So.  I go out after dinner, after cooking the usual chicken breast in the iron pan, spinach, a baked potato, also preparing hot Italian sausage from the Big M with peppers and onions.  I've had problems starting the old Corolla in the cold, even following the protocol, pushing the clutch in all the way, as the mechanic explained to me during the last go round, then the gas pedal.   Pump the gas pedal.  Turn the key, click, nothing happens, what am I doing wrong.  I have to ask mom to get out and come round to the driver's side as I get out for her little touch, and the old buggy fires up.  So I'm facing the devil of the car not wanting to start in the cold, with the simple desire for completing a lonely little mission of going out with the car down to the McDonald's for a double Quarter Pounder Deluxe.  I get in, climbing down into the seat, getting my legs under the steering wheel, okay, relax, pull my cell phone out of my back pocket, wiggle the stick shift to make sure we're in neutral, in with the clutch, foot on the gas pedal, turn the key in the ignition, and nothing happens, but the lights on the dashboard turns on and the gas needle jumps to its proper reading.  Again, and again nothing.  Then, okay, a little heavier on the gas, and as I turn, the clutch pedal, it turns out, has just a little bit further to go in toward the engine, and this does the trick, after one second or so, she fires right up, purring away now, and I can go down to McDonald's, just for some variety.  Around the corner, to Hawley, turning left, then to Erie, west and down along Lazarek's yard of gravel and sand and stone and brown dirt, ready-mix concrete, a series of green elevator chutes like dinosaur's reach, each with conical piles below, old rusty Caterpillar big light green rusted bucket-loader, dump truck yard, low cinderblock garage buildings on either side of the barren curving road.  Massive cement blocks laid along the road, no trespassing.  We saw a fox here in daylight on one of the outer mounds of dirt last summer.  A little bit of a break I'm taking.  A small effort back toward self-confidence and my own choice making.  It's not far, down toward the power plant with its smokestack towers and past the high school playing fields, the brand new football stadium bleachers.  I was going to go through the drive through window, but the lobby is open, so in I go.  A nice greeting at the first register as I study the lit menu board with the computerized display of offerings, so I order my Double Quarter Pounder Deluxe and also, from the Value Menu, how about a triple cheeseburger for three bucks, that ought to do it.  Anything else, no, thanks, I think that's it.  I've left the car running, so I take a look out the picture windows, ahh, everything fine now.

I drive, slowly, back up the hill, back past the mining operation, back to the townhouses.  Mom has gone up to bed and she is still there, so I can open my McDonald's paper bag of burgers for traveling, markers on the roads of life, sitting down at the dining room table there in the kitchen, unwrapping the Quarter Pounder, mowing that down, bite by bite, so good, not bothering to avoid the bun this time around, the sweetness of the dough going well with the rest, mayo lettuce and tomato on top of the original, and I didn't even tell them to hold the cheese, a rare treat.  I guess I don't care tonight if my belly keeps expanding over my pants.  I sip from the glass of Beaujolais I left on the table from before.  I find myself looking at the yellow & blue wrapper of the triple cheeseburger.  I cut it in half.  I'm free from Ophelia's singing, from Lear's blearing, mom's off tune Oh Danny Boy and soft song help, help, and all the self talk.  And with its bun, there's the classical beauty of the diner cheeseburger with a simple splash of ketchup, mustard, two thin slices of pickle, melted yellow beautiful American cheese, just like the quarter pounder but a different experience. I eat the first half of the cheeseburger, but then later I'm back in the kitchen and the rest is going to taste good, the thin roll soaking up a bit of grease.

I recall the Spartan habits of the family, like Pepin, the pleasure in a simple meal with inexpensive cuts and ease, not wanting more than you need.  Living this way, the world closes in on you, a fifty five year old man soon to mark a year older, sitting alone, eating McDonald's burgers on the old family dining room table.  "I'm used to hardship," my grandfather the chef would say, in family legend.  Simple life.  Solitary life after the crowd of the restaurant goes home.  Eating the last hamburger in town.  Putting away the cash drawer.  Once they left it out on the top of the car, this being in the Fifties or so.  But the cash drop box was heavy enough to still be there when they pulled up at home.  

Friday night in these strange days.

Saturday.  I was going to try to go dry tonight, but as dinner came along, again with the baked chicken breasts, and four hours with mom and her outbursts and my grumpiness of her intruding on my solitude, I folded, mom, I'm going down to Five Points, you want to come along?  Sure, she says, agreeably.  Okay.  I turn the stove down slightly, the bone-in chicken breast with onion, hot sausage from Big M with onions, green and red peppers... We've both been wearing those heavy Keen hiking shoes, and maybe their Frankenstein clunkiness is why I don't have a better feel of those careful Japanese Nip Zero, ha ha, pedals, as if I were obstructing myself, and mom is telling me to just be gentle, gentle, from the passenger's seat and just about all of the times I'm driving it's not for a joy ride or a date, but to keep her entertained.  I wince as she talks as I'm trying to listen to the hourly news on the local NPR station on the radio, as the little car tanks along in gear.  Gentle, gentle with the clutch, gentle with my car.  

Earlier today, when I finally had the courage to get up, after watching the news with her last night, then fucking around on Facebook for some milk of human kindness and some post Capitol Building Trump Conspiracy Riot arguments, I got up, fed her, showered and shaved, puked, dressed, sadly gathered myself with fresher clothing, and we go down to the Stewart Shop, mind you the sun is out, still a few cloud bands in the sky, and in to get a New York Times and the Palladian Times local newspaper, excellent, by the way, I ask mom if she wants the usual tuna wedge thing, but she says, how about in ice cream cone.  An ice cream cone?  (It's thirty out.)  Yes.  Okay, sure.  What kind?  Coffee.  Okay.  In and back out, put the newspapers in her little lap, underneath the big purple winter coat with the fur lined hood, and hey, she's happy.   Okay, now, after gassing up the car, leaving the motor running, not wanting to be caught out again, off we go, mom reading the big headline, House Moves to Impeach Trump, which is bringing her back to her old sense of humor and joy.   Off to the old Big M, which is in a building that not too too long ago was a pretty good little train station, as there were lots of goods coming in off the Great Lakes to the port, and then to the freight storage buildings, the mills not far away at all over here at West Second and First Street at Utica Street.  Okay, mom, I'll be quick.  In for supplies.  A guy on a small bike came in with white plastic garbage bags full of empties, plastic bottles, cans, to be redeemed in the machine.  Okay, Saltines, for mom, a quick check of the vegetable aisle, soup du jour from the polite hot counter, grab some precut turkey breast, though the low sodium is better, what else I need, uhh, ear plugs, cat food, oh, back to the vegetables, I need peppers both green and red for the sausage, remember that Mom was slowly reading from Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking book to me yesterday.  Eight-pack of Pepsi.  Vine-ripe tomatoes you might get two slices out of for a sandwich with a good sharp knife.  A quick tongue in cheek chat with the brunette who is the sophomore at college cashier, with whom I talk to about cats and chickens and dogs, because she had some, growing up out in Scriba and she studies Physics over at the college, the SUNY, explaining why I'm spending $3.99 on orange almost industrial rubber earplugs to her, "sure mom, yeah, sure, uh-huh, yup, oh isn't that interesting," (she might was well hear about that from me about these things, now, early in life, me being the benevolent kook wandering professor), and the poor young thing get it with a light polite quiet shy chuckle, as I load my stuff on the belt, ask if her if her cats will go out today, oh probably, and I'm a bit amped up and nervous as I always am, at the last moment remembering to find a vanity light bulb for mom's upstairs bathroom, and then the sort of good looking enough to be on her way to New York City to be Scarlett Johansen's stunt double, when I 'm kidding with her, because I never go older than a few years out of high school, it seems, she says hey to me from two aisles over, how are you, and I go, well, I took a shower today, but how about all that craziness in the news, achh, why am I babbling to the poor girl who's in high school, but she adds her agreement, and offers kindly, "at least the sun's out," and I say yes, yes, and then I pay with the credit card and squirrelly shoot away out through the automatic doors and up the parking lot and there's mom's silver hair head poking up like a Japanese spa snow monkey in the passenger's seat, and I come and put the bag in the backseat, and having forgotten to put back down the emergency brake--cars cost the absent minded a lot of guilt--as I forgot on the two slow drive blocks from 4th to 2nd Street...  trying to read mom, is she going to hassle me about going for lunch, let's go down to the lake, is that okay, mom, sure, I'm always up to go down by the lake.   But I'm getting bored.  I'm nervous again.  We go down to the dock, past Skip's Fish Fry and the Humane Society where we got the kitty-cat last February, kitty corner from the Salvation Army outpost, and mom says, is that a boat out there, well, the old World War Two tugboat is still out there...  we go, then turn around, back home.  The cat is waiting at the back door.

Not long after we go back, dragging the groceries and the newspaper in, mom's piping up with some fancy for excitement and adventure.  What's for dinner? she declares, as if a fanfare would come along hallways and Jacques Pepin and The Galloping Gourmet, (Kerouac watching the latter on TV one afternoon in Florida when the hemorrhage drove him to get up and go vomit his life out in the bathroom, dying in hospital hours later, not much they can do) and I can't even face the usual things in the fridge.  Mom, I'm going for a walk, while it's still light out.  Chinese or Pizza?  I ask, heading out.  Oh, I think Chinese would be fine.  Okay, ma.  And then, walking to the road, scrub Cape Cod like pines are hosting two little red squirrels running about and making a continuous chirping sound of noise, such that I thought they must be birds, but the sound coming from the old industrially disturbed ground here underneath the great overhead power lines.  Mink?  I wondered, having seen some before, but anyway, a magnificent free from stream of consciousness chatter from these little fur people of the wood.  And just coming out of the parking lot, small birds fairly high up were having a decent conversation too, seven of them, peeping, smaller than cowbirds and grackles, but bigger than finches and chickadees, a few wing-beats carrying them forward to the west, toward sunset, then cut the motor, then beat again, streamlined through the air.  As soon as I get back, so, again, "what's for dinner?"  It's barely four in the afternoon.  Too cold to go out walking too long.  Are we going out, or staying in?  I'll cook mom, don't you worry.  

Then Sunday.  The writing helped me find some peace, and I was kind to mom before going to bed Saturday night.

After dinner, a long nap, and then the TV News from CNN, which mom was watching, with the volume up loud, entering my dream almost as I woke up.  There's a special Jake Tapper piece about the fascist putsch event at the Capitol Building incited by Trump of January 6, 2021.   By midnight I've had enough, and don't really feel a need for company, and head downstairs from mom's bedroom for some proverbial solitude, first to do the dishes that came with cooking a chicken stew.  And then Mom comes downstairs.  I'm feeling a bit tweaked.   Filing for the weekly unemployment didn't work as it should.  I'm trying to stay calm, but then down comes mom.  

She fumbles for a saltine and peanut butter.  Mom, there's sliced turkey in the fridge.  She goes to fridge, but can't find it, here mom.  It's one of those ziplock plastic bag with a little sticker over the opening sealing it shut, Big M Turkey, 1/9/21.  She can't get that open, then fumbles for the scissors and opens the little bag, and I bite my tongue.  Okay, at least she figured out how to get a slice of turkey out, eating it straight off the counter top.  Oh, well.

But a writer's ideas have to be found, as if out of the blue, they must be tracked, stalked, caught blindly by surprise.  They must be found whatever, as they are, one never knowing which wild animal of the bush might appear in the night.  And having mom around is not helping me get into that groove.

Later on, after washing the dishes, the clanking of plates and silverware and cups upsetting her, getting her halfway upstairs, desperately in need of my own space, I take out the garbage, and the recycling, having sorted through the leftovers of carry out boxes.  I've got the colored load of laundry going down in the basement.  The pants and two green shirts and the socks and the underwear I've sat in for the last two weeks.  A bit of mom's clothes, the hand towels from the kitchen that mom uses to wipe the cat's feet dry when he comes in cold and wet.

I take the trash bag out, tossing it in the dumpster there in the parking lot, then lifting the lid to the smaller green bins to gently offer to the recycling effort a few wine bottles, clear plastic spinach cartons.  I walk toward the road, straining my ears under a winter watchmen's camp, are those wild dogs off yipping to each other in the distance wood...  Deep night.

I walk through the gap in the apartment townhouses, two floors, plus the basements, peaked roof line, over the frozen ground.  Dirt frozen now where the grass was reseeded after the lumber ties were replaced with finished low cement brick retaining wall.   I'm walking toward the back yard here, flat grooved ground, the ruts of lawn mower tracks or the original plowing and seeding when this farmland was claimed for townhouses.   The cat is out here somewhere, and sure enough he finds me by sight from a good distance, as I come toward him in my winter coats, my cap.  He jogs toward me, happy to find me, trotting up beside me, tail up, coming by my legs as I step into his world.  Sorry you're lonely, cat.  I'm lonely too.

Then suddenly his, the cat's, world opens to me in the wintry dark, where above us there are breaks in the patches of cloud through which the constellations can be seen in part.  I'm also in Ernest Hemingway's world, the beautiful passages of the posthumous writer notebook that he had also been working on, the sketches published posthumously in Islands in the Stream.  A cat father speaking to his favorite cat, Boise, here in Cuba, and Hemingway is talking to, and about, the habits of the cat, who likes to go up into the mango, or is an avocado tree, and chase the fruit bats, but who also enjoys eating the flesh of the avocado.  It's not a passage many speak of in reading through Hemingway, this late generally poorly considered poorly regarded and poorly received rambling novel in sections about his sort of retiring rambling years in the Keys and Bimini, Havana and the Finca Vigia days, going into town to drink in bars to the point of drunkenness, or going down to the harbor to take out the Pilar, Hemingway's Brooklyn Boat Yard boat, his yacht.  Passages on fishing the Gulf Stream, passages on chasing German U-boats.  Passages on Havana bars sharing fresh prawns with the local fisherman and his favorite cat as a kitten.  Hemingway felt strongly that the cats, who were around him constantly, helped him write.

I walk around with Mr. Kitty Cat, Yellow Fellow, Beetlebaum, originally by the name Mitchell, but when I call him I give him any number of names, even I call out, hey, Dumb Ass, or, come home, Stupid Kitty, I'm not so stupid, kidding, and he comes running, loping quickly when I open the back door off the kitchen of this cluttered townhouse apartment.  He wanders and meanders like a fish through my legs as we walk along the weeded edge of small trees and reeds, tail up all the time, and us menfolk needed a break from the house.  There are the two spruce trees, where I see him take shelter when there is light snow on the ground, a little patch of green where he can shelter within striking distance, of the bird feeder and other prey.  It's a joy for me to be on his wavelength all of a sudden, refreshed, here on his ground, with his senses, his sight, a moment of living in the present in the damp dark night.  A rabbit emerges and takes off to a safer distance.  They probably know each other.  Mr. Kitty Cat goes through his paces, going low, ready to creep up low to the ground and strike.  Then he goes for bursts of speed, romping fast as I've ever seen him, here at thirty degrees in the darkness, only a few lit windows in the town house apartments, mom's being the brightest one, everyone else behind drawn blinds and shades.  For a moment, closer to the building, I hear her television.  (Later I'll find a wonderful show about Alastair Cook...  "What a creative man," my mother says, as I go up from my writing post on her Eames Chair, her laptop, when I hear that he was there too in the hallway kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel where Robert Kennedy was shot, something I did not know.  The scene is replied in about the best motion picture footage there exists of the scene, the blood, on RFK's hands, pooling beneath his head, smeared on his cheek and the back of hand as the busboy cradles him.)

Here outside in the night, over frozen ground and grass and dried weeds, rushes, small weed trees like sumacs, three feet tall, or four, without language he shares with me his spots, how he hides here, strikes out of there, can escape this way, the cat.  I walk along the edge of rough grass lawn, toward the place where he usually enters into the weeds, sometimes meeting a friend or enemy with a puffed tail.  He follows me and I follow him in, to the edge of the drop off, near where I tossed the dried Christmas tree, and he sits on a log looking back at me.  I go back to the grass and away from the buildings, walking.  He bolts to the corner of the property, near a deer track.  I follow him and find him sitting upright on a mound, left by the original bulldozing of the clearing of the land, showing me his perch.  It is too far in and too dark to come closer to come.  We stand together for a moment.  We walk back where the deer and the fox go down to the wide ditch of the sunken railroad bed.  He stops to pee here, and I find this friendship just about the most entertaining thing I've ever felt, or felt in a long time.  When cats befriend you, they like to walk with you.  They tell you things, without language.  

In the night, nice and dark, it becomes clearer to me.   Hemingway in Cuba, and before, was on his way to be a desert monk.  Like St. Anthony of Egypt.  He retreated, always, really, to nature.  To close animal friends, to like minded-outdoor men like Gary Cooper, to his childhood in a wild Michigan we'll have a hard time finding.

It's the hardest act to pull off.  The writer artist's necessary call to the solitude where he will use words to analyze himself.  He must stride the world of society and his own private reactions.  As Hemingway did.  Finca Vigia, then driving 15 miles westward into Havana to the bars.  A social life, but balanced throughout his life, the quiet removal from the world.

In the solitary desert.  To rid one's self of anger and hatred, of all the temptations, as Jesus found in the desert.  The transformation of solitude.

"Go and sell what you own.  Give the money to the poor."  St. Anthony hears and follows the command of Jesus.

He retreats from the world, first at the edge of the town of his family, doing physical labors, prayer.  In the desert he meets the enemies of anger and greed.  He withdraws, rather than continue entangled, a victim of society, in order to escape the seductive impulsions of the world, the sinking ship.  Solitude of the desert, the furnace of transformation.  The struggles of the false self-compulsions of the world.  The three temptations Jesus found.

The struggle, the encounter.  We are all driven crazy.  All driven mad.  We cannot leave the world and society.  But we cannot.

Mom talks to herself, sitting in her Eames chair, thumbing through, browsing different books from her piles, book in one hand, picking at her scalp with the other, legs crossed, still wearing her Keens at 10 o'clock at night.  Finally, she quiets down.  "It's such a pleasure to have you here," she says, looking up at me. "Mothers don't last forever."

The desert, this is where the writer is headed.  Bowing out with a final spiritual Brothers Karamazov after a fraught life.

I watch Captain Phillips on Amazon Prime, switching from the last of the Beaujolais to a can of Woodchuck Cider.

The next day, I regret, I lounge in bed, letting the inner wheels tick, not wishing to tangle with the egos cramped up in the house, hearing mom carrying on downstairs.  It's cold, grey out again.  I order Chinese for us.  Dumpling soup, small fried chicken wings with the sauce, dumplings pan fried, and then Kung Bo Chicken.  I'm hungry, bored with what we've been doing for dinner, though the chicken soup I made along with the Hoffman hot dog chili dog supper I put together last night was pretty good.  Together we mow through our courses.  I need to take a nap later on to aid digestion.  Mom's only had one and a half glasses of wine, with food, but she carries on for a whole half an hour, "help, help, will someone please help an old lady...  bastards...  help, help...  where is everybody..."  I continue to hide in quiet prayer coming up through my chakras with Jesus Prayers and Hail Mary and Our Father.  It is like that I like the desert monk fathers am also all alone here, in my little cave, hearing my own inner devils of ego, of fear and anxiety call and call and call.  I'm proud for myself not having any wine.  Her devils are the mother of my own devils.  Finally she quiets down, finding company in her cat, and talking to the CNN News about Trump.  Later, she is at it again, hello, is any body here?  Ted?  Can anyone help me?  I go downstairs, refill my water bottle as she stands near the counter.  So what's up for today, she asks.  Mom, it's midnight.  Time to go to bed.  You're no fun.  I thought we'd have a nice conversation.  Go to bed, Mom.  And later again, I hear her coming up the stairs, hand on the bannister, talking to herself.  The bathroom, then her bedroom, giving an account of taking her socks off.  

When awake, it's either scrolling...  or getting up and writing, done in the quiet.  But you would not blame me for this found time through hiding, turning to the unlikely path of writing, as I have done before when life has stumped me.  You would not blame for the quiet when she sleeps on her bed in front of the television with the lamp on.  I've turned them off before, but, alas...  I seek calm, away from the frights she gives me over the day.

The thoughts of Henri J. M. Nouwen playing in the background on my iPhone on YouTube, coincide at this chapter in life, looking for a bridge.  Yes, I have been a people pleaser, I have given in life to help other people, and at a cost.  I've been a person used, shut off to things and people that might have brought me joy and relationships, a wife, a different path in life, a happier one.  I've let how others look at me become as a large part of my identity.  I have not established my boundaries as I should have.  I've not thought as highly of myself, rather thinking myself inferior.  But that all seems to be a classic pattern.  "Let go off all the self-made props," Nouwen tells us.  "Trust the inner voice."  Stop seeking everyone's opinions and input, which only tangle you up, leaving you dependent on all you've listened to.  And I fit the pattern.  I worked as a bartender for more than twenty five years, alone at the end of a day or night.  You give to your people, and then you eventually discover that they aren't able to provide you the emotional support you might think they could provide.  It's not their fault.  And that realization is a help in going "back to Jesus," the places you feel you need to go to.

And there was always this stuff going on in my mind, this whole time, for instance, the brokenness of the world, of our own selves.  Sometimes Buddha providing me support, stories from the Good Book, or sometimes the story of a poet or a painter, stubborn, hearing their own inner call despite everyone else.

There's a reason Kerouac liked to sleep outside.  He was not a lazy man.  This was the Christian road for him, the way of being a disciple, a comforting proof, and also similar to Hemingway's observations of his cats.  Perhaps in someway abetted by the sugar fuel of the port wine, but then trees run on sap and sugar too.  He knew his family, his mom, his sister, his brother in law, down  in Rocky Mount where he stays during the Dharma Bums tales, couldn't consistently provide, given their resources, the emotion support he might have needed, so, "inwardly (he) turned to God."  "Go thou, go thou, die hence, go roll your bones, go groan, go moan... go moan for man,"  or whatever it is exactly that he beautifully wrote and uttered on Steve Allen, old Jack Kerouac from Lowell, Massachusetts and other places.  Kerouac liked, enjoyed, the monkish simplicity, the setting of boundaries by going off on his own, a habit he had his whole entire professional life.

Henri Nouwen tells you, don't share, when you're in the state of limbo.  It will just make you lonelier, as others don't have the capacity to offer you the emotional support you would need.  

And look where Jesus ended up...

So, is it any wonder... Mom in her state, talking to herself softly, can't really provide me much, except to say, more or less, keep a good attitude, that "if you think it's too late, then it's going to be too late..."  I applaud her encouragement, and I pay for it, cooking, doing the dishes, shelter from her pension paid rent, small intermittent efforts to keep this little place from falling into disaster of piles and piles of this and piles of that.   "I have a Ph.D," she tells me, if some minor criticism should come out of my lips.

Then it turns, after I wake, into a kind of dull night, in that mother is asleep, and I can do the dishes, drink YellowTail Chardonnay on the rocks, sort out the refrigerator, take out the trash, manage the recycling. pay the bills, writing out checks, looking through my own mail, confusing enough, my writer friend Bob sending it along up to me.

Why did I have all these expectation...  People are too screwed.

Hemingway, life in Paris, being a bon vivant, is a Christian life as well, the discipleship of the cafes, the contact with artists of different stripes, the waiters, the other writers, a sense for travel and wide possibilities.

Just to get out of the house as the contentiousness with my old mom rises, after I've taken her with me on my little rounds, newspaper, sandwich overlooking the lake, through the old town, then groceries at the old train station on Utica Street and First, then to get wine, then back to the townhouse, get mom settled, her anger flaring at me as I lug grocery bags in, the wind is up now, she needs to go to the bathroom all a' sudden, I heard her walking behind me clutching her cane, bastards, bastards..  dusk.   I don't feel like it but I go for a walk.  It's just about dark.  I've slept again until 1:30 in the afternoon.   I have dinner to decide on, but even with the wind it's not bad out, 37 degrees out, and though it's just about dark, to move the legs will help the rest of me.  And so I put on a few layers of coats and walk down to the parking lot and out to the street, the road.  

Past the first house, where the dog on the chain barks in a friendly way, then past the older farmhouse with the implements and junky things out front in his yard, a nice guy, with American and Trump flag on his flagpole, bear figurines, stuff sort of for sale, even now, in January, I walk past him and then past the marshy cattail pond where water flows toward the lake even though it's low and even and flat here, the corrugated pipe under the road proofed against beaver, and just then lights coming down the moraine hill toward me and just then an awful loud "whunk."  Sound of hitting the breaks, and the car stops.  I waffle a bit, in the wind.  Is this a sign telling me to get away from the dark road?  I get my courage up and walk, as I've been walking very slowly, toward the scene of the accident.  I don't want to.  I'm not qualified in first aid.  But I walk up, one step at a time.  The hazard lights are on now.

It turns out to be one of those boxy U.S. Postal Jeeps sort of a thing.  I hear a woman's voice.  She doesn't sound too distressed.  She's talking on her phone.  Everyone has a phone now.  I get a little closer.  She would have seen me in the light of the headlights anyway.  Approaching reluctantly.  

Are you okay, I ask.  Hit a deer, she says.  She's looking in the tangled low brush woods at the road's side, shining a flashlight, so I join her with the small light of my iPhone.  Sad disaster of my own life.  Mom weighing me down like a choking anchor.  I don't see any eyes reflecting back, I tell her.  She jumped out into the road, she says.  Yes, it's a dark spot here.  I'm a bit squeamish, I tell her.  Indicating I'm not a hero pretending to save her.  Her supervisor is coming anyway, to check the damage.  A broken headlight, or rather, knocked out of sorts.

I'm sitting her writing this at 6 AM and Queen Lear Ophelia comes down the stairs, goddamn.  I serve her some soup.  She talks to herself.  She sings, I don't know why I love you like I do...  I just do.  Hows the weather, I'll go check, make sure all the animals are in.  She sighs.  I know I'm not doing a good job, they hate me anyway.  Help.  Back to the salt mine.  I'm afraid I have to go back to bed.  I'm going to crawl back to my bed.  Okay, you SOB, she says, finally going up the stairs.

The cat is back in.  Cleaning his flanks on the top of the couch.  

"The inner voice of love:  Work around your abyss.  There is a deep hole in your being. You will never succeed filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible.  You have to work around it, so that gradually the abyss closes. Since the hole is so enormous, and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it.  There are two extremes to avoid, being completely absorbed in your pain,  and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.

"Cling to the promise:  Do not tell everyone your story.  You will only end up feeling more rejected.  People cannot give you what you long for in your heart.  The more you expect from people's response to your experience of abandonment, the more you will feel exposed to ridicule.  You have to close yourself to the outside world, so you can enter your own heart and the heart of God through your pain.  God will send to you the people with whom you can share your anguish, who can lead you closer to the true source of love."  Henri Nouwen, A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom.  1998.  (Found on YouTube.)

The usual mom over dinner.  I was a very fussy eater, my poor mother.  All I would eat was mashed potatoes, with bacon.  My parents were in the restaurant business.  My mom was very intelligent.  Was your mom a good cook?  Yes, mom, you're my mom.

Later on, after I'm goaded to come downstairs after my nap after dinner, Chinese again, not having the energy to cook, hello, is anybody here?  Help.  Bastards.  I hear her opening various doors, calling the cat.  I pour some hot water in the kitchen sink tub with the dishes from last night, a quick scrub and I'll load the dishwasher and put it through, silverware, glasses, plates, cat dishes, tea cups.  I wash the two pans and the pot I used last night.  Mom sighs, huhhhhh.  She burps.  The cat is standing expectantly looking up at the back door out into the yard from the kitchen.  I crack open a can of cider.  I pour her a little wine, always a tentative mistake, the darkness of ego coming out in her further as she sits there at the table.  I let the cat out.  Two minutes later she is upset about it.  He'll never come back.  I shake my head, cradling it for a moment in my hands.

I get the dishwasher full, and just enough liquid soap for the little pockets on the door to lift and close with a satisfying click of a seal.  Later on, she comes and sits down in her chair, I'm on the couch.  Do you mind if a poor old woman joins you...  I'm trying to fill out the weekly DC Network unemployment form on my iPhone.  What's going on with it, I don't know.  She has a thick book in her lap now.  A Companion to Feminist Literature, and mom is talking in her baby voice.  I'll have to come visit so I can read this book, it's awesome.  Mom, you live here, it's your book, you must have bought it yourself.  But it doesn't seem to sink in.  She gives me a dull look, her eyes resting slightly lower in their sockets almost.  Earlier she told me I looked like I wanted to hit someone.  It was a small success back when we were in the kitchen that the cat came back, as there is a light snow falling.  I feed him again, from a previously opened can.  I go back to the kitchen, trying to find the space to tackle the computer issues...

Prayer is not easy.  Lord, I am a bum.  I even failed at being amongst publicans and sinners, let alone being a college professor or a lawyer...

There's a light covering of snow over the tops of the cars out in the parking lot, lit by three street lamps visible out the window.  I make a tuna and white bean salad for the morrow, red onion treated with lemon squeeze, zest, a forgettable dried sprinkle of oregano.

I wish I were dead.  I'm no good.  I'm just a stupid woman.  Wish I were dead.  Do you need any help?  What can I do for you, you never ask for any help.   Well, I'm cooking mom.

Any booze in this house or is it a bunch of teetotalers, my mom from Lynn, Massachusetts says to whomever might listen as I've brought her lap top over to the kitchen table for some peace and journaling as she continues on with her self-talk back in the living room, wish I were dead.  There's an abyss in us, one we realistically cannot fill.  Dr. King was depressed in his later years, with all the factions, sensing his own hounded irrelevance.  A great loneliness I feel, but that is normal, to be expected.  The beef stew has been brought to a boil, the cilantro from the Health Food Store bubbling toward the surface, now to simmer.  I woke up and recited the Jesus Prayer of Orthodox Christianity as my body waited to start the day.  Just at breakfast my aunt calls to wish me well, and I take the call over in the living room.  Mom comes and sits down in her Eames Chair and glowers and glares at me.  She doesn't remember today is my birthday, and though I turn the heat up she doesn't want to give up her spot to take a shower.  I puss the phone over to her, and she is curt with her sister.  Later:  what does she have, radar?  how does she know that you're here, she knows how to find you.  Mom I've been here almost three months...

I pass the night before my birthday proper in some agony.  But I manage to rouse myself, come downstairs and the first thing mom says is, are we going to do anything fun today.  I have in mind taking a shower, and shaving.  I have lived for fifty-six years on this earth, as they say, apparently.  There's even some sunlight coming through the clouds, if not any blue sky to be found.

Got a major headache, I wish I were dead, pipes up mom from the living room over the slow muffle of NPR.  I tried and I failed.  I'm no good, she goes on.

I need to go for a walk, so I do, after having chopped the onions, the carrots, the celery and browned the beef for the stew, brought it to a boil.  It takes ten minutes slow walking up by the power grid transfer station and the small pond and the corrugated pipe system that goes under the abandoned railroad tracks with the honeysuckle type woody weeds coming up, the paved service road slick with ice here and there, to warm enough to think of the phone calls one might make on his birthday.   I call my father's widow, who lives up in Northern Vermont, Newbury, close to the family of her son, Jeff.  She tells me about the town square with the classic town things around the green, the church, the town clerk, the local library, and I bring up the little postcard from Pompei, the House of the Fawn, her note how beautiful it was when she and Dad went on their bus tour, guided by the local art teacher, Citadino.   As I walk back, I keep on going, place a call with my aunt for some good vibes, and she's making a batch of American Chop Suey, with turkey.  I consider walking up to Hawley, then left down toward Erie to pay a visit to the Polish Veterans Virgin Mary shrine, white benches in front of her, white statues of two prayerful women on either side, a fawn, the juniper bushes having been mowed low this summer past, green emerging from them again, but it's cold and I make a lap around the parking lot to wrap up the call with my Aunt and Barry.  We've covered a few bases, touched on the family history in the restaurants, the Covid vaccine, the how's mom doing.

At night as I write, with the television on upstairs, Christine Amanpour, mom being quiet now on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, my birthday of 56 years, a light crystalline lake effect snow falling just like It's a Wonderful Life when George Bailey is suddenly back in the present world, present in time again, back in Bedford Falls, as far as explaining what the snow is like, just as it was a billion tiny perfectly round golf balls an inch thick over the grass the night before, I think of the great void in all of us, the great emptiness at a core.  The great unquenchable thing, the abyss we must work around, by first accepting, and then asking for some kind of change.

Mom comes down the stairs.  I put things aside.  I microwave us a container of Cantonese Wonton Soup, and for a little while things are peaceful again.  We sit at the table, quietly, as the cat prowls.  There are dishes to do, but I'll wait.  She talks about the news interview she just saw, powerful, she says.  We're in a tough time.  We're kind to each other for a little while, before it becomes necessary for a break or earplugs.  I can't do the dishes with her sensitivities to noise, until she goes back to the television, a book in bed.

Egos and agendas are quieter at night.  Muted.  Except for the cat's, who finds me again, after mom goes back upstairs.

I write all this as a journal.  I put it up here so I can find the record of it, as a reference.  I consider it a private effort at finding out basic human truths.

With mom off to bed, finally, again, I let the cat out, as he's been crying at me, yelling to be released.  I do the dishes.  I gather the plastic Pepsi little bottles, into one tall kitchen garbage bag, put my boots on, coat, hat, and walk out into the night to put the bag in the back seat of the car.  Through the powder on top of tiny golf ball snow upon the grass I see our friend's paw prints, and I'm somewhat alarmed to see, so it goes, that they out into the parking lot, along the backs of parked cars.  I follow on, and they lead out into the road, so maybe mom is right about keeping him.  A big blue snow plow truck with its snow blade scraping up sparks on the road comes down the moraine hill in the distance and past me as I stand in front of the first of the two farmhouses, where the cat's foot prints in the snow lead me.   I walk back, put the bag I've carried along into the backseat of the Toyota.   I come back and up to the townhomes and there coming along the back side, to the kitchen door, he's been waiting for me.  I take him in.  As I come in and stamp my boots, there's mom in the kitchen again.  

The smell of woodsmoke from the houses.  Trees bare to their bark, sidewalks along shrubs cleared of leaves, the still cool standing evergreens and the twinkling of lights.  A large owl calling in scrub wilds by the power station, as I turn past the quiet old house with the cats out at night, close now.  Walking back, up Bridge Street, westward, feeling ill, after dropping off the rental car, masked cigarette smoke.  Trying to get away, back to DC.  Unable to.  A cold, vague dry throat and unproductive cough, daily vomiting, from low blood sugar, dehydration, or, an additional worry, is it the effects of years of the drink, along with the stress, congestion in the dry heated winter air of mom's apartment.   An hour walk, now and then a sip the tall can of pale ale from the convenience store in a brown paper bag.   Christmas lights display across the town in front yards and side yards, inflated Santas and snowmen lit from within, holding tied in the breeze, clear lights, colored lights, white lights, blue icicle lights draped along eaves or trees or roofline or window frame or house.  Angels.  Some displays favor certain colored light schemes.  Cold, quiet, walking along, alone, lost.  The snowflake lights hung on the street lamps along by the town hall park and the bridge and all along the whole of the main drag, a town from It's A Wonderful Life cinema, to lift the cheer of the grey lakeside port city, and careful over the river, distant, unreal below, churning and dark reflecting lights and winds and currents toward the end of itself and the big lake just to the north.  Just a few late night bums like me out crossing the bridge, uneasy, tired, pulling our masks and scarves up warily as we pass, friend or foe at this cold hour of the night.  The Stewart Shop and the Byrne Dairy convenience stores having put away their warmed pizza slices and quickie little cheeseburgers, no juicy hot dogs at this hour rolling on the heat protected by the clear incubator cover, the meatballs and the chili dog sauce put away, a cold turkey sub with lettuce tomato and provolone wrapped in clear plastic, tuna wedge sandwich on marble rye, chicken salad on white, chicken caesar tortilla wrap, turkey club wrap with turkey bacon on a tomato wrap with a little packet of mayo there in its little plastic shell.  Up the hill.  Close to mom's Cedarwood Townhouse apartment, reclaimed land from old railroad roundhouse and junctures, freight coming in and out of the lake town with its port, a small naked harbor fitted out like the old forts, French on the west side, American on the east, overrun by the British, then abandoned.   There are some kids sharing a skateboard as I come up Liberty almost to Ellen Street, houses decked with lights, a bit of holiday cheer for the tough times themselves and the winter ahead, every little holiday they celebrate, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter.  I nod with my brown bag can of Goose Island India Pale Ale in the quiet past eleven on a quiet Friday night, and the kids nod back.  Everything is now a hard decision.   Everything a mistake.  A walk on the moon.  Meaningless.  When I go in, through the door, when is she going to start bugging to me for attention, then taking exception with things I say, open little cans of cat food, warm now on the counters she doesn't keep anymore, but complains about like a duchess, used wine glasses, dirty cat food little bowls, "don't fill the water too high, or someone will spill it," and I don't remind her that this was the very argument in the summer that resulted in my ripping off the glass neck of a bottle of red wine, lacerating my finger as she stormed outside and wine's the only thing that will pacify her, shut her up, until then later it gets her angry and argumentative, forgetting how much I've put into her day taking her around, not much, but some, a New York Times, a look at the lake while I hold on to a paper cup of coffee in the car.  30, 40 bucks a day to rent a car?  And her old Toyota Corolla was good enough all along, I just pissed away almost four thousand I don't have, she doesn't have.  Hard to leave her without setting her up, but that too is impossible.

I don't even want to write anymore.  That was where the trouble started.  Talking to myself.  Every now and again, a glimpse of something in the rough draft laid down, true, but obscure, hidden, disjointed, and yet there somehow.  l want to get back to DC, back to my space, my paperwork things, but that seems over now, at least for a while, though all my stuff is there still.  How many days in a row can I leave mom by herself...  There's Mary, the nice lady who comes three times a week, takes mom out to lunch, but that only goes so far.

Ten days till Christmas, and no stimulus check, no federal Covid unemployment relief since August 1.  DC unemployment coming to an end, then to file for extended benefit.   The clock running out.  And the cold winter winds and storm have set in, bunker down.  Mom's back on her medicines steadily, sort of.  But it gets worse.  And the piles of her stuff and our old kid stuff and other stuff, here everywhere, and her feeble mind remembers correctly, that she has moved many times since the old days in our family homes with Dad, up the quiet country road.

Sunday, as it is about to get dark, I take the Corolla down to the Lake Effect Carwash after running errands with mom, keeping her entertained, letting her come in with me as I go into the Raby's Ace Hardware Store down by the five corners and the tower smoke stacks of the electric plant by the university, spare key for the car, a few other items, light bulb, double A batteries.  They let her use the bathroom, in the back, we know where it is already.  Put the quarters in, activate the sprayer, wash, then switch over to the power soaping scrub brush to get the leaf residue off from the trees the car sat under all summer long, then the wax, after another round of quarters clanking down into the machine on the wall, spreading it out with the sprayer again.  I notice a sheet of metal hanging down, its edges having rusted off its rusted moorings, something to get looked at.  Then cooking Sunday dinner.  A half chicken, with onions in the iron pan, along with spinach and potatoes baking in the oven.

I speak with our mechanic down at Torbitt's Service Center, our friend.  No, just bring it down, he says, when I ask him if I should send the picture I took with my cell phone after describing the issue, how's two o'clock, perfect.

I have to decide again whether or not to rent another car again here, to drive back, to get my driver's license and other mail, my SNAP food stamp card, I hope, other bills.  

When we go down, the plate which hangs down has served as the heat guard between the exhaust pipe and the gas tank, and yes, there does seem to be a gas leak, so we need to get some work done.  Oh boy.  How's Friday?  Okay.  The quote is scary.  But what are you going to do.

I get up early and drive the car down, up over the moraine hill and over the railroad tracks north to the mills on the lake, then down along the strip malls and The Price Chopper, the fast food chains, then the box stores, then down into Scriba and it's there on the left on a cold clear morning.  The man is out in his Red Wing boots and blue work pants and service center shirt, helping a large set man reattach the hydraulic snowplow to the front of his high pickup truck.  I stand in the sun by the service centers own large four door high-bed pickup truck and study the mounting of the snow plow on it.  And finally I go in, and he gives me a ride to town and we talk about growing up in the Mohawk Valley.   And later that afternoon I get a call from Mike, "there's a problem with Claire's car... "  Oh boy.  Something is rusted in and we can't get it out, so...  Monday afternoon, hopefully...  I needed rest after my venture walking back along the stone cold snowy sidewalks...

"Hello?" she bleats sometimes, in fright, if I'm in the kitchen making a sound or blowing my nose or using the restroom.  "Silence..." she says, if I don't pick up on what she's saying, like when I'm driving, trying to concentrate on the road and safe driving when you're distracted as I am.  "I'm just a stupid woman."  This sums up much of her attitude.  And why it has fallen to me to extract a spreading cancer of clutter, to find the clean cells of a once living family, old pictures, Amherst, Ernst Road, maybe even out west, Berkeley, before I was born.  Nancy Jaffee.  The Keochakians.  The grandparents and aunt, both out in Beverly, and in Lee.  "I'm just a stupid woman.  What would I know...  No one listens to me.  Who cares..."

"I wasn't put on earth to do dishes or housework," she declares, from the old dining room table here in the kitchen, raising her head, after I explain, well, mom, this is your apartment, and you know, we do what we can to keep it clean...  And keep it clean is about all I can do along with fixing the meals of the day and escorting her around with little rides and she wants to go out to lunch of course, somewhere where they serve wine...  "Well, I've been moved around so much, I don't know where my things are..."  And this is her excuse not to make even the slightest attempt to ponder where her missing iPhone might be, which she must have put in a very special place after all my searching through forensic piles of a previous academic life and existence as a lone scholar, replete with all kinds of paperwork and folders, and 3 ring binders, on and on, to say nothing of miles of books, magazines, saved New York Times pieces and issues...  and all put into a blender, mixed together, a bog she resides in.  And the irony, I've spent half of the summer and now crucial months as winter comes at a crucial time in my own life's serious struggles for my own survival, I'm ripped from my own life and my own efforts to find time to look for work and keep going and do the things that are good for me...  No wonder I end up calling her a "stupid fucking bitch" sometimes, as I really cannot help it, no matter what a nice boy I once might have been with little stuffed animals on my childhood bed.

When it gets worse, when I express my what's the point frustrations with trying to explain a political issue of note, news for the day, or when I say, mom, you already read that headline to me ten times, or she quotes from the same page she's been reading day after day, it will escalate, and she'll end up saying, "You bastard, why are you so cruel, you are the meanest person I've ever met."  And this is how the day starts, and why I hid for as long as I could anyway.

And so, for a little while in the night, I have a chance to sneak back downstairs to the kitchen, first to straighten out the countertops, do some of the dishes, the trash, and then for some time for myself, to think, to write.  Or to watch Moby Dick on Amazon, on my old laptop, until it heats up, the inner fan going on, whirring, and then the dreaded rainbow circle...   And who can blame me, in my utter and general isolation here, if I maintain some form of "keeping in touch" with old friends' doings and humor and bits of the news national and personal and otherwise or a shared cultural remembrance, scrolling absent-mindedly through Facebook, looking for something interesting.  I make my public mistakes, sure, but that's how it goes when your old mom is driving you insane and you sneak not out, not to a bar, but the kitchen downstairs, even drinking cheap chardonnay over the rocks to make it bearable...

Yes, of course.   All my fault that it got this way, and that as the situation so lies, there is no right thing left to do, no good clear choice, at least not quite yet, and even then, then there will be the removal of all this, all mom's books, her furniture, her Eames chair, her cat, her piles of clothes and a basement full of stuff, her loom, the old family tent, all of this has gotten so far so far blown, nowhere now to put anything, and now I don't even have a place of my own to count on, even to hold all my books and paperwork and Buddhas and Jesus and iron pans and Instapot from aunt, teapot from old Georgie, my guitars, my professional clothes and decent clothes and basic utilitarian worker monk clothes....  my Dad's old brown chair, my rocking chair, a mid century Danish dining room set, all the things I managed to salvage from a hasty move in late February, suddenly just along for the ride, stripped from any false pretense of control I might have had.  

There are small victories, now, I suppose.  Repeating from a successful dinner a week ago, I get us a half chicken, bone-in, to roast in the iron pan with onions as a potato bakes deeper in, but once you see something you can't unsee it, as they say, as I pull out the poor headless baked chicken with its wings and legs tucked into a fetal pose, identifiably a beast with the range of humans, I lose an appetite.  If I could only eat bread and pasta without it immediately showing up as fat around my mid section, puffing me up.

Pasta fazool.  Black eyed peas.  Brown rice pasta.  Mirepoix.  Crushed tomato, stock, herbs.

And so... at almost 56 years of age, less than a month short of a fateful birthday--Lincoln was dead shortly after his, so was Hitler, and so was Caesar, and so was Beethoven, and kind of an old life male expectancy sort of thing, from the number crunchers, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., lived longer, (87 and change,) though Kerouac (47 years and 7 months) did not, both born in 1922, as was my father--and her I am, my life run by an 81 year old mom of a certain bearing and attitude, bullying me wherever she can...  No wonder.  Even as we often say, "the duty of another is full of peril."

Let it pass.  You can't think of everything.  

As soon as the rental car has been returned, finally, a bold move, me taking charge, not wanting to hemorrhage cash anymore, already facing $8000 in debt to American Express for all these cars are rented, too timid to take much out of her own accounts, 15% interest, such things as are not taken into account when literature is written, and to keep mom up and running, well, there's still my pad, my apartment to pay for...  what do I do?

All the things that have passed me by, through my own timidity, well, here they all are.  And the wisdom of older girlfriend Karen I could not resist, her prophecy, knowing, "if you do not make choices for yourself, they will be made for you..."  And when I had swallowed that, she looked at me, "I don't want anything to happen to you."  Jesus Christ.  I knew what she meant, and inwardly, I gulped.  

The White Whale.  Ship going up in flames.

The day the stimulus package, the last days of 2020, comes through, around 6 in the afternoon the news comes, I'm fighting off a cold again.  We order Chinese for dinner.  Soup with dumplings, fried chicken wing with orange sauce that mom takes a spoon to after the soup, Hunan Chicken.  After which I am still tired, and I retreat to the couch after putting away the leftovers.  I haven't even had any wine, nothing, and nor has mom from what I can tell.  She's talking to the cat in the kitchen, and then she comes and asks if she can sit in her chair, of course, mom.  I'm looking at some things on my phone.  She starts pecking at me.  "So what's the plan today?  Where are you going next?"  Well, mom, hopefully picking up the car from the mechanics,  Mr. Torbitt's in the afternoon, tomorrow.  I try to make a little conversation, but that too, I get "who are the people with the dog?"  My brother has gotten a new puppy for his family.  "Where are Trish and Barry going next?"  "Well, they aren't going to Florida...  too high a rate..."  "But they like to travel, where are they going? "  Well, they can't go on a cruise, they're not going to Rome or Barcelona...  "Why?"  Because of the pandemic, mom, and it's very dangerous to travel...  "And how's your restaurant doing?  Will you be going back to work tomorrow..."  No, mom.  

And soon enough she is crying, because I'm being so mean to her, and I go upstairs and see that The Sound of Music is on TV, and I go down and tell her, and then I retreat to my air mattress and I hear her boo hoo hoo-ing as she comes up the stairs, then intermittently talking to her cat quite normally, what a good kitty, what a good kitty, then immediately reverting to her soft crying and finally she quiets down.  Sometimes she can forget offenses, soon enough.

Around midnight, after I hear her making noise in an animated voice, and saying, to hell with the bastards, and at one point opening the front door and wishing everyone a happy new year... I go downstairs, and she's telling me about her books again, and the Nantucket theme she's exploring these days, from both her book about the ship The Essex, and also the children's book of old Nantucket with the woodblock pictures by a Japanese artist I'd found while inspecting the furnace area of the basement...  I put on something from Amazon Prime on her laptop and she quiets down and I go into the kitchen to take the leftovers of the half of the poor murdered bone-in chicken to make a soup of, first cutting some celery on the little plastic cutting board, then onions, half of them punky on the outside, ready to sprout, and there also all the clean dishes to take away out of the dishwasher, and all the dishes of the day and early this morning.  

The pot is coming to a low boil rolling away, not too much so the chicken shreds into strings, and I hear her rising from her chair, and then she's in the bathroom leaving the sliding door open, and I try to smile but all I can say is, after she asks me about the cats, there being only one, for the hundredth time, I tell her, as politely as I can in my sorrows, Mom, time to go to bed.  The cat will join you.  "Oh, I thought we'd have a nice conversation, but never mind," she says, kicking the hollow door to the cellar with her Keens hiking shoe that she wears all the time now for support.  Okay mom.  I've got nice soapy water and progress with dishes to cling on to like a life-raft.  And now, not thirty minutes later she comes down stairs, first cooing at the Christmas Tree, this the best Christmas tree ever, and I let quickly get up to let the cat in, but because of what I'm cooking, the chicken and mushroom potato celery onion stew, she tells me, in a better mood now, "what is that you're cooking?  It woke me up."  So I get up from the table and show her, and give her a taste, though I haven't corrected the seasoning and taken out the skin and the poor bones of the poor dead chicken...  "It's delicious," she says, though I find it bland and too potato-ey when I taste it.  But at least I am relieved now as she goes back upstairs, less haunted by childhood memories of her getting a little swaying blurry drunk with Bristol Cream after cooking dinner for the family, her personality changing, growing more entitled until she falls into a nap next to me as we watch the evening television news in the summertime on the couch in the TV room as dad finishes dishes and feeding the wolfhounds and goes to do his work in the brown chair.

Pizza last night, from Cam's, not Dominos, beautiful thin New York thin crust, and just the right slightly greasy cheese, large, half pepperoni and sausage on one side, mushrooms, peppers and onions on the other side, delicious, but in my rest, my right forearm throbs and aches, as if the salt and cholesterol kings were sending me a warning.  One more thing to Google at.

So Mike comes and picks us up in his Torbitt's Service Center pick-up, and he helps mom climb up into the back sort of jump seat in the high cab.  Claire's Toyota has been put back together again, a new gas tank, new heat shield, and so forth, new fuel distributor...  Mike and I talk in the front seat about Chevy and GM and GMC versus Ford pickups.  After all the nice conversations, time to get in and drive off back east up 104 into Oswego again, and of course mom wants to go to lunch and The Press Box.

Our meals arrive, okay....   I'll have a glass of Chianti, but with rocks on the side with a dash of bitters.  And here I am, at mom's saying I look morose still, sorry, that's just the way I am, and with the wine warming up my tongue I try to converse, like about writing or whatever, or the holiday spirit, and start off by telling of how my father would issue an apologia to me about the kinds of things we would talk about, me and him, in rides, or over tables, or getting the newspaper, the things of Dr. Torrey, Alan Watts, Buddha, Christ, the Theosophists, one of the main concepts being that of the "Thou Art That Which Is."  In the process of birth we roll of the great unnameable undefined unconcepted true nature of deep reality, to which, it follows, we return.  And I tell mom, that this is all well and good, no need to apologize for having being passed down a sort of legacy for lack of a better word, in the form of a teaching, but, but there is something Quixotic about such things, in the sense that the great novel Cervantes gave forth begins with a man of a certain age, getting up there, and he's been reading all these books about Chivalry and Knights and Great Noble Quests and El Cid and all that sort of Arthurian stuff, and guess what, it goes, finally, then immediately, then irrevocably into, or to, his old soft head.  And from thence forth the poor guy becomes, in his mind, which is all that matters, a great knight, Don Quixote.  A concept Jacques Brel liked enough to sing about, whether or not he took from the musical and made it French, yes, I think so.

The bowl of chili is hot, with melted cheddar atop, good heat to it, and I take some sour cream from mom's chicken fajita to cut it a bit, and enjoy the little pieces of onion and celery slowly cooked.  Feeding mom is both easy and not easy.  When she is finally ready to order, after looking at the paper menu over and over, and getting mad at me at one point, our friend, Allison, takes our order, as I say, "the Ouija Board has spoken..."  The chili has kidney beans in it, and they might not sit so perfectly well later, but there is the car to digest and be happy about, lest no other problems soon arise, and that's our main accomplishment of the Christmas Season, it seems, and there might be a break, we hope, in the clouds so we can see the Bethlehem Star conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, if we are very lucky, though being on the Great Lake one has to be realistic.

I look at her, she looks at me.  I ask her about the little rosary I found, red plastic beads, and she tells me, Oh, it's a kid's rosary, and she shows me by trying to slip it on over her head.  In the night last night I was watching Parkland, about the hospital, the Last Rites for President Kennedy, a nurse finding a Crucifix in her locker, resting it on the remains of JFK as he is wrapped in a sheet for the coffin.

The Cross, emblem of the nature of suffering, the higher four dimensional world symbolized in the world of three dimensions.  The death of JFK makes perfect sense, somehow.  Things you cannot escape from, that sometimes stare you in the face in their own subtle way...  And in this life in a way it's not victories we chalk up, but, more properly failures, as failure has meaning and import, enough, such as to wake us all up, at least for a time, pulling us away from our own lives for a few days or so, before we are commanded back to them.  I cannot help that I am here, away from my cluttered apartment, up here in Oswego, tending to mom, as if trying to bring in a very very slowly sinking ship into safer waters.

Failures and defeat lend to us a dignity one can have no other way, such as one learns, knows, that he too is one his way along the way.  A source of quiet stoic pride, such as the kind that one not need sing about aloud, "look what I did, me me me," but showing the cracks and the crumbling, which themselves reveal the inner light we all have.  Thus is it often such a terrible event, opening up in all its own dreaded ramifications...  And writers are quick to pick up on all this, whether or not they too are being pompous and overblown, Hemingway riffing on Cervantes with his old fisherman with his old tattered sail and shirt, "flag of constant defeat."

A few days ago it was Moby Dick on Amazon Prime, a newer version than the John Huston and Gregory Peck on.  How you tell the story, a matter of angle, perspective.  Rothko...  Twentieth Century Art, getting a little more serious, having suffered through world war and economic collapse, etc., etc.  Dresden, Hiroshima, D-Day, assassinations, all such things that never really started, nor ended, but deliver to us polite reminders, throughout, little introductions, of how bad things can go wrong, Gettysburg, Ford's Theater, the Blitz.

And the truth of all this can only come out in shards and jumbles to our little primate minds, as no one newspaper can ever report on all that much better than our own fragmented view, our general gut sense, things we only can see because we have experienced a little of this and a little bit of that.   Enough, and so vast the condition that we instinctively trust those who are able, as Shakespeare was, to put it all back together in their own forms and clever well aimed utterances.  Clown, idiot, fool as capable as the next one of observing such things.

The cat yowls at me with some vigor, and mom is still upstairs, I let the cat out into the damp overcast solstice night, and off he treads on the grass field rectangle behind the townhouse row, an inch of damp snow covering the flat ground and off he goes toward the weedy boundary and beyond.  When things go wrong, then you see they have been going wrong for a long time, as long as you can remember, and that's how it goes as things go wrong, or very wrong.

The cat has his temporary peace, as Hemingway might have said.  Who knows what goes through his little noggin as he seeks whatever he asked of me to allow him to seek.  Out in the dried ragweed boundary, under the two spruce trees, before the deep wide ditch that must have served as a railroad bed.  Nothing ends well, Hemingway wrote, in one of his Hemingway sentences. Truth.

But this is just simply how things are.  Things will go wrong.  I guess the Buddhists, having followed the wisdom delivered by the Awakened One, are the ones who tell us how it is such, who get it.  They go about it one way.  For the Christian follower's sensibility, there is the combined atomic knowledge, that when things go wrong, they go very wrong, and then worse, and then even worse than that, worse as you could possibly imagine.  How would you like it if your teacher, your man, your guide, your family  member got stuck with such a fate...  And yet, it's going to happen one day, as stands to reason, so we are told, so we have observed from places safe enough for us to see such things earlier in our time, protected appropriately at just the right level and temperature, clueless as we are, to go through such things.

"We were kids, just a bunch of jerk high school students," Vonnegut would later observe about his own heroic war effort of the Battle of the Bulge and all that.

Human beings, we bumble things.  We fight with each other.  Woe unto the world because of offences.

Light is light.  It casts its thing around nearby so that we can see, see better, see reality, little harnessed metaphor and piece of electrified tamed light.  The only way we have of going forward is to really suffer, suffer the gloom and the stun that comes with all the negative, the decay, the things that are the opposite physics and math and poetry of our childhood learning era, our early discoveries we do ourselves, walking in streams, speaking up in class, delivering our first speeches to an audience, our first art, such perfect moments, such as when I played the string bass on the back left corner of the stage as we, the little children's orchestra played Debussy's Pavane.  Thump, thump.  Our first encounters with girls, the physical woosh that goes to the head with each new discovery, blood glowing its flowing.

God, I'm worn out by the time we get back, contending with mom, us having a second round to attempt a feigning of joviality that soon wears off, and as I go up to hide and maybe nap, I hear mom's voice drifting up from downstairs, help, HELP...  and by the time it's loud enough to wake the devils settling down for a cold night in yonder woods, I come down the stairs, what's the problem, and Mom calls me a bastard, how could I be so cruel to leave the cat here without another cat to live with.  Mom, he has F.I.V., and they said at the Humane Society that because of the potential for contagion, Mitchell, Yellow Fellow, Orange Tabby with decent fangs on him and a general good attitude and friendliness, he's a good candidate for being the lone cat of the household.  But she is angry already at such injustice and their neighboring injustices, which I obviously have something to do with in my own lonesome little world, and I am lucky to convince her to come upstairs and watch some television on her bed, so she can take her shoes off and relax.  Note to self, no second glass of wine for mom at lunch, even if it's Christmastime, unless you want the scene, but isn't every night a scene.

What a spot to be in.  

If one is a real writer, it is hard to sustain the look at That Which Is.  No one can write so long about it.  It's near to painting a painting.  The painting acknowledges that one is looking at something.

Start with the brushstrokes, not even knowing what you're doing, nor what it's about.  That will allow, having gotten the picture up, the better formation of an understanding of a broader "story."

The cat comes back in, after a bit.  I hear him groom himself, on the top of the back rest of the couch.  

Eventually, the wrong decision will be made, will come.

The situation is sticky here.  The psychologist's Freudian spider's web.  The more I fight the more stuck I get, it seems.  She turns things around on me.  I show her pictures of the few girlfriends I've had in the last ten years or so, in Irish terms of the physicality side of human nature, such as that come to me with the wine with the pizza from Cam's and my frustrations with repeating and re-explaining the political situation, and she tells me I should learn from women, not use them as objects, and that I treat her miserably and have tossed away all she has given me--indeed I feel that way often enough when I look back at life in the past and my own sins--so again I go off to bed after we've sat round the Christmas tree, unable to control her, to get her to behave, to go off to bed herself, a defensive manuever.  

People as myself, white men in their fifties who sought not at all to discriminate or override or put down any neighbors, nor to be judgmental, can find themselves now, in the area of diversity and woke-ness pulled or pushed in different ways and to sides and directions.  For me, it's a realization that I have become like the old bluesmen, who got good simply by listening to the life around them, who got good by being themselves, their own howling voices, put it over a few chords, get discovered finally by some sort of outlier or alien, curious intelligent young men from Britain on their own paths of musical discovery, intrigued with their old bluesman sounds and their truth, or a Lomax or a Seeger, from their own country, found by ethnographers as a native art form.  Recording their sound in the rawness of originality and origin.  

I grew up in privilege.  For reasons unknown seem to have pissed it away to follow what my foolish youthful exuberance took to be original music, culture, just as food and drink.  Lincoln's letters.  Kerouac's.  Hank Williams, Lyle Lovett, Marty Robbins, Bob Dylan, the Kingston Trio, Elvis, going back toward the roots after having dabbled in the British fruits of the bluesman's labors and truths.  Not high culture, perhaps, but, culture none the same, as Twain is part of that democratic fabric of our nation, the contributions of normal men with a slight musical gift, along with a larger natural desire to play to communicate what it was themselves that they saw.   And this was what Kerouac played to a tee, the jazz rhythm, the real language and behavior of the street, raw as it was, learning to adjust his prose from the hyperactive master of storytelling, Neal Cassady, himself, and always, mind you, haunted by a sense of shame, Catholic guilt, such that Kerouac's stories always straddle two worlds, the one of the gritty true stories, the other of the good responsible school boy always trying to learn what life was trying to teach him, to make better of himself, to do his homework and to work away like a craftsman.

But yeah, it sucks to be broke, even if you got broke through some sort of true spiritual lessons, and being broke doesn't make one feel very attractive to people, other people, whoever one might imagine them to be.

The next week, on a Sunday, I take mom in the car, loading her up, cane and all, Covid mask, cloves, coat, a Pepsi, down for a New York Times.  Down Fifth Street past the hospital and the parking lot, across Bridge Street, past the huge brick mansions, Italianate, the large green grass park, on this slope above the town, to the promontory bluff overlooking the vast lake, where we share our halves of Stewart Shoppe tuna salad on marble rye.  Then, down along the lake, lower ground along the edge of the SUNY, past the fish fry and the ice cream stand and the small cottage park, then curving along.  But the car is making noise in the cold air.   Vapors of exhaust coming from the front of the car, and then, turning onto another road in this ride to placate mom's attention span, boom, sudden loudness.   Mom cringes, grabbing her head, what have you done to my car, it's all I have...

So, dreading the call, and the forewarning of Mike, the catalytic converter, could make things too expensive, given what the car is worth, such as it is, I call, as early as I can on a cold depressed Monday, calling on my iPhone from my air mattress, bundled up, avoiding mom.  It's another guy, and he makes sense too, when I ask how expensive an endeavor this might be, replacing this pipe that has failed at the flange, connecting to the exhaust pipe underneath the front seats of the car.  Bring it in tomorrow, as early as you can, so we can order the parts we need to.

Okay, it's a very cold day.  Coldest we've had yet.  Could be worse.  I manage to start the car, after organizing, bringing a courier bag, a bottle of water.  Layers.  Who knows.  I come over the hill, past the Walmart and the Lowe's, beyond the Price Chopper and the J.C. Penny's, the McDonald's golden arches, the KFC, the Tractor Supply and the shop for tools, auto body, pet supply, the car dropping down the hill into the old strange farmland of Scriba, the first houses of some prosperous form and shape and size, then flat fields, and here's the Torbitt's Service Center, which has old bones to it, and a good area of yard in front of it, the shop set off the road.  Mike doesn't really seem to be offering me a ride, so, I go hoof it.   Out onto the blue snow and the highway 104, back westward toward the town, maybe I'll catch a blue and white Centro bus, such as I discovered yesterday, doing a grocery run from near Mom's apartment, in case a lake effect blizzard comes.  Which worked out.  I pull out the bus schedule, here at 8:20 in the morning, and there seems to be a stop at the Walmart...  But the timing doesn't work out.  I'd rather walk for twenty minutes for exercise, even if I could use warming up in a lobby, and the paper flyer of the bus schedule is torn at by a devil wind.  I keep walking.  North side of the street.

I explore another side of the street, as maybe, like climbing the Eiger, there's a more direct route, headed to the southernmost bridge over the river, which would take me out by the friendly Big M little supermarket.  But in doing so, even as I'm walking back to 104 right where the Enterprise car rental shop is, I see the bus go by, and if the light had turned red, I could have caught it, gotten into town, warmed up somewhere, then figured out the next leg.  But alas.  I'm walking.  Slipping now and again.

At last I cross the river, over the railroad bridge pedestrian path and the wind is coming strong from the south, and gulls are hanging at my head, seeking fish down in the river twenty yard below.  Finally, shelter in the Big M.  I shop.  For what, I dunno.  But, I find a few things.  When I'm done, I'll have to wait for a good 25 minutes, for, as the bus schedule says, the final leg, and finally I'm out on First Street waiting and here at last comes the bus, and when it drops me off, it won't be too far.

So I'm the cook here, and the dishwasher, and the paperwork and the cleaner.  The laundry.  The cat.  Mom, it seems, can't always hear him when he cries, big long wide and orange, to go out for his morning jaunt, or his feeding.  She sits oblivious, on her chair, taking a nap, staring at the first page of a book, like she repeats headlines when she looks down at the newspaper, a passenger now in her old car.  In and out, waking from a dream with a low shout.  Dozing again.  Thank god for the cat, for a little focus on our day together.  For mom, it's always a point for an argument.  It's too cold.  He'll catch pneumonia.  I have to dry him off.  Don't let him out!   Mom, he's a cat!  He knows what's good for him.  One day he comes in with a bloody ear lobe...  I find him out front, chewing on a patch of grass, and I see the blood.  It's just a little spot.  She doesn't notice.  I open a can for him, and he digs in.  I treat him with a towel with hydrogen peroxide, before I take her on her noontime ride.  

Back to get mom down into the Toyota.  

Another night, I come in from my walk, just to stay calm.  Achhh, I don't feel like cooking, I don't feel like the refrigerator and reheating.  So I fold, no leftovers, it's Monday night, it'll be quiet, let's go down to The Press Box.  It's dark out by now.  I get the car started.  Off we go in the dark cold.  

Later on, after a long nap, I find myself awake, it's around midnight.  I get up, say hi to mom, who's on the bed with the cat, and then since I'm too awake now, better if I do down to the kitchen and do the dishes that have piled up since the night before.   Might as well.  Better to face the frustration of the clutter now, the silverware in the Rubbermade little tub, dishes, pots and pans.  I've grown tired of supermarket chickens soaked in chlorine or whatever, and whatever kind of digestible beans, black-eyed peas, adzuki beans, hard to find outside of health food stores, have become appealing, as also with rice, though the rice adds to my growing belly as I am adrift here in the grey vacuum of cold New York State winter.  Bah, get through a day with mom, get dinner cooked, reach into the freezer to please her with some coffee ice cream, by then I'm tired, after being made so nervous all day, anxious from the accumulation of all her little upbraids, mom, I'm going for a walk, you just went for a walk, no I just took the trash out, okay, whatever, women can never win, and so I am left to start my little daily walk with gloom and anxiety on top of other glooms and anxieties, along with dreadful realizations that perhaps, to be true to his quest for the truth and the pith of reality as he sees it, the great job of the writer, at a certain no longer youthful point, the poor writer must finally see that it his duty to write about the end of his ability to write, to write anything worth reading, to write lastly about how with all the things, pressures, of adult life and attempted responsibilities, as if it weren't just his own powers waning, his spirit in need of some transformative thing, a Leviathan to get rid of his own Jonah, he no longer finds it possible to really believe in writing anymore, so it goes.

So I'm standing in my underwear, black tee shirt, Beans chamoix hunter green shirt, stacking the dishes, cat and other, pots and pans, in a sort of triage after assembling the lost tribe of the silverware, the tap running with hot water.  I decide I'll use the dishwashing machine this time, after I soak everything and get the dried residue off, load it up after a scrub rather than using its blue plastic enamel racks for simple drying.  So much crap everywhere.  How could we simplify all this, even the eating part.  And I'm a bit dazed, having done my little reality check corrections for mom, no, mom, there aren't any children to worry about for coming along to dinner, no, mom, your father has passed away, I gave you that copper bracelet for Christmas, no, mom, there is no other home up the road a piece, this is it, this is where all your clothes are too, no, we don't have any big plans for tomorrow, no mom, that's Wednesday Mary is taking you for a haircut, at Two PM, tomorrow is Tuesday.  She's still functional in ways, despite all the nonsensical childish jabbering and ugliness, and she's probably tired of me shouting back at her when I get tired of explaining everything.  I've stopped talking to her.  And so I go, oh no, and here she comes down the stairs, right as I have my soapy water ready to go, the plates first, then the pots and pans.  And as I do my duties of cleaning up, I don't want any company, in fact I just pulled up a little background video, about a Father Lazarus of Saint Anthony in the Desert, as background.  He lives in cave up the mountain side, and he's gotten through that horrible dealing with ego and his own will, fighting Satan, the inner demons and outer demons, to get to some peace in his battle up there... well, it's a story of motivation, how certain things came to pass, and he wasn't even a church goer to start with.  So here Mom is, after clopping down the stairs, I'm tired but I'm restless...   I pull open a package of Saltines, a small plastic jar of almond butter, a knife, and she eats right off the table cloth not the little plate I gave her.  She'll belch loudly.  And this is all my earned Karma, perhaps.    Eventually, seeing me work away, offering a lame, "what can I do, you never ask for any help,"  well, go clean your room, throw things out  in your office...  things she'll immediately shrug off, eventually she'll make little noises, I know when I'm not wanted.

I load the dishwasher up, having gathered what I can in it, hand-washing two wine glasses, but letting a third go through the cycle, and she sits at the kitchen table that was our old family dining room table, I don't have the overhead lights turned on, she's picking at her scalp again with her right hand, in some form of thought, occasionally asking me a question, after I slice an apple for her little repast, who invented the apple, like she asks me, did Jesus invent wine, or, who invented the cat, all good questions, particularly if you're not, as the bandied about saying goes, "at the end of my rope..."  ammo of family battles...  I turn to the refrigerator, so cleanse, purge, sort out, put cheeses with cheese and fruits in the bottom fresher bin, throwing out the little trays the Meals on Wheels delivers...  And finally, she goes okay, I'm going up to bed, and at least she knows how to still make that trip.

And so am I left to ponder, sad thoughts, like now all the waitresses, I'm old enough to be their father, same with the young pretty women who are the synchronized swimming check out "girls" at the little supermarket that's full of nice people who remember you and your little quips.  Down to the right, before you hit the hot prepared food, fried chicken, rotisserie, chili, mac and cheese, potato wedges, before you there after you've gone past the bread on the one side and the peanut butters and the crackers on the other, turn right at the potatoes, the tomatoes, the onions, the cooled vegetable and fruits, I was hearing weird faint whistling, and finally, as one of the employees, a woman stocking the broccoli, I make a discovery, it's the angels and Mrs. Claus and other elf and Santa and Christmastime figurines, up above the cooler, that's what's been making these ghostly whistling cooing noises as I shop, picking out a lemon or a lime, rattled by impatient old mom waiting in the car with her grousing thoughts and complaints, and the woman and I chuckle over my little story of discovery.

At night, in the quiet, mom gone to bed, the big orange tabby at her feet, even the books climbed up, sleeping and strewn over the blankets, there is a soul to places, a spook that no one else can give to a place.  I light incense, frankincense and myrrh to disperse the egos of the day as they fall toward sleep.

 And again, like everyone else, I wake up with a strange sense of unease, the anxiety of not knowing what to do with yourself, so such thoughts as they appear in the mind, in my case as I shake the remembered dream of an old restaurant you worked in losing all its character, going corporate, if you will, old friendships strained where you are left high and dry, wasted of his years.  November Fifth, and I'd hoped by the morning there would be a clarity, better signs of a Biden victory, but for which we must be patient, painful as that is.  Still too close, uncertain by its own uncertainty.  When will, on top of that, my mind goes, Mom call, in what mood, with what questions...

Did we have too much confidence last night, after Wisconsin and Michigan went for Biden?  I chatted with an old friend from the hometown, Hilde...  who spent some time up in the Adirondacks, in rehab.  The convoluted way a woman talks, the mystery of her references and where's she going with this... a different kind of linguistic brain than mine, male, say what you will.  Male and female seem to endure one another, with some mild physical pleasures, good enough as they are, thrown in.  Too many phone calls last night, wearing me out.

Before the restaurant dream, half awake, checking on the news, too full of ache to rise, from yesterday's good yoga session in the sunlight in the field right on the grass the body turns all that alignment work into a consciousness that fires through the channels of the spinal central core, lighting on each chakra, from root to third eye.  If you're doing any pose involving balance, or stretching for that matter, you are engaging the energy centers, you can feel the channels of the inner Caduceus, energy belts spiraling within you, and what else is the point of life, but to make manifest what is in and of you and of where you came from.  Like bookshelves, making one at home.

In all this, with pressures on, one forgets that he could write, that he does write, even if the invisible authorities of the world of practicality one makes up in his own mind would require other things of him.  And writing is good.  The musicality in the fingers dancing their way along a sentence via the keyboard below their finger's tips.   Before the distractions of the day come your way.

And how easy to lose one's thoughts.

The Chakras have their own thoughts, their way of thinking, their way of being conscious in the world.  To tune them, or to them, is natural, just as to perform a yoga pose of balance and stretching, tree, plough, headstand, the energy must work through each energy center, so that then they will work together, as if one were asking different parts of the body to work together, to communally instruct the body as a whole to position itself for a successful pose.

The news from the outside world cools one's thoughts down, making them less accessible, like a plate of food, scrambled eggs, let's say, cooling.  Better when hot, better to enjoy them so.

Much is at stake over these days, looking bad election night, then better, much better yesterday afternoon, and then today, more anxious nail-biting.  We know the psychic cost, the weight of having that man Trump in the office...

I drink my pot of tea, Dragonwell green, to the point of almost getting jittery.  What to do, when the core of a person is surrounded, sort of, with challenging pressures.

I get outside to the field here to do my little yoga routine on the grass before the Urban Ecology Center.  The school kids at the middle school are out enjoying lunch break with the staff.  Mild air.  The stereo of the natural tuned down calm, crows orchestrating overhead flights.  I just wanted to get outside for some sunlight and fresh air, but the yoga was delicious yesterday, with inner soreness in joint and muscle to work out.  

So the back and forth, legs apart, lifting up arms from side to side, growing the wing span, and then mountain into down dog, warrior, and some down on all fours, then tree poses, one leg, then the other, tuning up and then into the good-for-the-liver pose then into shoulder stand, then plough, all the way back, then coming out exhausted and panting to recover lying down face up, sunlight feeling gentle and good on my old hide with its bumps and sun exposure faults.

The kids pack lunch and a  little ballgame and the forks with a walk around me on the side road by the gate, and I’m ready to get into headstand after pigeon, and I can’t resist tuning into my little radio of my Facebook feed on my phone, just after noon, and lo, the airs of Trump’s deceit and fraud are on the way out, the gentle miracle campaign of Joe Biden is surging again, the Blue Wave coming over the Red Mirage.  There’s staff laying out the coming results of the battleground states, and not without some surprise I bow and unfold my body over the cradled in hand top of my head in the best and smoothest and most self confident and upright free headstands I’ve ever accomplished as I listen, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia... and then after the counterpose of child pose I assemble my legs and pelvic structures into the most painless and easily stretched lotus pose I’ve ever done.

Self confidence, it is important.  And Biden restoreth, and how terrible for all of us the last four or so years under the demagogue.  Seriously.  

I try mom again, and while her answer of the phone might sound a little shaky, I have the good news that is on its way to us.  Yoga helps one gain in stature.  And today, this time, with me and my mom, it is a real conversation.  And she reminds me, you need space for your writing.

Keep in touch with your old mom, she says.  Of course.

I go back to lotus, and even note a brown recluse spider traversing the legacy of animal fur blond on my legs, who jumps off into the grass below without threat of bite nor causing her host any harm.  The company of jumping spiders, of which there are many, are more preferable, curious in their inspections, looking up, who are you?

You can’t help being sensitive, even these days, and the dark clouds of Trump descended upon us a gray January morning with helicopter and cruel shows of might.  Quite a bad vibe, back at the old apartment I used to keep.

A peaceful seat back against big pine on soft needle bed, then a tree pose—they see all of it, coming and going—on the hillock overlooking the old sleepy river that once divided the nation.  In the vines of Japanese hops covering the steep hill, cardinals, sparrows, a mockingbird.

Confidence is physical in nature.  It resides in the body.  Yoga is very good for it, and so with long walks.  Self-confidence is diminished when encountering the things outside of the self.  An elderly parent comes at you with feeble-mindedness, aggressive, upsetting, causing within you a great mix of emotions, along with them guilt.  Keep the body strong and you will stand against such things.

And Trump, who knows what he has done, all the damage he has done in his term.

But lo, after the subsequent early afternoon call, my attempt to shore up my mom’s confidence and peace in things as they are, as I stop into the little Korean run neighborhood deli, for cheap south of France Pinot noir and maybe cold cuts, after this victorious day of almost perfect yoga, a storm is brewing, yet one of such familiar circumstances of the everyday Covid time series of speaking with my 81 year old dementia suffering mom with her attuned personality prone to worries, an Aries of anxieties, from which I am still able to calm and placate her, mom have some wine, do you have any food, check the refrigerator, oh, feed the cat let him out he’ll come back, take your pills, what pills where, but I’m not in my home I’ve been moved around so much, pushed around...

It’s still okay at five and at six, but then she calls and tells me she’s made a tiny goof, that she might have walked into, by mistake, someone else’s apartment there at the townhomes where doors look alike.

Hanging on the phone, as she goes about, trying to locate herself and the cat, I hear in the distance a knock knock knock, oh Jesus.  I hear the interlocution, and the the policeman picks up the phone as it sits off hook.  He explains.  Paramedics, concerned neighbors, an evaluation...  Then a later call, soon after, they’re taking her in.

I’m scheduled for Friday night and Saturday night.  Still warm enough for foot traffic, outside dining on the sidewalk, while mild weather lasts...

Saturday noon, I call the Uber cab to take me down after a sleepless night.  14th and L, enterprise car rental parking garage puts me in the thick of it.  11:35 PA called for Biden.  The horns are honking, DC is finally celebrating.

I haven’t packed.  How long am I going for?  

Another week goes by.  $260 for the car rental per week.  But a $200 return fee if I drop the car off locally, here in this beautiful old working town by the big across the earth inner sea lake...  and a huge charge of $500 if I then must rent another car to get back to DC to find my food stamp SNAP debit card, my new issued drivers license, whatever else kind of shitty official paperwork I must keep on top of.

So now again, everyday, keep mom entertained.  Groceries to do later, first the Stewart Shop gas station quick mart for a NY Times,  A quick bite, a cup of coffee for me while mom waits oblivious in the rental car, tiny in the front seat, then down to the bluff overlooking the Marina work, the site of the old French fort lost to time behind us.  What to do today for fun, for a ride, for the imposed lunch or dinner so mom can have her wine, and maybe me too in order to endure, but sleep will be broken up, and I’ll probably vomit again when I get up, congested, sore.

In the nighttime, free for a moment, caught out in between, at a writer’s own Big Sur age, I run the dishwasher through, feed the big yellow orange cat, try to entertain myself, a social worker nurse coming tomorrow.

 Like everyone else, today, the fourth of November, 2020, I wake up sore.  Election Day, I had to go down to the old Georgetown Park Mall, to the Department of Motor Vehicles to convert my old DC Driver's License to the new standard of homeland security, the Real ID.  Something I'd been dreading for months.  I ride my heavy yellow mountain bike down to Foxhall, then down the hill and the curved path that goes under the canal in a damp tunnel.  Canal towpath or Capital Crescent paved bike trail, I chose the former.   Park my bike right there, lock her up, and into the building and down to the basement I go.  I have an appointment. At Noon, made months ago.  There's a line.  I get in the line.  I've got my paperwork, birth certificate of some ancient order, some recent bills, a W2 or 1099 to state my social security number...  I'm anxious to be in Georgetown, on Election Day.  A lot of it, shop windows, are boarded up, completely, as a protection should there come rioting and looting in the night.  

I go through the first line, and then to the clerk who prints out a service number, and I wait there and my number is called, over to window 10.  I say hello, how are you, politely, and produce my documents.  "The bill has to be in an envelope.  I can't take it without an envelope."  Okay.  But I've brought forth other papers, for back-up and it looks like I'm clear, until she tells me that I owe for a ticket, $120 plus the late fee.  Speeding, Suitland Parkway, 2010.  I've never even been to Suitland Parkway.  She prints off a list, so that I can pay.  A couple of parking tickets, from the old street, paid, okay, but...

She enters my credit card manually, entering my current data.  Eventually, we get through that, and it's time to sit down in the chair for my official photo.  You want to take that over again?  Your collar was doing different things.  I take off my blue cycling jacket, a snug fitting Spanish zip up thing with pockets in the back.  Who knows what my hair looks like.

Okay, I make out of there, gratefully, and out on the street the sun is out.  Okay.  Across to the sunny side of the street.  Working men are putting up window protection, and the sidewalk, busier than I would have expected.  The boss pays me in cash now, so I deposit the two one hundred dollar bills into the PNC ATM machine at the back, north side, of the old domed Riggs Bank.  Okay.  I can get out of here now.  The bum at the corner has gone away, so I cross Wisconsin to go fetch my bicycle.  It's nice to be in Georgetown, actually.  Clyde's Restaurant is boarded snugly from head to toe.  Back behind the old carriage house of Dean & DeLuca, a sleek coffee shop, seating at outdoor tables above the old canal.  I try calling mom.  

This time I'll take the path back, avoiding the mud puddles on the canal tow path.  I dilly-dally by the river, it is a nice day, there are people out, young college age couples, handsome, a light breeze over the river.  I wish there was a drinking fountain, my water bottle running low.  My niece had called out of the blue just as I was getting ready, rattled as I was, and it's hard to remember everything.  I go through the maze laid out in the park by the river, trying to be in a meditation, after all the anxiousness.  I better get going, I figure.  Maybe get some exercise in later.  I finally get through to mom, speaking with her as I walk my bicycle along.

I mount my bike again, Kryptonite U-Lock over the handlebars, pedaling away smoothly from the construction noise, etc., rolling along underneath the girder bottom of the Whitehurst Freeway.  Out by the boat houses, I get distracted.  Looking to the left for a possible drinking fountain, I find suddenly the closed part of the gate under the old canal bridge right in front of me, too late to swerve, so I fall forward and hit the deck, oooooph.   Ouch.  Landing on my palms.  I'm embarrassed.  I stand up.  Got to pay attention these days, I mumble, as a lady with a small dog comes by. 

Sorely, my hands now, feeling dumb for making such a mistake, rarely I crash my bicycle,   I pedal home.  A lot of people are out on the trail, joggers, bikers, which would on a normal day inspire me to go for a ride, but for the difficulties of putting on all my cycling gear, and by the time I get up the little hill up Foxhall, where I dismount, by the time I get back to the different climate of MacArthur Boulevard, a cloud cover to the west has come to the blue skies of Georgetown.

I lock the bike up outside, come in and wash my hands.

An agonizing night, waiting for clear signs of a Biden Victory...  I go to bed, and then Mom is calling, causing my iPhone to buzz silently next to me on my bed.  Then she calls again.  And once more, and I pick up.  "I'm cold and lonely," she tells me.  Well, Mary will be coming.  I tell her about how the election still hangs in the air.  She gets it.  Oh, wow.  Really...  Oh.  Yeah.  Well, I can tell you don't want to talk to me.  I'll call you later.  I'm just getting up.

I get up and have last night's brewed tea, along with the last Advil on the little bottle.  I look at my phone and open up Facebook to see what the news is.  It could be a horror show.  Mercury left its retrograde cycle yesterday, Election Day, at 12:50 PM yesterday.  Maybe today will be better.

I write for a bit.  Just to keep the mind moving.  I haven't written at all lately.  I call mom back, and she's doing better, and sane again, and not too needy.  The election is still not clear, and after writing, I take a little nap.  There's been a lot to swallow.  For, the more I think about it, a long time, ever since Trump won, somehow.

It struck one as if he'd been, along with his people, through a long forty days in a desert.   A miserable heat. A lack of sustenance and the water.  Temptations.  A voice telling you turn around, to turn back, to give in.

It seemed ordained almost that we would all have to go through such a time, something we had to go through in order to be better again.

So let's see...  Let me warm up first.  I've just come in off the road, more than eight hours driving, and I pull in by the old G.I. apartment building.  I left at 4:30 in the afternoon.  By the time I get my bags and travel stuff inside to unpack, park the rental red Hyundai sedan over in un-zoned street parking by the Urban Ecology Center, and crack open a can of ale, it's 1:30AM.

I drove up Saturday or was it Sunday evening, arriving about 10:30 in the night.   And now, back home in the apartment I am alone.  Entirely alone.  This is the way I have lived, ever since I moved in to George's grand house after the apartment I shared with my brother.  Which means I have failed in life.

I'd sent an email off to the landlord.  If I'm lucky I might pay half rent for the next six months, that's about it.  This was Friday, before getting ready to leave.  That would be about the best I could do, roughly equal to the cost of a storage unit for all my things, my books, my bikes, guitars, odder cooking things, my closets of clothes, winter gear, plus all the costs of moving.  The cost of being in true limbo, not knowing where to land.

Then just after that, sending out the email, two hours later, the boss calls out of the blue.  Maybe come back to work next Friday, if you're still in town.  It's going to get cold out, and maybe we can open the wine bar again...

Okay, sure.  Sounds good.

So now I need to go see mom.  I had to keep putting off, expecting that eventually there would be a deal for a Stimulus Package, so I could plan it out.  But, on and on that goes, McConnell and his band of self-righteous Senate Republicans of the most obstructionist kind are blocking all efforts to pass a new stimulus package, while every economist in the world agrees it should have been done months ago, as far as averting lasting damage to the economy.

I rent a car for Saturday noon, Enterprise, 14th and L.   In the morning, I get a call.  They're overbooked.  I made the booking late last night, and their computer system took it, but they are short on vehicles, meaning they don't have a car for me.  Okay.  I don't feel like moving much anyway.  I'm not packed.

Sunday, I make it down to Budget at 19th and L.  I get back and finish packing, and all this takes a while.   I'm finally on the road by 3:30.

Canal Road, then onto the Beltway, then merge left to get on 270 Northwest to Frederick....  Once I get through Frederick, the traffic eases, the road opening up, through the Catoctin.  Gas south of Harrisburg.  And onward.  In the mountains, at Ravine, PA, I opt for the truck stop Burger King for an early dinner of a Double Whopper, no cheese, then back on the road.

Past 10PM, I'm through Syracuse, which first appears past the long curve descending to Nedrow and the Indian Reservation.

I arrive, parking in the quiet lot.  I take a few bags in, one with the wine in it.  I find the door unlocked.  Stepping in, there is a stench.  Cat shit?  A dead animal?  Something severe in the fridge?  Has a rodent creature died the heating duct?  There are tiny fruit flies.  There are regular flies.  

Mom comes down the stairs, after I've already started trying to tidy things up.  She has to ponder for a moment who I am... how are you, mom, you look good, I say.  Poor thing, like all of us.

I stopped at the Burger King in Fulton.  $2 chicken nuggets, a fish sandwich, Whopper Junior...  I open some wine I brought up.  There is some white, but not much.  We sit at the table.  She has a couple of the lukewarm chicken things.    Later I run out for a six pack of Labatt’s Blue at the Stewart Shop.  That will help me get on with the cleaning.

I’m back and sorting out the refrigerator and the pile of dishes left in the sink. I take out a full trash bag, carefully tying its odors in, out to the dumpster.  It’s five in the morning when I get to bed.

Mom has not been taking her medications, this is clear.  Repetitive.  Did you sleep well, five minutes later, same thing.  I find one drug store brown prescription bottle by her bed in her disaster of a bedroom.  The other I call in.

The next day I manage to get up fairly early.  Forecast for rain.  Clouds.  52 degrees out.  I write up a grocery to-do list on a 3 by 5.   I take mom on a ride out down by the lake.  Then the stops we have to make.  Getting her Aricept at Wayne’s Drug Store, original neon sign out front...  Then the grocery store and the wine shop.  

I pick up some chicken tenders for a little lunch, to tide us over before The Press Box for an early dinner, wine, wings, a burger, something chicken for mom.

I get Mom home after dinner, but she is nauseous again.  Oh, there's nothing more I hate than vomiting, she says, as I bring over the mixing bowl coopted for use as a bedside puke bucket, which I then go empty in the bathroom toilet.  She was ill yesterday morning, the first day of my visit.

I turn to faith.  That's all I have now.   I have left.  That's all I ever had.

And how difficult it is for any of us even to have faith.  Buddha himself had to have faith, faith in his heretofore unheard of and unimaginable strange logic, such as no one had ever seen before.

Few of us learn much, or much to leave behind, about having and keeping faith.  If any writer could discover such, that would be a marvelous achievement.

The first day back is not easy.  The first time I have to get ready for work in a long time.  I have to take the rental car back, and I'm running behind, as I have to set the bar up.  I'm finally in the car, taking it back to 19th and L to the Budget Rental parking garage, and through a series of missed turns and one-way streets concentration being difficult, I make it back.  I pull carefully across the sidewalk and down into the garage, nodding at the Ethiopian guy, and down several levels, following the signs, down another level, and there's a guy before me, and I guess this is it.  He comes around to the driverside window and asks me to read off the odometer, and the fuel level, poor tired old guy, slender, in jeans, dyed blond hair, and I see on my phone in the darkness, do I have everything, that mom has called, twice at least.  I haven't had time getting ready, etc., yet today.

 I get out of the garage into the light of downtown, but she doesn't pick up when I call back.  The food trucks aren't lined up, so I get an overpriced gyro, stuff it in my courier bag, drink some water, go to K Street to find a bus. 

I'm waiting, and now my phone is buzzing, and it's Ben from the townhouses, the paramedics are here with your mom.  She's been going into other people's apartments again, and someone called.  He turns the phone over to the paramedic.  Once we've come, and she's in this state, we can't just release her, we have to take her in.  So I tell the guy that Mary her helper should be coming any minute, so I call Mary and then call him back, and he seems satisfied.  They'll wait for Mary.

I take the red Circulator bus, free, about five people on it, a young African woman, an older DC bum type, another guy, an older woman who gets on through the front door, not understanding, up to work, getting off by the public library after the bus takes us down along K Street before heading up Wisconsin Avenue.

Hugo I see up ahead of me after I cross and come up the sidewalk, bustling about over the new outdoor seating tables behind the cement balustrade blocks set out into the curbside lane.  "How are you, Mister," he calls, without missing a beat, having barely seen me, from what I could tell.   "Lotta work, man," he says.

Chef JeanBaptiste is there at the open door to greet me, and it's good, very good to see my old friends.  I get upstairs to the bar, and there's a lot of work to do, and I'll have to figure out what I need as I go along.  I start lugging things up.  I'll need a full load of mineral water, and all the reds we pour, sodas, bar garnishes have disappeared to, I see as I look in the cooler.  I wish I got in earlier.  I clean the ice bin, and start running things through the dishwasher.  Most surfaces are clean, just that the old stuff is in a jumble.

Mary texts me, after I try several times to call mom's landline.  "I'm taking your mom out for a drive.  She's fine."  I hope we don't get kicked out.

So I work my first two shifts back.  Then I'm tired for a couple of days.  I try to get outside, one day sunny, late in the afternoon, but the ragweed has come back.  I find out I've qualified for Medicaid.  

I did some grocery shopping after my shift Saturday night, but I'm hungry, and even though I'm just about broke I order cheap Chinese food delivery.  I'm starving.  I'll need my energy for what cometh next.  Then I settle in for the night, not knowing what's going to happen to anybody, and feeling bad for mom being alone.

I wake up late today, this day, Wednesday, and in the afternoon, checking my emails, I read, the Wine Bar is now open Tuesday through Saturday night, and "Ted your favorite bartender is back."  And this too is news I have to absorb.  Ahh, I say to myself.  What does this mean.  The clocks will be changing soon, meaning I won't have but a little light of day's sunshine to play with.  Five shifts?  I used to barely be able to do four, but things are a little different now, the set-up.

The world writes itself.  We do not need to embellish upon it all.  Writing is necessary unto ourselves and gives us the dignity of a work to do, but I wonder if it is unnecessary beyond the lessons of faith are observed, the lessons we are rewarded with for our travails.  In my view, Kerouac understood this.

Out sitting at a picnic table I felt too overwhelmed to add much thought to it all.  I'd been up the night before watching a new series, The Chosen, and I told myself I'd hold onto this moment of faith and perseverance as long as I comfortably could, even as I thought of how I should have spoken to the pretty young woman I've been wanting to say hi to, as we both made it to the last patches of golden sunlight a few days ago in this field here by The Urban Ecology Center.  I was sitting away, out in the field, but the sun went behind the tall pines, so I moved closer to her, asking her "May I borrow your sunlight," and she was friendly and smiled, "be my guest," she said, which was witty, and I sat down before her ahead of her, and went about my lotus pose, and when I stood to do my tree pose she was gone.  Dumb ass me.

Ahh, but it had been a long summer.  And sometimes you felt like dark things, hard to take it, everything coming at me, but day by day, I kept the faith, thanks to wine in the evenings and Jack Kerouac, and a few spiritual type of readings here and there, a little Jesus, a little Buddha, each in turn, then mixed together, and I thought less of buying some rope, which I wouldn't do anyway, I promise.

Just as I'd thought the eve before this small break in the clouds, I'd thought of faith.  And now faith was telling me about what I had observed being back at work the first two nights in seven months, that there is wrapped within bar-tendering a higher calling.  If I were to try to write about that I would or might wear it out so I'll tread carefully, it was just that faith, with a good dose of the Jewish and the Christian stories of faith, helped me see the appropriateness with the way the world had arranged my life, and that I just needed to see the good of it.  The very good.  The good of everything about it.  One doesn't always get a lot of support in life, us people of faith, but from our faith.  Good thing we have it.  Because to the rest of the world, as we all know, even I, it's all about the mighty dollar, and believe me, now I realize, the larger economy.  After thirty years in the restaurant business I found it not at all easy to pivot, and there I was in my depressed state, isolated, not working, either helping mom out up north 400 miles away, or here, meditating, praying...  

Therefore there was something indeed appropriate to my return to my real-life job and my livelihood.  I'd put a lot into it over the years.  I'd cultivated the garden of the Lord and the vineyard, and I'd put in just about the best effort I could have greeting people with kindness and letting them in, being a good lover of neighbor.   There could be no solution anyplace else.  No Jesus, now you're going to be selling software, and you'll make more money anyway, a lot more, nothing like that.  I'd grown Biblical, if you will, like I had become some sort of  a vine that had grown and sunk its roots down into poor soil, worked hard physically and certainly sweated through many a shirt, scared, on the edge sometimes, but always a job to go to.

The sky was grey, and even on a nearby picnic table the day before a crow right above me, directly above me, had cawed and cawwed, and kawed again, with a tiny little guttural giggle purring clicks thrown in, and of course I thought of Poe, but the bird of blackness in branches right over my head seemed comfortable with me, and they are smart, recognize us as individuals, observe us just as we observe them, and sometimes even spiders jump up on me, but anyway...  (I made a joke of it to a woman who asked me if she needed to put her dog on a leash, and she said, oh, I saw that...)  The sky was grey again, and the hopes for the appearance of the sunshine girl dropped and dropped, and why did I pass up my opportunity.  But I could see the world clearly again, and felt myself to be in the right spot.  Starlings, or Grackles, were gathering on the high mown lawn banks of the reservoir, ready to gather to do their murmurings, shimmering, as if the camera of thine eye was shaking...  But I felt like, my mother speaking to me, I felt, your (meaning me) time has come.   This is not the voice of your tormentors, the ones who ask you many many questions, without telling you any truth.

.

I could see the world fresh and new and alive, and it was as if, as the old saying goes, my time had come, and that I had to go back to the life my mother has always approved of, beyond all others, my sweet life as the quiet first miracle wine guy.  So don't be too hard on yourself.

Oh, things the summer had taught me.  And you can really leave things up to the way they happen, to the way God gives them to us.  For these sufferings, too, are our friends.  Each a kind and gentle lesson that will mature you has a man, as a human being.  And then you have far less of worries in this world.  And oddly enough, one barman does indeed stand a chance to be as noble as Lincoln or whomever, in that he will finally get the cadence and the meaning of all the old stuff.  In fact one of my occasional but decent customers, Andy, a New Yorker, was by with his wife for dinner on Saturday night.  We talked about Kerouac, and he himself knew a famous old professor who'd taught the man as a kid.  (Not the best student, but a really nice guy, the old teacher says about old Jack.)  We also talked about The Book of Job.  And it was good, to be back chatting with my old friends and acquaintances...  Where were you when I laid the cornerstones of the foundations of the world....  And his whole business, taking students on travels, shot all to hell.

And all the good old rare stuff comes back to me, the real stuff from people you won't get anywhere else, having administered a truth serum and a decent meal, and a nice place to dine, pleasing music in the background, the sharing of life, even to this hovering idiot of a mad Irishman Austro-Hungarian Po-lock.  

Yes, it made sense.  I had to be re-manifested back at the holy Wine Bar of The Dying Gaul.  And what did I have to live for anyway, such as it is, no wife, no kids, having tended to mom pretty long but not done, so if the damn thing of Covid-19 gets me, it does.

Ye shall know them by their fruits.  Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit;  but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

Matthew 7:16-20

I don't know, it felt like I had to go through all this anxiety and doubt and concerns of having all my stuff out in the street to feel like I was making a home out of this humble apartment and my place here by the palisades of the great Potomac River.  You could sit in a field on a picnic bench and watching the cycles of nature and seasons, like nowhere else in DC.

After talking to my aunt and then my friend from with Jazz Nights at the Wine Bar, Leslie, I'm wiped out, so I sleep for a bit.  The phone calls drive me into the wine, when I should or might be writing, for the same reason that writers are the people for whom writing is very hard, taking a great effort, grappling with the deeper truths that of course we can never consciously know.  Then I am up, and finish the half bottle of wine, and open another one, and it tastes good, and I have some black-eyed peas with hummus and some cold cuts before I go to bed, but again, the next day, as is the unfortunate pattern I feel rather ill from the wine and the dehydration, and also depressed, or down, as too will always happen, such that I feel rather tired and sore and mope around.

As soon as I get writing, building up a little head of steam, mom calls.  Up and down, and 40 minutes of trying to answer her question what should I do now, and I try to explain to her about the three Wayne's Drug Store pill bottles I've taped to the counter right in front of her, to the left Mom, to the left, but she can't do it, and asks why I'm being so cruel to her, such a prick, so mean, I have never been treated so in all my life even by my mother, I think you're trying to destroy me,  etc., etc., etc., spaced over two calls.  Then a third, ending with, after I tell her, yes, just go off to bed mom, tomorrow is another day and Mary will be coming in the afternoon.   I love you, she says, not that it matters, I love you too mom.  Good night.  Then I go crack open a tall boy can of Labatt Blue from my travels up north.

And so, things end where they started, with my reading books from the library in a spiritual vein, Jesus, A Pilgrimage by our friend James Martin, S.J.  And that's about all I got left anyway, life too complicated to have much time for a pretty girlfriend, I'm afraid, and me back to working nights at the old Dying Gaul.  The beer feels watery, which is maybe why it's good, you can't hurt yourself sipping away on one.

But the apartment feels like home now, after all that, after all the ups and downs and waiting for Congress and all that bad habit of doom scrolling on Facebook.