Today’s soundtrack: staring at the sky, staring at the sand
Today at 8:02pm: shivering



It works like this: Let’s say you live off one of the local stops. And as you’re coming down the subway steps in the morning, a flood of people is coming up the steps. This means you’ve just missed the train. We’ll call that train “Train A.”

But as you get to the bottom of the steps, another train pulls in. Train B. Very rare, even during rush hour, to get two trains back-to-back like this.

So you get on Train B, and you of course get a seat because Train A swept most of the commuters off the platform. (This is called Second Train Ample Seating Syndrome.)

And as you settle into your seat you have it in your head that Train A is just a short distance ahead of you.

So you realize that if you transfer to the Express at 14th Street, there’s a good chance it will overtake and pass Train A, and then if you hop off the Express at 42nd Street you can catch Train A as it pulls in.

So you do it, and it works. You’ve successfully jumped one train ahead.

You do this because there’s something satisfying about calculating and executing a faster way to get there. And you congratulate yourself for shaving five minutes off your morning commute.

But then you climb the steps at 51st Street and remember that you hate your fucking job, and all you’ve really accomplished is getting yourself there faster.

Nice going, Einstein.


Heater still broken in my apartment. Very very very cold over here. If you want to make ice, all you gotta do is leave some water in a glass.

I bought a space heater. It provides outstanding warmth in a fucking two-foot radius. This thing would be great if I tethered it to my ankle and dragged it around like a dialysis machine. I can pretend I am Osama bin Laden, outwitting Special Forces with my advanced rock technologies.

Right now I’m practically straddling the thing like a motorcycle. The worst part about this is I am a college graduate and oh, if you could see how I live. No heat, small meals, bland clothing. The freelance life is hand-to-mouth and I’m waiting for some checks to come in. I’m in between checks. I’m in between a rock and a cold place.


I just did some random Math for no reason. Today I am roughly 32.333 years old, which means I have awakened for 11,801 mornings. Give or take twenty or thirty for all-nighters, travel time and jetlag.

I wish I started keeping track earlier, I would’ve done something nice on my 10,000th morning. (Like smash my alarm clock into little bits with my shoe.) I suppose I could go back and calculate when that was but right now I don’t want to know. The only thing I want to know is when the goddamn heat is coming back on.


What’s up with this second sniper in Ohio? The news is keeping it awfully quiet. If I wanna read about it I have to dig for it in the papers, but it oughta be on the front page.

At lunch I always dig through the lurid crime briefs in the Times (underreported) and the Daily News (overreported). I don’t know why but I feel the need to remind myself that terrible things still happen daily. Kind of keeps things in perspective for me. It also makes me less shocked when I hear about things like Hey, they found a human head in a dumpster. I don’t like shocks. I want to be able to say Human head in a dumpster, Jesus, is it July already.


I’m laid up with a nasty cold. If you ride the subway in New York, forget about it, there’s no way you’re not getting sick in the wintertime. There’s always some nasty person coughing and hacking and touching all the surfaces in the train. Misery loves company, and germy people on the train loving touching the handpoles. I try to hold my breath after they sneeze but it’s usually too late; I heard somewhere that sneeze germs travel eighty feet per second and take three hours to settle. If I could have psychic powers I wouldn't ask for anything crazy like long-range clairvoyance, but I'd love to have a two-second warning before someone sneezes.

In Japan people wear dust masks when they get sick. They wear them to prevent other people from catching their germs. The mask creates a sort of personal maxilofacial germ containment area. That was one of the things I really liked about living in Japan.


As you can see, I have nothing meaningful to say. I’m just typing for the sake of typing and I know, there’s something deranged about that.