Saturday, July 29, 2017


And I watched a homeless man walk across the middle of the intersection of Bleecker and LaGuardia, shopping cart in tow. He ambled through heedlessly, with no regard for oncoming traffic or the color of the crossing light. Like: I own the street, motherfucker. I live here. This is my living room. It’s like he was walking from the kitchen to the couch.

Friday, July 28, 2017

It's a library-themed bar but no one here has ever read a book.

It does have its drunk at the corner of the bar though. I ordered from the empty space beside him and as he got up to get out his smokes he said excuse me unnecessarily and a little too loud, the way drinkers do. Never hurts to get a jump on Step 8 I guess. As I took my beer away he seemed to be complaining to the bartender that he wanted merlot; she gave him pinot noir. That's the type of drunk and that's the type of bar.

Thursday, July 27, 2017

Everyone’s gotta make it home from the office party. That means people who hooked up and find themselves in weird apartments in Astoria, just unlucky drunks who have to wait for the PATH, the numbers or the alphabet, Uber, Lyft. Everyone’s gotta make their sad way home.

When I stepped onto the platform at South Ferry I smelled that deep underground New York summer subway smell and I knew I was on the right way home.

We stood in wonder at 20-something people singing the lyrics to 30-something tunes. It never goes the other way. Old people don't sing young songs.

I imagined the music of Stereolab, the High Llamas and the Clientele, all mixed up together. What is it about that music? It makes you feel like you're high on drugs.

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

TROOPS


The Third World becomes a reflecting pool that gives a Western Narcissus back his own pale reflection.

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

I sometimes lie awake at night wondering what’s the secret. And then I think, it’s obvious: there’s no secret at all. He is just what he is. Dimwitted, narcissistic, oblivious. These are the magic ingredients that somehow add up to revolutionary American success. You can think a lot about that, or a little, and maybe reach the same conclusions.

Still, tonight I thought this: he has absolutely no respect for authority of any kind. This is both what makes him compelling to his base and what makes him toxic and terrifying. He doesn’t care about laws or institutions. About structures of power, checks and balances. Civility. The social contract. God. He completely dismisses it all—is contemptuous, in fact.

What the fuck is going to stop him?

Monday, July 24, 2017

I wondered briefly tonight whether “The Americans” was an allegory for the opioid epidemic. A middle-class family on a suburban street. Everything looks OK. But the parents are absent unpredictably. Sometimes they return home bruised, maybe missing a tooth. They go to great lengths to explain it all away. And when one day their child sees a crack in reality, and confronts them, they turn it into a family secret. Us versus them. You can’t tell anyone. But the child knows: there’s something Mommy and Daddy love more than me.

How many people live in homes where the sound of jet airplanes routinely pierces the silence, interrupting conversation, requiring the brief rewinding of video programming? A lot, I bet. I really noticed them tonight. Flight paths might have been low on account of the rain. But I like it. Imagining all those people up there, on their way—somewhere, or home.

Tuesday, July 04, 2017

TROOPS


He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed.