I was so profligate in my word-using, I do not even know who I was when I had so many words, I could just throw them into the wind and watch them fly, and they blackened the sky like a murder of many tiny crows, and then I had whole handfuls more. Who was I then? I was buoyant and wordful. Now I am more or less landed and wordless. And in this landed, silent state I have to reexamine why I paint (yes, it is true—I paint!). Yesterday I completed a painting that gives me pleasure but doesn’t edify. I have no objection to making paintings that bring pleasure alone, but only occasionally. If I do not paint with the greater purpose of experimentation and discovery, then I do not think it is worth doing—I have enough paintings that please me to last the rest of my life. I could even distribute them to others, and still I would have enough. I do not need to make these sorts of paintings, they simply do not satisfy me intellectually. But my intellect is like a pancaked basketball. I have exactly zero ideas. This was not the case even a month ago, but someone’s offhand comment killed the phase of work I was in (aided and abetted by my always-at-the-ready self-defeater, who sometimes uses others, with their offhand comments, as proxies—I am nothing if not efficient), and I am left no longer even yearning for that phase, even though I had thought—I had really thought! (I shake my head at my own ever-renewable ignorance!)—I would make these paintings for the indefinite forever we each dwell (alone) in. But it was not to be. They are dead, I have no feeling for the paintings that I was so profoundly enlivened by all spring and summer. So rapid was that death, I have a large canvas I had prepared for that work still ready to go—four squares, waiting to be filled with the story I was telling, which was one of predator and prey—always, it was predator and prey, this was the story I was telling in a way that I found edifying—so much so, I thought I had landed on the thing I would do forever. But I have said that already, and I have said with other words, but not these words that there is no underestimating or understating a person’s ability to fool herself. If only I could fool myself that I had purpose in my work! At least I have taken a mere half-fistful of words, blown on them and multiplied them by the dozens. But that is of no consequence, for I shall leave this in a minute and then I have a day comprising many and many and many hours in which I have to face the blank canvas with the blankest of minds. I wish you a better day than that.