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Of course overlaying all of these impact investments is the returns.

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on a rock or a log,

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, and later fell in with the anti-Vikings.

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because an actor's inspiration for a part is personal.

9/14/14

When I start writing, in Google Drive, the first thing I need to know is the date. I create a doc and that infernal little window pops up—it used to be that, by default, the title would be the first who knows how many characters of the text itself; the title would be the text and the text would be the title, and you needn't lift a finger—now I have to name it something so I name it for the date, in standard all-American format, like on the spine of a cassette of a Grateful Dead concert: 2/14/68, 5/8/77, 10/10/82. So 9/14/14.

Like the date might mean something. Like what I'm writing is historic, or enmeshed in history. Like it's got anything to do with it, really.

And sometimes, by the time I've thought hard enough to remember the date, I've forgotten what I was going to write about.

Overheard in Manhattan, a woman of about forty on her phone:

"... clips of her. You should just watch."

Here we are again at the beginning of things: school, work, the football season. Every year I think I'll take note of it, pause before it passes by. Every year I don't. Except for now.

Peering out from our balcony onto the Promenade des Anglais I saw the usual nighttime parade of pseudo-rich younger couples trying to make the scene or something, of vagrants and mediocre musicians, of tourists like us. There were two little fucking fountains erupting from somewhere on the sidewalk, or maybe from the island in the middle of the street. I couldn’t tell whether they were meant to be functional—to water the palms and those shrubs with the pointy leaves—or decorative. Or maybe it was the water main. No one seemed to notice or care, anyway.

We are staying in a vacation apartment on the water in Nice. It is clean, modern. Unlivable.

Behind the kitchen faucet there stands a bottle of dish detergent whose brand name is the Soviet space station that fell to earth.

I found the passenger list from the QE2, when my family came back from France, not quite a year after I was born. It fell out of the back of some old photo album, a not-quite relevant one—of my father growing up—the way these kinds of documents often do. It was blue, and plain, with a stylish little drawing of the ship at the bottom. There was no preface, no preamble; no ads nor filler about the grand history of Cunard Lines. No nothing—just the list. And it was absurdly long. Like the list of minor donors in the back of a program at Carnegie Hall. But worse. Hundreds upon hundreds of names, blanketing the alphabet; every common name you could think of and a good number of weird ones, too. Speaking of which, there in the expected place were we: my father, my mother, my sister with fourteen in parentheses, my brother with ten, and me without a number. I realized later that the date on the cover of the booklet, August 22nd, 1969, was exactly forty-five years ago today.

Ten hours of deep, dark jetlag sleep. I dreamt about work; the project manager on my team was sleeping on mattresses on the floor in the office. There was a bit of copy she wanted me to edit on a manuscript. I tried not to sound insane as I asked her about it. There must have been lots of other dreams, probably dreams inside of dreams, but I can’t remember them now.

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One thing that shapes almost all of these concepts: They're practical.

Some awful, frustrating reality kept intruding upon my dreams. Something to do with the sheet and the blanket, with being too cold or too hot, but maybe none of those things really because nothing seemed to make it better. Even as I was deep in a dream—about band rehearsal in a music store with packages of every kind of guitar string arrayed on the wall but always out of reach, I think—I felt the discomfort.

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I think that before you decide that you're in love with a guy from Russia,

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Katie just melts. I've never seen her melt before—

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now officially "too hot," pulled off his

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and in her panic to hold it together she leaped from the edge into soundlessness

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"Mmm. Timid people can surprise you."

"Well she did."

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were actually put to thee then by the

As I sat here typing my password into my computer to begin the day I wondered, Did I have a dream about typing my password into my computer to begin the day?