The last day at Les Frauds is when Mom and I got to talking about September 11th and it was curiously contentious; she found the picture book moving yet maudlin too, and she was right, and it was exactly what I feared she might think, and what I feared about everyone's reaction to the whole thing too in a way, but I found myself growing defensive anyway. The elevation of the towers themselves as iconic vehicles for the projection of grief and rage, which was fascinating to me (those smooth facades, those beautifully square corners, so abstract, could bear anything in their unreality – after having collapsed in reality under the burden of the attack itself), seemed alarming to her. Those were our worse tendencies, she thought. The vigils reminded her of Lady Di's death, and the exploitation of a moment of genuine national tragedy for such self-indulgent melodrama was sick. Yeah, yeah. I knew she had a point. But I wished I'd articulated something else, a different view, but instead we moved on and talked about Israel and Arab anti-Semitism. I ranted about the eventual decline and disintegration of all major world religions, starting perhaps with Islam. I was inspired toward exaggeration and extreme rhetoric. We talked about the Arabs who would deny that September 11th was the work of Islamic terrorists, what a terrible portent that was. I drew comparisons between the hatred of the Arabs for the Jews with all the other great racial hatreds of modern civilization. And she said it goes the other way too, and remember, the Israelis have so much and the Palestinians have so little. Religion is racist, I said.

There's a pair of black shoes strewn ten feet apart on the rain-spotted sidewalk outside our door.

A prostitute on an HBO documentary said she tells abusive pimps this: Don't you have no respect for your mother? You came out of a pussy just like what I'm sellin'.

Eight and a Half by Eleven

A man was wandering crosscurrent to the crowd, shouting into his phone: "I want everyone in the E.R. now!" It was shocking to image a parade of the wounded, the burned, filling overwhelmed triage centers; later was a bigger shock: the idleness of hundreds of doctors waiting for nothing. 

We walked up Fifth Avenue with everyone. The Empire State Building looked vulnerable and naked in the sun. There was a fierce, raw charge in the air, like anything might happen. You couldn't get a phone signal. We dropped off Julie with her boyfriend Guy, who was waiting across from Grand Central. Guy held Julie in one arm and told us they hit the Sears Tower in Chicago. Yasser Arafat, she hissed. He took credit for it already. I parted company with Paul and walked up Madison. 

People were generally calm. Some seemed almost cheerful, hitching rides on flatbed trucks, kicking dangling feet like little kids. I walked alongside a middle-aged woman with glasses and curly hair who was weeping so uncontrollably she was choking on her tears. Then I passed a posh Upper East Side restaurant and peered through the picture window. People ate and drank. A waiter fussed over a bottle of wine in a tableside bucket. They had to know. It seemed outrageous they could do this at a time like this. But a time like what? Maybe no one could take the measure of this event and respond appropriately. Still, it was jarring to see their dimly happy faces through the glass, the glint of silverware before them, crystal on their lips.

The first call I was able to make was to Mike. We talked about how it would always be before and after from now on. He said he saw the towers burning from the roof of his apartment in Chinatown and ran down to get a camera. When he came back upstairs one of the towers was gone. He took some film of a police officer who was helping people escape. While the camera was rolling the cop realized that other guys in his squad had been crushed in the collapse and he broke down. Mike wondered what he could do with this footage but confessed to feeling guilty for his mercenary thoughts. He never did say anything about it again.

Back home, Mel called. She said Su was over at her place and did I want to come over. I said I did. I got on the downtown bus at Fifth. It was crowded and I stood near the front. People were talking animatedly about the event. There was an eerie glee about the chatter. They seemed to want to outdo each other with stories of horror, to be the bearers of worse and worse news just for the vain thrill it gave them. Or maybe if they made it worse in their heads, and asserted it, the reality would not be quite so bad.

"I heard 40,000 people died," a woman said.

"Oh no. Way more than that," said a man. "200,000."

The bus driver told his story.

"I was down there," he began. "I looked out the window and I saw what do you call it. Graffiti coming from the sky." We knew what he meant. "But then I realized it ain't no graffiti. It's pieces of paper. Eight and a half by eleven."

I got off around the Metropolitan Museum and walked across the park with a crowd. Everyone's pace seemed slow by half a step—with nothing left to escape, we instinctively adopted a processional solemnity. In a way, though, it was just like a beautiful afternoon in Central Park. There were lots of children, acting like children, skipping and swinging their parents' arms. Still they knew. 

"Daddy, did the airplane really hit the building?" I heard one ask.

"Yes."

"What happened to the people inside?"

A roaring fighter jet pierced the empty sky above us.

On the way to work the other day I noticed the menu board on the sidewalk outside Dewey's flatiron advertising "Whensday specials."

Two nights ago Sean and I were sitting watching TV.

Blam blam blam blam blam blam blam blam!

Just like that, like drums, an utterly deliberate and emphatic expression. 

"That was scary," said Sean.

"Yeah," I said. I was eating a big bowl of rice and lentils and beans, sitting deep in the fake Eames chair. "As long as they're not aiming at us."

"Eight shots," he said. Like the number might mean something.

"Yeah?" I wasn't sure he was right. It seemed high. But he probably was. They came in a hurry.

"Have you heard gunfire around here—"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, so have I."

"That is scary," I asserted, feeling like my first reaction had somehow been too flip. I wanted to hear myself say it was scary before my next mouthful of rice, my next sip of wine. And I imagined where it must have all gone down to have echoed so loudly among the buildings outside our window—103rd Street? Mad? In my head I saw the arm, the hand and the gun; the body falling and the killer run.

I awoke groggily this morning, trying to remember dreams. The name Rohan came into my head, Rohan, the sullen Indian who hung out at Richter's like Keith, Rohan who played foosball better than anyone I've ever seen; better than Keith, and Keith is pretty good. I remembered nervously tending goal as Rohan drew his toy forwards back and forth, teasing the ball, until he felt the moment was right and in less than an instant the ball was deep in the gullet of the goal with a humiliating thunk. They're repaving Madison Avenue. Men are perched in strange heavy equipment, awaiting their turn to scrape or surface or steamroll. The traffic has to go around. Peter, our CEO, seemed oddly unfazed by the unfolding events. He'd wander out of his office, glance at the TV. He said something about how people could stay in a hotel if they couldn't make it home to Jersey or wherever. He'd wander back to his office, hands clasped behind his back. Brian and Daniela and I decided to walk home at about noon. Outside, the streets and sidewalks were completely overrun by people walking north. The analogy is tired but completely true: the only time you ever see something like this, your environment transformed like this, is in movies. It was as though 10,000 extras had been hired to swarm around the Flatiron Building and up Fifth Avenue for some disaster epic. Places everyone. They'll never let us close these streets again so let's get this right. Action!

Went out last night to a comedy club, Emma had some free passes. Five comedians or something, none too funny. One had an odd, hesitant persona, like a small child. "A lot of guys like big breasts. I like little breasts. They're so nice,” he said. “They're like, ‘Hi! Can I help you?'"

The Kiwis were there, Jen and Steve, and Chloe too. Then we went to Von on Bleecker and met up with Jim and Shane and Sophie and someone named Nicole who looked familiar and seemed to recognize me, so I pretended I knew who she was and said "Good to see you" not "Nice to meet you." Emma was leaning on me, arm around me. She and Chloe left early, and the rest of us wandered a while until we got to the Edge. There were lots of beautiful young women with their backs turned to us. Jim talked about how he's been seeing Lucy at school and they've been meeting up for drinks. Where might that be going? We talked about her mania. Sophie said she can never get a word in when she’s with her.

I played great pool. I've been playing great the last three times. Since Mel broke up with me. Maybe that’s what did it. Heartbreak’s prodded me to greater heights. The 2 was about five inches from the side bumper near the far corner but my shot to that hole was blocked; I hit the ball on the right, banked it, the cue ball and the 2 narrowly missed each other on their ricochets and the 2 rolled right in the near corner pocket. 

Eventually Jim and I lost and it was time to go home. I walked up 1st Avenue to Stromboli on 8th Street for a slice, past shuttered shops, past revelers whose nights were still young, past bags and bags of garbage, past a beautiful wide-eyed blonde clutching a book of Tartans in her green-gloved hands.

On the screen the towers stood stricken, smoking furiously. The anchor repeated what little was known in a tremulous voice, betraying shock but clinging determinedly to professionalism, to that formal tone and lingo by which we've come to identify The News itself—except this wasn’t news, it wasn’t what you consume with dinner at six or peruse drowsily on the morning train. Her mannered delivery seemed suddenly inappropriate, as though she were saying these things sitting right beside us on the couch. In case you're just joining us… as you can see from these images… two aircraft struck the World Trade Center towers this morning… the first hit the North Tower at 8:48 a.m., the second hit the South Tower 15 minutes later at 9:03… We also have word from Washington that the Pentagon was hit by a plane at approximately 9:40… Authorities suspect these are terrorist attacks…

Lucy sat watching, so did Paul. Other coworkers drifted in and out, unable to sit or stand or anything. Everything around me seemed precarious, uncertain; right down to the coffee table I sat on and the air I breathed. It occurred to me that we had suddenly been plunged into a new world of utterly chaotic possibilities and that perhaps it was not a world that was worth living in.

We watched.

I went to my desk and called Su because I thought she had jury duty downtown. You were supposed to call everyone you knew who was closer to the action than you I guess. There was no answer so I tried her at work and she was there after all; the court had been closed for some unrelated reason. She was crying and shaky. I called Mel, who was oddly calm. She’d been up to her roof to see. She said she was trying to call the editing studio where she was freelancing to see if they needed her to come in.

"I… don't think you're going to be working today," I said.

"I have to call them,” she said, annoyed. “I don't know that."

"Nothing after this will be the same."

"I know."

Lucy called out from in front of the TV: "Oh my God one of the towers is falling!" I ran in to see it evaporating in an enormous cloud of ash and debris that quickly climbed to obscure its twin. I went back to my desk. To stare at the screen awhile. I don't know.

"Oh my GOD the second tower fell!" screamed Lucy. A trace of outrage in her voice mixed with the grief. For some reason this was the real shock—the first one could almost be rationalized as a freak accident, something outside of human control so not of our concern. The falling of the second made both systematic, the conclusion of a grand design. Lucy and Julie were crying.

Last week I was jogging down Fifth Avenue, blissfully lost listening to live Grateful Dead music that I'd downloaded off the Internet, some hissy space jam from Berkeley, California, during the Reagan Administration and there I was on the Avenue, listening and blissing as the guitar went dee-dee-dee and bap-bap-bap-bap and the cymbals went whoosh-clang, and the bass went bum-bum-bum. I crossed the street down near the Met, one-two-one-two dee-bap-clang-bum and I sensed some motion to my left.

In a drawn-out moment I saw a dark Volvo race inexorably toward me, toward my legs; it screeched and skidded to a halt as I leapt to my right and held out my arms, palms out and fingers splayed, as though to block the giant object with my bare hands. I skipped away as the car lurched forward again, pursued by furious honking traffic. Bee-wee-wee-wop-bap-bap in my ears as I tried to think of how lucky I was to be alive, how close this really was; people stood around half-noticing, half-turned to me on the cobblestones. I kept running, bee-dee-whoosh, bee-dee-whoosh.

On the gravel in the station parking lot Sebastien eagerly took my bags, making me a little bit ashamed for every time I never lifted someone else's bag; his smile shined like a searchlight through the darkness and the rain. I had just about decided he was an all right guy when I got in the car with Mom to follow him and she told me what an insufferable pain in the ass he is, how you can't have a discussion with him because he always has to be right, you don't want to talk about politics or September 11th or anything because he's going to disagree and he'll say something about Americans and won't quit until you shut up. This is basically what she said anyway, as we searched the darkness for his furtive taillights disappearing and reappearing around each bend. So then I changed my mind and we talked about some other things.

The house was warm and lovely with a big fire and Yves sitting in front of it in his big chair, all wrapped up in his shawl with the tubes in nose and the oxygen humming nearby. I shook his frail hand and we said "Bonjour, comment ca va?" and that's almost all we said to each other the whole time. 

We all had drinks and I told Sebastien about my job and we talked but I had been made wary of him and I sensed I wasn't saying as much as I normally would. Anyway I wanted to talk to Mom. It was a matter of navigating between these two other figures, the extraordinarily quiet, unassuming presence and the noisy, needful one. We spoke French at dinner and afterward Mom and I lapsed into English when the others faced the other way, seeming to leave our world. I went to sleep early and slept late, a country winter night. 

The next day we sat around and I fixed some things on Mom's computer. In the late afternoon I went for a run in the cold wintry drizzle. I ran the twisting and dipping road, past fields piled with freshly cut trees, their wood dark yellow from the wet and bearing the loggers' inscrutable day-glo markings. It was foggy and silent and there wasn't a single car in sight. I tried to get a sense of where I was; the deep French countryside, the particularity of it, but it was hard.

A while ago I got on the bus to go home from work and there was a half-torn sheet of oak tag carelessly taped to the back of the divider behind the driver. Scrawled on it, almost illegibly, were these words: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I slept on the train down. Made my connection to the crowded little commuter train but missed the stop—I awoke to see the sign for Bussiere-Galant out there in the darkness as we pulled away. And I hated, hated myself for fucking up. I got off at the next stop and the station master offered to let me phone from his office, and I spoke to Yves’ son Sebastien, who said my mom was on her way to the station but they'd come out to get me in this other town now. He sounded irrepressibly, unaccountably cheerful.

I checked out and walked to the subway station at Republique, listing from side to side with the weight of my bags. At the Gare d'Austerlitz I remembered how I felt the last time I was there, agonizing over whether to call my ex and tell her everything was OK, I wanted to get back together. I remembered lifting the phone off the hook and thinking and putting it back down. With the weight of my bags.

I got my ticket, and a USA Today for a jolt of colorful American cheapness. I went to the station restaurant just like I had the year before and the harried waiter sat me in the middle of a long row of little tables, beside an older couple. I ordered a salad of chevre chaud and lardons and a steak and a little carafe of wine and the waiter repeated it all in one breath and said, "C'est parti," which means "it's gone," but really "it's begun" or "it's taken off," and I thought how French this little remark was—it is a banal, unthinking thing for a waiter to say to a customer but also a droll assurance of sorts ("don't worry, it's like it's already started, trust me") together with a slight suggestion of cold impatience ("it's gone, I'm gone, let's get it all done and over with"). C'est parti.

Dazed, I walked downstairs to the breakfast room where two maids had finished cleaning up what appeared to be the dreariest American motel breakfast spread—giant serving bowls of cornflakes, juice machines, an industrial-size coffee urn. I turned away. 

We got upstairs and my sister was there, looking just as she always did or even maybe younger somehow, fresh-faced. I hadn't seen her in eight years or something. We sat in the den and talked about her work, simple things. Then I walked to my hotel and briefly considered walking into a bar in a side street for a few hours and now I wish I had. Instead I pulled a few Francs out of an ATM and bought two giant cans of high-alcohol beer from the all-night epicerie. A couple of young guys were in there too, doing their thing, drunk, high, whatever, buying candy. I wondered at the insurmountable melancholy I feel whenever I'm in Paris, a heaviness and oppressiveness I feel all around me, expressed in the language and the streets and buildings, the gray sidewalks and the gray sky. I have to remind myself that in spite of this anything is possible. That's the key to the beauty of this place: in this precious city burdened by tradition, bound by ceremony, anything is miraculously possible. Somewhere someone's snorting heroin, someone else's running away from home; someone's coming back, someone's coming on someone else's back.

I got back and I lay on the hotel bed and drank, and smoked another Gitane, and flipped through the anemic French channel selection on the tiny TV, settling again and again on CNN International and seeing the same stories repeated over and over again, about the guy with the bombs in his shoes, about the launch of the Euro, about the economy, about the Lakers and Green Bay Packers and I felt it was a funny sort of punishment, to have come all this way only to watch the dreary cycle of up-to-the minute U.S. news. And I couldn't sleep, was the bad thing. I tossed and turned for hours. Finally I got up and transcribed some writing into my laptop. Then I still couldn't sleep, and it was that awful state where you can't sleep but you can't do anything either, so I just lay stark awake and miserable until about 9 and woke up at 11.

The interior architecture of Paris fascinates me. Not the façades of the classic buildings, the 19th century apartments with the wrought iron and the funny round windows in the roof. No. I am much more interested in the spaces inside, particularly where those spaces disintegrate into a weird, cramped collision of old and new: corridors, stairwells, bathrooms. Paris is a modern, explosive city inside an ancient, walled city; its first-world progress and growing population strain the tiny streets and low-rise blocks. The French obsession with preservation makes every building fragile, priceless. I feel a deep incongruity when I climb the steps of a McDonald's which is inside a bourgeois home that was built in 1860. The touch of the handle on the bathroom door thrills me further; inside, the plumbing and the mirrors and the tiles on the floor are shiny-new but the odd, slanted ceiling and rounded walls betray history.

A great deal of debate over whether we should go to DC, with C. W. this time. He came up the stairs into the apartment all manic and weird; I knew what was up. He really doesn't want to go, on account of the van being in bad shape and being not too burnt out to play the following day in New Hampshire. I hemmed and hawed, not sure myself of what really to do. But later discussion with J. T. and M. R. reaffirmed what I felt all along—we'd be fuckheads to cancel a gig so late. We have to brace ourselves for a long, meaningless ride down the eastern seaboard, through the dreary wasted landscape of Northern New Jersey, the incomprehensibly dull Garden State Parkway with the venomous State Troopers, to Washington DC for one gig and then back out again. It might really suck but we have to do it, and brace ourselves for the loss, financial and otherwise.

Later in the evening I got drunk. The cork from the second bottle of wine wouldn't come out so I stabbed at it and picked at it with a kind of intoxicated impatience; I shredded the cork to little bits and cracked the mouth of the bottle like of peppermint candy. Drank it anyway.

I might write a story about a crew of road workers, guys who pave roads and highways under those lights that are exactly like the sun; whose task it is also of course to paint the dividing lines. When it comes time to lay down the big white stripes the foreman tells this motley group of ex-cons and speed freaks to "paint a bright straight one, boys." He says this every single time, and for this and many other affronts the men despise their boss with a sinister passion. One night it begins raining just as they're about to put down the lines, so they all go to this tittie bar instead and get absolutely shitfaced and drag the foreman, whose name is Doug, out into a weedy lot behind the bar, in the rain, and each take turns raping the shit out of his ass. In the end they paint a big sloppy streak down his back and into his ass crack and leave him for dead.

Finch is wondering why we should go to DC with no money to play in a little hole. I think we should go, but I see his point. Since we have to be in New Hampshire the following night, we might have bitten off more than we can chew, or sucked more than we can swallow. We'll see.

We played in NYC on Friday. Have a sense of obligation now to document our comings and goings, as it were, but I'm not sure how it will come off. Anything can be described successfully, I guess. Not much to say about an experience that we had already had over and over, some just like this night, others not. Most just like this night. Went to the Downtown Lounge, on Houston St., a street too wide and dangerous to sustain a cogent night life, it would seem. But when we arrived there was a darkly clad crowd in a small hot room, smoking cigs and listening to some thrash punk band. We went on after many hours of waiting, and shooting pool. One guy who beat me said as he was leaving, cheerily: "Time to go home and be sick." By the time we played there was hardly anyone there. Had a good set, could not get the sound guy/manager to give us a nickel. Something about how the chick with the door money had gone home. He was shaking his head and looking down as he spoke, and fidgeting strangely with a little strip of white plastic. "Sorry. You should have asked sooner." We bought a couple of bottles of Olde English and headed home.

Saturday was a much better night, at Leo's in Portland, Maine. We were greeted by an impossibly good natured hippie cool guy who brightly offered free Guinness ("Just don't let it get out of hand") and pizza. Played for a small but extremely enthusiastic crowd. We never get new music up here, they said. You guys are so different. They seemed intent on telling us just what it meant to them that we had come up, how wonderful it was. A drunk fat chick wanted to get laid. An exile from Connecticut wanted news from home, was fascinated that we were from down there, probably figured every Connecticut band sounded like us now. Altogether a really good time. Listened to WFAN on the way home. The voice of the Jets, Mets, Knicks and the Rangers.

The great thing about these computers is that when you have absolutely nothing to say you can make a mark on the paper, or the screen or whatever, like some pretty /////////////////////'''''''''''''''''''or222222229-=9iooupp86ivfwxsbyn8unl, some nonsense and in a hundred million years of leaning exasperatedly on the computer, depressed and grieving from a near eternity of writer's block, you might have written The Odyssey or maybe at least a solid detective story. Just like that! Wondrous machine.

Microsoft software defines all of our lives: identically laid out resumes, memos, lost and found ads; fonts falling in and out of favor, clip art, spreadsheets; everything rigidly and meticulously formatted. What standard(s) are we gravitating towards? What to do with the utter loss of aesthetic originality in the workplace? Who cares? Everything is such a breeze. Printer chooser. E-mail. Will there be a tremendous backlash, a revolt, even, against what is perceived finally as nothing more than aesthetic and methodological fascism imposed on the entire world by some vague horde of brats in California? They mean well, sort of. Or at least they never meant to devastate the mind of every single living human being. They have not-bad aesthetic instincts and know-how and the level of efficiency and productivity that their work points to is astounding. In its unerring pursuit of perfect flexibility, adaptability, and versatility, Windows holds out the promise of true freedom but delivers none; only an elaborate labyrinthine path. Wondrous machines. Entire paragraphs deleted just like that.

Just finished writing a song – early in the morning of Dec. 1. Wouldn't have known what day it was unless I was working on the computer... the machine, with machine-like precision, knows the time and the date and does not hesitate to call it tomorrow when it's a minute past midnight. The machine.

It occurred to me that a great constraint of writing is that you can only write one thing at a time. It will be a great evolution in mankind's history when a writer effectively writes more than one text at a time. And not as a stunt, mind you. Because he has to, because the words, thoughts, directions, digressions are arriving too quickly or even all at once. A second pair of hands would be useful, I suppose. And by the way, what a weakness, what a shame it is to reread one's writing, as I have just this moment done. Or to stick the computer cursor into the text at will, as I have just now done, changing the very meaning of an entire half a paragraph (should it be a separate paragraph?) that I've just written, to say this: I am not sure of what I am about to write. That is, what I wrote earlier. I mean – this: Writing teachers, great and not so great teachers, will tell you that you must revise; but I suspect that writers, especially great writers, will tell you that it is really preferable not to look, even; but rather to race through page after page, unhinged. I am consigned to stop feebly at every turn – a comma here, a semicolon there, never sure it is quite right. You can not calculate great writing, arrive at it systematically. It has to flow freely. The words can be modified but the writing must be done.

On the way to work I saw a big plane, a passenger plane it seemed, arcing slowly, very close to the ground, in a place where there were no airports. I was fascinated of course and it occurred to me almost immediately that I wanted to see this plane go down. I mean, I wanted to see it loom spookily over the highway awhile, engines sputtering, rudders flapping nonsensically, and finally slam into the ground in a clearing in the woods. Why else would I be so excited, so unnerved when it disappeared from view? I tried to impose some measure of empathy on myself by imagining that my mother was aboard but it didn't quite work. Do we feel that witnessing atrocity is a privilege of living in these demented times? I saw myself as an awestruck bystander to catastrophe, maybe even narrowly escaping as the thing bellied stupidly onto the highway, gathering oncoming traffic in its useless wings. In a sense we can do no better than stare impassively at scenes of carnage, devastation. We are all beyond rescue. But I still tried to think of my mommy up there, not wanting to die, wanting to see her son again. And this is how I tried to feel about those doomed people in that big steel deathtrap, all the while craning my neck and nearly losing control of my car. Suddenly I would see it again, circling strangely, almost completely on its side. It had to be some kind of military plane. I thought of the horror movies when you think the monster's dead but he pops back up and grabs you by the neck.

But soon he was completely out of sight and I went on down the smooth, new highway to the funny-shaped building where I work.