Today’s soundtrack: I'm just calling on the wise man's communion
Today at 12:02pm: cutting notches with a jigsaw



The guy at the lumberyard assured me his delivery guy would not help me carry the wood in, and he was right. For twenty dollars they bring the wood to your building in a truck, but once it touches the sidewalk it’s your problem.

I carried thirty pieces of lumber up the stairs, twenty-six 2x6 ten-footers and six 4x4 ten-footers, and it took me nineteen trips. I’m not a big guy. As my shirt began to soak through I wished for the umpteenth time that the studio had an elevator. After the nineteenth trip I stopped wishing.

The 3/4” plywood was manageable weight-wise, but far too bulky for me to hump up the stairs myself. During my calls for help three friends said no, then Logan said yes. After the fifth sheet was at the top of the stairs, he and his girlfriend got back in his car and disappeared. They live on the Upper West Side.

Hi, my name is Rain and I live in New York City. I work a bunch of different jobs to pay the rent. For one of my jobs I’m running a low-end photo studio. It’s not very exciting but you know what, neither am I.

The studio requires renovation, which I’ve been putting off because I felt it was too big a job for me. Now I’m finally doing it, because I’ve been running the studio for over a year and have yet to break even. If I go any deeper into debt the U.S. economy would capsize. I am singlehandedly subsidizing Mastercard and several banks. So fixing up the studio is my attempt to generate business and not wind up being buried in a potter’s field.

I went to school for industrial design, so I know how to slap things together. Nothing fancy, but give me some wood and a couple power tools and I’ll produce a pile of sawdust with a new chair in the middle. I’ve done demolition and light construction, putting up sheetrock and such.

The studio needs a loft, which I’ve never built before but felt I could figure out. I called my friend Ben, an experienced builder, and asked him some questions about lofts and decks and he offered to help. I e-mailed him a simple floorplan and he figured out where the posts and joists should go. And it was he who spec’d out the cut-list in paragraph two.

Next we spent two days putting the damn thing up. The floor in the studio is more crooked than Tom Delay so it wasn’t easy getting the thing level and plumb. Ben did most of the math and construction, which was fine by me; I cut the wood to his instructions and used the Makita to drill whatever targets he pointed me at.

Now that the raw structure’s finished, Ben’s gone and I’m on my own. I have to finish securing the surface to the joists, then hang doors and build shelving for underneath. Last comes the staining and sanding. I’m pretty sure I can finish it inside of two weeks. Then again I was pretty sure John Kerry was going to win the last Presidential election.

After Ben left I spent a couple hours tidying stuff up--the studio’s been turned upside down--then washed as much sawdust off me as I could, and went out for dinner. 11pm on a Sunday night so my options are limited. I headed over to my favorite Vietnamese place, Nam Son, but they were closed. The streets, however, were packed with tourists. I forget how it gets like this on Memorial Day weekend.

I buried my craving for Vietnamese and walked up to the Korean deli on Spring, where I’ve gotten friendly with the counterguy; I think he gives me more pressure to get married than my parents do. I wanted a bacon cheeseburger but the grill was already off. I heard that when you’re writing a screenplay, you’re supposed to come up with complications that stymie the character at every turn. Wonder where they came up with that idea.

I settled for a couple empanadas and a small plastic container of something called 0% Greek Yogurt. Never tried it before so figured I’d give it a whirl.

“How many hours you work this week?” asked Korean counterguy, ringing up my order. I told him and he nodded. Didn’t mention marriage this time.

With my dinner in a bag I walked down to Chinatown. There are these fruit and vegetable stands that have these shelves out front, like bleachers. At 11:30pm they're long-closed and the shelves are bare. I parked myself on one of these, unwrapped the chow and started eating. Street life in front of me like a theater.

This part of Chinatown is filthy. I’m not sure if it’s the locals or the tourists. From my vantage point on the fruit bleachers, I look left and right and see a medium-sized avenue completely strewn with trash. There’s not a two-foot-square stretch of pavement or sidewalk that doesn’t have something dirty and discarded on it.

A drunken group of tourists, all female and middle-American-looking, stumble past me. Desperate Housewives. The leader turns to me and asks me which way the subway is. I start to answer her but she ignores me mid-sentence and starts walking again.

They stop at the next intersection and holler at a passing bus. Then, while waiting for the light, the group of them bends over and touches the sidewalk, each of them assuming the position of a sprinter at the beginning of a race. Their asses are all sticking way up in the air. All of the women are shaped roughly like Grimace, narrow on top and wide at the bottom, wearing tight pants and wobbling drunkenly. I’ve seen some pretty sick pornography on the internet, but to me this was more obscene.

A teenager walks past, speaking Fukienese into a cell phone. It sounds a lot more jarring to me than Cantonese.

A double-decker tourbus drives past. Though it’s nearly midnight, it’s filled to the brim. Each and every person in the bus turns and stares at me eating my empanadas like I’m some kind of zoo animal. I want to throw my feces at them.

Afterwards I crack open the Greek yogurt. It has no scent but tastes exactly like what I imagine a prison inmate’s asshole tastes like. The Greeks that first started eating this must have been very, very hungry.

Fifteen minutes later I abandon the fruit bleachers and walk home through the crowded sidewalks. I pass a yellow Ferrari Maranello parked in front of a Chinese restaurant. Behind the front seats is a glass panel, underneath which you can see the engine. It looks cleaner than anything in my house.

A couple is arguing on the corner across the street. I can’t hear what they’re saying but the girl is leaning towards the guy and repeatedly jabbing an accusatory finger at his chest. He doesn’t move.

A cop buzzes past in one of those enclosed scooters. He parks at an intersection and looks over the tourists with a bored look on his face.

A car filled with four Chinese people stops suddenly. One of them gets out, shuts the door and walks around the corner. The car drives off. None of them said goodbye.

A door opens and three young women come out of a building, apparently on their way to a club. They look like what bad girls looked like in the 1950s: Heavy makeup, knee-length skirts over fisnet stockings and their hair is in bobs and doo-wop perms.

Have fun at the club, girls. I’m off to bed.