To end this year, I would like to answer every question that I have found too interesting to purge from my folder of unfinished work, even if the questions seemed unanswerably broad or difficult or tasted of insincerity, like a thin, dry kiss.

Why are pencils yellow? Is it true that artists (particularly female artists) have historically exhibited bad taste in clothing? How are com flakes made — with tiny rolling pins, or what?

I would answer these questions if I could, but there isn't time left in this year (my twenty-ninth, the shortest yet), and anyway, these year-in-review articles have got to follow the basic rule of reviewing what actually happened, not what might have happened. Otherwise they'd probably not get written.

Most of the questions sent in by readers had to do with drugs, automobiles, and food, in that order, and I find it somehow gratifying that the questions on top of everybody's minds are so worldly. Not that I expected to receive a spiritual question like:

Dear Matthew Alice:

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III Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, is there allytliing about his theme of "existential dialectic" that strikes you as being ambiguous. or zany?

Woody Allen

New York, N. Y.

I found that nearly every question I received was the sort that people thought of while driving along to work, or while doing the dishes, or riding in an elevator — questions arising out of curiosity for the simplest things. I believe that in spite of our Western penchant for abstraction and analysis, we are most of us fundamentally Chinese. We love above all the things of this world, and when we die, our last thoughts will fly to a coffee pot, or the view from some remembered window. For me the best thing about the San Diego Museum of Art's recent exhibition of photographs taken in China was part of a letter that accompanied one of the pictures. It was from an English missionary, and in it he described his frustration at the thickheadedness of his Chinese converts. They think of absolutely nothing, he said, but what they see and touch and hear.

This morning at about eleven o'clock, as I walked into the kitchen to fix some tea, I noticed an American cockroach — Periplaneta americana — relaxing on the (spotless) drainboard. Immediately the question of Richard V. Lawhead, of EI Cajon, leapt to mind. "I call', help feeling sorry for the ugly little bugs. What is the purpose in life's ecological balance for their existence?" And together with the question, J remembered a slurry of details and impressions about roaches, stuff I'd discovered in research some months before, when I hated them so much. My favorite encyclopedias — the Britannica, the Random House, the New Columbia, and Van Nostrand's Scientific — had come down pretty hard on the insects. The Britannica in particular had said that the roach "is considered one of the filthiest household pests," and I would have retained this opinion if I hadn't looked up roaches in the library's juvenile books (which, incidentally, are an excellent source of quick information). One of the books had said that roaches, originally forest scavengers, have never been known to carry human diseases, and that they even clean themselves like cats. And here in my kitchen I saw that it was true. The American roach was washing its forelegs in its mouth, and pulling down its antennae, one after the other, to slide between its jaws. A cockroach is as dean or dirty as its surroundings; it has to be taken in context, like material material in the Tropic of Cancer. In what admittedly was a gush of sentiment, I picked the roach up in a paper towel and carried it to my balcony, where I tossed it to the pavement ten feet below. The cockroach spread its wings (it is believed to be the first creature to have specialized itself for flying), and flitting like a chip of bark, landed on its feet and scurried to a crack in the pavement. Three hundred million years old.

There goes a 717-200 past my window. It's nearly 4:00 p.m., and the jet traffic at Lindbergh Field has started to pick up and will peak between five and six, but the noise won't bother me, since I have donned the Welsh noise mufflers I bought long before moving to this apartment, when I shared a place with a woman who loves Barbra Streisand. I've been living under the flight path since January. If nothing else, the location has been handy for answering questions about the airport, which always interest me. I like talking on the phone to Bud McDonald, the airport manager, who is a pilot himself and talks like one. You'd swear he was communicating with a control tower, the way he barks sentences into the phone and remains completely silent during the reply. Jargon is almost always a drag when it's written - as when the manager of the state's motor pool on Ash Street describes his garage as a "storage/repair facility" - but when spoken, jargon like nothing else can make a speech believable. Once or twice a week, sometimes only once a month; a journalist stumbles past suspicion and care and manages to break into the giddy darkness of another person's mind. It was only a small thrill, certainly, but welcome as rain in September, when McDonald was telling me the other day, in answer to a reader's question, what it's like to fly in to runway two-seven at Lindbergh on instrument approach. "Busting through some clouds in a ragged ceiling, when all of a sudden you're at 300 feet and you look out and — woops! — no runway! You get on the radio and tell the tower, 'Missed approach,' and then you keep your runway heading and you take her up to 1000 feet, bank left, and pick up the Mission Bay VOR."

It's nice to know odd facts and scraps of information — that VOR, for example; stands for Visual Omni Range, and is a radio beacon used by pilots throughout the U.S. - because it's just these sorts of things that make for glittering conversation at parties when everyone is waiting through a Saturday Night Live commercial. There aren't many people who are likely to know that frozen orange juice is produced in a machine whose forerunner was invented during World War II to make penicillin, or that ants don't store food during the winter, or that the U.S. dollar bill is modeled on the Philippine peso. What's surprising is the number of people who care to know these sorts of things. At least, they care to know them as long as the commercial is on. When real entertainment resumes, one's store of trivia returns to the trivial.

Am I trivial? Have I wasted another year of my life, spent the last of my twenties, on natty three-page monographs; while crypto-Nazi "revolutionaires" have been kneecapping students in Turin, and while the real horror in Cambodia — not the horror suggested by Marlon Branda's expensive voice — is another Auschwitz that's already been turned into a museum?

I ought to take back everything I've said and start again. From Cambodia there is only retreat, past Tehran, Turin, Paris, Belfast - past everywhere that isn't home. I have been thinking of the best moment I spent last year, and I remember a bright kitchen crowded with people, most of whom I don't recognize. It's October — a costume party. I've noticed in the paper lately how many advertisements are out for costume rentals — even Sears is plugging costumes this year-and I wonder about this sudden interest in disguises. What's the most popular costume, year after year? (I think I have a costume-rental guy in my card file - he'll know.) And whatever happened to all the Darth Vader outfits? This year everybody's a vampire — because of Nosferatu? Will next year's winner be Spock? Good questions for Matthew Alice, but somebody else will have to ask them, as I don't allow myself to pose my own.

I'm talking to a young married couple, and trying to bring them 'round to the subject of costumes, but they're telling me they knew my older brother in high school, in Manhattan Beach. I do not recognize these faces from the past (they are both vampires); and now they're telling me about the house they want to buy in Oceanside, and how it's now or never as far as they're concerned, and besides they need a bigger place for their dogs, and possibly their kids, if they decide to have them. I am paying more attention to the woman than to her husband, and not only because she is beautiful, with the nicest long hair and green eyes, but because herald man is fairly wasted on Sauza Commemorativo, and she's been keeping driveable for the past few hours with Seven-Up. And then I find how good they look together, leaning against each other's hips, and looking as though they may leave at any moment and climb into their van and say, "Forget it - we'll sleep right here tonight."

And then from behind me I hear somebody quote a line from Auden. the line that says let me show an affirming flame; and when I turn, I see somebody firing up a joint. And I feel this great sense of wellbeing, and I don't even try to figure out why this is.