I have bought myself a half pint of Pinnacle for four dollars, at the Chinawoman’s, from Numbah Two Son.

I hope this will not leave me where the half pint of Smirnoffs left me three or four days ago, with an impossibly agonizing headache on the left side, that would yield to neither aspirin nor caffeine. (In the early 00’s I found that codeine and pseudoephedrine together were a foolproof specific, but I have no codeine these days.)

I have tried to sleep half the time lately, mainly listening to Grover Gardner reciting Shelby Foote’s The Civil War. I may still be exhausted from the last few weeks of nruns. But why? Why? Well I think it’s because I wasn’t in such good shape then. We’ll see when work heats up again in a month. Regarding which, I’ve had the inevitable sneaking worry that nruns is going to shelve me. Why? Because bottom-line analysis says half the paid part-timers have to go, and I’ll be in there. So instead of getting my $200-$800 per month, I have nothing.

I’m washing dishes in the sink, and will bring the houseboys up to fix the electricity by and by. I ordered some under-counter battery-operated lights the other day. We’ll see how they work. I’m getting by.

Odd things on my mind lately:

Moki’s USAA debit card. In Spring and Summer last year he’d always send me out to get him a sandwich or vodka (seldom both in the same errand). So I kept the card in the back of my mini-purse, along with the punch-card from the deli counter that gave you your tenth sammich free.

But then he’d go out to the Chinawoman’s for a liter. A liter of that nasty Vesica stuff with the metal top that often refused to open. And he didn’t have his card. Because I had it. This also happened when he went to Morton Williams, the grocery we usually called Norton Simon. In the case of the Chinawoman she’d let him write a check (if he had his checkbook); for Morton Williams I once went up myself and retrieved his bag of groceries. Somewhere along the line, possibly in June, I forgot I was using his card at Morton Williams. Entered my own PIN number three times, after which USAA blocked the card. It took some weeks before we got a new one, reactivated.

After Moki took to his bed permanently (this would be around August, though I managed to pull him out once or twice to show the newly cleaned kitchen floor, or a newly caught but not at all dead mouse), the card became a moot point. I continued to use it for a couple of weeks after he died—for vodka, for Verizon, for groceries—until USAA got the Veterans notice of death and deep-sixed it. I think it was December 8 that I got back home from the gym to return a phone call offering sympathy, but also the news that his accounts were now cut off. I’d written myself a check, which went through, but a later one did not, and I found when trying to pay for a pizza and salad at Mangia that this USAA debit card would be forever declined. I was ready for that.

Scaring Tom Wolfe. I don’t know when this was, exactly, sometime between 2006 and 2010 would be my guess, but I had some kind of appointment in the Grand Central area. The quickest way to get there is to cut across 56th or 55th St to Park, then parade down. On this afternoon, however, I was furious with my track coach or my husband or some family member, and was reading them all the riot act. Except I bumped into Mr. Wolfe who no doubt thought I was reading him the riot act. I remember the setting. It was that building on Park around 54th St. with the square pillars. Mr. Wolfe was resplendently dressed as Tom Wolfe. Anyway, I was colossally embarrassed, just as TW was alarmed.

Victor Faralli. For many years an orthopedic surgeon in Lebanon, PA. I found this out years ago and now he is semi-retired. He stands and talks exactly the same as when he was eleven. When I first discovered Vic was in Lebanon—many years ago, as I say—I thought, Holy Smokes! But I’ve since familiarized myself with the place, thanks to Colin. And that’s exactly where I’d like to go, or hide out. Fastnachts for everyone. And if I had ended up in medical school, I think orthopedics would be one ethically safe place to be. Why didn’t I go to medical school? Too complicated.

BUT TODAY I spent the morning sorting out Moki’s books. Pacific War books on one shelf, rivers and water policy on another, literature on another, banking debacles on another. Everything bball goes on bottom shelves.

I resurrected my Garmin 410, which seemed a bad purchase back in 2012, but today at least worked far better than the  235. With the chest strap it gave me my HR, which was perpetually elevated, from 61 to 159, as I moped about reshelving books,  and then going for a walk/shuffle/jog/run of perhaps 5.5 miles up the bridle path and around the Reservoir. Picayune, but more than I’ve done in maybe years. Afterwards I tried using the watch on a walk down to StP’s for mass, but again I can’t figure it out. The Garmin 410 had a short life, was soon discontinued, and I was most happy (late 2015, early 2016?) to move on the the 235.

Something else I did today was clean up start-up tasks on the old MacAir 13. The Monoprice usb wifi dongle no longer functions because I threw out a working driver. I am writing this on the crippled AirPort wifi, which was never fixed in October 2014 after I spilled soup on the computer.

So I went to the gym and drank a Celsius and felt ill so packed up and went home. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Need to walk/jog/run all days. At least 20 miles in there. I have postponed my hair appointment at Timothy John’s till the 31st, and by then should look great, in splendid shape…

You know, I have no shifts at nruns till mid-June. This is the time to write a lot and look for another job, perhaps a real job. Also draw, with a begging bowl. A few one-offs, otherwise Uncle Bill and Iggy.

Bought a half pint at Shirley’s on return from TMPL. That one little half, drunk in two goes, left me with a headache upon waking six hours later. I have to write the Tom Wolfe now but am thinking I am hungry and want to finish off the salmon and some of the spinach, but with rice. Some of the nice risotto in the cupboard. May do that. And coffee, to get the sinuses eased.

I put that heavy burnished aluminium lamp on top of the microwave today as a stopgap replacement for the nonworking fluorescent fixture.

I have given up on the dishwasher. Will wash by hand for a little while. Get the houseboys to fix the fluorescent fixture first.

Somebody from Marc J. Bern phoned me in the afternoon. Just preliminary information on the 9/11 business. I thought we were well past that. Will ring again in the morning at 11. At least that was my suggestion.

I need to phone MSK again. Couldn’t get through to a working human last time. I need my records from the dermatological oncology clinic. Supposedly that will speed things up. But perhaps the Bern concern has already submitted the request with HiPAA form? I’ll ask, but not expect a clear answer.

Heard back from that distant relative of LR on Ancestry. She knows nothing, less than I do. I have however confirmed that LR and brother Irwin were living in Conshohocken in the 1940s, something that does not come up independently on Ancestry, since they were in Florida for the 1940 and 1950 censuses. Found her 1971 book online, downloaded it in PDF. She mentions Irwin’s name and that her mother died rather recently (1967). The cringey gushiness of this “diary” no doubt is genuine but must have been reworked many times. I recall sending comments to Z about it years ago; suggesting that the LW doctor was Wollman, and another one was Rish or Wesser.

Found a wonderful MP 1971 site, with slides, photos from the yearbook, and videos. It’s funny how everyone who showed up in 2021 looks pretty much the same. Still in their 60s yet they’re mostly whitehaired, out of shape if not downright fat, often mustachioed. Except for VF I couldn’t possibly have recognized any of them.

Thinking about Marybeth McGurl. I thought I had blocked her on MD Twitter, but no I never did. Died in March 2020. Covid? Who knows? Sick enough to move back to family from Savannah. What a nasty piece of work. I found a drunk&disorderly arrest mugshot of her a few years ago, Savannah, but can’t find it online now. No doubt I saved it, perhaps screenshotted it, will stumble across it someday and wonder what it is.

At high school in Maine, 1976.

I keep a running list of dead people, listed my my discovery of them rather than death chronology. Last few run:

14 may 2024
dick foote
1 may 2023

28 feb 2024
Rob Dinsmoor on Feb 23

20 feb 2024
David Irving dead (oh no he’s not)

jan 31 2024
hoff

jan 1 2024
Mitchell Lash Adams
died 2020

sept 12 2023
David Springer, d. 2007
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-06-22-0706211018-story.html

sept 11 2023
Bob Slaughter (died in June)

timothy O’donnell (d. 2018)
teresa (terry) o’donnell plummer (d. 2020)
Mary Jane Bowersock d. 1993?

I affixed both bikes to the little vertical stands, late morning. Inspired to do this while checking the rain out the window. One stand was simple enough; you stick a wheel of the bike inside two metal frames that grip it. Ideally you use the back wheel, but I used the front. That’s Moki’s custom bike. The other stand mystified me initially. I decided a pedal crank (not the pedal itself) probably slid into the rectangular chamber, and that’s indeed how it works. There’s a vertical cut in the chamber so the pedal bearing slides down through that. Put my old Cannondale mountain bike in it. And there we are! They’re over by the liv rm window.

I didn’t do a blessed thing on Tuesday, which was sunny. Didn’t leave the house. Now it is Wednesday, and you hear the cars driving in the rain outside. Rain for most of the next few days. OK, fine, I’ll just spend a couple hours at TMPL every day. I’m not really in shape for serious running anyhow. A half hour on the treadmill, 20 minutes on the C2, all preceded perhaps by a few minutes on the stationary and a good long 25 minutes on the elliptical, as in the old days…can’t beat that. Followed by some dumbbells and weight machines on odd days. Stretch.**

What I did do was wash some dishes and drink the rest of Monday’s smoothie, which was easily 16 ounces. Didn’t eat anything for the rest of the day, but woke late at night and cooked salmon (delicious) which I ate with some baby spinach and a new batch of the cilantro lime dressing from the Power Foods cookbook. Email to Zagria. Revised Hoff comment. She asked if I had an info on Lyn Raskin and someone else. I had in fact looked up LR in the past, but her end is ambiguous.

After eating the salmon a little while ago I picked up the big quadrille diary Michael kept in 1987-88 in France, which has been sitting at the foot of the bed since maybe December, when I was sorting through his personal files and tossing out trash. Tension with Anne-Marie because he’s not doing anything with his life. He was feeling like a real loser when he left. A-M’s caviling against him were similar to mine in roughly the same period. Someday I must type up that diary and any other diary-like thing Moki left behind. Very touching.

A big time-waster at the start of the day (Tuesday) was compiling a dossier on one Abram Henry Rosenfeld, the lead attorney in some of the Nuremberg-style cases in Germany, 1946-48. He was nearly impossible to track down in newspapers and Ancestry items, because he’s given a variety of names. Sometimes called Albert, sometimes Abraham, sometimes A.H. Rosenfeld. Married a Mary O’Neill from Philadelphia, at Fort Bragg in 1942. A nasty piece of work as a prosecutor, wanted all the Malmédy SS men executed. Other Americans were alarmed at his vindictiveness (quite a few Jews in that party, in addition to him) so Yockey was hardly alone. And eventually the Malmédy thing led to a Senate investigation with Joe McCarthy, in the days just antecedent to McCarthyism. Why did the Jews pile onto McCarthy so? It wasn’t the anti-communism. It was his defense of the SS men.

I compiled this dossier because R was one of three Jews mentioned in the Bolton book on Yockey and Greg asked if I could find out background details. I tracked down the other two easily enough but R was elusive. As per usual, I had to go around and around, chasing false leads, till I found that the R from Mt. Holly, NJ fit right into the rest of the jigsaw puzzle. I even got his death certificate from Alexandria VA and his marriage certificate from NC.

Coming up on the groaning board: Must do the Colin Wilson book (The Angry Years), comparing it in passing to Allsop’s The Angry Decade and also to Colin’s Lost in Soho (or something like that)*. Also a quickie on Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word. (My library pback copy got soaked in my gym bag on Sunday during the rainy Gov Is venture; I’ve dried it out by sticking it on the liv rm windowsill above the radiator, betwixt two stout doorstops of books.) And 150 years of The Truth Seeker, with special attention to the Smith and Johnson years, and Robert John’s little book. I think RJ’s book should get a little review for itself, since it’s quite an easy read, short, and out of print. I can simply paraphrase and summarize most of it…while noting how he steps around hot-button issues the TS people wouldn’t care to endorse.

*Adrift in Soho. I couldn’t have remembered. And it’s a novel.

**No vodka, not even wine the past two days. I felt horrendously flabby yesterday. Ashamed to go out and try to run, really. This must be the result of six helpings of my vegan chili with a whole bag of the flour tortilla chips bought at WF on Monday.

A bumpy ride sleeping the last few days, what with little sleep on the weekend even with benefit of alcohol. (A half pint on Saturday, red wine on Sunday.) Did not sleep at all between Friday noon and Saturday evening; then perhaps two hours, and awake through late Sunday afternoon. Two shifts on Gov Is, one on a bright, breezy, sunny day, and then on a cold and wet one where my gloves got so soaked and cold I had to take them off to warm my hands up. Someone gave me a pair of sporting grip gloves, and I still have those, though my own—the Craft gloves—may now really be lost for good. Perhaps took them out of the pocket when in the john at the Cultural Center.

Little work on Saturday, mainly chivvying runners near the ferry terminals. By contrast, I finished up on Sunday by riding a rattling truck and helping to pick up perhaps a hundred orange cones, or “delineators” as they are known. This took us on a thoroughgoing tour of the island, with view of a mysterious cruise liner, thirty stories tall, docked in Brooklyn, and a tent encampment on the south side of the island. While marshaling, or ‘athlete experiencing’ a few blocks west of the Gov Is terminal, I snapped some shots of an overcast day and the lower tip of Manhattan.

All grey except for the SI Ferry.

I’d decided to locate and wear my CPTC rain pants for Sunday (rain predicted, as we all knew) but when I found them (in one of the Miele suitcases) I found I could barely get them on over my abdominal bulge. They leave me with a real muffin-top. I saw that belly-bulge coming in as far back as 2012, 2009 even, but it was slight. Now I can’t wear anything I wore then, if it has a normal waistband. Gym tomorrow, maybe run tomorrow (Tuesday) too. Wednesday looks rainy, as does much of the next week.

I’m thinking of doing the dishes in the morning then going to TMPL, from whence I’ll jog over to the river and then all the way up into Riverside Pk. We’re talking a serious 600-1000 cal loss every day just to be able to run normally again, let alone fit into clothes. I can’t brace the idea of weighing myself.

But I was talking about the broken sleep cycles… During one of the longer bouts in dreamland, I had a recurrence of that incompleted-college-class type of dream. This one involved the sc dragging on and on for years, even worse than it really did. Here I’m going to see Granato after five years or so, because for some reason I need the knife again. Apparently the job was never finished. His office has moved to a large hospital or clinic building, but his obese mystery-meat assistant is still in attendance. (Note: this does not reflect any actual aide, and may be coloration from the nogs and mystery-meats one encounters at nruns.) Some anxiety about whether my paperwork is in order. I barely see G. He is being succeeded by a younger surgeon I’ve never met before. I despair of being treated as though this were my first approach to the cycle, a cycle I thought I finished long ago.

I once told Emily S. about these recurrent dreams and she thought they sounded absolutely horrible.

For some reason, instead of hunkering down and dashing off that Truth Seeker piece, or the one about The Angry Years, I became determined to make myself a ginger-orange smoothie and some vegan chili, so that took up much of the midday and afternoon. The kitchen is still lightless, and now I’m pretty sure the dishwasher is gone for good.

Watched part of Foreign Correspondent today via YouTube. There is no credit for Vincent Sheean, though he wrote the original book. A batch of screenwriters winged it and turned it into a suspense comedy. Robert Benchley has a walkon as a dipsomaniac journo in a homburg.

I have not sent in a rent check. Tomorrow.

In the interest of carrying on the Moki tradition, yesterday afternoon I resuscitated that bicycle rack. He actually owned three. One, a simple wheeled stand that you stick your back wheel onto (instead of leaning your bike against something), another is a T-shaped stand into which you insert the seatless downtube, perhaps (I don’t know), and then the last one is one he never used at all. It has splayed legs like an ironing board, with a slanted bar contraption onto which you attach your diagonal tube and crank/gear assembly. You can’t imagine it, so maybe I’ll take a picture. He was quite excited about buying it, from a guy out in Woodside, or one of the other -sides in Queens. We went out there on a drizzly grey day, the Saturday before Labor Day or perhaps the Saturday after (it was around my birthday). The guy lived in an apartment on a nice residential street, and brought the pieces of the rack out to us. Moki put them into plastic bags, bin bags I think. Then we had lunch. There was a nice pub/restaurant a block or two away. As it was my birthday or thereabouts we called it my birthday lunch and I had an $18 lamb hamburger which was excellent. Moki astonished at the price. I mean, here we were out in Queens. But it was a gourmet lambburger. Then we walked to the subway in the drizzle.

This was during one of the periods when Moki was again getting excited about bicycling. We’d gone out to the bike expo in Red Hook (formerly downtown, around Pier 17) the previous May, or perhaps the May of the previous year (2018?) and Moki spent $180 on a lighted bike helmet with turn signals, which I don’t think he ever used. He showed it off to Wojeck the doorman who was much impressed. After Moki died Wojeck asked if he could have it. That sounds very forward of him, but he wanted it to be put to good use. So I found it, along with the USB attachment and instructions. Wojeck said he knew how to use it. He’d looked it up and found the price had gone way down.

I am confused about the date, something that doesn’t often happen. When I last looked, the trip to Queens for the bike rack wasn’t in any diary or datebook. I’ll look again. But from emails in late August 2019, it appears Moki found it on Craigslist around then. Surely if we had bought it a year before, he wouldn’t be looking for another rack. By this point we’d settled the bikes in the foyer. In the spring (2019) we pumped them up. But we never took them out. Around the time we were getting ready, Jeffrey Brando came by and smoked some tina with us. So that day was blown. I remember he was going through some problems at work. He was a highly paid specialty nurse but he worked through an agency and right now his wages were being garnished. So he didn’t have much moolah. And then he lost his job or was suspended for reasons I don’t recall. Possibly Moki made notes in diaries or email or text messages. It was around this time that Jeffrey disappeared from Moki’s life. I know he came by once in December 2019 and we smoked a little tina again, one last time. I was a bit ill, and then developed a sore throat and felt iller. I went to the bank and on the way back could barely stand. I had to grip scaffolding along 57th Street to get home. Later I decided this weird sickness was early-adopter COVID-19. It didn’t last long, because a few days later Greg and Jef and Cyan and Spencer and I had dinner together at the Playwright and at that point I told them I had just recently been ill.

The bike rack hung around, unassembled, for a few months. Moki didn’t know how to put it together. There were no instructions. Online I checked out every bike rack i could fine until I found one with a similar conformation. Then I put it together. And I left it assembled until I moved the coat rack from the corner opposite the foyer to the west side of the living room, by the rubberwood table. Needing room, I took it apart and folded it, and that was that for the next couple of years. I don’t know what possessed me yesterday to assemble it.

Because I seldom left town or did anything memorable, 2018-2019 is a very foggy period for me. I wrote a few pieces for Splice in late 2018; that I know. I also had a couple of pieces in the Reader. Two in AmRen in 2019. Saw Colin and Jared in June 2019. In July, I think, Moki and I had dinner on Travers Island with his bicycle tycoon friend, the one who explained the Ashtabula Crank (strange one-piece assembly used by Schwinn and some cheap American bikes). RG sent me on an interview at Spence-Chapin, an adoption agency whose stock in trade seems to be mostly niglets. Met Cyan and Pepper at Time-Warner in July or August. We ate at Chick fil-A and went to Trump Tower. She’d parked the big SUV nearby. Early September I went to election-poll training of a sort on West 19th St, which led nowhere. I never even got paid for the hour or two of training I was supposed to get. The following spring I was assigned to show up at a location in Chelsea in the wee hours of the morning. I walked all the way down but couldn’t find the address.

In August and September 2019 I thought I had some translating work, but it turned out to be a total scam. They sent a fake check and asked for most of it back in a rebate while the bad check was waiting to clear. They were foreigners, deep foreigners, not good with English at all. Someone named Savannah (fake name), forever sending me txt msgs. I wrote a long eulogy for George Mitrovitch that was finally published by the Reader in December.

I chased down some horrible jobs in October 2019. End of the month, I think, I ended up with the strange Robert Brooks thing. He did not have a true office, worked out of a rent-a-cubicle in the East 40s. Not much to do. I started some websites, not much progress. He called a halt to the job after a few days when he went to a conference in Florida for the scammy business of getting aliens work visas. Robert had been tracked for a career in biomed but became a lawyer instead, and not a particularly successful one.

In early 2020 we were hit with COVID. The city shut down, the gyms shut down. I signed up for another horrible job: Census2020. But instead of beginning the work in April or May, we were postponed to late July and August and beyond. One blessing was that I mainly canvassed my immediate neighborhood, basically Park Avenue over to Eighth Ave, in the 50s. Later on as the list grew thinner I had oddball addresses way the hell over in Hells Kitchen. By early October it was all finished. My boss was a theatrical fellow named Larry. I remember once when I slipped up, or he thought I slipped up, he gave me a warning, telling me that the way I conducted myself might determine the course of my future career with the Census. Career? You mean I might actually make a career of this, get a real job? No, that’s not what he meant at all, he was giving me bureaucracy-speak that I might lose the job that was going to end in a couple of weeks anyway. He was not a bad fellow withal. I just wondered why he got to be boss and I didn’t. Oh probably because he’d been an “enumerator” (what I was) at least once before.

Moki was jollier than usual during the Census time. Because I was working, sort of. Talking to Brian a lot on the phone. I had a pleasant chat or two with him. Moki would tell him I was working the Census, or I was down at the gym (NYHRC was gonzo but I’d rejoined Chelsea Piers). Moki decided to try bicycling again in September, so took my bike out on a Sunday afternoon. It was crowded in the Park, he fell down near Fifth Avenue, I suppose near Grand Army Plaza. Someone helped him up. He never took the bike out again. That was curtains for Moki and bicycling.

In early summer 2020 we went for walks in the Park. The squirrels were aggressively friendly, running up to everyone and begging for nuts. Moki was pretty weak on our walks, had to stop and sit every time he saw a bench. Often we entered near Grand Army Plaza, walked past the Thomas Moore bust and down under the archway, past the stone pillars, and then up past the ball fields and the Ballfield Cafe. We sit on a bench at the north end of that loop. it was hot and muggy, and we were chronically fatigued, but we enjoyed those little walks. Often he would stop at the Chinawoman’s for a liter on the way back.Later on, in 2021 and 2022 he was much stronger on these walks. Though mainly we just made our  way up to Tavern on the Green and had a couple of bloodies.

During the deep-Covid-lockdown of 2020 I noticed that a few places over on West 72nd and Columbus Ave were opening up in July, at least with outside tables. I told Moki and we found us a very pleasant place on Columbus around 74th St, across from the shabby Key Foods supermarket. Went there at least twice. Moki didn’t trust himself to walk home one time so we took a cab.

Very sluggish recently, no exercise. Finding it hard still to get up from a squatting position. 1/2 pt last night, I think a bottle of red wine the night before, and probably two half pints the day before that. I need to pay rent. One month’s rent only won’t do the trick. Looking for extra shifts on Deputy. Fortunately I still have a free week ahead of before the back-to-backs on Gov Is.

I finally got the D. Macdonald piece in a couple of mornings ago. A rich and sprawling thing, and I scarcely said anything about the smaller essays in the book. I wanted to say something about Cozzens, but instead went on and on about DM and Tom Wolfe (important) and DM and Orwell (not quite as important, but I have to get that in there). The Cozzens omission may be useful later on if I do my piece about Appointment in Samarra, now 90 years old. “Appointment in O’Hara.” Begin with DM and Cozzens and how that devastating review killed Cozzens’s career. Cozzens says in the Time article (Sept 2, 1957 cover) that he’d been working on the book (By Love Possessed) for eight years, but I find this unlikely. It smells of the lamp and overworkings, and I think he worked on for over twenty. Anyway my theory is that By Love Possessed is bad because Cozzens was trying to do an O’Hara, specifically something like Appointment, but with more cerebrality and less drinking and violence. Both are in small towns in Pennsylvania, both seem to happen in the 1930s (Cozzens was Hap Arnold’s speechwriter and communications officer during the War, but no war intrudes upon the characters of his novel), both concern events that quickly collide upon each other in the space of a couple of days.

Also still out is the Birchers review, the Dallek book, which I wrote a month ago and am sitting on. Then we do The Truth Seeker. Only angle I can arrive at there is that its obsession with atheism now seems to be free-floating, with no purpose. With Smith and Johnson, it was a useful duckblind for all their other dank business, such as publishing Imperium. I have the story of my encounters with TTS, and Ian Hutton, whom I was searching for last August. The Blessing of the Fish in Santa Barbara. Ian Hutton, Storyteller. That would have been Feb 1988. Then in late 1991 there he is again, at the door of The Truth Seeker, downtown near the SD library. The Cartos got to know JHJ back in the 60s when TTS was distributing Imperium. Stayed in touch, WAC expected a bequest, didn’t get it. Elisabeth said how disgusting the guy’s ear was. Decomposing, full of pus. Then Dr. John, that mysterious, yeasty polyglot of Armenian, French, Scots background, born in the French Riviera, raised near London, trained as lawyer at Inn of the Middle Temple, but never practiced. Got medical degree (much easier in England than in America; after university and legal training he could probably complete it in two years). Somehow with this he then transferred to New York. Without an MD? Didn’t really do clinical work. Some kind of psychiatric administrator on Wards Island. (British physicians seldom have MDs or PhDs unless they are in some sort of an academic role or intend to build a private practice. In the main, medical training is largely designed to provide the NHS with an ample supply of bottom-feeders, generic GPs and physicians to staff Accident & Emergency rooms. After secondary school you do six years of combined undergraduate and graduate school and end up with a B.S. in medicine. (Also a B.S. in surgery.) Anyway, Robert John too wanted a piece of the James Hervey Johnson legacy, and after much beseeching he got $600,000, a portion of which was used to publish a paperback book that gently supported race realism and eugenics.

POSTSCRIPT: So it was May 15, 2020 that I somehow discovered the RAD Easy-Fold Bike Stand and sent the PDF flyer to Moki. I suppose I assembled it within the next day. We never got any use of it, after all that.

FLYER DISCOVERED 15 MAY 2020

I found a gastropub in Sunnyside Gardens named The Dog and Duck, and that looks like the nearby bistro where we had lunch on that drizzly day. But unless I find some receipts I’ll never be able to nail down the exact date. And the pub no longer exists. A casualty, possibly, of Covid the following year? I don’t know that this is it, but the NE corner location is what I recall.

I think it was when I was listening to Sally Bedell Smith’s George VI and Elizabeth that I heard of a wedding celebration where 100 bad pipers were in attendance. I figured out it was really “bagpipers” but the notion of recruiting bad pipers was enchanting. First of all, the bad pipers would be pipers, but not bagpipers, who are quite bad enough to begin with, without any skylarking or incompetence to excuse them. These pipers would be more like the Pied Piper, or the Eleven Pipers Piping in the Christmas song, or the piper in the “Spirit of ’76” painting.

If you recruited a lot of pipers, it could be a mix of all types, maybe with a classic flautist or piccolo player amongst them. Could you get 100? No, I’d be happy with Eleven Bad Pipers Piping. The reason they’d be bad pipers is that they never rehearsed together and they don’t follow the same music. The pitchpipe would give them the key for some song they all presumably knew (say, “My Pretty Redwing”) and let them go to town.

This would be great entertainment by itself, much funnier than a passel of clowns, but what if you built a story all around the desperate search for 100 bad pipers for an affair of state. The word comes down from Master of Protocol: we need ten sad clowns and a hundred bad pipers to entertain the visiting King of Ruritania next month. And the showrunner for this spectacular has taken ill, so the job falls to her assistant, a frightened gal who runs the Autopen to “sign” official correspondence. It occurs to her that the order may be garbled, and the Master of Protocol certainly must have dictated “100 bagpipers,” but the Master’s office huffily insists that the order is correct, and so she must set to work. She remembers a couple of flautists who play in the band at church, and some neighborhood kids who play a practice instrument called a Flutophone, a cheap plastic toy intended to give six-year-olds an introduction to woodwinds. So there she has four, five, six pipers, or a sort, whom she can try to recruit. But she needs more and is desperate.

She learns there is a budget for the event, so is authorized to place an ad in various papers around the country:

100 PIPERS
NEEDED IMMEDIATELY!
Incompetence No Obstacle!

Entertainers are being sought for major high-class entertainment next month.
Can you play, or pretend to play, a flute, a recorder, a hornpipe, a fife,
or the sort of thing the Pied Piper played in the poem by Robert Browning?
Piccolos and krumhorns will be considered.
Respond to Box 336.

The sad clowns are easy to recruit, for there is a retirement home for sad clowns nearby and several of them can even play a wind instrument.

Just to be on the safe side, our heroine hires 15 sad clowns and 115 pipers and they foregather at the event with very little in the way of rehearsal. Many of the pipers turn out to have no instruments at all, so some hair combs are obtained which with bits of paper will be used as kazoos…

I don’t know how the story ends, but I suspect it will not be pretty. Some of the dignitaries will be killed, and the Autopen girl goes into hiding in a foreign country.

From 11:55 am on Saturday until about 3 pm Sunday, I did not sleep at all. I got out to McCarren Park much too early and wandered around the neighboring blocks a bit. Williamsburg at night is very attractive and impressive, full of bars and boîtes and avant-garde hotels and apartment buildings.

Williamsburg at night. It was far darker. This strange structure in the vicinity later proved to be the William Vale hotel.

Finally ran into an ancient, crooked-gaited negress in the uniform jacket, and she was searching the other way. I had found the headquarters tents when I first arrived (no one there but some negroes from Apex security) but now I had wandered around for a mile or so and I was a little lost. Finally, around a quarter to two (a.m.), I found the HQ tents again where we had a small but critical mass of staff gathered nearby. We started to finish the raising of the three small tents at the headquarters area. After a few minutes I realized I hadn’t clocked in yet so did so. Our leader J eventually appeared and took us on a tour of the overall site, including the Start Village. The Village was a fenced-in lot of about two acres, now lined on both sides with portapotties. My first task was to cut the zip-ties on those. Usually this was easy. Sometimes though people tie the zip-ties too tight and it’s hard to get the shears inside the loop. Then we set out water cups and the “water monster” urns in the lot.

One side of the lot was for Waves 1 and 3, the other for Waves 2 and 4. As we expected, many of those in Wave 1 came by right after the security gates opened at 5 am, an hour and a half before they could get to their corrals, and two hours before their race.One tall bearded fellow who arrived around 5:15 was confused and asked me what the route was, was it just loops around the park? Obviously he had done no research; the route was an out-and-back. His corrals would not open for over an hour. Most of the questions I got were similar. Are there any more pins around? (Safety pins. Yes, over on the table there.) If I’m Wave 1 can I run with my friend in Wave 2? (Yes.)

My other job, besides directing the 20k contestants and answering questions, was picking up discarded clothing. There seemed to be tons. We had lots of hirelings and volunteers to pick them. Few receptacles though. The clothes were strewn along the ground and by the corrals. Easily a hundred large bags full of tossed clothing. Not all were meant to be discarded. There was a finisher who wandered by when we were loading the trucks, looking for the jacket he had dropped by the big tree beyond the Village exit. Alas, it had been gathered up with the other discards. If and when we do a postmortem, we need to make a note of this problem. Our manic announcer Lynn talked up everything else during her three hours of emceeing by the Start, but said nothing about clothing discards.

By the time I started for home my feet hurt and so did my hips. It finally occurred to me what had been going on with my feet all this time: it’s plantar fasciitis. I hadn’t had it in so long, I just didn’t remember. The hip problem is just a variant of my old sciatica friend. When I got home I waited for noon, and went out to the Chinawoman’s for cheap wine. She actually had a bottle good California red stuff, which I slowly drank over the next day. I bought Triscuit, prosciutto and Entenmann’s crumbcakes at the drugstore, and that was my nourishment for the day. I dropped off to sleep, sometimes watching parts of Breaking Bad Season 5 (only one I own on Prime; I bought it back in 2013), and, going for three to six hours at a time, slept through till about nine today, Monday.

The internet suddenly cut out just before three pm, as I lay here in bed, playing with Twitter. My first thought was Verizon has fucked up again. They turned off my juice in spite of all. Checking my WF account now on the mobile app, I see there’s still over $300 in there, which means Verizon hasn’t taken out the authorized payment (about $88).

Intended to run and/or go to the gym. I believe it will be a jog/walk in the evening, just to stretch the legs, just for form’s sake, and to do the sort of downward dog and other stretching I need to cure the plantar fasciitis.

Mr. Grimm sent me a birthday present a week or so ago, thinking it was my birthday. Apparently I had put April 20th down as my b-day. A joke when I was drunk, perhaps. I finally retrieved it from the concierge yesterday, on my way back with the wine from the Chinawoman’s. A not terribly attractive Muppet-like puppet of a white-haired bearded man. With some modifications it could be a bearded Moki. Take a photo of it with glasses and an NYAC Founders cap. On the pillow with the other three and maybe the frog puppet as well.

After this, I put all puppets away except Moki Mouse.

I discover that Moki’s “television glasses” have just about the diopters I need for reading glasses. I clean them off and am trying them out. A bit strong, maybe. Use them for precise drawing or when my eyes don’t seem to focus at all in the morning.

Pleasantly tired and sleepy most of the past day since getting back from the Expo at Zero Space. Weird work there, but I rather miss it. Two middleaged ladies (middleaged the way I am middleaged, I suppose) running the credentials and uniform room on the 2nd storey, both from Colorado, which amazed one of the enormous negresses that came by. One was largebodied with her hair piled on her head, the other was a spindly superannuated counterculturist with multicolored hair scarf and noserings. The negress thought perhaps I was “from Denver” too, and we were part of a little coven. Interesting notion upon seeing a similarity amongst white fokes.

Misunderstanding when I checked in there at 9:15 am. I said I was looking for credentials and gear, meaning mine, but without knowing it I’d been assigned to work that room. So they told me to go away and wait. So when it was time to train me, I was downstairs, picking up bits of work here and there. Thought I was going to be working on bibs and bags. Miki was doing bibs but I was not part of that. So I’d print out “WAVE 1 / 12345” stickers to put on the bags.

Was in the right place upstairs by eleven, handing out t-shirts, jackets and hoodies to STAFFers getting their credentials for Sunday’s half marathon. Peer worker was Nick, an Italian guy who often spends time driving and unloading trucks. He brought lunch from home, a stinky ziti salad. We joked about how I folded the t-shirts because of my time in retail (which consists entirely of Williams-Sonoma).

Renata Slavicname from the Spring Fling on April 14 showed up to work the second shift beginning at 2. Very friendly atmosphere then. In the last half-hour or so before I left, business picked up, from one customer every ten minutes to one or two a minute. But we had it easy. Sounds like they are having a madhouse today.

Up to the Q at Pacific St near Atlantic Avenue by 4:30, after stopping for an 8.6% beer in the beer garden at the Expo. Really excellent stuff, from SixPoint, called Piff. $9 and worth it. Easy ride home. Bright and sunny when I emerged on 55th St. Then red wine from Shirley’s and a Marie Callender’s. Slept on and off for 18 hours between snatches of Godfather II and Andrew Roberts on Churchill.

Mild panic around noon when I rose, made coffee, didn’t know where my credentials and lanyard were. They were in the green eco bag, along with my yellow jacket, hoodie,

Where are my Craft gloves? i have lost them again. Going to pack the work gloves in the inside pockets of the yellow EVENT STAFF jacket. We can’t bring big bags or backpacks, so I’m putting things in pockets and carrying the black Sportsac (decaying insides) as a crossbody thing outside the jacket, with oddments inside. Amphipod as well? Maybe.

Thought I would get up for a run, go to gym, go to mass in the afternoon. No, too bushed. Conserve your energy. Big night/day coming up, probably won’t sleep much. At some sesame chicken and rice from Dainobu where I also picked up some Amino Vital gel, which I intend to sip along my journey. I catch downtown F (?) train at 1am or so, then L at 14th to Bedford Ave. Walk 5 blocks to 12th and Union. Meeting spot for pre-Start.

Put money into Chase checking (OD) and Chase Amazon. Ordered an amino supplement which with credits is only costing $7.

On YouTube, watching a guy named Billy Parisi make sausage. I’d like to make bangers but do not have equipment.

When M was still here we were often sick in the morning. Sometimes vomiting-sick, otherwise just a bit weak and nauseated. We were sick—I was sick—from the cumulative effect of drinking a lot of vodka for days.

Last night I finished off a 1.75 of Sobieski, the first 1.75 that’s been in the house in maybe ten months. I got the 1.75 on Saturday because I discovered a new liquor store on West 55th St (I think) west of Ninth Avenue. They had some good prices. The Sobieski came in a nice red box and had two branded shot glasses. About $24. I made a note of that and stopped off and bought it when I got back from the paint store. (I was matching chips at the Janovic on 52nd and Tenth. Needed two colors, bought just one quart this time, the light green cream for the living room.) And then from Saturday through Monday I drank it all with V8 juice (and sometimes Worcestershire and and pepper and celery). Got three tacos at Chipotle across the street yesterday. Really good, I think they’re better than the bowls. Then I bought No Country for Old Men on Amazon Prime but didn’t watch it. I have another day.

The LED tubes for the kitchen came on Saturday. I decided not to try to put them up then because by that point I had a couple of drinks inside me. On Sunday, almost sober, I climbed the stepladder and put them in. They didn’t work. What’s more, one of them makes a clinking sound, like a dead lightbulb. And when I took the tubes out, they were a little cracked at the ends by the prongs. Plastic. The fluorescent tubes have metallic or ceramic caps. So these tubes have to go back to Home Depot. And I’m beginning to think the fluorescents weren’t worn out at all. It’s the fixture, the wiring, that’s bad. How do I tell? I pick up a cheap fixture and see if they work.

I have to go to Brooklyn around noon to do some flyering, 1-5. We meet at a Coffee Land near Grand Army Plaza. I hope I won’t be feeling awfully sick and weak. Starting in on some coffee just now.

Messages flashing on Teams or Deputy. We’re not to bring any backpacks to the HM this weekend, and should avoid bringing bags to the Expo as well (I’m working Friday, morning and early afternoon). National Weather Service forecasts temps beween 28º and 60º on Friday, 47º to 72º Sunday. Jen saying something about carrying a Lululemon crossbody bag. I had a very nice Lululemon “festival” bag ten years ago, all gone now. It was bright dayglo yellow, got dirty and I couldn’t clean it. Maybe one of Moki’s special bags will work. Otherwise I can carry things in the inside pockets of the Patagonia, and keys and cards as usual around my waist. The thin little thing or that black webbed one from Aeropod, or whatever. (Go to check.) Amphipod. The zipper is stuck. Get pliers and give it a tug. There. Got some WD-40 as well.

Along with the vodka and paint on Saturday I got a package of L’Oreal root touch-up, medium brown, at CVS on Tenth. Going to put that on in an hour (around 9:30), let it sit under a cap for an hour. Then a shower and shampoo after rinsing it out. Dry in the big bathroom, maybe.

No more vodka this week. I haven’t picked up a pen but I wouldn’t be surprised if my handwriting is a mess. It took me so long to figure that out. Urrgh.

Was FB messaging with Grimm the other day. I honestly was inquiring about getting some tina. He says it’s a lot cheaper but not really very good, and made in Mexico.

Postscript, 7pm. Feet hurt like the dickens after trudging around in the red Magic Racer for at least five miles in the Eastern Parkway area of Brooklyn. Nice blonde girl in her early 20s, from Cincinnati and a Cincinnati Reds cap, accompanied me on our flyer expedition. Mainly a slummy part of Brooklyn with an awful lot of nogs, and since it adjoins Crown Heights, there are a lot of ultra-orthodox there as well, and Torah schools. The blocks between avenues along Eastern Parkway seem to be nearly a half-mile long each.

Brooklyn, our flyering area. The pin at left is the coffeeshop where we met.

Actually they’re 1000 ft. Meaning it’s over a mile between Franklin and Kingston, and we walked them both, directly, twice, and another couple of miles within our flyer area of about 30 blocks. And then another couple miles for me from the 7th Ave Q train near Park Pl and Sterling Pl to the tiny Coffeeland coffeeshop where we met at 1pm. Deo gratias, there’s an IRT station right beside it. From 5pm I rode the 5 train to Union Square and then the N to 57th St.

Stopped at Morton Williams for milk and cheap pot pies. I’m thinking of going out to Shirley’s for cheap red plonk if she has any. Then maybe come back and watch that film.

It rained on Thursday and Friday. I did not go for a run, nor yet go to the gym, but did walk down to the post office to mail the envelope to Marc J. Bern LLP. The exterminators and Chris were back in at midday Thursday, and I told them a rat had been trying to gnaw through the wall between the radiator and the electrical plug. Somebody looked at the door to the heating pipe, SW corner of living room, behind Moki’s desk, opened it and resealed it. More recently, as in around 2am Sunday morning (early yesterday) there was a rat scratching and gnawing there. Haven’t heard them anywhere else.

Dishwasher not reattached yet. I’m washing up by hand, a few at a time.

Friday I wanted to watch My Favorite Year for some reason. Saw it mentioned on social media. Rented it and watched it twice over the next two days. Early Saturday morning I found myself painting the pantry and bits of the kitchen with the Brandied Crimson semi-gloss. All those bare plaster chips annoyed me.

F train to Prospect Park at around 3:30 yesterday (Sunday the 14th). It was late, got to Bartel-Pritchard Square around 4:25. In the park at 4:30, clocked in on Deputy. Followed the familiar paths and roads down the hill to Center Drive—familiar enough even in the darkness, with a few streetlights overhead—where orange vests and a truck were collecting. Walked almost all the way to East Drive when I ran into a little blond girl, and we found we were both lost, looking for the Festival area. On the map I thought the Festival area was north of Center Drive, but this was an orientation problem, with a close-up map turned 90º. It was south of Center Drive. I helped a little to unload one of the trucks. By 5:30 we were setting up tents. With the wet cold ground my feet were soon suffering, though nothing like February in Central Park. There were Hot Hands in one of our plastic crates. I took out of couple of packages and stuck warmers into my sneakers.

I was on Bib duty, and in place by 7am. Very complicated duty, this. There’s a funny little app you access through the nruns site. You scan the runner’s QR code (or, failing that, enter a string for the name), see that the person is indeed registered, then take out a bib number for whichever race (both 5k and 10M today) and scan the QR code on that. If all goes well, and three-quarters of the time that was the case, you can just hand the bib number over to the runner with a smile. I expect there are still bugs in the system. I came across a sheaf of bib numbers that were out of sequence. They had apparently been canceled or reregistered, and when I scanned them on the app I got somebody else’s name. Eventually I was told simply to reassign the number, but it all seemed flaky to me. Was somewhat annoyed at the oriental woman who was chivvying us about.

At Bibs until 9:30, then we broke the tents and tables down, and I was put on bag-check-retrieval duty, and then finally handed out apples for an hour or two. Then took down more tents and carried some really heavy stuff from the Solutions zone to a truck parked 150m away on Center Drive.

It was getting warm. Took off the Patagonia jacket, put it in the Turkey Trot half-knapsack. I’ve decided that wearing that Turkey Trot thing is pinching a nerve in my left shoulder, however I wear it. Next time I carry a plain old spike bag. Do I have one without any branding?

Took a cinnamon-raisin bagel and a couple of apples while I was working those tables. The Turkey Trot was getting a little heavy. Some of us were told we could vamoose at 12:30, though our shift ended at 2pm. To add time I decided to exit via East Drive, reversing my entrance when I’d come here for the Turkey Trot races and the Al Goldstein summer series 5k. That somehow would lead to the Q train.* I missed the path turnoff (think I should have turned at the carousel) and ended up across from the Botanical Gardens and down the road from the library. Very bushed, with painful feet. Sat down on a bench by the Parkway and found some things I could toss out (water bottle; blue delineator tape). Took the Hot Hands out of my sneakers. Clocked out of the shift (had a hard time finding the button).

Instead of checking Google Maps and heading down to the Q train, I went on past the library, past Grand Army Plaza, and finally found an IRT station with the 2 and 3 express trains. Took one to 14th St. I was a bit confused and thought I could switch to the BMT at 14th St., but this was 14th and 7th Ave., not Union Square. I followed the signs to the F train, a block away underground, but the stairway was blocked. Back to the IRT and on to 42nd St. where I changed to the R. Emerged in bright sunlight at Carnegie Hall, with no sunglasses. Had I lost them? (Fortunately, no.) Went home, dumped my weary load, went out to the Chinawoman’s for another half-pint. (I’d had one on Saturday night to help sleep.)

The sciatica, or whatever it is in the hips, is still around occasionally. I keep the shillelagh nearby.

I don”t have another big race to work for two weeks, though a couple of small related shifts before the Brooklyn HM. In May I have back-to-back days on Gov Is. I should be quite wrecked by that if I don’t get into perfect shape in the meantime.

Missed Mass, said novena to St J before midnight.

Pain in far-left top incisor. The one Dr. Choe the nasty Chinese periodontist said I was losing, along with half my other upper teeth. I may have a trial appt with some Russian Jewess over on E 63rd on the 22nd. This is from responding to a FB ad, so who knows? I am looking for second opinions.

Have a piece on Dwight Macdonald half-finished. Must polish off the redo of W Robertson and send it in today. Also remember invoice for this and the Brasillach. Then the DM piece and the other Birchers book. Then maybe something on The Truth Seeker.

Postscript: The hand-delivered letter from Jeffries Morris, taken to me in the rain that Friday (the 12th) is actually dated the 14th, Sunday. It’s still sitting there on the desk. I am being told that I am eligible for lease renewal, which doesn’t actually come up for a year and a half. How I’m going to find the $25,000 or whatever in back rent is the only question. Get job, get real job.

*The Q train is way farther south, south of where Center Drive meets East Drive, and the proper path leads toward Well House Road.