DAY 8 (San Francisco: Borderlands Books)

I visit a dentist who has been acquainted with my mouth for approximately twenty years. Who says I don't know how to cultivate lasting relationships? My dentist puts his hand in my mouth. I think of the Mouth of Truth. Probing, my dentist says, "It takes courage to get up and read your writing in front of people, especially short stories, which are so intimate. To expose yourself in public."

I would point out that it could hardly be any more intimate than the position in which I am now, but he has his fingers in my mouth. What I discover about the Mouth of Truth: it is impossible to say, "Taaake your haaand out of my mooouth" when someone really does have his hand in your mouth. I grunt. What I try to convey with my grunt: modest acquiescence.

When he removes his hand, I tell him I am going to write 32 very short stories about teeth. He says he would be honored.

My ex-girlfriend later tells me she went to get her teeth cleaned a week ago and the hygienist suddenly said, "Oh my God, I have to be excused." She ran out of the room, leaving Caroline with one side of her mouth cleaner than the other and a mysterious puddle by the chair. It turned out the hygienist's water broke.

"It had a smell," Caroline said.

"What kind of smell?"

"I don't know if I've ever smelled that smell before."

After the dentist (AD), I lie around my parents' backyard in a beanbag chair and watch tadpoles ruminating in a murky bowl. Dogs bring me a succession of round things to throw. I remember an occasion when we were eating in the backyard and my mother said, Oh, look at the pretty pink ribbon someone put on the dog. Only nobody had put a pink ribbon on the dog. Then we looked at it more closely and saw that it was an intestine. The intestine of a rat, in whose remains, behind the garage, the dog had rolled.

I walk to Moe's and buy more books on my trade slip. I buy:
The out of print paperback version of the (17th? 16th? Century) book On Monsters And Marvels by Ambroise Pare (which I have been looking for for years!)
The Courtship of Sea Creatures by somebody Otte
A field guide to deserts

Borderlands Books gives a prize to the writer who has the most annoying fans. The prize is named after the most annoying fan of all, who is now banned from the store. Why is he so annoying, we want to know.

"He collects body parts," they say. "Also, he looms."

"He looms?"

"He's very tall, and he looms."

Before the reading, I visit the new McSweeney's store, where Dave Eggers is cutting a woman's hair. She is very excited. The store has a pirate theme, and it's great. It sells glass eyes, wooden legs, maps. There is a tableau of a chicken contemplating a pair of arms reaching up out of a lacquered surface. There is a bin of lard and a bin of rice. I ask if I can make a small ball out of the lard and roll it in the rice. "No," says Dave Eggers.

"Everything in the store costs money," explains the boy behind the counter.

"Oh, I was going to pay for it!" I say. We agree on a price: 92 cents. I make the lard ball. I roll it in the rice. It looks like sushi. I ask for a tissue to wrap it in, and a receipt.

That night, I have a dream about the McSweeney's store, but it is much bigger, and intricate and personal things take place there, in the back rooms. Someone was telling me proudly that he had been given the superhero name, "The Blue Screen". I was sad, thinking that what this meant was that he had no personality or aptitudes of his own whatsoever, existed only to host the projections of others. What kind of superhero is that!?

DAY 9 (San Francisco: SF Public Library)

I get an email from a friend who says, "The Blue Screen would be a great superhero!!!! He could wrap around his enemies and create any number of enviroments best suited to defeat them - anything from a trauma from their childhood, a sandy beach to pacify them, or a scene where Blue Screen himself was dead, making them leave. Also, some esp would help too." He is right, of course.

There are certain places I must go before I leave San Francisco: Peets, Taqueria Cancun, Good Vibrations. My ex-girlfriend and I go to all these places, buy coffee, burritos, and other things of various shapes and colors. We are impressed with, but do not buy, a kit for casting a silicone dildo in the shape of your lover's penis. I imagine scenarios in which I fuck my boyfriend with his own penis, in which I fuck my secret lover with my boyfriend's penis, in which I fuck my boyfriend with my secret lover's penis. Doubtless there are many, many more permutations, all piquant in different ways. My ex-girlfriend buys me a miniature chrome vibrator on a keychain.

Then we go to the beach. At the beach, we squeeze through bars into an emergency sewage overflow outlet. It is beautiful and creepy in there, but the tide is coming in, and we get panicky and leave.

Every day we have a reading; it's like going to work, and Kelly and I agree that when we get back to Brooklyn, we are going to start feeling restless around seven o'clock every evening, as if there is something we are supposed to be doing. The library reading takes place in a bookstore that occupies a corner on one side of the vast foyer of the new Main Library. People entering or leaving the library stop and listen for a while, continue on their way. Staring men in rags come in from the sidewalk, stand at the back and listen for a while, leave again. I like this very much and say to Kelly afterwards, we should hold readings on street corners, or drive-by readings from cars. I read Foetus for my friend Trudy, who gives me a wind up amputated hand. Disturbingly, it is wearing a wedding ring, and is well manicured. Kelly reads the Specialist's Hat. Afterwards a woman tells me she printed out the Mary Tofts the rabbit breeder memorial Connect-The-Dots puzzle from my website and is planning to complete it later. I am very happy about this.

On the way north I tell Kelly about the dildo kit. Because I have a story called Dildo, it naturally occurs to me to release a limited-edition dildo as a tie-in. But what would I cast? Fingers? Kelly and I lament that we do not have penises. We think of the Plaster Casters, and wonder if writers ever get those requests, and if not why not. Again, we wish we had penises.