I get my second vaccine shot, for the Covid-19, on Monday, just getting down to the Kinney's Drugs for the 1 PM appointment, in and out.  Sunday was another knock down and drag out thing, dinner with mom, getting her off to bed, and after all that I was up administering wine late, after the initial post dinner sleep.  

Sore arm.

Early Wednesday morning, I'm up at 2 A M, why...  but I need to get mom a pill, the pink one so...  

When I wake, the first thing, after the heartburn and the close dry air in the kitchen, congestion and then vomiting up the earlier evening's red wine, now I must hydrate.  It's cold out.  There might be snow here, soon, in the morning, here in mid-April.

"Shoulda' gotten a Ph.D., and I remember so long ago, the idiosyncratic move that doomed me with Henry Steele Commager...   I was on the ball in that class, but somehow managed to make the mistake of going to the faculty lunch with him, but not bringing my papers with me, so no walk with him across the campus, just like I missed the Dalai Lama, and you don't get second chances here at such pinnacle opportunities..."  Voice in head.

So I'm already beaten down, what the fuck have I done with my life, and then I got mom on my back now, on her turf, just as my life really starts to fall apart because of my own mistakes...

My god, my god.  But I've been through all that before.

Got to get up early to give Chuck, the neighbor, my friend, waiting to get back to bridge inspection jobs, a ride down to his mechanic to pick up his straight six '98 Jeep, but when I finally call him, around 9 AM, after being awake for 8 AM, he tells me his guy is telling him it'll be more like 11:30, so I go back upstairs, saying hi to mom as I see her on her bed, stacked amidst all her books in all directions, look out the window with her at the snow falling and covering the ground, well, I close the door to this room where I sleep on my air mattress and take a little nap, edging in and out of dreams and weary problems I can no longer solve and will have to accept eventually, and then later, after receiving the nice woman from Meals on Wheels, she's a cutie, and it's about time to go anyway, and I've cleared the car off of the snow twice already, and, as we discussed it over beers last night, sure, you want to drive?  And Chuck laughed then, and said, I'd knew you'd say that, with his hardy har harr smokers good laugh....

 But here we are now and Chuck doesn't even let the car warm up, though he notices as he guns it out of the parking lot over its bumps and pothole pavement that the engine is revving high, and the ride the whole way is like that, taking off and the whole ride is chaotic to my tastes, and the check engine light is on now, and after we pull of 104 in Scriba at the convergence of the three hills and he takes the steep road to the right, and up past the mechanic's shack and his lot out front, with the characters and ghosts of older cars and trucks then the ones before you, there is an old and queer interesting cemetery, and as I get out, shaken, as I am quite often these days, is there a vague smell of plastic smoke now as I take over the wheel. 

The engine is fluttering, now, taking with a breathing ailment, sputtering with palpitations and hesitations, and I think this is all probably related to the replacement catalytic converter our mechanic found, a few months ago, when there was the exhaust pipe failure, and which might have a related issue bearing upon the mix of fuel and air, oxygen sensors, that sort of thing.  And Chuck has noticed the sound of the grinding in the back, the rotors against the brakes, as happens on a cold day.  But as I see him walk away and get into his Jeep he doesn't seem to care much, and there is the empty orange juice plastic  bottle he swept up from the quickie mart past the McDonald's on 104 and quickly drank, going on his mad way, tossing it by reflex, done, into the back seat over his shoulder with his left hand behind us to that ultimate garbage repository, the back seat of cars immemorial.

So then, then you start thinking....  Why does it always burn you when you try to help someone else out?  

I stop at the Price Chopper, normally out of the way, to get some bone broth and a few other things you can't get at the Big M. lamb chops with a good expiration date.  Almond butter.  No, they don't have Rye Vita crackers, and by now I don't have the patience to look uselessly through gluten free or healthier bread options.  

Like the Tinder date, who then didn't want to drive her car back to her parents, so you drove her in her car  back home, thinking then you'd just walk back or get a cab...  But her parents are lovely, they make their own wine, they have interesting lives.  The young lady keeps two Clawed African Frogs, swimming listlessly in their tank, and before you go, it doesn't seem quite right, but she turns up the temperature on the tank, up to ninety.

Then later I get dropped, blamed for killing the frogs because it happened during your visit, and she's a depressive, so I hope nothing drastic happens, and maybe the family is mobbed up a bit...

Oh shit, that was not worth it, boys and girls.  Strife.  That's all that happens.  Strife and discontent.

And this is where we get closer to the first, the one true sentence.

Just about two in the morning, just as I am finally ready to write, or think like Picasso, just at the very moment, like a ghost, creepily, down the stairs comes mom, just when I'm beginning to have the right wine in the right mind, have taken out the smelly garbage bag, done the dishes, and she needs some attention and I give her her pink pill and she will crinkle the saltine wrapper and hunch over the counter at her low height, inspect the cat's dish, peer outside at the cold backyard...  So where are you going next?  What are your plans for today?  What are we doing for fun...

Her timing, exact, so much that it spooks you.

Well, mom.  Trying not to let out a shout with blood a'boiling instantly...  Well mom.  I'm trying not to shout at her at this point, as I say, because she can't hear so well.

My Life had Stood.  A Loaded Gun.  In Corners...  till a Day   The Owner passed --identified-- And carried Me away -- (however it goes.)  The oversoul overlord transcendent being guiding us all asks of us to be the loaded gun, picked up we are now, and what do we do?  WE WRITE A POEM.  That's what Emily did.  I explain.  

I'm trying not to be dragged down by her little ground like turtle toad creepiness... we have the nobility of our Father, and yet we're born from creepy little overachieving dirt, earth rather, dust.  No need to be cruel.  No need to shout even as you might like to at the interference pattern interloper.  Fame?  You think fame is a problem?  Try having a mother.

Where are you going next, Mom, I ask, turning the question around.  Why don't you go out for a little walk in the backyard.

It's too cold out.

She crinkles more at the saltine wrapper over my shoulder, as I'm thinking of transcribing a thought of Furtwangler, after looking in the refrigerator but unable to find anything.  Clueless bitch, I mutter, evil, to myself.  

I stand up and look for a stick of incense, Frankincense & Myrrh, looking for matches, and when I get it lit I wave it around and make the sign of the Cross over her, she looks at me, and then I walk through the room and up the stairs and to her bedroom.  She follows me up.  Oh, I can't come in.  Mom, it's your bedroom.  I adjust the television to something more of nature, North Woods Law, from Maine, game warden police doing their jobs keeping hunters and fishermen and outdoorsman in line.  You put a hex on me, she says.  No, this is Christian incense, and I explain.  I'll be quiet, she says.  Okay.

But now my ire is up.  I don't know why.  It's dark, cold, wet, about 33 degrees out, April snow.

Will she wake me up tomorrow, with what?

My mother is dead.  Bill Cunningham is dead.  Oh, that's interesting...  He died back in 2016, or so.

It's okay, in the night, as long as I have my wine.  And she feels the same about wine too, it's just a difference of opinion about how one manages to be creative.   That's the big point here I'm writing about tonight.  The world will always throw up hindrances at you, moral tests, like the Nazis came to beautiful cultured Furtwangler's doorstep, asking for him to bow, we'll give you this great stipend, we'll give you this huge baronial estate house to live, as long as you Heil Hitler salute to me, as long as you make the Berliner Philharmonic free to be an arm of Nazi Propaganda.

But the man knew.  He knew music was the issue, the thing to work on, for him at least.  (This is not said well.) And if he could do the right thing for his own inner spirit, he knew, this will help, this will help, all of us, all of us.

WF:  Without a community to which it is addressed, artistic form has no meaning at all.

WF: However high the technical capacity of an orchestra may be, the conductor has one arch enemy to fight.  Routine.  Routine is something very human, very understandable.  It's a line of least resistance, and there's no denying that in daily life it has its advantages.  But all the more must we insist that it plays the most deadly role in music.  Especially in the performance of old and familiar works.  In fact, routine with its loveless mediocrity and its treacherous perfection lies like hoar-frost on the performance of the most beautiful and best known works.

‘The conductor has one arch-enemy to fight: routine. Routine is very human, very understandable, it is the line of least resistance and there is no denying that in daily life it has its advantages. But all the more must we insist that it plays the most deadly role in music, especially in the performance of old and familiar works. In fact routine with its loveless mediocrity and its treacherous perfection lies like hoar-frost on the performance of the most beautiful and best-known works’.   James Keel.  Record of a BBC interview.  (norpete.com) https://www.norpete.com/c0181.html?viewfullsite=1

How is the great conductor and the bartender of any difference in the eyes of God...  well, in lots of ways.  The barman is a slouch, even if he likes his quiet walks and the motions of music and art.

I didn't feel like getting up yet.  Mom is quiet.  I roll over on my side.  I call the DC Unemployment line, wait a half an hour on hold three times, twice getting disconnected, then finally getting through.  They are back-logged, and the news, a computer system upgrade, that's what must be holding things up, but you wonder, in the back of your mind...

But it's been getting on my nerves, of course, being on the edge already, still keeping my apartment in DC, not getting the DC unemployment funds and then the federal pandemic aid on top of that.  So instead of $644 a week after taxes, nothing, and no obvious reason for it, I keep filing each week, the system accepts, but, still...

And then there's also mom's cash flow to worry about, how much is the car going to cost us, but what other option... The replacement catalytic convertor wasn't factory spec but an off brand, and the only problem was how the fuel sensors would adapt.  And now, maybe the system just isn't working anymore.

Leaving me pretty much sick with worry most of the waking hours on top of having to deal with mom who throws a big pout in the parking lot of the Big M because she feels it would be nice to go The Press Box, and so on, getting ugly with me...  I have no real choice but to give in.  And then you sit at the table too cramped and stressed, and then she's angry at me, because I'm being grumpy....  There's no use at all trying to talk to her about it, I mean, you might mention it, but what's the point of trying to get anywhere with it.  "It's not too late," she'll tell me.  And then the final fuss over finding her face-mask for her when we get up to use the restrooms and get back to the house.  And I should have been on the phone with the mechanic...

And curse anyone ever for ever being depressed in life, and the old house still haunts me.  The depressions are what will prevent you from moving forward.  Overbearing people in your life you cannot have a dialogue with...

I even see what shit this is, the whole writing thing, puny, minuscule, navel staring, except that you have to do your scales, and nothing means anything anymore anyway, and after doing the dishes after cooking a shitty dinner for us, rotisserie chicken in a soup, goaded on, I sit down and listen to a Furtwangler documentary.  

I got to write a bit.  That was the good thing.  Though I don't think I did a good job at it.  And there was the democratic experiment of a bartender's study, though I don't think that was much good either, or anyway.  I would have rather been a bit happier and more self-confident, did more with music, learned the piano and played classical music.

There is after all surprising intelligence and knowledge and learning in the people you come across, even in the lowly restaurant business, even in doorman who once were line cooks out in Lincoln, Nebraska, an impressive Vonnegut-ian knowledge of all things ...  & sundry.  Low things, high things, historical things, practical things.   You might think they are idiots, but there are plenty of intelligent minds in the restaurant business.  It's a way a lot of intelligent people without the luxury of a supported higher education get by, got by.

But I tell you, in life sometimes, depending, there is no choice but to be up at night, to find the quietness for the creativity burgeoning within you, burdening you, and in the nighttime there are the only people out there to make the journey of thinking and making art and creativity, where the rest of the day is filled with the most tiresome chatter one could possibly imagine, and which God himself must look down and think, for such chatter I in my infinite wisdom did not create you for this...

The book I wrote was and is regarded as a trifle, as shit.  Doesn't bother me.

But one has to give credit, acknowledgment to the fact of the divine loaded gun in corners creativity within.  There's a democratic right to that here, for your own right to interpret reality. 

It has become difficult here.  I can't do it, if I don't keep this time to myself.  But that is the conundrum.  If I were to be able to get myself I could do a bit better the dirty tasks, taxes, bill paying, the call to the lawyer, things now I can only take in small bites.

Does anyone else want to deal with her?  Will anyone call her?  

The reward for my kindness to her, to be the only one who would listen to her...

It starts to dawn on me, as I'm full of worries about the old car, and finding out just how difficult it is if you cannot take mom for a ride, up there, over there, by Rice Creek, up and out west to old Sterling, or simply along the lake:  maybe, just maybe, the unemployment and the additional federal pandemic help, maybe that has, unbeknownst to me, run out.  Maybe it isn't the recent computer upgrade.  There are messages in my inbox, cryptic, about how I will receive some status update through the mail, but Trump's appointed Postmaster General Dejoy has slowed the mail down enough to make you crazy on top of all the other things making you crazy.

So maybe I will not receive the last four weeks I thought were coming.  Nor any more.  And there's still my twelve hundred a month apartment with the stuff, my stuff, the things I managed to keep after the whole Decatur Place thing with the old landlord and my trying to balance too many weighty draining things, mom calling in need of emotional support and love, the restaurant business picking my bones dry, and then on top of that the true sense of my going nowhere, just falling behind, behind the Eight Ball as we say.  Maybe that's it.  

It's not a good feeling.  I take a long walk after fending off the repeated questions from senile mom, again and again, Tuesday, mom, Tuesday, that's when I'm taking the car in;  yes, mom, yes, I'll call Mr. Torbitt's to see if it's safe to drive the car there, yes, mom;  yes, mom, a rental car is about fifty bucks a day, and I'd rather not spend that.  But how's your unemployment?  Yes, mom I called them.  There's nothing they are telling me.  

I go for a long walk, slow, under a vaguely sunny sky.  Up the hill along the road, steep up to the water tower.  I'm rattled now.  I turned the car over after checking the mail, nothing but an offer from The Sierra Club, no news.  We took mom's check in yesterday, stressing the car out, the check engine light flashing now and then, not just steady, which is horrible and frightening.  I'm rattled, and it seems indeed the oil has gone down a bit, from one side of the stick indicator, if I'm reading it right, and the check engine light is on still, though not flashing.  I take the off the gas cap too, maybe that will allow for some readjustment.     But I'm so rattled that it does not occur to me, after the googling "check engine light flashing" and the eight possible causes, to not leave the car running when you are trying to top off the oil, and a quick impressive spray comes out, which later I conclude will cause a huge fire as I try to get the car out again to Scriba, but not as far as Chuck's mechanic...  I take some windex out along with more paper towels to clean the windshield off of the motor oil splatter.  What an idiot I am.

When I get back, after an hour, mom tells me she's been out for a walk too, over to the old farmhouse just a ten minute walk away, who sometimes has a junky yard sale, a rickety chair, something mom finds interesting.  I went over there, she tells me, but he's gone, he's dead.    And this I have to hear for a little while, and then over dinner, and even with a turkey meatloaf in the oven I'm trying to do tree poses but I hear the back door creak, and "where's supper."  Jesus Christ.

Better to take her for a ride than endure this, but we cannot do that now.

Virginia, they've opened the bars for sitting at, though at a six feet distance between parties...  Soon that will come to DC and the old bar at the Dying Gaul, and the trouble will only get worse for me.

Sundown.  Then again I have to worry, just as I've got mom dinner, and they seem to get harder and more laborious to cook, when I've cobbled together a decent dinner after all her rants and poking at me, lamb chops, say, one night, she is demanding now, like a child on the verge of a tantrum, after that then just when you're down and you're struggling to find enough of a relaxation from wine, dealing with the old woman's egomania, then she starts in on you with you.  But I'm worried about the cats.  How will I get him home, to my home home.  Up the road a piece.  Mom, does any of this look familiar to you.

Soon it's so tiresome and useless I get her a few scoops of coffee ice-cream, go upstairs to turn her television on, hope her body has enough room with all her books and piles and stacks and cruel messes of accumulated old shoes and useless bits of jewelry and clutters of things and stuff, all of it thrown into a still maelstrom of piles here and there and everywhere, by this point, after all that, I see how useless it all is, fighting a flood, every day, drain enough water, but it fills right back up again.

The only rest is the nighttime, after the three or four hours of troubled sleep when now it is quiet, and I'll be awake for three hours, doing the dishes, checking the dehumidifier in the basement, the load of your clothing in the dryer you forgot about in all the hell you're going through, distant voices over phones, no one to help out, and all the while you get this feeling of the slow ostracizing of the neighbors, even as they approve and applaud your efforts to keep your old mom the lady in her apartment, but the paper work cutting you, bleeding you, and worse, on top of all that, realizing, or pretending, or seeing, "my god, I am no completely unemployable, and all my stuff will be out in the street, and I can no longer even have the energy to invest in caring about such a bleak scenario happening.

Is there anything good to eat here?  Maybe a hotdog at three AM, to prevent, as Van Gogh's morning beer, to call in an aid, an anesthetic necessary for the terrible old lone Capricorn dealing with all the shit.

The clock ticks, mom's money cash flow is running down.  We're on edge most of the time.  I take walks to get some space, by the power lines, but still it's cold and windy, painful, stretches of marsh land and wet land cat tails bird habitat yet to be filled in with strip mall paved roads and it won't happen here under the great giant Quixote windmill power lines stretching all the way south towards Fulton.

Mom is upstairs in her bed, closer and closer to the older part of old age and the open jaw of Beethoven death bed gasps, but she's here still and all her books are here still.

But we are running out of fuel, and I never stood up for myself enough to have a fitting job more than a lackey one.  Take the car in for a fix, tomorrow, which of course makes me nervous, because I don't have a job, I'm running out of unemployment funds, they could be cut off already for all I know, and I, worse of all, have no ability to write a book of any sort.  Nothing.