I moved back to Venice and bought a small dog. It barked and lunged into my face and I thought better of it, but there were no refunds. I went to the mall with a friend–Francesco or Miriam? I think it was Miriam. We were in a department store and I realized to my embarrassment that I didn’t have a shirt on. I pulled on a tank top from one of the racks and she said she wanted to go to some other store up on another level. To get there, we had to enter a staircase that led into the back area of the mall and up some twisty stairs. There were windows to the outside, but all shuttered and locked, light coming in from around the edges. There was a little room or landing that we got to with tables covered in garage-sale pottery and I was speaking Italian but suddenly felt a deep terror and despair–the familiar trapped feeling I had gotten in Venice. I was thinking about how I’d have to go to the Centro Studi and let Paolo and Maria know I’d arrived, because they didn’t know–I’d arranged the flight myself–and I wanted to say it in Italian but that made it all worse, so I told my friend, “I’m getting claustrophobic. I think I want to leave now.” As I walked on the stairs in the blinding light that caught floating beams of dust, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to think about Italy the way someone thinks of it when they’re in America. But it was tough–so tough. I wondered what I had done. I could only think of it as a trap, a sadness, a closed box.

I took out a book by Thom Gunn that I’d bought a while back but never read. It had a black and white cover with a drawing of a tree, and each poem had a preface page with the title and an introduction. I was shocked to open it up and find one poem titled “Huan-Hua Chye.” To my great frustration, I started to wake up before I could finish reading the preface and poem. What I read of the preface described how I was in his class, and the poem itself was a dense, stylized, cool and somewhat difficult piece, probably a sonnet-like structure, around 15 or 20 lines long. Some insight about my nature rather than easily and immediately absorbed obvious impressions.

I fell back into my dreams and started dreaming of work–talking to Marketing, to producers. I woke slightly and was annoyed at having to deal with those people in my dreams. Isn’t 8 hours at work enough?

I was arguing with Dave’s new girlfriend over racism.

I was going on a trip with Kyle. We had only driven down University to West Berkeley, but somehow it felt really far, and it looked totally different from real life–a freeway overpass overhead, lots of sprawl and empty lots overgrown with grass, a curious pale, cold, but cheerful sunlight everywhere. We went to a bead store–they had a huge, empty parking lot–and they had a lot of faintly luminous little glass rings in colors like lavender, sea green, opal blue; as I went down the aisle, there was a section covered with a towel. I lifted it up and realized that they were storing plastic glow-in-the-dark bracelets, glow sticks, glow necklaces, etc. underneath, and they were in the dark to keep their glow from getting used up.