I recently watched the Herzog documentary "Grizzly Man." Herzog is a man whose words are distinct and lively beings, flaking off his mouth and wafting off into the air with their own life forces and destinies. I have decided to write him a long-overdue letter:

Dear Mr. Herzog,
I do not yet have a little daughter, but I have promised her that I will seek a recording of Werner Herzog reading some bedtime stories to complement my own which I will read to her. I believe she will grow up thinking fondly upon the days of her childhood and the experience of you delivering those short tales, crafted with a delicate, German vocal architecture. I hope you will consider my serious and simple request for such a thing, even if you had time for only one or two. If not for me, than for my wee daughter to which I would like to gift the result of your orations. Thank you.

Herzog is a fascinating navigator, bold, clever, and enduring, deeply fascinated by the obsessions of men and women. He'll appear when least expected to grab your hand and pull you through a crowded and savage marketplace, only to drop you off with a smiling, toothless artisan amidst the safe-haven of her whimsical, woven commodities with their tedious and undulating patterns. Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix was reportedly graced by Herzog's hand after being cast askew in a car wreck, only to hear that epic, guiding voice of Herzog's before it vanished, having brought aid to the disoriented actor. Later, in an interview for Grizzly Man, Herzog was shot at by an air rifle and took damage to his abdomen. Bleeding, he simply said "It is not a significant bullet" and handled it later still by stating, "The poet must not avert his eyes."

Now, the subject of Grizzly Man was a person who rejected the human world and civilization in favor of the Alaskan wilderness of which he wanted to be a part. His like-minded friend expressed her alienation from and disgust for humans when faced with a dinner party looking for a transcendent meal, who she could only process as a mere haze of "grandmas and babies and hairdos and coats." But grandmas and babies and hairdos and coats compose their own raw wilderness too. I feel this at my beloved local diner, Odessa. The most basic conversations become so savage and weighty, as if their termination would bring about either the apocalypse or the discovery of a long lost buried treasure. The anguish and frustration of a hungry man trying to describe to an exhausted Ukrainian waitress having difficulty with English whether or not the sliced turkey actually came from a big bird in the kitchen or delivered by a procession of sullied men hoisting large boxes into their beefy arms is truly a remarkable conflict, not so different than the meeting of two wild, untamed grizzly bears.

I sometimes feel diminutive in the world, a cherry pit surrounded by flesh before having sorted out what it meant to be one gender or another, having no features, unrealized but wide open and expecting to be squashed and molded and filtered through a forest of hands, before being handed a coat and a grandma. It is the most pleasant of all anticipations, knowing how much will soon come my way, and how strong I must be to face so many abdominal bullets and stale pie crust.

Last time I was at Odessa, there was a magazine at the counter which I read while waiting for the best chicken soup in the East Village. There was a "death clock quiz" which was supposed to determine when the hands would shape your own death. Someone had already partially filled it out (a middle-aged woman, as her early answers revealed). However halfway through the quiz she suddenly stopped, after wildly and angrily circling the substantial number of points deducted by the presence of plastic surgery. This was a person who felt offended by the penalties ascribed to her by an apparent authority on the very lives of individuals in a certain modern, scientific wilderness, and so she fled, no doubt vanishing into her own jungles once again.

Other people quickly adjust to the atmosphere and become what they're expected to be, afraid to risk rejection of their assimilation. minn and I went on a tour of an historic mansion recently where there was an old lady who was our guide. A little white boy from a family in the tour was running around and the tour guide called him a little monkey. So she said, "Oops! I have to stop saying that. The last time I said that, it was a little black kid and his mother got soooo upset. She just kept hollering at me, but I call *all* kids monkeys!"

Myself? I am like the man who follows Duchamp's urinal around, attempting to strike it with a hammer or urinate on it, and being arrested for that despite the fact that Duchamp would have wanted this done and the curators themselves admit it offers a sort a completeness to the execution of an otherwise unfinished Dada piece. Hoo-hah, isn't it nice to commit oneself to the necessary journey against all adversity?