I'm looking at the day's third Granny Smith apple, untouched (the apple) on the sill. Tonight is the Second Big Gallstone Purge and so I'm supposed to stop all intake, solid and liquid, at some point - 3 o'clock? 6? It's OK because by Day 3 of the apple fast you're not hungry anymore anyway.

Glorious gray gusty cool today. I'll have to lower the south awning again before it's ripped from its hinges. Hark! is that rainspatter din on tin roof? Splendid. I didn't want to mow the lawn today, anyway.

Reread Hemingway's "The Gambler, The Nun, The Radio" this morning, tangenting from discussion of white noise in the choral interstices of Kerouac's Mexico City Blues. Strange story; I'd forgotten how strange. Odd repetitions and refrains. I'll read Hemingway for Part 4 of the Thing I'm Writing, and Gertrude Stein behind Part 5. Joyce will do for 1, and for 2 maybe tales of Robin Hood and King Arthur - that's it! I'll just burrow into My Book House. Part 3, my finished "Road Choruses," is Kerouac. Six needs something sensual, overwritten - something Jamesian, maybe, or out of Virginia Woolf.

The Lombardy poplars across the way bend and sway in their neat row; trees always seem to dance in slow motion, in any wind. When I was young and paid attention to the World Out There I used to hypnotize myself watching them communicate among themselves, especially if the leaves were shiny and the sun was high, all the sparkles. I remember lying in bed during my second miscarriage, having taken too much Darvon for the pain, following, waltzing with those leafglints in the grove out the window.

Billowing curtains - same thing.

(blasted heat)

(blasted wind)

Janet Frame's mystical conception of her creative source was a place called Mirror City, where a demanding Envoy waited for her to bring her memories and perceptions to use as foundations for the palaces she built there - her novels and stories. At the end of the third volume of her autobiography The Envoy from Mirror City, she has the Envoy say,

What does it matter that often as you have departed from Mirror City bearing your new, imagined treasures, they have faded in the light of this world, in their medium of language they have acquired imperfections you never intended for them, they have lost meaning that seemed, once, to shine from them and make your heart beat faster with the joy of discovery of the matched phrase or cadence, the clear insight. Take care. Your recent past surrounds you, has not yet been transformed. Do not remove yet what may be the foundation of a palace in Mirror City.

Writers who are mostly Rememberers as opposed to inventors are very often Aspies like me, I think. If male, like Jack Kerouac, they may follow the common male Asperger pattern of using alcohol to relieve the chronic anxieties of coping in the bizarre and confusing society of NeuroTypicals. If Female, they may follow that pattern and study and mimic NTs to the best of their abilities, withdrawing to seclusion at every opportunity and for as long as practicable.

In many of us the compulsion to record and transform every memory and perception begins as soon as one can write, because the mind processes so slowly, and too often memories evaporate before that processing takes place. To incorporate them, then, we preserve them and study what we've written or drawn until it becomes a part of us.

We keep Childmind into old age. It's our neurology - the emotions never mature. And although this gives us a rough life - we never figure out how to be grown-up; we falter without tenders and managers - at this point in my own life I finally find Childmind a blessed relief. I am able to see the world fresh every day.

Grief and confusion because of my alienated family consumes me still, when I let it, but gradually I am learning how to let that pain go and stay present and mindful of life where I am.

Consuming Aspie biographies like bonbons these past months has paid off with understanding and some peace. Those shy turbulant socially ill-equipped artists so focused on their work that great palaces rose up around them - what matter they were built of mirrors?

Several days of cool, then another, now, of wind and heat and dust.

I've begun my monthly greenapple fast, just Granny Smiths and bottled water, with black coffee in the morning to fend off withdrawal headaches. This first day is challenging mostly because I have only four apples, but two of them are large, and as of now (3:07 p.m.) I still have two waiting. I will allow myself today, as last time on Day 1, a beverage (right about now) of molasses stirred into hot water, to ease the sugar jones.

I wasted yesterday from 10 in the morning until quite late in the evening dealing with a techno-crisis that turned out to be no crisis at all. My iPhone suddenly was "unable to join" the house's wi-fi signal, and also refused to recognize my email. After hours spent on Skip's cellphone talking to three clueless tech-support persons in succession, I ended up wiping and reformatting and restoring the unit's contents - 108 apps, 259 songs, hundreds of books, etc - which is a criminally slow procedure.

And ultimately unnecessary. All I had needed to do was reset the wi-fi router and change my email password. Which I figured out once the reformatting was already underway.

The upshot is that I lost a day of work, so have had to cancel my Wednesday visit with friendKathleen to make up for it.

I spent most of this very hungry day burrowed into Nicosia's Kerouac biography and Janet Frame's autobiography: Jack descends into suicidal alcoholism while Janet, at last diagnosed as sane-all-along, embraces her calling and finally earns literary fame.

And then of course I've scribbled some - written a letter to artguyJim down in Yolo (who gave me this trailer) and then faced the terror of My Own Work, which gradually becomes less and less terrifying. I have a title for the overall opus, and names for nine of its parts (with a tenth and eleventh TK). Part 3 is completed already, and Part 1 virtually so, requiring only the gathering and consolidation of a series of sort of hallucinatory early-childhood bits from an old blog.

Husband and brother are doing very well and so are the pet people.

I'm pretty sure it's time for that molasses now.

Yesterday - murderheat boiled my brains before I knew it. Evening, staggered with brotherB to storage unit and dug out from the back of all the junk a tiny Samsung airconditioner brand-new still-in-box someone gave us back in 2006. It fits exactly into one trailer window and ahhhhhh is so good in here now. How did my then-angelfriend know I'd need it one day?

Study today includes deconstruction of the Kerouackian sentence and further reading in a bewildering Paris Review interview with an incoherent and months-from-death Charles Olson. I want to understand the whole Projective Verse deal (tried before, back in college daze), although this interview is not likely to help me there.

Still time to scritchscratch at some poems before I go indoors to invent a lunch for my people.

This hot arid wind means I will have to water everything deeply again today. Cruel climate. Nothing grows, at least not without llama poop around it for good magic. A one-foot-tall lilac cutting I planted three-and-a-half years ago is still one foot tall. Likewise the wan honeysuckle still struggling at the foot of a fencepost. Few of my perennials came back this year - but here are the comfrey, faithful friend, and feverfew, yarrow, and a lonely hollyhock. The three-foot pine tree I planted in '09 is now ... three feet tall.

I gotta track me down some llamas.