Standing on a sidewalk in the West Village Sunday night, finishing a cigarette, a disheveled but exceedingly polite homeless gentleman approached me and asked me if I were a cop. I didn’t respond. He asked again, a little more urgently. Uh, no, I replied. Ok. Because I’m going to take a leak in this corner, he said. And thus he did, while I turned away.

At the end of lunch at a Chinese restaurant with a colleague on Monday, we received our fortune cookies. Hers contained four. A four-fortune fortune cookie! My single slip of paper was not even so much a prediction as an assumption about my character. Like I need that kind of judgment?

This morning I woke up with the phrase I’m concerned about the darkness inside you rolling around my head, but I wasn’t thinking of myself.