In spite of my blurred vision and the funny goggles pressed tight over my eyes, I found myself grinning at the woman walking ahead of us. We were in Spanish Harlem yesterday evening, heading from the car to Michael's apartment, Greg leading the way and Michael and I in tow. It was over.

The LASIK procedure went well yesterday. I opted against the Valium and went straight to the room where the equipment sat sterile and ready for me. First the numbing drops and then the eyelids taped open, then a clamp of some sort to open the eyes even wider. Then a metal ring placed directly on the eyeball.

"Okay Patrick, now you're going to feel a little bit of pressure."

He had told me all of this before, of course, so I was prepared. He had gone through the entire procedure before I slipped under the four banks of bright blue LEDs hovering inches away from my face. Keep staring at the blinking green light, he had said. And don't move.

"Suction."

The O-ring tugged gently at my eyeball, and the room went dark.

That was the point where I began to feel a little uncomfortable. My left eye taped shut, my right eye clamped open, my distorted cornea refused to let me to see anything and it was a little unnerving. I should have taken the Valium.

Soon enough, the suction came off and my cornea was peeled back. Everything was blurry, but I could see lights again. It was time for the laser.

"Don't move."

I clenched my fists.

"Stare at the blinking green light. You're doing well."

That was when the crackling sound started. It only lasted a few seconds, and I didn't feel a thing, but it wasn't the pain--or lack thereof--that made me wonder if I'd made some horrible mistake. It was the smell.

It was the smell of burning flesh, the noxious fumes you smelled as a kid as you took a magnifying glass to ants and beetles on a hot summer's day. The same smell you smelled as their tiny bodies vaporized in a sudden whiff of black smoke and you knew you got them right there right then and no matter how fast they ran they couldn't get away from you. I couldn't get away either; it was too late for me. It was the same acrid smell of burning flesh.

Damn, I should have taken the Valium.

The rest of the procedure went easily enough. Afterwards, I found myself in a darkened room, eyes closed and waiting for the doctor to tell me I could go home. Greg was waiting outside, and Michael was just about done, and soon enough we found ourselves walking out the door with goggles over our eyes and a care kit tucked under our arms.

Greg drove over to Michael's apartment where he and Anthony had promised to hand-feed us peeled grapes and tend to our every whimsy. We parked on the street and began the unsteady walk towards the building, Greg grasping each of us and leading us slowly down the street. That was when we ran into the woman.

"Can you change a dollar?" she asked, cackling as we shuffled towards the building.

Greg reached into his pocket and gave her four quarters. "They're just now coming back from eye surgery," he said.

"Oh? What kind of surgery?" I opened my eyes slightly and saw her blurred form dancing unsteadily ahead of us.

"We had x-ray vision put in," I whispered.

"Well," she said. "Can you see my pussy smiling at you?" And with that she ran off, screeching hysterically and calling for a friend she saw farther down the street.

It's a bit funny this LASIK business. It's hard to believe that I won't have to deal with eyeglasses and contact lenses and cleaning solutions any more. It feels as though nothing has happened, so strangely normal everything is. And then it hits me: I can see clearly. Here I am, sitting at work one day after cutting open my eyes and not feeling any ill-effects, and I can see!

Perhaps I'll ask about the x-ray vision option when I go in for my follow-up this evening. Perhaps I'll ask for the ability to see through clothing and walls and thick lead plates. It shouldn't be too difficult a request. Then again, with the mental image of yesterday's woman dancing ahead of me and a promise of her own smiling felines, you know what, maybe, just maybe I won't.

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I woke up this morning groggy from a night of restless sleep, hurricanes and floods and all things New Orleans on my mind. In the darkness of the bedroom, the tv flickered quietly with images of the Big Easy. Greg sat on the bed, mesmerized by the news and flipping channels. "It's started," he said.

I made my way to the shower and took a look at the single remaining pair of new contact lenses sitting in the bathroom, and immediately forgot about Hurricane Katrina. I looked at my contact lens case, I looked at the cleaning solution, I took off my glasses and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, blinking hard at the bleary image staring back in the mirror foggy with steam. Wow, I thought. This could be the last day of this. Today is eye surgery day.

I've finally decided to do LASIK.

In two hours I will take some Valium and get comfortable with my eye doctor as he flips open the top layer of my cornea like a hatch and then shave off with a laser beam microscopically thin layers there, zap after zap until I can see clearly. It's a bit nerve-wracking, really, but only if I think too much about it. And I'm trying to not think too much about it. Ignorance, they say, is sometimes bliss.

Today, hopefully, will be the culmination of measuring and testing and putting prescription eyedrops in my eyes. No more poking and prodding my eyeballs, no more walking out of the doctor's office with pupils dilated, squinting at the all-too-suddenly-bright sun and not being able to focus until the anesthesia wears off. Today, hopefully, the surgery will go smoothly.

Tomorrow, hopefully, I will be able to see.

Thankfully, I'm going through the procedure with Michael.

Wish me luck.

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We drove up to Westchester early yesterday evening, Greg, Michael and I, heading to see an old high school friend of Greg's perform a gig at a local bar there. We weren't sure quite what to expect, what with Greg not having seen her in years and all, and not even sure of where we were going.

Dunne's Pub was comfortably cosy, a tiny place with an even tinier corner stage and rowdy middle-aged locals who ordered shepherd's pies and Irish nachos and made mock threats at us as we joked with them. Sometime during the performance, Greg suddenly grinned and got up and headed over to a table adjacent to ours. He shook hands there with an older man and his wife, and the three of them began chatting away like people who hadn't seen one another in years. Twenty years, to be precise.

Mr. Lafrance was Greg's high school biology teacher, an aging man with a gentle and peculiarly sad look about him. He had just retired from teaching, Greg later told us, and had stopped by to see Karen perform. From where I sat, the conversation looked a bit stilted and Mr. Lafrance a bit clumsy as though unsure of what to say to one of his students now an adult. It must be at least vaguely awkward for him, dealing with young adolescents his entire career and then having to face them suddenly as adults, having to realise that they now have independent lives, that they are no longer subservient charges but peers. The awkwardness was reciprocal: Greg would later admit that he turned back into a fourteen-year-old boy that night.

How difficult it must be to see children grow up so fast? How sudden the realisation that we have all aged?

The rest of the evening was as lovely as the weather outside, a beautiful end-of-summer coolness lending a crisp touch to the early night air. We sat back at Dunne's as relaxed as could be, downing pints of Harp and munching on wings, listening to Karen sing and watching a little bit of Greg's past tap his feet quietly, vaguely sadly, as the music wafted up into the rapidly darkening skies.

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With the burgeoning rise in technological advances and subsequent lowering of associated costs, digital information is being stored and made extraordinarily accessible to the masses, more and more so with every passing year. And with ever-lowering costs of media storage coupled with the proliferation of archiving services, this information for all intents and purposes becomes permanent. The ephemerality of human life stood out in sharp contrast to the permanence of the internet today, when my cellphone rang in silent mode here on my office desk.

Over the past few days I have been looking for an architect, searching for advice on matters unrelated to this entry, and I sought help from the various internet engines for a list of prospects. Yesterday I left a message for one of the numbers on my list of Googled names, a Mr. Rickenback whose address was close enough to mine to be considered local and whose credentials online seemed satisfactorily solid. The voice on the answering machine was that of an old and fragile woman, one who spoke slowly and took considerable pauses between phrases as though lost in somnolent thought. I thought little of it yesterday as I dutifully recited my name and number after the beep.

About an hour ago, my cellphone rang.

The number was unlisted and blocked, and the display on my phone came up empty. I let it ring. The person who called decided against recording a voice message, and instead left a text message with a number I didn't recognise. My curiosity piqued, I immediately called back.

"Hello?"

"Yes, hello," I said. "I just received a message on my phone from someone at this number?"

"Oh yes. Good afternoon. How are you?" It was the same frail voice from yesterday's machine, the same slow and measured, almost apologetic voice at once steeped with dignified politeness and quiet resignation. "Yes, I am returning your call, your call from yesterday for the architect?"

"Oh, yes," I said.

"I was calling to say I'm so sorry, but we won't be able to help you." She paused for a second and sighed just barely audibly. "We won't be able to help you, I'm sorry. The office has been closed for many years now."

"Oh," I said, disappointed.

"I'm sorry, but the office has been shuttered a few years." There was another pause--a pause in hindsight I imagined filled with tangible tiredness--and another apologetic and barely audible sigh. "And Mr. Rickenback has since, he has since passed on."

She apologised again, as though embarrassed that clients would call for what I took to be her husband, and that she in turn would have to explain his death.

I thanked her for the call and apologised for disturbing her, though more for reminding her of a painful loss than anything else, and stared out the window at the dark clouds that had suddenly and unexpectedly gathered over midtown.

***

It's interesting this business of the internet. It's interesting for the mark we leave as bloggers, little traces of electronic DNA as it were, scattered throughout cyberspace to remind generations to come that we once existed. Records that allow us to live beyond our deaths, modern-day versions of gene-passing through children. And I have to wonder, will this here blog of mine remind anyone of me long after I am gone? Will I too live on in cyberspace? Will I online--years and years after my death--will I have some sort of enduring permanence?

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Warm sand, cold beer, clam chowder at Five-O. Hot sun, blue skies, Barbies atop castles, pretty boys walking about. Wading up to our knees in the cold, cold Atlantic, shrieking at the waves pushing the sea splish-splash up our legs and to the nether regions beyond. Walking the Marginal Way to Perkins Cove, clambering over the rocks at Nubble Point. Lobster, lobster, lobster.

All in a long weekend in Ogunquit, Maine.

Photos here.

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Left to my own devices, I am naturally quite shy, organically inclined to withdraw in social situations and preferring the quiet of solitude over the hubbub of a gregarious crowd. Put a drink in my hand, however, and everyone becomes my new best friend. Last night, my new best friend was Naim.

Naim drove me home at 1:30 this morning after a night out with colleagues. I flagged his cab right outside JD's, where my colleagues and I had spent the better part of seven hours imbibing and completely exhausting their store of weeburgers ("Sorry we're out, but we didn't expect anyone to order a hundred and forty weeburgers on a Wednesday night"). Naim was from Morocco. Legendary Casablanca. He has a house near the water, and a mother--young at seventy-three--who didn't like New York and who returned to Morocco to live in his house there. He visits her often, he said, the last time about three months ago.

Naim moved to America a spirited and idealistic young man, drawn to the American dream and lured by the promise of a better life. He's been in the country since the early eighties, first in Texas and now here in New York City where he's been driving limos and cabs for the past twenty years. Driving a cab is better than driving a stretch limo. More flexibility, and more down-to-earth passengers, he said with a grin.

Naim lives with his wife and two teenaged children in Astoria in a $1000-per-month apartment. When he spoke of his children, his eyes lit up and danced, and he became more animated. Even in my inebriated state, I heard the pride in his voice. Naim loved his children.

We chatted the entire twenty-five minute ride home, Naim and I. We spoke about his dreams and his needs, his hopes and his fears, what he wants to do, and how differently his life had turned out from what he had envisioned. We talked about the various Moroccan enclaves around the city and of his love of food ("the best food is Moroccan food"). I practised the few Arabic and French phrases I knew, and he taught me several more--even though we both knew I would forget as soon as he said them.

When I left his cab, Naim carefully wrote his phone number on a piece of paper. "When you need a driver, call me," he said. "Call me if you want to visit my home country. I will have someone show you around and take care of everything." He shook my hand and smiled, the creases around his eyes deepening in the yellow light of the cabin.

"And thank you," he said. "Thank you for the chat. You are a good friend."

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It's ninety-three degrees and sunny in Wilmington, Delaware. Not that I know what it feels like outside, being indoors and all. I'm here once again for the next couple of days, stuck in the corporate park of my firm's offices where I've just wrapped up the last of employee reviews.

I've never really gotten all that comfortable giving reviews. I've been doing it for the better part of my eight years here, but it's something I never look forward to doing. For the most part, it's about finding that balance between treating the guys as colleagues, equals, peers, friends even--and treating them as subordinates. One minute you're joking around, making some spectacularly inane comment about what Linda upstairs is wearing today, or how drunk the intern across the hall got last week--and the next minute you're talking career goals and how your colleague can communicate better with upper management. Thankfully, the guys in my group are mostly a good bunch and it's easy to talk to them about what essentially boils down to a pep talk on how well they're doing.

Mostly.

Last week I was in Wilmington with a handful of reviews, one of which was negative. The first negative review I'd ever written. We both sat in the office, my colleague and I, both knowing what we were in for. I'd spoken to him a few times over the past year about his performance, about mistakes he's made, about things that have embarrassed the group. And although we both knew what was in store, although there were no surprises in what his review would say, it was still a necessarily uncomfortable procedure we both had to endure. At the end, he made promise to improve, and we both went back to our desks, each a bit more shaken than before.

Today's review, the final for this group, was a breeze. We sat in the empty office afterwards, chatting about this and that, about his vacation last week, about his car, about everything we cared to talk about and nothing in particular. At the end, we shook hands and grinned, buddies again after so formal a procedure.

It's really tough, this reviewing business. It's tough when the review is bad, even if the cards are already on the table. It's tough when the review is good, so suddenly distinct the line between colleague and manager. What's the secret? I'd love to know. It's something I have to deal with every day, every day in this crazy thing called my job.

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