Went out last night to a comedy club, Emma had some free passes. Five comedians or something, none too funny. One had an odd, hesitant persona, like a small child. "A lot of guys like big breasts. I like little breasts. They're so nice,” he said. “They're like, ‘Hi! Can I help you?'"

The Kiwis were there, Jen and Steve, and Chloe too. Then we went to Von on Bleecker and met up with Jim and Shane and Sophie and someone named Nicole who looked familiar and seemed to recognize me, so I pretended I knew who she was and said "Good to see you" not "Nice to meet you." Emma was leaning on me, arm around me. She and Chloe left early, and the rest of us wandered a while until we got to the Edge. There were lots of beautiful young women with their backs turned to us. Jim talked about how he's been seeing Lucy at school and they've been meeting up for drinks. Where might that be going? We talked about her mania. Sophie said she can never get a word in when she’s with her.

I played great pool. I've been playing great the last three times. Since Mel broke up with me. Maybe that’s what did it. Heartbreak’s prodded me to greater heights. The 2 was about five inches from the side bumper near the far corner but my shot to that hole was blocked; I hit the ball on the right, banked it, the cue ball and the 2 narrowly missed each other on their ricochets and the 2 rolled right in the near corner pocket. 

Eventually Jim and I lost and it was time to go home. I walked up 1st Avenue to Stromboli on 8th Street for a slice, past shuttered shops, past revelers whose nights were still young, past bags and bags of garbage, past a beautiful wide-eyed blonde clutching a book of Tartans in her green-gloved hands.

On the screen the towers stood stricken, smoking furiously. The anchor repeated what little was known in a tremulous voice, betraying shock but clinging determinedly to professionalism, to that formal tone and lingo by which we've come to identify The News itself—except this wasn’t news, it wasn’t what you consume with dinner at six or peruse drowsily on the morning train. Her mannered delivery seemed suddenly inappropriate, as though she were saying these things sitting right beside us on the couch. In case you're just joining us… as you can see from these images… two aircraft struck the World Trade Center towers this morning… the first hit the North Tower at 8:48 a.m., the second hit the South Tower 15 minutes later at 9:03… We also have word from Washington that the Pentagon was hit by a plane at approximately 9:40… Authorities suspect these are terrorist attacks…

Lucy sat watching, so did Paul. Other coworkers drifted in and out, unable to sit or stand or anything. Everything around me seemed precarious, uncertain; right down to the coffee table I sat on and the air I breathed. It occurred to me that we had suddenly been plunged into a new world of utterly chaotic possibilities and that perhaps it was not a world that was worth living in.

We watched.

I went to my desk and called Su because I thought she had jury duty downtown. You were supposed to call everyone you knew who was closer to the action than you I guess. There was no answer so I tried her at work and she was there after all; the court had been closed for some unrelated reason. She was crying and shaky. I called Mel, who was oddly calm. She’d been up to her roof to see. She said she was trying to call the editing studio where she was freelancing to see if they needed her to come in.

"I… don't think you're going to be working today," I said.

"I have to call them,” she said, annoyed. “I don't know that."

"Nothing after this will be the same."

"I know."

Lucy called out from in front of the TV: "Oh my God one of the towers is falling!" I ran in to see it evaporating in an enormous cloud of ash and debris that quickly climbed to obscure its twin. I went back to my desk. To stare at the screen awhile. I don't know.

"Oh my GOD the second tower fell!" screamed Lucy. A trace of outrage in her voice mixed with the grief. For some reason this was the real shock—the first one could almost be rationalized as a freak accident, something outside of human control so not of our concern. The falling of the second made both systematic, the conclusion of a grand design. Lucy and Julie were crying.

Last week I was jogging down Fifth Avenue, blissfully lost listening to live Grateful Dead music that I'd downloaded off the Internet, some hissy space jam from Berkeley, California, during the Reagan Administration and there I was on the Avenue, listening and blissing as the guitar went dee-dee-dee and bap-bap-bap-bap and the cymbals went whoosh-clang, and the bass went bum-bum-bum. I crossed the street down near the Met, one-two-one-two dee-bap-clang-bum and I sensed some motion to my left.

In a drawn-out moment I saw a dark Volvo race inexorably toward me, toward my legs; it screeched and skidded to a halt as I leapt to my right and held out my arms, palms out and fingers splayed, as though to block the giant object with my bare hands. I skipped away as the car lurched forward again, pursued by furious honking traffic. Bee-wee-wee-wop-bap-bap in my ears as I tried to think of how lucky I was to be alive, how close this really was; people stood around half-noticing, half-turned to me on the cobblestones. I kept running, bee-dee-whoosh, bee-dee-whoosh.

On the gravel in the station parking lot Sebastien eagerly took my bags, making me a little bit ashamed for every time I never lifted someone else's bag; his smile shined like a searchlight through the darkness and the rain. I had just about decided he was an all right guy when I got in the car with Mom to follow him and she told me what an insufferable pain in the ass he is, how you can't have a discussion with him because he always has to be right, you don't want to talk about politics or September 11th or anything because he's going to disagree and he'll say something about Americans and won't quit until you shut up. This is basically what she said anyway, as we searched the darkness for his furtive taillights disappearing and reappearing around each bend. So then I changed my mind and we talked about some other things.

The house was warm and lovely with a big fire and Yves sitting in front of it in his big chair, all wrapped up in his shawl with the tubes in nose and the oxygen humming nearby. I shook his frail hand and we said "Bonjour, comment ca va?" and that's almost all we said to each other the whole time. 

We all had drinks and I told Sebastien about my job and we talked but I had been made wary of him and I sensed I wasn't saying as much as I normally would. Anyway I wanted to talk to Mom. It was a matter of navigating between these two other figures, the extraordinarily quiet, unassuming presence and the noisy, needful one. We spoke French at dinner and afterward Mom and I lapsed into English when the others faced the other way, seeming to leave our world. I went to sleep early and slept late, a country winter night. 

The next day we sat around and I fixed some things on Mom's computer. In the late afternoon I went for a run in the cold wintry drizzle. I ran the twisting and dipping road, past fields piled with freshly cut trees, their wood dark yellow from the wet and bearing the loggers' inscrutable day-glo markings. It was foggy and silent and there wasn't a single car in sight. I tried to get a sense of where I was; the deep French countryside, the particularity of it, but it was hard.

A while ago I got on the bus to go home from work and there was a half-torn sheet of oak tag carelessly taped to the back of the divider behind the driver. Scrawled on it, almost illegibly, were these words: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I slept on the train down. Made my connection to the crowded little commuter train but missed the stop—I awoke to see the sign for Bussiere-Galant out there in the darkness as we pulled away. And I hated, hated myself for fucking up. I got off at the next stop and the station master offered to let me phone from his office, and I spoke to Yves’ son Sebastien, who said my mom was on her way to the station but they'd come out to get me in this other town now. He sounded irrepressibly, unaccountably cheerful.

I checked out and walked to the subway station at Republique, listing from side to side with the weight of my bags. At the Gare d'Austerlitz I remembered how I felt the last time I was there, agonizing over whether to call my ex and tell her everything was OK, I wanted to get back together. I remembered lifting the phone off the hook and thinking and putting it back down. With the weight of my bags.

I got my ticket, and a USA Today for a jolt of colorful American cheapness. I went to the station restaurant just like I had the year before and the harried waiter sat me in the middle of a long row of little tables, beside an older couple. I ordered a salad of chevre chaud and lardons and a steak and a little carafe of wine and the waiter repeated it all in one breath and said, "C'est parti," which means "it's gone," but really "it's begun" or "it's taken off," and I thought how French this little remark was—it is a banal, unthinking thing for a waiter to say to a customer but also a droll assurance of sorts ("don't worry, it's like it's already started, trust me") together with a slight suggestion of cold impatience ("it's gone, I'm gone, let's get it all done and over with"). C'est parti.

We got upstairs and my sister was there, looking just as she always did or even maybe younger somehow, fresh-faced. I hadn't seen her in eight years or something. We sat in the den and talked about her work, simple things. Then I walked to my hotel and briefly considered walking into a bar in a side street for a few hours and now I wish I had. Instead I pulled a few Francs out of an ATM and bought two giant cans of high-alcohol beer from the all-night epicerie. A couple of young guys were in there too, doing their thing, drunk, high, whatever, buying candy. I wondered at the insurmountable melancholy I feel whenever I'm in Paris, a heaviness and oppressiveness I feel all around me, expressed in the language and the streets and buildings, the gray sidewalks and the gray sky. I have to remind myself that in spite of this anything is possible. That's the key to the beauty of this place: in this precious city burdened by tradition, bound by ceremony, anything is miraculously possible. Somewhere someone's snorting heroin, someone else's running away from home; someone's coming back, someone's coming on someone else's back.

I got back and I lay on the hotel bed and drank, and smoked another Gitane, and flipped through the anemic French channel selection on the tiny TV, settling again and again on CNN International and seeing the same stories repeated over and over again, about the guy with the bombs in his shoes, about the launch of the Euro, about the economy, about the Lakers and Green Bay Packers and I felt it was a funny sort of punishment, to have come all this way only to watch the dreary cycle of up-to-the minute U.S. news. And I couldn't sleep, was the bad thing. I tossed and turned for hours. Finally I got up and transcribed some writing into my laptop. Then I still couldn't sleep, and it was that awful state where you can't sleep but you can't do anything either, so I just lay stark awake and miserable until about 9 and woke up at 11.

Dazed, I walked downstairs to the breakfast room where two maids had finished cleaning up what appeared to be the dreariest American motel breakfast spread—giant serving bowls of cornflakes, juice machines, an industrial-size coffee urn. I turned away. 

The interior architecture of Paris fascinates me. Not the façades of the classic buildings, the 19th century apartments with the wrought iron and the funny round windows in the roof. No. I am much more interested in the spaces inside, particularly where those spaces disintegrate into a weird, cramped collision of old and new: corridors, stairwells, bathrooms. Paris is a modern, explosive city inside an ancient, walled city; its first-world progress and growing population strain the tiny streets and low-rise blocks. The French obsession with preservation makes every building fragile, priceless. I feel a deep incongruity when I climb the steps of a McDonald's which is inside a bourgeois home that was built in 1860. The touch of the handle on the bathroom door thrills me further; inside, the plumbing and the mirrors and the tiles on the floor are shiny-new but the odd, slanted ceiling and rounded walls betray history.

A great deal of debate over whether we should go to DC, with C. W. this time. He came up the stairs into the apartment all manic and weird; I knew what was up. He really doesn't want to go, on account of the van being in bad shape and being not too burnt out to play the following day in New Hampshire. I hemmed and hawed, not sure myself of what really to do. But later discussion with J. T. and M. R. reaffirmed what I felt all along—we'd be fuckheads to cancel a gig so late. We have to brace ourselves for a long, meaningless ride down the eastern seaboard, through the dreary wasted landscape of Northern New Jersey, the incomprehensibly dull Garden State Parkway with the venomous State Troopers, to Washington DC for one gig and then back out again. It might really suck but we have to do it, and brace ourselves for the loss, financial and otherwise.

Later in the evening I got drunk. The cork from the second bottle of wine wouldn't come out so I stabbed at it and picked at it with a kind of intoxicated impatience; I shredded the cork to little bits and cracked the mouth of the bottle like of peppermint candy. Drank it anyway.

I might write a story about a crew of road workers, guys who pave roads and highways under those lights that are exactly like the sun; whose task it is also of course to paint the dividing lines. When it comes time to lay down the big white stripes the foreman tells this motley group of ex-cons and speed freaks to "paint a bright straight one, boys." He says this every single time, and for this and many other affronts the men despise their boss with a sinister passion. One night it begins raining just as they're about to put down the lines, so they all go to this tittie bar instead and get absolutely shitfaced and drag the foreman, whose name is Doug, out into a weedy lot behind the bar, in the rain, and each take turns raping the shit out of his ass. In the end they paint a big sloppy streak down his back and into his ass crack and leave him for dead.

Finch is wondering why we should go to DC with no money to play in a little hole. I think we should go, but I see his point. Since we have to be in New Hampshire the following night, we might have bitten off more than we can chew, or sucked more than we can swallow. We'll see.

We played in NYC on Friday. Have a sense of obligation now to document our comings and goings, as it were, but I'm not sure how it will come off. Anything can be described successfully, I guess. Not much to say about an experience that we had already had over and over, some just like this night, others not. Most just like this night. Went to the Downtown Lounge, on Houston St., a street too wide and dangerous to sustain a cogent night life, it would seem. But when we arrived there was a darkly clad crowd in a small hot room, smoking cigs and listening to some thrash punk band. We went on after many hours of waiting, and shooting pool. One guy who beat me said as he was leaving, cheerily: "Time to go home and be sick." By the time we played there was hardly anyone there. Had a good set, could not get the sound guy/manager to give us a nickel. Something about how the chick with the door money had gone home. He was shaking his head and looking down as he spoke, and fidgeting strangely with a little strip of white plastic. "Sorry. You should have asked sooner." We bought a couple of bottles of Olde English and headed home.

Saturday was a much better night, at Leo's in Portland, Maine. We were greeted by an impossibly good natured hippie cool guy who brightly offered free Guinness ("Just don't let it get out of hand") and pizza. Played for a small but extremely enthusiastic crowd. We never get new music up here, they said. You guys are so different. They seemed intent on telling us just what it meant to them that we had come up, how wonderful it was. A drunk fat chick wanted to get laid. An exile from Connecticut wanted news from home, was fascinated that we were from down there, probably figured every Connecticut band sounded like us now. Altogether a really good time. Listened to WFAN on the way home. The voice of the Jets, Mets, Knicks and the Rangers.

The great thing about these computers is that when you have absolutely nothing to say you can make a mark on the paper, or the screen or whatever, like some pretty /////////////////////'''''''''''''''''''or222222229-=9iooupp86ivfwxsbyn8unl, some nonsense and in a hundred million years of leaning exasperatedly on the computer, depressed and grieving from a near eternity of writer's block, you might have written The Odyssey or maybe at least a solid detective story. Just like that! Wondrous machine.

Microsoft software defines all of our lives: identically laid out resumes, memos, lost and found ads; fonts falling in and out of favor, clip art, spreadsheets; everything rigidly and meticulously formatted. What standard(s) are we gravitating towards? What to do with the utter loss of aesthetic originality in the workplace? Who cares? Everything is such a breeze. Printer chooser. E-mail. Will there be a tremendous backlash, a revolt, even, against what is perceived finally as nothing more than aesthetic and methodological fascism imposed on the entire world by some vague horde of brats in California? They mean well, sort of. Or at least they never meant to devastate the mind of every single living human being. They have not-bad aesthetic instincts and know-how and the level of efficiency and productivity that their work points to is astounding. In its unerring pursuit of perfect flexibility, adaptability, and versatility, Windows holds out the promise of true freedom but delivers none; only an elaborate labyrinthine path. Wondrous machines. Entire paragraphs deleted just like that.

Just finished writing a song – early in the morning of Dec. 1. Wouldn't have known what day it was unless I was working on the computer... the machine, with machine-like precision, knows the time and the date and does not hesitate to call it tomorrow when it's a minute past midnight. The machine.

It occurred to me that a great constraint of writing is that you can only write one thing at a time. It will be a great evolution in mankind's history when a writer effectively writes more than one text at a time. And not as a stunt, mind you. Because he has to, because the words, thoughts, directions, digressions are arriving too quickly or even all at once. A second pair of hands would be useful, I suppose. And by the way, what a weakness, what a shame it is to reread one's writing, as I have just this moment done. Or to stick the computer cursor into the text at will, as I have just now done, changing the very meaning of an entire half a paragraph (should it be a separate paragraph?) that I've just written, to say this: I am not sure of what I am about to write. That is, what I wrote earlier. I mean – this: Writing teachers, great and not so great teachers, will tell you that you must revise; but I suspect that writers, especially great writers, will tell you that it is really preferable not to look, even; but rather to race through page after page, unhinged. I am consigned to stop feebly at every turn – a comma here, a semicolon there, never sure it is quite right. You can not calculate great writing, arrive at it systematically. It has to flow freely. The words can be modified but the writing must be done.

On the way to work I saw a big plane, a passenger plane it seemed, arcing slowly, very close to the ground, in a place where there were no airports. I was fascinated of course and it occurred to me almost immediately that I wanted to see this plane go down. I mean, I wanted to see it loom spookily over the highway awhile, engines sputtering, rudders flapping nonsensically, and finally slam into the ground in a clearing in the woods. Why else would I be so excited, so unnerved when it disappeared from view? I tried to impose some measure of empathy on myself by imagining that my mother was aboard but it didn't quite work. Do we feel that witnessing atrocity is a privilege of living in these demented times? I saw myself as an awestruck bystander to catastrophe, maybe even narrowly escaping as the thing bellied stupidly onto the highway, gathering oncoming traffic in its useless wings. In a sense we can do no better than stare impassively at scenes of carnage, devastation. We are all beyond rescue. But I still tried to think of my mommy up there, not wanting to die, wanting to see her son again. And this is how I tried to feel about those doomed people in that big steel deathtrap, all the while craning my neck and nearly losing control of my car. Suddenly I would see it again, circling strangely, almost completely on its side. It had to be some kind of military plane. I thought of the horror movies when you think the monster's dead but he pops back up and grabs you by the neck.

But soon he was completely out of sight and I went on down the smooth, new highway to the funny-shaped building where I work.

I am becoming aware of the passage of time as a terrible confluence of seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into eons, until lifetimes and generations pass in what seems like instants.

It was my last day at Aetna, and Meg took the occasion of my departure to contrive a pleasant, gossipy exchange about what else, O. J. Simpson. We were discussing the length of the knife used to commit the murders and we agreed that it was indeed a very large knife – I thought of J. L. quoting the cop: "It was a substantial knife," such cop talk – and just as suddenly, as though continuing a phrase uttered about the gravity of the wounds and Nicole Simpson's nearness to decapitation, a secretary mentioned all the wonderful knives her father had given her for her new apartment: some big, some small, all very sharp, with stone sharpeners, her dad is a chef you know. And we nodded just as agreeably to the train of this conversation as to the previous one.

Everyone wants to see you naked. The reason no one really minded when the TV news broke into the big game with live footage of O. J. Simpson driving down the highway with a gun to his head isn't because he is a "beloved hero" and that we are captivated by his tragic plight, or that we are awed by the surreal or Shakespearean in current events, or even that we want to see famous people bite the dust, exactly. It is this: that we like to see people naked. We look and point, and take great pleasure in staring and sharing the pleasure of staring with others. O.J. was cruisin' in the buff, emotionally stripped and revealed as people rarely are even in the hungry voyeuristic TV eye. His nudity was made all the more flagrant by the phalanx of cop cars that followed him, "uniformed" men with guns that protected them whereas O.J.'s only served to shame him, to reveal him, to blow his dignity.

We like naked ass. We are horny for the shame of others because it reminds us of the shame we feel regarding our bodies and of our earliest and most profound erotic sensations. The lurid appeal of emotional nakedness, or more properly of emotional obscenity, is not at all different from the appeal of open cunt, or tits, or of hard cock. The tabloids and in general the media are emotional pornographers, purveyors of a more insidious obscenity that can't be regulated like the geography of the human body; it is the pornographic geography of the soul.