in america 11 part 1 - 2006 june-july

work & days: a lifetime journal project

San Diego June 21st 2006 Want to make the solstice a turn-around. Blubber - want to clean up my middle section. Keep spine straight in next 20 years if poss, yoga. Stop watching TV at home and more real life instead. Ending blubber probably means something about eating as well as exercise. More about creating something. Transcribing 1991 quickly in the last days because I was so turned on then, doing so much, designing, building and supervising in the garden, TAing, writing the connectionist rep paper and the first paper on math rep for Andrew, glorious sex with Rob and heart courtship with Louie, Rowen at five visiting, electrical body and vision experiments, art invitations to Toronto, Australia. Around these doings the house and its light, the year and its weather. So full. I'd stopped being embattled and mean, everything was rising and filling. Wrote a lot of dreams. I was balanced, out and in. Planting roses and seeing the first of them bloom. Inventing, forming, pouring the tanks, those wonderful community events. Spectacularly free. Because it's the turn-around today I thought I shd get the evals done finally. Until now if I've opened one of them I've instantly closed it again, sick. Today I whipped through three of them and set up another. That leaves just one. And that's along with transcribing enough this morning to have only the notes left in that vol. So now it's 10 and I won't use TV to shut myself down and so how will I. Elated at being able to do them, my brain is all crisped up again after the semester, it just quits. Shower and sink drains plugged. Black muck like decaying leaves floated up into the shower in stinking water inches deep. Washed Tom's cashmere sweater for taking Joe to dinner. 22 Rereading my letters to Stacey this semester. A lot of good summary for mbo and girl-life. 23 Then the next volume bogged with Louie. Dislike reading any of that. Should I prepare to meet Joe, does it need preparing? Is there anything you want me to say   YES judgment, improvement, justice, fool Talking about Tom   I did it but it brings me nothing now     Is there anything I should be doing now   complete coming through practical mourning Do you mean the way I resent that nothing's happening for me   no Will you say   mourning about what happiness The way I'm mourning not being happy   YES I'm angry that I'm not happy   YES Do you want to say something about that   no You're saying get in a better mood   I don't think being with T is going to have any more payoffs     And I'm right   You want me to be okay with this level of dullness   no Disgusted with it   no You're right - sad   Will Joe be interested in me   no He's not equipped   YES I have nothing to say to him   no Will you tell me some things   come through to improvement of conflict into shared pleasure He's in conflict about something   intimacy and missing I'm not really interested in him   I'm interested in the restaurant   Alright so I'm grumpy about this meeting because it won't be anything for me and I'd love something for me. He won't be equipped to be interested in me and I won't be interested in him either though I'll sort of like him. The restaurant terrace will be nice though I won't be hungry. I'll be bored. I'll stare at him. I'll let the two of them talk and look around. I'm angry about it, resentful. Is it about fucking? And heart, mine. Tom has to say things so many times. I feel this same resentment about those eager women organizing the colloquy, it's nothing for me. 24 What was it with Tom this morning, he was going to come at noon but came at 8. Somehow spilled his coffee on the roof. I got him paper towels and he mopped it up and was standing in front of me just at the door and suddenly went rigid. He was looking directly at me but his face went blank. I thought he was going to faint so I said Sit down Tom. He didn't seem to hear me. Sit down Tom. I think I said it four times. Then he came to. He said it has happened twice before, once standing in line with Rebecca and once years ago with his boss. Danah Zohar The quantum self 1990 picks her way through choice points in a way that mostly to my sense of it doesn't go self-interfering in its language. - What did I like about it - something about wanting a way to visualize people being able to meld in some way - coherence. - Something about coherence within one person. - She doesn't put any emphasis on body but she wants not to go outside physics for explanation. - She is clear enough so I could pick out my questions. - She is old fashioned and unsubtle in the way she still somehow wants a nondualist dualism of 'consciousness' and matter. - I can never understand why classical physics is thought to be so alienating - thinking of bodies as mechanical, yes. - No one so far has made sense of how/why the quantum scale should have anything to do with our scale. - I need a catalogue of the philosophical/ontological branching points. - Need to think through how diff any of this wd read if one talked about being about rather than 'consciousness.' - I'm SURE something is going wrong because they aren't visualizing subatomic stuff correctly - I mean they are visualizing as objects things that are not. What do I have: 1. larger picture - philosophy - new culture - why mbo studies - relation to feminism - relation to new age 2. films/perception 3. within the new culture how to understand bodies - one thing - solid and ephemeral - conscious and nonconscious Larger picture: Dualisms Monisms derived from dualism 'consciousness' illusion mechanistic science, split science Integrated monism common sense science and humanities integration much more   Something about Joseph. I came up from behind them where they were standing outside the Prado waiting to be paged. There was Tom looking wonderful in his cashmere sweater and silver hair, strong tanned face, and there next to him a small thin person in a pale blue cotton shirt open quite a few buttons so I could see his very thin white chest. Bird eyes wide set and as if wider on the outside corners? Long white face tired under the eyes, nose thinner than Tom's, right side of his upper lip sometimes jumping. He had come from his expensive hotel and meetings with his army aide, lunch on a submarine, is going back to an interview for a director's job at Honeywell, outranking anything Tom has ever done and yet looking so half-baked next to him. I was feeling something about that bloodless look - his difference as a body from the facts of his accomplishment - that I hadn't got clear until just now thinking of quantum mechanics. It was a question about whether Tom had vampirized him somehow, is he that barely-there body with the spidery hands because Tom in his big reptile drive had somehow eaten half his substance? Is that possible? And something about Rowen too -. Or it's just genetic. Or psychological. He's very shut-down. He kept saying in a frightened way, It's just now. He didn't find anything funny. When Tom tells the story it's more loving than when I do. Tom's generous. I don't like to be candid, Joe said. 25 Sunday early. Just as I was waking from a last doze Susan in front of me saying, It's moonlight, we should go out. Dreaming many things I could feel. I'm at a house a bit northwest of La Glace, someone living there who used to live there? A feel of Myrtle. We walk a road north along the fenceline. I find a pile of photos from my own childhood, albums they have come out of. When were these left here? Later I see Janeen taking a photo of one of her old teachers. She has a photo of herself at a feminist demonstration with her eyes made up like a Barbie doll. Are those her naked breasts or plastic covers? A pang seeing her move and speak into a microphone so beautiful and alive when I know she's dead. Transcribing yesterday a dull section of 1991-2, dull because there's so much gnawing with Louie and endless dream stories that I don't make anything of. Went with Tom to Point Loma yesterday to deposit $6000 into a new account. He is talking about his responsibility to Joseph in a way he couldn't have ten years ago. Before the meeting he centered himself in his room and said, It's not about me. He planned that he'd make openings to correspond, go on in contact. He was quiet and watchful. Afterwards, though, he worried about whether Joe would be proud of him. We walked back over the bridge together. In one of the dreams I was climbing up over a mountain in my jeep. As I got to the top I realized I hadn't shifted down into 4x4. Seeing it ahead getting very steep, no track, deciding to keep going. 27 Today and yesterday working all day on sorting physics. Have read some bad books carefully looking at how people imagine in these conversations - also some better books to see how good minds understand the same things. What's been remarkable is that I've had the mental energy to go all day - 7 this morning to 10:30 tonight with an hour at Starbucks and bits of time for eating, talking to Tom, showering. Is it that it's hard enough, or that there's an enemy? In the heat today smelling myself, the spermy sexy smell of armpits and crotch, often aware of arms and legs, I'd be feeling how delighted I was to be working. I had the computer on my lap and as I read I'd be sorting notes onto 4 pages: definitions, idealism, quantum fields and philosophy of Q, in which there are 10 subheads. 30 Dreamed I was on a sort of broad shelf of glacier-like ice with someone, a man. We were some distance apart, could see each other but couldn't easily speak. I realized the ice was breaking up, was going to fall. We were going to die crushed in a falling mass of ice. I looked across at the other person wondering whether I should wave to say something - "we're dying" or "goodbye" or "this is it". It wasn't clear what there would be to say. It's Friday morning, nearly eight. I'm sitting in bed with the door open onto a bright pale day. I can see against the church that there's a luminous substance in the air, too fine to be a powder. What bird is rattling that way. It's fresh. Serious large motors, an airplane coming down, trucks. Proust. I want to wake and have feeling to go to, and am trying again with Proust. I can't begin at the beginning because I'm so put off by the rumination about social standing. I can see it documents a social class at a place and time, but it's so neurotic. Then I jump to the moment he's taking the train to Balbec on his own. There's a sunrise he sees from the train, and a pink-faced tall girl in pink light at a station in a valley with a gorge. Then more rumination, much more, then the moment his grandmother says to him "Do you really think there's anyone else in the whole world who's as silly and anxious and torn between the fear of waking me up and not being heard? Even a tiny little scratching on the wall would be enough for me to recognize a mouse like you, especially when you're such a dear and doleful little mouse. I was lying there listening to my mouse rummaging about in its nest, getting ready to knock, working up to it ...." As I'm reading I'm wondering who the people are that find him delightful, are they East Coast social people who live as he did wrapped in a thick gel of social estimation? People who live in a thick gel of literary allusion? July 4 Posted GW18 - first time I put in back-links to Still at home. Now it's a month till I'm gone. Don't even want to tell the long bedbug story of today. Short version: Tom was sitting up all night and going to work at 5. When I'd sit in the jeep with him bedbugs wd flow out of his clothes like tiny seeds. There was a big one got under my shirt on Sunday when we were having breakfast at Maria's, left a wide patch of stinging welts on my belly. I have been looking at studios with him but yesterday after the movie I stamped my foot and we got him in at the West Park Inn, $1200 a month, which is $500 more than he was paying, ie he can still save but not $1300/mo. He has a 5th floor room though, A/C, microwave, fridge, doesn't have to pay to have me visit. Double bed. Relieved when Louie wrote this morning that she's in real therapy, feeling the way her mother wasn't what she had been wanting to believe. Relieved as if now I could start liking her again. Is Louie really going to start being bearable     More   addiction, to justice, defeats, slow growth Do you mean righteousness   no, fairness Is there a reason you're telling me this now     you're excluded teaching Tom to win I'm left out in some way   I'm not being looked after   What wd it or I be like if it weren't left out   tempering mourning, for the death of, love woman I'd be mourning outright, not in this smothered way     I'm shut down   It's hormonal   no It's Tom   no It's teaching   YES Gotta quit teaching   no Wd art do it   Publishing   It's involvement I lack   5 In the parking lot at the laundromat yesterday aft I backed into a little green Saturn and cracked the fender. T and I were looking at the damage together. The owners were nowhere around. I was saying I'd leave a note. Tom said, Or we could just go, that's what I'd do. That seemed worth leaving him for. Woke from a dream this morning about 824 E Pender being renovated after I'd left. A group of people was working on an Egyptian theme. I said in my time it was more a Shaker feeling. Went to find the worksite - it was going to be some sort of social services building - and was walking through the building, which was crowded with people, feeling how the stairs were narrowed, good things ruined. There were my carpets dirty and flattened onto the dirty floor. Distressed. 6 Gretchen wanted notes on processing pain and I sent her Millie's intro and the edit of her ECT/birth process. Reread it. Her intro is good. I still don't understand why she went back on that. I think somewhere she's evened out and knows she did well. Little collection of things going wrong. I'll have to put a bunch on my credit card to pay for the Saturn's fender. Urinary and kidney infection on and off, threatening. A tight little muscle over the corner of my left hip that hurts when I get up and walk around. Bites. Sore throat, sore teeth. Went to Bellevue this morning and set out Nor's raised apron with stakes and twine. Pleased, and she was. It solves the space, leaves a quite lovely grassy triangle at the bottom corner, gives the gate a vestibule that makes it feel square to the house, allows for a platform garden the terrace looks down on, keeps a corridor circulating all around the sides, allows for a stepped path down to the south wall. 7 Wawanesa says they are going to fix it and there isn't a deductible. People standing frozen looking over their shoulders. My father or some man standing with us said it meant war. There were going to be soldiers. Devastation. I thought of my journal in a cellar (like the cellar I put the love book into when I was little). Wanted to hide where it was hidden. Got into the cellar with two smaller children, a boy and a girl I think. We thought to scatter snow over the trapdoor. Woke at night thinking how little we feel of human history, I mean we Americans, now. The love book in its box under the floor, in the slot between the floor and the surface of the ground. What I was hiding was my love for my father. The daydream about Ken Driediger, that he had an ailment that built wax into his ears, large smooth solid coils of it, and I took care of him - that's very odd. Does it mean something? That my dad didn't listen? But I had a sexy feeling about the coils of wax, their shape like shells or horns. I liked his powerlessness too. I stood over him. I googled David Larcher last night and found a letter from Peter Gidal describing the Film Co-op in my time. There was a context then and isn't now - is there? In Canada I'm inscribed in the movement - in Bruce's book, in the encyclopedia. Have been wanting to go to London. Haven't wanted that for years. Need to see work. And Berkeley. Do I have a platform now? Could I write to support what I do, without ruining its silence? What wd I want in film now - like Pound at his best - commanding lyrics sci vis sources neuroscience images 35mm? music Orpheus - the story of recovering real self pagan - Gks and Celtic philos - my heroes short pieces in series seeing real world structures spare clean language an active life quantum? Brakhage, Rimmer, Rhodes, Larcher I need a tech set-up - money - don't have much time - some sort of community - Can I do this?   Assemble my platform, equipment, community, credibility. I have a theory of rep, should I publish that? The art bits, yes. Stay in Van this fall long enough to launch it. Tom is going to have to go, I won't have time. I can try to hang onto him, but - I can do this now - I can be strategic - I can mine my notes - I can manage credibility - Then went out to the planning meeting with Art Lopez of Precision Landscaping, my height, small moustache, the gentle dignity of professional Mexican men. The kind of work I love, visualizing and planning, bringing my file of suggestions, handing out my drawings, consulting with Nor and Min. At Taft, butterflies and hummingbirds, it's very lush. Morning glories above the door a surreal blue. Something bit the sole of my foot. It means there are bugs still. Tom's room he upgraded to - $320 a week plus tax is $1400 a month for a room I fled - 5th floor and a window toward the park but it's tight. I'm off Tom, like I am sometimes, can't stand the way he just talks on - takes so long to tell a thing - goes on and on talking himself into how wonderful this room is, and this one and the next one, and they are all bad, and he now hasn't got money saved for first and last. And won't because this rent is so high. I'm sick of his incompetence. He seems to be alright at work, is hanging on, but I had to organize him through all that dreary labour of decontamination after Center City Manor and the fact that I still have bugs in my house is drearily appalling. I don't know what more I can do than I have done. He praises and thanks with transparent desire to keep me working for him but when's the last time we had open bodies - there was that little moment when he moved into the room at Center City - it was a nice room - little moment before we found the bugs - and after that it got so bad we couldn't sit in my room together - he isn't thinking how to make a place for me - he just hangs on to what he can grasp - I'm running errands - I don't know whether he's using on weekends - I know he'll lie if it wd be unpleasant not to - he's trying to talk his way out of his reflex to run from my accident and I'm not believing him. That disgusted me. It's who he is, it's who he always was. He was popping out of the shower in his towel pleased with himself because he's sixty and working hard. He has a buzz cut and is very brown and he's the right weight so his face looks amazingly young, eager and lit the way he was when he was nineteen. And then below the neck a pale old man's body, spindly in his chest and arms and especially shoulders, and lumpy in his legs. He keeps wanting me to look at him and I don't want to. The thin curve of his back. This aft to my cold eye it was as if his face was a mask of attractiveness and his body the true record. And yet he's amazingly strong and buoyant. Enough. 8 Saturday morning. These mornings I open the door and leave it open all day. A dream with my jeep flying off a ramp and ending gutted. Tom as he was posing in the towel yesterday saying that when he wakes he says I love you, body, and thanks it for being able to work hard. I need to be back in art because I need to be doing something that I can dig into with the kind of whole effort I used to have, the whole ambition, whole pride, that film was: what kind of human can I be. The sensation I have is of rooting down, the motion of going under that was my quality, down to the essence. Second thing: I'm very dependent on setting. If we are in ugly spaces together I don't open and am not in love with anyone. I keep wanting Tom to understand that and give me again what I need most to be happy with him: a right space. He is happy with less and doesn't care about keeping me open, or believes he can do it with his preferred method, which is flattery, which makes me more guarded. Was I wrong to be in such a hurry to leave 824? I'm worried about how much it takes to make a creative life - I don't have much time. But nothing else is worthwhile for the time I do have. I haven't been in this kind of conflict about T for a long time it seems. Why am I in cranky heart again. He isn't worse than he was and as far as I know isn't doing anything secret, is looking better, is proud of himself. What does this feel like. Childish. Lonely. Discouraged. Sad. Betrayed? Used. Sulky. Heartsore. He's doubled his rent without - without something. He's using me. I see the way my straight-up earned credit helps him with people who'd see his history in him. Try something else: he's attractive suddenly, the way he sometimes gets. The bookseller said to him this morning, You move like a teenager, how do you do it? I'm eating not much and my middle isn't thinner, I'm a thick little granny, nobody is coming on to me, I'm angry that he's walking around 60 and sexy and I'm not. I suspect it's his fault, he's conning me, he's really gay. Power balance - he's got more. I helped him get it and I have less. Frustrated. So then we go to Leonard Cohen and he likes it and we're driving home and my bitterness pipes up and says what it is about Cohen for a woman isn't his sophistication, it's the courage he has to be naked in desire for a woman's body. Tom says he has that sometimes. I say flatly I don't believe he has ever had it. He says we should take a break tomorrow. I say fine and drop him off. I'm in a rage. Is it fair? I don't care, I'm in a rage. There was a moment during the movie Leonard was singing about her soft lovely body and my heart slowed down heavily and I was saying to Tom silently You used to have so much of me and you don't even miss it. I was keeping myself going transcribing open times, other times. I'm not doing that and eating less and I'm in a pent rage. Also I feel obscurely that it's my fault. I'm blaming him because I'm shut down and I'm shut down because I'm gutless somewhere, either with him or about leaving him. I'm ugly because I'm shut down, I'm ugly and I'm empty, except that now I'm not empty I'm grieved and enraged. And somewhere too resigned. I want somebody to burst me open - somebody smart and true I don't have to be larger than. 9 Dreamed an empty two-storey building - long and two rooms deep but without inner walls - that had light pouring into it. I was moving around marveling at all the light. It was even coming down the stovepipe. Earlier I dreamed I was in a tent at night waking to keep a fire going in a stove. I'd blow on it. Then near morning something was trying to get at me through the little tent. Someone maybe. My brother said it was a bobcat. I had a long safety pin needle I pressed into its heart. I'm understanding that the reason Dusty wouldn't look at me is that he wants Tom, and the reason Tom has a sexy glow is that he's got an emotional affair going with Dusty, who is a wiry little criminal newly out of jail and very tough looking. Tom sets up his worksites always so he has a high positive charge with some man and a high negative charge with some man, highly erotic. So that's how it is and it's a way of keeping his body going and it's fine and I like about him that he does that. But me. I don't know what to do. If I leave Tom I'll be back in grief unless I move. Not ready to move though I will be. If I don't leave Tom I'm faithful and unfucked and eating too much and stuck in the past and ugly and unalive. You think there's a third option? It says yes and I'm believing it. Work it out with Tom, he's stable enough now. - June 2002 to July 2006. I was going to phone the credit union for my balance after I wrote this morning, punched Tom's number accidentally, it rang twice, realized what I'd done, hung up, pulled the plug. Put on my shoes, keys and money in my pocket, out the door. Downstairs, was crossing the parking lot behind this building when Tom shouted up. He'd been at Juniper when his phone rang. It was just a bit after 9. He handled my timidity well - a little anguish of it - just kept going. My whole belly has a creamy softened feeling. What I noticed though was that I wasn't feeling him much, I was feeling it, but I was at a loss about the him of the it. There he was jumping up escaping into his CDs one after another, there was I unfamiliarly naked on the bedspread quite smooth in my skin. Pussy hair thinner, he noticed. There he was with his big balls and his dick tucked under a crossed thigh. His beautiful military haircut. Do I have any more to say - when he talks I often don't listen, I've got in the habit of that like a wife. (Sometimes I do though.) I'm saying it was good nooky but it wasn't heart. 10 He was doing me a favor, is what it was. And then what it took to make him come was banging hard from behind, ie without regard to where he was. He said when he was watching Cohen he was feeling himself between 16 and 19, before he went into the army. He was a poet then. He could feel what it was but he can't go back. What matters to him is that we're friends. He wanted to say he thought only the women could really sing Cohen, naked desire is something only gay men and women feel, men don't do that. So then what is it people feel in him, why do gay men find him so sexy? He IS too gay   no He didn't want to do it yesterday   So I shouldn't have   no He finds me ugly   no He's desensitized   Is he doing it with other people   no Is he cheating with drugs   no His heart isn't in it   no His body isn't   Will you tell me what is sexy about him   his generosity His presence   When I met him I had more   Now I have less   Because I've allowed myself to be confined     Can I get it back   Sex isn't the way to do it   no Can I understand him better now? - Secret life of plants 1973. I'm reading this book again, after re-editing GW18 - finding myself as if on the other side. In 1972 or 73 when I first read it I didn't know what new age culture would become: a sickening market of credulity. The dead men of orthodoxy were the enemy and marvels were being announced, as they are now. What do I know now that I didn't then: I know some of the true workers among the dead men and I know the new age is blind to the difference between good and bad tone. It doesn't scrutinize itself. Headshots of smiling people with no more intelligence in their faces than plastic surgeons have. So now I'm between the dead men of old orthodoxy and the smiling merchants of credulity and trying to hold up a banner that says It's better but harder. There's something wrong with both, and it's the same thing. In those days I was culling language and pictures too. a report of light flashes passing from one scarlet verbena to another and noted that the phenomenon could best be seen during crepuscular periods when a thunderstorm approached after a long spell of dry weather. This validated Goethe's discovery that the flower of oriental poppies could be seen flashing at dusk. 156 Because on a clear day in good weather the earth has a negative charge while the atmosphere is positive, electrons stream skyward from the soil and plants. Bioenergetic fields. The notion of a sensitive field. Because body has been thought of as a machine, these are hypothesized as non-body organs. There is a biological field   It's sensitive   And active   And integrated with universe   More so in some people   Is it separable   no Does it organize the visible body   no Is it previous to   no The visible body has invisible aspects     The question of whether they influence each other doesn't make sense     Because they aren't different things   YES Plants synthesizing elements. Inorganic nuclear science asserts huge energies would be needed to do this - enzymes - low-energy transmutations - "a deeper level of nuclear chemistry" - "a type of reaction, specifically utilized by life, which brings about fusion in a strangely quiet way." 252 Dowsing sensors must be located in the region of the solar plexus. 11 In the Findhorn chapter Peter and Eileen committing themselves to being led. When I read that, a little surge of a wish to live that way with Tom, dedicated and being led to something new. Then Tom after work had been talking to Bud about a project. They could have a web radio show where they each chose a song and talked about its meaning. I thought that if Bud can pull it together it would be good for Tom to have a project, but I hate the drag backward to the old hippy days. I'm too fat   Is there an easy solution   Could I lose 15   20?  no   Dear body will you talk to me  YES Do you like to be as you are  no Is there a good reason you need to be  no Do you know how to become slim again     Will you tell me why you aren't doing it  happiness, overview, coming through, responsibility Will you slant this  Tom Because I'm not free enough  no Somehow too bound up with Tom  no Could you be and become slim  YES Just by deciding to  no By resetting metabolism   If I get away from Tom will it happen     Is it because Tom doesn't feel me   Is it protective fat  no Depressed fat   Bored fat   I need a garden I work in every day     I need success   Is there something you'd like from me  YES feeling, judgment, withdrawn, improvement Do you mean unconscious   Do you mean unexpressed   One more  act Gym?   12 I am so bored with Tom these days. What is that. He comes in and starts talking and I'm pleasant and don't want to hear anything he says, it's all repetition and junk. Don't like being this. He's asked me to go to Bud's on Saturday and I said I would but I don't want to, there'll be nothing I can be with those people but falsity and self-suppression. Why does Tom want me there. He has some kind of image of it - the way it was with a supportive little woman. He thinks I'll be like Rebecca. He wants me to see him when he was young in the stupid hippy days. I don't want to see him at all. I want someone to see me, I want to be with someone I can be something with. Editing vol 19. The semester mag with its wonderful image of a bright glass of nasturtium stems on black. In vol 19 Jan dies. I've found the photo I wanted and scanned it for the index. 13 I'm editing bookwork and what I understand is that I have to not go to Bud's and I have to fight it out with Tom correctly. Say I have a horror of those people and would have to be false with them and being there to please him would be corrupt and if I start being corrupt with him it's hopeless. - Little Italy for the first time - caffé latté - what are these trees - pointed leaves hanging like poplars' but with sharp green spikes of some kind of flower - smell like poplar - behind me the smell of Italian baking - it's a street. Jam coming on the 27th, why. About the journal - man in a white shirt and blue jeans, sandals, good shoulders - there can't be any mystique about me where everything is said - and if no mystique no interest - mm that taste of sesame on a bun - whole shopping cart of French bread in paper bags being loaded into a BMW - crusty rolls - people address me here - weekday morning - chef in checked pants carrying bundles of rolls - old couple, the man in purple pants, village people - trolley tower of vegetables in cardboard boxes - for $1400 a month, Tom, get a loft in Little Italy - the back of this leaf is moss-green suede, very fine-grained. Train whistle. Perfect air in the shadow side of the street. Adventure I need. Look at those tiny legs dangling out of the baby carrier. What could I find to wear that's wonderful - to bring something new. 14 I've posted vol 20 with a beautiful graphic, pink clouds cut up into woven rectangles with words appearing and dissolving over them. It's the volume where I write every day for 110 days through the summer of 2000. I crashed into such fear and pain, I had to keep pressing through such fear and pain. 15 So then I told Tom I won't go to Bud's. He wasn't angry. He has decided to move to the studio on El Cortez. He was sane and so I started liking him again. Sat on the chair vigorously telling me about running into a man called Rip as he was waiting for his bus at the VA. A long story about how he became a caddy at La Costa. The bars in Leucadia. Strippers who'd go home with him. They were from a titty bar where they'd work completely naked. The bar would supply the men with flashlights and the women would spread their labia for $5. Rip was an Indian, taciturn, an Apache. When Tom ran out of newspapers Rip, who knew him from many nights at the bar, said Meet me in front of the Belly Up at 5:30 tomorrow, you're going to be a caddy, I'll teach you everything. And did, so that Tom ended caddying for celebrities I won't name. Big money. What I liked was how to read the wind from trees. See that little tree over there, if the leaves are just moving it's 15 knots. If the branches are waving a bit it's 25. Three pages of vol 21 today, fall through January working through the gap in the perception-imagining center section. It goes on every day very hot. In my little house it's worst after 4 when the sun is low enough to come in straight through the west window. I've solved the sleeping problem by staying up until midnight. When I'm going through the mechanical parts of page formatting I'm considering ways the journal goes against principles of popularity (48 rules of power): don't seem different from others, make what you do seem easy, guard your reputation. What's my question - how to be (mildly) popular without doing the crooked things that make people popular. 1. look good. 2. be energized. 3. work hard at something people can use immediately. 4. be reliably honest in ways that don't hurt. 5. sometimes but not too often show vulnerability. 6. be autonomous but loyal. 7. have presence especially in your eyes. 8. be light. 9. respect your actual reserve. 10. be curious. 11. don't lie. 12. be surprising. 13. be fair and sometimes but not always generous. 16 Sunday. Not long after 7:30 I was in front of Tom's hotel and by 8 we were parking at Torrey Pines State Beach. Mostly only surfers in the water. Vigorous shore break. We went in. Warm water, warm creamy foam. It was too busy to get much of a feel for it. I'd easily lose my footing, and the waves were often on each other's heels so I couldn't feel safe between them. Fishermen on the beach with lines into the surf. We saw one pull out a large white corvina. On 101 as it got hotter. The smell of pine. Wonderful Café Ventana for lunch, wonderful Eleanor Roosevelt College. Tom came from his party at Bud's yesterday speedy and distressed. - Oh, the sunglasses. Tom spotted a pair of sunglasses on the sand next to us. Liked them, tried them on, was hiding them in a fold in his towel. I said No, leave them out in case someone comes looking for them. He tossed them next to his bag. An hour later a big wet surfer came from the direction of the parking lot. He came directly toward us. Have you seen a pair of sunglasses? Yes! Happily. Then later when we had arrived back at the jeep Tom called me to the driver's side, Come and look at this. There was his wallet on the pavement next to the driver's side door, open and showing his driver's license photo. It had been there for two hours. The best moments were lying flat and wet in the perfect temperature on a blanket in a bathing suit telling Tom what it's like to edit a volume, all the little tasks and sequences. What it was about it was the natural confidence in it. Tom said he's liking me more than he ever has. I said now that he's not seducing and manipulating all the time he's more at liberty. He says yes I'd made him aware he was doing that. He was there in cut off blue jeans and black teeshirt spry and lean, so exercised and young in his silver brushcut. "Construction guy" said the fine black cashier at the Ventana. "Is that your husband you came in with?" "He's my longtime sweetie." Came home and have been working on vol 22. It's the vol where I am thinking about Frank dying. Took a little rectangle of the carrousel in the trampoline photo. That photo has an amazing quality of black and white grain, so soft and smooth. How could that camera have done it? It's a quality that is not there in the print, it needs the luminosity of the screen. I look forward to making the images for each volume. I love the way it brings the page alive. A lot of the writing is bad or nothing special. These are slog chapters. I was just hacking through. But I can say on the volume index, this one is dull, or, this one is better. And Proust ought to encourage me, Á l'ombre des jeunes filles is easily as tedious as my journals, with short good bursts at long intervals. I was combing it for anything about Madame Swann. The young girls were boring on and on, his indulged obsession at least as bad as my bookwork. (Sigh.) I liked the hotel at Balbec but when he made friends with Albertine that was the end of it. I don't know whether he was transposing gender but it's unreadable for that or some other reason. DR is never unreadable. 17 Spoke to Louie last night. Was that a mistake? I woke at night from a dream that Tom said he was drinking. There was a heavy dark bar across my solar, something there hasn't been for it seems years. I tried speaking to it. Couldn't open it, couldn't find out what it was. It said yes it was heavy, yes it was because of speaking to Louie, but didn't agree to anything I proposed. Tom isn't drinking, there isn't something about Tom I don't know, etc. Louie turned 50 - she was 32 when I met her - and decided to pay off the last of her mortgage. She's done it in four years. They've repainted, resurfaced the roof, re-dug the drains, refinished the stairs, and still she's done. Getting sick of the dailiness of the journals - what other kind of writing cd there be. Something wonderful. - TSK doesn't talk about 'consciousness,' talks about Being. Why is that better. It feels more bodily. He talks about openness and clarity. I often don't understand him but it's as if he is saying it's possible to be what I was in acid, immersed in a flow of being, enthralled in a flow of time. The Solunto, 18th Slight breeze, caffé latté, a truck heavy through the intersection, UPS van with a rattle in the fender. Ah the smell of browned crust. A pedestrian slanting closer to the wall, into the shadow of the awning. I'm wearing the cargos, which are ragged now, and the black lycra teeshirt with cap sleeves. Physical clothes. I look stocky, thick but strong. Finished pasting the last volumes of GW onto pages. 23-25 still to format and link up. The last 3 are light. The worst is over, Louie's in her beautiful house and Tom is writing. I discover I'm good with students. The writing is not bad. I still like my arms. I often look at them, those parts of me I can so easily see. Their long brown reach, with a beautiful wrist bone and an angled spread into the hand. The skin on the outside of the forearm is quite weathered, and on the upper arm smooth and pale. They're my smart experienced arms that have done so many kinds of things. You will be old but you're not yet, is what I'm saying when I look at them. I lay one out along the rail to show it off and feel its length. There's my yellow bike tied to a post. These are good street trees. They're very green and the flower spikes on the tips give them as if gold highlights. The extraordinariness of everybody passing. Unspeakable exactness, a spirit plain and instant to see. The body not at all hidden by its clothes. The innocent gentle tossing of the boughs.   part 2 in americae volume 11: 2006 january-june work & days: a lifetime journal project