Handbill Handout

 This morning a grey Altima parked in front of my house.  It had New Jersey plates.  The woman driving the car got out, took three full black trash bags out of the back seat and carried them up the walkway adjacent to the twelve unit garden apartment building across the street. A little while later a grey pickup truck pulled into the spot behind behind the Altima and two women got out.  They walked around to the back of the truck which was one of those with the plastic cover covering the whole back part and opened the tailgate, took several black trash bags out of the back of the truck and instead of crossing the street carried them south toward the next corner and disappeared from my vantage point. A little while after a guy came down my street painting a while line to mark off the street parking.   Someone want to tell me what's going on here? 

  I had my hair cut today for the first time since around a month before the pandemic took hold.   That’s 18 months ago, more or less.   At some point during this period we find ourselves in I had decided that one positive thing I could do while I wasn’t forced to interact in person with anyone on a professional basis is grow my hair long enough to donate it to a charity that makes wigs for kids who lose their hair to chemotherapy or for other medical reasons.   It was a no-effort effort on my part, and now that it’s done hopefully some small positive thing will come out of this long tunnel of negativity.   Hair is just hair, I figured, you cut it off and it’ll grow back, maybe, right?   Still, I felt a little pang of sadness as I heard the scissors crunch through the strands.   I just had another birthday, and the thought that “it’ll grow back” is a promise of time that I’m not entirely sure I have and won’t know that I have until it has already pas...

  Watching the people go to the restaurant on the corner I wonder what their expectations are for the occasion ahead. I wonder if they’re looking forward to the gathering or dreading it. I wonder if they’ll get life changing news, someone announces a wedding or an imminent child or maybe they got a fatal diagnosis and they break the news between the apps and the entrees.  I wonder what the appropriate time of the meal is for that? Before dessert, certainly. 

Remember when the pandemic was new and those articles and some pictures from the 1918 flu pandemic came out and some people wondered why there wasn't more of a historical record or documentation of how to handle it?   I think this week has been an education in why that is, it's that when people 100 years ago got to the end of their pandemic they just wanted to get past it, be done with it and not think about it anymore.   So nothing was gained and nothing was learned.   We've come to the (beginning of?   middle of? ) the end of the pandemic now at least in the urban coastal regions of the United States.   In the middle we came to the psychological end a while ago because most folks in most states outside of the urban coastal regions don't give a rip about those we've lost, or their neighbors, or society as a whole, only about what "impinges on their freedom".    There’s zero interest in learning anything this time that we can use next time, or even i...

The young people of today will probably never know the overwhelming desire to turn off the television during a thunderstorm because when they were a kid they hear about That Neighbor Whose Antenna Got Struck By Lightning and It Went Right Down and Came Out Through The TV and KILLED HIM!   It's always a guy, I guess women were always smart enough to turn off the TV when the storm started. 

 I have been having a recurring nightmare where I'm caught somewhere, usually outdoors, definitely far from home, NOT naked like the stereotypical nightmare everyone has....just.....barefoot. Also in this nightmare, the foot that is now and forever missing a toe has that toe again, except that it hangs like a small bag with a rock in in it and flops around as I walk, completely out of my control.  Or sometimes it retracts into my foot.  Whatever it does, I know that it absolutely does not belong there and I have a mounting sense of panic that I need to get rid of it.   At that point I'm transported to a crowded workspace or restaurant or some other place where it's difficult to move around because of the press of people but somehow one of my mounting army of dead family members finds me and drags me to a table where other people are, people who want to talk to me.  I don't want to see them.  I argue and berate the people who are trying to get to me....

 It's not Monday Night Football or Hockey Night in Canada but it is my new Pandemic-End Days pastime.  Friday Night Shopping.  For the first three weeks after, as Arlo Guthrie might have said, we were successfully injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected we went to the shiny new Shop Rite in our area.  That Shop Rite is in a location previously occupied by a combination Path Mark and K-Mart that included one of those excellent "restaurants" with the particle board booths and the hot dogs of indeterminate age on rollers and the knock-off Slurpee brand "Icee" which means it was exactly where any self respecting lower-middle class nine year old would want to eat while mom listened for the Blue Light Specials.   So in other words, a Shop Rite aspiring to be a Wegman's would have some good mojo from the spirits in that particular location. Since variety is the spice of life we're going to change it up tonight and go to the Stop 'n...

 I've been told that because a piece of my foot is now possibly in heaven  or at the very least in an ashtray or garbage can that I can get a handicapped card for my car. Fuck that. I'm not ready. Somebody else asked me if it was tough to keep my balance since the part that's gone is pretty important for balance.  I said it wasn't.   Then I tried to look at the moon tonight.  It's a 54% waxing gibbous I think, and it was straight overhead.   I looked straight up while standing in the middle of my front walk and I almost fell.   I staggered back to the house and steadied myself against a wall and looked again.   I just saw a glow.  The edge of my roof blocked my view.   I went back inside. 

 I’m sitting here listening to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s “A Tuba to Cuba” and it occurs to me how little I still know about jazz in general and how I know practically nothing about Afro-Cuban jazz, so little in fact that I had to type some words in the ol’ Google box to make sure “Afro-Cuban jazz” was the right term.  Despite my utter ignorance I thoroughly enjoy this recording that I purchased entirely because I was listening to it at a listening station in the excellent record shop Louisiana Music Factory and Snooks the store cat wandered by and looked at me which I took as an omen.  Sometimes the store cat knows what’s best for you.  I’m glad to be listening to this at home, alone, working because if I was listening to it in the old office that I occupied before my employer’s ill-fated migration to the disease-friendly open concept that led to everyone wearing noise cancelling headphones all day and instant-messaging colleagues sitting six feet away inst...

 My maternal grandmother used to save orange peels and put them on the radiator to perfume the air.   I don't have a radiator but I sometimes do the same thing using an open window and the sun. 

 The gourmet tea bag specifically.  You're lovingly assembled from bespoke ingredients, put in a bag and live in a box for a while and when your big moment comes you get soaked in near-boiling water for 5 minutes and that's it.  Into the trash or the compost.   What a letdown. I buy my fancy tea from Rishi and this is what they have to say about their bags: "Rishi tea bags are made from a plant-based material called polylactic acid (or PLA for short). PLA is an inert, DNA-free material that is produced by breaking down starches found in plant sources. Through this process, no plant DNA is left behind, making these hypoallergenic and allergen-free. PLA is NOT derived from petroleum and will not leak harmful plasticizers into your brew. True to our sourcing ethics and to help showcase Rishi’s high-quality teas and botanicals, this material is purposefully sourced to provide you and your family with the safest and most delicious cup of tea! " So I got that going fo...

 We’re currently driving around with a box of medical waste from my most recent turn as a recipient of IV antibiotics at home.  The last time I had one of these boxes I had to take it to the hospital on one of my follow up visits and got sent from place to place like Batman trying to get rid of a bomb in the Adam West movie version until finally I took it to the lab, put it on the reception counter, said to the nearest person “I was told to drop this off here” and bolted as much as someone with my damaged limbs can bolt. Now they give you a box with a mailing label that you have to take to the post office and mail to a disposal facility.  Unfortunately, every time we’ve been at a post office to mail letters the lines to mail packages have been longer than we were comfortable standing in so back to the car it goes. Is it the weirdest thing we can’t get rid of?  Not unless you think my father’s old prosthetic leg is weirder. We inherited that when my now-late sister mo...

 The garlic we planted last fall must've liked the heavy rain yesterday, the greens are starting to poke out from the soil. Scapes in a month maybe?  We're down to the last three heads of garlic from the greenmarket that we stockpiled before  everyone ran out.   Life without garlic is sad.   The new lawn guy/gardener/landscaper/whatever the term is for the person who takes care of our small patch of grass and bushes and trees (It’s not much of a lawn and “landscape” certainly implies a scale that we lack and we don’t let him touch the food-growing-garden) came today to do a spring cleanup.  Did a nice job too, I was worried that the squirrels and birds would be annoyed by a sparser space, but the squirrels showed up for their afternoon peanuts and I hear the birds and they don’t sound any different than normal so it’s all OK, I guess.  There’s more daylight every day.  

 We now have a milkman.  I can say milkman without being sexist or gender-insensitive because the person we talked to (on the phone!) identified as male.  So we have a milkman, a guy who brings us milk once a week.  It’s better quality milk than you get in the supermarket, fresher (it comes from “farms upstate”, you know, those places where that dog you had as a kid was sent by whoever raised you (see I didn’t just say “parents” which proves that I’m properly 2021-model sensitive)), and even better comes in glass bottles that you leave out for the milkman to take back to the bottling facility where they get sterilized and reused instead of thrown in with all the other recycling that probably doesn’t actually get recycled.  The milkman used to do his deliveries overnight Wednesday into Thursday which added a cool factor to it because it made me think of the Milkman’s Matinee .   Unfortunately, an impending snow event made him decide to deliver during the d...

 I walked outside to bring in the trash can this morning and there was a guy in a cherry picker next to the telephone pole in front of my house.  I greeted him and he said "Hey, you're getting your very own 25 Miles Per Hour sign".   So, I got that going for me on a grey morning at the end of winter. 

Once upon a time I was ahead of the  times .   Up until college I did fine academically coasting strong test-taking skills.  I'm not sure where they came from or why, but I always did well on tests, particularly multiple choice tests because I could usually eliminate the no-chance answers and guess between the plausible ones.   Engineering school was a different matter.  First year calculus was something they used to weed people out and I found out I was a weed.  To be fare I spent a fair amount of time exploring the neighborhood my school was in rather than spending it in class or studying.  Having been a cultural prisoner for almost the first two decades of my life the escape into mid-1980's urban life was an irresistible attraction.   After I was weeded, I festered at a local community college for a semester, got my bearings back with a slate of courses that actually interested me resulting in a perfect GPA and advanced back into...

 Apples are better cold.  Now that the weather's slowly warming I'm keeping my apples in the refrigerator.  They taste brigher, crisper, more awake, which is weird because cold usually mutes flavor. I wonder what Harold McGee thinks about this.  

I had a toe amputated not too long ago.  Not really a huge deal nowadays with modern medical science being what it is.  The toe just got sicker quicker than the rest of me has to this point and was just about dead.  It had to be cut off so it didn't take the rest of me with it regardless of which parts of the rest of me might have been curious about the process.   In one of my follow up checkups I asked what they do with the bits they cut off of or out of people.  I figured they burned them.  The doctor said, very cheerfully given the subject matter at hand I might add, that "First it goes to Pathology and they do what they have to do and then yes, it gets incinerated.  So, a little bit of you is already in Heaven".   A little bit of me is already in Heaven? How is it that a dead toe qualifies entry into Heaven?  I don't recall the toe being a particularly virtuous toe.  It never told me that it had accepted Jesus Christ ...

 I went to have blood taken out of my arm this morning so the medical-industrial complex could tell me what else is wrong with me and sell me pills to fix it or control it.  I do this quarterly and so far I haven't died so it must be working.  Therefore, I keep doing it.   I was walking out of the blood taking room (Room 2, my favorite room at this facility because it usually houses a phlebotomist who gets what is needed without bruising my arm too badly) and a woman in the hallway had a clipboard from which she was about to read the next name.  She paused and said to everyone in particular "Manny Cotta?  Is that a real name?"  

 I have a talking coffee cup.  No, that's a lie.  A clever headline, clickbait.  I have a coffee cup that squeaks and hisses.  It doesn't actually talk.  It just makes noises that if they were louder might remind me of the radiators in the house I lived in for the first couple decades of my life but they aren't louder so they don't, or maybe they did anyway now that I mention it.  The cup came from WFMU, so it's probably appropriate that it makes odd noises.  The noises are because it's supposed to be an insulated mug, like a Thermos or as the English call it a vacuum flask.  Except the seal between the two layers was breached and when the cup gets washed water gets in what should be the vacuum.   Then when you put hot liquid in the cup the heat or the pressure or some combination thereof forces out the water and some of the air from the vacuum part.  It just squeaks and hisses and sounds like a hungry stomach all the time whil...

 I'm not going to use the p-word even when I'm writing about the p-word because I'd like to keep this quiet little corner of the G-word's part of the web that I live in rent-free.  But this is a post about life during the p-word.  I miss the subway .  Those links on the "the" and "subway" are to things I wrote about it over ten years ago.  I haven't been on the subway since early March 2020 and most likely won't be on the subway for several more months which makes this the longest subway-free stretch of my life since I started college in the mid 1980's.  Those subways were different than the ones I was riding last year but I'll neither wax nostalgic nor cast aspersions on the past here.  Some things were better, some things were worse.  The city changes when you are and when you aren't looking.   Some things will never be back.  Thanks to the location of the new Yankee Stadium I'll never have the experience of first bursting o...

 I've learned that you should celebrate all the things worth celebrating including just waking up in the morning and feeling relatively healthy and functional.  Still, New Year's is a holiday that almost never fails to depress me if I don't have distractions like a nice restaurant dinner or a concert.  It's almost impossible to think of the marking of the passage of time without remembering everything and everyone you lost in the interval and knowing that at the age you are the losses are just going to keep mounting.   On the other hand I just pitched a couple handfuls of unsalted peanuts into the yard and the squirrels and a blue jay seem happy about that.  I was late with my 11am apple this morning which means I was late pitching a chopped up core into the back yard and when I opened the door a squirrel was waiting on the step.  So now I have that obligation, though I don't mind.   I also have a pile of books (7 to be precise) to read to st...