I’m getting mixed up in a tough tennis crowd. I was playing with nice people before, but now I’m playing with the kind of women who will cut you as soon as look at you. I’ll cross some line—show up late a couple times, forget to bring balls, double fault—and I’ll just disappear. But that’s okay. I’m going in with my eyes wide open.

I’m trying to explain the mood to you, the mood is entropic, the mood is about disorder, dispersal, and I’m not going to wake up from it until the Fall. I’m failing to resist the impulse to find the way the house is breaking down reflective of my own internal life, because the house is being taken apart and then the parts of it that are not being taken apart are falling apart (there is a hole in our shower and the afternoon heat releases some dank foul smell from somewhere in our house and it blows up and out of the hole and into our bedroom, plus a leak elsewhere, plus John’s bed, which had been my bed, cracked and fell into pieces last night while I was lying on it with him reading him a book, plus the very computer I am typing this on is riddled with viruses and can’t be shut down because it might not start up), and all I want to do is hide out in the play room, which is also the TV room, and which is almost the only room that has been untouched by construction and disrepair, and watch shitty TV, even though Cynthia Ozick would never do this because she lives to read literature. Richard Serra also wouldn’t do this. But you know who would do this with me? Werner Herzog. Then he’d cut off one of his fingers or get shot with an air rifle. We’d have a big fight and I’d ask him to leave.

Maybe Herzog and I should play tennis together sometime.