Our friend Rick called. I was away from my phone and got the voice mail. He wanted to ask for a favor, and from the tone of his voice it sounded like he needed a kidney.

I called him back. "You don't have to do this, and I totally understand if you don't want to," Rick said, "But... Would you mind dog sitting Pepe this weekend?"

Pepe is less than a year old -- thus probably five years old in dog years. He behaves just like a five year old boy that has just eaten a pound of Skittles. He is mid-sized and muscular like a small horse or like Verne Troyer if he worked out a lot. He knows how to open doors. He is very friendly, and likes to hug people a lot. But for him, hugging consists of jumping onto someone and trying to give them a handshake with his mouth.

"Yeah, I'll take him," I said.

My favorite thing about this 'burg is that there are a lot of parks in which one can sit and just write for a while. Whenever I'm in New York City I'm always rushing around from appointment to appointment, but often I have an hour or two to take a breather. That's when I roll up to Union Square, Bryant Park, or Washington Square Park, take a seat with a Diet Coke and my notebook, and just work for a while.

Just working with an open notebook brings me a lot of peace. I feel like I'm working things through. Solving problems, figuring things out. And it's kinda great to do that surrounded by trees and traffic and people that are also trying to do figure out similar things.

New York fatigue kicks in easily for me -- running from meeting to meeting, getting irritated at people for walking so goddamned slow. Pausing in doorways and at the tops of escalators, conspiring as a system to make me late.

Coming from driving-centric LA you feel like you're giving up a lot of control. You're suddenly waiting for trains, you're being held up by other people. You're constantly moving and feel like you're forced to constantly be moving.

But one of the things you can control is to choose when to stop. Take a break, rest, write.

I finally got a chance to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had been trying to go for years but I kept bouncing off of the massive crowds.

This time I went on a Wednesday morning. Still busy, but far fewer people than usual.

I spent the majority of my visit walking through the Egyptian wing of the museum, and this was easily one of the most amazing museum visits I've ever enjoyed.

The ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur. Transported to NYC block-by-block, a gift from the Egyptian government. What's neat/sad is that 19th century European hooligans carved their own graffiti into the temple walls in 1820. Tagging has been around for centuries.

There was a very attractive lady docent giving a tour of the Egyptian wing to about a hundred young children. It was really charming how she kept wrangling their attention: "Can you help me find the Monster in this gallery?" She had a thick Japanese accent that was simultaneously working for and against her.

There was a small boy with dinosaurs on his yarmulke. I looked around online and apparently you can get yarmulkes with all sorts of things: Fire engines, robots, etc.. This is incredibly cool to me.

Some ladies came up to me with a map, apparently needing directions.

"Do you speak English?" they asked.

"No," I said, "I'm sorry, I wish I did. Maybe you should try that guy over there."

I barely scratched the surface before I had to leave the museum to make it to another meeting. I'm coming back to NYC in September and will continue my tour then.

New York City: I like you a lot. I even [heart] you sometimes. I will see you again this fall. RESPECT!

I just got back from a fun wedding where there were little kids running around doing goofy things. They had Kevin-from-the-movie-UP dolls, and were having lots of fun and being little kids.

In juxtaposition, here is an LA Times story (with video) about a a six year old kid with schizophrenia. This is easily one of the most interesting and sinister stories I've ever read.

She sees imaginary animals and names them after numbers. One is a cat named 400. She is loving and sweet one moment, then will suddenly start biting and kicking people. She has an IQ of 146. She needs 300 milligrams of Thorazine to manage her psychoses. She lives in an imaginary place called Calalini. "Calalini is on the border between this world and my other world," she says.

This is a really creepy, heartbreaking, and weird existence. The parents and doctors are at wit's end. It makes you wonder how people can live like this -- the little girl and her parents, I mean -- and illustrates the inner strength that human beings are capable of.

I have no real analysis of this story. I don't know what to make of it, other than I think it should be shared with others. Hug your kids and tell them that you love them. And if you don't have kids, be glad that your connection to reality is solid and stable.