Last night I dreamed that in each of the pictures that I’ve been talking about taking, in these last few entries, I posed, rather randomly or arbitrarily, a little statuette of Our Lady, which I usually keep on a dresser in A.’s and my bedroom. Meaning, in the dream I began to carry the statuette around with me, and whenever I stopped to take a picture with my phone, I placed her, or positioned her, somewhere in the frame, or area of focus, so that she would appear in whatever setting I happened to choose to memorialize that day, even if the setting itself was in no way remarkable.

If I do decide to post one, however, I want to make sure that I post one the following day as well, and the day after that, and the day after that, and so on, continually, or anyway regularly, for a period of time to which I will have committed myself beforehand, so that the consistency with which they appear might compensate for their ordinariness, or anyway might transform their ordinariness into a slightly higher order or level of ordinariness than they would’ve had on their own, apart from one another.

I went out on the balcony this afternoon and took a bunch of pictures with my phone of the roadway and the rail yard and the buildings and the traffic, and also of the gray, overcast sky and some of the stoplights in the distance. They all look pretty ordinary. I don’t know yet if I’m going to post one of them, but I’m still thinking of doing so. The fact that they’re ordinary looking doesn’t bother me, I don’t think. I think maybe I want them to look ordinary.

I have an idea to maybe start taking a photo each day and posting it to my Instagram or to one of the other social platforms. By which I mean looking each day for some object or scene or person to take a photo of, throughout the day, while I’m doing whatever else I’m doing, so as to document my life, visually, in a way that is not dissimilar to what I’m doing here in these entries, with the written word. Though I don’t yet know if the idea is something I’ll commit to, and that will take hold, or if it’s something that has merely occurred to me and temporarily captured my attention but soon, for one reason or another, will depart from me.

I remember once when I was ill, in Baltimore, Maryland, as a seven year-old, I had a kind of religious experience while looking at a picture book that had been made of the George Lucas version of Return of the Jedi. I was lying on a couch, covered in blankets, paging through the book, and when I reached the part where Yoda dies I became very emotional and began to weep. I think I had the flu then too, though I’m not certain that’s what it was. My family had only recently come over to the United States from Australia. My dad was doing a residency at Johns Hopkins.

Anyway, I am still quite ill, with what appears now to be the flu, so it’s a good thing I hadn’t arranged to go with A. on the trip overseas, when she’d been planning it, because I would’ve now had to cancel my ticket. I have body aches and congestion and all those unpleasant symptoms that one associates with this virus. I haven’t left the apartment in three days.

Especially when I’m in the middle of a project, as I am with this one, I don’t like to interrupt it to go off somewhere for leisure, because I cannot easily relax when I am there, at the destination; cannot easily cease my thinking about the work that I’m supposed to be doing. I guess I’ve felt for a long time that I need to have at least one more success, or literary achievement, before I can ease up, so to speak, work-wise. If one can call what I’m doing with these entries ‘work’. Which maybe one can’t.

A. is with her sister and one of her friends in Paris today. Paris is A.’s favorite city in the world. She boarded a flight from JFK yesterday with her friend, who lives in Manhattan, and they met up with A.’s sister once A. and the friend had landed at, I think, Charles de Gaulle. A.’s sister had flown from Phoenix to Dallas, and then from Dallas to Paris. I have stayed here in the city, with the cats, because I don’t like to travel as much as A. does, or rather like to travel in a different way, or for different reasons, even if I do enjoy traveling with A. when we happen to do so, because she has a lighthearted soul, and is pleasant to be around.

Unrelated, but I just saw that David Lynch has died. I mentioned him in an entry only a few days ago, when I was talking about America’s great film directors who are still living. His vision of the world was strange, terrible, beautiful, and true. Rest in peace to a real artist.

The French Open is the only one of the four slams that is played on clay courts.

The nickname for the Australian Open is ‘the Happy Slam’ because, I think, it has a cheerful, friendly, low-key sort of vibe, as compared to, say, Wimbledon, which has a reputation for being a little more formal or buttoned-up. Of course, with its grass courts and well-kept grounds, Wimbledon is probably the most beautiful of the four slams. The other two slams are the French Open and the U.S. Open.

I am following the tennis intermittently this morning. Meaning, the TV is on, but I am not sitting on the couch watching it, but rather am doing other things in the apartment while sometimes stopping in its vicinity and observing whatever match happens to be airing. The Australian Open is the tournament that is underway. I watch both the men’s matches and the women’s matches, and there are players that I like on both sides of the tour. My family is from Australia, as I think I have mentioned. And in fact is from the city of Melbourne, which is where the Open is played. I like to see, when the camera pans out across the skyline, in between matches, or before and after a commercial, the areas of the city that I am familiar with, even if I haven’t lived there since I was a child.

Of course, not everyone has time to pray, because they are busy with their lives. But there are other ways to recall oneself to God, or to consecrate to Him the activity of one’s days, so as to “work out your salvation,” as St. Paul wrote, “with fear and trembling.” Though I’d have to be presumptuous to think that I could say much more about the topic than that. Already I’ve probably said too much.

In fact, I’ve come to realize that I need to pray the Rosary every day, at the very least, unless I want to make myself more vulnerable than I already am to the vicissitudes of my personality or temperament.

There are, on certain days, moments when you become aware of the direction the day might go, spiritually speaking, if you don’t soon commit to moving yourself off to a quiet corner to pray, and this day was one of them for me.

I did manage to pray the Rosary, in A.’s and my bedroom, after I’d lay on the couch in front of the TV for much of the morning, flipping between the business news channel and the tennis channel, and scrolling on my phone.

I am unwell today, with either a bad cold or the flu. I felt it coming on yesterday in the evening, and then couldn’t sleep very well in the night because of it, and now today it is fully here, in my system. If I don’t write much today, or in the next few days, that is the reason why — because I’m feeling run-down. Although I am going to try to write anyway, if I can. Even if it is just to record how I am managing, illness-wise.

Three more women came in before Mass began, and sat in the row of chairs behind me and the old Asian lady, whose name I’d found out was Nancy. When the priest returned to the chapel, through the door he’d gone out by, he was dressed in his vestments, and his hands were folded in prayer.

I should say that this chapel was extremely small and makeshift. For one thing, it did not have pews and kneelers, but only chairs that had been arranged into a handful of rows, and that had the appearance of school board meeting chairs, or auditorium seating, or something like that. There were no windows, and the walls were made of laminate, or imitation wood, or some such material that you might find in the basement of a Midwestern house from the previous century. The altar was not raised up very high from the floor, but was more like an extension of it. The statuary was modest, serviceable. None of which is meant as a criticism, but only as a way of describing how a chapel will often differ from the church to which it is attached, in its dimensions and its aesthetics and its function. If anything I was touched by its humility. Which of course brought it closer to God than anything that would try to be grand. There was a cleanness and earnestness to it that made it somehow more vulnerable to those who would approach it with a critical eye, and yet to criticize it would reveal only the spiritual failings of the critic. One need think only of the stable where Jesus was born, to understand this.

While we were praying, the priest entered the chapel through the same door I’d come through, did a couple tasks on the altar, and went out through a different door, probably into the vestry.