22 March 2022

 So just start with a new window.  

11 pm.  I wake up after my nap after a miserable contentious and for me depressing dinner or lunch, whatever, at the sports bar.  Basketball on the screens.  Guys in town for the nuclear plant shut down.  A group of 8 of them having sports bar food, wings, nachos, burgers, beers.  

I come downstairs, and there's mom on the couch, still with her shoes on, pants, mumbling softly to herself, and I can't help but stare at her, out of a growing desperation, her birthday in two days.  It starts back at the house as she asks me five times who the card with the little pop up flowers is from, and I've explained it again and again.  Now who sent me this...

So to come down and see her sitting there, picking through her pockets--she's taken out the inner pen ball point cartridge out of the red Parker Jotter pen outer case, and is now complaining that she's looking for the thing she has lost now, probably in one of her pockets, and that in asking her to go upstairs so can have some space is interfering with what she wants to do, and then she gets very angry at me, slamming a packet of photos into The Amazing Journey red binder about to fall apart, and go upstairs.  I live here too, she yells at me.  I had to ask her, mom, what are you doing, as she's picking, pulling folded toilet paper Kleenex tissue out of the pocket of her jeans, and sitting down she can't really do this, and to me she is the picture of ignorance.

I'm feeling dehydrated, my nose is stuffy, she won't relent into calm as I follow her upstairs for her nighttime pill, and then later pick the cat, settled onto the sofa, up to bring him upstairs.  Now, leave, she says.  Or, I'll call the Police.  A familiar refrain.  What are you going to do, hit me?  I come back downstairs, jittery, but mission accomplished, the tv on for her, and soon enough, after soaking the cat dishes and things in hot water in the sink, with the mold ridden air that drifts upstairs from the basement to the wall where I sleep brings me to vomit, thick from the dough of the hamburger and the two glasses of Chianti I had at dinner to get through it.  Up it all comes, mixed together, and drops splash up from the bowl.

And later on now the dinner--I was feeling too tired and low to cook anything, though we're low on money again, always an issue--comes back in its miseries, "'cause you hate me," mom says, "you hate me."  Or, "what are you doing for summer..."  Another bleak and depressing topic, like everything else.  Write a book, she tells me.  Okay.  I wrote one, there's not much reward...  Write one anyway, she says, out of the flickers in her eyes, sometimes duller now.  What are you reading?  She chirps.  Some Kerouac, I offer.  A yoga book.  

Where's your yoga going to take you...   Good question.

I see the clear disaster my life has become.  It's hard not to wish for some Jesus red pain killer when you can no longer take it, the chattering questions, covering the red car in the parking lot.  That's a nice car.  Who's car is it.  Mom, I told you, that's Bonnie's daughter's car.  She lets her have a car?  Mom, she's a nurse.  She needs a car to get to work.  And moments later, back to the same.

Appropriately, perhaps, I'm left all alone to do this.  The ominous paperwork, then the cleaning out.  Where does it start, where will it end, how...

I watch the series The Chosen late at night.  The comfort is in the magical world of Jesus and His time, where women listen to men, have spiritual respect for male insight.  Things are to be gained listening to Jesus.  Candle light.  Life in an old school way, such as we will never be able to find again.

I don't have anything interesting to say.   No good stories.  Another guy, leaving with some college girls I'd chatted with amicably, looked back as they headed away too quickly for my own pace back to the chicks' apartment and referred to me, "is the old guy still following us..."  Ouch.  I brought home a brisket sandwich from the man with the red trailer who serves late night food in the vacant lot next to The Sting.

Mom only shouts at me once over dinner.  I search for something we can chat about, Sharon's sent along a picture of Tania and Barbara, and her son, long civil war beard, who'd shown up as they were all hiking the Rio Grand in New Mexico.  Mom, who are these people...    She says, she doesn't know about the son, he might be a rapist, women have to be careful.  Mom, that's Sharon's son.  Well...

So this is why I take a big nap, just to hide upstairs in my mom's study, full of binders, folders, articles, student's work, I don't even bother to roll out the air mattress.

No wonder I found something familiar, another version of my mom, in that nasty Princess bitch from the Upper West Side.   Just like her.  Volatile, hateful, incapable of anything beyond borderline personality and narcissism, enough of it to make my doubt my very self, my very self, as they used to say.

I don't know what else to say, just what it's actually like here, in this odd situation, the one I've been stuck in since I was a baby.  Yes, mom, you were right to call my dad a failure, sure, I would say, more or less, just to comfort her when were in the old Saab and I was six by Jerry Schilling's gas station, where he'd come out and pump gas and then amicably squeegee the window.  The '66 Blue Volvo station wagon.  

You hate women, mom tells me.  Oh.  I'm a fehmunhist...  Okay, mom.  I'm not stupid.  I'm a woman.  I have a Ph.D.  I wrote a book.  You'll be lucky if I don't cut you off...  We're done.  There's the door.  I don't need you.  I can find a new man anytime I want.

Now you tell me.  So glad you're a Fuh'munist, mom.  

All our lives are useless anyway, viewed one way.  

Kerouac was just real.  He predicted all this, all this pandemic and craziness, and the retreat of the gloomy economic world as it stands like a pimple on nature Earth, self important.  There's a way for us to live ecologically, but we haven't found it, or, we did, and then we lost it.  

How lonely.  

But my mother was great back then.  She knew how to have her own spiritual visions.  She told me once of listening to jazz when driving, and how the jazz become her own thoughts.   She had her spiritual visions too.  And they were good and true.  So I don't mean to put her down all the time, now that she is stricken with the Narcissism of great illness.  Which of course, she must deny, her diagnosis, six years or so ago, the Nurse Practitioner, "Doctor Nicole," who rendered the first, and gave us a prescription finally, as I had wanted to do for a long time.  As our old friend Joan Keochakian had been suggesting over and over.  And maybe she'd be better off in a group setting.

She had a vision at Puffer's Pond, though she don't remember it now, after Ray Tripp had gotten married all of a sudden to Sue, then suggested to her she start dating my father, the best man there will ever be, in my view.  Why would I ever get impatient with him.  It's like God gives you Free Will, and you have a choice to stay with Your Father, but you fuck it up, because there's lots of other shit thrown at you, in some cases, and in particularly, your own mom whom no one else had any slightest desire to deal with, and she was sweeter back then.  A regular human being, with sweetness and bright eyes and a pretty face, independent, yes, that used to help her for much of her life, maybe now too, who knows, though she makes me quite miserable.

And Kerouac had such vision.  His words would go with Jazz, immortally.  A voice as worthy and as strong as JFK's from all that time, early 60s and such.  And Kerouac had coincided, should have been invited to the Inaugural Party, except he wasn't, even though Jackie read On the Road in time.

jazz is for moonlight people, star gazers.  People who can deal with being alone, after they've taken in all the frenetic energy of life in.  People who let cats out at four in the morning, understanding their business, when no one else gets your own, and think you should be dealing with lawyers and tax accountants.  What the fuck difference does it make, as Jack said, life, is unfair, we're all going to die.  

Why do I think of that miserable ugly now twat, with once high cheek bones, now just another shrew who thinks to much of herself, with nothing to say, except if she tries to be nice, claiming to be "empathetic," too bad that won't last more then literally fifteen minutes, but I'm stuck because she's my mom, I sort of thought, in my pornographic magazine kind of fantasy of the woman I might want to spend my life with, as if she'd be worth all the difficulties.  Nope.  That's not how it works.  

Why did I get so obsessed with her...  she was my missing mom, capable of being a mother, but not, no, not at all, turns out.

Thus we are deaf to the things that wait and haunt us, preying on us.