Quite by accident, or because he was in a rush, or because Mercury was in retrograde, or all the above, Spalding Gray buys a perfectly imperfect house in the Catskills that just happens to be built on clay. In this monolog he becomes a contemporary Thoreau who has wandered too far from his native New England to make sense of anything. At last, frustrated by not having enough money to save his rotting, collapsing house, he flees to Hollywood to seek his fortune.