(Written about March 11, not live until March 30.)

The boo is almost gone, tra-la. I can do some scrapings. It makes me sleepy now, y’know. Haven’t been doing the writing I should. Tonight yes. The Dutton book.

Reading The Lost Weekend. Both awful and stupendous. Too experimental, naive self-revelatory for me. Now the protag is finishing up his last whisky, post-Bim, dropping bits of Burns, reading Shakespeare and Fitzgerald. Thinking about how there’s a lot of life left in Scott. Many more novels. He’s still under 40! This is supposed to be 1936.

Susie Bright talks about being an Irish Catholic, quotes a line from The Departed where Matt Damon is impotent. Something like

“I’m fuckin’ Irish, so I’ll deal with something being wrong the rest of my life.”

Well that’s actually it. I couldn’t remember, so copypastaed. Michael and I saw that a dozen times, I didn’t get the humor or the point. Some obscure bog-muckery I think. Suggestion of grudge-bearing?

Susie also mentioned Hunter Thompson was Irish Catholic. Believable if true. How did I miss that? Look him up. No, I don’t think so.

I got a letter from Medicaid. I’ve been approved. What do I do now? Only reason I wanted Medicaid is that otherwise I’d have to pay a ridiculous amount for Medicare Part B, which I never use anyway. I need to call some of those phone numbers, or maybe Dottie’s friend.

A chiquita from MSK phoned on my landline today (March 11). Just discovering now that my birthdates don’t match. I told her that was the birthdate on my ID at that time, and that was fine. What I don’t understand is why we received, or the Bern firm received, my medical records last October, and now you’re going through this again now.

Somehow in the last few mostly sleepless days I realized I’d had a recurring nightmare for years. It’s about an elaborate project I was assigned to do by igkins, nog hired as web director after the Indian left. I think Peter Pollack hired him because he looks like Obama. A little. For whatever reason, igkins turned against me, maybe because I tended to get blamed when things went wrong because I was the only one there half the time. (I call igkins igkins because that is his Twitter handle.)

And a front-end web person is the most accessible interface for the editors. So they knew me, and if something went wrong, it was my fault.

Anyway, in this dream: I was given this project to do that would require me to build a grid-table capable of digesting huge amounts of data and images. And it had to be constructed in some off-brand platform or library, one of those Django or Struts or Springs things that were hot 15-20 years ago and now have a user base of maybe 43. I tried getting guidance, useful examples I could copy, out of those big paperback Manning books. But those manuals had no solutions to what I needed. So day after day I’d take my notes and design specs out of a big wrinkled manila envelope on my desk. There was other work to do so I could put this aside for a while. The manila envelope sat on my desk, half-folded, frowning at me, making me feel guilty. After several months I still hadn’t built the project and I wasn’t sure if it was still needed. Somehow I never got in trouble for it. The curtain closes. I think igkins leaves the job, moves on. 

The nightmare part was the daily anxiety, knowing I’d been asked to the do the impossible. A whiff of truth from real life there, for three different projects. There was the Flash rebuild of the Thanksgiving widget when I first arrived there. This was nearly impossible and should instead have been rebuilt in HTML and jQuery from the start. Something I didn’t realize until I was heavily into the next project, which I did mostly in HTML and jQuery.

The Flash widget that I built succeeded, but it was far more trouble than it was worth. Adding to the confusion and anxiety was the fact that legacy files we got from last year’s vendor (Hudson-Union) did not work, could not work. I think I had to do tedious, repeated, proofreading and debugging in the Flash IDE. And it turned out they gave us incomplete files. One of the AS3 class files was truncated. I looked around, found a long class, the standard version used (this is a utility, not specific to a project). And it worked. But I had to agonize over that for a week.

And then the next project. I had to build interactive pages of schedules and speakers for the Classic in Aspen. These would be built in HTML, following the previous year’s Flash AS3 version, which read a big XML file to populate grids of test and images. There were so many things nobody understood there. Least of all the egregious DDP, a former temp who got himself hired as a web developer around the time I arrived, then begged igkins to bump him up to project manager. He didn’t know, and no one else there would understand this, tbat the reason the previous year’s Classic project used XML, not JSON, is that Flash could not  consume JSON. JSON, a set of strings that are formatted in javascript syntax, was fairly new then and just beginning to be implemented in databases, eg MongoDB. It’s cleaner-looking and easier to proofread edit than XML.

If I were doing the Classic in Aspen thing again, I might try do it using JSON just because it looked simpler. At least try. But instead David assigned the project to  this fat colored girl he had interviewed and hired, at least as contractor.  Her family were aliens from Central America (David was gay and Jewish and he liked to patronize female moojis). He told her how to revise or rebuild my old Classic project. They didn’t consider JSON, went with XML because David wanted to do the project as an AJAX file, AJAX being a javascript code technique he thought he understood.

Now, when I had built the earlier version, I had created the schedule lists of cooking classes, wine tastings, etc., in actual HMTL, hard-coded it, you might say. Because that worked, it was foolproof, whereas using XML probably wouldn’t work, because each separate seminar had to have its own #ID. You might be able to lay the data out in a flat file, but you weren’t going to be able to manipulate it if you asked for a record by #ID, and they all had the same #ID.

Anyway, David and the noggess built the schedules as forms, like mailmerge templates, without any unique ID for each seminar because unique information would have to be in the XML data, not in the HTML tags. I didn’t know they had chosen to do that until after they built it, at least built part of it. And it was intrinsically buggy because every seminar had the same #ID.  I told David this was a problem. I told him you couldn’t duplicate an ID. He acted huffy and asked why. He was clueless about that. I said, because it’s an ID, not a class, not an attribute. Must be unique. He didn’t know you couldn’t repeat an #ID over and over in the same file, the same way you can with the multiple-use .class tag, for example.

They hadn’t noticed problems yet because they’d simplified the project, only built half of it, the simple half, where the XML gets spat out into a list. They totally ignored or eliminated two sections that handled the output and printing utilities. It may be that the noggess tried to do those parts and found she coudn’t get them to work.  So, end of the day, all these two really built was a sort of AJAX demo, where dumb data is laid out into something like a spreadsheet. There was no need whatsoever to use XML, no reason to use AJAX, in fact it was a bad idea.  It’s harder to type, edit and proofread than normal HTML is, and a static HTML page is not going to break when it loads. But it’s AJAX, thought David, wanting very much to say he’d used AJAX in the project, and of course if it has these extra layers of complications, it must be better.

But it’s not. Let me beat this dead horse again. A simple HMTL page is  easier to manage throughout because it’s a one-step edit process .You have formatted text coded the way you want; you have nice PLUS MINUS buttons you can click on, click off (they used most of my little graphics, that’d I carefully drawn in Illustrator the last time; the had no idea that these illustration bits were part of the project, thought I’d downloaded clipart or something).  Then the seminars you clicked on would be output to a printable personal schedule for you. And if you chose two or more at the same time, same day, my Conflict Catcher javascript caught it and told you, in my cute drawings of a mid-century television clock and computer printer.

The whole point of the project is to have an app that lets you select and save a schedule. But how useful is that if you can book multiple classes at the same time and you can’t save or print the same thing out?

Bad headache just now, from a pint of Platinum last night, a half of Pinnacle the night before that, and could it be a pint of Platinum the night before. I just felt weak and hungover from this stuff yesterday (Friday) and Thursday, but now the cumulative effect has given me a migraine-line sinusitis headache of the sort that usually clears up by 4 in the afternoon, but is still sitting there now at 5:42 pm of a Saturday.

I ended up throwing out that risotto. I threw it out just last night. It may still be in the garbage. I took a garbage bag out recently, so am not sure. I made chop suey, of a sort, with ground beef and stir-fry vegetables and 90-second microwave brown rice yesterday, and have gobbled it all, meaning I won’t need to eat again for several days.

I spent part of the afternoon detaching that Verizon “extender” I was supposed to send back a month ago, and deciding how to replace it. Basically it was only feeding, via ethernet, a couple of my antiquated Macs. A few weeks ago I moved the Airport Extreme router into the bedroom, running it off the coax/ethernet extension device that’s been there for over ten years, from when we first got FiOS in early 2014. No need for it here; I could move it back, and use the extension device the same way, as a coupler, but out in the living room. I thought perhaps of buying another extension device, but I found they start around $80.

Finally I remembered the old 2014 Verizon router in the closet. I thought it wouldn’t work as a router anymore, because it’s code wasn’t actively registered with Verizon, but it turns out I gave up too early last time I tested it. This time I hooked it up to an open coax, north wall of the living room, and found that it worked only with hardwire ethernet but with its old wifi address as well. So I detached the extender tower they gave me a year ago, put it and its AC adapter aside, plugged in the old router where the extender used to be, and—voilà, I now have three live wifi addresses, two more than I really need. (In extremis, I can attach my iPhone as a Personal Hotspot, a virtual router.) I am probably going to switch at least one of these off, along with the unused computers, to save on ConEd bills. I’ve assumed their power usage is de minimis, but maybe not.

A lot of nastiness with the GC crank crowd on Twitter during the last two or three days. That lowclass “Birdy” person, who does computer graphics attacking the virtually nonexistent phenomenon of “trans kids” came a cropper recently, with both her and her “fella” supposedly being fired from their jobs and forced to live in a van, or something. Details are missing, the story is murky. Anyway, Mr. @wcobbett thereupon posted a parody of one of Birdy’s stickers, in which he or someone else spells out the actual subtext of Birdy’s lampoon.

No further happy news from Social Security. I did go to the local 48th St office a week ago yesterday and talked to a respectable negress behind the plexiglas. I told her I had ‘dire need’ at the moment because of back rent and unpaid back benefits. She put my request in for a recomputation of what I am owed. I fear they will up my monthly benefit by $200-$300 but neglect to pay the $20,000-$30,000 outstanding for years 2017-2024.

I called the SSA 800 number a few days later but they said there is a 20-day wait on these things. 20 days or 20 working days? Will it be in two weeks or three weeks? This is all a matter of anxiety for me because although I paid nearly $3000 to the landlords 2-3 weeks ago, I now owe out about another $7000, or close to $9000 as of today, this being first of March. I am barely keeping the lights on with payments for accrued bills to ConEd…going to be like $200 or more per month for a long time to come. Which would not be a problem if I had the SS benefits owed; they could see me through the year, with or without employment. I don’t know what’s happening with the VCF/WTC stuff.

I’ve spoken to the Bern lawyers and Marrlrria (Maria the chiquita at Bellevue) but they’re waiting for more information from Sloan-Kettering. I don’t know what additional information they can get. I do know I qualify for the award, same way Anthony did, even though he was already HIV+ with KS at 9/11 but it kept getting worse afterwards. If the Bern outfit and Bellevue say now, I’m signing up with the other lawyers I’ve contacted.

I stopped watching Fox News a month or so ago because I couldn’t see paying $50 p.m. for Sling just to see Fox News, which I didn’t like that much anyway. Very milksop, you know, and has been ever since Tucker left. Instead I’ve been watching OAN, which costs just a few dollars and is really lively, spicy, with little of that anodyne filler that mars Fox News. No widemouthed negress running the show at midday. Matt Gaetz is a live wire and always fun, the strange Chanel Rion (anorexic Eurasian? can’t tell) is enjoyable, as is this Dan Ball, a California boy who’d be a star of Fox News if it weren’t for FN’s deplorable devotion to racial diversity. I mean, really, the number of Jews (Levin), half-Jews (Gutfeld, Watters), and negroes (the Falkner negress) is out of hand, and those are just the few who come to mind.

The newswires these days have mainly been filled with visits to the oval office. Big huzzahs for Emanuel Macron and Keith Starmer, last week and this. Very warm and fuzzy meetings in yellow armchairs. Then yesterday Zelenskyy came in and it was a hilarious meltdown. He arrives in his Action Man commando wear and after a half-hour of serious chat it all turns into a series of colossal missteps and provocations, with Z suggesting America won’t feel so safe when someone starts lobbing nuclear warheads (“you have nice ocean but you will feel that in the future”). He’s really there begging for more money and he goes on and threatens us with bad karma if we don’t give in to his demands. Vance is there like Sonny Corleone, chiming in, making a bad situation worse by being candid, accusing Z of taking people on propaganda tours and giving speeches on behalf of Kamala Harris last fall, and staging this Oval Office meeting with the international broadcast press on hand so Zelenskyy can perform his little actor turns. Nearly every American on social media, every one who is not bought and paid for or utterly mindless, came down on Trump’s side, even though T went off on tangents about Russiagate; Brits, and those speaking for “Europe,” particularly the postage-stamp countries, all pledge eternal support to Zelensky. Katie Hopkins in England is absolutely wonderful, as she usually is, and the serious papers in London are also, on balance, sympathetic to Trump. One exception: Daily Mirror.

So, after 8pm now and headache still there. OAN keeps showing the Oval Office disaster over and over. Trump really got triggered when Z got mildly belligerent.

Gusto payment yesterday but not an awful lot. $150 or less? I had to pay $123 to my Apple Card, $150 to Citi Cash, about $30 to the Moki Apple Card, and I think about $98 (thought they want 3x times that) to Chase Amazon Visa. Next SS in a week and a half, but all that has to go to rent (I think!). Another Gusto, for maybe $260, in 13 days. No nruns for the next month, then a deluge beginning with back-to-backs on first weekend in April, Governors Island.

Much enjoyed my last stint six days ago (Feb 23rd) in Central Park. It was my anniversary nruns race; I began last Feb. on a biting cold night after 3 in the morning, with temps around 20º, feeling 10º or worse, by sunrise. We then had both a 5k and the HM running concurrently. They simplified it this year with merely the HM, which was the larger draw anyway. About 1800 starters. I didn’t have to hang around in the cold much, and it wasn’t all that cold, not after 9am anyway. First couple hours it was in and out of a U-Haul van with the Croatian big blond lady (who also works for NYRR, good to know), and a tall young intelligent black kid, first time there. When he came around the corner at Engineers Gate at 3:35 in the morning, I told him that our job today was the best we could have: clocks and signs. There were 18 or 19 sets of these, with both mile marks and major km markers. The clocks are easy to assemble, one bolt with wingnut through the bottom and its seat on its tripod. The A-frame mile markers (etc.) were much trickier. You have a bolt and a wingnut, again, but also two rubber tubes, separators between front legs, sign, and back legs. Difficult to position. We started on East Drive in the 90s, slowly made our way around past the finish turnoff at 102nd St Transverse. Chad on a Citi electric bike was a big help, scouting out our next “chalk marks” (white spray-paint, actually) for the signs and clocks. He also helped disassemble clocks and signs, making it much easier for us when we were driving around after 12:30, striking the set. The HM loops did not cover the full Park 6 mi loop, they instead cut through the 72nd St Transverse, thus about 5 miles each. Start at 94th St near the El Dorado, then 5 miles around, then another 5 miles, after which you’ve got about 5k to take you to the finish. I finally got home around 2:30. This was about an 11-hr shift. I drank a Resin from the drugstore, I think, fell asleep, woke after 5 and did not go to mass.

The previous weekend, another shift on a Saturday, Similar hours, not so long, and in Prospect Park. My fingertips in gloves were almost instantly frostbitten. (I ordered new gloves via Amazon last week, and they’re really not much better. I think the trick is, really warm gloves are going to be like ski mittens and useless for this kind of work in the cold.) I saw Senka and John last Sunday doing most of their work without any gloves at all, which seemed horrible to me. Fortunately April races won’t be frostbite weather. The Prospect Park race was the last of the three winter 5ks with cute “Frozen” names. Erica ran the finish, and my job was mainly setting up the audio. Half the time we have an audio vendor with professional DJ. This time we had a DJ with the soundboard, as well as the bearded announcer guy, but the DJ was not setting up the speakers. I winged it, not really knowing what I was doing, was generally successful hooking up the 100″ audio cables, AC extensions, and even getting the Honda 2200 generators started. Funny to start these lawnmower engines with frozen hands.

I barely made it to the meet spot, 16th St/PPSW, at Prospect Park at meet time 4:30am that weekend (Feb 15). Planned to catch the F around 3:40am, but F was closed at 57th, so I had to hurry down to Rock Ctr, subway entrance near 49th, dashed down steps, and it was just pulling in as I got down to the platform. After that, I found that it wasn’t going to stop at Prospect Park 15th St (Bartel Pritchard Sq), so I had to pick a stop before or after. I did this once before when it skipped my stop and I had to get off at Church St and find my way up to the SW corner of the park. About a mile, 20-25 minutes. This time I got off on 7th Avenue, went south to 15, turned left, and was somehow astonished to find myself back at Bartel Pritchard Square. I had the strange idea I’d be a block north of 16th St. Instead I had that nearly-half-mile walk down to the meet spot…and I got there just before 4:30. Miracles all around.

I’m coming to the end of that EasyPay card Moki encouraged me to sign up for back in mid-2021. I look saggy and ancient in the picture. I have about 8 dollars left on it, I think, and it expires for good on March 25th. After that, my OMNI card, which has about $5 on it and is set to automatically renew when it drops below $10. Fascinating stuff. I used the EasyPay card to take the A train up to 207th St on Tuesday. I was visiting the Medicaid office up there. A new, clean facility, mainly populated by nogs and demis, but not too packed with them at 4 on a Tuesday afternoon. Was returning them a deferral notice where they wanted pay stubs and a pension award letter. I have no pension award letter, so brought my 1099 from Met Life, showing my $398 pension from last year. Living large. Stopped in one of the nasty drugstores on Broadway, bought some cheap Bayer aspirin and a ginger ale.

I meant to get up to Medicaid midday Tuesday but put it off and when noon came I got a call on the intercom from Carlos. Once again, Christian wanted to visit to check out the noise coming from my radiators, or not coming from my radiators. Lady down below keeps hearing a lot of noise. Christian had been there a few days earlier, Saturday I think, but couldn’t find anything. This time he came with Jamie, and they decided it was the bedroom radiator at fault. So I sat out in the living room for an hour or two while they took that apart and changed the motor, or something. Quiet as a mouse peeing on cotton now. Mamet line, from Heist. Gene Hackman and wife and dog discovered dead this week. No foul play suspected, but it could be suicide. Their bodies were decomposed and “mummified” after what looks like a few weeks.

A while back on eBay I bought some juicer attachments for the Cuisinart Little Pro Plus food processor. Very white, pristine, unused when they came on Tuesday. The big opaque bowl with the shooting slot on the side isn’t really meant to be used for the juicer strainer and coring knobs; that’s for big-load slicing of vegetables. The juicer is supposed to fit over the transparent bowl. That’s what it said in the LPP manual I downloaded and after experimentation I find this to be the case. I went through a bag of 8 little ‘organic’ grapefruit from WF and got not much more than a pint and a half of juice. Those big red juicy grapefruits are the ones best used for juicing, but that seems almost a waste; those grapefruits are for eating, not juicing. Perhaps we could do both.

Thursday, I think it was, I made “tobacco onion rings” with big onions and an inch of oil in the big skillet. Tasted great, but a lot of trouble for a tiny snack.

Oh, you know, I was signed up for the Coogans 5k tomorrow, no intention of going, but I could at least have walked over to the new NYRR offices this afternoon and picked up the bib and t-shirt. Ugh. Have to renew membership shortly. Not too bad, senior rates. For that and for CPTC. You know they’re not doing the cheapo dormant membership anymore. Now it’s $10 per month. Which sounds good. I renewed inadvertently with USATF around New Year’s. Rather proud of that. Haven’t peeled the plastic card from its mailer yet. I have my bc birthdate at USATF currently, and my pp birthdate at NYRR.

Bought Kindle version of Ed Dutton’s Jonathan Bowden book the other day; have barely got into it but it seems very very good. Greg happy to hear I’ll review it. My first appearance in maybe 8 months in C-C.

A bit after 9 on Saturday night now and it seems the headache is about 90% gone. I put tea in the mikeywave an hour ago when planning to go out for a drugstore snack. It must be dreadful, but full of honey.

Drinking bad white wine at the moment. Went through a bottle of the red Rickshaw plonk from Shirley’s last night. The white wine I got for risotto, but to save money I cut down on the mushroom aspect and used Carolina Rice instead of arborio. No shallots, so used red onion. Perfectly edible, but not terribly appetizing. In the Rubbermaid container in the fridge now.

Coming back from Morton Williams this afternoon, I heard the Westminster Chimes go off in my coat pocket. The ringtone. A nice young lady at the other end (Caucasian! articulate!) from the local Social Security office. She was detailed on my appeal of a couple weeks back, noting my missing earnings, 1998-2006. She located them and reassigned them. All but the 1998 ones from SSB/Citi. Actually that was only for the second half of the year, perhaps $30,000, with the other wages through temp agencies. So it’s not a great loss if she couldn’t find them. Anyway it’s totally delightful and unexpected, considering the losses and frauds and scams I’ve been through the past two months. Miss Wills is her name. She was assisted by one Miss Terri Knight.

Wills told me these new earnings for 1999-2006 should begin to appear on my record in a couple of days. This I just cannot believe. What I can believe (and which she didn’t say) is that perhaps in a month or two I’ll have another three or four hundred in my SS monthly benefit. Which would make quite a difference. Retrieving the back benefits with corrected earnings, for 2017 through 2024 (eight years) is as yet unclear. That would be $20,000, conservatively estimated. I may have to fight to get there. “Usually they go back only four years,” she said, regarding paying back benefits. I cannot understand how the newly adjusted earnings would not add considerably to the monthly draw, however. If there’s trouble getting anything owed, I shall probably have to apply for SSI (I think it’s called) to make up the difference.

The need for this is very much on my mind, as there are new duns from the landlord and utilities. A young negro dropped off a DEMAND LETTER from the landlord lawyers two nights ago, Monday. How I dreaded and expected that door buzzer. Fortunately only $9000 is being demanded now, $3000 of which I can take care of in the next few days. Not the $40,000+ I was expecting. And then there’s the termination notice from Con Ed, final date around the 20th, I think. This I can argue with Con Ed about, as I use little electricity. And if worse came to worst, I could pay $1000 or so from the Moki Apple Card. (Have to watch that.) And I could plead the welfare office (HRA) to intervene, or help me pay that electric bill.

That was how I spent one of my days last week. Refiling an HRA request for money for rent. And applying for food stamps (I’m told I just have to go down to the office for my EBT card), and also applying for Medicaid. With Medicaid I can get Medicare Part B. With Medicare Part B I can get additional healthcare coverage. Tuesday last week.

And talking to Verizon, which overcharged me $25 because of the extender I did not ask for or authorize. They sent me a box and label so I can send the extender back to someplace in Coatesville. Monday last week, I believe.

And, most grueling, yelling at Chase jeets and chingchows over the fraud on the Amazon Visa card. They’ve closed that card off, as of January 25. I did not make the $95 payment due on Jan 27. Maybe in a few days. I do not intend to pay them more than would be due without the Hoolio scam. Spoke to them on Monday, and then on Tuesday, while uploading photo’d documents for my HRA filing.

I still will file a police report about Hoolio. Next week. Say they’ve strung me along until the last few weeks, never returned goods or paid me.

(While at Mass this past Sunday, in the Lady Chapel, I saw there were text messages from Eric Montoya, one of the scam artists who tried to get a few hundred out of me so he could send me lots more. I was susceptible to lots of such scams in December.)

And angrily emailing the Bern firm about the MSK files. The Gianfranco guy had the files last October. Didn’t follow up because he read in the early pages of the files that I had been first diagnosed in the year 2000, well before 9/11. Thus neglected to note that I did not get officially diagnosed and treated at MSK until 2003, at which time the plaques had increased considerably. I was reminded to do this because a chiquita named Maria phoned me up from Bellevue. Not actually Bellevue nor yet the Bellevue annex on Lex, but from her home, working remotely. She was asking after my medical files. The top of my head was about to come off. Gianfranco got the files to me, via email, a day or two later, along with his bullshit explanation about how I’d first been diagnosed in 2000.

A measure of good luck occurred to me as I walked home from Morton Williams, with the rice, etc., and peeled off to go to the Chinawoman’s for the cheap (and not particularly tart) sauvignon blanc for the risotto. Here I’d been thinking since awakening, slightly depressed, that it was afternoon of Thursday. Thursday the 5th of February. But the 5th is only Wednesday. I still have Thurs and Fri ahead of me. Maybe I can even cut my hair and make it to the gym. I have the Coogan’s 5k run in a month, but Lord knows I’m not going to do that. I do have a Frozen Bonsai 5k to manage in Prospect Park (I think it is) next weekend for nruns, and then the gawdawful Central Park Half the following weekend. No money via Gusto for me for a long time.

A couple days ago I dropped off some virtually overdue books at the 53rd St Library. Yesterday, to the MM Library to take out the Brad Gooch bio of Flannery O’Connor. Was going to take out another bio of her, but instead took out a nearby bio for the Marquess of Queensberry. I’ve dipped into that at length, not the Flannery. Have to do something on O’C for C-C. Walked down through Rock Plz. It’s coming up on Saturday Night Live’s 50th year, and they have a big black block with a video screen out in the middle of the street, slightly north of 30 Rock.

4 February 2025

Slept almost all day, 7am-6pm. Phone started ringing (iphone: Westminster chimes) mid-afternoon. One a junk call, one Dottie. Dottie wanted to tell me about how she got shrimp at Wegman’s and cooked it differently. Glad I didn’t pick it up because then I’d have to tell her how I’d cooked the whole bag of frozen shrimp from Sunday, and made more cocktail sauce, and it was great.

Got up, out in XPETI boots, bought a MC pot pie and diet tonic water at drug store, 1/2 pt New Amsterdam v at Chinawoman’s. Ate, and then ate muesli later. Curious to see if I could raise a puff from the bowl. Unlocked box, found little bits, lit torch. No, not worth it. Slight headache now. Took aspirin. Arguing with people on Substack, Twitter. Making fun of C. Cohn’s funny brow-bossing and eyebrows.

To sleep again, early a.m. Thurs. I hope. Two days from now, early a.m. Sat, must go to PP. Working at Finish I think. Only a 5k, get there at 4:30. After this, nothing for 3-4 weeks (!), followed by the dreadful CP Half, which is where I came in early last year. I believe it is at that point, 5-6 weeks from now, that I will change gears. Either get some sort of raise/promotion or decide it’s all loathsome and I have some new job now that pays me and saves my bacon.

A little money in WF from Gusto on Fri.

Finishing up the 3rd vol, Audible, of Nigel Hamilton on FDR. Tedious. Don’t need Tehran or Yalta. I’ll find something better and new at NYPL. Today (tomorrow, Thurs), must drop off books at library. Nice walk down there in boots.

Hearings on Pete Hegseth on Tuesday, nothing since.

Another pic from Coliseum Books that I ran across yesterday:

14 January 2025:

I have a dear little pet fish that responds to commands. He darts around in his tank. Maybe he’s a salamander of some sort. Tank is more like a terrarium. I keep the tank in a sunny, glassed-in, porch-like room at the end of a kind of motel suite we are staying at.

Sometimes we go to the big room where they serve meals. Today we see a recent film of the room, where they had a big ball recently. Maybe it is the camera angle, but they all appear to be dwarves or midgets. I go there for the next dinner-dance but walk on my knees so I appear to be cut-off too. I go back to see my pet fish, but he seems to have escaped or been stolen.

With friends I go to the bookstore/news agency in the rear of that ballroom-dining hall. It is a very complete, filled out magazine shop. Altogether it reminds me of Coliseum Books with a magazine shop in the rear. (Actually Coliseum Books had an interesting nook with oddball periodicals, around its NE corner.)

On one of the magazine racks there is a cheap camera for sale in a poly bag. It’s some kind of specialty camera, as I see from an instruction manual. Uses very odd-sized film, but can also accept 35mm. The sample photos shown all seem to be like b/w espionage pictures. “Real Lee Harvey Oswald type photos,” a friend remarks. This shop has sold a lot of rare cameras and films in the past, but doesn’t seem to now.

About 12 January 2025:

With my sister, we are staying at our grandparents’ in Bronxville. They are living no longer, and we think we have perhaps inherited the apartment, except when we step outside it is a house. The concrete doorstep is hollow, and there is some sort of animal there. I poke at it and it hisses back. It sounds like an enormous rattlesnake. I warn my sister and others to stay away. Later the head of a goal protrudes, and we learn it is actually a mother goat and her little kid. They come out and the kid romps around a bit.

First Friday Mass last night, St P’s, rosary, then yielded to temptation after a day of recovery from boo, and got a cheap pint at Shirley’s. She did not recognize me at first because I was wearing that pink and white synthetic scarf from Century 21 in 2015 (Tennessee Morn).

But now time hangs heavy, it is not quite 8 pm and around 3 am or so I must be up and ready myself to walk up to 72nd and Fifth. Only a 5k, and my duties look pretty light: setting up clocks and mile signs, which of course are few. I cannot get my mind engaged in anything. I like that Churchill book, Warlord, and will be going back to it, maybe starting the Paul Kennedy downloaded via E from NYPL. Ideally I’ll catch a few hours of sleep.

Sad and lonely, missing Moki, missing him intensely maybe for the first time in many weeks. Months. I am worried about the future and staring it in the headlamps, mesmerized. Behind in rent I can’t ever catch up on. Need to straighten out SSA. No luck a year ago. All would be well if I had just one normal job. I can’t count on the VCF coming in soon, though I must bother them soon. Also bother Chase Amazon Visa to report that fraud. Next week.

It could well be my mood is from lack of exercise and activity in general. Got some walking in Tuesday, for Prosecco and shrimp and Bellevue, nothing since except going to the subway and to Dottie’s on Wednesday.

And of course the boo can’t have helped.

Partly out of forlorn hope, and also amusement, I followed what seemed to be a big-money-giveaway scam again on Twitter. A negro lottery winner is giving everyone who follows him $30k, just like that. Sending it in cash, FedEx. But, as I suspected, they want a few hundred up front. Just a few hundred, you see. And while I was doing this, I discovered an identical scam going on, supposedly from the same person, on a slightly different Twitter handle. So I followed them both to our destination, where I said I had no money to give them up front, and would they take an IOU, payable from the proceeds of all that cash? I was hoping hard enough so that I was disappointed when both proved to be what they seemed to be. How many scams have I entered now? There was Hoolio (Brillio), and the Mexican in Texas (lost about $5000 and then $35 on those two), and then the fellow calling himself Jason Miller, also giving money away for free but asking $1000 for shipping expense up front. Then the two Generous Daves last night. So that’s five.

I have microwaved a potato. Must eat it.

Busy week. Noonish now, will soon be packing up for Dottie’s. Bringing her the shrimp boil and cocktail sauce I just made. Cleaning shrimp is more laborious than I remembered, not that I’ve done this that much. (These are medium-sized, fresh and wild-caught, from Wegman’s, which Dottie didn’t think had them but believed Whole Foods did—but then WF didn’t when I went there the other day.) Yesterday morning, Tuesday, I took the BMT down to Dottie’s neighborhood to pick up a bottle of Prosecco I’d pre-ordered at Astor, and the shrimp at Wegman’s, if they truly existed, and they did, in abundance. Then walked up to Bellevue where I was scheduled for a pulmonary test, as part of the WTC program. Tall negro had me hold a big hard white plastic nipple between my teeth and inhale then exhale quickly. I got the idea I wasn’t exhaling enough. That was done inside a booth with a ventilator hose leading up to the nipple dingus. Then I sat outside in a chair and tried to “breathe normally,” which gets harder when you are told to do it. Then back to the seat in the booth, with the suck in and blow routine. All in all, far less complicated than I expected for this appointment. Done in less than a half-hour, and we started early. Downstairs in their vast lobby I spoke to a fellow at a MetroHealth table, selling health insurance. I told him how I can’t seem to get any health insurance, because I don’t have Medicare Part B and don’t want to pay for it. I said my husband had Part B and didn’t pay for it. The fellow said people on Medicaid can get Part B without paying. I said I didn’t think my husband had Medicaid. Then, a long walk up First Ave., across 29th St to Third, long wait for a bus, which was the 103. Didn’t stop at 57th St because no one pushed the button, so I got off at 60th. Back home, where Charlie Papp again wished my Happy New Year, though it was New Year’s Eve, because it was his very last day. My favorite concierge. Says he was there 30 years, which isn’t much more than I’ve been here. Carlos will have his morning shift. Could be a lot worse.

I’d made up my mind to get a little sloshed and not go out again after buying a pint at Shirley’s. Which I did, downing half of it in an hour or two. Also took out the boo box and fiddled with the torch, which wouldn’t light. I thought to test the other one, still in its bubble-wrap (when did Moki get this? around 2011?), and once dosed with butane, it worked like the devil. The old one’s sort of clogged. I sat down in the living room, sipped a drink, and smoked little bowls with no unpleasant tremors or other problems. My hands shake a little this morning, though. I saw that while trying to peel the shrimp. Hungover, then, but not too badly…

….Back now after 6:30, on a night that promises to turn quite cold but wasn’t bad on the trips to the subway. Dottie delighted with the shrimp and my sauce, and so was I. Alas, she prepared an enormous repast, plying me with a huge plate of spinach, cooked radiccio, angel hair, a gorgonzola raviolo, a mysterious ragout made of pepperoni, steak, tomato…a dip of mashed red lentils with chips made of sweet potato skins, baked…all followed by a big hunk of pear cobbler. I could only nibble. Lots of red Argentine wine and my Prosecco.

We watched some Chead videos, all made with the Doug Kirby slant, so that he includes what he thinks are the funniest and most outlandish. I was quite thin and fetching when young, with shiny black collar-length hair. (Dottie liked my current hair, leaving the shock of grey at the part and temple, very mature and sophisto. Didn’t think I should go really dark again; it’s been hovering between light and medium brown the past few years.) Dottie brought an HBO rep to the Westbank once, having whetted the rep’s appetite with some sample clips, but on the night in question the live skits and videos were too cerebral, not as broad as the showreel, so no sale there.

Dottie with her ‘tree’ this evening, New Year’s

We talked about the weather. Dottie was alerted to something called a “polar vortex” coming down from Canada, which will turn much of the nation into an icebox in a few days. Not here, I believe, though perhaps a snowstorm after the weekend. Subzero temperatures in the north-middle parts of the country, and unseasonable cold as far south as Miami. (All I can think about with the weather is how miserable it’s going to be with the next nruns 5k on Sunday. A blessedly short shift; I don’t need to show up at CP till 4am. But the last two, one there and one in PP, were impossibly chill, with my hands feeling frostbitten within a half-hour. It appears Grace is away, and Katie will have the Nissan van. There was a thank you, good year, email from Steve L, mentioning again that an old stalwart who’s been helping to manage the races from the beginning, is saying goodbye. He didn’t give the name before, but this time he says Geoff, which rather limits the choices. I really liked him, one of the knowledgeable linchpins, rather roly-poly now but apparently a serious runner 15 years ago. As so many of us were. He’s actually a year younger than I. My mind wanders off to speculating whether my tiny billet could ever turn into a full-time job soon enough for it to matter. Regardless, I must find more work in the next week. Pull out all stops. Do Iggy strips, push out the begging bowl. Beg for a shit job at Home Depot. Even call Regis, who’s always a job but has the most gawdawful useless temp agency I’ve ever seen.)

Also talked about the St. James Monkey Sanctuary, which I visited on a very bitter and sunny Sunday one January in 1982. Dottie kept demanding to know where on Long Island this was. No, nowhere near Montauk, not the Hamptons, but way out there in Suffolk, toward the north shore of the Island. I didn’t explain to her the whole weird personal story of the Kwartas, but did say that I drove out there with Boylan and a photographer whose name I have forgotten. Somehow the subject of monkeys segued into Sea Monkeys, and I told her the Harold von Braunhut story, what I knew of it. All news to her. I read her the Wiki article and sent her the NYT obit. She never had Sea Monkeys, but did have one of his other fabulous notions, the X-Ray Spex. Another revelation to her was the origin of amyl nitrate, which she was introduced to at a club by some Florida gay guys some 40 years ago. They’d dampen a handkerchief and sniff it. She couldn’t remember the name of the potion. I suggested amyl, and she said that was it. Poppers, I explained, prescribed for heart trouble. They were ampules you broke and sniffed when heart spasms were coming on. But the male gay world took them up back in the day and soon they didn’t need the poppers per se, they got the breathable fluid and put it into little canisters or inhaland pendants. Only it’s illegal for normal sale for many years, so what you had (I said) was probably butyl nitrate, like the little bottles of RUSH, which she remembered seeing around head shops. The background of poppers was all news to her. Googling some medical papers, we found the stuff was invented about 1850, and became popular in the gay club world around 1970, when it was thought to enhance the intensity of orgasm, particularly in receptive anal intercourse. A few medical papers from the 80s, drawing a possible connection between amyl and Kaposi’s sarcoma cases (a paper from ’82), or HIV infection (later papers). I told her I first had amyl from an inhaler in 1971, and it always made me cough. Of course I couldn’t tell her the details of this. She was amazed not only that it had been around so long, but that already common more than 10 years before she tried it, or tried a substitute at least.

I’m looking at the Barry Landau book, big and red, no DJ, on the storage trunk in front of me in the nook. Grimm brought it by a few nights ago…was it Sunday? Gift-wrapped. It’s really superbly done. I’d only briefly thumbed through it before, probably at Borders or some such. I fear this will end up at the Strand or the Jap place. Another Christmas gift he brought me, not entirely new, was this strange glass device, a sort of vaporizer with a sealed glycerin filter you’re supposed to freeze so your smokables will be tasty and cool. I can’t test it out because it needs a USB-C Mini cable, such as supposedly came in the box but got lost when G unpacked it. This is the second time he’s come by. He was here before Christmas. (Calendar check: a week before; it was December 18th.) We worked out the purchase of some boo, 3 balls evenly divided, my share of which I am smoking again as I sit here. It must be weak stuff, doesn’t fire me up to mania or take me to the brink of anxious paranoia (which would probably really indicate poisonous adulterants; I’ve seen this, many years past, with bad coke). G now living way out in Brooklyn, Brownsville, approximately, with a negroid partner. Speaking of which, he tells me that Tony, Tony with the funny hats, is long gone with HIV.

G seems stable and sane, and I believe his story that it was Moki who was the aggressor on the night of the knives, February 2013. He was quite overbearing. Out of loyalty to Moki, and anger at G for having cut him up so badly, I hadn’t seen him since 2013, certainly would not have invited him over here within the first year of Moki’s death.

For a little while there, after G’s first visit, I was smoking boo every day. Maybe three days straight. And I was beginning to hallucinate. Moki Mouse was moving, breathing. Creatures under the bedclothes. Voices at the door. Someone in the bathroom. I was actually lying in bed for much of this, hitting a few bowls a day though I knew it was very bad for me, and kept me from working. The stuff focuses your mind on nothingness. I had some really good insights on Orwell, NEF included, back in 2019 when Moki had a ball from Jeffrey Brando. But writing was almost impossible because I had to redo every sentence 46 times.

Next day after this last G visit, I had to go to Coliseum. I worried a bit about boo residue showing up on my teeth. I had another cleaning, but not a deep cleaning, which I am told I need (new hygienist). And the dentist in attendance, a friendly Chinaman, went on to tell me that I’d need extractions, basically upper back, both sides. My own thought is that the left side can probably wait five years. I was upset at the front desk to discover that Delta is again trying to deny coverage of some trifle, so that I owe another $30 or $50 copay. Back in 2013 I was outraged when they didn’t pay for any of the $4500 periodontal work, because the claim went in during the blank period between my Amex coverage and my continuation policy (was that COBRA or separate?). I did get them to cover half eventually, but felt I’d been sold a bill of goods by Irene, Lupavici the periodontist, their front desk, and Delta.

Jimmy Carter died yesterday. So sweet and sanctimonous, one does not want to be churlish about his failures and his gullibility and vindictiveness when passing judgment on Reagan and most especially Trump. He more or less believed the Russia collusion hoax, because that was the consensus word among the pols he had been talking to. Granted, he was about 95 when he said this in an interview, but absent dementia, I can’t absolve that sort of foolishness. Imagine Herbert Hoover affirming his belief in the Warren Commission Report in 1964.

Trump on the other hand irritates these days because he’s plumping for the H1B visa thing to give support to Elon. Elon misspoke last week and said he was definitely going to use H1B to recruit geniuses from around the world. But mainly H1B is used to bring in grifting mediocrities from India. His comments showed he did not have a ground’s-eye picture of what this explosive issue is all about. Perhaps he knows now, after millions of negative reactions to him and his friend Vivek, and seems to have mellowed his style.

Bill Doyle would say that after Malvern, the four years of college would be a blur. Lord knows my college years were not a blur, they were the most daunting and difficult ones of my life. But to each his own. I think Bill’s experience was probably more typical, and my life crises are more extreme than other people’s because I built up a higher tolerance when young so don’t swerve to escape obvious hazards.

I think of that because I realize my nruns experience has been something of a blur for me. I won’t write down the names of the races here, because I don’t wish to privatize the post or expose it unnecessarily to search engines, but my shifts this year were the following:

February 25th, 2024 Central Park
April 6th, 2024, Gov Is (drizzly, sleet)
April 14th, 2024, Prospect Park
April 23rd, 2024, Franklin Ave area, Bklyn, flyering for Bklyn HM, 1-5 p.m.
April 26th, 2024, Zerospace expo for HM
April 28th, 2024, Bklyn HM
May 11th, 2024, Gov Is
May 12th, 2024, Gov Is
June 18th, 2024, Prospect Park
June 29th, 2024, Gov Is
August 3rd, 2024, Gov Is
August 4th, 2024, Gov Is
August 24th, 2024 Prospect Park HM (raccoon in dumpster)
September 14th, 2024, Gov Is
September 26th, 2024, JC, flyering
September 28th, 2024, JC HM, fluid and marshaling
October 19th, 2024, Prospect Park HM
October 26th, 2024, Gov Is
October 27th, 2024, Gov Is
November 6th, 2024, Warehouse timing
November 16th, 2024, Gov Is
November 17th, 2024, Gov Is
December 7th, 2024, Prospect Park (split for NB)
December 14, 2024, Central Park HM (split at 5k)

I’m counting 24 shifts here, including training and flyering, not counting online meetings and preparation. The pay has been scanty all along, made more so by the fact that there’s scarcely two months’ worth of work here (I say two months rather than one because many of these were like two strenuous workdays). It has been in the front of my mind all along that I should expect some sort of little raise in the next couple of months as I round out my first year. And by that point I should have a real job, a solid source of income elsewhere.

I’m now looking ahead to nearly three weeks of no more grueling loading and unloading, kneeling and wiring. Followed of course by a couple of months of return to labors in the bitter cold, but at least nearby.

Watching A King’s Story (Amazon Prime) and Some Like It Hot (Paramount+ ?) intermittently. Upset gut, from lots of coffee, with some chocolate syrupt, along with Entenmann’s crumbcakes and then some canned chicken noodle soup. Yesterday I had pizza and granola bars and chocolate milk. Just now developing diarrhea, running out of TP.

I got home yesterday, Saturday, around 1 p.m. and slept so soundly, in bouts of a few hours at a time, that when I woke last night around ten I wandered about wondering whether it was Monday morning or Monday night. How did I miss the Sunday news programs?

Finally I got squared away and slept a little more till Sunday (for Sunday it soon was and is) morning.

Worn out from setting up and taking down split mats and decoders in the bitter 20º cold yesterday in Central Park, I rode the subway from 100th St, and it was abysmally slow. An A train running downtown, slower than the slowest C. I was seized by a fit of sneezing, so got off at 86th, thinking maybe I’d catch a bus down Broadway. Instead I walked all the way (good therapy, I think, after the exercise in the cold morning, from 2:28 a.m. to 12 p.m.) but stpped off for a bite at a Two Boots I’d never noticed before, at W 72nd St. I had two huge slices that came to $9.90 but were the best under-$10 lunch I’ll ever have.

No liquor. I am on my 4th day on the wagon. Not entirely intentionally, but no alcohol at all. I may break this fast tonight or tomorrow but it certainly enhanced mt sleep, as no doubt did the half Ceterizine I took yesterday when I finally arrived home.

My station during yesterday’s HM (‘Big Apple’) was the 5km split, very lonely up there, my Lasker Rink, just off McGowan’s Pass. I had to set up the mats and decoder, and improvise how to wire-up the antenna cables. Still don’t think I did it right. Nobody thought to provide a diagram of how to wire these mats. Experienced people seem to start with the furthest-out map and longest coax cable, marked Y #4, starting at the bottom of the grooved inside of the mat, and moving up one channel in these rubber mat grooves, with each mat. This however is illogical and counterintuitive when you start out. Then it makes sense to begin with #1 in the closest mat, which doesn’t shift grooves at all, it simply extends from mat 1 to the decoder. Then #2 shifts up one groove when it moves from mat 2 to mat 1, so it’s just north of cable #1 when it emerges from mat 1 to go to the decoder. So on so forth with mats and cables for 3 and 4. When I am more experienced I may make up a drawing for this.

Angry old man on a bicycle was growling at me as I was de-cabling the mats around 11 a.m. “Is this a New York Road Runners race?” I said, and he went on to grouse about how the U-Haul van on the hill was cramping his style. Well, he should complain to the Park or the City, because they’re taking an awful long time, supposedly rebuilding the clubhouse at Lasker Pool to add more toilets.

Emily K came and spelled me for a half-hour while I went up to take a pee in a portapotty up by the fluids tables near the 102nd Transverse. A relief to see her again in the blue van when she came by to get the disassembled mats etc. I could have taken off then, but went to help her and Aaron take apart and load in the 15k split pieces.

Was talking to Grimm a couple of days ago about boo, but no recent replies from him. I will send him a query shortly. I suggested we do a deal today, but I’m not in any mood or condition for that right now.