By the first day of Spring, March here, two fingernails have those painful breakaway torn open edge cracks in them, hangnails?, and both thumbs have small fissures on the outside edges just to the side of the nails.  Doing anything with my hands is painful and awkward.  So finally I go with mom on our daily errands to get some of the versatile dish soap made without the chemical additive of Sodium Laurel Sulfate.  Sudsing agent.  Toothpaste with that in it will put wintry cracks on the sides of my mouth where the upper and lower lips meet.   Of course mom doesn't do the dishes.  She'll dirty two plates than eat her slice of turkey right off the counter top.  She'll feed the cat in one dish with one can, then open another can and use another dish.  I know how to feed my cats, she says.  On top of the cat dish she used an hour ago.

So then over to the Five Points for wine, then on to Raby's Ace Hardware, everything neatly arranged, looking for some heavier rubber gloves that won't leak after washing dishes with them in the hot soapy tub three times.  Back in the parking lot, I pass a white SUV, the driver with two chihuahuas.  Mom wants to go look at them, the sun is out, I tell mom it's okay, if we keep our distance, so we look from a distance and still the little dogs go crazy and the driver looks at us like she's saying what kind of fucking idiot are you.  

Then back into town for the groceries and the newspaper.  I drop mom off, lug the groceries in, and then I say, mom, I'm going out for a walk.   Fields near the Rice Creek Field Station.  Big red barns.  Fallbrook.  First time I've tried yoga in a long time.  I do some poses in the sun, the obvious usual ones.  I can't get into my headstand, which distresses me.  I'm careful about planting my the top of my head in cradled hands, elbows just so far apart, I walk up with my legs to where my spine is close to straight, but when I push up with the legs, nothing happens.  Barely, into my lotus, it all just sucks.  There is moss by the stream, soft areas, not so muddy like little mounds of poop.

I take out the camera function on my iPhone, takes some pictures of trees, bare, in sun and shade, old barns, rolled hay.  Getting closer now, to the apartment, I take some pictures of the Lazerek whole operation.  I'm thinking about the woman I saw sitting outside Cheap Seats sports bar across from the McDonald's, first day of Spring, happy hour, golden sunlight, and up ahead there are blackbirds up in the bare sugar maple tree, and then mom is calling.  

When I get in, she's telling me what a nice guy I am, and how kind I am to come by, and "I won't take up too much of your time..."  So gentle she is now, right.  She reads from a intro biography of Emily Dickinson to The Collected Poems, beginning with mention of the very important letters of the day, Emily writing to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and she drones on, in her dry with gutteral spittle voice, barely holding the sentences together, but proud of her knowledge....  I order Chinese for us, soups with dumplings to hold us through the horrible dry apartment paper dry air.  

And by the time we're done, I can't bare it anymore, she says, okay, just a little more wine and I'll go off to bed, it's bad manners to leave the table, by the time she gets upstairs to her bed, she is talking again, they hate me, bastards... oh, help, nobody cares, yelling almost, again, and I'm heavily on my air mattress soon enough, God give me rest.

I knew it as soon as she was happy with me when I came in the door.  I just had to wait for it.  You're bored with me, she'll say now and again.  Or, well, someone has to talk, because no one else is talking...

In the end there is no such thing as love, nothing but a childish thing.  We endure each other, that's about it.  I wrote a book that had some attempt at love, but yes, it was all bunk, romantic.  

I don't miss DC.   The people there aren't nice.  Except for the musicians, and even then.  It's heart breaking.  Every being is commodified now, taken as a soulless unit.  And anyone who doesn't want to play part to this disgrace is regarded as a creep, a loner, the outsider, a person to be used, taken advantage of.  

The inability to say no.  The inability to ask for what you want...  The abuse, of allowing other people to run your life.  Thus was I prepared for, and reminded by, by Creepy Old Guy and a whole flock of bar customers.  People coming in on me riding me.  People who won’t leave.  An offer of some kind of friendship, but with a penetrating bind.  It’s a feeling of being abused, one that, like a sexual abuse as a child, goes down deep in your spirit, placed in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.

Sunday comes and it’s a sunny day.  I catch Betsy’s yoga class over the Zoom, just taking mental notes from my tired spot on the air mattress, moved down now into the basement now that it’s warmer.  Then an hour of rest, then up to face mom in the kitchen daylight.  

Take a quick shower, then ride with mom down together to get the newspaper in the nice little rusted old Corolla.  A cup of coffee, a sandwich.  I get back to the car, she wants a scoop of coffee ice cream, okay.  A ride down by the old fort, to see the lake.  We’re looking at a War of 1812 placard, strike up a nice conversation with a guy, turns out he’s from Arkansas, up here working on the yearly shut down they do, down at the nuclear plant.

I take the car dipping down along the boatyard of the port, and up we drive by the Press Box, people outside on the red stained deck...  mistake.  Can’t we go...  no, mom.  She thumps the paper and then turns away from me looking out the window.  We are crossing the bridge in the bright light, blue river streams below us.  What’s up, mom.  There’s nothing to say, she tells me.

Oh Jesus I had plans...  I’m seeing the blue sky and this air, and God I need another walk at Fallbrook and another crack at yoga, but I turn the car around.  I get her out of the car after three attempts, two times finding the back windows down.  Then mom wants to bring her T.S. Eliot book in.  We get up, but then there’s a wait and some kerfuffle and mom has gotten on this thing about the conversation we had with the nice man over at the fort...  Then quickly our table is ready...  So we go in, another afternoon spent trapped in the relative darkness of a dining room with the threat of the impulse to have one drink just to get through it..  and there’s little old mom right to my left as we sit by the bathrooms...  we are through, she says to me, after I try but fail to be happy...

Later on, as I sit there at the table, I go to my phone to file my weekly unemployment claim, but it doesn’t go through, a message of my benefits expired.  Which is a feeling beyond description.  Later, taking a walk, oh, it’s been a year, the DC system wishes me to refile, to go through what I did before, a series of pages with click yes or no... some of it auto-fill and some not.

The man in black by the lake, “I made some bad choices in my life,” he says, when mom asks him when he’ll retire.  Never.  Me, too.

I walk up the moraine hill in the fresh 5 PM sunlight.  The moon showing in the blue zenith, up above me and the high power lines by the grid station sector.  What if my unemployment doesn’t go through?  But then theres the man in black, he gets it, he labors away in to dying breath...  And what am I doing anyways, but having to go back in and deal with an old woman sitting in her chair... I should go get some wine for myself.

I’ve made a connection on Tinder with a little girl with a pretty face.  She’s funny at least.

And my old friend from the bar wants to bring her demented 82 year old mom and 12 year old daughter up for Spring Break for a change of scenery, as if I feel like entertaining now...

Misery of the human condition.

By now I almost feel I’ve parted ways from the old life of people pleasing, of letting people even kind ones walk over me, which was my job, but for what?  I could count, I remember, on a happy jocular patient spirit coming from within, myself showing up, but then to go home, without any worthy relationship beyond friendship I had much taste for.  Waiting on people, waiting, and waiting on them, till it was all I knew, then mom calling me hours after I’d fallen asleep, myself saying aloud, oh no, when I heard the ringer going off.

Then there’s my stuff, the things I am responsible for, but have no place to put...  my old life... fake.  People I always had to estimate through my own professional calculations, and on that regard I am not such a pro, but how could you be in such an atavistic environment as a bar...

The city tries to tell you too many stories, niches filled with dull stories of salesmanship, and you look underneath them, and there is often very little, just another lonesome entity trying to make up a story of themselves...  And those better at lying, at manipulation, at abusing fellow beings in their own creepy ways will come out better...

But who am I?  I’m too messed up on my own to be able to move forward with what attracts me.  There’s always something big, a monster, in the way.  The feeling that if I acted it would only go wrong, horribly, anyway.