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.

Back in early 2017 I had Vistaprint make 50 copies of a 1950s Diego Rivera painting, Glorious Victory. Like a mural, though painted on a vast long canvas that is usually rolled up. Like a political cartoon, though too colorful and heavyhanded in the Rivera way to be haha-funny: about as subtle and ironical as Picasso’s Guernica. It’s a commentary on the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954, which led to the tragic and humiliating exile of Jacobo Arbenz and his highly cultured family. They were not Communists, not quite, but wokey and Left-leaning and easily manipulated by the Reds, and there were indeed Reds in the Arbenz government. The Eisenhower government, with the Dulles brothers leading the way, organized a bloodless coup, which should have been a happy ending, but wasn’t. Guatemala was in thrall to a succession of unstable dictatorships forever after, pretty much.

Two or three years ago I was looking around for the remaining stack of prints. I’d kept most of them, I thought, and certainly didn’t recall throwing them away. Vaguely I thought they were in the black file cabinet, probably at the bottom of the top drawer. I cleaned out that cabinet a year ago and moved the contents elsewhere. Glorious Victory was nowhere to be found. Vaguely I recalled having taken out a print in 2018, with an eye to enclosing it with a letter to Brian P. Burns, who at that point was again speaking to Moki and had begun to pay our rent in quarterly checks. (I had paid the rent for most of the preceding year. Prior to that, Moki’s brother Johnny was paying, but Johnny died in March 2017.) We were being extra-friendly and obsequious to Britain. He sent us books by friends of his, Bill van den Heuvel and Barbara Amiel, copies of his overproduced volumes on his collection of Irish Art (world’s largest private collection; he sold half at Sotheby’s the year before he died), and a framed blow-up photograph of himself with Donald and Melania Trump at Mar-A -Lago around 2016 or 2017. We sent him the oil portrait of his father, which had been decorating our hallway since Michael took it out of storage, and fawning book reviews and letters from me.

In the end I didn’t send a copy of the Rivera painting. It made no sense in the context, and was an odd size. I enclosed my letter with a large, more conventionally shaped greeting card, probably one of those promotional ones fro Departures or Travel + Leisure that I’d rescued from the trash at American Express Publishing.

Reflecting on all that a few days ago, I thought maybe I’d put the stack of prints (about 10″ x 5″, on heavy card stock) in one of the shoeboxes where I saved interesting postcards and some greeting cards and small museum prints that I might use for correspondence. My eye went first to the sturdy black Jil Sander box on the living room floor. I hadn’t looked inside this for literally years, though I’d moved the box around. And there at the bottom, underneath my postcards of the Hayes Well Spring, pictures of Willie Rushton, and assorted greeting cards and 19th century stereoscope views, was the stack of Glorious Victory.

[ERRATUM: The prints and cards were not n the Jil Sander box but in the Powerhouse Museum box. 3 June 2025.]

Another find in the box was something that was mysteriously new to me. In a wax paper envelope there was a carte-de-visite of Lord Palmerston, circa 1862. I don’t recall acquiring this, but I probably bought it impulsively from eBay, about 2012.

I put a bid on two ArtPens on eBay, but lost the bid the other day (Sunday). Good for me. I could not afford the $30 or so, and they merely duplicate the two nib sizes I have.

One outstanding item remains missing: the toenail clippers I bought for Moki in 2022, and used once.

The past two weeks have been very cold in the morning, temperatures in the 40s and 50s with occasional winds. It feels more like March than May. Yesterday I went off to Brooklyn for my “training” at Anchor Health, and wore the quilted black Barbour. I expected a 45-minute journey, but ended up spending over two hours. Not only was it a holiday (Memorial Day), there were extraneous delays on the J and M lines that kept me waiting at the Essex-Delancey station for 45 minutes before giving up, going back uptown to 14th Street, and taking the L to Metropolitan-Lorimer. Then a 20-minute walk south and east to 46 Cook Street. I intended to get there at 9am, arrived after 10. Doing reconnaissance beforehand, I saw there was no straightforward way of getting there. I could take the BMT to Canal, then the J to the Lorimer stop, which was a few short blocks away. Or I could take the F to 14th St. and then the L, but suffer a long a long walk. In the end I did a third option, F to Essex-Delancey, which didn’t work at all.

In the end it didn’t matter, Most of the dozen other attendees were already in place, having filled out their forms on iPads propped up on rubberized easels around our trestle tables. Half were nogs or deminogs, the rest orientals or whites. Some real prole ladies from Staten Island, and a fat but pleasant-looking Russian lady. We gave our IDs and SS cards (or numbers), filled out applications on the iPads, then did a dozen multiple-choice modules with questions about how to deal with difficult patients, and what to do in an emergency (usually: call 911, a doctor, or the RN). Pizza at noon, and meetings with a nurse in a hijab in a tiny room around the corner. She took blood pressure (mine was 128 over 83, not as bad as I’d feared) and drew a vial of blood, asked a few questions. In the afternoon we went downstairs and were shown how to give a bedpan to a dummy, how to wash him, how to get him into a wheelchair.

Two nurses demonstrating this, sister, of an ancestry I could not fathom. Bird-like and diminutive, seemingly oriental but not identifiable. Possibly some of those Filipinas with a lot of Malay in them.

A lot bearded Hasidic Jews, it seems, around there. Do Hasids run the place? I doubt that. Will have to look into it.

Most of the student-carers will probably be assigned to strangers, probably working 35-40 hours a week. Or more. Somebody upstairs had been talking about overtime. A nig girl said you should never book more than 27 hours of overtime because you wouldn’t get any more money, thanks to taxes. That would be 67 hours in a week. I can’t imagine how one would do that, unless one were a young resident. I’m not expecting more than 25-30 hours per week, and that would be entirely with Grimm, who proposed this terrible job to me. I must contact him and let him know it’s gone smoothly so far. It will be a few days before I pass background (criminal) check and get set up on the system.

Scrubs? Yes, Anchor does provide scrubs, if yu want ’em. Those I think would be mostly useful if you’re accompanying someone to the ER or operating room. I foresee mainly taking walks and making him see doctors and dentists.

Some photos on my way back up Lorimer and Union Streets, in south Williamsburg:

May 24th, early morning, and the weather says it’s 49º out, with “feels like” of 43º. A month ago it was getting warm, too warm, and the heat was still on, and I longed for the A/C to start. Well the A/C started last week on the 15th and almost immediately the weather turned cool. Cool and rainy. It rained most of this week and last, with temps in the 50s and now the 40s.

I spent yesterday morning cleaning out my fountain-pen nibs, soaking them in isopropyl. One of my old ArtPens has no barrel. The black-and-red retro fountain pen writes reasonably well with ink cartridge, the Rotring blue-and-black pen not so well. Later yesterday I put a bid on two used ArtPens on eBay. One has an EF nib and one has an M. Just like the two i have now. I find there are no new ArtPens being made, or have been for years. But there are similarly shaped “SmartPens” in different colors, apparently manufactured in the Far East and shipped from Singapore.

I lie on bed and watch The Sopranos. Now at S2 E9. This is the part of the series where Richie Aprile appears, moves in with Janice, after smashing up Beansie Gaeta twice and putting him permanently in a wheelchair. Tony’s crew make Richie fork over the money to build a wheelchair ramp, but that’s taking some time and I don’t think we ever see it. Meadow is applying to college, Carmela gets her nextdoor neighbor Jeannie Cusamano to ask her identical-twin sister (same actress) to write a letter of recommendation to Georgetown. I’m pretty sure that most respectable attorney does not, in spite of Meadow’s shining record and Carm’s ricotta and pineapple pie. Christopher started this season having some Chinese kid take the Series 7 for him, so Chris could get a sinecure in a brokerage office, but now he’s abandoned that plot arc, and is blowing safes and planning other capers. Two of his dumb colleagues from the brokers’ imagine that Richie’s dislike of Christopher means Chris should get hit, so they shoot Chris and now Chris is in ICU. Later on we find Richie’s son Richie Jr is sort of a fag, a competitor in ballroom dancing. In one of these episodes, maybe the next one, we start with Richie Jr and some girl waltzing all over the new house Richie and Janice have taken on in anticipation of their wedding.

Curious thing about watching the series again is that each time it’s as though they’ve created lots more episodes and plot arcs since I last viddied. My first viewing of the series, during its first run, was admittedly spotty, so seeing it again I wasn’t surprised there were thing I missed. Now I’m watching episodes for the third or likely the fourth time, and there are brand new subplots and characters.

Audible booted up again after a long pause. I may have to stifle it again soon. But I was happy to get the Keith McNally book, narrated by Richard E. Grant. His acting career may have floated away, but he’s a damned good narrator. Likewise with Jane Curtain, who marvelously read that Lee Israel one I got from the library, Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Skipping and sleeping through this one, I seem to have missed the business about him having the sexual relationship with Alan Bennett that began when Keith was in his teens.

Brian Patrick McGuinness and the other poor souls on FB keep parroting the story that there was a picture of Congo body bags in amongst the news printouts that President Trump was flashing at the press conference in the White House with President Cyril Bongobongo of South Africa. This one Congo ringer is supposed to cancel all the legitimate stories of militant black politicians urging the genocide of whites in South Africa.

Grimm has a new pinwheel notion of a wage job for me, and I have signed on so far. Seems there is a Medicaid program where I can be his “carer” for 20-40 hours a month. Monday, Memorial Day if you can believe that, I am to go out to darkest Brooklyn for a one-day training session.

Friday the 16th, just over a week ago, I made it down to that E 16th Street DSS office just off Union Square. After waiting around a bit in a molded plastic chair, with a lot of orientals and nogs and deminogs, I was called over to Window 17, where a nice elderly colored woman took my ID and gave me a temporary EBT card. It had $808 in food credits on it, and $21 in cash. The cash can be used for non-food necessities, I think. Or utilities. After this I intended to go to Wegman’s and try to use the card there. Instead I went to the Trader Joe’s on 14th St. Spent a whopping $18 on honey, maple syrup, chicken thighs, and frozen broccoli. Over the next few days I hit Target, Trader Joe’s on Bway and 72nd, and Whole Foods. I spent $180 total, including $16 for a rib steak, and maybe $30 on more honey. It’s been my intention to spend much of this free-food-money on red meat, canned goods, produce, and locally grown honey. I have three bottles of honey from NYS and PA in the cupboard now. Most of the honey you see on grocery shelves, especially the the honey in little honey-bear bottles, is a mélange of stuff from Brazil, Argentina, Canada, maybe America. Fuck that shit.

What none of these places seem to have is Familia Müsli. Does Fairway carry it? That’s another staple that should be stocked up on. Also Wolf’s Chili if we can find it anywhere. (ADDENDUM: You can order the Muesli from Amazon. But not EBT there.)

Yesterday I ate a thin Wagyu steak in the morning, from Wegman’s, and a thick rib steak at night, from Trader Joe’s. Didn’t eat much else yesterday, other than two very nice baked potatoes, one baked at 450º, the other mikeywaved.

Not drinking any real booze lately. Went through that liter of Vesica two weekends ago, and a pint of Platinum a few days later. In the past week, no alcohol at all except a Lagunitas 9% IPA last night and I think a Resin a week ago. The only Resin left at Morton Williams.

Send two checks to Jeffries Morris Inc. yesterday. They should get them for deposit by Tuesday. I have to monitor all my accounts to make sure they can go through. I sent a check for $1200 from the WF acct, and $688 from the Citi acct. This will cover the $1877+ owed for the rollback and freeze of rent by SCRIE, which went through four weeks ago. (During that glorious week when I saw T&L court on Monday, had the law intern Rebecca urge me to file for SCRIE and look into that ERAP application, and met KP at St Luke’s/Mt Sinai up near Columbia on a Tuesday night to exit him safely, then had that little Italian dinner near his flat by Tompkins Square. Then on Wednesday-Saturday worked the Expo for the half marathon, and set up and closed down the Festival in Prospect Park for Sunday. On account of which I netted over $700 in Gusto, with another $300 coming in yesterday. However, I have not worked for nruns in the past two weeks, back-to-back Gov Is races two weekends ago, and will not have anything from them for another month. In fact, I am not booked for any race at all in the future. Nruns is closed for a week and the next race is June 17, with two races in July. Slim pickings there and I will need this Grimm carer job very badly if it comes through.)

I also cashed out most of my remaining crypto yesterday, about $275 to be deposited at USAA when it clears. At present I have about $990 in WF and $1100 in Citi, so I’ll need to do careful transfers by cash and mobile this weekend. For ultra-emergencies, I still have about £800 at HSBC ($1000) to lean on. After that, zilch. Except SS on June 3rd. I can’t see spending that SS check on the rent; at best I’ll send them $1000 to keep them happy and hope the SS adjustment and DSS request comes though later in the month. I have T&L court on the morning of June 4th; I’ll wait for that.

I believe I’m squared away with DSS for emergency $6000 request for the rent. A long tearful screaming I’m-going-to-commit-suicide call to the do-nothing customer service office at SSA HQ on Tuesday told me my recompute was deadlined now for June 20.

After the Union Square outing to DSS and Trader Joe’s a week ago, I found the lease succession letter, the original, a copy of which I had used to get the SCRIE. The original seemed to have gone walkabout but it turned up in a pile of SS envelopes relating the $255 lump-sum payment last month. So I made yet another photocopy and filed the original away with the Jeffries Morris and Belkin correspondence from last year. Another thing I noticed in this pile as that the lump-sum notice said I had declined SSI. Now, I should really have applied for SSI. I could get as much as another $900+ per month. So I filed an app online, but am not sure that they got it.

Must do some CC writing for nickels and dimes. Do a review of Celine’s Londres. Skim through the French. The thing is vast and wobbly. I have it on Kindle.

A 1972 Joseph Losey film with Alain Delon. WHY HAVE I NEVER SEEN THIS?

And while it is still May, get out “The Day They Shot George Orwell.” Begin with the May 1960 stories about Ramon Mercader, alias something else. I came across these while thumbing through the H-T for comic strips. According to the 1960 stories, his name was Jacques Monard. Freed from Mexico City prison, now in Havana, about to sail to Europe with the help of the Czech embassy. (“Frank Jacson” as he presented himself to Trotsky, pretending to be a fan and a comrade, coming with letters of introduction from New York. The murder of Trotsky was amazingly intricate, superbly planned, brilliantly executed. It should be noted that there had been another attempt on Trotsky’s life during Jacson’s series of visits, and yet Jacson/Mercader still got in to see Trotsky because by this time Trotsky and his guards trusted him. When arrested, Jacson revealed his name to be Jacques Monard, from Belgium. Perfectly plausible, as Mercader was raised mostly in France and had connections there in and in Belgium through his Stalinist network.)

Mercader/Monard/Jacson, son of a wealthy Barcelona textile manufacturer and a spoiled pro-Bolshevik mother, found himself back in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, in which his mother was likewise a Red partisan. Mercader pulled the strings for the local NKVD network. One of his lieutenants was a British Jew named David “Crooks”, and Crooks was tasked with with keeping tabs on Eric Blair and his POUM friends and his wife. His gang rounded up Orwell’s friend with the wirerim glasses, what was his name? Bopp? Kopp? Rapp? One of those suggested as the model for O’Brien though of course he was not. He may have slept with Eileen or hit on her while Orwell was away or in hospital.

The other day I took myself down to Union Square again and walked down to Blick’s, which gobbled up the Utrecht art supplies shop in the area. Went mainly to buy some Sculpey. I find there are different levels. Premo, which is supposed to be artist-grade, is harder, costs a little more, bakes a little longer; and the Sculpey III. I bought one black and one white Premo. I wanted the Sculpey to finish the repair on the College Inn mug that fell and smashed into many pieces when I was doing the dishes 2-3 weeks ago. I did not gather up all the pieces, apparently. Many holes in this jigsaw puzzle. First used Gorilla Glue but that expanded into thick mortar when dry, and gave the mug a real jerry-built look. Sculpey liquid and now the Premo has filled in most of the gaps. And then we have the Tate Modern cup from the Picasso/Matisse exhibition in 2002. It lost its handle 20 years ago. Now it has another, a funny, Goudi-looking thing.

I should give them both a wipe. Neither of these will ever be used for coffee or tea, of course. These are pen-and-pencil-holder mugs forever. The 2005 Falmouth Road Race mug, black, worked as a caddy for nearly 20 years and now will be returned to its proper place in the cupboard.

Funny, there were originally two of those. Because Moki got one as well, because I signed him up for it back in 2005 when we were staying at Regina’s, ha ha ha. And then the following year I had another mug, similar, but white I think. They must have been smashed in time, like most of our terracotta mugs. My 2013 Falmouth mug is much nicer, but I am not proud of that race at all.

Before going down to Wegman’s the other day, I got around to returning the two last oustanding books to the library. These have been out since that period in March when I did 3 pieces for CC. One is The Ambassador (Susan Ronald twice tells the fake story about Hyde Park) and a bio of Lawrence Tierney I never opened.

Today I run, or at least walk, for a good 5 or six miles. In CP? Probably. In the 50s all day. Good running weather. And write. And maybe try to draw a little bit, to loosen up the hand for the comics. And perhaps even color the hair. Picked up some Light Brown shade of L’Oreal Excellence last night.

I have been sluggish all week. Meant to get to the Waverly Job Center (DSS office on East 16th) on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, but didn’t go. I want to drop off paper copies of the key documentation I uploaded a week ago and on Monday. Also get my benefits card. It appears I now have $808 in “food stamps” but can’t spend it because no card. And $21 in cash for…for utilities? Didn’t go today, Thursday, because wasted all day after double dose of DXM cough syrup last night. No alcohol withal though. A Resin two nights ago. A full liter of Vesica (!) on Saturday and Sunday, knocking me out after shifts on Governors Island.

Current plan is to get to TMPL at 6 when they open, good workout, shower, dry hair (may have to do that properly at home), then down to East 16th St. Larry Darby from FB is in town with daughter, thought we might meet up Friday or Saturday.

Saturday May 10th it was 5:15am at the warehouse. Leslie L, Senka, and Jess S were already there, looking for the medical iPhone. Couldn’t find it, it wasn’t there. We loaded ice and coolers and cream cheese into the UHaul. Leslie and I drove to the ferry. The tunnel was closed, so she followed the alternate GPS directions over the Brooklyn Bridge. Helped unload some bases and delineators. To the island, still riding the blue van. We set up clocks on H-frames at the mile markers and turnarounds for the 10k. Then, two hours for me marshaling at Division and King, familiar corner by Liggett Hall, at the 6 mile mark near the home stretch. Collect the clocks in the UHaul, transfer to the blue van, pick up delineators near the landing. I was going to ride back to the warehouse with Leslie, but Halloran needed a ride more because he’d parked his car in Brooklyn. So I said, You take it. I rode the ferry back, IRT 1 to Columbus Circle, stopped at Chinawoman’s thinking I might have $5 in my waistband, but I didn’t, so paid $20 for the liter. It was odd waking up around 8pm and realizing that it was back to work again soon and I couldn’t catch any more sleep in the meantime.

5k on Sunday, May 11th

Dressed at 4:30am and off to Columbus Circle with a mug of tea and a slug of vodka inside me. 18 minute wait for the 1, got to South Ferry just before 5:45. Long spell helping to set up corrals at Start/Finish. We got all the French barricades up in about fifteen minutes. I have not been used for my audio or timer-mat expertise lately. I stole off to my marshal position, on far-western side of the island, by 8:30.

CPTC girl who just had enormous sub-19 PR in the 5k, cool-down run after race.

Sometime after 11am, when the trucks were 3/4ths reloaded, most of us were released if we wanted to leave. Taco Vista was giving us free tacos, so I stopped in and had two. All the chafing dishes were empty, but they soon came out with two more. Very good tacos, I must say. I didn’t clock out on Deputy until about noon because it was supposed to be a 5:45 – 12:30 shift and I hate being short-changed on these things. Appreciation here is perilously close to the situation I felt myself in 10 years ago during the Volunteer days. (At the ferry terminal on South St, Erica R noticed my white nruns cap from that era, slightly different from the more recent ones you see around with Adidas branding. None of these white caps have been distributed for a while, and that may have been what caught her eye. I told this one was 2014-vintage. “Did you run, or what?” “Yes, I ran…and I also was a volunteer for a while.”)

Rode back on ferry with Yelena and Mark D and others who’d dined on the back picnic tables at Taco Vista. At Manhattan Y sort-of invited me to go on a long walk with her up to SoHo. Some cosmetic or moisturizer she used to get at Sephora but which Sephora no longer sells, but this place in SoHo does. She’s gained a lot of weight, trying to work it off with jogs and walks. At another time I should have said yes, but I was eager to get home to vodka and bed.

Mark (R) and others on the ferry, noonish on Sunday.

One productive effort this week: last night I decided to start creating a decent workspace for me and the drawing board. WHY did I put the Moki’s terrible Metro Shelving, the world’s worst clutter-catcher, in between a row of three red 2002 bookcases, and a fourth one in the northwest corner? I don’t know. But now I’ve changed that. Whole library wall on the north side, opposite similar thing on south side. Metro over in northwest corner, complete with Natalie Wood mounted on the old melamine desk top. How crowded and compressed things were after Moki filled the place up with extra file cabinets and the Metro and the storage bins.

Before this latest move on May 14.

Ought to bring up the trunk from subbasement. Moki’s clothes, my clothes, all out. I wonder if the drawing board would work better perched on that big anodized-metal trunk?

Anyway the place is still very messy and crowded. I’m not comfortable or secure over at Moki’s desk. To make it my own I’d have to move Moki’s old iMac. Move it where? Move it to the top of the Metro Shelving, and put the turntable on next shelf down, or even one below that. Keyboard on 2nd shelf perhaps. Leave old Pismo there.

A good place to work standing. Also a good place to have the HD monitor, either as monitor or as pseudo-TV, where you could watch Prime or Sling or OAN while working at a desk or drawing board.

Metroshelving moved.

4 red bookcases together.

I have not been able or have wanted to draw. Partly because I haven’t been forced too. I think I good running strip on the web could net me $1000 a month, which would make a big difference. The lizard one, Iggy, has been on my mind for a long time, but I did not have an attractive style in mind. I thought of Midcentury Modern, something like UPA. Going through old Herald-Tribunes I was reminded of Big George! by Virgil Partch. Hated the strip when I was little, but it would be perfect for Iggy. Much more animated and adaptable than a Harry Henigsen style. Virgil was a somewhat gormless-looking kid who started out as a Disney animator. He had what became a UPA sensibility. Drew odd-shaped panels, wasn’t limited to boxy oblongs, would put a character’s foot outside the frame. This sample, and above, is from July 1960. Iggy the character could look a little like George here, move a bit like him. I’d use some Arnold Roth influence as well. Always loved Roth’s stuff. (Poor Arnold’s Almanac was also in the H-T on Sunday.)

Final panels 3 July 1960.

Other possibilities: Mister Shadrach’s Memory Lane, with the Rocky Stoneaxe fantasist neighbor running a talkshow with forgotten comic-strip characters (Peanuts, the nonexistent title character from the Schulz strip; Pigpen, who disappeared because he was drawn similar to the later negro character, Franklin). And Focus on Fact, a strip based on one in Private Eye 50 years ago. This I could do mostly in AI, using the 19th century Punch cartoon-engraving style. Maybe three intricate panels, no balloons, just narrative captions.

I’m watching a lot of The Sopranos, nearly nonstop. I’ve gotten to be like Moki in so many ways. Going through the 21-episode final season (6) now. Haf the major characters get killed off. Tony may or may not get offed in the final blackout. Keith P thinks he does.

I have this recurrent thought that I’m supposed to register for a race. Go pick up my bib and t-shirt. This flickers in my half-sleep, an awareness I must get up shortly and go somewhere. When I do wake up finally (in real life; it’s after noon; I took half a Trazodone at 11:30pm last night) I have a pain in my right lower leg. That front muscle that runs along the outside of the tibia. Familiar pain but I haven’t had it in years.

Main dreams float in and out, beginning with a return to the San Diego Reader. I go back to work there, and visit there, and it looks much the same as in 1993, only I am afraid they’ll find me out, as there are still one or two characters hanging around from then. Once before I had a dream where I have to work on a major product, a special issue or insert that keeps me there for a couple of nights. A lot of pasteups. A lot of filler columns to write under different names. The editors come in and it’s Buckley and Tierney from the YDN Magazine. Also Bobby Shriver is in there, making fun of me because I’ve been there all night.

I have to prepare and host for a major event. It’s at a place like the National Press Club. Are we celebrating Ambassador Kennedy? Is he still alive? Again it’s an all-night, all-day slog. I get into arguments about the sorts of lies told about JPK. I have to gather up plastic bags of trash and newspaper clippings as the event wears on.

Moki is with me and some of his friends in a high-rise building someplace. More an office building than apartment. We are going to smoke some boo. Before we start he generates some printouts of line graphs, like EKG charts, showing the potency of the drug. This is very good stuff. I get very weak puffs, barely a hit, however. We are awaiting some woman who works at a tabloid newspaper downtown but she doesn’t show because she has to be at work all night. She can come in a couple of days, though. She’s a cross between Sherita and Sharlene. So we’re back in a similar place, a small conference room with sofa and upholstered chairs, a couple of days later. This time I’ve insisted that the graphs be drawn properly, with india ink and speedball nibs, so I produce those. The boo isn’t much stronger, but it gets me a little high. Not high enough not to be hungry. Down at the end of the corridor there opens a big food court, something like a cross between the food services at the New York Times and a food court in a shopping mall. Nothing special there, really, but we are hungry.

This has been bothering me since I woke yesterday morning. I’d had a very fine, gratifyingly deep, sleep. So deep that a discomfiting dream I had toward the end stayed with me as I awoke and I still thought it was something real. I had been assigned a big stack of race bibs, but they needed to be sold. I was expected to go door-to-door and sell these things. Any moment now my masters were going to ask me if I’d sold them all, and I believe I hadn’t sold any.

My real bib experience had occurred the previous week, at the half-marathon expo. At the start of bib pickup on Thursday, and at its conclusion on Saturday, I was one of many scanning and assigning bibs and t-shirts to the hordes. About 4000 bibs went out in four hours (that’s maybe 2500-3000 people, as there were some multiples) when we opened. For the close we probably did twice that and ran out of men’s t-shirts. It was surprisingly pleasant work, and far shorter than the gig on Sunday when I worked the festival in a 12-hour shift.

So, well rested, I let other things clutter my mind on my first cup of tea. Where, I found myself wondering, was The Secret Diaries of Harold Ickes? I consulted that some months ago to see how he got on with Joe Kennedy in London. This would have been in 1939, I think. Ickes had just married the niece of the ambassador to Ireland, Mr. Cudahy, and was being squired around to the Duke and Duchess of Kent’s. Harold asks Joe what he should call the Duke and Duchess. Joe says, “Well I call them George and Marina, but you can start with—” I forget how that goes. Anyway, a most friendly encounter, not what you’d expect of Ickes. Anyway, the book was not where I remembered it (with biographies) or where it should be (with the Roosevelt and Kennedy books on the westernmost bookcase). What I did find was Ickes’s Autobiography of a Curmudgeon, but there was no confusing the two books, as the latter is a white paperbound book, while the other is dark brown or maybe black, and clothbound. The mystery continued and I am still looking for it. In going over each shelf with a figurate fine-tooth comb, I also noticed that one of the Angus Wilson Penguins was missing. I had The Wrong Set on its proper shelf, but A Bit Off the Map was not beside it. Where was it? Now I had something else to search for. It turned up, with some other books by McCarthy and Waugh and Barnes, in the jumbled fiction shelf below the shelves for rivers and dams, and biographies. A lot of Dreiser and Woolf and Wharton on that shelf, Moki’s books. Something by William Dean Howells. So I dumped the misfiled books, mainly paperbacks, on the storage trunk I use as a coffee table, and continued to look for Harold. I looked for him again today. No luck.

One good bit of news in the past few days: I was approved for SCRIE. This happened almost immediately, a couple of days after I applied online. It means my rent is not only frozen, it is moved back to the previous lease, 2021-2023, thus is $1877 per month. I was encouraged to do this quickly by Rebecca, the young Jewish lawyer at the courthouse. Represents some pro bono outfit called Mobilization for Justice. A couple weeks before that, I was notified, belatedly, that I’d been approved for food stamps, or SNAP. That’s quite a novelty for me. I bristled at the notion when Moki would bring it up. I get $202 per month on my benefits card, and presumably I have a total of $808 as I have not yet used any of it, as I have not received my card. Do I get to spend it all, or is it just $202 per month, only for that month? That is how it works with this “flex card” that Aetna gave me. I get $165 per month in benefits, mainly drugstore things and “healthy foods” from CVS. And the $165 has to be spent each month, no rollover. As soon as this kicked in on May 1st, I spent 2/3rds of it ordering brain pills and vitamins and cough syrup, to be posted to me via UPS. One can also buy the stuff in person at a CVS, but then you have to show the benefits card and a bar code to the cashier. I’m also given another $150, total, for ordering things like aluminum canes and Zimmer frames. No need for that just yet. My Aetna plan changed recently, from a PPO that I liked, to a HMO that supposedly offered better coverage and this flex card. It changed because those Medicare telemarketers called me up and encouraged me to do so. So I had Medicaid commencing March 1, the Aetna Medicare PPO starting on April 1, and then that being superceded by the HMO on May 1. I’ve never used any of these welfare or Medicare benefits, and have no idea how they work. Last year I found a big white envelope with an application for what was essentially Medicaid, this sent to me in late 2021, probably from some online inquiry I’d made and then forgot about. So I could have taken care of much of this over three years ago. And then in my Healthcare file folder I found a UnitedHealthcare “community health” card that I never used. I thought it was some old prescription card, long since expired, but no, it was apparently a similar deal. Once when I went to a downtown office for unemployment in 2014 (at this point I was qualifying for only about $100 a week, not the $405 I’d had in my previous unemployment stints), the negress told me she was promoting a city- or state-funded health plan, and encouraged me to apply. And this was it. I never used it.

Tomorrow I will talk to the HRA people, if I can get through, and ask about the benefits card. I need to refile an emergency cash request because I am being sued for possible eviction, and that means a telephone call almost immediately. I shall also demand an in-person meeting, as when I made similar requests from HRA they turned me down, claiming I did not make the required interview (and I had).

The tall negro who delivered the Rent Demand back in early February showed up again on April 7, with the complaint. This is not so shattering to me as it would be if I hadn’t gone through it back in 2022-2023, in Moki days. A bit over a week later, the 15th, I went down to 111 Centre St and filed my Answer. I said that I actually had paid such-and-such, and the landlords were aware of the problem, that I am currently owed $25,000 or so by Social Security, which they were supposed to recompute, but haven’t yet. The following Monday I showed up for the preliminary T&L hearing on the 8th floor. I was given a court date of June 4th, and sent to talk to one of the volunteer lawyers. That was Rebecca. Another thing that came up with Rebecca, besides her urging me to apply for SCRIE, was the matter of the ERAP. This was seemingly approved for the tenant end a couple of years ago, but it now says that neither tenant nor landlord information had been verified. Now, when I first filed it in late 2022 the tenant verification choice said Yes. We were merely waiting for the landlord.

That was two Mondays ago (Sunday today). The following day, I got a text from Keith P. He said he was up at St Luke’s Hospital and they wouldn’t release him without an accompanying friend or relative. So I took the subway up to Columbia, walked over the Amsterdam and 114th St, figured out which of the Mt Sinai buildings was formerly St Luke’s, and called him down to reception. He was immensely fat, wearing sort of clown trousers held up by braces. He had a stroke back in 2021 while visiting Sylvia in Chicopee, he told me in a taxi downtown.Two weeks in hospital up there, now he was having some veinous or arterial procedure done at this hospital. He is again working for Captain Queeg, but only one day a week. Does not need the money, but the Captain needs him. We arrived at his apartment near Tompkins Square. First floor, near the entrance, most convenient. Hamilton Park was all stairs, lots of them. Place is a mess, with a big pothole of broken tile and grout right in front of the kitchen sink. He was looking around for his regular glasses, couldn’t find them, settled for his readers. He was trying to read a grocery receipt. I’d asked him what he paid for Kerrygold butter, having remarked that it is only $4.99 in the drugstore but a lot more elsewhere. The grocery receipt did not list butter, alas. We went out to a maze-like warren around the corner that was a sort of boutique gourmet Italian restaurant. I was astonished at the price of the simple entrees, $22 up to like $37. And the menu wasn’t printed, it was on a digital tablet, an iPad sort of thing with imperfect navigation. He had a really nice salad and I had green rigatoni with broccoli (I guess that was in the pasta) with a sauce that had bits of sausage and maybe pesto. It was okay, really quite impressive, but I didn’t need to eat pasta just then. I had a glass of wine, just that. Keith says he now drinks rum, and quite a lot of it. Here he drank water.

Next day, and for four days after that, to Brooklyn. Odd shifts, 4 or 5 hours at the Expo and then that enormous day of the half-marathon, helping to set up the festival, then banging the gong, or encouraging others to while they took videos or photos of each other. Or asked me to. Mainly I was giving directions to people. Telling them where the bag pickup was, and how the Family Reunion area was right ahead of them, right there!

A few days later, this past Wednesday, another 5 hours in Brooklyn, helping to take down all the NO PARKING posters they’d put up along the race route. Immensely pleasant stroll of about 5 miles, starting at Columbus Park and Cadman Plaza, then under the two bridge ramps, through Dumbo and past the Navy Yard (which goes on forever) and then finally the immensity of Williamsburg. The Domino factory development is very impressive. There’s even a sort of beachfront, I think, with a view of the Wmsbrg Bridge on the left.

Domino Square.

My coworker Debra and I had tacos at this Birra Taco place I told her about. It’s on Bedford, near the L train station and a couple blocks from McCarren Park (start of the race). I found myself spending over $17 for two steak-and-shrimp tacos and a Mexican Coke. Debra had almost the same. She was curious about the place when I mentioned it, then when we got there (used Google Maps or something; it was right where I remembered it, however) she recalled having been there once before while working an event in Williamsburg. That’s what she does, she works events at Javits Center and other places. Says there are specialized temp agencies that book you. And if they like you they keep you working. I am going to look into this.

After all those hours I am due for my biggest Gusto payment yet. Last check was under $300 net, for one day on Gov Is (Sunday 5k) and one day in PP (5k and 10M). Now I’ve got about 40 hours coming to me, which net should be between $800 and $900. Most of that goes to the rent. Having an off weekend just now. Next week it’s two days on Gov Is, back to that. I may get a day or two of warehouse hours this week: have applied for them in the past, but never got picked.

Mural in progress, Kent Ave., Williamsburg.

The week before seeing Keith and working the Expo, I’d gone to 111 Centre for the the Answer filing on Tuesday, 4/15; then on Wednesday 4/16 to Dottie’s at one, where I brought some carrot-ginger dressing and some fried potatoes. Dished this all up in the morning. Dottie had been working two weeks on some beef bourgignon (sp?). In a typical Dottie move, she didn’t eat much (my dressing on a little arugula she grew on her roof) and mainly watched me eat off an overloaded platter. I ended up bringing a generous helping of everything home. I was telling Dottie how much I enjoyed seeing the film, and then listening to the audiobook, of Can You Ever Forgive Me? That is a marvelous and hilarious memoir by Lee Israel, biographer and forger. Jane Curtin, who appears in the film as her agent, reads the audiobook. I also boasted to Dottie about how I used to have no health insurance at all, now have it up the ninyang. Medicare A & B, Aetna PPO, drug coverage, and yet even more dental coverage (haven’t seen dentist in months). Dottie tried to call me up later, concerned about how rundown and tired I said I was, and told me I should see a doctor and use up some of that fine new health insurance.

So that was 4/16. 4/17 I would have been back at 111 Centre for jury duty, but I’d postponed that. Downtown anyway, to 29 Broadway, Jeffries Morris, to drop off the Answer I’d filed at court on Tuesday. Good Friday 4/18 came and I made meatless rigatoni bolognese. It was good but just a little insipid. The complicated sauce was made with lentils. Not enough flavor. But I ate it all, over the next three or four days.

I’d told myself every day to go to confession because I’d been missing mass so frequently. No mass, no communion. No communion for years in fact. On a warm Sunday evening, Easter the 20th, I went to St. Joseph’s in the Village, where they supposedly had Sunday evening confessions before mass. But the lay brother there, guy with the beard, saw me sitting in a chair in the vestibule, waiting for the confessional light to go on, and told me there would be no confessions. But tomorrow at 10am there would be! That was no good for me at all, as next day, Monday the 21st, I was due at T&L court early afternoon.

Somewhere in here, April 8th I believe, Grimm was supposed to come by early afternoon. I had made guac the night before because he asked, and I’d stocked up on the makings of hamburgers with sauteed onions. But he overslept, somehow blamed it on Verizon which they’d just hooked up with. Send me messages. Has tried to reschedule since but I was very busy. Proposed last Saturday via FB message, but I said I’m going to bed early for that 12-hr shift in Brooklyn tomorrow. He cautiously messaged me again recently, asking me if I’d recovered from it, but I haven’t answered him back.

Paul and Anthony are coming here in a month and I have resolved not to be as bloated and aged as I was last time. (The most terrifically awful pictures of me I’ve ever seen.)

A negro came by to install a Clear Caption box on Tuesday (4/29). I cleared the foyer table, thinking that would be a nice place for it. But that wouldn’t work, for some reason. What was it? He needed a nearby phone jack, that’s what it was. So to the glass shelving by the living room windows. Sort of awkward over there.

I need to clear off the rubberwood table and position it better, with the drafting board on top. Move the glass shelving into the corner, sort of awkward, and put the table a couple of feet from the window. Natural light.

Mainly I’ve been lying on bed all the time. Looking at Facebook, reading newspapers. And watching the Sopranos again. I scarcely paid attention to it that last go-round a few weeks ago. Difficult to watch with all the commercial interruptions. I could pay extra and get rid of them…maybe do that just for one month…but I need to cut down on all these subscription expenses.

Drinking a little more than usual these days. Two beers two nights ago (a Kirin and a Becks, from the Japanese grocery nearby, Dainobu), then a full pint of Platinum vodka last night, mixed with pineapple juice. And now, Sunday afternoon, I want another nip. But I don’t want to go to the Chinawoman, and Shirley is closed. Really should go to the gym. And of course mass in the evening.

Hot and sticky these last few days and the A/C isn’t on yet. Early May.

POSTSCRIPT

Did I dream the whole thing? Is there really no book of Harold Ickes diaries in the house? I looked again. I even looked at the copy of the book (the 1936-39 years) at the Internet Archive, and while the meeting with Joe Kennedy in London is mentioned, the exchange about “George and Marina” isn’t there. So where did I read that? I thought perhaps it was in the Amanda Smith book of JPK diaries and letters. But it’s not there either. I look in the Susan Ronald book, and while Ickes is in there a little bit, the party for George and Marina isn’t.

I’m going to guess that the Ickes book will turn up in the living room, in some odd place, buried under trash or magazines. And it will be a condensed revision of the the Ickes diary series, and somewhere in there we will find George and Marina.

Rain broke an hour or two ago. I got caught up in making a FB post and it was too late to make it to St. P’s unless I got there at the end. Good, something else to confess.

I do believe I’m going out to the Chinawoman’s for a half pint.

The ushers, Lisha or somesuch, and her son? With groom and bride John and Deborah in between. Montauk Club, Sept. 2012.

The good news recently is that I got three pieces out for C-C, the last being this past evening for the annual Brasillach. Two weeks ago I got the Dutton thing in about Bowden, and in between we had Flannery O’Connor. Not bad, if I say so myself. Also I am now enrolled in Medicaid (approved in early March) which means I am given Medicare Part B. And I signed up for Medicare Part C (Medicare Advantage) a few days ago, and that is now “free” for me because of my lack of income and the Medicaid. It’s pending, but I don’t doubt I’ll get it. It even has dental coverage, up to a point. This was an Aetna PPO plan. First thing I did was look to see of Christopher Busillo, but as internal medicine, not PCP. So I signed up for a PCP (GP) up the street, one Kimberley Scotto, MD. It was going to be either her or a Matt Cross who’s similarly highly rated but up by Columbia. And I was also granted Part D, which is the pharma end. I think that kicks in beginning of May. So for the first time in my life—no, the first time in 12 years or so—I am as fully covered as one can be. I’m like Moki. I can go to doctors up the wazoo. When I had health coverage at work, and then COBRA, I never used it to speak of, apart from the periodontal with that awful Delta. I used a lot of coverage during the 10 years at Citi, but it was mostly OVs and I have no firm recollection of any big medical bills. My Botox wasn’t covered, but some of the lymphoma was (a lot of good that did). My $950 tube of Targretin was covered, except for $50.

Okay, so two batches of good news. What else? No word yet from Bellevue WTC or Bern. SSA has not fixed my account, upped my benefit, or arranged my windfall. They did however send me a notice, around the time they sent me a batch of envelopes concerning the Medicaid and Medicare Part B enrollment (a week or so ago) that because of the Medicaid and Part B, they were changing my monthly check day from the second Wednesday of the month to the 3rd of the month. So I’ll be getting the next deposit on April 3. Night of April 2 is three nights from now, and that’s mighty nice.

I told Moki a couple of years ago that I did not have Part B, and he said why not? Because he had it. He’d always had it. Told me I should have it for free too. He never bothered to connect the dots. At some point, possibly because of the VA connection (a frequent visitor down there sine 2009) he got it because he was on Medicaid. I assumed he had Part B because of some VA connection, something that wouldn’t work for me. But it appears I did make an effort to apply for something like that too, without realizing it, because there’s this big white envelope from late 2021, where I’m told to fill out this form for city-supported health coverage. Well that’s the Medicaid deal. Had I requested this online? Did my name go into a hopper when I got a jab or two at Columbia Doctors on W 51st?

Have drunk vodka almost every night for the past week. Half-pint tonight, pint last night, half the night before. Before that nothing, and day before that, just a Resin. Also had a Resin last evening (Saturday) and topped it off with a pint of Platinum.

I was pissed off that I was scratched from the Spring Fling 10k Saturday thing (upcoming). I’m still down for Sunday. I ride in the blue van from Warehouse to Ferry to Island. Briefly there was an open spot appearing on Deputy for Saturday, the shirt booth. I’ve never done shirts. Thought about it for a few minutes, then when I looked to see if it was still available, it was gone. People want those spots.

I made slow-cooker chicken teriyaki a few days ago, but cooked it too long. Going to toss what’s left. Ate some today. Otherwise today I ate Triscuits. And a Healthy Choice beef & broccoli I got at Target yesterday. On special, 50% off second, so I got two. I noticed that Target charges 4.99 for a half-gallon of milk. Big surprise there. After getting a few other purchases (big box Triscuits, a couple of those Starkist tuna packets in foil) I stopped at Whole Foods for the milk. Incredibly long line for self-checkout. Went to normal checkout, one semi-long line there. They had the milk of course, $2.49, but not the other thing I wanted, the $4.99 Simply Whatever grapefruit juice that’s $7.99 at Klein’s. That’s very good grapefruit juice. So I got a Pummelo grapefruit instead, which is 2-3 times the size of a normal grapefruit. Is it edible or just for juice? Haven’t tried either. The sink is filled with dishes as it usually is. Must do dishes tomorrow. Send rent checks in somehow to Jeffries Morris. March 31. Make payment on Moki card and the Citi Cash card. Go to gym. I’m thinking of bailing on TMPL since I never go there. Maybe it makes more sense to join the West Side Y. What does the Y cost? $100 a month for seniors, I see. No dice. I could change my mind later, but the $13 and forced trip to Hells Kitchen WHEN I ACTUALLY GO make it better to stay at TMPL.

Ten days ago (Friday the 21st) I hied myself over to Sunnyside, and on a sun-in-my-eyes brisk day wandered around and used Google Maps on the toyphone until I found The Dog and Duck, now retitled The Skillman. A bit of a disappointment. Empty and clean but the barman was a noggess. Not an Irish grubpub feel. Many beers and a $20 pint + sandwich lunch offer which I guess they think is a great deal.

Because I (finally) coughed out that piece on Flannery O’Connor for GJ’s “symposium” and got it in a week ago, I found myself thinking for the first time about that guy down in Georgia who called himself Velociman. Friendly enough fellow whose real name was Kim Crawford. He’s now gone to ground online. He was famous for his blog where in 2008 he denounced Obama for being the hating, hateful, loathsome devil Obama is. Somehow Obama made him think of this Francis Marion Tarwater boy in The Violent Bear It Away. Though he was gone from the ‘net I found one or two Velociman tweets.

GJ asked me to write a piece way back in November. I found the book at the library and kept renewing it without reading much of it. Radical Ambivalence, all about Race Issues in F O’C. Dreadful. I said everything I wanted to in maybe 2500 words, and don’t feel I cheated anyone. GJ was much more in earnest than I guessed. He did several pieces of his own, and O’Meara had at least a couple.

Some semi-sad news comes in from Ireland. John Farrell died a week ago. The 23rd of March. I found out two days later, initially through Brian Patrick McGuinness. He died in a Galway hospice. He’d been on chemo a few weeks. Nobody goes onto chemo and dies in a few weeks. He must have had something galloping. Lung and throat and prostate cancer take ages to creep up on one. Pancreatic perhaps?

Wedding at the Montauk Club, September 2012.

There was something misjudged and dodgy about John. His fondness for teenage boys. The horrible theatrical productions he’d do, playing Walt Whitman. Not the young Walt Whitman. A bearded, rather untidy and mangy Whitman who was a crashing bore. His teeth, all of which seem to have been pulled, replaced only in front with some shiny white permanent implants or dentures. That strange marriage to Deborah, which fell apart in a year after doing the wedding up in slap-up style at the Montauk Club. Death of marriage followed by his adoptive father’s death at the end of 2013 (I think it was), followed a few years later by John’s complete disappearance to Galway. And in general, his vagabond ways. I think he did have a decent job for a while at RTE back in the 90s, was it? But what exactly was he doing when I first met him? He’d been a friend of Michael’s. Drinking, drugging and talking about perverse sex.

Carey Harrison and John Farrell, with bottom half of me in the rear. Not sure whose house. Brooklyn, I believe. Reception after Jack Farrell funeral.

Once, I think, I visited the Farrells’ place in south Park Slope. Not far from Bartel-Pritchard. A walkup, maybe two floors up? Tiny place. Two large rooms was what I could see. Boxes and belongings mainly crowded into one of them, with some kind of plastic curtain shutting that off. How could three people live in this tiny place? Possibly it was smaller than the one John grew up in.

I’ve said hello to Cliona on FB but she won’t recognize the MB handle. A few of us, old John friends, are asking about John in the hospice. Why there, and how there, and have ye a valediction, boyo?

Appears to be this tall Irish girl, Lutine? is that a name? In Brooklyn perhaps with john 10-15 years ago:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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