I noticed the peculiar spaces of the theater, the way the steps down the side of the balcony end in a purposeless, oblique space, the haphazard old posters along the rounded walls. Twice I nearly fell in the dark, getting to my seat a minute after the lights went down. It’s no wonder people keep coming to plays. It’s to be in a space like no other as much as anything else.

Thought about theater disasters tonight, of fires urgently disturbing our most civilized sanctuary, the stage. Was watching the decorous performance scenes in "Topsy-Turvy," where things are in fact in their place; it seemed unconscionable that anything should disrupt the pristine suspension of reality among the crowd. There goes the bellowing Mikado, there's the Lord High Executioner. Why yes.

And if there were a fire? There'd be an awful moment when the actor abandoned the line. Fans clattered to the floor and the baton was stilled, and fell.

The human drama supersedes.

I walked from the subway, 1:30 in the morning, and P. C. was up, tip-tapping away at his computer, playing Scrabble online or God knows.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey, Campesino."

It had been a longer night than I expected, hustling out of work at six and going to dinner and then going to the one-woman show by my co-worker's sister. It was quite good and funny, she talked about how their dad had a mail-order bride from the Philippines. Later we asked Geoff how much of it was true and he stuck his tongue between his teeth and laughed. 

We all went out drinking after that and talked about seeing celebrities, how they seem small in person, how they disappoint us, how we want to connect with them and how they fill us with rage.

On the way home from the train my mind was preoccupied with a fantasy rant against religion: ALL these doctrines, I thought: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, Nazi, Buddhist – all of them, right? – they all distance man from God. All their mechanisms for piety, for, rationalization, for redemption, they can only serve to distance us from God, and what insanity that is! What reckless, awful insanity. Because out of that you get all the strife, the killing, the hatred, the torture. That's what you get when you deny the one truth: everybody knows. Let them know. Let them feel.