50 whole dollars!Wow I made

50 whole dollars!

Wow I made 50 bucks selling the little t. press books at that reading! I think that sets some kind of record. If only I had the other books on me and more copies of everything. I wonder if the jazz was the magic thing that made people buy them? Only 150 to go and I would make back the cost of the materials and postage for the magazine.

G.H. did not read the pirate ship poem. Goddamn it! But whenever he starts going "It's like Genet said..." some serious weirdness is about to come out of his mouth. Barely anyone realizes what he is alluding to when he rambles but at least I know he is alluding. He sounds like a crazy old drunk derelict going on about ethiopian army ants - I can't remember exactly what that one was, but once he mentioned that and something else and I realized it was this thing Andre Breton said about words on the page. Most of it goes right over my head and certainly over everyone else's.

i had a nice feeling when i arrived like everyone was coming up to me and hugging me and they were all different sorts of people, not like, one clique of people though the barbershop is a bit cliquish.

I can't get over how good the jazz guys were, so very funny, witty, responsive. "I've been waiting since 1955 to do this again!" - the cello player.

Person that is oddly like a small and quick and enthusiastic sparrow, how cute you are! 8-) I got that whole butchy shy thing going on all of a sudden as if I should be apologizing a lot for being an awkward lumbering beast. But then pleasantly that feeling would disappear like magic and I would just feel interested and fond.

My friend W. being all drunk disturbing me mightily, I have trouble visiting him lately but also for months and months. Not for the first or last time it struck me how he is constantly playing out being Gary Cooper or Will Kane in the movie "High Noon" except instead of justice he is trying to bring Beauty or Poetry or whatever to the unappreciative townspeople. But somehow I only ever see the bitter moment of him dropping the tin marshal's star in the dust and grinding it under his heel for all to see (which Will Kane did NOT do). He wallows in that moment. No one buys his carefully curated objects, no one is going to give him a million dollars for writing poems. The fact of no women running to sleep with him is also yet another symptom, and maybe the main one, of the way the townspeople are unappreciative. Those goddamn quaker schoolmarms!

In contrast I think of e.k. and her kitchen and her corn muffins. She has plenty of non-recognition, disappointment, being on the edge of literary scenes but getting no credit or respect, not to mention what I sense must be some level of disappointment in her own children, but she does not come off as bitter. by the time you are over 90, think about it, your kids are 60, 70, you can see the things they've done with their lives, any expectations you once had for them, there would be none of that left. If they turn out to be rather unpleasant characters it's not like you get another chance to reform them. You are stuck with them wondering when you're going to die and hoping they'll be decent to you. But she is not bitter, I would instead say that she emanates a certain amount of detached irony and private amusement.

Doing genealogy I called my client's grandmother in a nursing home to interview her for the family history and get her info; I did this with as much diplomacy and diffidence and gentleness as I could muster up. "Why didn't she just call me? I haven't heard from her in months." Sorry lady, I was thinking that too, but, instead she is paying me to talk to you.

The Old Coot, I worked for him again this morning, working very hard, and again fielding the dumb comments and staring at me as if bewitched by my fabulous beauty and charm. Er. I wondered if my tolerant pity was all too obvious, because I was focusing on my feelings of tolerant pity in order to avoid my other reaction to old men, which is white-hot rage and loathing.

Storekeeper behind the counter of the candy store, that is me. what the fuck. At the same time can't I be free to follow my own likes and dislikes? This is what used to paralyze me in high school and early college with women, was I just being the same idiot letch that I hated? I fall back now on "raunchy objectification for fun or if obviously consensual" and the rest of the time just be sort of sexless, which is possibly not a great solution.

W. kept grabbing my arm bruisingly hard and I swear the words "dont' grab me like that " were in my mouth but did not get out. Meanwhile as I said I'm hugging everyone else and having a good time. But I actually had to be super physically careful to stay out of my "friend"'s arm's reach because whenever I entered that radius he was so crossing my boundaries, so, so badly. This is just so sad. He's like a bomb ready to go off. Also every time he reads some poem which is ostensibly about love and poetry and "woman" but I know is addressed to me, and is actually a passive aggressive reproach to the owner of the candy store, it makes me want to barf... Unable to deal with this, I have not been visiting. At different times I have gotten the direct super melodramatic confessions that some poem was written to me or about me, and then other times, other messages like that he is all in love with a certain photographer, or then most recently, I went in the store and had to hear that he was all on the prowl because he had permission from his wife to sleep around while she was out of town. I suggested various prospects trying not to let on that it even crossed my mind for a nanosecond that he could have been trying to pick up on me, but this did not work, he slid into reproach and resentment mode just instantaneously.

In the past he has also said dumb shit to me that made it clear that he deliberately lets his wife think he is sleeping with me. I shudder to think. As soon as I realized all this crap, I stopped carpooling with him anywhere. but he will wait outside for me and then try to walk in as if we had come to the event together. Come ON. that is SO RETARDED. (Also, I never would have caught on to it in a million years if he had not told me that he wants people to think we are sleeping together. Ugh! I can barely stand to type that sentence!)

Ugh, ugh, ugh. I know I just recently subjected anyone who reads this blog to my own vague ramblings about polyamory but I doubt anyone gets the creepy feeling that if they don't rush over to sleep with me right now, I will hate them. Meanwhile, the nice good energy of our poetry clique is messed up for me. I used to go in and visit w. after a reading because we'd be all excited about the poetry and talk about it. But now he'll just be like "Huh, I noticed Joe was ALL OVER YOU last night. Whats so special about HIM?"

what fucking ever.

I should have instantly pulled back from friendship when about the 3rd month after I knew him we were carpooling and I commented that b. clearly thought we were having some sort of affair, and that it was funny anyone would assume that, in freaking california for god's sake, in the 21st century last time I checked, you can't have a friend of opposite gender w/out crazy assumptions? Dumb like elementary school cootie level dumb. His response was "Actually do me a favor and just let her go on thinking that." Um, what? Oops, I forgot about the whole commodity thing and I guess there is a whole old man/virility thing going here? Or what? I laughed it off and mocked him to his face. But that should have warned me big time of a totally unbridgeable gap in understanding that made real friendship impossible.

G.H. would never pull any of that sort of shit even if he does get drunk and say dinosaur like things about how we (the women poets of the group) are such wonderful beautiful dolls, it is not directed at me, he does not paw me or act like frustrated troubador trying to manipulate by "love" which is actually hatred and the attempt to make the "beloved" feel guilty. Arrr. I have spent the better part of a year not talking about this out of respect for w, but now I'm talking. I had told r. the heinous "car incident", which I will detail later here, but r. didn't understand even a tiny bit and apparently called w. the next day to talk about it, which shows just how bad he didn't understand.

I spent some time today just thinking of all my friends and how much affection I have for them and their various quirks and oddities and talents and foolishnesses. It is so great to know people over time and see how they are still themselves. Hmm it's getting late and I'm alternating between ranting and maudlin. time to stop.