11-22-00 W 6:06 PM

Waiting for the bus at Fairfax and Sunset, “Spare a cigarette, Bro?” guy with a beard walking a dog asks. A camouflage bus went by the other way. It looked like place where nothing wass happening but obviously trillions of things were happening. The bus came. He stood in it, scribbling, ass in someone’s face, probably wished he’d just sit down. He could feel the warmth of the people next to him. Felt like a sardine, but it wasn’t a bad thing: humble and lucky. The driver honked pedestrians off the sidewalk back to the grass as she zoomed in. He wrote walking in the dark from Wilshire and La Brea all the way home the opposite of nothing, like finding missing jokes.

Sun 11-26-00 7:37 AM

The phone rang. By the time I got out of bed, no one was there. The baby wailed like a banshee all night—heart-rending screams, as if she now realizes, two weeks after she arrived so peacefully, that existence bears as much or more misery as it does contentment. It pains you as a father to think maybe your poor, beautiful little baby might rather not have been born—that we have brought her here against her wishes and our better judgement.

She’s sleeping happily now upon her mother’s breast.

Yesterday, we put her in the stroller and and rode down to Olvera Street on the subway. She slept through a serenade of “Del Fondo Del Mi Alma.” She slept through everything. We went down to Pershing Square to see the ice skaters. It’s a distant second cousin, once removed, from Rockefeller Plaza. Cheap, cheesy, and way too small. We ate tortillas and beans and rice and split a beer at La Placita and strolled through Union Station. The wife just brought the baby out to me. She’s lying in my lap with her head on my knees and her feet on my belly. She’s content this morning.