The Bane of all on Earth that I Lov'd

 3-22-00 W 11:11 AM

[pencil sketch of a shapely young woman, perhaps ala Brooke McEldowney's "9 Chickweed Lane"]  My brother was at the house when I got home from the staff meeting.  He had a story about puking in "Baywatch" star David Chokachi's brand new BMW on the way to a party after drinking in a bar all evening.  They used his shirt to mop up the vomit, and he went into the party and passed out in the dog's basket.  He had to take a topless cab ride up to LA from there.  I typed a spotty third-person page last night.  Talked to Peachtree.  I'm going to be in his wedding party, so I've got to go to the bachelor party in Vegas, I guess.  I went to bed around ten thirty, I think.  I didn't get out of bed early enough to write this morning.  AGAIN.  Rode to work.  Talked to Harvard this morning.  Whipped through the paper while the kids looked up their new vocabulary words in the dictionary.  Got to track down Stone today.  Got some pasta to eat at lunch.  It's in a clear plastic container, and I put it outside in the sun hoping it will heat enough that I don't have to go down to the breakroom microwave.  Got to go to the literacy network class after school today.  Work on Jim when I get home.  Read some Out of the Dust.  Got to LACAS.  Type fifteen.  Maybe we can get some videos.  

"I act with benevolence & Virtue & get murder'd time after time."

"Where any view of money exists, Art cannot be carried on, but War only by pretences [sic] to the two impossibilities, Chastity and Abstinence."

[pencil sketch of Blake's "Aged Ignorance Perciptive [sic] organs closed their objects close]

    

"When God commanded 

this hand to write

    In the studious hours

of deep midnight,

    He told me the writing

I wrote should prove

    The Bane of all that 

on Earth I lov'd."

Blake writes about "the eternal consummation of Vegetable Life and Death with its Lusts."

"Men are admitted to Heaven not because they have curbed their passions or because they have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings.  The treasures of Heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of Intellect...The Fool shall not enter into Heaven let him be ever so holy.  Holiness is not the Price of Entrance into Heaven."

 3-21-00 12:37 PM Tu

My brother never showed last night.  I was afeared the wind blew him off the freeway.  He called this morning and said he had fallen asleep during the Laker game.  I never wrote my third-person page yesterday, even though I wasn't able to fall asleep until after midnight.  I didn't get out of bed until seven, so I didn't write this morning either.  I had time for a little guitar A B Em, down a fret and back, repeat, repeat, repeat, A D C G, down a fret and back, repeat, repeat, repeat.  I should try to think up some words.  Got to call back, Matt, Getoff, and Pablo.  Called moms and dads and told them the news.  The reproductive news.  We're supposed to go bowling Saturday night.  I have a class all day Saturday day.  Game Sunday.  Rochelle might be going Las Vegas Sunday for her sister's bachelorette party or she might not.  Rode my bike to school.  Read the paper.  The Lakers beat the Heat in Miami.  The Dow is still climbing.  I've got to do that third person when I get home.  My brother is supposed to be coming by to hook up a weed deal this afternoon.  Got to read some more City of Quartz.  "The Communards" I read yesterday about the Satanist/rocketry/Scientology connection in the 50s between Crowley, Parsons, and L. Ron Hubbard.  Whatever.  Go to LACAS.  Got a new little hottie: Dayanna.  Does me no good.  I think Jim's going to have a big background flashback about his mother.  A pigeon just came to the door, animated, willful, but soulless.  I read Zeta Acosta's Cockroach rantings.  Seemed like he was Ruben Salazar "Zanzibar," but I couldn't be sure because it said they were trying to pin Salazar's death in the Silver Dollar Bar on fellow Chicanos, but most people agree a sheriff's deputy killed him.  I also read a Sam Shepard poem.  An excerpt from Ask the Dust is next--good, old Arturo Bandini. 

 [pencil sketch of Blake's drowning hand "Help!  Help!]  "When the druids demanded chastity from woman...all was lost."

"How can the Female be Chaste, O thou stupid druid, ...without the forgiveness of sins?

"Without the forgiveness of sin, Love is Itself Eternal Death."

"...in your own bosom you bear your Heaven And Earth; & all you behold, tho it appears Without, it is Within, In your Imagination, in which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow/"

 3-20-00 The Vernal Equinox M 1:30 PM
"Shudder not but write & the hand of God will assist you!  Therefore I write..."  but "Hope is banished from me."  When we got home last night, we looked over the paper before driving up La Brea to see "The Green Mile" at the Hollywood Regent.  When we got there, the place was empty but for a sole specter sweeping popcorn.  She said to come back in about ten minutes.  We crossed the street to Mandalay.  I had a beer.  Rochelle was bummed about not being able to have one.  I saw the lights come on on the marquis over the Regent.  A figure inhabited the box office.  I finished my beer and we crossed back over the street and bought our tickets.  The movie was an overlong amalgam of Stephen King's other Stephen King works, a formulaic tale of a simpleton with miraculous healing powers on death row--with good acting.  The alarm didn't go on this morning.  I woke up at 6:20. Took a Club magazine into the bathroom and relieved an erection.  Haven't been feeling atraida a la esposa recientemente.  Ugh. Showered.  Dressed.  Added four lines to Jim.  Rochelle brought me a bagel, coffee, juice, vitamin.  Played a little guitar.  Took out the trash.  Pedaled to work.  Got the paper.  Keep staring at A. V.  Let's not get into that again.  urgh.  Whatever.  The kids talked about their weekends and wrote in their journals after the morning assembly.  At recess, I read about NCAA tournament basketball upsets.  We did a Stanford-9-style test on number concepts, including fractions.  They did O.K.  I hate myself because I went to Taco Bell again for lunch.  Got to do another Blake drawing, quote a few more lines.  Like to put it back on the shelf soon.  Got to read more City of Quartz. Type fifteen minutes.  Read Oscar Zeta Acosta's "Cockroach People."  Ride to LACAS.  Get in and out without Afra seeing me or she'll ask me to critique textbooks for her.  Teach my class.  They're going to want to know how they did on the test, but the office collected them, so I won't be able to tell them.  Got to write a third-person page when I get home.  Read some more Out of the Dust.  Maybe rent a movie.  [pencil sketch of Blake's "I want!  I want!]  "To sin and hide the sin in sweet deceit is lovely! To sin in the open face of day is cruel and pitiless!  But to record the sin for a reproach, to let the sun go down In a remembrance of the sin is a Woe & a Horror.  A brooder of an Evil & a Sun rising in blood!  O Lamb of God take away the remembrance of sin!"

2:12 PM 3-19-00 Su 15 min

On the Ten again, leaving Arizona. Saguaros salute our departure. We went to the Scottsdale Civic Center and strolled through a park where a wedding was finishing up. Stopped in the gift shop for the Scottsdale Performing Arts Center. Went to a bistro with an upstairs patio and had a couple beers and a lavosh pizza. Then, we went hope and took naps. Ended up napping through the cocktail hour scheduled with the neighbors. They rang the bell, and no one was awake. I got up about six and took a shower. We sat in the desert twilight by the pool and did more crosswords. At this very moment, we're crossing the good, old Colorado River. Something about it makes me sentimental. I feel affection as if toward a mother. She is a nurturing godsend to the West. And just like that, we're in the Golden State again. Four hours to home. Julie made poached salmon for dinner last night, which we ate cold with salad, potatoes, and wine. It was tasty. I proposed a toast to our hosts and announced to Reg that he was going to be a grandparent. He seemed delighted and at a loss for words for change. While the girls were cleaning up after dinner, we went out back for a smoke, and he told me what a special person Rochelle his daughter has always been, and what a great match he thinks we are. We all turned in at eleven. I had strange, violent dreams. Two guys jumped me to steal my bike in front of Blockbuster. I fought one of them, but the other got away on my bike. The cops came, but they let the guy go because he didn't do anything. Then I was at the house on Keniston, and my rip-off brother's ingratitude provoked a fistfight in the doorway. He tried to punch me, but I ducked, and he punched the door jamb instead. I woke up angry.

3-18-00

They were all the way out in Arizona under blue skies and orange trees planted in lawns of stone. The mockingbirds mocked the calls of different birds than they did in LA.

Reg liked jazz. He listened to Miles Davis. “In the Village, you know—Greenwich Village, one day, years ago, I walked past a church and heard a sad horn inside. I went up to the doors and peeked in. It turned out to be Miles Davis playing at John Coltrane’s funeral.”

J nodded, feigning belief. Reg talked about taking acid in Columbia in the sixties, and partying at Carnaval in Rio. He talked about not being “accepted.” J didn’t know what he meant, and didn’t seek clarification.

“You know, you look like Van Gogh,” Reg said to j.

Judy loved crossword puzzles. She made copies on the fax machine, and they sat on the patio and worked them with their glasses of wine.

 3-19-00 2:59 PM  Su

On the road again.  Passed the shell of an old gas station.  Phone pole Ts diminish down the highway, the old exercise in perspective.  My stepmother-in-law made eggs bearnaise with Black Forest ham for breakfast.  It was delicious.  We sat out back with citrus trees and did crossword puzzles.  Neighbor Frank, a gregarious Kansan, came over and talked about the motorhome odyssey he and his wife were planning for June or July or January.  Around noon, Rochelle and I decided we better get going.  Jodi and Reg gave us a card with a check in it for a thousand dollars and a sort of miniature grandfather clock (a grandson clock?) that chimes ala Westminster Abbey at each quarter hour.  Marriage gifts.  We drove through Phoenix.  I read Mike Davis' assertions of genius, of European war exiles' who despised L.A., bitter intellectuals, who envied movie stars and "cowboys with flat stomachs"--the opposite of Eve Babitz's relation of her parents' relief about being anywhere away from the war and who loved L.A.  We stopped at Burger King in Quartzite, a graveyard of old mining equipment and withered old timers.  I wrote a little paragraph to put on Jim.  Read the rest of Watt's introduction to Marmaduke Picthall's translation of "The Meaning of the Glorious Koran."  Mohammed is supposed to be "the seal of all prophets," the affirmation and be all, end all of prophets from Moses through Jesus.  I wrote fifteen minutes in the other notebook.  Read aloud to Rochelle Kate Braverman's "Palm Latitudes."  I don't know if it was a short or an excerpt.  The ocotillo look like coral on an ocean floor, the little red flowers, polyps.  "The imagination is not a state; it is human existence itself."  

"There is a moment in each day [red ink sketch of Blake's "My Son!  My son!]  that Satan cannot find but the industrious find this moment & multiply it...it renovates every moment of the day if rightly placed.  Shudder not, but write & the hand of God will assist you!"

 3-17-00 5:55 PM F AZ

We’re on the Pearl Harbor Memorial Highway, cruising through rugged Sonoran Desert, the full moon in the blue sky hovers over the road dead ahead, surrounded by rubble and jagged horizon bespeaking some violent titanic geological cataclysm. We’re on our way to Rochelle’s dad’s house in Scottsdale. I’m tired. He called at 8:00 this morning. He’s excited. I was out at the Bounty last night and had a couple Jameson’s and a couple Pacificos with Thing, but I didn’t have much to say other than that Rochelle is pregnant. My lungs are feeling the smokes I smoked. Rochelle came and picked my drunk ass up. I went to bed, but I woke up on the couch in the middle of the night. I stumbled back to bed. Then Mr. Mozer called. I don’t even know his first name. Anyway, Rochelle and I went to Bob’s Big Boy, and I further contaminated my bloodstream and read the paper. When we got home, I went back to sleep until eleven thirty. Then I got up, showered and dressed, and now we’ve been driving five hours with one to go. We stopped at Carl’s Jr. in Blythe. I asked Rochelle if she’d ever consider living outside the U.S. and she said she would. I’ve been reading the Chicago Tribu—I mean the LA Times until just now.

3-17-00 F 7:12 PM AZ

I'm in the car heading east on the 10.  Rochelle's driving.  She keeps changing the fucking radio and I'm about to jump out of this car at seventy miles an hour.  I just finished reading La Opinion.  I handwrote fifteen minutes in another notebook about an hour ago.  Not much has happened since then except that we're seventy miles further east.  Somewhere on the outskirts of Tempe, I think.  Shouldn't be long now.  I read a Ring Lardner story to Rochelle called "Ex Parte."  It was really funny.  About some poor bastard whose wife doesn't like their new furniture because she wants antiques, so he gets drunk and goes to work on the new furniture with an ax and a blowtorch, and she leaves him. Here's downtown Phoenix.  We're listening to Bach now.  The Lardner story was told from the point of view of the husband.  Bogus Mediterranean palms sprout anywhere you look, trying to give Phoenix the look of some Saharan oasis.  Blake drew pictures of himself in his garden with an angel, Ololon.  "I went to the Garden of Love...the gates of the chapel were shut and 'Thou Shalt Not' writ over the door...Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds and binding with briars my joys and desires."

"The cut worm forgives the plow."

"I did indeed appear to Reason as if Desire were cast out; but the Devil's account is that the Messiah fell..."

"The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."

"Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion."

"The nakedness of woman is the work of God."

[Alas the female martyr is she also the Divine Image? line sketch in pencil]  I'll have to try this one again.  It's too hard riding in the car.

 3-16-00 Th Noon

I'm at Taco Hell.  I forgot to bring my pasta to school.  I guy just rode by on a motorized scooter board/  Cool.  Wish I had one.  

I'm back in class now.  Silent reading.  I added the word "it" to a sentence in Jim this morning. A real leap forward.  Quantum.  There was a power outage last night.  Rochelle woke me to let me know.  I got up and changed the fuses, but that didn't help.  I warily opened the front door, half expecting some kind of ambush.  The street was enveloped in mute darkness.  Everything was visible, though not a light shone anywhere.  The fog glowed a little.  Weird.  "The whole street's out," I told Rochelle and went back to bed.  The power was on again by the time I woke this morning, but the alarm hadn't gone off because the clock had reset.  It was already seven.  There was little hot water and less water pressure.  A most unsatisfactory shower.  I dressed and heated some coffee, had a bagel with spinach dip.  Typed the word, "it," strummed a little, and hit the road.  Rochelle was leaving to see a doctor and verify that we have, indeed, conceived.  Like the Dropout at Knott's, I rode my bike to school.  The power was out here, too, but a fire alarm was clanging chaotically.  The halls were dark.  It gave the morning an air of mystery.  A post-apocalyptic "Omega Man" feel.  The power was out at the store, too.  I got a paper, but they couldn't make any coffee.  Admin convened an assembly of us blackout survivors.  We were given instructions for martial law.  I led my tribe to our room.  I taught our phonics lesson by what soft light fell through the window.  About nine thirty, an hour later, the lights came on.  The kids were squirrely.  I had to have them put their heads down and meditate awhile.  A book review, On Mexican Time, made me want to move to Mexico.  I'm almost done with Blake [A pencil sketch of At length for hatching ripe he breaks the shell]  Just twenty more pages.  I read City of Quartz while I walked to class last night.  We have to go to music soon.  I have to type for fifteen minutes when I get home.  Read about "the Debunkers" in Quartz.  Yesterday, I read about Lummis and Otis and the myth they created.  Got to type a third person.  Read that Dorling Kindersley.  Go to Pio Pico.  

 3-15-00 W 4:46 PM 

I'm sitting in the exact same spot where I typed my fifteen minutes this morning: my office.  I was too busy and stupid at work today to get this done while I was there.  OhbutIwill.  Obudawil.  When I finished typing, it was already time to go, but I heated up some leftover pork roast and potatoes and spooned out a bowl of apple sauce and had a nice leisurely dinner at 7:55 this morning when I wasn't entirely sure that school didn't start at 8:00 on a shortened day, which today was.  So, Rochelle gave me a ride to work.  School didn't start 'til 8:20.  There had been a paper on the porch this morning.  Maybe the Times felt guilty about selling itself to the Chicago Tribune.  Inexplicable.  Anyway.  Since I had a paper already, I didn't go to the market.  I just cruised through the office, picked up my mail, and went up to class and let the kids in.  I sat at my desk lost and unresponsive for a few minutes while the kids peppered me with unfathomable questions that I didn't know how to answer like, "What do we do?" and "Can I use the computer?" and "Here's my homework?" (not a question, I realize).  We finally did a lesson from the phonics book and then a Stanford 9 practice on suffixes and root words.  I don't remember recess.  I did read the paper or do report cards, I don't think.  Seems like there was some other unmemorable business to attend to.  We did some more Stanford 9 practice after recess on number concepts.  Then I read them some more Harry Potter.  I took the sports page with me at lunch.  Got coffee and orange chicken on the corner.  Don't know what possessed me to get the chicken.  I ate it on the playground lunch benches.  Mr. Herschel came up to give me his assessment of orange chicken.  He wasn't sure what word he was looking for.  "Rubbery?" I said.  "Yeah!" He was excited.  The bell rang.  Took the kids back to class for some silent reading.  There was a disturbing article in the Lifestyle section about which kinds of newlyweds make it into long-lasting marriages.  It said strong affection overcomes outside pressures that destroy marriages.  I feel weakly affected.  We read about Daniel Boone during Social Studies.  [Blake line drawing in red ink: Air On Cloudy Doubts & Reasoning Cares]  They were supposed to read it last night, but when I asked them the name who blazed the trail to Kentucky, no one knew.  I had conferences with Jackie's stepdad Benjamin's mom, and Teresita's mom.