[324]
04/21/2025 Monday. Kitchen Microwave. Queens House. Ridgewood, New York.
As a way to express my current mood and scenario allow me to regale you with a moment from just a few minutes ago. I’ve been back from Italy for about a week. A week and two days, I suppose. I’ve been eating mostly homemade Cecina tacos with black beans and avocado, cilantro, white onion, jalapeños and lime squeeze. The Cecina I made by slicing a wad of beef into thin strips, placing them on a sheet pan covered in tin foil. Sprinkled with salt on both sides and left uncovered in the refrigerator for four days. Aged beef as the bridesmaids say. I have seen almost nobody. I saw Jack and Jordy and Matt V the other day. I went to Andrew’s art show for a few minutes before I got overwhelmed by heat and people. I saw the landlord today when I delivered the rent early because I am driving to Vom tomorrow and Professor Curly won’t be back from Florida until May 7th or so. Its been an isolating time. The weather has been vacillating between hot flashes and chilly winds. Rain and sun alike. I’ve made a few phone calls. One to G’s mom, a couple to Scott, I called a Norwegian Cruise Line Rep earlier today. But aside from that, mostly text messages. Just the usual of getting acclimated back into society, but alas I am heading right back into the abyss. But a second ago I dipped outside to get a few Ticklers for relaxation purposes when I heard a honk storm on the corner in the direction I was heading. A bus was stuck and a guy had parked a delivery van in a way that was preventing the bus from passing. When I got to the mayhem I noticed what the true culprit causing the chaos was; a traffic cone. I moved the cone because I thought it was not the thing keeping the bus driver from moving forward. I was wrong. He opened his window and said, “Thanks, buddy!” I said, “You got it, dude.” I then walked to the deli and went to pay for the Ticklers and they bought a new card reader and I got a new card so there was three different attempts before I could pay for the item. As I returned to the apartment I noticed a stranger trying to get into the apartment building. I tried to dilly-dally, but he was taking forever. I gave up waiting and walked up the steps. I asked him if he was visiting Jefrie upstairs, he said, Eddie. At that moment I put my key in the lock and turned it, then the lock turned back. I turned the key and the same thing happened. I removed the key and Eddie, not Jefrie, opened the door. Then he said he was sorry and I said I was sorry and then the stranger awkwardly pushed in front of me while Eddie, not Jefrie held the door open and I said thanks and he said sure and eventually I was inside the apartment again, safe from the outside world and replaying the interaction over and over in my mind. I imagined the stranger telling Edie that his neighbor downstairs thinks his name is Jefrie. And the truth is, I do think his name is Jefrie even though I know it is Edie.
New York is funny this way. You can go for days without seeing anyone and then when you go out in the world nothing is normal. I got this new card. Two of them, in fact. One for my new business and one for personal use. They have that contactless thing where you just wave the card around like a dirty pair of panties in the wind. But the thing is: I don’t know how to use it. And everywhere I go somebody is teaching me how. Which is so stupid. It was the same thing not too long ago with the chips, when we switched from swipes to chips. And it will be another thing soon enough. Surely. My phone for instance and this ridiculous thing they call OMNY here in New York with the subway. And why do we do this? What was wrong with cash again? Why are we gatekeeping money now? If you are going to redesign the entire payment structure on the subway don’t you think instead we can just get rid of fucking turnstiles instead? I had to go to the bank today too. To get cash of all things. It was a dystopian free-for-all. There were four cashiers and two people in line. I had to prove my identity three times to get money, which was fine, I don’t want anyone taking my money, sure, but what the hell? An ID, I had to fill out a form with my bank account info and then I had to use the chip on my card and put my four digit PIN in. Maybe that is four times? And why? So I could take out more money than the ATM’s would let me take out? But why did I need cash? Why is cash such an anomaly these days? I never have it. When I do have it I give it away. When I got back from Italy I had $40 in cash because I thought I might need it on the cruise ship. For tipping. The problem with that was there was no $20 tips to be given away. So I had the money in my wallet. I bought something I can’t remember what maybe that steak wad, either way I had $28 in my wallet. I gave $3 to a lady on the subway asking for money. I gave $5 to another lady outside the subway asking for it and then it was Paddington’s birthday and Professor Curly had me send a card she had set aside for the occasion so I put the remaining $20 in the card. Happy Birthday, Paddington! She is a 4/20 baby hahaha. Smoke-em if ya got-em, right?
But that is what happens when I have cash. And money to me, it is a real asshole. When I have it, I don’t want it, when I can’t get it, I freak out. But then one day you go to work for a cruise line for 13 days and are basically an endured servant and anything you may need from the ship you have to buy from the company store and then when you get back to town and start to make an invoice for the work you have just done being on call the entire time and you notice that your bank account has been charged $748.32. And there is no record for what it was. When you call the cruise line they refuse to even let you speak to a representative and you know that some of that charge must be the company store, and some of it is internet you have to have to do you work, but still, that is quite a bit of unaccountable fundage. I hope it gets worked out alright. This job is an odd duck. A mixed bag as Brother Luke would say. Comparatively the money is good. I think if I gave you the specific details you would say I was crazy for not treating it like a windfall. But it is not a windfall. The negatives are too great. For instance, I have to fight like hell to get a charge so egregious on bank account that if it is not rectified, I may lose trust in the entire system and reconsider my involvement. Like all tyrannies, you give a little out of expediency, they take everything. Its not the money, its the principle. They overpay us, but we are underpaid, actually. Well, Scott is. Me, I am middling. I can do the job and the job will get done, but if the headwaters start flowing, I may jump ship at the next port and maybe let the company lose my number if you catch my jib as the bridesmaids say. My loyalty is to Scott, not the multi-billionaire cruise lines.
I don’t know. I started writing a novel about a billionaire who climbs Mount Everest who thinks he did it all on his own. A little bit of The Great Gatsby meets American Psycho meets Heart Of Darkness meets 1984. It is helping me process what we are going through. How we are being forced into a new Depression in order to redefine the monetary structure only for the working class and the poor to be immiserated for the sake of the ruling class of billionaires to benefit. This ridiculous notion that we should just go along to get along. That financial expediency is somehow a way to circumvent tyranny even though we know that they will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. That everyone will die a horrible death by saying and doing nothing just because they benefit a tiny bit on the way up. We are living in tragic times and the question you have to ask yourself is simple; how much money are you willing to sell your soul out for? They say the number that most poor people think is a lot of money is $1,000. They also say that most people can be bought for ten times that. $10,000. You make people desperate, you can get them for cheaper. You destroy the social structures that keep society stable and thriving, suddenly everything is on the table. It is a ridiculous calculation that nobody asked for, but here we are living through it. And to that I have a simple message:
Government is a conversation not a absolute. The Constitution is a government we created. Government is not bad unless we allow it to be. The only way forward is pushing through.
Many years ago I was working on a dance show in Norway that had some delicate iterations of misogyny in a way that created some difficult conversations. I thought there needed to be a dick bong in the show. So much so that I scoured NYC looking for such a bong. At one point in my “research” I sent an electronic mail to everyone in the production titled: You asked for it, here it is: Dick Bong. The mailing was a picture of the dick bong I found near Times Square. Dianne Madden, a very genius and very famous downtown dancer who was part of the project responded:
“Who asked for it?”
She then added a line space. She then wrote:
“Who let the dogs out?”
I laughed my balls off and there was no dick bong in the show. She had acutely and surgically scappled my idiotic musing as quickly as one pops a floater’s balloon. And I was grateful for it. There are sometimes in life, moments exactly within time, that all they need is somebody to ask the question;
What the mother fuck?
I think we have reached that moment.
[insert picture Jeny N sent me from Powell, WY in the 90’s]
L to R: Leigh Drake, Handsome “My Own Private Idaho” Joe, Jacob Bower, Jeny Nelson