friday before the weekend before two weeks of summerskool.

on monday i begin leading a class called, i think, "creative computing"... there might have been a nominal change in recent weeks. at any rate, it's me and some 7th-8th graders and a room full of computers. writing. you know those dreams where you are about to play Hamlet and the curtain's about to go up before a packed house and you're very concerned about your makeup and costume... and then you suddenly realize that you haven't memorized a single line? you know that feeling? that's my current state with this class. sure i've been considering it for weeks, but i hadn't set a thought on paper until this morning. i should have checked my mailbox last week...oh, never mind. the cool thing about a writing class is that all you've got to do is write...

last night jay and i spun up to gurnee to take in A.I. Artificial Intelligence... and it's worth seeing because it's provocative of thought... and just a plain old massively expensive and beautiful film... visually striking. it comes just as i'm finishing philip pullman's The Amber Spyglass... which is also unsettling in the way it sets up The Church and The Authority (God) (albeit in a very different universe) as the bad guys. in both the spielberger and the novel you know who (you think) you are supposed to like, but then you're not so sure because neither affirms the conclusions you want to be afirmed... nevermind... i'm floating off. i'm a stupid person...

and i'm avoiding... this business... read no further if you are squeamish about animal body fluids.

i brought the cat to the vet this afternoon because i noticed that her puke was kind of pink yesterday. cat's always puke, but this was different...bloody puke... and then again today, accompanied by some pretty nasty diarrhea. she complained not a whimper as i plopped her into the box and drove her off to the mundelein animal hospital. the vet took some blood, gave me some pills and a can of food. i call tomorrow for the lab results.

aside from these fairly disgusting symptoms, the cat doesn't seem to be doing so bad. her energy level seems about normal. she was just up on my desk exploring the new stuff i bought for the writing class. and now she's perched in her usual spot at the foot of the bed.

maybe it's no big deal, but i am pondering mortality, the sadness of time which is its passage away from the present which is happiness. because i am here and the cat is here. today.

The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.

Gertrude Stein