Continued Sketches for one act play, If There Is A Worse Place Than Hell, with occasional Shakespearean touches.

 But in writing a man must first distract himself, and then focus on that distraction.

By doing so, then allowing himself a moment of creative flow.

One must ride the distraction, or else the whole thing might sink. 

This is another reason why it is good to branch out into many talents, skills, languages, hobbies... The help keep something at bay.  The shell of having many distractions, work of a benevolent non-irritating sort, by engaging one part of the brain, letting the wheels spin.

I find the Seven Samurai works for me.

Or feeding the cat.  Or the dreariness of doing the dishes, keeping the drain free when first rinsing off the cat's dishes before putting them into the tub of hot soapy along with the glasses, the silverware, the dinner plate, the pot and pan.

You have to get in the right spot.  And thus I understand how Hemingway worked, doing the absolute best he could to distract himself, with violent hunting, fishing, war, bullfighting.  And of course, drinking, and of course, cafes, bars, dining places.  Such thick and horrible and gut wrenching distractions that he was then, in a sense, allowed, free, ready to create.  It couldn't happen before that.  He was wired that way, I guess, though I don't know, and of course this is all a guess, as everything a writer writes is a guess.

Shimada Kambei, the head ronin here, played by Takashi Shimura, finds each of the samurai, and some have particular kinds of sins, strengths, flaws, weaknesses...There's the drunk one, we all know that, Mifune, playing "Lord" Kikuchiyo, and I find it just enough, unless I have to deal with the emotional issues with mom here.  The sets are beautiful.  Wood, the old fashioned way, incorporated into stables and strange large shacks.  Streams.  Nature’s soothing.

Regular life doesn't do it, apparently.  Not for a writer, folks.  Thus the extremes.  The apparent extremes.  Thomas Merton being one of them.  Maybe Vonnegut, even, having been given the Battle of the Bulge.

Kerouac liked jazz and a certain kind of crowd.  They distracted him enough so that he could come back and write clearly without another single thought in his head, nothing, just the flow of the words before him, typing, as it should be.  The drinking, small or large.  

I have things to worry about which are quite difficult to distract myself from, as I try to keep that which is within me on-going.

If you can't distract yourself well enough, forget it, forget ever trying to be an artist.

I don't have it in me, and nor do you.

The poor writer must be, almost by definition, irresponsible to the things of the world.

Spiritual distractions can work to.  Vonnegut is full of them.  Even if it is softly vague laughable pornographic science fiction from the hack writer living far away from reality.

Seven Samurai moments:

Minute 22:23, an early part of the film--shot in black and white--in which the principal samurai has his head shaved and takes the monk's ragged robes on to save a child from a bandit kidnapper,  look at that stream that flows along by the village walls.  

Just after that, a departing scene, the road, at minute 25:16, the initiate samurai walking to the sky and the great mountain in the distance like clouds, following the now shaven head samurai, ronin number one.  

"I'm at a loss... There's nothing special about me...  I may have seen my share of battle, but always on the losing side...  That about sums me up.... Better not to follow such an unlucky man."  And then he plainly tells the kid, “I don't have the means to travel with an attendant."

Minute 50.  "We let a good fish get away.  An excellent swordsman...  A man obsessed only with testing the limits of his skill.  I doubt he'll join us."

Minute 51:44.  The samurai have gathered, a discussion that turns whether to bring the bright youth along for the battle.  The head one in profile.  "I was once your age, you know.  Hone your skills, then go to war and do great things.  Then become lord of your castle and domain.  But as you dream your dreams, before you know it, your hair will turn as gray as mine.  By that time you've lost your parents and you're all alone."  The swordsman arrives out of the darkness.

And even to ride that thin line of distraction.  As I sit in the kitchen of mom's apartment with the light over the oven and the one over the sink on, the rest of the lights dark.

Thus do great art works lead on, to feed, in the stream, the next great art, quite beyond you or me.

And must it not come out of desperate and unbearable circumstances that of course one is somehow able to bear, thanks to this gulp, this whale's rising breath of fresh air from the top of the head down in, then back down into the waves again, the ocean itself.

But then at a certain point it is more and more difficult to achieve any real kind of distraction.  Even you yourself see through them.  And you wish you had not taken life so seriously earlier, that you had every sense of humor but that of looking out for yourself.   That's the death knell.  If you could no longer achieve distraction.

If you were not captivated by distractions you would have to look at yourself honestly.  You would then see the continual dishonesty that is a crucial part of alcohol disorder.

So where to begin, on a cold rainy day...

The glaring lack of intimacy the old barman has gotten stuck in?  Some sort of past social trauma, if so from where and when?  A great lack of life’s natural painkillers, a woman’s hand...

And now, here I am.  Caught.  Trapped.  The repetitive pattern of waking hungover, tired, in pain, then to be constantly reminded of the desperate situation I find myself in... the opinionated headstrong senile mother on top of that, she being terrifying enough on her own to rattle me, if not by act than by habit and experience, the nightly sundown misery of talking her down off the ledge of confusions, "but my home is over there, you're not listening to me...  a little kindness now would help..."

I get up late again, feeling like hell.  Sharon has come to drop off part of a cake.  I hear her speaking with mom in gentle tones from my spot upstairs.  There's a rent check to write, taxes to do, we spent thirteen hundred plus on the old Toyota, but she needed it, and now she rides like a gem above her rusty fenders and rolling wheels and now purring motor, a misfiring cylinder, new spark plugs and a related wire, a ball bearing for the back breaks, new brakes in front, so now the emergency brake will hold solid now.

It's pouring out.  But we have the car back, and that is a huge relief, a small victory after days of considerable pain, six days full.  I take mom for a ride, we'll go get the newspaper, and a few odds & ends at the Big M.

I'm struggling.  The box wine from Portugal again I've been treating as medicine for all this.  There is a black Labrador dog on the box.  It leaves me feeling worse than I might otherwise need to be.  But after driving down by the water, the lake disappearing into the mist and even the great smokestacks of the power plant swallowed whole by the gods of the mist & fog of the grey lake and the low sky's coming in, after the supermarket, mom already with her newspaper from the Stewart Shop, there is the wine shop liquor store, and I'm thinking I need a wine of better quality, maybe even organic, and they have a Les Hauts de Lagarde 2019 Bordeaux, which sets one back about $15, but there is a lot to be said for a wine that doesn't kill you with tricks and artificially added yeasts after the natural ones already there are killed off by sulfites.  

After the car stress and getting mom down, this is before, I went out for a six of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, but something didn't sit well as I watched the Kurosawa.  He went through a depressive state too, at some point, hit a pretty low place.

But now mom has come, and thankfully gone after a Pepsi, here in the present night, as the rain continues to fall for the twelfth hour, it will be very windy tomorrow, and buying the six pack of Pepsi was a whole saga too, down to the Kinney's drug store, with her coming in out of the car as I was about to check out, mom, where's your mask, and the young women at the counter were kind enough to chuckle, though I could barely face them now in my beaten down shame...  She pulls a wrinkled blue mask out of a pocket as she stands at the end of the foyer's automatic doors now, somehow manages to put it on after I tell her to go back to the car, which I left running, which of course she won't do...  I take her by the lake for the talk she wants, and she wonders what happened to Ted, the most kind-hearted person she ever know, and I say, well...  We park beyond Rudy's, and stare out at the lake, deep in the belly of the sky to the west, some form of passing clearing light, but a passing one, like a torch going past you in the darkness.

Torture of a different sort is an odd chance for opportunity, just that God has amped the pains up now considerably, all the old ones, flourishing now across your face, bloated, sweaty, a feeling of residual puke from something there in the background but a stomach quelled.

I've heated up the beef stew for dinner, adding some mushrooms and a touch of yogurt, it will do.  Mom as her wine, she's calmed down some, but has been foggy today, not a good one for either of us.  She'll tell me it's fine if I go up and take a nap after the errands in the rain, or that she's going up to bed now around 6 in the evening, but then ten minutes later is coming down the stairs and telling me she had a big problem...  How are we going to get all my stuff back home, and there's the cat too...  Mom, we are home. And then the shouting will come.  

 I took a good rest after dinner too, leaving the dishes to do, but fell into sad displaced dreams, a wandering life, trying to join younger people at night playing guitars and music outdoors in the summer, but then, looking in my hand, the neck of my good Martin d28 is severed, and then there is another part of the dream trying to catch a Trailways bus like the one I was one when I was coming back from a college reunion and met a nice girl from Utica.  She didn't drink.  She was lovely, and we sat together, and exchanged letters and wrote each other for a while, but I was back to my miserable life in DC...

Dreams.

But I get up, knowing I won't be able to jump back into the robes of sleep anytime soon, miles to go, churning horses of anxieties over all the pragmatic and practical things and everything that once was good now haunting me, and I'm only fifty six.  Which also means unemployable, which also means, perhaps, an incredibly lonely person who has been so cowed in life that there is for him the wine to ease the pain, dishes to do, the whole wet process, so that the wheels might spin.  And quiet at least.  

I'm not fussy about wine, to tell you the truth.  This wine I drink tonight, Les Hauts De Lagarde 2019 "Vin de Bordeaux," Agriculture Biologique, Non GMO, has dark berry fruits, cedar, hot rocks and pine pitch and petrol, other medicinal things, eucalyptus, scuffed shoe leather, a hint of distant damp soot, a Cherry Orchard for the circumstances here, a feverish vision of a swirling black robed monk coming from a distance but walking ten feet above the ground in one's own mind's madness, the stem of a blue red berry patch briar's breath, chocolate, cough syrup drop, stable hooves, straw, damp clean dew from nature's moving winds and natural waters and estuary, an apple with its skin, and all dry over the tongue, right down the middle path, and then ten seconds later arriving at the sides of the back of the tongue as the voices of salivary rise clean, a hint of last autumn's fallen leaves, the mud of a springtime orchard with the blossoms of white just passing into tiny leaves, a whiff of sustaining planet miracle in the middle of an airless elemental chemical universe of physics, the atmospheres that protect us all from naked harm, a dirt path for foot or hoof or tractor wheel puttering, a gravel road, the open excitement, good or bad, of the open paved roads of life and commerce, the protective darkness of the shipping container across the sea, the great sensitivity of the wine to reach all that has touched it, but also its indifference.   Bark, with lichens, morel mushroom, the wood of a fallen tree slowly decaying as grass rises, as small creatures gentle it into softerness by stages, open spaces now within for larger but still tiny life to crawl, the ability of teeny tiny things being able to see and sense, a deeper pebble somewhere down in the old gravel river bed earth upon with the roots of an old vine happily deep against the extremities of season rests upon in embrace, yeasts taking up homes upon the surfaces of animals and people and old barns, apple skin travels in the wind, sunlight daylight, the tannic self protecting medications that rise in all such plant life to ward off the intruder, so that God's work in the vineyard will stand til the ripened robust.  

How did it all do that.  And the pores upon the papillary tastebuds of the coral reef tongue that goeth back to monsters deep finding a new darkness to entertain, a licorice catching off guard, how did that get there too...  Let it pour over your tongue like a cool mountain stream trickling down now, wait, what's that... now the bottle's been open six hours or so, more, savored savory, the agreeable bitters quality of all God's roots and medicines are there on a tea spoon fed to you when you were a child and your mom kindly watched over you with love so deep.   Another offering, as if from a muck, a marshland of watr'y birds, fowl, the things good for webbed foot and bill below a green edge algal surface just so, like blossoms fallen down upon, above the roots of cattails and twiggy things a turtle might sun upon just so, or a quick frog's leap.

A touch of an old Ancient Greek godly domain wind.  Smoke from open fires and stone rings, campaign, wagon wheels.  The tree bitterness of virgin olive oil.  Grapes eaten orgy style dangled by damsels as you robed recline, tanned, muscular, garland, clad in white with a touch of the blue of the sky.

The perplexed perplexing look of an iridescent royal blue insect, or a dragon fly with long tail, a twist of an insect eyed head, studying something quite beyond you, your vibration, your spectrum wavelengths, which the bug does not really give a shit about except you are seen as such, nothing personal, apart from spiders, who know, and see and are oftentimes friendly, enjoying the things our company allows, dinner.

The faint surfaces of rosemary and mint leaves, fresh grass, morning grass, sunny grass, mowed grass chewed by blades into an itchy richness for the skin of passerby.  

Asparagus, hot tobacco leaf drying now, along with the tubal core of things gathered by a greater hand into different forms of existence.  Carbon, both animate and inanimate.  Ancient seabed chalk packed by pressure's hold into limestone, porous, happy in its new existence.  Deeper creepy old fog of prehistoric geologic era Paleozoic Pleistocene and Carboniferous forests of giant ferns and early simple pines and the horseshoe crab trilobite...  Old currents with things crawl swimming part rock part creature, a shell, a few rudimentary things, mountains rising from their roots on upward.  Old Basque tales that remember, that could shake your bones and gray your hair.

Metals, higher elements born in furnaces of deep progressing stellar life far far beyond, on upward up the periodic table, adding another element, another particle.  and snowflakes.  The soft sensual earth of, again, pine forests, protected with their resin slow oozing skin bark, the youth of tree giving it it's character while the old sits within just happy to be there carrying up water cell by cell, tube by tube, and yet the outer growth, the bark, the skin, looks like ours, old and blemished now, grooved, tougher now, far less ticklish and pinkly fresh and thin, knobbed now with old bumps and sun exposure.  The chimney of an old castle upriver.  An early spear hidden nearby from long ago in human time.  Copper.  Dark volcanic periods, vast time of endless waters, and all of this buried within us, just like it is in the wine.  An old feathery pillow that has caught the sweat and sleepy drool and tears and the self lubrication of nasal and other passages, alongside a quilty blanket.  The soles of bare feet.  Rope.  Saddle leather.   A stony forest caught between the dampness of night earth and birth of honeysuckle leaves coming along and the bright heat of a morning sun overpow'ring the first heavenly blue that brings the bird to chirp for lover home.

Ten percent Cabernet Franc for the fresh graphite pencil lead stroke streak upon a page.  The underside of a shoot of green by the river bank for a tiny frog to huddle and hold under.  Entre-Deux-Mers, between the two seas.  Oysters and Arcachon dunes to the east of the moderating sea, above the druid pines of Landes, Dordogne, Garronne, Cahors up the road a piece.  A quarter Cabernet Sauvignon. A noble savage and wise grape, the right amount of red fruits here, plum, below the protective arms of mother Merlot.  The waters, cool, coming down from Pyrenees and Massif Central have gravelled the rocks down, pebbley, smooth, white, blue, I shouldn't know.  

Violets, of course, and lilac.  And cedar box as if pretending to be a Burgundy.  Wine's like us;  we're all alike, but different, sometimes vastly different, and disagreeable unto each other sometimes, but then again, alike, two legs, two arms, two eyes, kinship the whale, with the little weevil mole a housecat could easily hunt down, but one creature who helped mammalian existence survive the meteor dinosaur apocalypse.  Barge engine exhaust smoke ascending, but then coming back down.  Lacquer and varnish of old wooden furniture handmade.  An old oil paintings patience with the elements.  

Look left into this wine, look right, up and down.  Aged and distant manure, something made of iron.  Spittle of a hairy animal happy to rest in mountain cave far away where mists come, and snow, even in summer.  Rose petal.  The licked liquid dewed enjambment of a fair and sensual animal.  Innards of a well used gearbox, as if of an old English motor car, strewn with the faintest perspirations of raspberry, as it holds its old spoked tires like they don't really make anymore.  Bricks of reddish and brown of the kind that turn golden orange in the setting winter sun.  Soft pelt of regal wild life upon a hide.  The hot itch of a woolen scarf in dry wintry air, bone.  Stillness of morning upon a foggy pond.  Hint of tiled roof in summer distance.

 But now I just feel like I'm losing it, and maybe I am.  DC unemployment may have run out for me.  Did work let them know somehow?

I'm in a tight space up here anyway with mom, and now I feel truly horrible.  I could lose everything in this.  For what?

And then there's the car.  Does it need a new catalytic converter?  Does it need to be towed there.  Will AAA do that for free?  My fault for hanging out with the wrong sort of people...

I'm not doing my job taking care of mom, that is true.  I don't know what to do with her. I don't know what to do with myself.

I call the mechanic when I get up Monday.  Yeah, you can drive it down, no problem.  Probably just a misfire.  Okay, and that makes us relieved. 

But in the meantime I feel less and less capable of coping with the real world.  Tax time.  The possible disasters that could wait anytime you take your old car to a mechanic.  What's going on with it?  You get out with spending twelve hundred bucks you're lucky.  

Mom is upstairs in bed, breathing old breath away, and I'm stuck being the caregiver now and what will happen to all my stuff now,  and it's a bid tedious dealing with her all day, just to survive yourself, it's too hard to find the energy to tackle anything that might come next...  Strange, how nature works....

Jesus was friends with uses and addicts and drunks.  They grew tiresome to him.  He couldn't take that aspect of them anymore.  Job has to deal with being Job.  Job can't escape, smoking some pipe of some sort.

But Jesus can form a sort of therapy community.  A program.  Include some Buddhist type Eastern wisdom.  

At two in the morning, everywhere, in a time zone, it is co-dependent time.  

And here I am with mom, mom upstairs.  She came down earlier.  I heard her coming and brought the cat in.  Fed the cat.  Gave her her pill. 

I've walked 4 miles today, coming back from Torbitts, after dropping the car off around 10:15 in the morning, me feeling like shit, low cash flow for us.  And another week, week number five of zero from DC unemployment.  Maybe it's done.  In which case I might as well through my whole life away.

Walking back into town from the waste land ash heaps of the big parking lots laid down in front of the shopping center, the Lowe's, the Home Depot, a tool shop, further on the fast food signs.  I'm hungry, I could catch a bus, Metro they call it, but it's one of those days you need something to do just to take things off of your mind.  Big time.  Who cares where you're walking, or how shitty it might by, walking up the long ramp past the dual shopping centers up over the bridge over the railroad line across the marsh, Ruby Tuesday's on the right, blank, Dunkin' Doughnuts, a cheap but classic motel a famous rock star could die in.  Then you see the two tower steam electric plant smoke stacks.  The steeple of St. Mary's, over there on the hill, and the green coming to the trees, mustard colors, green colors, fresh ozone from the lake as I walk on and on, and down the hill past the high school there behind little humble houses, Garafolla's, should I stop in for their classic cold cut sub, and later I regret it, because three guys from the Coast Guard come in with a special floating boat with a light aluminum shallow hull.  They were going to go down by the fort to berth their small vessel on their long-bed trailer.  One of the guys gives me a friendly wave and I wave back, as I walk past shops that have closed, knitting shops, several mechanic shops, and I feel bad about walking past all of them, because I have no job, no career future, no prospects, and I'm along all these poor old shops.  There used to be some prosperity here.   Sustaining shops.  Small mom and pop.  There's a Stewart Shop.  A Byrne Dairy, brand new and clean.  Ignored gas stations, a weird quiet all over, and I shlep in it on, a law office with a Maserati four door sedan, black, parked there in the corner on the next street up after Wade's Diner I've never been to, and the guy on the other side of Bridge Street pedaling up on a hybrid bicycle with a rigged trailer full of bags and bags of Okie piles of cans and bottles for the local recycling redeemer.  Enterprise car rental is across the street there, I've been past it already.  I slug on.  Then past the A & J music store brick building, the Thrifty Shopper, the Mexican restaurant, the Chinese restaurant, and depressed out of my mind and desperate I walk on and on, having wasted all my talents and I can't even take care of my old mom's finances.

I've got a ways to walk still.  Cars go by.  Organized people.  People just going about their business, in cars waiting to turn left lane into the Price Chopper.  God puts beauty in all people, attractive enough to make you in your individual mind want to make more people.  I've seen them all along the route as I walk on, solitary, alone, fucked, broke, lost all my shit, having been broken, and there's no point being a monk because you need a job, at least you could be a school teacher at the high school given all your talents.   Should I open a restaurant bistrot wine bar here, but no, it's such a mix here, too many ghosts, too many dead dying shops, shells of life in a town of what used to be in some old fairy tales, an economy good enough to support so many little bars and mechanic garages and that sort of thing, all the old structures here like old failing quietly old teeth.

What will happen with the car.  What to tell mom.  How much will it cost.  How many months more can we pay the rent here for her before having to go into her TIAA, at which point there will be a cost, a penalty.  And I have to go in and put the papers together for tax time.  

I stop in at the Big M after my long walk.  Naked, awkward, broke, broken mind, cold, trudging on, just trying to people please with a dying glow, and will the bus come, over here by the telephone pole outside here on West First Street, bus route 2D, but I can't find the paper bus route I brought, it disappeared along with everything else, and now I just limp five blocks west, five blocks north after crossing Utica Street by the usual glib easy Stewart gas station shop, lugging now another unnecessary rotisserie chicken and a small styrofoam of ground beef mixed with rice filling wrapped in cabbage Polish glumpki or whatever you'd call it, and now money is so low, lucky to have.

Erie, now I'm cold and sore but each step brings me back closer, nearer to the apartment townhouse mom has been in for how long who knows.  

I've got to make it up to Hawley, and I see the old po-polsko hill red brick church, but i'm weary blind now, and it's not going to be even any form of happy when I get back to mom's apartment, bearing a cooked rotisserie chicken, glumki, cat food cans, cheap protein black eyed peas that haven't been there at the Big M for a long time,...

Ellen Street.  What's the point.  I should just go die in the woods, the ambiguous stick woods self cluttered in my self cluttered career free life, what will they say, he was a good guy, a nice guy, our bartender man for years, but me, to me who gives a fuck.  I take the short cut down into the old railroad sunken path, cinder grit, old trash hewn over the sides to the fancy Cedarwood Townhomes, the mailbox that tells us nothing new, just another shitty piece of mail, and when I get in, finally, the front door, mom isn't happy, just displeased, where was I, you should have called, I've been waiting, where's the car, is it fixed, do you have a car, and she's hungry, starving she says, so it's a good thing I brought along the chicken.

She lets me take a nap, and I'm out and into dreamland, body dead to the world, upstairs, the green camping air mattress my only friend, sleeping on side after meditating on back, but then I'm awake again and vaguely hear her talking to herself, oh, and the cat, craziness such as I've been burdened with all my very life. 

wake up again.  do the death march of dinner, this time easy, a frozen pizza.  

And no one understood. 

I found a Gordon Lightfoot song, the one about the ship.

 I get my second vaccine shot, for the Covid-19, on Monday, just getting down to the Kinney's Drugs for the 1 PM appointment, in and out.  Sunday was another knock down and drag out thing, dinner with mom, getting her off to bed, and after all that I was up administering wine late, after the initial post dinner sleep.  

Sore arm.

Early Wednesday morning, I'm up at 2 A M, why...  but I need to get mom a pill, the pink one so...  

When I wake, the first thing, after the heartburn and the close dry air in the kitchen, congestion and then vomiting up the earlier evening's red wine, now I must hydrate.  It's cold out.  There might be snow here, soon, in the morning, here in mid-April.

"Shoulda' gotten a Ph.D., and I remember so long ago, the idiosyncratic move that doomed me with Henry Steele Commager...   I was on the ball in that class, but somehow managed to make the mistake of going to the faculty lunch with him, but not bringing my papers with me, so no walk with him across the campus, just like I missed the Dalai Lama, and you don't get second chances here at such pinnacle opportunities..."  Voice in head.

So I'm already beaten down, what the fuck have I done with my life, and then I got mom on my back now, on her turf, just as my life really starts to fall apart because of my own mistakes...

My god, my god.  But I've been through all that before.

Got to get up early to give Chuck, the neighbor, my friend, waiting to get back to bridge inspection jobs, a ride down to his mechanic to pick up his straight six '98 Jeep, but when I finally call him, around 9 AM, after being awake for 8 AM, he tells me his guy is telling him it'll be more like 11:30, so I go back upstairs, saying hi to mom as I see her on her bed, stacked amidst all her books in all directions, look out the window with her at the snow falling and covering the ground, well, I close the door to this room where I sleep on my air mattress and take a little nap, edging in and out of dreams and weary problems I can no longer solve and will have to accept eventually, and then later, after receiving the nice woman from Meals on Wheels, she's a cutie, and it's about time to go anyway, and I've cleared the car off of the snow twice already, and, as we discussed it over beers last night, sure, you want to drive?  And Chuck laughed then, and said, I'd knew you'd say that, with his hardy har harr smokers good laugh....

 But here we are now and Chuck doesn't even let the car warm up, though he notices as he guns it out of the parking lot over its bumps and pothole pavement that the engine is revving high, and the ride the whole way is like that, taking off and the whole ride is chaotic to my tastes, and the check engine light is on now, and after we pull of 104 in Scriba at the convergence of the three hills and he takes the steep road to the right, and up past the mechanic's shack and his lot out front, with the characters and ghosts of older cars and trucks then the ones before you, there is an old and queer interesting cemetery, and as I get out, shaken, as I am quite often these days, is there a vague smell of plastic smoke now as I take over the wheel. 

The engine is fluttering, now, taking with a breathing ailment, sputtering with palpitations and hesitations, and I think this is all probably related to the replacement catalytic converter our mechanic found, a few months ago, when there was the exhaust pipe failure, and which might have a related issue bearing upon the mix of fuel and air, oxygen sensors, that sort of thing.  And Chuck has noticed the sound of the grinding in the back, the rotors against the brakes, as happens on a cold day.  But as I see him walk away and get into his Jeep he doesn't seem to care much, and there is the empty orange juice plastic  bottle he swept up from the quickie mart past the McDonald's on 104 and quickly drank, going on his mad way, tossing it by reflex, done, into the back seat over his shoulder with his left hand behind us to that ultimate garbage repository, the back seat of cars immemorial.

So then, then you start thinking....  Why does it always burn you when you try to help someone else out?  

I stop at the Price Chopper, normally out of the way, to get some bone broth and a few other things you can't get at the Big M. lamb chops with a good expiration date.  Almond butter.  No, they don't have Rye Vita crackers, and by now I don't have the patience to look uselessly through gluten free or healthier bread options.  

Like the Tinder date, who then didn't want to drive her car back to her parents, so you drove her in her car  back home, thinking then you'd just walk back or get a cab...  But her parents are lovely, they make their own wine, they have interesting lives.  The young lady keeps two Clawed African Frogs, swimming listlessly in their tank, and before you go, it doesn't seem quite right, but she turns up the temperature on the tank, up to ninety.

Then later I get dropped, blamed for killing the frogs because it happened during your visit, and she's a depressive, so I hope nothing drastic happens, and maybe the family is mobbed up a bit...

Oh shit, that was not worth it, boys and girls.  Strife.  That's all that happens.  Strife and discontent.

And this is where we get closer to the first, the one true sentence.

Just about two in the morning, just as I am finally ready to write, or think like Picasso, just at the very moment, like a ghost, creepily, down the stairs comes mom, just when I'm beginning to have the right wine in the right mind, have taken out the smelly garbage bag, done the dishes, and she needs some attention and I give her her pink pill and she will crinkle the saltine wrapper and hunch over the counter at her low height, inspect the cat's dish, peer outside at the cold backyard...  So where are you going next?  What are your plans for today?  What are we doing for fun...

Her timing, exact, so much that it spooks you.

Well, mom.  Trying not to let out a shout with blood a'boiling instantly...  Well mom.  I'm trying not to shout at her at this point, as I say, because she can't hear so well.

My Life had Stood.  A Loaded Gun.  In Corners...  till a Day   The Owner passed --identified-- And carried Me away -- (however it goes.)  The oversoul overlord transcendent being guiding us all asks of us to be the loaded gun, picked up we are now, and what do we do?  WE WRITE A POEM.  That's what Emily did.  I explain.  

I'm trying not to be dragged down by her little ground like turtle toad creepiness... we have the nobility of our Father, and yet we're born from creepy little overachieving dirt, earth rather, dust.  No need to be cruel.  No need to shout even as you might like to at the interference pattern interloper.  Fame?  You think fame is a problem?  Try having a mother.

Where are you going next, Mom, I ask, turning the question around.  Why don't you go out for a little walk in the backyard.

It's too cold out.

She crinkles more at the saltine wrapper over my shoulder, as I'm thinking of transcribing a thought of Furtwangler, after looking in the refrigerator but unable to find anything.  Clueless bitch, I mutter, evil, to myself.  

I stand up and look for a stick of incense, Frankincense & Myrrh, looking for matches, and when I get it lit I wave it around and make the sign of the Cross over her, she looks at me, and then I walk through the room and up the stairs and to her bedroom.  She follows me up.  Oh, I can't come in.  Mom, it's your bedroom.  I adjust the television to something more of nature, North Woods Law, from Maine, game warden police doing their jobs keeping hunters and fishermen and outdoorsman in line.  You put a hex on me, she says.  No, this is Christian incense, and I explain.  I'll be quiet, she says.  Okay.

But now my ire is up.  I don't know why.  It's dark, cold, wet, about 33 degrees out, April snow.

Will she wake me up tomorrow, with what?

My mother is dead.  Bill Cunningham is dead.  Oh, that's interesting...  He died back in 2016, or so.

It's okay, in the night, as long as I have my wine.  And she feels the same about wine too, it's just a difference of opinion about how one manages to be creative.   That's the big point here I'm writing about tonight.  The world will always throw up hindrances at you, moral tests, like the Nazis came to beautiful cultured Furtwangler's doorstep, asking for him to bow, we'll give you this great stipend, we'll give you this huge baronial estate house to live, as long as you Heil Hitler salute to me, as long as you make the Berliner Philharmonic free to be an arm of Nazi Propaganda.

But the man knew.  He knew music was the issue, the thing to work on, for him at least.  (This is not said well.) And if he could do the right thing for his own inner spirit, he knew, this will help, this will help, all of us, all of us.

WF:  Without a community to which it is addressed, artistic form has no meaning at all.

WF: However high the technical capacity of an orchestra may be, the conductor has one arch enemy to fight.  Routine.  Routine is something very human, very understandable.  It's a line of least resistance, and there's no denying that in daily life it has its advantages.  But all the more must we insist that it plays the most deadly role in music.  Especially in the performance of old and familiar works.  In fact, routine with its loveless mediocrity and its treacherous perfection lies like hoar-frost on the performance of the most beautiful and best known works.

‘The conductor has one arch-enemy to fight: routine. Routine is very human, very understandable, it is the line of least resistance and there is no denying that in daily life it has its advantages. But all the more must we insist that it plays the most deadly role in music, especially in the performance of old and familiar works. In fact routine with its loveless mediocrity and its treacherous perfection lies like hoar-frost on the performance of the most beautiful and best-known works’.   James Keel.  Record of a BBC interview.  (norpete.com) https://www.norpete.com/c0181.html?viewfullsite=1

How is the great conductor and the bartender of any difference in the eyes of God...  well, in lots of ways.  The barman is a slouch, even if he likes his quiet walks and the motions of music and art.

I didn't feel like getting up yet.  Mom is quiet.  I roll over on my side.  I call the DC Unemployment line, wait a half an hour on hold three times, twice getting disconnected, then finally getting through.  They are back-logged, and the news, a computer system upgrade, that's what must be holding things up, but you wonder, in the back of your mind...

But it's been getting on my nerves, of course, being on the edge already, still keeping my apartment in DC, not getting the DC unemployment funds and then the federal pandemic aid on top of that.  So instead of $644 a week after taxes, nothing, and no obvious reason for it, I keep filing each week, the system accepts, but, still...

And then there's also mom's cash flow to worry about, how much is the car going to cost us, but what other option... The replacement catalytic convertor wasn't factory spec but an off brand, and the only problem was how the fuel sensors would adapt.  And now, maybe the system just isn't working anymore.

Leaving me pretty much sick with worry most of the waking hours on top of having to deal with mom who throws a big pout in the parking lot of the Big M because she feels it would be nice to go The Press Box, and so on, getting ugly with me...  I have no real choice but to give in.  And then you sit at the table too cramped and stressed, and then she's angry at me, because I'm being grumpy....  There's no use at all trying to talk to her about it, I mean, you might mention it, but what's the point of trying to get anywhere with it.  "It's not too late," she'll tell me.  And then the final fuss over finding her face-mask for her when we get up to use the restrooms and get back to the house.  And I should have been on the phone with the mechanic...

And curse anyone ever for ever being depressed in life, and the old house still haunts me.  The depressions are what will prevent you from moving forward.  Overbearing people in your life you cannot have a dialogue with...

I even see what shit this is, the whole writing thing, puny, minuscule, navel staring, except that you have to do your scales, and nothing means anything anymore anyway, and after doing the dishes after cooking a shitty dinner for us, rotisserie chicken in a soup, goaded on, I sit down and listen to a Furtwangler documentary.  

I got to write a bit.  That was the good thing.  Though I don't think I did a good job at it.  And there was the democratic experiment of a bartender's study, though I don't think that was much good either, or anyway.  I would have rather been a bit happier and more self-confident, did more with music, learned the piano and played classical music.

There is after all surprising intelligence and knowledge and learning in the people you come across, even in the lowly restaurant business, even in doorman who once were line cooks out in Lincoln, Nebraska, an impressive Vonnegut-ian knowledge of all things ...  & sundry.  Low things, high things, historical things, practical things.   You might think they are idiots, but there are plenty of intelligent minds in the restaurant business.  It's a way a lot of intelligent people without the luxury of a supported higher education get by, got by.

But I tell you, in life sometimes, depending, there is no choice but to be up at night, to find the quietness for the creativity burgeoning within you, burdening you, and in the nighttime there are the only people out there to make the journey of thinking and making art and creativity, where the rest of the day is filled with the most tiresome chatter one could possibly imagine, and which God himself must look down and think, for such chatter I in my infinite wisdom did not create you for this...

The book I wrote was and is regarded as a trifle, as shit.  Doesn't bother me.

But one has to give credit, acknowledgment to the fact of the divine loaded gun in corners creativity within.  There's a democratic right to that here, for your own right to interpret reality. 

It has become difficult here.  I can't do it, if I don't keep this time to myself.  But that is the conundrum.  If I were to be able to get myself I could do a bit better the dirty tasks, taxes, bill paying, the call to the lawyer, things now I can only take in small bites.

Does anyone else want to deal with her?  Will anyone call her?  

The reward for my kindness to her, to be the only one who would listen to her...

It starts to dawn on me, as I'm full of worries about the old car, and finding out just how difficult it is if you cannot take mom for a ride, up there, over there, by Rice Creek, up and out west to old Sterling, or simply along the lake:  maybe, just maybe, the unemployment and the additional federal pandemic help, maybe that has, unbeknownst to me, run out.  Maybe it isn't the recent computer upgrade.  There are messages in my inbox, cryptic, about how I will receive some status update through the mail, but Trump's appointed Postmaster General Dejoy has slowed the mail down enough to make you crazy on top of all the other things making you crazy.

So maybe I will not receive the last four weeks I thought were coming.  Nor any more.  And there's still my twelve hundred a month apartment with the stuff, my stuff, the things I managed to keep after the whole Decatur Place thing with the old landlord and my trying to balance too many weighty draining things, mom calling in need of emotional support and love, the restaurant business picking my bones dry, and then on top of that the true sense of my going nowhere, just falling behind, behind the Eight Ball as we say.  Maybe that's it.  

It's not a good feeling.  I take a long walk after fending off the repeated questions from senile mom, again and again, Tuesday, mom, Tuesday, that's when I'm taking the car in;  yes, mom, yes, I'll call Mr. Torbitt's to see if it's safe to drive the car there, yes, mom;  yes, mom, a rental car is about fifty bucks a day, and I'd rather not spend that.  But how's your unemployment?  Yes, mom I called them.  There's nothing they are telling me.  

I go for a long walk, slow, under a vaguely sunny sky.  Up the hill along the road, steep up to the water tower.  I'm rattled now.  I turned the car over after checking the mail, nothing but an offer from The Sierra Club, no news.  We took mom's check in yesterday, stressing the car out, the check engine light flashing now and then, not just steady, which is horrible and frightening.  I'm rattled, and it seems indeed the oil has gone down a bit, from one side of the stick indicator, if I'm reading it right, and the check engine light is on still, though not flashing.  I take the off the gas cap too, maybe that will allow for some readjustment.     But I'm so rattled that it does not occur to me, after the googling "check engine light flashing" and the eight possible causes, to not leave the car running when you are trying to top off the oil, and a quick impressive spray comes out, which later I conclude will cause a huge fire as I try to get the car out again to Scriba, but not as far as Chuck's mechanic...  I take some windex out along with more paper towels to clean the windshield off of the motor oil splatter.  What an idiot I am.

When I get back, after an hour, mom tells me she's been out for a walk too, over to the old farmhouse just a ten minute walk away, who sometimes has a junky yard sale, a rickety chair, something mom finds interesting.  I went over there, she tells me, but he's gone, he's dead.    And this I have to hear for a little while, and then over dinner, and even with a turkey meatloaf in the oven I'm trying to do tree poses but I hear the back door creak, and "where's supper."  Jesus Christ.

Better to take her for a ride than endure this, but we cannot do that now.

Virginia, they've opened the bars for sitting at, though at a six feet distance between parties...  Soon that will come to DC and the old bar at the Dying Gaul, and the trouble will only get worse for me.

Sundown.  Then again I have to worry, just as I've got mom dinner, and they seem to get harder and more laborious to cook, when I've cobbled together a decent dinner after all her rants and poking at me, lamb chops, say, one night, she is demanding now, like a child on the verge of a tantrum, after that then just when you're down and you're struggling to find enough of a relaxation from wine, dealing with the old woman's egomania, then she starts in on you with you.  But I'm worried about the cats.  How will I get him home, to my home home.  Up the road a piece.  Mom, does any of this look familiar to you.

Soon it's so tiresome and useless I get her a few scoops of coffee ice-cream, go upstairs to turn her television on, hope her body has enough room with all her books and piles and stacks and cruel messes of accumulated old shoes and useless bits of jewelry and clutters of things and stuff, all of it thrown into a still maelstrom of piles here and there and everywhere, by this point, after all that, I see how useless it all is, fighting a flood, every day, drain enough water, but it fills right back up again.

The only rest is the nighttime, after the three or four hours of troubled sleep when now it is quiet, and I'll be awake for three hours, doing the dishes, checking the dehumidifier in the basement, the load of your clothing in the dryer you forgot about in all the hell you're going through, distant voices over phones, no one to help out, and all the while you get this feeling of the slow ostracizing of the neighbors, even as they approve and applaud your efforts to keep your old mom the lady in her apartment, but the paper work cutting you, bleeding you, and worse, on top of all that, realizing, or pretending, or seeing, "my god, I am no completely unemployable, and all my stuff will be out in the street, and I can no longer even have the energy to invest in caring about such a bleak scenario happening.

Is there anything good to eat here?  Maybe a hotdog at three AM, to prevent, as Van Gogh's morning beer, to call in an aid, an anesthetic necessary for the terrible old lone Capricorn dealing with all the shit.

The clock ticks, mom's money cash flow is running down.  We're on edge most of the time.  I take walks to get some space, by the power lines, but still it's cold and windy, painful, stretches of marsh land and wet land cat tails bird habitat yet to be filled in with strip mall paved roads and it won't happen here under the great giant Quixote windmill power lines stretching all the way south towards Fulton.

Mom is upstairs in her bed, closer and closer to the older part of old age and the open jaw of Beethoven death bed gasps, but she's here still and all her books are here still.

But we are running out of fuel, and I never stood up for myself enough to have a fitting job more than a lackey one.  Take the car in for a fix, tomorrow, which of course makes me nervous, because I don't have a job, I'm running out of unemployment funds, they could be cut off already for all I know, and I, worse of all, have no ability to write a book of any sort.  Nothing.

 But maybe the thing is, at the end of the day, to have less karma rather than more.  Thus, a need to strip down, eliminate what you have not already bought into yet.  The quietest possible life you can maintain.

Ahh, this is it.

Don't do anything to generate more shit.  Avoid what you can, at all costs.  Do not pick up any more vices.  Do not attempt to go out on any dates. 

Because it will be shown that you have nothing, that you are nothing, that you're a total failure, so stop pretending, stop trying to be what you are not, even though to do so is incredibly sad, unwanted as far as your concerned.

Oh, but you're sent into life to learn these things.  Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart.

Writing even ain't barely worth it.  Because to do that you need some form of fuel.  (Better off simply meditating.)

Just go back to your chakra energy centers.  To your alignment.  It's not too late to be in the best shape you yourself at this stage can personally be in.

Listen to a Bruckner Symphony.

You're already so false just trying to be who you already are.  You're "not man enough" to really go fully with the learning of karma, but at least you can pass on the idea...

Something to make it not feel so bad that here now you find yourself losing the life you had, the one you even worked for, the one by which the people know you.  

Sad, all the lives you lost, just to get where you are.   All the better ones that dropped off, sort of like negative rocket stages, that you yourself missed like you miss a turn and then you're on the wrong highway.

The poor American doesn't always know how to act his social caste and calling, his accepted position in the layers of which our educations match what we do in a simple uncomplicated way.  The jukebox here is too open, and we feel it good and obliged even to sing all songs and include all voices, which in the end results, or can, in a tragedy of great confusion.  And then we don't know who we are anymore, trying to be too many people.  We try to wear too many hats in the American democracy, leaving us open to a demagog dictator want to be who tries to corral enough of the electorate.  

We have no focus.  

Furtwangler, a quiet man.  Bruckner modernist touches swirling with Beethoven continuations.  Keep your kids in school.  Have them learn an instrument, the piano.  

 So, I'm up fairly late making another batch of braised short ribs, having left the last one on a cold electric burner, not knowing it wasn't hooked in fully, before going off to bed on the night I was drinking vodka and not counting them.  It had been another day with mom chattering away and after a long nap after going out with her in the daytime, around 4 in the afternoon, I woke from a long nap and started cooking, first with the Ruffino Chianti, and then, using that to cook with, a Beaujolais and again I wake up more hungover than I should be, but that's how it goes.  Mom's been calling out Help, help, kill myself, the usual self talk from her Eames chair and when I come down stairs it half surprises me that she's actually sitting there quite calmly reading intently.

As soon as I'm down, though, in the kitchen, heating the filtered tap water in the kettle, checking on the spare ribs, for my tea, she's getting increasingly emotional:  why won't anybody talk to me, my mother just died, what can I do to help, oh, please, somebody talk to me, and by the time the tea is steeping she's just about in tears, and I explain to her I'm making breakfast for us, and when the eggs are lightly fried with a little water in the pan, on the plate and the slices of fresh sliced turkey, I call her into the kitchen and ask her to sit down at the table.  I've made a piece of toast for her, whole wheat, from the kind people of Meals on Wheels.  I sip my tea, cooled with a teaspoon of ground flax seed, an ice cube, one, for good measure, so I can wake up now.

We take a drive, it's a cold kind of dreary day in the low forties range with a hidden wind, but the hillsides are waking up from winter, soft wispy green in the branches, the willows advanced, the forsythia along, and we're out by Sterling along the Western branch of the creek, through the old towns strung along the old roads and the hills.  I take pictures of things that bring emotions to me, and maybe you have to be pretty desperate and depressed and trapped in order to be moved by the roll of land with corn stubble rows and fields with the budding trees beyond that, or the rows in an orchard, or a partially abandoned Christmas tree farm.  We're taking the long way around, I guess you could call it, to Sterling Nature Center.  And along the route I pull the car to the side of a quiet road and take a picture with the camera on my iPhone, lifting up my glasses so I can see the little screen better.     Old houses, shacks almost, old window panes rippled by time, the trees budding over there above the stream, and then the fields and more fields by farmhouses.  

We get back and mom still wants to talk and talk and talk.  She talks about the cat, how surprised that this is the same cat.  Will there be other people joining us?  She's hungry, and fortunately I picked up a rotisserie roasted chicken on our way back, so a couple of slices off of that, a little bit of mustard, then maybe she'll just go upstairs and be quiet.  When I put my coats on, layering, to go out for a walk she says again, maybe she'll just go upstairs for a nap, okay, and I step outside, but I don't get very far, not even past the parking lot, because it feels really cold out, and this week, yeah, I think I'll just go back in.

So I'm sitting here, and mom's gone up for a nap, and I'm writing about how the pictures remind me of Hemingway's philosophy of prose, of writing down what you saw and how you saw it, the thing that gave you the emotions, and when I look back on the screen of my iPhone at the pictures, I see there is indeed something that remains, and that even brings back the emotions, and there is within the pictures something like the agreements in nature, so that make a true composition you allow it have happened, and then you see it later on still, how the trees seem to agree with the sky and the ground and the things living and growing on the earth, and if you're careful you can almost see how the things of human beings can fit in with all that as well, though now they are old things, weather-beaten, by and large or often enough.

I'm writing this and then the phone is ringing, it's my aunt, being supportive, and I'm happy to talk to her and share with her the events of the week we had to take the cat down into the depths of Syracuse metro sprawl with highways and ramps and disorienting clusters of commercial structures that later made me feel very glad to be getting away from.  

And Grandfather Vinard would, when he'd decided he'd had enough, he would simply get up from the family dinner table and out the door and walk all the way down to Lynn Beach, all the way from Park.  He was a policeman, he walked a beat, later in life, he had white hair.  And I'm glad I have the inkling of this same gene within me, and how I really must strain to deal with the constant talk, the talk made worse by my mother's old age.  

I have a nice conversation over the phone standing in the back, overlooking the bird feeder and the cat's yard, ducking in to warm myself, and I share how for the last three weeks I have not received the expected unemployment insurance payments for the Pandemic Relief, and other concerning things that make me sick to my stomach, on top of the anxieties I have as when I leave mom in the car to run in and grab the necessary groceries, for I know she will be complaining about how long it took me, and the little fork lift taking something out the side garage door of the Big M market in the old train station, and "did you see anybody you knew," so that I'm bound to be confused by something with that tugging beeping signal in the brain going off and it's a wonder I don't get in a car accident with her beside me.

But then, oh fuck, I hear the steps coming down and across the living room and toward the kitchen, so I thank my aunt and turn the phone over to mom to say hi, and when mom's done she comes into the kitchen and when is dinner going to be ready...  Okay, so, I just fed her it feels like, but I've got some red quinoa cooked to quickly microwave, and the pot of the spare ribs is there ready to go, so it's a simple dinner, I'm not even hungry, and hopefully she'll just go up and be quiet afterward.  She got it earlier, when I was sitting at the kitchen table about to write at the laptop after doing the dishes in the tub...

Later I try to return to writing, but even with coffee, no, it's run its course, and I go back and look at the pictures on the screen of my iPhone and upload a few of them for my friends to see, having a small sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, besides the quiet seeing of the agreement between the trees and other trees and with the land and the sky and the life that inhabits the Earth.

What you do not realize as a young man, a younger fellow, with no way of knowing, is that the further away you might go from whatever might be regarded as official and approved language, the accepted language of the professional academic, or the lawyer, the money, business and policy analyst, that should you stray from that out into the creative mind, the attempt to capture experience with some intimacy that one day you realize you've gone far beyond the bounds, into a kind of madness, from which there is no returning from.  You might make perfect sense to yourself, but to the mass bulk of how you are received is tainted by the regard of you as a kind of madman, a person who cannot fit in.   Where and when did this happen?  Where did you cross the line?  But there is no line, only a steady continuum, so that you can go as far back as you might like or be able to remember and still find only that sort of person who now, as we know, cannot fit in, even if technically he could speak with just about anyone, politely more or less, with the friendship and friendliness the species is capable of, or if he had to perform certain kinds of jobs, but ever more restricted as they are by rules and standards of conduct that might be so expansive as to coexist with his innate sense of humor.

And there you are, slowly watching it all, how events of a certain kind have had their universal gravitational black hole pull on your own being, and each act of struggle against that only pulls you in deeper.  And there are things you would like to turn off, to be spared from, but unfortunately your heart is just big enough to endure and to still care, even as the slow destruction comes to you as well, like a family's genetic code.

I do not see the surface of nature so much as to just stand there and shoot it, knowing that behind this surface there are things that emotionally move you, and deeply.  Maybe it is some overall rule of nature never quite elicited, never quite fleshed out along with all the other observations of science and theory, the way the things in any scene in which the nature of the planet is inclusively there beside us, before us, the way things of nature communicate with each other, an agreement come to, easily, seen in the light of the emotions a human being can carry within himself.  I stop by the road.  I get out, with my little electronic camera, whenever I see something, feel something, and then all I need to do is quite simple and easy, as long as you take to time to ask yourself the question, what do I see, what am I seeing, what is making me feel this.

I suppose the madman is scraped raw enough by the every day emotions of him not fitting in so well, having no place to go and call home, but unfortunately, every where.  Under the tree.  By the old orchard.  Up on that hill in the creaky old barn, or upon the seat of tractors lined up by the road.  Where the birds are.  Beyond the fields.

(Hemingway, along with them, had a fine instrument, and one that got banged around a lot.  Was it all the booze, on top of concussions and other shocks that brought an end to his peace...  But the damage too, one might imagine, made him feel things so that he could see them and render them into sentences.)

I wish I could sleep now, but I cannot.  I'm sure looking at the screen does not help.

To be led, to be guided by that instrument, the one of emotion leading one on to the intuitive realm where poetry, science and insight gather in order to better see and understand, is a good and fine and useful thing.  But, because of the instrument’s hard wired attachment to the heart, as we say, can make for a life more fraught, one might suppose.  In a cold rational world, yes...  to continue on is a hard defeating thing. 

The estimation of what one man, one human being can or has achieved is better done when the subject, the author, largely disappears.  Which is hard to do, a hard and almost careless act.  Could one be Hemingway and still be capable of disappearing into the poet science?  Only through the act, obscure, done in complete privacy, coming up again with the unexpected, the creative unanticipated surprise of finding one’s own self directly before a thing.

One wants no tricks for all that, wants no cheapening distraction for his own instrument.

humorous sketch

 When I was a teenager, I was so inspired by the summer Olympics and the marathon, Montreal, I think, where Frank Shorter, who won in Munich, came in with a silver medal.  I became a pretty serious runner, and I had the roads to run on, up and down, all sorts of terrain.  

But anyway, it was a rural road, and it had its attractions to people who were having fun at night, a sort of unknown road back then that inspired you, as it did for me, a 14 year old kid out on a run through the fresh air.  One day I'm jogging up the last crest of the hill that brought you past Chuck Root's property and out onto to the flats where there were corn fields on both sides of the road, to the right, the land climbing up to the lower reaches of the Champion farm, and to the left a field and a drop off and a perfect view of the farmland over on the other side of the valley.  Magnificent, really.

Well, it's a warm summer afternoon, something like that, and I'm out for my afternoon run.  It actually could have been a bike ride, yes, maybe it was, as I got into the cycling a bit later, after Osgood Schlatter Syndrome, and anyway, across the road, open like the Bible, was a Hustler.  And I could immediately see the glorious pictures...

So I smuggle the magazine home, and share it with my brother, because that's what you did, of course.  

Well, anyway, it's late in the evening, bedtime, and I have my headphones on listening to a cassette tape little white box player, and I have the Hustler out by the Sports Illustrated, and I'm ready for a little self-pleasuring ritual involving a rabbit fur faux coonskin cap, a la Danial Boone and Davey Crockett, and I don't really hear my mother coming in.  And the only thing is, she notices the magazine cover, and we'd figured out to send off for a few more in the mail, as it was us boys who went to the mailbox to retrieve the mail anyway, and we thought we could get away with it and did.  If I'd been on my toes, a little quicker, I could have shoved the Hustler magazines under the Sports Illustrated ones, to cover them up, but I was too slow, and...

And so, here I am, I feel like so much of that sort of pleasure has been deprived of me, because of the severe scolding, a whole scene that was, to this day I don't want to think about it, because then everybody got involved, and. I just felt like the worst person in the whole world for enjoying what was immensely physically enjoyable a communion, even just for the eyes, beautiful women, naked, relaxing for photographs.  

And to find myself at 56 with that same fear, mom imposing herself upon me, going crazy on me, like just when I'm starting to get in the groove writing, or putting together a little recording of music on the guitar, here she comes, glomming onto me, her favorite son, of course.   Here she comes, first down the stairs, creepy, then going "hello, hello?" in some disoriented state.  And of course it's all fine for her, yeah, she doesn't care.

I cook these days.  Drink wine.  Trying out vodka soda reruns tonight maybe so the buzz to hangover ratio can be adjusted.

The cat's abscess. sketch 4/13

But, computer mind, what am I doing here?  Should I be writing a country music song?  What?  In the meantime I have become addicted to Facebook. Pandemic...  Crap behavior.

I'm not even being good to mom.  Horrible.  

What am I doing?  Why am I not looking for a job?  Why am I not freaking out when I'm about to lose everything....

Hung out with Chuck tonight.  Maybe that's better than just taking a long unhappy nap, then broken up sleep.

The regrets of the drinking life come at you full bore.  Tragic.

You're in a house of drinkers, and you're the one who can't handle it.  And yet, you get energy out of it.

You want to quit, but if you did, well, you wouldn't have the energy to write the tale, so it seems.

Every night you have to think of what to do for mom for dinner.   We are easily worn out.

I drink, and I put weight into my own thought processes, when really I should cede to the great works of scholarship and literature that are here already, and who cares what I have to say...

We took the cat down to East Syracuse off of 481 and 690, mom on me the whole way please slow down, I can't take anymore, how fast are you going, please, I can't take it anymore, (starting to snivel and cry oh boohoo, I can't take it, you're going too fast, the old car can't take it,) and meanwhile I'm thinking of the poor cat with an abscess under his jaw quietly in his box that he fits in.  If I'd been quiet and done my research in the night instead of having a beer with old Chuck, who has cat with an amputated real leg himself, if I'd been on the ball I could have taken our cat down to the emergency vet clinic in Baldwinsville open all night sunday,...  I could have avoided all this.

What's healthier now?  Go for a walk, or write... while mom is calm upstairs today...

But this day feels very weird.  After taking the cat down, he seems mutable, changing, even though he is back to his old sleep places.   I feel weird in the head from the tree pollen, as if a different person had stepped into my body.  

Yesterday, caught between mom who now wants the cat back or go use the bathroom.  So I'm on the phone with the people at the veterinarian, they want to test a sample of the drained pus from this wound, for two hundred dollars extra, and then okay, we settle for just getting him a shot of antibiotics, and mom is pleading constantly about her bladder, over and over, and angry with me now, getting out of the car even in the damp rain as if to chase me down to go in and demand to get the cat back to the car, except of course you can't go it, and there's a sign, in this old car-lot dealership type of office building of two stories in this reclaimed marshland under the highways, the closest restroom is across another major road beyond a big parking lot, at The Home Depot.  None of this is in my control, and it was an hour drive getting down here with the wind strong and the car making a lot of noise so I can't even hear NPR news, and mom is telling me constantly to slow down, it's an old car, I can't take it anymore, when are we going to get there, is it soon, and the rain picks up on the way down as we negotiate past the ramps of 481 crossing over 81 north south, and good thing I have my iPhone map voice telling me where to turn, what exit, how long to be on 690 another dreadful road, to get onto Bridge street, and a good few disorienting off ramp roundabouts, and mom crying, and I'm ashamed of myself for not knowing the Baldwinsville Animal Clinic, also an emergency clinic was open all last night and I could have dealt with all this by alone in the quiet while mom slept, god how easier that would have been...  instead of this living hell. 

We get the cat back finally, and I get mom over to the Home Depot parking lot, to find this bathroom, and of course the place is a huge hanger of a building, with massive aisles, stacked up high, and the nice woman with an orange vest, says, yes, go down to aisle nine where it says lighting, and then the restrooms are all the way in the back, and mom shuffles slowly behind me, and then back out into the rainy parking lot, and now we just have to get out of here, looks easy, right?, as I see a sign ahead that says 690 East/481, and as we come out of the circle on-ramp, this is not an easy merge to make, with fast Beltway like traffic coming up behind you and you have to get over into the left lane, and mom's got my head in such a bad place I suddenly don't know what gear I'm in, and there's a guy behind me, and what to the lane markings mean, and I can barely make the turn to the left, almost getting us killed, not quite, and this too shakes me.  At least then after this in this weary flat land flats and reads and gravel beds and high tassel reeds like bullrushes, dried out, at least we are on the right highway road, 481 North, going past the thruway tollbooth, and the rain is steady now, and mom is back at it, please don't go so fast almost crying again, and with the rain now there's a drip coming down from windshield.  

Mom comes down the stairs now after some strange eerie peace and quiet as I find myself still messed with by yesterday not to mention the cruel swelling the poor cat had, still sleeping it off. And so I can't think anymore.  Then she starts pretend singing, as she can't remember much of yesterday...

My head feels lost and swoony, almost if I could faint.  Was it the wine followed by the cider last night?  Was it the horror of realizing I have no idea what I'm doing up here, 'cept taking care of mom, and she just told me she put all of her books on "a different bed," "organizing them."  

We stopped at the McDonald's at Fulton.  We pulled up into Oswego, a new massive construction project going on along 48 above the mighty river and the canal locks, across the bridge and I was so exhausted by then we simply went back to mom's townhouse.  Got the cat in his carrier into the apartment, put away the McDonald's extra coupon sandwiches--I ate the first one, quarter pounder with cheese, they give you two slices, there in the car as mom had her crispy chicken sandwich, bun and all, no more fight left in me, and the horror of the East Syracuse urban highway sprawl, will this be where I end up, working one of those jobs down there with all those nightmare roads... I could cry.  Oswego, a whole lot simpler, but even now, the construction is coming, ruining that old magic transport of the river viewed as you finally came in off that long bugger of a drive up from DC.  

And through out all of this, my boyish memories of my father, so competent and unafraid of things, just go and do them, like take me to the doctor when I wiped out in the grit of the road from the winter snow plow sanding trucks coming down Champion, or when Tim Hubbard banged my locked door into my head somehow.  So on top of things, with stoic patience and wearwithall, getting the thing done that needed to be done, without any complication, without any fright, just like my brother carries on the tradition, getting things done, like taking me to Syracuse to see the bone doctor when my growing pains in the knees came up.

And he had to deal with mom too, my dad.  In the car.  And everyone has to be a mind reader with her too.  But she knows of no wrongdoing on her own part whatsoever.  

And I've been a drinker, no wonder, and this is sad, given the heavy and rising costs of all that, the general toll it takes, the kind of constant lying.

But at least, but at least, I have an outlet still, even mocked alone by the breaks of life events beyond the control.  I have to listen to too much for too long from my mother anyway, talked out.

Mom is being quiet today.  She's taken time longer than usual, upstairs in her room.  

I'm cooking a bone in chicken breast over a mushroom sauce, baking it in the oven.   A strange feeling from the pollen.

I finished watching The Sound of Metal on Amazon Prime, being able to take it only in parts, not wanting it all over me in one sitting.