We went to the Ear Bar today for lunch and to scribble on the papered table in crayon.

I had the chili.

I love the Ear Bar, a New York City institution we take for granted because it's three or four steps from our office. It's one of those fucking bars that claims to be the oldest in Manhattan, founded in 1837 or some goddamn thing. Back when the Hudson shoreline came up to the plaque-commemorated mark right outside the door and a few feet to the left. Back when sailors would stagger off of ships on wobbly sea legs to drink whiskey, sing their chanteys, fuck whores and then be off to sea once more.

I love the Ear Bar but lately I've hated the food. The room has an oppressive stench, not unpleasant but inescapable, irremediable. It's the smell of 175 years of goddamn beer and whiskey, beer leaking out of tap lines to gently rot the bar wood till it wasn't rotten any more. Whiskey spilt in the cracks of the floor, blood let from lips and noses, falling richly on tables and chairs, vomit in the bathroom sinks, in the toilets, on the floors. Upstairs – whores, itinerant ne'er-do-wells and seamen sleeping, fucking, shitting. Performing their ablutions. Water pipes with rusted joints and cracked and peeling paint bearing their unspeakable filth to parts unknown.

And so it has a smell. A smell you cannot really describe, you can only faintly conjure in your mind when it's not there. It's the smell of the damp and of the stale. And of cheap spices and of grease, of salty grease. And beer and booze, detergent. Crayola crayons. The crayons they put in glasses on each table. Maybe that's what it is, mostly. Crayons.

And two centuries of puke and booze and blood.

So for whatever reason. I've been balking at the food. It's just not a place where it feels like you should chew on something. Seems like a place, you should be careful when you open your mouth. So I got a whiskey and a bowl of chili and I drew a picture on the table, and Jim and John got martinis and we were at the Ear Bar in the year 2007.

This morning late out the door and down the elly, past the doorman saying hello, out into the bright, bright cold and left to the weird street coming out the Lincoln Tunnel; there's a man there, standing in a scarf, muddy, brittle ice along the border of the sidewalk and the street and trucks and cars are stopped in the middle of the corner, caught as the light turned red, and now I walk among them and a car swings right before me, in from 34th Street, tires squealing, what the fuck.

I sat glumly on the E train. Passively, docilely. Obediently, even. We enter some station after a certain length of time and I look up and out the window just like anyone would and it says BROADW – Jesus Christ, this fucking train took me to Broadway-Lafayette.

A husky Hispanic man sidled up to me.

"Do you know why the train – "

"I have absolutely no idea."

Out on the platform a forlorn middle-aged black lady approached.

"Do you know how I can get back down to Spring Street?"

I wondered if there was anything in the world I could say or do to help.

"I have no idea. Sorry. I have no idea."

And so I got on that downtown 6 and to Canal and emerged amidst the throng of merchants and their dazed and wide-eyed marks.

Crashes

I watched on YouTube a gruesome and probably inevitable video: a compilation of Formula One racing deaths. At first my interest was, in spite of better judgment, juvenile and prurient. Ooh, crashes.

And I remembered the excitement I felt as a kid going to races and hoping for a crash. And when a crash began, let's say in a race of modest, open-wheel Formula Fords, with one car seeming to slowly lose grip with the wet track on a sweeping left-hand turn, the rear giving way, and it's a yellow car, a beautiful raincoat yellow with a red-and-black-and-white Champion Spark Plugs sticker and a number 17, and what is going to happen to this bright and beautiful thing now that it's lost grip with the surface of the planet, this pretty, fragile, angry thing in the rain, with the white helmet of the sweating and bewildered man inside, struggling against chaos and fear; and behind him there's a car that's green and blue and it says Valvoline, and the yellow car has red wheel rims whose spinning ceases in the skid so now you see the lug nuts and the bright, white GOODYEAR on the tires and the green and blue car slams into it, the nose all crumpled now from this brusque, perverse encounter with the misshapen and delicate – intimate – parts in the rear – exhaust pipes, brake light, suspension and wing buttresses and now everything's fucked up and the yellow car has been jolted off its tenuous orbit around the corner and onto the wet, green grass and it's zigging and zagging, trying to cut across and rejoin that winding ribbon of asphalt where its adversary is limping along lamely, nosewing askew and engine whining for a lower gear.

I loved this. And it seemed so evidently to be essential to the appeal of car racing, at its very aesthetic foundation – control erupting into chaos, mystery mixed up in beauty – that I wasn't the least bit ashamed of it and one morning at the track declared to my dad that I couldn't wait to see some crashes.

He said nothing at first but fixed me with a withering stare. He raised his finger.

"We don't come to races to see crashes," he admonished. "We come to see racing. Crashes can be very serious and the drivers can get very hurt."

I hung my head to ponder my shame and what it all might mean.

I thought guiltily about the drivers. Like it was me who might hurt them just by wishing.

And tonight, watching the video, those early feelings were reawakened, the child's diabolical pleasure in destruction and then of course the guilt. And it struck me that you really can't parse it all out after all. It's a carnal sport. Awful, nauseating, poignant, beautiful. The colors and the wheels. Fire. The ferocious, howling cars. The swooping lines they follow; blood. Vomitous splatters of oil and gas, of extinguisher foam. Men in fire suits and helmets, tempting death. And crowds, standing, cheering, waving. Signs, words, Marlboro, Shell.

And the worst accident of all is there, in real time and in slow motion: the South African Grand Prix in 1977, Tom Pryce hitting a teenage track official who was scurrying across the track to aid a stricken car. Pryce's front wing clips the boy, whose body seems to disintegrate a bit and flips many times end over end, straight up about forty feet in the air. The fire extinguisher the boy was carrying hit Pryce in the head and partially decapitated him and then was sent flying who knows where. Pryce's car kept going, banging into a side rail, crossing the track and then exiting it, onto the grass, but not to get back on again.

The Interview, Pt. 1

Q. What's the importance of proper grammar?
A. Well... (shrugs and waves unlit cigarette with a slow, fatalistic flourish). Well, I don't think anyone should get carried away. But a writer has to learn his craft (leaning forward, finger raised and unlit cigarette gripped in fist). It's important. (Reclining, eyes closed. Softly tapping cigarette base on the box, held in the other hand, by lifting it by the thumb and forefinger and letting it fall.)

There. There! There... There was? There is.

There's this feeling you get out in San Francisco, of airiness and of isolation, of night falling only upon the bejeweled metropolis, of couching it on all sides with the dark.

This is the cool air you get. The never hot and never cold. Never the bitter Northeastern nor Midwestern gales. With their ice attaching everywhere, hanging off of roofs, of branches and car bumpers. Not on this insular peninsula. In San Francisco you're sheltered in the middle of the air.

I remember telling Vanessa I'd resolved to write every night. I was sitting in the middle chair in the living room in Sally and Jay's house, the one Sally would sit in if there was something she wanted to watch on TV. She was sitting on an ottoman I think. The TV flickered in the background like it always does. I told her there's no excuse for not writing every night if you want to write. You have writer's block, forget it, you write about what you did that day. There's always something to write about. Everyone has something to say. I woke up this morning and then what? You had a piece of toast. There's always something to write about.

She was nodding and smiling and seemed to agree.

One morning a few years later Noah made Vanessa breakfast and kissed her as she went out the door to work. But she never came back. That's it. I think she sent him a letter, or left him a note. Maybe in her dresser or under the pillow or some other quiet place where she knew he'd find it soon. It said, I never, ever want to see you or speak to you again. It said, I hate you very, very much and you have no friends because everyone else hates you too. It said, I'll never forgive you for the time I wasted with you.

Or words to the effect.

It's so cold, people aren't showing up to work. To work in our drafty, semi-industrial space. Those who do huddle in their coats, maybe lucky enough to have a purring space heater at their feet, warming a zone about a foot or two around.

A curiously sad and fraught day. The day after the Super Bowl, figures. It's the only universally celebrated holiday, and just about the only one we don't get a day off for besides. It's inevitable that the half of our dreams that are dashed, or our prideful, whimsical bets that are lost, would combine ferociously with the beer and the chips and the beer and the whiskey and the pretzels and the beer to provoke dark mornings of self-loathing indeed, all across the land.

Tony Dungy said they proved they won it the Lord's way and I don't like that, I don't like it one bit.

I had the distinct impression tonight, the man swimming in the lane with me. He thought I was a simpleton. Me no goggles, swimming like Mao in the river, head straight up and out of the water, clunking my toes against the ladder. He'd wait at one end while I swam slowly halfway down before wearily diving into his crawl.

I Love To Brush My Teeth

I love to brush my teeth 'cause when I do I know that's what I'm doing. I'm not supposed to be doing something else.

Don't have to worry that I'm hurting nobody.

And then I walk back out with my mouth stinging of mint and I hear the squeal of truck brakes down outside my window.

Eternity of Your Love

I received a spam e-mail today, the title was:

Eternity of Your Love


The wedding reception took place on the sixth floor of a nondescript building in the Garment District, amidst wholesalers and warehouses and shuttered-up garages. Dressed-up people clustered in the narrow lobby waiting for the single elevator. Upstairs there was a spacious universe of brick and wood. A guest book, coat check, everything. Those potted trees with the thin, bare branches.

Right outside the elevator where the guest book was there were candles everywhere: table, floor. One caught the corner of Sean's coat and he went up in flames, requiring the assistance of a kind stranger to save his lining if not his life.

The waiters brought out tray upon tray of hors d'oeuvres, every last one laid upon a thin disc of cucumber.

Some guests chose to eat the cucumber too, grabbing the entire arrangement sloppily, the cucumber squirming on their thumbs, making two, three, four tries at it with the waiter stiffly standing by until they wrested the thing off its surface and popped it quickly in their mouths.

The hors d'oeuvres presented a narrative from the ordinary to the bizarre, a culinary adventure into absurdity. We began with scallops wrapped in prosciutto and mini quiches and lamb chops and then there was French toast on a stick and chicken livers smothered in molasses and caramels in rock salt and pickled fish eyes, cherries with blood pudding and raspberry-mutton sorbet; peach goulash, whale blubber soup, soy cake with deer antler butter, fried radishes and live ants stuck in honey.

Or so it seemed.

Diary of a Ghost

Some strange people live in this house. I was in the downstairs. The younger boy, the one with the disheveled hair. He stayed awake for hours sitting up in bed and playing with toy soldiers by the light of the moon. Infantries charging each other over the hills of his quilt. I scrutinized this scene with fierce interest until finally he fell backwards into a stupor and kicked a dozen doughboys to the floor. I never get bored.

Upstairs Mr. and Mrs. S. were tangled in their bedsheets after a bout of lazy and inattentive intercourse. He was asleep and she was not, her eyes wide open to the dark, afraid of what the day would bring. He snored and dreamt of driving a car in the town where he grew up, except he wasn't at the wheel – he was facing backwards in the backseat and suddenly remembered he had to steer, and he tried to twist his body into place to reach the wheel and see the road, and he tried to find a way to clamber over into the front to find the pedals, and he was facing down an impossibly steep hill.

The older boy had recently fallen asleep too, after obsessing over the ticking of his clock. The more he tried to ignore it the louder it got. When he focused on it he found he could make the infernal sound disappear for a few beats but then it would just as soon expand back into his consciousness, louder still, violent ticktocks blaring at him, taunting him, as though reproaching him for some mysterious sin. It never really ended but thankfully exhaustion prevailed and he passed into a dark and fitful slumber.

I slipped into the heating pipes with a hiss and a clang.

All new! Washable toast!

Introducing... Washable toast!

Put it in the toaster and toast it till it's hot and toasty. Take it out, butter it. Spread some jam or jelly. Enjoy your wonderful washable toast all you want and then simply WASH IT! That's right, soak it in the sink, wash it like anything else. It's even dishwasher safe! Place your washable toast in the dishwasher along with all your dishes. Take it out and it's time to toast it again for hours more TOAST FUN.

Washable toast!

There was a man in the laundry room so I lifted my head as I approached, I lifted my eyes. Nothing. He kept sorting solemnly his remaining clothes into the two machines.

John is the surly, quiet doorman. He wears glasses that droop a little too far down his nose, so when you walk in or out, and say hello, and he lifts his tired, jowly head he has to lift it a bit too far so that he's seeing you through his lenses. He's hunched over but his head is tilted back and he's struggling to see you through the glasses with the light from up above glinting off them too.

"Hi John."

Silence.

"Hello. Sir," his last syllable dissolving into a whisper, then a breath. And then he puts his head back down again.

George W. Bush Is an Idiot and a Fucking Craven Little Bitch Besides

George W. Bush on "60 Minutes" looked pained, reluctant, tired, all things you might expect. But it took me a while to form any other thoughts about this dreary, obligatory bit of public relations work. The President's vague and halting manner seemed to defy close scrutiny, as though his famous aversion to introspection and his incuriosity form a sort of field around him which similarly dulls our own inquisitiveness.

But with the benefit of a night's sleep a few ideas began to coalesce.

This is a sad, stupid and bumbling man who has real difficulty – and I mean the tragic, pathos-filled difficulty of the semi-functioning adult moron – putting together a coherent sentence. And like idiotic people typically do when they are faced with challenges, Bush has – deftly, even, one might say – developed a series of strategies to deflect questions and thus to appear "normal." For example, there is the "stalling" of questions that are beyond his mental functioning to properly address. Scott Pelley asked something like, "Mr. President, many Americans feel that you're stubborn. Is this true?" Bush replied, "What, that I'm stubborn... or that many Americans think I'm stubborn?" And here Bush produced his slack, shucky grin, like, Whew! OK. I thought of something to say. Pelley repeated, with what appeared to me to be a trace of impatience, of patronization: "Americans feel that way. Is it true?" And then the denial – odd, actually, since he's always tried to play his inflexibility off as strength, as gutsy resolve. This time: "I think I'm a flexible open-minded person. I really do. I really do." A touch of petulance now. And then, "Do you think you owe the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job?" Bush's reply: "That we didn't do a better job or they didn't do a better job?" The maddening tactic he employs of answering questions with questions, often idiotically reversed ones, no matter how ill-conceived or inappropriate, in order to deflect attention from his inability to properly consider and respond to such questions, questions that are even the least bit penetrating, is only part of the problem. He also reflexively casts the blame on others. Like a kid at recess: I know you are but what am I? It's a craven gesture, the signature of a petty and immature soul, and he performs it at once, without hesitation.

Why would HE fucking APOLOGIZE for the IRAQIS not doing a better job, anyway, for fuck's sake? My God, if you're going to be weak, if you're going to be a coward, if you're to be a petty little BITCH and you happen to be the President of the United States can't you be the least bit clever about it?

Bush's spin doctors, aides, speechwriters and other Rasputins have jammed a gummy wad of fucking self-serving, disingenuous, sinister, hypocritical EXCUSES for the mayhem and murder in Iraq into his thick, tiny skull and he STILL can't get them right.

And that's the sad truth about Bush. He's Pandora, who opened the box. And just as the box contained that one ghostly glimmer of good to be loosed upon the world, hope, Bush himself is not all bad. He's not evil; he believes he's doing good and in fact doesn't believe he's doing great harm in the service of good. He's far more dangerous than evil people are. Saddam was evil, and our rickety constitutional democracy seems to protect us against actually electing people like that. People like that are recognized and soon enough marginalized in a free, educated society. They'll make their mark, sure, but they won't become president. And if somehow they were to they'd get run out of town sooner or later – Nixon was as close to actual evil (knowing, calculated malfeasance) as any leader we've had and we kicked him around until we didn't have him to kick around any more. Bush is worse: he's both stupid and craven. Let's face it, this emperor's naked as a jaybird. Can we say so finally? He's a low functioning adult, not borderline retarded but frankly much closer to that line than most people are willing to think. By any measure, by any observation, he's hapless, exceedingly inarticulate, lost, halting, bewildered. In addition, he is a moral coward. He's quick to blame others, to hide, to avoid being implicated and to cower from any physical or other danger even when such a risk might be warranted as a rite, or in order to protect others, or as a matter of principle. He has no desire to accept responsibility and to experience the accordant realization of his own weaknesses, shortcomings and errors. In short, to grow. In some, these shortcomings arise out of evil; in Bush they arise out of stupidity. The effect is the same, though more terminal and – because he is not entirely unsympathetic, not a Nixon – more insidious. To bring us back to the playground, he's like that really fucked up dumb kid no one felt sorry for because his reaction to being dumb was being mean. And in the meantime those who are evil, who know how to, and seek to, take advantage of this circumstance, this president's miraculously obstinate idiocy, happily further their own war mongering, war profiteering, insane pseudo-religious fantasies and all manner of other machinations whose toxicity imperils our moral environment just as greenhouse gases imperil our physical one.

Fuck Ford

Fuck Gerald Ford. I mean really. Enough already, day after day of speeches and salutes and viewings and reminiscing and of the laying in state. All anyone can seem to say is he was a nice enough guy. Maybe he was. Who gives a fuck? Who are we burying, Willy Loman? This was a kindly Midwestern good ol' guy, the epitome of a particularly bland postwar type, the decent yet uncourageous American male. Good enough to let his wife outshine him, not too good to pardon Nixon in return for the presidency. In deference to another asshole president, he was kind enough to die when the Iraq War reached a gruesome new depth: the deadliest month for civilians. And what an irony that he upstaged James Brown, something no living man could do. Could you possibly even imagine a greater distance in every measurable way between two contemporaneous U.S. citizens than there was between those two? Hail Black Caesar. As for Gerry, let's bury him, not praise him.

In Paris there was a didgeridoo player down in the metro. Was entrancing two little kids by making sounds like a bouncing ball and miming a bounce with the finger of his free hand. He wore a hipster hat. Bwaaoing, baaoingg, bwoing.

The scene made me depressed for some reason.

34th Street on New Years Eve was run through with idiots. Young boys with gelled hair and pleated pants and their miniskirted dates in high heels and tights, 2007 tiaras. Everyone seemed to be on their way in or out of a deli.

On the precipice of debt.

There was a knocked-over stack of sodden newspapers in the middle of the tarmac between rows of empty, waiting luggage trailers.

I was reading an Ian McEwan story in the New Yorker about a clumsy and anxious couple on their wedding night when a couple just like them drifted into the restaurant where I was having lunch, a corner bistrot, French in every regard. They were mute and bewildered, evidently Anglo-Saxon. They stared blankly when the patronne offered them placemats at the bar. Eventually he pulled his knit hat back on his head and they retreated out the door. It seemed to me as though they had strayed off the page and, momentarily, into reality beside me.

We took turns walking out on the balcony to have a smoke or think about jumping.

Far below there were Christmas lights in windows and on buildings and in trees. The various bridges in the distance. The Chrysler Building.

That floaty, wobbly feeling when you look down from a great height, like your fear is cruelly lifting you out of your shoes.

I knocked over an entire tray of good artisan rustic bread and some kind of big, soft cheese.

I was drinking rum and Cokes, like I was back on the beach in 1985 with Matt and Nat and Rich and John. Pouring the Coke out of the big, squishy two-liter bottle and watching the bubbles sizzle on the ice. A nostalgia drink. The effervescent essence of my adolescence.

The night ended dully with The Matrix on TV, a movie everyone likes except now some people said they didn't, actually.

It's a good concept, is what I said.