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.

I went out yesterday (Saturday) because I wanted to get some Spam to fry. I’ve never had Spam. There was no Spam to be had. One can at a Duane-Reade drugstore. Couldn’t find it at Morton Williams. Ended up buying little steak rounds and Nishiki brown rice, which I ate instead.

Continually rewatching Fosse/Verdon. Hideously melancholy. I don’t like Sam Rockwell. He’s a slimy, sinister character whatever he does. I watched Heist a couple of times a week or two ago, and he’s just like that here, not a friendly, cute Bob Fosse at all. Michelle Williams is an intelligent, warm, Gwen Verdon.

And then there’s that awful Lin Manuel-Miranda they bring on to play Roy Scheider playing Bob in All That Jazz. They could have cast this better.

The actress playing Joan McCracken doesn’t look anything like her.

One very good bit of casting: whoever it is who does Paddy Chayefsky. An irascible, reliable friend. Looks like him.

More on this later. I have work to do this week. Another 2am convocation next Saturday in Prospect Park for nruns. These things punctuate my life, make my life worth living. But I have to get some regular shit work, something that will bring in another thousand or two per month, to pay the rent and Con Ed. ($271 in the latest Gusto deposit.) C-C and nruns together give me maybe $600-$1000 p.m. and I’m not making it. A shit job at HomeDepot would at least bring in at least $1500 p.m. and that would do me.

A half-pint v tonight, with blueberry POM and soda. A pint last night and night before.

Didn’t eat much today. A little of the Nishiki rice I bought when I couldn’t find Spam. And a lot of buttery crackers of the Keebler sort, now taken over by Kellogg’s.

Wind and rain outside. Some outer trails of some distant hurricane. Grey and muggy all day. It was like twilight at 5:30 pm.

I have taken three aspirin and three capsules of erythromycin in the past hour, and the pain in tooth #1 (upper right wisdom tooth) is subsiding. Actually not in the tooth proper but in the gum above it. Never had any pain or abscess there before. This seems to have been brought on the other day when I ate an entire half-baguette I got at Morton-Williams when I went out in the morning for milk and a munchy, not realizing that it was only 6:45 am. I usually don’t consume half-baguettes all at once, but I did this time. I’d been living on the occasional banana and instant oatmeal for a few days. No vodka, and scarcely beer. Since then, one beer and one half-pint of Pinnacle.

I’d been terribly sleepy all week, ever since taking to bed on Sunday after Governors Island. Sleepy and weak. Feeling much better now, thank you, but not exercising. Will try a few miles in the Park.

Fried up a package of bacon this morning and ate half of it, downing it with a few cups of coffee. The bacon inflamed my gum again. hence the recent erythromycin and aspirin. I also mixed up some pizza dough, which continues to rise on the counter. Slightly different from the Wolfgang Puck modification I made a year or two ago. Only two big balls. Yeast and spices and sourdough-starter discards as well. I began the sourdough starter about three days ago with whole wheat flour, bought some unbleached all-purpose yesterday at Whole Foods, to keep the thing going. I don’t think the starter is ready yet as leavening, but it may be helping the pizza dough to rise enormously. I can’t make pizza just now because I don’t have any sauce or cheese. Not a big one for cheesy pizza. I may just get some mozzarella, as with a margherita pizza, and put bacon on that.

Watching TV: looking at 3rd and last episode of 1992 series, When the Lion Roars, hosted by Patrick Stewart. About MGM. The first episode covers the whole history of the studio to that point. The next two retrace the 30s onward, so much of the material is repeated. I don’t mine. Better and more entertaining than I’d have expected. I am much taken by Kathryn Grayson singing a song to Tchaikovsky (“Serenade Waltz” ) in Anchors Aweigh. How this figures in the plot I don’t recall, but the setting is a movie studio, probably the same one where Gene Kelly dances with a cartoon mouse.

Yesterday I watched, once or maybe twice, the film Heist. Saw it here with Moki a year ago, didn’t pay much attention to it, but caught the Ricky Jay line, “Cute as a pailful of kittens.” At this point I was into the search engines. Written and directed by David Mamet. The gamine wife of Mamet, Rebecca Pidgeon, plays the disloyal wife of Gene Hackman.* The story is derivative, and contrived, but paced and edited so well you don’t notice or mind all the missing exposition. Superficial action keeps you rolling along fast enough that you don’t have much time to scratch your head.

After a few cups of coffee my mind raced back to one of my wheels-within-wheels theories about how life and astrology keep rhyming. The 30-month cycle, something I first observed about the late 1970s. A definite break and shift of gears every 30 months or so:

Jan 1979 – Aug 1981: the move, the change, another move, Touche Ross.
Aug 1981 – Jan 1984: apt share with Margie, to move-in with Karen; American Bystander; orthodontia; Ihlenfeld.
Jan 1984 – July 1986: Karen; surgeries; Chuckleheads; Carto and Spotlight; Bruce interim; move to Hoboken; quit Touche; end of orthodontia; American Express temping period.
July 1986 – Jan 1989: temping and lost; then a secy at Amex; grad courses at NYU; fading out of Cheads; Stimely; Instauration.
Jan 1989 – July 1991: the lezzie delusion/fiasco; back to Manhattan, then to San Diego; SDR; disastrous Mary Lang relationship.
July 1991 – Jan 1994: catastrophe at SDR; Laura relationship; travels to London and Bluehnbach; Gallery News; IHR coup.
Jan 1994 – July 1996: IRS lien; The Oldie; collapse of Gallery News; CTS/WXL; London fiasco.
July 1996 – Jan 1999: from London to Seattle; Punch; to New York and Moki; Citigroup; travels with Moki and then souring.
Jan 1999 – July 2001: Moki moodswings; move to Hoboken; a dead period I scarcely remember; lots of travel to England; real terminus of this period would 9/11 but nothing is exact.
Sept 2001 – Jan 2004: spending most of my time with Moki again, while keeping Hoboken apt; corporate design and illustration at Citigroup; return of K Peterson; Tinytown;  fitness regimen, lose 25 lbs, running seriously.
Jan 2004 – July 2006: sort of a peak time in mood and career; join CPTC, do marathons and a million road and track races; get promoted at Citi.
July 2006 – Jan 2009: last happy days at Citi; happy times at CPTC; layoffs, economy crash, awful Obama time begins; two years of unemployment, on and off.
Jan 2009 – July 2011: unemployment, contractual work; Amex/Time Inc., finally hired in 2011; perturbed at CPTC, attempting triathlons.
July 2011 – Jan 2014: crash and burn at Amex/Time; initiate arbitration; temp work, unemployment, Double-R Ranch.
Jan 2014 – July 2016:  Jared Taylor, AmRen, C-C; New York Forum; NPI conferences; shitlord era; Pepe the Frog; Donald Trump.
July 2016 – Jan 2019: Trump era, shit hits fan; Antifa/BLM craziness begins; “We did it, fam!”; we all get doxxed; Elizabeth Gray at NYAC; I begin again to write, as Meg Burns, for San Diego Reader; Splice Today; my mother dies intestate and money is probably stolen.
Jan 2019 – Jul 2021: overextended on credit, writing constantly; bad temp job; bad communications with Timmy; Census2020; Covid lockdowns and masks; I get my jabs; pleasant time with Moki, then Brian is ill and dies in August 2021.
July 2021 – Jan 2024: Brian dies, Moki dies, my sister dies, I am at a loss; mouse infestation, fruitfly infestation, rat infestation; many visits to 111 Centre Street, for T&L court and consumer debt.

The 30-month segments are fairly neat a consistent, except for a month or two overlap both ways; and so many varied things happen in some of them that it’s hard to find any commonality of coloration. The segments however seem to alternate in level of activity: from stability/stagnation to instability/movement/excitement.

Looking for something else (a Eurostar pamphlet with Nicki Slater illustration) I came across the sheaf of cosmetic and fashion cartoons I did for Tom back around 2000 or 2001. Scanned them in, posted some on Facebook. Also scanned and pieced together one of the Eurostar posters. I was thinking of printing up a bunch of postcards through Vistaprint. But they have a $100 minimum. I had the Diego Rivera painting reproduced a few years ago, but completely lost the stack of cards. Must have thrown them out inadvertently, yet surely I’d remember that? There were nearly 50 copies. I thought moving all the bookshelves and files around would uncover them, but no.

I did not run in the Sheehan Classic 5k in Asbury Park yesterday (of course) and did not even go to Shrewsbury to pick up my shirt and bib. I decided the $16 I’d already spent on a RT ticket (and the $40 race fee) were enough of a loss. If I took the train to Red Bank, then walked to Shrewsbury—very boring, I think—I’d be spending at least another $20 on lunch and then come home exhausted. And it was a rainy day. It rained most of this week. Yesterday dawned fair, but I not regret missing Asbury Park.

*Actually this was some Mamet cleverness that eluded me for a while. Recalling the film after a couple of viewings this time around, I realized that the actual denouement to the tale happens after the movie formally ends.  All along the Hackman and Pidgeon and Jay characters have been running con jobs, acting out prepared scripts in front of Sam Rockwell and Danny DeVito. Pidgeon goes off with the Rockwell character to put him off guard, while Hackman makes off with the gold. But Hackman and Pidgeon surely end up together AFTER the film ends; they’ve once again tricked that dolt Rockwell.

I know there is a hurricane somewhere out there. We are grey-skyed and wet for several days. It is Tuesday afternoon and I am lying on bed, having eaten a cup of oatmeal and one of those foil packets of tunafish before that. Lots of coffee, mild euphoria from that.

Feet were hurting yesterday: plantar fasciitis that keeps erupting when I’m on nruns jobs. Was out at Gov Is on Sat and Sun. Hot and humid on Sat, for the 10k, merely humid and overcast on Sun for the 5k. Now, the problem with the feet is that I just haven’t stretched the way I used to. I mean downward dogs and Wharton foot and leg exercises. Stretch the hams, stretch the toes. As an example of how little I’ve stretched, the other day I leaned on a tree to do a quad stretch (foot behind you, grab ankle or instep) and it was really hard to get a grip. I’ve been doing this all my life, now I’m totally out of shape.

I have mentally canceled the Sheehan 5k in Asbury Park on Saturday and online-canceled my ridiculously expensive ($270?) room at a shitty motel in Neptune, NJ, some three miles away. Had the idea I’d jog from there to the AP boardwalk as warmup. But it’s just not a convenient place to get to, and the logistics are made unnecessarily complicated. The race used to be in Red Bank. You pick up your bib and whatever in Red Bank, you run in Red Bank. Now you pick up your bib at Road Runner Sports in Shrewsbury, a mile or two south of Red Bank, and you race at the Asbury Park boardwalk. Asbury Park is about half nigger, and the motel I booked looked to be along those lines.

But as a consolation prize, I’ve bought me a train ticket to Red Bank on Friday. I intend to go down there, find my way to and from Shrewsbury, and get my shirt and bib. If this seems totally insane on Friday I’ll just blow it off. The senior-priced RT ticket was only about $17. I can have lunch in Red Bank.

A picture of Stacy Creamer showed up in social media, running the Club Champs last weekend. She looked good, same as ever. She was nearly my AA sponsor once. Luckily for her she dodged that bullet by not showing up for a meeting at a cafe near her Rizzoli office.

From May 2022?

I see by the website there is now a Rizzoli bookstore at 26th and Broadway, just north of Petsmart. So this NoMad is really coming up in the world. No bookstores at all in my part of the world (Rizzoli used to be across the street). There is now a McNally Jackson down in Rock Ctr, the holdout B&N at 46th and Fifth, and a Shakespeare & Co. way up around W 70th or so. Nothing on 57th, once home to Coliseum Books, some B&N remainder outlets, a Borders on Park Ave, and that Rizzoli from the late 80s to late 00’s.

Last night I was going through some mini-diaries from 2018. There was a period, around August 2018, when Michael was very much out of sorts. I didn’t write down details, other than that he was going to need to be put away in a mental hospital. I remember that around then I suggested it was time for a divorce. I think he actually looked into this and came back with an answer. It would be a simple procedure as we owned nothing and had been legally married for only five years. Whatever this spasm was all about, it never returned. In fact, the next five years were probably the happiest we ever had together. Mainly in bed together, I think. No sex. Occasionally tina when Jeffrey came over. That ended in 2019 or early 2020. He brought us N25 masks. Michael was often speaking to Brian then. Brian was paying our rent. Anxiety arose in early 2021 when Brian was sick. In hospital. Had a toe amputated (diabetes). Michael had to call B’s secretary to get a rent check. Shortly after that he died. I was at Chelsea Piers in August, Michael texted me to ‘Come home, Brian died.’ I came across that text recently. It’s not on my mobile, so must be on Michael’s. (Note, I have looked now and can’t find that message. Not in text messages, e-mails, or diary notes. Yet I’m sure I saw it just recently.)

One thing very appalling about these mini-diaries, 2015-2019, is the often illegible scrawl. I often affected an illegible scrawl to defeat nosy parkers, but in this case I was losing motor control from alcohol consumption. During the dry periods of 2016 I noticed my hand become steadier and my handwriting become more lucid. The regular intoxication really began to be noticeable around 2011 or 2012 and I wondered whether I was developing Parkinson’s or a severe case of essential tremor.

Mini diaries, 2015 and 2018. Greg J handwriting (ashwaganda) up top. Report on 2015 RR Ranch dinner with Michael Malice, which I don’t remember at all. Notes on unhinged Moki, 2018.

No drinks for 2 days, though I downed a pint on both Saturday and Sunday. Rationalized this as a need to get sleep. As a matter of fact I have spent most of my waking hours here trying to catch up on sleep, even to the point of taking a half Trazodone. (Some stiff coffees are needed the next day of course.)

Tim Walz, an extraordinary nonentity from Minnesota, was chosen by Kamala Harris for her running mate a short while ago. The only advantage to her campaign is that she may not lose Minnesota. Otherwise this will prove to be a disaster choice, somewhere between Dan Quayle and Tom Eagleton, when the pundits and admakers really get going. (I do believe Quayle and Eagleton were treated very unfairly.)

Listening to the Andrew Roberts bio of Churchill, over and over. Familiar material, I can’t take in anything new just now.

Pieces on Weiss and Elle Reeve in C-C last week. I did not realize Greg was paying me all along.

Last Monday, July 29th, I went to Dottie’s where she barbecued sardines, salmon and kebab, while we tried to stay out of the blazing sun and then the rain. I brought Prosecco from Astor Wines. My left knee was not hurting significantly as I went up and down all those stairs. Could be result of the glucosamine I’ve been taking sporadically.

Teeth and gums not hurting much.

I have a phone appt with the WTC health people in a couple of weeks, and then a live appointment at Bellevue way off in October. Someone from WTC Health, a John Koffis or something like that, phoned last week to tell me to bring the pathology report for the lymphoma when I go to that October appointment. I asked the Bern LLP people if they’d received my files from MSK, but Khadija, the golliwog who’s the legal assistant, says that’s still pending. I signed off on the requests back in January, I believe. I am going to have to make a request to MSK myself, just to be sure.

Strange nasty fat man in Chipotle two Thursdays ago. Fleeting memory that will vanish if I don’t make note of it now. I was curious about what he had put into his bowl. He made irrelevant replies. I said, “Gawd he’s fucking with me.”

I continue to use that sphyg I bought a few weeks ago. Sorry to say my BP is usually high. Sometimes around 130/75 but more often in the 140s or even higher. As with Dottie, I generally find it to be lower later in the day. After 4pm now, let’s test it out:

149/89, HR 63. Just extraordinary. Though not extraordinary for the past few weeks. It wasn’t until they took my BP at NYU Dental on July 8 that I even knew I had elevated BP. Then I bought the monitor and found I was often around 127/72, which seemed about right. For the past week it’s always been 130 or above. What are the variables? I don’t feel hypertense at all.

Subjects to write upon: Unity Mitford (did something a few years ago, rather deep research as I recall) and Philip Larkin. Would have to do the first by tomorrow.

Stuck on the Cuffey sequel on Substack. Made a long digression about Paul Printon. Shall I take it out? The second Printon 56 storefront is now proclaimed to be Corporate Chef. That’s 50 West 56th, the old Larré’s address. The first door, 48 W 56th, I think the original Mangia, has a Printon 56 still, but then a sign about Catering, and half of that storefront looks to be given over to a wog selling lottery tickets.

Haven’t done anything for Teentime there. I think I only need to double the current wordage to have something we can call a book.

That was Friday. I did not color my hair that day. I did go to Home Depot and buy two kinds of glue (for fixing the broken cat figure, and maybe a dimmer switch) and a new light switch. A Lutron one-pole light switch, i.e., on-off, not on-off plus dimmer, which costs 3 or 4 times more. Why we would need a dimmer switch in the hall between foyer and bedroom is anyone’s guess. Anyway, figuring I had a 50% chance of failing entirely, I put on rubber gloves, and with the circuit-breaker off I slowly unscrewed and extracted the old switch. Bits of plastic had broken off the back of the toggle piece, so it would stay on only if you taped it down. In the Lutron forum online I see guys saying they have to use duct tape to keep the light on. I found I couldn’t just buy a replacement toggle at Home Depot, which is why I got a new switch, a simpler switch. It took a while with the needle-nosed pliers to twist the bare ends of the copper wire sufficiently so they’d wrap a little around the screws (formerly they weren’t bent at all, they were joined to the dimmer-switch wires with insulator caps). With the switch semi-firmly screwed into the wall, I went “here goes” and flipped the circuit breaker. Nothing. I turned on the bathroom light (same circuit). It worked. Now the new light switch. That worked too. At last. I tightened the screws and put on the faceplate and snap-on cover.

Another realization about Moki: he had all these dimmers set up, in living room, bedroom, and hallways, because he wanted it to be a swingers’ party pad. I found it a little eerie and annoying in the early days, 1985-86, when he’d have a friend or two over and we’d sit around the coffee table, maybe with drinks or joints, and he’d turn the lights all the way down except for dim lights from the track lighting. Well this was his sex-club ambience. He was always trying to put “scenes” together, heterosexual swingers, mixed queer and straight, later a lot of queer stuff with tina smoking. In the old days he’d rhapsodize about how wonderful the swing scene was, but it always sounded like a bunch of old people from another era.

Here in the bedroom he eventually had hooks installed in the ceiling. They look like something you’d hang planters from, but really they were put in to support a “sling,” a kind of parabolic hammock used for fucking and sex play. I think he still had the sling stored around here someplace. Perhaps folded up still, in one of his drawers, most of which I haven’t really disturbed.

Oh yes, I fixed the broken cat, too, my favorite piece of bric-a-brac. I used Gorilla Glue. This expands and dries white, as you can see. Maybe I’ll sand some of it down and dab a bit of paint. Where will I get the green paint?

Paul and Anthony got in yesterday morning, about two hours later than they expected. Planes held up because of a Microsoft outage that screwed up travel and I think Amazon (the negroes at Home Depot kept talking about Amazon being down). They’d made all sorts of brunch and dinner plans, thinking they’d eat at Smith & Wollensky, at Delmonico’s, maybe even at Peter Luger if we could get in and could brace the trip to DUMBO, with perhaps brunch at The Plaza. I suggested doing Rue 57 as a backup, and that’s where we ended up. (They’re staying at the Warwick.) We walked off brunch, and killed time before their hotel check-in by visiting the Morgan Library. $25 admission each. I think Paul paid. Anthony paid for brunch. These folks have money for everything. Over brunch they told me of staying at the Ritz in Paris at the start of Covid season and getting very ill. They complained of food poisoning but the Ritz people were unsympathetic. Then the two went to Geneva, still sick on the train. Took a lift to the top of Mont Blanc, where Paul vomited.

“Out of the gondola?” I asked.

“No this was in a bathroom. I made it to the lavatory at the top. Fortunately.”

Paul was having trouble walking as we came back from the Morgan. He says it’s because he hardly ever walks in Phoenix. Also he’s had peripheral neuropathy for some years. Pain in the toes. He attributes that to his liver ailments. He’s been dry now three years. Interestingly he went to AA for a while back in his 20s, some time before we met. His doc in Phoenix told he was far enough along that he was a candidate for a liver transplant in ten years, and he’d put him on the list. At that, Paul stopped drinking entirely.

Today, that is, Sunday the 21st, the Western World was hit with the tragic news that Joe Biden is withdrawing from the Presidential race and endorsing Kamala Harris, his veep. On Fox News they’re discussing whether Kamala will even get the nomination. Their brain trust goes 60-40 against it. On Twitter there is a small buzz about Joe Manchin, who in my opinion is the strongest candidate they could get, unless they drafted RFK Jr. (Is there any reason why they wouldn’t draft RFK Jr.?)

Yesterday I had a prefab ice cream cone after the Morgan, then a Healthy Choice chicken marsala dinner with a half-pint of Pinnacle. I wanted more vodka so bought a pint of Svedka before the Chinawoman closed. Delighted to rise from sleep around midnight and find it more than half full. Well that didn’t last long.

No drinking today. Maybe no drinking this week. I walked to St P’s for Mass at 5:30, but felt wobbly and left before the sermon was over. I got a salad ar Chipotle. That went down well. I washed the dishes.

I bought an electric jug at Amazon a couple days ago, only about $12 with points, and unboxed it today. It takes 6 minutes to bring 1 liter to a boil. I think that’s longer than the tea kettle on the hob. So if use it I’ll put a lot less than a liter in there.

On Saturday I posted a long entry on FB about Eric Newman and the Enigma machine that turned up on Newsnight. I later though better of that, transferred the bulk to Substack. Nobody reads Substack.