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.

Looks like a reasonably pleasant day, in the 70s. I shall take a run, color the roots of my hair, see if I have any sort of wearable dress in the closet, for going to brunch with Paul and Anthony, arriving tomorrow morning.

The Gusto payment from Gov is is 128.65 net. I accidentally paid Barclay’s twice. Contact them and get a refund for the overcharge last December.

The toggle/dimmer switch in the hall by the bedroom is broken. Go to Home Depot first of all to get that fixed. Check which circuit breaker first. Any sales at Bloomie’s?

A mystery with the 1999 diaries seems now solved. At the start of Diary 46 (Michael Rogers Press, pink marbled cover), on the inside cover, there’s a passage that begins ‘from 41a.’ I took this to mean some Diary 41a and hunted around for the thing. I do believe any 41a is a lost diary from the London-Seattle period. But upon waking this morning my first thought was that I probably meant, ‘continued from page 41a in this book.’ And what do you know, the passage does continue from there.

My focus on the 1999 diaries began a few days ago when I found a typed-up page of some entries from mid-1999, on Word 5.1 on the Color Classic or one of its Zip disks. Now I’ve scanned in many of the drawings from that year, including shitty cartoons for Colin, cartoons of Regina and her dogs, Moki in Australia, and people in coffeehouses and on airplanes and trams.

Moki in Newtown, Sydney, Feb 1999

There are four main diary-books for the year, covering a happy first third,  a troubled and enjoyable middle, and a really upsetting end. Moki goes to NZ and Oz. I visit Regina in Belmont and Falmouth. I go to Oz, we drive from Sydney to Melbourne and back, Moki is thoroughly drunk for three days in St. Kilda, I fly home, go back to work, visit Regina again, and we go to Nantucket for Daffodil Day. Morris dancers and Tommy Hilfiger in an antique convertible.

Usually pleasant and generous, Regina Wagner had an emotional instability that always came as a surprise.

I visit the Egregious Nicki in Wisconsin in March, and in Mass. in April. I see Bryan and Anne, in town and in New Canaan. I get headshots taken, never pick up final proofs. Moki comes back May 1, is unhappy. Sends me off on errands and complains about them. Sends me out to get Progresso tuna in oil, and I get the little cans, not the big ones, so he goes on about that. Moki complains that the kitchen and bathroom aren’t clean enough. (Ironic complaint, considering.) We do the 5 Boro Bike Tour but he wants to give up after we get to Brooklyn, so we do. He’s bicycling with a oj-vodka in his water bottle. I go on rafting trip on the Delaware with some coworkers. I see this terrible psychotherapist, Mada, who annoys me more than anyone I’ve ever seen. Moki gets more irascible, tells me to find my own place. I get the share in Hoboken, but it doesn’t start till end of August. Moki’s friend Pat Thompson visits from NZ, but Moki never goes biking with us, he’s perpetually drunk. We dine with Edmund and Carol, we see movies. The odd and moody Sandra Albert enters and exits our lives. I move with the help of Dana and friend. The Egregious Nicki keeps stirring things up with the Friends list and gossiping to Lynn Conway.

In the Fall I go to England. Andrew and Claire and the mysterious Eric Newman in Devon. In December Rod and Jill get married in Dallas. Moki’s doing well, stays in Texas a while. We visit Roy Boe and family in Connecticut around Christmas. The year ends in bitter cold, and bitter feelings between Moki and me.

Again: when he got back from Australia in May he was in a near-chronic bad mood. I don’t know why he turned on me, but he did, and as I say he found all sorts of pretexts to excuse it. I remember at one point he went out to dinner with Dick Carr, at an Italian place at 56th St. and Ninth Avenue, and he asked Dick for advice on getting rid of me. “Pick a fight,” Dick said. Eventually I found that share in Hoboken, 928 Hudson Street, which was fine location-wise but unheated and uninsulated. Something wrong with the radiators. An 1869 building. My Ikea folding bed was about three feet from the uninsulated wood-mullioned windows. Marian, my flatmate, had a space heater running because of the cold, but I believe I couldn’t get one because it would blow a fuse. Around Christmas I happened to be with Moki for a couple of days. And after coming home drunk one night he said to me, “I want you out of here, if you’re not out of here, on February first I’m going to change the locks and spend a month on Cape Cod.” The obvious fact that I was out of there was past his reckoning.

Initially, sometime around mid-1999 he told me he’d give me $10,000 to move out. Later he said $5000. He didn’t, of course. Just as he’d proposed to pay for my plane ticket to Sydney, and didn’t; he said he’d buy me a ticket with this Continental frequent-flyer miles, then changed that to an insistence that I pay him for his frequent-flyer miles, and pay an amount rather more than I ended up paying for a return ticket on AA and Qantas.

Moki driving in Canberra or on the Hulme Highway. After Canberra I did most of the driving because he was nonstop drunk.

He’d gone into a tailspin that he’d only gradually come out of in the next few years, after Dr Summeroff sessions in Concord or Lexington, with the sessions and travel expenses paid by his brother Brian. Meantime I was dealing with my own nervous issues. I’d gone to see a psychotherapist, beginning with a guy named William Hapworth, who prescribed an SSRI called Celexa. A psychiatrist, he was married to this cartoon Jewess named Mada. She was a horror, full of misreadings and misunderstandings. I think I saw her for about a year, often canceling appointments. I gained weight from late 1999 through 2000, largely from the Celexa, and I was still carrying it around in early 2003 when I went on the weight-loss campaign that eventually took me down from 155 to 125 and had me running 30-40 miles a week.

Very therapeutic, this. I love him, I miss him, somehow I could overlook his deadly moodswings. He went to pieces in mid-2003 after Miss Kipper died and we adopted her sad cat. Remembering all these bits explains such later incidents as his NYAC fracases and the Grimm chef’s-knife stabbings. Without taking back any of my tears or protestations of love for him just before and after he died, I have to admit I may be better off now that he’s gone.

Finding the mid-1999 typed diary entries on the Color Classic recently was an attractive nuisance. I had to figure out how to transfer them (written in Word 5.1) to this blog, and ended up uploading them to the blarg files via Fetch. I can email from the CC, supposedly (have ethernet), but I don’t have the outgoing protocols. Downloaded about 3000 emails to Eudora Lite, but the ones since May are still on the server. Ran out of room on Eudora? Fortunately I think one can make a quick bulk delete.

The typed diary entries do not cite a diary source, but I found I used several books in 1999. Misplaced one in May, book 46 I believe, and wrote these entries in an unidentified one. This morning I discover that is the spiral sketchbook I bought in Australia. Lots of scribbling and pol cartoons for Colin. I see a TV reporter named Mark Matthews was staking his house out, accusing him of writing phony letters to the editor. Drawing of Moki in his Brookstone kneepads. Mention of the Egregious Nicki, Rachel, Andrea B, even Lynn Conway (first appearance; she’s mentioned later in the year toward the end of book 46). Movies with Moki and Sandra Albert. Move to Hoboken. Dinners with Edmund and Carol. Propping up the bar at Barleycorn and Seppi’s. Moki in a bad mood nearly throughout. I’ve now labeled this sketchbook 46A. As there are lots of cute drawings and even more scribbles that are ideas for drawings, I shall have to scan some of them in.

TMPL for a couple hours yesterday, then home and off to Brooklyn for the nruns party at Randolph Beer. In DUMBO, literally under the Manhattan Bridge overpass. Weak beer, sliders, tendies, tacos. Talked to a little blond girl from Mpls named Maria (I think), she asked me about the marathons I’d done. I talked about all the complications of the nyrr business model, depending on Sunday joggers who just want to do The Marathon with their friends. Called Steve Lastoe Mr Landoe. Oops. Beat a retreat after an hour. Nearly got caught in a thunderstorm. I noticed Miki had her big umbrella with her. She’s very prudent.

Gusto payment tomorrow. Won’t be much, maybe $120 net.

Watched J.D. Vance give his vp nomination acceptance speech. Very impressive. He can talk, hold the audience in the palm of his hand. After ten I thought I’d get some vodka. Outside it was raining. The Chinawoman’s was closed. I went to the drugstore and bought a Resin. That was very thirst-quenching. I’d had a weak beer earlier. Never mix, never worry.

Transferred those ’99 entries to a page in this blog. Now that I’ve discovered the source, I’ll have to rewrite much of them. Drat. Maybe add some scans.

I went to the NYU dental clinic last week (Monday the 8th) for a long preliminary appointment. A pleasant subcontinental student in a mask, named Karen, checked me over and took my blood pressure twice. It was alarmingly high, 150 or 151 over 99 or 100. I’ve never seen this before. Now, when I used Dottie’s sphyg back around Christmas or New Year’s, I came out at 130 or 135 sys and I thought that was terribly high.

So now I’ve invested in my own digital sphyg and am taking BP almost every day. A short while ago, after drinking a pint of vodka in the past 15 hours and a fair amount of coffee this morning, I came out at 125 over 72. That’s the lowest I’ve seen in the last few days. 128 over 75 is more usual. HR is high, 73 today, but I haven’t double-checked that manually. I get very strange HR readings on the Garmin and I think on this. I can be lying down and still get it in the 90s.

Carto’s birthday today. My CC contribution is about him and Elisabeth and the Truth Seeker connection. Sort of a strained connection, but nobody’s ever gone into before. Next, I think it’s Fred Weiss and Toynbee. You know, the old How Toynbee Tanked idea for which I’ve voluminous notes, some going back to about May 2019. May 2019 was when Michael brought the bikes over (they’d been stored at the AC) and we were getting around to inflating the tires…when Jeffrey Brando came by with some tina, which we were happy to smoke for the next five days or so. Many notes, many rewrites, a couple of Orwell pieces. With tina you just want to rewrite the same sentence over and over.

On Friday I phoned A.T., got through for the first time in months. The carers would tell me I had the wrong number, or I’d leave a message. Jamie tells me nobody gets the messages. Anyway, Alice Therese sounds fine. A few gaps in the memory. She couldn’t place Helen Maixner when I said she’d asked after her. Now, about ten years ago, according to Moki’s notes, it was A.T. who asked for Helen’s address (in Brussels and Gstaad), which is why I had those old addresses in the first place. Now Helen’s moved to Taos, so I got to tell A.T. about that and how Helen prefers the powder snow there to Gstaad, and is skiing still, age 90. But alas, I had to explain to her who Helen was. Maurice Tobin’s eldest, sister to Carol, whom Edmund Blake married. Edmund Blake the younger, not your uncle Edmund.

Other notable gap in her memory. She kept asking how Michael was. Was I talking to him. Yes, of course (I said) but he doesn’t answer. He’s in that dark place awaiting his Particular or Final Judgment. I gradually let it on that Michael was dead. Ashes still here, in a box and bag by the bed, awaiting transport up to Mount Auburn, which A.T. is going to pay for. (I should take care of that soon, as A.T. will no longer be with us in a matter of months and then I will have the complications with Alicia and Jamie.)

That was late Friday afternoon. Almost immediately afterwards I phoned Peter Sym@sk0. He had two numbers on his card (the one he gave us in 2011) but the first one, 860, went someplace else, a lawyer’s office, voicemail. Second one, 508 area code, Cape and Islands, got Peter. I introduced myself as M____ and he knew who I was immediately. I said I’d responded to his card with another card and letter, with ideas of what to do with Mary Alice Cooke, née Kirby. But I’d never mailed them. (I finally mailed them, and a postcard, two days ago.) So I explained my ideas. A.T. may need a better carer. And then there’s Mimi C0ll1ch down in Bucks County, with all her infirmities. Peter’s lady friend, Maria, is Mary Alice’s younger sister. She is in fact the youngest Kirby, and the one who worked at the Jockey Club, at least was working there when we met her at Dan Burns’s funeral reception in Winchester in June 2011. I recall her as being slender, dark-haired, quite pretty, and far too young-looking for her age. She was about 40 then, looked 30 at most. Maria arrived with some frozen yoghurt for Peter (he comically balked) while Peter and I were chatting, and then Peter switched me over to Maria. I got sort of a left-handed open invite to crash with them and sleep on their couch if I find my way to West Falmouth. That would have to be in a month or more. i have to decide whether or not I’m doing Asbury Park on August 10th, and if I travel up there I have to combine visits, see A.T., and maybe the Burns Library.

Asbury Park is almost certainly off the table. I reserved a room in what looks like a shitty motel, a former HJ Motor Lodge, three miles away. I reserved this on Moki’s Apple Card. I also paid $350 to Con Ed on Moki’s Apple Card, and there will be hell to pay if I get discovered. One good reason to cancel Asbury Park. Another is just the modest expense of getting there, and possibly Ubering around. Finally, I’m not in shape. Can’t do a 5k. It’s less than four weeks away. I’ve used the 90+ heat and high humidity of the past two weeks as an excuse to do little running. Current plan is, I’ll pay one visit to Asbury Park, this week or next. If I’m jazzed up at the prospect, I’ll floor the accelerator, practice-wise.

Took bicycle out on Sunday. Realized I could only do the lower loop because of the heat and my own weakness. Then I lost the chain around Belvedere Fountain. Could be my right shoelace got caught and pulled it. Anyway, instead of pulling the derailleur and getting the chain back on (it’s been a long while) I walked the bike through the Mall and back home. Came in the back door and Wojech told me I had to take the passenger elevator because they’re doing the “garbage” in the service elevator.

A week or so ago I got something I’ve long wanted, a USB record player for playing/transferring vinyl. When it arrived I realize that I had only record, and that was the Ben Bagley “Decline and Fall” thing, still in its shipping box with Certificate of Authenticity from Maxine Andrews’s estate sale, which I bought on eBay about 20 years ago. I knew I had some other strange record, or set of records, of Nelson Eddy and someone singing selections from New Moon. Also from eBay. But I couldn’t find the New Moon records. They are in a small box, 45rpm-size. They sat on one of the middle red bookshelves for years and years, never played. I emptied the bookshelves when moving things around in May and June, but where did I put the Nelson Eddy? After looking about five times, I found the New Moon next to the Michelle Phan makeup book and the watercolor guide (freebies from Penguin Random House, July 2015), which I’d put in the bookshelves by the far corner. After some hit-and-miss attempts with thumbdrives, I recorded the Ben Bagley and the Nelson Eddy, then went and ordered more Ben Bagley from eBay. Two records, Cole Porter Revisited and Unpublished Cole Porter (which Ben was planning as a revue, to follow the Decline and Fall revue, but never actually produced; thus began his steady course of producing revue records with celebrity singers but never producing any more revues). I’ve owned both of these records before. The first was give me by Eric Johnson from the Forestry Library back in 1973 or 1974, and I played it a lot on Nancy Nelson’s stereo when I moved into 411 Elm Street with Geoffrey in late 1974. It was the only record I had till Bill Lable, the madman upstairs, gave me a Bert Ambrose LP, also Cole Porter.

But you know, somehow I didn’t enjoy these records as much as I thought I would, as much as I used to. As I have no more vinyl to copy, I’ve covered the phonograph with the Henri Bendel bag from my knapsack purse.

The Bendel sack previously covered the Mac Color Classic. I’ve decided to use a cut-down ULine poly bag instead. That way I can show it off. I have no one to show it off to, of course, unless I have Paul and Anthony up here this weekend. They’re flying in on Saturday morning, we’re having brunch at the Carlyle, and I have to have some kind of smart dress to wear, though I don’t own one, at least one that’s available.

Right now the Color Classic is downloading all my Blarg inbox to Eudora Light. Is there enough memory? Surely I’m going to be trashing most of these. I didn’t even have the ethernet cable plugged in until today. My mind was on these things, because I wanted to see how much utility I could get out of the Color Classic. I still have ancient copies of Word and Quark on there. Also Illustrator and Photoshop. Out of mild curiosity I looked at some diary entries from mid-1999. I do not know which book these entries came from; I haven’t located the original volume. But I’m glad I bothered to type these out years ago, no doubt back at 928 Hudson Street, Hoboken. Because they’re real eye-openers. Moki was terribly, terribly miserable, and mean to me, almost nonstop, from the time he got back from Oz in early May until I finally took the place in ‘Boken. When I finally found the place in late July (just before Mr. Pat Thompson came from NZ to visit; he and I bicycled around Hoboken and I showed him my forthcoming address, but Moki stayed home, in bed and drunk for days) Moki was irritated that I didn’t have immediate tenancy. “You should have just JUMPED on that!” No help from him when I moved finally, a month after this. It was Dana and her friend Cal, from the place on Essex St. that would eventually be closed from a building fire. Another discovery, or rediscovery, was the appearance of Lynn Conway in the diary, about mid-1999. The Egregious Nicki was inviting Lynn to the Friends List. That of course came to a bad end, as Nicki liked to stir things up with innuendo and rancid gossip. But until now I’d long supposed the Lynn Conway episode happened around November 1998.

In a desultory sort of way I’ve been cleaning Moki’s bathroom, a little at a time, every couple of weeks, for six or eight months. And it’s ALMOST clean now.

I’m still coming across evidence of Moki’s fleeting attempts to solve the scat legacy. He bought electric Black & Decker scrubbers. Those triangular red scrubber-type things hanging in the utility closet for the last few years: unused, but that’s what they were for. And the dozens of cleaning potions and drill attachments. And of course the lighted toilet seat, which was my first discovery. That came loose recently btw. I had to get the instructions and reattach the plastic nuts to the two bolts that go down through the seat bracket. While detaching the seat from the bracket and reading the instructions I kept thinking of those guys in the Malvern 2021 reunion videos. Victor Faralli and George Sheehan and Abell and Fickinger and Beebe. Somebody’s saying Paul Duffy is up in Ontario at his granddaughter’s wedding. A granddaughter I can believe. But old enough to get married?

Tonight in DUMBO there’s a party at a big beer joint for the nruns people, a celebration for the roaring success of out Brooklyn Half-Marathon back in April. I have to clean myself up before I go. Haven’t showered in over a week. Maybe I’ll wander down to TMPL, do an hour’s workout. Yeah, that’s it. It’s getting close to three now. I can be back here before six, with my hair shampooed and dried. But not dyed. The white roots are sticking out all over. I think I still have some of the color-spray gunk.

Remarkably good weather just now. Highs in the 70s, humidity at 40. Sunny with 5-10 winds. Must run, maybe ride too. Governors Island tomorrow morning, ferry terminal and marshaling. After this a long blank period till early August. Heavy schedule Aug-Oct.

It’s on my mind that perhaps I could be a cyclist for nruns. I think they are looking for some. I hold back because I haven’t been cycling and I don’t have a proper road bike. Cannot ride Moki’s because the crossbar is too high, and my lovely old Cannondale mountain bike may not really be the thing. If I got another bike, I would not have room to keep it here unless I got rid of Moki’s, which is a pointless accessory at this point. Has been for years. It was over five years ago he brought it back from the AC and stood it in the foyer. We were going to inflate the tires. He never did, I never did (because I didn’t understand presta). Then Jeffrey came over and we did a lot of tina for a few days. This is when I was obsessed with Orwell and the Marshall Plan.

My last on Orwell, a few days ago, was just a listicle about the Angry Young Men. I have two or three more substantial essays in me, maybe already partly written. And there’s the book.

Money. I have about zeroed out the Citi accounts, once the rent goes through, and now think about the $700 in the duck and the £1200 in London. A little in USAA. Did I pay Amazon card? I don’t remember.

The J-word. After Brian died, Moki urged me to get a job. Kept reminding me. I looked and had some pretty sorry prospects. Briefly hired by Google but that sank like a stone within a few days after I made a jokey email. A few months after that there was the mysterious Gatestone affair. For a few hundred here and there I felt strangely prosperous. At this point, nruns and nuggets from essays for CC and elsewhere are not going to make it for me. Over the next mountain range I have the VCF award awaiting, mainly, but I know enough not to expect that or anything else.

Sling. Must cancel it today, tonight. I am watching the postmortems on Fox News about the Trump-Biden debate last night. They say Biden was a disaster, but Biden was just being Biden. This sort of thing on Fox News is the only reason to hold onto Sling. What else do I get with Sling? Nothing, really. This was a $20 trial, but it goes to $45, I think, if I don’t cancel. That wouldn’t kill me, but add it to the Verizon ($80-$90) and we’re halfway to the disastrous level we were at with Moki.

Con Ed is threatening to turn the lights off if we don’t send them $1000. Or $300. I’ve tried to call them. They have no humans in their phone queues or chat lines. I actually got an email with a human name at the end yesterday. Probably a bot.

Did not go out at all yesterday. Was going to run in the afternoon, then evening, then not at all. Got caught up in fiddling with the old Pismo. If I start on the Clare drive (internal) there’s a working copy of Word, and I think Photoshop. Currently it’s running off the Firewire Pismo drive, which has PowerMail and lots and lots of iTunes. I was just listening to one of a number of Ricky Gervais Shows. Why would I have those? I think Steve Cottrell gave those to me, and similar stuff, way back around 2007.

I added the wide-screen ViewSonic monitor, partly just to get it out of the bin so I can put the stolid 3:4 monitor in there instead. The ViewSonic has ports for both VGA and the other thing, but the Pismo only has a VGA port. In the back of my mind I’m getting an inexpensive Mac Mini, and that will be its monitor. At that point I might be able to retire the poor old Pismo, finally, which is useful mainly because it still can run OS 9 thus is a nexus between current OSX and my old 68k/PPC machines.  Moki had this weird big-letter USB keyboard in his desk bottom drawer, and that works. As does a shiny, unused Apple mouse, which probably came with the iMac. So I could actually sit there in front of the Metro Shelving and write on Word. I have the internet connection figured out, too. I think. It wasn’t connecting for a while because the ethernet cable wasn’t being recognized. Anyway, it’s now leading from the Pismo to the Apple Express router. That router is of course attached to the Verizon extender.

I moved the wire shelving that Moki had next to his bathroom (and which he fell down with numerous times), and I moved beside his night table a couple of months ago, to the liv rm, in that corner niche right of the sofa and to the left of the armoire. When I did this I was thinking of putting the Verizon extender router on one of the shelves (there’s a long loop of coax there) but practically speaking that extender belongs at the far end of the room.

Track lighting. Very far down on my list of priorities. Cleaning up the Con Ed bill should be our first thought when talking about lighting. How and when exactly did Moki assemble this motley collection? Surely there should be at least another couple of light fixtures up there. He liked a dim space. I mean, it seems to have been designed with sex parties in mind. Back in the Seventies when he had his swinger groups. And later on, he had hooks put into the bedroom ceiling so he could hang a sling from them. The hooks are still there.

Another thing I did last night: I put the two matted-but-unframed Cruikshank engravings I’ve been sitting on for 25 years, into frames and hung them in the hallway. Today I added the Cruikshank “Scorpio: The Slanderer” below them. But I made a mess hammering in hooks and nails and ended up having to spackle and  paint. The picture hook remaining up top once held Judge Burns’s portrait. I should put up my Yale diploma or maybe Moki’s Holy Cross one. Meantime I found the Willie Rushton photo and framed it in the frame I was using for Moki and me, November 2012. That now hangs beside Claude Chabrol, who also has a new frame, as I used his glass 5 or 6 years ago to replace the shattered glass that came with the framed photo of Brian with Donald Trump and Melania.

North American Precis Syndicate. That’s what Sharlene worked for for years before she went with O’Dwyer. I never researched it at all. Yesterday I searched it. Brave browser has a terrible, annoying AI thing that gets in the way. It seems they produce bumf for filler, formerly for newspapers, now more for content farms. Written by yoomins, but almost indistinguishable from bad AI.

Sym@sk0. A hand-written, actually neatly printed, card from P3t3r Sym@sk0 yesterday, “signed” by him and his wife. After condolences about Moki’s death, we move on to talking about Maria’s sister. Maria is apparently Peter’s wife, someone I’d never heard of. In fact, I couldn’t tell you what Peter’s connection to Moki and me was, other than someone we met at the funeral reception in Winchester after Danny’s burial at Mount Auburn. Well it turns out that it’s a Kirby connection. Maria is the youngest, or one of the youngest, of the Kirbys. Her older brother Paul married Liz Burns, Danny’s elder daughter. Max Kirby, the arrogant blond snot I met back in 2015, is Liz’s son, the eldest of four. Liz died of cancer back in 2016, I think after obstinately insisting on going ahead with another pregnancy. (I get that from her younger sister Mimi.) There was also a Kirby girl whom I took to be the youngest in that generation, and she worked at the Jockey Club. So this is the full extent of what I knew about the Kirbys till a few days ago. Except I didn’t know about Maria. Anyway, Maria and Peter are now asking me if I have any help or suggestions about what to do with Maria’s sister Mary Alice. Mary Alice C00k3 has been though a disastrous divorce and is destitute. Has been living in one of their houses but the house is being sold. So can I find her a place to live? She wants just a bedroom, an attic maid’s room, whatever, for which she will do cooking and cleaning. While she finishes the book she’s writing.

Whoa, whoa. This is too much at once. The only possible option I can think of is A.T. She’s got those awful ignorant caretakers who tell me I’ve called the wrong number. But I have to talk to her and her mind is pretty far gone, according to Jamie. And I’d have to talk to Mary Alice too. An utter stranger. And even if it seemed right, I’d have to sell the idea to Alicia and Jamie. Another backup solution is with her niece Mimi, but that’s in a remote corner of Bucks County, so not quite the Falmouth/Southampton kind of venue she’s looking for.

Until this, the Kirby branch of the family tree pretty much ended with Paul. Paul and the late Liz, and their three or four sons. Paul’s antecedents and siblings were a mystery, apart from that young sister from the Jockey Club. So I persevered and finally got something. Not by Kirby-hunting which was always fruitless, but by finding Liz’s wedding announcement in the New York Times, back when she was a manager at Manny Hanny back in 1985.

Another joker in the deck here: Christopher Paul Kirby. Nowhere else do I see him called this. So Paul was son of Dr Francis A. Kirby and the former Mary Alice Mullins. (There’s your Mary Alice; we’re on the trail.) Then Francis’s and Mary Alice’s obituaries gave us some offspring names. One was Mary Alice Cooke. Very little substantive on her, other than addresses in Connecticut, Washington State, and Massachusetts. So finally I enter that name in a search engine, and I find a nightmare of litigation and bankruptcies going back at least till the early 90s. She had about four kids. And she has brothers and sisters. Peter (and Maria) say she can’t get help from her marriage family (divorced, and I guess alienated from her kids). Also she hooked up with a guy in Washington state for a while, and that’s where some of the kids are. I suspect other relatives live far away. I also suspect Mary Alice needs company and wants to live in some kind of busy town or habitable suburb. I imagine most of the Kirbys living in Florida, where everyone ends up.

So the obvious source of succor has to be what she’s had so far, which is her birth family. I suspect the reason she’s been with Maria and Peter. As a backup solution, I’m going to suggest to them that they buy her a house, a modest fixer-upper, which she can redo and then set about selling for a small profit. This will take a couple of years at least.

I go to Ancestry and it prompts me with this item from someone I’ve never heard of, but is distantly related to a distant relation of mine:

Born in 1898, and seemingly still alive when whoever it was posted this on Ancestry. Except he really died in 1947 in his vacation house in Madison NC. A dentist. Brother in law to Kitty Staples who was once married to the Father of Prostatology, Oswald Swinney Lowsley.

Raced in once.

eBay tells me it’s sent $105 to my bank account. That means they took quite a haircut on the original $135 for the two pairs of tartan Mayflys. Actually $125 since I paid $9+ for postage.

New in box, but there’s no bag here. I put the bag from the others in here and gave the other shoes a blue Mayfly bag.

Over $20 in fees. Because two transactions.

I am hardening to the idea of scratching Asbury Park. I have just enough time to get into 5k shape. Am in far better condition than I was three months ago, but I doubt very much I could run even a mile without stopping. Extra weight is a problem, but also the basic cardiovascular thing. But the big thing is money. It’s like $300 getting a hotel room for one night. I could conceivably reserve or even pay with the Moki Apple Card. That would truly be criminal if I ran up charges, even if I eventually paid. I ought to try one payment with that, just as a test. Say we buy some crypto. Then we hold it, watch what happens (we could just buy fiat with some of it), maybe cash out, pay back. The idea is attractive for its fiendishness alone. May also be a good incentive for pursuing the J-word.

I wonder why Joe Biden is holding a rally on Fox News, then I realize this is live. He’s building back better after a disastrous performance at the sole debate last night. How does he get an audience? How do they paper the house like that? Two dollars and a box lunch?

Downloading Cold Fusion from Adobe. Did I ever work with this at all? I must have. There were all sorts of deploying tools left over at F&W and T+L. One called Conan and one called Red Sonja, which I always heard as Retsona, like it’s a Greek shellac wine.

Drank a Resin the other night, decided I can’t drink much beer anymore. Counterproductive. Can’t lose weight drinking superbeers. Especially when you down it with a Marie Callender’s turkey pot pie. So bought a pint of Pinnacle last night with the $9 cash i had on me. That didn’t last long. I got very hungry late at night and cooked up spaghetti with the last of some jar sauce that’s been in the fridge since around Christmas. I smelled it. It was okay, and it wasn’t past its use-by date. I didn’t remember the spaghetti at all till I went to the kitchen and saw, along with five days’ worth of unwashed dishes, the red colander with a few dried strands inside. (I just found out I do not know how to spell collander. Collender? Collander? It’s colander.)

Was thinking of writing a piece for the Lothrop Stoddard birthday, but I’ll pass on that. It would be so forced. I did one good piece on him, and that was on a rather eccentric entry in the Stoddard corpus. I have other things on the back burner. The Charles Stuart case, oopsie! JPK, the wronged man. Why Toynbee tanked.

Happy to discover that it is only Sunday, not Monday. I thought time had gotten away from me and there was no way I could crank out an Orwell article for the 25th. I was up at 4 and 5 in the morning, fooling around with earphones and the battery pack for the iPhone. I think I fucked up that battery pack. The Lightning connector doesn’t seem to work. I may need to buy another. Also fucked up the old earphones that came with the Census iPhone 8, and which I’ve been using for nearly three years.

Slept fitfully with half a Trazodone. At ten or eleven a.m. I was sleeping and listening to the Michael Korda book (Alone, a very good, detailed description of the Battle of France, up to and just past Dunquerque), when I had a vivid and desperate dream. I belonged to a little publishing commune where I gradually had my toys taken away from me. Recording equipment, my hair-dryer brush, even the newspapers, which were cut off when most of the group went to New Orleans for a conference. I had an enemy in the bunch, a Matt Potter type. (SDR on my mind because I’d been discussing SDR days with Lawrence Osborne, openly on Facebook, giving info on Adam, Mary L., Abe, and others.) The group comes back, and the head is something like Greg J. Some mystery-meat slattern with bare breasts and a wrinkly tan is lying on a divan or floor cushions, and pooh-poohing my anxiety. Oh you don’t really need those things, you can manage on your own, right?

I don’t know what any of that meant, but I got up at a quarter to noon and imagined the phone was ringing, or the intercom, or the door was buzzing. I thought it was Monday. Out in the living room the past week came back to me. To the Mac repair guy and the Jap Bookoff store on Monday; Prospect Park for that long Tuesday with nruns, back to Mac guy on Wednesday and negotiating with Thierry for the two tartan Mayfly pairs, and finally discovering the loud squeal coming not from the street but from the radiator; to P.O. and not much else on Thursday; lying abed most of Friday and Saturday, I believe, wasting time on Twixer and FB.

Made spaghetti bolognese against last night, the good recipe from the Jap lady in Australia. I used shallots rather than regular onions, a beef/pork/veal pack for the meat, and lots of red wine. Really delicious. I stuffed myself last night and today.

Orwell and the Angries, and Colin Wilson this week.

P.S. 4pm. The battery-pack charger seems to be working now, have tested it on both iPhones. Also the old Census earphones are working. I’m going to look into other battery packs anyway. Also, Verizon is letting you trade in an iPhone for an iPhone 15.

Since Tuesday morning—that is, yesterday morning, when I was looking forward to the nruns 5k in Prospect Park—there had been a high-pitched squeal out the living room window. So high, like tea-kettle high, Moki wouldn’t have been able to catch it. Do you suppose it’s all over the building and the old folks just don’t hear it? I figured it was due to the workmen doing their endless makework out in Sixth Avenue. It never ends. They come here at 1am sometimes, weekends. I served them notice, so to speak, and called in the cops, in the wee hours about 8 years ago. They left. No one stands up to them.

And now here on a second morning the whine continues. I figure I’ll give it another day, then complain to building staff, who will have a lot on their plate where I am concerned.

In the evening, after a busy day otherwise, I traced the sound to the radiator. With the help of working gloves and a hex wrench (we have so many) I removed the front panel of the lv rm radiator. I found the sound was coming from a little yellow plastic box with a hole on the top like that of a pencil sharpener. A 12v battery inside. I’d seen one of these things before. One of the exterminators took one of them out of the radiator in the bd rm and left it on the windowsill. A useless doodad, I decided. Tossed it out. This one I left on the liv rm windowsill because it’s clearly some sort of alarm, warning about condensation, or battery running down, or Lord knows what.

Anyway, no more dog-whistle whine.

Early morning, there is a Frenchman in Portland, Oregon who wants to buy my Mayflys. The Scots Tartan ones. Not just the new-in-box ones without bag, but the other, slightly used ones. (What’s his game? A collector? A museum curator at Nike?) Through the day we negotiated on my basic 89.99 for the NIB ones, plus about $45 for the others. And I added the used ones to eBay so we’d be doing it within the rules. Didn’t take long. He’d bought them by evening, and they are now packaged up, waiting by the door for me to hike them down to Rockefeller Center PO. One single parcel, two packages, $9.10 postage for me. A good deal for him. He’s paying $135, free shipping. I would have loved to be on his end in the olden days.

These are the first shoes I’ve sold since early April.

This $135, minus postage, plus the $140 or so I will have made yesterday in Prospect Park for nruns will go quite a way to making up for the $270 I spent getting my Mac Air 13″ trashed and data-recovered by the odd Mediterranean or Near Easterner at 501 Fifth Avenue. He’s very friendly, very personable. Would go back in a heartbeat. Am backing up the data-recovery hard disk right now, on Moki’s less-than-reliable G Drive.

Thought of going to Pershing Square for refreshment afterwards, but decided against it. Up Madison Avenue in the scorching sun. Stopped at the old Natureworks for two tostadas. I’ve decided the tostadas are better than the soft tacos I always bought before.

Some revelations as I scrolled through the drive contents at home. A major transfer to the Mac Air, June 6th perhaps, was copying the Playhouse 90 Mike Todd party DVD. That may have been what did my poor laptop in, eventually, though it died slightly later. I was using Moki’s LaCie DVD drive. I burnt out, or something burnt out, the CPU of the Mac Air. So Apple Repair Club man says he can fix it with a new logic board AND recover my data for $279 + $189. I say no thanks (this is in txt) but do recover my data. This I say on Monday night (two nights ago).

The major impetus for getting the drive data back, I am sorry to say, is that I couldn’t find the Julie Haugh photo she sent me 25 years ago. Well it wasn’t on any of my laptop drives at all, as it turns out. It’s in the blarg.net scaffolding. JFH-BOY she called it. JFH circa 1994. And she scarcely looks like a boy.

We have to ask: why did she send it to me? Or us?

I doubted the Ratty connection until yesterday morning, because the current edition is skin-ravaged and of course much older. But there’s enough there now for positive identification. Austin TX, Milwaukee WI. She had a girlfriend, or rather a civil-union spouse, from a ceremony in Vermont. Alas, the spouse died a few years ago. And then JF took a job with J****on Controls in Milwaukee. I picked up CV data via Ancestry and LinkedIn. An Austin ID photo from maybe 15 years ago, with good skin:

So JF is definitely Ratty. I was very fond of her in days of yore. I bought her a swimsuit and she traded me some surplus gear. That too was in Wisconsin, March 1999. She has seemed very unhinged on Twixer, going through various identities (a short-lived one called Carol Bratslover got smoked out quickly because she was acting abusive to the same people she’d fought with before). Insulting poor Fiona, going after Gami, reiterating a hundred times that she has a female ‘Q angle’ and is some kind of intersex (sounds plausible). Then claiming to be Jewish, ferociously anti-Christian (endorses a crazy theory that the Church was a vast conspiracy by the tyrants of Ancient Rome), and telling impossible stories about how her mother married at 16.

I have to look past that, as she’s taken far too much abuse herself online and in real life, and her mind has been easily poisoned by all sorts of people, not the least of them The Egregious Nicki a quarter-century ago.

I thought Julie was blue-eyed. Apparently not. Anyway it was hard to square this present edition with the Geena Davis clone we knew and loved in the late 70s.

So the hunt for Julie was just a blessed maguffin forcing me to recover data. And there was plenty of precious stuff. Raw video files, for Ashley and for me. The various rewrites of Teentime from years ago. The Capt. P. C. Martin files. Etc. Etc.

I was very beat today, after yesterday’s festivities.My exercise consisted of going to 501 Fifth and back. I will get my paltry check in over two weeks. Then another $100-200 two weeks after that. August through October seem to be shaping up into intense months.

Before and after the repairman, I struggled to move Moki’s glass shelving. It also needed to be balanced. Hex wrench, screwdriver, level. Tall, wide etagere into the bedroom corner. That’s a success. I had to vacuum there, both vacuums. Lots of rat turds.

People will laugh, but it’s a day’s work and a great improvement.

Where does the smaller, narrower one go? I do not know. Has to be lv rm.

Drank a 12 oz Resin, then went to drug store for aspirin and a 20 oz Resin. After 10pm I went out to the fabulous liquor store at the corner of 58th St., which I’d never been to before. Tourist prices. $7.60 for a half-pint of Svedka. Guy there let me have it for seven dollars.

Watched a doco on Tubi about the making of GoodFellas. I’ve had that book by the colleague of Matt Zoller Seitz, the guy with the Irish name, and never really read it thoroughly. Glenn Kenny. Made Men. I shall take another look at it.

I still cannot easily JOG more than about 200m without stopping, walking, slowing down drastically. But the overall fitness improves gradually. Today was hot and moderately humid yet I enjoyed it. Jog/walk/run to the reservoir up the Bridle Path and back. With other walkings (to Midtown and post-run to Whole Foods) I logged about 8 miles today. Early afternoon I took the soft rolling Sureté knapsack suitcase to the Jap book/CD shop on W 45th. I got just over $25 for about 45 CDs, and a handful of rejects. That’s a record. While waiting for that I went to the guy at 501 Fifth, 6th floor, who repairs Macs. I fried both my old MacAirs last week, trying to use an outboard LaCie CD player I found in Moki’s lower desk drawer. After frying the first one, you’d think I’d be wary. But no, because I sensed both were failing. Then I killed an hour at the B&N on Fifth at 46th. Took a while to get in because the block was cordoned off there. Somebody was throwing debris off the top of the building, the building next to the Fred French building, or else someone was threatening to jump. Tape and cop cars all around. Finally I crossed the street to the B&N side and it was air-conditioned, pleasant, nostalgic. Most B&Ns have disappeared, but this is the one I used to visit 2 or 3 times a week during the AmexPub days. They still have books stacked on tables, still have gift books and CDs and DVDs upstairs. Then back to the Jap shop where I got my $25 after a long wait while they got their cash registers organized. Walked back home, killed an hour, ran in the Park. Whole Foods: corn, butter, radishes, arugula, a big frozen bag of shrimp grits which I couldn’t resist, so I bought it instead of a couple of other things. Remembers in the queue I wanted some Resin beer, and having forgot to get the 20oz ones from the fridge, I got a six-pack of 12oz’s from the wall next to the express queue. Rather heavy bag to carry back, you may imagine. The little foreigner at the Mac repair place tells me in text he can repair my 13″ Air and recover the data for $279 + $189 for the logic board replacement. The CPU is dead apparently. I say no, I can buy another of the same model for a lot less than that. He’ll recover the data for $270 cash, flat. Okay, fine. I gave him a drive of Moki’s to put the data on. Will have to pick it up Wednesday since tomorrow, Tuesday the 18th, I have to work 2pm-10pm for nruns. Nice hot day in Prospect Park. I am looking forward to it.

I bid on another A1369 Mac Air for about $50 on eBay.

I bought Erythromycin at Petsmart (near Flatiron) last Wednesday, also a Y cable (3.5mm to RCA plugs) at Best Buy, then got home and found I’d shat in my running shorts. I often leak but this was major. Pieces of feces left in the sink when rinsing it out a day later. More Erythromycin ordered and drop-dashed a couple of days ago. I’m putting it into capsules and swallowing it every day almost, to keep the infected tooth (#3) down. I went to Coliseum on the 5th, and while the dentist girl was pleasant, they couldn’t do a fucking thing for me. This was occasioned because I’d lost a big black inlay filling on the previous day. She wrote me a script for Amoxicillin. That’s weak. Hence Erythromycin. I’m looking for a serious dentist. There’s an appointment at NYU in mid-July. Also looking at Peter Farrington at CPS. And something called Tend. Tend says I’m out-of-network though my AARP Dental is supposedly Delta Dental PPO.

Hooked up the new Lepai mini amp last Tuesday, but it took a while to find a proper 12V 3- or 5-amp AC/DC converter. Not at Home Depot or Lexington Hardware. I get home and there is one, so far overlooked, on the Malayan rubberwood table (almost entirely covered with spaghetti cables). And then there are others, running the big outboard G drives for Moki and Tom Ashley. I hook up those orphan Sony speakers that were on Moki’s Metro Shelving, and attach to the Pismo. Voila. Music. The Pismo cuts out a lot, something with the sound board. Not working just now. But the system runs off the 3rd Gen iPod just as well. The reason I went to Best Buy the following day is that I thought I could get a better 3.5mm cable for a connection, but the one I had is fine, as is the one with the RCA plugs.

Impetus for setting up this mini amp system was that I’d seen a YouTube video about how to hook one up, and I’d just managed to move the Metro Shelving to where it belongs. For years Moki had it squeezed beside the leather sofa, with the sofa and Parsons table making most of two 24″ red bookcases inaccessible, particularly when we had the bicycles parked over there.

The melamine desk top and Natalie Wood are between the Metro Shelving and the wall, as pictured.

Terrible headache most of yesterday (Sunday). Didn’t run, didn’t go to Mass. I’d drunk a pint of vodka the night before. A bottle of Yellowtail cabernet the night before. Now, just the Resin beer. Two cans. Maybe a 3rd. I’ve been known to have two 20oz cans, perhaps I’ll move on to a 3rd 12oz. I think I hear a headache erupting behind the left ear.

K. Brown has dropped out of TwiXer and is posting more on her blog. Wonderful takeout on L. Conway, dead last week, whose sexual obsession and predation seem to resemble Anne Lawrence’s. When we had the Friends list back in 1998, and joined briefly, she early on treated us to a series of photographs in which she does a strip-tease out of a demure blue-patterned square-neck dress and shows off her quim.

Same dress as in the 1998 strip-tease, but this is 2000 after her Ousterhout makeover.

Those are archived with someone, no doubt, but I certainly didn’t save them, and the only one of the series I’ve seen around is the first, with her fully clothed. Or maybe it’s a later photo, same dress.

The other day my Forerunner 410 slipped off my wrist and I couldn’t find it. It turned up near the coat-rack (I’d been taking my keys off the chain, as I was going out for a run in a while; though I didn’t go for long). In the meantime I identified the blob on the bedroom radiator as my missing Craft running gloves, which were wet and freezing back on Sunday the 12th, the rainy day on Gov Is. Thought they’d tumbled out and got lost in the lavatory at the culture center.

Mailed some new VCF papers at Radio City Station just before ten, then to Gracey at Timothy John’s for color and cut. I needed both. As it was my third visit, I got a “free” deep-conditioning treatment. Put $224 on the WF card and $27 cash in the little envelope. Then to Whole Foods, where I thought I might buy some flour to make bread. Instead I bought bacon and English muffins and avocados and sardines and salad greens and a Resin beer. Stole a cheap honey because the bar code did not scan on first pass. Washed some dishes at home, made myself two bacon-avocado sandwiches (filled me up for the day), drank most of the beer, took a nap mid-afternoon. Watching a Marg of Arg series with Claire Foy. It’s supposed to be Season Two of A Very English Scandal, and I stumbled into it because I found myself watching the final part of the Hugh Grant/Jeremy Thorpe thing from 2018. This is not nearly as good as that Season One story line. According to the credits, this is actually a standalone called A Very British Scandal.

Check to Con Ed and autopay to Verizon went through this week, and those with Gracey took up most of my funds in the Wells Fargo checking account. Rather magically, this had got to about $800 a week ago thanks to payments via Gusto last Friday and two weeks earlier. Money from home. But the first of the month is tomorrow and I won’t see another Gusto deposit until the beginning of July, and that will not be large. Very little nruns work coming up. Must write write write every day.

The other day I decided to try Sling TV. Back in 2012 or 2013 something called Slingbox was inquiring of me about a job. I didn’t get it, and it sounded flaky anyway. But it’s turned into Sling, one of a number of “streaming tv” products that act as a substitute for cable television. Not much different from Amazon Prime, except that Sling and Roku and the others offer you a variety of actual channels, not just an assortment of movies and TV series. So I have a trial deal for a month for $20. Twice that if I go on and subscribe. (Still a lot cheaper than what we were paying Verizon for unnecessary bandwidth and full-range cable.)

What attracted me was getting Fox News, and maybe Newsmax and OAN for a little more per month. Mr. Trump had the jury go against him on 34 (count ’em) felony charges yesterday, and while these will undoubtedly be thrown out in the coming weeks, the election season is shaping up into some interesting coverage. The sheer viciousness of these New York nigger judges and prosecutors amazes and appalls the world.

A fly in the ointment with Sling is that it does not work on our Samsung Smart TV. That device dates from 2011 or 2012, does not have the Sling “app.” This is a common complaint. There are workarounds. One is attaching a Roku box or Amazon Fire Stick. I bought a cheap “refurbished” version of the latter. Due to arrive in a couple of days. After clicking, I realized the thing may not work with my hardwire ethernet connection. Fire Stick et al. assume a wifi connection, though there are ethernet dongles as well.

Or would wifi work for us now, I wondered? Late 2020 our cable kept cutting out because it was riding on wifi. I thought to buy and attach a long RJ45 cable, and all has gone swimmingly since then, apart from the fact that I recently deep-sixed all the TV usage apart from what I could still get through Amazon Prime.

But, again, what about now? I recently downsized from 1gb mbps to 300 on Verizon, rather than severing it entirely and switching to Spectrum and paying nearly as much for all services, and meanwhile the 300 seems fine for everything. It even seems fine when I detach the ethernet and try the wifi again. A new router was put in, with extender box, on February 6, and this arrangement now proves more powerful on wifi than what we had a few years ago. Yesterday I disconnected the ethernet and connected the TV with the main Verizon router in the foyer closet, which is the closest signal we have. (There is also a ten-year-old Apple router running as a slave nearby that Verizon extender by the liv rm windows.) And it works fine. Strong signal. So the Fire Stick should get me Sling on our Samsung TV.

That 20′ ethernet cable from the TV will be useful when I am lying abed and writing and drawing on my old 13″ Mac Air, which has had a weak and wonky Airport connection ever since I zapped the machine with soup on 2014, and can no longer works with a USB wifi dongle because I foolishly deleted its extension a week or so ago, and the other ones I installed don’t work. I bought two more dongles on eBay last week. They work fine on the little, anemic 11″ Mac Air, which doesn’t really need one.

I made another batch of the lemon-orange-ginger-carrot-mint smoothie I did a couple of weeks ago, this time adding a bit of honey and ACV and rather more water than last time so it’s not all sludgy. Went out to Duane-Reade for some TP and paper towels and chocolate milk, and then to Shirley’s for a pint of vodka. Svedka this time. Have not had vodka in a week. Or more.

Last Saturday Dottie and I had an early Memorial Day celebration on her rooftop and in her apt. She got two kinds of steak and grilled them on an hibachi-sized Weber-type bbq grill. They were good, as were her lima bean and mushroom stroganoff side dishes. My contribution was $50 worth of Cointreau-type liqueur and quality tequila, with some limes from the big Wegman’s there (which Dottie absolutely swears by). She had ice and Himalayan salt and a blender, and I made margaritas.

Going down the escalator at Wegman’s, having just spent a half-hour in a nearby Dick Blick’s, looking for ink cartridges (they didn’t have ’em), I reflected on how my neighborhood used to have everything, now it has nothing…unless you go way the hell over to 9th and 10th Avenues, or east of Lexington, where again houseware and hardware shops abound. We lost a Best Buy and Bed Bath and Beyond around 62nd St and Broadway in the past year. But my old neighborhood, down along Third and Fourth and Second Avenues, Cooper Square, Stuyvesant Place…truly a delight.

Billy Flesch liked my Substack memoir of Cuffe. Looking forward to sequel. (FB comment.) I made a false start a few days ago, telling about how when I got back to NYC everyone was dead. That by itself is okay, but I have to get into Cuffe and Fehhrrgus Slloaan right away. And Gino. It was at Gino Restaurant (itself a good story of a couple hundred words) that Fergus, who always ordered the tricolore pasta salad and osso bucco, would tell stories about Cuffe and Gail Donovan. He didn’t think much of Sharlene Spingler, and he pranked us both. This should have led to endless enmity, but we got over it. That prank is the meat of the story.

Sharlene with her nutty Clark Rockefeller stories on the more obscure precincts of cable news, some 12, 13 years back. Sharlene with her immense mastiff mutt, bigger than her, taking up most of the oxygen in her tiny Tudor City apt. When she was prematurely old and dotty she’d show up at the Tap Room of the NYAC in a lopsided top hat that was out of 1950s Dr. Seuss. Looking through her FB account I see she collected funny hats like this, wore them to her Kentucky Derby parties. She was really sort of fashionable in her way. Back in 1998 worked for a hole-in-the-wall place called North American Precis Syndicate, which was just that. The kind of auxiliary-journalism outfit that thrived back in the 20s, when Haddon and Luce were founding Time. Thousands of papers, they had space to fill, here are your comics, your columns, your crazy out-of-town stories. NAPS must have gone under around 2004, because then she was at some place called O’Dwyer’s, a public relations firm of sorts.

After we became rather friendly we discovered through exchanges on Facebook that we’d both grown up or at least spent part of our minority in the Village, near Julius’ back when that was still at least a part-time family hangout.

It was after a bibulous lunch at Gino that Gail Donovan fell down on the sidewalk, I believe, and Cuffe said to leave her there. “Well she’s a real gobble and go,” he’d say of a doxy who ate a meal but didn’t do much else. After collecting a few of these stories, with Cuffe safely dead, I shot a proposal to Chris Buckley for FYI but he was mystified. “We provide service.”

COMIC IDEA for that old Hatlo parody notion I had 30-odd years ago, “There’s One Born Every Minute!” (Or maybe Minnit!)

Panel 1: Lefty lady telling well-armed Fashy lady, “How will you defend yourself with Armalites and AK-47s when the government has big tanks and jet fighters?” Tanks and jet planes in bg.

Panel 2: People with bags on their heads, gags, bound wrists, one holding newspaper with headline (TODAY’S NEWS), Fashy lady on oversize walkie-talkie like phone: “We’ve taken your whole family hostage. Maybe you’d like to test out your tanks and fighter planes?” Corner image of Lefty lady in cartoon shock.