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...