So I am cleaning up. This is an attempt at filing, knowing that I owe it to Joephet, but mostly to myself. I will be working at a desk at home. I am tempted to buy a laptop. Then this computer could go, and from there... a bed? These are frightening thoughts in some sense, but less so when you realize that I was cleaning cat piss and cat shit this morning. So getting a bed is not exactly a major step down, I guess.

Hrmm... to save on MetroFare, I did indeed end up walking basically all the way to Union Square, with a stop off with Cody and Julia for some Curry Hill goodness, marvelling mostly at how distant the past seemed, how free from it I remain, glorying in my past triumphs over Broke, but not dwelling on it: there have been greater victories, and involving the Blacks...

So I been reading: Persepolis, which is excellent Iranian stuff, readily and inevitably comparable to Maus, though much more moving despite its stylistic blankness--just the right sort of political punch--say it don't spray it. And Ha Jin stories, which are quite satifsying, the sort of slice-of-Asian-life stories I would want to do, only mine would be Asian American, of course. Hrmmmm... So reading is satisfying, though it is only truly possible when a computer is inaccessible.

In the only bookstore in Queens I have managed to locate, I was shopping today when my Asianness somehow seemed foregrounded repeatedly: once when there was a conversation about David Carradine (ugh) between a customer and the guys at the desk, and another time when there was this random lisping Chinese girl from the restaurant next door poppingbubblewrap as if it were World War III already: I was strongly distressed at what another ten years might mean in terms of her relation to white men ("she's cute now, but wait till she's eighty..." i heard...). But no... it has been quite satisfying, this quiet day, even as I continue to consider whether or not I should indeed try to fit boxing into my busy schedule... one gym I was at seemed like some sort of Russian mob training facility...

Other than that, just some minor hilarity and drama involving the quest to get Joephet an iron for his day tomorrow, at some sort of court. At one point, I am in the bathroom, staring at myself in my tight t-shirt, waving an iron, furious, in my left hand as I sweatily clench a cellphone I don't dare hold against my ear in my right hand, yelling something like, "I have an iron in my fucking hand! Why do you want to go to K-Mart! They're closed, the bastards!" (Sorry, Bessie....), but that was eventually resolved, even though he put me on hold for twenty minutes and then forgot I was on the line. In any case, once iron and french fries were purchased, it was more than pleasant enough sitting outside in the breeziness.

I must, however, maintain that the local Genovese is the worst place on earth. Some clerk, in cleaning up, threw an apple (McIntosh) from a candy display bin into a trash bin, and almost hit me with it. There is something about late night purchases at a pharmacy that total over $40 of basic staples which somehow has more than a faint whiff of desperation which no deodorant or multipack bar soap can quite cover. The dispute between frantic schoolteacher lady with scissors coupon and filler paper confusion is too painful to recount. It truly is the worst place on earth that's not an actual place of suffering as opposed to fist-clenching frustration.