Today’s soundtrack: kanashii koto nante
Today at 10:02pm: Sipping at an unwanted gin & tonic.


Right now it’s 5 in the morning and I can’t sleep. I’m just gonna stay up and go to work in a few hours.

Psyched, I avoided TV all day and didn’t see any tastelessly looped images.

Slept late, occasionally turning news radio on to see if anything had happened that might warrant my getting out of bed and putting some clothes on and evacuating.

Today was freakishly windy. I avoid the temptation to attribute meaning to that, understanding it’s the cause of atmospheric conditions, the little red and blue arrows on the weather maps.

The wind is blowing so hard all the white people on the street look like they’re doing Asian impersonations with their eyes.

Put the short stories down in frustration and switched back to the novel, steadily adding sentences to chapters two, three and four. My hope is that one day people will be able to read these sentences while they’re waiting for airplanes or riding the subway or lying in bed playing hooky from work.

After I graduated college I was recruited to work on a start-up magazine. We busted our ass and after it was published, distributed them to some universities. We visited one. They were using stacks of the magazines to prop doors open.

The thing I did get out of that experience was good friends. That’s how I met Lam and Deadly. So even if the magazine didn’t go anywhere we did spend the next seven years going to movies, eating meals and taking little trips together. Maybe my “career” will go nowhere but me and my agent will become golf buddies.

Went to bed at the decent hour of midnight. After restless slumber my eyes cracked open at 3:30am. Turned on the TV to see Conan interviewing Carson Daly, which was kind of surreal. Like watching Superman fight Batman or something.

Nearly out of money, earlier this evening I ate an inexpensive dinner by myself at the kitchen table, reading a magazine. Then the new neighbor called me down to help her install a shelf.

Half-hour later Shady asked me if I wanted to go out for a drink. He’d been planning on treating himself to a nice dinner tonight. A year ago he was one of those people running away from the collapsing tower while I was obliviously riding the subway. PTSD being what it is, tonight he wants a nice steak and a clear conscience.

“You wanna come out? Let’s go to Fanelli’s,” he says, referring to one of the standby neighborhood spots. In truth I didn’t want to go out at all, but I went so he wouldn’t be alone. Everyone likes Fanelli’s but for some reason I’m never really comfortable there.