I'm up at eleven, that's pretty good, and mom's not so hard to deal with.  Meals on Wheels drops of a plastic bag containing two small cartons of Byrne Dairy milk, red on white, dated, and two sturdy food handling cardboard trays, the first one having olive egg salad, which mom enjoys now, some beets, pickled, and some fruit salad, the other bearing a hamburger, roasted potatoes in small pieces, a vegetable medley, carrots, peas, etc. 

I survey the kitchen first, at least I'm up, the tub of last night's dishes waiting off the counter on the floor by the stove, put on a pot of water to boil, to make some green tea, some dandelion tea, some hot water to go with lemon and curcumin.  I get mom her pills.  Things feel like a mess, and I am slow to wake up.  Mom wants a piece of the whole wheat bread they brought toasted, and it takes me a good long moment to scan the fridge for the open block of butter...

I look through the news briefly as I sit with her.  I'm not really hungry yet, just trying to send the right messages to my metabolism to get it started properly, and maybe my belly will go down some if I do this right, better at not stuffing high glycemic carbs in along with the protein, which is hard to do.  The local mac and cheese is like Thomas Jefferson hand-made it.  I nibble on the olive egg salad, have a bite of a banana, dutifully put a tablespoon of frozen flax seed in my tea cup, and I'm glad I didn't bother with the possibility of scrambling eggs for breakfast.  

Hopefully, this will help us keep on some kind of sane routine.  Today is Friday.  We haven't gotten grumpy yet.  The cat comes in and three times before staying out for longer than ten minutes, and he's not intent on hunting the birds who have come to the feeder, so that's good.

I'm waiting on the UPS delivery of a guitar I've wanted a long time, a Gretsch hollowbody, like George Harrison of The Beatles played, found on sale for President's Day at the Guitar Center's website, and they are in trouble too, and hopefully hillbillies like me playing guitar will make a come back.

So, while waiting, what to do...  The mail.  Get mom a NY Times, later, when we go grocery shopping, maybe fried fish for dinner again...  At some point I should go to Wayne's Drugstore, a beautiful kind place, to see if, on Medicaid, I can get my Escitalopram refilled, along the Propranalol, the beta blocker that will help anyway with my blood pressure.  Go for a long walk, though I could use some new boots.  How long will unemployment last...

Ezra Klein Show has an interview with George Saunders to listen to at some point.  Has some book recommendations in it.  Meditation and Buddhist perspectives meet the ancient craft of putting words down on paper.  I mean to listen to James Martin, S.J., who has a new book out, How to Pray.

Mom is quiet now, in her chair, happy with a book about something, not sighing over and over.  This is the benefit of getting up and trying to be honest with her, not letting her wait, as I wake to "oh, fuck, another day," not wanting to lift the blanket off me and roll to the side and use the bathroom then come downstairs, at which point she will say, "oh, a human being," and then other things, like "when is this weather going to end, I'm feeling trapped, is it supposed to snow/get warmer..."  "So what are you plans today..."  Ugh.  But not so bad, and she even remembered I'm waiting for a package, from the UPS driver, which I told her about last night.  It was the last day of the sale, and I'd found the news through the virtual grapevine that a beautiful friend from my early restaurant days, an artistic soul, who always tried to follow what I was up to, more or less, was stabbed to death last July in Berlin by her artist partner...  She was a prime mover in the Berlin art scene.  She wanted me to move there, ages ago.

But I'm feeling dull in the head today, as if recalibrating.  Henry Louis Gates' beautiful history of The Black Church was moving, in a way I've not found in much since Ken Burns' The Civil War, each inhabited by characters, meaningful, unique very interesting characters.

That church, that kind of one, might not be mine, mine being more Alan Watts or Zen or Theosophical, more looking for revelation and contemplation and Thomas Merton Desert Father sort of prayer, not that I would actually like to be a monk...  I'm too shy to be on the pulpit of such a thing, too long out of practice, a quiet guy waiting on people, ready with a sense of humor if they should tap into it.

We have to wait.  She wants to go somewhere.  For a ride.  But I don't want to have any more hassle with the UPS delivery, a sticker left on the door, will attempt second delivery, and here we are in the throes of the cold part of winter, you can't leave a cardboard box under the dripping icicles on the stoop...  I'm bored, she says.

It takes me almost two hours to put the kitchen back together again, and I'm just soaking, rinsing and then loading into the dishwasher.  I take mom out for a short walk, to the little mailbox stand, and then slowly out to the road.

I'm sitting on the couch when the man from UPS shows up--he's been driving 26 years, he tells me, after I say, "when all else fails, start a rock n roll band..." and he is a bit of a drummer, turns out, and I carefully take the inner box out of the outer box, etc.  I carefully document how it has been wrapped, protected carefully within the shipping material.

It seems okay.  The guitar is still cool to the touch.  It's out of tune, to be expected.  It's handsome.

I tune the strings, and retune, several times.  The instrument is adjusting.  Mom is very happy with me and the new arrival.  She helps me with the boxes.  I take pictures, to document the packaging, in case I have to send it back.  I carefully remove layer after layer.   There are cracks in the skin of my thumbs by the nail, from winter, washing dishes in the wrong kind of soap.  The skin hurts there.  Mom doesn't do dishes anymore, except one or two, I'm not quite sure how well, and in doing so, she gets in the way significantly.

Okay, mom, now we can go out for a ride.  Through the town, to the lake, and back in, and my plan is to just pick up a good sized piece of fried fish at the little super market, I'll get some cider, sip them slowly, a vegetable, nice and cheap, but mom wants to celebrate, and finally, okay, I give in.  It's four thirty, it won't be very crowded at The Press Box.  I tried to push it, but, she just can't see anymore, and as always, immediate gratification, the curse of the genes.  "Don't you know, what my friend Helen Brown used to say, 'It's wicked not to have fun.'"  It's really not what I want to do.

Well, I'm exhausted again, by the time I get mom up the steps and back in the door.  She is eager for me to play the new guitar some, I humor her.  I'm going to take a nap...  She goes up to watch TV.  Good.  My body falls into a deep sleep and I wake a couple of hours later.  But she is getting up, too.

I go downstairs.  I just want to write a bit.  Check out the guitar.  I've noticed a small blemish in it, an excess of glue on the top side of the base.  Do the frets buzz?  Maybe I do need an amp.  Possessions always bring a new bit of trouble into your life.  Now I'll need an amp.

She's sitting in her chair, picking at the tread of her slippers with a nail clipper.  No book.  Bored again.  She wants something, a kind word.  I go to the kitchen, to the dining room table, open the old laptop.

Twenty minutes later, as I'm trying to build up a head of steam, looking at some things on both the laptop and my phone, she comes and sits with me.  Not having anything to say.  She eats some saltines.  I bring over the almond butter jar.  I'm trying to limit her sugar intake, the wheat.  I'm trying to keep her teeth in decent shape.  Gum disease can increase the dementia thing.

Mom.  Do you think Michelangelo wanted his mother sitting around watching him...  

Don't worry, I'll be gone in a few days.  Oh, really.  Where are you going?

I won't be around long, she says, looking at me trying to avoid looking at her, looking up inexpensive guitar amps on YouTube while I try a few new sentences out.  She is the unhappy queen, displeased with her servant.

Mom is offended I don't want to spend time with her, as she comes in and watches me dealing with my old laptop.  I'm trying to get back into the zone again.  It takes more than meditation.  It takes art.  Watching a film.  With such stresses one needs the pilot light lit from without, when one's quarters are closing in.

Finally, she goes upstairs.  I microwave some of the beef sort of Bourgignon stew I made, adding some Big M beef stew to augment it with its peas and use of potato, to go with the cheap Montepulciano which is depressing me and giving me a pre-headache along with mom expecting something from me, and we've been in the same goddamn place the whole goddamn day.  And anyway, writing is a goddamn dead art anyway, and who gives a ..... about it anymore.  It's pointless, isn't it.

(I'm not so happy with my guitar anymore, after all that.  But that it will be a conversation with other musicians, my true friends, not that I know them all that well.)

Except.

And this is where we begin to get real.  There is no other way than the way things happened, no getting around it, so find out the meaning of it, as it is a kind of text, for lack of a better word.  Things you might have hoped for, girls, women, respect, English professorships, nope, these things were not for you.   And you know what, it's better that way.

I never got in the zone today.  I suppose I should have better anticipated all of this, but that's not always how it goes.

A yogini friend of mine responds to my query, if she has any spiritual insights for the week, texts me back:  When the benefits outweigh the sacrifices you know it's worth it.

I don't know my own personal answer to the question...  is a family member bi-polar, and I can't see it, because I've been around her all my life?  That might explain a lot, the experiences I've had in life, the choices I make.

But what am I going to do?