Entry on April 14, 2026, 7:00 P.M

by Michelle Phuong Vu

Hi, to anyone reading. I just went on a nice hike and got out some jitters. Saw a few deer, too! I wanted to make sure to clear the air and make sure no one is worried about me (I’ve never had any ideations, so please do not worry about that at all). I’ve gone through a lot of manic episodes in my life, with a lot less information than I do know, and I’ve always gotten myself through, so we’re actually in a good position right now. I also have a great support system :).
I’m still on track to try out some Good Meds, and I can also initiate comms with Florish Therapy, who provides sliding-scales! I just genuinely find books more helpful, and want to see how I react to new meds first before trying to find someone I can connect with long-term.
I’m still curious to see about how I respond to the real world and the digital one based on various circumstances, so I’d like to continue to tread waters as possible. So far, I know I tend to physically clear out my real house of accumulated junk (there’s a lot of old and hidden stuff around here...as you may know). I can, now, also start to tell if something’s up based on how I’m writing.
Also, with the whole Internet Messaging thing, it’s pretty interesting and interactive, but based on where I’m at now, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s part of this Circulating Network. I’d like to ask for a haitus on any discrete comms. If the job listings are part of this, no need to make any more! I had only been applying when I didn’t realize I was manic.
Thank you again, and no need to worry! I’m just going to start using this page to stay creative as I can and to document as I go to get a better understanding of what’s up.
I also got a nice gift today, more curated towards me than anything, but it’s very tailored and well-made, so I thought I’d share in case anyone could use something different to activate this information and the senses:
https://shorturl.at/ysJNf

Dancing [...]

An Introduction of The Illustrated Man
by Ray Bradbury

My waiter friend, Laurent, working at the Brasserie Champs du Mars near the Eiffel Tower, one night while serving me Une Grande Beer, explained his life.
“I work from ten to twelve hours, sometimes fourteen,” he says, “and then at midnight I go dancing, dancing, dancing until four or five in the morning and go to bed and sleep until ten and then up, up and to work by eleven and another ten or twelve or sometimes fifteen hours of work.”
“How can you do that?” I ask.
“Easily,” he says. “To be asleep is to be dead. It is like death. So we dance, we dance so as not to be dead.
We do not want that.”
“How old are you?” I ask, at last.
“Twenty-three,”he says.
“Ah,” I say and take his elbow gently. “Ah. Twenty-three, is it?”
“Twenty-three,” he says, smiling. “And you?”
“Seventy-six,” I say. “And I do not want to be dead, either. But I am not twenty-three. How can I answer? What do I do?”
“Yes,” says Laurent, still smiling and innocent, “what do you do at three in the morning?”
“Write!” Laurent says, astonished. “Write?”
“So as not to be dead,” I say. “Like you.”
“Me?”
“Yes,” I say, smiling now, myself. “At three in the morning, I write, I write, I write!”
“You are very lucky,” says Laurent. “You are very young.”
“So far,” I say, and finish my beer and go up to my typewriter to finish a story.
What then is my choreography to outwit Death?
In story after story, The Illustrated Man hid metaphors aching to explode.
In most cases I don’t even know the metaphors lay waiting to be printed off my retina.
We theorize about what goes on in the brain, but it is mostly undiscovered country. A writer’s work is to coax the stuff out and see how it plays. Surprise, as I have often said, is everything.
Take “Kaleidoscope,” for instance. I decided one morning forty-six years ago to explode a rocket and toss my astronauts out into a wilderness of Space to see what would happen. The result was a story that was reprinted in countless anthologies and appeared and reappeared in high school and college auditoriums. Students across country performed the story in class, to teach me once again that theatre doesn’t need sets, lights, costumes, or sound.
Just actors in school in someone’s garage or storefront speaking the lines and sensing the passion.
Shakespeare’s bare stage still stays as prime example. Watching the kids act the dark territory of “Kaleidoscope” on a bright summer afternoon in San Fernando Valley decided me to write and stage my own version. How do you cram a million miles of interplanetary flight onto a stage forty feet wide and twenty deep before an audience of ninety-nine? You just do it. And when the last human meteor fires down the sky, there’s not a dry eye in the house. All Space, Time, and the heartbeats of seven men are trapped in the words which, when spoken, set them free.
What if is the operative term for many of these stories.
What if you landed on a far world the day after Christ had just left to go elsewhere? Or what if He were still there, waiting? Hence, “The Man.”
What if you could create a world within a room, that forty years later would be dubbed the first Virtual Reality, and introduced a family to that room where it’s walls might operate on their psyches and deliver forth nightmares? I built the room on my typewriter and let my family prowl. By noon the lions had leaped off the walls and my children were having tea at the finale.
What if a man could order a Marionette Robot that was his exact clone? What would happen if he left it with his wife while he went out nights? “Marionettes, Inc.”
What if all your favorite childhood authors hid out on Mars because their books were being burned on Earth? “The Exiles.” The start of more fires I would light with books three years later: Fahrenheit 451.
What if the Colored people (that’s what they were called when I wrote “The Other Foot” in 1949) arrived on Mars first, put down roots, built towns, and prepared to welcome the Whites when they arrived? What would happen next? I wrote the story to find out. Then, I couldn’t find an American magazine that would buy the story. It was long before the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War was starting up, and the House UnAmerican Committee was holding hearings headed by Parnell Thomas (Joseph McCarthy arrived later).
In such an atmosphere no editor wanted to land on Mars with my dark immigrants. I finally gave “The Other Foot” to New Story, a Paris-based magazine edited by Martha Foley’s son, David.
And again, What if you had an acre of junk in your backyard? Would you be tempted to weld it together and take a journey to the Moon? There was just such a junkyard forty feet behind my house in Tucson, Arizona, when I was twelve. There I made lunar trips on late afternoons and then ran to a locomotive elephants’ graveyard two blocks away where I climbed up abandoned steam engines to whistle-stop my way to Kankakee, Osewego, and far Rockaway. Between the junkyard rocket and the long-lost locomotives, I was never home. Thus, “The Rocket.”
The What ifs ricocheted around in my head.
In other words, the left side of my brain, if there is a left side, proposed.
The right side of my brain, if there is a right side, disposed. No use proposing on the left if there is no one home on the right. I was lucky in my genetics. God, the Cosmos, the Life Force, what ever fits, gave me the right side as ball-catcher for anything the stuff from the left field pitched over the plate. One half, the left, seems obvious. The other half, the right, stays mysterious, daring you to fetch it out in the light.
The seance, which is to say the typewriter, computer, pen, pencil, and paper are there to catch the ghosts before they thin out in midair.
Cut the comedy, my father would grouch. What do you mean in plain English?
What I’m trying to say is that the creative process is much like the old-fashioned way of taking photos with a huge camera and you horsing around under a black cloth seeking pictures in the dark. The subjects might not have stood still. There might have been too much light. Or not enough. One can only fumble, but fumble quickly, hoping for a developed snap.
These then are developed snaps, roused at dawn, posed at breakfast, and finalized by noon. All with no finales at 10:00 A.M., all with happy or unhappy endings just after lunch or with weak coffee and strong brandy at four.
Taking a chance on love, as one old song put it.
Or in the words of Mel Brooks’ Twelve Chairs song:

“Hope for the best,
Expect the worst,
You could be Tolstoy
Or Fannie Hirst.”

I hoped for H.G. Wells or to share company with Jules Verne [1][2]. When I worked out of a living space between the two I was ecstatic.
I end as I began. With my Parisian waiter friend, Laurent, dancing all night, dancing, dancing [...with the hope he might invite the others who’ve been wanting to join the floor. For now, a manic man asks me to spend my hours with him, to get to know him, a little softer, this time.]

Most information was accessed on April 11, 2026.
Last edited on April 14, 2026, 7:00 P.M.

“This work is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialog are drawn from [Bradbury’s] imagination and are not to be constructed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”

References:
[1] Verne, Jules. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Chapter XLVI. 2001. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/excerpt-from-20000-leagues-under-the-sea-48864536/.
[2] Verne, Jules. Journey to the Centre of the Earth. 2016. https://www.telelib.com/authors/V/VerneJules/prose/centreofearth/centerearth012.html
[+] Resnick, Mitchel. Screen Time? How about Creativity Time?. 2018. https://medium.com/mit-media-lab/screen-time-how-about-creativity-time-928528c0214

Rooms:
[0] — The Illustrated Man
[1] — The Weaver
[2] — The Designer
[3] — The Junkyard