11:47 p.m. Out and about, yet again! Yes! A fine dinner at a fine restaurant; good friends and giggling and pumpkin ravioli. There you go. That's the way to end the work week in style.

And, for me, it's been a pretty busy week. I've finally broken down and admitted that I really need some kind of a datebook to keep track of things. It's not that I have the social agenda of, say, a moth in a springtime closet of Harris tweeds, but still ... I do have my little patoos and appointments and deadlines. I do.

And did you know that you can go to every bookstore on the planet at this time of the year and you can not -- repeat -- can not buy a calendar or a date book or even a more generic daybook. Not a one in the several stores I've haunted for the last few days. Not even the Hallmark store has calendars in April.

You'd better not lose your calendar or decide you don't like it anymore, because you will be stuck counting the days on your fingers and writing your appointments on the backs of envelopes. Reason number 2,497 why retail stores ought to stop complaining about e-commerce taking away their business. Buy on schedule, buy in season, or bye-bye.

Anyway, I've solved my problem for the short run. An old datebook from 1995, only partially filled in, will also work for 2000, now that Leap Year day is over. And, because 1995 was not a particularly busy year for me, I stopped writing down my daily responsibilities on February 2, a Thursday.

That night we'd gone to see Miss Saigon in downtown Los Angeles -- and I guess that just about did it for recording purposes. It was a pretty obvious rip-off of Madame Butterfly, but without the fabulous arias and certainly none of the kimonos. There was that full-sized helicopter that flew in at the end, if you like a lot of heavy machinery in your musical theater.

It was a year in which I knew I was headed in the wrong direction, and I didn't need to mark it down week by week. I'd given up on my personal writing, for one thing. I'd tried to sell my company, for another thing. For compensatory activities, I had been spending time at DEA headquarters in Virginia, firing a Sig Saur at laser targets that jumped about on a movie screen.

We'd been renting Tina Louise's house in Beverly Hills, and it was partially furnished with Gilligan memorabilia. We'd tried to buy two different houses in the meantime, including Lloyd Wright's own personal residence, and failed. It was a time of endings and of new beginnings, and the decisions we made in those unmarked days are the reasons I'm sitting here now, typing my own words into my own web site.

The calendar's theme was "sun and moon" and it was full of solstice and equinox trivia. Those concepts were part of the last novel I finished before I thought I was finished with novel writing. I finally declared defeat and resigned myself to good old reportage and drinking into the wee hours with undercover federal agents and learning how to work those stupid little tape recorders that stop with a deadly click the second the story gets interesting.

Who was I? I bought miniature purple legal pads. I'd gone shopping at Laura Ashley for clothing. More than once. I bought brand new hiking boots. Who was this person?

No wonder I couldn't write down it down. You don't bother to leave a trail of bread crumbs when you're going off the deep end, over the edge, into oblivion.

Only five years, but so many many suns and moons ago.

I still have most of those little lavender legal pads and plenty of extra blank mini tapes, sequentially numbered. They, too, were pretty much unused. I can record my important thoughts now in many convenient forms: paper, tape, magnetic media. I can write for reams or tape for hours. But I have only one thing to say, really. And here's my one single important thought: don't try giving up the writing again.

Don't even think about it. It won't work.