Dinner with Marilyn

Yesterday I changed hotels, moving into a Days Inn very near the Hilton I was staying at. "Very near" here means a mile down an access road past a mixture of car parks and weed-strewn toxic former industrial sites. Still right across a six-lane highway from the airport, and the cheaper Days Inn has much worse sound insulation and a noisier air conditioner. So it's earplugs at night.

After work yesterday I checked in and took a shower, then drove (I have a rental car now) into Manhattan via the Holland Tunnel to have dinner with my friend Marilyn. We've known each other for more than ten years, since she first submitted her work to Frighten the Horses. Since then she's gone on to publish a terrific book of erotic novellas, Neptune and Surf, and to have stories published in a multitude of anthologies. We had dinner at an Italian place and had a *wonderful* fun conversation about writing, and about various deals and writing jobs she's up for, and gossip about other writers and publishers and so forth. The usual enjoyable shop talk of pornographers. It was a good deal of driving back and forth -- about 40 minutes each way, though the traffic was light -- but totally worth it. And we're going to have dinner again, maybe on Friday.

Tonight I'm going into town again to see another film -- Kurosawa's samurai version of "Macbeth," called Throne of Blood, starring of course Toshiro Mifune.

I came back too late and too tired to check email or blog last night. Also the Days Inn has a much more restrictive policy on phone calls. The Hilton starts charging you a high rate on local calls only after an hour; the Days Inn starts after ten minutes, so it's hardly worth trying to dial in.

Tomorrow is the Sep. 11 anniversary, and I was surprised that there was no big recognition scheduled for my company's New Jersey office, which lost somebody on one of the planes that day. (It was the plane they crashed in Pennsylvania. At first everyone was claiming that our co-worker must have been one of the brave passengers who rushed the hijackers. Then it came out months later that actually he was in a toilet the whole time talking on a cell phone to his wife.) In fact, people seem determined to come to work that day. When I heard this, I remarked tactfully, "Oh, and here I thought everyone would be home lying down with a cool cloth over their eyes."

Driving into the office this morning I listened to AM radio. I heard a long account of Sep. 11 from a firefighter -- articulate and moving (and obviously polished somewhat, if only from having been told so many times). Finally after the long monologue, the host said something like, "Thank you so much for that, Jerry -- and may I say if I could kill them all, I would." That kind of broke the solemn mood. It turned out to be Don Imus.