Emmett was drunk, he got picked up by a drunk driver. Her name was Claire and she was 41.

Yesterday Jim and I traveled to Princeton, New Jersey to train an ad agency to use our software except it wasn't really Princeton but a place called Cranbury which was just industrial parks by the side of the highway. I remembered keenly this awful landscape: the main road divided by the pointless grassy strip, low-lying buildings behind uniform walls of shrubbery, endless mazes of interconnected, half-filled parking lots. Building 7. Building 9.

I ordered a martini.

I sat hunched over reading the Voice, realizing I looked tired or lazy or something this way, the paper on the stool beside me. There was absolutely no one else there but the bartender. She came out from behind the bar and sat on a stool at the far end. She joined her hands on the bar as though in prayer and stared straight ahead for quite some time.

Finally a few other people came in and I was relieved for some dumb reason – I didn't want Mona to come into the cavernous room with no music playing and not a soul but me huddled over the paper.

The gin was getting warm.

It rained a full day and a full night.

When I came home yesterday I considered my apartment building and how unfamiliar certain aspects of it remain: what's behind it exactly? Where is that half-roof I see from our kitchen window with the door to another building, that strange suspended space from a city of fantasy or myth? That's where I watch the rain beat onto puddles and how I know it's raining hard. Where's the overgrown and trash-strewn courtyard below our living room where we beat out rugs? After four years it's still disorienting, mysterious; only the brick face and identical red awnings tell me it's my home.

On Saturday I waited for Mona at Double Happiness. The bartender looked like Jacqueline Bisset and she was brusque and a little nervous and she said just so you know, we have a private party at nine.

When he died he remembered with a start the names of so many things he'd never know again. But they were just words now, finally separated from the world and lingering in space: crash pad, envelope, turquoise, biscuit.

As I rest at night electricity pours into my various prone electronic devices: phone, camera, MP3 player, PDA. And as the electrons buzz toward their new nest I feel a wave of comfort, everything being renewed.

One night B. and I were walking to my place arm-in-arm, drunk, talking about nothing and thinking about sex, and when I put my foot down I felt a soft, spongy, shaking thing where I'd expected concrete. I jerked my foot up and released a terrified rat that sped away into 103rd Street.

When I lived in Connecticut thoughts of moving to the City expanded in my mind until it seemed inevitable and once it did I had one dark vision: slogging up a sidewalk at night after work, looking for a street sign to mark the yawning black path to my anonymous home around the corner. And I was struck with depression at the thought of it and I figured whatever came, I'd have to fight that off, and it's true, I'd better.

This morning I walked to the subway on Central Park North on the beautiful wet sidewalk, matted with pale gold leaves and what appeared to be crushed, soggy yellow chalk. A panhandler approached me, Can I get sum breakfast?, and feeling guilty for having turned homeless Jeff away the other day I reached into my bag and pulled out I mournful little palmful of pennies, dimes and nickels. I placed it in the man's hand, must have been like thirty-seven cents, and he stared at it with some distaste.

There's a show on TV called "The Reality of Reality."

A man, overcome with lust, fornicates a cold puddle of mud.