The Lexicographer's Rules

Told me his dream today. "It's all in the dream, you know? You know how in dreams you just know things? Well, I was dreaming I had super powers. Lots of them. All kinds, like flying and stuff, and then I could hear somebody in trouble on the bridge. So I flew out there to rescue this person so fast that when I went to catch them as they fell from the bridge it was more like I clotheslined them. Head popped right off. I think it was the green tea I drank, but I don't know. "But there was a second part. I still had super powers and I was somewhere else. I could see through everything but I couldn't control it, like, focus it. So I'd look completely through everything, right through the planet. Couple of times I brought the focus in some but still all I could see was the center of the Earth, all red and glowing. "So then I jump up and start flying again (in my dream), and I can go into space as long as I want and not breathe. So I go out towards Jupiter and Saturn to check them out and I go way too fast. I get lost. I went way past the solar system and then I didn't recognize anything. I got all these powers but I don't know how to use them and I'm no smarter. How many people could recognize the solar system at a distance? So I panic, in the dream, and start hyperventilating, and then I couldn't breathe. "When I woke up the cat was sleeping on my face."

Even before teasing, flirting is purest communication. Beats talking. No doubt what's being said: I dig you. Wanna see my apartment?

Got her all worked up today. Thinks I'm making fun of her, don't want her around. Ummm, yeah. How do you say that? "Please, beat it. You're driving me up the frigging wall with your shouting and your yelping laugh and your endless supply of crass breast-baring skin-tight clothing and the way you speak incessant Hebrew to your friends but then bitch when I read the newspaper at lunch." You'd think we were married. God forbid. Wants to cast me in the role of abusive boyfriend she's used to. Another think. Just teasing her like anybody. Otherwise, she'd be crying. Not treating her badly, just not like a girlfriend. Big difference. She's possessive.

October 1994, Park Avenue, a block south of Grand Central. One of Manhattan's mirrored glass buildings, looked great in the architectural sketches but completely bland, anonymous, vague in the cityscape. Lots of those. Sitting by the window on the twenty-first floor, 11 in the morning, thinking about lunch, a network problem, the tight necktie. A hand grips the window sill on the other side of the glass, outside, high up. Tight, bony, sinewy, thin, chalky hand. Fingerless gloves. A long-haired man in purplish shorts and a white tank top climbs up past the window to the next floor, hand and foot, looking skyward, not in. Who believed me? But there were chalky handprints on the outside sill for proof. Cops roped the street to protect passers-by from the possibility of a falling Frenchman. A caption from the New York Daily News: "A police officer (top) waits as French mountain climber Alain Robert scales the side of 101 Park Ave. in Manhattan yesterday. Robert, 42, was arrested on the roof of the 48-story building and held on a variety of charges." He's still active. Sears Tower in August, rescued on a building in Paris in September, heat exhaustion.

Received from an unknown AOL address: "you are so sexy" Thanks. I feel sexy.