“Do you have anything in a nutty brown ale?”
What a douche bag. He is talking to a waitress in an airport sports bar and he has droplets of whatever he was drinking last clinging to his supposed to make me look older beard. Later, when he starts making the inevitable cell phone calls, I will find out his name is Brandon. His parents destined him to be a douche bag.

I had a bloody mary for an appetizer, since it took a half hour for the hamburger I ordered to arrive. The second bloody mary was the third course, since it came after the entrée. The timing in this joint seems to be more than a bit off. It’s a sports bar in an airport, you douche bag, were you destined for that?

The first thing I said today was “I don’t think my boyfriend would like that.” It’s 8am and I have decided I want to make my last coffee at home. I go to get milk at the bodega on the corner, the one where the legless Yemeni kid scoots around on his knuckles, you can tell when he’s in residence, he leaves his wheelchair at the one step up outside. He’s not there this morning, but Cracky is. He turns from the counter when I come in, flicks his new lighter in my face and says “ I love you! I want to marry you!”
“I don’t think my boyfriend would like that”
“Fuck you boyfriend! He a pussy!”
“I don’t think he would like that either.”
Fucking good morning, don’t think you can fool me about where you live, you douche bag.

Getting dressed this morning feels like getting strapped for a gunfight. Maybe it's that the apartment is a little more barren with everything packed up, hard walls echo more, turning boot slap and buckle clink into hyperreal Western movie sound effects. Or maybe it's because I'm girding for a trip to the post office with the first box, to test how big an ass chewing some grumpy civil servant is going to give me for mishandling my choice of tape or cardboard or label or for even coming in in the first place. The escalator is out at the East Broadway station and six and a half flights of stairs later I would be happy to emerge, if the first thing I saw wasn't a poodle with a bottle of spring water in its mouth. Kinda makes me happy to get out of the Lower East Side for while.

He gets on the train first, stands in front of an empty seat to hold it for her. When she sits and looks up at him, he pinches her cheek. He's getting off at the next stop, but she is riding further down the line. He kisses her good-bye, once, twice, a third time. I can see her face over his shoulder, the eyes wide and unblinking, then narrowing in annoyance by the final kiss. By the time he's moved to the exit door, she is already staring off, head forward, not following his movement, his leave-taking. I see his hand on the door and look for it. There is the ring, and one on her hand too. It's too late.

Friday night of a four day weekend. Yellow flashing sign F train Culver local and I'm riding it to the end. None of these people will be with me when I get off. The man turning a greyed rubberband into a cat's cradle. The woman clutching an enormous coffee in one hand, chewing the nails of the other so ferociously entire fingers disappear into her mouth. The torpid security guard I recognize from dozens of shared benches at the downtown station.

We go above ground at the raised brutal pilings of the Gowanus Expressway, indifferent father to fuel oil depots and condemned coal processing lots. There's the lit sign of a gas station, ratty straggling holiday lights at the mouth of Red Hook, then the turn into the peeling rusty platform over the canal.

It will be a long ride but I need to see Coney Island one time this winter. Below freezing is no way to stand on winter still street corners, it's simply the only way, this evening. Cross six lanes of asphalt aginst the light and without even looking, there is no one here and I need the red neon burning cold like an Edward Hopper. I need the profound chill, the deep quiet, the living isolation, just this once this winter.

I am waiting for the train at the Jay Street station and watching the man on the opposite platform. He is holding onto the steel upright like a man holding onto a ship's mast during a storm. He is listing and bending, heaving under gale force. I wonder how long this can go on, how long he can withstand whatever hurricane he is experiencing. When he tilts his head downward and vomits onto the tracks I am not at all surprised by the fact, just the timing.

(and now that my handsome genius of a boyfriend has gotten me an awesome hummy glow box of a Christmas present, I can add Velvet Verbosity to my "Who I'm Reading" list. Huzzah!)

The Brooklyn is still better. Yes, the Golden Gate wins on approach. It is a seduction of classically Baroque persuasion, hint, tease, sudden surprise. Turn once and get a glimpse of the top of the towers, turn again, and more is revealed, another turn shows the flanks of the city rising across the bay, until finally you are on the bridge. But the bridge itself, the construction, is just a smaller version of the Verrazano-Narrows. And the Verrazano is longer, bigger, and it is blue. A blue that blurs water and sky, a blue that plays off the tiny lights necklacing its cables, a blue that makes you look for it hard off the south Brooklyn shore. But the Brooklyn Bridge is still best of all. Its approach is workaday, a 100 plus years of urban build up, a factual funneling of commerce to its endpoint. It wins in structure. It wins in closeness of steel slicing air, it wins in the soaring of solid stone arches, it wins in scale that is at once heroic and human. It wins because it never tried to be anything else but its own most excellent utility, its own best design, its own perpetuity. I can only hope to carry so much.