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...