I returned home from Rocky's with PC. It was a decent night; we won the drunken Irish trivia contest and discussed sickening American jingoism in his mother's car up Mad. I sank into the faux Eames and switched between CNN and ESPN. The oblivious, fickle manner in which CNN will transition from a story of deep tragedy and disaster to one of mundane, idiotic human interest – cute pets, let's say – is debilitatingly surreal, disturbing and depressing. This is saying something. It's exceedingly bad, utterly symptomatic of the American condition of the early 21st century and a key to why we are reviled as a society and deserve to be reviled.

The Gates are going up in the park, earnest men and women of all ages wearing their Christo & Jeanne Claude vests and hoisting and steadying frighteningly heavy poles. Like the intrepid settlers of the Old West. Building a home or a work of art, but really an abstract barrier against chaos.

It's going to be incredible, the Gates, I already know it. The saffron color is utterly surprising against the wet gray trees and sky. It evokes candy, sun, pleasure, comic books. And the incongruously happy hue of industrial machinery sometimes: bulldozers, backhoes and cherry pickers. It unites the worlds of childish sensual delight and grim adult labor.

At least it will, I think.

I did not realize the row of waiting cars on North Broome had been loosed by the light just as I'd stepped onto the street. So I stopped and doubled back as they streamed past me, and again I cursed my inattention.

At the dentist all hell was breaking loose. Hygienists were wandering from room to room, attending multiple patients. On this my second visit I noticed the "Forgive our appearance, we're under renovations" sign. They all seemed harried, short-staffed. The sexy dentist from the first time was nowhere to be seen. Instead I was treated by a man who introduced himself and shook my hand as I lay prone in the chair. He wore a ridiculous clear plastic germ guard resembling a flea-infested dog's head protector.

"You're here to get fillings," he stated. But with the faintest question mark at the end.

"Yes."

"Do you know where?" he asked, unbelievably. I told him lower left and he consented, verifying my chart. I had an unnerving feeling he'd been hired for the day, like a cop on the beach in summer. He excused himself precipitously, saying he had a cleaning down the hall.

When they were at work over my face, the dentist and the hygienist bumped arms and made jerky motions suggesting they had not established the division of labor. He seemed competent enough, and I admired the effort he made to maintain a quasi-normal interaction and to avoid referring to the surrounding catastrophe.

The thing slipped and sucked my cheek and she said Oops!

I Don't Care What You're Thinkin'

Played chess again with George inside the chess club this time, no kind of weather to be on the street. It was good, we each won a game, and I felt less adrift than usual.

There were guys playing backgammon, regular guys for sure, who were making a racket, especially one guy. He had some edgy game with a guy who eventually left pissed off, and then he was playing some new guy but he was still wound up from the game before.

"I don't care what you're thinkin', I don't care what you're drinkin', but if you get outta line I'm gonna set your ass on fire," he said, apparently by way of explanation to the new guy of what had transpired before. The new guy grunted in vague agreement. And then he said it again. "I don't care what you're thinkin', I don't care what you're drinkin', but if you get outta line I'm gonna set your ass on fire." And then again. He said it again and again. And silence. And then he said it again. Sometimes he'd flip around the thinkin' and the drinkin'. "I don't care what you're drinkin', I don't care what you're thinkin', but if you get outta line I'm gonna set your ass on fire." He said it again and again and again. It took on semi-comic overtones, then seemed to reach the status of mystical incantation. The rhythm always the same, the accents on the same places. A sermon-like cadence. It got to be where it stopped making any kind of sense at all, and then it got to be where you were pretty sure this was the only utterance that any human being would ever need to make, ever.

"I don't care what you're thinkin', I don't care what you're drinkin', but if you get outta line I'm gonna set your ass on fire."

Eventually the new guy grew a little bit irritated, not so much at this ceaseless, carping chant but with something in the game or something else about the guy in general. Things were said like fuck off. Other people came in, voices alternating quickly in mood and tone. Like no one could sustain ill will for longer than a breath or two.

And then the rolling of the dice.

At the gym pool tonight I perceived that the lifeguard was doubled over in his chair, asleep face-first in a tabloid paper. He didn't even seem to be on duty; he was wearing street clothes and had a knapsack beside him like he'd just dropped by, exhausted and seeking a few minutes' respite in the course of some unfathomably long journey. He was a young black guy with a matching baggy gray-and-black outfit. I got out of the hot tub and walked by him. The paper was open to a double-page article bearing a headline in huge type. His head covered the second half but the first half said:

GIRL, 14,

Let me tell you something, and trust me: The sound of a City pigeon cooing is exactly the same as the sound of a Duane Reade bag full of boxes of things scraping against the back of a chair on an uptown bus.

I was contemplating my mortality and deteriorating flesh when the bottle of Listerine seemed to spring from its perch atop the mirror and fell into my hands, blue fluid sloshing foamily inside.

Seller's Remorse

I've been in a frenzy of selling on eBay lately. Old camera lenses, guitar pedals, computer things I no longer need. Straining toward a vision of myself as unburdened and of life as elegantly efficient. But there's a curiously empty feeling now, not because there's nothing left but because there's nothing left to cast away. We're all really materialist fetishists of one sort or another; preoccupation with getting rid of things is just like preoccupation with acquiring things. Either way it's a preoccupation with things.

I walked stiff in the breathtaking cold back up Greenwich. Adam and Steve ahead, Jim and Rumana behind. The whole world seemed to want to crack: cars and asphalt, signs and facades, awnings, free-paper boxes and people belching plumes of breath.

We walked by the Umanov & Parsons bakery, where a waft of warm cinnamon seeped into forbidding air. There's a sign by the door there telling cars to turn off engines while they wait.

The odor of burnt bone clung to the walls and drapes and permeated every porous thing. We lived with it for weeks. The first night, after the shock of near death, we escaped the stench and drove to the ersatz New York delicatessen by the side of the highway for pastrami and French fries and pickles; strong, simple-tasting things to make us forget. And though we were happy to get out – and to have averted tragedy – that haunting smoke suffocated our mood. We were sleepy, dazed, not entirely in contact with the world or each other.

Had dinner with Andrea at a new Italian restaurant around the corner from her. The slate sign on the sidewalk read, "Now open Tuesdays." We were there alone and the place had the forlorn, eager air of a long-neglected inn along an obscure road, where stagecoach passengers in a Russian novel must spend an unexpected stormy night. Each of about twenty empty tables glowed with candlelight.

I had the orechiette and it wasn't bad.

As I drifted off to sleep early last night I remembered years ago when I came back from band practice to find our apartment thick with smoke. It was erupting out of the soup pot in a dreadful plume, like something funneled out of hell. I turned off the burner and took a towel and grabbed the handle and stiffly walked the thing downstairs, smoke still pouring. I threw it in the snow where it sank to the ground with a sinister hiss. I ran back up and found Aimee passed out on the couch. I grabbed her and called her name and as she came to she looked around in dazed wonder. "Baby, I fucked up," she said. We held each other. "I fucked up, baby, I fucked up."

There is a prodigious icicle growing outside the kitchen window, the sort of thing that might kill someone below. It's a fascinating object, a fresh growth whose molecules contain each ancient secret of rock formation, of erosion. Presently water drips down and off the bulbous tips of its hundred glassy fingers. And emerging from there's a crystal vomit-splash of ice across the window, starry and bejeweled.

Snow sifted down upon the city in a blur. I walked over to Andrea's and on the way I stopped at the liquor store on 103rd and Park, right by the elevated Metro-North, right by the vacant weedy lot where inexplicably there's a sofa, table and two chairs. A husky-voiced drunk was ahead of me in line, buying a bottle of wine or brandy.

"You got a opener? For sale?"

"No sir," said the clerk.

"My man, can you do me a favor? Open it halfway."

The wave coming in appears deceptively benign in videos. The occasional towering wave that collapses on the shore just like the rest. But this one kept coming and kept coming and soon enveloped trees and houses and flooded the road, breaching the untalked-about barrier between what's ours and what's the sea's.

I can't fathom that a drop of water, like one that runs down the outside of my whiskey glass, is the same element that this is made of. I can't reconcile the ocean with the drop.


In Puerto Rico we went body surfing on the first full day, tipsy from rum punch. I waded to my hips in the warm Atlantic and took a blissful piss. Waves came every five or ten seconds, cresting at my shoulder or neck. I turned around and body surfed pitiably, not getting tossed around in a cloud of sand like you're supposed to but getting pinned to the shore anyway. I'd get up and try again, and again.

Then I noticed I'd drifted into a clutch of rocks that stuck a foot or so out of the water, chest-high. A wave slammed me up against them. I tried to grip one but its surface was slick with moss and my hands slipped off as the undertow sucked me away. Then another wave. Slammed up on the rocks. Pulled away. Slammed. Pulled. I found myself growing tired, losing my footing with the ceaseless, rhythmic push and tug. In a moment I realized I had to act so I hoisted myself up on the rock, clambering up on my torso, heaving arms and a knee to the other side. There I waded in the calmer water and negotiated the other rocks on hands and knees, finally reaching shore.

The steam pipe's reassuring hiss, signaling heat and everything it means.

Today was cold, damn cold, fucking cold. On our way down Canal to the deli I drew stiff as a board against the Hudson gusts. Saw myself as a cartoon man, gloved hands outstretched. All you could do is pretend you weren't real.

I stopped at the liquor store on Lenox and 111th after work and a man said, Got a quarter? I'm short, and another said, Got a dime? I fished around the bottom of my bag as the earth ground to a creaking halt upon its axis. Finally I found them quarters and they were gracious as they bought their nippers.

The news is pictures of men and women palsied by grief, bent and twisted as loved ones are laid to rest behind them or cast unknowably deep and far into the sea. Now one listens to the tamped earth of a fresh grave, arms splayed out and palms up.

The wave rolling at five hundred miles an hour across the Indian Ocean. O you blameless wave.

I got on the 5th Avenue bus and he was already talking, across from me in the front seats facing in. He had a white beard, a kindly face. Decent pants and shoes but a bum's telltale posture, hunched and jerky. He was telling a young black woman, androgynous in a North Face coat and knit wool hat, about black music.

"See, black people make the best music," he asserted solemnly, nodding and watching for her reaction, drawing assent from her. She nodded almost imperceptibly. "They always did make the best music." He lifted his chin and gazed off in a professorial pose. "The Cadillacs," he said. "The Eldorados," he added confidently.

The girl nodded, bored, patronizing. She got up at the next stop. He said, "Oh you're getting off?" and wished her well and told her, "You're very beautiful," just to hook her into more talk. And she said, "You're beautiful too," just to shut him up.

Then he shuffled around the bus, looking for someone else.

"Mind if I sit here?" he asked a middle aged black man.

"You can sit anywhere you want. I'm, but I'm. I'm not in a very talkative mood right now."

The old man moved on, settling in the middle of the bus, where he eventually drove two white women away with who knows what he said. I wondered what he'd do next and by what unfathomable logic.

After a few quiet minutes he sprang up at a stop in the 60s. "Got to get off... this train..." he mumbled as he opened the door and stepped down uneasy. He stood on the sidewalk a moment as though he were trying to remember why he left the bus. And then he walked up to the wall and pissed.

Absence is a gesture of power. If you want to be revered, idolized, mythologized, don't show your face. Operate mysteriously in your lair, unknowable twists and turns afar.

But then – and maybe only then – there is the tremendous power of presence. A great athlete or mythic coach; actor, politician, rock star: There is the compelling fact of being there, on two legs and feet. Hobbled by constraining gravity and framed by the impediments of immediate truth. A stage, a rug, a wire. A chair. The ground we tread upon and our shared air.

Puerto Rico where we were, in Condado, had a vague look of distress. Everything was clean and safe for the tourists but there seemed to be a weariness from the decades of catering to them. On Saturday night at the El San Juan half the crowd was up in a throng watching a boxing match on TVs suspended from the ceiling. The room was ornate and old and retained some of the grandeur of another age when you had to wear formal clothes to gamble. The dealers were aloof, even rude. I sat down at a blackjack table and in between hands the woman to my left lit a cigarette, and the dealer waved off the air before her with a sour look. I rose in protest. Elsewhere dealers were grim and humorless; the cashier girl said neither thank you nor good night.

Cars on Lenox Ave., cars on Hudson Street. Racing through the intersection expecting deference. Twin morning worries on my way to work.

Drank at Cedar's tonight, to see Stephanie back from Canada. Sean, George, Mike H., Michele and Henry, Jake and Lis, Christina. A little clutch of sexy young people stared at us from the middle of the room until we realized they were staring at the photo exhibit on the wall. Right by Mike's head: the torso and legs of a beautiful woman clad in a leopard-skin bikini. Her taut flesh revealed cartilage and tendons. She made me think of Donna, who I'll never see again and that's just fine. Donna had a muscular physique. Donna had a sadomasochistic streak I never got to see.

There is a demented girl who hangs ou...

There is a demented girl who hangs out at Rocky Sullivan's who nobody wants to fuck. She leans in on conversations, makes herself plainly available, unappealing. And people who've befriended her report she's crazy, enraged with lustful spite for Daddy. Among other things.

So tonight there was a woman the whole time I thought it was her, but then maybe not. She had a placid countenance, a lucid smile, but other aspects of her face were the same. Eyes. Was it her, somehow sane now?

Steve spoke to Laura for an hour in an invisible corner so we imagined he was making it happen. We went to the Indian place across Lex, Bollywood posters in the foyer, a narrow space in front of the counter, the glass case with pans of goat, spinach, cabbage, chick peas, biryani rice; all of it oily with ghee. Chicken tikka, tandoori chicken and a tray of brittle fried samosas on the shelf. We left and saw Steve and Laura emerge with Andy and Lissette across the street and go their separate ways.

On the cab ride home PC and I discussed the prevalence of infidelity which led us to Hispanic women – their fury at their macho men who cheat but their eventual resignation. And then the Catholic Church and boy fucking, the boy fucking question.

Two women in high heels trotted down 56th Street in a beginning rain, trying to run. This is what they mean when they say you can't run in high heels. They were trying to run, click click click, and it was strange how stiffly hobbled they were. It's a persistent anachronism the high-heeled shoe, like if women still wore corsets.