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 felt simple as a milkmaid yesterday, walking to the library. It was so quaint of me! But the car was blocked in and I wanted to go to the library and get some books. And the library’s not that far. And it wasn’t that hot.

I had my camera with me, so on the way I tried to take pictures, but the truth is I never walk to the library, and there’s nothing meaningful on the way. A couple of dogs with electronic collars on stood at the boundaries of their electronic field and barked, so I took their pictures, which drove them wild. I passed the spot where a house I liked has been torn down and replaced it with something huge and corporate, but how can I take a picture of what’s missing? You’d just see a three-car garage. At the library I found a number of things I wanted to read, including The Sheltering Sky, and sat in a chair facing out the big picture window. I thought about taking a picture of the view there, but it wasn’t a very good view, the big tree was lifeless and there was too much grass and road.

When we lived in the city I worked at a private library that was probably a perfect place. It was old and very pretty and had a large collection, and upstairs there were lockers to keep your computer in and a room with desks where people could write books. If you needed to, you could go into the stacks and look for things, and if you found things you wanted to read you could go down to the big reading room, where there were little writing tables and couches and often an old man, snoring. It was always the same old man, and his snoring would grow loud and quiet again, without him waking up. There were very few bathrooms and only one place to make a phone call, which led to tension, which interested and distracted me. Another old man, not the snorer, used to occupy the ground level toilet from 12:30 to 1, the last solid minute of which was taken up spraying Lysol. I knew this because I could hear it from outside the door, and because when I entered after he left I breathed in great billowing clouds of it, and almost choked to death.

When I couldn’t write my book in a temporary way, I sat at my computer and typed in things about all the other people in the room, including my thoughts on the likelihood that they were sitting at their computers typing things about me. There was one woman who was incredibly sensitive to sound, or very bad at concentrating, or very good at not doing her work. The sound of work being backed up on a floppy disk would drive her absolutely crazy, she would start moving in her seat and breathing dramatically and looking around to make eye contact with other noise haters and finally, if it went on too long, would stand up and ask the person to stop. She didn’t like clicking, either, and typing could upset her. I wondered who was better at not doing her work, her or me as I watched her. Then we had a run-in at the phone booth which ended when she shouted “Shit!” at me and ran down the stairs, and I realized her problems were larger than procrastination. Another woman, whom I idolized for her profound bosom, professorial clothes, and air of extreme competence, was writing about Anne Frank. I don’t remember the men so well, although I could of course check my notes about this. The library was a seventeen-minute walk from my apartment, which was also perfect. In the winter the sunny side of Park was five degrees warmer than any other part of the city.

In The Chateau, William Maxwell writes that people often underestimate the perfect, or at least that’s how I remember it. I can’t find it anywhere in the book.

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.