This morning I tried to ride the rickety bike sitting in the back of the barn to the small cemetery a few miles away. First I had to hose it down, because I think it had been sitting there for a while and had dust and dirt and cobwebs all over it. I used the hose attached to the main house and then let it dry off while I went inside and had some coffee and read the front page of the New York Times. Nothing good is going on in the world, I noted. Not one piece of good news.

I went back outside and there were spiders crawling all over the bike, little metallic gray ones. I had trashed their home. I tried to figure out where they had been living exactly, and decided it was inside the handlebars. I turned the hose back on and flooded the handlebars, wiped the bike down, and then, in my regular hourly fit of paranoia, I checked for ticks.

There are tons of ticks here, everywhere. One of the artists, Liria, a Spanish environmental artist, informed me the first day I was here that she had already gotten Lyme disease. She had found at least ten ticks on her. "They must like me," she said. She went to a doctor and got an antibiotic and now she has no fear anymore: she can't get it again while she's on the antibiotic. I would think I would be the kind of person ticks would like since I'm so terribly juicy, but thankfully I've been tick-free - though I can't say the same for mosquitos and spiders, who have left their mark mainly on my back and shoulders.

I took the bike out on Hopyard Road and turned right instead of my usual left toward Devil's Hopyard, the state park I walk to every day. I have given up on hiking on the residency property for extended amounts of time. The horseflies are monstrous and completely immune to Off, or any other bug spray. They attack the head repeatedly, as if they were on a mission. They certainly haven't infested even a fraction of the property, but it's completely unpleasant when you walk through their territory. The other artists have been here longer and it doesn't bother them as much, but I can't deal with it at all except for short-term walks to the pond on the property, with its still waters that reflect the trees and sky as a mirror image.

Mainly, though, I walk a mile up the road to the Devil's Hopyard (there are at least five stories about the origin of the name involving the actual devil, someone dressed as a devil, and someone named "Dibble"), a park featuring a waterfall, and a number of trails that, while not by any means bug-free, will at least take me places where I can sit quietly and contemplate my writing and my life. Or nothing at all, if I choose.

Sometimes I like the nothing at all part the best. I lose myself in the woods for two hours a day and then I'll come back and write for three hours, the words pouring out of me in a rush, and then I'll nap, and then I'll eat, and then I'll edit, and somewhere in there I'll read - I've read four books in the last week (The Hours, Blue Angel, Dancing Queen, and Seabiscuit) and a half - and then I'll go to sleep and start it up all over again.

At least that was last week. This week I'm going a little stir-crazy. On Sunday I was PMS-ing, and then yesterday I was in bed all afternoon with cramps, and today I feel like maybe I could start a new story, but I decided to write this instead. It's the first time I've contemplated my site since I've been here. It doesn't feel like a part of what I'm doing here at all, though I know at least some of what I do on the site is art, whatever that word means. The internet is just a little low rent for these folks, I think, though there is a website for the program.

For example, we had our open studios on Sunday for those of us remaining (Kamilla, the lovely painter, left on Saturday, as did Jerry, the funny, older man from Los Angeles who composes music for movies). Liria gave a presentation on Ikebana (I've no idea if I spelled that right), a Japanese floral design artform she was doing on a large scale throughout the property, and I read half of a short story I had completed (I'm not so sure how well it went over but I'll get to that in a minute). Then we went to Eddie's studio and he talked about his opera and played parts of it on the piano. I don't know very much about opera but everyone seemed very enthusiastic about it. And then Ellen, who had just arrived, showed us sketches of the environmental installation she plans to do on the property. In a way I think I liked that the best. She wants to create a rift in the ground, and explore what happens underneath the rift. It just struck me as really cool.

Then we all drove down to town to have lunch, the artists and some of the board members and Ralph, the guy who owns the house and the land and I guess funds a lot of the program. He's a quiet guy, but he loves this place a lot, I can tell. When I asked him what he thought of the open studios, he said, "Oh I loved it. That's really the reward for me." So I like Ralph even though I don't actually understand him.

On the way into the restaurant I heard my name being called. Who the fuck is going to know me in this little town in Connecticut? It turns out it was the woman who had originally hired me at HBO nearly three years ago, D. She had left maybe six months after I got there for reasons that were never really made clear to me, especially as she had just had a huge promotion. You hear rumors. Whatever.

Anyway, she had lost easily forty pounds and looked ten years younger. We gave each other a big hug. She was having some lunch with friends from college, going to see someone perform at the local theatre. She's applying to get her PhD in medieval literature. I told her I was there as part of a residency, and that I wasn't at HBO anymore.

"I heard," she said conspiratorially. This sort of freaked me out a little bit, that someone I hadn't seen in nearly two years knew my job status, but then I remembered how small our industry is, and how much people like to talk, myself included. Obviously.

I told her how good she looked, and she really did look great.

"Yea, you quit HBO, you lose a bunch of weight," she said cheerfully.

Funny, I didn't lose any weight. But I know what she means. That job was all-encompassing, and intense, and it totally drives you crazy. There are benefits to it, for sure, like a regular paycheck and the excitement in supporting some really cool television shows. But if you want to have any chance at exploring your true creative self, you really have to leave - if not permanently, at least for a significant amount of time. I suppose it's like that with any job, though, but that was the experience we had shared.

We wished each other luck and I went inside. I'm not going to discuss the entire lunch, but there were a few things that happened that made me feel a bit on the low end of the "brow" scale. First I should mention that the story that I had read briefly discussed the main character's quest for Xanax. Now I submitted Deli Life as my writing sample for the application, so there should have been no surprises as to my writing. There are entire sections of that book dedicated to drug discussions. So while I knew what I was reading was perhaps a little risque to the world outside of New York, this is what I had been writing, and there was really nothing else to read, and whatever, I liked it and was proud of it.

One of the women in attendance at the open studio - I presumed she was some sort of board member - took it upon herself to bring up Xanax several times during lunch. Like when I mentioned that Liria would be staying with me for a few days after the session, before she returns to Spain, she said, "Well don't give her any Xanax, ok?"

I sort of wished I had a Xanax at that moment, to be honest. Which I would have slipped into the drink of the fine lady of Connecticut.

The other thing that happened that made me feel odd was that I somehow brought up The Mirror Project, a fine website that I think represents all the things that I love about the web: it is community-driven, has a universal appeal, and each contribution exposes the audience to a unique human experience. It's also about being self-obsessed, a concept with which I totally identify.

Anyway, the ladies at my end of the table thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard, that people would be taking pictures of themselves in like, the bathroom mirror, and putting it up on the internet. They laughed and laughed.

"It's really cool," I said weakly.

And then I remembered, to much of the world the internet is not art.

So up until that afternoon I had been highly productive and motivated, and then I felt stupid, and I got my period, and I got cranky, and so today I just decided to ride the goddamn bike and take pictures of the cemetery with my cellphone camera. I've got two days left here and I think relaxation falls under the valuable use of my time category.

I was unsteady on the bike. The gears were sticky so I couldn't change speed, and it was a lot smaller than my sturdy hybrid. I forged on though, and was fine until I hit the first hill. I would say I'm out of shape only I'm not, I've been hiking miles daily for the last week and a half with no problem, and I've been taking on the Williamsburg bridge fairly frequently for the last three months. This bike did not want to take me places, and I was afraid it might start rolling backwards. After the third hill I decided to walk it for a bit to see if the road would even out eventually. It didn't. I stopped and pulled out my phone.

I had service!

We have no service up at the house, so I've gone without talking to anyone I know except via email for the last ten days. I felt like an escaped prisoner. I immediately called Catherine at work. She was at work. People have jobs, somewhere, far away.

"I haven't been to a rock show in five weeks," I moaned.

The phone cut out three times in ten minutes. Eventually I hopped back on the back and coasted home.

Every night here is so quiet. These last few days everyone has been eating separately, and sometimes we run into each other in the kitchen or by the computer workspace. When Jerry and Kamilla were here they pulled people into the living room to watch movies sometimes, and we spent more together at meals. The night before they left I played Scrabble with Kamilla and her fiancee who had driven up to take her home. It was the most fun I had here, and that's not just because I won. Twice.

But I suppose this whole experience isn't really about having fun, it's about getting the work done, and if that's the case, I've certainly fulfilled the promise of this residency. I've completed two short stories, with an aim to finish up a collection of them by the end of the year. (I've outlined four more.) To give some perspective, it usually takes me three or four months to finish one story. I also wrote one essay that I'm going to try to sell. If I had stayed in New York, I might have seen a couple of rock shows, but I can assure you I wouldn't have even thought about writing a short story.

So for all of that I am grateful, and more, of course. As everyone's father says, "If it didn't feel like work, they wouldn't call it that." And I can't believe how much I accomplished at the residency, and how much I learned from my exposure to the other artists, and how exhilarated I was by the beautiful surroundings. But I miss people, I miss life, I miss my life. I'll have spent exactly thirty days away this summer. I think that's long enough. I'm ready to come home.

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