Every day I come home and set to work killing the flies in my apartment. Every day I kill every last one of them, the task of chasing them down, slowly stalking them, and banging them with a rolled up magazine giving me far too much pleasure - some demonstrable sense of completion, a task I set to myself done, a goal completed - my stated goals of writing however don't ask about. And every day, thinking I have successfully killed off these flies that swarm around my house, that there should be no more left to spawn more, I still find a few flying around the next day when I get home from work. I am convinced that shortly my efforts will be successful and that I will come home to a house free of flies.

I am eating lots of chickpeas and using olive oil to cook just about everything I eat. I just finished reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and am trying to alter my diet and food buying habits. I have been eating more plants, buying more of them, and trying to buy minimally processed foods. After reading some of his other work and that of many other food crusaders, the book wasn't revelatory, the argument having been made before in other venues, other articles and books, about the negative effects of industrialized food, and yet the book was still affecting, reminded me of things and explained others in interesting ways, laying out a cogent argument against the culture of nutritionism and showing how the ideology underlying it allows food processors to continually market new products containing some hyped nutrient.

Fall arrived on Thursday. I called in sick to work on Wednesday and went to the beach, the weather forecast scaring me that it may have been the last warm day of summer, certainly the last warm day of August. And perhaps it was, the air quite chilly now at night, the days having some scent of fall, an autumn breeze seeping in, feelings of nostalgia and loneliness and lovesickness all colliding in a way that they tend to with the onset of fall for me. I want to put on the Belle and Sebastian and wear long sleeve collared shirts that I can shelter my neck in from the wind bringing about these melancholy feelings. This week I have been consuming things: alcohol, lots of cigarettes, Britney Spears at MSG, Gloria Trevi, Paulina Rubio, Juanes, and Enrique Iglesias also at MSG, The September Issue, the already mentioned Pollan book, Didion's After Henry, and countless (mostly pointless) magazine articles. I am looking for distractions. I live by myself and sometimes find I don't know what to do with myself. Increasingly, I find myself longing for some sort of boyfriend figure, someone to hang out with and sleep next to often. I am killing flies.