What is it about Miami, folks?  If you’re living here, you love it, and you can’t do much of any­thing except get up at noon, pop open a can of beer, and let the sun­shine pour into your room.  There goes that lady in the pink rain­coat walk­ing her poo­dles past the bank again.  She’s a riot.  I walk down­stairs and see all my friends check­ing their email on the com­put­ers in the windswept lobby—but I haven’t checked my email in months!  Every­day, I do the same thing: Walk down Wash­ing­ton Avenue to pick up a falafel sand­wich from my favorite Egyp­tians.  I sit in their back garden and do the Miami Herald cross­word for three hours.  Time for another beer.  So I head back to my room, close the shades, and get drunk.  Before you know it, it’s 5pm; I’ve got to go to the movies!  They’re show­ing The Lady from Shang­hai at the Art Deco Edu­ca­tion Center in an hour.  

I was drink­ing sake (cold and unfil­tered) with my brother last night— he fresh back from a Tel Aviv visit to his fiancé’s family and I fresh back from a Port­land, Oregon visit to my Mom (if I don’t spec­ify the state, people do ask which Port­land, look­ing vaguely sated and offended).  We had just eaten a Mex­i­can dinner, and repaired to his Man­hat­tan apartment— I needed to borrow the recently re-​released / expanded 1997 Pave­ment album Brighten the Cor­ners.