When I woke up at dawn on Christmas morning feeling peculiar and spent the next two hours naked on my knees puking my guts out, I was annoyed. It's one thing to bring that kind of degradation on yourself through a series of dubious choices. But I made good choices, healthy choices. I ate vegetables. I ate a well-balanced late-night snack. I went to bed early after watching an informative documentary film. It was Christmas, for Christ's sake! Why?

It's tempting to assume I was poisoned by Santa Claus or perhaps the spirit of the Baby Jesus himself. But I abhor Jews who cry anti-Semitism in this brave new age in which hatred in the West has found other objects and Jews have so kindly been invited to join in all the xenophobic fun. This leaves me with the less inflammatory assumption that some ingredient in my balanced late-night snack gave me food poisoning. It figures. I've been to several parts of the world known for inducing digestive distress and emerged completely unscathed. The gods of digestive distress have been lying in wait for me for some time. On Christmas Eve, they followed me to the deli, and then they followed me home. Down the chimneys of the world went the man with the big belly, and up from my own belly came my well-balanced late-night snack, as well as these weird little globs of what I can only assume to be my immortal soul.

It must be said that I am a champion vomiter. Listing ships, turbulent planes, swerving cabs, vigorous dancing, heightened emotion and of course excessive drinking (not to mention any combination of the above) all lead to the immediate and profuse expulsion of dinner from my body. My roommate Rebecca, who hates vomiting so much that she "just doesn't do it," always remarks on the frequency, length and drama of my puking episodes. "They just go on and on," she says, "and then you look up and say, 'Am I gonna die?' and then you collapse in a heap, and sigh, and lose consciousness." The fact that I sleep--and therefore vomit--in the nude adds a certain pathos to the whole situation, I'd imagine.

Despite my many adventures in reverse peristalsis, I hate and fear nausea and find it far worse than pain. Vomiting, while sometimes a relief from nausea, is both distressing and fascinating to me. Vomiting is a moment when our bodies make clear to us just how little control we have of them. It shows us that we are just passengers on a complicated ship whose crew can enact a mutiny at any time. When the body works we hardly notice it at all.

When my body is working, rather than appreciate the ten thousand things it does every second just so my consciousness can experience a few decades of ecstasy, melancholia, neurosis, despair, bliss, fear, rage and occassional boredom before succumbing to deterioration and toxicity, I simply ask it to do more. "Climb that mountain!" I say to my body. "Bring these chemicals to my brain, break them down, and bind them to the little cells there! Now use the extra chemicals to put on a show! Now clean up the chemicals and throw them away! Wake up! Go to sleep! Have an orgasm! Twist into a funny position at the command of a vegan modern dancer! Jump up and down! Faster! Kill these millions and millions of tiny viruses! Make this quiche into pure energy! Maintain equilibrium despite confusing messages from the peripheral vision! Pick up that small child and turn her upside down without dropping her! Run up those stairs! Get on that train!"

To think that my body does all of these things, and yet at times I've been reduced to begging it for mercy. To think that a body has no battery in the back, no slot into which you can stick a coin, release the battery, override the freeze-up and start again.

This is why when it comes to puking, I've found there is one thing and one thing only that can bring me comfort and eventual peace. That is to surrender to the experience completely. To make my surrender clear to the gods of digestive distress in general and my innards in specific I yell, "I surrender! I surrender!" in between retchings until the episode subsides.

Christmas morning, the sound of me alternately retching and shouting, "I surrender!" eventually woke up Rebecca. Shielding herself from the disgusting reality of my distress, she brought me a glass of water and some towels. I made a little bed out of the towels to lie on between spasms of horrific puking. Rebecca went into the next room to read the New Yorker until things quieted down enough to go back to sleep.

The only consolation in my bizarre bout with food poisoning is that it did mar this, the biggest of all national and religious holidays, with the kind of perversion I strive to achieve on every national and religious holiday. As dawn made landfall on the densely populated wealth of the East Coast and children from Maine to Florida were sneaking downstairs to rip the wrapping from their latest consumer orgies and numb themselves into a lombotomized state with toys that would sow the seeds of future eating disorders and violent acts in accordance with the religion that brought us pedophiliac priests, the pro-life movement, the Puritan work ethic and the Madonna-whore complex, I was at least expressing my feelings about this holiday in the most honest, visceral way I could ever hope to--puking my guts out naked before passing out on the bathroom floor.

It's Christmas Eve and the globe is warmed. We've been doing Christmasey things, homey things, staying in, cooking, pulling Pyrex dishes from the oven with mitts. I baked blackberry crisp, I roasted squash. I sauteed greens. Old friends are coming and going from town, guest stars on the show, long-lost voices on the intercom, suitcases on wheels.

Christmas itself is a blissful lull in the flurry of socialization. Everyone is with their families. Most of the Jews are with their non-Jewish significant others' families. I am wrapped in miniature down comforter, watching movies, reading books. The Hanukkah tree is aglow with lights and miniature disco balls, its skull and crossbones, its annual joint, topped not with a star but with Woody Allen. Tomorrow we enact Jewish Christmas--Woody Allen double feature, Chinatown meal. I am worried that the Woody Allen Christmas Day double feature will be sold out, but what would a Jewish Christmas be without worry?

It was a hungover day, lethargic, slow. I woke up at ten, took some Advil, tried to be alive, but it wasn't working, so I had to give up and go back to bed until two. I used to live like this all the time, completely nocturnally, but lately I prefer to get up earlier, get things underway, take in some daylight. I didn't drink so very much last night, but red wine all night, sometimes it makes me feel fine, sometimes it makes me feel sludgy.

I found out in Germany that my last name means "wine sediment," the dregs of the bottle. "Emily Dregs," everyone laughed, a fine punk rock sort of name. Today I felt dregsy, but not in an unpleasant way. It was twilight already when I went to buy some groceries. Stepping out into winter twilight is one of my favorite feelings. If I am only going out for a little while, I like to leave the house while it's still light and come home just as it gets dark. Then even if I've only traveled a few blocks, I feel like I've been somewhere, taken another trip from day to night.

Walking home, I felt the dregs of my red wine hangover swirling in my veins the way wine swirls in a glass when you revolve its stem in a little circle. I love to catch other people doing this, looking down at their near-empty wineglasses and sliding them in circles, considering the wine for a moment before taking the final sip. I like particularly to watch men I find attractive being intimate and authoritative with their wine. I like when they are talking when they swirl their wine and they swirl it absently, and I like when they are not talking, taking leave of the conversation around them, and they swirl their wine intently.

With both the day and the year coming to an end and me full of the last sedimentary dregs of it, I wondered if I was a wineglass on a great big wooden table in a warm, firelit room, and somehwere someone was holding me by my most delicate indentations and gently swirling me, mixing me up before they drank the last of me down.

In my continuing quest to thrill and amuse you, I wrote about the middle of last week. What's more exciting than the middle of last week? Slaves to chronology that we are in this format, it's here.

It's gotten to the point where I basically have no interest in going out, in the traditional sense. Either I'm filthy in a foreign country or I'm ensconced in my tiny apartment. I'm by no means a shut-in; I get out, I get around quite a bit. My day job takes me to every neighborhood in the city where neurosis and college admissions reign supreme, and if time permits, I take long walks in between these neighborhoods, compulsively passing landmarks of personal significance and seeking certain cookies or sandwiches of which I have fond memories. But as far as going out, drinking in bars or going to parties or shows or readings or openings or such things, my appetite is greatly diminished.

I went to a party tonight, only because it was for a local publication for which I wrote an essay and hope to write more and was at a bar only three blocks from my house. I didn't know anyone at this party besides the two people I came with, and soon realized that this was simply a room full of people I didn't know in which I had to pay for the bourbon, and that if I were in my own house I would not have to be wearing pants. Everyone at the party was perfectly fine, well dressed, probably well read. But I have my own friends, who are also well dressed and well read. I was terribly lonely for them. I was lonely for the two friends I was with. I wished we were not surrounded by all these strangers taking digital pictures of one another.

Still, it was interesting to see what was going on on the outside. There seemed to be new clothing trends of which I had not been keeping abreast, though the clothing trends towards the end of a decade are never as pronounced as the ones at the beginning of the decade. The party was a holiday party, and someone made a toast to the publication and Christmas and the year 2006, and I thought, "Holy shit, it's the end of 2006. It's well into the latter half of the decade."

The things this decade will be remembered for--terrorism, war, electoral fraud, nihilism, global warming, the ubiquity of iPods--have already been set in stone, and now we're just living out the end of it. It seems that a decade is like a relationship, any relationship, between lovers or friends or bandmembers or siblings. The patterns are established early on, and as the decade or relationship progresses, they just find new expressions.

I live in a neighborhood known for its ennui, its outfits, its core not so much rotten as empty. Still, it has a magnetism, and people who do not live here often remark that they "should." In 2001 I sensed I should be living here and by the 2002 I lived here. This was the bygone time of pointy shoes and eighties revival, of trucker hats. It was also a time of halfhearted mass protest, or maybe it was wholehearted but ineffective mass protest. I don't know. I participated in the mass protests, but on the day the United States invaded Iraq, I took up yoga across the street from my house. I could see my yoga place from my roof while I was up there drinking, or doing drugs, or being morose, or euphoric. It's that kind of neighborhood.

But the neighborhood was known for something. It was known for trucker hats and yoga centers. It was known for coffeeshops full of computers of uniform brand. It was known, of course, for the most dubious of all cultural movements, hipsterism. It still is, but the trends are less aggressive now, the yoga less obsessive, and the condos are going up, to loom, to obliterate even our most dubious of cultural movements.

I have kept up with the times, I live in the now. I have the computer, I have the iPod, but they're four years old, almost obsolete. They were never intended to cross over into the latter half of the decade. It's absurd that anything could be obsolete after such a short time, but that absurdity more than anything else defines this epoch. We are living in a time of long wars and short lifespans for electronic devices. But how does that differentiate our epoch from any other? We are living in an epoch that slips free of any attempt to define it.

I think the reason I don't like going out is that it reminds me of time passing. The only bar I ever loved closed, and I am a sentimental person, slow to move on. The holiday parties are annual things, they mention the year, and time frightens and depresses me. I have kind friends in foreign lands willing to tell me via email that time does not exist, but I can't fully believe them. Time is passing. Electronic devices are getting faster and smaller and the war goes on. Things are changing, things are staying the same.

The bar we went to tonight, it's been here all the time. It has survived, we realized, as other bars have closed, or changed hands, or become different versions of the same bar. "We'll miss it when it's gone," said one friend. "It's an institution," said the other. "Then let's burn it to the ground!" I said, only half-joking. We were sitting by the bonfire this bar keeps in its backyard, even in winter, a place for smokers to crowd around. Someone from the bar came out, carelessly threw more logs on the pile. He made no effort to stack them in any kind of pattern. "That's no way to build a fire," I thought. But the fire, haphazardly, burned on.

It was a manic-depressive week of extreme highs and lows. Days of impressive productivity and pleasant megalomania alternated with hazes of mundane erranda, creeping despair. The middle of the week, that dubious stretch from Tuesday to Thursday, was particularly action-packed, garnished in the center with a perfect soupcon of Wednesday ennui.

Tuesday

Tuesday I interviewed an indie rock star in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel. For the first time in my brief rock journalism career, I had a digital recording device in hand and could concentrate on steering the ship of our conversation rather than writing every word of it down in my own peculiar shorthand. The indie rock star was so smart and kind and insightful and witty and filled me with hope, even as he described the experience of losing hope. There was a large pot of free coffee on our table in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, and by the end of the interview, the combination of hope and caffeine and the excitement of having captured it all in high-quality digital audio catapulted me into a state of such hyperstimulation that I took off running and ran around the city for the rest of the day.

Upon leaving the Algonquin Hotel at a near sprint, I wandered into the newly opened HBO store on Sixth Avenue. This is made for some interesting contrasts, between DIY indie rock and high-quality but ultimately corporate-owned television programming, between the ornate, old-fashioned lobby of the Algonquin Hotel and the pristine interior of this emporium of pure concept. The HBO store was designed like the Mac store, all white surfaces and relentless minimalism. Enormous screens of some new kind of technology formed a series of narrow alleyways. In each alleyway was a carefully merchandised version of an HBO television show. There were handbags for each Sex and the City character, a Sopranos cigar humidor, a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the fictitious movie from Entourage. The screens were designed in such a way that you disappeared into the alleys of merchandise, so the store, no matter how many shoppers there were, appeared an unbroken series of white surfaces.

I was disappointed. Having wanted for years to simply disappear into HBO television, I found disappearing into HBO television merchandise to be a distant second to this fantasy. I rematerialized from behind the huge white television screens and rejoined Sixth Avenue. Feeling dirty with corporate sleaze, I jumped on a downtown F train and rode it to Second Avenue. Inspired by the indie rocker, who had mentioned that he offsets the vices of touring with a "balanced vegan diet," I decided to purify myself with vegan food.

On Second Avenue I ate a meal so well-balanced and nutrient-rich I actually felt strange afterward. I came to the conclusion that I was too healthy. You need a little bit of death in you to know you're alive.

The workday turned out to be unusually challenging. The teenagers of New York were doing some serious, weighty projects--writing mock grants to improve infrastructure in Haiti, designing presentations to educate children about emphysema, advocating for the residents of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, parsing the pros and cons of building a pipeline to Namibia.

I felt bad. Yes, it was only by brute force that these kids were halfheartedly considering these questions, but when was the last time I tried to solve the world's problems? My latest aspiration in life is to spend an entire weekend getting stoned and watching Vietnam war movies.

I helped a fifteen-year-old find the choice quotes from a man's plea not to destroy his riverside community with the pipeline to Namibia. I encouraged her to consider the point of view of the Namibians, who suffer long droughts.

The day ended with Thai food, as so many of our days do.

Wendesday

Wednesday was laundry day, all day, sorting, schlepping, spinning, folding, wringing, laying flat to dry. Owning sixty pairs of underwear makes those days few and far between, but long and unforgiving. I do like my laundromat, where they play selections from a vast collection of action movies on a big TV. It helps if you are doing unfathomable amounts of laundry to look up and see The Bourne Identity.

I was in a terrible funk, doing my laundry. What was the point? Life was so repetitive. We wear things, we wash them, shrink them, stretch them, rip them, we get ripped, we shrink, we stretch, until one day we get rid of our old clothes and they are sent to Africa, to the riverside communities, to the drought-parched lands in need of pipelines. T-shirts given away at fundraising walks for various diseases, worn until they've stretched or shrank or never worn at all, are sent to Africa. Often these walks are sponsored by corporations. Often these corporations are investing in the continued impoverishment and destruction of the continent of Africa, so someone in Africa ends up wearing the t-shirt with the name of the corporation that's profiting from the destruction of their continent, a t-shirt with the name of a disease they'd be lucky to live long enough to die of.

The vertigo of knowing that this was a reality that existed in the world as much as in my wandering mind was depressing. I checked in with an action sequence The Bourne Identity to calm my nerves and escape my feelings of helpless culpability. When lost in despair about real violence, fake, choreographed Hollywood violence can be reassuring.

"Hey," says Fake, Choreographed Hollywood Violence, "Cheer up! Violence isn't only a deadly cycle of force and suffering enacted on a global scale through a series of channels too complicated to contemplate! It's also a series of interesting sights and sounds, some of them very satisfying, like shattering glass and landing fists!"

At that moment in The Bourne Identity, Matt Damon was krav maga-ing that guy who crashes through the window of the apartment where he and the German chick are having much sexual tension (to be later consummated in a quiet moment at a cheap hotel). "Who sent you?" asked Matt Damon, banging the intruder's head against the floor. "Who sent you?" he said, beating the man to death in front of the shattered, louvred windows.

What gives The Bourne Identity it's considerable gravitas is the fact that Matt Damon's character is capable of incredibly efficient and systematic violence and he's not even sure why. He's dangerous but lost, predator but prey. At the end, he finds out he's an assassin the CIA has invested $30,000,000 in training and maintaining, but due to an upsurge of humanity at a crucial moment, he was unable to complete a recent mission and has now gone "off the reservation." As the leader of his black-ops project tells him, he's a malfunctioning machine. Until this point, his most recent clue to his identity is the collection of fake passports and currency he finds in a safe-deposit box in Zurich.

Watching my incomplete, deteriorating wardrobe spin in the dryer, I wondered if maybe I, too, was a $30,000,000 amnesiac killing machine, now off the reservation and malfunctioning at the laundromat. I was just in Zurich, and yet forgot to check the banks for a safe-deposit box full of money and fake passports. Then I got all confused by that fence in Berlin, when I was in fact capable of hoisting myself over it in a single gymnastic motion. I wondered what else I was capable of. Possibly, I spoke several languages. Possibly, I had a general almost primal awareness of the world around me, a sense of when someone was about to come up behind me and try to crush my windpipe. Possibly, I knew how to overpower them and crush their windpipe instead. I just hadn't been using all of these fantastic skills, so deeply were they buried by my amnesia. Of course, if I was a secret agent gone off the reservation, wouldn't the number of the safe deposit box in Zurich be in a little laser capsule buried in my forearm? Wouldn't I have mysterious graze wounds from advanced heat-seeking bullets? The evidence to the contrary was mounting. What had seemed likely moments ago now seemed like just another impossible fantasy.

I was sad again, but at least the laundry was done.

Thursday

Thursday dawned unseasonably warm and undeniably optimistic. I ate lunch with my grandparents and discovered cheese souffle. What a marvelous invention, cheese souffle. It has been a month of great discoveries. Just a few weeks ago I discovered Jagermeister, another wonderful substance I'd somehow never ingested.

My grandparents were very curious about my trip to Europe to research the touring habits of the punk rock band. I obliged them, though I did not tell them about my exponentially increasing daily intake of Jagermeister and excised certain other details I thought unfit for their elderly Jewish consumption. In truth, it was my prudishness I was indulging, not theirs. They are two elderly Jewish people who know no limits nor inhibitions when it comes to swearing or vulgarity. They've seen and lived it all, from the Great Depression to adultery to the entire Allied Advance, and now they're just trying to make sense of it. They have completely different approaches to making sense of the world, which might explain the undercurrent of strife in their 61-year marriage. My grandmother is interested only in the most intimate details of human emotion, and my grandfather enters the world entirely through facts.

"What's the name of this band again?" asked my grandfather.

"The World/Inferno Friendship Society," I said.

"What?" said my grandfather. He's very hard of hearing.

"The WORLD/InFERno FRIENDship SoCIety!" I shouted, noticing that enunciating the band's name for the hard of hearing made it sound just like the battle cry/greeting that starts every show.

"Spell it," said my grandfather. "Or write it down." The slash proved difficult to explain, so I wrote it down.

When we established the genealogy of the name of the band, we moved on to classifying them. "What kind of music do they play?" asked my grandfather.

"They call it punk-ska-cabaret," I said.

"What?"

"PUNK SKA CABARET."

"What's punk?" asked my grandfather.

"That's a complicated question, Grandpa," I replied, and did my best to explain.

Once I satisfied my grandfather's thirst for factual knowledge, I answered my grandmother's questions, an entirely different set of curiosities. Who's in the band, and what are they like, and what are their names, and what kind of name is that, and how did they get it or make it up, and does anyone in the band date each other, and do they get along, and does ethnicity or religion come into play. My grandmother is curious bordering on nosy, insightful bordering on delusional, frank bordering on profane. She really liked hearing about my travels with the punk rock band, the kinds of things I'm writing about them.

"That sounds so stimulating!" she said. "So alive!"

"That's one way of putting it," I said. "It was definitely very stimulating and alive." With those words, a set of stimulating, alive memories came flooding back to me, six hours ahead and soaked in Jagermeister.

"This is a life...for a person...with a mind," said my grandmother. She often speaks in the third person, or the infinitive. "To have experiences...to go, to see, to open yourself UP...in this life, to be stimulated...to be alive."

"Yes," I agreed. "To be stimulated, to be alive."

After lunch, I wandered in Central Park, killing time until it was time to go to work. The park was misty, as if it were the early morning, though it was early afternoon. There were many construction projects diverting the paths. I felt as if I were in a beautiful, partially constructed dream.

There were lovely posters explaining the construction hanging prominently on the chain-link fencing, detailing the nature of the projects, the time frames, the expected results. I found this very satisfying and read the posters carefully. I approved of all the projects and was so glad someone had thought of them, hired the necessary crews, ordered the necessary supplies and made these informative posters.

I walked most of the length of the park and came out onto 60th Street, where there were a lot of rich people deciding which incredibly expensive store to visit next. "We could go to Bergdorf's," said one. "No, let's go to Tiffany's," said another. I was so disgusted to find these rich people milling around just outside my beautiful partially constructed dream that I jumped into a hole in the ground and didn't come out for twenty minutes.

I emerged downtown and made my way to a tutoring job in a brand-new condominium right on the Hudson. There's no smell quite like the smell of new condominium, a mix of floor wax and granite countertops and chlorine from the health club, and a laundry smell entirely different from the laundry smells of tenements. The cologne of the doormen, the perfume of the stay-at-home mothers, the smell of their fat expensively burning as they melt away the baby weight from their in-vitro twins. The healthy sweat of their high-finance husbands, jogging impossible distances along refurbished riverside promenades. Sometimes I swear I can smell the wall sconces in new condominiums, smell the glass and metal, the halogen lightbulbs, the mines and the ovens where they were dug and forged.

The student, like the condominium, is new and this was the day the doorman learned my name. Once they learn my name, the doormen always announce me as "Miss Emily." "Miss Emily is here," they say to the children awaiting my arrival on the upper floors, sometimes with river view, sometimes not.

Miss Emily was here, she encouraged the use of the active voice, she encouraged the sharp focusing of thesis statements, she assisted in the researching of Ben Franklin. There were two big biographies on Ben Franklin on the table and they each read one for a while. While Miss Emily was reading about Ben Franklin's sexual escapades in France, the kid was reading about how Franklin electrocuted himself many times during his experiments. "That's good stuff," said Miss Emily. "Make a note of that and put it in your report. And don't use the goddamn passive voice! See you next week." Miss Emily descended to the lobby and raided the building's holiday cupcake table.

Then it was time for my time trial along the Hudson. I had two hours to get from Tribeca to 108th and Broadway and I wanted to see just how far I could get on foot before I'd be forced to ride the subway. I'd been planning this all day and brought a pair of legwarmers to wear over my tights so I would not be cold during my walk. I pulled on my legwarmers and started up the river, listening to the music of the indie rocker in preparation for the piece I would write about him and all the hope he inspired. Like all the subjects of my rock journalism, this rocker is from New Jersey. I would listen to his music and look at New Jersey and come to some deeper understanding, I hoped, and I would not be cold because I had remembered to bring these thigh-high wool legwarmers, and I would not be hungry because I had found a table full of unattended cupcakes. Sometimes, with minimal but careful planning and a few odd strokes of luck, things really do work out.

During my walk along the river I encountered many sets of in-vitro twins in high-end strollers, nannies of all nationalities, a semi-naked trapeze artist, a flock of birds all facing the same way, an only mildly deranged man who wanted to discuss the birds with me, a lot of serious joggers. Hungry for dinner, I veered east around Chelsea to get some food before the long haul north. Once across the West Side Highway, I encountered a tiny gallery on the edge of the art world featuring an installation called Church. The info sheet on the door promised the "viewer/participant a new spirituality, a new approach to the transcendental."

"In this alternate universe," the info sheet went on, "the viewer is given the opportunity for redemption. He/she can take action. The profane can become sacred. Unlimitedness can be found in the ordinary."

I stepped inside. As promised by the info sheet, the gallery was full of "a medley of painted artifacts, poems, ramblings, trash, notebooks, paintings, club invites and random unwanted items left behind by party goers." A lot of it had been flung or dripped with neon paint.

A white-haired man was pointing at a lamp in the corner, telling a dreadlocked girl, "I want to levitate that lamp. I want it to rise with all its beauty and greatness."

"If you can get the funding," she said, "you can do it."

The dreadlocked girl began an unsolicited monologue. "Making an installation like this isn't an intellectual process. It's more organic than that. It's the other side of the brain. It's starting a dialogue, between yourself and the viewer, and yourself and yourself. It's putting things together without thinking about where they go, so they can go where they want to go."

The press release outside promised a confessional. I asked to confess, but apparently the priest was outside, having a smoke. At just that moment, the phone rang. I could see from the caller ID that it was a friend I'd been trying to take up on her invitation to come over for Shabbat dinner. It seemed rude to answer the phone in someone else's installation, so I let it go into voicemail. I felt strangely guilty. Here was someone calling to invite me to Shabbat dinner, and here I was trying to confess to a priest in an art gallery in Chelsea.

I left without a new spirituality, a new approach to the transcendental, without the redemption I'd been promised. The profane was still only intermittently sacred, but I was willing to concede that unlimitedness could be found in the ordinary.

You know when you get deep into your own private internet world (not porn, I don't mean porn), where your browser becomes like a map of your curiosities, neuroses and consumer desires, where the "History" is an itinerary of a few hours journey from "What time is that movie playing?" to "How did the beginning of World War I unfold after that guy shot the other guy?" to "Maybe today is the day I will spend half the price of an international plane ticket on a machine that makes 1" pin-on buttons."

One of my pastimes is finding scientific studies that prove that potheads actually have greater capacities for memory retention than non-potheads. Since I don't believe in most science to begin with (objectivity is a myth, the observer inherently changes the observed simply by observing it, too many variables in the average person/party/city/universe to accurately measure anything, better to impose your own view on the world than search for hard-won nuggets of questionable truth, etc.) I am free to pick and choose among conclusions I find most pleasing. Like the idea that smoking dope is not only not bad for your brain, but good for it.

Whether this is evidence to the contrary or not, in my speedy travels through the two-dimensional world of disinformation that connects us all, I often lose my way. I often forget the next noun about which I am seeking information. Was I about to Google galoshes or an ex-boyfriend? On my way to the Quicktime trailer site to check out some previews or finally going to download and read that 40-page .pdf interview with the famous author I'm currently emulating? Pay the cell phone bill? Check airfares to South America for an unexpected drop in price? Re-live recent events in my life through other people's shared digital photographs? Trust the hive-mind of Wikipedia to finally set me straight Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism, Fluxus, the Factory? For the last time, Proust is an author and Faust is a character! Why can't I keep that straight! Does it even matter, if I haven't read the books? What was the name of that movie I saw in the Yoko Ono retrospective in Paris (was it Paris? Maybe it was San Francisco) that was just people's naked butts filling the screen? Why, it's called, Bottoms! How marvelous!

Sometimes I just sit here and do that until I have a mild anxiety attack. Then I Google anxiety attacks and the whole thing just goes on from there.

Though I've haven't even been back from the Continent for a week, I couldn't refuse an invitation to spend a night with my favorite art collective in Providence. I find a quick little side trip is often just the ticket to ensure a complete psychic return from a longer, international journey. Also, while on the Continent I passed such a lovely day on the train, I was eager to attempt to translate the experience to America's inferior rail system. And I was promised dinner, brunch, kickboxing, and the opportunity to wrap a naked man in plaster. Who was I to say no?

Yesterday, while peaking on my daytime imbibement of espresso, Vitamin C and coca tea, I ambitiously bought a ticket on the 6:55 a.m. train. Yes! I would rise before dawn and be in Providence by mid-morning! My jet lag still lingering, I'd been waking up all week at what for me is the ungodly hour of 7 or 8 a.m. But the plans we make at noon when coursing with vitamins and stimulants are not necessarily the ones we'll stick to at midnight, sipping bourbon and listening to Chet Baker. I cracked and called Amtrak to change my reservation to the 8:30 train. (Where could the naked man go? How quickly could plaster dry?) "You want to sleep a little later, don't you?" drawled the customer service representative from his terminal somewhere in the rest of America. "I'm weak," I admitted to him. "Weak and lazy." "Well, your confirmation number is still the same," he said cheerfully.

Finally maxed out on the day's allotment of reading and writing, I lay in bed looking at a high, bright moon until I fell asleep. In a miraculous turn of events, I woke before my alarm, just as first light was breaking. For the first time ever, I was going to be on time for a train, plane, or bus. I wouldn't have to rush or sprint or dodge angry people in crowded corridors. I made a celebratory pot of coffee and breakfast sandwich, watched the sun come up and noodled around, imagining myself part of that secret society of early risers I've heard so much about, people who get a lot done in those fresh newborn hours of the day.

Time passed. Having had the hypothetical experience of being early, I set about making myself late. With forty minutes until my train's departure, I threw an assortment of electronic devices and eye care products into a bag and hustled out the door. How long could it take to get to Penn Station? It was rush hour. There would be frequent L trains.

Too-frequent L trains, it turned out. The line was congested, backed up. We sat in each station, doors open, train packed, iPods shuffling. Each minute passed with a high whistling noise. One might think that the chronically late person is ignorant of time, but actually, quite the opposite. The chronically late person is painfully aware of how a minute feels, and of the exact difference between two and five and ten, because the chronically late person is always parsing minutes, seconds, eventualities.

Having started with, "I'll make the train if everything proceeds normally," I was now slipping into, "I'll make the train if I make a miraculous transfer to an uptown express." As we crawled along 14th Street, the electronic voice droning on about the delay, I observed that the chime that precedes the electronic announcement that "We are being held momentarily in the station by the train's dispatcher," was having a distinctly Pavlovian effect on me. While at some level I am aware that I bring this--and all--suffering upon myself, on the surface I rage at all my possible enemies--trains, my fellow humans, time itself. Each time the public address system dinged and the male voice announced the obvious, I twitched, quivered, veritably growled. If the government ever wanted to turn me into a highly effective killing machine, all they'd have to do is play a loop of that dinging noise and keep announcing that "We're being held momentarily in the station by the train's dispatcher," maybe pipe in my grandmother trying to manipulate me into attending a family event at a country club in Westchester, lay that over Bush giving a press conference and mix in the sound of wealthy Long Island suburbanites discussing cars, weddings and college admissions and I'd be salivating for human blood.

I did make a miraculous transfer to the uptown express train, but the crawling of the L train had cost too much precious time. I sprinted through Penn, unholstered my credit card and jammed it into the first ticket machine I saw. My train was still on the board, boarding. The machine recognized my Visa, my itinerary appeared. Was I going to get away with my latest temporal gamble? With the cooperation of the ticket machine's touch-screen technology, I just might. "C'mon, c'mon," I sweet-talked the machine. "Give it, giiiive iiiiit..."

The "Print Ticket" button was in my sights, but when I touched it, nothing happened. The machine freaked out. And so did the next one and the next one, until the board flipped and the train left. After a few satisfying minutes spent viciously kicking the ticket machines and howling obscenities, I got in line to demand restitution, knowing full well that the next train leaving for Providence was an express and cost twice as much.

"I missed my train because your ticket machine malfunctioned and now I would like you to put me on the next train to Providence at no extra cost," I said to the man behind the window.

"When did you try to get the ticket for this train?" asked the man. "Because if it's after the train is scheduled to depart the machine won't give it to you."

"I am quite certain it was before the train was scheduled to depart," I said, not certain of this at all. "I would have made the train if your machines were working."

"You know," said the man, "we can check the machine. We can't put you on another train unless we prove that you were here before the train left."

"Go ahead," I said levelly. "Check the machine."

The manager came out from the ticket booth and unlocked the machine I had first sweet-talked, then kicked. How quickly seduction degenerates into violence and then finally, a hazy reconstruction of half-remembered events.

The ticket agent and I eyed one another warily. I could see he thought he was about to call my bluff. I squared my shoulders, narrowed my eyes and gave him the tiniest of smiles.

The manager came back, shaking his head ruefully. "Print failure," he said. "She was in there at eight twenty-nine. Transfer her ticket to the express and override the price increase."

I grinned triumphantly. For once, the law was on my side. The express would get me in only an hour later than the local, and I would be riding in business class. To celebrate, I went over to Hudson News and grabbed up an armload of glossy magazines, which I took to a corner of the store and perused happily until an angry person in a vest came over and kicked me out for not buying anything, but not before I learned that Britney is totally unraveling and you can wear your sundresses in the winter, if you put turtlenecks underneath.

The biathlon event in the Winter Olympics is roundly agreed to be an odd juxtaposition of skills. You ski, you shoot, you ski, you shoot-but why? Is it for alpine assassins? Restless hunters? I dimly recall the announcers commenting on the difficulty of steadying a rifle with an aerobically pounding heart, how this demands the ability to control one's heart rate, or the effect of the heart rate on the nerves, and that's where the challenge lies. I can think of far more exquisite ways to test the ability of people to separate their hearts from their nerves, but perhaps these would not televise so well. Perhaps it is best to stick to skiing and shooting and call that a biathlon.

For the less traditionally athletic set, however, there are other feats of strength that go together in pairs. For example, drinking a large, spicy Bloody Mary and then running wind sprints could be a biathlon of sorts. This sport is still in its exhibition stage, but I do believe I'm the reigning champion.

I happened upon the format of this alternate biathlon quite by accident. It had to do with CheapTickets.com, and their cheap but sinister plans for my air travel.

Next time I buy a plane ticket, I will factor in the unfavorability of the dollar against the pound before I consent to fly through London. On either end of my tour of Filthy Couches of Central Europe, I connected through Heathrow. This connection cost me hours of worrying that my liquids would be confiscated and my entire body would desiccate, not to mention upwards of USD$30 in coffee and sandwiches. On my return trip through Heathrow, I was so disgusted by the amount I paid for a panini and an espresso that I was immediately moved to spend more money on a cocktail to calm my frazzled nerves.

England was not even part of my trip abroad, and yet here I was with the Queen's head rattling in miniature in my pockets and Boots pharmacy beckoning me to buy unnecessary homeopathic ointments. I needed to liquidate these un-exchangeable pound coins and mentally prepare myself to spend eight hours on a plane. What this transatlantic flight demanded was a nice, nourishing Bloody Mary. And I was going to get one, right over there at that raw bar in the middle of Heathrow Airport. What was a raw bar doing in the middle of Heathrow Airport? No matter. There were Bloody Marys at that raw bar. I could see their tall, crimson form, even at twenty paces with my contacts dry as a cokehead's mouth.

I sidled up to the raw bar and waited expectantly. For several minutes I went unserved. I sat up straight and cleared my throat, rubbed my eyes. Was whatever it was that had scared those three little German girls on the bridge in Munich back in full force? Was my mascara smeared in such a way that I appeared to have a black eye? Did I finally have a black eye, which would constitute my fourteenth bruise of unknown origin? What did it take to get a freakin' Bloody Mary in this place? I was feeling belligerent, and after nearly two weeks with what has to be one of the world's larger punk rock bands and its equally large entourage, somewhat entitled to be served alcohol immediately. If there was one thing I had come to count on in the last two weeks, it was the ready availability of alcohol.

Eventually, someone took my order. Eventually, someone poured some vodka into a glass. But then there was no action. Apparently, there was no tomato juice. Someone was getting some, just a moment. The vodka sat in the glass, diluting by the minute with crushed ice. Where was the tomato juice and where was my Bloody Mary? Was it too much to ask? Trapped in a rock club at dawn, forced to scale a barbed-wire fence, the beneficiary of only a handful of actual beds or showers in the last two weeks, my body bruised, my journalistic integrity questioned, my modesty compromised, my immune system shot to hell, yes, true, all the result of my own free will and doing, but still, as the victim of many self-induced hardships now held prisoner in Heathrow Airport, about to be packed like a sardine into the germ-ridden depths of coach class and unceremoniously returned to a semblance of a normal life, wasn't I entitled to one little glass of spiced, alcoholic tomato juice to ease the pain and send me on my way?

In the last two weeks with the punk rock band and its entourage, I had witnessed more than one explosion of frustration and entitlement. These explosions both terrified and fascinated me, as I fear confrontation but like to get my way. I was on my way to just such an explosion when tomato juice was produced, my Bloody Mary was mixed, and I was presented with the alcoholic vegetable drink I craved. It was a little bland, but I spiced it up with liberal doses of Tabasco and black pepper and commenced to slurp it down. Another truth reinforced by living life with a punk rock band was when in doubt, add something else to the mix. I was just stirring the peppery bottom of my Bloody Mary when I thought to at least glance up at the big board of departures and check on the status of my flight.

The big board of departures was hanging from the ceiling in the midst of a vulgar Christmas display. As I looked for it, I noticed that the entire terminal was decorated for Chirstmas. The momentary bliss of my Bloody Mary forgotten, I immediately started feeling bileous about the combined insults of Christmas, airports and the weakness of the U.S. dollar. Why was I getting so agitated, I wondered. Maybe it was because I wasn't under my usual airport self-sedation. I had been saving a half a Xanax in my Altoids Tiny Tin[TM]/stash box, but when I opened the box to put more drugs inside it the half a Xanax disintegrated and blew away in the wind, like a little narcotic magic trick. I willed the Xanax back into existence, but to no avail. The Xanax was just a few more parts per million in the dust of a German anarchist compound. It was just me and this Bloody Mary against the Atlantic now.

Ah, airports. Ah, Christmas. This airport was also a mall, and everyone in the fucking place was on the lookout for an Arab with too much toothpaste. Judeo-Christian consumerism was the true religion of the world, and here in this airport it all melded perfectly into one mass of retail outlets, fossil fuel consumption and xenophobic suspicion. And it was costing us all so much money just to participate in it. This fucking Bloody Mary alone cost five quid. Ah, but "quid." What a great word. The British, so full of great words and questionable food. Wasn't I supposed to be thinking of something, performing some task? My flight, the flight, checking the flight. There it was. American Airlines Flight 131. I hate to say the name of my flight, even to myself. It reminds me of how it will sound if it crashes and becomes a famous flight. TWA Flight 800, we all know that one. American Airlines Flight 131, they'll say, and if I die my family will have to become friends with the other families. They'll see each other at memorial reunions and throw flowers into the sea from a pebbly beach in the south of England. My face will be in a montage on the cover of Newsweek. My brother can date and eventually marry one of the other surviving siblings; they'll be a sidebar in Newsweek. I wonder if I'll cling to the other passengers as the plane is going down, or if I'll be very placid and meditate in my seat. Stop being so morbid, Weinstein, said my left brain to my right brain. Well I wouldn't be if that Xanax hadn't disintegrated, retorted my right brain. Weren't you going to give that Xanax away anyway? That's right, I was. But still, it disintegrated before my very eyes. It was depressing. No, it was illuminating, don't you see? You wouldn't have it now anyway. Exactly my point--nothing is permanent. Whether we crash into the sea or live to make another connecting flight, everything passes, becomes dust. Spices, cookies, drugs, us. But I'm not enlightened, so it hurts. But look on the bright side--so too will this dreaded transatlantic flight pass, now if I can just find the gate--Fo-cus, and look at the board. There it is. AA 131 New York. Gate 18. FLIGHT CLOSED.

?!?!?

%#$&!

So began the second event in my biathlon. Bloody Mary acquisition and drinking behind me, leading the pack at the split, I began my sprint.

Have you ever run four hundred yards at top speed after drinking a very spicy Bloody Mary and sleeping maybe a total of four hours in the last two days while drinking and smoking continuously? Because that is a sport. My personal physician has a saying that I, too, like to live by. It goes, "I don't run unless someone is chasing me." I've amended it to, "or unless I'm chasing a widebody jet I'm expecting to take me home to my bed."

In Heathrow Airport, I ran. I ran fast. I ran fast through the corridors, past Lounges A through E, past the VIP Lounge, past the signs for Gates 28-55 and 1-27, dodging people of all nations and persuasions, dodging beeping carts, dodging my own quickly bifurcating personality. I ran fast, I ran far.

I ran all the way to the wrong gate. I knew it as soon as I got there, panting, and saw that the line was uniformly comprised of South Asian businessmen. Somehow I sensed they weren't all going to New York. In my haste and fatigue and drunkenness and disgruntlement, I had run to the same-numbered gate my flight had left from in Berlin several hours earlier. I was no longer leading the pack and had in fact made a fatal error. Once a sure shot for the gold, I was now going to have to scramble just to medal in my only event, the Bloody Mary British Airport Biathlon.

I turned around and ran the other way. I ran and I lept. I lept over little green men, laser beams, rocks, the fallen bodies of my comrades. I ran and I lept and I swore. I swore under my breath and I swore at the top of my lungs. At some point, I felt a strange and euphoric sensation, a departure of my soul from my body. I felt kind of...high. Was this what they meant, about the running and the high? A week earlier, hiking above the deserted mountain towns of the Swiss Alps, I had felt a similar sensation, but after hours of inhaling clean, evergreen-scented air. Was this "running" such a powerful drug that it could induce such a feeling after just a few minutes? Could I put it in a box and carry it around with me, taking it out when I was feeling bored or curious or despondent or fiendish? Were these flight attendants real people or were they made of plastic and could I topple them like dominos by smashing into them hard, BLAM! Better not, slow me down. The pack, the split, the flight, the gate!

The searing, horrible pain!

In an immediate karmic payback for my fleeting violent fantasies of knocking down some flight attendants, I was nearly felled at Gate 15 by an unbelievable stitch in my abdomen. Now this was more like my usual experience of running, not to mention romance. Not so much a clarifying high as a series of strange aches and pains. Not unless someone is chasing me, indeed. I had to look into that strategy, with regards to running--and romance--if I ever recovered from this latest searing, horrible abdominal pain. This had to be it--I had hit The Wall. Some people hit it at mile 20 of the marathon, others at Gate 15.

My momentum was so great that as I doubled over in pain, my feet were still churning beneath me like a cartoon character. Time slowed, stopped. "Wow," I thought, as I heard my pounding feet and heart. "I was going really fast." Gate 18, from which AA Flight 131 was in fact leaving, was visible at the vanishing point of the infinite corridor. Gate 18 FLIGHT CLOSED. I had to see it for myself, had to meet whatever fate that awaited me there. Would they slam the door to the jetway in my face, or would there just be one of those little nylon barriers that replaced the velvet rope, zipped wordlessly into place before my prostrate body? Or would there be no one there at all, would I be alone under a buzzing fluorescent light as five hundred strangers ascended to their cruising altitude?

Suddenly, I felt an acute desperation and sense of abandonment the likes of which I'd never felt before. The thought that American Airlines perhaps ran several flights per day from Heathrow to JFK and I might somehow get on another one did not cross my mind. I had missed my chance to migrate with the flock, and now I was all alone, stinking of several days worth of sweat, made more pungent by the fresh sheen of the sprint. I was going to be sniffed out within seconds and ripped apart by carnivores, leaving a trail of blood on the airport corridor carpet. The remains of the Bloody Mary, red and alcoholic as they were, would probably be misidentified as my blood, and my family would be informed that I, like poor Snowden, was made of stewed tomatoes.

Just as a lover who rejects us can instantly catapult themselves from a passing fancy into an object of obsession, my departed flight was now poignantly lost to me. Having dreaded AA Flight 131 for the past several hours and at some level, for the past several weeks, in truth since before I even left New York on AA Flight 132, I now missed it and loved it and mourned it, even though I never really knew it. As I pressed my fingers into the flesh of my belly, trying to cut the stitch off at the source, I was hit with the full force of the lost flight and the reality of my continued existence, at least for the foreseeable future, with no clean clothes and a dwindling cash supply, in Heathrow airport. Alone, dirty, drunk, tired, broke, sweaty and in pain, and my iPod battery dead to boot. Ah, well. I'd been down this low before. Lower, even. But first, like anyone who lost something they never even knew they needed, I had to see for myself that it was really gone.

Side stitch and all, I limped on toward Gate 18. The screen said, FLIGHT CLOSED, but the flight attendant at the gate looked placid and welcoming.

"I'm on this flight," I gasped. "To! New! York! And I gotta-! Get-! Onnit!"

"We're not even boarding yet," she said pleasantly. "Just have a seat, ma'am."

"But, the sign-! Said-! It was-! Closed!"

"Oh, it does that sometimes," said the flight attendant. "It makes mistakes."

"But you almost KILLED me," I wanted to howl. "My nerves are shot. My body is debilitated. I've been in a punishing punk rock immersion program for the better part of two weeks. It's like the opposite of a spa. I had to take the cure in the Alps. I've come hundreds of miles. I have suffered. I have bruises. I have felt pain, and euphoria, a dissolution of morality and ego. I need a massage, a Xanax, a punch in the face. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to vomit my Bloody Mary on your polyester uniform and have a stroke!"

But I was meek and relieved as much as I was indignant and enraged. "I didn't miss it?" I squeaked.

"No ma'am," said the flight attendant, fuchsia lips pulling toward a smile, fuchsia nails clattering on the keyboard.

I've always hated those dramatic airport-running scenes at the end of movies that end with such improbable gratification of the most distant of romantic hopes. But now I had lived it. I had dashed through the airport, not toward true love, but simply toward home. Thinking I was too late and knowing it was impossible, still I ran, fueled by determination and stupidity and an unwillingness to give up hope.

I could see how this experience, like all of my experiences, was going to be used justify more idiotic behavior in the future. It already had implications in the immediate present. My airport sprint, while nauseating, did pass the layover more rapidly and more important, helped me to discover a fine new athletic event. I maintain that the Bloody Mary airport biathlon should not only be an Olympic sport, but an element in the President's Physical Fitness Challenge. Any child who cannot drink a Bloody Mary and run four hundred yards of crowded carpeted corridor is not ready to assume the adult responsibilities of American citizenship. The future of the nation depends on our vigilance.

In a fitting end to the latest chapter in my research on subcultures of resistance and debauchery, I escaped this morning from a rock club in Berlin.

I awoke at dawn, fully clothed and still drunk, curled cosily into the depths of the very last stop on my own personal tour of Filthy Couches of Central Europe. I had been to three countries, filled five notebooks, seen ten shows and climbed two mountains. I had gained new insights, or at least come to see old insights through differently colored liquors. I learned neither German nor how to roll those big cone-shaped European-style joints I've always so greatly admired, but still and all, it was a good trip. I had come to know things I didn't know before, and was now sufficiently tired and dirty and bruised and cumulatively intoxicated to think that going home would not in fact be death to all wanderlust and vice but instead maybe a novelty of cleanliness and soft bedding. Or so I told myself when I realized that I was about to leave a world in which getting inebriated all day in a non-judgmental environment while furtively taking notes on the behavior of other inebriated people was widely accepted, if not actively encouraged. For me this life is a form of unparalleled happiness, hangovers, filthy couches and all.

The parking lot and backstage of the club were unnaturally still in the morning light. Places like that are meant to be seen in motion and shadows, piles of furniture making interesting shapes, people in silhouette, burning tips of cigarettes floating disembodied to their lips. Having seen the whole vista teeming with bodies just a few hours ago, I had the strange sensation of watching a time-lapsed movie, ghostly figures slowly disappearing as the stars went out and the sun came up.

Since I had stopped making any concessions to sleep other than removing my boots and any concessions to hygiene other than brushing my teeth, it didn't take me long to get ready to go. I hoisted my bags and settled into the counterbalance of their dual weight. Beyond the green metal gates of the club was Berlin, a city I would see from a train window and wonder about, and beyond Berlin, airports and beyond the airports, home. Directly beyond the green metal gates of the club was a neighborhood that so closely resembled home I considered just staying put, edging up to this population of hipsters and waiting for them to take me to their yoga classes, bars and bistros. Walking in the area the previous night, I had seen in a matter of minutes the same concentration of Thai restaurants, yoga centers, record stores, cafes, natural food stores and expensive t-shirt shops that define my home environs of Williamsburg. This had immediately cured me of my lingering desire to see the city, just as now one of those cafes I had seen would cure me of my lingering desire to drink an espresso. Beyond the green metal gates of the club was Berlin, espresso, New York, and more espresso. It was time to walk through the green metal gates and go home.

Except the green metal gates were locked. There was a padlock on the outside and two clever little armholes through which someone could reach with a key and unlock it. Or alternately, two clever little armholes through which someone could reach with no key and say, quietly, "Fuck."

It had finally happened. I was trapped on tour with a punk rock band.

This would have been marvelous news if not for several mitigating circumstances. First, their European tour was about to end. Second, I had been wearing the same all-black outfit for over a week and desperately wanted to put on a clean t-shirt with amusing verbiage on it. Third, there was the pesky matter of staying financially afloat to fund further research in international debauchery. And finally, I could see where it was all going from here, and while that place beckoned to me most appealingly, I wanted to put it off until after the New Year, or maybe my thirties.

"I have to go," I said to no one in particular, to the air of the courtyard of the rock club in Berlin, the last filthy couch of central Europe, the empty bottles, the morning sun.

But how to get out? The green gates connected two portions of a cement wall. The gates and the wall were each about eight feet high. The gates were topped with metal spikes and the cement wall was topped with barbed wire. This rock club was heavily fortified.

The whole place was surrounded by a wall and the green gates were definitely the only exit. There was no one here except a few sleeping band members, none of whom had the keys to anything but their next bottle of wine. The manager was sleeping in the van, which itself was outside the gates. The rest of the band was sleeping in a hostel I had declined to visit for precisely the reason that I wanted to facilitate my quick getaway to the airport.

I collected some chairs from the courtyard, stacked them up and stood on them to survey the situation. Marshalling all my powers of observation and innovation, I made an informed and educated decision. The thing to do, I decided, was to throw my bags over the gates and the wall and then throw myself over the gates and the wall. And then get some espresso, because with each passing minute of pondering and dragging of things around the courtyard of the club, I was coming to the conclusion that I was neither awake nor sober.

I gently lowered my bags over the wall by their straps, right into the path of a surprised pedestrian. The clock was now ticking, my bags sitting vulnerably in the street outside the green gates. Peeking over the wall, I could see a few early-morning hipsters walking their dogs and jogging. They didn't look like thieves, but then again, I didn't know anything about Berlin and its dogwalking bag-robbers, it's jogging purse-snatchers, and its general hipster criminal culture. I needed to get over the wall before some evil German hipster took my out-of-date iPod and more importantly, my notebooks, the loss of which would render a two-week fact-finding drinking binge simply a two-week drinking binge. That simply would not do. I was going to have to join my bags, my notebooks, my facts and my fictions on the other side of that wall, where the espresso was, not to mention Berlin, and New York.

Before I went over the top, I said a brief prayer for my coat. I had brought a black, fur-trimmed coat on tour, one that I saw in a thrift store and fell deeply in love with. Several people had advised me not to bring the coat, saying it was too nice, it would get destroyed in the squats and the clubs, but somehow it had survived the tour intact, keeping me warm and well-stocked with the many essentials I kept in its deep pockets. It should have been impractical, as the shaggy lambswool at the neck and wrists tended to collect ash and crumbs and other detritus, but it turned out to be perfect for a myriad of purposes. Some nights I slept under it. Other nights I stroked the fur like a pet, sighing with stoned contentedness. By now The Coat and I were friends, good friends--maybe even more like family. The Coat had consented not only to touring with a punk rock band but also hiking in the Swiss Alps, and it had proved itself just as well-suited to the wilderness as it was to the edges of civilization.

The prospect of destroying The Coat hovered above the whole trip, lending it a doomed excitement. Before I left, my roommate admonished me ominously, "Don't you vomit on that coat, Emily!" Her warning proved both blessing and curse. The very first night in Vienna I did indeed vomit, but just before I did, I heard her voice in my spinning head and whipped off the coat just in time, holding it daintily at arm's length while I retched in the alleyway.

It had been two weeks since I vomited in Vienna. Now that I had made it to the end of the tour without barfing in Berlin, I could see all of The Coat's and my safe travels done in by one errant snag of barbed wire.

I could have dropped it to the ground with my bags, but in my sleepy morning drunkenness I maintained some delusion that the Coat was in fact protecting me from harm. No, the Coat and I were going over that barbed-wired wall together. That was just how it had to go down.

I climbed up on a recycling bin, then hoisted myself up onto the cement wall. It was too high to jump from, so I sat there for a moment, dangling my legs over the side, thinking about how pleasant it would be to sit here and swig from a bottle of wine, maybe nibble on a sandwich, maybe hold a fishing pole and bait German hipsters with cigarettes. Some joggers went by and looked at me quizzically. I could have asked them for help in my descent, but that would have required a knowledge of German, and the willingness to admit I wasn't sitting on top of this cement wall out of my own free will. So I nodded coolly and kicked at the wall in a festive manner that said, "Good morning, Berliners! I was just sitting here on top of this cement wall enjoying the sunshine and I know just how I'm going to get down!"

The thing to do, I realized, was to walk along the cement wall until I came to some other sort of fence or post or pipe that I could climb down. I stood up and gingerly straddled the barbed wire, walking along either side of it until I came to a fence full of footholds with no spikes on top. I swung myself to the ground, dusted myself off, picked up my bags and walked off in a direction I was fairly certain led to an espresso.