Tuesday 10 November 1998

I've thought long and hard about the new... I don't want to say rules—orientation? Let's get this over with. I'm at the Hurst in the evening, trying to get somewhere while my coffee holds out. Before my time runs out, or the spell wears off, whatever. Okay, I'm not in Portland, Maine—that's the first thing. I never was, and I can't keep up this charade any longer. I'm now in Portland, Oregon—I was all the time, actually. That is, after the Fuel Tour was over. I came back here instead of going to Portland, Maine. Heather and I broke up shortly afterwards. I moved to a room on the other side of town for six months, and I was going crazy, so I started this journal—I mean, I already had a journal, you know, like my whole life—but I said I was in Portland, Maine, and started to call it the Lobster Bible. I had been going to a therapist for six months or a year previously, and that was really helping me a lot, but then my insurance coverage ran out and I needed to do something, so I kind of really went crazy within the framework of “The Lobster Bible,” my therapy journal. Therapy for the price of a notebook and a pen. That's what I told a waitress here yesterday at breakfast who asked me what I was writing. It's only half true. This is also part of my proposed 10,000 page novel, as yet unnamed, that I started in 1989—kind of discontinued when I was sick in the early 90s from wheat poisoning and alcohol poisoning, and then decided to continue again, I believe, in the spring of 1996 when I started the job I have presently. It was initially supposed to be a 1000 page novel, but I decided that was too limiting. Anyway, here it is in part—hopefully it will just be an organic continuous endless mess but not too much of a mess to read.