| in america 6 part 5 - 2004 october-november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
11 October 2004 It's Monday. I whacked through letters on the weekend. Favor, Larry, Layla, Patricia. Did my usual decisive chopping and as usual am wondering whether I'm too much. No one replying to my standards letter. If I want people to reply I have to be more deferential. I have turned out to be the program's heavy hitter. The rules in this game say that if you hit the ball out of the park everyone goes away and leaves you staring at the lights on your own. I've just sighed because that has happened a lot in this program. It happens all day long with the students, but it happens with faculty too. I was going to say I'm still in La Glace Alberta but in La Glace Alberta I didn't hit the ball. I withheld. Now I don't withhold, I hit the ball, but I do it in a space of my own. Sub specie aeternitatus. As if witnessed by someone larger than whoever I have available. I carry that solitude around with me, it's my aura. In bed last night I was listening to a man on Art Bell who was saying he was born into a family of Satan worshippers who tortured him into giving up his soul so it could be replaced by the family demon. The purpose of the transaction was to gain wealth and power in this world. (His people were churchgoers.) When he was 17 he was institutionalized as insane and there saw soul theft - people from one day to another made tractable and robotic and sent home. In one of his out-of-body travels he was shown a crystal city on the moon, which is the depot harvested souls are shipped through. In 2000 he prayed to god to help him and god did; he spoke within him and said he was his loving father. Maybe the crystal city on the moon is the brain. Are people ever crazy all the way through? It says no. This man was more or less sane but he was trying to make up a metaphysics that would account for his experience. He doesn't have a basic framework to accommodate <symbolic meaning> - do I have another way to say that - I had to do quite a long apprenticeship in <symbolic meaning> - it is part of the itinerary - I've ended not being very interested in it but had to work through a captivation. As if one of the things Work & days can show is an itinerary for female intelligence that is quite other than the schools'. I was starting to draft that, in that document [embodiment studies] -
Okay so I'm at [my college] working out an educational philosophy primarily for women - is that it? That's why I'm not doing mind & land, or seeing & 'seeing', or beautiful Orpheus. - Michael is sick today, sniffling, silent. So beautiful, all the way up and down. I want to eat him up, just sit there sucking him into me. I don't do that. And so then I want to rent an apartment and live with him and feed him right and make him well. Give him a clean beautiful space to grow up in. (I mean 'want' in a very dim way.) (He doesn't want a clean beautiful place, he wants a dirty stinking place full of birds, reptiles and bugs.) Anyway, it's lust and not useful to him though it is to me in the sense that it's keeping me from weakening with Tom. I guess it's the brain balancing. It isn't a crush of the old kind, I'm not afraid of it, I'm not particularly elaborating it. Because I know it isn't going to trap me I can just luxuriate in the velvet buzz of it. It's a physicality. I dress and walk better. I'm nice to him. His beautiful mouth is there in front of my eyes when I lie down. Is there more to say? No. 14 I dreamed that I had been hearing in many places that men work hard at their jobs but women don't care. - Poked at my garden plot some, rocks, the dried-out roses at the fence. I haven't seen anyone in that community I like. Still have the second readerships, Anne and Astro, but my lot are done. I wrote Amanda very affectionately, she liked Coleridge's journals, and wrote few but good short annotations. I took a breath and said letting Sequoia hold onto another woman is making her a ringed cormorant. Something is wrong with the jeep. When I'm starting out in first gear there's sometimes a hard jerk. The worst would be the transmission. It's not always, but it was a number of times, maybe half a dozen. Another thing is that I had very little strength working on my plot. Moving a rock would take my breath. That's not like me. It might have been lack of water. The spot on my arm, though, has healed to new skin. 15 Dreaming about Muggs. Someone at a Chinese newspaper phoned me about her. At the end of the conversation he said that she died an hour ago. That summary is very inexact, but I haven't the will to write it better. I'm just noting it in case it turns out to be true. What might be true instead is that my community garden self is dead. Juniper-Front is not Strathcona Community Garden. It's Friday morning, covered over. It's my free week apart from Anne and Astro. Check my gardens, some work at Taft. Plant sale Saturday morning. Felipe's party Saturday evening. Get to the hills a night or two? I'm very behind on money, about 2500 on credit cards and expenses coming up for about 1650. 16 The new scanner is working. Saturday morning, Balboa Park. It's the plant sale today. - The sale was so exciting I'm not wanting to settle down. I bought two boxes of plants, one for the Dawne slope, one for me. Am sorry Michael Duke and I are not speaking because I wd like someone to tell or show. It's the plant tizzy. Ceanothus! Eriogonum! Quercus! Cercocarpus! Encelia! Manzanita, ashy-leaf buckwheat. Why Michael Duke and I are not speaking is not known. He was friendly when he caught me going up my steps, but next morning he was in a sulk. But I'm at fault really because I made a move I shouldn't have. I told him I liked looking at him and then after that felt shy, or he felt moved-in-on, or something else I don't know. So now unless we clear the air we will be reading newspapers at separate tables. I was peeping at him so avidly that it felt wrong and I wanted to make an honest woman of myself. I didn't think it out, I just stood up and handed it to him. He said, like a teenager, a little stiffly, And you're a beautiful lady too. The word 'lady.' But then he said he needed a hug and got one. So I don't know.
- And at that point Tom walked in. I played him Favor's CD and he listened carefully and wrote notes. I entertained myself taking pictures of him and then when he started his "Do I have any hope" game, I carried him to the book. The book said, what matters is, are you being good for you, and he said "mindfulness" and "passionate sense of purpose." He said he'd been thinking I could help him make a web page and he could start posting Casual Labor paragraph by paragraph and dedicate it to Mathew and Joseph. I said that was a good idea and showed him Fetch. Then I opened Pagemill and said, Look I can do this, and dragged one of the digital photos I'd just loaded into the background box, and there he was - charcoal sweatshirt, red plaid and two areas of blue-white glare from the windows. So then I typed
into the illuminated air above his belly. Take the u out of labour, he said. I changed the black type to a bluish charcoal keyed to the sweatshirt, took the by-lines down a point, and there it is, impressive. I'm amazed at the photos I can take with this little unserious camera, not even able to see the frame. What do I like about this web page - the red, charcoal and blue-white surrounding a face. It's immediate. Person on R, white light on L. Strong and casual. I miss transcribing and am done with GW and so I started a volume of Aphrodite's garden at random and there found such another texture, someone I've forgotten I was. Closer to drugs. Very small handwriting. I'll know more. What I most like to read now are the notes on baby Rowen. 17 Winter. It rained this morning. It's dark when I wake. I have to do Anne and Astro and feel rebellious. I don't want to get into their little heads, I want something of my own.
This is reactivation. I can say that and then there's nothing further to say. It's true nonetheless that I spend my days and nights alone, and that I'm starved for play and touch and company, and have no likelihood, and no clue how to give myself more.
18 Well Mr Tom there I have you. In black and white. My man! You take a good picture, even when you're fat. How do you do that. Don't you ever die on me. I'm glad you're back. 19 Did I say that? I'm doubtful about whether I mean it.
20th Working with the scanner last night. It's good on photos. This week for rain. I'm pushing to get volume 1 posted. It is complicated and I need to figure out how to go ahead. First, the bookwork for vol 1 is in notebooks and untranscribed. July-Dec has almost three of them and I can't transcribe all that and don't even want to reread it. And yet I should because the bookwork set up what happens in GW. When I look at the summary for the fasting period I see it's foretelling the next ten years' trying and failing and slow restructuring. Second, there needs to be a GW introduction and I haven't written it yet. There also needs to be a bookwork introduction. - I realized then that it was what he was born to do and what he did. It was the foundation of his inner dignity to care. In that moment I began to understand human men in a way that I never had before, and my fear of them began to lessen. I began to see that the core of my being was a great deal like this male core: looking on from the outside, blank-faced, with a deep and abiding need to protect and comfort in a world where my ways of feeling and acting no longer had context. Congo, a man of sacrifice and ferocity, showing his core and his invisible strength in a jail built by those he loves, inspired me to open up and extend my heart to the world around me. I would no longer allow the great permeability of my spirit to lead me to seek smaller and smaller shelters. Dawn Prince-Hughes Songs of the gorilla nation 22nd The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." The aide told Mr Suskind, "That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality." Bob Herbert's Bush Blinkers column NYT A23 today's date Another piece this week described a survey of beliefs of Bush's supporters. A large percentage still believe there were banned weapons, and that Hussein was linked to Al Queda. They see Bush as defending them, against all evidence. Desperate denial. Kerry being photographed in camo with a shotgun, an aide carrying a dead goose. He can't win unless he pretends to be as cut-off as Bush. That means in this wealthiest of countries the denial is in at least 50%. It puzzles me that Christians are so in love with the war. I have to think it means they are not really Christians. That means their leadership is rotten. They aren't being taught. A culture of denial. If Bush's notion of god and theirs were true, this would be Satan's universe. Has lying seized what used to be god's? I don't feel the universe is wicked. I understand being against abortion but I can't understand being anti-abortion and pro-death-penalty and casually pro-war. It's patriarchy, it's patriarchal recidivism, it's a story Le Guin tells again and again, the strict father culture struggling against the change to egalitarian families. Oh the devastation - The British aid worker kidnapped in Iraq is videotaped pleading Help me, help me. Margaret someone, who'd worked for the Iraqis thirty years. The intelligent design people campaigning to put creationism into the high school curriculum. Are we being dragged into a dark ages by the demagogues who want to be emperors? Nothing reasonable is working. The investigations are there, the news reports are there, democratic process doesn't work without an intelligent electorate. I'm feeling nothing can stop the alliance of the stupid and the evil. The deniers need to be won into egalitarian freedom by generosity not imitation. There needs to be a truly Christian community within the authoritarian strongholds. Truly Christian means recovered early love. Clinton didn't need to pose in camo with a dead goose. Kerry doesn't have liberated radiance. One question though - is it possible that Bush's war has pulled the Islamic activists into war in Iraq and thus kept them busy? Sacrificing the citizens of another country rather than one's own. Apart from the 1000 dead and 10,000 injured and how many, 100,000? wrecked veterans to come. It's wrong but did it work? No because the economic damage to the US of fighting the war is more than anything terrorists could have wished for. The war is doing incalculable damage. It's not even oil, it's simply George's oedipal madness. - [NYT clipping about Wangari Maathai's Nobel] Yesterday I learned some about style sheets but I don't know how to work them with Pagemill. Today I was out the door looking for breakfast while the day was blue and cool. Went to Dawne with plants in the jeep, two ceanothus, a manzanita, a buckwheat, a mountain mahogany, a coyote bush, a false indigo, a willow. I'm smelling honeysuckle taken from the flowing cascades of it that are so good a groundcover. The yellow abutilon is filling out. The earlier ceanothus is starting to bloom again. The ivy-gone-tree is blooming so that it is smothered in honey bees. The red passiflora is running beautifully along the top of the fence. I've put the encelia where the mullein was. The lemonadeberry is standing up visible now, and what's that other thing below the ceanothus - a chaparral thing.
- sez LC, By the rivers dark
23 I thought Tom might be too pigheaded to like Ten new songs but he'd only heard two bars of the intro when he said it was good. We sat together on the couch listening all the way through with the lyric sheet in his hand. Saturday morning. He said my shoulder felt light and feathery. Then we went to the garden plot and chopped at the hardpan. Lasted an hour and went for lunch at Tacos y Papas. Should I say that when I talked about not being able to afford rent he brought up the Section 8 mortgage program, which sounds too good to be true. I said he should go for disability money and any pension he can get, go to school, volunteer. Get income security and then figure out what he really wants to do. He said OB web radio. Leonard Cohen 2001 Ten new songs Sony - I am avoiding Michael Duke not very successfully. Yesterday driving past Starbucks I saw the outside seats empty and thought it was safe to come back and read the paper. There he was sitting inside, so friendly it was awkward being noncommittal. Today when I drove past Starbucks after dropping Tom at the mission he wasn't sitting outside though it was warm. I parked in front of Lips and when I opened the door to step out there he was arriving with the most perfect timing. He was wearing an odd pale blue sweater and is always so surprisingly tall. 24 Sunday night. Listening to Drudge. His particular vitriol for strong Democrat women. "Elizabeth Edwards comes across as a cuddle-muffin" (was it that?) "but she's actually a lawyer." "Teresa is a little too nuts to be in the Whitehouse." Backlash. It scares me. I feel personally despised in this climate. It's the kids in La Glace. It is, too. It's them, their mystifying spite and crudeness. And there are more of them, so many. Familiar sore heart. Small. Holding-myself-together sore heart. "The country is divided between urban and the rest." Argument about the Electoral College, if they abolish it and have majority vote the cities will win, ie the modernized. Why would the rural and small town be authoritarian and jingoistic? Bush has slashed taxes for the rich even more, a huge cut. Why would people who kill routinely on their farms be more anti-abortion? Do rural people buy into the strict father model because they haven't had an experience of an egalitarian family model - for instance reading it, the way I did? Everywhere [in the country] the smart people exiting, the way we did, because we could. So the Electoral College enfanchises the stupid disproportionately. That's why the US is more backward than Canada or Europe, is it as simple as that? In some states by a factor of four to one. Electoral fraud being set up in Florida. Why would the urban be less frightened of accomplished women? Why would the stupid be more frightened? Reintegrate the smart people into small communities and even churches. Could web jobs do that? It's true the communities are too sorted, so that the urban tip into corruption. Isn't Vermont an example of a place where the modern have recolonized the rural? 26 I went to my plot and hacked at the subsoil. When I start I make five strokes with the pick and feel my heart so feeble it scares me. And then after a while I could keep going. Tuesday night, they're saying it'll rain tomorrow. I had an email from Logan this morning. He said field & field is hospitable, seductive and located precisely, and that he might want to use it when he teaches a class in "free verse, open field and line breaks." He is fond and as if concerned, how am I, he wants to know, and Maggie half an hour after I found his note writing that her semester with me was the only semester she didn't hate. 27 Favor. Had a hippy mom, schizophrenic, stoned, with a mad brother and a Jesus-believer sister and a 300-pound mother who got beaten up by her men. An unknown father who had lost his own parents, was adopted; abandoned his own kids with many mothers. Childhood in the country, very material. From that history Favor makes herself a marvel of soft attention, someone who can see and say what she sees. She is able to make money, marry. She's 33 (my guess) and born a week before Luke. This work will be published. 28 Bread & Cie. Rain pouring down. It is the wettest October in California's record. There are two mothers with three little kids at the next table. I hate them. I hate the false voices of the mothers and the blank clambering and trotting of the kids. They're so loud. They are taking so long to leave. - What else. Tom. Dropped in yesterday. I was glad to see him but I should hold my line. I am relieved not to be in anguish. I want the misery to be over. I want not to have to talk to myself anymore about Tom or any other one like him. I want that phase to be done. but I don't want there to be nothing. The journal phase is over too. I'll keep doing this but there isn't the drive and precision that used to make it worth reading - I know that. I've been railing at that death of giftedness but I'm starting to think I will have to get used to this very reduced life. All there is in it with any quality is the teaching letters, the residency lectures, and I guess maybe a kind of harvesting, looking after the work of other times, teaching from it. (It sighed.) When I say residency lectures I quail, [my college] isn't a venue that matters. I'm making a living. Now my heart is hurting. Teaching, but it's very small, it's not consequential. 29 The task of learning to be disillusioned with addiction, graduating to judgment and overview, toward success in the kind of action heartbreak delayed, it said. And in exchange I have given the lyrical elf, the gifted journal, touch, joy, significant dreams, exquisite personal beauty. I am now a mountain of competence, a servant-mountain.
Here is what I should ask: is it really the fault of my other dependency, on control and command? I've taken away what balanced it, the disorders of sex and adoration. So now I have just it: the primary freezing and blanking. Is that it?
- 100,000 Iraqis dead, sez a physician survey by Iraqis themselves. 31 That little black thing on the back of my left thigh. It's black, it's hard, it is uneven in color, it has indistinct edge. I'd rather ignore it. It frightens me. I can't afford to visit a doctor here, or fly to Van to see one. November 1 Stepping into the shower I'm telling someone that I regard my body now wondering which part is going to kill me - the sticky cervix, the breast, the little black spot on the back of the thigh (that is, the skin), the heart speeding when I use the pick, the veins in my shin. I also wonder which part will ensure that I'm repulsive - my ass, my hands, my teeth, my waist, the lines above my upper lip. And which part will make me helpless and stupid - my eyes, my brain, my bones, my right foot. What do I say after I've said that. It's pomegranate season. They were $1 each at the farmer's market, large and scarred, beautifully scarred, with bits of stem and leaf attached. She explained that there are two kinds, one paler and juicier, one drier and more intense. Brought home four of those. Cut them in half in a bowl to catch the juice, then cut the half into little pieces. Then bend and twist the skin and pry out the little rubies. It's laborious. And then I eat them with a spoon. I am left chewing their little woody bones. Did several things today that I liked. Potted the new agave parryi huacacensis (or truncata?) I bought Sunday from the cactus man on University, my autistic every-Sunday cactus friend whose dog barks at me and who is listening to Garrison Kiellor under his high filter-cloth roof. It is a blue round-leaf one with very dark teeth. I have put it into a large earthenware pot with backcountry road grit for mulch. It's a pretty one and will get big enough to close the top of the pot probably. I'm in a little tizzy about the other round-leaf one I had to spray for the black mold. It has been looking miserable - not as miserable as the earlier one with 3 rosettes - but since those days of heavy and repeated rain it looks radiant. So do most of them. I go out onto the roof and adore them repeatedly in a morning. This was the kind of day that has California magic - a winter day, I now understand. There's a giddiness in it, just walking in the street under the blue sky in such light. What about it? Angle. Mildness. What else. I wrote Larry abut eudaimonia, quite joyfully, the ecumenism of sacred and secular. That was good. I'm pleased with my statement of religious philosophy. I'm pleased to be teaching a minister though so nice and humble a one. Layla wrote back that she was excited to understand what it means when she dreams she climbs onto structures to get away from big cats. I buckled myself down into structural analysis of Patricia's paper and gave her enough to be able to decide I should stop and be done with the packet letters though there are still the progress reviews. After that I looked at my desktop for something else and there was Logan's letter. Is it the moment? He says he may want to teach it this week so yes and then I feel what it's like to be writing to that sophisticated and talented person, who has loved my loneliest work, and who also loves my honour in speaking to him with my best. Who knows me, that is. As I know him too, the way people can know each other who have been intent to be and show what they are. Only those. So how was it to write him. Experimental. Lighter. He said how are you (seriously)? Meaning, tell me. So I picked things to tell which happen to be salient. Things I would tell myself, though I told them briefer. That in the past year I was in tragedy a lot. That I go to the gym in an orange singlet. That I wanted to kiss a man who has repellent dirty fingernails. "Short story with few events." He bummed cigarettes and brought a king snake in a pillowcase. I told that story falsely, and it is a sign of something, that I am making an entertaining anecdote of Michael - yes a sign of anger. I'm watching it and not repenting. Two things happened. We got close a couple of times and both jumped back. Once about his illness and deaths. He doesn't want to talk about them and I held off respectfully but it stopped my contact. Second, when I started to get sexually juiced by him I got into self interference wanting more of the juice and then being angry at not getting it. So I'm avoiding him but aware of him. I've stopped taking him in when I'm with him. I'm stonewalling, which usually I don't do. How are you doing he asks suspectingly. Fine, I say. I've stopped taking Tom in too. I don't know whether they're related. Tomorrow is the election. What else - Juliana wrote about what season it was in the digital photos from her husband's Sunday walk. She said there had been two weeks of heavy rain and now it will be summer, but in the mountains it is always cool. I could see new grass coming up from below old grass. This house is more tuned, as houses become. Red cloth under the computer, vertical scanner as a stand for a picture book, the heater like a little moderne radiator. I can leave it on when I go out. It's silent even warmth with an unnoticed quality. Collection of pots glazed in strong red, green, blue, yellow. Medicine cabinet finally scrubbed out and organized. I've been here two years in December. I know this isn't good writing. I can do the student writing still. What's the difference. Public voice. It's a good public voice, has my qualities of tonal flex and concision. But what. Out of the habit of intimacy, out of the habit of intimacy, yes. So now I'm brushing my teeth and going to bed. 2nd Open the computer to a note from Margo: You and I are in Shelley's garden. I don't remember if we are picking beans or just wandering about before the pot luck final dinner. I am experiencing the intensity of perception that some associate with drugs but I associate with a transcendent state of consciousness. It is a sense of being connected to the cosmic and it is that connection that shifts my tactile and sensory presence, even merging with the lettuce leaf. It is an ecstatic state, but rather quiet. At first I imagine that this is just one of those lovely moments that seem to happen to me from time to time. But it comes to me that the reason I have this experience is because you are carrying, in that time, an expansive vastness that I enter. I ride on your coattails. I experience the garden as you experience the garden. I am able to do this because you have that profound love and thus openness to the garden and because I am open to you. Perhaps you connect to the particular and from there to the universal but my sense is that I connect to the universal (through you) and then to the particular. I am lying on my bed with my little 3-legged doggie beside me. I reach over and affectionately put my index finger on her front paw. Suddenly I am in the presence of one of those constellations - Pleiades? I have the thought: Oh, so, that's where you come from. A sense of knowing that she in some way comes from that place in the cosmos. This translates into a whole very deep set of understandings of her heart connection to mine and how we move through the world together. This came up because M wants me to put up [on the embod web worksite] a section on 'spiritual bodies' or some such, and I have put all that stuff into an awareness section along with art and rock climbing. Wherever people want to say 'spiritual' I want to use other terms because I want to ground it. I suspect they use it when they want certain kinds of experience to be evidence of something untrue that they nonetheless want - death survival, a divine parent. I'm also thinking from Margo's piece that 'spiritual' is a word people want to use for an ineffability that actually comes from the partial unconsciousness of some ordinary function like visual perception.
She was doing what she thinks I do.
Writing to Larry I unpacked 'spiritual' as realness in feeling and connections. I think generally it means a whole complex of real feeling values, denial and therefore unconsciousness, and then a setup that contains and limits contact with them in a segregated enclave. 'Separation of church and state.' So one doesn't want to deny 'the spiritual' with people, because it includes their realness, but one also wants gently to point to the fantasy conclusion it is being used to support. And mainly one should encourage just dwelling in the experience without jumping to metaphysical conclusions. Reconnect and there will be pain, expect it, endure it as the religious essence, reconnection always within the body.
- I finished the progress reviews fast after I made a progress review table and then moved a chair to the east end of the roof to be able to sit in the sun and finish my meal. I had been sitting there a very short time - next to the gate - when a voice said hi behind me. Michael bringing the sweater I'd left fallen on the ground behind my chair. There we sat and he talked about geckos and other lizards, smiling, talking, talking. He was interested in my agaves and looked affectionately at all my plants so I considered it enough. I wasn't a baby and could see the way he is, I mean. He has to take himself elsewhere. Mom anxiety. The way we seem to monitor each other's position as we move independently around the neighbourhood, the way today I was at the gate to catch him though I had no reason to think he'd show up. 3rd Tom and I downtown last night at election central, Tom in his black leather jacket and I in my green cord, both with large Donna Frye stickers and small Kerry stickers. Tom was practicing self containment. It suited him. At the end of the evening we were sitting in the hospitality room with I think mostly teachers, watching CNN. He was gazing at the TV with a beautiful look on his face, young, serious, thinking, remote. He hadn't been replying to anything I said but I had gone on commenting in any way I wanted. We'd sit so we were touching, for instance in the foyer on a padded bench where we could watch strange beings on their way through. At the end of the evening results showed Donna Frye winning for mayor, surfer mama from PB with surfer girl long blond hair and a low strong voice. A write-in candidate, Dem, running against two 65-year-old white Republican men who split 64%. Anti-development candidate. Bush-Kerry still waiting for Ohio this morning. I had a moment of rage. We were pressing through the crowd to leave the big hall and skirted the edge of a Ke-rry! Ke-rry! group jerking large signs up and down. My way was blocked by a small but solid large-bosomed Hispanic woman jerking her little Bush/Cheney sticker toward them. I wanted her to let me through and when she didn't I gave her a shove. It was rage at all those masses of people who are knocking my kind out of influence, so that what we care about is being harmed. I was aware that either way some large number of people would be feeling that. Now about Michael. I will summarize. There is some kind of connection through the uncon. He is looking for a mother and I am looking for a lover and we spotted each other. We are both afraid of it, he because of his mourning project and because it's a mother he's looking for, I because he isn't suitable as a lover. Because we're afraid of it there has been a lot of to and fro. It will come to nothing. So says the book. It is a kind of accident. Look at the way this writing is tighter than across the page where I'm writing about the evening with Tom. Is it because here I'm abnegating. Now here is my Wednesday, bright cold dewy early November. Next Monday finishing drafts come in. Amanda hasn't shown up yet. Digging this aft with Tom. Have to earn my $1000 for embod but can I get somewhere with posting journal please - - Email from Rob saying Chris killed himself September 18, at 50. Beautiful Chris Mills, who made the bee bracelet using the lost wax technique.
4 I'm listening to Bush in a press conference. That is new. I haven't been able to bear to hear his voice. In his photos he also has not seemed as repulsive as he was - has he grown in office - somehow? He sounds and looks less devious. What happens now is that we find out what happens when our confident entitlements are pruned hard. By 'our' I mean the urban, the schooled, the cosmopolitan, the self-experienced, with our forms of corruption that are different from the corruptions of hidden shadow. And on the other side that constituency will license itself enough to discover its own errors, so that the next election will bring a backwash. In Sherbrooke it is starting to snow. "There are a few flakes." I was buying [on the phone, from Garnier] new slippers, these are done. And yesterday I bought books for Luke. I am telling that because it is exciting, I've been so tight with money. I'm also wanting to say I did things yesterday. I washed my hair, I reorganized the closet, went to the laundromat. I like the sense of having made order, having taken care of things. What did I dream. Something about a man and images. A woman showed me her report on my report. She had made something lush of it. Naked Egyptian girls in a crowd. Yesterday I wanted to talk about Anne Carson. I read her askance. Margo says I get the $1000 regardless. - Got paid today and went to Amvets. 3 pr moss green socks, beautiful zipfront moss tweed sweater, v fine Indian cotton green white and black plaid shirt, moleskin dk green pants. The sweater is good. The pants fit across the rump and are a good color. 6 Today it went badly with Tom. He brought 3 CDs and played them all. He brought a book about physics and dreaming. He walked in the door and said FISH! which he has done the last three times he's come. He motor-mouthed. He asked for my crescent wrench and work gloves. He got nasty about a fuckin' Jew in a Cadillac. He said he's the only one who's trying. All of that was Tom's old self and my first thought is that it's back because he's got a job. It might be that he got into drugs but work would be enough probably. Wanted me to come watch him marching with the veterans on Veterans' Day next Thursday. Was angry when I said probably not. During the week I looked at Laura Schlessinger's book at the library, how to make a husband happy. Give him sex when he wants it even if you don't, and let him take leadership, and some other things. If you do those he'll love you like you want to be loved, except don't expect him to put up with listening to you, or help with the housework or childcare. Do it because he's making your living so you can stay home with the kids. What it would take to make Tom happy is not compatible with being who I am, and yet I miss him when I give up on him. Why did the Amish woman have a lover although she was married? She liked two Mennonite. "We must have patience for this is a game where principles matter." Oh Garrison Kiellor you are so fearless and clear, you are my hero. He used Guy Noir Private Eye to comment on the election.
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unconscious, graduation, secret, love woman