
New building going up around 9th Avenue and W 54th.
Friday today, Independence Day, 4th of July, First Friday. I’m mostly staying in. Sunny out, probably hot. Maybe a little run or jog in late afternoon, early evening. Must get to Warehouse by 5:15 am tomorrow morning for Gov Is race (blue van, set up clocks, marshaling). That is Saturday, 7 or 8 hours. Then Sunday there’s a 12hr shift on East 44th St, 8-8.
I can’t do much about increasing the nruns hours—just this, and a 5k in Queens a week from Sunday—but I’m going to have to get all the hours I can stand for the HHA business. This past week we had 6.75 (for Grimm; I wasn’t actually there except to check in and check out) plus 9 (3×3 for Lourdes, though I wasn’t there half the time, likewise) plus the most dreadful 5 for the dying nog with no A/C or fan on West 23rd. That is 20.75, or 32.75 if they count Jennifer L on East 44th on Sunday as end of week. Next week I see Grimm (exactly when, we are not sure) and Lourdes and somebody named Jeffrey who goes for methadone early morning.
Woke around 5:30 this morning then suddenly sleepy a couple of hours later. Listened to the end of the Buckley book. Around 8am two or three dreams intruded. I’m riding bike around Yale campus, worried about keeping my balance as I go over curbs and through archways. This story melds into some kind of party or conference where bratty kids tease me, poke me, end up stealing my belongings (maybe not my purse but everything else). I have some important photographs I need to show off. As I’m besieged by the brats and some adults (who believe I am somehow at fault and don’t like kids) I try to call security, but can’t get through. I don’t know how I get out of this, but I’m off to visit Adam Parfrey. Adam has a big new car, maybe an old used car. It’s a Lincoln Continental the size of a bungalow. I’m in it and he’s not, but he left the engine on and the Drive engaged. I have to race to the front of the car (the house) where the dashboard is like a long desk, and brake the vehicle. The brake pedal isn’t where it should be because this is the English model, and the steering wheel and pedals are way over to the right. We are going to smash into a fine terrace of houses, like something in Belgravia or Chelsea. I stop the car a half-second before we roll up onto the curb. But then forget to put it in Park, or use the emergency brake, and when I get up the car rolls on. I stop it again, just in time.
At this point I awaken. Still asleep enough that I cannot be bothered to stop the Audible when the Buckley book ends. The sound itself rolls on…to samples of other audio books. I go through three or four of those in my semi-dreaming condition, till I switch over to one of the Churchill books. The Martin Gilbert one I think.
Only a half-pint of Platinum last night, after three pints in a row previous nights. I just felt so bushed after working in the daytime. Working, and walking an awful lot. I walk to Lourdes’s (50th and 8th) and I walk from the subway to Grimm’s. Last week Grimm and I walked all the way from his nasty hovel in Brownsville (no A/C and the anemic fan soon broke) to Prospect Heights, via Eastern Parkway. With side trips down Vanderbilt to a nice bar specializing in vinyl records, and then ice cream cones nearby, it was a walk of well over six miles. Then this past week I’d get off at Utica Ave. (the penultimate stop before Sutter-Rutland on the 3 train) and stroll from there through a pleasant park that takes you downhill past tennis courts to a really nasty neighborhood under the IRT tracks (they come above ground after Utica), all bedecked with dollar stores and bad bodegas. Then, at Blake and Tapscott, there’s the early 20th century tenement where G lives with his negro ‘husband.’ The apartment is two rooms plus bath and kitchen, altogether maybe 300 sq ft, and Grimm has it packed with bin bags and boxes and bits of furniture and miscellaneous nonsense. He cannot resist taking on more junk. A local cat adopted him, so when he came across the parts of an electric self-cleaning kitty-litter tray (a revolving barrel on a stand that appropriately looks something like a commode), during our long walk back home on Eastern Parkway, he picked up the pieces and carried them for the last mile. He’d also found a multi-trouser hanger out on the pavement while we walked through Crown Heights, and he had me carry that while he bore the kitty commode.
The hovel, in addition to being over-crowded, is stifling. It hits you like a busy basement laundry room in midsummer. Not my laundry room, to be sure; that’s much better. But there’s like a 15-degree difference between the outdoors and inside. It’s an hour travel each way to get out there, counting subway and foot time. Not pleasant when you get there.
I had a taste of another unspeakable and sweltering dwelling the other day (Wednesday) when I was assigned to this 60yo nog named Wade. Acute renal failure with 3x weekly dialysis visits. Incontinence. Wears disposable pull-ups. I actually had to change him, just before I left in the evening. No worse than cleaning up after a sick horse, I suppose. But there is no way I am going back there. I left a note with Anchor that this person needs something close to round-the-clock care or should be in hospice. In any event should have A/C or at the very least a fan. One window, facing out on 23rd, opens, but only about six inches. That’s your ventilation. Mainly I sat by the window and wrote in a little Moleskin diary. The big flatscreen kept playing 1970s-80s sitcoms: Three’s Company, Alice, the Michael J. Fox thing. The apartment is in a new building, a rather utilitarian public-housing for elderly and invalid storage. There is a friend, a noggess a few floors below, who has been taking care of him, perhaps without pay, for some months. She stopped in to check on him about four times during my 2-7 shift.

Stifling. This is the place.
This Jennifer coming up on Sunday better not be a nog.
Looking in the refrigerator at West 23rd I saw a box with a prescription label for morphine. I opened the box and found packets of 5mg tablet, for sublingual use. I stole a sleeve, maybe five or six, and took a tablet. No noticeable buzz. Yesterday I crushed a few and snorted them from one of my Muji folding mirrors. A little more effect. This put me in mind of 2016 when I was snorting Moki’s unused Ritalin (because Danny Antinora told me that was a good idea) through much of the summer, the summer when I was not boozing. I’d been thinking back on this on Wednesday, sitting in that stifling apartment, making notes about William Rusher and William Buckley. I hazarded to guess that Buckley’s polemical style fell off in middle age because he was on Ritalin. He gave some to Chris and Chris gave some to me. But it’s basically speed and can make you go off on tangents when you write (much like what I’ve done earlier this year as I worked my way through Grimm’s boo), or else write and rewrite the same sentence or paragraph over and over.
Bought germicidal Clorox yesterday at the hardware on 9th Avenue. Wanted to wash and bleach the 2014-vintage nruns hat. Also again bleached the white flats with the Kennedy tops. What do you call them? Named after a Nike guy. Jeffrey or Jason something. What do they call them? J-street? J-stop? I only saw them sold on eBay. Samples, I suppose. I had three pairs, still have two.
(An hour or two later:)
It took a while and my mind wandered off, checking letsrun.org and AI bots and making notes in Stuff I Forget. The shoe name was Jarowe and the Nike person (later of NB and Tracksmith) was Josh Rowe. I found him on LinkedIn and shot him a note. I feel much better now. There are no Jarowes for sale at eBay anymore. They were a rare issue even back in the mid-00s.
One of the things I wandered off to was Facebook, where I explain to Paul Wood that my ChatGPT illustration was of Pap and Huck. Then I went on to say that the best illustrations were by Donald McKay in a 1940s edition.
I’ve been seeking a Thomas Hart Benton look for my recent ChatGPT pictures. I remark for the first time that the McKay color plates had a lot of Benton style in them. This may be one that gave Leslie Fiedler ideas:
The Huck-in-drag subplot seems purely gratuitous. He is disguising himself so he can ask some new yokels if there is any news of himself and Pap. But he could call himself George Jackson and do the same thing. The attraction here is costume: it is plausible that no one would ever recognize him in a sunbonnet and a dress, even if an old woman (Mrs. Loftus) guesses that he is a boy.
I was looking for the “Pap Finn Tonight!” piece I wrote a couple of years back. It was at Podsnap’s Own, but I did not pay for domain renewal, so the site was down. I got a free registration from DreamHost, but as of a few minutes ago the domain was still down. Is it now?
Yes it is. So is gallerynews.art, which I did not pay for. Also down is freshkill.net.
I rather look forward to the Gov Is work tomorrow morning. It’s an easy mix of driving and drop-off and marshaling. This Firecracker is a 10k so there will be people still straggling in after 90 minutes. After that, I should have a simple hour gathering up equipment.
Made chili today. No beans. 2 lbs ground beef, Carroll Shelby mix with onions and green onions. Absolutely delicious. Made chicken-carrot-rice soup yesterday from a carcase. More like chicken-rice stew.