The outside walls and columns of 30th Street Station extended high into an abnormally hot and blue October sky. I wondered what terrific and earnest work must have been involved in their erection. Italian stonecutters and laborers of every breed. If you removed a column, would the stone canopy above us fall? It didn't seem so. What if you removed them all? Even then. Everything seemed fixed in place by some immutable, ethereal force. It was stronger than a building: it was an idea. Below it cabs of various colors, many two-tone, drove in and out to pick up fares.

I decided to watch the last quarter of the Eagles game at our new bar, Dive 75. Beside me sat a couple, seemed like regulars. Someone else joined them and asked the obligatory questions, what've you done this weekend.

"I had the twelve-hour flu," the guy said. "You've heard of the twenty-four-hour flu. I had the twelve-hour flu."

He seemed all right to me. Prolly fully recovered. Did seem a tiny bit jaundiced though. Had that salty-eye look we've all been cultivating, what with the bars we frequent and the happenstance foods.

The Eagles stood up on defense, unlike last week. Last week is a story for tomorrow.

I left my tip and left a bit furtively, out to the crisp, fall air around the street.

I'm coming down with affluenza.

The Day the World Turned Upside Down - 2

He shuffled to the window and stood up to it, terrified by what might have darkened the morning. He looked up at what he thought would be the sky and saw a ceiling of grass, ornamented with bands of cement and wider ones of tar. Trees and bushes hung down, their leaves and branches reaching toward the dark.

He looked down. There was an immense chasm, a vast, gray maw; it made a sound everywhere like a great inhalation.

It's Just a Fucking Thing That Happened

Funny thing about mutation, natural selection and evolution: Even the most rational, science minded among us want to believe it's all pointing somewhere, that there's some kind of irreproachable merit to the process, some kind of reason if not design. Funny thing is, there isn't. A mutation - a generally unhappy thing - occurs by accident. And because accidents are governed by chance, very occasionally it's not unhappy. Others fail to reproduce and we have evolution. But there's it's neither here nor there. It's just a fucking thing that happened.

One day shortly after I moved in in a pile of dark debris materialized on our roof deck. Old iron ladder fragments, trapezoids of bent, heavy grating. Elements of the roof itself, it seemed, fixtures of the building itself, regurgitated before us. In the middle of it all, a twisted and weatherworn deck chair, pressed into two dimensions.

The Day the World Turned Upside Down - 1

There was some kind of parade going on outside.

"What is it?" she said.

A muffled cacophony of whistles, drums and tubas.

"I don't know. Italian Day?"

"There's no such thing as Italian Day."

"I was only joking."

From their perspective on the bed they saw the Star-Spangled Banner floating by. A little jumpily so you could tell someone was holding it up.

"There goes the American flag anyway," she said.

A moment passed.

"Should we check it out?" he said.

"I can't move," she said. "I'm full to bursting with banana pancake."

Another moment. Then –

"Do you think –" he said, but then and there they were plunged toward the ceiling that they had for many months beheld together; they fell heavily upon it, the plaster cool and hard beneath their naked flesh, and the futon and frame bounced once on their backs, and came to a smothering rest upon them. He hit his nose and mouth, unable in his bewilderment to put his arms before his face. She fell a bit more on her shoulder, as she'd been facing him a little in their bed, her hand on his chest. They thrashed and cursed beneath their burden.

"Jesus!"

"Fuck!"

They managed to crawl out either side and face each other above the bottom of the frame. A deep murmur of dismay and terror emerged within her and rolled into a moan. The sound of someone sliding over a precipice.

"What the fuck just happened?!" she said.

He got up on his knees without an answer. She crawled around the mattress to him and was momentarily distracted from her dread by the sight of blood dripping down his chin and falling in rich drops upon the milky white ceiling, wispy with webs.

"Are you OK, baby?"

"Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah."

"Baby," she said, "we're upside down."

Waiting in Line at the Post Office

One postal worker stopped cold in the middle of the sun-bleached lobby, behind where we stood in line. He barked something that to me was incomprehensible. I could see now that he was facing a man at the end of our line. He jabbed his finger vaguely at him, then turned around. Another worker was walking up behind him. He, too, addressed the man in line. "Don't make me come over there!" The man did not appear to respond. I scrutinized him. He was a thin man of about thirty, clean shaven, with strong, angular facial features and somewhat unkempt hair. "Are you going to behave?" This time he responded with a quick, compliant nod. "You not gonna bother nobody?" Another nod. The worker turned and went on his way. Few others in line seemed to notice or care. A couple minutes later the man suddenly jutted his right arm into the air and snapped his fingers loudly, twice, accompanying this with a faint, gulping vocalism, and I realized he was a Tourette's sufferer, known to the staff of this post office.

I saw by far the strangest-dressed people I've ever seen before, three of them, sitting apart on the other side of the subway and quite unaware of each other. A woman with a jeweled black tank top over a white blouse, tuxedo-style black pants and bright white sneakers. A man with the navy sweat shorts of some school's athletic department, a pinstriped navy blue Oxford shirt, gray socks and worn, brown Oxford shoes. A man in a fine gray suit and white dress shirt, the jacket well-tailored. Except. His pants reached only to mid-calf. He wore some standard businessman's dress shoes. He wore no socks.

The chlorinated atmosphere of the swimming pool was suddenly suffused with the aroma of fresh angel's food cake. Sweet, warm and yellow as the sun. A man who resembled Ben Kingsley and was stretching by the locker room door spoke.

"That smells delicious."

From my labors in the wet I raised my head. He was addressing the lifeguard, a young light-skinned black guy, kind of husky and hunched over a cardboard box at his table. I thought I perceived a golden crumb or two upon his chin but maybe, who knows.

He laughed, and said something. And then his countenance turned neutral once again, like a light turned off, and he bent his head to continue eating cake.

The warmth and faint viscosity of late-summer lakewater.

The dry pine needles and hot, hot gravel underfoot.

A ride in the car, to town, to buy some beer and corn.

The raft, or what do you call it, the float. The cold and probably murky water underneath, forbidding, like the space below the bed, you were a kid.

The profusion of tin foil. Enfolding unappealing charred and gray leftovers off the grill.

The sunset and later, stars.

Thin plywood walls to keep separate the cabin's drowsy inhabitants from the mosquitos and the dew.

The loons with their nearly human cry.

Precipitously it became Friday and I tried to reconstruct the week.

Tuesday night I went downtown.

John and I were going to see Badly Drawn Boy at some tent or something at the South Street Seaport so we got in a cab and disembarked on those cobblestoned and narrow streets, narrowed further by the burrowing ConEd crews and scaffolds; that other city down there.

There's a mall down there you go into, a cheap one. A perfunctory place. Beyond terraced tourist traps along the boardwalk. And empty, like no one ever goes there, or maybe it was just too late, but what's the difference. The true Mall of America.

We walked through, lost. Zoltar the Seer stood frozen in his booth beside a grove of hardy atrium plants.

He looked like my older brother's ceramic Ringo Starr piggy bank from way back then.

Just then an older black man leaned over the balcony on the floor above. The tent is that way, he said.

The show was very good and their lead singer seemed a little crazy.

A strange and sparse crowd, in this peculiar, circular, circus tent, a bar and tables around its perimeter. One guy, straighter than you could believe, a suit and tie, shave and a haircut, two bits. He had a woman with him, tonguing his ear. Or was it a woman? Clutching his neck. Was it a man? She pawed his tailored-pantsed ass. A monster? Replicant? She'd lift her nyloned leg and hug his trunk a little in her knee.

Was she a building? Or a tree?

A motorcycle.

There was in fact some babbly debate about her. What she was. Some had it that she was a whore. And the debate reverberated until it seemed one person, one guy.

John wanted to kick some guy's ass.

He said something to the effect and I nodded and smiled noncommittally and sucked a piece of ice from the bottom of my whiskey.

We left before the second encore.

What's really in the Dibs ice cream bonbons container that the bag-burdened woman sitting beside me on the train was holding and then placed on the seat between us?

Probably a live scarab.

A woman across from me has a big, black leather bag and tall leather boots and she reminds me of Sean's friend Patrick, an animal rights vegetarian in a void, wearing pleather shoes and quietly forgoing the boiled and fried meats that we'd routinely jam into our drunken maws before the crépuscule. He'd have lots of plain pizza I guess, so lived no more healthily than us.

I heard the crack of the impact of heavy raindrops on the air conditioning unit outside the window early this morning and as usual I had a hard time believing it was rain. I remember thinking through my half-sleep, That can't be the rain. But then there was a flash of lightning that shone through the blinds and a mighty boom and so I knew it was.

In the morning getting up, as usual. Sara had left already and called to say the trains weren't running. When I went out the world was sunny, hot, and the air was thick, and swarms of people drifted lazily into each others' way like bees drunk on nectar. I walked two blocks east and then back again to take a cab to work.

I noticed a corner of Madison Square Garden is named after Joe Louis and I wondered how I'd never noticed it before. There was his name white on blue.

You could forget about the bus.

A barker was giving away free papers. Two cops walked by smiling. New York cops seem to like it when things are just a bit fucked up.

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.