– Are You Happy Tonight?
– All the Women, Disappear
– The Power of Love
– Terror on the Train
– Ed Harris Is Not Jackson Pollock

One night when we were in Saigon, it was so hot outside that we got lost on our way to dinner from the hotel—a fairly straight shot across the city, walking distance, in one of the more tourist-friendly districts where they have an ice cream parlor named “Fanny” and a variety of fluorescent-lit pho shops that are popular with locals, too. It is that hot outside now. I’ve lived here for 12 years and got lost trying to get to University and 13th Street. The damp makes everything feel like rust.

If I read this article in the Science Times yesterday correctly—I’ve read it three times, and I’m not entirely sure—there are a number of species inhabiting the deep sea floor of the Gulf that feed on microbes which themselves are so specialized, they subsist on petrochemicals, not the usual hot minerals. The hypothesis, then, is that the Deepwater Horizon disaster could possibly be a boon to microbial life and, hence, the rest of the Gulf’s deep sea ecosystem (though the silver-lining opinion was voiced by a scientist, formerly of Texas A&M, which doesn’t inspire confidence). In a word: unlikely. In the meantime, the cap on the well has been temporarily removed because everything is that much more difficult when you’re piloting remote-control robots at 5,000 feet below the surface of the sea, and, in a decisive win for Rolling Stone and perhaps no one else, Obama has relieved McChrystal of duty. Even as the music industry has been relegated to the winners of American Idol and the keyfobs who program MTV and her sister brands, Rolling Stone keeps on keeping on. They should revise the mandate, go all-political (with the occasional Phil Collins and/or Mark Knopfler profile thrown in as a vestigial reminder). In other news, Spin is still a magazine. How is that possible?

Why is it that, immediately upon completion (or, let’s be honest, stopping), writing doesn’t produce the sense of guilt and horror that it does when you read it eight weeks later and realize that the whole thing is facile, embarrassing and, worse, deeply untrue?

It wasn’t so much the burning in her chest or how her eyes watered, nor was it the way her hands had developed this terrible palsy in public, the shaking hands of a much older woman, or how she felt increasingly sensitive to subtle shifts in temperature—the slightest warmth brought sweat to her throat, the suggestion of chill would twist in her spine, like the first warning of flu. And it wasn’t that her tongue felt thick and useless—unable to taste much of anything, let alone describe the changes in her body—nor was it that odd awareness of the softening skin around her belly, the backs of her arms, the folds on her neck where her chin came to rest when she was reading her magazines or watching her talkshows. And it wasn’t how normal sounds had become noticeable and unnerving—the clicking teeth of her co-workers, the wet breath of the woman who sat in the seat beside her on the subway that morning despite it being a mostly empty train, the uncrinkling of the receipt from dinner the night before, fishing it from the bottom of the bag and wiping the spilt Hoisin sauce off in a vain attempt to discover whether or not they had forgotten the goddamn bok choy or if she’d just forgotten to ask for it in the first place. And it wasn’t the smells: no, it wasn’t the smells, but weren’t they queer, the way she’d begun to distinguish between the high sharp notes of urine and the lower diffuse tones of general rot, that overripe smell of the city baking itself in the summer heat, mulch and rinds and waste and sulphur and wet rust and disintegrating bones and blown circuits and sick pigeons and poisoned rats and hundreds of years of ground-in filth—her grandparents’ filth, their grandparents’ filth, geological filth, filth you could excavate and use to measure time, filth so old it had once carried fucking smallpox and had aged all the way to sterile. And it wasn’t the way she’d found herself crying in the shower, or on the toilet, or, worse, in the toilet at work, tearing at her desk, welling up over tasteless Chinese at 10 p.m. or at the talkshows or at her screened calls or out of frustration at never being able to scrub the mould out of the fucking grout in the fucking bathroom which was the fucking size of an animal pen but only appropriate considering how small the rest of her apartment was, and wasn’t great that she had snatched the place up before real estate had really gotten out of hand—seriously, fuck her fucking apartment. And it wasn’t the way the oddest things struck her either, like the time she’d noticed how the light of the blue vapour bulbs caught in the rain dripping off the paper lanterns outside a St. Marks yakitori and spilled blue electricity into the street, or the boy in midtown with the jawbone and black hair who had a huge vertical sore between his pretty black eyes, a red and ragged thing that only made her want to kiss him, to taste it—it wasn’t the way those things struck her, nor was it her knowing that those things were striking her in a way that wasn’t normal.

When her cell rang this time, she picked it up. Even if it was Lise calling to tell her how lucky she was she’d put down 20 percent in 2003.

“Lise, thank God. Thank God it’s you. I really need a cigarette. I am fucking addicted. I mean, I really think I am a fucking addict. I’m losing my fucking mind. No, really. Yes—what? Are you laughing? Why the fuck would you laugh at me? What’s so goddamn funny about this? What’s so goddamn funny about smoking? This is a serious business, Lise. This is a serious fucking business and it’s no laughing matter for you.”

– a free espresso and a dog*
– Red Bull tallboys and two tickets to see Ke$ha, live in concert
– waxed mustaches, waistcoats, a side of cured organic pork and a brownstone in Park Slope
– an all-expenses-paid Valentine’s Day vacation to David Lynch’s house, featuring special tour guide Cuba Gooding, Jr.
– matches and a tank of gas**

*—w/thanks to Ninth Street Espresso, who carefully strain their brews through the cuh-yootest little filters of affectation (but I keep buying it, so, really, who’s to blame?)
**—w/thanks to the Afghan Whigs

– I’m going to have to push back on that
– Let me tell you why
– We don’t have the bandwidth
– Can I ask you a quick question?
– Be that as it may