Ehhhh . . . I sort of understand. I had a grandfather a bit like that. Less mobile. But totally irresponsible. Paid attention to little but Chinese poetry, history and art, as well as languages and lots of other bits of scholarly stuff. Spend most of his time reading. Unfortunately, spent very little of his time working, and a lot of time (and money) drinking. My mom's family was totally poor, my grandmother scraping to somehow make ends meet, because he would drink the welfare check if he got the chance. Hardly took care of the kids, did little around the house. He was worse than useless.
But somehow, knowing him, you couldn't hate him. He was just the sweetest person, even when he'd been drinking. Nice as the day is long; even if someone was trying to get him to do something he didn't want to do, he never argued--he just didn't do it. And he really was amazing in his odd way . . . never got out of high school, but he taught himself to read and write Chinese (plus smatterings of like a dozen or more other languages); he translated classic Chinese poetry into English and had masses of scrapbooks. He didn't care if he (or the rest of the family) had to live on scraps as long as he could do that stuff. He would occasionally say he was the reincarnation of a drunken Chinese poet. When he died the family brought his scrapbooks to the local university and the Asian Studies honcho looked at them, said he was a scholar, and took them into their collection. So like, I dunno, in the end people just accepted that he was what he was and you couldn't really do anything about it.