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.

I spoke too soon when I said I wouldn’t bore you about the renovation.

I’m going to leave that hanging there, like a threat. They’re pulling walls down today. That’s all I’ll say, for now.

Yesterday I tried to make a slide show of the loop I walk for exercise, which for some reason obsesses me. I know why it obsesses me. It obsesses me because it is saturated with crazy meaning only I know. There is the Murakami House, and the place where I saw Flowers in the Wilderness and the Dangerous Curve Where I Will Be Attacked and the House Where I Went to My First Party (Not Really) and the Road To Alien Abduction. Oh, and the Brothel. So, my imaginary world, as it intersects with the real one. I thought you should see it.

The camera batteries are charging.

On the one hand, I feel that I am in the grips of some kind of compulsion that comes from the deepest part of me, and on the other I am undoubtedly under the influence of Sophie Calle. It bothers me a little that when I wrote “I mean, why is no one interested in writers performing? And why aren’t writers interested in being somewhere and writing at some particular point and seeing what comes from that?” I had already read Calle, and read about Calle in Grégoire Bouillier's book, The Mystery Guest. Calle is a performing writer, when she’s not performing other things. In The Hotel, she was hired as a chambermaid in a Venice hotel and used the job to photograph the rooms she cleaned, glean personal information about the inhabitants, and make up stories about them. I haven’t seen The Hotel in person, but as a plan of action this seems to me to be brilliant. She also had her mother hire a private investigator to follow her around, while Calle herself recorded aspects of her life.

I wonder if her mother enjoyed that.

Mine would. If I have a problem with Calle, it’s that I think she’s too satisfied with the punch that aggregation and surfaces can provide. But I love that she makes things up. I love that she takes real things and lies about them.

There are four flies in my office right now. One just flew into me and then fell down dead.

Today we had a mystery. “Carey, I have bad news,” said the exterminator. He is a wonderful man and an excellent exterminator, and I have been fascinated for some time by his vivid turn of phrase and ability to build suspense through foreshadowing and other devices. In fact, I sometimes think of making him the hero of a knock-off Murakami story. Or if not the hero, then someone the hero is really, really glad to see.

On this visit we had already discussed the bats that live in the tippy-top of our house, how the flies I was seeing in my office could be there because of something rotting in the walls, and how you would think mice would be outside during the summer but all he is seeing is mice in houses. These weren’t pieces of bad news, they were just regular news, if you’re our exterminator. The first time he had given me bad news I had had to go down to the basement and stand with my head bent (we have a very shallow cellar) next to a pile of rat droppings while he talked to me about the rats in my house.

He had my attention. But then it turned out that the bad news was that someone or something had stolen our outdoor rat bait station, which had been driven into the ground with a stake and further held there by heavy stones. He said raccoons could do this, which was something else I didn't want to hear about. He was doubtful, though. I said we had an opossum around us somewhere. He didn’t think an opossum was up to it. Which leaves us with humans. So I’m wondering, which one of you stole my rat bait station? I want it back.