Saturday afternoon.  I awake with the usual sleepy yucky feeling about going upstairs.  If I can write about all this, I'll be okay.  Writing is only a few doors away from a monk's life of perfect prayer, maybe, sometimes.  It's not too far away from meditation.  You're putting your own thoughts out on paper, which is to have a chance to look them over and say, oh, well, they're just thoughts, mental events, that kind of a thing.

I took mom down for a ride after dinner into the town.  I hear live music, a guitar player singer at Water Street, the little park off First.  Pull over park.  I get mom out and we walk down to the river and around the new Riverfront building, coming along the clean new sidewalk to the bottom end of the venue on the river side.  Mom cannot resist going up to any dog and dog owner she sees.  Oh, what a nice dog.  Asking repetitive questions, getting the sex of the dog wrong, but what can I do.  Mom's talking with a husky puppy of four months, when one of her colleagues comes up and calls mom's name, Claire, how are you, long time...  Later we sit with them when a table opens up, the four of us, Barb and Tanya, mom, me.  I went back to the car to pour us out a little wine in the vessels of water I brought, but mom got angry with me for abandoning her seated on the raised border's slate platform under a bush in this little trip, and she's right.  But to find a place for her to sit, agonizing.  She's complaining about her legs.  But at the table, for a little while, while a large boned and fleshed man sings in a clear voice nice gentle songs for the occasion, and he's very good.  He sings an Amy Winehouse song quite calmly and naturally, "stop makin' a fool outta me..."  The crowd sits attentive, swaying, and passers by put cash bills in his cup.

Tanya takes me aside.  "How are you doing?  Are you okay?  We've been meaning to check in with you..."  They know.  Sharon has kept them up to date, but I'm impressed they get it, as if they understood the personality play here, which does not work out to my benefit.  I'm taken by surprise.  A sympathetic voice here, people who'd like to help out.

I get mom back, feed her some more, as she doesn't remember dinner, but I've kept everything warm on the burner and the curry chicken wings over sliced onion in the black iron pan.  But she has slipped into a verbal mode of some babyish talk self-pity, and this is added on to her sense of my frustrations with her, though she is unable to apologize for anything, but "sorry I can be difficult sometimes...  Obviously you're mad about something I did."

No, mom, I just need some space.  "We all do," she says.  I'm going out, and after finding a chamois shirt for the colder air, out the backdoor I go and across the wet long and around the building to the parking lot and the little old Corolla.  There will be some live music still to be had over at the pub overlooking the marina.  And it turns out to be fun and I run into Mike the guitar player and then later other friendly people guys, musicians, as the night goes on and I sip cider over ice in a plastic cup, standing by myself largely.  

I fear I've done something that makes our team, mom and I, less desirable when we go out, say, to The Press Box.  And my open mic performance having to play, unwittingly, before them out at the vineyard, the whole family, could only add to that, at least in my head.  They know something, can see through my lack of any employment or options, skills they would understand.  Two insane people stuck on their own drifting isle that passes by late in the afternoon or early in the evening.  My sad frustrated face bravely coping, enduring, as she has her glass of wine and I occasionally have a soda water, and sometimes two glasses or even three of Chianti.  

So anyway, the night drags on, more people I have met once or twice come by, random friendliness...  And then I get back in the old Corolla and drive back home slow and careful.

And the next day, I wish I never drank or caroused like the way I do, as a continual evening habit taken into the night with no one special in my life.  

I wonder.  Does the Buddhist need to cut the musician out from himself?  However, David sang Psalms, right?

Some people, females, smarter and kinder and wiser than males, know when to sense their own discomfort with something.  "I'm just not comfortable with this," they'll say.  And every time I hear that, I say, to myself, "Oh."  How could I learn to recognize?  How could I learn to say it, "no, I'm not really comfortable doing this..."  How do you define this sense of comfort and discomfort.  I've always thought, well, you just have to deal with it, but now I see how many times I've lied to myself, to feel better for the moment, while the nagging voice of something somewhere was shying away, wishing to go somewhere else, even if that other alternative place was pretty lonesome.  

The monk, again.  Comfortable with meditations often enough.

So there's mom staring at me should I pass through the hallway from the kitchen, looking at me like a hawk.  I offered her a plan to go out to Canale's the vintage '50s Italian around the corner, my friend Mike playing, but when I call, as much to my relief as anything, they have a party of 25 in the bar, and so the place is sold out, the rain steady through the coming evening.  Mom, do you need to find something to do?

When are we leaving?  (I mentioned we'd go to The Press Box later, quietly, slinking in and out.)

(Ugh.)  Not for a few hours mom.  I'm going to go for a walk and take out the recycling.   You could call someone...

I never know what to do.  I'm walking on eggs when you're around.

Are you kidding me?  I'm the one walking around on eggshells here.   (Fuck it.  It's not worth it.  I've got the tub of dishes done.  I go back to the kitchen, to reflect on why close relatives won't call her directly, if so going through me, which I find tedious.  But I guess I am the cruise director here.)

Comfortable.  I hope there is a fine place in heaven or hell for all the people who aren't comfortable with something that you yourself might regard as a basic duty.

But it's always going to be hard to write unless you set yourself free.  Mr. Lyle Lovett wrote that song, "kiss my ass, I bought a boat, I'm going out to sea," about, as in this case Tonto in relation to Lone Ranger, about getting free from the oppressions that you're own unique being senses clearly enough.  Music does set you free.  I play down in the basement, and after mom's gone off to bed.

Me, I've always been a creep, long as I can remember, or get taken so.  A little too quiet, squirrelly, awkward by comparison to the main branch.  And then you stick me in this miserable situation, throw my life up in the air...  anger.   Friends far away.