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Last minute preparations for trip to Thailand. Anxiety shows itself as a lump in the throat and a headache. A sense of not being able to catch my breath. Leaving work brought a surprising sense of loss and sadness. The big adventure has begun. All day envisioning car wrecks -- my car going out of control as the fevered race goes on -- crashing into a big cement mixer truck. Feel hot.

Lift off. Rain in horizontal streaks on the window, turning into glass beads sliding across the window. Then white obscures for good the misty city we leave behind.

Late arrival at Pittsburgh, in a soaking rain. Told that the Seattle flight was gone. Groaning moments till we arrive at the gate and find it still boarding. Luggage?

Discomfort of claustrophobic seats. Searing pain from sacroiliac down leg. Horrid back support. Feet tingle. Disadvantage of carry-on luggage: no leg room.

Reading: Andre Malraux, The Royal Way:

A man who's still young can make little or nothing of -- what's the word for it? -- of eroticism. Till he's turned 40 he humbugs himself, he can't get 'love' out of his system. So long as he can't see a woman simply as a vehicle for sex, but takes her sexual function as a mere incidental adjunct of her womanhood, he's all for sentimental love -- poor devil! But there's even worse in store: the time of life when the sex-obsessions of his boyhood start haunting him again, with all his memories to aggravate him."

"Adventure, as they call it," he reflected, "isn't an evasion, but a quest. A break in the established order is never the work of chance; it is the outcome of a man's resolve to turn life to account."