August 1st, 1967

Nathan & I talking about our transitions—those days when the old patterns of background were very much present, yet you knew they were worthless, but then again you couldn't define the new patterns of the future for yourself—so merely out of instinct you rejected the old patterns & hoped for the best.

He spent a year on kibbutz picking apples.

“That’s when I realized I couldn’t stand being a Jew anymore,” he says.

But in the yarmulke, the beady eyes, the granny glasses, he looks almost rabbinical.

Before Michelle, he dated Jewish girls just to please his parents. Feels guilty for leaving New York & dropping out of Brooklyn College.

“I couldn’t handle it, man.”

Beautiful person but no ambition.

“I don’t want to change the world,” he says. “I just want it to leave me alone.”

He thinks the hippies should move to Nevada, take over the state, & live off gambling taxes. Hippies already heading for the country. Too many busts, cops breaking heads.

We smoke opium in the hookah. I find myself standing at the edge of an Egyptian landscape at night: still, silent, eternal. Desert & pyramids stretch in the distance, the whole atmosphere pervaded by this luxurious, blissful sense of death. No fear whatsoever. Sheer peace & pleasure.

» August 2nd, 1967 : Rachel's Confusion