Two shifts at Gov Is over the weekend. Not too wrecked after that. Ferry Terminal and then Amenities on Saturday (10k). Start/Finish under Holleran on Sunday (5k). No particular pain in the neck/left shoulder. It was starting on Saturday but this time I brought along that mysterious tube of Tiger Balm that’s been sitting in the red hanging cosmetic bag for years. And you know, it actually works.

James P., foreground, Steve L. with arm extended, in bg, testing out the tape-break for the 5k on Sunday.

Middlingly cool, sweater weather, on Saturday. Uncomfortably chill, in the 40s on Sunday. I wore the navy sweatshirt with a Buff and the day-glo uniform jacket, with my zip-up Asics fleece running pants.

Oh yes, I shat in my red Tempo running shorts, worn as underwear. And I didn’t have a spare pair with me. I found this out when I went into a portapotty along Liggett Hall to take a wee. Seemed to be the result of the big Dunkin coffee and doughnut I had at 5:30 in the morning.

Went to the liquor store at 56th and 9th yesterday after coming in from Gov Is. Then stopped at Dave’s Hot Chicken and got little fried chicken ‘bites’ and fries. Good stuff, but $12. A very rare indulgence, more out of curiosity than anything else. I’m glad I don’t have a fondness for junk food.

Was out of coffee. Went out to M-W in late morning, after getting coffee cake and coffee at Starbucks early. I got milk and yoghurt, and toilet paper and a can of tomato sauce and box of ziti. Had an idea I’d make mashed rutabagas but there were no rutabagas to be had, not even for ready money.

But forgot the coffee. Turned around in the lobby and went back out, this time to the drugstore.

With the Brooklyn HM the previous weekend and these two shifts and odds and ends, there will be something like 25 hours hitting Gusto a week from this Friday. The pittance I get suggests something like $500 after taxes etc. I will feel almost rich.

Next week I also will have timer/decoder training in Brooklyn, at the warehouse. Perhaps impulsively I bought a used $50 ThinkPad on eBay. My thinking was that a PC machine always comes in handy, and the timer work seems mostly done on a Windows network. The Lenovo ThinkPad has Windows 10, but I think can be upgraded to W11 if need be. I’m hoping it’s not too bruised and used. I see many of these for sale about that price: “fleet” laptops remaindered by corporations. Good new Windows laptops go for $200-$300 so there really isn’t much resale value in these, unlike with Macs.

Other than that, no responsibilities for nruns until Nov 16 & 17, once again a 10k and 5k. I believe there’s a half in Central Park in December, and then not much for a while. I suppose nruns will be figuring out logistics and operations revenue for the upcoming year. They took a gamble by hiring paid (lowly paid and casual, but paid) part-timers early this year to take the place of the volunteer program, which really wasn’t working out. I saw the tail end of that during the Brooklyn Half expo in April, when the enormous Tina showed up and I briefly chatted with her and Tom Joyce in the ZeroSpace waiting room upstairs. Lots of attrition with the volunteers. I only lasted a year or two myself; there was a distinct lack of support for these people who were working for nothing. And so they decided to hire part-timers. But the part-timers too have suffered from attrition and JH has taken more people on in the last few months. I have a foggy notion that if I keep my nose clean and my eyes alert I can be bumped up to something more steady and serious.

Last week I bought a replacement battery for the Garmin 235, which now runs down after a few hours. Enough for a daily run, not that I’m doing that, but not enough for a 10-12 shift with nruns, where I’m doing maybe 5-6 miles of walking.

Today I took the remnants of the Cincinnati chili I made a few days ago, mixed in a can of tomato sauce, and used it to make baked ziti with the bag of shredded cheddar/jack. And it is quite good.

Must write something for Greg. The Charles Stuart thing, I think.

Took a trial sub to New York today, thinking there would be a lot to read. There wasn’t. I did however do a crossword, for the first time in decades, and finished it, in a bit under an hour. Those things are mesmerizing.

Appt with Coliseum Dental on Wednesday. Cleaning. I didn’t want to go back to them, but I’m paying the dental insurance and have not been to NYU in many weeks, because haven’t connected with the periodontal department. So, clean first, and ignore their useless extraction-happy lectures.

Seeing Dottie on Thursday. She’s tried to have me over a few times but we didn’t connect.

Doing a Peachy Keenan novena to Our Lady of Victory, for the (unstated) victory of DJT in the vote next week.

Only by glancing at my gmail list the other day did I discover that my Bellevue WTC appointment was supposed to be on Monday the 21st, not Thursday the 24th. In all this time I hadn’t made it to the gym or lost any weight. So I packed up, with the dryer brush, and set off for TMPL. Around 54th and Broadway I realized I was too fatigued to do anything, and went home. Exactly a one-mile walk.

I slept much of the afternoon and evening, fitfully, waking in the wee hours in the midst of listening to Toland’s The Last 100 days, which is surprisingly good. Little gossipy asides about, eg, Patton sending men on a suicide mission to rescue his son-in-law.

At 7am I took impedimenta out of the bathtub, and showered and shampooed. Good thorough cleaning here, with conditioning from the L’Oreal dye box. Dried hair with towel, gun dryer, and brush dryer. Dressed and set out for the doctor’s at 8am or so, heading across 56th to Fifth, down a few blocks, over to Mad and Park, through GCT and down Lex. 145 E 32nd is on the east side of Lex. The office was nearly empty when I got there. A large fat negro at reception gave me a clipboard of paperwork, then made me fill it in again because I’d filled in spaces he hadn’t marked. Dr. Schiffman turned out to be a squat, kinky-haired woman of 55. Not a trained gerontologist but a pulmonary expert. I didn’t take clothes off or discuss my last period or pregnancy. Very cursory. I did have to give blood later, but that was no nuisance.

Then, up Lexington again to GCT, where I wandered about, looking for improvements. They have a red-and-white brasserie in the old waiting rooms on the 42nd St side. I bought jalapeño jack and gourmet crackers at the cheese shop in Grand Central Market.

Temptation overtook me when I got to 48th St and so I went to Sean’s. Spent over $40 on a huge burger and fries, and a double vodka on the rocks. Because the old guy who came in ordered a double vodka and that sounded like a good idea. I wrote a couple hundred words in the Muji diary (88). Will type them in at bottom.

When I got home and stripped down for a nap, I recalled that I’d stopped at The Travel Agency, a cannabis store, on Fifth, somewhere near the Scribner’s building. I’d bought a tiny bag of chocolate edibles. Opening it now, I found there was only one piece there, shaped like a dark-chocolate mustache. I was disappointed, and gobbled the whole thing down without reflecting that the 10 THC listed was what was contained in a much larger candy bar I bought out in Seattle in 2017.

So in a half-hour or so it hit me. Like a bad trip. Hallucinating with my eyes shut. All the horrible thoughts I’d had on acid or strong hash when I was 18. Cruel caricatures of me before my eyes, mocking me for the pathetic freak I am. Unstoned, little of any of this bothers me now, just as it did not when I was 18.

Cottonmouth. I kept staggering to my feet and filling a cup with water. After doing this two or three times, the dreadful, self-persecuting thoughts began to fade. Yet it must have been a 4-to-6-hour high in all, mostly unpleasant. A relief when early morning came, after some genuine, undisturbed sleep, and I knew the bad trip was now out of my system. I still staggered a bit when getting up. In the course of the next few hours I ate all the cheese and half the crackers I bought yesterday.

I remember going home after first couple months in college, for Thanksgiving, and smoking a little joint in the bedroom with the window open. At that point similar thoughts had flashed upon me, but they were happy and welcome. There was the sudden realization, not for the first time, that the sc was a-comin’, and inevitable.

My blood report from Bellevue shows that my LDL cholesterol is high, but my HDL cholesterol is in the good range. I thought Michael had some anti-cholesterol pills among his stashes, but I’m not seeing them around now. Perhaps I tossed them.

I’m thinking of going down to The Travel Agency and complaining. Bring the pack. I don’t really want more of this stuff. Maybe something indica.

Now I feel free, terribly free and reprieved. It’s Tuesday, and I don’t have to go see Schiffman in two days. Nothing on the books in fact until early Saturday morning, when I work Ferry and Amenities for Gov Is.

From Diary 88, yesterday:

21 OCT 2024

Sean’s Bar for the first time in maybe 6-7 years. Double shot of vodka because I haven’t had booze in a week and this looks like a half-pint in the big double-old-fashioned glass (more like triple-old-fashioned).

Fatigue from yesterday, when I went off to TMPL but turned home again halfway out. Slept pretty well, listening to J Toland’s Last 100 Days. Never listened before. Awful lot of tiring detail about crossing the Rhine. Lately it’s Operation Sunrise and the ineffably incompetent Reischsführer Himmler.

To my complete surprise, my WTC in-person appt at Bellevue was this morning, not the 24th. And I was all prepared to talk about my pregnancies, my chillun, but the subject never came up. I didn’t take my clothes off. Short, fat, rather jolly Dr. Leah Schiffman. They did take blood afterwards.

Lying on bed, one knee propped up against t’other, MacAir on thigh, 10:25 of a Sunday morning. Don’t feel sick (occasional cough) or terribly wrecked after yesterday in Prospect Park (Falling Leaves HM and 5k) but when I get up I stagger a little and think I could sleep a week. I slept most of Friday, then got up around 9 or 10 pm, dawdled a bit before catching the subway at 2am. The F train is on a wonky schedule, skipping stations, and so it skipped Prospect Park – 15th Street. Next stop, Church St. I got off. Had no idea where I was but figured I could walk to the park within 20 minutes, and if not, call an Uber. After waking a mile or so through rather pleasant neighborhoods—a big BP statin and convenience store, like something you’d see maybe on an Interstate out in the sticks—some overhead walkways which reminded me of when I’d go to Bishop Ford H.S. to get bib for the Iona 5k in PP—I found my way to the SW corner of PP, and after that it was just a matter of another 10 or 15 minutes. I was supposed to show for the Finish squad at 3, and actually showed around 3:07. So not too bad. We almost immediately walked up Center Drive and unloaded a truck or two. Boxes of medals. A couple of tents and tables. As with the last 5k/HM deal in PP in August, I was assigned duty of sweeping or raking up the leaves and mulch and other debris from the road. This was the finish for the 5k, followed 150m up the hill by the HM finish. Again I got snoggled into filling the medal racks, after putting up the French barriers for an hour or two (we used about a hundred at the Finish) and then the webbing or gauze or whatever they call it. The mesh. Black on one side with nruns logos and white on the other. You unfurl and lock-tie these 50-foot-long, 3-ft-wide decorations to the barriers, on top and bottom; and then of course have to take them down again at the end, and spend about an hour with a half-dozen other people loading the barriers back onto a couple of trucks. This was only the Finish; down at the double Start area there may have been nearly as many. uStood with Jasmine at the top of the hill, laying 20 HM medals on each hook of the rack. We had 1000 registrants each for the 5K and HM, and had medals for almost exactly those numbers. Very little surplus. An hour or so into the HM I was sent out onto West Drive for crowd control, which I suppose means making sure people are strolling into the finishers’ lane. PP has 3.3 miles in its loop, so end of 3 loops is 10 miles, and anyone who’s run 10 miles knows he’s got another loop to go. Nevertheless there were people in the outer lane (for loops 1,2,3) who were confused and asked if they should get into the Finishers lane. I can see the confusion here; you’ve done three, now you’ll do the final loop; but the Finishers lane only takes you about 1/8th of a mile, to the HM finish mat. Ahead of me, by an H sign pointing to the lane for runners in loops 1,2,3 stood Geoff Vincent, ready with his mocking remarks at these runners who all had GPS watches but didn’t know how far they had run. (My Garmin 235 is losing battery power, conked out after 6 hours and maybe 6-7 miles of mostly walking and standing around.) Geoff used to to live in Brooklyn and ran in PP a lot, he mentioned the Cherry Tree 10-miler. I stood out in West Drive until after noon, then we did the “load out,” putting the tables and tents and barriers back on the trucks. This took us nearly till 2pm. I was so fatigued I had to stop and rest on one of the benches on PP West, before making my way up finally to Bartel Pritchard Square. Fortunately not too long a wait for the F, which was quite crowded though I got a seat. The digital station indicator in the car kept giving the wrong information. The stop was Carroll St when really it was Bergen St; then all the following stations, all the way into Manhattan, were Bergen St. I drank 1 1/2 Celsiuses from the tent. Marco Trevino jokingly told me not to drink the second (he was getting rid of surplus during final load-out around 1:45) because I’d already had one that day. The first time I drank a Celsius it did indeed make me a bit ill. These two had little effect. Except I did have a full bladder by the time I got to the subway. Getting home, the toilet was my first stop. A 35-second pee.

Next weekend, a double-header, though neither nearly as strenuous. A 10k and 5k on Gov Is. That’s maybe 6 hrs each shift, for perhaps 24 hours this month. Almost something like a real paycheck. We’re supposed to wear costumes or something. I’ll wear on of Moki’s flat caps and a black eye-mask and maybe a ratty scarf, and say I’m a burglar.

Sitting here on Sunday morning, watching bits of Downton Abbey, first two episodes (quite good), making coffee, ordering a replacement battery for the Garmin 235. I don’t know if there are instructions anywhere. There doesn’t seem to be a replacement service either.

I was supposed to have gone to the gym every day for the past two weeks, or months; but that illness Oct 1-15 and beyond through that into a cocked hat. Still a bit of coughing, though not a steady hack. On Thursday I have to see Dr Schiffman at Bellevue. I will be cheery and dishonest, and wince when I see what I weigh. Perhaps today through Thursday I wil make it to TMPL. Whatever I do weigh, I suppose I can slough off ten pounds. How to get to the new Bellevue office? Around Lexington and 32nd. Walk to Park, down Park seems the best bet. I’m almost certain MSK has not supplied my records to the lawyers and thus to the WTC VCF medical people.

No booze in the last few days. No desire.

It appears Mr Trump has the inside track to regain the Presidency, but I am far from certain about that. Betting odds are something like 60-40 or better. Those are bets, not votes. He might get swindled again, despite the slight precautions they’ve put up.

Have not paid rent in nearly 2 months. Tomorrow.

There’s a great quasi-underground magazine called Lobster, or The Lobster, or Lobster Magazine, and it has a focus on British spy scandals and conspiracy theorizing. American spies get wrapped up in this too, along with JFK Assassination theories.

One of the most beguiling things about Lobster is that, after 40 years of being just out of the public eye, it has stayed true to its roots and even now has something of the look and feel of a xerographed, hand-stapled, 1980s ‘zine.

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Fiercely ill the last day or two. Terrible hacking cough yesterday morning as I awoke (I awoke several times), temp of 101º in the evening. Didn’t feel too bad, so went out and got a couple books out from LPA and later a pint from Shirley’s. Went through that pint pretty quickly. Was schnockered by the time the VP debate came on. Verdict seems to be that J.D.Vance creamed Timmy the Bully.

Weather very pleasant yesterday. Cool and breezy. Sky clear for the first time in five days. The hurricane in Florida shut down power in the Gulf Coast and caused floods in Asheville NC, while sweeping us with a tail of cold mist. Peak of it came on the weekend.

Saturday I was setting up a fluid station and marshaling a half-marathon in Liberty State Park. In spite of the long hours (2:45am to 2pm) it was really one of the most enjoyable races yet. I had a new headlight (Amazon) and new gripping gloves (HomeDepot) and in spite of the constant drizzle didn’t get too soaked.

I spent much of the long first dead hour marshaling the HM (I was near the 10 mile mark) reading the LRB, a nice juicy review of what looks like a very find Kubrick book. At the LPA yesterday I was mildly surprised to see that there are already a number of Kubrick biographies out. In addition to the recent one I listened to on Audible and this one that was reviewed in the LRB.

What I got from the LPA was the Letters of Cole Porter and a bio of Joan McCracken, The Girl Who Fell Down. The Porter book was over- and ill-used, vile stickiness on the library cover, some of which I wiped off with Zep. Melancholy toward the end, of course, these Porter letters. He’s not writing the letters, even, they’re brief missives typed up by his secretary Margaret or Madeleine Smith, to Sam Stark or Abe Burrows or Irving Berlin or Solly Chaplin or some other Jew. Reason there are so many Jews is that after the double disaster of Aladdin and leg amputation Cole was still being prevailed upon to take a look at this or that property as a potential musical venture. Oddly enough, except for that Aladdin dud on TV and the so-so reception of Out of this World, Cole’s last working decade was his most successful. Kiss Me Kate (show and film), Can-Can (ditto), Silk Stockings (ditto), High Society (film), Les Girls. He was on a roll, and the producers and investors felt they could squeeze a few more hits out of him. After all, he was still in his 60s while Irving Berlin was about 80 and still tinkling away.

In looking at Porter books at the library, I went immediately to the index to see if that Egyptology professor were in there. I had a helluva time thinking of the name. Something for my ‘Stuff I forget’ list. There was a first initial and a Kelly or Kelley in there before the surname, two syllables. Now this is real brain-rot. It took me a good minute to remember: W. Kelly Simpson. Looking in Wikipedia I see he only died in 2017, age 89. I told Ben Bagley the only Yale person I knew who might have known Cole was this Egyptology professor, so he passed it on to a McBrien who came back with the embarrassed admission that he already knew Kelly because he’d “had a gay relationship with him.” I never met Kelly Simpson but Richard Beacham, Harry Scammell, and Nelson all seemed to know him, or know of him. Anyway, McBrien did not put Kelly Simpson in his biography of Cole, which came out about 30 years ago.

Last Thursday, when the rains began, I was in Jersey City putting up posters and flyers for the HM with Nick (Smerglio?) and Elijah something. Nice guys. Nick I run into all the time. Worked with him at the Brooklyn Half Expo in April, then I see him at the Ferry landing and on trucks, and last Wednesday at the warehouse when I dropped by to pick up my gear (a lanyard and badge, a yellow t-shirt, a long-sleeved navy sweatshirt from last year, when they had Adidas sponsorship), and now he’s taping up posters with me along the Newport and waterfront area of JC. And then he’s on a truck again on Saturday at 4am, dropping off tables and cups and ponchos so we can set up the fluid station. FS7 was the most remote of these stations, far behind the parking lot near Ellis Island, with a (remarkably distant) view of the Statue of Liberty (see photo above, from my marshaling station). Nick is moving back to Connecticut so won’t be around much for nruns. After postering in the drizzle in Jersey City, we took the PATH train back from Newport (formerly Pavonia/Newport but they’ve dropped the Pavonia part now). Crowded. Why? Middle of the day? We had to stand. Finally as we rumbled into Christopher St I said, “I can’t take this anymore,” and said goodbye. I had the notion of going up to Myers of Keswick to buy some pork pies. Which I did. Paul B and I had been discussing them recently on Facebook. I took them home and gobbled them down very quickly.

Around two weeks ago I met abject failure in two projects. First was the sourdough thing. That’s just not going to work out for me. I’ll keep jars of starter in the fridge, maybe try later. I made English muffins that were like hard, spongy, oily crumpets. Actually ate a couple with hamburgers. Quite filling. But I threw the others out. A big round loaf didn’t quite work out.

The other failure was with the Sharp Twin Energy Vacuum. It wore out or I destroyed it by mishandling a brush belt, but whatever, the brush does not turn. With great effort I put the last belt in the closet on the axle and brush, but it disintegrated into tar and smoke in a minute. It was the wrong belt. It was the belt for the Dirt Devil. I’d gone through two Sharp belts. So I bought two more belts through eBay, genuine Sharp ones, and put one on (much quicker operation). Easy-peasy. But the brush won’t turn and the belt’s rubber and remaining tar from the bad belt continue to burn and emit black smoke and powerful sell. I don’t think this Sharp is salvageable.

I feel bad about tossing it out because it was an actual  purchase of Moki’s, in July 1999. I found the manual, and the receipt from a place out in Queens. Now, it happens that relations between me and Moki were at a low point just then. I tried to remain chipper and cheerful and he had made up his mind to get rid of me. I had become another Mary Durdines. He was so out of it he wanted to know if I could go back to Laura. Sure, I could have gone back to Laura…6 or 18 months earlier! Moki was troubled, but unnecessarily mean to me. Had he been a blood relative putting me through this, I might have severed ties entirely. But we semi-separated for a couple of years—I’d come by for a day or two at time, and he was particularly difficult in the winter of 1999-2000, and held onto some terrible habits like making drunken calls to me at work to ask about some Excel function or something—and somehow by the time 9/11 had passed, the worst was over.

Remembering those bad times will help me get rid of the Sharp. I’d thought it was the Sharp, not the Dirt Devil, that Moki had retrieved from the trash bay. The Dirt Devil had all or more of its accessories, the Sharp was missing some important ones: the extension tubes and crevice device. If I had those, and the machine wasn’t smoking too much, I could get rid of the brush and belt and use the Sharp like a canister vacuum. But no, too much trouble, and that’s no improvement on the Dirt Devil. I have woozy sentimental attachments to both vacuums. I was focusing very much on them in the short happy months after we came back from Palm Beach in 2021, and I figured out how to clean the hose of one and change the belt on the other. I kept the Sharp in the utility closet and and Dirt Devil over here on the other side of my night table.

Today I bought myself a sandwich at the deli counter at Morton-Williams, identical to what I’d get for Moki and me for years…his with lots of goop (has it really been a year since the last one? I think I recently dreamed of him telling me to ask for extra mayo), mine with none. Gobbled it down in an hour or so. It’s a day’s repast. The last time I got Moki a sandwich, almost certainly last October or maybe early November, he ate little or none of it. After four or five days the bread was stale and I tossed it. I figured I’d buy him a fresh one, no problem. He didn’t ask for another, didn’t eat anything more. Anything at all. He loved it when I got some Starbucks coffee downstairs, after experimenting with the phone app. That was November 6. The night of Nov 6-7 he shat heavily in bed and I never really got it all cleaned up. I imagine I’m still smelling the fecal pong, but there’s also a rather sewagey smell that comes from the bathroom: something to do with the pipes, not us.

A big surprise around mid-September was discovering the Nike Team Nationals shoes had sold, and I was a few days late with shipment. I bundled them up almost immediately.

One of my imagined nemeses, Hamburger Club’s E H F Maxwell, put a desperate long post on her Facebook timeline. I knew she was married to a Chinaman, or perhaps Korean (from her photos) but the marriage turns out to be anything but happy. He’s a sociopath who sold their house, moved away into a $6000 rental which he clearly cannot, is having her evicted as a result, is virtually bankrupt and living on credit; used up all of her assets, including her IRA. She has lived in virtual poverty for ten years, spending nothing on herself. Car was going to be repossessed but someone just totaled it. Her husband’s room is a rubbish dump but by going through piles of junk and wastepaper she’s found a couple thousand in loose cash. People have put up GoFundMe’s for her. Elyse is the diametrical opposite of me politically but she’s well-intentioned in her hopeless shitlibbyness. Also very pretty. Deserves better. Her mother a was chorus girl in some big Broadway shows. Her story reminds me of the pathetic tale of that Kirby in-law, Mary Alice Cooke or whatever, who went through a disastrous divorce 30 years ago in Westport, and her millionaire husband declared bankruptcy, denying her most of the assets from the sale of their house, but hid most of his assets away until the bankruptcy was over. I am toying with the idea of telling her this, but I think she 

Three weeks from tomorrow I see Dr Schiffman at Bellevue for the VCF. Have to get my weight down by then. Tomorrow I should wend my way over to MSK on 3rd Ave and request my own copy of my records.

I’ve been rewatching a lot of Kubrick movies lately. Getting back from the HM four days ago (Saturday) I rented Spartacus on Amazon Prime. Then conked out (vodka) and forgot about it for a day or two until when I attempted to rent it again and there it was waiting for me. In the second half came a brief scene the memory of which has puzzled me for many years (because I’ve seen this so seldom). There’s a dwarf dancing with a dog, when the mob of slaves are having a sort of Woodstock party on the hillside. I made a special point of watching the end of Shrek a few years ago because I thought it was a scene the cartoon party there. No, Spartacus.

Thursday, October 3, 2024

Gore Vidal’s birthday, right. I just discovered I never published yesterday’s entry so I’ll combine these into one.

I have now taken two 3-capsule doses of erythromycin today, and finished off the cough syrup I bought Tuesday night. Went to drug store across the street for some more syrup, and ordered a margherita pizza from Mangia meanwhile. Over $16 with tax. Yikes. Absolutely delicious though, and sustenance of the day, same as the Morton-Williams sandwich was yesterday. (Did I mention one of the sandwich punchcards is almost full, so my next sandwich is ‘free’?)

So many things I left out of my survey since early September. Two weeks before that Jersey City Half Marathon on the 28th, we had another nruns race on Gov Is, the Squirrel Stampede, and I didn’t have much to do at all except help put a tent up (I think) and marshal over by Division Road, a few hundred yards from the halfway point and the finish, and help pick up the delineators afterwards. Oh, had to put up and take down the decorative webbing in the corrals, too (see top pic). Absolutely no more work to do when I took off around noon. I think that was an easy day for me. These nruns days definitely seem less tiring, at any rate.

Did I mention anywhere I got a kitchen scale from Amazon in early September? My continued focus on the sourdough recipes had a lot to do with using that, I think. Now it sits there, unused, on a shelf in the pantry.

Mid-September I got around to buying a photo album on eBay. A rather old, but unopened and unused piece, from maybe 20 years ago, with the then-fashionable hole in the cover for your most favored portrait. Very few sheets in this, all of the top-loading type, but my immediate need was a place to transfer the 2011-2020 pictures from the squarish black album that began in 2001. This didn’t work out well because the posts with the album were short little mothers, couldn’t accommodate more than about ten sheets. So down to Dick Blick for album posts. (I went to Wegman’s near Astor Place as well, bought bacon for some reason, and chunky sea salt. And hamburger meat. I think this is where I made hamburgers with the soggy pucks of crumpets that were supposed to be English muffins.) Around the 20th-21st, the weekend in-between Squirrel Stampede and JC Half Marathon.

So I got the 2011-2020 photo pages into the new album, with the longer posts, but I still have a shitload of pictures I want to add to the album but can’t because I don’t have pages. 12×12 album pages are excessively difficult to find. Fortunately I also acquired some white-ink gel pens for writing on those black album sheets I put in years ago. So I can buy black sheets.

Another items I bought at Dick Blick was a picture frame. Plastic frame but glass front so cost about $11, more than I thought from looking at what I though was the shelf price. I had exactly one picture in mind for it, and that is the enlarged cover of The Wrong Set that is always hanging about. So here it is, looking very lonely.

I watched The Third Man this past weekend (I think it was). Visually superb, but not a good flick in so many ways. Too long, too expressionist. All these oblique camera angles. A gossamer, unlikely plot device that reveals itself at the end. Harry Lime staged his own death but is really hanging out in the Soviet sector because they won’t arrest him there. His presumed crime is obtaining bootleg penicillin from the hospitals and diluting and reselling it. This strikes me as highly unlikely, as does the notion that diluted penicillin would of itself kill one or make you go off your nut. Graham Greene wrote this screenplay as a new screenplay, not adaptation, sketching it out in novella form first; and meant it as an exercise in moral ambiguity. To illustrate ambiguity we have Harry profiting off the deaths of people who were going to die anyway. Other unlikely elements include the subplot of the Czech/Austrian woman with a forged passport, who is worried about being deported back to Czecho. But she was probably born about 1918, so wherever she was born it was still Austria, and it’s not likely the Soviets would make a stink about recovering her. Then you have the Joseph Cotten character, a writer of Western pulps named Holley Martens, whose Zane Grey-type adventures have a following even in England and Austria. The pulp writer is inveigled to lecture at a cultural society in Vienna one evening, introduced to it by a minor character played by none other than Wilfred Hyde-White.

At some point in the past five or ten years ago I had a semi-public blog posting (accessible, but not easily traceable to me) about how Red Lobster’s decline was largely because they attracted too many niggers. In the course of this I quoted some online complaints about the place which I found simply hilarious.*

This comes back to me now because Red Lobster is in the midst of biting the dust because they overreached last year with an all-you-can-eat shrimp special. That at least is the excuse you read in the news. NYTimes piece today. More likely it’s a restaurant theme whose time has come and gone.

My sourdough starter was re-fed today and almost doubled in size. On a sour note, my ciabatta is not working out at all. The dough is too wet and soggy. I will give it a little more time to rise before trying to bake it. I don’t think it’s the fault of the biga. I think it was just too wet to begin with and not whipped up enough.

Money palpitations. The duck is now down to $300, as I put $200 into the Citi account to pay the Citi Cash Card due. I’d taken $100 out a few days ago and $200 back in June to archive my busted MacBook Air drive, which I’d fried around June 8. SS comes in a day, but it’s barely going to see me through, even with the Gusto pittance and whatever from CC because I’m at least a thousand per month short of what I need to get by, and two thousand short of what I need for a measure of comfort. I just am not making enough of an effort. Need to draw and write and push out the begging-bowl.

Went to Whole Foods and bought: parchment paper, milk, 4.99 frozen WF365 bbq chicken pizza. Latter was so-so but certainly edible.

A Substack post about Sixties Sitcoms got some favorable feedback from my tiny audience. Less so, my Ambassador’s Dogsbody opening, which I intended to be dense.

Supposedly the pittance from the sale of the Michigan Kennedy spikes hit my USAA account but I didn’t notice that when I looked earlier. Note to double-check earlier.

Still listening to and enjoying the Kubrick book. A couple of nights ago, slightly under the weather, I decided my 2020 Census earphones were lost for good, and I searched for an alternative. Rigged up the Lightning dongle and the noise-cancellation headphones and they worked fine, but it made for some uncomfortable head-resting on the pillow. Sunday midday I got up and gave another look around. There were the white Census earphones, dangling from the foot of the bed.

I wonder if I should whip the Embreeville memoir into shape. Toys in the Attic, etc. The Snake Lady. I wrote all that when I was in a morbid state of mind, about three months into my time at the Hippodrome in 2010.

Postscript October 4, 2024. The Red Lobster thing from 2017 turned up in one of the m****td***y blogs yesterday. I found it by doing an internet search for Red Lobster and Joe Queenan. I’ve pasted a slightly edited version to this blog, as of October 3.

That ‘Frontier’ sourdough starter that took a week to come alive still seems to be kicking. When I discard half and feed it a cup of flour and water each, it gains an inch in height and bubbles healthily. But it should be doubling in size and is nowhere near that.

Ate pizzas from a mixture of discard and normal flour formula on Friday and Saturday. Also drank about a pt of v each day. Nothing today (Sunday). Was riveted by a YouTube video about making ciabatta yesterday. Terribly complicated, but it starts off with a ‘biga’ pre-fermentation mixture you let grow for a day. I should have done the next step this evening, but had to wash the dishes and cook myself some dirty rice with ground round, most of which I quickly gobbled down.

Off to TMPL for a bare 22 min on C2 this afternoon. Still listening to the Then got very sneezy, felt tired, missed mass. Went to Morton Williams, bought milk, flour, the dirty rice and meat.

A lot of reminiscing about WTC these days on Facebook. I post as both the 2007 MS account and the more recent MB one. A real jerk troll calling himself Joe Leone left insulting remarks to MB postings yesterday. #uareal0ser, that sort of thing. Person has no history, no friends or photos to speak of.

Posted first section of Ambassador’s Dogsbody on Substack last night. Dense, voluminous second section with Harry Scammell and Jerzy Kosinski is still waiting in the hole. I used AI to get substitute pictures of Harry and Jerzy.

Found a memorial picture of Jack Farrell in a little notebook in the 1989 Tour knapsack. I was sitting on the john in the powder room, doing an enema because things were stuck after all the vodka and pizza. Almost immediately I pasted that picture into the album.

Nelson emails me, sends photo of a weekly Gaza protest they do in Belfast ME. I told him he was unrecognizable. We’ve been going back and forth, discussing whether I should send him some of Moki’s Nantucket Red trousers and maybe a shirt or two.

Five years ago Moki and I went out to Sunnyside for that bicycle rack, and then had a nice lunch at a nearby pub while it drizzled a bit outside. I thought it was the Dog and Duck, which I posted here a few months ago and identified as being on the NE corner. Well, in looking at the map I see I was turned around. SW corner, according to the map. Skillman Ave., we were walking north when I felt we were walking south. Overcast day. The Dog and Duck seems long gone now, though when you stroll down the street south of it on Google Map Streetview, a ‘streetery’ hut pops up as you approach the corner, then disappears. The streetery shot is from June 2022, the other is from December 2017. The streetery seems empty, thus the pub was perhaps a lingering casualty of the COVID scare.

I miss Moki.

Birthday. I have nothing planned except maybe a trip to the gym. If I had thought about it more, I would have treated myself to a drink and lunch at the Tap Room, which I have not visited since March or April. Not as momentous a birthday as last year’s, when I was distracted from thoughts of festivities by Moki’s growing weakness (it was not yet obvious that he was not long for this world; he did eat half a hotdog on Labor Day). We weren’t going to do lunch at Gallagher’s; okay. Maybe our anniversary on the 25th? By the time that rolled around I was coming down with an abscess in the gum of Famous Tooth #3, I was arguing with a nutter in New Zealand on Twitter, and Moki had ceased to get up to go to the bathroom. I caught him peeing into the wastebasket and reprimanded him, so that next time, next morning, he staggered to the john, and when he tried to steady himself on the flimsy wire shelving he brought it down on himself. He lay on the floor for an hour and then we struggled, he and I, to get him back in bed—arms, torso, legs finally—the bed in which he would die about 60 days later. I changed bedclothes and put on the new cheap blue comforter which I am lying on now. This was September 26th. Over the next two days we would sign lease renewal forms, my abscess would prove impossibly painful so that I was putting a dry-ice compress on my jaw and going up to Petqua for erythromycin, and I’d get Moki a pair of urine bottles which he never quite used properly.

And yet, at the time and in the coming months I thought of that September as a happy time. We were renewing our lease (though we hadn’t paid rent in a while), and my lawsuit from WF looked as though it would be delayed forever (I still haven’t filed the default-judgment papers at the courthouse; OR my name-change, two things I was preparing last December, once I got the cremation out of the way). I thought the mini Cuisinart had died, so I ordered another one, not as splendid, which turned out to be unnecessary since the Little Pro Plus was perfectly fine after all (and had all its accessories when I looked around, all except some juicer attachment). By error the eBay vendor in Vermont also sent me 64 LED lightbulbs, and didn’t want them back. I found a very nice ‘Montana’ chili recipe. I signed up for MGM+ and started to watch the Philby series with Guy Pearce.

I still spend a lot of time thinking about Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon. Not only did they inhabit Edmund and Carol’s penthouse before E&C bought it, afterwards they lived around here, a block or two away, different abodes. And Bob’s wife number 2, Joan McCracken lived at the Wyoming at West 55th and Eighth Avenue (180 W 55th was her address, a door that no longer exists), while Bob and friend Paddy Chayefsky hung out at the Carnegie Deli, a now-empty storefront a block from here. I was wrong about Giorgio Armani buying the penthouse. Apparently negotiations fell through, or perhaps the co-op board refused it, not wanting an often-absent owner to wield that much extra power in the building. (Edmund was usually president of the board, as largest shareholder, and one of the longest owners.) No, the penthouse was bought by John Legere of T-Mobile, in 2015 I think, and I assume he still has it. I shot him a note on Twitter a week or two ago. I don’t think he responded.

Joan McCracken, recognizably so, 1943.

I’ve listened to the Sam Wasson book on Fosse a couple of times now (from the NYPL), alternated with the Audible Alone book by Michael Korda. Both are rich with detail that was new to me. Korda’s treatment of the Dunkirk Dynamo is much more fully textured than one gets in most history books, which tell the tale mainly as a frame for Churchill’s bold speeches in his honeymoon days as PM.

More recently, I’ve been listening to a book on Stanley Kubrick, on Audible. I’ve successfully resisted looking at bits of the Kubrick oeuvre, other than snippets and criticisms on YouTube.

I drank a pint of Platinum last night and it went down very smoothly. Slight headache in the morning but that’s from cheese. I made two pizzas last night, after letting a mixture of sourdough discard, flour and yeast sit around most of the afternoon. The sourdough-starter project has occupied me for two or three weeks now, and is very frustrating. First I tried to start it all on my own, but the stuff refused to bloom. I bought some California old-tymey pulverized starter for $6 on eBay, and things haven’t done much better. After the last discard yesterday (put into the pizza dough) I fed the starter a little and marked off the line with a Sharpie. It looks to have risen by a half-inch. I’m not going to touch it for the rest of the day.

Time has gotten away from me. I’m broke enough that I’m counting the days till the SS check hits. Other than that I have only a couple thousand here and there, and much owed. I got a check to Jeffries Morris last week. End of August, basically for July. Paid a little to ConEd on Moki’s Apple Card, and paid a little to that and to my own Apple Card last weekend. One happy note of last week was a rare sale of one of my rare pairs of spikes: the Michigan-colorway Kennedys. I got an offer for $50, I countered with $56.50 to cover most of shipping, and the sale went down immediately. So down to the 51st P.O. I went an hour later, the shoe box inside a big padded mailer from Moki’s stationery cabinet; then off to TMPL, I think.

Had a yelling match this week with some of the Bern people. I was asked to fill out a HIPAA form request I submitted in April. I had discussed this a month earlier with Khadija, and now it turns out they’d done nothing at all on requesting my records from MSK.

Semi-napping yesterday, prior to making a TMPL visit (contemplated but not achieved), and listening to the Kubrick book, I had this strange brief dream of being a teenage boy lying in bed and hoping to be fucked in the ass by a man. Is this from a line in Full Metal Jacket? I don’t know. One of those generic thoughts that come out of the sky like a summer squall and disappear just as quickly. When you’re young and these oddball thoughts fly through your dreamy head, you’re inclined to read significance into them. Later on it becomes apparent that they’re just the bad elevator music that anyone can hear.

Wednesday this week—two days ago—I had an appointment at NYU Dental but we didn’t do anything except decide I should get a referral to their periodontal department. I was expecting a deep cleaning, for which I am due, but my teeth and gums have not been acting up lately, so I am not bothered. If I can get perio work covered by insurance, that’s fine with me. I got screwed by Delta back in 2013 and ended up paying thousands out of pocket.

The day I went to the NYU shop I got a text from Coliseum Dental reminding me of a checkup on Sept. 18. I texted back to cancel it. All it would be is a cleaning, but I just don’t want to face those people again. Anyway, I may be down at NYU perio that day or that week.

I’ve been imagining that I had a long shift in Prospect Park last weekend, but checking the calendar I see it was actually the previous Saturday, the 24th. We had a half-marathon with a 5k running inside it. I worked just about every aspect of it except the start and the fluid stations. Handing out medals took up a couple of hours, and then another hour or so hanging them on racks beforehand. Just before the races started, I was alerted that there was a raccoon in a nearby dumpster, which was right near the 5k finish line. I mentioned this to Steve, who thought we should throw a rock at the animal to scare him out. But the raccoon couldn’t get out, not till James P. tipped the dumpster over and the coon—a young animal, I believe—scurried off into the hilly woods south of Center Drive. Prior to that, one of our staffers tried to lure him out by offering the business end of one of our “lollipop” INFO signs.

The shift started at 2am and I hadn’t slept since getting up at 8 or 9 the previous morning. It takes an hour to ride the subway and then walk down to the meeting place south of Bartel-Pritchard, so really I had to be up and around by midnight. Made feeble attempts to relax and sleep after 9pm but it was hopeless.

I expected myself to be really wrecked for the rest of the weekend, and took to bed for the rest of Saturday (home again around 2pm) with some vodka inside me. But after a long nap Saturday afternoon I felt pretty well. Next shift that I know of is the 14th. Something to do with squirrels, another Gov Is race. Next Gusto payment is the day before, so I will be feeling relatively flush by end of week.

My resolution today, this weekend, this month, is to get a paying job, even if only part-time work at Home Depot (which I’d rather like) or Williams-Sonoma (where I at least have history). As I usually fail to land such things, I shall have to aim high, for a substantive position.

I started watching the F/X miniseries Fosse/Verdon last week, and with the Sam Wasson Fosse audiobook (from the NYPL) on my iPhone, I assuredly have Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon on the brain. I was mildly intrigued to see that there were some scenes in the miniseries that take place in a penthouse apartment on CPW that is very much like Edmund and Carol’s, right down to the terrace garden outside with the terracotta pots.

Now I learn through the book that the address depicted is none other than the penthouse at 91 Central Park West, which is to say Bob and Gwen had the apartment before Edmund and Carol.

So the scenes were not only depicting the penthouse, they probably were even shot there. I think Giorgio Armani has bought the place (he already owned the duplex penthouse on the west side of the building), but it was probably easier for the filmmakers to borrow it for a few days than to reconstruct it. After all, how could they reconstruct it, without photos from the right era, and how could they get in the proper backdrop of the Midtown skyline, and moreover why would they even care or bother? I thought Edmund and Carol had had the penthouse since sometime in the 1960s, but perhaps they took it a little later, maybe after Bob and Gwen separated.

Looking through the residences listed for Edmund Blake, I find him at 91 CPW at least by 1976, which is 9 or 10 years before I met him and Carol. Oddly, Michael and I have no photos of them except from obituaries and funerals.

I am trying to avoid writing and attempting to say something new about Leni Riefenstahl. This is difficult.

I have put $100 into the Chase account. This leaves $600 cash in the duck. That’s a magic number. I have not paid rent since June. Must write check (for July?) today. Yesterday evening I was presented with an acknowledgement of lease succession from Jeffries Morris. I do believe I shall have to take the first crap jobs to come my way, at Home Depot or whatever. I’ve said this before: need $1000 minimum over the bare SS etc. to get by, and $2000 to make life navigable. Currently my pin-money extras from C-C and nruns are in the neighborhood of $300-$600.

Bought a pint of Platinum last night. Only a Resin the night before. Platinum only $5.50 at Shirley’s and goes down very smoothly. TMPL on Monday and Tuesday. Today, Wednesday, I shall not go to TMPL but will attempt to run in Park…after getting something done on Leni.

45-min. screen chat re upcoming BICS with nruns on Saturday. This will be one of those 2am–2pm jobs. Meaning I have to sleep Friday afternoon and eve or not at all.

Watched bits of The Blue Angel via archive.org. I was looking up the fat Jew Kurt Gerron (né Gerson) who plays the evil magician. Looks a bit like Capt. Bob. Did not realize bits of it were filmed in English. Much of it is silent, so filming the English-language parts should not have been too onerous. It was common to do feature films in several languages in those days.