9:23. It’s always 9:23.

At seven o’clock from our roof there was the usual commotion down below, claps and honks and sirens, but almost no one else up on top. A neighbor to the right clapped gamely but inaudibly with garden-gloved hands before lying down to fuck around with the vines curling up around his deck. New Jersey glimmered far away. What would the guys from WBGO in Newark say tomorrow morning when my clock radio goes off at 7:30? It’s going to be a hot one.

Looking left at a certain point in the middle of a traffic jam to the George Washington Bridge on the Garden State: the number 1471 painted on a Jersey barrier, a little pile of trash.

We went to Englewood, New Jersey, today, to see Sara's cousin Przemec and his fiancée. Przemec took us for a walk around town, to see the quaint main street with the cars parked perpendicular, the sake martini lounge, the high-end ice cream shop people come from miles around, his office where he designs steel infrastructure for condominiums, train stations and parking garages.

We rounded a corner and there was the Englewood Public Library, a beautiful, modern building on a little hill with exactly the correct number of trees. There was a marquee sign planted out front, like a church might have for Sunday's sermon. I thought to myself before I read it that I'd probably be pretty amused by what it said. So I read it. And here's what it said:

June 14 - RAGTIME CONCERT
June 21 - HOLOCAUST POETRY

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.