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 9, Tues. 1978 9:45 PM

"G. came back today. I helped him unpack all his furniture etc."

Manhood Redo: I'm surprised that such a big event merited such little text. I don't even sound the least little excited. Given the kind of loneliness I was experiencing and have written about in earlier blog entries, you'd think I would have been thrilled, overjoyed, ebullient. But G.'s move back sounds routine, almost something to take for granted.

Sometimes I resent the hell out of masculinity - for instance, when it tamps down joy I might be feeling, and I mean a silly, happy, almost giddy joy about people and events. I've kept the full extent of my emotions - both exhilaration and sorrow - under wraps for so long that it still can be hard to not only express them but also to find a way into them. Someone at work told me I'm hard to excite; maybe that's true based on what I'm seeing today in this journal excerpt. Although it might be more the case that I have excitement bubbling up in me and am cautious about expressing it. I'm trying to think about both what forms of excitement are sanctioned by traditional masculinity and what aren't. Obviously, it's okay to get excited about sports if you're a guy. You can yell and scream and jump up and down and cry if your team loses. But had I jumped up and down and screamed in excitement about G. moving back to Lubbock, I can't help but think that people would've looked at me either like I was crazy or thought I was gay. So even in the journal I was keeping at the time, even in a personal and private space where I might have felt free to express what I didn't feel free to express elsewhere, I'm restrained.

Let me try to be a little unrestrained now. The last time I saw G. was maybe 20 or so years ago in Lubbock. I had tried to track him down a couple times over the web but never had any success - until about a month ago. He had been on my mind, perhaps because of this blog, so I just on the spur of the moment decided to try one more time since it had been quite a few years since the last time I checked the web. I had little in the way of expectations, so I was shocked when a photo of him turned up. He looked just about the same, except his hair had turned completely gray. He's in a covers band now. When we were friends years ago, he dabbled with the piano, and the two of us would sing Beatles tunes along with his car cassette player as we drove back and forth from Lubbock and San Antonio, but I never would've predicted he'd be playing keyboard and sharing lead vocals, singing anything from the Texas Tornadoes to the Temptations. I don't know if he sings lead on "YMCA" but that I would like to hear, maybe even dance to.

He's in the Southwest but no longer in Lubbock; he hasn't been there for a long while. I'm not sure what will come of our getting back in touch since we're far apart, there is a lot that's happened since we last saw each other, and we're both busy, but it's exciting to have him in my life again, even if only in a minimal way. He's someone who's had a significant impact on my life. I was best man at his wedding. We worked on a comic strip together and tried to syndicate it. We went camping for almost three weeks, driving from Texas to Oregon and back. We shared and critiqued our creative writing. We read our favorite poems to each other.

JOURNAL EXCERPT: April 14, Fri. 1978 8:30 PM

When I was typing the title of this blog entry, I initially wrote "JOURNEY" instead of "JOURNAL." Not sure whether that's because I deejayed a People's Dance Party on Saturday night in Greenbelt, MD and someone brought up the band, Journey, at one point -- a group whose heyday took place during the late 70s, the time I was writing this particular journal -- or because the journal and this blog are a journey in and of themselves. Probably a combination. I was pretty indifferent to the band Journey. "Anyway You Want It" and "Don't Stop Believing" seemed like kind of bland power pop ballads. There were a number of bands producing a lot of music like that at the time -- Kansas, Boston, etc.

Clearly music played a big role in my life during the 70s. The cassette deck keeps popping up again and again:

"I was paid today. $214 dollars. Put $150 in the bank.

"Bought 3 blank cassettes for my recorder, and Linda and I went to the Book Rack."

MANHOOD REDO: Before I bought the cassette deck, I would go out to the South Plains Mall every paycheck and buy an album or albums -- whatever looked interesting or was on sale. By the late 70s I had around 500 or so. I know that music often reinforces and perpetuates traditional masculinity, and I would say that about all music, not just rap and hip hop, which have become the stand ins for anything and everything sexist and violent in the music world. Rock 'n' roll, alternative, country music, and so on all have their sexist elements.

But I want to focus on another aspect, namely a couple ways music in my life has challenged traditional masculinity. It's one place where there's room for emotions that are typically outlawed for men, where you can sing about tears, mourn loss, and embrace tenderness. I mentioned the Beatles in an earlier blog. For me, their "Here, There, and Everyone" is one of the most beautiful love songs I've ever heard. Lyrics like these validated my desires for connection and relationship:

"I want her everywhere
and if she's beside me I know I need never care.
But to love her is to need her

"Everywhere, knowing that love is to share
each one believing that love never dies
watching her eyes and hoping I'm always there."

Or what about George Harrison's "Beware of Darkness":

"Beware of sadness
It can hit you
It can hurt you
Make you sore and what is more
That is not what you are here for"

It is a song that acknowledges the loneliness and probably sadness I was feeling at the time of this journal but wouldn't let me stay stuck there, reminding me of my desire for connection and relationship in an even larger, expanded sense than "Here, There, and Everywhere."

And then there's dance, but I'll have to deal with that in the next blog.