| in america 6 part 4 - 2004 september-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
September 12 2004 I'm not liking to look at Tom - so heavy and stiff - long hair and that high hard pot, a lot of flesh on his face. My real question is, what happened, why did you give up on yourself? His answer was I didn't, I was friends with Tony and Oscar and they were doing it, it helped the days at the Golden West go faster. I saw a lot of dead people. David Amero's death really hit me. Against this hulking Tom I'm seeing the most beautiful of his moments before I quit, the afternoon I found him outside the New Palace wearing a dark grey shirt with a silver tie. He was in his little white car looking at me with naked pain, his real self looking at me suffering that I was leaving him. This man is not his real self. I woke at 3 from a dream that I was getting ready to have sex with him. He ejaculated onto his lap. The waiter had a look on his face. Then I'm coming back into our house and find him naked crawling through the window. He's been with the woman next door. I tell him I want him to pack his things and be out right now. I look at her and say she's nothing, but he's ---- etc. Bitter. The man is more Roy than Tom. His dream is to take a year and drive a van up to Bellingham, down thru' Wyoming, across to New Orleans, down into Florida, up the eastern seaboard to Philadelphia, and then take Highway 66 back to San Diego. It's a good plan, he recapitulates geographically. What I felt when I woke was that the journal stories are questionable if he's turning out to be this trashed nothing - I was starting to have grand dreams about loving him forever and here he is, nothing to do with me. - This one passage in jejune misogynist Steinbeck: We have noticed many times how lightly Mexican Indians sleep. Often in the night they awaken to smoke a cigarette and talk softly together for a while, and then go to sleep again ... Half a dozen times a night they may awaken thus, and it is pleasant to hear them, for they talk very quietly as though they were dreaming. [Opposite page, book session with Tom: Tom: Okay, here's what I think. You've forgotten how much I actually jangle you. If I'm not at my best I can really jangle you. I have to behave with you with a certain amount of reserve, to be tactful, to respect your boundaries, to not be so insistent and garrulous. Anger - my anger toward you is that you don't want to keep our interaction on a level playing field. You want to have insights, this therapeutic thing. That irritates me. A lot of anger toward your father, toward patriarchy. You've idealized your animosity to the patriarchy. I get fried with that. On ideological grounds. He was the oppressor. Other than your legitimate anger when I fuck up. I have to be fucking temperate because being temperate is being sane and being sane is being productive. Betrayal means I don't betray you, I don't lead you down the primrose path - I'll betray you because I crush the bridge. I have to be careful that you don't betray me by being the arbiter, know it all. Why don't you love me, I've done all this. I buy into it. I'm not the guy who shot the dog. - 7:30. The students are in, except for Amanda. Larry read Agee and Tolstoy and wrote his own death stories. Layla waded into the primal agony of lesbian loss and sexual fear, very courageously. Anna peeked into the abyss of relationship fantasy. Patricia followed her schedule. Favor broke through. What do I do with the rest of this day. Too worn out to go to The Golden West subtitled mostly unbeautiful losers. I'm saying that bitterly. I'm bitter in disappointment with Tom and self-suppression recommended, 'reserve' - they are losers so I mustn't love them, so I mustn't love, so I must live smothered. It says that isn't how it is, but I still don't see another way. I said to Tom, But I am a fool, I'm an utter fool. That's why I have to do such endless bookwork, I can't trust myself, my emotional good sense was wrecked. I noticed he was giving that his solid stare of attention. I am furious with myself for falling in love with a junkie who dumped me to zonk out with the guys and has derogated me from the beginning - furious. Bitter. Shamed. I've shamed myself. My rage at Michael is really rage at Tom. Rage at bloodsucker men who just want a free ride. Disgusted. That rage is correct. He put me through 6 months of bewilderment. Blind lack of care. I want nothing more to do with him. I really dislike him. He's crude stupid and ignorant. Ugly.
14 Down 10 pounds since I started at the gym two months ago. Edited 1996 instead of student work. 16 Some pounds of those are off my breasts. I'm back to the little ones I had when I was in my 30s. They're alright. Editing fast - I'm deciding not to do careful revision and copying bookwork, it takes too long. Let me get an edit up first. Tom on the phone yesterday. I'm not wanting even to think about him. I'm sick of thinking about him. Editing the story I like it as writing. It's unsafe enough, this woman putting herself into danger with a rough man and sticking to her investigation, riding it out, making notes, energetically, faithfully. But if the story is written and if I know how to give it, then surely I can stop. Could I go home to Louie and my kids and Vancouver, and the garden, even? And leave the nightmare of Tom. I tried to talk to him yesterday. Didn't feel he understood anything. He's going to take another nothing job. 17 "World Citizen." It's a song. Mourning subtle intelligence, yes. Take up from there please. Wild intelligence, generosity within the losses of an addicted lover, the enterprise, the work of coming through. I know I'm stupider because I'm not thrown into struggle anywhere. I think Tom is not a struggle that could work, now. So I have to have a new struggle. I'm not in the right place, but I don't know the new place. It's not a struggle time, it's a time between struggles, when I give out what the struggle made. Is it necessarily less intelligent? Yes it says. But can I be more intelligent than I am? For that I'd have to be more feeling. But not more feeling about Tom. About what, then? Teaching the world overview and completion, it says. That thing I'm stopped at. Yes. Alright I'm willing. - Oh that's painful. I'm working on Patricia's letter, there's a knock, it's Tom in a striped shirt tight over his belly. Hair slicked down. He stands up and sits down as if it's painful. Is he sick? I had to say it wasn't a good time. He shouldn't have come. Maybe the interview went badly, maybe that's the heart pain. Maybe he can't even get a parking lot job now. He doesn't look good. Should I be loyal? Should I save him with love and care? Unconditionally? It says no, he has to do it himself. - Tonight a philosophy teacher in Brazil writes that he found my site looking for something on Descartes and Yolton. He said he is an experimental percussionist and also interested in a lot of things. His subject line was congratulations. I almost deleted it as spam. 18 I do thank myself for having got the Mac a new battery. Now I can be in bed editing at black 5:30 in the morning. She is so dauntless, this woman. 1998. -
19 Email that I have a garden plot. It is shaded from midafternoon but it is next to the cactus with the bougainvillea up in it. 20 I zipped over to Starbucks and told Michael I had a garden plot. He knew how to be pleased. He said, Do you want to tell me why you've been so mad at me? I said Yes I do. I explained myself thoroughly. I said it's the older-woman younger-man thing. I feel he wants to exploit me. He said he mainly only wants to exploit my having a car, to go to the backcountry. He wants to go to Santa Rosa. I said it's all those years with Tom, he was making more money than I was, and whenever we wanted to do something together he didn't have money and I had to be the responsible one. I hated that. He said, Because he was spending his money on ... Yes. Michael said he'd had 60,000 in the bank when he got sick this time and it drained him. I saw Tom yesterday and didn't like him. He can't help getting into seduction mode. We went to Ocean Beach and ran out of things to talk about. I talked to him about his being in the journal. Said I was changing his last name to Fendler. He said he wants his real name, it's a chance to be famous. Then I thought, no, I'm not going to give him that. He can brag for a solid half hour about all the ways he is being taken care of at the mission, and how much status he has there. I'm repelled by that. I am so repelled now by his grifter nature - 'nature' because he's had it since he was a child. I've dealt with it enough. He's a freeloader - sexually, conversationally, financially, intellectually, emotionally. Thinking of it I'm bitter, disgusted. I'm less likely to be generous with anyone and especially men. I want to know some responsible generous people. There's Louie - I want more like her. I want to know some men like her. It's good I'm seeing him now. I'll be less romantic in my edit. 23 Starlings still come and poke at the wire mesh I shoved into their entrance. This is months later. They don't believe they can't get in. I dreamed their sound, I think - and then that I saw they'd got it out. - Went to amazon.ca and bought used books for Luke - I love sending him novels - I'm feeling that after I die he will still have wonderful books I gave him. I am so happy he likes them. So far Riddley Walker, Snow country, The conservationist, Field notes, Wonder book of the air. This time Annie Dunne, To the lighthouse, True history of the Kelly Gang. I rushed to see Michael at Starbucks and show him the butterfly book and Nora's moth. You've got a black witch! he said. He looked at all the photos in the butterfly book, joyful. Beauty has something to do with love. He has a youngness of delight in creatures. And really I love to look at him. He has a forgiving lightness of spirit. Since we had the talk about why I was mad at him we speak with affection again. They're rebuilding the downstairs suite and have taken out the ceiling so now I can hear every word. When they move in later my daytime quiet will be gone. It may mean I'll have to leave. Money feels out of control. Only a week till early packets come in again. Have prelim-edited 21 vol of 25. The last couple have too much transcribed and will need to be weeded. Reading them, though, I feel how lapsed my spirit is. I have neither the pleasure and excitement of the sexual times or the valiant investigation of the later thesis times. What am I now and what's it worth. I do good work with students, but I'm not sure it is making any of them more effective, which is what would make it matter. I am getting ready to post the last ten years of the journal, meanwhile writing nothing worth posting. Is that the cost? No, it's other reasons. What will come of posting the journal. I'm depressed this morning. All the work with Tom came to nothing. All the work with Being about came to nothing. - Except that with both I built capability. Which I still have but it is squandered at [my college] so that nothing is coming of it, except for my private satisfaction. Where do I go after that - I'm discouraged with the bookwork too, it has got me the capability but not its effect. Reading so much of it I see myself stuck spinning in it. It calms me down but I don't go forward.
- Sat with Tom in the garden. He needed to talk about The Golden West. He'd had a delayed panic about me putting stories on the web about his kids, Rebecca, Lorrie, Pilgrim, Jim White. He wanted me to use his real name so he'd get glory if there was some, but he doesn't want those people to feel betrayed by him, for instance if Rebecca read that he'd left her for Lorrie because she was too fat it would hurt her feelings. I said sharply that what hurt her feelings was his cheating on her. I could see him in the midst of his extraordinary assumptions about secrecy, a structure like a honeycomb with everyone kept walled off from everyone else, and Tom feeling in control but himself kept inert and false in the effort of shutting everything down. Anyway at the thought of me exposing all his secrets he felt fear and rage, wanted to run, felt I was the worst misjudgment of his life, a cold witch who'd sucked out his story for her own gain. While I listened I was feeling that cold witch: she was pleased with revenge. You seduced and betrayed me and dropped me trivially to suck speed with your buddies - you bullied me, raged at me, refused almost everything in me - and I WROTE IT ALL DOWN and I'm going to out you. Am I doing it for that. When I read the loving parts of it I don't think so. I'm telling them because they're love. When we come through I tell the coming through as a wonder. I don't think anyone whose stories he has told me is diminished by the stories being told. I don't think anyone is served by being seen as better or other than they are. I think everyone is served by being described accurately. This question of outing my friends is the scandalous question that could consume the project - it's a lesson in the corruption of the way we live - the whole corrupt fabric of agreement not to speak. Say there were publicity more than I imagine and Tom's ex-s and children were to read what I've written about him and therefore them. What would be the worst that could come of that? I'm not sure any of them are smart enough to make much of it. I think they would find it too literary and wouldn't stick with it. If the kids stuck with it, it would be because they needed to know about Tom, and what they found would be what they needed to know, a whole. Would either Rebecca or Lorrie feel betrayed? I think they would have mixed feelings, as they did when they were with him. They would like seeing me name the tricks he also used on them, and they would feel pangs at seeing him intimate with someone else, but they would also like remembering how he was when they loved him. It's true it's a powerful intervention, but it's not about them, and they are unlikely to ever see it. I said that mostly it is for strangers I'll never meet, who might love me in it. Mostly people would just pick out little bits they could recognize, bits of themselves. There might be a few people who could see a larger structure. A chronicle. It would have a different kind of value at different times. - How did Tom look. I wasn't looking much. I said I'm not ready to have an open heart. When I did look at him he looked coarse-grained, knobby faced. I'm shutting him down whenever he goes into flirtation or praise. I'm dour. I am protecting myself by holding a couple of pieces of information to myself. 25th At 10:30 I went out with the book to show Mike Richard Nelson's deer piece I thought of because of the notes in the journal. The cathedral was having a book sale in its forecourt and I stopped to look at the tables. Someone addressed me. It was Mike. I took my books and walked up the street with him. He went through the newspaper basket while I stood in line. We read the papers together. I lent him the book. I looked at his mouth with definite lust. He looked crosswise into my shirt neck. Even his floppy dirty hands and his blackened teeth are bothering me less. When I left he looked at me with puppy eyes and begged me to get him a coffee refill for fifty cents. I said I'd buy him a coffee, what size did he want. I also said I don't have the gas money to go to the Santa Rosas at the moment. But this smooshy charge is worth $1.80 I think. His beauty is worth $1.80 though I don't like to think I'm so far past it I have to pay. What about him - he actually teaches me things I want to know. He smiles with bad teeth and shining eyes. Richard Nelson 1989 The island within North Point Press 26th My worrying skin bump is going down. I tried the [Work & days] introduction on Juliana and that was my first taste of the construing à choix there will be when it is a pond anyone can drop into. Mike's very irritable about two things, having to tell me something twice, and my telling him something twice, which I sometimes do for good reasons. 27 Espresso Mio on Stockton. At my house the dust and roar of a belt sander downstairs. Eucalyptus and bamboo, the eucalyptus dangling and drifting high overhead giving off a sound so high-pitched I have to tighten my ears to hear it. Oh the blue. Editing 2002. Feeling out what publishing it will mean, both to me and the people I talk about. It's a broad outing. It means I have to talk to a lot of people about their understanding both of negativity and privacy. The hunger there is to know about people's actual lives and selves. The conviction there is that very much about oneself should be hidden, and that loyalty means one accedes to this secrecy. People's belief that it is damaging to hear accurate but unflattering things about oneself. People's belief that if one says accurate but unflattering things about oneself one is doing oneself harm and showing weakness or bad judgment. I want to say enough about [the college] and my students to show the work. That's a dilemma. I may have to have edited versions and versions for later when I'm not working there any more. The other side of this is the extraordinary power of a written record. It's one person's viewpoint but if there is no other, it looks like god's judgment. What the writing really shows will be phenomenological flux - the unsettledness of opinion - the great unsettledness of identity - and more than that, it studies the manner of and reasons for this instability. I would love to have Wachtel asking me these questions and in a way I do. I'm having to answer them ahead of time to the best I can imagine. The instability of reading - oh that. - Working at Scott's. What we made is so pretty. When I stand with him looking down out his French doors onto the stone patio with dropped bougainvillea petals, the white on white lattice with its scramble of passiflora, we both glow. Camping out tonight. On the roof, to get away from fumes. Let me set up the bed. 29 Sleeping outside I dreamed Robert MacLean visited me. We kissed each other on the lips. Several of the times one of us was upside down. His face was fuller. His hair was curly. He said he married four years ago, a Japanese woman. I thought he seemed happy. [Later: He did marry a Japanese woman, not sure when.] - Anil's ghost and Canadian taxes. - [Opposite page, spirit-keeping notes: prolong the mourning period willing to separate themselves from daily concerns and involvements spirit bundle in the keeper's lodge sacrifice to watch over it and nourish it cottonwood spirit post in the ground outside releasing ceremony, hold the bundle to the sun "If you want to work with power you have to live a clean life, benevolent, or you can be tricked." Don't waste time. 'Power' can feel like moving electricity but is a kind of knowing that unblocks. Focusing processes: clearing, focusing, giving out. Becoming the rock - "I let the rock talk to me. We become friends ... the more I do 'becoming,' the wiser I become about everything." Rituals done for the sake of the entire world. Seeing into. A larger vision, temporal, personal, consequence. "I use my eyes to touch" "If I decide with my heart, my judgments are never harsh", take into account the things that have hurt people. calling on the directions "When you have used the focus tools, deny yourself something to thank the powers." Yellow, black, white, red Cognitive theology Curing: Asking powers - sky, earth, directions, night, day, seasons Tell the wish for the person to be well with straight limbs, to be healthy, have a good heart, and have love for other people Examine oneself in relation to 4 principles Wish to be well to be able to help If they can't be cured they can be shown how to be unafraid and calm 30 This photo of Mike and Rowen. Terry sent. Mike is wearing an old leather jacket and a flat cap. There's a bit of grey hair showing but it's still so much Mike. And there's Rowen with longish dark hair in a white sweatshirt smiling a beautiful smile with his eyes down like a girl, a happy girl. They're in Chinatown, on Pender I think, not far from the Carnegie Center. Oh Mike and Rowen together again. They both look right. 1st October Happy and alive Louie said. Yes, they look like they're in love I said. I had about stopped worrying about the spot on my right arm, because the bump has gone down, when I suddenly have a new and much worse-looking spot to worry about on my left thigh. It is small, very dark brown, hard and raised. How big - about the size of my pencil lead unsharpened. It's different from my other moles in being raised more, darker, harder. Is it being with Mike Duke that has me in these cancer-scares? Is it lack of anything else to be scared of? The book says it's not the bad thing but it looks like it. - Took Tom to South Mission Beach and we sat on the jetty rocks with small fish in schools along the seaweed edge, little crabs on the rocks and a sandpiper assiduously pecking and snacking where the rock was wet. I took off the blue shirt to sun my shoulders, sat there in my skin and orange singlet. Tom kissed my nearest shoulder, as well he should because it looked very smooth and warm. I browbeat him off as I should. When he wanted to know where he stands, as he mechanically does, I said it is much too soon to tell. I want to know whether he can look after himself. So then we walked on the firm edge of the sand and I picked up thumbnail-sized shells in different combinations of black, orange, cream and white. Tom went and sat on the dry sand and looked at me against the green little waves, my small jeans, blue linen shirt, red sneakers, and I felt like a pretty girl all over, shapely and young, though he - oh he - is carrying that forty pound backpack on his front and seems to have a lot of new crowns of the cheapest kind pegged rather randomly into his crocodile mouth. We were in his teenage territory and he was happy. It was a good afternoon.
I said my strategy is that I'm going to call him on his seduction and pressure because otherwise I have to shrink myself down trying to resist and that's not good for me. I'm going to candidly say my own difficulty rather than struggle with it alone. The strategy worked this time because he got clearer and I felt fond of him and fond of the soft warm sand and the footprints with their tiny toes. I like his dream of a van he can park at Cardiff Beach, laptop, CD player - 2nd This week it is 9 years I have known both this town and Tom. I have balanced on my diaphragm - writing on the couch - a bowl of hot supper, squash cooked mushy, with red pepper, onion and tomato, small squares of uncooked white onion and a lump of butter. Just waiting for packet 3's to come in. My early people have failed to show up and this time there'll be Astro and Anne Bergeron too. Sean and Charlie won't need much probably. It was a Sunday - evening now - cold this morning - so cold I had to take a hot water bottle under the cover - that means the heater soon - that means it's winter. Since I gave him Kate's book [on international organic agriculture] John has been my friend personally. He's such a good heart that I am happy to have got through his first screen. At the farmer's market I am making friends one sentence at a time. There are some kids, seventeen year olds who help their folks, and they have that friendly reserve I know. I take trouble with them. There is one who sells me passionfruit and good tight tomatoes. We all keep our appointment Sunday mornings. Some, like the egg and honey man, and John, make it an exercise in joyful presence. They're both hippy men, come to think of it. The man who sold me grilled chicken for breakfast was telling the people ahead of me that he was airlifted out of Yugoslavia in an American Hercules aircraft. He had been guiding Italian journalists and they arranged to get him out. I went from the market to the cactus nursery on University where John someone - a Dutch name - a skeletal man who doesn't like to look at us when he talks to us - spends his days in a kingdom of angular and autistic plants. When I visit Sunday mornings he often has on Garrison Kiellor. I wander the aisles in his filtered light, he has just the width of an alleyway, roofed in a light filtercloth, looking at his strange pots and hearing Keillor's kindness to outsiders such as us. There is a dog who barks briefly, and a little work area at the back, often with some misfit soul working for him, today someone rebinding staghorns onto larger boards. I am meaning to say that it's a small kingdom of love. Today I was there to have my big brown mixing bowl drilled for a drainhole. He had to get out his big diamond bit and charged me a dollar a hole. Kiellor is being very direct about working to defeat Bush. Bruce Springsteen is touring in swing states, free concert but you have to register to vote. Every Sunday morning a fine young person standing with a clipboard at the exit to the farmers' market asks if I wouldn't like to help defeat Bush. Tom began our meeting on Friday by sitting in the jeep with me delivering a summary of the Bush-Kerry debate. He calls Kerry 'Curry' which must be an Irish homeboy pronunciation. He said Clinton called Kerry and delivered a new campaign team, including Carville. Am writing all this stuff because it is too early to go to bed. Haven't said anything about the community garden meeting Saturday morning. It's an old bunch except for was his name Dean, a campy Southern man kept busy with his church work he said, but taking over whatever bit of ground he can. A very old man came late and pushed into the bench next to Jaye. He had remarkably large remarkably thin flat ears, like bat ears at a wide angle to his small shrewd head. They called him Judge. He looked ninety. When the two new people were asked to introduce themselves and I jumped in, he turned around and gave me the sort of look smartish old men give me these days, that says Here's a live one. Men over seventy I mean. After the meeting he introduced himself as Manny - I knew he was Jewish from the ears and that look. My falling-asleep story about the man with the ranch. He's called Mac now. Somehow his Mexican helpers are important. There is an old man who gardens, a mother who sometimes cooks and cleans house, teenage children, one in college. They live at the asphalt end of the long driveway, gatekeepers. They are old friends of his. He sponsored them into the country. The library is the room he lives in. His bedroom opens onto it. Work tables. Both open onto a stone paved area under an oak that overlooks a valley to the west. 4th The Golden West starts 3rd July 1994. "Beginning sad and in fear. What is fear like. Small fear. It says, What will become of me, now you are really gone." My eyes and lips are stinging. It is the varethane curing downstairs, still; sore throat; it's really bad. 5 I had an impulse to go to Amvets after transcribing this morning, and there found the kind of heater I want, oil-filled electrical and used, so that hopefully it won't give off fumes. Came home and worked with letters this aft and into the evening and then when I was lonely put my name into Google. There was Jody's culture piece published in a web magazine. I have a student publishing, it means. So there I went to my files and found the five letters I wrote in my semester with him. He was my ideal student. He could use my work. He was overjoyed with it and he credits it. When I see my letters to him I see my brilliance. His too, that he could snap it up. The way I worked with him on the fine grain of conceptual revision and answered his questions about how I could do it. 6 Ooch I can get so turned on sitting with Michael looking at his beautiful mouth and shoulders. When he acts out his animals he's charming. He was showing me his macaw taking a sip of fruit nectar and pulling back his head saying eeeee in astonishment. What god he is, lord of the beasts. He becomes them. He showed me an underwing moth's somersault in the air and then its landing frozen into camouflage. We were talking about the stories we liked about children without parents. I said for gifted children it's often true, they have no parents, there's no one who can see them or help them know what they are. He lit up agreeing. He can be shallow and silly but it's his love that turns me on. "But you I think I'll kiss" Freckles said to him in the bar the first time they spoke. I'm his mom's age. She had him when she was seventeen. It's as if he's my son with Frank. He's an Aries [like Frank]. Cernunnos - ker noo nosi - nature, death and renewal, fertility, sacrifice, wild animals, sex, underworld, oak. From Indus valley driven west - Etruscans - Indus religion and Irish Celts - the father of himself sacrificed, Shiva - cauldron of rebirth. 7th When I look at that paragraph my mouth and puss light up. Again, still. He has an open body, is what it is. Transfusing - I mean the way we are doing it - will be good for his health. He has an open body the way Rob did, innocence. - Jeanne's pleasure in the magazine. She clicked an url and there were her two pieces, Corin's lovely image on a pinkish white background, turquoise blue type and red underlined links. I love looking at it. Faculty conference call talking about standards, the list of what we should look for when we evaluate. I tune out as soon as we do these criteria and standards talks. I tried inarticulately to say why that is. When I have a student in front of me I know what their strengths are and what they should be working on. I said half my students are young women who are working on how to live as women. Survey work is not what they're needing. They need to track the one thing they need to be putting their finger on.
The students who are doing 'topics' there can be mastery of are students I think of as more dissociated. Charlie. What I think is there's something obsolete about the notion of areas of mastery - look at us as a faculty. An old idea of vocational mastery, professional accreditation, formation. An even older idea of spiritual development. A Gurdjieff school, Sufi, Zen, exercises, koans, question is taken as a device for working with a whole personality. So the standard isn't mastery of techniques and materials but basic sanity. In art, trying for mastery of techniques and materials can be the forcer that shows up what's wobbly in the person. My own feeling about what I do at [my college] is that the work with basic sanity can't wait. We ask them to find their own questions and finding their questions is a task of the latter kind. For instance if they aren't self loyal their question is likely to be false. What's best is a student who is willing/able to work on basic sanity at the same time as they are working to be professionally effective in some field they care about, because they see that the former is a precondition for the latter. 9 Saturday. Yesterday I was speedy all day after putting together and posting the letter about [college] standards and criteria. I found out what I meant as I was saying it, and then was so satisfied to have said it I kept rereading it. I also kept rereading it maybe because no one replied. Tomas said it was 'stimulating' but only because I addressed him in it. Lise said it was phenomenal but that was it. Anyway the social effort made me spinny so hours later I couldn't fall asleep. When I went out in the evening to take the bike to Whole Foods I found the back tire gone. Now they are hammering downstairs. I am so bored with packets. - There are 77 pages of pages for Dorothy Richardson when I put her into Google. She's booming.
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