There's no question that some of the today's very best writing is to be found in the pages of The New Yorker.

Just this last weekend, I paid to see a film on the power of The New Yorker review alone. The film, as the review had argued, was terrible, a supreme exercise in cynicism, "violence's answer to kiddie porn." But the review was so well written, the critic so clearly animated in his reaction to the film, his argument so cogent, that I was drawn to experience the film for myself.

Even among the uncredited capsules in "Going on About Town" there are jewels to be unearthed. Consider this endorsement of a exhibition of Old Masters at the Frick:

"Savor eight of the nine visiting Old Masters, then pour yourself into Rembrandt's 'Girl at a Window', which will use you up. The unremarkably pretty subject, in an open blouse, leans forward on a stone sill and gazes slightly past us. Rosy-cheeked, against a black ground, she steams with vitality. Is she chld or woman, serene or anxious, innocent or cunning? She is all those things, but not at once. Her aspects flicker in the mind. One hand oddly raised to her throat becomes as tormentingly enigmatic as Mona Lisa's smile. Your response to her induces a responsibility. She has become a person in your life. Your life is different."

Whoa!

I am lucky enough to find myself surrounded by people whose intelligence and facility with words I admire. This is a situation that I do not take for granted; a situation, in fact, which I actively sought to put myself. I have friends who have written for The Times, and friends who have been invited to read at philosophical symposium. I have friends who nosh with famous authors, and others whose work has been lauded and published by prestigious journals. I find their success tremendously satisfying, and share in their glory as a wanderer takes share in the bounty of a desert oasis. Graduate school was my reason for moving to New York, but my motivation was to meet a girl and maybe someday get a piece into The New Yorker. Maybe someday I'll accomplish one or both of those goals, but until then I'll continue to take joy in the intelligence and wit of my friends.

Six months ago I would have told you that I dreaded going to the Dentist, and hated getting my hair cut. Hell, six weeks ago I would have said that.

Well, I had to go in for a root canal about a month ago, and I approached the procedure with a healthy amount of trepidation. To my lasting surprise the procedure was quick and completely painless. It was so fast, in fact, that I can't even justify complaining about the discomfort. And to make matters worse, or better, I suppose, the dentist and his assistant enjoyed an easy and remarkably high-brow banter, intelligently bullshitting about the political and cultural history of Kyrgyzstan and the fraught relationship between the Persians and the Afghans while they drilled my tooth with a drill that didn't even make any fucking noise!

I walked out of that Dentist's office smarter and better looking than when I walked in.

So maybe I was primed for a revolutionary trip to the Barber Shop. I got wise, this time, and when the young Russian woman who greeted me at the door asked if I'd like to have my hair washed, I said yes, please. Never say no to a girl asking to wash your hair, that's what I say. And as I lay my head back and let her fingers do their thing, I allowed myself to wash into the conversations flowing around me.

I say that I find people fascinating, but really rarely am I able to really take the pleasure of being an anonymous witness. Sitting in the Dentist's chair, I am an anonymous witness because to the Dentist and his assistant I am no longer a person but something to be worked on. To the Barbers and their customers I disappear the moment my head dips and Olga begins to soak my hair. So I listen and find that most people are smarter, funnier, more human than I generally judge them to be. They have something to say.

I don't know why it took me so long to discover that these places have their subtle pleasures, but everybody can expect a better coif and brighter smile going forward.

Jeff is the baddest dude I know, and one of the best friends I've ever had. His whole existence has been preeminately at odds. We were introduced by a mutual friend after Jeff had returned from a bit at a labor camp in the Cascades. From birth, this guy had total disregard for everything decent. And it wasn't a put on, and it wasn't a show. It was the sincere expression of his being, and making it work in this world, being appropriate to this world, seemed to require more than he was capable of giving. He was born in the desert.

Jeff was a living, breathing archetype. The great outsiders of film only mimic Jeff, and great works of literature have been written about him. He menaced the highways of California in an XL Ford Bronco, mad, Dean Moriarty mad:

"Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparkling flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again."

He was, is, the perfect expression of the Western spirit, the kind of man that can only be nourished in the vast landscape of North America. He is not cowed, will not be infringed upon. The man follows a code. Merle knows the man I'm talking about:

Well, I missed wishing everybody a happy 4/20 by a couple of days. Huh. Can't say I have any memorable 4/20s in my past, but being a pretty typical Northern Californian(er), I'm certain I've enjoyed a few.

If I had been around a computer last night, I would have wished everybody a happy 4/21. There's no significance to 4/21 that I'm aware of, but last night I was thinking about how when I was a kid, probably bout 8, I rode with my friends through the early morning of July 5th and collected the previous night's used fireworks. We weren't looking for the accidentally discarded live bomb. We were collecting the material evidence of the previous nights revelry, each of us emptying our backpacks onto the grass and separating the common fireworks from the exploded firecrackers that somebody had smuggled out of the Indian Reservation or across the border from Tijuana. It was awesome, and that memory of 7/5 is more palpable than any of the many 7/4s.

Is there anything worse for a man than to be called sweet?

A man doesn't want to be known as sweet. A man takes sweetness as a reproach. The word is bitter on a man's tongue. Sweetness doesn't win pennants. Sweetness doesn't discover new worlds, break the sound barrier, or close the deal. Sweetness gets men killed in war.

John Wayne was not sweet. Ernest Hemingway was not sweet. Don Draper is certainly not sweet. Aren't these the kinds of men women want? Isn't the strong and silent type desirable once again? My father is not sweet, but in him I've always considered this a defect, an accident of excess aloofness rather than a positive characteristic, the consequence of a strong willed masculinity.

Sweet is the ideal of bourgeois domesticity. Sweet mows the lawn but does not chop wood. Sweet makes love, but never, ever fucks.

Sweet is, above all, appropriate. I want to be appropriate, I want to fit in, but I also want to stand out. I want affairs, fucking free of sentimentality, but I want a lover even more. This is the conflict that I can't seem to resolve.

My roommate has beaten me three times in a row, in chess.

Victories in the previous 434 matches had caused me to become accustomed. I considered the outcome certain, predestined in fact, and attributable to the possession of what I gladly reasoned was an ineliminable mental advantage. The matches themselves could be delicate and ornate explorations of the possibilities for dismantling your opponent. They were almost ritualistic. I tremendously enjoyed this state of affairs.

The losses of this weekend, well, they've got me a bit concerned. Early onset Alzheimer's? Mercury poisoning? Sex addiction? There must be some fucking explanation. This shit does not just happen!

...

There is trouble at home.

"The Situation", which is what I've taken to calling the collection of events that have led to my parent's current predicament, has become a crisis. My family's ability to deal with this crisis depends on its ability to communicate, and determine the contours of a new reality. For a family such as mine, it is a perfectly tragic condition. It's the fucking American pastoral.

So I deal by contemplating la dolce vita. This is a list of my current top-5 to-try Manhattan restaurants, in no particular order:

1. Eleven Madison Park
2. Locanda Verde
3. Degustation
4. Ko
5. Daniel

I must have a very recognizable face. People who have never seen me know me from somewhere. Like a fine wine, I pair it with a familiar manner...(ewww, sorry for that)

A Fruit Guy gave me a very good, really, a phenomenal deal the other day because I am a 'very good customer.' I had been there only once before, so either I was the only repeat customer he's ever had, or he thought I was somebody else. Maybe several somebodies, who knows? Now that I think of it, I get a lot of people looking at me strangely as I walk down the street. I've always just figured that it was because I must be kinda silly looking, which is why I'm always checking my fly. But maybe it's because they think that maybe they know me, maybe I remind them of somebody...maybe a movie star? Yep, probably a movie star.

But wait, I just thought of a third option. It could be, and indeed very likely is the case, that this otherwise honest Fruit Guy tells every customer, hell, passersby even, that they are 'very good customers.' My fly is down, isn't it? Sigh.

In my OK Cupid profile I claim that my smile is the first thing people notice about me. It seemed both attractive and reasonable. The pretty Colombian girl who serves my coffee in the morning likes it.

It's nice being greeted by a smile and my name, 'Good Morning, Christopher,' in a heavy equatorial accent. It's nice being told that somebody likes your smile. One of my clients says she does too. Also a Colombian, but with a heavy Queens accent. She's old school, very smart but also very sexy, sexy in a coming up in the seventies and eighties, when women were expected to be sex objects in the office so the successful ones owned it kind of way, owned it and never just gave it away. She's a 'difficult' woman, one of my favorite people.

The thunderstorms from last night left this morning with a faint smell of summer in the city. It's a smell I will always associate with my first day in New York. I remember it raining for the first weeks I lived here.

There is a different quality to the smell of warm rain in the city. The concrete landscape prevents the rainwater from seeping into the ground. Without topsoil to absorb the rain, it pools on the sidewalk, and the ledges of buildings, beads on glass faces; the city marinates in its rain, and all the smokes, the soots, the smogs that flavor the air of the city concentrate, brew in the rainwater. In the city you smell the rain, and the rain smells like the city itself.

Scent drives to the essence of the the thing. The smell of a girls body, the trace it leaves on your pillow, your sheets, after she had laid with you. It is the smell of the girl, it is the smell of all girls. It is the smell of girl.

Fresh cut grass is what Home smells like. Tobacco is what Dad smells like. My father is the slightly stale but masculine smell of Tareyton cigarettes and Mitchum deodorant.

I remember after high school football games, everybody putting on cologne before seeing the girls. CK1 is the smell of adolescence.

Far be it from me to doubt the B.I.G., but my money is currently solving a whole lot of problems. It could be that me and Biggie have different ideas on mo and money, but when you've got nothing a little sure as shit helps.

In the last couple of months I've gotten my teeth fixed, gone to the doctor (twice), got my eyes checked. I've painted my kitchen, and made my student loan payments. I've enjoyed several nice dinners, after-work cocktails, working lunches. I've been eating, plenty, and drinking just the right amount.

I woke up in the middle of the night last night to use the bathroom. Usually when this happens I have a helluva time getting back to sleep. There are no distractions at 3:00am, there's very little of anything at all. It's when I'm most anxious, and my mind races over all that might be the cause of my anxiety, but of course there is no cause for my anxiety, so my mind just races over and over again over every shortcoming, over every mistake, over every deception, and I just lie awake. But last night I just went right back to sleep. I even thought to myself, 'nothing to keep me awake, tonight.'

Hey, I've still got my issues, shit just doesn't go away because you've got a couple dimes in your pocket. But I'm dealing with them, and I'm able to deal with them because I'm working hard, and earning a few dollars. It's a taste of responsibility, of the kind of independence that comes after failing to take care of yourself, but never failing to keep open the possibility that someday, you might just figure it out.

So, mo money? In this case, I'll take it. It ain't Biggie money anyways.

Much of my time at work is spent updating this fucking lame database that Big Brother Sales Manager uses to make sure that the money they give me is in return for some kind of productive activity. Well, the joke is on them, because while I'm sitting at my desk tap-tapping away at the keyboard, I'm not out schmoozing with clients, which is what they really pay me for. Nor am I spending all that much time updating this database with anything but imaginary tasks. What I'm really doing is surfing Blogger, incessantly clicking Next Blog, Next Blog, Next Blog. That's how I discovered this: White Collared Redneck. And boy, is this shit funny!

PS - It's 1:47 right now, and my work day is proceeding according to plan.

I was never the kind of person who knew what they wanted to do for a career.

When I was in third grade I thought I might like to be a brain surgeon. In high school, a barkeep. Once I discovered philosophy, well, I thought academia might be the thing for me.

But I never had any love for surgery or the brain. Bartending was misguided, youthful exuberance. And although philosophy does indeed occupy a special place in my heart, I don't mourn not having ascended the ivory tower.

Besides, we're talking about a job. Work, for fucks sake. And work is work, right? Now, I know what I like to do: I like to bullshit with people. It's what I'm good at. Sure, I can uphold my end of a serious conversation. Sure, I can get deep. But what I really enjoy is aimless, meandering chit-chat. Gossip. Idle talk about the weather or the ballgame. And so last Friday, when, after lingering over lunch I found myself strolling on the sunny side of the street with a pretty girl at my side, chit-chatting, I realized: I fucking love my job. Because I can do that, and that's pretty much my idea of perfect.

And as long as I can get paid doing that, it makes no difference to me what exactly my job is.