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give birth to three sets of twins: they’re nine years old, one has false teeth, two are great dancers. The rest move to South Dakota for schooling
.
    Now I’m dancing with Lewis and Clark (my two children) and an iguana who’s making eyes at me (he’s not that good of a dancer). Bruce punches him in the nose. The iguana turns into Sean Penn, who knocks Bruce unconscious. Sean and I start walking, and he tells me his life has been meaningless up until he met me, then we see one of those photo booths, four for a dollar. He urges me to pose with him. So we get in and have our pictures taken. He covers his face for all of them. He asks me to keep them. He beats up the machine
.
    I fly back to the States alone. The pilot announces, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we’ll be landing in ten minutes. Ellen, I just want to say my life has been meaningless until you came into it.” We land. I go to the baggage claim, and my bag comes out first. I think to myself, “Ellen, you must be dreaming—that’s impossible.…”
    “Fuck, we’re going to crash!!”
    False alarm. The plane just landed. I guess I’m alive. Oh well, that wasn’t so bad. But what about that dream! I don’t know what it means. I’m pretty sure it’s sexual.
    Maybe it just means I shouldn’t be flying.

ellen’s new
hobby

J OURNAL E NTRY
    I need a hobby. Something to pass my time—a goal I can work toward. I’ve tried knitting, square dancing, social work. I need to have passion about something. Here I am, sitting at my kitchen table, staring at my pancakes and coffee, feeling the emptiness of a life with no meaning.
    It’s like I’m sitting in a car but the engine is idling. I’m not even on the road—just off to the side. I see the others swoosh by me. I can recognize the shapes of the cars but not the direction they’re going. I’m alone, all alone in a car on the side of the road.
    My dogs are staring at me, trying to give me hope. “You can do it, Ellen,” they say. “Get out of the house, find your path and follow your heart.” I want to find it so bad, I do. But all I can do is turn on my TV and watch
Regis and Kathie Lee
. I can answer those trivia questions. Maybe they’ll call me and put a pin in my city. I want a pin; I want to share a hot-air popcorn popper with number 35. That’s who I would pick.
    I just saw a flash of a woman with dogs on the screen. She races or something; she used the word
Iditarod
. I looked it up in the dictionary, but it wasn’t there. I was so upset, I started to cry and scream, “Why—why—why?” I was pounding on the table with my closed fists. I was filled with anger—raging with fury—I was a wild stallion rearing up on its hind legs, snorting and whinnying and kicking and … Wait a minute. Hold on just a cotton-pickin’ minute. This is passion I’m feeling. This word
Iditarod
has moved me. I must find out what this
Iditarod
is and do it—I will
Iditarod
and I will win.

J OURNAL E NTRY
    I am beginning to feel frustrated. It is my fourth week of training for the Iditarod and I am seeing very little progress, if any at all. The big race is two months away, and I worry I won’t be ready. I already have one strike against me: My sled barely moves along the concrete-paved roads.
    Having only two dogs is also not helping. Since I don’t believe in hitting, I certainly won’t strike my dogs just to make them pull me. So I encourage them strongly. “Please, let’s go, come on.” But they come toward me and get in the sled. Seems they’re conditioned to come
to
me when I speak, not away. I’ve tried dog biscuits, but as I place them down several yards ahead of the dogs, by the time I run back to get in the sled, they’ve run to get the biscuits without me in it. Also, one of my dogs is rather small so the times we do move at all, it’s in circles—the larger one sets our course off balance.
    I am sweating so much in those big Eskimo clothes because of the warm California climate. I