A homeless woman in Penn Station

The woman in front of me definitely had a beard. She also had a small protuberance - about half the height of a ping pong ball - on her right cheek, as if a ballbearing had been launched from her throat...

My Dog Ate My Homework

There is a spot -- where my desk used to be -- where glass actually pierced the wood in the floor when it was hammered in by the toppled radiator. You would never mistake my desk as something a craftsman would build but it looked...

Diary of an Aspiring New Yorker: February 5, 2008

Today is the big day: the largest battle in this winner-take-some knock-down war that we call the Democratic primary. The news today is aflutter with Democrats making last minute uncertain decisions. I ran into gobs of these Democrats yesterday and what...

February 1st, 2008: What I am doing after the Superbowl

We have just been handed a quarter-inch thick packet of paper. The cover page reads 'Post-Superbowl activity. Staff training manual.' At the front of the room a slender woman in black wool pants and a tight sweater is preparing a...

Growing up, there were a few golden legends in our household: The McCarthy campaign in '68; The Vietnam Moratorium; Hunter Thompson's race for Sheriff of Aspen; and my father's own race for Treasurer in Colorado. All of them featured fantastic places imbued with the magic that only places in stories...

The best description I could give is that I have never seen anyplace that resembles Kubrick's The Shining quite so well. The first indication that we were entering a haunted place was my GPS system going bust. One minute we were on a marked highway, the next we were on...

The sudden upset in the caucuses brings to mind the speeches of 2004: there was Dean's famous scream-based implosion after the race; the sore-throated Kerry thanking the caucus-goers of Iowa; and my own, slightly less historically important though also hoarse, speech that began: "The key is to get them out...

"It's not sinking!" uncle John is angry. Or grumpy. Or both. He has spent far too much of his life screaming logic at disinterested boobs to tolerate misphrasing. "The water is rising."

The 'it' in question is New York, specifically Manhattan.

"True, but isn't that really a matter...

Day 47

Sprayings four and five have come and gone and we are still plagued by bugs. They haunt our furniture like guerillas, waiting for nightfall before conducting feeding raids that leave me squirming and sleep deprived. Our apartment, like our government, is plagued by insurgents.

My bedroom/office...

Wednesday, November 7

11:30p.m. "They're not exactly cookies," Marvin says. He is right. They are very much not cookies in any conventional sense.

"They are sort of like sugary bread," I suggest.

"Or chocolate chip pancakes," Marvin notes. "They're a lot like chocolate chip pancakes."...

Day 34

I have moved from denial, to anger, to depression (I skipped bargaining), to acceptance, and then back to anger. The five stages of tragedy may not account adequately for my anger.

We are now past New York's official deadline to be rid of these creatures. Bedbugs...

Day 27

The score so far is 0-0. The bedbugs have not forced us out, but I am pretty sure they too are still here.

I have little faith that our second spraying has gone any better than the first. The exterminator who came in seemed stunned by...

The men also particularly loathed bedbugs, and sometimes, on long, tedious winter evenings the whole ward would be turned upside down in an effort to get rid of them. And although, apart from the unpleasant smell, everything in the ward was as clean as it could be on the surface,...

Day 13

Quarantine is a frustrating experience for anyone. And, obviously, much more so for people who have some awful disease that will probably kill off most of humanity. I don't have one of those diseases, so it's probably not fair to complain. Still, it would have been nice...

Day 7

What is shocking about bedbug veterans is the sense of inevitable defeat they have. I have now spoken with three people who had bedbugs at some point. The first said: "don't listen to anything but fumigation. There is no solution but to poison everything." The second: "I...

Day 1

Obviously we are embarrassed. There is no other appropriate attitude to have, though our embarrassment loses it's genuine quality through endless repetition. I declare our plight to anyone with a passing interest like an alcoholic seeking forgiveness.

"My roommates and I discovered bedbugs...

"Well, Alex was the love of my life. And he was from Des Moines so we moved here and I started my company," Stuart, the gay Scottish decorator we had hired, said to me.

I was in Des Moines as part of a team organizing a town-hall meeting with...

"Ow, goddammit!" The words fill the air like the song of some ill-tempered bird. This is the call of the amateur carpenter, a species usually native to the suburbs, that has migrated in flocks to New Orleans over the past year-and-a-half. Since joining the flock, I have been hearing the...