5:30 PM

December 6:  I think what writing helps me to do is pay attention.

This year I've mostly written professionally, and my attention has been rigorously directed: this piece, this performance, this artist.  But in letting my unpaid writing slide, I'd also let lapse attention I used to pay to, well, everything else.  It feels good to get back to smashing my face into the rest of the world.

Yesterday I ambled back from the drugstore with my stroller, passing the plate glass windows of the combined cleaning service/art education enterprise.  It's an odd pairing: the storefront is divided into two halves, and the half that houses the cleaning company is rapturously dirtier than the half that houses the easels and paints.

It was nearly, but not quite, full dark -that overeager December black that arrives before you've braced yourself.  A cat picked its way amongst the paper piles of the cleaning side; in the art studio, a lone man sat, inexplicably reading.  He had a real book, hefty, at least the width of his wrist, and he looked to be near the beginning.

It was all the inches left to him that speared me with delight.