What they don't tell you in a city or in any town is that everything under the economic sky is, in its own way, subsidized. And there I was, a dumb kid working my ass off in the DC restaurants for pennies, anesthetized by what once were the classic affordable democratic pleasures of company and dining and a bit of a wine that go back to the beginning of us.
Sure, there were enormously accomplished people, finely educated beyond being just having learned how to think, and learn, but onward and upward into law degrees and so forth and then the training of a career. And one would naturally kowtow to such people, to not quite grovel before them, but in a way to eventually befriend them, by doing so ultimately realizing that, in a way, they were not so far from your own level, or rather, than your own level, when you got down to it, was not far away from theirs.
What a city holds out for its elite is class snobbery. You put yourself up by putting other people down, and ordering them around. The squeaky wheel gets the oil. The complicated pain in the ass gets the attention. The people who put down others, abrupt, self-important...
But guess what, folks? The system, their system, doesn't work so well without its peons, people regarded as being stupid, or poor in their own making of important choices. Then it's too many chiefs and not enough indians.
And I'll tell you, every now and again, you hear it, how they, the upper people, regard us, the lower people. Attitude. They have to look down on anything you do, if it is not useful to their own interests and means, as being the things of a rube, of an innocent fool. The book you wrote cannot be any good, because they have better houses and cars and bank accounts whereas you have none of that.
The snobbery gets manipulative, and the poor and disgruntled, squeezed endlessly, their jobs sent overseas, a working person's place in the economy marginalized into gig worker peondom, all for the sake of the profits of the One Percent Goons and their corporate share holders, who cares, as long as profits are up, as long as our stocks are up. And you see, oh, look at the great tax break the politically entrenched rich folk, supportive of their "law and order," look what that did to our national and general economic underpinnings. A basic sucking of money, earned wages and benefits, out from all classes below the upper ones, and into the upper ones.
Oh, gee, and who made extra extra billions during the pandemic, a time of coming together in national crisis, of collective mobility for the common good, who but the billionaires who were already billionaires. Shameful.
This was, this type of snob thing, by the way, was never the culture in the French Bistrot where I put in my time. Bruno, and all he hired to manage and partner with, but he in particular, was a socialist deep down. And as Godfather of now two restaurants, feels a responsibility to his staff, staying open in hard times. (though living in some form of material comfort, fine things of a decent living standard, befitting gentry.)
The places where I worked came with an all for one and one for all attitude in the fiber, in the core of the job, the shift drink at the end of the night.
It’s mom's birthday of turning 82 years old. I think Truman died when he was up there like that.
The writer by himself is cannon fodder. But he has to stand up for himself and his own work. He must refuse to accept that his work is not subsidized as all things are. He has to make a sort of political planting of his flag.
After her birthday, the second Moderna shot. We make a deposit at the bank just over across the bridge over the river under the overcast sky. I take her for a look at the lake, and then to the Big M. At the counter, stuffed peppers. Yes, after getting mom shot number two, I think we’ll celebrate with three of them. Make sure your mom drinks lots of water, a kind woman to my left says, after her experience of fever and bed. The woman behind the counter: knocked a neighbor of mine out for four days. In the parking lot now, the wind has picked up seriously.
Back in the car. I want a Texas Hot, my says, firmly. The opening of Rudy’s by the lake has been anticipated. There’s a newspaper blurb.
I’ll make you one at home. No! I want one at Rudy’s. You always ruin everything! So now we gotta drive back town, west, past the university along the lake.
Oh Jesus, it’s opening day. You have to go through the whole system. But I relent. I park the little old car across the street from the place. Mom gives it her best to give directions to me, peppering me with questions, "are they open? what does that sign say? are you calling them?" on and on. So I'm standing outside the car, and she's as grumpy as she was in the pharmacy, truly angry at me, why do we have to do this, where were you... Now she's telling me "it's cold. Shut the door." I'm waiting, and finally a voice answers, a young woman, and I thank her, give us our order of a two Texas hots, a side of Texas hot sauce, a Center sandwich, which refers to the thick cut of of the fried haddock. I wait outside, the sun is coming out finally. Then they call me, and I go down across the street and wait in another line, where a few people are standing with beeping devices assigned to them. (I should have just gone to the head of the line, but I'm rusty at this. It was the same way last summer, the first pandemic seasons.) I look back up at the car and mom comes out of the passenger side and then gets in on the driver side. I wait and finally I come back across the street with a little cardboard tray in a paper bag, and inside, on paper plates, wrapped with foil, our sandwiches with lemon and tartar sauce and ketchup packets, a few napkins, not enough. Usually we sit down by the lake, but with mom telling me it's too cold one moment and then warm the next, I figure it will be easier if we go eat at a picnic table, just us two. With a little bit of sunlight on us, now at 2:30 in the afternoon, and mom's bitching about the details of this and that, and there in the distance below is the long flat surface of the lake beyond the rocky shore and the picnic tables and gull laughing as he stands on the top of the roof, celebrating the season's opening of french fries and other chicanery and food thievery and good smells and people and kids and dogs happy with eating and the garbage bins, looking for diners with less than watchful eyes.
We finally get back to mom's apartment, taking a little ride along the lake, past mysterious old abandoned wooden cottages almost out of Russian woods and such. I'm keeping her hydrated, but she gets angry with me anyway. She goes upstairs for a nap. It came on all of a sudden, she tells me later.
Earlier I'm in the drug store aisles looking for an NR41 little tiny coin-like battery for the automatic quick-read thermometer. Now, finally some satisfaction, having opened the little clear plastic and cardboard paper packaging to see if the little hearing aid battery sized thing would fit the device, nope, then just returning it and purchasing the same damn thing, after taking a mini course in battery labelling, I take mom's temperature, beep, and then when ready, a triple beep, voila, 98.4... Everything made in China. Flashback of mom irritated with me in the car, on one hand saying how she's not the village idiot, perfectly capable, I have a Ph.D., I gave her a mask to wear earlier as we left, for the Covid plague times, but by the time we get to the drug store she doesn't have it, can't find it, and so I pull out the spare I brought along, Mom, put on your mask, we have to put on our masks before we can go in, but she holds out, because it's windy she says, holding out until we're in the first of the double doors, yes... She marches in now, with her mask on, somewhat cockeyed, past a man, an older gentleman with a large bandaid on his right jaw bone, a kindly elder guy, and she says something like, oh, here's a decent fellow, unlike that man I came in with... All the way, get her in the chairs set out for this purpose of the vaccine shots at the pharmacy counter aisles, announce ourselves with the vaccine card,
The whole thing here like this on a daily basis, "you treat me horribly," mom tells me. I'm not the village idiot!
I grunt and groan, bearing the burdens of a beast, a stock animal like the oxen, the ass, the horse, pulling the plough forward, getting bitched at the whole way. I have my little fantasies of being a young man coming out of college to find all his talents at his beck and call, an actor, a writer, a guitar player, a musician of jazz, rock n roll, you name it, I can do it again, down in the basement, broadcasting to the entire world through my iPhone recordings of myself. Escapism, hiding, staying up late when the witch goes back to her upstairs apartment, before she comes down and demands something of me, what are we doing today, what's next, where are you going next... And instead of wishing to work in daylight, I want to hide in daylight, resting.
And sometimes I'm so exhausted by a single day's efforts of keeping her happy while doing all my duties, I can do nothing but retreat to my puffy green air mattress, to lay back quietly maybe under a warm blanket, going back to the mother ship, the spiritual home of the spiritual traveller, the Adept, the soft warm welcome of return to the space ship, and glowing within the energy of all the chakras all lined up like lights around the edge of the flying saucer... Home, my friends, let us go home and reflect upon that world we were just in, the human world, the world of suffering beings who do not get it, ignorant to the great Truths.
And sometimes when I'm walking along a road, somewhat wearily, but hopefully, pretty young married women in the vehicles assigned to them for all they do, like a Jeep wagon, an SUV, a large used to call them station wagons but now they are higher up on the level of the great manly pickup trucks here, these pretty hard working wholesome women with beautiful faces, smiles break out on their faces while I'm taking my long slow walk along the shoulders of roads that once were only farm service roads, roads to deliver trade and goods back and forth to the port city town. Why they smile, sweetly, with an empathy too dislocated to find in DC, what do they see, a young man grown into mid life manhood of sadness, after much strange work of his own, attempts of entrepreneur ship, my kindly face a blur, a waif of an old historical image, as I walk along, pensive of the stick trees along and the wet shoulder of the road spots, do they see a Kerouac, or a wandering still surviving lost disciple of a great Holy Man of Jesus or Buddha or Mohammedan roads... He's probably taking care of an aging relative, all alone, for they, the nice family people here who have people to talk to on phones as they walk their own exercise walks, more vigorous than mine, less perhaps an exploration on the surface of this strange planet, such they might think. He deserved kindliness, they say, even if he might be a bit of a lost bum. Their sweetness passes at 35 mph, and I feel it tangibly, a surprise as it passes, and the Lord from Above says sweetly to me, these people up here along this lake, they get it. Even as the churches here slide quietly into quiet dusty mote strewn light shaft through stained glass window airs within their pews, fixed and solid, air in the furniture grounded to hold on to in times. How crazy it is here. People are nice.
The nice people here, if on their own, and not distracted, by small crowds or duties, what have you, maybe they get why the space ship landed here and the metal door opened and I came down the ramp, to make the Earth stand still with my humble stumble bum-ness.
On the green air mattress I am traveling through spiritual space and time and finally figuring out why the things of life are, in the absence of my father, my true saint fallen into the world whose face shines out of some old ikon of Slovakia or old Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his own Turners Falls up in Montague up along the Connecticut River in Western Massachusetts sainthood while his mom died of TB, off to the WWII service, then back to Mass Aggie, but not as a horticulturalist, but as a botanist, with R.E. Torrey as a mentor, leading into the Theosophical... That saint who did so much for me, and I failed being there when he died. Kissed his forehead and touched his cheek, just like Kerouac found he needed to do when he looked at his father's body after all the struggle and the sickness. A clip of hair, from that man who held you close, did so so much for you, let you bloom in your own way under his gentle botanical guidance, knowing that I too would suffer, as I always understood, once, as I cried, the neighbor girl Anna having seen a ghost go by out her window in a house just down the road from us, my spooked Sunday morning tears--even then my brother was too cynical and rational to be bothered with things of questionable validity--telling my dad in the driveway, as we backed out, to go down and visit the bakery and get the holy Sunday New York Times, that perhaps these spirits here were already here, before we came, and that is their world first, and not ours, most correctly, to a child in the passenger seat up front privileged, with his benevolent mono-god his own Father, my tears lifting, the realization descending of a higher truth, and I felt my father smile, and his rugged saintly happiness, a man who'd been through a lot of shit (and also good stuff) by then, in a gentle exile.
You can only know this, even as you did as a young man, with the authority of years of wanderings under your belt.
I wanted to write in my own given natural way, the way I talk, in the manner in which thoughts come to my mind. I didn’t care about any particular literary endeavor, successful or not. I wanted to capture speech, American thoughts, ways, in the way Twain did. Kerouac. An ear for the music in words.
As I’ve said before, I got tired, I am tired, of being the people pleaser.
And I regard whatever work I do as a spiritual endeavor. Keeping bar, landscaping.
And now finally, writing.
Kerouac was serious about the term Beat having its origin in the Beatific, in the Beatitudes, in his strong sense of the people he encountered, jazz men, drinking bums in alleys... An attitude that gives way to a way of focus, a filter to all experiences, putting them in perspective.
You can never be realized about a thing into you are truly willing to pursue it.
So, I stay up late, after receiving my own first shot of the Moderna vaccine for the Covid-19 Corona Virus, 2020, 2021, ongoing. I took a nap after the shot, in mom's living room with the afternoon sun rolling its rays in on me through the front window, again returning to the mother ship, the holy time traveling spacecraft that gets our souls around through countless kalpas of time and worlds, and happily, too, Mom was upstairs and being quiet. I'd checked in on her, flipped around the channels to see what was on PBS and TCM playing the director's cut of Lawrence of Arabia at 4, gave her soup and then water, taken her temperature several times, once 100.4, then back down in the normal range, maybe it was the two Bayer Aspirin I gave her. My homemade electrolyte recipe, a dash of good salt, a sprinkle of baking soda in a quart of filtered water... I went for a tired walk later, after taking her for her usual daily drive, now in the afternoon with the sky losing its sunlight and becoming a bit more dank of cloud covers, the drive the usual affair of cheap wine, a newspaper, a few back-ups for the kitchen, cans of cat food, up the road, under the power lines, warm enough to sit on the guardrail by the entrance of the power grid transfer station, the swamp to my back, dried hearty ragweed stalks still with their blooms intact, so I could write on my iPhone a little bit, just to get down a few thoughts... Hitting the buttons on the inner tape recorder, back to when I walked into the Five Points, crowded with college kids happy in the warm weather, and the guy just to the left, looks like a boxer, asking me if I'd like to taste a sweet white or a dry red, and as a professional courtesy I accede and bow, to taste from a little tiny red plastic cup, it's a New World style, Argentine, Mendoza Cabernet, 10 percent off, not my style, but it's actually more subtle than I thought it'd be, but here I am, on a mission to get the 2019 Bolla Bardolino in the 1.5 liter size, and I'm being a people pleaser yet again, as if I felt obliged to give up my whole life to make one lost sheep happy, and he adds a little tale about how he was a bartender at the Crown Plaza, the famous circular hotel at the foot of Syracuse University's hill, and just east of the raised highway of 81 as it passes through, and how he got a little tired of the grumpiness of drunks at 2AM, and now puts a lot of milage on his car, and we talk of the importer he works for, and they have DeBouef in their portfolio... back to mom and the car, into gear, off we go in our little Japanese tank to swing by the lake... So I'm sitting there and the high power lines way way up are humming away in the air, and there is the Beatific peace I was writing of here in earlier parts of my thoughts and the drafts I try to capture them in, like a spider's web, or a fisherman's net, of an eel run, the Beatific sensibility now shining over everything, telling me that it is in fact okay to be sort of miserable, because that's what it's all about, not the consumerism, beyond the simple things you need truly... Gulls cry like cats, Geese bark like dogs as they come in low, perfect aircraft for the airs of God, and maybe in certain old parts of my brain I think of the little poem I wrote for Mrs. Martin's 10th grade English class I think it was, "I strum the strings on my guitar, and I go free, away from here. And over trees and through the wood, away from things I understood." Not bad. She read it aloud to the class, and I felt that nice soft feeling of being responsible for something good, though I dunno, it just came through me, just a moment of clarity, honesty, finding a path, inspired by something... All there in this ostensibly dreary setting about a mile or so from the shores of Ontario, the electric steam plant's two huge towers of smoke stacks, here in rushy weeds where the low parts are wet and muddy, a few gravel paths here and there, but somehow I find it all quite inspiring, upon this day where I got mom her second vaccination shot, struggling with her for her to put on her mask and sit there, the whole day, like I may have said, sort of a very minor Station of the Cross, including the opening day at Rudy's scenic by the lake as you eat your beautiful soft rolled moist haddock sandwich, and then the charred almost Hoffmann's hot dog with the Texas hot sauce laid upon it just so, the lake changing colors as you look at it out to its distant edges as the planet's lake meets the horizon beyond which you cannot see, there at the picnic table under the trees with everybody on opening day going, "how does this go, go to the window to order with cash, call them, or go on their ordering website, with credit card in hand to read off all the little numbers... now what do I do..." God, show me the way. I take a little short walk up past the first little pond there to the right, with the sort of cage fence they needed to prevent the beavers from damming up the pipe going under the road, and I see more Beatific things, and I hear, as we first heard yesterday, the sounds of the peepers, the little tiny frogs or tree frogs that come together to produce a beautiful chirping harmony that makes you feel like the trees are wiggling and stretching out their rooty toes to go dancing in the night, to stretch the sun in in gathering branches, ticklish little buds coming out now, the birth of leaves and pussy willow soft things. We need to keep hydrated, so let me fold from my duties as the cook here, and order Chinese soups and chicken wings and dumplings from Food Chow City II, just over the bridge, but they deliver... Yes, make this night a little bit easier.
I end up getting up and staying up late after dinner, to write down my thoughts in the night after putting on my orange rubber gloves to gather and soak the dishes before filling out and finishing the great loading of the dishwasher, but like clock work mom is angry with me again, even only after two glasses of wine, even after the first sip, over dinner, I can't even remember now what we ate, the Chinese food I guess, get her up to bed, with a glass of water and aspirin at the ready after the day turned bad and mom is talking to herself, they all hate me, bastards, and no Lawrence of Arabia on tv.
Everything is neither good or bad, but thinking makes it so, Mr. Shakespeare. (And Kerouac's girlfriend, first wife, when they escaped NYC to train up back to her home in Grosse Point, he'd go into the bathroom and lock to the door and read The Bible and Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Bible, for four hours at a time, and no one could use the bathroom, neither she nor her sisters.)
And Jesus Christ was there at the dawning hour of the great enlightening thought, that life is in its very essence inclusive of suffering, of what feels like suffering, of what is suffering, and then so firmly ennobling that suffering to give it redemption, raising it into "happy are the meek and the mournful..."
Ahh, but feeling the effects of the vaccine, or from having simply stayed up too late fooling around with my little writings and inspirations, sipping away at the wine, I don't jump off my pleasurably crinkly air mattress down in the cold basement. Feeling wiped out, in need of sleep and hydration, a break from my intense little old stubborn foot and cane-stomping charge, I rest more, but that totally back-fires, for when I hear her now loudly calling out fluid riffs on "Help!", rising up the stairs, it's obvious she's been into the wine, by fits angry, expansive, proud and spiteful, and too much in general to handle and I haven't even had my tea cold from the fridge yet.
The only advantage of this, on a windy day, winds of 30 mph, is that after I feed her a piece of toast with chicken salad, she's in the bag, and will soon go off to sleep, though one cannot be 100 percent certain thereof, so I might as well heat in the microwave a little bowl of soup with one wonton dumpling in it, and humor her a small pour of a little bit more wine from the box into a glass with an ice cube in it. She protests that she wants a ride, so I say, okay, sure, but by the time I come down from using the john and checking on the upstairs, yes, she's fallen into an upright nap on the little sofa with the cat along the top of it, and I check in on her a few more times, then with my coat on, with my hat, I slink out the back door, starting the car, checking the mail, the car has revved up and then down low again, all warmed up, and I go back up to peer in through the front window, and no, she is not still on the couch, and when I quietly open the door, I sense she has gone up to bed, and I have a nervous sigh of relief. Maybe it's the vaccine.
And when I drive out and run my errands, find some chardonnay with a lower level of alcohol to it, get an easy little dinner for us from the Port City Cafe, stop by the Stewart Shop for a newspaper, by the time I get back, she is indeed asleep in her place on the edge of the bed with the piles of books haphazardly strewn to her right as the television gives out CNN news. A lot of thought has to go into these little dinners and meals I feed her. I was going to do fish sandwiches again, but decided against it.
Who is to know, who is to say, when unhappy thoughts get in our way.
The tension here. No wonder I feel like walking on eggshells with her around. The readiness of her to charge me with some unfairness, some slight, some nastiness, even as I get up to investigate the kitchen at the start of my day, and I must go into the living room to answer her questions, and if I say anything with candor, Mom, have you been into the wine... then she even gets worse angry at me. And no way to claim, look mom look at all the things I helped you with over the last few days... In her mind she was perfectly appropriately sweet and well-behaved, not a short tempered so & so.
I have things to give other than a glass of wine and French Fries over a bar and to a table.
But then I get mom on my back, this kitchen is a mess! Or telling me, like I'm her husband, that we are through, or that she'll kill herself, you'll be done with me soon, I won't be around much longer...
Then again, think of the layers of life, but now through the focus of the Beatitudinal approach to our experiences of everyday life and events... The light from the object you are studying is broken up by the prism into its component lights and energies, and then, Oh, I see...
No comments:
Post a Comment