Vol. 25, green Indiana cover, begins 19 February ’73 in a Bloomington visit, then turns into the first of the Fostoria series. Some overlap with the previous volume.
A phantom follows me around in flashes of her traipsing and schlumping through campus … my real reason for the visits was to win her back, only to be thwarted in the pursuit. And then Capt. Amerika flaked on me, after all the hospitality I’d offered him earlier. Did I take the Greyhound on any of those trips?
You list an old address and an older phone number. Who are you running from? Or what? It’s funny how so little can say so much. Two friends saw you last week, about the same, with a slob-freak grad student, an older man: still seeking a father you can punish? Still seeking to punish yourself?
15:III:73 / Day in Yellow Springs: see why Fern and Cedar ran back to the ashram after moving out: security of the tribe.
“We expand through sorrow.”
The self-righteous barrier of Quaker smiles scared me off in Waynesville Sunday yet I should share through speak.
Knife in the Water: such a fine title (film by Polanski): using only three players.
Ugly Ohio: snarl of rails, grain elevators, auto parts factories, sky vast as Montana, endless prairie, 50-hour workweeks at scab pay.
(So I was mulling the job.)
Horoscope: opportunities multiply.
Associate editor = managing editor elsewhere, opportunity of editorial page column; 12 correspondents and a small staff.
Move with ideas.
Mom revealing her mother’s past [add this to my Mother’s Day perspectives!] As for the aunt divorced and smoking scandalous cigarettes?
Searching for an apartment: highway trucks shake the walls all night, a king’s ransom for not enough room to turn around in, “furnished” means crowded with junk, Grubber tells me of kicking the last tenants out for taping Playmates to the ugly walls, “Told ‘em: Out! Tonight!” And no wimmen in the room either. No closet and a terrible stench.
And then, stalking the wild auto, Morris Jones, fine rap VW salesman, delivered …
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Entry of 29:III:73 introduces Kat and Ann, the waitresses, Italian and Polish.
Two weeks later, a Friday / Met a great Boddhisatva, Jesse Owens. Expected an aging jock and found a yogi who gives his energy to spur on others. He told of a high school track coach who sacrificed vacations to tell students of muscles in such clarity “You could see it” … and in response “you wanted to give this man everything you could … you learned your lessons well” A Virgo, September 12, too fast to be a Capricorn
Soon, betwixt Palm Sunday and Easter, I was calling the place Prairie Depot, but with only one “i,” a misspelling that continued a few years. One eye? Or half-blind?
Two weeks later / West Virginia white-water rafting trip. No dams upstream … Cheat River … Kingwood Albirght power station smoke Mamie’s motel and restaurant.
Cold, cold river.
And two weeks after that, a dash to the ashram. Memorial Day weekend? Swami’s first comment: “You have city pallor.”
Swami Black Cloud in hell.
Slave wages = no pride.
Small-clan Fostoria, small minds and no imagination
and divorce from nature gods.
Mid-June. Took Kat to BG today: in her brother I saw my old self: selfish, materialistic, mean, bossy; she, too, saw a difference, “You’re alive, you’re human.”
I was also teaching hatha in the apartment …
“Be a lay teacher … for laymen.”
And then poetic blasts about glaciers before I’d ever seen or heard any …
“where once flew eagles now sail buzzards” except that eagles have returned with a vengeance
By July, Troubles with Kat …
Why great monasteries are in mountains: the reaching up to the glory of the universe, versus the running out to worldly desires …
Many yoga notes, too.
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From Spiralbound Flatland, with commentary from now.
Jnana's Red Barn 