sketch early May

 There are the things of yourself that fall away from you.  You regret the losses, the missed opportunities, the old selves that should have developed into something fine and good and honorable.

But then, as they say, things happen.  Unfortunate choices, burdens, events...  maybe a mood came over you, more bad choices.

Failing to learn languages you could have, if you'd applied yourself, had not been a sorry excuse.  Full of a rich fantasy life of imagined sensuality, where nothing really ever happens, moves forward much, ever reaches completion.

Like all things.

You went on your way, for bad or good, who knows, life itself being a queer and honest mix, more about change than anything else in particular.

Hopefully you did not leave much wreckage behind, no space junk swirling above the atmosphere waiting to collide and disrupt.  

Real positive attitude, huh...  Rationalization written all over it.   And defeat, permanent defeat.  A departure from the typical Western Civilization attitude, perhaps...

Who's to say, or know.

So I vowed not to drink any wine at all.  I tried the organic but still, to drink wine you'll end up mixing in shitty wine.  

So time changes things.  The situation changes, you can not change what you would like changed.  You can not turn the clock back on the health of an elderly, nor your own circumstances.  

But what will you turn into, what will you become?  There are no other options left.

These are long miserable nights, and dreary days, not wanting to deal.  Where will all these books end up?  A dumpster?  

It is unfortunate that the souls of your relatives, along with all of their problems and bad habits, come to haunt you and form you when you are young.  The pull of their egos is hard to escape;  they bring all their sins to your doorstep, the dark side of the gifts of life.  So am I my grandfather, on my mother's side.  The sins impinge upon you, take over, for you yourself have an ego, and this is what makes you vulnerable and susceptible.

All the old family dramas and fights and bitterness will rise and attack you, engaging you with a great stickiness.  Aggressions, bottled up like devils, flying out at you, old failures ripping through your life.  Ripping at you, ruining you, where you were once an innocent, and it's your mother, trying to escape, so she thinks, who drags you back into it.  

No one can mend this lack of unity in a family.  You're fool to try.

Some nights, there are no distractions to find.  Just rent and misery, the third visit in the night watch, mom coming down to crinkle saltine packages, then to talk to the cat.  You hate me, she says.

(All a bartender is is a samurai, in the terms of the film.  An expendable.)

I guess I was the only one stupid enough to fall for it.  Every other family member knew themselves well enough.  They knew the hatred, the mean streak...  I was more like my father in temperament, perhaps, who knows, but I had enough of the darkness in me, and I was the one who fell so hard into respecting it and reliving it, the shitty put upon drinking life of the restaurants...  My mom cried when I told her when I was going into it.  I was a fool.

How can I get out of it now...  Maybe just turn off the bad habits...  cleanse...  then the bad karma will be short circuited, disconnected.

So do we stumble into the paths of the old egos, the ghosts of family members past.  You offer respect to one who has had a tough life, and then you take up subtly the habits, the bitter mindsets of such, and then as if by accident, you fall.

Let that be a lesson to you, boys and girls.

So much anger, so much mean spirited bristle from her, and all of it directed at me.  

May 1st, what a good day to start never drinking again.  But all I can do is quit the wine, and wait til the old woman finally goes up to bed and stays there, no more shit about "but this is not my home."  In the morning of the day I asked her to change out of the high water jeans that she's been wearing without a change for three straight weeks, her socks never matching.  My socks are always matching! she says, ever since I was two, you (whatever insult she was leveling at me.)   You insult me! she says.  Mom, I'm just saying... I've given her a pair of purple socks.  One of them is on, her right foot, but the left one, after her sneakers are tied, is black.  I point this out to her.  Who Cares! she yells at me.  

So she's bitter and angry at me, out of the box for this, as I take in my tea, wisely made the night before.  What the fuck.   I bite my tongue.  I really do not want to take her for any ride, my mood this time of day..  And one day, I will honor this, and just not put up with the bargain.  Or, more likely, I'll just keep on here, doing what I can, whatever, okay, sure.  She'll even ask me, are you sure you want to take me for a ride, then being bitter, saying, well, implying that she has the privilege of the car to dangle over me.

We go down by the lake, after we go for a walk in a cold but sunny field up Rice Creek from the SUNY field station there.  So many dandelions, as she has been saying day in day out.  I guess it gives her something to talk about.   I want a dog, she says.  I want another cat.  Okay.  The wind is blowing.

The book store, maybe that will help her, and at least she's not wearing her high-waters after me looking at her swollen ankles with different socks.

I'm tired now, already, and thinking that feeding her might be a good idea, okay, let's go to Port City Cafe, used to be deli, but it almost falls apart there, my disgust with her, and her escalating observations of "you hate me, you hate me."  More true every day, I mutter.  But we get to our feet, mom uses the rest room, and we pass two young college student women sitting in the window full of life and opportunities that they will be open to rather than depressed and shut about as the sun shines and I get mom into the car parked here on the main drag of 1st Street.

Big M, back home, carrying a big plastic jug container of kitty litter and the newspapers.  I reheat the beef stew for dinner with frozen squash.  I go up for a nap after getting mom to bed.  I've made it all day, but around eleven at night I need something to take the edge of, so much for my not drinking the whole month of May, cracking open a cider from a little stash I had.    What a bum I am, but at least I've got some room from her, and I'll go and distract myself with the poor old samurai in Kurosawa black and white, each shot framed, full, a masterpiece.

I'm feeling shaky though, don't know what's going on, no job, my vital papers are back at my old apartment and I'm stranded here, where to go...  It's a rainy day, a straight band of green radar rain with intense yellow like a spear coming down from Canada aimed at us on the weather.  

My karma theory doesn't hold up so well, gleaned as it was from readings of Gnosticism...  I'm just the bad actor here.  I'm the one who feels bad about having a cider or a glass of wine, my bad attitude senior year of college...

So, I get up and have my tea.  Let the cat out so he can sit on the stoop under the eaves and watch the rain and the birds and the green grass and the honeysuckle.

Mom comes down.  I've got a few greetings from Bumble, and as I address them in a timely fashion here comes mom, so I get her some turkey, and I get her her pills, and then the rest of the Greek salad in cardboard paper bowl from yesterday's placation.  I listen to her, chat with her, make the small talk.  It goes okay for a little bit, but I'm drawn back to my iPhone to send a message to Veronica, 52, out in Irondequoit, who has picked up the guitar in pandemic times, and what kind of music does she like, "rock and roll!" she says.  Cool.

But the chickens have come home to roost.  The psychological burden of dealing with her my whole adult life, and I should have known it when she came to visit me for my final week in college before graduating, a last time with friends...  "I won't get in your way..."  sure.

I guess I've thought a fair amount these last months here about putting an end to it.  It's ugly now, and it's only going to get uglier, and it's going to stay that way.  Yeah, we should have done something earlier about it all, mom, moving her, etc., but it was too draining just listening to her and dealing with her from week to week, on top of my own sad situation, to get much of that done.  

My first nervous breakdown.  I guess...  well, let me start by saying, mom had moved to South Salina Street in Syracuse.  A couple gay guys owned an Italianate set back from the street, near the Church's Fried Chicken.  My brother and I, back then, would drive up, renting a Lincoln Town Car, and we'd smoke very good cigars along the way, and finally get there for mom and a holiday, thanksgiving.  

That was a long time ago.

And then, she needed, or wanted, to move up to Baldwinsville, now, closer to her next place of employment...  This happened in the middle of winter during a storm...

sketch may 6

 But it's always like watching from the corner of your eye, or on another floor in the apartment, the string is being pulled back and the bow is tightening.  Maybe it will hang there, just like, for a while, strung just so, as if at a particular musical note.  There will be happiness, perhaps, confusion, gaiety, chuckling over things, things like "I used to be a pretty good cook," or, "you should go into the restaurant business," and then a break, and then a phone call will come, or a disturbance I must pull myself away from, to focus on, and then boom, the explosion, the anguish in the air, waiting, feeling the stab that makes one cry out too...

You'll ignore it for as long as you can, go for a walk, meditate, forget that you know that it is coming, sooner or later, that maybe there will be a nice time, like there used to be more of, but then I didn't live here, rather making my guilty visits and pretending all was okay in my own little life away from her.

The anxiety levels have been very high.  Feeling so dejected, so nervous, so much feeling everything being up in the air, justifiably, enough mini maelstroms on a regular basis, anger over not getting a cup of coffee ice cream...   Six weeks, still nothing from the unemployment insurance of DC.  Tree pollen, feeling useless, too cold for a walk even, naps, dead tired too stressed to do anything else but be glad you got your taxes done, and wait for the next shoe to drop whatever it might be.

When I awake at night, having no idea what time it is, having gone back to bed a couple of hours after dinner, I feel the stress of the last months, I feel the stress subliminal of this life just so, as it is, no one's fault, let's say, believing that.  The volatility, the sense of your own working away on something, and then the sudden burst, anger, dissatisfaction, from outside your own hermetically sealed struggles, her, mom, "you're a failure, you're a failure, you're failure," crying, stomping about, yelling, making a scene, good god.  

So I try the Buddhist yoga effort of the attempt to picture where this pain is embodied.  There on my air mattress in the darkness it feels like a monster crushing my head, encircled, I cannot escape.  A weight on the chest that stops you in your tracks, and just as you almost feel like you're getting somewhere, but no, and you're trapped, cement weight.  In the backs of the eyeballs, a dreadful animal fear.  The shoulders sag, and you are all alone.

So why try anything?  Why try anything good like be a good little school teacher with a retirement pension when it's just going to come after you, the sudden rage, "everyone hates me!"  

Mom, there are already two cans of cat food open in the fridge...  "I CAN"T DO ANYTHING RIGHT!  I'M NO GOOD, I’m no good..." and she goes out the door, slamming at things, and mini versions of that, slapping at the newspaper, to express her dissatisfaction.

But no one's fault, except my own.  Twists of fate upon a person who tends to believe more in fate than in not.  On the ropes.

She is a fine person, a very fine writer and thinker, every right to be proud and noble, and she's encouraged me to do many things that would be, or would have been, good.  "Just get your feet wet,"she'd gently say.  Or, "it's not too late, it's never too late."

So, I come downstairs, the dishes awaiting, quiet, dark, I let the cat out and monitor the lights.  Otherwise I'm completely useless, beyond household chores.  

I have to be prepared, should she come downstairs quick and say, "I'm starving," which means you have to act.

To do the dishes is a slight reprieve.  Reestablishing a bit of order over the stove and the sink and the table, the countertop with the glasses and the tea cup, the dishes from dinner, sausage grease in the black iron pan to wipe, the cutting board, the chef's knife.  How many times a day do I wince inwardly, crushed down the brow as I wait for her to come with me to the car...

Me not married?  What a surprise.

It takes a lot of energy to do the dishes, to put away the silverware out of the drying rack, when you've got nowhere to go, nothing to look forward to, broke.

Odd that the one who would encourage your greatness is somehow the great oppressor.  It's like free will;  it comes at a cost.  Like free will, you'll make the worst most terrible of mistakes, caught between the things, the paths to go, unable to chose.  

Happiness, the kind in movies, the kind that makes you feel good, or the running of a self-help enlightenment documentary you might watch late in the middle of the night doing dishes, those all seem so pat, so easy, trite.  Who would want that happiness...  Happiness only reminds you of the things you missed out on, of the fool you were not stand up and try things, seeking out repeated rejection and obscurity instead.

Better listen to some old bluegrass blues from the old holler.  

The long straight road of life, and then the JFK open limousine moment, something's wrong here, the kid's car coming towards James Dean little Porsche Spider on a California road intersection in the middle of nowhere, can't stop it now, and then, bang, you are broken, and the people now looking down on you, as they are whole, and you are no longer, but still there somehow, are monsters, and there is of course nothing they can do for you, and you still don't know what hit you, but that there is no fixing it, your head, your spine, your face, the eyes out of which you see.

And then it will go away.  Comically almost.  A phone rings in the middle of her rant and tirade.  "Hello?" The chemical spell within her down to the genes is broken, and when she returns she will simply wield her  own powers of the indignant.

But how is one person different, free, separate from another at so close a bounds, from the other.  You look at the happy people former peers, ostensibly, on Facebook, sending their happy children off to graduations and then to college, having homes now, feeling the coming retirement, living the lives they should be living, normal, happy, social, and all you're tasting is the distillation distilled of your own failings, having to start from scratch every day, nothing much to sit back upon for support.

And mom will come down and ask, sounding positive, which is a trick and not to be trusted very far anyway, "so, what's next for you, where are you going next?  Any summer plans?"  And you can't blame her, you just don't have an answer, none at all.  "Uh, maybe we'll go for a ride," but there's even guilt in that, knowing somehow you're letting everyone down including her, though, for a moment, looking at something and tapping her fingernail, tap tap tap, on the window to signify it, she seems, for a little while, content.  You've been fucking around all these years keeping other people happy, continuing to do even what you knew was making you miserable--you might have thought there was some Jesus in it, or Buddha, or yogi, or Zen--rather than making the effort to correct it all;  why stop now.  The job was too exhausting, or you were too lazy, to make any sort of a fresh move forward.  The doom will come at the fated time.

Like the little horror of the pull off lids of cat food cans, sharp and thin with stuff still on them as you pick them up out of the wet sink.

Oh, but cheer up.  It can't be as bad as all that.

Envision and meditate upon the pain as you feel it, until you see it is separate from you.

Earlier in the day, she's in her chair, reading a print off copy of her dissertation.  And she says something, a remark, of hey, this is really good writing.  And this is very true, something intended to meet a scholastic exercise but so full of sense, beautiful to read.  I've always told you that, I say, and I do.  Too bad they don't give out medals for it, she says.

Help is on the way.  I could still cry.  It's hard to just let things go out of you just like that.

But I came upon a sense--perhaps social media is responsible for it, as much as anything--that writing, as we used to revere it, attaching some significant thereupon, has little place anymore, as if becoming demeaned, gibberish, as if every one was talking so loudly that you couldn't hear a word anymore.  Thoreau?  Who was he?  Melville?  What's the point?  Twain...  Agee... And now why bother with any of them, but to look good with a short quote, a small headline to a thought, a copy writer's play on a venerable phrase, cheapening it, a bitchy selfish fuck you to what once was something to provoke thought, not sell cleverness.

So, then, therefore, what the fuck was I doing, this writing crap, that I've now outgrown in the strife of my middle aged cemented poverty, my failure to become a teacher...  What am I going to do now?  Sell real estate?

The crescent moon rises, just after 5 in the morning, the first bird call from the top of the poplar.  You're not tired, so much, but you are, but just time to go hide and rest and meditate.

Why do people feel compelled to write?  They must be lonely people who feel themselves incapable of reaching out to anyone with any real success.

The thing with alcohol, is that it works.  It sends the message to a part of the brain, and we get happy.  Just like that.  But it's not a thing to really help you much on the courage front, nor with self-confidence, when it gets to be a certain habitual way.  That habit might be graceful and friendly, but to employ it to go forth into new life skills, no, it isn't any good. 

Soothe the nerves for a time after a bickering day, sure.  With dinner.  In the night under a moon.

What did General Joe Hooker say, after second battle of Bull Run, or was it Manassas, when Stonewall Jackson and Lee swept through his position...  He was a drinker, talked a lot.  So what happened that day?  "I stopped believing in Joe Hooker," he replied.  (From remembered viewings of Ken Burns, et al, The Civil War.)

 The worst most shameful thing I ever did was to miss the Dalai Lama.   His Holiness came to visit our college, when I was a sophomore, 1984.  I still don’t know how I managed to do that.  And by doing so, I feel I shamed my father’s, the botany instructor from down the road, his science, his loose interest in things Theosophical, his spiritual tradition.  He had seen D.T. Suzuki the author of books letting things like Zen being understood in the West, and he was an old man by the time Dad saw him speak at Johnson Chapel.  The old man said something like, "the only proof of the divine is that we always think we'll have another day."  

Unfortunately, emblematic.  What was my focus then?  What were my influences then, that made me flout much of the opportunities for a wonderful future, there before me.  And so the ticks of the clock along the road of my own Personal Karma leading me to where I am now.

Caught in a perfect bind here, my old life standing back there in Washington DC, a false life I have led pursuing frivolity.  Vice and intoxication, aiding and abetting the same in the others...  I was in need back then as now in need of Buddhist psychology and meditation practice.  A depressive then, a depressive now, relying on the glass of wine to make things a bit more bearable.

And now I cannot even write without drinking wine or cider, for fear of interruption, my brain filled with my mother's reactions and words.  I write at night when mom has gone to bed.  And this too is a false life, a corrupted life and unhealthy life and unrealistic life.  

Away outside and far from the Buddhist monk life I would like to honor, and I feel very sad about all that. Bringing shame to the sweet gentle knowledgeable and reasonably well read and curious kid I once was.

Amherst College was the perfect place to enter into my Buddhist life. The connections and studies and professors at Amherst were the perfect introduction to Tibetan Buddhism. And yet I missed out on all that. I was selfish. I was mistakenly focused on hedonistic socializing and drinking beer.  I was not serious, even if, or though, I tried to be.

And now I must suffer the consequences of my actions. I must suffer the shame. I must suffer from my failures to make a scholarly Buddhist life happen.   I even failed to take a class with Robert Thurmann.  

.

I have found Buddhist wisdom the wisdom of the Buddha to be correct and so as a sinful man I too must abide by the Buddhas truth. Of all the people I did not want to fail my father I failed. I did not become the Buddhist scientist, the creative scientist testing Buddhist law and psychology. Instead I became a nobody, committed to nothing, a pained lost prodigal son bobbing in the waves, tossed by the wind, a perfect fool.  One who blew all the opportunities he might have had, in the pursuit of a false personality he was not inclined toward anyway, but seemed to have a weakness for, a fault.  Never to have a decent life ever again.  Job.

And so all my work in the frivolous world of restaurants and sensuality has come to nothing. My karma then is to lose all I have tried to hold onto during those years when I was a bartender, not being serious. I was contributing greatly to illusion and delusion, a shameful waste of time energy and academic talent. Just about the worst that one could do. And so now I am being repaid in full and kind, examples of success all around me, myself the greatest of failures.

In a dream I'm trying to keep my old father's detached head alive, keeping it reconnected to his body, as if will graft back on.  He is a national hero, and I can't seem to fix him.

I find some documentaries about the Dalai Lama.  Dalai Lama, Scientist.  He's a charming happy guy, like my father.  Unlike me, who tries to hide his misery as best he can, though it eats from within.  And even still I seem to need a glass of wine to find the calm to write these things down out of my brain.

I came back from a walk today, cold, about 45, with winds of 15 mph, sunny.  I've taken mom for a ride, to get her a newspaper, along with a scoop of coffee ice cream, then a swing by the lake--they're widening the western pier, a construction project to look down upon from the high bluff, and in the wind the waves are up--where I have to feign some sort of interest when the news has hit that back in Washington, D.C., the bars and restaurants will be fully reopened a month from now to the day, which will have its implications.

Can I go back to the false life?  Can I endure this one here?  I should have bonded with Tibetan Buddhism thirty five years ago.  (I have read up on the subject a lot since then, but even before then...  Did it not seem practical at the time?  Did I think being a writer free of all interactions was a practical path?)

I sat in on a class my father was giving, in the Science Auditorium of the Hamilton College Science Building, in one of his last years of teaching.  Plants and Humanity, I think, and there were a lot of guys from the hockey team in, because they were sharp, and Dad was cool.   I was up in a back row, to his right, and he brings up something, a general note of education:  "There is a time to be praying, and a time for playing.  And one should not be playing, when he should be praying," his lessons being along those lines.  And this went right at me, and I felt it.  He saw, he knew, and I was corrected with chagrin, looking back.

He didn't blame it all on me.  Advisors left, left me down, some were more interested in self-image promotion then helping me out, didn't grade me fairly, he thought, as he would cut some slack for a good student having some trouble...

Wine is false to a writer.  It dulls the senses, for one thing.  It seems to give you the power and the patience to sift through things, but in doing so you don't make any headway in your own professional engaged life.  You have your space, free of torments, but you pay for it in the morning.  In the meantime, it seems to numb the pain, and the pain is probably caused by drinking in the first place, but now you can't really stop.

You get dragged out on rides, to placate, to entertain.  You get dragged out later at 4 PM for a ride, mom wants to go out for lunch, again to the Press Box, we just went there two days ago, mom...  and it's going to end up being a scene, eventually, because she will first have her fun, oh, so nice to be here, ha ha ha, but that will turn, sooner rather than later that will turn into abject misery and spite and crying and shouting.  Help, help, HELP!  You bastard.  My sons hate me!  Wish I were dead.  Wish I were dead.  (Just because the circumstances left you feeling exhausted, and in need of some re-balancing yourself from her craziness.)

I have a soda water.  She has her Kendall Jackson.  She gets a Mary's Salad, with chicken, of course, house dressing.  I get the Caesar with grilled tuna, rare, with creole sauce, and when the dish arrives, I'm reminded of the product I've seen in restaurant kitchens, a shrink wrapped frozen tuna steak, color added by however they do it, a treatment to keep it looking red.  Fake.  I should have stuck with the Buddha's harm no one, no thing, principal of vegetarian practice.

I am exhausted by it, and fall into a deep sleep, three hours almost.  Grim thoughts.  Feeling almost sabotaged, taken advantage of, so that others wouldn't have to deal with mom, like set-up, here in my paranoid mind deprived of curative meditation, and even last night I practiced Kundalini Yoga meditation with some success.  

Later, after waking, going down to the kitchen to assess the doing of the dishes, I remember to get mom her bed time pink pill.  I go upstairs and bring it to her, but that doesn't go well.  She's upright, sitting at the edge of her bed, which is covered with books, open books, books which have slid off the bed fallen on top of sweater and bathrobe, books left cracked, books stuffed with mail, books with covers about to come off, spines about to split, and I see she's into the mail again, with the bill from the local drug store in hand, and if she keeps it any longer it will get lost into her piles and her pockets, and her nonsense stuffings into the fleece she is wearing.  Mom...  But it's soon a shouting match.  I try to explain, look mom, this is a bill, we need to pay it, don't lose it, and then before I know it, she's accusing me of physical abuse and she'll call the cops...  Jesus Christ.

People pick up on when you're not being who you're meant to be, like when you're putting up some sort of foolish Hunter S. Thompson persona act, or acting like a punk rocker, as if that will be the cure to the world's problems.  You have to be responsible, and serious.

I've had wine with many a fine person.  Madam Korbonska and I, late at night, the Warsaw Uprising, politics, life in times gone by...  I've stayed up having fine conversations, many many night.  These were civilized evenings.  But I always come back, necessarily, to my life, such as it is.  Broke,  Jobless.  No more time to mess around.

The shame of bartending is that you sometimes have to sort of tacitly support things of the bawdy life, as honest reflections lead to sometimes in the barroom confessional booth at certain rare times, if the boisterous crowd doesn't start singing for it.  Oh yes, ha ha hah, great times, yeah, great times, and meanwhile all the people who don't to go bars are married and taking care of children and careers and each other.

Well, at least I was brave, at least up until the pandemic, going to work, putting on a jovial face, even quite enjoying talking to people who were kind enough to trust me, the idiot, with their stories and tales, with their lives, with their friendship.

Now everything and everyone feels detached from me, far away, out of touch.  The tree pollen of sprouting leafing out Springtime can make you feel weird, enhancing this situation here.

Do you have to see certain things to be able to understand Buddhism?  Do things have to, as Pema Chodrom has it, fall apart.