I had a severe headache when I was finished at the typewriter. Carol had subsided to the point where she could collapse on the sofa-bed with The Stranger, but she was flipping the pages angrily. She had noticed my unoccupied meat.

I went over to her and got very tender and caressing and so forth, and we were back on more or less friendly terms after about thirty minutes. We realized that we hadn't had our last falling out about the extra Something, but we were all cuddly and content for the time being, the storm had passed, we could look forward to a little peace before the subject again reared its head.

And in such moments I really, keenly regret that I am not better with my words. The Mesozoic always does that to me, makes me want to talk to Carol about what it was like to have been a young man back during the Sixties and earliest Seventies, when it looked as though there might be hope for humanity ... when blacks were suddenly demanding the right to be people, when women were demanding the right to be human beings, when ... when so many different voices were being raised, crying out for sanity and justice, when there were good and noble causes, worthy causes, when there was still time and the future that has come to pass was still a small, gray cloud hanging low on the horizon, when...

When the smell of extinction was not in the air.

But I can't make it live for Carol. She's too young. She was born after things had already gone to hell in a hand-basket. She was barely out of diapers when California broke up. (Goodbye, L.A. You always fascinated me.) She was just a kid when Texas made its abortive attempt to divide itself into five separate states, and as far as Carol is concerned, Texas has always been occupied by enemy troops.

Carol came too late, after there was no longer any place for hope in our lives. And I have never been able to explain to her the essential difference between the poor dumb earnest optimism of my youth and the inanely glowing stuff I write for TV.

Carol, Carol, dinosaurs and all their brethren were majestic creatures. How much so, you will never be able to understand, because you can't be told about it. You have to feel what it was like to be twenty meters long and the lord of the world. Or to glide on six-meter wings above the Kansas Sea. The dinosaurs were the most awesome things of all time, mountains made to walk. And, for all of their cranial density, Carol, they were nobler monsters than men. When the dinosaurs died, they left a clean world. They walked out of the world, and it was still full of living things. The dinosaurs died out gracefully.

When we die out, we'll take the whole world with us, one way or another.

I have such a mind for trivia. All morning long, I've been haunted by a song which I can't possibly have heard for years. It's something from the Sixties, I think, something by Bob Dylan. A cry of anguish, of disillusionment, bemoaning the fact that the singer is stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?

And this, from one of the stanzas: "... deep inside my heart, I knew I can't escape."

Oh, but I try.

Today is Friday, Food Day at the commissary, and the streets are packed. I had to go to the studio. Pushed and fought my way to the mass-transit stop at the corner, and then the steam bus was twenty minutes late. But it did arrive, and I did get a seat up front. It was a miserable ride, all the same. My respirator has sprung a leak. (God, who would have thought that Austin, Texas, would ever have really bad smog?) The day was a scorcher, and everything stank, the bus, the streets, the people, the whole city. The smell of extinction.

And so I leaned my head back, closed my eyes and got away from then as best I could. All is calm, all is bright.