But who wants to read any of this crap.  It was just my escape into further irresponsibility.  Self therapy.

At night, waking at two, with mom's television mumbling, then turned down, at night came the fear.  And maybe you should have not thought yourself as up for all this if you were not prepared for this fear, a cowardliness, a real true dread.  Part of the fear was in her unrelenting nature, how she too was afraid, and wanted someone to talk to, but feeling she couldn't talk to anyone else, not wanting to call them up out of the blue with all her inner problems.  But mom, everyone is going through stuff like this now.  That's the good thing about now.  No one can go out.  Everybody is worried.

I came back from my walk.  Earlier in the day we'd wound our way out to Sterling Nature Center, and she was happy, 65 out now, the sun out, the lake in the distance giving you a background that something inside you and beyond words responded to.  Then as we walk walked back to the dusty gravel parking lot, the two horses had returned, their women riders with the long horses carrier vans behind pick-up trucks.  There was something about Massage Therapy on the closer wagon, by the chestnut brown horse, the dapple gray one in the distance, and we stood and hesitated, and then the woman called us over and we talked to the horse, a Missouri Fox Trotter, aging now past her twenties, stroked her, we were given pellets of food and the horse gently swept them up.  She has her winter coat still, stringy with dried sweat.  Later in the year, they will go to the Adirondacks, for longer hikes of seven eight hours...

(The older woman tells us of how she once had a frightful accident on the highway, 481, with the horses in her trailer, tipping over, come undone...  People were so nice, and protective, she says.  Silver hair.)

I came back from my walk and cautiously entered, having fed mom some chicken stew earlier, and I got my guitar out, and I played for her, the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and she kept telling me, oh, you're so good, you're so talented, and when I stopped to retune, she asked me if I had broken anything, and I looked at her, irritated with her for babbling away over my process of trying to gather myself.

But by a few songs later, it was the third and final part of Ken Burns PBS on Hemingway, and I needed to sit through it., for I had learned a few things earlier.  I watched from the chair by her bed, and it was also strewn with clothes, and I drank Labatt's Blue from a tall can and it helped me slightly, and then I was emotional by the end.  Then I slept some, then I was awake again, and I had time to myself, alone, which is good if you can find yourself at work again, or terrifying if you can't.

I loved the writing of Hemingway, particularly the palpable early stuff in the short stories, and I knew instinctively what were the good and the great and the best of his works, but I also knew the whole and what each represented.  I knew how to appreciate what was in the poorer ones too, and I liked them too.

But Hemingway scared you.  Kerouac was frightful also, but somehow without the outward direct anger of Hemingway of the kind that made you feel your own depressions and failings and the instrument you worked from.  Hemingway was great about talking about that instrument, but he also scared almost terrified you, and that was why he too needed his bars and buddies and the outdoors, to protect, to insulate himself from the dark side we all have.  Jolly, convivial, of good taste.  Knowing how to do things and live right.

With Kerouac you could rest a bit easier, for his retreat, and this is true of Hemingway too, was into something like Catholicism, or a sort of natural out in the rugged western United States territories love of the raw outdoors and all it had to offer you beyond words, directly.  Kerouac found a place he could rest.  One can suppose Hemingway did too, with the Gulf Stream below him, but he was always in a competition, always in motion, and I knew those pained yet beautiful works when he kept on going even while needing a rest.

But I had to avoid the wine.  I'd been up cooking the lamb into a stew and had a bottle of Ruffino Chianti, and then kept going on with the Bardolino, and the next day I felt like absolute hell and stayed in bed past three in the afternoon.

I suppose the escapes from mom cooing over my gentle guitar playing--I grant she knew it was good--into the soothing of the beer, the cider, the wine, the rest after dealing with her all day, the small angers of her being left in the car in the sun while I went in to shop for groceries, they were like the run for home plate, for the effort to find peace and quiet and some kind of satisfied harmony of work, where you drank to calm the excited running nerves, to focus your athletic endeavor away from the chatter of other duties, as you made that terrifying run for it the writer makes and once having started into must continue writing for the remainder of his life, unless he is somehow sainted, specially gifted.  Always running, always with the ball coming behind you, back from the outfield, to the infield, the roar behind and all around you, and there you are...

Is that any kind of a life?  Living out of a suitcase, far away...

"You're so talented," my mom says, from her chair, "it must not be easy."  And that makes it enough, good enough being here, even if that talent in danger here as anywhere, the rest of the iceberg people cannot see, particularly if you allow them to have expectations from you as a worker bee.  

Talent is a shameful thing as much as a good thing, let me tell you.  But that shameful kind of life has long been honored in various cultures, the Irish with their pub and the music and the tales... staying out too late,  lawless, talkative, friendly... farmers.

To tell you the truth I get a good and fair amount of of agony relief by coming down here into the kitchen at night.  Believe me there is always lots to be done, sorting through the refrigerator's ugly things, used or on going cat food and dishes, the constant elimination of the clutter here in mom's kitchen forest, the just about but not quite empty plastic Pepsi bottles, my beer bottles, the wine bottles, the trash, the trays of Meals on Wheels drop offs that don't quite get eaten in time.  Last night, after we watched the second part of Hemingway, after I took a break, I go check on mom and she's hungry.  Yes, a little pizza will be good.  So, to the detriment of my figure and waist line and the keeping up of my pants and the tucking in of my shirt, okay, there's mushroom and green pepper and even pepperoni to add as the frozen pizza of Wild Mike's spends it twenty minutes in a 400 degree oven...

And in my fantasy, and in Tolstoy's as well, as Levin, in Anna Karenina, I get realigned by little chores, for Count Leo, scything hay with the peasants in the summer, being a strong man.  I succeed with getting a new soft version toilet seat on the upstairs bathroom,, take the old one out, recycle the packaging, the cat comes in back to the back door and I feed him from two of the four cans I put away in the fridge after mom had opened them through various parts of the day while I was out on a walk or napping.

The lonesomeness isn't so bad with three cans of cider into you as you putter around with these small chores.

But reading one writer, after you've been processing another in the fibers of your being with what you have left to give and can give in your life, your intimate personal mental life, will be like feeling a new wind in the morning.   That's a good thing.  Freshening, invigorating.

The whole lot of these old useless males who imagined they might have time enough on their hands and the desire, they did play it out with the vigor of a sport, an intellectual pursuit, something that had some sort of immediate spiritual demand upon them, even if they always have look back and the latter and wonder why, and think it, even they, what bullshit it must be.  Every now and again, one gets through, as a real spiritual epiphany, but none of us can really say, but to pay some weird homage to the thing.

Your old mother's crazy cluttered apartment is hardly one of the fine hotels Hemingway must have stayed in, in London, Havana, Madrid, Paris, Schruns, Austria, the rest of France and Spain, nor it is a bar full of vigorous faces working on getting high as kites from the drink's liberating properties, the stories.  (Without knowing, my brother out of love took me to London for my birthday of turning forty, though I had nothing to show for it, and we stayed at the Mayfair hotel that Hemingway stayed in while covering D-Day, not directly then to my knowledge.  The Dorchester, were Hem drank with a lot of the greats, A.J. Leibling, Capa...)  Nor is it the house of the old fisherman of constant defeat because that is reserved for you yourself.

Nor is it the charted points of a Kerouac road, not the cottage of Gary Snyder, who is a success at everything, not an apartment back in the old days of New York with all the people, nor with the stakes of the house of his sister Nin and her husband and boy and Kerouac Mere down in Rocky Mount, when he becomes out in the woods, meditating almost perfectly and quite perfectly, Saint Jack of the Dogs, before off on another sad horrible lonely venture of patched together transportation.

The sky is clear tonight, thus my thoughts.  I've sprayed a mold killing spray on the cold damp cinderblock mold that has come below the front door.  

It seems my unemployment help is still coming through, but I know I have to decide, and what do I do with all my own stuff let alone my mother's stuff.  It's not so easy politely holding her hand when I have such messes to wake up to and constantly haunt me, what am I to do.  It was a lot to go through that documentary absorbing what I never really wanted to absorb, the volatility of male female relationships, as Hemingway knew and practiced his whole entire life, Jesus Christ.

I look in the mirror, with my growing stubble, and I see Hemingway, and I also see Kerouac.

I have a moment of peace, in the night, 4 AM, no wars going on.  Did any bar I worked ever really get my depth, my occasional muzzled brilliance, my little crow's nest gathering of little shiny bits and pieces, old forms made of metal, or driftwood, or the work of elements meeting what man uses and then must abandon...  I was pretty funny, pretty deep.  They don't pay you for that.  The thing about the bar though was that I just couldn't leave all that work to be done by someone else.  I had to do it, with my hands, my back, my fingers, my legs, my bending, my attention to cleanliness, all the finer stuff few might really now about, why, because you don't get paid well enough for that, even no matter how noble and affirming that work is to society.  By the way, it took Hemingway "the better part of five years" to write one of his greats, Death In The Afternoon which is so totally him and which touches upon all the little things a workman might know or want to know, down to the clock like ticking details and textures and the smells too.

But at work, they sniped me too.  Miguel would relay it back to his wife, Renata, the manager's right hand man, so to speak, what I had allowed in the late night of the bar when the tributaries of chaos came with their satellite friends who too were interesting, and who echoed the pleasures of a chef, while, if I was lucky I had ordered the veal cheeks, or a flank steak, or a duck leg confit, or something that would keep my belly full as the night came to the unpredictable that made it keep its living soul as a ghostly place were people tread and talked.

You get the spook from others, you do, the writers, the musicians.  That is a thing that goes far beyond any medium, the spook that's carried and comes out.  You have to be awfully free and liberal with words in order to capture the slightest part of any of that, your own personal inner crazy.  Shakespeare is the king of all that, and he had kings of it who went before him, to be always able to explode the language, the common usage, use it or explode into dust by reforming it with a complete free oceanic freedom, crashing waves of little bits of speech, here's something for you.  

Larkin, to my mind, was a fellow who honored that as well as anyone.  To through out a term.  High Windows, to be liberal and unafraid enough to say, to admit, to personify, "I work all day, and get half drunk at night."

Smart people, at five AM, know it's all PR, watch what you say out into that effective rented world...

"Is it, has it come to, the bar or mom..." the protagonist asks...