18:00 CET: Noon in New York and I’m at the Strand.

This morning my Sagittarius Amigo and I met for breakfast at 7. He’s suffering from jetlag and, having had woken up at 03:30, informed me that USA Today was a terrible newspaper.

After breakfast we left the hotel and over the next several hours we first took the Staten Island Ferry to and from Staten Island (admiring along the way the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and big ships), then went to the 9/11 Memorial (more on that later, once I’ve finished digesting it), then Century 21 (despite being hetero, he has more fashion sense than me), followed by a subway ride up to Union Square were I managed to get us to surface at just the right exit to find the Strand.

I walked into the Strand, looked at the clock, and said, “Oh, I must take a photo!”

It was shortly after 12.

We spent about half an hour there – it truly is a nice bookstore, although I am already laden with books from Denver—so I suppressed my natural instincts to buy books and only bought two: Sex at Dawn and Go the Fuck to Sleep. I bought the former because it comes highly recommended by Dan Savage and, as such, it must be good. I bought the latter because after seeing a newspaper article about it, I saw this YouTube video:

I’m not really sure if the book is for me, or if it is for one of my colleagues – although he is probably more inclined to say “Gehen das Bumsen, zum zu schlafen.” (No, I didn’t translate that, but it seems to be close.)