(diaryland) July 28, 2001 - 5:48 p.m.

My mother told me that people have been stealing a lot of bowling shoes from bowling alleys lately. I'm not too sure what all this means, but I just bought what looks like bowling shoes.

She also told me that if I don't vacuum out my car, all the dusty bits and pebbles will work their way into the carpet and seats and kill the machinery and engine and my car won't work anymore. I understand her motivation for saying that - she's trying to scare me into vacuuming my car. But the first comment I mentioned is a little more cryptic. Whatever could it mean? Will I get wrongfully arrested for wearing bowling shoes? Will I turn to a life of violence and crime? Will I never clean my car due to bowling shoe overexposure? I can't answer these questions.

I saw a documentary about Marianne Faithfull last night. I love Marianne Faithfull a lot. I can't believe she managed to live after taking a hundred and fifty sleeping pills and then going into a coma for six days. And of course, there's that wall she lived on. She's a hardy person. But that's not why I admire her.

It was amazing to see the stuff she talked about freely in the late sixties. She was a very naughty person. She was this sweet folk singer who told everyone that to go nuts on drugs was really quite a nice thing to do. In a present-day interview, she was all like, "Oh, man. I can't believe I said that. What a dweeb." Which is true. And she gave many good reasons as to why she said such things in the sixties and why she shouldn't have said such things and she also said she didn't regret saying it. And that's why I think she's great. She can look back and understand her role in the sixties as a kind of loopy pawn for a bunch of guys and then go more hardcore than them all, eventually emerging with intelligent things to say about that role she had and changing things. It's neat.