JOURNAL EXCERPT: May 20, Sat.1978 6:45 PM

"I started reading The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe.He excites me. He became so immersed in the world around him. I have only read You Can't Go Home Again by him. I started The Web and the Rock, got about three-fourths of the way through and wasn't able to finish it. It became too much of a struggle. It also became very boring. You Can't Go Home Again was a much better book; more cohesive. I also have Look Homeward, Angel by Wolfe, but haven't read it yet.

"Received a letter from Ida a few days ago. Surprised the hell out of me. I haven't written her back yet.

"I've decided to start writing poetry again. Hope I'm ready for it now. My past poetry hasn't been too good."

MANHOOD REDO: Looking back, I think I was drawn to the study of literature because it seemed like a way into the world of emotions; I suspect that explains the sentence, "He became so immersed in the world around him." Whereas I felt cut off from the world around me, locked in a frozen emotional state, standing on the board but unable to dive headfirst into the messy human world, stuck in a place of feelings stunted by masculinity, Wolfe in my mind could feel everything, enter fully into his environment. He felt all the pains, darkness, and glories of childhood, captured the rolling emotional states of a town, a community, savored the struggles and transitions into adulthood. He reveled in the complexity and comprehensiveness of a lived life. It all seemed so different, such a nontraditional way for a man to be in the world.

The same applied to writing. I could spill feelings onto the page, whether a journal, a story, a poem. I was reading and writing to save myself, to start the thawing process.

Of course, later in grad school, I learned that the study of literature had its own very traditonally masculine qualities. And it became hard to hold onto that deep-seated emotional revelation in stories. Some twenty-five years after grad school, it's still not as strong as when I first began reading literature on my own in my twenties, although there are flashes of it.

JOURNAL EXCERPT: May 7, Sun. 1978 11:10 PM

"No insert tonight, so I don't have to go in [to work on the newspaper dock] till 12:00 AM. Just finished recording Emerson, Lake, and Palmer on the King Biscuit Flower Hour. Recorded them on one of the Scotch tapes. Sounds fantastic.

"Slowly reading Moby Dick. On page 150.

"Didn't get off work last night till 8:30 AM. Presses couldn't start until the results from the governor, senatorial, etc. elections were in, so they didn't start running till 3:30 AM. I'll be glad when I quit."

"I received notice yesterday that I had been readmitted to Texas Tech, so it's official now. Back to school again. I'm going to major in English lit."

MANHOOD REDO: By this point I was very ready to leave the Avalanche Journal newspaper dock behind. Material and monetary success are very much a part of traditional masculinity, and while I have never been one to place high value on either, I knew that I could only work the dock for a limited time before I would be seen as one of those guys who never had any drive, who failed to live up to his potential. Plus, I had been connected to the AJ for quite a while.

I had started working their when I was a senior in high school - first as a city newspaper driver, which meant I delivered papers to some of the carriers in Lubbock in a particular area of the city. There were probably 10 to 12 of us, and since the AJ had a morning and afternoon edition, we had to make deliveries twice. Usually, about a half hour before the city bundles would be ready to start coming down the chute - sometime between 2 to 3 am - we would receive a call telling us to come in. I roomed with T. my first semester of college, and I don't know how he managed to sleep through the phone ringing in the middle of the night. In the afternoon, we had to arrive at the dock about 2:30 or 3 pm. This lasted for about a year before I started working the dock, eventually becoming dock foreman. I was responsible for overseeing the other dock workers, for making sure that the bundles of papers ended up in the right country and city trucks, and for stacking the bundles for the car carriers on the dock.

I dropped out of college after my second year and went to work for a small print press, which I generally hated, especially when I had to stack inserts on wooden pallets. They came off the press in batches of 25 for the local Piggly Wiggly grocery stores, and I would purposely take my time stacking so that the inserts backed up, jamming the track, and someone would have to come over to help me keep up. After about nine months, I'd had all I could take and decided to quit, making plans to return to college. They hired a Vietnamese immigrant in my place who was more than happy to stack Piggly Wiggly inserts on a pallet, which made me feel sort of like a snotty nosed, entitled college kid, even though I wasn't exactly yet.

The timing was such that I wouldn't be able to start until the fall semester, which was some months away, so I had to find work in the meantime. I really didn't have a sense of where to start looking, and even though it felt kind of humiliating, I thought the easiest thing to do would be to go back to the Avalanche Journal, although I didn't know whether there would be a job available. But the AJ dock always had a lot of turnover, so I started almost right away. Many of the same people were there, and they were happier to see me that I was them. I knew that my time would be limited, since I planned on quitting when I returned to school.

I had some sense that a degree in English literature might give me a little more merit and status in the world than the position of dock foreman at the Avalanche Journal, but I couldn't have told anyone how since I only chose that major because I had discovered I liked to read and I wanted to write creatively - not exactly a well planned career path.