All of which is to say that, yes, I wanted to write about something, wanted to find some subject to write about, even if it wasn’t much of a subject, in terms of importance, but had to do merely with place, or weather, or time of day, et cetera; some insignificant subject, in other words (in comparison to others); something rather innocuous, so that I could persuade myself to try and put some words on a page, without thinking too much about what those words might be, or what they might suggest, or point toward; and thus begin to make some progress on the book I was supposed to be ‘gathering material’ for, even if I didn’t appear to be gathering material at all, at least not in the sense of being, say, investigative, or ground-breaking, or anything marginally exciting, but instead was just a guy in a motel room with his laptop, writing about where he was, and what his day had been like, and what he thought or felt about what his day had been like, and so on.