Today’s soundtrack: So you run down to the safety of the town
but there's panic on the streets of Carlisle
Today at 8:02pm: Eating real cooking.


It’s nice to have people you can talk to. Yesterday afternon Lam and I sat on a Lafayette Street stoop discussing our take on the human condition, creative blocks, tortured artists, being good versus being bad.

The night before Wendy said she’d heard that whatever your personality is at age nine is the true you. During your teen years you can develop defense mechanisms that accidentally disguise your personality and conceal it from yourself, but eventually you return. Seems to us that shit starts shaking out sometime in your late 20s/early 30s.

This doesn’t bode well for us; at age nine I was an annoying little bastard, and Lam confesses he was pure evil. Mrs. Menin wrote a portentous letter to my parents warning of some kind of future doom for me but it was rather vague. Kind of like the FBI terrorist warnings: We know something bad’s gonna happen, but we don’t know what, or when.

Moonberry’s invited us over for dinner, so afterwards we went to pick up cookies at Café Roma.

Dinner was killer, followed by good conversation and coffee. Moonberry’s tidy, mod-retro apartment took both Lam and I aback; it’s surprisingly inviting, comfortable and well-decorated. The place is practically cinematic, done up in colors, objects and tones Wong Kar-Wai would appreciate.

Cranks out the chow and she’s got a flair for interiors. What can I say, her man’s a lucky guy. Me on the other hand, I expect to receive phone calls like the following:


GUY: Can I speak to Rain Noe, please.

ME: Speaking.

GUY: Mr. Noe, I’m just calling to inform you that you have *not* won tonight’s New York State Lottery.

ME: What?

GUY: That’s right, you haven’t won anything.

ME: But I didn’t even buy a ticket.

GUY: We know. We just wanted to underscore your unluckiness by letting you know you haven’t won anything anyway.