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The guy was almost down and out. He would entertain me with his stories of roaming up and down the west coast, most of the time as a vagrant, but sometimes being gainfully employed at some job that didn't exist any longer. He confessed to me, sometimes in ways that were odd and elaborate. "Yeah, you know, I have to stop being so damn foolish! I'm too passive, not determined enough and it has cost me but good. I think over things and a dry ash appears. And I know better!

I know what I've seen man!

And no way I want to live it over again

Well, here's one that will amuse you. I was bored in school. I didn't get the education I wanted. In high school I wrote a novel and rested my hopes on that novel. I don't even know where it is. As I told you, I was bored but I was living with a woman. That was far more interesting. Not that education didn't interest me, I always read stuff; political ideas, literature, revolutionary material. And thinking, man. Always thinking wildly but earnestly and protecting it all with a kind of silence.

But why did I flow and flutter in the wind? After a time I kept the substantial part of myself hidden, working in its own way, conscious to myself but hidden from others. That part of myself that showed itself to others soon was the face of themselves; sorry, I can't describe it any other way. I became no better and no worse than themselves. It is a fine art my friend. But it also pulled me down. That face kept turning back in a taunting and leering sort of way. My good parts were all humiliated, let me tell you."

Well, I wanted to tell him that a man's whole life is his growth. Only the defeated, the damned, and the disillusioned will cut it all off and try to perfect something that he has inherited. His whole life. And not the pressure to become everything at once which leads downward.

But I didn't.

I should have done some confessing myself and told him that at one point I felt life to be so overwhelmingly in momentum, so resembling wild nature I was familiar with up in the Valley's that I felt there was nothing to do but observe it all, give it some opinion and even concoct a ritual or two as if I were a cavemen surrounded by nature. It appeared to me at that time that it showed all the symptoms of insanity as well as profit-making. Voices heard, incongruent images, valuelessness, telepathy, a real insane world. I should have confessed that to him but I didn't.