Dropped Alpha off at the airport yesterday, story here, and after we’d bought nice-smelling candles and things at the Body Shop and roasted candied almonds at the pharmacy and had coffee at a coffee shop (where I ate all the roasted almonds) and looked at things at Harrod’s I saw her as far in as I could see her. She showed her ticket to the man and went through the turnstile and through the glass I watched her walk off to her gate.

She didn’t look back.

I hung out at a newsstand for a while. I was looking for something good to read, or failing literature something with naked ladies. The Playboy with Dita Teese on the cover was tempting, but I passed and also passed on some lame Penthouse collector’s issue, Bob Guccione recycling old Pets o’ the Month I guess.

Instead I bought Anne Rice “Blood and Gold” for a nice wintry shot of goth excess and Paul Auster’s memoir “Hand to Mouth” for some literariness.

I read Paul first, I enjoyed it so much I wished it were longer than 127 pp plus some old unpublished stuff added in as footnotes to make it total 436 pp.

The reason, actually, that Auster’s memoir jumped out at me from the book rack where it laid in wait was because on the way to the airport I’d been telling Alpha how all I’d ever, ever wanted to do was write. Paul’s book is subtitled “A Chronicle of Early Failure” and I didn’t find it too pretentious although he does drop names. But why shouldn’t he? Drop them if you have them. As I said, it could easily have been twice as long, three times as long. I could listen to him all day.

Money problems? Failure at writing? I can relate to that. Paul Auster is Paul Auster, and I am me, I realize that. And you are you. But you know.

Crazy schemes to keep one’s head above water? Hack writing? Translation? Inventing a game, for god’s sake? I can relate to all that.

But Paul is Paul, and I am me. Paul is sharp, and I am not sharp. Those few of you who have seen the first draft of my latest book know this to be true. Or is it? After all, it’s just a first draft.

I’m having a little crisis over it right now, over what I should write in general, because Alpha sort of rolls her eyes at the genre thing. Understandably, I think. She thinks I would write best about daily life, as I do here, rather than try and be pretentious.

Yeah, well. Anyway. You write what you write, on the one hand. On the other, Alpha is always right.

One thing I’d hoped to get at in this post, though, was the thing I have, or had, about being from the West Coast of the USA. From a corner of the Pacific NW, in fact. Not the crappiest corner, but not the greatest either. When I was growing up and reading a lot, during the 1980s, all the good writing allegedly came from the East Coast. From the New York area. It all referred to life in New York, and summers in the fucking Hamptons or whatever, places that had zero resonance with me. It was totally meaningless to me, but I figured since this is what’s getting published, it must be the best. New York must somehow be more significant than someplace else. It really fucked me up for a long time.

My mother and her siblings were children during the Depression, and she often told me stories about growing up with nothing. They made rubber band guns, large high-powered ones, out of pieces of wood and strips of innertubes. You amuse yourself with what’s at hand.

We don’t have a television now, so my children watch the fire burn, or bread bake, or read books or draw or do some other thing.

It’s all life, isn’t it.

Gamma has a cold and is really stuffed up. Last night she had a headache, sore throat and belly ache. She fell asleep on the sofa watching the fire. Beta has new nylons and that, I think, is the reason she wore a skirt to school for the first time in a long time, today. Gamma had toast and ham for breakfast, Beta Special K.

Look at me, I’m writing.

Here’s what I wanted to get at: in the Dobl