I was trying again, but now everything was wrong. The sun was too strong, the trees were overgrown, the bridge was closed and I had to walk around. Cars were parked where they shouldn’t have been. I couldn’t find the House Where I Went To My First Party (Not Really), or I didn’t know which house it was. The Murakami House’s hedge was too high. Then I turned and went completely the wrong way and didn’t realize it for a quarter mile, somehow. I hadn’t noticed that all the houses were wrong. I had to backtrack. I felt shy about taking pictures of people’s houses. I thought I was going to be yelled at or arrested. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. The pictures I wanted to take weren’t there, they were somewhere else. Maybe I should just be taking pictures of my parents’ house, I thought.

So you have words. Not pictures. I’m glad, by the way, I failed. I was being stupid, but sometimes being stupid is correct. I had thought, I’ll walk and catalogue as I go, but you can’t catalogue. I remembered: You have to create. If I were really a photographer, I wouldn’t have taken the walk, I would have just gone to the parts of the walk I cared about, I would have arranged things, I would have planted things, I would have waited until the light was right or I would have fixed the light how I wanted it. I would have waited at the Home Invasion house until someone passed in a truck, and I would have caught the end of the truck as it went by, or I would have hired someone to drive by. I’m no Gregory Crewdson, with a totally controlled sound stage filled with props and actors, but maybe I should be. He’s not wrong.

I’m glad I failed, because I want to write. I thought I might want pictures, but I don’t. I ran home from the 2005 Elizabeth Murray retrospective at MoMA in a fever of excitement because I thought that I had seen into the heart of things. I knew, because the paintings had told me, that Murray had spent her time as an artist identifying, and then loving, and then trying to solve the problem of painting, which was that art was about movement, and paintings, of course, are static. So, I mooned, What was the thing that writing didn’t do that it had to do, what was the problem that I had to solve? I ask myself this question, still, every day. My problem is that all I see is what writing can do, because writing never ends, it keeps running down the page, I can keep writing and writing until I put my finger down precisely on the spot.