A basketball court near us doubles as a local dog run when not in use. Spanky (first photo) is a good friend's dog and could pass as Opal's older brother.

The dog pile was impromptu when we all showed up at once.

Dogs smile? This one laughs.

She's finally learning how to go down stairs.

Yesterday Joe came in from Opal's first walk around 6:45 a.m. "Number 2 is getting laid," he said. Our building only has 4 apartments to a floor and we pass all of them multiple times a day. Number 2 recently got new tenants - 2 women and a guy - and this was something we hadn't heard coming from there yet. The women are big partiers and I hear glasses clinking and slurred laughing most nights I pass their door. The guy is a pothead, or my guess says it's the guy since we never see or hear him and only smell pot when the apartment is silent. Whenever we walk the dog past the second floor she wags her tail at the sounds of fun but this morning she cocked her head, confused. "I thought Opal let out a weird bark then realized it was a female, moaning."

The front door in that apartment line opens in the kitchen so I figured she was having kitchen table sex. Maybe stove sex. This apartment has a super high rent and super high turnover, so we never get to know who lives here.

Opal's favorite dog in the world lives on the same floor two doors over. Relic, a 100-pound 9 month-old Rottweiller, is owned by a gay couple and of everyone in the building we're the friendliest with them. They're ready for Number 2 to move out. For them, today would be nice.

The next floor up houses mostly professionals who leave early in the morning and come home in the evening with dry cleaning. There's a Maltese named Hercules who lives above Number 2, but Hercules doesn't get long walks so we don't see him much. This floor used to be the home of a star chef on the rise who was also a pot dealer. He couldn't keep a job and eventually bottomed out. He moved home to his mother's and got clean and now runs a restaurant in Chicago. Though we never met while he lived here, I know all this because we ended up meeting through mutual friends. We're now Facebook friends.

The next floor has a Miniature Australian Shephard owned by a fashionable Aussie who travels a lot. She has a 7 y.o. son and until recently she had an English manny. Who may have been her ball buddy. That's me making that up and not just because they looked good together. Whatever it was it's kaput since the manny is gone and a babysitter/dog walker with a great looking pocketbook is now in.

Up a flight is Duke, a rescue adopted 7 years ago when his 83 y.o. owner became widowed. Duke vacuums the streets while walking and yesterday scored a bagel, a slice of pizza and a mitten. He also knows what doormen give out treats and when his owner takes him swimming in a hotel in Tribeca Duke drags her doorman to doorman as they make their way to the pool.

Our floor has Opal's other favorite dog, Bowser, a Boxer/mutt blend who is also a rescue. Before Bowser and owner moved in the apartment was a brothel, or where pros would take their clients. This arrangement was short lived since within a month the whole building knew what was up with the 6 ft. glamour girls and their 5 ft. dates and someone complained. Like the tenants before them, they disappeared overnight.

The tenants before them were two runway models, a male and female. Both were gorgeous and I'd catch glimpses of them coming and going during fashion week. The rest of the year I'd never see them and figured they were away walking a runway somewhere. The super must have thought the same thing because he went into their apartment one day to check a leak and there they were in bed, freebasing heroin. A day later they were gone.

The apartment next to them used to house two men, one of whom was a big EDM DJ. Late one night the DJ knocked on my door and I when I opened it he calmly stood there wearing two sleeves of tattoos and a skimpy red metallic thong. "Will you call the police?" he asked. Behind him his boyfriend was casually throwing crate after crate of albums down the stairs, along with bits of clothing and a bong. Mirroring his calm I said "I'll call the police for you," and reached for my phone. He was high, his eyes looked dreamy and there was no urgency, no sign of physical fighting. He thought about it for a few moments and his eyes focused a little. "No," he said. "I don't think I want you to." Shortly after both moved out.

The neighbor I remember most was a white 20-something guy who lived across the street from me when I lived around the corner. I had a loft on Wooster Street and my studio and bedroom looked into his floor-thru apartment. Or really, the front half of his floor-thru. (A floor-thru runs from the front of the building to the back.) If I left my apartment, walked down hall and around the corner to the elevator, I could look into the back half, which I did when I came and went.

I first noticed the apartment because three of the windows in the living room/bedroom had the backs of large stretched canvases leaning against them. They never moved nor were any added to the pile. Next to them was a tv and at night I could see it glow. All of this faced a bed, where most days and nights this 20-something good looking guy laid either on the phone, eating or watching tv. He'd get high, too, but I couldn't tell what he was smoking. He'd sometimes get off the bed and disappear down the hall where there was a bathroom, and if he continued walking down the hall, which I never saw him do, he'd enter his kitchen. Waiting for the elevator, this is the room I looked into.

One day I saw a beautiful black woman about his age wearing nothing but rubber gloves doing dishes at the sink. I had seen her around the neighborhood; she had an afro-style head of hair and was at least 6 ft. tall. Over a few months only once did I see her in the bedroom with him watching tv. Most of the time she was compulsively cleaning the kitchen, always in rubber gloves, her eyes dreaming away.

This was how it went for a while then I saw new movement in the bedroom. I went to the window and there he was getting it on with a man. Hmmm, what happened to the girlfriend? The kitchen was spotless and a few days later she was back, scrubbing away. Did she know? Did she care?

A week later I saw more movement, but this time the apartment was crowded. I put my brush down and went to the window and saw police, maybe five of them. They were circling something on the floor and I couldn't see what it was. Or who it was. A few hours later a coroner's van showed. Though I looked into his windows for days after I never saw him.

My neighbor had died and I didn't know how. The apartment started getting emptied and what was left was a beautiful, richly upholstered custom white loveseat. I obsessed for a day over that loveseat - a guy died, but damn I want that - and then two top of the line Mercedes pulled up. His girlfriend got out of the back seat of one and what could only be his parents got out of the other. All were dressed impeccably, Greenwich Connecticut-style and they went up into the apartment. His girlfriend came out with a sheath of drawings and waited awkwardly by the car and it struck me how final death is. His parents came out empty-handed and as I watched the cars drive away I felt that even though I never knew him, in a way I knew him well.

There was an old kook who roamed the neighborhood and if you gave him a dollar he'd tell you anything you wanted to know. I saw him ambling up Wooster Street and ran out with a buck. I stopped him and pointed up to my neighbor's windows. "About a month ago someone died up there. Know anything about it?"

He waited for the dollar and I gave it to him. "Choked to death," he said. "Puked, and choked."

My neighbor had OD'd. I felt awful, sad, his parents would never understand and his girlfriend would move on. She must have, since I didn't see her for a whole decade. Then one day there she was, around the corner, homeless on the street. She was still a beauty, but her eyes were dead. The next day I went back to where I saw her and she was gone. I never saw her again.

I'm not on Facebook much. When I am I always like when friends who don't know each other and are from very different times in my life, i.e. high school versus now, post the same thing. Like this.

(photo by Mark Ackermann)

After I moved to New York and got a job with the ex-Rockette, I had to look for a new job one year later when her business closed. I had no savings and started applying for anything that had 'entry level' in the title. My favorite place to job hunt was a bank of phone booths in back of the Time Life Building on 6th Ave. and every day I'd put on my one suit and matching shoes and hoof it on over. The phones were private yet thick in the hustle and I had enough room to open the New York Times or Village Voice and make notes. I had a dream forming in my head: I wanted to wear high heels and hear them clack clack clack across a marble floor in a skyscraper where I hurried to my windowed office because my job was important yet creative, like maybe a photo editor at Life Magazine. At the time I was taking a lot of photos, but I was overwhelmed with still being new to New York. Less than a year out of art school, when to paint or even what to paint was white noise with no discerning sound.

I interviewed with a headhunter, with a belt maker, with a salesman who sold boxes, then saw something for a 'creative type' at a pre-press house in Hell's Kitchen. I got an interview and met with the secretary, a 30-something curvy blond with soft eyes that held hurt. She told me the company was owned by a Brit named Mike, a genius she whispered, a man transforming the way images were reproduced. Moments later Mike entered, a chipper 50 y.o. who never stopped moving. The way his secretary looked at him told me they were sleeping together. The wedding ring on his finger told me it was an affair.

The company prepared print material for advertisers and books (back then it was mostly still done by hand) and after Mike gave me the tour we walked back to where I entered. Here, an alcove held a very clean table with three computer terminals on it. Mike looked at the terminals lovingly, as if they were his children, then turned and stared at me for a long moment. "Have you ever heard of Scitex?" It sounded like a bra company and no, I hadn't heard of it. "We're -- I'm funded by them. I'm creating imaging software that will revolutionize the way pictures are created and reproduced."

I didn't know much about what he was talking about , but since I needed a job asap I smiled, wide, hoping I didn't look stupid. "I'm looking for a few new employees I can teach the basics to, then you'll find your own level and see where you fit. I don't manage. I want you to manage yourselves." It was a perfect Lord of the Flies opportunity and without asking me a single question he offered me a job. I must have looked surprised. He grinned. "I read people extremely well. You'll fit fine."

Print images are made up of thousands of dots. Depending on size, shape and placement, the dots create the image as well as effect color and tone. Three of us had been hired and within a few weeks we learned all the stations of Mike's cross. That's how we saw it, since not once was he in front of the computers. Instead he was always furrowed with his secretary, her office door closed, though from my seat I could see them gesturing anxiously through a window.

The other hires weren't interested in managing the work flow or dealing with the sales guy so I was organizing and distributing the work and handling the long term projects. The day I started a new Garfield cartoon book came in and I learned how to cut rubylith, work the darkroom, make films for printing, check color and fix color. I worked on watch ads, crappy catalogues, Chanel print ads and learned to dot etch, burn and dodge to soften lines, take elements out of film and put elements back into film. It was a sweet job since I had no boss, lots of freedom, liked my co-workers and loved cutting cartoons. As long as jobs came in and went out on schedule, the sales guy and Mike loved me.

"Think it's shady?" Another new hire was a girl named Martha, a chain-smoking beauty who dressed like a boy who had a boyfriend who dressed like a girl. She was at my desk watching Mike frantically gesture with the secretary who was trying to calm him down. Martha was from a wealthy Main Line family and her father ran a top Fortune 500 company, something almost no-one knew. (I found out when she asked me to finish a project for her. Her father was being honored by a museum, a museum opening a wing with his name on it and she had to leave work for the ceremony.) Martha and I were the same age, both art school grads new to New York, and though she had a boyfriend and best friend neither of us knew many people and spent a lot of time alone. Her best friend Jeff was gay and single and would come and meet us for lunch, and in short time we were all becoming friends.

Jeff was a member of a gay club called The Saint, a giant club in the old Fillmore East. I had never been -- I had barely been anywhere -- and one night he asked us to go dancing with him. Martha and I dressed up in chains and lace, I put on pointy leopard print shoes and ate a quick peanut butter and jelly sandwich, then close to midnight we met Jeff.

We entered the Saint and walked passed what looked like standard ticket windows for a theater or concert hall. We then went through a large set of doors to the dance floor. Disco was pounding, but it wasn't like anything I had heard on the radio. Nor was the dance floor like anything I had ever seen: it was huge, bigger than a skating rink, and it was covered by a massive dome. In the center of the dome was a pole that held a sci-fi looking contraption filled with lights and it slowly moved up and down projecting stars and swirls and blasts of color onto the top of the dome. Hundreds of men, mostly shirtless, many in leather, danced packed in.

We worked our way to the corner of the dance floor and danced for a while, then I left to check the rest of the club out. I had been to a couple of dinky discos outside of New York, but this - this was out there. Off the dance floor it was dark and made my way to the bathroom, figuring I'd freshen up a little. Right when I entered I saw three bear-like men near the sinks, wearing leather vests and chaps. One held a small metal gadget to his nose and was inhaling a popper, one was laughing, and the third was giving a blow job to the guy laughing. I tried to look casual, like I see this on the subway all the time, and nonchalantly walked to the first stall. In it two men were jerking off. Looking unfazed I walked to the next stall. It was filled with cocaine and cocks and for some reason I nodded hello, my face a blend of boredom mixed with did we go to Hebrew school together? I suddenly acted like I forgot something and strolled on out.

I roamed through the club to a metal spiral staircase and climbed up. This floor had an industrial staircase to the side and I climbed that. Up here it was dark, the music was pounding and I stepped onto a landing to adjust my eyes. Around me I could make out chunky benches that in the dark looked like blocks. I suddenly remembered an art history class about ziggurats, which is what they looked like, but carpeted.

The dome on the dance floor opened and light shot up through the club. I glanced around to better see where I was. Everywhere around me men were fucking and sucking and man handling each other with a practical determination of getting down to business. This wasn't romance or urgent release and I didn't even see lust. One guy saw me and smiled, friendly, kind of like 'welcome' then turned back to the four-way he was part of. I stood there looking around awed, my cool gone. I was still frigid then and sex was complicated, but around me it was as uncomplicated as sex could get. No hang ups, no cares, no anything. This was fucking, straight up, as far as I could see.

The dome closed, the lights dimmed and I headed back downstairs. I found Martha and Jeff and we danced till the next morning. I was heavier on my feet, stomping them into the dance floor, being a part of something that was so foreign to me yet felt like home. Some time later I went to work one morning and couldn't get into the office: Mike had driven the business into hell, absconded with the funding and left the country to avoid arrest. The secretary was devastated, positive he was going to leave his wife, desperate since he had been paying for her apartment. Martha and I looked for new jobs and kept going to the Saint. I found another club, Area, and started going there. A lot of artists seemed to be at Area and I got a glimpse of the art world. It gave me the same feeling The Saint did, of being foreign yet so familiar, so right. I lived in a shit hole and was broke, but New York was starting to feel like home.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an artist he discovered named Henry Flynt. I never heard of the guy and looking around I found this invite from 1961 inviting people to hear music at Yoko Ono's house. The list of people performing is incredible, but what's more fascinating is how they all must have known each other. This is why I love technology: what museums used to do - show me 'x' across a room from 'y' in a way that lets me make associations - is now what the internet does. I can research almost anything and surf my way into far out ideas and connections. Granted, online content is still fueled by humans, but hopefully science is working hard to change that.

Or, well, mine. Joe Villari made this video of her which tickles me cockles to no end.

The funny thing about having a puppy is watching her growth spurts. Parts seem to grow versus all over growth and right now she's all head and paws. Given how she's goofy in her body to start, the last few days she's skipped goofier and went straight to goofiest. She careens off furniture, trips over her toes and during walks somehow ends up on her face. When that happens she's as surprised as we are. It's like watching a toddler fall and get up, fall and get up.

I've seen this breed on the street lovingly carrying a plushie everywhere they go and I'm curious to see if she'll do the same when she's a little older.

The bottom photo is from a few days ago. We figured she'd grow to about 40 lbs, but this sudden spurt is making us wonder just how big she'll get.

That nose.

She loves snow as much as she loves heading toward home.

(photo is from Area's photobooth)

I love seeing patterns on the street. Not in the design sense (I do, but that's not what this post is about) but in the people sense.

I've always seen patterns and started noting them a few years ago when the tranny hookers at Christopher Street and Hudson began to look like they had just gotten the baby to sleep and were dashing out to pick up a jug of laundry detergent. They'd be wearing gray collegiate sweatshirts that read Dartmouth or Yale, beat up pale pink sweat pants, and their hair was haphazardly tied up in a scrunchie. The kicker was they wore no make-up. I loved it, found it conceptually fascinating, and then poof! Make-up and size 12 stiletto's were back on the corner.

Then it was blind people. I saw them everywhere, for three days. Then people missing a limb; an arm, one leg, a hand. I'd see them all over town so it wasn't like there was a prosthetic convention going on in the neighborhood.

One of my favorite things to see is a tourist window shopping around the corner on Prince St., say - maybe their bag or coat caught my eye - then six hours later I'll see them in Chelsea. Sticking with tourists, I've had a week where all I saw were tourist couples arguing loudly. No-one swears like the French and I don't need to speak it to know that.

Occasionally the patterns show me things. This summer I was walking through Tribeca late at night and passed a woman outside Nobu wearing a micro mini paired with red-soled 8-inch heels. This isn't unusual to see since it's everywhere, all the time. This night though it hit me that she couldn't run if she had to. 8-inch heels and cobblestone streets don't mix well and if she was chased she'd surely be caught. Maybe New York is getting safer.

The pattern I see now is a broader one, not yet defined. It mostly involves people in their late 20's to mid-30's and it has to do with a desire for an '80's kind of decadence. Desire is the key word, since what really seems to be desired is a simulated decadence, a decadence that's safe and without an edge. Granted, I'm talking about a sliver of this age group: the sliver with money. Interestingly, in the actual 1980's this group made a bundle of money on Wall St. With this new faux '80's sliver, their parents - youth of the '80's? - make the money and support them.

What fascinates me is how accepting and even hopeful this group seems to be about being part of the status quo, the mass appeal. Even the hipsters, moneyed or not, seem eager to define their personalities through fashion that advertises brands from the 1970's, or their clothes co-op an entire ethos and lifestyle of a past generation -- any generation -- except their own. Their clothing choices isn't political: it's as if commercialism and identity have happily merged. The individual is no more.

Over the last five or so years a private club scene has blossomed here. The application process to join paints a picture of exclusivity, one where artists and creative types romp freely, yet this isn't the clientele and members know it. Anyone can join these clubs, something also known by members. The decor is simulated chic, the art offends or excites no-one, and even the personality of the crowd has a consistently homogenized tone. (Soho House is the one private club I've been to that has personality, plus they throw fun parties and from what I hear have a great breakfast scene.) These clubs do reach out to creatives with free memberships, but the comps I know are home watching Netflix or getting ready to take the dog out. (The art world has been turned inside out and culturally neutered, too, but that's a longer discussion.)

In the east village I'm seeing '80's hairstyles and dye jobs; fur is back on the street; drugs are being sold openly; there's a pile of new shows and movies in production that take place in the '80's; and music, even some EDM has hints of a Flock of Seagulls. All this isn't the point I'm writing about. What is, or what congealed all of this and turned an intuitive 'is it the '80's?' cog inside me was a company called Reviv.

A close friend spent the New Year at a fancy hotel in South Beach and one afternoon around the pool he noticed men and a couple of women sporting colored arm bands. Some had more than one arm band on. He asked his date what they were and she told him they had seen 'the doctor.' The doctor?

My friend wanted to better understand what she meant so his date took him upstairs to a lavish suite. Inside it had been turned into a spa, or more appropriately, a med-spa, called Reviv. Every bed and chair had a (mostly male) 30-something hooked up to an IV. Hot nurses tended them while a doctor casually roamed the room. Each client was receiving a personally tailored infusion, a doctor-concocted blend of saline and multivitamins and medications - some were getting oxygen - for whatever ailed them. All ailments were gotten by partying too hard.

Run by an ex ER doctor who threw around terms like 'Hydrating therapy' and 'MegaBoost' and 'UltraVive,' this was the womb you went to if you drank too much or snorted too much cocaine or needed to sober up so you could start drinking again. This struck me as real decadence, nothing simulated about it.

My friend isn't much of a partier and back down at the pool his date called over some of the armband wearers. This crew -- all trust funders -- ignored my friend and spoke to his date of how they wanted to start their own Reviv and make it global. My friend listened quietly, since he recently helped build a global brand which he sold for a huge chunk (and now heads another global brand). It was like this crew was playing at business, acting out what they'd do knowing full on they never would. And it wasn't because they didn't have to; talking about it was satisfying enough. Fantasy success has a built in safety net -- you never have to lose or fight for something. What struck my friend was that this crew showed no desire to go for the real thing. Simulation is sufficient.

I find it all disturbing. I know that change, ultimately, is good and I love when I see signs that we're moving into the future. Right now I can't understand or find purpose in how this sliver moves our evolution forward. Sometimes we gotta go back to move forward, so I'm hoping this sliver is the equivalent of an algae bloom, one that will eventually block its own sunlight and cut itself off at the legs.

Our friends Larry and Shyamala call them 'pit fits.' They have a full grown pit bull that could be Opal's twin brother and I was telling them that every once in a while Opal gets these crazy bursts where she hops like a bunny then tears around the house - sometimes running in circles - with a look on her face that just has to get it out. Then she plops down and goes back to being a lap dog.

Their dog does the same thing and he's not a puppy. Maybe it's the breed. Maybe it's New York. Maybe they're flouridating the water, Mandrake.