January 31, 2017

This morning over the gym parking lot flamingo vapor trails crossed a dark turquoise sky. Past days have been jumbled. I look on the page and see I have not journaled, though away from the page I thought I had.  Excellent day in the studio. Bubbling happy boys visit me before class. Excellent class days. Monday it was Dryden, me thinking I was one of a handful of academics in America who give a whole day to Dryden. The obbligato under all, though, is the political catastrophe America suffers even as I write. It never crossed my mind that there would be a time when my deepest hurt was not personal, but rather public. It never crossed my mind that I would see  a time when the Free World would be leaderless, when the institutions of the greatest nation on earth would be threatened by a self-delighted and probably insane tyrant. When do the checks and balances kick in? When do the Republicans fade away out of pure shame, and never raise their heads again? Will the Judicial Branch fold up like a kicked kitten and slink away? When does Conservatism admit it is not Conservatism but envy and resentment and greedy malice, not here and there, but everywhere it raises its head?  It is not often that the political battle is between good and evil rather than something far grayer and less certain, but one of those times is now. I am waiting for someone to tell me what to do. I am waiting for the battle to come within reach.

This has been a good day. Even my patriotic rage has something fine in it.

Some shit bitch found the passages from my studio journal about J and copied them out and sent them to him, anonymously. It never crosses my mind that anyone who reads my blog will know me or anyone I’m talking about, and when they do it always turns to mischief. But, I wrote nothing that wasn’t felt, and the upshot is that J and I are back in communication. Some people love hurt and mischief, and stumble over themselves initiating it. I do pray for vengeance against my enemies sometimes, expecting God to know when to turn a deaf ear.

January 28, 2017

Prednisone made for a remarkable class day. It must be very powerful, or I am unusually susceptible. Gout submerged, anyway. One of my students said, kindly, of the 8 AM class that I was “all over the place.” I knew as I stood there talking that I could not keep on the straight and narrow of discourse, but there was nothing to do but get to the end of class. Hope to repair the damage Monday. Crashed home and slept the oddest late morning sleep, one I didn’t think I could arise from, but did. Then to Edna’s for coffee with N, who, he reminds me, was my advisee and Telemachus nine years ago. What I remember mostly is he and I being the sole basses in the university chorus at the time. Recalled immediately how much I enjoyed his company. We caught each other up on our lives. He now runs a lawn care company, using his degree in creative writing to its fullest potential. I told him of my catastrophe with Y, and he admitted that he also knows nothing about botany, and sort of scorns the idea of learning anything. Odd, it strikes me. Offered to be his botanical consultant when I retire. Recent events having enlarged my never very large interest in Debbie Reynolds, I watched The Unsinkable Molly Brown on TV. A truly terrible movie. Not one moment of the genuine. Not her fault, I supposed. Sort of C+day at the studio. Fell asleep in Jason’s big white chair. Voice clear most of the day. Started writing music for Dinosaur Movie, after having asked M to do it. What are the ethics surrounding that, I wonder. Whoever gets there first---

January 27, 2017

Woke with an urgent need to turn the radio on, some dream having convinced me there was news of import. I think I thought Trump had been assassinated. But, no . . . Woke also with gout. Took the steroid the doctor prescribed, which made me so lightheaded I could barely make it up the stairs. Looks to be a lovely day.

January 26, 2017

Painted most of the morning, well, I think, in my new mode, owning and honoring my weirdness. Lunch with SS. I had his energy for the organizational aspects of theater once, but it has dissipated, or redirected. I can admire it purely, as I no longer have any desire to possess it. Have not been on stage for half a year, and don’t care. Gobsmacked before each new atrocity of the new administration. Not one choice correct, not one statement not a lie, not one gesture other than coarse and vulgar. Potted a gift jade plant. Had visions during a massage with Zach.  

January 25, 2017

Flames dance in my study gas heater.

Hung my new painting in the living room, the demi-Kandinsky. It is lovely, I think.

Asked in a meeting to think of a day when I was happy with my vocation as a teacher, and it was but the day before, when I was giving my students Donne and they were accepting him with both hands.

The department is not as wild as they might be about initiating an MFA. Anecdote had led me to expect better.  Everybody feels overburdened. Add  twice as much to do and we will feel exactly the same degree of overburden, so, why not? Poor A is now in charge of assessment, which, like the lines at the airport, is 100% bullshit. What makes it worse is that it’s bullshit no one will look at after it’s laboriously cobbled together. The perfect tool of bureaucracy: make work for others from which you yourself are exempt.

Gym at opening the dark of this morning. The one person there before me was Brent, ripping the machines apart, flaunting his supernatural level of fitness. Were I filming The Iliad, he would play Diomedes.

Dream one night in which I was a kid living in a sort of camp where young gods were trained. I was not treated very well, and I thought I was meant to be a servant, but one morning I woke up and realized I’d turned into a god in the night, and my identity had been kept from me by a woman who claimed to be my mother, but who was actually an evil witch. That woman was Jane Fonda. I was so beautiful that I left my clothes in a pile, to give people the opportunity to see me naked. But, I needed to escape from the camp, and from the wicked Fonda false-mom. I ran into the parking lot (it was still night) having discovered that nascent gods get a blue sports car (mine was a Lotus) on their emergence day. I looked for my car, to see evil Jane mom trying to run down the battery so I couldn’t get away.

January 24, 2017

Some days are so long you forget what actually happened when they started out. Worked out and wrote a poem in the gym café, which becomes one of my favorite things to do. Quite good classes, at the end of which I was staggering with exhaustion. The students claimed to be as well, or said so to make me feel better. A few boring sword-and-sandals on TV, then monstrously early to bed.

January 22, 2017

My people made up 1/3 of the Night Music house Saturday night. Tom and Laura motored down from Blacksburg; Linda and Jim were there, as well as James the political hotel employee whom I invited without ever anticipating he would come. Linda felt he was flirting with me. If so, it’s saddening that I don’t notice such things any more. I suppose they all liked it. I liked it better each night I watched. I appreciated Cleve’s skill and Phil’s naturalness, and Jesse’s beautiful eyes, the more. I even began to think it was a sort of masterpiece, a jewel of a play served up to, maybe, in all, sixty or seventy witnesses. What does that mean? I think it is not absurd to say no one in the theater is writing better than I, and few are more obscure. Am I paying for some forgotten karma? Am I neglecting the one thing I should do, the one door I must knock on, to turn this around? It is a beautiful play, as if it were not actually mine. I saw this once I got over my terror of boring the audience. But, so what? It’s a ring of infinite price on the hand of a dowager in a decaying mansion, where only a few retainers ever see it. Guessed my way out of Greensboro before dawn, drove home through constant rain.

T emails:
We had a tough drive home, in the dark and rain, but made it. A good bit of talking about the play, so that's good. It keeps on living that way. Would you mind sending me a copy? If it's easy to find. 
The last image was fascinating. As if it were possible to keep the whole flood of emotions set in play but not yet fully enacted there, in this space we all shared, unnamed. It seemed very intimate, a shared secret--the whole play. So Laura and I tried to talk about it some--the sadness under the always good at things feeling I've always had; the close unnamed relationships, outside of our marriage, even before it. I tried to talk about those years we wrote letters so intensely (at least it seemed that way to me) and how it changed my life, gave me a part of my life really. A part that's still there and alive, though obviously I didn't honor it properly by just drawing into my own little world of family and books and church. 

The one review that means something.