gringo in AMerica
d i a r yTuesday Martes
14 Corn Moon 74 Northern Summer 63 Space Age
1 Septiembre 2020
1.No time, never going to be.
FROM HERE EVERYTHING CHANGES
I am reminded of my own struggles to write.
How many years I have spent not writing about my own life.
Imagine if I had: the day to day compendium of facts that I now look back upon, from sixty years of age, slowly contemplating those distant weeks and months when I was quick: only nineteen and twenty and twenty-one, then twenty-two and twenty-three, my boulevardier years (on or around El Cajon Boulevard, stretching from east San Diego to La Mesa), before I went away to live in Washington D.C.
BUT I REPEAT MYSELF
2.
Tuesday morning, and I awake, NINE YEARS LATER, I awoke. Two or three hours ago I almost forget now when I got up and went to the toilet and then ate a bowl of cereal. We are running out of milk so I only used a little, enough but not twice, only once.
Then I began to read more of David Friedman’s book. Fascinating, simply told, straightforward, a history of the Bible, or rather the old testament, the Jewish scriptures, delving into the question of who wrote its different pieces, the documentary hypothesis, telling of the different authors, J and E and P and D, an hypothesis I first heard of in a class at UCSD back in 1984 I think it was. The young scholar who led that class knew David Friedman personally, since they both taught at UCSD. Friedman’s studies and writings were discussed but he had not published this book, Who Wrote the Bible? – no, not yet. Now I have checked it out from the internet archive book collection and am finally reading it. I say “finally” because I have wanted to read it for almost twenty years now, ever since I read, or heard, somehow, somewhere, that Professor Friedman had published the book. So now I am.
I almost began writing in my diary here, but waited until now, when it is already many minutes after eight a.m. daylight savings time. Brutus has gone away to Apple Valley or somewhere to go to work, and after that he will drive into Los Angeles to see Leeza, then he said he would come back tonight. I am thinking about either taping or glueing on my rear view mirror today and going to the store. But that will be after I take the call from (deleted) sometime around eleven-thirty this morning. We will be discussing the credit card repayment agreement I signed yesterday with that company.
Yes.
I have a cup of green tea with honey.
I can feel a movement coming forward inside my colon. That will be a regular event to be grateful for.
I am also thinking about cancelling my reservation at Gaviota State Beach but am holding off to see how the rearview mirror repair goes and whether I make my trip to San Diego on Thursday.
I had a rather frustrating experience yesterday when I could not find the postage stamps I thought I brought along with me. No. Nowhere. Somewhere they disappeared. Bummer. I wonder where I put them. Simply cannot remember. I have other important items that were in the same little cannister on the kitchen table, but not the stamps. Boo hoo hoo.
I have not yet made the effort to dig through all five of the storage trunks we brought into the house a week and three days ago when we brought back everything from my campsite. Maybe I put them in one of them instead of in my books-and-writing trunk, which I have searched. Maybe. Perhaps.
Later, never. This isn't your mother's Greek tragedy any more.
Today will be, today is, years in the future, when I am reborn as this page, as another page.
I have leapt over-paper, hypertext, from 2011 to 2020, from the 54th year of the Space Age into the 63rd year of the same.
Daniel Charles Thomas
tijuanagringo@yahoo.com
