Mind:

 Wake up, hungover, at least mom's not shouting. "Help... help.  Won't some body help an old lady... Bastards...  Alright.  I give up.  Kill myself..."

I'm falling out of the loop of normality.  I'll never get back to it, after all this.  My interaction muscles... withering away...

In this state I am afraid of her.  I'm afraid of making noises that will awaken her.  What are we doing for fun today?  Will I get dragged out to a restaurant?

The life of drinking, you don't get anything done, you don't move ahead.  You enter a false life when you go out to a bar.  A glass of wine numbs the pain, gives you the energy to face doing the dishes, but beyond that, it's a waste, you say to yourself.  It relaxes you for the time being, that's true, and that helps.  But the unpredictable quality of when it comes around and bites you in the ass..

Treat yourself gently.  At least you meditated this morning.

What we observe cannot be fully considered without realizing that the observations are subjective to our own perspective.  The nature of the observer must be fully taken into account, and there is nothing observed completely without this realization.  An experiment is altered by the perspective of the observer.

Therefore, we must purify our own perspective, as best we can.

Some days the temptation is strong, to stay down on the green air mattress cramped up against the folding door closets on the south, to my right as I lay, and the old wooden desk that looks like it was from a school house of some sort.  I could hide, snooze, drinking water, meditating in corpse pose.  There are the fears of facing the day in such circumstances, unemployment, trying to find something healthy and satisfactory as an activity without straying too far from mom.  I've let many whole mornings pass, as she sits below me, reading in her Eames Chair, murmuring, calling, sometimes shouting.

I get out in the back yard after the fog off the great lake lifts, the sun drying the dew off the grass and the red clover, the white clover, the yellow little Bird's foot trefoil, finding footing to acknowledge my good yoga intentions, that I will experience what I will experience, and let the yoga and the philosophy and the breathing exercises transform me in this strange time of transition, from barman to now focussed on what I should have never left, a needy old mom all on her own, and let my prejudices against her habits float away without all the fears.

Sun salutation facing the sun, downward dog, warrior poses, shoulder stand and other preparations for assuming the squeeze of the plow pose.  Tree poses, for balance and breath, pigeon to open the tightness of the pelvis.  And from reading just a little of a classic old yoga book from the 1970s I have taken inspiration as to the purpose of why we do the different measures of yoga and the kinds of yoga we do.  The headstand feels okay, and I can almost hold it for five minutes today, about twenty seconds short, and when I am relaxing on the old towel into child pose, letting my ribs expand after holding together vertically upside down, letting the spine readjust and letting it sink down in as I rest on my folded legs, the cat comes up along the ground to nuzzle up against me, and as I enter into lotus, easier than often, he pushes into me, rubbing his length along my arms and back.

Then mom is under foot.  

I was a sick man, in the way that touring musicians, rock stars, jazzmen, who also work at night, descend into pain killing misery, without being able to lift a finger to do much that is healthy, out on the road.  I long strove to maintain a balance, but it was hard to do that.  I'd be too tired to do anything before two in the afternoon when working those nights.   A job shouldn't hurt so much and leave you with so little, but that's the artist life sometimes.

The old illnesses still dog me, here in these uncertain circumstances, and I have little option other than to first get healthy, which is not easy to do when feeling provoked, rattled out of the space of meditation.  The return to the bottle of red wine, for a buzz to smooth the festering lack of peace within...

We went out for a ride, after we ate a modest lunch together.  We stopped at the health food store, we stopped at The Big M, we drove by the lake, and then we took the groceries home.  Mom suggests we go out for lunch, and I don't have any other way to entertain her.  It's almost 80 and the humidity is up.  Another trip out, to the Press Box.

Every now and then you find a good book, a classic.  In my case today, Yoga, Tantra & Meditation, by Swami Janakananda Saraswati, (The Source of Bliss), translated by Sheila La Farge, Ballantine Books edition, 1976.  

To wake up as a creative, "a writer," is a strange thing.  If you commit yourself to it, as you know you have to, in order to do anything with it, you're not doing something else to commit yourself elsewhere in your mind's eye.  I suppose you could do two things, but you can't be both militaristic and spiritual in the way of Buddha;  there will be a great clash.

You wake in the sorry world.  You don't have a job. 

Mom wants to go for a drive, a little adventure.  Out to Sterling, go to the Nature Center.  Nice sunny day, lower humidity.  We park, walk up to the old farmhouse.  Places are reopening, perhaps we can pay our yearly membership dues.  Mom goes over to look at the tee shirts.  You already have one of those, and the director, Jim, who could take payment, is not here, and I forgot to bring cash along.  Mom gets angry.  You're being cheap.

On the way back, after "please slow down," many times, I pull the little old car off the main road 104 and down into the parking lot of Ontario Orchards.  Mom wants to go in, okay, fine.  We also have something to pick up at the bookstore.  If we browse here too long Mom will get hungry and grumpy.  But I amicably pick up fruit, placing it in the shopping bag after the clear plastic bag to gather, peaches, plums, apples, greens.  Mom finds some escarole.  "I don't know what to do with escarole.  It's a little bitter..."  She slams her cane down.   I'm ruining everything.  She has no idea how I'm feeling about my ability to hold a job now and what the future will look like for me, and how I'm floundering, can't really take a job, and in the meantime I'm gotten back with my Buddhist side too much to care for anything more than improving my health, through yoga and proper perspective...  and anyway I'm feeling pretty sad about things, taking it day by day, yoga, walks, meditations...  on top of trying to keep mom entertained.  I'm being braver beyond my means for it.

Writing only adds to the sense of vertigo, of now longer knowing which way is up and which way is down, and even mom says, "I don't know if I'm coming or going," on a daily basis.  

My Buddhist spiritual sense says that this Earth, this world, is deeply damaged.  And turning on the radio, NPR, historic drought in the West, along the Colorado River, Lake Mead, as an example.  A 1200 year drought.  How livable is that?

Really my only way out of all this is the monastery, the monastic life, the yogi life.

I notice how at night when driven to the wine, weary, too much brow beating from mom, wanting desperately to push back against her, to make my small voice heard, and all I end up doing is making it worse by calling out her bad behavior, the "you hate me, I'm going to kill myself, I have nothing to live for" type of thing just getting exacerbated, I notice how the wine turns me into a different person, a creature less aware of himself.  Like the drunk in the bar, you think you're funny.  You think you're a grand guitar player and stand up singer, ready for an open mike, when you're singing voice struggles with the tune.  You think all sorts of things with the wine in you, you're unique, special, a great writer, and it's none of those things.  You succumb to a false view of the world.

There is no way I can really please my old mother now.  The irony...  Not without a restaurant meal with a crowd and a glass of wine.  And in the meanwhile, when I'm trying to entertain her, my concentration is interrupted, I cannot focus on a grocery list, or what goes on it, what do we need...  She will upbraid me, for leaving some water behind on the counter near the sink after doing the dishes.  For not wearing a shirt when I am sweeping the floor, for leaving her in the car in the direct sunlight.

She used to be more forgiving, more understanding.  Now I must hide myself, my feelings, my unhappiness, my sadnesses, my worries, my dissatisfactions, my awareness of our finances, all the things I must meditate through.  And it all got this way, it's easy enough to think, because I was left to take care of her, ever since the moment I was finished with college, emotionally, visiting her, helping her, this is the very thing that has distracted and destroyed me, try to be happy with that weighing on you now...

Human beings, we are complex creatures, rich with psychological make up.

We took the slow usual way along the lake, after getting a New York Times and the local Palladian Times and a chicken caesar wrap in case we got hungry out on the road.  Out past the turn off to the Sterling Nature Center and over the moraine hills on two lane road past farms onto 104 and up the hill and down into Fairhaven for the Fairhaven Beach State Park.  Afterward we pushed onward along the bay and out to the Collocca Estate Winery, busy on a Saturday, then back and by the time we got back my gloom and anger came out, I'd had too much of circular conversation, of being told to slow down you're going to fast...  And I felt like this is the last ride I can take, never again, what's the point...  I cook dinner, but that's a fight too, asking her to clean the asparagus, nothing is working, but I get dinner on the table and sip my way through a bottle of Pinot Noir.

All I've been able to think about, while listening to old woman babble, is how many opportunities, how much time I've let go flying by.  Unemployable.

I've bided so much time I've run out of time.  I didn't make any real choices.  I tended bar.

When you are young is the time to borrow money and commit to something.  I never did that.

Now I just feel so trapped, with this heavy personality of mom hanging all over me, no space, and I can't even grocery shop in peace enough to make decisions if she's waiting in the air conditioned car in the parking lot even with her New York Times.

Exhausted after dinner by the whole day and arguing I plopped down on the air mattress after setting it and adding more air to it, stripping off its blankets thrown about to different sides, and when I wake up, around midnight, mom's awake watching television.  I found the Westminster Dog Show on a Fox sports channel I didn't know about.  Then I went downstairs to open a bottle of Beaujolais and ponder things, venturing off into my musical realm performances on Facebook.  I don't blame myself for finding some space from her, no.  The wine goes down easily.  Drunken humor soothes.  I can't tell if I can sing or not, but sometimes I can, carrying a tune.  I take a walk in the night, listening to a Robert Thurman interview on my iPhone.  The beaver splashes a tail at me.  The dam they've made is stronger and stronger, dark adobe mud, branches strategically reinforcing.  No water is getting through the front, built on the wire that was meant to deter them, nor at the sides, only a trickle over as it has not rained in several days.  

The next day I wake up exhausted, too much grass pollen or something, too much wine, too much mom contradicting me at every turn or saying something patently false and inaccurate.  

I drive off to get the groceries on my own, turning on the car AC.  When I get to the grocery store, how fine it feels in my heart to not have to explain myself, mom, I'm going into get the groceries, are you okay here, is the temperature okay, etc., and to hear her, well, don't take any longer than you have to.  Okay, mom.  Don't take any longer than you have to...  right.

When I get back, she needs help and persuasion to take a shower, after I listen to her telling me she doesn't know what to do with her life now.  Mom, you've had a full life, (unlike me.)  I help her, picking out underwear, socks, setting the temperature, every time she showers I hear the story of how she almost got scalded or some bad memory she cannot easily get over of, fear and more fear.  So I'm back downstairs in the kitchen typing away at the keypad, and I hear she's turned the water off, what the hell is she doing?  What do I have to do for her for dinner?  Chinese?

There's nothing here.  I'm swallowed whole.  

We take a Sunday drive, down past the big aluminum steel tanks of the water purification plant underneath the electric plants tower smoke stacks to the park overlooking the lake.  The Lions Club put on a crafts show earlier in the day, but it was hot and humid and I didn't feel like getting up and least of all getting mom up when she was comfortable watching The Westminster Dog Show on the television screen on her bureau of drawers.  I've gotten her to take a shower.  From the roundabout we park and look at the lake, and we get out for a walk.  Oh, look at those ducks, I've never seen so many ducks...  Mom, those are Canada geese.  In the distance I see young mothers pushing young children on swings, the sun on their bikini top backs, wearing shorts near the new little water park.  Yes, they're putting money into Oswego...  I can't muster much feelings of joy, as if I felt in the last few days turning the corner into a kind of hopeless state of being so overwhelmed here by paperwork stuff, Medicaid application forms, and all the clutter upon clutter and the woman refuses to do anything about it, I like my room as it is, it keeps me company...  Jesus Christ...  So, whatever, park the car at the next lot up at Breitbeck Park proper, for more of a walk, fine.  It's the old yacht club building they're going to tear down, mom, not the old lighthouse, I explain, to correct another of her lacking of clarity over what she read in the local newspaper.  Those benches are new, mom says, well, no, actually they've been her for awhile.   

I'm so irritated I walk on ahead, leaving her to take her own halting feeble hunched pace, letting her muse on her own over what she wants to stop and express something about.  The marina has opened up.  A powerboat comes revving in from the west beyond the breakwater wall of worn eroded concrete blocks with a low rumble.   

Mom rejoins me.  Do you want to sit down on a bench?  I join her.  People pass with young children, she gives her stupid old lady wiggle the fingers wave that makes me want to slap her, saying something intrusive, as I regard it, to passers by, but they are kind and polite enough to respond in some small polite way, sure...

We end up having a nice chat with a tanned fellow, a local who has an off road vehicle with a trailer for bags of trash.  The Craft Fair was busy, he says, almost like HarborFest, he tells us.  They did a good showing.  Live music.  Food.  Shame on me.

After finishing our long slow pained walk, me thinking of coming here and doing yoga on the grass, a headstand at least, getting the old lady back to the car, okay, let's just go to The Press Box...  fine.  I could use a glass of wine and a hamburger with blue cheese anyway...  lettuce, tomato, onion, ketchup, Mom will have a chicken fajita, and we can catch up on the restaurant family baby news...

I get mom in up the ramp, and it's nice and warm out so let's sit outside.  Choosing a table, torture, I don't want too much sun, she says.  The sun is setting anyway.  We get sat and she asks me if I'm okay with the sun, and yes mom, and finally, after she asks me a forth time, yes, mom, stop torturing me.

I end up having two glasses of wine, though I don't need or want the second one, but as a sort of comfort blanket over my great shame.  As my wise and energetic brother has always told me, man with a plan that he is, "if you want to something, you have to make it happen..."  Years and years ago, and over the years, he tells me this.  But it's as if I somehow knew in my mind's inner eye, that I would end up being sucked into the great disaster who is my mother with all her pride and clutter and attitude.

If I mention anything in the slightest of why, trying to give a diplomatic answer to why I might be looking glum, all she can say, after a beat, is, in one kind of mood or another, "you want me out of your life, there's the door."  If she's outside and feeling social, she'll add "I can find a man any day..."  Mom, I wish you had.  And then I look back and see that I was too nice, too patient, too responsive, coming up old Route 81 so many times to spend whatever vacation I might get from the bar to help her out.  Which was not so much help and doing things that needed to be done, because of her various neuroses, like how no one can touch her stuff, god forbid throw out the stack of New York Times gathering in piles about her chair, nor about any cluttered flat surface, god forbid her bedroom with all the books slovenly spilled over into incoherent piles, books open, spines cracking, odd bits of enveloped mail stuff into them.  And she'll bitch at me, I'm no fun, if I hesitate to go the book store...  where they are, I must admit, friendly, which is a social help, getting a mind out of the salt mine it's stuck in.  

"You have a penis," Mom says, as she does, to the sickness of my stomach.  Mom...  "You can do anything you want.  You want to leave?  Go.  There's the door," and then she'll look away.  And I can only say to myself, "you fucking bitch."  Take another bite of blue cheese burger with knife and fork.  Not like I'm employable anyway...

"People respect you," she'll say, when I get too down about the professional aspect of my life.   Yeah, mom, but that doesn't help here.  No one knows me here.  And they barely know me, well, okay, a lot better, if they think of me back in that box on the shelf, Ted the bartender at the wine bar, he'll humor us 'til the wee hours, but beyond that, not so much.

And I see every moment of every day, how all this is ruining me, and now how my life already is pretty much over, and what do I have to look forward to, nothing kind, nothing decent, nothing good, no steady owned little place of my own...

I come down to the kitchen, unless she's down here already, fumbling for a Pepsi or crackers in light plastic wrapping to crinkle in her proud carelessness.    She was earlier, so I hightailed it back to the cluttered study where my death green air mattress is laid out, with one purple maroon sheet, one puff comforter, bottles of water...  And when she went off to bed, not asleep but up reading, I come down to write and do the dishes and try not to start crying and have a dry Woodchuck Pearsecco bubbly dry cider to regain my nerves, my prayers, a bit of peace and quiet in which to think, and the cat is yowling at my door, knowing I'll let him out, as it's always a federal case issue with mom, don't let the cat out...  Yowl, yowl...  Okay, cat.  And the only problem now is that it's almost four in the morning, and soon it will be five and already starting to get light out, but when else can I find some space and do the dishes without being bitched at for "clanking, clanking..."

The sky has cleared and it must have rained earlier in the night.  Jupiter out shining.  The cat is happy.  Thomas Merton wouldn't say no to a beer, being a Trappist.  There's no sin in it, or at least it's a lesser evil.   Just that the whole working world will be getting up to go to work, to the office, soon on a Monday morning in the real world time, while I will be elsewhere.

I know all this is futile.  If you want to do anything you have to work with other people.  Find a mentor.  Find a group.  You can't go it all alone, you'll end up doing nothing.

I look back.  Hugo the busboy.  Not to be patronizing, but, one remembers the thought, the fleshing out of the biography of Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov.   The old heironomonk liked the company of a very simple old fellow religious, an old man who would not strike you as having anything special to over such a high intellectual mind as that of Alyosha's great spiritual guide and interpreter of life in day to day reality.  Joy in the company of the simple "rudest" type of all sweet monk fellow...

One wonders, was I ever loved by my mother...  was she capable of love...  or was it always clouded up by "all about herself," her own agenda, her own need.  You're the kid who has to say, has to be the patient adult in the room, "no mom, don't fret, it was okay you acted that way, I understand why you blew up..."

But that's not quite fair either...  worth saying?  to yourself?  Born into a kind of emotional blindness, a parent's selfishness...  so you'll never see when real love is offered to you, you don't know it, so you're unaware, blind to it...

This is why one must find love in Buddha, in Jesus's little bits of wisdom, being an enlightened person, but not always explaining the whole thing as well and thoroughly has Buddha.  Earthly love being illusory without its backup, its larger program.

If you can write, you're alright.  Jack Kerouac writing Dharma Bums down in Orlando, near his mom and sister's house... living his unconventional life, even as On the Road had succeeded finally after all those years, as he could not turn away from all he had fought for, but realizing his need for the quiet mendicant life.  Had he realized that fame would not destroy him, King of the Beats, the emphasis not on the enlightenment he had struggled to find and read about and worked for and all that, written one of the great texts of modern life's textual qualities, the craziness of Cassady, Ginsberg, Burroughs, but the emphasis from the cultural looking in on Kerouac being more about the terrible way he had lived, the things he endured, in order to achieve some modest form of enlightenment, rather than the enlightenment itself.  Some, of course, celebrated that enlightenment close to Buddha form, as Steve Allen got it, getting that Kerouac's "spontaneous Bob prosody" went perfectly well with the enlightenment of Jazzmen and Jazzwomen.

In the early light, impossibly early, a slow stew of aduki beans on the stove, mom still asleep, I look out the back door off the kitchen, finally having the peace to let the intuitive mind work for itself again, the joy of allowing work to happen again, with the unconscious ease that the beaver works on the dam to make the wetland marsh bloom with wildlife, eyeing the water level it takes, while feeling like stolen time, I look out the back at the long rectangular lawn and there to the left, north, by Bonnie's daughters herb and vegetable bed, there is the handsome ginger cat, and he sees me and comes galloping in.  I pick him up and he rejoices and I stroke and tickle his sides and he rubs his head closer to me, purring away.  And then the lone female deer comes walking gently past and then behind the two spruce trees.  I'm holding the cat in my arms and she comes out from behind the trees and looks at us, and I tell her she is lovely and what a nice visitor she is.  Talking to her, she is spellbound, like when you shine a light on them, but when I sit and let out a mantra, Oum Mani Padme Hum, she decides pretty much instantly to gallop off, and I wonder why.    Away she goes, trot trot trot, and we can hear her hooves hitting the hollow ground, and then up into the bushes up the overgrown greenery where the mound of earth is, puffing huffing as she gets back into the safety of the woods, as if to say, what did I just see...  Do deer eat bread?  I'll have to google it.  No, they don't.  It will make them ill.

It is not fair to mistreat the elderly, to list all their faults. They have made it so far; let them rest.