in america volume 21 part 1 - 2010 june-july

work & days: a lifetime journal project

23 June 2010 Reading 1966, 1967, feeling what I often do, that I want to share the record with the people I describe, I want to make a gift of it, but hardly anyone is left. What I really want is them as they were, my beloveds. 29 Sent in IRA application. Got my 10 ISBNs! Ant Bear Press. Not Ant Bear Books, though it's better, because there will be videos. Scrubbed out the bathroom, including inside the toilet tank. Figured out how to install a new toilet seat, the old one had black mold in its pores. Washed the inside of the cabinet, trailed toilet cleaner down the shower walls. Saw that I could get rid of the corroded uncleanable aluminum shower door and get a shower curtain, though I haven't done that yet. None of this says the satisfaction of looking at clean white walls, clean white bowl. 25 Announced the ISBNs on Facebook and asked for photos. 26 Dreams roaming the world. An ugly adobe house on stilts where in the kitchen two cookstoves were set diagonally with their backs to the room and 2x4 studs behind them needlessly breaking the space. A young man on a road in a field setting to hand dig an oil well. A woman rushes out to say don't dig there, underground storage for her tofu. - All day working on Ant Bear covers - made one each for Favor and Emilee - messed around with color like Virago and didn't like it - tried a photo across the whole spread, liked it a lot. Sent them to Louie and Emilee. Made a Facebook group and invited 12. Now I'm tired but can't quit. Learned to reposition the zero on rulers. [opposite page plant list: agave isthmensis in green pot - dwarf butterfly agave haworthia fasciata Super White in clay little cactus in yellow pot, round honey pot kalanchoe thrysiflora in pink pot in green chinese pot in little Chinese jar in black Chinese pot - the seaweed hair in green pot in blue pot, maroon haworthia in small beige crock, baby toes in Bauer bowl echeveria in blue bowl in white cream jug Indian clay pot cactus tiny green Chinese pot cactus red square pot cactus larger ovoid green jar agave blue larger maroon pot Michael's aloe purple larger clay pot agave - Sharkskin? large clay pot tall cactus tricocereus pachanoii yellow pot - window plant haworthia truncata Lime Green green hexagon pot haworthia limnifolia dark red pot haworthia cream colored small pot grey pink At Tom's: senecio blue fingers faucaria little toad crassula arborescens silver jade furry flower stapelia asterias] 27 Waking at 3:30 from one of the dreams in which I end sobbing, sobbing. I was talking to someone in London who said my son's friend Josh had committed suicide. By Josh I understood his childhood friend. Waking I'm not sad but worried for Luke, because he's in a gap time after he breaks up with somebody. Is the dream important    YES Does it mean what I think it means   Luke is in danger   Will Luke commit suicide in his life    no Should I phone him     Now     - Spoke to him for an hour. He hasn't moved out yet. I so love when he laughs at me. Barbara Meter's movies last night. I was loving her for them. There was also an interview she said not to look at, a shockingly old woman, thought of as my age - she's six years older - but speaking such ready warm English and so my kind of person. She demonstrated her optical printer and said how she likes to get into the frame. Beautiful images, brought up and down out of the light, wonderful sound - sound like I'd imagine for Orpheus, murmers, bits of music, all at the right, low level, clear and recessive. I wrote her before I went to bed and she'd replied when I got up in the morning. 28 Have been fixing the hyphens in RF, going through fast. Left RF5 till last today. Marveling how impressionable I was, how intense an imprint of persons I took. It now seems inefficient to feel so much about irrelevant people. I'm supposing it was hormonal like frisking in puppies. I was at the age to make my life ties, except that I wasn't making life ties, I was spilling capacity on anyone and then writing the impression to erase it. The intensity made me loveable, so there could always be new people, and erasing made me mobile so I could speed from adventure to adventure always agape. Now I'm the opposite of that, efficient in my impressions like an old dog lifting my head briefly and setting it down again. I'm not loveable except to those I have good reasons to love. But still I like reading myself in those excited times. I like the stories I found, Fredi and Darinka, Ferdinand, Madame Matter, the old woman on San Giovanni in Laterano, even the hitchhiking tales, the survey of what lives are. Bill. Mademoiselle Ziechelmeyer. - Last night a house I stopped to look at. It was a room-shaped tent with one long side sheeted only in netting. The figure of a woman inside it making a double bed. - There's a lot to do tomorrow but I've resisted doing any of it today. Scared heart about leaving. 29 Trailer-camped in a pasture wondering whether there's a bull among the cattle. See a man who looks like a sheepherder squatting by a very tall young horse (10'). Try to ask him. He doesn't understand. Cow papa? Then he does. Toreador. (It has tried to supply toro.) I unfold a map to show him where we are and where I'm thinking to go. It is oilcloth, as big as a bed sheet, and has almost nothing marked on it except the grid. Try another smaller one that shows our place here inland on the right side of a peninsula and the car ferry port over on the left side near the tip. And much more. - All I've done today - scrubbed and bleached the windows, laundry including sheets and therefore taking the bed apart, money from the bank, supps at Whole Foods, jeep to Tom's which involved taking the bike to ride back, Sean's to deliver what I forgot yesterday, library fine, parking ticket from yesterday mailed, plants downstairs to Richard's which needed four trips down the stairs dragging a box, bike ride, carried bike up, put the monitor into its box and up onto the closet shelf, which meant hauling other things down - that was so long ago, the first thing I did - stack of [the college] cards to Baby Cakes to get rid of them, bike rack onto and then off the jeep, checked the new Ant Bear cohort page all day - did a bit more of it this morning. Cooked, made salad, mostly packed. Sorted a pile of CDs and DVDs, the ones I don't want, kept the cases. Tom came by from traffic court where he'd had his license confiscated for not paying a ticket he's had dangling for years. He's fat, big round stomach and his jaw folding into his neck. When he left me he winked - that thing I had trained him out of. But his house was clean and his plants alive, and the bird feeder his pleasure. Asking to park the jeep there was alright, he was just someone I know. Liked showing him Rowen's boat and the Ant Bear cohort page, was glad to hear his new neighbours are quiet. He doesn't weed the plants, doesn't see that they need weeding, but he enjoys them. 30 Ten people in the cohort as of this morning - Becci, Carolyn, Louie, Jeanne, Jaes, Kri, Amanda, Juliana, Emilee, and me. - The schlep to get here to gate 20 - dragging computer bag, camera bag, jacket, 10 pounds of books I had to take out of the suitcase [because it was overweight]. Do I want coffee enough to drag all of that all the way down to gate 28 - I do. Tired, blank. Glad it's a direct flight. Glad Louie's meeting me. This is one of those bad departure lounges, like a commuter lounge, dark, low ceiling with acoustic tile. Vancouver July 1 West Boulevard. A wet dark bank holiday when I couldn't do anything I'd intended. The lost feeling of a house that isn't mine. Sniffles and sore throat. Eating and reading junk, watching TV. Louie's bike crashes out of its gear. The course tomorrow. A month ahead without structure. At the garden they've built a greenhouse at an angle at the west end of the herb garden, which is a neglected mess, now unreclaimable. Stopped at 824 and found a family in my place, kitchen opened to the middle room, paint on the balcony door slathered over with a muddy turquoise, the quiet logic of the house wrecked, after all the years it had endured. Basement suite. Someone is making 12,000 a month with hardly any repairs. [Kids'] bikes in the garden. 2 Dreaming a renovation to the house. I don't live there now but I'm distressed. It's a mindless hodgepodge. Crude bamboo posts for the upstairs balcony railing. I'm standing in the upstairs corridor saying the light used to flow through the rooms - from there, and there, and there. Why people don't have a sense of whole spaces. This place of Janet's full of bits, some irrelevant little thing everywhere; what they've done with the garden, made it in their own image. - What shd I do - struggling with technology, starting to blank - one computer I can print from, that doesn't have a version of InDesign I can use. Another computer I can't print from. Too much noise, hitches I can't figure out. Benton Sans art book text - different weights. What he said for section heads - more weight differences. The poem is too broken up. More white space. Could try overlapped titles in different color. Colored text in CMYK needs to be in exact register. Don't do three columns, do 2 and more white space. Keep the units clear - heading with text, space less than gutter for instance. He doesn't like the boxed in feel of inset photos. Aldus with Optima, Chronos with Aldus Cover letterspacing x1.5 Gothic for Bateman cover 6% yellow wash over all CMYK For text, bigger gutters, more space top and bottom Edit - Color settings - Enable color management - CMYK - US sheet-fed coated V2 (most generic) Adobe Bridge - color management across Adobe programs On offset press there can be a color profile for each file. It wd be tied to a particular press. 'Color modeling' Look at the shape of the page as a whole 3 I have a sure hand putting a slide on a page he says, but don't have a feel for text or text with pictures. That includes layouts I thought were good. Am I sometimes right and he wrong    YES Do you think this has been worth the money     4 Sunday morning. Do I need to catch up. The sky has mostly been closed since I've been here. The bike has to be fixed so I'm walking. Yesterday my right hip started hitching again. This morning neither the wireless nor the DSL are getting me online. The loan officer at the credit union is saying he needs my Canadian tax returns for the last two years though I've given him the American one. I'm at the publishing course in ugly shoes walking badly, and find myself bitter. There are 6 women and 2 men, and the women are dumb lumps. One of them sits there working at a piece called Obedience to God's Plan for the Catholic Register. The only interesting person is Jonathan Louie, a tiny gay man with a wizened brown face who came in wearing a butter yellow linen coolie jacket and a wedding ring. The instructor didn't set us up to know each other, and the publab now is configured in rows so we can't see each other's work. Peter has spent hours showing us hideous covers he's made for Douglas & Mackintyre potboilers and telling us how he made them. The rest of the time we're supposed to sit there working on our own thing. There's a lot of distraction, his voice, yesterday kids in the hall. I get snagged on technology and am soon at a halt. Then he comes by and does sit talking about what I'm showing him, making suggestions but he's rigid in his own style, just tells me to do it his way. So what has the course been good for. It pops my set. Puts options into the air. Meantime, here's this place, which has a lot of baskets everywhere, and little pots of fake flowers, fake scent from plugged-in dispensers, a lot of mirrors, toffee-brown walls here and there, no clear spaces, a jumble of furniture and little decorative objects and textile patterns. I'm cringing back from it all the time. On the other hand, I've looked nice in the many mirrors. I don't look bad naked, not as bad as I thought. 5 Not so grumpy this morning, open sky, bike tires filled and chain oiled so it's rideable, no appointments though I have to write evals all week, coffee and a few NY Times at Bean Brothers, leafy neighbourhood. 6 Hello. Sun on the roses that come pressing onto the long window. Tuesday eight o'clock. Ry Cooder singing Across the borderline, not as well as Willie Nelson who sings it with aching simplicity. I looked at Tom's Facebook page last night, his old ugly groupies who praise whatever he says, ached that he is what he is, that that's what he has. Email from Luke yesterday with a photo of University College hospital 1929. "The place I was born has been demolished this summer. The Hospital Trust head archivist cheerfully walked with me in the sun and apologized, which was sweet ...." Mad Men marathon last night, 50s men in their entitled boorishness, 50s women in their elaborately outfitted slavishness. Thirty something from the same milieu but thirty years later, Michael and Hope realer, Melissa possible, anguish more mentioned. No one in the Mad Men era could have written Mad Men. 7 Cutting and pasting the Tia letters all morning. Their naturalness, the naturalness of letters. 8 When I woke thinking of 824 before I left, its beautiful order, the life I had going - the doc, Louie, the garden, Tom, the book, California and Strathcona - its level my furthest - that I got to by building in place through 26 years - now knowing I will not be able to build to anything like that level again - I don't have time - I'll go on having meager marginal years in a reduced space - It was a mistake to move to CA    no I should somehow have kept going with Being about     I've deadended myself     Should I soon leave [the college]    no Will I get fired    no Shd I skip into the BA    no Port Townsend MAFIA    no Is this because I got turned down for the loan    no My heart hurts     I don't like living here     But I have to     Will I ever have a full life again     Should I move back to Van     no Berkeley    no Arizona    no New Mexico     I should move to New Mexico    YES Jump    YES Or NYC    YES   Will you talk to me    exclusion, action, fight, truth Fight for truth?     Of my situation     Is there something I don't know     About Tom     Something he did    no Something about me     That he seduced me from my right path     no Are you sure it's about Tom    YES Will you tell me    partial loss, balance, improvement, processing I'm still in a state of loss     Which will improve if I balance by processing     You mean I've been ignoring the loss       Will you talk to me about money     VanCity isn't going to work     8 Credit union has said no, my mom's bank account is drained by Paul buying her good furniture, Louie called this morning in her beleidicht brat mode so I can't ask her for anything. It will have to be the credit card at 21.5% per annum. Went to the TD bank and made sure I could do that. Rowen saying it's urgent to phone him and then being unphoneable. Mary clear, not complaining. Luke phoning - the way it is with him - pleasure of fit. And what's up with Louie. She left me feeling abandoned - what happens when she insists on being her baby, I realized today, is that I feel alone. I get disgusted and stoical: alright I'll have to do it with the credit card, I'm on my own. Meantime between all of these phone calls and figurings I washed my hair, did laundry and got all but two of the evals written. Still have to write the lecture blurbs for Ruth's schedule. Set up the teeth appointments, SFU med appointment. Louie's demands what they always were, unsorted, indirect, projecting. It's the same feeling as Lise's demands this semester, icky, somehow terrorizing, unclean. It's not straight anger or accurate calling out, it is vile crooked irresponsible amorphous guilting. I feel like a man with it, inwardly stunned into blank defense while trying awkwardly to give her what she wants. What a poisonous little spirit that is, the way it shocks the day. It makes me want never to see her again. Do you want to say anything about it     Is it as vile as it feels     Is it because of the money    no Because I praised Tia    no Because of the joke I made about white people     NO Is there a particular reason     Always the same reason    no Because of the polite questions    no Are the polite questions wrong    no Because on some level I don't like her    NO Because on some level she doesn't like me    no Because of something actual about her     no Because of something actual about me     no Old structure in her    YES She asks me polite questions all the time    YES Should I drop her for a while    YES Because it's abusive     Can you tell me what it is    YES anger, (Knc), love woman, despair Anger and despair that I don't look for love woman    YES That I don't see her as -     She wants me to be a home for love woman     Is it something I should do for her    YES And someone should do for me     I wasn't seeing her as love woman     Because she wasn't being it     It's her way of trying to turn me into a man    YES I evoke man in her     Shoulders     And rationality     Support her love woman     Is there more you want to say    NO It's my anger at Tom too     no An aspect of it     Are you sure that's it     9 Good dreams. I was at Western Front and saw an arrangement of lights and tables that made me think I could have photos on the surrounding walls and writing on table set in a rectangle in the center, people could sit at the tables and read. On the wall in the outhouse a little construction of pebbles and writing. Cryptic, but I could read it, an exquisite use of words. Later someone gave me the piece dissolved, a handful of pebbles. I was going to try to reconstruct it. It was maybe a Japanese artform. With a child playing on the floor, lying on our backs and scooting through a tunnel made of some kind of curtain. 10 Yesterday went better, a young man at Vancity was sophisticated and respectful. I got tax forms and began to fill them out, stopped at the Sinclair Building and talked to a reassuring gay man about OAS, began to fill out those forms. Got to Rowen finally. Louie sent another kind of note. Ran into Jules on the bus - used to be the bee man at the garden. Rowen said he'd paid a thousand of his own money on the boat so I need to find less. Walked four blocks downtown easily without pain. 11 Evals are done! 12 I need something. Can I make it for myself. Absorbing difficult important intellectual work Beautiful easy-moving health Honest honorable devotion Adequate livelihood Daily open-heartedness, realness - OAS application is in. 14 Closed the G&F account yesterday after how many years, moved into that neighbourhood when I was 31? The young woman asked why I was closing the account and I held back tears. Then on the street with an official check for $3983 looking at that corner on Hastings wishing never to see it again, grey dereliction, the Woodbine Hotel's scabby pediment opposite the bus stop where I'd stood so many years. So now Canadian taxes are filed, OAS applied for at probably maximum status, which will mean 12 x 518 = 6216 a year, Louie has lent me $3000 so there is over $7000 in the [Vancity] account, enough for Rowen. I can be completely caught up with what I owe Rowen by my next birthday, and then with pension and the [the college] 301 will be saving at least $8000 a year so I shd be able to afford a housetruck by my 68th birthday, 2013, which will also be the year I'm up to 40 points for US SSI. This morning I read through my Tom email file for last summer and it was such a home feeling that I wondered why I wd give up on such a suitable sweetie. I got back in August and by November I gave up. So ready to feel I wasn't loved. Should I go back to him    no Why not    withdrawn, child, in friendship, with Tom Child stays too withdrawn     I shut down too much     [notes from Nussbaum The fragility of goodness: an excellent life Pindar Joy, too, strains to track down eyes that it can trust, "eyes on whose understanding, good will and truthfulness he can rely." the way lies can make the world rotten the special beauty of the contingent and the mutable that much that I did not make goes towards making me whatever I shall be praised or blamed for being; that I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods and that circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help being false to something or doing some wrong. in fact in the natural history of human beings Aeschylus Euripides Hecuba Sophocles Antigone Plato Protagoras, Phaedo, Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus most people, when asked to generalize make claims that are false to the complexity and the content of their actual beliefs. They need to learn what they actually think. They do not understand that it is by being at variance with itself that it coheres with itself. Heraclitus quoted by Nussbaum our wrongly expecting an explanation, whereas the solution of the difficulty is a description. Wittgenstein Zettel 314 It will frequently be difficult for a single human being to honor simultaneously the claims of gods as different as, for example, Artemis and Aphrodite, and yet each human being is obliged to honor all of the gods. I have a central doubt in this book, and it's the notion of human goodness. She lets it slide between a sense of social duty and a sense of personal efficacy, "a good life," and where I doubt is something about standards? I don't expect myself to honor all the gods. It seems to me that humans are of many kinds and each kind honors the god of that kind - division of labor. However, when she talks about tragic conflict I have my strong example, what it was like to leave Jamila, knowing I was giving up sublime companionship, a level I'd never find again. The whole maelstrom of Dames rocket. There was also leaving Frank, and in another way the whole time with Tom, in which I did for a long stretch manage a description that was a solution. Work within a network of more concrete and informal distinctions rather than with this dichotomy. The doing of irreparable harm to another person, violation of antecedent commitment involving major values Arete my one memory of Duncan's lectures in philosophy. a whole tragic drama is capable of tracing the history of a complex pattern of deliberation, showing its roots in a way of life and looking forward to its consequences in that life. people who wish to live together and share a conception of value Stylistic choices - the selection of certain meters, certain patterns of image and vocabulary - are taken to be closely bound up with a conception of the good. Animal sacrifice, from which Greek tragedy, in Burkert's view, derives its name, expresses the awe and fear felt by this human community toward its own murderous possibilities. By ritually acting out the killing of an animal, not a human victim, and by surrounding even this killing with a ceremony indicative of the killers' innocence and their respect for life, the sacrificers distance themselves from, and at the same time acknowledge, the possibilities of human slaughter that reside in human nature. Function of police procedurals on TV. ataurotos not-bulled, ritual term designating virginity! consistency in conflict bought at the price of self deception reared in a mythology of autochthony that suppresses the biological role of the female "The good agent" - in that phrase I can feel a sense of good organism - a well-structured organism that decides optimally - and her point in understanding emotion as praise- or blame-worthy. It's excellence of body, as excellence of tree or car. In this feeling-out of it, assessment is not like Christian assessment, toward that characteristic moralistic sensation of 'goodness' or 'badness' - it needs to be said better than that, it's a freer more neutral assessment of quality. I judge students that way - Todd is an excellent being, is ambitious, responsible, alert, sensitive etc - and Andy is not an excellent being, he cuts corners, he's unclear and chaotic, he doesn't address what needs to be addressed. There's pleasure and distaste in these judgments. appreciation of the complexity of the claims upon us where suffering is the appropriate acknowledgment An old fashioned notion of praise and blame linked to notions of will and control. Passion, imagination, sensitivity are not thought to be controllable by will so the agent isn't 'responsible' for them. And yet having or not having will is itself not controllable by will. She's writing in defense of feeling as an aspect of excellence of decision; it needed more saying in 1986 and in the context of philosophy, but - what? Is she cutting it short? In philosophy the notion of commitments to principles thought of as rule-statements, and an effort to make the whole set consistent. - He insisted that there be only one prize, called Third Prize, because the entries were so bad. He analyzed my keeping a journal and rejected the idea. I must abandon it, he said. It was just a way of anthologizing experience. A writer is not a writer because things happened around him. 108 The very earth underneath the city shrank, because London is built on thirsty clay. Theroux 1998 Sir Vidia's shadow McClelland & Stewart 15 Shooting neuralgic pains this time up the R side of my head - sore teeth, sore throat. Have approx 3 weeks to prep this mighty lecture. Mo: I love Ellie's honesty and her passion for integrity and intelligent work. I entered [the college] because I wanted someone to challenge me, to help me work beyond my comfort zone and she did all of that ... Ellie always made a point of highlighting the things that I did well. This was always followed up by critiques that made me reevaluate my work, my theories and the credibility of everything I wrote or even cited. She is an extremely intelligent woman who is strong, and never apologizies for her honesty (I mean that as a compliment!). She embodies her beliefs and I really respect that. It is very clear that she has first hand experience with doing hard research that was both academic and personal. I believe this work and her background were critical in her ability to offer me so much feedback ... I always admire people who can do the academic work as well as the personal work. It is very clear that she has done and continues to do both. Rani: Ellie's really good at tapping the pulse of her students, I think. She's good at surprising people into producing material they might not have expected to write. Zach: Ellie is a wonderful advisor and embodies the quintessence of what the advisor/advisee relationship is about. But also this, which was a little dart: I wish that Ellie had a little more hope and faith in humanity. I think she would like this, and I think it would help her bring her love into the foreground. Is that accurate?     NO Do I overpraise him     no He's guilty about privilege     Like Emilee     Shd I have more faith and hope in humanity    no Accurate about individuals    YES I shd bring love to the foreground     I'm often disappointed     He needs to have illusions about people     16 This book [Milo Wolff] is bad, a lot of typos, it repeats in a sloppy way, many times, its language isn't thought-through, he keeps talking about particles after he's said there aren't particles, his mind isn't the best but he has to be approximately right. I can believe the mass of quantum physicists are wrong because their mistake is like the mistake of the representation theorists in phil of mind who don't imagine propagated alteration of structure in a material, and are caught in a metaphor. In both instances it's a metaphor that makes them imagine an object, 'a particle,' 'a representation,' 'an image.' In both cases spatial imagining is what makes a difference. Instead of 'particle,' wave-center, space resonance. Instead of quantum say subatomic. Space density instead of curved space. Wave optics. "This is how waves behave." - Elizabeth Jolley 1923-2007 Birmingham, London, Perth, orchard, dementia at 77. - I'm in Cusco. My father died day before yesterday. This morning I dreamed that a friend pointed out something in the garden on the land in Wisconsin. I turned and saw two whole arms laying on the black earth like from a girl teen. They were on an area of turned over soil different from the garden in full growth. In the dream I thought, oh yes, this had been a crime scene not yet finished. When I woke and talked it over with a friend I realized it was my arm coming back, from my childhood experience with my father. I no longer carry his wound or the effects of it. I am given a gift now here in Peru and from my father and us both letting go. Is Jaes understanding her dream correctly     no Her arms are still severed     Was it an instruction    no Something still to do     Arms mean aggression?     no, action Something her teenage self didn't do     She laid down her arms     Can I tell her I think it means there's more to do     Will it be done if she writes vol 2    no Is there something particular     Can you tell me what    YES truth about defeat of action needed to come through Truth about her father    no, grandfather Area of turned over soil, what she's been writing about     Handless maiden    YES 17 I need to complain. Have I really been here 19 days. It has been deterioration. I shd not stay in other people's places. I look grey and exhausted and I ache, my right leg now hurts the most, knee, hip and poor thin calf and thigh. I don't stretch, don't bike, don't slow breathe, my throat hurts, I'm languid. The first weeks I watched TV till my eyes blurred, zapping through channels 3 to the grey dirt at 56 and then hitting 3 again. I've read whatever books I can find. I'm yearning for my bright roof and its disciplines. I need to leave and there's nowhere to go. I haven't booked the physical because I don't want to know how much I weigh. I haven't booked the tooth cleaning though all my teeth hurt, as they haven't for a year or two, at all. No one is emailing. All my money has to be dedicated to repaying Rowen. My forehead feels scowling and my mouth compressed. There's no one I want to be with. This neighbourhood is full of old people, I'm careless with eating, I lose discipline because there's no one I care to impress. I have to go to Abbotsford and deal with Luke's boxes, lug them about, rent a car I have to drag on the bus to get to, I hate the long Arbutus bus slog, I don't like this neighbourhood at all. I hate the bland blank Globe and Mail. I'm depressed by Jan's place it seems. Have to go see the anxious remains of my mother. Elizabeth Jolley was gripping but bleak. She got down the way I am now, calling the gone loves and places, cycling through them in the same way year after year. How Rowen is. He was at the door looking different, older, a thinner longer less balanced less pretty face. When he had his wet hair slicked back I could see that it is beginning to shrink back at the temples, an inlet on either side. His mouth is still sweet and plump. His eyes were smaller. He's thin, a thin droopy torso. A fond boy, startling into a big laugh when I tell him stories. He dresses oddly. Doesn't have rooted strength in the way he stands. He's a grateful person, feels things are going his way. Made Michael cry yesterday telling him he'd been perfect as a father. Gets crushes on quirky girls. "She's just adorable." Good things: These grey cargos that still ride well on my rump Sunny garden at the window Tax and OAS being done Not being poor, pension steady increment The sky room The jeep and its journeys Having most of W&D done Having DR still to do Finding wave structure theory Luke's friendship Row being pleased with himself   Can you tell me anything about this crummy health    passage from difficulty, action, losses, turn for the better Is this about why I'm sick    no About how it's going to go     The kind of action I've been trying     no Life improvement things     Love     But not sex    no Should I be looking for a new man     Are you changing your mind     18 Is there a name for this sensation, jaundiced? Discouraged, disgusted. "I wish Ellie had a little more hope and faith in humanity. I think she wd like this, and I think it wd help her bring her love to the foreground." I am disgusted by humanity and the disgust is bad for me though it's accurate. What do I mean by humanity. The people on TV. The ranks of new novels in the bookstore. I'm grateful to see quality anywhere, and where I see it I have to know it is quality of a moment not of a whole life or being. It will lapse. And oh I hate knowing this crummy health will get more and more permanent, till there's pain always. I don't want to be everywhere an unloveable old woman, feeling ugly. I had come to my mate a shocked being, agog, a salt dab in his creel, girl in oil, his dish. I had not known that one could approve of someone entirely - one could wake to the pungent day, one could awake from the dream of judgment. Olds Fish oil in 2007 The unswept room Knopf 19 I read two poems about her husband and burst into sobs. Mary's institution like a motel for people in walkers. [Tabor Court, Abbotsford] 20 My stars are in a mess. Some things turning well and others bad, bad. Pain from my right hip down, never stops, aspirin only dims it a bit. Sore throat. Feverish dull feeling. And now there I am on 41st Ave staring at my bike lock realizing the key isn't on the ring. No immediate way to cut the chain. Have to get home on my aching leg. Yesterday in David's little truck the long ordeal for all of us, getting the boxes, bringing them to Global Shipping. I don't have the energy to write about it. Just need to say the boxes are delivered, and Jason this morning said Vancity is approving a $5000 credit line subject to doable small conditions we are already looking after. But I can't get up from a couch without hurting or sleep without aspirin. Louder hiss all the time. 21 All I got done today - thorough annual physical - sat with Jason for an hour - sent change of address fax to Equifax - tracked TD labyrinths in India and probably Ontario until at last there was someone who could tell us who to fax - Jason wrote the letter asking for a credit amendment and copied passport and got a letter from TD for himself - and there I was some late for Reach Dental but had teeth cleaned and Dr Sever's checkup anyway - meantime the young woman at West Point Cycles went to cut my bike's cable and took it back to the shop, where I arrived just before they closed at 6. 23 11 days till the res. I've frittered many but have got most of the business duties done. Was somewhere wanting to look up my income on a little computer that I couldn't figure out. Realized I was far out into the country and it was night. When a headlight was coming past on the road I dipped the computer's light into the sand. It would be dangerous to be seen. Thought of walking back in the dark, having to hide whenever there was traffic. No I'll just burrow into the sand and sleep here, the sand will be warm. I did that and woke in daylight. My lectures are still unformed. Why are there two. So I don't have to do a workgroup. Do I need two? I don't know yet, what am I wanting to learn. How to imagine materiality, how to visualize it. What is wrong with the physics we're taught. What is alternative to it. Is there something right about intuitions of immateriality, and the wish to say there's only 'consciousness'. Stability and instability of pattern Matter and energy aren't different substances What is energy? What is matter? Are they different things? Are they things at all? I don't trust the men of physics who are the priests of science. They want an esoteric exclusionary vision. The students tend to some version of matter-spirit dualism, including matter-energy. The vision I love is a one-world vision, matter which is energy. It is partly a matter of language, which is also a matter of visualizing. Is the Tantric psychology really related, and how. Imagining the universe in a way that lets us feel ourselves part of something marvelous and beyond us. Tantric psychology - open possibility - less locked down theory that tells us what we are implies the limits of our possibilities. 25 Sunday morning - head clicking on about health - Louie coming at 10 - the cleaner - have to get into action very soon, laundry and packing - got a lot of the lecture blocked out yesterday. 28 Wandered into GW11-1 and -2, summer 1997 and when I'm there in the deepest realest struggle with Tom I can't believe we aren't going on. We have to go on. No, it says. Say more     be valiant, about Tom, for improvement, of love woman I was perfect with him then     And am not now    no Now it is perfect to give up     Are you sure     Because he is unable    no Because I am    no Because of new things to do       Will you talk to me about this health situation     Do I have post polio     Do I have temporal arteritis    no Trigeminal neuralgia     Tooth related    no Thrush    no Strep     no Respiratory infection     Will my sedimentation rate be down     Will she want me to do a biopsy    no Will myalgia keep getting worse     no Will sore throat clear up in a week    no Two     no Three     Will hip yoga fix the leg problems     no But will they stop some time this year     Will I be walking well again     Will that summary help her     Polymyalgia rheumatica     no Should I take meds for hypertension    no Will slow breathing fix it    no Long fast again    no Can anything fix it     Emotional work    no Weight loss    no Is hypertension harming me    no Harming my kidneys    no Will neuralgia recur    YES Often    no Do I have arthritis    NO Autoimmune disorder     no Will she be able to figure out the mystery thing    no Wd estrogen fix it     Is it important to lose weight     no But I shd lose 6 lb     Can I do it just with carbs     Will I get caught with health card     no Will there be pension deposited this month     Will I need to use the loan    no Is it true there'll be major changes     no Will I get back together with Tom    no Will I want to     NO Will he    no I'll be lonely     no How not    come through, perfected work, deep change, uncon I have come through to deep change of uncon    YES I don't need Tom anymore    YES Because I did my work     And he did too    no I would have liked real intimacy     I hoped for it    YES He wasn't capable     He's not honest enough     He didn't want it enough     It's a deep sad loss    YES I still want it    YES I have to go on without it    no How not    decision, to deal with, evasive, aloneness Is that what you mean    no Evasion of something     Evasion of (hermit)     I evade something     Will you say what    whatever you evade Could I have had that intimacy with Susan     no I evade feeling     I need Joyce!    no I'm not capable of the real thing    no Noon at the Union Street Market 8 years since it was my neighbourhood. Sheila on the street says she's 80. Street trees have burgeoned. I have nothing to tell. Don't have temporal arteritis. Have a $5000 credit line at Vancity. Rowen has $6500 to finish paying for his boat. Luke's boxes are delivered and Mary's money paid off. Can taxes filed, OAS applied for, Louie's bike fixed, Jan's house cleaned, 6 days till the res. I owe Louie $3000. Keep evading the lectures, don't know why. Louie explained what's been happening to my legs last night - hip sockets loosening so the femur isn't positioning well. That tells me what to do. Still boxes to look after. Rug to Rowen, quilt and teddy bear Videos to Jo Ann? Film stuff where? Shredding or burning, 2 boxes Images - scan and dump? Video In transfer of 4 tapes Trapline prints x2 Lose 6 lb - Find Wikipedia has removed the wave structure of matter pages - "heterodox" says the page removal discussion. Will Rowen deal well with the boat     Will he get student loans     Will he spend the remaining money foolishly     Then be willing to earn       Dr Ranger isn't very good    no   part 2 in america volume 21: 2010 june - december work & days: a lifetime journal project