St. Pat’s Day, everybody in Binghamton turns Celtic. Just look at the high school marching band.

Pebble’s staying: too many dishes pile up, and trashy living room

After I went to bed, Pebble and Marj began whispering in the living room, just outside my door. Pebble’s so loud anyway, and then they started giggling and I heard cloth rustling, snaps, and a zipper, followed by heavy breathing, oohs, and aahs. When I awoke, they were sleeping in Marj’s room.

Pebble’s stuff is strewn all over the place, and the dishes are piling up very high. They have been leaving them for me.

~*~

As for my typing, a la Kerouac, on long strips of teletype paper, which I had in abundance from the newsroom. It served me for both correspondence and my own drafts at literature.

~*~

Last day of winter: 2 inches new snow.

First day of spring: sunny and warm.

Getting my knee to touch the ground, closer to lotus. My body is a joy; it does some things I want now, like playing, standing on one foot and “flying.” My balance is improving. This trip started out on a downer.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hippies, with commentary from now.

By this point, I was getting addicted to the weekly hatha yoga sessions and had even visited Swami’s ashram in the Poconos. I’ll save those details for a more focused presentation later. Or you can read my novel, Yoga Bootcamp.

For now, here are some more mundane activities and thoughts from that period.

~*~

From Borges’ “Anxieties”: “Now that I have the secret, I could explain it a hundred different and even contradictory ways … Compared to it, science – our science – seems not so much more than a trifle … The secret, I should tell you, is not as valuable as the steps that brought me to it. Those steps have to be taken, not told.”

In my readings of the Inca: “In 440 years we have failed to eliminate the savage in music of language: Spanish remains the secondary tongue: the West has been defeated: the flute solo sounds strangely like jazz or Xanakis: there is hope for u.”

[Esperanza was originally from Ecuador!]

~*~

Headline writer
Poet of gossip
[Robert Katzman]

~*~

Meditation revelation: I was trained and conditioned to be a technician: me, the artist, a technician! Frightening thought! A technician knows the surface, not the heart or subjective substance

Swami: “Do not do the exercises on your own. You destroy your cells, they don’t have time to regenerate. Once a week will be much stronger.”

Two I may do, though:

• Contemplate a candle flame.
• Prepare for lotus.

~*~

Snow follows me wherever I go these days: here in the Poconos, also Staten and Long islands trips.

~*~

Surprised to get a letter from Fay and wrote a reply. Noted mine “sound manic but it’s not. How does one write about happiness? Or yoga, the Protestant atheist discovering God within himself, and Spinoza and a Quaker?” The latter item comes out of the blue, considering how little I knew of Friends. Once again …

Also wrote to Nicki.

Blue jeans, desert boots.

And Betty Ann said something like, “Hey, that’s a tough outfit you’re wearing,” and I answered, “Yeah,” She’s been mostly pouting, probably because I haven’t asked her out yet. She was dressing in a brown bibbed pantsuit.

With all the yoga, am going through such mind changes, perhaps the biggest in my life.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hippies, with commentary from now.

Polly’s hometown on north shore of Long Island … Oyster Bay … her grandmother’s house Mully Hill … there’s no hill, the area a lot like Lexington horse country or Palm Beach.  A little gardener’s house next door. Polly’s smoking Parliaments …

Sez she: “Your journal seems written with an audience in mind.” [Quite the opposite. And I should have been appalled by the invasion of my privacy.]

She calls her grandfather Chief. A terribly strong man. We heard from his duck blind the blom-blom of a shotgun …

Favorite words? Polly “far out,” Nicki “yuck,” Len “dig” or “stomp shit.”

I feel there’s this stranger inside me, the real me. The other self, the one I know, is an external shell, the intellectual/jokester/speaker/writer/observer/participant/moralist. The inner self is a pearl, an essence within a dark cave, surrounded by space. It is tormented by demons, driven by fears, seeks sexual release and union. One is rational; the other, irrational. Which is closer to God, I know not.

Marj or Judith, either or both: I’m afraid of a relationship, platonic or passionate.

Headlines? When top French radio show offers advice, astrologer is a big star.

Judith called to say she’d received an “A” in voice, it surprised her, though she’s one of the few operatic voices at Harpur. Her prof gives an “A” only to the elite.

Polly called to see if I’d join them for a movie. “Can’t, I just put a pot pie in the oven,” but she erupted, “Pot pies and onion soup, nothing changes.” That made me angry, why should I cook for solo mio? Now, if we go Zen macro?

Fay signed her postcard from Bloomington, “See ya!” I wondered how to take that. What was she doing there, anyway, rather than West Lafayette?

Ann [whoever] told of her new roommate who talks only of her boyfriend who has a girlfriend …

Started reading Gary Snyder last night: fine stuff. His entries seem to follow weekends: was this a journal, day-off work thing?

Nikki called, collect (2:30 now). Strange conversation, distant, she didn’t know why she called [repeated several times], too much to write: something about a 25-member commune, maybe Sufi, but soul searching, reaching, suicidal.

Somehow, I had expected her to call. Things are looking up. She would bring me down. I couldn’t follow her orbit.

[This was the moment, though, when I mentioned considering yoga and then chancing upon the notice the next afternoon. As I noted on the last page of my journal, “yoga – Steve, 723-7226, 7:30, 131 Clinton St,” a rather fateful commitment.

Of course, we believed there were little men inside our television.

~*~

Although I had three summers in Binghamton, including a college internship, my only winter there had snow cover from Thanksgiving to nearly Palm Sunday, sometimes several feet deep. There was no place to pile it, either. January’s cold was brutal. Global warming lessened the Snow Belt lock by the time I revisited the region a dozen years later. These photos, from the milder winters, convey none of the exhaustion we experienced. Even so, it could be breathtakingly beautiful.

 

 

 

Just about every time we thought it was going away, we got hit with a fresh round. The storms seemed to hit us twice a week. As I recall, the heaviest hit in March: a 24-incher followed by 30 inches and then a 36-incher. Our parking was already packed in on the street.

~*~

In the meantime …

Read Marj some of my Corinthian Columns: very fine shit but my arrangement of words is shifting: my prose style: how awful.

Reading piles around my mattress: self-imposed obligations and duties.

When I came home, wanted to play violin but Marj was studying but Marj was studying so I cooked noodles with mushrooms and broccoli while she watched.

How great it is to say that Sunday has been one of the most beautiful days of my life (had I gone to the Byrd tonight, probably would have overloaded my circuits.)

What shit I put up with from Nicki! Standup, standoff: why don’t I do that with others?

Snidely jumped out Molly’s kitchen window and ran away: dumb cat!

The Inca was king!

In revisiting these, I’m finding my Dark Age was quite fertile.

~*~

I could probably try to reconstruct the time sequence by weeks, but I did suspect the volume covered more than the two months between the holidays and the end of February, when the next volume begins. A lot was happening in the midst of seemingly nothing.

My updated perspective now accepts that I did, indeed, fill 150 to 210 pages in a little over two months. It was the cusp of a life-changing turning point.

~*~

Misc. loose slip of small notated paper: Doctors Bonebroke, Sickler, Dieman, and Hazard. As for Thelonious Panter? The small slip of paper was printed with Date, Instr., Period, Class, Absentees, and Tardy as the header and two columns to list the offenders. A school attendance document! Did I really find that floating, blank, on the street?

[Incinerated]

~*~

From Spiralbound Hippies, with commentary from now.

Nay does not mean no, except in oral voting.

Nark:

• From nok, nak, nose: Brit a spy, employed by police: informer, stool pigeon
• To act as an informer
• To become irritated, annoyed: “Hope you aren’t narked at me”
• Killjoy, wet blanket, an unpleasant and irritating person
• Nark it, meaning to cease, as command

Narky, ill-tempered and irritable

Mencken: “America has no institutions, only fashions.”

From Antioch Review, Summer 1970: “If everybody pleaded not guilty, the judicial system would collapse.”

And then: Laws “should not be understood as meaning what they purport to say, even after being interpreted in court. They can be properly considered only if one examines the intersection between the stated laws and the particular interests that are being served by it, in an actual setting.”

“Fairly obviously, then, the posted law … was intended and used for a purpose exactly opposite to the one stated in words.”

“A stable balance of illegality requires that the law, in practice, exclude from prohibitions the ‘normally’ illegal behavior of particular groups.”

“In this way, the customers get the law they want.”

“Law defends the rights of ownership.”

[Joseph S. Lobenthall Jr., “Buying Out, Selling Out, Copping Out: The Law in the City”]

~*~

Len announced he’s moving out, he can save $12.50 a month in rent and another $25 in food stamps. It hit me bad, at the wrong time: I’m broke, don’t want the hassle of getting a new roommate and getting to know him – most of the “character” here is Len’s: the lights, god-chair, dancing Victorian virgins. I’d like to live alone but can’t afford the extra $250.

Judith’s Wandering Minstrel says he loves her, she said bullshit but she loves him: three days during finals, no studying

[Later entry]:

She has decided:

• She hates Teddy, he’s really messed up
• She pities him (what did Spinoza say about pity?)
• She was crying after 10-minute confrontation when she told him to get lost

[Note that Teddy was in reality the same badass who would later cast a shadow over a promising fling with Stephanie of Bear Mountain.]

He condemned her because

• She likes school more than him
• She took him in to feed and shelter, “I don’t want that”
• She’s afraid of getting involved
• She won’t trust him
• She won’t take off with him to go nowhere
• She won’t give him anything, “I’ll give you anything you want”
• She’s not free

He’s 28, plays guitar and banjo, sings: no home, no income, and a parasite who believes everything should be free.

He doesn’t like classical, “It’s not people’s music, they can’t understand it.” As for opera, her major: “Why be better if you’re good?” Literature, ditto.

Looks like a sandy-haired, sad Allen Ginsberg.

She was crying: You shouldn’t see me like this.

Later, we were wrestling and laughing. Good! I can get through …

~*~

Marj G took Len’s room …

Mixed feelings about her moving in: a feminine touch, cooking, redecorating. A fear, too, of getting involved. She was going to be Polly and Molly’s roommate. Molly sez she’s fine. Tom O’S sez she’s funny, something about Baptist Corners …

Her friend Pebble, the Italian, so euphoric in a raucous way, promised to cook us a lasagna dinner

Adele, resembling Nicki’s sorority roommate of the polka-dot bra: very high strung, beautiful, into Ted. He keeps showing up, like bad karma, first at the old place, then Judith, then again tonight. Lives on Grand Avenue.

Still deep winter at this point of the journal, “it’s 2 degrees, my beard and mustache catch the water vapor from my breathing and it freezes”

I got a fat letter, with newspaper clippings, returned: insufficient address, addressee unknown, and no such street, it said. The Post Office knows so much but won’t disclose it. Are you dead or did you run away to British Columbia with him or merely to a country farm? It will not say. Goodbye, witch, leave me alone, my own life: do not come near me: you can destroy me, I hate you [or that] and fear you: my heart beats too fast. [Nicki? Or Fay? Or]  …

Style is projection.

Judith called this morning, wanted my box number, said she wrote me a long letter and didn’t have time on the phone … she wants to move in with me and split the rent with Marj “and I can pick up after Marj, she’s not too neat” – yeah, neither are you, babe. And she sez Teddy isn’t so bad, “I know so much more now, I can control people better, I don’t have to worry” and her voice tightens, pinched, nervous, “Teddy and I might go away for a couple of days … could I come up a few days early and stay at your place? I can’t stand it here, I can sleep only seven hours” she’s grabbing again, “If I stay with Shayna, I won’t grow”

Mixed feelings I have [too].

Perhaps I should have dropped Nicki when Cox told me to, but then there would have been no loss of virginity, no Florida, no Montana-Utah … am guessing my changes/growth would have been lesser.

Len, who seldom does the dishes, frequently tells me to rinse them immediately upon using. Today he made an omelet (with my eggs, he never uses eggs, he sez); he left the milk out and the dishes, “Oh, yeah, I was too busy kissing Zeezy and tucking her in bed.”

He was also talking about Dr. and Mrs. [his last name] and about hitching out west this spring. He’s in future-possessive bigtime.

~*~

Friday, Judith was here, I called the neighbors to turn it down, “I’ve got a biddie here and she’s trying to study,” “a what?,” “I said biddie,” and she attacked my bare back with a magic marker and I started laughing and Tim on the phone started laughing, couldn’t stop, any of us

Next day, when I returned from work, she was playing records, broke the spin on my Max Rudolf Don Giovanni album, put the discs back in wrong order, slopped up my collection

I enjoy telling people about the books I’m reading before I actually do enjoy reading them

Wrote to Fay today: what an effort! Pain, fear, trepidation, desire.

At the post office, a letter from Judith, sez she’s so much together, stronger, etc., but the script is tiny, tight, 5^th grade appearance … tried going downtown to try to get some arcade photos of myself, no luck finding a photo booth in any of the discount stores downtown

Pips was rushing a sorority … Polly and I were going down to the river by now …

Polly related that Esmeralda had told her the only time she’d seen me with my guard down was on our 4^th of July attempted camping trip … and she felt a sexual power.

In conversation, even if someone makes a trivial flat comment, I have to intellectualize it, a broad interpretation, etc, make the speaker feel guilty for saying anything – sez Polly. Or as Dick Allen had said, I say more than is asked for; it’s great for the prof and me but not for the rest of the class.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hippies, with commentary from now.