The basement gives me more room.   I wake and lie in corpse pose, meditating.  I hear mom above me come down the stairs, then up the stairs.

In thinking of her anger last night--meditation helps all things--I can see her point, even how she's right.  There are my issues, my sorrows, and professionally I shouldn't let them bleed over on her.  

It's long been a strain to lead this terrible life of not having that steady position in society that every American and citizen of the Western World economy, now global, craves, takes as an entry into the privileges of adulthood.   How could I escape then being sad, disappointed in myself, all things like that... What did I do in my professional life, but over a simple basic kindness.  Not the productive truly helpful kindness of the educator, or the lawyer, the doctor... but just that of the guy who waited on you last time and waits on you again and remembers you if you care to chat with him.  It's a tentative position to be okay with that achievement, but there it is.  And maybe it's a manifestation of something deeper, a kind of true sort of selfless hospitality.  It can't really be reduced into dualistic terms.  If one were to say, "selfless," then another voice of reason comes along and says, "selfish," for not taking better care of yourself, being so lazy as to become a dependent upon people, dragging them down.  And so it is painful to wake up, to find you really don't have anywhere to do, just take care of mom, etc., etc.

Scary.

But this job too...  a kind of hospitality.  Of course it's not random you're sitting there entertaining your mom, the best you can.

It strikes me, the thought, perhaps meditating really isn't the worse thing I could be doing right now.

I've reached a point, I guess, where every day I feel so dumb, lost, unhappy, that I have achieved a point of being unable to "lord anything over anyone else," as people do, showing off their confidence and capability when they do have jobs.  What can I do?  Meditate?  Do a little yoga, without being in any particularly obvious form of being in shape...?  That ain't much.  And yet it's human.

I go check on mom, turning the television channel from Light Classical, 1950, over to the Tour, listening in a bit, to calm my nerves.  Bob Roll and the other commentators are making a point about something, the business model of the Tour De France, but I don't quite follow...  There heading eastward away from Brittany toward Fougeres, it seems.  The race doesn't have the pull over me it used to, and again I have to shrug over wasted years, years I could have established myself doing something productive, a career even, not caught in dreamy cycling modes.  Even in rest she seems displeased, about to bring the hammer or the judge's gavel down upon my take of these proceedings...  demanding better.

And nothing, nothing at all is happening her.  My ankle feels better.  The only pair of shorts I have are athletic ones for yoga, not for street wear.  

Mom is psychic, I fear.  She doesn't go on line anymore, but I wonder if she does indeed sense my grievances against her psychological make up and the resulting behavior, such as all family members will admit, a demanding quality, a willingness to attack at the slightest suggestion of a slight against her.

When she gets in her mode of chuckling, and seeming to enjoy herself, finally lifting her spoon high at the dinner table, as if to salute the Gods, before taking it to her palate, I get nervous, how could I not.

Uh, oh, I hear motion upstairs, not unexpected.  She's probably ready for breakfast.  And I'm ashamed of the wine I drank and the songs I tried to sing with the guitar down in the basement last night, an illusory attempt at an illusory escape, dreams of devoted fans and chicks, ha ha ha.  She did come downstairs, like a ghost haunting me at the kitchen table, at least three times, crinkling the saltine wrapper, opening another plastic bottle of Pepsi so they're all around like landmines on counters and in refrigerators and sitting on countertops losing their fizz.  I had no choice but to escape into my personal fairytale dreams.

The drain is backed up upstairs in the bathroom sink.  It's been slow for a long time.  I go to work, after lunch, as mom takes a break.  I got a chance to talk to an old friend, one of the wine importing company representatives we used to work with, Mark, whose family goes back to Cong, in Mayo, Ireland.  He's been thinking branching out from the wine business into real estate, but it takes a good few years and thousands of dollars to get established.  It's a jovial conversation, but age comes up.  "Oh, there's age-ism out there, you bet.  Once you hit sixty, no one wants you, no one will hire you..."  His wife has worked for a good 16 years at a real estate office in Virginia.  (The Virginia Real Estate License test is a hard one to pass, it takes most people about four times).   Yeah, I'm 56, Mark.  "You're still in the game then," but that's a scary shot across the bow.  

Again it's too hot to do anything today.  I pour Drano down the sink drain, as black gook has come out from the stopper, and then a kettle of boiling water.  I try getting the drain stop to move up a little bit higher, and it breaks off.  I'll have to wipe the black junk off the shaft of the stopper, and then use a chop stick to bring the rest of it out of the drain, and a decent amount comes up, and I try not to think about it.  The chlorine smell is still hanging about.  I have the overhead fan on.  I get the drain cleared, then another kettle of hot water, heating hot tap water to the boiling point in the kettle again.  Back downstairs, I clean the stopper, wiping it off with a Lysol disinfectant wipe, and wiping the sink with another one afterward before returning the stopper to the drain.

The shower has calmed my nerves some, just a bit, but the expiration of turning 60, in less than four years now, has got it back up again, "rising in my gorge."  

The feeling has returned again.  It is up to me to test humanity's faith in God or gods or Buddhas... The Jesus Christ unemployable mendicant scapegoat... 

The last day of June, 2021.  We've been through an oppressive heatwave.  I'm feeling myself slip further and further away, expelled from normal society, a feeling I've fought every day as long as I can remember.  Yes, keeping a bar and all its relationships gave me some form of being able to fit in, letting the odd ball I was remain afloat, not consumed by his own strangeness.   This is the main thing about the artist these days, whoever he/she may be, whatever he/she does, the bravery of spending so many days not really fitting in at all.  It's a hard place to come from to deal with the normal flow of life.  I feel it written on my face, I don't fit in.  Or rather, I'm dealing with craziness that I have no clue how to deal with.  Where does that craziness begin, where does it end?  

There's the first appointment to make, for dental imprints, a chapter of the upcoming oral surgery mom will have to go through.   There's the Medicaid application worksheet.  Things that sit heavily on me as I wake, have my first pot of tea while mom is quiet upstairs in her bedroom.

I have to make the effort to write, to untangle all the knots in the adult mind, to take the strands and set that straight again by light of a new day of things to be doing.  If I'm able to untangle some of this, I can remember the basic fact of compassion that runs through human experience.  Other people, though they might scare you, if you're in a weird tangled disconnected frame of mind, are willing to help.  You're not alone in all this, a fact that some of us have a more difficult time remembering than others.

Mom comes downstairs to the kitchen and I get out something to eat.   She's moving slowly.  It's still humid out.  She observes my morning down, the depression that run through the first part of the day, all the things you have to do, you've not done, smaller picture, bigger picture, the whole scary range of things.  None of which I can tell her about.  She asks me about the why and wherefore, and I tell her I'll write a bit and that this will make me feel better, once I can get a few things down.  She seems to hover in the distance from my state of being.  "Well, whatever you're going to write, I'm sure it's going to be pretty bleak..."  She announces soon, after silent moments, no real plan today, no desire to go to a dive bar, that she's easy to please, that she will get out of my hair and go back upstairs so that I can do my work.

And I am grateful.   In her absence I call the dental office and get an appointment for her.

Mom comes downstairs an hour later, "I'm starving," she says.  Okay, I expected her.  We have Fajita Grill leftovers, and I'll get some soup on the burner, and she picks at the open black styrofoam plastic container with chopped red onion and fresh jalapeño, finely grated yellow and white cheese, chopped tomato and lettuce, black olive along with the braised chicken.  I listen to her eat, how her mouth takes in her sustenance now.  I listen to her speak.  She speaks quietly, a voice cracked somewhere in its connection to a hold on coherent sequenced thoughts, enfeebled in its volume, fainter now, with less hope and self confidence.  I worry I am causing this.  

I was low on wine, and in need of it last night after dinner.  I resorted to gluten free beer to close out my night.

I ponder the long slow constant distraction from my own life that her life has come to.  I think of Cervantes, how he too become unemployable, even as a gallant old servant, loyal as he had been, thrown into prison for not being able to pay his taxes, and he still has the courage to summon the figure of Don Quixote for us.

We are all on our own voyages.  One can't compare.  My father as a boy endured his mother coughing her wet lungs out from the tuberculosis.  Get the grim things out of the way first, before more come later.

I wish I could be kinder, I think to myself.  That's the failure of mine.  Bum.  Punk.  Some fine example of humanity, yeah, right.  I let myself get in this fine damn fool condition, through my sins of inaction, the things I didn't do.  I wish I could be better with her, and when we go out, of course, I have wine, as she does.    Where will it end.   The black indignities of a life of a poverty you'd thought you'd never see, but did nothing to avoid even in your own foolish little tailings...

Okay, so it gets up to 90 degrees here on a Sunday.  I manage to dodge mom long enough to manage a little writing after her early feeding and pills and the coached dental hygiene.   I've got a shower in, and after is when I wrote, as she seemed content in her chair with a book, Valiant Friend, a biography of Lucretia Mott, 19th century feminist activist, abolitionist, early suffragette, etc., making her little self comments of amusement.  Okay.  Works for me when she can entertain herself.

The dishes aren't piled up too high, can be done later, so, when we get out to the car, after I'd cooled it off already and brought water bottles and yesterday's barely read New York Times so she can read something while we sit in the parking lot, when we get her to the car, "I can't remember heat like this in years," she says, the agenda is to go to Kinney's Drugs to get the Sunday Times and an ankle support wrap sleeve for my sore left ankle.  And then take a ride.  She's quickly angered by something when I get to the car, I forget now by what, oh, I was checking my phone, going so far as to unbuckle her seat belt, "well, if you'r just going to look at that, I can just go back home..."  

The grass pollen has blown up now, in these last blooming days of June, and the ragweed pollen too has become in the range where it can be counted as well as felt.  Something's eating at me.  A fly has joined us in the car, when I had the windows open to get the parking lot heat out of the interior, then turning the AC on, first without the recirculating air button pressed.  I take the car slowly very slowly, up the roads of an unbuilt subdivision of lots too close to the high power lines, John Paul II Way, connecting with Lazarek Drive, which makes me think of Lazarus.  Lazarek has his name on the big dirt ready mix concrete lot with all the different piles of dirt, pebbles, rocks...  At the top of the hill we can look and see the lake in the humid distance merging with the sky, and we pass the brand new football field at the high school and mom offers one of her repetitive but ignorable opinions, nothing ever goes on in this building... I don't bother.  Ankle support, newspaper to keep her shut up and happy, that's how I start to see things more and more.

Out, we drive on, through the SUNY college campus, slow, twenty mph, along the lake, then the ice cream stand of Bev's, the RV summer park on the left of the two lane road here, a couple taking pictures of each other by their parked three wheeled motorcycle, then the lines of Rudy's On the Lake, fish fry, hot dogs, Texas hots, still in pandemic mode, even as the governor has lifted everything, and on we drive.  Past the point, past the outlet marsh of Rice Creek, the water low, no birds, the green algae fallen low into the muck almost, no fat kids on their bikes with their fishing poles by the guardrail.  

The cattails have taken over the water in the streambed.  It's too hot to get out the car on this Sunday drive,  so we agree we don't need to out to Sterling Nature Center.  I take a left, back southward toward 104, a quiet winding road, and climbing out of the woodlands above us to the right and the creek to the left we come upon a pasture with rolled hay bails.   And further on, to the right, a dusty dry gravel parking lot and a long low building, something I've seen on maps before,  Hooligan's Irish Inn.  There are pick-up trucks parked out front.  As soon as I mention it, I regret it, but mom is up for it, so we venture in.  There's a pretty young bartender in shorts and a halter top, and some guys speaking loudly with lots of Fucking This and Fucking that, and they have a bit of a buzz on, red faces, sweaty, eyes squinting now in the afternoon light through the windows, the room a big one with pool tables, a juke box, dart boards...  But we sit at the bar and mom is happy, so she gets a wine, and I'll get a cider, and eventually we order fried butterflied shrimp, again against my better judgment, with cocktail sauce, as mom is making a bit of a deal about them, about how they'd have fun.  Yes, mom, "it's wicked not to have fun..."  We end up talking to the gentleman to our right, who has a long grey beard, and a fuzz of hair all over where not covered by his tank top, talking about his dog, a lab, who he had to recently put down at age 17.

By the time we get home, coming back in on 104 and then the quicker way back west, I am tired from the cider, dulled, ready to take a nap.  Mom calls the cat, and when I haven't said much, back we are in the kitchen now, calls me a bastard.  "Silence."

I've received an email, a reader response, from mom's educator friend and colleague from Syracuse University and Oswego, and when she came by earlier in the week to take mom to lunch, dropping mom off I gave her a copy of my lousy book self published through CreateSpace, a sub of Amazon Industries, to see what her estimation of what market it might be appropriately aimed at.  I want to get back to her sooner rather than later, but there are sad and painful memories of the times I couldn't or wouldn't hand in my English papers, what a bum I was, and how as a reading teacher she reacted to how frustrating it is, when bright engaged kids sabotage themselves by not doing their assignments.  Groggy, taking a nap, falling asleep even, I mull over such failings.

Self-sabotage it is, and I wonder how much of a cry for attention it might be. And there's also an element of the artist's strange wish, the false need, the false perception that the artiste must work in solitude, self-isolated, secluded from his fellows while doing his work.  Rather than think a bit, reflect, meditate, but then, definitely definitely come back to the Sangha, the Community, the peer group wherein ideas and language thoughts are exchanged.  You can't go it alone, and yet you think so, young fool.

In the morning, I wake up.  I don't know what the hell I should be doing.  There's the dental appointment looming.  There's the Toyota Takata Air Bag Recall, flying bits of metal, to take care of, a whole day spent down at some dealership forty minutes away, as I can leave mom alone for that long.  There's the Medicaid Application Documentation Form the Elderly Care Lawyer asks of us, paperwork.  There's cleaning mom's house so that there might be some form of order, in her books at least, that would be a start, even though she'll soon pull them all off the shelf and put them open on her bed...

And then there is her deeply rooted psychological behavior.  I don't know what to call it:  displacement?  She takes her anxiety, blows it up.  "Where are the animals (the cat, one of them)?"  "But we are not HOME!  If we let him out he won't know the way... this is not his usual house...  My house is up the road a piece..."

If I try to calm her down, it all ends up going toward "You hate me!" or some other form of passive aggression as she talks to herself, "I wish I were dead," or "I'm tired of this.  I won't take it anymore."

It doesn't stop.  She might eventually brighten out of the particular mood, but I'm never convinced by it, and I know her chuckling over dinner with a glass of wine taking its effect, I know where it will end up, when it becomes more obvious that I have grown tired over her subtle verbal Grand Dame attacks.  

I try to point out this kind of verbal behavior, but of course she is offended by all that, deeply.  "I'm not wanted here..."

And in the meantime, were that not the case, I'd have to listen to the verbal self talk.  "I've had it.  No one here likes me...  I don't know what to do with myself. "

If I say, "well, mom, I'm sorry, I can't watch television now, I have to think of what I'm going to do with the rest of my life," as a way of explaining honestly how I feel, though I must admit I don't want to be in the same room with her after putting up with it for hours long enough, her attack comes swiftly:  "My life is over..."

Okay...

Now it's Monday, I've succeeded in writing an email back to Sharon.  I've got mom first some sliced turkey, with her pills, then later some soup.  It feels even hotter and muggier today.  And yes, it is a sad day for me to delve back in to those places my "Jamie" inhabited back then, bringing upon himself his own depressed and depressing academic downfall, ruining all the work he'd down to get there, all for the thought of how he should be a writer, not part of anything, but a fool going off on his own, which is another whole chapter, even worse and more depressing and more with the piling of continued heaping of bad consequences, than the earlier chapters of the long personal story.  

Kerouac had his "Duluoz Legend," referring to how he envisioned and wrote out the stories of his own life, in many different chapters and in many different takes, repetitive, back and forth, up and down, forward and backward in referential and reverent time.  And he had to portray his downfall, not just the happy times in 1955 where he found Dwight Goddard's Buddhist Bible in the Sacramento Library, but the long slide into drinking a bottle of scotch a day, giving up on his exploration of Eastern Wisdom, no longer making the effort to be a scholar, wishing to kill himself actually, and going back to Catholicism.

I get the laundry going, and mom's upstairs.  I get to write a little bit on the laptop in the kitchen with the Air Conditioning running through the house.  Mom comes downstairs.  "Where are the people?"  And she's also thinking of the poor people, the Surfside condominium collapse of twelve floors and 150 or so souls...  "I'll turn it to the Tour de France," I say.  Are cats in?  "Let's go look for him," and just as I walk out and call a few times, here he comes, sort if slow predatory mode, not the sometimes joyful hungry gallop back in up the steps and through the open kitchen door.  It's just business today.  And feeding him, getting the canned cat food out of the little can and into the dish, I have to bang a little bit the spoon at the edge of the dish, and mom's in the bathroom pooping again with the fan on, and yells out, as if I were knocking on the door, "Just a minute!  I'm in the bathroom!"  "No, mom, I'm just feeding the cat."  "I can't HEAR YOU," she says, even more agitated.  Jesus Christ. 

When she comes out from the sliding door, I try to explain to her, I was just feeding the cat, but I get into it a little too far, and then she shouts at me, "I CAN'T DO ANYTHING RIGHT," and then she storms out the door, "I'm gonna go kill myself.  Good bye."

Mom goes and sits in the shade, calming down.  I strap up the black sleeve and Velcro ankle brace, shorts off, pants on, I need to go out for the groceries.

It’s peaceful now, and I ask mom if she’d like to come along. “It’s up to you,” she says.  "Well, you’d be sitting in the Big M parking lot and I’m moving slow anyway..."

I’ll take you out for a ride later.

I gather the plastic Pepsi bottles for recycling, screwing on the blue bottle caps as I take the collection from the brown paper grocery bag to a larger white plastic garbage god for transport.

And then there is quiet, and I’m left with my own shame, which is a simpler state at least.

I get down to the Big M.  In through the double doors.  They've taken down the plexiglass barriers over the old stainless steel grocery counters.  With the brace chafing against my achilles tendon, and its sleeve's tightness around the sore of the top of the joint, I'm walking slowly, with a tenderness.  Each time I push the clutch in I'm exacerbating it a little bit.

When I get back home, mom is waiting, hungry.  What's for dinner, as soon as I walk in the door.  Okay, so I get her a little ham and cheese roll, and then start to heat up leftover and get the fresh spinach into a pan.  Pour her a glass of wine.  The ground turkey mixed with peppers, green and red, onion, a bit of the usual tomato sauce and diced tomato, herbs, all cooked down together is easy on us.  I skip having a glass of wine with her, and again we talk of the building collapse.  But I am tired, rather so, after dinner, contending with her moods earlier in the day, and as soon as I can, putting away what needs to be put away, I slip down into the basement to the Thermarest Air Mattress tucked safely in a bigger space now near the washer and dryer.  And I fall into a nap, and then sleep, and then I wake up hearing a knock on the door, the drug store delivery man dropping off the white box of mom's dementia pills, the long roll of them in the clear plastic pouches...  and mom is coming in from the backyard just then too, having hailed the cat and talked to Bonnie the farmer woman who lives with her daughter the nurse three doors down.  

I'm taking a pee in the bathroom with the door slid mostly shut, and she comes in, "hello?   hello?   Hello?  HELLO?   Is anybody here..."  which drives me quickly to anger, and I can't help mocking her shouting at me.  "Well, I was wondering what's for dinner..."  We ate just two hours ago.  Two hours ago she told me she couldn't eat another bite, stuffed.  Then the phone rings.  My aunt, I talked to her earlier today, hot out there in the Berkshires also, and she has a bear in the backyard story, and I hear my mom getting all worried as she listens to the story, and that she only has one sister, which is actually pretty good for her.

So, fuck... I've got to feed her something, and fortunately there's the thin panko parmesan crusted chicken breast cutlet I cooked two evenings ago, with grilled onions... I put that on a plate, heat it up in the toaster oven beep beep beep...  She gets off the phone, I put the plate down in front of her.  Nothing for me.  I sit down and look into my phone screen, maybe to find some news to talk about, maybe just to tune her out, and again she gets mad at me, Angry Claire, angry at me once again.   "You look so depressed right now," she says, looking at me look for something novel on my iPhone screen, something...  I guess the heat tired me out, but being cooped up is not fun.  I don't have much to say.  I look back at her looking at me, as if to shrug.  Yeah...

"Well!  It's quite rude not to talk to people when everyone and the kids are sitting at the dinner table."  Duck and cover, let it ride its wave over me...

One cannot escape the family drama, of, more specifically, the persona.  I shrug.  I'm not backing down.  Okay, Angry Claire.  Look, I've dealt with ten of your angry outbursts today already, and I'm tired. 

She picks up her plate and goes and sits in her Eames chair to finish what she wants to eat.  When I slip into the bathroom I find her glaring at me.  Angry Claire.  Keep on being angry...  I do the dishes in soapy tub water, fretting over how to be more comfortable with the ankle brace.  When's this going to get better.

Family is karma.  There's nothing to do to escape it.  Maybe this there for a reason.  You're stuck, trapped, there's nothing to do but ride it out, observing how to keep your own self calm, and meditating any chance you can, and even forget writing, if it weren't part of meditation.  

But not long afterward mom comes back downstairs and apologizes.  I'm sorry, I was being a little grumpy, she says, meaningfully.  

Oh, that's okay, no need to apologize.  I was just confused.  I thought we'd had dinner, and I was still groggy from a nap.

"I'm sorry," she says, apologizes again.  

No, I get it.  I was being grumpy myself, in a weird mood.  I think it's the grass pollen, on top of this crazy heat.

It's later in the afternoon by the time I get out to do yoga, and it seems that every day I've been sore.  Something up with my left ankle, still a bit swollen, the last five days.  I don't remember doing anything in particular, perhaps a warrior pose I sort of fell out of to the side.

 

At sundown, the battle, to get the cat in, so she starts opening cans, crying if the cat won't come in.  And if the cat eats, he wants to go right back out again.  I'm trying to get dinner on the table.  "No, but my house is over there there.  (Not here.)  A couple of doors down.  He won't know where to find us..." She pleads.  Terror panic in her dulling eyes.  Jesus Christ.  You're stressing me out, I mumble to myself out in the living room.  The pot needs to heat up some more, the burner slow.  I get the mix of greens wilted in the big Lodge pan.

We eat at the table.  I'm bored, anxious, tired, depressed, worn out...

and when I can, I disappear.

Cat dishes, with little bits of leftover after the cat licked his "chicken feast in gravy" to the edge of the little monkey dish.  The dishes from dinner.  Another American Chop Suey made with ground turkey put away in its big pot into the refrigerator.  Seemed to have been a hit.  

Why did I take career advice from my miserable old grandfather who'd worked as a chef all his life.  Get a job.  That wasn't my good side.  My good side was to be a scholar, academic.  Something.  He insinuated I'd be a moocher my whole life...  dragging me down into his alcoholic working class Irish spirit, so that I too would have to deal with the misery of his bloodline, my mother in particular.  Thanks, Eddie White.  That time I went to help him out thirty three years ago when he had his cataract surgery...  staring at me in the car, after we picked up scrod filets down in the little town of Lee, "what are you going to do?"  My connection to the scholarly life I once knew and could handle, still with a balance of my own originality, was frayed enough already.  "Go teach prep school," he could have said. "You're a smart guy," he could've said.  But instead he condemned me there and then to the yoke of hardship, toil, the restaurant business looming before me as soon as I wore out the uninspired office job...  the drinking, the chasing of social life supposed fun, days of wine & roses for the cowardly grandson of his, the great trap and waster of time.

My father stood in opposite to Eddie White. My father wore three piece suits, even in the summer, to teach botany; he was a Theosophist.  He read like it was his job to do so, and it was.  He had the time usually to read the New York Times every day, saving articles he found interesting.  My father understood what was up with contemporary academia.  He did not blame me for my falling out.  And he would have understood a spiritual quest short on responsible family-man-to-be planning.  My father understood the good of the monastery and in the importance of "psychonaut" voyages in the spiritually awakening mind.

Has your epiphany from God arrived yet, young man?

But people have always interested me.  More than books.  People are fascinating, particularly those at the edges, common people, but uncommon, with the infinitude of human variation at play.  Like, the bluegrass the two guys who worked as managers at the pizza place, Faccia Luna, next to Austin Grill.  Keith, Kevin.  Some hell of a banjo playing, the guy from The Seldom Seen ripping his picking and his torrential river riffs, I heard with them, back in the confines of their privacy, apartments back in Glover Park.  And Keith had one of those painting art works you buy at a hotel auction sell off.  A tree, a river, but it works.  Keith told some great stories, a far better story teller than me, or any one I ever knew, for that matter.  He smoked cigarettes.  

Was I looking for a kind of Neal Cassady Complex in all these people, so I could blindly justify my lack of seriousness, my mortal inability to take care of adult responsible things, monetary, financial, professional career... as if trying to find a lost family, when my family still was there, but as if I had set out to destroy everything they had built and given to me...

Yeah, quite a pickle, that's the thing.  And stuck in the world's most weirdest relationship situation, bound in chains, a son to his elderly mother, trapped.  Can I go out for a walk?  Can I get away from this old dusty apartment?  Can I do yoga now, or will mom come...

I wake up the burn off fumes of the cheap wine fuel I used to do my foolish thinking with last night.  The hours of the unemployable, of someone who never gets anything done.

My life is really all just a bunch of bullshit.  My self-told professional lies...  That's why I'm here now, never having invested in any group, or any professional self...

So you're already feeling like a big loser, with no self-confidence to speak of, and then you have to face your mom, who's crazy.

Is one too proud to ask for help?  Where?  How?  What can be done anyway?

Overwhelmed already, and to face something that makes no sense on a daily basis, fickle, somewhat volatile, potentially demanding.

I am one easily led astray.

You'll feel slightly better if you write...  just an increment.

Mom is awake now, and she comes down the stairs to the kitchen, without sounding too confused.  "The stupidity," she says, and she was watching motorcycles racing on dirt tracks, Mission giving $5000 to the guy who just won, who's going to use the cash to pay off stone work in front of his house.  I couldn't find the remote, didn't disturb her bed with its piles of books.  The swelling in her jaw as gone away.

I have some Progresso soup heating up, added some bone stock to the little pot I cooked aduki beans late last night.  I've got some good sliced off the bone turkey breast for her.  Romaine, sliced tomato, a little Bermuda onion.  First the antibiotic pill.  She wants to know what the news is, the clock hits the hour, a bird clock cooing the hour, so I go and turn on the radio for NPR news.  And it's not so much mom who disrupts my train of thought, but the first sentence I hear on the radio, introducing the next hour's show on cyber war games the Pentagon runs.  

Do we have anything fun planned for later?  

Well, she's not doing too badly today, not hitting me too hard with her sense of dislocation and confusion.  "Can I get back to where I was earlier?"  Yes, Mom.  You're not a big walker.  It's not like you came from two blocks over to get here, it's hot out, you'd remember it.

She goes back upstairs.  

I'm doing better now, after getting her lunch, her pills, then getting her the hot salt water rinse, the antiseptic Listerine mouthwash, then encouraging her to brush her teeth.

But I am feeling near to being triggered at the end of the day.  It's a Saturday night.  I am weak.  I've cooked dinner, panko parmesan crusted chicken breast they had at Big M, a grass-fed steak that was about to expire in a day or two, turning out to be tough.  I've taken her for a ride.  I've not even had anything to drink besides dandelion tea and water.  But I am feeling triggered by the time I get home, and by the time we get through the last fight of the day, Mom going off to bed, lacking and deprived of human kindness, according to her, the day ruined, wishing she were dead, okay.

Later on, I get an itch to go out.  I drive the car down by the bars along the strip.  I walk past The Sting, and then past the window down into the basement of the American Legion.  I look it at the pool tables, and I see a bar, the open end toward the window, and the bartender, a woman leaning there, not having to get anything for anyone.  I walk back to the car, two police officers on foot getting ready to go into The Sting, where people are smoking cannibas out in the open.  I walk a block further, to where on Second Street here on the west side there is a bar that keeps the gate open to a sort of courtyard bar where three large screen TVs hang facing the street.  Nah.

I go to the car and park by Gibby's.  The band, a trio, is playing Sweet Home Alabama.  The weather is nice, the place is crowded.  Inside the bar is poorly run.  One bartender, a big girl, kindly, a good bartender, is having to do barback things, like get ice, stock up on more White Claw, a case of beer, while the other bar gal, dolled up, if you can still say that, is sort of blank out of some vanity, over it, not making any decisive moment to get people drinks, and true, there is the whole line of people leaning over the bar, trying to get their way in, and after five minutes, a quick survey of the characters and the women, I quietly leave and walk back outside west, the marina on the right, the lake beyond that.

By the time I get back home, not having a single drink, the impulse to want that cider I would have ordered to deal with the pub has become a thirst.

The night becomes a matter of cracking open another can of dry cider, made from pear, Woodchuck Pearsecco, 6% abc, listening to the ins and outs of Robert Thurman giving a lecture free on YouTube about Buddha as a shaman.  The guitar ambitions come out later.  I record myself on my D-28 down in the basement, chords of three chord songs ringing out like a harp pipe organ, but I can't sing...

I move the Neoair air mattress down to the basement, down on the rugs and the new eco friendly yoga mat, next to the noisy dehumidifier.  I have a dream that amounts to me be welcomed back into the fold by Bob Thurman...  first good dream I've had in a long time, feels like.

In the morning, or rather my version of it, shamefully around 12:30 PM, I go up the stairs to the kitchen and get the teas going.  Mom has not stirred lately.  She's actually doing better on the antibiotics, which gives me some sign of hope, with the horror we will go through over her teeth.

I get her her pills, get the soup going with some added bone broth.  "Pepsi Cola hits the spot, two full glasses, that's a lot," she intones, over the table.  

"You sound like Ophelia when you do that."

"What does that mean..."

"Well, you know, Hamlet, Ophelia is driven crazy, starts singing to herself..."

I get the soup on.  But she quickly turns into mean mode, after asking me four times how well I slept, and what's new in the world.  "What exciting thing are we going to be doing today?"  I put a bowl of soup down in front of her, and the sliced turkey.  She slurps at her soup, burping little burp gurgles.

"I don't know, it's too hot to go to Sterling Nature Center, and you don't like when we go on 104 because you'll tell me I'm going too fast."

"You have penis," she tells me, a familiar refrain.  "You're a man, you have all the power, women can't do anything on their own..."  Part of her I'm Just A Woman theme frequent little refrain.

"I'm going to go take a shower."

"Funny that hurts you when I say that..." she shoots after me.  

In the shower I have, the sides of the neck, and again I wish you could wash away being a bum.  

My writing.  It's therapy.

She sits in the chair, and the "help" vocalizations, along with "no one wants me..."  

She gets to the john, near where I write, rolling the sliding door shut with the fan and light on, pooping.  When she gets out she asks me if we're going for a ride.  Yes, mom, after I write a little bit.

Oh, just a journal about what happens here every day.  Like when you said, "You have a Penis!"

She chuckles, actually.  She's impatient.  When I hear the NPR news make mention of the Tour de France I come out into the living room to listen, as she sits there in her chair.  She looks up at me, not really getting that I'm listening to the radio news.

Kerouac's sister, older than he, died of a massive heart attack in 1964.  In 1966 his mother was paralyzed by a stroke.  Neal Cassady died in Mexico two years later.  

Bob Thurman reminds me to watch Democracy Now, for the real news of climate change and the Bahamas Hurricane that other news outlet covered.  And that the Protestants closed all the monasteries...  "Get back to work!"

I pray to get mom through this day.

My writing is crap.  I can't even look at it.  I don't want to be part of it, except that it seems to enable the good work that meditation brings.  

I can't bear to look at what I've scribbled down until time, a week, more, has passed, and even then...  Never any point to it.  Hollow.  Dull.  Worthless except for the personal therapeutic effect.  

And the new devil has arrived.  The right side of Mom's jaw all puffy and swollen now.  I call in to the primary care office down in Fulton, to see if they can have an on call doctor send in for a round of antibiotics...  By Sunday night they seem to be taking hold.

Tuesday, we brace for the appointment, 10:15, Aspen Dental.  X-rays, the dreaded bite-wing where you have to hold that thing in your mouth.  That's when they call me in, just noticing I listed Dementia as one of her health conditions.  Could you come back, sure.  Trey walks us down the hallway to sit in hygienist's chair.  Mom's complaining about the cold.  There's a television on, a sort of reality show.  "Who's this tramp," mom asks.  We chuckle, Trey and I.  They've been very gentle with her.  You see how human beings are meant to help others out, in that it makes them calm and happy and engaged.  "Oh, that's so&so..." Trey says.  Then the hygienist herself, a young woman with her act together, who tests mom's gums, offering a general note that not so bad considering no trips to the dentist in twenty plus years...  Then the dentist doctor, herself, again pleasant as can be, a Brazilian surname, American accent and manner, and we go through things, the X-rays, showing the infected pockets, the broken teeth, a sad state of affairs.

Yes, we've neglected her.  I've, more importantly and directly, have neglected her.  This was something to take care of and we didn't, I didn't.  

 They won't be able to get her into an oral surgeon until mid-August, and there will be lots of work to do, probably 11 teeth out.  

We leave the dental office.  It's been cool and rainy, and mom probably wants to go out, to The Press Box for some form of faked pleasant lunch as my guts boil in grimness, more shit added to my plate.  Earlier in the office she was on me, I just want to go home, can we go home yet...  I get her back in after we park the car, after minor squabble, and hearing "I never want to go there again;  it's all a racket."  Yup.  And they want $9000 for all this.  

I heat up the turkey American Chop Suey batch, the last of it, without any macaroni, pour her a little wine, get her the pills she has to take everyday for dementia, put out some of the no sodium added Plainville Turkey slices and some lettuce...  

Aunt T texts, seeing if I can talk over the phone in twenty or so.  We get through lunch, I get mom to do her hot salt water gargle, the mouthwash, a quick brush, see if she needs a pain pill...  And as I grab a rain shell coat and tell mom I'm going out for a walk, is that okay, buzz buzz buzz buzz, and I get out the back door, and put my finger on the top part of the iPhone screen.

And when I get back, mom seems fairly calm, in her Eames Chair, and I am bone tired exhausted and when I get upstairs and slip down onto the NeoAir puffy camping mattress, I feel a cold coming on, if it isn't plumes of mold coming up from the freshly dampened cinderblocks two floors below, and I am out like a light, and in a dream when I hear mom call Ted ted, Ted, but she seems to let me rest a little longer, and by then almost three hours have gone by, and I still feel exhausted.  Too tired to cook, too disturbed, bah, let's just go to The Press Box.  All the stress doesn't make it any easier to listen to and respond to mom's pattering on babble, and I almost shout at her as we cross Utica Street, when she says, "did you go through a light..."  Put twenty bucks of gas in, cash at the counter.

Get mom in up the ramp.  The sun has come out, shining through the skylights, warming the oak saved from the old pews of St. Mary's.  I have a second glass of Chianti, along with a cheese-less hamburger with sautéed onions, slice of tomato, romaine, no, don't need any potato chips.  Mom has her Mary's Salad with chicken, with the dressing on the side.  You have to be strict about the Type O diet.  I tell her about my trip to France years ago with my old buddy Phillippe.  Traveling, for me, isn't a lot of fun, sometimes.  And Phillippe driving like a madman on the big D highways and wherever else he could, and all the cigarettes--this is more than twenty years ago now probably--and sleeping on fold out beds after a family event like watching theVHS wedding video from a few years ago, and swallowing cheap booze after a couscous dinner...  As soon as I get mom squared away home, back to the mattress for some quiet, and again, I fall asleep without a memory of doing so, and I still ache all over, and sleep is the best, whenever you can, to try to digest all you've been handed.

But I have officially become a creeper, along with all this postponed and now dreadful health and financial stuff with mom...  The restaurant business will do that to you.  Your best years and all your opportunities gone by by bye.  

Sharon is coming tomorrow.  Take mom out to lunch at Rudy's.

When I get up after being up late, watching the Seven Samurai, part two, just for some visual distraction to bathe in, having my wine, mom's still in her bed.  I get her down for some soup, and she is kind, and says just the person I needed to come save me...  But as soon as I start, as her Progresso Savory Chicken and Wild Rice soup heats up on the stove, start to tell her, or rather ask her, Sharon wants to take you out to lunch, do you think an hour from now would work?  And as I try to get out of her what she might want, she starts blubbering immediately, about how exhausted she is, can't take anymore, needs more nap time, so I'm just as puzzled as I was before about what time might be convenient for everyone...  I start yoga while she is upstairs, after making her comply with the wash and rinse duties she moans through, and wait for the clock to tick.  Will she fall asleep?  Or will she just have some quiet time.  Twice I go up and peek in, checking, spy style, and the third time she seems more or less ready to go, asking me about it all over again, when's Sharon coming...

Sharon arrives in the parking lot, and as I've got mom's coat and hat and cane at the ready for the wind off the lake, and she comes up the cement steps bearing a box.  I brought you dinner...   Cheeseball, vegetable dip, three little mason jars of chicken stew soup.  

I get out back, and foggily try to think and get my way back to yoga, just going through the motions.  And as I go through I think of how horribly I've handled all this, my main responsibility, and no wonder I've made a shipwreck out of my own life, restaurant, bartender, 56 year old creep no one would want to get all that close with, with all my problems, and deep sadnesses from my own bad choices day after day, night after night.

And I think back to my mother's assault of tantrums when I was ready, just when I got of college, after spending the weekend with her, that I was ready to get on the road, back to my father's townhouse apartment , her wailing and sobbing about my leaving her...  I was a sitting duck, for all her drama.  Spoiling any sense I might have of having a normal relationship...

I do my yoga, out in the preferred back yard.  But I cannot get away from the fact that I have deferred from fitting in to any form of responsible profession.  And now, where do I go?

No chance in hell I'll be employable by the time I'm done with all this mom stuff...

But anyway, it's nice and cool out, while being sunny.  I pull my headstand with a surprising ease, aligned, not fighting it, comfortable, until I'm almost ready to cry uncle, and just then the timer on my iPhone goes off, brrrrt, brrrt, brrrt, I've got my yogi recommended five minutes in.

Earlier the cat came and rubbed himself against me as I stood just within the shade on one leg, then the other, tree pose.  After all the exhausted rest yesterday and some form of break from the ugliness with mom down in the kitchen in the middle of the night until it got light blue out, the yoga is smooth, just that I can't really concentrate on it.  When will Sharon bring mom back?  Do I have time to grocery shop?  Do I need to?  

The thought goes through my mind that if my life isn't already over, here, taking care of dementia mom, then it will be when I'm done with this duty as far as I can take it.  And I've already fooled around all my life, never thought I'd need a career or any forward professional certificate or training for the next step.  No, I just kept on writing, doing my exercise, my bachelor life cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, increasingly secluded to a point now where I can't go back.  I've drowned in the depression whose root cause is my mom's volatile neediness, her hyper storms of dissatisfaction, her tirades, her stomp dances, her constant anxieties, fears out on the road while I drive the speed limit...  Unhappy with the air temperature inside.  

Sharon drops her off.  But soon enough she's in quite a mood.  I ask her to rinse out for the sake of her dental situation, and she has a tantrum, boo hoo hoo sobbing quietly as she's over the sink, I'm so exhausted, can't I just sit down...

Then it's too hot outside.  I have the windows open in the back, screen door, one front window.  It's not even seventy out.  Can you turn on the air conditioning, again about to fake sob.

Okay, mom, I need to get some groceries.  Bye.  My aunt calls to check on me as I make my way through the aisles, almost done, having lost my little list, constructing it out of memory, oh, yes, Campbell's Chicken Noodle for mom, right...  Avoid soybean oil poisoning in mayonnaise, hummus, handy deviled eggs, or all the chemicals in processed meat, as easy as it is to serve that up for breakfast, sliced turkey to tide mom over til the next.  I had a good talk with my brother, in that he wasn't as horribly disappointment in me as I am in myself, briefed him on the upcoming expenses involved with fixing 82 year old and neglected teeth, check to see if the Empire Plan might have an oral surgeon in network...  But I'm fried, there's the cute redhead high school young woman with whom I exchange polite musician and yoga notes with.  It's a beautiful evening out, and mom's been really angry and telling me she's so exhausted why don't I just leave her alone, and okay, and then she says come talk to me, you hate me...

Tiny white winged moths float up from the evening grass, rising from the shade, as I were stirring a field of invisible nests.  Birdsfoot Trefoil, yellow, and purple clover rise above a sort of blank light moss green lawn, and earlier it seemed to disappear and become a sort of blank light green plane of some different dimension world as I sat in full Lotus looking out from the shade of the mom's backyard.   There is something buggy about the spread clouds of moths, as if they were somehow getting in your nose, but this is just the sensation and not the reality... They appear up out of nowhere, invisible places under blades of grass perhaps, folded, or from over on the spruce tree where I pruned back a honeysuckle bush infringing on the trunk, getting rid of the sumac tree growing up through the middle of it.  Trees agree with other trees about crown arrangements and space, but the lower level shrubby things will get away with whatever they can.  The cat comes over.  And the neighbor's cat, gray with tabby stripes, looks curiously at us for a moment before going back to his attention in the tall weeds.

But so much horror, so much angst, so much anxiety, so much anger and drama...  I feel I cannot blame myself for falling asleep after dinner, and then when I'm awake again, at one in the morning, I can't avoid going down to the kitchen for some wine.  There will be dishes to do, a batch of dandelion tea to brew, something for myself to eat, perhaps.

This anxiety feels a little different, a little more intense.  The moon is low and bright, almost full.

I've worked hard enough trying to get my own life in order, failed at it, and now here I am with a vengeful old woman who takes my faults apart indirectly, driving me toward the anger I've held within.  Is it that?  It feels like it sometimes.  

To be a night owl is to not be solving your problems.  You can run wild and far in your imagination all you want, but you'll need a job, a career...  and it's too late to be building one now.

It's been a rough few days.  The dentist...  Mom hysterical at the drop of a hat...  "I'm so tired..."  Well, go upstairs and go to bed...

In my late night attempts to find some form of distraction from woes, problems with the kitchen, all the clutter, craving 16th Century Japanese spare elegance, after I've watched Seven Samurai 145 times, I find Ugetsu, reviewed as cinematic beauty, a ghost story, but as I get further into it my anxiety goes through the roof, the old noble house the farmer is beckoned to bring his pottery to, having a wife already, and it stirs something inside me.  

I take a break from it to the Rubbermaid tub of soapy water I've washed the Revereware pot to heat the soup Sharon brought us in, and the fear of this ghost story bleeds over on my own anxiety to reveal, no wonder, how I've always been afraid of male female relationships from watching how my mom treated my dad and all the crazy stuff that came along with her part.  Headstrong crazy.  Amnesia crazy.  Angry crazy.  Entitled crazy.  Me first, spoiled, crazy...

I go up the stairs to check on her in her bedroom, hearing her footsteps to and from the bathroom next to it.  And she has woken, though the lights are out, the Discovery Channel on, to the fact that the dentist feels the need to pull some of her teeth.  "I think I'm going to have a heart attack," she says about it all.  "Do they put you under?"  Yeah, mom, I felt that way too, when they pulled my four wisdom teeth.  I didn't feel good about it.  At all.  My dad called that morning, and his voice cracked just slightly.  Nastia took me in.

So I must take back all I've just said, my duties are that of taking care of her, there's no other choice.

There are no other pleasures left here.  We have to sit it out til August.  I'll practice mediation, and we will have to go out to lunch and dinner, just to stay sane.

But this too, above, was written in a state of anxiety, at night, with wine at the reach, a bottle, 12.5% abv, and so it is not true either.  

The pandemic has passed, I notice this, hearing on NPR that New York State has lifted all restrictions, in schools and hospitals..  It's brave even for me to get up and face the day, to look in on mom, how's she doing, and she tells me she is dreading what is coming, the dentist, the oral surgeon.  Alone, with my tea, coping, I call the New York State Empire Plan to see if they'll offer any coverage to tooth extraction, and the answer is no.  If there were an accident, oral surgery, or surgery to mend an occlusion...  The nearest in network providers are in Rochester.  I run that through my mind, but if there isn't any coverage, no point at all to that.  

I call Aspen Dental to refresh my mind as to what's going on about the further appointments, first, a sort of fitting for the partial dentures, impressions taken, mom bites into wax.  Half of the fee will be due then.  Then the oral surgeon, mid August, here at the end of June now.  That's a lot of fretting.  Her antibiotic will run its course.

But the horror of my state of unemployment boils up from time to time.  I'm an old dog now anyway.  What could I be trained in?  I'm a drop-out, plain and simple.   It's a terrible horrible feeling, shameful.  You're supposed to use your talents to help people, not slack around all day like you're some self-important artist.  Teach.  Time has run out.  Now it's mom's concerns from here on.  Disaster.  Causes for anxiety that make getting much done hard, and then on top of that how to handle getting mom through a day, with the rides and all that.  

Mom seems to be comfortable, she has a big pink covered hardcover biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, and I tell her I remember when we bought this at River's End.  Yes, mom, you're fine where you are now, propped up, reading, of course, why not.  "I'd love an ice cold Pepsi..."  Sure.  Time for an Amoxicillin anyway.

I go do my yoga, first a lone sun salutation. Make that call.  Before mom comes downstairs.  I go back out and do a little bit more.  Oh, what am I going to do with mom today, to keep her calm...

The sequence I start back by the spruce trees...  The headstand is up first, then a counter pose, then shoulder stand.  Interesting.  I've always put head-stand toward the end, after all the warm ups.  The shoulder stand, I can't get a good grip because of my belly.  Five minutes to the dot with the headstand, then let the cat in and feed him, but the shoulder stand, not more than two minutes, and I still cannot not hold in plow for very long.

The slender retired woman, about 70, a neighbor is sunning herself on a chaise lounge in a bikini.  I avert my glance from her.

I come back and poke my head in, mom's awake, still reading.  "Okay, I'm ready," I hear her say as I shed my clothes in the bathroom.  I wrap a towel around me and tell her I'm taking a quick shower.  Shave.  It's been a few days.  I look in the mirror.  I wish you could wash away Old.  But you can't.  I go down to the kitchen, open a can of soup for mom, but she's fallen back into rest.  Maybe she needs it.  I get the mail.    Small potatoes today, and I haven't even solved the what-to-do-with-mom as far as occupying and entertaining her.  I'd like to go back out and meditate more in lotus pose, but the day has moved on, into this strange limbo.   And all I can do, on top of these realizations of what a bum I am, contributing absolutely nothing to society, pretending I was a little prince and could just smile to people and act princely and that was enough, no, it's not.  Mom's been through a lot.  Yesterday, "I'm so exhausted, can't you just let me rest..." breaking down into sobbing, her form of it, which can come and go.

Tedious to be switched around, the mode you thought you'd be working on, dealing with, coping with.  And I can't really do anything productive without hiding what I'm doing from her.

At night, full moon rising.  I'm taking a nap after dinner, meatloaf, potato, greens, and I hear her calling me, with panic.  "What's up, mom?"  "Well, don't you know the apartment building collapsed and people died, didn't you know that?  I don't want to be alone."  Okay, so I go in and sit on the chair, with clothes of all sorts strewn over it, to the right of her bed and the cat who is asleep, on top of several books, and there are more piles of books.  I take the remote, the batteries held in by tape, and change the channel away from CNN.  I try MSNBC, and then flip to the guide listing, to see what's on, PBS, Turner Classic, History, Discovery, upper ends of the dial.  I come upon James Dean.  There's also Hunt for Red October.  PBS is Ask This Old House.  Smithsonian Channel has a piece on David Hockney.  "I'll get a migraine if you keep flipping it around."  Okay, Mom.  I've just been watching the scene where James Dean is explaining to the guidance man at the police station about his home life, how his mother is always on her father, eating him alive, and if he "just knocked her out cold once..."  Poor Jim Backus.  Okay.  I've had enough.  I put it on Golden Girls and hand the remote over to her.  "Go ahead, break my heart," mom says as I depart from her bedroom.  Rebel Without A Cause is on, I’m not up for it, I don't have the patience for something so dated.

"Go ahead, break my heart."  I've been hearing that since going off to college.  It doesn't sit well with me.  The bind.  Double?

Pouring myself a Loire Valley Pinot Noir...I come back up later when the moon is above the trees. Look at the full moon rising, I say.  She smiles.  She’s calmer.  I go back down to the kitchen and look for something interesting on YouTube.  I end up watching the latest episode of The Chosen, season two, episode 6, where they go find Mary back in town, after she fell sort of possessed by devils again.

The guitar comes out later, and next day I wake up ashamed the next day, for playing a Billy Bragg song "St. Swithin's Day" in honor of a man who recently passed, who played guitar at the wine bar.  He was very very good.  I am not so good, a clumsy busker.

I wake up with the Disaster light flashing.

 It is a relief to get up and off the camping air mattress in mom's old study and find she's quietly in bed, dozing with the tv news on not too loud or head propped up on a pillow reading a book.  With so much paper, and so many books all over the upstairs here, the air is dry, and I cough at night.

I get up now.  It's nice to find I haven't overdone the wine, and in concert, important, underdone the food department.  Some decent smoked salmon before bed, and three or so hours before, a good bowl of aduki beans.  

My mind has space to bring the yoga books back downstairs to look at them later as I pour myself green tea in the kitchen, opening the laptop out on the kitchen table, where it seems vulnerable to interference of some sort.  I write a sentence or two.  Peace, for the moment.  I did some great yoga yesterday, when mom was off with Mary down in Fulton at the hair dresser.  Three full daytime hours, a good portion of it spent cleaning around mom's bed.

It's a strange kind of a job here, taking care of her.  It follows from my years in the two restaurants on Wisconsin Avenue, but it's a stretch, a mental battle, sometimes pitched, in my own head.  She makes me nervous, as a job would, just exactly like nights at the restaurants always made me wildly nervous as I dragged myself in, knowing that such jobs were, on the one hand, a humble living, but on the other hand a complete waste of time and talent, but for the up close and personal view on the human condition, even as viewed through the artificial circumstances of privileged customers, etc....  "What's going to happen at work today..." and in the restaurant bar business, you never know.  You're on the bus, going in, tolerating how full the bus is, what the weather is like, whether or not you've gotten through with mom to keep her calm...

I have some tea and check what the weather is like.  I see the guys, powerfully built, who work for National Grid, neighbors, talk shop as I look out the outer door at the light out front.  Burly quiet men, not particularly friendly, former warriors perhaps.  I hear them talk about Doug, how he's a good guy, who'll do anything for you, how to handle people if you need something, "just saying..."  The sun has not come around the building yet.

Ahh, but I hear mom clomping around above me, and the upstairs bathroom fan turned on.  Mom comes down, getting in my face as she sits to my right at the kitchen table, so that even as I sit hunched over my tea she can look up at me, drilling her prickly consciousness energy into me.

We are on different planes, I really think.

It's an interesting situation to be in.  A man-child with his aging old mother, who accounts for a large part of his creation.  She's about the created world, and the man-child is about what is beyond it, or about studying it more than actually living it in the typical way of seek and grab and work work work.  It does not seem my fate would be one of the real men who work at National Grid who climb ladders and go up in bucket lifts to take care of power lines. 

My principle source of keeping mind alive is Robert Thurman's lectures on YouTube explicating Tibetan Buddhism, along with some art, some music, some old films, documentaries on other subjects...  I'm far away from my old book shelves in Washington, DC. 

After getting mom a little bit of sliced turkey, I get up, okay, Mom, I'm going to go out and do some yoga, okay?  Okay.  But we were supposed to be doing something today...  Well, we'll go for a ride later.  I can't think of anything in particular, I tell her.  She sighs, her exhale, burdened by inner conflicts.  She goes and sits in her chair.  We'll take a ride later, I tell her again.  Okay.  This makes her feel better.  I'm feeling sore, but somehow today I feel it's very important, to keep the ball rolling with the good health stuff.

I go out.  The grass is dry.  I take along an old faded green towel.  I pull my yoga shorts up, tying them a bit tighter below my belly.  But I get to it.  The sun is barely coming through the cloud layer, the temperature comfortable, enough breeze to keep the bugs off.  I find a place that isn't an ant hill.  Sun salutation, and then, the poses that follow, easy warm ups.  

I wander through the usual stretches in their poses, without the fortitude of the day before.  Pain is a good sign of working out the muscles, so I'll just go slow today, I tell myself.

I'm working my way toward my headstand, and I hear mom coming outside.  She calls me.  I thought we were going to do something, she says.  I answer, but she can't hear me, so I get up and step closer.  We'll go for a ride later.  Okay.

God, she makes me nervous.

Later, when I came back from doing fifty minutes of yoga, I feel a vague sense of the form of an internal monk who is happy to go about monk duties, a sort of picture of a St. Jerome, hunched over his book, translating, within.  And one who must go in and now and face something.  And mom has a toothache.  I've called in, but no appointment made yet.

I'm going to take a shower.  Do you want to go out to the mailbox and get the mail, give you a little project to do?

I come down clean and she is just reaching the mailbox.  She comes back in.  It's damn hot out there.  I'm sweating like a pig.  Take a shower, mom.  Do I have time?  Of course you have time.  We're just going to get the newspaper, nothing crazy, drive by the lake maybe.

Mom has to complain, about the shower, about her clothes, etc.

I grimace, as much an inward expression, as anything.  The meditation after a yoga routine cut short by an nosey old woman who can't hear very well...  after the headstand, lotus pose lightens the brain, soothes the entire nervous system.  But having that under my belt, I can deal with the day.

But another devil is on the horizon, as Friday wanes, after the ride, after the bargain, I'll take you to The Press Box, when she suggests we have lunch somewhere, and then you can give me some space after, okay?  Over our booth, attended by Ellen, who grew up around here, and who, when I ask her what does she do to ease the Mommy Stress, tells us she runs, as we eat, facing each other, I see some swelling on along the front of her right jawline.  

It's raining still when I get her out to the car, and I'm too tired to even make a stop at the grocery store, just get us home.  And it doesn't quite dawn on me the import of this swelling I've just noticed.  Oh, shit...

By nighttime it is more pronounced.  I've run down to the health food store to get something to ease her pain, I have her gargling with warm salty water, swishing out with Listerine, giving her aspirin when she needs it, and she is reading quietly and watching television, but we have a problem on our hands and it's beginning to make me increasingly anxious.  I google local emergency dentists, but there don't seem to be many options.  I'd called the dentist Mary had recommended--she knows him from his work at the nursing home where she worked as a nutritionist--but didn't get through to make an appointment, and missed one morning call while asleep, shame on me.  In fact I should have taken care of all this a long time ago, when she first broke the top of a tooth while eating a lonely slice of pizza at Cam's, and she put the broken off part in a napkin, but then someone she knew came along and she lost the napkin with the tooth in it, a tale I heard walking to work from George's old house through the woods behind Dumbarton Oaks to get to Lepic for my shift.  These kinds of things turn my guts around, "you've got my stomach in a knot," as we say...

To cope I have some wine, and cook the basis of an American Chop Suey, using ground turkey I bought the other day, trying to think ahead.  I check in on mom, give her an aspirin, but yes her face is getting more puffy and swollen.  Alarmingly swollen, in fact.  Oh, Mom, I say to myself...  It's a vulnerable feeling, when you see how a parent doesn't have the sense to be able to deal with practical matters enough to take care of themselves, and then on top of that, a cluelessness.  

In the morning I awake with her calling out, so I rouse myself to check on her.  And now the wine is still sitting in my blood, making me as nervous and anxious as I could possibly be.  And feeling sick is no way to help yourself feel capable of facing the sufficient evils of the day, and I don't even know what we'll have to do.  But seeing mom in pain, and worrying about her, I call the dentist's office and leave a message with the emergency get ahold of phone numbers.  

In my morning panic I'm wondering, what do we do?  Go to the Emergency Room?  One dentist calls me back in an hour or so.  Probably best to take her into Urgent Care over by the Utica Street Bridge on East First Street so she can get an antibiotic.  That's going to be her best friend, he tells me, and this helps.  Then later on, as I rest, going through all this in my worried head, feeling badly I've not taken better care, not having insisted years ago we go to a dentist, the originally recommended dentist, Dr. Bozek, calls, and offers up, with his gentle manner, the suggestion that I call her primary care doctor, this being a Saturday, and have them call in a prescription.  So we are spared from having to go in and waiting at the Urgent Care, as the on-call doctor, calls in the medicine.  I have an appointment set up for Aspen Dental, and he diplomatically suggests I give his office a call Monday afternoon when things settle down, as he would be a bit more ginger about what measures to take with an 82 year old.

I'm still nervous when mom comes down the stairs, as she can get angry in her fragile state should I suggest something, gargling with hot salty water, and then have to explain it to her, mom you're going to swish this around, don't swallow it, and maybe you should be over here by the sink...  "I'm doing the best I can!"

I'm heating up Campbell's Chicken Noodle in a little pot with a lid, and the lid top is a cork stuck on the short post of the old lid top, and when the soup is hot, I lift the lid and the cork separates and the lid falls with a little clang and we both jump out of our skin, as mom is very noise sensitive indeed.

An enormous chagrin has been with me, and in studying it with the meditation that writing is, I think of that heartbreakingly beautiful passage somewhere in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck and Jim get lost from each other at night in the meandering channels in the heavy rain fog, swirled around, disoriented, then finally they find each other come morning, and Huck thinks it up to play a little trick on old Jim, that it was all a dream, but Jim looks down at the raft, covered with litter, looks back at Huck, and Jim delivers the most beautiful lines about how he was "mos' heartbroke"and most relieved to find Huck again, still alive, and all Huck can do is think of playing a trick on old Jim's head.  

Dealing with someone, as I tend to react with anxiety and fear with mom's volatility, can lead you to downplay the humanity of them, even your own loving care and best wish and intention;  you're glad to have another chance at it, as a swollen jaw or abscess is no joke.

You should be a doctor, mom tells me.  Ah, it's too late, mom.  It's only too late if you think that...

And so as I take in my dandelion tea and soda water, I gradually begin to feel a little bit better, even with the remaining sense that life always catches me with my pants down, unprepared, and too self-absorbed and selfish to think my way toward some basic productive role in society helping people out.

Philosophical types are drawn to certain situations.  A gambler likes the race track, the poker table, the casino….  The Philosophical tend toward difficult things…. They, we,  like to look in at suffering, as a mathematical problem, a geometry to solve.  What are the other points on the triangle of human suffering and misery.  They look at suffering intimately.  They don't care to drive around in fancy cars and go sit in hot tubs and go to fine dining restaurants all that much, distractions, wave interference with the true stuff, and the true stuff can be almost horrifying, terrible, so far out you'd thought you would never have to ever go to such places, and see so clearly your own irresponsibilities, your own failings.

Libraries exist.  They do.  For good reasons.  You can't go out to the bookstore and get a copy of Desolation Angel, or Dharma Bums, or the Diamond, or Lotus, Sutra just because you don't have your own with you at the moment.  They wouldn't have such books on their shelves anyway, with all the space taken up by promoted things, sections...

Mom rests through the day.  The drug store drops off the necessary antibiotic, and I'm doing the best I can to have her wash and gargle, and rinse with hot water with salt, pain pills.  But by nighttime with the swelling getting worse--her temperature is normal when I take it--she is beginning to get weary of this situation.  Can we see the doctor tomorrow?  Soon, mom.  Soon.  Oh, boy.

This, on top of my own personal sense of disaster in my life, a ticking time bomb, when my own health goes bad... who knows.  Makes one pretty awful tired.

"how much bone-sucking jarring misery this mother of mine has caused me all through the years, having to tolerate her, telling her her rudeness is okay, and she's even a decent person, but just... yeah, I'm the one she chose to vent all her misery on...  And now I'm out of Beaujolais after one and a half glasses of it, and have to switch to cider, and I go up and look at her on her bed, with the light over her she always leaves on, a Susan Howe book open...  How would I have ever known what mental health was like with all of her shit bearing down upon me...  Self medication, that's what I chose.  Except it backfires the next day, deeper into the hole..."

I go look in on her as she rests, and the swelling is worse, not better, her lips closing in on that side of her face.  She's two pills in to her antibiotic regimen.  Tomorrow is Sunday.

The cider now it's just making my blood pressure rise...

 "Ted, you need to evolve," I say to myself.  You had a great chance to do that back when you had all that knowledge potential at your fingertips.  A chance to learn Sanskrit, if you had looked.  A way to go with the Amherst strength, its Transcendental ties to the East and its perennial wisdom...

I'd been working on it then, just not very effectively.  And while I was working on some secret parts of the brain, where knowledge is a physical sense of the body and the world around it, the flow of the spirit within, I didn't do a very good job at just that, finding a good job for me, a place.  I mean, half of it worked pretty well.  A flow between myself and the people passing through the restaurant jobs where I worked, first as busboy, then totally dragged into it as The Bartender.  

Oh well.  Poisonings many times over, after riding the back of the tiger into the night.

Mom, thank god I get a break, Mary, her old helper, is taking her down to Fulton for lunch and a hairdresser's appointment.  I have three hours.   So I get her up, feed her a slice of turkey breast, so she can take her pills, she took a shower a few days ago, so we're fine on that, and the clothes she's wearing work, even matching, pink tones.  But somewhere along the line, I guess I was not as respectful as she might have wanted me to be in bowing to her and over her repeated questions to not irritate me, anyway...  so the frustrations between us are there again immediately and that's life in broad daylight now.

How do I do this on a daily basis?  No wonder I stay up late, and hide by slumbering until I have to get up, as she won't fix herself anything to eat but peanut butter crackers or almond butter on Saltines...  Pepsi.

The anxiety level when I wake up...  I don't even want to do yoga, and I'm kind of sore anyway, but she'll be gone at some point, so...  out into the world from my own inner one.  I'm going to take advantage of this day, and I'm up before her...

I take her for a little walk, so she'll know to wear a coat..  When is Mary coming?  In about forty five minutes, I tell her, for the 40th time, and she is beginning to get testy with me.  "I'm not the village idiot.  Don't treat me like that..." 

And then I get set up out back to do a good yoga routine.  I start slowly, just warming up to do the poses, testing them out, making expanding stretches into different poses, legs straight, holding onto big toes.  Nice and slow and deep into the sun salutations, then some of the poses of the sequence I'll dabble with later.  Each pose, as you align yourself into it, is good exercise.  I go back in just as Mary is taking Mom off to her car, in a jovial mood.  

Oh, thank god.  First, back to the yoga.  Self care.  Shoulder stand, plow, headstand, lotus, corpse, and then I'm ready, after a walk barefoot up across the lawns of the town houses, and up the road, the pavement being cool enough even in full sun with a breeze blowing.

When I get back from my little cool off after the good yoga walk, I get out the Meile vacuum cleaner.  The living room, it's enough of a mess.  I was sorting through New York Times piles the night before, but they are hard to throw away, there's always something interesting...  And then the courage to go face the disaster area, upstairs, her bedroom.  I put on NPR, and President Joe Biden is speaking.  And after all the shittiness of the Trump Era, as if it would ever leave us, I get emotional listening a clear calm rational well thought out voice...

Bits of paper, baby aspirins, useful pills for her dementia, toothpicks, batteries, parts of plastic mechanical pencils, paperclips, binder clips, pennies, bobby pins, balled up kleenex, the last bit of toilet paper rolls, and the books all broken and strewn askew over the piles of clothing and papers, mail and old cards.  It's not a large area I've done by three in the afternoon when she's set to return, but it's something.  The vacuum cleaner is still laid out, coiled flexible tube, cord, the business end of long tube

The good yoga and work mood gets immediately dashed, as soon as she comes in the door.  She wants me to sit and talk to me...  "You were going to do something weren't you, how did it go..."  Well, yeah, I did yoga, and then I did some cleaning up.  I explain.  Nothing in particular.  "No, something about your head," she says.  "Well, yoga is good for the body, good for the mind...  meditation, poses, keeps you calm..."  No, it was more than that.  I shrug.  She gets angry at me as I go up the stairs, to see where I am in my little projects.  I feel dusty now, in need of a shower.  "Okay, fine, leave me alone." 

And I'm getting ready for the shower and she has worked herself up into the high drama, help help help, please, someone help me...   As if she psychically felt how down I instantly became as soon as she was dropped off, how I did not wish for her to be back...

And I'm realizing, by having a break from it, how bad it's been, without any break that was more than sleep or hiding or a long walk, always, when will the anxious one rise to trouble my peace as I try to figure out something to do with the rest of my life, which needs to happen desperately enough.

She seems to intuit these things.

I have not eaten much, just some aduki beans.  After the shower, I'll make peace with her by taking her for a ride along the port and the lake view bluff then to Breitbeck Park, where we walk over and sit on a bench.  Mom's beginning to lobby for going to The Press Box...  Mom, you've already been out for lunch today.  

But I'm feeling a little bit leery of the meatball and sausage Sunday sauce I made, turning the burner down to medium low, putting the lid open just a crack before going off to bed and when I come down the next morning the burner is cold, even though it appears to be on...  I don't want to add food poisoning on top of everything else.

I call in an order from Skip's Fish Fry for a Maine style lobster roll for mom, as she's always talking about lobster and growing up on the North Shore north of Boston, I know about fresh lobster, and a broiled haddock dinner, and this isn't cheap either, but cheaper than if we went out when you add in the wine.

We get home, and the lobster roll, the meat served in separate container with a very light touch of mayonnaise, the bun buttered on the two outer sides, is pretty good, though she hems and haws about it.  The fish dinner of haddock is edible, not thrilling, too big a piece, I should have just gotten the sandwich portion.  I put one french fry in my mouth, and it's salty and good, but I think of my belly and spit it out while mom can't see it.   

She asks me if we should go out for a ride, but I'm tired.  Maybe, I hope, she can just go off to bed.  I told her earlier of how I almost filled up listening to President Biden give remarks at Geneva after meeting with Putin, a return of our democracy, and I hope she can watch the news and be happy with that,.

But she isn't.  Well, I'm watching television all alone, she says, coming down the stairs to hang over me at the landing as I look through my iPhone with the yoga book beside me, as I'd like to study it, the sequenced order of poses, the mantras, the breathing, energy centers to focus on in the particular poses... 

Well, Mom, I've got some work to do.  It's still light out.  She hasn't fallen asleep yet.   

Evolving.  Yes.  This is what we need to do.  This is our chance.  We missed it before, a long time ago.  Now, one cannot avoid it.

 But just briefly, as I woke up late and hungover with a wine headache, mom was not being easy going with me after dinner.  She got angry with me because she felt she shouldn't have to watch television alone.  I'd had my taste of freedom earlier in the day...  She followed me out into the parking lot in her light shirt, following me as I walked toward the road with my neon green down sweater jacket on.  Three hours away, you'd think she'd be calm, but earlier she started right in on me, wanting me to sit and talk with her...

So the anxiety and the lonesomeness and not knowing what to do with myself, her pressure, when I wanted to be reading my yoga book, feeling so good earlier, and then hearing a cat fight going on outside just after I let him out, well, I got on the phone with my old friend Randy out on the west coast, first about the weather in Encino...  

A good conversation with the wine, and then some down time on Facebook, thinking you're a wit.   Mom comes down and you deal with her, you open another bottle of the Loire Valley Pinot Noir, thinking you're okay...  

Anyway, I wake up, probably a bit intoxicated still, and I feel like a nervous little animal, shaking...  It doesn't help to hear mom from below, "hello, hello... Is anybody here?  hello, hello.  Help, help...  Ted, where are you?"  But I'm too hungover to get up.  And when I do, I'm still shaking, and feeling like a scared little animal wanting to hid.

The opposite of how I felt at night, feeling like I was a giant walking below the stars with a half moon sinking...

Then later, you are just depressed.  Things that are slight weigh heavily on you;  a small thing in passing becomes symbolic of all your own failings.  The girl you saw walking your mother through the Farmer's Market...  Make eye contact, you manage a smile, a smile with the beauty of life, but also its ephemerality, the sad things, of tending your old mother, walking her at her pace across the street, half afraid of her, drawn away from the old things that could have symbolized life and pleasure, blocked off now, leaving one high and dry.  Feeling too old, weak and feeble, already, in life.  The soreness of the good yoga from yesterday and the success, while mom was away with Mary to the hairdresser, of cleaning mom's room and the living the room, all of that having faded into the nervous system's troubles...  more keenly felt because of the good and healthy things you were able to do the day before...

Back from the errands of the grocery store, first a New York Times for mom to read in the parking lot while you run into Big M, then the farmer's market, unexpected, then closing out the ride, and back around 6 PM, I go and put my exercise shorts on, take the old towel out back to practice on the dry grass.  The yoga goes very slowly, which is perhaps a good sign of the work accomplished on an old body in yesterday's practice.

Maybe it's the pollen, I tell myself.  It drags your energies.  And, again, you boost yourself with wine to have enough energy at the end of the day to do some work, or self work.

It is said that the Buddha, just as he was about to attain enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, was able to envision all his past lives, his past lives as different creatures, on and on, and even the lives of every being that ever was and will be, in his great compassion.   And so do I feel the little life of the poor little anxious creature ready to shake, fluttering heart beat, and then later in the day moving upward, just feeling a sadness, a heavy slowness of the depressed creature dragging along in some form of muddy burden, and that too will lift, eventually, with some rest, I'll climb back up to the human being creature and remember to be with my fellow beings.

February poem

 How nice to be James Bond

Unafraid of heights as he scurries

Up a conveyor belt to fight a violent enemy,

an amorphous anonymous bad guy

Atop a construction crane.

Making a daring jump,

throwing a punch.

How easy, how clear.

Deal with your old mom’s

Craziness, dementia,

A pathetic angry stupid bitch you can no longer

Stand.

Welcome to that, Mr. Bond. 

Good luck with it. 

Kick that pistol out of the

other guy's hand.

 So now I am fat, like 'Ti Jean Kerouac.   

You better lose that watermelon, says my old mom, from Lynn.

Paunchy, old middle aged, just like Jack.

Life's passed you by.

On the Road, all of it was good.  Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, still celebrated by poets of by-gone days.  Desolation Angel, Big Sur.  

Just that you won't really write anymore.  Fame, or something poisonous, has sucked up upon you, stifling you, chasing you.  No more innocence, anyway, can barely spell it anymore.

Give some interviews, drunken.  Bloated.  You've paid the price.  Might as well, let them see it, still have some things to say anyway.  Just that they might be different from the other earlier less bitter days.  Wake Up, a biography of the Buddha you wrote, just as good as Hesse's Siddartha.  

I've seen the cruelty of the restaurant business, enacted on the innocent, when I was not the barman, a busboy bystander.  Get Jamie drunk.  He kneads his thighs like a cat.  His Jimi Hendrix looks get enough attention from the chicks.  He comes in and out, again like a cat.  So now the skinny old guy, a librarian at Georgetown University, or he worked there, pulls up in front of 2404 Wisconsin Ave.  With his white helmet on.  Lawrence is bartending.  Lawrence pours him out a shot of Jack, once Jamie has been primed.  The laughter, enough, okay, eggs him on, sure.  And then Jamie can not stand too well.  He tries to take the bike, getting onto it, maybe, I don't remember, this is thirty years ago at least.  Guy might weigh 140, 150.  Has a son.  Kadeem.  Smokes Marlboros, has the same laugh every day, kind of dry.  Finally, he realizes, he's too wasted to walk the bike, straddling it, backward, so he can pull away to the south, and get home on his Norton okay...

It was a shitty thing to do.

Lawrence did that to me once, when I came in for a decent lunch, Ann Cashion's brisket barbecue sandwich, before heading down, wearing my suit from Jos. A. Banks down to see the History Department a summer day, when their offices were open and back when you could walk in.

It's the old, have one shot, one shot of Herradura.  I know how to make his engine fire.

And then it goes on to ending up out in Arlington, so I can feed Lawrence's social life, out at the new Faccia Luna pizzeria the guys have taken next door out to Clarendon where more gold is.

I never became a history professor.  I never learned an adult professional skill.  But how to be mean, how to be cruel, if not to others, at least toward yourself, taking you your own along for a ride.  Won't it be fun.

So now I am fat, middle aged old, and paunchy, like 'Ti Jean Kerouac.  No longer in control of myself nor my fate.  Swollen in the belly, from what I don't know.  Not a thing to say.

A yoga book, a yoga practice, that's the way out.  No more self cruelty, the restaurant business, sucking it up, stale my skills, burnt out am I, from all the cruelty. 

The cruelty, for jack.

Jack watches The Seven Samurai wherever he is now.  Better than The Raiders of the Lost Ark, much as you might want to be Harrison Ford.  Just a better movie, a better franchise.  Gary Cooper, High Noon, that was enough, but they make Magnificent Seven, because they could and there were good looking manly men around to put sweat on faces and give the viewing audience a kind of buzz, a kind of forgetful high, whereas The Seven Samurai, you bathe in, you don't forget.  Shot in black and white, blends in the the dream life you have left still, or left behind.  Rain.  Each shot like a tea ceremony, carefully crafted.  An art to soothe you over and again.  Nothing, for the moment, anyway, left out.  Rice looks pretty good, at the end of a meager day.

Don't spoil it.  Don't write anymore.

But there's one more thing, before calling it a day.

The time Sietsma came.  It was a jazz night.  Jay had come back from his World Cup grand adventure to Brazil and beyond, as there had been a magnificent going away party for him up the wine bar.  Everyone coming out to see Jay, and to drink with him.  I had a cold.  I felt pretty sick, but this was a long one, and that's how it goes.  At some point, pour yourself some Ventoux, or some Beaujolais.  Everyone's here.  All the old regulars who know the ant trail way to the bar and how to hive on it.

Jazz Night.  We'd just been through a meeting, you know, take the red covers of the seat cushions off, and take them down to wash, Maria will wash them, and then we'll take them out of the dryer and put them back on.  But now you'll have to stretch them back around the cushions, and the zippers, all of this manufactured in Bali, Indonesia anyway, don't want to work anymore.

And Hod O'Brien has come to play.  Hunched over.  A legend of the be-bop keyboard.  Played with Chet Baker.  Impeccable.  The marathons he ran.  But now there's a cancer, somewhere, lungs I think.

His wife, she is, who sings.  What can  I, a mortal, say.  They are very good.  She takes care of him, and we all try our best too.

Jay says Vanessa will work upstairs with you.  We barely get ready before the door opens.  Sietsma has come in at least twice over the week before, a four-top over the weekend, at the front window, best table, very happy, and I saw him last week at a two-top, 21, with a friend, and he said hi to George the chef, who'd he given a good review to before.

Harried.  Table 56, there's one guy, and he orders a Manhattan, or, no, a Last Word cocktail, something like that, irritating, early for me.  Then Tom Sietsma himself is there.  Vanessa takes the order.  "Do your thing," she says.  She gets it.  

When his salmon arrives, he orders a glass of pinot noir.  In addition to a healthy taste of that, the Pinot, I think it was from the Loire, or the Pays D'Oc, but good, I bring him a taste of the Chinon, and also, I hope I did, of the Beaujolais, from Ed Addiss, Wine Traditions.  I don't talk him up with my usual friendliness toward restaurant people and professionals, and other people who get it, like the wine that matches...  The friendliness I get is to awkwardly tell them about old Hod O'Brien.  "Do you want to move over to a closer table so you can see better?"  No, no.  We're fine there.  There's a photographer here from the Post too.  

But I never open this night, to be myself, easily, engaged, happy, with Mr. Washington Post food critic, when we have lots on the line.  I feel a strained pressure.  I don't deliver my usual lines, "the wine gets lonely if no one is trying them out... paying any attention to them."  Ha ha ha.  It's probably true.

 The truth is, though, that we are all connected.  Life is interconnected.  

So I get up.  I don't look at Facebook too much, just to share a post by B. Alan Wallace about the appearances of joy and suffering, wholesome habits to cultivate, unwholesome ones to be rid of, and one of the Dalai Lama, so without comparing myself so painfully to everyone else and their successes, I come quietly down to the table.  Mom had a toothache last night, concerning.  She is resting now on the bed, on a cool rainy day with the cat sacked out at the foot of her bed on a fuzzy fleece blanket with the television on low volume.  

How beautiful it is to be able to pour clean filtered water from the tap.  I think I'll have a cup of coffee this morning, so I find the Bialeti, water in the base, coffee grounds in the chamber and on to the stove burner. 

What a beautiful family I am connected to, even if I have no wife, no partner, no children around me.  Beautiful like shelter and water and sustenance, a roof over one's head.  The little metal coffee pot is soon gurgling, and I've looked out back already and it's damp out.  Maybe today is the day to go to T.J. Maxx and find a yoga mat.

The hero is not an actor.  He or she must go through real life.  The hero must go out way far, and come back having been both defeated but also somehow with some understanding.  Mistakes of an ultimately beneficial sort, to see the good in life, the interconnectedness, the fleeting nature of successes and failures. Not to be too hard on the self.  The self has to be so very brave anyway, in this beautiful mortal human gentle form.  

I have lived unwholesomely, under illusion, whatever it might be termed or called.  I have lived in fear, fear being ignorance in Buddha's great knowledge of all things.

The long years wandering are predestined, so you shouldn't be ashamed of yourself, I say, to myself first of all and foremost.   That's just a good person, I suppose, that such things happen.

Up here I am not on my own turf, not in my own abode, with my stuff, organized as I have allowed it to be.  I wake up surrounded, piles, binder notebooks, stacks of papers, my mother's scholarly life that she has fallen into, becoming a natural creature of all her books, like a log fallen, turning into a habitat as it slowly decays to the elements.

Naturally I wake up feeling timid.  Her stuff.  And then I have to think, but what about my own stuff, which is in a similar state.  For months I have indeed been living like a monk, clothes on a my back, a guitar, a fresh change of clothing, my tablet for scribing, my mattress with a provided blanket and pillow. I lie there for awhile, running through the chakra energy centers one at a time, connecting them, whether or nor this does any good, a kind of breathing meditation without words, with thoughts like "what is mom doing now, where is she, what will I do with her this rainy cool day so that she won't get any with me..."

It is hard to think of any plan.  Last night after the falling to bed after dinner and dish doing and mom settling, I woke at midnight again, or later, and so I go downstairs and fix a few things like the refrigerator, which has become crowded again, what to toss, what still might be of some use, and I open up the laptop and find a Robert Thurman lecture on Tibet Buddhism, crack open a cider, pour it over the rocks.

Too too much of my life has revolved around wine, and also dining, too.  Professionally.  You make many people happy for a time, relaxed, get them out of their own heads and into conversation and new friendships.  But you can't escape the product you are selling, and the wine can take you to places that leave you in a bad place.

Wine.  Mom gets angry, starts up on me.  The wine affects me too, and I rail back against her, it's hard not to, and then I have to get out for a walk to clear my head.  Out to the road, along the side to the National Grid station, for beaver and wildlife observation.  I seem to feel my habits are unwholesome, and this is how I've ended up so, in this situation I'm in.  The way I don't sip wine, but tend to take in more than that rather than savoring it, which is part of the point of good wine, in that it's good enough you just want to sip it.

It's harder to be wholesome when you are surrounded by unwholesome behavior.  Mom breathes in an awkward stressful way, exhaling in sighs.  Mom, breath in, breath out, energy in, energy out.  But she can only take so many of my recommendations before turning angry and indignant on me, as if there were indeed a devil of several names within her.  "I will not go off to bed!" that sort of a thing.  By the time I remind her to brush her teeth after a cold cut breakfast, after her toothache last night, "I've been taking care of myself since I was six years old," she pronounces.  Okay, Mom.  The Lee Holden Qui Gong I showed her just now on the laptop didn't get very far.  I used to do things like that.  Well, mom, you could start over again.  It'd be good for you.  "People make their own decisions about such things," she snoots at me.  Okay...  Wholesome, stay wholesome.  

I rinse my face and my arm pit joints over the upstairs tub.  She's growing impatient and started in with the "kill myself" thing from her chair as I brushed my teeth with the homemade whitening powder I've concocted out of baking soda, activated charcoal tabs emptied out and turmeric.  "Whose pills are these," she demands, but my mouth is full with a rinse as I climb the stairs. 

And as I get ready, with notes of anger at me, she says I'm going upstairs.  Okay...

And then I put a load of light colored towels into the washing machine down in the cluttered basement, with the dehumidifier going, a quick Moldex spray along the cinder blocks there in the corner, and when I go back up to check on her, she is peaceful and just wants to relax for a while.  Okay, mom, I'll go for a walk and we'll go out later.