Easter and Brasillach’s birthday. I wrote up something for CC, with about 1500 words of translation from Notre avant-guerre, don’t know if it’s appeared. Have to do some proofing for the new edition of the Varange. I answered some more questions for Greg re citations for the new Imperium, but he came back asking for actual newspaper article from ChiTrib 1915, which I had and did send him, last night.

Tried calling A.T. in the afternoon, no answer. Maybe out for Easter lunch? Wanted to tell her I’d heard from cousin Helen. Helen’s responding to my letter of two weeks ago. She’s moved from Brussels to Taos. She’s got a daughter in Santa Fe. Invites me to visit. Something I should plan on doing before many months have passed, as H won’t around forever. One of those many relatives we have left, who are not blood relations.

Went to Easter Mass at St. P’s but they were just beginning when I got there at 5:40 and it looked as though it was going on forever. Worse yet, they’d cordoned off the egress to the Lady Chapel, and the rest of the Cathedral was jammed. I made my prayer at the St Jude shine and vamoosed. Said a rosary to myself. Walked up to St. PA’s. And wouldn’t you know it? They were just beginning their Easter Mass which was going to take forever. So I left after a few minutes. Went to the Morton Williams on 9th, bought a half chicken and milk, cranberry sauce, frozen broccoli. To CVS for Pom. To the Chinawoman’s for a half pint of Pinnacle for $5.

Was going to repaint the chipped-away paint in the living room, above the pantry entrance, but it turns out we don’t have that paint. I chipped off the peeling-away paint yesterday. I tried to look up the paint number in old diaries, but couldn’t find it.

Dottie called me yesterday. I don’t remember quite why. I gave her a toaster on Wednesday. It was Moki’s Oster toaster, which he seldom used. I used it a few times during his last weeks, making myself some Waygu steak sandwiches which he rejected. Not eating anything then, around ten days before he died. I spent a good long while cleaning it up and testing it out again. Very crumby and greasy.

I drank a lot of red wine with Dottie Wed afternoon. When I left it was around five, and I was due to meet some nycr folks at a happy hour in a brewery concession in Brooklyn, near the DeKalb Avenue stop. Easy enough to get to from the R train at 8th St, but it was drizzling, and after the wine I did not feel in the mood.

Dottie happy to hear I have some bitsy part-time work. Work of any kind is beyond her ken these days. She wants me to accompany her to Washington Square Park where we can buy fentanyl from the drug dealers she hears abound there. That will be her rescue (suicide) lot. Dottie has a nice new pair of dentures, which she took out to show me, and put back in, while sitting at her desk.

Looking at my nycruns schedule, I see I’ve got 33 hrs for April. Very busy, beginning in a week at Gov’s Island. How the hell you get to Gov’s Island at 5 in the morning is anyone’s guess. I’ll have to ask that during the online meeting tomorrow. 6:30pm. I’m going to guess I need to go to Brooklyn and take a ferry from there.

James Henighan or whatever the building manager’s, name is came to see me at 10:30 am Friday. Hears I need exterminator to seal up pipes for mice. Actually it’s rats. Tomorrow, Monday, we set a date, supposedly. I’m going for a run tomorrow, regardless. I haven’t attempted anything for a week or more.

Register for Sheehan 5k Asbury Park by tomorrow. $40. How does one get there? I have to find hotel, I think. Aug 10th.

Must pay rent, for one paltry month anyway. This week.

Peter B sounds pretty desperate at Vd. The negress judge is tightening the screws.

Now over 4 months since Moki went. What were we doing on October 31, I wonder? Halloween. Did we notice it at all?

Somehow the pt job with the running company led to another one in a TV studio. No sooner did I show up than they told me the schedules were all scrambled and they’d need me more than they thought. Immediately I got kicked upstairs, riding the hi-speed elevator up 30 Rock (because it seems that’s where we were).

That’s it. That’s the dream. Nothing more except constant anxiety about showing up for work.

I have used the lighted commode seat a couple of times now. Not again for a while—out of TP for that bathroom. Bought some paper towels earlier today, but no TP. While sitting on the seat for the second time, noonish, I suddenly reflected that there was a connection between Moki’s collection of household cleaners (usually in big spray bottles) and the mysterious scat life. While thinking about this I looked down and noticed I had shat in my pants. The pants in question were the red Brooks running shorts (circa 2005). It was one of those cases of the runs where you can see you were eating birchermuesli in the past day. That in fact is all I ate, other than 16 little sushi bites from Klein’s yesterday evening. And a big banana I had this morning. Also drank a lot of strong tea, which may account for this diarrhea. Anyway, while still seated I struggled to get out of my shoes and running tights (circa 2007) which I was wearing over the shorts. Then took the shorts into the powder room, where I wash clothes in the sink (often enough for such reasons as this), put the shorts in the sink, ran water, and got the Persil.

I’d gone to Klein’s for paper towels and a few other items because I suddenly found myself reading Irish soda bread recipes and wanted to make some. So I got more baking soda, and milk, and yoghurt (mixing this and some apple cider vinegar with a pint of regular milk as substitute for buttermilk) and raisins rather than sultanas or currants, and some Kerrygold Reserve cheddar because I really felt like some cheese. At home, after changing my underwear, I combined about three different recipes, ending up using much of my whole wheat flour (3 cups) and the White Lily (3 cups). Added some white sugar and dark brown sugar. I was mixing in the ersatz buttermilk when I again stepped onto the great big rat glueboard. This time the ruined sock was one of Moki’s All Blacks socks. It’s not gone forever; I cut off the toes, and since the socks are roomy I’ll be able to sew them up with a simple stitch. The serious problem here is that I flipped the glueboard while trying to get free, so about half of the glue was adhering to the linoleum kitchen floor. I tore away bits of the cardboard, but this wasn’t going to do the trick. To the medicine cabinet for nail-polish remover (non-acetone, unfortunately) and then to the pantry closet for isopropyl. With a utility knife I sliced up the remaining glueboard. When it was sufficiently soaked in remover and alcohol, I put on rubber gloves, and with a paper towel as insulation was able to get up 99% percent of it, bit by bit. Still a little tackiness there.

I was in the middle of that when I became aware of a running faucet in the bathroom. I’d left the tap on for a few minutes and now it was overflowing. So grabbed some towels and threw them on the floor. The red shots are still sitting in the sink, even as I speak.

I put the dough into the dutch-oven-like pot I have, formed it roughly into a dome on a layer of parchment paper, stuck it in the 400º oven. I have now removed it, put it on the hob, paper and all, too cool. It will be a miracle if this stuff is edible.

Drinking more tea, reheated. Watching a Columbo episode with Patrick McGoohan playing a headmaster of a military academy. For some reason I wanted to watch all the Columbo episodes with Patrick McGoohan. He starred in four, and directed a couple of others.

It occurs to me that it is time to move that terrible flimsy metal etagere shelving Moki put next to his bathroom door. I will put it just east of Moki’s night table. Right now all I’ve got there is my little red clamshell suitcase. I’ll toss out all of Moki’s shoes on the rack, any other detritus I don’t want, and make for clear egress to the big en suite bathroom.

I don’t remember when Moki put it there. What I do remember is that in his last months he often gripped it for support when going to and from the bathroom. Often enough he’d bring it down upon himself. In late September he ended up resting on the floor for much of the morning. I had a hell of a time getting him back into bed. After that I guess he never used a bathroom again. I bought him a pair of urine bottles, with which he’d make a mess, because around the last time he pulled down the wire shelves I’d caught him peeing into a wastebasket. I told him no, and removed the receptacle so he couldn’t. I think this is why he going into the bathroom that day.

Drank a pint of Smirnoff last night with no ill effects. Kept the bathroom door shut, but not the hall door to the living room, because I don’t want our rodent friends to come visiting me in bed again, or digging up the carpet in an attempt to burrow into the living room.

Bread seems okay. Maybe a little soggy in the middle?

It’s been raining all day. Too bad it’s warm suddenly (50º), I could do with a nice early-spring blizzard.

As I may have mentioned earlier, I have been plagued by a rat problem for the past two or three months. I asked some of the maintenance staff if other tenants had had complained of this, and I apparently am the first. We had mice in the summer of course, and I bagged 11 with the Tomcat traps; but these are great big rats.

Perhaps because my apartment is near the elevator, and there are all sorts of little passageways around the building core. And I’m only 7 floors up in a 20-storey building, so this is as high as the rats can climb. I’ve had rats recently because of cold weather and all the construction on neighboring blocks: that’s another pair of rationales. Yesterday, walking up the West 57th incline, I noticed that the toothpick tower going up on the site of the old Calvary Baptist Church (Pastor: David Epstein) is already way up there, approaching the heights of the one over the old Steinway/Economist building (111 West 57th) and the older Hyatt 157 West 57th on either sides of it.

So rats we have. And today Jamie, one of the maintenance men, was there with a dark round-faced Amerindian or mestizo who’s the extermination expert. Very friendly. I showed the droppings in the corner (most had been been vacuumed up) and the egress points by the radiator. He laid down some glue boards (great big ones; I lost a sock while pouring myself a mug of milk a couple hours ago) and took some pictures, and will be sending someone by in a day or so. One person specializes in sealing up radiators.

Knowing these people would be coming by this morning, I made an effort to clean the apartment. Vacuum a little, and mop the kitchen floor. Going to the utility closet, I couldn’t find the squeegee I used last time, the one I bought at HomeDepot last July. I rummaged around in the utility closet, and as it suddenly occurred to me that I’d last used the squeegee in Moki’s bathroom, mine eyes lighted upon a big flat Kohler box in a Lowe’s bag, containing a toilet seat.

A toilet seat! Could this be Moki’s old toilet seat, the original one he took off when he bought some super-duper lighted LED seat? No, this seemed to be new, and sealed. I opened it up. All the parts were there, and instructions. This was a new seat, never installed. I took it into the Moki bathroom and started to install it. That did not take long.

Seat installed. Scat scene not completely cleaned.

I found two D batteries in one of Moki’s drawers in our captain’s bed. In the same baggie was the remnant of the scent pods used by this model of toilet seat. Yes, it’s a battery-operated, scented toilet seat. So this left me with three possibilities:

• Moki installed a seat like this, or rather had it installed by building personnel. Then ripped it out, didn’t like it, threw it out. This is the story he told me. Hence the D batteries and scent pod. Then he repented, went back to Lowe’s, bought another one. But never had it installed. Or mentioned it to me. Which it why it was a surprise to me today. And to think I came close to buying a replacement seat for $35 at Target!
• Moki originally bought two of these seats. One for me. The one I just put onto Moki’s cistern was intended for me. But he never mentioned this at all to me.
• Moki may have bought one or two seats originally. Doesn’t matter. But after he installed his seat, he got heavily into a “scat” scene, finding insalubrious toilets, with a lot of shit all over the place, very erotic. This would account for all the filth and toilet rolls and brown encrustations on the floor and around the commode, which I have not yet succeeded in cleaning up.

I’m afraid the third possibility is most likely. As I almost never went into Moki’s bathroom, I don’t have the timeline of the toilet seats or the filth. I certainly noticed the filth when fixing the toilet in October 2022 and I saw that it was worse in October and November 2023. When did he buy and install that lighted, scented toilet seat, anyway? Back in 2011, around the beginning of the madness when he bought the SentrySafe? Or more recently? You see, I don’t recall him talking about it at the time, merely speaking of it in retrospect. How he hated it and tore it out.

In the morning, resenting the need to get up in a few hours and clean up a bit for the rat-catchers, I watched the first half of Trainspotting after finishing The Great Escape. I loved this film in London in early 1996, not so much now. The Worst Toilet in Scotland episode, high hilarity, seemed very apt, putting me in mind of Moki’s filthy loo. But I had not yet connected the dots and considered that it was an actual scat scene Moki was promoting at some point.

And when was that? Well the answers will be in his text messages and perhaps email. I vaguely recall something like that in texts and photos only a year or two ago.

Last year it seems I spent most of my time in bed, with Moki sleeping beside me. I am writing on a MacAir, tweeting, and/or listening to some audio book. There’s a tube of Fluocinonide on the night table and I periodically feel the plaques on my thighs and backside and rub it in. Also rub it into my forehead when the psoriasis erupts there. It was particularly bad in August and September. End of September I had a horrible abscess pain in the the Bad Tooth (upper right 6yr molar) and went out to find some erythromycin. Bought it at a pet shop at 98th and Broadway, Sept. 27th I think. The abscess subsided after a day or two, but after a few days of the erythro I noticed that most of the plaques were clearing up as well. I’ve tried researching this online, can’t find any attestation to it.

Mice in August. We got 11 with the Tomcat traps. Beginning of September a plague of fruitflies. They were really persistent. Up through November, I think.

And now, in March 2024, the rats have returned. They appeared around December. I thought they’d gone away. I put out trays of benign poison. I trapped three young ones on a glue board. Didn’t notice them for a couple of weeks. Now, with the return of a cold spell (temps in the low 30s outside) they’re scampering out through the radiators. They like to eat paper. They also like avocado pits. Twice I’ve found an avocado pit over by the living room radiator.

I told Charlie about the rats today, and he said there’s an exterminator coming on Thursday. So Thursday, maybe around ten. Must have the place tidied up a little.

Yesterday, the red Harambees to the guy in Hicksville. I see by eBay they’ve been delivered already. I put another few pairs up. The blue Air Zoom Vapors with the Japanese floral design. The Lanangs I wore in Spokane. White to begin with, but I took them outside Chelsea Piers one day and spray-painted them day-glo yellow. I did this after removing the Nike swooshes.

The Jana XCs that I put the blanks into. Didn’t like wearing them, really, a little floppy, so into the sales bin they go. And then the Eldoret II’s, which are really comfortable but I seldom if ever raced in. They have three permanent compression pins, so didn’t race in the Armory in them.

Not getting any bites just now on eBay, though the used yellow Mayflys have had a lot of views.

Argument with some kid on Twitter over the weekend. This led to my futzing around with the iguananews site. A new Thesis was ready to download, and that broke the system for some reason. Then, some hours later, it wasn’t broken anymore. By this point I’d bought a new domain, a free “store” domain, as a rebuild replacement. For some reason that broke. I cleaned out the .store site’s wp install and will redo it. Maybe with a daily pocket cartoon for Iggy. Actually Iggy belongs over in the right rail of the main site.

I’m beginning to think my fun time with Thesis is over. I’m paying $100 per annum for it, and Chris Pearson is demanding that mainly because he is interested in selling his Focus skin. What I really want is his old Press Row theme. Where is it?

Last three days I meant to to TMPL, didn’t. Today went to Tap Room instead, had a double martini and a burger. Got a bill, 64.00 all in. Wow. First time I got a bill. Were my previous lunches free? I think this was my first lunch this month (March). Sent a letter to Michael Gleason, Secy at AC, yesterday, thanking and acknowledging the Z card.

Have been brooding about the Charles Stuart business. How to write it up as a story? It’s a tale that keeps changing in the media in order to push one agendum or another. Initially it was “Boston is crime-ridden and it’s all because of the blacks.” That was during the Ray Flynn administration. This was too good to be true. Charles committed suicide (or at any rate drowned off the Tobin Bridge) two months after he and his wife were shot by the unidentified criminal, and immediately the story turned around, making him the culprit. Charles’s brother was pushing that tale. Apparently it was in aid of a jewelry-insurance caper worth five or ten grand. Now that bit is fishy to begin with. Charles made 100k as general manager of a fur store in Newberry Street, and his wife was a tax lawyer. They were doing well and lived modestly. There was no need for Charles to pull of a small-time swindle. If he was truly larcenous, he would have worked something out at the fur shop. Now, the Boston Globe resurrected the story a few months back for a series with the theme of “Oh what a racist time we were living in then.” But if you followed the tale to the end, and got past the tiresome hand-wringing, you discovered that in the opinion of the writers and the cops and the prosecutors, Charles Stuart was probably not in fact the planner and the shooter. You see, right after the “suicide” we were being told that Charles shot his pregnant wife and then himself. But the trauma surgeon said it was impossible or unlikely for Charles to shoot himself the way he was shot, in the gut. He said this way back when, when Charles was still in hospital. Anyway, the likely culprit was Charles’s brother Matthew. Matthew and maybe one of his MacLean friends. Matthew himself is long gone (drug overdose in a homeless shelter in 2011), along with Charles and Charles’s wife Carol, and the Stuart parents. And the mysterious crimes are now nearly 35 years in the past and there aren’t that many people around still concerned about the whole thing…except it makes for an exciting rehash in the Globe. And since the series needs a theme, the Globe builds it around race.

Looking at some jokey stories I wrote about the Stuart case for Podsnap’s Own in early 1990, I see there was mention of Charles’s plan to rob his fur store. This is evidently yet another doggy tale brother Matthew was telling people. But I don’t recall this coming up in the Globe‘s recent coverage.

Drawing I made back in early 1990. I was in Nantucket, I believe, drawing/tracing with an ArtPen on vellum.

TL;DR: 35 years ago the Globe and others conjured up a story wherein a conman named Charles Stuart murdered his pregnant wife in an insurance scam that went wrong, and he blamed the murder on a black man. It was an unlikely story back then, and now the Globe concedes that it’s still unlikely, and Charles was probably innocent. Having lost a wife and a baby, he may well have been filled with despair and truly did commit suicide by jumping off the Tobin Bridge. But the suicide does not make him guilty of everything else.

Obiter dicta: Curiosity compelled me to enter Charles into Ancestry, and I find that the bloodline of the family is mostly Irish (from Clare and Cork a few generations back) with some Scots. But there is also a Jewish great-grandfather named Hyman Stone, alias Sklarinsky; and possibly a great-grandmother as well: Lithuanian Jews who spent a few years in London before finding their way to Boston. So Charles’s father, Charles M. Stuart Sr., was either half or one-quarter Jewish. The reason I can’t be precise here is that the father’s mother, Ida Stone, was married in a Catholic ceremony and buried with a requiem mass funeral. Both her parents, Hyman and Rachel, are however buried in a Jewish cemetery in West Roxbury. I have a photograph of Ida but that is inconclusive. It appears that some of Hyman’s other children were also baptized and had Catholic marriages. One of them, who appears first as Nathan then as Alfred Stone, in 1931 was married to a Polish girl in Detroit by a Catholic priest. Alfred gave his parents’ names on the marriage license as Henry and Rose rather than Hyman and Rachel. No doubt he had good reasons for such evasions.

But getting past all these trivialities: what I find really noteworthy here is that this bit of Jewish background never was mentioned in any of the news stories I read on the Stuart case. In addition it reminds of me of the strange saga of the Kohn/Kerry family, Jews from the Austro-Hungarian Empire who moved to Boston and took the name Kerry, presumably pretending to be Catholic. When this got press coverage 20-odd years ago, John Kerry said it was all news to him, he had no idea he was half-Jewish. This surprising claim would be easier to accept were it not for the fact that we’ve seen it elsewhere, e.g., in the case of Madeleine Korbel Albright, a Jew from the same part of the world (Czechoslovakia) whose parents “converted” the family to Catholicism in 1941 and supposedly never told Madeleine or her sister their family was really Jewish. For me it strains credulity that one would purposefully choose to pass oneself off as Catholic, rather than pick some less demanding denomination, e.g., Unitarianism or Methodism or low-church Anglicanism, or even Christian Science, where you’re not expected to show up at mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation.

Thursday, March 14

I was supposed to tune into and participate in Doug K’s online gavoreet last night (Wednesday the 13th) but I didn’t. Because I’d gone to Brooklyn (Smith & Ninth, where Jimmy Conway tries to get Karen to check out the Dior dresses) to drop off an unbranded orange vest for n*cr*ns. Distances in Brooklyn, at least in THIS part of Bklyn, are five times longer than they are anywhere else. I remember coming out here with my late Moki in 2014…to Lowe’s…a few steps away from the subway steps…and it took forever to get there. In this case the address was 168 Ninth Street. A good quarter-mile, half-mile, from the Smith & Ninth train AFTER I’d descended the endless elevated subway stairs. An UNMARKED DOOR except for the number 168. I turned the knob, it was open, no one about in this garage or warehouse. Little office off to the left. No one about. I knocked on the window. A squat Chinoise I thought I recognized. Gave her my vest. And my name, which I do not doubt she did not get straight. Chinoise says the main operations for the org are at Industry City. Where is that? I ask. She says 35th St., meaning Brooklyn. Later I check this on the map and it turns out to be way down by Sunset Park toward Brooklyn Army Terminal. Another new name for me is something called Zerospace Gowanus. This is where they are going to have an expo before the Brooklyn Half-Marathon at the end of April. So much of this Brooklyn geography I don’t know at all, yet it has become vital lore.

Friday, March 15

(Continued.) I walked back to the subway. Thought, Why not make a detour to Dinosaur BBQ? This meant doubling back a quarter-mile then heading north to the outskirts of Park Slope. About five years ago I lured Moki out here again, and he was miserable with all the walking and the distances. That was my fault. I had forgotten he didn’t like to walk more than two blocks for any reason, and as always I mis-estimated distances.

Once you find Dino BBQ, on Union Street, you are at the very bottom of valley that will not look anything like Park Slope until you’ve detected the beginnings of a hill, then see Fifth Avenue in the distance (technically the western border of PS) and proceed to walk for a half-mile or so up an incline that ranges from 12º to 25º. At long last you reach Seventh Avenue, the main commercial thoroughfare, and that’s where you catch the subway. There are several to choose from. However, I was thinking of catching the F train back home, and that is some distance down Seventh, perhaps a mile. Union Street is near the north end of PS when it meets Seventh. I walked and walked and spied nary a familiar landmark on this sunny day, on these narrow, crowded sidewalks. Somewhere there was Methodist Hospital (now part of New York Presbyterian, I see) and a Barnes & Noble, and way beyond that a JackRabbit or whatever they’re calling themselves now, if they still exist. Finally there it was, the hospital, and the B&N. Where was the subway entrance? I gave in at last and looked at the iPhone. Just a half-block down the street.

Not too long a wait for the F, but when it came it was maddeningly slow. I just have no patience for these things these days, and the number of stops in Bklyn and Manhattan was more of a surprise than it should have been. I had a book with me (Dwight Macdonald) and should have been reading it, but wasn’t, and therein lay the problem. And then finally we get to Rock Ctr, which is now the nearest stop to me, since F is not stopping at 57th St these days. It’s been 30, 35 minutes. I eagerly, gaspingly, trot down the platform, up the stairs, choose the east side of Sixth, at 48th St rather than the west side near 50th because I’m not in the mood to cross big avenues just now. I trudge home, thinking of the muggy day when I’m walking home from work in 2011 or 2012 and the UN is meeting, and there in the middle of the street with a window rolled down is a limousine and in the back seat is François Hollande. I am walking about as fast as M. Hollande is riding.

I take to bed for what is meant to be a two-hour nap, but as the 7:30 call approaches I wake up, decide I have no intention to present my bleary-eyed self to these other people who haven’t seen my in years. Back to sleep. Sleep until midnight or so.

What did I have at Dino BBQ? Not a terrible lot. Salmon tacos, which were okay but overpriced. Mashed potatoes with gravy were the side. They were very good. A good counterpoint too, because the tacos were lacking something. The tortillas were crisp and had a lot of red cabbage. I feared they were fried on a grill that spent a lot of time with eggs. I also had a little margarita on the rocks. I would have needed three of those to get intoxicated. I was spending $35 as it was and intended to spend no more. I had a nice waitress, young woman in her 20s. Great big place, Dino, almost entirely empty. One big company lunch, it looked like, at a long trestle table, and a couple of old guys on the street side of the room opposite me.

So much for Wednesday. Thursday the 14th I had Coliseum Dental. This was not a happy event. The Chinese consultant, Dr Choe, thinks my back teeth on top are all gone, need to be pulled. I can have implants or maybe dentures. Bottom teeth not so bad. I said I needed a second opinion. I need to call the NYU clinic. I’m quite certain most of my teeth are solid for now, all except the 6yr molar on the top right.

It’s the business model of Coliseum Dental that I most object to. Heavily staffed, largely with noggy support staff to do paperwork, lots of hygienists (mainly colored too, mestizos or whatnot) and dentists of mostly nonwhite breeds coming in and out. Big overhead, necessarily a profit-making place where they upsell you as a matter of form. The only reason I got connected with Coliseum Dental was that I wanted a dentist named Scott P. He was the sort of person I wanted in a dentist. He was a white man, an American, presentable, well educated. And he was supposedly on staff here. But then after I re-upped with Delta and got ready to make an appointment with Coliseum (Jan 3rd was the first) I was told Dr P is usually in California (Walnut Creek, I believe). Now this to me is a clear case of fraud. I was led to Coliseum because I wanted a dentist who does not in fact work there. How could I have made such a mistake? Well I made a mistake because they wanted it that way. Perhaps I can find a better set of specialists through NYU. Why didn’t I go there to begin with. Oh, because I wanted Scott P. Or the guy with the Irish name who works out of Barry Musikant’s office across the street. (Quick detour to see if I can find the name. I can’t. But it would be at 119 West 57th, if he’s still there. Barry was there a couple of years ago but has moved a few blocks away to the East Side.) There is a Dr. LoPinto on CPS who belongs to the AC. That’s a possibility too. What I really want is another Silhan. A single practitioner, small office, low overhead.

After Coliseum the plan was to go to TMPL. Lord knows I need TMPL. I’d walked/jogged/strided a little in the Park in the morning, actually made it all the way up to the Reservoir this time (sounds like a joke, but that’s an achievement for me, even mostly walking there; when you’re not dashing around there all the time, you see how vast and tiresome it all seems; Ralph McElhinney didn’t like it when I insisted, on our 2014-2015 walks with Moki, on taking us all the way up to the Oval and even the Rez).

But I didn’t go to TMPL. I went to Chapas, again, and had calamari, the cheapest lunch option ($11, jeez) instead of the lovely and filling roast pork pho I had last week. Then home and so to bed. I’d been up since midnight, having missed the Doug memorial for Rob the evening before.

Strange happenings on TwiXer this week. I looked to see if one of my locked or suspended accounts could be resurrected finally, and by george it was, as though it had never been locked. The problem is that they wouldn’t send me their code through email. I used a landline when opening the account and of course you can’t send a text code that way. So I revived one account, and then tried another. Same deal with that. Two accounts returned from the dead, and soon a third. Because finally, hours later (this would be Monday, maybe) I went to my old “main” account, dead to the world, permanently suspended supposedly, and appealed that one’s demise. A few hours later I found an email, saying they were in error. I went to my old account and there she was again. One proviso, which the email said nothing about. I had to delete one tweet. It was a tweet that used the word “holohoax.” That may be a no-no now, but I don’t think it was two or three years ago. So the human being lifts my suspension, but meanwhile a bot scours my tweets for bad words and catches me just as I bring the account back to life. All is well now, and I screenshot the offending tweet and posted it elsewhere for safekeeping.

Stuff I Forget: a new entry. Nicki Slater. AKA Nicola Slater. I first knew of her when she was mentioned online around 2000 for the Eurostar posters she did. (I have three from the original run, because I asked Eurostar for them, and they very nicely sent them to me in a tube, back in 2000 or 2001. Very much on my mind because I was imitating her Adobe Illustrator vector style for a while, most notably in the drawing for the abortive Breeder Bullies project.) But I could not remember her name past the Nicki. I knew she was now calling herself Nicole, and that she illustrated some Princess Diaries books. After many searches I found her, as Nicola, not Nicole as I misremembered. Probably this was on the website for her agent. I shot that agency a note: IS this the same as the Nicki Slater who did the Eurostar posters I collected? And I get a nice note back this morning, indeed it is. Only of course the answerer couldn’t discuss it in depth, is just responding on the strength of something on Nicola’s CV.

Nicola’s style has been quite protean over the years, going from the boldly stylized vector art that made me think of airbrushes and frisket-cutting, to a heavily outlined storybook style that was basically line art filled in with color; and then finally to her most recent period, which is somewhat primitivist, drawing pictures for kiddy books in a style that the kiddies might conceivably imagine were thought up by another child.

This may well be one of the later Nicki Slater posters for Eurostar, where she was using cartoon outlines more. The “frisket” technique of her earlier vector-art posters is seen in the background figures.

I’ve been poisoning myself lately. I bought a pint of Smirnoff last night, and had finished it off by morning. Then I got another Starbucks coffee and coffeecake through the app. Finally I went across to the street to Duane-Reade for a bag of the Himalayan salt popcorn. Ate the whole thing in a few fell swoops. Meant to go running or do laundry, or both today, but have done neither, and evening is upon us. I’m ready for a nap.

Some money came in from working that race a couple of weekends back (that terrible frostbitten weekend on West Drive in the Park), a bit under $200, and another hundred should be hitting some account shortly from some spikes I sold on eBay. I netted a paltry $35 for the yellow Zoom Kennedys, finest spike ever made, a week or two ago. Now this guy out on the Island has bid for four or five of my lovelies and the pittances so far take us over another $100. He’s a reseller, sells t-shirts and golf caps and whatever out of Hicksville. I don’t see any spikes in his collection. How did he know to take the Kennedy XCs and the first-edition white Ventulus? And the limited-edition-colorway Mayflys that I bought in 2010 and never wore? And now he’s got the standing bid for the red Complete Harambees that I bought at the Sheehan race in Red Bank, way back in 2010? 2012? I’ve posted a few more pairs on eBay now, have perhaps a dozen or so up there, ranging from the high-end Jasari+, a modification of the original ceramic-pin version, to the probably unsellable AdiStar ST steeplechase spikes in two sizes. Somebody is selling used Mayflys, original yellow edition, for well over a hundred dollars. No takers. I’m selling my slightly used yellow Mayflys for a fraction of that, also no takers so far.

As for the race people, those Brooklyn-centric mystery folks: I am at present scheduled to work another 21 events this year. This includes four, three races and a half-mara expo, in April.

John M was supposed to be coming into town last weekend, didn’t, I don’t know if he will make this one. I told him it was not a good weekend. We have St. Patrick’s parade tomorrow. Then Sunday is the real St. Patrick’s Day, and I believe that’s the day of the NYRR’s half-marathon. Why not a weekday afternoon?

I have these brown accordion folders labeled SHEARSON LEHMAN HUTTON, which was somehow a predecessor firm to Salomon Smith Barney, before Lehman Brothers spun itself off again and went bankrupt. I can’t tell you what happened to the E. F. Hutton portion, but I’m pretty sure Shearson stayed with SSB/Citigroup because that was Sandy Weill.

Anyway, odds and ends and scraps of drawings and writings and correspondence fill these folders, some going back further than 1996 (which is where my life virtually begins, since my memorabilia prior to that has mostly vanished). There are letters from H. K. Thompson and Nancy Hunt Bowman and Ted O’Keefe. And from North Sydney, J. Michael Buckley. A letter from the Bournemouth bailiffs to Robert Baird from back in the 1980s when his nightclub went under. I was being mischievous when I squirreled that away.And then a sheaf of cartoons from the summer of 1996, when I was unemployed and had the notion of perfecting the “pocket cartoon” style you saw in Private Eye and elsewhere. I haven’t looked at them since then because they were embarrassing in memory. I’d already had a piece in The Spectator, so I was pitching the drawings to the Eye and to The New Statesman. I note the date of drop-off or fax on the back of the copies; that’s how I know.

I really like some of the various styles I’m mashing up together here. I note a bit of Pilbrow in the pension thing, which is very silly and very Brit. The best idea of the four here is the least successful in execution. You can’t tell who’s speaking “You look sick.” The fact that it appears here 90º counterclockwise doesn’t help it either. I’ll probably run some of the cartoons in GN, without comment. Just put them in the right rail as though an unknown cartoonist is supplying pocket cartoons.

I had forgotten that I had a number of letters from H. K. Thompson. One without an envelope kept turning up, evidently from about 1993, but then there were three or four from when we were in London and then Seattle. In an October 1996 letter he says he’ll write down my address (in his address book) in pencil from now on. I still can’t locate an envelope for the first one, but it was probably an odd-sized one since he says he’s enclosing information about Spiro. (Probably news stories from local papers.)

And then, finally, the Michael Bywater piece written just after Jeff Bernard died. Independent on Sunday, 14 Sept 1996, a few days after we landed in Seattle. I have the whole thing, but have scanned in only the title-page art. I exchanged notes with Bywater some years later, either because I’d written about this on a blog, or maybe—could it be that late in the game?—social media.

Finally got that review of A Conspiratorial Life done. I will do a review of the Matthew Dallek Birchers as well, for CC. Was thinking it would be good for Chronicles, but it seems it came out in 2022, not 2023 as i thought. Find a new book.

The loose molar is getting loose again, jutting out a little, some occasional pain around the gum. I made some erythro capsules and swallowed them today. Will need more erythro soon. Have dentist next week, finally. What to do about this?

Puzzled recently because I couldn’t find any diaries or pocket calendars for early 2010. Finally I found one this morning Lots of tight spidery writing, from Jan-Mar 2010. But the money shot, the time I was in that boutique hotel near Copley Square, has next to nothing there. Except me drinking vodka the night before. The boutique hotel, I find out, is the Charlesmark on Boylston St. What I remember mostly is bright red stools, bright red accents elsewhere. Did I decide NOT to go to the Al Gordon? Is that the day I dragged the Athlon through Cambridge, went all the way up to Chauncy St and badly sketched 29 Chauncy? I’m sitting in the lounge area, looking at Facebook, and Rob Dinsmoor is telling us that Amy Bishop who shot up her fellow profs in Huntsville was a friend of his from the Hamilton writers group. Most of the spidery writing was about how I was waiting to near from NBC Universal about the Flash job…which never started. And anxiety about races. Was going up to Ithaca, booked it, then canceled when I realized I didn’t have a special place in the Hartshorne Mile. It was a very snowy winter that, Jan and Feb 2010. Then, when I’m at Masters Champs at Reggie, I get an icepick in my lower back. Just when I’m thinking how lucky I’ve been not to have the sciatica… Met Kathy Webster later, when I’m feeling better because I’ve been slowly jogging around outside. We go to Jamaica Plain and have ice cream. K imagines I’m having this back and hip problem from running so much.

I have no mention of Rob here at all, but one vague joke about Amy Bishop. The Roz Chast of biology professors? What does that mean?

Picked up the rat poison from Amazon Go at Rock Ctr. It’s a little snack shop, staffed by obese nogs. There’s a tiny counter, like a paper admission booth, where you get your items. Otherwise it’s 30 Rock people coming in and out for pastries and sandwiches. One girl walked off with a six-pack of Klausthauler. You have to get a nigger to unlock the gate for that.

Bought and ate an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s today. Nothing else except a few crackers. And coffee and tea. The B&J’s may be because I’m not swilling the vodka. I sort of miss swilling the vodka. I’d like to have Moki right next to me, swilling it with me. And alive and conscious and able to get out of bed. That would be any time before July 2023, I suppose. I fancy making a papier-maché head of Moki for the pillow. Was thinking of armature wire and clay, but that is heavy and beyond my ability.

Tomorrow I have color and cut from Gracie at noon, Timothy John’s. It is an expensive place, can’t go there often. $100 for cut last time. Still about $500 on the Citi Cash card. What do I have in the Citi ck acct? $1700 ck. $70 USAA ck. Pay for hair with Citi Cash. Put money on Citi Cash. Pay dentist next week with Citi Cash.

I see CPTC is raising its stakes, wants $30 per month dues. This is ridiculous. No, I can’t drop out. Too much sunk investment. Spend next 2-3 weeks getting into sufficient shape so you can at least slow-run a few miles without blowing a gasket, then show up to someone’s practice.

Still rather blocked, though I’m determined to get the review of the Miller book on R. Welch drafted before I knock off. It is just after midnight, and I have plenty of tea. Tetley tea, in the round sachets.

I slept like a log from about 5pm to 8. Before that, I’d been out on this rainy day to see a curated talk at the new Grey Museum (formerly Grey Art Gallery) south of Cooper Square. I had no idea where to find it, expecting it to be near the big block sculpture or Cooper Union. No, it’s way down past the old NYHRC (now LIFE TIME Fitness; not much activity within, it looks like), and past the Muji store to the south of that. I was lucky to see the new navy-and-white banner waving up on high. 18 Cooper Square, easily a quarter mile south of Astor Place.

I was much too early for the tour (1 pm) so I killed time in Muji. Did not need to buy anything, but I’ll pick up a couple of black t-shirts there soon.

It was drizzling. I didn’t know it was going to rain, didn’t bring my umbrella. The enormously stout assistant at reception had me marked down for the 12 tour, which is not what I registered for. Fortunately I had the receipt e-mail. She was very nice about it. Most of the turnout were old folks, the sort of people who like this sort of thing. The them was “Americans in Paris,” post-WWII. Mostly people you’ve never heard of. A few Negroes, a few Jews. Early abstract expressionism, geometric designs, complex armatures of black welded metal.

Pleasant layout in the new address, though the old one, on Washington Square, had the advantage of location, as well as seeming like one great big room that didn’t need to be partitioned off.

Thought I’d grab a bite to eat afterwards. Maybe the Japanese BBQ place I’d passed on my way. Going out into the rain, I saw Phebe’s way down on whatever street this Cooper Square branches off into. Bowery? Bowery68 is the wifi pw. Sat at bar, ordered a Blue Moon beer and a Blackjack burger, which is an $18 cheeseburger with jack cheese and bacon. Cooked medium, and absolutely delicious. A dark, somewhat bearded Irish fellow named Ciaran at the bar. Exchanged a few words in Erse with someone who came in. I told him and a young woman at the bar that when I first visited Phebe’s it was much smaller and John and Yoko were there. Years later I used to accompany a friend who owned a club on the other side of town (Glenn) and would check out CBGB and other clubs to see what was coming up.

At home all I wanted was to lie down and go to sleep, though I fooled a bit with email and the London Review of Books before passing out.

A week ago Rob D. died. He and I were interacting via the new Substack fiction sites we started, coincidentally around the same time. I guess his “Sebastian” story will never have an ending. Rob was a bit better with fiction than nonfiction, where he tells everything in a droning, sonorous manner and is very lazy about visuals and specifics. It’s like Norman Mailer criticizing Morley Callaghan’s memoir in the NYRB 60 years ago, telling how the memorist doesn’t bother to make his own material interesting and seductive, or even informative. (Comparison to someone who met Truman Capote, and upon being questioned, says, “Oh he’s very bright and he’s short.”)

This vacuousness comes up in his two self-published memoirs, one about the “Troupe,” the other about going to a rehab clinic about 12 years ago. In the first he’s describing the branding and collateral we used on our flyers and posters. Originally the mascot of the C-heads was an old line-drawing clip art of a fellow who was supposed to be Bob Dobbs, of the Church of the Subgenius. Doug K. pasted a serrated crown onto his head and renamed him News King. News King had his own life before the C-heads, in some zine Doug or a friend put out. And now Doug repurposed him for C-head programs.

But Rob’s description of it all is that there was a generic line-drawing of a stereotypical Dad figure that we used as symbol of the C-heads. Did he really not know the background here, or did he just not want to go into tiresome details?

Much more annoying and inattentive is how he describes the usual C-head branding, once we moved on from News King. This started as a tiny halftoned image of the smiling head of Fatty Arbuckle. Bob Keenan, a graphics whiz, blew this up many times so the halftone dots were big and clear. As Rob describes it, this was some line art of a fat man that Bob came across, and it rather resembled Bob, which is why, perhaps, it was chosen.

We had this branding worked into all of our posters, etc., for years. I recently saw a pic of Rob wearing one of these shirts. Funny that he didn’t make the Fatty Arbuckle connection.

Rob in C-head shirt

Or perhaps…perhaps…he knew it all once, but just plumb forgot. His “Troupe” book, a memoir of the C-heads, focuses mainly on stressful adventures that he went through as a writer and sometimes crew member.

My theory about Rob’s prose style was that he was trying to perfect a kind of flat, affectless prose, where colorful details were neglected on purpose, out of a kind of “whatever!” contempt for too many descriptives. Somewhat like Hemingway, but not a Hemingway parody. Something like O’Hara, but without pages of ear-catching dialogue. In fact, Rob’s really bad at dialogue altogether, like J. Boylan. Everybody ends up talking in the same cadence and idiom. I don’t think he got much helpful criticism from that writers group he went to in Hamilton, Massachusetts.

From the time he moved to Hamilton, he informed me that it was the hometown of General George S. Patton. This surprised me, because when I was at the Santa Anita racetrack and Huntington Library with Ted O’Keefe and Bill and Karen Hulsy, Ted pointed out that this is where Patton grew up. (San Gabriel, CA, actually.) It seems Patton married a wealthy heiress from the Boston area, and that’s how he came to claim Hamilton, MA as home. For me this is a very telling detail, and Rob was getting it all wrong. It wasn’t quite Patton’s hometown. Hamilton may be duly proud of the Patton connection, but George didn’t move there until he was out of West Point. It happens that I have a book on the Patton family.

Both the Rob memoirs I mention begin with thanks and acknowledgments to such friends from the circle, beginning with the name of Amy Bishop, and that is an eye-catcher. Amy was the biologist who shot up her Huntsville, AL fellow faculty members in early 2010. I was sitting in the breakfast lounge of a snazzy boutique hotel* in Boston that weekend, in town for some races at the Harvard indoor track, when I tuned into Facebook, and there was Rob, telling us all about how he’d known Amy for years. She was crazy, most certainly, but Rob never said so, or gave any indication he thought so.

Now Amy’s long in prison, and Rob is gone. I should drop Amy a note.

*Charlesmark, I see in an old diary. On Boylston St near Copley Square.