You try to live a life working on the meaning of life. You wait on people, fair enough.
But you end up taking care of your old crazy Mary Lincoln volatile mom. Broke. Running out of money to pay for basic things, like rent. And a job after all this?
So you end up soaking the dishes, getting the silverware done that you'd washed yesterday but didn't rinse, just left in the sink the morning after you cooked dinner and served mom and then got so tired you had to disappear, pretending to do homework, reading at least, but doing nothing, so disheartened. And the next day is a big doctor's appointment. But we can't really be getting on the road until just after two, and it's noon now and you've fed mom, so you take her for a little drive into town, a cup of coffee ice cream, a New York Times she won't really read, a look over the lake, the sun is out. Skip the bookstore, to buy a book for kids or to shepherd her around the store, waiting for her, no real time for that, just a grocery store run, quick, and then the wine store, being out of white for her and red for me.
I get her down to the doctor's office, down in Fulton, a nice drive along down the west side of the river reflecting the winter sky, then over the bridge, and not too many hysterics from mom.
We need to up her dosage on whatever we can up, the memenda, and maybe, well, something to mildly tranquilize her. She talks one story to the doctor, and I slip in the truth, my perspective anyway, where I can. I think he gets it. Dr. Ouano.
But goddamn, I'm feeling grim the next day. The hour of yoga anatomy with Ellen Saltonstall was fascinating, about fascia. And in the night, with wine, I think of how all the writers in the world were motivated by this strange enveloping muscle holding organ that goes in bands through all of us. The fascia has moods, is effected by them. Any writer worth his salt knows motion, physical activity, the knowledge of holding a tool, an axe, let us say, or a wine bottle and the opener, the lifting of cases, the motion of running. The writers knew, know, the secret of keeping the fascia happy, and of how bands from the forehead go over the head and down hour back and through your legs, and all the way down to the bottom of your feet. And inactivity is no good for these fibers. Motion is necessary. Kerouac the fullback. Hemingway the hunter.
So I get the tub with hot water and soap, get the batch of the silverware dipped and rinsed, all of it feeling the silverware rack of the dishwashing machine that does not work here, waiting to be replaced, and then I proceed with the rest. Then tossing a few things from the fridge, packing the tall trashcan liner bag full.
Mom slept on the couch again. In her coat. I had to take her out to The Press Box, as a treat she insisted upon, though by that point I had time constraints. Coming up the stairs from the basement she is bent over, head on her hands and forearms. But I let it slip, mom, you need a shower, you haven't taken one in more than two weeks. There's shit on your pants. She denies it. From two weeks ago when you had to poop against the dumpster outside Bame's.
I go up the stairs and look back, to use the upstairs bathroom as she uses the downstairs. She's looking for her cane. She sees me looking at her. You're a fucking creep, she tells me. And I am.
I go back down to sleep more, or just hide. Got a headache. Can't deal. Summon the courage later to face the day and the dishes, and the rest. The bookstore?
I feed her, I get her out for a drive, around 3 in the afternoon, we go get a newspaper and her cup of coffee ice cream, then down for a view of the lake. The old lighthouse reflecting the sun. Quick swing through town, First Street, then to The Big M, quick run, okay, we'll take a quick trip to the book store, but we can't stay long.
I put two chicken breasts in the oven with some quickly cut onions and I make the meeting, Cheryl, for a tutoring session.
But it is no fun to have the time to write, rather a curse. A time of being unable to make any decisions. Of being stuck. The argument when we got home, when I tell her, look, be thankful, I took you out to the bookstore, I told you I had a meeting. Oh, you're so important. You have a penis, I just have a hole...
What?!? (Disgust.). Look, mom. You were a professor, you had meetings too. Anyone still working has meetings to go to.
So I stew around with what to do with mom for the day. I've done the dishes. Let the cat out on a prowl in the back yard before it rains. It's not warm out.
After my meeting, which takes my head away from mom, who's carrying on upstairs, with large long OOOHHHHs and other cries, so that I have my aunt call her just in time, and my tutor asks me, "is your mom okay," as I get completely distracted with the directions I'm supposed to be giving for The Four Essentials, Open, Engage, Align, Expand. I need to work on my language for the poses anyway.
I get through the hour. I don't how dedicated to yoga I can be. I'm making it hard for myself, psyching myself in a lot of ways.
But after we're through dinner, I've had it with mom.
There's no way around it, I need to go to graduate school. Brother calls. Maybe it's too much for her to be driving all that way, then not being in her home with her cat, disorientated as she is. Will the pills, the new dosage, help? Will there be a tranquilizer for her? Take care of her teeth, or get her hearing aids. I tried to press the point about her anxiety, as did her colleagues. The doctor is listening to her, yes, but I get my points in... We went to The Press Box that night...
I'm trying to look past, or around, my misery. I deserve it. What did I do with that nice kid, but become the Prodigal Son, had, been had, by everyone and every thing...
And I'll never have a chance at a girlfriend or any fun or happiness like that ever again, not at my age and state. That's what you get for being a writer... a bum... I get the internet, the web, friends on Facebook far away, in all senses of the term, unreal. Horror. Dark thoughts.
But my job has been good for the fascia, at least. Constant motion.
Other than that, I've never achieved a thing. I"m ashamed of myself. How could anyone else likes me... And I know my situation...
Mom is quiet til mid morning. I sneak a peek in at her, she's reading, okay, cool. I can go work on my yoga practice and my homework. There's the whole decision too about driving her down to DC to see her grandchildren. I could go by my old apartment...
After making soup for her, a nice onion soup color from the onions baked with the chicken breast, I get her to change out of the jeans she's been wearing for three weeks now, telling her I'm doing a colored wash. I'm also working on the Cologuard stool sample process, and of course you don't want to get that wrong. Set up the little tray under the toilet seat, then the white sold plastic bucket with the screw on tight lid, and also a strange Q-tip type thing you swab through the shit you just took, to cover the groves at the end with poop matter. I've been careful to take a probiotic and also some fiber, but the shit doesn't come out as neatly as I'd hoped. Well, anyway... I shave, I take a shower, after sealing the whole thing up.
It's cold, rainy, I head out, taking out the trash, and with my poop box all sealed up under my arm in the cold blustery wintry mix rain. I'm not happy about anything anymore. There is no more happiness. I'm not even confident about doing well in yoga class. To earn the heart affection of a woman, you have to be capable of doing something, like, being a school teacher. Competent at it. A man about it.
No wonder, no girlfriend...
But as soon as I get my laptop out, after coming back, concerned she might be hungry, from my yoga homework--I saw a pretty young woman working the barista job at a little coffee booth in Canal Commons, having forgotten my laptop earlier after dropping off my Cologuard Poop in a Box, just as soon as I sit down to write, after putting a tray of stuffed peppers, gluten-free spaghetti and potato gratin for mom, just as soon as I sit down to write, mom comes down from upstairs, talking to herself, sighing, talking to herself more. Just as sure as the ghost she's been in my life, pouting and sighing, always with the big volatile explosive reaction, all my life, since boyhood, putting on all the lights back on Ernst Road after I came home late from necking with Hilde in high school, on my way to being a local rock star with the Chevy Malibu station wagon with faux wood paneling. Everyone else was drawing away from her, just to spare themselves the craziness, patient as my father truly was, an honorable man, my brother just finding a way out and away and off I go, bye. I wanted my father's life. Not hers. She'll still lampoon anyone for "never doing anything fun." And her defense against that, of course, is ugly. Do you placate her? Or, maybe you just begin to hide, let the cat deal with her. Your father, he didn't know how to have fun...
So speaketh Claire.
Every day is an ordeal here. I hope the dosage change helps. I hope they can come through...
Disgust is my feeling every day. And of course mad at myself for having fallen into this trap.
I wake up foggy, and I have to get mom down to the hospital for a bone density scan. She's out cold up on her bed. I touch her toes, and a twitch, but she's still deep asleep. Finally I wake her, and the first thing she says, she asks me if I've come to try to kill her, Jesus Christ mom. Mom I'm sorry to do this to you, but the next appointment isn't until February. I bring her up a chilled Pepsi. Downstairs, I get her a slice of pizza, eyeing the clock. The appointment is at ten. They ask you get there fifteen minutes early. Okay, we'll just try for our best. Old lady wrangling. On top of Christmas open mess of of all the possibilities of what might be needed ad infinitum. Presents? What kind of presents or price range? Ship, mail, or are we going down there in person, just so other people can see where we are at with mom... But that's eight hours on the road...
But on certain days I become aware of my true horrible college failures, and if I'd put just more effort in and not been such an obstinate contrarian and if one of my professors might have caught it, and asked me what I needed, instead of letting me dangle... Drinking to rid myself of all the bad feelings... as if to put them away, hide from them.
And I need to put out another book, morally, just to show I was wrong, that you shouldn't go drink your way through college or whatever I did, and offer some sort of pained correction over the lessons learned about the illusions I've lived under...
You made a choice, my aunt says, to stay at that bar with all those interesting people, no need to be ashamed of that, you still have a life to live..
But I need to express to someone where I'm at, how I'm struggling. Like a confession. A correction. A rock bottom I've hit, finally unable to hide it from myself or anyone else. But then there's mom on top of me, squeezing me all the time unless I simply escape.
But you'd thought what you wanted, what you'd hoped for, the chance to write, to not have to drag your sorry ass in to the bar to work like a dog until you were completely beat and do it four straight nights, after cruel earlier Tex Mex Restaurant shifts, night, day, night, day. Sunday night, typical of your love hate relationship with the whole thing. The day you wanted to stay home, the sabbath, and in the same the night you hold court.
To have to sit home, or wherever you are, on the roads of life, and have nothing much to do BUT write quickly becomes a nightmare more than an opportunity, a deep look at your ugly old lazy self who, unlike all other adults, hasn't gotten a single thing together. And the boring life you previously wrote about has just gotten, seemingly anyway, even more hollow, devoid of all the normal things of male human life, the job that is a career, having your own family, passing on that most precious thing of all, your genetic codes and the traditions of your parents.
I do have the yoga to lean on. A therapy for all those years not being good to myself, just hanging in there.
A few days have passed since I last wrote. I got the booster, it didn't even hurt, down at the Kinney's drug store near the McDonald's and the Quik Mart gas pumps, the intersection at 104 just this side of the university and the electric plant's huge stacks, and I didn't think much of it and went for a cup of coffee. At night, not enough water either, and rather getting into the wine, just feeling desperate and behind and incapable on my yoga teacher training course. And the next day feeling increasingly achy and tired through the day...
I gutted it out, my heart almost breaking at my lousy job of being a student.
And is spirituality any good for you in this world, or does it just get in the way...
I'm not even Dharma Bums St. Jack of the Dogs in the chapter of Nin's house in Rocky Mount, North Carolina...
And so I try to get distracted, after I've cooked breakfast and gone to the grocery store and kept mom entertained some, then lunch, then dinner, and dishes all the way through, and the constant battle to keep the kitchen organized... I attempt to distract myself so that my mind can work.
Mmmm k. The way mom says okay. She uses a sharp knife to spread the almond butter on saltines. She doesn't want the cat out at night. There are small open bottles of Pepsi by her bed, by her chair, on the counter, on the kitchen table.
She comes down and wants a bite to eat. I give her a pill for her memory and focus. I heard her stirring upstairs, just as I sit down to write. Then she's calling my name in the living room.
Am I your mother?
So I tell her I'll cook a pizza, the frozen cauliflower rice crust kind, with some ham and sliced red onion, but it will take a few minutes, and she's asking me, so, are there any interesting plans for later today? No!
So later after it's cooked, I go up and call her down. I put a slice in the toaster to heat it just a bit, and present it to her, and soon enough she's using scissors to cut it, having failed with the sort of sharp knife. and then she's staring at me as I'm half watching YouTube for a good classic samurai film, then finding Lester Young jamming some bluesy jazz, and she's looking at me, anything new in the world, usually people talk at the table, is that a song, so I raise my voice, yes, Mom, it's Lester Young from 1944, raising my voice and she gets angry at rises from the table. Don't forget to brush your teeth, mom. Don't forget to wipe your ass, she counters. I feel a bit bad, but frustrated enough to just shrug, oh well. Off she goes.
But it's enough to destroy the mood.
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