By early April when the willows, the forsythias and maples budded, I felt like I’d lost it, a year out from work during mom's slow needy fragile centimeter by centimeter up and down decline.  My horoscope confirmed how I was feeling, low on energy, quite unsure to get back on track toward what I wanted out of life, you know, the basics that everybody not in an intensely abnormal situation had loads of.  I didn’t have nothing, and I was getting tired of it, and even with other stuff on top of that.  The tree pollen had come, on top of everything else, and for weeks I'd not received my unemployment, but that was from the computer upgrade the District of Columbia government was performing, I wasn't alone, I found out, to some relief, temporary in nature.

And I didn’t even know how to write anymore, and wrote rambling sentences that went with my confusion. Again, I was up til 5, 6 AM, when the blue light came up after keeping my night watch for the ghosts.

Mom wouldn’t give me a goddamn uninterrupted inch if she was not asleep and there was nowhere to go with the covid risk very high, with low vaccination rates.  Didn’t feel to me like there would be another ounce of joy in my life.  And all my clothes and a lot of my gear was stuck back in an apartment I couldn’t even get to.  Every single issue had become heavy and weighted like that, and out on walks away from mom’s apartment sometimes I just wanted to lay down on the ground or against a post and hide and meditate.  The tree frog peepers had come back.  Pond scum.  I kept walking.

I might have considered my wine drinking a problem but what the hell else was I going to do out on night watch with Hamlet.  It felt like I needed a project of some sort.

I walk back to the apartment.  There’s a bottle of ten dollar Beaujolais in the fridge.  I’ve got a piece of friend fish to reheat in the toaster oven, wings I cooked earlier potato in the oven from earlier.  Back to the chorus of one, wish I were dead, I’ll kill myself, people used to like me, I wrote a book or two, I have a Ph.D.  I’m no good.  I don’t know....  nobody cares...

I plop down at the table, my thumb in a mug with ice and cold water, a clumsy burn from earlier when we came back after our errands, putting a plate down on the pan with the cooked wings to cover them, then the plate going down too deep and not wanting to come out, and nothing works here.  How do you think I put up with it, I say, also talking to myself now.  The cat is back out again.  There is light in the woods at sunset out the back door just like a Cezanne.

Anything I can do to help, mom asks.

I suppose American writers, along with their character, fresh and innocent, democratically read enough to get a start, they are responsive to innovation in prose.  They take in the world, full of immigrants now, and customs more set, digest and come up with slight tweaks on something which no longer has much real room for tweaking.

They will go a long good way.

And one point they too will realize how they've been taken advantage of, just by their own fool individual solitary pursuit of the form, and one day will no longer want to do much more than just get bombed by the evening of the day, to quell all their real anxieties.  

Some writers are more entrepreneurial in their personal lives, in order to protect themselves and save themselves financially, even as they keep the creative independence they would wish for.

And for others they have long had so many problems growing over the years, taking on things no wise person really would want to for long or to make a habit thereof, that they find themselves stuck in so deep that there is nothing else to do, get into the wine at night, keep one's own hours, no longer able to intersect with anyone else who is normal in a normal town.  Thus their need for the Bohemians.  The lawless.  The irresponsible people of the world.  Musicians making a small living, if they're good enough.

When the boss called he mentioned all the customers, the long old good regular ones who I had cultivated as well as anyone else, and never taken advantage of, but been on an even plain with as far as the restaurant went, genuinely happy to see and serve them.  There was the older African American gentleman, Jim, who had been in arbitration legal matters so long he'd long sustained himself at the top.  I'd heard from him on social media that he'd had a little issue which had prompted him to move into some form of assisted living, and, though from sight just a little bit diminished at our sister restaurant, that this was one of the things I talked to about my boss, and I longed to rejoin the team, doing good things again, even though the finances ate at me and I could no longer have anymore mom calling me ten times a day while I was trying to work.

But on the other hand, why, why go back?  What for?  For another twenty years slogging it out, which would not leave me in good shape...  to continue what?  renting?

And all that hospitality, genuine, instinctive, where had that gotten me but taking care of a difficult grumpy feeble minded 82 year old mother no one else wanted much to do with, not of their fault, but of hers, but of course you could not mention any fault to such a princess bitch, and this was all draining the life out of me on a daily basis, so I had my rest, and got up again for the night watch when it was only me and the cat around in the whole complex, the only ones awake for miles and miles around as far as I could tell, except the night shift guys working at the plant.

In the night watch I'd chip meaninglessly away at the piles of things, the excess in the refrigerator, reflections of my honest attempts to cook and keep feeding ourselves in an interesting enough way, but with milk cartons from the Meals on Wheels program to dump out, the food that I'd cooked but was growing too old to enjoy, the foggy clutter, and along with that different piles of papers and books all scattered around mom's Eames chair throne.  

My suitcase lay open still, clothes clean but not folded, scattered about, and everything else was that way too.

But the man was too tender, and too accommodated to defeat and not getting his way, and with an equanimity he might have shrugged under his old sail like a flag of Quixotic constant non-victory, to really see anything much different from one thing and another, between ever upwardly mobile success and the wife and the big house, between that and his own little life of constant failure, a steady string of perhaps a slow decline but the same as decreed by nature, and he'd long been a part of such a process that it would be too late to get out of it, having like the snail who'd grown a shell, or a flower that had come and gone, or an animal that had a summer coat and a winter coat and then grew old and died, for far too long that he was reduced to his basic elemental you might say monkish self.  Eyes, ears.  Hands to do things with, a body to stretch out and try to keep in alignment.  A hollow coconut head to keep things in, a flexible back bone, legs to carry, hands to hold a steering wheel or slice an onion, or open a bottle of wine. 

The Lord keeps lots of us around, as spares, to call into duty when something else dies.  One old monk croaks, well, I got a few 'nuther idiots to replace him with, the keep the circuit running.  An old writer full of nonsense gives up the ghost, well, God's got another one set up to come on line, another Beaujolais drinking freak of nature "not intended for mass production," as Dr. Hunter Thompson put it once.   Some stupid innocent who by virtue of being nocturnal has hid out from the cruel realities of life.

The idiots know, just as laborers on the Pyramid project would have known, it's all step by small step at a time.  Cannon fodder of ants making a long chain between jungle tree posts, strung together.  John Donne is one ant hold away from Hemingway, maybe, perhaps, a step away from his other Earth planet friends, Kerouac, Shakespeare...  You find what fits for you...

I watch Shane MacGowan singing over the years as Hemingway watched bullfights, but here a slow mutual death, not a violent death, but a long slow self-destruction, one that coincides to the longer haul another artist might have to make, one that gives him enough truth to keep going through his lot in life and miseries.

I add thoughts to this mix whenever I can.  Write it.  Don't say it.  You can never talk about anything on that level of thought 

My friends, this is Ernest Hemingway, and what I am about to talk to is not popular, but it is true.  It is not in the language of the official language mugs, 

An Irishman knows with a knowledge within him that he will die defeated, from famine and coffin ships and other things, and that he will be left to watch the long slow decline within himself when others will turn English, self protecttive, monied.  

( but set out happily in the corners of escape as was Emily a loaded gun resting in corners, held steadily so as not to fire prematurely...  waiting for an oversoul or a lord or greater higher transcendental being to come along...)