My standard morning is not exciting. When I was 25, walking back and forth on a Cleveland ghetto road at six-thirty in the morning is not what I had envisioned my future mornings to be. However, after I get a few cups of coffee into my system, the walk has become necessary. Not so much for me, but for my friend, Rickolas.

See: Rickolas is someone that needs to SCREAM! Not in any mean (or literal) sense. He just needs to vent. To speak without having anyone else around.

I have been elected his official listener.

When you live in a sober house there are ears everywhere. In the kitchen, in all the rooms. When you go to the bathroom you are wondering if there are any deceptive digital devices recording the embarrassing mutters we (well, at least I can admit to it,) sometimes have during the call of nature. Walking up and down the side streets is the only way to carry on a private conversation.

And this morning, Rickolas most certainly had something he wanted to talk about without the rest of the house knowing.

(I don’t even know how I can – or should – write about this. I know that writing can be a form of exploitation, and I noticed people have been reading these posts. So, I am going to try and do this as best I can.)

Here’s the deal:

An elderly individual is having medical troubles. They can not eat due to problems swallowing. Something about burs in his throat. This person has a feeding tube. Food (in the form a liquid not all that different from the product Ensure,) must be administered into his stomach through a tube. Not only does he have to endure this, he also just had surgery on his wrist, preventing him from feeding himself.

He is asking others to do it for him.

We live in a sober house, not a Care Facility for the elderly. None of us drunks and addicts should be held accountable to care for someone in such a state.

How do we even handle the situation?

I know. I know. I know. The standard thing to do is to inform the Executive Director of the house of what is going on. And, to a certain degree, she knows about his condition. She knows he is frail, has cancer which he is going to die from, and professional help (i.e. a nurse,) is becoming more and more a need. (She does not know he is asking help to be fed from the residents.)

In the end, I know this situation is not going to end well. That is just the ugly truth. The man does not want to leave the place he has called home for the past however many years. It is a standard story. But it is still a difficult, frustrating story full of grief and tragedy worthy of a cheap novel. Or a great novel, depending on the author.

Rickolas and I kept walking. After his “outburst” of emotion, after we went up the road yet another time, I’d come to realize the houses on the road were not that bad looking. One or two are empty. The windows boarded up. But most of the homes have nice flowers and plants growing in pots. Shrubs are trimmed. Driveways paved. I have been in much worse places in my life.

I am sure the elderly man has been to some bad places, as well. Hell, I know he has. I wish I could tell him he could go someplace better. Better than the West Side of Cleveland we are in.

But that is not my place.

Nor is it my place (or Rickolas’) to care for him.

Hemingway had a house full of cats. Both Bill Burroughs and Charles Bukowski have books dedicated to the very subject of cats. Hunter S. Thompson had cat named Jones, and famed artist and close friend of the Great Gonzo journalist, Ralph Steadman, wrote a cute little book about him.

I had an insane cat living with me, my ex-wife and, at the time, our new born son.

His name was Church. He died when my son was three years old. (I think Church was six or seven when he passed; he was not very old.) Anyway, I don’t know what he died from. R@#$, my wife at the time, and me were walking around the house in the morning. When we came to the end of the driveway, in front of the old barn, we saw Church laying. But it was not the kind of laying associated with sleep. Especially not the sleep of a our notorious cat. And, yes, he was notorious.

I won’t get into detail at how upset my ex-wife was. All I will write is I never heard her scream the way she did once she realized he was not sleeping.

The feline has caught the attention of human being going back to the time of the Egyptians. Each cat having its own personality, and their personalities expressed through movement and sound and touch, The Cat is a most impressive thing of Nature.

There are cats, like Church, that will talk to you. Cats that will ignore you. There are the feisty cats that will attack your feet when they are dangling over the edge of the bed.

Most importantly, especially right now in my life, a cat can be understanding, comforting, and in need to be comforted (an important trait to someone like me that has not even so much as cared for himself in the past five years.)

Feeding and caring for the house cat, Mr. Wallace, has been a form of therapy. I think this is my third time writing about him (and cats in general,) but no feline will ever etch the mark on my heart as Church did.

Yes. We, my wife and I, named the little kitten-cat after the brought-back-to-life cat character from Stephen King’s 1983 novel, Pet Sematary. We bought him as a birthday present for my former betrothed. Her birthday is close to Halloween. So why not name the new member of our home after a character in the scariest book I have ever read?

I don’t know why, and I don’t know how to describe it, but the name fit. Church was not like the cat from the novel, or Mary Lambert’s 1989 film adaptation of the book… he was just a CHURCH!

His coat was white and grey. He had Siamese-shaped eyes, and talked the Siamese speak. They meow – he meowed – to announce his presence. Church meowed when he was hungry. He meowed when he walked; he meowed, I think to listen to himself meow.

Our House Cat, Mr. Wallace, meows with Church, now. And he only meowed when he saw I was feeling low-down. Mr. Wallace was run over by a car about a month ago. We had to put him down. There is a marker for him by the house where we buried him.

(AUTHOR”S NOTE: I will be including the other “Cat Sketches” in the future.)

This all began back in 2013, writing on WordPress. That was back when I lived in Missoula, MT. I don’t remember what I was trying to accomplish back then. Maybe I just wanted to learn how to share my writing with the public…?

For years, my writing has been in secret spiral bound notebooks, stacks of typewritten pages, volumes of composition notebooks, and private files on laptops and desktops. I turned in essays for school… I have been published in some books, two magazines, newspapers, and there were some websites kind enough to include my words. But as far as my own forum on the internet dedicated to writing, this is where it began.

Where it is going to begin again. This time, I will be writing sober.

See: I am an alcoholic. Have been alcoholic since I was 20 years old. I have wrecked cars, been in the hospital more times than I care to remember (and I think there are some times I DO NOT remember,) lost my wife and son, been homeless, and been declared legally and medically insane.

But I have kept on writing.

What I will be publishing/posting here are personal essays – columns, diary entries, whatever you want to call them – I have written over the past six months living in a Sober Home. I typed these pieces up on two typewriters, usually in a dashing from my room to the kitchen where I am the Kitchen Manager, trying to convince myself I am still a writer.

(I am not sure how long it had been since i had used a typewriter. What I do know is I have not been in a stable place – have not lived in any one place – in over two years. (I imagine it is hard to lug around a typewriter when you are homeless.)

So, in the following weeks, I will be selecting some of my columns, titled Stirring the Sauce, to re-write and to be published here on WordPress.

Hope you enjoy them!

Tension & worry, it seems, became ludicrously available, ever-flowing and common as tap water from a faulty kitchen sink faucet.  More horrible than tension and worry, hands down,was The Doubt.  Self-doubt, ranking as Highlander Master over the other varieties of uncertainty, taps both my wife and me on the shoulder, serving as a daily reminder Little Lee’s 18 month check-up dented our comfort and capability as parents, spider webbing the security we had Lee was healthy, in body and mind.

I stayed at the apt. to write while Rory & t/ baby went to Dr. Flow DimDiddles, Pediatrician Pisshead Specialist of Missoula, MT, for the obligatory year-and-a-half poke and prod.  I hadn’t stood up from my desk the whole time they were gone, not even to get a beer or have a cigarette… whatever I had been working on was going so well my two essential maintenance drugs had been forgotten.  Rory opened my office door to my without me noticing… or, maybe that’s just a detail I’ve forgotten… ever since that day, I’ve forgotten a great deal more, concerning many things about various stages of my life – so many things are forgettable when the first word your wife says returning from the pediatrician is AUTISM.

There was always one – sometimes, two – all night long bouts of sweeping and mopping all the floors, putting every article of clothing and linen through both machines, then for some meticulous sorting, folding, organizing and re-hanging neatly:  these were important nights before my son was born.

Through those midnight hours, my territorial impulses to award the new apartment-space, unarguably, MONTANA LOCKE SPACE snared a good portion of time; more importantly, hard work at the massive Office Desk Unit – a perfect metaphor, it was, of the Writer’s colossal Ego – setup in the Main Living Room was relentless.  Writing had never been as purely concentrated an expression – more, numerous expressions – pulling content from all facets of my life; nor had it ever violently formed a haunting-like presence of what played-out from imagination as if it were from memory.

This was my time alone:  a period of cultivation and training.     

It is still happening:  staying awake for 50 (at the worst, 70) hours, tackling as much fallen-behind, built up, overflowing HONEY-DO! lists, with no comfort of finishing my mystery solving responsibilities including folding socks; a never-diminishing, pell-mell-stacked array of dishes faithfully wait – my midnight-hour evenings alternating in purpose and significance, never sure if that sense of accomplishment will be granted with the dawn.

As far as the writing goes… well… my General’s Commanding Office Unit met with a tragic, 3:00am sledgehammer execution before getting on a plane to Ohio.  Most of our cherished belongings, along with the work station, needed to go.  The casual visitor should have no difficulty in knowing most of the good n’ dangerous belongings are hibernating, gone, or displayed/dwelling in another room. 

An exciting outcome from all the change:  I now have a small place in the home designated for work – Vincent’s room!  My writing area may not be as large, not as stocked with dangerous and borderline illicit recreational material, not even host to a magnetic-pull or beckoning:  The main nerve center of operations within my home is a consistently mobile, gibbering lunatic-happy baby… making space for this collapsible picnic table/desk in his room for the Old Man is going to grind a few good stories out from him.

Inside this Jack-O-Lantern orange walled space (still adorning my wife’s handcrafted circus animal stickers I refuse to peel-off) will, without question, change as these Notes and other works are composed within; there will not be a change of Rank or Title initially awarded to the room.   

It will remain, The Baby Room.