What is it like walking down the sidewalks of Brooklyn or Manhattan or the other boroughs. Tell us some "Tales of the Sidewalk."

Regarding sidewalk life in Manhattan, there's not much of our "local color" that the world doesn't already know about. It seems like every quirky detail of our lives here, from our crazy taxi drivers, streetwise cops, and heroic firemen to our lunatic street-preachers, greedy bankers, and ruthless lawyers to our struggling immigrants, artsy 20-somethings, and high-priced hookers, right down to our colorful crackpots like the "Naked Cowboy" and the "Soup Nazi". . . becomes a famous TV show, celebrated movie, important novel, or immortal piece of music, before most Manhattanites even know that they exist.

I live in a part of Brooklyn called Park Slope. It's near where the movies The Chosen, Dog Day Afternoon, and Smoke take place, but it's nowhere close to being as well-documented as most of Manhattan and some other parts of Brooklyn. But even so, it will probably sound familiar. . .

Park Slope is a neighborhood of solid, elegant brownstones shaded by solid, elegant trees. The kind of place a Metro writer would be unable to resist calling "leafy." It's full of well-kept schools, empty churches (and synagogues), cozy tea shops, and clever boutiques selling things like specialty coffee, vintage dresses, and handmade furniture from Peru. In addition to the usual New York mixture of single professionals and idle rich folks, Park Slope is populated by moms and nannies pushing strollers (the kind that holds twins or triplets, generally), well-scrubbed schoolchildren, politely exuberant teenagers, and happily frolicking big dogs.

In the spring and summer, the kids decorate the broad sidewalks with pictures and maps and games of their own devising with brightly colored chalk. In the autumn and winter, there are lots and lots of Halloween and Christmas decorations in evidence. It's unheard of for books to be simply thrown out, here. . . the appropriate thing to do is to arrange any books you don't want anymore on your front stoop, either on a weekend or early in the evening, to give any neighbors who might stroll by (and we love to stroll out here) the chance to pick them up and read them first (and we love to read out here).

Do you like being an attorney? If so, what do you like about it?

I do like being an attorney, sometimes quite a great deal. What I like most, I think, is the chance that it gives me to solve puzzles, and to work with language, in a way that involves a struggle against a (hopefully) worthy adversary over what I (occasionally) think are meaningful stakes.

Why do you think you're slipping in the writing department? Is you grammar or spelling getting bad? Does your writing seem less creative? What's wrong? How can you fix it?

It's not my spelling. . .but it might have something to do with my grammar. I used to have an instinctive feel for how to phrase and structure my sentences. My words would either feel "right" or "wrong", and if it was the latter (and it seldom was the latter), I always had a sense of just what was amiss, and just how to fix it.

These days, I find myself feeling like my sentences are "wrong" a lot more often, and I'm no longer so instinctively sure about what's wrong with them, or so quick to see how they might be repaired. That's my problem on the "micro" level.

My problem on the "macro" level is that I'm having a harder time coming up with original insights and persuasive ways to frame them. . . I keep thinking that if all I'm doing is rehashing arguments that can be found on someone else's blog, then all I'm doing is wasting everyone's time. . . even though I know on some level that most of the arguments here are fairly obvious, or should be.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that the act of writing used to feel effortless and satisfying to me. . .but it has gradually come, over time, to feel (at least sometimes). . . laborious and hollow.

You know?

Has your legal training and work experience helped or hurt your writing ability? How?

Neither. If anything, I think it's my writing ability that has affected my legal career. And it's done so both for the better and for the worse.

How have your studies changed you view of "God" or "the divine"?

If the thousand-odd science fiction books that I read as a child between the ages of approximately 6 and 16 can be counted as "studies" (and I think they can and should be), then I'd say that I was powerfully influenced by the skeptical, atheistic point of view that was implicit in virtually all of those books. .. as well as tartly, powerfully explicit in quite a few of them. I'm thinking here about books like Robert A. Heinlein's "Revolt in 2100," Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," and Harry Harrison's "Deathworld" trilogy, among a great many more.

Those books made me into a mocking, pitiless skeptic of religion and religious beliefs. . . a point of view that nothing I saw or learned at school or in the media (in the age of the Meese Report, the Moral Majority, and the 700 Club) caused me to moderate or question in the slightest degree. . . and to a considerable extent, the Republican Party's embrace of religion as a tool of political expediency is the reason I became a liberal.

Nothing that I have ever read or studied about religion or theology itself has made me more inclined to believe in any religion, but. . . what I've read in history, on the other hand, has at least made me more sympathetic about the emotional need that people often have for belief in religion, as well as more understanding of the positive side of the role that religion has played in current and past human societies.

What is your own philosophy? How did you develop it? Why don't you think you believe in it? Is it implausible or too demanding?

My own philosophy is something that I came up with as an intellectual exercise. . .ultimately, I think, as a result of reading Dr. Manhattan's explanation of how he perceived time in the graphic novel "The Watchmen." Dr, Manhattan's take, as best as I can remember from my Freshman year of college when I first read it, was that time is like a multifaceted jewel that should be perceived in its totality but which we poor limited humans "insist on viewing one facet at a time."

The idea that time, to an omniscient mind, can have no meaningful existence. .. was one that made a great deal of sense to me, at the time. . . and it only made more sense as my undergraduate education continued, and my formal studies turned to science and theology.

To an omniscient mind, like God's (if God exists), everything from the beginning of the universe to the end of it must necessarily be happening right now. To an omniscient mind, human "free will" can only be an illusion. . . in the mind of God (if God exists) my actions tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and indeed for the rest of my life have already occurred. They are the predictable result of a chain of causality set in motion by the specific details of the act of creation itself. . . a chain of events that an omniscient intelligence cannot help but have foreseen, and therefore can only have intended, from the very first moment of creation.

If we were to rewind the universe's "clock" to the beginning, we would see everything in the universe coming back together, converging on the central "point" where the Big Bang occurred. . . wind the clock forward again, and we would see all the matter in the universe tracing outward lines to where they are now, and beyond that, to where they will ultimately come to rest. . . the fact that everything began at a single point carries the implication that, to a divine intelligence (if such a thing exists), from a point of view outside of time, that connection between every piece of matter in the universe continues to exist right now. . .

Which means that, in at least one rationally explainable sense, the seemingly metaphysical statement that "all things are one" can be claimed as demonstrably, and provably, correct. This suggests that all of the matter in the universe is a part of the body of God (if there is a God). . .which in turn suggests, since matter appears to give rise to consciousness, that all of the consciousness in the universe is a part of the mind of God (if in fact God exists).

I'm glossing over quite a lot. . . but what it amounts to, for me, is that I'm pretty sure that I know what I think about God, if God exists. . .but I don't know if God exists! Which is why I don't know whether I believe in the rest of my philosophy or not.

Does going from your 30s into your 40s mean anything to you? If so, what? Did you think about some day being 40 when you were 17 or 18? How did you see yourself at 40 back then? Are you like or unlike that vision now that you about to turn 40?

I'm honestly not sure what the prospect of entering my 40s actually means (or ought to mean) for me. There was no sense of any big emotional odometer clicking over when I turned 30, and I suspect that turning 40 will be much the same.

I never, now that I think of it, had any thoughts at all about being 40 when I was younger. I had thoughts about what it would be like to be in my 20s... and also my 30s (which I correctly assumed would be a continuation of my 20s, just with slightly more money and slightly less hair). I even thought about what it would be like to be in my 60s and 70s and even 80s (I always pictured myself as someone wealthy and very well-preserved, sitting in the library of an opulent Manhattan apartment, savoring a glass of expensive brandy as I pore over some elaborately bound leather tome) but my 40s and 50s have always been a bit of a blind spot in my predictions.

I suppose that's because I never really thought of myself as a father, so I never thought of myself as someone of an age for being a father. . .someone too old to fit my vision of myself as someone "younger," and too old to fit my vision of myself as someone "older."

How do you intuite your way through complex issues? (We know you are smart so leave that out of the explanation.) Describe the methodology you use.

That's a pretty difficult question, given that what we're talking about is intuition itself. . .but I'll do my best to give you a useful and intelligible answer.

I think that the best way for me to explain my. . .method of intuition (God, what a strange term), is to say that it's a process of deliberately trying to get hit by a random bolt of inspiration. . . by instinctively feeling my way -without thinking about doing so- into what I would describe as the "thin spots" and "exposed intersections" in my thought process. . .the kind of places where (my intuition tells me) inspiration is most likely to strike.

That's not really a useful or intelligible answer, I know. . .but it's the best that I can presently manage.