Lazy Saturday

Very few hours with HHA this past week, just Jeffrey R and Grimm. Small check next Friday. Big hunk taken out of paycheck this last time however. I think I netted $363 with Anchor and $185 with Gusto nruns. Not good.

I thought I’d have some hours this weekend, but not so far. (It is Saturday.) I turned down shifts. At the dentist at 3pm Wednesday I got a call from Jennifer seeing if I would work for “Mister Wade.” No, I do not wish to go back to Mr Wade, and fortunately I could say in all honesty I was at an appointment. I thought Haim Zitman the Israeli wheeler-dealer on East 52nd would be in the bag for me today and tomorrow, but no. Lourdes Vasquez is back on my availables, but now looking for someone in the afternoon. I should much prefer that. I fear Jennifer L. the samovar is going to return to my list soon. Had her two Sundays ago. The apt was comfortable enough but the hours passed slowly. And the tragedy and amputations were too much to bear. If I were to see her again I’d tell her she needs to start a podcast, not about her disability, but about other things in addition. Then she’ll get her bionic hands quicker. The sad story began a few years ago, when she’d been living with MS for a while, then was found passed out and comatose by a friend. Off to the hospital where they saved her life by taking off her hands and toes (gangrene) and giving her a colostomy. Septic shock or toxic shock, I don’t know. As she came too she found she couldn’t use her mobile phone or a TV remote because (she thought) her hands had been all bound up in a kind of tight sock bandage. So she asked the nurse if she could rebandage her hands so she could at least have a lobster claw, with her thumb separate. And the nurse goes, “Oh my dear…”

Curious thing is that so far the only white people on this HHA patient roster have been Jews. Haim, Jennifer, and the egregious Esther Levy, in an overcrowded and hot, stuff apartment on West 71st (last Friday).

Oh, but I’m forgetting the reliables, Grimm and Jeffrey. Only Grimm is not so reliable. He is punctuality-challenged. Misses the times when he’s supposed to come visit me (I said 1:30 in the afternoon back in March, and he wakes at 1:20 pm and messages me: I overslept) or meet somewhere else (he was supposed to go to the Dental Oral surgeon at 164th and Broadway last week, and I was meeting him there, but he stood me up—vile place anyhow). Jeffrey I see each morning for an hour, generally walk with him to Bellevue and back, and that takes up the hour and gives us both some exercise. Grimm I’ll see briefly if he’s there…this last time I sat with him in his sitting room where he watches his new flatscreen tv through a big mirror he’s placed opposite his chair. He’s quite the scavenger, finding things on the street. A shop-vac that looks to be in mint condition, an incredibly beautiful drafting table. First time I connected with him, three Mondays ago, we walked all the way to Grand Army Plaza (Blkn) then up Vanderbilt in Prospect Heights, had a beer at the vinyl-record bar, then ice cream cones nearby. The entire expedition took less than three hours, and we walked about 8 miles on my watch (dubious).

When he did not meet me at the oral surgery place on Wednesday the 9th, I bought a black scrubs top and then had a burger with fries and very good but expensive beer at a new pub across Broadway, called Fort Washington. Now, that scrubs top, size S, looked plenty big in the store (nasty, stuffy, crowded little store, USA Scrubs) but I could barely squeeze into it. So next day, Thursday, I went back and traded it in for a size that fit, which turned out to be an L. Nicely designed garment, but I’m sorry to say it cost $26 and the fabric, some synthetic, is awfully heavy. Fort Washington, the bar, tempted me again, and this time I had just a beer and french fries. Coogan’s closed a few years ago, and this new place seems to have taken up the slack. Its neighborhood notwithstanding, I recommend it.

(Another good place where I spent even more money: Draught 55, near P.J. Clarke’s on East 55th. I was the only customer when I got there around 1:30 in the afternoon last Saturday. Splendid burger and garlic fries. Brilliant new craft beer, high ABV, but something like $9 for 12 oz. The barkeep made it out that they made the drinks small because potent.)

As to Grimm: An alley cat adopted him a couple of weeks back and proved to be pregnant. Three kittens but I haven’t seen them. This past visit, I stopped at Barclay Center to check out the nearby shopping mall. Went into Old Navy where I bought nothing but thought of getting a couple of simple, cheap, v-neck t-shirts as scrubs alternatives; then Best Buy to see if they had an HDMI-VGA adapter. They did but it was $20. That was Monday. Around Wednesday I got around to taking it out of the box and hooking it up to the ThinkPad and old Viewsonic (?) HD monitor, which I’ve relocated to the glass shelves by the living room wall. No sound from the monitor speakers. Must use laptop for sound or attach speakers to the 3.5mm port on the back of the monitor. Only thing I’ve watched on it is OANN for an hour or two. A much better news channel than FoxNews or even Newsmax, but it often annoyingly plays the same ‘inspirational quotes’ house-ad filler over and over.

Thursday, I think it was, I did half the dishes and mopped the kitchen floor. It didn’t look clean enough so I went over it another couple of times with bleach. Looks okay now but I haven’t put the squeegee away.

I’ve been living mainly on A-Sha noodles. The other day I opened a can of mole chili I’d bought at Whole Foods (very expensive) but it wasn’t good at all. I’d had a couple of ears of corn lying around for a few days, getting rather dessicated looking there in the fridge, so ate ’em and they weren’t bad at all. Wednesday I think it was, I went to Whole Foods and managed to run up a total of $60 (EBT card: play money), mainly on two jugs of honey and a Porta frozen which was on sale, something less than $9. Little blueberry yoghurts. A $5 loaf of sourdough which quite possibly I did not pay for. Two cans of skipjack tuna. Four or five peaches, which I haven’t touched. Now, does that add up to $60? Oh wait, some honey hot sauce, which was about $6.

I got a notice from the SNAP office that my food-stamp benefit is being raised $90, from 202 ro 292. I really don’t need that. I need cash to pay the rent. And Con Ed. I need to send in a rent check now, and then again in two weeks. August 6, the next T&L court date, is coming up, and I want to have shown some earnest effort by then. It is too much to hope that SSA will come through with the $25,000 they owe me from the last few years. Two weeks from yesterday brings me another Gusto check (nruns gave me a 10% raise, for the princely wage of $25, effective with the last shift on July 13 in Queens) and a not-too-big Anchor check, and the $165 benefit from Aetna, and the not-yet-recomputed SS deposit of $1481 (deposited by August 1, as the normal date of Aug 3 is a Sunday).

Minor tragedy from Dottieland. She ordered a $300 Sony Trinitron, maybe 1994 vintage, on eBay. The FedEx guy dropped it and the picture tube came loose. I’d like to take a look at it and see if I could fix it, but I have much too much going on. I told her to cash in the insurance.

I had a minor tragedy myself on Monday evening in that thunderstorm. For fun I was listening to the old iPod 3rd Gen, 4-button one, on the subway. In the drawstring spike bag it got water damaged as I was coming down 57th St, diving under scaffoldings and canopies, but getting awfully wet nonetheless. So that’s dead. The apple comes up, but then a low-battery icon. And/or a no-file icon. Bios works, no power, no working storage drive. There is absolutely no reason to keep this, except maybe decoration. The beat-up old iPod Touch 4 that I bought back in 2021 to replace the Tuppy one Michael gave me for my birthday in 2010, but which I lost in the snowdrifts of West 18th St in early 2014…that has some real utility.

The Coliseum appt on Wednesday, July 16, was pleasant enough. Nice black lady named Maleka, friendly and intelligent. Consult and probe and bitewing. I’ll go back for debridement in a few weeks. In the meantime I ordered a new Waterpik flosser, which ought to have arrived by last night.

Spent most of yesterday flat on my back, rewriting an old Substack draft, “Before the Internet, Part I,” which grew into both Parts I and II. Haven’t spread them around on socmed, they’re not that good. Long though. I have been putting off writing the Buckley book bit for CC. “How Billy Buckley Broke Bad,” is my proposed title. I begin by noting that Carto is not in there, neither is GLR. Relations with Joe Sobran are barely touched on, though we get the tantalizing information that Joe was fired at the urging (behest?) of Norman Podhoretz. Tanenhaus wrote the book over about 15 years, and it looks it, 1000 pages long, and rather spotty and disjointed, with the last 25 years of WFB’s life compressed into a couple of chapters. He was chosen to write by the book by WFB’s son Christopher, largely because Tanenhaus had done a magnificent job with the bio of WFB’s friend and idol Whittaker Chambers. But the Chambers biographer had a clear focus: the tumultuous tragicomic Bildung of Chambers’s own life story, climaxing serially in his break with the Red underground, his astonishing success at Time-Life, and then the Hiss Case, the greatest political watershed of mid-century America. By the time Tanenhaus took over the Chambers story, the Hiss Case was no longer murky and controversial. Alger Hiss himself was still alive (he died in 1996, around the time time book was published) and preposterously proclaiming his innocence, but of his guilt there was no doubt: it was settled history. There’s no such clarity in the plot-arc of the Buckley story, and Tanenhaus is too overwhelmed by his own research, and perhaps his own cultural limitations, to weave the tale of the Buckleys into a sustainable and coherent narrative. We’re given the maudlin story, stage by stage, of the decline and fall of the House of Buckley, blossoming gorgeously in the 50s and 60s and 70s, after a luxurious, indulgent, horsey springtime in Europe and the Buckleys’ two vast estates in Connecticut and South Carolina, then their fortunes slowly collapsing with fraud suits against the family oil company, the eldest son drinking himself the death, other family members and in-laws growing dotty and disabled, the two estates finally being broken up and sold, the goods all auctioned off, in the early 1980s. The youngest Buckley daughter, Carol, marries a Jew (for a little while anyway; and Mr. Raymond Learsy was a thoroughly presentable author and commodities investor); Christopher, WFB’s only son, abandons the Catholic Church; Pat Buckley, a lifelong cigarette smoker and convivial imbiber, dies in 2007 from a series of illnesses, followed the next year by WFB himself, of emphysema (cigar smoking, and inhaling) and diabetes, which he developed after a weight gain late in life. But while these tragedies were slowly mounting up, and the family fortune dribbled away, Bill was becoming more and more successful, maintaining a thrice-weekly newspaper column for forty years, and editing NR for most of that time, cranking out nonfiction books (mainly collections of columns and essays), and then finally hitting paydirt with his spy-thriller series. There were one or two setbacks, such as a radio-station empire that never quite paid its way, but generally as money disappeared from the rest of the family, through illness and improvidence, it kept pouring into Bill’s coffers. And he was very generous with this largesse, seeing that his increasingly mad and crippled brother in law Brent Bozell was kept comfortable, and his children’s private-school bills were paid. Tanenhaus credits WFB, and Bozell as well, for spearheading the Conservative revolution that got Goldwater nominated in 1964 (Bozell ghostwrote The Conscience of a Conservative—for $10,000, but then no royalties on all those millions of copies sold, Tanenhaus helpfully informs us), and finally put Ronald Reagan in the White House. That would seem to be the great lifetime achievement of WFB and his kin, and Tanenhaus is neither enough of a sourpuss or right-winger himself to point out that the Reagan years accomplished nothing memorable or lasting. (Find that quote from Roger Devlin.)

I drank nearly every day this past week. Monday I got caught in a huge flooding thunderstorm coming back from Grimm’s. Went home to dry and change. Seriously thought of getting myself some nice gin. Why not gin for a change? Instead I got a tall IPA from the drugstore, one of those 9% ABV deals.

Next night however (7/15) I went to Shirley’s and got a pint of Tanqueray for $21. Won’t do that again. Vodka, 1/2 pt, next evening, and 1 pt the next. Friday 7/18 I looked bloated and unrecognizable when I caught a glimpse of my face while snapping the dog mosaic (above). I’d been to Home Depot for some batteries…and a motion-detector light for the kitchen…baking soda, paper towels. Stopped at Wendy’s for a sausage biscuit and home fries. Good but I initially grabbed the wrong order.

No drinking yesterday except for a small Kirin (I think) from Dainobu, which I drank with some chili shrimp thing I microwaved.

Memories of that gin bottle: I didn’t drink much of it before knocking off to sleep. Then around 1 or 2 in the morning I got up and drank half of what was left, and then after tooling around online for another hour, I drank the other half. Knocked off again, woke up, in my dreamy half-sleep had a sudden orgasm. Pretty intense. Not July 29, 2025 all-over waves of intensity throughout my torso, just your localized thing, but it was there. Impressive. I roused myself to check the time. It was about 6am. I figured I’d get up after 7. When I woke again the clock said 7:27. Oops. I would have to book it. Forgot my card-belt, couldn’t find my backup OMNY card actually bought a full-fare one from the machine. A few minutes wait for the subway. Didn’t get to Jeffrey’s till after 8. He’d gone to Bellevue. Oops. I won’t do that again.

Last Sunday’s setup and takedown in Flushing Meadows (a 5k) seemed like one of the longest and most strenuous of my nruns outings, but I did not feel wasted and dead to the world when I got home. I was much taken by Cara Bernstein’s white sneakers, which cost only $22 on Amazon (or the Bezos Bin, as her daughter calls it). From my iPhone I ordered a pair myself. I had a choice of size 10 or 11, and Amazon recommended 11 (based on past purchases). Well they came but they were pink and not white, and great big clodhoppers. So I took them back to the exchange counter at Whole Foods. On Tuesday…or was it Wednesday? Tuesday, I’m pretty sure.

The previous weekend’s Firecracker 10k on Gov Is was, conversely, very tiring, and I wanted to bail at 11am. Lacerated my right pinky badly opening the door gate at the warehouse. Rode with Craig (b) to the Ferry terminal, set up clocks and H-frame mile markers. Marshaled way over on the west side of the island. Jen H was running, so passed me a couple of times, hand-slap first time. Sun beating down, really needed shade. A funny guy in the medical tent gave me some dressing for the lacerated finger, but it continued to smart through the day. Kept changing the bandages all week. I headed for the Ferry without giving anyone a heads-up. Many hands, they didn’t need me. But the Ferry line was long. I looked for the new installation for Taco Vista, a quarter-mile away. Had two chorizo tacos. Very good, but they cost $13. Then I realized I had to return my radio. Trudged back to the start/finish where whatsisname, Marcos, was happy to direct me to the person taking the radios (Jasmine, who was a skinny thing when I met her 13 months ago and has now blimped up incredibly). Then I got to lug a few things around and help reload a truck for a few minutes, before peeling off again and going to the Ferry, which this time I just missed. Sat on the stone ledge outside the visitor center for 20 minutes, and finally got home by 1pm. Then I slept, I think.