He is back in Coma Town, trying to find his old equilibrium, before he can read through the notes he took down, at times in the middle of the street, and make cognet narratives, draw lessons, plan literary projects etc, around these. These are some of those notes, sent as an email before.

It's me, again reporting from Times Square on Thursday night. The Disney crowds are crazy as before, and this is indeed better than science fiction - the ascent from the subways with flaking paint, into spit and shine, rattle and dazzle, and the great bullshit machine that seems to operate at these cross roads. I wonder how Marco Polo would respond to this.

Anyway I am back again in dear ol' Uncle Sam's bosom, even thought I am not all that sure if he wants me here, or that our love for each other is what it was once. After staid, and quite, and rather cool, Toronto of last evening, NYC is perfectly cooking all my glands again tonight. The question however I was posing to myself as I met with a friend this evening for food down in Chinatown and Italiano Mama Mia street, is this stewing might be okay on the nerves for a week or so, but can I live here, and still keep all my fuses?

I even detect a sense of mania flowing underneath this missive - not unlike what our old drunk-dumbass Jack Ker-o-crack was possessed by when he sat down to type his opus on a big, big stuck together scroll? I think I will not quite make it just by myself. Perhaps with the sanity of a extremely sane woman I might, but surely not by myself.

But then goddamn, this circus is fantastic, I see ghosts of stories, of novels walking the avenues down here, yes to write a mad novel would be much easier here than in that Coma Town we live at. The ghosts stare at me in the reflections of subway windows, in the reflections of reflections of reflected buildings, in the wail of a trumpet player down in the gullets. In fact a whole posse of these ghosts can be heard rattling the tunnels, just above the roar of trains.

I was riding in from LAG today, and the bus was passing through Queens, and I saw that people, I mean real people, not the stoopid waxworks of Madame Tussads next door here, were hanging out on street corners - toughs, pimpish chaps, old nearly toothless men, hot hot latinas, women in burkhas and so on - talking, drinking, quarrelling, and perhaps plotting against each other. This is what is needed for fiction, no? A credible strip of real estate where tribes clash, and which can be easily copied by quill pushers like us.

So brother-o-mine, what the hell are you doing in Atlanta? Your great American novel can't be written there, although Tom Wolfe did take a shot, bad one, at our Coma Town. Come here, find a stylish Madison Ave babe - or go the other extreme and romance a punk chick - drink a bit, and then bottle the live juice flowing here, and sell it for big bucks.

Tomorrow I am going to the Met and drool over all the stuff - legally stolen or otherwise - they hide in those catacombs. Actually why should art be immortal? If the fate of art is to be hidden behind sensors in fortresses, after the artist, in most cases anyway, is driven to death by poverty, why the hell should the artist paint? I know I am asking meaningless questions, for I am fulminating. I am angry that Great Uncle Van Gogh is now sold for millions, when the same precursors of all these million-ed idiots wouldn't pay any heed to him, as he was spilling his blood out in Arles, Southern France.

Well I am out of internet time, so I shall sign off now. I shall keep you posted with these pieces of mental wreckage again, soon.

You will be leaving in a few minutes, and in those few minutes you indulge your graphomania. But first you must write down the rhyme you were humming all morning:

Tweedledum and Tweedledee Agreed to have a battle, For Tweedledum said Tweedledee Had spoiled his rattle.

You read that this morning at a statue of Alice in the Wonderland in Central Park, Olmsted's grand masterpiece. And as you rode back on the C train, you noticed that a girl sitting opposite to you shared an uncanny resemblence to Mariel Hemingway in Woody Allen's Manhattan, which was also a visual hymn to a city and one man's obsession with it.

You are greatful that you purposefully forgot the camera behind for must toursits you observe with complex pieces of machinery seem to be more obssessed in capturing the city for the native back home, rather than just wondering about the wierdness of it all - a forest in a city, a sheep medow in a city, and the city with its persistent low roar never too far away.

In a few hours you will be crossing another border, and now you have gotten into the swing of wandering about. You recall the argument made by Bruce Chatwin that man is inherently nomadic, and settling down leads to repression which further leads to violence. And thus to restore one's equilibrium it's best to wander around. As he put in in his most brilliant book:

"I have a vision of the Songlines stretching across the continents and ages; that wherever men have trodden they have left a trail of song; and that these trails must reach back, in time and space, to an isolated pocket in the African savannah, where the First Man shouted the opening stanza to the World Song, "I am!"

So you go on now, to walk this northen songline by wing and foot.

Updates will resume when I return this Sunday...lots of notes to transcribe....