3:24 a.m. I'm working pretty late tonight on a final edit and a book index. Nit-picking, all-involving, detail work. The sort of thing you can get lost in for hours and hours.

When I finally looked up, I realized it was (it is) almost 3:30 in the morning and I have yet to write this piece, and it's very hard to switch gears from the careful attention to detail that editing requires to the all-out mayhem that writing demands.

An artist friend once told me about her very first lesson in drawing class. She'd come prepared, as instructed, with a very nice set of paints and a pad of very expensive watercolor paper. Exquisite sheets of fiber-flecked, rippled, linen-like purity. Ooooh, but I do love paper.

The teacher, however, was intent on creating artists -- not office managers or stockroom clerks -- and so the first lesson was nothing less than an hour of forcing the students to rip and crumple and wad and otherwise destroy that pretty paper right in front of him.

His theory was that if you have too much respect for the medium and the tools and not enough confidence in your own abilities, you'll never be able to smash down the conventions, break all the rules, and in general wreak the necessary destruction on the prevailing order that art demands.

It's interesting how much comfort I derive from creating order, rather than destroying the status quo. I find it mind-numbingly wonderful to sort and organize, and I can sort and organize just about anything that comes into my possession.

I have all the makings of a first-class collector, if I were to indulge. As it is, I don't do it. Or, I try very hard not to do it. Did you know that collecting, as a hobby, has only been popular since the Industrial Revolution? Did you know that it's the very existence of excess of in our culture that drives people to start trying to corner the market on say, printed hankies from New Zealand, circa 1940?

Too many things float by each and every day. Too much stuff is thrown on the ash heap before its time. Somebody's got to rescue all those turtles made out of shells from the Outer Banks and the Winky Dink crayons and pink foam rollers from our inner-city youth.

I think a person who has found the exact right thing to collect is a happy, contented person. For instance, my mother collects roosters. Why? I couldn't say. I can't remember what started it, and I can't imagine what sustains the hunt, but her house is crammed full of roosters on every conceivable surface.

I can't think of anything I like enough to want a lot of.

It's estimated that a full 30 percent of the American population are legitimate, confessed collectors. You're not allowed to count books or CDs as true collectibles because a collection is not something you would tend to use. A proper collection is supposed to gather dust.

I have three actual bird's nests, including a hummingbird nest. That might constitute a collection. And seven months of journal entries, crying for an index, which I'm working on. And a nice stack of fancy paper, some of it real parchment.

Coffee-colored and thick. Gorgeous texture. Far too nice to write on. What words could I possibly create to do that paper justice? It's best that I keep it neatly stacked and tied with a ribbon, all the deckle edges lined up just so.

I accept the demands of my heart, the call of the mild. I am a clerk.