"Baby Now that I've Found You" Alison Krauss and "Angel Doves" Mindy Smith

Bluegrass sung this way is that warm feeling of having just eaten a stack of pancakes and sliding back in bed.

This vicious tilt in the Earth's axis, bringing these ungodly winters. I need more sunlight.

"Age of Consent" New Order

Last night before Memoirs of a Geisha, I saw the trailer for Marie Antoinette. Sophia Coppola, that weirdo, chose to use this song and a punk-Pretty-in-Pink-new-wave font to push what will inevitably be a stylish but meaningless movie.

It was utter perfection.

I know somebody who used to be a hostess at various Chinese bars. There, she learned how to engage men for hours, and to manipulate them out of their money. She confessed this to me over pizza. She put her two younger sisters through college, paid for one of them to go to Europe and sends her two kids to private school. She now makes shitloads of money in the business world and negotiated two raises within her first year on the clock. What respect I felt for her ability to play-the-game or do what-a-girl's-gotta-do or some other hyphenated cliche was outweighed by this question: How can I trust anything she says?

Geisha create a fantasy that envelops you; making you believe that you are the architect of this world is their most dangerous illusion. Efficient manipulation is marked by the willing participation of the victim.

Ever since I got back from traveling over a year ago, I have been different. I'm not sure how, exactly, but I feel I am watching things very carefully. It is not the awareness of a curious mind, nor the vigilance of a paranoid-schizoid; it's something else, like I'm preparing to meet something head-on.

"Agua" Jarabe De Palo

Here's my last rejection:
Thanks for sending your sample chapters. Unfortunately, I do not feel that I could be the best advocate for your work. Please keep in mind that mine is a subjective business, and an idea or story to which one agent does not respond may well be met with great enthusiasm by another, and I encourage you to continue writing to agents. Hopefully you will find someone who will get behind you and your work with the conviction necessary in the present market.

Best wishes.

Sincerely,
W.C.

I actually love getting these rejections. I mean, what else can I do, right? Can't possibly do what I'm not capable of. My deadline for sending out queries is at the end of this month, and I'll give myself a nice pat on the back for having given it all I got. I'm going to turn in my published chapters to some compilations and we'll see how those go.

I have nothing else to say.

Aimee Mann's last album.

Last night I went to Newport Beach. There's a pier there that has functioned as my touchstone.

When I was in Catalina sometime in college, a student from Evergreen University asked me what it was that drew me to the ocean. It was part of her documentary. I said the ocean's rhythm is ours. The crash of the waves, the complexity of the undertow, the seeming placidness of its surface -- these mixture of forces mirrors what happens inside us. I go to the ocean because it reminds me of me.

Her assignment--from an apparently liberal college--was to use public transportation to travel down the coast from Oregon.

I have important memories of this pier in Newport Beach. I imagined what I normally imagine at the ocean: How deep is it? How far does it go? What happens when it gets angry? What happens if it decided to stand up all of a sudden? In what would be an imperceptible flinch in its massive body, it could swallow me whole. In the dark, the ocean merely adopts the characteristics I project.

A Tibetan monk checked my charts and said I was a naga in a previous life. Another psychic that lived on top of a jewelry store in Jaipur said I need to stay away from natural bodies of water. Somebody tried to drown me when I was a small child. When I was 12 and experiencing my first real anxiety attack, I heard the competing voices of a devil and an angel in the white noise of my shower.

There are times when I understand things with real clarity. I undertand the patterns that surround me, and patterns are patterns, and learning to define them empowers you to see where they will go. Part of growing up is coping with these patterns, part of living a full life is embracing these patterns and understanding that a system that ebbs will flow.

"I was in bed last night and I thought, I'm almost 30." I said this as a friend and I were driving towards the pier.
"Don't say that," my friend said, "because I'm almost there too."

I'm going for this.