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.