Two days in a row the guy's been there, at the top of the stairs, the first thing you see after leaving the subway, air conditioned to the goose bump point, after you transition through the pressure cooker of a thousand bodies and finally emerge into the harbor breeze. This box is really a piece of sophisticated medical equipment, ladies and gentlemen, take this flier. How much longer would your loved one have lived if they'd taken the flier, if they'd only known to use the machine?

Take a flier; contemplate the nature of being in a city full of crazies and crackpots - if you're swimming in insanity do you get insane or does the insane get you? The coffee shop an oasis of calm, the large cup at the register by the time you're ready to pay, but hot coffee kills the breeze as you walk up Broadway. Tourists crowd the bronze sculpture of the bull that you pass every day and you think, how did John Ashcroft drape a curtain over the naked breast of the statue of Justice and let this display of anatomy stand?

Guy and sophisticated box gone but tourists still there when the sun starts to set and the buildings cast longer shadows and you sit by the fountain thinking you'd jump in but for the shame you'd cause your family. Crazy person pulled out of fountain. Sorry, ma, but the water looked so good...

Are there beaches in Manhattan? You'd want to go. Beaches the topic of the day, ironic because they were on your mind last week. Not ironic. Strangely coincidental. Stop misusing the word. Ironic, however, that an island like Manhattan doesn't have a single beach, only the tiny patch of sand under the Brooklyn Bridge you read about in the Times, but since it was in the Times it's probably already got umbrellas to rent and anyway, who wants to swim in the East River?

Down the stairs into the maw, gaping as maws tend to do, the heat so hot they might've left the furnace on, you're a sardine but you keep those at room temperature. Well I've got no room and the temperature's still climbing.

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