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.