What Makes Life Worth Living

I don't know what I will post today other than this illustration.  It's kind of fun.  Nothing else in my life is right now, and I am not happy with myself at all.  I'm getting worse at the whole caregiver thing.  My nerves are shot.  I'm a time bomb ticking away.  The least little thing has me exploding.  And then, of course, I'm pissed at myself.  I don't just explode around my mother.  I've been jumping people in public like I'm fucking Mike Tyson.  I need a week or two somewhere else.  

Still, I do a good job.  My mother will live for years and years and years.  

In constant misery.  

So in the evenings when I try to watch television and my mother is moaning and groaning and banging shit on the table next to me in non-stop motion, when she keeps interrupting the show with questions every couple minutes, I retreat to the living room and sit with a 13" computer.  I put on music and look to see if I have any texts or emails.  Usually I don't, but if I do, they are often disconcerting.  With nothing to do but drink too much as a coping mechanism, I try to make stuff, but this reminds me of all the things I am not making, no photos, no tactile artwork. . . nothing but digital images.  Then I think about what might help me settle down.  Advil PM?  Xanax? NyQuil?  THC?  Tramadol?  Hydrocodone?  Dare I do an Oxy?  Something?  Anything? 

And when I wake in the night and eventually, if I'm lucky, in the morning, I look in the mirror and don't recognize what I see.  

"I'm melting. . . I'm melting. . . . "

When people ask me how I'm doing now, I tell them, "Great!"  I've found that if I tell them anything close to the truth, it makes them too happy.  Nothing picks a person up like someone else's misery.  

"But for the grace of God. . . ."

Cynical?  I don't think so.  

Even now, my mother has gotten out of bed and pushes her walker in slothful slow motion misery, first in one direction, then turning around, back in the other.  She moans and bangs things around in the bathroom.  Everything she does is louder than can be described by science.  It is a hillbilly phenomenon that has never been explained, only experienced.  

Once she gets to the kitchen and sits at the table where she is on a heated vibrating pad most of the time, the banging and shuffling on the wooden drum of a table begins.  She will moan and stand half up, shuffle a few steps to the kitchen counter, hold on near collapse, then make a sudden grab for something, a cup, usually, anything that she can bang on the table top.  

The banging, the rattling and scraping of the walker, all of it. . . I react to them now as if they were gunshots.  

I am ashamed.  You must believe that.  And the shame adds disproportionately to my misery.  

When I leave my mother's house now, I don't know what to do other than run errands.  I have forgotten how to live outside of the cage.  My social interactions are off.  I say things in groups that make no sense.  I have a tendency to talk that I have never had before.  I used to talk, but things made sense then.  I was learned, had insightful observations.  I was witty.  Now?  

"I do PG-13 things to jars of mayonnaise."

If you don't know the reference. . . I just can't put the clip here.  It is wrong, you know. . . but you can Google it.  It has become what the media calls "viral."  

I hate that phrase.  And many other.  

"Her new album drops tomorrow."

Word.  

See?  That's my point.  I am no good at conversation anymore.   

My mother's life, however, as horrible as it is, is in some ways much better than it has ever been.  Rather than big bags of cheap waxy sugary milk chocolates with minimum flavor, I buy buttery rich bars of dark chocolates that only takes a bite to fill the void.  Instead of snacking on cheap processed foods, we have real food, whole foods.  Dinners are full of beans and grains and vegetables and meats.  There are complex salads and rich homemade soups.  Last night I made a healthy chili full of vegetables and beans and meat.  My mother has become quite enamored with the food.

And all she needs to do is sit and wait for me to get it all and get it all ready.  

And when she needs to go somewhere. . . I'm her Ready Teddy.  I take her to the cardiologist mid-afternoon.  Next week we have appointments with the pain doc very early in the morning and the spine specialist some other day.  I think.  I'm getting more forgetful all the time.  Should I worry?

It is all taking a grand toll on my physical health. . . about which I won't even go into.  I have a reputation to uphold.  

"Tarzan. . . oh, Taaarrrzzzaaan."

But I can't afford to keep believing the lie.  As I've said, overestimating myself gets to be more of a problem every day.  

If I could cash out, I would run away.  I would run fast and far, stopping in only the most intriguing places.  My midwest friend has done just that since her parents died.  She must have come into a real bundle of money because she is never home more than a week or two at a time.  She travels constantly.  She left her job, moved into the 200 year old family mansion, and jets around the globe.  

Yes, that is what I would do, too, with the few moments I have left.  I'd try to outrun the inevitable.  

Which seemed very, very close last night.  I don't own a pistol for very practical reasons.  The obvious one is that I have a very quick temper sometimes.  But there are others.  So no gun.  And my stash of pills was in my own home.  And MAYBE that was a good thing.  I would have been very, very, very tempted to wash them down with the rest of the scotch last night.  

So how do I feel about it this morning?  Really?  Have you not been reading?  Yea.  I'm feeling that this life is not worth living.  The few moments I get away from the constant vibrating humming of my mother's heating pad and the squeaky wheels of the walker scraping along the floors, or the sound of commercials and westerns on t.v. or the questions spoken in low tones from another room or the preparing meals and cleaning counters and dishes and the running around to banks and doctors. . . those few moments are to me what a transfer bus ride is to a prisoner serving life.  For a moment, there is the sky, the sun, the passing of trees and fields, the inrushing of all those memories. . . . 

And, of course, there is the guilt for the way I am, a privileged American boy living with deep chocolates and fresh fruits and vegetables and good meats, clean clothes and cars and computers and music. . . right?  

"What the fuck is wrong with YOU white boy?  That's your mama.  You need a beating, that's what you need.  You'd feel grateful after that."

I'm not stupid.  I know.  But even Richard Corey went home one night and put a bullet through his head.  You don't have to live in a Bombay alley to be sad.  You can be sad in the back of a Mercedes, too.  It's part of the human capacity.  Life ultimately is not about living but about meaning.  And, I think, the dumber you are. . . you know?  I have relatives whose search for meaning goes no further than a Hallmark card.  They are much more content than I.  

"I do PG-13 things to jars of mayonnaise."

 But sometimes, just at the moment of breaking, or maybe just before, I recall Woody Allen in "Manhattan" lying on the couch alone with a tape recorder asking, "What makes life worth living."  One of his answers was a Louis Armstrong tune.  Not for me.  But every time I hear "The Queen's Suite: Sunset and the Mockingbird," I think, yea. . . wait until tomorrow.  This song is one of those things for me.  

That and, of course, "Tracy's face" (link).  

I hope I can take it all with me when I go.