This morning vur' early I drove up to the small suburb where I used to live. I added boxes of books to my storage cube there--- cleaning out the flat, trying to make shelf space for books. I liked being there so early: alone amid corridors of roll-down metal doors, alone in air-conditioned shadow. The facility is automated; motion detectors turn lights on and off as you go down the passageways. I liked that, too. It had a Wm. Gibson feel to it--- silence and machines and shadow in an exiles' city.

I stopped at a donut shop in a small town on the way up. I drank coffee and thought about steeping wherever she might be. Tiny donut shops late at night or vur' early in the morning, little coffeehouses at the same times--- university towns with shaded streets, urban corners in half-hidden neighbourhoods. I do wonder about where steeping is for breakfast, or ginny_mccoo, or yes_please or Apparitional at D-Land... Where are they on Saturday mornings at 0700--- sleeping naked on crisp cool sheets, writing in paper journals in cafes, lighting a cigarette on a balcony and looking out at empty streets?

Black coffee and cigarettes--- Amber Valleta called that the New York Models' Diet. I do like that idea. It's something I must ask both Ginny at ginny_mccoo and Liz V. at nightmareteeth about.

Long ago the Evil Dana Lynn worked at a gourmet coffees outlet--- she was working there when she first met me. She tried to teach me to drink coffee black. I can do that with Cuban or Turkish coffee, but I've never been a black coffee drinker. It's a habit-- two of the little blue packets of diet sweetener. I have to wonder if it's for the flavour or just to have something to do with my hands--- tear, pour, stir while talking or reading. I'm bad about that--- pens, stirrers, small objects on my desk. I need something to fidget with while I talk or read.

It's only 1025 hours here. I'll be back in the city for lunch. Then I'll sit on my balcony and read Banville's "The Untouchable" and light a cigarillo and make notes in my Moleskine. I will try to re-read "The Great Gatsby" this weekend. I do feel a need for Fitzgerald.

Ginny at ginny_mccoo is making lists of books about Japan--- "outsider-looking-in" books, she calls them: expat memoirs, bar hostess' accounts. I've drawn up a list to send her. She and I do agree that Ishiguro's books count, too: he's as much an outsider in Japan as any gaijin novelist.

Make note: tell ginny_mccoo about "Fear and Trembling" (2006)--- from Amelie Nothomb's novel. Another outsider-in-Japan film (and book) I think she'd like.

"Teeth" was vur' funny. And the girl who played the lead--- Jess Weixler ---was vur' lovely. It's a small film I will be recommending. And I must look for "Big Bad Swim", Jess Weixler's first film.

I'm going to miss the days when driving was affordable. I'm going to miss exploring forgotten towns and finding cafes and bookstores and shadowed houses. I grew up finding towns like that all through the inland Deepest South. I wish I could find them in the high desert or along stretches of empty coast--- but the future is one of five and six-dollar gasoline. I'm a believer in trains and subways, but I'll miss the days of exploring inland, exploring out from secondary roads. Six-dollar gasoline will put a halt to creeping standardisation and strip-mall and big-box infiltration of hidden little towns, and that's a plus. But it will make all those towns as inaccesible as parts of the Ura Nihon or the Altai. You can take some ultra-high tech train from Beijing to Lhasa these days: the lake villages on the Tibetan plateau will be easier to get to than towns in Tensas Parish.