I wake to find that my roommate has installed glass paneling in our shower. At the drugstore, I flirt with the clerk by asking for candy that doesn't exist, then suggesting she serve me tiny pieces of pineapple and watermelon on the end of toothpicks. She serves one and drops one into a crate of diapers. Exhausted, I ask her to just send the other by email. She does.

I wake to find company in my cluttered living room, which is now open to the elements. After drawing up a plan we scatter to our places: I am sent our with a tape recorder to gather intelligence at the city gate. I leave the tape rolling on a granite surface and stake out a spot to observe the crowd. Soon I'm singing loud enough to be caught on tape behind the dull roar of foot traffic. And I invent songs that depend on the cries of merchants and beggars and the creaking of wagon wheels. I wake up, then flip the tape over and start recording from the middle.

One the eve of her wedding in Ithaca, a friend asks me to get a visa for her Senegalese lover.

Flossing with a screwdriver, I unwittingly pry out my left front tooth. It's larger and heavier than I would have expected, until a mirror reveals that it has come with a sizable chunk of face that includes some upper lip and about a third of my nose.

I walk out of a mother-daughter-incest-themed house party and flag down an old white van in which my friends Abby and Abby are headed up into the hills.

A Brooklyn waterfront at dusk of the first day of spring. As I wait for my car to arrive, I watch a crankhead inducting his two young children into his own tradition of physical theater. The first game is as follows: "If a Black Hat ever tries to cross your path -- beard, coat, big nose: a *black hat* -- you turn to the side and keep walking." I keep waiting.