Seventeen degrees this morning. No wind, but a deep stillness; cold settling like sod, the air freighted with cold. Cold as a version of Bohemia in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale--a real land that is also an imaginary land. Cold as a way to exit, pursued by a bear.

Lately my imagination has been pinging all over the place, like those miniature pinball toys with rolling silver beads and elusive holes punched out in the shape of Santa, the ones that show up in Christmas stockings and are lost forever the next day. I think this is the result of my Thursday-night salon prompts: where I'm put on the spot to produce something, anything, from a pile of random Frankenstein scraps . . . a sort of automatic writing, clanking noisily into the dustbin of my brain, while sitting in a room crammed with other people's also-clanking dustbins, and we're all frantically filling our trash bags with returnables we hope to turn in later for a nickel apiece.

You see what I mean? Every hole is a rabbit hole.