What to do with some of the things that you simply know about yourself? Like this: I have a strong reaction to bitter faces, an even stronger reaction to kind ones.

Things are happening all the time, simultaneously: a V of birds circles around a theater marquee, their underbellies lit up by the fluorescent light of the billboards, a bright syncopated swoosh. It makes her think of the Olympics, specifically: the Los Angeles Olympics, which she never attended, but for years there was a mug sitting in the kitchen cabinet with an Eagle in an Uncle Sam suit holding the Olympic rings in his hand.

Perhaps it is even still there.

Novelty mugs, who invented these and why? There is one with a drab-looking woman saying, "When's Friday?"

There should be a tax on things that memorialize ennui.

The other day, from the top of a hill in Silverlake, there was a view of an immodest sunset. People stopped to look, pointed, showed their children. It was the kind of flush that saturated the sky, and then your lungs, taking your breath away.

Today, it is 80 degrees and sunny. Yoga instructors say things like, "Have a fucking great 2010."

I send out an email about propriety. How there should be none because it was refreshing hearing this. And yet, when there isn't any, I don't know how to react. I am alternately a study in propriety and then the opposite. I am ruled by my own contradictions.

Jo is in the malaise. Alessandro is glum. I met them both in Carmichael, in September 1997. None of us really wanted to be there at first. Now we are where we want to be, and sometimes don't want to be here either. Perhaps there is a meaning to this finding.

I am eating a mini-eclair someone handed me on the street. Not just someone, a baker, outside his bakery. What if someone just handed me an eclair on the street? Would I eat it? No. I don't even have to think about it really.

He played me a song once.

This is the excavation you were talking about, he said.

Excavation, unearthing. I am forever on my hands and knees trying to remove things from the ground in one piece, fingernails full of dirt.

Don't add, don't think, don't paint over the truth. When you see something that has been excavated, painstakingly, you know that it is not a counterfeit, a knock-off. This is rare, though.

But still.

Some people's words you read thirstily, as though you are parched.

She imagined him through his words. She saw him in her mind as slender, with long fingers and pushed-back cuticles, but when they met he was nothing of the sort.

Isn't it strange how rarely writers are this kind of physical person and how often others are? The world is cast all wrong.

He told her that her words were precise, clean, but not without sentimentality.

This was all right. It is what she would have said to him, only she would have exchanged the word sentimentality with pretension.

But this is the way some men decorate empty spaces.

Just as in the cold, her sentimentality kept her warm.

Why does this story never end well? he asked her once. It ends, again and again and again, but never well, never right.

It does, she thought.

Stories know their own ends, they drive themselves to their own conclusions. This is perhaps the only thing they know how to do. They are heading home, like those birds in a V, their underbellies lit by the neon lights of our city. Perhaps if we took the time to follow them, we would understand this, but we catch only a glimpse, a piece, and wonder about the rest.