An 18-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From March, 1970 | Thought Catalog

An 18-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From March, 1970 | Thought Catalog

Early Sunday Morning in Apache Junction: Rain in the Wash

It's been an uncharacteristically rainy weekend in the Sonoran Desert, and by 7:30 a.m. today, the wash outside our house looked like a lake.

An 18-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From February, 1970 | Thought Catalog

An 18-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From February, 1970 | Thought Catalog

Saturday Morning in West Mesa: Grand Opening of Mesa Grande Cultural Park

Early this morning, we were at the grand opening of Mesa Grande Cultural Park, the culmination of decades of efforts to preserve one of the most important prehistoric Hohokam sites in Arizona. When we first came to Arizona in 1998, our brother lived just down the block, on West 10th Street east of Date Street, so we knew the area pretty well but had never before been able to explore this ancient archaeological treasure.

According to the Arizona Historical Society,

The Hohokam, the ancestors of the Akimel O’odham (Pima), constructed the Mesa Grande temple mound. With walls made from “caliche,” the calcium carbonate hardpan that forms under our desert soils, the mound is longer and wider than a modern football field and is 27 feet high. Construction of the mound began by AD 1100 and continued to at least AD 1400. A large adobe wall encloses the mound and a large plaza in front of the mound. In one corner of the site, volunteers from the Arizona Museum of Natural History constructed a replica of a Hohokam ballcourt, an open-air structure where ballgames were played using a rubber ball made from a local plant.

One of two Hohokam “great mounds” in the Salt River Valley, the Mesa Grande mound was a dramatic symbol of the power of this ancient community. The village surrounding the mound once covered over one-half square mile and was home to perhaps two thousand Hohokam. Situated near the headgates of one of the two largest networks of irrigation canals created in the prehistoric New World, the site of Mesa Grande controlled over 27,000 acres of highly productive farmland.

The City of Mesa purchased the Mesa Grande ruins in the 1980s to preserve Mesa’s premier cultural treasure and to open it to the public as an educational and recreational facility.

This project has had the enthusiastic support of the community since 1927 when local citizens and the chamber of commerce held a parade down Main Street to promote its development. More recently, the Mesa Grande Neighborhood Alliance identified the development of Mesa Grande as a heritage tourism destination as their number one economic goal.

There was a free pancake breakfast after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, but we just were happy to walk around the site, learning a great deal about the Hohokam and their sophisticated society.

We're grateful to everyone involved in this, especially the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, which provided a lot of the funding. The visit to Mesa Grande Cultural Park made us think of Tom Outland's story in Willa Cather's The Professor's House, one of our favorite underrated novels, when Tom comes across the ruins of the New Mexican cliff dwellers:

I can't describe it. It was more like sculpture than anything else. I knew at once that I had come upon the city of some extinct civilization, hidden away in this inaccessible mesa for centuries, preserved in the dry air and almost perpetual sunlight like a fly in amber, guarded by the cliffs and the river and the desert.

An 18-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From January, 1970 | Thought Catalog

An 18-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From January, 1970 | Thought Catalog

Friday Night on the Upper West Side: Pushkin Society 79th Anniversary Concert featuring Larissa Grabois and Samuel Katz at the Nicholas Roerich Museum

(Videos courtesy Lara Grabois)

An 18-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From December, 1969 | Thought Catalog

An 18-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From December, 1969 | Thought Catalog

An 18-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From November, 1969 | Thought Catalog

An 18-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From November, 1969 | Thought Catalog

Richard Grayson's THE EIGHTIES DIARIES published as Amazon Kindle E-book

Dumbo Books today published Richard Grayson's The Eighties Diaries as an e-book available at the Amazon Kindle store for $1.99.

The promo stuff says in part:

Richard Grayson has been keeping a daily diary compulsively since the summer of 1969, when he was an 18-year-old agoraphobic about to venture out into the world -- or at least the world around him in Brooklyn. His diary, approximately 600 words a day without missing a day since August 1, 1969, now totals over 9 million words, rivaling the longest diaries ever written.

Despite the crackpot nature of his lifelong project, the diarist actually did become a writer of sorts. Starting in the mid-1970s, he began publishing his stories in literary magazines and anthologies, and later in webzines. His articles have appeared in PEOPLE, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE MIAMI HERALD, THE SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS, THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC, NEWSDAY, THE NEW YORK POST, THE ORLANDO SENTINEL, and many other newspapers and magazines. He won four state arts council grants for his fiction writing, and in addition to being a lawyer and political activist, has taught writing in colleges in six states since 1975.

ROLLING STONE called Grayson’s first short story collection, WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK (1979) “where avant-garde fiction goes when it becomes stand-up comedy,” and NEWSDAY said, “The reader is dazzled by the swift, witty goings-on.”

LIBRARY JOURNAL called LINCOLN’S DOCTOR’S DOG (1982) “excellent” and said of I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ (1983) that “Grayson is a born storyteller and standup talker.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW said Grayson’s I SURVIVED CARACAS TRAFFIC (1996) was “entertaining and bizarre” and “consistently, even ingeniously funny.”

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY called Grayson’s THE SILICON VALLEY DIET (2000) “compulsively talky and engagingly disjunctive,” and THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, reviewing AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET (2006), said, “Grayson has a fresh, funny voice.”

THE EIGHTIES DIARIES runs nearly 300,000 words, chronicling his life and the lives around him from 1981 to 1989, in Manhattan and Miami and a few places in between.

It includes all of six volumes previously published separately: SOUTH FLORIDA WINTERS, 1981-1984; LATE SPRING IN SUNRISE, 1982; WEST SIDE SUMMERS, 1984-1987; INDIAN SUMMER: PARK SLOPE, 1985; SPRINGTIME IN LAUDERHILL, 1986; and EIGHTIES’ END: AUTUMN, 1987-1989.

Grayson has already published his first book of diary entries, BOY MEETS BROOKLYN: 1969-70, and the next six volumes of the diaries of his late teens and twenties as THE BROOKLYN DIARIES, featuring SUMMER IN BROOKLYN: 1969-1975; WINTER IN BROOKLYN: 1972-73; SPRING IN BROOKLYN, 1975; AUTUMN IN BROOKLYN, 1978; MORE SUMMERS IN BROOKLYN: 1976-1979; and A YEAR IN ROCKAWAY, 1980.

Five volumes of THE NINETIES DIARIES published include SUMMER IN NEW YORK: 1990, LAST SUMMER IN ROCKAWAY: 1991, FIRST FALL IN GAINESVILLE: 1991, SPRING IN GAINESVILLE: 1992-1994, and AUTUMN IN GAINESVILLE: 1994-1996.