I'm passing pages 100, 101. They are glowing shining comprehending, Adam's paragraphs. The book feels too good for me. Behind me lies a pile of largely unedited, even unread, words that I've catapulted into English, into my Swedish Word program. In the middle there is a wonderful book, a striking experience, reality shattering formulations; you, I, can feel the inner right of mania, the Orphic faith of it. The pervasiveness of a normalized mania nevertheless, living to earn money. Yesterday, after meeting a lovely woman at a bar I received this email from her, a parcel of a larger conversation:

"Theoretically everyone is a product of their environment, whether good or bad. Those who don't follow what society deems as 'normal' are deviants and diagnosed with something as though they're somehow less than the rest of us who have learned how to play the game. People with schizophrenia just have a different reality than you or me and can't survive in the community."

I replied:

"Likewise the environment is a product of our actions, and therefore the community is not merely given, rather it is something struggled over. Also, those who are 'outside' the community nevertheless are essential to its identity. Another way to put this maybe is that you can't exclude reality, or rather that exclusion is part of a never immediately graspable reality that is more than any community. The risk that I read into your 1am summation is that community is conceived of as a given thing, that can be pointed to, rather than a process that includes exclusion (as part of the process). At one point in my life my reality landed me in a mental institution, and it could again. For me being able to survive in the community while not subordinating my experience to its norms, is the struggle for existence (god that sounds grandiose), let's say being existent, as an individual that can speak and communicate (in and with the community) and is not left in the dustbin of irreconcilable difference. There is the potential that respect for such difference is part and parcel of a certain conservatism about what constitutes the social order, and patronizes while being in awe of the exoticism of the other."

It's wonderful that Åsa and Adam could live together when they did. In a way the grounding of manic insight is the recognition of that impossibility in the everyday. The going over toward what cannot be settled upon, but is nevertheless re-engaged. Another woman I met last night described Tango to me, the pushing against each other of the bodies, the friction of it, allows each to know where the other is, and how to (re)act. Without that tension, a slackening, harboring the abyss or our individuality.

DREAM: I'm back together with Jenny. I'm distrusting though. But then my girlfriend comes along and I go off with her. It's going to be easy to break up I think, she's complaining about my lack of sexual interest and her own engagement with others on the internet. She has a yellow patch around her eyes, pimply, says she's depressed, wears sunglasses. Jenny's jealousy doesn't escape me. She's with a friend. I had been planning to play soccer with some classmates but we don't have a ball.

I keep being drawn back to the yellow patch, it is like urine - I think of old age. She was interesting there though, it was something to focus on. Is it the translation? My Swedish dictionary is yellow and a bit ugly. Really I want to go back to my old loves ...

The Hospital at Mora.

I've come (too slowly) to the most jarring part of the book yet. Adam has finally made it to Sweden from the hospital in France, only to be considered healthy by the hospital at Mora, and let out to Åsa's panic. After what seems a night or two he heads off to Paris again. He is obviously manic, by his own account as well. The hospital's main difficulty though is in dealing with Åsa, to them he is a bit flighty, but ever so charming, and ultimately healthy. He cleans his room thoroughly before going, taking all his photos from the wall with him, except that of Åsa- she's not coming.

Åsa the superego. Evidence of the illness. Reality. Flight from.

Presumably reality lies somewhere inbetween. I recall my own anger at being forced into hospitalization in Sweden. I perceived that my mother got a perverse joy from having me fixed in one place, and from organizing my social contacts.

I've been given a writer's residence for June here: www.cyberpunkapocalypse.com

Still waiting to hear back from three agents, so far three uninterested responses.

The writing is quick when I do it, but slow in doing. Spring is popping up with surprising consistency.