Blank page.  5:30 AM.    Friday,  February 18.  Covid-19 middle of winter.

I went to bed after supper again.  Mom had been taken out by Mary for lunch and a hairdresser's appointment down in Fulton, picked up at noon, and then dropped off at 3.  But I'd been up late digesting a disturbing bit of news, chewing it over after hearing about it the day before.  I took her for a drive, being a good sport, after she came in from her little sojourn in a chatty mood, and I had to tell her that I didn't feel like talking so much, had some things to do.  She gets up from her glass of water, storms into the living room, sitting down on the couch, cradling the cat like a child.

I take her out for a ride.  We go out Cemetery Road, getting a feel for the cold gray land under the blank metal gray sky, past the big colonial house on the left, a station of the Underground Railroad in these part, the south where the turn-off to the Fruit Valley orchard stand is, then straight, across 104, to the lake.  I'm in a bit of a mid-winter gloom.  Facebook, not enough of a social life for anyone.  Leaves on stuck in memories, nostalgia, comparisons...  Mom pipes up, she wants a dog, how about we get a dog.  

I'm gloomy about that too, apparently, because soon, as in all family matters, it seems, she says I'm depressing her, that I would depress & discourage God--actually not saying that this time, but a theme, a family expression--when I tell her, mom, if you have a dog, that's a lot of responsibility, well, I had children...  And I almost begin to think, well, she has a point, maybe she's right.  I'm never going to move forward if I'm all gloomy all the time.

The contention follows us home.  It seems I'm either discouraged and brought down by her, in my mind, or she declares she is brought down and discouraged by me, in which case I am forced, more or less, to brighten up a bit, apologetically.   So we wage our little battles of anger back and forth, her saying, "it's all my fault," meaning it's mine, while I get depressed about being so dragged down, in my own mind's outer layer's thinking, carrying on with the silence of the weight of her, our great mismatch that is our alikeness I suppose, then me having to backtrack away from my sense of the burden which is on top of the Covid and my middle-aged unemployment, so that I have to be the sunny one.

No one gets what they want in the conversation without getting angry at the other.  Each has to fight for what they take to be their own.  In a way, I'm sure of it, it would be for mom to have a dog.  But...  walking it, feeding it, picking up the poop, the veterinarian, so forth...

Mom needs her own emotional distance from me for her own survival.  She has her limitations as far as what she can give to me.  So does every conversation seem to have an ending, a terminal point.  Don't bother with her rejection, she is simply asking for compassion.  And within that is a calling for me to, as Henri Nouwen puts it, come home to God's love.  That's why, I suppose, churches, in whatever form, come to exist, to fulfill a need no one in your close family is able to give you, leaving you with an emptiness, unfulfilling to you.

Then it's the cat now.  The cat is wailing, without pause, as we sit, as I clean a few pots from earlier, dishes, he wants to be let out, after I've poured mom a glass of wine and placed some 3 year old local cheddar cheese in block form in front of her.   So, the cat is outside, and now soon she is crying, he will never come back, he doesn't know where he is...  Mom, he knows, look at all the little tracks in the snow, look at the cans of cat food here, his dishes, he knows...  But she won't listen, so I go out for a walk in the frigid dark snow rutted parking lot air.  I've put a pack of suet out for the birds, struggling with the little green wire cage, attached to the trunk of the spruce tree, just wanting to do something today, in the great stretch of no accomplishments, going on vaccine websites without sign of any appointments...    I've ladled the chicken stew I made the night before into a RevereWare pot to reheat it, but again, mom and I are at our own unpleasant throats, and I go out and call for the cat, who does not come, and in the back of the mind, a seed planted, I think, the coyotes got him.

I build up the courage to go back in, and soon afterward, looking out the back door off the kitchen, there he is again, wanting to come in.  I've stirred in some kale, and thinly sliced zucchini into my stew, some Celtic sea salt.  But she wants to go upstairs to watch some television, unpredictably, and when I go check in on her later, she is sleeping, her eyes closed, head propped up on the pillow, glasses still on.  So, I have a little stew, all by myself, not even that hungry, and then I too am exhausted down into my bones and in my poor mind with its troubles, and I need the break of sleep, at 9 o clock in the evening, and I sleep until 3 AM.  

What saves the night, the day, the second part of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., leading a history of The Black Church, and for the first time in a while, after having enjoyed part 1 of it, days before, I find myself engaged, superb television.  It's the only thing I've seen to provide some hint of a direction I've had for some time now.

There never seems to be any happiness, any lasting joy, if you're cut off from a certain kind of experience.  So my thoughts run now, in the sense deprived days of mid winter and another thick monotone sky.  We get hints of it in church mosaics, tiles flaked with green and gold and brass and brown, St. Francis in the hill towns, talking to birds and the sick wolf, taming them.  Time spent in nature, watching crows do their thing in the tree tops here with snow on the ground, a bit of light blue sky, the wind, what does it all say, who knows?

I suppose the bars I kept, or tried to keep, were some form of a church, and maybe not in an unfulfilled way, given the time.

 Ash Wednesday, they are doing fried fish at the market counter.  They'll take it out and let it cool on the rack, and then place it on a thin little rectangle of styrofoam, wrapped in plastic.  Mom's waiting in the car.  I got the sliced turkey breast, a six pack of V8, a little bag of pre-washed baby spinach, what else to I need.  A New York Times.  Pepsi in the little plastic bottles, mom will have 3 of them open at a time, and the little cans you can't close and go flat, live and learn.  The sun is out, with blue sky above and to the east, so, hmm, a little drive, let's go over by the old fort, and the roads, when we get in through the parking lot, are narrow lanes with snow plowed up neatly on each side.  The further parking lot, just above the lake, unmistakable, a Bald Eagle in the tree standing high in profile, and even rounding the last corner, with the dark almost black body and the head that is white, that's got to be, you say to yourself.  We get the binoculars out of the glove compartment.  Good call.  I take a panoramic of the lake from the dark clouds beyond the steam plant smoke stacks to the far right east where the sun is in a clear sky still, all the way to the cooling tower of Nine Mile Point, in operation since 1966, with big steam clouds of shape towering above the land, Scriba.

We get back after dithering around along the lake for another view, and then on home, and the sun is still out, I dig out the little walkway trench through the snow I've been maintaining through the snow falls, so I can get to the spindle spruce trees and the bird feeder, which is now seeing lots of visitors, worth the entertainment value and the silent unspoken connection with this little part of nature.  I get the path cleared, refill the feeder better than I could this morning, and when I come in the cat wants to go out, but not for long.  I watch him pouncing, holding out his two catcher's mitt paws to catch and hold down his imaginary snowball prey, readying himself to stomp the liveliness into submission, he takes a few bursts of runs back and forth, and when he comes back I open the door and he keeps on running right into the house.  Okay, mom, who's happy, in her chair, a little glass of wine, fed with a little bite of something, she's reading the newspaper, okay Mom, I'm going out for a walk while the sun is still out, and it is.

Up the road, clear pavement.  The crows are out in the tree tops, kawwing, cawing, clicking, balling little bird roars in three excited notes as they rise and coast in the air moving from tree to tree.  The sky is Prussian blue to the north, a light wind.  I walk for a little while, almost up to the National Grid fenced off power station with all its cables and insulators and odd Flash Gordon silvery connectors, and then I turn back.

Mom's okay when I get in.  The garbage truck attending to the big green dumpsters and the smaller recycling bins, its sound drives the singing crow birds deeper into the woods, quite a song.  I'm cold anyway.  I go upstairs for a little quiet time, prayer for Ash Wednesday and my own directionlessness, leaning back flat on the crunching air mattress, lifting my iPhone to do some business with Earthlink, reaching a gracious woman named Rhonda, or Ronda, who is in Durban, come to find out, and she politely likes that I mention Gandhi living there for a time, and yes, there's a statue of him in the park near where she lives.   Her feminine kindness, her Indian diction of polite words, soothes me, and I don't even need a nap, and mom's probably getting hungry anyway.

I had put the fish away, and I look in the refrigerator for what I might add to this dinner of ours.  Frozen squash, a hot dog, where's the chili, a tradition here with fish, though they call it Texas Hot sauce here.  The ubiquitous spinach.  I'm too wiped out to think of cooking the chicken thigh stew I'd planned out a few days before but didn't get around to.  I cut the single later of saran wrap of the fish, put it out flat on a dinner plate, along with the single hotdog, no chili, half a previously baked potato, a couple slices of thick cut bacon I cooked a few nights ago, sort of half ruining the Ash Wednesday meal but that's what we have, so... into the toaster oven, the rack in the bottom for reheating mode, and push the button with a beep and the elements start their jet plane engine rear glow...  The little frozen block of Birds Eye cooked squash barely fits into the little pot I've designated for it.  And I'm feeling tired.  I call mom into the kitchen as we get closer, as a gesture, lifting a glass I just poured of Bolla Chianti, imported by Frederick Wildman, goes down well, but a nasty headache if you drink more than a bottle, which I shouldn't anyway, now that it's Lent, cheers mom.

For the last several days she's been talking vaguely about having a lot of things going on, hopeful to attend some sort of ceremony honoring one of her gentle Syracuse University graduate Reading and Language Arts professors, Hal Herber.  She keeps a lot of papers and things, academic newsletters, reading societies, rare book collecting magazines, a lot of it great stuff, but I have no idea, beyond a name, what she's talking about.  It will cost a lot, but she needs to go, she tells me.  And at this point of the day we're just at that cusp, the turning point, when she starts saying, no, my clothes are over at the other house, that sort thing, and quite stubborn about it to the point of getting disagreeable with me.  Ahh, what's the use, I think to myself, just draw inward.  Too tired to talk anyway.  Because I know all of this has been handed to me for some sort of purpose, all these shifts, and I know my own old life as a barman lackey has large shortcomings and financial issues, though, to be true, it's the only job security I've ever managed, for, like, thirty years plus, too much of a coward or an introvert to seek a bold moving on from it toward something where I might bloom a little bit better and now the old dog is too old to bloom much more, old vines, concentrated clusters, roots going way down to make our living under the sun and the rain and the world God made.

When she goes off to bed, finally, I'll have some creative time to look forward to, such as it is, but after dinner, scraping off the plates, wiping some of the curry powder out of tonight's spinach plan and a few other greasy things with a paper towel, I can't take anymore.  Mom has been talking all through dinner to me with a great sense of importance about this vague thing for Professor Hal Herber, professor of reading.  Again, I pull my phone out to the google machine, enter the name, "look mom, here he is.  He died in June of 2012.  Maybe you went to his memorial back then."  But I just read it.  Well, mom maybe you were reading from an old issue, or something.  She reads from the phone, holding it close to her, picking at her head with her right hand, and finally I just go upstairs to my little nook.  I'm exhausted anyway.  Yes, mom, I'm going to go up and turn the TV on, I think there's some good TV on now, on PBS.  I encourage her to come up, but she's got her own will to will things different from my own, which I might regard as unpleasant, stubborn, disagreement for its own sake.  I've fallen into a heavy nap at the edge of a dream, feeling chilled, when I hear her calling my name, energetically.  Mom, the tv is upstairs.  She comes upstairs.  Calls my name.  She opens the door.  Yes, mom, I'll come watch TV with you, in a little while, and then I fall again into dream.  Sort of a restaurant meets home dream.  She's following me around.  Down on Reservoir I befriend some guy, and I end up being too nice to him, like he has no where to stay one night before flying out, and I take him in, but then my brother comes, and he's right, I'm a complete fool to do such a thing and even I know by this point the guy, nice as he seemed, is turning at every minute into a huge pain in the ass, and I forgot that we had to put on an event this night in the house, and five minutes before opening, and someone already opening the door to let people in and they want to be seated in my section and I'm not even dressed yet...

Waking at 11PM, more or less after a good nap, I feel first the pain and then the pain lifting from the muscle cores of my shoulders and wing blades.  I have to get up and use the john anyway.  So I roll to my side and then up, standing now and quietly out the door past mom's bedroom and down the stairs.

I put some water on on the stove, some in the kettle, some in the big pot, to send up some moisture into the air here.  The cat wants to go out.  I watch him go out on the little path, and then he climbs up onto the crusty snow, he walks a few strides, then sinks down in through the crust, and then lifts himself out and continues on with dignity, crunching down in, then up again, and maybe he's learned how to do it as I see him walk down to the end of the row where he'll stick close to the buildings and then slip underneath a row of gas meters and their pipes to emerge on the front side of the townhouses.  I'm at the front door to watch him pass, and he stops to look at me, before going on with his prowl missions, daintily down the sets of steps and out toward the street, sticking close to the cars, and I can track him.

Later mom comes down.  I hear her first rising then using the bathroom, and I tend to hide here in the kitchen, closing her laptop, which is far faster than my own one which is old now and hesitant.  She comes into the kitchen, oh god, but I don't say anything, and she looks around, pours a little Pepsi for herself.  I don't say a word.  The spell is about to break... which makes me feel sad, on top of being sad.

A long time ago there was a girl who was kind to a shy busboy.  She'd wait for him to clean up and sweep the floor after the upper class, the waiters and waitresses had gone home with their take.  We hung out some, but it never ignited into anything.

She invited me to Berlin a few years later, after she'd lived in San Francisco for a time.  She had a boyfriend named Roland, who had once been a street musician.  We were friends soon enough, and they'd go to work and then I'd walk along the old sections of the Berlin Wall there in Mitte, at the edge of Prenzlauer Berg, and I'd buy beer and wait for her to come back.  They liked techno, and soon I was digging it too, in places like Tresor, a former East German money depot not far away from Hitler's bunker and the Reichstag, where I danced to a famous German DJ.  

We staying in and out of touch.  But we saw something in each other, peacefully.  When I flew away, boarding through the gate at Tegel, after she dropped me off that morning, the man said, "don't let her go," but at that moment it didn't feel like I really had that choice.  One can romanticize, but there in person, in close quarters, it's not easy, and I was grumpy and she was critical at times, as I deserved, and I wondered what she might have wanted with me, and I her.

I had a horrible hacking cough and a flight ahead of me, through Heathrow.

She and Roland came and visited.  Her mom lived not far away.  They came and sat at the bar at Austin Grill and I took care of them and Roland took pictures of me, the phone held in the crook of my shoulder to my ear while I punched in a carry out order, made a few drinks, coping with the rush.

And then you get something from say Facebook Messenger, an old acquaintance, oh sure, I remember.  And then, it's, 'oh, you don't know..."

I let the cat out, and now mom is sitting in her chair, mostly quiet, but a presence.  I don't want her to know, of course, that the cat is out at this hour.    My face falls grim again.  

Mom comes in as I'm starting to do the dishes from dinner, wiping the bacon grease from the reheating plate the fish sat on.  "How can I help," she asks.  I don't say much.  "I know when I'm not wanted," she says, with a sigh.

I finally have the energy, around 3 AM, to look in the fridge, taking out the chicken thighs and boneless breast, wrapped like the fish, but on thin gold yellow styrofoam, with the little watery mattress with chlorine chicken pink slimy juice.  And then comes Mom again, starving she says, and I'm about searing the thighs in too much olive oil, after laboriously chopping old carrots and then new ones, the celery, the onion, then searing the breasts, and I have to say, Mom, I'm sorry, I don't feel like talking much, when she asks me what's going on, and I elaborate why I'm glad I purchased a Gretsch guitar at a good price on a President's Day Sale, an old reliable friend of mine, an artistic mind, a curator, a publisher, her artist boyfriend stabbed her to death in Berlin, last July, and then he drove away and killed himself in the lake house she had, a nice little project they seemed to have together.  23 years ago, she and Roland took me swimming in one of those pristine lakes east of Berlin.  There were guard towers, the party apparatchiks were allowed their peace by the lake.

She grew asparagus, it was a fixer upper, her little house by the lake, sparse and tasteful, used year round.  She and him.  Saul, the self taught artist and photographer, from up by the Humber, Lancashire, Larkin country, I would guess now.  Yes, he was troubled, they say.  He used his darkness, his depression to create.  

Family, we're all a bunch of creeps really.  Insecurity with other people is our only true guide, so that our art doesn't get overblown, costing other people too much in its wake.

Hemingway did smart things, like build little out buildings where he could go and write alone, not be bothered by wandering family members.

To her credit, she gets it.  I'm sorry about your friend.  Is it in the news?  Young people need to know about this.  She was 53, I tell her.  Yes, you're right.  People need to know about this sort of thing.

In fact, the first pictures of his art I ever noticed via her social media, or facebook, was his sacrilege of the poor old cross, of poor old Jesus, done up, if I remember with smears of blood, that sort of thing.  More of a mocking than anything else.  And even then, I thought, seven eight years ago, creep.  Unfortunately, the extreme and the grotesque statements, are read less as juvenile, less as creepy, weird, a very unhealthy thing, a kind of inner poison letting itself out, which might be good on the one hand... more of a current style, or that sort of a thing, a bold and valid voice, place that in quotation marks.  Saul, the artist, the provider, the artist, in between one thing on the one hand and the deeply troubled thing on the other, New York, Berlin, Brad Pitt in Florence, they'd buy that sort of a thing.  And I'm sure, yes, he was a talent, sure...  but the cost, yes, one fears it, it will come out, not being anyway near normal, wearing the black trappings of the contemporary art world...

But best yet used to insecurity early on, at a decent age, at a time you're emerging from the good health of youth, always running things off, before you encounter the true blood competition of human beings with themselves, the taking, the attractions, the selfishness you need in order to succeed.  Best you face failure and ostracism, left untended by the good light and the good water you deserve, sinking into your own shyness, the sense of ridicule, "you're weird," "you're making a fool of yourself with that guitar," "you pissed away yet another thing.."  Rejection outright.  Yes, I'd rather that be my star rather than the praise that just leads you down  into your own hole...

The only thing that makes art true, I mean, besides showing up and the constant practice and the proper flukes of condition and attitudes at a certain point in time, what makes it true is the character within.  And that lies invisible, and unknown, protected in the soul, a decency about it.  And even at your worst, you'd simply say, leave me alone.

 From upstairs on my sleeping pad air mattress, wiped out by the danger of taking mom out across frozen icy landings and sidewalks and sets of steps down to the silver Corolla in the parking lot so she can accompany me for a little ride, utilitarian, to get the newspaper from The Stewart Shop so she'll have something to read while I'm in The Big M getting the groceries before tomorrow's snow storm, even under the comforter half draped over my torso I'm feeling cold, I hear mom getting into trouble, exuberant with the wine and I didn't want to deal with her after my walk up the road under the power lines in the snow, we picked up a rotisserie chicken for dinner, but now she was talking about "just order a pizza," which ain't cheap, and she's suddenly proclaiming how she has a life, that she likes where she is now, and that she'll live the rest of her life and die here, and I don't have the energy to figure out what to do, as a pizza sounds good, or we could do Food Chow City Chinese delivery, but both of those would cost as much as I just spent on groceries, so...

"I need another cat...  We need a dog... I've figured out the rest of my life, I have a life, I'm going to survive, I have a plan, and my sons will be in the background...  I like it here," she says.  Exuberant self laugh, and the monolog goes on and on.  Is she shouting out the open front door now?  Oh, shit, I should have fed her earlier, besides the tuna wedge we shared overlooking the lake, the far horizon of the water's end obscured and darkened by reaching clouds...  I should have postponed the walk...  I should have gotten her a piece of cheese before I went out for my mental health walk maybe make a few phone calls walk up the dreary road in the scruff woods by the National Grid power line station, the gravel, the railroad tracks with all number of small trees poking up, a low area with marshland ponds in between higher ground where two bulbous water towers stand strong and metal.

But, in the cold, that feeling of a zombie cold coming within you, taking you away, exhausted by all her verbage, her Burbidge, all her heavy complaint filled thoughts as she looks out of herself, dissatisfied, her sense of humor running out, without a constant wine, I need to lie down.  Just to meditate.  To pray.  To remind myself of my own pretend life.

How fake a life of writing is.  This you learn.  And then it gets worse.  How fake emotions are, a fleeting up or down, passing through us given what we do to ourselves, the extremes we feed ourselves and enable...  This terrible but necessary piece of wisdom is now directly.  There is little reality to emotions.  It's all a passing hollow thing, the stream of it.  

She's bellowing like a clown from Shakespeare, rapping on the door, from what I can tell through the floor below me, maybe shouting out the door, hello to everyone, I'm going to live, hello...

And then sitting back down on her chair, carrying on with her conversation with herself. 

I lay there for a little while longer, a zombie in the cold room with all her infinite piles of clutter everywhere.  I could shout too.  Please, shut up!

I finally rise, down the stairs, go into the kitchen, and when I come back, after ducking into the bathroom for a quick pee, she's almost shouting again, "hello?!?  I didn't know you were here.."  What?  Panic.  Mom, I just walked past you...  (Granted,  I need to hide, from time to time, and it is awfully tiring, having all this dumped on you, a personal present, "fuck you...")

So, I take the rotisserie poor little bird out of the plastic shell, heat the oven to 250 or so, place it on the Lodge iron skillet.  Mom's telling me she needs a cat, she needs a cat, and I tell her, look mom, he's up by the head of your bed...  I turned the TV on, PBS, British stuff, cultured, Jane Austen, how the folk of her time read her...  Oh, my cat's upstairs?  Yes, mom.  I need some more wine, she says.  What can you do at this point.  I fucked up.  I'd fed her a pretty good breakfast of bacon, and egg over medium, slice of turkey, salsa...  I didn't dawdle too long taking a shower, I got her down to take a ride...  Storm tomorrow, might not be as easy..

Please mom, please, she goes up to bed, to talk, coo, to the cat, what a good kitty, what a good kitty, what a good kitty, you're not like him...

I got her back in, up the stairs, into the townhouse apartment.  I should have fed her something then, planned it better taking my walk in the snow of tiny pellets beneath the high power lines of the grid...

Quinoa...  I'll get a pot of that going, reheat the chicken, add stock to the cheddar broccoli Big M soup of the day, extend it, lighter.  I don't need any more dough, the way my gut is going, and my thighs seem to hurt anyway, from the horsing around I was doing late Saturday with tree poses on some silly self-entertaining clown recording of me doing T'ai Chi, and "Feng Shuy," and Yoga poses and Giotto haloed saints and Jesus with a golden cross about his head, and other crap, half silly, three quarters serious, part tongue in cheek...

Spinach, sautéd.  Tired of spinach.  Where is mom?  I hear footsteps thumping around upstairs...  At least she's not shouting anymore, and no more "HELLO?!?!?" at every little sound, which might be the single most thing that drives me wild...

I get into the wine, the Chianti, too, what (the fuck) (else) am I supposed to do...

Later on, I remember it's still Valentine's Day, right, so why not say hi to my guitar friends, my restaurant friends, old college buddies.

Now it's quiet.  I can write now about how silly writing is.  How pointless an art it is.  All's it is is therapy.  For me.

We bluster and we blow...  we strut our hours upon the stage, we roil and rumble, shout and cry, Learing on the heath with jester clown, the only one wised up as I to the bleakness and the hi ho the wind and the rain, floating upon a stream til we do now know ourselves well and separate enough from boggy weeds and reeds, cattail, to keep on floating, not in a garden no more, oh great randomnesses, water flowing throughout.

I keep with the Chianti, after prepping, cooking the quinoa, the poulet safely reheated, and still she's not coming down to bother me, I forget, perhaps she does, I'm too tired now by all this to remember.

I take the bird out, put foil over it, she still is quiet upstairs.  Later I carve it, breast meat, wings and thighs, bones for a soup later on, perhaps.  Put it all away, after it cools.

And I don't even drink too much wine...

Every now and then I post something on Facebook, something the Dalai Lama might say, for instance.  "love and compassion strengthen us," some thing like that.

Rhetorical questions...  rhetorical complaints.  Pot shots, unfair, they all did their thing, best they could.  They sacrificed, like Larkin, "your mom and dad, they fuck you up, they might not mean to, but they do, and throw in a little extra just for you..."  I read that to her, accurate or not, and she laughed, and I didn't strangle her or hit her about the head like I wanted to.  I took my nap and she was crying, and crying, in the dark insanity of old age realizations of the closing in of complete abandonment, obscurity, being stuck in a home somewhere, her circuits fried out by all her self-created stress, my own grandfather her farther ruining my life through all he did, making her up at night, pretending by the sound to her little ears that a great war was happening, and better to be in an actual war, outside forces, than it coming from within where you can't protect yourself, the crazy legacy of all families, perhaps, the only ones who'll drive you to madness, destitution, skid row bum, and this, why must always wonder, behind that beautiful hedge, within that perfect mansion, there is murder going on, step by step, if not by action, by inaction, by some pride.   That's how it goes.  That's in the genes, how a family is extruded from the clay, each with their roles, their attitudes...  Too naive one is to say anything about it, it goes on, ever mentioned....  but it's there, sure it is.

So what does this all show?  I'm too fucked anyway, will never have a steady home, so...  why not be a sort of Desert Monk, if this is all there is, in my own way, cheap as possible, on the road, in a van, who cares anymore.  Tend bar till I can't anymore?  

Writers have to be, by their very nature, personalities.  Perhaps of a peculiar kind.  It's necessary for themselves to be true to who they are.  They have to be of a style appropriate to their skin.  This is the hardest part.  The rest is in finding a decent typewriter, and just having the faith to put the fingertips upon it.  

The thumb hits the space bar.  The swirling rainbow circle comes up again on this old laptop.  It takes forty minutes to get to my blog.

It was one of those grim days, following upon my failure at The Press Box to be a bit more expressive of my interest in the prettiest most attractive woman I've seen in Oswego, (but it's always that way) and there are many of them, but dark hair, blue eyes, she looked me up and down, eye contact, then honed in on my pants, which are indeed comfortable and lightweight.  I had already sat old monkey in need of a lost tribe of chimpanzee humans, and mom is placed facing this stranger, with her lovely pale face, and now Jesus Christ I regret it.

Talking.  Trying to be a whole family unit of monkeys, and I can't take the necessary chatter, and I'm sick of the drama.  It's ruined me, I have to say.  My aunt can handle it.  She's a retired school teacher.  She's tough.  I can't handle mom.  She's getting angry at me.  I'm cooking dinner, but she's mad at me, because we can't hear each other, or something...

I pick up the phone.  Please.  Trish.   Can you talk to mom?  Well, can we FaceTime you in fifteen minutes?  

Never mind.  I...  We'll be eating dinner soon.  We can talk tomorrow.  No, Teddy, stay on the line, just put her on.  Thanks Trish.  

I leave them be, talking on my iPhone, mom on the couch petting the cat.  I can go back to the kitchen.  I can overhear a little bit.  Aunt Jean, driving back to (from?) Reading in a blizzard, snow storm, drive thru window...  Aunt Jean doesn't do drive thru...

Things are back in order in the kitchen.  God, I needed this.  Why didn't I do this earlier...

Mom needs girl talk.  I don't have girl talk in me.  The night before it was Sharon, mom's professor colleague from the Education Department, Reading and Language Arts.  It was a snow day, and she lets me know, as we took a walk a couple weeks ago together (which made mom confrontationally jealous, "you're going to run away with Sharon..."  standing there in the door), that she didn't have to drive in from work, using that two hours to go skiing along the Canal.  (Forgive me;  none of this is compelling.)  So.  Mom, how about we call Sharon.  No, I'm not in the mood.  Mom, she's your friend.  She's kind.  Easy to talk to.  No, I can't be forced into it...  And then all of a sudden she's mad at me.  Mom, look, you're telling me you're lonely, you need someone to talk to.  I'm sorry, I'm talked out.  Well, why don't you call her then.  Mom, she's your friend!  

Finally I give up.  I text Sharon--we keep in touch to keep up to date with mom--that she's in one of her moods.  I go upstairs and lie down on the green air mattress, just to chill out for a spell.  I hear her, boo hoo hoo, boo hoo hoo, sob sob sob, the baby downstairs, boo hoo hoo.  "If you feel like calling her landline, that would be good.  But if not, maybe we can all talk tomorrow."  I lay back.  Minutes later I hear the phone ring.  At the fifth ring, enough to make me nervous, mom picks up.

Later I come down.  Oh we had a nice talk, me and Sharon.  Oh.  What did you talk about?  Oh, just girl talk.  Sigh of relief.  Now I can bear her for the dinner hour.  Makes a world of difference.  The Cross is lifted for a bit.  I forget what we had for dinner.  Oh, the chicken thigh stew I made the other night, slowly cooked on the stove top, added a can of crushed tomatoes toward the end, flavored with ginger, cayenne, turmeric, red chili pepper flakes, skip the black pepper's acid.

I don't know, I guess you get used to being depressed, though that's not quite the right word for it, it's more about a need for some inner exploration that has yet gone undone throughout history even though we wake up and find ourselves completely volatile, different, that's the writing life.  "No one listens to you anyway, so just keep writing," you think on the one hand, but that's not it, it's more like you're a particular kind of being that needs privacy, time... You come to think that depression is a normal state of things.  A normal part of adulthood, rejection, competition.  

You can say, oh, I was too nice a guy, too shy.  

But on the other side of that, an entitled female parent, an Aries, born 1939, "what are we going to do for fun, what are your plans, what can I do to help...  what's for supper, can we go out to somewhere fun, or are we going home..."  Mom, we don't have enough money...

She came to my college, senior week, the week leading up to my graduation, a week to party, a week to be in touch with friends before you have to say good bye farewell.  Again, even back then, I'm saddled with, but what are WE going to do for fun.  Well, Mom, even then I was trying to explain it to her, I let you come out here, you know, to see Joan Keochakian, you know, visit, but don't put this all on my like I'm going to entertain you every day this week, and even then she was treating me like I was her daughter, and nothing is worse for a son, a male child, particularly now, going out into the world, and now I'm suddenly responsible for every moment of her feelings too?  Fuck me.

Her self-image problems passed down to me.  The childish, I'm going to pick up my toys now and leave because you're not playing it the way I want to...  Yup.  The same as her old age I'm no good.  Nobody likes me.  No one wants to talk to me.   They all hate me.  Cat, you're such a good cat.  At least you're nice to me...  Humphhh.  Stalking away upstairs.  Fuck you, I mumble silently.  Then, oh well...

Sometimes she comes down and sits down in her chair.  Expecting conversation.  Like after dinner.  And even with chocolate and Bialleti coffee, I don't have the energy.  The nervous system might be fooled, but I'm done, that's it.  And I even took an hour walk today, and a surprisingly gentle conversation with the big boss, my brother.  Mom, if that's what you're telling yourself over and over, yes, no one is going to want to hang out with you.  To which she will immediately get angry about.  Go stomping about.  Reminding me of her yelling at the best, most decent, most gentle gentleman, who always had his act together, the consummate old school college professor...  "You're a failure, you're a failure, you're a failure..."  and then later asking me, age 10, was I being too rough on him...  Yeah.  

The poetic mind opens a page of news, and it's all Buddhist news, meaning that it can be known before, along with the vastness of the universe and the vastness of time, meaning it's somehow recognizable.  Like a dream one already knows, just needs to remember.  

Because of my "low self-image, low self worth," fine going along with things as usual, as if dragging around were normal and jobs involving office work mental stuff are simply too much, too tedious, must be in physical motion, yeah, I'm a people pleaser, a restaurant guy, talked into it, dragged into it step by step, and I never really should have ever been in Washington, D.C., unless I came to work at Congress, which never happened, because I had the writing demon about me.

And that all was pretty useless, a childish, a juvenile thing to do.  The depression, at least, was interesting, and it remains so.  

On the other hand, children like story books.  They know how to keep the imagination alive, cartoons, drawings, Richard Scarry illustrated books, like What Do People Do All Day, and still, do we have an answer?

I got up at noon, today, Thursday, February 11, with the new moon coming.  Thank god, a Lunar New Year, and a benevolent at that, a water oxen, from what I've heard.  That's pretty good for me.  I was up cooking sausage with peppers and onion on the stove top, bacon in the oven, for my break at night.

It wasn't easy getting up, I had some cold green tea, a can of V8, toast with almond butter.  I looked outside.  My stomach not ready for coffee.  The pickup truck with Seal Coat logos was pushing the snow around the parking lot.  I went up to say hi to mom, whom I'd hidden from at the start of my day, and then I got the blockage in my nose and I had to go throw up, embarrassingly, just as I get the first talk from mom, and I shut the door, acting quickly as  I can, take my glasses off, heave, kneel, look down at the V8 looking like Kerouac blood, a few chunks of gluten free bread with efforts of detox almond butter, all of it recognizable puking in some shitty toilet bowl, god knows why, the heated air, the claustrophobia... the collapsing snow drift tunnel of child Ernst Road Central New York snow drifts at the top of the dell, brought down on me by my gleeful always joking and therefore loving and kind, even as he collapses a suffocating amount of 10 degrees out snow drift off the farmers field Himalaya on my claustrophobic self, and he'd planned the whole set up probably, to "build character" upon me...  But after that, I felt better, and I put socks and old L.L. Bean boots on and went to sweep the snow off the car so I could move it straight across to the other side of the parking lot, cleared to the rising snow banks, and Ben, going by with a snowblower, when I looked over at him with my arms out, as if to say, My God, he says "we're running out of places to put it."  I clear the car off, let it run for awhile, go check the mail, still no forwarded mail from my apartment in D.C.  I could use a food stamp card, and the other stuff, my W2...

And gradually the day seems less useless.  I go in, take coat and boots and socks off, make a pot of Dragonwell, timing the fresh dried leaves in the strainer, do the dishes from cooking last night.  Mom's staying upstairs in her bedroom, snug, watching the Impeachment.  I put a can of Adzuki beans on, after toasting the herbs just a bit, the usual ginger, turmeric, cayenne, salt, in olive oil, throw in a little bit of flaxseed meal, as I put in my loose leaf tea.  And mom stays quiet.  And not coming down to haunt me like ghost of Japanese old ghosts who stare at you, wanting something from you, you don't know what, possessed.  I cross myself.  Child rosary beads.  I try to be careful.

I come back inside after clearing the car off and letting it run for awhile, the engine running fast at first, so that if you were to put it into gear it would run faster than you'd want, then calming down, dropping in pitch, purring at a lower pace, released from the night, and I go over across the slippery parking lot then slouching over to the mail box.  The tread has worn off the L.L. Bean low Maine Hunting Shoes George handed down to me.  They are too low.  They're years old.  Slipping easy.  I've taken a foot ride in several tiled linoleum floors like you'd find in a supermarket or the Stewart Shop.  I've been asking around, what are good.  Mucks, the guys here tell me.  Tractor Supply.  I like talking gear with them, Ben, Chuck who drinks canned light beer.  Works building bridges in the summer.  Thick skin like a tomcat from working out in the elements.  The Red Wings were good for a year, but now my feet are soaked, Ben says.

Massive ice buildup along the high gutters of the townhouses, icicles 7 feet long, a foot in circumference hanging above, mom at a corner, the cycle of melt off drip.  Ben is over chipping away at them with a long yellow pole.  Backing off as the icicles fall and shatter on the concrete landing.  

I'm getting a few small things done in the kitchen, a few things to straighten out just so we can still walk around here in the living room.  She comes down.  I'm hungry.  What would you like, mom?  A turkey sandwich, a BLT?  I don't feel like making scrambled eggs... Do you have any soup?  Sure, I say, more brightly, since I've been given the rare respite of being able to come downstairs without immediate questionings, a lonely wish for conversation.  What kind of soup, chicken noodle, chicken with rice... or the chicken stew we had last night...

She's in a good mood.  Shocked by the horrors provoked by Trump at the Capitol building.  Why are young people like that, she asks.  This is a great country.  Why are they angry?

We have a conversation.  It's nice when she gets something.  She's always been an Impressionist.   If you listen carefully you'll find wisdom, political and otherwise, with a spicing of understanding character in a shrewd and intelligent way.  She's psychic, as many of us are.  She gets it, they, the rioters, feel that they are getting shafted.  Yes, I say, many of them have fallen for Trump, the demagogue who claims to be a populist.  I'll never lie to you, he says.  They are hurting.  They buy it.  They're poor.  That part she gets.

But the real answer, as we talk, is, like FDR, Biden, who's going to be a great president.  Put the people back to work.  It's the Wall Street Reagan gajillionaires who've fucked the American worker, and Trump is just exploiting it, and he couldn't give a fuck either, and can't tell the truth, and lies to Americans, all the plants he's built, right, bullshit, how he's on the side of the American farmer, his own tariffs having totally fucked them too...  A great con man doing one of the great con jobs of the century.

Okay, mom, you want to go for a ride?  I don't really want to deal with her, but, maybe it entertains her, the adventure women want.  When I get back in from the Big M, "see anyone you know," and that shit, hand her the New York Times, happy I have carrot and celery now to make the stew, and then to the wine shop, because I need some wine for it, too, a sort of Bourgignon in the making, in my mind, I say, well, you want to go by the lake, sure, of course, but when we go by the promonotory and look over the lake and see its watery star edge far away in different light every day, and then drive back west to connect with the street that goes by the McDonalds, and Cheap Seats, the sports bar, known for their local brand of chicken wings sauced, and I want to find a replacement for the bird feeder I overfilled then broke with a snap of the top thing lid, cutting myself on a dried left thumb like a paper cut, she's telling me she wanted a scoop of coffee ice cream, that she's hungry and has a migraine, mom, you have to tell me these things...

I say, mom, I'm going to run in and find a cheap bird feeder...  I feel guilty... because when I refilled it, there a good number who came.  Oh fuck, she wants to come into the hardware store with me to look for a bird feeder...  so that's another project and when we come out into the 4PM cold bone ice winds, she's poking at little icicles coming down from the front bumper and grill of the old Corolla with her green cane, picking at another little bit of car ice crust, I can't help yelling, MOM, GET IN THE CAR, and she's "nothing I do is ever right," and I get in start the car, her door is open and I'm seriously ready to just pull away, except but what would that accomplish but a tiny sickened moment of glee spread around the whole peace seeking and vengeful human race, as sometimes she doesn't know who I am anyway, and i'm probably muttering, as we drive the last few roads, six of them, with curves, fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you bitch, fuck you fuck you .... and then we turn a corner, oh, here we are...  and just to get her in from the car, with her trying to hold a folded newspaper to her chest, a small plastic bottle of Pepsi too, and her cane, walking across the cold parking lot, to the stairs, then the next set of stairs, that's when I too have finally had it.  And if I get her into the house, up the last fumbling steps, a sheet of ice without her calling me, yelling, you're a bastard, you're a bastard...

And me saying, as I get inside, dragging in one two three shopping bags or items, fuck you all humanity fuck you too.

As I say, I go out for a walk, with a water bottle, hydration, and first it's too cold and my goddamn boots are too loose but I can't really find a knee down in the road to tie them so I keep sloughing along, just to get a break, get the dreaded monthly phone call in with the higher powers, go up, come down, go up the hill by the water tower as I'm doing this, then back, careful to crouch by the bank when the cars and pickup trucks with plows on the front come toward me, go hide in the Toyota listening to the 6 o'clock news on WRVO NPR news, scribble maybe two lines in a notebook that fits in my technical gear insulated windbreaker over my green North Face puff feather sweater...  just not to face mom and dinner yet, god help me.

"Ernest Hemingway, 56 years of age now," wakes up after the post dinner nap, even forgetting what dinner was, just a nice nap, falling into droooly dream, and then with the coast clear, mom silent asleep before the television, orange cat tabby male laid out at the foot of her bed, he goes downstairs, pours himself some wine.  He's awake again. Jittery from the quarter bar of chocolate and the coffee mixed with chocolate milk, nervous, practically shaking, like it were the booze...  He strips to his bathrobe, gathering the colored wash of his gear, thick black socks, tee shirt, two flannel Beans shirts green, two pairs of pants, one heavy, one light but waterproof and easy.  Down into the basement, spraying some Shout spot stain remover, after some spray difficulties on the pants and the shirts...  choosing out the cycle to put them all through.  Don't have to put quarters in, like back at the shitty apartment he likes back in DC?Paris. Coming up to work on the great stew assemblage.

Sear the stew beef, in three batches.  Bacon.  Pork side, cut in small strips.  Add onion then celery and carrot.  Scrape bottom of the pot.  Add Chianti from Wildman Imports.  Add stock then.  Simmer down.

Mom is right asking that question, so, what are you going to do this summer... Its a good question.  Hemingway, trying to write, doesn't have the patience for it, but he knows he should write like his life depended upon it.

And every now and then, there is an outcropping, it seems.  Something that comes to me as I wake up after hours after dinner's digestion in the cold, mom quiet, where I come down to the kitchen to perform the little tasks of cleaning up the dinner plates, the pan, the silverware, the cat's dish crusted with his digestive salivations dried now as the little bits of tiny bits of his canned food in gravy are.  An outcropping of something far better than myself, without my faults and my anger, without my arrogant conception of myself--of course, I thought I was above it all, above the steady office job and the nine to five, or any real sustained effort at anything academic in nature, despite my years and years, early on, as a good little reader, back in high school and college, savoring words, as one, at least I find, cannot do so much when out trying to survive and pay rent and take care of the most basic things and the paperwork that goes with them, finding reading indeed very hard to do, so tired one becomes.  Something beyond my normal selfish mindset, a place where my buttons cannot be as easily pushed, where I resign myself to situations and plights I can't do much about, and rather look for what I might be able to, in a small way change.

Granted, it helps to be alone, and so rested that I won't feel like falling off to sleep again, or hiding somewhere, just commanding the tiny tiller of a small boat that floats along with the written word, with the impetus of the energy of the thoughts that might be grown, harvested, after a planting long enough ago, or distilled, or set down as a foundation agreeable to the true nature of the self and my own little warily beating human heart.

And I guess I tried a bit of it earlier today.  I did what I could, took mom for a newspaper run, then by the old fort Ontario, then further down the east side past the buildings of barracks used for safe haven for the European Jewish refugees who were given a place here, another view of the lake from a little park just over the two line railroad track barely used anymore, but once upon a time in the vital flow of industry and commercial things here, mills, old factories, grain elevators, shipments from far away, lumber, concrete, aluminum...

Yes, there is a hollowness in our core, in our center, and we try to fill it, and this is a fundamental human truth that any writer set out to wander in a manner deemed thoughtful to himself and his own ways, each of us a natural philosopher, a desert wanderer coping with sins and temptations, each of us like an Aurelius stoic or whirling dervish, or a Chomsky, or a Kerouac, unto himself (or herself), will eventually stumble upon, at an ordained critical time in his life, say, middle age, sad situations like Jonah and Job and Moses and Abraham, or old Lincoln looking down upon the stage...

And this is hard to hold onto, when your old mom is repeating every story you've heard already a thousand hundred times, I was a fussy eater, my parents worked in the restaurant business, it took a toll on them, (which, being a guy who has worked in restaurant bars for 30 years or so, makes me feel ashamed of myself, given all the great college boy opportunities I had once upon a time before taking a bad path in life, under foolish pressures I created myself in my own fool head, trying to be "cool" as we used to say, cool like Humphrey Bogart, I suppose, or James Dean, when to be truly cool, a good student that is, engaged socially and positive and bright and optimistic and not cynical...) was your mom a good cook, were your parents good cooks...  All of this part of the Sundowning Effect medical practicioners note about those who suffer from dementia and the low amounts of Vitamin D, or folate, or whatever...

Outcroppings.  I guess that's the word I use today, this night, as the cat wanders outside.  You hold on to them, knowing intuitively how far you will have to go, how you will have to pull off something akin to what Jesus Christ, using figurative language and never quite to be taken fully literally when you could see the formation of a parable coming, says to the wealthy fellow who wants to be perfect, in effect, "go and sell what you have, give the proceeds to the poor, and come and follow me on the road of poverty and spiritual wealth," or, put another way, "the camel, passing through the eye of a needle."

I've put a kettle on, to bring water to roiling vapor point to add some humidity here.  I open the back door, as the dishes soak in a tub of hot soapy water in the stainless steel sink's left side, reaching for the bottle of $10 Italian red I put out there to chill, as I sip it slowly, and the cat, with his orange tabby stripes is ready to come in now, and he shakes off his back paws as he stretches his rear legs out, coming in now and giving me several bold headline meows, as if to say, Nuclear Plant Unit One in low power mode, Ship in Danger in the South China Sea, and lapping his flanks now before insisting on being fed.  The wine's a bit too cold, but I put my thumb over the open top of the bottle and give it a good shaking, to aerate it, to bring out that satisfying fizz.  And I think of lines from a U2 song, "sunrise like a nosebleed, your head hurts and you can't breath, you've been trying to throw your arms around the world...  going to run to you run to you run to you woman be still,  run to you run to you run to you, oh woman I will...  I had a dream that I saw Dali..." however it goes, and Christopher Plummer passed away earlier today, and everyone is thinking of an old Austrian folk song from the Rogers and Hammerstein...

There is the sound of water running through the pipes up above my head, and though mom complained earlier, as when she did with my little walk at dusk down past the church of Saint Stephen here on Polak Hill, with purples and pinks through silver clouds and orange pink fading sunsets over the great lake that can be framed by the two great smoke stacks of the electric plant down by the shores and the SUNY, that she is lonesome.  Kitty clicks his nails across the linoleum and gives me a series of two-toned inflected meows, wanting to go out again, in need of fresh airs, barely looking at his cat dish as he passes.

It can sink on me as well as it can given my level of man child boyish maturity what a rotten selfish little bastard I am, my solipsism, my narcissist tendencies, staring at my navel while the real world turns of people doing real world good and bad, coming away from them with good careers and real stories, when I sit here at night at the old family dinner table that has been through a good many moves, and basically, moving in with mom, given the state of Covid-19 related unemployment for the old restaurant worker...

And I see, clearly, who am I to say anything about my mother and all of her issues.

perhaps there is something that is not so much real as representative, sent to me, speaking of the greatest of truths and deeper realities, that have much to do and go back to things like the scientists put into the astronomical science poem of the great explosion every day expanding our universe and every other one, the Big Bang, the growing distance, the opening hollowness that reflects equally as well who and what we ourselves are...  the ultimate falling apart we will all go through.  Disintegration.  And once she have birth to you, the other natural cycle kicks in.  

Climb out while you still can.

Oh, but we all need a little time to ourselves, a little time to do homework, to mess around.  Yeah, sure I could have been a rockstar like Bono, or sing Edelweiss and do Shakespeare upon a stage...

The empty hole, the chasm, the hollow we try to fill, of course we do, but there is nothing but dark matter, dark energy, all the things we cannot see nor feel, all the things that cannot be born into real existence, the powder energy of the "fairy tales" we Walter Mitty types tell unto ourselves as we drive down to get gas, a newspaper, a sandwich, a cup of coffee over the bumpy small city winter pavement and on to the grocery store where one sees that everyone else, absolutely everyone else, even addicted bums, have lives, wives, people for which to steal or earn money for to buy more time.

And it follows that one would try to fill this whole of holes of abysses, not knowing any better, with the things like people never meant for us, girlfriends that never were, flickering in imaginings of a burning past, that in burning still gives some unknown insights such that we tell stories, ghost stories, fantasies, sexy women out of Philip Roth, who are of course not real...

So you wonder, about the things that exist as physics knows, the dark energy, dark matter, black holes...

 It's sundown and the dinner hour, here in winter, along with her getting into the wine, that makes her very hard to deal with.  It's no so bad other times of the day.  I come down from one nap, feeling the cold from the wind in my body still after my little walk, after taking her on the grocery rounds, and the confusion is setting in.  Is this where I'm supposed to be?  Where are my parents?  Yes, mom, this is your apartment.  Do we have to go anywhere tonight?  How will we move the cat?  Mom, we're home here, don't worry about it.  

Then she's on me about what to do for dinner.  Things have gotten tighter by the month, after the two rounds of mechanical repair for the old Corolla.  It's a beautiful car, the 2003, standard transmission.  The rust is eating at it from underneath, but for the time being... hopefully we are okay.

The Big M.  I ordered my low sodium sliced turkey breast.  The regular hot counter person, with friendly blue eyes under her hat with a name card that says Sandy, she's very nice.  And because she seems to be in charge of the flow of things and the extra offerings, I say, Hi, Chef, how are you...  I get some chicken tenders too.  What are you making for dinner...  Beef tips, she tells me, having to pull down her mask so I can hear her, over egg noodles.  Oh, cool, I tell her.  Yeah, with the meats on sale, I made a beef stew the other night.  Get tired of chicken.  Mom always wants chicken...  Cooking is like therapy for me, taking care of mom, I let her know.  She gets it.  It's so nice when someone takes the time to chat with you in this world.  I tend to feel like I'm bothering people, taking their time, but they get I understand people and the ways we serve each other and the humanity we bring along with us.

I'm back out in the wind now, get to the car, get us back to the Cedarwood Townhouses.  The sun is out, significant continents of blue sky amidst the clouds at 4 o'clock with western sun coming to my face as I walk up the road bundled against the wind.  

After dinner a nap to hide.  Two hours rest, even a dream or two.  I wake up and slink past her bedroom.  I come down at use the bathroom, the cat coming down and finding me sitting, telling me something about what he wants and expects and needs to do.  Okay.  

I sit down in mom's chair and pull our her laptop, as it works far better than my hand-me-down 2009 MacBook Pro, but soon enough she's coming down the stairs, first at 9;45, and then again, almost putting me over the edge into panic and inner strife, at 10:30, in a wandering state.  "I don't know if I'm coming or going," she says.  She uses the downstairs hallway bathroom.  When you turn the light on the fan comes on too, and it's not quiet.  Nervously I get up from the writing, and go to the kitchen.  Maybe it will help her if the cat's back in, and I look out into the darkness, but no sign of him.  I top off my little tumbler glass from the box wine and take my own computer back with me.  If I sit in her chair, she'll be less likely to stay downstairs.  "It's awfully dark out," she says.  She opens the front door, standing in her baggy Levis, sneakers, a fleece zip up.  I put my hands up to my brows, to focus.  The earlier time she said, I won't bother you...  But this time I have to tell her, Mom, your bed is upstairs, here's your Eleanor Roosevelt book, and she shuffles up the stairs, childishly unhappy.   Good night, I say.  Her response expresses her discontent with that, a minor insult.  But, she goes off to bed, and later I have a couple of phone calls...

The writer's nerves are fragile, shaky, and just such an encounter wreaks its havoc.

I go back into the kitchen after turning out the light, looking out over the pathway I've dug for the cat's night wanderings.  

I struggle to get up at 12:30 in the afternoon.  I was awake earlier, at 9, then at 11, but felt low on sugar and water, and then finally feeling almost worse, but at last ready to get up, feeling shameful, is it all the sugar I put through my system, waking so low and empty and knowing I've missed the boat of being a decent employed citizen faithful to a career...

I sneak past mom who seems content reading upright on her bed, down to use the john, then for yesterday's leftover coffee, then to brew some tea, then to assess the dishes situation, the pan from last night's eggs fried with a touch of water to finish, over bread with thin slices of ham.

I feel like the devil when I wake up, like he played me, Satanically, yet again, somehow.  I am not the classy gentleman my father was.  I've been a bum my whole adult life, not ever having a plan or at least one I had the self-discipline and the energy to carry through with anything, not even getting up at the proper hour, preferring a night job, one with a built in excuse to get up late.  I feel iII, though I didn't have much wine the night before.  The dry heated air in the kitchen, sinus congestion I try to open so air can come in and breath can come out and my stomach will not have to respond to the slightest alarm with the gag reflex that once initiated cannot be put aside, a fine way to wake up on your knees in front of the toilet off the kitchen, kitty litter on the floor, the garbage can nearby.  A thick nose, you can't smell anything at all, and so without being able to differentiate, at this age, everything is poison, potentially, and maybe most everything is, given the world and the floating atoms of plastics and industrial chemicals that should have remained in the ground, not having been crucibled into daily creature life.  It's mostly clean air up here, with the vast lake down the hill going as far as the eye can see, a curved earth visible to the naked eye from any decent vantage point.

 When I come up from the cold basement after the snowstorm's end, there's some light in the sky.  She has gone upstairs, so I can't complain as I brew a cup of tea bag green tea and a little pot of coffee.  Toast.  Reheat the bacon I cooked the night before last.  I make myself a quick BLT with a slice of turkey, and wait for her to come down and she comes down soon enough.  "I like my bacon extra crispy, I've been eating that way my whole life, ha ha ha," she says.  I've put her on toast and heated it a second time in the toaster oven.  I shrug.  I can nuke it in the microwave, if you want, I say, going for the coffee.  I blow my nose.  There' a congestion here I can't get rid of.  I take a decongestant cough syrup, half a Lexapro, half an allergy pill, half a beta blocker.  Mom, take your pills.  From the little plastic sleeves that tear away, that you have to cut open  with scissors.  Today she gets the extra high dose green blue vitamin D pill.  I go upstairs.  I look in the mirror.  I need a shave.  I look bad.  I put menthol vapor rub on spots on my skin, including one on my scalp.  My hair is greasy.  Okay, why not, take a shower.  Shave in the hot water.  A change of underwear.  Look out the window.  A new tee shirt.  More coffee.  Brush my teeth.  Cat fed. 

She lets me go out, down to the Big M by myself.  I'd like to write, but I have to dig the car out, and it's just nice to be free of her, to not have the constant running commentary over the car radio WRVO as I negotiate the streets of Oswego.  That alone is a blessing.  

I get back.  I take mom for a ride, walking her out to the car without her cane.  I drive up away from town, west, up over the hill, then down past the bottle and can recycling plant and beverage center and the muck farming fields for onions, then up the next moraine, then down, then out south Route 7, turning up the road that goes past the Sterling Nature Center.  A little tour of Fruit Valley, over to Cemetery Road, turning at the old Colonial white farm house that was an Underground Railroad stop, up past the orchards and the quonset hut farm stands, then back, slowly, an ambling drive with a pink sky, and she doesn't push me to see the lake and we don't need to anyway.

I cook dinner.  The stir fry.  We sit down at the table finally.  So what's in the news.  I show her an article about the kid who killed a person as he was playing militia cop at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, who was out on bail, but now the circumstances have changed.  So I explain it all to her.  Yes, she wants to know.  "Is the kid black?" she asks me.  Mom.  Think of it.  Would that make sense?  I go back and try explaining, using salt and pepper shakers.  Cops kill and unarmed black person.  Black Lives Matters protest.  Militia goons come with their guns...  She doesn't get it.

I haven't the energy to explain further.  Another fight.  She shrieks at me.  Okay, maybe I pushed her a bit about her logic.  Would that make sense, mom, I pushed her.  She has her distinct logic, which, to be honest I have been pretty tired of for some time now.  And if I were to explain something to her, how we all got here, she would then say, "oh, you mean it's all my fault," ready to flip out on me and go shrieking within a matter of minutes, I'm never coming here again!  Which to my mind largely confirms this set-up in my mind.  So whatever, I'm stuck here for the night and the fucking foreseeable future so why not just take a break in the cold basement watching old German grannies meeting young male lovers in some happy cultural event that is not in the programming here in our culture, given things the way they are in our fine country and democracy as far as I can tell, the U.S. like everywhere else all about property rights, no sharing without paying, thus no true democracy beyond the token shoulder rubbing.  Some things, here, are sacred, I hope.

I go down to the basement to hide.  

Later on, after a nap, I leave the basement.  The concrete slab, it gets very cold.  I can't do another night down here, as dark as it is, comforting in a way.  The downside, I still hear her clumping over on the floor above me on the other side of the plywood boards I see with joists and cobwebs, back and forth.  There are the dishes to put through.  The iron pans need boiling water to clean them out.    She screamed at me tonight on two separate occasions about my not putting salt down on the ice concrete steps front and back, okay mom.  "We could get sued."  She wanted to throw out two tablespoons of carrot peels out for the creatures of the forest, off the back stoop where the cat sets up his watch, after I asked her, when she asked if she could help, to toss them into the trash can from the drain catch, and so she goes out, and I hear her yell, and she almost slips, she says, angry at me now as she comes back in.  And I'm beginning to doubt if I'll ever go back to that futile old waste of a life back in DC being a people pleasing barman pretending he's some sort of missing Jesus.

I like this town.  The big lake, an inland sea, Ontario, it turns the land around in your mind.  It's not all from the perspective of looking down at where you came from, the big cities, DC, Philly, but it's now about looking over the lake, in a town that has genetically duplicated all towns, in a scale that fits the land.  Here the occupations are heavily skewed more to trades that involve pickup trucks.  Working men who put up siding, dig foundations, build from the ground up, plumbing, engineers who work at the 9 Mile Point Nuclear plant and the aluminum plant closer in to the town, and the big electric plant near the university.  A bookstore.  An old school pharmacy.  A few local restaurants, Italian, sports bar, a Chinese one, pizza, chicken wings, a few other efforts, a vineyard up the road west beyond Fairhaven beach state park.  The young people are the same as young people everywhere, attractive, and so are the adults.  A few people have had tougher lives.  There's meth, poverty, things like that too.  The churches are retreating, only a few open in the pandemic, or maybe none, not the big megachurch ones.

A pretty girl from up the road in Scriba, a college student in Physics, sweet, quiet, she looks Irish to me, told me quietly, after I quietly asked her, what you make as an hourly rate as a checkout person at the small local supermarket, the Big M, going on 44 years with its "Best Yet" line of products that are as good, if not better often times.  They just got a raise the first of the new year.

And what good have I do for the world.  I've done not much, as far as working Oswego terms.  Oh, sure, I was a barman in Washington, DC, for thirty years or so.  But that hasn't left me with anything, I guess I didn't work hard enough, though I thought I did, being efficient and thorough.

Writing, why, I don't know.  I'm not sure I respect writers, the kind like I am, the Kerouac, the Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Vonnegut...  maybe it's all useless and terribly self-indulgent.  Don't do it, in particular, if you have no real profession.  Fine if you can make a dreary living out of it, though I don't think I could do that sort of a thing.  I'd rather do some other form of dreariness, more physical, and leave my thoughts to the word chains in my own head, and no longer have the burden of sharing them.  At this I spent thirty years too long, at least.  

So now what.

Writing helps me get through the night.  It helps me when I have no friends to talk to, at 3:15 in the morning, when there is no possible help for my situation, probably given a sort of low mood I've dragged around my adult life, treating it with walks and nutrition, good things, healthy things, but also bad things, unhealthy things who knows.

I watch Chernobyl for the hundredth time.  I put neat's foot oil on the old low Maine Hunting Shoes old George gave me before he too failed, gave up.  The soles are worn out.  I do not feel like watching/listening to a reading from Henri Nouwen, nor, at least right now, about the Saints or the Desert Fathers.  Get a little color from the old days, Moby Dick, maybe, or Hillary and Tenzing on Everest, 1953, or JFK or LBJ?  Nah.  I wish I had a bottle of Moscow vodka.  They knew they were dying.