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.