The one (and the only) advantage of flying into JFK at three in the morning is that there is no traffic along the ugly route into the city. After almost going off with the wrong driver (I could have sworn he was holding up a sign with my name on it), I got into the city around four, and into my spacious corner room at the Marriott by quarter past. By 4.30, I was asleep. Five hours and twenty minutes later, my alarm clock went off, and I called in to a work conference call. I felt pretty awful. My cold had hit me full strength.

Despite everything, Friday proved productive. After my conference call, which I took buried so comfortably in my bed that I drifted off a couple of times, I got up and took a huge rafter of pills, the most effective of which was 12-hour Sudafed, which is, for me, a miracle drug. I went through the rest of the day distantly aware that I was still sick, but feeling well enough that I even contemplated going to the party that Phoenix had invited me to in the evening. But by early evening, I realized I was starting to fade. So I spent a quiet evening in my hotel room. I ordered a pot of tea - sixteen dollars including tip, and settled comfortably into my armchair to watch a movie on the hotel system. I unwisely chose "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", reasoning that only a particularly action filled movie was likely to keep me awake until bedtime. It was beautifully shot; the late evening light glistening on the actor's features was painterly. So was the blood that dripped from severed limbs. Half way through the movie, I turned it off, in revulsion.

I've just gotten a new laptop from work which includes a DVD player, and I'd bought the newly released DVD of "Master and Commander" with me, so I watched the long documentary on the second disk about the making of the movie. It was really one of the best produced movie documentaries I've seen, and it added to my growing determination to get back into a creative vein. I've scarcely written anything but this journal in almost a year, and it's been even longer since I last held a movie camera in my hand.

This morning, I felt a little better than I had the morning before, especially when I'd taken my Sudafed again. I spent the morning finishing off some work that had been near completion yesterday. It was the culmination of weeks of work, and it felt like a great achievement once I'd gotten everything working, and had dispatched a modestly self-congratulory email to all of the project managers. Outside, it had become a beautiful Spring day, albeit with a cool wind blowing off the Hudson. I spent much of the afternoon shopping for books at the huge Strand ("eight miles of books") bookstore on lower Broadway, decimating their Edith Wharton shelf, but not finding "The Stoic", the final book in Theodore Dreiser's "The Financier" trilogy which I've been seeking for a long time.

And late afternoon, I finally buckled down to do some serious writing. Over the last few months, the only real work I'd done was to put together the bare bones of a short screenplay. I've tried, since then, to put some flesh on it, but the task of creating a back-story for the characters had filled me with something less than excitement. This afternoon, however, at a Starbucks in Hells Kitchen, I finally started writing, abandoning the idea of the back-story, and just drawing the characters on the real life people on whom the story is based (being myself and my family). And before I knew it, I had five pages done. It felt good.

Now it's not long after six in the evening, and the sunlight is softening to that golden glow known in filmmaking as the golden hour. Time for me to head back to the hotel and get spruced up to meet Chris for dinner.