Oh those rare occasions when you're reacquainted with the floor, violent and unexpected. You might have clunked down drunkenly, too desperately miserable to seek a more civilized bed; you might be held anklewise by a brutish tormentor; you might have tripped on a roller skate. But it's a different world down there, always somehow new. The polish of the hard, hard wood. The film of dust both cosmic and human, tiny pebbly debris, maybe a long-forgotten object under a chair: blue cigarette lighter!

We are too alienated from the floor.

Out with C. K. at Paddy Maguire's, on a Wednesday night after the Yankees won, after Roger Clemens won his 299th game. We watched it at an Irish bar on second with her coworker, a cute tanned pretty thing who was such a Yankee fan, she could hardly breathe when they came to bat.

After, C. K. and I marched up Second, looking for a place to shoot pool. We stopped into Nightingale's after I told her about the manager Tom, how great he was, the tremendous leather-clad rail-thin drunk fairy, he loved us and we loved him; he had us play when he knew we'd not earn him a penny; the Chinese guy who owned the club made him replace all the beer he drank at the end of the night. On one of the last nights we played J. T. and I saw him at the deli down Second at about 4 o'clock in the morning, slurring, hobbling to the front with a case of Rolling Rock. We were there to buy beer to drink and he was there to buy beer he'd drunk.

Sometimes at night there seems to be a great whirring, clacking machine outside our apartment. Especially near the bathroom.

Thought about theater disasters tonight, of fires urgently disturbing our most civilized sanctuary, the stage. Was watching the decorous performance scenes in "Topsy-Turvy," where things are in fact in their place; it seemed unconscionable that anything should disrupt the pristine suspension of reality among the crowd. There goes the bellowing Mikado, there's the Lord High Executioner. Why yes.

And if there were a fire? There'd be an awful moment when the actor abandoned the line. Fans clattered to the floor and the baton was stilled, and fell.

The human drama supersedes.

A dreary mantra plays in my head as I lift my groggy head out of bed, step into the shower, walk down the street to the bus stop:

Hundreds of dollars.

Hundreds of dollars, hundreds of dollars. Sometimes like an old folk song, or maybe I'm just thinking of the line in that Jimmie Rodgers song: "She took a hundred dollars to buy me a suit of clothes." To buy me a suit of clothes. That delightful, unnecessary repetition: suit of clothes, not just plain suit; it was crucial to the rhyme of course but in the end it doesn't sound contrived, it sounds perfect. She didn't just buy me a suit, she bought me a suit of goddamn clothes, for Christ's sake.

J. bought a banjo.

When I call him at night I can hear him plinking at it in the background. We'll be talking about sex or Donald Rumsfeld and I'll hear a honking scrawk of open strings, the precarious frame of a familiar melody.

"I'm practicing the claw hammer," he says.

Watching TV, and trying to reconcile the disparity between the Holocaust and a Japanese cooking show. To reconcile the disparity or explode the proximity, I don't know.

There was a dignified elderly couple on the L shuttle tonight, she was wearing orange pants, and I wondered: do they still have sex? Or maybe they've deferentially ceased making such demands of each other – slipping into bed on either side instead, then poking themselves in the belly with a hardcover book. He dresses nice and I wondered, when he dresses, does she tug on his tie and tell him what a handsome man you are.

A few days ago it was sunny and breezy and I walked up Greenwich to the lunch place on the corner and some big machine in the construction site across the street was making music. An insistent, rhythmic phrase comprised of two distinct and counterbalancing melodies: Wee-DEE-da-DUH-huh followed by an EEE-ah-uh, EE-ah-uh. Sometimes the phrases would repeat in slightly different patterns, as though shifted by some marvelous intelligence, and yet maintain their tempo, and it was such a beautiful song that I nearly grasped the wrists of the office girl sitting on the bench in front of the restaurant with her sandwich and said, "Can you hear that?"

The paintball king just walked down the middle of the hill with his goggles up on his head. No one could believe what they saw. For a moment they all let him lope in peace, unblemished, as though in respect to the power he'd had. And then he was hit in the chest; he barely flinched, but a flurry of streaking pellets soon hit him from all sides until all had reached their satisfaction and he was splattered everywhere with streaks and blotches. He kept walking at the same deliberate pace. He never looked back and was never seen again.

Went on an Internet date with a sweet short-haired girl named D. who's going to school for construction site management.

In the cab on the way home we spoke about art she's done, an installation at the Limelight with cotton balls in mesh covering the stained glass ceiling. "It was about clouds trapped in the windows. Usually windows let clouds through." French news crackled on the Haitian cabbie's radio, an animated man telling of Algerian youth who were volunteering to help fight the Americans.

I let her out on my side of the cab and we kissed for about 15 seconds and I got back in and watched her walk up 3rd Ave.

Went on a date with a former lesbian, a lawyer who represents Martha Stewart in some of her civil litigation. We shared a bottle of red wine on the Park Avenue median. She referred to it as the "meridian." She was very charming and engaging and everything and all except: she looks exactly like my brother’s wife.

Shock and awe.

The Big Dance

In the basketball tournament, the Big Dance, every nine-to-five slave has a tenner in a pool and consequently we find ourselves identifying with these players and places and we match our momentary emotions to the haphazard, pan-state scattering of places our teams are from, Kentucky and Kansas and Texas and Eastern Tennessee, and at the very same time there are soldiers sitting in a barren room in Iraq telling their Iraqi interrogators where they come from: Texas, New Jersey, West Texas, Kansas. 

At way past eleven a silhouette in the all-night grocery store, reaching to the shelf.

Went out with C. and her ex from Hungary. He's a heavyset man with red hair in a pony tail who speaks very quietly and hesitantly and smokes Camels nearly all the time. There were times when he was trying to say something and C. would lean over to him, lean in a little, and grin, sort of taunting him or cajoling him, spit it out. I was kind of manic and generally dissatisfied. We were at the Knitting Factory to see Luna, a good band but it was kind of a mistake. They play droning, soporific indie rock. The kind of music that, on a Thursday night for Christ's sake, makes you feel like a little kid with your parents in a museum or something, rocking back and forth on your cramped feet with your jacket on.

The lead singer said he'd played with Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs recently and Tuli said, "The war against Iraq will be very short but the war against America will be very, very long." No one really reacted to this. Should we applaud? Yes? No? Wait. The singer broke the pause by saying, "That's what he said!" and there were some relieved guffaws. 

I'd been thinking, in the rain on the way to the club, walking the footbridge over Varick, scared by the soaking-wet corrugated metal steps. I thought, this is the age of the American Empire. We've had the British Empire, the Spanish, the French, the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, the Chinese, the Greek, the this, the that. Now for better or worse it's the age of the American Empire. And the trouble is, an empire is never good. It may think itself well-meaning, aligned with God, a defender of justice – was this not the British imperial view? – but it can't be. By virtue of its power and its dominion over others it is immediately corrupt.

But beautiful too. And doomed.

Here's what I remember, for now: the stunted jut of my arm as I lay prone on the snow and deep, dark maple syrup on the table at the restaurant. 

I walked back from the Ear Bar after work, walked across on Spring Street to the 6, and I walked by some dumb shoe store on a corner, a long narrow shoe store, and I remembered having been there years ago with A., and I remembered how smart and ornery she was, and how much I loved her, and I muttered "I love you" over and over under my drunken steaming breath until I passed the store, like you hold your breath while passing a graveyard.

His Name Is Fritos. That shall be the title of a short story of mine. Yesterday on my way from work to Barbara's a guy sat down near me on the F train. Too close to me it seemed – there were plenty of open seats but he took the nearest one against the wall, perpendicular to my bench. He was a thin, young Hispanic man with a wispy mustache, a gold chain, and curled hair bulging under his baseball cap. He was eating Fritos. At first I didn't, but then I caught a whiff of that unique Frito smell, that salty-sandy smell, momentarily delicious but so transient, so insubstantial. And I thought of the word itself for the first time, how it's a Spanish word for a fried thing, but I'd managed to never in my life recognize it as a Mexican-influenced thing: to me Frito was all-American, garishly so; as American as Crayola or Dr. Pepper or Visine, blissfully artificial and pure Yankee.

But they stole the word.

And I remembered the real reason I get this American-flavored taste when I think of Fritos: when I was maybe nine, we were in the hills of Northwestern Connecticut visiting my mom's cousin and her rich small-town family. She'd married an oil executive and had a Barbie doll-blonde baby daughter whose beauty was fated to be ravaged by alcoholism and depression. But I digress. This girl, then a teen, was introducing my brother to someone I think, and she momentarily forgot his name, and she took the opportunity of her misstep to say this:

"Fritos! His name is Fritos. I've got to go get more Fritos."

And she glided into the kitchen to pour more in the bowl.

The sidewalk on 103rd, usually rat-infested, was frozen over glassy.

This morning I awoke at B.'s in Brooklyn to the shriek of newsradio: "… THE SENATOR REPEATED THAT PEOPLE SHOULD AVOID NEW YORK CITY SUBWAYS…" I slammed it off and got back in bed, faintly nauseous from the wine the night before, and pulled a blanket out of a tangled pile over me, and thought about devastation, bombings, poison gas, and whatever fate awaits us all.

If I'm Dead

If I'm dead
I won't see the peeling paint
at 51st and Lex
as I ride the escalator to the E

D. the bisexual from Brooklyn told me about a party on Saturday, at her dorm at Pratt. I was at work, obsessing over some fine point of the project.

"What kind of party? Cool kids?" I asked her, by instant message.

"Yeah, cool kids. You need to wear a wig. I might be able to make you one."

I begged off, using my nagging throat cold as an excuse.

Truth is I'm not that attracted to her, curiously. She's got a great body, she seems to be a competent artist, these would seem to be the things that matter to me. But her tongue is too invasive in my mouth – we were kissing the other day and she kept parrying and thrusting with it and I closed my mouth a little, trying to discourage her. "Give me your tongue!" she said brightly and hungrily, as though she were addressing a waiter at the Carnegie Deli. I did, reluctantly, but the entire exchange left me woefully unexcited. She has naked lust, too much enthusiasm. I like restraint and friction, uncertainty and tension.

I've been falling in love with women on the subway recently. First a few weeks ago (months? Days?). She was with a guy, some nondescript yet clearly phenomenally lucky guy; a man I hardly noticed but for the hot envy that welled up in me. She had dark hair and Russian features; she looked a lot like J. but better somehow, more self assured. She had a small, perfect mouth that made a little frown all the time and she had pronounced, slightly slanted eyebrows. She had the slightest underbite. What struck me about her was her control over herself and the ease, the authority with which she interacted with the world and others, whoever they might be. She and her boyfriend were evidently accompanying friends from out of town on a tour around the city. She declared that they had to have New York style pizza, of course, and in the morning of course they had to have bagels. With that delicious underbite. Her eyes half closed the whole time, her eyes, half-closed.

And just the other day there was a Hispanic girl across the train from me who was one of the most beautiful humans I've ever seen in my life. She wore wire-framed glasses; she had flowing, elaborately styled hair that was red at the tips and black at the roots; impeccably flawless olive skin and a sensuous mouth framed by such a complex and ravishing mechanism of dimples, muscles and subtle creases that every expression she wore seemed to be definitive of some aspect of man's longing or perhaps of truth itself. Her spectacular face lent her a talent for smirking. She was accompanied by a taciturn Hispanic kid, maybe her brother or cousin (her boyfriend? Maybe, but he was overweight, and so standoffish and dismissive of her that I could not imagine he saw her the way I did), and once when she turned to him to react to his mumblings she said "Serious?" in such a streetwise-homegirl way and with such a wry, wicked smirk that I nearly lost consciousness. But it was when she was at rest that I found her the most alluring. She'd look blankly the other way, away from her neighbor, her hands deep in her coat pockets, and as her face softened into a curious mask I was left only to imagine the meanings and powers of its potential forms.