update

I am still caught in Chicago limbo, John and I spend our times in cafes and eating meals out in restaurants. No family around, everyone in Iowa as my brother's new baby was born. This week waiting I am having kittens. We are leaving for the South day after Christmas, will be driving through the mountains in a snowstorm. A sort of luscious and empty boredom. I just had lentil soup + garlic spinach + a glass of Cote du Rhone.  So am slightly tipsy writing this. Have decided my New Year's Resolution is to drink more (I will write this in my Ledger like Scott). Have more cocktails - all my life I never had cocktails, never allowed myself, and I feel this needs to be fixed in what's going into my 33rd year (I turn 33 this weekish, end of the year, or does that make this my 34th year?). Went to Violet Hour with Suzanne, a cocktail bar with Prohibition-style pretensions. Had a ginger-like-vodka thing. Fizzy and light. Am now deciding cocktails will decide my life. Of course am furious through the Fitzgeralds. So am living them, and wanting to fight and get splashy sorts of drunk and move all over Europe with an open suitcase always in the center of the room. 3/4th of the Nancy Milford/ Zelda bio is subtitled "Breakdown." Am writing furiously in my notebook about Zelda and what it all means - I feel I'm now adopting the pose of the essayist, again. Perhaps this thing will be written.

While at dinner with John tonight - this week the move we are always together there is no where else to go - mapped out a new novel. John thought it was maybe minor but what makes something minor or not? Everything I write is minor, I argued.  It will be called "Deenie by Judy Blume." It will be epic I think. A minor epic, of course. From birth to an early death. Like Tristam Shandy except a fucked up girl who wants to be a model. But maybe a black page as homage. But not just about a girl, the education of a girl, but also filtered through Deenie by Judy Blume which is also filtered through the character of Deenie played by Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass. I keep on wanting to write novels like Thomas Bernhard or Elfriede Jelinek or fuck it, Faulkner, but instead I come up with titles like "Deenie by Judy Blume" or "Cunt Portraits."

I am now going to bed.