Man and his symbols.

Last night I ate dinner alone in a diner, with a glass of red wine and a newspaper. The newspaper was brought to me by one of the busboys, a young spanish dude with an intelligent expression who said to me in concern, "you are thinking too much." Then he gave me the Post.

I left the diner and walked around the vicinity of 86th street and 2nd avenue, talking on my phone to a friend who'd moved away to become a SMBC (single mother by choice) in a place more affordable to raise children.

NYC has become strangely conducive to replicating. There are strollers and especially now, double strollers dodging commuters and joggers and shoppers on the sidewalk. I couldn't sit down at a bar during brunch last week while waiting for a table until a harried parent moved his twins' stroller out of the way. I clogged the aisle, with the stroller, we two entities locked in conflict.

City kids are different. I wasn't one. I am a city thirty-something.

Last night before dinner I spent a half hour in Blockbuster looking for some entertainment. The movie "Joe's Apartment" looked promising but then I remembered I used to stay at that exact apartment three years ago--the real apartment where it had been filmed--and thought, nah. I don't know which would be grosser: the roaches in the film or the memories of that relationship, which ended on Valentine's day after he gave me a purse. The gift had nothing to do with the breakup. We had a communication problem: we stopped calling each other.

A pocketbook. And it was damn funny, because I had dreamed in the first month we knew each other that an Uzi kept going off in my pocketbook. Israeli guy. Go figure. He presented me with a box and as I opened it he said, "baby, I wanted to get you a purse."