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.

Something very sad happened this weekend, but I’m not going to tell you about it. It was warm on Saturday, so warm that we could spread a blanket on the grass at the side of Henry’s soccer game and sit there in the late afternoon sun with our shoes off, watching him play. We had already exchanged Henry’s costume at Target, gone grocery shopping, and gotten the boys haircuts. David had gone to the dentist, my dentist, where he learned that some of his teeth were cracking. I shrugged my shoulders at the news. The dentist fixes teeth. He’ll be fine. Dad joined us at the soccer game, and on the blanket. He was taking the boys back to his house, so he and Mom could watch them while David and I went to the Spoon concert.

The West Side highway was backed up. We sat under the George Washington Bridge for a long time. I saw David’s office, which is filled with pictures of me, including one with my eyes closed. Why is that there? We ate Japanese noodles. I ate too much.

David went to the bar and I stood by myself, watching people meet each other, and the stage, where workers moved things around. On the sound system they played something with a slow rising line and I felt that, standing there, I was at the portal to happiness. When the band came on the bass and drums vibrated through my body and thrilled me. Then the band stopped thrilling us and everyone started talking about other things. We left during the encore. They didn’t play David’s song. There wasn’t traffic, driving home.

Sunday morning the fax didn’t work. We were tired and had to find a fax. We went to the supermarket in my parents’ town and I hit the car door against another car door but didn’t really notice and then a woman got out of the other car and yelled at me but then saw it was all right and waved me away.

We saw my uncles and other people at my parents’ house. Our children were happy, and happy to see us, and we kissed and hugged each other. My niece was there and did something funny and then everyone laughed and then she did it again, so everyone would laugh again, and this was even funnier than when she did it the first time. Then she did it again, and it was just as funny.

We had to get Henry back for a birthday party. John was tired but wouldn’t sleep. We all sat on the blanket on the grass at our house. John whispered David a spooky story. I went inside to get the car keys so I could pick Henry up at the birthday party and heard one of the doorbells ringing loudly and continuously. I pressed the other doorbell to see if that would make it stop, but instead both doorbells rang loudly and continuously. I saw dirt tracks all over the carpet. I called David and asked him to fix the doorbells and vacuum up where he had tracked mud on the carpet. The mud on the carpet was making me anxious. I took John to pick up Henry. When we got home David had shut off the doorbells by shutting off the power to parts of the house, and had vacuumed the carpet. That made me feel better. Now David was anxious. He was dressed but I had to get dressed. I ran upstairs to get dressed. My parents weren’t there. I didn’t have the right things to wear. I ran my stockings and had to find another pair. My parents were there. Henry was mad at my father. My father was hurt. David was yelling at me. I had to hug Henry. I had to leave. David drove quickly into the city. We couldn’t find parking. We tried to pull into one lot but it was full. Another lot was full but let us leave our car parked out over the sidewalk. We went into the building.

We went to pick up our car. They sent us outside where a crowd of people was gathered. An elevator delivered the cars to the crowd, one by one. We saw people we knew, and talked with them. They are probably moving to Brazil. We saw other people we knew. Cars blocked the road and other cars honked. Most of the cars that came out of the elevator scraped their undercarriages on the sidewalk. I was determined to avoid this. When our car came out, I did. I drove us to the West Side highway. It was stopped again. We sat in traffic. We couldn’t reach my parents to tell them this. Finally one of them called us.

I wanted them to see the movie they wanted to see, but they were too tired, they wanted to go home. I ate all the chicken salad Mom had given us and was unsatisfied. Both children were too tired, they fell apart near bed time. Henry was too tired to brush his teeth. I wanted to read books with him but instead I said, You win, I’m shutting the door and I don’t want to hear you again tonight. David had a call he had to be on. I watched TV by myself in the dark. This is how it happened. This is how it always happens.

I’m letting the children watch TV every night this week, and not just good TV. Bad TV. The fourteenth in the Air Bud series, in which the dogs are puppies and talk and you want to throw yourself against a wall so you don't have to watch anymore. Last night the boys settled down for a remarkably (I’m finding putting John to bed tiring, so I put it off) large part of Angels in the Outfield, a film that forces you to explain to your kids how parents can legally relinquish custody, and endorses cheating. And has angels. Freakish, smiling, cheating angels.

We watched part of Time Warp Trio on Tuesday. I actually consider this good TV—I learn so much!—except for the ads, which are targeted at broke grown-ups or young children, or both (McDonald’s). And yet I love some of the ads. Henry and I share a fascination with both the rocket blaster fishing gun, and the one for the cake decorating kit with three thousand attachments, all of which, except for the grass-making one, seem wonderful to Henry. When he saw the grass-making one spewing fake green icing grass onto a cake, he said, Okay, that one’s gross. But the rest are so cool. Can I have it? Please? I’ll pay for it with my own money.

He loses two more teeth and he’s got enough. Speaking of which, I had somehow forgotten I had the dentist today. Partial crown: mother fucking shit and piss. I’ve given up on the idea I’ll be able to watch TV there. If anyone has any ideas of what I should think about for the ninety minutes that I have to keep my mouth open, let me know.

At night I’ve been watching the crappiest of crappy crap crap. True Hollywood Stories of Rock Star Wives. Fifty Most Expensive Weddings, which should really be called Creative Math. A My Life on the D-List marathon, sadly cut short by the need to make Henry’s lunch for the next day. I read somewhere, although I can’t find where now, that Cynthia Ozick’s heaven would be to sit under a tree with a pile of books, reading a book and then picking up the next book, for, of course, eternity. Oops. I’m not going to valorize my choice. It’s worse than hers.

I went to the dentist yesterday. My mother had told me she liked the hygienist, and I said, "Really, why?" And she said, “I don’t know, I like talking to her.” So I decided that I would try to like the hygienist, too, and would ask her about her family and not ask her to turn the television on, which had been the source of tension on previous visits. On previous visits I had looked up hopefully at the television hanging over me while she told me about how wonderful her neighborhood is, all the kids just run from house to house and everyone looks out for each other (a story I hear from time to time, and which I never believe, but which I always have to say How nice about), and then when she took a breath I had asked if she could turn the television on and then she had been offended and grown silent and searched for the changer and then she had pretended she didn’t know how to turn the television on, or, once it was on, how to change the channels. She had called someone else in to help. Then there had been nothing on I wanted to watch, anyway. Ellen was never on while I was at the dentist. Anyway, this visit I would try to enjoy the hygienist for who she was. I would try to know her a little. I wouldn’t treat her as a delivery system for pain and boredom which had to be circumvented or ignored or just gotten through.

Someone came to get me and lead me to the chair, the reclining smooth chair of horribleness, and I thought I was going to get another hygienist but I didn’t, which I actually deep down knew would be the outcome because they always bait and switch like that at this dentist. People dressed in scrubs take you to your seat, only to disappear into the depths of the office never to be seen again. I don’t want to know what they do back there. Although I may find out, since I have to have a partial crown in a month and a half. I didn’t know that at this point. The television shone above me, its screen gray, blank, opaque. They were watching soaps in the reception area, by the way. While I waited for the person to come lead me to my seat one of the characters had said, “I feel like I don’t know you anymore.” I can’t decide if I like it better when, on a soap, someone says something that must have been said millions of times on a soap, or when someone says something that has probably only been said ten or twenty times on a soap, like, “But she didn’t know at that time that you were only pretending to be a nun.”

Are you following me? So now the real hygienist, the hygienist my mother likes as a hygienist and as a person, came in and said hello and I felt the very strong desire to leave the dentist’s office. As it always does, the sentence, “I don’t have to stay here, I’m a grown-up, they can’t make me,” jumped to the front of my consciousness as if there were two of me and one of me had just shouted that in the other me’s ear. I restrained myself, I put my magazine down in my lap and asked, nicely, “How’s everybody?” The hygienist was pleased to be asked, and we put off the business of picking plaque off my teeth while she answered my question and I asked follow-up questions and I found out a little bit about Hersheypark. And then we put those things in my mouth and the lead apron was draped over me and she kept talking while they X-rayed my mouth and then took the things out of my mouth and we chitchatted right up to the point where the cleaning began. I didn’t ask for the television to be put on.

Now she was cleaning my teeth, really cleaning them, and the room was silent, except for the music, the first song being “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain.” If you are having your teeth cleaned while this song comes on all you will hear is the word “pain.” Carly really lands on it. But then that was over and the teeth-cleaning continued and the hygienist was silent, working, and all I could do was stare up at the lights and watch my own mouth and tongue and teeth in the reflection on the metal frame that holds the lights and try, while I lay there, to increase my understanding of the universe.