-- Wednesday, October 27, 1999 --

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2:48 a.m. I'm finally finished step one, leg one of the project I've been working on. I've missed all sorts of fun in the meantime -- the Yankees game, for instance. I heard a lot of yelling and shouting, but from a distance. From my desk. It wasn't all that exciting anyway, right? And Bob Costas was starting to grate, right?

At least I didn't have to listen to that big-baby-boy whiny John Madden. A voice I loathe. He's always shouting and crying in the same sentence, demanding to be heard. Bear with me here, as I decompress. It's been several nights of hardly any sleep and my tolerance for things is thinning and stretching. I can picture my nerve endings flapping all ragged and raw against each other as I type.

Sleep is a truly wonderful thing. A miracle of our existence. After just a few hours I will be fixed. Meanwhile, I've often noticed that when I get very sleep-deprived -- I mean very, very sleep-deprived -- that the oldest, least relevant memories float to the surface. A barrette that I wore once. A school yard in the late afternoon with somebody's lunch bag there in the dust.

I'd wager that when we're normally rested the second miracle -- the miracle of forgetting -- is active and on the job, directing traffic, stuffing the trash, pushing the lever and getting rid of yesterday's irrelevancies. But when I get too too tired, it seems as if the barriers are weakened and all the stray bits of experience start fluttering insanely to the front of my mind.

It's Fresh Kills landfill on a windy day, I tell you ... and you'd have to be from the East Coast to understand that allusion ... and believe me, it's not a pretty one. Picture all the garbage from New York City in one place. Swampy. And did you know that when garbologists go out there with their drilling equipment and pull up a core sample, do you know what is the most common, least disintegrating thing in the landfill?

You'd never guess. You'd think, of course, that it was baby diapers and assorted nasty plastics, as we have been carefully taught. But that's not it at all. Not by a long shot, either. Nope, the thing they pull up from the bottom layers of landfill, hardly decomposed at all is: phone books.

Yup. That flimsy paper. You'd think one good squall and it would be slurpy, but nope. They are too thick and there are just too many of them. And you'd think by now the phone companies would get the message that nobody really bothers with them anymore. I mean, I have looked in one of ours, it's true, but that it was a pathetic moment.

Something, as usual. had sprung a leak and our old reliable plumber had retired and moved to Palm Springs. You know, I think I was supposed to be making a point here, somewhere, but it's long, long gone.

I do want to explain what little I know about the weird picture I've put up today. I was on a typical walk, down a typical ally, and you must understand that it was only a day or so after the JFK plane had been reported missing. No confirmation, no real news.

We passed this -- what? Room at the back of a -- what? Store? Warehouse? Studio? The door was ajar. And there was this huge mockup of a newspaper headline, already. Less than 24 hours had passed. Maybe it was a prop supply place. Maybe an artist's back room. Maybe a play was being created. A mystery.

But I thought it exactly mirrored how messed up my mind feels right about now, and so that's why it's there. No mystery. Now, let me tell you: I'm diving headfirst into the warm oblivion of bed and pillows. Yippee, I say. See you on the other side of this day.