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.

 In through the first sliding door, still laid with matts for the winter and the wet and the wind, in past the plastic bottle and can and glass recycling machine, then in through the second automatic door, where the grocery carts are parked in nested formation, and then through the door inside the small old supermarket, the newspapers stacked to the left, the little blue grocery baskets to the right as you head in past bread on the right and then the peanut butters...  There's a little raised booth where a manager's assistant sits, where you buy cigarettes, other transactions, and throughout, if you look, the old market is trimmed and decked with touches of old Oswego and the train station motifs throughout, if you're not too lost in yourself.  I go through and look at grocery items.  Does something speak to me?  Is there a psychic bend in time to which direction I am bent in, buy bacon today, oxtail or short-ribs for a stew, sausage, what else do I need, on top of the strictly normal functional things, the cold cuts, the fried chicken to keep mom's stomach happy when I go for my walk when she's started into the wine already.  Spinach in bags, pre-washed, onions in little red fiber net basket, nodding to markets long ago, old brakeman's lamps hanging above the checkout counters, toy trains along high shelves for decoration, framed pictures of the old town in old photographs back in its magnificence, large old brick buildings on both sides of the great wide river feeding out into the port, mills, grain elevators, small factories, before the evil destructions of Urban Renewal.  How many could have lived in the old Nestle plant complex down the road in Fulton, poor also beautiful Fulton...

And Mom is already on me, "Jesus Christ," banging angrily at her yesterday's newspaper when I come up or down from my hiding sleeping place, coughing and hacking, some bad air in here after so many years, maybe the foundational leak under the front door staining the cement blocks...  She'll be angry and dissatisfied with me all day, as I keep her, as she sees it, in the car when I go in to do the minor Shopping of the Groceries Station of the Cross, so that she can use it for leverage when she says, "well, what are we going to do now,"  just in the way she says, "Well, I'm just a stupid woman, what would I know..." 

The cough, the great cough.  It's not fun.  No simple way to clear it now.  Dry air?  Mold?  Failing lungs?  Some organ growing with a cancer within to push in on things...  I try.  I heat water, I make my tea, I try to demure, outside, clear the upper breathing...

Every day a battle.  With an economic cold hard reality behind it all, and because of hers, my own.  Family are the ones who will crucify you.  Looking the other way.  

At night, the creepy things mom murmurs, before she goes to bed, again, unhappy with me, the queen displeased, as she leans back on her bed, barely enough room for her little old body, piles of books and papers about to slide (they keep me company, she says, adding to my sense of all the lonely abuse she's withstood, as much my fault as anyone's), "I can find a new husband," really mom. And adding a little dig.  "One that likes me."  It's not enough I've found her her cat, told her that this is indeed, her home, "no, I"m up at the other place, and it's too cold to walk home."  She murmurs on.  "You hate me," she might be saying, and I do, she's right.  Not that I ever meant to.  And I empathize with her too, of course.  I did my best, she says.  I don't deserve this.  Yes, you're right mom.  

Maybe I could get some help. From somewhere.  The Void.  From the rich worlds of the I don't care people.  To whose world I can't get back to.  Pretending to have seen too much, in my own head of judgmental too kind to others nonsense.

The day starts and ends in the same way.  I go back to a nap, a light sleep, hiding again, before I can sneak a few hours to myself.

Stories of the Irish.  

My grandfather, hard-working chef, working more than one job to get by and take care of family, breaking his body down, slowly, bit by little bit, unfiltered cigarettes, my aunt has an "Aunt Jean" story, as my mom is lucid around 7:30 before the dinner I've worked on, simple, easy, is ready...  It's Thanksgiving, and coming down from Beverly in from Danvers--mom must be away at college at UMass by now--they show up at Aunt Jean and Jimmy's, four in the afternoon.  "Jean, when did you put the turkey in the oven," he asks, as they come in the house.  Everyone is hungry, probably.  Aunt Jean hasn't even put the bird in the over at this point...

And maybe sometimes it is better to have a rough job, the one my grandfather Ed worked, one that involves a kind of thinking deeper than the business set mind.  "Work smarter," they say, but, what good does it do the Earth, this planet...  to work smarter, not harder.  

I run the dishwasher through, two nights and days worth, I suppose, after dinner, and getting mom wrangled and set, something on TV I can watch for a little while, a reality show about homesteaders, Swiss immigrants, who came to Alaska to escape Hitler and the Nazis.  

After a few hours rest, around 1 in the morning, I sneak past a snoozing mom on her bed, I need to get up, write a bit for my own sanity, as it's been one of those days when it closes in, mom sinking down into her condition, you don't even have any time to think of old slights and shitty people, 

So I come downstairs, having moved from the grievous basement's cold darkness, a towel hung over a PVC pipe tube to block the light of the front, the southwestern little low to the ground window, having moved upstairs again, on the same level with mom.  The upstairs bathroom.  I have a narrow space for my sleeping gear, but, maybe it will be okay, with earplugs at the ready.

I cough some.  And then the need to vomit comes, so I stand outside the kitchen on the back stoop, trying to clear my passages, but up it comes, thickly, it will not wait.  I can't make it back to the bathroom, which has its own close airs, no clear air coming from the sea, so out it must come, over the little railing into an overgrown little place, a weed bush of a tree.  Oh fucked up days of fucked up days, and by now, a year away, how will I ever get back now, how will I not be marked, by my own insane out of polite society customs, being the Scape Goat in life....  Thick glop.  Here comes the Wild Mike's pizza I took from frozen into life last night late, sharing with mom, adding fresh mozzarella and banana peppers from a jar for a nice tang.  And up comes the wine colored things from the bottom of the stomach, of a system, an animal, trying to breathe, trying to escape from all his own bad choices day after day, trying to be a good Jew, a good Christian, a good whatever. 

But how will I ever be employed again, and I'll never make enough money to have anything but rented, on the way to, perhaps sooner rather than later,

a final resting place.

It was warm for a bit, then it got colder again.  The wind, 25 to 30, hurt.  

I thought mom's hair appointment was today, and that made us both nervous and mom was fishing around upstairs in her drawers doing nothing from what I could tell, just looking blindly in drawers, fiddling with this and that, and then with the visit this week from Saint Elizabeth coming all this way on the shitty road, the road so lonely, both ways, no one giving a fuck, and my own holy middle european monk father saying even, "I wouldn't wish this drive on anyone."  Cold darkness, shit coal mine territory after all the farmland of beautiful Cana home of New York State before the land changes to a natural boundary south of Binghamton's beginning of rivers going different ways and the valleys breaking up in a foreboding way, this way, the hard ground of Pennsylvania, a long no-man's land extends before you with a cruel road too.  The publicly available radio will be in and out as far as things that sustain, though one could always go to Country Music beyond the occasionally but sort of rarely useful preacherman Jesus radio on the low college station end of the dial, all the way to Harrisburg, get across the river, and finally Gettysburg, with the Round Tops right there, sustaining breasts of history after the wilds.  Ground to rest on, after all the struggles, please let me stop here, but you have to go on, and on, toward the worst part of this disillusioning drive that reveals so much about the American Economy.  

God Bless Joseph R. Biden, Jr., President of these United States of America, who knows these towns, lived in, knew the heritage, the difficult lives of Harrisburg, after Scranton and Wilkes Barre and and and Hazleton, the Burger King in Ravine off 81, preferable to, at least different from the next stop, another McDonald's as you drive out of the last danger of the mountains unto the flats that lead to a western leading road of tedium even through beautiful country farmside, past Fort Indiantown Gap...  tricky rest stop you don't want to stop at because it's too hard and suicidal to try to merge back on...

And Trump just came in, to satisfy their justifiable sense of displacement, the things the Hedge Fund guys and the Koch Brothers and all the One Percent so don't give a fuck that the Confederate Flag still at rest stops and gas stations and McDonalds in the back of Ford F150s.  

But I won't go on about such.  

draft sketch 3/26/21

What they don't tell you in a city or in any town is that everything under the economic sky is, in its own way, subsidized.  And there I was, a dumb kid working my ass off in the DC restaurants for pennies, anesthetized by what once were the classic affordable democratic pleasures of company and dining and a bit of a wine that go back to the beginning of us. 

Sure, there were enormously accomplished people, finely educated beyond being just having learned how to think, and learn, but onward and upward into law degrees and so forth and then the training of a career.  And one would naturally kowtow to such people, to not quite grovel before them, but in a way to eventually befriend them, by doing so ultimately realizing that, in a way, they were not so far from your own level, or rather, than your own level, when you got down to it, was not far away from theirs.

What a city holds out for its elite is class snobbery.  You put yourself up by putting other people down, and ordering them around.  The squeaky wheel gets the oil.  The complicated pain in the ass gets the attention.  The people who put down others, abrupt, self-important...

But guess what, folks?  The system, their system, doesn't work so well without its peons, people regarded as being stupid, or poor in their own making of important choices.  Then it's too many chiefs and not enough indians.  

And I'll tell you, every now and again, you hear it, how they, the upper people, regard us, the lower people.  Attitude.  They have to look down on anything you do, if it is not useful to their own interests and means, as being the things of a rube, of an innocent fool.  The book you wrote cannot be any good, because they have better houses and cars and bank accounts whereas you have none of that.  

The snobbery gets manipulative, and the poor and disgruntled, squeezed endlessly, their jobs sent overseas, a working person's place in the economy marginalized into gig worker peondom, all for the sake of the profits of the One Percent Goons and their corporate share holders, who cares, as long as profits are up, as long as our stocks are up.  And you see, oh, look at the great tax break the politically entrenched rich folk, supportive of their "law and order," look what that did to our national and general economic underpinnings.  A basic sucking of money, earned wages and benefits, out from all classes below the upper ones, and into the upper ones.  

Oh, gee, and who made extra extra billions during the pandemic, a time of coming together in national crisis, of collective mobility for the common good, who but the billionaires who were already billionaires.  Shameful.

This was, this type of snob thing, by the way, was never the culture in the French Bistrot where I put in my time.  Bruno, and all he hired to manage and partner with, but he in particular, was a socialist deep down.  And as Godfather of now two restaurants, feels a responsibility to his staff, staying open in hard times.  (though living in some form of material comfort, fine things of a decent living standard, befitting gentry.)

The places where I worked came with an all for one and one for all attitude in the fiber, in the core of the job, the shift drink at the end of the night.

It’s mom's birthday of turning 82 years old.  I think Truman died when he was up there like that.  

The writer by himself is cannon fodder.  But he has to stand up for himself and his own work.  He must refuse to accept that his work is not subsidized as all things are.  He has to make a sort of political planting of his flag.

After her birthday, the second Moderna shot.  We make a deposit at the bank just over across the bridge over the river under the overcast sky.  I take her for a look at the lake, and then to the Big M.  At the counter, stuffed peppers. Yes, after getting mom shot number two, I think we’ll celebrate with three of them.  Make sure your mom drinks lots of water, a kind woman to my left says, after her experience of fever and bed.  The woman behind the counter:  knocked a neighbor of mine out for four days.  In the parking lot now, the wind has picked up seriously.

Back in the car.  I want a Texas Hot, my says, firmly.  The opening of Rudy’s by the lake has been anticipated.  There’s a newspaper blurb.

I’ll make you one at home.  No!  I want one at Rudy’s.  You always ruin everything!  So now we gotta drive back town, west, past the university along the lake.

Oh Jesus, it’s opening day.  You have to go through the whole system.  But I relent.  I park the little old car across the street from the place.  Mom gives it her best to give directions to me, peppering me with questions, "are they open? what does that sign say?  are you calling them?" on and on.  So I'm standing outside the car, and she's as grumpy as she was in the pharmacy, truly angry at me, why do we have to do this, where were you...  Now she's telling me "it's cold.  Shut the door."  I'm waiting, and finally a voice answers, a young woman, and I thank her, give us our order of a two Texas hots, a side of Texas hot sauce, a Center sandwich, which refers to the thick cut of of the fried haddock.  I wait outside, the sun is coming out finally.  Then they call me, and I go down across the street and wait in another line, where a few people are standing with beeping devices assigned to them.  (I should have just gone to the head of the line, but I'm rusty at this.  It was the same way last summer, the first pandemic seasons.)  I look back up at the car and mom comes out of the passenger side and then gets in on the driver side.  I wait and finally I come back across the street with a little cardboard tray in a paper bag, and inside, on paper plates, wrapped with foil, our sandwiches with lemon and tartar sauce and ketchup packets, a few napkins, not enough.  Usually we sit down by the lake, but with mom telling me it's too cold one moment and then warm the next, I figure it will be easier if we go eat at a picnic table, just us two.  With a little bit of sunlight on us, now at 2:30 in the afternoon, and mom's bitching about the details of this and that, and there in the distance below is the long flat surface of the lake beyond the rocky shore and the picnic tables and gull laughing as he stands on the top of the roof, celebrating the season's opening of french fries and other chicanery and food thievery and good smells and people and kids and dogs happy with eating and the garbage bins, looking for diners with less than watchful eyes.

We finally get back to mom's apartment, taking a little ride along the lake, past mysterious old abandoned wooden cottages almost out of Russian woods and such.  I'm keeping her hydrated, but she gets angry with me anyway.  She goes upstairs for a nap.  It came on all of a sudden, she tells me later.  

Earlier I'm in the drug store aisles looking for an NR41 little tiny coin-like battery for the automatic quick-read thermometer.  Now, finally some satisfaction, having opened the little clear plastic and cardboard paper packaging to see if the little hearing aid battery sized thing would fit the device, nope, then just returning it and purchasing the same damn thing, after taking a mini course in battery labelling, I take mom's temperature, beep, and then when ready, a triple beep, voila, 98.4...  Everything made in China.  Flashback of mom irritated with me in the car, on one hand saying how she's not the village idiot, perfectly capable, I have a Ph.D., I gave her a mask to wear earlier as we left, for the Covid plague times, but by the time we get to the drug store she doesn't have it, can't find it, and so I pull out the spare I brought along, Mom, put on your mask, we have to put on our masks before we can go in, but she holds out, because it's windy she says, holding out until we're in the first of the double doors, yes...  She marches in now, with her mask on, somewhat cockeyed, past a man, an older gentleman with a large bandaid on his right jaw bone, a kindly elder guy, and she says something like, oh, here's a decent fellow, unlike that man I came in with...  All the way, get her in the chairs set out for this purpose of the vaccine shots at the pharmacy counter aisles, announce ourselves with the vaccine card,   

The whole thing here like this on a daily basis, "you treat me horribly," mom tells me.  I'm not the village idiot!

I grunt and groan, bearing the burdens of a beast, a stock animal like the oxen, the ass, the horse, pulling the plough forward, getting bitched at the whole way.  I have my little fantasies of being a young man coming out of college to find all his talents at his beck and call, an actor, a writer, a guitar player, a musician of jazz, rock n roll, you name it, I can do it again, down in the basement, broadcasting to the entire world through my iPhone recordings of myself.   Escapism, hiding, staying up late when the witch goes back to her upstairs apartment, before she comes down and demands something of me, what are we doing today, what's next, where are you going next...  And instead of wishing to work in daylight, I want to hide in daylight, resting.

And sometimes I'm so exhausted by a single day's efforts of keeping her happy while doing all my duties, I can do nothing but retreat to my puffy green air mattress, to lay back quietly maybe under a warm blanket, going back to the mother ship, the spiritual home of the spiritual traveller, the Adept, the soft warm welcome of return to the space ship, and glowing within the energy of all the chakras all lined up like lights around the edge of the flying saucer...  Home, my friends, let us go home and reflect upon that world we were just in, the human world, the world of suffering beings who do not get it, ignorant to the great Truths.

And sometimes when I'm walking along a road, somewhat wearily, but hopefully, pretty young married women in the vehicles assigned to them for all they do, like a Jeep wagon, an SUV, a large used to call them station wagons but now they are higher up on the level of the great manly pickup trucks here, these pretty hard working wholesome women with beautiful faces, smiles break out on their faces while I'm taking my long slow walk along the shoulders of roads that once were only farm service roads, roads to deliver trade and goods back and forth to the port city town.  Why they smile, sweetly, with an empathy too dislocated to find in DC, what do they see, a young man grown into mid life manhood of sadness, after much strange work of his own, attempts of entrepreneur ship, my kindly face a blur, a waif of an old historical image, as I walk along, pensive of the stick trees along and the wet shoulder of the road spots, do they see a Kerouac, or a wandering still surviving lost disciple of a great Holy Man of Jesus or Buddha or Mohammedan roads...  He's probably taking care of an aging relative, all alone, for they, the nice family people here who have people to talk to on phones as they walk their own exercise walks, more vigorous than mine, less perhaps an exploration on the surface of this strange planet, such they might think.  He deserved kindliness, they say, even if he might be a bit of a lost bum.  Their sweetness passes at 35 mph, and I feel it tangibly, a surprise as it passes, and the Lord from Above says sweetly to me, these people up here along this lake, they get it.  Even as the churches here slide quietly into quiet dusty mote strewn light shaft through stained glass window airs within their pews, fixed and solid, air in the furniture grounded to hold on to in times.  How crazy it is here.  People are nice.  

The nice people here, if on their own, and not distracted, by small crowds or duties, what have you, maybe they get why the space ship landed here and the metal door opened and I came down the ramp, to make the Earth stand still with my humble stumble bum-ness.  

On the green air mattress I am traveling through spiritual space and time and finally figuring out why the things of life are, in the absence of my father, my true saint fallen into the world whose face shines out of some old ikon of Slovakia or old Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his own Turners Falls up in Montague up along the Connecticut River in Western Massachusetts sainthood while his mom died of TB, off to the WWII service, then back to Mass Aggie, but not as a horticulturalist, but as a botanist, with R.E. Torrey as a mentor, leading into the Theosophical...  That saint who did so much for me, and I failed being there when he died.  Kissed his forehead and touched his cheek, just like Kerouac found he needed to do when he looked at his father's body after all the struggle and the sickness.  A clip of hair, from that man who held you close, did so so much for you, let you bloom in your own way under his gentle botanical guidance, knowing that I too would suffer, as I always understood, once, as I cried, the neighbor girl Anna having seen a ghost go by out her window in a house just down the road from us, my spooked Sunday morning tears--even then my brother was too cynical and rational to be bothered with things of questionable validity--telling my dad in the driveway, as we backed out, to go down and visit the bakery and get the holy Sunday New York Times, that perhaps these spirits here were already here, before we came, and that is their world first, and not ours, most correctly, to a child in the passenger seat up front privileged, with his benevolent mono-god his own Father, my tears lifting, the realization descending of a higher truth, and I felt my father smile, and his rugged saintly happiness, a man who'd been through a lot of shit (and also good stuff) by then, in a gentle exile.

You can only know this, even as you did as a young man, with the authority of years of wanderings under your belt.  

I wanted to write in my own given natural way, the way I talk, in the manner in which thoughts come to my mind.  I didn’t care about any particular literary endeavor, successful or not.  I wanted to capture speech, American thoughts, ways, in the way Twain did.  Kerouac.  An ear for the music in words.

As I’ve said before, I got tired, I am tired, of being the people pleaser.

And I regard whatever work I do as a spiritual endeavor.  Keeping bar, landscaping. 

And now finally, writing.

Kerouac was serious about the term Beat having its origin in the Beatific, in the Beatitudes, in his strong sense of the people he encountered, jazz men, drinking bums in alleys...  An attitude that gives way to a way of focus, a filter to all experiences, putting them in perspective.

You can never be realized about a thing into you are truly willing to pursue it.  

So, I stay up late, after receiving my own first shot of the Moderna vaccine for the Covid-19 Corona Virus, 2020, 2021, ongoing.  I took a nap after the shot, in mom's living room with the afternoon sun rolling its rays in on me through the front window, again returning to the mother ship, the holy time traveling spacecraft that gets our souls around through countless kalpas of time and worlds, and happily, too, Mom was upstairs and being quiet.  I'd checked in on her, flipped around the channels to see what was on PBS and TCM playing the director's cut of Lawrence of Arabia at 4, gave her soup and then water, taken her temperature several times, once 100.4, then back down in the normal range, maybe it was the two Bayer Aspirin I gave her.  My homemade electrolyte recipe, a dash of good salt, a sprinkle of baking soda in a quart of filtered water...  I went for a tired walk later, after taking her for her usual daily drive, now in the afternoon with the sky losing its sunlight and becoming a bit more dank of cloud covers, the drive the usual affair of cheap wine, a newspaper, a few back-ups for the kitchen, cans of cat food, up the road, under the power lines, warm enough to sit on the guardrail by the entrance of the power grid transfer station, the swamp to my back, dried hearty ragweed stalks still with their blooms intact, so I could write on my iPhone a little bit, just to get down a few thoughts...  Hitting the buttons on the inner tape recorder, back to when I walked into the Five Points, crowded with college kids happy in the warm weather, and the guy just to the left, looks like a boxer, asking me if I'd like to taste a sweet white or a dry red, and as a professional courtesy I accede and bow, to taste from a little tiny red plastic cup, it's a New World style, Argentine, Mendoza Cabernet, 10 percent off, not my style, but it's actually more subtle than I thought it'd be, but here I am, on a mission to get the 2019 Bolla Bardolino in the 1.5 liter size, and I'm being a people pleaser yet again, as if I felt obliged to give up my whole life to make one lost sheep happy, and he adds a little tale about how he was a bartender at the Crown Plaza, the famous circular hotel at the foot of Syracuse University's hill, and just east of the raised highway of 81 as it passes through, and how he got a little tired of the grumpiness of drunks at 2AM, and now puts a lot of milage on his car, and we talk of the importer he works for, and they have DeBouef in their portfolio...  back to mom and the car, into gear, off we go in our little Japanese tank to swing by the lake...  So I'm sitting there and the high power lines way way up are humming away in the air, and there is the Beatific peace I was writing of here in earlier parts of my thoughts and the drafts I try to capture them in, like a spider's web, or a fisherman's net, of an eel run, the Beatific sensibility now shining over everything, telling me that it is in fact okay to be sort of miserable, because that's what it's all about, not the consumerism, beyond the simple things you need truly...   Gulls cry like cats, Geese bark like dogs as they come in low, perfect aircraft for the airs of God, and maybe in certain old parts of my brain I think of the little poem I wrote for Mrs. Martin's 10th grade English class I think it was, "I strum the strings on my guitar, and I go free, away from here.  And over trees and through the wood, away from things I understood."  Not bad.  She read it aloud to the class, and I felt that nice soft feeling of being responsible for something good, though I dunno, it just came through me, just a moment of clarity, honesty, finding a path, inspired by something...  All there in this ostensibly dreary setting about a mile or so from the shores of Ontario, the electric steam plant's two huge towers of smoke stacks, here in rushy weeds where the low parts are wet and muddy, a few gravel paths here and there, but somehow I find it all quite inspiring, upon this day where I got mom her second vaccination shot, struggling with her for her to put on her mask and sit there, the whole day, like I may have said, sort of a very minor Station of the Cross, including the opening day at Rudy's scenic by the lake as you eat your beautiful soft rolled moist haddock sandwich, and then the charred almost Hoffmann's hot dog with the Texas hot sauce laid upon it just so, the lake changing colors as you look at it out to its distant edges as the planet's lake meets the horizon beyond which you cannot see, there at the picnic table under the trees with everybody on opening day going, "how does this go, go to the window to order with cash, call them, or go on their ordering website, with credit card in hand to read off all the little numbers... now what do I do..."  God, show me the way.  I take a little short walk up past the first little pond there to the right, with the sort of cage fence they needed to prevent the beavers from damming up the pipe going under the road, and I see more Beatific things, and I hear, as we first heard yesterday, the sounds of the peepers, the little tiny frogs or tree frogs that come together to produce a beautiful chirping harmony that makes you feel like the trees are wiggling and stretching out their rooty toes to go dancing in the night, to stretch the sun in in gathering branches, ticklish little buds coming out now, the birth of leaves and pussy willow soft things.  We need to keep hydrated, so let me fold from my duties as the cook here, and order Chinese soups and chicken wings and dumplings from Food Chow City II, just over the bridge, but they deliver...  Yes, make this night a little bit easier.

I end up getting up and staying up late after dinner, to write down my thoughts in the night after putting on my orange rubber gloves to gather and soak the dishes before filling out and finishing the great loading of the dishwasher, but like clock work mom is angry with me again, even only after two glasses of wine, even after the first sip, over dinner, I can't even remember now what we ate, the Chinese food I guess, get her up to bed, with a glass of water and aspirin at the ready after the day turned bad and mom is talking to herself, they all hate me, bastards, and no Lawrence of Arabia on tv.  

Everything is neither good or bad, but thinking makes it so, Mr. Shakespeare.  (And Kerouac's girlfriend, first wife, when they escaped NYC to train up back to her home in Grosse Point, he'd go into the bathroom and lock to the door and read The Bible and Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Bible, for four hours at a time, and no one could use the bathroom, neither she nor her sisters.)

And Jesus Christ was there at the dawning hour of the great enlightening thought, that life is in its very essence inclusive of suffering, of what feels like suffering, of what is suffering, and then so firmly ennobling that suffering to give it redemption, raising it into "happy are the meek and the mournful..."

Ahh, but feeling the effects of the vaccine, or from having simply stayed up too late fooling around with my little writings and inspirations, sipping away at the wine, I don't jump off my pleasurably crinkly air mattress down in the cold basement.  Feeling wiped out, in need of sleep and hydration, a break from my intense little old stubborn foot and cane-stomping charge, I rest more, but that totally back-fires, for when I hear her now loudly calling out fluid riffs on "Help!", rising up the stairs, it's obvious she's been into the wine, by fits angry, expansive, proud and spiteful, and too much in general to handle and I haven't even had my tea cold from the fridge yet.

The only advantage of this, on a windy day, winds of 30 mph, is that after I feed her a piece of toast with chicken salad, she's in the bag, and will soon go off to sleep, though one cannot be 100 percent certain thereof, so I might as well heat in the microwave a little bowl of soup with one wonton dumpling in it, and humor her a small pour of a little bit more wine from the box into a glass with an ice cube in it.  She protests that she wants a ride, so I say, okay, sure, but by the time I come down from using the john and checking on the upstairs, yes, she's fallen into an upright nap on the little sofa with the cat along the top of it, and I check in on her a few more times, then with my coat on, with my hat, I slink out the back door, starting the car, checking the mail, the car has revved up and then down low again, all warmed up, and I go back up to peer in through the front window, and no, she is not still on the couch, and when I quietly open the door, I sense she has gone up to bed, and I have a nervous sigh of relief.  Maybe it's the vaccine.

And when I drive out and run my errands, find some chardonnay with a lower level of alcohol to it, get an easy little dinner for us from the Port City Cafe, stop by the Stewart Shop for a newspaper, by the time I get back, she is indeed asleep in her place on the edge of the bed with the piles of books haphazardly strewn to her right as the television gives out CNN news.  A lot of thought has to go into these little dinners and meals I feed her.  I was going to do fish sandwiches again, but decided against it.

Who is to know, who is to say, when unhappy thoughts get in our way.

The tension here.  No wonder I feel like walking on eggshells with her around.  The readiness of her to charge me with some unfairness, some slight, some nastiness, even as I get up to investigate the kitchen at the start of my day, and I must go into the living room to answer her questions, and if I say anything with candor, Mom, have you been into the wine... then she even gets worse angry at me.  And no way to claim, look mom look at all the things I helped you with over the last few days...  In her mind she was perfectly appropriately sweet and well-behaved, not a short tempered so & so.

I have things to give other than a glass of wine and French Fries over a bar and to a table.

But then I get mom on my back, this kitchen is a mess!  Or telling me, like I'm her husband, that we are through, or that she'll kill herself, you'll be done with me soon, I won't be around much longer...

Then again, think of the layers of life, but now through the focus of the Beatitudinal approach to our experiences of everyday life and events...  The light from the object you are studying is broken up by the prism into its component lights and energies, and then, Oh, I see...

sketch 3/12/21

It is necessary that I must distract my mind if I can begin.  Maybe I'll find something to watch on the computer, something to do with my background interests.  Guitars and music, a broad category to chose from, the technical equipment, lessons of how to play a Beatles song, a video of an old band, or maybe a poet, Larkin reading, or some sort of travelog, an Irish monk's place.  The life of a musician.  The Civil War era people.  The history of wine.  Mountain climbing, the Eiger, Everest, K2.  The tiger.  Kerouac's rise and decline.  Jesus on the Sea of Galilee, travels of the Buddha.  I confess to being stuck sometimes, the same things.  Sometimes I sit through things of questionable factual background.  JFK.  Giotto.  

Jesus had a pre-existing condition.

Cooking helps sometimes.  The building of a stew.  Sear the meat.  Enter the onion, the vegetables to follow, then the wine to deglaze, and then the adding of the stock.

The more I get distracted, the better.  This lets the inner wheels turn.

The awful rule a writer must live be, courting things different from the facts of reality.  A lotus eater, tranquil, forgetful, distracted from real life.  The writer needs it.

As the distractions go, so goes life.  More and more, something like Thomas Merton, a Desert Father for advice, in this land where I am stuck, no answer to anything, everything leaving one caught in a trap.