Notes From My Journal: Chapter Forty-Three

Notes from My Journal: Chapter Forty-Three

It’s early July, 1974. We are standing in the middle of Geno’s Fresno backyard. A mighty California sun beats down on us. Water floods from a man made spring some fifty yards away and feeds the thirsty brown tipped grass. My bare feet are washed by its flow. “Look out!” I yell giving Geno and hard shove and diving to the ground. A helicopter flies overhead. “You know, every time I stand outside I think of the Vietnamese. Yesterday I was hoeing in my garden. I could hear the B-52’s flying above me.”

“Yea, I know what you mean,” Geno answers.

“ Can you believe that the average guy thinks that the war is over.”

“We’re fighting just a much as ever.”

“ Do you realize what you just said? Just as much as ever. The fighting has gone on forever as far as we’re concerned. Every minute of our lives we have been at war. Entire generations have grown up thinking that war is the natural state of things. Peace is an unnatural dream.”

“Yea, we are still on a war time economy. Our entire economy is based on war.”

“And competition.”

“If we didn’t export billons of dollars in arms to the entire world, our economy would crumble…”

“Do you realize that we grew up playing war games? All we ever paid was war games. We fought the Japs and the Germans. We fought the Indians. We were cops fighting the bad guys. We made wooden swords for our sword fighting games. Whatever movie was playing that week determined who we would be fighting…”

Geno nods in agreement and smiles remembering.

“You know, I was still playing war games when we split for Alaska. Our plans were to make enough money there to finance our trip to South America. Anne was gonna go home to spend some time with her parents while Vance and I were gonna join up with Castro and help free the Cuban people.”

“Yea, war was glorious in those days wasn’t it. While you were playing solider of fortune I was doing military police games with the Marines…”

“Hey, I hope you don’t mind me doing this,” I say looking up from my notebook. We’re inside now sitting at the dinning room table.

“Hell, you shouldn’t ask. What do you ask for?”

“I don’t know. I know I don’t have to ask. I just felt that I had to.”

“Naw, That’s bullshit.”

I still feel a little guilty as I continue jotting in my notebook. I’m sure that Geno wants my company. “God damn man. You’ll have to read some of this. If I’m saying what I really think I’m saying, is that enough? Do I only have to write for myself?”

“The answer to that would be Yes!”

I get the feeling that Geno is being too polite, too understanding. He is doing the same thing that Alex accused me of doing some three years ago. “You never disagree with me, man, and that’s unfair. I always have to initiate everything,” Alex told me as we stood in my Walnut Creek kitchen.

“How do I know what you feel if you always accept what I say, if you never disagree? Why do you always avoid an argument? Why do you never reveal your real self, your true feelings?”

“Yea,” I said giving off a nervous laugh. “I know I hold back a lot. It’s been a part of my whole defense, to protect my feelings. But, I can’t suddenly break away from thirty plus years of conditioning…”

“What’s that laugh for? That’s not a natural laugh. What are you really feeling? Why don’t you ever get pissed off?”

I was really pissed off right then. I felt like punching Alex right in his smug face. But, my conditioning took over. You don’t let someone arouse you feelings. But, he did stir up my feelings I told myself. Now, as I write these words in Geno’s dinning room, I know the difference between feeling and emotion. I didn’t act on the stimuli from Alex, but I sure as hell felt it. It struck me right in the heart, for what he said was true. Showing my feelings to Alex would have been as Howe says an expression of the cognitive side of the feeling duality. I took his words, the feeling, anger, shame, hurt, and turned it inside. I turned that energy loose upon myself. To be honest in a relationship only hurts when we turn our feelings outward and attack the truth.

Strange that this should flash through my mind now some three years later. “The thing is…” I say putting down my pen and passing my notebook to Geno. “The thing is to know who the you is that you are writing for. I mean, Krishnamurti would say that you are everything that you are in true relationship with. He says, “You are the world.” You know, I can just this moment see what that means. In my relationship with people, in my relationship with myself, I have to be completely honest; because I am not contained inside my skin. In a true relationship, I am all that is involved. If you really get involved in a relationship then at times you know more about an individual than he knows about himself.”

“Yea, I can see that,” Geno tells me.

“Now, Anne tells me that this is being selfish. And, it a sense it is. At least, as long as I am not truly involved in the relationship. Like our place in Byron, I love it man. I would never want to move into town again. Anne hates it though. She wants to return to Tracy. Since I don’t make any effort to return to Tracy, she thinks me selfish. Yet, I really feel that the place is good for her, good for all of us. Now, this may be a misconception on my part. I have no right to decide what is right for Anne. Only she can decide that…”

“Yes, but isn’t she being just as selfish, not giving in to your wishes?”

“True, but she has to want what is best for her. That’s why honesty is so important in a relationship. If we both act according to our spontaneous needs, then the relationship must grow. It certainly may change. In fact, it will have to change according to what we both really need…

“Anne and I are actually antagonistic to one another at times. She’d rather watch a baseball game on T.V. than go out and toss the ball around with me and Stoke. She doesn’t get out of the house enough. I can’t tell her that though. You can never tell another person what is good for them. They have to see it themselves. And for all that, my perceptions of her needs may be way off. She doesn’t need the same things that I need…”

Gene tosses my notebook back on the table after looking at a few pages. “What do you think?” I ask.

“It’s really authentic sounding. You got a good memory for what happens too.”

“Yea, you know, I didn’t write this like I usually do. I started writing notes out on the lawn, but I didn’t go through step by step. I picked up things that were happening right here and now. Things that were running through my mind…”

I’m a little disappointed at Geno’s criticism. I had wanted him to fall out of his chair. What Henry Miller says is true. We never get the kind of praise we want for our writing.