Was thinking of London. Then Chicago. Then San Francisco. I think I'd feel stupid living in San Francisco and going to all those pretentious New Media parties and pretend haute monde Infobahn affairs with endless cheese and toothpicks and communal IRCing.

Maybe they don't have those kinds of parties any more.

But San Francisco is almost as expensive as Manhattan, and I'm getting tired of never having any money.

Everyone I've ever known who left New York later said they regretted not having anything to do any more, and not having a deli right outside their apartment, and not having the opera and the museums and the transportation and the strange feeling of safety provided by all these damn people.

When I lived in Washington Heights I lived near 181st Street, which is the most densely populated area in the United States, maybe in the world.

You could really feel the crushing presence of all those people, too. To go out shopping on 181st street was to rub elbows with 4 or 5 hustling bodies per square yard. And any time I saw a neighbor open the front door to their apartment I could look in and see 13 or 14 silent people sitting in the living room, with the screams of 3 or 4 babies coming from the back room.

It always reminded me of a documentary I saw on TV about the British flop-houses set up over there by the socialists. There seemed to be no rule requiring anyone to do anything. They just read the newspaper and sat on couches all day.

Lately, I'm feeling as if that's all I do in a day. Nothing seems to be going anywhere any more, and whether there is any sense to it or no, I go to bed each night feeling that this has been another day wasted.