No word back from Andy. Well I wrote it to his lawyer email address. Of course a lot of people have only one email address.
Revealed my bereavement to Dottie. Will probably go visit before Christmas. Michael never ceased to wonder at that sixth-floor walkup. He never went, though he gladly accepted her joints and we had a nice birthday dinner at Indochine once. 2015 was it?
I’m not down in that area much anymore, since I’m not running at the 6th Street track (it was closed for a long time) and the NYHRC converted itself into a “Life Time” gym that charges 180% more than the HRC.
Modest workout yesterday evening. Over 30 min on the stationary, a bit over 5 on the C2, just a few on a bumpy-ride elliptical. I really don’t like those Lifefitness ellipticals, with all their funny arms. They got rid of their awful rowing machines and brought Concept 2’s, as I recommended. Why can’t they get some Precor EFX machines as well.
As Max, arguing on Twitter with a couple of autistes over consummation and annulment of marriage. I can’t tell if they really don’t understand what consummation is, or are they’re just winding me up? Another day, another Twitter argument.
Was up betimes (4 am) finishing the painting of the living room wall. Looks okay. No need to slap on another coat. Now to clean the Sneem glass and put a couple of nails or picture hangers in the wall. Next up: figure out how to drag out and clean behind the file cabinet. If we still had the handtruck I might be able to leverage it by sticking the lip under the bottom and working the thing out, one side at a time. But we left the handtruck at the storage facility in early 2022 and never went back for it and the remainder of Moki’s belongings (mainly pictures and files). He stopped paying the storage place. That was sort of the beginning of the end for him. We fell behind on rent and stopped paying that. A.T. had a stroke and stopped sending him his monthly remittance. I recall him still being bright and chipper in the Spring. Late April anyway. May, June, July he’d shuffle out to the Chinawoman for a football or liter, call to me when he came in the door, demand I take the sack and make him a drink. Those are happy times. I told myself he was having trouble walking because he quit cutting his toenails. I told him the VA could take care of those long, curling nails, but he stopped going. When was that? Perhaps the unsorted mail holds the answer. Early this year? Late last year? Anyway I soaked his feet in July and tackled the overgrown nails. Not just long, the big toes had nails that were 1/8″ thick. Why was he producing so much keratin? Was it the Biktarvy?
There was another drug he took, a retroviral I think. Atripla.That was the only HIV med I was aware of till this year, when I found he was taking Biktarvy and the script had run out in March. I called the VA and ordered more a couple of months ago, but too late, perhaps. I must call his physicians at the VA and ask about this. Had he continued on the Atripla, would he have lived?
I was reminded of the Atripla because I came across it in a case on the upper shelf behind Moki’s desk. And I was looking around there because all this attention to the red file cabinet got me wondering whatever became of Moki’s “drug box.” This was a black hinged box with the logo of Hotels International on it, and I believe it dates from his Indianapolis days, when he was EVP of the Indiana Pacers. 25 years ago it might contain some glass crack pipes, copper screens, scrapers (concave metal rods that supposedly came from a windshield wiper), maybe bits of plastic drinking straws. There was a time when Moki went away to a New Zealand bicycling trip in early 1999, and I kept going back to that box, scraping and smoking the bejesus out of that glass. Got decent hits at first, but the residue was soon gone. But I kept imagining that it would grow after a few days, so compulsively I’d go back and check. This is how you know you’re slipping into an addiction. If I’d had a dealer around, I probably would have phoned him up.
Anyway, up near the Atripla there was a metal mesh Container Store box, and inside were Bernzomatic torches (one still in its blister pack), Bic lighters, a scraper or two (the classic kind and a medical-grade one that looks like something you’d clean your toenails with), a clean and empty tina pipe, and…and…a bigger pipe with a bit of stuff at the bottom of the bowl. So I lit up and got a modest hit out of it. Waited a few moments and got an even better one. So now I’m back in the early ’99 mentality, hoping there’s still a good hit waiting for me, but there isn’t, alas, scraping be damned.
Greg’s sent me two emails about articles he wants. I have work ahead of me.
Also from email: Vital Records in PA finally approves my ID, which I had to resend the other day because the apartment number was missing on my form, though it appears on ID. So now they’ll get me my certificate copies, or come back with some other terrible excuse or holdup.
