What Next?

I hope you have been noticing some of the elements of the photography I've shown here over the years.  Surely you've recognized the simple setups of the chair or the chaise lounge from the studio days.  Sometimes I'll add features that were not in the studio like a window.  I am able to change some color schemes.  This was one of my first attempts with ChatGPT to convert one of my very early studio pics.  You may remember.  

She was a pretty Persian, a student at Country Club College.  We got along well and kept in touch for a good while, and she planned to come back to the studio again, but things happen.  In this case, I can't remember what.  I should go back and look through my email and report here. . . but right now, I haven't the time or energy.  

This was the second version, or maybe the third.  I said no, no, no. . . landscape rather than portrait orientation.  But it came out a bit odd, so I tried again.  

In the end, I liked the first version best, but feel free to like what you wish.  I just thought I would go through some of the iterations with you.  

I've learned much about making images in A.I. now and often stray further from the original photo.  I've found a hundred ways.  

I got a slow start yesterday and decided it was too late to exercise before going to see my mother, so I got dressed and headed out the door.  Outside, I could hear water running.  I walked around to look.  Uh-oh.  The lawn guys had cut the head off one of my sprinklers and water was running out of the pipe and puddling up on the ground around my deck.  

Shit piss fuck goddamn.  

I went to the back flow device to shut off the water.  The levers had rusted tight.  I ran back to the irrigation controller to shut it off and see if that would stem the flow.  Nope.  I got a hammer and tried beating the back flow levers.  The levers moved, but only the levers and not what they were supposed to turn.  The water kept flowing.  I would have to turn the water off at the meter.  But where was it?  The irrigation meter is next to the water meter for the house, but I couldn't see it.  I began to dig.  I hit something.  It was a brick.  I was digging with the claw side of the hammer I had used to beat on the back flow levers.  Deeper I dug and finally I was able to find the cover to the water meter.  Roots from the ligustrum had grown over the top of it.  Branches had grown and with the weight of the leave were hanging above it.  I cursed the lawn guys.  I'd asked them many times not to blow the lawn clippings and leaves into the beds, but they have short memories.  I went to the utility shed to get a shovel and some hedge trimmers.  I came back and trimmed back the branches above the meter and then began to dig away the dirt.  I had to use the clippers to cut back the thick roots.  As I dug, I could feel the strain in my lower back.  Not good, but there was nothing to be done about it now.  I had sweat through my shirt in the muggy morning air.  Finally, I got the thick cover of the meter loose.  I went back to the garage to get the big key to turn off the water supply.  

Shit piss fuck goddamn.  Where the hell was it?  I looked everywhere.  I know I'd put it here, but it was gone.  I began cursing the tenant.  Surely it was her fault.  Had she lent it to someone?  

The water kept flowing.  I jumped in the car and drove to the hardware store.  

$25 later .  . . 

The water was off.  I decided to cut back some other branches from a couple trees.  I was soaked.  I was dirty.  Fuck it.  It was noon.  I needed to get up to see my mother.  I washed my hands but didn't bother changing.  

When I got to my mother's room, she had company--three of the gals from the neighborhood.  Mom looked much better.  Things were pretty lively.  One of the girls, the daughter of my mother's 91 year old neighbor, figured out how to get the cowboy channel for my mother.  "The Rifleman."  

"Don't change the channel," my mother cried out.  We turned the t.v. off and back on to see if the station would come back on because we all knew my mother would never be able to find it again.  

It did.  

When my mother's lunch came, the girls said it was time to go.  I fixed my mother's plate.  Put tartar sauce on her fish sandwich.  Opened her apple juice.  There was a cheesy cauliflower dish.  A bowl of cut fruit.  A piece of cake.  Mom ate it all pretty well. When she was finished, I moved the tray off her bedside table and said I was going.  It was after one.  I'd be back in just a few hours.  

I had packed my gym clothes, and that is where I went.  And WTF?  When I went to the locker room, there sat Craig.  

"You been here all night?" I joked. 

"Hey. . . can you help me do something?"

"Sure."

"I can't get my sock on.  Can you put it on for me?"

I'm not very good at these things.  I don't like doing them.  I don't really enjoy touching people I don't love.  But I've been such a caregiver this year, I closed my eyes and gave it a go.  The first attempt didn't go well.  I took the sock off and rolled it up so I could get it over his toes.  His legs were swollen twice a normal size.  I was eye level with the scars on his knees from the replacement surgeries.  His feet were like hooves, hard and inflexible.  I got the sock over his toes and got the rest rolled most of the way up. 

"That's good enough," he said.  "I'm going to a funeral."

I watched him struggle to put on his pants.  He was in worse shape than I had thought.  His clothes spoke of poverty.  His eyebrows were wild.  I watched him run a comb through his thinning hair.  I changed into my gym clothes and asked him if he needed anything else.  

"No," he said.  

I told him I'd see him later.  

Since I've been living with and taking care of my mother, my body has begun to fail me.  Walking becomes more difficult.  My hips and knees are hurting badly.  My lower back is a wreck.  I've not had a real workout in weeks.  I was only doing a therapy kind of workout that afternoon trying to get my body to work.  No weights.  Thankfully, hardly anyone was at the gym on a Saturday afternoon.  Except one.  Alain.  He came back to see how I was doing.  

"You're losing weight," he said.  

"Not the good kind.  I'm just getting puny." 

He stood and talked for a long time, maybe twenty minutes.  The afternoon was wearing on.  I wanted to get through this workout and go to the grocers.  I did some stretching, some flexibility exercises, and then got on the treadmill.  I thought to walk an incline for two miles, but my knee and hips wouldn't let me.  After a single mile, I stopped.  I did my orthopedic stretches on a platform for about twenty minutes and looked at the clock.  

By the time I got home from the grocery store, it was four.  I had decided to boil shrimp and have Spanish rice with chopped olives for dinner.  I needed to get back to see my mother.  The smart thing to do, I thought, was to set the rice to cooking in the rice cooker and boil the shrimp.  Boiling shrimp takes two minutes.  I would drain them and put them in the refrigerator.  The rice would be fine.  And that is what I did.  

After a shower, I headed back down the road to my mother.  She had already eaten dinner.  Pork chop, crab cake, fruit and veggies.  The food at this rehab facility is pretty good and about twenty times better than the hospital meals.  

I had an idea.  

"Hey, ma. . . do you want to go for a ride?"

She said she was up for it, so I got her into the wheelchair and tooled her around the place.  

"Do you want to go outside?"

"Sure."

We got into the elevator and went to the first floor.  I didn't know if I was allowed to do this or not.  There was a woman sitting in a wheelchair by the front door.  

"We're making a jailbreak," I winked.  

"I won't tell anybody," she said.  

I strolled mom around the building to a little garden area where we stopped for a while.  I sat down on the bench--in a puddle of water.  

"Whoa!"

That was funny to my mom.  She was doing much better now.  I'd walked with her in her walker in the morning.  She told me she had done it again by herself in the afternoon.  She seemed to be getting stronger, and I suddenly knew that I would be taking her home when rehab was done.  She'd be able to use a walker again.  Maybe I'd get a wheelchair for outings.  But is seemed certain to me now she would be going home.  

She was dying.  Then she wasn't.  

The facility is huge.  It has housing for hundreds in their apartment complexes.  We were sitting by the big restaurant that served the village.  We watched old people walking in.  

"Are you ready to go back?"

"Yes."

Back on her floor, I took her to the public sitting room.  There was a gas fireplace behind glass flickering for eternity.  Above was a huge t.v.  We were the only ones in the room, so I put on the evening news for my mother.  I was glad my dinner was ready at home.  

I got home at six-thirty.  I made a Negroni and sat down.  Negronis are equal parts Campari, sweet vermouth, and gin with an orange slice.  I've become addicted.  I need to stop, but man. . . at the end of these days, it is medicine.  

I plated the shrimp and rice.  Too many shrimp.  Too much rice.  

I couldn't eat it all.  It was dark now, or nearly.  Saturday night.  I was beat.  I wouldn't be able to pressure wash the side of the house and the deck until I got the leaking irrigation pipe fixed.  I needed to call someone about the back flow device.  Things were getting worse rather than better.  People were at movies, bars, on dinner dates.  

I poured a whiskey.  

I'd been watching more of the Chamorro stuff during dinner.  

He is a romantic fellow.  You've noticed, of course, he champions mostly young women.  One could complain, or one could say he is counteracting the boys era of the Rat Pack.  You can say whatever you want.  

I love the choice of music, though.  Always my kind.  Times gone by.  Time recaptured.  

Somewhere after nine, I rented "The Phoenician Scheme" from Prime Video.  I made it to ten.  I was shot.  It was the stress of the day.  It was the alcohol.  It was my mother's durability and the knowledge of my own fleeting life.  I was done for the night.  I knew tomorrow would be very much the same.  

Not As Brief As Promised

What?  You want to know about my day?  That's so kind.  

Wait. . . wait. . . don't go!  I thought you were my friend?

Well. . . maybe one of you stayed anyway.  Here's the tale told in brief.  

In the morning, I went to the bank with my Power of Attorney form.  They were nice enough. . . not really. . . and none too pleased.  So they made a copy to send to an attorney, I assumed.  That was in one part of the metropolis.  Then I drove to another to see my mother.  

She was not doing well.  She had called me late the night before confusedly asking me to bring her back pain medicine.  Now, in the morning, she'd had therapy and breakfast.  Shortly after I arrived, a social worker came in to ask her questions to assess her mental state.  My mother couldn't answer some of the questions.  She was given three words to remember but could only state back two.  I told the social worker that my mother had been on morphine for the past seven days and was in a lot of pain now.  She smiled and said yes, this was just a preliminary interview so they had a baseline in order to gage improvement.  She had me sign a form.  Another admin came in and talked to me about my mother's health care asking if she had a Living Will and if she had a DNR.  I said yes.  I had the Power of Attorney doc with me, so she made a copy of that.  

When she had gone, I got a phone call from the bank.  They were denying my Power of Attorney, they said.  

"O.K.  Send me a letter explaining why."

"We don't have to do that," said the bank guy.  He said he'd email me why.  "The document was never registered at the courthouse," he said.  "And it is stale."  

"Stale" meant old.  My mother set this up a long time ago.  The state statute says there is no time limit for a Power of Attorney, but statutes are interpreted in the courts and there have been incidents where banks have had decisions in their favor on this.  Or so I think from going through many websites from Elder Law websites. 

There is no law.  There is only Case Law.  

Or so it seems.  Legislation is passed and then the courts rule.  One ruling can become precedent.  

I think.  Don't listen to me.  I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about.  I'm going to have to see an attorney to figure this all out.  

I had an appointment to get a Handicapped Parking decal for my mother, so I kissed her goodbye and headed out.  There was a Clerk of the County Court office on the way, so I decided to go in and see if I could register my Power of Attorney document.  I had no appointment.  At the kiosk, I put in my information and was given a number.  The waiting room was full.  There seemed little hope I would get called quickly, but I sat and waited for forty-five minutes.  At that point, I had to leave to make my appointment at the DMV.  

Fortunately, with an appointment, I was in and out fairly quickly.  I decided to stop at the Clerk of the Court's office again and see if my number had been called.  

When I walked inside, a woman who had been sitting next to me earlier was still there.  I talked to her for a minute.  She had not been called.  I decided to go through the automatic doors into the room that people whose numbers were called not so very often went to see if I still in the cue.  There were fifteen windows.  Two of them were operating.  I stood in the giant room waiting for one of the two parties to finish up a their windows.  It took awhile.  One couple, obviously there to get married, he in an ill fitting suit, she in a white dress and a white hair vail, finished up and meekly, I approached the window to ask if I could find out if my number had been called.  The woman working the counter was nice and looked it up.  Nope.  It had not yet been called. 

"We're running about two hours behind schedule," she said.  She guessed that I had about another hour's wait.  I thanked her and went back to the lobby.  

And waited over an hour without being called.  Nor was the woman I'd been sitting next to.  The waiting room was still full.  I'd gotten my number over two hours before.  

My phone rang.  It was my mother.  

"What are you doing?  I'm dying here," she said.  "Come sit with me."

"I'm at the courthouse right now, mom."

"Oh. . . O.K.  I'm sorry.  Go ahead."

"I'll be by in a bit."

"O.K."

And that's the way that has been going since she moved to the rehab facility.  They are not giving her morphine, so. . . .

I couldn't wait any longer, so frustrated, I left.  It was just later than mid-afternoon.  I would go to the gym and walk the treadmill and then go back to see my mother.  I'd be out and showered, perhaps, in time for dinner.  

When I got to the locker room, Craig was there.  I sat my bag down and began to get dressed as Craig and I chatted.  And chatted.  I will tell you some crazy stories upcoming.  As we talked, he said, "I remember you now.  You didn't look like this then.  I always thought of you as the literate one.  You could actually read," he chuckled.  

I took a chance and mentioned something he might not want to talk about.  

"You had a weird relationship with your father, right?"

He always claimed his father, an M.D., was trying to poison him.  

"Yea," he said, "I had him disbarred.  He'd been giving my wife drugs to put in my food for years.  That's why I had the car wreck.  I was drugged."

He'd been in a wreck that damn near killed him.  He had a brain injury that took years to get over.  

If he did.

"It was a year before I could tell time again," he said.  "It took a few years more for me to fully recover."

"I remember that."

"I found out my father was fucking my wife.  She was a coke addict and I didn't know it.  I knew her friends were, but I didn't know about her.  That's how my father controlled her.  He knew all the drug dealers in town.  She couldn't get her coke without him."

"I never knew that.  You never said that back then."

I remembered that his father had his office a block off the Boulevard.  He was doctor to a highfalutin crowd.  

As I say, I will tell some crazy stories we recounted from those old gym days later.  But I had stood there in my gym clothes for over an hour shooting the shit with Craig.  It was too late to work out now, so I said goodbye and headed back to the rehab facility.  

When I got there, the couple from across the street were visiting.  My mother lay in the bed miserably while we chatted.  This is the couple who frequently invite us to dinner, especially at the holidays.  I was expecting a call from the cardiologist to talk about my mother's echocardiogram, but I knew my phone wouldn't ring if I hadn't answered a call from the number before, so I called the office.  

"I was supposed to get a call from the doctor at 3:30 about my mother," I said.  

After a lot of questions, the person on the other end of the conversation said the doctor would call me sometime after 4:30.  

I set about trying to figure out how to disable the privacy setting on my phone so that the call would ring through.  I asked Siri how to do that.  It was wrong.  

After awhile, the couple visiting were ready to leave.  "If you need anything. . . ."

I sat with my mother.  She needed to go to the bathroom.  She had forgotten how to call the nurse.  It took awhile.  When the nurse came in, I excused myself from the room to go talk to the physical therapist.  

"My mother would like a heating pad," I said.  

"Oh. . . we don't have anything like that here.  We don't want people to accidentally burn themselves."

"My mother said she had only had physical therapy in the morning.  I thought she was supposed to get three sessions a day."

"This morning she had PT and OT.  We went together to evaluate her."

"So tomorrow she will have separate PT and OT sessions?"

"Yes.  I don't know if she is going to get speech therapy or not."

Was that the third?  Odd.  I did not feel placated. 

When I went back to my mother's room, I asked if she had gone to the bathroom.  

"No.  I can't.  It won't come out." 

She was sitting in the bed, feet dangling.  She sat like that for a long while, then said, "I can't remember why I am sitting here.  Am I waiting on something?" 

"I don't know.  Can you lie back down by yourself?"

"Yes." 

She sat there for a long while more.  

"Why don't you lie down?"

She managed.  She lay holding her belly, moaning.  

"What hurts?" I asked her.  

"The back of my leg."

She was in the same pain as she was those two weeks before she went to the hospital.  Just then, a nurse came in to give her pain meds.  

The phone rang.  It was the cardiologist's office, but not the cardiologist.  The woman on the phone told me my mother's echocardiogram was good.  Her heart was pumping fine.  There was no fluid buildup around the heart.  There was some valve leakage, but that was old.  The call did not last very long.

"That was your cardiologist.  Your echocardiogram turned out well.  Your heart is pumping strong.  There is no congestive heart failure."

She just stared at me.  

"Did you hear me?"

"Yes." 

"That's really good news," I said.  She nodded.  

"O.K. mom, I'm going to go get some dinner.  I'll be back in the morning."

I kissed her forehead.  Going is always hard.  

At home, I changed out of my unused gym clothes and made a Negroni.  I needed one, my pain meds after a long day.  I hadn't been home since early that morning and had not successful in many ways.  It was Friday.  I don't like to cook on Fridays.  I decided I would go to the Italian place that is no longer my favorite for some chicken cacciatore and wine.  

I found a seat at the bar.  There was an empty stool next to a character who is usually there when I go on a Friday night.  He stands out in the crowd.  This is a conservative town where people dress as if for the country club, but this fellow looks all L.A.  Multiple bracelets, sometimes leather pants, thick funky glasses.  He always stands behind his chair and drinks glasses of champagne talking to no one.  

"Mind if I slide in here friend?"

The bartender said hi and took my order.  She brought me a glass of the Classico.  I decided to be friendly and talk to the fellow beside me.  

"You always drink champagne," I said.  

"Or Bellinis."  

That is what he was having now.  

He had a heavy accent, so I was rude enough to ask him where he was from.  He said, "My mother was from Berlin, my father from Barcelona."  His name was Flo.  

He talked about his mother.  She taught him everything about life, he said, and he began to philosophize.  It was Hallmark Card philosophy delivered in a high toned manner.  It was about being happy and enjoying life.  Schmaltz.  But I had opened the door, and he was bringing the whole circus with him.  So I listened and drank my wine.  

The t.v.s about our heads were showing a women's match at the U.S. Open.  Between sets they cut to the broadcasters, John and Patrick McEnroe.  I started laughing.  

"John McEnroe looks like Keith Richards," I kidded.  But it was true.  Spitting image.  

"That's what I am saying," said Flo.  "It doesn't matter what you do or how much money you have.  You are going to get old and die.  You have to enjoy every moment. . . ."

My food came and I began to eat.  Flo paid his tab and said goodbye.  I ate in silence.  

Back home, I was pooped.  I poured a scotch and. . . well. . . you know the drill. 

I guess that was not the briefest of tales, not what I promised.  I'll just end with my lullaby before bed.  A couple of pills and eight hours of sleep.  It is Saturday.  I must go and check on my mother.  

A Chance Encounter

I'll not write about my troubles today other than to say my mother made the transfer to a rehab facility yesterday.  I've already worn you out with the details, I know, so/but. . . updates to come.  

Let me begin with a chance encounter.  I went to the gym yesterday later than I had hoped.  I have gone but once in the past week and a half, and I went late in the afternoon in order not to see the usual posse.  I was going to go early yesterday but I waited for the cleaning lady to come to my mother's house for two hours.  As a result, I hit the posse at its peak.  I had to explain things time and again.  I didn't want to.  My troubles are my own and yours.  As I say, people cannot do anything to help really other than give words of kindness and thus it is frustrating.  They are nice people, but they will eventually learn to shun the sad sack with a wave and a smile.  

I got through my workout and was ready to leave, but first I needed the restroom.  When I walked in, I saw a seated man who looked much like an old gymroid I knew "back in the day."  I mean way back in the Arnold days.  Decent people didn't go to gyms back then, not so much, and so the old cement block warehouse building was full of policemen, bikers, and bouncers along with cabbies who sold drugs and guns.  It was a steroid gym and you could buy any sort--dianabol, deca-durabolin, winstrol, primabolin, and, of course testosterone cypionate, as well as equipoise, a steroid used in horses.  There were sometimes more exotic things around, too, like anadrol which killed one of my training partners and caused a stroke in another.  

"All to be bigger than dad," as they say.  

But Craig was different, if only slightly.  He had a Masters degree in Education and worked part time as a counselor at one of the local colleges.  His wife managed the apartment complex where they lived.  Craig's part-time job, though, was very part-time and seasonal, and like many others, he dabbled here in there in some underhanded capital enterprise.  

He was part of a group of locals who had gone to high school together, and there was some animosity between Craig and Lizard.  I can't remember what exactly the beef was, but Craig had besmirched Lizard's character somehow and turned him into an object of ridicule.  Craig was a fairly good looking guy, and Lizard. . . well, the nickname was appropriate.  

Lizard was a cross-country runner in high school, but these guys all joined the gym and began training at the same time.  The gym had just been sold by the famous German Strong Man Milo Steinborn, and was undergoing a bit of a transformation away from the training ground for professional wrestlers it had originally been.  In Steinborn's day, the gym manager was a fellow named Oop.  Oop was the father of some older fellows I went to school with.  They were tough guys and were wrestlers as was their father who became the state's first bodybuilding champion.  If you wanted to join the gym, Oop would invite you to come into the wrestling ring in order "to see what kind of shape you are in," after which he would recommend you start running and losing weight and getting into "road shape," before you came back in.  

Now the wrestling ring was gone as were a lot of the old-fashioned training equipment like rings and peg boards.  There were two types working out at the gym now--body builders and power lifters.  Lizard had decided he would train for an upcoming local bodybuilding contest, and Craig and Rocky and some others told him he should drink milk to prepare.  This was a joke.  You can't get cut drinking milk, so when Lizard took the stage, he was big but smooth as a baby's butt.  The boys thought it hilarious, but after that, Lizard became a power lifter and drank a gallon of milk every day.  By the time I came to the gym, he was the state's deadlift champion and rated in the top 50 powerlifters in the country.  

Craig was a bodybuilder who won several contests but never managed to win at the state level placing well several times but never winning it all.  

Lizard was a strange fellow who eventually got a Master's degree in History, but his obsession was with genealogy.  I might tell you a billion tales about Lizard sometime, but my intention today was to talk about Craig.  

Craig was odd, too, just not so very apparently.  His father was a doctor, and he said that his father had been trying to poison him for years.  He found powder on his car once, he said, and had it tested, and it was arsenic.  His father had been giving his wife drugs to put in his food for years.  He tried to sue his father and have him convicted.  Craig was a little cockeyed, and I could only guess that his father might have been giving Craig's wife something to give him to keep him calm, but that is just a guess.  

Like everyone else in the gym, Craig dealt in guns.  There were a lot of deals in the gym, and sometimes someone owed someone else money and there was bad blood.  One day, one of the gymroids was found dead in his living room.  He was sitting in a chair in front of the television, part of his head blown away.  There was a pistol, but everyone said it hadn't made sense.  It looked as if the fellow had been shot from behind.  And. . . everyone said he owed Craig money, and the rumor spread that Craig had shot him and tried to make it look like suicide.  

But I got along well with Craig as I did with almost everyone there, and Craig gave me training tips from time to time.  Though he was friendly enough with everyone, Craig always seemed aloof and living in his own head.  When you talked to him, he was always slow to respond as if he needed time to process what was said.  

After I went to the bathroom, I walked back through the locker room and looked again.  It sure looked like Craig some forty years later.  After I left the locker room, I decided to go back in.  

"Craig?"

He looked up slowly.  

"Yes," he said.  

"I used to work out with you at the old steroid gym."

He looked up at me, sort of, from his heavy brow.  

"Yes. . . I remember the gym."  

He was slower than before.  He told me he had hip replacement surgery and that this had been his first day of physical therapy.  

"They told me to lie on a table and lift my leg ten times.  I couldn't even do it once.  I couldn't lift my leg."

He chuckled.  He looked like an old body builder, heavy shoulders, thick arms, but he had grown a good sized belly that now rather complimented his overall look.  

"I'm going to the pool," he said.  It was obvious he had no memory of me, so I said goodbye and that     perhaps I'd see him again.  

It was a surprise seeing him, of course, as almost all the old steroid guys have died.  I really didn't know that any of that old crowd was still around.  Old Craig was a survivor.  

Hence the photo at the top of the page.  It's a funny one, really.  I asked A.I. to give me a prompt from one of my photos from which to make an image in the manner of a Michelangelo painting.  I didn't pay attention to the fact that the prompt didn't mention gender, so this is what I got.  I couldn't get A.I. to give him a bigger pecker, so this, too, is what we have.  

Oh. . . I revised the prompt to ask for the female version.  

I guess this is his sister.  They must train at the same gym.  

Hey. . . do you want to relive my night?  I may cancel all my t.v. subscriptions but YouTube.  They have become too expensive for what they are.  I end up watching YouTube most of the time.  Navigating it is much like dealing with A.I.  You really have to be specific when you put in search terms.  But if you are, there is a whole bunch of smart stuff.  

Last night, though, I just ended up watching these.  You will need to be a bit of a romantic, but if you are, you can, too.  

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.