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.