Tuesday, March 9, 9:19 a.m.

Everything hits me right in the balls. But I'm powerless to change any prevailing status within my life. The only comfort is enjoying who I am: taking my sentences out for a walk, composing pictures with my eyes ... my mother's good taste, whispering into my ear. A ghostly inheritance.

I had almost all the qualifications to live an extraordinary life; instead I pour my gifts out onto the ground unobserved - a camper emptying his coffee cup into the bushes with a single thoughtless gesture.

I am a well-kept secret. I am a lonely person.

Wednesday, March 3, 12:12 p.m.

I don't know why my stuff is so negative, and sad. Sometimes I read it and recoil. But what should I do? Lie?

Where do I see hope in life? It's not in marriage. You won't find it in your job or your relationship with your parents. It's in the small stuff that happens in the middle of an ordinary day. It's a crisp apple or an unexpected, early evening break in the clouds. It's in writing (like this), or the acrid stench of turpentine up your nose when you are finishing a really good painting. Look for happiness not in a break from your life, but in the idiosyncratic thick of it. When the drudgery is full upon you, that's when fruit tastes the sweetest.

Anyone who tells you to plan for happiness, other than taking obvious precautions, is a charlatan. They are, themselves, unhappy people of the worst variety.

Wednesday, February 24, 12:08 p.m.

Those who might be called "average" people tend to be annoyed by me, or feel sorry for me, or distrust me, or find me mildly ridiculous. This has been by far the bulk of my experience of others.

What's so incongruous is that some truly above-average people have felt empathy for me, have been amused and gratified by my sense of humor, and have felt the works by my hand showed great merit.

I'm never sure whether to be happy or sad about this. Mostly, I'm happy about it.

Saturday, February 20, 2:27 p.m.

My strongest connection to childhood is that almost everything I do still has to be kept secret.

Saturday, February 20, 2:18 p.m.

It's not surprising that alienated, unsuccessful people are attracted to cultural heros, the famous. Especially today, when the Internet puts their stories and pictures at your fingertips. And although it's sad that I may think myself Joan Crawford or Hart Crane, it does get me through the day.

I am responsible for living out my days. It takes a full tank of inspiration and fantasy.

Wednesday, February 17, 12:36 p.m.

Aging is a process of exchanging some of the ambitious desire to be "right" for a greater loyalty to yourself, even if it turns out you were sometimes dead wrong.

Friday, February 12, 6:36 a.m.

The individual is what is precious and beautiful in life. The more you cherish those memories no one else has, the more you grieve a loss that is only yours to grieve, the closer you come to understanding why we live, and, possibly, what sort of god might exist, if one does exist.

I am selfish, foolish, and unkind. But the story of my life is my treasure.

Friday, February 12, 6:07 a.m.

I wake up before dawn now. I kind of like it. It's not that I win the battle with my subconscious, but just getting up and making coffee seems to silence the frightening voices.

My heroine as a child was an octogenarian aunt who always rose at dawn, or just before. At 11 years old, I would set an old heavy "Big Ben" alarm clock for 6:00 so I could be up with her. Her narrow, ancient face would collapse in a surprised smile for me, and she would bring her knotty index finger to her lips to indicate silence. This code of behavior, this Quaker-like time together, thrilled me. Together, silently, we prepared oatmeal. The sun climbed through the kitchen door like car headlights.

I am obsessed with wondering what will be my last mental picture, the last memory I have before death. This one is high up in the queue.

Friday, February 12, 5:42 a.m.

I can't stand news, current events, trends. Yet I felt I wanted to know why this young designer, Alexander McQueen, killed himself. I didn't know a thing about it.

So, at age 40, gay man is devastated by death of mother and hangs himself? Do I have that right?

Sunday, February 7, 7:01 a.m.

On June 25, 2002, alone in her apartment, sitting at her table, I wrote my mother's eulogy. The next day I read it to the small group huddled beneath the sun like a black baseball team.

Since then, in everything I do, I've been writing my own.

Friday, February 5, 5:21 a.m.

I seem to be entering a period when even the novelty of my observations and poetic reflections doesn't amount to much.

I'm sure there are people who pack every breath, right up to the last one, with "life," but there are those for whom the motivation quits well before the last act. I'm bored.

Oh, is everything I have experienced simply to be chalked up as "depression"? Talk about dismissing richness ... flattening out a box full of words and sensations and tears. Don't throw it out! There's something inside!

No, I guess I've always been unwell, and the worst when I was very young ... in college. It's not true of me now, but it was then: I was desolate. Imagine being that young, that full of sex and life ... and feeling desolate! But I can remember it, I can feel it (what it felt like) even now. Panic. I think it arose from living among too many others. I do best alone, with just one other (unlucky!) soul as a sounding board.

What will I do when he's gone?

Thursday, February 4, 12:15 a.m.

To be a great artist you have to be really, really, really motivated. That usually translates into either ambition or suffering.

Friday, January 29, 11:20 a.m.

At 27, there was the illusion that my life, my body, belonged to me ... that my ideas, my enthusiasm for fedoras and Cecil Beaton's Garbo - my stylistic independence - would drive my fate. My superiority would keep me from becoming one of the casualties I so often observed during family holidays, or waiting for a bus.

At 50, I observe the results of my own hatred, and my ectomorph's neglect. The car is turning, accelerating, on its own. I might as well punch in the lighter, tap my cigarette on the dashboard, and stare out the window.

The next pee break is Hell.

Thursday, January 21, 9:38 a.m.

I started my long essay about my mother by deciding to write it like a business letter (for which I am prized by my employer).

My aesthetic could be described as an alert, formal subjectivity. A kind of elegant restraint that masquerades the purely emotional motivation (I have no other motivation). Yet, I can't imagine the opposite would be very pretty: an overwhelmingly (and genuinely) logical personality trying to burst forth into poetry. But hell, anything's possible.

Wednesday, January 20, 6:02 a.m.

The majority of the work in my own life is constantly trying to calm down, so I can do my job, or go to sleep, or swallow food. At some point, this seems to be tantamount to seeking anesthesia. Perhaps it's just slowing down to enjoy the scenery, but it could also be trying to drug or distract myself long enough to - calmly, decorously - finish my life and die.

Quickly: What separates us from cattle?

Wednesday, January 20, 5:04 a.m.

A little worried about myself. I've cut myself off from the harbor a bit too much. And the irony is I need other people more than most ... other people! I guess it comes down to need and anger. Usually my anger is stronger. Does anyone else have to deal with this equation, this crap?

Monday, January 11, 6:53 a.m.

I have buried myself in temporal inconsequentiality. I've accepted the indifference of others as the truest assessment of my worth. What I think, what I want, isn't even important to me. In fact, I don't even know what they are.

I regret abandoning my mother, but I've abandoned myself in just the same way. I wonder who it is, or was, I did ever value. I can't recall that, either.

Sunday, January 10, 11:26 p.m.

Judy Garland had a special way of singing the word goodbye in her songs. Listen to the film voiceover of "The Man That Got Away" and her last appearance on the Johnny Carson show, in which she sang "After the Holidays." Like the pimiento in a cocktail olive, she stuffed just enough hopefulness within the hopelessness of it.

It's worth the study of a lifetime.

Wednesday, January 6, 11:09 p.m.

I seem to get the farthest by openly breaking my heart in front of people. By simply telling things as they actually happened, and letting my obsessive, nervous sadness, my undisguised yearning for understanding, come through.

Our life as we lived it, what happened to us and how jittery and unsure it made us, seems to contain both the material with which we can be ridiculed as well as our justification - our only glory.

Tuesday, January 5, 4:51 p.m.

Just beyond a few glasses of wine, there's a place of sadness and beauty I could exist in for good. A sunset that lasts forever.

~~ ~ ~

Our mistake is in thinking this adult life is anything different from high school. If you think of your friends as either the goody-two-shoes straining to answer each of the teacher's questions, or the potheads blowing spitballs from the back of the room, it's incredibly clarifying. It still fits.

For what it's worth, I miss the potheads.