An old friend from the 1980s, Jim R, contacted me to tell me that there was an interesting talk going on at a church on East 96th St.

I said, “Sure,” as I usually do to these things.

The talk was by a crazy little woman who teaches at Fordham and has written what looks like a self-published book called The Sin of White Supremacy. Everything about the program looked hilarious.

For one thing, the title of the book is a double shibboleth: “sin” can be a good or bad thing, depending on your point of view. But let’s accept it’s a bad thing, a mortal sin or a venial sin, and figure the author is making a theological point.

Thus “white supremacy” is something like a moral sin. But what is this “white supremacy” anyway? It’s a cant phrase used largely by Jewish Communists in the 1940s and 50s, to describe segregationists of that era.

As a thing it never existed. There are race-realists, white nationalists, white separatists, civic nationalists, ethno-nationalists. “White supremacists” are just a Communist invention. Rather like “racist,” another concoction of these people.

Anyway, I went to this talk, part of a program called “Pop-Up Theology” in the basement of the St. Francis de Sales Church on East 96th St. Attendees were mostly old folks. Cat ladies, funny old men, some oddball youngsters. Mainly white, a few coloreds.

The little lady who supposedly teaches theology at Fordham was a lively, articulate sort, but her slide-talk was even worse than I could have hoped. Her thesis is that helping to improve the spiritual situation of nonwhite savages is somehow a “sin.” I don’t know if she is Catholic, but I doubt she is.

A few of my colleagues arrived, the usual gang of idiots. Besides me and Jim, we had old Rob in his funny coat and shuffle-shoes, and Basil O’Connor, our 40ish balding guy who’s a bland, generous supporter of all race-realist groups. Jim asked a long but concise question about how white people are being dispossessed in their country, and how little attention is being paid to this, along with such crises as the Sacklers’ promotion of opioid addiction.

Too much furious steam was coming out of my ears for me to raise my hand. But a nice old lady beside me queried me afterwards, having noted my anger. I told her the whole premise of the talk was sacrilegious. Leading the American people to race and national suicide is the truly huge, grave sin on the table.

The old lady’s head was full of cottage cheese. She corrected me repeatedly when I referred to illegal aliens. She wants to call them “undocumented.” I said documents are not the issue. She took issue when I told her the “indigenous people” (Red Indians) were not indigenous at all; they came over from Asia. This bit of anthropology was known to every 6-year-old when I was little 50 years ago, but apparently it was news to the Old Lady.

Afterwards I and my three confreres went next door to a tiny “Italian” pizza place run by Mexicans. I think we each had a slice and a few laughs.

A week ago GJ proposed a dinner for a recently deceased dead poet. After a few days he hadn’t located a venue, so asked me to look around. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday making phone calls and visits. Dropped in on some excellent little bar/restaurants in Chelsea and the East Village on Wednesday, and rather enjoyed myself.

But I came up snake-eyes because every venue with an event room was already booked. Saturday night (that is, tonight) is a big March Madness playoff-fest. I had no idea of this, neither did Greg. Neither did my husband.

So I told Greg and, sounding disconsolate, he told me he was calling the whole thing off because there weren’t that many respondents.

During the day I dropped in at the Zwirner Gallery on W 19th and saw the Paul Cadmus and Robert Crumb shows. Will have to write something about those.

 

Bobo calls on one of the landlines. Inevitably about the Chatham Ghost. Some terrible story that a retired friend he knows from Cape Cod and New Canaan, made up.

I wasn’t inspired by the “poem” there, although I could do some drawings, a la Ditties for the Nursery. Really need to see a few shekels.

Bobo’s had other health crises, down at NYU Langone for a week. Had a benign brain tumor a while back, but latterly another brain malfunction that is not a tumor or a stroke.

I’ve been experimenting with certain Amazon features, and wanted to test the new Amazon Locker service in my neighborhood.

This is a new and very complicated add-on that has come to Whole Foods since the company was acquired by Amazon. Basically, you order something at Amazon, and instead of sending it to your home or office, you send it to an Amazon Locker at Whole Foods. That way, it may come quicker, and you don’t have to be around to sign for the package when it arrives (a big issue for some people).

As a test I ordered an Oxford University pocket diary. It was remarkably cheap, and I need a new pocket diary for the coming year. I was to pick it up at the Amazon Locker in the Whole Foods on East 57th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. I wanted to pick it up at the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle, but I find that is always full, and not available to me.

Amazon sent me an email a few days later, saying shipment was delayed. A few days after that, I got a notification that it had arrived.

I went over to the Whole Foods at 227 East 57th Street. I found I had to enter a code number into the touch-screen panel on the locker-machine. I didn’t have the code.

I went home (maybe a 12-minute walk) and got a printout of the Amazon description of the purchase. It had a big long number at the top.

In the drizzle I trudged back to the locker. The touch-screen wanted a six-digit code, and I didn’t see one on the Amazon printout. A friendly negro who works for Amazon/Whole Foods told me I should have an email with it on my phone (mobile phone). I said I don’t do email on my mobile phone.

I walked back home and sorted through recent emails. There it was, a reminder from Amazon to pick up my item. It had a six-digit code and a bar code as well! I printed this out.

I stopped at the spirits shop for a handle of cheap vodka, and moved on to East 57th.

This time the friendly negro was eager to help me out. He had some trouble entering the six-digit code, so I suggested scanning the bar code. This worked like a charm. A little locker door swung open, and there was my Jiffy Bag with an Amazon smile logo.

Back home, I opened the package, and there was my handsome Oxford pocket diary. It ends in December 2018. I had bought the 2017-2018 version, not the 2018-2019 one. That’s why it was so cheap. I should keep it mint, and resell it in a few years. Or use it as a code/password book.

I’m going to pick the cheapest non-American pocket diary I can find.

 

 

Flat on my back for much of the last few days. Not much different from the past few weeks. My energy began to decline (stress) around 2009, and it’s been a gradual straight-line depreciation since then.

Tomorrow is the gawdawful NYC Marathon, the weekend joggers’ festival, and I am glad I am not a part of it. I heard the pre-mara 5k going on outside my window this morning, but didn’t have the interest or energy to follow the progress.

I am now like those people I knew in Paris, who were wondering or supercilious about my doing marathons in Paris and elsewhere. They tried to ignore the whole thing, regarded distance running as a passion for autistes and eccentrics. Of course this might simply have been a dismissal of enthusiasms they did not hold. Which is okay.

Had lunch with Bobo and his friend Frank the other day, at Pershing Sq (my suggestion). Bobo has a compulsion to manage and product, and he seems to think that this Chatham Ghost story has great publication possibilities. Yes, it does, if I get my drawing-board set up, and I really do work on it.

Bobo had a brain tumor a couple of years ago but it hasn’t affected him. He looks the same as always. Oh, he says, he has trouble with memory, with reaching for the right word.

I must revise my CV, shop it around through him and all the online sites, bother the temp agencies every day. Pretty much skint these days. Would be hopelessly enfeebled by desperation if I weren’t usually stewed.

M and I went through yet another bout of Breaking Bad in the past week, now are dipping into Beirut and The Romanoffs.

I have a lot of half-written pieces for ST and CC. These things pay so little, and I end up spending a day or two earning pin money, when if I had a real job I’d make more than that in an hour, forty hours a week.

Ever make a 180-degree turn in your opinion on someone or something, then after a bit come back to where you were to begin with?

For me, this happened with the recent death of Adam Parfrey. I spoke to him several times and exchanged messages in the weeks before he died. We hadn’t interacted much in years. I rather gathered I was on his shit list, as many old acquaintances tended to be. At one point he blocked me on Facebook. But now he said he was trying to do a memoir, and was contacting old connections in order to fill in the holes in his memory.

A few weeks later he was dead—suddenly, unexpectedly—and I learned that responsibility for the memoir had been passed on to someone else. The memoir was to be an oral biography, like the 1980 Edie Sedgwick book (Edie), or the Ed Wood bio (Nightmare of Ecstasy) that Adam himself published in 1991.

Our Modern Boswell had been helping to collect Adam stories for a year or two. He told me, frankly, that Adam had a habit of making up lurid and scurrilous stories about people he’d known. I’d detected this tendency during our last phone conversations, but I put it down to memory lapses and his innate need to find a sensationalistic tale wherever he looked.

I learned he’d had a couple of bad accidents over the years, and suffered some brain damage. Not so much that he couldn’t function well; superficially the difference was that he was no longer the manic, mischievous youngster he’d been when I first knew him (we were both then in our early 30s). Now he was slower, calmer. I met him after the first accident, as he was sliding into middle age. He seemed fine.

When I learned about the “accidents” excuse, I let it cover a multitude of sins. It explained everything. It wasn’t just that Adam was forgetful, his brain wasn’t wired correctly. He was just imagining things that never happened. I’ve seen people die of AIDS. Some of them, in their final months with cytomegalovirus or whatever other opportunistic infections attack the brain, begin to say crazy things about family and friends. Surely, this is close to what was going on with Adam.

There my opinion lay until in the passing weeks I took account of the sheer number of people Adam had betrayed or lied about over the years. Slander was his habit. I realized that he was retailing gossip about me and others long before any accidents and brain damage offered an excuse.

Many years before, we’d both been employed at a weekly paper where someone was bad-mouthing and pranking me, repeatedly. I could see Adam was involved, at least peripherally, but it just never occurred to me that he was the actual source. I blamed everyone else, but left Adam out because I considered him a friend. Now I realized I was wrong.

Of course I was furious with this realization. Here I was now making excuses for Adam because of his infirmity—had in fact been making excuses for him long before the infirmity—and I had to face the fact that he was a first-class shit. I’ve known a few other gossip-mongers and slander-retailers among family and friends, and they all had a nice front of being witty and charming in your presence, and then making nonsense about you when your back was turned. Adam was just one of these.

So that was my first 180 turn, around June 2018, a month or so after Adam’s death. Then another month rolled past and I just didn’t care so much. Yes, he was a shit in many ways, but his late-life fantasies, around which he was structuring his proposed memoir, were just the product of brain damage.

Maybe I’ll change my opinion again. I don’t expect to see the memoir for another year.

DIARY 2000

OCT 28  Saturday. Went to corp gym on Wed or Thurs so am not impossibly logy but slightly constipated fr too much codeine-taking it every nt-finally it boomeranged + left me w/ massive headache early this am.

Going to get cold, v. cold + windy this wknd. Warmish + windy now.

Moki v depressed. Regina. He can’t borrow her car when he goes up to see Dr Nicholai. Going to rent car. And he broke his bedroom phone. I’m going to bring him his 2-line old Panasonic phone back. Maybe.

Tate membership card finally arrives this wk. I signed up in April but apparently they never put charge thru till Sept. Patti Smith on tate mag cover. Makes me think of Connecticut Eagle. I write DRC, we exchange emails. My longer 2nd or 3rd one gets no reply. She tires of me quickly. Her brother works for the Mets.

Mets lost World Series in Game 5. I saw nearly every game, at least part, beg. Last Sat. at rr on Franklin St. (Film Forum: Brit New Wave this wknd.)

CAT Scan on Tuesday. A pleasant and thrilling experience except for the 2 days of diarrhea afterward from all the magical elixirs. RA has not returned my £90. CG Review still be revised by Carol W + K T Gallo. CitiFX Econ back in gear, due for completion by Wed.

I revived my cellphone w/ VoiceStream (which took over Omnipoint). New number bks they sold my old one to a noggie. I called it once.

Found a most surprising sudden phone msg on my Manhattan phone, dating from the Sat I was in Oxford (2 wks ago). Barat—out on the street (“with Claire”—Claire 18 now, still offstage like a papoose having a nap—somehow distasteful to me how my sister has treated her daughter, maybe distasteful because of the remoteness of my own parents—or maybe I dimly recognize that my sister, in keeping this ‘familiar’ abt her, is just doing what she often did w/ me. It wasn’t a good thing for me, how can it be for Claire?), didn’t leave a phone number. Like calling a business contact at lunchtime, you don’t really wish to visit with the person.

NOV 8  Wed. Stopped at Tristan on 6th last nt to buy a charcoal grey skirt bks I’d worn the same charcoal grey trousers (bought at Brooks on Sun nt) for 2 days running. Dark festive election night. Went to the old Jewish lady’s liquor store on 55th to buy wine-2 bottles of what turned out to be slightly bitter Shiraz from Californra. Watched ‘The Conversation’ w/ Moki. Harrison Ford in early bit role. Self-indulgent technothriller that wears on one. But very ambition, says Moki. Elections inconclusive , to M’s irritation. “What kind of country are we living in” (where so many people vote for Gore). FL to Gore, then to Bush, then withdrawn, w/ B slightly ahead. No one talks of anything else today.

Stock markets “all but paralyzed” says the BBC about the unfinished election. Results not due till Thursday.

“Don’t get snippy with me!” Line from Fargo, supposedly used by Gore on phone to Bush at 3 am when Gore phoned to retract his concession.

Gym today. They had the sound up on the TVs bks everyone wanted to hear the election reports.

Afterwards me & Chas G. to Due South for rum & cokes, then another round and a dinner. I bought Vanity Fair, Dec. issue, at WTC bfr Path, thinking I needed change, and inspiration for those cosmetics cartoons too…

Disco notice from “verizon” (Bell Atlantic) for Hoboken. $200+ due by Nov. 13. Send tomorrow (9th) to reach them 10th or 11th.

Someone named Mike, whom I gave my phone no. to on the CTCL list, phoned up last nt as we were tuning into the election. Much to Moki’s annoyance. Who are you talking to? What sort of person calls up at this time on election night? Mike is having 3rd biopsy today. Has a particularly nasty variant of CTCL, w/ swollen lymph nodes.

Gave J Woodley 4 Solpadeine tonight, in case he needs it for his tooth discomfort.

Bit of a scare 8 days ago when I got here (Hoboken) w/ my big garment bag + trash bag full of clothes-M had driven me over after coming back from Boston in the rental car (which he is nw preferring to taking thr train or bus). An IRS letter lay on the mailbox in the doorway. I ripped it open, sick to my stomach. They just want me to identify the $326 I paid in April. A delightful relief.

 Remember to get new SS #.

Nov 18. Moki is 60. Still no president-elect. A sunny Saturday. We watch a rented Rules of Engagement w/ Samuel L. Jackson. Tomorrow to the cancer luncheon on Coney Island w/ Sonnekson. He knows the restaurant. Gargiulo’s. I’ve been in Hob most evenings the […]

Last Sunday afternoon to Tap Room. Doug Cooper showed. I ate lots of roast beef. Doug drew a map of the lower 48. (Page opposite.) M in bad mood bks I had not bought the paper earlier. I did buy it after 8 pm Mass however. Monday I felt sleepless + tired, thought of running right home to Hob at 5 but was tempted by Merlin Holland’s appearance at the Donnell Lib. I thought perhaps 50 people wd show. But the event had received wide publicity, it seems. A line of 400 or more stretched down 53rd St. yet I nearly made it. 260 seats and some standees, and if I’d been there 10 min earlier…  To Hob where I ate a cup of chili and garden salad at Lady Jane’s. The large round-faced Bill (Holmberg) was at his usual corner table. Bought me a wine + Grand Marnier wh we dunked into coffee. The coffee later kept me awake longer than I’d like. Bill is a Gore man, has nothing but contempt for Bush He is a ‘human rights’ attorney for a private firm that establishes clearance policies for American companies doing business abroad. I like him but I had his number early on. A lib Dem (right, of course), a nonbeliever, no regard or concern for the afterlife of the “after” generations. “After all-they [his descendants] won’t care about me.”

Back at 928 I found another msg from the Egregious Nicki. Jacked up on booze + coffee I phoned ***. Jolly conversation abt my cancer, abt Diane Lask, and whatever else I forget.

Tuesday I saw Colbert, who sprayed my rear end w/ liquid nitrogen. It felt like powerful medicine when it sprayed but had no result. I got C to write me a script for Renova, though, so it wasn’t a total loss. Back to work at noon, off to Silhan at 2. No cavities, it seems. But my teeth felt artificial for the net day after the cleaning. He’s still a clumsy, rough, scraper, when it comes to cleaning. Took radio taxi home to Hob that night – quite tired, and I went straight home to bed Another taxi on Wed night – one cig and one beer toward midnight at Maxwell’s Back to Maxwell’s Thursday nt at 830, sat at table w/ the pretty blond waitress from South Africa serving me. She was astonished, really truly, to learn I favored Bush. Wanted to know more abt my claim that Gore’s party had been jiggering the votes all along. (An idea had recently occurred to me, wh is that the ostensibly irregular vote for Buchanan had a fudge factor of phony ballots—not at all a matter of old Jews misvoting en masse on the confusing ‘bufferfly ballot’ in Boca Raton. )
Nov 25  Saturday in Starbuck’s. Icy cold + overcast outside. There is an art supp shop in Wmsburg I mean to try. ‘Big Genius,’ 540 Metrop. Ave., 10-11 718 302 4002. Fierce headache this am. Sinus headache, didn’t yield to 4 ibus + 2 codeine tabs. Came here and one big cuppa killed it-mostly. On my 3rd ± it is still throbbing there remotedly in the b.g. Last nt at riverrun 2 big beers, one ‘Bay Breeze’ (free from Daniel, reward for fixing the cable TV connection wh he’d dislodged from the box), also dinner of blackened swordfish 2/ some sort of salso on top, a huge clumb of broccoli, two identical boiled or roasted pertaters. I was feeling ill by Bay Breeze time. In the frosty night to WTC, home to 928 via the Academy bus after 10 pm.

Excellent review of 2 food concordances, one from Oxford, one from Cambridge, in the New Yorker. One of the most thrilling reviews I’ve ever read. Humorous + intelligent, bound to send me looking not only for these new books but for the old ones mentioned as landmark histories. Hunter-gatherers ate better. The trade-off for the agro-society is oppression + malnutrition.

***

We ate Thanksgiving dinner at 3 pm at the Greek diner on 57th st near 8th. Sad and funny. Dry, leathery turkey. I told people abt this as a comic incident-until I told Marian heller last night, and she did the same thing, w/ a friend, in the Village, Thanksgiving afternoon. But she had a real T-giving dinner later on.

Must do a half-dozen drawings for old Ashley… (later, late Sat nt.) Bill Bergstrom buys me a third wine at Lady Jane’s Looks at my drawings. Is impressed. How pleasing it it. Doesn’t understand why I am tracing one of my own drawings.

Still wound up from those 60 oz of Starbuck’s coffee-yikes.

Moki’s family has tradition of phoning around on Thanksgiving Day. Late morn on Thurs, as I was going in an out, I sensed he was talking to to AT and indeed he was. Very friendly call. She’d just sent him $1500 for his birthday so he had that reason among others. (Note this is paid out of the bequest from late brother, Bob, not out of AT’s piggy bank.) later on Moki told me that AT had asked after me. She thought I was ‘troubled.’ Moki brushed this off, but when relating it to me made it out to be an allusion to my being weird. Weird-eccentric and perhaps weird-the-other-thing too. Here Moki was probably missing the context entirely. Because AT had also asked how Moki was getting on with Carol. I told Michael, ‘Well in regards to me, Alice Therese was obviously asking about the cancer.”

“About the what?”

“About my health problems, which she’s undoubtedly heard of through Carol. She had heard I had a health problem and she was askig you about it.”

“Carol? No. How would Carol know?”

“Because I told her. Obviously she told AT. What else could AT be referring to?” I spun the analysis out a little further-AT not only keeps this back-channel open to the Blakes, without specifically referring to its, she’s understood from Carol that Michael has been difficult when drinking, and-perhaps for this reason?-has been p.n.g. w/ the Blakes since spring. “So Michael, did she say Carol had mentioned you?” As a matter of fact she had.

How like Michael not to put 2 and 2 together.  So blindered + wrongheaded where his family’s approval is concerned. Esp. when it’s AT speaking. Last Christmas he was near-psychotically fretful and angry w/ me, thinking I had got AT’s nose out of joint at the Dallas parties and that’s why AT failed to send him a Christmas check-then when the check turned up a day later, and Michael got drunk courtesy of me (I bought him 6 or 7 martinis on Christmas Eve) and raved at me that it was time for us to break up-he went and hid that red envelope so I wouldn’t rip it up when he went to the bathroom. Next day, and the day after that, he couldn’t find it. Asked if I’d seen it. I told him he’d hid it. He did not remember.

Bitter cold that Christmas, and a bitter time for me. It was the height of Michael’s nastiness toward me, though it flared up again in late January and wasn’t ever completely gone. Still, relations in 2000-after January-were far better than in 1999.

December 10-evening on Sunday   Back at Maxwell’s. Moki practically screamed at me on the phone for a full ten minutes-I put the handset down during most of his ran who seemed to be abt his family, who didn’t understand that it wasn’t impossible for him to make a living because he had ADHD, and Dr. Nicholai doesn’t understand it either, and I don’t understand the stress and torment he goes through when it is noon on Sunday and I am there (as I was today) and he has to go through the compilation of his bills to send off to Lefty Thomas, the family executor. It wasn’t too bad. I had spent early afternoon at the little dining table to trying to write the St. Chad piece for Chris Buckley while he fretted at his desk. I ran out at noon for buns and beer and an extension cord for the old PowerBook I keep at Moki’s. I bought one at Radio Shack for $5 after trying 4 other stores. The proper cord finally showed up in a pouch in the PB bad. So it was an errand wasted. I couldn’t even find a UK-US 3-prong adapter for the English cord I had on a bookshelf. Most frustrating, though at long last I did buy a cord, plugged it in and got some writing in before Moki’s fuming crescendoed.

The St. Chad piece is a doggie dinner. References at the start to the Boys in the Band, Chad + Jeremy, and Peter and Gordon, before I get into the meat of the piece.

I work at this, doggedly, for reasons of obligation that go back over 20 years. In early 1979 Christopher told me that John Berendt, editor of New York Magazine, was looking for an executive secretary. Not an attractive position in other circumstances, perhaps, but it would finally get me out of New Haven. *** Ever since that time I’ve kept away from Chris, burdened with guilt. Gladly I sought out whatever obscure life I could find. Once, when living in the Chelsea-fall of ’79, not long after the Berendt episode-I phoned him at his place on East 20th St, loking from some juicy connections. He gave me the name of Paul Slansky, editing a movie throwaway, but I never followed up. Upon returning to NYC in ’98 I contacted Chris at Forbes FYI and tried to sell him on a harebrained story abt Ed Cuffe. Finally he relented-give it the old college try, he said-but by that time I was off on the May  trip w/ Moki in Hillsborough and had to say I couldn’t meet the June 5 deadline. End of Chris Buckley, for a while. ***

Chris was ill Thurs morning and we nearly didn’t meet for that reason. I rang him up at Forbes. He was dodging his calls, answering as “Chris Buckley’s line.” “It’s Miss Sheehan.” He was overjoyed to find it was me. We met at King Cole Room. Too crowded. Led me to the upstairs bar at the Peninsula Hotel where I had 3 Jack Daniels to his 3 vodka martinis. I told him Michael was great fan of Michi’s. Chris says, alas, he and Michiko haven’t spoken in 20 years. “After a point she drew a curtain between herself and me and anyone she’d known before, off the Times.” She had an affair w/ Carl Bernstein, and this somehow embarrassed her. ***

“Do you remember who it was I got you the job interview with? At New York Magazine. Remember who it was?” Oh of course I remembered, through having him remind me of it hit me like a stone. “He later wrote ‘Midnight in the Garden of-‘”

“Fucking closet queen. I haven’t forgotten,” I said.

We traded outre references. Hilaire Belloc. C recited part of the ‘unpublished’ doggerel-“At the end of Piccadilly stands a”-wh Chris’s father WFB Jr had once taught him. I riposted that indeed the thing had been published, in A. N. Wilson’s 1984 bio of HB. (Must send him a copy.) Revilo Oliver-the man w/ the palindrome name. He committed suicide in 1994, which Christopher didn’t know. He was mildly surprised to learn I had known him slightly. Peter Cook: I said he was fabulously wealthy w/ a big house in Hampstead, from his share in Private Eye, Christopher pretty sure he’d read an Alan Bennett eulogy telling how he’d bring poor Peter sandwiches and coffee.***

Friday night: met Sonnekson again, outside Two Lives on Waverly, just after 7. We went to a tiny Italian place on Greenwich-Sapore, I think. I stuffed myself on spaghetti + meatballs, w/ a share in the fried calamari appetizer. Corner table. Tiny bright place, very hot on a very cold night. A blind mulatto w/ a white-tipped cane was at the vestibule door as we passed out. “I see a white cane.” “Thank you,” he said. We went to Raffaela’s. R showed me his notes on Breeder Bullies, wh we are now conceiving as a comic treatise w/ lots of drawings. I lay awake much of the night w/ intestinal cramps. The Donnager I bought in Stamfor is alsomot gone, so tonight in Port Authoritiy’s Duane Reade I picked up a bottle of Kaopectate.

Have had a pain in my left shoulder and back last two days. Oncoming heart attack? Elevated pulse more than usual-72 to 78 when resting. Very unusual.

Off to London Thurs. Unprepared as usual.

Ashley phoned mid-week when back from Rio. We shall meet on Tuesday? Bring him cartoons.

Did 3 more for Colin on new topics-sent him 2. Got $500 ck for recent work, deposited it. Owes me maybe $1500 more.

Dec. 13  Have been BM-ing like nobody’s business. Terribly swollen around the middle for last week. Now we get over constipation? Made a point of eating salad last few days. Don’t forget. Have to go again now.

Ashley phones again. I tell him I spoke to Susy Goei in Paris yesterday after our lunch. He tells me she had a high old time w/film people in LA when she was living there after her arranged mariage broke up. Ashley to messenger down the CD art for ‘Diamonds’ wh I am supp to wk on.

No word from D Stead. Send Chad to Toby Young.

May have to go by air to Paree on Sat. Pick up pic in Islington at 11 am.

Ooh. Hemorrhoids beginning.  Have had a week of shits since 8 am….and we’re down to the soft caramel stage now.
Moki a good man. Loving, funny last nt. Phoned me up again today to tell me that Brian’s Christmas card this yr is B in a grip ‘n’ grin w/ Pres. of Ireland.

Bush Prevails” hed in NYT today. Late Supreme Ct ruling last nt. Barring Florida from jiggering the vote for Gore. This could be the fifth false alarm in as many wks.

Bright blonde girl named Petrie has turned up on the web. She’d made a website and domain for AA. P is nearly *** inscrutable, went to Andover + Babson. Lives in Manhattan. She’s the diametrical opposite of the last mirror-image who fascinated me (RD)…  I sent a note to AA via Petrie’s site but no reply.

12/15 3:55 GMT on BA flt 188
Whatever was I thinking? This Chris Buckley mtg a wek ago-I was putting myself on display for him. Nothing may come of this. Nothing. Fucking nothing.

From now on instead of going into depress, blotting things out through black thoughts, drink, whatever, I’m going to go pick fights and get back at those sleazoid jerks who need to be rubbed out…or just yell + scream and make myself heard.

This fucking Egregious-how dare he? And he is a he.

Yeah my thoughts were rushing on + scattered back in Dec. 72. And what did those incompetent fools at DUH do? They crippled me for life w/ that Trilafon.

Contagion of Michael’s LAZINESS. He has no drive. No drive. Which is the desideratum of Eastern religiions. No struggle. How demented and oppressed you must be-how tired of struggle you must be-to conceive of this as attractive. But where did Michael get it? Utter hell in his own childhood-fear of being negatively criticised, mocked, hit, punished. (Here Margot starts projecting her own hell on everyone-but that’s as sensible as any other apercu.) There is none. Keep to your knitting.

Grotesque fat blond creature w/ tattooed shields on his cheks + chin, distended ear lobes like some fucking savage. Crazy. Saw at Donnell Library on Sunday. This during time when M was being nasty on and off.

[image]

Christopher had this way of punctuating questions-when I was ready to respond-by flopping himself backward. Disconcerting to me.

[image]

Last nt (13th) worked till 8:30, then 2 win‘s + bowl of soup at Due South. Gore on at 9-conceding. Smiling like a cretin throughout. Began w/ one nice joke-he told Bush he wouldn’t call him back this time. Later, when I was in Hoboken + had tuned in WNYC, Bush was giving a longer, clichÂŽ-ridden speech. A panel of jews then commented that it was a lame speech-a warmed-over campaign speech. Wh it was- but surely it was okay speech for the person giving it.

I have rehearsed in my head what I sill say to the Brits when they ask me abt the election. “I wouldn’t have shed any tears one way or the other—but tell me what you’d be inclined to think.”

12/16 15:20 Paris time. We are somewhere in the Channel Tunnel. I booked for a table seat in the smoking car, surprised even to be asked if I wanted a “table seat” when I diffidently bought the ticket yesterday afternoon at Waterloo. Smking car, yes, because it seemed more European. The car is almost empty. Some continentals speaching French (why? Indians in Paris? What do they do? Run bad cheap hotels in the Marais? Popularize Doner Kebab?) are beside me on the other side of the car.

Ah! Out of the tunnel. First time in France, more or less. It looks just like England.

Rang up the Cottrells, spoke to Stefan + Steve, just before w e took off. Almost knows abt the Sonnet upgrade card-good-he was keeping this a secret

diary late 2000gallerynewsgallerynews

Wracked my brain for most of the past day trying to remember when we met Rosie-in-the-green-cape for lunch, and what the weird eatery was. I was sure it was between 2008 and 2010, but it turns out to have been mid-February 2005, a few weeks before I was in Paris and right after I went with K and S to see The Gates in Central Park.

How fleeting memory is.

Rosie was very fond of the Chelsea Market (here in NYC) where I’d never been. We ate a few blocks away at a place calling itself the Bright Food Shop. Exactly the sort of place where a rare overseas visitor might wish to meet you; she fancied it a bit of local color, I suppose. She was apparently a friend of Michael’s London acquaintances with the odd clock shop. We haven’t heard from them, or Rosie, ever since.

Looking at a predecessor blog from 2005-2006, I find a clutch of limp but still edible ideas sketched out in the Drafts bin, some no more than a sentence long. Laying them side-by-side makes an interesting autobiographical collage, A View from Pompous Head.

RIP Sausage Lady

The Sausage Lady died of colon cancer last year and I missed it. While I don’t want to be too harsh (after all, I expect to die of the same thing myself) I am presently giggling myself nearly to death.

I described her earlier as a “vile, mean-streaked harridan.” That is putting it gently. Her real name was Judith Moore, and she was the author of a thin, self-indulgent memoir called Fat Girl, published the year before she died. Prior to that her literary output consisted mostly of navel-gazing book reviews and essays that got printed in freebie weeklies in California.

Initially her publication was the East Bay Other (or something like that), in the vicinity of Berkeley, California. In the mid-80s she collected a stack of her essays and had them printed up under a vanity imprint called the SoHo Press. For most kitchen-table scribblers, the story would end there. But Judith was an idler with modem, and she subscribed to

Dago Death Trip

Many years ago, say fifteen if you like, I was recruited as a contributing writer for an obscure but wealthy weekly newspaper in Southern California. Let us call it the San Diego Bystander. My stint as contributing writer lasted only a few days, as I was soon inveigled into becoming a contributing editor, then associate editor, and finally managing editor. This all happened in the course of about three months. It was a magical time.

No, wait! I was never managing editor. But there was a plot to make me managing editor. By the time I got wind of the plot, I’d figured I wanted no part of it. But I’m jumping ahead…

A Vision of Hell

About twenty years ago I dreamt about hell and the devil. Repeatedly. I made the mistake of repeating my fast-fleeting memories of these dreams to a few people. It appears I upset them greatly, because then they had nightmares about the devil and being areligious people (like most of the folks I knew), they just couldn’t handle it. They were like people who don’t have bookshelves, so when you give them a pretty new book they stand around holding it and worrying about it, because they have no place suitable to set it down.

In particular I recall Elke, a German woman named Elke was particularly upset by my description of the Bad Guy. He may have had horns in my telling (I honestly don’t remember) but his most striking characteristic was his deformed, bifurcated face, like a pair of buttocks.

Oh how Elke fretted. You’d think no one had ever dreamt of the devil before. She decided to calm herself down by Seeking a Rational Explanation, as though a nightmare needed one. She told herself, and me, that my vision of Old Nick was just something I’d picked up from Hieronymus Bosch. A clear case of begging the question, but Maybe this helped her get over it. I don’t know.

Old arse-face was not my only nocturnal encounter with the in a filthy underground tunnel into which I’d been led by a Negro practicing voodoo. The worst thing about this cramped tunnel wasn’t its darkness or its filth but the certainty I had that it was inescapable. Miraculously, it seemed, I awoke, with the thought that there wasn’t anything strange at all about worshipping the devil: belief in magic and the supernatural is part of our nature, so if you don’t believe in God you still have the devil to reckon with. So you pay homage to him in one form or another, believing in things like the Earthly Paradise and the Perfectibility of Man (if you’re a sophisticated Westerner) or his ability to bring disaster to your enemies (if you’re a savage). Your notion of evil takes on a pragmatic, self-centered aspect. Anything that keeps you from getting what you want at the moment is evil; the face of your enemy is by definition evil (at least while your enemy is still your enemy; tomorrow he may be your friend and together you can form a league against some other solipsistic idea of evil). Furthermore, anyone who talks in highfalutin abstractions and long-range terms that mean nothing to you and have no benefit to you, at least none that you can immediately see, is probably evil as well. That’s the way we are wired, back in our little ape-brains. Maybe this is why hatred of Christianity, or God-worship in general, is such an obsession among

Miniskirts: The Current Thing? Uh-huh. Sure.

Two years ago I happened upon an image of the original poster for the New York Mini roadrace, a 10k that happens every June. Originally conceived as a 6-mile ‘mini-distance event’ the Mini began life as something called the Crazylegs Marathon. It was named after a leg-shave product briefly marketed by Johnson’s Wax.

Do you remember Edge shave gel? ‘Give your face the Edge’? Well, that was Crazylegs. Same stuff, same can, different label.

Crazylegs Marathon. The name and sponsor sound bizarre enough, but for creep-out factor they have nothing on

How to Deal with a Troublesome Individual…

…or a crazy. I am not sure there is a hard distinction.

While I was writing the last frippery something else was eating at me and it had nothing to do with Consumer Reports. It was something that happened at one of my gyms. A case of bad personal interaction. One of those odd encounters I get every year or two, usually with a highstrung or unstable person, someone whose behavior is so unexpected it sets my teeth on edge for weeks afterwards and makes me wonder–maybe I’m the one who’s crazy here.

On this occasion, though, it wasn’t me, it was the other person. I know because I’ve had trouble with her before. I’ve known her for about a year and a half. Skinny, pale, about 50, with a short crop of spiky black hair and red-red lipstick. Let us call her Maureen Kabuki. She is not Japanese, however.

I first met Maureen Kabuki when I joined this upscale health club on the West Side of Manhattan. She’d been a member for years. We both used lockers at the west end of the locker room and sometimes took the same classes, so we chatted occasionally. She was chatty and bubbly, and when I’m with a bubbly person I go bubbly too. I riff. Laffs all around.

We were friendly, though never friends. There wasn’t much to connect with. She often seemed a little dim, but only (or so I told myself) in the way that hicks and nurses often seem dim. They’re not really stupid, you know, they’re just not used to understanding any kind of nuanced conversational idiom. That was it, sure. She was unsophisticated.

We’d be in a class together, and I’d make some bland remark on the level of, “I’ve never done this, but I’ll try,” and Maureen would immediately apologize for it, as though it were the height of outrageousness. Had I really said something odd, or was Maureen funny in the head? It wasn’t a big deal, so I put it aside.

Then I was away for a while and when I saw Maureen again I found she was very cold and snotty to me. Quite theatrical about it, you know. Melodramatic, in case I might miss the point. I’d say, “Hi Maureen,” (or whatever her name really is), and she’d go–unnh–literally lifting her nose in the air as though I were a bad smell she was trying to avoid. I’d try to be friendly, strike up a conversation, but she always led me down

The Uses of Idiocy, or Is This a Good Thing?

Let’s recall the early days of webmania (1995-2000, roughly) and the commonplace observations you’d hear about its effect upon our national, or meganational, culture. “We are becoming two nations,” the favorite cliche went, “the computer-literate and the others.” What this almost always meant was, those who were daily Internet addicts vs. those who had not yet hopped on the bandwagon. Sometimes this was phrased in a way that suggested socioeconomic deprivation (“only ten percent of African-Americans have used the World Wide Web” and that sort of thing.)

When I Got Back to New York Everyone Was Dead

Maxwell Vos, Ben Bagley. But there was always Carley Cunniffe. Now I find Carley Cunniffe, the stunning head of her family’s investment boutique, is also dead. Damn.

And Where Shall Mister Buckley Sit?

It’s been some weeks since Bill Buckley died and I haven’t figured out where he stands in the Great Scheme of Things. Was he Good or Bad for Civilization? Surely, in his younger days, he was a guided missile for the Christian West, with all the force and singlemindedness that a

(Ah, but that’s just how our Chris is. Superficially smooth but incredibly inept socially, always eager for the cheap filthy laugh at your expense. He had a similar falling-out with old friend and onetime housemate Michiko Kakutani around 1983. They haven’t spoken si