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9.6.4

zuko's?

My new GP thinks I have an obsessive compulsive personality, presumably because I brought a brief handwritten medical history to our first meeting. So I didn't mention this to her, but sometimes I do have the feeling that New York is like the consensual hallucination in Ubik, constantly deteriorating minute by minute, and my admittedly sporadic efforts at housekeeping - throwing moldy food out of the fridge once a week and washing the dishes every few days - feel like a fragile bulwark against the forces of decay. A film of dirt and grime perennially forms on the sill of any window left open, three lightbulbs recently burned out on the same day, like our food processor our DVD player no longer starts when plugged in, we rented a defective (scratched) DVD that wouldn't play on any of our laptops, etc.

The moment my creative drive returns, I'd like to start taking time-lapse photography, like the death scene in A Zed and Two Noughts, to document the process by which graffiti accretes on anything newly installed in the neighborhood, like those clothing donation boxes.

A couple weeks ago, the building housing my favorite place to buy produce, the 7th Ave Fruit and Vegetable Grocery, briefly caught on fire. It's not more than a block or two from the fire station, and I understand they got it under control real fast, but none of the shops in that building have reopened. So I mourn the passage of the florist Zuzu's Petals, a branch of the local Mediterranean chain the Olive Vine, and of course that wonderful cash-only grocery store, whose friendly clerk was the spit and image of a diminutive Asian Mark E. Smith, and where (unlike everywhere else I've shopped so far excepting the co-op) I never purchased an onion that turned out to be rotting inside its paper, nor a bag of rancid bean sprouts, nor a split watermelon, nor a cracked and gluey egg.

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