Friday, December 28, 4:12 p.m.

It's the little cruelties that really kill you.

Friday, December 14, 2:07 p.m.

For no particular reason, I've been listening to Jobriath the last few days. I've never listened to Jobriath, never cared about that music. Particularly in the live stuff, when I hear that voice it evokes, of all things, holidays and being around the house with him and my mother. It's the same voice that used to say "Oh for Christ's sake Mom!" and "That's so TACKY!" It is an "around the house" voice. The background noise at Christmas dinner. A familiar sound from my own teen years, like Archie Bunker or "Gilligan's Island."

The music's not bad.

Wednesday, December 5, 4:54 p.m.

When I see snow on the ground, I dream! Spring pales alongside the first snow of the season. Such clarity and purity! It is cerebral and melancholy. The past, everything I have ever felt, pushes up against my chest like a fat woman on a bus.

Friday, November 9, 4:39 p.m.

Our sadness is deeper than we think it is, worse than we remember it. If you are lucky, you have friends who, even if they cannot comprehend it all, will give you the credit for having suffered. If you are less lucky, there is nothing to affirm your experiences, good or bad. No one to measure or record them. The natural impulse is to forget, to round off anguish or extreme pleasure.

Don't do it. The memory is who you are. Hang on, and remember. [You may carve this on the grave stone I'll never have.]

Wednesday, October 3, 9:04 a.m.

So much communication with video (I spend too much time in YouTube) has made writing a very intimate thing. One is embarrassed by how another person punctuates. It's too personal.

Wednesday, September 26, 5:32 p.m.

(Comment withdrawn.)

Wednesday, September 19, 4:43 p.m.

If you live in one of the prudish states, there's still the trip to the liquor store. Some of you no longer do it, some of you never did it, and some of you, like me, do it almost every day. Lately I've been going on my old steel Nottingham Raleigh bicycle, and they are lovely September afternoons. Drinking is like sex. You don't really like to think of yourself doing it, so it gets fit into things quietly.

Tuesday, September 11, 7:54 p.m.

In a life of namby-pamby sensitivity to images, after so many years of collecting pretty pictures - powerful, glamorous, devastating images - photos of my mother's face remain the most resonant.

Friday, September 7, 5:19 a.m.

There is incredible vulnerability in our friends. Looking at pictures or recalling an evening, often I feel I haven't handled their kindness well. Should I write or call more often? Have I said what they needed to hear? This is especially true for people I know in their twenties or thirties. It's harder to hurt someone who is older - I should say you are safer from it. For, of course, we have gotten over other people, and hoping (or dreaming).

Friday, August 24, 9:56 a.m.

I do better in groups of three (or more) - I don't have to be an adult.

I never managed to stop being a kid, trying to make others laugh or just trying to get their attention.

Tuesday, August 21, 11:36 a.m.

Certain photographs punch a hole through the present into a future time. The love that exists between people, the positive energy of a certain moment, seems to perpetuate itself through this. An image is made, not always the most artistic, that becomes iconic of the rightness, the goodness that was there.

You don't need to believe in anything to apprehend that some precious things, ghosts evoked into perfect recollection by a single picture, have some enduring life of their own, parallel to this one. The images correspond to a place within us which is more than the sum of memory and experience.

Sunday, August 5, 5:21 a.m.

[On this day I began a journal that would continue for three years. I hadn't kept a diary since 1991.]

"If you knew me better, you'd like me more." Do you know how long it's taken me to be able to say that? What a relief! I was never sure.

I feel like apologizing to myself.

~ ~ ~

The most galling thing in life is a failure of poise in a specific moment. Yet even when we have carried ourselves with pleasing confidence (as everyone has at least once), spoken with apparent logic, made everybody laugh or fall in love with us, what was gained? Such has not been my experience, but if it had I'd have always been afraid of the quiet one in the crowd, knowing whatever he was thinking was probably closest to the truth.

Success would make me nervous, just as failure has (sometimes) been comforting.