I awoke and paused until my dreams had settled like a dew.


I'll work backwards, gingerly. Delving careful. First there was a moment, just passed. And then my drowsy evening. And with its lazy reading. I'll progress to the ride back home from work, but first honor digression.


It's funny that the Jazz Age has become a symbol of the old. Anytime anyone on TV or anywhere wants to evoke old-fashionedness, old-timeyness, and all the rest of it, well, it's flappers flappin' and big, ol' cars splashin' through the streets, honking horns; people walkin' herky-jerky, speeded-up like Keystone Cops, antlike & funny at the feet of a looming Art Deco monolith. You see that and your button's been pushed: You recognize the old. But of course it should represent the new. Is there anything newer, in fact, than that era, in which we were catapulted most vigorously and unambiguously into the future? In which life really did accelerate, and society changed down to its every recess, transforming art, religion, politics and sex? And yet we see a grainy, shaky newsreel from back then, its stentorian narrator relating some catastrophic disaster at sea plus lawn tennis results – the birth of our absurdity – and we think, Aw, how quaint, the old. Really, the old should be, say, 1840. I mean, take your pick, of course, yesterday is yesterday. But why not a time before industry, before mass media, before emancipation and before trains? Not just before the war; before the wars. Now that's fucking old. But the reason we aim squarely for the new when we think "old" is very simple. The early 20th century was the first period to be recorded by that automatic metaphor we all adore: the movies. Film changed the way we saw and thought about the world, the way we experienced time and history, and thereby started it anew. And this world was so new it must now be consigned to antiquity. The timeline's been redrawn to its right. It is the new antiquity, the new Year Zero, the new Genesis. In the beginning was the lights, camera, action.


I gave a young woman directions to Little Italy before I went down to the train. I hope I didn't get her lost. She was standing there in her glasses, and her little sister there beside her, with her glasses too, and I couldn't decide which one to look at for a moment.

I like to wonder at the motivations of the characters in my dreams.

It Will All Be Over Presently

What we have now with this Tivo, with this DVR, what you want to call it: We have these new, strange interludes in life. When we're pushing the fast-forward through the ads. It's preferable to watching the ads, of course – well, I suppose. But sometimes there you are for quite some time. Thing pointed to the screen and thumb depressing. Litanies of images flash by: A cliff. A face. A dog. A car. And all in silence. And if you have a companion, there you are both.

It will all be over presently, but still.

I awoke and raked up the scattered leaves of dreams. There was a rat-tat-tat outside the blinds and I wondered, could this be the rain? I kind of wanted it to be the rain but I could not be sure it wasn't the sporadic rattle of the air conditioner. Sometimes it did that and you had to whap it.

I arose in darkness.

I performed my ablutions thinking all the time, Performing my ablutions.

It was only when I went online that I knew the weather: heavy rain. So now I know about the sound, I thought. And I went downstairs without a hat or coat, with no umbrella. John was at the desk.

"Hi John."

He waited half a beat as usual. "Good morning, sir." His mumble took me out the door, into the vestibule. Soon I would be soaked through to the skin.

The toothpaste fell off the shelf and glanced off the tumbler with the toothbrushes and clattered down around the toilet.

To consider that for months and months, years I suppose, the pressure built up in a pipe under Lexington Avenue. As we all walked blithely by. Going to the glasses place, the nails place. Going to the train. Going to work and going home. Then boom.

Fuck You

My dad was telling me about old Uncle Austin. He was a painter and ceramicist of some talent. Tiles. Mosaics.

"He was a character," he said.

"Really?"

"Once when they were living in France and we were living in Switzerland they came to visit. It was nice they came so far away. We had tea. And cakes. It was a lovely time. He took out his wallet and I tried to stop him. They were our guests, after all. And he just said, Fuck you."

I just kept staring at the upside-down people in her glass. Bodies distended, bubbles of bloat running up, down their bodies, depending on where they stood.


In the airport waiting room they're babbling senseless things over the PA, nobody gives a fuck.


I felt a terrible malaise come over me in the plane, a visceral unhappiness with the food I'd eaten, with my position in the seat, the cold air blowing in my face. I was happy to sleep on the long, long cab ride into town. Raising, lowering the window at the midday heat. Traffic jams. Hip hop blaring from some truck. I landed in my hotel bed and had six long hours of jetlag sleep, tossing and turning from dreams.

Later I struggled up and out to see Weezie. Table on the sidewalk. Not feeling so good. Waiter told us his boyfriend came from Iowa.

"Middle, middle..." he said.

"Midwest?" I offered.

"Middle of nowhere."

I strained to drink an entire Belgian white beer with its lime hidden in the foam. I ordered a plate of crudités and picked at it glumly, contemplating with some revulsion its drizzle of thick vinaigrette and occasionally winding a strand of cabbage around the fork and placing it in the mouth for chewing.

Dave had a formidable orthodontic contraption around his face. I seem to remember wire extending out either side of his mouth, giving him a perpetual lunatic smile; a web of gauzy, elastic material holding everything from behind his head and tousling his hair; an elaborate system of metal braces, wax and fleshy plastic retainers, all lathered in spit, embedded in his mouth like some long-entrenched parasite.

Dinner in the Bronx

Welcome to Yankee Stadium. An establishment founded a hundred years or so ago by Mr. George Ruth. Legendary gastronome. Peerless bon vivant.

May I interest you in some appetizers this evening? We're featuring a firm corn tortilla, presented in artful shards and accompanied by a distinctive, lukewarm sauce. It is a cheese sauce, to be frank. But it is a subtle sauce, evocative of myriad things, not least the shifting savors of the kitchen, shall we say. I mean, we like to say. It's our chef's first foray into Mexican-American fusion cuisine and I happen to be of the opinion that mere words can't describe it.

Yes, it's a favorite.

Heading East! If you're in the mood for something simpler though no less substantial, allow me to recommend a savory pastry of Austrian origin. We take a dense dough. We roll it and form it into a whimsical knot. Then I think we boil it or something, but anyway, it's great. Hmm? Oh, cold. It's served cold. Like revenge.

Fucking Sox.

What?

It's seasoned with a generous coating of rock salt, if you think that might float yer boat.

Many aficionados favor a mustard topping. If you are so inclined, might I recommend the Gulden's? Spicy brown? Not the French's, for Christ's Jesus sake. We're in New York. Deli style, baby.

Perhaps you're in the mood for something a little lighter, for the table? In that case let me draw your attention to a perennial classic of the carte. Peanuts, in a word. That's right. Peanuts in the shell from our fine, fine nut purveyor, Bazzini Nuts of Downtown Manhattan, founded in eighteen-God-knows-what. They are dusted with a fine and silty layer of salt. You heard me right.

At this juncture in time I feel it is incumbent upon me to signal to you that these peanuts may have been processed and packaged in a facility that processes and packages peanuts. Just to say. This is the allergy era, after all. I do not want to have to stick no one with no goddamn EpiPen, motherfucker. Please. Thank you. Alright.

And for the main course! I need not tell you that the specialty of the house is the frankfurter sausage. Your choices are: Hebrew National, Empire Kosher, Glatt Kosher, Imperial Hebrew, Glatt National, National Imperial, Empire Glatt, Glatt Glatt, Kosher Emperor, Kosher Hebrew, Glatt Emperor, Empire Nation – wait, that's not one, sorry – Hebrew Empire, Kosher Nation, Grand Imperial Wizard and Nathan's.

Again, please – the Gulden's.

Sauer-? Sorry, no. Sorry, I must insist. No. We don't – shh! – we don't have. No. In fact – I'm sorry – we don't ever, we don't breathe that word here. Ever. Rules of the house.

We do seek to honor the immigrants who have made this country great. First off, the Italians. Let me tell you, they do a thing with a flat piece of dough and a little bit of red sauce and some cheese. It's of an unmatched succulence. We entertained bids from scores of thousands of contractors and decided – well, "decided" might not quite be the word – it was prevailed upon us to select the fine family of Famiglia family restaurants to present to our diners a monumental accomplishment of tri-state area ethnic culture: the slice. I beg your pardon? No, that's not a typo. Thirteen dollars and seventy-five cents.

Let's not forget the Chinese and their foods that are saturated in glory. You know right away when you order something from our Wok 'n' Roll menu that you're going to get something old and something new. Something clean and something dirty. I think they call it "yang" and "yin." It's like, opposites attract. Salt and sugar. Animal and vegetable. Mineral, artificial. And when I say they, I mean them. You know. The Chinese. The lo mein in that steam tray is the product of a civilization that's thousands of years old. Gives me the chills, frankly.

Shall we discuss some beer pairings? Wonderful! The discriminating connoisseur will be delighted to see that we have a selection of beers from – are you ready for this? – around the world! You heard me correctly. Let's see we, they, our selection includes choices from... uh... England. That's one. Germany, Holland... Belgium, I think. And... Mexico. That's correct. And there's one from one of those fucking ex-commie countries too, like maybe Poland or France. And Australia too, and I think China or Japan. One or the other. That's around the world, right?

If you're in a patriotic mood we are offering a slop bucket brimming with Miller Lite and lidded in tin foil.

I have absolutely no fucking idea.

May I outline the desserts? The first one's more of a palate cleanser – enjoy it between courses! Soft, frozen, lemonade. Never did Bacchus feast on finer ambrosia. It's like someone took a delightfully refreshing summer drink and said, "It should be thicker." Genius works in mysterious ways.

Speaking of genius, let me draw your attention to what is perhaps the pièce de résistance of our entire menu. It is – oh boy, what to say, what to say. It represents a stupendous technological achievement and you can see that I'm quite breathless just trying to describe it.

Ladies and gentlemen, let Adria play with his foam – we have the future of ice cream. That's correct. Small, hyperfrozen pellets, at first glance fit for guinea pigs or hamsters. But no. No, no, no, no, no! They're for people. Yes. The ice cream of the future for the people of the present – I ask you, is there no bass-drum-beating tail to the parade of wonders that grace our age? Consider yourselves the luckiest diners in the world.

And plus you get it in a little helmet.

We stop at nothing. Nothing!

And, oh yeah – enjoy the game.

I Hate the All-Star Game

I hate the All-Star Game and all its dreary preambles. This midyear puncture in the illusion that a team is a team, a rivalry might be for real, or that the outcome of a game might be like dying. Who are these smug, slack players in their unfamiliar stripes? Who says we need a respite from the exquisite escapism of the sport itself? Any such event only serves to undermine our suspension of disbelief, to defy our faith that the balls and strikes and runs and outs are all that matter. Home run derby my ass. Good for Bonds for not participating. Worse than everything is the air of lazy bonhomie. It's like we had a baseball season and then a corporate team-building exercise broke out. Stop patting each other's asses, Yankee and Red Sock. We all know it's all a game, but do we need to have that fact be dunked in candy and swung hypnotically before our eyes?

I swam lazily today, like Mao swam in the Yangtze, my corpulence made discreet and graceful by the water's buoyant prism. Head stuck straight up like some proud and unselfconscious bird. The timid breast stroke, in all its glory.

Through the night I had tossed and turned the sheet into a ball which now lay by my side. In between my dreams I thought, My deconstructed bed. Here I am in my deconstructed bed.

Car after car would appear, one at a time in quick succession, or spread apart so you didn't know when one'd magically appear again. Once they appeared almost paired, attached – when Fisichella looked like he was on top of Coulthard's car and Coulthard was the one found to be unfairly blocking. It was like having a car heaved towards your lap.

I had hot sensations about my face. The excitement and the beer, surely.

We saw Kimi poke his nose out of Rascasse and stop abruptly, weirdly, short of the wall. A funny echo of Schumacher's move the year before, when you think about it. Schumacher, that unrepentant motherfucker, pretended to lose control and parked it, expertly, a few centimeters from the wall in exactly the same spot, drawing out the yellow flags and ruining Fernando Alonso's last gasp at pole. "Who me, what?" he protested disingenuously, grotesquely. It was pure, sinister brio, an example of beautiful failure in the service of success. Fail, but fail by just the right degree and you succeed ten times. Counterintuitive genius. But in fact he paid a price – he was penalized to the back of the grid for his ruse yet, irony upon irony, struggled valiantly to fifth place. A performance somehow more commendable because he'd been given his medicine for being so arrogant, and had choked on it, yet performed brilliantly with its taste still in his mouth. And so here's Schumi's replacement, Kimi Raikkonen, to try to fill those big, lead shoes. Everyone wondered: Now that Kimi's got Schumacher's car, will he finally prove himself to be just as good? Or better? And instead he struggled – he won his first race but then he disappointed, frequently qualifying and starting a bit worse than you'd expect. And today, in a moment of sublime symmetry, he tagged the Ferrari's brittle suspension against a wall and lost it slowly, and for good, in exactly the spot where Schumacher exercised his deliberate, devious mischief. Kimi's car emerged sidewise, pointed perpendicular to the wall. He somehow managed to lurch it into reverse and create a path for his teammate, Felipe Massa, to pass a few moments later. That hard-won and unremarkable accomplishment was practically his only one that weekend – also, from sixteenth and he clawed his way back to eighth for a single point, yet another faint echo of his predecessor.

At the end of qualifying I looked and Sara and noticed she had a few dark specks on her cheek and forehead.

"You have something on your face," she said.

"You do too," I said.

It was burning oil from the backs of race cars.

A moth got in the subway car somehow and its incongruous presence caused some alarm in the large, black woman seated to my left. Batting at the air around the flitting thing. Then a strange, strange thing happened. A Latino junkie across the way fell into his nod at the very moment the moth flew at him, slowly sliding off his seat, but it awoke him on its way by like it was a pinch of fairy dust. He sat upright, squinting straight ahead. The man beside him said, "Where you goin'?" and the junkie mumbled Bronx.

"This don't go to the Bronx," the man said. We were approaching 125th now and the man got up. "It go to... two-hundred seventh."

"Two-hundred seventh," echoed the other black woman to the other side of me.

The junkie grunted and made a small, dismissive gesture of the hand. Like, don't worry 'bout me.

"If you wanna go to the Bronx, you gotta get out here," the man insisted, standing at the door now. "Take the one."

No response.

"Be careful, man. You in Harlem."

Then another car erupted into its agonized whine. It was David Coulthard's car. We heard it wind its way around the track, echoey. As we sat at the last corner I kept expecting it to emerge when in fact it had a longer ways to go. Then suddenly it came 'round Rascasse and raced before us with an urgency. All navy blue and red and yellow. Zigzagging a little as it turned away from us, backfiring, backfiring into the distance.


Ahead of me in line at the Duane Reade, a teacher buying boxes upon boxes of chalk and a pack of Pall Malls; I thought school was out.


The thing about the Grateful Dead is either you really, really love 'em or you really, really hate 'em. You can't say the same of, let's say, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. Can you? Or Dire Straits. The Cars? OK, Fleetwood Mac. Forgive me if I've named a band you really, really love. That'll happen. Or you really, really hate. But I think you know what I mean – whether you really, really love the Dead or really, really hate 'em. You know who you are. No other band has such a dynamic sweep in the public's perceptions. No band is so polarizing. And that's neither a good thing nor a bad thing, of course, but permit me to assert that it's interesting.

The truth is the Dead have a fundamental weakness and I know what it is. When you ask someone who hates the Dead what they hate they might say, "I hate the jamming."

Fair enough. "Do you hate jazz?"

"No, I love jazz."

"Well, jazz is jamming."

"You're right. It's not the jamming, it's the... it's the... it's the... aimless jamming. It's the noodling. I fucking hate it."

Now we're getting somewhere. The Dead's jams are aimless and they do noodle. And here's why.

Jerry Garcia was strongly, philosophically, disinclined to assert a theme. This was so deeply ingrained, evidently, in his personal philosophy and his musical philosophy that it is practically inescapable in either, and his considerable charisma in both realms ensured that others would adapt their strategies to his (forget everything you ever heard him say about the Dead being a "leaderless" band or how a drummer might lead them – that's yet more evidence of his aversion to assertion. But in that way, he asserted.). So whereas a great jazz improviser – Herbie Hancock let's say, or John Coltrane, or a thousand others – might stumble upon a theme and grab it by the balls, play it for all it was worth, play it hungrily, like it was the last musical notion they'd ever get again; when Jerry or anyone else in the Dead for that matter would cross paths with a theme they would leave it alone. They would curiously, agonizingly almost, yield to the imaginary space it occupied; they might indicate it; perhaps allude to it; but they would just about never seize it. The Grateful Dead's music, their improvisation that is (it being the aspect of their music that is most recognizably theirs) is a chronicle of frustrations, of incompletion, of allusion. Of metaphor. My fondest moments of the Dead's music are characterized by an ineffable, bittersweet melancholy: they are brief, they die upon the threshold of the ear; they describe a huge longing, a space far greater in every dimension than we have ever perceived, but they don't and can't quite take us there, because to take us there would be the end of everything. They flirt and tease, agonizingly; they tickle the itch. Where other improvisers hold a lamp and the best among them are a lighthouse, Jerry Garcia is a firefly, unpredictably aflame and never alighting anywhere.

This I love, love, love, love, love and others hate.

As we walked along the streets and past the barricades to our section of the track the din of engines ebbed into the whine of a solitary car, more poignant still as you could discern its progress around the slower turns and down the straightaways, its sound bouncing off of buildings and the rock beneath the Palace. And by the time we reached our seats the track was silent; that last car had since gone in from practice and we were left with mystery, like do the cars exist?

It seemed like not bad an idea to strip naked and run crazy down the street, banging the windows of passing cars, or to get a grilled chicken sandwich from the dark deli.

"I'm obsessed with them," said Britt.

"OK," I said.

The prices on the daily sandwich special signs taped to the deli case were drawn to look like the numbers on a calculator. Someone had painstakingly. Those blocky numbers, with the segments. At the bottom of these sloppy signs.

Britt had said it was unclear how much they'd charge you for the sandwich.

"They charge me four dollars and thirty-six cents," she said. "But they charge Tom three dollars and sixty-five cents."

They charged me four eighty-eight.

It was a hot day, hot fucking hot. And the AC in our office went out awhile and there was some issue with the door alarm so that it went "WEEEEEEEEEEEEE" and you just had to, you had to cover your ears. All day John pacing in the cramped confines of his cubicle proclaiming the energy in the office to be strange.

Out West there were developments afoot, an entire group being welcomed below our umbrella of products and services or is it just products or is it just services. Or a single product or a service. An entire, new group being subsumed that frankly seemed vaster than our own. That seemed a superset of the set it entered. "Welcome, welcome!" Higher-ups writing those five-paragraph e-mails. Thinkin' they're rallying the troops. One of them cocksuckers wrote something like, "Let's continue to have fun with what we do," with the bold and the italics, and it was about as convincing as a cuckolded husband saying please continue to love me with your body, baby.

We went up to see Shakespeare last night, at Boscobel, across the river from West Point. We could sit , plastic glasses of fine wine in our hands, and contemplate from our picnic chairs the lair of the brutally disciplined cadets where not a month ago the spectral Dick Cheney did deliver a commencement address. And it was not altogether irrelevant to the matter at hand, the fate of one Richard the Third.

There's a quote in this play that immediately struck me and released some poison in me from its spike. At one point later in the play the widow of the king, the king whose throne shall soon be usurped by Richard through his devious machinations, says, "So now prosperity begins to mellow, and drop into the rotten mouth of death." The metaphor is of fruit on the vine. Something ripe, something full of sugar and overripe, in fact; something past its prime. What happens? It falls, inevitably, from its weight; its fullness of pulp and syrupy nectar. It falls into the void. Where? Into putrefaction, into death. This is more than just a description of the sad and ironic cycle of life. That we all know. It's a frightening reproach to cozy complacency. Literally in the play, prosperity is the bounteous opportunity afforded all by Edward's death. Someone shall be King, and someone shall be his wife, and so on and so on. And that prosperity is "mellowed," in other words ripened, aged – here the term takes back its perhaps original negative connotations, those that point towards decay rather than the graceful burnishing of a fine old jewel, say, or the complex improvement of a wine or spirit. No, here "mellow" means "weaken." The way a fruit does before it loses hold of life and succumbs to gravity, then decay, then death. The way a serendipitous event is twisted and corrupted by egotism, selfishness, envy and spite. And we may apply a more contemporary negative connotation of the word "mellow" too – our tendency to soften, to betray our youthful passions, to rationalize, to accommodate. That, too, points to death. And it is when we are prosperous, glad of ourselves, sedate and sated, that we succumb most easily to this easy thinking. We mellow and we drop – before our time – into the rotten mouth of death. To fall into the mouth of death, after all, is not exactly to die. But once we do we are promised to it, and life is finished. It is a process she describes – prosperity begins to mellow, it hasn't already mellowed. So there still is hope, as of course there is hope for the characters in this play that in fact ends well. It's Shakespeare's version of Dylan Thomas raving, "Don't go gentle into that good night." It's Shakespeare saying, "Rage against the dying of the light."

The one guy, they call him by his last name. They all do. He had a strange and absent look about him. Pale hair above a numb and ghostly face. He seemed to be struggling a bit to pay attention and I almost felt sorry for him somehow, but of course this was really because he'd been all day drinking – Evan said he got promoted at his job and took Friday and Monday off to bookend a nice, lost weekend – but that didn't occur to me right away, so much as his awful and bleak persona.

We sat down in the theater. It was a pan-cultural drumming show, lots of leaping. Music made with the unlikeliest of tools.

Last Name Guy belched loudly and not for the first time. The woman in the seat in front of him turned around and said, "Would you stop it with the burping?" Almost immediately, as though he'd expected her to say this, he replied with "My bad." The effect of this was somewhat dismissive and perhaps mocking but for the moment it was accepted and everyone let their eyes drift to the stage.

I tried to relax and pay attention to the performers. They were wearing a confusion of scant, outlandish outfits, suggesting mythic Middle Eastern harems and the extras in "Mad Max." They were really quite good and the music, even, was not in the least offensive.

A peal of chatter erupted to the right of me. Evan and Last Name Guy, and maybe Lauren too. I don't know what they were fucking talking about. Then Last Name Guy burped good and loud this time and the woman turned around and, quite a bit more spitefully, said, "Will you STOP with the TALKING and the FUCKING BURPING?" and immediately there was a confused commotion farther down the aisle. Others in the woman's row had turned around and evidently someone else had spoken, perhaps gestured, and Lauren was saying, "They have to leave!" and Evan was up on his feet and – swinging! – connection on his punches, holding the guy in front of him with his left hand and hitting him furiously with his right fist, again and again and again and again. I perceived an almost soundless gasp rise collectively from the crowd about us, thinning out the atmosphere as in a storm.

I noticed that the players were still playing upon their stage. Pictures of professionalism. Every other neck was turned our way, though. I felt mildly hypnotized by the commotion; even as Evan was swinging and Last Name Guy was trying to dart into the fray I felt quite safe. Sara had to lean over to remind me to get out of there and I said oh yeah, and we slinked away to empty seats in the back row. It took a strangely long time for the staff to descend upon the scene, to understand it and order the transgressors out. This seemed to be done silently, by the way, with emphatic pointing, perhaps in deference to the performance still underway. But the clipped shouts, pushing, punching – this seemed to go on for a surprisingly long time, let's say a minute.

And finally it did end and Evan, Lauren and Last Name Guy walked past us, out, and we watched the rest of the show, happy for its pantomimes of violence, its slapstick drama.