10:29 a.m. A fabulous, brand new month!

8:36 p.m. And then I dropped off, wandered off, to putter. I've been gone the whole day, moving things around, thinking about things. Whenever I go to a party, I can't help but think of the poor shmoo who's giving it ... running ragged, dumping, exchanging, stirring, stashing, tossing, fussing. While I, the party goer, merely have to select and fluff and ring the doorbell.

But today, friends, today I am the shmoo. I've been doing all the thing shmoos do when confronted with the evidence of their variant lifestyle. I've stashed half-finished projects, kicking and squeaking and oozing, behind closed doors. I have been trying, valiantly, to look as if I live like a perfectly normal person.

I'm not a normal person. I play with my imagination for a living. And yet, I'll wager that nobody, truth be known, is normal enough for their own vicious conscience. That's why I read diaries and online journals in the first place -- to try to see how other people do it. How do they structure their day? How do they arrange their hearth? I'm very very curious.

11:30 p.m. I really love people and parties and socializing and talking and drinking wine and nibbling on crackers and laughing and listening to music and talking. I really love spending hours and hours and silent hours in front of the computer typing and moving my files around and creating the universe in the tiny square world of the monitor.

I like wearing sloppy shapeless clothing and going barefoot and I like getting dressed in creased and dry-cleaned duds and wearing earrings. I like total silence and I like loud music. I like grabbing food and eating it as I walk and I like the tinkle and sparkle of service plates on starched white cloth.

The problem used to be: which do I like better? There really are two kinds of happiness, I've learned. There's the giddy surface zetz and fizz that makes you jumpy and electric. More: jumbo: extra: bigger: better. It never ends. It's never satisfied. It believes in upping the ante all the way to eleven and playing through the night.

And then there's a quiet stable kind of happiness that you don't really even notice unless something snatches it away. The rich quiet velvet of the empty space, a leisurely dust-mote dance when you sigh; a long, lingering thought that nobody interrupts.

A few years ago, once we settled here in California, I made my choice. I was in the middle of a screenplay class at UCLA and taking all sorts of meetings with movie and TV types and trying to negotiate changes in a novel with an editor and revisions in a nonfiction with another editor and I just ... wasn't. My misery was stubborn and it wasn't responding to surface cures.

So, I slowly began to extricate myself from one deadline after another, trying not to burn bridges, but definitely not looking back. I chose the abandoned road, ruts and all. I have a quiet pilot light now instead of a roman candle. A fish tank instead of a three-ring circus.

An ant farm instead of a ... but you get the picture. It's going in the closet.

It's time to party.

Tomorrow?