That Kind of Crazy Afternoon 

The summer has been really lousy. It's rained a thousand days in a row. Some people got really excited about the weather this summer, because it never really got too hot. That killed me. People got excited because they never had to use their air conditioners, but they couldn't go outside, either, because it rained like a monsoon every single day, I swear to God it did, so no one really got to enjoy their summer, but at least they didn't have to use their air conditioner.

One thing about me is, I sweat a lot. Summer comes and I start sweating and then I don't stop till October. And what's funny is, it doesn't matter whether it's eighty-five degrees or ninety-five degrees, I sweat just the same. I wear an extra t-shirt to mop up all the sweat, and then I use a handkerchief to mop it out of my eyes, and then I have to change shirts a few times a day, too. Like that tennis player who no one can remember his name, even though he was really good. He was going to be a tennis star except he sweat so much he'd get dehydrated. It got so he started covering his body in talcum powder, to stop the sweating, but it wasn't enough, he'd still get dehydrated and cramp up, and eventually he had to retire, even though he was good enough to beat just about anybody. Sometimes I wonder if I have a medical condition like that. I've been using my air conditioner all summer, just to stop my sweating, and I'll probably use it till October.

But this week wasn't like that. After a million days of rain in a row, this week the sun came out and there was this cool breeze and it was really nice, for a change. Everyone and their uncle came out of their apartment then, you can bet they did, to go outside in the beautiful weather. Everyone called up their boyfriend and their girlfriend to go for a walk, and even the people who didn't have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, they called up someone nice too, because just about everyone outside was holding hands with someone. That's what kind of nice day it was—the kind of day you want to be holding hands with someone, even if that someone isn't really your boyfriend or girlfriend, just so you can pretend for a little while, to make the day even nicer.

That's the kind of day it was yesterday, and I went up to Central Park so I could enjoy it. Maybe if you haven't lived in New York, then I should explain how there's just so much of it, block after block of streets and sidewalks, and more streets and more sidewalks. Boy, is it big. Sometimes it can be a little disorienting, even if you've lived here a long time, because everything is on this grid of streets and sidewalks for what feels like a hundred miles in every direction. Every corner there's the exact same stuff—a deli, and a little diner, and maybe a restaurant. I mean, some of them are nice and some of them are lousy, but after a few blocks, they all look the same. Then there are high buildings everywhere, so you can't always see landmarks, unless you recognize that particular deli or that particular diner, which sometimes you do, but just as often, you don't. That's why it's so important for people to get out of the city. Sometimes it just repeats itself too much and it's exhausting.

I think that's why people go to Central Park. It is literally a breath of fresh air. People always say "It was a breath of fresh air," and I puke when I hear it, but in this case, it's literally true. It is a big breath of fresh air. And it's so goddamn big. This park is bigger than some cities. That's not even an exaggeration. Central Park is bigger than the whole city of Boston. I'll admit, it's pretty nice to be able to get out of the goddamn stinking subway crammed full of all those people and then be in a whole city-sized park full of fresh air.

Except, today I got out of the subway and I couldn't move, there were so many goddamn people. I just wanted to go down to the lake and watch the rowboats and the ducks, but I couldn't really even do it, because there were so many people. It killed me, because here was all of this nature and supposed peace and quiet, but instead everyone crowded around this one phony bastard doing magic tricks and telling jokes into a PA system. Some of the tricks were pretty good, and he was athletic, too. I mean, at one point, he completely jumped right over this little girl, and she didn't even know he was going to do it. That was pretty impressive. But this just isn't the venue for that sort of thing, that's all.

I tried to climb through to the rowboats but I couldn't on account of all the people and the way they parked their baby strollers side by side across the entire sidewalk. Anyway, by then, I didn't really want to see the rowboats anymore. I just wanted some peace and quiet and to enjoy the goddamn day. And would you believe it, as soon as I got out of earshot of that magician, didn't I find another crowd of people around another guy with another PA system? Maybe that's what people like to see on a beautiful summer day—some phony bastard talking into a microphone, instead of lakes and trees and instead of relaxing. I guess they think it makes them urbane.

I was in one of those moods where I didn't want to be around people, so I made my way toward the zoo. I thought it would be nice to see the gorillas because at least the gorillas seem to enjoy some peace and quiet. I heard a story once about how a mountain gorilla in a zoo found an abandoned kitten and adopted it, and when the zookeepers tried to take the kitten from the gorilla, she protected it and wouldn't let them get anywhere near it. She just cradled it like a little football and kept walking away from the zookeepers and took care of it like it was her own baby. And then the zookeepers, who are supposed to love animals, they took the kitten away from the gorilla, and she bawled her big black eyes out, and they gave that kitten to a goddamn pound. Hypocrites.

There was never a point where I wasn't surrounded by crowds, and where I couldn't hear some moron on a PA system. It was kind of funny in a way. The trouble was, I couldn't concentrate too hot with all these people around, and then a funny thing happened: I was having trouble breathing. I really was. I thought I might puke, so I went looking for a bathroom, but there was a line full of people and baby strollers, and I decided to just sit down. I really wanted some water, but the water from the fountain was so warm and bad and the goddamn zoo wanted four bucks for a bottle. So I sat down at a table in the cafe, and I was near the gorillas, but I never did see any, not a single goddamn one.

Life is a Fellini Film 

And vice versa.

Am I Invisible? 

Then why do people keep walking into me on the street?

Panchito's: The Worst Mexican Food on the Planet 

Panchito's, the Mexican restaurant at 105 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village in New York City, doesn't seem like the sort of place that would inspire superlatives: the entire block is given over to sloppy, unassuming restaurants of all ethnicities—Indian, Ethiopian, Middle Eastern—aimed presumably at the students of nearby NYU.

But it turns out that Panchito's is exemplary in more ways than one.

Panchito's is, first of all, the largest restaurant in all of Greenwich Village, laid out on a scale so large that its cavernous dining rooms could fit a dozen or more Village-sized trattorias and bistros.

The menu immediately greets you with a second superlative: Panchito's, it turns out, is home of the "best margarita in New York." Fine print later goes on to clarify, the margarita is actually considered one of the top six best margaritas, though by whom is anyone's guess. (The menu itself is a contender for another superlative—Worst Graphic Design—though that's a contest that will be waged bitterly through all of Chinatown before the label can be definitively applied.)

You order one of these margaritas. It sets you back $10, and when it arrives at your table, it's lukewarm. A lukewarm margarita defies a law or two of physics.

A small bowl of stale unsalted corn chips eventually finds its way to the table. You shouldn't judge a book by its cover and you shouldn't judge a Mexican place by its chips. Still, there's no denying: these chips are bad. The comparison with cardboard is obvious but unavoidable. The chips are accompanied by a small plastic ramekin of vinegar and sugar that they call salsa.

You didn't actually realize it was possible to make bad salsa, till now.

The entree arrives. It is served without silverware, till someone notices and brings a miniature knife and fork, like for children or dolls. The plate of food is the saddest looking plate of Mexican food you've ever seen. The menu, which bragged about "three different kinds of beans!," didn't warn you that the beans would be overcooked into a crunchy powder, nor that they'd be lacquered in an inch of (is that Velveeta?) cheese. Two tacos remind you of the cafeteria at summer camp. One of them literally has a few slices of unseasoned, sauteed flavorless white mushrooms and a chunk of unmelted cheese. The rice (the best thing on the menu, by far, if you can find it under the cheese) has a single green pea in it—for flavor? for nourishment? an accident?

"Is everything alright?," the waitress asks, pointing at the mostly ignored pile of food. "You want more chips?"

"Yes!" But—somewhere else...

Panchito's 1 The Urban Sherpa 2009-06-22 "The worst Mexican food on the planet."

New law of thermodynamics 

An object in motion tends to stay in motion ... unless it is an MTA subway.

.

Life Raft 

I remember, as a kid, I'd sometimes lie on my bed and pretend it was a life raft in the middle of a stormy ocean. Underneath me were miles of cold water and monsters, but I'd batten down on my raft and I'd be safe, alone and insulated: the ocean that surrounded me and threatened me was also a moat that protected me from intrusion.

I realize now, holed up in my bedroom all alone and surrounded by a turbulent city, I'm still doing the same thing: gazing out my window like the porthole on a sea vessel, far from shore, far from anyone: alone and sometimes lonely, but safer for it. Drifting.

Urban Renewal 

These last couple weeks I've been in such disrepair: it's actually seemed like my brain shut down its thinking and feeling processes, to protect me from myself. (The clinical term for this is "neurosis.") So I guess I've been really pretty seriously unhappy, though I can't think, this time around, that it was actually cued by anything. (The clinical term for this is "depression.") And from this numb unhappy place, I'd occasionally retreat into half-articulated fantasies of escape—moving to Canada to take up organic farming, etc.—fantasies I haven't entirely put out of my mind. (The clinical term for this is "psychosis.")

I feel like I'm finally switching back on, powering up, slowly coming back to life.

(I've learned that I can gauge my psychic energy by how many camera-phone photos I take while walking: when I snap pictures, it's a sign that I'm taking interest in the world; and when I stop taking them, then it's a symptom I've disengaged. The last one I took was a month ago...)

Tonight I wandered through the Manhattan streets, wandered aiming to get lost—such a simple joy, to get lost and to get filled with a renewed sense of wonder, to see some of the things I've been missing, to feel the air in my lungs, to feel the light on my eyes, to feel my heartbeat and the heartbeat of the world around me—to feel renewed, to feel wonder.

The city is endless and wonderful, and though sometimes it feels as though it steals everything from us, other days it seems to give everything back, and more.

Shiva the Destroyer 

(This piece appears in issue 29 of In Between Altered States.)

This is where I am  

This is where I am: walking across the bridge, beside the trains and above the trash barges, five hundred yards from either side, away, away from everyone and their noise, till everything is just a disappearing din, most of all, myself.1

---

1. (The old pond,
A frog jumps in:
Plop!

Manners 

The bartender asked me what I wanted to drink, but I told her I didn't want anything. I was tired.

She came back a minute later with a half pint of whiskey and sat it down next to me. "On the house," she said.

I drank it. It would have been rude not to.

Sunset 

All that's left now is whatever comes next.

Joe Six Pack and the Weight of the World 

Responsibility for the fate of the Western world and the only society we've ever known has been laid squarely at the feet of "Joe Six Pack." Joe might never have wanted this. But it is his.

The rest of us won't sleep now, or even breathe much, till the day after Election Day; and when we do, it'll be with our passports under our pillows. I doubt that I or the nation can take another heartbreak.

Dirty, Clever & Self-Absorbed 

We've already been talking for a half-hour when the woman next to me at the bar blurts out: "You're not a hipster, are you?"¹

"Ugh," I groan. "I need to get Lasik..." (She's asking, I'm sure, because of my glasses.)

"I'm so sorry I called you a hipster!," she immediately apologizes. But the damage is done. No one wants to be called a hipster. Even hipsters don't want to be called hipsters, because everyone knows, hipsters are dirty, clever, and self-absorbed, and no one likes them.² If a Biblical flood were to rain down and swallow Williamsburg in its entirety like a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah, I would happily let the whole neighborhood disappear into the East River, though the resulting floodwater would be a toxic wash of scabies, syphilis, and old bong water.³

When that rain comes, I say, let it come down.

"I'm not a hipster," I growl—but it's useless, because any hipster would say the same thing.⁴ It's a painful concession for a narcissist to admit that we are not alone in our own self-aggrandized importance—that so many other people in the bar and in the neighborhood are all, each and every one of them, also the center of their own universe—even if it is just a paltry microcosm of obscure music, cheap cocktails, and organic mac & cheese.

"I feel bad for asking," she says. "Let's talk about something else." We quickly change the subject, to Anne Hathaway; to my man-purse; to ironic political bingo; to sex; to anal sex; to ukulele bands; to the pros and cons of Xanax, Ambien, and Klonopin; to rice pudding restaurants; and to my glasses.

"I'm not a hipster...," I mumble, but my conviction is gone, and self-loathing drives me to down an unpronouncable Czech beer and a side of mac & cheese. Even if I am a hipster, it doesn't change how I feel: when that rain comes, let it come down, and wash us all out to sea. Our drowning will be the first authentic thing we've done, without self-consciousness, without irony. It will be glorious.

---

1. Her friend laughs. "You can't ask someone that!"

2. Say what you want about about my own being self-absorbed or clever: my hygiene is impeccable.

3. I would send in a small rowboat full of waders and antibiotic, to rescue a few select few people.

4. From "Overheard in New York":
Old hipster walking by group of young hipsters, waiting at an apartment door: "Oh, look at you all! Didya get all dressed up to come to the city? "Oh look at me, I'm a little hipster, look at me, I'm so pretty! I'm so special and pretty! Look at me! Oh! I'm waiting to get into a hipster party!"

Young hipster #1: Look at you man, you're all by yourself.

Young hipster #2: And you're wearing a fucking cowboy hat.

Ambient Intimacy, pt. 3 

Knowing the names of all of the dogs on your block, and none of the people.

Ambient Intimacy, pt 2 

Sometimes, often, pressed up against people during rush hour on the train, I'll catch a whiff of some horrendous, impossible-to-escape body odor—and I'll have no way of guessing whether it's coming from me or from someone else.

Ambient Intimacy, pt. 1 

Sometimes, often, pressed up against people during rush hour on the train, I'll see a small scar on the arm of a stranger, and I want to ask them what happened.

(But I don't.)

Cassandras in unexpected places  

Walking down the street and lost in my thoughts, thoughts about staplers and taxi cabs, about tuna salad and untied shoes, about the brown puddles and the jackhammers, and how you never see the sunset from midtown Manhattan,

A woman,

A toothless ashy supine jabbering woman on a pile of sweatpants on the sidewalk, a forgotten woman I almost stepped on, said:

"You have a knife in your bag."

I looked at her, and I looked at her again,
because I did have a knife in my bag.

"And a roll of quarters
And too much chewing gum,
And a book you'll never read.
A bag of all the wrong things."

At least that's what I heard her say.

Stupid crazy people.

Some days I hate this town.

Another Friday Night 

Another Friday night,
sailing through the archipelago of barstools,
looking for home.

White Lies, pt. 1 

"What's that?," she asked, at the rustling of the underbrush in Tompkins Square, just beneath our park bench.

"It's nothing," I replied, "probably a squirrel," while I watched the parade of a half dozen rats clamber over one another and disappear into the night.

Little House in the Big Woods 

Perhaps it's a pitfall of big city living (or perhaps living of any sort) that our directed motivations are replaced by momentum, and our good intentions replaced by mere inertia: we get up, get out of bed, put one foot in front of the other, and the next thing we know, we're a well-fed sixty, asleep in our contentment and creaky in the knees, still wearing the same clothes and dreams and disappointments we wore when we were twenty.

So I'm taking some days away from the city, as many as it takes to recover a hope or an aspiration.

"Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egoism no longer nourished his peremptory heart."

The Good Samaritan of Smith Street 

It was all just a big misunderstanding. It was a whole set of misunderstandings, in rapid succession.

I boarded a Brooklyn-bound F train in SoHo. It was a beautiful weekend afternoon, and the subway car was full of (more than usual) happy couples and their children. So many children. So many children, in fact, that my first impulse was to change to another car.

But the bell dinged, the door closed, and that settled it: I was staying with the kids. The kids and, at the far end of the train, a banjo player.

Goodie.

A little girl waved, and then spit up.

I waved back.

Her mother beamed at me, I suppose to thank me for helping to teach her daughter that the world is full of friendly people and not misanthropes. That old tale.

Squeals erupted from my left: a small gaggle of toddlers were falling and drooling on each other, dancing to the music of the banjo player, who was making his way toward my end of the train. The banjo player was plucking away, and the kids were having a literal hoot. They were having a literal hootenanny. So I did what any childless adult would do in this situation: I turned on my iPod. This situation is exactly why God invented the iPod: to keep your children and your banjo out of my world.

One square-dancing toddler got tangled up in my headphone cable, yanking it from my ear; and as I reached down to untangle it, the train slammed on its brakes. The child flew through the air, toward one of the subway poles (and certain death, or at least pain and a lot of crying)—and through no fault of my own, I caught this child. I guess I saved its life. Its mother thanked me, and a few of the other mothers did, too.

I was just trying to untangle my headphones.

The child (who now owed its life to me) sat down beside me, but I wasn't having any of that—this tot looked a little soggy in the diaper. I stood up and—wouldn't you know it?—an old woman with a walker boarded the train, and thanked me for giving up my seat.

"No problem," I told her, since it had been an accident. A few of the mothers beamed at my generosity, at my act of kindness, and this time, some of the fathers beamed, too.

I was getting a bit of a reputation on this train.

That's when a man handed me five dollars.

"Huh?"

He pointed to the banjo player, then exited the train. I understood that this man had wanted to give $5 to the banjo player, but couldn't get through the wall of children without missing his stop—so he entrusted his $5 to me, the most reputable citizen on the F line. He wanted me to complete the transaction.

Of course I thought of keeping the $5. But the banjo player's shoes were in tatters, and he had actual duct tape on his instrument, and if I'd kept the $5, I'd have felt so guilty that I'd have spent $40 on whiskey, to salve my guilt—so, in the end, it was a losing investment. It was simpler just to give the $5 to the banjo player, and I did.

And he dropped it. It fell on the floor of the subway car, and the toddlers clambered for it, drawing everyone's attention to me, the donor, the Good Samaritan of Smith Street: everyone saw "my" $5 donation to this banjo player whose music I was trying to drown out with my iPod.

I could hardly bear all of the good will that I was engendering, so I got off the train one stop early. As I did, I ran into a man who asked, "Spare change?"

"As a matter of fact..." throwing him a couple of quarters and imagining the car full of beaming parents admiring me as the train pulled away.

Fathers' Day 

Two stories nearly side by side in the New York Daily News1, each one terrible in its own way, each one describing the unnecessary death of a child.2

The first story, "Dad crushed over death of little Kyle," tells the story of one Elliot Smith, suffering through the loss of his recently-murdered 3-year old son:

The boy's guardian, Nymeen Cheatham, 30, has admitted to beating Kyle with a hairbrush and her hands in the Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment she shared with her boyfriend, Lemar Martin, 25. Martin told cops he hit the boy repeatedly in the arm.

The article claims that Kyle's "drug addict mother was unable to take care of him," thus he wound up in the safekeeping of Cheatham, a woman who had no legal claim to the boy, and who had had her own four biological children removed from her custody, before moving to New York from Texas.

But the article brings us no closer to the true mystery of the story, the question that's between each of its lines. All it says on that subject: "It was unclear why Smith did not claim his younger son." A question that Smith is very likely asking himself tonight.

*      *      *

Seeking refuge from the awfulness, I turn the page3 and find "Bronx girl at play struck by cabbie"—this time, the story of M'Mah Bangoura, playing in an open fire hydrant. The spray of water apparently hid her from view: she was struck by a cab and killed.

The cabbie immediately called his girlfriend, to say he "thought he had hit a little girl." "He wasn't certain," the girlfriend told police. Then the cabbie drove the injured girl to the hospital, where she died.

The article said nothing of the girl's mother, but described the father, understandably, as "brokenhearted." "Every day, after school, she calls me," sobbed the dad, "and today I didn't get the call."

*      *      *

As holidays go, Father's Day is often taken to be a somewhat artificial and arbitrary one: it lacks pedigree (having been invented in the 20th century) and lacks uniformity (celebrated on different days in different countries). "In recent years, retailers have adapted to the holiday by promoting male-oriented gifts such as electronics, tools and greeting cards," says Wikipedia. And that's most of what there is to say about Father's Day.

Without fail, day after day, newspapers report on random, sudden acts of violence, and label them "tragic." They are "tragedies," the papers say—as if we, the chorus, bearing witness to the unfolding awfulness, stand something to learn from it all. I don't know what to learn from it all. But I do know that this year, Father's Day will be, to me, a little less artificial, a little less arbitrary.

---

1. New York City's paper of ill repute.

2. The adjective would seem to imply that there is such a thing as the "necessary" death of a child.

3. This being the Daily News, if I were really seeking refuge from the awfulness, I'd have put the paper down.

Sex in the City 

As if finding a loved one in this town weren't hard enough—today the Associated Press ran a story that claims, "One in four adults living in New York City has the virus that causes genital herpes."

The scariest part of this story (and there are many scary parts to this story) is imagining all of the New Yorkers who, fearing for their own sexual safety, start seeking partners in ... New Jersey? Which I'm sure is much safer...

Eww, all around.

---

De-Construction 

"Help! Help!" It's not a fine day at all. The sky is falling, and we're running to tell the king!" - Chicken Little

This morning in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a crane fell—the second in three months—crashing through and demolishing an apartment building, killing two people and injuring and displacing others.

In the grand scheme of disasters (even recent ones), this one is relatively trivial—at least, as trivial as this sort of thing can ever be: a natural consequence of modern Icharian living. What makes the collapse of this crane remarkable is the sense of deja vu, and the gradually-growing belief that this is the kind of thing that happens. When the similar incident happened in March, it seemed such an oddball fluke that it gave credence to the insurance industry phrase, "Act of God."1

People on the streets are now casting understandably-wary eyes to the sky, suddenly questioning a certain kind of safety that they've, till now, taken for granted:

"The sky is falling, the sky is falling..."

I remember hearing, a few years back, that when a plane crashes into someone's house, if that person survives, then the trauma of this experience can be so great that the phenomenon has its own name, a sub-category of post-traumatic stress disorder.2 This particular kind of trauma is nearly untreatable: once the sanctuary of one's home is invaded by soaring, flaming, crashing steel, then what comfort is left in the idea of "home"? If one must admit the possibility that the sky really is falling, then what sanctuary remains? Where can one hide from falling cranes and planes? When houses are no longer "safe as houses," then where is safe?

Where does one hide from an act of God?

---

1. If falling cranes are an act of God, then God clearly has some grudge against the Upper East Side.

2. I can find only scant evidence of this on the Internet, and it's possible I learned it from a source no more authoritative than Donnie Darko.

Oy vey 

"Well, then, where do you buy your bagels?"

- Visiting Bostonite, noticing that New York has fewer Dunkin Donuts franchises

Autoschadenfreude, pt. 2 

I saw something today that made me want to coin a new defnition of "autoschadenfreude," completely different from the original:

autoschadenfreude. Noun. The malicious satisfaction experienced by people who gather to watch and heckle, while someone attempts to parallel park their car.

Up Over the Manhattan Bridge Overpass 

I walk home from work. It's a trip that (according to Mapquest) is five and a half miles door-to-door, and it takes an hour—an hour which I'm afraid says less about my health than about the dearth of demands on my free time. But I enjoy it. It relaxes me, and gives me time to think.

My path meanders past the storefronts of Soho and onto the teeming streets of Chinatown, before arriving at the footpath for the Manhattan Bridge, which spans the East River to Brooklyn. The bridge is over a mile long: it takes maybe fifteen minutes to cross; and most days, the footpath is nearly empty.

Fifteen minutes of peace and privacy, watching the sun set over the Hudson. In the midst of the clamor of New York City, this one span is deceptively intimate.

Perhaps, then, I can be forgiven for what happened on my walk today: a man, not unlike myself, was walking in the opposite direction, and when we passed each other, right around the center of the span of the bridge, I looked him in the eye and I said, "Hello."

He scowled at me and brushed past, quickening his pace, and never looked back.

This is New York City, after all.

Buy-a-Baby 

You've always been an achiever. You put your career first, and you worked hard to get where you are. You and your spouse have a lovely Brooklyn brownstone, an Audi Quattro you never drive, and a combined income that would be, in any other city, above average.

What now?

Just because you gave your healthy breeding years to the workplace doesn't mean you can't have your very own little Alina, Emily or Abigail. You can! After all, what would be the point of making all that money, if you couldn't use it to buy a baby on the Internet?

Browse our selection today and see if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.

Unrecycling 

Like so many of my fellow Americans, I am deeply concerned about fossil fuel consumption and the resulting effects on the global climate—but not enough to do very much about it. (Said Michael Pollan in a recent article in the New York Times: "I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in An Inconvenient Truth came ... during the closing credits, when we are asked to ... change our light bulbs.")

So I'll admit that I felt a touch of self-righteousness—certainly more self-righteousness than I deserved—when I schlepped all of those bags of carefully-sorted recyclables down to the curb last night. At one level, I suppose, I should have felt ashamed at my ability to generate so much trash; but on the other hand, I was so proud that I'd taken the trouble to designate it as reusable trash. (That is, I was proud of the fact that I remembered to put it in a separate bag and carry it downstairs on Wednesday instead of Sunday. Go me.)

I was confused, then, when I came home and found one of my bags of bundled newspaper leaning against my front door. "Hmmm." I stared at it for a full minute. "What does this signify...?"

No obvious answer came.

I carried it back upstairs and dropped it in my living room.

The trash collectors of New York City are as finicky as a chef picking over the morning's produce. Trash bags will be left on the curb because they contain a single (recyclable) Coke can or water bottle, or, more often, for reasons unknown. I gazed at my bag of newspaper, trying to imagine what offense it had committed—why it had been deemed unworthy. The other bags were collected without ceremony, but this one—this one otherwise-unremarkable bag was found somehow lacking. Why? What commentary was being made on my recycling ways?

Some mysteries will never be solved.

I dropped it in an opaque Hefty bag and took it downstairs again, this time depositing in the trash. There is a regular pickup on Sunday: they'll take my non-biodegradable bag to a landfill without further incident.

I want to do what's right, I really do. If only I knew how...

Crossing Guard 

A few times during the day, the doors of P.S. 29 open up, and children gush out, yelping and laughing, loosed onto the streets of the city—and then the city is loosed onto them.1 Every day, on every corner, their guardian angels are there to protect them, and help them home: the crossing guards.

The crossing guards know the children by name. They talk to them, ask them about their day, ask about their homework, or their new boyfriends or girlfriends. The children joke with the crossing guards, laugh with them, seem to confide in them; and when the crossing guard says stop, the children stop; and when the crossing guard says go, the children go.

Today, at one crosswalk, a woman escorted a small pack of children across the street, and, arriving at the far curb, she took an extra moment to re-button a girl's coat, and to brush a bit of loose hair out of her face, before sending her on her way. And with that gesture, she reminded me what I love about New York, and about Brooklyn, and about people more generally.2

---

1. The children of New York—maybe every single one I've ever met, without exception—are so thoroughly smart, able and self-possessed that I now think of New York as the best (and possibly only) place to raise kids.

2. This week, I had the pleasure of meeting "Princess Genevieve," who was visiting, along with the rest of her family, from Ohio. Princess Genevieve wanted to ask me some questions about her website, which I thought was in pretty good shape already. While talking with her, I felt very briefly, very slightly, like a crossing guard.

Charity, Chastity 

There's a man who came over to my table an hour ago to ask for money. He was well groomed; he had a nice watch and good teeth, and spoke gently. He claimed to have just been released from the hospital, and showed me his bracelet, though he didn't say what hospital or why he was there.

He touched me twice, softly, his fingertips brushing my arm while he spoke. And now, in retrospect, I'm furious. I hate him for touching me, because now, on account of those two touches, I won't be able to put him out of my mind1; and also because he'll probably be the only one to touch me today.2

---

1. I use the same trick myself, when I want to make an impression on a stranger. I do it consciously, manipulatively, and sincerely, too. But I hate having my own trick used against me.

2. I remind myself, like I might have reminded him if he were still around: we move to the city and surround ourselves with people, in order to be left alone.

5,999,999 to Go 

One reason to go on dates: it narrows the field.

There are six million people in New York City, and now, based on the past two hours, I feel comfortable ruling one out.

Lying Naked and Face Down (pt. 2)  

New York: a big enough city that it's easy to forget it's a small town. I try to pass off as coincidence the fact that, at various points during the day, I walked by Xxx Bxxxxx Street in Soho, and also Xxx Hxxx Street in Brooklyn—both addresses piled high with flowers and cards of condolence—the addresses, respectively, of the late Heath Ledger, and his former fiance, Michelle Williams.¹

To be fair, I had business in Soho, and the Brooklyn address is only a few blocks from where I live. Both locations really were on my way. Still, I traveled the extra block or two both times, knowing full well where I was going—yet each time, the pile of flowers (and the pathos) caught me off guard: whether I was surprised at my own sadness, or just pretending to be surprised for the sake of passersby, even I don't know for sure.

Either way, I'm forced to conclude that I'm actually upset, for reasons I don't fully understand. I am upset by the death of this person I never knew, and even in the midst of this upset, I think that's pretty strange.²

Celebrities thrive in life because they're so adept at wearing our projections, and I suppose it's no less true in death: I project onto the exit of this celebrity all of my own unrelated, contemporaneous sadness.

I am sad for all of the things I've lost in these last months—the romantic notions of that wonderful future I was supposed to have, a particular future I now realize I'll never see. I grew so attached to this one route to happiness that I'm having trouble imagining any other way.

And this death dramatizes my own loss of hope, and of imagined, better futures. ³

This idea (more than the death itself) shakes me deeply, shakes me so I can't sleep, till finally (and without irony) I too take a pile of Ambien, and lie naked and face down in my bed, hoping to make it till morning without dreaming.

1. Actual street addresses removed, once I saw Google traffic coming in, and realized stalkers (like myself) were using this blog as an instrument to disturb the peace of these mourning individuals. (We should leave them be, and find our own people to mourn...)

2. A friend of mine died this week. He wasn't a close friend, but he was someone I liked very much, someone I cared for and trusted; and I missed seeing him, even before he died; and now I miss him in a wholly different—and final—way. He has "left the building," and when he left, some of the air got sucked out of it, and it reminded me (the way it does whenever someone I know dies) of the terrible loud sound of nothing. It reminded me that our gradual accumulation of things, throughout our lives, amounts to nothing—because life is also about losing things, getting less and less, growing smaller, and then finally, sometimes loudly and sometimes quietly, exiting altogether. And I'm sure this week I've been conflating my feeling of loss for the one person with the more publicized loss of the other, the stranger, the celebrity.

3. A feeling I've not felt since the death of Nate Fisher (!).

Inexplicable, Moving 

During a recent trip to the Guggenheim Museum, I decide I'm done with modernity. Whatever that means.¹

The Guggenheim was showing collection of photos from Central Europe—abstract explorations of shape and light, the rise of the machines and the fall of humanity (and all of those other Art Themes).

I've long considered myself a "purveyor of modernity," genuinely interested in all of those pretentious things they teach in art school about form and structure, about art as a forum for man to explore his relationships to the machine in all its incarnations (and everything else in our accelerated culture...). I'm good for nothing if not for appreciating modern art—the suburban white-boy version of Lee Dorsey: "Everything I do is gonna be Pomo." In other words, I'm an art snob. I actually like these things. Or thought I did, until this trip to the Guggenheim, which I found to be tiring. "Oh. Those old collages, catch-phrases, and abstract shapes, again?"

The museum's other exhibit was a collection of Richard Prince paintings and photos, which I found even more tiring: enormous clever paintings, and photos he'd taken of magazine ads. Ho hum. So much canvas, so little soul. ²

By the end of my visit, I felt as though I'd been walking uphill all day. ³

Exhausted, I returned home, ready to toss aside modernism and post-modernism, structuralism and post-structuralism, formalism and post-formalism, and anything I knew or thought I knew about art and aesthetics. All of it, top to bottom, left me cold.

Then I saw a block of light shining through a window onto my stairwell and it stopped me where I stood. I found it inexplicable, moving, and as expressive as the arcing arm in a Michelangelo. Expressive, and expressing what, I did not know.

Which was exactly what I loved about it. ⁴

1. This is a direct quote, of myself, to myself, when I asked myself what I thought of the photography on exhibit: "I think I'm done with modernity."

2. The exhibit was titled "Spiritual America." Whether the irony was intentional or accidental, it was ironic nonetheless. (And therefore post-modern.)

3. Ha ha.

4. These shapes made by angles, lights, and stairs seem integral to the design of the art museums themselves, and by far my favorite thing at the Guggenheim was the Guggenheim itself: I stood at the top of the long round ramp, looking down, realizing the probably-obvious: that the building was art; the shapes it made out of ramps and stairs and the resultant strange croppings of the paintings on the walls were art; that the people looking at the art (now framed in my view by the ramps and stairs) were art; and that I, looking at them while they looked up at me, I was art too.

That Guy 

When I wake up, I can't tell what's going on. It's dark and there's sharp thudding. After a few seconds, the morning snaps into better focus and I understand: it's that guy. That insomniac road crew guy who runs the jack-hammer. He's at it again.

As I sit up in bed, I feel vaguely like Roy Scheider, who, having vanquished the giant predatory shark in Jaws and then again in Jaws 2, sees his family flee from Hawaii to Florida, only to have the shark follow them, in Jaws 3-D, looking for revenge.

* * *

We first met in upstate New York: I lived in a sleepy college town, in one of those broken-down, overpopulated old clapboard houses that make up these towns—the kind where the walls are all crooked and the doors never quite line up, and rooms seem to have been haphazardly appended to the original structure till you can't tell what the original structure was, rooms just slapped on here and there so that the building resembles a hamster's Habitrail—even before one considers the rat's-nest decor of piled laundry and food containers that are the closest thing the house has to insulation. You know—one of those houses?

We lived a little ways off the road, but they were doing some work on a water line or sewer line or something, and that's how I met that guy.

That guy, that orange-vested guy with bulging triceps and a penchant for early rising, was an up-and-comer: he had everything it took to be a very successful jack-hammerer. And he knew it. Every morning he'd be up and coming right outside our window, hammering away into our driveway, into what felt like the foundation of the house, into what felt like my molars and my cranium, at 7am. 7am! No regard was given to the fact that we we'd been up all night working studying drinking and playing guitar. 7am, on the button, every morning. This guy was a German train. This guy was the Cal Ripkin of jack-hammerers.

The resulting lack of sleep led to more than half of the house coming down with mono.¹

There was no evidence to support the obvious theory—that guy enjoyed waking us each morning from our privileged (and often hung-over) sleep.

* * *

I didn't see that guy again for a few years: we drifted apart and went our separate ways, and I kind of forgot about him. Maybe I caught a glimpse of him in L.A., but I couldn't be sure, because the steep angle of the sun threw the shadow of the hard hat across his face, and all I saw for sure were his white teeth shining out from his gleaming sadistic 7am smile.

* * *

It's only natural, I guess, that we each wound up in Boston: it's an obvious destination for private contractors and for over-educated liberal arts grads. The entire city of Boston is always under construction, constantly.² Road crews are easier to find than T stops, and at least as prevalent as Dunkin Donuts.³

[Construction is the status quo in Boston, along with its evil twin, destruction. Put aside the exceptional example of the Big Dig and consider instead the thousands of smaller-scale fiascos: i.e., the entire time I was in Boston (so, two years) saw work on the Congress Street Bridge, a major passage across the Boston Channel into South Boston. Work started before I arrived and it goes on to this day. Construction in Boston is so common that you might never twice take the same route from one place to another: like the Hogwarts staircase, the road itself will bend and twist and reshape itself over time.]

That guy found me a week after I renewed my lease in Boston's South End. I had plenty of misgivings about signing on to another year of that apartment (in particular) and another year of Boston (in general), but I made some peace with these misgivings, and decided it was for the best that I stay. I inked the new lease and settled in for another year.

The wrecking ball showed up the following week, there to tear down the adjacent building and replace it a new set of luxury condos. Yes—wrecking ball. Since we'd first met in that sleepy college town, that guy had diversified: he was now adept in many new tools of noise and destruction, including (but not limited to) the pile driver, the bulldozer, the wrecking ball, and even explosives.

The amount of time it takes, apparently, to level an old building, clear the rubble, and then build, from the ground up, a new set of luxury condos is exactly one year—exactly the duration of the lease I'd just signed. They were just installing the windows when I drove my U-haul out of town.

I hope that guy forgives me for not saying goodbye.

* * *

From the window of my Brooklyn apartment, I can make him out, in his too-familiar hard hat and orange vest. He's surrounded by an army of rubber construction cones and he's blissfully jack-hammering away. Sitting there on the curb, off to one side, there's a coffee from Dunkin Donuts. Even from this distance, through the light rain and through the cement dust that rises up around him, through the shadow that the sun casts off of his hard hat, I can see his bright teeth smiling, as he hammers his way back into my day.

1. Or maybe it was all the kissing.

2. Given the number of liberal arts grads, it's probably under constant deconstruction as well.

3. It's completely possible the prevalence of Dunkin Donuts in Boston is a direct result of the prevalence of road crews, because you will never see one without the other.

My Friend Tom 

Today I had a long meeting with my friend Tom. I first saw him from across a courtyard, and though he looked more or less same as always, for some reason I didn't recognize him. I'm forced to consider it's less because of changes that have taken place with Tom than the ones that have taken place inside me.

[Among the rules of the ocean: you can't swim against a riptide, and you can't position yourself inside a sea change. When everything's moving, it's hard to judge where you are. Focus on far-away points and try to triangulate...]

I like Tom, and just seeing him made it a better day than it would have been otherwise. Tom's one of my favorites.

* * *

After the meeting, I got back to Brooklyn but wasn't ready to go home. I took a detour to Boerum Hill, to a bar I keep meaning to check out. I had four drinks and paid for two: safe to say, it's my new favorite bar. The bartender, a friendly stocky quirky fellow, felt like long-lost kin. We argued with some people at the far end of the bar about socialism. He kept my bowl of peanuts full. His name was Tom. When I said "Goodbye," he replied, "See you soon."

Yes, you will.

* * *

The last stop on my way home was impulsive: I stopped at a local convenience store to buy a plant. I'm sure this had as much to do with those four whiskeys as with my own persistent sentimentality about flora. On my way out of the store, I walked by the ever-present homeless man who has claimed full squatter's rights on this stretch of pavement. I see this man every recent day of my life, but I've never spoken with him, and he's never asked me for anything. He is a panhandler of the most unobtrusive kind. And probably for that exact reason, I walked back to him and gave him the contents of my wallet.

He laughed. "I don't ask people for money, so when they give it to me, I know it's because they want to. " I talked to him for the next twenty minutes. I might have set out just to assuage my bourgeois guilt, but instead I made a friend.

His name's Tom.

I + NY 

I thought as soon as I moved, I'd transform into a prolific blogger. But all the unpacking, all the accessory shopping, all the negotiations with the utility companies, (all the heat and humidity,) and all the enjoyment of being back in New York have gotten in the way.

(Not counting the weather), it's good here. I feel tension lift off me one layer at a time—like exfoliating the soul. Soon, I think (and once the heat breaks), I'll be hitting the pavement to offer up some fresh Sherpa-ing.

Where Trains Make Sense 

America's first subway, a stretch of track laid under Tremont Street in downtown Boston in the 1890s, promised, "Rapid Transit 10 minutes to Park Street," and travelled a distance of what is now six city blocks.

While waiting twenty minutes for this very subway, I read this email from a friend:

It's quarter of two in the morning. I'm sitting on a bench on the
subway platform waiting for the F train. It's quiet. Then, out of
nowhere, the guy at the end of the bench bursts out with, "Why don't
these trains make sense? I'm from Boston. In Boston our trains make
sense."

Everyone else on the bench bristles. But no one says anything.

"All the trains go to Park Street, and then you can get any train you
want at Park Street. Why aren't these trains like that?"

"Well," says the girl next to me, "New York is a lot bigger than Boston."

"You could go back to Times Square," says the guy on the other side.
"But it might add another hour to your trip."

"Well," says Mr. Boston, "I just think the Boston system is better. Now, where can I get the G train?"

All of which is just to say: Come back.

Yeah.

Days of Moving Slowly 

We were glued to the TV late on Thursday night, because all three of us had places to be early the next morning. "They won't strike," one of us said. "They never actually strike."

They, in this case, was Transit Workers Union, who were threatening to shut down New York City's public transportation if the city couldn't meet them halfway on a new contract agreement. This backroom poker match happens every few years and always has the same result: a heroic late-night resolution to the impasse, with train service continuing uninterrupted the next morning. And sure enough, they didn't strike on Friday, though all day and through the weekend, the trains moved with almost sympathetic slowness.

Maybe I was remembering badly. Maybe the trains were always this slow.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is a the last and final stop. Please exit the train." People on the car looked confused. "I thought this was an express...?" I shrugged. Maybe this is how you strike, without striking....

On Sunday, there was a rat in my subway car. I'm sure it was a coincidence. Disgruntled subway workers wouldn't stoop so low. Would they? The rat ran up and down the car in a panic, sending the passengers squealing, swatting with shopping bags, standing on their seats. Finally, somehow, the rat found a way out of the car, and things quieted down again. "Well," chuckled a man in a suit, "that broke up the day."

By Tuesday, there really was a strike, and no good way into or out of Manhattan. I had to get back to Boston. "You could walk to the train station," a friend suggested. "But it's seven miles. It's fifteen minutes just to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. And it's 28 degrees." Finally, I convinced a car service to drive me, what turned out to be a two-hour ride. The driver was furious. "In my country—it's a democracy, you know, but a dictatorship—this would never happen. They'd all go to jail. They're ruining Christmas." Then: "When is Christmas?"

Even Amtrak seems slow. Standstill outside Stamford. Sympathetic slowness? And people seem reluctant to say goodbye: they hug on the platform—nothing unusual about that—but they cling to their hugs just a little bit longer. "I love you," they say. "I'll talk to you tonight." They hug one more time. "I love you," they say. "I'll see you soon." Whenever that is....

Home / Away From Home, pt. 2 

(or, "What's On Your iPod?")

The Fung Wah bus lurches through traffic, somewhere in interminable Connecticut, on another leg of its Sisyphian circuit between Boston and New York. [The drivers, I'm told, finish off each four-hour leg with a short cigarette break, then turn the bus around and drive back to where they started, back and forth, who-know-how-many iterations before they get to rest for the day.] As we finally cross into the no-man's land of bridges outside New York City, the song on my iPod is Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" (now featured in the trailer to some movie or another, can't remember which):

I am the passenger,
and I ride and I ride...

I step off the bus like I did two weeks ago, in Chinatown, in New York City, in the place I still think of as my home though my mailing address would indicate otherwise; only this time, it's a little different. "Can you tell the way to Reade Street," asks a passerby. But I can't. I can't remember the way to Reade Street. I duck straight into a favorite bar because I really need to see a familiar face; the place is crowded, but not with anyone I know. Rather than stay, I grab my bag and head back out into the street, where it's started with a gentle rain. My iPod, as if to mock me, starts in with Whiskeytown's "Sit and Listen to the Rain," and for a little while, I do.

Used to feel so much,
Now I feel so numb
Could go out tonight
But I ain't sure what for
Call a friend or two
I don't know anymore

The weekend passes. I swap books and DVDs with friends, go to a party, go to a brunch. There's one person I want to see and I don't manage to see her; we can't get our schedules together. I confess to her, "In a weird way, I'm already looking forward to getting back to my lonely simple life in Boston." In the background, while we talk, is The Devlins' "Drift":

You say what you want to say,
In my arms, I know you're home
You go where you want to go
and leave me on my own
to drift alone

By the time I head back north, I'm feeling vaguely Sisyphian myself: I'm not sure why I bothered to come. I stand under the Brooklyn Bridge and contemplate the crisscross of cables; I feel a stone of disappointment in my stomach. I'm not sure what comes next. I decide to take the train back. The song iPod plays PJ Harvey's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea:

One day
I know
there'll be a place
called
home.

"Last call. All aboard. We're going to Boston. All aboard."

---

Brownout 

New York suffers slowly through its heat wave: the air conditioners sputter and spit, and finally the lights flicker, dim, and go out—a momentary blackout that knocks out the Internet connection and seems to have done some more permanent damage to my computer. (There goes the aggregator, again…) And when the Internet goes, so too my hobbies. What in the world is a fella to do?

What is it about these low-tech nights that feel so monastic, anyway? I've felt monkish ever since that first blackout—when was that, a week ago? Even with the candles, it was too dark to work, too hot to play. I spent the night sitting on my bed, just listening. You could call it "meditating" if that didn't sound so, well, meditative.

The next day I read a magical, soulful book by Naguib Mahfouz, and since then I've been phrasing everything in my head as some kind of pilgrimage, some kind of vision quest. It's how I've started framing my upcoming move to Boston—alternately as a crusade (to conquer the Internet? the future? the debt?), or a monastic retreat—long nights in a city of strangers, nothing to do but look inside myself. (Really, though, I don't doubt I'll be plenty apt at inventing distractions.)

With all this pseudo-religion in the back of my mind, I guess I shouldn't be surprised a friend was able to talk me into a detox/fast. Ten days of nothing but a noxious potion of maple syrup, lemon juice, and laxatives. Whatever. What do I have to lose? It's been months since I felt healthy, and even if it doesn't turn around my constitution, at least I'll fit a little better into my jeans. They've been pinching a little lately around the waist.

In truth, though, I wonder if I'll last a day. I wish the desire to believe were the same as belief itself, but I don't think it is. Like the electricity around here, my piety and passion come in fits and starts—not reliable, doing some harm as well as good. All I want is energy, clarity. Light. (And an Internet connection...)

Embrace the Kafka 

Some mysteries will never be solved.

They say people are creatures of habit, and I am no exception. I have a favorite mailbox, at the northwest corner of 34th Street and 7th Avenue. It's conveniently located at the top of the stairs as I get off the subway, and it gets emptied several times a day. Sometimes I drop mail there and discover that it's been delivered to its destination that same day. My mailbox is big and it's blue and I find its big blueness reassuring, as if the rivets that anchor it to the ground also anchor me: every time I drop a letter in this mailbox, I feel connected to the vast, powerful permanence that is the United States of America. (Anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating clearly hasn't watched Kevin Costner's The Postman, the premise of which is that a lone mail carrier is able to bring order back to his anarchic, post-apocalyptic country.) Say what you will about the United States Post Office: grumble about your mail carrier, long lines, or the economic inefficiencies of state-sponsored monopoly. I find it to be the most reliable and least nefarious manifestation of federal government that there is, and it makes me proud to be an American.

Maybe this preamble will begin to explain the shock—no, let's call it distress—I felt when I came out of the subway the other day and found my mailbox was missing. I looked to the spot where it had been, immovable, the day before, and there was no trace of it, just a little dent in the snow. I had a letter that needed mailing and I didn't know what to do; I walked back and forth, envelope in hand, in stupefied disbelief, while people passed by as if nothing catastrophic had happened.

How could a mailbox be missing? There must be some mistake.

Calm down. Take a breath. There's another mailbox at 36th and 8th. At least I hope there is. I hope to Christ there is.

I grabbed a mail carrier who was passed by. "Excuse me," I said, trying to slow my breathing. "What happened to the mailbox?" He looked back quizzically, and I had to consider the possibility that he wasn't yet aware of the crisis at hand. "The mailbox," I explained. "It's missing."

Oh, I'm sorry. Was I screeching?

What is it about the Post Office that taps so deeply into my bureaucratic paranoia? My grandfather worked at a post office, a big urban sorting center, and I still shiver remembering his tales of the vast underground network of sorters and filers, of conveyer belts and mail sacks, an entire underground city, layer upon layer of unfathomable bureaucracy. When a system grows large enough, it takes on uncomfortable resemblance to an organism: it grows desires, appetites, even sicknesses. My grandfather joked that people had gotten lost forever inside his sorting building, but I never thought it was very funny.

Why did I care about a missing mailbox? Even the reasonable explanations weren't reassuring: as when anything unusual happens in New York City, I blamed it on terrorists. "Al Qaeda took my mailbox!" "Full of anthrax and in CDC custody!" "Dirty bomb!!!"

But this fear was followed almost immediately by another, deeper one. If the Postal Service persists in the face of rain or sleet or snow or dark of night, then what worse catastrophe could have befallen my unmovable mailbox? The mailbox is representative of a law and order that I have been able to take for granted as fundamental, impervious to attack and immune to entropy—until now.

Sure, the lid was a little creaky and it didn't always close. It's completely possible that my mailbox was in for a repair, or had been retired after years of dependable service. But even this didn't offer me much solace. I thought of the de-commissioned aircraft carrier, the USS Intrepid, only a few blocks away—a giant steel symbol of aging, rusting empire—and wondered, is my mailbox another, smaller one?

It's all so strange, as if I awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, and found myself transformed...

This Is Your Life 

MP3 audio track

You wake up a little before sunrise. You sit up but you can't see; you have a cracked pair of glasses around somewhere but who knows where. You must have been sleeping on your neck, because it feels like whiplash. Something's not right: an amber flicker on the wall, which your myopia reads as sunrise till you glean that it's the candle you left burning all night. You reach for the plastic cup of water by your bedside, and drink half before it slips and spills on the bed. You roll to the opposite corner and fall asleep.

You wake again an hour later, the sun now bright enough to find your glasses on the windowsill, next to the half-liter of whiskey that survived the night before. Outside: the small yard filling with brown leaves where squirrels find some refuge. Across the way: a symmetrical grid of darkened windows, ethereal in a morning fog, like row after row after row of Mark Rothko. You see all this, like you see every morning, through a set of wrought-iron bars. They are there, you remind yourself, for your own protection.

Your body is sore and your mouth is dry and you can't say why, exactly, you feel so bad. Winter and its too-short days. You think of recent events and how the sum total of them should add up to more than this, this vacant feeling, this deep-down boredom and disappointment. You think back to a doctor's appointment earlier this week, as he ticked down a list of test results, each one "Negative." You found yourself wishing, Please, let me have something. Please, let there be some measurable deficiency, some quantifiable cancer or lurking parasite, some infection, something. Let there be an explanation, or at least an excuse, instead of this general malaise, this incurable unwellness.

You refill your plastic cup and drink it. You blow out the candle. There's no reason to be up, yet, so you don't bother. You return to bed, confident or at least hopeful that by the time you wake, next time, things will look better. They often do.

What a View 

Yesterday a man jumped from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, fell eighty stories to a sixth-floor landing, and died instantly. His name and motives are unknown. Police say he was about thirty years old, that he vaulted the ten-foot fence, and that the entire act was caught on the building's security cameras. The tragedy of the facts in this story are matched only by the tragedy of the facts that are not known.

"Why" is the question that casts the thickest shadow over suicide, followed perhaps by "how" — the head-scratching just barely precedes the rubber-necking. Why? Why why why why why? So many scenarios present themselves (a holiday weekend, for God's sake), but part of the chill it strikes in me comes from the fact that I'll never know. I'll never know whether it was planned and laborious (did he draw out the moment with a "walking meditation," up the 1860 stairs?), or an impulsive sprint? (How does one "vault" a 10-foot fence?, is one obvious question.) Did he give any consideration to the passersby on the street below; did he aim for the sixth-floor landing? Had he spoken to the tourists on the elevator, made eye contact with any children as he tipped over the top of the fence? Had he done research? Did he know that at least thirty others made the same jump before him? Did he plan a last meal? Had he taken out his trash, fed his pets, made any last phone calls? Was there an audience for his act, or an intended one? Did he want someone to feel very bad? Or was there no one?

The moment he let go of the fence, did he regret it? In the seconds that followed? How many seconds were there? How many thoughts does one have in those seconds?

Did he call anyone's name?

Was he crying?

It was a perfect, clear autumn day. From that height, he would have been able to see all ends of this enormous city, and still he decided there was nothing for him. He must have stopped to look, his last view of anything in this world. What did he see? God, what a view!

[Addendum]

P.S. Remembering David Okrent

While I'm going on about the morbid... I remember years ago reading a story in the Boston Globe: the body of a Harvard student was found one cold winter morning, dead from a single stab wound to the neck, on Revere Beach, miles from where he lived in Cambridge. No one was clear on what he'd been doing out there, or whether the death was a suicide or homicide.

The most striking detail about the story was buried a few paragraphs down: his parents learned of their son's death while eating breakfast in their Evanston, Illinois home — not from the police or the university, but from an agency asking if they would like to donate their son's organs. "He's a big boy," the father replied. "Why don't you ask him yourself?" The caller, realizing the parents hadn't been notified, hung up. The father spent the rest of the morning trying to reach his son on the phone , only reaching his answering machine, with an ever-longer beep.

As time went by, more facts came out in the case: the boy had a history of depression, and the knife found near the body was his own. But he had also just enthusiastically changed majors, citing better future job placement as a reason. There was evidence that pointed to suicide and evidence that seemed to cancel it out, and the police report, finally, was inconclusive. At the center of this sad story's grisly details, the most disturbing aspect of it is how much will never ever be known....