BEATNIK MEMOIR ON A ROLL

Eighty-two people looked in on The Silent Boomer today. Thank you. All my jabber in recent entries about my psychology and the memoir I'm working on and a current rereading of Steinbeck's East Of Eden has created the following Facebook discussion with myself and friends. The picture above is a cartoon I created for my microzine, George and Mertie's Place, long ago and far away.

BEATNIKING A PATH TO UNDERSTANDING

Putting aside the memoir today. It's escaping me and that's discouraging. Trouble is the timeless connections within the unconscious. I'm working on Chapter 5: Cast Of Characters. I want to rough out limited bios of the people in my family who most affected me. But as I begin to write about my mother, thought leads to thought and emotion fires up emotion and soon enough the hidden connections between my mother and my ex-wives takes me to the moments in my marriages when I feel my mother in the images of my exes. I find myself

far off target, in a memory that belongs to another chapter. I mean, when you understand that the abuse your mother suffered as a child is connected to how you picked your wives, what chronology can contain that awareness? Where do you write it—when the twist was put, without your knowledge, into your psyche or when decades later you finally discovered it hidden there? When I understand my life, everything seems connected to everything else. I wonder if another structure is called for? One without a chronology of any sort, but, I've tried that too, and I can't imagine anyone reading it with any patience. Think I'll go home and pick up where I left off in my third read of Steinbeck's East Of Eden. Let me tell you about finding myself with James Dean in the movie East Of Eden, cold and lonely atop a freight car heading to Monterey to look for his whore mother—connection to connection to connection....

BEATING THE BEATNIK TO DEATH

It's 5:30 am, and I'm unable to sleep. Writing my Memoir Of A Nobody is turning out to be quite a disturbing task. Writing stirs up memories in me that won't go away and let me sleep. Several nights recently sleeplessness has overwhelmed me. It's a good thing I don't write every day or I'd be in awful shape. My life contains many disturbing events, many psychologically terrifying periods. Fortunately, I don't believe I normally realize what I've been through. I have so many tales to tell and many psychological insights that I've gotten from them and through counseling and reading in psychology, specially in evolutionary psychology. I truly have something to offer about the process of recovery from many emotional difficulties to find happiness and love. I spent four hours today writing and rewriting four paragraphs, trying to get the facts and feelings down as they truly happened. I'm writing about my experiences as a 19 year old with prostitutes in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In many ways those experiences foreshadowed the troubles I would later experience with all women. I've rewritten the opening sentences below too many times already. 

1. Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

I wonder if writing this memoir will be the death of me? Lit by a computer monitor, here I sit, age 81, at 1:52 am, naked except for white briefs, bent over a computer keyboard, driven out of bed by a restless memory to begin….

Somewhere within me my stepmother’s words are indelibly inscribed: “You’re selfish. You’re not like your father at all. You’re not a Thomas.”

    I’ve begun many times in 81 years to write this memoir, and every time I begin, I tell myself memoir writing is the most selfish task a person can try. I immediately begin to quibble with myself....


It's now 6:15 am as I finish this entry and still no sleep....

Now 2:43 pm as I add this entry. My lack of sleep has nothing to do with guilt. I'm long past that, but my mind just goes hyperactive sometimes. Thoughts run riot.