My first job ever was delivering newspapers (maybe distributing information is a theme in my life?). So I felt a lot of empathy for the delivery guy I noticed out my window this morning. The Sunday New York Times is famous, even among people I know in Europe, for it’s bulk. Its ___ sections and ____ pages cost _____. Spending hours reading it while sipping coffee and eating bagels in a favorite pastime. Anyway, this guy had to double park midway down the block, load up a handtruck full of papers, and roll from building to building carrying a few papers into each building. Not quite the same joy I had riding my bike around the neighborhood tossing papers onto driveways, but his deliveries probably make people quite happy.

I thought it might be gimicky, but upon seeing it – for the first time from Columbus Ave at West 87th St. – I thought it was rather beautiful and majestic. I like the idea that it’s temporary, a tribute and not a momument.

“sechs-sechs-sechs, seiben sechs, seiben sechs” says the female voice over for the phone sex service, the German pronounciation of “6” deliberately punning on the English word “sex”. Late night television in Germany is full of these commericals for phone sex, complete with soft core video. Accordingly, they reflect the German standards of obscenity: nudity on TV is fine.

To an American this is weird, of course, as all manner of churches and parent groups would sooner slit the broadcasters throats than allow soft core on television. So an American might come to the conclusion that pornography, what Americans consider pornography, is alright in Germany.

So one night my German girlfriend and I are in bed in a hotel room. I’m flipping through the channels trying to find something in English that we’ll both understand. I come across the hotel’s pay porn channel playing a sample, hard core this time, and stop a moment to see what the German porn movies are like. She explodes. “What the hell are you doing? That’s pornography!” Uh, um, uh, I quickly change the channel.

It took a few minutes for me to explain myself. I’m thinking “Germans are OK with porn on television” and figure that extends across the whole range of the genre. And Germans are thinking, “A little skin on television is fine, but anything beyond that is pornography!” They don’t erase the line, they just move it a little further out.

My father once told me about when he was a young man, riding the subway from home in the Bronx to the dances in Manhattan. When he would dance with a young woman he would strike up a conversation and ask where she was from. If she lived not-too-far away – the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens – he’d keep dancing. But if the answer involved Brooklyn or Staten Island he’d excuse himself, go to the men’s room, and then search for another dance partner.

My mother was from his neighborhood.

I take for granted the accomplishments of people in the past.

Sometimes I think we have no new ideas, that all our ideas are variations on what came before. Even the language we use came before.

But our variations are new, sparked by the electro-chemistry of other’s brains mixing together inside our heads.

We broke up on a street corner in Murray Hill. I feel horrible, like what recovering from surgery must feel like. From the center of my chest to my tongue is tight and heavy. I want everyone to feel love, but there are so many intentions in the world, and not all of them result in peaceful evenings sitting on the couch watching television.

Do we ever grow beyond the 2-year old who throws a tantrum to get what he wants? The President starts wars. Corporate takeovers. I run away from a certain but unsettling future.

My company has pioneered the use of a colorless, vapor form of caffiene that we gently spray into the atmosphere of our office via the ventilation system.

It replicates so fast I can almost feel it inside me, warming my blood. It adapts so well to the environment, reproducing new strains that live in spite of our best efforts to end it. And when I pause the treatment it reverts back to its original, wild, form. Always killing. More efficient than the shark and the lion and the scorpion. The virus is so awe-inspiring I feel honored to be infected by it.

I fantasize about confronting someone full of hate and who hammers me with every dumb thing America has done in the past 50 years and I grin and then I laugh and I say, ‘I love you, you have no idea

how much I love you.

One day you will get tired of hating and you’ll rest and let your defenses down and you’ll feel loved.