around, no more self imposed agony . . . it’s time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time . . . Yay, for this, more aloneness"—“Go back to childhood, just eat apples and read your Cathechism sit on curbstones, the hell with the hot lights of Hollywood” (remembering that awful time only a year earlier when I had to rehearse my reading of prose a third time under the hot lights of the Steve Allen Show in the Burbank studio, one hundred technicians waiting for me to start reading, Steve Allen watching me expectant as he plunks the piano, I sit there on the dunce’s stool and refuse to read a word or open my mouth, “I dont have to REHEARSE for God’s sake Steve!”—“But go ahead, we just wanta get the tone of your voice, just this last time, I’ll let you off the dress rehearsal” and I sit there sweating not saying a word for a whole minute as everybody watches, finally I say “No I cant do it” and I go across the street to get drunk) (but surprising everybody the night of the show by doing my job of reading just fine, which surprises the producers and so they take me out with a Hollywood starlet who turns out to be a big bore trying to read me her poetry and wont talk love because in Hollywood man love is for sale)—So even that marvelous, long remembrances of life all the time in the world to just sit there or lie there or walk about slowly remembering all the details of life which now because a million lightyears away have taken on the aspect (as they must’ve for Proust in his sealed room) of pleasant mental movies brought up at will and projected for further study—And pleasure—As I imagine God to be doing this very minute, watching his own movie, which is us.
Even when one night I’m so happy sighin to turn over to resume my sleep but a rat suddenly runs over my head, it’s marvelous because I then take the folding cot and put a big wide board on it that covers both sides, so I wont sink into the canvas confines there, and place two old sleepingbags over the board, then my own on
