Entry 2:

I saw the new Trump Tower today. I was walking over by the United Nations, going to have lunch with someone, and I walked by the 900 gazillion-foot skyscraper he's building on the East River. The sign next to it says, "The Tallest Residential Building Anywhere in the World." I wondered, when I saw that, about the "Anywhere." I'm sure the original line, as written by the advertising agency, was "The Tallest Residential Building in the World," which comes off the tongue easier. The "anywhere" sounds like something Trump added, just in case, I suppose, anyone missed what he was driving it. I would like to think that if I were Donald Trump I would be happy just building a really tall residential building. But then I don't really know, do I? Judith Harris, who wrote that wonderful book The Nurture Assumption a few years ago about the importance of peers in shaping personality, says that one of the reasons rich and successful people often become so eccentric is that their success frees them from having to conform to the standards of their peer group. So, if you're a rock band, you can ask for M&Ms backstage with all the yellow and brown candies removed, because you can, because you no longer worry about your contemporaries making fun of you if you do. Or if you're Donald Trump you can be quite open about the fact that you're afraid of shaking people's hands because you don't want to get their cooties. I think that's a really cool theory, because it suggests that celebrities--who the rest of us narcissistically believe crave our respect and attention--are actually who they are because our respect and attention are completely irrelevant to them. It also suggests that if you aren't rich and successful, you have no idea what you would be like if you were. Who knows what weird idiosyncrasies are now being held in check by your peer-dependent status? And isn't this the problem with a lot of therapy? In therapy, you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what your real self is--that is, the self that would emerge if you were socially unconstrained. But since most of us are never going to be that way--and are always going to be operating under peer constraints--what's so real about that self? As I walk back from lunch, I resolve to share this new theory with my shrink. (Just kidding. I don't have a shrink anymore.)

What else did I do today? It's late now, as I write this, and I can't seem to remember.

I think I slept in, then spent a fruitless hour or so at the café down the street trying to get some work done. There is a man there who always sits in the corner with a stack of philosophy books and a laptop, and I've become almost insanely curious about what he's writing. When I was in Los Angeles a lot last year, house-sitting for my friend DeeDee in Beechwood Canyon, I would get coffee at a little café on Franklin called the Bourgeois Pig. Beechwood Canyon might be home to the greatest number of budding screenwriters per capita anywhere in the world, and in the afternoons the "Pig" would look like a laptop convention. When someone got up to go to the bathroom or get a refill, I would sometimes peek over at their screen, looking for some kind of signature line. It's been my experience, for example, that budding screenwriters rely heavily on the phrase "is all," as in "No, no. I'm OK. I'm just tired is all." Has anyone, in real life, ever talked that way? Anyway, I got it in my head that "is all" might have actually came from the "Pig." Once I think I actually worked out a series of plausible "is all" birth scenarios, involving overheard conversations distorted by the sound of the coffee grinder, or that funny thing when you're trying to do backspace-delete and the guy right next to you on his laptop jostles you and you erase the three words in the previous sentence. Does that sound plausible? I'm just wondering, is all. See? It sounds ridiculous!