funny that while the week is passing we get moments of intense beauty or insight or sadness or happiness and then when on a friday night we sit to recall them they will not be recalled. all this life slipping past. all this stuff we call time which really still is life walking the same corridors day after day smiling at these others saying hi how are you day after day (and caring, really caring just as much as anyone might expect) and standing at the head of the class up by the teacher's desk being the teacher which is sometimes not unlike carnival barking or a curious child talking silly just to see what might come out.

sorry. we're still out there with huck and jim and way down deep with invisible man. thank god the juniors finally got back into she stoops to conquer today after a week of researching the film project. what a relief to laugh at young marlow who has mistaken his likely father-in-law's home for a roadside inn and his likely wife for a barmaid. and then there's tony lumpkin, the lovable lout. good stuff. we should do this play. let's.

spent a good chunk of last saturday in the big city with leonard who's moving back east very soon. wandered around a bookstore, took in a movie, had a good meal, talked. stuff like that. concluded that there are way too many cars in that part of the world. concluded that the conditions of life and my mental/emotional constitution make refreshing friendship tougher and tougher as the years go by. if you are one of my friends you know about this.

from tuesday afternoon to wednesday afternoon i found myself wired up to what's called a holter monitor ... on the trail of the wild thumpadump. five connections variously stuck to my frontal region with the wires running down into my pantsleg and out to a digital monitor/recorder in my pocket. moderately inconvenient during the day, freaked out the cat when i dropped my trousers to expose all this circuitry. night was bad, sleeping on my back, waking up every hour or so. whenever i felt the thumpadump i had to push a little button which, i guess, marked the recording in some way that would attract the reader's attention and allow him/her to skim most of the 24 hours. i pushed the button quite a bit but mostly during class. i could be pushing it right now. i don't know what this is but it wants to be my friend, a fairly constant companion.

beauty. a few of the songs by laurie anderson off life on a string. and now mitsuko uchida (i've mentioned her before) with schubert piano sonata d. 960 on a phillips disk. nothing like the sex pistols but beautiful enough if you just listen. the sunlight this afternoon out my classroom window just before i closed the shades to show the ken burns video on mark twain. and later the cat at the foot of the bed warming up in sinking sun barely noticing me she's so sleepy. wish i could be a cat sometimes.

trivia: did you know that an early graduate of carmel high school was one julia cameron who eventually married martin scorsese, bore their child, worked on taxi driver and new york new york, divorced him (or vice versa), and launched a series of books and bookoids about the glories of writing? yes, i'm told she was once one of us.

Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn't in us. It's almost as if we're put here on earth to show how silly they aren't.

Russell Hoban