Sunday, November 9, 1997, 11:44:35 PM New York City   So, this is taking longer than I thought. The creation of sorabji.com is creeping along, mostly because I have not had the time I thought I'd have to finish it and make it what I want it to be. From November 1 until yesterday, when I bought a table and a chair and a couch and some shelves, I'd been sitting on the floor of this apartment for all things except sleeping. It is an impossible way to work. The new apartment is quite nice. It is bigger than any place I've ever had. Each of the two rooms in and of themselves, in fact, are bigger than any place I've ever had in New York. I am not used to having rooms. There are 3 rooms in this apartment and it is hard to know where the sounds are coming from. And if I leave something somewhere and forget where it is I have to walk all over the world to find it. And furniture. What about furniture? I've never had room for it before. I used to mutter to myselves that my studio apartment on East 78th Street was the apartment of the future, where everything was within arm's reach and I didn't have to, or rather couldn't seem to stand up to get what I need. It was all there, on top of me, under me.   The job is going well. My Atlanta-induced compulsion to drink 8 beers a night has disappeared. My head feels clean, my dreams are typical new-apartment dreams, and I have no second-thoughts or regrets about leaving Atlanta, only regret at having gone in the first place. I don't make a very good happy person. The people who know me get disoriented and glassy-eyed when I talk like someone who is satisfied with the things he has. I sound näive and childish talking about things I like, people I like, things I want to do or enjoyed doing. It's been an up-and-down period, though. The end of October is probably the worst of all possible seasons for me, even outdoing Valentine's Day or Christmas. And this year, unlike past years, I went through the torpor of the season in the company of another human being. Being among people at such a time was so new to me that I wonder how life would be different now if someone had been there all the times the very life seemed to pour out of my chest and onto the streets. Or all those night I cried myself to sleep over tragedies and heartbreaks which were just make-believe. Or the times I thought to do unspeakable things to myself. Who can ever know? But this year, again, I sank or floated or did both through the lie-down-and-stop-breathing phase of my year, and aside from the usual nonsense of scratching the hell out of myself in the middle of the night it all passed without incident.     The drive from Atlanta was relatively uneventful, though not without stress. I'd never driven a U-Haul or any truck before, nor do I recall ever driving a vehicle with suspension as bad as this one. It barely could reach 60 miles per hour, but this was fine since the stress of having most of my possessions in the vehicle would have reached heart-attack proportions if I'd known I was speeding. I stayed at fancy-schmancy hotels and motels, hemorrhaged cash at every rest stop, ate badly and infrequently. Tried to keep a journal, either written or audio-taped, but this was mostly a failure. Somewhere in North Carolina I stopped for gas and had a conversation with the clerk behind the counter. I told him I was moving to New York City. Instead of the usual dismissive gasp I got from most people he told me that he'd live in Rego Park, Queens for several years. In our 2 or 3 minutes of conversation he used the expressions "a good life" and "a better life" over a dozen times. He didn't say it explicitly but it seemed obvious that he had moved to North Carolina for a better life. I told him I might be living in Manhattan, and that I'd lived there for almost 7 years before making this huge mistake of moving to Atlanta, and he said "Oh, you can have a good life there in Manhattan. A good life." It was an obvious conversation, and I don't know why but it stuck to me the rest of the drive up here, and it sticks to me tonight. Was I moving back here for a better life? Do I even care if I have a good life or a shitty one, a big apartment or a tiny one, a beautiful wife or nobody at all? And if I don't care then how have I ended up with anything at all? I don't know. But it's getting late and I need to sleep. It is quiet here, and I am genuinely excited about what might happen with sorabji.com. I don't know how different it will seem to anyone but myself and the people who have watched this site closely over the past nearly 3 years. But there are things I want to write about, and places I want to go. Places I became afraid to go in early 1996, when everyone I've ever known started climbing onto the internet and finding me and reading about me; when I discovered I could not make a comment about my job without getting some asshole comment about it from a co-worker the next morning; when I found that people were paying attention to this shit and telling their friends about it and it made me feel bad to know I had not produced what I know is my highest level of work. And I want to get right the things I've done poorly here. It's a lot of work. I genuinely thought I could re-organize this whole site in a day or 2, but I now see that there is far more stuff in here than ever imagined, and that it might take a few weeks to get it more or less complete. But the new site, such as it is, will be out there this week. It has to be.   -mt