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.