The wave coming in appears deceptively benign in videos. The occasional towering wave that collapses on the shore just like the rest. But this one kept coming and kept coming and soon enveloped trees and houses and flooded the road, breaching the untalked-about barrier between what's ours and what's the sea's.

I can't fathom that a drop of water, like one that runs down the outside of my whiskey glass, is the same element that this is made of. I can't reconcile the ocean with the drop.


In Puerto Rico we went body surfing on the first full day, tipsy from rum punch. I waded to my hips in the warm Atlantic and took a blissful piss. Waves came every five or ten seconds, cresting at my shoulder or neck. I turned around and body surfed pitiably, not getting tossed around in a cloud of sand like you're supposed to but getting pinned to the shore anyway. I'd get up and try again, and again.

Then I noticed I'd drifted into a clutch of rocks that stuck a foot or so out of the water, chest-high. A wave slammed me up against them. I tried to grip one but its surface was slick with moss and my hands slipped off as the undertow sucked me away. Then another wave. Slammed up on the rocks. Pulled away. Slammed. Pulled. I found myself growing tired, losing my footing with the ceaseless, rhythmic push and tug. In a moment I realized I had to act so I hoisted myself up on the rock, clambering up on my torso, heaving arms and a knee to the other side. There I waded in the calmer water and negotiated the other rocks on hands and knees, finally reaching shore.

The steam pipe's reassuring hiss, signaling heat and everything it means.

Today was cold, damn cold, fucking cold. On our way down Canal to the deli I drew stiff as a board against the Hudson gusts. Saw myself as a cartoon man, gloved hands outstretched. All you could do is pretend you weren't real.

I stopped at the liquor store on Lenox and 111th after work and a man said, Got a quarter? I'm short, and another said, Got a dime? I fished around the bottom of my bag as the earth ground to a creaking halt upon its axis. Finally I found them quarters and they were gracious as they bought their nippers.

The news is pictures of men and women palsied by grief, bent and twisted as loved ones are laid to rest behind them or cast unknowably deep and far into the sea. Now one listens to the tamped earth of a fresh grave, arms splayed out and palms up.

The wave rolling at five hundred miles an hour across the Indian Ocean. O you blameless wave.

I got on the 5th Avenue bus and he was already talking, across from me in the front seats facing in. He had a white beard, a kindly face. Decent pants and shoes but a bum's telltale posture, hunched and jerky. He was telling a young black woman, androgynous in a North Face coat and knit wool hat, about black music.

"See, black people make the best music," he asserted solemnly, nodding and watching for her reaction, drawing assent from her. She nodded almost imperceptibly. "They always did make the best music." He lifted his chin and gazed off in a professorial pose. "The Cadillacs," he said. "The Eldorados," he added confidently.

The girl nodded, bored, patronizing. She got up at the next stop. He said, "Oh you're getting off?" and wished her well and told her, "You're very beautiful," just to hook her into more talk. And she said, "You're beautiful too," just to shut him up.

Then he shuffled around the bus, looking for someone else.

"Mind if I sit here?" he asked a middle aged black man.

"You can sit anywhere you want. I'm, but I'm. I'm not in a very talkative mood right now."

The old man moved on, settling in the middle of the bus, where he eventually drove two white women away with who knows what he said. I wondered what he'd do next and by what unfathomable logic.

After a few quiet minutes he sprang up at a stop in the 60s. "Got to get off... this train..." he mumbled as he opened the door and stepped down uneasy. He stood on the sidewalk a moment as though he were trying to remember why he left the bus. And then he walked up to the wall and pissed.

Absence is a gesture of power. If you want to be revered, idolized, mythologized, don't show your face. Operate mysteriously in your lair, unknowable twists and turns afar.

But then – and maybe only then – there is the tremendous power of presence. A great athlete or mythic coach; actor, politician, rock star: There is the compelling fact of being there, on two legs and feet. Hobbled by constraining gravity and framed by the impediments of immediate truth. A stage, a rug, a wire. A chair. The ground we tread upon and our shared air.

Puerto Rico where we were, in Condado, had a vague look of distress. Everything was clean and safe for the tourists but there seemed to be a weariness from the decades of catering to them. On Saturday night at the El San Juan half the crowd was up in a throng watching a boxing match on TVs suspended from the ceiling. The room was ornate and old and retained some of the grandeur of another age when you had to wear formal clothes to gamble. The dealers were aloof, even rude. I sat down at a blackjack table and in between hands the woman to my left lit a cigarette, and the dealer waved off the air before her with a sour look. I rose in protest. Elsewhere dealers were grim and humorless; the cashier girl said neither thank you nor good night.

Cars on Lenox Ave., cars on Hudson Street. Racing through the intersection expecting deference. Twin morning worries on my way to work.

Drank at Cedar's tonight, to see Stephanie back from Canada. Sean, George, Mike H., Michele and Henry, Jake and Lis, Christina. A little clutch of sexy young people stared at us from the middle of the room until we realized they were staring at the photo exhibit on the wall. Right by Mike's head: the torso and legs of a beautiful woman clad in a leopard-skin bikini. Her taut flesh revealed cartilage and tendons. She made me think of Donna, who I'll never see again and that's just fine. Donna had a muscular physique. Donna had a sadomasochistic streak I never got to see.

There is a demented girl who hangs ou...

There is a demented girl who hangs out at Rocky Sullivan's who nobody wants to fuck. She leans in on conversations, makes herself plainly available, unappealing. And people who've befriended her report she's crazy, enraged with lustful spite for Daddy. Among other things.

So tonight there was a woman the whole time I thought it was her, but then maybe not. She had a placid countenance, a lucid smile, but other aspects of her face were the same. Eyes. Was it her, somehow sane now?

Steve spoke to Laura for an hour in an invisible corner so we imagined he was making it happen. We went to the Indian place across Lex, Bollywood posters in the foyer, a narrow space in front of the counter, the glass case with pans of goat, spinach, cabbage, chick peas, biryani rice; all of it oily with ghee. Chicken tikka, tandoori chicken and a tray of brittle fried samosas on the shelf. We left and saw Steve and Laura emerge with Andy and Lissette across the street and go their separate ways.

On the cab ride home PC and I discussed the prevalence of infidelity which led us to Hispanic women – their fury at their macho men who cheat but their eventual resignation. And then the Catholic Church and boy fucking, the boy fucking question.

Two women in high heels trotted down 56th Street in a beginning rain, trying to run. This is what they mean when they say you can't run in high heels. They were trying to run, click click click, and it was strange how stiffly hobbled they were. It's a persistent anachronism the high-heeled shoe, like if women still wore corsets.

The Blarney Stone on Third Avenue is an unhappy little bar, dark and disordered and infected with the sick-smell of beer rot. This is where PC and Lis and I met for drinks on Saturday. Lis couldn't decide what to drink, was unhappy with everything, two different beers and then a scotch, and so she left with a sigh and PC and I went to Paddy's.

I e-mailed Alexandra to say what the hell, I know it's last minute but what are you doing tonight? And she replied: Crying my eyes out.

Spent the day and night with Kathryn. She said she was thinking of moving. Not sure where. Just moving. Putting the kids in boarding school, moving somewhere alone.

As George and I sat at the sidewalk table to play chess in the evening chill a pudgy, middle-aged Asian man stopped to leer at us. He rocked back and forth on his heels, giggling, brandishing a cigarette. I thought maybe he just wanted a light but it was lit and shedding ash. We didn't address him and George did a particularly good job of continuing our conversation unperturbed. The man rocked and giggled for a few more seconds and walked away.

The date sits over these babbling half-formed thoughts in silent, cool reproach.

She wants this and-a she wants that. Electric, she's a feral cat.

Save.

Save!

Hobbling across Second Avenue and cross Third. Beyond all glowering cab lights – immune to the mute testimony of the paper box, the overflowing pail; the essentially distressing street.

Waited at Park Avenue with my elbow on the pole. And then I looked and saw: 2:22 next bus, 2:22. And it was 1:36.

So then I headed underground.

The shadowing, creeping blimp, the Goodyear Blimp.

Played on Friday night with George and Joe, at the studio where Joe writes jingles all day. The picture window gave out on 17th Street, the upper limbs and leaves of a tree trembled and shook in the wind.

Saturday at the gym, suds streaming from a shower stall formed a cloudy skull against the tile.

I think I had a dream about Henry Kissinger recently. He wore an Arab headdress like Yasir Arafat, and now I think I was thinking of Arafat too. But it was Kissinger, and he was laughing, nodding and laughing heartily, like he was a little fucked up at a party and just heard a great joke.

As I walked down 56th today I saw a garbage man with a soft, open gaze, waiting for something, and I saw that it was a garage door opening hydraulically, vault-like, descending to reveal, to reveal a room of wheeled canvas bins, bins of insulation in candy pink and yellow tufts.

I had a big dresser in the closet of my room growing up, it was pine or cedar, some kind of redolent wood, or maybe it was the varnish or the stain but the thing had a remarkable floral, musty, acrid smell. It was the smell of its brass handles beating on their stops upon release. It was the smell of the sound they made. The smell of the sight. The face it made when a shirtsleeve protruded from the bottom drawer. It was the smell of the living beast called furniture. It stood watch in the dark as I made mountains of the bedding with my knees, seeing roads and rivers form by moonlight from the foothills to the peaks.

After weeks of no contact I guiltily e-mailed Stephanie and said, you know, sorry, would you like to have a drink? And sure enough she wrote back yeah and then a day later she wrote again, you know what, a drink is not in the cards, so to speak. She said so to speak, as though the cards were a pun. Not in the cards.

The dreary listing of a doomed and idle coupling, sure to run aground but when and how?

People are wringing their hands over this election. Blaming Kerry. Don't fucking blame Kerry. People are tempted to see in losses sorry, self-evident conclusions when it's really just a fucking loss. Even after the fact we struggle to assert some kind of control over the event, as though we could reverse the outcome by explaining it away. He lost because he wasn't aggressive enough. He lost because he wasn't inspiring. He failed to make a case for himself.

Who's to say that the very qualities we now reproach him for are not qualities that earned him votes, not cost him votes? To a certain degree, for better or for worse, he certainly presented himself as the anti-Bush. Actually fuck that, he didn't just present himself that way, he is that way. Thoughtful and introspective where Bush is impulsive and brash. Intellectual and well-read where Bush is incurious and famously ill-read. Versed in the minutiae of policy where Bush paints broad strokes. The advocate of nuanced and complex views where Bush will hit you in the face with a fucking idiot sledgehammer. Isn't this who we fucking wanted? Didn't the anti-Bush voters want to vote for the anti-Bush? Of course we fucking did. Had he won – had, say, fewer votes in black districts been thrown out in Florida and Ohio, or lines had been shorter in these same districts – you better believe we'd all be fucking crowing about how he had been the ideal candidate. We're so lucky Kerry came along to capitalize on the anti-Bush sentiment, we'd be saying. Wasn't he just perfect? Aren't we fucking delighted that our great country woke up and realized we need a smart, reasonable man in the White House and not a fucking moron? Hurray! This is SUCH A WONDERFUL TIME TO BE AN AMERICAN.

You better fucking believe we'd all be saying that. 150,000 votes in Ohio. But now that he lost we have to fucking cry about it and go blaming Kerry.

It is a sad truth of human psychology that we accentuate the positive and accentuate the negative. When something goes right we trick ourselves into imagining that God Himself is shining a fucking light up our asses. When something goes wrong we enter paroxysms of petty blame and self-loathing. Let's remove the inconvenient factor of subjective human perception for a moment and examine the truth: Kerry lost a very close election to a fucking flag-waving Jesus-talking moralizing prick of a wartime president. Bush basically handed a big fucking lollipop to every single voter who: is insecure and possibly even hypocritical on the topic of morality and craves reassurance that they are morally superior; dislikes gays without quite knowing how to articulate why – just fucking dislikes them; kinda feels the same way about – shh! – black people; thinks America is like, the greatest, and doesn't understand why those who are enemies of freedom seek to do us harm; and perhaps most importantly, resents, fears and dislikes smart city folks.

Turns out there are some people out there like that. Call it the oppression of the many by the many.

There was a conservative Jewish woman on the train, I could tell from her gray skirt and her knobby knees and the little black bows on her little black shoes. At least I think. She had an unhappy face, her mouth twisted in a perpetual pout, yet it was easy to imagine those same lips in contortions of ecstasy, those watery eyes alive with lust. I watched her fidget with a perforated sheet, some sort of bill or invoice. She had an iPod and as she turned its wheel with a thumb's caress I tried to imagine with what it filled her head.

Arbitrary Ambiguous Film Noir Scene

"I don't think I can."

"You don't think?"

"Get the money."

"You are looking at a man who doesn't care."

"What?"

"Hey."

"I'm what?"

"You're looking," he walks closer. "At a man."

"Who what?"

"Care."

"What?!"

"Doesn't care."

I was sick the day after the Yankees lost, trembling and uneasy at work, hung over and food poisoned or just plain poisoned. Haunted by the thought of the Stadium's dank, infernal halls, the floor and walls glowing that medicinal green from neon and fluorescence. So I proceeded gingerly through the day, sipping little spoonfuls of soup, quiet and resolute with regard to work and shuffling to the toilet to shit ropes of black, acid shit. 

Tonight we watched the Ron Jeremy documentary on TV with little interest, which seemed to mirror Jeremy's own view of himself and of his life. What an odd figure – vaguely pathetic in his short, fat unsexiness and his naive conviction he'd be a real actor someday yet also weirdly neutral, disengaged and adolescent; he's got the blank stare and drowsy speech of an onanistic boy returning to the world from his exertions.