1:42 p.m. Were I to sit on the bench, this is my view. The view needs a little work, but at least it's all swept up. The part that needs the most work is that newly sloping hedge thing that you see -- it's sort of a mistake.

It's bamboo. It's stronger than any human. It doesn't cotton too well to being hacked at -- it grows an extra inch that day, just to spite you. It eats our morning newspaper, whole. I found two of them, wrapped in blue plastic swaddling, when I was hacking away on Sunday afternoon.

The bamboo. It was also the reason that we had to have the pipe that leads from the street into the house replaced. Nothing, they tell me, nothing! is more tenacious than a bamboo root. Nothing is more invasive or more relentless.

But then you have this journal, don't you? Its roots have gone deep, deep into my life, wrapping themselves around absolutely everything that I once thought of as My Pipeline to Reality. The pipeline is still there, but it is completely obliterated by the fast-growing day to day kudzu of words spiraling into sentences into little bushes of thoughts.

Every day. Even if I feel sick or there are people talking in the next room. Every day. In spite of feeling worried or too happy to sit still -- I sit still and I weave a vine. It's become as easy as breathing. As easy as talking to a friend. Every day.

There are so many friends out there. I keep thinking about that whenever I ride through the night roads outside the city. Way out there, out of the reach of the highway lamps. there are people looking into their computer and making an emotional connection. All around the world.

I never had this feeling -- this feeling of live thoughts in the night hills -- from the books I've written. Each one of them is a carefully pruned, prize rose bush, separate from its neighbor, covered with thorns, blooming for a short while after much expensive fertilizer has been applied. Not a vine in sight.

Well, ok. So the metaphor has run on without me. Bamboo will do that to a person.

Back inside and out of the sun, I've got something happy to report. The worrisome book is a huge success! Nobody cares about the switched pages -- everybody is happy, including the author, and most of all -- the boss.

It's another lesson, yet again, in the futility of worrying before the fact. And the whole experience also came packaged with a lesson I hope I've learned about the necessary importance of humility.

Of the relative unimportance of one's personal pride. In the importance of good work, and the sick insanity of running after people for praise and kudos and props.

Yeah! Spin out the strings and the vines and the powdered cheeks of blue-veined iris; let the transitory words of encouragement fall on deaf ears. That's what I'll do from now on.

(But you know what? I got some nice compliments, according to my spies at the meeting. But you didn't hear it from me.)