What's harder, remembering your dreams in the morning or the day's events at night?

The bank buildings on Sixth Ave. loomed high above the subway exit, uniform and bright, appearing to vibrate very slightly in the sun.

On Broadway there lay a pigeon fetus in the crosswalk, by the curb at 53rd, pale-pink, waxy, assailed by a thousand tiny ants.

Chris had a baby doll's head stuck on a broken drumstick. He declared they would take it to the top of the Empire State Building later, take a picture. In the middle of the afternoon I received it on my phone, the head on the stick staring past the camera with its eerie little smile, behind it all of Downtown Manhattan.

There were two young white guys standing on the F train home, intoxicated, overheated. One said something about one of the two pretty black girls chatting on the other side of the pole. She didn't hear. Or maybe she did.

It was no insult.

Their voices rose and fell. It was hard to make sense of their conversation - they mentioned friends, I guess. Parties. Some kid they knew who followed some band around the mid-Atlantic states. To the Merriweather Post Pavillion and beyond.

"How can he afford it?"

"Dude, he's fuckin' rich!"

"Oh yeah?"

"He's so, so, so, so, so fuckin' rich! He's got like, tons of electric guitars."

"Oh yeah?"

"He had a Super Bowl party. His mom made like, Cajun food."

"Yeah?"

"'Cause of the Saints."

"Yeah."

"She made crocodile stew."

"No fuckin' way!"

I found myself idly fantasizing that they'd notice me, say something rude. Insolent. Deride me for my hat. I thought through the magnificent steps of my furious response.

They grew louder yet, at times. People sitting farther down the car looked up from the papers and the books they rested in their laps. Their electronic reading devices.

"I don't care if people look at me," one boy said. "This is how I am."

As I walked past them off the train at Seventh Avenue, this is what I thought: They're not so bad. They're not so bad at all.

The Summer Party

At the summer party there was a curious jumble of food arrayed on a table in the dark garage: pulled pork and barbecued chicken in foil trays, tubs of obscurely branded deli salads, hot dog buns with nothing to stick inside.

People sat listlessly in chairs arrayed out on the tarmac, under the stinging sun. Then it clouded over and a spitting drizzle fell. Then the sun came back, hotter than before.

Someone played Nirvana on a guitar.

A fat old man grilled what remained of the meat and flipped it onto a platter, forming a jumbled heap of charred sausages, hot dogs and burgers. Then he turned off the fire and walked away.

Running through the park in the morning, between nannies and dog walkers, into the woods by the pond and up the hill and through the big, rolling field, cans spilling yesterday's trash into my path.

Fireworks bloomed all over Brooklyn, on the rivers and New Jersey in the distance, some in haphazard bursts, others methodical, he result of civic budgets and deliberate preparations. The big ones were on five barges somewhere on the Hudson. Their reflections flashed on every pane that faced them and their thin, sulfurous smoke crept across the skyline.

At the end of it the crescent moon appeared in the left side of the sky, in a band of clouds, blurry, indistinct. It was almost cloaked again before it finally reemerged, reclaiming the night for good.

Back downstairs, we heard a solitary voice from the street, through our living room window. It was a weary, male voice, with an old-time, Brooklyn accent. Here is what it said:

Fuck you!

I was sitting beside a guy on the subway today and he had a box in his lap. A small, white box that read:

Dan

(scrawled in green marker)

And below that:

TURKEY

(printed on a little sticker).

If my name's Dan and I'm due to eat a sandwich-a turkey sandwich, and it's been provided in a little white box, with my name on it and an indication as to the type of sandwich: Kill me. Kill me now.