Activity

Monday, 21 December (Day 10).

My wife encourages me to make a list of the things I want to do before I go. The language that she uses to tell me this is strange and uncharacteristic. Only later, while urinating off the back patio, does it occur to me that she is probably operating from a script.…

Thursday, 17 December.

The cat is sitting by the door. Evidently it wants to go out. I sit by the door also, watching it. It is as if our hostilities (the hostilities of cat and mouse) have already begun. This is a feline that I purchased at a fair. A charismatic man was giving kittens away. You…

In 1975 I was a baby; what happened was not my conscious experience. My memories, instead, are of growing up in Michigan, with a strong grandmother and a strong stepmother. The summers were short and the winters went on and on. Icicles lengthened from the eaves and fell like daggers into the snow. …

I suppose if there is a reckoning in middle age, it’s a tragic sense that you have been formed by things, and sent hither and thither by those things, and put in a frenzy and made to run around the place, and up and down the house in the service of those things, and they were not real. They were th…

Yes. I think it was a response to my environment—to being misunderstood and feeling that the environment of my family was promulgating a version of life that I was at odds with and that I didn’t agree with. I think my earliest question was, Is my version the right one? Or am I wrong? Very early on …