When I get up, I have a cappuccino-that's breakfast. I don't have any food till lunch. I get into phases where I'll have the same thing every day. Lately I've been having feta cheese, olive oil and vinegar, tomatoes, and some tuna fish mixed together. Before that I was having tuna fish on lettuce and cottage cheese, but I got tired of that in about three months. I once had the same thing for lunch every day for seven years-a Bob's Big Boy chocolate shake and coffee at 2:30 every afternoon. A lot o those Bob's have closed down since I changed.

I once considered psychoanalysis because I thought I might talk to somebody about these cycles of things like lunches. I asked the man, "Could meeting with you affect my creativity?" and he said, "I have to be honest, it could," and I said "Thank you very much, goodbye."

Every day is different. At the moment, I'm busy editing my next film, Lost Highway [out Feb. 21st]. When I'm not working on films, I'm sometimes in my wood shop. Right now I'm building a boat for my son, Riley. It takes me a long time to think through how to build things and then to actually build them, but eventually they get built.

I meditate in the morning and in the evening, for half an hour each time. I don't know what my life would be without meditation and I never have missed one session anywhere. I've meditated every day for the past 23 years. It cleans the nervous system, which is the instrument of consciousness. Little by little, a person becomes a hair more aware of what's going on. The bad things that happen don't hit you so hard, and you're not overpowered by success. Success can be even more dangerous than failure.

I don't work out, I've got a treadmill and it's still in its box. It's been there for months, in fact. I like the idea of walking and walking and never getting anywhere, so I want to get it out, but I don't have a place for it right now.

In the afternoon, I try to spend some time reading or just thinking. I long for a kind of quiet where I can just drift and dream. I always say getting inspiration is like fishing. If you're quiet and sitting there and you have the right bait, you're going to catch a fish eventually. Ideas are sort of like that. You never know when they're going to hit you.

I like, staying home at night, and I don't go away too much. It always strikes me that wherever you go, there you are. We could be in Pakistan right now, you know what I mean? You always carry all the same problems. It's not so different anywhere you are with yourself, so I figure, Why go?

These days my girlfriend and I have a fire in the fireplace, and we have dinner, which varies lately between a few things: cottage cheese, apples, and cheddar cheese, or chicken and asparagus or chicken with broccoli. I drink red wine and maybe have a Cuban cigar. I have a bunch of other vices, but I don't want to get into that.

I go to bed around midnight, and I drift off to sleep easily. I'm excited about the next day. If left alone, my natural waking hours would probably be I 0 A.M. till 3 A.M. After 3:30 A.M., a cold wind starts coming in-the warmness of 2:30 goes away and it's time to sleep. A lot of people assume I have very strange dreams, but I've only had one dream that affected a film. I don't dream much at night. Most everything is daydreams. -Count Iain Blair

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