The Cambridge Chronicles

I have just returned from the office. Apparently everyone here thought I would be there for some time. It was a surprise to them. Dana and Simone were together in Dana's bed. It was a familiar position. She was ministering to his organ. I go to my room after asking, What's going on here? A few minutes later Simone comes down and tells me Dana got self-conscious so they stopped, always putting it in terms of his being the one to end things. But from her nervous behavior it is obvious that it is the same for her. I tell her how she acts like someone who has to have my permission to do this. She protests and makes it more obvious. Dana has not been as withdrawn from her in recent days. The other night they were in bed for a short while. My impression is that things are going better for him in his other relationships. This makes it possible for him to try more things with Simone. Polly has been spending a lot of time here. The other day she suggested that she and I should have an affair and break things open around here, or something to that effect. The next day, when Linda was here for breakfast, we all talked about the problems of following ones feelings and best interests in relationships. How does one keep a good relationship, and is it possible, or necessary, to threaten or endanger it with another, or others. Clearly it was not decided. She is a very traditional person whose own attempts to perpetuate tradition, marriage, family, monogamy, have failed. But she is well trained. This is Dana's great fear. As I see it, she is bidding her time, trying what she can to get him to come around, but never really coming out directly with what she wants, or says she wants. She probably also enjoys the benefits of not being tied down in the traditional, normal (as Simone might say), way. She has even told about an old boyfriend who has resumed contact with her. It may be a ploy to be able to gently ease into a new relationship with him, and Dana at the same time. She is no doubt at least thinking about it. She has had the nerve to talk about it at some length with Dana. When she asks me about what's going on around here I have to defer to Dana as he is nervous about how much she knows. He's another one who likes to ease into informing people about what he's up to.

We have discovered what happened to Carol. She vanished two days ago. She was in a motel with a black man she met recently. She seems able to have relationships with this type but not others. It is partly their very loose relaxed manner. And the other part is to rebel against her parents. They would not approve of even Simone and I sleeping together. It is her way of getting even with them. They went to an all night sex club in Brockton. Why all the way down there, Simone asks. Probably so she wouldn't meet anyone she knows. But they arrived too late, and so the motel. Now she has some sort of infection, but will go to the doctor tomorrow. But the best part is yet to come. While talking about this new sexual binge of hers they begin to talk about men being distant, unable to commit themselves to a person, how they are afraid to be intimate. But Carol and Simone, and most others I know, are just as likely, if they don't have anyone, will go out to a bar to find someone to fuck them. And they won't have the slightest interest in closeness, commitment, or intimacy. They just want to fuck, exactly the crimes Simone, and other women, are always accusing me of. There is no end to this amusement. Simone was doing this with some half-dozen men when I first met her. At the beginning some number of one-nighters came and went, so to speak. It really isn't any different for women. They are just more likely to resist that part of themselves. While men will be more likely to resist their emotional selves. I find myself often jealous of Simone's ability to get men to fuck with her. There are certainly lots more women I would fuck with. But it is difficult to even tell if they are interested. They hide this part of themselves as well as men hide their emotions. But none of this does me any good. Complaining about my inability to attract women to living with us. I don't know that it would be best to be straightforward about this. Linda has told me how being straightforward with a man seems to scare them off. So she is learning to consciously play the traditional female role. Why is it that I get resentful and carried away with this sort of explanation? Do I do it for the reader? No, it doesn't matter, because I find myself doing it for nobody but myself. I've done it lots of times, and I'm always the only one listening. This must be how people can drive themselves crazy. Convince yourself of something, keep doing it, and soon it will be so deeply ingrained, that no matter what you do, or think, it is ok. I catch myself giving this little lectures inside this head. They are all meant to explain and justify the doing of something. Then I sometimes notice the little voice inside me that pops up and says its wrong. So I have some number of fights to push this guy down and out of sight. But since he is in my minds eye it is literally impossible to really do away with him. Even doing away with him would just be pretending. Which is to say that he is really still there. And he pops up at the darnest times. No telling how he will come out. Sometimes he has completely disguised himself. It seems I am just feeling nervous or anxious or that some vague thing is wrong. Nope! Its only him again. It is also called the conscience. It makes me feel guilty. I don't want to feel guilty. A biologist has said that telling the truth seems to be at the deepest part of our biological selves. It seems that a lie will set off a whole set of internal reactions that can superficially controlled, like not blushing or blinking, but these deep internal things cause the release and creation of a whole set of biological reactions. It is as though the conscience has a biological organ somewhere in the brain. It makes sense. A lie can never be good between people in the long run. It does not seem that there could be any evolutionary advantage to be able to successfully tell a lie. And why am I suddenly talking about telling lies? Because I lie. Not in the sense of directly telling someone a wrong thing, but more in the sense of not telling the truth. Often I feel guilty for not saying something to someone when it needs to be said. I will often notice that I have some impression or feeling about a person, and it is immediately followed by tension. Tension from two sources. The first is anxiety about saying the thing. The second is from holding back the saying.