At the Channel 4 Pub on 48th Street they make a nice French dip. I’m in the mode of ordering it each time we go there from work for a semi-inebriated lunch. An echo of the career NBC men who probably did or maybe still do come here every single fucking day and order the exact same fucking sandwich from whichever Irish waitress is floating in from JFK that month plus three scotches on the rockses. It’s a no-fucking-around type place, workmanlike, with Arsenal and Aston Villa on the tube. When you order a bottle of wine, you don’t order the bottle but the varietal. Today we had the cab.

On the walk back John noted that a woman was trying to cross the street coming our way. A box-blocking cabbie deterred her and she turned on her heels and walked straight up Sixth Avenue in the opposite direction. Her life will now be completely transformed.

A pang of paranoia shot through my former team today as reports surfaced in the UK that one of their online chat bots was propositioning one and all for oral sex. All a lexical mistake, of course. Glitch in the code. But it had the project manager in question fearful for his job. He absented himself today with a quizzical e-mail to the entire floor. But the sky’s not really falling on anyone’s head, not yet, at least. I think.

The Patriots won again tonight, goddammit, but the thing about winning all the time is this: all’s there’s left to do is lose. I thought I’d say this poignant thing cuz they lost tonight but instead I’m saying it cuz they won.

Who was that drug-running dictator, Noriega? The wide, pockmarked face. The impassive air, subtly tinged with menace. He fixes salad at the salad station below my work, now. Guy looks just like him. Is that why I don’t care for him much? More likely it’s the way he grips fistfuls of salad ingredients in his surgical-gloved hand, almost defiantly, like, Fuck off, I’m not using the tongs. Gringo. My brother got paid a dollar an hour to pick these tomatoes and I’m getting ten to pick ‘em back at you.

Which I appreciate. I’m a bourgeois yada yada. But when you put the corn, the bacon, the tofu and the chickpeas in your mitt like that it all acquires the same briny, sour savor. And here I am back upstairs under the fluorescent lights going, yuck. I’ll never eat from the salad station below my work again.

The Treats

I paused today before an array of leftover baked treats in the office and inhaled deeply its intriguing odor. It was a morning selection, cast by mysterious hands onto the long and wide credenza across from the main door, as usual, at the conclusion of some catered meeting. Muffins, granola, honey, yogurt, bagel halves of various types and their cream cheese accompaniments: a ludicrous boat of chive-flavored on a bed of lettuce leaves, ornamented by wan tomato slices, and a bowl of individual Philadelphia brand portions which some reptilian part of me considered stealing a handful from to bring home and populate the top shelf of our refrigerator door until God knows when or what.

But I did not.

The odor: a sticky, sickly sweetness with a trace of something sour. I breathed deep, contemplating it and the place it put me, in the middle of the sixth floor of this Midtown office building, beside a gray sea of cubicles, one of which I could call my own.

I went outside and I saw a helicopter.

Kvuh

I muttered fuck all the way to work and realized all I was really saying was kvuh.

Kvuh, kvuh, kvuh, kvuh, kvuh.

There were pockets of bad traffic on the ride home and I spent the better part of such helpless, agonizing minutes fantasizing about not letting anyone into my lane. It was the type of ride, the Stones were shuffling on the iPod and I was growing amazed at what a terrible band they were. We stopped at a McDonald’s rest stop on I-95. An older, white man in a cap and bad sneakers got out of his pickup truck beside us and trudged toward the entrance. Why is everyone at a McDonald’s on I-95 always an older, white man in a cap and bad sneakers? We regained the clotted highway and I looked around for cars to hate. It was good to get back to the City.

The strident and explosive buffoonery on the sidelines and JumboTron were occassionally interrupted for a few seconds of solemn, nearly ritualistic activity: the football game. The quarterback emerging from below center, the clack of helmet upon helmet, quarterback dropping back, dropping back; his linemen endeavoring breathlessly to block without holding, more clacks and dull thuds as some level their assignments to the turf, a wobbly screen pass and then - some linebacker meets him with his uneasy embrace; a safety comes to his assistance, and it's over.

Our seats were on the north side of the stadium and we found ourselves half blinded in hot, yellow sun. I sensed it searing my forehead as we scrutinized the field, awash in golden haze, and tried to discern the movements of the shadowy figures upon it.

An old woman so old womanly, progressing through the entrance to the 72nd Street subway station. Her respiration discernible only by seismometer. She still knew, somehow, to place one foot against the earth and press. And then the next. She had a severe hunch, giving her head the appearance that it had somehow retreated into her chest. Thoughts of, this is a human being. This is what occurs after some time. I thought, maybe she's in the process of living forever.

We live in a sea of serial numbers, tracking numbers, radio frequency IDs. Of things reduced to the purest abstraction. The closest we can come to effectively representing an object is via an obscure and breathless spray of digits and letters, beyond math, beyond language.

This is how we get closer to God.


You have to reason your way through the question out loud, they told the contestant before the show. You have to think out loud.

At the Halloween parade, as puppets swung over the heads of the crowd, people climbed up on the traffic light posts and entwined their arms around the fixtures for the walk/don't walk signs. To get a better purchase. To get a better view. Their faces would glow red awhile, and then bluish white. Men and women in skeleton body suits. Figures from the comics page and figures from the screen.

I came home to watch some of the "The War" on PBS. It occurred to me for the first time that the 9/11 bombers were nothing more – nothing less – than kamikaze pilots. This was nothing new. Nothing no one'd faced before, you think about it. They're vested with the curious, solemn authority of the sacrificial rite, all the more daunting as they're sprung from another civilization, another, more ancient, mode of thinking. But in the end it's just a pile of ashes and debris to sweep into a pile and a dead body, or a few, that you need not mourn.

The outside walls and columns of 30th Street Station extended high into an abnormally hot and blue October sky. I wondered what terrific and earnest work must have been involved in their erection. Italian stonecutters and laborers of every breed. If you removed a column, would the stone canopy above us fall? It didn't seem so. What if you removed them all? Even then. Everything seemed fixed in place by some immutable, ethereal force. It was stronger than a building: it was an idea. Below it cabs of various colors, many two-tone, drove in and out to pick up fares.

I decided to watch the last quarter of the Eagles game at our new bar, Dive 75. Beside me sat a couple, seemed like regulars. Someone else joined them and asked the obligatory questions, what've you done this weekend.

"I had the twelve-hour flu," the guy said. "You've heard of the twenty-four-hour flu. I had the twelve-hour flu."

He seemed all right to me. Prolly fully recovered. Did seem a tiny bit jaundiced though. Had that salty-eye look we've all been cultivating, what with the bars we frequent and the happenstance foods.

The Eagles stood up on defense, unlike last week. Last week is a story for tomorrow.

I left my tip and left a bit furtively, out to the crisp, fall air around the street.

I'm coming down with affluenza.

The Day the World Turned Upside Down - 2

He shuffled to the window and stood up to it, terrified by what might have darkened the morning. He looked up at what he thought would be the sky and saw a ceiling of grass, ornamented with bands of cement and wider ones of tar. Trees and bushes hung down, their leaves and branches reaching toward the dark.

He looked down. There was an immense chasm, a vast, gray maw; it made a sound everywhere like a great inhalation.

It's Just a Fucking Thing That Happened

Funny thing about mutation, natural selection and evolution: Even the most rational, science minded among us want to believe it's all pointing somewhere, that there's some kind of irreproachable merit to the process, some kind of reason if not design. Funny thing is, there isn't. A mutation - a generally unhappy thing - occurs by accident. And because accidents are governed by chance, very occasionally it's not unhappy. Others fail to reproduce and we have evolution. But there's it's neither here nor there. It's just a fucking thing that happened.

One day shortly after I moved in in a pile of dark debris materialized on our roof deck. Old iron ladder fragments, trapezoids of bent, heavy grating. Elements of the roof itself, it seemed, fixtures of the building itself, regurgitated before us. In the middle of it all, a twisted and weatherworn deck chair, pressed into two dimensions.

The Day the World Turned Upside Down - 1

There was some kind of parade going on outside.

"What is it?" she said.

A muffled cacophony of whistles, drums and tubas.

"I don't know. Italian Day?"

"There's no such thing as Italian Day."

"I was only joking."

From their perspective on the bed they saw the Star-Spangled Banner floating by. A little jumpily so you could tell someone was holding it up.

"There goes the American flag anyway," she said.

A moment passed.

"Should we check it out?" he said.

"I can't move," she said. "I'm full to bursting with banana pancake."

Another moment. Then –

"Do you think –" he said, but then and there they were plunged toward the ceiling that they had for many months beheld together; they fell heavily upon it, the plaster cool and hard beneath their naked flesh, and the futon and frame bounced once on their backs, and came to a smothering rest upon them. He hit his nose and mouth, unable in his bewilderment to put his arms before his face. She fell a bit more on her shoulder, as she'd been facing him a little in their bed, her hand on his chest. They thrashed and cursed beneath their burden.

"Jesus!"

"Fuck!"

They managed to crawl out either side and face each other above the bottom of the frame. A deep murmur of dismay and terror emerged within her and rolled into a moan. The sound of someone sliding over a precipice.

"What the fuck just happened?!" she said.

He got up on his knees without an answer. She crawled around the mattress to him and was momentarily distracted from her dread by the sight of blood dripping down his chin and falling in rich drops upon the milky white ceiling, wispy with webs.

"Are you OK, baby?"

"Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah."

"Baby," she said, "we're upside down."

Waiting in Line at the Post Office

One postal worker stopped cold in the middle of the sun-bleached lobby, behind where we stood in line. He barked something that to me was incomprehensible. I could see now that he was facing a man at the end of our line. He jabbed his finger vaguely at him, then turned around. Another worker was walking up behind him. He, too, addressed the man in line. "Don't make me come over there!" The man did not appear to respond. I scrutinized him. He was a thin man of about thirty, clean shaven, with strong, angular facial features and somewhat unkempt hair. "Are you going to behave?" This time he responded with a quick, compliant nod. "You not gonna bother nobody?" Another nod. The worker turned and went on his way. Few others in line seemed to notice or care. A couple minutes later the man suddenly jutted his right arm into the air and snapped his fingers loudly, twice, accompanying this with a faint, gulping vocalism, and I realized he was a Tourette's sufferer, known to the staff of this post office.

I saw by far the strangest-dressed people I've ever seen before, three of them, sitting apart on the other side of the subway and quite unaware of each other. A woman with a jeweled black tank top over a white blouse, tuxedo-style black pants and bright white sneakers. A man with the navy sweat shorts of some school's athletic department, a pinstriped navy blue Oxford shirt, gray socks and worn, brown Oxford shoes. A man in a fine gray suit and white dress shirt, the jacket well-tailored. Except. His pants reached only to mid-calf. He wore some standard businessman's dress shoes. He wore no socks.