7:00 a.m. Alarm wakes me from sex dream. (Just so we're clear, uncomfortable details of the sex dream will not herein be revealed.) The day is off to a resounding start as already a discovery has been made, a point proven: alarms are dangerous and can wake you from sex dreams. It is one of my many suspicions of the neocolonial crypto-fascist capitalist global empire that its agenda includes replacing sex with alarm.

7:00-7:40 a.m. Pathological snoozing that begins to encroach past the pathological snoozing bumper I have built into alarm time. I am finally awakened when the mental strain of doing the eight times tables to predict the snooze alarm's next move proves too stimulating and I can no longer sleep through it.

7:40-7:59 a.m. COFFEE.

8:00-8:25 a.m. Overlong (by ten minutes) getting-ready time. How did COFFEE take twenty minutes? This was not the timing I calculated when I created the pathological snoozing bumper and carefully did the eight times tables while snoozing. I have no concept of time.

8:25-8:30 a.m. Walk to train. My research into this foreign concept called "morning" is underway. First observation: The morning is fucking BEAUTIFUL. It's amazing. The light! The smell! The dew on the grass! Everything feels so new and full of possibility. The world is waking up! The world is alive!

Waking up at noon just does not provide the same shot of optimism. My God, the SMELL. It's like the smell of newborn time. Everything looks different and feels different, the quality of time and space itself. Am I on DRUGS? Suddenly I realize why it's called the morning rush. Where can I get some more of this morning stuff?

8:30-8:45 a.m. L train. It's even nice down here in the morning. Cool, but not dank. Fresh. How can the subway be fresh? It's the people, they're all clean. Or cleaner than the crowd I usually ride with. Between noon and three you got your self-employed alternate-time workers like myself, your stay-at-home parents, sure, but also a high concentration of the elderly, infirm and insane. Then at three school lets out and the trains belong to high school students and their clouds of violent hormones and shrieking voices. But at this peak commuting hour we've got the docile hordes, quiet, caffeinated, well-groomed.

Moo.

8:45-8:57 a.m. 3 train. The train is so packed there's no bar for me to hold, so I practice surfing. Despite moderate-to-serious ear problems I am certain are affecting my equilibrium, upper-body weakness and a general lack of athletic ability, I am determined to continue learning to surf after spending four bruising days in solitude on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, getting the shit beat out of me by the ocean itself. I am not sure if not holding on to anything on the train can help me in this process, but I bend my legs and try to stay loose and upright while looking around the train from behind the safety of my ever-present sunglasses.

There is a businessman whose balding pattern has formed a sort of horizontal Mohawk. It's oddly regal. An Orthodox guy is sleeping like a bird, his chin tucked into his chest and his beard nearly in his armpit. The guy next to me is doing Sudoku. I am irritated by Sudoku and Sudoku-doers and don't know why. The guy next to him is doing the Times crossword with a pen and he's almost done. On a Thursday, no less--sexy. I give him an approving look, then realize he can't see me raising one eyebrow approvingly because I'm wearing my sunglasses.

8:57 a.m. I hit the ground running at 73rd and Broadway, one snooze too late. I've got to cover nine blocks in three minutes and there are no cabs.

It's still morning! Gorgeous! Clean! I had no idea it went on for this long! I assumed that around 9 a.m. the magic burned away, but not so! There are, apparently, several hours of beauty to be had before noon. The light is still special and the air is still cool and crisp! Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Yeah! We are so totally going to REALLY DO IT today, world! I had this really giant cup of coffee and nothing to eat! I now realize that what took twenty minutes was drinking this giant cup of coffee! Now I'm running down the street, punching the air like Rocky! I want to get naked and jump in a lake!

Instead, I caroom up Broadway, past a slew of high-end supermarkets. Foot traffic is heavy--the nannies, the babies, the semi-retired, semi-retarded. A few late-to-work business types bark orders into their cell phones, presumably to the myriad of people they employ in their offices and homes, the ones who send their letters and feed their children. "Put all the medicines in a box and label it!" says one. "That needs to go out TODAY!" says another. Is this the reward of serious amounts of schooling and hard work--you tell other people what to do all day long, grumpy and entitled?

What about waterfalls of champagne and people in the streets chanting your name, elaborate performances staged in your honor and for your entertainment, capped by hour-long fireworks displays, and maybe you have your very own pony? Now that would be a reward.

9:06 a.m. I'm in school, meeting one of my students during a free period. I'm a little uneasy in the school. Large groups of children terrify me--or rather, the expectation that I'm supposed to control them terrifies me. I relate to young people as an ally, not an authority figure. At the same time I am a narcissist who doesn't like to have her own authority challenged. When put in a position of authority I have an immediate and total personality meltdown. Also, I can't write legibly on a vertical surface and make a terrible mess of the white or black board. Also, I don't believe in school. I have exactly one disciplinary technique (honed in Evil SAT Camp Where I Sold My Soul for the Security Deposit on This Apartment circa 2002) and that's to dive under a desk and speak in a quiet monotone. It shocked the SAT Camp kids into submission, but I'm told that this would not have the same result in some of the city's more "challenging" classrooms.

Thankfully, I am only here to deal with this one very agreeable and easily teachable student. He is making tremendous progress under my tutelege and just between you and me, could turn out to be one of my major success stories. The SATs are next weekend. It's crunch time.

9:10-10:15 a.m. My hardest-working student shows me to an empty library cubicle, buckles down and absorbs like a sponge. While he does problem sets, I skim the excellent selection of books on the cubicle shelves. I thumb through an illustrated history of trench warfare (fascinating!) and picture book called Pirates! (also pretty awesome) and re-read my new favorite Bible passage, Ecclesiastes 9:11. "The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise nor riches to men of understanding nor favor to men of ability; for time and chance happeneth to them all."

Fucking A, man. I am tempted to stop my hardest-working student and read him the passage to transmit some much needed perspective, but he is extraordinarily businesslike and seems concerned with getting the most bang for his buck. He is tolerant of my digressions, but I think better of it and show him how to find the area of a circle when given the hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle that is inscribed in one quadrant instead.

10:17-10:25 a.m. Shoplifting at the local Barnes & Noble, one of my many hobbies. For a person of limited funds, shoplifting at big-box retail is simply a must. Also, it funds full-price purchases at independent establishments and enables one to own inspirational media items one really needs but can't afford.

10:35 a.m. Downtown 1 train. Outside, it still smells like morning. An early wake-up for me is 10ish, so we're getting into my potential normal waking time now. I am now fully convinced of something I'll viciously deny to anyone who says "I told you so"--that waking up early is, like, awesome. The 3.5 pre-noon hours I've already lived feel stolen, and yet incredibly effective. I've earned an honest wage, ripped off a superstore and read about pirates, war and the nature of human existence. What could I do with all the other mornings before I am "caught like a fish in a net" (Ecclesiastes 9:12)? Take over the WORLD?

11:03-11:45 a.m. I return a bunch of crap I bought but don't need so I can save money to get the hell out of this consumer nightmare of a country of which I am a weak, consumptive part.

11:45 a.m.-12:02 p.m. Crossing town at 15th Street, I notice that the air still smells suspiciously good. Maybe it wasn't the morning. Maybe it is just a beautiful spring day. My relationship to this day is turning out to be like my relationships to some people--do I love them, or just the experience of being around them? Is it me? Is it them? The things we consumed? The things that consumed us? Who cares? Life is beautiful and we're all on borrowed time.

Outside a museum, a class is gathered. Late high school or early college. Their teacher is saying, "Does everyone have their worksheets? Make sure you fill out your worksheet completely, because on Monday we are going to use them when we break up into discussion groups in class."

I am filled with rage. Really? Worksheets? Who the fuck wants to do a worksheet? Who wants to "break up into groups"? What is this bullshit we call education? Is that the best we can do? The words "discussion group" remind me of the squeak of desks and chairs on linoleum as you drag your desks into circles to talk about the worksheets on discussion group days. It can't be true, but I remember all of these days as brilliant, sunny, spring.

There are lightboxes with quotes on the outside of the museum. One says, "How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it," Alexander Dumas, fils said that.

I take a picture with my camera phone and make it my new wallpaper. I want to bring down the entire educational-industrial complex, but I settle for expressing my feelings on the screen of my cellular telephone.

12:15-1:20 p.m. Yoga class. I've been doing, like, a lot of yoga. Like, more than usual. Like, addictively. I've been cutting back on some of my less wholesome addictions and yoga has rushed in to fill the void. Yesterday, my only male yoga teacher gave me an assist that was totally the bomb. It is my all-time favorite assist. You're in spinal twist, and then they come over and somehow brace your torso with their legs and kind of climb their fingers up your vertebrae, alternately kind of spreading your spine apart while you inhale and then pushing down with both hands on your knees and shoulder on the exhale so you stretch out even further. I have a very tense back and am always kind of trying to achieve this effect on myself but the expert touch of highly trained professionals is really where its at.

There's a whole weird thought process that goes with breathing in and out while lying under the straddled legs of another person of the opposite sex when you are a straight person and having a physically pleasurable experience that also entails a certain degree of submission on your part. It goes like this, "Inhale this feels really good exhale where should I look inhale I won't look right at him, I'll look off to the side exhale my spine is long inhale it's weird, this could be sexual, but somehow it's not exhale yay! I am getting the awesome assist today inhale Michael is a really good yoga teacher exhale I am attached to this assist, and Michael, and yoga inhale I am trying to breathe into my back ribs, but he doesn't seem to believe me exhale I AM BREATHING IN MY BACK RIBS, TRUST ME inhale so, like, Michael' s job is to command entire rooms of scantily clad young women to get into crazy positions while sweating profusely exhale but his wife is also a yoga teacher and really gorgeous, but still inhale this is not sexual, it is healing exhale whoa, I am really deep into this twist inhale Michael is like, a shaman exhale I'm totally gonna get a massage inhale whee, I am made of jelly exhale enlightenment is nigh AND switch sides."

Today, as is often the case, I spend Savasana (relaxation) reliving whole episodes of HBO programs I have watched and enjoyed. I can't help it! They're so good. Also, I am totally unenlightened and incapable of emptiness.

1:30-2:00 p.m. Falafel.

2:00-3:15 p.m. As I walk from St. Marks over and down through the East Village and Soho to Tribeca, I am inundated with consumption opportunities. I notice that as I lick my ice cream cone (Ben and Jerry's was up the street from falafel, couldn't resist) the desire to buy something is somewhat quelled, but after I throw the napkin in the trash the finery calls to me like a siren song. One store, I believe it's Triple Five Soul, appears to have based its entire spring line on my ideal wardrobe. Everything in the store is either iconic to the point of costume (trench coats, flight suits) or an iteration of military green, camo or black, most of it incorporating zippers, lace or excessive pocketry. This unified aesthetic, which happens to be one of my favorites, is punctuated by orange cargo shorts, engineer-stripe cabbie hats, and lots of black tank tops that look like they'd be impossible to wear with a bra. I'd replace my entire wardrobe with the contents of this Triple Five Soul store, stat. The situation isn't helped by the fact that all the clothes are hanging from giant utility clips on bars attached to the ceiling, like an art installation, and they swing hypnotically in their generously allotted space.

I'm starting to overload. It's always been a dangerous predilection of mine to believe that I AM THE WORLD and the THE WORLD IS ME, one only exacerbated by a steady flow of hallucinogens and rock music, my growing fascination with Eastern religion, and large amounts of time spent alone. I'm starting to identify with all the clothing in the store, believing that it and I are one, or maybe that this store is a projection of my own materialistic fantasy, that I AM THE TRIPLE FIVE SOUL SPRING LINE. I am siezed with the delusion that it will make me more me and that I, in turn, can bring it to its full potential, simply by wearing it. At some level I'm aware that this is a false consciousness, an illness of the left channel (the idea that any object or person can complete or satisfy us) but in this iteration that feeling seems at once benign and all-encompassing.

Like anyone who's just fallen in love, I'm starting to stumble and bumble and drop things on the ground. The uberhip staff of the Triple Five Soul store is looking at me funny. Seeing no chance of making off with my one true love, the Triple Five Soul spring 2007 line, I reconnect to my own trusty companions and comfortable loves, the black and army camo clothing I already have and am actually wearing. "I lost myself for a minute there," I tell my outfit, "but I'm back."

3:30-5:00 p.m. I meet the second student of the day at a pre-arranged Starbucks location. We were originally planning to meet at a library, but there are far more Starbucks than libraries. It took a half-hour on the phone to make sure we were both talking about the same Starbucks and she still ended up in the wrong one. Thank God for cell phones.

The student is new, the session is uneventful. So far, our common ground is that we both like aviator sunglasses. This is promising. Through this common ground, hopefully I can gain access to her cognitive mind and beam in an understanding of algebra.

5:00 p.m. In hopes of not being late each week for the next session, I've scheduled a generous half-hour for a four-block walk. Tribeca, I've noticed, has a lot of really high-end wine stores that kind of look like art galleries. The wine is well lit and displayed in innovative materials at unexpected angles. Since I got this gig I've had this Tribeca session inconveniently sandwiched between an Upper East Sider and a Central Village and consequently been racing to and from it, but the schedule is now changed and I've got nothing but time.

Turns out all of these wine stores have tastings on Thursday afternoons. I work my way through some exciting new whites from France, including a sauvignon blanc the wine store employee and I agree is "austere." She schools me on the effects of progressively warmer climates on grapes. She pours generously and as I am philosophically opposed to spitting out wine, I leave for my last session of the day pleasantly buzzed.

5:30-6:30 p.m. I've got a kid in a high-rise condo working on a report about the War of 1812. His social studies teacher assigns these agonizingly long-term reports on American history. We just wrapped up three months on Benjamin Franklin. The kid is smart but also twelve and fairly unmotivated. His mom thinks I can fix this problem. This is an illusion I'm perfectly willing to perpetuate. I can't exactly motivate kids, but I can come at them with such a barrage of energy and inquiry that sometimes they appear motivated, if only to get me to shut the fuck up.

The kid wants to write a report on how "The War of 1812 was pointless because in the end neither side achieved their goal of becoming the ultimate empire." I encourage him to refine this thesis and carefully choose his details to support it. He points out that the Americans went into the war to get the British to stop impressing their sailors into the British Navy and to end the blockade on their trading with France, but the Americans only got what they wanted after the British defeated Napolean, not through the war itself. So in a way, the British beat themselves in the War of 1812, and the Americans got what they wanted not by beating their enemy but their enemy winning, albeit a different war.

This excites me. This is a perfect teaching opportunity for the concept of irony. Really, I only have two goals in teaching (besides astronomical test performance with which I can justify skyrocketing hourly rates) and those are to leave my students with a sound understanding of irony and hegemony. Our remaining half hour is spent conveying the theme of irony and relating it to the war of 1812.

I have a nasty habit of turning my students' longer and more boring writing projects into essays I myself would enjoy writing. "The absurd irony of war" is a theme I like to toy with, and now this poor seventh-grader is going to end up handing in a paper to that effect. Oh, well, it'll be good for him. He'll learn something!

6:30-7:35 p.m. I go back to the wine store, buy the austere sauvignon blanc, then hit up two more wine tastings and buy one more bottle. Happy hour in Tribeca! And it would be free, if I could only stop buying the wine. It's a dangerous situation--it's almost dinnertime, I'm drinking on an empty stomach, suddenly I'm half in the bag and happily opening my wallet to make an investment in future inebriation. Oh, well, I tell myself, some people invest in war. I invest in wine!

The last wine-tasting of the day is particularly epic. The store is very high-end and the wine guy is from France. He's impeccably French. He's from Avignon. He knows everything. Me and him and some other wine tasting officiant get into a long discussion about the adjectives used to describe wine. "This one tastes like a thunderstorm," I say.

"You hear that?" the American wine guy asks the French one. "She gets a thunderstorm. What do you get?"

"I do not get a thunderstorm," he says. "I get earth, mushrooms and"--he pauses to sniff and make this really weird noise swishing the wine in his mouth-- "tree bark."

American wine guy pours me a Pinot.

"This one is voluptuous," he says.

"What's the opposite of voluptuous?" I ask. "Sinewy?"

"What's voluptuous?" says the French guy.

"Flesh," says the other wine guy.

"Breasts," I say, my tongue loosened with voluptuous wine.

"Ah," says the French guy.

"And this one, this one is rounder, a rounder feeling in the palate." "This one is white pepper on the attack and black pepper on the finish." Everything the French guy says is totally absurd and completely true.

An eccentric, drunk and heavily made-up lady waltzes over, buys a whole case of the Chablis, waltzes away. "Don't drink it all at once," says the American wine guy, rather unkindly, I think. Another lady comes in, tastes one wine, comments in French to the French guy. I start speaking French to the French guy. My accent is terrible but my grammar is correct. I've tried, like, eight wines. I'm very fond of the Chablis.

"I'm very fond of the Chablis," I say to the French man. "Ca coute combien, cet vin?"

He rattles off a number in French and it takes me a second to translate it. French people always answer back really fast in French, I'm convinced because they are saying at some level, "You think you can come all up in my house and speak French, motherfucker, but you can't."

I've been there for at least half an hour. We've talked of wine and thunderstorms and quitting smoking and French people and violence. He's kind of attractive. I'm kind of drunk. As is my policy in such situations, I reccomend a book to him I think he'll enjoy and run swiftly in the opposite direction.

7:35 p.m. I leave a series of exhuberantly drunk messages on Rebecca's voicemail exhorting her to meet me for Korean food. I don't want this day to end! I love this day! My messages get progressively more agressive and suddenly, fearing she won't want to meet me, as she tends to avoid me when she thinks I might "make a scene," I decide to just show up at her yoga class as it lets out and usher her gently across the street to the Korean restaurant before she comes back from Planet Yoga.

7:37 p.m. I board an uptown C train to find A Writer I Admire sitting on the bench. We kind of have a thing, me and him. I run into him every year or two and I recognize him. He's known but not famous to the point where I think he'd be annoyed to be recognized. For some reason, I am totally unembarrassed about cheerfully calling out to this Writer I Admire when I see him across the street, even though he's kind of wry and witty and not exactly exhuberant. "Hey [Writer I Admire]!" I always yell, using his full name.

"Hey [Writer I Admire]!" I say now, drunk, delighted.

"You look different," he says.

"I'm growing," I say.

"You're growing up," he half-smiles.

"Or old, or both."

"Where are you going?"

"Out to dinner. Where are you going?"

He is going to perform in and host an important literary event. I ask tentatively how one gets involved in such an event, he tells me there's a kind of training ground/minor leagues for it. I tell him I enjoy seeing him perform, which is very true. He is one of the only Writers I Admire I haven't had entirely disastrous and embarrassing interactions with.

"Where do you live?" he asks. "Brooklyn?"

"Williamsburg," I reply. "Where else?"

"But I've seen you in my neighborhood, too," he says.

"Where do you live?"

"Boreum Hill."

"Oh, BoCoCa."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means Boreum Hill/Cobble Hill/Carroll Gardens."

"I hate to tell you this, but that term never really caught on," says the Writer I Admire.

"I don't care," I say. "I'm running with it!"

We chat until 14th Street and say goodbye until our next run-in.

7:45 p.m. L train. I sit down and open the L magazine. The L magazine on the L train! It's so...banal. I start hitting myself lightly in the forehead with the open magazine.

"You are fighting with your magazine?" The man next to me has a faintly European accent. I think he's French, too. He's middle-aged, but he's wearing it well. I see how the middle-aged French men get the young ladies. They're arch and blase.

"Yes," I sigh dramatically. "I am locked in a lifelong battle with the printed word."

"What is the magazine?"

I hold it up. "It's got listings in it, mostly. And pornography on the back." I waggle the American Apparel ad, which this week, as usual, does not disappoint. Girl in leggings, bending over, shirtless.

"I work in the zee industry," he shrugs. "They have a look that works for them."

"True, true. And no one seems upset about it. Not like the Calvin Klein ads."

"You mean the campaign they say insinuates incest?"

"I thought it was child pornography. No, wait, it was both. The kids in the wood-paneled basement?"

"Yes. Now they have a big billboard on Houston of--I don't know what."

"Young flesh? America is obsessed with young flesh. We want to eat it. That's why we have all the wars."

I'm terribly prone to making reductive statements about the national character to foreigners, especially when drunk, but the middle-aged French photographer takes it in stride.

"I see," he says. He sneezes.

"Gesundtheit," I say.

"This is my stop," he replies.

"Nice talkin' to ya," I say, my worldliness dissolved in young American flesh.

"Good evening," he says, smiling crookedly.

I resume hitting myself in the forehead with my magazine.

8:02 p.m. My friend Lucky has left me a message reporting that he is currently employed projecting an American Express ad on the side of a building from a truck and would I like to visit him on the corner of 10th Street and 3rd Avenue anytime between 4:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. during the next two weeks? I call him back to say that it's too bad, he just missed me in the city but I will swing by another day and maybe we can get some ice cream cones at the Ben & Jerry's across the street, the one I frequented earlier today. Lucky's financee Molly texts me to report that the kid she nannies for with whom we had popsicles with on Monday in the park keeps mentioning that we had popsicles and HE ATE SPONGE BOB'S EYES, an observation I pointed out to him by asking him how Sponge Bob's eyes tasted. I am having an effect on the youth! Rebecca comes out of yoga, has deleted all my messages without listening to them and would love to get some Korean food.

10:20 p.m. Rebecca and I return home full of Korean food. Our all-time favorite Six Feet Under episode has appeared on HBO OnDemand, the one where Nate has a dream sequence while he's having his first AVM surgery and sees that he is both alive and dead, that the universe is split in two and that "everything that can happen, does happen." He sees all of his different possible lives go by, including ones where he doesn't even exist. Then for the rest of the episode he's haunted by weird deja vu moments that refer to things that happened in the parallel universes he's semi-visited. The point, we think, is that this universe is just one of many, and everything that happens here, specific as it seems, is just a single possibile outcome plucked at random from infinity.

Labels: advertising, algebra, education, Frenchmen, infinity, materialism, morning, spring, subway-surfing, time, War of 1812, wine, Writers I Admire, yoga

The crowd at the playground at 85th and Central Park West is about half nannies, half mommies, with the nannies up by a woman or two. There are Thai nannies, Indian nannies, Caribbean nannies, Dominican nannies, post-collegiate American nannies, matronly nannies. Some of the nannies are like mommies, wiping noses, feeding Cheerios one by one, some are like office workers, watching an invisible clock.

Out on the Great Lawn, nannies self-segregate by native language, forming little cloches, the adult faces all Asian or African or South American, the children all white. A quick scan of the greater weeping willow tree area reveals at least a dozen $700 strollers. A year's rent in strollers, I'm thinking, a big score for the stroller thieves of Central Park.

Young mothers aggressively push the strollers, diamond rings flashing, t-shirts expensive. Their bodies betray no aftereffects of childbearing, taut with wealth if not with youth. Glossy private school girls, anorexic and voluptuous at the same time, talking on cell phones, cottony-clean private school boys, shirtless, swaggering. Older dads, making enough dough to be in the park at 4:00 on a Monday, embodying the joys of fatherhood at fifty.

There is, as always, a significant percentage of twins, and I marvel again at the oddity of a population so wealthy and specific that they conceive their babies at will in test tubes in a buy-one-get-one-free format. Do the double strollers cost $1400, or is there a discount on those, too?

An inordinate number of little boys wear polo shirts and it is not hard to imagine their steady march toward financial adulthood. It is not a meaningless act, I think, to put a collared shirt on a young child. The absent parents of the Upper West Side, ensconced downtown multiplying their mutual funds, must know at some level what they do when they collar their toddlers. It's the yoke of economic expectation, locked firmly around the kid's chubby neck. Let the children wear t-shirts!, I think. Let the children be children!

A boy fails to gain possession of a soccer ball from a bigger boy and erupts in tears. His mom scoops him up, kisses his cheeks, croons, "I'll play with you." The kid who kept the ball away now offers it, chagrined, but the crying boy throws it on the ground, "I don't want it now," he sobs. A determined mother hustles her kid along the path, dragging him by the arm. "Lately," he says, "I've been eating my lunch."

Older brothers terrorize younger ones in symbolically pregnant games of catch. Impatient fathers try to improve the younger brothers' techniques, they squirm and cry and continue to throw (I hate this expression, but it is evocative) like girls. The older brothers' throws are dead-on perfect and just a little too viciously hard and the younger brothers bobble them. The older brothers roll their eyes and kick the grass. The younger brothers' throws are a mockery, they fall short, or go long, or lob high and weak, and the older brothers make showy catches with the sadism that hides in every older sibling. The younger brothers scramble, puppyish, and even as they are made to suffer they grow in some cruel way, pulled a little bit beyond their limits by this enemy and friend who wears the bigger replica Yankee jersey, sleeps in the bigger bedroom.

Baseball teams take the field, clouds of dust, the bellows of serious coaching. Track teams hustle by, gaggles of barely pubescent girls, their adipose tissue rearranging itself by the minute, and coltish boys, so spare, the ones who run. Older girls, the real stars of some prestigious high school, streak by in lockstep, their bodies Olympian, their legs dotted with the prevention or aftermath of serious injury, stretchy, black braces of varying sizes and high-tech polymers.

I am hit between the shoulder blades, hard, and the wind goes out of me. As the impact recedes I realize by sound and smell that it was only a tennis ball gone wayward from the nearby fraternal battle. "Tell the lady you're sorry," shouts the dad.

"Sorry," says Older Brother, rolling his eyes.

"Sorry," says Younger Brother, panting up alongside Older Brother and imitating his eye roll.

"S'okay," I mumble, and continue reading my book, digging a stick absently in the grass.

A few minutes later, a really little kid pushing a toy baby stroller stumbles up to me and bumps it into my legs.

"Tell the lady you're sorry, Maxie." says his dad.

I smile at the kid, encouragingly, forgivingly.

The kid stares blankly back at me, crouches down, picks up a handful of wood chips and brings it meditatively to his mouth.

"Don't eat dirt, Maxie," says the dad.

The way Max is crouched down reminds me of one of my all-time favorite quirks of little kids, which is that if you crouch down to meet them at eye level they crouch down, too, as if they just don't get it that they're little. Almost all little kids do it, and it cracks me up.

The kid looks at me, totally defocusing now. The wood chips fall from his fingers. He has that great stare of the preverbal, the way they look at you free from assumption or connotation, their expression saying something between, "huh," and "who or what the hell are you?"

I put down my book. I look back.

Labels: Central Park, childhood, New York, siblings, spring, wealth

For New Yorkers, I will be reading this Sunday, April 15, in the Tax Day edition of the Mr. Beller's Neighborhood reading series, at Mo' Pitkin's House of Satisfaction on Avenue A between 2nd and 3rd Streets. Come for the name alone! It's at 8:00 and it's FREE. I am one of four, and the whole thing takes an hour. You're in, you're out, you're literary!

Labels: events, taxes

Just the other day I said that Kurt Vonnegut would say, about the death thing, So it goes, and now he's gone.

I am one of the doubtless many who counts Vonnegut among my heroes. I saw him speak once, on a panel about the Patriot Act at the New School, and I touched him once, when I ran into him at full speed on 48th Street. I was in Dresden for 24 hours last November, and the whole time I was there I thought about him and the bombing.

For some odd reason I picked up Slaughterhouse-Five and re-read it in one day last week, newly amazed by its sadness and simplicity. How can this book be in the world and war still go on? Have any of those lunatics ever read this book? This book says everything you need to know about war. What heroism, to tell us that there are no heroes in war, only children.

A while ago I started writing letters to my heroes, even the ones I have met and made a fool of myself in front of. The one to Kurt Vonnegut began:

Dear Mr. Vonnegut,

About two and a half years ago I ran into you on 48th street. Literally, I ran into you. I'm almost certain it was you, as you are fairly unmistakeable and I recall vividly the sensation of a pack of cigarettes crinkling in my victim's shirt pocket as we collided.

I was late for a Fulbright information session at the UN and consequently as soon as I realized that in my collision with one of the great writers of the twentieth century neither of us had been harmed, I took off running once again, only to realize a block later that I had just run into one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

Heaping further flattery upon you I will say that I wish I had stayed and accosted you in the bumbling way that young admirers accost their heroes when they meet them by chance on the street, rather than boarding the elevator of that crumbling monument to ineffectiveness and sitting for several hours in a molded plastic chair to be lectured on just how difficult it might be to obtain U.S. Government funds for the purpose of foreign travel.

Please consider this letter in lieu of an on-the-street fan accostment you might have suffered in October of 2004.

I did not finish my letter. I was going to ask for advice.

The advice I got from Kurt Vonnegut is therefore a little more abstract. It consists of things he wrote, and the cosmic jokes he told and alerted me to.

I liked all the times he said about death, "So it goes." And I liked when he quoted his son, who said about life, "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." I liked when he called us all fools and babies, and I liked when all the other panelists at the New School were talking about the legalities of the Patriot Act and Vonnegut said, "Well, it's just as insane as anything else you see on television," and I liked maybe best of all the part in Slaughterhouse-Five on pages 74 through 75 in which he describes what World War II would look like in reverse.

If we were to play Kurt Vonnegut's life in reverse he would be alive again, as he was yesterday, and he would blow the smoke back into many cigarettes and all his children would all be babies and then soon enough he would be right there in Dresden to see all those burned bodies brought back to life again, and along the way he'd take all his books away from us and put them back into brain.

I don't know how to do that but maybe he would have.

What can you say to your hero when he departs this Earth?

I am only a stranger, one of the millions who read the words you wrote, but I think you are a very great man. I am glad you were here on this planet. I am glad we were here at the same time, for a while. I am glad that once we were on 48th Street at the same time. I am glad you had bags under your eyes and curly hair. I, too, have bags under my eyes and curly hair. I want to be like you.

Were you tired? Were you ready?

You made it look so easy. You made me want to try. You made me think. You made me laugh. You made me cry. You taught me things. You took away the pain.

You did good work. We needed you. You helped.

I hope things get better. I fear they'll get worse. So many awful things happened to you, and you managed to live to tell about them, so we, who did not live through those things, could understand. You used your imagination, made up crazy things that aren't true, to tell the truth somehow. You pointed out that we are cruel beings and life is a destructive thing, "a horrible thing to do to an animal," you so cleverly said. I could say you were absurd, that you pointed out the absurdity inherent in every moment of life, I could say complicated things, but you made it simple.

How did you do that?

To end his long and famous poem, Walt Whitman said:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop some where waiting for you

Maybe we will meet again, Mr. Vonnegut, on the midtown streets of Tralfamadore. Next time, I would like to shake your hand and say,

Thank you.

Labels: Kurt Vonnegut

The other day I bought myself an ice cream cone and ate it standing still in the center of Grand Central Station at 5:45 p.m. I can highly recommend this experience to anyone. Go to the Ben & Jerry's by the steps to the 4-5-6 trains and get yourself a cone in your favorite flavor. It is absolutely imperative that it be a cone, not a cup. Take this cone to the middle of Grand Central Station, by the Information Booth but not too close, as the Information Booth enjoys a kind of buffer from the tides of people streaming through Grand Central in rush hour. Your goal here is to bathe in the multitude, not set yourself apart from it. Stand in the middle of the station licking your ice cream cone while people all around you stampede toward Westchester and Connecticut. Trust me, you will love it.

Some of the only other people standing still in Grand Central Station at 5:45 p.m. were the soldiers in their camouflage uniforms with their big guns. I recognized their camouflage uniforms as the latest kind of camouflage, a new kind of uniform the Army is rolling out called the Army Combat Uniform, or ACU. The ACU will replace all the different kinds of camouflage for desert, woodland and urban settings with one universal kind of camouflage. It's called MARPAT. The uniform is machine washable and printed with low-resolution pixels. There is some concern that the Velcro on the pockets is too noisy for combat, but drills are being developed to work the Velcro into protocols of Noise and Light Discipline.

The MARPAT was blending in quite well against the beige stone of Grand Central, but the black of the soldiers' guns gave away their position. My friend Holly once commented on the absurdity of soldiers in the train stations thusly: "They evoke in me a feeling of dissonance. It's like, that man has a machine gun, and I am wearing a sundress."

There is also the odd fact that the soldiers are frequently enjoying refreshments from one of the station concessions, so that if terrorism were to suddenly break out everywhere, the weapon they would be holding would be a 32-oz Styrofoam cup from Smoothie King. But hey, better in Grand Central slurping a smoothie than in Iraq banging down doors and scaring impressionable children who like all humans, might be prone to holding grudges. Bring all the soldiers to Grand Central station, I say, and I will buy them all smoothies. There is a great big American flag hanging from the ceiling and messing up the view of the constellations painted there, and they can salute the fucker if they get bored.

While eating my ice cream cone I gazed upon those constellations on the ceiling of Grand Central, replete with their twinkling lights. Sometimes there are one or two escaped balloons up there, bobbing and slowly deflating. I wondered if a soldier would ever shoot down one of those errant balloons with his rifle, first reaching noisily into the pocket of his uniform and affixing a sight to the barrel of his gun, then firing into the heights of this vast echo chamber, at the golden constellations in the painted blue sky.

Labels: Army, camouflage, constellations, guns, ice cream, New York, soldiers, train stations

For a long time I've had these terrible recurring nightmares that I'm going blind in a bookstore. This could be because since I was a small child I've spent a lot of time in bookstores, browsing myself into a narcotic stupor until my eyes actually do give out and my vision begins to blur.

My bookstore blindness is related to my dental deformities. After I lost my baby teeth, my permanent teeth came in at radically different angles, each one pointing in a different direction. I wore braces for seven years. I had headgear. I had a palate expander, which is a medieval torture device cemented into the mouth of a minor child and tightened each night with a metal key by the child's parent. My parents would chase me with this key and I would hide under the dining room table. Over the course of my transformation from a dentally deformed child to a reasonably normal-looking adult, I had fourteen teeth removed (eleven baby ones and three permanent ones, not counting my wisdom teeth years later), one of them under general anesthesia in the hospital.

"Most of my cases are purely cosmetic," my orthodontist would say. "But not this one. This one is a medical necessity."

My orthodontist was a chichi operation on Central Park South, next to the Plaza Hotel and across the street from where the horse-drawn carriages line up to take tourists through Central Park. To this day I associate the smell of horses with the taste of metal, the poking of stray wires, the bitterness of probing latex fingers in my mouth, the dread of the orthodontist announcing that another tooth needed to come out before he could enact his vision upon my crowded jaws.

The oral surgeon was also a chichi operation, somewhere in the East 50s. He was a tiny little man who collected antique dental equipment. My mother was very concerned that some of this equipment might still be in use and was perhaps not up to modern safety standards. The oral surgeon had a German nurse named Margaret who would hold my hand while he pried my teeth from the bone. At some deep and ethnophobic level of my Semitic body, I found Margaret's accent and smile deeply disturbing as she squeezed my trembling hands with her efficient, gloved one.

My parents bribed me into withstanding these heinous acts of orthodontic torture with books. After having my braces tightened I would be allowed to buy books at the nearby Doubleday bookshop, which I loved for its glass elevator. After my oral surgeries I would be permitted to buy many, many books. After one oral surgery, blood started dribbling out of the side of my mouth where the cotton packing had come loose from the latest crater in my gums, and still I wandered the aisles of the Doubleday Young Adult section, my arms full of books, the other children shrinking from me in terror.

Books were my first addiction, and it was also through my orthodontic travails that I had my first drug experience. It was discovered that one of my cuspids was about to grow out from underneath my nose instead of descending to where it was supposed to be. The orthodontist decided that it could be exposed, lassoed with a little wire, and slowly dragged down to join the rest of my teeth. (This did come to pass and for a while I had a tiny, S&M-style chain inside my mouth. It was kind of punk rock, actually.)

This was a complicated surgery that would require general anesthesia. An operating room was booked and I was promised many, many books at Doubleday bookstore if only I would go willingly to the surgery. I was twelve and just beginning to understand that the world was a terrible place and life sucked and would suck for some time. I actually believed it would suck forever, having no inkling that things would ever get as good as they are now. This surgery was just the latest in a stream of indignities being visited upon me. First suburbia, then middle school, then puberty, now this.

I recall a rather embarrassing episode in which I was dragged up the street bodily by my parents, having frozen in protest and fear outside the hospital. I recall being somewhat shamed by the idea that there were kids in the hospital having far worse surgeries than mine, who stood no chance of getting out of the hospital that day, that week or ever, for that matter.

However, when I was given a hospital gown to put on my self-pity returned. I was about to remove my clothing so that strangers could knock me unconscious and go at me with sharp objects. There was no amount of books that could make up for this indignity and very soon I would run away to a place where people had teeth growing out of their noses just like me and I could live in peace, like on that episode of the Twilight Zone where everyone looks like pigs and the beautiful woman thinks she's ugly.

Some very kind residents came over and I was petulant with them. Then they inserted a needle in my arm and put something in it and instantaneously all my troubles disappeared. I found out later that this needle conveyed to my veins a combination of Valium and sodium pentathol. "Cut me open, I don't care," I sang as the gurney went down the hall. "Do whatever you want. I love you all so, so much, do you know that, do you, do you?"

They let my mom come into the operating room to watch them put me under. Her face, upside down, was the last thing I saw as I counted backwards. I didn't understand why she had tears in her eyes, in this, the most wonderful place in all the world.

I woke up in a distinctly less positive mood. My first (and only) experience with intravenous barbiturates was over and I now had my first hangover. My parents were standing at my bedside, my father wearing a scrub shirt and carrying a canvas sack. They only allowed one parent in the recovery room at a time, so my father had stolen a bag of laundry off a cart in the hallway and snuck in, posing as an orderly. My parents had this terrible look on their faces I thankfully wouldn't see again until I totalled the family station wagon six months after I got my driver's license. It was the expression of parents looking at their child lying in a hospital bed.

In the end, they lassoed the tooth down but they couldn't make it fit. "I told you when we started that her mouth was crowded," said the orthodontist defensively. His bold, risky move had failed, like when they dropped paratroopers into Belgium in the summer of 1944, or tried to dock blimps on the Empire State Building.

I went back to the oral surgeon and he and the German nurse collaborated in defanging me, leaving me with only one canine and a slightly lopsided smile. For a long time I carried my fang in a small pocket of my bag wherever I went, fingering it compulsively from time to time. I would run my fingertip along the smooth surface of the tooth part, up the root and onto the curved hook at the end. Baby teeth break off from their roots when pulled, but permanent ones are meant to last a lifetime, and come out with the root intact. I was perversely proud that I had this part of my body, perfect and complete and knowable in a way it wouldn't have been if it was still attached to the rest of me. There is a hole between my front teeth and molars not big enough for a tooth that I can probe with my tongue, another nervous habit. My room is full of books, and when I stay in bookstores until my eyes blur, I feel strangely brave and safe.

Labels: adolescence, books, childhood, dental problems, drugs, orthodonture, pain

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon writing in the New York Public Library. I thought it might be different to write in an enormous room full of marble and hardwood. It wasn't. I was still there and so was the blank page. It was just like writing at home, except that when I leaned back in my chair and stretched after finishing a sentence, I looked up and saw pink puffy clouds painted on panels in a carved wooden ceiling as high as my four-story apartment building. Those clouds must have been painted by a sentimental person, or someone on drugs. They are too pink and fluffy to have been painted by a realist.

The New York Public Library was so beautiful that I had to check on the progress of Moynihan Station, which is supposedly going to restore to New York the glory of the old Penn Station, which they tore down in 1963 to build the then-new Madison Square Garden. I am considering becoming a Friend of Moynihan Station, so badly do I want it to be built and restore to New York the glory of the old Penn Station.

I am preoccupied with these matters because Rebecca and I recently finished watching New York: A Documentary Film (not to be confused with New York: The Place Where We Live). In it, we learned about how when the city went into fiscal free-fall in the 1960s they knocked down Penn Station, which was only 56 years old at the time. It was based on the Carcalla baths and built to last for millenia, to stand as a glorious monument to the striving of all New Yorkers as they bustled to and fro, or so the narration said, or so I imagined the narration said, as there really isn't any point to watching PBS not stoned.

When they showed us pictures of the station when it was first built, we cried. When they showed it being torn down, which took three whole years, pictures of its beautiful stone angels being hacked off and lowered to the ground and eventually, we later read, pulverized into dust in a New Jersey landfill, we also cried. When they showed the picture of what is now Madison Square Garden in architect's renderings before it was built, we cradled our heads in our hands, and made a soft, keening sound, and then we smacked our foreheads with our open palms, and this made a sharp, fleshy sound.

The new Madison Square Garden is almost as ugly as the new Penn Station, but it is not all bad. In Madison Square Garden, in 1998, I saw Michael Jordan play against the Knicks for the second-to-last time in his career, because Rebecca's dad was being solicited by a pharmaceuticals rep who gave him four tickets to the game. Rebecca's sister Rachel couldn't go so I went instead.

We went up an escalator to a room where we saw a brief presentation on a particular brand of penicillin. Then the woman gave us four tickets to see the Knicks vs. the Bulls at Madison Square Garden. These were hot tickets, even in the nosebleeds, as they were. Somehow right before tipoff Rebecca and I picked our way down to the very front seats, right behind Celebrity Row. People rich and powerful enough to have these seats don't waste their time watching the first quarter of a basketball game. We saw Woody Allen. We saw the artist then-known as Puff Daddy. We saw Spike Lee. Later on, I saw Ethan Hawke in the corridor, wearing a very nice suit. And best of all, for about fifteen beautiful minutes, until partway into the second quarter when two burly businessmen arrived at their rightful seats, we saw Michael Jordan play basketball from twenty feet away on the floor of Madison Square Garden.

The game was decided at the buzzer, when the Knicks missed a field goal and the Bulls won. By this time we were back in the nosebleeds with Rebecca's parents and all the other doctors who had been solicited by the pharmaceuticals rep. The man next to me was a middle-aged doctor from Jamaica and as the Knicks made an improbable run in the final minutes to catch and tie the Bulls, he and I were jumping up and down and high-fiving one another in the fast friendship of shared fandom. When the final shot went up we grabbed one another's arms and craned our necks and held our breath with the rest of of the crowd in the architectural nightmare that stands where a beautiful building once stood. When the shot bounced off the rim we dropped our arms to our sides and did not look one another in the eye the whole way down all the escalators. I didn't care that the Knicks had lost. I was used to them losing. I had seen something I knew I would tell my grandchildren about one day, and the moment might not have existed without pharmaceuticals salespeople and the destruction of the original Penn Station, terrible as these two things are.

Michael Jordan no longer plays. Rebecca's dad no longer lives. I hear that pharmaceuticals reps are no longer allowed to solicit doctors with free tickets to important basketball games.

I have been reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut lately and about the death thing, he would say So it goes, and about the time thing would say that all time is simultaneous and so really Michael Jordan is still playing and Rebecca's dad is still alive and we are all still in Madison Square Garden, with Rebecca's mom and the Jamaican doctor, and Phil Jackson is there, too, it is all still happening and will always be happening, and Puff Daddy is still Puff Daddy, not P. Diddy or Diddy, and Woody Allen's most recent movie is the brilliant Deconstructing Harry, and Spike Lee has no ideas about making a documentary about any broken levees because they are at this very moment just concerns on a list of engineering problems to be dealt with at a later date, and Ethan Hawke has not yet written a book containing a chapter about John Starks' unraveling in Game 7 of the 1994 NBA finals, a chapter I will hear him read in Central Park one summer evening, and not two miles to the south the two towers still stand and the world still trades there, and I am still thinking that the Knicks could win a championship when Jordan's still in the league and prove that they could beat even Jordan, and we are all there together watching the arc of this latest Knick misfire as it hangs in the air that is really just the space inside this building or that one.

Labels: architecture, death, Knicks, New York, time, train stations