Today’s soundtrack: I wanna know your plan.
Today at 8:02pm: At hapkido, doing leglifts until I feel certain I will vomit.



A friend-of-a-friend recently visited from Paris. After walking around for a spell, she observed that midtown looks like it’s packed with hookers.

New York’s anti-smoking laws dictate smokers stand outside in front of buildings and puff their little hearts out (literally). In Paris, apparently the only women who stand in front of buildings and smoke are whores. But here it’s well-heeled women who work in marketing and lead fashionable, stressful, carcinogenic little lives.


During my afternoon break today I stretched my legs in front of The Corporation. Standing stupidly with a cigarette in my mouth and fighting the urge to rip my tie off and use it to choke a random fellow employee. I bet if I did it no one would be shocked or try to stop me, they’d all just stand around and nod solemnly while the chokee drew his last breath, crooked fingers grasping skyward in vain.

Anyways I’m standing there on the Park Avenue sidewalk and this guy who looks exactly like Captain Kangaroo walks up. Wearing some type of outfit with a badge and a hat.

He stops, looks at me, and instantly says “Rain.” (For those of you new to this journal that’s my name, not some unsolicited weather prediction.)

I fight the urge to run and look at him carefully. “Murph,” I say.


Back in college I started turning out these crappy articles for the school paper, which more or less began my side career in writing. I wasn’t really qualified to write but it was an art school; I was in high demand because I actually knew what an adverb was and showed up for work without paint all over my fingers.

On campus there was a security guard named Murphy whom everyone used to make fun of. Nothing evil about the man, he was just, for lack of a better term, a doofus.

Anyways in my pre-graduation sign-off article I wrote about the things I’d miss about college. “Most of all, I’ll miss Murphy,” I wrote at the end. It was intended to be, like me, mean and sarcastic for no good reason.


Nine years after the printing machine spit that article out, here’s the man himself, Murphy, standing in front of me in midtown Manhattan, maybe forty pounds heavier. In 1994 he looked like a skinny version of Captain Kangaroo and, well, now he just looks like Captain Kangaroo.

“Rain, Rain, Rain, Rain,” he says, breaking into a toothy grin. “About ten years ago you wrote an article in The Prattler. I’ll never forget it, I cut the article out and saved it. ‘Cause at the bottom you wrote ‘But most of all I’ll miss Murphy.’ You remember?”

“I remember,” I say, wearing a decent and upstanding expression. Murphy’s still a security guard of some sort, judging by the uniform.

“I told myself if I ever saw you again I’d ask you about it, and here we are. Now was there a professor named Murphy, or was that me?”

“No, there was no professor named Murphy.”

“No kidding,” says Murph, standing back and giving a little laugh. “So that was me! Why me?”

I realized he didn’t realize I was being sarcastic, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him. “Because, Murph,” I said in what I hoped was a jovial tone. “You were the security guard everybody knew.”

“I was?” he said, and gave another little laugh. “Hey, you know, I know all about that hole you guys cut in the fence.”

“The one by the White Castle?” I asked. “We got tired of climbing the damn thing.”

“I knew you kids wouldn’t walk around the fence to get back to campus,” he says. “What a war zone.”

“Forget about it, it was like Beirut,” I say. (Back in the early ‘90s my school, Pratt, was in a part of Brooklyn that was considered Fully Fucked-Up. There was a fence around the school but people were still getting shot, raped, stabbed, you name it. Boy those were some good times.)

“Like Beirut, hahahah! I’ll tell ya, whenever I had to check the buildings on Ryerson I always made sure I had this.” At this point Murphy reaches into his jacket and I almost took a step back, certain he was about to spray me with automatic fire and disturbing cackles.

His hand came back out holding a little flashlight, which he turned on. He hunched behind it like a cartoon spy and flicked it around furtively. I realized he was making a joke.

“Hahahaha,” he said.

“Hahahaha,” I said. Then Murphy the Midtown Security Guard shook my hand and walked away.

I wished one of my coworkers had watched the whole exchange. “Bet you didn’t know I knew Captain Kangaroo,” I’d say, nodding smugly. “I’m down with Mr. Greenjeans too. He’s my bitch.”