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It occurred to me last night as I strolled past Gramercy Tavern, where dinner can be had right here in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan...

Wait.

See here: I'm calling it the "Gramercy Park area of Manhattan" instead of the "Gramercy Park Neighborhood", because this is no longer a part of Manhattan where there are neighborhoods. At the time of this writing, most of the neighborhoods in Manhattan and at least half of Brooklyn (and 30% of Queens) have been obliterated. In their place are a growing number of towers filled with the sort of people for whom the person in the picture there to the right cannot possibly exist.

Wait.

There's no person in the picture. There might have been, had I taken it a few hours earlier. It's too late for a person, but just the right time for about 150 pounds of frozen meat.

So I mean to say "In their place are a growing number of towers filled with the sort of people for whom the 150 pounds of frozen meat in the picture there to the right cannot possibly exist".

It occurred to me last night as I strolled past Gramercy Tavern, where dinner can be had right here in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan for about $200 per person, so long as the wine is reasonably priced, that human urine isn't among the things a wealthy banker (one of whom I imagined was imagining to himself how nice a piece of waitress tail would be as a digestive after gorging himself on taxpayer money) imagines that he will find in his soup.

I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I do know that it was a very, very cold night when I found the body in the park.

Whatever mess there may have been was frozen and invisible.

I didn't know what I was looking at for a little while, which is what always happens to me when I come across a cadaver. Sometimes I can hear a little bit of the grinding in my mind: "Is it a lamp? no. Is it a book? no. Is it laundry? yes. I mean no."

I stood there for a little while after making sure that he was beyond any of us, and after taking a few pictures, watching people walk by. The body was in a certain context, see? The park, very cold winter night, icy sidewalks, yellow sodium lamps on the hospital across the street, dead homeless dude frozen to the ground. There's a harmony to it such that the eye doesn't pick out any of those elements by itself, but only sees them as a whole environment that one must traverse in order to get to the good deli on first avenue. Or to the emergency room just across the street.

Homeless dudes belong on the ground.

One morning in Brooklyn while I was in a cab, I saw something that reminded me of a person-sized ice cream cone that had been smeared across an intersection by a giant child. No one walked past that. And yet I hadn't realized what I'd actually seen until I was halfway over the Brooklyn Bridge.

I've never pissed in soup.