You can see pretty far. You can see this apartment building from there. That is not very far away, though. You can see far off into the dust of Buckhead buildings which I can not name and do not recognize.

I am eating burritos, and watching America's Funniest Home Videos on the TV, and laughing out loud at an essay in The New York Review of Books about Philip Roth and his astounding tirades.

I look up and see two people sitting at a table drinking beer, talking between themselves and gesticulating aggressively. A man and a woman. While I am looking toward them, the woman takes off her shoes and throws her legs up onto the metal railing which keeps us all from walking off the edge of this very high place and into the bushes below. The man looks away for a moment and she quickly grasps both of her breasts, adjusts them in some way before he looks back and then, when he is looking at her again, she throws back both arms and jiggles wildly.

She pelts the man she is with and anyone else looking at her with hostile sex, flapping her legs wide apart then slapping then shut like some kind of zealot bird. She keeps talking, the man she is talking with keeps talking and my eyes go up and down her legs, over her feet and back up her legs, and I disappear into sexual fantasy in which her shorts vanish and I vanish into there and there is no backache, no sore neck, no boredom, no chafing, no confused attempts at conversation and kissing, no perspiration, only those few moments of existential fucking and endless orgasm punctuated by me looking away from her legs and back at the television and Bob Sagat and some home videos which make me giggle uncontrollably.

That is a good thing about fantasy. You can do whatever the fuck pleases you for as long or as short a time as you need, and no one gets hurt, no one hates you or publicly curses you a month later, no one stomps all over town looking busy but really just killing time while waiting for the other person to stop it with their prissy anger, no one lays his troubles out on his friends until they stop being his troubles and then become forgotten altogether, no one has to do anything except turn away from her legs and continue watching TV, or continue eavesdropping on the conversation going on behind me.

I laughed right out loud an awful lot tonight. Sitting at that table by myself, I was happy to read from my magazine and watch the TV and just be completely entertained with myself all at once.

I turned to my right and discovered that I was sitting about 10 inches from a table filled with people. 15-20 women, all sitting there. They were completely silent, one of them squashing out her cigarette with her right hand and tapping her fingers with the left; it was their sudden silence which made me realize just how fucking loud and noisy they had been up to that moment.

A few moments of thrilling silence. No one was looking at anybody. One woman suddenly and aggressively blows cigarette smoke all over the face of the woman next to her, then yells "GUESS WHERE I GOT THIS HAT?"

Then the volume of their conversation resumed. A lot of words zoomed back and forth. A lot of gestures. A disgusting quantity of cigarette smoke (Well, any quantity is disgusting, but don't get me started). I turned back to the TV. A home video of a baby vomiting angers me, and almost drives me to write a letter to the show explaining to them that supper-time is an inappropriate time to broadcast video of babies vomiting. It damn near made me do the same. So yeah, I know what I'll do. I'll write them a letter. That will make them stop! There will never again be baby-vomit in prime time, and you'll have me to thank!

 
I was supposed to go piano shopping today. I got up quite early just for this, only to discover that none of these piano places in Atlanta open before 1:00 on Sunday if they open up at all. Most of them did not open, and I ended up spending many hours wandering around this neighborhood looking a place called "Piano Gallery" which, according to a certain internet map-making program (one of those things where you type in an address and Voila, there is your map and directions to the place), is supposed to be right across the street. So I went out looking for the place, only to find that it could not possibly be across the street, there is another building there. So I came home and checked out the address on another internet map server and got a completely different location. I tried a third server which returned an even farther-out location, this one not even in Atlanta.

I threw up my hands. It felt foolish to do it, rather like jumping up on a stool and screaming and flailing a whisk upon seeing a mouse in the kitchen, but that is what I did. Threw up my hands and gave up on finding a piano today. Called a few places, one of them way the hell up north. Another somewhere else. Three others (which had Steinways) were closed. Rates for renting a piano here seem very reasonable.

I think that this matter of not having a piano for the past weeks is fucking up my mind. I am so used to having that outlet available to me, and not having it at hand for so long leaves my brain feeling burned. This is not an emotional thing (God, how I hate it when someone talks about playing the piano or any other instrument as an emotional outlet). It is only an intellectual and partly physical exercise which is so ingrained into me that it is almost a part of my metabolism, part of the hourly cycle of things that roll through my body and mind with such regularity that they pass unnoticed.

There is no such thing as emotional music, I don't care what anybody says. There is music which somehow, through inexplicable or perhaps interesting associations and references, resurrects forgotten emotions or unexplored feelings -- but there is no such thing as purely emotional music. Except for shit like Yanni, which does nothing at all but try to provoke the emotions of people susceptible to the suggestion that they live in a world of hurt, or in a world whose emptiness can be spoken for by a goddam musician.

I need to play the piano right now, but I can not. I live in a building where there is a grand piano in the lobby. On that piano is a sign which loudly says THANK YOU FOR NOT PLAYING THE PIANO.

Aah, fuck you. Signs, signs, everywhere are signs. I can not argue with them, and will not even try. Keep your piano there as a piece of furniture.

Bastards. Cocksuckers! I hate you all!

 
I am a guy who can wander around like it is an Olympic sport. I wandered around North Atlanta today for hours and hours and hours. It was hot, I was lonely, there was no one anywhere, and I saw a lot of vacant lots, grassy fields covered with garbage and the remains of demolished buildings, I thought a lot of empty, nonsense thoughts, and all-in-all started to feel a little more at home here in this town.

Started to wonder if I was getting too old to be wandering around strange towns like this. In my early 20s I wandered around Oberlin, Ohio; Tampa, Florida; and New York City. In Oberlin, I wandered out to the cornfields, to the creeks, to the places so far away that some Obies felt free to concoct feeble yet highly-regarded legends about beheadings and ghosts and children of the corn. In the months after graduation from Oberlin I drove my mother's car in Tampa so many miles and so far out of town that it seemed like I was not anywhere except in some children's fantasy book about walking into closets and out into a land of confusion. In those days, I would spot a retirement community and think "Hey, they probably have a piano which is really just a piece of furniture. I could probably get a recital there and make $75." In New York I wandered from the highest streets of Manhattan all the way down to its core, breathing in putrid, hot air from the throats of empty apartment buildings on Allen Street and then feeling so into them as to want to lie down and fuck the flowerbeds of all that Northern Manhattan parkland.

I can not stop doing this. I will never stop wandering around. This is a solitary pursuit. I will wander alone. Because wandering like this with another person has only proven to be irritating for both of us. I wanna go in there and buy a hammock, he does not. She wants to buy some shoes, I would rather go over to the river. She would like to stop and stare at some naked mannequins, I would rather go get some pancakes. I wanna walk through this crowd of people, but can't really do it because 2 of us could not fit through that tiny opening in the middle of this crowd of people. One of me could have made it just fine. Two of us? Well, one of us will get irritated, and it would not be me. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck me while I wander all over this fucking town.

• June 16, 1997 - Makin' Whoopie
• June 8, 1997 - Away From the Transient Residence
• May 14, 1997 - At the Transient Residence