August 2nd, 1967

Lying in bed this morning, Rachel says: "We don't know each other any better than we did a month ago."

I passively agree but later differ with her. The sexual angle is different here. It's the most beautiful sexual relationship I've ever had & its over-emphasis is not the over-emphasis in the common sense.

We have a long discussion about how she's helped repair my ego from the devastation of my elopement to Copenhagen & the last 2 years in Philly finishing school with my parents. By the time I came here I was beyond negation or depression. Just numb.

Strangely enough she reveals that I’ve helped her ego too, that she’s been involved with domineering, egotistical people who were so concerned with exerting themselves that she never got a chance to project herself & therefore felt inadequate.

She says I create an atmosphere of sharing by talking about my work & always letting her know what I’m doing. This also gives her the opportunity to share for which she feels a great need, but hasn’t been given the opportunity.

When we’re finished, she caresses me & says: "You know, baby, I love you so much right now."

The “right now” may mean it’s only momentary, but it doesn’t bother me because I know that for at least that moment she loves me as much as any woman can love a man & that moment is like a precious jewel to me.

I start reading her some of my dialogue from Sanglorians Run & we’re hysterical.

"You're perverse," she says. “You're sick!”

Yet she continues laughing. I love making people laugh at their own corruption. How ironic!

I show her the Musical Fucks sequence, set at a swingers motel run by Siamese twins. After struggling for every word, every paragraph, suddenly it broke open. Wrote it straight through. Needs work, but it’s good.

“You’re demented!” she says & keeps on laughing.

“It’s my revenge on Philly.”

“Where did you get these names?”

Talking about Highbeams, Flyshit, & Melon-Cakes.

“They’re sexual grotesques.”

Later, I go to I & Thou Café, sit alone with a pot of tea, thinking about my responsibility as a writer, taking it too lightly, assuming the novel will write itself.

I think about my long-range responsibilities as a figure in a culture that will have a recognizable absence of cultural figures in my lifetime. I must achieve what is required of me, it is my cultural duty to achieve so much.

Must get off this merry-go-round.

» August 5th, 1967 : Richard The Speed Freak