Everything is a mess in here. One nice thing about living alone in a place where visitors do not appear unannounced is that you can leave piles of activity everywhere. To my right there are stacks of assorted paper, a paper cutter, and two jars of rubber cement spread in a semicircle on the floor, with a space in the center I can slide in and out of whenever I feel like it. Across the room is an open accordian case with an accordian half resting inside, half hanging over the edge and onto the floor. Behind that is a basket filled with books to be sorted and a crate full of records I'm not sure of. There are spaces like this all over, everything I do goes in a sort of rotation, everything started, nothing finished. I don't mind this kind of mess, I like to do twelve things at once. I've been happy this week.

This book is a huge, unwieldy, poorly thought out disaster. The worse it gets, the more I love it. It's like building a monster, adding more and more arms and legs that it doesn't need but maybe it will like to have. I don't know what to do with it when it's done. I meant to give it to someone, but how do you present such a thing to someone without frightening them? It takes just the right person at just the right moment to understand, but the only way to test it is to hand it over and study the face, quickly, before it turns to polite. But then what? If the face is wrong do I take it back? The main problem with everything everywhere is that it's not so easy to take things back. The main problem and one of the best things, both at the same time.

I've been sleeping up a storm. Oh, a sleepstorm! You can just hear the sheets whipping around. I've been dreaming well. I dreamt that I moved into a house with a secret closet cabinet that opened out to a strange little back deck and a complicated staircase. I dreamt I was shuffling through dead leaves, on that street between the railroad and the movie theater, and now I can't wait for the leaves to fall. I've been dreaming about rain and fireplaces and secret shelves full of secret boxes and mystery bottles with flowery labels and words I can't read. I wake up certain that anything might happen, and that may be the best way. Fall is here to make everything okay. All I need now is a working record player and maybe a crowbar.