It appears that my old high school friend, D.S., is coming to town. I haven’t seen him in a while, perhaps two point five years in fact, when he threw himself a goodbye party at a little bar near Canal Street, a stone’s throw from where I used to work and smell the collapse of the Twin Towers daily. He moved to Berlin, which was not an untoward move.
Alas, his return (or not) comes at a time when I feel very much without many of my old friends and colleagues. There are so many people who I once “hung out” with, sat with, drank with, movied with, talked with, commiserated with and they are all alive, thankfully, living their actions in good order. But I have to say that time has put a bridge between me and them and I do miss them, each and every one. Not dramatically or desparately – just plain old miss them.
(I don’t think most people want to admit that they had friends that they don’t see or correspond with anymore because it’s painful to know that this string of (perhaps natural) failures is a precursor to nursing home culture.)
I thought about compiling a list of the individuals who I miss and posting that list here. But then I thought about the categories of “missing” with which I might organize that list. The categories might be something like:

• Phoned in the past six months
• Has kids, no longer available
• Been over three years, no idea
• Former girlfriend, thankfully
• Hasn’t called or written me (their fault)
• Haven’t called or written them (my fault)
• Lives in another country (Europe)
• Lives in another country (Canada)
• Might as well live in another country (California)
• Went insane
• Had a falling out with, no love lost
• Nothing in common but college
• Emotionally tight but geographically far
• Common experience under duress, now not
• Godless heathen
• Hopeless aristocrat
• Artist and too busy to meet up
• Artist and too smart to meet up
• Artist and too cool to meet up
• Only does e-mail these days
• Only does IM these days
• Won’t remember me
• Willfully won’t remember me
• Hopes I never contact them
• Hopes I do contact them but won’t themselves take the initiative
• Still in college

My daughter and I were playing on the carpert with a set of 16 blocks today. We started building one big tower and then she remarked that we should each build one and then we did. Each of our little towers got up to 5 blocks high. Then upon each of us adding the sixth, the two fell into each other and all the blocks fell to the ground. There was laughter but not from me.

Was on CPAP last night.
Nasal pillow made of silicon gel.
Slept 6 hours. More than before.
Tube got in way of head.
No facial markings.
Saw, before sleep, blue areas mixed with bright green.
Awake like a nicotine addict on lettuce smokes.
The elephant machine.

It’s making the rounds. When you type the word “Jew” into Google’s main search window, you get this page, which shows at the top of the rankings a site called “Jew Watch,” an anti-Semitic site.
Google took out its own little ad to comment on it and it has further links to more information. Does this mean that the JewWatch.com website is more popular than any other Judaism-related website? If Google’s objective and automatic rankings are correct, and they probably are, the answer is yes.
But what’s maybe equally sad is that beneath Google’s ad is another ad titled “Jew prints.” What could the sponsor, AllPosters.com, possibly seek to gain from this?

I was priviliged to watch 45 minutes of tonight’s Extreme Makeover, wherein a future husband and wife decided to undergo tremendous amounts of plastic surgery on screen.
It’s quite obvious that the dominant aesthetic that ties all of these “medical” and radical surgery procedures together is a Northern European one. In each case of “after,” the men and women look more white, their noses straightened, their eyes enlarged, their chins made stronger. I studied Greek and Roman art many years ago (as did many Germans in the 1930s) but our unspoken and unacknowledge popular inheritance of racist preferences seems unstoppable.
Just when we were starting to think miscegenation is okay and that Latinos can look white and that Jews can look Arab, we have to undergo (or go under) the knife yet again.

Over the past year, I’ve come to the widely thought but rarely spoken and never-printed conclusion that we are living in a very speculative housing market bubble. I know that some will disagree, especially those who buy and sell real estate, those who are realtors, and those actually know how markets work and study real estate for a living.
In my very unscientific research, the following findings confirm for me that no three bedroom co-op in Brooklyn is worth $985,000 (plus $850 per month maintenance), as I saw posted in our Park Slope neighborhood:

• The baby boomers, who control most of the political and monetary capital in the U.S., will not want their large houses forever. They will need to sell them at some point in order to move to warmer climes. Who will they sell them to? The Village Voice recently published a long article about debt for those in the 18 to 34 year old demographic and noted that “the average collegian … is $20,000-plus in the hole thanks to student loans and credit cards.” Not them
• Health insurance continues to sky rocket, increasing 13.9 percent last year, far outstripping what folks can possibly earn in overtime. If it’s health insurance or mortgage payments, I imagine there will be many home defaults in the coming years. People will abandon their large homes and mortages in order to stay alive.
• A Google Search on the real estate bubble finds very little of substantive discussion by the media. This is because the media, by and large, relies tremendously on real estate agents and advertisers to fund their publications. I can’t remember the last time I saw an article in the New York Times about speculative real estate. Even the Village Voice doesn’t dare to speak the possible truth on this one.
• Politicians sometimes go out on a limb to talk about the coming burden of health care and Social Security for the coming boomer retirement. But they will never point to the fact that Gen X and Generation Y will need to pay for those soon retiring. Taxes will need to go up on the young to pay for those on Social Security. And without safe, lucrative jobs with health insurance, they won’t be able to afford homes if taxes are high.
• I learned today of yet another person I know who is going to real estate “school” to buy and sell the stuff. This makes a total of about 6 folks within my little circle of friends and acquaintences who either want to study real estate or have completed their coursework. In 1999, I read many stories of folks taking courses in “beating market timing.” But that was a different and well publicized bubble.
• Brian Lehrer said something interesting the other day on his WNYC show: that if you don’t own real estate, you’re essentially paying a tax because investing in other products (e.g. IRAs, mutual funds, stocks) will assure you of a lower and riskier return. This is true especially in major metropolitan areas like NYC but is coming true even in upstate New York.
• The housing pricing market just does not reflect anything going on in the rest of the economy. Jobs are leaving the States or are not growing statistically. 13% of the population is in poverty. The stock market is doing well but and is nervous about the next attack on U.S. soil.

Instead of going to cool converences, like the current SXSW in Austin, or visiting the sets of Law & Order as my cool pal Jake Dobkin did, or reading what looks a great new book on improving websites usability by the 37signals folks, or putting up the new superbly excellent artist of the month, Ruth Root, on The Site at MANOVERBOARD, I’ve been working.

Every once in a while, New York City pulls a very fast one on us, and it is never pretty. The mayor did it a few days ago with his education buddies (a good idea, imho), the restauranteurs and their dishwashers have fun with us (with their special sauces), and now my old high school buddy, D. Strauss, comes clean about New York’s latest crappo artist: House of Scams and Fog, Or How to Break Into Your Own Apartment. Published in this week’s New York Observer, it will either break your heart or break your supposedly hearty New York spirit.

There are so many dishes in the sink. And all I can think about are two things:
a. The huge pile of work I have to attend to tomorrow, digital piles on top of piles on top of ruins of email.
and
b. The fact that Coca-Cola never patented its formula, because to have done so would mean that the copyright would have expired and we would all be making Coca-Cola syrup on our stove top. Coke does, however, tell you how Coke is made. After reading it, I estimated that a bottle of the stuff costs them about $0.16 to make.

Two nights ago, I dreamt that my wife and I were invited to witness the execution of Saddam Hussein. We were given a call by a U.S. Government official and told to come down to the Barnes and Noble at a certain address in Brooklyn.
When we went inside the store, we were directed downstairs to the basement and then to a hidden chamber where we waited on the floor for the room to fill. We sat there, on the carpeting, for a few minutes and soon there were perhaps 20 or 30 other people in the room. I didn’t know what to expect and then all of a sudden a large, white sheet was pulled away from right to left and there was Saddam Hussein standing, staring, still. He looked very pale and looked straight ahead. He was tall and his hair was short and his moustache prominent.
I was astounded by his presence. My heart was pounding at that moment and my immediate thought was what happens if he tries to escape or kill or hurt one of us in the audience. Where were the guards? Where were the justices? They couldn’t be found. Yet I knew they were there. I woke up and I wasn’t sure how he was supposed to die, but it was clear that we were there to know his non-existence.