11:40 at night.  The kitchen.  Cluttered surface tops, 4 opened small plastic bottles of Pepsi with about a half an inch in each.  The cat has been fed.

Mom comes down, so I have to wait to do the dishes on account of her complaining about any noise I might make.  I'm starving, she says.  Well, what do you want, the lemon chicken, a glumpki, or a slice of pizza...  Pizza, she says.  She shuffles on uncertain feet, still in her Keen's hiking shoes, over the fridge, takes out a small bottle of Pepsi.  I hear the hiss as she opens the top.  She rummages along the countertop, as I get the pizza slice out of the box, onto a piece of foil to put into the toaster over.  Mom, do you want a Saltine?  Yes.  She sits down at the table.  I've got my laptop out, prepared to take my nightly daily notes, so she sits in my normal seat.  Ahh, she says.  Pepsi hits the spot.  "Pepsi Cola hits the spot, two full glasses, that's a lot," she states, not quite singing, an old advertising song.

She eats her slice of pizza, it's thick crust, with knife and fork, working her way, picking the good stuff off the top, on up to the crust.  She tells me I look frustrated.  I turn my head and look over my shoulder back at the cluttered countertop.  I mention the four open Pepsi bottles, gone flat by now.  That's your domain, over there, I don't go over there, she says.

She looks at my belly.  "Yes, mom, that's the three slices of bread I wolfed down at Canale's when he brought the check, I was hungry still."  I don't mention the death of Joan, mom's friend since they had their first babies at the same time.

She eyes me as she picks at her plate.  "You hate me," she says.  "That's why I don't sleep, because you hate me."  Mom, I don't hate you.  She can see I'm looking at my laptop, the modern typewriter, with a forlorn sort of goddamn, if she weren't here, dragging me down, I could get something done.  She picks up on such things.

Did you sleep okay?  Well, mom.  Let's see.  I got up at about two in the afternoon, after being awake til about six in the morning.  I fed you lunch, and then I went to the grocery store, then I came back, and took you to The Press Box for dinner, and then, because of all the pollen I took a nap, and now I'm awake again.

Oh.

"I'm in your way.  Thank you for the food," she says, getting up, clutching her Pepsi, shuffling off.  "Am I going the right way," she asks.

To keep her entertained, over dinner, at The Press Box, as she let me go and do my errands without weighing me down with her indecisive impatient presence, oh, look at that blue car, oh, they're making a lot of white cars these days, I don't remember a day like this...  at least it's not snowing... and I almost feel guilty having spared myself of that, having a decent and helpful conversation with my aunt as I sat in the car, with the AC on, in the Big M parking lot, touching on what might be good travel days for going there.  

They turn out to be full, so we take a high table by the bar against the window.  They have a group of 24 out on the porch.  Inside is full.  I get mom up on the bar chair the hostess offers as a replacement for the bar stool.  Anyway, mom is leaning over her shoulder trying to talk to the three year old boy and the two year old girl with at the booth with their friends, and soon, to my tastes you can sense her interest is getting a little repetitive, unreserved, too much, creepy.  So I distract her, call her back, and tell her my thoughts on Vonnegut and all he went through, and what Dresden had been like.  I have to explain it to her a couple of times, after I explained Cuomo the Governor of New York State, who did so well with the Covid briefings a year ago, but had things to hide, three times, and then what else.  I know as I speak about Vonnegut that I'm ruining the holy energy that sustains writing momentum.  "You're like my father, always ruining my fun," she says when again I attempt to bring her back my way, not turned toward the children, creepy old lady, and here I am with no children of my own, no wife, nothing.

Still, she's turning over her shoulder and looking at the kids, which is halfway nice, but interfering with the peace of the table.  I tell her about Sam Clemens, Mark Twain.  Where was he from mom?  What did he do?  She comes up with it, "steam boats."  Yes!  And growing up on the Mississippi and being a riverboat captain, well, that gave him a background, a solidity.  So that when he took his big risk, renting out the hall to deliver a lecture about his travels, shy and sick to his stomach, he was a great hit.  Mom, people guffawing in the aisles...

Later I found at, as I always do.  You have to learn to protect the sacred process.  And you find when you try to come back to it, it's not there anymore.

There's a downpour outside.  And later, a big ship down by the Port of Oswego unloading container boxes with huge on board cranes.  The new agricultural grain hub.  I take her around in the little old car to show her different angles, the huge ship, the new grain elevator structure with the concrete pouring crane set up.

So many years went by, when my mother intended to block off her sister, and even my being in contact with my aunt.  Crazy jealousy.  And all those years, worn out, manipulated, I missed all my aunt's love and sound advice and help, until things got worse and worse and finally pretty bad.

I've always had to fight, it seems, with that feeling of being a creep.  It came upon me later.  Too much an oddball, all at once, all of a sudden, like Hemingway character going broke.  So whenever I do anything, I'm stuck with that sense of looking over my back, because, well, I seem to be different, or use to being apart, in it, but not off it, as they say.  Ahh, the Jessica Dorfmanns of the world.  And you can't blame them.  It's fair, the female of the species is choosing the best male for her offspring...  And if they have to get rid of you, so they will do.  A foolish thing, rejection, for a male to dwell on for more than an afternoon.  It takes a toll, so, my advice, avoid it at all costs, it will ruin your life.

But that's ultimately where your author voice comes from, from this odd perspective, of a person who doesn't fit in any way.  That's the hope.  If you can translate all your own rotten prose and lack of a story back into your own voice, and it fits, without bending you too far, and you're happy with your persona and not disgusted with yourself, then you've got something.

The kitchen.  I made some decent choices at the grocery store, provisions for the next few days.  Enough to keep mom happy.  But looking around it still feels like you're in that German U Boat in the movie and the ship is sunk.  Guy movies, what do you expect.

So fuck me.

I was a dumb kid when I tried to walk off to adulthood.  A complete fool.

Like Vonnegut going off to World War Two.  What did I know.  "I was a high school jerk."  And I was trying to be Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky, ha ha ha.  Isn't that funny.

I thought I could do it in the restaurant business.  Boy, wasn't that a waste.  

Now I'm taking care of mom.

This is a war.  It's as bad.  Face death, hers or your own.  

In the morning, just before noon I raise the courage to go up the stairs to the kitchen.  My meditation is not complete, I'm feeling tired, I'm feeling pretty down, but I'm going to face the day.  I don't know what to do, but I have my tea.  I was upstairs earlier, around ten in the morning, I took a mug of the chilled tea, went back downstairs, looked through my weather apps to figure out the weather.  At 11:45, mom is sitting out on the front stoop.  I hesitate to engage with her.  

I put some more water on the stove.  The Meals on Wheels friend Nicole, she should arrive soon.

Can't go outside for long, the ragweed.  There's no good place here indoors that encourages yoga.  Ragweed feels exactly like depression.  It hits the same part of your frontal brain, your brow, as far as I can tell.  It makes the body feel dull.  I took a shower last night.  I guess I could get a haircut, maybe that will make me feel better.  

Do I get mom's clothes ready for tomorrow?  I suppose that's one thing I could do.  

Are we going to do something exciting today? Mom asks, from her chair.  YES!  I shout at her.  We're going to do something very exciting today!  She instantly throws the newspaper down on the floor.  Don't shout at me!  You hate women!  She shouts back at me.  I walk out with my mask to the car to get the key to the mailbox.

I feel better for having shouted at her.  Or maybe it was the walk across the parking lot.  Shouting is self-defeating, I know.  But...  

Out in the backyard, after cleaning the trash can liner--some lemon slices fell wet outside of the trash bag--the heat is oppressive.  Heat Advisory warning from the National Weather Service.  I come back in and Nicole, our Monday and Wednesday Meals on Wheels kind visitor, is knocking on the door, and I apologize for not catching her so she didn't have to walk from her pickup truck to the front door, being out back.  "You're good," she says.  "Too hot out!"  "Yes, terrible.  Staying inside today!"  Mom looks up from her chair.  "Take care.  See you next week."  I don't want to hold her up.  "Stay cool."  Smile.  

Mom for some reason wants to put away the two plastic bags, the normal one with the milk cartons and the two trays, one bearing egg salad and coleslaw, the other with one hot dog and beans.  The additional bag, with "cup of soup," and some other things for the pantry.  She's taken them to the kitchen table, going through them like the Golem, after taking them out of the plastic bag.  I stay away from her.  She opens the small bag of Cheez-Its.  "Should I open the potato chips too?"  No, mom.

"Mom, are you hungry?  How about some soup?"  Okay, she says.  She wanders off, back to the living room, to her chair.  I open the can, add some additional stock, heat it on the stove, add some dried thyme, some ginger, a dusting of cayenne.  Mom, soup's ready, I call.  She comes in and sits down.  I'm still working on my lemon water, my dandelion tea, green tea.  Liquids before a meal, good for the blood pressure, the metabolism.  Seated now, I point out to her the paper towel napkin I placed under her silverware set, but she explodes at me.  "You always make me feel like shit!," she yells.  Rises, stomps out, goes out the front door, I hear it shut, and then a minute later comes back in.  "I won't be pushed around," she tells me.  I've lit some incense, frankincense and myrrh, and its calming effect wafts through the room.

After lunch, after a series of missed phone calls, I ask mom, "why don't you call your sister?"  And she agrees.  Okay, progress.  They seem to have a nice chat.

I ask mom to pass the phone to me when she's through.  She stays in her chair, watching me as I speak with my aunt.  She makes a gesture, with her hand in a circle, "come on, come on."  Well, mom is telling me to cut it short...  "You bastard," she says, gets up, leaves the room, then comes back to the hallway to the bathroom.

With the heat indexes of 100 through the Mohawk Valley into the Berkshires, along with the strong thunderstorms forecast, we've decided to put off the trip.

Later on, I'm putting together a little package to put off in the mail to my buddy Bob Girardi, my neighbor back in DC, a couple of buildings away from my old apartment, which I still occupy, even though it's been nine months since I've seen it.  A copy of the keys on a little keychain.  A note, explaining the library books.  The mail, of course.  A letter, the keys, a check for him, his address from a text back in December, written down on a 3 by 5 card.  Then write a check for mom's landline.  Then a check for Pepco, for the power in the old apartment.  I'm doing this and she comes and sits and stares at me, as if to say, "Well, when are you we going?"  Creepy.  Mom, I'm trying to concentrate here, if you don't mind.  "Fine," she says, getting up, "you'll never have to see me ever again."

I can feel the ragweed.  I've been out to the mailbox, but already I feel disoriented and heavy.  I poured out the soapy rinse water from the bottom of the inner shell trash can liner out back.  

Okay, mom.  "Do you want me to come," she asks, all polite and demure again.  "Yes, mom, if you'd like to."  "I'd love to," she says.  

The Post Office, just on the west side, overlooking the river from the high bank, except it's hard to get to the edge to see the view and look down and see the fishermen.  

Okay, the book store.  Mom spent $25 last time on a book she already has, but they said they'd be happy if we need to return it, thank you gentlemen.  And to smooth things over, there's a book she'll be interested in to order through them, another $25, and then mom finds a new paperback about Jane Austin, by the woman from the BBC who takes you on tours of royal history, I think.  

Back south, away from the lake, up fifth, to the Stewart Shop, for a New York Times.  I debate within about getting a pack of Pall Mall unfiltered, but, I hold off.  Thunderclouds stacked high in the distance above the small houses of the town.  

We get back, in, out of the heat.  "What's for supper?"  Later, she calls from her royal chair, so I can hear, "need any help?"   I don't say anything.  Turkey meatloaf, half of a baked potato to reheat in the toaster over, easy enough.  Spinach, a few days past its prime, picking out the slimy leaves.  I have a glass of wine with dinner.

And then afterward, one glass of wine, getting her a dish of ice cream, I rinse off dishes, save doing them for later, and as she goes and sits outside by herself in her chair, I slink off down into the cellar, closing the door behind me, and quickly falling asleep, with some bad dreams, and wake feeling wiped out, the pollen, even worse, and I wore a mask all day.  

How will this ever end...

At night time, when mom has gone to bed, I relent, I feel guilty for my impatience.  I get sentimental.  I sit out on the stoop out back with the cat.  The Perseiad Meteor Showers start tonight, a light rain, droplets, from a passing wind, and later the sky clears.  The cat feels hollow to my touch, in the atomic sense, and he is enjoying that I'm in a state of mind enough to get this, for the same reason, I would gather, that he comes running when I've achieved a certain state in yoga, often in my five minute headstand.  The cat gets that I have adjusted my own atomic structure, let it breathe free, to swirl and do its genie upon tinier whirling genie composition that belongs first and foremost to the universe, the Buddhaverse.

The clouds part, providing a clear view of the sky, and indeed, the Perseiad constellation, and I see first one, then another, then another, whoosh zip across the dark heavens of a hidden moon.  Then two more, in different directions.

I wake up late, the next day.    Nine months have passed, since Election Day, when I packed a suitcase, a courier bag for my papers, my Martin D 28 in its case and drove up to get mom out of the hospital, and nothing has happened.  

She wants to go for a ride.  I get out the turkey, the fresh mozzarella, the fresh basil, a tomato for our brunch today.  She did not cooperate with taking her pill last night until I pleaded with her, saying the pill would interfere with her sleep.  Today I have more luck coaxing her to take the two, chased with her Pepsi.  She sighs.  She sighs.

I try to explain a bit of the news, reading from NPR off my phone.  I resort to getting her laptop out, from the living room and bringing it in to show her her Facebook page feed.  As you'd expect, she fumbles, but I show her the scroll downwards key.  She calls out a name here and there.

I show her another thing, a new page, NPR news, the little piece on NPR, Ken Burns not being diverse enough.

She's grumpy back in her chair now, after I brush my teeth after washing my face upstairs.  She wants to go to Sterling Nature Center, after she sees their Facebook page pictures, but I tell her, Mom, we did that three days ago, it's too hot, there's too much pollen.  You have that new book, mom.

I'm feeling the loss of my professional life, one that I never really was able to get started, that of the ecologist naturalist scientific person as my father's botanist friend from Tufts, Norton Nickerson, descendent of whaling families, who was kind to me and took me to Great Exuma in the Bahamas to crawl through mangrove swamps, the nurseries of the sea, protection against the ravages of the tide.

How I've come to hate her, and yet, there still is love.  But the daytimes are depressingly tedious, I don't want to get up and face her.  I don't mind all the chores, but to face the constant attacks and aggressions and regal bossiness, no wonder Shakespeare wrote those plays as the best depiction of senility and dementia.  "Take me for a ride?"

I ask her to rinse and brush her teeth.  I'll go check on the cat.  Mom, he's right there taking a nap on the back steps, he's fine.  She comes back, negotiating the charging chord for my laptop here before me, cane, Keen's hiking clunkers, and I stand and how her, the two rinses, hot water with salt, mouthwash, then pick a toothbrush from the big pyrex measuring cup, the toothpaste laid out without its top right in front of her. She picks the wooden toothbrush I got from the health food store, and dips it in the little cap of mouthwash.  Mom, there's toothpaste there too, I say, over my shoulder.  Those are rinses.  She figures out the toothpaste, and I nudge her through the rinses, remaining calm, only because I am defeated.  With nowhere else to go.

Water with lemon and ginger.  Dandelion tea.  Green tea with mint.  A grocery list on a 3 by 5, NPR news on the radio failed record player by her chair and the front windows, check the mail.  

Me, the light that failed.

Go upstairs to use the john, so she doesn't try to open the sliding door on me.

 The height of allergy season.  Chenopod and ragweed.

"What are we going to do today," mom asks.  "It's wicked not to have fun."  She sits in her chair, reading the large print, the story of President Biden's family, the death of his eldest son.  At some point, we should go the town library.  

Okay, so... I've made the tea, from last night, it's chilled, both the green mint tea, and the dandelion tea, and I get some more water going in the kettle, for detox lemon water.  Both of the former might be better when they are hot, but when I'm done with the lemon water task I'll make another pot of Moroccan Mint.  It's not the best I've had, but I got a big bag of it from Amazon, way cheaper, I'm afraid, than from the health food store, but I buy things from them anyway.  Cans of beans, aduki beans, and other things.

It's getting above eighty degrees before noon here, outside.  I left the air conditioning on overnight, set at about 74.  The nice woman from Meals on Wheels will be coming, and when I come out to look for her, mom asks me what I'm looking for.  There is pizza, slices of vegetarian pizza from Canale's Saturday night, in a cardboard box in the fridge, so I can heat one up for her in the toaster oven when she says she's hungry.  

"What's on your agenda today?"  "Can we go out for a ride, somewhere interesting?"

Mom, it's very hot out, and I can't really spend much time outside with the pollen out.  

She has on a Fall red sailor striped pullover, in addition to the same pair of jeans, the same socks, the same Merrill hiking shoes.  I ask her if she'd like to change, after she storms out into the heat in front of the townhouses.  It feels like high school here.  I bring down some lighter options she might wear, tops.

Okay, well, at some point I need to go run some errands, get some keys made, put them in the mail, down to my old DC neighbor Bob, who'll walk over to my old apartment, put my mail together, look for the library books I took out before Covid-19 hit in March 2020.    You can come along with me if you want, mom.

I hate bringing her along.  A block against anything I'm trying to do.  I have to pay extra attention while driving.  She mumbles on.  "I've never seen it so hot here...  What do think of that blue car... I like it.  I can't remember it getting so hot here...  We haven't seen any snow here.  I've never seen snow here..."

I'm sitting down trying to write out a thought or two on a very blank page day.  Nothing.  Not even the faintest glimmer of a true sentence, not even one.

"I'm starving," I hear, as I try to collect my thoughts, which aren't going anywhere at all anyway, sort of quashed down by things here.  In fact I'm quite depressed now, and should be, and reading about Jesus Christ is both good and bad, because you know the good, but then the bad things will inevitably happen to him and you can't forget this, and does His condition apply to all of us, this Son of Man guy.

And the Buddhism stuff, well, that's all well and fine, and I truly believe in the wisdom above anything else I'll ever come across, you know, bite off what you can chew, but...  there's still that gnawing rat in your gut, asking you why don't you have a job, why have you thrown away so much of your youthful potential, such that you know find yourself in this horrible situation, nearing age 60 and forget ever being employable except if you go back to what you were doing before, which is, was, rather physically demanding, and not a lot of money.

Covid-19:  Jesus coming down to Earth and telling the economies of the world, "Lay off on those poor restaurant people, they need a goddamn break.  Plus they have crappy things they need to attend to anyway, as if to put the nail in the coffin."

Well.

The pizza slice, on a small sized sheet of aluminum foil on the little rack, is heating up rapidly in Toast function mode.  And I haven't had all my beverages yet, still stirring the flax seed and the Ashwagandha powder in whichever cup of tea is before me.  With the gluttonous meal of dough and fried things dredged in flour and cooked to acidic perfection such as the windpipe will be sore from its depth charge...

She comes in as I take the slice of hot pizza out of the heat with oven mitts.  She seems moderately happy at the offering.

I sit down with her.  I'll slice some tomato, a bit of red onion, put that with the usual sliced turkey and whatever else I can find, some romaine maybe, fresh mozzarella, but definitely some basil leaves from the new neighbors.  Basil is calming.

The days slide by like this.  Just dealing with her.  Coaxing her.  Getting her in and out, with the right clothes for the weather so she's not too cold or hot or wet, whatever.  

Keys.  I intend to take mom along the lake.  I'll get her in the car.  I take the recycling out.  I take the trash out.  Lemon water, it feels good.  She eyes me from her cat shredded Eames Chair, positioned there on her throne to know all and see all.  The cat is fast asleep on the sofa.  It's a narrow sofa bed, and I've tried sleeping on it over the years, but the springs dig into your back and side.  So it stays, with my clothes from my old apartment draped over it, so I can find clean underwear and socks laid out when I go upstairs to go up for a shower.  He was out at night, as I make sure to let him out at three in the morning, or four, and most nights awake late enough to let him back in when it turns blue out again.  He calls me when he needs, and now he's at least pretending he's asleep.  He's gotten leery of mom and I, apt to start yelling at each other, after she says, "what?" and me having to repeat myself, after repeating myself earlier. 

Both the cat and I like the deep nighttime.  It's dark, hushed, quiet.  The egos have gone away.  The art, whatever small trickle there is of it, can come out.  No need to go out.  

But yes, things happen today as any other day here.  There's the pressure on me, about when we will get on the road for the trip down to Lee, several variables preexisting or branching off from that.   What will the weather on the summer road, the New York State Thruway, a road I love in my heart, and even getting better along the way, and particularly into the beauty of the Berkshires...  But now with worsening dementia, frail, my passenger, highly anxious.  "Slow down, slow down, I can't take it anymore, (sobbing--boo hoo hoo)...  Kill myself." Screaming.  No, that, when it happens will not be fun.

And then add on top of that, the possibility of attending the big funeral.  Will there even be one?

Lots to sort out. 

"What can I do to help," she asks me.  And I can get cruel.  "Mom, what can you do?"  "You bastard."

And then, because it's hot, and I'm rather depressed and unhappy, and because mom says she's bored and doesn't want to stay cooped up all day, "rotting," I go, "well, mom, how about you clean your room?  How about you fold your clothes?  How about you sort your drawers?  How about you pick your books up off the floor and organize them and put them on a shelf..."  

"You bastard..."  she lets her ire build.  Plots what to say.

"I mean, I'm glad you're such a feminist that you feel that you don't have to cook, clean, pick up after yourself, do dishes..."

"Well, I'm just a stupid woman. What would I know.  I don't have a penis between my legs..."  

"Mom, you're a man hater.  That's all.  You use feminism as an excuse..."  Why don't you just admit it.

It doesn't do me any good, but there you go.  I get the dishes rinsed.  I have some more tea.  I'm not going to shower today.  I showered last night to get the pollen off, and that helps.

I cross the hot pavement, muggy air, throw the trash bag into the dumpster.  Start the car, AC on.  I'll relent, smooth things over in her forgetful mind, by taking her for her little ride, down to the little gas station convenience store shop for the newspaper.  I brought the Sunday New York Times along anyway, placing it upon her lap, as I get her into the car, myself settled, a little bottle of water for her, one for me as well.  No reason to go to the grocery store.  There's a haze over the town.  August, summer doldrums.

Then on, after the wine shop, no way in hell am I getting through another day with her without a little self entertainment, particularly when I can't step outside without my immune system being bashed to Raby's Hardware, the big parking lot almost full on a Monday.  They are too busy to make copies of keys in the main building.  They don't have the little traction sticker strips to put on the base of the tub so no one slips and falls.  I looked.  I remember buying them before here, but they don't have any.  I'm beginning to feel the pollen again, the disorientation in my head again, things getting heavier, under water doing anything... I purchase a bag of 10 white N95 respiratory masks.  The cloth one I have doesn't seem to do much good against the ragweed pollen.

My patience is wearing thin again as we go along the lake, and past Rudy's.  I get her home, and she thanks me for the ride.  "What a nice ride," she says.  "Yes, wasn't it," I say.  I bring the wine in, she manages with the newspaper.  We get in, she closes the outer door, and I adjust the air conditioning, to make it just a bit cooler now.  The cat will be wanting to come in soon.

I chop an onion, get out the big mixing bowl, concoct a turkey meatloaf.  Simple.  Protein.  I can reheat potatoes previously baked when I get back.  Might as well put it in the oven.

"I don't know what to do," mom says. "I'm so tired."  Well, go rest a bit.  "I don't know if I'm coming or going..."  Would you like anything?  "Yes," she chuckles.  I get her a small cafeteria juice glass of the white wine.

Mom, I have to go do my errand...  Okay, she says.

I drive up past under the high power lines.  I've not been able to check in on the beaver dam there.  Up and turning onto John Paul II way, then up Lazeraks, and down toward the lake.  I come back, to the side building, out of which they sell the barbecue propane gas grills and rent the moving trucks and the equipment.  I had copies of my keys from my old key chain made here back in December.   I walk in, say hello the guy, tell him what's up.  Might as well get three copies.  I haven't used the keys in so long, I forget, because basically they are same brass key, which one is which.  Is this one with the black electrical tape fully over the end the front door key to the building, or the key to old 304 itself?  In any case where will I end up?  Renting a 14 foot truck, then over the hills of Route 81 through Pennsylvania, no, this does not sound great to me.  There are packing materials, and also ropes, ropes good enough that they look like mountain climbers use the same kind, blue, with orange thread and the like.  They would do.  The ideation is there, not that I would do such a thing, I just picture the thing around my neck sometimes, going through all this shit, nothing to look forward to at the end of it, staring two disasters in the face every day, my mom, my own situation.  I'm in there when my aunt calls.  I was talking to the guy, asking him his impressions about the local Renaissance Festival down in Sterling.  The whole field was full of cars the other day, all the way to the road, Sunday.

Why don't you give Simon a call now.  It's five o'clock, there's no funeral going on now.  I know it's hard when you're shy, but it will be one more thing off your list.  

There's the turkey meatloaf in the oven, but I was wise to give myself some time by setting the oven low, at 300 degrees.  

I haven't been reading many books lately.  That sort of fell off a long time ago, when I got depressed, when my mom wanted to go off on her own and became such a problem, such a feminist, mean, obstreperous to my poor old dad, and yet claiming perfect innocence and victimhood the same time, "help, I need help," she still says, to this day, shouting almost, stamping her feet..  good bye old house on Ernst Road...

I call Simon.  There's no mention of anything in particular.  Lots of bureaucratic things to attend to, death certificates, bank account information.  He has a supportive family and friends.  He has friends visiting now.  I ask him if he'll go up to Maine. Yes, Geoff wants to take me up to Wiscassett...  "Well, they had babies together, a long time ago.  That's quite a bond Joan had with your mother..."  It's an easy call.  He asks me if Claire understands that Joan has passed (or is dead...).   I think she gets it, sometimes.  She's still processing it.  We've been out for long rides.  I take her out to dinner...  At the end of the day, so to speak, we are men, and we let each other go, slowly but surely.  "When we think of Claire, we think of Ted too..."  Thank you, Simon.

I get back, bringing in the key copies, and a little key chain so my buddy Bob back in DC can keep them together.

Maybe I'll be able to get to the Post Office tomorrow.  Even though acting with any rush seems rather pointless.

Looking through Facebook I see a post from The Paris Review, George Plimpton's graceful interview with Kurt Vonnegut.  

And then I sort of get it.  It's the voice.  Read anything in Kurt Vonnegut voice and it becomes clear, the folly, the humanity, the bravery, the daily things you must go through...

What a shit I've been not dressing and acting like Kurt Vonnegut over all these years.  Enough of Jesus and Buddha.  Kurt Vonnegut is what I need.  I should have written him, while he was still alive.

When you're going something, as he, Kurt Vonnegut, went through, I suppose you just take mental notes.  That's the best you can do, when slogging along in this imprisoning world where a man must take up a fixed solid self in a fixed solid role, none of it exactly natural for him to do.  Man is a natural philosopher, pondering the beauty of life of being up on two legs now, erect, able to talk, given the freedom to do so by his very standing, and the evolution of small bones in his windy areas that allow him to turn breath into something like a meaningful song, for better or worse, an expression at least.

None of it will gel.  Years later you come back, if you're lucky, and not so miserable with your own life situation that you haven't forever given up any exercise of reflection, now seen as a useless endeavor when you really need to be doing something real and tangible.  Years later you come back, if you're lucky, or even want to, and just for the sake of something in that biped's constitutional make-up, and you'll put it in some perspective.  

As if to say, I was just a kid then, a jerk, a baby, a high school punk, what did I know...  and here's what I saw, as if to acknowledge how you might have glimpsed yourself finally going through that great mystery of, as they say, growing up.  Yes, growing up.  How grand.  Watching your mother fall apart and take you yourself down with her quite effectively and efficiently, all because of her thing, leaving you with this darling burden because she had to be free, free of your father, free to do what she wanted, being a feminist, not to give feminism a bad wrap, just that I don't feel too pleased these days with her version of it, which I think I have some right to.   

It's as if you had signed up for, at your very birth, the duty of seeing her out, alone, no one else wanting to deal with her.  Well, well.  Such thoughts are said without perspective now.  Later, they will be transformed.  "And so on."

But this is the kind of shits we also are.   We miss giving credit to the potential.  "A bartender who wrote a book, how laughable.  It can't be any good, coming from such a monkey."  Even Hemingway put such a statement, very similarly put, about the memoirs of Jimmy from The Dingo, was it, or some other Generation Perdu barman of Paris in the Twenties.   Hemingway, of all people.   And of course, the stinger, he was probably right.  A barman's brain isn't going to be growing too fast now, doing all the stupid work. 

Jack Kerouac, my father, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., were all born in 1922.  I let them all down.  I didn't realize life was life.  I spent too long in the restaurant business, listening to people's stories, failing rather largely to make my own happen, I mean, anything worth telling.  I hid my candle under a basket.  It's quite true.  A fault of the way my brain works?  I'll never know.

And no one really got my own Giotto genius idea, that I knew by laws of physics and through my own experience being a human being, that it would be quite possible to sit down and write, daily, on a live basis, through just recording the thoughts and visions and experiences randomly traipsing around in the mind and various other areas of mentality, just the normal plain-told stuff, like an Abraham Lincoln leaving little notes about his journeys as a Prairie Lawyer, that it would be quite possible to write a great work of literature, once it were all collected and properly signed off upon.  Better than anything else the poor writer would have written anyway. 

The funny thing of it being, of course, that it was, within a day or a week or a month or so, going on live, like TV.  Brought together by the democratic notion that everyone's, every sentient being's, experience is worth collecting, worth shooting at, worth taking a recorder to.  

All the greats have believed this all along, and set the precedence, and this effort here, is just a continuation of that.  Kundera talking about how Tolstoy does this amazing thing at the end of Anna Karenina, after a rather great and dexterous warm up session, to, as Kundera puts it, drop a microphone down into the depths of Anna's thinking, moment to moment, unscripted, natural, a very close image of how we as human beings think, our thoughts three dimensional now, pulled upon by gravity and light and shadow, fully formed, no longer just flat, no longer just to be interpreted in one way, one way only, for how can a thought be taken so.

Joyce, don't even need to mention, his contribution to the great work, nor Flaubert, nor Proust.  These were all people responding to the form of the novel, a seed that flourished from the Earth and flowered, everywhere.  Cervantes establishing the form.  Contemporary of Shakespeare.  How can any of this be qualified, quantified, labeled...  The form that works, is the form of the atom, ultimately the genie.  

Is physics chemistry, or is chemistry biology?  Was that Goethe who wrote that?  You might as well say that it's little tiny genies, and within them their own little tiny genies, who do the show, who knows who runs it all...

My college thesis, years ago, was a study of how you could:  I took Ernest Hemingway's late three works, Old Man and the Sea, Dangerous Summer, parts of Islands in the Stream, and I should have added A Moveable Feast to all that.  To say:  just write about life.  Write as it happens.  That is fiction enough.  The mind brain thing does it for us anyway, all the time.  The notebook, honest, catching the voice within, is the best, and the truest, it gets.

This is the best and truest novel, or piece of literature, that can happen, even if it's painful to the critic, or the advertising department (not to insult anyone who has a steady and decent job) push for the latest trend, or, as they always do, having someone come looking like James Dean did again.  

The novel will never do that, a true one, anyway.  A true one will be unique, fed by ground water, a trickling daily spring.  See, Hemingway wasn't such a bad guy after all, a poet in his own greater and distinctly male-brained way, communicating through how the making of coffee on Nick's camping trip is coffee according to Hopkins, of Big Two-Hearted River.

(Some are certainly entitled to say that it's not worth it to engage in this kind of a thing.)

That's why I have done this, all of this.  I figured one day it would start to gel, to take a form, even as I was and have been and will be distracted from the cultivation of it.

And it is a truly Quixotic exercise, believe me, I don't even need to say believe me, anymore, for everyone knows, writing is not a lucrative career, it is a sort of monkish dark ages individual quest for science as God and Inspirations and the William Blake in you and me allow.

Focus on the great endless amorphous impenetrable dark matter darkness, stare into that long enough, the imploding bombs of life, stare at that long enough into the deepest depths of blank blackness and you will then begin to see.  That's all.  Life is just life.  It's perfectly aimed and fleshed out, and yet totally random, just like the Kennedy Assassination, I suppose, which always will stick with us, being so real and yet unbelievable, so unimaginable, yet there, after such a life of some perfection, an end, sudden.

The poor author has no one to caress or be caressed by, which is either a problem or it's not, but JFK, he didn't have that problem, his old man was who he was, a role model, for some anyway.

But I thought, all along, in my deeper mind, you could do this.  You could do it for free.   You could provide a humble template for all, that would serve some good and true purpose, out of being in alignment with the deeper realities in the manifested worlds we live in.  You would be doing a great thing, a humble Nobel Peace Literature Prize from another realm, not this one.  Dylan over Vonnegut?

Do the people in publishing get it?  I don't know.  It's not their thing, the great Golden Rectangle of the deeper information an individual human being will go through in the vessel of their brains in a way that reflects all of the nature of reality.

Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins.  The coffee was bitter.  Nick laughed.  It made a good ending to the story.  His mind was starting to work.  He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough.

 Drivel.  As in, what stupid drivel to fill up the page today.

Feeling better.  No walks outside, yesterday.  Kept the windows of the car up when I took mom out for her drive.  No yoga, at least outdoors, which has its downsides.  The trip, taking mom to Lee, has been thankfully postponed, after the groundwork for it was laid, negotiations, the finding of the cat sitter.

The stands of ragweed, the chenopods, are a bumper crop of nature and along all the roadsides everywhere, taller than I've ever seen them.  New forests of a new geological age, a vengeance against our digging up the carbon of ancient swamp litter.    The pollen is just a taste now, and it's virulent to me, and there's going to be a lot of it, for a long time.

Stancy, a real angel, comes to visit.  Mom's former department secretary and friend and sitter of cats previous, I hesitate to bug her.  I sent her a text last week, about how we might need a cat sitter, might she know of anyone.  Don't want to impose.  I get a text back from her.  She'd be happy to drop by.  She's back working part-time at her old role.  She could swing by easily.  "How about I come by in a few minutes," the text I get.  Shock.  "Sure, that would be fantastic."  I tell mom, who's anxious about any sort of thing.  Mom, Stancy is coming by, check if she has the right key.

Another person coming to help, just like that, I could almost weep.  

I kept myself, at four in the morning, to two glasses of wine.  Waking up wasn't perfectly smooth, but the anxieties of anticipation of the day and what it might bring, the big decision of when to take mom out on the road, abated with a little bit of effort.  It's hard to communicate your wants, needs and desires to people when such are not quite clear, even to you.  At this point a good portion of anything comes with misery.  Pick a flavor.  "We might be going out of town this weekend," doesn't have the decisiveness that lets other people process their own responsibilities into the equation.  

But nice people, you don't have to feel so bad about yourself, at least in a friendly town, where it matters more to connect with old friends.  Sure, I'm happy to come and check on the cat.   But I'm not going to let him out when you are gone, I would feel terrible if anything happened to him.

Okay, cool.  Sigh of relief.  And I learn that dry food is good for a cat's teeth, keeps them clean.  (The last vet we saw made mention of our boy's teeth.). 

Mom is curt with me after our angel of the cat sitting and feeding departs.  I took over the conversation, she tells me.  

I stopped counting how many times mom asked Stancy, "so how is Pam doing?"  Mom, Pam is retired.  

But I notice, I feel a measure less anxious today, now that I've got the ball rolling.  Less fearful.  Less of a pile on me, the immediate need to pack for a four day trip tomorrow.  

This gets ironed out when I call my aunt, to tell her we're figuring things out here on our end.  I was under the impression that for her part this would be the good weekend, but, since they have things going on, tired from taking friend to hospital, the need for a pain shot in the shoulder, the weather too, better to postpone it a week.  Aunt keeps a calendar. 

Mom comes to the back door and stares at me as I pace, talking on the phone.  Yes, mom, the soup is on the stove, I'll be in shortly for lunch.  

And somehow I find myself being on top of things, a capable person dealing with the variables of a visit. 

The things I lost when I became a drinker…

Stancy tells us a story, mom asking her about her health, as I come back from the kitchen with a glass of soda water with lime for our guest.  “I was sitting at my desk one day, and a voice said, call for a mammogram appointment.  I heard a voice.”  The good angel of Oswego visiting with us.

But afterwards I fall into a hard dreaming nap, dreaming of driving on roads through the flat farmland back up from the south to the old home.  Straight roads, good for speed, but need for slow caution, coming right along side the large livestock.

It’s the allergies again, and I was barely outside today.

Yes, now I remember.  Nicole, my friend from Monday and Wednesday...  Meals on Wheels.  I hear her knock on the door as my day starts in the usual paranoia here. I was about to hide on the cellar stairs, hearing mom upstairs, but here she is, and then there’s a problem with the storm screen door, the lower pane coming out of its hinges.  The mower team has come, and as she hands me the package, two meals on cardboard trays, and we chat over the sound of the weedwhacker, the industrial leaf blower and the gang mower noise.  She’s taking her son on a trip to Lexington, Massachusetts and beyond, maybe the Maine Coast.  She sounds pretty busy, her husband’s father in and out of the hospital, dementia cases… I ask her about the burden of her volunteer job.  No, no, she enjoys it.  Gets to talk to people.  Loves it.

And she takes the time, as I walk her back to her heavy four door pickup truck, with all the noise and the grass clippings and the blower, to tell me, “and the drinking, doesn’t do you any good…. I used to drink,” she tells me.  Yeah, I admit.  You see me in the mornings sometimes… She does.  

There was a time, in the winter, she's cute, I just wanted to lay my eyes on a woman, and she is one.  A beauty of Southern Italy, or Sicily, crossroads, some Africa in her, Northern, maybe.  She prefers the cold to the heat.  

And then we have to go our separate ways.  Part of me regrets having to end the conversation, my nerves acting up with all the noise and the trip preparation looming… She was sketching the people she meets on her route, some encouraging her to go the their church, and she takes it all in.

Mom is in the kitchen when I come in.  Busted.  Fuck.  I go over the lemon and ginger water I made the night before.  "Where the animals," she asks.  He's sleeping on the couch, mom.  (It's always, "the animals."  It's really just one cat.)  Anything I can get you?  I get her a slice of turkey, sliced provolone.  She asks for a couple of Saltines.  

By the time I awake at six in the afternoon from the troubled afternoon nap, mom has expectations of dinner.  I've worn out the ground turkey leftovers.  The meatball sausage ragu ended up vulcanized by the misbehaving electric burner, overheating at low, why is another mystery.  I got nothing.  Okay, see if she'll go for Chinese.  Press Box?

Press Box is closed.  Darn.  The safe option is shot.  Now I'll have to negotiate with her.  Ugh.  Where do you want to go?  Where do You want to go, she asks me back.  Shoot me.  Canale's?  The Mexican place? All I wanted was a burger.  

We end up at Alex's On the Water, in the big hotel along the river upstream from the port.  They have a lobster entree.  Seasonal restaurant.  Service is a bunch of kids.  The manager picks up the glassware from a vacated table with her fingers inside the glass rims.   I can figure out what mom wants for a drink, easily enough.  "Do you have any fun?  You need to have some fun..."  I look back at her.  Right.  Okay, fine, I'll try a glass of $6 Finger Lakes red, just out of former professional curiosity.  Finally the drinks come.  I don't blame anyone in this situation, just the way it is.  Wine's been open too long.  Or maybe that's just the way they made it;  could be.  I pour it over the ice cubes left when I drain my water glass.  There's music playing outside, country pop.  Too loud for mom.  And I don't want to sit outside with the Chenopod pollen killing me, bad enough there's a wide open doorway for the servers and runners to come through.  

And the taste of that one lousy glass of wine perturbs the surface of my being enough to leave me little option, once we get home, with mom babbling on about how fresh the night air is, as she’s been into the wine, for me to, after hiding in the basement for a while to go and open the bottle, telling myself, I’ll just have a glass, maybe two, just to get rid of the yucky feeling, and then I get the guitar out, and there I go, telling myself I need to rehearse the next open mic night.  And of course I open the full bottle, after drinking the half of one…  the pattern of my lone cut-off life at mom’s.

Wake up the next day with the feeling internalized, with a desperation to escape it, and all my related sins…  anxiety, sensing the need for a great detox.  Wanting to hide from mom.  

She wants her ride.  Okay, I’ll take you for a ride, if you take a shower.  And I press her on it.  Anyway.  After she takes her shower, she’s wearing the same violet polo long sleeve… Who cares! she says.  Mom, it’s dirty, look.

We go for our ride.  I almost feel like my nerves are too hyped for traffic.  A guilty mission to get to the music store to replace the guitar strap before they close up shop at four.  It’s rush hour.  Groceries at Bosco's & Geer, but they don’t have any rotisserie and the deli turkey is the same brand as Big M.

But I don’t feel like cooking, and even though I realize I’ll get into the wine if we do go to the open mic, I need to do something with mom to keep her entertained… so…  I sheepishly pack up the guitar, don’t even want to, the new strap doesn’t fit over the knob well at all, but we go.

We drive over there, to Curtis Manor, the big barn…  I get mom in, a glass of wine for her, a bottle of Finger Lakes Cabernet Franc for me.  You left me sitting alone, mom says, as I come back to the table.

Our chicken tenders and hamburger dinner arrives, onion rings, and then my phone is ringing.  Simon.  our old friend Joan is dying…

I take the phone outside so I can hear what he’s saying. It won’t be long, but the timeline isn’t clear.  Her heart is pumping out at twenty percent, not enough to sustain the vital organs.  Ultimately it will be uremic poisoning, when the kidneys fail.

I go back to the table, tears in my eyes.  I explain, over the music.  Yes, here we are having our lark…  Simon has told me to call, late morning tomorrow.  With hope we can pay them a visit next week.

We finish our meal, get a to go box.

She is in her final hours, Simon tells us.  I sit with mom at the table in the kitchen, the phone on speaker.

I no longer want to relate to people in the way I have done all these years… or that’s what my horoscope is saying.

Simon is a man.  He played his role.  He controlled the finances.  He was frugal.  

I look at my mom.  Where has all her “feminist” line led us, but serve as an excuse for her tirades, her stubbornness, her volatility, her loudness…  where had it all led me, but to be abused, beaten, walking on eggshells.

Simon doesn’t drink.  Faces things head on.  Joan was a woman.

I'm left without goals.  Having stood for none.  I'm like Colonel Chabert in a French novel, Balzac.

I come up the cellar stairs, hearing her in distress.  Hello, hello.

Every now and again, one has the sense of the amount of suffering in the life of Jesus.  We all know He realizes the fate hanging over Him.  Then add to that, any number of things, Lazarus, the pain of encountering in an up close and personal way, the leper, the crippled, the sick…

He put away all the lost years talents.  They weren’t serving him as well, a distraction from his main talents…. Why go to open mic night and fuss with guitar, if it's not in the purpose of something greater.

No last phone call with Joan.  I got distracted, mom on my back every day...  "What are we doing for fun today..."  Me trying not to shout at her.

I rise up the cellar stairs finally, greeted by mom shouting "hello, hello, is that the Boston Strangler, please help, I haven’t had anyone to talk to all day, please come talk to me…"

I put cold chicken tenders into the toaster oven to reheat.  And my aunt is calling.  She asks, how are you doing, you sound a bit down.  So I tell her how, what unfolded, the finality of death.

Meanwhile mom is getting louder, "alright, I've had it, I’m just going to kill myself…"

The call cheers me up, as I am prone to being down in myself and here I am hungover again.  My aunt reminds me of what I'm going through, of how little time I have to play with here, the heroic quality of care taking that only people who do it will understand.

I put a modest lunch on the table.

Sheepishly, now what…

Okay, she wants a ride.  A half-hearted trip for groceries at Big M.  The pretty check out young woman, pale, dark hair, who is studying physics isn't there.  She has a nice aura, a presence you don't find in the cities, somehow.  She was doing an internship studying crystalline structure on-line, Nebraska.  

We end up at Canale’s.  

It’s hard not to be an amateur in all this, bobbing in the sea with her madness.  If I don’t exercise control of course it all gets out of control.  She orders a second glass.  I have a third. The nice guy, obviously a professional is a Canale, and indeed, he worked in restaurants eight years out in Las Vegas.  You can tell.  Incredibly kind.  He shows us pictures of his four boxers and a smaller dog rescued from the pound.

But everything, maybe especially dinner, is a battle of political will.  My energy to cook or not.  You have to admit this is a strange day, the day after mom's longest closest friend passing away.  I forgot I shouldn't mention it directly, pulling out of the Big M parking lot onto First in front of the new Dunkin Donuts this side of the old railroad bridge over the river.   But it slipped out.  I mentioned something and then she pressed me on it.

Dinner, she gets a veggie pizza, I get the veal parm.  

It all goes south, accusatory, by the time we get to the car.  I forget why.  

You hate me, you hate me...

 In the hard car ride home:  You ruined your own life.  I had nothing to do wit that.  You’ll come to a bad end, she says, barely acknowledging my humanity here.  Maybe I was telling her about how her supposed Feminism, her fear of her father, an aggressive hatred of his ways, ruined my life, as she abandoned any attempt to follow God's plan of femininity...  being a little harsh.  "I cooked for twenty years," she says, proud that she doesn't cook anymore, too important to do the dishes even, or lift a finger to organize anything but in her own messy way, newspapers, books.  Forget folding laundry, organizing anything in her bedroom, anything, leaving everything, dirty plates, a steak knife smeared with almond butter, open cans of cat food there out on the counter.  

"Bad Claire, bad Claire," she says, pounding on herself, over something I said about her.  I slap her lightly on the head.  Stop it!

I'll call the Police! she yells.  

Getting her to the front door, damn, I left the front door key in the car, so the quickest thing is to go round and open the kitchen door and come through.  I open the door and she's yelling, her pants down, squatting to pee.  I need to pee, you bastard.  I grasp her by her armpits and get her inside.  She's shouting Help, help, and I cup my hand over her mouth.

Last time she gets a second glass of wine.

Don’t expect sympathy.  Don’t expect gratitude.  This is all regarded as all your own fault anyway.

And if I hadn't spent as much energy on her, and pressed her, maybe she would have found a boyfriend, a man in her life.  But it didn't happen.

After a defeated nap, anticipating nothing of much good happening, my heart pounding, I rise and take a slice of the veggie pizza, so good, so tasty, why is it that dough puts a belly on me instantly, and decide I need to get out of the house, even with the ragweed forest releasing its pollen, down to the little pub where I meet musicians sometimes.  But inside the music is blaring, and outside is just dead, so, I should have just left, but I have one cider, and then another.  What am I doing there anyway.  A woman from the wine shop over at the Five Points by the university recognizes me and comes up and gives me a gentle high five, though it's too loud to talk with the juke box playing songs the girls are dancing to, happy with their own considerable attractiveness and good looks, songs I've never heard, and I'm in a completely perfect gloom, as the women of Brazil and the United States play for the gold on the flat screen TVs.  I've flirted with her a bit, I mean, just of out the discovery of our mutual small town kindness.  I've become friends with her husband, a talented guitar player.    But I have nothing tonight.  And the death hasn't been confirmed, and nor is there any mention of any funeral plants, and we're supposed to go down and visit with my aunt near there anyway, toward the end of the week, another week speeding by without getting anything done, without making any choices, just stuck, the brunt of it all, and with, making it more maddening, nothing to fall back on.  

When I get home, after taking a shower, I go back down to the basement, and the acid catches up with me, and I vomit into a plastic trash can, burning my throat, making my teeth feel funny.

I'm doing the dishes from earlier in the day when I hear her stir.  I go up and get her to take her pill, and she remembers nothing of the craziness from earlier.

I light a stick of incense, after the tea is made and put away in the fridge.  Disconcerting, to hear it from your own mother.  It spooks you.  "Bad things coming your way," from your own mom.  And you're the only one helping her, and got sucked into it years ago.  

And she's right, perfectly, from a societal point of view.  I'm not doing a god damn thing, not getting my ass off the ground, to help fellow humanity and serve, nothing.  I'm not planting orchards of plum trees, I'm not working, I don't have a job anymore, I don't have a direction, I'm not toiling in a Testament Vineyard, I can't get anything together, not even anything.  Lie down with dogs, you'll get fleas.  Don't even know where to fit in anymore, where to even start, with age sixty looming over me, soon enough, at which point, forget looking for a job, you're toast, buddy.

Floating, tossed around the waves, things beyond basic control.  The only decision I seem to be able to make is whether to go for a walk, or do yoga, if I have the time without her pressing me, or something fallen further into neglect.

I get up and face it, the Sunday after Friday's news.  I'll just chip away at it, I say to myself, as she sits and eats the piece of last night's pizza pie.  I've got the kettle on for lemon water.  "Oh, your tea," she says, with a light scoff to it.  Why don't you come sit at the table... What's new?  Anything new?  Are we going somewhere interesting today?  It's cold in here.  I get her dark little jacket.  This used to be my fancy jacket.  But no one ever takes me anywhere nice. 

Mom, I took you to Canale's last night. 

All my classmates are dying.

Are you going to take me for a ride later?

Mom, I've got some work to do.  I can't just drive the Queen of Sheba around all day.

What's this pill? Mom, it's good for you.  It helps with your memory.  I don't know what you're trying to do to me...  MOM!  Please!  Take your pills!

Do you have any siblings?  

Yes, mom.  I show her the picture, off a printer, from my brother's wedding, a man who knows what he wants. 

"I'm just going to sit here and rot," I hear her say, after I feed her, get her the pills, get her to brush her teeth.  She gets up and stands in the bathroom, frustrated by something, as she comes in from the living room.  I'd hoped she was taking a nap, with Freakonomics from NPR softly in the background, as the Mary Walker, the local doctor heroine from the 19th Century book sits in her lap.  The cat is sprawled across the couch.  

She goes out the back door and slams the door on me.  

What are we going to do today...  

The easiest thing is to go get the Sunday New York Times at the Stewart Shop, an ice cream.  Then drive west, just to keep her quiet.  Look there, mom, that's all the ragweed.  The Nature Center.  We walk to the lake overlook from the high eroding bluff.  Then up to the old farmhouse with the taxidermy in it, and I'd like to get a new hat.  Mom uses the port o potty, I get her sat under the pavilion, go inside the building, but they're only taking cash today, so no fresh hat for me.

An hour later, we're home, and I'm feeling tired, on top of being down, and then, yes, it kicks in, the reaction to all the pollen I've sucked in keeping mom entertained.

And she remembers nothing of the slamming of doors, the calling of attention to herself, the misery she causes to herself, doesn't remember her bitter self talk, "I guess we're just going to sit here and rot..."  I didn't say that.  I didn't slam any doors.  I didn't stand at the bathroom door staring at you as you tried to write in some form of concentration there after you fed us, making noises, sighing, burping.

And I will inherit all this from her.  

They, who could deal with her, and be entertaining, of course, equipped to deal with her, they are not here, but far away.

And in the Western World, if you come without any plan, no goal, come at it as a vague sort of Buddhist Christian, it's interesting, and sad, to see the way things go down.  

Disasters don't turn on a dime.

 I hear mom above me, footsteps in the kitchen.  She remembers to let the cat in, calling him, then happily as he comes along, and then as she feeds him.  "What a good kitty, what at good kitty..." At noon I will get her her pills.  She goes back upstairs, and I'm groggy still, down in the basement, to hide, and then I hear the knock on the door from the nice Meals on Wheels lady, Nicole, who's become a sort of friend.  She's happily married.  Small town, her son worked at the deli counter.  Okay, so I go up the stairs, sleepy, barely manage a word to her, she asks how we're doing, I shrug, and she's got a lot going on, she says, so.  Okay, so, put the two trays with the milk cartons away in the fridge, still in the clear plastic bag.  Okay, still waking up.  Why...  why can't I get up earlier...  Why didn't I ever do an internship, or take a class...  

I sit out on the back stoop in the sunlight, the leaves of the poplars fluttering in the breeze, drinking cold green tea from the mug.  Yoga would be good.  A little walk to wake up.  

I bring mom, reluctant to engage with her, her pills from the clear little plastic packet.  She's propped up on her pillow, reading.  CNN is on.  I passed the cat, who is sound asleep on the couch.  "Are you going to take me out to lunch today?  A ride?"  No, mom, we really don't have the money for that.  "I have money."  No, you don't really.  "You're taking me to lunch today."  I'm going to go do some yoga, mom.  I slip away, sauntering down the stairs.

To be a grown man without a career is unacceptable.

I make a little pot of coffee, something I don't often do.  Pour it on ice in a cup.

I do my yoga, finishing with a good 5 minute headstand, careful to land down on my right foot, and the left ankle gingerly seems capable of the bend down of the foot underneath as the body is tucked into child's pose.  Corpse, under the shade of the two spruce trees, after starting my sun salutation, table, camel, etc., in the sun, then seeking the shade for warrior poses, ankle holding up again.  Shoulder stand, plough, then finally into a decent full lotus, plenty of time to align the chakras within.

I haven't been bothered, so I go around the end of the building for a walk, and there's mom sitting on the front stoop.  How you doing, mom?  Who are you?  Are you Ted?  Yes, mom.  She looks at me.  I walk over to her.  There are more productive things to be doing than to stand on your head, she says, dismissing the work of the previous and precious forty minutes or so.  Okay...  Well, what's the plan today?  Uhm, well, let's go for a ride at some point.  And then later your friends are going to take you to the concert...  

This upcoming event, around seven this evening, has got her riled up.  She wants me to come along.  Well, Mom, I've got some friends who've invited me to something.  Who, she says, suspiciously.  Oh, just some guys we met at the thing over at the big barn, the open mic...  Where is it?  I don't want to tell her.  She can't handle the speeds of the drive.

Anyway, we are thinking about how and when to get out to Lee...  And this too is a stresser for her.  It's enough to make me feel sick to my stomach too, on top of everything else, but that's probably because we need a break from each other...

"Well, I know I'm not wanted here.  When you're ready to talk to people...  let me know, you miserable stinking rotten bastard," she says getting up from the breakfast table.  Earlier she asked, what to people do on such a lousy day, the rain falling lightly.  I told her I needed to write some poetry.  Do you write poetry?  Do you show it to anybody?

She goes and sits in her chair.  This is so fucking boring, I can hear her say.  An occasional slap on a book or a newspaper, like the tail of a miffed cat.

I was feeling very (or pretty) stressed yesterday.  I had mom lined up to be picked up by Barb and Tania for the outdoor jazz concert in the park by the pavilion, leaving at 7:15.  She's asked me over and over again.  What time are they coming, and finally I write it down on a 3 by 5 card.  I get her some slices off the rotisserie chicken, and not hungry myself, am headed out the door, I finally resolved, to catch my friend Adam and his band play a place called Turtle Cove out in Fairhaven.  I kept on 104 by mistake, but enjoying the liberated speeds mom will raise great protest over.  Adam had invited me out, an open mic.  I didn't feel I had anything up my sleeve, practicing some outside with the guitar back over behind the spruce trees drinking dry cider on the rocks.  Two of them, and one for the road, to get in the mood, I tell myself. 

It's a beautiful later in July evening with the corn reaching tasseled maturity, six foot tall, across the hills.  Roadside places offering brisket, and sausage, meats, produce, firewood and other little country offerings.

I get back up to 104a, and take it into Fairhaven that way, and soon after several broad sweeping curves the old Toyota takes quite well, and then I'm sitting with my buddies, and it's a cool spot on the water.

This morning I feel ashamed of it all.  I brought McDonald's back with me, two double quarter pounders and even a Big Mac, I share with mom when I get in.  She called.  But it was a drunken trip, that scares me now.  And I don't think I played very well, nor anything memorable, up on the stage at the end of the night.  So I stew in that, raise to get mom her morning round of the two pills, and then she comes downstairs for breakfast.  Now she's pounding on her book.  "Kill myself.  Fucking boring."  The cat has come back in.  Yesterday there was a commotion in the high mint along the back of the townhouse by the air conditioning.  The grey striped cat of the neighbor had cornered a juvenile rabbit.  I heard it squeak out the back window getting mom lunch with sliced red onion, tomato, fresh mozzarella, as we were discussing planning a trip to go see her sister out in Lee.  I let the cat out, and he ends up killing it, flaying it alive, a horrible sight, out there, as we eat our little lunch and worry.  The things a drunk does, checking to see, oh yes, the guitar case is here, and I remember seeing my wallet on the passenger seat of the car, because I paid for the burgers at the drive thru here.  I slept fitfully, but at least I'm still alive.

The Buddhist concept of no solid fixed self encounters difficulty with drinking and all its involved encounters.  The no solid self will get lost, easily, distracted, misled.  Maybe even in trouble.

That’s all I get to write, and it’s off to the car for a ride to entertain mom.  I get mom to the car, and the rain is falling harder.  A van with Amazon pulls up, man goes out with box to 33, the new neighbors.  Is that for us?  No, mom. That’s not our stoop.  I go back in to get the umbrella.  And now it’s pouring.

Okay, what direction are we going in…. Newspapers first.  At the convenience store, pouring out, even harder, and cool air, not a summer monsoon type.  

By the lake, where rides and bandstand have been set up.  

Grocery store, you okay mom?  In I go.

Then a drive, south along the river.  Wet coats when we get back.  Exhausted feeling.

Down in the basement, Corpse pose, in the early morning, trying to draw in from the damp air energies to the Chakra centers.  What is spirit anyway?  Some creative one side of the brain thing.  The right brain, more intuitive, paradoxically not so focussed on words... but creative concepts.

People wiser than I came up when the understanding of the energy centers and the map for them in the body.  Wiser than I, they emphasize the quiet, breathing, listening to the breath, nothing else, just being there in the moment, when, for me, the memories of a million ghostly spirits and all the regrettable things I’ve done being carried away, then having to go back down the stairwells of our trespasses sneaking away, swirl around me.  My lack of self control, all my bad behaviors mounting upon me, making me pay…

And the meditation serving to remind me, or reinstalling the good I was once capable of, had I but applied myself, protecting myself against all the bored spirits that will take you for a joy ride…

To think that distraction its very self was my profession, my job, even.  Bartender.  What a fool.  On top of the clock ticking and the calendar pages, the months, the years in a kind of isolation.

Where is home now, anyway…  Soul searching…

I turn over onto my right side, head on hand on pillow, old position of the depressed sleep since college days, falling into a dream of trying to gather my things.

I wake up on my left side, hearing mom creak in her chair above me.  “Hello,” she says, reflexively, at something, and feel that so sick of being myself who I have become now feeling.  If I go upstairs, she’ll be on me.  What are we doing for fun today.

What have I become…. The first thought of the day.  I was a young prince, mild, inoffensive, I played the bass in orchestra, I was in the student council.  What happened to me, or was it just my foolish listening to rock n roll, the rebellion.   I wasn’t the dominant mage type, but I was competent, some talents here & there, good at some things…

She comes down a second time in the quiet of the night, in an hour's time.  She goes to the back door to check on things, as she says.  The cat I let him out a half an hour ago.  Oh, poor cat, I'm sorry...  I’m so sorry, she says to the cat, as she calls him, about to rummage for a can of cat food.

I can't handle it anymore, another intrusion, so I raise my voice, standing up to leave the room toward the front door, "enough with the tension, the cat is fine being outside, I don't need the drama," I find myself shouting at her, which not only breaks the spell but casts us all, each of us, including the cat, into a deep sudden worry.  Oh my god.  Something's going wrong within me here.  Not only the loss of the humor of an SNL skit about The Godfather, played by John Belushi, in group therapy, but then the whole evening of my trying to find some free artistic space, and maybe a chuckle, humor as medicine.

The cat is scared by my shouting, retreats to the living room's safety.  Mom freaks out, you've ruined my evening, and she goes, of course, upstairs.  I will not tolerate this, she said. This is over.  I will never get back to sleep now.  I will never trust you again.

But it's not important anyway.  In fact, that I think I need to be doing so is completely self-indulgent.

Never try to be an artist.  It is not possible to try to live frugally as possible in the USA.  No matter how you might feel inclined, it's not going to be a healthy life for you trying to "be a writer."  No way.  Be a school teacher.  Get up early and regularly, don't mess around, don't embrace the night life and musicians, don't be foolish.  Let all that art stuff go.  Just let it go.

You go looking for fun, but often what fun consists of is tension.  You take in the tension, and then you need to work it out, feeling the need for art.  Better than that dreadful feeling of nothing going on, right?

There seems to be too many choices here, but all of them wrong, all of them half failed already.  

Mom is calmly reading upstairs, which surprises me.   She came down earlier, and I gave her some soup, Campbell's Healthy Choice Chicken Noodle--at the label, the listed ingredients, I cringe, still, at least no MSG--and she had some, and then she said, well, I'll leave you alone, after asking me four times, did you sleep well, and with that I seized the chance to not worry about writing, but to go and do yoga in the backyard, quick, figuring the time constraints, and still, "what am I going to do with her, take her to the HarborFest Summer Bash... or out to Sterling Nature Center?  Is it possible to avoid going out to eat?"

Last night we tried to repeat the pleasant time of Thursday night listening to the music down in the park, a shared plate of chicken tenders and home-cut fries, ten bucks, and little glasses of wine at six bucks a pop. Last night was Friday night, and of course, with the weather improved, clear, sunny, the town was out in full, and by the time I parked the car and walked mom down along the road to the pavilion, there's hardly anywhere to sit, I didn't bring a fold-out camp chair, the only picnic table bench, where the characters, some of them looking a bit crystal meth rough, are kind enough to allow mom to sit, as I keep an eye on her, Mom, come slide back this way...  and they're out of the wine at the booth, and the best option seems to be Blackberry wine slushies, at ten bucks each.   We get back home, and I'm exhausted and feeling poisoned by the wine slushies and need a nap, just a disheartening day with mom's back account running low and here it is time to pay the rent.

Feeling too much as a bewildered chicken shit, the only guy in America without a job, a plan, nothing but all those years of tending the bar behind me, what good did that do, feeling too anxious to go check in with Attila who's still being quiet upstairs.

A battle of wills, the doer, the Aries, versus the quiet industrious Capricorn, a homebody.  The relationship that has led my life to be so.  Or maybe I'm just placing the blame on her force.

I used to form my close relationships over the bar, which is different than the normal way.  Trying to be everybody's friend.  Which is not how adults operate, of course.  What fate will "everybody's buddy" come to, but a low one.  The guy people came to drink and eat with, and drink some more.

This is the writer's notebook that every writer must keep.  This is mine.  I publish them, these little pieces, because it makes it easier for me to read the published ones, rather than the draft ones, which I have to save anyway, while working on them, before letting them go.

It will be, by nature, repetitious, redundant.

I go upstairs and give mom her midnight pill, Memantine, a substitute for Namenda, 5 mg., a little pink one.  Her bed is strewn with books and all sorts of things, in a way that saddens me, and the cat still finds a way to sleep in this little landscape of bouldery books and landslide rock shelf hardcover piles with clothes and mail.  I have to awaken her, but not from too deep a place of sleep.  I make a small attempt to find her remote, as the TV is off, but I don't see it being obvious anywhere, so, as to not further frustrate myself, okay, I slink back down the stairs.

To see one's loved ones aging, and then to see it too about yourself in the pictures you took at the Summer Bash HarborFest/Quest Fair, seeing your own face now as the camera is turned toward you to capture the image behind you...

But no, Jennifer Sandbridge is right, you can't think that way.  You have to turn it around, as Buddha did, as Jesus did.

And then I realized, sort of all at once, that I'd been doing it all wrong.  My fault was that I had no goal, and therefore everything had to be relevant to me, I needed to respond.  A peculiar personality trait.  Being unable to do the basic hippocampus division of things.  Good, useful, a tool for forward motion toward the successes we all need to secure to eat and have a roof over our heads, procreation...  or, an obstacle.  

I let other people's will come before my own.  Depressed and unprotected, misery deepening.

Addicted people lie to themselves.  The lies the lies, they all mount, and mount.  Micro lies.  Macro lies.  And they are hard to distinguish, even the truth from the lie.

Sure, I'm helping mom out.  Yeah.  

And my own sacrifices mount.  

I take time away from them, pretending it's not so.  That I'm not absolutely fucked, as they say.  I have a cider at night, play the guitar for the audience of friends on YouTube.

Oh, sure.  I'll read The Brother's Karamazov, "unless a kernel of wheat fall to the ground and die, it gives forth no fruit," (whatever, however it goes), study the inspirations Jesus Himself must have felt within, pray like Buddha, then I will achieve something noteworthy and good, true enough to bring back to the rest...  I thought, once upon a time, these were noble aspirations.  The very seat and seeds of creativity.

Nope.  All Rothko ended up painting, in the end, black.

All you get stuck with is shit.  And a prison's misery.  No one else wanted to deal with, wanted to drive back and forth with her in the car, or by yourself, the only one with an active working attention.

The chenopod pollen hits.  I'm woozy, out of it, exhausted, feel quite unable to face anything.  I had cider last night, again was up til it got light out.  I'd done yoga yesterday, outside, a walk early, to check on the beaver dam by the power relay station, then one later with mom in the late afternoon by Rice Creek, the barns and fields of Brookmore, used by the university.  The meatballs and sausage I cooked last night, the burner was set on low, but when I come down it's hot, as if it were on a tick past medium, bubbling away the pot, and I smell come charcoal bitter burn to it.  Vulcanized.  But I don't have much energy, at all, in fact, plus there's the thought of trying to get mom ready for the road trip to see my aunt, which would include laundry, packing her, food for the trip, and so forth, on top of the Delta variant of Covid-19.  I get mom her pills around 12:30, explain to her that I don't feel well, and go down and fall asleep for another two hours.  Time is going by quickly.  Mom wants to go for a ride.  It's August now, which scares (the shit out of) me.

It's a big mistake, it seems, to read up on Buddhism and such things, Sutras, Alan Watts lectures, The Sermon on the Mount.  It seems like a set-up, where you'll end up in some place where it's all you have left almost.  You have to give up on attachments, accept that you'll never have any children, or that you'll never be employed, truly, again.  You'll end up throwing your life away, the amicable easy going one who end up with nothing.

And the truth has come out late in mid-life, about all the lies I've been telling myself over the wine, and then having no means to protect my own interests, and even mom doesn't care.

Mom asks me to stop and talk with her for the fourth time today.  Talk to me, she says, please, I'm so lonely.  Mom, I'm waking up, I'm not feeling well, will you give me some space, please.  I sit on the Ottoman, and try to give her one of those, "look, here's the kind of a thing I'm going through these days..."

"You're a mess," she says, looking at me sternly, from her chair, her eyes narrowed into cold slits of dimness.  I'm wondering if I don't see some swelling happening again along her jaw.  The teeth issue again.

I come down from the shower and having dressed.  "I'm getting impatient..." I hear her say.  At least she's dropped the cruelty and not caring, for the moment.  She easily forgets the moods she'll pass through and the tantrums.  "I am impatient."  Mom, you were born impatient, I say as I walk past her.   No, she offers, it's just the men I get mixed up with, ha ha ha.

But I've woken up with paranoia.  The credit card issued with mom's information.  How did that happen?  (Later, after dinner, after she goes upstairs to read on her bed in front of the TV I get the piece of mail I got from First Union Bank, about the credit card we have nothing to do with, and go up and have her sign it, which she quizzes me about, sternly.)

The trip out to Lee has us both riled up.  I don't know if I can do four or five hours driving with her pleading and pleading, crying, "slow down!  You're going too fast!"  And when the ragweed, or whatever it is, hits, it's always a shock to the head and the energy.

Oh, please, could something happen, I hear her say, as I get some soup ready for her, again with bringing the sliced turkey breast out.

Later, back after the ride along the lake, along the college, back into town passing over the heights over the lake, blue, the book store, the grocery store.  Dishes to wash. "Can I help," she calls, from the living room, and I try not to blow my stack.  I've been careful about not being outside long, and if so, with a mask on.  The shower made me feel quite a bit better, but the ciders the night before to keep calm, yeah, I drink water, green tea and dandelion tea, taking it easy.

I get dinner set, the bone in chicken breast, squeeze of fresh lemon, oregano, dried parsley, Irish Sea salt, a dusting of lemon pepper, on top of three onions cut up in the old iron pan, Idaho potatoes, cut in half, sweet potato in the smaller iron pan.  I go down and take a nap on the air mattress, and I feel a tickle on my arm and there's the good rather large wolf spider, all black, seen on last night, huge, on the cement block wall where the rain comes and dampens, leaving effluviant stains.   Right up close to my left arm, where the sheet is crumpled up at the side of the thin ThermaRest NeoAir mattress, and fortunately not biting me.  The spider runs off quick, just a little ways, stopping, and I shoo it off further by advancing a sneaker toward its position, and it runs off in the direction of the stairs.  

I avoid drinking over dinner, and later on.  Dinner has its rough spots.  I have to explain things over and over again, and it gets tiresome, after hours of it.   Yes, we had a nice time at the book store, I try, groping for something sustaining.  I took her down to the Summer Bash at the park by the lake, Thursday, then Friday, then Saturday, cheap wine...  There's the mail thing, the new local library library card, renew the first two books we took out a month ago.  Dinner's dishes.  I go upstairs to coax mom into taking her nightly pill, but she's instantly angry at me for waking her, "a strange man in her bedroom..."  Waking people up when they're trying to sleep is a terrible terrible thing, she tells me.  Okay, sorry mom.

A few nights ago, down in the basement on the air mattress, I looked through a picture book, art from the National Gallery, art through the centuries, Venice, Rembrandt, portraying the chapters of the life of Jesus Christ.  It calmed and relaxed me.  I woke up in a decent mood, after a decent night's sleep, the will to go on.

When you are forced to do a kind of deep dive into your own life, all of it, you're coming up upon a need for the presence of all that which is truly radical in the spiritual life we speak about.  First of all your rampant mistakes, your self-misguidedness, your own pursuit of all the sad illusory things.  And then, with all of this before your own sad eyes and heart, you have to ask, why.  Jonah, Gautama as he sees pain,  because you cannot see pain in other people if you avoid seeing it in yourself...  

What's the point, you might ask. 

Well, it's salvation, some form of it, for all sentient and human beings, isn't it?  I'm not original in saying this.  You could, if you were perfect, avoid that, couldn't you?  Or at least you could wisely and through thrift and hard work and diligence and a minimizing of mistakes and foolish behaviors, just focus on doing the best you can and try to get around that.  

The planet wells with suffering, and the people in it, upon it, dealing with it.  Mom repeats herself, well, at least it's not snowing--mom, it's august--I can't remember ever seeing snow here--okay, mom.  

Mom, can you think of some clothes to bring, if we can make it out to see Trish?

I've been moved around so much, my clothes are over there, a few houses over.

But there's, I've seen some clothes in your bedroom, just upstairs...

Talk breaks down.  

Excruciating.  

I pick at my sweet potato.  Can dinner end soon enough, so I can just do the dishes and go hide.  Mom likes the onions from the pan.  I'll pull the meat of the chicken breast off the bones, scrape the pan and the onions, the leftover oil into a bowl, doesn't have to be a big one.  I'll put the still hot potatoes in another, cover.  Can I do that yet, yes.  Mom wants to save her half of a half of a potato.  Okay.  

Okay, I'll get out of your hair, she says.

Shamefully, after doing what I can, spot wipe clean the miraculous air mattress, try out the library card registration, sorting the refrigerator, in case we are able to get on the mighty road, I open a bottle of the Frenchy $11 Pinot Noir, sipping it slowly, preparing lemon water for the morning, for detox.  Who knows what the morrow brings, sufficient to the day, the evil thereof.  The men at the bookstore serving as father confessors and repository of information.

Once I was egged on, at a dog show, to steal a golf ball, as it landed on the green below us.  I threw the golf ball down on the green, not far away from where it had landed, as men shouted at me, upset.  I had to run away.  My brother laughed.

  But the real writing is never going to get done here.  I’m either hungover, franticly worried, or having to deal with mom.

I wake up in a panic with the headless horseman chasing me, every day.  It's like a joke those more organized than I, in life, in everything, are playing on me.  I find a moment's peace, working on my singing at night, after the bar, where my friend Mike, the local energetic guitar player, and his sister, who's flying back to Eastern Oregon tomorrow, after a month's stay, they have an elderly mom too, Irish, tell me I have a beautiful voice.  What?!?  I can't barely carry a tune.  But I played before them, and their mom, and my mom, old Irish songs, and they saw it and heard it.

I'm out for a walk.  I slept in, too hungover to move.  When you go out to the bar where I meet my friends, like Michael, they don't have any wine of note, so I get cider.  But it's big shot in the arm, to hear they liked my singing and that I, most difficult thing of all, have a voice.  So when I get home, I say, well, I have to practice, and the Olympics opened tonight, so...  They did a beautiful version of John Lennon's song.  Imagine, of course.  So, it's not easy, I have to look up the words, but I work on it.  Not much good, but I work at it.

And the next morning, when I wake, around one in the afternoon, when I hear mom calling above, hello, hello, is anybody here, I need help, help... that sort of shit, on and on, I find myself still feeling fairly full of wine in my blood, and I really don't feel like getting up and functioning, I'll tell you.  I was up til what, six in the morning, just out of my rhythms, a long held thing, a steady habit, the cat don't mind it, I find peace away from mom, what's not to like about peace & quiet, even though of course you always pay for it.

But it became such a joke, I finally said, okay, you want me to be a worthless drunk who has to deal with mom, hey, fine, I'll do that, because that is the only way, once you boil it all down.

I'm walking up by the power station, finding the water even higher now.  The beaver have capped off the structure of their dam beautifully and brilliantly, and with their eye (and their own inner level) always working.  There is a cage structure, so first the built up the front side, then they build up the sides, working with the mesh intended to thwart them.  And then, after the last great rain storms, downpours really, they have done something I didn't anticipate.  They put a cap on the whole thing, a roof over the big pipe, to finish.  And the water level, even as I am still intoxicated in my blood, but wanting to be rid of it, even so, just wanting to disappear from the face of the earth, I see the water is higher now than ever.  It's come up to the road.  It's come to the gravel raised bed of the power station...

The phone rings.  Guess who.  Yes, mom, I know where you are, I know where the cat is...  I'm out for a walk, I'll be back soon.  (And to make me even more downhearted and crazy and disgusted and unhappy, as soon as I turn the corner on my stupid slow walk back along with tiger Lillies past their bloom, and pink sweet pea and garlic wild scapes and little chamomile flowers and daises of the field, there she is in her same outfit as yesterday waiting for me on the stoop.  Oh, bother.). 

Tania, a new and great friend, an old friend, a friend from the Universe who has always been there though I just didn't know about it in my limited circumstances stuck with the same old greedy fools, were I to grow impatient, of the late night bar, I've been cut off from all these great spirits of planet Earth.  Anyway, Tania has sent me a message, by text, on your phone, there is a friend of hers singing jazz tonight at Canale's.  I'm walking back, having gotten mom's call, and I get through, I get transferred to the hostess stand, the phone rings again and again, seven eight nine times, okay, they must be busy....  I'm in a fog anyway.  I take a look at mom's main bank account, and there's forty bucks in it, great.  I know her social security check hasn't come in yet, and the other check, $800, hasn't come yet.  But still...

I go back in and try to keep her happy.  I'd like to write.  I'd like to have a moment.  She stares at me, after I get her some bone broth.  She looks at me.  She stares at me.  I look into my phone.  I'm hungry, I'm desperate, the last thing I want to do is go out to dinner, because it costs money.  Mom, I'm going to take a shower, okay.  Just to feel better.   Creepy bitch.  Leave me alone.  That's how I get sometimes. 

I go take a shower.  After, I doddle a bit, in her old office, just trying to find that one true sentence, and I'm almost there, I almost have it, I do have it, but then she's calling Ted Ted Ted hello hello is ANYbody here, is anybody here, her voice rising in panic.   And I can't take it anymore, this funny cruel joke playing on me.

Mom, look.  Could I just have two minutes.  Two minutes is all I want.  Can I have that?  Can I have two minutes.

Everyone here hates me.  I'm no good.  I'm no good.

Oh Jesus..  

So there's no other choice.  Okay mom, I'll take you for a ride.  

I put on a tee shirt.  My aunt has finally called to check in.  She's out celebrating with her dear old friend at The Red Lion, a birthday party, 76th for Yvette.  Every now and then when I get desperate, I text her, please, could you just call mom and talk to her for like two minutes, is that too much to ask...  (Again, craziness and too much wine has gotten to me, the anxious stuff.) 

But then mom turns it psychological again.  Why did I even bother.   "My mother always said, everyone would hate me.  I'm no good.  My sister, she has everything, she's happy.  I'm a failure."

Oh Jesus.

Get the stupid old bitch into the car.  I could take her out to jazz.  But, "it's too hot, it's too cold, the music is too loud, I can't go up those stairs."  I want to keep it simple.

We drive along the lake.  I look at the gas gauge.  Mom isn't quite hungry enough to go to The Press Box.  We drive right by Canale's Restaurant, old, classic, since the 1950s, where the music will be in the courtyard.  I ask her.  I'd prefer to go to The Press Box, she tells me.  Okay.  Easy.  Cheap as you can get.  Shock looking at her bank account.

We get there.  After the drive.  It's busy.  It'd be a nice night to sit outside.  But, the outdoor seating is full, and I'm already feeling guilty enough about not pushing for Canale's and the jazz out in the courtyard.  

No open tables outside, or indoors on a Saturday night in Oswego at 6:15.  I almost shouted at her as we came to the door, mom, in or out, I don't know, okay, we're going in.   Our server friend, manager, lays out our options.  I gather she would have heard me raise my voice in frustration, at mom, "in or out."  So, yeah, the bar's fine, thank you.

We sit at the bar.  And we end up having a decent time at least towards the end when a gentleman joins us.  I'm feeling horrible about missing Tania, the open sky courtyard, her jazz friends, but, here's a man who reads, who travels, who documents covered bridges, down almost all of them in New England, retired special-ed BOCES teacher, a man who knows how to work.   Great conversation.  He's been reading American authors of the 1950s, Henry Miller, Hemingway, he even, I find out later, has a soft spot for Kerouac.

Turns out he likes Confederacy of Dunces, which cuts too close to the bone for me.  He tells mom the story, of how John Kennedy Toole finally sort of gave up, and how his mother tirelessly kept sending the book around.  I've had four glasses at bar over dinner, mom's had two.

By the time we get toward home, Canale's, the musicians are packing up, Tania is gone.  We sit and have a glass of wine, and the hospitality is really there for us.

The husband of the singer comes over, recognizing mom from twenty years ago,   They sat on the environmental committee together.  He's written a book about following the old farm harvests in America. He's heading back to Key West.  Second literary conversation we've had today.

When his wife joins us at the table, I ask her if she sang "Satin Doll."  She's tired, she says, just wants to go home. Hasn't sung out in public for a long time.  "I just sang three sets of jazz standards."  She answers, somewhat curtly, completely understandable.

Writing is a series of poor personal choices done and continued every day.  You didn’t fight for what you wanted.  Guess what; you end up with nothing.  Wake up to the sober truth.

I cower and wait as I hear her stirring, above me.  The sound of the toilet flushing, her heavy hiking sneakers clomping across the bathroom floor above the kitchen here.

I don’t want to go out to any pub today. Some yoga would be nice.

Bah, look at your life, what a bum.  The rebel gets beaten out of you, for sure.

Mom left her role as a calm good mother and wife, abandoned her post when I was 16, and then, of course, I had to follow suit.  I'll show you...

I start the day trying out some yoga.  I've heard her clomping around a bit, but then she didn't come downstairs, so, okay, I'll give it a shot, outdoors, easy.  I do some warm-ups, gentle standing alignment standing up straight, taking breaths, arms up straight, stretching, and then later reaching for a sun salutation.  Stretching out the spine, leaning over, deeper and deeper, releasing tightness holding you in little known inner places, lower back coming out of hip bones, each breath bringing you closer and longer.  

Then mom comes out.  I pick myself up from pigeon pose, and go over to her, what's up mom, how you doing?  "Are we going out to Collocca today?"  She stares up at me.  (A place representing fun to her.  the place we were yesterday.  over there.  where we saw the people and we went with them.  we were there yesterday...)  Mom, that's a long drive, and I don't feel like wine yet.  And if we go out there I'll have some wine.   I don't feel like having any wine now.  "But we don't have to have wine..."  Mom, it's a vineyard.

She sits down, on the neighbor's back steps.  I move away back across the yard, where she's less in my face.  Next up in my sequence is the headstand, and I get set up and up I go.  

And when I come back down and soothe myself into the counter pose tucked in a child pose ball with my face down on the earth.  "Did you hurt your neck," I hear from the distance.  "are you okay?"  I mumble something into the ground.  

Mom, I'm doing my yoga, do you mind...  

You'll do whatever you want to...

Mom, it's good for me.  It helps me.

Inside.  Later, I check in on her.  The pressure has not gone, worse maybe.  She's glowering head down on her Eames Chair, not even reading anything.  Selfish.  Jealous, an encapsulation of all the bad emotions a body can have.

Then it occurs to me, she's confused.  She goes and sulks in her chair.  Not looking up.

Mom, what do you mean by Collocca?  

Garbled answer.  She's not clearly describing anything like a vineyard, using vague term, where we saw the people...

This is when I wonder, in my twisted anxious hungover tired brain, why is I’m not getting more help.

All my life's work, gone to try to take care of my mom, gone to shit.  Gone to complete utter destruction.  And the others simply stayed away.  A choice they made.  I was the stupid one, the fool, seeming to pick up the slack in her life, when we should have pushed her to get a boyfriend to take care of her, rather than me.  And to me it all seemed like my miserable fate from the very beginning.

I barely want to get up from my air mattress anymore.  It's dark in the basement anyway.  Not healthy.

I come up the stairs.  Mom shouts "HELLO?" as I come out of the hallway bathroom.  

"Alright, I quit.  I'll just kill myself..."  her patter from the living room.

To try to punish her or reprimand her just backfires anyway.  It's all I can do not to raise my voice at her.

"Lots of jobs out there," she says, reading from the newspaper.  Four cat dishes already today, a knife with almond butter smear out on the counter.

My career has long been a thing of professional and economic ruin, what's the point of going on now...  I break jumbo eggs carefully over the small teflon pan after the butter melts.  Add water, just a little bit, cover with the stainless pan.

And why is that so...  What depressed me so mightily, the thing I knew I'd be left to deal with.

Double barreled misery.  No job, no real career to speak of...  And then mom.  What am I doing, where am I going, where am I going to end up...  

Today I was able to go the bank, then the grocery store, then the wine shop, and each time the interior of the car heats up.  There’s particulates in the sky, smoke from the great terrible forest fires out west here in late July.

I'll never have a family of my own.  So sad.  How easy it all happened.  The saint fails.  What do I have to look forward to...  I'll never have a girlfriend.  I wish I'd known what I was doing, struggling along, not doing well.  Just by being a drunk, no success at writing, generally being regarded as a creep, well, or if not exactly a creep, just a greatly inadequate male, poor, never having his stuff together, thinking too much importance over art.  All the talent I threw away, after the rejection "at Nazareth."  My great misunderstanding of society thinks about the individual.  The individual does not exist, outside of relationships.  "That's no life." The stone that the builders rejected will always be the first corner stone, but that doesn't do you much good now, does it.

I'm writing shit anyway.

Mom shuffles around.  I can't write.  Second time in the kitchen in five minutes.  Does she know she's driving me crazy?  At least she's using mouthwash now.  

The $9.99 Montepulciano tasted like overripe dirt, a disappointment.  I'll go back to Pinot Noir tonight.

With writing you have to keep chipping away at it.  Every little bit, the attempt to throw out a rope and lash in the thoughts on your mind.

But all of this I write, going through such things here, it’s really about my own fault, my own creeping alcoholism that has gone on so long it has just kept going all these years, with the wine now, with the cheap decisions, the betrayal, the youthful lonesome punk damaging his brain.  That’s whose fault it all is, my own.  And at least I’m granted being allowed to come back here and help my old mom out, to be as gentle as I can as she’s losing it.

The alcohol for me is really about all I gave up, let pass by, as I stated she and aloof and pretending I was wonderfully creative, from within, without teaming up with anyone…

And then it’s shame for me, on me.  People pleasing.  The bullshit of late night wine and poetry… its later-Kerouac emptiness.  The man-child attempt to soothe the anxiety of his childhood.  I suppose this condition is more normal or prevalent than one might think, making me not far away from a regular type troubled guy, but that I wasted a good head start, opportunities few are given.

Mom is either bored or over stimulated.  This makes her harder to deal with.  My getting up late doesn't help, though she is not getting up early these days either.  

I have failed, all my adult life, and failed at this writing thing too.  I now have one last chance to help my mom get through mid stage dementia with some grace, and hopefully I can stay kind to her.  I pray for sleep, and for kindness.

On the other hand, being a good standing familiar shepherd to get people through daily reality, as the Buddha and Jesus do, in an off-handed way (am I using the term right?), with a little wine and comfort, there's something to be said for that too.

I gather it was just the years of panic from her phone calls when I'm at work, about to tend bar, that will throw you off and make you crave the wine at the end of the shift...  On top of other years of her stirring up panic and stress with her Mary Lincoln carrying on, shouting at my father, "you're a failure, you're a failure, you're a failure..."

But you can't bring any of this up with her now, she'll just get angrier, harder to handle, something...

The Irish have a sensitivity to ghosts.  In the broad sense of the term.  The ghost can be the soul, all the actions of a close family member, and that family member, your grandfather, let's say, can pass down his soul pattern, the rut he lived in, haunt you with it, wreck your life just like he did with his own, his soul's effort, poetically, let's say, to share the family burden, "get to work, young man..."  You should have tried to better protect yourself, or run, but it hit you full blast, as it did no one else, so that you now find yourself more and more living out his life, the anger back and forth between himself and my mother, the look for an escape when you have none.  

That's what scares me, the ghosts.  You might think it's bullshit, but I don't.

I've had anxiety and performance anxiety ever since senior year of college.  I gave up musical performance.  And my life contracted, getting smaller and smaller.  

I can perfectly understand this great era of mental health awareness, Prince Harry on Oprah, admitting his drinking to cope with the pain, Naomi Osaka, and now Simone Biles, just today, for whom it would seem to be taken for granted to be able to fly through the air and stick a landing. 

This is why I'm not a great joiner in with things, all the anxiety, and then, if you don't do anything about that, naturally, it will get worse, and you'll withdraw further into your hole.

It's the anxiety that has made me into a singular lone creature, an isolated writer.  

Back in previous life I could cope with it, by welcoming people to the great dinner party at the restaurant.  And even in that, my joining-in-with-people muscles atrophied.  I could have joined in with investment bankers selling 401k plans to poor restaurant people like me.  I could have been part of a team.  

But something spoke up in me, a sort of subtle wish to be welcomed by a Jesus or a Buddha into the circle, the team, the Sangha, the prosperous happy society of morning commutes.  It's not been the healthiest of mental lifes.  I've retreated far too often, rather than going forward.  Take dancing.  I love to dance, and I can do it free style to music played, and I enjoy it, but I have no ability with the close to close dancing out of the movies, the choreographed movements, the steps of a waltz.  That speaks right up my own alley of private fear, feeling bad for not knowing how to salsa, having been too shy for too long, being unable to come up with the admission that I need for someone to teach me.

Because I haven't been good, and bold enough, about making choices, this is where I am now, here, with my old mom, my own future uncertain, foggy, but with tasks at hand.  Shame on the prince, for turning out to be such a bum, almost even a drunkard.  And imagine how I might feel now, here, having blown everything you're supposed to do, not even being a schoolteacher for kids.

And all this is why I've gravitated toward yoga, mediation walks, to find calm within, self-acceptance.

I go do some yoga as the clouds gather into whishy whooshes of the thunderstorm coming in from the northwest off the big lake.  Twenty minutes ago, heat and sunlight come to meet my rising and then bending Sun Salutation, but now a cool has come.  Light droplets touch me as I stand in mountain pose, legs, feet spread apart, then into down dog, still, after years of doing, still figuring out as a way to stretch the spine, primarily, "worry about the feet touching the ground and straight legs later," my friend Betsy the yoga person tells me when I tell her about my weird ankle soreness.  I open some windows back inside, swiping the counter off from crumb and drop of cat food, touching on my Moroccan Mint tea, and soon its time, as the heavy droplets first come to the stoop, time to give mom her daily pills, regimen against dementia.

There's more broken people in the world than not, and some of being brave is being so enough to admit the cracks in you.  Not everyone in the world can have a decent life, not every human soul is not undisturbed by things out of their own control on this earth, with all the things that happen.

As a child I always felt I recognized a basic level even amount of intelligence spread throughout.  There's a smart kid in everyone.  The cat is smart in his cat form, the bird just so, everything knowing what to do, way better, it seems, than us poor noggin' heavy human forms.  And even insects, I see it in them too.  And if I were a teacher, I see the smart creatures in the bad kids, the literary gift to a London Punk MacGowan.  And I also know that many seemingly dumber, more ill at ease in a classroom kind of kids are way way more successful than I am.  They have wife, kids, grown up now, they own houses and have jobs, whereas I seem to get more and more anxious all the time.

Yes, maybe it turns out that Amherst College wasn't so good for me at allowing certain self-confidence to develop.  There were factors, but it always hurts us deeply to get ostracized and misunderstood, at the formative brink of adulthood in particular.  

So I stand with Jesus, and listen to His Sermon on the Mount, about who has a right to be "happy."

She came down again and asked me again if we were going out "Coloooka," rhymes with Bazooka, again with her 1940s gangster Mike Bove, (sounds like Bovie), a business associate of my grandparents in the diner days.  Up there with the way she says, I wrote about this earlier, broth, "buh-rot'th."  Or the way she says, like a child, the word soup, "szoooop (huh), a breath on the end.  Lots of baby talk from her, or childish talk.  But given that, "huh huh huh, you know what my friend Helen Brown said, 'it's wicked not to have fun,'" I endure, sip my tea, present an alternative, you know, the two library books we took out, her's a large print of Joe Biden's treatment of the sad losing of his eldest son, myself, the story of Jesus Christ told in art from the National Gallery, maybe we can go the public library again.  {I thought I wrote this down, but between the edits I'm able to do on my iPhone's access and the laptop's, I get confused sometimes, with my the wifi not always working...}

So between the bands of rain, I get out for a little walk, up to check on the beaver dam construction.  Frogs jump unseen, ploop, into the water.  The beaver have laid fresh green shoots over the top.  The red winged blackbird, who initially instructed out warning calls, is bored as I walk my way back, hidden in the reeds, calling a simple two note, .  A catbird sighs.

Mom is calling.  I don’t know if my meditation walk has succeeded.

I feed her a second meal of the day, again, the sliced turkey, but now with thinly sliced red onion, tomato, fresh mozzarella, along with the Genovese Basil the neighbors sent over to us after I, we, sent them over a bottle of French Pinot Noir, kind enough to let me know that such a wine was right up their alley.  And mom sings how I know so well to make things beautiful and tasteful, I should look into doing it for a living.  Yes, mom, yes.  Sure, yes, that's a good idea.  Yes, I wish I'd gone and tried to be a chef earlier.

(What's haunting me from those early days is the liquor I used to get into.  Shameful.  Drinking alcohol, without blessing it somehow and praying for protection, leads your soul and your energies to be distracted, so that you don't end up doing the work you're supposed to be doing.  It might not be actual spirits waiting at the mouths of bar & grills, to leap on you;  people, believe me, are distracting enough, bent on it, enough Dean Moriarty out there to take you on a hell bent trips with their weird energy, and your own soul is so lost now, given being browbeaten and taken away by everybody else's distracted idea of a good time, that you, tired out anyway, fold and go along with it, as I now have to do here with my own poor old mom.)

We go out to get our errands done.  At the end yes we need copies for the key to the front door. Everyone at the hardware store fits in, has a place to be, a job even.  It hits me when we get back.  I got nothing.  I don't have a job.

By the time I get her through dinner, a turkey meatloaf I left in the oven too long, even at 325 degrees, because of a nap, I'm still so exhausted I rinse the dishes, take her for a ride, then retreat to the basement, sack out, and even as I sleep I feel the body taking care of itself, cleansing it from its pains from all our exertions at the bar, which would be fine if we could actually support them.  At least that's how I feel.  My heart beats funny, as I rest, a sickness, devil coming out of me.

I have never once figured out how to fit in, how to belong, how to have a place, one to put me on any sort of footing.  To work in a restaurant as a front of the house bartender is to simply be a cheater, a go-along.   How could he not be.  

True, maybe you hold a line, of decency and brotherhood...  I don't know...

No wonder Shane MacGowan sings that lovely old song, Lullaby of London.  "May the ghosts that howl 'round the house at night, never keep you from your sleep.  May they all sleep tight down in hell tonight, or wherever they may be."  It's the truth.  Spirits are all about.  And if you don't take charge, and try to command them, they will take their pound of flesh, and everyone is possessed one way or another, except the real monks and so forth.  Don't be distracted.  Don't end up being so mislead, haunted.    That's a bar, isn't it.  Complete distraction, with some pleasure added, feeding your tummy and whatever else, a show your brain can work on, thinking its writing poetry.