Would you like to live somewhere where you have freight trains going by just outside your bedroom window at all hours of the day and night, are awakened far earlier than necessary by bright sunlight coming in through curtainless windows, have raccoons on your porch nightly, find spiders in your shoes in the morning, and can hear roosters while sitting at your desk? I live in such a place, for five more weeks. And I love it. This house is too expensive for what it is. It is permanently grubby from having been lived in by too many annual crops of beer-drinking boys. We are plagued, intermittently, by ants. The plumbing only works when it feels like it and you can't drink the water from the kitchen sink. But it's in the woods, and I love that, especially in the morning, and when we move to a dirt-cheap partially furnished very nice basement apartment much more in the middle of civilization, I think it is going to make me kind of sad.

I read Prozac Diary last night. Lots of interesting thoughts, plus a brand of nakedly honest writing that I'm not sure I'd seen before. Stylistically, I wasn't too impressed, and the book didn't make me love the author. But I think maybe it taught me something about accepting how I write. She varies in style... sometimes poetic, sometimes prosaic, sometimes remote and sometimes fiery. And she went and published this book of hers and didn't bother to equalize it. So maybe it's okay... maybe mood swings don't need to be muted. And maybe I could censor myself less. Write the things that seem ridiculous. Like I found one crushed salamander earring yesterday, hidden in the pile of my carpet. And I remember buying that earring from a vendor at Falcon Ridge, standing over the little velvet boxes of silver studs, picking out a salamander and two different frogs and a spider, wondering if I should buy the leaping frogs for Emily, because somehow I felt like I knew she would like them. And I tried to un-crush the earring, bend the post back so I could put it in my ear again, but my achy hands couldn't get the job done, and now it's just sitting on the base of my computer between the vial of Celexa and the bottle of cough syrup, waiting.

And allergies are making my throat feel like it is made of dust.

Now my hand is shaking and I'm not even trying to do anything with it. I think it's time to stop typing.