"Well, I’ve had to deal with her my whole life, so of course there is meaning, of some kind, in that.  A strong within unto herself, headstrong, a woman of her own independent reality, that cannot be shaken.

And I am forced to enter into this picture, bound to it, for life, and everyone else runs."

He lay finally there on the green soft breast of the air mattress of comfortable support, floating again, four AM for the first time back to himself again it seemed for the first time in days.  The visit had been an ordeal.  Trying to get everybody on the same page, and no one could even hear each other.  Now, with a final day to go, however it would work out, feeling a guilt of not being happy with anyone else, itself a liberating artistic feeling, he lay back, intoning within the prayers, Our Father, Hail Mary, Jesus Prayer, reciting them within his body from the lowest tail bone chakras on up, so that by the time he got to the giving of the daily bread part he had come up the sacred Moses serpent energies to his belly within.  And so on, as he brought the allowed energy to him up through the breast and the throat, the words of the intoned prayer up to the inner eye, finding the right place, as if the texts of such prayers were within his body, as much as any code or helix of DNA...  And then on the next prayer, as he needed all these prayers.  His Hemingway hand, guided by God, moved to the two short glasses with ice cubes and red wine.

The words of the prayers helped him understand the chakras, and the chakras helped him understand the words of the prayers, oddly enough.  Functions.  He had finally learned something, made a small stupid inane contribution.  He'd been trying to intertwine them, to make them fit, without forcing anything, and the weather stayed cold, the air was hard to breath, his kitchen fingers and dried out, he'd become so afraid of the truth that he knew he needed to tell the truth, finally, and the truth was a combination, of course, of work and prayer.   You needed a lot of time for it.  And time could be given only by God, and even then it was running out, but in a way, quite appropriate.

And oddly with all falling around his own life dragged down into unfixable disaster, again he felt that events were like the hitting of a tuning fork, revealing himself and whatever it was about him, how he was not normal, and fame, as people trying to make him conventional again, was completely unsuitable for him.  You finally got why fame would have indeed broken Kerouac, such that one could see it in The Steve Allen Show interview, reading a sweet passage to a musical background of soft life giving and supplication nourishment of jazz.  You might only get that if you too had slowly found or grown within enough to discover the truth the reality the poor old Kerouac within, knowing that you too would never fit in, but bore within a creature duty of solemn soldiering honor to reveal what the creature really was about, no more lies, the real true thing to bring to the strange garbled by many Babel voices marketplace, the true nature within of the human soul made by God upon the land and the seas of His world.

The visit had brought tremendous pain, a tearing away of what we might say belongs to a past we are no longer capable of being part of.  Five months had it been, away from the old life and all it was, being good at a job through which you knew a lot of people.  You smile polite, endure, as you’ll always ever be stuck in some dream state, because you still have to belong in the world, enough to make a living, but now the greatest part of your reality is dealing with the Shakespeare madwoman living out her own life, now downstairs as you hide at nighttime awake, worrying about your own brain and all the abuses you’ve pounded into it in order to soothe it and the poor body it rides in.

Anniversary of my father’s death.  Ten years.

And at the same time, by the same breath, they, whoever they might be, in any sense of the imagination, past, present or future, would deny Kerouac as being far too strange and unlikely a guy, a man, a vessel, a person of culture and words, in their own short sighted visions to be a bearer of wisdom and things of a general nature worth listening too, call them soulful or spiritual if you must.  You too would have looked at him, and been stuck, between boy I don't think so, but yet catching a flooding wind from the details caught in his work that would be as holy as anything else you could find, if you were of a certain Massachusetts river kind of Catholic Church faith of humble parish Irish, Polish, Italian, Slovak, then mixing that again with old Yankee science of Theosophical collections of sacred texts...  The inevitable and true "flowering of New England," of educated people and well-funded cloistered educations, that let the light come out of the ground at certain spots, Transcendental, poetic, enlightened...  even as they were hermits.

He wrote at night, in the quiet, with his visions and glass of wine like they all do.  Till all the voices of the last day went back into sand and dirt and earth.

The glass of wine in the restaurant, unless you’re working there, does not work.  It can only remind you of the physical depressions your core must endure, the slow crucifixion you pressing ever in closer with passing days.  Better to be a waiter then.  Otherwise it’s numb yourself to the tedium of conversation when you already have enough going on in your own terrified mind humming that you can barely hear, can barely manage to get everyone ordered at the table so that the next will come along and pass.

Kerouac too was stuck with the care of his mother.  And he took use of that situation to continue on with the writing of what he had to say out of his own painful experience of life and its attendant visions, his seeking to be clear and write clear. It was just a situation the fates handed to him. 

And in the midnight pain he would have seen the widening gap between himself and his own views and all those who are somehow able to fit in.  He hurt so bad, of course he needed wine.  The call of higher duties, higher responsibilities left him barely able to take care of himself.

King of the Beats, King of the Jews.  Anthony Bourdain.  Stay away from fame.

You're entangled with physics here, the rocks of life.

(Once he's stuck with fame, you cannot blame who he was, Kerouac;  you can't blame him for not being able to really recognize his own daughter, brushing her off, even knowing who she was, poor thing.  He was far gone by then, a fifth a day of Johnny Walker, not that we need to know that.  As a real writer, you know your things might well be gone out into the street.  It's something no one could explain.  It becomes more the state of being so than the writing itself, almost.)

If you were to say, "everyone is a blood sucker in one way or another in order to belong in this economy, the way it is, and there is no other way, but it's still worth questioning," they'd throw rocks at you, call you a deserter, a bum.  I wouldn't blame them.  That's the thing, right?  Everyone needs a job, and indeed they do.  But, somehow, maybe you know what I mean, not that I am speaking for myself or anything here.

In a way, yes, in ways you always have to go back to the politeness, the joy of the human gifts we're able to give each other still, even if you're at maximum irritations level, with so much pressure, the last thing you want to do is to fit in with some polite schedule, or for taking old biddies around on long quiet roads with their pee clock ticking or whatever, the adult becoming the grumpy child again.  

But you got no complaints, it will all work out.  You can make a go of it with whatever you have on hand, find some sort of a type writer, a kitchen table for a desk, an old rusty car to drive around for groceries and wine and cat food.  The rest?  Well...  say good bye to stuff.  'Cause you're never going to be a blood sucker yourself, at least at the rate you're going, nor an effective child of Roman Empire, so, let the fates that taught you and made you wise away from fame and the literary crap mainstream children's toys and fancy popular things, let them who made you a writer continue on with their magic.

Earplugs to deal with mom until she's reached another stage, another point.  

I never had real Beats in my life.  Nope.  No one particularly interesting.  That's the way it goes, and I'm okay with that, because I don't need any more crazy in my life.  I got myself.  I've had a long list of characters, all worthy, each a perfection, and as you age, even you yourself no longer immune to it, visible, physical, you see it better, what characters they were.  Because you were a foolish innocent, enchanted with your own inner energies.  Enough of a rube to be taken by fools and bums or anyone telling a story, where everyone else will run from that, and find only the successful stories and the blowhards telling them.