-- Saturday, February 26, 2000 --

4:42 a.m. It is with great joy that I can report that I have been out and about for the greater part of the late afternoon and the early evening. I felt actual sunshine on my shoulders. I took a nice group of pictures as long as the sun held out and I even got a few neon-splashed storefronts.

Oh, it's been quite the adventure. And as any photographer will tell you, there's that flush of adrenaline that you feel when you begin to circle in on one of the more elusive quarries, be it a white-tailed brer rabbit hopping across the road, or the legendary blue-footed boobie of the Galapagos, or this rare spectacle that I have snagged.

In my travels today in Santa Monica I was able to capture and bring back for you this rare shot of near urban-legend status. Here, for the record, is the plastic bag collection of the famous Library Man.

It seems as if everyone in this part of the world knows somthing about this man. I often show my photos while they're still in the camera. People are fascinated with this newish digital technology, so I flip the switch to the view mode, turn the camera around, and let people scroll through the pretty pictures. All day long today, when I scrolled to this shot, people would recognize it -- oh! It's that guy from the library! I know him!

There is this man, you see, who goes to the library each and every day with a marbled composition book, his pen, and of course, his plastic bag collection. I don't know whether or not the collection grows or shrinks, or if he's been lugging the exact same plastic bags around for all these years, but the collection pretty much always looks the same.

And yet, that's not the weird part. Not the fact that he guards the bags and glares if you so much as glance at them. Not even the fact that he'd left them unattended for just a second. No -- what's stranger still is the notebook. I don't know whether there's only one notebook or several hundred thousand; I only know that I've been going to the library for ten years now and he's always in there. And he's always writing in that book. It drives me mad.

The first time I went to the library my own novel was ten years old and popular enough to still be in circulation. I have always enjoyed finding my book on the shelves and writing a little note saying hello and thanks for reading and slipping it between the pages before I put it back between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Shirley Hazzard. I always hope a stranger will find it and know that a real person has written the book.

Ten years ago I was really worried about whether I could keep on going with my writing. And so it was there, standing next to the gray metal shelves with my own book in my hand, that I first saw the Library Man. He had an array of books fanned and opened and piled high around his bent head and crooked arm, and he was very carefully writing in his copybook.

I crept closer and closer and eventually slinked behind him to take a peek and sure enough, there was row after row of neat, careful handwriting just filling, filling up the pages. Blue ink. Small letters. Numbered lists.

Inspired, I went home and started writing again. Why not? There he was, just doing it. He was far ahead of me in output. Yes, the plastic bag dolly was there beside him, and yes, he might very well be crazy, but he also might be the greatest genius ever to put pen to paper. His notebook might save mankind.

It's possible. How could you think otherwise and still be a writer?

Well, as you can imagine, he's been there -- Every. Single. Time I've ever gone to the library, and I go there a lot. There is a cone of privacy around him and for whatever reasons, I've never seen him look up or talk to anyone, ever. I certainly have never felt that I should speak to him.

There are things I don't want to know. Words I don't want to read.

He might as well be a Seward Johnson statue. A moment in stone. Or a ghost like Marley, pushing and dragging his crinkly bags as I bemoan my fate. We have the same fate. We both must write. Who knows if either one of us is any good? Not that it matters. You don't write because you're any good, but rather because you'll never know.

The only other person I've ever heard of who made the library his home was Julian Jaynes. He was one of the last people to actually have keys to Firestone Library. They once had open stacks and I've personally held books in my hands from the 15th century that have never had their pages sliced. Books that have never been read. Professor Jaynes could go there at night, stay there all night, and never stop researching until his own limits were reached.

It's a fantasy existence. One summer I tried to read every book on Latvian folklore in the Indiana University library. They had the largest collection in the world and the country of my grandparents had not yet won the right to resume calling itself by name. I wanted to keep the stories alive by trying to know all of them.

I don't know what particular chalice the Writing Man is researching. I hope he's closing in on it. I hope and I wonder.

I wonder if one day he will be able draw some double blue lines under his last sentence and put down his pen. I wonder. I wonder if he'll finally have the information he needs. I wonder if I'll ever know.

I wonder how many plastic bags are too many ... and how do you know when you've had enough?