If it wasn't for 3 pairs of socks and 3 underwear miraculously found, I wouldn't be writing now. I would be doing a laundry. I haven't blogged in a while and a lot has happened since then. A lot, and nothing. Any attempt on my part to give a linear account of what happened is bound to fail. Past days and nights merge together in a formless conglomerate.

That was a couple months ago: That was before catsitting. [NB: catsitting did prove itself a dangerous activity after all and almost cost me a friend. That was strike three. I'm not catsitting in this city ever again.] Sara takes me to that restaurant somewhere on the Upper West Side. I'm not good with this kind of things. Menus, names of the restaurants, names of cocktails. So it was a restaurant in the Upper West Side. Come to think of it, I'm not even sure of the location. But who gives a fuck anyway. So we're a dozen steps from the restaurant's entrance, me following Sara, when I notice a homeless standing up and pulling up his pants. On the sidewalk, between his dirty blue sneakers is something you usually only see in cartoons and commercials. You know, the way in cartoons apples always have a perfect shape and color; the way in commercial McDonald's cheeseburgers don't look like the miserable thing you see when you open the box in real life. Well, that's what I saw on the sidewalk. Kind of. A perfectly shaped human turd. If I told you what it looked like, you would never put whipped cream on your food again.

I look away almost immediately, but the image just cannot go. The weird thing is that nobody has noticed anything. And I'm not talking about pretending not to notice anything. It's a small street, there are old brownstone houses and small French and Italian restaurants and anorexic looking trees. People. Cars. Even Sara hasn't noticed. It's like this guy is a genius, producing turds with such a perfect shape that if someone ever decided to sell us shit, that's the image commercial agencies would kill to use. And nobody noticed him. Like I said, a genius. Humble, anonymous, he returns to the world of the invisibles. He took my appetite with him.

That was a couple of weeks ago: as usual, I'm the last one to get the new gossip -- my manager has been fired.

That was last week: I lost my keys. Home keys, work keys, New Yok Library key-ring thingie and Duane Reade key-ring thingie. Everything.

That started a few days ago: my computer's been acting strangely. Mysterious messages on the notorious you're-in-so-much-trouble-blue background about "beginning dumping physical memory." And my monitor is still fucked up. Fucking ingrate. You give a shelter to a 800 Mhz Celeron (!) computer nobody wanted anymore and the fucking ingrate does everything it can to bug you.

I need a new computer. I've been saying that for 3 years now, I realize. It was true then, and it's still true today. Computers come and go, problems stay.

That's almost everyday: "Good morning ladies and gentleman, I apologize to bother you but blablablablabla, give me your money, thank you." And always the same sentence: "I'm not a thief," or "I don't steal." And it goes on and on. Everytime I want to jump on my feet and yell, You should. Mug! Steal! Revolt! Refuse! Attack me! Act like a human being. Don't let anybody give you something that you could steal!

But I just grind my teeth and try to keep reading in spite of the noise.

I do give to homeless people. When I am lucky enough to be in a position to do so, that is. But rarely to people who ask. Never to those who give an explanation or tell me it's not for booze. That was a few days ago, it was cold and a guy was sitting on the sidewalk, his back against the wall boarding Bryant Park. I was on the bus, it was cold outside and the guy was barely visible in his coat. At his feet he had a basket that read: "Property of U.S. Postal Service." He also had a sign in his lap that read: "Tell me off for $2.00."