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.

I am starting to suspect that Richard Serra has a sense of humor. Could this be? Will someone else go look at "Union of the Torus and the Sphere", 2001, and tell me if I’m wrong? If I’m imagining things? It’s at Dia: Beacon, wedged into a room not much larger than it is, and it leans, it swoons to the side. I thought it looked ridiculous, crammed in that space, and then when I walked around I thought it was actually, kind of magnificently, funny. Because it was elegant but dangerous but not dangerous and heavy and all Serra-like, serious, but then you had to squeeze by and it was like when you’re at a party and there’s someone hugely drunk talking to other people with her back to you, blocking the way to the toilet, and you can’t get her attention so you try to sneak behind her but then she steps backward and falls on you and throws her drink on you and pins you to the wall and gets your toe. And says sorry.

Which reminds me that the other day I was racing through the supermarket under deadline, deadline being making it home with the groceries in time to get the groceries from the car to the house to the fridge and also hand off the children to my parents with sufficient time to gas up the car and make it to our seats at the Mets game for the opening pitch. I was under pressure, but when am I not, when do I wander through the supermarket aisles thinking What will I do with myself today, all I have is time? Anyway, I was rounding the corner from the beer aisle into the dairy aisle with a full shopping cart and I went a little bit, a tiny bit wide into the dairy aisle, thanks to the weight of the cart and the speed I was going at, and screeched to a halt quite close to a stooped elderly woman who was not under pressure, and doesn’t understand the way people drive through town these days etc. “I took that a little wide,” I said, smiling apologetically. She corrected me: “A little fast.” And I said, as I walked down the aisle, “Thanks. Bitch.”

Now I’m entranced by the idea of Richard Serra, who never, ever smiles for pictures—please see the MoMA bio picture of him—having a sense of humor. Not a wry sense of humor but an actual sense of humor, so when I get home from a hard day playing tennis and running errands and tell Richard Serra, who is out back at the grill, that if they made a documentary of my morning it would be called An Inconvenient Poop, he puts down the tongs and laughs.

On Friday I went to the Museum of Modern Art to be ravished by the Richard Serra retrospective. I love the free Fridays at MoMA, when the place is packed with groups of students who have given over maybe their lives, and certainly their personal appearances, to Art. A staid matron in from the suburbs, I wander alone.

This Friday was better than many, also, in that it was cool and sunny out, and that I hadn’t been let out of my house in some time and so was happy to be free. David was supposed to meet me there and was late and I didn’t care, because I was by myself, looking at art, surrounded by strangers. If you ask me what I miss most about living in the city, I will tell you it is the strangers. When people are strangers they are perfect. When I am surrounded by strangers I am filled with love. As opposed to when I am at the playground.

I wonder if Richard Serra feels the same? Or does he hate everyone? Oh, it’s not all about whether an artist hates or likes people, I know that. But Serra kind of hates people, I think. Or we’re not important to him. That’s probably more accurate. I went into the Sculpture Garden to see his works, and it was like a party there. People were snapping pictures of themselves and of their friends, children were hanging out on the little bridges, a crowd of snackers (soon to include me) occupied the chairs in the snacking area and watched the parade. There was a creepy dude wandering “Intersection II” smiling and telling people they were taking beautiful pictures of the rust. When you entered “Torqued Ellipse IV”, it was like you entered a room in someone’s apartment. Everyone was lit up and facing you. Hey! You wanted to say to the people already there. How is everyone?

None of this had anything to do with the art. Well, the art was made of shapes that allowed people to wander through it and gather in it, but the art wasn’t there for that. The art didn’t like that. It didn’t like parties. It didn’t care about people’s bodies. It wasn’t there to create community, for God’s sake. The art was about something else. What else? It was hard to say, standing there in the late spring sunshine, staring at the leaning slabs of steel that were, according to the signs, not to be touched. Something about eternal shit that is going to fuck with you? And shapes?

On the one hand, I think that art that can’t stand up to a little joie de vivre is pretty shitty art. And yet, I do love the idea that art might have nothing to do with human concerns. It might not reference human form, it might not engage topics of human interest, it might not even be able to be seen by humans, until the Great Salt Lake dries up. Why not? Who says art has to be appreciated by people? It could be a message sent out to no one. Right?