(photo by and miniature set by Charles Brogdon, On the Set)

When I was 22 I had my first revelation that I might have a drug problem. At the time I was trying to kick a coke habit, so I tried crack. After that first hit - I had never felt anything like it - something deep down said this is the drug that will kill me. I made a deal with myself: if I never smoke crack again I can keep snorting cocaine. I never smoked crack again, but a piece of me knew that negotiating one for the other probably wasn't good thinking.

Some time later I went to a party and a friend was there with his girlfriend. Someone offered her a drink and she took water. When someone handed her a mirror with a line on it she casually passed. She didn't smoke cigarettes either; though I had told everyone I quit I was sneaking onto roofs and hanging out windows to steal puffs off a Marlboro Light when I thought I could get away with it. I was intrigued by this girl and tried to imagine what it would be like to not drink or do drugs or smoke cigarettes. I couldn't imagine it, but wanted to.

Over the years if someone mentioned 'spiritual life' or 'higher power' the words would catch in my ear. Same with 'meditation.' For all of it I pictured gurus with long beards and people chanting so I'd cancel the idea of it out. The last ten years of using I was a pothead and every night (and eventually every day) I'd get high and trace figure-eights around my apartment. I'd listen to music and have moments of awareness of how I was getting in my own way, or what patterns I was repeating and how they weren't working for me. Then the next morning would come and the button would reset and I'd start all over again doing what I was doing.

My mind is like a wood chipper in that it takes everything in and frantically chews the shit out of it. I used to grind life up to try to make sense of it. I'm curious about the world around me, so a sense of wonder would pepper the sawdust, too. When I got clean I tried to meditate but my head was a pinball. After a couple years I started going to a once a week meditation group a friend led. It took a year before I could actually quiet my mind for a few minutes out of 20. Now I try to meditate regularly and when I do my head might still monkey around, but I'm sitting.

This morning I was meditating and suddenly realized how powerless I am over what's going on right now. A few months back I wrote about how it doesn't go the way I think it's gonna and at the end that of the post I mentioned that I wrote a new pilot and it had changed everything. It's true - I got the pilot to a production co., a studio came on board and they took the project to a premium cable network. Premium cable loved it, then passed and everyone dropped out. I got the project back and got it to a writer/producer who at the time was with the tv show JUSTIFIED. He loved it, and though he couldn't take it to FX he wanted to help me get a manager, which he did. I love my manager. And the writer/producer.

When I create a show I write the pilot and also create a whole platform for it including ways to maximize the business end of it. The shows I create become very real for me - I see that world in 3D and see how it fits into this one. When I get a pass I get blue and frustrated and pissed, but passes have no effect on how I feel about the project. If anything it makes me more ambitious. Going through that process showed me it isn't personal when I get a pass. Plus, new people read my work and all want to read what I do next.

Recently I finished a new project, a half-hour comedy (the other pilot is a one-hour comedic drama) and my manager is just starting to take it out. I wrote the best pilot I could and I'm so ready to get a show on the air, yet I'm powerless over what happens next. I've done everything I can to try to make this happen, and what I do now is start a new project. Writer/producers keep telling me that's how it's done. Faith tells me the same. So that's what I'm doing.

The dog goes down for her first walk around 6:30 a.m. and for the last 2 months or so we've noticed a line forming outside the Dominique Ansel bakery on Spring Street. It's mostly a corporate crowd, suits and ties and dresses and heels and they don't look like interns. The bakery opens at 8:00 and what these people are on line for are Cronuts.

We don't take the dog to the basketball court anymore but we spun through there early Friday morning. It was her second walk, the one where she goes and romps for a bit around 7:45. The Cronut line now wraps around the court; it used to wrap the other way and I'm guessing neighbors complained. At a party Saturday someone brought Cronuts for the hosts and I got the lowdown: you're allowed 2 per person; if you're not waiting by 7:30 they'll sell out before you make it inside; the bakery workers don't think they're the best thing they make.

I love donuts from just about anywhere and my favorite croissants come from Francois Payard on West Houston, though I've eaten one from a roadside stand in Ecuador and that was pretty perfect, too. The idea of a mash-up has no appeal. Any Cronut fans out there who say tasting is believing?

We joined a neighborhood dog run. I was on the fence about having to pay for my dog to play, but it's very clean and they have a pool. No towel service yet or grilled cheese sandwiches with a Hoodsie for dessert, but we're working on it.

Growth spurts are tough on her. Mixed with today's humidity she's barely moving. Kitchen to eat, living room to sleep, downstairs to pee, back up to conk out.

This morning was hectic hectic hectic

by eight a.m. we hit the greenmarket and I wrap

three birthday presents for a seven year old who I love very much and

then we have to cook and eat and clean up what we ate and shower

shower you're getting bread and I'll shower first before we head out

Okay Joe says but be quick since I don't want to be late and I thought

if I had an axe an axe an axe had a nice sharp axe I

might swing it am I ever late?

We drive over the Williamsburg Bridge

Joe is driving and I am in the passenger seat not aware I'm --

How's your brake? he asks Your brake brake brake?

I'm slamming my foot on my imaginary brake every time a

motherfuuuu-oh my God - the truck the taxi it's veering into our -

I'm going to die

close my eye

s oh my

I see a sign

it says Take Turns Meandering

that's a weird sign for the Long Island Expressway

and I realize it says Take Turns Merging

a sign a sign a sign!

I swing my feet and pfffft I'm good

One of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits was when John Larroquette played a recently deceased guy and Dana Carvey played the angel he meets when he goes to heaven. The angel asks the deceased guy "Anything you want to know?" and after a bit of conversation the deceased guy asks "What's the grossest thing I ever ate?" The angel quickly says "You don't want to know." The deceased guy says, "Okay, what's the 200th grossest thing?" and the angel replies "That would be some butterscotch pudding that had a dead earwig in it."

The dog has gotten so much better with vacuuming the street, but occasionally she'll grab something off the sidewalk before I can kick it out of the way. Sometimes I don't know what I'm fishing out of her mouth and last week I wrangled a flattened and stiff bird part from between her teeth. (There was a beak, a head and a bit of something else.) A fellow dog owner referred to it as a 'bird chip' and for the record that bird chip barely makes the top ten things I've fished out of the dog's mouth. The week before she got her jaws around a massive cockroach, also dead, and that makes the bottom of the top ten because a cockroach beats a bird chip any day in terms of not wanting to touch.

After 9/11 our neighborhood changed in many ways and one that's been long lasting is the kind of wildlife and vermin we now have. One of my close high school friends was a flight attendant on the first plane through the towers and ten days after they fell, when I was packing to go to her memorial, my phone rang with "Has the infestation reached you yet?" The caller lived eleven blocks south of me and they were being overrun with cockroaches. Right as they asked a giant waterbug lumbered across my living room floor and I panicked. It made sense - the vermin had to go somewhere. Bizarrely, I had crickets right after the towers fell, the most beautiful, sleek black crickets that tweeted comfort for two days then went silent. Crickets were okay, but cockroaches weren't and I left for my friend's memorial unsure of what I'd come back to.

What I came back to was getting mugged at knifepoint by a transvestite who was better dressed than me, but no cockroaches. Seagulls, rats the size of cats, doves, a hawk and a praying mantis moved onto the block and stayed. Praying mantis look like floating fairies when they fly and though they're the rarest thing I still occasionally see one. Last night the dog ate a ladybug, which I love, so I'll have to keep my eyes out for Tinkerbell, should she fly by.

For six months this dog was silent, then two weeks ago she heard a sound in the hall and bam! She was at the door with rogrogrog. We stared at her in wonder, like Dr. Zira did at George Taylor in PLANET OF THE APES when he growls Get your paws off me you filthy ape and she realizes It speaks! Two weeks later we're not at It doesn't shut up! but we do have a solid watch dog.

I use 'watch dog' loosely. An egg carton in the kitchen got a growl and a woof and yesterday she dove on her bed in the living room and leapt off it just as fast, like it was about to snap it jaws around her. She glared at it with a grrwoof then she head butted it for a solid minute before plopping down behind me and conking out. She likes to lay down behind me while I work - I'm on a deadline which is why I'm posting mostly about the dog - and suddenly she'll be up and across the living room, with wargwargwarg out the window. We're quite a few stories up so she can't see the street below, but she'll sit and stare across to New Jersey, or a block away at scaffolding on Renwick Street, or at a construction crane on Hudson Street and woof and grunt and pfft. Argargarg.

First time in a pool, following her favorite dog in.

Her favorite dog is a Rottweiler who lives downstairs. They're a few months apart in age and about 75 pounds apart in weight. They go at it when they see each other; the Rottweiler loves to chew my dog's ears and my dog loves to chew his chin.

Both dogs are breeds that are perceived to be tough and both dogs are the exact opposite. On Saturday we took them to a dog run together and though they'd play with all the other dogs they kept running back to us for a pet, for reassurance, to stand between our legs and watch the action. They're both big babies, which is probably why we love them so.

(photo of the meat packing district by Christopher Payne)

I've been in a bad mood about the art world for a few years now. I love money, I love fashion and I love art, but I don't love the way they interact. Gavin Brown was recently interviewed by Nicole Phelps at style.com and said it well:

What do fashion people get wrong about the art crowd? And vice versa?

The fashion crowd doesn't get anything right about art. The two tribes speak two entirely different languages. You are either on one side or the other. This is a particularly interesting week to think about the difference: the punk Met Ball and Frieze Art Fair. Both sides using the other to dress themselves up as something they are not, and destroying something essential about themselves in the process. The punk Met Ball was particularly hideous. The final enslavement of one of the most powerful postwar social movements. Reduced to Sarah Jessica Parker's fauxhawk. A sad and accurate diagram of the state of our culture. A crowd of shiny morons turning reality inside out so it matches the echo chamber of their worldview. Would Sid have been invited? What would he have thought? Is this what Mark Perry meant by "This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band"? The English art schools of the sixties and seventies—the cradle of this creative movement—must be writhing in their supply-side straightjackets. It only emphasizes to me that fashion—whatever that is—sees art (and artists) as an idiot-savant gimp, and they keep them on a leash, begging for glam snacks. And fashion follows along behind art, picking up its golden shit.

How different is the art world from the fashion world, in the end? Hasn't all of the madness around collecting, and the obsession with which artist is up and which artist is down, eclipsed the art?

I see the fashion world with my nose pressed against the window, but from that perspective it seems dynamic, fast, frothy, and 99 percent empty. But that really isn't so different from most cultural worlds—including the art world. There are creative and talented people doing incredible things at the heart of each arena. But both fashion and art suffer—in different ways—from the crushing weight of capital. And in this sense, they have both been co-opted to do capital's bidding—as it reaches into every corner of the globe. Wherever you find an LVMH store, a brand-name contemporary art gallery will surely be very close by. The right bag and the right painting are the clearest ways possible for those with money to recognize each other.