Now I am home alone. What do I do when I'm home alone? I drink whiskey neat in a tiny Morroccan glass. I watch Sex and the City. I don't wear underwear and I wear my glasses. I smoke pot and rearrange my furniture. I am suddenly siezed by urges to find pieces of paper or old photographs in my files. I find them. (My files are very well organized, all the easier for reminiscing.) All the lonely people, and aren't they all the same? Aren't we all drinking, smoking, searching, watching, myopic and half-naked?

There is a song that the naked ladies with the ukeleles played, and it is haunting me. They sang the chorus a capella as they thumped their thumbs against their ukeleles, and it had the word "night" in it, and it's the only song I want to hear right now. And it sounds like another song, but neither of these songs are on my "Things That Sound Alike" iTunes Playlist, and so the only music in this room is the hum of the air conditioner.

My dad bought me this air conditioner. He bought me every electrical appliance in this apartment, except the toaster. Rebecca's mom bought that. My dad actually did buy us a toaster, but I accidentally set it on fire. I hold Mark Bittman the cookbook author responsible for that, though, because his index has a mistake in it. Mark Bittman's book How to Cook Everything is very useful to me, because I don't really know how to cook anything (except pesto and martinis). But Mark Bittman, he lies about some things. The recipe for breadcrumbs was not where he said it was. He said it was on page 259, but on page 259 is a recipe for White Pizza. I got impatient and decided to wing it, and there went the toaster. I suppose somewhere in that cookbook is a recipe for breadcrumbs, but I'll never know where. My college mentor, a.k.a, the foremost Black Existentialist in the world, said that it's very important to have a good indexer for all your books. It was the kind of offhand advice that makes quite an impression on a young person, especially coming from the foremost Black Existentialist in the world.

It's hard to set an air conditioner on fire, though, so I still have that. My iPod was almost incinerated last week, but luckily that all turned out just fine. There are many ways I'd like to imitate my parents when I'm (God forbid) one day a parent, and buying unnecessarily powerful gadgetry for my children will be one of them. The air conditioner my dad got for me is designed to cool a room twice the size of mine. I've never run it above "Low Cool" and my room is an icebox. Having overly powerful gadgetry is one way my family expresses love and feels safe.

My parents were both here in this very apartment tonight. I met them in Prospect Park to see the showing of Dracula with a live orchestra and they gave me a ride home. Unfortunately, Dracula was cut short by a massive thunderstorm, but before it was, I saw enough to be enthralled. It's very strange to see the source of such colloquialisms as "I vant to suck your bloood" and "I am...Count Dracula." I know these phrases not as lines in a movie, but as cliches. When Bela Lugosi first came on the screen, I was struck by how serious he was, how at the source of all these parodies was such a direct and perfect embodiment of a character.

It was most amusing for me to watch Dracula while sitting in between my parents, because when I was a kid I was terribly afraid of scary movies and music in minor keys. I learned the term "minor keys" just so I could describe the exact type of music that scared me. Now that I am finally able to watch a scary movie scored by music in a minor key all by myself, I was instead doing it just as I always had--flanked by the two five-foot-four-inch Jewish people who gave me life and kept me safe, safe from music in minor keys and safe at the comfortable and artificial temperature of 74 degrees.

My parents imparted to us a belief in safety, but also a sometimes contradictory thirst for adventure. My brother is now a whitewater rafting guide on the West Coast, and I spent a week of the summer on tour with a band, and will spend another three in the Andes. I think my mother would be totally out of her mind with worry if she weren't taking a series of seaplanes to a remote British Columbian island in a week to distract herself from the fact that her two children are, in her mind, constantly in danger of capsizing on a Class V waterfall or getting thrown into a foreign jail, without a jacket.

"So," she said casually, "Are you going to Bolivia, or just Peru?" I can tell she thinks there are some kind of still greater dangers in Bolivia, but she's putting up a brave front. Last summer, when Holly and I went on our fishing trip to Nicaragua, my mom implored me before I left, "Emily, I know you and Holly really like to do all kinds of crazy things together, and the two of you together come up with some wild ideas, but please, you're going to a foreign country. You can take hallucinogens here at home, where you won't get lost."

Well we didn't even take any hallucinogens in Nicaragua, so she worried for nothing. (We've taken most of our hallucinogens in city and state parks, and I have gotten lost, but only in my own mind, which is a much scarier place than any foreign country.) Instead we climbed a giant volcano with what I now realize was a totally incompetent guide and got lost in the jungle in the dark and almost slid off the not entirely stable cliffs all the way down the side of the volcano. And wandered around a vaguely menacing border town for two days, drunk. But other than that I would say the trip was totally safe. Well, the rest of the trip I took with Holly was pretty safe. We went to a colonial city, grumbled about colonialism and wound things up by skinny-dipping with some strangers in the harbor of a beach town. Then she went to Peru to see her boyfriend and I went off by myself. Which was completely safe except for the part where I went surfing for three days, unsupervised, in this beach town on the brink of gentrification. It was wonderful. I traveled thousands of miles and I finally felt like I was in Williamsburg circa 1996. I took one surfing lesson and then the guy gave me a board and sent me out into the crashing waves for three days at no charge, where I was battered to a pulp except for the two or three times a day I stood up on my board and actually surfed. But then at the end of the three days I found out that I hadn't really been unsupervised. "We've been watching you," said the Costa Rican surfing instructors on the shore. But there was something about the way they said it that didn't exactly make me feel safe.

The Yoga Farm I went to after that was very safe. Except for the snakes on the road in the dark. But I don't think there were really as many snakes as Balbino the horseback riding guide made there out to be. He was just really paranoid about snakes because he'd been bitten by a poisonous one and almost died.

This year my mother has nothing to worry about in:re what has become my annual sojurn to Latin America, because this year Chloe is coming, and Chloe is nearly a licensed physician. So, you know, while we're taking the hallucinogenic drugs on the Andean moutaintop, she'll be able to monitor our progress in medical terms.

And as for worrying what might happen to me while on tour with the rock and roll band, my mother is just being ridiculous. The band spends most of it's time inside a van, so I was essentially being supervised the entire time by a highly trained team of experts who have a lot of experience with teenagers. There was nowhere at all for me to get lost. Well, I did get lost for a little while in Vegas, but I wasn't really lost. I was just asleep on a couch in a dark corner, and the band was very busy setting up their rock and roll show. I don't think they would ever have left me on the couch in Vegas, unless they had picked up another adorable teenaged runaway.

Lost and safe are relative terms anyway. You're never really lost, I reason, because if you got there, wherever there is, you can always get back. And you're never really safe because we're all going to die anyway. It's sad to say, but no matter how powerful your air conditioner, something's gonna get ya. It's taken me longer than most people to realize this (such is the soothing power of powerful gadgets) but I'm starting to accept it. The only way to keep from getting completely lost is to record your image and voice in a film good enough to be shown at outdoor film festivals a century from now, and even then, one big bolt of lightning is all it will take to make your graven image flicker, and go dark.

Recently I was in Death Valley, looking for the nearest liquor store and feeling most peculiar. My skin felt like it was about to burst into flames, but it was the nagging sense of deja vu that was really bothering me. There was something about this town and its few buildings that was oddly familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. I was certain I'd never been to the Mojave Desert before, never experienced this feeling of being roasted alive, outside my one trip to the Russian & Turkish Baths on Tenth Street. I'd definitely never felt this close to being roasted alive while aboveground in the bright sunshine without a young Turk flogging me with an olive branch.

It was a very particular and specific experience, walking along the dusty sidewalks of this desert town with these two very particular gentlemen, one in a black suit and a grey fedora and the other in a black and white baseball shirt, in the dead heat of the day. A heat of about one hundred and fifteen degrees, if the giant thermometer in the center of town was correct. That giant thermometer itself was strangely familiar, as was the ubiquitous brand name "Bun Boy." It must be the heat, I thought. I must be delirious. I kept trying to form a sentence about the Russian Turkish Baths and hoping that my sunblock would survive the short walk. The black, gray and white clad men were saying things I could only vaguely hear through the obliterating heat, things about high-contrast photographs of their former bands taken in this very desert. I prayed that one of those buildings that said "Bun Boy" would soon also say "liquor." Why did everything in this town say "Bun Boy"? What sort of a person was this Bun Boy and just how did he remain so impervious to the heat? And why did I feel that I'd seen Bun Boy at his desert outpost before?

We arrived at some kind of liquor store and were rewarded for our efforts with cheap wine in individual tiny bottles. I may or may not have purchased a popsicle; my memories are fuzzy and my notes on the incident do not include food. I eventually drank enough of the cheap wine in the tiny bottles not to really register the existence of Las Vegas at all, which was probably for the best. But before the desert and the tiny wine combined to produce an even greater delerium, one final shudder of deja vu awaited me back on the Interstate. We passed a road sign for Zzyzx Road and I thought, "I have been down this road before."

But really, I had never been down that road before. I most certainly had never been down that road in a van with an entire rock and roll band, their adorably dreadlocked manager and their equally adorable sixteen-year-old runaway, drinking wine out of a miniature bottle in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I think I would remember something like that.

The wine, the heat and the music took care of these questions by simply untethering them from my mind and sending them drifting into the night sky. It wasn't until a week later when I returned home and began sorting through the pile of papers on my desk that I learned why the giant thermometer, the Bun Boy and the sign for Zzyzx Road were all so familiar.

A few years back, my friend Sara took a cross-country trip that ended in New York, where she stayed with me for a couple of days. I remember feeling terrible that I couldn't show her around better, as I was employed on Wall Street at the time. The sole benefit of my employment on Wall Street was getting to see Springsteen from the seventeenth row at the Meadowlands while drunk on free champagne, but that's neither here nor there. Sara accidentally left some pictures of her cross-country trip at my house and for the intervening six or seven years, I've kept them carefully in an envelope marked, "Sara." I've seen her a few times since then but always forgotten to give them to her. Every so often I take them out and look at them, always puzzling over what the significance of that road sign or street or place might be. The picture of Sara in the sequined cowboy hat I always recognized as the kind of silly road trip high-jinks picture, but the rest of them never quite added up.

Until now, that is.

All the touchstones of our desert rest stop were there. The Bun Boy, the giant thermometer, the sign for Zzyzx Road. I didn't know where we were and didn't think to ask, but apparently we were in the town of Baker, and the Bun Boy, the giant thermometer and the sign for Zzyzx road are considered the photogenic local curiosities of the town that bills itself the "Gateway to Death Valley." I had been to Baker many times before, not in my dreams, but in an envelope of someone else's memories. If Sara had disappeared, but I'd always had the sense that she'd been kidnapped by aliens and the mysterious envelope of pictures was my only clue to this mystery, then our walk down the street in Baker, California might have been come to something. But instead, like many experiences I have, it was only a nagging sense of deja vu soon obliterated by drunkenness.

The media loves to report on how porous airport security really is, but I can tell you firsthand that if you take an army regulation ammunition box, slap a skull and crossbones sticker on the side of it and fill this box with wires, batteries and electronic devices, your will get a reaction out of the Department of Homeland Security.

It certainly wasn't my intention to bring operations at the Long Beach airport to a screeching halt at 9:00 p.m on a summer Sunday. I was looking forward to my return to New York after two weeks on the West coast, enjoying such delights as camping on the beach, touring with a rock band and watching old movies in cemeteries while eating big picnic dinners. Full of belly and nearly empty of bank account, I packed my belongings carefully in their various containers. I packed my arsenal of beauty products in their little zip-up kit. I packed my collection of black, white and camouflage clothing in my backpack. I packed my books and papers in my satchel. I packed my batteries, chargers, wires, iPod, digital voice recorder and camera in the fantastic heavy-duty metal ammunition box I bought for $7.95 in an army surplus store in Oregon. I closed the box with a satisfying screech and clank and admired how nicely the promotional sticker from the tour I had just been on--a red-on-white skull and crossbones--looked decorating the outside, how neatly all my electronic devices fit inside, how well-protected they would be during all my future journeys, now that I had my fantastic new box.

At the airport security check-in, I felt paranoid and guilty, as I often do in the presence of uniformed officials. When I didn't beep walking through the metal detector and escaped the wand and pat-down, I was surprised. Usually I forget to take off my belt or empty my pockets of change and am separated from the herd and made to stand on the little footprints, like a criminal in a ballroom dancing class. I am always certain they are going to detect the drugs in the fatty linings of my cells or the violent anti-government fantasies in my mind and take me away to a little room and do something unpleasant to me, or just make me wait for a long time under a buzzing fluorescent light with no reading material.

I waited on the other side for my stuff to come through the conveyor belt, trying to think innocent thoughts. After a few moments, I realized that my stuff was not appearing on the conveyer belt like a happy little parade of things I own marching back to greet me. In fact, the conveyor belt was stopped and a small crowd was gathering around the screen. "Pam," said the woman quietly. "Get Tom." There was some walkie-talkie conversation, and a man in a different uniform came over and considered the screen. "Get Bob," said Tom. A man in still another uniform came over. "You see that?" said Tom. "Uh-huh," said Bob.

His voice was grim. It was moments like these he trained for, possibly even read airline safety trade publications for. Moments like these that compelled him to polish his badge and keep his innersoles fresh, his gaze steady, his mind sharp and his unmentionables powdered and dry.

Tom squinted at the screen and pursed his lips. Motionless, shoeless and defenseless, I began to sweat.

"It's an iPod!" I wanted to say. "It's a cell phone charger!" But I said nothing. There were posters everywhere that said, "Joking about a bomb in your luggage is a federal offense." What if they took any attempt to explain the contents of my box to be some form of self-incrimination? What if they got one of those robots and took away my fantastic new box and all the things inside it and blew it up on the tarmac? What if there were traces of actual ammunition on the ammunition box and they found them and called me terrorist and took me to Guantanamo Bay? I'd never read the New Yorker again. I'd hang myself in my cell when I got tired of teaching the other inmates algebra, another casualty of the empire.

"It's an ammunition box," I heard Bob say. Or was it Tom? Someone came over with a little wand. They swabbed the box on all sides and put the wand in a machine. The machine beeped frantically. What was the machine detecting? What if it detected everything? It was probably an Everything Detector, and the box was probably covered in traces of all kinds of nastiness--some of it mine, some of it the nastiness of the NATO soldier who once kept his M80 shells in there. They were going to charge me with possession of gunpowder and about a dozen different illegal substances I had probably exhaled on the box while rooting for my extra camera battery. There was gunpowder on my box! And drugs on my gunpowder!

Everyone seemed excited about the beeping machine, but it remained unclear what exactly its beeping had revealed. Then there was an uncomfortable pause. "So, who's gonna open it?" asked one of the securers of our homeland. "I'll open it," said Tom. Or was it Bob? He fumbled with the clasp, the very strength of which was the reason I had bought this drug- and gunpowder-smeared box to begin with. Or rather, bought this gunpowder-smeared box and smeared it with drugs. Obviously, Tom wasn't a military man himself, and dubiously qualified to open this box or defend our homeland. Did I detect a nervous trembling seeping through the precision of his procedure? His meaty fingers scrabbled at the lid.

I wanted to help, but I kept quiet. Everyone in line was looking at me. My shoes hadn't come out of the machine yet. I stood there barefoot, in a fluffy black tulle skirt, a rather filthy t-shirt, my army green baseball cap and protective aviator glasses. I tried not to look deranged.

Even though I knew there was nothing dangerous in the box, all the activity surrounding it had created some suspense. When it was revealed that the box was filled with several hundred dollars worth of small sound recording and playing devices, I breathed a sigh of relief along with the better part of the Long Beach Airport security staff. As the officials pulled each object from the box, they shook their heads and said, "ohhhhhhh," a little revelation with each part of my electronic arsenal. It turned out it was the four-pack of AAA batteries that had particularly alarmed them. In order to keep my cables from tangling, I had wrapped them around things--an unopened package of batteries, my iPod, my camera, never imagining that this configuration of objects might resemble a small bomb. I had inadvertently proved the airport staff's ability to identify four little cylinders all lined up and surrounded by wire and several unidentified electronic devices and react accordingly.

"You might not want to fly with that thing again," said one of the security guys as I repacked my box and hustled away.

"Believe me, I won't," I replied. I walked over to the waiting area in a daze of relief and fear and promptly smashed my shin into a metal pole. Not wanting to attract any more attention, I swallowed my curses and whimpers. The pain felt good. I was free.

Blog! said Greg Daly, so I blog. Normally, Greg Daly drives the van, but he's resting in the backseat and Franz is driving. I'm here in traffic in southern California, drunk, in a van with a six-person rock and roll band. Normally, they're an eight-person rock and roll band, but some people have to work, sometimes. Pity. All the other people on the road here in California have been working all day, instead of getting drunk in a van.

Getting drunk in a van is a serious business and we appraoch it accordingly. This morning began in Vegas with a martini and some video blackjack. I left Vegas down $7.00 but up one shower, which I consider a triumph. You see, I 've become the biographer of the Greatest Rock and Roll Band of All Time. I think it's going to be an opinionated biography, lacking some of the detachment of most journalistic pieces, but including more of the drunkenness. Last night the band played Vegas and I did my best to observe their every action by getting drunk in the van in the desert and then passing out on the couch in the Double Down Saloon (slogan: "The Happiest Place on Earth"). Somehow I managed to wake up in time to see the band play a great show. "Band played a great show," I wrote dutifully in my notebook. "Got drunk and passed out on a couch in the Double Down Saloon in Vegas. Rock and roll is here to stay."

This isn't my debauchery, it's my research. Thanks to network television, mainstream publishing and the NEA, too many undeserving stories have been told, and I am here to tell one of the more important stories I've happened upon in my sweet short life. ("Goddamn you're old," cackled the woman who scrutinized my ID at the rest stop outside Vegas.) And so in the name of research, and storytelling, and the imortalization of those few who actually deserve immortiality, I have sacrficed myself to a week of drinking, sleeping in punk squats lacking toliet paper and other amenities, and subsisting on a diet of pretzels and boxed wine.

How often do you get to put your iPod on random and when a song comes on, it so happens that the entire band that recorded it is sitting all around you, drunk and stuck in traffic? That is the sort of event I wish to bring all several dozen of you, dear readers, from the trenches of human experience--the experience of touring with a rock and roll band and letting them judge you by the shuffle of your iPod.

Naturally, I celebrated the overly mythologied beginning of this vile empire by hiding from a misogynist cockatoo in the hills outside of Portland, Oregon. It wasn't too hard to hide, since both the cockatoo and I were in the mansion of the Kentucky Fried Chicken scion, and there was plenty of room for both of us.

The scion of the Kentucky Fried Chicken empire is one half of an gay couple who have devoted their lives to two things: a modern dance nonprofit and Barney, the misogynist cockatoo. Neither the scion of the Kentucky Fried Chicken empire nor his partner was present in the mansion to celebrate the beginning of our vile empire, which, come to think of it, also rests heavily on fried chicken. They were away in the south of France on vacation, and kindly encouraged my friend Greg, who was housesitting for them, to open their home to his own guests to alternately celebrate, ignore, pamper, hide from and grill the various birds of our nation.

Enter a dozen people, a jug of sangria, and some marinating ribs, already smoked.

When we arrived at the mansion, Greg was a wreck. Four days spent largely with Barney the misogynist cockatoo had wreaked havoc on his nerves. Caring for Barney was far more involved than feeding the average neighbor's cat or fish. Barney came with two pages of typed instructions, detailing how often and when he was to be fed his specially prepared diet of couscous, sweet potatoes and broccoli. Barney, reported Greg, liked to watch movies before bed, but only movies with much dialogue and little action. The directions advised that if you don't go to bed when Barney goes to bed, he gets upset. Best of all, Barney is tempremental and hates women. He has attacked women viscously in the past and sent them to the emergency room. Therefore, the women at the party were kept from his sight, and Barney was kept from ours.

Barney was spirited away to another wing of the vast house and I was advised repeatedly not to even look at him should we accidentally meet. The scenario gave me an eerie feeling I hadn't had since we attended my Orthodox cousin's wedding and my mother, grandmother and I were forced to sit on a separate side of the temple from my father, grandfather and brother. It was the feeling that there was something about me I couldn't change that was both dangerous and inflammatory.

With Barney duly hidden, we pampered Greg instead. One dose of Kava Kava, one juice smoothie and several joints and cocktails put a little distance between him and the bird. Only the many posters of Hitchcock's The Birds, white feathered wreaths in the bathroom and bird likenesses in every room reminded us of the beast downtstairs.

As the party progressed, all the men drifted away to pay their respects to Barney. Everyone came back with a story. "I talked to Barney." "I danced with Barney." "Barney and I played a special game." I would have been jealous, but I was too busy feasting on the flayed flesh of other animals, while Barney pecked at his vegetarian dishes in the house's small but well-appointed gymnasium.

The afternoon was a banquet of delights. I ate my first oyster. We devoured ribs, grilled shrimp, vegetables, corn, sausages, hot dogs. We whipped fresh cream and ate it with berries. There was proscuitto and melon, there were specially-glazed hazelnuts, there was venison pate, which itself was wrapped in bacon. There was fine wine and fine weed. I quickly forgot that I was a second-class citizen, and that somewhere in this beautiful mansion lurked a bird who given the opportunity would rip my lower lip from my face. I licked my lower lip. It tasted of cream, of salt, of Syrah.

The table grew heavy with carcasses. Bones and husks and shrimp shells were piled on plates, puddles of wine and ash littered its surface. It was a meal in the style of another long-gone empire, a meal of locally-grown produce and artisan charcuterie that this empire never intended. Only by selling billions of buckets of deep-fried chicken to the ever-expanding people of this ever-expanding empire had our absent hosts managed to make it possible for us to dine this way--in the hills outside the city, in the shadow of our exploding, self-devouring nation, in hiding from a pampered bird who lives in a beautiful glass prison. In its own odd way, it seemed right.

And that is why the symbol of my nation won't be a noble eagle, but Barney the misogynist cockatoo, to remind us we must feast in the sunlight on the decks of other people's mansions, even if very nearby someone who's never met us is quietly plotting our demise.

So I've been busying myself making money and laying plans to entertain you with tales from places not New York this summer. I've made so many plans I'm exhausted just trying to pick a flashlight for each of them. How do you pack for a week of camping on the West Coast followed immediately by a week on the road with a punk band that hates hippies? A lot of the things that are useful to have while camping look suspiciously like something a hippie would own. And I can't even make my usual excuses like, "It's not my fault I'm wearing this Polartec fleece jacket, I don't even know what's happening, because I'm in California," because this band happens to perform a song called, "All of California and Everyone Who Lives There Stinks."

So I leave for the West Coast in twenty-one hours and counting, and I can't decide which boots to bring. If I bring the hiking boots, the punks will mock me, and if I bring my combat boots, I'll get blisters when I'm hiking. And the combat boots don't have Gore-Tex, and therefore will get wet if I cross any streams. But if I just bring the hiking boots, I'll have nothing to wear with my white fringed flapper dress at the show in Vegas, though come to think of it, combat boots are not the right shoes for that dress either. What goes with a white fringed flapper dress? What goes with Vegas? I refuse to bring more than one pair of boots, because I am somewhat well-traveled and one of the rules I've made for myself is "never bring more than one pair of boots." You understand my dilemma. Surprisingly, there are no magazine articles called, "How to pack for a week of camping followed by a week on the road in California with a band that hates California and camping and hippies," and that is why I long ago started wearing a pair of army pants and a 37-pocket black fishing vest everywhere I go besides New York City.

I think my best bet is to wear my headlamp all the time, turned on, so everyone who looks at me is blinded by a flash of light and can't see what I'm wearing.

I promised you neatness, I promised you nausea. I promised you a wedding and a war and a volcano. I promised you Dr. Michael S. Cohen and his magical wall-mounted ear-vaccum.

Here are the first two.

The others require true love, proper attire, hundreds of thousands of people and their equivalent tonnage in tanks, landing craft, ammunition and rations, millions of years of geologic time and four years at a good medical school, another several in the finest of residency programs, and what I'd imagine is a fortune in malpractice insurance.

So I'll have those for ya next week.

I don't put much stock in astrology. There have got to be more than twelve kinds of people in the world, and I hear the astronomy in those days wasn't too accurate. But much to my chagrin, one of the cardinal rules of my own sign, Virgo, seems to apply to me and many other Virgos with unwavering accuracy. This would be the part of the one-paragraph summary of your personality in which you are told, "You are neat. You are clean, to the point of rigid. You prefer order and hate deviations from it."

While I detest rules, law, and the rule of law, there is one system of rule, law and order that I take very seriously. That is the one that says: use a coaster, sweep the kitchen floor every day, line up your hair products in size order, alphabetize your books and subdivide them by genre, fold your undies and separate them by color, and there IS an appropriately-sized Tupperware, box or container for every item.

Breakdowns in my adherence to these maxims are few and far between, and occur mostly during times of extreme illness or inebriation. During the year I spent as a barfly, Rebecca said she knew whether to make sure I wasn't drowning in a pool of my own vomit if she saw that I'd left the keys in disarray on the kitchen table and my pants in a heap on my closet floor. You see, the keys go on the little key hook by the door and pants that I've just removed, but am not going to wash just yet--pants that I privately like to think of as "active"--go on the hook on the back of the bedroom door, next to the "active" yoga clothes and "active" t-shirts. Deviations from this routine were indications that I might have taken dangerous amounts of illegal substances and should be monitored closely.

So, when left alone for the first 48 hours in more than a month, it's no wonder I've devoted myself to simultaneously cleaning every surface in the apartment and every surface on my person. It's been a day of beauty and relaxation for me, a mix of treats and tasks. I had a bikini wax, I mopped the floor, I used my special sea-salt body-exfoliant, I used my ostritch feather duster from the Fuller brush company, I used the non-chlorine glass cleaner. I used a special product called iKlear (chamois included!) to wipe down iPod and iBook.

Now I'm sitting here with a whiskey (neat, of course) listening to the dust settle on my freshly-wiped surfaces and pondering the source of my compulsive cleanliness. It's hard to tell if it's in the stars or in my genes. My father, also a Virgo, is also super-neat. One of my fondest childhood memories is of our routine each night when he would arrive home from work. My mother would altert my brother and I as to our father's imminent return, and we would sit on the back of the couch, facing the window, and wait for him. In the winter, the window was covered in plastic to keep the heat in. I would boing my nose against the plastic, watching the world flex and bulge with its movement.

My father would come in smelling of the woolen cold, and we would kiss his five o'clock shadowed cheeks. I would follow him around the house as he put down his bag, removed his keys, billfold and glasses case and placed them in a row. He did everything with a purpose and care that made the act of putting things in their rightful place seem the act of putting things right. I would sit on the floor in front of his closet as he changed from his work clothes into his home clothes, shaking his suit pants into their crease on the hanger, putting them into the closet on the bottom bar, in line with their matching suit jacket, which he placed carefully on the top bar. He'd take his jeans and flannel shirt down from the hook inside the closet and put them on, turn out the light and close the closet door with purpose, and we'd stride down the hall toward dinner.

So maybe I came to associate neatness with my family being safely reunited and made whole again at the end of the day. Though I prefer to think of my propensity to create order in my desk drawers and closet as a way of shouldering the responsibility I'm taking on by advocating anarchic entropy and lack of order in the world at large. There is order in nature and there is order in every one of us. The systems of our body, the processes by which we replicate our cells and replicate ourselves, the predictability with which the smell of split-pea soup reminds us of the hallways of middle-income high-rise buildings--all of these are strict examples of adherence to order. There is even a kind of order to the disorder of matters as complex as love and war--people fall in love and fall out of it, people destroy people, places and things and whoever is left rebuilds them.

I think that is why I like cleaning up so much--in a world of entropy and destruction, it gives me the illusion taht things can be made right, sorted through, labeled, categorized, put away. At least things in drawers and on shelves.

Order is not inherently bad--it's power exerted through order that's dangerous. I only think we should each be free to define order for ourselves, and that we should be subject to the laws of other people only when drinking beverages in the sovereign nations of their living rooms. Call it the Virgo theory of anarchy.

(Warning: in this essay I will reveal a plot detail of the novel Indecision. I can't decide if this is a major or minor plot detail, but I'm leaning towards minor. Ish. If you prefer to consume your media with no prior knowledge of plot, do not read on. Read this instead.)

Reading the novel Indecision, a fine first novel, an excellent novel, a novel that reminds me of nothing so much as the pleasant sensation of reading young adult novels, in the sense that this is a novel about my exact demographic, I came to feel a certain horrific nausea. The novel itself touches on existential themes (point of jealousy #1--I am existential! I write about existence! Now I must do it louder and better to drown out these other voices also concerned with this unique topic!), though it attributes many of the existential themes to a fictitious philosopher named Otto Knittel, when they are in fact Martin Heidegger's ideas. (Point of jealousy #2--I never read Heidegger, which this author obviously did, since he can quote him and attribute his ideas to a fictitious philosopher of his own imagining. I think there was a Heidegger book in my library carrel that semester in England, but at some point I put it back on the shelf and went to find my art student roommates to smoke hash and beat them all at basketball.)

Of the many themes the novel touches on, which include: indecisiveness, hopelessness, nihilism, doing drugs, doing drugs on September 11, doing drugs in foreign countries, ambivalence, commitment phobia, corporate greed, Marxism, wealth, the irony of anthropology, the ambivalence of sex and the offensive boredom of privilege, there is hardly one with which I don't identify. Of the scenarios described in the book, scenarios at once universal and specific, there is hardly one that I haven't lived, or someone close to me hasn't lived. (Except for the incest theme, that is.)

It's a book about a 28-year-old guy who can't make any important decisions in his life, works in a cubicle at Pfizer and sleeps with a girl he doesn't love that much. Then he takes a pill that's supposed to cure his indecision and goes on a trip to Central America, maintaining his neurotic/ironic detachment from the experiences of his own life until he goes into the Amazon and takes a drug called San Pedro, and has a mind-blowing tripping experience complete with mind-blowing sex.

The thing, therefore, that causes me the most existential nausea about this book is the fact that two years ago I went to South America and I took this same drug and I had a mind-blowing tripping experience. I wrote about it in such abstract terms that no one knew what the hell I was talking about, but it did happen. And now, reading about it in someone else's words, I felt several levels of horrible existential nausea of the kind that can only come from realizing that one of most seemingly unique experiences in your life wasn't unique at all, and that you yourself are not as unique as you seem, and the fact that you desire to be unique--and yet to belong--and that you hold both of these conflicting desires and yet at the same time know that they can never be satisfied, that you will never be truly unique and no one ever truly belongs, only for fleeting moments here and there, if at all, and you and everyone else is going to die without achieving true originality or belonging, that you belong only in the sense that you do not belong and you are unique only in the fine flavors of your own neuroses. The vertigo of these multiple levels of nausea was itself nauseating.

The funny part is, the drug in the book, the drug in my memory, the drug that made me love a garbage can and my best friend and a total stranger equally in one night--it, like many drugs, makes you nauseated, too. But it removes so many other problems, like the fear of death or the terribly sad illusion that we are separate consciousness. (Unless you drink too much and then you might need to pass some time in a minivan until the sound of all the DNA vibrating in the universe just gets a little less noisy.) But if you've only taken a little and are feeling quite fine and also have attained special powers like being able to smell each mountain you can see individually or perhaps understand the feelings that your campfire is trying to convey to you, you might feel some physical nausea, but without a nauseous feeling in your consciousness to land on your physical nausea will only be a pleasant reminder that you are alive. So I experienced existential nausea reading about the physical nausea brought on by one of the only drugs I've ever taken that can actually cure--or at least suspend--existential nausea. But if I had been on San Pedro while I was reading the book, while I might have been physically nauseated, I might not have been so existentially nauseated, because the idea that someone else was living a similar life and writing about it would not have made me so hopeless and sad. Instead, I would have accepted this other person's experience and their writings about it as evidence of the Total Oneness of the Universe. Oh, the irony! The only thing worse than existential angst, worse than nausea! Irony is terribly dangerous, but then, hallucinogenic drugs can be, too. One form of nausea can cure another, but the only cure for all kinds of nausea is death, a concept one can contemplate with both total acceptance and pleasant removal and physical nausea when tripping, and terror, denial and existential nausea when sober.