[From another popular blog, md/news1: “I did not renew presenttension in time, and my payment has not gone through at this moment. Diary entry here instead, late on Sunday June 20, 2025.”]

Today I saw an old photo of Union Square with a very distressed billboard for Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips. Well where the hell can I get good fish and chips? I found myself resorting to things like Yelp. I was guided to Judge Roy Bean, out the back door of my building. Where Moki and I spent many a lazy afternoon 1998-1999 and maybe beyond. We had a regular barman named Rudy. Lebanese, and I think he was or had been a student at Columbia. Great guy, could talk about anything. I got there today at noon. It was empty. I sat at the bar. Almost the same as the last time I was in there (around 2003 maybe, with Keith, both very drunk, and the place was unaccountably filled with niggers). But the bar is a lot longer now. They broke open the kitchen and made that a seating area.

The $22 fish and chips were okay, served up with malt vinegar, ketchup, tartar, et al. I made notes in Book 88 about the Buckley book. Things left out. Lack of focus in Tanenhaus. The bill was rather more than twice that $22 as I had two beers. Can’t do this again for a long time. Money very short. Rent. Con Ed. Bills.

Cagney, Cuddles, Whorf

Last weekend, on the day when I was not due out in Queens (that would be Saturday) I found myself watching Yankee Doodle Dandy. I had tried to rent it on the Fourth, but there was some Amazon glitch. But the rental was made anyway and it was available when I looked a few days later. Friday, Saturday. My, it was much much longer than I remembered, and I must have been raised on truncated editions on Million Dollar Movie and The Early Show. What I remembered were the Little Johnny Jones numbers (Yankee Doodle Dandy and Give My Regards to Broadway), somebody singing Mary It’s a Grand Old Name, and Forty-five Minutes from Broadway. And then the lights go off in an outside stage, but with the help of headlights they all sing Over There. And of course the story is framed with Cohan meeting an FDR impersonator in the Oval Office (which is upstairs in the WH, not by the Rose Garden in the West Wing, as it had been by FDR’s day), and at the end Cohan dances down the WH stairs. The Sam Harris character I barely remembered, did not remember at all it was played by Richard Whorf.

And I never saw, or blanked out, on the early scenes when young George M. is playing in Peck’s Bad Boy and gets beat up by the neighborhood ruffians. And then talks fresh to Mr. Edward Albee, the theatrical manager, who comes to the theater to lure the Cohans down to Providence. Cuddles Sakall is an early angel when Harris and Cohan go into business. That I did not recall. Or the four Cohans singing I Was Born in Virginia.

That’s the place that’ll win ya.

I unpacked the Waterpik Flosser today and used it three times. I’m very clumsy and uncoordinated and sprayed water all over the place the first two times. My old Waterpik in orthodontia days had a big tub receptacle that held about a pint of water. The handheld device, attached on a siphon, was controlled by a button that turned the squirt on and off. This new one is shaped like a cross between a dildo vibrator and an insecticide can, where the squirt nozzle goes into your mouth but you control the spray from an on/off switch on the side. I will adapt.

Very few hours with HHA this past week, just Jeffrey R and Grimm. Small check next Friday. Big hunk taken out of paycheck this last time however. I think I netted $363 with Anchor and $185 with Gusto nruns. Not good.

Sort of a William Wegman weimaraner mosaic in the 23rd St F train station. I’d just been to Home Depot.

I thought I’d have some hours this weekend, but not so far. (It is Saturday.) I turned down shifts. At the dentist at 3pm Wednesday I got a call from Jennifer seeing if I would work for “Mister Wade.” No, I do not wish to go back to Mr Wade, and fortunately I could say in all honesty I was at an appointment. I thought Haim Zitman the Israeli wheeler-dealer on East 52nd would be in the bag for me today and tomorrow, but no. Lourdes Vasquez is back on my availables, but now looking for someone in the afternoon. I should much prefer that. I fear Jennifer L. the samovar is going to return to my list soon. Had her two Sundays ago. The apt was comfortable enough but the hours passed slowly. And the tragedy and amputations were too much to bear. If I were to see her again I’d tell her she needs to start a podcast, not about her disability, but about other things in addition. Then she’ll get her bionic hands quicker. The sad story began a few years ago, when she’d been living with MS for a while, then was found passed out and comatose by a friend. Off to the hospital where they saved her life by taking off her hands and toes (gangrene) and giving her a colostomy. Septic shock or toxic shock, I don’t know. As she came too she found she couldn’t use her mobile phone or a TV remote because (she thought) her hands had been all bound up in a kind of tight sock bandage. So she asked the nurse if she could rebandage her hands so she could at least have a lobster claw, with her thumb separate. And the nurse goes, “Oh my dear…”

Walking home from Jennifer L’s on Sunday July 6th: the Jurassic dinosaur at 30 Rock is being disassembled.

Curious thing is that so far the only white people on this HHA patient roster have been Jews. Haim, Jennifer, and the egregious Esther Levy, in an overcrowded and hot, stuff apartment on West 71st (last Friday).

Oh, but I’m forgetting the reliables, Grimm and Jeffrey. Only Grimm is not so reliable. He is punctuality-challenged. Misses the times when he’s supposed to come visit me (I said 1:30 in the afternoon back in March, and he wakes at 1:20 pm and messages me: I overslept) or meet somewhere else (he was supposed to go to the Dental Oral surgeon at 164th and Broadway last week, and I was meeting him there, but he stood me up—vile place anyhow). Jeffrey I see each morning for an hour, generally walk with him to Bellevue and back, and that takes up the hour and gives us both some exercise. Grimm I’ll see briefly if he’s there…this last time I sat with him in his sitting room where he watches his new flatscreen tv through a big mirror he’s placed opposite his chair. He’s quite the scavenger, finding things on the street. A shop-vac that looks to be in mint condition, an incredibly beautiful drafting table. First time I connected with him, three Mondays ago, we walked all the way to Grand Army Plaza (Blkn) then up Vanderbilt in Prospect Heights, had a beer at the vinyl-record bar, then ice cream cones nearby. The entire expedition took less than three hours, and we walked about 8 miles on my watch (dubious).

On the walk back from Haim’s, and Draught 55 last Saturday.

When he did not meet me at the oral surgery place on Wednesday the 9th, I bought a black scrubs top and then had a burger with fries and very good but expensive beer at a new pub across Broadway, called Fort Washington. Now, that scrubs top, size S, looked plenty big in the store (nasty, stuffy, crowded little store, USA Scrubs) but I could barely squeeze into it. So next day, Thursday, I went back and traded it in for a size that fit, which turned out to be an L. Nicely designed garment, but I’m sorry to say it cost $26 and the fabric, some synthetic, is awfully heavy. Fort Washington, the bar, tempted me again, and this time I had just a beer and french fries. Coogan’s closed a few years ago, and this new place seems to have taken up the slack. Its neighborhood notwithstanding, I recommend it.

(Another good place where I spent even more money: Draught 55, near P.J. Clarke’s on East 55th. I was the only customer when I got there around 1:30 in the afternoon last Saturday. Splendid burger and garlic fries. Brilliant new craft beer, high ABV, but something like $9 for 12 oz. The barkeep made it out that they made the drinks small because potent.)

As to Grimm: An alley cat adopted him a couple of weeks back and proved to be pregnant. Three kittens but I haven’t seen them. This past visit, I stopped at Barclay Center to check out the nearby shopping mall. Went into Old Navy where I bought nothing but thought of getting a couple of simple, cheap, v-neck t-shirts as scrubs alternatives; then Best Buy to see if they had an HDMI-VGA adapter. They did but it was $20. That was Monday. Around Wednesday I got around to taking it out of the box and hooking it up to the ThinkPad and old Viewsonic (?) HD monitor, which I’ve relocated to the glass shelves by the living room wall. No sound from the monitor speakers. Must use laptop for sound or attach speakers to the 3.5mm port on the back of the monitor. Only thing I’ve watched on it is OANN for an hour or two. A much better news channel than FoxNews or even Newsmax, but it often annoyingly plays the same ‘inspirational quotes’ house-ad filler over and over.

Thursday, I think it was, I did half the dishes and mopped the kitchen floor. It didn’t look clean enough so I went over it another couple of times with bleach. Looks okay now but I haven’t put the squeegee away.

I’ve been living mainly on A-Sha noodles. The other day I opened a can of mole chili I’d bought at Whole Foods (very expensive) but it wasn’t good at all. I’d had a couple of ears of corn lying around for a few days, getting rather dessicated looking there in the fridge, so ate ’em and they weren’t bad at all. Wednesday I think it was, I went to Whole Foods and managed to run up a total of $60 (EBT card: play money), mainly on two jugs of honey and a Porta frozen which was on sale, something less than $9. Little blueberry yoghurts. A $5 loaf of sourdough which quite possibly I did not pay for. Two cans of skipjack tuna. Four or five peaches, which I haven’t touched. Now, does that add up to $60? Oh wait, some honey hot sauce, which was about $6.

I got a notice from the SNAP office that my food-stamp benefit is being raised $90, from 202 ro 292. I really don’t need that. I need cash to pay the rent. And Con Ed. I need to send in a rent check now, and then again in two weeks. August 6, the next T&L court date, is coming up, and I want to have shown some earnest effort by then. It is too much to hope that SSA will come through with the $25,000 they owe me from the last few years. Two weeks from yesterday brings me another Gusto check (nruns gave me a 10% raise, for the princely wage of $25, effective with the last shift on July 13 in Queens) and a not-too-big Anchor check, and the $165 benefit from Aetna, and the not-yet-recomputed SS deposit of $1481 (deposited by August 1, as the normal date of Aug 3 is a Sunday).

Minor tragedy from Dottieland. She ordered a $300 Sony Trinitron, maybe 1994 vintage, on eBay. The FedEx guy dropped it and the picture tube came loose. I’d like to take a look at it and see if I could fix it, but I have much too much going on. I told her to cash in the insurance.

I had a minor tragedy myself on Monday evening in that thunderstorm. For fun I was listening to the old iPod 3rd Gen, 4-button one, on the subway. In the drawstring spike bag it got water damaged as I was coming down 57th St, diving under scaffoldings and canopies, but getting awfully wet nonetheless. So that’s dead. The apple comes up, but then a low-battery icon. And/or a no-file icon. Bios works, no power, no working storage drive. There is absolutely no reason to keep this, except maybe decoration. The beat-up old iPod Touch 4 that I bought back in 2021 to replace the Tuppy one Michael gave me for my birthday in 2010, but which I lost in the snowdrifts of West 18th St in early 2014…that has some real utility.

The Coliseum appt on Wednesday, July 16, was pleasant enough. Nice black lady named Maleka, friendly and intelligent. Consult and probe and bitewing. I’ll go back for debridement in a few weeks. In the meantime I ordered a new Waterpik flosser, which ought to have arrived by last night.

Spent most of yesterday flat on my back, rewriting an old Substack draft, “Before the Internet, Part I,” which grew into both Parts I and II. Haven’t spread them around on socmed, they’re not that good. Long though. I have been putting off writing the Buckley book bit for CC. “How Billy Buckley Broke Bad,” is my proposed title. I begin by noting that Carto is not in there, neither is GLR. Relations with Joe Sobran are barely touched on, though we get the tantalizing information that Joe was fired at the urging (behest?) of Norman Podhoretz. Tanenhaus wrote the book over about 15 years, and it looks it, 1000 pages long, and rather spotty and disjointed, with the last 25 years of WFB’s life compressed into a couple of chapters. He was chosen to write by the book by WFB’s son Christopher, largely because Tanenhaus had done a magnificent job with the bio of WFB’s friend and idol Whittaker Chambers. But the Chambers biographer had a clear focus: the tumultuous tragicomic Bildung of Chambers’s own life story, climaxing serially in his break with the Red underground, his astonishing success at Time-Life, and then the Hiss Case, the greatest political watershed of mid-century America. By the time Tanenhaus took over the Chambers story, the Hiss Case was no longer murky and controversial. Alger Hiss himself was still alive (he died in 1996, around the time time book was published) and preposterously proclaiming his innocence, but of his guilt there was no doubt: it was settled history. There’s no such clarity in the plot-arc of the Buckley story, and Tanenhaus is too overwhelmed by his own research, and perhaps his own cultural limitations, to weave the tale of the Buckleys into a sustainable and coherent narrative. We’re given the maudlin story, stage by stage, of the decline and fall of the House of Buckley, blossoming gorgeously in the 50s and 60s and 70s, after a luxurious, indulgent, horsey springtime in Europe and the Buckleys’ two vast estates in Connecticut and South Carolina, then their fortunes slowly collapsing with fraud suits against the family oil company, the eldest son drinking himself the death, other family members and in-laws growing dotty and disabled, the two estates finally being broken up and sold, the goods all auctioned off, in the early 1980s. The youngest Buckley daughter, Carol, marries a Jew (for a little while anyway; and Mr. Raymond Learsy was a thoroughly presentable author and commodities investor); Christopher, WFB’s only son, abandons the Catholic Church; Pat Buckley, a lifelong cigarette smoker and convivial imbiber, dies in 2007 from a series of illnesses, followed the next year by WFB himself, of emphysema (cigar smoking, and inhaling) and diabetes, which he developed after a weight gain late in life. But while these tragedies were slowly mounting up, and the family fortune dribbled away, Bill was becoming more and more successful, maintaining a thrice-weekly newspaper column for forty years, and editing NR for most of that time, cranking out nonfiction books (mainly collections of columns and essays), and then finally hitting paydirt with his spy-thriller series. There were one or two setbacks, such as a radio-station empire that never quite paid its way, but generally as money disappeared from the rest of the family, through illness and improvidence, it kept pouring into Bill’s coffers. And he was very generous with this largesse, seeing that his increasingly mad and crippled brother in law Brent Bozell was kept comfortable, and his children’s private-school bills were paid. Tanenhaus credits WFB, and Bozell as well, for spearheading the Conservative revolution that got Goldwater nominated in 1964 (Bozell ghostwrote The Conscience of a Conservative—for $10,000, but then no royalties on all those millions of copies sold, Tanenhaus helpfully informs us), and finally put Ronald Reagan in the White House. That would seem to be the great lifetime achievement of WFB and his kin, and Tanenhaus is neither enough of a sourpuss or right-winger himself to point out that the Reagan years accomplished nothing memorable or lasting. (Find that quote from Roger Devlin.)

Pat and Nan…maybe the early 80s?

I drank nearly every day this past week. Monday I got caught in a huge flooding thunderstorm coming back from Grimm’s. Went home to dry and change. Seriously thought of getting myself some nice gin. Why not gin for a change? Instead I got a tall IPA from the drugstore, one of those 9% ABV deals.

Next night however (7/15) I went to Shirley’s and got a pint of Tanqueray for $21. Won’t do that again. Vodka, 1/2 pt, next evening, and 1 pt the next. Friday 7/18 I looked bloated and unrecognizable when I caught a glimpse of my face while snapping the dog mosaic (above). I’d been to Home Depot for some batteries…and a motion-detector light for the kitchen…baking soda, paper towels. Stopped at Wendy’s for a sausage biscuit and home fries. Good but I initially grabbed the wrong order.

No drinking yesterday except for a small Kirin (I think) from Dainobu, which I drank with some chili shrimp thing I microwaved.

Memories of that gin bottle: I didn’t drink much of it before knocking off to sleep. Then around 1 or 2 in the morning I got up and drank half of what was left, and then after tooling around online for another hour, I drank the other half. Knocked off again, woke up, in my dreamy half-sleep had a sudden orgasm. Pretty intense. Not July 29, 2025 all-over waves of intensity throughout my torso, just your localized thing, but it was there. Impressive. I roused myself to check the time. It was about 6am. I figured I’d get up after 7. When I woke again the clock said 7:27. Oops. I would have to book it. Forgot my card-belt, couldn’t find my backup OMNY card actually bought a full-fare one from the machine. A few minutes wait for the subway. Didn’t get to Jeffrey’s till after 8. He’d gone to Bellevue. Oops. I won’t do that again.

Hung over from the Tanqueray, I actually missed my 8am meeting with Jeffrey on Wednesday…so I had a crumbcake and energy drink in the Whole Foods cafe at Madison and 28th. Took note of this sign.

Last Sunday’s setup and takedown in Flushing Meadows (a 5k) seemed like one of the longest and most strenuous of my nruns outings, but I did not feel wasted and dead to the world when I got home. I was much taken by Cara Bernstein’s white sneakers, which cost only $22 on Amazon (or the Bezos Bin, as her daughter calls it). From my iPhone I ordered a pair myself. I had a choice of size 10 or 11, and Amazon recommended 11 (based on past purchases). Well they came but they were pink and not white, and great big clodhoppers. So I took them back to the exchange counter at Whole Foods. On Tuesday…or was it Wednesday? Tuesday, I’m pretty sure.

Lots of work putting up and taking down the mesh in Queens. A special sponsor this time.

The previous weekend’s Firecracker 10k on Gov Is was, conversely, very tiring, and I wanted to bail at 11am. Lacerated my right pinky badly opening the door gate at the warehouse. Rode with Craig (b) to the Ferry terminal, set up clocks and H-frame mile markers. Marshaled way over on the west side of the island. Jen H was running, so passed me a couple of times, hand-slap first time. Sun beating down, really needed shade. A funny guy in the medical tent gave me some dressing for the lacerated finger, but it continued to smart through the day. Kept changing the bandages all week. I headed for the Ferry without giving anyone a heads-up. Many hands, they didn’t need me. But the Ferry line was long. I looked for the new installation for Taco Vista, a quarter-mile away. Had two chorizo tacos. Very good, but they cost $13. Then I realized I had to return my radio. Trudged back to the start/finish where whatsisname, Marcos, was happy to direct me to the person taking the radios (Jasmine, who was a skinny thing when I met her 13 months ago and has now blimped up incredibly). Then I got to lug a few things around and help reload a truck for a few minutes, before peeling off again and going to the Ferry, which this time I just missed. Sat on the stone ledge outside the visitor center for 20 minutes, and finally got home by 1pm. Then I slept, I think.

The marshaling spot #7 for the Firecracker 10k, July 5.

New building going up around 9th Avenue and W 54th.

Friday today, Independence Day, 4th of July, First Friday. I’m mostly staying in. Sunny out, probably hot. Maybe a little run or jog in late afternoon, early evening. Must get to Warehouse by 5:15 am tomorrow morning for Gov Is race (blue van, set up clocks, marshaling). That is Saturday, 7 or 8 hours. Then Sunday there’s a 12hr shift on East 44th St, 8-8.

I can’t do much about increasing the nruns hours—just this, and a 5k in Queens a week from Sunday—but I’m going to have to get all the hours I can stand for the HHA business. This past week we had 6.75 (for Grimm; I wasn’t actually there except to check in and check out) plus 9 (3×3 for Lourdes, though I wasn’t there half the time, likewise) plus the most dreadful 5 for the dying nog with no A/C or fan on West 23rd. That is 20.75, or 32.75 if they count Jennifer L on East 44th on Sunday as end of week. Next week I see Grimm (exactly when, we are not sure) and Lourdes and somebody named Jeffrey who goes for methadone early morning.

Woke around 5:30 this morning then suddenly sleepy a couple of hours later. Listened to the end of the Buckley book. Around 8am two or three dreams intruded. I’m riding bike around Yale campus, worried about keeping my balance as I go over curbs and through archways. This story melds into some kind of party or conference where bratty kids tease me, poke me, end up stealing my belongings (maybe not my purse but everything else). I have some important photographs I need to show off. As I’m besieged by the brats and some adults (who believe I am somehow at fault and don’t like kids) I try to call security, but can’t get through. I don’t know how I get out of this, but I’m off to visit Adam Parfrey. Adam has a big new car, maybe an old used car. It’s a Lincoln Continental the size of a bungalow. I’m in it and he’s not, but he left the engine on and the Drive engaged. I have to race to the front of the car (the house) where the dashboard is like a long desk, and brake the vehicle. The brake pedal isn’t where it should be because this is the English model, and the steering wheel and pedals are way over to the right. We are going to smash into a fine terrace of houses, like something in Belgravia or Chelsea. I stop the car a half-second before we roll up onto the curb. But then forget to put it in Park, or use the emergency brake, and when I get up the car rolls on. I stop it again, just in time.

At this point I awaken. Still asleep enough that I cannot be bothered to stop the Audible when the Buckley book ends. The sound itself rolls on…to samples of other audio books. I go through three or four of those in my semi-dreaming condition, till I switch over to one of the Churchill books. The Martin Gilbert one I think.

Only a half-pint of Platinum last night, after three pints in a row previous nights. I just felt so bushed after working in the daytime. Working, and walking an awful lot. I walk to Lourdes’s (50th and 8th) and I walk from the subway to Grimm’s. Last week Grimm and I walked all the way from his nasty hovel in Brownsville (no A/C and the anemic fan soon broke) to Prospect Heights, via Eastern Parkway. With side trips down Vanderbilt to a nice bar specializing in vinyl records, and then ice cream cones nearby, it was a walk of well over six miles. Then this past week I’d get off at Utica Ave. (the penultimate stop before Sutter-Rutland on the 3 train) and stroll from there through a pleasant park that takes you downhill past tennis courts to a really nasty neighborhood under the IRT tracks (they come above ground after Utica), all bedecked with dollar stores and bad bodegas. Then, at Blake and Tapscott, there’s the early 20th century tenement where G lives with his negro ‘husband.’ The apartment is two rooms plus bath and kitchen, altogether maybe 300 sq ft, and Grimm has it packed with bin bags and boxes and bits of furniture and miscellaneous nonsense. He cannot resist taking on more junk. A local cat adopted him, so when he came across the parts of an electric self-cleaning kitty-litter tray (a revolving barrel on a stand that appropriately looks something like a commode), during our long walk back home on Eastern Parkway, he picked up the pieces and carried them for the last mile. He’d also found a multi-trouser hanger out on the pavement while we walked through Crown Heights, and he had me carry that while he bore the kitty commode.

The hovel, in addition to being over-crowded, is stifling. It hits you like a busy basement laundry room in midsummer. Not my laundry room, to be sure; that’s much better. But there’s like a 15-degree difference between the outdoors and inside. It’s an hour travel each way to get out there, counting subway and foot time. Not pleasant when you get there.

I had a taste of another unspeakable and sweltering dwelling the other day (Wednesday) when I was assigned to this 60yo nog named Wade. Acute renal failure with 3x weekly dialysis visits. Incontinence. Wears disposable pull-ups. I actually had to change him, just before I left in the evening. No worse than cleaning up after a sick horse, I suppose. But there is no way I am going back there. I left a note with Anchor that this person needs something close to round-the-clock care or should be in hospice. In any event should have A/C or at the very least a fan. One window, facing out on 23rd, opens, but only about six inches. That’s your ventilation. Mainly I sat by the window and wrote in a little Moleskin diary. The big flatscreen kept playing 1970s-80s sitcoms: Three’s Company, Alice, the Michael J. Fox thing. The apartment is in a new building, a rather utilitarian public-housing for elderly and invalid storage. There is a friend, a noggess a few floors below, who has been taking care of him, perhaps without pay, for some months. She stopped in to check on him about four times during my 2-7 shift.

Stifling. This is the place.

This Jennifer coming up on Sunday better not be a nog.

Looking in the refrigerator at West 23rd I saw a box with a prescription label for morphine. I opened the box and found packets of 5mg tablet, for sublingual use. I stole a sleeve, maybe five or six, and took a tablet. No noticeable buzz. Yesterday I crushed a few and snorted them from one of my Muji folding mirrors. A little more effect. This put me in mind of 2016 when I was snorting Moki’s unused Ritalin (because Danny Antinora told me that was a good idea) through much of the summer, the summer when I was not boozing. I’d been thinking back on this on Wednesday, sitting in that stifling apartment, making notes about William Rusher and William Buckley. I hazarded to guess that Buckley’s polemical style fell off in middle age because he was on Ritalin. He gave some to Chris and Chris gave some to me. But it’s basically speed and can make you go off on tangents when you write (much like what I’ve done earlier this year as I worked my way through Grimm’s boo), or else write and rewrite the same sentence or paragraph over and over.

Bought germicidal Clorox yesterday at the hardware on 9th Avenue. Wanted to wash and bleach the 2014-vintage nruns hat. Also again bleached the white flats with the Kennedy tops. What do you call them? Named after a Nike guy. Jeffrey or Jason something. What do they call them? J-street? J-stop? I only saw them sold on eBay. Samples, I suppose. I had three pairs, still have two.

(An hour or two later:)

It took a while and my mind wandered off, checking letsrun.org and AI bots and making notes in Stuff I Forget. The shoe name was Jarowe and the Nike person (later of NB and Tracksmith) was Josh Rowe. I found him on LinkedIn and shot him a note. I feel much better now. There are no Jarowes for sale at eBay anymore. They were a rare issue even back in the mid-00s.

One of the things I wandered off to was Facebook, where I explain to Paul Wood that my ChatGPT illustration was of Pap and Huck. Then I went on to say that the best illustrations were by Donald McKay in a 1940s edition.

I’ve been seeking a Thomas Hart Benton look for my recent ChatGPT pictures. I remark for the first time that the McKay color plates had a lot of Benton style in them. This may be one that gave Leslie Fiedler ideas:

The Huck-in-drag subplot seems purely gratuitous. He is disguising himself so he can ask some new yokels if there is any news of himself and Pap. But he could call himself George Jackson and do the same thing. The attraction here is costume: it is plausible that no one would ever recognize him in a sunbonnet and a dress, even if an old woman (Mrs. Loftus) guesses that he is a boy.

I was looking for the “Pap Finn Tonight!” piece I wrote a couple of years back. It was at Podsnap’s Own, but I did not pay for domain renewal, so the site was down. I got a free registration from DreamHost, but as of a few minutes ago the domain was still down. Is it now?

Yes it is. So is gallerynews.art, which I did not pay for. Also down is freshkill.net.

I rather look forward to the Gov Is work tomorrow morning. It’s an easy mix of driving and drop-off and marshaling. This Firecracker is a 10k so there will be people still straggling in after 90 minutes. After that, I should have a simple hour gathering up equipment.

Made chili today. No beans. 2 lbs ground beef, Carroll Shelby mix with onions and green onions. Absolutely delicious. Made chicken-carrot-rice soup yesterday from a carcase. More like chicken-rice stew.

Pint of Platinum last night and night before. Something of a spike for me these days. But a good long sleep both nights. We are now into the Home Health Aide part of life, and I have two “shifts” today, 9-12, and 2-7. If I were to do 25 hours per week with Anchor, plus the occasional nruns race, that would be perhaps $2500 for this month. Not great but managing. And write again: just a few hundred.

I don’t know the SS status; have they recomputed? Am I getting my $30k in back benefits? Monthly payment goes in tonight.

I keep listening to the Buckley book over and over (Sam Tanenhaus) and my mind goes back to Bill Rusher. Met him, sort of, at a reception by the Tory Party or POR in 1971 or early 1972. The question came up about the fake Pentagon Papers. Little Bill said, “Well if you know Bill Buckley, you know he wants to play advisor to Presidents and policymakers three days a week, and be Peck’s Bad Boy the rest of the time.” As the publisher of NR, Rusher found the “ex nihilo” forgery of DoD papers the previous summer to be an embarrassment. The problem was that they were too good, too credible, and although hundreds of people were informed it was all a prank to expose the gullibility (or something) of the New York Times in printing the Sheehan/Ellsberg “Pentagon Papers”, no one spilled the beans, and the little prank seemed in bad taste when WFB admitted it.

Tanenhaus “outs” Rusher as being gay someplace in the book. I remember when he retired from NR, it must have been in the late 80s, someone snidely wrote in the letters page of Instauration that it’s noteworthy that Rusher is retiring to San Francisco, as that’s where the swishes go.

I was thinking yesterday (and scribbling notes, while waiting for my 3 hours with Lourdes Vasquez in the old YWCA at 50th and 8th to end) of how WFB’s polemical insight seemed to drop off in the early 70s, and how this may have been due to boredom, increased drinking and other distractions, and mainly the Ritalin. By the mid-70s he was on Ritalin. “For low blood pressure,” Christopher told me. It’s essentially a form of speed and inclines one to go off on wild tangents when one writes, or to write the same tangled sentence over and over, stuffing it with additional ideas without making it more intelligible. “Do you think he’s become more parliamentarian?” Chris asked me once. He somehow thought I was a fan of his father and followed his career closely. I couldn’t really answer because I didn’t know what he meant. Parliamentarian to me meant following Robert’s Rules of Order.

What dos the online dictionary say? Nothing helpful, just what I thought. Following the rules, or else siding against the King in the 1640s.

Paid $255 to ConEd yesterday because they have sent me another termination notice. Back in March or April I agreed to another installment plan, $97 a month, for arrears, but although I’ve paid hundreds since, they say I broke the agreement.

Two weeks back I had that strange “Lousy T-Shirt” 5k in Prospect Park, working amenities under Tom Joyce. This coming Saturday, July 5, I’m riding the blue van from the warehouse and setting up clocks on Gov Is for the 10k Firecracker, then marshaling. I ran a 5k Firecracker there once, ten years ago. Did not do well. One of my very last races as a participant. The following year I quite seriously thought I was in fair shape and about to do the Mini 10k, but of course I didn’t. That was during the AA period, when Lorna Kelly died, I was on the wagon for a full 100 days, and for a while snorted crushed Ritalin off a mirror (because Daniel Antinora suggested it). The following weekend there’s a 5k in Flushing Meadows, the Queens Ice Cream Social.

We got an email from Jen telling us that after the Queens race there would be another “dusk” for the organization, to give all the full-timers and part-timers another break. I don’t recall anything like this last year, and we just had a long break a month or so ago. I suspect the org is overleveraged, spending at least as much in operations as it takes in. These little races with 1000 participants, every couple of weeks, can’t keep the lights on when you have two dozen full-time employees.

I’d half-hoped I could get a full-time job with nruns but now that looks unlikely. I’ll hold my breath with this awful Anchor HHA business until a real job comes along. I hope by summer’s end.

I was interested in Ed Dutton’s latest Substack and podcast last night, but now forget why.

Lourdes again at 9 (it is just after 8 now), then someone called Wade at 2.

That which was lost has been found. New mystery arose in the last few days. An electronic chirp would occasionally sound in the bedroom (which I seldom leave). The sort of chirp when a battery of a mobile phone is running down. The likeliest culprit was the cordless Panasonic on the windowsill. I replaced that with its twin, which no longer works adequately as the display is faded. They both seemed to function well otherwise, at least when charged. And they didn’t chirp.

I moved them out to the living room to eliminate the possibility. The chirping continued. It was coming from the vicinity of Moki’s credenza or tall oaken chest. I searched around. Some old piece of bicycle equipment? Is my FireTV in need of a battery? Anything?

The chirping continued, at :07 and :37 past the hour. It took me almost a day to work that out.

In the bottom drawer of the chest, the one I used for my underwear and hose for years, there was a Container Store plastic bin with old mobile phones and AC converters and Vodafone SIM card packages. Dead soldiers. I moved the bin to get it out of the way.

No chirping in the bedroom then. I checked that bin out in the living room. My Nokia candybar from c. 2007-2012 was lit up, telling me it had no SIM card. Well of course it didn’t. I had this old phone plugged in for months and months for some reason, then when I decided to move some shelving around last month, I unplugged it and put in the bin. (In the back of my mind I thought I might start using it again, as a sort of secret phone for special calls.) But it was still on now, and possibly the chirping culprit. Was it? I took it into the bedroom and looked at the clock and waited. At about 2:36 it chirped. Mystery solved. It should have been the most obvious answer. Why did it take me so long?

One discovery in that bottom drawer was a Buff from c. 2006 that I don’t think I ever wore. No branding beyond the Buff logo. I’d wondered what had become of this.

Just ate a bison burger on sourdough toast buttered with the butter I made the other day. Yesterday morning I went up to Whole Foods to pick up the ground bison and two pounds of coffee I’d ordered the night before. Yes, EBT purchases for pickup. Expensive coffee, bison and venison meat. The Death Wish coffee is seriously caffeinated, like coffee when you first start drinking it at 16. Mild euphoria, then racing thoughts. The Peet coffee is good too. These should last me a couple of weeks.

It is another cold day in June. I am wearing my thin black tights or leggings. It was raining today. I should be active today but am lazing away. That is the trouble with drinking a lot of coffee. Boosts me up then drops me. Wanted to do laundry and/or go to gym. Maybe in a couple of hours.

Missed mass yesterday…really just too fatigued. Napped and woke at a quarter to six in the evening. I’m getting to be like Moki. “Is it morning or evening?”

Reading Buckley book, and too much social media.

Cute AI illo I did last night with ChatGPT:

Tomorrow to Prospect Park, 2-10. Amenities with Tom Joyce. Still sort of pissed off about the whole thing.

At long last a bill arrives from the NYAC for $288, I presume for the lunches and drinks I had there, mainly last year. That is slightly steeper than I would have guessed, given that I have had only about five lunches there (with one or two double vodka martinis, however) in the past 15 months. Could be there are late charges. I shall phone and find out today.

At 11 am today I was scheduled for a phone call with someone called Harrison Tanico on a Zoom call, something about how to find a job. It all sounds fishy. I canceled.

And while looking for that I see a message from Jen, asking me if I can do Amenities Coordinator next Tuesday for that midweek 5k in PP. Okay, I say, I’m so flattered to be second choice for Amenities Coordinator. Purely a political decision on my part, saying yes. I was all set and happy to start jury duty that day, but I didn’t want to sulk just yet. Still…shit, man. I didn’t get any shift after applying for three in the last two postings (for Lousy T-Shirt race and Firecracker setup). But if I say yes to this, maybe I’ll be a Team Player and get some better oppies in the near future.
Tomorrow I go down to W 36th St to get fingerprinted. Some third-party government vendor for Anchor. I believe this is part of the holdup on that job.

Sling I have canceled, or paused again, after today. Another three months. Really a terrible deal. All I ever got from it was Fox News, and Lordy knows it’s not worth $50 for that. Tuned in OAN last night for the first time in weeks. Seeing what they’re saying about the LA riots. OAN is still running the same awful house-add filler with pictures of Mark Twain and Oliver Wendell Holmes and various niggers.

Idea for comic strip: A John Kent-style 2-panel deal called “Our President,” with a very bland and upbeat treatment of Trump.

Rounding up stuff on Orwell for my forthcoming compilation or two. “The Day They Shot Orwell” is real red meat. I should scribble a version on Substack first. I have about a dozen draft pieces there right now.

Was idly wondering last night when it was that I saw Suez, the movie. I was thinking of Suez because I discovered I had Churchill’s The River War on my Audiobooks, never listened to it. I would have guessed 2021, maybe, for watching the film with Tyrone Power and Annabella. No, it was almost exactly 5 years ago, June 2020. That little lull in lockdown when they were still banging the pans at 7 pm and my Census work had not yet begun. I found this while cleaning out some Gmail from the margotdarby acct.

I got to the last 20 minutes of the last Sopranos episode (its best in some ways) and decided to hold off. I think the worry was partly that I’d begin the cycle all over again, like I haven’t enough to do.

To Target yesterday for EBT food. Tuna, black beans, ground beef, frozen french fries. Heavy whipping cream ($3.99) to make butter. Just had a hamburger for breakfast, like Lou Costello.

Last night in a state of real bored idleness, I managed to locate the stories about Prof. La Blanche and the lost balloon that came down in Central Park back in 1894. Wayward aerialists and balloons were a mainstay of the daily press in the 1890s.

I’ve occasionally copied old diaries into private pages of this blog. One section was largely lifted from a section I typed in 20 years ago, on the Color Classic Mystic. Generally my handwritten diaries are numbered alphanumerically, but the ending portion of this section mystified me: I didn’t know where it came from when I copied it into this blog last year. Finally I found that it was in an unnumbered book, the spiral-bound A4 sketchbook I bought in Sydney in early 1999. A matter of some embarrassment to me. I decided to call this book 46A. I note on the bottom of the blog page that it follows, and is followed by:

the pink marbled Michael Roger Press book numbered 46. 

But where is that pink, marbled-cover book? I see it in my mind’s eye. Tan pigskin binding at the spine, Pink and marbled silkscreen-type cover, roughly quarto- or P4-letter-sized. I misplaced it in early 1999 (evidently), then found it late in the year, around the time I moved to Hoboken. In the mental crystal ball I see it at the bottom of a stack of books, its bottom (non-spine) edge turned outward. This was probably last misplaced last year (2024), as I haven’t come across it in the last move of a month ago, but clearly identified it when I copied and expanded the notes on the 1999 diaries. Might it be on the Moki desk? In the Moki area? Where the Color Classic still is? (I have been thinking of moving that to the armoire, the upper shelf, where I can hook it up to the ethernet for occasional light use and research.) *

I think I wrote that I found the Glorious Victory card prints in the black Jil Sander box. No. They, and the Palmerston CDV, are in the Powerhouse Museum shoebox, covered with Australian memorabilia from 1999. The Jil Sander box has greeting cards, mostly used, with correspondence.

The screensaver on FireTV (in which I enrolled last summer, after cutting the cord for the regular FiOS cable TV and cutting Verizon expense by 60%) has started to show a slideshow of some old images and newsclippings. Apparently I had chosen an option of “Daily Memories.” But where were these images coming from? At long last I found yesterday they’re in my Amazon Photos, uploaded there around 2010-2012, and plumb forgotten about since. Linked to my m*****@b****.net account, my master email address and still used for one acct on Amazon.

Some are real finds. Central Park Lagoon, St. Luke’s Hospital, other buildings, 1862 (full-size one from NYPL Digital Collection, above). Captioned photo of W 54th St in 1867 (Rockefeller house and St Luke’s), a panel from George Cruikshank’s The Bottle, some 1850s newsclippings about fugitive slaves in Canada, John Urquhart Andrews stuff.

A Napoleon Sarony comical litho from 1861 Valentine’s Manual:

I have a distinct memory of finding that image online and posting it various places, around June 2011. The townhouse on the left still stands. Sarony was later famous for his photographic portraits of Oscar Wilde, W. T. Sherman, Sarah Bernhardt. His litho draftsmanship was honed while working for Currier & Ives. He must have been their most talented artist, as his composition and detail are much better than most C&I that I’ve seen. In the above and some other lithos, I get the distinct impression he was already getting into photography and using photos as reference material. Some vistas, such as the view from lower Central Park in 1857 or the upper Park in 1865, would not have been reproducible in the technology of the time, but could be copied and improved upon in a lithograph illustration.

1865, Central Park from 110th Street end. From Major & Knapp, but no Sarony as he was away and about to set himself up as photographer. The old fortifications and gatehouse foundation, now covered with weeds and grass, are just left of center. The former Mount St. Vincent’s chapel is at the top of the hill, upper right.

I didn’t recall buying any Wolf Chili from Amazon, but apparently I did last week, as two cans arrived. Heated up one today, the no-beans variety. Looks like dog food, tastes okay. I put in a can of black beans to give it some more substance. A cube of beef bouillon and some Gebhardt’s chili powder.

Slowly finishing up the video lessons and quizzes for the Anchor business.

Called 48th St SSA about applying for SSI. The negress was discouraging. It’s Federal welfare, she tells me, and I’m not going to get any if I have over $1400 per month in SS benefits as it is. But I could make an appointment to apply anyway. I have decided not to. Futile. And it would be zeroed-out by the other money I’ll be getting, from Anchor, nruns, whatever.

Tomorrow to T&L court, 9:30 am. Not looking forward. Yet I am much better off now than I was six weeks ago. I got the SCRIE almost immediately, solved the ERAP problem (landlord dropped the ball, and that is apparently the reason why they wrote off the 2023 rent), have prospects of some bleak work starting. I also have my EBT card, which eases one burden though does not directly affect the rent owed. The SCRIE does affect that; I need to recalculate the amount of rent owed/paid since April 2024, using the $1877.xx rent-freeze rate. Make up a spreadsheet of that, an extra copy of the SCRIE approval, have that for Rebecca and the T&L court tomorrow morning.

Sent in those $1200 and $688 checks to Jeffries Morris a week and a half ago, they haven’t gone through yet. Par for the course.

Card for Jury Duty. I postponed it to June 17, and now that is coming up. Must postpone again, as that is the one and only nruns race this month. Need a good excuse. Or maybe bag nruns instead. Perhaps I’ll be working for Anchor then. The Anchor deal still strikes me as iffy. My plan was to be the carer for Grimm, but he hasn’t entirely sealed the deal yet with his DSS medical contacts. Just asked for a lot of hours of care (ie by me).

To Whole Foods yesterday afternoon. Honey, milk ($4.69 a gal, was $4.09 two weeks ago; has been $3.99 at Wegman’s and TJ’s), two Blake’s pot pies (a “last chance” deal marked down to $3.99), the $4.99 pink grapefruit juice. Very heavy Samsonite bag to carry home. Stopped at Chinawoman’s for a half-pint, as I had $5 in cash with me and dasn’t drink more vodka than that. Went through it in about a half-hour. Found myself fiendishly hungry for ice cream. Cheap cookie-dough ice cream at the drugstore, and nuts.

I got a call from front desk on the intercom phone an hour and a half ago. A workman in the building is installing sensors in the apartments. What sensors? I asked. For gas, I was told. He wanted to come up now. No, I said, I’m leaving now, will be back before three. I find this sort of call on the spur of the moment, very annoying. Is it really impossible to give us a day or two notice on these things? Now, Moki loved having handymen and mechanics and decorators and the super come in all the time. Me, I don’t like it at all. It’s always they’ll be here at 10, then when they don’t show I’m leaving at noon and THEN they show up. And then they have to go away and come back later. That colored kid who installed the caption-phone a couple of weeks ago: he was here precisely on time, was in and out within a half-hour. Really excellent service.

• My mental crystal ball was pretty accurate. It wasn’t on the bookshelves or in the Moki area, but a few feet from me in the bedroom, underneath a big sketch/notebook, bits of mail, a folder marked Weiss & Toynbee, and on top of old issues of the London Review of Books.

1. Not bothering me in the morning to go out and buy him some vodka when the Chinawoman opens.
2. He’s not compulsively inviting the handymen in on some minor errand every other day.
3. I can get his bathroom halfway clean.
4. I can bathe in the shower.
5. I don’t have to kludge together our dual set of earphones with splitter and adapter to listen to audio books at night.
6. His perverse and pesky habits online, which always meant he kept his iMac tilted at an odd angle so than no one could see what he was doing, not from the living room, not from the kitchen.

That is a very short list, about rather minor matters. I still love him very much. I am not mentioning the horrors of his last two months.

I keep remembering that blustery November day when he realized his driver’s license from Mass. had expired, and he had a short window of grace period to switch it to a NYS license. (Not that he’d ever use it.) Mid-November 2021. We thought of joining AAA up past Columbus Circle. That was not going to work. We found our best chance was to go up to the DMV on Fordham Road in the Bronx. We got there far too early before the appointment, had time to kill, and I said let’s explore Arthur Avenue, which we’d just passed. It was a cold day, and he got tired, couldn’t walk well (partly because he had overgrown toenails, as I found), sat down on a bench in a little park there. We found a restaurant that was open post-lunch. I had some wine and he had a beer. He was in good spirits. After a while we trudged back to the DMV. With minimal waiting and queueing he had his license within the next hour. He looked old, and with his shuffling walk, I thought he might be good for two years on the outside. Maybe only one. Well I called that right, but did sorely wish he’d lasted for five more. Or pulled himself back into shape and lasted ten more. Anyway, we walked back to the IRT subway on Fordham Road, rode downtown, almost certainly stopped at the Chinawoman’s for a liter of v.

I believe I have had a pint of v two nights running. Don’t feel too sick today. Not sick at all. What’s the deal there? Different diet. Tunafish and greens yesterday. I got around to making the crabcakes too, and while they were tasty and nutritious, they had no cohesion. The lumps were too big and the vegan mayo wasn’t enough of a binder. Put the remaining four of them, reassembled, into the oven today to cook another 10 minutes and brown. But they fell apart again. Next time, chop up the lumps. I may experiment with cheapo canned crab first.

Twice-cooked crabcakes

I made a discovery about the Chinawoman the other day. I was coming back from the NYPL, MM, with Céline books and odds and ends from the Bryant Park Whole Foods. And Francisco at the Chinawoman’s told me that she (Linda Kim) owns the building there. It’s a good-sized apartment building with lord knows how many units. So she doesn’t really have to make a living at wines and liquors. She can undercut her competitors slightly, who depend on the tourist trade and sometimes have longer hours.

A couple of weeks ago, just before getting my temporary Benefits card from East 16th Street, I had $808 in my EBT account. It started to mount up back in February or March but I was waiting for the card to arrive and couldn’t spend the “food stamps” money until it did. It never did. You have to go talk through Plexiglas in person. But since receiving it I’ve spent over $300, I believe. That includes $101 at Wegman’s yesterday, whither I journeyed in the subway and drizzle of late afternoon because it seems to be the only place you can buy lump crabmeat (apart from the canned type). I thought I was getting a pound for about $10 or less, but the scanner registered $33. Ho well, it’s only play money. I bought stuff I’d never pay real money for. $10 for gourmet vegan mayo (for the crabcakes), $13 for fried chicken and $7 for some beef chili in the “prepared foods” section. One avocado, one lemon, a bunch of scallions. About $5 for a half-pound of gabagool (hot capicola). Coffee, tunafish. I’ve never spent a three-figure sum on groceries before.

This morning I went to Whole Foods and bought two Blake’s chicken pot pies (their last), some Rice Select Arborio Rice, a half-gallon of milk (their cheap gallons were all gone, only the organic milk left, which costs seven or eight dollars), some chicken sausage for stir-fry, and lots more cheap yoghurt. The $4.99 Simply something grapefruit juice, which is a very nice deal when they have it.

So I have perhaps $480 on my EBT account now, and this will be topped up with another $202 in a few days (after the 1st of June) so I don’t have to count food pennies there just yet.

I sold some of my last crypto a few days ago, that was $260 into the USAA account when it cleared the other day. Then that awful Delta Dental billed me for its monthly $50. Must hit the dentist soon, for a cleaning at least.

No bidding on eBay these days. I’m thinking of selling some ephemera soon. Start with a Diego Rivera card print, some vintage art postcards. Clippings and vintage ephemera. Make some postcards with Moki’s color inkjet printer, using the postcard stock we still have, and my Eurostar and Penn Station collection.

I have had to keep a close watch on my last rent checks, however. I sent in a Citi check and a WF check last Friday, and they have not yet gone through. But last night I noticed that part of my account balance at WF was ng, probably because I padded it with a mobile check from USAA, which I made out with some very wet and penetrating purple ink from the Enobling Pen. So I guess it was being rejected as digitally illegible. That was back on Tuesday, I think, two days ago. Seeing as I have to face the landlord lawyers in T&L court next Wednesday, I can’t very well bounce checks at this point. So I went to the WF ATM at Broadway and 56th, took $300 out of the USAA and $200 out of the Global HSBC account, and deposited this cash into the WF checking. So now there is $1404 in there and the $1200 WF check should have no trouble going through. I have about $850 in the Citi account and a $688 check to clear. SS payment hitting the Citi account in four days. No money from Nruns till July. There is a chance I may start my preposterous job as Anchor Healthcare carer person in the coming week. Grimm tells me he’s trying to wangle 40 hours of help.

Thinking of going out for a pint, or a half-point, to go with the grapefruit juice. Perhaps I can scratch together a fake review of Celine’s Londres for C-C. My thought is that I’ll pick a dozen random pages through the book, loosely translate them, and tell the story that way, combining it with whatever aperçus I can get from the TLS and LRB. NYRB? Must look.

Sluggish and napping most of the day. On second mug of tea. I’m almost out of tea. Watching Sopranos again. Season 3. Ralphie just killed Tracee. Noah Tannenbaum just dumped Meadow.