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Recently, while working his day job, the Urban Man almost set off yet another global financial crisis. Really. All because of cell H33 on page 5 of a spreadsheet I was constructing...

Last week I got a little depressed. Yes, it happens even to the most dedicated Angeleno. Maybe it was a post-election depression or maybe it was part of the upcoming global depression…in any case, I needed to access The Spark of Life...

Wasn't it a shame that just before Athens fell, nobody snapped any pictures…or okay, made a few sketches? I mean, wouldn't it be great to see how the Acropolis actually looked? The Roman Colosseum? The Colossus of Rhodes?...

Just after the election, I read a quote from a woman in France who said, "I think America is re-becoming a new world." All week long that phrase rang musically in the ear of the Urban Man as he went looking for the new world right here in L.A....

I don't know about you, but tonight the Urban Man feels ten months pregnant. I'm lying here with a strangely distended belly, waiting helplessly for the birth of a new world...

I don't know about you, but even though the world is coming to an end, I haven't yet noticed any despair on the streets. The people I run into seem curiously upbeat, in fact unusually free with their smiles. New vitality has entered social gatherings. A strange optimism. Maybe that's because every time one world ends, another begins, and who knows—the next world might be better...

Once upon a time, anyone could be a prophet. It was so easy. We all knew the future would bring the spread of democracy, the retreat of religion, the surge of prices, the extension of freeways, and the fulfillment of extraordinary ambition. It seemed…inevitable.

Let me assure you that I never wanted to live in a casino. I mean, there's the noise. The smoke. The sleeplessness. The excess of bad food. You can't avoid the constant reports from the tables: sometimes good, mostly bad, but either way…unstoppable...

Despite the financial crisis, I know we have not come to the end of the age of the high flyers. We admire them too much. We have invested too much in them. We don't remember how to function without them...