To find form— coffee and cookies conversation of companions to see we seldom take the time for conclusions, completion, closure; contemporary culture depends on the caffeine-sugar alcohol fix and doesn’t say how to cope with withdrawal, decrescendo; there are no silences on the radio between rock songs whose fading choruses have no final note; temporary content dies without will or testament and makes no explanation beyond the fact, a cliché; everything we create is compensation displacement, which satisfies what we call “need,” the commercial product the “real thing”; desiring conformity, we try to copy the fad before it fades; “be here now,” “it’s all a trip”—our catchphrases; freedom and control are linked to cash flow; competition keeps us constantly failing, falling, flailing; our complaint: the lack of time; if we extend ourselves beyond our capabilities we call it “growth,” if we can do a job successfully we’re put in one more difficult so we compromise, cop out; there is no concept, beyond the poem, of abiding change, so changes are crises and continuity, stagnation.
15 August 1979