| in america volume 23 part 4 - 2011 september-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
26 September Wm Heise State Park. Eleven on a Monday morning. A lot of small flies. Oaks all around. Chainsaw whine over there, fire crew doing something. Tom barefoot and bareback with a green kerchief on, white tufts on tanned chest, reading at the concrete table. A little chipping bird in an oak. The oaks have dry black moss on thick cracked bark. Woodpecker flashing white wing bars. We forgot to buy wood but Tom scrounged firepits round about. It was a good fire. There was a log next to it we could sit on. I had a cardboard box full of dry leaves and wood chips and I'd throw on a handful to make it blaze up. - There's a hawk, two hawks, balancing over the hill. The sky darkened. When I was gone fetching pyjamas out of the car Tom was standing looking up through firelit oak trees to stars. Night on planet Earth he said. It's a good tent. We could lie next to each other zipped in but with the whole roof open to stars showing between black oak cutouts. I could see the Cassiopeia W on its side in a gap. Bed just right. What stories told in the dark. Tom said one of the views of me he likes to remember was when we were coming back from Read Island, waiting in a nearly empty ferry terminal with odd lighting. I remembered it when he told it. It was a barn of a place, very empty, with picnic tables. He said he was starting to cross the room and saw me at a table reading a newspaper. I said what was it about it. He said it was like a way station. I said like somewhere between space ships. Yes. Very Edward Hopper. We were awake in the dark from about four. Talked until the stars had faded and the pink light had passed. I had been saying that to me the science story is so beautiful I don't know why anyone doesn't prefer it to religion, the so-many thousands of years of slowly working it out. He said when he was little he had understood that he would die but someone else would be conscious in his place. Like the Norse story of a vast hall a bird flies through from one side to the other. I liked that moment best I think. 27 25245 Mesa Grande Rd Santa Ysabel CA 92070 USA. 1940. Application fee $30, 1 yr lease negotiable. Deposit $1200. Frank Rys Progress Realty.
Month ahead - big finances, research changes, commitments and consequences - proceed carefully, barriers exist. New moon - waxing 15. 28 Wednesday after. I dreamed Susan coming to lean the side of her face against me for a moment. Out at the park, on the second night, I dreamed a penis that went flat and woke beside Tom wondering whether I've been so bitter with Tom really because there's been no sex. The second night was harder. I was awake a lot. I ached mildly. Next morning we went to have breakfast in the coffeeshop and I said let's go back to the realtor to look at the schoolhouse place. Sprague Realty. A soft pretty blond our age at the first desk, a dry shrewd old thing at the other one. Not much later the blond was on Craigslist asking for a rental in Julian or Mesa Grande. There was one - Mesa Grande, hillside, agricultural preserve, unrenovated, $1250. We drove out to look at it. Payton Rd with a gate I could open. Asphalt ribbon up through blond hills. Just at the base of the summit trees a lane to the left over a cattle guard. Faded blue-green board and batten house with a lot of little additions. Good rock terrace on the shady side. Looking southeast through the oaks next to it a vista so stunningly beautiful I'm shy to look at it, glance away. Front door has a realtor's padlock. We walk around the side. A back door on the W end behind the garage is open. A lot of space. Bookshelves under the living room windows wide enough to sit on. A white room in the southeast. A dark warm room with casement windows in the northeast. Between the two of them a carpeted room with a built-in desk. Another bedroom in the SW, door to the outside, strips of window on two sides. Wide kitchen. Wider living room with a stone fireplace fitted with a little stove. Beige paint, beige carpets, too much of those. What do I think - yesterday I came in and sat straight down with the phone. Talked to the realtor, talked to the propane seller in Santa Ysabel, talked to someone about pellet stoves, left my number with Blue Mountain cable company, added up columns, all with direct efficient energy. When Tom and I were sitting on the bookshelf. I said You aren't ready but I might be. I have $1660 after taxes plus $520 Canadian = 2180 - 1250 = 830. In winter utilities could be $500. - 500 = 330 for gas, food, car repair. Summer - 200 - 630. Three times during the trip, in which I let Tom drive though he doesn't have his license back, there was a moment when the jeep jumped and roared simultaneously. Each time Tom slammed on the handbrake and jammed it into park. We were mystified. I was afraid it was the transmission and I'd have to pay a lot of money to a bad garage. He tested the gears. They were fine, so he decided it had been the floor mat riding up onto the accelerator. Then later he discovered his big shoe was over both the brake and the gas. I was falling asleep just now and suddenly remembered my fear. It's what I have to talk about in this enterprise - my fear of Tom's incompetence, a constant tension when I'm with him. He's better than he was. He was thinking it through. He'd need 90 days. Give notice, last month's rent. Get back his deposit, live at Bud's while he works at Hands On. We could agree to try our best for a year and if it didn't work quit with no hard feelings. He could get work in Ramona.
I don't trust him to find the money - I'm calculating what it would cost me to do it on my own, and what it's worth to me. It would mean giving up 2 years' savings, approximately, and this nest that has given me my first ease with money. I'd likely have to teach longer. On the other side, sitting on that bookshelf with sublime grassland behind me I felt I already lived there. I felt it's holy ground. I'll walk out with my camera and be in love. There'll be stars. There'll be silence. 2011, most significant turning point in your life ... true power, talent and personality to the fore - forever. You've held something back over the last 15 years. Not any longer. Be ambitious all year. Poor time to retreat, be overly domestic or to seek security. Take risks ... bet on your talents ... dissolve restrictive ties. Unexpected events loom in money for 8 years You are just beginning to perceive whom you really want. June 2012 - June 2013 can establish the home you'll live in for many years to come or might end one career and start another. This year do research to be ready for that. 29 Another thought, the camera - buy a super-8 for $600? "It's time for us to be magic people again." - 18 Dec 2002 - almost 9 years. What were they for.
I was telling Greg I spin my wheels because I haven't had a call. This is a call. I'm fizzing. Contemplating it I feel heart joy like when I fell in love with Tom. Heart joy like the field above the mission.
30 Filling in Tom's form this morning, mine yesterday. Pinning down the numbers he'll need to come up with. I wanted to make sure he knows what he's up against. Does he want it enough? If he does, something comes true after many years. If he doesn't I'm on a branch of the road leading away.
1st October Online this morning seeing James Taylor and Carly Simon singing You can close your eyes, it's alright, thinking of Luke in his carrycot in the van on an Irish field. Phoned him. Found him in a house-sit in Kentish Town, Saturday afternoon on a day of record heat, blinds drawn. He has a co-op place for November, for as long as he wants, cheap. Why do I remember Bickerton Road. Victorian terrace like Burghley Rd. I'm happy for him. We talked till my card beeped and then he called me back. He said I could stay with him! In London! Where in this season the rowan outside his window has yellow leaves, red berries and black crows. I told him about Mesa Grande and he had been calling it up online as we spoke. When I hung up I found Bickerton on street view, bow window and attic dormers. Josh and Nathalie thinking of buying a country place in France where cousins could be together. - John Eliot Gardiner Bach Cantata Pilgrimage BBC 2000, Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque soloists their own love and sense of discovery of this extraordinary music I'm longing for the year - Said to Josh about his neighbourhood tree survey, when he said photos and sound recording, that it could be a website - and then imagined photos, footage of blond grass at the foot of a rock, with crystalline silence and one ribbed black call of crow. Maybe there's a brown hand, white sleeve. Somehow it will take me to New York and London - I can't not assume I have it, and I say I not we. I quail thinking what Tom would have to do, and yet there's joy thinking he might, and what it would mean if he did. - As I came down the steps to Tom's a strange animal the length of a small lizard but lower to the ground and side-to-side wriggling like a centipede. Stub legs very close to the back end of quite a long body. Red-brown. Salamander missing its tail, must have been. Slow-worm is the word I was feeling for, but it's not that. 3 Latitude 33.18, longitude 116.769, elevation 3, 238. 4 It is obvious that life works in terms of species rather than of individuals. The individual just has to be born, to develop to the point at which it can procreate, and then to fall away into death to make way for its successors ... We have, however, contrived to extend our falling away so much that it is often longer than our development, so what goes on in it and how to manage it is worth considering. ... there is not much on record about falling away. Being well advanced in that process I say to myself "Why not have a go at it?" To be urgently wanted at a time when I not longer expected it cheered me up and brought me alive again. Also, I am curious. Surely the part of life which is within our range, the mere fact of life, is mysterious and exciting enough in itself? What filled him as death approached was grief at having to say goodbye to what he could never have enough of. ... it is simply that one has to pay for what one has enjoyed. One should never, never expect them to want one's company, or make the kind of claims on them that one makes on a friend of one's own age. Enjoy what they are generous enough to offer, and leave it at that. What caused the kind of grief that twists the gut was not losing my mother, but losing the place where she lived. When I reached the market town and turned into the road I used to get - still get - an extraordinary feeling of entering my own body. What an old person is is a mobile reservoir of experience. Our life went back to being, in about equal parts, sad and boring. I have gone off novels. By the time I retired from my job, at the age of 75, I hadn't written anything for a long time because it was a long time since anything had happened to me that needed curing. I could make them laugh! I loved making them laugh! A great deal of my reading has been done for the pleasure of feeling my way into other lives, and quite a number of my love affairs were undertaken for the same reason. Diana Athill 2009 Somewhere towards the end: a memoir Norton [the Irish] were so much more lively and witty, and so much readier to start or follow a new trail, than the people among whom I was raised, that whether or not interests were shared didn't seem to matter. the pact we make with life. That we will see it through and live it according to the length of time bestowed on us. 5 It's been 9 days without knowing and I've gone flat. I'm in stress of suspense, which feels like fear. Have been researching what's wrong with me, what I've called the black arms. Now aware of constant tension especially in my left hand. It's well known, night clenching, and it's a symptom of fibromyalgia, along with other bad things some of which I don't have but many of which I do. 6 Steve Jobs died yesterday. Louie writing about the Occupy Wall Street movement. - Something about taking on this journey with Tom, a turning. I won't look at him with an eye for danger, I will look at him to see how he is. I will look at him as my Tom. When I say that I feel a warming both at cunt and at heart. 6 Mink River. What do I think of this. Pacific Northwest magic realism. I like that the plants and animals of the place are constantly named. I like the thick paragraphs where he tells what everyone is doing at a given moment. I don't like the Catholic schmalz. It's an Irish-Salish-American tale being told in a tradition of tale-telling and so the talking crow is fine and so is the bear who come out of the bushes to carry one end of the smashed boy's litter, but I don't like the way he elides consequences, for instance the way the boy being beaten by his father is made more the father's problem than the boy's. The women all love their husbands more than they would. The town is like a town in Paul Klee. It's not how a town is, but is it wrong to invent it that way? Does it damage true love to invent false love? If love is true why would it need to invent by means of falsity? Schearer is true love. It shows drunken lift and its cost, both. So then Sebastian Barry. Never a wrong move. The difference is that Doyle swaggers and Barry is always treading on mortal ground. Both born 1955. Sebastian Barry 2011 On Canaan's side Viking Brian Doyle 2010 Mink River Oregon State University Press 7 Friday morning is it, mild pink and blue after two days rain. Dew on the windows. I've had the heater on for the first time this fall and got down the flannel pyjamas from the closet shelf. 8
- Myofascia thin tissue holding muscle together, thickened and tightened
- Diegueño Ellykwanan, Elcuanan. Near the San Diego River. Area codes 442, 760. Ted Couro 1973 Dictionary of the Mesa Grande Diegueño. Iipay Nation Kumeyaay / Yuman language family, Hoban stock SY on slopes of the Volcan Mountains, nearly 4500' About 350 on SY reserve Most important calendar event, stars of Orion's belt to its zenith about autumn equinox Acorn harvest season Sept 21 - Nov 21 Sept 21 new year Tribal library, Kumeyaay Historical Society, open to all individuals 760 765 0845 Assistencia 1818 rebuilt 1924 open 8-4 Preserves 8-5 or summer 8-7 County of SD seasonal park attendent Don's Market meat specialties Population in 92070 987 Spencer Valley elementary school SY Head Start Center Conway Rd Santa Ysabel Rancho wheat, barley, corn, beans, orchards, vineyards Mesa Grande Band 920 acres, library 760 782 3818 Population 75, 1820 acres Or 186 of 630 on the res 27220 Mesa Grande Rd Shenandoah Ranch for sale 5 and a half million, caretakers' house Tourmaline at Himalaya Mine, Gem Hill, privately owned, green and pink since 1898 Mesa Grande Orchids 27275 MG Rd Oct 6 earthquake Thursday MG 2.9 1:24,000 scale MG quadrangle topo map 9
- I phoned Mary and she was alright. Said I was wanting to move to the country. She remembered the Valhalla house. Will it be like that? I hope so I said. But you and Ed won't be just up the road. I arrived at Tom's this morning to get his paystubs to scan for Frank Rys. He'd had his hair cut but looked different in another way too. On Friday he looked tight, beaky. This morning he looked beautiful. He'd had a clear moment after he panicked at one in the morning. I said it wd be better if he thought through before he said he was going to do things rather than after, but I agreed that his plan was too hard. I don't know that he isn't evading. I said I'd take his word. 10 I've woken a bit after 3 scared of how poor I'm going to be and sore that once again Tom is choosing not to be with me. [columns of calculations]
I am seeing myself there with no furniture - my futon bed and unsuitable chair - and computers - cold - afraid to buy food - and knocked back again into heartache about Tom having suckered me with a promise he isn't going to keep. Did he do that to psychically drain me? Can I find somebody else who really wants to be with me?
- There I lay down and felt the pinched anguish at the forehead, and felt it, and kept returning to feel it. There was the tight band at my temples the whole time and it eventually was most of what was left. I heard myself sleeping. Woke from dreaming that I had been sleeping outside and woke with slugs on my belly, green round things 4" across sucked tight so I had to pry them off. Then I saw a frog swimming toward me with a small frog on its back facing backward, and a snake facing forward. - The Grass - November when rains make hills green The Sun - winter solstice, white clowns The World - spring equinox - mourning fire human participation in the making and unmaking of the world - dark of the moon after spring equi, 3 days to the crescent marriage The Moon - 2nd full moon after spring equinox, men 14 days prep, 9 nights The Summer - summer solstice 21 days The Water - early or mid August The Wine - autumn equinox - crazy drunk 11 I went to T's house and confessed honorably and he listened, and when he did I felt sparks of tears, which alone I'd been far from, so we had dinner together watching the news and I came home and saw a couple of episodes of Emily of New Moon on Hulu and went yawning to bed at 9:30 and am awake this morning to white mist in pale early daylight. Have sent Frank a nudge. Found yesterday that it would have to be a Wild Blue satellite at $300 plus $70 a month of which the college wd pay $600. Books by mail won't do interlibrary loan but Ramona and Borrego Springs libraries can call in the UCSD catalog. - When are you and Tom available to meet at my office in PB and exchange the keys for rent/deposit? - So I'm moving to the country. Tomorrow will sign a check for $3115.
Is this trouble Tom's mouth gets him into? He says to me let's get a place in Santa Ysabel and split the rent. It'll be $1200 a month. When he says that I swivel instantly from being broken up with him to agreeing to live with him. A couple of weeks later I say let's go camping. There's the house. I say I'm doing it and he is or isn't. He says he is. Making the application has harrowed him. He's had to produce pay stubs, pension records. His 3 credit delinquencies came up and he was questioned about them. He squirmed. Making the application harrowed me too. The suspense harrowed me. I was a steel trap mind getting things done. Today I stopped at California Coast and applied to have my line of credit raised a thousand dollars. I faxed VanCity to ask them to wire transfer 6000. Anyway, Tom. Now he has promised to 1. Get a job 2. Pay his debts 3. Buy a car 4. Send me $625 a month. I'm smiling a bit wickedly. If he wants me back those are the conditions. He'll sign a lease with me. Maybe he'll honor it and maybe he won't, but I will. I can. He isn't committing his housing or his furniture and he didn't want to commit as much of his information as he did, and I don't know whether his deep truth wants the adventure with me or not, it would feel safer to assume not. In any case he helped me get it - I couldn't have done it without him.
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- It turns out that the lease is signed the very day, exactly 16 years after I first drove through Santa Ysabel and said this is where I should live. Oct 12 1995. 19th I'm in the lobby waiting for my laundry to dry. The desk clerk sits down with me, Tom. 20th Then my phone rang and it was Tom inviting me to dinner. 1st November I was in a field in the mist. 13 Been telling in all directions and people are excited with me - Rowen, Logan, Emilee, Cheryl on chat last night, Janet, Louie, David B, Mafalda, Juliana, Katie Soule, Jerry - - Have been thinking to sit down and write all day but then I'd jump up and do something, empty a drawer into boxes, go round the restaurant back door looking for more boxes, google cat adoption or fencing material, check email all day wanting to talk to people about the house. - There I do it again, go to add up my cost and income columns once more. Now it's 8:30, black at the window, Richard's cricket sounding along with a white hiss. I have two weeks more in this little room. Want to keep the pretty shell of the room as it is till then. Doesn't it feel lighter without the hidden blocks of compressed paper in the closet and in file drawers? Sean said Wow! Oh wow! Katie Soule said love eyes central. The mesa. Is the name of something. Tableland and table. Make a cup of tea. Settle for tonight. If I can. But then I start thinking about a vegetable garden with wild plants outside the wire fence, tank with drip irrigation, fill soil - agaves and salvias perimeter, manzanitas, scrub oak, ceanothus, Cleveland sage, spreading into the gravel. Calif poppies. 14 When I reread the GW page about coming to SD the first time, I thought the writing wasn't interesting. I'd thought it was, so I wondered a couple of things. Is my taste better? Was I enchanted with the writing because I was enchanted by the tale, the Tom enchantment? - And then a strange turn. Tom wanted to come look at the boxes and showed up midafternoon. Was irritated and so was I. He wanted to buy bungees, I wanted to find some in the jeep. He wanted to put something to weigh down the tarp, I said I'd anchored it at the corners. He wanted to go somewhere and get a cup of coffee. I was disliking the way he drops his g's, wanted to just take him home. He wanted to stop at the 99¢ store, go to Ralph's, break a $100. I dropped him off and went twice around a block on University looking to drop off a box of books. Got $8 for them. Ran across the street and bought a toaster for $8. By then I was less tight and thought I'd go back to Tom's and make up for being short. His priesthole was open so I called through it. He took a while. When he opened the door he went straight to the French doors in the kitchen and had them opened wide. I smelled burning resin. You caught me making dinner, he said. I caught you smoking dope. So I was sitting on what had been the blue couch and is now covered by a grey blanket. My heart was fluttering darkly. I was rapidly calculating consequences, at the same time sighing in thanks to the book for getting me the evidence that he'd lied to a direct question. This was weeks back, when we were negotiating. I said I only want the real thing. He said his only reservation is that in the future he may sometimes want to smoke weed. I said, Are you doing it now? He said no.
15 It's been since the res, two months - Came back from res and he'd been exercising, "slim straight man." Two-bedroom craftsman, book says no. A man and a little house, and art, and countryside. Naked heart and trusted speech. Sex. Soon? No. Big wave day Tom is courting me by listening. Blackout. Month ago we talked about getting a place in SY - he said his only hold-out. The book thought it was possible too. I say three things to Tom - "I want the real thing, though." 25 Sept going camping with T. 28 see the house. 6 Oct I won't look at him with an eye for danger I will look at him to see how he is. I will look at him as my Tom. 10 Oct woke at 3 in panic. 12th sign [the lease]. - I don't like the way I'm tipped into inner mutter again - it will be all day long for a while. I'm thinking about what to do about getting to VT in Feb, where to stay overnight, where to leave the jeep.
I dreamed there'd been a man who had somehow threatened me. I was trying to remember how he looked to describe him to a group of people I was staying with, who were going to help me. He came to the door. He was their friend. He and one of the men capered across the floor together singing. They were charmed. I went away to my bedroom and was looking for things to pack, I was going to walk out into the night. 16 [sketch of dimensions of windows and doors] Southern oak woodland Engelmann live oak usually narrow, blunt, untoothed dull blue-green [leaves], family of blue-leafed oaks Common in open oak woodlands in interior foothills Acorn woodpecker carpintero Scrub jays Kind of pine? Coulter, 3 needles, 9" Grassy bald Toyon Scrub oak Buckwheat Cypress? Fast-growing annuals, wild oats 17 There is a little faucet next to the rock bowl along the wall in the terrace - when it's turned water runs out from under a rock. The rock bowl, which is under a spreading toyon, overflows into the flower bed. My collection of succulents is tucked in there till I'm back next week to live. Last night a bit before sunset we walked a ways past the cattleguard and sat on an edge of the asphalt to look down a shallow crease toward more slopes, more oaks, more rocks. The sun went down orange behind us. As we walked up the slope again a small tribe of large birds crossed the road single file below us, headed toward a rocky outcrop. This morning a hawk slipped past the living room window. There was the iron rocking chair left by the forward oak. 18 Under its high canopy, from its carpet of broad, lacy shadow, the blond slopes falling away in curves and creases. On the opposite slope far away tiny cattle. On the nearer slope cattle too, and the smooth looping asphalt of new road laid grey through yellow. Behind us where we had come before dawn to see the eastern sky color was the house in its grove and beyond it uphill thick dark oak forest. There's a thick-trunked grandmother oak up against the side of the blue-carpet room with its treehouse windows, another over the driveway in front. Small flat blue leaves, blunt-ended acorns. There was the way when I'd walk through the house every room was a different temperature. Behind the long kitchen cupboard's doors and drawers my books and CDs, film cans, tapes, and the Orpheus papers. Yesterday morning while we waited for the tow truck working with the cards with Tom. He asked what would be needed for him to be good for me there. It said careful observation of shared pleasure and oppression, meaning being aware when he oppresses me and not thinking shared pleasure means he has his kind of fun and imposes it on me. I was stern about the ways he butters me up while at the same time sabotaging by lying and not having money. Then he talked about writing. It's only in the last two years that he's been able to like what he's written, he said. And that's enough about that. When he tried to choose a room I slammed him. No Tom, you do not get to claim a room before you put money into this place. I did not like it when he called it our house. We were lying alongside on the carpet facing the window and I said I'm not at all sure we should continue. But I'll say what I liked about having him there. That he carried everything, certainly, that he drove, though without a license. But also feeling out the house together, naming the rooms, going out both dawns and Sunday sunset. His acknowledgements when I rose up. His wanting to go out and sweep. His pleasure in the tribe of birds crossing the road. And now that's really enough about that. It's foggy this morning of my last week in this little room. Nora sat with me on the couch listening to the story of the place, the first sight and the 16 years, the ewe of god and the ecstatic grass. She gave me the table. "I have lots of surfaces." I'm leaving her the filing cabinet, the curtains, the fridge, the shelves in the closet, and this little house made lovely. The country does have a look of Provence.
- Today I signed up for power, phone and sat, bought a wireless router, bought a phone, bought floormats and a measuring cup and a mop, mailed the landlord move-in sheets. 19 Wednesday at 8, fogged in. I've written more of my people, Rob, Jody, Jim Mann. 20 Shooting neuralgia pains up the R side of my head. Packet slog, Pizzuti on anarchism. - Sore and feeble at Tom's house while he waited in a clean house for a tenant inspection. He was wearing his silver jeans and a tight long-sleeved t, thong sandals and his black specs. I had my head on his lap and he was reading me an LA noir, sometimes stroking my head. He'd tucked me into a blanket. I would drift asleep and when I woke he'd tell me what had happened while I slept. He was reading well, sometimes laughing. Santa Ysabel West and East Open Space Preserve - bikes and Nature Conservancy 8-5, 8-7 in summer. Part of old Santa Ysabel Ranch San Dieguito Space Preserve Trails follow the old ranch road Kumeyaay seasonally occupied Santa Ysabel Creek 5 miles - Kanaka Loop Trail Wildflowers mid-April - yellow mountain violets, white forget-me-nots, purple canchalagua, baby blue eyes, yellow lotus or California broom Lupin White popcorn flowers Yellow wallflowers Pink phlox Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel, SY reservation 3,200' - 5700', 5,000 acres 7 varieties of oak Rancho Santa Ysabel Mexican land grant 1844, cession 1848 Big Book meeting at SY Mission Tuesdays at 7 Santa Ysabel Casino $4.95 prime rib dinner - menu online, steak $16, carnitas and pollo asado $8, cheesecake $5 Mid-November feast day at the Assistencia Mountain bluebird comes in winter, Warner Valley, SY Valley, Ramona grasslands SY post office window M-Sat 9-11 760 765 0441 MG-SY valley "supports the largest remaining expanse of Engelmann oak woodland habitat in Southern CA" "Non-native annuals are the dominant grasses in the oak savannah and grasslands." San Dieguito watershed reaches to Del Mar - My mind was seized with a boundless hatred for America. America, with its optimism, boosterism, and yahooism that opted for sentiment over truth every time. James Ellroy 1981 Brown's requiem. B. 1948. 21
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- There have been a lot of hits on Joyce Frazee Vancouver - Baden-Wurttemburg, Houston, North Van, Vancouver, Gibsons, Pest Hungary, Surrey, Washington State, Vancouver a couple of times more, Windsor CA, Santa Rosa, Vancouver, Omaha, the earliest last December, which is as far back as the record goes. Someone somewhere talked about her? It isn't a link, they are using varied search terms, that all land on the GW index. 23 Dreamed I was doing heart surgery on my own heart, had it small and warm in my hand. Checked whether it was beating. Yes. But then when I wanted to sew it back into my chest I had trouble attaching the vein. - Tom is in a new incarnation. He seems taller and straighter, slender, quite lovely, except his profile, which has that lack of jaw his mom had too. He smiles beautifully and has been wistful for my company now that I'm almost gone. [page of notes on fibromyalgia] 25 9:20 on my last night here. In the morning I'll take the bed apart and pack the fern and the lamp, the Buddha calendar, Homer and Shakespeare, and the clock, the little shrine I've left at the foot of the bed when everything else is disassembled. I wanted its company tonight. It's been the ripening of the room, the way the blue bedroom in 824 was made exquisite before I left. I'm looking at the curtain with satisfaction too. I understood the room before I left, though I began in it so crudely. I've been thinking of the last time I moved into a house in the country, the Olson house, also in fall, though that fall began in August. Went to Up north 1, to read those pages, the edited versions. Liked them, a light-spirited person not saying too much, close to her concerns, working to stay in work. Reading them I was feeling I couldn't be that porous now, I've been solid too long, I haven't earned that sort of company. But I'd like to be something like that, there. I can feel something at heart when I think of it. This afternoon I realized the place page is called Here. Had that title ready. When I was closing the computer after looking at then, Greg sent a sentence from January 1963. Sexsmith the first move. And Shirley-Tia tonight, after months, sent a story about Richard, that I read on my couch with tea when at last I could stop after all the cleaning, packing, running around in the jeep. Now I'll have to take a Tylenol, I'll be sore when I lie down. Cleaning and packing today I've hated the grime and complication of having stuff and furniture. Days of handling and washing labor. The room has more echo tonight. It's clean in all the corners. The shelves are washed.
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