SNAPSHOTS! NEW YORK CITY! GLAMOUR!

On the subway, the white boy with the buzz-cut, jean shorts, and black sneakers glances at me over sunglasses to let me know just how rough he might be. The hipster with the Colin Melloy hair uses serene hipster eyes to seduce a girl leaning against the door. Both men do well in their respective haunts, I imagine. Later, in the bank, the slim Asian girl with the odd sagging ass can't stop looking back at me. I wonder if this is a weird flirting ritual or if something's amiss in my appearance. I've just come from the coin machine, depositing maybe four months worth of change. If you guess near the final total, you get a prize...a Commerce Bank pen, I think. I guess 47 dollars and 34 cents. The actual total is 116 dollars and 76 cents. The Blarney Stone at 3pm is already full of ruddy middle-aged Irish Americans, or Americans who want to be Irish, and one of them comes to the serving line to speak to the Hispanic cook. He praises the chicken cutlet. "It's good," he repeats four times, with other words sprinkled between. His inflection is surprised. The Times puzzle is a cinch, and I have time to read an article about a television show where a man named Mystery teaches virginal white boys to seduce women with social manipulations. The writer, a woman named Virginia, ends the article by calling Mystery's tactics "ingenious." Then another article talks about a crap show with David Duchovny as a New York writer in Los Angeles with writer's block. But Alessandra the writer and I both know that writer's block is bollocks. Saying that now, I don't even feel inclined to knock on wood. On Third Avenue again, a blond from behind looks beautiful in a white dress until I overtake her and see she's older by fifteen years than first imagined, and inside the lobby of my building the security guards have new card readers that don't beep like the old ones. Maybe I'll knock on wood anyway.