JOURNAL EXCERPT: April 12, 1978 5:15 PM

This excerpt will be short and sweet (well, maybe not so sweet)...

"Felt full of lassitude today. Don't know what the problem is. Didn't write or draw. I think working the long hours at the Avalanche Journal [newspaper] is screwing me up."

MANHOOD REDO: While the long hours working on the AJ dock might have been part of the explanation for my inaction, I don't think they account for my lassitude in its entirety, especially since I seem to have the problem again and again, as anybody who read the journal would see. My writing production seems pretty spotty and unpredictable.

I'm going to pose another possible reason connected to something I wrote about in my dissertation: an internal conflict tied to two different selves, one I call the "Critic," the other the "Idiot." The critic is very much tied to traditional masculinity, the Idiot to everything that exists outside masculine norms and expectations. Here's how I explain it in the dissertation:

"Within the past two years, I have become increasingly more conscious of how this Critic's foundation rests on an internalized division, an inner split between the me in control, the 'dominant' me, who competently masters himself and the world for the betterment of all through his ability to present piercing theoretical insights (a Messianic intellectual?), and the me out-of-control, the incompetent, vulnerable, 'Idiot' me, less formed, who seems to begin in childhood and carry on into my adult years - a 'me' the other 'me' wants to disown, to distance myself from, because he is unpresentable, embarrassing, ignorant. It's the suppression of this 'Idiot' me that results in oppression. I project him onto others so that they are the ones 'out-of-control' and not me. To be out-of-control is, ultimately, unmanly, like my 'Idiot' self, so ignorant, so out of touch."

When I began writing seriously, I struggled with the part of me, the "Critic," that demanded perfection and control - expectations that would have seriously constrained my ability to throw myself fully into the art of learning to write. I must have known that I had years ahead of me learning the craft, that my stories and poems had a crudeness common to beginners, and rather than accept my place in the process of growth and development, it was safer to foist my attitudes about my fumbling, imperfect attempts at prose onto others, like R-- in an earlier journal excerpt or the older woman in the creative writing class.

Sometimes, you have to accept it's okay to be an idiot.