If you chose to self-administer the viewing of an upcoming appearance (emergence, really) please keep a respectful distance, for it is possible that, if unimpeded, I will not enter Christina’s Deli at the corner at all. There's a chance you may see me make the rare turn down Driggs Avenue toward the city. (One day the view down Driggs looked like this.) If I make that turn, it's a half-sure thing I'll eventually appear on the L Train. If you pay your fare and continue to track my appearance on the subway, there's a good chance you'll see me open a book and silently browse its pages. I tend to lean my gargantuan girth against those heavy-metal vertical girders that support the ceiling of the subway platform, itself like a rectangular perch within an impossibly stained and tiled wormhole, and there I do something so light, so gentle, so hushed: I read. While reading, I hold in mind the peripherally spied transmissions embodied in the train-waiter poses of the passersby amongst me, and often I pull my head from the pages to admire human form with eyes trained all aboard. Please keep in mind that this is not a regularly scheduled event. If you camp at the subway stop and spend your day thus, your chance of seeing me decreases with everyone you see who you think might be me but isn't. To confirm an appearance, readers of this tract are provided a password, which, like a good key, has more than a single tooth; by which I mean the password consists of teeth, which are, in order of appearance, these: "The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed." Say that quietly to my neck's thick flank and you'll win an unspecified prize.

Light and darkness in perpetual round: if night, and I head down Driggs but don't descend the gum-scarred steps into the veins of transit, there's more than a half-chance I'll make an appearance at either Enid's or The Abbey. For all those readers in other countries, or in other countries within this country, please realize that Enid's and The Abbey are countries onto themselves. (The author of this and that runs the first one.) As you may have guessed from the password's teeth above, I have recently ceased smoking, and since discretionary funds are few, there's a good chance I won't be appearing at these locations as often as I've had in the past, for these places are places wherein time, like money, is not as happily or as readily spent as it once was. 

During the day, in warmer weather only, you may see me walk down Driggs with my longest possible  stretching-out strides, then run around the track in McCarren Park. If you are interested in attending such an event, you should realize that it's best enjoyed with a book, for it's not an event at all. But I would gladly slap your hand and count each accomplished lap with you, I'd even compete to see who could shout the tally most loudly, but as I lope toward the track's inevitable apogee, it'd be best for both of us if you occupied your time with anything other than the thought that I'm a greedy absorber of all appearances (a vista consumer) when up close, yet no larger than the tip of a tongue when farthest away, narrowed as I run counterclockwise past the rounded oval's noon, widening down the farside's straightaway, taller with each stride, sprinting toward the completion of another lap, another handslap, another lick, when I get to where you wait for me at six, standing on a bench, the cleft in the chin of the track's clockface. 

Every Tuesday this month, I'll appear from 8 to 10PM at the gym in the basement of the synagogue at the corner of Garfield and 8th Ave in Park Slope. I shall be playing basketball there. Access to this event is exclusive to invited players. But if you wait near the side entrance, you may catch my arrival in pointy hood and high-tops at 7:50PM or so, and my departure, half-limping and fully exhausted, about two hours later. You may want to follow my car from Park Slope to Greenpoint, either north on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or through Fort Green, the Navy Yard, and Williamsburg. Why you would do this, as well as anything at all, is entirely unclear. Maybe to wait beside the car at a stoplight for me to drag a fingertip (through the condensation of the steam that burst from my head and collected on the windowglass) and edge out the form of half a heart as the light changes and I pull off across the intersection? 

On Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, there’s a good chance I shall be compelled to move my car to the other side of the street, according to NYC street-cleaning law, sometime before 9:30AM. I shall emerge for this as well. But for most of the month, I'll be in my bedroom, maybe at my desk, typing  worthless overwritten crap intended to amuse and confuse no more than a hundred dozen, or I may be seated in the chair by the window, reading a book by someone long since gone. If I am not in any of these locations, neither standing nor lounging somewhere about the apartment's bowels, it is possible that I am in bed. I generally appear there around midnight, sometimes with a book, for a while, until I fall asleep. And if you sleep too, you can see me appear as a pear, an au pair, an apple eating an ape, and you can whisper the truth to me that the time wasted on this would have been better spent if I wrote it while a little more awake.

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