June 29, 2023

Sultry summer heat, spiced by burning Canadian forests. 

Went to write by the river, which I did with some success. The day’s theme was evidently women and their big dogs. The German shepherd was completely uncontrolled, and pulled his mistress off her seat and under the table every time another dog walked by. He fought viciously with two white Labs for five seconds, and then they were all best friends and went swimming in the river. The heads of the dogs in the water were huge and startling until one figured out what they were. At one point I was smitten with urgent intestinal issues in the worst conceivable place. With so many women about, I knew the restroom would be occupied, but I rushed there anyway. It was occupied. Drove around to my own office (where there is a restroom) and of course the parking lot was sealed off by a gigantic truck making a delivery. Parked illegally and made it to succor just in time. It would be funny in a movie. You foresee that one day time will run out and you will soil yourself in public. 

With time yet to waste to avoid the cleaning lady, drove to Habitat for Humanity, where I was tempted by not one thing. Did have a nice chat with R, who revealed that she’s recovering from a stroke. “I’m just glad not to be in bed drooling,” she said. As are we all. 

 

June 28, 2023

Early at the Y. Trainers taught lanky high school boys how to weight train. It was sweet. My chest felt wonderful, having done nothing but typing and gardening for a month or so. Sat then by the river, meaning to write, but not, instead watching a great egret preen and stalk and spread his wings on the far side of the water.

J wants me to write a libretto for a one-act opera based on Schnitzler’s The Green Cockatoo. 

JH has died.

Founts

 

June 25, 2023

Finished the knotty play. Went back to painting, a dark horse romping on a meadow beneath a mountain. A green heron fishes a nearby creek. Days went by when I simply couldn’t think of anything to paint, working so hard on the play that all my invention went into language. 

Ordering plants for a no-longer-so-far-off autumn. 

Screeching of cats, sometimes right up against the house, tears the night. Once you know what it is, it’s less startling. I assume it’s love rather than war. 

Remembering a fist fight with C in the Hyre Junior High boys’ locker room. 7th grade, I think. He started a campaign of harassment that I resolved to end right at the beginning. Still recall his look of astonishment when I laid him flat. Not sure we ever spoke thereafter. I discover today that his wife and his daughter died of cancer. I feel close to him, as though something altogether else had happened sixty years ago. 

I assert that I was never bullied in school, but I think I probably was and simply didn’t notice, or interpret it that way. I was certainly a prime target, with my glasses and my brief case and my intellectuality and my inability to take gym class. Apparently some people recognized I was gay a decade before I did. When I was in 9th grade, a kid came back from Ellet High expressly, so he said, to apologize for his bullying of me. In fact, I hadn’t noticed, and had taken his attention, which he evidently meant as mockery, as a kind of affection. I’ve probably done that all my life, put the best possible interpretation on people’s behavior toward me, missing malice and hatred until they welled up frustrated, enlarged, and finally unmistakable. The other issue was that I was scrappy, even physically aggressive from time to time. Bullying based on the assumption that a person could get away with it quickly dissipated. 

Contemplating the truth that painting seldom went well before, and seldom goes wrong now. Contemplating the truth that the founts of poetry, which were meant to have dried twenty years ago, haven’t. I can sit down in a quiet place, and out it comes. Toward what end? Here is the great faith of my life. 

 

June 22, 2023

Rain continues. So cold last night I closed the windows and slept in my hoodie.

Plowing through a play that’s been eight years in finding its proper path. I had the whole summer to travel if I wanted to, but 1) I’m loathe to place myself at the mercy of airlines in the state they’re currently in and 2) I realize I’m holding off until some great achievement allows me to treat myself. I’ve barely left the house, which I know because the front door is locked, as it wouldn’t be if I’d passed through it.

Solstice

 

June 21, 2023

Stiff rain for the Solstice. 

Tedious meeting last night. One person in her report tried hard to be peppy and exciting. Who can say how exhausting that is? Recent vandalism was discussed– people damaging the campus without even the excuse of robbery, out of apparently sheer malice. We’ll put up cameras. We’ll widen the gap between ourselves and our allowance of derelicts, through no fault of ourselves. Some of the homeless are full of malice, just as some of us are. 

Triad Stage has closed. 

 June 19, 2023

Juneteenth

Woke blessing the rain, which means I cannot today work the garden. Yesterday, when I did work the garden, things looked droopy and spent. Rabbit gleaning the clover. Yesterday evening a terrible din out back, where two cats– Jordan’s big black and the local feral brindle-- got acquainted. Reports of aggressive raccoons entering by dog doors and cracked windows. I walk the perimeter every day, looking for gnawed places. 

A man in Ohio executes his three little boys with a rifle. Without the rifle, those boys would still have their lives. Our mania for firearms will be inexplicable to the future. We are the soldiers giving smallpox blankets to the Indians, while at the same time we are the Indians. 

 

June 17, 2023

Watched Cherubini’s Medea from the Met last night. Riveted to the TV. Dark, majestic, dramatic. I don’t understand why it’s not a staple of the repertoire. 

Took the cat carrier to Goodwill.

Magnetic asks me to be in a couple of plays for their one act festival. I accept the clever, mordant, surprising one. I reject the one that’s about the wise homeless guy under the bridge lecturing to the new homeless kid how everything’s going to be all right. That is exactly the play I did last time, though preachier and therefore worse. Maybe I give off old homeless guy vibe. 

Learned that a woman who caused a lot of trouble for me-- baselessly, out of her own garden of ignorant misunderstandings-- is fighting cancer. Had to push it aside, as the thoughts I had were not worthy. 

Concert

 

June 16, 2023

25th Anniversary concert last night at Montford Amphitheater was a social if not entirely an artistic success. We pleased our audience and felt good about ourselves, and maybe my inquiries should have stopped there. Both the Mayor and the Governor sent anniversary greetings, Mayor Esther proclaiming yesterday “AVLGMC Day.”One Facebook comment read: “Guys I am astounded at how lovely this is,  Simone and Rob, Bravo.  I love hearing the wonderful vocal bookends of David Hopes Basso Profundo and Will's angelic Tenor floating out of the chorus at the perfect moments. “ Nevertheless, acoustics there are not right for the sort of thing we do, and, as we had no rehearsal in the venue, there was no opportunity to address the problem. I apparently had a microphone shoved down my throat, and however gratifying that might be in the abstract, in application it played havoc with balance. 

Coffee with our founder D this morning. He was critical, blaming it on the director, especially her antics at the podium, which he thought unbecoming. “The director doesn’t perform; the choir does.” I’m amazed sometimes by my tolerance of things I think are wrong, my simply assuming nobody else notices and I’m being an old crab. He observed, “You almost lost it a couple of times, but miraculously got it back and managed to end together.” Not especially high praise. MM remarked, “The acoustics were not in your favor.” 

WLOS was there interviewing, and interviewed me as one of the “founding members.” I thought no more about it until I turned on the late local news and there I was, looking not bad and (thanks to judicious editing) sounding wise and eloquent. I wonder if they’ll send me a tape. One of my Cambridge students attended, and she cried out “You look wonderful!,” which I took to mean I looked much less decayed than one might expect. 

Over coffee caught up on D’s jagged life, much less rewarding than his mind and talents would seem to have deserved. The surprising revelation that his father died of gangrene. 

M and A are getting a divorce. She told him she hadn’t been in love with him for years. Sometimes I consider what heartache my solitary life has shielded me from. 

June 15, 2023

Haircut from a 6'6" guy with the build of Captain America. He once owned Rio Burrito, and witnesses that barbering is much less stressful than running a restaurant. In NC it takes as long to become a barber as it does to become a nurse, and far longer than it does to become a cop. 

Sang our concert pieces at rehearsal last night better than I ever had before. Perhaps that means the actual concert tonight will be second place. Our director cannot stop herself from screaming (literally screaming) “D!” when our final consonants are not grotesquely exaggerated. She’ll do it in the concert without thinking, and my rage will be so great it will be hard to sing. It’s pathological.  Also, we will never have rehearsed in the actual concert space. 

The scraping sound, which I heard again last night, is a raccoon either climbing or trying to climb a downspout. I hope she, finding no more gashes in the roof, will give it up as not worth the effort. At the stroke of midnight I was looking out the kitchen window and a saw a bear and at least one cub move down the drive into my garden. Their absolute silence meant I would have noticed nothing had I not been staring out the window at that exact moment. The cub did make a side trip to bounce on the wheelbarrow. My walled garden may make a good resting place for the night. 

Yeats's Birthday

 

June 13, 2023

Yeats’s birthday.

Found a mouse in the kitchen trash can. By the number of little mouse turds it looked like he’d been there for a while. How long can a mouse live without eating? Tossed him into the grass and he scurried off. 

Heavy vine-clearing. 

Random revising. 

Voices of children in the gray dusk.

 

June 12, 2023

More construction on the street and in my driveway. Applying macadam, I think. The sunburnt construction guy says it’ll all be done by the end of the day.

For a time I had 13 green vest clad workers leaning on their shovels in my drive, while one man dug, When I rolled out the trash, the macadam was still radiating significant heat. 

 

June 11, 2023

Gentle rain. 

To the theater last night to see the play, SAE, that I’d vowed not to see. It was better than anticipated, if only just. Odd that one of the trailers should have been the worst (and first) moment in the piece, a reminiscence unsuccessfully ad-libed. Which is not to say I had a memorable night at the theater. The rest that I feared came true, it being a series of personal testimonials never achieving extended form, or plot, or engaging the curiosity. Two of the players sometimes read from the script disguised on clipboards or in notebooks. I believe transmutation of perceptions–not merely the presentation of perceptions– to be the crown of theater, and at no point did this happen. It was a conversation, one-way, and with clearly only one acceptable reaction from the exhausted auditor. This is not to say there wasn’t excitement. Ten or so African-American students came in, attended by two adult chaperones. It rejoiced my heart to see them in that space. They were surely the intended audience, and the only audience that could be expected to profit very much from it. They were invited by the actors to respond, and they did. It was lovely for a moment. Not far into the first act, the adult chaperones hustled them all out into the twilight, slamming the door behind. I asked Mandy at the interval what the problem had been, and she speculated it was the strong language. If I knew how to find those two incompetents I would do so and slap their ignorant faces for a deed so destructive on so many levels. Anyone pretending to be offended by “language” in the volcanic world needs to be slapped silly. 

Watched from the bathroom window a little rabbit zooming back and forth, then testing the tunnels of the cinder blocks for possible hiding places. 

Finished a new play: It Was a Beautiful Dress.

 

June 10, 2023

Some acoustic effect makes every word uttered in the apartment parking lot next door completely audible in my study. The people there have rich and, to me, unfamiliar lives. 

Energetic clearing of vines.

Lilies of the Valley

 

June 9, 2023

Two nights of disturbed sleep. One night I was cold and ill, the other night I was cold and heard scratching in my room, which, being investigated, could not be located or confirmed. I think now it might have been my own empty stomach noises (they have alarmed me before), but I’ll check the outside wall in a few minutes. The scratches didn’t sound like an animal’s rhythmic, short-spaced scratches, but rather like a person dragging a stick along stone. The fact that it’s June makes me hesitant to close the windows, even in face of freezing, though the radio reported the temperature “in the low 40's” 

Not-bad rehearsal last night, possibly our last one before the Montford concert. 

Bought a ticket to the show I vowed not to see. 

Pat Robertson is dead and Donald Trump is indicted. I will pour libations to the gods. 

Bent a huge bamboo that would not break for me. Now it curves over the back garden, and mockingbirds perch on it. 

Planted lilies-of-the-valley, once more, trying to make them work for me. 

 June 7, 2023

Sky hazy, warning on the radio concerning air quality, because forests in Canada are aflame. 

The spice bush grows huge and overwhelms the end of the drive. I have to roll down the window to listen for traffic, and so get smacked by a branch of flowers every time I exit. 

Storage of my finished paintings becomes a real problem. Part of the problem is that I want to look at them any time I want.

Unexpected thoughts of a student, a Goth girl in my senior seminar years ago. She introduced herself to class as asexual, and gave a little speech about how, since sexual relations were objectively disgusting, the only reason to have them was to reproduce, and she had no desire to reproduce and was the only person in class honest enough to admit that sex wasn’t repellent. Many students made no distinction between “memorize” and “remember,” but she was especially vehement about it, vocally resenting anything that smacked of “rote memorization.” The specific instance I remember was her anger at having to know the names of figures of speech (Metaphor, metonymy, onomatopoeia, etc) when such things could always be looked up. Angrily fighting off the education she (or somebody) was paying for. 

Graduation

 June 6, 2023

Fifty-five years ago tonight I graduated from Ellet High School.

Sat by the river and wrote– theater, this time, funny but maybe inconsequential. Some random thoughts: A bad play is a play that thinks it has something to teach. A bad playwright is one who thinks she has something to teach. 

UU

 June 5, 2023

AVGMC sang for the installation of Pastor Bob at the UU of Transylvania County, in Brevard. Small, hugely appreciative audience. During the service we sang hymns with texts rewritten to express environmental and social concerns. Despite honest Unitarian emphasis on diversity, not a brown face in the crowd. A recording was made and put on line. I don’t think we sound very good, but it may be the quality of the recording. Maybe not. The problems to my ear are blend and balance. W, of course, showboating, his strained and -ever-more-pinched treble piercing through the fabric of the sound, unblended as a razor in a glass of milk. B barked at him for putting on his final consonant after everybody else, presumably so it could be fully heard. 

Lunch and writing session with S and R at Green Sage. We ate, chatted, then sat at the table and wrote, each on our own project. Surprisingly conducive. I either wrote a short play or began a long one. 

 

June 4, 2023

Reading in The New Yorker about Alice Sebold. Her rape must have happened while I was at Syracuse, though I don’t remember it from the time. She might have been my student. All her teachers were my teachers. How terrible to have your life invaded; how far more terrible to destroy the life of an innocent in your lashing out afterward. I tried to think of the tunnel where all this happened. 

Awesome diarrhea was the feature of the early morning. Who knows what happens inside? I’m thinking it was horseradish dip and pretzels. 

The Lord sent rain upon my new plantings. 

Sasquatch

 

June 3, 2023

Intensive gardening. Planted devil’s poker, and acanthus which Jesse Israel ordered special for me. Watered. Done with all that before noon. Painted in the early afternoon. Still developing the image of wild animals at Stonehenge, sort of. 

Thought I’d go to the theater tonight, but the offering at M (I know by the trailers) is the theatrical equivalent of rap music: one dimensional, uplifting, morbidly self-referential and self-congratulatory, artless in all ways, good and bad. A featured scene begins with beaming actors each intoning, “My favorite teacher was–” The question of diversity is addressed by importing black actors to valorize black experience to a (one supposes) white audience. This is, I grant, better than some other possible offerings, but is it what is wanted? Needful? I feel it is in large measure condescending. Can I trust my judgment in that regard?  There’s no attempt at discovery, but pure and direct didacticism, from stage to house, a lecture with–it seems–music. I go to a play to see a PLAY. M is backing off from that and staging energetic, loose-limbed, skit-night collaborations. I have no general criticism of that, except that it is not what I want to see. We emerge into Theater of and for Overexcited Lesbians. I suppose it rightly belongs to those who do the work. 

Watched a program before bed about Sasquatch and plesiosaurs in Alaskan lakes, and no matter how stupid I thought it was, I lay awake for a while listening to every sound outside. 

 June 2, 2023

Heavy gardening in the west garden. Inhaled tiny insects the whole time. Hosting the tick makes me more attentive, showering off and investigating myself when I leave the yard. 

 

June 1, 2023

Parents’ anniversary.

Sat by the river, and though I didn’t write much, I met many dogs. Watched the skinks. 

 May 31, 2023

Dark skies, though no rain.

When L was here we discussed why I “chose” to remain single, considering my tastes and preferences and propensities. I realized sometime after– as I have at intervals in the past– that I remained single because no one wanted to spend his life with me. The simplest explanations are often the correct ones. 

More than a week ago I noticed that one of the knobs on my ruined left leg was growing and discolored. I pointed it out to L, and she noted that it was red, and thus getting circulation. When I went to the doctor I pointed it out again, saying I feared it was gangrene or the like, but the nurse said if it were gangrene the whole leg would be involved. Thinking it was just one of those horrors brought by ruined circulation, I tried to ignore it, while noting it grew and changed color. I hoped that like a blood blister it would eventually disappear on its own. Today in the Ingle’s parking lot I took another look, and saw that it had grown antennae and a leg. It was, in fact, a tick, now gray and as big as the end of my thumb. I pulled it loose and dropped it. I went in, did my shopping and asked the pharmacist if there was a way to guard against tick fever, and he said doxycycline, which I, miraculously, have. When I went back to the car the hideous thing was dragging itself across pavement approximately the color of itself. I had said to myself ten times “it looks just like a tick,” but, as I do, I assumed something other than the simplest answer.