Getting better all the time?
March 20, 1985
Things seem to be turning around.
I got a call from the Bloomfield Dunkin Donuts telling me they decided to hire me after all.
They sounded less positive yesterday when they claimed they did not need another baker.
This combined with my little job in Ledgewood may let me meet my bills.
Trying to get back into baking after a layover like mine is no easy task.
I need to get back into the groove so that I have a good job.
Fotomat is easy, but pays crap -- just what I told the new Fotomat supervisor, who wanted to know why I wasn’t pushing the high end product on unsuspecting customers.
Even our suicide mission at the college set for Monday morning appears to be on again.
James Spinoza called to say he would join my little protest.
I’m hoping others will call.
I sent letters to everyone I could think of.
I’m also climbing out of an emotional hole, reading and writing as if grasping at rungs on a long, torturous ladder.
Why I write so much remains a question. I have to keep telling myself there might be a future in it.
Mat called.
He’s working for the Suburban Trends with Kathy Brucatie.
For him, it’s a significant step up.
I think it’s a step down for Kathy, who has a lot of talent that would be wasted on a newspaper.
She writes novels in her spare time, lacking only life experience to give them emotional power.
I suppose that might be remedied with her taking up with Franz, that Brit who seduced off the college before she seduced him.
I have nothing against newspaper reporting, but if you can write novels, you should write novels.
Maybe she will eventually.
I should talk. I fin myself wasted time with petty projects while my own novels rest in limbo.
Perhaps I should go back to writing a page a day. That way I will get something done, even if it isn’t very good.
Another good idea!
Not all the news, however, is good.
Cindy is dying. The doctors took her off her medication and now she’s waiting for the worst to drop on her. She’s an epileptic with a non-understanding husband who cries when she slips into a fit, begging her not to die.
This only makes her want to die all the more.
Her sister who lives next door to her as the same reaction.
Bob tells me it’s not a pretty sight, but neither is a pair of helpless witnesses.
I’m not sure what I would do in the same situation.
I have a hard time with wounded kittens, and my only experience with epilepsy is a Vietnam vet when I was in the army who faked a seizure in order to belt a particularly nasty male nurse.
The prick of a captain had ordered the vet to do something stupid. So wham!
That old boy got cheers from our ward for a week -- just about as long as it took that captain to wear off his shiner.
Funny, I should remember that.
I guess it’s the reading. I just read an article on Vietnam vets tonight, written in 1970.
Such reading takes me back in time, and I keep thinking about what I was doing back then, and the people I associated with.
I think about Michael Day (one of his fake names) and wonder where he is now, and whether he escaped the law the way he hoped.
I keep thinking that America just repeats itself, trading one war for another, hoping to eventually get the art of killing down right.
That idea is enough to spoil any good news I might have.
Good night.
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