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Dreams
November 2003
The goddess of sleep wants more respect. Eight hours? I object. I tell her I used to get by on four. She tells me I was younger then. I tell her I don’t have time for this conversation.
November 2003A Partial Inventory Of The Great Mistakes I Have Made
Burning the teakettle to a crisp because the whistle was broken and I forgot I’d turned it on.
August 2003
Rules Of The Dream
Last night I dreamed I was a Chinese man who worked in a nuclear power plant. The plant leaked radiation, and I spoke out about it and was denounced by the authorities. At home, my mother looked at me coldly and said that I was no longer her son.
August 2003
Letter From Central Illinois
The Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety passed out potassium-iodide pills this month for citizens to take if the nuclear plant is blown up by terrorists. If we swallow them four hours before a release of radioactivity, our thyroids will be protected from cancer.
April 2003
Bathifying
I am a bath mystic. You can also be one. Read this and decide if bath mysticism intrigues you.
August 2002
August 2002
I get up early. I wait for the light. I still trust the dawn more than I trust religion, more than I trust philosophy. Every morning the darkness disappears; morning never lets me down.
August 2002July 2002
Three thousand people were killed when the World Trade Center was attacked; to read aloud a list of their names would take two hours. Six million people were killed when the Nazis attacked European Jewry, reducing it, too, to rubble; to read aloud a list of those names would take six months.
July 2002May 2002
As long as I’m still trying to curry favor — with my dead father, with my admiring readers — I’m not writing from the heart, not really. What a busy little gardener I’ve become, pruning these sentences with such care, clippers always at the ready, clip clip. But beyond the rose garden is the meadow and beyond the meadow is the forest and deep inside the forest is the river and the river runs to the sea. I can’t get to the sea by working on my roses, by making them picture perfect.
May 2002November 2001
If we could ask the people who died in the attacks what to do now, I wonder what they would say. Wouldn’t we want to take time to listen to all their voices? Voices of rage. Voices of sorrow. Voices of compassion. Voices of hate. Voices that say, Do something. Voices that say, Don’t do something stupid.
November 2001
