Double triple quadruple quintuple miseries of this day and hour.

Out of a job and can I ever get back?  What about my stuff, where does that go when all this is through, and do I, can I, even go back to that, without more shame upon me, and old mom won't be taken care of anyway, and how's her money holding up and she wants to go out for dinner and "adventure" every night, and I sit there through it all, nodding at the repeated questions, "where are you going next," "how's your writing going," "how's the restaurant doing," all of which are questions that add to my aches and pains, sitting there, and all I can do really is go out for a walk, finding some peace in the sunlight, a pair of Canada Geese by their low puddle marsh by the power grid station even in the cold, bundled up with every layer, and I don't bother the geese and walk by slowly, treading carefully, and through the high tassel dried grasses and over the abandoned railroad tracks, little weedy trees growing up some you can't walk through... up over the grassy hill underneath the wooden crucifix power lines in the Good Friday winds that hold birds up in a difficult hover, an osprey, large blackbirds...

I try, going through the papers all over strewn throughout her office upstairs where I sleep and rest.  Piles and piles, the book collector woman of Auburn in the 19th Century ordering books from Southerain's in London, etc., and all the letters and the timelines of all these people, all of which she ordered xeroxed from the Syracuse University rare book library, in clipped or bound sheafs...  old computer manuals, computer cables, different generations, all of it mixed together, and books leaning or stacked or on a shelf or just lying on the floor somewhere underneath other papers, and in amongst all this, which I honor and try to save in an economical fashion, and amidst these piles, the photographs, old yellow envelopes and some just with the negatives, a few attempts at photo albums like we used to...  treasures in image, ancestors, time, memories, the old houses, the safety and innocence of happy childhood imaginations and love and the beauty, the unique beauty, saintly in its own nature in every face and captured gesture...  and I should with my own handsome genes passed down have passed on and lived a normal life with wife and happy responsibilities and children as sweet as I once was, looking out over the brook that came down from the old willow tree swamp that channeled the water down from higher farm fields and woods, dropping down through it all and rubbing the massaged roots of life shouldered up by the rock and grit soil.  Old cars, the '66 blue Volvo station wagon parked there in the driveway up on Ernst Road when the house was built so perfect and fresh, in the grove of Elms and Sugar Maple...

And in the meantime, it finally dawns on me that I've breathing in mold from the cinderblocks in the basement here, at the corner of the steps of 35 Cedarwood, the ice and icicles, every day of winter...  Maybe that's why I vomit when I wake up, always congested, go downstairs, trying to breath, nauseous, and it beats me more often than not, puking with either empty stomach or fuller with thicker things than bile and foam...  And after I do all the dishes and have done the cooking, mom might come down and say something like "put the toilet seat down," or "this place is a mess," if she were to venture to clean a cat dish in the sink.

So, you go for a walk, when the sun is out, over the other road to the east, up it to the hill where you can now see the lake in the distance, blue sea past house tops and roof tops and church steeples and the hospital bricks and the smooth cement of smoke stacks and all the magnificent trees that reach up to blue sky now with cones and cones, and the grass is green now, and that house over there, on the south side of Ellen Street a house with paint just like that of my maternal great grandparents in old Lynn, Massachusetts.    And I go up to the crest of the hill and then down a gentle slope and here's a path through the grass by the old Polish St. Stephan's, in through the back door, and I can walk my gentle observations now warmer inside with the sun's rays low over the pews and the resonance of a church like a footstep has the same sound of opening the cover of a grand piano's keys as it always clunks, you can't keep an acoustic instrument of any sort quiet...  I pace slowly gently along the church walls from west to north to east and then up to the front where there is an alter draped with an appropriate linen covering, Cardinal Wojtyla used once in the Seventies in American and found in storage somewhere.  

When I get back to mom, after leaving the safe sanctuary and through the parking lot back to Ellen and down past the few old beaten interesting farmhouses, back to Cedarwood, first to the old Corolla to look at the pictures and iPhone 8 shot videos I've taken on my walk, warming up with the car on, charging up the phone from 7 percent up, and then thinking, as I can't see so well with the sun reflecting from windows east of the setting sun looking into the phone, and in my mind as always now, more or less, constantly, how's mom doing, will she be a bit loud and tipsy, and how much of an attack will she mount on me of how she's been lonely and needs to talk and talk, but when I get in she's not too bad, sitting there on the couch with the cat, and I just want to take the chicken breast tenders out of the fridge and cook a sort of Chicken Cacciatore, she of course wants to go to the Press Box, and finally, exhausted, I relent.  Friday evening, 6 o'clock, it's busy when we get there, but we only have to wait ten minutes, and again, there are the happy people who belong to each other all through the place, and we don't belong anywhere.

We get sat, we get our wine, we order, chicken fajita for her, haddock fried for me with cole slaw, tartar sauce, lemon, ketchup, sweet potato fries... and I try to tell her over the din of happy people through their work week, and I'm already remembering how the construction guys called in to their table upstairs, in from their journey travels working on the nuclear plant yearly make over, wished gently to wave us through as we walked up, and a gracious act and gesture from these big burly maybe biker type guys, big and heavy, "wait guys," and I say in the cold under the awning, thank you, we're good, we'll go in after you, that sort of tingle you get from a buried sweetness coming from anonymous strangers when you need it, as a cold blue dusk, holding mom gently by the arm, as we enter the gauntlet, mom is happy...

Ahh, when we get home, what was I thinking, I'm tired, she still wants to go on, "you know, people who go out to restaurants like to talk afterward..."  But I'm done, for this day, Good Friday, after balancing the leftover containers and the car key and getting mom back, I'm done, exhausted.  And gloomy enough to just want to go rest, and soon I fall into dream, dreams of old opportunities for fun, suited to one's talents, and in the dream I'm with a guy who's a drummer and we pull out our guitar and bass and start playing some cool old reggae song, from which I wake up cold and dry and another deep sore throat, a thick and runny nose, and the night before I'd observed, as I might have told mom over dinner, after she'd asked me maybe an additional time I didn't need, where are you going next, I tell her, well, Kerouac, after the best years of his productive literary life, alone, obscure, he lived in Orlando, in a separate little apartment in a small tract house bungalow sort of a thing, near a great live oak tree strewn with Spanish moss, and at least he was protected here, obscure, no one to bother him, "hey, you're the King of the Beats," he could still write at night, and then sleep outdoors in a sleeping bag.  I mean, it's a great admission of the truth.  You've been on the road for a long wearisome time, and even if you have nowhere solid to go land upon, a tree branch with the stuff you've weeded through and valued and used and put mutual marks upon, however with luck or fate such things happen, even when it all tied to your own irresponsibility, fuck it, I want to say to old questioning mom who once and still is a little girl, pretty, headstrong, a mini Mary Lincoln perhaps...  you can't fight it anymore, you go with it rather than against, a certain kind of fight still there, but what's the point, all you've absorbed, like we all must and do, the body blows of life, the hatred, the being cast aside, as must happen to any writer creature of exile pure.  

What I write... that alone is a separate but quite relevant and involved question for any writer of prose or poetry.  Such that I fear it if anyone who knows me or is related to me were to look in over my shoulder to see what this old boy is up to after all his promises of blossoming seasons of earlier flowering beauty...  those who ask themselves with love and deep worries now, how are things going...

But I cannot look back at them, and I can only say that what I write is fiction, a complete fiction, especially if one were to consider the real science behind such practices as Joyce did in exploring his reality.  See, none of it is true, 'tis just the active mind, a mind going through the necessary mediations, and therefore no one can take anything I say personally or seriously or think to heavily much about it, for I am just like you and you are just like me, and we are all going through life, and that is all I mean to emphasize, in a way to put the writing far far beyond any need of bitter critique of estimation of any value of prose ability, or readability, or anything like that, you know, the kinds of questions that go along both with "why and what are you writing," and "why are you spending your time this way, when after all, work is work and time is money, earnings for a future, for that which is beyond the little fairy tales existing in our mental unreality musings, for your own security, and isn't writing just a sort of off shoot, not to be taken seriously, of those of us who like our wine and our company and song at night to soothe us, but not meant to be more than a sort of hobby...  one that is not of much use, really..."

So that sometimes I look back and my guts and spine and skin grows cold with a sudden jump automatic, saying to yourself, writing is nothing more, as I do it, in my style, with a sort of Penthouse Letters style.  "I got out my wah wah peddle and we were sweating up in the attic as I played my electric guitar and we both felt it, and soon, with each touch of the pedal we began to feel the vibrating deeper within.  She looked at me and relaxed, both of us feeling it in, her in her tight cut-off shorts, and she started rubbing her breasts..."  Fantasy, in other words.  And even Keats, the Grecian Urn and the line no one can really fully understand expect through being inspired like jazz musicians to their riffs, truth, beauty, perception, our little minds that can only take so much, and which in order to make ourselves successful and responsible in life, must put at arm's length.  

And Hemingway himself would say it, in all sorts of ways:  write, don't talk about it, for you cannot talk about it, or however he would have put it in Hemingway.   

And all this too will cause lots of friction.  Friction in places where it would seem you needed peace most of all, agreement, open communication, instead of argument and anger and pointed argument fingers attempting to impose some kind of human ape surviving sort of interest...

When you finally realize things, the world turns upside down.  And you laugh, almost, albeit in an oftentimes grim but touched way, all your friends and allies and good souls lining up on your side, your buddies, people you can talk to, people like musicians who want to play music and not lord anything over you, least of all their popularity or any of that shit, the people without successes that would exclude a single soul, least of all your own...  Like Buddha you lean back and laugh at things you once considered important with all the juvenile hormones running through you so much that you yourself keep on running, and at least show up to work for similar and related reasons, wherever my moon in my twelfth house might be tonight or any night... You, I, the great over I, placed some form of illusioned interest in all sorts of things and concepts of how to live, wealthy, successful of course, but all of this was seen through some kind of eyes no more higher than that of a lizard reptile. 

And Kerouac, say of him what you will, sums it up just as clearly as anyone... "who knows... we're all going to die..."

Old Hem, Ernie, he liked the form of fiction, of the brief cutting sentences so direct to experience, the short story, the short passage, a little theater, behind which really any ready understands quite well, very instinctively and directly, "Nick trailed his hand in the cool water as they went across the lake in the canoe, quite certain that he would never die..."  at the end of that story, Indian Camp, in which his uncle is a doctor who has to perform an emergency Caesarian, "damn squaw bitch," when she bites him, and the poor father to be, young hunter of Upper Michigan tribe, in the upper bunk, leans over, unable, in the midst of it all, to handle it....  you know the story.  

The stories were an imaginative refuge for him.  They were his way to talk about the most close and intimate things there were to him, and in fiction, no one could get all that mad about him and all his irresponsibilities, taken care of by Hadley as he was back then.

The greater form, or at least equal to the luminescent short stories of his early career, came later, in the memories of how he did it all, seen most clearly in later forms, the stories of A Moveable Feast, and in the later acceptance of fiction's blending in with the realities we think are real in our minds, the manuscript journals of Islands in the Stream.  

You can't do it, you can't write anything, you can't think, without that crucial danger, the fear of shocking other people, loved ones who might be hurt deeply by any word your inner saint writer might delve in with, the fear of stepping out across the line.   And that happens, not through any great adventure, necessarily, though it can, not with driving a motorcycle incredibly fast when you're high out of your gourd... No, it shows up better when you get more tender and sensitive and think of gentle things, like eating spaghetti birthday dinner in childhood sweetness, your favorite.

Oh, sadness all around us, the seasons, truth.

You'll never be accepted, not until you accept yourself.

What can I say?  My lovely mom has always and ever supported me, in a perfect way.