The Classical Mess

Life is weird. I feel like I'm stuck in some crazy repeating cycle. Groundhog Day. Return of Groundhog Day. Son of. Grounghog Day vs. Memento. That's it. That's entirely it. So I'm driving myself and my mother from Milwaukee to Ellensburg. Six day and five nights. Black Hills. Pine Ridge. Rosebud. Crazy Horse Memorial. Mount Rushmore. The Bighorn Mountains. The Museum of the West. Yellowstone. Sun Valley. And that's all terrifically good. But, as it always is, there's so much more than at first meets the eye. My mom has been, I suppose, the love of my life. My number one fan. The kind of unconditional love and enthusiastic support that no other woman in my life could probably, in my mind, live up to. But perhaps I digress. My hope in taking this trip was somewhat, er, um, okay, very much rooted in idyllic, Maxwell Parish glowing clouds, over the top juvenile/infantile Freudian fantasy. You know, son and mom taking an adventure road trip together, uberbonding and all. I told my mom, 'It'll be like Thelma and Louise.' We both grinned. 'I mean, without probably the picking up the guy at the cowboy bar.' Another grin, giggle. 'Or the cops and the going off the cliff thing.' We laughed. So thumbs up, right! Uh, well, honestly, at this point I'd say that on a scale of one to ten we're looking at a six and a half for overall bucket list meet unrealistically large expectations score. See, my ma has rapidly developed a fairly pronounced lack of ability to recall things with a generalized anxiety disorder. It's tricky. And frustrating. And scary. And it's suddenly exceptionally high maintenance. My mother has begun to spout really fantastical statements, utterances which contain wildly spontaneous spatters of a magical surrealism rivalled only by some of Latin America's finer literary talents, think Gabriel Garcia Marauez. Many of the towns that we drive through, most of the ones over ten thousand people, are accompanied by stories of how she always enjoyed coming here on the way to visiting us when my two older brothers and I lived with our father as youths. How she knew people who lived here or there. Yet best I can recall my ma never once visited us there. And what's worse is hearing her go on about how she had to come see us because she couldn't possibly go for long without seeing us. Um, yeah. Dreams die hard. The death of hope? Some addage or other. When all the laughter died in sorrow. Her generalized anxiety disorder, unfortunately, colors the endlessly repetive verbalizations with a grating distress that appears to be genuinely based in fear and disorientation and is therfore this disturbing panic-think stripped down fight or flight. The look is positively feral. The statements that come at this time are things like, 'where am I.?' or, 'where is Chacon?' (her husband)----okay, folks, double triple bonus alert interuption to say that in REAL TIME as I JUST finished writing the earlier part of THIS semtence, my mother called out from the inside of our two bedroom condo here in Sun Valley to say, truly, 'Peb, where's Chacon?' I shit you not! We are now returning this broadcast to your regularly scheduled program). I'm trippin cuz there's so very many different things about the way my ma behaves, how she thinks, how we interact, who I am today, that I am not able to reconcile the today shit with the shit from forty years ago. When I was seven. I mean there now exist such large ass gaps between what I thought was going on then (and maybe it was?!) what, best I can tell, is going on now. Like what, as a child, you think your ma is doin when she goes out one or two nights a week to Mr. P's, a south side night club and dance venue. And the amount of thought that a person should put into the selection of a babysitter for their 7-10 year old boys-one would imagine that another would take this type of care with the due diligence that it deserved. But no, things didn't it seems go quite that way. I am not intending to be alarming. No hyperbolic, worst case, babysitter sexually abused anyone. Not that I know of. Point is that my two older brothers, Marco and Leone, and I didn't get protection in these areas like any person would give to something that they felt a strong need to protect. I mean, would they? Say some human somewhere has a prize worth, oh, let's say twenty seven million dollars. A swiss bank account user name and access code. Would that person, all things being equal, life in a vaccuum and all, NOT choose the caretaker of said prize for the evening really carefully? Hmmm? Uh, no. They would do everything in their power to have their time away AND to safeguard their prize as well. So where does that leave us three little guys back in the day when we lived on Sherman Ave. in Madison, WI, when my mom goes out and leaves some schmucky nineteen-ish aged never met before gal in charge of us and things turn into biker party toilet overflowing with shit/vomit/piss and people passing out and vague things that I can't remember distinctly but which end up forming a strange soup of viewed from a distance bewilderment and perhaps alienation. Here's (with a large 'perhaps' here. Just my take at this moment) where it leaves us. With fairly pronounced issues that revolve around our perception of our mother's committment to parenting us. Were we not her biggest prize? Sitting here on a pebbly surfaced, brown leather couch in the living room area of the two bedroom timeshare that we're staying at in Sun Valley. Just had a good red curry shrimp stir fry on jasmine rice with two pints of Sun Valle Brewing Company brew. Had the UberCranky IPA and the seasonal Scotch Ale. Both really good ales, especially the latter-like what I imagine an old world Scotch Ale should taste like. But alas, back to the story here, the story of my mom's deteriorating state of mind. Decompensation. I believe that's the word. Throw that in along with depersonalization and derealization. And then compound that with the effects of a similar nature that it has on those around you who try to help buffer tbe edge between the more solid world and the less solid one. My mom has lost alot of life's rhythms, how they operate, why. But she knows and has an easy, familiar relationship with the TV. Blisses right over, through commercials and all. Huxley's soma right here in our laps. Can tell when a show is nearing conclusion. No interruption of experience or memory or perception there. Watching her watch the tube is sort of like seeing the box within the box thing, or the life imitating art/art imitating life circle swallowing it's tail spiral down to hell phenomenon. I am reminded of the quote, supposedly from the tombstone of Bruce Lee, 'A once fluid man, crammed and distorted by the classical mess.' My mom, checking the locks on the windows incessantly, operating from fear, everything an unknown, a threat, unsure, afraid. The smell of the afraid, of living amongst them, it's neutering me, it's my allergy. I run from it. I run from it. So here is my mother, my one ALWAYS fan; the one most loving and supportive person in my life. I mean I'm puzzled and somewhat stunned and a bit afraid of what appears to be transpiring in the life of my mother and hence in the lives of myself and those integrally in her life, my two brothers, our families. But all in all and een including six days now spent driving across North America with her--interruption alert, my mom is wLking around looking for some fictitious tray with her medicatikns ad I write this-and I got her to sit down and watch Joni Mitchell sing 'Coyote' on the flatscreen in Martin Scorcese's classic rockumentary The Last Waltz. A film I first viewed in Iowa City in 1987 on acid wit a group of people that I knew for a fairly brief time. The kinds of things, perhaps like this one or like jail stories or drug stories that no one really shows interest in ever engaging me in. Can't blame 'em, guess I'm sort of a dweller on the threshold. So here I sit, caretaking my ma. The cycle completing itself. She like the character in Memento, in need  of writing every important thing down so that sbe can keep it in her mind; yet like the character in that tale, if she doesn't tattoo it on her skin she won't find the piece of paper again-my mom has no tattoos. And every day like the last, lost in a busy, over stimulating, synesthetic blur, a kaliedescope of memories, of smiling childhood friends, of first jobs and loves and breakdowns and of tired small trails leading back to the tired small you trying to stoke the fires of life and love and of the earth and its unending completeness. It seems to me that the world around my mother is akin to a Rorshach Test, you know, the inkblots shown to people who then say whatever comes to mind while looking at it. So that if my mom happens to see, oh, say a black boy riding a bike down the side of the street, she may say, 'many more blacks live here now then before wben I lived here. And, you know, they are very decent and they've done a really good job of cleaning up the whole area. It's much nicer now, very clean.' All of this about a place she had neer been to before and the whole while she wouldn't even be able to tell you what state we're in. Like a wide eyed child she looks around her and wherever her synapses are stimulated she makes some connection and out comes some interesting facet of her as it relates or pertains to whatever is being viewed or experienced.