anyhow, I am glad YOU haven’t turned…yet…but I am sorry it was your head in enfoldo smash that gave me time to pinprick my self-pity. forgive me, but understand that I am suffering from shell shock years. leave it up to me to fuck up everything. I am very good at it.

meanwhile, while you were jamming your head into wolfgang ersatz zero sludge I too was trying to kill myself but did not quite bring it off, maybe not kill myself but tinker with the limp edges of the thing a bit, a tendency I have when high, and maybe some day they will give me my gold star on head for being a good kiddy and bringing it off, but like now I am fucking that up too. I was up at Thomas’ place and I am the only one drinking heavily, I have brought my own stuff and am slamming it down as fast as body will hold, sensing only electric light and faces, everybody else very calm and kool but I am going crazy quietly, my health has been bad very and there is a kind of delight in ramming it through with surfboards and elephant tusks, and everybody is so CONTENT they are like stems of flowers, not the flowers, just the stems, and finally it comes time to leave, I am with this editor (OPEN CITY PRESS; Notes from Underground) (John Bryan) and we go out to my 11 year old car and somebody walks through my side mirror to begin with and I get in with Bryan and I let the car roll, very steep down one lane two way street cars parked everywhere, and I think I ram something, Bryan very excited, “Jesus, make it out, make it!” we are going again, down sliding, I have foot on gas for sound of engine trying to pull the strings up and together in me so I can hold and go, and then we are running along out of the hills at last, on the way out, and suddenly I turn left and we are heading steep UP into the hills again SOMEWHERE, very steep, and Bryan is hollering at me and I find a nice cliff, no houses too near and I take the car and run the 2 wheels along the edge of the cliff seeing how close I can get, I just hear Bryan’s voice and ignore it, placing the wheels close to the edge and going at a good clip, and it seems a SENSIBLE thing for me to do, a very logical thing, a very good thing, really, but Bryan can’t see it, and I pull off from the cliff to think of the next good thing to do but when I hit the street again he opens the door, leaps out and starts—running running away from me and the car. my first THOUGHT IS TO RUN HIM OVER, but I am rather disgusted with his lack of LOYALTY so I let him go. if he had been more loyal I probably would have run him over, but probably no German blood in him, poor chap. anyhow, I got home all right but of course don’t remember driving there, and Bryan is still alive too. he walked all the way home, 5 or 6 miles at 4 a.m. in the morning. well, that’s a nice time of the morning to walk—hardly any people you have to look at, no shock in belly as you pass the usual sucked-out corpses. [* * *]