12:44 a.m. There are two sides to every street. This first picture shows one side -- the backside. One of these days I'm going to go around to the front of this store to see what it looks like from the main street. This mural is on the rear wall.

The opening between the railings leads down to some sort of basement trap-door concrete steps. The stuff of your typical urban nightmares -- you know the ones -- when you're running and the street dead-ends and your shoes are getting stuck in the melting tarmac ... and the bad guys are closing in ...

The second picture, at the bottom of this page, is the other side of the street, the sunny side. According to the old song, you'd be rich as Rockefeller if you'd just di-rect your feet over there ... where

... why, there's the FedEx building, the stuff of different typical nightmares, many of which come true. You know those nightmares, too. Your check depends on finishing all corrections by 4:46 so you can race to the back of the line before they lock the doors. And yet the pages are stuck together and the files won't open; there are missing captions and you've just given yourself a paper cut on that most tender part of your hand between your fingers.

Whether we drive or we walk, we're at the FedEx building all the time, usually at the same time of day in these pictures. It's almost closing time -- and now with the time change -- almost sundown. When we first starting coming to this particular FedEx, they'd just planted the trees, and the trees were about the height of the railing.

The trees are growing faster than an internet IPO. We're still not rich as Rockefeller.

I tried to juggle two TV programs tonight: X-Files and Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. So we've got Mulder strapped down and Scully keeping her eyes on his eyes and not lifting up that little napkin covering his privates ... and on another channel we've got mostly white guys still trying to win that illusive million bucks.

And tonight there was, for me, a moment of true heartbreak. No, it wasn't when Mimi Rogers slithered into Mulder's darkened doorway, although she is a scary lady, even in the daylight, even when she isn't flossing. No -- it was the question about Toni Morrison.

Now you know the mostly white, mostly guys on the Millionaire program are somewhat bright and somewhat in touch with our culture, right? They've struggled mightily with their touch-tone phones to get themselves onto that show.

But Toni Morrison is one of the most important writers in our century. She has won the Nobel prize, folks. One of the few women on earth to ever get that far. She may not be white and she may not be a guy, but Lordy help us, what do you have to do in this society to be remembered?

Why do I think those guys would know Mimi Rogers' name? Is it because she has an overbite, or two largish breasts, or a divorce from Tom Cruise? All fine attributes, surely, but when you balance them against the Nobel Prize ...

And so now there's yet another guy on the discard pile, and this time I don't feel so sorry for him. Just one more guy in a really long line who won't be rich as Rockefeller.