When Virgo suggested we meet for milkshakes, I didn't have a clue where to go.

"There's a place on St. Mark’s,” she said. “The Milkshake Factory' or something like that. I’ll meet you at seven-thirty."

As I headed into work today, I stopped off at the coffee cart down the block from my office.

Brian and I left Erick’s party rather early, but neither of us was quite ready to go home, and, since we were downtown, Brian suggested we visit New York Dolls. “For old time's sake.”

I went in to the coffee shop near my old apartment this morning. I hadn't been there in a while and decided it would be nice to stop in for some brunch and say hello to some of the people who work there. They have a lot of new servers, but John, the cook, was still at it and he gave me a warm, "hello, how have you been?"

Billy’s Topless is long gone, and the girls who worked there — the handful I still talk to —  joke about the bagel shop that took its place. “Have you been?” one of them asked me recently.

Was it a full moon last night? It can be so hard to tell sometimes. But it sure felt like it. Even when it dipped behind that building, I could still feel its light. It saturated my skin, until it glowed pale and green. I pushed open the door of the only restaurant in my neighborhood and traded the weight of the moon for the luminescence of red and white neon beer signs.

And so it begins. I have no photos or exciting tales of drunken exploits from New Year's Eve. That's because I stayed home alone and read a book. In fact, I didn't even notice that the clock had passed midnight until Jaime-girl called from San Diego to tell me so. "Happy New Year!"

I had no heat again this weekend. When Jaime-Girl called and heard that it was colder in my loft than it was in my refrigerator, she invited me over. She said she'd been out late with her friends and that Sarah had spent the night. "Come over," she said.

When the doors opened up on the subway this morning and a girl stepped in, her perfume washed over me like a heavy gas that, if it didn't suffocate me first, would surely cause the entire car to explode into a department store mushroom cloud.

I ran into The Coffee Shop Girl on the street yesterday. It's hard to know who reads this blog regularly, and judging from my analytics, more than half of my hits come from people doing random searches for pictures of J-Lo's poon-tang, so if I mention "The Coffee Shop Girl," only a handful of people know who I'm talking about. Probably just as well.

Girls are afraid of my basement. Jasmin thought she heard ghosts there once while she was doing laundry. She skidattled back upstairs in a hurry. I always tell her she can do laundry down there any time she wants, but instead she lugs her heavy bags to the laundromat. Yesterday, Britta said that if it were her basement, she'd be afraid to go down there, too. Whenever someone comes to read the meter they get spooked by the mannequin. Raymi said she thought she was gonna get AIDS by walking around barefoot on the cement. Kimmy never even went down there at all. I think Denver maybe liked it a little, but she's kinky like that.

My brain has the faint smell of a burnt-out resistor. I'm trying to find a new place to live and trying to whittle down my existence into its bare essentials in the process. Adrift on a raft that's slowly sinking...tossing off a thing at a time to stay afloat. Sentimentality, thick and dense, pulls me under with every white-capped wave. Why is it so much easier to accumulate things than it is to get rid of them?

This might be a long post. But it's an important one, with a lot of mystery unraveled and questions answered. There won't be any deep dark secrets that those who know me don't already know, but I've never written about these things quite so directly in this blog before. So bear with me.

When the clouds hang low and thick like a wool army blanket, the light from the Empire State Building reflects off the sky and makes it look like fluorescent light behind frosted glass. I imagine sitting on a fire escape or a rooftop and looking down at myself. Watch myself do the stupid things I do. I look down and shake my head and think: "That guy is a fucking idiot."

"What are you looking for, Jamie?" she asked.

I laughed, "You're kidding, right?"

I've been told by people who know me in real life that I seem "different" in my blog writing than I do in person.

"Or maybe it's just that in real life you don't say everything that's on your mind," she said.

“Well, of course not. Who -- aside from maybe a cokehead -- ever says everything that's on their mind?”

After dinner, Brian and I went for a coffee and some dessert. We walked to a little place in his neighborhood where a cute Italian girl works as a cashier. I had been with Brian when he'd met her at a restaurant a few months ago. She and a friend of hers had been sitting at the next table, and by the end of our meal, Brian had gotten her phone number.