Grim here.  Taking it day by day.  

I failed to meet my mentor, that is a shame.  For whatever reason.  Robert Thurman.  The English Department guys weren't much of a help.  As if there were something they had to guard against, strict standards… I focussed on them too much.   Increasing dissatisfaction, examining texts too carefully, slowing down my paper writing, another round of bad grades…

But you don't get a chance to do it all over again.  You live with your regrets and all your mistakes.

Distractions, the girl from New York City...  The rejection.  The depression, the retreat to my own little world, not taking advantage of opportunities to make new friends and such.  The problem of mom going out on her own, no one else to hold her hand…

And now I'm stuck.  Can't move one way, can't move the other.  

So many years wasted.

Vague death wish to go with the unfortunate thoughts that pass through the mind, easily meditated away…

But I did my yoga yesterday.  Maybe this is the key.

What happens to my stuff, all my stuff?   I guess I deserve this.

How can I find peace and a future, and take care of mom at the same time?  Work for the Post Office, for a little bit of retirement? 

Sad I'm not a teacher of some sort.  

When will mom wake up, and come down, and ask me "what are we doing for fun today?  It's wicked not to have fun."  And now I hear her clomping around.   Fuck.

And I can feel my father's disappointment from hyperspace, how I wasn't a good student, couldn't tell him things...  And he reached out to me and sent me letters of guidance...  Go meet the Dalai Lama of Compassion and healthy psychology, ask questions of Commager, but I was confused or distracted...  sad.

All my college foolishness and stupidity is now evident.  All the distractions in the world outside, such as now turn my stomach for all my mistakes.   The distractions of someone trying to either self medicate or take care of himself, but without solving basic practical real world problems.

And don't be Jack Kerouac; be a Buddhist.  The Buddhist Monk within who is always there, even for sinners.  (Actually, he was a pretty good Buddhist, for a time, wrote his own version of the Buddha’s life…)

Ahh, morning pages, to bleed out upon.  I always believed in writing, but now I don't any more, and there are probably better ways to meditate...

The agony of the leaky windshied, another chapter in the saga of Mom's old car.  Will the windshield break when they cut it out, to clean up the rusted frame...

The agony of depression, acutely felt.  Acknowledge it.  We're not all automatons.  In fact perhaps we have an inner sweetness that puts us on a collision course with such things, meeting the non Buddhist world such as it is, with all its competitions.

Yet, if I don't write, it's like I can't see straight.

Mom wants to have fun.  Don't they all want to have fun, while my heart goes on aching and aching.  Wine just leaves you with fool sentimentality, after the calming.  

"Help, you bastards, help," she says, from her Eames Chair, talking to herself.  I hear the chair creak.  "Goddamn it, I want my car."  It's very tiresome to listen to it all.  "I quit."

So I get up and go check on her.  "I'm just letting off steam," she says.

I call the guy, Randy, at Port City Collision.  He took a look at the old car when I dropped it off the day before.  Knew what was going on.  "To do it right...  We'll have to cut the window out, and we can't guarantee it won't break."  I know I'm in good hands.

So mom is ranting, raving, about to lose it, so I call the man around 11:15 or so.   "We got the window out in one piece."  I’m about to be stressed out too.

When I get down there, and the kind attractive woman from Meals On Wheels sees me walking, and says, hey, can I give you a ride?  I was going to walk, just to get rid of the stress, but I like talking to the locals, and besides...  You're saving me a drop, just like you did last week...

She’s dealing with dementia too, the in laws.  Worse.  It’s rough, she says as she drives the four door high back Dodge Ram.

I get there and look around for Mom's 2003, 110,000 miles on her, grey tan Corolla, but I don't see it lined up anywhere.  The building is an old car dealersthip.  So I go in, ahh, there it is.  The man is at the counter as I go in through the lobby.

Insurance companies, they want a discount on labor.  He told them where to go, and the business is sent elsewhere, including the police cars, and the police came back to him.  He started his own business 30 years ago with a thousand dollars borrowed.   Bought a repossessed trailer to live in for $17,000, married, built a log cabin after digging a cellar.  Still lives in it.  Hard to maintain a cabin, hard to heat, plus by regulation you have to put 2 by sixes in anyway, so what's the point, if you can't see the log walls.

Mike's wife—mike refers the body work to him, cash-/-was driving her Mercedes, got hit by a deer, $12,000.  He doesn't like to do big wrecks, finding something distasteful about them, and I wonder...  

One of the maintenance guys here at mom's townhouse apartments ran a tow truck.  In the back of the lot the dogs were barking at something.  A pickup or something that had been in a wreck with a motorcycylist, a body part, a leg.

I look through the framed pictures.  Open framed race cars.  A crate engine, sealed, a car on the local race tracks.  Restoring automotives.... a 1950 black & chrome Ford special.  

Obama created a program, $4500 for an old car.  They’d take the car to get it off the road, pour in something into the engine so it will never drive again…So rather than pay for body repairs folks would take the government cash.  The Government boy.

He was a woodsman.  But that gets hard on a body.  

Bass Fishing tournaments.  Up on the St Lawrence.

It’s an old car dealership.  There was a line up of them over here as you come into town on old route 48, western side of the great river.  The meals on wheels lady mentioned an old ghost of a dealership, and the Chrysler Plymouth Dodge Jeep car lot now bigger enterprise has moved out to 104 near the Walmart and the Lowe’s.  Since they left, Randy’s business has taken a big hit.  

Nor is he optimistic feeling about the new buildings.  Old folks homes, he says.  The hotel across the river above the locks… that will be used, this building, for the people they are letting out of the prison.