We were walking a dog around midtown. Alisdair had the corporate apartment for the night. He, Matthew, a girl from Hanover named Lisa, and I agreed to take a four-month-old German Shepard for a walk around Bryant Park for a corporate friend. The puppy had wrinkles in her forehead. Afterwards, handing her back to the owner, the puppy decided to shit on the sidewalk. Panicking, we searched a nearby trash heap in front of Starbucks for something to pick it up with. Sitting on top of the styrafoam and cardboard was something that looked like a loaf of shrink-wrapped cheese

“Oh my god,” Alisdair said. “This is a pound of Starbucks frosted lemon cake!”

His corporate friend, holding the dog’s leash incredulously, said, “Don’t eat that, man.”

But it was far too late.

“This is twelve slices of lemon cake!” Alisdair held it up in the air like a trophy, yelling. “And I’m going to eat this! I’m voting for Obama! I’m a democrat! I’m going to dumpster dive and eat every piece of this!”

Matthew, Lisa and I began foraging around in the heap and found three pallets of vacuum-sealed M&M cookies, ginger snaps, and espresso brownies. Joy was had by all. The corporate friend cowered into the late night shadows of midtown and the rest of us paraded back to the corporate apartment.

There was our leftover Chinese feast spread across the glass-top coffee table (snowpea leaves, chicken-fried steak, Buddha’s Delight, fried rice, seaweed and pork dumplings). I took a bath and used all of the free soap and shampoo, my feet pressed against the bright, white wall. We all made the free coffee and sat next to the bay windows, watching the city.

Two musicians that Matthew recently met during his hostel-hopping showed up around one in the morning, one of which was a girl named Ella Joyce Buckley. Ella was raised in Johannesburg, and–what is it about South African women? There’s this bright, crisp intelligence, this willingness to engage and create sparks. Their vocabulary is different. We all played songs we’d written, on various guitars, towering over midtown, and all five of us fell asleep on the soft, white rug and woke up with the sun.