2007-06-29 - 3:40 p.m.

We watched this movie The Fountain last night, by the guy who directed Pi and Requiem for a Dream (which I hope to never, ever watch again, ever, and not because it's not a good movie, because it's obviously a good movie, but just because it's art and that doesn't mean you have to like it, right?). I liked it, a lot. It's sad, but not as heartbreakingly, crushingly, from-all-angles sad as is the case with Requiem for a Dream. It stayed with me as I fell asleep last night and is staying with me today. It's got all kinds of things in it, but it's an original vision of what a movie can be, I think. Love story, fucked-up chronology, time travel or something, two actors playing three characters each. It's very sad and I cried and I don't usually do that when it's not sports.

We had a great trip to Canada and Maine and, for a night at the end, New York:

- The running of two change-only tolls, one in Maine and one in New Brunswick, the locations of which may really fuck me if, when the tickets come, the car rental place gets its reading glasses on and figures out they can charge me for taking the car out of state.
- Lonely, quiet, windy, beautiful Prince Edward Island, with its red soil and sand and little capital town with its capital building and its art college with its art kids who look like they could be from any city but are really from a city that gets a month and a half of good weather every year, which means that when it's 60 degrees out, they're in shorts, no doubt.
- Acadia National Park, with its hills of one hundred percent rock, with its scalp of thin soil for the pine trees and the scrub. Just an amazing place and we got there before the rush, which meant no wait at the lobster place on the water we went to ($33 for two lobsters, two beers, two corns, two cole slaws, and two chunks of blueberry cake the size of my fist), almost-empty camping areas, quiet roads, and no one around when I tried to dip my hand in the Atlantic in a rocky and beautiful spot where you weren't supposed to do any hand-dipping.
- New York, of course, with its overwhelmingness, its speed, its expensive beer, its pretty girls in heels, its cabs everywhere, sailing down the streets like Radio Flyers on a cul-de-sac, not caring what you think about their line-straddling, its magical bridges, its sheer size, its buildings that no one looks at, for some reason, except you.

I've all but pulled the trigger on the writer-in-residency thing. I've got the contract and I know the guy there's getting a little antsy. I'm still ten-percent entertaining just quitting the job here and taking the three months off and going to the main library downtown every day and writing for six-seven hours there, or killing myself trying to. Wouldn't have to go three hours away that way. But that doesn't really seem to make sense when I can do that and basically get paid for it, etc. At least my mom's not so heartbroken about it anymore, since I'd miss her annual week at the beach.

The new White Stripes is pretty aggressive and fun. I like Catch Hell Blues. It's a guitar-crazy song. He's kind of a bad banterer, on this album. He's just not as funny or witty as maybe he should be. Still, I like the "If you really want some hot water. I can help you find it." It seems a little over-the-top, but it makes me laugh because I say stuff like that all the time and laugh immediately after saying it.

All right. Biking the road around my office building three-four times a week. I've been trying to go almost as fast as I can, or as fast as I can in jeans and button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up as far as they'll go.

Even though we were only gone for a week and a day, it's strange to wake up and not have to pack up a tent and food in plastic bags and get going. We put 2,600 miles on the rental car.

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