I’m writing this entry from the passenger seat of our vehicle as we travel along I-80, just west of Iowa City, on our second day of travel in the Midwest. One of the cats is on my lap, and the other is in the back seat, asleep. A. is driving. We’re listening to music now, though earlier we were listening to a podcast. I drove all day yesterday, and this morning until early afternoon.

A. and I decided yesterday that we’ll begin our drive today instead of tomorrow. So I woke early this morning to write an entry or two before we leave. In about an hour I’ll walk over to the parking ramp and get our vehicle and bring it over onto our street. Then A. and I will make a couple trips in the elevator in our building, to bring our things down to it.

I feel like Søren Kierkegaard without the brilliance.

The internet has changed publishing, and continues to change it. Even that remark seems oddly dated.

I’m thinking of maybe concluding these entries early, or anyway taking a break from them when I get far enough to have been recording them for six months. And then of trying to publish them as the first volume of a two-volume work. Though I suspect I’ll have to self-publish both volumes if I do want to see them published. Because I don’t know any publishers who would be interested in them. And I don’t have the patience or the motivation to try to find one.

A. and I are planning to drive out to Wyoming on Saturday with the cats. That is, we’re planning on leaving the city on Saturday, and beginning the drive, which usually lasts three days. I’ll be going over to the parking garage this afternoon to check on our vehicle and to take it out for a drive, and fill it with gas, and maybe load it with two or three boxes from our apartment that we’re thinking we’ll bring out there with us, to the house.

Because it is the one thing that holds the attention of an audience after everything else dissipates, or resolves into the clarity of fact.

Mystery, of course, being the one trait that any given artwork must have, in order to in fact be art.

Which isn’t to say that’s what first comes to mind — a blonde and a brunette — when you think of Lynch’s movies, but that, if you consider them from a distance, in relation to each other, you realize it’s a fact that is there, in them. And that it’s part of their mystery.

Someone recently wrote, somewhere on social media, that “Every David Lynch movie is fundamentally about what if there was a blonde woman but also there was a brunette woman?” This was written in jest, of course, but it is funny because it is true. Because so much of Lynch’s work does seem to depend on that question, or paradigm, as an element of plot, and as a motif.

In other words, themes or motifs will repeat themselves in an artist’s work, but the work rarely benefits from the artist becoming conscious of that fact. Or, anyway, from an analysis of that fact, by the artist, once he or she does become conscious of it.

Which I don’t think is uncommon, in the creative process, and which I’m sure means something, psychologically speaking.

I went through a phase when I was preoccupied with doppelgängers, one might even say obsessed. That is, they often appeared in my work, even if I didn’t know, when I was beginning a particular work, that one was going to make an appearance in it.

I once wrote a novella that is set partly in this neighborhood. It can be found in a book called The Three Sunrises, which includes two other novellas. That specific novella is about a man who encounters his doppelgänger one morning, as he waits on a platform in the subway in the city.

Notre Dame is French for Our Lady, I don’t know if I need to say that. Meaning, I don’t know if most people know it, and don’t need to be reminded of it, or if most people don’t know it at all.

I say I walked to the top of a hill, but really I climbed a stairwell on the far side of a snowy baseball diamond in the park that is at the bottom, and to one side, of that hill. When I reached the sidewalk at the top I was on the street that runs behind the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which is two blocks from the church I was heading to, the Church of Notre Dame.

The way I got there is I rode the E train from Court Square over into Manhattan, switched to an uptown B train at 7th Avenue, got out at 110th Street, at the northwest corner of Central Park, and walked several blocks to the top of a hill, where 114th Street meets Morningside Drive.

Today is the feast day of Our Lady of Lourdes, so I went to Mass up in Morningside Heights, near Columbia University, at the Church of Notre Dame, where there is, in the sanctuary, a replica of the grotto in which Our Lady appeared to Bernadette Soubirous, in Lourdes, in France, in 1858.

To put it another way, it will promote Christ ‘without the cross’. That is, it will emphasize Christ’s compassion and mercy, but none of his spirit of sacrifice, and none of his judgment.

Which makes sense, because the spirit of Antichrist will not manifest as something monstrous and obvious, but as something sneaky and counterfeit. It will be, as Fulton Sheen said, “the ape of the Church.”