Cutting the Umbilical: The nice folks at Time Warner Cable phone up to schedule repo of my cable box. Down to smoking long butts (a disgusting habit I share with EB, which may come in handy when I am living in cardboard box), too prostrate with langour to make the trip to the Heaven bodega. Have to go out at 4:00 to see the doc anyhow. From NY1:

In December, NY1 reported on the taping of a special Sesame Street episode to help children deal with their fears in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. On Wednesday night, the children of some New York City firefighters got a sneak peek of the finished episode at a special screening in Brooklyn.

On the program, city firefighters give some safety tips to the character Elmo to help him overcome his fears after a grease fire in Hooper's store. The episode ends with a special visit to the firefighters of Station 58 and Ladder 26.

The unemployment check arrives, the kettle boils. I have missed my lunch date with Mike Cohn at Internet World, but reschedule for tomorrow. I read a review of Stephen Toulmin's new book, admonishing myself that this sort of thing has nothing to do with the price of basic cable service but unable to help myself.

Return to Reason repeats the historical sketch in Cosmopolis of how canons of Rationality came to dominate the criteria of reasonableness, how talk of the Universal and the Eternal subjugated the local and the timely, how the Dreams of Certainty and Method confidently promised permanent practical solutions to doubt, ambiguity and the plurality of belief.

Sic mihi autem: better off confining myself to the local and the timely, and accustoming myself to deadline pressure and the fleetingness of the New York Minute.

The Return of Juano: DJ Werewolf weighs in with news of the impending arrival of Juano, whom I last saw producing Byzantine-influenced outsider art in the Haight-Fillmore about 10 years ago. He now works for an energy-management software company called Abraxas. We should send him to Brasil to solve the apagão. Wonder if the man is sill playing music? We were in an embarrassing white reggae band in college and jammed with Two-Dimensional Billy ("There Is No Word That Rhymes With Orange") once at an Ecstacy party.

From the Inbox and Outbox: Victoria Rowan, the boot camp "drill sergeant" at Media Bistro, writes to thank me for sending her some links to free listings of writer's markets and submission guidelines. Finally get off a note to the famous Isa Mara Lando, the biggest literary star I have ever met next to Allen Ginsberg and Richard Stark. CC is coming out to see me Saturday to help me piece together that painful part of our shared personal history. Chat with OneNic, who is moving to Santa Fe in March. Roux42 wants suggestions on East Village bars, settles on the Whiskey Ward.

The Ass-Dragging Blues: Nothing worse than rolling out of bed, scratching yourself, and going directly to HotJobs, FlipDog, and Monster, among many others. I have not even thought of a reason to put on pants yet. What the hell day is it anyway? Ah, Thursday, I am registered fto attend an anti-WEF teach-in tonight at Columbia. I suppose I should go through the motions anyway. What was it that Samuel Johnson said about pants? Aw, who gives a rat's ass? My first job query of the day returns the following:

510_TS_ERROR Texis Web Script (Vortex) Copyright (c) 1996-2000 Thunderstone - EPI, Inc. Commercial Server Version 3.01.975518872 of Nov 29, 2000 (sparc-sun-solaris2.6) Error 000 /hj-job-search-1.1:28: CORRUPT OPERATION IN THE FDBF FILE /tstone/hotjobsdb/job_m_text.btr in the function readhead 000 /hj-job-search-1.1:28: Assertion EX failed in file fdbf.c, line 269 000 /hj-job-search-1.1:28: Vortex (21224) ABEND: signal 6.

"Corrupt operation" indeed. I crank up "The Seeker" by the Who to try and get my motor revving, followed by some nasty, nasty Mott the Hoople. Wonder how Harvard is doing with the anxious time surrounding surgery a family member's undergoing. Answer a ProZ query about the phrase "ceteris paribus." People are always writing in to query Monty Python Latinism like "Incontinentia Buttox." The Indy Press guy writes in with some small queries about my stuff. I phone up the agencies with the usual availability advisory. Hey, world, the path to my door is well-beaten with my own worn shoe leather, just ring the damn bell.

Here is one of my translations for The Citizen, which you can link to by clicking the "link" link at the end and copying and pasting the archive URL. This section of the site in general suffers from a lot of awkward translation, I think, though I do not necessarily vouch for my own translation of what literally rendered from the Arabic says "the flailing movements performed by" as "the clumsiness of," for example ...

[Editorial] Bin Laden at the Arab Voice

The Arab Voice, 01/12/02

The clumsiness of some Americans-—intelligence agents and ordinary idiots alike—provokes some modest observations about the air of superiority assumed by such people when they would have you believe that they, as educated elites, know what is really going on in the world. If you try to ask them a simple question about, say, the best way to get to a neighboring state, they will scornfully inform you that Pennsylvania, for example, is not part of the Middle East.

Even so, some of the conversations I’ve had with people will amaze you. It’s as though they think we are ignorant peasants, while they’re descended from royalty.

A while back, a very polite American gentleman called me and asked, “May I speak to Osama bin Laden?” I managed to control myself, coldly replying, “Bin Laden is busy right now.” The man was calling my office to personally negotiate the surrender of bin Laden, just in case Osama did not want to lay down his weapons and surrender to the American authorities. I asked if I could pass along a message. “No! I want to speak to him personally!”

“Fine,” I said, “Please hold the line a moment.” “I’ll hold,” he said.

A short while later I got back to him, saying, “Sorry, sir, bin Laden refuses to speak with you unless you provide your full name.” “My name is Victor Rosemary,” he said.

“Your surname sounds like your mother’s given name,” I said. “What’s your father’s name?”

“I don’t know,” the man replied.

“I’m sorry, Mr. bin Laden refuses to speak with anyone who lacks a decent pedigree,” I informed him. Apparently, the man was satisfied: He laughed and hung up.

A few weeks later an American woman called me and asked, “How old are you?” “Nearly sixty,” I replied. “You know, if you were younger, I’d come live with you in Afghanistan,” she said. “Why Afghanistan in particular?” I asked. “Because there’s plenty of drugs there,” she said. “Here I have to sell my body just to get a hit. They say that over there you can get a hit for free. It’s good stuff, and it doesn’t cost too much.” I laughed and hung up the phone.

On the Christian New Year, a drunk American man called me and said, “Listen, I’m coming to New York for some nightlife, so if you’re planning any terrorist operations, tell me and I won’t come.”

“Sir,” I said, “hasn’t the American press informed you that terrorist operations only occur by day?” “Why only by day?” he asked. “Because Muslims are busy praying at night,” I said. “What kind of religion is it where you pray at night and fight by day?” he asked. “We do the opposite of what the American air force does,” I explained. “In Afghanistan, they bomb by night so they can kill more people in their sleep. As for us, we give our enemies a chance to retreat.” “That’s good,” the man said. “You do have some mercy in your hearts.” And he hung up the phone.

Some weeks before, I had received an e-mail from an American woman who wrote, “I tried to translate your newspaper’s Web site into English, but it wouldn’t translate.” I replied, “That’s because our site uses images and not text.”

In her reply, she wrote, “This is the same excuse Arafat offers! He tells us one thing in one language, tells the world something different in another language, and tells the Israelis something else in a third.”

“How many languages do you know?” I asked. “Just one,” she said. “English.” I said, “Well, Arafat is better-educated than you are: He knows three languages.” “Go to hell,” she replied.

Changing the subject, I asked “How old are you, ma’am?” “Seventy-three,” she said, “but I’m willing to consider marriage or friendship, if you’re interested.” “All right, but only if you stop abusing me and Arafat,” I said. She added, “I am also prepared to convert to Islam.” I laughed and said, “I’ve got no use for someone who’d give up her faith that easily. Goodbye.”

But the cream of the crop was the following: A woman phoned me to ask, “How old is bin Laden?” I said, “I don’t know, perhaps in his forties or nearly fifty.” “That’s about right,” she said. “I’m looking for a husband around that age.”

“How old are you?” I asked her. “Twenty,” she said. “Do you think it’s right to marry someone as old as your father?” I asked.

“My son Jonathan is five years old, and my daughter Carola is four. The baby, Simon, is only three months,” she said.

“Why do you think bin Laden would marry you when you already have three children?” I asked. “Because I hear you guys can have four wives,” she said.
“That’s the number of wives we are permitted when we are banished to the mountains and caves,” I told her. “In more prosperous times, we ‘re allowed to marry forty wives,” I replied.

“That’s a lot,” she said, taken aback. “How do handle all those kids?”

“We send them off to join al-Qaeda at an early age,” I said.

“I see,” she said. “Now I understand why you guys are multiplying like ants in this country. I hear there’s seven million of you right now. In a few years, there’ll be seventy million!”

“God willing,” I said, and hung up.

Jots and Tittles: So much for masochistic fidelity: Oops, I digressed again. Just sent off a pitch to Mother Jones for a profile of Findley, who kindly sent me an amazing CV that takes him from the SeaBees in the Pacific war to Sana'a. My qualifications graf:

I am a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist with a background in Islamic cultural and religous studies in the department of comparative literature at UC Berkeley, where I served on the executive board of the UAW local representing graduate student instructors. I am currently working as a translator of Arabic-language press for The Citizen project at the Independent Press Association (www.indypress.org), working on a profile of the editor of The Arab Voice, and writing on educational technology for a reputable professional association (with whom I am still negotiating a contract). I was most recently employed as copy editor and contributing writer at Internet World magazine, for whom, among other things, I conducted an unpublished interview with former Sen. Bob Kerrey, president of the New School University, about his work in Congress with the Web Based Education and Training Commission. I am appending some URLs of recent work and attaching some of my most recent work for IndyPress. I also attach a brief CV Mr. Findley recently sent me, and a copy of my editorial resume.

I can work this story, in the same way that Monkey Woman always gloats, "I could really work that dress." Have also been working on a Valentine's Day anecdote for the Christian Science Monitor. A Sereia Enigmatica checks in and asks me to link to her two blogs. " Worried about your 33 dollars .... Gotta get my benefactoring skills moving to avoid your transformation into a real bum. Just wait and see. Hey link the mentions to The Merm to pombostrans or to la sirena. There is lovely Jenny Holzer marquise there today. Have you seen it?" I am a little leary of linking to the second, which purports to chronicle the Merm's, er, intimate preoccupations. The SE-EM really knows how to work the global network, though, that's for sure.

Jot Book: Climbing up to the rooftop of Harvard's Mulberry Street tenement for the morning's first cigarette, anxiety floods back in with the crack-like rush of nicotine through my thirsty veins and the unsetling vision of the diminished skyline to the south ... Jay Cross gets back to me with instructions to add the <$BlogItemArchiveFileName$> to my e-learning blog template ... Paul Findley writes back with his itinerary for late February and an invitation to a session of the National Council of Churches ... On the F train, I am working on a Pocket MindMap of my freelance writing campaign (so Ramist-ramifying-classical structuralist, so Ginsberg long slow train of associations) on my iPaq and miss the Carroll Street switchover to the G, which takes me on an inadvertent pilgrimage to the spot at Smith-9th, the spot where I witnessed the second crash into the WTC after a similar morning arising from a lover's bed in Nolita ... CC of Berkeley days writes with an offer to schlep down from Inwood to drink Brooklyn Chocolate Stouts with me ... everything tends to reminiscence today, for some reason ... I need to make a list and execute it with masochistic fidelity.

Past-Time Paradise: Speaking of Wordsworthian emotion recollected in tranquility, here is a nostalgic echo of the good old days of the dot-com bubble, from the New York New Media Association job listings:

THIS IS NOT A PAYING JOB. It is an opportunity for several talented writers to join a team of professionals working from home in their spare time to create an innovative new website. Compensation will come in the form of an equity stake in the newly-forming company.

What the hell. When the world is running down, you make the best of what's still around. Jesus, do I hate having that platitude of a shimmery 1980s anthem in my mental commonplace book ...Time to reboot.

Portrait of the Artist as a Flat-Broke Jerk: Where to begin? First of all, the time has come to gather up that fifty-pound bag of spare change and cart it on down to one of those supermarkets with the coin-kachinker machines ... Monkey Woman once offered me $250 for the lot, uncounted, thinking she'd get the best of the deal. We are AIMing right now, me doing a Derridean critique of her Nerve dating profile ... I have three cans of Progresso soup, some leftover hummous, and Iggy between me and starvation. I am saving the hummous as a dipping sauce for the cat.

This Just In: Call from a nice man at Amana Publications to arrange for me to meet Peter Findley, author of Silent No More, a book on the distorted public perception of Islam and Muslim Americans. Interesting guy. He suggested that if I cannot pitch this to the Times, I might interest the Christian Science Monitor in the piece. The Monitor was one of the few U.S. papers to review the book. The Times, notably, did not. Can one make a living writing about contrarians without ridiculing them?

Poisoning Pigeons in the Park: Just finished downloading Tom Lehrer's "Masochism Tango" and "Oedipus Rex" ("I'd rather marry a duck-billed platypus / Than end up like old King Oedipus Reeeeex"). Takes me back to fifh grade and Mrs. Riensche, who would wear her square-dancing costume to class, spin Lehrer records, and climb on the desk with her ukele to caterwaul her way through "Sweet Betsy from Pike" (a mildly racy song for kids, "with her lover Ike"). She gave me her tickets to see Stacey Keach as Hamlet at the Music Center. The gravedigger scene featured the comedian Avery Schreiber, famous at the time for his tortilla chip advertisements. The scene incorporated an eating schtick, of course. I remember that the program included Keach's notes on the character, including such deep insights as "Hamlet the Dane / Are you really insane? / Or is it only a game you are playing?" ...

The Television Screen is the Retina of the Mind's Eye: Remember S&M TV in Cronenberg's Videodrome? And the lawsuit that ensued when an instructor in the department of rhetoric at Berkeley made the film required viewing for a course in composition?

FOX PULLS CONTROVERSIAL REALITY SHOW
"The Chamber," a program which subjected contestants to subzero
temperatures and 150-degree heat, has been taken off the air after just
one week following complaints that it amounted to televised torture.

The Literary "Life," Soi Disant: Received a response to my pitch for a Latin translation, 18th century legal document, perhaps a contract. Could go a couple thousand. Favorable response from Indy Press to my translations from the Arab Voice. Hook 'em and cook 'em. First meeting of the "boot camp" at Media Bistro last night. Interesting group of people, with a few flounders to be endured with that patronizing delicacy so familiar to veterans of the writing workshop. I personally don't think it helps anybody. Lots of botched limericks and ignorance of the art of iambic pentameter was my kneejerk reaction.

Cheap Datebook: Signing up for a research seminar at Media Bistro on my birthday. Oops, I am down to my last $33, and my one-month MetroCard expires at midnight. Flailing away at getting this instructional design story to get my sources lined up and get myself prepared to ask intelligent questions. With all that going on, I am supposed to write a Times-worthy profile for next week. What do I have that will do double duty? Flailing, flailing, adrift in a world insane ...

OneNic, my Vanderbilt Avenue neighbor weighs in from work, feeling poorly. She's a production manager in publishing, doing the serious industrial stuff like ordering up print runs and ink and glue and paper stock. I admire that, and envy the vendor-provided schmooze lunches. Jen and I had a long conversation yesterday we plan to continue this evening before her family comes to town to bond over an elder's upcoming surgery. Time for that leftover chicken kabob ...

Mad Dog at Noonday: Received an e-mail out of the blue from CC, a comrade-in-arms from the war on madness in the Berkeley days. Good thing I decided to go in and hose out that Yahoo e-mail account, which has developed over the years into a dummy account I use as a spam magnet. In the course of running down sources for my story, I sign up for three free seminars from the Fathom consortium: "The Conflict in Kashmir," "The Globalisation Debate," and "Beyond the Internet: Predicting the Future of Internet Technology." "The Biology of Venomous Animals" also sounds fun. Use the Course Finder in the left navigation bar to search for the freebies.

From Media Bistro daily news: "In a confidential letter obtained by the New York Times, anchor Greta van Susteren tells her bosses at CNN of her hurt feelings and general lack of respect at the network. The letter was written just before Van Susteren accepted a job offer with Fox News earlier this month." First Christiane Amanpour disappears, and now this.

Morning Information Overload: Researching background on ERIC and getting in touch with some old sources, preparing for telephone interviews this week. Who knows if the ACM editor will even commission the piece? Sent off a couple of translations that should please the Indy Press guy. 65 degrees today: God is tantalizing me, deskbound Prometheus that I am, liver torn by the vulture of duty. I am missing Pat Kiernan, the morning anchor on NY1, what with the cable cut off (not to mention my episodes of Oz and The Sopranos). That little smirk of his. Notice that Jay Cross at the E-Learning Forum has set up a blog of his own. Jay, a curmudgeonly Harvard Biz alum and learning consultant, helped me a lot with my e-learning piece for Internet World, and I have an e-learning blog of my own to document my research, or that's the idea. Very little work on the thing so far. Hope to speak with some people at MIT's Future of Education project.

The story of the blind lion of Kabul, Marjan, who survived a hang grenade from a vengeful enemy (apparently he ate somebody in self defense) and now deceased. RIP, nice kitty.

Snooze When All Else Fails: All right, things are not getting done here. Best succumb to a glass of Scotch and some companionable snoring with Iggy and try to rock and roll in the morning. Thanks to the Merm for forwarding me a good opportunity with an educational content development venture from Craig's List.

Sun Day Times: Receive another great set of answers to my query a Proz about an idiomatic phrase in Arabic. Planning a late evening after spending the afternoon tooling around Prospect Park with my friend JN in 60-degree weather. Kids, dogs, trees, human forms lounging in the greensward where the lake used to be, if you study the history of this Champs d'Elysée of Brooklyn at Winslow Homer's monument to the Grand Army of the Republic ... feeling a litle on the languid side this evening, emptied out and empty-headed. The W-2s have arrived (and we will not be retaining an accountant to do our taxes this year, thank you very much), while much research remains to be done on the ACM story, and a framework for intereviews written up. Leftover shawarma for a late supper, washed down with a Corona Extra.

Saturday Morning Refrigerator Hose-Down: Times Square mob scene at the AMC 25 megaplex, on the New 42nd Street across from the Port Authority bus terminal. The danger zone. Poor EB got a little agoraphobic, but we pulled through. Enjoyed getting to know Andy and Polly better.

"Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia currently seeks an Associate Weddings Editor who will report to the AVP, Deputy Weddings Editor." You imagine a whole hierarchy of weddding editors, like the cherubim, seraphim, powers, potentates, you know, like in Milton. Not feeling ready for guests this evening. Day will be spent with Hans Wehr's Arabic dictionary and various cleaning fluids. Oh, and I have to write back to Ooky in Berkeley, my old, old friend from Claremont and Frisco Bay days, just back from her childhood Italy and working on a neat progressive Web site.

Overnight, Morpheus has downloaded the complete works of the Germs and "A Boy Named Sue," the latter reminding me of my late, great father, Skeet Brayton, of whom some odd mementos have arrived in the mail lately. Still have a box of his effects on top of my refrigerator that I have not gone completely through, 11 months after his death (which I look up in the Social Security Death Index)

BRAYTON, ROBERT D
570-52-1857
Birth: 30 Aug 1940
Death: 20 Jan 2001

Off to Heaven for coffee and cat food.

Beauty and the Kung Fu Beast: Off to the Beauty Bar to meet EB, Andy, and Polly to go see Brotherhood of the Wolf at the Ziegfield. What could be better? F--k this work s--t.

Hope for Dopes: My friend CR, recently laid off from a publication owned by one of the German media conglomerates, calls to tell me there's hope, that the market is about to boom. Right, she's still on severance pay, and has a big, fat portfolio to shop around. Even Kinko, my former freelancer, has a job now, even if it's a sucky one. DJ Werewolf, my old college buddy and recovering pornographer, weighs in with one of his humorous mass-mailings. From a court transcript:

Q: Are you sexually active?
A: No, I just lie there.

Heh heh. Maybe I should write pornography. A former roommate had hilarious stories about writing those two-for-one, back-to-back type of paperback pulp porn novels, like the Kilgore Trouts read by Duane Hoover in Breakfast of Champions. Hilarious, but also wretched, the lot of the artist, as EB is wont to say. Hmm, I used to have a copy of Venus on the Half Shell by Kilgore Trout (actually written by Phillip José Farmer). Where did it go? The soixante-neuf drive, heh heh. The doc says I should check out The Noonday Demon. "Depression is the flaw in love," it begins. Say, I like those new book preview pages on Amazon. One-click it to my place, Mr. Bezos.

Munch Lunch: In a trance from the relentless eclecticism of Radio Free Virgin. Ragas and ra'i and rap and Celtic folk and drums 'n' bass and sultry samba la bamba... hypnotic. So varied, and yet so bland, like mixing all the colors together ... Did I say something about laundry? Okay, just let me send off this query to ProZ about that Arabic word "tabalwara" [to crystallize], can't for the life of me remember its idiomatic usage. Lentils for lunch, again? So nice to hear from that sarcastic bitch from the collections agency, advising me to retain counsel ... hung up too fast to catch my witty blood from a stone quip. D'oh!

HOUSTON (Reuters) Former Enron Corp. vice chairman J. Clifford Baxter committed suicide on Friday, found with a gunshot wound to his head, Texas police said. [Your snippy, snarky, pithy, laconic New Yorker–style comment here].

Midmorning Maté Break: Trying to find the transcript of a speech given by the Muslim calligrapher Mohamed Zakariya at St. John the Divine, heard on WNYC this morning. An interesing job proposition comes in from ProZ: "We have a 50-page document in Latin from the 18th or 19th century, from Germany. The document is handwritten. We have no pressing time limit. Please send bids to XXXX." Finished a translation of the main editorial from the very funny and caustic editor in chief of the Sautu-l-'Uruba [Arab Voice] published in Bergen County, NJ. Here's a sample:

A woman phoned me to ask, “How old is bin Laden?” I said I didn’t know, perhaps in his forties or nearly fifty. “That’s about right,” she said. “I’m looking for a husband around that age.” “How old are you?” I asked her. “Twenty,” she said. “Do you think it’s right to marry someone as old as your father?” I asked.

“My son Jonathan is five years old, and my daughter Carola is four. The baby, Simon, is only three months,” she said.

“Why do you think bin Laden would marry you when you already have three children?” I asked. “Because I hear you guys marry four wives,” she said.

“That’s the number of wives we are permitted when we are banished to the mountains and caves. In more prosperous times, we can marry forty wives,” I replied. “That’s a lot,” she said, taken aback. “How do handle all those kids?” “We send them off to join al-Qaeda at an early age,” I said. “I see,” she said. “Now I understand why you guys are multiplying like ants in this country. I hear there’s seven million of you right now. In a few years, there’ll be seventy million.”

“God willing,” I said, and hung up.

I told you Osama was a sexy man. Gentle eyes, sensuous lips, and the guerrilla appeal of a Che or Subcomandante Marcos. Of course, now Hamid Karzai offers a viable substitute, with his exquisite cloaks and Paris tailoring and aristocratic bearing ... dreamy.

Okay, back to work. I finished my Asleigh (spelling confirmed) Banfield ditty, now a country and western tune.

The Ballad of Ashleigh Banfield
When al Qaeda bombed the heck out
of the blocks below Tribeca
Ashleigh Banfield was the first to take a stand
When she rolled out of her co-op
To deliver up the sco-op
She became our anchor from Afghanistan

CHORUS
We will roll through Afghan passes
With a grrrl in hipster glasses
in an armor-plated Range-o Rover-ee
Lustily we’ll sing a chorus
of “She Is No Amanpour”
Bus will depart for Tora Bora, half past three.

Oh, the brass said she’s the woman
to describe the sound of bombin’
Never knowing what exactly’s going on
She’s got style that will drive traffic
From a valued demographic
And she never will gainsay the Pentagon
(Repeat chorus)

After all, it worked for Rather
With his sotto voce blather
from an ambush laid by brave mujahhidin
In the wild and wooly eighties
Before Panama and Haiti
and the Baghdad Hilton really made the scene
(Repeat chorus)

So she hit the road to Kabul
In a sensible ensemble
That did not lack a certain sense of fun
And although I was embarrassed
I could not help but stare as
She pressed Green Berets to talk about their guns
(Repeat chorus)

Later on, in Tora Bora
She became a brave explorer
Sifting through what CIA boys left on the ground
And she lifted up the burqa
With a patronizing smirk
To show that grrls like fun the whole wide world around
(Repeat chorus)

(Molto ritardando)
You don’t have to be a Trillin
To be ready, able, willin’
To diss downtown grrrls like Ashleigh out of hand
But she really could have bought it
As she got the news and brought it
Home in ways Gen-MTV can understand
(Repeat chorus, a tempo)

Fingers Poised on Keys. So? Bummed to see my translations no longer up at the Cidade do Conhecimento at the University of São Paulo, a collaboration with MIT's ThinkCycle project. Got to get through this pile of work samples for my Web site. Just back from seeing my friends at the Heaven Mini-Mart, walking up the crazy quilt slate sidewalk past the dudes that drink forties by the gas station and the mural in memory of Brian, the young man tragically slain ... a friendly place, Heaven. The Arab owner watches Univision to learn Spanish so he can speak it with his workers. A lady comes in and says "sabah-ul-khair" to Farid and "buenos dias" to the boys in the back. One late, late night during my, er, recent period of intense cable news and BattleBots addiction, the ATM was broken, so the young guy who works late handed me a twenty and told me to pay him back later. Small courtesies make the world go round. Now there, with embellishments, is a Diary anecdote.

Signs of Life: Happy to see that Anastasia Ashman, one of the first to go in the layoffs at my last job, did the boot camp last term and published a piece on Bryon Gysin in the Voice. AA was the best writer of the whole bunch. Received a pome from CML that I must now riposte to. Got to return Jen and Jon's Zip drive this evening, hang out with EB, maybe go see The Royal Tenenbaums. Guess I will sit in front of the infernal machine until then, listening to streaming radio stations and click-clacking, with a break to bundle laundry and suck up some cat hair. JN will be a guest this weekend.

Signal to Noise: Iris was not showing anytime soon when I arrived at the NoHo-SoHo border, so I stopped in to see Amélie instead. A habit I like to claim I borrowed from the Surrealists: promiscuous cinema-hopping. First assignment comes in from the Parris Island workshop I will be taking starting Monday: compose a piece of doggerel fit for the Metropolitan Diary of the Times Metro section. I hate the Metropolitan Diary. It never reflects the paranoid psychosis that surrounds us everywhere in this town. It's so damned bemused. But I am feeling aimless so I decide to write a faux-Irish ballad about Ashley Banfield, the MSNBC reporter who tumbled out of bed to cover 911 and then got dispatched with her downtown hipster looks and combat gear from Banana Republic to cover the war in Afghanistan. Need something to rhyme with "she's certainly no Christiane Amanpour" in the chorus. OK, how's this?

First Chorus
We will travel Afghan passes
With a girl in hipster glasses
in an armor-plated Range-o Rover-ee
Lustily we’ll sing a chorus
of “She is no Amanpour.”
Bus will depart for Tora Bora, half past three.

Definitely not Dear Diary material. Silly-ass assignment. I hope this is going somewhere. I want to learn to rake muck, but I will write Seven Great Cheap Dates for money if i have to: the shut-off notice from ConEd demands it.

Up Clinton Avenue Without An Umbrella: Interesting technical writing gig on Dice:

Familiarity with Plateau or Learning Management Systems, business/technical writing skills, strong
training development experience in online/e-learning courses, the able to learn new computer applications easily, familiar with Qarbon or Simulation authoring tool development, knowledge of instructional design and storyboarding skills.

I landed a tech writing gig at a dot-com in 2000 but chose to go to work at IW instead. Bad choice. Now I have to go off and check out these authoring tools they mention. I digress. It's my modus operandi. Better heat up some lentils and bathe myself, got to go see the doc mid-afternoon. Want to see that new film about Iris Murdoch at Angelika, too. It's raining wolfhounds and Iggys.

Incipit vita nova de novo: Mild morning blooz and an extended deadline, 47 degrees with fog and rain. Thinking back on my conversation with CML and how to get writing again. "Writing pomes / like raising pigs / every day the shite to be cleared / fresh straw laid." But old schticks die hard. I drag out bits and scraps of old journals dating back to 1989 and feel like Rodney Dangerfield: my act hasn't changed in years. Sigh. Anyhow, to work.

Wild in the Streets: The World Economic Forum is coming to New York January 31st, a chance to observe the progressive antiglobalization forces at first hand, "armed with cellular phones, grid maps of the city, noxious chemicals, urine, and a plan formulated on the Internet," according to the Voice.

Minor beef with the Indy Press editor about the translations he wants is peeling my pickle. He goes:

Remember, it has got to be an article in some way about the New York
metropolitan area -- even if nothing more than "here is what Muslims (or
Arabs) in the NY metropolitan area think about the new war." We are a site
about NYC. None of the articles you cite sound as if they even have the word "New York"
in them, nor any reference to this area.

So I go, if it is being written by a local writer and read by the guy next to you on the subway, then it is of local interest. No wonder the why I hate my editor topic in the Byline conference on the Well is so popular, and why "define mediocrity" is an anagram for "dim NYC editor, fe" (with a couple letters left over). No, that's uncharitable, but there's something screwy with saying you are interested in whatever Arabic speakers are reading and then saying "not local enough." I mean, we're talking a cosmpolitan readership in a cosmopolitan city, right? The guy from Yemen wants to read about the Yankees, he buys the Post for a quarter.

Deep Smolder at Midnight: Deep smolder in my overflowing ashtray like the never-ending tire fire in The Simpsons. I keep telling myself, as I hit 40, that the only way I will ever get those 40 or 50 more years I will need to lay the groundwork for my posthumous literary fame is to stop being the dupe of Big Tobacco like a yutz. Encouraging is that my grandmother smoked for thirty years, quit cold turkey (I have vivid memory of her stubbing out the Camel straight and saying, "That's my last one'"), and is now alive at 95. The bad news is that my dad died of lung cancer last year (though it might have had to do with sitting in a car by the side of fields being sprayed with pesticides as part of his job as an agricultural inspector).

Parabens á VC: Enigmatic Mermaid writes to say that she got the job as a project manager in San Jose, California. Says her coop agreement in São Paulo does not, however, allow her to sublet to the Antichrist, as she now refers to me for some reason. Reminds me that I wanted to send her a translation of a trecho from Hilda Hilst's Cartas do Seductor that I remember doing, and sending to Jolielaide, but cannot find on my drive. A very midnight activity, searching your drives for things forgotten.

Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum: Long catch-up letter from the famous (kind of, in Germany, apparently) Karen Christopher, the first great love of my life, after decades and decades. She is married to a Scotsman! Don't know why, of all the surprising details, that one leaps out. But it does. It seems a sensible thing for her to do somehow. Karen teaches video and is founding member of Goat Island, whose career I have followed over the years. She sends news of Mamoni Bannerjee (whoa). I love the chain of associations: chance computeristic meeting with CML, which put me in touch with Tom Leabhart, which prompted me to google KC ... I heart my DSL line.

I Got Your Hell is Other People Right Here. I had forgotten what an all-day expedition into the noise and waste of Manhattan is like. Yelled at two little razor-scooter punks for not standing aside and letting the passengers off on the 6 train. I firmly believe in the rightness of letting them off first, and standing clear of the closing doors. Seemed like I was getting little done (is there a functioning payphone anywhere on the whole freaking island?), but I did figure out how to cash out my retirement savings, what's left of it after developed tech fever two weeks before the bubble-burst, like a lame-o. Should keep me alive in the present for another little while. Who plans on growing old in the age of anthrax, anyway? A very civilized night with my friend JN took some of the edge off the misanthropic feelings I was developing from hanging around midown, resenting bridge-and-tunnel jobholders wh can still afford their cell phones and banzai bike-messenger dudes plowing through the sidewalk Mississippi of ambitious, striving human meat, my New York version of the attitude of that woman in that X song, "Los Angeles."

You Can't Go Home Again.Finally arrived home late this afternoon to pile through some of the accumulated business and paw through the mailbox for unexpected checks. The old Brayton homestead in South Pasadena, purchased before WWII, where my father and his brother and I all grew up and had Mrs. Berlot for English honors at SPHS (she looked exactly like the witch in that Bugs Bunny cartoon, through Gretchen Jaeger always says I am mean for saying so), is sold to a nice young family for x hundreds of thousands of dollars.

On the Dime. Got to get cracking. Have a translation to finish tonight before South Park, and must collect all the correspondence and URLs for the story I am pitching to ACM, and I promised EB I would have some more sample pages done for the Gorilla project. First must send off some résumés from Media Bistro , check the listings at ProZ, and do some research at Proquest. CML says I must start writing pomes again. Now there is an idea.

Into the Gotham Gloom: Okay, I am off. Wallet? Keys? PDA? Meow Mix in the bowl? Phone's out, though I posted a damned payment. Really have to look into claiming a hardship and cashing out my 401(k). The New York message boards at the Well are full of stories of people moving out of NYC in search of work, like Okies. The dead magazines topic is a lot of fun as well. Shit. The final notice of sale arrives from Grandmother's conservator. End of an era.

MOGADISHU, Somalia (CNN) -- Somalis watching a bootleg video of "Black Hawk Down" on Monday cheered as helicopters crashed and U.S. servicemen were killed in the new movie.

Just days after the film's widespread release in the United States, hundreds of Somalis crowded into an outdoor playground Monday to watch one of the first bootleg copies to reach Somalia.

Haste, Waste, Cut and Paste: Today's entry will have to be terse and telegraphic. Events are outstripping the capacity to process them. Multitasking like a mother before heading off to the library. I try so hard to follow the Engimatic Mermaid's example when it comes to furious networking

A. and I enjoyed the works of Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape at the Guggenheim Brazil show, and the sublime works of the madman Arthur Bispo do Rosario, and the black Santo Beneditos and the folk arts of Bahia. Walked through the park, lovely crisp grey winter day, austere, around the reservoir past the pumphouse where Dustin Hoffman faces off against Lawrence Olivier in Marathon Man. Met C. for the first time over risotto and prosciutto-wrapped figs at Pfiff, then wangled her into sharing a bottle of wine with me at Fanelli's after a masturbatory, Varese-like broadcast from the fire-station TV studio on Lafayete. Overall impression: C. stands for "cyclone." Fervor. A St. Joan who, however, is nimble enough to avoid the stake. Someone I need to talk to further. Not a muse, exactly. Gurdjieff-like dialogue with remarkable humans.

Home at 2 a.m., stiffed the cabbie who tried to give me the runaround (Exit 38 off the BQE, how hard is it?), astonishing communications with LN. Got my CD-RW reading writably, finally, after reading a lot of technical documentation, offloaded some of that MP3 gigabytage.

Sunday, Funday: Drunk on some new (to me) kind of Scotch whiskey at the 24/8 Aussie lounge (emu carpaccio?) on Mulberry Street with LN, the unemployed advertising copywriter ("smoky" was her well-chosen adjective for the whiskey) with the impeccable leftist pedigree. An impromptu social occasion, but we turned out to be kindred spirits, singing "When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch" in the snow. Whatever did happen to Billy Zoom? Reminiscing about teenage nights at the Hong Kong Café. Saw J. today for brunch at Leon, happy to hear she is doing well, using the layoff to pursue a long-term goal deferred until now. Seems like there is a lot of that going around in my circle friends. I guess it applies to me as well. A. is a bit blue, so we will meet up tomorrow to see the Brazil show at the Guggenheim, after I do my errand at the 42nd Street research library in the morning. The show does not seem to have a section on cordeis (cordel poetry), the self-produced newsprint chapbooks of topical and traditional oral-formulaic poetry from the wild Northeast. I saw a wonderful show about these jornais do sertão at SESC Pompeia in São Paulo last summer. The continuity with medieval popular verse is really striking. The Enigmatic Mermaid likes to call me Lampião o Gringã after a famous bandit hero of this tradition.

Ethics of Blog: C., writing to me about her wild busy Saturday, is a bit leary of being blogged about, an issue I have thought a bit about. It is odd to be writing a diary with others in mind, I guess, though it is really more like a personal newsletter. Names are changed to protect the innocent, of course, and I don't think the contents show up in a google. And I do write stuff purely for my own private consumption, of course. The FBI will have to get a subpoena to extract it from the secret encrypted folder of doom if they want to know all about my feeble thought crimes and petty sins in thought and deed. On the other hand, I would love to do a collaborative blog on some topic of mutual interest with smart people of like interests. I don't suppose it would hurt for me to cut and paste in what I wrote back about my intellectual interests in response to C.'s question:

My very dry thesis was called "Is Fiction an Illocutionary Force? Notes on Currie's Attempt to Rescue Searle from Searle." It belabored a very dry point in speech-act theory touching tangentially on some topics in Derrida, sort of. It had lots of modal-logic symbolism and discussion of possible-world semantics and fancy shit like that. Dull. But the great thing about Felman's book is that the French title, The Scandal of the Speaking Body, and the English title, The Literary Speech-Act, are part of a subtle satire on the stylistic differences separating Anglo-American and French treatments of the same issues in semiotics and semantics. She talks a lot about translation. Was going to follow up on that groundwork in my Ph.D. dissertation, which was going to be called something like "Analogy, Casuistry, Fiction, and the Rhetoric of Exemplarity in the Frame-Tale Tradtion." Starts with the Kalila wa Dimna, goes through the Thousand and One Nights and the Maqamat of al-Hamadhani, Chaucer, and Petrus Alfornso, and ends up with Cervantes' Novellas Exemplares and the Quixote, maybe some Gongora (why not go for baroque?), and perhaps de Sade's The 120 Nights of Sodom as a counterexample illustrating the phenomenom described in Ong's Ramus and the Decay of Dialogue. Underlying, unifying theme was to be neo-Aristotelian theories of analogy as embodied in certain Islamic and Christrian theories of the role of fiction and casuistry in the art of moral legislation.

Quite a mouthful. But then all the poor poets started to lose their verse, and the ladies they rolled their eyes. I may have already mentioned that.

Work is for Jerks: The editorial and publishing classifieds in the Times do seem to be picking up. I zapped off a résumé to the following, for example:

Editor
COPY EDITOR Leading bi-weekly retail publication
seeks Copy Editor with at least 2 years'
trade experience. Job entails heavy
copy editing and layout, with some
rewriting. Strong Quark skills in Mac
environment a must. Management
and production experience also re-
quired. We offer a competitive salary/
benefits. Please submit resume, which
MUST include salary requirements, to:
Lebhar-Friedman, Fax: 212-756-5124.
E-mail: ssmith@lf.com EOE
LEBHAR-FRIEDMAN

So hire me already. Time to order up some hummous from Mat'am az-Zaytoon and work on the Gorilla project. Awaiting input from EB, the art-mistress. Need to work up a questionnaire for my respondents in the article on instructional design I am pitching to ACM. Iggy could use some Meow Mix as well, or so he says. It will be a busy week.

Manahatta, Here I Come: Yes, I know it is nearly three in the morning. I am off-loading a quarter-gigabyte of my Morpeus gleanings from my hard drive to a writable CD-ROM, in order to make room for the Gorilla Press files I received from E's charming and hospitable friends, Jon and Dr. Jennifer, this evening in Chelsea, and keeping up with my correspondence. I am becoming quite the inspired archivist, though at 600 KB/sec through my clunky old 266 ... Wish I had one of those 1.5-GHz jobs with 20 gigs on the hard drive, don't I, though. And how. Amen.

Very pleasant dinner with E. and the two J's at Intermezzo, after which I made E. watch "Mulholland Drive," which i saw with A. at the Angelika when it came out and somehow, though I was floored by it at the time, could remember absolutely nothing about. Now I remember why I forgot what it was about: It makes no sense at all! Not that that's a bad thing. E. and I booed when the film was over, even though we liked it. While E. went to pee, I went out to smoke and watched about a dozen people line up to read the review of the film on the poster in front of the theatre so as to glean something meaningful to say about it to their hipster pals.

Anyhow, I believe I will stay up and work tonight, get a head start on things. No social engagements until I see J. on Sunday. She wrote today to express concern that I might make so bold as to describe certain activities that took place in the early phases of our acquaintance, before she fell for M. from B-Burg and our friendship found its proper level. I reassured her as my sainted mother and her ordained Anglican husband have the URL to this blog, no such matters will be discussed!

Our Foreign Correspondents: Speaking of letters from other planets, another really intense missive from C., partly to arrange Monday, but mainly to express that "headful of ideas that are driving [her] insane," to cite Bob the bard and Grammy nominee (and not the deity of the discordian cult of the Sub-Genius, nor Dylan Thomas either, whoever he was). She enjoyed being called "kind, petite, cutting-edge, prolix, and prolific," apparently, and the link to the "Bad Girls" essay on Avital Ronell. She reminded me of the time in the mid-1980s when I worked as an assistant on the Mime Journal for Tom Leabhart, a job my then-girlfriend Karen Christoper got me when I was a bit down and out. I kept that issue in a place of honor all these years, only to lose it in the fracas of moving in the weeks following 911. So I wrote to Tom to see if there are still copies to be had, and to express how sorry I was to hear about the deaths of Brian Stonehill and Dick Barnes. Remind me to repeat Dick's Confucian-homespun epigram about "literary theory" sometime. Boy, memories of Washboard Tutor performing their ragtime version of Blondie's "Heart of Glass" at Nick's Café and rolling with the crazy gypsy Barnes offspring, Harry and Jenny ...

Distance Re-Education: It's a lovely afternoon, which I wound up sleeping well into after an insomniac session with software that rips CD audio into MP3 files. I contribute the Kinks' "Big Sky," my personal national anthem, to Morpheus. "And when I feel / that the world's too much for me / I think of the big sky / and nothing matters much to me."

Also instant messaged last night with my old colleague John Zipperer from Internet World. Just a few rudimentary pleasantries, but it reminded me that a bad work situation shared with good people is preferable to no work situation shared with no one. Mike Cohn and my old freelancer Kinko also weighed in. My new friend C the choreographer-biochemist invited me to a media blitz on Monday at a public access television studio.

Arbeit Macht Frei:ACM wants to commission a feature article, wrote to request a more detailed query. There's also the translation gig for Indypress. So I am reclaiming my idle hands from Satan to a degree. It's a beginning. J, recently laid off herself, wants to get together for a cheap Afghan feast of Pop Tarts parachuted from the sky, served in a chain link cage in Cuba. Off to the Gorilla Press shortly.

Publish, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! By the way, Alexa has a new version of its Web cross-reference tool in the form of a browser toolbar. I like it! It's very panopticon and parergon and all that. Speaking of which, I came across an interesting story about an old professor of mine from Berkeley, entitled "When Bad Girls Do French Theory." What does calling Avital Ronell a "theory slut" have to do with the death toll at Ground Zero? So happy I got out of the business.

Ravens and Doves: So many resumés sent out like doves over the face of the waters, and no olive branches yet. Nevertheless, I have spent the day pleasantly occupied in my little monk's cell. Happy to discover, at least, that the state labor department has put its unemployment benefits claim form online. Maria checks in with an update on her crazy, alarming love life and another of her Brazilian maxims: "Mas homem é como biscoito, vai um e vem dezoito." She reminds me I really owe Isa Mara Lando an e-mail, as well as a reply to my good old cousin Jay and his wife Christina.

A belated Christmas package arrives from my mother and stepfather, with neat little trinkets from Levenger, my favorite catalog: some copper page clips and an envelope opener. The check was nice, too: the creditors are getting nasty.I am back on board with the Voices That Must Be Heard project at the Independent Press Association, translating some of the local Arabic-language press. Some weeks ago, I met a remarkable librarian at the main branch of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, an Egyptian Copt who knows everything there is to know about the history of the Arabic-language press in the States. I have been carrying on quite a correspondence with a choreographer-biochemist I met online, who was delighted to be described as "kind, petite, cutting-edge, prolix, and prolific." My old partner in crime Velma66 has apparently forgiven me and pops up on AIM.

Pratt art-grrrl upstairs seems to be practicing her clog-dancing again. It reminds me of when I lived at the San Francisco Zen Center in the mid-1980s, downstairs from the poet Phillip Whalen, a monk there. Phillip composed, like Wordsworth, to the cadence of his stride, and so would pace up and down his room at all hours. Now those, to quote Sir Lou Reed, were different times. In fact, it was about then that I lost my verse and the ladies started to roll their eyes. Have to do something about getting that verse back, damn.

In the meantime, I'm signed up for the Parris Island Journalists' Boot Camp at MediaBistro, which promises to make a Studs Terkel out of me. Hope to come out of it with some salable material and get in on this writing for a living scam. Another recent acquaintance used to write a column about shoes for Self magazine. Now there's a dream job. I was surprised to see that responses are still coming in to SourceNet for a story I wanted to do on instructional design, or more specifically on what it's like to work as an instructional designer, what training you need, what you do, the market demand for those skills, and so on. Maybe I will actually wind up writing it. Post-911, it seemed that an e-learning publication at the Association for Computing Machinery was interested, but I never heard back from them. Rude. When I was hiring freelancers, I always sent out a mass e-mail to all the applicants to let them know I'd chose someone and to thank them. Courtesy counts.

Yerba Maté: I have a doctor's appointment at 2:00 p.m., so I will have to forego the nap I planned and break out the heavy artillery: the maté tea bags I found at the local market. Claude Levi-Strauss describes its effects in the section about his travels in the Amazon in Triste Tropiques, and Maria's father related all sorts of lore about it, and also guaraná, during my visit to their presidential compound in São Paulo last summer. A sweet cup of maté should get me through the afternoon, yeah.

It will be good to see the doc and report that I am feeling better. I discovered recently that he shares the same name as a senior Indian military official in charge of nuclear weapons, by the way. Joy of googling. I walk up Clinton Avenue to the Clinton-Washington G stop on Lafayette, then change to a C train at Hoyt-Schermerhorn that takes me all the way up to 72nd and Central Park West. I can drop by my favorite newstand on 72nd and Broadway after, have a Grey's Papaya hot dog.

Long Live Blog, I Need It Every Day. I finally changed my home page from good old Arts and Letters Daily (still a daily requirement, like zinc) to the blogger-based US Daily Report. Yes, I am procrastinating. So what?

Pop-Up Killer, I am finding, is a little more sophisticated than the other. Rather than blocking all new window creation, it works off a database of blacklisted URLs that you can download and add to, leaving you free to browse naturally. It also emits a very satisfying gunshot sound when it's killing a new-window create. That work-from-home thing is harder to kill than a flaming eyeball from Doom. Blam blam blam blam!

Devil's in the Details: I am trying out Pop-Up Stopper to see if it can really ride me of that goddamned "Earn $100,000 a year working at home" pop-up ad that loads everytime I navigate to a new site or refresh the current site. It works well if you enable the most stringent level of prevention, and you can still open up links in a new window by pressing a modifier key as you right-click the link. There's a helpful article about this and similar freeware on ZDNet.

Nocturnal Submission: I'm awake at this what they call ungodly hour because I have a bid to submit on a freelance translation gig. It requires a work sample, so I am trying to knock off an article from the infamous al-Jazeera, the satellite news network from the United Arab Emirates that some of our leaders advocate taking out with a cruise missile because of the way that it frames those videos Osama bin Laden keeps sending them. I have to find a freaking floppy disk to transfer my Arabic word processing software from my laptop, since I lent the only one I had around here to E to put her slide labels and resumes on.

What the hell, I will crank out this job, do some business in the morning, and then nap in the afternoon. Down with the tyranny of standard time over my deviant circadian rhythms, right on, man! Fire up the old java machine.

SEOUL (Reuters) --- Hounded by pet lovers, South Korean dogmeat proponents were forced to postpone a major event planned for this week to promote canine cuisine and fight off international critics.

Feisty animal lovers' phone calls prompted the owner of the venue to withdraw its offer to rent space to a would-be dogmeat restaurant federation that planned to launch a campaign to promote the meat to tourists before and during the World Cup.

"There were complaints from animal lovers," said Kim Yoong-kwan, spokesman for KT Corp, the state-owned telephone company which owns the hall outside Seoul where the dogmeat convention was to be held.

Regrets, I have a few, and they always seem to turn up around midnight. In the wake of a telephone conversation with a woman I met through one of those online dating services, I am chewing on a Philly cheesesteak from Number One Taste of China (the abundance of takeout in this neighborhood after three years in Greenpoint is like manna from heaven, with duck sauce on the side) and wondering whether I might not be an idiot after all. She suddenly seemed in a big hurry to hang up, just as I was set to stop trying to be amusing (story about working at a certain sassy women's magazine and being assigned to edit the vibrator reviews) and commence with the perceptive questions and patient listening that would demonstrate my worthiness. Or perhaps she is just shy. Mating rituals. Ain't it a kick in the head? I have been around the block more times than a patrol car in the Bronx and still have not the foggiest as to what's what. As the Culture Critic says to Deep Eddy in Bruce Sterling's story, "... every vital impulse in human life is entirely pre-rational." No duh.

Fact is, though, that I miss A, with whom I spent the night of September 10, and whose Little Italy apartment I was leaving when the first airliner barreled symbolically into the World Trade Center. Nothing's been the same since, but not necessarily for the reasons the government gives. (There's a novel in that somewhere.) Still have that photo of her from the NY Press, standing on the rooftop gazing off at the smoking tower in the distance, like Lot's wife. After we half-quarreled, I said I would mail her back her Pink Panther guest toothbrush and then never did. Have had the envelope on my desk, addressed and with postage affixed, for weeks now. Funny, too, how the first thing you think of when come out on the other side of going ten rounds with the Monkey is the mating drive.

These are the ides of my fifth month of joblessness, and so what can a poor boy do but blog and blog again? I hold onto the irrational belief that the day I am offered the job of my dreams will be the day some Green Beret gunnery sergeant walks into a cave in Zawar Kili and finds Osama "Yo Mama" bin Laden eating hummous, reading the Wall Street Journal, and watching himself on CNN: My downsizing and the 911 debacle went down in such close proximity that they are linked in my mind as cause and effect.

Nevertheless, I spent a very pleasant afternoon, drinking cups of Earl Grey and watching the light filtering through the backyard evergreen and the venetian blinds onto the Che Guevara poster over my bed, working the network for leads and grooving to a Moroccan pop station coming over the Web and into Winamp. Iggy creeps into the wardrobe closet and curls up on the sweater shelf, undoing twenty bucks' worth of drycleaning, the sneaky little monster. I'm overdrawn and understimulated, waiting for the next unemployment check, but the job market in publishing appears to be looking up. As you all know by now, my last job at Internet World magazine dried up when the bubble went bust and advertising disappeared into the black hole what we did not realize at the time was a recession. I taught my friend Jolielaide (blame it on the bossa nova, heh heh) some workarounds to expedite getting through on the unemployment claim automated phone service, and even put in some time with broom, vacuum, and mop, behavior that would shock Adrienne, who knows my slovenly ways all too well.

On a more serious note, I went through a bad bout of depression over the past couple of months, as I have periodically over the years. I had almost convinced myself that the Monkey (the poet John Clare called it "the blue demon") would stop visiting me as I advanced in years (I will turn forty in a few weeks). My last serious bout took place about five years ago. I was wrong, but I did manage to climb up out of the Afghan cave complex of misery in the end, with the help of my fine, fancy Central Park West psychiatrist.

So, life going forward ought to be pretty interesting. Stay tuned! Most immediately, I will be resuming an Arabic translation project I had taken on before the Monkey arrived, along with some book design work for the Gorilla Press, an enrichment project for New York City school kids that my friend, the painter Ellen Blum, got me involved with.