And then it became very hard to write.

I drove up on a Friday, the first week, picking up the rental car as rumors flew about a Presidential Act calling in the National Guard to close down interstate travel.  I'm in an Uber.  I check the web, a rumor, proven to be false.  All the rest stops on Pennsylvania closed, an eery silence on the roads.  In Ravine, where I stop, just as the road climbs into the mountains, I use the restroom.  Not even any appetite for a Whopper, a double, sandwich only.  A trucker man reaches out to me as I look at the Burger King counter.  Through the big notch, four hours in, on time.  At Great Bend, I pull off the road to use the restroom of a convenience market gas station, and they've got Portopotties lined up outside.


On Thursday, I drove back, leaving at 4:30 PM, hard to part with my old mom, wondering whether or not I'd brought the Coronavirus to her doorstep.  I also felt I needed to get back, to process the mail related to the unemployment benefits.  My head turned over many thoughts, almost all of them dark, and the only hopeful thing I saw was that perhaps I'd gotten her back on track with her medicine, the one for her memory.

I pulled into DC around midnight.  I unpacked the car, pulling out the opened bottle of ten dollar Chianti from the night before, eventually falling into an uneasy rest and finally, sleep.  Then a very anxious day, worrying my head over whether mom was displaying any symptoms, wondering if it might be better to keep the rental car just in case.  She mentioned being sore.

Up at mom's, a coworker had called me to tell me that she might have been exposed, since meeting a doctor friend of hers who had been exposed.  Great...  Calling her later, trying to make my mind up for a next step, what to do, her ache was only in her shoulder, a slight relief.


I also had a job interview lined up, and summoning my courage I drove the rental black Toyota down and across Key Bridge and onto Wilson Boulevard to slowly make my way through what I knew as familiar, until it wasn't familiar anymore, coming upon my destination, Total Wine, a retail shop occupying the first floor of the modern recently constructed office building, circling the block, figuring out the parking, guiltily calling my mom again.  I went in for my interview, early.  The young woman, tall, was kind to me, easy going.  They weren't offering much, a cashier position, to meet the current business model of on-line and curbside.  With social distancing, there wasn't to be any real wine recommendations happening.

I found a convenient Enterprise car rental office to drop off the car, and near the Ballston Metro, I caught a Metro bus back along the line into town, back to the DC side of the river, from where I could shuffle home.  The bus took many turns that confused me.  I lose my direction in Virginia.  There are, on the other hand, a good amount of conveniences, but anyway, I slogged back up the old hill, the same one I'd stared at when I first came to town in 1988, made it to the friendly little Korean market for some cold cuts, 70 percent rubbing alcohol, a small container of tuna salad, a bottle of soda water, walking back slowly to the little apartment, with khakis, blue blazer...  Why haven't I gone to more job interviews, to better myself, my station.

Later, I went and did some yoga at dusk up on the little bluff, relieving the pressure from my visit.  Is she more forgetful, more repetitive, harder to deal with in general?


I look at the jobs I seem eligible for.  Not pretty, it is.

Mom, over dinner, asks me, so what are you working on.  So I begin with a few sketches.  I talk of how Kerouac, in putting up with the Neal Cassady people of the world, was effectively being a good Christian.  She likes this, but then her mind turns.  "You need to find something solid.  You need to make something happen."  She starts crying.  "I've done you a great disservice," she says, sobbing out front of the apartment.   "I could kill myself."  I try to reassure her that I'll make something happen, to save myself, effectively.

Eventually, the conversation is forgotten, swept away by the next day, the next long ride somewhere, to the shores of the great lake, Ontario, here.  In the wine that is essential with lunch and dinner, even for me, maybe particularly so.

Over dinner, again, a conversation comes up.  "I've been telling you for thirty years to believe in Ted, to think good thoughts.  Who knows what you could do?  You could promote all the bands you know, up here in Oswego," and again, I turn away from the conversation, feeling a sadness deep down.

What happened to me?  I reflect on the Sondheim Fresh Air Birthday interview, how, again, I could have studied acting, and singing too, and been a song and dance man.  But I got depressed that year, late 1986, and my inability to write papers had been building, falling into some childish juvenile spiritual ideas, of how things happen in accordance with great unknown and unseen laws divinely and fatefully ordained, in a way of being appropriate.  So, no, I didn't get the girl, all my talents did not be put to use, the musical ones, the ones that come out of being reasonably attractive or even good looking almost like a minor movie star...  I did not become a college professor, nor even a high school teacher.  And instead, so it seems, I've greatly failed, and can't even take care of my old mother now, let alone even myself.

Such are the things of talent, talents squandered.  I've tried to read wise books, to the extent I have the energy for.

And all of it has led me to where I am now.   Waiting on unemployment.

"You never ask for help," mom's voice, echoes in my head.

Yes, the dark thoughts.  And what do you do with them, you push them away, and move onward.