Something I like about pre-Space Age science fiction book covers: The Earth is always depicted without clouds, like a cartographic globe. Not one cloud. The oceans are an unimpeded, uniform blue and the continents are masses of untroubled green.

Last night I slept badly because my bedroom doesn't get enough cool air from the AC box in my living room/office. I slept part of the night on the futon and stumbled into the bedroom sometime in the early morning, although my memory of this is hazy. After working online for a while, I collapsed for a few hours. Fearing a wasted day, I spent the rest of my time reading and drinking caffeinated beverages. I started Norman Spinrad's "Agent of Chaos," which I quite like, and returned from the coffeeship with a stabbing pain in my head. The heat is pretty bad, although I noticed a cool breeze tonight.

I've had a buried preoccupation with death the last couple days, judging from the content of my dreams. I think it's the temperature; I have to be perfectly comfortable in order to get a good night's sleep. The slightest disturbance can make me feel drugged or feverish. Variations in air pressure give me headaches.

Sometimes I feel a little bit like "Newton" from Walter Tevis' "The Man Who Fell to Earth." Newton, a human-looking alien, was on a mission to transport water to his dying home planet. I don't have a mission. No extraterrestrial imperatives to appease that I know of. I think this is why spy movies are so popular; the romanticized spy lives a life with a defined purpose, whereas those of us unlucky enough not to be James Bond suffer from a sort of amnesia, as if awaiting instructions that will never come.