Now panic beats and flutters inside my skull like a flock of starlings locked in an attic.

And she sees that the moonlight is losing its orange glow. It has become buttery, and will soon turn to silver.

Scaring people, especially in our day and time, is one of the hardest things on earth, as far as I am concerned.

People can be stunningly unobservant.

For some reason California's always been where the struggle is about how much authority you can impose on people's private lives. It seems to show up there most clearly. They had a helmet law for motorcycles in California and the bikies were saying things like, "It restricts my vision. I can't hear what my bike's doing. If it was on fire I wouldn't know it until my ass caught." And at the bottom line what the bikies were saying was, "Look, it's my goddamn head and if I want to splatter my brains all over the guardrails on the Coast Highway, super for me."

But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.

Dreams age faster than dreamers.