Clearly, I'm not writing a page-turner here. Not even a page-scroller. Funny how as readers we've returned to scrolling rather than turning. Civilization is in decline, this is just one example of that. When I was writing "On Painting" I had a unifying theme, it was painting, and this gave the series of paragraphs I was writing a degree of cohesion that these new ones don't have. If there's any unifying theme here, it's untitled, and that leaves me with a world-sized field of things to write about. I am someone who does well with parameters and less well without them. If I could actually find a title for this thing, then maybe I would know why I was writing it, apart from the reason of simply wanting and needing to write. Which brings me to another problem (you don't know this yet, but I have a pocket full of them), which is that I'm pretty sure I've written everything there is to write already. If I don't write about contemporaneous things, I'm sure to repeat myself (which bores me) (with a nod to the Poet). As I walk, I write. When I'm not writing this, I'm writing something else. When I'm not writing, I'm painting. And let me be clear about that, when I'm not writing or painting, I'm waiting around to write or paint (mostly paint; writing is confined to the shorter hours of the early mornings and evenings), I'm biding my time, filling in the boring hours or resting my body which does not bear up as well as it used to under my labors, not that I labor all that hard, there are many and many and many and many minutes in which I am only looking. (The painter's curse.) The problem is—I have pulled another out of my pocket, this is an apron pocket, I think, a worker's large pocket—I don't especially have any interest right now in writing about painting. For one thing, I'm not intellectually engaged at the moment with the why's and how's of it. I'm just painting. (There is a gorgeous flaming-salmon sunrise this morning! Have you ever noticed how, if you look at certain skies, you can see into the past, both your personal past and the historical one? It is a form of time travel.) By "just painting" I mean that I am not painting with any sense of purpose, I am not obsessed with this or that aspect of the job, be it storytelling or technique or approach (that said, I am in an "approach" phase, where my main concern is how to approach painting, it's just that I don't really care and so my approach is lackluster). But if I'm not going to write about painting, what then? Despite the fact that I have spent the greater portion of my life spilling my guts, either onto the page or onto the canvas, I'm a very private woman, and I cannot tell you the really interesting, page-scrolling stuff—I cannot do that! So it leaves me with this, this thing that has no more cohesion than if I had brought a bunch of words together, tossed them in the air, and said to you, "There! Read them where they lay!"