Slept off a hangover and had a semiconscious sort of day Saturday, taking the bus down Fifth and staring, entranced, at the people on the sidewalks, all ugly and beautiful at once. A group of Japanese women got on at the Met; two sat right in front of me and one in particular was beautiful and I stared at her profile and her hands. She pointed something out on the Plaza, maybe the hot dog guy, maybe the hot nuts guy beside him, maybe the pigeons on the statue or the idle horse-drawn carriages on 59th. The other woman giggled in one breath, one soft convulsion, and I wondered at how similar we all are after all.

The nut guy's nut cart said "Nuts 4 Nuts."

I got a haircut at the barber on 23rd Street, just under the wire – I was in the owner's chair and he kept stopping and unbolting and bolting the door as each remaining customer left. He cut my hair deftly yet deliberately, and I was amazed at how this could be any kind of business at $10 a cut. He spoke some foreign tongue from time to time, seemingly to no one in particular but I suppose to the young barber one chair over who was fussing with a black man's fade. The young man didn't seem to respond but I guessed their communication was supraverbal – no indication was required for a thing to be understood or to be understood to be understood. What the hell was it I wondered, Russian? Hungarian? Albanian maybe. I got my hair cut and my eyebrows trimmed and my neck razed – the hot shave cream he applies daintily with his thumb and the delicious prickle of the flat razor on my nape. He wipes it on the tissue tucked in my collar between each set of downward scraping strokes.

A couple weeks ago I went to Baltimore with Chris and Jim, to see their old friend Jeff play. We drove in the pouring rain, Chris racing in the fast lane and peering over the dashboard to see below the fog on the windscreen.

Down this way the sniper was hunkered somewhere, thinking. Or maybe sleeping or maybe having something to eat. He'd shot eight people by then, or was it nine, and six had died, or was it seven.

We stopped at a rest stop just across the border into Maryland. It was overrun by teenagers who had evidently adopted it as their hangout. Friday night at the rest stop, hanging out in the food court, racing through the main hall, dodging drifters and old fat couples, twisting the knobs of gumball machines. Two boys were languidly wrestling each other, getting in people's way a little and not caring, fully preoccupied with each other but addressing each other only with arms and hands – their eyes looked elsewhere. Tittering girls at a table near us discussed the sniper.

"I heard he shot five people in a single day!" one girl gushed.

Right outside of Baltimore, October 2002.

Extreme unction, what's your function?

"I don't think we'll have much of a fall," the cashier at the grocery store said to one of the others.

The sound of a car door slamming. 

The sky above the hardware store.

An ad for coffee in a magazine.

A seagull on a saturated beam.

A couple of weeks ago at C.'s party I blacked out. Actually it was after her party but during it I could feel consciousness falter and slip away. I was drinking gin and tonic and vodka and tonic and I can hardly remember talking to anyone but I know I must have, S. I think, and G., and K. a bit and P. who was sitting in a chair by the bookcase looking morose.

G. and C. were there with C.'s sister, whose name I can't remember but who was beautiful, long straight brown hair and dark eyes and a small mouth with full  lips, her lower lip perpetually wet.

Everyone left and C. and H. and C. and I walked to Paddy's and this is when I lost it. I think I remember walking over there, dodging the trees in the sidewalk. We played pool of course. I was drinking whiskey but I'm not sure how the glass got in my hand. We played this couple over and over again. Once I looked over at H. He seemed to be looking down at me. He shook his head a little and smiled, amused, sipping his gin and tonic from the stirring straw. I wondered what he saw.

At one point C. and I were telling C. what shot to take and she hates that, and I know it, but she said OK to shut us up and then C. said hit it low, and that freaked her out. She was crying. She said you guys don't understand what that's like. I wanted her to stop crying, I wanted it to all be better. She wanted to leave but we convinced her to stay. I could not attenuate myself to the situation. I said come on, let's play again, and she was still pissed off. I wanted us to forget about this.

The woman in the couple bought me a drink. I think it might have been because I won a game but I think she might have bought me another one. Maybe more.

I think I remember leaving the bar – literally walking out the door – but nothing else. And I don't know how I got home, or how I remembered that K. had my keys and he was waiting for me to buzz my buzzer.

That's all I remember but the day after C. and C. reminded me about things. C. said he was laughing because I had a giant whiskey stain on my shirt that wouldn't dry. I was marked, extraordinarily, like Lady Macbeth. C. said he'd told me to go talk to the woman who was buying me drinks. Apparently I walked over to her at the bar. She was sitting with the guy. I stood and watched for a few moments. Stood there. And turned around and came right back. After we made C. cry she had comforted her, putting her arm around her and squeezing and saying who needs men anyway? We don't need men. At the end of the night she was grasping C.'s hands and kissing them as we left.

Hearing C. and C. tell me what happened gave me a key to this part of my consciousness and I could sort of remember what it felt like to inhabit that state. At the time I think it felt perfectly normal. I was not aware, of course, of the disintegration of my consciousness – how could I be? But I was present, responsive, engaged. And to have all that be disconnected from consciousness is terrifying.

On the bus on the way home from work I was reading an article in The New Yorker, a sort of typically dense economics article, by turns engrossing and numbing, and I began to drift off and I actually noticed the words and phrases losing their meaning until I reached a strange, delicate limbo in which I was not sleeping, not quite dreaming, and yet I began to read a completely different meaning in the text than that which was intended. I mean, completely different. Apparently irreconcilable to the actual words on the page. And yet I was reading the words, and the meaning I perceived was driven by the act of reading those very words. For a while the misapprehension centered on sex. The text was about unscrupulous CEOs and their greedy abuses but I understood it to be about sex, the sex act, and quite violent sex I think, at one point.

Sitting here at six in the morning a familiar sound erupted behind me: the hiss and gurgle of the radiator. They put the heat on.

My job is winding down in our new office in a strange part of town, at the crux of TriBeCa and SoHo, facing that striking public works building out on the Hudson. Each day I walk down Canal to get there, from Chinatown past the watercolor letterists and shops of knockoffs. The street is intimate; I get a sense of it as a distinct, self-sustaining community. A Chinese woman swept dust from out of one store and emerged to return the dustpan and broom to a store a few doors down. Businesses sit on top of each other and you don't know what's what or who you're supposed to buy anything from but someone will step up to sell. Shops with "electronics" and "audio" in their names sell nothing but fake shoes and handbags.

I hardly do any work. I show up and greet the few remaining people and we hang around and talk and we go out for long lunches and when Steve isn't there we play the guitar, we sing, we erupt in mad fits of cursing. It occurs to me what a weird and wonderful time this is. I will likely never have another time that is quite like this. In spite of the gloomy circumstances and the industrial grimness of the office (Jason said yesterday, "I hate coming into the office") I know that I will look back on this fondly. I'm in the middle of it and I know all too soon it will be over and I'm just trying to grasp it a little.

Listening to old tapes of my song ideas I feel like Beckett's Krapp listening to the tape of his diary. Disconcerting and absurd. At one point on a tape from '98 I heard Aimee's chimey voice in the background and I was plunged back into that cozy world I'd lost, or given up.

I was ironing a shirt and the steam liberated the scents that had been trapped in the fibers: a bar – cigarettes, other people's cologne, booze, wood tramped on by tens of thousands of shoes and boots. It smelled great and it made me want to be lost.

Friday night I fell asleep on the uptown bus after Christina's roof party, drunk and sated from salty sweet McDonald's hamburgers, and I awoke at 120th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. The walk back down was strangely delightful. Adam Clayton Boulevard, a tree-lined corridor bisecting the top of Central Park, was a dream of old New York, of New York in 1925 or something. The beautiful old buildings seemed more intact than I'd expected, preserved somehow, not by renovation but by some invisible benign envelope. The walls were bathed in yellow glow. There was street life here and there, people on stoops or gathered in groups on the sidewalk. Looking down, the street disappeared into the blackness of the park aglitter with lamplight. I took a left onto 110th Street. I passed a blue awning that said DENTIST'S OFFICE and a plaque beside the door that said DENTIST'S OFFICE too.

We left at dawn with all the Japanese kids, all of us sweating, them in their tight racing-striped tees and platform boots and hair dyed blonde, hair dyed blue. There was a locker room where we all had checked our bags and it really looked like a gym locker room and for a moment I fantasized I was one of them in a Tokyo school. I liked to stand among them, their titters and glances dancing around me.

Roger and I went into a train station and a British couple approached us to chat. They'd been out celebrating his birthday – happy birthday, we said. He'd had "quite a few beers, mate, quite a few tequilas." Turns out they were there teaching English; they lived in a tiny apartment somewhere and had this strange ex-pat life. They were ordinary working-class British, down to earth and fast-talking. We asked them what it was like and the guy riffed about Japan and the Japanese. He was funny and I liked him. He said it was right strange living here, mate. The Japanese do not feel shame the way we do, he noted. For example, they are not the least bit disinclined to stare straight into your eyes for a long while simply because you're white. It happens to him all the time, he said. He'll be on a train and he'll sense something a bit off and look up to find the commuter across the aisle staring intently at him and, rather than looking away in embarrassment upon being caught, unflinchingly continuing to stare, every bit as intently. And also the customs, you have to be careful. It's quite taboo to eat while standing up. Very taboo. Don't eat a piece of pizza or something standing on the platform of a train or walking down the street. And don't blow your nose in public. You may just as well be wiping your arse.

What do you eat?

Lots of noodles mate. You get used to noodles. You have to get used to noodles if you want to live in Japan. Food is bloody expensive but noodles are fucking cheap, mate. And a bit of seafood now and then yeah? But the shop is very strange here too. The way prices are for things. For example you can go into a shop and find a mini-stereo, speakers, CD player, radio, the whole lot, for 3,500 yen. And then you go to the fruit section of the store right? And you pick up a package of red apples, three polished red apples packed in clear wrap on a green styrofoam tray and you look at the price and it's… 3,500 yen.

The girl was quieter but funny too and I liked them both. She had brown hair tied back severely in a ponytail and bright red lipstick and lots of mascara and a sexy sort of form-fitting leather jacket. Roger said are you a Jordy then? She smiled and said yeah, she's from Newcastle, can you tell? And Roger said yeah, you got a Jordy accent.

I took a great picture of the two of them on the train, her head on his shoulders, and then they got off forever and there I was with Roger on our way back out through the suburbs, gray and dewy this time, schoolgirls staring with their white socks up. We got off in a little town near the airport and took a walk, and he wanted to go see a monastery or some fucking thing and I just wanted an excuse to leave him so that's where we parted, him walking down the road, me hailing a cab back to the hotel. I took a shower, numb and nauseous, and took the bus to the airport and flew back around the world.

There was a huge crowd in a U-shaped space around the bar, everyone dancing in place, like everything else in this city. A DJ was spinning up-to-date hip-hop. I waded from one side of the room to the other, watching people, stopping to dance awhile, hoping to really feel lost. It was mostly young Japanese but there were Westerners here and there. There was a magnificent sight all along the bar: ten or so beautiful young Japanese women all dancing in a row, their hips and arms in counterpoint. I approached and faced one and danced before her for a while, aware of myself as a sort of worshiper or supplicant. She occasionally graced me with her gaze and smile. Eventually it was just too much and I had to move away, and I danced before another one, and another.

When I saw Roger again he had gotten a hold of two glow sticks and was dancing ostentatiously raver-style, his gaze intent, wildly waving his arms in the space he'd created around him. I wandered away again, hoping to perhaps never see him again.

The music was hot and I was drunk, a mass of dancing youth around me. Everything vertical, up up up! Time raced for the sunrise. A particular bar dancer caught my eye because she was wearing a t-shirt that said something. I could tell from afar that it was English and I knew that if a beautiful Japanese woman dancing on a bar was wearing a t-shirt in English, then what it said had to be remarkable. I made my way closer to have a look. I felt hot and short of breath in anticipation. Finally I could see it. She was dancing, knees pumping up and down, arms swaying. The t-shirt was white, with a rainbow on it. Above the arc of the rainbow it said this: COMMUNICATION. And below the arc, on three lines: GOOD JOYFUL HAPPINESS.

I wanted to cry it was so beautiful. Then I danced in front of her like a fool.

We got out at Shinjuku Station and found a place to eat, a sushi restaurant on the second floor. Everything in Tokyo is up stories; it's a vertical city. Bars, shops, restaurants: 2F, 5F, 7F. What's on the ground floor? Banks.

We took our shoes off at the front door and sat cross-legged at a low table in the back. I had sake and Roger had tea and we ordered sushi that was no better than it is in New York. We talked about where we were from and then about girls and relationships and he said he was in love with some girl but he cheated on her or something and pissed her off and now he wants her back. Outside it began to rain.

There was nothing happening in the neighborhood so we took a cab to Roppongi. As I gazed through the beaded water on the windows I wondered, this place could be any city, it's like all the cities I know: What makes it Tokyo? I searched for something that would evoke magnificent, strange difference but found only pleasant residential streets lined with trees and shrubs and walls around parks, streetlights and crosswalks and cars and parking meters.

When we got to Roppongi the rain was pouring in thick, warm ropes. It was maybe the hardest rain I'd ever seen; a choking, blinding deluge that soaked all the fabric on my body. We walked up and down the main street and finally decided to go to the Gas Panic Bar, just down a side street. We spent a couple of hours in the second-floor bar, Club 99, a relatively subdued place with an American-looking bartender and lots of young Japanese. We sat at a small table, drying off and drinking beer and looking around. I took pictures in the red-lighted semi-darkness. And then we went to the bar on the third floor.

Lis and I drove into San Francisco from the airport on Thursday, with time to kill before picking up Mom and Viv in San Jose. It was beautiful and breezy. We headed north on 101 to the hill that said SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO THE INDUSTRIAL CITY. I was struck by all the Spanish names, San Mateo, San Bruno, San Francisco, and I thought of how good they sounded in American, in sunny California American, and I was happy that we had kept these Spanish words for towns, though it hardly occurs to us they are the names of saints.

With nowhere to go we headed directly to Haight-Ashbury.

Went to a bar to see my coworker DJ, with my other doomed coworkers, and we talked about what it was like to be on the way out and we talked about our dream jobs, not just our fantasy dream jobs but our realistic dream jobs, and we talked about seeing art in a museum and how the context is fucked up. Howie DJ'ed good and he played a great slow version of "Heart of Glass." 

We talked about outsider art and the creative process. Geoff has tried to write but he's sure he can't do it. "Yes you can," said Chris, "No," said Geoff, "Trust me. I write a paragraph and a half."

We told him we'd really like to read those paragraphs and a half.

Denis appeared to be high. "Life is beautiful," he blurted out at one point. We turned to him. "Don't you just think life is beautiful?" he asked. He described how important it was to him to escape the mundane.

Thump thump thump thump thump-bash thump thump-bash thump went the music.

Newton was a bit like Columbus. He made a big discovery, but he didn't know exactly what he had discovered – or how momentous his discovery really was.

When Newton discovered gravity, he discovered God. What is God – what could God possibly be – if not gravity? Without gravity, the entire universe would be completely empty and there would be no reality of any kind whatsoever. Think about it.

This view is consistent with other notions of God – or suspicions as to the nature of God, anyway. We are often tempted to assert that God is love. This sounds "right" in a sort of abstract, instinctive way – we like to imagine God as a ubiquitous, positive force. Well that's right. God is a ubiquitous, positive force. Literally. And it is love. Everything that binds or draws one thing to another, everything that staves off entropy, the single thing that has enabled matter to coalesce into worlds and higher and higher forms of life – it's simply gravity. And to the degree that we feel that God must be an agent in the life of the universe right down to the minutest elements in human affairs, well… that's true, too. Perhaps not in the way that we would like to think (God does not answer prayers, let's face it), but God – gravity!- is unquestionably the agent of everything that happens in the universe.

It's deceptively simple. We have overlooked it perhaps because it's too simple, and not satisfyingly romantic or spectacular to our overstimulated imaginations. Also, we have a foolish – tragic, sometimes – tendency to believe the greater the question, the more complex the answer. Often the opposite is the case. Good scientists and mathematicians really appreciate this paradox – when faced with a difficult problem, they know to look first for the simplest answer. And it's a law of troubleshooting, expressed in the owner's manual of practically any gadget: Not working? Make sure it's plugged in.

Looking for God? It's everywhere. 

The city train was more crowded and I felt people staring at us, not in any kind of antipathetic way but out of naked curiosity. We were so obviously different. Their gazes followed us in and out of the car and almost every moment in between.

The train was full of somber, inconspicuous commuters; working people; young pigeon-toed women clutching their handbags, paunchy men with their arms crossed. After we shared perfunctory background information about ourselves – he's "going to university" for physics, I'm starting a new job – Roger managed to steer the conversation to Her Majesty the Queen: she has more power than you might think actually, and I thought, what is it with the English and their queen? Here we are in Tokyo and I have to hear this. I looked away during a pause in the conversation and perceived a wild burst of fiery red light in the darkness right outside the window. I turned to see a hovering, laser-projected logo on the tunnel wall and it said:

Yahoo!

The ride took about an hour and a half and we still weren't there. We got off at some arbitrary station that seemed deep in the city but then we realized it was the business district – a forest of office buildings with corporate logos on the top, empty for the night. A sweaty man with glasses offered to help. "Where are you going?" he said haltingly. We tried to tell him and he said OK, and he made some strange remark about girls, were we looking for girls, and we said ha, no no, but he did tell us what connection to make to Shinjuku Station. We thanked him and he bowed and nodded and thanked us.

We went out to dinner that night with Jo and Michael and his wife and the kids, at a good French restaurant. We sat at a long table in the back and had spicy Australian wine and I had the lamb and it was all very good, and we talked about this and that and I admired Jo diagonally, in vain.

Then the next morning it was time to go, just like that. Kevin had to go to work and so Kate drove me to the airport and walked around the terminal with me a little while, killing time. We browsed a clothes store – it was odd to be engaged in such mundane behavior so soon before our separation. But finally I had to pass through the gate and we embraced and like always Kate said, "You're shaking!" and I said yes I know, I'm a trepidatious man.

I landed back in Tokyo nine hours later, at about 7:30 at night, went through customs, took the shuttle to the hotel, checked in, and there I was, in Tokyo with the night ahead of me. I went down to the lobby and noticed a line of taxis outside. I got in the back of a taxi and told the driver I wanted to go into Tokyo. He didn't understand a word. I wrote "Shinjuku Station" in my little notebook and tore out the sheet and gave it to him. I had read about bars and nightlife at Shinjuku Station.

He scribbled something and handed the paper back. It said "25,000." That was like, $250. I briefly considered giving it to him but figured there had to be a better way. He gestured with his hands and said something in half Japanese, half broken English, articulating how far away we were, how that was a normal price. I said no thank you and slipped out of the cab.

I was asking someone at the front desk how to take a train to town when a young English guy sidled up to me.

"You going into town?"

"Yeah."

"So am I. Let's go together."

"Sure." I didn't want to say no. How do you say no to a complete stranger in a place that's strange to both of you? But I had fantasized about being alone in Tokyo, of having a solitary and unpredictable experience. And I was sorry to give that up.

We got our directions and took the shuttle back to the airport and descended to the lower levels of the terminal, where the trains were. The deeper you went, it seemed, the less English there was. At the bottom there was nothing anywhere but Japanese characters: exit signs, train schedules, poster ads, everything was a colored blur of lines and squiggles. I had a sense of truly entering a different world, where my reference points had vanished. We went to the ticket booth and with difficulty got the man to understand what we wanted, and we found a train to take. We could take the express or the cheaper local commuter train and the English guy, Roger, said he wanted to save money so I said OK fine, and we took the slow train, and I already began to regret having met him.

After the fights Kevin and I walked through the downtown Olympic Park, the strange mass of international tourists, the tents and kiosks with pins and other souvenirs. We looked for a place to drink but everything was crowded and awful so we took the monorail out of the neighborhood. We got out and walked up a steep pedestrian street with young street life, musicians and people sitting in the middle of the pavement watching. We walked across a big empty green bordered by office buildings and lit by just a few lamps and there was no one in sight.

On Friday, my last day, we went into town in the car and ate breakfast at a chic café, the kind with wooden chairs and flowers and everything written on a chalkboard. We had parked in a cul-de-sac near steps that led down a steep hill facing the city and someone put the baby down on the top of the steps and I took a picture of her from above and beside her on the pavement there was a junkie's discarded needle.

We drove around more, went to Kate's parents house again, went to a great big shopping center out in the country somewhere with a long escalator up to the supermarket. The aisles and aisles of packaged food, the weary people stopping on the way home from work, the inescapable light, it always makes experience immediately mundane. I strained for evidence that this was still exotic in some minute way, as I was far, far away from home, but I could not, and felt hollow and tired, infected with the petty melancholy of something idly pleasant reaching its end; like a child on a Sunday night.

Last Friday I went out after work just like always, liberated, with limitless possibilities and mysteries ahead. Jason and I met up with Christina in front of the Ciel Rouge on 7th Ave., and it wasn't open yet of course, so we walked down to 14th Street and found an old Irish bar with a long green awning. "It looks like they might have beer there," said Christina.

Inside it was dark and cool and it smelled dank and dead-flowery somehow, a sharp, rich stink from industrial-strength cleaning agents and hundreds of man-years of bad cologne. It seemed like we were in some other city in a faraway state – when we left I said maybe the Southwest somewhere – the place was too cold and spacious and empty for Manhattan.

After one drink there we went up to the Ciel and sat in the back garden and P. C. came too, and Jake, and Jason's friend Ed and Lis and Nora finally, and I drank mojitos and picked wet mint from between my teeth, and everyone talked and had a good time. Christina went to the Knitting Factory and Jason and Ed left, then everyone else got up to go and it was dark now and I hadn't even noticed. Jake and P. C. and I met P. C.'s friend Bret and this other guy Tom and we walked to a pool hall nearby. It was some weird new-looking place with a bar upstairs and tables downstairs and everything was chromy-clean and slick and awful. Jake left and the four of us played, Tom and I beating Bret and P. C. in a few games, and I guess I drank Heineken, I'm pretty sure. 

The interior architecture seemed to preclude conviviality or even the most incidental human contact.

We walked farther east now, to Paddy's. I want to describe how we knew upon walking in that we had to leave but I'm not sure how. The crowd was not precisely unfriendly but sort of leeringly territorial, flush with the idea of themselves. We turned on our heels and walked uptown to some other place, a place I'd been, and ordered drinks and sat like assholes in chairs by the wall, waiting for God knows what to happen.

Finally Bret left and Tom and P. C. and I met Christina back downtown at Bar 81. We sat around the corner of the bar and drank and talked and I was starving so I went with Christina to get pizza and we got back and drank some more and played pool. I was unhinged, dancing around the pool table. In fact did not play so badly. But I wish I had been more conscious.

After the first few hours of blackness I got hit hard in the morning. I craved sleep but it only seemed to come in fitful spurts punctuated by agonizing nausea. There was no comfort anywhere. I got up once and took some Advil and water and assessed the true scope of my misery.

Then I woke up at 4 o'clock and felt fine.