3 August 0:07

Beautiful night, and what am I thinking about? The usual, running in circles in my mind, discussing the variegated underbelly of New York, its mad-dashers and its shuffling commuters; the cycles of life, the nuances of 21st-century flaneurie and its strange vectors; whether or not I should hurl this laptop into the still marina waters, with a great yelp of writerly frustration.

[A large fish jumps, just a few feet away, with a lazy, slow thud. Twice.]

5 August 0:41

And here we are, our thirtieth installment of writing from this strange and magical summer.

Some nights, the water is so still and mirror-like that I begin to understand why there are so many paintings of sailboats. It's understandable; anyone would want to capture something so sublime as a reflection on water, the boats themselves like nesting birds shifting slightly in their sleep. Yet it's the height of summer and the water is warm and dirty. In the light from the promenade, I can see a sheen of scum, detritus and small bugs skittering on the dark surface. The golden lights on the docks and the periwinkle sky against the wine-dark still water...it's a beautiful little floating village.

A boat cruises in and the surface barely breaks—it just undulates slightly in my direction. The moving water, which defies our sense of space, time and steadiness, is a constant reminder of what lies beyond consciousness.

The slight undulations have sent the entire marina into a frenzy of wake. Big rhythmic lines flow into chaos and develop into large round ripples; these are broken and the entire surface is of small, waving lines. They shrink from slow to fast, and the lights are broken into electric scribbles, sensationally brilliant characters dancing out unintelligible stories on the water.

I am concerned by my bedding. My irrational fear that I will be hit by a bus and not have made my bed becomes a frantic quest each morning, as I struggle with an oblong, irregular and asymmetrical mattress and a set of sheets—not my own—covered in vertical stripes, thinking vertically from head to foot. the idea of having "ship-shape" sheets throws that much more urgency into perfecting the bed. I am deathly afraid of being found to have been careless.