I Never Leave Brooklyn Anymore

On 5th Avenue in Park Slope there is a veterinary clinic that also serves as a boarding house for cats whose owners are on vacation. It is a very nice respite when I'm working to go watch the cats for a little bit. They are in rows and columns, each sitting or sleeping or stretching on its own towel.

I saw L'Avventura today. I finished reading Black Hawk Down. I covered an anti-arena ralley for the Brooklyn Eagle. I did laundry. I stared at the wall. I decided Great Lakes makes my list of top three bars in New York. It would be higher if they had Scrabble in addition to Trivial Pursuit and such good music. Good music makes me happier than almost anything. I started to read Godel, Escher, Bach. My brother told me that I won't understand the math. I'm hoping that it won't matter, because he's right. I only bought it because it was two dollars. I finished the 10 billionth draft of my play, which is about 9.9 billion drafts too many for something only thirty pages long. Especially because the last version was better and after the director agrees with me I'm throwing this one away. I don't know what sucks and what doesn't anymore. When I revise something that much the removed words sort of pile up in my head, in their isolation like radioactive waste, such that discarded passages like "she had a word with our sponsor, and then she stepped on it. The sponsor? No, the moth," or phrases like "a fear of double-chinned anonymity" are going to give me brain cancer maybe. They don't go away.

Sometimes I wish Saturday nights were Monday nights, when boredom is so much more publicly ordained. I feel rotten.