July 24th, 1979
Today is one of two self-proclaimed absent days from work per year. Inventory is conducted at the store in the winter and the summer. All employees are expected to participate; those of us in non-selling areas are usually made supervisors and given much responsibility. I think it’s absurd that part of my job expectations are to take physical inventory of merchandise in the store.
It has not been a pleasant day off, however. Last Friday, Mary Ann Coughlin, Garfinckel’s representative at the Star, was killed in a crazy head-on collision en route to Ocean City for the weekend. (The car that collided with her car was being driven down the wrong side of the highway.) She was not a close friend of mine– but a friendly business associate who I was in contact with almost daily. She’s taken me to lunch a couple of times before. She was only thirty years old, pretty, bright and very enthusiastic about her job and, apparently, her world. I take this death hard. It frightens me that life is so easily, so suddenly stopped. How vulnerable we all are.
Another July death. My Dad, Richard’s mother.
Last Wednesday my fish Tallulah died. I disposed of her and got in my car to visit Robert. Midway a car rammed into mine. They ran a red light and tore the hell out of the front end of my car.
My relationship with Robert has become anxious and strained for me as the standard relationship anxieties that I carry around inside of me begin to surface. The demands on my mental and physical energy are enormous and I creak with the weight. Robert is extremely active, social and gregarious. I am basically a reclusive, passive personality that requires huge amounts of empty, reflective time. After three months of happy running around together, I start to withdraw. I start to balk at plans and actually broke a date with him last Saturday night.
Why do I need so much fucking time to myself?
Re-reading my journal from 1976 today I am astonished at the sameness of the personality that I lug around with me today. I have changed little. Perhaps when one realizes that one’s personality has been formed– rather than analyze it one should learn it and cooperate with it.
Larry who likes being alone. Larry who likes to wander through a quiet house with records blaring and strewn beer cans and hot cigarettes and clacking typewriters. Larry who needs time to dramatize the mundane. I have always been this way, and apparently I always will be this way. The only child spending summers alone in the house all day. It is as if those three months through the summer became, as I was growing up, the time of mental rejuvenation and preparedness for the new role next Fall. Each change in grade during school carried with it major readjustments of identity. The transition from freshman to sophomore was incredible.
It was possible, during these formative years (although in retrospect that I see it as being formative), to change identities yearly– in fact it was encouraged and rewarded. In four years going from the low expectations of freshmen to the enviable position of being seniors, a young adult ready to enter the real world. As a youth I believed completely in the idea that life was a steady progression– a definable series of changes. Now I find myself years later watching years pile about me, spinning my wheels.
I think there is a connection between my now common summer depression and the sanctioned hibernation period I always knew as a child.
I am basically a loner. I need as much blank time as I need filled time. I am constantly in the process of recreating myself. And that requires much concentration.