Boy am I not in the mood to write today, so often leading to bleakness.  An artist friend and I in high school used to sit in class and draw pictures of a bird we called a Greeble—a flightless bird walking a plain of polished, black obsidian stretching to infinity.  We made croaking sounds and laughed and I was ecstatic that someone as sharp and cocksure as my friend liked how my mind worked.  I idolized him but was not sharp and cocksure and now I see where this is going again—my desperate dependence and all that.

The school was 8 miles southeast of Sedona, Arizona in its own mile-wide basin surrounded by stunning Red Rock formations.  It was the first landscape that got inside me—screw Yosemite and Yellowstone.  I fantasized being there for the rest of my life, living a small and simple life with the just-right woman.  Lots of sex, of course, but I didn’t feel compelled to have children—no, that’s a lie.  I didn’t want them taking away my woman and I was still too much of a child myself.

I think even then I knew I was doomed, that my fantasy could not stand much reality and sooner or later my desperation would show and ruin it.  She would see I was a shell with no inside.

What I really wanted was to be someone else, someone strong, full of drive and self-confidence.  I thought I was so sensitive but I wasn’t.  I was fragile and almost anything could break my shell and everyone would just walk away and I’d be like the Greeble, walking to nowhere for no reason and alone for eternity.

I tried the mystical thing there in the Red Rocks.  I became obsessed with working out with free weights in a corner of the maintenance compound but hoping girls would see me.  I drank wheat germ oil, ate voraciously and became strong but wiry, never buff.

I ate so much and so slowly in the dining hall that I was always the last one there so I would take my food to the kitchen where Cecil and Eileen were preparing for the next day’s meals and we would talk and joke a little and they liked having me there and would invite me to sit at a little table in a room that held nothing else but a huge oven and they were always baking bread and the smell was wonderful and the room was warm and they would check on me and ask if I wanted more of anything.

It was a new experience, being eccentric and still liked.  In “On the Waterfront”, Marlon Brando complained that he just wanted to be somebody, and for those hours in the kitchen I felt like somebody—noticed and appreciated—and the unkind voices in my head left me alone for a while.