The hardest part of writing for film and television must be making believable scenes where desperate woman are also somehow attractive.

Furthermore, today I am handing in a big new draft to an agent who is interested. Whenever I finish a big section I like to take a walk in the neighborhood and remind myself that I live in New York City. I threw on jeans over my pajamas and went to the store to get three hole paper. It is very exciting to buy blank paper, knowing that I will have to fill it.

I brought a regular coffee mug with me because sometimes it's nice not to be travelling. "Taxi?" "Taxi?" shouted a group of early morning cab drivers outside the grocery store. Most of them have a good raquet going by driving everyones groceries home ten block for eight bucks. "Taxi?" one said to me.

"No thanks." I kept on walking and he called out: "Yeah. Maybe after you shower!"

So that's how my day began. A New York City cab driver told me I needed to bathe.

David Johanson from The New York Dolls has this great story about running into The Ramones at a practice studio. "David! David!" Joey Ramone said. "You gotta hear my band!"

They played three songs in three minutes and David said, "This will never work. You're nice kids, why don't you try getting a job or something?"

Eventually I will make up / put myself in a position to have that same story.

But today I want to just say that you are going to start hearing Bonde do Role as the DJ's pick for song to play after 3 AM. Here's two songs:

Melo do Vitiligo.mp3

Melo do Tabaco.mp3

Yesterday two things happened

1) A co-worker of mine gave me two pot brownines. This wouldn't be so special if I didn't know that this coworker were dealing drugs in order to pay for culinary school. They are phenomenal brownies to begin with (reduced ghee butter and dipped in white chocolate) in addition to which I have been warned to take these tiny brownies very slow. He put an ounce in every pan. Since they are so special, I want to find the perfect event to share them with.

2) That event may be my recent invitating to judge a fiction contest at Y@le University. The other two judges are professors at Harvard and Y@le who are authors of novels I had to read in college. They invited me because I sometimes write book reviews for an alternative weekly near Yale. I've lied my way into alot of jobs that were above me and yet this one is so far above me that it seems to fit.

Puerto Rico was like this. The pool deck of our bed and breakfast was three feet from the crashing waves. Highlights: 1) We found our way to a place in the hills of this small Puerto Rican village where there was a bar whose entire concept was that it had a pool. On sunday nights a local guy goes out fishing and when he comes back he makes amazing sushi for eight dollars.

2) In order to save twenty dollars, we lied about having auto insurance at the rental place. I've often imagined how fun it could be to go to another city and trash a hotel room and rent a convertible and tool around. But it turns out car rental places are basically an international surrogate for borrowing your parents car. All any of them have are beige sedans or boxy minivans. This is a terrifying way to save twenty dollars when the whole point of the trip is drinking rum.

3) I thought alot about Ernest Hemingway while I was there. I don't think he ever went to PR, but I became obsessed with his recipe for a dacquiri. Run, 1/2 lime juice, 1/2 grapefruit juice and a dash of marachino liqueur. No one has maraschino liqueur, even in new york, and no one ine PR seemed to have any goddam limejuice. Yet they all had grapefruit. One bar made me a grapefruit/margarita mix rum drink, many of them refused my ridiculous Spanish and instead nodded to everything I said and then just handed me a rum with grapefruit juice and a slice of lime. I never once minded, since drinks were two dollars everywhere. Someday my future sponsor is going to look over my web log and red flag each page. I guess I'll wait a while to write about how great St. Patrick's day was last night.

It would mean alot to me if you and I became myspace friends. I would like it even more if we were real life friends, or if all of my myspace friends came to see me DJ at Beauty Bar on tuesday nights. What a scene. In walks The Rapture followed by Rilo Kiley and all the living and dead members of the MC5, who will no doubt high-five Demetri Martin on their way to buy drinks for Adam Conover.

I do wish that friendster was still cool. No only because I had six million friendsters, but because if you found someone cute or famous on friendster they would show you which six people you have in common in order to stalk them.

Goddamit. In my novel-project there is a band that the main character loves. I made them up after seeing the Rapture*. They're called The Plural Nouns.

And some goddam band from Jersey also came up with this completely generic band name and already made a myspace page.

*Some kind of indie credibility light just went off in my head and I felt I had to mention that there were only twelve other people at the show.

Yesterday I really wanted to call my ex-girlfriend and say, "I just bought a new pair of sandals and gave my other pair--my last remaining possession that I can connect with you--to a kid in a small village in Puerto Rico."

That would be my second un-made call for the week. The first would have been. "I just got a new phone and a new phone number. I'm not putting you in my new directory. And neither you nor my new phone will have eachothers numbers. You two shall never speak again."

But of course one cancels out the other.

Three years ago on St. Patrick's day, Bush announced we were going after Saddam and his sons. Pete and I shared a bottle of Jameson as we watched the news in my living room. I was pissed. The next year I was broke and in Florida on senion year spring break with friends. I was so broke that I had to buy gramma cigarettes (menthold 100s) for a dollar fifty and volunteer to be the designated driver back from Key West.

Last year I hadn't worked a real job since august. I was so broke that I brought an apple juice bottle of whiskey out with me for the night. I had just finished writing something that I thought I would see on bookshelves within the year. Turns out I would, but just on mine. Pete said it best:

Brendan and I tacitly decide we're just going to keep the stools warm at Peter McManus's for awhile. He's brought a juice bottle full of Bulleit Whiskey that he's surreptitiously dabbing into his empty pint glasses and sharing with me. At one point, during a dab, he loses the cap to the juice bottle. With no other choice, he fills half (HALF) of a pint glass with the whiskey and insists that we have to finish it right there. Meanwhile I've already found two unopened bottles of Harp on the floor smuggled in with a paper bag by someone who forgot about them AND stolen an untouched pint of Guinness that belongs a guy who's been busy sticking his tongue down some girls throat for the last fifteen minutes. Brendan and I get drunk on other people's dimes and an enormous amount of whiskey for the next hour.

1-2am : Brendan and I leave the bar and talk to a man from the London Fire Brigade who's here with his other uniformed friends on holiday. He's a sweet kid, sympathetic to these two scrappy Irish cunts slurring in his face (good-naturedly) about international relations. Looking back, it was kind of hilarious, this scene. Two drunk Irish mugs in our street clothes smiling big and a navy-blue uniformed London bloke trying to keep straight and sober.

I jump into a bodega while Brendan smokes and buy a mini-apple-pie-in-a-box for us to eat since we're both hungry, apparently for food that is total crap. I come out and Brendan has a staggeringly, deathly, absurdly drunk homeless Jamaican man hanging on his arm (for support, not belligerence) asking for money to go home. We say we've got nothing (probably true) and offer him food instead. He says no, and while talking about being all this drinking we're all diong, he admits to us that his favorite drink is "Bah-KAR-dee" rum and that he is a homosexual. Then he says, to-be-honest-and-I-haven't-told-anyone-this kind of way, "I like dee men AND dee wee-men...I fuktup." He walks away shrugging.

2-3am : Brendan and I run, skip, scurry, etc. up and down the neighborhood of Chelsea singing all the Irish songs we can think of at the absolute TOPS of our voices while at the same time trying to look for a swanky club we've been invited to by Abbey Simon. We find it and we're electric with drunk energy for all these male models and waify women. There's a homeless man outside asking for money, being refused it, then cursing under his breath about his brother and pyramid schemes.

Abbey gets us in the club for free (barely). Two things happen immediately: (1) I hate this club, all clubs, all the people who go to clubs, who run clubs, etc. (2) Brendan disappears quicker than hotel soap in a hot shower.

Today I'm sitting at home on a self-imposed spring break that began in Puerto Rico. I have just read over what I think may become the final draft of this project and I'm sitting here fixing typos and making the chapters flow together better.

Everyday I undo what I did in days before. I will miss this little paragraph. I remember when I first created you. And now I will destroy you.

The main characters have just arrived in San Francisco, when they run into a group of tourists.

In Seattle I tried to blend. I didn’t take pictures. I looked straight ahead on the sidewalks. I walked to the coffee store every morning like it was part of the grind. In Wyoming, a big family sat down at our picnic table. True American heroes. Snacks, coolers, nature-themed games, sunglasses tied to their necks. The Mom and Dad musta stayed up nights for three weeks working out the details. So we gave it a shot. The next morning we got up and pulled our socks to our shins, strung our cameras around our necks, and walked to geyser. Free. Unbelievably great to just walk around and smile and really get a good look at the things that everyone says you’re supposed to look at. We started just calling each other Dad and Son and we got the picnic table to ourselves by talking to imaginary children. “Let’s say your mother and I split up. Who do you think you’d want to live with, huh? Who loves you more?” We took hikes. We took naps at a campsite, we took flowers and pressed them in books. We went to a butterfly garden and learned how butterflies survive by blending in with the flowers. We took notice. And we took excellent pictures. I wish they had a word for these things. Americans work too much to have a word that means “standing out as one who blends in well” or “comforted by the hellish daily routine.” Even if they did, I wouldn’t really know. They might, actually.

When I was a child my mother would only ever buy the cheap Scott's toilet paper rolls. The kind that were actually wrapped in a softer paper than they had inside, the kind that when applied would rip both itself and your asshole in half. My best friend at the time was named James. His father invented something and within two years his house, which was heretofore identical to my own, underwent non-metaphorical renovations. And then one day I went over to James' house and hist mother had stocked the bathroom with what appeared to be Zeus' bed sheets.

I swore that when I grew up I would have the most fantastic toilet paper the world has ever seen. And today I bought a six pack that represents my 6th-12th rolls as a sucessful adult. But if I have children, I am going to buy the fax-paper kind that my mother did. So that atleast I can give them something to shoot for.

Silicon Valley must be worse, but in New York City working professionals go through a second puberty that is more awkward than the first. A lot of people go through their twenties working two jobs or one job that is twice the work. They're low paid and they still wear the clothes their mom bought them for their job interviews and the smallest respite in their life is when their boss decides to take the whole team out for drinks in some place with thin martini glasses and loud house music.

And then one day they get their own place, they buy some clothes and right when they always thought they would get married they can afford to live the life they thought they'd have when they were sitting on their parents couch on Oak Tree Ln. watching Sex and the City. The first thing that happens is they get their hair highlighted. No matter how dark their eyebrows are, they'd prefer to walk around the city getting the attention of every passing sleazeball as they smirk through a pair of brunette apostrophes on either side of their nose, making every expression look like it's in 'airquotes.'

The nerd they always were and who got them where they all today is deep inside them. It comes out in the articles they read in the times and the high-pitched rat-a-tat laugh that they can't seem to shake. And those party guys and girls who had all the fun and the friends? They're at home watching Sex and the City.

One year minus one week ago I finished what I thought was the final draft of my novel. I had nothing to do--since I didn't have a job at the time--and so I went for a completely blissful walk through my neighborhood:

There are a number of social engagements I have to attend to this evening. And I am seriously considering wearing my headphones for the rest of the day just so that no one can kill this fantastic mood I'm in. After three years of daily frustration I have just printed out the entire novel-project.

I walked around Williamsburg with my iPod on listening to indie pop all afternoon, smiling at the cold afternoon, smoking, and wishing that everyone I know could understand the joy of jamming your own printer with four hundred pages of your own work.

Now, one year (minus one week) later I have a job and a new apartment, no iPod and I don't really smoke so much anymore. But I did print out a brand new draft. After all this time I have cut over a hundred pages. But today I sat at home, kicking my cheap lazer printer and (non-metaphorically) feeding old drafts into it so I could print the whole thing at once.

Most of my literary heroes made their wives handle this part.