12:01 a.m. I've been drinking ginseng and I think it shows. I've really been getting an awful lot done lately. Yes, the printer is amazing, but really. I can take some of the credit, too.

In fact, I'm practically bouncing off the walls, and it's now midnight. I've had some chocolate, which is a rare thing for me. I've been making lists. Crossed off a lot of things-to-do because they are all done! I'm catching up. I'm maybe pulling out ahead. Could it be the tea?

Yes, I'm a hard little worker.

I wonder if you crash on this stuff after awhile? I mean, it *is* after midnight and you may be wondering, as I was wondering just this very morning, why I don't just sit down and try to write in the beautiful foggy a.m.? And you know why? Because I realized this morning that given my current schedule, I ... haven't ... done anything yet.

But now, now that the day is all tamped down, I can report. Not that it's world-shattering or paradigm-shifting, but it's completed. Folded, sorted, stacked, stocked, and watered. Laundry, mail, dishwasher, fridge, plants. If I had pets or children underfoot, there would be more.

Holes punched, aspirin pestled, a button put into a tin; receipts filed.

We have minutia here, folks.

And what we need is a reflection, or this will be just another vampire day in the annals of online journaling.

Good sentence, huh? I admire that one. Ok. Now we move on -- do you realize that I could write the most beautiful sentence of my entire career here and then I'd just have to write the next one? That's a sobering thought. Will any of this end up on anyone's refrigerator, under a magnet? Folded and refolded into a fragrant leather wallet compartment? Underlined?

I didn't think so.

In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg suggested that you learn how to let your writing go -- write for the sheer joy of it, and cast its fate to the winds. She suggested, among many many other exercises, one that particularly bothered me.

Set up a card table, she advised. At a mall or on a street corner -- it doesn't matter where. Offer to write poems, custom original poems, on the spot for a dollar. Write them on nice paper, fold them in half, and hand them over. Presents of mind, pushed across the shaky table and flapping off into the world, abandoned and unremembered by their creator.

Somehow that idea terrifies me. Offends some part of my record-keeping mind, my accountant's heart. I guess I like to stockpile what I've written so that I know I will have one reader, at least.

On the other hand, if I got a long, pointed stick and started down in San Diego ... leaning over and writing my current novel in a fine line in the wet sand, parallel to the ocean and looping along, cursively retelling the tale of my youth, how close would I get to Santa Barbara?

Would I be more honest and write more freely if only the waves were lapping it up? Would I still matter to the universe if I left without a trace?

Ginseng sing song, letting me down gently into this good night.