I guess I didn't get enough sleep. I was up late yakking on the phone again with my senior prom date and then Bunny woke me at 5:30, as usual, because she could care less if I'd been up late, yakking on the phone. And so now I'm tired and its masquerading as "sort of feeling depressed again" and I just don't want to go there, damn it. So I'm trying to get the brainwaves to reach out rather than go deeper in.

When I am talking on the phone with him, I am incapable of hanging up, even when I'm dead tired and become just barely coherent; on & on I chatter. Here is a man who knows me so well, who is so kind and so incredibly funny, but with whom I went thirty years without having any communication whatsoever. So it's psychological; even though he'll be moving here in a couple weeks, I can't stop talking to him. This feeling, like, "No! Don't hang up!" as if I won't see him again for another thirty years or something. Plus, he's in a different time zone, so it's never late where he is.

Anyway. So I'm a little tired here and wanted to go back to bed. But there is this older guy I know casually who has a lot of walnut trees on his property and yesterday evening, he gave me a big bag of walnuts to give to my squirrels. I was very excited about getting out there at the first sign of daylight this morning, in below-freezing weather, to scatter those walnuts around for my squirrels. And to fill up the bird feeders, and to break through the ice in the birdbath & fill it with slightly warmer-than-freezing water. And as soon as the first squirrel hit the yard, wow, was there excitement around here. Much running hither & yon, furry creatures with big walnuts in their mouths, scurrying off to bury them somewhere/anywhere.

Even the little baby squirrels were trying to scurry off with those huge walnuts in their mouths. (They're still doing it; it's so cute to watch them.) It becomes impossible to get even a little depressed watching all that life. Problem solved.

On another note... I have been thinking a lot about fame versus anonymity. I'm writing an erotic story that includes these concepts at its core. When I went to Chicago last month, I read that new edition of Conversations with Marlon Brando that I had bought last spring. It's a short book, so I read it in its entirety on the plane rides there & back. Pretty much everything the man ever said was thought-provoking in one way or another, if not always in the best way. But still. It made for really great reading. And it made me think a lot about this fame vs. anonymity stuff.

It's easy to see the perks of fame. Although I think fame with great wealth is probably where the real perks lay. And it's also pretty easy to see what's not so great about fame. But I had never really given a lot of thought to the perks of anonymity until I read that book. I become more & more aware of those perks everyday. And again, I think anonymity with great wealth is probably the best combination of all, but plain old anonymity has so many lovely advantages. I can see where it can be really precious and it must feel a little devastating to have that ripped away from you. You can no longer simply just go anywhere and do anything, ever.

I think about prison in those same terms. I've never been in prison, but I've been locked up in a mental institution that had those wires all over the windows so that you could never just comfortably see outside. And I couldn't just open a door and go outside,either, because all the doors were locked with keys. There were things about that place that were very prison-like and it instilled in me this intense love of freedom and an intense fear of institutions. In short: I think about my freedom and my anonymity and find new ways to value them everyday. I'm only bringing this up because I'm writing about these ideas right now.

On a slightly different Marlon Brando note... I guess people who have known me a really long time, especially people who knew me in NYC, know that I was a hardcore James Dean fanatic in the 1980s and early 1990s. (Just FYI, James Dean was a hardcore Marlon Brando fanatic, hence the association...) anyway. James Dean was in essence the catalyst that made me want to give up music and become a writer instead. Even though Tim Burton's movie, Ed Wood, was the final catalyst -- the thing that made me say, "Hey, I'm going to give up everything I've been doing for the last 20 years and become an insane, sleep-deprived pornographer instead! Yay!" -- James Dean had set all that in motion within me several years earlier.

I was so obsessed with James Dean (I wore the kind of glasses he wore, the clothes, smoked the same cigarettes, etc), that one guy I knew really well back then ran into me at MoMA and said, "Wow, Marilyn, what's happening to you? You're starting to look like James Dean." At that point I figured I was spending a little too much time alone, staring at pictures of James Dean.

Since James Dean died so young, there was only a very finite number of photos taken of him. Granted, that finite amount is still an awful lot but I thought I'd seen every photo ever taken of him until last night, I discovered this one below online and I just love it. 1955, a NYC diner at night, a cigarette, a cup of coffee, and what looks like a huge chunk of rice pudding or something like that piled high with whipped cream and some strawberries. To me, those few pleasures are enough to make life on planet earth so compelling. James Dean died that same year. Perhaps he felt he'd tasted a little bit of the very best of everything and it was just enough. Onward to those crossroads in Salinas, gang.

(Tomorrow, perhaps I will regale you with my lifelong obsession with Johnny Cash. We shall see!)