I haven’t written in a while. Sounds like an apology you would write in a letter to someone you’ve fallen out of touch with. Why am I writing every day? I guess you would call it a journal. It’s journalism, reporting the events as I see them, as well as moods and dreams. Though the compulsion to write every day takes on a feeling that acts wouldn’t exist if not written about. What I think it ultimately amounts to is simply writing the story so that it might happen and that it might happen to make sense. The big picture, like something composed rather than accidental, something that has a design. To whom is the story addressed? To myself, I imagine, many years from now.

Yes, exactly, and I did receive the letters. I’m reading them now. Strangely enough, with the first big arts grant that I got a couple of years later after finishing “Desert Dive-Inn,” I used some of the money to travel to the Greek Islands for a few months, eating sausages in little cafés much like the one I had dreamt about. Adventures like that profoundly expanded my manner of thinking and being in the world. Maybe in some mysterious, subconscious way I was writing the story of my life by creating desires and expectations that I would eventually realize in action, ultimately becoming who I am now.

I remember my twentieth birthday ten years ago exactly, walking around Appleton Wisconsin where I was in college, kicking a stone on the sidewalk, a piece of crumbled paper, that, when I open it, turns out to be a child’s note with a child’s drawing of the sun. At the time, I didn’t know that my father was going to die two weeks later.
I had a dream about my father recently. I was sick in the hospital and he came to check on me. When he walked into the room I remembered that I used to practice walking like him when I was young. I watched him walk down the halls of the clinic where he had his office and I wanted to walk just like him. He said “I used to have a first name . . . can you help me out here.” I told him it was Daniel and he said “Yeah, that’s it. Thanks.” Then he looked at me and said seriously “You are doing okay, Tom.” I paused and then said honestly, “I guess that I’m going to be fine.” As he left the room, I realized that he was actually an older version of myself, coming to tell me that everything would be okay in the future.