Mind control

 

Sept. 8th 1980

 

Morning rises around me blistering the world around me

Jets roar over head and trucks rumble along the street outside.

The wind, a rare and distinguished visitor, whispers through the alley like a thief.

Just why I am conscious of the breaking day today and its sounds, I don’t know. But I hear it all in layers, the curse words, the honking horns, the battering of bumpers, each contributing to a concert that wages war on my nerves.

Sexual warfare parades through the college campus in the same way, a stealth attack on the young men and women that walk the concrete paths, carrying their collection of books, each male on the hunt, while women seem to waver before us like wood nymphs, some shy, some pretending indifference, some even taunting us with glances.

I see Sue Merchant posted outside the doors of the Student Center nearly every day, a siren on the concrete all, luring passing sailors.

I have never been good at this game. Even in high school, I was hopeless shy, my Catholic morality hanging around my neck like a millstone, always making me assume my thoughts and desires were sin.

I’m supposed to be dating Susan, but we have drifted apart since my return to school, she caught up in her job and her ambitions for higher education, even I suspect looking around for a potential life mate I have failed to become.

Guilt and conscience consume me as I wander this strange new emotion ocean like a modern day Odysseus, trying to work out the details of each new

A decade older than anyone here and I still struggle with the concept of lust.

Masturbation doesn't help; it merely puts it off or becomes its own addiction.

I’ve spent most of my life struggling to control my thoughts, if not lust, then anger, if not my dishonesty, then my tendency towards delinquency.

How do you set limits on what you say and think?

When does fantasy become dangerous obsession?

Hank used to drag me to go go bars throughout the area and wanted me to go to sex clubs in New York, and I refused.

Both seemed remarkably sleazy, although Sue Merchant has bragged once or twice at her being a regular at Plato’s Retreat.

How does everybody else deal with their inner conflicts, and still manage to achieve the principle purpose of education while they’re here.

Every turn a new siren sounds.

I look into everybody’s eyes and see the intensity of struggle. Even laughter seems contrived.

This, of course, may well be my own imagination, my projecting into them what I feel inside.

All this scares the shit out of me.