June 28th, 1976

Home in the middle of the afternoon. Nerve-y feeling of skipping class. Playing hooky. The fact is that I didn’t have anything due at the office today. Outdoors like a raging furnace. Judy wants me to go with her to meeting with Mr. Detwiler (President of the company) with my memo about new typesetting equipment. Patsy presents me with my very perfectly typed 3-page memorandum from L. Waite to Mr. Detwiler. Very important. Actually, the letter was half Patsy’s concoction– devised the letter herself from disjointed comments she took from me Friday afternoon in shorthand. Fascinated me. Then took that and handed me back this marvelously professional inter-office memo to the president. My timidity with authority. So nervous and afraid to leave early today. After weeks now of overtime and working Saturdays. That I should spend the entire day waiting for Judy and Mr. Detwiler to catch each other between meetings. The heat pressing in on your skin in the muggy blasting sunlight. Now home and stoned out on Mexican grass– drinking iced water, smoking menthol cigarettes. Wondering whether I may take a nap or get industrious for awhile and house clean– or drift through dreams and write. Always the choice I am whiningly confronted with. To dream or be awake. Always wanting the dreaming. Whole weekends spent in somnambulant trances. The nagging guilt to return to reality. Toward bills to pay and dishes to wash or…

—-

Exactly. Richard just called. Breaking into the quiet privacy I was enjoying. Needing. My personal reverie. Trying to extend it longer. Half-apologizing that I will do the washing tonight. Responsibilities closing in on me like walls crashing. If he knows I haven’t cleaned up the house– 

Then he mentions going to the movies tonight– I’d hoped he had forgotten. Says if I put a load of clothes in now– get started. 

I haven’t even been home alone an hour yet now all this excitement and hype gets rolling. Shit! 

And I am not blaming Richard. It is my own retreatism, my collapses, my turning in that shuts the world down. But I want to be high and industrious and even-keeled– not the brooding, hollow-eyed zombie I turn into like clockwork.

I surrender then. Now. Up and at’em Larry. Put a load of clothes in. Straighten up the apartment. Take a shower. Clean the kitty litter pan. Get your clothes ready for work tomorrow. It’s your responsibility to reality. Don’t just sit there staring out the window.

I surrender cautiously.