[* * *] Two people down at the mill think I have cancer. Maybe I am starting to smell? Anyhow, feel god awful weak and only feel good in bed, but probably only the cause of too much drinking and gambling and working at the same time, and down where I am getting it you have to work and sweat and bleed for it, I do mean. The people are half wild with fear and something they know not of; they tremble and jerk with work neurosis, all cackling flat laughter of the deserted innards, and I am beginning to feel that way too; it is contemptuous what we have done to life and the living and ourselves. I was hoping for luck and skill in the gambling to free me but this too appears only another trap where they throw sand on the living. All the traps, and I walk into all the traps, every one that’s there, I spread myself with olive oil and ointment, with hemorrhoid salve and I say whoops, LET’S GO, BABIES!!!

It’s a hell of a juncture to bust loose and I guess I’ll never bust loose, not writing poetry, and it appears I can’t even do that anymore, and I sure can’t go the novel, not the way I feel, the novel seems like nothing but WORK, a grandiose concept of saying a lot of nothing, and I guess the idea of the poems, good or bad, is to keep me from going crazier. I could pay money to hear some psychiatrist tell me this, and then we’d both feel better; only he’d feel better than I because he’d have my money and a nice secretary to look at walking around the room and to fuck. ah, wilderness, my wilderness. [* * *]

I reread Camus’ The Stranger the other night and once again this appeared to me to be the perfect antidote for what was essentially wrong with the resolve in Crime and Punishment. It is so good that others do this work for us so that we do not have to do it ourselves.

Children outside gyrating, seeing grass and mystery and freedom, and parental tyranny too; but they (the holy children) will be melded down, they become me: an old man at 4 o’clock in the afternoon writing tea-leaf thoughts in a vestibule that smells of bacon and frogs and tumbling silence.

From now until the end of the book, the letters all bear the new address given in the following letter.

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

May 1, 1964

We have moved to—

5126 ¼ De Longpre Ave.

Los Angeles 27, Calif.