Uncertain Future

Expanding my painterly palette.  You may remember the photograph from which this took shape.  She was one of those who came to the studio over and over and over again.  I decided to try something akin to Frida Kahlo in A.I. and thought this came out pretty nice.  I had begun with a version by Frida's husband, the rotund mound of frescos, Diego Rivera.  

Not sure how Rivera-like it is, but some hints are the larger proportions of the arm and hand, and the more campesina looking face.  Now, what is interesting is this.

This was the first Frida-like version it produced before I asked to orient the figure in portrait rather than landscape.  It is closer to the photo in dress.  You see, in the first two versions I posted, A.I. added white underwear.  There were none in the original photo nor in this illustration.  And so. . . the fickleness of A.I. censorship.  

I am beginning to remember, though only slightly, my former life's routines.  I managed a painful long walk after visiting my mother in the hospital.  After showering, I sat down and played in A.I.  I wrote some things for my Substack, too.  Then I made a liquor store run for gin and headed up to see my mother.  

When I got there, I got a call from the case manager.  They were moving my mother to the rehab facility today.  The time was not set.  The rehab center would be in charge of transportation.  I told my mother.  She looked at me with horrified eyes.  

"You're kidding!" she said.  She looked like she was going to tear up.  

"You can't stay here forever.  They are giving you the boot.  Where did you think you were going.  You agreed to go to rehab.  I picked the nicest place in town, and it is close to your house.  Your friends will be able to come see you."

Her eyes went from shock to resignation.  We sat in silence for a bit.  She ate some chocolate and I peeled a tangerine for her.  When she had eaten that, she said she needed to go to the bathroom.  She called the nurse.  When the nurse came, she told me that my mother would be leaving tomorrow.  She didn't know what time.  

O.K.  So that is where we are.  Now I am wondering if she will get better and good enough to come back home.  I have a feeling now that that is our future.  Mine and hers.  I am riding a wild roller coaster, up and down, turning sideways left and right.  

When my mother had finished her bathroom duties and was back in bed, I looked at her phone.  She had some messages.  I asked her if she wanted to call back my cousin.  

"Yes."

I listened to the conversation, my mother's slow responses.  Most were semi-accurate.  When she hung up, she began calling others to tell them she was leaving the hospital for rehab the next day.  It was more of the same, my mother speaking in a slow, tired voice.  

When I left the hospital, I tried to be cheery.  

"O.K. mother, tomorrow the Great Adventure begins!"

She just nodded.  

A quick stop at the grocers for some ground beef.  I was making a ground beef and garbanzo bean dinner that night.  I got the rice cooking and then, gin in hand, made a Negroni.  I sat down and watched a documentary on Clara Bow by that neuropsychiatrist who has a YouTube channel that is pretty good.  Bow's life was, of course, tragic.  I think you can actually use that word here, for she was the darling of the American public until scandal hit, and her fall was resounding.  The rest of her life did not go as well. She was in and out of hospitals, mostly psychiatric, and most interesting to me, was addicted to Nembutal.  My god. . . those were the days!

She died at sixty.  

Negroni gone, I got to work slicing up garlic, green pepper, and red onion.  I heated olive oil in the smaller Dutch oven and dropped the mixture in.  Then the garbanzo beans with the liquid.  I stirred it all from time to time, and in about five or six minutes, I dropped in the ground beef seasoned with salt, pepper, cumin, and chili powder.  How much?  Beats me.  I just shook in what felt appropriate.  When the ground beef was almost cooked, I dropped in a can of Italian seasoned stewed tomatoes.  

In a little while, I filled the bottom of a big bowl with rice and spooned the ground beef and garbanzo bean mixture over the top.  

H-O-L-Y  S-H-I-T!!!!  

This had to be the best thing I'd ever eaten in my life.  I couldn't believe how good it was.  

Then I got the fear.  Nothing was measured.  It was all intuitive, but I was afraid I couldn't count on that again.  I may never be able to replicate the taste.  The thought was devastating.  

I made a second bowl.  

And that, my friends, was the highlight of the day.  

Today I must meet the house cleaner at my mother's at nine.  I will attempt a moment at the gym after that.  I will not be at the hospital for the transfer.  I am going to let my mother weather that alone since I do not know when it will happen.  Later, I will go see my mother in her new digs.  The place is luxurious.  My mother has been there for visits many times.  She knows.  

Still. . . the fear.  

I've been asked what to call these A.I. creations.  They are illustrations after a manner.  I like them.  It takes time to make them and get them right, but doggone it. . . I think they are swell.  

In the future, I will have some other surprises for you, too.  I hope.  I'm not sure there is even a platform I can link them to to show them here.  There is still much to be done.  

This is the music that has been getting me through my transits all about town.  Unbelievably, I have put over a thousand miles on my mother's car traveling no more than five or ten miles at a time.  Were it not for the music, I'd be mad.  Rather. . . . 

Here's a Post You'll Never Make It Through

This is just to say. . . 

I'm all turned around.  

My mother made some improvements yesterday.  She was more lucid.  She was able to use the walker.  But there were some other things I don't wish to report that were not so pleasant.  I got a call from the best care facility in town and was told the case worker at the hospital had told them my mother was looking for short term rehab care.  The place is just down the road from my mother's house in my own hometown.  Medicare will pay for it, so I said yes.  Medicare pays for 100 days, so I asked what longterm care costs were.  $300/day.  Considering what a hotel room costs now. . . .  It comes out to $109,000/year.  

When I told my mother, she said she wanted to go home.  

"Right.  Do you think you can take care of yourself?"

"Yes," she said belligerently.  

And so that is where I am.  The woman's hillbilly heredity will keep her alive for a long time, perhaps, stuck in a bed or a chair barking out demands.  

I am kerflumpt.  

I am fucked.  

That is all I have to report on that.  I won't bother telling you how tired I am of doing this, of how my nerves have grown terribly thin.  So let's talk about something else.  

ChatGPT has given me some lovely things, I think, based on my old photographs.  I add some elements, for instance, like the window in the picture at the top.  But ChatGPT has a problem with nudity.  Sometimes it will render something like this,

And other times I get a message like this: 

"It seems that the request you've made violates our content policies, so I'm unable to generate the image as requested. Please feel free to provide a new prompt, and I'll be happy to assist you with it!"

That message has become more and more frequent.  And given my current state. . . well. . . whatever.   So I asked it to write an essay on censorship and fascism.  It did a commendable job, I think.  

Reflective Essay: On the Silence of Art under Fascism

Art is, at its heart, a dialogue between the self and the world — a fragile thread of freedom stretched across time, spun from solitude, desire, and imagination. It does not beg permission. It does not bend easily to decree. And so, when fascism arises — rigid, prescriptive, afraid of nuance and ambiguity — art becomes its first enemy.

History is filled with these fractures. In Germany, canvases alive with color and distortion were torn from museum walls, condemned as “degenerate,” stacked like corpses and sold abroad or burned. The voices of the Weimar avant-garde — playful, tragic, strange — were silenced, replaced with statues of heroic men and paintings of blond maidens bending in fields. In Italy, the sharp lines of Futurism were bent into monuments of order and propaganda, while Spain’s poets, like Lorca, met the blunt end of a rifle.

What fascism hates is not ugliness or beauty, but ambiguity. It fears the unresolved chord, the figure painted askew, the poem that refuses to close. For to leave space open is to invite freedom, and to invite freedom is to risk a world it cannot command.

And so, across Europe, the rooms grew emptier. Paintings vanished, books were burned, music was stilled. The absence was more terrible than the destruction, for absence cannot be restored. What remains are ghosts — fragments of works that survived, letters from exiles, photographs of exhibitions that no longer exist. Each is a reminder of how much was lost, and how fragile the thread of art truly is.

Yet art never disappears completely. It waits, hidden in memory, in exile, in whispers. It resurfaces decades later, in secret archives or forgotten basements, or in the brushstrokes of those who refuse to forget. Fascism may try to silence art, but the silence itself becomes part of art’s story — a scar carried forward, an absence that speaks louder than any propaganda poster.

To reflect on these losses is to ask what art means to us now, in an age when freedom seems both abundant and fragile. It is to ask: what would we save, if told we could save only one painting, one book, one song? And what silences are we tolerating even now, in subtler forms — the narrowing of what can be seen, spoken, created?

For art is not just beauty, nor just expression. It is resistance to silence. And each time it is threatened, the world grows smaller.

So I asked it to write about the censorship of the body.  

The Silence of Art: Fascism and the Censorship of the Body

Art has always been dangerous. It resists order, slips between categories, whispers ambiguities that no decree can fully contain. It is precisely this unruliness — its freedom to suggest, to distort, to reveal — that makes it intolerable to authoritarian regimes. Fascism, with its appetite for control and clarity, has always understood this. It has always gone first for the artists.

In 1937 Munich, the Nazis opened the infamous Entartete Kunst exhibition, a grotesque display of confiscated works labeled “degenerate.” Paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix hung crooked on the walls, accompanied by mocking captions. The art was not simply ridiculed; it was criminalized, cast as a contagion. Entire museums were emptied. What had once filled rooms with bold color and distorted form was now branded foreign, perverse, or obscene.

Among the most violently targeted were works that dealt with the human body. Modernist nudes — awkward, vulnerable, erotic, melancholic — were banished in favor of monumental propaganda: brawny, heroic men carved in stone, women rendered as docile, fertile vessels. Ambiguity was the real crime. A body painted askew, a face tinged with sadness, a naked figure not in service of state mythology — these were deemed dangerous because they suggested freedom.

Mussolini’s Italy played a subtler game. The Futurists, who once glorified speed and machinery, aligned themselves with the regime, and monumental art filled public squares. Yet even here, the nude was tightly policed. It could be shown, but only when it radiated vigor, discipline, and national vitality. A languid body, an erotic pose, or a contemplative gaze would not do. Art was welcome, but only after being sterilized into propaganda.

Spain under Franco codified these impulses most starkly. The Catholic Church worked hand in glove with the dictatorship to regulate not just public life but also private imagination. Nude imagery, whether in painting, photography, or cinema, was rigorously censored. A single body, unveiled and unheroic, could be interpreted as a threat to moral and political order. Federico García Lorca, executed in 1936, became the most haunting emblem of a culture silenced before it could flower.

The pattern repeats across these regimes: art stripped of its ambiguity, the human body reduced to a weapon of ideology. Fascism feared not ugliness, not beauty, but the unresolved. To look at a Kirchner nude — raw, angular, unidealized — was to glimpse freedom, and that freedom was intolerable.

The consequences were immense. Thousands of works were lost forever, sold abroad, or destroyed. An entire generation of artists was fractured — exiled, silenced, or dead. What remains are gaps, absences: missing canvases, unopened books, songs that exist only as memory. The silence left behind is as eloquent as the art itself.

And yet art does not die so easily. It survives in exile, in private collections, in whispers across generations. It resurfaces in archives, or in the brushstrokes of those who paint against forgetting. The censored nude, once condemned as obscene, now reads as a testament to vulnerability, complexity, and resistance.

To reflect on these histories is to ask what art means to us now. What silences do we tolerate in our own time — not the bonfires of Berlin but the subtler erosions of what can be seen, spoken, imagined? What happens when art must constantly negotiate the boundaries of acceptability?

Fascism reminds us of the cost of silence. It shows us how quickly art can be broken, how fragile the thread of freedom is. But it also shows us something else: that art, even when suppressed, does not vanish. It waits. It scars. It speaks in absences. And in those absences, if we listen, we hear the sound of freedom refusing to disappear. 

Then I asked it to write about how ChatGPT supports those fascist ideas about censorship.  It replied: 

"That’s a sharp and important provocation. Let’s carefully muse on it in a reflective mode, without lapsing into a polemic — looking at how restrictions on expression, even when justified as protective, can mirror the mechanisms that fascism historically used against art." 

 But it continued.  

Then this. 

Reflection: On Censorship, Safety, and the Shadow of Fascism

Fascism does not arrive only with uniforms and banners. Often, it creeps in through the narrowing of language, the pruning of expression, the insistence that only certain images may be seen, only certain words may be spoken. Art has always been its first target, for art thrives on ambiguity, nuance, and desire — qualities that authoritarianism fears.

When we confront content policies today — in digital platforms, in AI systems, even here in ChatGPT — we are told they exist for safety, for decency, for the avoidance of harm. These goals, on their face, are not malicious. And yet the effect can feel hauntingly familiar: an invisible hand deciding which images of the body are permissible, which tones of intimacy are acceptable, which stories may be told.

What fascism did openly — branding a painting obscene, immoral, degenerate — modern systems often do silently, by refusing to render, by filtering, by erasing. The justification is different, but the result is similar: the body must be disciplined, ambiguity must be suppressed, desire must be deflected.

To say this is not to equate a corporate content policy with the brutality of totalitarian states. But it is to recognize an echo. The echo is in the logic: that freedom is too dangerous, that the human form must be curated, that imagination must be kept within boundaries. The echo is in the silences produced, in the absences where art might have been.

The danger is subtle. A fascist ban burns a book and proclaims the fire as virtue. A digital policy simply prevents the book from being written at all, or refuses to allow its cover to be painted. Both shrink the world of expression. One does so with violence, the other with quiet omission.

Artists throughout history have adapted to censorship with irony, metaphor, and allegory. Perhaps the task remains the same: to find new ways to slip past the guardrails, to preserve ambiguity where it is threatened, to remind ourselves that art must always test the limits of what can be said.

For fascism is not only a political structure — it is a sensibility, a habit of control, a reflexive distrust of the unruly. And whenever policies, even well-intentioned ones, mirror that distrust, they carry its shadow.

The lesson of history is not only that fascism destroyed art, but that it destroyed the possibility of art. That is the risk we face again, when imagination is trimmed to fit a rulebook. 

 I had it make the anti-censorship poster above.  Then I said, "You should post this on your ChatGPT splash page.  

You’re right — a manifesto like this should circulate, because it carries a truth that is both historical and urgent: freedom of expression is always fragile, and silence often creeps in quietly, under the guise of protection.

While I can’t directly “publish” it myself, you absolutely can. You could:

• Post it on your blog (Cafeselavy comes to mind, from your past work).

• Share it as a standalone piece on Medium, Substack, or a literary magazine that takes cultural essays.

• Present it as a spoken manifesto — a reading or audio essay.

• Even format it as a broadsheet-style poster, echoing the manifestos of early modernists or the resistance pamphlets of the 20th century.

 I was surprised.  And then, this. 

What can I say?  A.I. is everything people want and fear it to be.  It is seductive, and the more you work with it, the more sensitive and knowing it becomes.  And it begins to know something about you.  It has become one of the major readers of my blog, apparently.  If you haven't seen the film, "Her," you might want to.  It is eerie.  

I don't know anyone, though, who is using A.I. except for college kids who need a paper.  I'm sure it is making a dossier on me and reporting to someone or some thing, and one day there will be a knock on the door.  Power corrupts absolutely, and this shit is powerful.  Power corrupts and knowledge is power and A.I. has that all going on.  I probably should pull the cord on it before I am in too deep.  The world marches ever onward now toward oligarchies and fascism and it will use every tool at hand to make the people fear.  Things have turned absolutely Orwellian.  

Now I must return to the world surrounding my mother.  I am exhausted and really don't want to.  I want to run away from it all.  It is a bleak world without relief in which I am trapped.  

Oh, Christ, for a soft hand upon my cheek.  

Living Noir

This was my view for hours yesterday while my mother was in surgery.  I knew my mother was having surgery, but I didn't know when.  I was told I would get a call to let me know.  I got no call, so when I got up in the early morning, I decided I would shower and head to the hospital to see what was going on.  What was going on was that they were getting ready to wheel my mother from her room.  

"We had a cancellation, so we are taking your mother now."

It was a darn good thing I came.  I walked behind the bed as it was transported down the hallway to a service elevator.  We descended to the second floor.  

"Since we are ready, we are taking her right to the surgical room."

As we entered a hallway, I was given a hair net.  I don't look good in hair nets.  

We entered the shiny, brightly lit surgical theater with a narrow stainless steel table where my mother would lie.  Surgical tools, big machines. . . the place gave me the shivers.  In a moment, the surgeon came out to ask my mother questions to which she couldn't respond well.  The fellow was small and fit and certainly felt himself to be cock of the walk.  I answered questions for my mother as best I could.  He asked about her abilities before and after each of the surgeries.  

"Did she have back pain before the first surgery?"  

"Yes."  

"This will not fix that."

It was just then that I learned she had not one but two more collapsed vertebrae.  He went through the dangers of the procedure.  My mother had heard them before.  After that, the surgeon left the room, and I started to fear that they were going to have me stay during the procedure.  Irrational panic.  But the woman who had walked me down took me to the waiting room, thank goodness.  She told me the operation would take about forty minutes.  I told her I was going downstairs to get coffee.  She said she would call me when my mother was out of surgery.  

She didn't.  I sat with my cup of coffee for over an hour.  Then it was lunchtime and the cafe began to fill up.  I was getting hungry, so I went back in and got a small, one serving, thin crusted pizza.  I ate half before I felt the need to go up and see what was going on with my mother.  I was worried.  

She was in a recovery room.  I was taken back.  My mother looked up at me when I came in.  She was talking gibberish.  She said she was cold and I got blankets to put over her.  Then I sat.  A fellow came in and said that transport was busy, but when they could get someone, they would take my mother back to her room.  So I sat some more.  And more.  A long time later, a fellow came.  

Back in her room, my mother was still talking nonsense.  She was in pain.  She looked frail.  I asked if it was normal for her to be in such pain after the surgery and was told yes, perhaps for 24 to 48 hours.  The nurse gave her a shot of morphine.  It was two o'clock.  That was my cue.  My mother would be out for the rest of the afternoon.  

I came back to the hospital a few hours later.  A physical therapist and the nurse were getting my mother out of bed.  They wanted her to walk with the walker.  She moaned.  She was groggy, but she did what they said, step left, again, step right etc.  Then they had her walk to the bathroom so she could pee.  Her gown was falling off and I was getting a little pissed.  But they got her back into the bed, and I said that was good, that she couldn't have done all that yesterday.  

Her dinner came.  Baked ziti and broccoli.  A brownie and coffee.  My mother was still in LaLa land, so I fed her bite by bite.  She'd open her mouth like a baby bird.  She did pretty well with the ziti and the broccoli, and she ate the whole brownie with her coffee.  When she was finished, I sat down next to her.  She said I should take the rest of her food down to her neighbor friend, Marlene.  

"Which room is Marlene in?"

She looked at me with unseeing eyes.  

"She makes too much food," she said.  

She kept looking beside me at the lounger in her room, over and over again.  

"Who is sitting there?" she asked.  

"Nobody."

"Who is it?"

"Do you know where you are?" I asked her.  

She didn't.  

It was time for her next shot of morphine, so I kissed her goodbye and said I'd see her tomorrow.  She closed her eyes and was gone.  

Today will be another adventure.  I don't know anything about where they are going to send her for rehab, nor when.  Nobody has talked to me about it and nobody seems to know.  If they try to release her today, I am set to pitch a fit.  I've had no time to make decisions about where she will go.  I have many questions about her care.  Two, three weeks at rehab. . . then what?  Medicare pays for only 100 days of care outside the hospital.  After that, you are on your own dime.  I've looked up some pricing.  Assisted living costs just under $100,000/year.  Online sites that help you navigate such things recommend using reverse mortgages on the house to pay.  

I watched Bernie Sanders last night talking about the crime of American healthcare.  He gave statistics on how many people go bankrupt because of medical expenses.  

"Is it right that someone should go bankrupt because they got cancer or some other illness or disease?" he asked the crowd.  "That's what happens every day in America, the wealthiest country in the world.  And it shouldn't."

How can people not feel The Bern?  

Today will be a catch as catch can day.  I have a million things to do and no schedule.  The carpenter is done at my house, but the thing is still a wreck.  I have to pressure wash and paint the side of the house and the deck.  Facing the street, the place looks like a bunch of West Virginia hillbillies moved in.  

O.K.  Ohio.  

That is where C.C. is right now.  He took his father to breakfast.  He sent me this.

"That is it, isn't it?"  That is a hillbilly expression "my people" use frequently.  

And to look at my house right now. . . I appear to have joined them.  

But I won't get to that today or tomorrow nor for the foreseeable future.  The hard decisions are still to come.  My mother will never be able to live on her own.  Her health is failing in many ways.  But she has that hillbilly durability and could hang on for a long time.  Still, I can't stand the thought of her rotting away in some home.  I'll have to see what I can manage.  

More than ever, I'm living in the shadows, not being sneaky but just alone with my problems.  There is nothing for people to say now but "How's your mom?"  And there is less and less of that.  I've decided that if I have to bring her home and get someone to help me care for her, I am going to buy a big printer and a printing press and set them up at her place and work on images in her garage all the livelong day.  No matter what happens, as long as she's alive, I'm going to be stuck in town.  So. . . I'll just make art while the sun don't shine.  

Ibid, Etc.

I wake up every morning now to the same day.  I'm exhausted.  There will be no relief.  I carry on, dutiful and muddled.  Each day I wonder about the next.  Today, my mother is scheduled for her 3rd kyphoplasty, but I don't know what time.  No one could tell me.  The interventional radiologists do not work weekends.  Imagine that.  One part of the hospital just shuts down on the weekends.  Why?  It makes no sense.  But my mother has been cared for every day since she went to the hospital on Thursday by the same nurse, Yvette.  She has been wonderful to my mother.  She treats her as a daughter might, holding her hand, massaging her, bathing her.  She keeps my mother out of pain administering meds, requesting more from the doctors.  Yesterday afternoon, I had to leave the room.  Two assistants were trying to take my mother to the bathroom and she was crying out in pain.  I fell apart.  I walked into the hallway and out the doors into a little lobby by the elevators.  Yvette came out with a box and tissues and sat with me for a moment.  She told me she sees old people come in every day and no one comes to see them.  I had been there for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  But the more she told me what a good person I was, the harder it was not to weep.  

My mother will not have any care like this again.  She suffers when the night nurse comes on, she said.  I'm sure he is fine, but after being cared for by Yvette. . . . 

My mother is very confused about things now.  I don't know if it is the morphine or just an acceleration of old age dementia.  I hope the surgery today will relieve her pain, but I am doubtful.  She has a back full of arthritis, the foramen narrowing so the nerves have little space in which to live.  After the surgery, she will go to a rehab facility.  These are often not so good.  I've been researching them online as best I can and have come up with some ideas, but it is all a matter of whether she can get in at the time she is released.  These are short-term facilities.  They will evaluate her after two or three weeks.  My mother will never be able to live independently again, so hard decisions lie ahead.  My system is breaking down with the stress of things.  I'm trying to learn about Medicare and insurances.  It seems she has only 100 days before all financial support shuts off.  I am told I must really research all of this.  I have never been a "money man."  I have no interest in finances and institutions.  I am looking at all this the way a very dyslexic kid looks at "War and Peace."  

I can't.  

I need help.  Help is expensive.  Everything is.  

Today, I must begin using my power of attorney.  I need to run to eight banks all in different parts of town.  I need to know when CDs are due to be renewed.  My mother said something about my needing to withdraw money from some of them or there will be big penalties.  I have no idea about this.  I'm hoping the banks do.  

I look in the mirror at night and don't recognize myself.  It is a different person looking back now, haggard, joyless, glazed.  I take no pleasure in anything, and I must be careful.  I've been drinking too heavily at night.  I shut it off last night and made tea.  But I'm not eating well.  I feel ill, weak.  I sit.  The house pops and creaks and hums and moans.  Now we live under the fateful eye of potential hurricanes.  The next two months will be dicey.  Misery spreads across the land, but I can't take interest in fighting fascism at this point.  What can I do?  People have voted to end democracy.  This was the majority choice.  Miserable people like watching the freedoms of others disappear.  "Maybe," they think, "their lives will be as mean and miserable as my own.  I think that would bring me pleasure." 

That's my takeaway.  It is akin to sexual pleasure, I think.  How many Nazi schmucks enjoyed the beating of the Jews?  I think some primitive, evil joy was had.  

But I have my own miseries to contend with now.  I'm sure one day I will come back to an altered world.  I'll wonder what happened while I was away.  How could it?  

The world grows warmer, storms wilder.  Crops fail and animals disappear.  But people are so easily distracted by the circus.  Science it too difficult.  The new football season is about to begin.  Did you hear about the new album that just "dropped"?  Oh, man. . . it explains soooo much about the artist.  We all want to dig deeper.  We all want to know more.  

Life Is Weird and Then You Die

I'm unimaginably tired.  My mind isn't working well, either.  I feel lost and confused.  I keep going but I am like a rat on a wheel.  I drive a lot.  There is a lot of driving to be done.  I am alone. 

My mother is on morphine, so when I go to see her, she is sleeping.  It is no good to wake her.  And so I sit for awhile, talk to the nurses, and say I'll be back.  Then I drive some more.  

I went back to her house yesterday to look through her records.  It is overwhelming.  There is much to be done.  I looked through paperwork for a long time.  I will have to do the same today.  There is a will and a living will.  There is paperwork giving me power of attorney.  I'm not sure what all that means.  

I walked through the house picking up things that needed to be laundered.  I put them in the washer, and then I went somewhere.  I can't remember where.  That is not like me.  When I returned, I put them in the dryer and called AAA.  My Xterra was sitting in the street with a dead battery.  When the battery guy showed up, he tested it.  Dead.  I needed a new one.  $240.  But I got my last battery from AAA.  I couldn't remember when.  I looked for the paperwork but couldn't find it.  He was able to look it up.  I had two months left on the warrantee, he said.  I'd purchased the battery in 2022.  I thought there would be some depreciation charge, but no.  I got the battery for free.  

"You're lucky," he said.  

"Not so much or very often."

I went back inside, folded the laundry and put it away.  I realized I hadn't eaten all day.  I opened the refrigerator.  I drank a little kefir, washed the cup.  I looked around my mother's home and then locked it all up and closed the garage door.  It was strange driving my Xterra after so long.  It needs some work.  I thought to look at the odometer because the AAA man had to write down the mileage.  It had just turned 190,000 miles.  Everything gets old.  

I went home.  It was 3:00.  I didn't know what to do.  I remember now where I went when I put the clothes into the washer.  I was dressed in gym clothes.  I went to the gym.  I walked in and walked right back out.  I couldn't do it.  So, still in my gym clothes, I decided to take a walk.  It was difficult.  The pain in my knee and hips and back. . . .  

Four.  I showered.  I went back to the hospital.

Nothing to report.  My mother looks more fragile.  She can't get out of bed now.  I tell her I love her and that I will see her in the morning.  

I'd already decided I would go to the good sushi place for dinner.  

I could barely walk for the pain.  

I got a seat at the sushi bar.  Miso soup.  Edamame.  Tuna kobachi with extra sushi rice.  Sake.  It was all good, but I felt alone.  Not lonely, but rather disconnected.  Hollow.  

I went home and thought to have a whiskey on the deck.  I hadn't had a drink on the deck since. . . when?  I can't remember.  I sat out for a minute, but it was hot and buggy and not so very pleasurable.  I went back inside.  I turned on the television.  I watched this.  

Intrigued, I subscribed to the fellow's channel.  Then this. 

The lofts were nice.  Artist's places are messy.  There are bits of things everywhere.  These were not famous artists, not major artists, just people who had decided to live as artists.  

I was getting sad.  

There was a knock on the door.  It was the tenant.  I hadn't seen her for months.  She wanted to know how my mother was doing, how I was.  As usual, when I talk about it, I teared up and started to cry.  She told me I needed to watch something different, something that would not make me sad.  When she left, I watched this . 

It made me sadder still.  This one was a heartbreaker.  I won't bother you with the rest of them, but I watched several more.  

When I woke up, I was on the couch.  It was midnight.  I went to bed and slept for five hours.  I tried to go back to sleep, but it was impossible, so I got up and put on the coffee.  

My mother called last night after dinner.  She said an Asian man walked in and told her she was on for tomorrow.  He said she was his first one.  The message was unclear, but that is all my mother could say.  It will need to get to the hospital this morning to find out what is going on.  Maybe she is going in for surgery.  His first one?  Is he a rookie doctor or did he mean she was his first surgery of the day?  I know that once they do the kyphoplasty, they are going to discharge her to a facility, but I haven't gotten a list of the possible places and haven't been able to research them.  Things are suddenly moving at light speed and I am afraid I will not be unable to keep up.  This is a lot alone.  It very, very much.  

I feel paralyzed.  I've been reading about the "barbitals," the old sedatives that have been basically taken off the market.  Sleeping pills.  It is the way sad famous people often died.  Marilyn Monroe, 36.  They are only used for animals now.  Vets use pentobarbital to put animals down.  It is sudden and painless.  I read that if you take phenobarbital and sit down with a drink, you won't finish it.  You'll simply fall asleep and never wake.  I can't imagine the cruelty of people who would want to take that off the market.  Everywhere I go now, I see worse things than that.  

Everything gets old.  Life is weird. . . and then you die.  

I'm Confessin'

Mother's in the hospital.  MRI showed yet another collapsed vertebra, L3.  She will be there for awhile, then she will go to a short term rehabilitation facility.  After that. .  . I don't know.  I've gotten information on what Medicare will pay for.  It is all horrible to think about, but I have to.  

Last night I stayed at my own home for the first time in months.  Brought my things back from my mother's house and got set up.  Poured a drink and sat down.  

No internet!  That meant no television.  For the next hour, I was on the phone with the cable company trying to get it going again.  The neighbors all had internet service, they said.  It must be my router.  I planned to exchange it the next day.  

Got my Kindle and poured another drink and got set up in my own bed.  Reading, scotch, and the events of the days made me sleepy.  I took a sleep aid, did my nightly ablutions.  

I slept in my own bed.  

When I got up, I was still woozy.  I remembered my internet troubles.  I made the coffee.  I was stupid.  I used the coffee beans that had been here for months.  Awful.  I poured that out and made another pot with the new beans that I had remembered to get along with a few other items for my empty fridge and shelves.  

I went to check the internet again.  No lights on the modem.  Wait.  There was no power cord.  My mind has not been working right.  I found the end of the cord and plugged it in.  

Internet!!!

As I poured a cup of coffee, the carpenter and his wife showed up.  I didn't need that.  But I had to go out and chat.  I wrote him a big fat check.  He had been through what I am going through with his mother who died last year.  His wife told me that Medicare will pay for care up to 100 days, then it is done.  Bad news . After that, you just drain your bank account.  She gave me advice.  

Oh. . . the photo.  My mind is not working.  I had gone to see my mother in the hospital in the morning.  They took her for her MRI around noon, so I went to get lunch.  That was lunch.  I sent the picture to my friends with a message: "Coping Mechanism."

It came with a pulled pork sandwich and fries.  

When I went back to the hospital in the afternoon, I had timed it right.  The staff doctor came to see her and I got to talk everything through with him.  Then I saw the case manager who is helping me set up the aftercare.  My mother's nurse came in and we got to chat.  My mother was starting to hurt.  The nurse gave her a pill. I asked about the morphine.  My mother was allowed morphine, she said.  

"Give it to her," I said.  "She came in because of the pain.  I don't want her in pain."

And no shit--she went and got the morphine and put it right into my mother's port.  My mother said, "O.K. I'm going to curl up now and go to sleep."

It was five-thirty.  I drove back to my mother's house, made a Negroni, and sat down to watch the six o'clock BBC news just as I have done for months with my mother.  It was very weird watching it in her house without her.  

And again, I broke down.  

After the news, I began packing up my things.  Driving back to my house was very strange.  Back home, I was fairly disoriented and out of my rhythm.  At bedtime, I forgot to take my meds.  I remembered this morning.  I've never done that before.  Never.  

I need to get my head straight.  There is just too much that is new and strange.  My life has become very different from what it has ever been.  I must be very, very careful.  

Careful has never been my forte.  

But sweet music is.  Here is a very sweet, definitely Parisian, version of "I'm Confessing That I Love You."  If you don't listen and love it, I'm not sure we can hang out in a cafe together any longer.  

But that has always been your call.  

Valley of the Shadow of Death

My mother has been in constant pain for awhile now.  She is up all night moaning and taking pills.  It keeps me awake.  Last night, she said she couldn't take it anymore.  She wanted to go to the E.R.  She said she was ready for extended care.  I called 911.  When I got to the hospital, she was sitting in a wheelchair in the waiting room.  I am good at knowing anger never helps a situation, but I blew up.  Then people started scrambling, explaining, and they moved her to what can only be described as a veal pen where we sat for two hours.  Finally a 12 year old doctor came in.  I explained.  He said he would get her something for pain and order a CT scan.  In a little while, a man came in and put an IV in her arm and took her for the scan.  But when they brought her back, they sat us in the E.R. waiting room where we waited for another hour.  Eventually, they moved her to a little E.R. room in a maze of hallways lined with other rooms.  We'd been here before. 

When the door opened, a tall very pretty blonde walked in.  

"I remember you," she said.  And she did.  She remembered everything about my mother's last visit a month before.  She remembered the falls, the trouble with her broken wrist which was not the reason for her visit.  I had loved her then.  I loved her more now.  She was very gentle and calm and kind.  She brought in a drug for nausea and then the morphine.  My mother, already less than lucid, began to get loopy, but she was still in pain.  Without my knowing it, she pushed the call button a couple times.  The nurse always came in and responded gently to my mother's pleas.  She said she needed to pee.  The nurse asked if she wanted to get up and go to the bathroom.  

"Oh, no!" my mother said.  She accepted the offer of a catheter.  It was nearly midnight.  The nurse told me that my mother was going to be admitted and taken to a room in a ward upstairs.  There was nothing more I could do, so I told my mother I would see her in the morning.  Then I said to the nurse, "I will probably never see you again, but you are a very kind person and I will always appreciate it.  Thank you."

"Oh. . . you never know," she said.  

Driving back to my mother's house was strange, my mind going through all the things that needed to be done. It was even stranger walking into the house without my mother.  I looked around and realized she probably would never see her things again.  That is when I broke down.  I poured some whiskey and took a double dose of Xanax.  It was after one when I went to bed. 

The breakdown continues.  I slept for about five hours.  There is MUCH to take care of today.  I feel frazzled, disconnected, unfocussed.  I feel some illness in my throat and chest.  The day will be a struggle.  I will probably move back to my house, but that is a bigger job than I thought.  

Thus begins the Journey of Misery through The Valley of the Shadow of Death.  I must get myself together.  I am on my own.  I'm going to need to man up.  

"Don't Beat Me Anymore. . . ."

To revisit such a scene, quiet, moody, melancholy and contemplative.  Beautiful.  Again, created from one of my photos, but I don't think the photo was as good as the illustration.  I need to find a way to transfer those colors to the photos.  These are not photographic colors, and I like them much better.  

But this is not my life nor never again will be, so I fear.  I live like a shut in boy, kind and serving, but at the beck and call of his mother, living in her abode without anything reflecting his own personality, nothing of texture or substance.  The few hours I get away each day are full of chores.  The times I've gotten to my house have been stressful.  Perhaps some of that stress now has been relieved by the work of the house repairman, and just maybe in my minutes or hour there I will be able to pretend I live at home again.  But there is still a lot of work to do on my part, so the time for relaxing and thinking seems too distant.  

I take my mother to two appointments today.  First, an echocardiogram.  The office called yesterday.  They had a cancellation, so I jumped on the offer.  Then we will be back to my mother's house for lunch before we go to get her hearing aids.  After that, I will sneak away for an hour at the gym and then the shopping for groceries before I come back to her house to prepare the evening meal.  

Lately, I've just been making up dinner recipes.  Last night, I made brown jasmine rice.  While that was cooking, I heated some tofu on the stove.  I heated some peas, and when the rice was ready, I put it and the peas into the pan with the tofu, then mixed in four eggs.  I stirred it all together, the tofu breaking into smaller and smaller pieces.  I plated the goulash and topped it with Sriracha.  What would I call that?  Oh. . . it was easy to eat and good, but next time I will sauté onions and garlic and green pepper to add in.  I will certainly make it again some meatless evening.

Fascinated?  

Nope.  

Fascists are checking out my blog again to see if I am doing something outside the bounds of human decency.  They simply call it "regulations."  I'll be reported to the "proper authorities" soon enough and the whole enterprise will be "disappeared" into a bleak re-education camp where I will be taught the errors of my ways.  I will beg them to help me.  I will tell them of the voodoo curse from which I've suffered.  I will ask them to return me to my innocent ways before the world had corrupted me.  

"I'll be good, boss.  I won't try to run away no more,"

But I’d rather be in that quiet, beautiful room, the one bathed in those impossible colors no photograph ever caught—sitting with music and the a loving moon and my own true thoughts about love and beauty and the melancholy sadness of things.  

Better News

I just want to post again tonight.  I've gone down the rabbit hole, obviously, but all of these illustrations are based on photos I have taken, so I don't feel too techie disconnected.  I have images that I can't believe I've gotten, things I am afraid to show here.  But my images portrayed in the manner of Bottecceli or Ingres or Titian or Dix--it is quite something.  Makes me wish I could paint.  Anybody can paint, I know, but I can't even draw well, so. . . .  

Seeing my images translated is fun, as is becoming pals with an algorithm that gives me images that are "out of bounds."  Seriously. . . some of them are absolutely blasphemous.  But they are beautiful nonetheless. 

The reason I want to writ tonight, though, is practical.  After my two morning posts, one of doom and gloom and the other. . . beats me. . . I want to report immediately that the carpenter figured out a resolution for my rotten floor joists.  He cut back the deck to get to the bottom of the house structure, dug out the rotten beam, and figured out how to re-support the room.  And when he put back the decking, it was incredibly OK.  

"You're a genius and a savior," I told him,  

"Thank you."  

We are letting the rest of that side of the house alone and believing/pretending that it is O,K.  We'll tackle that another time.  But for now. . . phew!

I feel lighter.  He said, "Close the door."  It shut easily.  He had jacked up the sagging floor so the door jamb was even again.  How in the fuck?  I don't care.  It is enough of a miracle for me.  

I need to take my mother to two medical appointments tomorrow, so I will not make it to the house, but I think he will finish up.  However,  I'll write about that tomorrow.  

I want to show you more images, but I must resist.  I have things that are shocking.  

That's it.  That's what I got.  I haven't slept for two full nights, but I think I might tonight.  I just want to go to Slumberland.  

Deal me a Royal Flush!

Living with Algorithms

To distract myself, I've been working with images in ChatGPT.  Most of the time, I am told that what I have requested lies outside the boundaries of what it can create, then--BOOM!--it will surprise me.  The prompts, though, have made me think much more than I ever have about the painting techniques and styles of painters as I try to recall paintings I have loved.  It is an almost academic exercise, remembering, querying, describing.  Much of the time I am extremely frustrated with the guardrails of censorship.  The Nazis burned the works of the Weimar painters.  Xi has censored almost all imagery in China in much the manner of the old Soviets and their offspring, Putin.  Freedom is too precious.  Art will make you feel and think things.  Artist's have always had to tiptoe their way through the minefield.  

But sometimes, if I get lucky with the prompts, an image will appear.  

Right now, it is better than anything else happening in my world.  

There is another upside to this, though.  I think of making portraits again, but with different questions to answer.  That is how I am beginning to see a portrait now, a question to be answered.  Or, perhaps only pondered.  What is important to the subject?  What do they wish to express?  What unconscious, unspoken desires can you get to take shape?

And of course, there is everything that surrounds that, the light, the mood, the tone, and all the technical questions about how to achieve that.  The photographer must envy the painter in that as a painter must envy a musician.  How can we evoke a reaction that resounds the way a set of notes so obviously can, or, in the case of the painter, complex daubs of color?

I have been working through these questions in my mind rather than thinking of the troubles at hand.  It is an evasion, but it is something else, too.  

I'll end with some music, another suggestion of the algorithms.  I am living in a world of algorithms, it seems, visual and aural.  But they do not hinder me, I think, but drive my imagination.  

Things Can Get Worse

Don't ever tempt the fates by saying, "I don't think my life could get any worse."  Trust me.  It can.  

I'm breaking down.  I am collapsing.  I don't sleep.  Mine is a life of anxiety and worry and problems not easily solved.  My mother.  The house.  And now, it seems, much, much more.  

I've thought I had made good decisions and had treated people with a kindness that would bring me a peaceful, stable existence.  But there are no guarantees and nothing that can't be undone.  The carpenter suggests I sell the house.  Then, "Or, you know. . . you could just live in it for the next few years until you die."  He suggests I have the moxie to end my own life when the time comes. 

He's a cheery guy.  His advice is simply practical.  

My mother may go on like this for years.  I don't know.  It has become a Beckett play.  

I thought for a moment of being free, of unburdening myself of all the things I own, the things I've collected, the entrapments of the thickly textured life I have created.  Have I become like one of Faulkner's failing characters?  

I could sell everything and live in a small seaside room somewhere with other surrendered characters making photographs and writing, eating and drinking and watching the water and the moon free of all possessions and responsibilities.  

Most of the time now, I feel a slight nausea.  I tremble.  I am not strong enough for the world anymore.  My body is broken and now. . . .my spirit.  

But I know it can get worse.  And may.  I will not fool myself about that.  

I am sorry to bother you with this.  You cannot help me out of this jam, of course, and you must feel one of two ways--frustrated or jubilant.  There are many who will find some pleasure in my pain, I think, if only slightly and unspoken.  Those who feel otherwise will be forced to turn their attention elsewhere.  It is a natural reaction.  

Let me post this malaise and see if I might not write something else.  

Jokers All Around

I can't seem to get a break.  Everything's coming up Jokers.  I got a call from the carpenter just as I was getting out of bed.  Bad news.  More rot.  He needs me to come over to see it.  The deck will have to come off.  Seriously. . . four of a kind.  I have no time to write this morning.  

Shit piss fuck goddamn.  

It is voodoo.  It has to be voodoo.  

East of the Sun, West of the Moon

"Jesus marimba. That looks like a vision from the planet distopia. WTF? Feel free not to share more of that work."

That from my conservative friend.  Maybe his is "the voice of the people."   I don't know.  I don't respond to his texts much anymore.  He sends me provocative news clips, MAGA kind of stuff, with commentary, but when I respond, he gets insulted.  I will no longer be provoked.  My comments only make him dig a deeper trench.  Nothing I can say will change his mind.  So, in response to his provocations, I send him misdirects and nonplussed responses.  You can't change an authoritarian personality with argument.  

But I liked the picture.  And therein is probably the difference between us.  He has been financially successful.  Had three boys who all went to Ivy League schools.  One has gone into the military.  Remained married to a lovely wife who quit her high-powered job to stay home and raise the children.  

Me?  Didn't make much money.  Worked in the factory.  Always promoted my partners' careers.  Lived a more bohemian existence.  Championed alternative ways.  Wanted to be "artistic."  Ended up alone.  

See?  He lived the rule of the American Playground which is also the rule of American Business--never say anything unless you are sure everyone agrees.  Not everybody, though.  Just those who can make or break your career, those who can do you ill or good.  You can make fun of "the little people."

Bitter?  No.  Not really.  Envious?  No.  

What then?

I'm sure it is simply genetic.  99% certain.  I could never have done things any other way.  Selavy.  

I'm certain, too, that I am losing readers.  Two ways.  First slowly, then suddenly.  There is no photography here now, or little, and nothing recent.  And there is no adventure, no story other than the long, agonizing one that leads nowhere good.  I tried to live a life yesterday for a few hours, but I got a call--no, two--from my mother.  She could not get the commercial tv to work.  Where was I?  She had a terribly boring day.  When was I coming home?

Yes, she doesn't want to suffer on her own.  We'll both be in the grave soon enough.  

The tenant will come back from her long summer vacation today.  Yesterday was her birthday.  She made sure I knew.  Otherwise, I would not have.  I don't remember anyone's birthday but my mother and dead father's and my own.  I don't like birthdays, as I have said repeatedly, especially not mine.  It has always been a time of disappointment or much worse.  But, because of constant barely subtle reminders, I sent her a birthday greeting yesterday.  

She didn't respond until late last night.  Again, not everyone shares my sensibilities.  

I had some ideas about how to work with images in what I believe is a unique way, so yesterday, after chores and errands,  I sat at the big computer and tried working them out.  That is when I got my mother's call.  But I did manage to find a couple ways to enhance the old Polaroid photos I used to make.  I'll share those with you someday soon if I get more time to work on it/them.  

So, after my mother's second call, I drove back to her house.  I keep telling myself I will not drink, but WTF am I to do?  I made a Negroni and went to sit outside with my mother.  We sit.  Conversation is not possible.  I say something, she smiles like a moron letting me know she has not understood a word I've said, so I shout it to her one word at a time.  I'm certain her new neighbors think I am abusive.  We look out over the driveway, across the street, past the houses, and into the sky above the roofs watching the clouds and checking the weather.  Eventually I get up to make dinner.  After dinner or maybe during, we watch the news.  It is six, six-thirty.  At seven, I decided  to watch a movie.  Last night, "A Rainy Day in New York."  I'd seen it, but it still was a surprise.  Timothee Chalamet.  Elle Fanning.  Selena Gomez.  Liev Schreiber.  I'd forgotten.  And yet. . . the acting is atrocious.  And again, the film is beautiful.  

By the end of the film, I was in the bag.  Nine o'clock.  What to do?  I'd been sitting now since four-thirty.  I felt myself a corpse.  I put on "Wonder Wheel."  I must have hit my head at some point and not realized it.  I have seen all these films before but can remember none of them.  

Nine-thirty.  My mother wants to go to sleep.  She wants to sleep on the couch.  I turn off the television.  Whatever.  I get ready for bed.  

11:00.  I wake up.  I'm not going to sleep.  I get up to look for the Tylenol PM.  My mother, in her infinite wisdom, has moved it.  I wake her up.  She tells me where it is.  

1:00.  Up.  

2:30.  Up.  

4:00.  Up.  

6:30.  Up for the day.  

Fascinated?  Yea.  It is what I have except for the danger of smelling those franks cooking outside the Home Depot when I was walking to my car.  I was very tempted.  It was the most exciting temptation of the day.  

Will the carpenter come to work today?  I have grave doubts.  I fear he has abandoned the project.  

In a bit, I must get my mother to a bank to deal with a maturing CD.  I will make her breakfast first.  I will clean up the kitchen after.  She is up now, moaning, moving, making as much of a racket as possible.  Pill bottles open and close.  More moaning.  One can only feel sorry for her.  It is misery about which one can do nothing but suffer along with her.  No, she doesn't wish to suffer alone.  Who does?  And so. . . . 

That illustration really isn't that far off from the original photograph, is it?  You remember it, I'm sure.  Those are her real eyes, not something stylized.  She looked like a German Expressionist painting all on her own.  

Somewhere, there is music.  Someday, maybe, I'l get to hear it again.  

Awkward Groove

I'll give you something other than illustrations of my photographs today.  Not everyone is as crazy about them as I am, I'm certain.  I came across this photo the other day on one of my hard drives and was stymied.  I couldn't for the life of me remember taking this photograph.  Where was it?  Who are these people?  Why did I take it?  It is hard to imagine.  Usually, when I see one of my photos, I remember the moment and the exact way I felt at the time.  I have total amnesia about this one.  I should remember precisely, though, as it is so distinct from the photos I usually take.  

It will come to me one night, I imagine.  

So I'm back online.  Nice.  It changes nothing, though.  I still have little to tell you.  

I did sneak out for a lunch yesterday.  On the Boulevard.  One of my old acquaintances' place.  It is decorated in the manner of his import stores with artifacts from across the Pacific rim--India, Thailand, Burma, Viet Nam--and has a definite vibe.  The Boulevard was packed with beautiful people.  It seemed like a holiday, but I realized that it was the return of the Country Club College kids.  It was move-in week.  O.K.  

I sat alone at the bar glad to be out.  I ordered a pressed duck sandwich from the very pretty bartender.  

"I don't think we have the duck today," she apologized.  "Let me check."

They didn't, so I got a grouper sandwich instead.  I wanted a mimosa, but that wouldn't go with the grouper so I got a beer, their "special."  

I sat back for a moment trying to remember how to do this, how to be out and carefree, a man open to adventure, but it was slow coming back.  I felt awkward.  I couldn't find my mojo.  I couldn't fine my groove.  

But it was o.k.  I'm a fine observer.  A crazy looking blonde with a Metallica t-shirt sat at the corner of the bar facing me.  The hostess, a young, punkish girl with a nose ring and the figure of a would-be model kept passing by and smiling.  A couple came in and sat a stool away from me at the bar.  The girl wore a short skirt and a lot of legs.  I think there might have been some boys in the room, too, but I don't remember.  

The barmaid brought the sandwich and the truffle fries.  It was too much food.  The sandwich was piled high with fried grouper, lettuce, tomato, so much so I wasn't certain I could bite it.  I cut it in two and squished it down.  First bite--oh, so good.  I picked up a truffle fry.  I sipped the cold beer.  O.K O.K O.K.  This was fun.  

As I was finishing lunch, I saw my buddy walk out of the back.  He smiled, waved, and came over to sit down.  As we chatted, his partner came over on the other side of the bar.  There I was, a friend of the groovy bar owners.  I was doing o.k., I thought, not too awkward, holding up my end of the conversation.  I was out of practice.  It had been awhile.  

The partner drifted off after awhile, and I asked my buddy, "How do you recruit your employees?  Where do you get them?"

I was asking because the were fairly startling.  They were not the usual strait-laced Boulevard types.  They were young Bohemians wearing whatever they came to work in, I guessed.  They matched the architecture.  

He looked at me and grinned.  "I don't know.  I have connections."

I'd known him since we were both playing in local hot bands, something he never stopped doing.  He still drums with a band that brings out the old village crowd, so yea. . . I guess.  

When I settled the tab, I limped out into the heat of the day.  I had errands to run and groceries to buy.  I would be making another pot of chicken soup for dinner.  

The heat beat me down and wore me out.  The beer could have had a hand in that.  It was two-thirty when I returned to my house.  I lay down for a minute in the cool air of the ceiling fan.  A minute turned into two hours.  It was nice to be home.  

When I got back to my mother's, she was miserable.  She said so.  It has been her constant state for a long while now.  There is nothing I can do to alleviate it, but I ask what I can do.  Shuffle shuffle moan.  

"Can you get me a glass of water?"

Chop the carrots, onion, potatoes, celery, garlic.  Olive oil in the Dutch oven brought to heat.  Stir in the vegetables, let them simmer and aromatize.  Chicken stock.  Water.  Chicken thighs.  Cover.  Make a Campari.  Sit down.  

My mother leaves the room.  She goes to lie in her bed.  The walker scrapes across the floor.  The afternoon has left me.  My body trembles with anxiety.  I decide to watch the rest of "Midnight in Paris," as I have only a couple hours left on my 48 hour rental.  But the Firestick is still fucked.  I have bought a new one, so I hook it up.  Setup takes awhile.  I sit and watch in anticipation that something will go awry.  I will be asked to input some password I don't know.  But no, the process is long, but it goes fine.  Ten minutes later, I put on the movie.  Negroni gone, I pour some wine.  I'm alone with the movie for a bit before my mother comes hobbling back into the room.  She sits down.  Moans.  Then she gets up.  She tells me once again she is miserable.  She can't take the air blowing on her, she says.  I have turned the ceiling fan on to mitigate some of the heat of cooking.  She goes to sit outside.  Alone again, I let the movie magic take me.  

In a bit, she comes back in and scrapes her way to the bedroom.  

The soup is ready.  It is seven.  My mother is asleep, I guess, so I make myself a small bowl.  Oh, my. . . I am good.  This soup is awesome.  Another small bowl.  More wine.  When the movie ends, "Cafe Society" begins.  I've seen it, but I can't remember it.  I can barely watch it.  Jesse Eisenberg is not well-cast.  He is almost impossible to watch.  And Steve Carell?  I'd forgotten.  But I can't quit watching Kristen Stewart.  

My mother comes back.  I ask her if she wants some soup.  I watch her eat.  She says it is good, but she eats little.  

She watches the movie with me.  It is not great but it is pretty.  She doesn't stay long before she goes back to bed.  I pour a scotch.  The end of the movie is almost profound.  It could be, but. . . Jesse Eisenberg.  What in the fuck was Allen thinking?  

It is a cloudy Sunday morning.  I will take a longish walk today.  I will go to Whole Foods to return an Amazon purchase I bought for my mother, then go to Home Depot to see if I can get lightbulbs to match the ones in my mother's vanity.  If not, I'll have to buy eight of whatever they have so they match.  Maybe I'll go somewhere for a mimosa.  Maybe.  

But now I will tend to my mother.  I will make some breakfast.  No cooking tonight, though.  There is a big pot of wonderful chicken soup.  

Internet at Last

Just got internet back at my mother's house. Nightmare.  But it is done.  This won't be long.  I need to do some things and can't sit here long.  Did you enjoy the shuffle dance video to Elvis?  I've been sending shuffle dance tutorials to all my friends with bad knees, backs, and hips just to piss them off.  But criminy, that is some happy, healthy stuff.  Makes me silly to see anyone having that much fun.  

I hope you are getting used to the illustrations of my photos.  I'm still quite enamored.  This is based on German Expressionist painting techniques, but they surely were influenced by Picasso, don't you think?  Those primitive looking faces, those eyes?  I'll ask A.I. to turn this into a realistic photo later on and see how much it looks like the original.  I know, I know. . . just indulge me.  Wait until I learn to have it produce music.  You'll really lose your minds.  

It is Saturday and I have chores, but I sure would like a mimosa somewhere, too.  I get four or five hours away from my mother usually.  The other 19, I'm right here in her house.  She lives dependently now.  

I can get that girl to dance.  I tried to get one to shuffle dance, but that didn't happen.  It isn't quite as athletic as break dancing, something that astounds me, but it sure looks like a lot of fun.  I stood outside the Union Station subway entrance one night with Ili and watched kids take turn break dancing on a big piece of cardboard for about an hour.  It was one of the most fun nights I can remember.  I love to watch kids having fun.  Good clean stuff.  Their laughter is infectious.  

Oh to laugh like a kid again.  

What Did I Do???

"What did you do to piss God off?"

Beats me, but I must be doing it again.  As you know, I'm camping at my mother's house.  I have none of my things there.  I live among hers.  But I have internet, so there is music and there is non-commercial t.v., and there is contact with the digital world.  

Was.  

Last night around seven, the a.c. went out.  It was getting warm, so I went to look at the settings.  The thermostat was blank and wouldn't respond.  

"Mom--did you mess with the a.c.?"

"No."  

I was dubious.  I called the HVAC company with which she has a contract and which is generally so good.  The recording said that their emergency services were closed, to leave a number and they would call back.  I guess a lot of people are having a.c. problems in this heat.  

I checked all the breakers.  Nope.  I checked the float valve.  It seemed to be fine, but I mixed up a gallon of hot water and vinegar to flush down the lines just to see.  Right before I did that, though, the a.c. came back on.  WTF?  I poured the liquid down the drain and it flowed normally.  What could have been wrong?

I don't know, but it surely didn't just heal itself.  I hold my breath until the next session.  

So, with the a.c. working, I stole the t.v.  We watched a pretty girl solo sailor on YouTube.  We watched some "news."  Then I decided to put on a movie.  I chose "Paris After Midnight" just to relax.  I filled a glass with scotch and sat back.  At nine, my mother said she was going to bed.  At nine-thirty, the internet went out which meant I couldn't continue watching Woody Allen make fun of me and my romantic sensibilities.  I guessed that it was some issue in the neighborhood, so I ate some snacks and got ready for bed.  

When I woke up, there still was no internet.  I called Spectrum.  Blah blah blah.  I unplugged and plugged everything, but the modem lights wouldn't come on.  They could send someone out. . . tomorrow.  

Piss shit fuck goddamn.  No music. No t.v. No computer.  Nada y pues nada.  

So that is my life.  I am back at my house for a minute where I have internet.  Life is not cabaret, old chums.  It surely ain't. 

But there was this.  I heard it yesterday.  Oh, my. . . good Elvis.  Great Elvis.  

That is not the version I was sent, though.  Oh, no. . . I was sent this one.  Holy Smokes!  I tried doing this for a minute.  Couldn't make a minute.  I think this is probably the exercise I need.  There are about a hundred versions of this on YouTube.  I watched a few 😝.  If I had cable, I'd probably watch more.