Accomplished nothing today, except a letter to Zagria about Hoff (who died last October); an email I lost before sending, because I copied from a draft, and then copied something else before pasting. So I rewrote the thing, shorter. Still didn’t send.

Then, early evening, weird stuff was happening. The internet was down. Was everything down? The phones (landlines) were out. I copied what I had written and pasted it into a TextEdit. I went into the living room to check the router. The track-lighting bulbs were blinking. Turn on, they dim out slowly. Turn off, they blink. The rheostat thing didn’t seem to make a difference. I turned off all the circuit breakers, turned them on again, one by one. No change. Dimly I remembered round controls, somewhere on the floor, that overrode the wall switch. It took me a while but I found them, far side of the leather sofa. One of them operates the track lighting. Don’t know what the other does. I turned it up and the problem went away. But how did it get turned down? Where did the flickering come from?

Meanwhile, internet, TV, phones were down. And from a Verizon box in the closet by the door, came a constant clicking. Like the ticking of a bomb. I called Verizon a couple of times, failed to make connections with their nasty robot chats. Finally got a person of incomprehensible speech (but who travels under the name of John Kennedy) who wanted to send over a technician next week. I demanded one now. He couldn’t get one now. So, tomorrow, between 1 and 5. I said okay.

Internet is still down. I’m writing through a iPhone hotspot. I went out and bought a pint from Shirley. Today I’ve eaten most of a banana, a full sleeve of Town House crackers and nothing else I can remember. The chili and shepherd’s pie leftovers sit in the fridge still, unconsumed and probably inedible. Last night I ate Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza. I received a pound of French Lentils via Amazon, which I will do something with. John McDonnell on Twitter pictured them in a Sunday night roastie dinner. I asked what were Lentils de Puy, though I think he wrote Put.

Tom Ashley called around 6:30. I told him everything was fucked up. He gave his condolences, perhaps we get together next week.

Mimi Collich sent an email out of the blue yesterday, surprised that Moki had two kids. I gave a snowjob on that. Yes, they’re in Brussels.

It’s a good thing I changed the Verizon cable guy’s date from Friday to next Tuesday, because I can’t really manage rearranging the apartment for Friday, not with the other Verizon guy coming by tomorrow.

Have done nothing on the Vacate or Name Change. I need to redo the first, take it down next week (MONDAY??).

As of the past hour, it is 10pm, the bomb-ticking in the closet hath ceased.

After this, no more v. I awoke, feeling wasted, and decided to feed the pig. I set up the humidifier the other day. I put maybe a quart of water into the top, and then tried to figure out how I’d replace it without spilling water all over the place. The night before I’d taken the bottom and inverted it with the top, then turned it over. This time I just dumped water all over the place, nearly splashed and ruined the M1 in the pink quilted case.

Back in the humidifier’s box there’s a screwtop to the water chamber. Ah, yes, that’s it. Tried it again.

It was around then that I first noticed the track lights dimming on and off.

Postscript, Feb 18. A day or so later I discovered that the twisted-pair wire, the RJ-11 leading to the main 0209 phone, had been chewed through. Our rodent problem. Big Norway rats lately. They chew on paper, they chew on cords apparently.

So possibly the chew-through was new, and short-circuited or brought down the old A21 box in the closet, started the ticking. It’s been so long since that technology was common, the techs didn’t realize the possibility that wires had been chewed or cut.

While cleaning out/sorting through Moki’s desk drawers a week or two ago I came across the red iPod Nano I bought him for Valentine’s Day back in 2010. Did he ever use it? Maybe he didn’t. I just brought it to my old MacAir 13″ and plugged it in, and there are definitely songs on it. A lot of his stuff and my stuff. Angela Bofill, Curtis Mayfield, Bee Gees, smooth jazz shit. But also Ben Bagley’s The Littlest Revue and a lot of Johnny Mercer. Well this is good to know, though I don’t recall transferring anything at all into the Nano; I barely touched it. I charged it up a couple weeks ago with a USB plugged into the strip on the windowsill. But when I looked at the Nano today, it appeared that the screen was smashed. No damage on the outside; just radiating cracks inside the crystal, and most of the screen obscured. This is sad. It fell off my desk and just that little fall destroyed it? Do I throw it out now, or keep as another needless memento?

Later that year, after I started in at Amex Pub, Michael gave me an iPod Touch for my birthday. It was the closest thing to an iPhone I’d have for two years. I used the hell out of it. Started my Audible career, listening to The Worst Hard Time on the bus down to Philadelphia to do the half marathon in September 2010. Moki had had it engraved, something like “To Tuppy Two.”

Then in early 2013 (I think) I was waiting for a 14 bus amongst the snowdrifts and slush at 10th Avenue and 16th (?) Street after a day at Chelsea Piers. Somehow the iPod slipped out of my grasp without my knowing it. It was gone for good. By now I was mainly using the iPhone 4s, so it was hardly a necessity. Still, losing Moki’s gift to me…sad.

Years later, like 2021, not long before we went down to Brian’s funeral in Palm Beach, I bought another IPod Touch, same model. I put it in the cheap orange case I’d used for the 2010 one, and occasionally used it for Audible. The screen was abraded, but otherwise it was much like the 2010 one. I had that 2010 one with me when we went to Dan’s funeral up in Winchester in June  or July 2011. Took pictures of us in South Station, where we were waiting for a train. For some reason those photos disappeared. I had fuzzy ones of a xc race in Franklin Park (still do), but the Tuppy Two photos I want, the only ones I want, are gone. I bought that other iPod in 2021 because I somehow thought I could transfer the old backup, and the photos would be on it. Yes, I spent a lot of time with this in 2021.

Some good news from the Winchester (A.T.) front. Phoned her, and then Jamie arrived. He very much wanted to talk to me. Apologized for not having called back a long time ago in December. Sick for two weeks around Christmas. He knows I need the $2210 and says he’ll Priority Mail it to me tomorrow. For me, this seems like a stroke of magnificent luck.

Another blessing appeared a few days ago, courtesy of the A.C. Two letters from NYAC, one addressed to Moki’s family (that would be me), the other addressed directly to me. I believe Joe Mangan had a hand in this. They are offering me a Widow’s “Z” membership, rather like a continuation of my spousal card membership, because of Moki’s many years (53?) with the Club. I don’t seem to have any initiation or dues, I merely have to pay for my food and drink when I get billed. I can’t use the gym or Travers Island and certain other facilities. I suppose later on I can convert this membership into a full membership, probably without initiation.

It will be interesting if they look through my past and find the Elizabeth Gray incident from Christmas 2017. Will they ask me about it, or just let it go, figuring it was on Moki’s watch and deciding it would be inappropriate to delve into it all now? Though I’d love to set the record straight with them. Just tonight I came across yet another scrap of correspondence from Moki to an official at the Club, telling him that we did nothing wrong, so far as he could see. Ms. Gray was an extraordinary nutcase and a bully. The lies she wove when she went downstairs with her brother to speak to the manager! We were drunk (we were not, though she undoubtedly was); we were noisy (we were not); of course I used the n-word (so like these Lefty bullies to get all coy like that, loving the word but refusing to say it); I left, then came back and sneaked up the back stairs (what the hell are the back stairs?). At the disciplinary hearing they even told Michael they had me on video (video and stills they never produced). He was a drunken wreck when he got home that evening, Feb. 20, 2018 or whenever it was. “Oh they had your ass, they had you dead to rights! They knew everything!” I should have gone to that meeting, but I didn’t trust myself not to get enraged. It was Michael whose status was on the line, not mine.

My spousal card: I continue to have use of it till the end of March! By which time I’ll presumably have my new widow’s membership Z card. This means I can go and have lunch on occasion in the next two months. Maybe meet Mark Brennan. Perhaps I’ll bring Moki Mouse.

I walked my NYAC papers to the membership office, 12th floor, on Friday. The swarthy girl at the desk had never seen these forms before.

Curiously, in the first few days after Moki’s death, I stuck some NYAC bills in the metal caddy on our front door. “PAY NYAC!” I had this idea that I would use Moki’s remaining money in his USAA account to pay his back bill (now about $1300). Then I would proceed to use my spousal card and no one would be the wiser. Fortunately Moki’s USAA account got locked before I could put this into operation, and it would have been a waste of money anyway. Now I don’t have to pay anything, and I get a complimentary membership, sort of. The NYAC saga has been one of the few truly happy-ending stories of the past two months.

It will be nice to go into the “Ladies Lounge” by the lobby to see John the bartender. He probably has heard about Moki. Those were happy times, back in 2021 and 2022. A few mishaps. I fell down on the pavement once around March 2022 and broke my glasses, tripping in my black boots after two drinks at the bar. (An event preceded by a slight workout at TMPL, then a walk up 9th Ave to stop at a hardware store for a fixture that would give my bathroom an outlet via one of the light sockets above the medicine cabinet; then a bottle of v at the wines & liquors shop with the antique neon sign; then a couple of drinks at home while I tried to screw in the fixture, letting my hand slip so the globe bulb fell down and crashed in the sink; oh, now I had another thing to buy, it seemed.) M could tell I had been drinking earlier. And a few weeks before this, Moki was drinking at the bar, tried to get me on the iPhone, didn’t, started to walk home by himself, but slipped and fell in front of Carnegie Hall, where a useless Good Samaritan helped him up and called for an ambulance. He ended up at the Mount Sinai facility over by 10th Avenue, from whence he texted me and where I joined him for a few hours. He was in good spirits. They didn’t let him out till five a.m. I have a vague memory of leaving and then coming back to escort him home.

Thursday the 25th (Tim’s birthday, I now remember) I filled out some papers for Marc Bern LLP, the WTC Victims’ Fund lawyers. Needing Paul Bourguet’s number, I check the Contacts on my iPhone and half-accidentally called him, ringing off almost immediately. Anthony was there and told me all about the big payoff he finally got, though it took him two years. A quarter of a million, minus 10%, the max contingency the lawyers can take. Nice piece of change, and I could use it. I told A that one of the last things Moki said was, Where is Anthony and his wonderful Starbucks coffee beans? Paul filled me in on why he gave up drinking. Was over a liter of v per day, and finally his doctor told him he had cirrhosis, and in the future he might think about getting on a wait list for a liver transplant. So that was two years ago and he hasn’t drunk a drop since.

I had to go up to the TD Bank on 57th and 8th to have a negro manager with a torn Achilles tendon and knee-walking apparatus notarize my Victims’ Fund papers. Then I xeroxed some stuff at Kinko’s and mailed in the packed to Marc Bern LLP down on 42nd St. Also copied the Civil Court judgment, as it will be necessary for my name-change petition. (Or maybe not, if I delay the latter until after I try to vacate the judgment. I had intended to file both of these by Friday, but now I realize the name-change isn’t important, while getting rid of the judgment is primary. Can I get away with calling it a default judgment? And if not, is there an alternative process of quashing the judgment because of the plaintiff’s deceit about changing the date, then changing it back at the last minute without notifying me, so that I was unready and unprepared…?)

Not sure why, but I reupped with USATF that same day. About $60. This time I put down my 1953 birthdate. Let’s see if this causes a fuss. It’ll get back to Devon or whoever manages the USATF end (Neil Fitzgerald still?). I can’t imagine running in any masters’ races for the next few months. I have not truly run at all in months, years. No more than a few minutes on a treadmill or elliptical. Was still trying to go out to the Park a year or two ago, never got far at all. Walk/jog up the bridle path hill just south of Tavern on the Green; about all I could do. My involvement with NYCRuns figures into these vague intentions. I will be forced to make myself look like a half-decent runner by the spring, if I’m working all those races.

One use I could make of USATF very shortly is…Level 1 Coach training again! I bonked out of that in 2016 after signing up twice. Still have the book; is it any good at all? But they’re doing the training on Zoom these days. Somehow that seems like cheating. If you don’t travel down to Villanova or out to Brooklyn, it isn’t much of a challenge, is it? Let’s see how much it is.

Remarkably, I was last a USATF member as recently as 2018. What was I thinking, renewing in 2017 and 2018?

Went to the gym this afternoon, Sunday. Did not feel ill, but was definitely fatigued. This is the latter stage of the walking pneumonia. A few days ago I went and had to give up because I’d worn out my legs a few days earlier with 20 min on the C2. This time I did a few minutes on the C2, then a few minutes on the elliptical, then the stationary, then back to the C2 for a few. In the evening I went to STPA for Mass and N and a rosary I partly said in the Adoration Room. On this freezing wet night the church was packed. I needed the pews in the A.R. because I had to sit down.

Productive day. I laid off the hard stuff for a day and a half so I could do an early a.m. Teams interview with Jen at n——-.

Had a good sleep, with me waking every two hours during Daniel Todman’s Britain’s War. Then tea, cold water on the face, and set-up.

Went well, though our visual conked out early on. But I got another chance to try video and my little video-conference light.

So I”m going to be on board to make a pittance at their races. They never treated us volunteers well, you know, ten years ago; why I dropped out. Some of this was obliquely admitted by Jen, when she said they didn’t give volunteers much responsibility. I never liked volunteering at NYRR or Randalls Island either. So I’ve got documents to submit, etc. Meantime I’ll find real employment.

Then, in the afternoon, I made out affidavits for name change and vacation of default judgment. Did much of this a month ago. Correcting errors in the original version of ‘vacate,’ and correcting them again, I see I might have a pretty good case here. They were dishonest pranksters, the WF and T&H people.

So there we were in bed, Moki and I, and August was a pretty fair month for us, and Moki was in pretty fair shape, though he was rapidly reaching the point where he wasn’t going to be able to get out of bed anymore, not even to go to the bathroom. Meanwhile, he’d demand his vodka and mixer, and I’d lie next to him in bed, and we’d watch things he’d saved on the DVR (usually the old Fugitive series), and a lot of favorite movies, some repurchased from Amazon Prime. This is a partial listing, since some favorites (L.A. Confidential, In Harm’s Way) we’ve long owned. We ended up renting The Godfather and The Firm more than once; should’ve bought them a long time ago. Eventually I bought The Godfather; already owned Part II, which I accidentally bought or rented again.

We also went through all of Breaking Bad and most of Better Call Saul, skipping over the boring parts with Charlie McGill.

July 20: The Godfather

July 30: Blow

August 3: The Godfather

August 6: The Godfather

August 14: The Godfather

August 24: Everybody’s All American

August 28: The Godfather

August 29: Mulholland Falls

August 30: Body Heat

September 5: The Firm

October 19: The Godfather

October 23: The Godfather Part II (did I buy this AGAIN?)

October 24: Mulholland Falls

October 28: The Fellowship of the Ring (just for me, and I still haven’t seen it)

October 30: Gone With the Wind (for me)

November 3: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011 film)

November 7: Double Jeopardy

November 7: Fargo

November 8: The Godfather

November 8: The Godfather (I BUY it after just renting it again?)

November 9: My Cousin Vinny

November 10: Absolute Power

November 11: They Died with Their Boots On (Moki pissed off about me watching this and The Santa Fe Trail; mood getting worse)

November 12: Bonnie and Clyde

After about November 15 he wasn’t paying much attention to things; he didn’t speak much or ask for a different movie. Or any movie.

The books we listened to in August and September were mainly the Nigel Hamilton WW2 trilogy, and two books about Raphael Semmes and the Confederate Navy. He got quite interested in the Confederate Navy.

During one of those long periods when I had a steady job and was only vaguely aware of what Moki was doing during the daytime, he purchased a small SentrySafe safe and put it under his desk. “We can save all our important documents in case there’s a fire!” Something like that. He never used it like that, in fact we never stored anything at all in there until I found $600 under the seat in front of me on a transcon flight in 2014. We put it in the safe. Locked it? I don’t know. We drew upon this for small purchases, and I sometimes restocked it when I ran a dinner or lunch and Sven or Mike paid up with a lot of greenbacks and I put the do on my credit card. Latterly Moki stored some cheap Chinese tina pipes in there (still there; must dispose of in public bin) around 2019. I suspect this sort of thing was the real end in view when he bought the safe in 2011.

Years pass, and Moki dies, and I can’t figure out how the safe works. With the door open, I try combinations I read about on reddit. They don’t work, and the door locks itself (bolts out). More research: this is apparently a safe that works with a tubular key. You put the key in, turn clockwise to unlock, then do the combination. But where is the key and what is the combination? We had some tubular keys around, a couple that apparently belonged to a long-vanished file cabinet, and another that may go to a bicycle lock. They don’t fit the safe. I worried over this useless safe for a week. Yesterday morning, just as I was coming down with flu-fever, I decided to give up.

This morning I suddenly wanted to sort through Moki’s many folders and manila envelopes of personal papers. And there it is: SentrySafe. Inside, a manual (irrelevant for this model) and a little bubble-wrap bag with two tubular keys.What do you know? They fit. Following the method I read on line of going 0, three turns left to first number, one full turn right to second number, turn left again to final number…and now I move the lever and the thing “opens.” Bolts in. Moki wrote down on the manual that you can just do 53 then 56, but I haven’t the energy for figuring that out today.

I was terribly knocked out by that flu or whatever. Still have mild headache, a sort of sinus headache. Fever went up over 103º, then broke mid-evening and I broke out in sweats. This morning it’s sub-normal, slightly over 98º. I’m weak, a little dizzy, working on my first tea of the day.

Must send that letter out to A.T. With the pic of her parents and the Harvard LS dedication to her father (with A.T. and Ellen Moira in attendance). And another Moki-Mommy print from Falmouth c. 1979.

I drank a pint of Smirnoff vodka in the space of 4-6 hours last night. This is not remarkable as a daily intake, but guzzling it like that leaves me feeling weak and somewhat nauseated. And this is how I often felt for much of last year. My sleep cycle would get disturbed, I’d go 24-36 hours with no sleep at all, so then I had to guzzle some more v, and maybe take a Trazodone, to catch a few hours. And the Trazodone made me sick, often enough, even if I took just a half. So I’d be sick in bed here for most of the morning, maybe early afternoon, and Moki was just as sick or sicker. I think on my worst days we were working through a 1.75 or liter of v, so if I got up at 3 in the morning there’d still be a fair amount of rotgut on the counter. Moki would demand vodka, first thing in the morning, and always wanted paper towels, which he coughed or retched into. These retching spasms had been going on for a few years.

There was a time in the fall of 2015 when my system was seldom free of demon spirits. I might wake up with a hangover, and still a load on, maybe gulp a drink and go to the gym. Not an ideal energy drink. Early in 2016 I’d run into Dr. Dan coming back from the gym (at that time we were both NYHRC) and tell him I thought I really had a problem. And his response was pretty much, “Oh yes, well let me take you to a meeting. Lots of people in the club [a running club we belonged to] are alcoholics.” So, a Sunday night AA meeting in the basement of a church on the UES. After that it was mainly the 12:30 lunchtime “Foglifters” and “Beginners” meetings at the First Presbyterian Church. After which I’d cross the street and take pictures of myself in the reflective walls of the Trump Tower lobby.

And after a few weeks of this, I looked pretty good, felt pretty strong. Then I got a strange contractual job where everyone was disorganized, and that gig died after a few days. It concerned pharma and pharma advertising and a pharma prescription app, so you know it just had to be awful. On the bright side, I got paid for that week, and for several weeks following. This was due to my employment contract with the RHT recruiter. So with that and a previous string of temp jobs in 2015, I had enough earnings and employment to file for unemployment benefits, which I gladly took for 6 months. At one point in the summer they stopped unexpectedly. I discovered when I was missing 4 or 5 weeks of benefits. Turns out I’d been checking in on the UI site with a VPN set to Germany. Well you can’t get unemployment if you’re out of the country. So then I had to prove I’d been in the country all the time. Had to scan my passport, including visa pages, and upload it. A week or two later a fat deposit hit my bank account. And then, another few weeks after that, the unemployment gravy train stopped for good.

Anyway, when I lost that terrible job in February 2016, my husband and I decided to console ourselves with a liter of v. So I was drinking again in March, April, May. End of May, I went back to the Presbyterian church. This time I was going to get lined up with a sponsor, and be serious. The likely candidate was a 70-year-old Englishwoman named L*rn* K*lly. She had white hair with a pink forelock, and had once been semi-famous as the first woman auctioneer at Sotheby’s. She gave me her number. How nice. Then she stopped coming to the rooms. After a week or so we learned she’d suddenly dropped dead from a heart attack. Clearly the alcohol-free life is not beneficial to the cardio-vascular system: that was my first thought. L*rn* had a big funeral up at St. Ignatius Loyola, and beside me on the bus and in the pew ahead was an acquaintance from college, DWD. Turns out he was an old friend of the deceased, via AA, like many of us at the funeral. L*rn* was commemorated with a few short remembrances, mainly focusing on her retirement years when she went to Calcutta to work for Mother Teresa.

But I didn’t drink, through June, July, August, early September. I made 100 days. I look great in most of the pictures from that period. Not so good before and after. I confess I was not entirely free of psychotropic substances in this period. I found an old vial of Ritalin, a Moki prescription, and for a few weeks would mash some up on a hand mirror and inhale it through a straw. A mild buzz. When it ran out I tried doing the same with pseudoephedrine, but no luck.

My birthday rolled around in September, and Moki and I celebrated with a lunch and many drinks at the AC. I have not gone dry for more than a day or two since then, over seven years ago.

It’s time to try again now.

Back to Dottie’s on Monday. It’s like a continuation of the holiday season. I brought some split-pea soup I made (she thought it was an awful lot, but it’s about 1/4 of the actual batch) but we didn’t eat it. No, we ate turkey-provolone-dijon mustard sandwiches on toast. Delicious. Her computer problems seem to have been worked out (I turned off her notifications, which solved the junk-notification problem). She prodded me to clean the apt immediately, and sell off anything I could. Or, “When in doubt, throw out.”

But because I’m going through the Moki stuff painstakingly, I’m able to discover long-lost items such as his Irish passport. Now, I could get Irish/EU nationality, but I’d actually have to live in Ireland for a year. It didn’t used to be that way; they tightened the rules about 15 years ago. Also, there are pictures from 1979 of Moki and Miss Kipper in Ireland. And slightly more recent ones of Moki with friends in England, along a canal, and what looks like Eton. Old address books and lists of friends’ phone numbers from the 70s, 80s, 90s. I thought I was nowhere in there, but then a 619 number for M**** (misspelt) showed up, probably from early 1991. There’s a business card from when he was EVP for the Indiana Pacers, and a big sports-page story from Oct. 1979 about him being summarily fired.

Very cold and wet yesterday. Didn’t go to church or gym. Perhaps today. Didn’t call A.T. Perhaps today.

I’m feeling a little better now…must fetch my tea. I will be non-alcoholic, to all intents and purposes, going forward. I remember when I first stopped drinking, in November 2015, I was fine for the first few days, but then I went out to Santa Cruz and had a beer with Greg and wine with dinner and lunch. I believe I got roaring drunk on vodka martinis while waiting for my flight at SFO. I had a lot on my plate then. Bloomberg job interview coming up, and the AAA arbitration which I believed would go swimmingly, and up to a point it did, but my complaint was denied because the arbitrator depends on big corporations to pay her way.

A half-hour later (12:04). I called A.T. She was nice. I told her I had a fever of 101.4º. I’d just taken my temperature with the digital thermo, last used on Moki back in September or October. Going to take it again now… 100.8º. Does not feel like a cold, feels like oncoming flu. Or mono, though I haven’t experienced the tremendous fatigue yet.

Going to get that photo of A.T.’s father and mother and some woman, an aunt perhaps. Also the news story in Ancestry where Ellen Moira appears. Also send her another Moki and Mother in Falmouth.

I touched on the unpaid cremation fee. She was pleasant about that. I said I’d call back in a few days.

I created a new blogging account at a site called Dreamwidth 4 weeks ago, and forgot about it and never used it. I was reminded of it recently when I got an email from Peter Harvey. So I’ve cobbled together one entry (below). I suspect this will get no more use than LiveJournal.

I forgot about Dreamwidth….and the account I started on December 9th, 2023. A Saturday. That was the day I picked up Moki’s ashes, I believe. Original death certificates the day before. Tearful talks to the USAA people in the afternoon. I meant to go to church but swilled vodka and cried instead. A few days later I received Moki’s DD214 documents, took them to the funeral home. Then I got the death certificates reissued, noting his service record. They cut off Moki’s USAA debit card as of the 11th, as I found when trying to pay for a salad at Mangia.

I came to Dreamwidth by a roundabout way. There was Elisa Rolle’s site, with lots on Peter Harvey. Peter is still around. Did I write an email to Peter? I got one from him a few days ago. Maybe I posted a note on his own website, peterharveystudio. Peter, addressing Margot (telling: not Meg) says that Richard Flagg was merely a lodger at 96 Perry.

But I sent a note to Elisa too:

to elisa at dreamwidth.org
i made an account
megburns@dreamwidth.org
E-c-1
dec 9 2023
Also…I just stumbled across your bio of Peter Harvey, whom I knew back in the Seventies. He did indeed lease a flat at 96 Perry Street, however in the early 70s at least he was mainly living in a loft on Prince Street, across from a big painted billboard for pinking shears. His friend Richard David Flagg was subletting 96 Perry (legally or illegally, I don’t know; but Harvey remained on the mailbox downstairs), and Richard in turn would have a series of flatmates using the bedroom at the south end of the apartment. Big living room, but everything was pretty bare and austere. I recall Peter also had a little house in Kingston, Rhode Island. Other than that, you clearly know a lot more about him than I ever did! When The Children’s Mass folded after a week in May 1973, they brought Tennessee Williams along to the big dinner. He was in town appearing in his “Small Craft Warnings.” Tennessee told playwright Fred Combs that the problem with the “The Children’s Mass” was that it didn’t have a dog. “People lak dawgs.”

Thanks loads.

Meg Burns
megburns@nbnm.net
9 Dec 2023

Strangely depressed this Sunday morning. Rainy outside. A big winter storm presumably dropped snow on New England but it was too warm here. I spent most of yesterday making a big crockpot of chili (good but not as good as last time; suspect last was spicier) and working my way through a pint of Svedka.

In the mail the other day was a card from Deanna and Jim. I must keep what few friends I have close to me.

I discover, in a letter Laura wrote me over a year ago, pictures of her and her sister and nephew Bryan, who got out of the joint a few years ago. I didn’t bother to open this till a few weeks ago, still haven’t read the letter. And another photo, clearly of me at Claire’s in Vancouver BC after getting my ears repierced in 1997. That goes in the album by its partner.

Definitely in a depressed near-panic now over money and the future.

My mind keeps going back to highlights of the past year. Lowlights. Were there any happy times? The first half of September was okay. I thought the Mini Cuisinart was dead, so ordered a new one, quite different, and by the time it came I found Moki’s old one was perfectly good and a hard-to-find workhorse to the cognoscenti. The new little one was good for making butter, though you had to hold down a button all the time. Easier to clean. And then, following hard on the new Cuisinart I received a big box full of LED lightbulbs. 64 of them. A shipping mistake. But this is like $150 worth of bulbs. The company up in Vermont decided I should just keep them. But I don’t need them. So the box still sits in the corner, next to the white Morton Williams bags with the empty vodka bottles.

And the mice were gone. I trapped 11 of them in the second half of August. Moki was impressed. But when September rolled in we got an infestation of fruit flies. Much worse. I’d never seen anything like it. Moki was still eating a little, sometimes getting out of bed. In August I cleaned the kitchen floor (hadn’t been done in a year) and invited him to come out and see. Yes, he could still walk then, still go to his bathroom.

And I got the certified mail from Tenaglia & Hunt saying they would need a further adjournment, past the trial date of Oct. 2. What a relief, what a pleasure. I didn’t know that it would turn out to be a ruse. In the middle of September I finally got my WF debit card with my married name on it. And then checks. A few week later I sent in the ACH form so Meg B can be direct-deposited (haven’t used that one yet!). I found a really good chili recipe, Montana Spicy Chili, made it on the 22nd.

September got edgy towards the end. On the 25th I had a mild flamewar with an asshole in New Zealand. On the 26th Moki, getting up to go to the bathroom, or coming back, fell down, couldn’t get up. I put a pillow under his head. I took photos with the iPhone. The day before, I caught him pissing into the wastebasket. I remade the bed, as well as I could, with the new mattress pad from Amazon. He’d soon wreck that one too. Scent of urine everywhere. Eventually we got him back in bed. I’d ordered urine bottles for him, they came on the 27th. It was around this time I realized he might well be dead in a month or two.

I had a horrible pain flareup in the UR molar. An abscess just above. I’d use dry ice wrapped in a towel to bring the swelling and pain down a little. On the 27th I went up to Petqua again to get erythromycin. I’d been there once before, Dec. 2022, same thing, same condition. After about two days of the antibiotic, it starts getting better. Also I noticed a week or two later that my plaque psoriasis (face) had cleared up, and the plaques on my butt and thighs had diminished. I’d been puting fluocinonide on them with little result. Sept. 28th, we lay in bed, probably watching The Fugitive (TV show, not movie) and worked our way through the copies of the lease renewal forms. Moki got weary of it after doing one, so I did the other, signing his name and mine. There was a third copy, but I couldn’t find it. It turned up on the floor by Moki’s side, yellowed from urine. Patricia Warren ended up sending us a clean version of the missing copy.

Through all of this I was writing little Substack pieces, often posting old blog stories to make it look as though I were productive. Tom, the guy Jim Russell and I went to the Met with on August 11, ponied up $80 for annual donation. Later Kristin Anderson did. Sept., Oct., Nov. I published nothing in CC, VDare, Amren, Chronicles, SDR. I regularly used Moki’s debit card to buy the vodka we drank every day.

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Right now I’m terribly bothered by the tooth/gum pain on the upper left. This probably relates to the sharp pain I started feeling a couple of weeks ago, on the day I went out with Pat E to J. G. Melon. And maybe to the deep cleaning on Wednesday. I’m sitting here, lying here, with the fake Moki hump next to me (Moki Mouse and the other puppet), thinking I’ll make some erythro capsules, then maybe head up to Whole Foods around the time they open (8 am), and get the makings of the other chili recipe (very similar to Montana, but uses a homemade premixed chili powder seasoning). I’m drinking cranberry juice, having finished the pint of vodka between 3pm and midnight. I’m not really much of a lush, but I’m still over my old half-pint limit. I remember how Moki would get the 1.75s and the liters, and together we’d go through them in a day. By July or August we had vodka bottles everywhere. In the hall, the pantry, rolling on the floor in the foyer. In September I set about bagging them up and dropping them in the streetcorner bins, one or two bags a day. First the liters and 1.75s, then a mix of pints and liters, finally just pints.

Moki somewhat resented my pints. He’d sometimes order me to get two pints. And when we were both awake at 8 or 9 in the morning, lying abed, he’d constantly asked for a timecheck, so that at 10 he could get me out the door to the Chinawoman’s. Sometimes I felt sick, couldn’t get out, or told him to wait, practice self-control. On a Sunday, perhaps a week or two before he died, when he could barely sip anything, he was grousing at me to go out to the Chinawoman’s. She wouldn’t open till noon. He didn’t realize what day of the week it was. His last week he didn’t really speak at all, but I still got him his vodka and mixer. And tea or coffee. One of the last things he ever said, perhaps a week before he went, was “Why tea? Why did we start drinking tea?”

“Because one day we were out of coffee, but I had plenty of tea, so I made strong tea with honey, and you liked it very much. And we used the tea kettle, and I gave you instructions on making a cup in the microwave.”

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Lots of emails back and forth with Laura. I resent not being able to share any of the foregoing with her. She keeps asking me if I miss my sister (ha!) and if I feel bad that she died. She says this knowing full well that my husband died a few weeks ago and I’m a complete mess about it.

Today I took most of Moki’s outstanding library books to the 53rd St library. A couple of them I kept around for ages because I was doing a year-end wrapup review for CC. One book that hasn’t gone back is a book of essays by Elizabeth Hardwick. Very typical of Moki to decide that it’s high time he learn who and why Elizabeth Hardwick is.

On my way to the library I dropped the big white envelope from the Marc J. Bern law firm in the mailbox on the corner. Mailing back questionnaires pertaining to the 9-11 Victims Fund class-action settlement. I didn’t start going to MSK until 2003 and I definitely had a biopsy sometime in the previous year, so there’s an outside chance the environment may have affected the lymphoma. These mailboxes do not have doors you pull down anymore. You have to slide your letters through a narrow slot. I thought they were all locked up for security reasons, and did all my mailing at the post office.

I’ve once again been stacking up all the London Review of Books issues, New York Review of Books, Harper’s, Time, The Week, Bloomberg Business Week, The Economist, AARP magazine, etc., etc., and moving them to the trash bay. While going through the LRBs, I was careful to look for one with a cover listing for a review about David Foster Wallace, as that means something to me (was reading a long memoir by a onetime fiancée when Moki was in his last days, and finished reading it a day or two after they took his body away…and here come the tears again).

And the issue wasn’t there. I accidentally threw it out, or misplaced it. Okay, so I would read it online? Eventually? When I re-upped my subscription? (For a while I was putting all subs on my Citi UK debit card since they were about to close out my account, and I didn’t want any automatic renewals.)

Out in the living room, on the back of the sofa, in a stack of mail, opened and folded in half, as though I had been carrying it in a sack…I found the issue just now. I must have taken it with me one of those times I went downtown on the subway. Perhaps the time I went to Petco at Union Square for erythromycin around December 15? Did I have it with me when I went to see Dottie on Christmas Eve? Or perhaps when I went to Petsmart on Dec. 30, when I finally did buy erythro, as well as José Cuervo a few minutes later?

I vaguely remember reading bits of this issue, probably on the subway. A review having to do with King Cyrus, and then just the opening of the David Foster Wallace thing. Anyway it’s here, not particularly interesting. About a mini-novel that was excised from Wallace’s last, posthumous doorstop.

At dentist 11-1 then home, where I ate a Mangia pizza (burrata, I think the special of the day was called) and drank most of a pint of vodka. I had just gone well over a day without any alcohol. I gulped it down, and with the pizza inside me was soon fast asleep. I had awakened around midnight on January 3rd. Drank coffee and threw stuff away. Reread my Philby piece and my last Teentime Substack. I have to figure out how to get from Teletape studios to the Pat Pleven myth to explaining what happened to Hornblower when he was carousing amongst the Jackson Whites. All except the Pleven part here is supportive fiction, unlike the last few chapters, which were mainly reconstructions of Hornblower’s flat and mindset. I shall put in some Aunt Pudge brutality. Maybe backdated: in the videotape I have a bandage on my head. One of the things the folks at Teletape liked. Only remembering it now. That was the time she broke the window.

I needed the sleep, though I ended up sleeping again toward midnight, getting up at intervals to grab the dregs in the Svedka bottle, if there were any. Besides dragging stuff to the trash bay, I went off to TMPL around 7 am. Very busy then, surprisingly. Surprising to me, because I seldom go to gyms in the early morning. I didn’t have the drive or stamina, and felt very tired after a little stationary and elliptical. Took a shower, my first in a week or two, but didn’t do my hair. I’d wanted to clean up and do my hair before going to the dentist at 11. Coliseum D, at 244 West 54th St., toward Eighth Ave., was a disappointment. One of those chain clinics with coons working the reception/business area. I’d signed up because I wanted the all-American dentist Scott Pope whose name is just a shill on the door. Instead I barely saw a dentist at all, I think a small-boned female J in face mask was what I got, after an hour or so of waiting and then being worked on by a mestizo or indian hygienist who took a million x-rays and then cleaned my teeth in three stages, with a water gun, a pick, and then the abrasive polisher. The dentist was nice enough but her prognosis was dismal. The 6-year molar will have to come out. It’s rotting the bone and will kill adjacent teeth. Actually I don’t think it’s much worse than it was ten years ago, and the major downside is that it’s become looser and has had abscesses periodically. So anyway I have to see yet another perio, a Chinawoman, on February 15th. It could have been January 11th, but that date looks like bad new for me. Fortunately my charges were only $46 on Delta Dental from AARP. Hundreds, thousands, more in the future. But if I have serious pain again, perhaps I can call them up and get a script.

What will we do with replacing that tooth? Can I get a partial, a removable bridge?

Talking through FB messaging to a friend of Paul Wood. Wants to get me on his (Australian) video program, talking about this or that. He went to Westminster, like Philby. I said, wasn’t Monty headmaster of Westminster for a while? Turns out he wasn’t. A delusion I’ve carried around for years.

I still have $900 in the ceramic duck. I want to put $100 back in there, and keep that there for peace of mind and emergencies. I remember when I found $600 in a zippered BofA case on an airplane back from my first C-C conference, and Moki got a kick out of that, put it in the safe under his desk. (What do I do about that safe? Is the combination anywhere? Can one set it? Are there instructions?)

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Forgot about that Weimar Culture book till I was packing up for TMPL. That was going to be one of the books in the roundup. What are the others?

Tariq Ali, Churchill
J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia
The Washington War
Andrew Lownie, Traitor King
Hollywood: An Oral History