-- Thursday, March 30, 2000 --

10:19 p.m. I've been working at the machine all day, stealing time away from paying jobs to work on my nonpaying joy -- the spiffy journal redesign I perform (like clockwork, I might add!) at the turn of the month.

This has become a big, honking production, let me tell me. I try to make everything match and I try to make it topical and I try to make it completely different from the month that's just gone past.

It's all fantasy and irrelevant, and really hard work sometimes. And it all feels real. I guess I'm deep into imaginative withdrawal -- but I feel as if I've been to the beach and back simply because my new theme for April is --

(and of course I should keep it secret and under wraps for just one more lousy day. I should be able to manage that.)

Igor has been traveling relentlessly this week and he's finally back home and relaxing in front of the very loud TV. I'm several rooms away, happy as a bug in soda to have him back. Happy because we've ordered pizza. Happy that I'm not watching the show he's got on -- loud. It's the premier of Wonderland.

It sounds, from this vantage point, as if every hammy actor in Hollywood is torqued up and flinging one of those scenes at the camera -- you know the ones -- scenes of a crazy person screaming something, repeating repeating repeating something, yelping, snarling; God knows how disheveled they must be ... and weaving through the human mess are the even-worse pseudo-competent voices of the professionals who are superior to the scrungies rocking in the corner and tap-tap-tapping their hands on their heads.

I've never enjoyed these shows ever since I can remember. Ever since I watched a neighbor lady being taken away, wrapped tightly on a stretcher so she couldn't squirm ... and someone put her hairbrush on top of her tummy for her. She was staring at it. I was staring at it. It was ages ago. She's probably no longer with us.

It was the era of the photo of a few days ago, and they took her out of the back of the building behind me. There was some sort of total collapse of the feminine ideal in that scene; some kind of warning about what can happen to young housewives. They carry you away.

I can still see the brush. It looked to be a natural-bristle brush, and no matter what they say in the fashion magazines, natural bristles guarantee nothing. You're still going to have a headful of static.

Hmmmm. Where does all this stuff come from? This must have been what it was like in the old days of radio. Your imagination runs circles around the slow spoken words. Remove the images and you go routing around in the back rooms and grab hold of these ratty little memories.

"Look at how small this is," you remark. "How did I ever fit into this?"

So, I shake it out and display it here, and maybe you can try it on for size. Lady tightly bound and swaddled and wheeled away. Several small children watching from doorways and windows.

Which is why I don't like to watch now. This way I can work out all my crazy ideas and schemes for web tweaking and wonking. That way lies madness.