The Cambridge Chronicles

Simone and Carol are in the bathroom. Simone says something about George's pictures of her and how I'm paranoid about having everyone else see them. Suddenly I am overwhelmed with rage. Perhaps I'll go to the office, and not tell her, or just go away for part of the day. She can go to Tom's by herself. But I don't do it. Then thinking about Edwin. He wanted to buy some labels from me the other day. I delivered them to his office. Asking him for payment he suddenly responds with what about my chair. The one he loaned to us. Someone spilled orange juice on it. He seemed to be connecting his paying me with cleaning and returning of his chair. What a petty, vengeful, small minded asshole, I thought. It was uncomfortable to realize the same quality is in me. This often happens. I notice some sort of behavior in one person, or myself, and then the situation reverses. I see the same thing in myself or the other person. We seem to all be alike. We seem to all be able to see this ridiculous behavior in others, and on the other hand become indignent and self-righteous when we notice such things in others. Especially when it will do something against us.

We visit Tom and Debbie. They are in a constant fight. This day it seems that Debbie protests against everything Tom says. He can't say a thing without her criticizing it. He tells us, jokingly, how they start the day with a fight and keep it up till the end. On the way home Simone tells me how Debbie almost decided to go away for the day. Tom had told her we were going to visit and talk about relationships and sexuality. He apparently has his high hopes for what our visits will do for him and Debbie. Anyway, we hardly touched on the subject. I had no idea of this till we were on the way home. Simone did speak briefly about how we have managed to reduce the length of time we hold grudges against the other. And also how she has noticed herself falling into a childish, helpless role. Except for these things it was very mild and a bit boring. The best part was walking in the woods and finding all sorts of new mushroom types, and a railroad spike. One mushroom had two slugs on it. On the larger slug was a still tinier worm with something like a hundred legs.

We visited an outdoor arts fair. I learned about cloth making technology up to the beginning of the industrial revolution. It took 10 spinners to keep one weaver busy. They cut the wool from a sheep, carded it, spun it into thread, wove it. This took four machines. The wool cutters, the carders, the spinning wheel, and the weaving machine. The man who told me all this was a computer programmer. He was making a shawl that would last longer than the life of its owner. He thought I must be some sort of technical person.

Ken is having some technical difficulties. But I say this in jest, as it is something not handled by est. His difficulties, that is. He begins to feel things that have nothing to do with est, but rather the deepest feelings that people can have. He is beginning to have what I would call small failures. That is, he is having difficulty being the sort of person he wants to be. One who makes arrangements with people and abides by them. One who is not overwhelmed by feelings that tend to swamp most of us, and cause us to behave in ways we later regret. He has become very aggressive towards me. By having Simone pass on things that he hopes will make me jealous. He is beginning to fall into a familiar pattern. At the beginning he had no deep feelings for her. Now he is overwhelmed by them and tries to make a situation that helps him avoid this. He wants her away from me. No doubt he will no collaborate with Stu to end our relationship. It is becoming messy for him. He will try most times to remain emotionally distant. He will try to remain aloof. But nothing in est will help him with the things he has yet to feel. He says many things against me. Just now, while reading this, Simone tells me that he thinks I have defective sperm. This comes from the problem Simone is having at the moment. She may be having a miscarriage. He wants to see it as my problem. To put all the evidence he can find against me. I have told Simone to be careful with him. These feelings can easily be turned into aggressive behavior against her. I am sure he is having lots of violent fantasies about me. What to do about it? He is clearly in a position that will leave him feeling left out and not really loved. Simone can't really satisfy him in her present position. She lives with me. She spends the most time with me. Most of her life is a mystery for him. He's not going to get the satisfaction that his feelings demand. Lots of unfulfilled longings. Like Stu, he will come to see me as an obstacle. Explosive feelings will build up inside him. He will have no choice except to go elsewhere for what he needs, or to fight against me. Our not living together makes it impossible for him to get anything but fleeting satisfaction. He has relatively little contact for someone that he now cares for very deeply. I don't know if it would be possible for him to live with us. But I think it is becoming more and more obvious that other relationships will not be able to tolerate the kind of distance living this way creates. He wants to be closer, but Simone will not allow it. Its not that she deliberately cuts off feeling for him. But that the way we live keeps them distant from each other. She is beginning to feel awkward when he is here. Last time was very hard for her. I could feel it myself. It caused some sort of artistic explosion in me. Seven and half pages. The tension and awkwardness from that evening broke some sort of dam or writer's block for me. Why is it that we can't push on to the next most obvious thing to do? All of us living together. It is an emotional block. A feeling out of control. Its too much to go the next step. Its too awkward or tense. We have had the same experience here with every person that has fallen in love with Simone or me. They just develop this longing for one or the other of us. Then someone gets afraid of being rejected. So they eject themselves from the situation. Nobody has the courage to break through that seemly impossible barrier. And we fall back to a position of getting less than what we want and need. It starts again with the next person who feels something.