But the real writing is never going to get done here.  I’m either hungover, franticly worried, or having to deal with mom.

I wake up in a panic with the headless horseman chasing me, every day.  It's like a joke those more organized than I, in life, in everything, are playing on me.  I find a moment's peace, working on my singing at night, after the bar, where my friend Mike, the local energetic guitar player, and his sister, who's flying back to Eastern Oregon tomorrow, after a month's stay, they have an elderly mom too, Irish, tell me I have a beautiful voice.  What?!?  I can't barely carry a tune.  But I played before them, and their mom, and my mom, old Irish songs, and they saw it and heard it.

I'm out for a walk.  I slept in, too hungover to move.  When you go out to the bar where I meet my friends, like Michael, they don't have any wine of note, so I get cider.  But it's big shot in the arm, to hear they liked my singing and that I, most difficult thing of all, have a voice.  So when I get home, I say, well, I have to practice, and the Olympics opened tonight, so...  They did a beautiful version of John Lennon's song.  Imagine, of course.  So, it's not easy, I have to look up the words, but I work on it.  Not much good, but I work at it.

And the next morning, when I wake, around one in the afternoon, when I hear mom calling above, hello, hello, is anybody here, I need help, help... that sort of shit, on and on, I find myself still feeling fairly full of wine in my blood, and I really don't feel like getting up and functioning, I'll tell you.  I was up til what, six in the morning, just out of my rhythms, a long held thing, a steady habit, the cat don't mind it, I find peace away from mom, what's not to like about peace & quiet, even though of course you always pay for it.

But it became such a joke, I finally said, okay, you want me to be a worthless drunk who has to deal with mom, hey, fine, I'll do that, because that is the only way, once you boil it all down.

I'm walking up by the power station, finding the water even higher now.  The beaver have capped off the structure of their dam beautifully and brilliantly, and with their eye (and their own inner level) always working.  There is a cage structure, so first the built up the front side, then they build up the sides, working with the mesh intended to thwart them.  And then, after the last great rain storms, downpours really, they have done something I didn't anticipate.  They put a cap on the whole thing, a roof over the big pipe, to finish.  And the water level, even as I am still intoxicated in my blood, but wanting to be rid of it, even so, just wanting to disappear from the face of the earth, I see the water is higher now than ever.  It's come up to the road.  It's come to the gravel raised bed of the power station...

The phone rings.  Guess who.  Yes, mom, I know where you are, I know where the cat is...  I'm out for a walk, I'll be back soon.  (And to make me even more downhearted and crazy and disgusted and unhappy, as soon as I turn the corner on my stupid slow walk back along with tiger Lillies past their bloom, and pink sweet pea and garlic wild scapes and little chamomile flowers and daises of the field, there she is in her same outfit as yesterday waiting for me on the stoop.  Oh, bother.). 

Tania, a new and great friend, an old friend, a friend from the Universe who has always been there though I just didn't know about it in my limited circumstances stuck with the same old greedy fools, were I to grow impatient, of the late night bar, I've been cut off from all these great spirits of planet Earth.  Anyway, Tania has sent me a message, by text, on your phone, there is a friend of hers singing jazz tonight at Canale's.  I'm walking back, having gotten mom's call, and I get through, I get transferred to the hostess stand, the phone rings again and again, seven eight nine times, okay, they must be busy....  I'm in a fog anyway.  I take a look at mom's main bank account, and there's forty bucks in it, great.  I know her social security check hasn't come in yet, and the other check, $800, hasn't come yet.  But still...

I go back in and try to keep her happy.  I'd like to write.  I'd like to have a moment.  She stares at me, after I get her some bone broth.  She looks at me.  She stares at me.  I look into my phone.  I'm hungry, I'm desperate, the last thing I want to do is go out to dinner, because it costs money.  Mom, I'm going to take a shower, okay.  Just to feel better.   Creepy bitch.  Leave me alone.  That's how I get sometimes. 

I go take a shower.  After, I doddle a bit, in her old office, just trying to find that one true sentence, and I'm almost there, I almost have it, I do have it, but then she's calling Ted Ted Ted hello hello is ANYbody here, is anybody here, her voice rising in panic.   And I can't take it anymore, this funny cruel joke playing on me.

Mom, look.  Could I just have two minutes.  Two minutes is all I want.  Can I have that?  Can I have two minutes.

Everyone here hates me.  I'm no good.  I'm no good.

Oh Jesus..  

So there's no other choice.  Okay mom, I'll take you for a ride.  

I put on a tee shirt.  My aunt has finally called to check in.  She's out celebrating with her dear old friend at The Red Lion, a birthday party, 76th for Yvette.  Every now and then when I get desperate, I text her, please, could you just call mom and talk to her for like two minutes, is that too much to ask...  (Again, craziness and too much wine has gotten to me, the anxious stuff.) 

But then mom turns it psychological again.  Why did I even bother.   "My mother always said, everyone would hate me.  I'm no good.  My sister, she has everything, she's happy.  I'm a failure."

Oh Jesus.

Get the stupid old bitch into the car.  I could take her out to jazz.  But, "it's too hot, it's too cold, the music is too loud, I can't go up those stairs."  I want to keep it simple.

We drive along the lake.  I look at the gas gauge.  Mom isn't quite hungry enough to go to The Press Box.  We drive right by Canale's Restaurant, old, classic, since the 1950s, where the music will be in the courtyard.  I ask her.  I'd prefer to go to The Press Box, she tells me.  Okay.  Easy.  Cheap as you can get.  Shock looking at her bank account.

We get there.  After the drive.  It's busy.  It'd be a nice night to sit outside.  But, the outdoor seating is full, and I'm already feeling guilty enough about not pushing for Canale's and the jazz out in the courtyard.  

No open tables outside, or indoors on a Saturday night in Oswego at 6:15.  I almost shouted at her as we came to the door, mom, in or out, I don't know, okay, we're going in.   Our server friend, manager, lays out our options.  I gather she would have heard me raise my voice in frustration, at mom, "in or out."  So, yeah, the bar's fine, thank you.

We sit at the bar.  And we end up having a decent time at least towards the end when a gentleman joins us.  I'm feeling horrible about missing Tania, the open sky courtyard, her jazz friends, but, here's a man who reads, who travels, who documents covered bridges, down almost all of them in New England, retired special-ed BOCES teacher, a man who knows how to work.   Great conversation.  He's been reading American authors of the 1950s, Henry Miller, Hemingway, he even, I find out later, has a soft spot for Kerouac.

Turns out he likes Confederacy of Dunces, which cuts too close to the bone for me.  He tells mom the story, of how John Kennedy Toole finally sort of gave up, and how his mother tirelessly kept sending the book around.  I've had four glasses at bar over dinner, mom's had two.

By the time we get toward home, Canale's, the musicians are packing up, Tania is gone.  We sit and have a glass of wine, and the hospitality is really there for us.

The husband of the singer comes over, recognizing mom from twenty years ago,   They sat on the environmental committee together.  He's written a book about following the old farm harvests in America. He's heading back to Key West.  Second literary conversation we've had today.

When his wife joins us at the table, I ask her if she sang "Satin Doll."  She's tired, she says, just wants to go home. Hasn't sung out in public for a long time.  "I just sang three sets of jazz standards."  She answers, somewhat curtly, completely understandable.

Writing is a series of poor personal choices done and continued every day.  You didn’t fight for what you wanted.  Guess what; you end up with nothing.  Wake up to the sober truth.

I cower and wait as I hear her stirring, above me.  The sound of the toilet flushing, her heavy hiking sneakers clomping across the bathroom floor above the kitchen here.

I don’t want to go out to any pub today. Some yoga would be nice.

Bah, look at your life, what a bum.  The rebel gets beaten out of you, for sure.

Mom left her role as a calm good mother and wife, abandoned her post when I was 16, and then, of course, I had to follow suit.  I'll show you...

I start the day trying out some yoga.  I've heard her clomping around a bit, but then she didn't come downstairs, so, okay, I'll give it a shot, outdoors, easy.  I do some warm-ups, gentle standing alignment standing up straight, taking breaths, arms up straight, stretching, and then later reaching for a sun salutation.  Stretching out the spine, leaning over, deeper and deeper, releasing tightness holding you in little known inner places, lower back coming out of hip bones, each breath bringing you closer and longer.  

Then mom comes out.  I pick myself up from pigeon pose, and go over to her, what's up mom, how you doing?  "Are we going out to Collocca today?"  She stares up at me.  (A place representing fun to her.  the place we were yesterday.  over there.  where we saw the people and we went with them.  we were there yesterday...)  Mom, that's a long drive, and I don't feel like wine yet.  And if we go out there I'll have some wine.   I don't feel like having any wine now.  "But we don't have to have wine..."  Mom, it's a vineyard.

She sits down, on the neighbor's back steps.  I move away back across the yard, where she's less in my face.  Next up in my sequence is the headstand, and I get set up and up I go.  

And when I come back down and soothe myself into the counter pose tucked in a child pose ball with my face down on the earth.  "Did you hurt your neck," I hear from the distance.  "are you okay?"  I mumble something into the ground.  

Mom, I'm doing my yoga, do you mind...  

You'll do whatever you want to...

Mom, it's good for me.  It helps me.

Inside.  Later, I check in on her.  The pressure has not gone, worse maybe.  She's glowering head down on her Eames Chair, not even reading anything.  Selfish.  Jealous, an encapsulation of all the bad emotions a body can have.

Then it occurs to me, she's confused.  She goes and sulks in her chair.  Not looking up.

Mom, what do you mean by Collocca?  

Garbled answer.  She's not clearly describing anything like a vineyard, using vague term, where we saw the people...

This is when I wonder, in my twisted anxious hungover tired brain, why is I’m not getting more help.

All my life's work, gone to try to take care of my mom, gone to shit.  Gone to complete utter destruction.  And the others simply stayed away.  A choice they made.  I was the stupid one, the fool, seeming to pick up the slack in her life, when we should have pushed her to get a boyfriend to take care of her, rather than me.  And to me it all seemed like my miserable fate from the very beginning.

I barely want to get up from my air mattress anymore.  It's dark in the basement anyway.  Not healthy.

I come up the stairs.  Mom shouts "HELLO?" as I come out of the hallway bathroom.  

"Alright, I quit.  I'll just kill myself..."  her patter from the living room.

To try to punish her or reprimand her just backfires anyway.  It's all I can do not to raise my voice at her.

"Lots of jobs out there," she says, reading from the newspaper.  Four cat dishes already today, a knife with almond butter smear out on the counter.

My career has long been a thing of professional and economic ruin, what's the point of going on now...  I break jumbo eggs carefully over the small teflon pan after the butter melts.  Add water, just a little bit, cover with the stainless pan.

And why is that so...  What depressed me so mightily, the thing I knew I'd be left to deal with.

Double barreled misery.  No job, no real career to speak of...  And then mom.  What am I doing, where am I going, where am I going to end up...  

Today I was able to go the bank, then the grocery store, then the wine shop, and each time the interior of the car heats up.  There’s particulates in the sky, smoke from the great terrible forest fires out west here in late July.

I'll never have a family of my own.  So sad.  How easy it all happened.  The saint fails.  What do I have to look forward to...  I'll never have a girlfriend.  I wish I'd known what I was doing, struggling along, not doing well.  Just by being a drunk, no success at writing, generally being regarded as a creep, well, or if not exactly a creep, just a greatly inadequate male, poor, never having his stuff together, thinking too much importance over art.  All the talent I threw away, after the rejection "at Nazareth."  My great misunderstanding of society thinks about the individual.  The individual does not exist, outside of relationships.  "That's no life." The stone that the builders rejected will always be the first corner stone, but that doesn't do you much good now, does it.

I'm writing shit anyway.

Mom shuffles around.  I can't write.  Second time in the kitchen in five minutes.  Does she know she's driving me crazy?  At least she's using mouthwash now.  

The $9.99 Montepulciano tasted like overripe dirt, a disappointment.  I'll go back to Pinot Noir tonight.

With writing you have to keep chipping away at it.  Every little bit, the attempt to throw out a rope and lash in the thoughts on your mind.

But all of this I write, going through such things here, it’s really about my own fault, my own creeping alcoholism that has gone on so long it has just kept going all these years, with the wine now, with the cheap decisions, the betrayal, the youthful lonesome punk damaging his brain.  That’s whose fault it all is, my own.  And at least I’m granted being allowed to come back here and help my old mom out, to be as gentle as I can as she’s losing it.

The alcohol for me is really about all I gave up, let pass by, as I stated she and aloof and pretending I was wonderfully creative, from within, without teaming up with anyone…

And then it’s shame for me, on me.  People pleasing.  The bullshit of late night wine and poetry… its later-Kerouac emptiness.  The man-child attempt to soothe the anxiety of his childhood.  I suppose this condition is more normal or prevalent than one might think, making me not far away from a regular type troubled guy, but that I wasted a good head start, opportunities few are given.

Mom is either bored or over stimulated.  This makes her harder to deal with.  My getting up late doesn't help, though she is not getting up early these days either.  

I have failed, all my adult life, and failed at this writing thing too.  I now have one last chance to help my mom get through mid stage dementia with some grace, and hopefully I can stay kind to her.  I pray for sleep, and for kindness.

On the other hand, being a good standing familiar shepherd to get people through daily reality, as the Buddha and Jesus do, in an off-handed way (am I using the term right?), with a little wine and comfort, there's something to be said for that too.

I gather it was just the years of panic from her phone calls when I'm at work, about to tend bar, that will throw you off and make you crave the wine at the end of the shift...  On top of other years of her stirring up panic and stress with her Mary Lincoln carrying on, shouting at my father, "you're a failure, you're a failure, you're a failure..."

But you can't bring any of this up with her now, she'll just get angrier, harder to handle, something...

The Irish have a sensitivity to ghosts.  In the broad sense of the term.  The ghost can be the soul, all the actions of a close family member, and that family member, your grandfather, let's say, can pass down his soul pattern, the rut he lived in, haunt you with it, wreck your life just like he did with his own, his soul's effort, poetically, let's say, to share the family burden, "get to work, young man..."  You should have tried to better protect yourself, or run, but it hit you full blast, as it did no one else, so that you now find yourself more and more living out his life, the anger back and forth between himself and my mother, the look for an escape when you have none.  

That's what scares me, the ghosts.  You might think it's bullshit, but I don't.

I've had anxiety and performance anxiety ever since senior year of college.  I gave up musical performance.  And my life contracted, getting smaller and smaller.  

I can perfectly understand this great era of mental health awareness, Prince Harry on Oprah, admitting his drinking to cope with the pain, Naomi Osaka, and now Simone Biles, just today, for whom it would seem to be taken for granted to be able to fly through the air and stick a landing. 

This is why I'm not a great joiner in with things, all the anxiety, and then, if you don't do anything about that, naturally, it will get worse, and you'll withdraw further into your hole.

It's the anxiety that has made me into a singular lone creature, an isolated writer.  

Back in previous life I could cope with it, by welcoming people to the great dinner party at the restaurant.  And even in that, my joining-in-with-people muscles atrophied.  I could have joined in with investment bankers selling 401k plans to poor restaurant people like me.  I could have been part of a team.  

But something spoke up in me, a sort of subtle wish to be welcomed by a Jesus or a Buddha into the circle, the team, the Sangha, the prosperous happy society of morning commutes.  It's not been the healthiest of mental lifes.  I've retreated far too often, rather than going forward.  Take dancing.  I love to dance, and I can do it free style to music played, and I enjoy it, but I have no ability with the close to close dancing out of the movies, the choreographed movements, the steps of a waltz.  That speaks right up my own alley of private fear, feeling bad for not knowing how to salsa, having been too shy for too long, being unable to come up with the admission that I need for someone to teach me.

Because I haven't been good, and bold enough, about making choices, this is where I am now, here, with my old mom, my own future uncertain, foggy, but with tasks at hand.  Shame on the prince, for turning out to be such a bum, almost even a drunkard.  And imagine how I might feel now, here, having blown everything you're supposed to do, not even being a schoolteacher for kids.

And all this is why I've gravitated toward yoga, mediation walks, to find calm within, self-acceptance.

I go do some yoga as the clouds gather into whishy whooshes of the thunderstorm coming in from the northwest off the big lake.  Twenty minutes ago, heat and sunlight come to meet my rising and then bending Sun Salutation, but now a cool has come.  Light droplets touch me as I stand in mountain pose, legs, feet spread apart, then into down dog, still, after years of doing, still figuring out as a way to stretch the spine, primarily, "worry about the feet touching the ground and straight legs later," my friend Betsy the yoga person tells me when I tell her about my weird ankle soreness.  I open some windows back inside, swiping the counter off from crumb and drop of cat food, touching on my Moroccan Mint tea, and soon its time, as the heavy droplets first come to the stoop, time to give mom her daily pills, regimen against dementia.

There's more broken people in the world than not, and some of being brave is being so enough to admit the cracks in you.  Not everyone in the world can have a decent life, not every human soul is not undisturbed by things out of their own control on this earth, with all the things that happen.

As a child I always felt I recognized a basic level even amount of intelligence spread throughout.  There's a smart kid in everyone.  The cat is smart in his cat form, the bird just so, everything knowing what to do, way better, it seems, than us poor noggin' heavy human forms.  And even insects, I see it in them too.  And if I were a teacher, I see the smart creatures in the bad kids, the literary gift to a London Punk MacGowan.  And I also know that many seemingly dumber, more ill at ease in a classroom kind of kids are way way more successful than I am.  They have wife, kids, grown up now, they own houses and have jobs, whereas I seem to get more and more anxious all the time.

Yes, maybe it turns out that Amherst College wasn't so good for me at allowing certain self-confidence to develop.  There were factors, but it always hurts us deeply to get ostracized and misunderstood, at the formative brink of adulthood in particular.  

So I stand with Jesus, and listen to His Sermon on the Mount, about who has a right to be "happy."

She came down again and asked me again if we were going out "Coloooka," rhymes with Bazooka, again with her 1940s gangster Mike Bove, (sounds like Bovie), a business associate of my grandparents in the diner days.  Up there with the way she says, I wrote about this earlier, broth, "buh-rot'th."  Or the way she says, like a child, the word soup, "szoooop (huh), a breath on the end.  Lots of baby talk from her, or childish talk.  But given that, "huh huh huh, you know what my friend Helen Brown said, 'it's wicked not to have fun,'" I endure, sip my tea, present an alternative, you know, the two library books we took out, her's a large print of Joe Biden's treatment of the sad losing of his eldest son, myself, the story of Jesus Christ told in art from the National Gallery, maybe we can go the public library again.  {I thought I wrote this down, but between the edits I'm able to do on my iPhone's access and the laptop's, I get confused sometimes, with my the wifi not always working...}

So between the bands of rain, I get out for a little walk, up to check on the beaver dam construction.  Frogs jump unseen, ploop, into the water.  The beaver have laid fresh green shoots over the top.  The red winged blackbird, who initially instructed out warning calls, is bored as I walk my way back, hidden in the reeds, calling a simple two note, .  A catbird sighs.

Mom is calling.  I don’t know if my meditation walk has succeeded.

I feed her a second meal of the day, again, the sliced turkey, but now with thinly sliced red onion, tomato, fresh mozzarella, along with the Genovese Basil the neighbors sent over to us after I, we, sent them over a bottle of French Pinot Noir, kind enough to let me know that such a wine was right up their alley.  And mom sings how I know so well to make things beautiful and tasteful, I should look into doing it for a living.  Yes, mom, yes.  Sure, yes, that's a good idea.  Yes, I wish I'd gone and tried to be a chef earlier.

(What's haunting me from those early days is the liquor I used to get into.  Shameful.  Drinking alcohol, without blessing it somehow and praying for protection, leads your soul and your energies to be distracted, so that you don't end up doing the work you're supposed to be doing.  It might not be actual spirits waiting at the mouths of bar & grills, to leap on you;  people, believe me, are distracting enough, bent on it, enough Dean Moriarty out there to take you on a hell bent trips with their weird energy, and your own soul is so lost now, given being browbeaten and taken away by everybody else's distracted idea of a good time, that you, tired out anyway, fold and go along with it, as I now have to do here with my own poor old mom.)

We go out to get our errands done.  At the end yes we need copies for the key to the front door. Everyone at the hardware store fits in, has a place to be, a job even.  It hits me when we get back.  I got nothing.  I don't have a job.

By the time I get her through dinner, a turkey meatloaf I left in the oven too long, even at 325 degrees, because of a nap, I'm still so exhausted I rinse the dishes, take her for a ride, then retreat to the basement, sack out, and even as I sleep I feel the body taking care of itself, cleansing it from its pains from all our exertions at the bar, which would be fine if we could actually support them.  At least that's how I feel.  My heart beats funny, as I rest, a sickness, devil coming out of me.

I have never once figured out how to fit in, how to belong, how to have a place, one to put me on any sort of footing.  To work in a restaurant as a front of the house bartender is to simply be a cheater, a go-along.   How could he not be.  

True, maybe you hold a line, of decency and brotherhood...  I don't know...

No wonder Shane MacGowan sings that lovely old song, Lullaby of London.  "May the ghosts that howl 'round the house at night, never keep you from your sleep.  May they all sleep tight down in hell tonight, or wherever they may be."  It's the truth.  Spirits are all about.  And if you don't take charge, and try to command them, they will take their pound of flesh, and everyone is possessed one way or another, except the real monks and so forth.  Don't be distracted.  Don't end up being so mislead, haunted.    That's a bar, isn't it.  Complete distraction, with some pleasure added, feeding your tummy and whatever else, a show your brain can work on, thinking its writing poetry.