Early March.

It really bugs me not having a job, not knowing what to do with mom.

I'm wearing earplugs now, as a top round roast is now at 325 degrees after the ten minute sear at 450.   Mom is talking to herself in the living room.  I haven't worked in almost a year.

This is dinner, I don't know, one of these Covid-19 nights that bleed into each other, even in memory.  Served with the roasted onions, potato, sweet potato, a pan gravy I'm not impressed with.  I cut the end pieces for mom.

It happens slowly, bit by bit, someone taking over, ruining your life.  And then you see it was a river, strong and wide with an inevitable current, pulling you along.  You didn't know you were in the river.  Every one else was a bystander.   It took you when you had no natural defenses.  A little bit here, a little bit there.  A temper tantrum you should just have walked away from, as it didn't mean anything anyway, just sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot.  Signifying nothing.  "I'm lonely.  I'm so lonely."  Well, that's the life you chose, you should have said.  And one saw that coming, even long enough before that.

The invisible well-meaning chokehold, that takes away from the life that was given unto you... your old father, so sweet, good in every way, and her, your mother, turning into your grandfather, her father, of course, and I, the sucker, stuck with it, the kind to her well-meaning son...  right.

Saturday, before, I get up late.  I really don't want to do much with her today.  It was a pitched battle getting her in to have her first vaccine shot.  It's sleet early in the morning, pinging on windows and sideboards, then it's rain, then it gets clearer, but still, I don't want to get up.  I get hungry eventually.  And I forgot to put my earplugs in.

At night, after the roast, and the retreat after dinner, I wake up at 1AM.  At nighttime there is peace.  There is no mom, how can I help?  hello?! I wish I were dead, every five minutes.  She is up safe comfortable in her bed, perched along the edge of the bed.  Hopefully she will stay there.  The moon is full.  The cat is out.  I've washed the dishes and pans of dinner, along with the cat food bowls, glasses...  I've thrown some things out, from the fridge.  I've swept the floor.  I've cleaned the counter top.  

Most things I look back at now with complete regret.  Not having a job to have a family, wife, children.  Suddenly, it seems, that happens, and yet it happened every day.

It's probably why I'm too shy to fully display my talents without feeling weird, conscious that I must have to deal with mom until the end of her life, in some way.

She comes down around 4 in the morning.  I hear her come down and whisper talk to herself in her chair.  Ten minutes later she thumps into the kitchen.    How are you doing, mom.  "Not so well.  Oh...  I'm hungry.  There's not any food here."  Mom, look in the fridge.  I get her some cheese.  She's placed her slippers on the countertop I just cleaned an hour ago.  I cut a thin slice of three year-old cheddar, an individual packet of two premium saltines before her.  She eats them together with the cheese, not using the plate I put in front her, but the countertop itself.  Then she wants more saltine crackers.  There's an open sleeve of them, so I bring those over.  She stands and crinkles the plastic foil the crackers are in, as if to further torture me.  I can barely stand it.  What are you doing, she asks.  Trying to be creative, I guess, I answer.  What are you working on?  If I knew I couldn't say.

Later, the cat comes back in.  I feed him from a can, the second half.  Then he gets up on the table, via the chair.  This is all very amusing, all of this, but I enjoy when the cat comes near.  He comes up on the table and talks to me after she's gone back upstairs.  He nuzzles me after I pet him.  I play with his paws.  He's pleased with me, licking my arms above the wrist.  

He stands comfortably before me.  The profile of his skull as he looks away, strong, sturdy in its structure, from which he looks out of, remind me of my grandfather's profile, my mom's.   The child, in old age, a strong skull, standing to eat, not caring anymore if she burps out loud, proud of it.  That's what you become.  A survival mechanism.  A brunt fortress shrinking into itself.

But what a shit I am.  An utter piece of shit.  Capable of nothing.  

There are times you simply run out of writing.  You don't want to look at anything you've written recently.  You can not extricate yourself to any platform of observation that does not support cringing.

Looking at the backdoor here, letting the cat out, the moon, full yesterday, clouds drift past quickly from the south west, leaving me feel like I am on a sailing ship, but one going nowhere.

The perceived failings of your life, no children, no adequate job to return to, really very painful... The Days of Wine and Roses your life has turned into.  No amount of lyrical prose can be a substitute for people, for family, for support.

I should never have done the things I've done, should never have asked myself to do them.  So I drank, in order to deal with the job, the work, the dealing with mom.

The Christian fairy tale...  it's not doing it for me today.  Mom creeping around.   7 PM, I get into the wine finally.  I took her out to lunch, around 3:30 at the old Press Box.  I had hot water with lemon, a bowl of chicken vegetable soup.  Mom had her Kendall Jackson and "Mary's Salad," with chicken.  The organic Chilean wine was good to me last night, no hangover.  I went out in the night and brought back a double quarter pounder and two filet o' fish.  There was depression in the morning, certainly.

But I know I'm not using my talents well.  I'm not speaking in public, explaining things to people.  Now it's too late for all that, beyond participating with the chatter at a bar.  

I sleep a lot these days. The days tire me out, easily.  My ears are tired.  My tongue is tired.  My nervous system, from holding up a person slowly falling.

The writer is the last person in humankind who is original.  Beyond many of the influences of modern life and economy.  The writer, naturally, would prefer to return humanity to the basics, to early days, ecological days, olive oil, wine, the simplicity of a communal meal, the natural garden in the rhythms of the countryside.

The writer is a Tralfamadorian.  There's not much hope for him.

In the night I have wine, perhaps too much.  And the next day, yes, I am hungover, with a headache, which is a blow, because I'd thought I'd found a way to get around that issue.  I sleep in.   We do the usual, go for a ride, an errand, the grocery store, I set up a stir fry, and even though I've fed her a fried chicken wing, she gets drunk and angry pretty quickly.  How can I help, she calls from her chair, to me in the kitchen.  I've got one earplug in.   You hate me, she says. Then quietly to herself, I don't care.  Then, I want a dog.

I text my aunt, maybe, if she had the energy, now at 7:30, probably past their dinner hour, she could talk to mom over the phone as I cook dinner.  I can't help getting involved in it, there's always helpful information, back and forth in Covid times...  I've got everything ready to go for the stir fry, just the iron pan to heat.

It gets worse after dinner.  Bastards.  They all hate me.  Help.  Someone.  Oh, help... I am going to get a Cocker Spaniel.

Finally, after I go hide, she comes up the stairs to her bedroom and the cat and the television.

I've been turning to watching silly things on Amazon Prime and YouTube and so forth, things about the Bible and the life of Jesus.  In one I find some beautiful scenes from the Holy Land.  Sprengeri Tulips in the hills above Pella where Jesus went for the forty days after the Baptism by John, provided with a cave, a nearby spring.  It's not the desert.  It's lush and green and full of natural wild flowers.

Sedative in the night for a foolish man for whom now everything has gone wrong.  Gone to ruin.

Unable, even to write.  

 I load the dishwasher, the second loading, which seems to work, soak all the dishes from the cat food dish to the cutting board and the dinner plates, a mixing bowl, a pot, soak all that in the yellow Rubbermade tub, in hot soapy water, then go through it quickly, brushed off quickly with a pad, then down into the dishwashing machine to the left of the sink, the racks rolled out for you, these in the top, these in the bottom, silverware...  By the time you've taken the dirty things out, scrubbed them off, then placed them in the racks, and before that, using the virgin soapy water to clean what you might more immediately need, or not want to scar, as wine glasses can be ruined, so I've heard, by putting them through the cycle the dishwasher with its chlorine washes, the chef's knife--I ask mom to put the Pepsi away, as a little project, and she takes the beautiful sharpened chef's knife made by Hoffritz, and she uses it to cut those little plastic six pack ring holders, which prompts me to shout, NO!, have respect for the Chef's Knife, and she goes I can't do anything right, they hate me, I'm never coming here again, as she exits the kitchen, from a previously decent mood, to go, again with some more things, then opening the front door and stepping out, I'm not following her, and then in a few seconds she is back in...  I clip the things with the scissors, which I keep clean, as she'll scissor anything in front of her now, bacon, a slice of pizza...

It's nighttime in the forbidden safety zone.   I'm waiting to be bombed at any minute, except she had too much wine earlier.  The things you cook are never that great.  You're bored as you look at the plate you serve yourself.  You see the faults... thus the beauty of set recipes to follow, rather than the made-up ones.  

I'm hungry, so there's a Hoffmann's hot dog, a sublime beautiful thing, to reheat in the toaster oven, as I ponder the Jesus Christ, Old Testament, New Testament film work documentaries I find.  

It's hot now, in a small oven proof oval plate, the olive oil helping, and now for some mustard and a pickled banana pepper...  15 minutes at 325.  Excellent.  They know how to make a sublime hotdog up here.  Syracuse.

Shame on me.  I never studied with masters,  I never advanced beyond my troubled college degree.  I was a rebel...  that sort of a thing, a non compliant type, for which one pays until his dying days.

There's a bit of Judas in all of us.  About 1/12th.  That makes sense.  The cat purrs heavily now that I've let him out into the deep cold night, and back in again.  He's the Sphinx again, as I watch in the background a documentary that offers a Google Earth sort of live earth map of the Holy Land.  The towns you've heard of, not sure of how to pronounce...  Then the cat is quiet, pensive again.  He senses my brain waves, and he's listening in now.  What are you going to do for a job, both of us ask me.  He gets it, he totally gets it.

Nazareth, yes, I think it's in the video, up on the top of a hill, thus the Rejection there, where they like him first, but then take him as a blasphemer, and gather to throw him off the ridge, except he walks through their midst.  

The cat is keeping vigil.  

Two to Three AM goes by very quickly, in the blink of an eye.

I go for a walk while the sun is still out.  With the Northwest Wind blowing along exposed parts of the road, even with the orange light of the sun as I come down the hill along the road scrubland woods too dense and tangled to see through, an unhealthy forest too crowded to offer any great specimens but a sort of low untended and Posted woods, no trespassing, why would one want to except to dump something or level it all and build another house, it's cold, and I'm tired when I get in, feeling ready for a nap.  But I push on, pouring mom a glass of wine, along with some saltines with almond butter and slices of cheddar on top.  These last few days have been very depressing, again, waiting on muddle-headed idiot Republican Senators, and I don't even feel good any more about my life's direction, such as it was, beyond its own simple old world appeal, a server of wine, a poet, a sort of missing holy man to the community, a preacher of the good wines, not the bad ones.  Even as I go back to the Portuguese box red wine, hopefully made in a scale that allows for the native yeasts as opposed to the replacing of those by the genetically modified yeasts of industrial production...

If I say something is blue, mom tells me it is green.   Feeding the cat causes strife between us.  As an old barman I find it very difficult to take inefficiency in a kitchen task.

After dinner and the long nap to hide from mom's noise, still I am depressed, almost too much so to pick up a book and read.  First of all where?  There's no chair for me, without going out my way...  A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders' sort of master class on writing and the economical form of the short story.  I barely have the energy at first, lying there on my air mattress head propped up on a pillow with the door closed ...

I can't even think straight these days.  The trap is closing in around me.  Even if I move from DC, where will I go?  How will I have time to pack up my apartment when I can't leave mom alone?  How can I look for a job?  Where should it be, this job, all my things...