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.