Thursday, December 11, 5:18 p.m.

The worst type of experience an artist can have is one that cannot be extrapolated or generalized, that is so unique one simply suffers its consequences (or inhales its virtues) alone.

I have wondered whether my life with my mother, and her haunting of me after death, is such an experience. I try to draw it, over and over, as a classic case of beauty, distrust, irresponsibility, kinship, and betrayal that went both ways. And yet, when I think about my friends and their mothers, suddenly I feel a tremendous loneliness.

Though I have always been unhappy, the purity of my grief when she died finally made me an artist -- at 42, where the watercolors and Virginia Woolfish pages had failed. Maybe it was just age, but ... I don't really think so.

My life became my art.

Friday, December 5, 12:47 p.m.

The absence of a naturally-developed personality leaves some people able to think of themselves only as geniuses or assholes. It gets tiring by middle age, like staring at a changing traffic light for 50 years. I was, after all, just another person, eligible for kindness but unable to extend it to myself. There were a handful of years when blending in would have been bliss. [true enough]

Friday, December 5, 12:44 p.m.

Vermeer, or Caravaggio, or some old whatshisname, was right: light and shadows are everything. I can't shoot a video or take a photo without the direct natural light of a bright day.

Thursday, November 27, 10:46 p.m. (Thanksgiving Day)

Two voices on the telephone from long ago, today [my cousin Brian and my old boyfriend Jose]. And two new friends, just beginning the summer of their lives, swimming in love. My holiday was almost perfect.

Letting the dog out before bed, I stare up into the cloudless night, the permanence of the skeletal stars making me ache for a present that never really existed.

Thursday, November 20, 6:16 p.m.

People, especially kind people, trying to make sense of my videos have said I am so "emotional." I never understood that. What was the other option? [Being externally oriented.]

Tuesday, November 18, 1:27 p.m.

(Retracted.)

Saturday, November 15, 2:15 p.m.

Once about five years ago I found (on the web) a quote attributed to the poet Robert Lowell (long my favorite writer). Incredibly, I never saved it, printed it out, or anything, and though I have searched many times I have never found the statement again. It was just one or two lines. He said, talking about his poetry, I wanted to break your heart. There was something more to it, but I can't recall what.

Of course I don't believe every insight, all the days, are sadness. In fact they are lust, and treachery, and boredom, and affection and comfort. But for me there is no art without heartbreak. We only love something, we only understand someone, as we are on the point of loss ... when we observe a change in landscape ahead, as during a long, languid ride on a train. We look up from our book, and we feel the track as it turns beneath, a route which had been so monotonous before.

That is the moment of clarity, a devastating and graceful frame. I think if the dead could wish, it would be for us to be free of the inevitable regrets, to sit quietly in the light, enriched, made better, by memories ... through tears, staring at the old familiar landscape, under a late afternoon sun, as it gently curves out of view.

Tuesday, October 28, 3:52 p.m.

Losing my sexual desirability, a style of petite 'adorableness' (there isn't a better word) that was all my own, has to some extent freed the creative, profounder part of my self. It was as if how I looked, and what I had to say, were irreconcilable. Yet in sleep I still have dreams in which I am approached, a look or gesture once so familiar, that leave me perplexed in the morning.

I quit too soon.

Wednesday, October 8, 5:28 p.m.

Sometimes I think all I have is the weather, its complexity and tenderness.

Friday, September 26, 5:47 p.m.

I never went with the group. On more than half of those occasions, I should have.

Thursday, September 18, 10:59 p.m.

When we are young, we are obliged to manufacture our drama, our own delicious suffering, with our break-ups and make-ups with people (almost!) as pretty as ourselves. They hurt us, then caress us, and this is the gentle surf that rocks us.

Decades later, we manufacture tranquility to (almost!) cover the abyss, like a cotton sheet on an ice-cold night.

Friday, September 12, 8:44 a.m.

A person can't resist when you smile at him. Either someone isn't looking into faces at all, or he is fully in his shoes and ready to acknowledge you. Whole days have turned on the good will that is in the smile of a passing stranger.

Monday, September 8, 11:37 a.m.

I miss myself. The handwriting, the obsession about shoes, the huge-waisted sharkskin trousers cinched with a narrow belt, seeing my jaw, the awful telephone conversations with my mother, being terribly in love, having only one watch, having only twenty dollars, wanting more books, listening to Beethoven records as if there was some secret that could escape from them, walking down the street and acknowledging young men as they glanced at me, smoking (!), kissing.

Now I know how the elderly can so simply step off into physical death. Everything has already been surrendered. We become strangers to ourselves. We carry nothing across. [Reading this two years later, I amaze myself!]

Wednesday, September 3, 1:56 p.m.

People have no taste. Just do it and forget about them. That's my only advice to artists.

Wednesday, August 20, 8:43 a.m.

Take whatever strength or inspiration you can get, from wherever you can get it.

Wednesday, July 30, 10:30 a.m.

Life is good as long as there is still something that gives you tingles down the length of your spine, that moves you to tears in its beauty and perfection. That means there is still something to live for, to strive for. It means that whatever inspires you lives somewhere inside you as well.

Wednesday, July 23, 5:16 p.m.

Life eludes any meaningful pattern, yet powerful emotions persist, like trail blazes deep within the woods that seem to promise an outcome, a well-earned apocalypse, but never deliver.

Our feelings are the only meaning our lives will ever have.

Saturday, June 21, 10:10 a.m.

To be really good at something you need to do it every day, or almost every day. Whether it's cooking, or playing the piano, or whatever it is, your life has to be the small breaks you take from it to eat and clear your head. [Sadly, few have the opportunity.]

Tuesday, June 17, 10:14 a.m.

Hope there's someone
Who'll take care of me
When I die, Will I go.

Hope there's someone
Who'll set my heart free
Nice to hold when I'm tired.

Antony and the Johnsons
From I'm a Bird Now

Wednesday, June 11, 8:59 a.m.

You need others in order for you to be at your best. After a rash of deaths last summer and the natural expiration of one or two friendships, I find myself pushing harder than ever at the lid of my coffin. Has anyone ever put themselves out there on the Internet quite like me? It's an honest question.

My attitude has been one of defeat, but in the last analysis I don't think anyone will resist annihilation quite so ferociously. I'll always have one more descriptive phrase, one more amazed anecdote, singed around its edges with bitterness, about the life I wasn't strong enough to live.

Thursday, June 5, 8:19 a.m.

Any outstanding artistic composition hangs from a single, good idea. Most often this idea arrives to the receptive mind as a result of luck. This moment is among the happiest in an artist's life.

Sunday, June 1, 9:55 p.m.

The three most important, most beautiful words in English? "I am yours."

(Have just watched the film "Becoming Jane.")

Thursday, May 22, 2:09 p.m.

An $80 bottle of French wine tastes like an $18 bottle of California wine. Few of the many facts of life have made me sadder.

Sunday, May 18, 9:35 p.m. (following a lousey dinner party)

Despite having several unchangeable factors limiting my personal happiness, put there more or less by fate (as we all have), still the worst thing to influence my life, uglier and sadder than illness or debt, is my social ineptitude. That alone has shut the door on what could have been otherwise a nearly happy life.

Conversely, those who can make friends of other people, who experience a world full of peers, who recognize themselves in others and are recognized in turn, possess the key, in my opinion, to contentment.

To inspire nothing but boredom or vague dislike (or, worse, pity) in other people, face after face, year after year, is death within life. [I was pouting the whole night - was my own damn fault for being pathetic.]

Thursday, May 8, 11:02 p.m.

I still look for heroes. My mother has died, and those boys who swept me up in their arms and tried to give me confidence are middle-aged now. But I still think someone has to come along.

Monday, April 28, 11:26 a.m.

So many things in my life point back to Philadelphia. In fact, most things. Though I would never move back there, I believe I am a Philadelphia boy.

Thursday, April 24, 9:05 p.m.

The Blue Zone Vitality Compass says I'm not doing well.

(My doctor says I'm not doing well.)

I'd still rather be Dylan Thomas than Oprah.

Monday, April 21, 2:06 p.m.

Nobody ever told me not to spoon up too much of guts for other people. Only in the face of revulsion for another person have I ever been less than warm.

How did everybody else figure this out?

Tuesday, April 15, 5:32 p.m.

Nothing is as strange to us as our own chief personal characteristics. Whether we are nervous, or sanguine, or cruel, we need to be continually reminded, re-introduced to how we've lived our entire lives. Our lifelong analysis got the notes right but missed the tune altogether.

In any case, this ignorance has been for the best.

Friday, April 11, 4:09 p.m.

[Withdrawn.]

Monday, March 3, 12:00 p.m.

In how many different ways have I repeated, that life is goodbye. It is a hundred endings hidden inside the years like cherry pits. We can define personality as what determines whether we wink and grin in the face of this or, at noon on a sunny Monday, cold sober, the kitchen door wide open and the dishes languidly in the sink, we start to cry. About nothing. About life.

Friday, February 22, 11:24 a.m.

The point about me is just that I'd rather be Mahalia Jackson than Eleanor Roosevelt. I'd rather be Edna Millay than Edward R. Murrow. I worship artistic talent. Luckily, I got some. My life has been hard but Jesus I certainly know what I like. [I am the messes I admire.]

Saturday, February 16, 7:00 p.m.

A lack of sentimentality is a distressing trait. Ultimately I avoid a person who does not possess this weakness. Be strong - that's fine with me. But cry now and then.

Friday, February 1, 11:35 a.m.

Your genuine attitudes always show to others. You can't hide what you "really think." I was in my forties before I really understood this. I guess I always thought that the unseen, what was deep down inside me, was safe from observation.

Unfortunately, we're stuck having to be ourselves. We have to live what we feel and think. It's a pleasure and a damnation.

Thursday, January 10, 3:39 p.m.

Never relinquish a habit of dancing every day. Regardless of your age, however busy you are, at least once a day, dance.

Thursday, January 3, 7:00 a.m.

I love cuisine. I love cooking. I am at my happiest, or nearly so, scrubbing leeks or sifting three different types of flour together. It's rarely tedium. I love copper pots and the cloudy, blackened steel of old chef's knives. Good food, based on culture, made in intimate, personalized kitchens from the rudimentary ingredients, is one of the best things life has to offer. [I always begin the new year with a perky remark. Why?]