Julius Shulman died.

Michael Jackson. American nightmare.

I have just fucked up my manicure.

I'm in my captain's office, just doing some routine paperwork for a day I took off the previous week. He says, "I'm glad you're in here, actually.. I understand we're going to be losing you soon?" I can feel my eyebrows knit.
"Oh, yeah? Where am I going?" he seems taken aback, and starts clicking his mouse, looking at his computer monitor.
"I got an email.. from HR.. was there a job you applied for?"
Then I remember. The job I applied for last July. Interviewed last, what, January?
"That was a.. year ago. Holy shit."
"Well, according to this email from the head of HR, you got it and you start in July."

The next day I'm in an office with the head of civillian investigations and the head of HR and they're confirming it, apologizing for the captain telling me before someone from HR could contact me.

I have a new job.
In two weeks.

This is a terrible picture.

I wrote more poetry and fiction when I was in the office on light duty than I have in the four years I've worked on an ambulance. It's because I have a partner. No privacy, no time to get into my own head and cultivate the language for my own ideas. Ten years ago I would commute by bus, then boat, then train; I had my discman but it would stay in my backpack during the morning commute. In the mornings I would scribble into a black marble notebook for a good part of the trip into the office. And being in an office means dividing the work you're given with the time you need to let your head wander. I've done some great writing when I was supposed to be doing something else. Comfortable, maybe with a cup of coffee, putting off some task because my daydreaming head found a rhythm and was putting words around it.
It's impossible to construct something lasting with a partner three feet from you; much worse when he's chatty and you work a nonstop job. Being this active makes me unimaginative and dull. Blue collar life..

I also wrote a lot more when I was generally alone and generally more lonesome. Ideas mutate when there's nobody in the world you want to speak to.

I must still be tired. As the ferry passed the statue of liberty, the front-left looked bright white green, as if cleansed by the relentless rain that fell on us all day.
But the top half was dark, and in a dirty way, not in a shadowy way. There is no sun- the sky is grey like a cellar door closed over the world. Liberty's face is nearly black, an outline looking out from her crown. I saw a skull looking out, black as charcoal in the black spikes of her halo, a woman stepping in darkness with a tarnished torch, her face the center of a black star.

I'm on hour twelve in the ambulance. Four more to go. I've a mean, pacing energy within me, restless in the vehicle trembling and humming deisel mantra.

No matter how much filth
separates the sky
from my eye
and my mind
from my eye
I'm inclined to believe
There are ten thousand stars
Burning from afar
Like little eyes
Tell me how it's going to be
Pin me to the wall
Like a functioning fly
Show me the constellation
of scars
Show them all to me.

The night bends and blends and the rigid, ordered rules of the sunlight world melt into something less recognizable. Falsity is identifiable as a lighthouse, and the truth emerges from the dark in moments; a light turns on in the second-story window, the ceiling fan throwing a whipping shadow across the room visible through the dirty windows. Anything can appear in this window, like something out of noir, and would fit perfectly well.

My heart is a bag of broken glass
My cologne is deisel fumes
I'll give you a rat's asshole for
A wedding ring
Let's resume the exorcism
You begin when I make the incision
Let's exhhume this tainted thing.
I'm a patron saint
in the church of Satan
and the exiled prince
of the Bellevue station
The architect of the kennel
incapable of satiation

Gotta go. Another job.

Last night I slept for nine hours. I dreamt more than I can recall in a long time. The dream had a narrative, a beginning and an end. It was a weekend tour through a town where the people who lived there went mad.
In the dream I had desperate hotel sex, and as we left I saw the scenes on lawns and backyards like faded, flickering ghosts acting out their miseries for the guests

Hang on. I'm imagining skinning a man's head. With a blowtorch. But as the skull emerges, it's still grinning like it understands the joke we don't get.
The man and girl greet each other casually, untroubled. They begin to touch each other's faces, hair, and then embrace in the gentlest and most magnificent kiss. I'm torturing him with screwdrivers and hydrochloric acid and black gloves. The skull is laughing, and neither life or death can be grasped, even when you take the gloves off.
Just contemplating and hallucinating, apropo of nothing.

Wednesday. Summer weather, and the city's going mad as an ant farm on fire. The calls to 911 are relentless, and the demand far exceeds the city's capabilities. 250 calls an hour. There are Brooklyn and Queens units all over Manhattan, but it's not enough because Brooklyn and Queens and everywhere else is overwhelmed with sick people, injured people, crazy people, swine flu panic, bus accidents, drunks, overdoses, sexual assaults, fires, births, murders and deaths. The fire department activates the private transport companies into 911- Transcare, Seniorcare, Richmond County Ambulance, Joe's Ambulance Shack, all taken from transporting stable dialysis/special needs/nursing home/etc. and are directed to fdny ems stations, where they are given radios and given designations like A100, A101.. we can at least got the jobs on our kdt screens, but these guys are getting verbal assignments from the dispatcher. All day tour crews are mandated to work four extra hours of overtime. Manic overdrive sets in. Things become unreal, then surreal. I'm supposed to get out of work at 5:00, and approaching 9:00 I call the lieutenant and ask when they're releasing us. He says there's no word. I tell the lt. I'm going home sick.

And it's a beautiful, warm night, and I ride my bicycle slowly along the river to my ferry.

Once on the ferry I call the lt. and call out sick for Thursday. I made my dentist's appointment from the ambulance early in the day just to get a documented excusal from what they're calling a citywide emergency. I don't care. Thursday I sleep until noon, go to my doctor's appointment. It's a leisurely day until the night. It was a bad night, broken sleep. I don't want to go into it. I didn't sleep much.

Today I come into work, and discover everyone who worked yesterday was mandated for four extra hours, and they're doing it again today. Three days in a row.

Since this winter I've been telling people this is going to be the worst summer nyc will experience in perhaps twenty-five years. I wasn't an emt during the bad old days, but I've heard the stories. This year we have an economic depression, a lot of unemployment, and a lot of unhappy people. And in the summer, all the energy follows all the people into the streets. Sick people get sicker, angry people get violent, party people party harder, and everywhere we're rushing to pick up the pieces. It's difficult not to sound like the production of a Jeremiad. But the elements are there, like pieces of a destructive chemical reaction waiting to occur.
All this noise and horror, these bursts of chaos that occasionally give way to respite, send me home wanting to stay home. It could be worse. I could be doing this in the South Bronx, or East New York, or Brownsville. Downtown Manhattan is busy but not an unrelenting nightmare like those haunted Brooklyn projects.

It has taken me stolen moments within three hours to type this into my phone. At red lights, bathroom breaks, the rare silence that sometimes affords five or six minutes of quiet before the next wave.

Any impulse towards socializing is being murdered by these days. I go home seeking quiet. They've told me I'm being kept on for an extra four hours. I'm going home sick after one.
I'm so fucking tired.

The virgin of Spring deflowers into Summer's whore; we're not there yet, but her skirts are getting shorter, that's for sure. I've been dealing with the catastrophic collapse of my school year by chewing my cuticles and sustaining on the music of vast stretches of highway, maps with handwritten street names, thunderstorm skies.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Third (over and over and over and over) and Massive Attack, their rare stuff. William Basinski's Melancholia Loops, pastoral and aching. Getting stranger still. Monolake. Lullatone. New VAST. Esmerine. Hermann Nitsch's Island Symphony- yes yes yes, orgiastic Dionysian knife party in the park next to the castle, interludes of narcoleptic strings interrupted by screaming tibetan thighbone horns, tubas, trumpets, and the unreal howling of maybe more than a hundred people.
(this sounds hallucinatory, but is actually how Nitsch's Island went down- a seven-day action play in the acreage of his castle- in fucking 1997)

That's in the headphones. I don't listen to music at home as much as I used to. I have a fairly paltry speaker/sub combo connected to the ipod dock, and it's actually impressive for it's size (we use it at the parties).. but Astrid doesn't usually want to hear music in the apartment. But I have my office.

I bought a new turntable for my 1978 pioneer receiver, all set up in the office. Something's wrong between the connection. I need to plug in the tape deck, and see how that sounds; and after that, headphone test. I suspect the connections in the back may be dirty, dusty or rusty. There are two final papers to finish- one tonight- and then I can figure out where the problem lies. Finishing the office comes after: I have the children's drawing of hell, the three prints from the film One Hour Photo (where Sy is bleeding uncontrollably from his eyes- a projectionist friend printed photos right from the film reel), the abstract painting of me from when I was 16, the poem written on driftwood, some postcards- these objects all have to find places on the wall.
Once the stereo's in order, I'll come back down to earth. Headphones have a way of keeping me transfixed with the interior landscape, and I get weird if I live there too long.

Saturday was my one-year wedding anniversary. We spent the day together, simple, just remembering and being all at once. I'm so, so happy here.

Psychosis isn't anger, or fear, or anything affective. It's a crystalline lens fastened over everything the psychotic interacts with. There's a bright clarity about it; completely removed from emotional systems, the world becomes the toy of the psychotic, to play with or break as they see fit.

Me and Heisenberg, driving into the lake.

The rain falls all day, deadening the colors of everything consumed by it. Everyone looks like they've had a bad day. I keep drinking coffee just to keep going, transitioning from a stranger in a uniform to a stranger among students. My bipolar, hyper-nurturing partner on the ambulance talks enough for the two of us, and I drive along with no intention of connecting to anything he has to say in any way other than to keep a superficial conversation going.
I need to sleep. I need to undo this worry. I'm remembering some shivery hallucination where I felt like I was in a labyrinth snow globe, only the specks swirling about were grey and resembled human ash. I'm under that water again.