The height of allergy season.  Chenopod and ragweed.

"What are we going to do today," mom asks.  "It's wicked not to have fun."  She sits in her chair, reading the large print, the story of President Biden's family, the death of his eldest son.  At some point, we should go the town library.  

Okay, so... I've made the tea, from last night, it's chilled, both the green mint tea, and the dandelion tea, and I get some more water going in the kettle, for detox lemon water.  Both of the former might be better when they are hot, but when I'm done with the lemon water task I'll make another pot of Moroccan Mint.  It's not the best I've had, but I got a big bag of it from Amazon, way cheaper, I'm afraid, than from the health food store, but I buy things from them anyway.  Cans of beans, aduki beans, and other things.

It's getting above eighty degrees before noon here, outside.  I left the air conditioning on overnight, set at about 74.  The nice woman from Meals on Wheels will be coming, and when I come out to look for her, mom asks me what I'm looking for.  There is pizza, slices of vegetarian pizza from Canale's Saturday night, in a cardboard box in the fridge, so I can heat one up for her in the toaster oven when she says she's hungry.  

"What's on your agenda today?"  "Can we go out for a ride, somewhere interesting?"

Mom, it's very hot out, and I can't really spend much time outside with the pollen out.  

She has on a Fall red sailor striped pullover, in addition to the same pair of jeans, the same socks, the same Merrill hiking shoes.  I ask her if she'd like to change, after she storms out into the heat in front of the townhouses.  It feels like high school here.  I bring down some lighter options she might wear, tops.

Okay, well, at some point I need to go run some errands, get some keys made, put them in the mail, down to my old DC neighbor Bob, who'll walk over to my old apartment, put my mail together, look for the library books I took out before Covid-19 hit in March 2020.    You can come along with me if you want, mom.

I hate bringing her along.  A block against anything I'm trying to do.  I have to pay extra attention while driving.  She mumbles on.  "I've never seen it so hot here...  What do think of that blue car... I like it.  I can't remember it getting so hot here...  We haven't seen any snow here.  I've never seen snow here..."

I'm sitting down trying to write out a thought or two on a very blank page day.  Nothing.  Not even the faintest glimmer of a true sentence, not even one.

"I'm starving," I hear, as I try to collect my thoughts, which aren't going anywhere at all anyway, sort of quashed down by things here.  In fact I'm quite depressed now, and should be, and reading about Jesus Christ is both good and bad, because you know the good, but then the bad things will inevitably happen to him and you can't forget this, and does His condition apply to all of us, this Son of Man guy.

And the Buddhism stuff, well, that's all well and fine, and I truly believe in the wisdom above anything else I'll ever come across, you know, bite off what you can chew, but...  there's still that gnawing rat in your gut, asking you why don't you have a job, why have you thrown away so much of your youthful potential, such that you know find yourself in this horrible situation, nearing age 60 and forget ever being employable except if you go back to what you were doing before, which is, was, rather physically demanding, and not a lot of money.

Covid-19:  Jesus coming down to Earth and telling the economies of the world, "Lay off on those poor restaurant people, they need a goddamn break.  Plus they have crappy things they need to attend to anyway, as if to put the nail in the coffin."

Well.

The pizza slice, on a small sized sheet of aluminum foil on the little rack, is heating up rapidly in Toast function mode.  And I haven't had all my beverages yet, still stirring the flax seed and the Ashwagandha powder in whichever cup of tea is before me.  With the gluttonous meal of dough and fried things dredged in flour and cooked to acidic perfection such as the windpipe will be sore from its depth charge...

She comes in as I take the slice of hot pizza out of the heat with oven mitts.  She seems moderately happy at the offering.

I sit down with her.  I'll slice some tomato, a bit of red onion, put that with the usual sliced turkey and whatever else I can find, some romaine maybe, fresh mozzarella, but definitely some basil leaves from the new neighbors.  Basil is calming.

The days slide by like this.  Just dealing with her.  Coaxing her.  Getting her in and out, with the right clothes for the weather so she's not too cold or hot or wet, whatever.  

Keys.  I intend to take mom along the lake.  I'll get her in the car.  I take the recycling out.  I take the trash out.  Lemon water, it feels good.  She eyes me from her cat shredded Eames Chair, positioned there on her throne to know all and see all.  The cat is fast asleep on the sofa.  It's a narrow sofa bed, and I've tried sleeping on it over the years, but the springs dig into your back and side.  So it stays, with my clothes from my old apartment draped over it, so I can find clean underwear and socks laid out when I go upstairs to go up for a shower.  He was out at night, as I make sure to let him out at three in the morning, or four, and most nights awake late enough to let him back in when it turns blue out again.  He calls me when he needs, and now he's at least pretending he's asleep.  He's gotten leery of mom and I, apt to start yelling at each other, after she says, "what?" and me having to repeat myself, after repeating myself earlier. 

Both the cat and I like the deep nighttime.  It's dark, hushed, quiet.  The egos have gone away.  The art, whatever small trickle there is of it, can come out.  No need to go out.  

But yes, things happen today as any other day here.  There's the pressure on me, about when we will get on the road for the trip down to Lee, several variables preexisting or branching off from that.   What will the weather on the summer road, the New York State Thruway, a road I love in my heart, and even getting better along the way, and particularly into the beauty of the Berkshires...  But now with worsening dementia, frail, my passenger, highly anxious.  "Slow down, slow down, I can't take it anymore, (sobbing--boo hoo hoo)...  Kill myself." Screaming.  No, that, when it happens will not be fun.

And then add on top of that, the possibility of attending the big funeral.  Will there even be one?

Lots to sort out. 

"What can I do to help," she asks me.  And I can get cruel.  "Mom, what can you do?"  "You bastard."

And then, because it's hot, and I'm rather depressed and unhappy, and because mom says she's bored and doesn't want to stay cooped up all day, "rotting," I go, "well, mom, how about you clean your room?  How about you fold your clothes?  How about you sort your drawers?  How about you pick your books up off the floor and organize them and put them on a shelf..."  

"You bastard..."  she lets her ire build.  Plots what to say.

"I mean, I'm glad you're such a feminist that you feel that you don't have to cook, clean, pick up after yourself, do dishes..."

"Well, I'm just a stupid woman. What would I know.  I don't have a penis between my legs..."  

"Mom, you're a man hater.  That's all.  You use feminism as an excuse..."  Why don't you just admit it.

It doesn't do me any good, but there you go.  I get the dishes rinsed.  I have some more tea.  I'm not going to shower today.  I showered last night to get the pollen off, and that helps.

I cross the hot pavement, muggy air, throw the trash bag into the dumpster.  Start the car, AC on.  I'll relent, smooth things over in her forgetful mind, by taking her for her little ride, down to the little gas station convenience store shop for the newspaper.  I brought the Sunday New York Times along anyway, placing it upon her lap, as I get her into the car, myself settled, a little bottle of water for her, one for me as well.  No reason to go to the grocery store.  There's a haze over the town.  August, summer doldrums.

Then on, after the wine shop, no way in hell am I getting through another day with her without a little self entertainment, particularly when I can't step outside without my immune system being bashed to Raby's Hardware, the big parking lot almost full on a Monday.  They are too busy to make copies of keys in the main building.  They don't have the little traction sticker strips to put on the base of the tub so no one slips and falls.  I looked.  I remember buying them before here, but they don't have any.  I'm beginning to feel the pollen again, the disorientation in my head again, things getting heavier, under water doing anything... I purchase a bag of 10 white N95 respiratory masks.  The cloth one I have doesn't seem to do much good against the ragweed pollen.

My patience is wearing thin again as we go along the lake, and past Rudy's.  I get her home, and she thanks me for the ride.  "What a nice ride," she says.  "Yes, wasn't it," I say.  I bring the wine in, she manages with the newspaper.  We get in, she closes the outer door, and I adjust the air conditioning, to make it just a bit cooler now.  The cat will be wanting to come in soon.

I chop an onion, get out the big mixing bowl, concoct a turkey meatloaf.  Simple.  Protein.  I can reheat potatoes previously baked when I get back.  Might as well put it in the oven.

"I don't know what to do," mom says. "I'm so tired."  Well, go rest a bit.  "I don't know if I'm coming or going..."  Would you like anything?  "Yes," she chuckles.  I get her a small cafeteria juice glass of the white wine.

Mom, I have to go do my errand...  Okay, she says.

I drive up past under the high power lines.  I've not been able to check in on the beaver dam there.  Up and turning onto John Paul II way, then up Lazeraks, and down toward the lake.  I come back, to the side building, out of which they sell the barbecue propane gas grills and rent the moving trucks and the equipment.  I had copies of my keys from my old key chain made here back in December.   I walk in, say hello the guy, tell him what's up.  Might as well get three copies.  I haven't used the keys in so long, I forget, because basically they are same brass key, which one is which.  Is this one with the black electrical tape fully over the end the front door key to the building, or the key to old 304 itself?  In any case where will I end up?  Renting a 14 foot truck, then over the hills of Route 81 through Pennsylvania, no, this does not sound great to me.  There are packing materials, and also ropes, ropes good enough that they look like mountain climbers use the same kind, blue, with orange thread and the like.  They would do.  The ideation is there, not that I would do such a thing, I just picture the thing around my neck sometimes, going through all this shit, nothing to look forward to at the end of it, staring two disasters in the face every day, my mom, my own situation.  I'm in there when my aunt calls.  I was talking to the guy, asking him his impressions about the local Renaissance Festival down in Sterling.  The whole field was full of cars the other day, all the way to the road, Sunday.

Why don't you give Simon a call now.  It's five o'clock, there's no funeral going on now.  I know it's hard when you're shy, but it will be one more thing off your list.  

There's the turkey meatloaf in the oven, but I was wise to give myself some time by setting the oven low, at 300 degrees.  

I haven't been reading many books lately.  That sort of fell off a long time ago, when I got depressed, when my mom wanted to go off on her own and became such a problem, such a feminist, mean, obstreperous to my poor old dad, and yet claiming perfect innocence and victimhood the same time, "help, I need help," she still says, to this day, shouting almost, stamping her feet..  good bye old house on Ernst Road...

I call Simon.  There's no mention of anything in particular.  Lots of bureaucratic things to attend to, death certificates, bank account information.  He has a supportive family and friends.  He has friends visiting now.  I ask him if he'll go up to Maine. Yes, Geoff wants to take me up to Wiscassett...  "Well, they had babies together, a long time ago.  That's quite a bond Joan had with your mother..."  It's an easy call.  He asks me if Claire understands that Joan has passed (or is dead...).   I think she gets it, sometimes.  She's still processing it.  We've been out for long rides.  I take her out to dinner...  At the end of the day, so to speak, we are men, and we let each other go, slowly but surely.  "When we think of Claire, we think of Ted too..."  Thank you, Simon.

I get back, bringing in the key copies, and a little key chain so my buddy Bob back in DC can keep them together.

Maybe I'll be able to get to the Post Office tomorrow.  Even though acting with any rush seems rather pointless.

Looking through Facebook I see a post from The Paris Review, George Plimpton's graceful interview with Kurt Vonnegut.  

And then I sort of get it.  It's the voice.  Read anything in Kurt Vonnegut voice and it becomes clear, the folly, the humanity, the bravery, the daily things you must go through...

What a shit I've been not dressing and acting like Kurt Vonnegut over all these years.  Enough of Jesus and Buddha.  Kurt Vonnegut is what I need.  I should have written him, while he was still alive.

When you're going something, as he, Kurt Vonnegut, went through, I suppose you just take mental notes.  That's the best you can do, when slogging along in this imprisoning world where a man must take up a fixed solid self in a fixed solid role, none of it exactly natural for him to do.  Man is a natural philosopher, pondering the beauty of life of being up on two legs now, erect, able to talk, given the freedom to do so by his very standing, and the evolution of small bones in his windy areas that allow him to turn breath into something like a meaningful song, for better or worse, an expression at least.

None of it will gel.  Years later you come back, if you're lucky, and not so miserable with your own life situation that you haven't forever given up any exercise of reflection, now seen as a useless endeavor when you really need to be doing something real and tangible.  Years later you come back, if you're lucky, or even want to, and just for the sake of something in that biped's constitutional make-up, and you'll put it in some perspective.  

As if to say, I was just a kid then, a jerk, a baby, a high school punk, what did I know...  and here's what I saw, as if to acknowledge how you might have glimpsed yourself finally going through that great mystery of, as they say, growing up.  Yes, growing up.  How grand.  Watching your mother fall apart and take you yourself down with her quite effectively and efficiently, all because of her thing, leaving you with this darling burden because she had to be free, free of your father, free to do what she wanted, being a feminist, not to give feminism a bad wrap, just that I don't feel too pleased these days with her version of it, which I think I have some right to.   

It's as if you had signed up for, at your very birth, the duty of seeing her out, alone, no one else wanting to deal with her.  Well, well.  Such thoughts are said without perspective now.  Later, they will be transformed.  "And so on."

But this is the kind of shits we also are.   We miss giving credit to the potential.  "A bartender who wrote a book, how laughable.  It can't be any good, coming from such a monkey."  Even Hemingway put such a statement, very similarly put, about the memoirs of Jimmy from The Dingo, was it, or some other Generation Perdu barman of Paris in the Twenties.   Hemingway, of all people.   And of course, the stinger, he was probably right.  A barman's brain isn't going to be growing too fast now, doing all the stupid work. 

Jack Kerouac, my father, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., were all born in 1922.  I let them all down.  I didn't realize life was life.  I spent too long in the restaurant business, listening to people's stories, failing rather largely to make my own happen, I mean, anything worth telling.  I hid my candle under a basket.  It's quite true.  A fault of the way my brain works?  I'll never know.

And no one really got my own Giotto genius idea, that I knew by laws of physics and through my own experience being a human being, that it would be quite possible to sit down and write, daily, on a live basis, through just recording the thoughts and visions and experiences randomly traipsing around in the mind and various other areas of mentality, just the normal plain-told stuff, like an Abraham Lincoln leaving little notes about his journeys as a Prairie Lawyer, that it would be quite possible to write a great work of literature, once it were all collected and properly signed off upon.  Better than anything else the poor writer would have written anyway. 

The funny thing of it being, of course, that it was, within a day or a week or a month or so, going on live, like TV.  Brought together by the democratic notion that everyone's, every sentient being's, experience is worth collecting, worth shooting at, worth taking a recorder to.  

All the greats have believed this all along, and set the precedence, and this effort here, is just a continuation of that.  Kundera talking about how Tolstoy does this amazing thing at the end of Anna Karenina, after a rather great and dexterous warm up session, to, as Kundera puts it, drop a microphone down into the depths of Anna's thinking, moment to moment, unscripted, natural, a very close image of how we as human beings think, our thoughts three dimensional now, pulled upon by gravity and light and shadow, fully formed, no longer just flat, no longer just to be interpreted in one way, one way only, for how can a thought be taken so.

Joyce, don't even need to mention, his contribution to the great work, nor Flaubert, nor Proust.  These were all people responding to the form of the novel, a seed that flourished from the Earth and flowered, everywhere.  Cervantes establishing the form.  Contemporary of Shakespeare.  How can any of this be qualified, quantified, labeled...  The form that works, is the form of the atom, ultimately the genie.  

Is physics chemistry, or is chemistry biology?  Was that Goethe who wrote that?  You might as well say that it's little tiny genies, and within them their own little tiny genies, who do the show, who knows who runs it all...

My college thesis, years ago, was a study of how you could:  I took Ernest Hemingway's late three works, Old Man and the Sea, Dangerous Summer, parts of Islands in the Stream, and I should have added A Moveable Feast to all that.  To say:  just write about life.  Write as it happens.  That is fiction enough.  The mind brain thing does it for us anyway, all the time.  The notebook, honest, catching the voice within, is the best, and the truest, it gets.

This is the best and truest novel, or piece of literature, that can happen, even if it's painful to the critic, or the advertising department (not to insult anyone who has a steady and decent job) push for the latest trend, or, as they always do, having someone come looking like James Dean did again.  

The novel will never do that, a true one, anyway.  A true one will be unique, fed by ground water, a trickling daily spring.  See, Hemingway wasn't such a bad guy after all, a poet in his own greater and distinctly male-brained way, communicating through how the making of coffee on Nick's camping trip is coffee according to Hopkins, of Big Two-Hearted River.

(Some are certainly entitled to say that it's not worth it to engage in this kind of a thing.)

That's why I have done this, all of this.  I figured one day it would start to gel, to take a form, even as I was and have been and will be distracted from the cultivation of it.

And it is a truly Quixotic exercise, believe me, I don't even need to say believe me, anymore, for everyone knows, writing is not a lucrative career, it is a sort of monkish dark ages individual quest for science as God and Inspirations and the William Blake in you and me allow.

Focus on the great endless amorphous impenetrable dark matter darkness, stare into that long enough, the imploding bombs of life, stare at that long enough into the deepest depths of blank blackness and you will then begin to see.  That's all.  Life is just life.  It's perfectly aimed and fleshed out, and yet totally random, just like the Kennedy Assassination, I suppose, which always will stick with us, being so real and yet unbelievable, so unimaginable, yet there, after such a life of some perfection, an end, sudden.

The poor author has no one to caress or be caressed by, which is either a problem or it's not, but JFK, he didn't have that problem, his old man was who he was, a role model, for some anyway.

But I thought, all along, in my deeper mind, you could do this.  You could do it for free.   You could provide a humble template for all, that would serve some good and true purpose, out of being in alignment with the deeper realities in the manifested worlds we live in.  You would be doing a great thing, a humble Nobel Peace Literature Prize from another realm, not this one.  Dylan over Vonnegut?

Do the people in publishing get it?  I don't know.  It's not their thing, the great Golden Rectangle of the deeper information an individual human being will go through in the vessel of their brains in a way that reflects all of the nature of reality.

Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins.  The coffee was bitter.  Nick laughed.  It made a good ending to the story.  His mind was starting to work.  He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough.