3/27

Sunday, cold, but the sun was out.  I get a decent sadhana in, silent mantra, then my round of Maha Mantra, then yoga outside on the mat, on the walkway, facing the sun.  I try headstand on mat on green grass over damp dark earth, three times, no, then move mat to the sidewalk, and that flat surface works better.  I count.  I count to 120.  I count to 120 again, and then beyond, I'm still counting, but the wind comes up and I've done what I can, and this time I want to focus on the recovery pose accompanying headstand, child's pose, which does its work, real work, relaxing the back of the rib cage and the organs within after the holding in of upward.

I go in and mom comes down, again, and sits on the couch.  I made her a sandwich earlier, very tedious, and she won't take her pills without a big protest, stop bossing me around, so today, after a horrendous dinner after the ride on Cemetery road, across 104, then along the big pond wetland of Rice Creek before it winds its way out the big lake in the distance, before her manipulations on my pity for her, she wants to go out for dinner, oh, wherever you'd like is fine, today I'm just going to leave her alone.  I hear her talking to herself, as she does when she looks in the mirror, and of course her footsteps, but last night she was telling me that she can take care of herself, doesn't need any help, then asking me every five minutes how come I look so miserable, you hate me, you hate me, don't like it?, there's the door.  And the other table, one man with a dark sweatshirt from the local church, St. Paul's Catholic, on the east side, a party of six, are dining, able to ignore us.  She has trouble trying to handle her chicken, lemon and artichoke dinner, whilst I have Fish Italiano, wisely ordered with a side of gluten free penne, tomato sauce to save my palate from boredom, and finally, over entrees, I don't even want it, but I'm trying to be more of a sport as her voice rises at me, and then asks me, again, and then again, and then again, so, what's next for you, where are you going next, I order a class of Chianti, and I don't even want it, but I'm trying.  I too have my doubts about going full Krishna consciousness, even though at this point, it makes indeed perfect sense.  I reach over to take the steak knife that came with her dinner, to cut the chicken breast into pieces she can then take with the fork.

Honor, dishonor, happy things, miserable things, that's all the dualities of life, and you just weather it, it's all the same anyway, while inwardly you vibrate with ever growing consciousness of Krisha.  With his divine help, friendship, and guidance, reading from the proper lineage.  

I reflect back on the highlight of the day, Sunday, cold, but sunny, windy, walking, barefoot, up the hill, the road perfectly smooth, as they spray a salt solution, rather than spreading crystals, or, as the used to, sanding in the winter.  I'd taken mom for her drive, back around through the town, I'll get you a Sunday New York Times at the Big M, and when we get back to Erie Street, mom's aren't we going to go out for lunch, making it clear that she will not like going straight home, and I don't even know what to cook her anyway... Okay, fine.  Continue the birthday celebration, except now, it's no fun, and even worse than the first.  She's looking at me, and I know I'm miserable.  So, my chakras aligned I do my best to address it honestly, the next time, the next round of where are you going next, how's your writing, where are you headed...

Well, Mom, as it becomes clearer to me in my own head, I start.  You and I have different approaches, different ways of thinking about things.  You believe in academic learning, in footnotes and references, and studiousness, and that's great.  But that's not me.  I am comfortable with--I try to find a way to explain it, so I think...  received learning, passed down learning.  And that's spiritual, about belief, and faith, and that's just not your thing, I explain to the creature across from me in the booth.  And I listen to her with another round of contradictory observations.  Oh, they've done a nice job with the place, the architecture, the decorations.  Oh, but they have a ways to go... I look at her.  Mom...  I was in the restaurant business, she says.  

When the waitress, a friendly woman, dark hair, has waited on us many times over the years, comes over, mom says that embarrassing thing, "we're easy."  No, you are not easy.  Later I tell her how I used to immediately distance myself with a bit of despise at the insult.  I'm a professional, I can deal with whatever you throw at me.   It's like the guy who tells you, and women, lawyers, who play ultimate frisbee have told it to me to over the years, along with a lot of other types, "I'm a good tipper."  Yeah, right buddy.  So I waste my breath a bit, how I was really in the restaurant business, not just a kid taking ice cream orders at the Howard Johnson's, as if mom was a real on her feet waitress like her mother was... and how I took a dislike to such people, even if it was a joke, and she's said it many times.  Oh, we're easy, huh huh huh.  The way you express yourself to a server is with eye contact and grace and body language and complete calm acceptance, for the gifts they will bring.  They're professionals, you're paying them.  

So this is going on, and I go through the misery of ordering for her, asking her in a stage voice what kind of dressing would she like, Caesar, or crumbly blue, along with her baked potato, as I sip my soda water, and I say, well, mom, you're just not a faithful person, a church goer, a believer, and she can accept that.  So, mom, if I explain to you what I'm up to, that I live in the present moment, which is all we got, get up, pray every day, do my chanting and my yoga and then write, that's the day right there, isn't it.

Meanwhile in my own mind, horrors face me.  What will I ever do for gainful employment after all this... I'm ruined, just as I always have been, as an adult.  My father's way, as Keats says, education is the process of remembering what you already know, awakened from within.  

Happiness, joy, of the kinds that doesn't come within, I don't have much of that.  On top of the shames of my own choices...  Jesus Christ doesn't really have material happiness and joy, now does he, Holy Week, coming.  I look at her.  I wanted to take her to Joanne the neighbors funeral around the corner at St. Stephen's, but she got terribly antsy, and we ended up, sadly, at Rudy's telling ourselves whatever...  They were bringing the coffin in up the steps out of the black Cadillac hearse when we drove by, and over on the back side passing the large parking lot, we even missed the figure of Sharon going in, who would later tell us how it was beautiful, with singing of Irish songs and Oh Danny Boy.  I'd made the drive the night before even, and gotten us up in time, and then I guess I chickened out, or didn't want to do anything but read how to placate her, causing myself trouble of a deep unhappy guilty kind.

Don't like me, there's the door, she says again.  You hate me.  I can take care of myself.  Yes, mom, think you can take care of everything, figure it all out with any help, and here you are being the greatest burden and drag on me I almost wish, from conventional stand-point that I'd never been born.  Stupid stubborn bitch staring at me and moving her silverware around on the table like she's in control of everything, everything at her mastery and command and her references, and her I'm a woman, or, the other way, I wouldn't know I'm just a stupid woman, or, you have a penis, and on and on.

Finally, as I seek out the tomato sauce's comfort over the gluten free penne, I stare out at the wall behind her four booths away, a tan stucco, been there for every, terra cotta, warmer than a Bistrot's tobacco smoke wall yellower color with a faint nod to Provence's warmth and Garden of Eden vegetation.  What are you look at, she demands of me.  I sit up straight now, from yoga practice.  I am capable of slipping into a meditation light or deeper.

But it feels okay to sort of plant a flag, to figure it out, how I am happy with A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's translation, the Bhagavad Gita As It Is, marvelously clear with Sanskrit and then phonetic Sanskrit with each term broken down and defined, and then the commentary of Purport.  What's going on, who is saying what to whom, who is speaking, what does this name term mean for Krishna, as the name terms slip around a lot, such that without a guide it's very easy to get puzzled, and then baffled.  

I regret the wine as I drink it.  It's not making me anymore jovial in the slightest, plus it represents many a problem and wasted year of my pathetic life of seeking out learning in the less common way for those of us who have tried to deal with academia in tangential ways at least.  

But we've learned, because I asked her, if she'd been working out or running, she says, oh, I'm running, and I get it, but she adds how her eleven year old, they've been going back and forth to the hospitals in Syracuse, and in another trip over to our table she tells us that her daughter woke up paralyzed, but that she is relearning how to walk.  Oh, wow, thank you for letting us know, I try to say, as gently as I can.  Yeah, I'm doing my yoga, I add, as if I have ever had a problem as severe as paralysis, though I have read how serious back nerve issues have been healed through Tantra yoga, not that have ever fully experienced that real lovely thing of a man and woman bringing their chakras together in communing harmony of intercourse.  

I needed a nap when I got in, and, as I'd blocked her from sitting on the couch by the two guitars in their cases, offended she went upstairs with her coat on, and soon as asleep, I hid in the old office on my green camping air mattress, and fell asleep just out of stress.  

Waking again, dryly, fogged a bit, but gathering myself to read from Chapter Two, verse by verse, saying the Sanskrit terms to hear them better, then reading the commentaries, which do add a lot to one's understanding of the Holy Book of Krishna Consciousness.  In the Eames chair, the dishes gathered in the sink.  Illusions have rested upon me, for so many years, distractions, but now it's all clearer.  

But still in despair, even after a good Sadhana day and yoga and the good walk up the hill and back, the water seeming to rise on the sides of the road, as the beavers are up to something, around 4 in the morning I find the cold bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, just for, I don't know, something to give some form of comfort as my life falls totally apart.   By God's will.

And, at 2:26, here she comes, my way, down the stairs and to the kitchen talking to herself with commentary.

And I'm angry.  And as I later regret, when she comes towards me my voice rises in anger, though she doesn't remember telling me any of the things I am now repeating to her.  I said that?

And when I finally apologize and calm down a bit, as goes up the stairs with a packet of peanut butter crackers and an oat bar... she tells me I'll regret this, and I say, yes, I know I will.  But the outburst came, and maybe it had to come, though I am not proud at all, but rather ashamed.  

Maybe it was the moment she caught me in, the latent two beers in my system, the short hours of sleep, the weather, I don't know, she probably won't remember it anyway.

As she goes back upstairs, mom, would you like a sandwich, do you want me to get you a Pepsi, she says, I want you not to shout.  And she is the calmer one.  Great.  Her, you hate me, settles uneasily into the air, and now what do I do.  Go for a walk?

Fortunately the anger in my throat dissipates.  I think of cooking some fried eggs, but as I make mom a turkey, lettuce and guacamole sandwich I realize I'm very hungry, and when I take the plate with it upstairs, cut into fours, she says, I can't eat all that, so...  

A headache comes.  Along with a wave of weariness, and whereas yesterday was a good day, as far as reading, and yoga, and mantras, and the readings of the night before, today the clarity is gone and clouds and drizzle have come.

I make myself a sandwich too, mindful now of how the turkeys suffer, knowing what's going to befall them, so as I finish my plate, I pick up each little shred of turkey breast flesh.  

Jesus was a good sport in all this, maybe that's why he took the wine they gave him, or why he made it himself to keep the people at the wedding gathering at Cana happy, as the Lord loves human happiness.  

But when it leaves you, at 58, now you just feel stupid, anti-social, trapped in worse chemistry than you had before, the old hangover.  And it was even quite clear to me that I didn't want to drink at all, not when I drove the car straight rather than taking the left up Hawley towards the Cedarwood Townhomes.  The depression, the feeling sad about everything that is the after-effect suffering of trying to please yourself individually.  

The neighbor two doors down, not unattractive, utters her first words to me in months, as I go back out the door after getting mom in to retrieve my iPhone, her dog, a black German Shepherd bitch scuttling over to sniff me, "Sorry," she says, and I say, oh, no, I like your dog, but she probably doesn't hear that as she closes the door with the dog back in, and her little boy there in the mix.  I think she thought I was a creep. I cleared her Jeep station wagon SUV off of snow, early in the winter, maybe that was being too friendly.  Or maybe it was because sometimes when I get home, after peering in through the front window to see if mom has taken over the couch in the living room, then if so I traipse along the back of the row of townhomes, coming in the back door.  I always give her space a wide birth, so I don't know.

And today I hear her speaking to a girlfriend who brought her own kids over in her own white Jeep the same, about Mike, and about how it was a pointless conversation...  I would have stayed and liked to hear more but, ah, not my business, though there is some entertainment value in it, I suppose, or to see if I might strut my own plumage, ha ha ha, I don't think so.  I thought we were friends last Fall, and I took the dog for a decent long walk, at least one poop, to the watery area and back...  We were sitting out on our front stoops then, and she offered to bring the dog over to meet mom, and I thought that was nice, and she asked me about yoga at least once, and I told her, yeah, it helps me from going crazy and she understood.

The garbage truck comes around and bangs the dumpster up and over and then back, and I took two boxes out of the cellar this morning, and one large one yesterday from an old printer.  

I take my pills, one Wellbutrin, and the BrainMD capsules and soon start to feel better.

Why has Catholicism retreated in the light of the Bhagavad Gita....

What do I know, I don't know anything.  There's nothing in us, we have to get back in contact with the source.

I go for a walk.  Was it the one glass of wine to deal with mom over dinner at Canale's?  The two beers in the middle of the night?  

The world of alcohol's imaginative un-reality.  Hemingway grandiose destroyed but not defeated kind of stuff.

Later my rain coat damp on the inside and my left toes feeling damp in my hiking boots, I go down to the store.  Grey, still drizzling.  A sea-gull screeches overhead the parking lot shiny and I tighten my belt, go, "oh fuuuck," to myself, it's that kind of a day.  

Inside I do better, have a talk with George the manager guy, who has quit the diner because he has everything including his truck paid off, and got himself a 1985 reissue MG, black, of a 1952, with the fender running board style.  He sold his big Yamaha roadster motorcycle, the arthritis in his hip flaring at every ride.  Just some human interaction is all you need.

And I feel I am not good enough, not pure enough, am headed for such a disaster that reading the Bhagavad Gita won't really help so much.

I leave the market, the parking lot, onto the main road, through the four corner traffic light intersection, the YMCA old armory building and the Dunkin Donuts, the lights along route 48 on the other side of the river as grey dusk falls and night comes, pulling in to the parking lot just past Bame's, to park, shop for wine.

3/28  Two in the morning.

After a fitful nap, trying in half my mind to read mom, if she needs anything, half to leave her alone, and then the other moments just trying to take care of myself, give myself some space.

I am reminded of what Dostoevsky wrote in Notes From the House of the Dead.  How the smartest most highly intelligent men he met were those on the inside, society's deemed criminals, and indeed some of them had done acts horrible enough, but he saw them brightly.  They were on the inside, too smart really for anything else.  Rich not in academic learned knowledge of the kind you sit and study for and then are graded, and then round after round, constantly adjusting, but those who must run forth into learning wherever they can, right in front of them, from life, from the occasional nuggets of wisdom they find in the stream.  People who don't fit in, who gave up on rules and tiresome obedience to the order of artificially constructed modern societies, because they couldn't stand, couldn't tolerate, not longer than a short enough time span to be cast out.  Rejected.  Pushed away, with no option but to do something else, spur of the moment, disagreeable as they are, but in some way realizing that they too must fit in somewhere, and so, as a last option, they find criminality.  

Dmitri Karamazov, who is innocent of the murder of the father, though he is charged and found guilty and sent away, is one of those brave rash men who cannot fit in, burning brightly through their clenched teeth with the fire that God imbued and entrusted them with.   Because society tends to want people to conform, it leaves no room for them, and so they live desperate lives, ones of passion, as passion guides them as much as bright intellect.  

Thus the passion of their patron saint, Jesus Christ, who too is taken as a criminal, outsider to society, even as he is its most central insider, as if at the beating heart of all humanity and all human ventures, such as he sees with the same passion.  There is the miracle of the first, the wedding at Cana, the youngest brother Alyosha experiences at the wake, the body of the Elder Zosima, in dream.  The happy miracles, but there are the sad ones that are true as well.  The rejection, the sadness, the brutality...  The first miracle seems but a candle, even as it might provide some form of safety and support.

Notes from the Dead House brings forth a wide variety, a cross section of a humanity far away in geography, ancestral position, and time, but a range of the same people you might still find in Mother Russia and the greater part of that world, the handsome young pious Chechnian, who takes interest in Gospel readings, all sorts, forgotten to me, but for the vignettes of the imprisoned of the Siberian labor camp of the 1870s or whenever it was.  The Christmas play, put on by the prisoners.  The card games, the unfortunate cycle of the smuggling of vodka and what it does, bit by bit, until the crazy are crazed and then blow like fuses.  

The criminal, waiting to become the holy man, the holy man, waiting to become the criminal...  It is a good thing that God has allowed us to be in touch now with other cultures, that we might find our own, ourselves, in what was foreign, strange, interesting, compelling, and now guiding us.

How strongly I do not even want to touch anything that changes my mind, and yet, just one disastrous evening, unprotected, with no place to put her so that I might get a break and she might have some social pleasure without me and my misery and my fading life juice.  

The grocery store and the buying of supplies, including meats, and then a stop on the way home for that anesthetic, I agree it's not facing the problems of life squarely, but one has to eat, has to rise from the drying out nap and wish to find some energy in order to cook the ground beef, or whatever, of the pan of bacon for mom's sandwich for the next day, just to keep moving, the soothing wine.  It does not work, out of the house.  The imprisoned must feed himself, alone, not ask for help.  

Eating a hamburger, having some wine, in a tumbler, over two large ice cubes for each, topped with soda water, listening to a lecture on Krishna consciousness over the computer, for a moment I can catch my breath.