Last Day of Vacation [1979]

[Passage from my journal, 25 March 1979]

♇♇

—On this last day of vacation I am taking out a little time to write to my folks. Nothing worth mentioning is happening here—I spent the last few days at my aunt’s reading and so forth. I am thinking of enclosing a xerox of the long-lost Wasp chapter of Through the Looking Glass and telling them to put it somewhere safe—I hope they don’t lose it.

I got my story sent out to ASF. I wish the MS didn’t look so unprofessional, what with the machine and all, but what the fuck. Maybe it will change my luck a little. If my fairly decent manuscript was rejected repeatedly, maybe an awful one will make it. I revised it too, in a couple of places, for what that’s worth. It won’t make the difference between a sale and a rejection slip, but the product may as well be as close as possible to the best I can turn out.

10:18 pm PST—I’m feeling something I haven’t felt in years, the old Like-On-Sunday feeling of end of vacation, irreparable loss, loss of self, return of the hellish ordinary world. It’s over. I’ve been mildly down the last couple of days.

And I wish to God I had never come here to this appalling place, that I had never decided to go back to school, that none of this had ever happened. Why the hell didn’t I have the guts to pull that trigger a year ago? Why did I live to see 27, let alone 28? Yeah, smile you fucking bastard looking over my shoulder as I write this, you social worker, historian, psychologist, or future self, smile and be damned to you.

I guess I should count my blessings. At least I’m not depressed, not yet anyway.