But maybe that was it, he thought, as he rose from the air mattress and traipsed quietly downstairs.  Maybe it was just that he was an alcoholic, and then alcoholics are great at lying to themselves.  And wasn't all this then the biggest lie, as his life had been the biggest lie, for quite a long time, ever since coming out of teenage childhood really.  There were bad influences in the town, ill-chosen friends...  Then there were the lies of money, and jobs.  He could not even see it himself, so immersed in it.  And now, the final lie, the biggest lie, from the one who'd caused so much stress in his life...

It was eleven thirty, the start of SNL, but he did not want to enter the room where the television was, and there were dishes from dinner to do, chicken with mushrooms, fresh thyme, the sauce not thick enough when he served it to get mom off to bed, but with good flavors from following the age old treatment of things.  The frozen squash, orange pumpkin in color, and the spinach from the other saute pan, worked.  No need for rice, though that would have tasted good.

Past midnight, and after folding the laundry of one load, his socks, underwear, tee shirts, work pants, towels, he moved the cold delicate wash of his mom's pink and lavenders into the dryer, and the cat did not even hear him, perhaps because of the humidifier upstairs outside the bedrooms on the landing.  And then with these thoughts in his mind, and the tree pollen, he went down to the car, and down to get gas at the Fast Trak past the high school down by the McDonald's and the empty Friendly's.   When he pulled up under the  brightly-lit toll booth like gas pumps he found that the screens on all the pumps said, in blue, closed.  He did not want to have to keep his mother waiting, another thing for her to get grumpy at him, too hot, too cold, too much sun, nothing to read, while he filled the old Toyota's replaced gas tank, so he went east into town to Fifth, to the usual Stewart Shop, and the shop itself was still lit within, some kids had just come out, and the woman, the manager was mopping up and he felt for her.  When he put the credit card into the machine, the card was frozen, stuck, so he had to go to the window, as she had just turned the lights out, and mime, and she politely came to the door, and he apologized.  She came out to check and pressed the same buttons he had, still nothing, so she told him she'd go back in and hit the breaker and he apologized again, and she was perfectly kind, not a problem.  The lights went off above him and then the card came out and he waved to her and drove back.

At least the dishes were done.  At least mom was still sleeping.  

He was broke.  There wasn't any way to get around that.  If he went back to work, his mother would be left, and it wouldn't last anyway.  If he stayed up there, he would do little more than continue to live the greatest of all his self-lies.  

One big laughable goddamn lie, chased back with red wine and ice cubes, and late nights, and friends who did not do much to help you but wanted to you to be part of their own lies.

And for having to deal with his mother advancing into senile repetition, confused thoughts and speech, the tedium of it, for the lies her life was, and how she too when all alone would get into the wine, enough occasionally to be a bit of a scene, everything here would be blamed on him, the gift he received for bearing the brunt of it all, talking her down, in off the ledge of her drama.

His own apartment, back in the city far to the south, was enough of a lie, but her's seemed worse, and there wasn't much he could do about it, all the piles, every once in a while putting things into a pile and then into a garbage bag, or out into the recycling bin, staying up late in order to quietly do chores and avoid her madness.  "Some people like me," she would say, when she caught him cringing at her approach.

And even coming to realize all this after the typical venture to closed convenience shop gas pumps in vain, the old car seeming to drink a lot more gasoline than it had before the new catalytic converter had been put in, even to think about his alcoholism, he needed a glass of Beaujolais to write it down in a way he could think about it, and try not to be overwhelmed by his life of sin and prodigal ways.   There had been a lot of kids out he'd seen, groups of girls walking back to the dorms, off campus housing party houses on porches and backyards, and he remembered himself thinking it was that simple.

Then once you've started again, then you cannot go back, you need another fill in your tumbler of the Beaujolais on the rocks, maybe topped off with a splash of soda to fill the void in you and in your stomach.  At two in the morning you're getting hungry again.  Granted, you've put in some energy, the laundry, then straightening out around mom's chair, books and newspapers thrown together in piles, horrible, what a way to treat a book leaving it laying around like that, stuffing into the leaves a flyer from a non profit to save the parks, the animals, but you can't tell her anything like this, it's your job as a 56 year old grown man to do this all alone in the night.  Some way to end up.

You straightened out the suitcase, open, underwear, socks, finding a pair of shorts suitable for hot days and exercise and yoga poses.  Something of a pretense, just something to do to keep your mind off of things.

Shit, this is serious now.  No wonder...

You find other examples of self-destructive artists, creative types, to give you some solace in the night.  That was one of the problems, the creative urges.  That's what got you into trouble, that and boredom.  Pretending you could fictionalize your own innate understanding of Hank Williams or Shane MacGowan and think you were accomplishing something, sure.

There is brilliance and poetry and laughter and science in all of that, but nothing to bring home, nothing to pay the bills with.

He thought about getting in the car again.  But somehow felt so stultified where he was, and at four in the morning, what...  what?  Maybe take a walk.  The cat's out now.  Try and run, make a run for it, at the fences, get away, get away from her shoes and boots, her wearing the same clothes for a week, her glomming onto you, looking out as you're away in the yard talking to a rational family member, and when up close she'll, because she talks to herself out loud, say, I'm glad to be away from him, he brings me down with his defeatist attitude....  Yes, the world is a cruel place.  And only because Jesus drank the wine and all the monotheistic people and the others do I do it.  It would seem safe, wouldn't it?  But then wine and alkool, the devil, have only been around maybe 5000 of our 60,000 years, so that's not a big percentage, and who knows what DNA one is carrying around within.

Even the pseudophed makes you crazy after the third day of it.

Never mind how it all started.  Never mind about that.

There is no satisfactory answer to any of this.  So you keep on, looking over at the bottle on your right.  You sip.  It tastes good.  Still.

But still, the terror, that nothing could now fix away from him.

Poor old Ted, what will come of him now, after his long journey, leaving him with no skill.

Can she help me now?  Can anyone help me...  and I'm helping her out.

 By early April when the willows, the forsythias and maples budded, I felt like I’d lost it, a year out from work during mom's slow needy fragile centimeter by centimeter up and down decline.  My horoscope confirmed how I was feeling, low on energy, quite unsure to get back on track toward what I wanted out of life, you know, the basics that everybody not in an intensely abnormal situation had loads of.  I didn’t have nothing, and I was getting tired of it, and even with other stuff on top of that.  The tree pollen had come, on top of everything else, and for weeks I'd not received my unemployment, but that was from the computer upgrade the District of Columbia government was performing, I wasn't alone, I found out, to some relief, temporary in nature.

And I didn’t even know how to write anymore, and wrote rambling sentences that went with my confusion. Again, I was up til 5, 6 AM, when the blue light came up after keeping my night watch for the ghosts.

Mom wouldn’t give me a goddamn uninterrupted inch if she was not asleep and there was nowhere to go with the covid risk very high, with low vaccination rates.  Didn’t feel to me like there would be another ounce of joy in my life.  And all my clothes and a lot of my gear was stuck back in an apartment I couldn’t even get to.  Every single issue had become heavy and weighted like that, and out on walks away from mom’s apartment sometimes I just wanted to lay down on the ground or against a post and hide and meditate.  The tree frog peepers had come back.  Pond scum.  I kept walking.

I might have considered my wine drinking a problem but what the hell else was I going to do out on night watch with Hamlet.  It felt like I needed a project of some sort.

I walk back to the apartment.  There’s a bottle of ten dollar Beaujolais in the fridge.  I’ve got a piece of friend fish to reheat in the toaster oven, wings I cooked earlier potato in the oven from earlier.  Back to the chorus of one, wish I were dead, I’ll kill myself, people used to like me, I wrote a book or two, I have a Ph.D.  I’m no good.  I don’t know....  nobody cares...

I plop down at the table, my thumb in a mug with ice and cold water, a clumsy burn from earlier when we came back after our errands, putting a plate down on the pan with the cooked wings to cover them, then the plate going down too deep and not wanting to come out, and nothing works here.  How do you think I put up with it, I say, also talking to myself now.  The cat is back out again.  There is light in the woods at sunset out the back door just like a Cezanne.

Anything I can do to help, mom asks.

I suppose American writers, along with their character, fresh and innocent, democratically read enough to get a start, they are responsive to innovation in prose.  They take in the world, full of immigrants now, and customs more set, digest and come up with slight tweaks on something which no longer has much real room for tweaking.

They will go a long good way.

And one point they too will realize how they've been taken advantage of, just by their own fool individual solitary pursuit of the form, and one day will no longer want to do much more than just get bombed by the evening of the day, to quell all their real anxieties.  

Some writers are more entrepreneurial in their personal lives, in order to protect themselves and save themselves financially, even as they keep the creative independence they would wish for.

And for others they have long had so many problems growing over the years, taking on things no wise person really would want to for long or to make a habit thereof, that they find themselves stuck in so deep that there is nothing else to do, get into the wine at night, keep one's own hours, no longer able to intersect with anyone else who is normal in a normal town.  Thus their need for the Bohemians.  The lawless.  The irresponsible people of the world.  Musicians making a small living, if they're good enough.

When the boss called he mentioned all the customers, the long old good regular ones who I had cultivated as well as anyone else, and never taken advantage of, but been on an even plain with as far as the restaurant went, genuinely happy to see and serve them.  There was the older African American gentleman, Jim, who had been in arbitration legal matters so long he'd long sustained himself at the top.  I'd heard from him on social media that he'd had a little issue which had prompted him to move into some form of assisted living, and, though from sight just a little bit diminished at our sister restaurant, that this was one of the things I talked to about my boss, and I longed to rejoin the team, doing good things again, even though the finances ate at me and I could no longer have anymore mom calling me ten times a day while I was trying to work.

But on the other hand, why, why go back?  What for?  For another twenty years slogging it out, which would not leave me in good shape...  to continue what?  renting?

And all that hospitality, genuine, instinctive, where had that gotten me but taking care of a difficult grumpy feeble minded 82 year old mother no one else wanted much to do with, not of their fault, but of hers, but of course you could not mention any fault to such a princess bitch, and this was all draining the life out of me on a daily basis, so I had my rest, and got up again for the night watch when it was only me and the cat around in the whole complex, the only ones awake for miles and miles around as far as I could tell, except the night shift guys working at the plant.

In the night watch I'd chip meaninglessly away at the piles of things, the excess in the refrigerator, reflections of my honest attempts to cook and keep feeding ourselves in an interesting enough way, but with milk cartons from the Meals on Wheels program to dump out, the food that I'd cooked but was growing too old to enjoy, the foggy clutter, and along with that different piles of papers and books all scattered around mom's Eames chair throne.  

My suitcase lay open still, clothes clean but not folded, scattered about, and everything else was that way too.

But the man was too tender, and too accommodated to defeat and not getting his way, and with an equanimity he might have shrugged under his old sail like a flag of Quixotic constant non-victory, to really see anything much different from one thing and another, between ever upwardly mobile success and the wife and the big house, between that and his own little life of constant failure, a steady string of perhaps a slow decline but the same as decreed by nature, and he'd long been a part of such a process that it would be too late to get out of it, having like the snail who'd grown a shell, or a flower that had come and gone, or an animal that had a summer coat and a winter coat and then grew old and died, for far too long that he was reduced to his basic elemental you might say monkish self.  Eyes, ears.  Hands to do things with, a body to stretch out and try to keep in alignment.  A hollow coconut head to keep things in, a flexible back bone, legs to carry, hands to hold a steering wheel or slice an onion, or open a bottle of wine. 

The Lord keeps lots of us around, as spares, to call into duty when something else dies.  One old monk croaks, well, I got a few 'nuther idiots to replace him with, the keep the circuit running.  An old writer full of nonsense gives up the ghost, well, God's got another one set up to come on line, another Beaujolais drinking freak of nature "not intended for mass production," as Dr. Hunter Thompson put it once.   Some stupid innocent who by virtue of being nocturnal has hid out from the cruel realities of life.

The idiots know, just as laborers on the Pyramid project would have known, it's all step by small step at a time.  Cannon fodder of ants making a long chain between jungle tree posts, strung together.  John Donne is one ant hold away from Hemingway, maybe, perhaps, a step away from his other Earth planet friends, Kerouac, Shakespeare...  You find what fits for you...

I watch Shane MacGowan singing over the years as Hemingway watched bullfights, but here a slow mutual death, not a violent death, but a long slow self-destruction, one that coincides to the longer haul another artist might have to make, one that gives him enough truth to keep going through his lot in life and miseries.

I add thoughts to this mix whenever I can.  Write it.  Don't say it.  You can never talk about anything on that level of thought 

My friends, this is Ernest Hemingway, and what I am about to talk to is not popular, but it is true.  It is not in the language of the official language mugs, 

An Irishman knows with a knowledge within him that he will die defeated, from famine and coffin ships and other things, and that he will be left to watch the long slow decline within himself when others will turn English, self protecttive, monied.  

( but set out happily in the corners of escape as was Emily a loaded gun resting in corners, held steadily so as not to fire prematurely...  waiting for an oversoul or a lord or greater higher transcendental being to come along...)

As I saw it, I did not have any other way to do it, but to seek rest and peace after dinner, then wake up later and rise and do my work.  The day would drag, taking mom along with me on errands and taking care of her, feeding her dinner, restraining her when she started saying, how about we go out to The Press Box tonight I'll write you a check when we get back, even though I had shown her the local statistics and the risk rate published in the newspaper, and even if I had lined up dinner, told her what we were going to have, gone out for a walk, then come back and started cooking, then she would hit me with different concerns, how her real home was up the road a piece, then we'd take a walk around the building just to get her oriented, and then she'd be angry at me for no reason.  So I'd turn the burner off, put a lid on, and take her for a short ride, over to Cemetery Road, then back along the Rice Creek road, then down along where the peepers were.   I'd get through dinner, her talking as if she was in a good mood, and me saying nothing by this point, grim.  I'd go up to the room and the green air mattress, close the door and fall to sleep.

Then at night, say I woke up around midnight, I'd go downstairs, do the dishes in the tub, putting them to dry on the rack, keep an eye out for the cat, and then I'd have some peace.

I'd had beer one night, just to feel better the next day, and then some cider, but the wine came back and I hoped my head would not hurt after I did what I had to do to smooth out the pain that was almost everywhere now.  I knew it was not exactly good for the brain to have light and LED lights and electronic device screens, to have that brightness, but I did not have time to write on paper.

So I sat and wrote on the old dining room table in the kitchen after getting the dishes and the pots and the silverware and the glasses away, and prayed for a miracle or a vision, put away my worries why the deposits for my unemployment were not coming in deposited into my account, and then I put away the worries about my apartment and all the things in it, my books, my decent clothing to give me some diverse options, I'd then put away my worries about where I was going to end up, where should I be.

And then I remembered I had done my yoga out in the heat of the afternoon out on the mossy soft grass in the backyard.  And by the time I'd done my headstand, holding it, done the right counterpose of the child's pose head down in a crouch against the ground, then laying back in corpse, then mom came out.  And she was not in a panic, and not demanding, and so I showed her just the very surface of things, the chakras, the globes of energy within us to be aligned.  She'd been complaining about a pain in her side, and I explained the alignment necessary in a pose, and how holding such an alignment increased strength and balance and health.  She held her arms out at her side, as I was showing her, and she said, have you ever taught this, you know so much, you should be a teacher.  And later as I said we would, I took her upstairs gently, and showed her how, in terms of the relaxation poses she needed to clean the clutter off her bed, all the books, the papers, the other books, hardcover and soft, and for once I convinced her, and I readjusted her pillows and put some of the books on shelves and straightened a few of them too. 

It made me sad when she was agitated with me later at dinner time, when we had our lamb stew, which was indeed very good, after I added a pinch more cayenne paper and Celtic salt as it heated.  I had one beer, before my escape from her, and I knew, after the three nights of the Hemingway special documentary, I would need some time, as if I had to digest all the head injuries and gashes, the concussions, the ill effects of medication and years of steady drinking the hard stuff, poor Papa.  There was one moment when I'd finished my bowl and just felt I'd had enough and made a motion to the back door to sit outside on a white plastic chair.  "I'm never coming here again," she almost yelled, and with anger she hunched over, bawling for a moment until I came back in.

I had wandered long, away from family, on my own.  And I deserved my fate.  Now my punishment.

But I did not always mind it being alone at night to write.  After I'd been through what I had endured during the day with the human species, a female, lots of talk, enough to inspire all forms of Lear and Ophelia and other mad people, I found I could no longer talk about pedestrian things, or rather, that most talk now, after being burned in it all day with little relent, emotionally charged all the time those words, I had finally that true adult lack of patience to put up with words of the normal concerns, and I was glad I was away, far away from my old haunts, even quiet ones they were, glad I could be alone in my agony in the spring garden, safe in it for a time.

My mother, she had no idea, she could not, of what I was going through.  Of course she wanted me, hypothetically to get back to work, though she would be lonely.  She had no idea.  No one could blame her, given her state.  "I've been taking care of myself for years, all by myself," her refrain.  If I'd tried to explain it to her, she would only feel insulted.  Indignant, an old old habitual stance of hers.  

Setting her bed straight, before my long slow walk after the yoga in the first 75 degree day, I picked up a three by five card, and I noticed it was in my father's handwriting.  Red felt marker, as he often wrote in marker, usually black.  And I remembered.  This was when we still lived in the house on Ernst Road. We were at the same table I'm writing from, but in a place long ago and far away and far better.  But my mother was arguing with my father.  He had a course he was teaching, a beautiful one.  It was called, "Plants and Man," about all the uses and beneficial relationships between the plants that had been created and the humans that had been created, after the first stars and suns were born, and of how all the higher elements came along, hydrogen, helium, on up the periodic stellar table, up until when silicon comes, and then a star collapses.   And the card, with my mother's huff and ire on the left side of me at the table, and my father on my right, and he told her clearly in a clear voice, that judging a course by its title was anti intellectual.  She had him write it out, and sign it, and how here it was before me.  And whose word had lasted longer, even in this chaos.  And I was showing mom how she needed to be put to bed and how to sleep, and later, when I came up to check up on her, she was sleeping not cowering at the edge, but normally, and now even on her side, and I quietly came in and tuned down the volume of the television playing This Old House, turned one light off, then another, and let her be quiet on her bed.

I changed the water in the little plastic humidifier, and went back downstairs, stepping outside for a moment on the back step off the kitchen to look up at the stars, without the back light on.  Very clear.  Then I heard a commotion, bird chirping.  And then coming toward me in the dark the low figure of the ginger cat came, and then he was pouncing forward and putting his big front paws out, to hold down what he might have caught in his mouth, and the bird was still alive and the cat was fumbling intensely, and I raised my voice at him, again, and moving toward him, "let the bird go, let the bird go," the cheeping frantic now, squeezed, and I reached forward, and then I felt the bird go free, flying away, and cat was shaking his head now, as if to clear the feathers out of his mouth.

Mom stayed quiet upstairs.  Blessed silence.  I thought of Dostoevsky, as I often do, up late at night, lights dimmed low.  A cool breeze came in through the kitchen door, the screen lifted up halfway, touching my back in through my tee old college tee shirt, as far in the background the little peeper tree frogs were in symphonic escapades.  And I felt decently again.  The wine was no longer a bad thing.  I thought of my father that evening writing out in his handwriting things he believed in, with his beautiful hand.

And I was awake and alive, having a slice of liverwurst, with cayenne and numeric and olive oil and a light touch of prepared horseradish, forgetting the good sail, as it lasted good with the wine, and I thought of reading the Torah.  

Out back, above the trees, the wind was just now picking up, and it would be raining likely in the afternoon.

Somewhere in the starry night the cat is out.  Kerouac is a small room in a plain low house in Orlando, cracking off writing the Dharma Bums, up late but feeling decently.  Somewhere Hemingway is either by a fireplace with the driftwood burning different colors like the old fire in Bimini's fictional Cuba, just as he was when he was squeezing orange peels into fire at a top floor Paris walk up where he wrote.  

And then I hear mom calling, help, help, and when I go upstairs to check on she's in the bathroom, and then later on she's angry, and I find her riled up about having to shut the window I left open for fresh air and rest, and I give her the blanket Elizabeth brought in her Easter baskets for us when she came up with her family to cover her, then we watched a little bit of the second part of Hemingway, Avatar, and soon I'd had enough of the neat wealthy life of Hemingway in Key West.

But who wants to read any of this crap.  It was just my escape into further irresponsibility.  Self therapy.

At night, waking at two, with mom's television mumbling, then turned down, at night came the fear.  And maybe you should have not thought yourself as up for all this if you were not prepared for this fear, a cowardliness, a real true dread.  Part of the fear was in her unrelenting nature, how she too was afraid, and wanted someone to talk to, but feeling she couldn't talk to anyone else, not wanting to call them up out of the blue with all her inner problems.  But mom, everyone is going through stuff like this now.  That's the good thing about now.  No one can go out.  Everybody is worried.

I came back from my walk.  Earlier in the day we'd wound our way out to Sterling Nature Center, and she was happy, 65 out now, the sun out, the lake in the distance giving you a background that something inside you and beyond words responded to.  Then as we walk walked back to the dusty gravel parking lot, the two horses had returned, their women riders with the long horses carrier vans behind pick-up trucks.  There was something about Massage Therapy on the closer wagon, by the chestnut brown horse, the dapple gray one in the distance, and we stood and hesitated, and then the woman called us over and we talked to the horse, a Missouri Fox Trotter, aging now past her twenties, stroked her, we were given pellets of food and the horse gently swept them up.  She has her winter coat still, stringy with dried sweat.  Later in the year, they will go to the Adirondacks, for longer hikes of seven eight hours...

(The older woman tells us of how she once had a frightful accident on the highway, 481, with the horses in her trailer, tipping over, come undone...  People were so nice, and protective, she says.  Silver hair.)

I came back from my walk and cautiously entered, having fed mom some chicken stew earlier, and I got my guitar out, and I played for her, the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and she kept telling me, oh, you're so good, you're so talented, and when I stopped to retune, she asked me if I had broken anything, and I looked at her, irritated with her for babbling away over my process of trying to gather myself.

But by a few songs later, it was the third and final part of Ken Burns PBS on Hemingway, and I needed to sit through it., for I had learned a few things earlier.  I watched from the chair by her bed, and it was also strewn with clothes, and I drank Labatt's Blue from a tall can and it helped me slightly, and then I was emotional by the end.  Then I slept some, then I was awake again, and I had time to myself, alone, which is good if you can find yourself at work again, or terrifying if you can't.

I loved the writing of Hemingway, particularly the palpable early stuff in the short stories, and I knew instinctively what were the good and the great and the best of his works, but I also knew the whole and what each represented.  I knew how to appreciate what was in the poorer ones too, and I liked them too.

But Hemingway scared you.  Kerouac was frightful also, but somehow without the outward direct anger of Hemingway of the kind that made you feel your own depressions and failings and the instrument you worked from.  Hemingway was great about talking about that instrument, but he also scared almost terrified you, and that was why he too needed his bars and buddies and the outdoors, to protect, to insulate himself from the dark side we all have.  Jolly, convivial, of good taste.  Knowing how to do things and live right.

With Kerouac you could rest a bit easier, for his retreat, and this is true of Hemingway too, was into something like Catholicism, or a sort of natural out in the rugged western United States territories love of the raw outdoors and all it had to offer you beyond words, directly.  Kerouac found a place he could rest.  One can suppose Hemingway did too, with the Gulf Stream below him, but he was always in a competition, always in motion, and I knew those pained yet beautiful works when he kept on going even while needing a rest.

But I had to avoid the wine.  I'd been up cooking the lamb into a stew and had a bottle of Ruffino Chianti, and then kept going on with the Bardolino, and the next day I felt like absolute hell and stayed in bed past three in the afternoon.

I suppose the escapes from mom cooing over my gentle guitar playing--I grant she knew it was good--into the soothing of the beer, the cider, the wine, the rest after dealing with her all day, the small angers of her being left in the car in the sun while I went in to shop for groceries, they were like the run for home plate, for the effort to find peace and quiet and some kind of satisfied harmony of work, where you drank to calm the excited running nerves, to focus your athletic endeavor away from the chatter of other duties, as you made that terrifying run for it the writer makes and once having started into must continue writing for the remainder of his life, unless he is somehow sainted, specially gifted.  Always running, always with the ball coming behind you, back from the outfield, to the infield, the roar behind and all around you, and there you are...

Is that any kind of a life?  Living out of a suitcase, far away...

"You're so talented," my mom says, from her chair, "it must not be easy."  And that makes it enough, good enough being here, even if that talent in danger here as anywhere, the rest of the iceberg people cannot see, particularly if you allow them to have expectations from you as a worker bee.  

Talent is a shameful thing as much as a good thing, let me tell you.  But that shameful kind of life has long been honored in various cultures, the Irish with their pub and the music and the tales... staying out too late,  lawless, talkative, friendly... farmers.

To tell you the truth I get a good and fair amount of of agony relief by coming down here into the kitchen at night.  Believe me there is always lots to be done, sorting through the refrigerator's ugly things, used or on going cat food and dishes, the constant elimination of the clutter here in mom's kitchen forest, the just about but not quite empty plastic Pepsi bottles, my beer bottles, the wine bottles, the trash, the trays of Meals on Wheels drop offs that don't quite get eaten in time.  Last night, after we watched the second part of Hemingway, after I took a break, I go check on mom and she's hungry.  Yes, a little pizza will be good.  So, to the detriment of my figure and waist line and the keeping up of my pants and the tucking in of my shirt, okay, there's mushroom and green pepper and even pepperoni to add as the frozen pizza of Wild Mike's spends it twenty minutes in a 400 degree oven...

And in my fantasy, and in Tolstoy's as well, as Levin, in Anna Karenina, I get realigned by little chores, for Count Leo, scything hay with the peasants in the summer, being a strong man.  I succeed with getting a new soft version toilet seat on the upstairs bathroom,, take the old one out, recycle the packaging, the cat comes in back to the back door and I feed him from two of the four cans I put away in the fridge after mom had opened them through various parts of the day while I was out on a walk or napping.

The lonesomeness isn't so bad with three cans of cider into you as you putter around with these small chores.

But reading one writer, after you've been processing another in the fibers of your being with what you have left to give and can give in your life, your intimate personal mental life, will be like feeling a new wind in the morning.   That's a good thing.  Freshening, invigorating.

The whole lot of these old useless males who imagined they might have time enough on their hands and the desire, they did play it out with the vigor of a sport, an intellectual pursuit, something that had some sort of immediate spiritual demand upon them, even if they always have look back and the latter and wonder why, and think it, even they, what bullshit it must be.  Every now and again, one gets through, as a real spiritual epiphany, but none of us can really say, but to pay some weird homage to the thing.

Your old mother's crazy cluttered apartment is hardly one of the fine hotels Hemingway must have stayed in, in London, Havana, Madrid, Paris, Schruns, Austria, the rest of France and Spain, nor it is a bar full of vigorous faces working on getting high as kites from the drink's liberating properties, the stories.  (Without knowing, my brother out of love took me to London for my birthday of turning forty, though I had nothing to show for it, and we stayed at the Mayfair hotel that Hemingway stayed in while covering D-Day, not directly then to my knowledge.  The Dorchester, were Hem drank with a lot of the greats, A.J. Leibling, Capa...)  Nor is it the house of the old fisherman of constant defeat because that is reserved for you yourself.

Nor is it the charted points of a Kerouac road, not the cottage of Gary Snyder, who is a success at everything, not an apartment back in the old days of New York with all the people, nor with the stakes of the house of his sister Nin and her husband and boy and Kerouac Mere down in Rocky Mount, when he becomes out in the woods, meditating almost perfectly and quite perfectly, Saint Jack of the Dogs, before off on another sad horrible lonely venture of patched together transportation.

The sky is clear tonight, thus my thoughts.  I've sprayed a mold killing spray on the cold damp cinderblock mold that has come below the front door.  

It seems my unemployment help is still coming through, but I know I have to decide, and what do I do with all my own stuff let alone my mother's stuff.  It's not so easy politely holding her hand when I have such messes to wake up to and constantly haunt me, what am I to do.  It was a lot to go through that documentary absorbing what I never really wanted to absorb, the volatility of male female relationships, as Hemingway knew and practiced his whole entire life, Jesus Christ.

I look in the mirror, with my growing stubble, and I see Hemingway, and I also see Kerouac.

I have a moment of peace, in the night, 4 AM, no wars going on.  Did any bar I worked ever really get my depth, my occasional muzzled brilliance, my little crow's nest gathering of little shiny bits and pieces, old forms made of metal, or driftwood, or the work of elements meeting what man uses and then must abandon...  I was pretty funny, pretty deep.  They don't pay you for that.  The thing about the bar though was that I just couldn't leave all that work to be done by someone else.  I had to do it, with my hands, my back, my fingers, my legs, my bending, my attention to cleanliness, all the finer stuff few might really now about, why, because you don't get paid well enough for that, even no matter how noble and affirming that work is to society.  By the way, it took Hemingway "the better part of five years" to write one of his greats, Death In The Afternoon which is so totally him and which touches upon all the little things a workman might know or want to know, down to the clock like ticking details and textures and the smells too.

But at work, they sniped me too.  Miguel would relay it back to his wife, Renata, the manager's right hand man, so to speak, what I had allowed in the late night of the bar when the tributaries of chaos came with their satellite friends who too were interesting, and who echoed the pleasures of a chef, while, if I was lucky I had ordered the veal cheeks, or a flank steak, or a duck leg confit, or something that would keep my belly full as the night came to the unpredictable that made it keep its living soul as a ghostly place were people tread and talked.

You get the spook from others, you do, the writers, the musicians.  That is a thing that goes far beyond any medium, the spook that's carried and comes out.  You have to be awfully free and liberal with words in order to capture the slightest part of any of that, your own personal inner crazy.  Shakespeare is the king of all that, and he had kings of it who went before him, to be always able to explode the language, the common usage, use it or explode into dust by reforming it with a complete free oceanic freedom, crashing waves of little bits of speech, here's something for you.  

Larkin, to my mind, was a fellow who honored that as well as anyone.  To through out a term.  High Windows, to be liberal and unafraid enough to say, to admit, to personify, "I work all day, and get half drunk at night."

Smart people, at five AM, know it's all PR, watch what you say out into that effective rented world...

"Is it, has it come to, the bar or mom..." the protagonist asks...

 One true sentence, so I write down, "Jesus Christ."

It's nighttime.  Again, 3 in the morning.  For some reason I have Woody Guthrie's "This land was made for you and me," in my head, but in a low range.  I'm about to research it, on the web, or Youtube, or whatever.  It's a three chord song.  That's all you need.

And here she comes again.  Down the stairs.  To ruin my creative vibe.  She came down an hour ago.  

But no, it had not been so much fun or an adventure, tending bar that year, nor the year before it, not the year before that one either, nor as simply living as a barman who was off duty some times and writing as a way of self-therapy.  There was always the possibility of the panic phone call from my demented mother saying that she was not home, that she needed to get back to her real home, or that why was she all alone, or that there's no food, and no wine here.  Everybody else avoided being directly in this awkward place, and even before those troubles that came and grew, myself the only one who would call or be called by her, or go visit, or pay her much attention, even before all this, there had been my own living situation, one which I should never have accepted, but which also had grown increasingly awkward, and my friend the landlord's insistence that he knew what I really did at night, and that I should come right out and admit that I was inclined to be some form of homosexual, even as he was a terribly sweet man, a lonely man, a man I was friends with, and we got each other on many many good levels, and he did much for me, though of course that all evaporated after a long slow fraying of the strands that hold such ropes together.  He was kind, though, always, even when being strange and hard to deal with, not wanting to let me go if I came up and had a drink with him, an awkward pause as I went down the stairs and looked for some words to close the door by, and he knew, as our friendship grew tragic, that I was, as he put it, "under a lot of pressure."

But it was the phone calls, the Mary Lincoln mood swings, the crying anxiety, the volatility, of the calls as I tried to get to work the best way possible, early, to deal with extra things that might, as they often did, come up, let alone the phone calls I might get during my shift.  And I'd do my best, feeling quite guilty of course, when she would say I'm home but I'm not home and I need someone to take me to the house up the road a piece, and I tell her about the things she could see because she was in her kitchen, and there was the inexpensive painting of elephant mother and child, a picture of her grandmother, the mirror her own mother had purchased and passed on, a sign of the better life, the dining room table, now in the kitchen by the landline phone, the old chairs that went with it, furniture my parents purchased together up in New Hampshire after they got married.  

It was less of a strain on my nerves, even as I required monkish long hours to scrape the surface of whatever creativities I might find within to soothe myself, giving that up too, along with my old apartment with my stuff in it, after I'd moved out, finding myself suddenly on my own.  Except that now, I could also be interrupted, now in person, or face a possible hard time from her if I took some time for myself, a walk, a drive in the car without her to make me nervous, and all of it dragging down my verbal and mental energies.  No fun, not much of it, anyway, unless I was occupying certain regions of my brain with the making of a stew, dish duties endless, a project like coping with the mold on the cinder cement block basement walls from the water that came in from above.  

And like living in the Palisades, access to the quiet bluffs and the California Pines, a little breath grove with the soft needles I could do all my yoga on, t

he river below, an easy 35 minute walk to work on a bus line....  my outlet was also, in addition to writing and trying to read, the latter having become difficult for me, as the guilt of my past as a fallen college student haunts me, still, was wine, and I was by this point quite familiar with wine, and I'm not the only one either, in that particular boat, except that I was pretty much a loser, an increasingly weird and old bachelor with his own ways so engrained in him, the hours he kept, despite a constant self lecture from more prudent voices in his head, "you're burning the candle at both ends" type of thing, alone, and the best thing about my life was that I had, at least, no children to try and support.  Great.

My humor of course turned more crass, as the stuff of a healthy male female relationship faded from me as my lack of resources dwindled down in a pained way.  Well, you have your health, they tell you.  But the isolation will drive you mad, and there seemed no more possibility of any love story fitting to my tastes anyway, as much as Catholicism might reassure you.  So they told me, my more upwardly mobile bar characters...  I was the crass one.  Okay, I admit it. That's how it goes.  But I'd still smile and repeat what I heard from the busboy man, "mucho carné," when an attractive female of the human species passed by, back and forth to the upstairs bathroom at the old Dying Gaul.

So what was I telling you...  the mind gets distracted quite easily these days, tired.  Up here at mom's, I find another thing, like how she puts the toilet paper roll's feed coming from the inside, against the wall, rather than rolling down outside from the top so you can find the end in the darkness rather than fishing for it, and I can't help when I suddenly yell out, something like "stupid bitch," so unhealthy I have become I'm afraid.

Recycled anger, not walking enough, trapped here, wintertime, dried out, half dead.

But I suppose, or rather, this is what I thought, when I looked back at my old life.  There at the bar.  There in the midst of the city.  And my thought sort of ran, or runs, like this, that in order to. be successful, to carry on your military campaign of being a student council president (I was once one myself, but of a class of about 180, and I wasn't very aggressive, and soon learned I was terrible at the job in the fibers of my DNA), to do that in Washington, D.C., or any place like it--and you may feel quite free to completely disagree, as that's all we seem to be able to do these days--what you had to do, if you wanted to be like that, was to take absolutely zero risk.   Yes, you might have taken a risk taking out a shit ton of grad school loans, but to do such a thing would wed you to a job and a career, and that's what everyone did and still does.  Very rational after all.

But there was no risk to such a life.  You were caught, by then, if you did that.  You're life was, at best, scripted, in a good way, sure.  Plenty of leeway for success, because it was the success of everyone else, therefore you were supported in whatever you did.

But some of us, to live like that were to bring on a rather steady case of liquid diarrhea.  You just couldn't fucking handle it, to be quite honest, not in any of the places the forms of such had seeped into like a poisonous kind of water always on the floor, getting your shoes wet.  Even if your co-workers had great lean fine asses and red hair, and to them you were, in the bars up on the Hill, James Bond.

Without the foot soldier barman who kept Robert Shoffner, great food critic of the Post, happy, would there be the early recognition, of course there would be, but you helped with your own two hands, 

Without my efforts to get the old wine bar upstairs there at the Dying Gaul up and running and a steady cash cow from my giving my life's blood to it, and all my friends told me, you need a share in that, given what you've done, without those efforts, there would not be a second restaurant up the road, at least in some sense.   My sincere appreciations, taught by friends through the connections that were there, that had come together, let me understand what Chef Francis, old friend of Bruno, could do, after the left the ambassador residence job.   I wasn't about to partner with him, I didn't have the time, the energy..

Even in the city, you really felt that there was no one who had ever taken a risk, never thought of a reinvention more aligned with a soul within.  It was all about, as it will be until this poor old planet dies finally under our selfish morbid weight, the resume, the C.V.   A horrible insult to deliver, but, one asks, where is the soul these days.  (Biden, yes, thank god.  Perhaps the system works after all.)

In a town where no risks are taken, you get lazy.  Imagination is squeezed, narrow.  Blood out of it.  No room for it, not here, anywhere.  The bar was a last stand.  The native American's revenge upon the invading race, of karma.  Your women will eat you alive.  They cannot be women anymore.  Men cannot be men anymore, unless they are selling everyone else out.  Everyone criticizes every one else to the most minutest detail.

The leg of lamb.  I under-cooked it, considering the thermometer, or the placement of it, like everything else in mom's apartment, a bit of a mess a bit off, and rare lamb in such a form is not that appetizing.  Lamb chops I have overcooked often enough to be that sad.  This time I didn't have the rosemary or the fresh thyme like I wanted, but dealing with your mother any grocery shopping is nerve-wracking.  The thermometer at 130.  I let it rest.

Irish style, or Navarre... And now, a stew the fatty pieces.

are there any good interesting people, outside of the restaurant business, still there? 

the successes of their careers has dulled their minds.  and good for them.  dead personalities. too often playing a role.  which they did to be successful, very diligent, very hard working, very get up early and work all day and deal with the shit, except for why?

The most boring people, who would show you in a phony way how interesting they were, through lines of exalted happiness, or cleverness, or smug self-reliant success of which they were not reaping the rewards quite yet, though they already were, while the rest of us starved.  words out of their mouths were dead, though they thought themselves interesting, enough to not listen, blinded.

None of us are interesting, or worthy of a single thought beyond our own little mouthed childishness.  

So after Kerouac, and those efforts, I went back to Hemingway, and both of them carried a lot of traction, and both of them stood up, one way or another, to proclaim and work.  And what they did, each of them, was, is, glorious, such that there is no real place for a' many of us to stand, and even walk where we want to be, without them.

Myself.  A poor bare college grad. Visiting my brother, Inman Square, he's making a success out of his life, has a motorcycle, Thunder, a Honda 500, something like that, dark green gas tank.  I've gone out to the UMass Boston campus, the JFK Library, via the T.  And I ask them, as I get in, I'd like to see a little bit of a manuscript from Islands in the Stream.  Well, they are rather tight-assed with me.  They don't give a shit.  I, as a visiting idiot, have three choices here.  They let me, give me, so that I can look at it, a copy of some scribble, Hemingway's, pursuant to my interests, and it's some strange scrawl pen on paper sketch, Dillinger, gas station, rum running, boat, I can't make much out of it, but it's a very preliminary sketch of his, just hanging out there.  Still, weird, strange, nonsensical, but, the word scribble of EH.   I got back to Cambridge.  I got off at the wrong T Station and walked back toward Harvard Square.  I forget where we were supposed to meet.   And then I even see my beautiful brother coming toward me with his cold beautiful sullen face, sunglasses, not looking at any peasants, just driving forward on his great motorcycle.  No smile. Grim sullen cool, like Eastwood.  Hmm, I say, maybe he didn't have the greatest of days. 

So I walk back, all the way back, thinking my little poetic thoughts as I walk past all these houses of the successful, and in order to protect myself from the lavish kings of success had in every way, money money, lucrative time, just don't be an idiot, don't be a dope, just use your college degree and connections and culture to its good extent.

I'm ready to tell my brother, by the time I finally get back to the door, another mile I've walked today, for walking is already good, and guess what, he's disappointed with me, like I fucked up his whole life, and I try to tell him, but I saw you so beautiful, and I was there, in the Harvard Square, but then I realize, his cold cool look was aimed at me, the loser, the defunct, the idiot, the fool kid who cannot be responsible, who did not do what he was supposed to do, as an adult, who has a supreme talent for not being where he should be at the right time, even though I thought I had a good memory for such things.

So he won't talk to me, too disgusted with me for my lack of timely meetings, and who knows indeed what good plans I might have fucked up, it's all my fault, for the extra dilly dally, over there at the Ernest Hemingway manuscripts that I think so rightly are kept here, at I.M. Pei's JFK library, and let alone all the interesting things any school boy might find down below, in the museum of Jack and Bobby, all f them, and I never tell anyone about how I went to the great beautiful library of my favorite most sensitive and poetic of presidents next to Lincoln and was allowed to look at, up on some second library balcony floor, some weird disjointed and unconnected but beautiful hand-made 8 by 11 page scribble, as far as I could tell, of Ernest Hemingway's.  A tidbit.  I had not badge to show, no scholar tag.  Clearly, they just didn't want to talk to me.  Or maybe I should have asked.  But their coldness, that said something to me, an anathema to what I might have hoped for.  There was no bar here, no porno Paris artistic tits and ass for sculptors or lesbians of the time back then, with their Modernist collections.

And then I sort of realized, as a quite young adult inkling, that my brother was in no way, or at least not exactly, like my father, though I do believe that both of these men had taken issue with the way I'd lived so that I'd failed with what I should have been doing.  Yeah, that's how it goes. Dad was gentle, always got the musician I wanted to be....  he liked my writing.  My brother, he wanted to be mad at me, and like my mother, always looking for tension, an excuse, to attack.   Bless me Father for I have sinned.  Accuse someone else, that's good too, fuck you.

It always meant the world to me, not to be waited on, to order, etc, but that the chefs, the French ones, got to know, got to respect me...  Le Caprice, who remembers that place?  

The one true sentence, 

how lame you have to be, to live in 

 Double triple quadruple quintuple miseries of this day and hour.

Out of a job and can I ever get back?  What about my stuff, where does that go when all this is through, and do I, can I, even go back to that, without more shame upon me, and old mom won't be taken care of anyway, and how's her money holding up and she wants to go out for dinner and "adventure" every night, and I sit there through it all, nodding at the repeated questions, "where are you going next," "how's your writing going," "how's the restaurant doing," all of which are questions that add to my aches and pains, sitting there, and all I can do really is go out for a walk, finding some peace in the sunlight, a pair of Canada Geese by their low puddle marsh by the power grid station even in the cold, bundled up with every layer, and I don't bother the geese and walk by slowly, treading carefully, and through the high tassel dried grasses and over the abandoned railroad tracks, little weedy trees growing up some you can't walk through... up over the grassy hill underneath the wooden crucifix power lines in the Good Friday winds that hold birds up in a difficult hover, an osprey, large blackbirds...

I try, going through the papers all over strewn throughout her office upstairs where I sleep and rest.  Piles and piles, the book collector woman of Auburn in the 19th Century ordering books from Southerain's in London, etc., and all the letters and the timelines of all these people, all of which she ordered xeroxed from the Syracuse University rare book library, in clipped or bound sheafs...  old computer manuals, computer cables, different generations, all of it mixed together, and books leaning or stacked or on a shelf or just lying on the floor somewhere underneath other papers, and in amongst all this, which I honor and try to save in an economical fashion, and amidst these piles, the photographs, old yellow envelopes and some just with the negatives, a few attempts at photo albums like we used to...  treasures in image, ancestors, time, memories, the old houses, the safety and innocence of happy childhood imaginations and love and the beauty, the unique beauty, saintly in its own nature in every face and captured gesture...  and I should with my own handsome genes passed down have passed on and lived a normal life with wife and happy responsibilities and children as sweet as I once was, looking out over the brook that came down from the old willow tree swamp that channeled the water down from higher farm fields and woods, dropping down through it all and rubbing the massaged roots of life shouldered up by the rock and grit soil.  Old cars, the '66 blue Volvo station wagon parked there in the driveway up on Ernst Road when the house was built so perfect and fresh, in the grove of Elms and Sugar Maple...

And in the meantime, it finally dawns on me that I've breathing in mold from the cinderblocks in the basement here, at the corner of the steps of 35 Cedarwood, the ice and icicles, every day of winter...  Maybe that's why I vomit when I wake up, always congested, go downstairs, trying to breath, nauseous, and it beats me more often than not, puking with either empty stomach or fuller with thicker things than bile and foam...  And after I do all the dishes and have done the cooking, mom might come down and say something like "put the toilet seat down," or "this place is a mess," if she were to venture to clean a cat dish in the sink.

So, you go for a walk, when the sun is out, over the other road to the east, up it to the hill where you can now see the lake in the distance, blue sea past house tops and roof tops and church steeples and the hospital bricks and the smooth cement of smoke stacks and all the magnificent trees that reach up to blue sky now with cones and cones, and the grass is green now, and that house over there, on the south side of Ellen Street a house with paint just like that of my maternal great grandparents in old Lynn, Massachusetts.    And I go up to the crest of the hill and then down a gentle slope and here's a path through the grass by the old Polish St. Stephan's, in through the back door, and I can walk my gentle observations now warmer inside with the sun's rays low over the pews and the resonance of a church like a footstep has the same sound of opening the cover of a grand piano's keys as it always clunks, you can't keep an acoustic instrument of any sort quiet...  I pace slowly gently along the church walls from west to north to east and then up to the front where there is an alter draped with an appropriate linen covering, Cardinal Wojtyla used once in the Seventies in American and found in storage somewhere.  

When I get back to mom, after leaving the safe sanctuary and through the parking lot back to Ellen and down past the few old beaten interesting farmhouses, back to Cedarwood, first to the old Corolla to look at the pictures and iPhone 8 shot videos I've taken on my walk, warming up with the car on, charging up the phone from 7 percent up, and then thinking, as I can't see so well with the sun reflecting from windows east of the setting sun looking into the phone, and in my mind as always now, more or less, constantly, how's mom doing, will she be a bit loud and tipsy, and how much of an attack will she mount on me of how she's been lonely and needs to talk and talk, but when I get in she's not too bad, sitting there on the couch with the cat, and I just want to take the chicken breast tenders out of the fridge and cook a sort of Chicken Cacciatore, she of course wants to go to the Press Box, and finally, exhausted, I relent.  Friday evening, 6 o'clock, it's busy when we get there, but we only have to wait ten minutes, and again, there are the happy people who belong to each other all through the place, and we don't belong anywhere.

We get sat, we get our wine, we order, chicken fajita for her, haddock fried for me with cole slaw, tartar sauce, lemon, ketchup, sweet potato fries... and I try to tell her over the din of happy people through their work week, and I'm already remembering how the construction guys called in to their table upstairs, in from their journey travels working on the nuclear plant yearly make over, wished gently to wave us through as we walked up, and a gracious act and gesture from these big burly maybe biker type guys, big and heavy, "wait guys," and I say in the cold under the awning, thank you, we're good, we'll go in after you, that sort of tingle you get from a buried sweetness coming from anonymous strangers when you need it, as a cold blue dusk, holding mom gently by the arm, as we enter the gauntlet, mom is happy...

Ahh, when we get home, what was I thinking, I'm tired, she still wants to go on, "you know, people who go out to restaurants like to talk afterward..."  But I'm done, for this day, Good Friday, after balancing the leftover containers and the car key and getting mom back, I'm done, exhausted.  And gloomy enough to just want to go rest, and soon I fall into dream, dreams of old opportunities for fun, suited to one's talents, and in the dream I'm with a guy who's a drummer and we pull out our guitar and bass and start playing some cool old reggae song, from which I wake up cold and dry and another deep sore throat, a thick and runny nose, and the night before I'd observed, as I might have told mom over dinner, after she'd asked me maybe an additional time I didn't need, where are you going next, I tell her, well, Kerouac, after the best years of his productive literary life, alone, obscure, he lived in Orlando, in a separate little apartment in a small tract house bungalow sort of a thing, near a great live oak tree strewn with Spanish moss, and at least he was protected here, obscure, no one to bother him, "hey, you're the King of the Beats," he could still write at night, and then sleep outdoors in a sleeping bag.  I mean, it's a great admission of the truth.  You've been on the road for a long wearisome time, and even if you have nowhere solid to go land upon, a tree branch with the stuff you've weeded through and valued and used and put mutual marks upon, however with luck or fate such things happen, even when it all tied to your own irresponsibility, fuck it, I want to say to old questioning mom who once and still is a little girl, pretty, headstrong, a mini Mary Lincoln perhaps...  you can't fight it anymore, you go with it rather than against, a certain kind of fight still there, but what's the point, all you've absorbed, like we all must and do, the body blows of life, the hatred, the being cast aside, as must happen to any writer creature of exile pure.  

What I write... that alone is a separate but quite relevant and involved question for any writer of prose or poetry.  Such that I fear it if anyone who knows me or is related to me were to look in over my shoulder to see what this old boy is up to after all his promises of blossoming seasons of earlier flowering beauty...  those who ask themselves with love and deep worries now, how are things going...

But I cannot look back at them, and I can only say that what I write is fiction, a complete fiction, especially if one were to consider the real science behind such practices as Joyce did in exploring his reality.  See, none of it is true, 'tis just the active mind, a mind going through the necessary mediations, and therefore no one can take anything I say personally or seriously or think to heavily much about it, for I am just like you and you are just like me, and we are all going through life, and that is all I mean to emphasize, in a way to put the writing far far beyond any need of bitter critique of estimation of any value of prose ability, or readability, or anything like that, you know, the kinds of questions that go along both with "why and what are you writing," and "why are you spending your time this way, when after all, work is work and time is money, earnings for a future, for that which is beyond the little fairy tales existing in our mental unreality musings, for your own security, and isn't writing just a sort of off shoot, not to be taken seriously, of those of us who like our wine and our company and song at night to soothe us, but not meant to be more than a sort of hobby...  one that is not of much use, really..."

So that sometimes I look back and my guts and spine and skin grows cold with a sudden jump automatic, saying to yourself, writing is nothing more, as I do it, in my style, with a sort of Penthouse Letters style.  "I got out my wah wah peddle and we were sweating up in the attic as I played my electric guitar and we both felt it, and soon, with each touch of the pedal we began to feel the vibrating deeper within.  She looked at me and relaxed, both of us feeling it in, her in her tight cut-off shorts, and she started rubbing her breasts..."  Fantasy, in other words.  And even Keats, the Grecian Urn and the line no one can really fully understand expect through being inspired like jazz musicians to their riffs, truth, beauty, perception, our little minds that can only take so much, and which in order to make ourselves successful and responsible in life, must put at arm's length.  

And Hemingway himself would say it, in all sorts of ways:  write, don't talk about it, for you cannot talk about it, or however he would have put it in Hemingway.   

And all this too will cause lots of friction.  Friction in places where it would seem you needed peace most of all, agreement, open communication, instead of argument and anger and pointed argument fingers attempting to impose some kind of human ape surviving sort of interest...

When you finally realize things, the world turns upside down.  And you laugh, almost, albeit in an oftentimes grim but touched way, all your friends and allies and good souls lining up on your side, your buddies, people you can talk to, people like musicians who want to play music and not lord anything over you, least of all their popularity or any of that shit, the people without successes that would exclude a single soul, least of all your own...  Like Buddha you lean back and laugh at things you once considered important with all the juvenile hormones running through you so much that you yourself keep on running, and at least show up to work for similar and related reasons, wherever my moon in my twelfth house might be tonight or any night... You, I, the great over I, placed some form of illusioned interest in all sorts of things and concepts of how to live, wealthy, successful of course, but all of this was seen through some kind of eyes no more higher than that of a lizard reptile. 

And Kerouac, say of him what you will, sums it up just as clearly as anyone... "who knows... we're all going to die..."

Old Hem, Ernie, he liked the form of fiction, of the brief cutting sentences so direct to experience, the short story, the short passage, a little theater, behind which really any ready understands quite well, very instinctively and directly, "Nick trailed his hand in the cool water as they went across the lake in the canoe, quite certain that he would never die..."  at the end of that story, Indian Camp, in which his uncle is a doctor who has to perform an emergency Caesarian, "damn squaw bitch," when she bites him, and the poor father to be, young hunter of Upper Michigan tribe, in the upper bunk, leans over, unable, in the midst of it all, to handle it....  you know the story.  

The stories were an imaginative refuge for him.  They were his way to talk about the most close and intimate things there were to him, and in fiction, no one could get all that mad about him and all his irresponsibilities, taken care of by Hadley as he was back then.

The greater form, or at least equal to the luminescent short stories of his early career, came later, in the memories of how he did it all, seen most clearly in later forms, the stories of A Moveable Feast, and in the later acceptance of fiction's blending in with the realities we think are real in our minds, the manuscript journals of Islands in the Stream.  

You can't do it, you can't write anything, you can't think, without that crucial danger, the fear of shocking other people, loved ones who might be hurt deeply by any word your inner saint writer might delve in with, the fear of stepping out across the line.   And that happens, not through any great adventure, necessarily, though it can, not with driving a motorcycle incredibly fast when you're high out of your gourd... No, it shows up better when you get more tender and sensitive and think of gentle things, like eating spaghetti birthday dinner in childhood sweetness, your favorite.

Oh, sadness all around us, the seasons, truth.

You'll never be accepted, not until you accept yourself.

What can I say?  My lovely mom has always and ever supported me, in a perfect way.

"Well, I’ve had to deal with her my whole life, so of course there is meaning, of some kind, in that.  A strong within unto herself, headstrong, a woman of her own independent reality, that cannot be shaken.

And I am forced to enter into this picture, bound to it, for life, and everyone else runs."

He lay finally there on the green soft breast of the air mattress of comfortable support, floating again, four AM for the first time back to himself again it seemed for the first time in days.  The visit had been an ordeal.  Trying to get everybody on the same page, and no one could even hear each other.  Now, with a final day to go, however it would work out, feeling a guilt of not being happy with anyone else, itself a liberating artistic feeling, he lay back, intoning within the prayers, Our Father, Hail Mary, Jesus Prayer, reciting them within his body from the lowest tail bone chakras on up, so that by the time he got to the giving of the daily bread part he had come up the sacred Moses serpent energies to his belly within.  And so on, as he brought the allowed energy to him up through the breast and the throat, the words of the intoned prayer up to the inner eye, finding the right place, as if the texts of such prayers were within his body, as much as any code or helix of DNA...  And then on the next prayer, as he needed all these prayers.  His Hemingway hand, guided by God, moved to the two short glasses with ice cubes and red wine.

The words of the prayers helped him understand the chakras, and the chakras helped him understand the words of the prayers, oddly enough.  Functions.  He had finally learned something, made a small stupid inane contribution.  He'd been trying to intertwine them, to make them fit, without forcing anything, and the weather stayed cold, the air was hard to breath, his kitchen fingers and dried out, he'd become so afraid of the truth that he knew he needed to tell the truth, finally, and the truth was a combination, of course, of work and prayer.   You needed a lot of time for it.  And time could be given only by God, and even then it was running out, but in a way, quite appropriate.

And oddly with all falling around his own life dragged down into unfixable disaster, again he felt that events were like the hitting of a tuning fork, revealing himself and whatever it was about him, how he was not normal, and fame, as people trying to make him conventional again, was completely unsuitable for him.  You finally got why fame would have indeed broken Kerouac, such that one could see it in The Steve Allen Show interview, reading a sweet passage to a musical background of soft life giving and supplication nourishment of jazz.  You might only get that if you too had slowly found or grown within enough to discover the truth the reality the poor old Kerouac within, knowing that you too would never fit in, but bore within a creature duty of solemn soldiering honor to reveal what the creature really was about, no more lies, the real true thing to bring to the strange garbled by many Babel voices marketplace, the true nature within of the human soul made by God upon the land and the seas of His world.

The visit had brought tremendous pain, a tearing away of what we might say belongs to a past we are no longer capable of being part of.  Five months had it been, away from the old life and all it was, being good at a job through which you knew a lot of people.  You smile polite, endure, as you’ll always ever be stuck in some dream state, because you still have to belong in the world, enough to make a living, but now the greatest part of your reality is dealing with the Shakespeare madwoman living out her own life, now downstairs as you hide at nighttime awake, worrying about your own brain and all the abuses you’ve pounded into it in order to soothe it and the poor body it rides in.

Anniversary of my father’s death.  Ten years.

And at the same time, by the same breath, they, whoever they might be, in any sense of the imagination, past, present or future, would deny Kerouac as being far too strange and unlikely a guy, a man, a vessel, a person of culture and words, in their own short sighted visions to be a bearer of wisdom and things of a general nature worth listening too, call them soulful or spiritual if you must.  You too would have looked at him, and been stuck, between boy I don't think so, but yet catching a flooding wind from the details caught in his work that would be as holy as anything else you could find, if you were of a certain Massachusetts river kind of Catholic Church faith of humble parish Irish, Polish, Italian, Slovak, then mixing that again with old Yankee science of Theosophical collections of sacred texts...  The inevitable and true "flowering of New England," of educated people and well-funded cloistered educations, that let the light come out of the ground at certain spots, Transcendental, poetic, enlightened...  even as they were hermits.

He wrote at night, in the quiet, with his visions and glass of wine like they all do.  Till all the voices of the last day went back into sand and dirt and earth.

The glass of wine in the restaurant, unless you’re working there, does not work.  It can only remind you of the physical depressions your core must endure, the slow crucifixion you pressing ever in closer with passing days.  Better to be a waiter then.  Otherwise it’s numb yourself to the tedium of conversation when you already have enough going on in your own terrified mind humming that you can barely hear, can barely manage to get everyone ordered at the table so that the next will come along and pass.

Kerouac too was stuck with the care of his mother.  And he took use of that situation to continue on with the writing of what he had to say out of his own painful experience of life and its attendant visions, his seeking to be clear and write clear. It was just a situation the fates handed to him. 

And in the midnight pain he would have seen the widening gap between himself and his own views and all those who are somehow able to fit in.  He hurt so bad, of course he needed wine.  The call of higher duties, higher responsibilities left him barely able to take care of himself.

King of the Beats, King of the Jews.  Anthony Bourdain.  Stay away from fame.

You're entangled with physics here, the rocks of life.

(Once he's stuck with fame, you cannot blame who he was, Kerouac;  you can't blame him for not being able to really recognize his own daughter, brushing her off, even knowing who she was, poor thing.  He was far gone by then, a fifth a day of Johnny Walker, not that we need to know that.  As a real writer, you know your things might well be gone out into the street.  It's something no one could explain.  It becomes more the state of being so than the writing itself, almost.)

If you were to say, "everyone is a blood sucker in one way or another in order to belong in this economy, the way it is, and there is no other way, but it's still worth questioning," they'd throw rocks at you, call you a deserter, a bum.  I wouldn't blame them.  That's the thing, right?  Everyone needs a job, and indeed they do.  But, somehow, maybe you know what I mean, not that I am speaking for myself or anything here.

In a way, yes, in ways you always have to go back to the politeness, the joy of the human gifts we're able to give each other still, even if you're at maximum irritations level, with so much pressure, the last thing you want to do is to fit in with some polite schedule, or for taking old biddies around on long quiet roads with their pee clock ticking or whatever, the adult becoming the grumpy child again.  

But you got no complaints, it will all work out.  You can make a go of it with whatever you have on hand, find some sort of a type writer, a kitchen table for a desk, an old rusty car to drive around for groceries and wine and cat food.  The rest?  Well...  say good bye to stuff.  'Cause you're never going to be a blood sucker yourself, at least at the rate you're going, nor an effective child of Roman Empire, so, let the fates that taught you and made you wise away from fame and the literary crap mainstream children's toys and fancy popular things, let them who made you a writer continue on with their magic.

Earplugs to deal with mom until she's reached another stage, another point.  

I never had real Beats in my life.  Nope.  No one particularly interesting.  That's the way it goes, and I'm okay with that, because I don't need any more crazy in my life.  I got myself.  I've had a long list of characters, all worthy, each a perfection, and as you age, even you yourself no longer immune to it, visible, physical, you see it better, what characters they were.  Because you were a foolish innocent, enchanted with your own inner energies.  Enough of a rube to be taken by fools and bums or anyone telling a story, where everyone else will run from that, and find only the successful stories and the blowhards telling them.