well folks,

tonight it really is the end of the world.

i sit here perched on the 19th floor, looking out on a city extinguished by fog, disappeared in a blanket that has the bridges and buildings out like night.

i see through windows across the street, into apartments that are always illuminated but never inhabited. i hope for some sudden display of life, a twirl of movement across the window, the unmistakable hue of flesh. but no one lives there. or there. or in any of the two hundred windows i see.

night skies in london are an unhealthy green or orange, in vienna they are gray.

the faded purple of new york night.

living at the top of the world in a glass palace, isolation indeed.

ah, the joys of house-sitting.

This is what i did yesterday.

Work from 6-1. Lunch with L from 1-3. Scanned two dozen slides from my cross-country trip. Went out for Mexican food with K. Had a single solitary margarita. Got drunk. Went to a large Barnes & Noble, leafed through some magazines on creative writing (booo) photo editing and a collection of photographs from Life magazine. Went home to my temporary home. Watched four episodes of How I Met Your Mother. wrote this post:

“Reach out and touch someone”

there must be a better word for it. infatuation sounds so petty, wonder sounds so bland, everything being alight sounds so New Age i want to put on Yanni and aroma-euthanize myself.

but anytime everything’s on fire and you beg for someone to just acknowledge that it is so, and no one seems to have an inkling of what it is you’re on about or what you want from them (do i?), well apart from certain expletives born of frustration, that good old AT&T slogan comes to mind.

Then I went to bed.

How did any of that lead to me dreaming about a couple of quarreling lesbian train conductors who abandon me at the control post of a speeding train just when the tracks suddenly become so much entwined and diverging spaghetti? And when i finally take a wrong fork in the track and bring the train to a grinding halt, the chief lesbian conductor comes out and screams at me and then proceeds to make out with me, or rather, chew on my lower lip in a very unrelenting way.

How then did the dream segue into me being part of some extreme family gang lead by my father, with members ranging from my brother to other cousins, and us killing at least five people in gruesome ways and having the cops show up the second we do away with our last victim, in the filthy laundry room of our house which incidentally has an open screen door that the cops simply sidle up to as we go about our murderous business?

is it the tequila? or the salsa? a combination of both? the carrot cake i had yesterday afternoon?

Or was it all about, um… finality?

am i sitting on the floor in an empty apartment watching tv in my hula-dancer motif orange boxer shorts after finishing a thing of hummus, a jar of olives, half a cucumber peeled with a steak knife, and two dozen teency weeency cherry tomatoes, washed down with a frozen chocolate-covered Entenmann donut? Is M back in Geneva while i stay on for a few weeks living with my cousin?

yes to both.

like water on ice
i watch everything recede
till the constant motion of this overcrowded
street settles into minor oscillation
no longer hurting and hurtling in jumps and
spurts but flowing
ever so slowly.

My first stop was the restroom, in back. Waiting there was a man not dissimilar in physical appearance to a latter-day Burroughs. He was thin and his skin was taught and crusting in places. Several sores on his hands and lips and his yellow stare, as well as the way he kept twitching, added to the general sense that his business in there would be too long to make it worth my while to wait. I got on line instead and spent my five minute wait-time in the usual funk of despair that deciding what the best course of action re: ordering food would be. After dealing with the confused look of the woman who tried twice to hand me a dozen ketchups when all i wanted was one, I looked for a seat. Downstairs the air had been rebreathed so many times i felt faint and so returned to the front where someone had vacated a table in the interim. I ate and held my paperback open with one hand, which never fails to develop into a painful hand-cramp. On my left sat a couple of Asian women and it struck me again that in this city one can never take anyone’s origins or linguistic abilities for granted. I expected them to not speak a word of Enlish, as do most tourists circa Union Square at 3pm on a weekday, but they spoke perfect SoCal. In front of me was a young woman, in her twenties, eating, talking on the phone and rocking her large baby carriage back and forth. When she was not on the phone she alternated cooing at her baby and trying to coax it into drinking from its bottle. We got up to leave at the same time and i followed her to the wastebasket to dump my platter, and then to the door. The first of the two doors opened outwards so i akwardly tried holding the door open for her with one arm as she wrestled with the carriage. She didn’t thank me but instead kept talking to her baby, so i figured i’d let her struggle with the second door on her own. She swung the carriage around so as to be able to back out the door, and looking down at her baby, i discovered she had been talking to and trying to feed a large plastic doll.

an hour a day i glare at myself reflected in the subway glass. I am menacing, now sincere, now sly, now kind, i study myself intently and i know i see nothing.

i move like an imperiled dancer, smooth and flowing, yet my sense of balance flawed. I misjudge openings, forgetting to allow for limbs, shoulders; when calculating width, i omit to factor myself into the space i inhabit.

the man across from me sits calmly in a taut gray gabardine suit whispering to himself. After a time he closes his eyes and rocks his head back, a faint smile on his lips, tasting something of the divine.

the glass is tinted darker and so it is ghostly that i gaze, thinking penumbra suits contemplation, the eyes the only thing remaining unchanged.

wolves in sheep’s clothing,
people on the train,
everyone knows you’re not one of the pack.

They have installed a huge concave disc in front of Rockefeller Center. Though this was taken on the other side of it.

I see the gas dancing along the neon tube above the front desk. I feel the place in my little finger that is split, was bleeding an hour ago. I feel the pressure of the band aid. I like my navy blue short-sleeved shirt. I feel alright when i wear it. I like Exile on Main Street. I like the tempura udon that the Japanese place i cannot locate on a map for having only ordered delivery from delivers. It is comforting. I like the Ikea table and bed we assembled yesterday.

I approach assembling Ikea furniture with the same reverence once reserved for Lego. Back when it would be a whole afternoon thing, take no calls, don’t answer the door, kick my little brother out of the room.

First, prepare. Set the settings. Gather the tools. Clear the workspace, be it kitchen or bathroom or bedroom floor. Isolate yourself and meditate. Perhaps offer up a silent prayer that this will not be one of the 50% of Ikea pieces that come pre-damaged or defective. When anticipation is balanced by your sense of focus and readiness, kneel and open the box. Slowly, slowly, forcing yourself to slowness, find the instructions. Stop. Do not go straight to step one, do not collect 200 Kronor. Do not rush anything. Remember that screw you snapped, that board you cracked, that wood you scratched. Slowly. First, verify that all required pieces are present. Count screws and bolts and locate whatever symbiotic tool designed for one single specific screw or bolt comes with the piece. Vacuum out the holes left full of sawdust. Read the manual once through, visualizing the sequence of events. Now, at last, you are ready. In one fluid series of movements, assemble your Lego monorail or Mella table or Malm bed or Ramberg bedside thingy. Lose yourself in the alignment of the legs, the symmetry of screws, going from one to the next, tighten, adjust, tighten, adjust. Stand back and admire your handiwork. Bask in the glow of your new home, all bright white and dark wood. Is there such a thing as catalogue kitsch?

There is always a slight comedown when it is complete. A sadness at it being over so soon, an urge to go out and buy more bookshelves, more hampers, more lights and coatracks and shoeracks and that orange fuzzy thing you’re not sure is a carpet or a doily. Or maybe just move again so you can start over… Post assembly, animal triste.

Today at approximately 14h40, it is a year since my arrival here. Nothing has changed, everything has changed, etcaetera, woe unto mortals for whom time does not wait.

Surprisingly enough, i’m no fatter than when i left. Unsurprisingly enough, i’m still not on any definitive path to enlightenment and/or a career.

This year’s major event: developing sufficent facial hair for a modest moustache and chin thingy.

This year’s unmajor event: depending on whether you mean a small yet significant event, or an event so insignificant as to be the absolute antithesis to a major event, in which case i’m sure i can safely say that at some point it is likely i farted in my sleep, stepped on a crack in the sidewalk, walked in a puddle, missed my train, waited in line, stayed up passed my bedtime.

Years used to be counted not from January to December, but September to June. Henceforth the year begins on August 16th. Today is the first day of the second year a.e. (after expatriation). The end draws nigh. Repent and/or get shitfaced.

The subway is comforting. You’re somewhere, and then you’re nowhere going somewhere, suspended in destination or destiny suspended. Those brief inconsequential moments. And you are rocked to reverie or sleep by the beating of the tracks passing below. Light, no lights. Light, no lights. Shush now, go to sleep.

An umbilical experience of sorts. Reborn at Bryant Park or West 4.

There is of course the smell of cabbage and sauerkraut (which is cabbage²), people with warts and open sores, panhandlers, detuned musicians, subterranean permanent residents, rush hour, screamers, singers, open-mouthed gum chewers, the unbathed, the brutal, the selfish. Chivalry is often shoved aside by someone deathly intent on securing an already graciously offered seat.

There is the sticky car. There is the empty car. There is the car so crammed full of breathing sweating life that you must stand immobile, arms locked to your sides and holding your breath, for fear of contracting humanity. There is the car abandoned save for one occupant, so powerful in her stench a special task force is called in to evacuate her. There is the leaky car on rainy days, every seat covered in water, sloshing through the darkness. There is the sauna car, it’s AC on the blink. There is the car with the broken door, slamming like a shutter in a storm. There are the garbled indications of a PA with Tourette’s, telling you the csdraaa line is not running between brrrl and gaaaaaaa so please transfer to the fffsssm.

There is the line that runs express in Brooklyn and local in Manhattan. There is the line that runs local in Queens but express in Manhattan. The line that runs local between Brooklyn Bridge and Columbus Circle, but express between 72nd and 125th, then local again. There is the line that doesn’t run on weekends. There is probably a line that only runs on weekends. And above all there is the ghost line, a line that i have never actually seen running, the B. If you can attest to the B’s existence and the fact that it still runs, please send photos as I do not believe in it.

As seen on a billboard figuring prominently over Houston near 2nd Avenue (note the Katz’s sign right beneath it):

It is the most beautiful day of summer here, a kind sweet air blowing in through the open windows, the trees in the rear garden rustling, the ever present sounds of a young child and a barking dog, echoey, distant.

I want to be in Aix, I want to be in Camogli, I want to be in Thira, I want to be in Ronda, I want to be in Grindelwald. I want to exit the Trümmelbachfälle into the blinding afternoon sun.

What I am going to do is go learn six pages of dialogue from Mourning becomes Electra and do four washes at the laundromat on Wyckoff, then return here and try to write application letters and tweak our resumes for the 171st time hoping that at some point someone will have the courtesy to answer, if at least to expressly tell the applicant to fuck off as opposed to silently implying it, which is pretty much SOP here there and everywhere nowadays.

for comprehension purposes, i must specify that it is pronounced Howston, not Hewston.

Also, it is a very very hot day in nyc.

I have recently (yesterday) given myself a summer haircut (i.e buzzed it all off). Sun + 0.1cm of hair = bad news. So i set off to find a cap/hat/beret, anything really.

Over the course of fourteen blocks, and as many stores, i learned the following.

a. people believe it is their inalienable right to walk in a straight or sinusoidal line at full speed and never break and/or apologize for bowling you over, elbowing you in the face, walking on your foot, dripping ice-cream on you.

b. the crappier the cap/hat/beret and/or the more inane or obnoxious the sentiment expressed on it in bold letters, the more people are willing to pay for it. Because hey, who wouldn’t pay 36$ for an unmarked razor blade pre-aged cotton cap for a little punk credibility.

c. one store played the entire first album by the Darkness. One played all of Thriller. Most of them played Ump Ump Ump music or Sean Paul on repeat. All i know is that by the time i reached the H&M right below Houston two hours later i’d developed a vacant stare and had stopped saying excuse me or sorry when i ran into people.

luckily H&M had shitty cotton caps for 5.90, and all was well with the world.

On Christopher Street, 55 Bar is a jazz/blues hangout. Except the people who hang out there are mostly Berklee (not Berkeley) graduates, and can count in 7/8 and 5/4 simultaneously, whilst rattling off the F# mixolydian mode.

I saw Wayne Krantz there tonight (and no, i’d never heard of him before today either…) and he was playing with a drummer named Cliff Almond and a bassist named James Genus. And it was a stark reminder that everything on the radio sucks and should be used for fruit juice and cereal commercials.

I guess you’d call it jazz fusion because the concept was jazz, take a simple theme, run through it once and then off everybody goes, except they were playing in the rock idiom. All i know is that though i could nod my head to the underlying beat, nobody including the totally amazing drummer actually played on the beat anytime during the hour-long performance. You oftentimes catch yourself smiling during such performances, simply because there is some form of inherent humor or irony in such total technical mastery, but also because there is an exhilaration in the tension created by three musicians pulling in often separate directions along the razor’s edge, when it would take only a split second of self-awareness on their parts, the slightest conscious thought, to send the whole elaborate yet spontaneous structure crashing down.

Recommended though not directly related album: Spectrum - Billy Cobham.

It is six-thirty a.m. and the pair of boxers you hand-washed the night before are not dry. What to do? As you fret and pace, an idea suddenly forms, not out of nowhere, you know you’ve heard this somewhere though the source remains obscure. Microwave!

And it actually works, for the first three-minute express cycles you put them through. The water evaporates, they start smelling laundry fresh, like when they come out of the dryer.

Then they melt. Or rather, the elastic contained within the cotton melts. Or rather, goes up in smelly plasticky smoke. And you end up with burnt boxers that no longer have any structure, only surface. You can put them on, but they won’t stay on, they’ll tear right off.

Don’t try this at home kids.

It is now seven a.m. I’m open to suggestions. You have twenty minutes.

So this is how my day ended. After walking the streets aimlessly for most of the day, tearing at my clothes in grief over the radiohead debacle, i wandered back towards school for my 6pm class. As i sat down at the 3 Square Cafe right across from school I noticed a congregation of about 15 people and 4 security guards around the back entrance to Irving Plaza, a small rock venue. I figured they might be waiting for someone i liked, as i knew that Seu Jorge had played there recently as well as the Eagles of Death Metal (Josh Homme’s side project from QOTSA). I pulled out my camera and crossed the street just as a minivan pulled up. I came around the side of it and came face to face with Eddie Vedder, as he and the other four members of PJ leisurly poured out of the van. I shook his hand. I’ve spent the rest of the evening in a kind of daze. Funny how you think you’re above such things till out of nowhere you feel like a fourteen year-old.

Today was like not getting tickets to see the Doors and then running into the Rolling Stones at the supermarket. Possibly. It has been suggested I am totally incapable of formulating valid analogies.

And did i mention that there are about 4 bajillion (that’s four and lots of zeroes) sites out there selling 200 bajillion tickets to the shows for just a little under 500% of the original price? As Ticketmaster is the only official means of purchasing tickets and all tickets sold out in approximately 1 picosecond although Ticketmaster has all sorts of scrambled-text based safety measures to allegedly prevent automated scalpers from purchasing tickets, i ask thee, doth ticketmaster not verily deserve a speedy demise?

the bastards.

The dirty bastards. I’m not one for vulgarity, but any of the people who got tickets to the shows must SUCK THE COCK OF SATAN. There. That’s all I have to say about that.

Are playing Madison Square Garden in June. I know this because i have just received an e-mail from Ticketmaster. Having frantically clicked through to the site to purchase 11 tickets, all for myself, aaaaaallll for meeeee, most of my hair fell out upon discovering that they’d only be on sale at 10am today. I am leaving to class now (8am). I will be locked indoors till 1pm.

M must succeed in buying them for us. She must. She has already been instructed to summarily auction off my guitars and photographic equipment if need be. But what if there’s a power outage? What if Verizon decides to suck just at 10am, bringing our blazing 700k line down to 0.01k a second, rendering all forms of communication impossible? What if she tries the phone instead and it catches on fire, falls off its stand and lands in a plastic smoldering mass on both her cellphones (the Swiss and the US one). What if all our neighbours are out, or the stairs cave in and she can’t reach them in time? What if Homeland Security instructs Ticketmaster to only sell tickets to pre-screened individuals who pose no threat to Republicans or the United States? What then i ask you? What then?!!!!

These are very tense times.

As you all know, SXSW is the annual conference where anybody who’s anybody in the blogging world gets together to discuss how cool blogging is, how cool they are, and how blogging could change the world if only the Powers That Be would let bloggers run things.

But do you know NXNE? The North by North East conference was held for the first time this year in NYC and drew a crowd of existential and neurotic bloggers from at least two cities. Panel discussions covered vast and important topics such as “is it ok to shower with my blog?”, “if my blog won’t make love to me, who will?”, and “if a blogger screams in cyberspace, will ridley scott make a movie about it?”.

The two keynote speakers this year were none other than the only attendees, the irreplaceable Waterhot, and Yours Truly. Below a picture taken at the afterparty, held in the middle of the street in Union Square (caps, hats, and quality beards provided to protect you or them) (Waterhot is the tall smart one).

The sun was out, the smog was minimal, and neither of them was in the throes of deep depression, so an exceptionally pleasant day was had by all.

It was great meeting you Tom, do come again.

I’ll be starting classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute tomorrow. I’m proud of this fact, not for having been accepted -they pretty much take anyone who can pay, is willing to attend, and can write the 200 word essay they require- but because i first decided i wanted to go there during my third year of law school, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Caesar decided to cross the Rubicon and da Vinci painted the Monal Lisa, sometime in 1999.

And seven years later here i am.

It’s a strange feeling to be doing exactly what you want. Like being told that your homework is to play video-games or your job is to play guitar, fulltime. I feel unjustifiably guilty. Crazy how conditioned we are. “If it’s not unpleasant it can’t be good for you / isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing” kind of thing. But i also feel incredibly elated. I’m afraid they might think i’m high because of the stupid glee i’m constantly emitting. It’s a novel experience feeling authorized to be excited about something. Sort of makes you wonder why you didn’t have the cojones to do something you felt genuinely excited about sooner. But i have no regrets. Whatever the convoluted paths i followed to get here, there, or wherever, it’s the trip that counts. And here i am.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh… is what you say when you have a guest arriving tomorrow and you leave work early to clean up and do a week’s worth of dishes and sweep the floor and wax the windows and polish the ceiling and…stuff, and you come home and first feel a jolt of pure fear as you see your door ajar, and then you walk in to find your furniture bunched up in the middle of the room and plaster and tools strewn all over the place and some guy simultaneously replastering parts of the ceiling and repainting parts of a wall and fixing something in the bathroom and powersawing through the floor in your bedroom for some obscure reason, and he is doing this under the supervision of your landlady (from hell) whom you’d expressly asked not to do this work today because you were expecting company, and she agreed and said the week after next, and she speaks fluent English and did not make any grunts or other international sounds of incomprehension, so you know this can only be to spite you.

There is a law in the Amateur Photographer’s Handbook that states the following:

If, on a bitterly freezing day, whilst fighting gale-force winds with a visiting friend, hopelessly searching for the Ellis Island ferry, you should accidentally come across one of the following:

(a) a whale shark, (b) jim morrison, (c) hillary rodham clinton;

One of the following will inevitably happen:

(a) your underwater camera-housing will leak, (b) your flash will misfire, (c) your acid flashback will end, or (d) your camera will refuse to focus on anything other than the back of the TV crewman standing directly in front of you.

This is Law and is inevitable. Do not try to fight it. Bend as the reed and accept your fate.

Okay, get this.

Wednesday i went to see DJ Cam spin at the Hiro ballroom in the Maritime hotel. Nobody here knows who he is and the place was only half full. I got up on the low stage and mentioned, as he was switching vinyls, that Substances is one of my favorite albums. He thanked me and as i was walking away he called me back to tell me he was currently working on Substances 2.

And now i’ve just come from a free concert at the BAM café, where Keziah Jones played to a room of about 100 people, alone, on acoustic guitar. Which in itself is ridiculous. Then i caught up with him at the bar and got to ask him the question that has been keeping me, and many of you i’m sure, up at night: what does kpafuca mean? To which he kindly replied that it’s a Nigerian word and means everything’s all fucked up. Craaazy…

I suppose next week Jimi hendrix will resuscitate and proceed to play every song from the potshumous Blues album in the bar up the street from our place and then we’ll meet up with Thom Yorke and go for drinks and maybe a movie…

I am…(drum-roll please)… SUBWAY MAN!!!

I have unimaginable powers that allow me to control these electrified block-long beasts of the underground!

Tremble mortals!

In plain English, as I arrived at the top of the stairs leading to the Bergen Street station this morning, I heard the “ding” sound familiar to commuters the world over, indicating the opening of subway doors.

I plunged down the stairs, in one smooth continuous motion tearing open my jacket, pulling out my wallet, grabbing my Metrocard, swiping it and diving through the turnstile, at great risk to both myself and, um, the turnstile.

And as I hit up against the train’s door running at full speed, only to verify with my full weight that it was in fact closed, I somehow managed to maintain consciousness long enough to howl “noooooooooooo…” (a la Luke Skyalker when he finds out who his daddy is). And then the doors opened again and I was allowed to board.

Now, I know some of you live in small peaceful mountain villages like Geneva and have had the occasional experience of a bus driver being in a good mood and letting you on though the doors have already closed, and so you don’t necessarily realize the full extent of the superpowers that were revealed to me this morning. Subways are a different kind of beast. Unless you are actually physically blocking the doors, there’s no way in hell they’re opening again. I’ve seen people pull at them, hit at them, ruin manicures trying to pry them open, all to no avail. And yet, this Wednesday, February 1st, at 5:25 am, I commanded the doors to open and they did. Helpless to resist me. I must now go and sew my leotards and cape.

The one question I have is, as I know that with great power comes great responsibility, should I quit my day job?

Finally got around to updating the photo site

Riding back to Brooklyn at 2am with M and her sister J and J’s boyfriend. Everyone is dozing, drifting, waking only when the conductor announces the next stop by way of the shrill useless PA system that garbles even the simplest information.

Suddenly there is a sound like an alarm clock or a timer, meep-meep…meep-meep…meep-meep, and J and I sit bolt upright and stare at each other and then cock our heads this way and that trying to localize the source of the sound. No one seems perturbed by this sound but us. No one scrambles to get a cellphone or a blackberry free of a pocket. I lean over and look under the seats for a suspect package but see none. After ten seconds or so, the meep-meeping becomes a rapid-fire me-me-me-me-me and J and I stare at each other bracing ourselves, certain that this is it, our very last second on earth.

In such an instant the age-old myth of your life flashing before your eyes goes up in smoke, so to speak, and is replaced with the reality that all you think is “will this hurt?” and “what will it sound like?”. Will i have time to hear/feel it or will it be like a general anesthetic, first you’re here and then you’re just gone, with no transition whatsoever.

happy new year!

resolutions.

be good.

be happy.

lots of sex.

lots of musicbooksmovies.

love.

many gajillions of dollars.

and all this by Jan. 31st please.

amen.

extra points for:

time management

non-aggression

an end to procrastination and its little buddies, staring into space and navel-gazing

joining the UN/HCR/ICRC/or some other NGO and working for World Peace instead of wishing for it really hard and then going back to staring into space and navel-gazing.

And to all one-and-a-half regular readers of this blog, i wish you a very happy healthy fulfilling whoopdeedoo 2006.

love & kisses

B.

Saw Goldfrapp in concert last night. It was glam-rock robot cabaret, which is the closest i can come to categorizing it. It’s what we thought the future would be like thirty years ago. Tight uniforms and platform shoes and analog synthesizers. She’s in love with a strict machine. Yes.

This can only end badly. I know it with the certainty of one who has read too much fiction, seen to many movies, been terminally infected by that disease of the narrative world, suspense.

The first time i crossed the homeless man’s path it was a month ago. I was leaving work, rushing to the subway, and he was very, very slowly shuffling up 42nd street. As i waited at the corner to cross to the Bryant Park side, I turned to look at him. He was at least fifty-five, stooped, toothless and was entirely shrouded in newspapers held on with bits of string.

I know you’re supposed to be inured to the human desolation you witness on a daily basis in this city, but the lesson hasn’t quite sunk in yet. This man, I was suddenly certain, had about three days to live, and I couldn’t just walk away because… well, because there is a point up to which you can resist doing what’s right, you know that saving the world is a bottomless well you can only drown in, and then some set of preconceived ideas dictate that this situation is beyond the ordinary despair you can cope with if not ignore entirely, and you what? Take him home with you? (cf. Nick Hornby’s How to be good, which attempts to, if not offer any practical/feasible answers to this question, at least lay bare the inadequacy of our total inaction and guilt-trip us into oblivion). You know you’re supposed to take him home. It’s obvious, simply because you have a place to live that could easily shelter six people if push came to shove, and leftovers from Saturday night that go uneaten on Sunday, and a human being is a human being and not a social issue or a conscience problem. But we’re rabbits in the headlights, paralyzed by the enormity of the situation and the contradictory nature of our inculcated desperate race for comfort and security, be it real or imagined. And you know all this already, and i’m getting sidetracked.

So I wasn’t going to take him home with me. And I didn’t want to give him cash, because you want to make sure that it’ll be put to good use, and not good booze. I despise myself for thinking that way, because I’ve always been of the opinion that I’m in no position to judge what my fellow man wishes to do with his money. The day I ask someone for some change, I’d like them not to question my motives or intentions. And I try to act accordingy when asked for a handout. But in this case, I was so sure the guy was a) dying, and b) would simply not make it to a store to buy food, or c) would not make it into the store because this is midtown Manhattan and you just can’t have newspaper-shrouded people wandering the aisles of your BCBG deli, dahling. So I decided to buy him a meal.

Stupidly, in my confused state of good intentions and simultaneous discomfort at wanting to help some random homeless person in full view of two thousand other members of the rat race that could only resent my showoff-ish display of goody-goodness, I went straight to buy him a sandwich and a bottle of water instead of first asking him if I could buy him someting to eat. Because you want to make this type of act as hit-and-run as possible. If you speak to the person, then you’ll have to take them home with you, right? They’ll no longer just be another homeless person, they’ll be Harry or Mark or John, and once you know that, you’re not leaving them sitting on the subway stairs. I realize now that this means buying the guy a sandwich is just another form of payoff to my conscience, to get it to look the other way, but hey, whatever i takes so you can live with yourself.

So I run into Pret-a-Manger, grab a tuna and cucumber baguette (after losing thirty seconds debating whether or not a homeless person’s diminished digestive system could deal with the more enticing tuna wasabe-and-ginger club; in restrospect I confess to being some kind of dumb shit) and a bottle of water and head back to the corner of 42nd and Fifth. And of course he’s gone, out of sight.

I spent the next twenty minutes circling Bryant Park and the neighbouring blocks looking for him, kicking myself for not simply telling him where I was going so he could wait for me. I swear he just dematerialized. A vision, a spook, the ghost of Novembers past. By this time it was full dark and bitter cold and I resolved to give my little paper bag to the first person I met asking for food or money. Because after all, the person I was looking for hadn’t asked for anything. Why pick him when there are at least four people between where I’m standing and the subway entrance with their hand out or a sign that reads HUNGRY. Kundera defines kitsch as that which sets a common tear in the eye of humanity. And I’d clearly succumbed to our predefined notion of pathos, our ingrained emotional triggers that say “sadness is the old helpless man with newspapers tied to his arms and legs, not the twenty-something guy with the pierced nose and army boots with the HUNGRY sign”. But in truth, what the fuck do I know, who am I to judge?

So I handed the kid the bag and went home.

Weeks passed, rain turned to snow, December rolled into town, and lo-and-behold, as I was leaving the subway station at Bryant Park at six a.m this dark and freezing Monday morning, there he was, newspapers and all, slowly shuffling from the corner to the steps leading to the library. I immediately decided to make good on my previous intentions, though this time it would be some form of breakfast, and this time I’d let him know first. But I was literally sprinting across the street as I thought this, because I was already fifteen minutes late to work and, as he’d just settled down on the steps, I could run up, punch in, and come back down again.

There’s certainly a theory out there that stupidity comes in threes. Or that we never learn. Or that not listening to your instinct is generally something you regret. And so, naturally, by the time I got back downstairs, he was gone, evaporated again. No sign of him in any direction, though at that time of morning I had a clear line of sight up and down both 42nd and Fifth.

That’s when anxiety started to set in. I kept having concurrent flashes from two very different movies. The first was the Lynchian “Hobo behind the diner” sequence from Mulholland Drive. This guy keeps having visions of a homeless man living next to the dumpster behind the diner where he’s having breakfast with his shrink, discussing said visions. And then they walk back, to dispell the guy’s fears, and though no one is there, the guy has the vision anyway and dies of a heart attack. Sort of a “hobo as portent of death and impending doom” thing. The other scene I kept returning to was from Groundhog Day. Though Bill Murray keeps trying to save an old homeless man, over and over and over again, he always ultimately fails and the old man dies.

And I know things come in threes, and I know that somehow I will cross my homeless man’s path again, and he will be dead, and it will be my fault.

My landlady’s a genius. Because she developed what has become know the world over as Pavlovian Heating.

The way it works is this:

1. In early October, when the first couple of weeks of cold weather arrive, you disappear, unreachable, all messages unanswered. You let your tenants sit, adding layers of clothing as they freeze, and let them consider whether or not they should break down your door, afraid that they may find you face down in your Cheerios.

2. Once they can’t take the psychological anguish of having a place that’s colder inside than out, and have given in and lugged an oil heater from Bed Bath & Beyond to their third floor flat, you BLAST heat, hissing and steaming, for three days straight, and claim that everything is as it should be. At this point it is important to draw their attention to the whistling sound the radiators make when on. The whistling. Whisper it to them in their sleep. Mention it randomly in conversation. Ssssssssssssssssssssss.

3. let it sink in.

4. When the weather turns cold for good in mid-November, let them sit again, maybe for a short weekend, with no heat.

5. And then - and this is the beauty of it - you somehow get the radiators to whistle, but without actually heating them. Ta-da! Your trained tenants believe they’re getting heat, when in fact they’re only hearing the auditory manifestation they associate with it. You save money, they don’t know they’re cold, it’s a flawless system.

I sometimes have violent thoughts involving my landlady, the oil heater, and lots of chicken wire.

i googled “how to start my life from scratch” this morning, as well as “chronic fatigue”, “how to become a swiss diplomat”, and “finland”. I also checked up on the application process for the CIA’s clandestine operatives division, NYU’s graduate program in philosophy, and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory.

am i sitting at a reception desk on the eleventh floor, when all human activity takes place on the tenth?

that i am.

am i considering hitting the girl two offices down with a blunt object repeatedly?

only if she keeps talking in a nasal whine, recounting sequentially and incessantly the banal string of insignificant minutiae that have so far made up her day, with the pride and blatant lack of consideration for anyone’s emotional and mental wellbeing only a truly truly umbilically inclined person could muster.

is today a good day? it’s a matter of perspective.

i’m alive and kicking, earning three times this country’s minimum wage, sitting in front of a screen contemplating life’s infinite and thereby meaningless possibilities.

i am however bitterly disappointed, having discovered that Dr. Martens no longer sells the model i’m currently wearing. They’ve apparently replaced the flat sole with something resembling a white shark’s teeth, and thereby considerably reduced the appeal of their boots to an only moderate rock n’ roll person such as myself, who does not regularly engage in kicking contests and/or serious rock-climbing and/or feel the need to express the teenage angst of a thirteen year-old girl by way of aggressive looking platform shoes.

so that all balances itself out and i’m just ok, instead of really super duper.

so it’s 6 am and i’m walking to the office from the F stop at Bryant Park, and as I step out into the irrefutably crisp october morning, i wonder, what am i here for? (here being nyc). Because, of all the things i’ve done here so far, none has in any way been related to that which i’ve been going on about for the past seven or eight years and compelled me to come in the first place. So i ask myself, realizing i may seriously need to get my act together, What am I here for?

And I stop dead in the middle of the street as my iPod shuffle, by way of Ella Fitzgerald, echoes me word for word: Whaaat am i here fooor?*

And i think to myself, wow! how weird is that?!! i have to run upstairs and post this immediately!!!

And as i sit here attempting many different formulations of this post, the appropriate manner of expressing the truly transcendental quality of the abovementioned experience subtly escapes me…

*(on Ella at Duke’s Place, Verve, 1965)

Whatever you’re looking for, someone here is catering to your needs…

this place is not cupcakes and manolo blahniks and sex & the city. it is a city suffused with the smell of boiled cabbage. it is the world entire rolled up and mixmastered. it is humanity in all its anthropological splendor.

had drinks with two women last night, late forties, and they talked about the fact that there was no recovery. that it was all cosmetics and posturing and forced smiles. “we’ve recovered”, “the country’s recovered”, “fuck that” is all they kept saying. “this city never recovered. you see the way people are crammed on the streets today? because of the UN summit, and because the president’s in town. otherwise, empty. it used to be, if you dropped a penny you couldn’t bend down to pick it up, for fear you’d be carried away by the crowd. there was a buzz to the place. never came back. recovered. no fucking way.”

one of them lost her partner of 8 years in the attacks. after some minutes discussing her loss she pulled out a laminated picture, saying “so you at least know who we’ve been talking about”. he was a lieutenant in the FDNY and was on the 67th floor when it came down. i kept tearing up and biting my tongue, trying to not show how terribly sad it made me. which doesn’t make sense i guess. but she seemed to be holding it together, at least temporarily, and the only proper way to discuss that type of thing is if everyone pretends it’s just a detached casual conversation. you can’t look it in the face without being silenced.

an 18 year old kid working with me tried all day to explain why humanity couldn’t exist without crime or violence and why he felt he should learn to use a gun and we should all have obligatory survival training.

my best friend just went home to switzerland. she’d been here a year. now we’ve traded places. all this coming and going. where is everybody?

started work on tuesday and wednesday at 5.30 am, today at 6. you get used to the rythm of it after awhile. except that i got off this morning at 11 and the only thing i want to do is nap. forget travelling without moving. this is jet lag without travelling.

it’s at least 100% humidity today. if you’re thirsty all you need do is breathe.

we’re going to be living in brooklyn:

over and out.

Rode the Cyclone at Coney Island. Screamed myself hoarse, as a means of communing with kitsch and propriety, it’s just what one does.

Spent an hour watching the walruses (walri?) at the aquarium. I want to come back as one. Biiig, squishy and waterproof.

Bought some peanut-butter M&M’s at a local deli, the Chinese guy behind the counter wetly sneezed into his hand and then picked up the pack and slammed it back down on the counter, proudly annoucing the price of 75c, as if estimated by weight. I think he just wanted to touch it to see me cringe.

No one got beats like Missy. The Cookbook is going to soundtrack my indian summer. Till it’s time to segue into Leonard Cohen et al.

Have decided to quit french toast. It’s a nasty habit. You think it’s a meal but it’s just bread bathed in sugar syrup, with a sophisticated name.

things i’ve seen

thirty thousand feet and not a one without a pedicure

on the corner of 34th and 5th three fire engines, two cop cars and an ambulance, full sirens blaring trying to turn, and people keep crossing at the intersection, a guy hails a cab, and the cab actually stops to pick him up.

the new arrivals are those that walk staring up at the buildings.

talking here is an agility game. commuting is an agility game. paying, ordering, counting, walking. no time to reflect. either allow free flowing spontaneous motion or fail.

i walked into a supermarket yesterday and wandered around for 15 minutes, gnawing at my lower lip, a growing sense of panic and impending doom taking hold of me. in the end i was unable to buy anything constructive and escaped the place crushingly depressed. i don’t know why but the sheer magnitude of choice here gives me a serious case of the shopping blues.

though i knew it would be so, everyone here plays guitar like joe pass or eric clapton, and i’m ashamed to even suggest that i dabble. but it’s like tennis, being around better players is stimulating.

i thought viennese bureaucracy was bad, but in truth kafka hailed from nyc.

it took me a full day to get a cell phone and get it activated.

a woman looking like anne bancroft with a walker tapped at the window of the rental i was driving today. I thought she maybe wanted a lift uptown. She said she was seventy-five, and asked for a few bucks. And i don’t understand how such an arrogantly opulent city can leave grandparents out in the cold.

i’m starting work on monday. i showed up for the inteview dressed as i would for a swiss office job, suit and tie, and was informed that i was overdressed, that i should just, you know, wear regular office clothes, no jeans, no sneakers, but dockers and a shirt, no tie. Ironically, i don’t have any middle of the road clothes since they were of no use to me in CH. And a pair of khakis costs 60 bucks. So i’m considering going in in my underwear or spray-painting my suit-pants beige.

every single woman in SoHo is taller than me, wears pubic hair revealing skirts and knee-high cowboy boots.

i feel like the hick rube that i am.

america is a twilight zone version of europe, on paper they’re identical, but in truth everything here is just slightly skewed, off-kilter, different and bizarre.