Jonathan Goldman Chakra Chants thundering in the headphones. Sunlight streaming in from skylight, kissing my cheek good-bye as it moves on along the wall.

First writing of the day. Glorious bright still day.

Must spend the afternoon with friends who come here every-other-week to play exotic board and card games, weirder the better. Group has been on hiatus for several months, it's our first Saturday back, and it will be a good time, I think. Today we play 7 Wonders.

***

Good dreams overnight I feel no impulse to record: moving among the friends from Central Casting, having long conversations, picking locks, opening doors. Several young persons I am friends with locally were there, and I was telling them with sudden dream-insight that they would go on to publish many books, that they were doing very well.

Made it up here before confronting needful morning conversation--got the porridge cooked and served to brother and me, fresh blueberries! affordable once again, and his banana and my huge glass filled with Sumatra coffee and cream, cats and dog fed and let out and let in again, then dashing up steps to my loftofficebed to eat and read silently in the blessed hoarfrost morning moan of gray January sky.

I took yesterday a long hike diagonally across the waste and vacant lots toward the highway out of town through the Brass Rail Trailer Park its Jesus Saves bumper stickers and satellite-dish tripods on cinderblock feet and barking guardbeasts straining at the ends of their tenuous tethers, and on past the Rim Rock Motel, to nowhere, more of it out there even than here if that can be imagined.

Wondering from time to time how it looked, grayhaired lady wandering among weeds and road trash (when in my head I'm 12 still in adolescent gawkbody and still as ever childcurious about the world).

Emptied out the gifted trailer. Years worth of rat nests stuffed in every drawer, pine needles composted with foam-rubber bits chewed from the mattresses and bench pads, each of which is missing sizable chunks to rodent enterprise. Too, mattress coverings drenched & dried in ancient cat pee and here and there a long wafer of dried excrement.

The HEAVY rubber gloves. Hot water, vinegar for the stench of it, later (not combining) waves of ammonia and bleach in turn, not combining. Planned for today.

I emptied out the writing trailer late yesterday after first keyboarding 500 words for Chapter 5. I had started this project completing 1500 words a day, Now it's murder wringing out 500.

Hence, an analogy: my first two days of fastwalking I covered several miles and never was winded or sore. Since then, though, I crap out sooner and sooner. How does this square with building stamina? Husband, erstwhile drill instructor he is, explains that with much exercise after long slothfulness the body responds as though it were in emergency, and it hands you all the juice you need. But when a pattern of exercise forms, then the body adapts--this is the new normal--and returns to its pre-exertion levels of fuel and energy. So now I am winded after six blocks, now I pass out as soon as I get back home, and so on.

So with the writing: the emergency that carried me forward in the early chapters proves not so emergent after all, and now I have to build that muscle on my own. Ugh.

Let me find something pleasant to write about here.

My friend the artguy brought me the writing trailer, as I have said. He brought with it six sacks of VHS tapes--culled from his collection, now that he's done going over to DVD. So last night I sorted through them, have a sackful to give to the Friends of the Library thrift book nook. And a sackful of rarish Japanese and Chinese films, and a couple of Spanish ones, and some on Russian history, to mail to my friend LesLight in Sacramento, who is an art film person. There are enough westerns here to fill a sack--stuff with Charlton Heston and John Wayne and even cheapo recent things with Sam Elliot and Tom Selleck. These would have found their way to the thrift store, but Husband glimpsed them, and so ... My Brando collection has been enriched by six, and my Italian films by two.

Anyway, artguy gave us so many I think I can safely cancel my Netflix subscription for a while.

Best of all, he brought a boxful of persimmons just picked Monday night. A half-dozen are eatable now, so maybe I'll make persimmon pudding.

***

Sunbeam on my face now. Calm, calm. Feels so generous and kind. And of course warm.

My friend Artguy delivered a trailer to me today, which I have parked behind the house to be my writing shed. It is a dirty wreck of a thing and stinks of cat pee and rat nests (I think he preferred giving it away to cleaning it in order to sell it), and I am thrilled indeed.

"30 November [1914]. I can't write anymore. I've come up against the last boundary, before which I shall in all likelihood again sit down for years, and then in all likelihood begin another story all over again that will again remain unfinished. This fate pursues me. And I have become cold again, and insensible; nothing is left but a senile love for unbroken calm."--Franz Kafka, Diaries

***

CatLobsang hears the tapping of my hands on the keys and comes to engage--he will lie on the keyboard, or the mouse. If I pick up a pen he will lie on the notebook or rest his chin heavily on my writing hand as though purposely to stop me, calm me. As though my writing were a symptom he must treat.

Perhaps this is so.

Today is quite beautiful. Big puffy clouds scud about in the wind, which is high and blustery. The sunbeam is creeping into the skylight and should be full on my face in about 7 minutes.

Cat's head on my wrist.

"6 February [1922]. The comfort in hearing that someone had served in Paris, Brussels, London, Liverpool, had gone up the Amazon on a Brazilian steamer as far as the Peruvian border, with comparative ease had borne the dreadful sufferings of the winter campaign of the Seven Communities because he had been accustomed to hardship since his childhood. The comfort consists not only in the demonstration that such things are possible, but in the pleasure one feels when one realizes that with these achievements on the one level, much at the same time must have necessarily been achieved on the other level, much must have been wrung from clenched fists. It is possible, then." -- Franz Kafka, Diaries

***

Brilliant first day of what surely will be a pivotal year--for someone, anyway. I sit in the sunbeam from the skylight, which this time of year sweeps right to left across my bedpillows where I work, blinding me, and again I pause to search online for cheap raffia hats.