Echh what a miserable and sick 24 hours that purge was. Foolishly I tried Hulda Clarke's Epsom-salts method, not understanding what Epsom salts, intended here to be used by non-fasting people, actually can do to a body. I should have realized that, after my three days' fasting, Epsom salts would be a violence to my body - and was it ever. I swallowed my two doses Friday evening at 8 and at 10. It began scouring my innards immediately, and by midnight I was a weak and dehydrated and heart-pounding mess, heart pounding all the sleepless night as I tried to lie flat and still (fat chance! running to the toilet every 15 minutes) and let the olive oil do its work on my gall bladder - which it did, I suppose - as before, all my right-side discomfort is gone like a miracle - but I was feeble and sick afterward and empty for sure. Gradually yesterday I returned to normal as I ate wonderful food and drank blessed water. No more Epsom salts for me! My gentle, effective apples & olive oil will suffice for my monthly cleanses after this.

Still windy but cool here now, and cold nights. Early Saturday - maybe 5 a.m. - as I writhed in wakeful tachycardic misery in my little trailer, a powerful rainstorm swept through and pounded the roof tin, winds rocking Sylvia and us inside her (catGreta, dogApple), & delightful healing din of whitenoise water and fitful air. Everything is clean again now. Summer heat is due back next weekend (it will be July, after all) but I'll be ready for it this time, and won't complain. Maybe.

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.

Another warm fore- and afternoon. I missed my cool-of-the-day walking window; perhaps early evening instead, then. These breezes (as opposed to gales) sweeten the day.

Hard to believe school is out. Neighborkids are with their fathers abroad for a week or two, so quiet prevails, and no interruptions other than those imposed by my role as care provider to my brother, husband, and pets.

Inevitably, then, I remain stalled creatively. I struggle not to toss it all in the fire: keep the eye on the process, not the result.

Movement of body moves the mind. This is true. So I break from Sylvia's innards and go out to tend the wilting yardplants and feed the trough-fishes, run the errands, make the stew to get us through to payday.

Tormented Elm lends her winddriven stems to the afternoon chorus, and I can detect no suffering behind her generosity.

A magnificent afternoon, wind just starting to come up, temp around 85F in Sylvia here. The leaves rustle seductive in the Tormented Elm framed in the narrow doorway.

My mind feels turned-around, a little, not quite grounded, as though one foot of me still stood on the ground of vivid dreamworld I woke from so reluctantly. My dreams of night are sweeter and fuller with every sleep since I move toward full health. It's a blessing.

But this mindframe prevents my concentrating on the page, any page, whether bookstudy or journal.

I keep drifting away ...

A noise of chainsaw - another tormented tree, perhaps. Among the dry weeds here a fawn-colored butterfly flits - blossoming salsify and alfalfa - and a housefly swerves ess-ing around.

But sparrow twitter from neighbors' shrubbery, constant, and whoosh of movement from the highway yonder.

Sylvia's wall thermometer reads 85F degrees. The top of my head is beginning to simmer a little, no sizzle yet. Roof vent has been popped, shad-side window cranked out, small floor fan pushing the air around. I overslept, now trying to catch up studying, still copying notes from Nicosia's Memory Babe Kerouac biography.

The poet Robert Duncan, reading this [cafeteria, Visions of Cody] scene in manuscript in 1954, was struck by Kerouac's extraordinary ability to sustain a 1500-word narrative in which the only exterior action, besides the passing of pedestrians, is the flashing of a neon light.

and from Visions of Cody itself,

"... my heart broke in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream."

***

I dreamed of a small personal jet a wealthy friend owned. I let him park it on the vacant lot near my house. I looked out one day soon thereafter to see it being stolen - towed off down a shady alleyway at the lot's far end. I ran to cach up with the thief but I was too late. The towing tractor had reach the vacant nighttime avenue the alley gave onto and joined the column of carnival acts moving out in drays and flatbeds to some faraway venue, where it would be exhibited. I told the policeman I called then that I'd had it nearby because my friend had promised to teach me to fly it, if only I could get past my fears. Secretly I knew, though, that I would not have needed lessons. Secretly I knew I would have flown it just fine, on instinct.

Great winds rocking the little Aladdin caravan all night long. I left the fiberglass awning up to fend for itself, unwilling to go fiddle with it in the dark and cold wind of aftermidnight. Caught in the gale, it filled the cabin with a groaning and creaking that wasn't unpleasant, and wasn't the reason I didn't sleep. That I can blame on a sugar binge yesterday midafternoon and then icecream dessert too late in the evening. Shameful. But blissful as any narcotic. (Careful, though, careful ... )

Slept late in the morning, then fed the crew, fetched in the mail (package - a browned and marked-up used paperback on "the lives & literature of the Beat generation"). Back in Sylvia's warm officebed I consumed my own oatmeal&blueberries and mug of coffee, swallowed my magic thyroid pill, and spread around me the day's books and notebooks. (Interruption: a quick online foray to order refills for my Energel pens ... )

Conventional modes of composition had forced the writer to ignore much of what he really thought. Lifting the censorship of the conscious self, Kerouac opened the door to the unconscious, by all accounts the mind's richest storehouse.

That's the storehouse I want to access. It's the core reason for all the isolations of my days. And now that I'm recovering finally from a decades-long decline and enfeeblement, now that I am (ironically) revitalized in this my 60th year, I may again participate in the common realities of the consensus world, take them in and set them down transformed. Time to allow some life in. Refill, refill.

To prove me wrong -or, better, to give me a little gift - the worldgods have bestowed upon us these eight or ten days a taste of spring, gray and drizzly, sometimes downpour, sometimes a fresh burst of sunbright chilled in breezes. I am loving this. I hope it goes on and on.

The Friday-night overnight so looked-forward-to was a miserable failure, though no fault of the children's. The point of it for me was the grand breakfast I'd planned for Saturday morning, much anticipated by hungryboyDeaven. His sister was ill and did not come along and so it was only he who dropped off so nicely before 10pm on the trailercot at the north end. I, old-ladyish, anxious stayed awake until 3 at least, ruminating. So the awakening at 6:45 was rude indeed, his sister's knocks at the trailerdoor: send him home now. Now. NOW. I was surly and ungracious about it, having had no warning about his family's planned sunrise departure to shop in the city a two-hour drive to the north. Rude, I thought, thoughtless and inconsiderate to permit him his first sleepover the night before such plans. And so after they left I burned through the pages scribbling a short story about a childish grumpy old woman's experiences with a red-headed neighbor child.

It virtually wrote itself.

But anyway we had a good dinner together.

***

Sprinkles now on the trailer tin. Two cats and a dog napping alongside me today as I work. catGreta hunted all the gray damp morning, patiently staking out entrances to ground-squirrel nests in the vacant lot next door. Now she's here for her afternoon lie-down.

Abundance of wonderful nightdreams this week - fullmoontime - my own, husband's, friendKathleen and her husband, and all very similar in their positivity, even in setting. My own had me waking up reluctantly, so vivid and thrilling it was, and I was filled with happiness all that day because of it, and every time now whenever I call it to mind.

Summer is here with nary a spring. It's only taken me the entire 13 years of my confinement to this area to grasp that, on the ModocPlateau, there is no spring. The snows and freezes sublime directly into punishing heat and lightblast, desiccating wind.

But no matter. Yesterday Husband helped me raise the grubby fiberglass awning over Sylvia's long south window, and now it's not unpleasant in here at midday, until time for me to leave anyway and tend to The House.

I sit with my volumes and papers heaped around and watch the line of dark-blue prayer-flags flap in the quickening air. I can't read the Sanskrit on them, so I am ignorant of what it is we pray for. From time to time a paperwasp settles on the cloth there for a moment as it passes through.

From time to time, too, a yellowjacket enters the trailer and bumbles deeply at me and exits again, so I won't forget who's in charge.

Got the ambient noises going on the speaker, catGreta stretching in deep sleep at my elbow.

Bright, warm, spring day. Outdoors, the green stuff is drying out after a week of rain and damp. So is my lawnmower - the first time I've ever let it sit out like that, in the weather. I didn't even fetch a tarp for it. I hope it forgives me. They sometimes do, in my experience. But forgive me quick - the lawns are knee-high in alfalfa and dandelions, thanks to all this moist.

My trough fishes are happy today, too, I'll bet, since they sink in stupor whenever the temperatures drop. When the sun shines, they can eat! and boy do they have appetites.

Neighbor kids have asked to spend the night on Friday and I said sure, in my great happiness, having hoped all my life for grandchildren who would stay with me as I stayed with my own grandmothers as a child. Now I hesitate, though - where will they sleep? Can I handle two at once (these particular two fight and argue incessantly)? Maybe on Friday I can track down foam pads at the second-hand stores and fix up the bunks here in Sylvia opposite my own bed. Otherwise they'll sleep on the floor in the house and I'll have to doze in the recliner or something. Then I'll be wretched in the morning, and I so wanted to fix them waffles and strawberries ... OK, don't get all Aspie about it. This will be fine, you wait and see.

***

Here's dogApple right this moment:

Had a head full of words and delayed setting them down just long enough to lose the thread. ... Well.

***

Eventful week, from my perspective, given that I usually stay shut up in Sylvia most of the day and night and shut up in the house the rest of the time. It rained and rained, which is unusual for these parts and most pleasant to experience from Sylvia's innards. Wonderful sound on the trailer roof, and with the barn heater going and the curtains open wide, catGreta to my right and dogApple at my foot, I was snug and happy indeed. Read copious amounts, taking notes from a heap of books-in-progress. Did almost no writing.

On Monday I drove the old Cougar down the mountain, a rapid turnaround trip for a cheapie ultrasound from a clinic there that serves uninsured people. I suffered not one whit from the journey, so my heart must be beating again behind these thyroid pills. The result of the imaging was - gall stones in plenty, due to my sluggish no-thyroid decades. Doc says let's remove your gall bladder forthwith; I say not so fast.

And fast I did, on Granny Smith apples and spring water, for three days (ugh). Then Friday night I flushed my system with olive oil and lemon juice and spent much of yesterday passing softened (from the malic acid in the apples) stones in great quantity, from sand and gravel to end-of-my-thumb size. Impressive. Felt much relieved, most pain and discomfort of past several years was gone, and I was down another two pounds.

So, yay.

I'll do this every month for another 2-3 months, though, and incorporate lots of raw apples into my menus - at least one Granny Smith every day.

I think all may be resolved.

***

I've been reading John Clellon Holmes's essays in his 1967 volume Nothing More to Declare. If, like Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac is considered anomalous and undeserving of critical respect and more closely looked at in biographical terms, then John Clellon Holmes was Kerouac's Ted Hughes.

In a way.

Having read Kerouac's notebooks, journals, and working drafts during a time in the late '40s when his friendship with Jack was particularly close, Holmes, perhaps not believing Kerouac would ever publish, and lacking themes of his own, wrote and published the novels Go and The Horn and, particularly, the essay "This Is the Beat Generation," using ideas and materials sseemingly culled directly from Kerouac's papers. When Holmes was the first to be published and celebrated it was a slap in the face to the trusting Kerouac, who fumed for a year or two before finally forgiving him.

But I find, at least in this autobiographical collection, which does not seem self-serving but rather generous and affectionate, that the great betrayer has been misunderstood. Here, he is Kerouac's interpreter, apologist, promoter. I find no trace of guilt, but neither do I see any defensiveness. Humility in plenty.

If anything, I think his preemptive work probably broke the ice, provoked the curiosity that got Kerouac read later on - perhaps even got him published in the first place. Holmes could no more parrot Kerouac than fly, given his constricted verbal imagination. Clearly he envies Kerouac's casual access to otherconsciousness, the ease with language his own coifed and tailored approach could never incorporate.

He was not Kerouac's Ted Hughes, in the end, but his John the Baptist. And who remembers him now? This volume of autobiographical essays has been out of print for decades, and the few available used are cheaply acquired.

I think he was an OK guy, in the end.

Breezy enough to sweep through the open Sylvia door and keep her innards to 80F degrees or so, and so bearable and actually quite pleasant to work in as the air passes coolly over the skin.

The occasional yellowjacket drifts in then out again. Never had a yellowjacket on the place until I put up the yellowjacket traps last week. The label said it worked for paper wasps too, the kind that sting the bejesus out of my hands and feet every summer as they nest everywhere, everywhere around and about the house. Instead, the trap pheromone simply attracted every big fat bumblewasp yellowjacket in a five-imile radius to a property they'd never noticed before. The traps are half-full of these hapless critters, while the spindlier wispwasps with the mighty stings go peacefully about their papernest building in the eaves and yardjunk unperturbed.

So. A flawed plan.

Studying all day today. Not really writing. Except for a burst of poetry a month back I haven't really had beautymind in a long time. I do not fear. I know it will return one day.

Meanwhile biographies are closely read and notes scribbled, passages transcribed. Nightdreams ruminated on.

Sitting in Sylvia sipping soft coffee, eating soft oats mapled and raisined. Door open a crack - yellowjackets drift in and out ominously, deep humbuzzes loud in the otherwise silence. Earlier I heard a rustle and glanced through the crack to see a large robin eying me from the weeds just outside, cocking his head around. We gazed at one another for a while and then he hopped off and I meandered back to my book.

I dreamed prodigiously all night long and remembered them, mostly. In the last but one (the one that got away) I lived in a women's shelter. They gave me a very nice room all to myself. I decked it out with all my belongings. I went out each day and engaged in the shelter's activities, sat down to meals with the other women. There was a matron called Grace who was firm but generally kind. One night I decided to sleep in a first-floor cell instead of my own room and when I went upstairs the next morning I found myself locked out, some young black man named Quentin living there. But my things! Where had they gone? I was in a panic, ran about the building demanding to know why I'd been evicted and where they'd taken my things. I was assured my stuff had been boxed up and taken to "The Depot" - a storage place in the town. But when I spoke to Quentin through the opened door I could see much of my stuff remained there. He assured me he would'nt take any of it. Later I forced my way through the door to see that my record collection was missing, decades worth of irreplaceable vinyl albums. I was in a rage. Downstairs, Grace informed me firmly but not-so-kindly that if I wanted them back so badly I could buy them at her second-hand shop "Grace's." Fury. The women around me seemed indifferent. Only the caretaker, a black man (played in the dream by the actor who played Lester Freamon in "The Wire") was sympathetic. He went out with me to try and find an agency that would assist me. In the courtyard of some county offices, though, he collapsed, and I covered him with my coat and put a newspaper under his head and continued alone. When I came out again he was standing up. "Do you have narcolepsy?" I asked. "No, that just happens sometimes," he said. I went on alone, trying not to need a shopping cart (although at one point I pulled one along, humiliated to look like a bag lady). I gathered up some bright yellowgold blankets and sleeping bags from the shelter, things that had been my own originally, and walked out with them. They were awkward to lug around town but I knew I'd need them against the cold of night. I didn't know where I'd be sleeping. At one point I was near the sea, and I stood and watched the waves crashing in for a time. It was a clean upscale coastal town, not unlike La Jolla, the first city I ever ran away to in "real" life, back when I was 14. (There I bought a foil "space blanket" from a sporting goods store for $12 and planned to sleep on the beach before I chickened out and took the bus back home to L.A.) Late in the day, in the dream, as I stood at an intersection hopeless and bedraggled and exiled, I looked up and saw a block or two away the great glass edifice of a public library, darkly packed with so many books they were visible pressed against the window-walls. And my heart opened with gladness and I knew that I was saved.

Terrific afternoon. Skip reads in the yard-chair next to mine. The unmown yard grasses nod and twitch their heavy seed heads in the little breezes, dandelions' spherepuffs white and soft irregular amongst them. Birds twitter and peep, occasional repeated soft dove coo-call.

dogApple lies on the ground between us, alert and panting, ears pricked to hear better the distant barks and yipes of her lonely yardbound dogfellows.

No sleep overnight. Caught a couple of hours 9-11 a.m. Pluto retrograde sits on my natal Sun yet again. Go, go, off with thee, damned planet. This is third or fourth minisleep day in a row. I fear the thyroid supplement is waking me up to old sufferings. So liquid melatonin etc stuff that used to work sometimes, not so much now.

It will pass. We'll find new strategies. I thought I shouldn't waste energy in struggling to sleep, but instead should simply shift my schedule 'round to write at night. But at night I have no words - no images, even. Only endless reruns of the day's events, pounding residual headmusic from evening TV.

Maybe I should just go to bed at 8 p.m. That way it will be a decent hour when the struggle finally ends.

But anyway the immediate world here is beautiful and calm today. Green and gentle and warm.

Thanks.

First wasp sting of the season yesterday - on my sandaled foot as I walked out to water the hollyhocks.

O cruel nature, red in tooth and claw.

I'd had two close calls already that morning - the beasts are everywhere, setting up shop under the eaves, even starting a nest in Sylvia trailer near where I work and sleep! So it was off to the hardware store to buy a pair of wasp traps. Hope to heaven they work.

***

Ongoing health questions use up all my attentions and the Project languishes at the almost-done phase. Meanwhile I've outlined a more straightforward piece on my experience of starting a used-book shop though Asperger's.

The yard - well, much of it - got its first mow yesterday evening. Dragged the trusty mower out from under its eight-month winter tarps, gassed it up, checked the oil, gave it a squirt of starter fluid, and we were off to the races on the very first pull. Things are looking pretty neat and trim.

And the goldfishes in the trough are fat and happy, our first water-lily leaves unfurling at the surface.

Spring comes late to the high desert, and then in a heartbeat it's summer.

All the more precious, then.

***

Look at the time! Off to mail Mother's Day cards. love

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.

Rain all night through, whitenoise on trailer roof, turning to whitesilence midmorning, that peculiar hush that brings one to the window or door to (astonish) fat falling flakes cascading draperies snowgauze across streetscape & trees. Lovely lovely, & so cold here in Sylviatrailer. Should go to house but this is sweet, just catGreta & me under downcomforters & iPhone radio droning ambient tones.

I dreamed of Stiller and Meara (remember them?) in old-age home, settling into their little room together & the mean unheeding nurse. Stiller, Meara - the famously unsuited pair, she tall thin Irish, he short stout Jewish, famously funny. Now in my life - Stillinger, Mills - more unsuited husband and wife could not be imagined, she tall exhippie earthmother Asperger hermit, he short excokespoonwearing Armanisuit executive horseplayer worldtraveler. Brought together by circumstance in late life to age together. Not so funny sometimes, not famous at all, but happy couple mutual support, and pray - keep the mean nurses away, far away.