I blacked out on the Precor EFX556 today. I was making my lambchops move like you do on a cardio machine and had achieved that pleasant pseudo-narcoticized state of mind that you can thereby get; my thoughts were drifting and actually what I was thinking about was Project Defeated Eggplant � this was partly due to the nature of what Vanessa and her friend Melissa and I talked about last night, fine, but also I�m coming to self-forgive and believe it�s mostly a calendar thing, as it is a simple fact that my last three October-Novembers have all been high fiber and memorable � and I was looking at the timer and it said 11:12, meaning that I was eleven minutes and twelve seconds into it, and then the next thing I knew I was almost done falling to the ground and one foot had slipped underneath its pedal. In the next instant my right hip hit the ground and the other foot slid and the high-school girl on the machine next to me was asking me if I was all right and I *was*, I didn�t feel like there was anything wrong with me at all. No dizziness, no headache, no hungry. It was most peculiar. The casualty list of appliances grows, by the way � last night while I was driving Vanessa home, the brake lamp indicator came on in my car, and today my Snow White watch stopped despite the fact that I got a new battery put in less than two weeks ago.

And my PC is in its death throes, the situation cannot be avoided, so sometime over the next few (please) weeks I have to get a new one and get that all set up. The bright spot however is that Stephen knows some cheap software that does everything I have asked of SoundForge on the dying machine, so the Christmas cd can go forth as planned. Let us not have another year without Christmas. Bless Stephen. And praise Augie Rios, for He is risen.

Sleepy. Spacey. Drinking Shiraz like tooth enamel grows on trees. I made cauliflower curry tonight and no brag but it was mighty tasty. Mrs. Ezra Pound, the former Olga Rudge, had an incredibly lovely, Gibson-Girlish Cupid�s-bow upper lip. The Pounds gave their daughter to a foster family until she was twelve, at which point Ez became interested in the idea of being someone�s father and took her back. I feel that every other weekday is not often enough to be writing, but often when I push myself what I end up with is something like this, which is� ick. Pound praised Eliot for having "trained himself and modernized himself on his own"; he considered the training and the modernization to be the irreducible two components of preparation for life as a writer. If you had to name only two, what would they be? And can anyone do better than Daniel Day Lewis in the movie? (Miramax, mais oui.) Or, better, Brian Cox after a few months on Atkins?

There�s more to say about "Punch Drunk Love" but I am shy. I didn�t watch the DVD with Steve two nights ago � that�s when I was writing my diary entry � because since the TiVo installation guy was here there�s a problem with the DVD player where the dialogue track is soft and muddy and the background one with the music and some Foley effects is crystal clear and deafening. My ears that bud headphones fall out of are also princessy DJ ones and I absolutely cannot deal, whatever we watch I am in a snit pout funk five minutes into it, this causes me physical discomfort and I have to leave the room. We watched, what, "Rio Bravo" recently and that was fine, but newer stuff is torture, and especially since the score for "Punch Drunk Love" was so brilliant I didn�t want to associate it with discomfort and resentment. (Why don�t I just call TiVo customer service? Because the same way that as far as the Washington DMV is concerned there�s no such thing as hazel eyes, TiVo doesn�t believe in shacking up, and I�m not allowed to report a problem with the service that is billed to Steve unless I am Mrs. Steve. I will drink their blood! but what can I do, and anyway I�d feel dumb taking a big princessy stand over the sound issue when we don�t watch DVDs all that often. I wrote a review of "Punch Drunk Love" last fall, last year about this time. It was not very restrained and I took some heat for it, notably from the person with whom I saw it. He thought it was nuts that I loved the movie so much and that, in discussing its effect on me, I�d written him into the review of it. He indicated that if this was a ploy to win his affection then I was going about it all wrong � but it was he who was wrong, my love � and it was love � was for the movie. The *movie*. And (duh) P.T. Anderson. The sense of hope it engendered was generalized. Being that misunderstood, being thought to be that easy, I felt dirty, like I was a hooker or something, and a retard for not being able to explain otherwise. And now I am redeemed, no I am humbled: Steve, sitting alone on the sofa while I typed at the lowboy in the dining room, loved it too and loved it more and loved it alone. It�s absurd, but I feel vindicated. Also as though I am finally home. I haven�t said this well. It�s because I am shy. This is the best October-November ever.

The latest joke is that when Steve�s cat dies � she is 17 and so creaky, it�s OK to talk like this � we are going to take her to a taxidermist and have her stuffed in an action pose, specifically upright on her back legs posed as if she�s bowling and holding a scaled-down bowling ball. I am not 100% sure it�s a joke.

P.S. I love it. I love it. I love it. I drank it.