Finally the first Cyclone ride of the season. My best friend has convinced me to come to a really poorly organized war protest on the beach. While we are waiting for them to figure out what they are doing, we go to Nathan's. It's not even 11AM, but hell, that can never be too early for cheese fries, particularly not when eaten al fresco with cops, bikers, kids from the PJs across the avenue. We still have time, so I start mooning at the rollercoaster. It doesn't open until 12, and that gives me half an hour to call my friend chicken, using a less polite and more gynecological term, about 50 times, for not wanting to go on it with me. He's never ridden coaster in his life and now I have decided it is time to push him beyond his comfort zone, which is both a gentle kindness and incredibly obnoxious. This would be what I call "the black eye of happiness" I sometimes administer to those I care about--hey, sometimes joy is rough stuff, but it is joy none the less.

So, yes, he acquieses. But we can't sit in the front (crap!) and he has to be able to hug me (okay). The resulting photograph, snapped sometime during the proceedings is a hilarious depiction of the masks of comedy and tragedy, I am screaming with delight, he looks like foot-long surgical needles are being inserted into his kidneys. He looks so miserable it would give me pause, well, in fact I would feel terrible about pushing him too far, making him so uncomfortable, except I know he then went on to brag all over himself about it at last night's dinner party. Yippee!

The man on the platform reminds me of a high school crush. I was 14, too young to understand why I wanted, only to know that I did. How could I have helped it, he had a red mouth and curls the color of the beach, sand and driftwood tumbled together and bent over a list of French verb conjugations.

I’m standing on a crowded train, looking at the woman seated next to me, looking down into the threads of grey cross-hatching the start of a nest in her hair. She is slumped, her chest a sallow sink, her belly rounded. I wonder if she is pregnant and I watch her hands for confirmation, for her to slide one over her swell protectively. She is pawing through the bag perched on her knees, digging with reddened knuckles. She finds her Blackberry, cradles it in the knot of her fingers.

In the reception area Mr. Businessman is all business. Good shined shoes, American flag pin in his lapel, he is filling out medical forms with a burning intensity I imagine him using to bulldog a deal. He has a David Spade bag to say he is not old yet but his harsh haircut is fading into a thickening neck.

My earphones say “It’s not having what you want/it’s wanting what you’ve got” and I think that’s about half right.

It's the F line on Saturday night. When the train pulls in, it's wearing "Coney Island" across its forehead and I think, well, I could. I could take that long slow ride, find the tiny kiosk lit against the night, buy my ticket, get into the front car, and scream my way into the first Cyclone ride of the season. But it is a damp cold night, I am already chilled, hunkered down into a cowboy squat on the open-air platform. I let gravity hold me and the train pulls away.

He is pale, skinny, begging for attention. She is wide, awkward, giggling encouragement. He is beat boxing on the platform, she thinks it is a peacock's play for her affection. He is about to put his foot into the bear trap of expectation. She is about to put her heart into the undertow of disinterest. I'd like to tell them, but I look away.

Here comes my train.

I wish you could be here. This morning's run takes me past Mr. K. sweeping Friday night into the gutter. Three addicts doing something conspiratorial between two parked cars, waiting for the methadone clinic to open. The genteel frenetics of the farmer's market, shoppers hopping and keen-eyed as ravens. Serious cyclists are out, packs of them and with their glossy gear they are hard shelled speeding beetles. Children and dogs are collapsing and colliding in the long meadow, a beagle tells his person he is not done smelling the air here yet, a pomeranian waltzes with a small boy.

There is a young woman running towards me. She has just out of bed hair and a loose gait, floppy at the wrists and ankles. She waves her hand and I think she is gesturing at me, but really her hand is following her head as she double triple checks before stepping across the street. I like to think she is beautiful to someone. Someone who is still drowsy in her bed, or noticing one of her stray reddish hairs on his own pillow, or making breakfast to conjure her return.

How embarassing. This is really what I would wish for myself. Instead, I am back on my own stoop, inspecting the progress of this spring's strawberries, unfolding the weekly local paper, giving the hairy eyeball to the young blood who bombs his ambulette the wrong way down this one-way street, and yes, of course, wishing you were here.

He is the mayor of this patch of cracked cement. In the gated apron that fronts a beaten grimy tenement, he presides from a dented folding chair. There is an elaborately dilapidated shed housing the building's garbage and sometimes he is a magician inside, incanting, waving his hands, conjuring. On those days I pass wordlessly.

And how many days have I passed him? Hundreds. We are both creatures of our habits, and after the first hundred times I start to acknowledge this with the smallest nod of my head, on my way to the train in the evening. He may see me, bob his head back, or he may be hollering at ghosts moving down the street, or have his eyes rolled wide and staring at the dusty trees and filthy cornices.

After the second or third hundred times I ventured a sharp head nod and a "Howdy." That made him laugh, open his mouth in mirth, show dentition of infrequency and erraticism, a gold color good in raw honey but bad in teeth. But he said howdy back, in a way both delighted and mocking, and now we agree on each other.

Today he is sitting in his usual spot. He is barking at the sky, snapping his yellow tooth stumps at the sun. He pauses long enough for us to exchange our greeting, then, perhaps to commemorate our sixth hundred time, he adds a new layer, "Always a pleasure."

March: Nowhere, Mass

It’s a room in a hotel off the highway and I am looking out the picture window like it is a huge tv. It is not unlikely for me to get gone for a day, to go pick blueberries, to go throw snowballs at the dogs, to go look at art. The reason I am here is something like that, to build or make joy or learn. But where I actually am feels like such a contrast to that. The buildings here, they have no relationship to the land, they are acontextual, like if they sneezed they would slide right off the low hills. On the third story I am even with the off-ramp, sluiced with the homeward slowed, red taillights blinking crawl and go. Some careful planner has engineered a discreet nod to the wildness that preceded all this, put a drainage pipe under the roadway so the creek can still run its course, and now it is emptying into a slough spread at my feet. There are stands of winter dead phragmites with their solemn beards, massed tumbles of briars, greyed grass waiting for spring. I could say I am not here for this, this incidental vista forgotten in the elbow of progress, but in fact I am, because here comes one tiny perfect bird hoping his way through this tossed and beaten landscape.

I don’t take pictures when I travel. I don’t want to stop, evaluate, frame, select, judge. I don’t want anything between me and what is. I keep things in my head, make up my own slide shows, melt the edges, elide images.

My first view of the Sierra Nevadas has me straining like a bloodhound in a butcher shop. These are not familiar, the friendly green of the Adirondacks, the gentle roll of the Ozarks. These are stark and terrible, a brutal landscape stripped to bare skin over sharp bone, a blazing mortification. I am trying to stuff as much of it into my eyes as I can possibly stand, even though I know they are going nowhere, but I am moving, still moving to the next thing, the next vista.

Some things I remember best: the shrieking pop of a snowball fight at 8000 feet; the pair of coyotes that appeared like bookends on either side of the road; in one direction the blue hour settling on distant mountains and turn the other way to the swoop of bats dipping in and out of one still lamp; the smallness of running in the edge of the evening with the absolute magnitude of scale and the press of 90 degrees of air temperature; holding still on a ridge to smell the sage and hear three distinct birds calling, layered over the bleating of goats, the warbling of chickens and the scratching of a boy making an empire of dirt.

It’s time to come on in now, it’s time to come home, but I have still not wiped the dust from my boots.

The F train is going above ground, pulling out from the tunnel. I jump up, press my face to the window like a tourist. I have been back all of an hour and I am stupidly enthralled to look down and see a grungy urban panorama of floodlit parking lot next to the McDonald’s next to the stained concrete pillars of raised highway. The highway traffic has slowed, a red dragon of tail lights crawling through the sky, behind it the far off tiny white Christmas lights of the New Jersey cargo ports. We are headed to a decrepit station, rusting utilitarian ugliness at the subway system’s highest point over the Gowanus Canal. I crane my neck as we hit the curve because I know what comes next, hold, wait for it, wait for it, there it is, the Statue of Liberty levitating over the dark metal streams of nighttime traffic.

It's been long enough since I have left this city for any length of time. Four years ago I went to Vermont to go fly fishing. Along the way I made sure to satisfy my curiousity about Thaddeus Kosciusko, brave son of Poland and Revolutionary War hero, which status he won for feats of engineering, and necessitated visting battle sites all the way up the Hudson River valley.

Now I am going to the desert. Literally. If it leaves me with stories worth telling, you'll hear them in a week.

The intersection of yearning and receiving is mapped to my shoulder blade. It’s a place I can’t touch, can’t soothe, but I can feel it, keen under my jersey as I go running. I am trying beat the cold front home, rising wind in my teeth and I am hung up at the light. It’s six lanes of screaming traffic and I am not planning on pushing it until I see the Flat Fix sign red and blue neon wheeling urgent. So I take the first three lanes, and then the second three lanes, and then I am two blocks away from where I can sit on the top of the stoop, press my tender shoulder against the house, feel its mass and warmth behind me.

It’s a rainy morning, the cables outside my window strung with water drops. The light is opalescent, grey and shimmering, turning the concrete block wall, the rusting barb wire, listing fence staves into the nacred interior landscape of a junkyard oyster.

I am grateful for the rain. The overwintered plants are back out on the stoop. The rosemary, lavender, chives and little alpine strawberries are ready to drink in the sky. And the rain will wash the sidewalks, clean away the ugly splat of vomit from in front of the methadone clinic, the tragically mishandled ice cream cone smearing the front of the dry cleaners.

Trackwork on my subway line makes this a halting jerky ride. I am listening to drowsy gentle music, keeping my face open, but I am seeing nothing until the train grinds to a halt and there through the scratched glass, harshed from construction lamps, an old Revs graf piece. I have heard of this, they are legendary, this man deep in the tunnels, spraying his autobiography into the dark in huge swathes. This is “page 50…catholic school and drugs” and ends with “I was an asshole.”

The train starts up again, and with this sleepy music, this sudden subterranean confession, I am not prepared for midtown this morning. I am wearing red, but that is not enough. Spin the dial on the machine, bring up "Storm in a Teacup" bellicose, crashing, and now I am ready to shark the business district, stride hard, mouth full of razors.