-- Wednesday, February 9, 2000 --

1:40 a.m. I've got to start spending some time outside in the sun pretty soon, or I'm going to completely denude our fridge and pantry of anything with serotonin in it. Matzo balls, potatoes, pasta, bread. The new four major food groups.

I posted a picture of a plant in the sun. The front of our place needs a good sweeping. My work is all inside, in front of the cathode ray. I get fidgety if I stop working even for one minute, let alone the twenty I know I need to stop the carbo monster urges. I rip bread with my bare teeth.

I know there will one day be a break in this behavior, just as surely as I predicted this predicament at the end of August. Soon I will become the human equivalent of a health-food juice bar, but not tonight. Not today.

It's a real shame I didn't hang my grow lights when I had the energy. I would probably enjoy basking in them right this second, but no -- now I must moan and lament instead of getting out the drill bits and the measuring tape and the extension cords and hang 'em high. Sigh.

At least you folks in the cold and frozen portions of the world have a good excuse for wanting to declare a holiday of sloth. If your world is bathed in that wonderful reflected white light of icy nothingness, nobody will mind if you grab a Poirot and an Oolong and cuddle with your duvet. You have a free pass.

I do not.

However, all is not limp. Tonight I saw the Sopranos and I am singing their praise. In just the same way that wretched writing makes me sleepy, great writing (and filming, and acting, and scenery, and subtlety, and humor) makes me alert.

I raced through the accumulated kitchen cleanup, efficient yet bottled, just like Carmela. I went back to my endless index with another refilled cup of Brazilian coffee and a grim determination to finish it off.

I would ordinarily never recommend something that throws blood-specked violence right onto your TV-room carpet, but this show is really special. It's layered. You have to watch it very closely or you will miss a significant glance that threads to something that was said at the beginning and ties up the loose skeins at the end.

It's an hour that puts a checkmark in the plus column of your permanent spreadsheet. And oh, but the scenes of Naples were sun-soaked and pretty. I would really like to travel one day ... and see really old structures, pavements, monuments, churches. I think I will hardly believe my eyes.

I'm stuck inside so many hours these days trying to do my part in the old quest to make enough money to keep on living in our present structure, which was built in 1978. I'm very conscientious here, let me tell you. It's now 2:43 a.m., for instance, and I will work until 5:30 or so and then crash-sleep for a few hours and then pour some coffee and start right in again.

Don't be fooled by my pathos. I love every minute of this. If you teleported me to the caves I saw in tonight's episode, right there where the sibyl was supposed to have inhaled the gas and stared unblinking at her visions, I would only wish I were back here, on my really uncomfortable swivel chair inhaling the perfume of the coffee and staring at the same screen you're currently looking into.

Seeing visions. Sharing same.