| in america 6 part 2 - 2004 august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
August 6 2004 Blue-eyed Indian, Kiowa and Lakota, he said. He's the man I've seen walking on 5th, at the Mission Hills library, and at Starbucks. He's dirty and noble-looking, maybe fifty, tall, thin, broad-shouldered. Wears a filthy London Underground touque over curly grey hair. Good boots. Dirty crooked teeth, small pained eyes, Plains Indian cheekbones, quite a lot of European blood, narrow freckled hands with horrendous long dirty fingernails. He's on meds, schizophrenia is my guess. I was dimly thinking 'Michael' before he said it. Showed me a drawing of an evil pixie he designed for someone to make a tattoo. Naked girl with perky tits. He said there are different kinds of white sage growing at different altitudes. He assumed I was Indian. I asked him to say something in Kiowa. He said a sentence and then he translated it as "the Great Mystery has brought us here," bringing his index fingers together from wide apart. His grandmother was Kiowa, adopted by white Catholics but sent to an Indian school. She was there until she was 18, sneaked into the office after hours and found out who she was. Her mother was dead but she located her dad, who hadn't known he had a daughter. Michael's mother wouldn't have wanted him to have anything to do with Indians - she was half white - but his grandmother took him to pow-wows and made sure he did a vision quest when he was 13. His mother afterwards told him the man he thought was his father wasn't; his real father was a Lakota from Oklahoma (I think it was that way around). It made sense of everything but it - he was silent for a while, he went back into it - it blew his mind. When I asked if he lives downtown he told me the long circuit he walks. I'm supposing he's dirty because he sleeps out. The way he carries himself is remarkable to see on 5th Avenue among the Californians. I first saw him at least a year ago, walking uphill with that long light traveling stride. Wouldn't have thought he was Indian. German, maybe. He has a beautiful nose, a strong-boned face. He looked a prince in disguise as a pauper. But not when he opens his mouth. His teeth and his speech too. He looks otherworldly but isn't. He talked on and on. - Sent Luke The conservationist, Field notes, Wonder book of the air, Riddley Walker. 7th And now that both of them are dead, I love to think of them standing with the shining backwater between them, while Elton's voice goes out across the distance, is heard and answered, and the other voice travels back: "Yeeeaaah!" Wallace Berry 2004 "Are you alright?" in That distant land Shoemaker and Hoard Berry writing about located people, the two hundred years of family increase in one place. He gave himself that story as his only story, so in the end it is all one story. It is inevitably a story about death, since it stays long enough to feel each disappearance. His characters are full of appreciation for each other. His appreciation. I feel as if, in the journal project, I am opening labour that's too big for me - once again - another kind. Is it what I should be doing? I'm not quite sixty but I'm starting to think of myself as sixty, as if that's the next stage and I might as well get on with it. 60-80 is early old age, sixty is old in the sense that death is in the air of it. I'm having to think about heart disease. I notice mistakes of attention and memory that startle me.
- Michael has had non-Hodgkins lymphoma since he was 16 (ie was in remission and it's back). He's 42. - Everybody dies in this book! He has Elton Penn cutting tobacco through a hot afternoon on a ridge by himself, four rows, stopping at the end of each to eat a melon. He says what it's like when you've done heavy labour and changed the look of a place and want to sit with it for a while feeling pleasure in what you've done. At the end of the story Berry says "In seven years from that day he would be in his grave" and he follows the story into retrospect. "Thinking of Elton as he had stood there with them in the barn door in the long shadow, sweaty and soiled, exultant and graceful, eating that sugary little melon, Mart would laugh with satisfaction and delight." His characters die and other people remember them. I said to Michael that since he's been sixteen he has had the wolf next to him and known it's there. Radiation, chemo. At the point where I have my balance again after Tom - and I do, I'm busy and happy and I look better - I am making friends with another of the kind of friends I make for some reason. I am hoping it doesn't mean something about me - that I'm still derelict. 9th He's a naturalist. His heart leapt toward the cassia because in it there were cloudless sulphurs, uncommon in the county. Gulf fritillaries, which are really heliconiniiae, a cicada nymph with wing buds. When he was little he would go into the brush with his reptile books. He raises butterflies, birds, snakes. He's anxious to go into the mountains, so anxious he has offered to be my faithful Indian guide and bodyguard. I will certainly go camping with him but I will be wanting to arrange showers and a laundry so I don't have that garbage smell, which it is, in the car. Since my fit about his not listening he is alright in conversation though not investigative. One of his ears is scalloped as if an earring had been violently ripped through the lobe. Today he was telling me his naturalist credentials. I feel a bit of a tizzy, which is unpleasant and an unfreedom. I know I'm processing and it can't be helped. I guess. I should just observe it. What else did I see today. Taft is getting cleared. I need to clean it up now and keep it cleaned up. There's grass, a lot of it. Michael was five hours under the [buddleia] weyeriana making it a fountain, and now is working his way down the vine edge of the fence. I was hours once again pulling grass along the evil edge next to the roses, but the rocks are gone and I'm going to mulch so deep and decrease the water too, and should there be some definitive ground cover? Plant to the edges of the bed, now. 10th This day was hotter. He tunneled through the jasmine. I scratched grass and that strawberry-leaf weed off a lot of the ground and trimmed the cassia. A mourning cloak stayed a long time on a buddleia flower. There was a zippy small blue something. He held a June beetle, which is a scarab, and showed me the livid green carapace dark red below. How to hold it at the shoulders feeling the sharp insistent strength of its forelegs. An iridescent dark blue wasp looking for spiders. Late in the afternoon I was in the golden light of a little room between the [salvia] greggii and the mountain marigold poking and prying and he was over there snipping and pulling jasmine and singing. He considers creatures sacred. He knows quite a lot about plants but is interested in them mostly in relation to animals. He has no interest in me, though he praises my having made a garden attractive to so many kinds of butterflies. We are starting to make plans to go camping next week. He's surprisingly straight. I mean his carriage is. At lunch I saw him with his long fingernails holding his cigarette and bringing it to his mouth like a lady. I can't be anything interesting to him. The question is will I be able to be interested with him, I mean at liberty. I think maybe not. He's mildly humorous, pats my arm. 11 A walking stick. It's an insect maybe 5 inches long that looks like a bit of twig. 6 thin legs, bits of red on the forelegs at the joint near the head. I'm the one who spotted it and called him. It was his joy of the day. I was irritated by the end of the day; he lags, stands with a cigarette, goes off and looks for caterpillars, doesn't attack with energy, it seems to me. Meantime I'm working steadily and when I see it won't be done today if I leave it to him, I get into the tangle with ferocity and finish it. Resent him. Send him to tidy up the orange tree. Will I have to go back tomorrow and finish? No, most of the garden is ready for mulch, I can leave it 'til Friday. Plant Saturday? Rush in with the lattice and get the jasmine back up onto it. 12 Thursday morning. To be able to go back to sleep in the night, two more aspirin and making myself come. What do I need to do today - finish Corin if I can, buy a tire and have it placed, buy some plants, talk to Nor about the pots. - What really happened is that it took all day to buy a tire. I was going to Costco in Mission Valley. Take 163 and then north on 15 he said. I didn't know quite how that would get me there but I thought maybe I'd just drive and find out. Went east on 163 and found myself streaking along at 75 miles an hour and all the lanes and all the mid-day traffic, my accelerator foot weak and pressure of fear at the chest. Was having to watch for signs and landmarks and at the same time stay aware of lane changes I'd need to have made. Didn't know there'd be that horrendous merge of the 163 and 15N, five or six lanes coming in on the right. Anyway, I was flying past towns and it seemed obvious I'd gone too far, but it took me a while to get far enough over to exit. So then I was going west on 56 and then south on 5 and then east on 8 looking for the stadium and there it was but no exit so I somehow ended up in Kensington, Adams Avenue, and then 805 north looking for a stadium exit and there wasn't one so I got off where I could and was in Kearny Mesa? Somewhere I recognized from the Clairemont bus, and that still wasn't the end. I asked at a service station and she said go left here and at the bottom go right. It wasn't clear how far down was the bottom but there I was on Friar's Road going past Costco. Turning into a lane, U-turn, and finally arrived, but I have to buy a membership for $45 and it's going to be four and a half hours. The car has to be there, I can't drive away and come back, four hours in a wholesale mall. Mercury retrograde. People pouring through the concrete warehouse with shopping carts as big as lawn tractors, that the cashiers call 'baskets'. I wander across the acres of cars and find a Starbucks. Read the Times. Go back into the warehouse and buy a Thomas Guide. People seem to be buying whatever there are piles of - boxes with 5 pieces of luggage. Outside they stand in line to buy hot dogs and pizza. People tell me opposite things about how to get back to Hillcrest. Tire installed $175. On the way home I shoot past the 163 south exit and have to backtrack patiently. Go to do laundry on Washington because I'm out of socks because of working at Taft. When I've taken the shirts and socks out of the dryer and put in another quarter for the towels and my workpants, I go home, put down my stuff and realize I have to go back. Come home again and eat something wet and lie down on the couch in the lovely sun and fall asleep and wake hours later in the dark. All this week I haven't been able to remember names of plants. I'm stressed by having to plan for an excursion next week. wondering whether Michael will have the money to pay his half. What will I need - jerry cans for water. Motor oil. Flashlight. Food. Gas. 13th It's 8 at night. 9 hours on site today - spreading mulch, pruning the buddleia more. I sent Michael to Miramar with Nina while I sat and did detail. Michael said he wasn't feeling well but he and Nina pushed to empty and spread two truckloads of mulch and haul away two truckloads of branches. Nina paced him. He ran the wheelbarrow. I wd sometimes be looking sideways to see who was there, and I'd be surprised, but by the time we drove home - twice, because he forgot his book - I was suffering every moment both from his smell and from his unstoppable dull self-absorbed language. I missed Rob's intelligence in work. I missed Tom's cleanness and personal eye. Is that it for the day - this whole week lost from my work - next Thursday two weeks of packets. 14 Hard night. Two aspirin weren't enough. My hands were mashed and nicked, with raw blister spots. Shoulder and ass muscles ached. Wrists. Burnt stinging on my face. Uncomfortable ghosts of Michael's garbage smell and the stink of eucalyptus mulch, maybe traces in my hair, maybe memory. The uncomfortable imprint of Michael himself after so many hours. Burnt eye surfaces. And that worst pain in a little muscle in the small of the back that lifts the right leg. What do I actually want - to either do nothing all day or else go to sleep again and mend all my sore spots while unconscious. 15 Woke in the dark thinking of philosophy, that earlier life I went away from once before, the way I have gone away from it now. That took me to Eric calling these former lives wells, and that took me to Eric, a story I haven't told. It's a story about a boy on a farm in Saskatchewan who writes columns in the local newspaper as 'The Young Woodsman,' who is sexually bent by a neighbour farmer, who grows up to become an alcoholic journalist, writing easily only when he drinks. His son is killed in an accident. His marriage breaks. He's adrift in the '60s taking drugs in support of what come to be elaborate fantasies. He is humiliated that he sometimes when he's drinking finds himself fucking boys. In the 1990s he's on welfare in a skid row hotel on Hastings and he takes a community garden plot. He's still an interesting man and he knows gardening and carpentry from his young days on the farm. He tells me stories of psychic events and powers that I hear psychologically. He live as if in spirit battle. He believes there is no death, that he could be hit by a bus and seem to die but in fact would get up and continue in a parallel life. He is arrested fucking an Indian boy in the United Church parking basement. He is terrified. I go with him to his court date. He's afraid he has AIDS. He wants no one to know. Monty is living in the garden that summer. Eric by now has his pension and he's living in the seniors' housing block overlooking the garden. He and Monty have a run-in one night. Monty knows his secret and taunts him. Not long afterward Monty is murdered by a knife to the gut. Eric says he was downtown at the time. The police aren't interested and the murder is never solved. The gardeners have a wake for Monty on a Sunday night. It rains and we crowd into the greenhouse. I play the tape of Monty's interview. Eric kicks the power cord off the tape player as if by accident but in unconcealable rage. I know Eric knows I suspect he killed Monty and I watch my car in these days. I find a nail under a tire. I go to California. During one of my later trips I hear that Eric has been found dead in his living room, a perforated bowel. Bob writes a sentimental piece about him that he sends to Eric's ex-wife and two daughters in Calgary, who appreciate it, it is said. Now it's 6:30 on a Sunday morning, grey sky like many this summer. Yesterday I came to the paragraph for Corin's evaluation that was a real paragraph. I said Corin has been a good student from the beginning but she was oddly diffident. - Michael [Voskamp] came into town to be with Rowen. He has taken a room and found work. Rowen met a girl at Jim's funeral. Rowen Michael and Louie were up late last night juicing grapes. Rowen has dropped his ice cream job. Amanda said when she was little she loved to write. She wrote an adventure on the other side of the mirror, Treasure Island. I said start there and find that confidence again. I think that was right. I also said use pictures too. Having done the week on Taft, and Corin, and Amanda, I could open July-Dec 1994 again, slowly transcribing the bookwork. The story of the Fraser trip is wonderful. The writing is so pleasurably natural. Now I'm wanting Louie to read it. I'm eager in this work - 16 I was at a meeting or conference with a lot of feminist political women. They were direct clear energized responsible people, very active. Tall. Some of them already knew each other. Nora was there. She was differently dressed than they were, so they could see she had money, but they liked her. Tom had also been in the room and a woman who didn't know I knew him was talking to me about him. She said he was bullshit from top to bottom. She imitated his bluffing posture, leaning back, arms folded. Leaving the meeting I was thinking how to evade Tom. I didn't want to have to walk further in the cold night, and I was wearing my long black conspicuous cloak, so I decided to crawl under my brother's bed (he was in it). Then my bed across the room would be obviously empty. I was squished under the springs up against the wall. Tom crawled in next to me. He'd easily found me. He was laughing. He said he'd taken a railway job in the meantime. I wanted to know how he'd found me. He'd just known what I'd do it seemed. - It's grey 6:30 Monday morning. later I'm making plans with Michael [Duke] and we'll leave town this aft in time to set up camp before dark. I want to say about Michael that what has been annoying me is his childishness. I said to Louie he's the kind of person with long floppy hands. He's irresponsible generally, the way he doesn't wash or look after his teeth, the way he lights a cigarette when it's time to start working, the way he babbles on heedlessly. He got into being interested in animals to escape from family pain, and none of his failures of emotional responsibility have made him care to fix himself. What's beautiful in him is partly that youngness. Knowing about animals is better than video games because it's not fantasy, but I've noticed there's something - is it juvenile? - something crude - even in the way he is with animals, for instance the way he was holding the butterfly by its wings. His posture with me is as if he thinks of me as a parent. He'd ask permission for this and that: Is it okay if I have a smoke? He was expecting me to want to cook. He expects I'll drive him places he needs to go. I do want to learn about the backcountry, though, and he wants to teach me. He's maybe ADD. He has trouble spelling. He's middle-class. His step-dad was a white engineer who was promoted up to company vice-president. The family knew how to support his interests. They bought him nature books for Christmas. At 13 he was so good as a goalie in junior soccer that he played for a team that competed in England. His parents divorced when he was 12. That confused him. Enough. What does it add up to. Refuse to be parental and don't take anything personally. 17 Dreamed I had been in the house alone with Ed for three or four nights. I was in my bed downstairs from his. He came downstairs in the dark and sat on the edge. He wanted to fuck me. I had some doubts but certainly wanted it too. I let him. He was a good lover though he was so old. Surprising. I said we shouldn't do it after my mother came back. He was saying he was going to leave, go out into the world. I haven't written the dream from last week, where Louie and I were at the top of a very steeply sloping very high grassy cliff. She suddenly dropped over the edge and sped down as if on a toboggan. It was an act of reckless daring. We watched her out of sight. At the end of the run there may have been a drop we couldn't see from where we were, onto rocks. She might have killed herself. - I wrote those by lamplight before I picked up my piles of pre-packed stuff and walked down to the car. Michael wasn't at Starbucks yet. There I sat looking at maps for an hour, expecting to see him arriving with dirty bundles from his mysterious roost somewhere to the north. When I've waited for an hour I'll leave, I said, and did. Up 163 to Escondido. A mistake that found me explaining to a motorcycle officer that I was in the commuter lane because I was looking for a way to turn left. He was going to ticket me, and then I felt a second of hesitation in him and leapt into it with more explanation of how I hadn't known which exit to take and it said Felicita Road to the Animal Park so I took that one, but then Felicita Road was going the wrong way so I thought that if I headed east I'd intercept 78, and then I found myself on this road and had no idea it was a freeway entrance. That worked. He'd had to assume I'd come up with a fantastic excuse for being in the commuter lane without a passenger. I said I was going camping and he glanced into the back of the jeep and then that was that. He gave me directions. Anyway, up Black Canyon Road slowly as the day heated. I was growling at Tom. Why isn't he with me. I'm growling at Michael too. He has been so presumptuous. He thought I would drive him around all day yesterday doing his errands. He was affronted when I stopped him after an hour and a half of monologue. He was startled when I said we should each buy our own food. I think he thought I'd take care of him. When that wasn't my plan he said he'd just get a loaf of bread and some peanut butter. I said we could buy that on the way. In his monologue I did like the way, when he told a story involving a pigeon, a juvenile ferruginous hawk, a prairie falcon and a golden eagle, he acted out the parts of all the birds. - Oh I forgot to say he also insisted I should bring along my pillow cases because that's the best thing for transporting snakes if you find some. I said no. I am sorry though to be having this eventless dull kind of camping rather than learning about rocks and animals and plants and more places. So here I am at Indian Flats campground. He'd said joyfully that it's the hottest time of the year. He wanted a pry bar to be able to open up cracks in the rock and see what's in them. Lizards. A mine back up in the hills, tourmaline. I'm under oaks waiting out the heat, another couple of hours maybe. There are sudden winds. The air flowing into the shade from the sun is freighted with heat and scent. I've had to put my socks back on because wasps are interested in whatever is between my toes. High desert. Is it maybe 8:30. There's my jeep looking nice under the oak tree. Good breakfast cooking although she said - the warden - don't even use the Coleman. Manzanita, coast live oak, sagebrush, white sage, California scrub ash, redshanks, St Catherine's buckwheat. How was the night. Cold enough to need the sleeping bag, the orange blanket, and the quilt. I woke often. Had a look to see where the Milky Way was, looked uncomprehending at the stars, and went back to sleep. Peepers or whatever they are shrieked at a constant level all night. Not long after dark some large animal screamed from the pile of rock that's east of here. There were shots like an automatic pumping. I've been lonesome and grouchy and then something will catch my eye. At that moment a fine tuft of grass springing light green from the base and beige-dry at its tips. It's very full and fine-textured, upright and fountaining, catching a lot of light and jittering its ends. The oaks are full of buzz and give out occasionally a single dry skitter when they let go an old leaf. Yum garlic sausage stew. That pile of rock is made of this same rapidly decomposing granite. It's pink by some thin flush of lichen I think, and has stronger grey and black markings where there's water seep. Thick chaparral between the boulders. What is the smell when I crush an ant - almost a plastic smell. I'm wondering what it would be worth to me to have a guide, here, someone who could tell what that screaming was last night, what kind of butterfly that was, what that nice trout-banded lizard was. Transport him, feed him, listen, endure smell, spend day doing errands, supply pillow cases and small containers. The exchange wasn't clear, was being negotiated unclearly. I'm so nervous about being asked to serve that I may have refused an opening into all sorts of arcana. He did keep promising marvels. Tourmaline. Secret site, Indian songs, reptiles in the headlights, butterfly migrations, summer storms, the Baja, Dr Banta's ranch. It wasn't clear who was buyer and who seller. We both assumed the other was buying. Meantime here I am with the advantages and disadvantages of just me. It's getting hot. Shall I stay here another night. Why not. The redshanks are messy things. They don't have the compact shapely glamour of manzanita (which has berries now, dark red, and so is even more beautiful), and at first I thought they spoiled the landscape with their red-brown dead stuff held aloft among the plumes of yellowish-green new growth, the whole thing looking too chartreuse for this oak-grove and that grey-green scrub. But yesterday I sat looking into a stand of redshanks with the binocs, and what I saw was its interior light. If I look into the plant's space - this is like being in the little golden room between the greggii and the mountain marigold - I see quite a golden somewhere. Yesterday when it had cooled and I was on a sand ridge looking down a bank I opened my eye onto a blue glitter of the greasewood below. It had the bitty reflectivity of the decomposed granite itself. I thought that was the light particular to greasewood. I'm not sure I'm not making this up, but it makes sense that the surface forms and textures of any plant will set up specific intensities. Maybe in a redshank canopy the stems are reflecting wavelengths those needle-like leaves (ie absorbent all the way around) will want to take in. Say they are internally reflecting a lot of that yellowy-green. The whole canopy is singing at that pitch. So is the messy dry stuff in the redshanks there because it's feeding the plant light? Anyway redshanks is a particular kind of temperament, helter-skelter but luminous. A lot of grass in its litter-skirt. I like the pale coral color of the buckwheat flowers with the silvers of the larger buckwheat (I think) and white sage. They seem often to grow together. There are crows. I saw a scrub jay catch a bug on the wing. A black bird with white patches on wings and tail that flaps a lot. Largish bird that came off the mountain at nightfall closing its wings and shooting down. Large-headed small brown birds in the oak. It's quieter by day than by night. Beavertail spines are good toothpicks. What is it about oaks. They are dark and dense. The way those leaves are convex - is that it? - convex and small, thick, dark, stiff and where left alone reaching to the ground - gives the tree - that one, in front of me - an impenetrable density. An establishment tree, buzzing with manufactury. It's pulling in rather than giving off. But it does speak, in its dry light rattle, to every shift of air. The air has a thick quality. A lizard, very striped, with a long grey tail. The binocs let me see how well he was hidden, brown and grey, in the oak leaf litter, his long grey tail like any of the fallen twigs. He freezes and flows alternately. At the peak of that mountain-pile are a few pines with their roots among the boulders. I was looking across the thick scrub in this bowl thinking the landscape of people has that mixture of kinds and accidentalness of individual structure, some shrubs half dead, some trees with limbs torn off by a flash flood. I am not able easily to tolerate the complexity. Clouds form toward the southeast where there may be hotter land. Yesterday afternoon an immense blazing pillar with solid round protuberances like the boulder pile beside it. Today's clouds are milder so far, not those tight formations of huge energy. No - I see one of those forming due south, over Borrego. It's growing fast but it doesn't seem to travel. The softer cloud over the mountain-pile is spreading in place. Now - not much later - it has simply relaxed itself. It was a tight erection and now it's just a loose pile, though it does have a tighter front edge. There are strong abrupt gusts that clean the oak by sweeping it. That little bird just swooped down and took my manzanita berry! (Off the table.) Yes it's hot. I'm hiding out under my home oak with my head on a pillow up against the jeep wheel. - Hours later - look at that, the roiling cloud completely dissolved to a lax little white puddle. 19 Thursday morning. A bad thing happened after that. When it had cooled I was up the road on a rock pile with the binocs looking at a large brown bird with a long black hooked beak, when a big black pickup closely followed by a red Cherokee zoomed past on the way into the campground. They were driving so fast I thought 1. they'd be loud and 2. they'd be drunk. My car was open so I rushed down. They were at the farthest corner but there was music. Alright, I'll have to go. Up onto the unsurfaced road that flanks the mountain. Good spot, a bench. It overlooks the range on range of hills both on this side of Warner's Valley and to the west. I get my bed set up. Am going to watch the night arrive. Suddenly loud music thumping. It's rap, it's angry, stupid and everywhere. It goes on until the Milky Way has shifted a long way west. I wake from my first little sleep with a dream of a mountain lion pair tearing at the garbage in the campground and something threatening me, maybe lion, maybe man. There was drunken bawling and singing. This morning by seven the music had started again. I packed up and moved a mile up the road to this spot where I've made tea and bacon and eggs. They left as I was writing, kids, I guess, six of them. I looked them in the eye as they passed and glared. Such hateful music. Alright, am I rid of that? It's heating. Very quiet. Hardly a cheep. Another cup of tea. Use the dregs to wash plate and pan. Everything put away, now would be the time to have a nap in the shade of the tailgate, if everything weren't so well put away. I don't want to go. Last night I also 'saw' a man walking toward the oak flats holding a little boy's hand. I'm next to a different kind of hill here. This one has its boulders mostly covered and is blackish because the scrub is chamise with here and there the brighter green of lemonadeberry. Dry sotol spikes. The redshanks stop at a lower altitude. That's a scrub jay. Blue. 20 Went to bed at 8 and now am up at 5. The air conditioner is growling, horrible. What did that excursion amount to. Some of the digital photos are nice. I spliced a long view of Pine Mountain. Buckwheat and the distant hills above Warner's Valley. The jeep under a coast live oak. I saw August. Got road grit for my succulents. Worked out more about how to pack the car. It took 24 hours and two cups of tea to be able to start seeing anything. Driving home on 15 yesterday I was flying with the best, alert. Knew to exit on Deer Springs Road and end up at Buena Creek Gardens from the north. 21st Saturday. Charlie, Anna and Favor are in. Sore throat. Haven't recovered from the heavy work week yet, sore and weak.
He said the scary noise at nightfall was probably a grey fox, the beaked bird probably was a thrasher, and that the holes up the trunk of the oak were the jays' granary, each hole just big enough for one acorn. That the silver plant is yerba santa. He has the sore throat too. 23 It worked out with Corin. She had her family at her grad. Her dad too and he cried. There really is a completeness of this trajectory. She carried all of them. She could do it because she trusted me. That was the part I gave her. She could trust my sanity and liking while she felt the worst and said what was forbidden to say. Patricia said in her first packet that she was "so moved" by the way I called them dears in my note after the res. That was calculation and yet it works. If they see me as a loving parent they open up the core so it can work. So here I am in a cold room hung among the palm fronds, no personal love but angel's work. Am I an angel also to myself? Last night I was transcribing the scraps I have of 1963, the last half of the year I was in Sexsmith. It was after I lost Frank. I stopped writing my days in the 5-year diary. I stopped writing Frank. I went home for weekends only sometimes. I'd work after school 'til late. I had no meals, I starved myself. I was down to 113 pounds. I'd binge. I didn't know I was neglected. I didn't know I was suspended all alone in the world. I was giving up Christianity. I didn't have Janeen any more. I was beating up whatever connection I could. There were a lot of exclamation marks in these notes. It's the aloneness I'm still in, am in again. I stood on the platform in the beautiful dress I made and gave a speech that I can still admire. It's clear. When I say am I an angel also to myself what I mean is the feeling I often have when I read my journal - if I give this present time to that past time, is my present self there participating in that past time? As if the moment when I wrote called on the future to help me see and be what I saw and was. - Saw and was. If I could be a help to that desperate girl what would I do. I'd say, Oh for goodness sake feed yourself. Demand enough money to be able to eat. You don't have to be good or unselfish, you don't have to love everybody. You do have to do what you're doing, you have to work hard to prove yourself so you can get to the next thing, but you don't have to worry that you'll be like your father. You are like him but you'll be able to make something else of it. You could just go ahead and be sad about having to give up Frank and your community and your family. It's a sadness you're staying out of because it's built on an older sadness. - I guess that's where an angel would be needed, to contain me while I got through that one. If I had been able to do it then, my twenties and thirties would not have had to be so lost. - Patricia writing a familiar story about catastrophe in her family and her salvation by art. The key is the state of creation - finding that good state. Larry writing a mostly dull unfelt piece about Islam. He's going to have to get into saying what he thinks somewhere. Taking the full hit of the tragic. There's no meaning to Jim being killed. There's no way to get a good death out of that. Layla doing this and that with erotic junk and then writing a wonderful piece on how to understand balance in relation to what I used to call assertion and attention. The work I'd seen she needed to do, she just did - she even talked about her dancing, what I saw and didn't like about it, that it was tense with intention to present. I said to her at the res, in essence, how would you want to be if there were no men? She got it. She felt how she'd want to be and that she wants to be that anyway. Sean - tells two stories about his experience with fainting and concussion. His dreams of storms. He got that from the way we listened to him in advising group. 25th Lonely, slogging at packets. Late afternoon there's email from Michael D. He's writing about another of my pieces. winter interference. He picks out passages. They're so nice. His comments between are incomprehensible to me but what he pastes in has a rhythmic lightness and what he calls so much humanness, thrilling to come upon. Closeups and panning effects he says. I hadn't thought of that. 26th
The liftgate struts will be $140 for the two. The CD player will be $50 to install and maybe $200 to replace. Back to the gym for the first time in weeks. I've lost six pounds I am proud to say - real pounds not fasting pounds: that's a lot. Four are done - Anna Larry and Favor today. Trying to get Larry realer. Get Anna to press a little more, she had most of it. Quite tough with Favor. She's the hard one. She wants to found herself parthenogenically and the story reads false. - Here is evening, almost 10, nothing to do. Should I get a TV?
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