it.</p><p>I come back in. Mom is sighing. Where are those bastards. Women always have to wait for men, she's explaining to herself. </p><p>I wish I'd gotten up earlier, but I didn't feel up for it. Just every day, exhausting.</p><p>The microwave beeps at me. Mom wants to go out for a drive. Then she'll want to go out for lunch. Her social security check came through into her account, but there's not much room for play when the rent is half of that. </p><p>I open a small can of chicken and rice soup from the generic brand, add some stock, a dash of bone broth, spices. I take some of the chicken artichoke from an earlier dinner, for the soup, and then the baked potato, along with a few chicken wings doggy bag from earlier in the week. I hear her call my name from the Eames chair. Yes, mom, that's the Helen Vendler Emily Dickinson book I got for you. Yes, it's yours. Can I take it home? You are home. </p><p>Her sighs are more appreciative. She's dropped the bastards keeping her isolated thing. My blood pressure drops somewhat. The cat has eaten two thirds a can of Grilled Chicken Feast in Gravy, and goes back out. The sun is coming in and out through the clouds. The wind has dropped.</p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-26280413814203166462022-05-13T23:08:00.001-07:002022-05-13T23:08:53.839-07:003/24/2022<p>Well, just keep writing. Keep up the chops. The physical effort. The typing. Let your body do the yoga of thought. </p><p>What happened today... Sharon came by to drop off flowers for mom. Lillies. Poisonous to the cat. I put them in the vase with water after clipping the ends, decided to throw them out as we left for "lunch," as mom calls it. The bouquet of roses from my brother arrived around 11, and then Chuck needed me to follow him in his new Jeep so he could sell his old one the mechanic. </p><p>I came in and took a nap, two hours. I'd been up til 5 sipping cider, jerking off to Chaturbate to calm myself over young female bodies and the varieties of. Mom didn't get up til three. That's okay. At least I got my sadhana in. </p><p>Mom's birthday, I was dreading it. I thought we'd go to the book store.</p><p>There's plenty of doggie bag food leftover now in the fridge. I've been eating pizza, dough, pasta, burgers with the bun the last week, on top of Ezekiel bread, through the bread is acidic to my esophagus.</p><p><br /></p><p>We go to Vona's. After we stop and park at Canale's. Mom specifically said, let's go to Canale's, when I agreed, let's go out, it's your birthday. I get her in the car. We're right there. Parked. Engine off. I come out to open mom's door. We're friendly with the staff, and that's worth something. The food is good at Vona's, maybe a light step up, but basically the same menu, good old Italian table cloth comfort food. But Mom then says, let's try something new. Okay. Fine. You sure? Okay, don't wait for an answer. I come back around, after helping her close her door. Vona's right around the corner.</p><p>We get in. I always worry about the Corolla 2003 Emergency Brake, but they did fix that cable last time or so, parked on a light slope. The old train station, raised bed like the Old West, the old yard gone, used to be a roundtable, I hear. We go in the door. They just opened, a few people at the bar already. The friendly bar woman comes around and seats us at a booth, Dark wood, and some tribal carve, Lake Tahoe in The Godfather? Mom hovers in everyone's way, as if she can't figure out how to sit in a booth, and the woman has to dance around us, it's pretty clear where to sit, and mom won't take her coat off because it's cold. The view out the windows would have been better with the old train station, gone without hardly a trace.</p><p>So, we order from the menu. Mom loves to read menus. My parents were in the restaurant business, she tells me. She pores over the menu, but I have to point it out. "Stuffed mushrooms," she says, bright and happy. "yes, that's an appetizer... we get salads and a side, you'll get a twice baked potato with your entree." So, as I always do, I steer her around to what she might like. She recites the names of the chicken entrees. Yes, I think you had that one last time, mom. I don't remember being here. I don't want to drink, but, it's been a lot of stress leading up to this, so, go along with it. Shepherd us through it.</p><p>Our Caesar salads come. Very good. I put ice cubes into my wine glass. Mom looks at me. She looks around, at the paintings. You should get into painting... There's lots of things to do, housekeeping... That's not important. You're right, mom. Thank you. What do you want to paint? Oh, naked college girls... Au plein air, like Van Gogh. Just capture the seasons. I tell her of a few of his paintings, the pussy willow tender branch in a glass of water, when he first gets to Arles and there's snow on the ground.</p><p>I can get sad over nearly everything. I guess that's why I write. Keeps my mind moving forward. Present moment, reached by writing down a few things that happened, so you got some ground work. </p><p><br /></p><p>So, our entrees. Mom's chicken in sherry with dark mushrooms, and the twice baked potato she eyes with glee. Whatever. An interesting old gentleman taking up health stuff, I think, he could be dying, through his tone. "Anyway, here we are..." he says to his lady, stylish hair cut. I hear him mention a nasal spray, Sinex, and then later, when the pork shank osso bucco arrives, the tells the familiar waitress, do you know what when you die to have to fill out paper work...</p><p>Then I see my aunt calling on my phone, silently vibrating. So, I come around to mom's side of the booth. Mom takes the phone up to her ear, though I have it on speaker, apologizing later to the nice couple behind us. Okay, Trish, how we doing, we're okay, and then I run a little running commentary to gently correct mom's images of what's going on.</p><p>I go back to my side, and share some of the stuffed pepper, the Caesar salad to left of my plate, a second chianti, mom's picking around with her fork, exploratory, happy, talking away, repeating herself.</p><p>My brother calls on a family speaker call. He greets us generously and happiness. And I praise, and pass the phone on. It's six o'clock. I joke we're at the Early Bird Special. I turn the phone to mom. I wondered if we'd do FaceTime. It's great to hear everybody, the kids, everybody piping up, signing happy birthday.</p><p>And then the rest of the dinner goes.</p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-42012977960728464402022-05-13T23:06:00.001-07:002022-05-13T23:06:23.216-07:0020 March, 2022<p> And then it slowly came to blow up in my face. Mom. Leaning on me since I was seven. </p><p>She has eaten my whole life, with barely any gratitude. </p><p>Writing doesn't even interest me anymore.</p><p>At the Stewart Shop again. Don't want to go home. What am I going to cook for dinner? When will I start drinking wine? Hangovers since St. Patrick's day. </p><p>It's nice to have something ready to go when I get in.</p><p>I can't even concentrate anymore. </p><p>Dough still makes me fat. </p><p>I'm just waiting out a clock here. Every day is misery. It's all I can do to feed her. </p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-77139358591707706132022-05-13T23:04:00.001-07:002022-05-13T23:04:38.404-07:00March 2022<p> My heart chakra center began to open up as I lay there on my comfortable green air mattress. </p><p>I struggle for moments of peace, which cannot be had here when mom is present in a room. Not only for talking to herself.</p><p>I'm distracted enough already anyway.</p><p>My peace is shattered easily by her, even her clunking footsteps.</p><p>And why do I muddy up my energies, my chakras... Why drink wine at night, but some attempt to find peace away from the trauma and the remembered traumas of the past. Mom yelling at my dad, unable to restrain herself, in the car on drives back from Massachusetts. I turn to the back passenger's side door and try to hide from it. Childhood.</p><p>I'm not enough of a wise man at Buddhist peace to be able to for it not to get to me.</p><p>So hard, so exhausting to keep the peace. And our American culture is so largely ignorant, ignorant of Yogic philosophy, Tantra, the five elements....</p><p>I tune into the peace. </p><p>An idiot peaceful man has no chance in this world, unless he turns to yoga.</p><p>Prophets can never have peace in their own homes.</p><p><br /></p><p>All I've tried to do my whole life is to find the peace, the peace of love, serenity, and the outside attempts never work, too much pain, too much unnecessary distractions, lack of focus, barely reading anymore. And with the wine comes depression, from not finding the right kind of peace, but only a reprieve.</p><p>When my father was removed, my mom's doing, there was no more source of grounding and peace in the family. Aggressive. In your face. Controlling through emotions.</p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-74718050923323630222022-05-11T00:22:00.001-07:002022-05-11T00:22:24.944-07:00<p>22 March 2022</p><p><br /></p><p> So just start with a new window. </p><p>11 pm. I wake up after my nap after a miserable contentious and for me depressing dinner or lunch, whatever, at the sports bar. Basketball on the screens. Guys in town for the nuclear plant shut down. A group of 8 of them having sports bar food, wings, nachos, burgers, beers. </p><p>I come downstairs, and there's mom on the couch, still with her shoes on, pants, mumbling softly to herself, and I can't help but stare at her, out of a growing desperation, her birthday in two days. It starts back at the house as she asks me five times who the card with the little pop up flowers is from, and I've explained it again and again. Now who sent me this...</p><p>So to come down and see her sitting there, picking through her pockets--she's taken out the inner pen ball point cartridge out of the red Parker Jotter pen outer case, and is now complaining that she's looking for the thing she has lost now, probably in one of her pockets, and that in asking her to go upstairs so can have some space is interfering with what she wants to do, and then she gets very angry at me, slamming a packet of photos into The Amazing Journey red binder about to fall apart, and go upstairs. I live here too, she yells at me. I had to ask her, mom, what are you doing, as she's picking, pulling folded toilet paper Kleenex tissue out of the pocket of her jeans, and sitting down she can't really do this, and to me she is the picture of ignorance.</p><p>I'm feeling dehydrated, my nose is stuffy, she won't relent into calm as I follow her upstairs for her nighttime pill, and then later pick the cat, settled onto the sofa, up to bring him upstairs. Now, leave, she says. Or, I'll call the Police. A familiar refrain. What are you going to do, hit me? I come back downstairs, jittery, but mission accomplished, the tv on for her, and soon enough, after soaking the cat dishes and things in hot water in the sink, with the mold ridden air that drifts upstairs from the basement to the wall where I sleep brings me to vomit, thick from the dough of the hamburger and the two glasses of Chianti I had at dinner to get through it. Up it all comes, mixed together, and drops splash up from the bowl.</p><p>And later on now the dinner--I was feeling too tired and low to cook anything, though we're low on money again, always an issue--comes back in its miseries, "'cause you hate me," mom says, "you hate me." Or, "what are you doing for summer..." Another bleak and depressing topic, like everything else. Write a book, she tells me. Okay. I wrote one, there's not much reward... Write one anyway, she says, out of the flickers in her eyes, sometimes duller now. What are you reading? She chirps. Some Kerouac, I offer. A yoga book. </p><p>Where's your yoga going to take you... Good question.</p><p>I see the clear disaster my life has become. It's hard not to wish for some Jesus red pain killer when you can no longer take it, the chattering questions, covering the red car in the parking lot. That's a nice car. Who's car is it. Mom, I told you, that's Bonnie's daughter's car. She lets her have a car? Mom, she's a nurse. She needs a car to get to work. And moments later, back to the same.</p><p>Appropriately, perhaps, I'm left all alone to do this. The ominous paperwork, then the cleaning out. Where does it start, where will it end, how...</p><p><br /></p><p>I watch the series The Chosen late at night. The comfort is in the magical world of Jesus and His time, where women listen to men, have spiritual respect for male insight. Things are to be gained listening to Jesus. Candle light. Life in an old school way, such as we will never be able to find again.</p><p>I don't have anything interesting to say. No good stories. Another guy, leaving with some college girls I'd chatted with amicably, looked back as they headed away too quickly for my own pace back to the chicks' apartment and referred to me, "is the old guy still following us..." Ouch. I brought home a brisket sandwich from the man with the red trailer who serves late night food in the vacant lot next to The Sting.</p><p>Mom only shouts at me once over dinner. I search for something we can chat about, Sharon's sent along a picture of Tania and Barbara, and her son, long civil war beard, who'd shown up as they were all hiking the Rio Grand in New Mexico. Mom, who are these people... She says, she doesn't know about the son, he might be a rapist, women have to be careful. Mom, that's Sharon's son. Well...</p><p><br /></p><p>So this is why I take a big nap, just to hide upstairs in my mom's study, full of binders, folders, articles, student's work, I don't even bother to roll out the air mattress.</p><p>No wonder I found something familiar, another version of my mom, in that nasty Princess bitch from the Upper West Side. Just like her. Volatile, hateful, incapable of anything beyond borderline personality and narcissism, enough of it to make my doubt my very self, my very self, as they used to say.</p><p><br /></p><p>I don't know what else to say, just what it's actually like here, in this odd situation, the one I've been stuck in since I was a baby. Yes, mom, you were right to call my dad a failure, sure, I would say, more or less, just to comfort her when were in the old Saab and I was six by Jerry Schilling's gas station, where he'd come out and pump gas and then amicably squeegee the window. The '66 Blue Volvo station wagon. </p><p>You hate women, mom tells me. Oh. I'm a fehmunhist... Okay, mom. I'm not stupid. I'm a woman. I have a Ph.D. I wrote a book. You'll be lucky if I don't cut you off... We're done. There's the door. I don't need you. I can find a new man anytime I want.</p><p>Now you tell me. So glad you're a Fuh'munist, mom. </p><p>All our lives are useless anyway, viewed one way. </p><p>Kerouac was just real. He predicted all this, all this pandemic and craziness, and the retreat of the gloomy economic world as it stands like a pimple on nature Earth, self important. There's a way for us to live ecologically, but we haven't found it, or, we did, and then we lost it. </p><p>How lonely. </p><p><br /></p><p>But my mother was great back then. She knew how to have her own spiritual visions. She told me once of listening to jazz when driving, and how the jazz become her own thoughts. She had her spiritual visions too. And they were good and true. So I don't mean to put her down all the time, now that she is stricken with the Narcissism of great illness. Which of course, she must deny, her diagnosis, six years or so ago, the Nurse Practitioner, "Doctor Nicole," who rendered the first, and gave us a prescription finally, as I had wanted to do for a long time. As our old friend Joan Keochakian had been suggesting over and over. And maybe she'd be better off in a group setting.</p><p>She had a vision at Puffer's Pond, though she don't remember it now, after Ray Tripp had gotten married all of a sudden to Sue, then suggested to her she start dating my father, the best man there will ever be, in my view. Why would I ever get impatient with him. It's like God gives you Free Will, and you have a choice to stay with Your Father, but you fuck it up, because there's lots of other shit thrown at you, in some cases, and in particularly, your own mom whom no one else had any slightest desire to deal with, and she was sweeter back then. A regular human being, with sweetness and bright eyes and a pretty face, independent, yes, that used to help her for much of her life, maybe now too, who knows, though she makes me quite miserable.</p><p>And Kerouac had such vision. His words would go with Jazz, immortally. A voice as worthy and as strong as JFK's from all that time, early 60s and such. And Kerouac had coincided, should have been invited to the Inaugural Party, except he wasn't, even though Jackie read On the Road in time.</p><p>jazz is for moonlight people, star gazers. People who can deal with being alone, after they've taken in all the frenetic energy of life in. People who let cats out at four in the morning, understanding their business, when no one else gets your own, and think you should be dealing with lawyers and tax accountants. What the fuck difference does it make, as Jack said, life, is unfair, we're all going to die. </p><p>Why do I think of that miserable ugly now twat, with once high cheek bones, now just another shrew who thinks to much of herself, with nothing to say, except if she tries to be nice, claiming to be "empathetic," too bad that won't last more then literally fifteen minutes, but I'm stuck because she's my mom, I sort of thought, in my pornographic magazine kind of fantasy of the woman I might want to spend my life with, as if she'd be worth all the difficulties. Nope. That's not how it works. </p><p>Why did I get so obsessed with her... she was my missing mom, capable of being a mother, but not, no, not at all, turns out.</p><p>Thus we are deaf to the things that wait and haunt us, preying on us.</p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-33880683866407636892022-05-11T00:17:00.000-07:002022-05-11T00:17:32.485-07:00<p>3/19/2022</p><p><br /></p><p> My days start slow, moping, low. </p><p>I do my sadhana, now to Todd's (Norian) recordings. His voice helps me get through this, all this.</p><p>Mom has camped out on the couch since her anger at dinner, her lack of gratitude for my service to her. No clue. Her being there now much of the time, as she tells me she doesn't want to go upstairs, who the hell are you to boss me around... I come down and ask her once to go to bed, but no, no, looking up at me with more anger. Well, mom, if you're not doing anything but just sitting there, why don't you do the dishes? GO TO HELL, she shouts at me.</p><p>Well, it was leftover Canale's for dinner. I don't understand why she didn't enjoy it more. The usual, I'm starving, I haven't eaten in three days as she comes into the kitchen. A quick zap of lemon artichoke chicken and then into the toaster over, along with the chicken parm cutlet, and a meatball, and half the baked potato for mom. Okay, maybe I served dinner late. I try to get her upstairs, and by that time, with two glasses of Montalcino in me, I need a nap, just to shut down, meditate, think of Tantra yoga.</p><p>I don't sleep well. In and out. Mom has stayed down on the couch, and I'd rather just hide than go back down to the kitchen, maybe write a bit, drink more wine, no, I'm getting tired of that.</p><p><br /></p><p>I do my sadhana with Todd Norian on my iPhone screen, after passing by mom on the couch to get a mason jar of the green tea from the fridge. Don't talk to me, she says, after I soak the dishes in the tub, as I go back upstairs to the cluttered study where if I love the air mattress I have some space for sitting cross legged. And it turns out to be a beautiful practice. </p><p>I come down, we speak cordially, I ask her if she's hungry, she asks for a glass of water, I put a blanket over her thighs, turn the heat up slightly, and she is fast asleep after I make soup, scrub the soaked dishes, two casserole dishes perfect for reheating things.</p><p><br /></p><p>Maybe I'm allergic to wine, or to beverages alcoholic in general, as liberating and seemingly soothing as they seem to feel to me. There's always the light headache afterward, the sluggish feeling. I drink to get through things I don't always feel like dealing with, like late night customers, or phone calls, intrusions in general. I've always liked my peace, unfortunately. Loneliness is acceptable in the Tantra Path. A vehicle for continuing Enlightenment, itself an ongoing process, a voyage of self discovery. Nothing is a problem, just accept it with a positive attitude as I go along my journey.</p><p>And everyone else has left me alone here to deal with the mom situation. They are living their lives, which leaves me entitled to lead my own, as my followed heart sees fit.</p><p>And after my sadhana, a new mantra dedicated to the chakras, and rigorous pranayama breathing exercises, chakra rising sound chants, oh, oo, ah, aa, ee, mm, mnng, I do indeed feel better, allowing the main shoshodana channel become filled with light, expanding wider.</p><p>I can't blame myself for mom driving me to drink, this whole shitty situation, alone, but this too is part of the path as I must completely accept it.</p><p><br /></p><p>For a long time, back in my lonely life back in DC, the bartender barman of the neighborhood wine bar, I read up on monkish readings. Kerouac, Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, Big Sur. Merton. Alan Watts. Suzuki. Biblical accounts. That was where my tastes ran. I felt they made my mind open. As if to say, this is what I want to be doing.</p><p>57, it's not too late.</p><p><br /></p><p>St. Patrick's Day looms. Do I go out and play music... Mom... I get her soup, as a man from the power company comes about a matter of billing concerning solar energy. I sit down and eat with mom, after serving her, soup, water, pills, a slice of pizza when the landline phone rings, Sienna College, a woman with a mild speech impediment asks me questions related to the economy and my perception on inflation and so on. Mom glares at me, angrily. Mom, I'm answering questions for a survey about the economy. Better off a year ago, better off now... The man before has tired me out, as far as getting back to my thoughts, then the survey which goes on for a while, mom continuing to stare and glare at me.</p><p>And then afterward mom accuses me of trapping her. So I go back to explaining how all this happened, a year ago, last November and it's March now. The neighbor, the big woman who had the baby next door, she called the paramedics on you because you didn't know where you were, because you went into their apartment... Then they wouldn't let you out of the hospital, so I had to come up here, to take care of you. I do the cooking and the cleaning... I want my life back. Mom, remember when we went down to see Doctor Heather, down in Fulton and she asked you some questions. Mom, it's not my fault. You were diagnosed with mild dementia, I'm sorry, that's the way it is. But I'm getting better, I'm fine. No, you're not. That's why I give you these pills, so you won't get worse. </p><p>She tells me I'm keeping her trapped, or down, or that I'm trying to destroy her. Okay, mom. It's better than you're here with me taking care of you then you being in a nursing home, or assisted living. That's the way it is.</p><p>She gets angrier at me. Okay, fine. You don't want me around, you don't want me taking care of you, fine. See you later. l</p><p>She glares at me. </p><p>Fine, blame Ted. Ted is the only one who does anything for you in this family, fine blame him. Everyone else does. It's all my fault. Sure.</p><p>Well, the dishes could be worse. The cat's been fed. It's raining out. A few things to get at the grocery store.</p><p>I see the demanding people in my family march across my mind, stubborn, headstrong, poor at listening, quick at judging, good at plans, structured, but...</p><p>They wouldn't understand me, and I don't really understand them either, after taking it so long. Occasionally a whiff of tolerance from them, suggestions, certainly. And all that is blocking me from my own path, as strange and different and seemingly unique (but actually Universal) as it is.</p><p><br /></p><p>As the day progresses, after the sadhana, the spirituality is hard to see, hard to find.</p><p>I go to the library. I try writing for a bit, but the day, with all her craziness that brings me back to when I was a kid listening to her explode and being held hostage by it, it makes me lonely. I go upstairs to take a pee, the library clerk comes out from the children's book desk to unlock the restroom door, because of the homeless people, and I end up finding a copy of On The Road in hardcover. I pick it up in my hands, open to the end... It still reads so well for me. Part of my karma...</p><p><br /></p><p>Now mom is reduced to sitting on a couch babbling to herself, angry with me, won't take her pill unless I plead... Where's my hat, she asks. On and on and on. Oh, my poor legs. How did I get mixed up with this bastard... Don't turn the light off. On and on. </p><p>St. Patrick's Day was hardly a success. We get there at six, but the sign up sheet is full, last spot I sign on, 9 pm. I had a few glasses of wine just to get mom here. Don't even have a clear game plan. Lots of Irish songs under my belt, but I don't have any inspiration to play at all. The crowd has gone home. I end up feeling like a public drunkard. I ask the kid next in line to step up and play. I remember the look John McConnell the emcee gives me as I come up with guitar to the mic and plug in. None of these people know what a shitty time I'm having these days.</p><p>And the next day my nervous system is tired and jittery enough that I must take Chuck up on his offer to come over for a drink. He's been a solid friend all along. He'll be out in Indiana doing a job, refinishing a bridge over a railroad track, rust prevention painting job. Chuck shares some with us. He has his beer, Busch Lite, I have my wine, and he gives me praise for what I'm doing here, taking care of mom. You're doing the right thing.</p><p><br /></p><p>It turns out my idea, my dream, to be a writer in the Kerouac tradition wasn't such a bad idea after all. The guy is spiritual, after all, you can't deny him that. He's got the bases covered, from Zen to Jazz, to the Catholic sweet surrendering fervor to Christianity principles. The Beatitudes make it in.</p><p>But I wasted years surrendering to other people's dreams, that of the chefs and the restaurateurs. The customers themselves. Tirelessly did I wait on them. I slept into the afternoon so they could have their way with me. </p><p>It's been two years since I've worked.</p><p><br /></p><p>Mom continues to talk, on and on. "Sweet Jesus..." Cooing at the cat again. </p><p><br /></p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-43518892688973702422022-05-03T23:10:00.002-07:002022-05-03T23:10:41.484-07:00<p>3/16/2022 </p><p><br /></p><p>Help, mom says, in her basso voice as she comes down the stairs, repeating it, as if it were a musical theme, of one note steady note. Oh, what a nice kitty, oh, what a nice kitty, and then the wrinkle of mail, or paper, then a heavy huh sigh to let out, then another help, and then some higher singsong about something, to herself, and then blowing into a Kleenex, and then more self talk, as if she were reading a commercial offer out loud while trying to figure it out.</p><p><br /></p><p>Mom comes and sits with me at the table, as I drink my tea and lemon water. What would you like? Soup. Soop, she says, in a child's old dialect. She says other words like that. Br'aww'th, for broth. Her dry voice sqeaks, on cue, good bru'aww'th, by the way. To'oast(uhh.). Good toast anyway, she says, which is her own way of appreciating things, believe it or not. She looks at my tee shirt. Amherst College, she says. and look where we are now. Yup.</p><p>You need to do something with your hair, she says, clearing her throat. Sighing lightly. She looks down, playing with her Kleenex napkin. Well, as long as Bonnie is doing okay, I guess we're doing alright.</p><p>To my mind's eye she looks more and more like the little old Breton woman by the side of the road in the Louis Malle film, Vivre Le Tour, more or less expressionless as the Tour de France. A little blank, a long passive stare, her soul silently ticking within, under the white grey hair and the just perceptible smile, a silent clock that still ticks within.</p><p>But she's actually doing okay. As long as there is peace, and I did my morning sadhana and yoga chants yesterday.</p><p>You're hair's getting nice and long. I explain I don't want to go to the barber, for Covid reasons, yes, it looks great. You shouldn't do anything with it.</p><p>When she came down initially, the anxiety, fueled by the green tea, spiked, but ...</p><p>I think I can find my way back upstairs, all by myself. You want some help? No, you're busy.</p><p>I walk her upstairs as she carries her Pepsi, as I carry the new thick biography of Sylvia Plath, to go with the hardcover one of Ted Hughes.</p><p>I come back to the kitchen. The cat is back in, avoiding the grey tiger who's currently looking over the bird feeding area above Bonnie's raised bed.</p><p>I feed him the rest of the can. I can't do any dishes while he's here in the kitchen, particularly with the noise of the silverware as it clacks in the sink as I rinse it before the hot soapy water. I draw up a grocery list.</p><p>I've been hard on myself while here, and no wonder, if you look at it. What the hell am I doing with my life, but trying to be honest, but lazily sleeping away, sometimes in pain, sometimes in respiratory pain in the dry winter air of cold January, wishing away that I was a teacher, but unable to move a muscle toward that goal somehow.</p><p><br /></p><p>There's no point to stress, if it's going to eat you alive. No one else would do that to themselves, why should I?</p><p>See, as in the Bhagavad Gita, see the intention behind the karma yoga, and worry not about the result.</p><p>You'll see things with a better sense of humor anyway.</p><p>I sit in lotus pose on a couple of pillows before the storm door, letting the sun shine in on me after I puff and push and roll my belly muscles upward, then side to side, a kid at this, no swami yogi am I, the muscles hidden under a layer of what once was sugary irresistible carbohydrate dough and pasta.</p><p>I chant mantras for five minutes, then various cleansing breaths, with puffs and action through the nostrils and lungs expanding with energy and breath.</p><p>Mom has a sense of humor. What can I do, but allow for it, and not mock her little heh heh heh, and these sadhanas--I get nervous if I don't get them in--are like bathing in the pure baptismal water and light. They really help, sensually, getting back in touch with this beautiful instrument, the body, and the breath and a calm connected feeling that begins to flow throughout all your cells and atoms.</p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-23786611217384591152022-05-03T23:07:00.002-07:002022-05-03T23:07:40.511-07:00<p>3/16/2022 </p><p><br /></p><p>I get up, can't resist looking at Facebook. The time on my iPhone betrays that it is already afternoon. I've just finished the 200 A Yoga program.</p><p>I perform a Nauli Kriya round, rolling my belly muscles around, expelling the toxins, puff, puff, puff, out alternating nostrils, then another big breath in, exhale and repeat. This is a good exercise. Often enough the exercise is difficult, and on top of that, it brings me promptly to vomit all the water and whatever else is left in my stomach trying to protect myself from the hangover I am currently in the grips of. I've learned to do this out on the back steps, where I let the cat out. You can blow your nose like a snot rocket, and in case I need to puke over the railing where the air conditioning unit sits. </p><p><br /></p><p>The comparison game. It always hits us. Why are we not doing as well as the Jones... Pleasure is the line that catches us. Wouldn't it be nice... </p><p>When it's the universe all along taking perfect appropriate good care of us. </p><p><br /></p><p>But you cannot write until you are in tune, in touch with yourself. The Universe has brought you to a particular place, and you cannot deny the wisdom of having been placed so, recognizing the opportunity in it, even as this place to must be tweaked, in accordance with intuition and meditation. And of course many people develop survival techniques, which are generally excessive, such as anger and control. Believe me, I know. My mother, who could be bipolar, or who could be Borderline Personality Disorder, or just neurotically angry and anxious, unsettled, unless she is talking to herself, I've had to deal with her my whole life. Add to that her selfishness, her lack of empathy, now exacerbated by feeble mindedness, dementia, hard of hearing...</p><p><br /></p><p>Sunday was the last day of the yoga course. I was up 'til 1 into the morning absorbing it all. I did not think I would get through it. It had been a struggle, and a strain, and I didn't even know why I was putting myself through this awkward teacher training of the yoga with its elements and instructions, and the whole body of yoga, beyond the basic poses new to me. I had gravitated to the philosophy, and the lazy things about it, which turned out to make for the finest aligned meditations as I had ever have, with a new calmness from practicing some basic pranayama. I had no hope that I would survive these sessions. But I kept up with the chanting of ancient Sanskrit Mantras, and Aums, Omg, pranayama breathing techniques, and the whole world view assembled together into a trusted body of philosophy a long long long time ago.</p><p><br /></p><p>I pour myself some of the Jesus medicine, in this case a simple red from Lisbon, available in bottle and box. I've been hiding all day, upstairs on my green air mattress in mom's cluttered office. I ventured downstairs once earlier, had a sandwich, retreated upstairs, after a knock on the front door summoned me from an exhausted rest. It takes days for me recover, indeed. Physically, and mentally, as if you'd suddenly came to a bright light, and it opened up a whole new world, a way of seeing things that rises you above all the dissatisfactions of life and personal history, as if you'd been put back in touch with the original self of yours, removing, as they even say, in yoga, the dust that gathers. </p><p><br /></p><p>The wind was blowing all day from the west with gusts above 23 mph off the lake, shaking the front of the house. And I did not mind being here anymore, even in the clutter. I was taking care of mom, even if I had to shout at her, worn down, for her to stop saying "this is not my home..." "Your home is upstairs. Go to bed!"</p><p><br /></p><p>There was no more joy for me anyway, back in DC, before, doing my job. There was always a phone call, a panic, a crisis at the other end fo the line. At work I had gotten use to panic drinking with the wine, on the rocks, just a bit to calm myself, after the phone call on the way to work, then the one later... then the one early in the morning. Calls no one else could take. I'd order her groceries delivered to her door, then then would lie out on the counter until the helper felt obliged to throw them away, the wings, the chicken quesadilla, the sandwich, the rotisserie chicken. My asking mom to take her pills...</p><p>It was better, for me, to just have left everything behind, but the very basics. A suitcase. My Martin D28. Winter gear. My blue blazer. An old laptop.</p><p><br /></p><p>As the wind blows heavily, rocking the spaces of the walls of the apartment siding, I hear mom rise and go down the stairs, hello, is anybody here... Ted, where are you? I rest, hearing her carrying on. She insists she can take care of herself, and feed herself. The cat, kept in her bedroom with a closed door starts to cry, so I let him out and take a comfort break, and go back to my slumber. Over the last few days I heard I'd missed a few homework assignments, to my surprise, and I want to get them done and downloaded, so that my graduation and the 200 hour Hatha Yoga certificate can come. </p><p>I hear her crying help, help, help, I need help, can't someone please help. </p><p>She's shouting, crying, yelling, cursing her fate. All of it comes like waves. She'll let it subside, then quiet, then she'll start all over again. The problem is she's downstairs, right in the middle of things, and there's enough food where we can get by without needing groceries. And I have wine, and she, reluctantly, there's wine for her too, and for Pepsi. Everywhere, Pepsi, little plastic bottles.</p><p><br /></p><p>We all have, so it seems, defense mechanisms, honed from childhood. Some are controlling. Some shout. Some continually panic. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.</p><p>What has been mine? I probably just dealt, rode it out, take the Jesus red painkiller, try to have some fun, in a modest schoolyard way, nothing too personal.</p><p>And life was pretty empty, just go an entertain mom, and absorb all her defense mechanisms, going back to childhood days of hers.</p><p><br /></p><p>There is a validity in the new circumstances where I be here now. A relaxed way of encountering has come over me. And the luck of taking this yoga course has given me the new direction of an old one.</p><p><br /></p><p>I do not look back at my days of being a Jesus with publicans and sinners, a period of my life that lasted as long as the entirety of Jesus's life, with too much shame. Wine and comfort of company in public is a reassuring thing, just like church.</p><p><br /></p><p>Yoga teaches you not to bother with defense mechanisms, rather to make a shrine or a temple to your own inner peace, and to practice in such a way as to sustain that. The Universe is your teacher, and as at school, at every level, teachings and lessons you must accept and seek to understand.</p><p>The great teachers realize this.</p><p>I had always had an impossible time finding jobs, because jobs need meaning. I felt I had a truth in my in need of expression. To just go and be a teacher didn't seem to be the thing. Tending bar was satisfying for me. It's what the universe handed me too. That's the way it was. For me, such a thing was preferable to the corporate success ladder, but this has to do with my own psychology, which being immersed within it, is difficult for me to see from another perspective.</p><p><br /></p><p>To at last find your calling, as they say, upsets the apple cart. Borne out in lives before, the story of Jesus. The yogis. </p><p><br /></p><p>The contrast between my father's peace and my mother.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>But where did my life go, the wife I should have met. Was it the beauty from Ukraine who came to the bar after yoga, and I neglected to treating her and her friend to a tasting along with the beet terrine and the veal cheeks they split. I wasn't sure she wanted to engage. I could have given her and her friend a splash of bubbly, good for the appetite. Never saw her again. "I could not be more single," she had said. The boss looked at me when she walked away and down the stairs. We could at least have talked about yoga.</p><p><br /></p><p>I did my yoga this morning, the sadhana, and mom starts to stir right after I lie down in corpse pose, shavasana. </p><p><br /></p><p>I take a walk in the winter Saturday up to the power grid station and back in the wind, flakes falling. I help a new neighbor moves some things in, out of her van. She has a little boy.</p><p>I get an unexpectedly friendly message from a new online date sight friend. I text her, I have to feed mom first. 50 minute drive down to Syracuse. Sexy. Come feed me, she writes. And then I get distracted, or lazy, or cowering, nervous, reality too heavy for me to make a move. </p><p>I take mom for a ride. I tell her, I'll take you for a ride, but we aren't going out to dinner, okay? This it turns out, is the act that blows completely and irrevocably, as she seems to always manage to do, a potential new chapter in my life, my love life in particular.</p><p>I take her by the lake. That's scenic enough. She ought to enjoy that, right? A stony silence grows over her. She stares forward. Nice ride, huh. I get back to the apartment parking lot. There's her mood again. I've wronged her.</p><p>Okay, we go to The Press Box. A cowardly move, concerning the new friend who's asked me if I can still blow a good load. In your case, yes. </p><p>I get home and I feel worn out. I need a nap. Further cowardice, retraction from the possibilities, even as I say, I've made a new friend. We'll have a nice conversation tomorrow. Yeah. Right.</p><p><br /></p><p>The next day, after my big failure, of not getting myself down to Syracuse, begins with an early call for my brother, who's gone over to check on my apartment. "Shithole," he mumbles, half under his breath. "This place needs a good cleaning." He's checking on the 100 year old guitar, to see if it hasn't dried out and broken apart without the humidifier thing in its sound hole. He's looking around for one of the sponge humidifier things for the guitar. As if I'd remember from a year and four months exactly where I left a thing the size of a cigarette pack. And it wouldn't do any good anyway, if someone's not keeping the inner sponge wet weekly. I'm left with a sense of his hatred for me, his care, but largely hatred and disgust, not a human being, an idiot, a fool, a child. Be a man. Be strong. Yeah. "You need to get out of there," he says. "Talk to the lawyer..." </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The next day, I get mom breakfast, a Pepsi, cauliflower pizza. I need to do my yoga sadhana. Mom remains in the kitchen, oh please come talk to me. Kill myself. Alright. I'm going to commit suicide, slightly louder. No body likes me. Everyone here hates me. Kill myself. Ohhh. Please, no one here to help an old woman. </p><p>I wake up from the long nap, a habit showing you I'm not living life. I get downstairs. Find a bottle of soda water. I sit down. Then my iPhone is ringing, FaceTime. Elizabeth. She's driving back to Annandale, after going into DC for dinner and drinks with a mutual friend, who has also lost it. Covering the bases of the usual misery. I wasn't in the mood, but I picked up anyway. I didn't real feel much like talking at this point. My feelings of the moment get buried a little deeper. Support is good, but sometimes you just want to try and have fun. Let the old life go. Fuck it. I avert my eyes as she takes her shirt off. Her room, like ours here, is a mess. She does a lot of good in the world, but I want to live my life now. MY life. </p><p>And none of this helped my ability to show up the next day to see if I can make amends with Rakia, the beautiful treasure of a young African American who might want to have children with me.</p><p>I'd like to drive down to Syracuse and meet a woman for a hook up. But I keep running out of time. Things to do. It's cold and it's windy and at the very least, I have to make a grocery run.</p><p><br /></p><p>I can't write at home anymore. Unless it's late at not. All I can do is yoga, and even then it doesn't work. I need a woman here and now.</p><p><br /></p><p>Monday, The attractive African American woman dumps me and our conversation from the dating sit, once and for all. Bye bye.. I figured. "U have issues," is the last thing I hear from here. To which I lamely shared, Being a caretaker isn't much fun sometimes. I had earlier saved a screen shot of a couple of pictures she sent along from me. My inaction. I dropped the ball. Big time. Maybe I was suspicious of something too good to be true.... It actually depressed me to have such a great offer laid upon my plate. I'd have to be decisive. I thought I'd get mom her soup, then she lobbied for a ride, and that was my mistake. Stone face on the ride. And somehow I cannot feel I can ask anything of her. Mom, please, let me go. </p><p><br /></p><p>Bitter Monday of seeing my flaws and being cut off by the hot black girl... And now, Tuesday, after driving her down to Fulton for a checkup with her doctor, the bitterness grows worse. The nap was where I blew it, Saturday night, after dealing with mom, ending up at The Press Box to placate her. </p><p>If you are that depressed, you need to do something about it. But how long have I been depressed, and just soldiered on, soldiered on. Route 81. All alone, the whole way. So much passed by. Days of wine and roses. Then coming into DC, the real estate wars. Parking on the little dog leg road behind the public school, taking a shirt out, wobbling in from the rental car after driving seven hours, stopping twice, a double Whopper, a gas stop south of Harrisburg after getting through that misery, of construction, a younger brother trying to adapt to an economy that's left it behind. Trump flags. Some nice cars, but what does one do in Harrisburg, and at least there is the cleanse of 15 through the Catoctin, coming up right to the back door of Big and Little Round top. </p><p>Then the final merging of traffic after Fredericksburg's own misery, then 270 onto 395, merging again. Slogging it to work a night at the bar... The creativity of wine not making it very far onto stage or the newspaper.</p><p><br /></p><p>If I can't even make a hook-up, how will I ever find the strength and the fortitude to find a job. </p><p>Or did I just have a sense, what was the point, the beautiful young woman 50 minutes down the road needs a delivery four times a week. </p><p>I feel too rattled most of the time to do that, maybe because of the booze I use to numb my pain and anger and the sense of wasted time, the constant anger from mom if I don't pay her the attention she wants, all of it turning to anxiety. </p><p><br /></p><p>Down the stairs she comes, clomping on her Keens, hello, help, is anybody there, just as I was about to sit down and write, to journal some, to work on this depression which is getting worse. "Here he is, the man with the food." I feel her staring at me. I just cooked a steak in the iron pan. "Where are all the people," she says, standing, staring at in the hallway, in her jeans, a sailor striped shirt in red and cream from J Crew. "I'm hungry," she says. I get her to sit down at the table, a slice of pizza into the toaster over. The steak is out on the cutting board, resting. I cut her off a slice from the end. "Best I've had a in a long time," she says, and I'm surprised, because the steak is rare. I bring her the slice of pizza heated now, and a chicken wing. I sit down and open my laptop. She always hits me just as I was going to sit down to write. </p><p>Mom stares at me now. Just sitting there, at the table, slightly hunched over, dumb. And if I don't acknowledge her she will start in on "you hate me," or, "I'm just a poor stupid woman," on top of "what are we doing for fun today..."</p><p>She stares at me at the table. Looks down. Sighs. Looks up at me expectantly. "Talk'a me, you dope," she'll say. "I gave my mother such a hard time," she'll say, over the peas. "I was such a fussy eater."</p><p>"I'm just a stupid woman... I don't want to take anyone else's food..." Mom, I made that food for you... Enjoy.</p><p>I ignore her, and start writing. "What are you working on..."</p><p>"Mom, I'm writing. That's it. That's all."</p><p>"You're a good typist," she says. Repeats another version of that a few minutes later. Thank you, mom.</p><p>"Well," she sighs, "I'll get out of your hair. You're more important than I." </p><p>Mom, I need to do some work, that's all. </p><p>She picks at her teeth with a toothpick. Mom, you could brush your teeth... </p><p>She says something about putting her coat on. My home is over there. That's where my mother is.</p><p>Mom, you're home. You don't need to put a coat on.</p><p>"You ruin everything..."</p><p>Mom, your bedroom is upstairs.</p><p>Anxious, as she might sit down on the couch and fall asleep right in the middle of everything, I monitor her and where she's going. She puts on a black open pullover. I hear her say, "they hate me," to a stuffed little polar bear doll, and she turns to pull herself up the stairs, leaning forward, her hand on the railing.</p><p><br /></p><p>And I go back to a depression that takes away my will do to a thing. After the doctor appointment, and the obligatory Press Box 3 PM lunch, and the grocery store, after a brief cold walk in the rain to the gates of the power grid and back after getting mom inside, the groceries put away, all I can do is go up, lay down on the air mattress and take a long rest.</p><p>Then I woke up, organized the refrigerator, a tub of dishes.</p><p><br /></p><p>There's a little bit left in the 1.5 liter Lab Lisboa vino Tinto. I have to admit, it tastes good. I take another half a tab of Escitalopram for good measure. Swallow at the thought of another thirty years of regret, for not getting off my ass that night and driving 48 to 690 east in Syracuse. What's wrong with me... I even like driving. It's relaxing. </p><p>There'll never be another opportunity like that, trust me. I could have made room... if...</p><p><br /></p><p>It happens. The depression of your whole life, hidden away, as you made your claim on holding down a job, it all catches up with you, not in a good way. The depressive feeling is so mighty that you cannot really have fun anymore, outside some sort of studious exploration of the kinds of meditations and acts of self therapy, attempts at positive take good care of yourself things like a study of yoga, </p><p>Men don't understand women. Women don't understand men. It's all a form of selfishness, no place to meet in the middle.</p><p>The only fun you have now is stoic. Play a song on the guitar. Administer tapeworm medicine to the cat.</p><p>The depression stalks you, and then it catches up with you, catches up with you in actual hard real life terms, the running out of money feeling, the losing of an inspiration to find a career at this stage...</p><p>You'll never get out of this alive.</p><p><br /></p><p>Every time I would try to stand up for myself, raise my voice, speak up, a timid I could use, or I want, it soon would become such a big issue that you never wanted to do it again. Wasn't worth it. Just go and do it, but then you don't do that thing you want enough and it atrophies.</p><p>It's like getting caught, like that's the right word, for jerking off, for self pleasuring, through exploration. A Federal Case.</p><p>Mom, your sister is on your side, she's trying to help you. GO AND TAKE HER SIDE WHY DON"T YOU.. oh.</p><p>We need to divorce, she tells me, over the pained lunch she demands after the doctor's office. Her will, raging against the dying of the light.</p><p><br /></p><p>The woman nurse who takes mom in, blood pressure, weight, oxygen, at Fulton Prime Care, her son, 27, works at the aluminum plant. A physical job making good money. He owns his own house. Has two cars, one for winter, one for summer, and just purchased a '58 Del Rey, to tinker around with.</p><p><br /></p><p>If you're a bartender, by habit, you let the burdens of other people become your own. Mr. Nice Guy. Nice guys finish last, or not at all. You let other people take over the show, unless the people are observant. The bartender is part of the show, but in my case it was largely due to a particular burden placed upon me. Rebel against a mother, not wanting her shit, and you'll just get more of it. Such a grand self view of herself.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are no more moves left on the chessboard. Only radical unrealistic ones that have nothing to do with the economy of a town.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Now the panic and the anxiety have grown. A second tranquilizer pill for mom, as the doctor said he had started her off on a low dose so she could tolerate it, but still, she is angry with me as I put her to bed. We went out for an open mic night. I needed some contact with the musicians, and it felt good, it felt like a break from the panic. I didn't plan a set.</p><p>The sexual beauty of the black woman from Syracuse fades just slightly, thankfully. Another thing he's blown.</p><p>I'd run into Terry, a man of the town, former Air Force, in the parking lot of the Big M. He's just endured the pain of recuperating from a knee replacement. He was there at the Press Box bar on the Saturday evening when I had too much going on in my head, blowing my personal desire to meet this woman down in Syracuse, out of fear, out of stress, out of anxiety.</p><p>Mom having more bad times than good times, getting slightly worse, though it's hard to tell. She fights against the slightest criticism.</p><p><br /></p><p>The pills for the cat's tapeworms came, but without the little eyedrop squirter tube. There's a complete one here somewhere, but I can only find the plunger, here in all the clutter, which I have added to as much as I've tried to organize.</p><p>What will happen to me, after all this, and even this is nowhere near over, and I can't seem to gain any ground, and I haven't even cleared out any space any larger than the green air mattress upstairs.</p><p><br /></p><p>I have the same disgust, here toward myself, as anyone of this situation, the craziness, the endless clutter of a neglected life.</p><p>And on top of that, the hurled bitter attacks. What is this pill? What does it do to me...</p><p>It won't stop, it can't stop, all of it. And between trying to remain calm, through journal, through yoga sadhana and asana practice, walks--I was out for an hour today, but largely devoted to the nitty gritty of spending down--along with a little music therapy</p><p>Yes, of course it's all confusing.</p><p>Where even to find the tool you need, the piece of paper, the pile of books by mom's bed she swears she knows nothing about. "That was here when I got here. I didn't do that." Oh. </p><p>And I hide in my fool's paradise, my self medication.</p><p>Whatever happens, it will all be blamed on me, and there isn't even a way to win here, or to make a graceful departure or end. When I get out of this, all of it, my lack of a career, my lack of a life...</p><p>The lack of love is the worst thing, the worst thing that could happen to a son, sabotaged by a crippled old mother, his nerves shot, being driven into hiding, insulted or squashed at every turn.</p><p>Feeding the cat now, everything frays my nerves. I find an eye dropper, and use that to administer his tapeworm pill, breaking it up in small cup with a wooden spoon, adding the small amount of water the eye dropper will hold, mixing that, than lifting the cat up by the back of his neck, inserting the nozzle then squeezing.</p><p>Writing. Is there a worse most desperate choice in life than to try it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Where am I going to end up? </p><p>Wouldn't I just be better off playing music... Open mic night with Steven Watson down at old humbler beaten down Bridie Manor...</p><p><br /></p><p>After Sadhana, Friday, the sun out, I have mom stand out in the sun for a moment. She's been talking to herself as I chant and develop my pranayama session. Later I look at the crows, black birds gathered in the trees and on the blue snow crust by Bonnie's bird feeders. How do they learn to be the crow? They land gracefully, talk to each other, each taking an equal perch in relation to a moving center. </p><p>How does learn to be a human being? What's the secret? What's the trick?</p><p>I feel better after the sadhana. Since open mic night I've slipped into the wine again.</p><p><br /></p><p>People, some of them, face the existential. A sense of meaningless, even as they have sought meaning their entire lives. When there are no external reasons to be joyful. The seeking of fun leads in the direction of wine, a liberation that leads to a prison the next day, of one's own making.</p><p>I was up late watching an episode of The Chosen. Of course I realize the point about the joy of wine...</p><p><br /></p><p>But that myth is also about the purity of the container, the stone purification jars.</p><p>And this reflects the basic problem, desire, a taste for pleasure. Things which stir up waves on our waters, deluding us, putting us through rolls and swells of very vivid emotions brought up from the depths or who knows where. Waking in a state of ruffled anguish, exhausted, vaguely ill, tired of life.</p><p>The world seems to run on desire, well-handled, so we try to handle desire.</p><p>How truly important is peace.</p><p>The old patterns come at us. Have some wine, and drink it until you reach a certain buzz. </p><p><br /></p><p>Saturday, after taking mom out to Canale's and the usual bitterness coming as I get her back to the house, after midnight I wake up and go out to get a six pack of cider. Which hurts less the next day, but gets too sugary sweet after a certain point. I drop by the bar there on the main drag.</p><p>At the end of the night, the chicks go off into the night with the guys, passing me by on the way. I follow slowly enough after them, keeping them in sight. "Is the old guy following us," the angry guy with the green felt St. Patrick's Day bowler, asks, which drains my enthusiasm. And rather than go get in the car, I go to the late night Johnny's stand for some of his brisket. The old guy.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Mom. I go up and call her down for soup. Eventually, after I call her again she comes down, wearing her boots. You'll make me trip, she says. I ask her to rinse and brush her teeth. She nods. Five minutes later, she's still sitting at the table. Mom... I"m still eating, she says, picking at the skin of a reheated baked potato. Ten minutes later, she's making me nervous. Mom, you're going to forget.</p><p>So finally I end up yelling at her almost at the top of my lungs. </p><p>Contentiousness. I go for a walk, as she goes up the stairs. </p><p>I go out for a walk. Almost a mist out. I run into the old guy with a Honda four wheeler, whose dog Chopper, a mix of Jack Russell and Lab, is out for a Springtime romp. </p><p>Oh, yeah, you're mother, she's bipolar...</p><p>I ride around with him in his rugged buggy up the road. The muddy dog comes up running alongside of us. We go almost all the way up the hill. "He'll cross the road up there..." Tire him out.</p><p>Cars slow as the dog paces, around them. </p><p><br /></p><p>Later I return to my walk. Slow pace. Fascia limber. I feel sometimes like I can almost look through things, beyond the sky, beyond the earth at the horizon. Deeper reality. Where things are at peace, making sense.</p><p>I get back, fill the bird feeder. Let the cat out. Deer venture by, stopping at Bonnie's feeder.</p><p><br /></p><p>The equation of everything being as it should be, in the non dualistic Tantra view, and the callings of desire...</p><p><br /></p><p>I get a small comfort out of hearing stories about Jesus. I've watched the older color movies on the subject, and more recently I've taken to watch <i>The Chosen</i> series to light my imagination. I get a small faint pleasure out of the old stories, even as they get dressed up now and again with new scenery and a new cast of characters, a jump forward in cinematic technology. I stay up late, and let my mind wander, with Jesus turning the water in the ritual purification jars at Cana into wine at the budget wedding his mother and friends are at. Doesn't seem to do me too much harm. But for the Quixotic sense, of an old guy reading books on chivalry that go to his head and coincide perfectly with a softening in that old guy's head, thus informing his body and spirit with the notion that he himself is a legendary knight. One of the most beautiful and true premises of all literature, and it goes way back, and kind of instinctive utterance in an old time when the imagination of humanity leapt out of the old theatric style into a new more novel form, as Cervantes, who'd been through some shit, as Shakespeare too became temporaries, working on similar things. I think it was one of those things where they almost died days apart from each other, but I could be wrong.</p><p><br /></p><p>Mom can come down and bother me anytime day or night. I dread when she stirs. Mary Lincoln. She might come into the kitchen, where I'm writing, as a ragu of sausage and beef bubbles judiciously away, saying she's starving, and if I don't pay her much attention, there we go again. She'll go sit on the couch babbling to the cat then refusing to upstairs to bed. I hear her clunking around now, above me</p><p><br /></p><p>But let's face it, if Jesus were to come back to us, nobody, not a damn soul, would listen to him or take him in in the slightest, without deeming him a stranger. Prophets get used to it. They get used to their own society's mysterious hatred, addressed and directed toward anyone who can't seem to abide by the rules in the same way, for thinking too deeply on nonsensical things like the True Nature of Reality, or of how we ourselves are the very consciousness of the Universe, spun off as an individual of some free choice, to look back at Itself observantly to experience How It Is, the great visible truths that might appear to a mind too used to independent wonderings and thoughts.</p><p>There's all sorts of fossil records of such things. The Rejection at Nazareth. That's a good one. Even his own family tries desperately to restrain him.</p><p>And so, my friends, as Mr. Vonnegut, of a scientific mind toward this reality in the Universe we are all stuck with 100 percent, what does it all mean, would write in his famous book, "So it goes." Tralfamadorans arrive to tell people of earth of the plight of their planet, try to communicate their enlightened understandings and knowledge of deep reality, and what happens, the humans bonk them on the head, done with it before it even could start, this imparting of knowledge.</p><p><br /></p><p>But take anything old Jesus did or said. You have to like the guy, no? I mean, Jesus, there He is at the wedding of the poor, and He has them fill up the ritual purification vessels with water, and boom, now, holy shit, it's wine. Not bad. </p><p>Or the old one of the knowing people and things through the fruits they produce. A good tree makes for good fruit. Yes, look at what Putin is doing now.</p><p>But it all sort of says to me, in a kind of poetic way, maybe reminding me of Whitman, not that I was ever much of a serious student, that even in spite of ourselves, we are as the ritual purification jars. This is what old Jesus is trying to tell me right now, as I sit up somewhere toward 5 in the morning now, at peace, without any more disruption than the cat wanting to come in, wanting to go out, the new dishwasher rattling softly away as a deep watery voice gurgles within so that cone could imagine the spraying arm revolving around at an unseen speed, the clomp of mom's feet gone back to bed. And I only poured myself a glass of wine after a very brief sadhana of purification, having done a great one earlier today...</p><p>I have seen these pure vessels get into it, the pleasure thing, the desire for adventure and carousing that I have often observed coming natural to our walk of life. I always took it for myself, because I was the one waiting on all these people as they got a bit ramped up, I always took it merely as a self administration of Jesus's own personal red painkiller, brought forth by good masters and servants and owners of the vineyard, spoken of so much in his gospel recorded words that one might gather He had a fair almost obsession with the business of vineyards, and hey, you know what His First Miracle was, don't we all. And a journalist's eye, say that of a Dostoevsky, is always welcome to suss this whole First Miracle out. Because as much as there is very little to say about It, there is also, when you look at it another way, very much to It. </p><p>And maybe this is why, like an obsessive Jesus, I don't mind my purification rituals. The air in mom's apartment is quite lousy anyway, with mold spores, as I see it, that make my lungs feel like an old bicycle inner tube with a leak in in.</p><p>All part of the great cosmic joke, that moved high Spanish grand theater, rococo as I might imagine, like an El Greco or something, to move away and on to a quite a different and mind blowing form, the novel, or the soliloquy of Hamlet, or Lear with his fool on the heath, or, as Kundera, essayist, novelist, art critic, personality of democracy and freedom and Prague '68 and exile, puts it, the same in a portrait done by Francis Bacon, capturing within the essential unique thing of say, Pope Leo, even with all the apparent distortion.</p><p><br /></p><p>But anyway, as a barman of more than thirty years personal experience, and often hungover, as happens to lonesome people of contrary style and hours, having ingested the modernized version of Jesus's red painkiller and nerve soother and observation of the consciousness of the Universe down to the tiny pebbles that live beneath a vine, perhaps not as pure and as simple and as direct as the original farm to table Jesus Original Red Painkiller, boy, I've seen it, people being people. Laughing, even howling, sometimes, or stoic, or maudlin, all kinds of ups and downs that lead one again back to Shakespeare's "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing." Indeed. I've seen it. And then, as I would imagine, they get through Sunday, and by Monday morning they are all back to their so-called normal householder lives. Good for them.</p><p>But it still says something, about the purity of the vessel, ourselves, redeemed from all the impurities we might ingest. And I've seen people get quite smug and happy about themselves, puffed up, in a way I didn't really fancy too much, but to chalk it up, that's what kind of a tree this person, say, Kyle, is, and that's the way it goes, and the Universe saw too it to create him just as he is, and the Universe took joy in doing so, and the joy continues out of Kyle, that's how it is, and I enjoy him too, and should have listened better to his way and his life, that of Kyle, who gave us much business, a definite rain maker, even if he might have kept me late at the old wine bar on certain occasions. That was my choice, by having made the deeper choice, and Uli was there too, a heavenly observer and deep confidant of the heart.</p><p><br /></p><p>So now I've added a touch of nutmeg and cinnamon to the pot. The carrots had a best before early February date, and I didn't have time, as I was cooking chicken tenders as well, with onions, in the black iron pan, with getting the dishwasher going, to for a real celery carrot onion voyage.</p><p>I've sipped the last of an open bottle of Beaujolais, and have moved on to a previously opened Lisboa red with a Lab doggy on the label. I've learned to be suspicious of the latter. I think I've done okay today.</p><p>If we accept the tantra idea that we are already in the perfect place, as ordained by the greatest deepest meanings of the Universe itself, that we must first completely accept, and then understand </p><p><br /></p><p>I can only write for so long without returning the wisdom of Jesus, or that of Buddha, which works for me too, of Tantra.</p><p><br /></p><p>I forget how much my customers, the music, the constant motion, buoyed me up.</p><p><br /></p><p>Three in the afternoon. I feel groggy still. Mom's downstairs. I tiptoe down, yes, there she is the Eames Chair, with her coat on. I turn the heat up, pass into the kitchen. Tea. Lemon turmeric ginger water. Put some soup on. I feel strange. There's a thing at the college tonight, but I don't want to bring her along so much. It will be dark. </p><p>I feel that sense of impingement as she falls into a nap. I practice a few kriya to expel toxins with the breath after rolling my belly around until I almost pass out, then gasp in some air and out alternating nostrils. I got things done at night, including cooking, which is indeed vital in the battle here. </p><p>The thing at the college has to do with Jack Kerouac. </p><p>Mom likes the Campbell's chunky gumbo soup I doctored up a bit. Do I need a grocery run today... Yes, we're out of turkey. Or I can't find it in the fridge. Amidst cooked cauliflower pizza, meals on wheels trays, the rotisserie chicken, </p><p>When you're not doing anything conspicuous and obvious as a member of the economic society you'll feel weird. </p><p>Mom had a nice cuddle with the cat. She gets his name right. The cat, not "cats."</p><p><br /></p><p>At night, in the temple, the kitchen, amidst a taste of incense smoke, the monks do the dishes. The dishwasher is an amiable dish rack, and seven cat food dishes, the spoons for soup and knives for butter and the glassware are scrubbed, ready for use tomorrow. 4 am. The useful time of the day.</p><p>There was a Jack Kerouac event at the college, quite impressive facilities. Bright. Even. An auditorium. With seats. A great jazz band, playing the style of the Kerouac Lester Young Dizzie Gillespie, Charlie Parker era. I found people I could talk to. Barbara's son. Emil from the bookstore. He's reading Visions of Cody, but seems to have put aside the book I wrote and dropped off for his father in law Bill, the bookstore owner, to look at.</p><p>It feels better to wash everything by hand. That way you have some time where parts of the brain shut off, to listen to the music, even if it's muzak, elevator music. Cheese. Montovani. Henry Mancini. </p><p><br /></p><p>My friend Masha, I ask her how she's doing. She has been vaguely Pro Putin for a long time.</p><p>I am beginning to project the field, the matrix, of my mother's constant mental illness, her disorder, of narcissism, bi-polar swings, something borderline. Graph that out and you will see how there's hatred between us all, the survivors. I struggle to find the meaning of my father's life. For my brother it means hardworking discipline, dedication, practicality, and all respectable things, hard work and family. My dad seasoned as a twenty year old student going through bootcamp, an air base weatherman at a training field in Arkansas, then going on to work on radar, testing how it worked in different weather conditions at different altitude.</p><p>For me my father means Theosophy, for one thing, along with all he did for me, lifting my budding music career, praising my personal style. He'd drive me around to events, and even jams.</p><p><br /></p><p>But now we all hate each other. The successful are narcissists, who make me feel hated. I can't speak in front of them, without being sniped, without being hated.</p><p>The yoga kula, it's always good to meet with Emily, Dawn, and Lisa. "You can still be a man, as a yoga guy. Men with money can be deep as a puddle. There's lots of money out there, what's the point of that anyway..."</p><p><br /></p><p>I've gotten through Thursday evening, all day Friday, all day Saturday sessions, of the free yoga retreat included in the $75 Kula membership, and all that remains in is the homestretch, Sunday morning, the morning sadhana at 7 AM, then from 9:30 to 1. But Mom has been difficult ever since I asked her to go back upstairs after lunch so I can do my yoga in peace. Saturday turns hellish, over dinner, I'm tired, and so I get into the wine. Then there's a phone call, later than I want it to be, and it ends up lasting two hours. I wake up late, past 7, with a headache, feeling awful. So I stay in bed. But I'm feeling much better at 9:30, and I hear mom's downstairs anyway. I don't wake up until 1 in the afternoon, and I feel bad about the whole thing. I mean, if there were any proof I can slide into a drinking problem with the wine, a bottle and a half to feel jolly, there it is. In mud mind this was the whole weekend's sessions meaning.</p><p><br /></p><p>Later, that night, exhausted with mom, who, just as I'm about to drive off after I start the car, let it warm up, sweep the snow off in the wind and cold, mom comes walking out the front door with her purple woolen coat on, not the warmest one, clutching her hat so it doesn't blow away, with her purse draped from her arm. She has to look for the poor woman in dire straits, she tells me. There was mention of this earlier as I prepared her breakfast of soup and slice of cauliflower crust pizza. There's a poor woman up in my room, she says, she's in trouble. No there's not, I just was up there. YES, there is! Why do you always doubt me... Mom, there's a nice PBS show about Ireland, the Burren. I thought she'd find it calming. But again, she finds something to be agitated about. And now she's out wandering off in the parking lot. I watch her walk away, after going back in, bringing her needless purse to drop off, to pick up her cane. You could help me, you know. Mom, where are you going? Over that way, she's up the block over there... She wants me to get the car, but she probably needs a walk anyway, for exercise, so I let her walk, advising her not to walk in the middle of the road, met with, don't tell me what to do, why are you always bossing me around, who died and left you God...</p><p>I finally get her back to the car. I open the door for her. She attempts to knock some snow off on the front grill with her cane, as she likes to stop and pound the cane down on any snow patch on the pavement or steps. Great. She loses the idea of what side of the car to get in on. </p><p>So, we go for a ride. Which calms her, but makes my life worse. So she's starting to wander now, great. </p><p><br /></p><p>I get back with the groceries. But I forgot tall kitchen garbage bags, plus the frozen Stauffer's Lasagna I wanted to try out, as I read a good review of it. Something to present mom with, when she comes down and bugs me. I pick up dinner at Canale's, calling from my resting place, The Stewart Shop.</p><p>I'm in a gloom still, for missing my yoga session, hungover. I'm mishandling things, I'm misaligned.</p><p>So what kind of soil am I for the sower in Jesus' Parable... </p><p>But I feel real headway in this yoga class, today, Monday, finding mom has not left the couch in the living room. I load up the dishwasher with last night's dinner dishes and cat food dishes, soaking the batch, before the load. I go back upstairs, as mom has fallen asleep again, take a shower, and commence my sadhana with the recording of yesterday's with Todd, which I missed. I still feel like I've brought shame upon myself.</p><p><br /></p><p>Mom has fallen back asleep, after the slice of pizza, and then twenty minutes after that, I make her soup, back on the couch. I've done what I can anyway. Mom, did you take all your pills? She slipped two away in her coat pocket, which she has not taken off, even if the heat seems considerably warm to me. I get her to down them. </p><p>And then I quietly leave the house through the bag door, with my Nalgeen water bottle full of still warm detox lemon lime ginger turmeric water tea, the old laptop, wrapped in a towel into one of those polyester reusable Price Chopper shopping bags. The car is started, it's warmer today, so I'm ready to go, just not sure where, after checking the mail, finding my US Postal notice that they've processed my forwarding mail from the old apartment in Washington, DC renewal up here in Oswego. Out the parking lot, right, the corner, then turn and then I'm turning right onto Erie, and down Fifth, north toward the lake, the Stewart Shop at the corner of Fifth and Utica Street, the bridge to the left, East, over the river. I'm going down to the water, a walk along the river. I end up by the marina, parking the car, still wondering how mom's doing in the back of my mind. I walk up the hill to Breitbeck Park for a view, pull up the Mantra Todd is teaching us to facilitate our chakras. There's a view of the cooling tower, standing by itself to savor, seen from marina western point, way to the east.</p><p>I'm walking along, no real purpose, looking down from the higher ground, near the old fort territory overlooking the lighthouse and the breakwater wall, mumbling the new mantra for the chakras, and then up by the old civic center building where they have a good open mic night on every other Friday. Cold enough, after the sun goes behind the clouds, to be wearing a mountain gear worthy windbreaker over a down sweater, the bright fluorescent green one my mom found at T.J. Maxx here. I see two teenage or college girls having a happy afternoon walking up to the overlook bluff.</p><p>As I pass one has climbed up out of the sunroof of a BMW sedan talking on the phone and laughing, and she is cute. </p><p>On I go, parking closer to the river, down by the business district. Maybe I'll stop in at the book store we go to. There's the offices of the Palladian Times. Well, why not. I'll drop in. And I do, not really even thinking of what I might want to say. I ask about local color... A brief conversation with the publisher, who recommends I take a card of the appropriate guy.</p><p>Cross the street. new building on the river side of First. Corporate pizza on one side, go through the line, pick what you want, and on the other side, bagels, another good looking woman passes by, who looks down, seeing that I've noticed she's attractive, in a business mode, rings on left hand anyway, I walk on. Milky sunlight. There's the Murdoch's bicycles and sports gear and wear, where my mom would go, supporting them, having a friend there, who cut her deals. Across the street. River's End. I enter quietly, not in much of a mood to speak with anyone anyway, and my friend Emil is there.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-6135289518747209652022-05-03T23:01:00.001-07:002022-05-03T23:01:34.006-07:00<p>Early February 2022</p><p><br /></p><p>Shut the door, it's cold! she says, as I come in with a heavy bag of groceries. "I know!" The snow is blowing. I've been through it. The streets and roads are in a shape the old Corolla puts its hazard lights on. The wind is whipping about, twenty miles per hour from the north, but with changes of direction. You can see it best in the street lamps up at the level of the maples along the road as I get away from the lights, The Big M, The Stewart Shop I never made it to tonight for homework, a place to write on the laptop, have a hot dog, something. Bame's Liquor Store, with the Open sign, where I buy the wine to keep us going here. I need to pee as I come out, but a nice police man has pulled over a woman, young I gather, who has, or might soon have, a suspended license. The man is truly helpful. I'm surprised to find him still graciously talking. But that's who he is, man is part of his job, and the other way around. I wait for the policeman to leave, I don't know why, and find behind the dumpster by the drive in bank window to take a little relief off the old bladder, as the wind keeps hurtling air and snow, tiny particles of ice that will cover a car window blind in a matter of minutes, all around.</p><p>I slam the door behind me to make sure it's shut, down the steps, the sidewalk, out to the car again over on the other side of the parking lot. The snow is coming down sideways. Blowing as it crosses the vector of light beneath a street lamp. I go over to the car, open the back door on the driver's side, and look in, to bring back the three bottles of ten dollar Beaujolais. The other bag of groceries, or my lap top and Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the soda water bottle that will be wasted if I let it freeze. I've failed again at achieving the homework goals I might have ideally set out for myself. Dinner for mom. We will see.</p><p><br /></p><p>At the grocery store, when I come back, the car is covered when I turn the ignition with the clutch pedal all the way down beneath my snow boots. I get out to brush it off again. Did I drop a glove somewhere. Just getting dark out.</p><p>I was up late doing the yoga exam. Needed wine after all that. Got up at one pm. Mom comes down as I drink my tea. Of course. Hello, hello, is anybody here? Is anybody here? Oh, my savior, she says when she comes down. Chicken salad sandwich, she responds after I present her the options. I'll just be drinking tea and turmeric lemon water. I need to do my sadhana, which you must do on an empty stomach.</p><p><br /></p><p>Later, I've gotten all the way to corpse pose. Down she comes. Same thing. The ideas are percolating through my body, through all the rocky pores like that old horsebone limestone. I'm feeling better, but it doesn't last. Mom is not sure if she's hungry. Something cold and wet, she says. Okay. Was the cat out? The good mood, the joke she made seeing me lying on my back, has gone away. What are you going to be doing later? I don't know mom... Now all the decency of the yoga thoughts have vanished.</p><p>I take the bag of black sunflower seeds out, hopefully it will be enough. I cross the new fallen snow. The birds have come back, after a few quiet days at the feeder.</p><p>As soon as I'm in the door with laptop, yoga book, wine, she's all over me. Did you see anybody you know? How are the roads? It quickly gets repetitive. </p><p>I duck down into the basement. </p><p>It isn't easy to sustain any kind of professional thought faced with such, and on top of that, "what?" she asks, over and over, so that soon you really feel that you do actually have to shout, but then she covers her ears. "You don't know what shouting does to me..." she says. Okay, she's right. </p><p>But when all my wordy thoughts and moods are shot to hell every single time, as if she had some kind of sense, how to ruin the lad's projects, so he'll pay more attention to me, and I'll be helpless and not do a thing, as such I am owed, because of whatever faults she might perceive in her ordained and ordered world, by now a great grating irritation arrives quickly, a pissing away of life, for whatever junk you're given, the right to pick up the pieces and mourn over all the books and stuff that will meet the private dumpster, because there's no where else for it all to go...</p><p>And can I study, can I focus on the last hurdles, the attempted teacher yoga practice, come to the front of your might, open, engage, align, expand... and whenever I say it, I can't get rid of all the little voices, old cartoon voices, Ola, Señor Duck, Hey Ant, how'd you like to jump between two slices of bread and be my lunch, Ask not what you're country can do for you, my brother need not be remembered in death beyond what he was in life, Monty Python's Flying Circus, It's just a flesh wound, It's just a rabbit, This is London calling... Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray... Purple Rain, purple rain... Purple haze, is in my brain.. Tis a far far better thing I do, than I have ever... Tyger tiger burning bright, in the forests of the night... And the Auld Triangle, went jingle bloody jangle, all along the banks, of the royal canal... I want to hold your hand, I want to hold your hand... My name is Jan Jansen, I live in Wisconsin, I work in a lumber mill there...</p><p><br /></p><p>No, a phone call and that's all truly gone out the window... I can't do homework anymore, or reading, beyond my own selfish mind. Buddy Holly died, on this day, February Third. HIs chartered plane, a small thing seating three in addition to the pilot, a Beachcraft, flies off low into a snow storm, the kid pilot who's not so good at instrumental flying, tends to panic, did he miss where the ground was? It seemed the plane dragged and skidded along the cold frozen cornfield ground for hundreds of yards. The Big Bopper was ejected, by the end, when the plane's broken fuselage came up against the fence where the pictures of the crash and the deaths were taken. </p><p>But this is a story, of how I struggle to get any work done.</p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-75648696025561314042022-05-03T22:45:00.000-07:002022-05-03T22:45:58.628-07:00<p>1/28/2022</p><p><br /></p><p>I come down to check on things around 2 in the morning, and mom is fast asleep on the couch. I encouraged her to go upstairs to her bedroom earlier, as she dozed off, then just stared forward, cooing the cat curled up beside her. "I'm not ready to go upstairs," she told me, raising her voice slightly. Okay.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I sleep upstairs in her study, and at around 6 in the morning I could hear her going on. Hello, is anybody here, is anybody here, hello? Ted, Ted... She calls me a couple of times. Where are all the people?</p><p><br /></p><p>I go downstairs, she's got her little juice glass there with wine in it. She's angry. I need food! she yells at me. I was a school teacher. I get up early!</p><p>And then other times, with this same pattern, in the middle of the night, or the morning, I just need a voice to talk to... Okay, mom. She's softens a bit. She looks at me from her chair, there's a glimmer in her eyes. The wine.</p><p><br /></p><p>I open the refrigerator. There's half a quick stop chicken salad on rye sandwich in a small open clear plastic container, the other half gone. I fed her the other half somewhere in the late night not worth remembering. She's been getting up early, then sleeping from the afternoon into the night. When she comes downstairs she needs something. Food. Company. I'm lonely, she says. Hello?!</p><p><br /></p><p>I go back to bed after the encounter. I get up to face the news about the water bill back in my old DC apartment. The landlord believes that when Bob my neighbor, the writer with the old Triumph from a couple of buildings over, came by to check on my mail back in early September, he left the water running. And the door unlocked.</p><p>And landlord's office is just figuring this out. They want sixteen hundred dollars to pay for it.</p><p><br /></p><p>The next morning I hear mom is up at five. I hear her, yelling almost. Where are all the people! I need people. Hello?! So I get up from the green air mattress to go down and check on her.</p><p>Mom, do you need anything?</p><p>I'm a human being, I need food!</p><p><br /></p><p>She always tells me she doesn't need me. We're over. We are done. I've been taking care of myself, I've been doing it for years. "Mom, you can't even feed yourself, beyond crackers and almond butter..." "You're trying to destroy me!" she counters. She counters everything. I'm to blame for everything. "You made me do this..."</p><p><br /></p><p>She's already called me twice. When I leave her to go back to an uneasy rest, not feeling up for facing such a day, the sting of the whole water bill thing, everything else, she's failing up someone from her little list, her sister, or maybe Sharon.</p><p>I got back up to bed, drink some water from my camping & hiking Nalgeen bottle with some sea salt and a touch of baking soda and try to get back to bed and hopefully mom will quiet down.</p><p>I had set it up with Nell to take the old Larson Bros parlor guitar from Mrs. Eaker's, one hundred years old, and like an idiot I didn't put it in a case, and it dried out, and then Craig Baumgarner, a luthier who plays in one of those Gypsy Jazz groups, took it on as a project. Her boyfriend is a guitar player, has a whole room full of them, and it's humidified. Well humidified.</p><p>But, now they want what I would consider a lot of money from me, literally down the drain, and so I tell her in email, I'll have my brother go over and gather a few things. I'll be in touch.</p><p>There's something about guitars. Jimi slept with them. Sometimes in alley ways in New York City when he was going out on his own. That's all he had when they flew him over to London, a Stratocaster and the clothes he was wearing. Jimi didn't care, as long as he had a guitar.</p><p>So I go back to a winter snooze, truly not wanting to face getting up, gather the will to live again, and keep on with it. And I've been listening to too many lectures and things, words, from "spiritual types," and so with my head in the clouds, it's hard to think of a step forward that isn't part of the spiritual journey, such as I hope to write about.</p><p>I have no particular desire to be a holy man, a man living on the road, without a home, without possessions by the ones he wear, or basically carry, functional ones, as they must be, for all season. Nor is it a society that wants people to be without a home, but in my situation, with my mom waking at all hours, too fast asleep at other times, and so lonely, as she says, and "what is there for fun today..." you can kind of give up hope for ever having a normal "householder" kind of a life, even as that should be a thing you can do here in this life, without depriving yourself of the normal every day ups and downs and pleasures and pains.</p><p><br /></p><p>I think of what Kurt Vonnegut said, that all the the pain and anxiety he went through to produce Slaughterhouse Five was enormous, the things it cost him, in form of fear and sleepiness and worry and depression. Good man, he made it to the natural end, and kept his smoker's chuckle bright and polished.</p><p><br /></p><p>And that's the path writers must face.</p><p>Not all of us are cut out to be St. Francis, rebuilding the broken down church after he hears a voice, putting body, mind and soul to it, No Sirree.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Right before the first true snowfall, sort of half blizzard strength from a Nor'Easter coming up the coast and staying put with winds from the north for our parts, I took the old bird feeder off the shepherd's crook, cleaned it up a bit, removed the solidified seed at the bottom from the year, and put it back to hang, full of fresh black sunflower seeds. </p><p>And I was gratified when I woke and saw the birds clustered around in the storm, a white-out. Winds, the snow coming sideways. In every direction.</p><p>And then, and then, then the squirrels came. Black ones, grey ones. A team of them running down through the trees, leaping from gray branches. They climb up the crook, and up the cage of the seed, a cylinder swinging as they pick at if from the sides, driving away the birds, the cardinals, the chickadees with their little black hoods, the catbirds, the occasional red-bellied little woodpecker with his ermine sides, the cowbirds and grackles.</p><p>The day after their invasion I looked out, and there was the lid of the bird feeder out to the side. I thought to myself, I could have sworn I put the lid back on, when I took in the slender old narrow bird feeder none of the animals wanted anything to do with, its seed long consolidated into a frozen block. It's something you struggle with, as I do, to line up the top just so, then twist it shut, then push the metal tabs down tighter.</p><p>And then it happened again. The lid laying on the cold ground, detached, in the snow. And one squirrel down in it while holding on from the top. And I remember something about cayenne pepper. A deterrent. </p><p>So. I can't find the vaseline, but I make do with Vick's Vaporub, as a sort of base, a vehicle for the pepper to stick to. I fill the feeder again, slather the top with Vick's, give it a good round peppering of the cayenne powder and let it hang, walking back in, proud also of the good Kaufmann Sorell boots to make it through the snow.</p><p><br /></p><p> But by the time I'm clearing the cold powder snow from the top, the windshield, the sides, the back window, the headlights, of the old Toyota, I begin to feel like a war criminal, and the comparison to Napalm is too obvious to be ignored for long. It's about twenty out, or colder, and I envision some poor starving squirrel limping around with his frozen paws covered with the frozen gel and cayenne pepper, poor devil. And what is feeding the birds all about, anyway... What kind of a grim thug have I become, the squirrels being a rodent pack of thugs in my mind.</p><p><br /></p><p>I feel some relief the day later, when I find the lid is off again, to my amazement, though it took them a few days. I mean to go out and pick up the top when I get in from the grocery store, but I have a six o'clock yoga class, a review of our anatomy lessons, a challenge rising...</p><p>I wake up the day of gloom, of having found a home for an old guitar, humidified, loved and all, but... it's like the landlord could then take it. So the thinking goes. And why am I still even keeping the apartment, but for storage for the few things I do have, and renting places getting harder to come by anyway... so if I'm honest with myself... how can I not feel like a complete failure...</p><p>My aunt says, call your brother. Yes, maybe he can check in. Maybe he can keep an old piece of wood humidified for me, for posterity.</p><p>That's what you get, thinking about old monks in the Sinai Egypt desert, Thomas Merton, the yoga stuff, Buddha, Thich Nhat Hahn.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway, it's a shitty day. Poor old Kerouac saw the same in his own life, brought to tears, poor old St. Jack of the Dogs, as he was in The Dharma Bums visiting his sister's family down in Rocky Mount, NC. </p><p><br /></p><p>Any fighter has to take body blows. And they always hurt, and they always surprise you, somehow. Eventually, the body absorbs them.</p><p><br /></p><p>The next day Mom's up early again. I go down and heat a slice of pizza in the toaster oven for her, cauliflower crust, with prosciutto, ham, a little salami, banana peppers, fresh mozzarella. I put a fair amount of love into it. Okay, mom. I put it down for her. More wine, she says. Okay... I depart away as fast as I can, after putting some dry food out for the cat, go back to bed. </p><p>And when I come down around eleven, there she is. "I'm going to see if Ted's going to take me out to lunch." Great. I make tea. Put the Bialletti on for some coffee, as back up. Okay, fine. The sun's out. She gets angry at me. You guys get to go out and do whatever you want while I'm stuck here all day. Mom, what... I go the grocery store... I haven't been out for a month!</p><p>I can't really argue with her. I'll have to handle the ice on the front steps. Salt. I'll start the car up, warm it up. We go down to get the newspaper, then take a look at the lake. The Press Box. I have a half hearted hamburger with goat cheese, wishing I just got the regular hamburger. She has her lemon pepper chicken, a glass of wine. Her meanness level starts to rise. It's okay for a bit, before my mind wanders over my problems. What's next for you, she asks. $1600 the landlord wants from me. Literally down the drain.</p><p>She wants to go the bookstore afterward. She lingers at the table taking time with her wine. I check my phone. Write a grocery list. She starts in with me. "You hate me. It's clear you hate me." </p><p>We park close to the bookstore, at the main four corners of on the west side of town. I get her up safely on to the sidewalk, looking out for patches of ice, we get to the store, pull your mask up mom, and then in, after a guy helps with the door. I look around for the book Sharon suggested for mom. <i>Ex Libris</i>, I think it's by the Japanese person who reviews books for the New York Times. They don't seem to have it in the best seller shelf nor the new non fiction, nor the section where you might find a book like Kurt Vonnegut on writing. Mom goes over to a spot, amusing herself with paperbacks at a table. I go up to the young women at the counter to order the book recommendation, and out comes the proprietor to give us a hale chat. Heckyl and Jeckyl are here, I tell him. We haven't been out of the house in a month. He shows me a book he gently recommends. I've got too much yoga homework due soon enough. There's baby news on Emil's front, he plays the bass in a local band. He's on paternity leave.</p><p>So mom's sitting there, in nor rush. Do we need to go now? No, that's okay. I'm glad she's enjoying herself. I'm going to take a walk around the block, I tell her. One of the smoke stacks over at the electric plant, as we discuss with the nice man with a paper cup of coffee in his hand who helped with with the door, has an impressive plume of steam billowing out of it. Twice a year, they fire it up. I go out and take a walk in the cold to take a picture of the great towering smoke stacks with my phone, for posterity.</p><p><br /></p><p>I get back to the bookshop. She picks out a book, finally as my steady patience and up in the air feeling starts to wane and kick in. At the counter, I pay for it. Mom, we need to go, I have an errand. Mailing the keys to my apartment to my brother. Maybe he can have Jack take care of Mrs. Eaker's old guitar, as the thought of it drying out continue to haunt me. I should just give it to someone, or maybe back to the guy who fixed it. Mom comes up to the counter. She wants one of the purple cloth book bags with the logo The River's End Bookstore on it. Mom we're coming back here anyway... But she insists. She wants to do it herself. She produces a savings bond. She fishes through a pocket. I go back and help her pull a twenty out from her little wad of papers.</p><p>I get her out to the sidewalk. She yells at me, I forget why. I get her to the car. It's nearing in on four o'clock. I try to help her with getting her up and safely on to the ground, one hand for her cane. The other, she insists on holding the new bag. I end up ruining the inaugural run of bringing her purple little book bag into the house. Okay, I get it. Maybe I'm the same way. I remember Sasha giving me a ride back from the vet's with my kitty cat's ashes in it. And maybe I would have wanted to walk back that same route we walked, kitty cat with rectal cancer in the old lobster trap like wooden cat carrier that goes way back. Bah, too much to think about.</p><p>I get the keys off with a hastily written note, over at the Post Office, a friendly place with excellent service. I mention looking for a job with them before, doing my profile, the test, the driving record. There's a sign out front where you drive up to the two mail boxes. Hiring.</p><p>I hit The Big M for a little grocery shopping therapy, some cold cuts, a can of beer, ground turkey, chicken stock. I tell the dark haired, almost black, straight and silky to go with her pale skin and her calm friendship--every now and then she blushes when I say hi, so I imagine, and I do wish she would say yes, but she seems to have a boyfriend, that's okay, she's in college here, studying physics--about my travails with the local squirrels, as I put a large shaker of cayenne pepper on the belt. I tell her how I felt like a war criminal treating the lid with Vicks so the cayenne powder would stick, but how they got the goddamn lid off anyway. And she's heard the coyotes too, over there in Scriba, as I heard them by the light of the full moon not long ago and the cat was out too then. I told her about how I felt like maybe I'd go out the next day and find a rib cage, but I guess he's smart.</p><p>I have to take a pee after the lemon water and the soda water with lunch, so I pull in to The Stewart Shop, with my laptop in my bag. A chicken caesar wrap, a slice of pizza to put in front of mom when she's being crazy... I write a little bit, not very well, and then I start to feel the cold along with all the other things, please, please come through, Medicare or Medicaid whatever it is, I could use a win over here I'm my section...</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Maybe the old apartment is holding me back...afraid to move forward.</p><p><br /></p><p>The next day after the lunch and then the bookstore, I'm wiped out, exhausted. I was up in the night having a chat with a girl from college, now a child therapist, and she advanced the interpretive theory that my mother has pretty much all her life, from the way I describe it, a case of Borderline Personality Disorder, someone who can take nothing like criticism without throwing it back on you with anger, who doesn't seem to have the normal level of lasting empathy in her tank if it doesn't suit her purposes and "having fun today..." So I've been playing against a loaded deck, the pain of the irrational for as long as I can remember. I mean, not completely, but often enough, I'm afraid.</p><p>I hear her downstairs, but I can't bring myself to get up and face her. Finally about three o'clock she's gone upstairs, to her bedroom, and it's safe for me to sneak out of the room across the hall and downstairs, where I find two solid hours of work to do in the kitchen, a sink full of dishes, the humidifiers out of water almost, tea to make, lemon water with turmeric and ginger, the cat to take care of, the refrigerator a cluttered mess like everything else. And me, hapless.</p><p>I can make a turkey meatloaf, there's a small NY strip to sear, I make soup with added stock, a few extra vegetables from the meals on wheels little trays, shredded rotisserie chicken and if she wants, a slice of pizza.</p><p><br /></p><p>By the time I begin a brief sadhana, the kriya, the mantra chant, the pranayama, at least to detox my system after some form of evil combination, I hear her clunking footsteps upstairs. Enough to make me nervous.</p><p><br /></p><p>She is nasty when I get up, shouting. There aren't any crackers! She has a full glass of wine in her hand as she sits on the couch. Aren't you going to come and talk to me? I'm in the kitchen making tea, surveying what I have to feed her. After that, doing the round of dishes, I work on paying the bills. The woman from Medicaid, the facilitator from Syracuse has called to tell me she needs bank statements from both accounts for November. I fish around, in one of the desks, and I can find one but not the other, despite my efforts. I call the banks, and they are obliging.</p><p><br /></p><p>I fill out the form for a medical bill, into the envelope and a stamp. I hear mom upstairs. I'm down in the basement, looking for my gas bill. When I come upstairs, mom has taken the envelope ready to mail and has just ripped it open. I express my frustration, and she demands that I give her back the piece of paper. I'll have you arrested. It's a miserable day. Will I get any homework done?</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-52807908196107470562022-05-03T22:27:00.000-07:002022-05-03T22:27:34.261-07:00<p>1/19/2022</p><p><br /></p><p>It was a lot to absorb. The practice teaching part in particular. The philosophy, that felt like the immediate thing for me to focus on.</p><p><br /></p><p>I was looking for some grand genesis of spiritual things, a way to bring it all together, writer that I suppose I try to be.</p><p>I found the steps I'd made, forward, had to be undone, if I were to really make some progress. I had to regress back to childhood. Better to know than not. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I lost a lot that year, and the next year, and the year after that. I was forced to move. I left behind a large framed poster of an old French Bicycle company with a naked red head flying through the air like an angel. I didn't have room for it. I left behind a lot of stuff. Black Converse sneakers, Lucchese cowboy boots. I lost a lot of books. I lost a print that reminded me of the Joan Miro painting Hemingway won in a kind of raffle in one of his Paris cafe haunts. I downsized. I left behind things that expressed to me who I am, like an old tattered Ike Jacket I found in a second hand shop in Northampton. An old cashmere overcoat of my dad's from the 1950s. The books I kept were rare, of my father's, and my own particular interests.</p><p><br /></p><p> I lost track of it all. I moved, without even any money saved, and started paying $1200 in rent out on MacArthur Boulevard not far away from the river bluff, the walk to work past the hospital and Georgetown University's northern border, Reservoir Road.</p><p><br /></p><p>And then, Covid. Right before St. Patrick's Day. And then, the eve of Election Day, neighbors call the Police, mom is disoriented, the paramedics come, and then they take her off to the hospital. I pack a suitcase, take a laptop, a guitar, winter coats, boots. I leave my apartment. Gone.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now when a death is announced, a musician from eras ago and passed dies at age 78, I feel better, for I am closer to the natural finish line. Mortality and immortality should not bother one.</p><p><br /></p><p>So I had a fairly good day.</p><p>Music is the Fearie Queen.</p><p>At the end of the day, after getting mom her soup, her pills, in the morning, and then later, dinner, turkey meatloaf, plus a decent piece of fried fish from the meals on wheels program, </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Groans of gloom, alight the room. Poetry is the most satisfying there is for me, along with music.</p><p>The bitter gloom has settled in the room, the dinner made last night, chicken breast in one pan, a sort of meatball and pepper & onion ragout with a good locally made sauce, Rinaldi's.</p><p>The recriminations, "you hate me!" mom storming away, the anger, the charges, the guilt. I should have known she was tired. She was unresponsive to Sharon's phone call, and before that, Trish & Barry's call over the Sandhill Cranes in their yard down in the Lakes of Florida outside of Orlando. The blame, put on me, the closest human being, as she unhappily picks at her pasta. I fed her a shrimp before, from her lunch with Mary, before the haircut down in Fulton.</p><p>The innate therapy of poetry, and as I write, I still shake slightly, but I feel better.</p><p>To be a good poet, one must be pretty stressed.</p><p><br /></p><p>Purchasing a humidifier, I missed my on line meeting with Todd. The stupid things we do... I was doing a price check. The price listed on the shelf was for the cheaper one they were out of. Meanwhile the meeting is supposed to be going on. You lose track of the days when you're facing the same situation, day in and out, when you don't have a place you go to like a job. You don't know what to focus on.</p><p>I'm taking a photo outside the car, of the smoke stacks of Oswego in the distance by the high school. Then it occurs to me, as the voice mail comes through finally.</p><p>Oh, shit.</p><p><br /></p><p>Finally, I get the little plastic cover on the windshield wiper screw at the base of it. The one had disappeared when the man from the body shop, Randy, had to take out the windshield for a second time to fix the leak, back in high salmon fishing season along the big river. Aluminum foil had worked, until the real winter snows came.</p><p>To get a little thing done takes so much energy, wrestling with mythical chaos. The cat, I can't take the silverware out of the drying rack without irritating the cat. Along with mom, he too is a fussy eater.</p><p><br /></p><p>The Universe (in the greater more encompassing sense of taking in all things, as in Genesis) is telling us a story. We have, if we feel obliged to tell the insights we find and see, the tools to tell is. And I suppose some of us feel obliged, by the duty of having been given life, to return to the Universe our own little accounts of it, as if we truly were a living piece of the whole, broken off to tell that story, of the living Consciousness of the Universe look back at itself, as if the individual must then, without a direct awareness of that being separated from the Whole, a factual ignorance, an amnesia toward that act of Creation breaking you off as an individual to look back and comprehend itself through the small living perspective you are given in life.</p><p><br /></p><p>A most grim and wintry feeling comes over me, after the birthday. I think of T.S. Eliot's Preludes.</p><p>There is price to pay for having "one's soul stretched tight across the city skies... The conscience of a blackened street impatient to assume the world... an infinitely gentle in finitely suffering thing." </p><p>No one really wants to buy this state of affairs, because aren't I have enough troubles just getting through this life and keeping a rough over my head, you need a job. Being an interpreter and scholar of existence is okay only if you're an accepted religious scholar, but not if you're a Herman Melville or a Kurt Vonnegut, or a Jack Kerouac bum off the street, trying to please the literary types. There is no grist for the mill unless you feel like Jonah, or Job, or with Moses on a long trek through the desert... You have to be, as Kerouac said, Beat.</p><p><br /></p><p>So came my problems with the necessary script of the Ashaya, which you have to do if you want to pass the 200 hour teacher training course. I felt a buildup of words that I could not ignore and reading any scripted and regimented thing made me feel weary. It's as if you have only so much energy to devout. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-60759535174655711272022-05-03T22:22:00.000-07:002022-05-03T22:22:57.398-07:00<p>January 6, 2022</p><p><br /></p><p>The loneliness sets in. We went out to Canale's on New Years Eve, about 6:30. There's a pretty waitress there. I just needed to see other human beings. Mom enjoyed it. We got home without arguing. The memory of the pretty food runner reminded me of the waitress, and when I asked, McKenzie only works Sunday day. We'd run into her as our server weeks before on a Sunday night, after I got out of a yoga weekend I really had to struggle through. Then we went out. Mom got difficult at the end of dinner, and getting her to the bathroom and then helping with her coat I forgot to sign the credit card tab, such that the beautiful young, kind, somewhat sassy waitress, maybe 20, if that, had to follow us out to the car. So I get out of the car and profusely apologize to her, and she tells me she just didn't want me leaving my card behind. I tipped her forty on one hundred, and then I had to go back in and get my stainless steel jotter pen, still on the table, as if the night needed some proof I'd a long day, scrambled by the end. As I went out I quietly told her how hard it is to be dealing with dementia, and when I got mom back to the car she was still terse with me. I'd texted my brother about how we might call Jack from the restaurant, as we sat in the booth, but as I soon as I pulled out my phone she turned on me for being rude at the table.</p><p>Three glasses over dinner, leftovers of Chicken with Lemon and Artichoke, then a long nap, and then around 11:30 I stir again, and then because it's New Years Eve I have some Beaujolais, and wake up shaking on New Year's Day.</p><p><br /></p><p>She comes down the stairs again, calling my name, but calmer and in better humor than usual. I served her half a convenience store tuna sandwich an hour ago, and she went back upstairs. Now she's back again. The cat seems to have diarrhea. After he came back in from stoop, not going very far, 18 degrees, layer of snow and then a dusting on top. He took some water from his bowl. He wasn't even interested in the dry food he usually crunches on. No interest in catnip. </p><p>He goes away quietly and finds his spot on the top of the sofa. I'll clean the hatbox later.</p><p>I give her the nightly pill, the upgraded dose of Memantine. That's enough to make me happy. And she didn't even fight me. I pour her a small glass of the Yellow Tail Pure Bright chardonnay, low in sugar, 9.6 %. She tells me she doesn't know how to get back upstairs, she tells me, but her mood is surprisingly consistent, and even some calm to it. She makes it upstairs. The cat seems to be feeling better.</p><p><br /></p><p>Art. A combination of common touch, jokes, of dipping down into the communal reservoir. I</p><p>I've spent too much time of mine being alone.</p><p><br /></p><p>I put up one of my little improvised sketches, of grandpa telling the children, in some form of Abe Lincoln backwoods accent, one of the tales of King Tanowando and The Settlers. Up on Facebook. I get amusement from them at night, after mom has stopped coming to down to visit me, wanting to be fed, and the cat too. </p><p>The next day, Monday January Third, the world goes back to work. It's cold out.</p><p>I feel I'm still getting over something, but it's hard not to feel ashamed. I texted a long Whats App note to Bruno the Chef over there in Portugal, responding to his wishing me a happy new year and how am I doing, and the Covid is driving everyone crazy.</p><p>There are the dishes to tackle. Mom hit me two times in the night, saying she was "starving," first a tuna fish sandwich, then a rising dough crust frozen pizza, as she sits around at the table, looking over at me. The abyss again. And what help does spirituality or religion of any form do for you but just drive you mad. Great.</p><p>The paper grocery bag has a topping of Woodchuck Cider Pearsecco cans, light blue. </p><p>The cost of making humor and comedy is apparent in the morning.</p><p>A distant Facebook friend--she teaches architectural history in Paris--gives me a compliment on a video that iPhoto put together about Spring 2001. Mom and I going out to Sterling Nature Center. She tells me she remembers seeing me freshman year down in the basement of Frost Library. I blew that one two, along with other ones I remember, Elena, Tina...</p><p>Then even worse, becoming a lone asshole up at Plimpton, the old DKE house, with Sir Isaac Newton's fireplace, while by buddies lived together down in B Dorm, and Jeffrey kept the same nocturnal schedule I did. The lonesome country boy, Farmer Ted, the Feral Ted Beast.</p><p><br /></p><p>Where do the educated go these days... No G.I. Bill, no FDR, no free masters degree... No jobs in teaching, but for the thoroughbreds. </p><p><br /></p><p>Mother Earth is poor. She has been plundered, to make some wealthy business men. But where there is wealth, there is no Jesus Christ, not much honest spirituality, as Francis, both the original Saint, a visionary, and the current Pope.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>But all these good thoughts don't help so much when I wake up. I only brighten after paying a few bills, as much as it hurts. I hear mom stirring, so I go up and check on her, and she tells me she has a bit of a cold, but her mood seems fine, and when I've checked in on her earlier she was sleeping heavily.</p><p>The sky is grey. I don't feel motivated to read my yoga books.</p><p>This situation will bog you down. Trying to write will bog you down, and leave you with nothing, and no life either. You end up doing dishes and letting the cat in and out, doing the recycling, but pondering whether or not to remove the pile of newspapers building up by mom's chair. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>And sometimes, at night, or by day, I ask myself, or I ask God, how is this all worth it, first the suffering of writing, second for the lack of the dignity of employment, the lack of dignity of having no family of my own, but tied in by fate to my aging mother with dementia.</p><p>And what began as an odd and too much isolated curiosity towards earthly part saintly things of a youth's interest, that all gets worn down.</p><p>I do the dishes, at 3 in the morning, stirring from a long nap.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now it's five in the morning. I've recently watched Wim Wenders documentary of Pope Francis, Man of His Word, and I've enjoyed the portrayal of the original, Saint Francis. </p><p>I've having some Beaujolais. With everything going on, isolation sets in.</p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-73545773945839453602022-01-08T00:56:00.012-08:002022-02-07T00:56:25.495-08:00<p> Thoughts on <i>The Bhagavad Gita,</i> as translated by Stephen Miller. Yoga Course assignment sketch.</p><p><br /></p><p>There is an immediate recognition here, my life is that of Arjuna. And the problem for here is for Arjuna to bring the teaching of Krishna home, to awaken to it, to bring it out of the general unconscious dream of life's experiences and situations previously thought of in many different of emotionally exhausting ways. This is the problem, the ignorance, which causes great suffering, taxing the mind, leaving one in despair over the past, the future and largely incapable of understanding the present, all of which will always be subject to interpretation: is an action good, or is it bad, or is it a mix of both in an agonizing way. This leaves a person in the agony of adulthood, stuck in a realm of blindness, ignorance to the Truths of Lord Krishna.</p><p><br /></p><p>We each lead the life of Arjuna, here, as the battle waits, about to tip, frozen on an edge, into all the horrors of war. No wonder Arjuna is stuck, what to do?</p><p>Why so? Because of the human nature Lord Krisha will reveal out of all of us. We already, unbeknownst to ourselves, within the stages of development of karma yoga itself. We know within ourselves, by our nature, which must be revealed by divinity to us, that we can only act by the only vision, the only sight we have, to do an act for the best of reasons, for the intentions we find within us. Krishna is telling Arjuna, the atomic nutshell of humanity, representative of all, that we do indeed act, in the final analysis, on our intentions, and that these intentions are and can only be detached from the desire to possess any outcome.</p><p><br /></p><p>And so to us, it is revealed which side of the battlefield we live upon and in. Rather than the logical, who, by the way, turn out to be evil and greedy and self-centered, completely without access to the awakening Arjuna has the capacity to receive as Gospel and greatest of teachings, as divine forces have placed him just so, through the greatest of Universal Laws, which he must accept, Arjuna is in touch with the purest forms of intention. We see it in him. He cares, even about his enemies. Even in victory in this battle, surely beloved brothers will meet death in war. And for what? For the vanity of rulership? Not worth it, thinks Arjuna. His look at even the outcomes are complex. And this is not the problem, at all, for the other side, who think in baser terms, greed, no problem with a simple and uncomplicated desire to hold power, for the sake of power. </p><p><br /></p><p>As if burdened so deeply into a frozen state of inaction by the complexity of things troubling to the mind, which we ourselves are now as much as ever brought to face, as our planet runs out of room for everyone's greed and ambitions, and even basic life, quite starkly, Arjuna, thoughtful and reflective enough, is ready to receive the greatest of lessons from the highest of sources. Krishna reveals himself, as Himself, with an open maw such as to blow away all shreds of illusion as if in a great fire, burning away all one might have thought he knew. (The Book of Job catches some of this, in different terms.)</p><p><br /></p><p>And in this great fire of recognition Arjuna now can understand. The motive of an action is pure as one might make it, and why not strive to be good and pure rather than evil and corrupt, and that the material results or those ones of sensual desire are of little consequence, and must be so, things to actually ignore, if one is to achieve the appropriate end, the one in tune with the very matter, the fiber, the energy of all that is created, created just so.</p><p> All of this can only be to look at ourselves, deeply within. Here, the great lesson of the Gita, reveals a portrait of our own lives, an accepting one.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>For myself, a quick sketch, that I think bears some parallels to the ones we've read about from Todd Norian's own life events, that could take into consideration our true and most purest of desires as described in <i>Tantra Illuminated,</i> that we ourselves are to be regarded as facets, angles, individualized pieces and parts of the Universe looking back in at itself with its own consciousness, placed just so, to see ups and downs, frail difficulties at life's crossroads, the so called bad habits and sins which deposit some form of sand on a beach so that things have a base to grow upon.</p><p>Was it a bad thing that I raised a glass, sometimes over-exhuberatnly, with weary workers needing a break to catch up with themselves before facing the chores of home... Was it a bad thing to practice compassion and hospitality, in a blind dumb ignorant way, just so that I was moving, that the depression of my own life would be abated as I kept moving as a busy bartender... Was it a bad thing to be placed just so, and become more of a poor person, even with all his college education and verbal talents, than a solidly placed financially responsible one... Was it a bad thing that I honor my mother, with all her anxieties, rather than forge away from her and find and make my own family... </p><p>As Arjuna, we cannot know. We are bitten and infected by the spirit of a Saint Francis, humble and non materialistic in a world grasping for material, for the illusions of security which themselves seem pretty real most days. How far behind are we, we ask ourselves, fearful of abject displacement and poverty, even as we, with a good heart, feed the dog and the cat, with a pat to both.</p><p>So do we accept and hold onto the Cosmology of the Lord Krishna who holds us, first as an earthly gentleman charioteer aiding his own master, then revealing himself to show, in essence, that all things, all actions, all the things one might do in the future have already been completely resolved any way, so why worry about the larger things.</p><p>Maybe in a deep rest, in sleep itself, can one conjure up the alignment of deep poetic understandings to craft them into a truth to follow. What is action, what is inaction? It is the intent that matters. An action can be done for many different reasons, as Krishna outlines, and so the heart virtues we bring to a task are the significant things at play.</p><p><br /></p><p> But again, hospitality, an ancient mitzvoth to welcome strangers, neighborliness, respect, listening skills, unselfishness, forms of poverty, humor, acceptance, a love of flora and fauna and the cleansing airs from spaces wild and natural, are things to hold within our intentions.</p><p>As a writer, I add, there can be no fear of death in its practice, no wish for anything of security if words are to ring true, and there can never be any emphasis on the wealthy riches such as one might think his talent deserves. </p><p>Rather, the Don Quixotes and Cervantes, the Hamlets and Shakespeare, the Kerouacs of the world, as much as they ended up suffering, all the poets of the world, the Irish rebels, the Hafiz Persian poet singing, lay firm a general intention, to go out on the road, as both observers and participants with the intention of encountering the great wisdom of the Lord...</p><p>Who would have known, the importance of intention...</p><p><br /></p><p>It's as if our view of how we achieve success and even the nature of defining success has completely changed.</p><p><br /></p><p>The hero must enter the practice of karma yoga, which is action in the world. And in karma yoga guided action, Arjuna can only overcome his great paralyzing fears, through the lesson Krishna teaches him. That the outcome has already been decided, simply waiting to be played out, in accordance with one's inner nature, is one of the comforts offered to Arjuna. He must not be attached to the outcome, he must not worry at all about it, but simply engage in the battle. And in engagement, Arjuna will learn, he will explore, he will find enlightening experiences, as when Krishna opens a godly maw to show the deeper true nature of the Universe. </p><p>Thus detached from attachment to an outcome, the actions may be now offered up to Krishna, for the divine rather than any earthly development, for in doing so the actions of Dharma Yoga are elevated, purified to Bhakti Yoga.</p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-51325170160724937342021-12-29T11:53:00.002-08:002021-12-31T00:32:30.380-08:00<p> So it is in, and through, the Beatitudes that we find “the map,” the way to Jesus, the way to embrace fully that which is completely a story, completely a myth, also a history, also a penetrating psych-scientific study and teaching of how to attain intellectually and physically a spiritual life, the way, in other words. (Credit to <i>The Chosen</i> Series for putting these phrase, a Map to find Me, into the Beatitudes episode culminating Season Two.)</p><p>The cat has gone outside again. It’s four AM, and I watch him tread his paws over the lightly frozen ground, disappearing into the darkness of a cloud covered night.</p><p><br /></p><p>We all make our pilgrimage as children, trying to be men, women. Our own path of spiritual support, which comes to be the single most important and meaningful thing to us. To the greater meaning, we can only be ignorant.</p><p>This is the pained thing, the path, its great length through time. We cannot come to its conclusion, its greater meaning, before we are ready.</p><p>It is an incredible and unbelievably difficult and trying path to be on. To listen to the order of heaven, god, truth, reality, ... It might also smack of madness, for its risks, for its otherworldliness.</p><p>Joseph, a good father who must, as all good mortals, pass way.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>And Jesus is the one who reveals the reality of existing in the universe. Not to exclude any other path, the ancient wisdom of Eastern thought...</p><p>The myth shows us the way, a map, to whatever it is we chose to strive for.</p><p><br /></p><p>As a writer, maybe it's harder to fake who you are. If you end up doing yoga and reading Genesis and that's all you can do, that's how it goes. </p><p>Mom comes down, after I write two sentences. She sits down at the table, I get her her two morning pills. Did you sleep okay... She examines an empty box of museum painting holiday cards. She is concerned about the cat being out, reaches her hand, her right hand, to the top of her head to pick at around at it. She makes little observations. The refrigerator is very full, she says. I'm making soup for her, the usual can of Progresso, tear up some chicken, from fried chicken breasts today, add stock, spices. I need to get to the River's End Bookstore. She wants to go for a ride too. Mom, it's cold out. The way she clears her throat irritates me, perpetually. Do you want to take a shower, Mom? It's too damn cold. But you just said that it's too warm already when I asked you if I should turn the heat up. She opens a can for the cat, he eats it. You're scaring him, she tells me. Soon he wants to go back out. I feed him another spoonful from the open can, he mushes the bits up against the side of the dish, licking up the liquid gravy and some of the bits, abandoning the rest. He's calling to be let out now, on top of mom going on. She looks through her purse. She brought it down last night, when she came down for a slice of pizza. </p><p><br /></p><p>I get through the dishes, sip on a chilled paper cup of Stewart Shop coffee from the fridge, take care of some emails, write out a card for Ben the maintenance guy, and low on money as we are $40 is generous, but I feel guilty about that, and then as winter night comes with cloud cover I go up to change out of my sweats and put my trusty pants on, with belt, wallet, mask, either to go for a walk in the light, or to get down to the grocery store, so I check in on mom who was lobbying for a ride earlier. No, she's comfortable in bed. I sit in her chair, text my friend Betsy to catch up, on yoga, on the Christmas holiday, and she's flying back to DC from Utah, and in the background mom's talking to herself, stirring, and down the stairs as I am in mid sentence composition. And she's hungry. Oh, but not that hungry. Oh, I don't want to disturb you. My voice rises, mom, what do you want?! Okay, pizza, so I put my energy on hold and heat up the oven for 425, Paul Newman cauliflower crust pizza... Okay, calm down, you can do this. She's on the couch still. The cat has observed me head into the kitchen, so he hops down from being next to her on the sofa and out he goes. Where did the cat go? Then she's singing Silent Night in her out of tune tone deaf way, so I vanish back into the kitchen's relative refuge.</p><p>She'll go around all day looking at random pieces of paper, packing slips, old mail from the Toyota Takata Airbag recall, oh uh, we're in trouble, Ted, Ted, are we in trouble... So I leave the kitchen, over to where she's sitting in her great chair... I look at the two pieces of mail, one a promise of rates for an extended car warranty, and the recall note. Mom, we already took care of this? I'm not so sure. Mom, remember driving down to the Toyota dealership in North Syracuse off of 481? No, she doesn't remember...</p><p>No wonder I've become addicted to looking into my iPhone for the communal minds of distant cyber friends for some relative sanity, Instagram. (If not worse.)</p><p>Is this my home? This is a nice place. But I left some things back at the other house. Okay, mom.</p><p><br /></p><p>It gets exasperating. This spiritual journey to pained adulthood.</p><p>Okay, pizza's ready, mom.</p><p>She rises from her chair. I'm coming. I don't have an airplane, ha ha ha. </p><p>She comes in. Where are the people? Mom, it's just us.</p><p>I ask if her if she wants some "roast beef," from the standing rib roast from Christmas dinner leftovers. No, I'm fine. How about a small piece. Okay, she says, as if she doesn't remember saying no. I've brought the horseradish sauce over, as an alternative to the hot gravy way I've served it with the last three nights. She smacks her lips as she eats the cut of pizza picking it up with hand, her mouth looking like a monkey's as she chews with her broken teeth. She spreads some horseradish sauce on the bit of crust she's picked on.</p><p>Well, I offer, I never thought we'd get through all that roast beef, I say. (There's more in the freezer, plus the bones.). </p><p>It ends with I won't come here again, after she says, no, my house is over that way. This is the last time.</p><p>She observes her mother's mirror, there to my left on the wall before the old dining room table here in the kitchen, cluttered. I should write a story about my mom's mirror, she says. Well, why don't you. You have to get in the...</p><p><br /></p><p>I suggest, as I mention my going out to get groceries, that she rinse her mouth out, and she quickly gets angry with me. I will not be bossed around. She slams down her glass when I ask her to take her pill. I call it pill for a her bones, though it's a mild tranquilizer. I move her little wine glass closer to her, asking if she'd like more. She immediately bangs the glass down where it was before.</p><p>Do you want a B-12? I've had enough with your pills and being bossed around. Well, I'm going to take one. Good for you, she snoots.</p><p>So, what's up for the rest of the day... Did you cut your hair last night? It looks good. So what are going to do... Mom, I told you I'm going to the grocery store. Oh, fun. She compliments me on my shirt. L.L. Beans, I tell her. Mr. Beans has outfitted a lot of good men... and women too. What a nice bracelet that is. Is it gold? No, mom. Copper.</p><p>She rises to clean off her plate, the pouring some water on it, then checking on the back door and here comes the cat. Oh you’ve been out all this time… poor kitty.</p><p>Okay mom. I leave her picking at her scalp. It’s damn cold out there. Yup.</p><p>I find the card and envelope with 2 twenty dollar bills, and as I walk out and start the car to warm the engine. My spine straightens.</p><p>And on my grocery list, wine, and maybe cider too...</p><p><br /></p><p>I go the grocery store, after the wine store, where I leave embarrassed from having asked the stalwart woman if she's been boosted yet, and to hide my embarrassment I listen to her agreeably as she tells me she is a healthy person, and that everyone she knows who's had the shots has gotten sick, and she hasn't gotten sick yet. At the grocery store I repeat my parking lot joke, looks like a good night to ge drinking down by the river. And here to I embarrass myself, and no one really gets my "living in a van down by the river," because you shouldn't really joke about such things.</p><p>Then later, after four glasses with a nice young woman bartender at Bistro 197, I go out across to the east side, where there's a bar that serves food late. I was just going to leave, but the woman bartending there was nice enough to come over and check on me, so I have a shitty California fruit bomb cab in a plastic cup full of ice, but the whole crowd is for Trump. The night gets increasingly weird when an older guy asks if I want to smoke any weed with them, no thanks. I avoid the weed, but strike up conversation with a large man who looks vaguely like Albert Finney, but Polish American.</p><p>As I drive away the kid in the hoody is up in a maple tree where the older guy, slender, who was also wasted, I should never have said hey to him as he got his jack and coke and passed by, he's talking to the kid up in the tree, whereas going to the car I was pretty sure he was talking to himself, in a drunken rant.</p><p><br /></p><p>In the morning, I'm wakened by our meals on wheels friend's knock, and also Ben the maintenance guy's call at the same time, as he needs to come and measure for the new dishwasher, who comes and goes curtly, and the poor woman has to see me with my hair stuck out to the side looking like a crazy man, and I can't explain to any of these people about the Covid symptoms, for which I was careful about wearing a mask last night.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I take some cough medicine, but the sweetness of it quickly brings on a feeling of a hollow stomach. I open a fresh seltzer water, regretting the plastic of it, and release a bit of the demon airs from last night being a fool. I feel stupid again. But I get in a few Nadi Kriya and attempts to roll my core stomach muscles back and forth, exhaling through opposite nostrils on the back steps of cold concrete, coughing, releasing mucus so I can breath again in the dry heated cluttered apartment air.</p><p>And down in the basement I continue with the kriya practice and the breathing pranayama variations and breath counts and holds, after the mantra as I sit crossed legged and I begin to feel decent again, and after the silent mantra Ham Sa I'm feeling on my way into Shavasana corpse pose, and I feel that Jesus is just one to call attention to how we can be, as the proverbial "Son of God/Man," to be as if at the center of the universe, the center point where the Big Bang came, but also stretched across the whole thing like a vast blue light energy field with cores of other light. The chakra opening chant had set up a very pleasant vibration, almost like those Tibetan monks I saw once at Amherst, who can make one note, but let other notes drone from deeper within their vocal chambers sympathetically. </p><p>And so it can seem to me, how my years were not completely wasted, as I did explore mediation throughout the years back in the old apartment in the house on the quiet street, as Jorge harassed me but was sweet and kind enough as well, as much as I wish those years back and consider them wasted ones now as I say. </p><p>I was getting in touch, dialing in with the deep... It's a nice long relaxing breathing lightness thing, letting the muscles sink away from the bones, as if something that needed to gradually sink down to the soft sea floor and find comfortable and safe bedding had drifted down just so, and the old bones could too. And I had in my deeper heart center mind meditation reconciled Jesus and Buddha and the wisdom of the yoga traditions. Proper action, as the Bhagavad Gita tells us.</p><p>The cat comes in, proudly, as chickadees swim just so through the honeysuckle bushes coming away from the brief visit to the neighbor Bonnie's lard bird feeder.</p><p>And when will mom come down...</p><p>It's not an easy assignment to write out the spiritual experiences of mediation, morning Sadhana inspiration...</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>It is a burden, to be responsible, dutiful to the journal, to its honesty, to its reflection of your human thoughts.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-44305969716115137022021-12-27T00:42:00.001-08:002021-12-27T00:42:57.953-08:00Early December sketch <p> So, gradually, bit by bit, I became a bum.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>"Thanks," is the first thing I hear, after the cat nudges the door open to mom's old study where I try to sleep and balances along a cluttered shelf. That's from mom, across the small hallway, on her bed. Thanks. As in Thanks a lot, offered with the usual. I guess I'm not making her very happy. She was on the warpath when I was asleep, waking to hear her. "hello, is anybody here, where is everybody, Ted? Ted?" She quiets down for a while. In the night I get her the pill, but I'm exhausted still. She doesn't push me about how she's starving. Can you take me home tomorrow? Mom, you are home.</p><p>I get the old chilled tea out, gunpowder green, sit down, find a place of peace, not easy, within, think of how to approach my being behind in my yoga teacher training certification class. Behind on the homework, the lesson plans, the agility with teaching the poses. In truth, I haven't been doing much yoga. If I get to the morning sadhana spiritual practice in this gloom and uncertainty, that's pretty good. If I get to study from the book, that is good too. If I get to read, The Bhagavad Gita, more power to me.</p><p>I get a bit done. I sprayed the wall with watered down bleach last night. The fan and the dehumidifier... But what do we have to do, to keep mom pleased. I'm glad she's still in bed, but.. I've done the dishes. I've rehearsed a thematic opening and then a centering for yoga class, and then taught myself through a few warm up poses and then asana. But I still feel a fog over me. I had two ciders with dinner, somehow enough to make me want to go up and rest, and a nap here turns into sleep.</p><p>I had a dream of Chef Bruno the other night. I had a dream of having a college age girlfriend, as if I was back in college. Outings to old reservoirs in the woods. And I'm not certain that mom arrives even in these dreams to spoil the party.</p><p>"What is it that is not serving you anymore," one of the adult spiritually questions the Yoga Man Todd asks of us when we fall down into corpse pose. "What if you let that go, let someone down... How badly do you want change... What are you willing to do for it..."</p><p>Do I take her to the bookstore? Do we run out to Ontario Orchards for a Christmas tree? Is she going to demand to be taken out to eat... If so, where? And if so, will I have a glass of wine, which then leads to another and general strife. Maybe I should just escape now, and study somewhere. But that would leave her all alone... She can't feed herself intelligently anymore. Thanks.</p><p>There's the drive down to Washington, DC, for Christmas... Try not to let that hang over your head, or that you'll be going back to your old apartment... Will you ever move back there? What can you salvage...</p><p>Almost 11 and mom hasn't stirred yet. The cat's been in and out several times since 7:30.</p><p>I walk around on eggshells, nervous, almost shaking a bit. I look at my old Jesus face in the bathroom mirror as the fan whirs, inseparable from the light, after brushing my teeth and putting ten percent hydrogen peroxide on some skin barnacles. Is the cat due for a rabies shot. Maybe it would be nice to take a walk by the river, but perhaps for now I should just get out into the sunlight, over to the old beaver saga power grid transfer station, where they re-dug the water way to beaver proof it. I make some dandelion tea.</p><p>Maybe I should just let her have her way today. Lunch at The Press Box, fine, I don't give a shit. I just won't drink. Homework later.</p><p>I'm an old bartender. I don't have any advice to give out.</p><p>I'll look at my phone, but there will not be anything interesting, beyond a friend's post on Facebook, or Instagram.</p><p><br /></p><p>About 11:45 I go up and check on mom, and she's there sitting at the side of her bed. I ask her if she's hungry. Sure. I go down and open a can of Progresso Chicken Noodle soup, adding a small carton of decent chicken stock, the store out of bone broth, a shake of ginger, cayenne, turmeric, a pinch of ground flaxseed, a dash of seaweed salt, cutting into the bone in chicken breast I baked last night in onions. </p><p>Well, Mom, would you like to go get a Christmas Tree out at Ontario Orchards... It's a nice sunny day, not too cold, not too windy. She snipes at me. Asks me irrelevant questions. Are you still in school? Yes, mom, this is your home. The mirror, the map of Ireland. Nana White. Well, I've lived here before.</p><p>She's less kindly to me as I get her out the door, after finding her the right coat, her gloves, her hat, her cane. She pauses as she stands out on the sidewalk in front of her steps. Mom, the car's right there, I say, pointing to it. I'm not the village idiot, she shouts back at me. Ten times smarter than you, she adds, quietly as I open the car up. </p><p>Really mom. Do you want to get a Christmas Tree or not... She pretends to get out of the car. I look at her. Up to you...</p><p>We get on the road. Over the hill down past the muck farming fields, up the next hill and over, down to turn left onto Seven South. Right on Twenty West. Down along the marsh of dead flooded trees, a habitat for duck and geese, beaver... And soon, after mom asking me to slow down again, going about 40, we pull up to the intersection of 104. Ontario Orchards just by, past the old school house and the small brick church, a large parking lot and nursery, the barn building where you'll find produce, Christmas ticky tacky, frozen meats, lots of apples, pet food, plant material, garden stuff, potted plants, vegetables, chocolate, aged cheddar cheese, baked pies and breads. Potatoes, squashes, onions, scented soaps, cat nip.</p><p>Out in the lot we have a leisurely walk over to the trees, after I wait for her to talk to herself and finally unhook her seatbelt, bundled up there in her coat, finally opening the door and stepping out. There are only a few Balsam Firs left, way too big for the car's back seat, too big & heavy for me to handle. The rows of trees, there are some Douglas firs in the size I'm looking for. And I have done my chants earlier, so I'm feeling fairly calm about negotiating her through the market part with its many aisles. I get her in through the door, holding onto the receipt tag from the tree as the man is cutting a fresh end to take water. She hovers once inside the door, so I have to guide her forward. </p><p>Go pick out some apples, mom. I'm looking for almonds, dates, catnip (the cat looking depressed, picking up on mine, hurt by our yelling at each other). The tree. A simple wreath for the front door. Get her back, feed her something, maybe go do some homework. Or maybe just write. Get away from dementia town. Laptop. Get some sunlight sitting at the McDonald's like table. </p><p>I don't feel up for any homework, but at least I'm moving independently. Mom wanted to come along. I told her NO.</p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-34413064461394261562021-12-27T00:32:00.001-08:002021-12-27T00:32:24.532-08:00Sketches, pre Christmas 2021<p>You try to live a life working on the meaning of life. You wait on people, fair enough.</p><p>But you end up taking care of your old crazy Mary Lincoln volatile mom. Broke. Running out of money to pay for basic things, like rent. And a job after all this?</p><p>So you end up soaking the dishes, getting the silverware done that you'd washed yesterday but didn't rinse, just left in the sink the morning after you cooked dinner and served mom and then got so tired you had to disappear, pretending to do homework, reading at least, but doing nothing, so disheartened. And the next day is a big doctor's appointment. But we can't really be getting on the road until just after two, and it's noon now and you've fed mom, so you take her for a little drive into town, a cup of coffee ice cream, a New York Times she won't really read, a look over the lake, the sun is out. Skip the bookstore, to buy a book for kids or to shepherd her around the store, waiting for her, no real time for that, just a grocery store run, quick, and then the wine store, being out of white for her and red for me.</p><p>I get her down to the doctor's office, down in Fulton, a nice drive along down the west side of the river reflecting the winter sky, then over the bridge, and not too many hysterics from mom.</p><p>We need to up her dosage on whatever we can up, the memenda, and maybe, well, something to mildly tranquilize her. She talks one story to the doctor, and I slip in the truth, my perspective anyway, where I can. I think he gets it. Dr. Ouano. </p><p>But goddamn, I'm feeling grim the next day. The hour of yoga anatomy with Ellen Saltonstall was fascinating, about fascia. And in the night, with wine, I think of how all the writers in the world were motivated by this strange enveloping muscle holding organ that goes in bands through all of us. The fascia has moods, is effected by them. Any writer worth his salt knows motion, physical activity, the knowledge of holding a tool, an axe, let us say, or a wine bottle and the opener, the lifting of cases, the motion of running. The writers knew, know, the secret of keeping the fascia happy, and of how bands from the forehead go over the head and down hour back and through your legs, and all the way down to the bottom of your feet. And inactivity is no good for these fibers. Motion is necessary. Kerouac the fullback. Hemingway the hunter.</p><p>So I get the tub with hot water and soap, get the batch of the silverware dipped and rinsed, all of it feeling the silverware rack of the dishwashing machine that does not work here, waiting to be replaced, and then I proceed with the rest. Then tossing a few things from the fridge, packing the tall trashcan liner bag full.</p><p>Mom slept on the couch again. In her coat. I had to take her out to The Press Box, as a treat she insisted upon, though by that point I had time constraints. Coming up the stairs from the basement she is bent over, head on her hands and forearms. But I let it slip, mom, you need a shower, you haven't taken one in more than two weeks. There's shit on your pants. She denies it. From two weeks ago when you had to poop against the dumpster outside Bame's. </p><p>I go up the stairs and look back, to use the upstairs bathroom as she uses the downstairs. She's looking for her cane. She sees me looking at her. You're a fucking creep, she tells me. And I am.</p><p>I go back down to sleep more, or just hide. Got a headache. Can't deal. Summon the courage later to face the day and the dishes, and the rest. The bookstore?</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I feed her, I get her out for a drive, around 3 in the afternoon, we go get a newspaper and her cup of coffee ice cream, then down for a view of the lake. The old lighthouse reflecting the sun. Quick swing through town, First Street, then to The Big M, quick run, okay, we'll take a quick trip to the book store, but we can't stay long.</p><p>I put two chicken breasts in the oven with some quickly cut onions and I make the meeting, Cheryl, for a tutoring session.</p><p><br /></p><p>But it is no fun to have the time to write, rather a curse. A time of being unable to make any decisions. Of being stuck. The argument when we got home, when I tell her, look, be thankful, I took you out to the bookstore, I told you I had a meeting. Oh, you're so important. You have a penis, I just have a hole...</p><p>What?!? (Disgust.). Look, mom. You were a professor, you had meetings too. Anyone still working has meetings to go to.</p><p>So I stew around with what to do with mom for the day. I've done the dishes. Let the cat out on a prowl in the back yard before it rains. It's not warm out.</p><p>After my meeting, which takes my head away from mom, who's carrying on upstairs, with large long OOOHHHHs and other cries, so that I have my aunt call her just in time, and my tutor asks me, "is your mom okay," as I get completely distracted with the directions I'm supposed to be giving for The Four Essentials, Open, Engage, Align, Expand. I need to work on my language for the poses anyway.</p><p>I get through the hour. I don't how dedicated to yoga I can be. I'm making it hard for myself, psyching myself in a lot of ways.</p><p>But after we're through dinner, I've had it with mom. </p><p>There's no way around it, I need to go to graduate school. Brother calls. Maybe it's too much for her to be driving all that way, then not being in her home with her cat, disorientated as she is. Will the pills, the new dosage, help? Will there be a tranquilizer for her? Take care of her teeth, or get her hearing aids. I tried to press the point about her anxiety, as did her colleagues. The doctor is listening to her, yes, but I get my points in... We went to The Press Box that night...</p><p><br /></p><p>I'm trying to look past, or around, my misery. I deserve it. What did I do with that nice kid, but become the Prodigal Son, had, been had, by everyone and every thing...</p><p>And I'll never have a chance at a girlfriend or any fun or happiness like that ever again, not at my age and state. That's what you get for being a writer... a bum... I get the internet, the web, friends on Facebook far away, in all senses of the term, unreal. Horror. Dark thoughts.</p><p>But my job has been good for the fascia, at least. Constant motion.</p><p>Other than that, I've never achieved a thing. I"m ashamed of myself. How could anyone else likes me... And I know my situation...</p><p><br /></p><p>Mom is quiet til mid morning. I sneak a peek in at her, she's reading, okay, cool. I can go work on my yoga practice and my homework. There's the whole decision too about driving her down to DC to see her grandchildren. I could go by my old apartment...</p><p>After making soup for her, a nice onion soup color from the onions baked with the chicken breast, I get her to change out of the jeans she's been wearing for three weeks now, telling her I'm doing a colored wash. I'm also working on the Cologuard stool sample process, and of course you don't want to get that wrong. Set up the little tray under the toilet seat, then the white sold plastic bucket with the screw on tight lid, and also a strange Q-tip type thing you swab through the shit you just took, to cover the groves at the end with poop matter. I've been careful to take a probiotic and also some fiber, but the shit doesn't come out as neatly as I'd hoped. Well, anyway... I shave, I take a shower, after sealing the whole thing up. </p><p>It's cold, rainy, I head out, taking out the trash, and with my poop box all sealed up under my arm in the cold blustery wintry mix rain. I'm not happy about anything anymore. There is no more happiness. I'm not even confident about doing well in yoga class. To earn the heart affection of a woman, you have to be capable of doing something, like, being a school teacher. Competent at it. A man about it. </p><p>No wonder, no girlfriend...</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>But as soon as I get my laptop out, after coming back, concerned she might be hungry, from my yoga homework--I saw a pretty young woman working the barista job at a little coffee booth in Canal Commons, having forgotten my laptop earlier after dropping off my Cologuard Poop in a Box, just as soon as I sit down to write, after putting a tray of stuffed peppers, gluten-free spaghetti and potato gratin for mom, just as soon as I sit down to write, mom comes down from upstairs, talking to herself, sighing, talking to herself more. Just as sure as the ghost she's been in my life, pouting and sighing, always with the big volatile explosive reaction, all my life, since boyhood, putting on all the lights back on Ernst Road after I came home late from necking with Hilde in high school, on my way to being a local rock star with the Chevy Malibu station wagon with faux wood paneling. Everyone else was drawing away from her, just to spare themselves the craziness, patient as my father truly was, an honorable man, my brother just finding a way out and away and off I go, bye. I wanted my father's life. Not hers. She'll still lampoon anyone for "never doing anything fun." And her defense against that, of course, is ugly. Do you placate her? Or, maybe you just begin to hide, let the cat deal with her. Your father, he didn't know how to have fun... </p><p>So speaketh Claire.</p><p>Every day is an ordeal here. I hope the dosage change helps. I hope they can come through...</p><p>Disgust is my feeling every day. And of course mad at myself for having fallen into this trap.</p><p><br /></p><p>I wake up foggy, and I have to get mom down to the hospital for a bone density scan. She's out cold up on her bed. I touch her toes, and a twitch, but she's still deep asleep. Finally I wake her, and the first thing she says, she asks me if I've come to try to kill her, Jesus Christ mom. Mom I'm sorry to do this to you, but the next appointment isn't until February. I bring her up a chilled Pepsi. Downstairs, I get her a slice of pizza, eyeing the clock. The appointment is at ten. They ask you get there fifteen minutes early. Okay, we'll just try for our best. Old lady wrangling. On top of Christmas open mess of of all the possibilities of what might be needed ad infinitum. Presents? What kind of presents or price range? Ship, mail, or are we going down there in person, just so other people can see where we are at with mom... But that's eight hours on the road... </p><p>But on certain days I become aware of my true horrible college failures, and if I'd put just more effort in and not been such an obstinate contrarian and if one of my professors might have caught it, and asked me what I needed, instead of letting me dangle... Drinking to rid myself of all the bad feelings... as if to put them away, hide from them.</p><p>And I need to put out another book, morally, just to show I was wrong, that you shouldn't go drink your way through college or whatever I did, and offer some sort of pained correction over the lessons learned about the illusions I've lived under...</p><p><br /></p><p>You made a choice, my aunt says, to stay at that bar with all those interesting people, no need to be ashamed of that, you still have a life to live..</p><p>But I need to express to someone where I'm at, how I'm struggling. Like a confession. A correction. A rock bottom I've hit, finally unable to hide it from myself or anyone else. But then there's mom on top of me, squeezing me all the time unless I simply escape.</p><p><br /></p><p>But you'd thought what you wanted, what you'd hoped for, the chance to write, to not have to drag your sorry ass in to the bar to work like a dog until you were completely beat and do it four straight nights, after cruel earlier Tex Mex Restaurant shifts, night, day, night, day. Sunday night, typical of your love hate relationship with the whole thing. The day you wanted to stay home, the sabbath, and in the same the night you hold court.</p><p>To have to sit home, or wherever you are, on the roads of life, and have nothing much to do BUT write quickly becomes a nightmare more than an opportunity, a deep look at your ugly old lazy self who, unlike all other adults, hasn't gotten a single thing together. And the boring life you previously wrote about has just gotten, seemingly anyway, even more hollow, devoid of all the normal things of male human life, the job that is a career, having your own family, passing on that most precious thing of all, your genetic codes and the traditions of your parents.</p><p>I do have the yoga to lean on. A therapy for all those years not being good to myself, just hanging in there.</p><p><br /></p><p>A few days have passed since I last wrote. I got the booster, it didn't even hurt, down at the Kinney's drug store near the McDonald's and the Quik Mart gas pumps, the intersection at 104 just this side of the university and the electric plant's huge stacks, and I didn't think much of it and went for a cup of coffee. At night, not enough water either, and rather getting into the wine, just feeling desperate and behind and incapable on my yoga teacher training course. And the next day feeling increasingly achy and tired through the day...</p><p>I gutted it out, my heart almost breaking at my lousy job of being a student.</p><p>And is spirituality any good for you in this world, or does it just get in the way...</p><p>I'm not even Dharma Bums St. Jack of the Dogs in the chapter of Nin's house in Rocky Mount, North Carolina...</p><p><br /></p><p>And so I try to get distracted, after I've cooked breakfast and gone to the grocery store and kept mom entertained some, then lunch, then dinner, and dishes all the way through, and the constant battle to keep the kitchen organized... I attempt to distract myself so that my mind can work.</p><p><br /></p><p>Mmmm k. The way mom says okay. She uses a sharp knife to spread the almond butter on saltines. She doesn't want the cat out at night. There are small open bottles of Pepsi by her bed, by her chair, on the counter, on the kitchen table. </p><p>She comes down and wants a bite to eat. I give her a pill for her memory and focus. I heard her stirring upstairs, just as I sit down to write. Then she's calling my name in the living room.</p><p>Am I your mother?</p><p>So I tell her I'll cook a pizza, the frozen cauliflower rice crust kind, with some ham and sliced red onion, but it will take a few minutes, and she's asking me, so, are there any interesting plans for later today? No! </p><p>So later after it's cooked, I go up and call her down. I put a slice in the toaster to heat it just a bit, and present it to her, and soon enough she's using scissors to cut it, having failed with the sort of sharp knife. and then she's staring at me as I'm half watching YouTube for a good classic samurai film, then finding Lester Young jamming some bluesy jazz, and she's looking at me, anything new in the world, usually people talk at the table, is that a song, so I raise my voice, yes, Mom, it's Lester Young from 1944, raising my voice and she gets angry at rises from the table. Don't forget to brush your teeth, mom. Don't forget to wipe your ass, she counters. I feel a bit bad, but frustrated enough to just shrug, oh well. Off she goes.</p><p>But it's enough to destroy the mood. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4992093413883216399.post-78333838292389050412021-12-27T00:31:00.009-08:002021-12-27T22:59:12.111-08:00<p> Christmas Eve. </p><p><br /></p><p>I went over to the Throop's house the eve of Christmas Eve, and fortunately, almost psychically I brought along my guitar. </p><p>A welcome break. I lead them into Like a Rolling Stone... it's a good jam.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I remember how my father would handle it, her expositions, her rants, her tirades, her takeover of our peace and happiness, taking us back to the picture of her childhood seen through her childhood mind, now acted out upon us. I felt so sorry, so sympathetic, when he'd take to the bedroom in the afternoon, to lay on his back and close his eyes, and just let it rest, let it pass away.</p><p>And now I find myself doing the very same thing, feeling an exhaustion, even from just spending two hours with her.</p><p>That's how I grew up. Expecting all of that, as normal.</p><p>And so when I met a girl in college, who pursued her New York City scorched earth policy against my sensitive benevolence, putting her fireworks and unpredictability, virtual schizophrenic duplicitousness then blaming me, and then when she'd done that marvelously, then she softens... but by then I have enough self awareness and self respect to know that she's evil, no good for me, so I avoid her, to what I would later see as a chance, one that I missed. Great.</p><p>So the whole thing is bogus.</p><p>hard for me to be a man anyway, when the burden of mom living off on her own came down squarely on me just as I was going through my senior year at college... blah blah blah.</p><p>Mom's crying out on Route 5, because her car has broken down. No body else going to help her.</p><p><br /></p><p>Unwrapping presents, or, rather, cutting open the heavy paper sealing tape on the Amazon Prime boxes, giving gifts, rather, Mom opens her first one, struggling to open first the box, and then the gift bag within. Over on the couch, I cringe, trying to write off an email to my little yoga group, and I cannot form sentences in my mind as mom continues with her circular rambling talk. The first gift, or maybe the second, after the body lotion from her grandkids, Kiehl's, is the new book in hardcover, the latest biography on Sylvia Plath. I might have grumbled my exasperation, and then after enjoying the book and reading off the picture captions, oh, we need to go to Cape Cod, I haven't ever been to Cape Cod..., suddenly her face drops. Earlier she'd asked me, "did she kill herself," well, yes, mom, it was a cold winter and she was alone with the kids and with the gas ovens back in those days, you could do that, so it was sort of a fluke as much as anything... But now she's turning on me. You gave me this book, you want me to commit suicide, she suddenly shouts at. Mom, I didn't get you that book. Chris did. She's a writer, she was married to Ted Hughes, you know, so you can round out your history of him...</p><p>Brother calls with family. That goes well. Everyone is Covid shy these days. Everyone has a story, too.</p><p>Another Amazon box, and this time it's the biography of Ted Hughes. I shrug. Sorry about the theme. Writers are miserable people in general. It's like a possession.</p><p>(Later she's mumbling on to herself over his pictures like she's talking to him. Stay out of trouble. Handsome...)</p><p>She calms down later. We have some chip dip, onion, with small curd cottage and cream cheese, Nana's recipe. Potato chips. </p><p>I go out for a walk. Not far, just to get out of the house and let my back straighten and my shoulders going up for a change. </p><p>As far as I see it, the roast, a huge one, sure to give us plenty of leftovers, needs to sit out to come to an even temperature, and I don't feel a lot of happy energy to get the roast going. I'm just putting it in over the onions I've sliced into the big Lodge iron pan. Mom comes into the kitchen, looking concerned. Is dinner ready. No, I'm sorry mom, I'm not very organized today... I'm sorry.</p><p>I end up making her some soup to calm her, and she goes back into the living room.</p><p>She comes back and stares at me... No, not yet. How much longer... Oh, half an hour anyway, then I have to let it rest.</p><p>I get her some, and then she's talking to herself in her chair over her books, and I go up for a nap and conk out, then I come down later and do the dishes.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The day after Christmas I wake at 1 in the afternoon feeling empty and hollow, with a tight cough deep in my chest, a pain I've never felt before, and too exhausted and fall back to sleep after taking a pee and drinking some water. I was up watching Russell Crowe in Noah, and after my Christmas alone with mom, who wonders, "where are the people?" What people? We talked to x and y, and Sharon can't do anything... I see the grey murk clouds of winter sky... don't get up really til after two, but something is up with my lungs, and who knows now, Omicron... It was a long day, two bottles of pinot noir down in 12 hours... that's too much. Why can't I quit, I'd like to...</p><p>And Noah was a righteous man, where the rest were wicked, and God sent a great flood to wash away the evils thereof.</p><p><br /></p><p>Mom comes down. At least I had the energy to do the dishes last night.</p><p>I heat a slice of pizza for her. What's the plan today? What's on your agenda? Did you sleep well? 3 times. </p><p>Again, I make soup for her. Again she comes down after I've stirred after my nap as I'm doing yet another round of dishes and carving up the remainder of the standing rib roast and putting some of it away in the freezer, well-wrapped up.</p><p>I'm getting impatient with her, but she has enough kind words, it's a hard holiday, very tiring. And after I ask her how the plate of food I've put in front of her, and she says, snootily, "fine..." dismissively, the same thing she did to the apple pie my sister in law cooked from scratch at Christmas dinner at my brother's house a few years ago, and he blew up at her too, just as I want to now, but I let it slide, slide past, just ignore it, Sanskrit chants... She'll go to bed soon, she's got her pills down, just gotta get her to do her rinses and then brush her teeth, which she always finds a way to resist, and she complies with me and goes off to bed, though she might well stir in the night, as she did last night to the point where I shouted at her.</p><p><br /></p><p>I found that I needed to remind myself what a woman is. I looked at things at night I felt a bit ashamed of. Even then I'm scarred, not finding anyone, to be all that nice, either out there in unfortunate addictive cyber world, or in on line dating. And I can't blame anyone. </p><p>Mom reminds me, "you hate me." You hate women, she tells me. </p><p>Oh, what a fine example you are, Mom. </p><p>It takes whole blank hours of the quiet nighttime late hours to relax. Sad, I suppose, but that's how it is.</p><p><br /></p><p>And finding myself too old to connect as I had been able to for so long with anyone, as if cast out, I thought of Noah, and of God. I thought as an ineffectual man in a fallen and wicked world, to entertain a fantasy at least, briefly, as I knew not which direction to turn to.</p><p>The things the old people in the oldest of tales, they went through things. Things painful to take. And so they took to coming up with stories, out of their own experiences, of course, to symbolically express a sense of the deeper things they knew to be going on. Could all of humanity be wicked, so wicked, evil and violent so that they, we, ruin the whole face of the earth of God's Creation... Only a great flood could do justice, justice itself. And one, only one, that's all it takes, along with his family, one family, were enough.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>But it's not that bad. It's just how I am tested, and finally become a man, as they say, an adult. I see her later, all by herself, the cat at her bed, as she watches television, after I wake from my nap, feeling lousy again.</p><p>The pressure had left off a bit, and Christmas was retreating from the calendar.</p><p><br /></p><p>Okay, she comes down from the bedroom to the kitchen, checking the bathroom, "toilet seat down," as if she does anything to clean here, she takes a bottle of Pepsi from the refrigerator. And then, thank god, she leaves. I hear her pulling a couple Kleenex tissues out of the box as she goes, and then her feet, as always, in her Keen hiking shoes, back she goes.</p>DC Literary Outsiderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03688760371859275415noreply@blogger.com0