I remember the bric-a-brac in her bathroom, the candle on the toilet tank, the unhappy mess of toothpaste and brushes and soap on the sink. A burnt orange towel I always used that seemed to always be a little damp. An odor everywhere of slightly dirty perfume. Unmatched dishes piled in the sink, tables and chairs obstructing bookcases overflowing with books and papers and knick-knacks and God only knows, the random detritus of an undisciplined and incomplete life.

She had a life-size painting of herself in butterfly wings in the cluttered study where she kept her treadmill and her stacks and stacks of Penthouse and Omni magazines.

Waving

My phone vibrated on my desk at work this evening. It was Jen. Hey, I said, and she said hey.

"Look out your window."

"What?"

"Look out your window!"

I got up and looked. It dawned upon my addled consciousness that she was out there somewhere, amid the barking Holland Tunnel traffic.

"Do you see me? I'm waving," she said. I began to wave robotically out my fifth floor window at the dark. I perceived shadowy figures across the street, beyond the rows of box-blocking cars. "I'm across the street! I'm waving!" I saw one figure waving as I heard this in my ear. I was waving still. Back and forth, wave, wave, wave. Crouching a bit to see beneath the blind.

"Dan's here!"

"I see you! Down there," I said. Waving.

She was waving from the southeast corner of Greenwich and Canal. Like magic, I could see her dark arm and silhouette yet hear her voice, clear in my ear. She said they were doing something, going somewhere, God only knows.

I was thinking of something to say.

"Kick him in the ass for me."

And then I saw her booted foot arc off the ground and strike the form beside her.

"See? Did you see me kick his ass?"

"Yes," I replied. "Yes!" Waving.

I walked down the middle of Canal Street today on the narrow median that's straddled by hot dog carts on summer days when the weekend Holland Tunnel jams start midday Thursdays. Today was a gray day, gray like the concrete beneath my feet walking down the middle of Canal. In fact the median was cracked; one squarish slab had buckled and been riven like a tablet. It sank like a V into the netherworld beneath the street. I imagined I was in Caracas, Santiago, Istanbul, Algiers. Some second-word place where the earth intrudes upon the infrastructure every day.

I felt much better today than yesterday, Not sure exactly why, but it helped I wrote last night. So all day today, so cheerful. All day today so strong. And yet the world stays where it is; it won't defer to your good humor – or charm you from your grief – with undue prettiness or nothin'. There was still the billboards on Canal, the broken-brick strewn lot. The lotto license on the deli wall. Our wintry plumes of breath. You have to find something there for you if you want. Don't walk, walk. A truck downshifting raspily on the West Side Highway. Leaves & trash.

Mea Culpa

Dear John,

At this stage in our relationship, such as it is, which is to say, at no stage at all really, considering recent developments that I need not enumerate, I feel it would only be proper and decent and scrupulous of me to offer you a carefully worded, nuanced, admittedly perhaps even somewhat reluctant apology.

I'm kinda sorry about some things.

It's true I convinced you to abandon your doctoral thesis – what was it? Education, Folklore and Gender Dilemma in Rural, Pre-Bolshevik Ukraine, if I'm not mistaken, or had you changed it again? Was it Literature, Nudity and Secular Authoritarianism in Late Colonial Societies? Stop me when I'm getting warm. Eating, Fucking and Shitting Through the Ages? That might have been it. Whatever the case, I compelled you to hurl your entire manuscript into the fire and disavow yourself of all learning, edification and enlightenment; of the intoxication & majesty of letters; and of the siren call of beauty, truth & reason so that you could get a job selling furniture at that place on Route 9 beside the Olive Garden and thereby fill the car up all the way with gas now and then and pay the rent at those goddamned renovated mill apartments with the shag carpeting and the gym before the middle of the fucking month for once and for this I am a bit contrite.

The day Mr. Heyward ran you around the parking lot brandishing a gun and threatening to shoot you in the face if he ever saw you again, the day you slept off your hangover on that Naugahide loveseat in the display window, I feel I am in some sense to blame as it was my 24th birthday the night before and we drank schnapps until we couldn't see. But sweetheart, a man must answer for his actions, fundamentally.

If he is a man.

Honey, it's possible I broke your dreams. I'm somewhat regretful and have more than a little empathy for you but I think I gave you what you wanted, deep down, on a certain level. And admit it, perhaps you resented that I knew you better than you knew yourself. I do feel bad, I do, that you had to labor, benighted, all our years together.

I might have made something inside of you die, my former love. I thought I was nurturing something richer, deeper; something that would thrive on regular visits to my dad and stepmother's house for dinner, rote responsibilities such as the making of our bed each morning, trips to Target, Parcheesi, brie, the renewal of license plates. The unmaking of our bed at night together to sip soothing herbal tea and read Architectural Digest. Apple-picking, pot-pourri. Baby, this was the real stuff of our very lives. None of that wordy mumbo-jumbo that kept you aloof and onanistic, emerging only long enough to push your glasses up your nose and look away. I guess I'm sorry it destroyed your soul but I was trying to create something.

I shouldn't have fucked your brother. That was too much. A strange and disloyal act, utterly beyond the pale. Yet how could I resist? He was you yet he was not you. Everything I always wanted in a man.

Dearest, by the time you read this you'll be dead. Which is to say, come to think of it, you won't read it at all. By now your veins are pulsing with so much strychnine, mercury, arsenic, rohypnol, cyanide, belladonna and benzene that it's a wonder if you haven't burned a hole right down to your very grave. Why did I do it? For you, my sweet. Liberating you from the hell which I have more or less wrought is the only way I can even hope to make things right. Consider it my ultimate gesture of kindness, a final act to undo and redeem all others.

And why did I write this? For me. It's a little something I wanted to get off my chest.

It started to rain hard on the way home. And blow wind. Back home I was sad to see the lights were out in the courtyard on the roof of the building next door, the weird courtyard you can see down onto, with the door onto from a building next door, like in a dream. I like to see the puddles there and the rain falling in them in a bit of light reflected from the lamps on the walls of buildings surrounding. But the lights were out and that was that.

I like the rain sound too, I like it rise, fall in the wind; I like it cut through by a car down Fifth Avenue.

There's a special sound people make when they speak with their mouths full of steak. A honking, adenoidal sound. Almost choking. Drowning in meat.

In France the premise is that human desires can and should be satisfied, day after day. Desire itself is never extravagant, nor viewed as indulgent or vain, but rather rational and manageable. Not so in the U.S. "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" was written by a Briton but it's a distinctly American sentiment, inspired by similarly titled American blues. In fact it is a reaction to America: In the midst of this bounty, this ludicrous and hideous embarrassment of riches, I am lost, paralyzed, frustrated. A man comes on the radio, and he's telling me more and more. But the French would answer that song with: Of course you can be satisfied. Have a good meal - three courses. Not too much. Enough. Have wine, just enough to begin to get drunk - the happiest period in the span of intoxication. Plus you get a coffee at the end. Then go home and fuck your wife. Or your mistress. We know, and it's OK. Buy her some lingerie from one of those hundred shops on the boulevard. Satisfied? Of course you are. And tomorrow you get to do it all over again. To reenact and ritually refute the myth of desire.

But America is the land of the all-you-can-eat. Implicit in that very proposition is the idea that satisfaction is elusive, distant, perhaps nonexistent. Satisfaction? Who knows. Keep eating. And of course when we follow the American program we cannot be satisfied. The all-you-can-eat leads you directly from hunger to nauseous, uncomfortable fullness without a pause. There is no satisfaction. You are left with a vague sense that you should eat more to really get your money's worth, trumped by the fact of your strained, distended stomach.

Where does this insatiable American hunger come from? There was perhaps a backlash against hyper-abstemious Puritanism. And then the credo of eminent domain - all-you-can-eat writ huge, territorial. But it mostly comes from the very model of the so-called American Dream. You can do anything. How much can you do? More. How far can you go? Further. How much is enough? Nothing is ever enough. Satisfaction is anathema.

French society is calculated to satisfy desire, where American society is calculated to inflame desire. In America the carrot is on the stick; in France the carrot is in the hand.

Are you at risk?

What you need to know to keep your family safe.

After leaving work I observed Halloween from a mental and emotional distance, examining the costumed hordes as they progressed gamely, station to train to station. There's something funny and what's the word. About someone who's all dressed up and waiting. All dressed up with somewhere to go. A man wearing a mask and a ridiculous, long hippie wig, its black synthetic strands shiny in the fluorescence. I scrutinized him as he – poignant? – gathered up his fake mane and took a seat beside his similarly dressed girlfriend. No. Arresting?

Women, young women, scuttled across the crowded subway halls in fishnet stockings and mini skirts with a little knowing smile, ever so slightly self-conscious. All sexy and shit. I mean. There seemed among them a great desire to dress slutty. The license you get this night to play, to regress and play, be cops and robbers, cowboys, Indians and whores.

The air outside the office was richly redolent of butterscotch. As though some tanker heading down the Hudson, God knows. A thick, cloying brown-sweet. The goddamned odors in this city, for the love of Christ.

A homeless man was bent over the trashcan of Canal & Greenwich northeast. Not bent over looking inside mind you. But propped. Perched, by the chest. Examining the ground on the other side.

Last two, three days I been trying to memorize that Dylan tune Tangled Up In Blue. Waking up in the morning to the deep-deep-deep of the alarm, already bearing the cadence in my brain: Early one morning the sun was shining. Getting up, brushing the teeth. She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe. A strangely difficult song to memorize, its language the authentic one of a single real man in the world, liable to tell you something one way or the other. She said over my shoulder we'll meet again someday. Stepping through the puddles on Canal and Hudson, animated from caffeine and work. And when finally the bottom fell out, I became withdrawn. A flurry from her cigarette, waiting for the light to change. A man and a woman push a car across the intersection. An entire car. I never did like it all that much and one day the axe just fell. A tall, hunched leather rocker with a despondent air chose a seat across from me on the L. She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me. She took off her glasses and placed them on the bar. I jaywalked across Fifth Avenue and the gypsy cabs and a man coming 'cross the other way. Her folks said our life together sure was gonna be tough.

To plunge into the furious, bewildering flurry of dreams.

I've been putting ashes to my lips.

As I began to take my seat on the flight back to New York the older lady in the aisle seat said, in French, that she'd been separated from her husband and would I mind switching?

We're pushing back.

I said yes, yes, of course, even though he had a middle seat and I wanted window.

The hyper-American accent of the voice from the flight deck. Suggestive of deep and mythical American experience: A lush green and sunlit farm by a winding country road; red barn shaded by oak, maple & elm; acres and acres upon which to play; milk and all it represents; no laws to follow but those of the planting and the growing; breakfast - eggs, sausage, biscuits, ham, grits, bacon, oatmeal, halved grapefruit, monstrous breakfast - steak, waffles, toast and butter and jam, jam, jam; corn muffins and popovers and holy hot cross buns; flapjacks or griddle cakes or pancakes or whatever you want to call them drowning in syrup, beautiful amber syrup. Syrp. Corned beef hash and cream of wheat with cream and molasses or brown sugar, hash brown potatoes. Carnal breakfast. Extravagantly sensual. A new meal for a new world.

Gallagher's at Newark Airport with the big band honking away in the upper background along with the sweet tang of onion rings and there's a bartender calls you buddy, pal, my friend, surprisingly old school but why not really? And a bonhomie among the waitstaff, the small-

I love to get there early, you become alive.

He called - the bartender - he called a mulatto waitress "two-tone.'' Hey Two-Tone.

-voiced black waitresses gamely playing along.

There's a guy at the bar, says he's from New Hampsheeah. He talks about here's what I like about sitting at the bar. The girls – you see them – here's what I. What I like. To sit here. To sit at the bar – you see the girls. You can see their – at the bar, you can. Bartender: what? You can see their thongs. You get a view.

The man from New Hampsheeah likes to drink wine and he has an ever-so-slight overbite. Ruffled dirty blond hair and unflattering glasses. The bartender humoring. I hear that, I hear that. But turned away the same time.

The Way It Really Is, Part I

The world is made up of many nations with many different types of people, all of whom work together for the betterment of themselves and of humankind as a whole. Nations trade with each other with their mutual interests in mind, knowing that what is good for them is only good if it is good for the other as well. These interactions are always embarked upon in good faith and with utmost sincerity. The leaders of nations accept their duties with modesty and the deepest sense of personal conviction and responsibility. Theirs is a mighty task: to look after the interests of all the people, primarily their constituents but also the interests of all people everywhere on earth. People rich and poor, black and white. People of all creeds and habits and inclinations.

Imfomation Society

Mr. Pride, our alcoholic art teacher in high school, told stories about the Ku Klux Klan chasing him around the South. You'd go into his office, one of those offices adjoining two classrooms. Next door was Mrs. Nevers. Mr. Pride had a bottle of Maalox there full of vodka. Maalox and vodka. White, chalky vodka. He'd take a pull and pry the plastic bottle off his lips, momentarily reluctant, and loose upon the small room the antiseptic tang of alcohol mixed with the faint, sweet blandness of antacid.

This was 1985. One day Mr. Pride told us, "Chillen, you is livin' in a imfomation society. This world is turning into a imfomation society. Iss all gonna be 'bout computers an' communication an' imfomation an' computers talking to other computers an' everything. Git used to it! Git ready fo' it. You best be gettin' on dem computers an' such. Imfomation."

The envoys from the rebel army entered the grand hall of the old imperial palace and took their places around the table to discuss with the president not only his complete abdication and the dissolution of his cabinet, administration and coalition-led parliament but the absolute effacement of the national identity and the overturning or subjugation of millenia of national culture: art, literature, music, architecture, dance, cuisine, folkloric crafts, pagan and modern religious rituals and holidays and the like; these being named as a partial, representative, list only, not to the exclusion of other stipulations to be made at any time at the discretion of the rebel leader or an authorized deputy.

The president was late. He arrived and paused briefly in the doorway to bow and offer his most heartfelt apologies. Gentlemen, he said. I am at your complete disposal.

I worked with her one summer but I'm not gonna remember her name. She drove a blue Mustang convertible. An invisible boyfriend.

She was that type of still-hot Puerto Rican girl soon promised to a life of childbearing, child-rearing and eventual matronly misshapenness. She wore her hair in a trashy mid-'80s bouffant.

Not going to remember her name.

I peered above the magazine to the TV to find that all hell had broken loose in some fucking stock car race. Wheels and side panels had sheered off to glide above the fray.

It's getting dangerously close to the point where the best life to live really may be a life of torpor and indulgence. Wireless Internet access, TiVo, FreshDirect, video games and Netflix, coupled with older and still-improving conveniences such as cable TV, processed and frozen foods, microwave ovens and laptops, are making the case louder and stronger than ever before that we should stay home in the half-dark, sinking deeper into our armchairs and sofas at a glacial yet inexorable pace, in geologic degrees.