2026

● Friday, 1-2-2026:   Trump called his controversial 2024 budget bill, which further cut taxes for the wealthy, the “one big, beautiful bill.” I call it the one big beautiful-for-the-rich (ugly-for-everyone-else) bill.

● Saturday, 1-3-2026:   Desert ride. It was pleasurable. I had a renewed sense of accomplishment in my Journal. I ate my usual patty melt at Tom’s #25 in West Palmdale. It was good. Traffic was lighter than usual, probably because of the rain. I had intended to work straight through on my Journal, to finish this read-through by Sunday (tomorrow); it would have been convenient to begin the next two-week break from it on Monday, since I have four depositions next week. But my energy-level crashed; I was fatigued and unable to keep working on the Journal, and so I was forced to take a day off. One of the more substantial diversions on my meager menu of entertainments is the desert ride . . ..

● Sunday, 1-11-2026:   I just had a dream in which I was an attempted murderer. I was in a gun store high in the mountains in a European country; I bought 40 high powered rifle cartridges, and was firing them with my rifle at a long row of outdoor yellow seats in some business establishment far below, trying to kill people. I hadn’t hit anyone yet. After firing 16 rounds (I had 24 left), I got scared that I’d be caught, and so I stopped shooting and left the gun store. I was driving down the mountain road, trying to find a place to discard the remaining ammunition, to evade incrimination. I thought that, by now, police would be trying to find the shooter, and I worried that, if the police found the rest of my ammunition, they’d have caught me because my fingerprints would be on them. Then I woke up.

● I just finished this last read-through of my Journal. Like the one just before it, it seemed especially fruitful. And I feel good about the 2025 material. This one took 36 days (a time with few depositions), and I added eight pages of new Diary material.

● I just awoke from a dream. I was in late college or graduate school, and soon to graduate and start a professional career. I was in a quandary over what to study and to choose as my career. I had been studying law, but turned it down as a career because I found it tedious. Instead, I chose the kind of work involved in the last class I happened to take: studying bird biology. In the last scene in the dream, I was meeting with the professor—alone (it was so late in the school year that she was meeting with me specially, not as part of a regularly scheduled class)—and I was explaining to her my decision about this. At one point in my explanation, I was showing her a scene of a hypothetical legal case, a traffic collision. I said something like, “I find it so boring that I couldn’t even remember the color of the sky, and we both, unsuccessfully, tried to remember the color of the sky. Then the scene zoomed in on the cars involved in the massive gridlock/collision. There were many newish luxury cars; one was a new, white Rolls Royce. I think it was somehow a reference to the potential lucrativeness of a legal career, wealth that I somehow missed. But my point was that law was out of the question because I hated the work. This dream came just a few hours after I added a note in this Journal to an entry of 1-26-2001, wherein I express an insight about the difference between humans and lower animals (and which note I thought was especially good). I interpret the study of bird biology as symbolizing my desire to write: when I write, I fly. . . .