Back and forth up and down February 19, 1985

  

Back again.

Three years after the beginning of settling old scores, finding some new means of survival (or old means), I’m back again.

I’m shocked at how much time we spend reversing ourselves, going back to those things we think served us well in the past.

Sometimes even when the past didn’t serve us at all and we look back with nostalgia at an imaginary past, what we thought was or what could have been.

Louise and I went through this a half dozen times during our brief relationship, constantly seeing the grass as greener on the other side, even though it wasn’t as green as we assumed when we were on the other side in the first place.

We went to and from Denver twice, to and from Portland twice, (only for Louise to repeat both of these later on her own, throwing in another trip to Las Vegas, and some time in Norther California through we only passed while together.)

Rarely satisfied with what we have, we keep looking for something more, some sense of perfection we rarely attain.

I had no choice when I went from working for the card company to working for Donald in 1974 – even though I had been offered a manager’s job at an evolving electronics company (I was not then or perhaps never would be management material).

After Louise, I bounced around from place to place, living with Dave, then in the Montclair rooming house, then with Pauly and Garrick in Passaic, then to the Paulison Avenue apartment in Passaic, back to Montclair, then to Passaic again to the apartment Pauly vacated when evicted, then to the larger apartment next door we’d shared earlier.

I gave up the good-paying job at Dunkin to seek a career as writer in late 1981, and when that didn’t work out, worked underpaid at Fotomat, wandering from booth to booth for several years before finding a booth of my own in Clifton, living hand to mouth only to return again to Dunkin, lured by good pay and a promise that I wouldn’t starve or become homeless, now leaving again for all the same reasons I left before, the belief that somehow I might make a living as a writer, and not as a wage slave (for good pay or bad0, back in a fotomat booth with my typewriter, tapping away at novels that may never see the light of day.

 

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