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.