Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002)

Lesson: Never be where you don’t want to be on acid.

Ted said that my paintings are basically signs. “We do not enter their space, they enter ours.” That seems about right.

That’s the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it’s so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it. *

nothing else, a diary teaches you what you’re interested in. Perhaps at the beginning you restrict yourself to issues of social injustice or all the unfortunate people trapped beneath the rubble in Turkey or Italy or wherever the last great earthquake hit. You keep the diary you feel you should be keeping, the one that, if discovered by your mother

annoys me when someone assumes he’s stronger than me and calls for a third set of hands to help. I am not a physically weak person, just uncoordinated.

found this excellent bit of advice in The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette: “If you start to shake hands with someone who has lost an arm, shake his other hand. If he has lost both arms, shake the tip of his artificial hand (be quick and unembarrassed about it).”

Yesterday I caught a wasp and put him in a jar in the living room. Later I threw in a dead bee, and the wasp chewed it up. Last night I poured Canada Dry and Comet into the jar. The wasp rolled over on his back, kicked up his legs, and died in a matter of minutes. I felt really bad about it. Lots of people kill wasps, but I made it suffer. He was l

a hamburger the size of a Susan B. Anthony dollar. All day long I installed doorknobs. It was all right.

This afternoon I found a $50 bill in the foyer of the building near the mailboxes. It was folded thin and full of cocaine. Some of it spilled when I opened it up, but there’s still plenty left. So that’s $50 in cash and around $80 worth of cocaine—$130! If I find $50 every day, I won’t need to get