Feeling Ill, Like in the Olden Days

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.

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Try to Remember December. And Dreamwidth.

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.

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Good Months, Bad Months

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.

========================

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.

 

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Out with the Old, In with the Terrors

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?)

  *   *   *

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

 

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No Tequila Tonight!

At Dottie’s, in the spare-room bed. Astonishingly Jeffey G slept in this bed a year ago. They tied one on together last NYE and he threw up. Just like when I first knew him.

I thought Dotsworth wanted to make margaritas, so I got some Jose Cuervo margarita mix and a 375 of Jose. I went through the latter pretty quickly on the 30th, so went out to Shirley’s to buy a bigger bottle. Checking my email the morning of the 31st, I see Dottie’s a purist, doesn’t want mixes. Tells me I can bring a lime. Or Prosecco. I get a bottle of Prosecco and we have it with caviar and toppings and Two Boots pizza on New Year’s Eve.

Waking up on the 31st, I see all that tequila did a number on me. Really wiped my memories clean.Had to check and see if I filed the Philby story (yes). To Dottie’s at 1. Mailed crazy card (Biltmore Estate) to Dr. Yockey before leaving home, I write that the Christmas Day 2025 was in error.

On the 30th, I noticed I was low on erythromycin, decided to check out that Petsmart at Broadway and 24th. They door-dashed me a box two weeks ago, but I don’t remember how that happened. They did indeed have it at Petsmart, WAY in the back. I had gym clothes in my backpack, thinking of going to TMPL, but instead I walk uptown and find a liquor store on Sixth near 30th. Where we find Jose. No gym for me. Then to the subway and home.

Put $400 into the Citi Cash card, and $100-something onto the Apple. Must pay something to JetBlue card. No interest for the balance transfer, so we can pay that in small stages. Funny to think if I’d had the balance transfer a few weeks back, I could have put Moki’s cremation on my Amazon Visa. Lots of points there.

Dottie happy I’m seeing a dentist Wednesday. I told her I can’t let them upsell me. It has to be bare basics.

Dottie watching The Master (2012) with Philip Seymour Hoffman on her Mac Mini this evening. I think the fake notifications are gone. I removed Bitdefender and gave her a tab for Gmail, which she has meant to use but forgot about. Instead she was using that nasty Mail program.

January 1, must call A.T. in the afternoon. Mass.

I have not slept in nearly 24 hours.

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Night Closes In. I Can’t Write.

For months I’ve wanted to write an incisive review of the Kim Philby/Nick Elliott miniseries. After cranking out and rewriting 2400 words or so (surely too long) I find it to be impenetrable. So I clean it up slightly. Will send it to C-C later, with an end-of-year book wrap-up.

Call from Pat Clark today. Actually he phoned first on the Moki landline, then on my landline. Hung up almost immediately. So I rang back on the Moki iPhone. And we had a good chat. Usual stuff. Can I keep the apartment? What is this about him having two kids? Dottie and/or I posted the Manhattan Cremation obit on Facebook and Pat just saw it.

Teeth and gums occupy my thoughts. Back in September I had that awful abscess above the UR 6-year-molar, which I got rid of with erythromycin from that shop on the UWS. It took a few days. Meanwhile the pain migrated over to the UL side, premolar area. In recent weeks pain has erupted again, just above the UL bicuspid, and it’s spread to the adjacent part of the lower jaw. I take antibiotics and aspirin, and after some hours of severe pain it goes away and I fool myself into thinking it’s gone for good. But aha!

Anyway I signed up again for Delta Dental. I was going to do that end of September, when I was working through that phase of the trouble. Having signed up, I find they have my whole Delta history, going back to early days at AmexPub. I didn’t use them at all until I was booted out of there. Then almost immediately I ran up a $4000+ bill because I allowed myself to be upsold into an extensive periodontal program of cutting and scraping. The Delta insurance paid very little of it and was a bitch to deal with. So no upselling this time. I have an appointment at 11am on January 3rd. No upselling. I was attracted to this dental practice because it had an all-American guy named Scott Pope. But it turns out Scott Pope doesn’t really work at this practice on West 54th. He still spends most of his time out in Walnut Creek.

At the moment my gums do not hurt. But just let me try to eat something. The recent phase began a week ago Wednesday, the day Pat E took me to J. G. Melon. I’d bought a Marie Callender’s pot pie, and was about to eat part of it when Pat called me up and led me on a protracted wait that led well into the evening. So I ate some of the pie anyway and got a sharp stabbing pain in the front of my palate. I’d never had that before. So it hung around, came and went for the next week, with colonies of pain elsewhere in the mouth.

Dottie is having me over again for New Year’s Eve. Weird food, a lot involving eggs. I remind her again I can’t deal with eggs. She’s having caviar on toast points. I guess I can stomach fish roe. She wants margaritas. This means getting tequila and margarita mix. What about Cointreau or triple sec? Don’t they make up some drink?

I was at Dottie’s on Christmas Eve and again on the 26th. Bought Bitdefender for myself and installed it on her Mac Mini. She gets annoying notifications in the upper right. Source unknown. I thought the anti-malware thing would cure it, but no.

Pointless arguments with near-identical fools on Twitter re Caster Semenya, the intersex black South African. They keep insisting that Caster is “male,” even though she was raised female and is IS. This sort of insistence betokens something akin to autism.

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Dotsworth, Fredericka, and Family

Spent yesterday, Christmas Eve, with Dottie. She made me a brunch, part of which I could not eat because it was quiche. I can’t eat eggs; hadn’t told her. Took a big bite. Felt ready to gag. Drank a lot of red wine. Smoked a cigarette. We went up to her roof where I photographed her infected trees and then ourselves. I came out old and flabby and very strange looking. I have conquered this before, however. I’m just not working out. Work out, yoga, swim. All week, then you can run.

She is having computer problems. Unwanted notifications, probably trojans and viruses. I bought Bitdefender to use on my laptops, will install it on her Mac Mini. It found 5 infections on the old Mac Air 13.

Greg wants me to get in close with Fredericka. I think Fredericka will be wary. But I’ve sent her a card and letter, dated Christmas Day. (See bottom.) Also something to Laura, and Paul & Anthony, and to A.T. and to someone else. Oh yes, Dottie. I may go see her tomorrow, late afternoon.

Tried to go to Mass at St. P’s today, in the evening, but the crowds were queued all the way around the Cathedral, and the normal side doors weren’t open.

Made a shitload of spaghetti bolognese this evening, and drank a pint of vodka. The Chinawoman’s was open, and son Sean was there.

Very nice call from young Danny in Tarpon Springs, late morning. After he gets the Buffalo Wild Wings franchise outlets set up (20 of them?) for the Adler Group he’s going to retire. He’s 62. He seemed barely 50 when I met him in Palm Beach. We talked about the many ailments his sisters have had. Liz who died in 2016. Liz was 5 mos. pregnant with Evan when she found she had cancer (some lymphoma on her neck). And then she had a fourth son, Sam, before she died. Max got married in Scotland to a wee demure Scottish lass who had no idea what she was getting into. And I asked about Mimi, who has had Covid and myasthenia gravis and kidney failure and COPD and Lord knows what else.

But then it was a delight in the evening to get a call from Mimi, too, in the evening. We talked death and diseases. The sicknesses plaguing her family seem to have come down through her mother, a Cabot and a Lucci.


 

Letter to Fredericka Yockey.

Christmas Day, 2025

Dear Dr. Yockey,

Having lost my sister and husband just recently, along with a number of friends, I was doing an end-of-year What We Lost roundup. And some kind soul pointed me in the direction of the semi-solved mystery of your sister Isolde.

That must be the most remarkable certified death of the year. Mercifully—I suppose it was—you had the best part of five decades between her actual murder (as I assume it was) and its confirmation. Furthermore you were living in Europe for a long while afterwards, with medical school to focus on.

By the strangest coincidence, when I read the story about Isolde, I was reminded that an acquaintance of mine from 50 years back married your cousin Connie Coyne (Vinette’s daughter) a year or two after I met him. I hadn’t thought of these people in many years, literally. And, Deo gratias, I resisted the temptation to ask them if they heard or knew anything more about the Isolde story.

I’m further attuned to all this because a fiancé of mine died suddenly and tragically 30 years ago, after amassing a trove of correspondence about your father. After he died, the collection went to the University of Oregon. Years later two people eventually produced their biographies of F. P. Yockey. Both were deep and scholarly, but one was didactic-Leftist, the other mildly sympathetic.

I am thrilled to say I made a slight, perhaps insubstantial, contribution to both books but am not listed in the acknowledgments of either. Perhaps that’s for the best.

With kind regards of the season,

I am

Meg Burns

(etc.)


 

Letter from Greg.

Merry Christmas, Margot!
I think this could be a very important project for you. I would love to salvage whatever letters, photos, and memories remain among FPY’s relatives. Maybe there will be a volume four of the Collected Works.
All the best,
Greg
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Another big stack o’ mail

The mail haul this evening was rather good, all things considered. Little Christmas cards, as yet unopened, from Dottie and Laura. Envelopes of different sizes from USAA, to me and/or to the Estate of——. Two envelopes from PA Vital Records, each with a new-style certified BC copy. They bigger now, with blue background, and they list your parents’ names. I was expecting all sorts of holdups and frustrations with these, that being par for the course, and this being a funny time of year. And I was told to expect them after the first of January. But no, here they are, reprocessed with my December 14 application, posted on December 19, and they arrived on the 23rd. This means I should be able to change name shortly, unless I get snagged on that judgment.

Other reasons for upbeat thoughts: it does appear that as a survivor I might be able get my husband’s Social Security benefits. It’s not an awful lot, but certainly sweetens the pot. A few ifs there, the description online is ambiguous. Something to pursue next week, along with the ongoing missing-earnings saga.

Went to TMPL but didn’t do much. I felt tired. Drinking wine now, that’s good. Some frozen vindaloo from Westerly, where I stopped mainly to buy some cheap supplement that comes in capsules. This is for the erythromycin. Also baby arugula and more goat cheese. Am going to try for TMPL again tomorrow morning, open 7-12.

Tried to copy the Gordon Sharpe CD to iTunes but it didn’t work. It copied one track, less than a half of the disk. Why? Because it is not a DVD? Why can I not copy the disk image and take it from there?

Dottie’s at one pm tomorrow. I believe I won’t go to Joan Igoe’s. I will plead fragility.

Left message at Jamie Scanlan’s home phone, no callback yet. I think he’s dodging me. I’m going to have to go after Alicia.

A Little Later: Tried the Gordon Sharpe CD again and this time it worked. Only trouble is, it all appears as Track 1 and Track 2. I suppose that’ll be okay. Have it on my iPhone SE now.

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Around the World in 90 Minutes

“Around the World in 90 Minutes” was the name of the Mike Todd party feature in October 1957, broadcast as an episode of Playhouse 90. It was roundly derided in the press, and some reviewers even regretted that it ran opposite a Hallmark presentation of “Green Pastures” on another network. Then other reviewers (who presumably tuned into “Green Pastures” for a while) cocked a snook at their stuffy colleagues and said the only reason it got praise is that it wasn’t the crazy Mike Todd party, and very few people watched it.

I know I’ve seen this, I thought a couple of nights ago after being out with Pat E. But I couldn’t find it on YouTube or elsewhere. They do seem to have it at the nearby Paley Center (formerly Museum of Broadcasting). But how did I see it a couple of years back? So it comes to me yesterday that I found it at Robert’s Hard to Find Videos and ordered it, for maybe $20. Probably PayPal; check that for late 2021. I watched it on a DVD, via this selfsame Mac Air 13″ (still my favorite). It contained only the broadcast, narrated by Walter Cronkite, with a lot of circus animals and celebs. Pat E’s colossal moment does not appear.

I look for the Robert’s Videos site, all combinations of its name, and it seems they don’t exist or are gone. Maybe Robert died? In Saskatoon. Most likely I kept the DVD disk in the envelope it came in, whether it not it was in a jewel box. Most likely it’s around here. Going to be hard to hunt through CDs, DVDs, similar detritus.

One thing I immediately see in looking at one of my stacks is Gordon Sharpe’s “Relaxing” CD, which should be copied onto our digital devices. Also Pat Whatsisname’s running-rhythm music.

On the credenza, atop the set-top box, are Moki’s passport, a card case with SS card, license, and various other things. The wandering mind thinks: I can set up a new Amazon Associates account for him. But would it be worth it? I didn’t make a cent, even though I was cheating, with my own account. And they cut me off. I just didn’t have traffic on my sites.

Good call to A.T. late yesterday afternoon. Well now, it seems she does remember getting something with a photo of Moki and their mother. Must be only thing that registered with her.

Last night I worked my way quickly through the second pint I bought Wednesday night (it is now Friday) and bought some Rice-A-Roni Spanish Rice mix, San Marzano tomatoes, and jalapeño chicken sausage. I stuffed myself on that, and half of it is still in the skillet, though minus the sausage bits that I picked at.

Tonight or tomorrow I should call Joan Igoe to see if I should come over on Sunday (Christmas Eve). What should I bring? This afternoon or evening I should try Jamie again. Maybe phone him from Moki’s landline. Need that check. I may suggest I travel up there.

  *   *   *

A little later. I went out to the lv rm to start a search through all the CDs, instead decided it would be a good time to hang the Sneem photo. I have done it, more or less aligned, with the picture-hanging hardware picked up from Target earlier this week.The paint is not too streaky, even with the bad lighting here.

I’d gone to Tarzhay mainly to see if there were any more tiny-bulb LED Christmas tree lights for my spindly clot of weeds (remains of an avocado plant that may or may not sprout again, surrounded by what look like tomato plants). Position it pathetically in our dirty windows.

  *   *   *

A little later still. I walked all the way down to St. Agnes on East 43rd, and let me tell you, that is twice as far away as St. Patrick’s. But I was going to Confession for the first time in (modestly estimated) ten years. Got some Filipino or other nonwhite Spanish-tinged priest. Very kindly. Penance, a mere three Our Fathers. Asked me if I lived alone. I do now! Any children? Well they’re grown, and they live in Europe! (Does this count as a sin?) Outside a Mass was slowly going on. The priest there (another foreigner) took his time with the sermon. I left at the cusp of the Offertory. I wasn’t there to receive Communion, I was there to be shriven.

My mind now unravels to thoughts of moving to Front Royal, or Winchester, or someplace farther up the Shenandoah Valley where I might claim distant roots. Northern end has the advantage of being within driving distance of Berkeley Springs while still letting one get to know the TradCat pod around FR. The Yockey kin have burrowed deep into UltraTradCatism, attending a Ukrainian Catholic Church, in a rite and Uniate sect relatively unpozzed by the mainstream. Of course I used to go to a Lithuanian church near Canal Street, because they had convenient midday masses, and a Tridentine Latin one on Sunday. But that wasn’t an Eastern Rite Church.

I do not have the money to move, otherwise I might be tempted. But I’m too old to start over someplace else. I must grow where I’m planted, and maybe visit these places and try to make do. Of course I do not have the money to stay, either. Get a job, a real job, where you show up every day in the office and get a paycheck every two weeks. Do they still exist?

  *   *   *

Terrible tooth and gum pain, last couple of weeks. It’s as bad as the one around my bad tooth, the UR 6-year molar that was drilled to distraction in childhood, and then gloriously root-canaled and crowned in 1987 by a guy who still practices across the street. But that was definitely an abscess. This new pain, in the UL bicuspid area, just feels like severe gum pain, with no swelling or pain high up in the gum. More like a toothache, but I can’t think what brought it on. High sensitivity to heat, as I found while drinking tea this afternoon. I’ve taken aspirin and just now made four capsules of Erythromycin, in case there is an abscess coming on. (Get new capsules of that Ayurvedic herb so I can empty them out and fill them.)

My purple Craft gloves have disappeared. Not in the Barbour coat. Not on the floor.

At Shirley’s I picked up a bottle of the $9.99 plonk I bought a couple of weeks ago. Shirley made Christmas present of this to me, along with a pint of Svedka.

The season is being good to me. Now if only I could get that check from A.T.

I bought a little arugula salad and a log of chevre at Klein’s. May eat it when the pain goes down.

Could not find the Mike Todd disk. Clearly I didn’t value it much. It didn’t have Pat E’s scene. But I did come across the 1958 Aladdin video disk that I bought around 2013-2014 from the same Robert’s Videos place. I posted the Cyril Ritchard opener to YouTube years ago, and later on another kind soul evidently posted the whole damn thing.

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From Pain to Self-Pity. Also, Mike Todd.

It was about a month ago that Michael slipped into his semi-coma, and I began to cry about it all. Early mourning. The wrenching, very physical sense of loss had already begun. I continued to believe, somehow, that I could save him by continuing the ongoing novena to St. Jude. The Friday night before he was totally gone I went down to the Cathedral, with one of his mother’s rosaries in the zippered inside pocket of the black Barbour jacket, went to the St. Jude shrine—first one on the left it is, and knelt on the hard marble. No cushions or hassocks there. Took out the holy card with prayer that I keep in my 2023 Moleskine pocket diary. (I’d come across one of these left on the prie-dieu in front of St. Jude at St. Paul the Apostle a few months before, and carried it around until it went walkabout. The shop at St. P.A. got a new supply of holy cards, and so I got a new Jude, only a dollar. It’s still in my Moleskine.)

And I was crying so hard I couldn’t even read the print easily. “Please bring him back, please cure him, please make him better.” I walked around the inside perimeter of the Cathedral, still teared-up. Past the Lady Chapel, where my parents married in 1950, and where Moki and I sometimes half-seriously said we’d do a real wedding someday.

Streets very crowded. It’s the day after Thanksgiving, tourists out and kids home from school. Very reassuring, my eyes dried up a bit. I think I got a dragon roll, or something like that, at Dainobo, and then a pint of Svedka at Shirley’s. Unless that’s when they were out of Svedka and I got Smirnoff’s instead.

I probably conked out early; had been up since the wee hours, writing the blog, writing the Substack. I get up around dawn, Saturday morning, and Michael is gone. In the afternoon the corpse has gone stiff and I realize I have to do something. I wait until late Sunday morning to call 911, that being the only option I know of. Then the first responders, and the medical examiner, and the two girl cops, ask me in various ways why I didn’t call before. It’s because I didn’t know what to do; it’s all new to me, I say, more or less. It would have been easier to say I woke today, Sunday, and my superannuated husband was dead. But I was thinking, they’ll be able to gauge the time of death. As it happens the medical examiner lady declared him dead just after 3 in the afternoon on Sunday the 26th November, so that’s what we have on the death certificate.

I keep going back over these things, like Emma Bovary remembering the ball and the night she danced with the Baron. Only two weeks ago! Three weeks! Four weeks!

In the past week I’ve a couple of other shocks, and although I’m still crying, it’s perhaps less from the awfully physical sense of wrenching separation from the person I loved, than a sense of abandonment and finding myself facing a world of sorrows. Bills, debts, unpaid rent. Have reupped with NYC’s Access HRA. A public assistance program I tried to enroll us in early this year. But Moki was the lead on the form, and when someone from the office phoned him up on his landline in April or May for an extensive interview, he didn’t answer or return the call. He’d taken to bed more or less permanently, except for visits to the bathroom, and sometimes staggering out for a football or liter. An HRA notice by mail came in around June, telling us they’d terminated the application for this reason.

And last Sunday, four days ago, I get a notice from Civil Court telling me there’s a judgment against me. Went down November 9th, but the letter is dated December 11th. I need to get this vacated. Also need to part out any substantive bank account holdings, put them in USAA and HSBC, leave tidbits in WF and Chase, bare minimum at Citi. I found this while shoving off for TMPL on Sunday afternoon. I was so unnerved that I cut my TMPL visit short. No workout, no shower. I was sitting on the C2 for a bare minute, pondering: This is the shock that has blown the Moki loss out of the water. I will never break down in tears over him again.

But of course I would, and have. Though right now I tell myself he’s still with me and always will be. More and more my tears are those of self-pity. After leaving TMPL I trudged up 9th Ave. and bought a pint of Smirnoff. Nobody’s going to fuck me over with funny-money judgment. I have four or give solid counts for vacating this bullshit.

Last Tuesday week, after breakfast with Tom, I stopped in at the First Presbyterian Church. Fog Lifters are no longer upstairs, they’re just off the entrance, to the right. Still 12:30pm, but only one meeting, no Beginners session around a conference table. It seemed a plausible exercise last week, but I’ve been drinking every day since. Other thing I’ve been doing that’s less than healthful is gulping two or three cups of coffee, from a Pike Place Blend I bought at the drugstore a week or so ago when I decided to stop using the Starbucks app, which was costing me five or ten dollars a day. Feeble Moki loved that in his last couple of weeks, when I ordered coffee and would bring it up. One of his wandering thoughts when I made tea instead a few days later was, “When did we start drinking tea? Why did we start drinking tea?” We started, in the last year, because one day we had no coffee in the house, but I had lots of tea bags. I gave my microwave tea formula. One or two bags, a dollop of honey, water in the cup, 2:30 on high. He much enjoyed it, though he wasn’t out of bed to make himself any after August.

Pennsylvania Vital Records notifies me that after two attempts, they’ve finally produced my requested birth certificate copies and have shipped them. I’d ordered them maybe ten days ago because I need to make the name change official. One new obstacle in this is that the judgment will count against me if it’s not vacated. Perhaps not: I’m not totally changing my name, just officially taking on my husband’s name.

Banking nuisances the other day, Tuesday, after spending a few hours uploading documents to HRA. The $350 Moki check I deposited into Chase a week ago has been returned, NSF. I blamed this on USAA. They sequestered Moki’s accounts, it would seem, without notifying me. I’m told to fill out a “Letter of Instruction” and upload it back. Then I go downstairs and find a pile of correspondence from USAA to me and to Estate of Mr. Michael E. Burns. Among other things they’ve turned back the last SS deposit, which they claim was December 1. I know I got a balance statement out of the Duane Reade ATM on November 30 (can’t find it now) and it was $1200 or so. I took $100 out and spent maybe $750 the overdue Verizon bill (must cut that to almost nothing) on December 6. If another $1200 or so was deposited and/or reversed in December, then the thing cannot be zeroed out. Oh but wait, $310 to the USAA American Express card around December 6. And Netflix too. I didn’t realize USAA might have taken some action until Dec.11th, last Monday week, when I tried to use the debit card to buy that $17 salad at Mangia…

What else on Tuesday. Damn JetBlue card from Barclays ran up a $5700 debt on the card (on a credit line of $3300) in order to effect a balance transfer of my Amazon Chase Visa. But it never showed up on that Visa, after more than two weeks. Aha, but I check again on Wednesday, yesterday, and there it is.

I have not been reimbursed by A.T. for the cremation. That’s $2210 I badly need. Call her today. After checking the mail. And throwing out trash.

Some bright spots in the last week. There is the case of Isolde Y., mysteriously murdered back in 1975, body discovered in 1976, finally verified as her remains last July. Her younger sister Fredericka (now an ophthamologist in Houston) did a DNA test, and there was a match. I wrote a short piece on it for C-C. (Greg’s suggestion.) Her first cousin Connie, Vinette’s daughter, married Bill M. way back when, not long after I first met him. (I shall need to privatize this blog post or use initials because the search engines will be screaming for more details.) Every bit as headstrong and intellectual as Uncle Frank, though much more stable, and not a risk-taker. A half-century of marriage, with neither partner as yet decrepit, is an impressive achievement. Over the past 25 years or so, Connie had her widowed mother and aunt Alice move to her Valley community in Virginia. Both are now deceased. This is an extraordinary clan. I’d like to ask Connie if she’s aware of Isolde’s murder and revelation, but there’s absolutely no tactful way of doing this.

Pat E. and speak every few days. He calls on Moki’s phone. One of the first Moki friends I notified. Yesterday he calls me after three, suggests getting a burger up at that place around 73rd and Third. “J.G. Melon’s,” I say? Well sure, Then he makes complicated plans to have his son drive us there. By the time I get picked up it’s about 6:30. And the place is packed, with the usual young crowd. Pat slips Mine Host a wad of bills, and in a few minutes we bypass the kids in queue and get a tiny table at the back. He tells me about his girlfriend Susan with her 7500 sq ft duplex coop or condo in PB. He tells me about being accepted into Columbia when he was 17, only the faculty from Powers Memorial disapproves and beards his parents at home. A couple teachers in the living room, the guidance counselor out in the kitchen. Then don’t want him to go to Columbia because “he’ll lose his faith.” (My experience is quite the opposite, based on Moki, his cousin Edmund, and my sister and brothers.) And what was the upshot? I do not know. DID he go to Columbia? Sent his kids to Chicago. And then he tells me about early jobs. Sales training at Johnson & Johnson. Beautiful young redheaded woman named Maureen shows him sanitary napkins, tampons, gauze pads, wants to date him. He must have been quite a looker. Probably blond-red-haired to judge by complexion now. And then Pat’s job in a ticketing agency, same building as Mike Todd’s office. Mike and he become good friends. Pat wants to join the Marines, but the Army drafts him first so he goes down to Fort Dix. Mike Todd calls the base to find Pat, much to the annoyance of a sergeant or base commander, who thinks it’s a prank. Well it is Mike Todd and Mike wants Pat and some army friends to come to his big party in Madison Square Garden, celebrating the one-year anniversary of Around the World in 80 Days. Pat doesn’t have a uniform for some reason; the army is shifting him to another unit, and his boot camp duds get binned. So he borrows his sergeant’s uniform and goes to the city to see Mike and Liz. Something like ten thousand people there.

Mike wants “the sergeant” (Pat) to climb a wobbly stepladder to the top of the cake, and make the first cuts. The cake is fifteen or maybe thirty feet high. With the cameras rolling, someone bumps the ladder, and Pat falls into the cake. He has a hard time explaining to his sergeant how his uniform got all messed up, but apparently he got it cleaned sufficiently after he got back to base.

Corbis Images says the cake was 14′ high. Somebody apparently held the ladder steady for Liz.

Mike and/or Liz and Pat got together for dinner or whatever for a while. Not too long a while, of course: Mike died in that plane crash in March 1958, and he and Pat can’t have known each other for much more than two or three years by that point. Too bad Liz is gone and I’ve only heard this story for the past two years. Something tells me she’d have a vivid memory of it if I’d caught her twenty years ago.

The footage of Pat falling into the cake is lost to history, so far as we know. There is a Walter Cronkite doco about the Mike Todd party, and I’ve watched it online, but it closes off before the cake-cutting. A couple years ago Pat said he’d give me $10,000 if I could find that missing footage. Or even still pictures, I guess. He reiterated this as we went to our respective homes in a taxi.

“Merry Christmas,” Pat had said as we were led to our table at J. G. Melon’s. He pressed a Chicago bankroll into my hands. Felt like a few hundred. It was ten, actually, ten crispies. A thousand in cash, which I really need now.

 

 

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