How am I going to get this book project off the ground, Fish Ladders of Oregon: A Typological Survey, when it hurts to take a deep breath? This one small part of me is spasming. My trunk makes a fist. To breathe or twist invites trouble, as do some kinds of reaching, or waving to a lonely friend as he leaves on the California Zephyr for an ill-advised rendezvous with a guy with a choking fetish he met on the internet. It's going to be a coffee table book full of stark black and white photographs, like the Bechers' book on water towers. I've withdrawn into my room again, what with my spasms and my sneezes, my garbled speech and nameless fears. My Friedrich air purifier is running eighteen hours a day. Sometimes it crackles, it's like a cozy campfire for sad urban shut-ins. Nobody will look at fish ladders the same way again. A chronicle of human ingenuity and grateful fish. I'm an adult survivor of nothing at all, I make an impression like a dog walking in wet cement, plus I'm getting pretty old—it's time to latch onto something, and this fish ladders thing might be my ticket to a slightly less empty part of oblivion. Imagine being buttonholed by someone like me at a party, enduring the most profound tedium as I go on and on about fish ladders. I used to think buttonholed meant something else, it led to some funny misunderstandings.