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...