I haven't had an interesting thought in my head for two days. I'm filled with thoughts, of course, as I am, for better or worse, a consciousness that cannot be turned off, but they are all stupid. It's icy in the driveway. Don't hit it to her forehand. There's nothing good on television. I wish my head cold would go away. Our kitchen is nice. I like sugar.

I can go on, if you'd like. No, really I can.

For relief from myself I picked up Quentin Bell's biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf. He wrote, about a Woolf forebear:

He was known as the greatest liar in India; he drank himself to death; he was packed off home in a cask of spirits, which cask, exploding, ejected his unbottled corpse before his widow’s eyes, drove her out of her wits, set the ship on fire and left it stranded [darlings, wait for it] in the Hooghly.

About another relative:

He was, I believe, the author of One More Passionate Kiss; this embrace was reserved, however, not for his beautiful wife but for the second footman.

However real life may seem, says Bell, it is a story, and not only a story, but a joke.

We went fishing in a hired boat, with a hired captain and a hired mate. They took us out of the harbor along the submerged jetty, out past Great Point to a spot where two currents came together. There was a line running down the water: on one side it was glassy green and rolling, on the other it was dark chop. The mate set up a line for Henry, and he got an immediate bite, a hard pull on the line that you could see was something big. He reeled the fish in and the mate caught it in a net. It was a 34-inch striped bass, good eating, and relatively rare. It was a prize, so we kept it. The mate dropped it in a metal box at Henry and David’s feet, where it thrashed and died. We would eat half of it for dinner, and give the other half to the mate.

The boat circled around, crossing the currents, for another hour or so, and we caught bluefish for the rest of the time. They’re very oily, and my family doesn’t like to eat them, so the mate threw them back. After that there was just the pleasure of repetition, of letting the line drag, the boat turn, feeling the fish bite, reeling it in, then watching the mate catch the line and use a metal piece he had to free the fish from the hook. We were never sick. I thought we might be, but we were too busy reeling in fish to be sick. The captain called down from his seat above us, encouraging us to catch more, showing us where the blues were making the water virtually boil, from their numbers. On the way in and way out you couldn’t hear anything but the wind and the motor.

The fishing was stupid, it was fishing for stupid people, but it was still something I did with my family, somewhere beautiful. We killed something, and we ate it. Now we’re back.