In through the first sliding door, still laid with matts for the winter and the wet and the wind, in past the plastic bottle and can and glass recycling machine, then in through the second automatic door, where the grocery carts are parked in nested formation, and then through the door inside the small old supermarket, the newspapers stacked to the left, the little blue grocery baskets to the right as you head in past bread on the right and then the peanut butters...  There's a little raised booth where a manager's assistant sits, where you buy cigarettes, other transactions, and throughout, if you look, the old market is trimmed and decked with touches of old Oswego and the train station motifs throughout, if you're not too lost in yourself.  I go through and look at grocery items.  Does something speak to me?  Is there a psychic bend in time to which direction I am bent in, buy bacon today, oxtail or short-ribs for a stew, sausage, what else do I need, on top of the strictly normal functional things, the cold cuts, the fried chicken to keep mom's stomach happy when I go for my walk when she's started into the wine already.  Spinach in bags, pre-washed, onions in little red fiber net basket, nodding to markets long ago, old brakeman's lamps hanging above the checkout counters, toy trains along high shelves for decoration, framed pictures of the old town in old photographs back in its magnificence, large old brick buildings on both sides of the great wide river feeding out into the port, mills, grain elevators, small factories, before the evil destructions of Urban Renewal.  How many could have lived in the old Nestle plant complex down the road in Fulton, poor also beautiful Fulton...

And Mom is already on me, "Jesus Christ," banging angrily at her yesterday's newspaper when I come up or down from my hiding sleeping place, coughing and hacking, some bad air in here after so many years, maybe the foundational leak under the front door staining the cement blocks...  She'll be angry and dissatisfied with me all day, as I keep her, as she sees it, in the car when I go in to do the minor Shopping of the Groceries Station of the Cross, so that she can use it for leverage when she says, "well, what are we going to do now,"  just in the way she says, "Well, I'm just a stupid woman, what would I know..." 

The cough, the great cough.  It's not fun.  No simple way to clear it now.  Dry air?  Mold?  Failing lungs?  Some organ growing with a cancer within to push in on things...  I try.  I heat water, I make my tea, I try to demure, outside, clear the upper breathing...

Every day a battle.  With an economic cold hard reality behind it all, and because of hers, my own.  Family are the ones who will crucify you.  Looking the other way.  

At night, the creepy things mom murmurs, before she goes to bed, again, unhappy with me, the queen displeased, as she leans back on her bed, barely enough room for her little old body, piles of books and papers about to slide (they keep me company, she says, adding to my sense of all the lonely abuse she's withstood, as much my fault as anyone's), "I can find a new husband," really mom. And adding a little dig.  "One that likes me."  It's not enough I've found her her cat, told her that this is indeed, her home, "no, I"m up at the other place, and it's too cold to walk home."  She murmurs on.  "You hate me," she might be saying, and I do, she's right.  Not that I ever meant to.  And I empathize with her too, of course.  I did my best, she says.  I don't deserve this.  Yes, you're right mom.  

Maybe I could get some help. From somewhere.  The Void.  From the rich worlds of the I don't care people.  To whose world I can't get back to.  Pretending to have seen too much, in my own head of judgmental too kind to others nonsense.

The day starts and ends in the same way.  I go back to a nap, a light sleep, hiding again, before I can sneak a few hours to myself.

Stories of the Irish.  

My grandfather, hard-working chef, working more than one job to get by and take care of family, breaking his body down, slowly, bit by little bit, unfiltered cigarettes, my aunt has an "Aunt Jean" story, as my mom is lucid around 7:30 before the dinner I've worked on, simple, easy, is ready...  It's Thanksgiving, and coming down from Beverly in from Danvers--mom must be away at college at UMass by now--they show up at Aunt Jean and Jimmy's, four in the afternoon.  "Jean, when did you put the turkey in the oven," he asks, as they come in the house.  Everyone is hungry, probably.  Aunt Jean hasn't even put the bird in the over at this point...

And maybe sometimes it is better to have a rough job, the one my grandfather Ed worked, one that involves a kind of thinking deeper than the business set mind.  "Work smarter," they say, but, what good does it do the Earth, this planet...  to work smarter, not harder.  

I run the dishwasher through, two nights and days worth, I suppose, after dinner, and getting mom wrangled and set, something on TV I can watch for a little while, a reality show about homesteaders, Swiss immigrants, who came to Alaska to escape Hitler and the Nazis.  

After a few hours rest, around 1 in the morning, I sneak past a snoozing mom on her bed, I need to get up, write a bit for my own sanity, as it's been one of those days when it closes in, mom sinking down into her condition, you don't even have any time to think of old slights and shitty people, 

So I come downstairs, having moved from the grievous basement's cold darkness, a towel hung over a PVC pipe tube to block the light of the front, the southwestern little low to the ground window, having moved upstairs again, on the same level with mom.  The upstairs bathroom.  I have a narrow space for my sleeping gear, but, maybe it will be okay, with earplugs at the ready.

I cough some.  And then the need to vomit comes, so I stand outside the kitchen on the back stoop, trying to clear my passages, but up it comes, thickly, it will not wait.  I can't make it back to the bathroom, which has its own close airs, no clear air coming from the sea, so out it must come, over the little railing into an overgrown little place, a weed bush of a tree.  Oh fucked up days of fucked up days, and by now, a year away, how will I ever get back now, how will I not be marked, by my own insane out of polite society customs, being the Scape Goat in life....  Thick glop.  Here comes the Wild Mike's pizza I took from frozen into life last night late, sharing with mom, adding fresh mozzarella and banana peppers from a jar for a nice tang.  And up comes the wine colored things from the bottom of the stomach, of a system, an animal, trying to breathe, trying to escape from all his own bad choices day after day, trying to be a good Jew, a good Christian, a good whatever. 

But how will I ever be employed again, and I'll never make enough money to have anything but rented, on the way to, perhaps sooner rather than later,

a final resting place.

It was warm for a bit, then it got colder again.  The wind, 25 to 30, hurt.  

I thought mom's hair appointment was today, and that made us both nervous and mom was fishing around upstairs in her drawers doing nothing from what I could tell, just looking blindly in drawers, fiddling with this and that, and then with the visit this week from Saint Elizabeth coming all this way on the shitty road, the road so lonely, both ways, no one giving a fuck, and my own holy middle european monk father saying even, "I wouldn't wish this drive on anyone."  Cold darkness, shit coal mine territory after all the farmland of beautiful Cana home of New York State before the land changes to a natural boundary south of Binghamton's beginning of rivers going different ways and the valleys breaking up in a foreboding way, this way, the hard ground of Pennsylvania, a long no-man's land extends before you with a cruel road too.  The publicly available radio will be in and out as far as things that sustain, though one could always go to Country Music beyond the occasionally but sort of rarely useful preacherman Jesus radio on the low college station end of the dial, all the way to Harrisburg, get across the river, and finally Gettysburg, with the Round Tops right there, sustaining breasts of history after the wilds.  Ground to rest on, after all the struggles, please let me stop here, but you have to go on, and on, toward the worst part of this disillusioning drive that reveals so much about the American Economy.  

God Bless Joseph R. Biden, Jr., President of these United States of America, who knows these towns, lived in, knew the heritage, the difficult lives of Harrisburg, after Scranton and Wilkes Barre and and and Hazleton, the Burger King in Ravine off 81, preferable to, at least different from the next stop, another McDonald's as you drive out of the last danger of the mountains unto the flats that lead to a western leading road of tedium even through beautiful country farmside, past Fort Indiantown Gap...  tricky rest stop you don't want to stop at because it's too hard and suicidal to try to merge back on...

And Trump just came in, to satisfy their justifiable sense of displacement, the things the Hedge Fund guys and the Koch Brothers and all the One Percent so don't give a fuck that the Confederate Flag still at rest stops and gas stations and McDonalds in the back of Ford F150s.  

But I won't go on about such.