Long Beach

It's possible that the major project the rest of my life will be trying to remember everything I've forgotten, which makes the concept of the present turn into a rainbow rather than a straight line or a series of dots.

Michael writes everything worth writing into one of those small brightly colored spiral-bound notebooks that fit into a shirt pocket. He prefers the color blue, but I've seen him scribble into red and yellow notebooks. I tell him it's pretentious, that it makes him look like a reporter for The Daily Pilot or a systems engineer in the glory days of imperial America. "You'll see soon enough," he says,"that you begin to forget a good idea the moment after you have it."

Linda, painter, says she's having difficulty with depth perception in her paintings, which causes problems with perspective, but that the problem "comes and goes." She says she became aware of the problem when she looked at a painting through a mirror. The discrepancy between where she thought she'd meant to paint an eye or a mouth and where she'd actually painted it, as seen by the mirror, seemed wrong to her when she first saw it in the mirror, but that as she's beginning more and more to trust what she's seeing from the beginning and to let it go at that, the better the paintings are.

Dear people, I started to write in my notebook this morning, l love each and every one of you with all my heart. And if I write something down it means I really mean it.