The smell of cigarettes coming in from who knows where. I don't smoke in this place; there's too much carpet. The window is so enormous that the street outside has taken on the quality of a huge, wall-sized painting: an eternal, nearly static view of a city, staring at me, the one wedding-cake historical building, the collection of little charmed roofs, the enormous cliff of another high-rise with its staggered lit windows, a crazy quilt of lit windows and indifferent brick, taking up half of the composition. Exhaustion. Hatred of smoking pot. Why would I? The pot plump and sticky with resin, pale-green and succulent as a small cactus. It smelled like a real plant, not like drugs. No hint of shame or secrecy or even grooviness in that little jar, just the smell of real grass or shrubbery or maybe a sweet tea, maybe I am Jack Kerouac. Then I smoked and I suppose my pupils grew and I stood in a room of near-strangers and made grammatical and logical and sexual errors over and over, like a little machine. Then the clear autumn night with one of those trees that looks like it's partly on fire, with a great big round green crown and one big patch suddenly all red. And then sleeping in and feeling drowsy all day while I shopped for Halloween costumes. I am going as Winter in a quartet of mostly reluctant Four Seasons.