this week, there was much to learn. my copy of The New York Review of Books arrived tuesday, and there was a long, long article about Marcel Duchamp. any time i read about Duchamp, it's almost, but not quite like reading about myself. oh, i wish. in a more impressionable century, at least. staring into the mystified fog of analysis.

then there was a captivating amicus on the matter of euthanasia as deliberated by a group of 6 otherwise recalcitrant philosophers and presented by them to the u.s. supreme court. maybe i don't know enough about the real politics of the issue, but the idea of 21-year-old policemen intervening in the matter of voluntary or assisted suicide among 104-year-olds facing inevitable death always, and i mean always forces an emotional response from me.

then i had to get off the bus and stave off smarmy leaflets from $7-an-hour mumbling college graduates who finally got the job of shoving ditto sheets from the KitKat All-Nude Club into the gut of every guy who ambled along midtown. and i spent an hour that morning wandering around midtown looking for a better doughnut. and better coffee. and i wandered as far downtown as 40th street before turning back uptown, and i got into the office after 11:00 only to discover that no one gave a shit whether i sat or stirred or whether i rolled my ass out of bed before or after noon.

and so tonight i walked around outside, after 1:00am, and the first thing i noticed was a real conspicuous looking criminal kinda guy, bopping up and down and almost pointing his fingers at every goddam thing that happened to land within eyeshot whenever he lurched his whole body around for no fucking reason. and after a few seconds of curiously checking this guy out (and noticing his $300 jacket) i guffawed good and solid and thought "Oh, he's a cop." And so ignored him, much preferring to loiter on York Avenue with the likes of him then with the likes of the serial rapist/sodomist who has commanded such a giant presence around these parts the last few months.

there were signs outside the delis plugging Steakwiches for $3.50. Roast Beef for $3.50. And i get inside the one deli and there's some ridiculously beautiful woman negotiating the cost for a can of Ravioli.

and so she talked the cashier down 4 cents, but promised to pay up tomorrow. or today. or whichever comes first. and she left the place and all the guys behind the counter made horny, lonely remarks and/or gestures.

and my dad called tonight. he was drunk, and so was i, and since he will never ever visit New York and i will not reach Daytona Beach within the next 10 years, then there is no other state in which the two of us can ever again communicate.

my cousin Dean was killed in a head-on collision somewhere outside of atlanta on thursday morning. he was a year older than i. what happened is a terrible thing, but you know, Dean, i never fucking expected to ever see your ass again anyway.

when you were born your parents considered naming you Mark. when I was born my parents considered naming me Dean. but i was named Mark and you were named Dean, and our parents (and we, or rather i) laugh about this strange coincidence to this day, and maybe therein lies the rub.

we played around with my chemistry set when you were 12 and i was 13. we tried to make the house explode. you were so fucking intelligent. your understanding of what those experiments all boiled down to somehow resurfaces in my head every few mornings when i'm on the bus to work and reading something that reminds me of that phrase you used when we got to the base of it all.

you lived for one-half-hour after the collision. somewhere outside of atlanta (i'll learn the details later). during that time i was sitting here in New York tapping my fingers across this desk and gazing into this glorious monitor hoping for an answer to a question.

you went on to be a juvenile delinquent. you got arrested frequently, got kicked out of the army, worked the counter at Darryl's Oyster Bar in Daytona Beach, did some time for driving a John Deere through a neighbor's living room window, and the last words i remember you saying in my presence were "Where the hell's your goddam car?" then you pissed off the balcony of my dad's apartment, and so did i, and we laughed and laughed and slapped each other that redneck high-five, crossed piss-streams, and i don't remember ever talking to you again after that night in Daytona Beach.

you went on to all that, and i went on to these nights like this of getting drunk and killing time. walking around York Avenue tonight, savoring the fact that i'm still walking around. sitting here on this spot and sitting out on the front steps of this building wondering what it might have been like to have known you better, or to have known anyone at all among this family of ours.

to tell you the truth, pal, i don't know which of us is luckier. i just hope that there is some place where we will see each other again.

because i can't see anything right now. my eyes are so watered out that i can't even piss straight.