1:00 AM Tues 25 Jan 72
Received a nice letter from Toss Sheffield my high school pash wondering what I’m up to! Should I tell him? Feel like griping about Mencken (whom he’s writing his thesis on.) Everything about Mencken enrages me – the Pilsner, Sara, you name it. Anyway it’s nice to be remembered. He says he’ll “never forget” me. Him & Devon; but what good is being unforgettable? Imagine a story with all my old boyfriends showing up at hospital where I’ve been in an accident – getting to know each other and going out drinking together.(The heck with me.) It could happen. We bought a new puppy (Spitz) and are considering moving to an abandoned turkey farm. Chloe pleads with me not to be a hermit but I like it. Bruce played Johns Hopkins coffeehouse to shouts of “encore”! Reading More Work for the Undertaker but decided I really do not like Allingham. She’s no Sayers (still my favorite). Mon 30 Jan 72 Apparently we are stuck forever in student housing – no one will rent to us because we have no income. Our “expectations” fail to impress them. Bud is angling to buy a property together where the four of us can live – Honor less enthused but Bud keeps getting Bruce excited about huge houses & properties in upstate NY going for a song. Bruce’s latest passion is painting – enormous abstracts. Also flying – he has enrolled for lessons at Friendship but when he went for the first lesson it was too windy to go up. He is painting now – I just got off the phone with Avril – who is depressed although still as zany and humorous as ever. She wants me to help “free” her from school – M & D are making her see a psychiatrist who is a very depressed man himself, sitting behind an ancient popcorn machine to which he gestures hopelessly, muttering, “Youth. Youth.” School equally hopeless – the teachers have given up being adults. They went on a camping trip where all the teachers disappeared leaving the kids alone together. A did end up in the sleeping bag of some guy but he cried all night and nothing happened. She wants to just get her GED and get out of that place. I warn her that anything I try to do will send Mom in the opposite direction. She blames me for really strange things I have nothing to do with. The less I say the better. (Maybe different once we can pay them back.) Memories made me write a story about Toss I am happy with: Dreamer. Don’t want B to read it though because it’s about a boy who wishes his parents were dead! New puppy (Weasel) sleeping on the floor looks like a little pig. Reading Simenon’s The Train highly recommended by Bruce. I am not so sure. A bit disgusted with the French. On the other hand any writing about sex gets me enflamed and Bruce is never in the mood except at night. He played the Junior College Presidential dinner at the Sheraton – spent my time wandering the halls with the other girlfriends. Perfect place for Charlie Chan to discover a body. Mon 7 Feb 72 More trouble with “camp followers” lured by the glamour of the rock life (and the maybe someday lure of Big Money.) Tristan now wants to be paid. We didn’t want him in the first place. They put him off telling him to wait till they’re making $1000 a month. Wed 15 Feb 72 Snowing all day! Only just stopped (quarter to 8.) Spent my morning at college Xeroxing my two stories Travel Fever and Dreamer. 3 versions of Toss story – think I like the Young Fascist version better. Toss himself wouldn’t like it at all, but the muse seldom has a real relationship to the Finished Product. What a wad of MSS. Took copies to Chloe who is working at The Manor. I feel embarrassed around her – like I am in the presence of an old lover. (Finally let B read it – he prefers the “crazy” version. He would.) Come home to find band meeting deep in band business. B is buying a Fiat sportscar – blue – the first new car I will ever have owned. This is good because I currently have to open hood to start Volvo. They have decided to record at ITI studios in Baltimore –right on Rt 83 – much cheaper than NYC. 3 times as much studio time for the same amount of money plus one free song if they like the way it’s mixed. I don’t dare say anything while the others are here but the minute I get B alone I will have LOTS of suggestions. (I think he ought to dump this band since he is the talented one.) My latest story – A Charitable Institution – is going nowhere fast – I have to figure out the character of the murderers - so I crack open Haight’s George Eliot. Feeling more forgiving that she didn’t more actively champion women’s’ rights – it simply wasn’t in her nature. But I find her philosophy of suffering depressing. The men of her time were insufferably arrogant! All this “Beauty” garbage (usually spoken by some man who looks like the back end of a hippopotamus.) Poor Marian! It bothered her all her life. Mom and Dad back from the Paris Peace Conference. They bought a Picasso! Pewter Hill night of Mon 21 Feb 72 I feel like Mrs. Gaskell – she was always complaining about her pens. This place filled with alarums and excursions. Auntie Beulah pitched herself down the basement stairs and landed on her noggin – no bones broken but she has two big lumps on a head that wasn’t working too well to begin with. (Her favorite TV being Lawrence Welk and/or the Republican convention – anything’s better than talking to her – she says “women” don’t need “liberation” and it’s just something our generation “made up”.) Frantic phoning around for doctors and ambulances; I say why? Let her go ”into the good night”. This exposes to raw air poor Mom’s last nerve – Mom has been trying to get Auntie B into a nursing home for months now but the old lady rejects every possibility, including the expensive and the glamorous. She persists in countermanding orders to the maid and gardener and sabotaging food prep – the Maxim she put in the percolator yesterday almost sent Dad into cardiac arrest. Mom wants to get Dad to “retire’ to Maine – she is sick of the “young things who don’t believe in marriage” sitting agog at his feet. I cannot believe any sane young woman would look at Dad as a sexual target. On the other hand there are a lot of insane women – of every age – out there. (More than there are witches, in my estimation. Probably driven insane by – wait for it – MEN!) I don’t understand how a person who believes in heaven can get herself into such a state of gibbering fear over the prospect of death. She’s 86 years old – you’d think the inevitability of the whole thing would have sunk in by now. But apparently the older they get the worse they are. Maybe the best way is to go like Mrs. V – insult and abuse one moment – “lights out” the next. (Of course it was rough on Nana. But that actually makes my case.) Went skiing today, sledding last night, going to Marlys tomorrow. Didn’t get to talk to Avril half as much as I wanted but then I never do. She is so funny. She has wonderful stories about her psychiatrist. He wrote a sex book for teenagers that has to be seen to be believed. Mom and Dad like him because his “politics” are right (i.e. everyone is hopeless; the throne room is empty; all authority is Corrupt.) Dad insists our phones are being bugged and he yells into the phone at the men he imagines are listening in ‘ “Why don’t some of you get off the line so the rest of us can hear something!” Mom rolls her eyes and gazes northwards longingly. Got a good idea for a story – a girl skier - notably unreliable - sees a frozen baby beside the trail but when she gets people to go back of course there’s nothing there…
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Alysse Aallyn
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