Posthuman Blues

Late trip to the ATM across the street. Children's artwork -- none of it interesting -- adorns the cement flanking of the still-skeletal Plaza Colonnade. $60 in crisp, sticky twenties, watermarks like puddled oil under the bleak outdoor lights. White limousines glide past storefronts like metal sharks, cold and purposeful.

Sitting next to a pretty Latin medical student in the coffeeshop, so close we're almost touching. Intermittent flashes of digital cameras. Thick espresso lodges in my cracked lips like tar. My reflection in an adjacent mirror is bloodlessly pale.





New purchases: Natalie Merchant's "The House Carpenter's Daughter" and "Edison's Eve," a book on the history of mechanical simulacra: the sort of text I imagine J.F. Sebastian from "Blade Runner" poring over in his cluttered office-laboratory (scuttling white rats and Petri dishes of designer chromosomes).