wn country, because everything seems like fiction. Since I started writing on a computer, I have saved everything I write by hand. I do not dream of flying. In the middle of summer, a rainy day makes me as happy as a sunny day in the middle of winter. When I’m in a foreign country, I pay more attention to the norm than to the exceptions, I would rather spend time in small cities that have nothing remarkable about them than in capitals full of curiosities. I have not put on rubber boots in at least three years. I suppress the superfluous. I am handsomer with a cane. I don’t need to talk much. I need to not talk much. I do not shout. I eat three times a day. I do not eat between meals. I drink two liters of tea a day. I need to leave the house at least once a day. Once when I was six I was running up the boulevard Saint-Michel, I was racing my cousin back to school, each of us on his own sidewalk, I crossed without looking, a car hit me, I flew two meters and landed on my head, nose broken, face bloody, the car drove off, someone got the license number, the driver was a nursing student, my father went to see her, he had decided not to lodge a complaint because he didn’t want to ruin her future career, she wouldn’t see him, she lived with her mother who opened the door a crack and said: “If you’ve come to blackmail us, get lost,” and slammed it shut. When I was fourteen I had my ears pinned back, at the suggestion of my father, who had his ears pinned back when he was eighteen. When I was twelve I had warts on my left heel, several treatments failed to get rid of them, my mother decided to have them burned off, a very painful operation that my brother was supposed to have undergone a few years earlier, but the day before the operation, his terror had literally made the warts disappear, I hoped the same thing would happen to me, but it didn’t, the dermatologist worked away at my foot for an hour, when we left his office my mother said, “I think I suffered worse than you did,” two months later the warts came back, one year later another dermatologist, whom I trusted the moment I saw him because of his gentle face, made them disappear in four sessions by applying a brown odorless cream that he had concocted himself, I learned ten years later that he died of AIDS. I have Asian friends. I do not eat ice cream. I do not fill my house with “finds.” In nearly empty restaurants I count the number of people and pity the fate of the restaurateurs. I cannot stand to read vernacular English translated into French, the expressions, often misplaced, are dredged up from the translator’s youth or from what he believes to be the language of the street. I enjoy the simple décor of Protestant temples. I admire American religious ceremonies where the preachers launch into sermons that come close to song and trance, as if they might revive that morbid, desireless event: the Mass. In my periods of depression, I visualize the funeral after I kill myself, there are lots of friends there, lots of sadness and beauty, the event is so moving that it makes me want to live through it, so it makes me want to live. I don’t know how to leave naturally. I want to laugh with common people, tattooed, fat, bare-chested in a campground, making lots of noise and off-color remarks. I shave with an electric razor, it’s quicker and less painful than a blade. I often wonder what people say about me right after I leave: maybe nothing. I have had four motorcycles: a Kawasaki Zephyr 750, a Yamaha SR 125, a Honda CB 500, a Kawasaki ER 500. I do not write memoirs. I do not write novels. I do not write short stories. I do not write plays. I do not write poems. I do not write mysteries. I do not write science fiction. I write fragments. I do not tell stories from things I’ve read or movies I’ve seen, I describe impressions, I make judgments. It is no use asking me to repeat a news story, even one a few weeks old. I don’t learn the names of cabinet ministers by heart. I learned what little I know about agropolitics in prep school. I visit numerous buildings though I have no technical knowledge of architecture, it amazes me that they can construct a vault, a ceiling twenty meters high, a tunnel, a skyscraper, I don’t want to know any more about it because I’m afraid I will be disenchanted. I know nothing about the mechanics of automobiles, but I am not amazed that cars go. I would like to accept the idea of love without passion. Sports on TV bore me. Concerts on TV bore me. I find the musicians badly dressed, with bad haircuts. I do not go to concerts. I have a recurring nightmare: in an apartment where I’ve been living for several years I find a hole in a room that I rarely use, the hole is accessible from outside, so all that time anyone could have come in without my knowing it, and maybe they have. I prefer lamps with lampshades to halogen lamps. Someone playing the saw depresses me more than the accordion, but less than clowns. The traditional circus revolts me more than figure skating. I can manage to snicker at synchronized swimming, but not at figure skating. In curling, the sweeper makes me laugh. I feel sorry for actors who have reinvented themselves as Renaissance jesters in sound and light shows, especially if they take their job seriously. I have witnessed an air guitar competition. I find mimics reactionary. I would rather watch bad mimics, who think they are doing impressions of celebrities but only mimic other mimics. In disused factories and abandoned barns I feel emotions that are aesthetic (beauty defined by function), nostalgic (sites of production where nothing now is produced), erotic (memories of children’s games), beneficent vacuity, calm, all mixed up, in a tingling way, with feelings of death, fear (perfect scene for a crime), and the forbidden (no one gave me permission to enter this private property). I always regret taking a shower at night, the hot water keys me up and keeps me from sleeping. I feel irritable and sticky if I don’t wash in the morning. My oldest memory is of a creek in Spain with a high, steep bank, I am wearing a white hat and I don’t know how to swim, according to my mother this happened when I was less than two years old. The ticking of the alarm clock and the dripping of radiators keep me from sleeping. I sleep better in absolute darkness. I have dry skin. As a hypochondriac, I rejoice in my ignorance of most diseases. I drink water. I do not drink lemonade. I drink Coca-Cola. I do not drink beer. I drink red wine when I eat, and sweet whites by themselves. I often remember that there is something I’m forgetting, but what? I prefer beginnings to endings. I do not scorn the teachings of my mother. I have not managed to describe the pain of a powerful electric shock. I am surprised that some people worship Satan, the name makes you think more of profanation than of cults. I have taken Prozac, Lysanxia, Athymil, Lexomil, and Temesta without success. I have stolen things from shops, but not from people’s homes. I have never swindled anyone. I do not feel joy doing evil. I saw a madman walking up the boulevard Beaumarchais in his socks, in the middle of the street, creating a traffic jam that moved as slowly as he did, he wore white and gazed up at the sky, trailed by the furious honking cortege of cars, it wasn’t until he got to place de la République that he deigned to step up onto the sidewalk. When I lived in the rue Legendre I often saw a woman in her sixties who was a mass of nervous tics, I wondered how she managed to smoke without burning herself. Three things make pools unpleasant: the locker rooms, the fluorescent lights, the smell of chlorine. I have no financial woes. I wait to sort my mail. My life is nothing like a hammer. I wish there were one-liter bottles of wine. In an abandoned factory, I smelled a mixture of dust, grease, old floorboards, and fossilized sweat. I think the rich are wickeder than the poor. “I love you” can be a form of blackmail. I do not force myself to be enthusiastic, even with people who are. I have spoken with several American Indians. I have spoken with several Indian Indians. I have spoken with at least a thousand Americans. I have no obese friends. I have no anorexic friends. I cannot integrate myself into a group of friends who already know each other, I will always be the latecomer, I like groups of friends formed all together at the same moment. I do not know what I expect from love. Passionate declarations make me think of hysteria. A friend of mine swears that people behave more aggressively toward him when he wears his red suit. Here is how I tell the story of Jesus: an adulteress got her husband to believe that she was impregnated by God, she drove her son crazy with this story, which he believed, he set off to announce the good news and it got him killed. I have sometimes thought that everything I know is stored in my brain, so I think intensely about this flimsy piece of flesh, but I feel a void, the organ evokes nothing in me: I am unable to think about the organ of my thinking. I do not iron my shirts. I do not think my house is tilting to its death. Too much light doesn’t bother me during the day, but it gives me neuralgia at night. I have no spiritual father. I do not know what debts I owe to which artists. I do not feel myself under the influence of any writer. I am more guest than host. I do not wear tight pants, they prevent me from writing. I will never have finished reading the Bible. I will never be done with