There is nothing more important than to sit down every day for at least 10 minutes and write a thing called "stream of consciousness" (or maybe it's stream of unconsciousness). I write the first thing that comes into my head. I feel better when I do 20 minutes. It's like brain aerobics or spirit aerobics or creative aerobics. It's like aerobics all around except for physically. It leaves me with the same feeling I get when I go for a long, early morning walk with the dog along a river path, only it lasts longer.

I'm telling you this because, basically, I have nothing else to tell you. I think I covered this once already, but having a rant has helped me to run out of rants. Although I'm sure getting older and mellower has had something to do with my dimished rantness. I still deplore the loose driving of most of those behind the wheel but I've learned to accept their behaviour. When annoyances happen, I tend to go "Okay." like an Albert Brooks character in a movie. That's kinda how it is. Life has been getting in my face all my life and I've learned I can't do a thing about it except choose what I'll do now that I'm here. As Gandalf says in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, "We can only choose what to do with the time that has been given us." Today I choose to describe that vagueness that sits between periods of good writing. This is it.

It's 10 p.m. (Eastern US Time) on a Saturday night. I've just made a fresh pot of "Bengal Spice" tea in a china container which has also been used a couple of times as a vase. The pot was a gift from my mother who bought it at a flea market in Germany. I'm listening to a tape recording of an unnamed group of musicians playing traditional Cypriot-Greek music that was popular when I visited Cyprus in 1983. The music is excellent. The recording is an amateur one, sort of like those I used to make by holding a microphone up to the speaker of my record player. I'm drinking from a mug that has a picture of a tropical sunrise on it and says "Guam." The mug is also a gift but from my second son who did a tour of duty there courtesy of the Air Force. When I asked him to bring me a souvenir he said all of the souvenirs were cheap and made in Japan. I said, "Okay."

I'm wearing a yellow T-shirt embroidered with "50th" in gold and "Festival de Cannes" in black. The shirt is also a souvenir, but of a place I never visited except on the internet. That year it was a hoot to browse in French and order in French and hope I pressed the right button. I was a little scared when I saw the price in French francs but felt better when I saw the bill in American dollars.

So here I sit, in the vague in-between and wonder how long it will last and when I will have something to write about again—almost like it's not my decision. It seems like it's not. I just write what's given to me—sorting it, organizing it and translating it into words. That might be a good topic to explore someday.