I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.

And so I rehabilitate myself - staying up late this Friday night in spite of vowing to go to bed early, because it is more important to capture moments like this, keen shifts in mood, sudden veering of direction - than to lose it in slumber.

I said: I must remember this, being small.

I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on top of the beer can

This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.

There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.

And there's the fallacy of existence: the idea that one could be happy forever and age with a given situation or series of accomplishments.