War-torn Vienna

Some kind of cosmic nadir yesterday. Today I'm crawling out of the wreckage, looking around at the city I used to live in and wondering how I'm going to survive…

"It's not yr fault," Annie kept telling me over and over again on the phone yesterday. "Deep in yr soul you equate betrayal and pain with love. Look who you had for a mother. At least my mother had the grace to abandon me before she could do much damage."

Generally I get through bad times by fixing my mind on some vanishing point in the future. One way or another, I think, I'm going to get there. It's a passive act, really, because time is a treadmill and it drags you there. You don't even have to break a sweat. But this time, I'm not sure I can see that far ahead.

"I understand the temptation of God," Tony Stigliano wrote me several weeks ago. "Resist. It is too easy a solution."

I guess, then, that leaves me to my own narrative devices. On the agenda for the day – wait for the Cannery Row folk to yea or nay the lease, tunnel back down into my book. Two things I do well – I'm a good writer, I'm a good mother. Everything else is writ on sand…