Early one Friday.

There are at least two great things about getting in early to the office.

One is the absolute silence of the place.

This morning around the area in which I sit, it looks like the aftermath of a Civil War battlefield. I worked 'til about 7:30 last night, but there was a gang going, I suppose, all night preparing for a big meeting this morning.

There's no leftover Thai food around. Just a giant inflatable pig head, a couple hundred miscellaneous comps and chairs out of trim like a marching band at an anarchists' convention.

But it's quiet.

The furor and sweat of the evening has vanished.

Most of the changes made in the stealth of night, no one, I think, will ever notice. But if you're serious about what you do, you make them anyway. You move something over a pixel. You change a "but" to a "yet." You thicken a hairline or shorten a headline.

William Carlos Williams would understand. He said so much depends upon...

The other nice thing, at least from where I now occupy a freelance seat, is the slow blue of the Hudson. There it is, out of the north windows. Occasionally a ship goes by. And then another. Every once in a while, if you're lucky, you'll hear, above the white noise and the distance, the sonorous howl of a ship's horn. It can make you feel like you're at sea.

Sometimes, I look at the river and think about the same view 406 years ago, before Henry Hudson arrived. When Manhattan was called by the Lenni Lenape Manahatta and had over 350 species of birds and more varieties of flora and fauna than Yellowstone Park does today.

They're nowhere to be seen today. Except for an occasional pigeon, or squirrel, or sparrow, or rat.

Like I said, no one's in yet.

And I like that.