A young man on the train, to his friend: "I'm gonna dead it. I take her out, I spend mad dough on her yo. She can't be... treatin' me like that. I'm deadin' it."

We arrived in Monaco after a stint shrouded in mountainous tunnels. Arrived in its clean station, underground. Or in the ground. In the mountain, still, it would appear. We thought about which way to go and then we went there, along the shiny platform. Uniformed persons ushered us further, down the stairs, toward our eventual exit. We rounded a couple corners, curiously makeshift, or in the midst of renovations, and then we were out in the open.

It seemed like it might start to rain.

There was a howling, moaning din out in the distance, reverberating upon the hillsides, in the trees. But in the distance. The sound seemed to present an alternate reality; a strange juxtaposition with mere people in their clothes and shoes, with shops, sidewalks, street lamps and earthy knolls.

The sound haunted us. Got softer and then louder. It was evidence of a fierce intelligence at play out there, unseen, but in our midst. I could not wait to get nearer it.

You can't wear shorts, the state decrees so. You can not play music publicly on portable music-playing devices. You may not be intoxicated from spirits nor from herbs. You may not. Not. You may not contradict this sentence.

The book depository. Books upon books upon books upon dusty shelves of books. Books are important. Our children need books to read.

The Accident & Its Prolonged Aftermath

The accident happened and we laughed at it from on high. Was hard not to. All that metal bent now. Two cars prone, at odd angles in the intersection. Took a while for the drivers to get out but they got out. Presently there was a siren sound. An undercover on the scene. As he got out and walked to one car, a guy on a bike and two pedestrians approached the scene in a deliberate and somewhat stately manner like the three goddamn wise men come to see a birth. And our attentions drifted and we went back to work and the accident's aftermath progressed in its oddly languorous way, the drivers out of their cars now, one standing nearby smoking. And later on two uniformed cops took charge. Somehow the cars had been moved to opposite curbs. And a great rain fell, and veiled the scene from sight, and the sun shone for a thousand years without a trace of night, and the city fell to rubble all around; and a finer, more glorious city was built and stood for 10,000 years; and women and men grew to be strange and awful beasts, and perished in a calamitous famine; and finally a fine white silt settled upon every surface; but through it all still stood the dented cars, the two cops watching, the one driver smoking but the other one gone.

Anthony Bourdain narrates his show in loud commas. "That night COMMA we ate COMMA we drank COMMA and we drank again until the sun came up."


An elderly Hasid on the train, with his felt hat wrapped in plastic against the rain. Reading the Torah for the hundred thousandth time. Strange that there could be reason to plumb any text like that. But in fact there is for any text. He could just as easily be gleaning new insights from a tattered old TV Guide. It's the mystery of language, the leap of faith of words.

There was a sharp, dark shout on the Grand Street platform as the D pulled in. I turned around.

I spied nothing but that placid Chinese couple, an older white man - a tourist? - trotting in his sandals after his wife who'd gotten on the car behind him.


Sad that jazz players, for all their wily chops, don't change up their game a bit. Clean, suit-wearing mothafuckas. Introducing Mr. This and Mr. That, this tune by the great Mr. So-and-so. Christian McBride motherfuckers.


Someone vandalized the graffiti museum.

I felt so old and tired at that club on Friday night. The way you feel when you're patronized by children. But they were all quite kind. Putting my bag in a safe place behind the bar and pointing me to it when I turned around to find it gone, and panicked, and pretended not to panic.

I spoke to Rumana and her friend about Little Italy, where they'd been to see the Italy-France World Cup final and where I'd just been with Sara to have a dinner at a tourist trap that was not so bad mind you. The waiter said salud after he poured our wine.

Of course.

Rumana said an African worker at the place they went tried to wear a France journey, I mean jersey, but I'm honoring my mistake as somehow significant, a France journey, the journey you take to France as an African immigrant, a journey you're compelled to wear on your back.

He was told at once by his boss to take it off, which is interesting, but not surprising in the least. Nor is it controversial, nor should it be, but it's interesting.

I spoke to Jim about his twin uncles, one of whom once was a monk and married a woman who once was a nun.

Imagine that.

The din in the club, a nuisance if you're working there, a pleasure if you're there at play.

On the Boardwalk there were two birds fucking. Up on top of a pylon. The one was shrieking and flapping his wings and staring out to sea from behind her. Precipitously, she flew away.

Also we saw a man kneeling on the shady seat of his rickshaw, prostrate, facing Mecca for his midday prayers. Seemed he might have been facing north but what do we know. He oughta know.

A lot of the rickshaw guys seemed to have nothing to do. They'd park in rows along the side of the Boardwalk and sleep or watch the world go by.

An old couple riding in one, the man looked angry. He ashed his cigarette out the side, low to the ground.

We played that claw game. In a long and narrow and empty arcade. Luna dropped the claw right on a bear and it clutched feebly, gaining no purchase, and just as quickly withdrew to the machine's roof.

We kept along down the arcade and drove the go-karts. There was a view of the Atlantic Ocean, checkered flags fluttering in the breeze. You could keep it flat out around the track.


Ed's senior show at FIT consisted of toothy monster heads growing out of craggly trees.

"He's had a rough year," Sara remarked.

My apartment has nice, thick old Manhattan walls, walls that sound when you tap them, like the side of a cliff.

And a wide-eyed lady down the hall with a yapping little dog.

And no one else, it seems, practically, on my entire floor. Either that or spectral figures, gliding in and out of their doors at exactly the times when I'm not. Very, very rarely I've shared the elevator with someone who pushes number 3. And they'll go the other way down the hall, away from my corner of the world after all.

We are, in fact, fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here. What we are actually doing is sacrificing the lives of two or three young American soldiers (not to mention Iraqis; I'll play the ol' American interests game for now) each day so that we don't have to "fight them here." There's no progress we can point to over there, no measurable weakening of our enemy. On the contrary, they have thrived on the growing public outrage against us, on our botched and aimless measures, on our grief; they are gleeful to see us waist-deep in the mire of our pride. In fact we are feeding them with our own flesh and blood. Or more specifically, the flesh and blood of generally less privileged members of our society, often minorities, whose limited opportunities make this dirty work a decent option. We are, every day, leading a couple of them to the slaughter, simple as that. Virgins to be offered to the gods of terror so that we may carry on playing Xbox, leasing cars and watching "Lost." We'll feed the monster as long as we've got willing, wide-eyed sacrifices – consider them our martyrs if you will, our not-so-willing suicide bombers, sent down the gullet of that dark and hungry volcano. But their mission is really to appease, not to disrupt. Never mind whether this can or should sit well with us today. What will happen later, when we run out of other peoples' sons and daughters and the gods are hungrier and angrier than ever?

We went to the Highline Ballroom the other night to see the notorious Amy Winehouse. The place is a slick new nightclub with a stage and it seems to be run by Israeli secret service. Bald, thin guys with sharp suits and earpieces. Half-whispering to each other, guardedly, their eyes scanning the room. One escorted us upstairs to consider seats at a shared table on the mezzanine. It felt like a cop was tying my shoe.

We settled at a corner of the stage and I went for drinks. As I lifted them off the bar I got a sad and sickening feeling I'd never felt before – they lacked the heft I'd come to expect over thousands upon thousands of repetitions of this sacrosanct act. They were light. And by that I don't mean light in booze. I mean the glasses – a perfectly normal-shaped small rocks glass and highball glass – were made of plastic.

The very strange Patrick Wolf opened up. He seemed to be in the vanguard of some invisible '80s nostalgia trip, coming off as a Boy George sort of Adam Ant kind of Peter Pan. He wore shorts with suspenders and knee-high black socks and blue patent-leather shoes and something was up with his hair. Some of his songs sounded like Shriekback and others like the Fairport Convention. I found his performance dully unappealing yet also oddly terrifying. And then the stage was cleared.

A gray-haired old roadie soundchecked all the instruments, each a beautiful vintage axe with its accompanying priceless amp. He played the bassline from Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues" over and over, lazily playing an utterly false note at the end of the phrase each and every time. I cringed and lifted my featherweight drink to my lips.

He set Amy up with orange juice mixed with Jack Daniel's right at the base of her mic stand.

Finally she came out and took stuttery steps across the stage, looking down, but not demurely, and grabbed the microphone with an insolent and condescending air as her crack band, all sharp in suits but no ties (to suggest a touch of dissolution) fell into an immaculate groove, her backup singing men dancing in big unison movements beside her, and she swiveled her hips ever so slightly, exaggeratedly little in fact, and took tiny steps in place before the microphone, to the beat – her backup singers dancing widely, warmly – then swung her knees in turn, feet together, within a tight and measured space, mincingly. Her. And she held the mic out in her hand like she was handing you the phone. Then when she put it to her mouth to sing a remarkable thing came out, belying her tiny frame. A golden moan, molasses-rich and plaintive; disenchanted and weary too. A voice that's beautiful in spite of her, and all the more beautiful for that fact.

She seemed to observe some degree of amused contempt for her audience and the proceedings generally.

She's a perfect star.

May 9, 2007 at Yankee Stadium

I trained a wary eye upon the batter's box. We were sitting a couple dozen rows back, behind first base, in those good, good Union seats. I was juggling peanuts and their shells but keeping an eye out for dear life. Watch out, foul balls. Robinson Cano was up.

Sure enough he cracked one our way, sweetly struck, if early. It arced up to fifteen feet or so then curved sinisterly to the right, so that it appeared at first to be missing us to one side, then not at all, and then – it seemed to glance off someone's shoulder, perhaps, to our left, and then it flew toward us with a terrible, and I mean, velocity. It missed our heads by five feet or so and smacked into the railing behind our row with an awful, staccato ding. Ding. It.

It.

And then it rolled upon the ground amidst the peanut shells for the fat old man across the aisle to fetch.

Todd's suicide note was the most embarrassing piece of drivel they'd ever read. Full of extravagant declarations of self-loathing; laughable, elegiac paeans to lost and unrequited love; dressed-up petty digs at made-up nemeses and pompous, maudlin pronouncements upon our sad and bellicose world; it read like a wicked satire of some stupid sap's self-important self-negation.

Except it was real.

And he pulled through.

John is our taciturn doorman although, or perhaps for this very reason, he's pretty good. He seems to have aged beyond his years – bent back, misshapen feet. Slack and hopeless countenance, put upon; the look of a man who's opened a hundred thousand doors without ever stepping through one once.

The train from San Francisco to the Valley is the double-decker CalTrain, a whimsical configuration accentuated by the rows of single, privileged seats above, although CalTrain makes you think of cattle train and so do the tall, ungainly wagons. On the first morning I put my feet up on the seat across from me and sure enough was scolded by the conductor, I knew it, shoulda known. And it's outta the reverie to examine the world pass by outside: sunny towns, drowsy towns. Houses, sheds and muscle cars, stucco.

We arrived in Mountain View to find the air honeyed with sun. It was one of those days as though we'd drift into a dream and awake to face some unnameable beast with nought but our wits to protect us.

Instead we got aboard the company shuttle and crossed the bridge above the highway.

There's that tired phrase we hear from time to time from Bush and his supporters: We have to fight them there so we don't have to fight them here.

I propose that what's really happening is a grotesque twist on that pat phrase: They're not fighting us here because they can already fight us there.

I wondered what sort of society this would be if we weren't the least bit reserved about sexual images. That's right, pornography everywhere. An entirely licentious atmosphere, in the media, on the streets. Blowjobs, pussy, big cocks all around: on billboards, on TV. Shop windows. Government buildings. Anal.

First I considered the consequences: Would we become numb to it all? Would our behaviors and mores break down to reflect this new world, eroticized wide open? Then I chastened myself for even idly contemplating this: It can't happen, I thought, of course. But then I thought: Why can't it happen? And I realized: Not because we're prudish, or puritan, or ashamed. On the contrary. It's because we cherish the taboo erotic image – we value it commercially and myriad other ways – so we preserve its prurience by hiding it all away.

The campus had maps below our feet, in brass plaques set in the path's concrete, like memorials to itself. We were told that the buildings were arranged in the shape of the company logo but this was difficult to ascertain.

One of our meetings was in the building where they make software for Macs. The walls were covered with "Think Different" posters and celebrations of the latest Mac wizardry. There seemed to be no one around, like a scene of neutron bomb devastation.

Remember the neutron bomb?

Taken By Self

The language of the mass killer. Has anyone studied this? I'm wondering if there are commonalities. I'm struck by the theme and tone of Seung-Hui Cho's self-videotaped rants. There's a lot of second-person accusation, which I suppose stands to reason, but I'm intrigued by the theme of entrapment, of being cornered, of being left no choice. And then he contradicts himself: "I didn't have to do this," he says. "I could have left, I could have fled."

What does he mean?

Then he says no, he can no longer run away. He suggests this is a means of facing the truth finally, of confronting a problem that demands to be resolved. Here he lapses drowsily into predictable martyr-speak, how he's doing this on behalf of some imaginary family of kindred and similarly marginalized souls, his "children" (an interesting term – is he anticipating copycats in the near or distant future?), his "brothers and sisters" whom, he adds venomously, "you fucked." In the moment he says "fucked" his face flashes with malevolent life. He capitalizes on the hardness and violence of the word to give his accusation a mysterious ring of truth.

What is he talking about?

Whatever it is, he means it.

The title of one of the countless video clips on YouTube of Cho's videos is "Video of Cho Seung-Hui, Virginia Tech Killer, Taken by Self," which is interesting because it could be read two ways. At least.

"You decided to spill my blood," he says. He spilled his own blood of course – he was taken by self – so this is in one sense an interesting interpretation of the suicidal urge. We generally believe that urge to be voluntary – a willful, if irrational, reaction to hopelessness from within. But Cho thinks we did it. We forced him to do this. Perhaps other suicides, depressive suicides, the more common ones I suppose, never forfeit the social contract and, finding themselves ill-equipped or no longer willing to keep up their end, direct their nihilistic urge inward to the ultimate point. It appears that Cho never bought into any of it, freeing him to narcissistically direct his outward, to make an explosive statement of redemptive extroversion.

And of course, that's why he gave us his video artifact. Self-glorifying, self-serving, self-centered. Taken by self.

Out of this fucking life, I suppose, you gotta take something.