new york minute

weather: 58°F, which is quite cool, i think, for early august. it is wet, all kinds of wet, wet air, wet sidewalks, wet floor beneath the kitchen window--but also wet soil in my pepper plant's pot, and its two tiny wet fruits are the prettiest things i've seen all year.

odor: and lo, the rains did pour forth and wash away the sins of the world, and cleanse it of its old-bologna funk, and short out its third rails, and the wretched masses huddled on street corners and crowded together underground and were too angry to notice how great a rain-washed street smells early in the morning, but after they had huddled and crowded for a bit everything smelled like coffee breath and armpits anyway, so it was just as well.



maybe some people become deadened to the sidewalk's layer of refuse over time, and perhaps i will too, but so far living in new york has blessed me with a drastically heightened appreciation of a clean street. david lynch would also like to encourage you to refrain from littering:



and i would like to encourage you to refrain from tampering with the united states mail. the other day my roommate came upstairs and handed me a packet of sra paperwork, the august 13 issue of the new yorker, and a white envelope that had once contained an offer for a 0% apr on balance transfers but which now contained a small ziploc baggie filled with bullets. i don't know much about munitions and so can't describe the bullets in great detail, but they were about as large as my thumb between the tip and the uppermost knuckle and looked to be made of brass. there were fifteen of them. granted, i do not need another credit card, and if i did know something about bullets i might be able to take better advantage of the ones that have been given to me--for all i know they have a high street value--but still; after a long day at work, it just isn't the kind of thing i want to ponder.

i am almost caught up on the new yorker--only three weeks behind! that's the nearest i've come to closing the gap in about a year--and it is just beginning to dawn on me that, if i wanted to, i could probably attend almost every new yorker festival event this year. i doubt that i will want to, but it sure is something to have the option. if anyone would like to join me, you're more than welcome, but be warned that i may embarrass you by hugging deborah treisman for an uncomfortably long time against her will to thank her for packing the fiction issue to the gills with miranda july, or poking louis cona with a stick until he admits that, yes, condé nast probably can afford the extra ten cents a pound it would cost to print on one-hundred-percent post-consumer recycled paper, or paintballing nick paumgarten for, oh, so many things. you are equally welcome to watch me embarass myself from a safe distance, as long as you keep your hands off malcolm. if not, there'll be an extra paintball just for you. but no brass bullets--that's just creepy.