Drizzle and cold oh drizzle and cold. That�s today. But it�s all right, ma. I prefer this flat-out nasty weather to the pure skin-cracking cold of the last several weeks. The rain washes away all my bitterness, it does. Plus coffee on a day like today tastes like it smells, which is about a million times better than coffee normally tastes. And I love coffee.

I saw 25th Hour last night with my buds Frances and Jeff. I loved that movie�not so much the plot, but the subtext. The way Spike Lee mourned for New York and looked unblinking at New York now, post-trauma New York. Like a low-note bleating through the whole movie, like an oboe, that mournful sound. I fell in love with the dog, Doyle, who looked a little bit like Basho�or the opposite of Basho. Handsome fella, that dog. I also fell a little bit for Edward Norton, someone who has mostly inspired hate-filled tirades in me over the last several months because he is so irritating with his pretentious method. But he was damned good in this. It was a lovely movie full of small, lovely and true moments and I was surprised, even though I should not have been, because Spike Lee is nothing if not brilliant at getting those lovely small character moments on the screen.

Oh I had so many things I thought to say, so many things I planned out to say here, but now all I can do is rub my eyes and roll up my sleeves and blink at the screen. What was I going to say? It doesn�t work to plan things like that, not for me.

I feel like the quiet after a long night of celebration, like an emptied house, like a well-worn shoe, like 3 am, like silence, like a cigarette and whiskey mellowed voice, like a poem you must lie down to hear. Spent, content, calculating, lonesome and spare. Like a spare room, I am, a little bit useless, but comforting. Isn�t there a bit in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe about the loveliness of spare rooms? Maybe I'll look for that today. Maybe not, too.

Paragraph out of context, an aside, a tacked-on ending that would never work in the movies, never work if my life were really a story. Here: How do I say, we aren�t friends? We never were friends, not yet, and we never will be friends, not ever, not after such outlandish displays of insensitivity, of disrespect, of fuckheadedness. I'm just not interested, not a bit. I don�t care enough to say it--not in person, not in private, not in a bar, not in a car. Keep the book. A souvenir. But we ain�t friends, kiddo. Never were, never will be. I don�t mind and the best I can say for you is I hope you don�t mind either. But if you do, a word of advice: don�t fuck around so much with people. People worth anything won�t stand for it. Take care but leave me the hell out of it. The end.