No. The kind of reality I'm talking about is the simple reality that rolls like the ocean underneath your feet. It's what you feel when you're alone at night but you know very well you're not alone. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not talking about being afraid of scary movies or serial killers hiding behind the backyard fence. It's the fact that the earth is always there, waiting to take you back in. And it doesn't intend any malice in being ready to accept your death, either. It's got bigger things to do than to worry about your death and whether or not it's being unfair to you.  

10/14/97 That's always been my problem with people who try to figure out what God wants or what God meant in a certain situation. How can you know something like that? Doesn't the Bible tell us that the mind of God is unknowable? Didn't God go and think up this whole planet, something more than any living person can grasp the meaning of-like why is it here and why is it crawling with bacteria like us? We may look like one-celled diatoms, flagellants, perhaps, to God.  

I wish I could shout against the hypocrisy in the same way that Holden Caulfield did. But, he was better at it than I am. And I already know how hypocritical I am. I think that for the sake of purity I should be an agnostic, but every week I seem to find out more about God than most of the other people I meet. It makes me think I'm more in line with being a mystic, or at least having a set of beliefs like those ancient Gnostic Christians. What can I say? Sometimes it's more interesting to have a whole set of beliefs than it is to be a nihilist. And anyway, when I get depressed, my whole cosmology fails and I'm left holding onto my shame at having pretended to know who  or what God is. *       *       *  

10/21/97 I feel a need to stick with this project. It's as if I won't have anything else to show people if I skip this one. It's not that it's so important that it must be done or bad things will happen, just that if I don't do this one, when am I guaranteed another shot? *       *       *  

10/22/97 I've had trouble getting to sleep ever since I was just a little kid. I can remember lying in bed thinking. The rest of the house would be asleep and I would be thinking about what it would be like to be dead. Not to die and feel pain, but to be gone from this earth and to have everyone I ever knew in my life be gone, too, with me alone. That kind of aloneness made my heart beat faster and made me feel panic. I would stare at the ceiling, looking for a pattern in the cracks in my bedroom's ceiling. And then, on some nights, the glass light fixture that hung from the ceiling would make a quiet tinkling noise, as if a little dinner bell were being rung. Or the chimes on your front porch were being blown in the wind.  

That was it, the sound of chimes in the wind. And I expected my grandfather or great-grandfather, whom I imagined to be the sternest of Germans, would open my bedroom door and walk in, gaunt, dead, and alone. Ready to share with me this incredible aloneness which they knew now. And then I knew I was doomed to know this aloneness in the future.  
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