I've got to come back to life and it had better be now.

So far I have slept gluttonously, after flipping through hours of shitty, shitty European TV.

Suicide is masturbatory, the ultimate self-indulgent act. What more can you give yourself besides an orgasm? Death. The gift that keeps on giving. That's why we're so dumbfounded with shameful, prurient awe at death from autoerotic asphyxiation. The math isn't sex plus death – a heady sum already – but sex times sex. Masturbation squared, and escalating into the stars. Do we envy them, discovered dangling and enrapt?

There is a fundamental friction between the races in the United States which doesn't seem to exist in France. The source of it is obviously slavery, the blunt fact that whites owned blacks and that the presence of blacks in the country and their citizenship and their identity will forever be colored so to speak by this fact. It tends to leave a bad taste in the mouth.

I entered the mouth of Penn Station, the escalator going down, with an old vacationing couple, the woman had red espadrilles. Halfway down, on the stairs to the left, a homeless black man clung to the partition between us. He was howling something repetitively in a gasping, croaking voice. At first it seemed inarticulate, then not, then so. As we floated by I strained to understand it.

"Moon river!" he howled. "Moon river!"

That faint, singing hum, like a hint of tinnitus; the hot salty smell from the galley, woven with the scent of extraordinarily synthetic things; the anechoic, blood-drained cabin; but outside the roar of pure atmosphere, uh sounded together with oh, phasing gently into a melodious murmur like river rapids.

A little turbulence and the engine dances under the wing – the plane seems elastic, alive, made of cartilage and sinew.

Little stars of frost form on the window and here's what it says on the wing: no step, no step, no step, no step.

On the screen the red arrow has us well over the Bay of Maine, south of Bangor, east of Portland, west of the moon.

We get infantilized when we fly: put your seatbelt on, watch the safety video, put your bag under the seat, no, all the way in front of the seat in front of you. Maybe we like this? It's a ritual of regression, the chance to be helpless once again.

When Janet bit her glass when we were all tripping on ecstasy and a perfect half moon of glass broke off in her mouth. We were all tripping but it wasn't very good, it was creepy, with Pete looking off into the distance, and he played guitar for Janet to sing that blues, what was it. She never did sing it well. She had a maniacal leer, she was thirsty and she had a glass of water that she kept up close to her chin, as though she craved reassurance that it wouldn't take more than a nod to quench her thirst. At times she had the glass in her mouth, without drinking, the rim wedged into her grin. And she just bit it, she bit the perfect shard into her mouth and she was not cut.

Sarah hid under the table and played with her cat.

In the morning first thing I do is check my e-mail, have a look at the news to see what disasters befell us as I slumbered. Today: Congo clashes, Kabul blast, three shot dead.

At Zesty's on 95th and Third, drunk late last Saturday night, stumbling in the open double door and in line with the rest of the kids, I spied this behind the counter: a shelf full of grape jelly and Pam spray margarine. Alternating impeccably. Pam grape jelly Pam grape jelly Pam grape jelly Pam. It was so perfectly precious and surreal that I had the impression I was the butt of a very clever joke: you think this is funny don't you?

But the joke's always on us because what we see is real.

Oh those rare occasions when you're reacquainted with the floor, violent and unexpected. You might have clunked down drunkenly, too desperately miserable to seek a more civilized bed; you might be held anklewise by a brutish tormentor; you might have tripped on a roller skate. But it's a different world down there, always somehow new. The polish of the hard, hard wood. The film of dust both cosmic and human, tiny pebbly debris, maybe a long-forgotten object under a chair: blue cigarette lighter!

We are too alienated from the floor.

Out with C. K. at Paddy Maguire's, on a Wednesday night after the Yankees won, after Roger Clemens won his 299th game. We watched it at an Irish bar on second with her coworker, a cute tanned pretty thing who was such a Yankee fan, she could hardly breathe when they came to bat.

After, C. K. and I marched up Second, looking for a place to shoot pool. We stopped into Nightingale's after I told her about the manager Tom, how great he was, the tremendous leather-clad rail-thin drunk fairy, he loved us and we loved him; he had us play when he knew we'd not earn him a penny; the Chinese guy who owned the club made him replace all the beer he drank at the end of the night. On one of the last nights we played J. T. and I saw him at the deli down Second at about 4 o'clock in the morning, slurring, hobbling to the front with a case of Rolling Rock. We were there to buy beer to drink and he was there to buy beer he'd drunk.

Sometimes at night there seems to be a great whirring, clacking machine outside our apartment. Especially near the bathroom.

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.

A dreary mantra plays in my head as I lift my groggy head out of bed, step into the shower, walk down the street to the bus stop:

Hundreds of dollars.

Hundreds of dollars, hundreds of dollars. Sometimes like an old folk song, or maybe I'm just thinking of the line in that Jimmie Rodgers song: "She took a hundred dollars to buy me a suit of clothes." To buy me a suit of clothes. That delightful, unnecessary repetition: suit of clothes, not just plain suit; it was crucial to the rhyme of course but in the end it doesn't sound contrived, it sounds perfect. She didn't just buy me a suit, she bought me a suit of goddamn clothes, for Christ's sake.

J. bought a banjo.

When I call him at night I can hear him plinking at it in the background. We'll be talking about sex or Donald Rumsfeld and I'll hear a honking scrawk of open strings, the precarious frame of a familiar melody.

"I'm practicing the claw hammer," he says.

Watching TV, and trying to reconcile the disparity between the Holocaust and a Japanese cooking show. To reconcile the disparity or explode the proximity, I don't know.

There was a dignified elderly couple on the L shuttle tonight, she was wearing orange pants, and I wondered: do they still have sex? Or maybe they've deferentially ceased making such demands of each other – slipping into bed on either side instead, then poking themselves in the belly with a hardcover book. He dresses nice and I wondered, when he dresses, does she tug on his tie and tell him what a handsome man you are.

A few days ago it was sunny and breezy and I walked up Greenwich to the lunch place on the corner and some big machine in the construction site across the street was making music. An insistent, rhythmic phrase comprised of two distinct and counterbalancing melodies: Wee-DEE-da-DUH-huh followed by an EEE-ah-uh, EE-ah-uh. Sometimes the phrases would repeat in slightly different patterns, as though shifted by some marvelous intelligence, and yet maintain their tempo, and it was such a beautiful song that I nearly grasped the wrists of the office girl sitting on the bench in front of the restaurant with her sandwich and said, "Can you hear that?"

The paintball king just walked down the middle of the hill with his goggles up on his head. No one could believe what they saw. For a moment they all let him lope in peace, unblemished, as though in respect to the power he'd had. And then he was hit in the chest; he barely flinched, but a flurry of streaking pellets soon hit him from all sides until all had reached their satisfaction and he was splattered everywhere with streaks and blotches. He kept walking at the same deliberate pace. He never looked back and was never seen again.

Went on an Internet date with a sweet short-haired girl named D. who's going to school for construction site management.

In the cab on the way home we spoke about art she's done, an installation at the Limelight with cotton balls in mesh covering the stained glass ceiling. "It was about clouds trapped in the windows. Usually windows let clouds through." French news crackled on the Haitian cabbie's radio, an animated man telling of Algerian youth who were volunteering to help fight the Americans.

I let her out on my side of the cab and we kissed for about 15 seconds and I got back in and watched her walk up 3rd Ave.

Went on a date with a former lesbian, a lawyer who represents Martha Stewart in some of her civil litigation. We shared a bottle of red wine on the Park Avenue median. She referred to it as the "meridian." She was very charming and engaging and everything and all except: she looks exactly like my brother’s wife.

Shock and awe.

The Big Dance

In the basketball tournament, the Big Dance, every nine-to-five slave has a tenner in a pool and consequently we find ourselves identifying with these players and places and we match our momentary emotions to the haphazard, pan-state scattering of places our teams are from, Kentucky and Kansas and Texas and Eastern Tennessee, and at the very same time there are soldiers sitting in a barren room in Iraq telling their Iraqi interrogators where they come from: Texas, New Jersey, West Texas, Kansas. 

At way past eleven a silhouette in the all-night grocery store, reaching to the shelf.

Went out with C. and her ex from Hungary. He's a heavyset man with red hair in a pony tail who speaks very quietly and hesitantly and smokes Camels nearly all the time. There were times when he was trying to say something and C. would lean over to him, lean in a little, and grin, sort of taunting him or cajoling him, spit it out. I was kind of manic and generally dissatisfied. We were at the Knitting Factory to see Luna, a good band but it was kind of a mistake. They play droning, soporific indie rock. The kind of music that, on a Thursday night for Christ's sake, makes you feel like a little kid with your parents in a museum or something, rocking back and forth on your cramped feet with your jacket on.

The lead singer said he'd played with Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs recently and Tuli said, "The war against Iraq will be very short but the war against America will be very, very long." No one really reacted to this. Should we applaud? Yes? No? Wait. The singer broke the pause by saying, "That's what he said!" and there were some relieved guffaws. 

I'd been thinking, in the rain on the way to the club, walking the footbridge over Varick, scared by the soaking-wet corrugated metal steps. I thought, this is the age of the American Empire. We've had the British Empire, the Spanish, the French, the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, the Chinese, the Greek, the this, the that. Now for better or worse it's the age of the American Empire. And the trouble is, an empire is never good. It may think itself well-meaning, aligned with God, a defender of justice – was this not the British imperial view? – but it can't be. By virtue of its power and its dominion over others it is immediately corrupt.

But beautiful too. And doomed.

Here's what I remember, for now: the stunted jut of my arm as I lay prone on the snow and deep, dark maple syrup on the table at the restaurant.