I am still being chased by the same assassin. This assassin is relentless and I have had not one moment's rest since the hunt begin last spring. I've tried to make peace, call a truce, end this meaningless war, but you can't reason with this assassin. More machine than man, it finds me every day. Maybe that's because I won't give up my position. I am stubborn, yet unarmed. I am vulnerable, yet unconscious. The assassin comes for me in my sleep, and it is not Teflon. It is not any toxin on planet earth, nor any of my many vices, nor any enemy I've inadvertently or deliberately made through anger or simple obliviousness. This assassin has mysterious powers. It can perform the elusive chemical reaction known as fusion, which, if we were to find it here on Earth, would solve all energy problems, end all oil wars, and make for a damn good action movie starring the starlet of your choice as the highly improbable scientist. This assassin, who is watching me, who is waiting for me, who wakes me from a deep slumber every fucking day (except the cloudy ones), is none other than the sun. Being prone to international travel and moments of reckless abandon, I've felt my heart tugged, if not entirely eviscerated, from thousands of miles away, but this assassin reaches me across millions. All it would take to make me less vulnerable would be one late stoned night and a spontaneous desire to move the furniture, but the thing is, I like my bed where it is. And so I remain the unwilling, tortured victim of this impassive, inhuman ball of fire, which, like so many forces in my life, adheres to no laws and defies all rules. It is simply there, in a constant state of explosion, giving us all life and asking nothing in return. I can hate it, I can love it, I can live by it, I can shrink from it, but it cares not. Each morning, until some indeterminate day in October when I am granted reprieve, it shines through my shades and curtains and reminds me I am not alone, I am not in charge, and I am not asleep. Cruel and harsh and sharp as its light may be, it says, "awake, and begin, and begin again, it's too late, I've shined through your shades, I've pierced your filmy veils, and there's no use pretending you can't see me or all that I illuminate. You can't go back to the strange beauty of your dreams, you are here, and I've brought you, and I give you light, and life, too." You can't argue with an assassin who's also keeping you alive.

Remember how I said I'd get a new email address so you could all get in touch to offer me residence in the shacks on your property or tell me to fuck off? Well, I did. It's superleftypfeffer at gmail dot com. I'll put it down at the bottom of this web page so I can start receiving email in a 10:1 ratio of shack residence offers to spam right away. Why the Pfeffer, you might ask? Because the alias SuperLefty is no longer enough of a pseudonym. Just as my own actual name has been commandeered by an assortment of cat artists, fervent Californian Jews and other writers who live in Brooklyn, so too has my alias. So now my alias has an alias. This one, however, is foolproof. There can't possibly be another SuperLefty Pfeffer in the entire world. I am the only SuperLefty Pfeffer! Also it's almost 3 a.m. and I'm drinking Tanqueray gimlets at my computer though I have scheduled an early lunch with my grandparents tomorrow. This lunch was several weeks in the making. I cancelled twice, and they, without precedent, cancelled once. My grandfather had to see a team of neurologists because, according to my grandmother, he is "unsteady on his feet." My grandfather is 87 years old. You might think the fact that he's "unsteady on his feet" wouldn't require medical attention, but rather, a little acceptance. But if they want to see a team of neurologists, that's cool. Rage, rage against the dying of the light! and all that. We are going to have a very large, vaguely French meal. A meal that will be much more enjoyable if I stop drinking gimlets and go to bed. But oddly, the gimlets have given me a burst of energy and now I have no interest in going to bed, though my bed is four feet away. Instead, I wish to mix cocktails for a team of neurologists! But there are no neurologists here, only my one tiny roommate, humming to herself in the other room.

It's been a while since I've been out, really out in New York. I'd forgotten how it is. It's always the same, in that it's different every time. I forgot how the money disappears from your wallet. I forgot how many other people are out at any given time, but especially on a Friday night, and how acute and complicated is the quiet hum of their own private pain. I forgot what it's like to ride the subway, a glass or two of wine in you from dinner, hair wet, clothes clean, at almost eleven, and know you aren't late at all. I forgot what it's like to emerge in Manhattan and stride across the pavement, all alone, moving fast, boots banging on the sidewalk, looking at everyone with naked aggression. No one calls on Friday night, because everyone has already called. While you're on the way, the phone is mercifully quiet, everyone is already committed to his or her orbit by centripetal force, you are already expected, everything (including you) is in motion, and you are not even so much you as a part of the night about to fall into place.

And then you do, you arrive, you drink, you dance, you inadvertently offend, you squint at yourself in the bathroom mirror. Drugs are exchanged in the bathroom, good drugs, and for a while everyone is happy, and the future is bright.

I forgot how witty everyone is in New York, or maybe it's just my friends and the friends of my friends, how I can't even keep up. Everyone is so vast, so complete, so incomplete. You get the feeling that we are all being a lot more honest than we are willing to admit, and wonder if you're just high.

Before the yuppies next door moved in, the backyard our apartment directly overlooked was empty and gone to seed. Still, we had green outside our window, and a bit of open space and sky--a rarity for New York. The older couple who lived in the house seldom went outside. So seldom, in fact, that when Holly, Steve and I built a refrigerator-box fort one February night and then pushed it off the roof of my building into the backyard next door, it sat there until spring, a fond and disintegrating cardboard memory. I once heard the older couple have a terrible fight in the yard, a fight full of shuddering curses and curdling screams. Other than that, I admired their weeds and rusting, mismatched patio furniture.

Then one day everything changed, as it always seems to be doing. There was youthful vigor bustling about the yard, there was a piercing, female voice ordering around a small army of Latin American yardworkers. There was a dog and a baby with complicated baby accessories. The infamous yuppies had moved in.

For Rebecca and I, the yuppies have been like two more roommates who live across a small garbage alley in a tantalizing paradise of high-end patio furniture and gravity-defying baby strollers. In the last year and a half, they've re-done their yard twice, and I'm happy to report that contrary to several articles I've read in the New York Times Real Estate section, these people are in fact using their outdoor space. (Perhaps I would not be so very jealous of and aggressive toward the yuppies if I wasn't, to my great shame and chagrin, interested in New York real estate and aware of what a fantastic deal they got on a freestanding townhouse with so much outdoor space in a neighborhood in the process of skyrocketing.) From March until November, the yuppies are very much engaged in what many fine housewares catalogs call "outdoor living."

In addition to constituting a third and fourth roommate (fifth and sixth if you count the baby and dog), the yuppies are also like a real-time reality television show we can't turn off. In the course of the yuppies' outdoor living, I've heard the yuppie couple have not a terrible fight like their predecessors, but a very serious marriage discussion of the kind I always suspected existed but never witnessed. (I can report, in my humble and eavesdropping estimation, that the yuppies' marriage is actually pretty good.) I've been paranoid, as I've written before, that the yuppies have heard me having sex, and also possibly talking at the top of my lungs about all the illegal things I've done, and also perhaps yelling at the top of my lungs about how I am going to foment and lead an enormous global revolution and take away all the yuppies' townhouses and fill them with absinthe and trampolines. If the yuppies have heard any of these things, they haven't really let on. I've also been plagued, as I've written before, by the female yuppie's unusually loud voice. All day she talks to her baby and dog in the yard, i.e., my bedroom. (I can also report, in my humble and eavesdropping estimation, that the female yuppie seems to be a loving and understanding mother.) I wake up almost every day to the words, "Don't eat THAT! Don't put that in your mouth!" being spoken at top volume to the toddler, or the dog, or both. It was quite literally not a peaceful coexistence, but I had come to accept it.

The second time the yuppies re-did their yard, we woke up one morning to see that they were putting up a big wooden fence that would separate our rent-controlled, freelance twentysomething depravity from their mortgaged, wedded, breeding domestic bliss. While this fence failed to reduce by one decibel the sound of the female yuppie's incredibly loud voice, it immediately cut off our view of all things green the yuppies had cultivated, from the grass to the expensive shrubbery to all the lovely patio furniture. Our television show became a radio show, and we became like the men in an Orthodox shul, shielded by a barrier both real and symbolic from that which we would be profaned by--and might profane--if we gazed upon it. It was a sad day and the alley rang with our lamentations, as plank by plank the green world disappeared from vieww. Suddenly, outside our window was the usual New York vista of concrete, garbage cans, wall and sliver of sky.

But then things changed again, as they always seem to be doing. Over the summer, many of the plants the yuppies had planted found their way through the spaces in the wooden fence, just as the female yuppie's voice so easily does. And they grew all over our side of the fence, covering it with leaves and flowers. And they met up with other vines coming from other yards, and they are forming a new green world, one just for us, in which our nakedness is hidden from the yuppies and the color of the yuppies' weekend gardenwear is hidden from us. And it is a better world, and we are better neighbors, and the fence, as they say, is a good one.

When Rebecca and I first moved into this apartment four years ago, we bought ourselves a New Yorker subscription in the name of "Schiff Weinstein." Like any two Jewish names mentioned in succession, this conglomeration of our last names sounds more like a law firm than a person. Nevertheless, Schiff Weinstein developed something of a life of his own, at least in the eyes of U.S. Postal Service. In addition to hundreds of issues of the New Yorker, he has received pounds and pounds of junk mail. Mr. Schiff Weinstein has his own set of stick-on mailing labels, courtesy of some children's hospital Mr. Schiff Weinstein has declined to donate to, for fear of receiving more junk mail. Mr. Schiff Weinstein is not a very nice man. Apparently he'd rather let children die of cancer than place one piece of junk mail in the recycle bin.

The problem with Mr. Schiff Weinstein was always that he is not in fact one person. He is in fact two people, Schiff and Weinstein. These two split, female halves of Mr. Schiff Weinstein's tortured and nonexistent personality have been silently fighting over the single issue of the New Yorker for the last four years. Schiff usually gets her hands on it first, being the first one home in the evenings. She prefers to read the New Yorker at the kitchen table while eating cream cheese and crackers, a habit she perfected in adolescence. (When Weinstein started reading the New Yorker, she finally understood why Schiff would never go see any movies with her in high school. Schiff was reading David Denby and Anthony Lane's brilliant and unforgiving reviews in the New Yorker and consequently would sniff at the mention of any movie, "I heard it's not that good.") Weinstein, on the other hand, prefers to carry the New Yorker around with her in a special New Yorker-sized pocket in her satchel, reading it in bits and pieces on the subway. Schiff sometimes takes the New Yorker into bed with her at night. Schiff does not rise until well after noon. If Weinstein wants the New Yorker for a morning commute, she must secrete it in her own bedroom. However, as Weinstein does not wish to admit to herself that she is the kind of person who would hoard a shiny, fresh New Yorker and keep it from the other half of Mr. Schiff Weinstein, the person to whom it rightfully belongs and is in fact addressed, Weinstein must not only secrete the New Yorker in her own room, but do so while lying to herself about the very act she is committing. This upsets Weinstein, because while she did not understand much of the Sartre she labored over for most of the year 2000, she does know that Sartre thinks lying to yourself is bad. She read all about Sartre, in fact, in the New Yorker not long ago and how nasty he and Simone de Beauvoir were to all their other lovers. Weinstein estimates that 68% of her amalgamated knowledge of the world comes from the New Yorker, and this may be one reason she's willing to go to such lengths to ensure that she reads it.

For four years, the idea of purchasing a second New Yorker subscription for the bifurcated halves of Mr. Schiff Weinstein was never discussed. Then one day, Schiff asked Weinstein to stop taking the New Yorker on the train for days at a time, and Weinstein had a stroke of brilliance. "I'll get my own New Yorker subscription," said Weinstein, and in that moment she realized that this was something she had dreamt of ever since she first read a Talk of the Town and thought, "Well, isn't that just terribly clever."

Mr. Schiff Weinstein continues to receive the New Yorker, as does his friend (and perhaps married relative), Meg Weinstein-Pfeffer. (Weinstein prefers to have magazine subscriptions sent to various aliases, so she can track the junk mail that they send her and direct her ire accordingly. A pointless but amusing sport.)

The only problem is, Meg Weinstein-Pfeffer started receiving the New Yorker while her superhero alter ego, Super Lefty, was in Peru for three weeks. Super Lefty and her magazine-receiving alter ego Meg Weinstein-Pfeffer hoped vaguely that the New Yorker would publish those double issues they sometimes do, the ones that are both a disappointment and a relief when they arrive with an ampersand in the date in the upper right corner, indicating that no new New Yorker will arrive next week, and this particular New Yorker is to suffice for two weeks. No such luck. Super Lefty arrived back in New York this week to find that Meg Weinstein-Pfeffer had received no less than three New Yorkers, one for each week Super Lefty and her alter alter ego, Dwight D. Eisenhower (apparently, wearing army pants rolled up over one's boots and a leather jacket and some aviator sunglasses and an army green military cap and a pretty necklace one's mother gave one that happens to have a chain that kind of looks like tiny ball bearings and chewing on a toothpick or a smoke all the time can cause a person to look like Dwight D. Eisenhower, but that is the impression of others, Super Lefty maintains that she was simply dressing for the weather and terrain) were away in Peru. And of course by today, today being Wednesday, a fourth New Yorker has arrived, this one some kind of special 9/11-fifth anniversary issue.

And so after years of alternately hoarding, sharing and losing the New Yorker, Meg Weinstein-Pfeffer is literally drowning in New Yorkers. It's all she can do to blow through the mid-August issues, reading outdated but still brilliant political commentary by Hendrik Hertzberg and articles about surfboards and conductors the rest of the L train has long since forgotten, in her quest to reach the present New Yorker moment. Weinstein firmly believes that a New Yorker should be read in the week that it arrives, or not at all, otherwise it becomes a blur of that unmistakable font, a cacophony of witty observations and meticulous, sprawling journalism. But the August New Yorkers, untouched as they were by Schiff, addressed as they were to Weinstein (or Meg Weinstein-Pfeffer) were just too tantalizing. And so Meg Weinstein-Pfeffer is learning the hard way to be careful what you wish for. If it's your own subscription to the New Yorker and you have a credit card, you just might very well get it.

I have writ (?) something new after my August hiatus. Here it is. I always plan to write so very much while I'm away, and I do, but in my notebook, not on the computer. The real reason, I'm sad to say, is that the computers in the internet cafes of foreign countries often have sticky keyboards and infuriatingly hidden punctuation, and I feel like a pianist playing a broken piano. My true talent, you see, is typing. I type upwards of 90 w.p.m., and if I can't type, and I can't tune in to the station where the words are coming from. We are all radios and when we do any kind of work we're not even hardly there. Or haven't you read Bluebeard, by Kurt Vonnegut? I ran smack into Kurt Vonnegut one day when I was late for a Fulbright information session at the UN. I do so wish I'd said something to him other than, "Sorry, sir!" Now I don't have a Fulbright or any good advice from Kurt Vonnegut. But I suppose the radio thing and his other two dozen books are enough advice for one lifetime. If I'd asked him right then, his advice might have been, "Slow down!" and I would have listened, because I greatly admire Kurt Vonnegut.

But I digress. This is not a rambling, but rather a very important message to you, The Readers, from me, your Super Lefty. The message is this: that email address I've just erased from the bottom of this page is defunct. Kaput. Un-useable. Its junk mail has finally multiplied to horrific proportions, and I am no longer able to receive email there at all. So if you've sent an email to emily at superlefty dot com anytime since, say, June, please assume I haven't gotten it, not that I just don't care. I do care. I care so much I'd stand out in the rain, shivering, under the window of your email, looking longingly up at it while it slept in a canopy bed.

I will work out this email problem on the double, and then you can once again write me to tell me that I amuse you, or that I most certainly do not amuse you. Those seem to be the two camps out there, if memory serves. If you are the person who shares my complex feelings about Curt Schilling, I'd like to take this opportunity to say that I've really put a lot of that behind me, and I hope time has healed your wounds as well. If you are my mother, please stop reading this web site and then hesitantly asking me if I have a drinking problem. If you are the fellow who wrote to offer me residence in the small shed on your property in Virginia, I must say I'm intrigued but a little afraid. In future emails, please explain the size and furnishings of the shed and also give some convincing evidence that you are not an axe murderer. I hate to assume such things, but you know, the shed in the remote area, it has connotations. All others, please don't be discouraged from offering me free real estate. I live in a very tiny and expensive room.

I've been back on American soil exactly twenty-four hours (eight of them in blissful Xanax slumber) and this is what I've observed. The usual things: America is big and rich and profane, but things generally work better and faster here than in other places. By "things" I don't mean ideas like happiness or democracy, but things like public transportation and plumbing.

You can't tell who's American and who's a foreigner just by looking. Anyone here could be American, and anyone here could be from someplace else. This fact has already been used to advertise the services of a bank. In fact, the bank's clever ads were lining the very hallway I walked down on my way to the immigration hall, where they waited with rubber stamps to re-admit me, so I could assess the state of my union with these United States.

As the Homeland Security Guard scanned my passport, he asked where I'd gone, and what was the purpose of my visit. I paused for a moment. The purpose of my visit? The purpose? Of my visit? To find out what's at the end of certain roads. To glimpse the tiny, squirming bodies of three newborn puppies born on their mother's first birthday. To take the purest and finest and rawest of fish and other fine substances into my body and let them work their magic. To ride a moto up and down the same stretch of the Pan-American highway, running an errand that quickly turned into a wild goose chase. To get stoned with my best friend in one of the seven wonders of the world and sit on a precarious ledge laughing at the parade of tourists. To lie on the beach about three kinds of high and drunk with my other best friend and laugh at things that may or may not be funny. To ride half an hour into the desert with to sit in a pool of sulfuric mud with both of them and take the cure of its murky waters. To become a godmother. To wait out a rainstorm smoking alone in an Incan tomb. To drink Jim Beam Black in a rooftop hammock. To finally see the way that Pink Floyd album synchronizes with The Wizard of Oz. To mix a couple dozen martinis and drink all of them straight, but some of them on the rocks as well, the big giant rocks of a field through which children sometimes ran and frolicked. To treat the sunset like a concert and the sun like a temperamental rock star. To go on a series of stoned shopping sprees. To stay up all night and fall asleep in the street of a town where there aren't any gringos at all. To eat very thin slices of raw alpaca meat on toast, to eat cocaine gnocchi. To buy a bathing suit of a brevity not normally worn in the Northern Hemisphere. To improve my Spanish. To watch clouds blow across a glacier. To serenade a bemused taxi driver with the better part of Joni Mitchell's Blue. To get a really good deal on a custom-made leather jacket.

"Tourism," I said.

The Homeland Security Guard waved me through without welcoming me back. I like it when they at least say, "Welcome back." I always say, "Thank you," while silently thinking, "This empire will fall in my lifetime and one day you'll work for us, sowing the fields of fine legal drugs and dismantling all the subdivisions, blowing up all the unseemly architecture and cleaning all the rivers, one by one."

America is a place where words sometimes fail to describe the reality of the situation, but there are certain answers to certain questions that keep the line moving along.

Since I came back to America, my only travels within the city have been up and back on North Sixth Street. There's a new expensive boutique on North Sixth Street and a real estate agency where another expensive boutique on North Sixth Street used to be. I thought an expensive boutique was the highest form of evolution a storefront in this neighborhood could take, but I was wrong. Real estate agencies are the true endpoint. Soon the blocks will be solid with real estate agencies, and they'll simply buy, sell and rent one another.

Every time I go away, the neighborhood changes in my absence. One summer I returned from my travels to find the neighborhood overrun with fratboys and the girls who love them, but that was several years ago and they've long since blended in. Now I've come back from my travels, on the national holiday that marks the end of summer no less, but I can't find in it me to feel any outrage or shock. The entire waterfront of this neighborhood has been sold to developers, and the new real estate agency has a tiny, precise model of a luxury condominium complex in it. I never thought I'd miss the old real estate agencies with their handwritten signs advertising overpriced rentals, but now I do.

America is a place where one form of insidious destruction disguised as progress can just as easily give way to another more overt and unstoppable one.

Since I got back to America, all I've eaten has been some hummus, a handful of very low-dose Xanax, a large Korean meal and a whiskey, neat. All I've made is a color-coded weekly schedule of how my livelihood is to be wrangled, scammed and otherwise earned for the next little while.

America is a place where we have a vast choice of things to consume, provided we can make enough money to buy them, and we sometimes need pills to get to sleep at night. Or dawn, as the case may be.