On my way home today, outside the comedy club, the big club on Broadway, there was a guy on a cell phone. Dressed-up guy, but young and fit. Looked at first like he worked there in some capacity.

"Walk over to Seventh and then the next one is Broadway," he said. "Broadway!"

A couple seconds passed. I looked back at him 'cause of the way he was pacing in that doorway there. I wanted to hear the next words outta his mouth.

"Stop talking! Listen! Stop talking! Listen!"

The air horns the spectators blow at races produce a curiously downbeat effect; they seem to drop in pitch in the second or so in which they sound. In the very first moment they're like a siren, brusque, alarming, but then the timbre emerges and it's a bit of a moan, and it trails into something like a baby's cry. You hear them the most when the race is over, on the victory lap, and they're saluting the winner of course, and all the drivers, in fact, jubilantly, but the chorus has a valedictory, melancholy quality. It's over and there's nowhere to go but home.

At the race I noticed for the first time a remarkable sound the cars make. I first heard it from the GP2 cars on Saturday, and it's a sound that seems only to occur when the cars are on their warmup laps. It must be that the drivers open up the throttle but the clutch is lifted, though not quite in neutral, so the cars edge forward a little; you've got to really know what you're doing or you'll shoot into the back of the car in front of you like a canon. The engine races very hard and makes a stuttering, staccato, keening wail, like the whinnying of a spooked horse. I heard it at the end of the lap, as the cars were about to take their spots on the grid, so it was like horses that didn't want to enter the gate.

We went to find the best sandwich in the world, at an inconspicuous shop that looked like it could be closed, when we saw it from the Rambla, until someone swung open the door and walked in. There seemed to be mostly locals there, seated around a bar with two women working it. The menu was mostly unpromising - wraps and melted-cheesy sandwiches, the kinds you'd find at an airport terminal. In fact the Iberico ham sandwich had sort of been promoted out of the menu and into its own rarefied spaces, on the board and on the walls, scrupulously accompanied by references to and quotes from Mark Bittman's effusive New York Times review, in English and Spanish. The Times review calls the sandwich a "flauta," which means a baguette sandwich I guess, but at Cafe Viena they just call it the Iberico, and they could probably just refer to it as it.

A human statue from the Rambla came in and darted to the bathroom.

The sandwich was great of course, and the greatness comes from the Iberian ham, which I made sure I ate plenty of every damn day we were in Spain. The fat on it had a buttery, vaguely sweet quality. Like many other squeamish Americans I tend to pare ribbons of pale, cold fat off the meat when I'm faced with a plate of ordinary ham. But this fat was appetizing and delicious - it had none of the throat-clogging, unpleasant blandness of other fat. The meat itself was rich and slightly chewy, and delicate, and aromatic. The baguette was good and crusty, and the sandwich included only one other ingredient, one that you barely notice but which probably is crucial to the entire experience: a layer of fresh crushed tomato, gossamer-like, thin enough to convey just the spirit or the idea of tomato.

The fat doorman directed me to the eighth floor, sir, and got in the elevator after me 'cause he was going upstairs too. I wondered if he'd say anything while we were in there. He opened his mouth and intoned a bored and tuneless melody. I wondered if he'd say anything when he got out. He didn't.

The Curse of the Now

It occurred to me as we wandered the Ramblas in Barcelona that the manifestations of our existence, all of us, of our presence on earth, are becoming uglier and uglier - ugly cars, ugly clothes, ugly buildings and parks and fountains, footbridges and barriers, shopping centers, sidewalks, signs. The old is still beautiful of course, in kind of a suspect way. Old things seem to have long ago skulked beyond the reach of aesthetic reproach. Or earned a free pass by virtue of persistence. The plainest, creaking, hundred-year-old tenement glooming up a narrow city street has this authority for some reason, and I'm loath to question it. But its upstart neighbor, the bank building with the curved-glass facade, is naked to judgment, and the verdict can't be good. Did the world look this way a hundred years ago? Certainly many people were appalled by modernist architecture, and reviled those fume-belching motorcars, and were scandalized by the immodest dress of the youth. But look at a picture, a crowd scene or a streetscape, from the forties, sixties, even the eighties - every detail has a period charm and conspires with the others to tell a poignant, coherent story. Not so today, with all our rounded, plasticky cars in colors of unearthly dreariness; our garish storefronts, billboards and marquees; our bad shirts and belts and hats and sunglasses. Are we reaching a fever pitch of postindustrial hideousness? Or maybe it'll all look different when we see it from the future. Maybe it's just the curse of the now.

We took our seats in brilliant sunshine, with the chicane bending toward us. We were surrounded by beauty - the gravel traps and walls of tires, the candystiped ribbons of curb, the ads that repeat repeat repeat: Movistar Movistar Movistar, ING ING, Santander Santander Santander. And then the mountains and then the sky. I sipped from my bucket of Catalunyan beer.

Then there arose a distant whine, like the crying of the sun, and everything became a little more alive than it had been before.

When we arrived at the track on Saturday it was hard to tell where it was. A grandstand loomed, Sovietically, high above the trees and brush, but not much else; you couldn't see any bands of asphalt emerging from the hills. The circuit seemed to be embedded in some bowl or crater, just beyond our view. We crossed a footbridge that seemed to cross the track but it didn't cross the track; it crossed a shallow ravine of rocks and bushes, and only then were we even close to the track, finally, on that paved footpath that seems to ring every racecar track, shadowed on the outside by an informal one, of beaten dirt.

The first thing I did with my Internet fortune is I bought a diamond-studded salad spinner.

There was a wide-eyed woman on the subway today next to her burly and inattentive man. She seemed charmed by everything she saw; she gazed at my hat with a strange smile and then laughed at the antic gestures of a retarded woman who sat with her helper beside me, but it wasn't a mocking laugh, it was an open and delighted laugh.

The backs and asses of Midtown drones like me, filing out the various turnstiles, some through the emergency exit door (alarm will sound!), and up the wide stairs of the 50th Street station, the one with the Alice mosaic. In the sunken plaza into which we all emerge, there's always someone sort of frozen in the stream. Almost like they just had second thoughts about it all. As I recall, this morning she was Japanese.

The Jamaican food truck with the flat screen TV on its side, playing Bob Marley videos incessantly. Get up, stand up. Stand up for your rights. As the working men and women stride by, heads down. And a homeless man meanders, head up, hardly on the radar.

Le Bernardin is to the left, with its gauzy window shades revealing the faintest impression of a dream realm beyond the reach of the living. Whatever happens there happens in reduced gravity, on the surface of the moon; in anechoic splendor, in the palace of Hades.

And then there is the Heartland Brewery and some industrial ventilator spewing exhaust from the kitchen at all hours - a deeply acrid odor that's tinged with tired fry fat, that's viscous, nearly tangible, but also syrup-sweet. It's disgusting enough to make you pick up your pace to your burying ground.

It's interesting to have a bandage on your face. I bounded out of the men's room today and a man who was reaching toward that steel rectangle to barge on in was caught surprised. He exclaimed and stepped back a foot or so to give me ample passage, stammering two or three incoherent syllables. I told him: "Yup!"


If I could only begin to comprehend the the energy around my office, near Rockefeller Center. There's a thousand and one triumphs and tragedies taking place every minute on the asphalt stage between the theaters. A bike messenger whistling a warning and careening past. Christians from somewhere else: white-socked Mom and Dad, with arms spread a little in a futile posture of protection behind their bony pubescent girl, dolled up sexy-naif in tight jeans and a hat, and their petulant yet loving son with his glam-rock belt, gelled hair and Goth-rock shirt. But more and more it feels like the walk from my subway stop to my office door is like the walk from my bedside to the bathroom.

The Longest Runway

Sitting on the tarmac at JFK, on the way to LA, I became entranced by the languid dance of the signalman. At a certain point he walked beside the plane and fell behind a bit, and then he disappeared, a solitary man loosing the behemoth. Just as we began to taxi along the mysterious crisscrossed pathways that lead to the runways, the captain got on. He told us we were headed to the longest runway at the airport, three miles long, and it was the only runway they had open 'cause of the fog. And there were, it looked like, maybe forty planes ahead of us. And it was going to take a long, long time, and frankly he couldn't even tell how long.

I don't know why he said it was the longest runway. I mean - I'm sure it was.

The ebullient man in the aisle seat reached over the lady in the middle and touched my arm just as I was most lost in thought.

"What's it like out there?"

"It seems foggy," I said.

People evidently grew restless as we inched our way toward the runway. There were exasperated messages from both the captain and a stewardess telling people no, they absolutely could not go to the toilet. Faint groans of dismay. An indistinct stir in the canned air. The awakening, perhaps, of some nearly atrophied instinct in all civilized men towards mutiny. Before long the captain came back on and said OK, OK, he'd pull over so that people who absolutely have to can get up and go, but they better make it quick.



Illustration by Louise Asherson

When I awoke yesterday morning a waft of city dust had blown through the living room window. It was the odor of old plaster and concrete, possibly from a demolition or restoration project nearby, and it had a gray, mineral character, and it reminded me of Paris somehow, the way that construction dust, or destruction dust, would hang in the cool and dewy morning.

The stitches in my forehead are beginning to itch and it's a bit like there's something in my head that wants to come out through the breach. I must be patient and not let it.

I was climbing to the upstairs at Citarella, that sneaky second floor that is exactly like a thousand delis in the city with the word "gourmet" in their name: the low lighting, vaguely both romantic and creepy, like you're in the dining room of Dracula's castle; the inviting, florid glow of pricey smoothies on refrigerated shelves, the dusty stacks of non-economy sized cereals and muesli; the rows upon rows of nuts, wasabi peas, apricots, yogurt-covered raisins and plasticky Japanese snacks in clear plastic tubs; the European chocolate cookies.

Halfway up I passed a woman on her phone.

"Babka. Yes. I'm getting a babka."

Chuckle. Pause.

"Are you getting me a babka too?"

The sun was waiting for us and when we got outside it clutched us in its hot, dry grip. The brittle vegetation and pretty little lawns down Harvard Street were in shock too, not stirring but seeming to murmur a faint complaint of thirst. It seemed funny to be walking because walking is something that just isn't done there. It felt like you could go from one point to another but you'd never really get anywhere - the vista didn't change; there were no big boulevards and streetlights and rows of fast food joints, cheap hotels and lamp shops. Just the thorny brush, the scintillating street, the houses and the sky. We got to Jesse and Anna's friends' house and it was a beautiful, big house, they'd just had it redone; there was a veranda I guess you'd call it and a big, florid garden in the back. We ate at picnic table under a sparsely vined trellis. Wisteria. They were very nice - she was almost too nice, painfully nice, you felt like you should watch your mouth and even watch your mind around her - and at the end their son Ben woke up, who's disabled, and she cheerfully introduced him to the group then fed him potatoes and boiled chicken.

The Back Waiting Room

The back waiting room is where they send you if you're already in but you have to wait some more for something. There seemed to be among those who drifted in and out of there a sense of bonhomie, of kinship borne of shared travails, or maybe it was just that one woman who was too chatty and everyone else had to be a little bit like her so they wouldn't hurt her feelings. I kept my own bandaged head down for the most part, reading the darkest corners of today's Metro Section. The chatty woman was a bitch. She'd made a big deal at the front desk about how she had patients of her own and by X time she had to be out of there. I have a patient I absolutely, absolutely must see.

Every ten minutes or so one of the assistants would come in and tell one of the patients that there was more skin to cut, it's not all out yet, or, it's all out, we're going to stitch you up. Some effort went into not making this sound too cheery or too dire, depending. Chatty lady must have left while I was on the table.

On the table there's a bright, bright light you have to close your eyes. Pinpricks of anaesthetic, vulcanizing my forehead into a strange mask of second skin. And the surgeon comes in and in a whiff of burnt skin she's done and she's out the door again. Five seconds, maybe, or ten. And the assistant says go back to the waiting room.

The back waiting room.

And we'd wait to be summoned again, or else to be excused.

But eventually, everyone was done.

I was waiting in line to take a piss at the Beacon Theater at the Ray Davies show tonight and a stupendously wrinkled, short, thin man emerged from the urinals and shuffled past me. He was a bit bowlegged and slouchy, and this combined with his fixed, utterly impassive countenance to make him seem like a something from a cartoon. A young, heavyset man with long blond hair and sideburns awaited him with a wry smile.

"Come on, man! Where you been, man?"

People began to recognize him now and their knowledge moved through the crowd of drunks like static.

"Hey Lou!"

"Hey Lou Reed!"

"Lou Reed, man!"

"Alright Lou!"

He continued at his deliberate pace, expressionless, out the door.



Illustration by Louise Asherson

I had a one-on-one with my manager's skip-level manager not too long ago. When the invitation came from his assistant I did not know what it might portend. It must, if nothing else, mean something. We all got an invitation, my manager too. He called me when the agreed upon day and time arrived.

"I want to hear from you. I want to hear your thoughts and concerns," he declared. There was the unmistakable sound of whining in the background, of one, maybe two unhappy brats.

"Good, I've got some questions -"

"Justin! Calm down!"

Fumbling noises. And are those wiper blades?

"I'm calling from the car. I'm taking the kids to school," he explained.

"Oh, OK."

"Go on, I'm listening."

"I'm a bit worried about our sales goals."

He gave a somewhat halting explanation of why things were gonna be alright. Then his vision of where the technology might go, interrupted for a few seconds as his children leapt out like paratroopers and he edged back into the stream of traffic. Some calm descended, as though he'd walked into the coatroom of a noisy restaurant, but he still gave the impression of being too busy to listen, too harried to care. We talked about some mumbo-jumbo. Then we thanked each other for our time and I hung up.

Felt strangely serene today. Unaccountably, really. After a fitful night punctuated by dreams of an evacuation from some complex of buildings on an island, a network of rivers, a jutting embankment thatched with bramble, like an enormous bird's nest, which someone referred to as Palm Springs.