Journals in the Box

11.READING JOURNAL FIRST DAY AT BUROCRACY
Journal from burocracy

Distinct chapter Do I want to alternate present time chapters on Isla Caiman w text segments?

One of my first days at the burocracy
Insert date
At my phony marble top desk, big and rectangular with gray metal towers and scratches where others graffitied their presence.
I sit writing at my desk facing the mirror office building across the street canyon...My 11th floor office I share with Lucha who is always on the phone with the emotional growth school where she has sent her teenage daughter Jody to get straight, a private prison to save your child from going to real prison.

This is what I thought on my way to work today as I made my way down the labyrinth of streets of City Center, streets that trace indigenous footpaths, my body rolling like a marble in one of those video arcade maze games Machi outgrew last summer.
Here's the thought and I don't want to forget it: The worst thing about capitalism is how it makes you collude with your own oppression. It leaves you with nothing...not even yourself.
12. SECOND WEEK AT BUROCRACY
My second week at my first fully full time job.
A notation :do I keep this?
I see I can't just read...I have to annotate...
I feel embarrassment and aching compassion for my old self. I didn't yet know how my whole life was changing, what would happen to me to my time now that I was selling most of it. I had no idea what a difference it would be to have a full time job. Up till then I had managed to live, support my art, my revolutionary work, my boy, with part time work. Capitalism did a gear shift and I was overtaken by not being able to support all that anymore without working full time. I didn't know yet how royally I would be fucked. I didn't know what it would cost me over the years coming up ahead, what it would cost my art, my political work, what it would cost my son, my marriage. I was just fucking glad to have a job, an income, health insurance...I was just fucking glad, when I think of it, to have a good excuse not to write, not to keep producing plays, not to expose myself to that public sphere that felt like it wanted to kill me...
I had to stop reading this aching mess of words, look out at the sea...I miss god, the god of my childhood. I never felt alone. He made this lovely sea. I wanted him to be real and good and ...
I have to forgive myself. I have to approach myself like an anthropologist, or an angel, without judgment. Or I'm not going to make it inside my own head.
Again the raw terror rises up in my chest, I'm shaking and I have to clench my jaw not to scream. I am a worker. I don't know how to live without a job. I bartered away my life, my time, so I would have a roof over my head, a paycheck every other week, so I could provide...I don't know how to live on an island, in a makeshift shelter made from tarps, not sure what or when I will next eat so that I, we, can find these missing men we are not yet certain are here....

Do I keep the anotation...Or make it shorter? Can't decide
Back to Beach Do I want to have an entire segment of the other text? Or keep going back to the present on the beach? Was that all of the reading segment???

Machi is still floating Taina in his arms in water, bent at the waist. The water is just above his knees, so that if she stood Taina da pie, the way I used to float him when he was learning to swim. This sentence I have written in the encampment journal. I'm making myself read some more. I'm good at making myself do things I dread and don't want to do.
Reading
On my way to my new job I picture myself like a marble rolling in one of those pinball mazes Machi suddenly outgrew over the summer. This job started in the fall, like school. I have the same dread I had of school each fall. First thing when I got up today I threw up, like in the old days.
Anotation
What is it about going into the public sphere that makes me feel I will be annihilated? I am prey. They are predators. I feel I will not live. I've just realized that terrified as I am in the Encampment I haven't vomited in the morning...(Did my mother want to kill me when she hit me? Did I feel as if she did? Was she channeling the slavemaster, the genocidal colonizer? Are my chromosomes screaming the screams of those who died? Were we one organism like a flock of birds and some of me died with them and some of them lives on in me, so I am sometimes the annihilated and sometimes the triumphant survivor who prevailed? And o the price those who prevailed had to pay, each of their compromises, lies, accommodations, betrayals engraved in my confused genes. Machi would say, where the fuck is that prevailer, that victor? He would like to see that one, the victor, now and again...

Reading

13. SEVERAL MONTHS INTO BUROCRACY
I walked in, early, ready for my secret private writing time before my wage enslavement begins but Lucha was already in, on the phone. Irritating. This is new. She used to be a 10 to 6. I called out good morning but she doesn't answer. Is this going to be her new routine? I called out good morning again, louder. Lucha nodded without looking at me and kept on talking to Jody's counselor someplace in the mountains upstate where she sent her daughter to be saved, a private detention camp to keep her teenage child from ending up in an actual prison.
Lucha kept talking. When did she stop lowering her voice when I come in? I half listened. She must know I've learned to filter out her never ending phone calls about Jody. I am irritated by Lucha. I think 'Vete p'al carajo,' but will I ever say a word?
I was still thinking about how capitalism makes you collude with your own oppression and that's the biggest oppression of all. And it occurred to me the abuses at home set you up to collude with your own oppression by teaching you to love your abuser. That is the confusion that prepares us for all the others. It's not that Lucha oppresses me, it's that I let her, I was trained to
I have to make myself stop avoiding the stack of papers on top of my desk. I have to bring myself to go over the stapled sheaf of papers right on top, my report on the last two site visits for the meeting at ten.
Abuse went on and on, a terrible ongoing contagion. It didn't make it any better to know that the abusers at home abused you because they were abused.
I looked out the window. Rain had spattered a filigree onto the soot. In the building straight ahead, across the street, I saw the woman I liked to spy on, my Mirror Woman. She rushes into her window cubicle and throws her briefcase down onto the floor and herself into her chair. She leans forward, plants her elbows on her desk, raises her hands to her face and sinks her face into her hands. Is she crying?
The pain never ended. They called oppression depression. That place where you stay confused. Where you stop being able to know if They are good or bad. If Life is good or bad. If you are good or bad. The place where you forget your righteous indignation. All life frozen into a fairy tale or a horror story, which? Because who isn't confused by the many ways those who loved us most also abused us the most?

I studied the gray particles on the surface of my desk. They were supposed to resemble something in nature but I wasn't sure what. Granite? Wood grain? Marble?Was I in a fairy tale or a horror story? Are they good or are they bad? And then, which is the badness and which the goodness? Those were my abiding questions.
That was why I wanted to stay home and hide and never leave my house. That's why I dwell in my notebooks. Why I was always trying to go back to that static state I attained in my original childhood home, the place where I learned the perfect balance between love and terror, the place where I learned to navigate the specific geography of my abusers' ways to love and hurt me at once. It was a terrible thing. It made me beta and made others alpha, depending on how we learned to sail the violence tsunamis.
Solly peeked in and gave us the five minute call for the meeting. She waved and smiled. For just one moment I think I can learn from her how to be happy. Is happiness a decision? I want to decide to be happy but I feel I am abandoning the sad people who made me. And her joy is so strange. Could it be real?

I grabbed my stack of papers. Already I was bored out of my mind.
I'd stayed forever with the sad people, the frightened and frightening people, waiting for them to be good again. And after a lot of waiting I came to think the way they are, the way they hit or lie, that’s what goodness is. I want to love that much. And want that much to be loved.
They are hurricanes or tornadoes of oppression. Natural human disasters. Humans who become disasters. Humans who are parasites.
Last night I screamed at Adolfo, that parasite shadow Machi left behind in his room when he left. “What's going on here? Where's my lamb skin coat?” Things go missing, here and there, all valuable. Adolfo gives me a saintly look and I start to think I misplaced the things. First he looked and then he shouted back, “I never disrespected you.” He turned the menace on and off. I believed the angel side and forgot the scary side. Adolfo is a human tornado and human parasite. How have I gotten stuck with this grifter Machi imagined was his friend, until my checks turned up in his pocket the day they were both picked up by police on Kill Island? Now Machi's gone god knows where and I can't get Adolfo out of Machi's bedroom. Every word out of his mouth is a lie. He’s almost a good conman. Because we, I, want to believe, wanted to believe. Wanted them to be good. I was programmed by capitalism to collude with my oppressors, internal or external. So is Solly happy because she knows something I don't yet know, or because her life protects her from ever having to know what I know?