The quotations dribbling down the side of This Journal's opening page are inspired by thoughts from my current AP Literature class. I have explained to that class that the various texts we'll be reading are bound together (at least in my wobbly brain) by the question "Where is Here?"

This is one of The Big Questions. Right up there with Who Are You? Why Must I Die? and Is There A Really Good Used Bookstore Around Here? In fact, I think it's bigger than all of those.

This body can only be in one place at one time - they say. So here I sit in my big old second floor room down at the end of McKinley Ave. in Mundelein Illinois, USA, North America, Western Hemisphere, Earth, etc. But two years ago I was slightly somewhere else. And before that ... and before that. This is only too obvious. We occupy space. I've always liked maps and, though I'm no artist, I like the idea that any place can be mapped. And if we use place as a metaphor for other spaces which may only be "imagined" - such as "in my imagination" itself or "in your heart" or "in our culture" - then those spaces are also possibly susceptible to exploratory expeditions and a mapping process.

Many years ago a wonderful, doomed magazine named Wig-Wag asked readers to map their lives. Some of these were published on their back page. I mapped mine and sent it in, but nothing happened. (Like I said, I'm no artist. But I'm not even bad/good enough to be an Outsider Artist. I'm just No Artist - in that way.) My map was a series of overlapping circles - I know how to use a compass - representing the places of my life and surrounded by oceans of names of people who have mattered in positive or negative ways. Each name called to mind the "place" I was in with that person. It's tempting to say that that place had little to do with our physical location. But who we each were at that moment was subtly bound to where we were, literally, in that moment. (For some reason I'm remembering Walgreen's in Milwaukee, corner of 16th and Wisconsin, booth by the window, cherry coke - Gary Kezele making me laugh.)

So I think it may be possible to map it all. Borges, I think, has a story somewhere in which a man has a map that is on a 1:1 scale with the actual world (or am I thinking of a Steven Wright joke? punchline: he never unfolds it. No matter - same thing.) But even that map would be ridiculously incomplete because it is only a surface; it has no depth. Inner cartography would require a more sensitive tool - and I think we have it in Language and Art, in the glorious lies and "let's pretend" of Homer and Hawthorne and Ellison and Swift and Conrad and ...

Oh. Out there on the surface yesterday I bought some stuff. I bought a desk chair (gratis the Murphy clan) and some newsprint and three boxes of Crayola® markers. I bought some Metamucil® and enteric aspirin. I bought some pens. And then last evening Jay, Bob and I went to a very good Mexican restaurant (with a seriously forgetable name) in Libertyville. I had the Enchiladas Poblanas with mole. (What the heck is mole? I probably don't want to know, do I?) And then we came back here where the cat waited patiently for some excitement, which I provided.

Today I pray and read student papers - tiny maps of some inner places. And the reading is a prayer of sorts, too.