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Updates | Mar 19 2002

» On January 29, in a piece entitled MIAs, I lamented having forgotten four of the not-so-many women I’ve slept with. I’m pleased to announce that I’ve since “recovered” three of the missing. One is a good friend, another practices Scientology, and a third is my former wife. You may wonder how I could have forgotten my former wife. Well, she wasn’t really my wife; I merely helped her with her immigration problem. Our sexual relationship was limited to a single incident which took place long before becoming man and wife.

» In Garbage, posted on February 26, I documented my non-confrontation of a man poking around in the garage in front of my apartment building. The next day the building manager cleaned up the man’s mess, but soon after, a new mess appeared. A few days ago the same thing happened: someone, presumably the same guy, knocked over a garbage can and tore open all the trash bags, spilling the contents on the ground. Was he looking for something? Was he trying to deliver a message to someone? Fuck if I know; my plan, though, is to wait until I run into him again and ask.

» On March 14 I wrote The Third Balloon, a piece about the balloons stuck in the tree outside my bathroom-mate’s window. The strange part of that story was the sudden appearance, after a year and a half, of a third balloon. Now that balloon has vanished. Ever the rationalist, I still believe what I wrote in the original piece: that there were always three balloons, I just failed to revise my thought that there were two. Ah, but has what happened to the third balloon? The string that held it to the tree became worn and broke; it flew away.

» On February 4 I posted a piece called Happening in which I described a disturbing and mysterious incident involving a posse of Hasidic Jews, a prone man, a cop with a flashlight, and some indiscernible cries. A week or so later I investigated further, walking to the spot where the cop had stood peering over the wall at the edge of the platform, his foot on the prone man’s back. It turns out I was wrong about what’s down there. It’s not the grass along the side of the BQE, but the BQE itself. However, I don’t believe the cop was looking at the BQE. No, he was probably looking at the metal walkway at the bottom of this huge traffic sign that’s directly under that spot. Or not at the walkway, but at the thing on the walkway, a person. Although I have no way to confirm this, I now believe that some person, a Hasidic Jew, was lying or standing on the walkway and moaning in pain. How did he (he sounded like a he) come to be hurt? Well, either the prone man hurt him or he hurt himself jumping onto the walkway. Why did he jump onto the walkway? To get away from the prone man.