10-1-01 M 2:00 PM

I’m at school. There’s a leadership council meeting after school today. I don’t what I was thinking when I signed up to be on that. Shall I bring up the diminishing role of the teachers’ professional judgement in regard to curriculum and scheduling within their own classrooms? Shall I talk about the administration’s failure to provide the infrastructure for learning-equipped classrooms, i.e. computers, air-conditioning, TAs, etc.? Whatever. I have to call Rochelle and tell her I’ll be late. I’ll read a page of that silly Mysteries of the Bible book. Type a third-person page. Get Jim the hell out of jail. Insert a paragraph as he steps into the night air. We’re having fish for dinner. Rochelle has class! Oh, shit. How are we going to work that? I’ve got to get home and watch Ada. Oh, lord. Night school tonight. I’m becoming a worse and worse teacher. I haven’t eaten today. Wrote Rochelle a check for a thousand dollars for the deposit on the house in Riverside. She was going to get a new answering machine, too. 3:55 PM Home now. Had to excuse myself from the meeting. Rochelle had fish, tater tots, and peas ready to go. Ada and I ate together, and Rochelle left for class.

[ink sketch from inside the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, NV] I called Idaho. My dad is working for his neighbor, a carpenter. He has pledged $5,000 toward the purchase of a house. The navy hasn’t called. Ada is emptying out her diaper bag and spreading its contents all around the room. Jeez. What the hell else? I’m so thirsty all the time. I put the baby down for a nap. What a lot of new furniture we are going to need. I need to give Mariachi a call. Email Senorita Villa. Apologize to both. This is taking forever. The breeze blows in. I should turn off the ceiling fan. I’ll have to try to give LA a farewell tour before I move to Riverside. I should ask Phylicia about the Metrolink. I’ll never be done with this. The sun seems to get brighter as it lowers toward the horizon. It is noticeably darker in the mornings.

 9-28-01 F 8:05 PM 

What? I'm at home. I could've met Senorita Villa at the museum or gone to Pasadena for the party Daron is throwing, but I couldn't see leaving Rochelle home with the baby, so we're both here bored to death. I took my class to the Museum of Natural History to see the new dinosaur egg exhibit Wednesday night. After that, I went to the Bounty and had a bourbon, a shiraz, and five or six beers. The GIP came. We went to Cheetah's, and I lost two pool games. Hardly noticed the girls, but I did hump the wife for a while when I got home. Didn't finish for whiskey dick and her lack of energy. The next morning, I was slightly hung. I went to the Oaxacan barber on Pico. The neon sigh glowed OPEN, but the door was locked. I could see girl in the back room in a mirror and someone lying on a couch raised his head. Neither came to the door. What the fuck? I muttered. I lingered a few minutes. Finally, the guy on the couch got up and came to the door. I guessed his hangover was worse than mine. The barber is not here, he said. Can you come back later? Whatever. I went to Taco Bell and ate enough food for two grown men, sumo wrestlers. Went home and lay on the couch. Showered. Looked over the Navy web page again. Went back out to the barber. The door was open. Four guys were waiting to get their hair cut. The woman from the back room was cutting a guy's hair. The barber was wandering around doing nothing. I read the news. About forty minutes later, she called me. I asked for a haircut and shave. We don't do that, she said. I've gotten a shave here before, I said. We don't do that, she repeated. The barber who was shuffling around doing nothing was the guy who shave it last time. That's the barber who shaved it last time, I said. It's his day off, she said. So, she shaved my head, and used a straight razor on the back of my head and behind my ears but couldn't shave my beard. I drove downtown to the navy recruiter with short hair and a shaggy beard. My mouth was dry. Heath Hairston welcomed me and had me take a test of language and math. I was embarrassed that I scored a 96. I should have gotten them all. But sail Hairston was impressed. He said, Wow, you blew the roof off that thing. We talked a while about my age and health. He wasn't really able to answer my questions.

 

Tu 9-25-01 6:44 PM

LA High. Whatever. I typed fifteen minutes not long ago. Not a lot worth writing has happened since. Rochelle packed Ada into a papoose on her chest and took the dog for a walk. I videotaped them, full of love. Sent Senorita Villa the names of my kids so we can do pen pals.  Voluptuous Dawn Diore left a note for me at school. My dick twitches. I’m wanting to… I read thinking, “Yeah?! Yeah!?” …read for your class. MY class. Call me and her phone number. Gah! She doesn’t know that I’m married with child now. Sigh.  I learned that synagogue is a Greek word. We had a useless, boring meeting after school today.  It was picture day. I hadn’t sent home the envelopes, so my whole class will have to wait for make-up day, confirming suspicions that I am not a good teacher. The principal came in while I was writing my lesson plan for the week. She asked if it was part of our state-mandated reading program. I should’ve lied and said yes, but I said, “No. They’re working on their written expression, practicing personal narratives. I have them write about their weekends as soon as they come in, as a warmup.” She smiled falsely, condemningly, lips together, shaking her head. I wanted to push her face. “Psch,” I pushed air through my teeth and lips. Another fucking bureaucratic mouthpiece. “All right,” I hollered. “Put your journals away!” She crept at of the room while I sneered at the children. “We’re not supposed to write in our journals…” I was steamed the rest of the day. Third grade’s test scores were the best in the school again. We met our performance goals. Why do these little tinpot dictators with their wannabe superiority complexes get to come in and shake her head and smile condescendingly at me. Principals are like highway patrolmen: you wouldn’t want to be one unless you were already a prick. Whatever. I spend the rest of the morning sounding out p-a-t, pat; p-a-s-t, past; l-a-s-t, last; l-i-s-t, list. Those four words, over and over all morning. Fucking brilliant. After recess, I failed to get the little dunces to say numbers to the thousands correctly. I’ve got to see a recruiter.

 9-22-01 Sa 7:32 Am

Comforted by commercials: if you turn the TV on, and they're selling dish soap, then nothing unusually horrible is happening. I went to bed praying that this will not be a time of terror that I have brought my daughter into; I pray that she will never suffer chemical or biological warfare. I stayed home from work yesterday. Took looks at the Navy's and CIA's websites. What would they want me for? Ugh. Whatever. Not whatever. That fool asshole fatass Hernandez dropped by, badmouthing Bush. Now's not the time. He's not the one to focus on. Whatever his many failings, he seeks to protect freedom of speech, religion, etc. The people who attacked us seek to oppress those freedoms along with half of the human race, women, and to eliminate all relgions but their own. And that asshole Hernandez, the titty-bar lover on his way up to Sunset Boulevard to flirt with a fake-boobs barmaid. He'll overlook six thousand murders for the vanity of criticizing Bush. If Hernandez were in Afghanistan, he would have been beheaded years ago. Fucking idiot.~~~~~~~Watched the 1976 "King Kong" last night. Typed 15 minutes yesterday. Read about fire and pain and doom for the infidels in the Koran. Emailed Mac's lawyer. Never went anywhere yesterday. Held the baby's hand while she walked down the sidewalk. She marveled at the glowers in our neighbor's yard and collected some rose petals to bring back to the house.

This looks like Afghanistan to me or Hell or a nuclear wasteland, and I wonder what time of evil is upon us. But it's just a few people. A few people with enough hatred to fuck the world. How many nuclear warheads has Pakistan got? What is the extent of their capability and range and rage?

 

9-18-01 Tu 11:30 PM

Beauty inspires envy in the ugly and mediocre. [written in drunken scrawl]

9-19-01 W 9-24-01

I’m all snot-nosed today. Had too much sake and Asahi last night. I wrote Jim up to page 166. The spit hit the Dan. It’s pointless and negative. I read about sixty pages of Chesapeake. Sometimes Michener sets apart passages from the narrative as if they were cited from some historical source, but I believed it is all fiction. After that was when I worked on Jim. We watched this Italian movie, “Malena,” about a woman so beautiful and lust-inspiring, she bears the constant brunt of a small town’s fascist scorn. Forced into prostitution, she is eventually beaten by the ugly people of the village. In an off-beat epilogue, she is accepted back into the village after the town has been liberated from fascism and her husband has returned from the war, alive after all; the point being, I suppose, that fascist values do not allow for the appreciation of beauty but rather engender an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. We had dentist appointments to have our teeth cleaned, but all they did was have us fill out forms and have x-rays taken. An hour and half later, they sent us home without cleaning our teeth. I should have growled at them and threatened to find another dentist if they didn’t clean our teeth, but I didn’t. My sister, Mardis, came by after we got home. She was going to interview for a job with Donald Sterling, the owner of the Clippers. She watched the baby for us when she was done. That’s when we went to the Sake House. I rented “The Tailor of Panama,” based on LeCarre’s novel and bought a DVD of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Mariachi is going to come by to collect money for baseball. Rochelle has class today. She wanted my help in editing a paper she had to write for class, but when I made some suggestions, here pride became wounded. Have to teach night school tonight. When I’m done with this, I’ll read the news. Then I have to write a third-person page. Get Jim out of jail. He bit his tongue. If only  he had done that earlier… Then I’ll read some more Chesapeake. That’s all for now.

 

9-17-01 M 1:57 PM

No one will want to read a book that complains about America like Jim does. Whatever. I need a drink. I have to get straight home to babysit when school ends in half an hour. I’ll eat when I get home. I’ll be riding my bike. The market dropped. Who can think? Argh. I typed fifteen minutes on the laptop. Read the newspaper. We ate at the Pantry Saturday morning. A cel phone rant at the table of brown-skinned foreigners, Latin or Arab. “Johnz,” Reg asked, echoing my thoughts, “Is that Spanish they’re speaking?” I strained to listen. It was Spanish. They were not suicidal extremists who had just gotten the call to pull the cord on the bomb in their backpack. I’m going out drinking tonight. Shoot some pool. Where? There is nothing else? Maybe if I turn off the radio. Turn off NPR. Whatever. Ugh. Arg. Ackfuck. I think maybe if I didn’t curse so much, God would not allow so much horror into this world. Rosh Hoshana starts tonight. Florelle called from the supply shed as I was heading to my car on Friday. She said, “I’m not gonna tell you who, but someone said she wished she would have married you.”

“That’s embarrassing,” I said. “I’m not even going to try to guess who.” Maybe this unknow party would like to give me a handjob some time, though.  Just kidding, honey. Lately, I crave drink when it’s not around; then when it is, I don’t want it. Thirteen minutes until the bell rings. I have to put the homework on the board. I have to pay the phone bill. Shall I fill out the mentor application” I have to send in confirmation for a salary point workshop on Saturday, October 13^th. There’s something after school Wednesday, too, at Le Conte Middle School, wherever that is. I’ll rad a few pages of the Guide to LA Lit Agents, though it’s a waste of time. No one will consider my manuscript until it’s finished, and I’ll have forgotten everything by then, or the info will be out of date. Still, maybe I can lay myself a foundation for understanding the business. I lack stamina anymore. My lungs, legs, hands, and wrists are all achy. I’ve become weak. I’m sick of kids.

 

9-4-01 Tu 10:35 PM

Today was the first fucking day of the school year. I suppose I could try to decide to have a better attitude, but I don’t. I typed fifteen minutes at school. Only fifteen kids showed up. One of them’s blind as a Louisville Slugger. I could go for a smoke. I’m watching remote controlled robots destroy each other on TV. It’s so late already. I needed to work on my mentor application, but it’s too late now. Ugh. We’re starting a new math program, a new reading program, and we’ve got al new administrators. All five of them are black women. No big, but no five white men could hold all five leadership positions at a school without a clamor for diversity. Overcompensation holds can be just as inequitable as the injustice it seeks to replace. Good luck to them all. I barely got through half of what I was supposed to do for the new reading program and none of the math. The Open Court reading coach same in and advised me to rearrange my desks so that the children were all facing the letters on the wall above the chalkboard (instead of a few that require a slight turn of the head, as I had them), and she sent me to observe some other classrooms to see how they had arranged their desks. So, I took apart the table groupings that the brain trusts had insisted on in years past and turned them so they were all facing forward. Okay? I got home about three thirty. They baby was asleep. I read the newspaper. Had to be at a meeting for LACAS at four thirty. They had sandwiches. There were forth minutes between the end of the meeting and the beginning of class, so I rode my bike down to Rite Aid and picked up the pictures from the developer and got an anniversary card for my dad and stepmom and some crap to use for prizes at school. I was all discombobulated once class had started. My Spanish had deserted me, and I felt like I had never taught before. I was nervous and didn’t know what I was doing. Ugh. It was torture. It ended unmercifully three hours later. Martin gave me a bag of loaves of different breads from the bakery where he works. My dad was on the phone with Rochelle when I got home. I doubt I’ll be able to get up early enough to do that mentor application before school tomorrow. Whatever. I never saw the baby awake today. I owe Pablo, Getoff, and Gil phone calls. I’ll read some more Michener after this, I guess. Got to get a third person page done tomorrow. Write Jim out of jail. I’m sick of the Jim world view.