I am looking out onto a fog covered New Jersey skyline. It is raining outside as I sit here on the twelfth floor of a builidng in SoHo scanning Scantrons and looking out these large windows. I have had a lot to say recently but I have been without internet, am still without internet until the cable people replace the cable line in our backyard, which should hopefully occur tomorrow.

I am thinking about hope because so many other people don't seem to be thinking about it. I know, it is easy to feel defeated, too easy, and yesterday, despite my efforts, I occasionally slumped into periods of hopelessness, wondering how there could be so many in number, if it could really be true. Last evening, I sat in Union Square and the scaffolding that had been surrounding the statue of George Washington seated on a horse had been removed. This is one of my favorite statues and when I first came to New York, I used to sit in front of it and marvel at it, at the history of this country, and think about what American means, about what it meant then when he was atop this horse fighting. That here is George pointing forward with his finger, looking up at the sky filled with our nation inchoate in that head of his. It seemed too meaningful to me that the removal of the scaffolding used to clean the statue occured on the day we learned that George Bush was to be our president for another term. I did not know it meant, but I wanted to. I sat there on the ledge next to George with my eighty cent cup of deli coffee and a couple cigarettes with Le Tigre playing on my headphones to silence the protestors gathered thirty feet away on the steps of Union Square. I got real sad because it was dark and the building across from Union Square, the new Filene's Basement that just opened was glowing out its bland merchandise, and I saw where George was looking. No longer was his gaze and finger towards the sky, but now it was and is directly pointed at this garish consumer spectacle. The irony of this got me down for a while, that those big dreams produced this, but this wasn't the dream in that head, that instead that finger is leading the charge, pointing out enemy forces.

I listen to good music. I look at the sky and at the changing leave colors. Yesterday, there was a tree on my block with one solitary leaf left on it. One leaf on a whole tree, and I got to see that last leaf there! I am reading good stories. I am drinking good coffee, not always the eighty cent deli variety, and I am thinking of plans, curtains, stories that I will construct. These are the things that keep me from getting down, that and the knowledge that vigilence and hope change things.