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.