I shifted through my morning rituals as though in a haze, my mind pleasantly blank and idiotic.

Next to nothing occurred at work. An interteam meeting of some animated discussion punctuated by drowsy pauses.

We played foosball with the giggly guy from downstairs who doesn't play so well. Swings at the ball lightly and giggles at his maladroitness.

We had dinner with Jan from San Fran. Later we sat on the roof deck and observed a plume of smoke erupt from the side of the San Remo, the black cloud spreading upon the dark blue sky.

The Sword of Damocles

We sat out among cicadas and mosquitoes. Feet up, drinking, smoking. From time to time beyond the fence a train would rattle by and howl.

Just past the fence there was a tree with a cracked branch dangling over the swing set by its ropey, splintered pulp; the sword of Damocles.

Cicadas sound faster than crickets.

In Verdi Square there was a beggar speaking of himself in the third person and requesting not one dollar but two.

"All he wants is two dollars! Two dollars! Two dollars is all he wants!"

Coming Back from Long Island

The rest of the Slurpee melted into a frothy pink soup and I wedged the cup between the seat and the door. We got caught in a throng of rubberneckers, lusting for a glimpse of carnage perhaps, but when we passed the accident on the other side it appeared unspectacular. Suddenly the cars spread apart to reveal Manhattan: an array of gray glyphs on a page of sky.

Why Is the Dalai Lama Lying?

The Dalai Lama was at Radio City today. At the corner of 51st and 6th Avenue I was greeted by a monk's outstretched hand bearing some anti-Dalai Lama tract. A businesswoman in a skirtsuit took one and opened it up while we waited for the light. I peered over her shoulder to glimpse this heading in the middle of a page: Why is the Dalai Lama lying? Rumana and Devika paid someone $100 apiece for tickets, and I think that was less than face value. It's like Aerosmith was in town.

The subject of Italians came up the other day. Jim had read some book some guy gave him that said Italians have a negative birthrate and their culture and race is in danger of extinction. Their precious open and democratic society, corroded though it may be by corruption and hypocrisy.

Also their government colludes with their mothers to infantilize them well into their 20s and 30s. Who will beat back the black wave of immigration? seemed to be the question posed.

Today I saw Italians in the elevator of the Excelsior Plaza King's Queen Hotel, where I have my gym and go to swim. All I can say is this: They have stupendous eyewear. A young woman with wore blue frames, wide on the sides, with some sort of gold logo affixed. A young man with dark frames, split along the sides, adorned with a swirly, baroque emblem.

My nights lately have been muddled at the start by anxiety that I'm not falling asleep and at the end by guilt that I'm sleeping too long. These preoccupations manifest themselves in dreams.

Two young girls, twenty or so, walking to the elevator with me at the Royal Crown Pallazzo Hotel after my swim. Dressed to kill. Tight brown dress on one of 'em, she has the body of a Barbie Doll. They're talking about their plans for the evening.

"I'm going to get soooo drunk. Omigod."

"Me too. I'm gonna really get drunk. Jesus."

"We don't have anything to do tomorrow except turn in our time sheets!"

They behold each other joyfully and just then the elevator we're waiting for opens and out spill the people. One man walks by, late-thirties-looking guy. He notices the girls on his way past.

"Hey! There they are!" he exclaims, still walking.

"Hey!" they say. "See you tomorrow. Be good!"

"We will!" one says.

"We will!" says the other.

We walk in the elevator and just as the doors begin to close the brown dress girl says, "Not."



Illustration by Louise Asherson

There's a phone by the pool at my gym, at the Hyatt King's Jewel Hotel on 49th and Broadway, some kind of special phone without a dial that's in a gunmetal box on the wall by the lifeguard. It's suggestive of the communications apparatus in a submarine in World War II - boxy, unfamiliar, fraught with urgent connotations. Why there's a phone I don't know, and why it ever rings I'll never know, but it rings sometimes, and when it rings it makes an eerie sound. Like a kettle all of a sudden on the boil. And it echoes off the steamed-up skylight, and off the walls and water. The lifeguard answers it: a thin Hispanic teenager with long hair, a bandanna and a goatee. When I get out and walk past to the locker room I wonder whether I should say goodnight, and sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. Every time I do he says the same thing: "All right." With a slight accent on the "all." A pronunciation that seeks to reassure, or perhaps under other circumstances to contain, to arrest. "All right."

There's a new light in the ceiling over the foosball table and now everything is new fluorescent. Monday morning on my way to work there was a crosswalk light hanging sideways on its post like some beast with its head half-severed. It still worked and told you when to walk and when to stop.

I was back out in the world of trees and guard rails last weekend. To Cat and Rich's house on Saturday, on Long Island just past Queens. I forget the name of the town even though it was on the front of someone's shirt the whole afternoon. East something? It was the sort of place that got put on a T-shirt for people to laugh about or maybe not. It was a hometown.

It's a house with a car that crowds the driveway right beside it, and a porch and lawn in back, and fences.

There was a crashing thunderstorm in the late afternoon and everyone huddled around the table on the tented porch, around the chips and congealing meat. I leaned back on the rail to get drops on my face and shoulders. Some lightning must have come beside us; we didn't see it but there was a terrible bang and everyone was OK.

Planes flew low above us toward one or the other airport. Two engines, four engines. I tried to make out their designs. We drank the rest of the beer and Cat broke out some wine. We talked about baseball and Tom Waits and the planes seemed to get nearer and nearer as the night went on. WHOOOEEESH they went with blinking, blurring lights. We played games with the kids such as why are you hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself. And the planes got closer and louder and closer.

I had a dream the other day in which I thought to myself, "This is very dreamlike."

My small talk with Emilio deteriorated to the point where he was mumbling and staring straight ahead. He was carrying three big, flat boxes of various sizes, piggybacked with packing tape and with a packing tape handle so he could carry them like a briefcase. Beyond the picture window, tourists gathered 'round the mini Statue of Liberty all done up in St. Louis Cardinals red.

Emilio has one of the best shots in foosball; a violent, wrist-snapping event that usually sends the ball down the gullet with a nasty bang. When it doesn't, the ball ricochets crazily about the table and Emilio says, "Good block, good block!" with a jovial sigh.

We went to the Summerstage show tonight. In the long lulls between acts they played music on the PA, much of it from live recordings. The special guest Rufus Wainwright was introduced at a certain point, provoking furrowed expressions throughout the throng that had stretched out upon the AstroTurf before the slowly setting sun. A lot of crowd noises of another crowd; a phantom, unseen, rival crowd taunting us from the dark beyond which is inhabited by all such artifacts, be they records, films or photographs; from the mysterious world of mirror, from anti-place and anti-time.

I was thinking of a statement, a sentence, you said it without a comma it sounded very different. What was it? I thought I could use it to investigate the nature of language. Gave me the idea to talk that way more.

Foosball is our surrogate purpose, the counterproduct of our workdays. Wouldn't it be interesting if, during the course of our employ, we happened to become tournament-level foosball players, reducing this tavern game to a dreary science with our expert moves and ripostes, scoring only by chance again, as though we were gripping the handles for the first time and smacking the ball willy-nilly. You come full circle in life.

It'd be a way to go.

The other night I tossed and turned with ideas for a dubious business swimming in my mind. I pawed around for my bedside pocket notebook and wrote in it in the dark, not knowing whether I was overwriting some previous thought, some great inspiration perhaps, and pausing to think and then not remembering what letter I was at in the word I was in.

We'd seen "Get Smart" at our local megaplex, the AMC Theater near Lincoln Center, which has a casino-like decor and quality - big fake plants, a perilous escalator, textured walls and tesselated carpets. The faint, not readily explainable stench of chlorine. The theater was warm - don't people see these movies in the summer just to be refrigerated for awhile? - and completely packed. I was thirsty and foul-tempered at first. I wondered if it would be OK to get up and get something to drink. I decided fuck it. People get up from movies, don't they? I made my way gingerly down the row but failed to avoid a woman's toes - I didn't step down on them but brushed them with my heel.

"Toes!" she said.

When I returned - with my Diet Coke, like some sad, fat fuck - I tried again my best to wind my way between the chair backs and the knees.

"Again with the toes!" the woman said.

I peered at her sinisterly - but uselessly, in the faint and inconsistent glow - as I sat back down. I muttered "damn you" and I don't know if she heard. But I felt much better and had a pretty good time after all.

The Steely Dan show at the Beacon Theater last Saturday night proceeded pleasantly, like a fever dream. I was drunk and happy. I barked out some lyrics, usually the right ones. There was a sense of bonhomie in our quadrant of the orchestra.

We left and I always love leaving the Beacon; the throng slows your procession so you're forced to admire the halls, the walls and ceilings. And you never really know where you're getting out, which rain-slicked avenue or street. After we emerged, we darted into the street to circumnavigate the crowded sidewalk. We walked around a black SUV and I thought nothing of it till we reached the other side and I saw the crowd was even tighter; there was a bodyguard facing them down. I stood behind him, innocently enough, and suddenly I was face to face with Walter Becker. I reached out my hand and said, "Hey Walter!" He shook it, smiling, and then some unseen handler collapsed him into the backseat.

As we leaned over the foosball table, lost in our exertions, Dave Song came by and told us hollowly that he'd hit a woman on his bicycle the day before, thought he was going to die. Thought he was gonna go end over end. She was on rollerblades and he thought she saw him; she turned to cross his path and he hit her full speed. She was OK, more or less, and so is he. A couple days later he was called to the reception desk over the intercom and then I saw him escorting a purposeful-looking young black man with a backpack to his desk. He was an ergonomics specialist there to install Dave's special chair. Between bursts of his power drill he spoke into his cell phone in a Jamaican accent.

I love the long, long track, passing by odd artifacts of French countryside: methodical rows of high-branched trees, lush green knolls and ditches, little stone and tile structures to which there seems to be no access.

I went to Le Mans in 1975 and 1977. The memories blur but I remember the beautiful baby blue and orange Gulf Mirage that Derek Bell and Jacky Ickx drove to victory. I remember it was number 11 because I was fixated on the numbers too; the colors and the words and numbers. Blue, orange, Gulf, 11.

Dawn broke with cold gray skies and rain. We went over to the pits and I remember peering over and seeing the Gulf car from above. There were also blue Ligiers in the race, done up in the design of Gitanes cigarettes, with the silhouetted woman on the hood.

I remember telling my dad and brother that I was hungry enough to eat a horse but I don't know what we ate. At night the cars' headlights got mixed up with the lights from the ferris wheel and the fair.

In 1977 it was all about Porsche 936s with white, black and red Martini colors. Jacky Ickx won again. I remember sitting in the sun on the lawn to the right of the track after the first corner, waiting for hours, it seemed, for the race to start. In my memory the winning car crept to the finish line, stricken, moving a few miles an hour and held together with wires and tape.