in america 9 part 2 - 2005 september-october

work & days: a lifetime journal project

15 September 2005 Went straight to sleep and woke at 5 processing Susan. The phone rang at 6 last night rather than 7 and there she was. At the end of the call she told a dream in which she watched forms flattened on the surface of a road pull themselves up into bodies. Two were standing on one hand on a rail like a train track rail. One seemed to be teaching the other. Something pulled into focus there. Visually, for me; I saw them. They were two black cut-outs in an underworld sort of light. That is a lazy way of saying something I'm not remembering well and maybe don't register well. Differently, for her; when I said two's in dreams are about the unconscious and conscious, and here one teaching the other, her voice changed. What else. Quite a lot. But I'll first mention the dream I was working on before I woke. Janeen had died and I had been trying to locate and get to the place where she was being viewed. It turned out not to be Sexsmith but Grande Prairie. I was somewhere else feeling toward the gathering where she was being remembered, and at the same time looking around at the place where I was, which I was noticing was crudely self-built by someone who had a better kind of place in mind but skimped on the windows and proportions and slathered the plastered surfaces stupidly. There was a little dog who came climbing onto me more than I liked. Back to Susan - when I woke I was feeling her speediness and not liking it but liking that I had things to think about because of it. I thought I could thank her for doing it for me. Here I'm remembering something about cultural currency, like reading the Sunday Times. She can use her speediness to get that and then pass it on to me. I liked telling her about yelling at Tom on the freeway. I like talking to her about Tom. I liked the freedom in the talk last night. It was moving along in a rush and she wasn't stopping to have her feelings hurt. I said it was bragging to tell everyone when she introduced me that there'd been 500 emails. I said her bargain with Gia, I'll believe you're not mentally ill and you'll believe I'm a good person, made my scalp crawl. I said that if she doesn't like the man her squeeze wants to have a baby with there's a sense in which she doesn't like her squeeze. I liked her story of talking on her cell phone to what's-her-name, putting on her coat, getting into the jeep, driving to her house, sitting on the yard talking on the phone, refusing to come in, and then at the end of the call going into the house to pee and getting what she wanted, a fuck. Grace holds her on her lap, manhandles her, vacillates between bliss and fear. I said early love and she's willing to work through it or not. In sum I took ground to stand on and wasn't scared of her. We talked from 6 to 7 and 7:30 to 9. In between Tom called and what was that like. He was talking about a classroom moment with an instructor he was starting to like. I liked that he'd had that and wanted to tell it. He was excited. Louie has been pressing to talk on the phone. I have been in dread of it, holding off, but coming out of talking to Susan I am feeling I can say, These are my terms. At times when she was talking I would hold the receiver back and listen to her voice, such an ordinary American female voice. She said she was allowing her imperfection (not her word) to speak more. I said she's doing it for her writing. She said amazing what she's willing to do for her writing. (Then we talked about work, the way we both believe in work.) I said she seems younger because she's doing that. 16th Friday night. Chomped through Margaret and Richard today. Another dream last night about moving into a bad house. There was one large room to be shared with a roommate I wasn't going to like. I'd got there first and went around taking down things like a rope that was meant to divide it in two. When the roommate arrived I was finding myself volunteering to live in a bad broken-down little storeroom just to be able to have my own space. I was looking at all the work there'd need to be done - repainting, patching. To Margaret about the politics of perception, whether the poor junk perception altogether and the rich specialize it into consumption, which I rather think she's doing. Richard about how his god's a rude and tyrannical father, and about how his grammar is okay when he's telling stories and in scholar-prose is chaos. What is this garble some people get into when they let go of the concrete? Is it state-specific somehow? They're okay when they can write from speech? From earlier time? 17 September where I come from is blue and gold, this September is nothing - blank fog. I'm looking at my forearms wondering whether the Premarin is working. I think they're smoother. I'm halfway through packet letters and my eyes are scratchy but they don't really hurt. I get into fucking every night. I'm also hungry and eating a pile. Don't know whether that's just autumn eating. - Anne's book. [my Aunt Anne Konrad] Peter Konrad and Luisa Braun in a wedding portrait. Rectitude. They didn't marry until she was 28, he 30. Look at the firmness in their mouths. He didn't become a believer until he'd knocked about in the wars, and she had been a teacher for years. They were intelligent. A voice said to him, This is the one. He waited a year before he asked. She said ask again in two weeks. She prayed. God said, This is your way. They look turned on together, beautiful. June 1920. They were 37 and 39 when they immigrated with 5 kids born 1922, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1928. Papers stamped in Canada Valentine's Day 1930, Alberta end of March 1930. And then they worked and prayed and had six more kids - 1930, 1932, 1933, 1934 (2), 1935. The kids did what they had done - married, had kids, were responsible citizens - but in them it wasn't the same. Peter and Luise a strong couple I guess. They made themselves a team. It was what was needed. They had that staying clarity. Prospered. The rules worked for them. I look at their pictures and stories and have a sort of ownership of memory. I knew them. They gave me what they gave their own. I didn't know they gave me membership, it had always been there. They understood family. It was their profession. My membership now is very distributed. And am I what was needed? [Opposite page: We rehearse for the big death through erotic living. I died 50 times through insulin shock treatment when I was a boy. Peter Redgrove b. 1932 d. June 2003 @ 71. Married Shuttle at 48, she was 32.] 19th Yesterday Tom came an hour early and once again different than he's ever been. He hasn't had his hair cut and it's at the stage where it spikes like an old rocker's. He was wearing a short sleeved print shirt which thankfully he took off, and then a too-tight sage-green teeshirt that molded his high tight paunch, and, it later turned out, a good black undershirt. I was lying on the couch with the laptop against my thighs and he came and sat on the narrow edge and gave me an awkward hug. I got right into it. Touch! Here's touch! He stopped too soon. He sat himself down on the other end of the couch. I put my legs across his lap and listened. He and Bud yesterday hauling concrete blocks. Bud bought him a box of floppies and wants to get him a laptop. "Ellie and I will keep you focused." He won a rumble in the dining room chores shift. This week he's going to put Casual Labor onto a disk. Then he responsibly asked about my packets. It feels forced but I go for it and sometimes it works. He read all David Noonan's performance credits and was interested. I was meantime looking at a Reader piece he brought on Nico and the Velvet Underground and Jackson Browne. He gets hungry at 4 because that's dinnertime at the mission, so we carried up the charcoal and the barbecuing thing whatever it's called, green thing quite dirty from the years on the patio downstairs. At that point he took off the teeshirt and was there in the sun in a muscle shirt, pale freckles on his arms, the mixture he is now of young and old. His arms have thinned and his neck is an old man's, there is his father's high paunch on a dwindling frame, but then too there were his green eyes with auburn lashes in the sun. Talking to me his face had lost its mission crudeness and come beautiful, and always his hands. I was cooking potatoes inside and put the beans and corn over the charcoal as it was heating. Cube steak delicious on the blue plates. Watermelon after. Lemonade. So conventional it's exotic, I said. Read him my journal, the trip starting at Quartzite. I'd got to the reunion before he said he was losing concentration. He was really listening, murmuring. I was happy. I had a style of reading for him I noticed, fast, flattened and not pausing at periods, carrying across as if staying aloft above a gap. So we had a thoroughly happy time and I drove him home under the fading sky. Held his hand in the jeep. Three kisses goodbye. - Michael D is a professor, Google says. Undergrad college in NH. One more letter tomorrow and then I'm done for 2 weeks. Unusual sky today. Very fine curdle of cloud, platinum, blue, grey, white. A few large hard drops of rain this afternoon and just now, nine in the dark, thunder breaking overhead. I was transcribing a bit of 59-60 this morning before I went to letters. She's boring whenever she tries to be lively - now I hear rain - there's a floor of solid candor and then sexual froth and then teenage impersonation - tapering off, aw, it has already stopped. I feel sorry for her, I'm bored, I admire her social energy. Susan writing about mice in her house, damp, cold. Darkness. Why is she living half dug into earth and why do animals move in with her? I say they are animals that go into the dark, and does she dream about going into cellars? 20 Tuesday early. it rained briefly at night. What was that bad dream - why wd I dream I'm in a horror film, dead babies and a sinister couple trying to lock us up, Two of us are outside, though in a neighbourhood full of danger, but the third is caught and being driven away lying flat in a cart. I ended up addressing Lisa very efficiently. I answered her questions and that was nearly all I had to do. Showed her a trim of her first half page. All I needed to say to any of the questions was, Your instinct is already right. She's young. She has the narrator as a viewpoint and thought she needed her as a character. She had two extreme views of the mother and didn't realize those are her narrator's views. She worried that her ideas weren't coming in sequence but in fact the order given can be an order. Inexperience. I wrote her in her own flat accurate voice and that was a pleasure. I said her tone holds my interest, which means it isn't shallow or false. She worried about maintaining tone and didn't realize her narrator is her tone. She will come to see her narrator in the process of writing her knowing she's doing that. Susan's poem about parking on the hill with me. It has good lines. It's a 'poem' though, not her fierce fast prose, which I'd like to compare [the poem with] if it's the first version. She doesn't have the adult depth for poems of bland voice. were there cows I seem to remember horses wild flowers guttering the dirt lane where I pulled us off not once but twice so I could cry the force of being actually with you months after   didn't know the sun would set but it went somehow unpredictably to pieces clouds piling four colors of blue so much vital splendor what could I do but gasp and swing how really could my getting it wrong matter anymore   telling you what you did in what you said was wrong and then you undisturbed as ever by foam or suffering raised your beautiful hand into the glint of living you touched the back of my head - Evening loneliness - I need to talk and I need touch - Tom phoned and wanted to stop when it was me who wanted to talk - and now that I'm wanting to touch him he has that little fear, he pulls back. Anyone who emails me wants something, doesn't want to give me something. I have got to the part of 1960 where I am finally touching a man, not going mad in the blind froth of not touching one. The burst of sex I could get away from home. I forgot about Doug but when I read about him now it's as if he prefigures Frank - he was physical - clickers on his shoes, tight teeshirt if I am remembering right - he was after me with intent and kindness. When again has it ever been like that, straight up physical intention though I hedged and fussed. Thank you for what I didn't know was good - I knew it was good, I was determined to have it - but I didn't know it was a better good than for instance Reiner's sentiment. He was very level and clear, he could see me in my girl self quite directly. Yes I want it again - I want a man to be after me with that sort of sane male certainty. 21st Whizzy about going somewhere in the evening. Spanish classes at the Discover Baja offices in an old mall on Clairemont Drive. Just driving somewhere at the end of the rush hour. Surface streets empty, the freeway full. Powdered air over Mission Bay. From the top of the hill on Clairemont Drive, California sunset, marachino pink sun. Walking around in the mall looking at the small shops, intoxicated somehow, excited. Tall white-stemmed eucalyptus here and here in the large parking lot, showing their feathers against the pink. Three shredded beef tacos with guacamole and cheese. An old surfer with a white moustache smiles at me. I feel viable in that linen kung fu jacket. In the classroom I plunk down next to the men at the back left table and make a joke about high school and wanting to sit with the bad people in the back row. Surprised. The back of the room perks up when I say that. The man next to me takes it up and talks to me throughout the session. The teacher is young and has very wide hips with a small waist. She's not much of a teacher. The single women are sitting in the front two rows and their backs look either blocky or meager. There are some couples and two dads with kids. When we break so people can have instant coffee and cookies, the motorcycle riders, including my neighbour, converge to talk about roads. I break in boldly and ask about 4wd routes. I'm throwing myself into the evening. I ask questions, How do you say, Is this Highway 3 going north? Keith and I are teaching each other sotto voce. Esta 3 norte, he says. Enjoy myself. Buy a dictionary. At nine get in the jeep and turn on the lights and zigzag through the many lanes of the parking lot to find the way onto Clairemont Drive dazzling with headlights. As often at night I'm dreaming as I drive, not earthed enough. I'm quite elated. What was it about the evening. People were there each with their own moment of Mexico. Mercado, taller mecanico, semaforo, esquina, carretera. Collection of strangers, which in itself is traveling. Last night I phoned Luke, found him coughing waiting for his laundry to dry. I had to patiently ask and listen and then he relaxed and talked on comfortably at home, and I did too. What I needed, that relaxed belonging. 22 Being led through Daphne's new house - if that means something about writing I should track it - but does it? Levels, an architect-designed staircase she was proud of. Mattress salesroom on the top floor - that sounds ironic. I said they could put more windows in the west wall. Looked from the one there was. Train track then forest. In the foreground a large wooden structure. Wd it be torn down? Something related to trains. Nonverbal knowledge, that the window looked west. In the dream the word was not there but I don't hesitate with it now. Susan took me into the beginning of the trees and told me she and Grace were back together. There's another kind of nonverbal knowledge, where I don't get the name but know who. This morning I shd work on the written version of the language lecture. I'm in open time 'til Monday, when there's Carol again. Gardens - Scott, Dawne, Taft. Smog car. - Passed smog! 23 Why do I need to write down business accomplished. Jeep registration on the web just now. Receipts to [the college]. - Alright, done everything else I have to do, stuck with having to start the language paper - listening to BB King and Terry Gross - make some tea - take a run at it - there's Caetano's beautiful face, CD cover across the room. What can I do to get a feel for it again. A theory of reading and writing Juliana said. It's broader than that - theory of cognitive function as physical function - theory of language as physical function - the widest context is important but can I explain that. Lot of noise. A/C grinding on the roof. What's important to say to TLA. What are the implications. TLA should have a framework wider than the how-to manuals. 'Expressive arts.' Do I need to do some research on trauma and language. Is there fresh stuff I should add, find. Goldstein on segregation. Gendlin's focusing for why it works. Gestalt? I have a strong but unsupported sense of what it means. Experiential and patched-together. 1. con and uncon nets 2. segregation, reactivation 3. 'feeling' as patching together 4. unfelt language and segregated function 5. language that can be felt to be good function or poor function, body feeling can tell us which, liking as liking to be 6. "the unconscious likes truth" 26 Dreamed Tom or a Tom-like person was saying to me that I should advertise for a lover because I'm new in town. I was doubtful that advertising could work. He thought it could work because I'm new here. I was lifting down a bicycle as he was telling me the phone number to call. Last four numbers were 6666 and I hadn't caught all the numbers before that. He said "although this could have very bad consequences for me" - not exactly that - and I woke in shock because he was telling me to find somebody else. On Saturday driving back through Mission Beach I said I had a song in my head and sang the tune. He knew the words. You-ou-ou-ou / made me leave my happy ho-o-ome / now you're gone and I'm alone. Wondered whether it meant that I was picking something up about him. Have ignored Louie's email wanting us to work it out etc. I feel impatience, contempt. There's nothing anywhere but people wanting me to take care of them. What I scan the horizon for is someone who delights in me. David did this summer and it was a transfusion of well-being although I know that in him there's something wrong with it. My mother does not, though she clings hungrily. Louie does not, though she clings hungrily. I don't want to talk to her on the phone because it will not be what I need. I particularly hate those who should give me what I need and don't. I'm saying 'should' against resistance. Does Tom? Not as much as he should. And yesterday was barren, he just sat here and talked very loud about music. Although yesterday, when he started talking about working full time and I dropped into feeling he doesn't care about sleeping with me and looked about for an exit, he caught my shutting-down motion and gently and kindly and lucidly tracked me down. That was beautifully done and I was grateful. The other thing which is my delighting in him - is the way when I'm with him I'm always interestedly looking to see, who is he now? What is he like now? So was my bad dream just the unsafety of being more attached? It says yes. Is everything okay? Yes. Should I make more demands? Yes. - Then I went into Google and researched "language and trauma". The bits that made sense were: Gendlin focusing and felt sense. He's very comprehensive and describes the way I think outside language, he's the philosopher who has actually moved in this era. Somebody talking about evoking a client's metaphors and allowing them to resolve in their own terms by attending so the metaphor restructures. Julie Henderson using Tibetan Buddhism to go directly into a good state and then ask the question. What else - a lot of mind and body talk. Someone saying that in trauma it's talking hem that takes the hit and guided imagery resolves something by evoking non-language. Ref to 'conscious embodiment' from aikido. 'Unify the energy of the body' which allows us to trust sensation, which is the basis for intuition and wisdom, unconditional love, powerful action, generosity. Therapists frightened of body sensation, rage and lust. Buddhist mindfulness. "Provoking body systems, going beneath the verbal." Feeling opposite sensations, splitting. Refs for trauma and dissociation. Working-through is from Freud. Bizarre notions of unification "of body, mind and spirit". 28 do I feel delighted in - you are a terrible woman - being delighted in by you is a mad roller coaster ride of being smashed about and taken seriously and once in a while when I least have hope of it being bussed lightly exactly once before the light is shut out and the room again empty. I would rather laugh with you than with almost anyone. That showed up on the blue screen in the dark when I got up to take an aspirin for sleeplessness. Wrote back that I admire the way she can do a springy sentence. Also admire the flirtation. I was wanking trying to go to sleep and feeling around for which fantasy to try. There's a version where my dad takes me out with a blanket on a Sunday afternoon, to a spot in the field next to where there were gooseberry bushes among the poplars. It was quite a dense bush to the northeast of the yard. There we take our clothes off in the sun etc. This time it wasn't quite working and I was looking for something more and imagined another man coming along, as usual a blank except for the penis. Feeling around for more - hairy legs? Cloven hoofs? The devil? Hope not, maybe Pan. But I couldn't, wouldn't go on in that line. Am noticing something lately, a misgiving about the father fantasies. I've been going there in very easy good conscience since they work and are only fantasies, but lately I've had as if a moral uneasiness. I'm saying 'as if' because I think it's maybe the thought of someone like Auntie Anne reading about it in the journal, and something about doing that to my actual dad's memory. The way he is thought of. What I am thinking this morning is that the father fucking fantasy is so loaded a taboo because it is so much the whole culture's unconscious fantasy. I was taught it vigorously in church and it is philosophically admirable of me to investigate and articulate it in its true form. But still, Ed Epp did not fuck his daughters though he likely wanted to, and it would have been ruinous to them if he had. He was god-fearing to the end, and should be remembered as he was and not marked with what he would have abhorred. There are photos of Opa and Oma in their rectitude, the sweetness of their 60th wedding anniversary photo, the success of their belief. The heavenly father may be, is, infantile fantasy, but it carried them in faith steadily through catastrophe to happy marriage and social success. And here is their granddaughter taking Nietzsche's liberty and more, a science that can be joyful to very few - but must be preserved for those few. A doubt that maybe I am corrupt, that I have been carried into corruption by degrees all of which seemed innocent to me, that the book is really the subtle devil leading me by clever mixture of truth and falsity, or maybe truth entirely, until there is one final falsity that is fatal. - Transcribing spring 1994. I was cleaning houses, obsessing about K, sleeping with Rob, working with Joyce, inventing the plan for the doc, working in the garden. I was full. I love transcribing it. I'm the age Susan is now. Running up to menopause, estrogen surge was it, flaring like she is now. The writing carries me in detail. So much feeling. So much saying. 29 Santa Ana yesterday, so that as I was turning onto Mission Bay drive to go to Spanish class the sun was setting in molten metal, an incandescent pool of apricot-orange-gold. It's because the off-shore wind blows the pollution to sea, Keith said, and the grain in the sky holds the color. "Tomorrow it'll be clear toward the mountains, you'll see." I opened the computer this morning to check email as tea water heated and started transcribing. Just this paragraph, I said. It pulls me along. 10 pages before I have to stop. I was still in art, is the difference. Can I fund myself to live that way again? Money is the question. With 250,000 I could work for another 10 years without having to teach. Stop being undecided, it says. 30 Friday. I don't like waking before dawn but I like walking across the dewy roof to unlock the gate. This morning a white sickle on its back above the cathedral. Milky orange above the desert. Yes I'm more self-conscious here since I've been imagining it posted. Transcribing is feeding me though it's false food. I don't have touch, talk, play, inspiration, feeling, but I give myself the record of it and am happy. I love reading anything concrete, the Calabria, the garden, Rob, moon and rain. What do I have: secure income, slightly more money than I've ever had, so that with my credit cards I can stretch to trips, buy what I need; stable health - nothing really scary; easy respectability because of the doc and the word 'professor'; this safe little house; my strong brisk jeep, well maintained; this lovely small machine so good to touch, so sturdy and miraculous; ten years transcribed; open intervals every three weeks; Luke's confidence; Rowen's at moments; a very zingy new friend. So what is the name of this time? Vacant prosperity. Use it, use it, don't waste it. What was the name of that time. Wracked fullness. Use it for what: to transition out of [the college] to finish transcribing to find an open income for the rest of my life to decide where to live to get Being about published to publish other stuff   Still recovering from the doc it says. Learning authority at [the college] Working socially with the uncon   That's true   YES You trained me   YES Will you tell me how soon I can do something else   soon as you've done the work A deeper level   I haven't dug down enough yet, with this writing essay. That's why I don't want to touch it. My assignment is, say something to TLA. Their belief is that writing - writing in groups with an amateur facilitator - does something for people that they want done. What they want done: they want to be less anxious, more attractive and interesting, is that it? They want a way to make other people like them and know about them. What I have to say about writing and bodies is irrelevant to their desire. I do TLA with students all the time one-to-one. It's intervention by means of writing. They write and I diagnose by means of writing, and I suggest other things they should write about and ways to do it. My belief is that writing is 'transformative' in ways amateur writers want it to be when it 'connects' something - Let's say we're talking about personal writing. What does it actually feel like? Resolving. A lens bringing something into focus. Resolution. How fine is the resolution. The sensation of focus. It's a method for doing something different, cognitively, than we can do in the sort of talk we get at home - or around. It feels like looking for the way to say it brings it into focus. Left hemisphere focus being poured into right hemisphere sensation? Is it about energizing a circuit? In Temperance it's the left hand pouring but I think that's wrong. Focusing is the key. - Alright now here's my next step in philosophy - it is making me remember where I was in the last stage of writing Being about - wanting to write Childhood of the philosopher. Can I say it - Gendlin's introduction to Experiencing and the creation of meaning. History and culture only elaborate an animal body that lives interactionally directly in situations, and continues to perform vital and noticeable functions in speech and thought. I was working in a context where no one understood me but Gendlin would more than understand me. [Opposite page: Charles Murray in the Wall Street Journal Sept 29. Hurricane and visibility of the underclass. "Thugs" and "inert women", "falling crime and a growing underclass", prison population 2,086,000 in 2003, black males 20-24 30% in 1999. "Deteriorating socialization," children raised without fathers, illegitimacy ratio 35% of all births 2003, 68% black. "Not caused by lack of jobs or of job skills, but by the inability to get up every morning and go to work." "Not caused by the inability to save money from meager earnings, but because the concept of thrift is alien." He's arguing that what's needed is more coercion, men in charge of women, old men in charge of young men, restoration of patriarchy. Say instead, lack of initiation, lack of contact with world.] 1st October Saturday morning. Tom's coming at 1:30. Let me pick up from last night if I can. There were dreams. A large room like a camp dining hall with a roof of shining water. A murder mystery in which we were - a woman and I - in a basement zipping open the foot ends of mattresses. A clue that was a collection of feathers, photos, bits of writing. She said it showed the time it happened. Gendlin has the fact of bodies being about, though he doesn't write it with charm. What does he say. Bodies are about from the beginning, culture elaborates. A configuration of aboutness - he calls it a "....." - shifts, alters, resolves when people talk, write, are listened to, attentively. His unemphatic certainty that knowing evolves naturally and without limit reminds me of the Time, space and knowledge book, Buddhism. He doesn't say knowing is structure, he doesn't need to, but might be interested in the way I do. What am I feeling - confirmed - but I knew I was right. Hopeful? His paper that says primacy of the body not primacy of perception gets perception wrong because he's coming from phenomenology. Hasn't thought it out. 'Five senses.' I've gone further than he has just in that move into saying it's structure. This is for me, not the paper. 1992, he imagines perception as they do, "presented," "data." "Lurk behind the five peepholes of perception." "Appears before or to a body." He accepts their characterization of perception and says what he's talking about, "sensing", is more. But by sensing he means aboutness and aboutness, yes, is the larger category because it includes action and is the action of cultural adjustment. The body after language is more formed and interactional. What I like about G is that he was a philosopher who didn't scorn therapy. He tested everything in philos against his own sense of how he does things, he wants philos to be liberatory for anyone, not a professional enclave. He wants to give knowledge away. He's humble and confident. What he evokes is the sense I had, writing Being about, of the philosophical process itself, what I was forming as comprehension of how to do it. Let us begin with the body as we just reconceived it. Rightly refuses the order of percepts, relations, concepts. Statements that speak from the felt sense can be recognized by the fact that they have an effect on the felt sense. It moves, opens and develops. The relation between sensing and statements is not identity, representation or description. He learned from Wittgenstein. He describes discovering what I did about how a notion in one system shows up under a different name in another. He talks about speaking from. 2nd Is it estrogen, I think. Dreaming more interestingly, connectedly. Was in bed with Ken Sallett talking. He said he was going away. I hear a noise. Say I'll get up to check it. He says he will. I say no I will. I go into the next room. Do I look out the window toward the river? I turn. There's a man holding a gun. He says he found my driver's license. I say how did he find this place, it's not the address on the license. He says he is going to kill me. I accept that he will. Kenneth is behind him and I'm wondering whether he'll do something, but he doesn't. It goes on. Throughout, the river in spate, sets of three high-water peaks. The man is tall and thin with dark curly hair. Artistic looking? Could be. There's a long middle section. I'm bored writing this. Or is it resistant? I don't remember it well except for the part where I hold up my pant leg and show him my thin leg. I'm telling him how I got a scholarship and did a triple major with three general exams and got 89%. There was a moment earlier I saw Tom sitting against the back wall smoking a cigarette but later both he and Kenneth are gone. I'm talking to the man so maybe he won't kill me but I am calm about dying. And then come the end credits which are the heads of, first, the writer, a prize winner, a nice-looking actorish-looking man with black curls, and then others including the actor who played the killer. At the end my own head as a baby. It puts me off at first because I'm snaggle-toothed, one much larger front tooth with a serrated edge, but then my strange little face moves through different feelings and I like myself. - Sunday late aft. Sunday's kind of day. Wash my hair after gumming it up under plants at Taft yesterday. ATM, LA Times, farmers' market. Passionfruit, hard peaches, watermelon, green beans, honey, kale, carrots, courgettes, tomatoes, cucumber. Two colors of gerbers, one white like swans' feathers, the other a hot yellow nuanced with bits of red at the center. Come home and cram things into my little fridge. Was going to wait to read the paper tonight but I couldn't. Cynthia's packet has arrived and I read ninety pages avidly because it's real life, she's grown into herself. I can see that her process notes are part of what's working for her, they are helping her work through snags quickly and they are connecting her concrete competence with her abstract interests so that she's resolving them at the same time - is that the way to say it? She's firm and clear, something changed. Wanted something personal, tried transposing but the rest of that volume is bogged in processing Ken. Jonesing for Susan to write - she's pushing to finish a packet. Yesterday Tom was going to show up at 1:30 but he shouted across the street as I was starting back from Starbucks at 11:30. He was freaked - drawn, beaky, staring - because he'd lost it with the cook at breakfast. Six foot lesbian who gave him an order so he hurled a stack of cookie sheets with styrofoam cups across the room. Thomas, you're upset, she said. Gave him the rest of KP duty off. He couldn't just sit on his rack. I knew what to do. Give him coffee, listen to him tell it, hold my hand on his chest, feed him, laugh with him. An hour later he was all better and we were going out the door with his CDs and my player, first to UCSD and then to Taft to do more work. At UCSD it was the start of the term, no one in the library, the smell of books so like the stacks at Queen's, eighteen coming into a university library for the first time, that long cathedral room upstairs. I was so undistinguished a creature, crude, but I had won my way to that room by myself, and I knew it to the core and it was a confidence that still carries me. Meantime Tom was in the jeep parked by pepper trees and eucalyptus at the head of Pepper Canyon, happy setting up a reggae fusion tutorial for me. I like having him at Taft helping me so long as he's working in a different area. I'm grateful that it saves me energy. We do two hours together and it's enough to call a day. Wind and Sea afterward. It was another kind of sea than I had ever seen. There was a light overcast with sun behind it well down into the west and the sand was steeply sloped so that looking at the water was like looking into a bowl of molten silver. The largest waves would turn to cream in trodden sand and the front edge would come fumbling toward me with an unusual little falling-sideways motion. I wanted to do nothing but sit staring in front of that sea. Could feel Tom behind me, up on the cliff, pressing me to be available. Ignored him as long as I needed. He was insulting in the jeep. "Your life is too complicated." "Yours is too complicated too." "No it's simple." "It's simple because it's yours. It's too complicated when you have to deal with another person." "You're moody." "You're moody too." "I'm not moody." I laugh. "You were throwing cookie sheets across the room this morning and you're not moody?" And so on. I say I took an energy hit from him in the morning and it's not fair to be mad at me for needing to deal with it. He disagrees with everything and does not want to barbecue. I settle down to look at gardens [he's driving] and wait for him to come around. He does. I say when I'm in trouble he should just be nice to me. He says he is nice to me, he helped me at Taft. I say I want him to be nice to me when I'm in trouble. He says he's never been any good at being nice to people when they are in trouble. I say, well. He grips my hand and we're happy. We did that right. We go to Whole Foods and I buy cube steak, corn on the cob, Greek salad, a crusty roll, lemonade. He lights the charcoal. We sit on the roof. I read him journal, want to read him the coming home trip pages but they are too brief so I end up principledly reading parts I wdn't've wanted to, a brutal physical portrait of him, and a passage about loving Susan. He takes both objectively, not the way a girl would. Thank you. And then I take him home through Saturday night in the Gaslamp, crowds, crowds of headlights, what did he call it - hedonic treadmill. We pass the ballpark, which is reverberant in massive banks of bluewhite spotslights. 70,000 people Tom says, the Padres are in the divisional finals. I turn into the mission courtyard, two cop cars and black people milling, that feel of prison yard and daycare center. Lingering kisses. I'll call you Monday. He stands in his wheatcolored sleeveless vest and watches me out of sight. Listening to Paul Simon. Deeper and deeper the dreamer of love.   part 3 in america volume 9: 2005 august-december work & days: a lifetime journal project