December 24, 2010

Brilliant Christmas Eve. The Y was nearly empty this morning, the streets vacant. But the grocery stores are full to overflowing. Couples push carts with $200 worth of food in them while I stand behind them at the checkout with my sushi and cream soda.

Working steadily on my filmscript of The Pillar of Fire.

Sick to death of The Santaland Diaries.

Ste writes tender emails from Cambridgeshire. I answer them tenderly, I think, but I don’t know how anything sounds to anybody else anymore. Part of his delectable strangeness is an almost supernatural tenderness, a quality so extreme you think at first he’s mocking. But he’s not. I’m tender in my way, I suppose, but I’m also worldly and direct, and I don’t always know if I’ve mixed the recipe of my responses right. Yet somehow he blasted his life to smithereens. Somehow he got himself barred from half the pubs in his hometown, so when I was there we had to wander to find a place to tipple. What part of him is that? He can snarl and hiss. Sickened reaction to that in himself is part of his tenderness.

Muddy paw prints appeared on my back doorframe at about the height of my eyes. It seems pretty certain I was visited by a bear.

Christmas has defeated me every year since I was thirteen.

So cold in my studio that the paint won’t dry. My peacoat has a green stripe from where I backed into a piece that should have been dry last weekend. Driving back, I was almost wiped out by a garbage truck. Afterwards I thought that if I had died then, my last words would have been, “Logan! Merry Christmas!” That would have been all right.