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Tonight I went with Jeff to a birthday party on 46th St. and 9th Ave. When we were walking up 8th Avenue from the subway I noticed the glow of the lights from Times Square against the buildings one avenue over. It gave me that sort of strange swell that you get sometimes in places that are so "quintessentially" New York but don't hold any particular meaning. No one experience in the five years I have lived here has been especially connected with the lights in Times Square from one avenue block away. How it's sort of strangely silent for all its activity. In the middle of everything. And part of me started thinking about the strangeness of the idea of the Perseids that might be falling just above the cloud cover that was reflecting all that light back, like a giant stadium canopy. Sometimes I think about the idea that I could have been an amateur astronomer if I hadn't moved to New York. It's one of the stranger things I hold against the city. But I always have a fantasy of packing a picnic and renting a car and driving until the roads are dark and there's a field where I can watch the stars falling from the heavens and think about how human it is to do that. How long people have been amazed at the beauty and spectacle and uncertainty, even now, of having the sky fall.