The second phone line was broken. I waited around the house all yesterday for someone to come and fix it, but no one did. The day ended in a frenzy of recriminations and being put on hold. This morning a repairman came and told me that the alarm system had taken over my second line, and I asked him if he could route around it, and he said he could, if I didn’t mind disabling the alarm system. So we disabled the system.

At first I was happy that my problem was solved and that it didn’t involve someone telling me that mice or rats had chewed through the lines, because we have mice and rats in the house and they make me crazed and ashamed. Sometimes the mice and rats die in the walls and smell and once I am sure that the dead thing is in the wall and nowhere I am going accidentally to find it I am pleased by the smell of something rotting, because I know that at least one of them is dead. I found out recently that the previous owners had five cats and I feel ashamed, as well, that we can’t have cats, because we are allergic to them. I thought briefly about the new crazy hypoallergenic cat, but you don’t know you’ll get a good mouser, and they cost $6,000. And there’s a waiting list. And ideally I would want more than one. I also thought about a terrier, because some terriers are good at killing rats. Right now we’re using a lot of poison, but I feel like these other methods would be better. I don’t know why I think that.

Anyway, then I realized that we don’t have an alarm system anymore and someone I don’t know, the technician, knows that we don’t have an alarm system anymore, and I became worried for our property, and for our future sense of security at home.

I’ve been trying to imagine how a writer could make her work performative in the same way that a visual artist can and often does. 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? For four nights I undertook a performative exercise in which I went upstairs to my office at 10 p.m. and wrote one hundred words in ten minutes, but after four nights this made me really tired, and it conflicted with the surprisingly long list of things I also often need to do at 10 p.m. (eat dinner out, sleep, have sex, stretch and strengthen muscles so I can play tennis without injuring my back). This was supposed to be the point of the whole thing, of course, that I would write then instead of doing those things, but those things won out. I am a shitty artist. Still, I wonder why better, crazier people than I am haven’t managed to do anything interesting with the idea of writing as performing. I’m not talking about one-off contests and stunts, I’m talking about some kind of rigorous attempt to make writing as much about the writer, about the physical self of the writer, even, as painting, drawing, film, and performance art have been.

I kind of like the story I started. It was about a couple with an infant son, in Brussels. Each night at 10 p.m., because the baby wouldn’t sleep, they walked to get ice cream. In Brussels in the summer, if it isn’t raining, it’s still light at 10 p.m., and not only light, but bright. People are out walking and eating dinner and skate-boarding, illuminated. The couple liked to choose different ways to walk to ice cream, and back. One way was the way that went by the cat that would follow them.

Then something happened, but then I stopped writing.

The point of all of this is that of course the blog is performative.