December 1, 2007

What a day! I’m just able to sit down after fighting agonizing leg cramps– I was yelling and dragging my convulsed leg from room to room, one of the possibilities of expression open up by living alone. My leg cramped up after I got up from for a nap wherein I’d dreamed a horrible dream. My mother had left my sister and me to fend for ourselves in a strange city. From time to time people would appear whom she had sent to “take care of us,” but they were more horrible than being left on our own. We went to one of their houses, and were sitting on the kitchen floor, when we looked down to see nematodes and bacilli and various microscopic disease organisms which some quality of the floor (perhaps extreme dirtiness) rendered visible. At one point my mother and a clump of strangers were having a whispered discussion at one end of a huge, filthy room. We had been banished to the other room, but finally I rose to demand to know what was going on, what secret was being kept from us, but I was stopped by my mother, who would only put her finger to her lips to shush my questions. She looked like a corpse with a hideous wig, and I was afraid of her. I lay down for the nap because everything in the day was going so badly that unconsciousness was, I thought, the only remedy. Titus’s eye is swollen shut with some infection. My friends were going to see the gingerbread houses at the Grove Park, and I kept asking to come, but they kept ignoring me. The peck of tangerines I bought from the Reynolds High choir rotted in four days. I’d worked out at the Y, which was all right, but depression made that an imperfect experience. I looked out at the Escort this morning and lost control. I gave the car to Roland on the one and only condition that it disappear from my life, and there it sits, he having not only failed to take it or get rid of it but also retaining key and title so I can’t. My rage was out of proportion for one day of this, but not for six weeks. I went briefly to the studio (too upset to paint, but not for a little housekeeping) to find a note from Richmond asking me to read his novel and critique it and tell him how to get it published, along with a codicil asking me to give the $100 I pay him for $20 worth of storage space to Jolene, not, apparently, imagining that my critical expertise and hours of my time were worth anything. And that was the base of it all: the fact that I am always engaged in something or other that is almost always volunteer, unrecompensed, unaccompanied, even, by the embarrassment which would obtain if anyone thought it SHOULD be recompensed and they just couldn’t, and which is EXACTLY like–except for being better– what other people are doing for pay. We opened Christmas on Broadway last night, and nobody could miss the fact that it’s basically a wreath of trifles surrounding two important pieces starring our director, a vanity project at which attendance is insured by finding parts for twenty kids, and in which the rest of us are variously ridiculous volunteers for a project for which he collects the money. I don’t really mind this sort of thing once in a while–one is sometimes a jester in the court of one’s friend-- but it’s gotten to be invariable, inevitable, ludicrous. At the studio entrance I passed a show where paintings no better than mine (I think worse, of course) had been sold for $500 a pop. Jesus, I could use a little of that! I receive a whopping bill from a credit card which I evidently forgot to pay last month, just when my decision finally to go to Ireland was balanced on a very thin margin of solvency–much thinner than the amount of the bill. And I thought “I will read Richmond’s book, because I love him. He will not give me– did not think to give me-- the $100 because he does not love me.” This cannot be refuted. I might have left some things out, but, anyway, I am not feeling very jolly, and I have one hour to jolly myself up for the second round of Christmas on Broadway.