06.11.01 - 12:08 a.m.

No. No. No�. I just had the misfortune of seeing the worst commercial in the world, for the oh my god, I can�t bear to even type it, Non-Stop �90s Rock Collection. Featuring Brick, All I Want, Mr. Jones, Hey Jealousy, and No Rain alongside Steal My Sunshine, Lump, that idiotic Freshmen song, and oh, many more I can�t remember because I was too busy staring at the TV with my mouth agape. Brick! On a late nite music collection! I am embarrassed to tears.

Remember Aeon Flux on Liquid Television? It was so cool, but it always seemed like the same episode that never made sense and I think she died every time. But I recall some graphic make-out scenes that had me riveted. Now there�s nothing great in terms of Sunday night animation save SGC2C, which are reruns anyway. There�s just O Canada, which, ugh, doesn�t even compare. I miss the glory days of 120 Minutes � Dave Kendall � that hair! Those ripped tank tops! Lewis Largent � my shirt is BLUE! "Grunge!" Being forced to watch My Bloody Valentine videos each week! And that Odds song, "Heterosexual Man," which I thought was a BNL song for a long time. Silly ninth grader.

The end of the "Pop" video is a Lichtenstein painting come to life. Except instead of impossibly perfect blonde women, you get an impossibly perfectly crafted boy band. Same difference.

I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids play tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

I always think of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh as a summer book, not only because it takes place during a summer, and in a place I love and can visualize, but because I first read it one hot, boring Johnstown summer on our front porch. The play of words, the smells and sounds coming from the pages, are so vivid. It�s one of those books that immediately transports you to a space and time, so close to the real world but infinitely heightened and exciting.

Then he asked me what my plans were for the summer, and in the flush of some strong emotion or other, I said, more or less: It�s the beginning of the summer and I�m standing in the lobby of a thousand-story grand hotel, where a bank of elevators a mile long and an endless red row of monkey attendants in gold braid wait to carry me up, up, up through the streets of moguls, of spies, and of starlets, to rush me straight to the zeppelin mooring at the art deco summit, where they keep the huge dirigible of August tied up and bobbing in the high winds. On the way to the shining needle at the top I will wear a lot of neckties, I will buy five or six works of genius on 45 rpm, and perhaps too many times I will find myself looking at the snapped spine of a lemon wedge at the bottom of a drink. I said, "I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray."