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.)