Tonight, Maggy quoted Salman Rushdie to me, and I pointed her to Dickens. What were we talking about, anyway? Stories. Why does it feel lately as if I'm wasting all my stories? Why am I so tired just from thinking of moving again? Why am I so aloof and distant from all the people I want to be with, and with whom I most openly communicate? Why do I feel like my past is slipping away forever, that moving to New York this time is the end of something. And the beginning, but mostly the end. I like writing on-the-line. I realized last week that I only ever have one regret at the end of a week, or the end of a day, and that regret is that I did not take the time to sit down and write something about that day. Anything, however mundane, to delude me into thinking that this day had meaning, that it was not a total loss. And for a long time I did that. I wrote things down every day. I still do, in episodes, write down where I am, what I'm doing, what is happening. Last week I wrote a sentence or two while riding up the escalator at the Georgia World Congress Center. I never read it. After they are written the words never pass over my eyes again. Well, that's an exaggeration. I've looked at things I wrote years and years ago; but that is the plan, of course, is that I can put moments into capsules now and rediscover them later. Living far away from everywhere lets you think you have somewhere to go. But in the city you just can't go out for a spin. You can't escape to some person's farm without their consent. Not being able to drive 140 mph on a Sunday night over deserted interstate roads is the worst drawback of urban life. Hey, that was the first time in my life I ever did not have to think about who was who, Dustin Hoffman or Robert DeNiro. I always get those two mixed up. As well I should be by anyone who could say more or less what I've been thinking for a couple of years now. But I digress. In fact, I don't even know why I mentioned SpeefNarkle. Am I looking forward to clearing my head some? Yes, I am. To be honest, I don't know why I do that, or why anyone would. That is a difference between journal-ing and writing for this. I like being the boss, because I choose my words fairly carefully. And since I'm the boss everyone listens to every goddam thing I say and they laugh at it and kiss up to me whether I had anything to say or not. Not included in the payphone project
near MECCA convention center, Milwaukee, WI (414) 273-9422

basement of the Milwaukee Public Library (414) 347-9452

Not included in September 27
No one trusted electronic media yet, and this was a crowd to whom the word "internet" was just spooky.

The train from O'Hare to Wicker Park in the first week of September, 1997, for some reason made me feel like I was falling. Falling became a metaphor for that whole week in Chicago, didn't it? Falling now, it seems, like Satan cast out of heaven.

Someday soon, a person will murder another person in direct response to something slanderous which appeared only on the internet. Outsiders will demand that this anarchy be regulated "for the sake of the children."

Usually, when I happen to know that the woman I want to be with is screwing someone else, I eat a lot of pizza and drink a lot of beer, and listen to the radio. Tonight, though, there is no radio worth hearing. This has been true since moving down here. I leap to shut off the radio in the morning, and I usually end up a half-hour late to work because of it.

Not that my job matters a whole lot any more. I am officially leaving this sordid place no later than the 15th of October, which is the official start date at my new job. Same company. Same "family," that is. Different city.

Not included in September 14
and just some general sauce that I bet looks like bile or looks like what rising barf appears to be.

Not included in September 8
Most nights in this building I hear knocking sounds. The sounds, that is, of door-knockers (what the hell are those things called, anyway?) jumping up and ratcheting down under the weight of a slammed door.

Not included in August 20
And I want to make a lot of extraneous noise any time I sneeze or cough or stand up or sit down. And when I can no longer sneeze or cough or stand up I shall invent new ways of getting the detritus of anxiety and the energy of inexplicable fear off of me and onto the ground around.

What would it be like to turn myself into someone else? What would it be like to go somewhere at night, under all the emptiness that saturates daily life (I'd take a cab), and blast what I could of every person I ever wanted to be across a cast of familiar strangers?

Let us think about it.

Not included in an e-mail to David Sharp, June 17
I would be quick to defer to certain Sanskrit Theosophical volumes, if not for the fact that

Not included in June 8
New York is the only place I've lived in my adult life which felt like home. I have no expectation of making Atlanta my home. So why am I even here? I asked myself that again this morning, and reminded myself that this is a self-assigned year of discomfort in the name of a "career move." Oh gross.

Not included in an e-mail to a friend, April 22
the women down there will be as boring as before.

Not included in April 20
Got this empty El Pico coffee can sitting here.

Not included in My CD List
In 1991 I met David Dubal at a bookstore in Manhattan. Mr. Dubal knew Horowitz during the pianist's later years, and has written voluminously about the time they shared.

Not included in April 4, 1997
Wow, if I had someone to talk to right now I would be babbling so hard that that person would be cowering in a corner begging for relief.

Pending the outcomes of some more job interviews with NBC and the New York Times and Sony Music, and eliminating from the fray my silly emotional outbursts (which were, of course, quite well-founded and only excreted for the benefit of The Business), I will be very quite soon.

Reading the New York Review of Books, I feel like a failure. Normally, when I read a magazine and see an article in which I have no interest, I turn the page and forget about it. But with this illustrious and mightily intellectual journal, it seems as if I should care about Stalin's tomb, or some British guy's interest in whips.

Not included in March 16, 1997
, and deduced that something must be wrong with the setup at home, as I've been at my job almost 2 years and have never once thought about

Then I found myself wanting to write things for myself at the office, and that was something new. I'm rarely so distracted at my day job.

Not included in February 26, 1997
I work at Rockefeller Center, on the west side leading toward the Square. Sometimes I forget how interesting a neighborhood this is.

Not included in January 20, 1997
I've also known people who moved and said they missed New York, but still would not go back to live. No one else's experience is likely to mirror my own, whatever I decide to do, and what I decide to do will probably be nothing.

But I already know what will happen. About a year from now I'll buy a 2 or 3-bedroom apartment somewhere in this neighborhood. A couple of years after that I'll buy or share a small place somewhere else, like in Colorado or Maine or some place cheap like that. Or maybe somewhere back in Florida, out in one of those trailer parks that sits outside of Florida zoning restrictions.

Yeah, I got it all worked out.

Not posted on January 2, 1997
It's the second day of the year. The new New Yorker magazine is thin as hell.

Before the year ended, I threw out all my pornographic videos. There were only 4, but 2 of them had never been opened, and I can't remember ever watching the other 2. I thought of pitching them down the trash chute, but instead decided to put them in a bag and drop them in a trash can of another apartment building.

I did not dispose of them as part of some new years purge. It was a practical matter; they took of a certain amount of space deep in the closet, and I needed the space for more vital things