It’s kind of nice to know that the potential leader of the free world reads the books my company makes (or, well, at least he’s read one of them).

Not everyone forgets, though. One group of people not only remembers the scores of eyes that glide over their towns as trains pass by, they revel in them. Working at night (they must; I have never seen them by day, but their work is so prolific that I think I’d have seen at least one of them if they were doing it then). These, of course, are the graffitos. The breadth in style and color in the work you see on a trip from Boston to New York is astonishing. Most simply, there are tags in black, a sort of visual claim broadcasting the name of the person who put it there. Many tags are ugly, executed by those who (I presume) don’t have the skill or the passion to learn how to create the larger, more intricate displays that take up whole sides of boxcars and switchboxes. This kind of tag, like the layer of black spots that used to be chewing gum caking the sidewalks of my neighborhood in New York, bothers me. What’s the point, if you’re not striving for some level of beauty?

From time to time, however, the austerity of a simple black tag seems to be more like the rules of one of those poems constrained by the specifics of rhyme and meter: boundaries within which the artist works to create a piece of stunning simplicity. In Providence, for example, we pass through a tunnel as we exit the station there, and a tagger has written his name, over and over, each one beginning with an S whose curves are evidence of his skill at creating a pleasing, elegant form. The line of names continues on, fifty, eighty, one hundred feet (it’s hard to tell from a moving train) before ending in an ellipsis. That ellipsis extends the work—I could go on forever, and I would (I do), but there’s been an interruption, and I have to go now. Maybe it was morning. Maybe it was the police. It might have been boredom, true, but it strikes me that a person who is able to replicate a form so perfectly in such repetition is probably not a person who has deficiencies in attention.

These small artworks are rarely so noticeable, though. For the most part the tags seem like scribbles around the edges of the larger pieces that cover the railbeds and whatever lines them. As the train approaches New York, the pieces grow more complex and colorful, interstitial spaces between each one growing smaller and smaller until finally, just as we pull out of Connecticut, there is no space anymore at all, and the names become an endless stream of curves and angles, lights and shadows, in an array of colors that surprises with its variety. It seems likelier that some of them, closer to mauve and chartreuse than to more common reds or greens, must sell more to the graffitos who create these pieces than to any legitimate do-it-yourselfer refinishing a patio chair.

As we trundle over the Hell’s Gate Bridge for our short jaunt through Queens (I could get off here if they’d let me, actually—I live in this part of town, in Astoria) we run out of surfaces to cover. There aren’t any walls on these raised tracks, and anyway, we’re in a neighborhood that isn’t as able as the tony towns of Connecticut to thrust its graffiti to their edges to be seen only by travelers like me, so there’s less of it here, actually, than there was on the city’s outskirts.

A few weeks ago, the bugs were certainly mosquitoes, making that horrible noise as they swoop by my ears, the one that makes me (half-asleep) writhe in my bed trying to wriggle them away. Each time, after a slightly more conscious realization of their attempts (which always means that I’ve already been bitten), I tilt out of bed and across the room, train the fan on myself at full blast (see if they can fly in that! ha!), and pull my covers up to my chin. Despite these air and land defenses, the sea remains an open front, as I never find the standing water they thrive on, and getting rid of it is the only sure way of getting rid of them.

After each nighttime battle, I resolved to call an exterminator, but, like everything else during the day, that resolve fell under as the demands of work, with its endless waves of activity, crested over my best intentions and swept them out to sea. Finally, when I could stand it no more, and had even looked up the exterminator, there was a reprieve. The increasingly usual, unusually balmy weather that had extended right up to the beginning of November gave way to a brisk chill, and it seemed the bugs were defeated, not by my elegant tactical solutions, but by the sudden change in conditions. If mosquitoes have an insectival equivalent to “Never fight a land war in Asia,” I imagine it must be something like “Never fight a blood war in November”—they are, by nature, bound to lose. I returned to restful nights, sleeping with a soundness unavailable to me when I know there’s an assailant hovering in the corner, and loosened my defenses. Sometimes I even stayed up late reading, confident that when I closed my eyes and set down my book, sleep would come easily and well.

As any soldier could have told me, I should not have let down my guard so easily. Tonight, I stayed up particularly late, enduring with Robbie Turner the long march to Dunkirk, before turning in to catch five good hours. As I was slipping under, I absently scratched my shoulder blade, trying to reach from every angle the point at its tip which is inaccessible by my short fingers. My essays did not subdue the itch, and in my discomfort I flipped from side to side, once, twice, again, again, until the night watch quartered in my brain wrested itself awake, having too late noticed the enemy’s advance.

The bugs are back.

But this time, I’m afraid they’re something worse. Mosquitoes don’t leave bites that big, and there hasn’t been a drastic change in temperature to account for their resurgence. No more makeshift strategy, though—I’m not waiting to bring out the big guns. Prevention Pest Control can expect a call from me in the morning.

Edit, 4:00 am: It’s the damn mosquitoes. This time they’re biting my face. I am not amused.

Two Fridays ago, on 16th Street, as I walked to Union Square to catch the R after work, I saw a middle-aged man, in conversation with two younger associates, leaning against a wall with one knee up and stroking two iguanas that were perched there, catching the afternoon sun.

One Friday ago, in Washington Square, I watched a woman with two parakeets on leashes approach a five-piece brass band from Harlem’s United House of Prayer for All People to tip them. The birds were startled by the loud music, and as she bent over to drop a bill in the bag, they flew up, as one, from her shoulders and continued to do so as she left and crossed the park.

I eagerly await this Friday, and wonder what pair of pets the ark of Manhattan will then have to offer.

1. Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing by Coser, Kadushin, and Powell
2. A Wanderer in the Perfect City by Lawrence Weschler
3. 28: Stories of Aids in Africa by Stephanie Nolen
4. At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf by the same
5. Brunelleschi’s Dome by Ross King
6. The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe
7. Editors on Editing edited by Gerald Gross
8. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
10. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
11. The Uncertain Hour by Jesse Browner
12. Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
13. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
14. Invisible Nation by Quil Lawrence
15. A More Perfect Constitution by Larry J. Sabato
16. Moneyball by Michael Lewis
17. Becoming Shakespeare by Jack Lynch

And my current read: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.

Just now, as every Saturday night, there’s a lovely salsa party going on in front of one of the buildings on my street, the one that has three beautiful trees framing its stoop. It always looks like tremendous fun, and the salsa is my Saturday evening lullabye.

On Wednesday, when I left for work, people were streaming out of the subway stop at Prospect Avenue and Fourth Avenue and one man looked at me pointedly, shaking his head and saying “No trains, no trains.” The thunderstorm the night before had been loud (particularly loud bursts thunder set off car alarms on my block) and it had loosed a flood on the tracks below. I joined the stream of walkers slogging through the steamy morning sun, hoping to catch a train further on, and quickly estimating that if I didn’t, it would only be about three miles—an hour or so to work instead of the usual half. As we headed toward the solitary mountain of the Williamsburg Bank (my favorite building in Brooklyn), the flow of people grew heavier at every block. At every subway entrance the refrain came from self-appointed criers: “No trains, no trains.”

The closer to Flatbush Avenue (and the Manhattan Bridge) we got, the thicker the traffic. Twelve-person vans appeared out of nowhere flagging down pedestrians to ferry them across the river (”Thirty fourth street! Thirty fourth street!” “Midtown! Grand Central!” “Waaaaaaaaall Street! Waaaaaaaall Street!”), and a few private cars flung open their doors inviting others to fill their seats. At the intersection of Fourth and Flatbush, the traffic changed; instead of the single mass of people moving downtown it had been, parts of the crowd now folded back on itself, phones to ears: “I can’t make it in, I’m sorry. There aren’t any trains. Do you know how hot it is out here?” I kept an eye on a brown twelve-passenger van, the one that had declared itself for Thirty Fourth Street. We kept pace with each other for several blocks, the road full of cars making little more progress than the now-rivulets of people at its sides. I stayed on Flatbush as it angled up to become the bridge, walking around workers from the transportation authority as they scurried around pumps and manholes.

As I started across the bridge, the Statue of Liberty peeked out from around the corner of a DUMBO tower, and I could see a matching stream of foot traffic traversing the Brooklyn Bridge across the water. I go across this bridge nearly every day on the subway, and yet I’m seeing for the first time its metal girders (the same color as the faraway statue) and art nouveau canopies. I hadn’t before appreciated its length (the full span is nearly one and a half miles) and I was beginning to suspect that my hasty estimate was wrong (or, at least, I was hoping I was wrong: I’d already been walking for over an hour).

By the time I made it into Greenwich Village, having slowed considerably as I passed the tables of bitter melon and mushrooms in Chinatown, I realized that I wasn’t able to go any further without some sort of stop. I was disgusting: my hair, my clothes, even my bag felt gross. I slipped into a coffee shop and bought myself a key lime sugar cookie and a diet soda, which, had I been asked, I would have declared to be the preeminent examples of their respective forms before making the final push up, through Union Square.

I entered the office slowly at 11:20 (by now, everything about me was slow), and mazed around mostly-empty cubicles and through hallways towards my destination. “Ah, you made it!” said my boss as I came into his office. “I’ll be over in a minute to give you something to do.” I deposited myself in the next room, and brought up a map to see how far I’d gone.

I’d just walked six miles. Knowing that, I slumped a little in my chair, relieved that I was hardier than I’d begun to suspect.

That man looks Belgian, I thought to myself. I suppose I think of Belgium as being rather beige.

The neighborhood is either in Park Slope, South South Slope, Greenwood Heights, Sunset Park, or Windsor Terrace, depending on who you ask.

I’ll be living on this block: “On one block, a 27-year-old Polish grocery store sits alongside a months-old wine store and an organic food shop that opened three weeks ago. More dramatic changes are coming soon: A wine bar is to open across the street this summer.” (From the same May 17th New York Sun article linked to above.)

It is very near the Prospect Avenue station (six local stops from Manhattan), which means that I needn’t change trains to get to and from work.

I will be living on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn, and working on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. The symmetry of this pleases me in ways you can’t possibly understand.

It is a railroad style apartment, three rooms strung out in a line. It will be like Dunster again. Ah, walkthroughs.

Update: Well, now the only thing I know about where I’ll be living is that this won’t be it. The sublet fell through. Yargh.