| in america 12 part 2 - 2006-07 december-january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
18 December Why am I melancholy when Rowen leaves. Hollow-hearted. We don't really like each other. He's a friendly cooperative boy. He's nice looking. His photos some of them have the look of my framing. Last couple of days after it turned wet and he was sleeping inside started to wear me out. I was shutting down. So was he. We were both sitting reading. He tried wrestling me into agreeing to pay for the laptop he could do gaming on. There was addictive pressure in it that I called. - Writing at random in Starbucks with my feet on the window sill in the sun. At Tom's house on the weekend, both of them photographing me, I felt desolate, I can't be anything I like the look of with either of these people, lonely. In bed remembering the blank all weekend with Tom, who did his best with Rowen for me. I said to myself, I must keep remembering now, I must remind myself, when I want what I used to have in magic love I must make it in work. That's what I have to do now. 19
1. Could her work succeed on its own, without seduction? 2. Does she have to have emotional dependency to do the work? Maybe this is the critical one - the way she adapted her work to Lise against its grain. 3. These amount to not having confidence in her own gift. For myself: 1. Has she genuinely used my work? No. She has cited my refs where they will most impress. Would she promote me when she goes on, the way someone who genuinely honoured it would? No, because she will have to be hyping whoever is her current mentor, is my guess. 2. I'm depressed to see I'm still vulnerable to seduction. Why am I. Because I am without a right context, because I'm disqualified. (It says no.) I need something, I'm starved for something. (No.) 3. This crazed foundation means my journal is skewed (no) and worthless (NO). For herself: I agree that she should win for herself what she needs as she can. I admire how alive she gives herself to be. What to conclude:
Do I need to get even? No. I need more power myself. YES. Editing 1991 - noticing how depressed I got when I was with Louie - oppressed.
22nd Friday - solstice yesterday - look at this little writing - then I look back over the pages and see I've been gloomy for two weeks - since Tom's burst about chloresterol - his mad shopping - his barking about Oscar - then Rowen sucked energy without giving back - he's miserly - the itches - and then crashing about Susan. So here I am - Dr Marquez's corticosteroid has worked on my ear - I'm balancing about Susan - evals will be done by tomorrow at the latest - then I'll have four weeks. 23rd Phoned Susan last night, dealt with Madeleine this morning, mailed the Nikon cord Rowen forgot, remembered to phone Abbotsford and send Mary flowers - I said roses and carnations for $70 US including delivery. Then was transcribing the last of the trip with Louie in 1992. The way the writing focused when I got to Valhalla. Long passages after some mediocre years. It seemed a story in itself, I thought I could make something with it called Ditches of Alberta about what Louie and I were working out on that trip. Slides. Her images and mine. Maybe Louie would want her photos in it. Her journal if the writing isn't bad. Tom showed up this aft, hadn't expected him till tomorrow. There he was looking hollow-faced - still don't know what it means exactly. I should have foreseen that if he had the jeep he'd shop. $81 worth of snack food and cleaning products at Albertsons. A poinsettia, that plant without plant value. This and that, ugly wooden tray he's set under the lamp. A big blue glass tumbler he liked. 8 or 9 videos he bought because they were there. He has buying frenzies that lead his taste. He sees stuff in front of him and wants to buy something and so he invents sentences that persuade him whatever he wants to buy is good. And then later he delivers those sentences to me while I look at him disgustedly. I tried to forestall a lot of ruin of his wonderful house by getting stuff he needed before he could. I loved my own buying frenzy and so have to sympathize with his wish to bring stuff home, and I know he's buying junky videos and CDs because it takes the edge off a buying drive that could quickly turn into large folly, but his place is already getting junked up. His floor lamp that turned out to be made of plastic. His candle holders he's proud of. How can he like Christopher Alexander and not see what's wrong with them? I get him good stuff and he stares at it in wonder and then buys stuff to add to it that wrecks it. I feel mean-spirited saying these things - it's his house - the room in the Maryland eventually was nice - he has turned out to be generous when he has money - he doesn't carp at anything I buy - and yet I do hate what spoils his house and I don't like the way he loses his bearings when he shops, it's a kind of stupidity. - If he had better taste he'd mind my leg more, he'd mind many things about me more.
What's the truth about Lise. Nightmare fear of discovering she was only using me and would do the same with her other advisors, and then I'd be tipped into having been wrong. After the first semester I did warn Lise that S is seductive. Last res I said I wasn't speaking to her. More loyal to S than to Lise, protect it. That lends itself to being used. Simple jealousy. I think Lise had her own perception.
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24 Open sky, Sunday morning. Need to finish evals but want to be something with myself first. Here's the day - There is something I've been saying to myself vaguely now and again - it's about melancholy - the sour tone of what I am a lot - it's the Epp chemistry isn't it - shuts us down as we get older. I don't have to be that.
I've been cutting experience because I don't want to do things that are irrelevant, but then in the nothing time that results I do a lot that's irrelevant. Is it better to have irrelevant experience? Can I cope with it? It's as if I'm afraid it will send me down false trails. 25 Black Canyon Road. Here I sharpen my pencil by scratching it across a rock. It's silent. There's hardly a bird. Winter midday. I'm on the edge of the road above the creek. There's a tall slope across the way, oaks halfway up grown out of piles of rock whose shaded cracks are like their crooked black boughs. Above them a band of something fawn-colored that grows like clumps of fur. Then finer-textured scrub. It seems the size of the rocks grades smaller going up the same way as the plants. The whole scene is finer textured than a wetter place would be. Olive green overall. Bitty. This trip is going well. We have learned a lot. Tom is pulling over and letting people pass. He chose good music - so far the Greek woman, Sarah, the Mexican natives. I negotiated stopping somewhere for at least an hour and he's back there writing in his notebook having climbed a draw and found a place to camp by himself - I mean he imagined it. Because he has a kitchen we fried eggs and ate before we left. We took a new road. 27 I'm looking at my Being about conclusion and finding I can hardly read it - wow. I thought of it as an easy chapter. - That was true for the beginning, not the later parts. AG16 - Dave, the MA, starting to edit, Rowen moves to Read, misery with Louie, her book. In 17 Ken will appear and go on through 17-20. 29 Working on Mind and land I-III. Feeling what I sometimes do - that I could give parts of what I do to the people whose work I've loved - start there. 30 Have just read Leaving the land - it's a marvel. I ought to reprint it somewhere not as obscure. Same with Brain and metaphor. Same with parts of Being about. A reader? There I think of all the visual work, voice work. How am I this morning. Not settled. Opening the Mind and land pages and not focusing, start somewhere else. Turn that thing off. Kind of intoxicated by being off the leash, is it? Louise later but not much later - at 10. That aerial on the Martin Building - it's not the Lips building anymore, which means there's parking on 5th at night - is new isn't it? And there's a bird on it that has a red head which I almost can't see from here. - This place is called Hudson's Bay Seafood - I've never needed to know its name before - meeting Louise here - sun in the corner. 31st Louie back in Van, Rowen leaving for Costa Rica. Depressed about Tom. Maybe about Tom. Yesterday I arrived and found him after a Saturday shopping grey-faced and unshaven, intent on the dual cassette he bought at Baras Thrift Store, a pile of CDs, a pile of videos. It ended badly. He played bad music without letup. I cooked steak that filled the place with the smell of grease. Went home at 9 with the book I'd picked up. Not good. Depressing too, Stegner showing his generation's blind complacency about women. Then Tom here not long after 8 this morning. We wrangle 'til noon. He feels we've done well and I'm deeper in gloom. Take him home. He's agreed it's better if I don't try New Years Eve at his house. What did I say - a lot - he said he's imagined me dead because that's the only way he could think to get out of our bind. I said I've thought that too. I liked that he thought it because it lets me off the hook for thinking it. What depressed me first was that he wants to furnish his place his way. I agree he should have that but if he did I wouldn't like to come to it anymore. I'd be distressed that he'd spoiled it. He says that if it weren't for me he'd be at the bottom having fun. 1st January 2007 I'm sick. My upper jaw aches to the top of my head. Blowing my nose. It's a bit past 6. The sky is brightening a little over the cathedral. Quiet. I'm sneezing. Have nothing to say. I'll go finish editing 17-5. There'll be fun linking this one - film passages later. 3rd New Years letter from Carmichael - photos of Helen and him - he's on full pension - there was nothing of him in it - family man, department man - anyone could have written that letter - why would I reply - to triumph in the ways I can - being less straight - a cold letter - what his says is that his students like him - what mine said - is this a bad decision, it says yes - is that I'm posting my journal. His bit isn't up yet - but isn't the last visit? - Management studies and [the college]. Working conditions. Initial energy level - where you are when you start - wanting to be part of something good. If you meet them at their first energy, you maintain it or build on it. If the organization doesn't meet them, over time that energy will drop off. They'll be disappointed and lose motivation. Flexibility, challenge, personal responsibility
4 Color of the sea John Hamamura 2006 St Martin's Press I've read it through the day often crying, because of the samuri teaching mostly. He is a kid, has jumped into the sea to swim across a cove. He's been warned by the old man not to do it, there's a cold current. He finds himself swept out, tiring. There's the old man. "Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. And say: 'I inhale strength, I exhale fear.'" "Say: 'My breath is the sky, my body's the sea.'" "Say: 'My strength is without limit, my spirit is filled with gratitude.'" "Let's study this current. Let's see if we can merge with it and ride it." Then as they near the shore a shark passes under them. The old man knows how they can together imitate a sea turtle. The old man asks him to report the colors he sees. Tells him to breathe well. "I want you to breathe with your belly. Inhale down to your toes and up to the tips of the hairs on the top of your head." Within and surrounding the old man there exists a constant field of tranquility. - In the midst of the boys' screaming, old man Fujiwara leans close and speaks, directly into Sam's ear. "What color is the shadow of the fish?" The fish is streaking back and forth. Sam can barely see it moving over the shallow coral rocks. "What? The shadow?" Just then the line goes slack. Sam staggers backward. The boys groan in unison. "Aw, you just lost the biggest blue jack I've seen all year!" "The color of the shadow," repeats Fujiwara-san. Sam stares into the water, but the ulua has disappeared. "I can't see it anymore. It's gone." "Close your eyes." Sam shuts his eyes. Instantly, he sees the blue jack. Sees it leaping once, bright and vivid, falling, blurring back and forth. He sees the taut line, beads of water bouncing off to sparkle momentarily in the sunlight. He sees the ulua and the ripples nipping across the surface of the water. He sees a sliver of darkness flitting across the coral. "The shadow has no color. It's just darkened the colors it passed over." "And what color are those?" "Tan. Pink. Purple. Black. Orange. Blue-green, emerald green, and a kind of brownish-reddish-purple seaweed color." "Yes!" Fujiwara-san claps his hands, and laughs with delight. he finds himself looking around in utter amazement at the profusion of colors he is seeing. Mu Learning how to bow, how to fall Without warning the old man spins Sam like a wheel on a frictionless axle. Over in a blink Sam had felt it the tiniest whip crack of energy, pure, devoid of anger or desire to defeat or conquer, and yet immense ... his own flesh and bone lightened to a puff of wind ... so far beyond transparent ... no wonder the old man called it empty. Fujiwara-san kneels, leans close to Sam's face, gazes steadily into Sam's eyes. "Someday when you are beaten and exhausted and all is lost you will hear my voice in your ear. Isamu, go the distance." And suddenly, there it is. Tiny. A raindrop striking the sea. Sam feels the effortless spinning sensation, assumes he's been thrown. But to Sam's amazement, Fujiwara-san hits the ground. Smoothly, the old man rolls onto his feet and steps back. "Isamu you don't own it. Nor can you ever own it. Because it is nothing. It is mu." Then there is the girl. I think John Hamamura is gay. He describes women looking at young men with avidity. But I like that he makes Keiko a samuri woman. She has a fearless gaze and she knows how to maintain composure. The way she is about Sam's vacillations reminds me of what I was learning with Ken in the volumes I transcribed last. To concentrate on what is, when it isn't what one had wanted. Keiko's eyes are soft, clear, wise. She is in full possession of herself, and at the same time, she seems to be giving everything to him. "When you dance the waltz you must open your heart. You must be like a house with all its doors and windows opened wide so the music can flow through every room like a warm breeze. And remember this - when you're dancing with a woman who loves to dance, you must dare to challenge her with your strength. If she truly launches herself into the dance, you must be courageous enough to go with her, beyond her if you can, and help her explore the limits of her capacity to dance." Find the core of light within yourself. The core is compassion. We are not here to look or sound good. until in every instant of every moment you are totally conscious and present - present without pride or any desire to impress or look good. When Fujiwara-san dies Sam spreads a cloth under a tree and sets up his photo, a 2" statue of the Buddha, strawberries and roses. Lights incense. "Sensei, I am surrounded by a feast of colors." Sam bows once more then begins naming colors. The love he feels for his former teacher blossoms like a lotus illuminating the earth and all its creatures, living and dead. Sam's murmured chant of colors goes on and on ... Then the scene where Keiko comes back and is sleeping on the couch. She wakes and finds Sam next to her with moonlight through the lace curtains. They walk out among the grapes with two dogs. Scent of ripening grapes and scent of their own bodies. Very Mills and Boone. "You are being tested here and now. Are you paying attention?" "Sam, hovering like a cloud, opens, lets every guarded part of himself fall, and as rain to waiting earth, his words and eyes and hands and tongue and mind and heart and hard, lovely penis, penetrate her. outclassed and panic-stricken Sam has been playing wide and open, as though ignorant of any form of strategy. July 16 1945 5:30 AM the Trinity test. Friday night. I've just finished the first sweep of AG, pages distributed, gross edits. Now I can go through beginning to end and do the intros. Men - what was that about. Dreaming. Garden. Louie. Joyce. 6
7
8 It was a good weekend, Tom was himself mostly. On Saturday he had cleaned his house beautifully. He'd gone to the library and borrowed documentaries. He was funny in his best ways, riffing. He was wearing his cargos and a black teeshirt and was moving well. His feet weren't hurting much. He put on one of the tapes he made me and we lay together hearing the songs I'd heard in wonder alone in my bed in 1995 - Tom's music, Tom, so other, so male and private. Bandito. I was hearing the singers' names for the first time. He was telling me what he hears in them. Joan Osborne St Teresa / hi-igher than / the moon. If I were a woman and you were a man. Put a candle in the window. I heard them in such a pitch of longing, fear and pain. Here we were with the Danish modern desk across the room with tulips in a drinking glass and the moon-globe lamp, maroon lily buds on the mantle. (On Sunday morning we ate bacon and eggs at the bistro table in the kitchen. I planted 5 kinds of scented geraniums.) At home I'd spent Saturday working on Aphrodite's garden, sketching the intros for the section page and making last decisions about AG1. This morning I got the structure for the Mind and land lectures. 1. sketch of a project - intro. 2. theorists and advocates - platform. 3. being marvelous - practitioners. Quickly came to the end of mental energy but it was murky and [now] is clear. I love these open weeks - two more. Susan flying to LA today. I say that wondering whether I should invite her, or go see her. 11 She was here 24 hours, from arriving at the train station to being dropped at the same curb. Came with such a lot of gear, a heavy bag full. Looked beautiful and was bright in the ways she is. Talks. I felt silent, ugly, dull and shabby next to her, ashamed of myself. I fell on the street, watched my paper cup of chai latté hit the pavement ahead of me. Have to haul myself up stairs by the rails. She was coming from meetings at UCLA where she had dealt with freeways and been excited and successful with strangers. I took her up the coast to Wind an' Sea and Torrey Pines Grade. Parked where I'd parked with Jam. She walked down the cliff and touched the green ocean. The Pacific. Was it true she had never touched the Pacific? There was a Santa Ana and the foam was blowing back. At Wind an' Sea the waves were forming close to the rocks, wedging. She was feeling she'll be living in LA. I'm depressed because she was finding me ugly. She wasn't excited about me. It's a loss even though it frightened me when she was. It makes me feel I'm dropping out of life. Her currency does. Seeing her still so much in it. The pants she was wearing yesterday tight and urban over her gorgeously round rump and lean thighs. Her jeweled earrings. The currency of her clothes. Her social success anywhere. Apart from shame and envy: what was there of my own. The moment as we were sitting together on the couch before I took her to the station and she was looking across the room at my spot of colors. The turquoise pitcher with dark pink flowers, dark green stems, and in front of it the pale green dish with oranges in it. And that she noticed the colors of the towels.
The ways I can be useful to her. Give her neuroscience and linguistics references so that she can go into a department at UCLA with intellectual mastery. Give further material for her demonstrations of hot-shit marvelousness. Support her in doing what I'm disqualified from. Should I ask her to coach me in the things she knows and I don't? Clothes, skin cream, iPod, other tech stuff. Health, energy. She earns her support, I mean from other people, by fighting to learn from them. She's very proactive. She's very transparent. 12 When Susan was about to arrive, Louie emailed. I waited until Susan had gone and replied with pictures of Rowen and of Tom's desk and plants. Then she asks how I am. I don't tell her, I ask about India. She replies in a way I suspect. What I suspect is that she felt Susan was here and was in a rage and needed to try to conceal it. The years of Louie's concealed rage. I'm repelled. When I got home yesterday late afternoon, there was even grey light on the deck chairs standing together on the roof. I took pictures for Susan. Emailed her the best one to find when she got home from her long travel day. She wrote back at 1:30 her time, had just got in. A tired lonesome letter. Set down some moments. What do I want to know. She said between things, "I'm sorry you have had to be alone so much." I ignored it because it is so much the right thing to say that I was suspicious. This morning have set out a bibliography for her wonderful project. Yesterday morning when I lay down and began to drift I saw a moonlit road in thin snow. It was like a road somewhere on the plains, tire tracks with compressed bits of snow in them. I saw it for just a second but very complete. Then snapped away but after a moment saw another version, also night and thin snow, miles of blue light. 13 Got up and worked on AG. Have been making the index page, setting up categories for the intro. (So cold this morning.) (My bp shot up because of the email telling us we have a beautiful black 30-something playwright joining the fac.) The volume index page summary sequences are quite charming on their own. Looking for categories I feel I've been vast, I've been searching and sometimes finding over such a range. I've had persistent global lines of interest. I've been local in a small area - few friends, house and neighbourhood - but global in questions I was holding. I didn't take on the work identity, have been unknown in my multiplicity, people have thought of me as they've known themselves to be. I will try to figure out what happened with T and R. It was such a struggle that it must have been that I wasn't feeling it correctly. Could I feel it correctly now and resolve it with my body?
I was lying awake under the window last night feeling how crushing it has been to what is now a submerged self to have Being about unrecognized. My friends have failed me in that - no one has known I'm crushed, no one has cared that that enormous labor and achievement is as if - here I'm looking for a word and as I'm hesitating I'm seeing how it's related - large sigh - the words I was looking at were words about vanishing, being blanked out, being gone - I haven't tried to publish Being about because I am in the structure of having fallen out of view. "No one has known I'm crushed." Last night on Twenty-five years of Nature the most wonderful sequence a flock of a million finches moving in ways no other phenomenon can move - no way to say it - natural motion and what I am when I see it. - The Mind and land lectures - a workbook - their shape at the moment. I. Cultural invention - an introduction to the project II. Theories and advocates - imagining action - resistance III. Being paradise - practitioners of paradise - people who get to know animals - cross-species community, chimpanzee, bonobo, capuchin pharmacognosy. Animal knowledge itself. Lost capabilities/attitudes of other cultures. 16 Still so cold. Avocado groves freezing. I stay in bed with a hot water bottle because the room even with the heater and the hotplate does not warm up. Went through the last half of AG5 this morning. Savage even with Rowen. It ends with a clear statement to Michael. There are good descriptions of what it's like to come into leadership in the garden. Allowing savagery I become clarity. It's interesting. I show a very pained emergence. The warrior I become is the one who goes on to tackle philosophy. I come out of such dissolved solitude into such grounded alert power. I'm no longer afraid of myself. - Shopping day. I started higher up. Nordstrams. Ralph Lauren blue linen shirt. Just when the old one has come to its end. Something very femme - red polka dot silk with pin tucks and an inner slip. $80 each. Dark blue long-sleeved crew in very light cashmere. Olive drab cargos, stretch pinwale corduroy jeans moss green. Should I say what I saw in the changing rooms. A lot of loose skin under my jaw. Such a short thick person, lumpy flab around the waist, all the way around. Messy hair, dry brush sticking out at the bottom of the braid. A crook in my back - the way I stand falling apart from the waist down. Face: not good. Baggy under the eyes. Harsh. - Funny the way I feel a kind of cheerful relish saying these things. What is that. At the time, studying these things in cubicles, I feel - grim? Oh well even Elizabeth Taylor is ugly. Yes, but it's about exercise. 17 I'm not getting the Mind and land lectures formed quickly. My brain quits early. Tea isn't giving me speed or grip. Brain fog - a swollen dull feeling that must be this grey ache of the scalp and other muscles. What I thought today was, start with III. Being marvelous. Examples. 18 Thursday - today and four more days. Don't want to work on the lectures or any other thing - don't want to be so cold. 19 Day on Justin's I ching papers. I just got shafted didn't I. 20 Susan: two days distressed with Lise, Lise is going to want her to take an extension etc. I hold her hand a couple of ways. Last night she has a phone conversation with Lise, phones me after, Lise has told her to make various changes, "Just do what I tell you." She has let Lise off the hook. We talk about other things. End of the conversation she says "Should we have a party? Let's go into town and get something, should we drink champagne?" I say "We should drink whatever you want." Then she says "I should warn you, at the end of the conversation Lise said 'I'm going to have lots of time, we should smoke cigarettes together, we should drink together.' Do you mind?" I say no. I'll buy time while I discover whether I do. I wake at 2:30 from a dream about the event. There's a tape I want to give her. I don't remember much more than that - the feeling is yearning distress. I write her a note whose subject line is bait and switch. Then I lie not sleeping. My note said "There isn't going to be much time, you'll be celebrating with Lise and with Jim and I will be not speaking to you if that's what's necessary to keep from feeling I'm competing with them, which I won't tolerate."
Peter Gabriel and Sinead O'Connor Blood of Eden 1992 remix Geldorf in Vegetarians of love, Thinking Voyager 2 type things:
21 Sunday aft - two movies last night - Tombstone, Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday. It's fun to be insightful and aristocratic, to stand up for your friend and make sacrifices for him. It was fun to be arrogant like he was and have the goods to back it up. I get an easy, automatic sense of myself in nature, a wholeness I feel nowhere else ... That's why I live in New Mexico. The physical terrain, the feeling improve my life just by waking up there. And White knights, Baryshnikov dancing next to Hines - seeing the way his lines hold attention - when they were dancing the same steps I couldn't look at Hines - the training that makes every inch of the body participate in the shape. Tom is being wonderful to me. This weekend he had a craggy Keith Richards look that became him. I was staring closely at his large strong features on the pillow after the movies. "Your demon is strong today and he's looking at me quite fondly" I said. So then he took off my pyjama pants. How is he being wonderful. He cleans his house before I come, he picks DVDs at the library, gave me $200 to pay for the jeep's service tomorrow. Is happy when I like something he does. Listened to my story of the rumble with Susan. Halcyon - maybe he won't have that house ever after, and if we lose it we will look back yearningly. - A blog called Diffraction. 7 December 2006. "Here's Ellie Epp, the Canadian filmmaker and philosopher on writing a journal." Posted by Ansuman Biswas in the journal of an Arts Council England placement at HP Labs, India. Bangalore. 41, artist. 22 Monday morning, cold. Jeep service at 10, lectures the rest of the day. Sent out the magazine yesterday. How did Ansuman Biswas find Work & days. What is this hard ache in neck and arms. I think there's something toxic in this little house - always spitting up slime in the mornings, sneezing, this ache, puff around the eyes, the way I pee off my belly when I go to San Felipe and pack it back on here. Maybe the way I don't have mind energy in the mornings. What did I want to say about Tom. He's blooming into love. Earned love. He wants to help me. This is Pinoccio graduated. And now will something come of it, I want to know - he has a base, he is a base. He looks around and says, everything here is quality. (But he's buying junk books.)
How it relates to embodiment - the medical, the marvelous - body as billboard, body as abandoned hovel - (body as Airstream trailer). Both a lack of presence. How it goes on from last semester - dissociation, cultural dissociation, new humanism, cosmic humanism, dualism of body as machine and disembodied soul - Renaissance and pagan values - 'cosmic humanism' - 'new humanism.'
But I'm not going to talk about embodiment as such. How to live a monistic secular humanism without giving up the sense of the marvelous - complex attention.
What it is about modernism at its best. What's naïve about landscape painters, 'too easy,' and photographers. Magicians - work with the perceiving body as well. 23 Yesterday after I'd taken the jeep to PB and the shuttle had dropped me back I worked on the first lecture and felt the springiness of invention the best of the lectures have. Playful. I feel it as balance. Then at the end of the aft being brought back to Robert's and paying $364 for the minor service and a bunch of little things, feeling contented and responsible at having looked after my beautiful jeep. Then going to Tom's with the printout of work done and having him mull over it with as much pleasure as I, sitting with me on the blue couch in his clean house. When I get back I'll phone him and he'll pick me up at the airport and take me to his house - it'll be a Saturday evening. "I have a house where you can stay!" he said joyfully. So I'm happy this Tuesday morning at 4:42, sitting in bed with a hot water bottle in the tent of covers like a kotatsu stove. Cup of tea just finished, flight not 'til 11:14. This time there hasn't been a lot to do - it seemed - house was cleaned earlier, for Ro and Susan. Sweater washing and laundry at Tom's. I haven't had the travel-death anguish this time at all - was that about aloneness? - There have been a couple of times in the last days when I've spoken to Tom with a tone I haven't heard for a long time - what is it - confidence, buoyancy, energy, confident warmth. Security. Money - it's money too, this semester because Tom's been paying for gas and giving me hundreds of dollars I haven't been stressed about money at all - when has that ever happened before - and I'm making more for less work. Haven't gone into my credit cards, stay caught up out of my salary. I'm sleeping easily. Letters with Susan. Louie it seems not mad at me. Rowen rescued maybe. - At that moment I remembered to phone Luke. Andy's Emily doing an MA in anthropology in Leipzig. Elliot with an art degree from St Martins working as a photographer's assistant. Andy [Wyman] recording a CD with his band. A 4-year-old who calls him Uncle Luke - Josh's boy. Illy having a second
baby. Luke working with Ez building a fence in Highbury. When it's fences
and decks Roy calls in his boys. Staying near Brick Lane in the East End;
he'll stay 'til the end of February. O Luke. Said he'd thought yesterday
that I'd phone. I was thinking to, the times weren't right. He's working
on his business plan, has time to.
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