The keyboard never is at hand

Again

I'm stuck with the pen

Neighborkids screaming, unhappy at each other

and their mother

shouts, to no end

I pull the headphones on - "Alone in Kyoto" track by Air from the Lost in Translation soundtrack

Alone in Alturas ... drowsy and a little down - will I ever sleep well in Sylvia?

But yesterday woke to gloomsnow and cold, cold

Today is bright, brisk, bluesky and gustwind buffeting
Sylvia

and I within, and dogApple, catGreta

who sleep well, wherever they lie

11:54, "Armellodie" by Gonzales

***

Reading Murakami, What I Think About ... When he runs he listens via earbuds to Lovin' Spoonful, Carla Thomas, Otis Redding. I rush to download the music - soundtrack behind a novelist's mind. Once I read a Nicholson Baker novel wherein the showering protagonist contemplated the satisfying shape and heft of a bar of Basis soap. I have used Basis soap ever since.

***

Has the childrens' discontent reached critical mass? I lift the 'phone off one ear to listen. Angry shrieks. Headphones secure again: Mike Oldfield, "Theme from Tubular Bells."

I have finished reading another wry story in The Grim Smile of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett. Now I take up the wrecked secondhand hardcover volume of Memory Babe, floppy in its cracked binding, and slide back under blankets, lids drooping.

At this rate nothing will be done.

Stephane Grapelli, Chapeau Blues.