When the world comes marching in.

 

January 13, 1984

 

I’m angry and scared, and begin to feel the first real pangs of pain from losing Fran.

I knew it would come and I’m surprised it didn’t hit me last week.

But then, our relationship has been one of such intensity that often I created breathing room just to survive.

Now it shows like an ugly wound hidden under layers of direct, revealed only have intense scrubbing.

Ritchie, my alcoholic, now mentally ill uncle who I’ve become caretaker to, doesn’t help.

Nor does my mother living 80 miles south in Toms River, echoing my problems with presumptions that I’m working too hard and need rest.

Possibly I am.

But work provides a release valve for all the other issues, in particular Ritchie, whose past and present mingle into a confusion of non-linear time as he spends days and nights contemplating things I’ve not privy to.
I don’t know what he really wants.

Self-destruction, I think.

Since he got dumped into my life again, I’ve been stoned and drunk, and yet find sleep difficult, filled with dark dreams of my own destruction.

I do not want him here, but do not know how to be rid of him and not feel guilty.

The only other choice he has as this point is Graystone, and that’s the old story repeated again, not just with him, but with my mother, and from what my grandmother says, my grandmother’s father as well.

The cycle of madness fills certain people’s lives, and there are times when I wonder if that is my fate, too.

The tendencies are there – the social struggles in a society where I don’t quite fit.

I wanted to start this journal entry saying that I was “mad,” meaning, of course, “angry.”

My temper is flaring at everyone, mother, uncle, Fran, even drivers on the road – especially those assholes who think they are soooooo cool or in reality are such jerks.

I actually egged one of them on today.

He speeded up when I tried to get on the highway, and for the next six miles we played road warriors with him at one point slamming on his breaks in a show of force, and I laughed a fake laugh to show how little it bothered me (when I was all rage inside).

I felt helpless and wrong – and bent on self-destruction.

Perhaps I am destined to spend my life going from one time-consuming dependency to another: Fran, Ritchie, my mother fearful intrusions into my life.

Or do I invite such people? Do I use them as excused to undermine myself, and my ambitions?

Ah, Freud! You have such a way about you!

Life build on guild maintains guilt throughout – my first law of mind.

Yet if I want it, I also hate it.

Maybe it’s because I no longer have a place to run and hide.

When I was a child, I always had my room to lock myself in and lock the world out. In the Montclair rooming house, I was particularly successful in keeping the world out, despite my intense loneliness.

Now the world comes marching in, and I hate it. HATE IT! 

See?