12:14 p.m. Is it weird to be writing everyday? Is it weirder still to be putting it online everyday? Who determines what's abby and what's normal in life? I ask you. I ask myself this same thing All The Time. All the time. Is it because I was raised in a strict non-questioning religious environment?

I remember once upon a time that I had peace of mind. It was a long time ago. I was a junior in high school and we were just beginning the school year after all the turmoil of a particular summer vacation had ended and we were all safely back into our uniforms and home rooms and routines. I remember being really comforted by the fact that the Catholic Church, in the person of a visiting Jesuit scholar who came to conduct our retreats, had all the answers. Because certain nagging questions were foaming up. Doubts were forming. Dark roots were showing.

Groups of shiny-haired girls and shaven-headed nuns would engage the Jesuit in philosophical Jeopardy and the serene old man, representing the entire collected wisdom of Mother Church, would think for a while and come up with a fine explanation to whatever prickly thing was bothering us, and darn if he didn't know everything.

It never occurred to me that I might be especially stupid or unusually conformist or even unduly dutiful -- I just remember that for every little question I could come up with, he would have a ready, eloquent proscription. And I remember being satisfied back then. If he paused or hesitated, it was only for dramatic effect as he pulled out the famous hail-mary defense, the catholic Catch-all 22: if he didn't know the answer he sighed and looked ... exasperated? irritated? pixilated? and said we would just have to "take it on faith."

Many men have said this very same thing to me in the intervening years. Faith is a wonderful thing, with the emphasis often on wonder. I wonder what will happen if it breaks? I wonder why he's out so late? I wonder if everyone is getting paid this little? Sometimes you have to take it on faith, and sometimes ... sometimes you just have to take it.

Those asterisks between paragraphs always mean that I can't figure out how to make the transition between thoughts. When you find a lot of them in a book you've just bought, you can rightfully begin to question what you're spending your good money for. Maybe the author should have worked a little harder to gather up her disparate thoughts and bring you a nice coherent whole. Instead, she's asking you to do the work and put the thing together for her. Or, she's saying that her work is so darn fabulous that just any old thing she has to say between cups of coffee is all wonderful all the time.

This daily journal form breeds fragmentation. It demands you put out, there in the gnatty glaring sun of the shop window, whatever it is you have cooked up, whether it's all gone flat, or it's a masterpiece of the art, or it's too yeasty, or it's a bulbous horrid pile of damp clammy bits. It's today's offering -- one day only -- and it's on special.

It's what I like about this journal form in the first place and it's why I think the web is giving us the opportunity to make a new kind of writing -- a living form of writing. Ripley and Guinness would have been amazed if they were still alive. Believe it.

And ask yourself this question: How many days can you keep it up? When will you break?

Down into incoherent babbling ... and would anyone notice?

The fact that it's a living form does not, however, mean you can make a living from it. And that's where you can legitimately question your own sanity. If you're aiming to be a writer, is it right to fling your words out this way each day? Is it wasteful and irresponsible? Are you spreading memes across the universe like so many invisible micro-fungi that take root and bloom in someone else's garden, never to be harvested, annually, by you and your team of lawyers? That little copyright sign at the bottom of the page -- that's a joke, right?

And I wonder, sometimes, if anybody is reading this. Are these words coming through? Is anyone browsing by the window to see what's inside?

I wonder.

Sometimes ... sometimes you just have to have faith.