New York noise/Madison noise.

There's some infernal machine grinding away at street level beneath my office. Is that always there, and am I just noticing it? Because, now that I'm noticing, it's a constant, distracting presence.

I'm telling myself it's no worse than when they crank up the lawnmowers on Bascom Hill under my UW office window....



Oh, no! Don't get homesick!

The thing is you know the lawn will get mowed and the lawnmowers will go away. But what is this noise?

I climb up up on my desk to try to get a look down to where the noise is coming from. I picture myself falling out the window, and I realize that if I did, everyone would check what I'd just been writing. Two suicide posts in the last 24 hours -- here and here -- not to mention the white hair, the diamond-encrusted skull, and the "concentration camps and skeletons." You'd all conclude I'd jumped. Damn it! Death and that on top of it.

I scramble off the desk and think about relocating to a café... a Starbucks... not an indie café like back home. I'm trying to adapt. I've accepted that it is necessary to pay for a T-Mobile WiFi subscription so a Starbucks can approximate one of my beloved free-WiFi indie coffeeshops.

But please, Brooklyn: approximate finishing mowing the lawn!