July 25, 2020

Mother’s birthday. She would have been 96. She has been dead 46 years. It’s absurd. What did she think of me when she died, when I was apparently a failure living in a trailer, working as a janitor in Ithaca? It’s one of those things I cannot think about.

The combination of quarantine and retirement does odd things to my perceptions. I live so much in the world of the Ideal-- literature, art, conversations with the glorious dead, the characters I’m creating as I write--that actual people, with their slowness, their indirection, their scattered or invisible purposes, irritate me a little. I do remember this from times before, especially graduate school when I was conquering poetry and living in my little Platonic retreat on Madison Street. But then I was also sexually active, and the hunt for and seduction of sexual partners brought me back to a state of civility.