Asthmatic Immigrant Learns To Breathe By Writing.

... I'm The Fortieth-ugliest Man In This Bar. But So What! So What! What If Someday She Lets Me Kiss Each One Of Her Freckles Again? She Has Like A Million. But Every One Of Them Means Something To Me. Isn't This How People Used To Fall In Love? I Know We're Living In Rubenstein's America, Like You Keep Saying. But Doesn't That Just Make Us Even More Responsible For Each Other's Fates? I Mean, What If Eunice And I Just Said No To All This. To This Bar. To This Facing. The Two Of Us. What If We Just Went Home And Read Books To Each Other?

Summer Is A Latvian Chicken. We Make Foolish Choices. We Think We’re Young Again. We Run With Outstretched Arms Toward An Object Of Love And It Pecks Us And Pecks Us Until We’re Standing There Snot-nosed And Teary In The Middle Of Astor Place And The Sun Sets Fire To Our Penguin Shirts And All That Is Left To Do Is Go To Our Air-conditioned Homes And Ponder The Cruelty Of Our Finest Season.

In A Strange Way, I Expected Russia To Become More Like America Since The Soviet Union Collapsed, But The Reverse Is True. America Has Become More Like Russia: A Kleptocratic Society.

We Are Now Part Of This Giant Machine Where Every Second We Have To Take Out A Device And Contribute Our Thoughts And Opinions.

Then I Celebrated My Wall Of Books. I Counted The Volumes On My Twenty-foot-long Modernist Bookshelf To Make Sure None Had Been Misplaced Or Used As Kindling By My Subtenant. “you’re My Sacred Ones,” I Told The Books. “no One But Me Still Cares About You. But I’m Going To Keep You With Me Forever. And One Day I’ll Make You Important Again.” I Thought About That Terrible Calumny Of The New Generation: That Books Smell.