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....

A SILENT BOOMER IN THE NIGHT

Bought 6 tickets to the 36th Annual Portland International Film Festival. Tonight the film was at 8:45 pm and drove into the city by myself at an odd hour for me to be driving in but hardly any traffic at that time. Slightly misty and all the small bars I walked past after parking at a Smart Park looked so comfy and inviting that I didn't go in. The film, Shun Li & The Poet, was shown at the World Trade Center Theater so everything was new for me and the World Trade Center is a sprawling open, steel and glass structure that covers two blocks near the Willamette River. The movie was beautifully filmed and I was entertained. Tao Zhao won the Best Actress Award from the Italian Academy and I thought she earned it. Not for a minute did I remember that she was an actress. It thrilled me to be sitting on a Saturday evening, surrounded by people who enjoy good film making, and the excitement for this 75 year old Silent to be walking the streets of a major city all by my lonesome on a misty Saturday night was entertaining in itself. A delicious separateness set in that was not at all like loneliness. The film was about separateness too, being about two immigrants who meet and become friends in Italy...one a Chinese woman and the other a Yugoslavian. The globe is getting to be full of immigrants who have left home for a variety of reasons, isn't it?

The day has been full. My own writing crept along another few paragraphs today when I accompanied Mertie to a Buddhist meeting in Oswego. I waited for her at a nearby Starbucks and worked some more on "Tom Brokaw's Identity Crisis" which follows this paragraph. It's a transitional paragraph, setting up the conclusion. I'm very near finishing the first draft. After that I let it sit and move on to another chapter in the precocious fictional life of a 13 year old girl in 1940 Iowa. Then back for another essay about the life of a Silent Boomer.

"Brokaw’s impulse to glorify the American GI and their wives and mothers initially brought me, and many alienated Silents like me, right along with him back to the warm feelings about the generation which fathered me and about which I had so many questions and toward which I harbored so many ambivalent feelings after the Sixties smashed my rose colored glasses in one of the many street scuffles of that time. I’d worn them right up until that decade, only slightly cracked by my four years in the Navy. Inspired by Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation, and by the swoon of feeling that it created in America’s patriotic breast, I was impelled to go see Saving Private Ryan which came out in 1998. I devoured Band of Brothers based on a book by Stephen Ambrose (a Silent born in 1936) when it became available on non-premium cable channels. For good measure, I reread Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to put me back in touch with the Depression Era and leafed through Studs Terkel’s oral histories for good measure."