9 November 1997

Spent this very rainy morning watching the taxingly-long 1962 film of Eugene O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey Into Night. The story of an alcoholic has-been; an alcoholic wannabe; another character dying of consumption and a drug-addicted mother. Cheery. The mother in the story takes morphine to forget the present and to live in the dreams of her past (dreams which she would have been unable to acheive, given her lack of any talent).

I came away from this film with only this: pain comes out of unfulfilled dreams, and dreams never pan out, so why bother ever having dreams at all or ever trying? Just live for the moment (that is, without dreams or aspirations): take morphine or whiskey if it lightens the time you are cursed to be alive until that day when you finally die.

If ever there was a story to influence one to become a homeless bum, this is it. What a waste of a fine rainy morning...

After watching this depressing movie....I went out about 9:30pm. I just wandered the dark and empty streets of rainy Boston until 2:00am

I felt like meeting some seedy people for some seamy night-life. I wandered into a dive bar: I had only just stepped in, saw a few people, including a number of drag queens, and left. I wandered into a porno shop and looked at the nasty pictures on the video boxes. When I left there, I walked over to the Blue Line subway station (a few blocks away) and I got off at Maverick Station and walked from there all the way into Chelsea (up to Bellingham Square).

On my way back toward Eastie, I saw an old man "choose" a handsome young hispanic man who had been standing on a streetcorner. I just happened to follow behind them as they walked to their loveshack. Along my way, a very drunk hispanic man who had been standing in a doorway talking loudly to no one nodded to me and said, I think, some kind of come-hither comment in slurred drunken spanish. This must be some kind of gay pick-up area of town.

I continued on and eventually got over the McArdle bridge back into Eastie, but I didn't go right home. In the light rain, I walked around and poked into people's garbage, looking for some reasonably good-condition nightstand for beside my bed (I'm using a cardboard box now).

It is now 2:56am, and I'm beginning to fall asleep as I write. I'm getting a headache, and there'll be awakening noises beginning at 6:30am which I know I'll not be able to sleep through...

8 November 1997

A rainy night here in Boston, and I'm listening to a live broadcast of the Boston Symphony on the radio (Classical station: WCRB 102.5 FM). Andrew Davis guest conducting; Murray Perrahia, piano, in Mozart's Piano Concerto #24.

There are few things more gratifying in this world than giving yourself the time to stretch out, relax, and listen - really LISTEN, not just 'hear' - a great piece of classical music...

7 November 1997

This morning [my long-time friend] Michael said that back in our Hayes Street days (about 1983), I was "less present" than I am now.

I interpreted this to mean that back then I had less of a "personality" or "identity;" that I had not developed into my own person with interests and opinions, etc. Micheal says that this was only a piece of it; also that I am now much more accessable (interpersonally). That back then I was much more defensive and private (but he understands, given what I grew up with, how I would have developed into such a closed and private person).

Michael says that people need to earn their faces and bodies, that at some time they grow into them. Which reminds me of that quote from one of my favorite photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson: "At some age, everyone gets the face they deserve."

30 October 1997

8:22am: I'm listening-in to ham radio operators on my shortwave radio (14270 KHz):
Two old men discuss young people today and retirement tomorrow:

Man One: A plan for retirement: the government sends you a tin cup.
Man Two: When you ask an employer today what retirement plans they offer, they say, "You know that cemetary just outside of town..."

26 October 1997

Listening to an old LP of Pearl Bailey.

I came into childhood "consciousness" in the 1960s seeing Pearl Bailey on TV shows and I liked her. Little did I know then that I was coming into her life toward the end of her already long career.