Last night we met after work, a whole lot of us, at that terrible place the Cutting Room. A. D. dreamed up the event, a kind of holiday cocktail hour that had nothing to do with the holiday, but not the place – she had wanted to go to Dewey's on Fifth, which was way crowded. So we end up in this place with awful dressed-up and made-up people elbowing and jostling and generally violating the delicate, unspoken protocol which governs the lane before the bar. We were seated on stools some of us, others standing. A. introduced me to Steve, a friend of her boyfriend Michael, and right away, the way he launched into a self-deprecating and not very funny joke about being the guy no one knows, he struck me as somewhat lost and pathetic. He had wide, ingenuous eyes.

There was a sort of running joke between P. C. and Rachel about how all they ever talk about is sex, bodily functions and real estate, and this phrase penetrated the rest of our group by osmosis. I had ordered food and was bringing a slice of precious, overpriced gourmet pizza to my lips when Steve asked, bizarrely, "What category does that fall under? Sex, bodily functions or real estate?"

I examined the pizza for a moment, as though I were searching for the answer.

"Strangely enough, real estate," I stated, then took a bite. I looked at him, my mouth full, and added, "Location, location, location."

This was not terribly funny of course – just weird – but he laughed very, very hard – too hard – and for a long time. 

Later we went down to the Silver Swan, that old-time German beer bar, and it was clear that Steve was totally hammered. At one point he returned from the bar to our table gripping a hard pretzel. He had a manic, strained expression on his face. We all stopped talking and turned to him, warily awaiting his next move. He extended his arm almost ceremoniously and placed – sort of proffered – the pretzel on the red tablecloth, and – mission accomplished – collapsed into a chair, not to be heard from very much again.

We drove to the Presidio and stopped where a street took a right angle right and straight ahead the earth seemed to completely fall away, and in the distance was the Bay. We parked the car and got out and walked down the steps, the Lyon Street Steps, shouldered by ornate, shuttered Venetian-style homes with terra cotta roofs. It was all beautiful and precious and I wondered what it would be like to be one of these joggers, rich healthy San Francisco people, running up and down the steps and stretching against the stone walls of the flower garden.

For all its precious boutiques and pricey clothes shops and restaurants, and its good-willed hyper-liberalism, Haight-Ashbury has a faintly menacing quality. Punk drifters sitting on the curb staring us down as I backed in the car, as though to say this parking space is ours. Hordes of pierced-face, purple-haired youth walking three or four abreast, owning the sidewalks too, everything under the white sky.

We split up and I wandered listlessly, eventually hanging out in an empty radical bookstore and flipping through little stapled and Xeroxed lesbian art mags and tracts by tired revolutionaries. 

To realize that we need new contexts to recognize such values as honesty, and even beauty.

I was walking through Midtown after work yesterday, in transit between train and bus, down the Madison Avenue valley between dark glass buildings with shuttered delis and sandwich shops below. There was something bright and awful splattered in the middle of the sidewalk up ahead. Others walked wide arcs around the mess, which seemed deliberate and meaningful in its placement, like an art installation. I approached it and saw what it was: a plastic container from a deli buffet exploded open, pasta and carrots and barbecued chicken; rice and beans; macaroni and cheese, everything radiating from the center and a single white plastic fork pointing away.

The graffiti tag on the poster in the subway is the grinning boy again but now he's on the surface of the crater-pocked moon, its horizon curving behind him to affirm the otherworldliness.

Later we staggered down Canal in the cold rain to a party in a warehousy building in TriBeCa. It was a lesbian party – a dozen or so in the dimness of a vast, sparse apartment. Some were still celebrating Halloween, looking sort of demented in obscure, indistinct costumes while everyone around them was normal. It was decided that I had come as a man and everyone laughed. We drank some more, some punch with god knows what. There was a microphone and an amp set up for some reason and people would approach the mic and say things or sing off key a bit and step away fast, as though evading a calamity. I spoke to a short and wide-eyed woman named Catherine or something, who said she was 38 but looked like she was in her mid-twenties, and I kept telling her I couldn't believe it until she begged me to stop.

There was a desultory aspect to the party, and I can't even remember if there was music but there must have been, and it was dark like a cellar, yet the mood seemed happy. They were running and jumping on a big inflatable ball, rolling over it on their bellies and landing harshly on the floor on the other side. Gleefully flirting with injury.

Something about B. made me nervous. She was jumpy, manic, impulsive. When she had a thought she'd go "Oh oh oh!" and blurt it out at once. And there was an aura of mischief around her too. There was that time she told me she had the credit cards of her bosses at two jobs where she'd been fired. She told me once, what if I ordered things and had them shipped to your house? No one would ever know. I changed the subject.

Met S. and B. and V. at a bar and then we went to a gallery on Broadway and Canal where some friend of V.'s was curating something. There was free booze there, not just the typical rotgut red and white, so that was good, and I had mandarin vodka and orange juice. I glanced cursorily at the art, pointless painted ceramic pieces like a large white squash. A thin blue wedge emerging from one wall, head-high. A blue pot with its lid resting beside it. There was a makeshift catalog, just one printed sheet of paper, lying on a shelf by the guestbook. The prices began at $10,000 and peaked at $26,000.

There's a graffiti artist in my neighborhood whose tag is great. It's a cartoon of a boy walking, head-on, his right knee bent back and the shoe vertical, his left foot forward; his right arm lifted and the fingers splayed in a bursting wave. The boy's mouth is a wide, rectangular grid of teeth superimposed on his round face – the borders of the mouth are actually outside the borders of the face. He's got a zooey expression and abstract, spiky hair. The image is joyous, positive, affirmative somehow, yet also faintly disquieting (that mouth!). The artist sometimes draws a suggestion of a sidewalk beneath the boy's feet, and usually a "© 2002."

He also sometimes refers to the surroundings in his tags: I see them a lot in the subway, drawn in the white space of an airline poster that mentions foreign cities and seems to change cities from week to week. When the poster said Paris he drew an Eiffel Tower behind the boy and, weirdly, a landscape of snow-covered mountains in the distance. When it said Rome he drew the leaning tower of Pisa.

He also sometimes incorporates messages. On another poster in the subway he drew the tag and these words above it: REGAIN CONSCIOUSNESS Early in the morning, underground, waiting for the train, I can't help but perceive this as something like a divine command.

I walked back from the bar past J's apartment on 79th Street. Its awning jutted at me from across the street, menacing kind of. I wondered how weird it'd be if she saw me there. What are you doing here? Nothing. I'm walking home from a bar. As the cab curved through Central Park I wondered if A. had been the right girl for me. I thought maybe. The one so far. But so what? When I got home the apartment was unlit and quiet but the air was ripe with the warm, heady odor of a freshly showered body. Soap hung almost cloyingly in the kitcheny darkness. The smell was something wonderful that I wanted to hold up by its arms, its arms against its sides, to hold up and to praise and to glorify.

Slept off a hangover and had a semiconscious sort of day Saturday, taking the bus down Fifth and staring, entranced, at the people on the sidewalks, all ugly and beautiful at once. A group of Japanese women got on at the Met; two sat right in front of me and one in particular was beautiful and I stared at her profile and her hands. She pointed something out on the Plaza, maybe the hot dog guy, maybe the hot nuts guy beside him, maybe the pigeons on the statue or the idle horse-drawn carriages on 59th. The other woman giggled in one breath, one soft convulsion, and I wondered at how similar we all are after all.

The nut guy's nut cart said "Nuts 4 Nuts."

I got a haircut at the barber on 23rd Street, just under the wire – I was in the owner's chair and he kept stopping and unbolting and bolting the door as each remaining customer left. He cut my hair deftly yet deliberately, and I was amazed at how this could be any kind of business at $10 a cut. He spoke some foreign tongue from time to time, seemingly to no one in particular but I suppose to the young barber one chair over who was fussing with a black man's fade. The young man didn't seem to respond but I guessed their communication was supraverbal – no indication was required for a thing to be understood or to be understood to be understood. What the hell was it I wondered, Russian? Hungarian? Albanian maybe. I got my hair cut and my eyebrows trimmed and my neck razed – the hot shave cream he applies daintily with his thumb and the delicious prickle of the flat razor on my nape. He wipes it on the tissue tucked in my collar between each set of downward scraping strokes.

A couple weeks ago I went to Baltimore with Chris and Jim, to see their old friend Jeff play. We drove in the pouring rain, Chris racing in the fast lane and peering over the dashboard to see below the fog on the windscreen.

Down this way the sniper was hunkered somewhere, thinking. Or maybe sleeping or maybe having something to eat. He'd shot eight people by then, or was it nine, and six had died, or was it seven.

We stopped at a rest stop just across the border into Maryland. It was overrun by teenagers who had evidently adopted it as their hangout. Friday night at the rest stop, hanging out in the food court, racing through the main hall, dodging drifters and old fat couples, twisting the knobs of gumball machines. Two boys were languidly wrestling each other, getting in people's way a little and not caring, fully preoccupied with each other but addressing each other only with arms and hands – their eyes looked elsewhere. Tittering girls at a table near us discussed the sniper.

"I heard he shot five people in a single day!" one girl gushed.

Right outside of Baltimore, October 2002.

Extreme unction, what's your function?

"I don't think we'll have much of a fall," the cashier at the grocery store said to one of the others.

The sound of a car door slamming. 

The sky above the hardware store.

An ad for coffee in a magazine.

A seagull on a saturated beam.

A couple of weeks ago at C.'s party I blacked out. Actually it was after her party but during it I could feel consciousness falter and slip away. I was drinking gin and tonic and vodka and tonic and I can hardly remember talking to anyone but I know I must have, S. I think, and G., and K. a bit and P. who was sitting in a chair by the bookcase looking morose.

G. and C. were there with C.'s sister, whose name I can't remember but who was beautiful, long straight brown hair and dark eyes and a small mouth with full  lips, her lower lip perpetually wet.

Everyone left and C. and H. and C. and I walked to Paddy's and this is when I lost it. I think I remember walking over there, dodging the trees in the sidewalk. We played pool of course. I was drinking whiskey but I'm not sure how the glass got in my hand. We played this couple over and over again. Once I looked over at H. He seemed to be looking down at me. He shook his head a little and smiled, amused, sipping his gin and tonic from the stirring straw. I wondered what he saw.

At one point C. and I were telling C. what shot to take and she hates that, and I know it, but she said OK to shut us up and then C. said hit it low, and that freaked her out. She was crying. She said you guys don't understand what that's like. I wanted her to stop crying, I wanted it to all be better. She wanted to leave but we convinced her to stay. I could not attenuate myself to the situation. I said come on, let's play again, and she was still pissed off. I wanted us to forget about this.

The woman in the couple bought me a drink. I think it might have been because I won a game but I think she might have bought me another one. Maybe more.

I think I remember leaving the bar – literally walking out the door – but nothing else. And I don't know how I got home, or how I remembered that K. had my keys and he was waiting for me to buzz my buzzer.

That's all I remember but the day after C. and C. reminded me about things. C. said he was laughing because I had a giant whiskey stain on my shirt that wouldn't dry. I was marked, extraordinarily, like Lady Macbeth. C. said he'd told me to go talk to the woman who was buying me drinks. Apparently I walked over to her at the bar. She was sitting with the guy. I stood and watched for a few moments. Stood there. And turned around and came right back. After we made C. cry she had comforted her, putting her arm around her and squeezing and saying who needs men anyway? We don't need men. At the end of the night she was grasping C.'s hands and kissing them as we left.

Hearing C. and C. tell me what happened gave me a key to this part of my consciousness and I could sort of remember what it felt like to inhabit that state. At the time I think it felt perfectly normal. I was not aware, of course, of the disintegration of my consciousness – how could I be? But I was present, responsive, engaged. And to have all that be disconnected from consciousness is terrifying.