We went to the New South Wales Art Gallery and saw some Australian abstract art, lots of it earth-toned and sandy-looking, as if such pigments were the only ones available in this desert continent. Then we walked through the Botanic Garden, where plants and shrubs and flowers and palm trees strained the margins of our path. We had lunch on the veranda of a café in the middle of the park. It was incredibly beautiful, tree flowers at eye level, birds chirping. Kate and Kevin were still sort of fighting. We had a bottle of wine that tasted like blackberry, and I had steak, and Kevin ate almost nothing but buttered bread. After lunch we wandered to the harbor and the Opera House, through the weird international throng of Olympic tourists.

When we got out of the train Kevin didn't know which way to go. It was raining even harder and I was wearing a thin wool sweater that got soaked through and that stifling wet-wool smell filled the air around me. We got on a bus going the wrong way and finally we got off and got in a taxi cab.

The casino was disappointingly similar to every other casino everywhere else: a vast room with muted gold light, a ceiling high like the sky, the faint stink of cigars, a carpet with a tessellated turquoise and purple pattern. People from all over the world but a prevalence of Pacific Islanders and Asians; businessmen from Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur. I had some noodles with greasy duck from the noodle shop on the concession floor downstairs. Everything there was sad and ugly in harsh white light. Dazed families, packs of bored teenagers, not quite knowing what they were doing but doing it anyway. We lost at blackjack for awhile – I think I lost about a hundred. And that was it, we went home to Kate and the baby.

Thursday was strikingly beautiful. We went walking with Julia sleeping on Kevin's chest and Kate and Kevin arguing: Kevin was meant to get swimming lessons at the gym; he said he would but he hadn't and Kate was hectoring him and Kevin was snapping back at her defensively. I walked a few paces behind them, between them, watching them keep a mean little distance from each other. It seemed they had always fought like this and maybe always would and that's not necessarily bad, as long as they stay together – maybe it's worse the day they stop.

That night Kevin and I went to the casino in the pouring rain. I had taken a caffeine pill to counteract jetlag and now I was wired to the point of agitation; on the train into town I desperately hung on to Kevin's words, scouring them for meaning. I confessed to him how wired I was and he laughed.

The other morning on the bus to work I was in a mildly hung over reverie, slouched in my seat with my forehead leaning bumpily on the cool glass. I became vaguely aware of a man in front of me barking loudly into his cell phone. An older man, with a gruff Brooklyn accent.

Suddenly a woman in the front yelled out, "Sir! Would you please stop that?"

"What? I can't talk? Mind your business," he protested. And at the same volume as before he said into the phone, "I don't know, some woman is telling me to quiet down."

"You're very loud, sir," she continued.

"I'm not bothering anybody. Am I bothering anybody? Everyone raise their hand if I'm bothering you. See? No one raised their hand."

Another woman, sitting across the aisle, said to him, "You know, it really is annoying."

Things more or less calmed down after that.

There is no God and there is no devil but there is temptation. And there is righteous resistance to temptation borne of an instinctive apprehension that to succumb is wrong. Not wrong because God says so. Not wrong because man says so. Wrong because on a deep level, an unconscious level, we all know this: When you harm another you are harming yourself. Why? Because there is no other. "Other" is an illusion. We are all manifestations of the same being. And in spite of ourselves, in spite of our desires, in spite of our religious delusions, we know this is the only real truth. Though I deride all organized religions, the Christian notion of "do unto others" comes close to expressing this. The thing they got wrong, once again, is that the dictum does not come from God – it's much simpler than that. It comes from pure logical truth. To harm another is not sinful; it's perverse.

Somewhere in the course of the development of civilization we forgot this simplest truth, oneness. (Animals, incidentally, have not forgotten. They never do anything that is not morally justifiable. Animals do not – they can not – "sin." And it's not because they wouldn't take pleasure in doing so. It is simply not in their nature to violate nature.) And we had to invent an apparatus to maintain order in the face of this fracturing of consciousness. We had to invent God. How foolish – and foolhardy – to imagine that God is something outside ourselves. Because if it's outside of ourselves we can never be fully reconciled with it, and so our religions themselves become elaborate means to rationalize and support our transgressions. And in many cases, to exploit them.

The current wave of child molestation and denial in the Catholic Church is a clear example of the failure of religion, and religious orthodoxy in particular, to save man from temptation. These men who seduced young boys, young girls – who violated their vows but did much worse of course – are not inherently evil. Banish that facile interpretation from your head. They were sorely tempted, and the gravity of their temptation was proportional to their piety. These were not cynical men who entered the priesthood without faith, intending to rape the mouths and asses of the first altar boys they got their hands on. Of course not! They were religious men. Their faith – not just the hierarchy of the Church itself (though that counts for a lot) – actually enabled them to repeatedly molest children.

The Christian notion of forgiveness is to blame. Sin and redemption – that magical, compelling moral narrative that seems to invest every Christian life with meaning – actually provokes terrible deeds by the faithful. Original sin and inherited sin mark believers as sinners and they live down to that expectation. But there is no original sin – there is only original sanctity! And it's by denying our sanctity – and embracing our "sinfulness" – that we have gone so far astray.

"Look in your sister's room," P. C. said, as he walked past me to the kitchen.

"Look in my sister's room?" I said.

"Yeah."

"You want me to look in my sister's room."

"Look in her room."

I got up and walked over uncertainly and peered in the open doorway to find her slumped sideways on her bed, shoes on, face buried in a tangle of bedspread and pillow.

"She came home earlier and I said how are you and she said, ‘I'm shitfaced'," P. C. explained. "She went into her room."

"Did she tell you why she was shitfaced?"

"She went in and I expected her to come back out and tell me but she just like that, went down and that was it. Like that."

She winced a bit. "The things you do for fun in India you can't do here. I don't know, I read," she said. She ate tortilla chips in tiny bites. Sometimes a piece would crumble off and fall in her downy drink and she would pluck it out and pop it in her mouth. "I see how people live on television," she said, "and it's very different from life in India. I wonder what it would be like to live like that. I think I would like to try."

"But life on television isn't like real life," I said.

She looked across the room for a moment. "People going out to bars and drinking, and laughing, and doing things like playing pool," she said. "I think I would like someone to show me what that is like."

And I realized she was right: life in America is like life on TV. She was describing my life, and it had more in common with a beer commercial than with anyone's life in India. And I also realized what she really wanted from a man, an American man, and I realized I could give it to her if I wanted but I knew that I didn't and it was sad.

We sat at a table in the corner and she ordered a strawberry daiquiri and I ordered a scotch. I asked her if she had just ended a serious relationship and she acted a little surprised that I would ask, but she said yes, and we talked about that. The romance was gone, she said. They'd been together for nine years, almost since she'd come over, and they had done everything together. He was Indian too and he was practically her only friend in the States. She teased the frothy surface of the daiquiri with her straw and bent her head down when she went to drink.

"You've met other people though, right? At work?" I inquired hopefully.

"No. It is a very big problem with immigrants. They come over and they never fit in. They try to but they cannot. They stay with their own kind always."

We talked more about her ex, and about mine. She still lives with him, she said. He's a writer, he's trying to sell his novel but he hasn't and he's depressed. But she kept returning to this sad theme of being lost in the New World, of longing for what was all around but out of reach.

"What do you like to do for fun?" I asked, hoping this idiotic and banal question would lighten the mood.

Everything is quiet and gray-dark in the apartment. There's a half-filled glass of water on the coffee table but no one's there.

She waved to me from across the street and pointed we're going this way, across the avenue. Before we'd even crossed she asked me what do I do – oh you write? What kind of writing? If you write about your experiences, how does the reader know you're not lying? These writers who do this, they're vain, they only want to look good. Yes I suppose it's a problem, I said. We walked a few blocks, turning here and there, and she stopped across from a Mexican Restaurant.

"Do you want to go there?" she asked.

"Sure."

It was a generic blonde-wood margarita place with a basket of chips on every table and twinkling Christmas lights for décor, a sad and futile place to suit the nature of our encounter. Like me, illegitimate.

From a dream, yesterday morning: May freedom melt in your throat like ice cream.

I went to 28th Street and walked up and over to the uptown side and I waited. I watched as waves and waves of commuters got off trains and filed through the turnstiles, disappearing upstairs to leave the station quiet again. I scanned the crowd for any dark woman's face. I was calm but not serene; all I could think of was how strange this was, this dreadful anticipation. I was about to see her.

Finally she appeared. She was slender, with a long black coat and her hair tied back. She had thin lips, high cheekbones, a bit of an overbite. She looked good and I was relieved. Pat, she said, yes I said, and she smiled and we stood wordless a moment, and I said would you like to get together later and she said sure. I said what about tonight and she put her hands up to her head and said I don't know, I'm so pressed for time and I said that's OK, how about tomorrow and she said yes. I said we'd talk later and it was good to meet her and I shook her hand.

Later she called me and left a message. "It's Sajita, I want to make sure everything's all right." She was afraid I had changed my mind, I realized. I called her back and said everything's fine and she said why don't you come out to Brooklyn tonight, come out to Grand Army Plaza and call me when you get out.

I waited on the corner on Nevins Street, waited for her to come and find me, watching people walk home in the cool spring dusk. Two women, one black and one white, walked up.

"Excuse me," the black one said.

"Yes?"

"You speak English!" she exclaimed with goofy, exaggerated delight. "Do you know how to get to Park Slope?"

"I'm sorry, I'm not from around here."

"Oh."

I motioned toward the subway entrance with my head. "You could go down and ask the, uh, the tollbooth guy."

"Good idea!"

"The token booth guy."

"Good idea!"

They nodded to each other, eyebrows raised.

"Good idea! Thank you!"

And I was left to stand and wait again.

P. C. found a walk-don't walk sign on the street somewhere – just the flat part with the words on it – and put it on the wall in the kitchen. In its new context it is quite striking. Here's what it looks like, in big bold block letters:

DON'T

WALK

WALK

It is a poem, a piece of found art. Stare at it for a long time and see where your mind goes.

Last night I couldn't remember whether it was 2001 or 2002. I saw 01 on a computer file I thought was recent and I thought, damn, is it still 2001? Then, is it 2002? Hard to say which was more baffling. And in the morning I was chilled by the looming date on the milk carton – it seemed so far away at the store.

We are well into the future. 

The last day at Les Frauds is when Mom and I got to talking about September 11th and it was curiously contentious; she found the picture book moving yet maudlin too, and she was right, and it was exactly what I feared she might think, and what I feared about everyone's reaction to the whole thing too in a way, but I found myself growing defensive anyway. The elevation of the towers themselves as iconic vehicles for the projection of grief and rage, which was fascinating to me (those smooth facades, those beautifully square corners, so abstract, could bear anything in their unreality – after having collapsed in reality under the burden of the attack itself), seemed alarming to her. Those were our worse tendencies, she thought. The vigils reminded her of Lady Di's death, and the exploitation of a moment of genuine national tragedy for such self-indulgent melodrama was sick. Yeah, yeah. I knew she had a point. But I wished I'd articulated something else, a different view, but instead we moved on and talked about Israel and Arab anti-Semitism. I ranted about the eventual decline and disintegration of all major world religions, starting perhaps with Islam. I was inspired toward exaggeration and extreme rhetoric. We talked about the Arabs who would deny that September 11th was the work of Islamic terrorists, what a terrible portent that was. I drew comparisons between the hatred of the Arabs for the Jews with all the other great racial hatreds of modern civilization. And she said it goes the other way too, and remember, the Israelis have so much and the Palestinians have so little. Religion is racist, I said.

There's a pair of black shoes strewn ten feet apart on the rain-spotted sidewalk outside our door.

A prostitute on an HBO documentary said she tells abusive pimps this: Don't you have no respect for your mother? You came out of a pussy just like what I'm sellin'.

A man was wandering crosscurrent to the crowd, shouting into his phone: "I want everyone in the E.R. now!" At that moment what was so disturbing was the idea of a parade of the wounded, the burned, filling overwhelmed triage centers; of course what ended up being more disturbing was the idleness of hundreds of doctors waiting for nothing. 

We walked up Fifth Avenue with everyone. The Empire State Building looked vulnerable and naked in the sun. There was a fierce charge in the air, like anything might happen. You couldn't get a phone signal. We dropped off Daniela with her boyfriend Guy, who was waiting across from Grand Central. Guy held Daniela in one arm and told us they hit the Sears Tower in Chicago. I parted company with Brian and walked up Madison. 

People were generally calm. Some seemed strangely cheerful, like the guys hitching rides on flatbeds and in the backs of pickup trucks. I walked alongside a middle-aged woman with glasses and curly hair who was weeping so uncontrollably she was choking on her tears. I passed a posh Upper East Side restaurant and noticed people inside eating and drinking, seemingly oblivious. They had to know. It seemed outrageous that anyone could be doing anything so indulgent at such a time but then again, maybe no one could take the measure of this event and respond accordingly yet. Still, it was jarring to see their faces dimly through the glass, the glint of silverware before them and glasses on their lips.

The first call I was able to make on my phone was to John. We talked about how it would always be before and after from now on. He said he saw the towers burning from the roof of his apartment in Chinatown and ran down to get a camera, and when he came back upstairs one of the towers was gone. He took some film of a police officer who had helped people escape. While the camera was rolling the cop realized that other guys in his squad had been crushed in the collapse and he broke down. John wondered what he could do with this footage but confessed to feeling guilty for his "mercenary" inclinations. He never did say anything about it again.

Back home, Jill called. She said Lis was over at her place and did I want to come over. I said I did. I got on the downtown bus at Fifth Avenue. It was crowded and I stood near the front. People were talking animatedly about the disaster. There was an eerie glee about the talk. People seemed to want to outdo each other with stories of horror, to be the bearers of worse and worse news just for the vain thrill it gave them. Or maybe if they made it worse in their heads, and asserted it, the reality would not be quite so hard.

"I heard 40,000 people died," a woman said.

"Oh no. Way more than that," said a man. "200,000."

The bus driver told his story.

"I was down there," he began. "I looked out the window and I saw what do you call it, graffiti coming out of the sky." We knew what he meant. "But then I realized it ain't no graffiti. It's pieces of paper. Eight and a half by eleven."

I got off around the Metropolitan Museum and walked across the park with a crowd. Everyone's pace seemed slow by half a step – with nothing left to escape, our bodies had been suffused with a processional solemnity. In a way, though, it was just like a beautiful afternoon of families in Central Park. There were lots of children, acting like children, skipping and swinging their parents' arms by the hand, but it was clear that they knew. One inquired naively about the thing: 

"Daddy, did the airplane really hit the building?"

"Yes."

"What happened to the people inside?"

A roaring fighter jet pierced the empty sky above us.

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.