March 2001

I went to the City of Angels, amidst darlings and devils. Never mind what brought me here. Never mind what happened between the last entry and this one. It's only life- blue-eyed, lean, cigarette-smoking life strutting on uneven sidewalks. I found an enormous eraser and erased every inhibition by feeble candlelight. Erased the past, the future, all of it. I threw away everything, gave away books, boxes of them. Sentimentality was folded between the dusty pages. Nostalgia broke in the move. On the drive down I witnessed a fatal car crash. A woman was thrown from a van, lay face down in the grass, her clothes ripped from her body by the impact.
On the way back north I stopped in Santa Barbara and visited with Anita and Frederick. I confessed to Anita that I am sick, the depression overwhelms me. The words were bruised, their harmonious bones broken, their veins misleading. I wondered if I could hide, disappear without hurting others or myself.
Vacant halls of my mind are lit by candles. Thoughts spill like hot wax in senseless patterns. The walls shudder with memories. Recollections put on a burlesque show, showgirls stomp their high heels. High hopes topple like civilizations. I am lost amidst the standing columns of my dreams, fluent only in the terpsichorean language of the deaf soul, which retains the poetry of life; not the prattle of avoidance, the plaintive realities.
I went for a run on the path that weaves through the UCSB campus. The sun warmed the coastal breeze that carried all aspects of the sea, accompanying me all the while like music, and the squawks of seabirds. A small startled snake slithered into the aromatic brush, rhythmically breathing all the elements into my lungs, veins pulsating with meditative appreciation for nature. Someone like me is far better at envisioning other lives than living his own. When I looked up from the swerving path, its bumps, crevices and cracks, I found I had arrived at the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean.
Here I sprawled on the grass and listened to the waves- white horses, as Frederick calls them- stampeding toward the hot shore, stumbling over one another in salty haste, trampling one another with ice-cold fanfare. One thing remains steadfast, barely- the acoustics of my diary, whose pages are not churned by words, nor turned by hand, but by time. Time whose averted face wears a hidden countenance, whose plans remain clandestine, whose gender and motives, agenda and morals are secret, vexed by its own knowledge that life is not as concerned with it as it is with untimely coincidences.
Again I went to the ocean, sat on a small backless bench on the edge of a cliff. Below an occasional figure jogged soundlessly by, androgynous surfers bobbed like buoys as they waited like dreamers for the next crest. In the nebulous horizon outlines of misty islands flickered and for a moment I considered swimming out to deathly distances. I cried quietly because it hurts my feelings that I should want myself dead, and my obstinate refusal to accept life as it is created the swell the idle surfers were waiting for. I need to grow up.