Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

As I rock along the subway line, and pass with throngs of others up and down the stairs, escalators, and ramps, and pour onto the city streets, I can feel the hum of the urban hive.   Its rhythms, its rhymes, its pulse.   It's heartbeat.   These are the things I see.                On an average Monday, with mid-fall overcast skies and leaves beginning to change, billows of steam erupt from the sewers and rooftops.   Those from the lower domains carry the odors of the city, those that out of towners notice and I've long learned to ignore.   The ones from above, I look at them and wonder if they are the cast off dreams of New Yorkers awakening to find themselves in the cog again.   Or, I wonder if they are the cast off dreams of New Yorkers who find themselves awash in regret the morning after, in the middle of, or years into the game.   Are they the bellows of exasperated parents bemoan...

I really have little, if anything, in me to say about the NYC bombings this weekend.  Yet, parts of me feel the urge to pontificate . . . of course, there's also the questions from a couple of close friends wanting to know when I'll ponder. When 9-11 happened I was teaching a course--we were covering the Comstock Laws--and when Saddam Hussein was captured I was shoveling my car out of a blizzard.  When he was executed I was in rural Virginia for a holiday and packing, as I was headed to my first trip to Turkey that January.  When Osama Bin Laden was captured I was doing laundry in an urban, city 'hood fashion.   I pontificated here, probably one of the better ones . . . or not.   When bombs, of pressure cookers and burner phones, went off in NYC I was home . . . reading literature on Chinese American restaurants, blaring some "empowered women's mix" from Apple radio, and rotating with edits on a grant application to finally finish my Aegean Sea cultural st...