Last year it seems I spent most of my time in bed, with Moki sleeping beside me. I am writing on a MacAir, tweeting, and/or listening to some audio book. There’s a tube of Fluocinonide on the night table and I periodically feel the plaques on my thighs and backside and rub it in. Also rub it into my forehead when the psoriasis erupts there. It was particularly bad in August and September. End of September I had a horrible abscess pain in the the Bad Tooth (upper right 6yr molar) and went out to find some erythromycin. Bought it at a pet shop at 98th and Broadway, Sept. 27th I think. The abscess subsided after a day or two, but after a few days of the erythro I noticed that most of the plaques were clearing up as well. I’ve tried researching this online, can’t find any attestation to it.

Mice in August. We got 11 with the Tomcat traps. Beginning of September a plague of fruitflies. They were really persistent. Up through November, I think.

And now, in March 2024, the rats have returned. They appeared around December. I thought they’d gone away. I put out trays of benign poison. I trapped three young ones on a glue board. Didn’t notice them for a couple of weeks. Now, with the return of a cold spell (temps in the low 30s outside) they’re scampering out through the radiators. They like to eat paper. They also like avocado pits. Twice I’ve found an avocado pit over by the living room radiator.

I told Charlie about the rats today, and he said there’s an exterminator coming on Thursday. So Thursday, maybe around ten. Must have the place tidied up a little.

Yesterday, the red Harambees to the guy in Hicksville. I see by eBay they’ve been delivered already. I put another few pairs up. The blue Air Zoom Vapors with the Japanese floral design. The Lanangs I wore in Spokane. White to begin with, but I took them outside Chelsea Piers one day and spray-painted them day-glo yellow. I did this after removing the Nike swooshes.

The Jana XCs that I put the blanks into. Didn’t like wearing them, really, a little floppy, so into the sales bin they go. And then the Eldoret II’s, which are really comfortable but I seldom if ever raced in. They have three permanent compression pins, so didn’t race in the Armory in them.

Not getting any bites just now on eBay, though the used yellow Mayflys have had a lot of views.

Argument with some kid on Twitter over the weekend. This led to my futzing around with the iguananews site. A new Thesis was ready to download, and that broke the system for some reason. Then, some hours later, it wasn’t broken anymore. By this point I’d bought a new domain, a free “store” domain, as a rebuild replacement. For some reason that broke. I cleaned out the .store site’s wp install and will redo it. Maybe with a daily pocket cartoon for Iggy. Actually Iggy belongs over in the right rail of the main site.

I’m beginning to think my fun time with Thesis is over. I’m paying $100 per annum for it, and Chris Pearson is demanding that mainly because he is interested in selling his Focus skin. What I really want is his old Press Row theme. Where is it?

Last three days I meant to to TMPL, didn’t. Today went to Tap Room instead, had a double martini and a burger. Got a bill, 64.00 all in. Wow. First time I got a bill. Were my previous lunches free? I think this was my first lunch this month (March). Sent a letter to Michael Gleason, Secy at AC, yesterday, thanking and acknowledging the Z card.

Have been brooding about the Charles Stuart business. How to write it up as a story? It’s a tale that keeps changing in the media in order to push one agendum or another. Initially it was “Boston is crime-ridden and it’s all because of the blacks.” That was during the Ray Flynn administration. This was too good to be true. Charles committed suicide (or at any rate drowned off the Tobin Bridge) two months after he and his wife were shot by the unidentified criminal, and immediately the story turned around, making him the culprit. Charles’s brother was pushing that tale. Apparently it was in aid of a jewelry-insurance caper worth five or ten grand. Now that bit is fishy to begin with. Charles made 100k as general manager of a fur store in Newberry Street, and his wife was a tax lawyer. They were doing well and lived modestly. There was no need for Charles to pull of a small-time swindle. If he was truly larcenous, he would have worked something out at the fur shop. Now, the Boston Globe resurrected the story a few months back for a series with the theme of “Oh what a racist time we were living in then.” But if you followed the tale to the end, and got past the tiresome hand-wringing, you discovered that in the opinion of the writers and the cops and the prosecutors, Charles Stuart was probably not in fact the planner and the shooter. You see, right after the “suicide” we were being told that Charles shot his pregnant wife and then himself. But the trauma surgeon said it was impossible or unlikely for Charles to shoot himself the way he was shot, in the gut. He said this way back when, when Charles was still in hospital. Anyway, the likely culprit was Charles’s brother Matthew. Matthew and maybe one of his MacLean friends. Matthew himself is long gone (drug overdose in a homeless shelter in 2011), along with Charles and Charles’s wife Carol, and the Stuart parents. And the mysterious crimes are now nearly 35 years in the past and there aren’t that many people around still concerned about the whole thing…except it makes for an exciting rehash in the Globe. And since the series needs a theme, the Globe builds it around race.

Looking at some jokey stories I wrote about the Stuart case for Podsnap’s Own in early 1990, I see there was mention of Charles’s plan to rob his fur store. This is evidently yet another doggy tale brother Matthew was telling people. But I don’t recall this coming up in the Globe‘s recent coverage.

Drawing I made back in early 1990. I was in Nantucket, I believe, drawing/tracing with an ArtPen on vellum.

TL;DR: 35 years ago the Globe and others conjured up a story wherein a conman named Charles Stuart murdered his pregnant wife in an insurance scam that went wrong, and he blamed the murder on a black man. It was an unlikely story back then, and now the Globe concedes that it’s still unlikely, and Charles was probably innocent. Having lost a wife and a baby, he may well have been filled with despair and truly did commit suicide by jumping off the Tobin Bridge. But the suicide does not make him guilty of everything else.

Obiter dicta: Curiosity compelled me to enter Charles into Ancestry, and I find that the bloodline of the family is mostly Irish (from Clare and Cork a few generations back) with some Scots. But there is also a Jewish great-grandfather named Hyman Stone, alias Sklarinsky; and possibly a great-grandmother as well: Lithuanian Jews who spent a few years in London before finding their way to Boston. So Charles’s father, Charles M. Stuart Sr., was either half or one-quarter Jewish. The reason I can’t be precise here is that the father’s mother, Ida Stone, was married in a Catholic ceremony and buried with a requiem mass funeral. Both her parents, Hyman and Rachel, are however buried in a Jewish cemetery in West Roxbury. I have a photograph of Ida but that is inconclusive. It appears that some of Hyman’s other children were also baptized and had Catholic marriages. One of them, who appears first as Nathan then as Alfred Stone, in 1931 was married to a Polish girl in Detroit by a Catholic priest. Alfred gave his parents’ names on the marriage license as Henry and Rose rather than Hyman and Rachel. No doubt he had good reasons for such evasions.

But getting past all these trivialities: what I find really noteworthy here is that this bit of Jewish background never was mentioned in any of the news stories I read on the Stuart case. In addition it reminds of me of the strange saga of the Kohn/Kerry family, Jews from the Austro-Hungarian Empire who moved to Boston and took the name Kerry, presumably pretending to be Catholic. When this got press coverage 20-odd years ago, John Kerry said it was all news to him, he had no idea he was half-Jewish. This surprising claim would be easier to accept were it not for the fact that we’ve seen it elsewhere, e.g., in the case of Madeleine Korbel Albright, a Jew from the same part of the world (Czechoslovakia) whose parents “converted” the family to Catholicism in 1941 and supposedly never told Madeleine or her sister their family was really Jewish. For me it strains credulity that one would purposefully choose to pass oneself off as Catholic, rather than pick some less demanding denomination, e.g., Unitarianism or Methodism or low-church Anglicanism, or even Christian Science, where you’re not expected to show up at mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation.

Thursday, March 14

I was supposed to tune into and participate in Doug K’s online gavoreet last night (Wednesday the 13th) but I didn’t. Because I’d gone to Brooklyn (Smith & Ninth, where Jimmy Conway tries to get Karen to check out the Dior dresses) to drop off an unbranded orange vest for n*cr*ns. Distances in Brooklyn, at least in THIS part of Bklyn, are five times longer than they are anywhere else. I remember coming out here with my late Moki in 2014…to Lowe’s…a few steps away from the subway steps…and it took forever to get there. In this case the address was 168 Ninth Street. A good quarter-mile, half-mile, from the Smith & Ninth train AFTER I’d descended the endless elevated subway stairs. An UNMARKED DOOR except for the number 168. I turned the knob, it was open, no one about in this garage or warehouse. Little office off to the left. No one about. I knocked on the window. A squat Chinoise I thought I recognized. Gave her my vest. And my name, which I do not doubt she did not get straight. Chinoise says the main operations for the org are at Industry City. Where is that? I ask. She says 35th St., meaning Brooklyn. Later I check this on the map and it turns out to be way down by Sunset Park toward Brooklyn Army Terminal. Another new name for me is something called Zerospace Gowanus. This is where they are going to have an expo before the Brooklyn Half-Marathon at the end of April. So much of this Brooklyn geography I don’t know at all, yet it has become vital lore.

Friday, March 15

(Continued.) I walked back to the subway. Thought, Why not make a detour to Dinosaur BBQ? This meant doubling back a quarter-mile then heading north to the outskirts of Park Slope. About five years ago I lured Moki out here again, and he was miserable with all the walking and the distances. That was my fault. I had forgotten he didn’t like to walk more than two blocks for any reason, and as always I mis-estimated distances.

Once you find Dino BBQ, on Union Street, you are at the very bottom of valley that will not look anything like Park Slope until you’ve detected the beginnings of a hill, then see Fifth Avenue in the distance (technically the western border of PS) and proceed to walk for a half-mile or so up an incline that ranges from 12º to 25º. At long last you reach Seventh Avenue, the main commercial thoroughfare, and that’s where you catch the subway. There are several to choose from. However, I was thinking of catching the F train back home, and that is some distance down Seventh, perhaps a mile. Union Street is near the north end of PS when it meets Seventh. I walked and walked and spied nary a familiar landmark on this sunny day, on these narrow, crowded sidewalks. Somewhere there was Methodist Hospital (now part of New York Presbyterian, I see) and a Barnes & Noble, and way beyond that a JackRabbit or whatever they’re calling themselves now, if they still exist. Finally there it was, the hospital, and the B&N. Where was the subway entrance? I gave in at last and looked at the iPhone. Just a half-block down the street.

Not too long a wait for the F, but when it came it was maddeningly slow. I just have no patience for these things these days, and the number of stops in Bklyn and Manhattan was more of a surprise than it should have been. I had a book with me (Dwight Macdonald) and should have been reading it, but wasn’t, and therein lay the problem. And then finally we get to Rock Ctr, which is now the nearest stop to me, since F is not stopping at 57th St these days. It’s been 30, 35 minutes. I eagerly, gaspingly, trot down the platform, up the stairs, choose the east side of Sixth, at 48th St rather than the west side near 50th because I’m not in the mood to cross big avenues just now. I trudge home, thinking of the muggy day when I’m walking home from work in 2011 or 2012 and the UN is meeting, and there in the middle of the street with a window rolled down is a limousine and in the back seat is François Hollande. I am walking about as fast as M. Hollande is riding.

I take to bed for what is meant to be a two-hour nap, but as the 7:30 call approaches I wake up, decide I have no intention to present my bleary-eyed self to these other people who haven’t seen my in years. Back to sleep. Sleep until midnight or so.

What did I have at Dino BBQ? Not a terrible lot. Salmon tacos, which were okay but overpriced. Mashed potatoes with gravy were the side. They were very good. A good counterpoint too, because the tacos were lacking something. The tortillas were crisp and had a lot of red cabbage. I feared they were fried on a grill that spent a lot of time with eggs. I also had a little margarita on the rocks. I would have needed three of those to get intoxicated. I was spending $35 as it was and intended to spend no more. I had a nice waitress, young woman in her 20s. Great big place, Dino, almost entirely empty. One big company lunch, it looked like, at a long trestle table, and a couple of old guys on the street side of the room opposite me.

So much for Wednesday. Thursday the 14th I had Coliseum Dental. This was not a happy event. The Chinese consultant, Dr Choe, thinks my back teeth on top are all gone, need to be pulled. I can have implants or maybe dentures. Bottom teeth not so bad. I said I needed a second opinion. I need to call the NYU clinic. I’m quite certain most of my teeth are solid for now, all except the 6yr molar on the top right.

It’s the business model of Coliseum Dental that I most object to. Heavily staffed, largely with noggy support staff to do paperwork, lots of hygienists (mainly colored too, mestizos or whatnot) and dentists of mostly nonwhite breeds coming in and out. Big overhead, necessarily a profit-making place where they upsell you as a matter of form. The only reason I got connected with Coliseum Dental was that I wanted a dentist named Scott P. He was the sort of person I wanted in a dentist. He was a white man, an American, presentable, well educated. And he was supposedly on staff here. But then after I re-upped with Delta and got ready to make an appointment with Coliseum (Jan 3rd was the first) I was told Dr P is usually in California (Walnut Creek, I believe). Now this to me is a clear case of fraud. I was led to Coliseum because I wanted a dentist who does not in fact work there. How could I have made such a mistake? Well I made a mistake because they wanted it that way. Perhaps I can find a better set of specialists through NYU. Why didn’t I go there to begin with. Oh, because I wanted Scott P. Or the guy with the Irish name who works out of Barry Musikant’s office across the street. (Quick detour to see if I can find the name. I can’t. But it would be at 119 West 57th, if he’s still there. Barry was there a couple of years ago but has moved a few blocks away to the East Side.) There is a Dr. LoPinto on CPS who belongs to the AC. That’s a possibility too. What I really want is another Silhan. A single practitioner, small office, low overhead.

After Coliseum the plan was to go to TMPL. Lord knows I need TMPL. I’d walked/jogged/strided a little in the Park in the morning, actually made it all the way up to the Reservoir this time (sounds like a joke, but that’s an achievement for me, even mostly walking there; when you’re not dashing around there all the time, you see how vast and tiresome it all seems; Ralph McElhinney didn’t like it when I insisted, on our 2014-2015 walks with Moki, on taking us all the way up to the Oval and even the Rez).

But I didn’t go to TMPL. I went to Chapas, again, and had calamari, the cheapest lunch option ($11, jeez) instead of the lovely and filling roast pork pho I had last week. Then home and so to bed. I’d been up since midnight, having missed the Doug memorial for Rob the evening before.

Strange happenings on TwiXer this week. I looked to see if one of my locked or suspended accounts could be resurrected finally, and by george it was, as though it had never been locked. The problem is that they wouldn’t send me their code through email. I used a landline when opening the account and of course you can’t send a text code that way. So I revived one account, and then tried another. Same deal with that. Two accounts returned from the dead, and soon a third. Because finally, hours later (this would be Monday, maybe) I went to my old “main” account, dead to the world, permanently suspended supposedly, and appealed that one’s demise. A few hours later I found an email, saying they were in error. I went to my old account and there she was again. One proviso, which the email said nothing about. I had to delete one tweet. It was a tweet that used the word “holohoax.” That may be a no-no now, but I don’t think it was two or three years ago. So the human being lifts my suspension, but meanwhile a bot scours my tweets for bad words and catches me just as I bring the account back to life. All is well now, and I screenshot the offending tweet and posted it elsewhere for safekeeping.

Stuff I Forget: a new entry. Nicki Slater. AKA Nicola Slater. I first knew of her when she was mentioned online around 2000 for the Eurostar posters she did. (I have three from the original run, because I asked Eurostar for them, and they very nicely sent them to me in a tube, back in 2000 or 2001. Very much on my mind because I was imitating her Adobe Illustrator vector style for a while, most notably in the drawing for the abortive Breeder Bullies project.) But I could not remember her name past the Nicki. I knew she was now calling herself Nicole, and that she illustrated some Princess Diaries books. After many searches I found her, as Nicola, not Nicole as I misremembered. Probably this was on the website for her agent. I shot that agency a note: IS this the same as the Nicki Slater who did the Eurostar posters I collected? And I get a nice note back this morning, indeed it is. Only of course the answerer couldn’t discuss it in depth, is just responding on the strength of something on Nicola’s CV.

Nicola’s style has been quite protean over the years, going from the boldly stylized vector art that made me think of airbrushes and frisket-cutting, to a heavily outlined storybook style that was basically line art filled in with color; and then finally to her most recent period, which is somewhat primitivist, drawing pictures for kiddy books in a style that the kiddies might conceivably imagine were thought up by another child.

This may well be one of the later Nicki Slater posters for Eurostar, where she was using cartoon outlines more. The “frisket” technique of her earlier vector-art posters is seen in the background figures.

I’ve been poisoning myself lately. I bought a pint of Smirnoff last night, and had finished it off by morning. Then I got another Starbucks coffee and coffeecake through the app. Finally I went across to the street to Duane-Reade for a bag of the Himalayan salt popcorn. Ate the whole thing in a few fell swoops. Meant to go running or do laundry, or both today, but have done neither, and evening is upon us. I’m ready for a nap.

Some money came in from working that race a couple of weekends back (that terrible frostbitten weekend on West Drive in the Park), a bit under $200, and another hundred should be hitting some account shortly from some spikes I sold on eBay. I netted a paltry $35 for the yellow Zoom Kennedys, finest spike ever made, a week or two ago. Now this guy out on the Island has bid for four or five of my lovelies and the pittances so far take us over another $100. He’s a reseller, sells t-shirts and golf caps and whatever out of Hicksville. I don’t see any spikes in his collection. How did he know to take the Kennedy XCs and the first-edition white Ventulus? And the limited-edition-colorway Mayflys that I bought in 2010 and never wore? And now he’s got the standing bid for the red Complete Harambees that I bought at the Sheehan race in Red Bank, way back in 2010? 2012? I’ve posted a few more pairs on eBay now, have perhaps a dozen or so up there, ranging from the high-end Jasari+, a modification of the original ceramic-pin version, to the probably unsellable AdiStar ST steeplechase spikes in two sizes. Somebody is selling used Mayflys, original yellow edition, for well over a hundred dollars. No takers. I’m selling my slightly used yellow Mayflys for a fraction of that, also no takers so far.

As for the race people, those Brooklyn-centric mystery folks: I am at present scheduled to work another 21 events this year. This includes four, three races and a half-mara expo, in April.

John M was supposed to be coming into town last weekend, didn’t, I don’t know if he will make this one. I told him it was not a good weekend. We have St. Patrick’s parade tomorrow. Then Sunday is the real St. Patrick’s Day, and I believe that’s the day of the NYRR’s half-marathon. Why not a weekday afternoon?

I have these brown accordion folders labeled SHEARSON LEHMAN HUTTON, which was somehow a predecessor firm to Salomon Smith Barney, before Lehman Brothers spun itself off again and went bankrupt. I can’t tell you what happened to the E. F. Hutton portion, but I’m pretty sure Shearson stayed with SSB/Citigroup because that was Sandy Weill.

Anyway, odds and ends and scraps of drawings and writings and correspondence fill these folders, some going back further than 1996 (which is where my life virtually begins, since my memorabilia prior to that has mostly vanished). There are letters from H. K. Thompson and Nancy Hunt Bowman and Ted O’Keefe. And from North Sydney, J. Michael Buckley. A letter from the Bournemouth bailiffs to Robert Baird from back in the 1980s when his nightclub went under. I was being mischievous when I squirreled that away.And then a sheaf of cartoons from the summer of 1996, when I was unemployed and had the notion of perfecting the “pocket cartoon” style you saw in Private Eye and elsewhere. I haven’t looked at them since then because they were embarrassing in memory. I’d already had a piece in The Spectator, so I was pitching the drawings to the Eye and to The New Statesman. I note the date of drop-off or fax on the back of the copies; that’s how I know.

I really like some of the various styles I’m mashing up together here. I note a bit of Pilbrow in the pension thing, which is very silly and very Brit. The best idea of the four here is the least successful in execution. You can’t tell who’s speaking “You look sick.” The fact that it appears here 90º counterclockwise doesn’t help it either. I’ll probably run some of the cartoons in GN, without comment. Just put them in the right rail as though an unknown cartoonist is supplying pocket cartoons.

I had forgotten that I had a number of letters from H. K. Thompson. One without an envelope kept turning up, evidently from about 1993, but then there were three or four from when we were in London and then Seattle. In an October 1996 letter he says he’ll write down my address (in his address book) in pencil from now on. I still can’t locate an envelope for the first one, but it was probably an odd-sized one since he says he’s enclosing information about Spiro. (Probably news stories from local papers.)

And then, finally, the Michael Bywater piece written just after Jeff Bernard died. Independent on Sunday, 14 Sept 1996, a few days after we landed in Seattle. I have the whole thing, but have scanned in only the title-page art. I exchanged notes with Bywater some years later, either because I’d written about this on a blog, or maybe—could it be that late in the game?—social media.

Finally got that review of A Conspiratorial Life done. I will do a review of the Matthew Dallek Birchers as well, for CC. Was thinking it would be good for Chronicles, but it seems it came out in 2022, not 2023 as i thought. Find a new book.

The loose molar is getting loose again, jutting out a little, some occasional pain around the gum. I made some erythro capsules and swallowed them today. Will need more erythro soon. Have dentist next week, finally. What to do about this?

Puzzled recently because I couldn’t find any diaries or pocket calendars for early 2010. Finally I found one this morning Lots of tight spidery writing, from Jan-Mar 2010. But the money shot, the time I was in that boutique hotel near Copley Square, has next to nothing there. Except me drinking vodka the night before. The boutique hotel, I find out, is the Charlesmark on Boylston St. What I remember mostly is bright red stools, bright red accents elsewhere. Did I decide NOT to go to the Al Gordon? Is that the day I dragged the Athlon through Cambridge, went all the way up to Chauncy St and badly sketched 29 Chauncy? I’m sitting in the lounge area, looking at Facebook, and Rob Dinsmoor is telling us that Amy Bishop who shot up her fellow profs in Huntsville was a friend of his from the Hamilton writers group. Most of the spidery writing was about how I was waiting to near from NBC Universal about the Flash job…which never started. And anxiety about races. Was going up to Ithaca, booked it, then canceled when I realized I didn’t have a special place in the Hartshorne Mile. It was a very snowy winter that, Jan and Feb 2010. Then, when I’m at Masters Champs at Reggie, I get an icepick in my lower back. Just when I’m thinking how lucky I’ve been not to have the sciatica… Met Kathy Webster later, when I’m feeling better because I’ve been slowly jogging around outside. We go to Jamaica Plain and have ice cream. K imagines I’m having this back and hip problem from running so much.

I have no mention of Rob here at all, but one vague joke about Amy Bishop. The Roz Chast of biology professors? What does that mean?

Picked up the rat poison from Amazon Go at Rock Ctr. It’s a little snack shop, staffed by obese nogs. There’s a tiny counter, like a paper admission booth, where you get your items. Otherwise it’s 30 Rock people coming in and out for pastries and sandwiches. One girl walked off with a six-pack of Klausthauler. You have to get a nigger to unlock the gate for that.

Bought and ate an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s today. Nothing else except a few crackers. And coffee and tea. The B&J’s may be because I’m not swilling the vodka. I sort of miss swilling the vodka. I’d like to have Moki right next to me, swilling it with me. And alive and conscious and able to get out of bed. That would be any time before July 2023, I suppose. I fancy making a papier-maché head of Moki for the pillow. Was thinking of armature wire and clay, but that is heavy and beyond my ability.

Tomorrow I have color and cut from Gracie at noon, Timothy John’s. It is an expensive place, can’t go there often. $100 for cut last time. Still about $500 on the Citi Cash card. What do I have in the Citi ck acct? $1700 ck. $70 USAA ck. Pay for hair with Citi Cash. Put money on Citi Cash. Pay dentist next week with Citi Cash.

I see CPTC is raising its stakes, wants $30 per month dues. This is ridiculous. No, I can’t drop out. Too much sunk investment. Spend next 2-3 weeks getting into sufficient shape so you can at least slow-run a few miles without blowing a gasket, then show up to someone’s practice.

Still rather blocked, though I’m determined to get the review of the Miller book on R. Welch drafted before I knock off. It is just after midnight, and I have plenty of tea. Tetley tea, in the round sachets.

I slept like a log from about 5pm to 8. Before that, I’d been out on this rainy day to see a curated talk at the new Grey Museum (formerly Grey Art Gallery) south of Cooper Square. I had no idea where to find it, expecting it to be near the big block sculpture or Cooper Union. No, it’s way down past the old NYHRC (now LIFE TIME Fitness; not much activity within, it looks like), and past the Muji store to the south of that. I was lucky to see the new navy-and-white banner waving up on high. 18 Cooper Square, easily a quarter mile south of Astor Place.

I was much too early for the tour (1 pm) so I killed time in Muji. Did not need to buy anything, but I’ll pick up a couple of black t-shirts there soon.

It was drizzling. I didn’t know it was going to rain, didn’t bring my umbrella. The enormously stout assistant at reception had me marked down for the 12 tour, which is not what I registered for. Fortunately I had the receipt e-mail. She was very nice about it. Most of the turnout were old folks, the sort of people who like this sort of thing. The them was “Americans in Paris,” post-WWII. Mostly people you’ve never heard of. A few Negroes, a few Jews. Early abstract expressionism, geometric designs, complex armatures of black welded metal.

Pleasant layout in the new address, though the old one, on Washington Square, had the advantage of location, as well as seeming like one great big room that didn’t need to be partitioned off.

Thought I’d grab a bite to eat afterwards. Maybe the Japanese BBQ place I’d passed on my way. Going out into the rain, I saw Phebe’s way down on whatever street this Cooper Square branches off into. Bowery? Bowery68 is the wifi pw. Sat at bar, ordered a Blue Moon beer and a Blackjack burger, which is an $18 cheeseburger with jack cheese and bacon. Cooked medium, and absolutely delicious. A dark, somewhat bearded Irish fellow named Ciaran at the bar. Exchanged a few words in Erse with someone who came in. I told him and a young woman at the bar that when I first visited Phebe’s it was much smaller and John and Yoko were there. Years later I used to accompany a friend who owned a club on the other side of town (Glenn) and would check out CBGB and other clubs to see what was coming up.

At home all I wanted was to lie down and go to sleep, though I fooled a bit with email and the London Review of Books before passing out.

A week ago Rob D. died. He and I were interacting via the new Substack fiction sites we started, coincidentally around the same time. I guess his “Sebastian” story will never have an ending. Rob was a bit better with fiction than nonfiction, where he tells everything in a droning, sonorous manner and is very lazy about visuals and specifics. It’s like Norman Mailer criticizing Morley Callaghan’s memoir in the NYRB 60 years ago, telling how the memorist doesn’t bother to make his own material interesting and seductive, or even informative. (Comparison to someone who met Truman Capote, and upon being questioned, says, “Oh he’s very bright and he’s short.”)

This vacuousness comes up in his two self-published memoirs, one about the “Troupe,” the other about going to a rehab clinic about 12 years ago. In the first he’s describing the branding and collateral we used on our flyers and posters. Originally the mascot of the C-heads was an old line-drawing clip art of a fellow who was supposed to be Bob Dobbs, of the Church of the Subgenius. Doug K. pasted a serrated crown onto his head and renamed him News King. News King had his own life before the C-heads, in some zine Doug or a friend put out. And now Doug repurposed him for C-head programs.

But Rob’s description of it all is that there was a generic line-drawing of a stereotypical Dad figure that we used as symbol of the C-heads. Did he really not know the background here, or did he just not want to go into tiresome details?

Much more annoying and inattentive is how he describes the usual C-head branding, once we moved on from News King. This started as a tiny halftoned image of the smiling head of Fatty Arbuckle. Bob Keenan, a graphics whiz, blew this up many times so the halftone dots were big and clear. As Rob describes it, this was some line art of a fat man that Bob came across, and it rather resembled Bob, which is why, perhaps, it was chosen.

We had this branding worked into all of our posters, etc., for years. I recently saw a pic of Rob wearing one of these shirts. Funny that he didn’t make the Fatty Arbuckle connection.

Rob in C-head shirt

Or perhaps…perhaps…he knew it all once, but just plumb forgot. His “Troupe” book, a memoir of the C-heads, focuses mainly on stressful adventures that he went through as a writer and sometimes crew member.

My theory about Rob’s prose style was that he was trying to perfect a kind of flat, affectless prose, where colorful details were neglected on purpose, out of a kind of “whatever!” contempt for too many descriptives. Somewhat like Hemingway, but not a Hemingway parody. Something like O’Hara, but without pages of ear-catching dialogue. In fact, Rob’s really bad at dialogue altogether, like J. Boylan. Everybody ends up talking in the same cadence and idiom. I don’t think he got much helpful criticism from that writers group he went to in Hamilton, Massachusetts.

From the time he moved to Hamilton, he informed me that it was the hometown of General George S. Patton. This surprised me, because when I was at the Santa Anita racetrack and Huntington Library with Ted O’Keefe and Bill and Karen Hulsy, Ted pointed out that this is where Patton grew up. (San Gabriel, CA, actually.) It seems Patton married a wealthy heiress from the Boston area, and that’s how he came to claim Hamilton, MA as home. For me this is a very telling detail, and Rob was getting it all wrong. It wasn’t quite Patton’s hometown. Hamilton may be duly proud of the Patton connection, but George didn’t move there until he was out of West Point. It happens that I have a book on the Patton family.

Both the Rob memoirs I mention begin with thanks and acknowledgments to such friends from the circle, beginning with the name of Amy Bishop, and that is an eye-catcher. Amy was the biologist who shot up her Huntsville, AL fellow faculty members in early 2010. I was sitting in the breakfast lounge of a snazzy boutique hotel* in Boston that weekend, in town for some races at the Harvard indoor track, when I tuned into Facebook, and there was Rob, telling us all about how he’d known Amy for years. She was crazy, most certainly, but Rob never said so, or gave any indication he thought so.

Now Amy’s long in prison, and Rob is gone. I should drop Amy a note.

*Charlesmark, I see in an old diary. On Boylston St near Copley Square.

Back to deer-in-headlights mode. What I am going to do about the rent? About moving on? Now thinking about grabbing a martini and snack at the AC, but this does not seem healthful. Why haven’t you written anything?

The long-awaited inaugural event with nr finally arrived early Sunday morning. I had no trouble at all getting out there into Central Park and showing up. I set an alarm on an iphone and checked it again every hour. It was like the last few hours before the London Marathon, sans the BBC “UK Theme” playing on the radio as I got ready to get out of bed. Finally roused myself around 2:45 and made coffee, out the door a little before 3 am. Wore the orange NYCM souvenir shirt from 2006 or 2007, zippered black Asics pants, the orange Patagonia jacket (from Freeport ME, 2006, with Chris Yerkes), and a Buf scarf that I probably bought in Dartmouth, Devon in 2006. Carried the old black Turkey Trot shoulder sack from 2007 or whenever it was. I think they’ve got Central Park closed from 1am to 6am, so I had to take the long way around, to Columbus Circle, then up the pavement, mostly walking, a little jogging. I’m definitely stronger than a few weeks ago; that little bit at TMPL every couple of days is showing. I couldn’t even jog at all, not just a few weeks ago, but most of the last few years.

The intense cold did not bother me at all, at least as I made my way there. It was 25ºF, colder than anticipated, though the winds the came up and it felt more like 5º. Meeting place was entrance at West 96th St. I entered the Park at 90th, where we go in for the Mini, then jogged a few blocks. Noticed a group over by CPW, went and joined them. Slightly late, maybe 3:35. Didn’t log into the app till 3:45. We walked down to the start for the HM, trucks came by, we unloaded. I was given an orange vest to wear, no branding. Someone had “Hot Hands” hand-warmer packets that you rub to warm your hands when they’re feeling nearly frostbitten. I don’t think my hands have known this cold since I was a small child waiting for the very-late schoolbus among the snowdrifts.

Half the crowd wandered off to the south to get ready to set up the 5k. One was our leader, CJ. I told her I didn’t know which event I was supposed to be working. Turns out it was the HM, which started at 9, one hour after 5k So, back to the HM start and more hand warmers. Coworkers were middle-aged men and oriental females. Great confusion about setting up the corrals and “delineators,” as they call the orange plastic bollards that mark off the lanes, with blue plastic tape running between them. We needed to have wide left-hand lanes for corrals (maybe 15 ft) then “pedestrian” lane (perhaps 8ft) with an entrance into each corral, with a bicycle lane and emergency vehicle lane to the right, undemarcated. At 4-5am, in the dark, we were there, putting up the orange bollards (they are held down by black hexagonal weights) and continually adjusting them and the blue ribbons between them. The first corral was 6:59/min and under; last corral was 12 min and over.

A surprising number of people came in toward the end to do the 12 min pace. Joggers. By this point the 5k had begun, the sun was up, and we were ever-so-slightly more comfortable. Another woman and I stood at the back of the 12 min corral with our INFO HERE signs. That was fun, and very useful, because we got querents every ten seconds. Where is the 5k start? (This kept up until 20 minutes into the 5k; I told them not to worry, their time would be clocked when they passed over the mat.) Where are the bibs? (Most had them; late registrants could get them in the nr tent on the left.) Where do we get the shirts? Where is baggage check? That would be up by the 102nd Transverse, near the end of both races.

Enjoyed this part of the setup more than any previous event, maybe more than any race where I was actively participating, in which I was always feeling sick as a dog for two hours before.

We were discharged after letting the tents down and stacking the delineators, etc., around 11 am. We could get extra hours by checking with the people at the baggage check/refreshments area. So I wandered over there, changed my mind, retied my shoes and removed my orange vest. At CPW walked down from 100th to 96th, took the C train down to 59th. Finally at noon I logged out. If there are any questions about the extra time, I’ll say I’m still an hour short, and I logged in 15 minutes late.

I slept well for a few hours in the afternoon, but when I woke I found the bitter cold had played havoc with my nose. A sinus infection or irritation on the left side. I’ve taken a lot of off-brand nyquil and pseudo in the past two days. Better now.

Finally I sold some shoes on eBay: the yellow Kenns, which I thought were the greatest prize of all, but only for the minimum, 39.99, plus tax and shipping. Meh. Clearly the market isn’t what it was 15-20 years ago. I now have an assortment of other Kenns, Milers, Jasari+, Zoom W, mint Mayflys up there. The Mayflys are worth $100, but maybe only to collectors. Yesterday, Monday, I bundled up the Nike box in brown paper (inverted Whole Foods bag), taped it up, took it down to the Rock Ctr PO. Then walked from there to WF because I suddenly wanted to make some bolognese again. This time, linguini, with no crushed tomatoes. A little bit of tomato paste. An 8.99+ Yellow Tail cabernet from the place on 9th Ave. Drank it all last night and through the wee hours when I awoke. The linguini was okay, somehow not as rich and tasty as the the spaghetti I made two weeks ago. I think the difference is that I used a whole pound of linguini this time, and I only had a little thin and regular spaghetti with the last batch: much more sauce in proportion.

Woke up every few hours, watched parts of the first two “pilot” episodes of Columbo, late 60s-early 70s. Not very good. Stiff, artificial. Too many Jewish actors. Besides Falk you’ve got Gene Barry and Lee Grant, living in an artificially wealthy L.A. atmosphere where people get their dry-cleaning picked up by Rodeo Cleaners. Falk was neat and suited in the first one. Graduated to tatty trenchcoat in the second.

Yesterday brought me two cards I will seldom if ever use. My latest AARP, and my new USATF. I put them both away in the black Tusk bag (from Nordstrom’s UTC, circa 1996) where all the extra and old cards go. Only purpose I can see right now for the USATF is getting certified again as coach, as I did in 2012, and as I nearly did in 2016, when I was in better shape than any other time since 2012.

Hours (s) on chat line to Verizon yesterday, looking for a credit for the days my service was down at the beginning of the month. Grudgingly they offered $18, on the basis of my having a $220 monthly bill. Yikes. I got them to go up to $30. Still have to pay that $220 because the credit has not hit. Maybe pay off Amazon Chase card, then pay Verizon with that.

I have decided I owe myself a lunch martini at the AC. Using my Z card for the first time. Thither I shall go, in a white-collard grey PINK shirt, black trews, black boots, Agnes B. jacket with hole in the sleeve. I shall bring the Birchers book with me, and notebook, and make notes as the first sips hit me.

I got up a few moments ago and went to the kitchen for something urgent…then forgot what the hell it was. Since I was out there, I filled the dishwasher. It seems the dishwasher always needs filling or emptying, though in the time since Moki took to his bed permanently (June would that be?) I’ve run only about two washes a week. Electric bill, unpaid, now at 788. I should pay something on that.

DCM, a debt collector in…Phoenix?…sent a couple of notices about his 11k debt on an American Express card through USAA. I sent them back, saying, there is no estate to collect against.

I must look into probate and see if there is any point in filing Moki’s will. If he had finished the 2014-15 will, I’d have something solid, but the 1994 one is meaningless.

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp seems dead and gone; can’t update on the iPad Mini because I can’t get to the App Store. Nintendo doesn’t recognize my acct no. or my email address. This is a time waster I certainly could do without. One of those legacies of that disaster year, 2017. NYS tax bill, Enoch doxed, Mr Trump given hell, Moki exploding at me for no good reason at Johnny’s wake, yelling at me the next morning (both hungover from vodka), the Elizabeth Gray incident on Christmas…

I suspect I am a local heroine at the AC, and that’s one reason why they were so eager to give me a rare Z card. I have yet to receive a bill, but it’s going to be over $100 when it arrives.

No further word yet on the judgment. I must attempt the vacate in the next day or two. Things hanging over my head.

It was just four weeks ago I finally got the $2210 check from Jamie/AT.

I’m getting dressed and going to the Club.

No news today, no crises. I did not work. I really felt unmotivated, blocked. I watched the latest episode of the Truman Capote thing on Hulu. Jimmy Baldwin comes to give him solace, only the negro actor is too tall and un-ugly.

Mid-afternoon inspected my 500-series Mac Powerbooks. What a fascinating waste. All can power up, but there’s nothing there. So fascinated by them 25 years ago.

Ate a big bowl of the leftover split-pea soup in the afternoon. Instant oatmeal (McCann’s) in the morning. Lots of coffee after having been awake since…12:30 am? To Shirley’s for one 1/2 pt Smirnoffs. That little bit is enough.

Timmy posted a number of 1920s-30s pictures of the Daverns in Meadville and Buffalo, around the first of the year. Where and how did he get these?

I sent him a card and photo just after Christmas, no reply. I suppose that’s dead stock. Should shoot a message to Claire. One of these days I may be up in her area.

Messages via Teams from the nycruns Start people for the 5k and HM on early Sunday. I have to work from 3:30am to 1:30, I think.

What a time for my sciatica to start up again. But there it is. Need to run, need to do gym, next two days.

Ebay has charged me nearly $10 for items I’ve posted but I haven’t made a single sale. None of the Kennedys, the Milers, not even the Mayflys (though there’s still hope there yet).

Got the other Birchers book from the 53rd St lib yesterday. Mark Dallek. Much more incisive than the terrible Miller bio of Welch. Do a review of each, intersecting, over the next day or two.

Greg wanted a crowd-sourced answer to mysterious FPY references. Who said this? What’s it about? Very obscure and generic for the most part. I found something on Little Entente and maybe John Dewey and Nye Bevan.

I ordered a charging battery pack for the iPhone SE2 the other day and must say I am pleased. A charge on the phone and pack seems to last for nearly two days. This is what I need when out doing donkey work for nycruns over the next few months.

Have been reminding myself to phone A.T. and others but have not. I just cannot see my future straight.

Last night, early evening, Wotjek stopped me at the door and told me he videoed Moki’s gurney being pushed out through the lobby in November. It was cold out and water was dripping out of my eyes, so W said, “I show you later, I not want see you cry. Michael he not so old was he?” Well he was 83.

I still talk to Moki, call out to him. He is in the darkness, with wailing and gnashing of teeth. I will rescue him.

A truly terrifying nightmare. I’d incompleted a lot of courses in college so they were going to throw me out. I’d been summoned to a meeting of the Executive Committee in SSS or some building in that region. I think 6:30 on a Monday evening. Somehow I got mixed up and thought it was 2:30 in the afternoon. Anyway I slept late, till a quarter-to-two. Was sleeping in the basement of Bingham or Farnham, I don’t know why. A new semester had begun and I’d only glanced at the blue book, the course catalog. I’d made up my mind I was going to pretend to be a very serious, earnest student from here on out. Actually take courses and finish them.

So at 2pm I was rushing around trying to find another copy of the course catalog. In the basement of some building where they run student businesses I find what I think is the course catalog, but it’s only a Course Critique, laid out with a cover to look like the course catalog. I can’t find my courses at all, just long essays about things I’m not interested in. But where is the course catalog? I think they hand them out in some building near Dwight Hall.

But I’m in a rush, have to get to Hillhouse Avenue shortly, and I don’t think I can make it. I head up towards Dwight, or Linsly-Chit, but the buildings are cordoned off. I stand in the middle of Elm Street, between Durfee and Calhoun, and yell out asking if anyone’s got a copy of the course catalog. Only I say Course Critique, which I don’t need or want.

Here I woke from this truly terrifying nightmare, which is pretty much what both halves of my undergraduate career were like.

Feeling rather triumphant today. Spent several hours moving Moki’s iMac to the SW corner of his desk. It’s always been at the north-south axis so you can’t see the naughty stuff he’s looking at when you enter the living room. I threw away a lot of papers and scrubbed down half the desk. Needed two or three goes.

But then the printer wouldn’t work at all. I got something out of it when I tried a wired USB connection, but no wifi. This did not begin with the move. I noticed it a few days ago. In fact, I tried to print once at Moki’s after the routers were changed, so the new router might have been the problem. Tried my laptops. Couldn’t print from them either. Couldn’t scan.

Finally I found directions to go Home>Settings>Wireless LAN etc., and enter the wifi name and password directly into the printer. This worked. I’d felt hopeless, despairing, envisioned myself doing my printouts and scans at Kinko’s for the foreseeable future. But now, triumph. I’ve only set it up to work under the Margot wifi, not the new one, but that’s enough effort for today.

It was three o’clock, a bit later than I’d meant to go to the gym. Impossibly bitter cold, but you feel good after a mile or two walk in the bitter cold. Only a boutique workout. A little treadmill, tiny bit C2, the stationary. No more than a half hour in all. My main objective was showering and doing my hair, which I did do.

Message from Coliseum Dental on my phone. The periodontist, Dr. Cho, won’t be there tomorrow, so we had to postpone to mid-March. A reprieve! Let’s go celebrate.

Post-TMPL, went to St. Malachy’s and got ashes. They were doing ashes before and after the 5:30 mass. This was before. The foreign prelate or deacon, in a Covid mask, said a screwed-up version of “Remember thou that thou art dust…”

Stopped at ShakeShack on Seventh Avenue, mainly out of curiosity. Almost entirely staffed by nignogs. Most of their business is via delivery, apparently. I don’t think I’ll do it again, though the cheeseburger and fries for $12 were okay. I haven’t eaten anything like that in months.

Watched The Day of the Jackal last night and this morning. Slept very soundly through most of the night, waking only for a couple of hours around midnight. Also watching Raging Bull, on and off. A movie I wanted very much to see 40-odd years ago. Murphy sneered at the idea.

Wotjek the concierge the other night wanted to give me some wine in return for giving him Moki’s lighted helmet, so I suggested pinot noir or cabernet. Was hoping I’d have it for Mardi Gras or even paired with my burger this evening, but no. I’m not giving up anything for Lent, though I don’t foresee drinking much v. Had a nice big v martini at the AC yesterday. Only solid food, not too solid, was French onion soup.

Cleaning out Moki’s papers today I came across a manila envelope full of our correspondence with the disciplinary committee after the Christmas 2017 incident. Extraordinary what an utterly evil fabulist that Elizabeth Gray was. Her negro son, Nate. Me creeping up the “back stairs” to the second floor. Anyway, that manila envelope is a keeper, goes right into the fat NYAC file with the Vic Gainor story and other amusements.

Threw away Moki’s dusty old two-line phone (set up for 3642 and now-gonzo 6301). Right now the desk has my 0209 deskset and Moki’s ultra-large-type funny old folks’ phone with his legacy 3642, a number I’ve known since 1985. I now have extensions for both in the bedroom. This is something of a first for 3642.

Postscript, February 18. Yesterday it occurred to me that there was a spare cordless phone that might work with 0209. I’d thrown away the handset when tossing Moki’s two-line phone, but I hadn’t emptied the wastebasket yet. Went out to the trash bay, unloaded the basket, and there it was at the bottom. Polished up the handset, good as new. But did it work? I swapped it with my working handset on the windowsill. Nothing. Swapped the batteries. Now it worked. And the old dead batteries (rechargeable) on my formerly working handset showed “Charging” when I put the set back into its cradle.

I found the other cradle and AC adapter in the pantry closet, set it up on the foyer table. We now have another phone extension for 0209, a number I seldom use anymore. I’d trade it in for a mobile, but I have too many mobiles as it is, and meanwhile we have these neat cordless extensions.