the rix mix

I wish, for my birthday, I could assemble three or four reasonably sensible people I know, lay out a series of serious problems I have, & decide how & in what order I should deal with them. The #1 problem I know, I'm attempting to sort it out at this very moment, but even that presents a number of options & challenges.

Yesterday, I mentioned offhandedly in an e mail that I wish I resided in senior housing. That's because nearly every problem I have large & small is common enough among people a few years older than I am, I'd just have to ask around. A disabled friend I know in senior housing in Massachussetts, who has post-polio syndrome & tougher problems than I have, seems to find some solutions this way. She has to travel a long way to see some of her doctors.

One of the effects of depression is that you do not manage your health care. It's difficult to manage anything with consistancy. So I've always considered it very strange, & inefficient, that my psych clinic doesn't deal with this, considering it's part of a much larger health system. It seems to have little connection at all, except that I somehow flagged down a staff shrink, associated with the clinic, when I was in the hospital a few weeks ago & had him prescribe a mild sedative just for the duration of my stay. But he wasn't part of the team. He didn't see me on his rounds. Thing is, this stuff all goes in the big computer, but there's nobody looking at it. My primary physician - the one who keeps an eye on the whole picture & makes basic recommendations - probably ought to be my shrink.

My HMO, which also handles Jersey's SCHIP, sends me notifications of hospitals opting out of the HMO, never of any adding it. But those hospitals, & their specialists, continue to accept the straight up Medicaid + Medicare packages a lot of seniors carry. My HMO must be a bad payer. Today I called & punched in my ID number just to make sure I was fully enrolled in the HMO. I thought, if there's a crack in the coverage here, I'm squeezing through it. But I was able to go out of system only temporarily under the coverage rules.

Oh well, I've heard similar complaints from people with HMOs through their jobs.

I had a harder day today than I deserved. I learned what happens when neither a hospital's attending specialist or attending primary doctor are in my HMO.; the two doctors the hospital handed me. & the only specialist in my HMO in this large city with a large hospital is very old & has an office over a beauty parlor in not very pleasant location, & the next nearest ones I can possibly get to are in Millburn & Newark & aren't affiliated with this large local hospital. & I have to immediately switch specialists. Those other specialists aren't required to accept me as a patient, although fortunately I'm permitted to contact them without a referral.

But I did get through quickly enough to a service rep at the HMO & she did explain clearly what I needed to know.

The owner of this apartment building should put a No Loitering sign out front, & the sign should be intended for the miserable alcoholic guy from the third floor who was standing unsteadily out there at 11 am & asked me for a dollar. I'd just walked home because it was a nice day & I needed to clear my mind & think rationally, & I also saved myself return trip cab fare & picked up some decent orange juice on sale.

Now I am going to listen to Brahms' String Sextet No. 1.

Early appt today (8:30, not that early), I had enough sleep to wake up before alarm clock. Had a short power outage. They occur often here, most last under a minute, this one clicked on & off & on again, a little worrisome. Followed as usual by sirens headed toward Morris Ave., I always figure a car hit a pole or shorted a traffic light box near the ridiculously dangerous intersection by Kean University's biggest parking lot. It's also one of the worst pedestrian crossings I know, involving left hand turn signals pedestrians can't see & drivers too impatient for pedestrians. The county in its wisdom put a playground & park on that corner. Last year I signed a petition to stop a bank & drug store from locating on the intersection. In a short stretch there's already two campuses of the school, an office park, a pharma plant, an NJ Transit train station, an historical mansion, a road 18 wheelers use to get from Route 78 to Goethal's Bridge. I could imagine how many more power failures this neighborhood would have with a drive-thru bank & a Walgreen's up there.

Detroit: Urban Laboratory and the New American Frontier. Interesting article (especially photos) on how Detroit is turning into a vast urban prairie with enough cheap open land, unemployed labor pool, & need for food to support farming. The city is so large - 139 sq miles, so poor, & so unmanageable that there's no hope of revitalizing it, much less trying to govern it, conventionally. Too much space to fill. It's become a canvas for visionaries, artists, innovative house renovators, & a few crackpots.

The Amish ought to consider migrating there, as Lancaster PA farm property values soar with encroaching development.

The United States Army knew Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was screwed up. Too screwed up to be a shrink, too screwed up to counsel soldiers, too screwed up to serve at Fort Hood, in Afghanistan, or anywhere. No doubt Muslims face prejudice in our armed forces. There are problems that go far deeper than what Muslims must experience, given the influence of evangelical protestantism on military life, throughout all ranks. It can tough to be a Jew or Catholic, or pagan or no preference in some units of the United States military. The Army has no excuse for Hasan. They kept this deeply disturbed man on active duty despite years of complaints & bad reports (& discharge patriotic homosexuals who speak Arabic). As this tragedy is investigated, we should expect a list of disciplinary actions against those responsible for pushing Hasan through the Army pipeline just because they needed more psychiatrists. Graduate students in social work at the state university up the street are put through more rigorously monitored examinations & internships than the Army apparently required of Hasan. Here's an opportunity to take the lid off & expose a whole bunch of festering problems.

Labels: in the news, religion

Labels: jersey shore, nature, postcard

Watching the Yankees victory parade on TV would be tedious even for Yankees fans. There's the players on decorated trucks waving. Double decker buses carrying, one supposes, Yankees employees & their families. Parade attendees mostly between high school age & 30, when interviewed by reporters, half want to see Derek Jeter & the other half just shout, "Yankees, Yankees." Probably last call for Johnny Damon & Hideki Matsui. So it goes, up to City Hall where a fireman sings "God Bless America" & everyone gets a key to the city, including the assistant trainer & some people not even identified by a job. Jay-Z raps a second rate number with help from an Alicia Keys substitute, hip hop as a waste of the form. Then it's over. Aren't you glad you didn't go? Could be a big mistake, manager Joe Giraldi, changing your uniform number to 28 next season.

What happens to the official Phillies World Championship clothing?

Phillies title gear a hit far from World Series

Each fall and winter for the last three years, World Vision has sent to the impoverished around the world thousands of team championship caps, jerseys and T-shirts produced before the World Series and Super Bowl and then rendered unusable for marketing in the United States when teams don't win the title.

Labels: baseball, sports

Performed by Steve Rabb

Nice set-up. The A100 is pretty much the same as the more collectable B-3 & could cost half as much. An old Yamaha DX7 synth up top, sound of the 80s.

Labels: music, TV

Reading Why Do Catholics Do That? A Guide to the Teachings and Practices of the Catholic Church by Kevin Orlin Johnson (Ballantine Books, 1994). It has both the Nihil Obstat & Imprimatur, so it's an authentic document of the Pope John Paul II era. I was curious about exactly what Catholics are expected & required to believe & do if they are strictly observant & not "cafeteria Catholics." Also want a better understanding of the Catholic take on sola scriptura, which is at the heart of protestanism, & taken to absurd extremes by fundamentalists. Johnson begins with chapter on the place of "Tradition" (contrasted with "custom") in Church doctrine & practice. But just 45 pages in & I can see why he has the Nihil Obstat. He has to ignore a lot of Biblical literary scholarship & stay a single path through early church history. He's also too condescending toward protestantism, too much a generalist.

It's very different from Garry Wills' books. Wills is a dissenting apologist who explains why he remains a Catholic despite what he knows. Wills has a charming, almost devious way of sounding like a fairly progressive protestant in his Biblical expositions only to arrive at a "Tah Dah!" moment where you realize he's thinking & reasoning as a Catholic steeped in Thomas Aquinas. Could Wills convert to Catholicism based on what he believes now? I don't see how he could get through the Rite of Christian Initiation classes all parishes offer. He challenges the Church to kick him out.

Labels: religion, what I'm reading

No great surprise Chris Christie beat Jon Corzine. He did it handily, without carrying Bergen County, & he carried Middlesex. Neither of the candidates was a strong campaigner. Corzine had so much going against him, not least of which was a lack of enthusiasm among Democrats. Very few Corzine signs on lawns of this Democratic city, with no local races cranking up the GOTV machines. Obama's young supporters didn't vote. Younger people never did in large numbers before Obama, why would they this year? Many of Obama's independent suburban voters went for Christie or stayed home. While Christie's win is played as a massive defeat for Obama, this was a Jersey election on Jersey issues, & the toughest issues were mostly not discussed. It wasn't about giving back the stimulus money. Christie is a "moderate" as Repugs go, from the North Jersey establishment of Kean & Whitman. He began appealing to the Repug hard right only when polls showed his comfortable lead slipping. We don't really know the man. He ran bland.

In addition to the recession & the state's economic woes, we had the sorry spectacle this year of a wave of corruption indictments against Democrats. In the middle of the campaign, Corzine showed he had no power over the South Jersey boss, George Norcross, who couldn't wait until after the election to topple Senate President Dick Codey, a popular Democrat in North Jersey. The Democratic Party has to get a better face on in New Jersey.

The surprise was Mayor Mike Bloomberg's narrow win. He needed to spend a hundred million to win. With a better financed campaign, William Thompson might have beat him. There was more resentment against his overturning term limits than he had thought, & he did poorly with minorities. NYC voters voted for term limits, & their will was ignored.

The Democrat has apparently won NY-23, the upstate congressional district where the national teabaggers, Palin, Glen Beck, etc., drove out the legit Repug candidate because she wasn't a lockstep wingnut & homobigot. But Obama carried the district last year. Even Newt warned them to let her to run her own race. Repugs had held that seat for like 100 years. Now they won't.

Virginia is a conservative state. McDonnell outspent & narrowly beat Creigh Deeds for attorney general four years ago. He only serves one term.

Labels: New Jersey politics

Took maybe five minutes to vote. I speed the process along by bringing the sample ballot & handing it to the poll worker to look up my name & address. Same old guy at the booth taking the ticket & saying, "Have a blessed afternoon" to every voter.

An amazing blog post. Thuman Hart is so shocked, shocked, to discover there's gambling in the establishment (Hudson County Democratic Machine) that he's dropping his Democratic voter registration & registering as a Repug. So he becomes an instant RINO. But he's still not voting for Chris Christie. I wasn't even registered to the Democrats until I wanted to vote in a local city council primary & had to declare myself. When I did, the automated phone calls doubled at general election time. But even as a "registered Democrat" I'm not a member of the Democratic Party. A political party is an institution first & only secondarily a democratic process. There've been up to four Democratic Parties on the primary ballot in Union County, only one of which is the "regular" party that actually controls the Courthouse by fielding winning candidates in the primaries & generals. & that "regular" party does occasionally suffer defeats in local primaries by well-organized insurgencies, few of which offer any real hope for reform. They want their own hands on the controls. The Repugs in Jersey are weak because their machines are weak, not because they're too honest to win. If they elect a governor today, it's on resentment, & the party hacks will be lining up for (& receive) the spoils of victory: state patronage jobs. If Steve Lonegan's right wing supporters want power, then they have to do more than gripe about taxes, post nasty comments on the web, throw a few bucks at the candidate, & show up at one rally featuring Joe the Plumber.

Republicans in Union County, who do control some towns, couldn't even field a third candidate for freeholder. What if Corzine wins the statewide election by a few hundred votes that one additional local Repug candidate may have generated with a spirited campaign? There are debatable issues here.

Unfortunately, had no reason to patronize this old sheet music store in the lively, predominantly Hispanic Morris Ave. retail district, I'm sure he had a great selection of classical miniscores. The owner had no walk-in business, & must have specialized in supplying church music. He was there every day wearing a jacket & tie. A few months ago he began taking days off & taping "closed today due to illness in family" signs on the door. It appears that the store has been sold, a sign mentions a new owner, but a lot of the shelves have been cleared. Online catalogue sales have driven famous sheet music stores out of business, like the one behind Carnegie Hall. Surprised this local one hung on.

Morris Ave. is now anchored by popular Colombian-flavored cafes, with beauty parlors & other service businesses, it's been getting through the recession without many storefront vacancies. In fact, there's been a good deal of renovating over the past year. If Elizabeth ever had a candidate for a commuter retail & residential district, the stretch of Morris Ave. between the train station & Kean University was probably it. But the city was uninterested in master planning around the underutilized train station plaza.

Labels: Elizabeth NJ, music

Later: Well worth the cab fare to see the shrink ($6 + tip, a bargain). He renewed my Ambien, filled out some forms. I surprised myself by walking all the way home, including a stop at a Supremo supermarket, my backpack so off balance afterward I realized I was walking like I was inebriated.
***
If you hate the Phillies & Yanks so much that you didn't catch Johnny Damon's tenacious 9th inning, 2 out at bat & steal of second & third base last night, your loss. No more baseball this year when the Series ends.

Ordered free Windows 7 Upgrade. Haven't bothered learning much about Vista. I have no printer or scanner plugged in. I was given a scanner a few years ago that I couldn't use with old PC. If it works on this one, I can get a basic cheap printer, model determined by cost of black ink cartridges.

Rutgers women's basketball opens at home against Stanford on the 15th. Only ten players on the Rutgers roster, & Epiphanny Prince turned pro in Italy. Epiphanny was the go-to scorer but she wasn't comfortable as court leader & no one else was stepping up last year, this Big East season must have looked long, difficult, & unnecessary for someone with WNBA aspirations.

Labels: baseball, Rutgers, sports

Downtown. Bought cheap jeans, sweatpants, boxer shorts in a store I don't like giving money to. The sweatpants are thick & warm looking. I know they're slave labor clothes. Quick spin around large rummage shop, no decent flannels. Across street to buy two C clamps to stabilize PC desk top. Over to Family Dollar for two cans of Sunny Farm strawberries (great for smoothies, hard to find) & dish detergent. Family Dollar is an enjoyable browse, reliable chain about as close to a McCrory's as we have now, everything clearly priced. Hard to figure the Hispanic preference for grape-fragrance cleaning products. I think I will be quite tired in a little while.

No matter how well one treats them, after a certain amount of wearing & washing, one's "neat" jeans cross a threshold.

Labels: jersey shore, postcard

Zoned out & napped this afternoon, which was fine enough. Walked up the street to feed the cats & run a small load of wash, wind blowing drizzle into a more unpleasant weather. Ballgame. Ordered Brahms three string quartets, inexpensive used set popped up on Amazon wish list. Brahms is mostly a genial, companionable composer, Beethoven without the angst. Brahms' personal hangup was knowing he wasn't Beethoven, although his more fanatical supporters called him the natural successor to Beethoven, which was good for business. Brahms was a popular composer in a music-crazy city, Vienna, & enjoyed his celebrity. He sold a lot of sheet music. The longing in his music is more for intimacy than for passion. Performed poorly, it can be sentimental.

Labels: mental health, music

Thinking of dropping by Immaculate Conception Church this afternoon, I'll be by that way later. This is not some sudden conversion experience. I often have an urge to sit in a church for awhile. The UMC a few blocks away has an 11 am Sunday service & small congregation, & it's impossible to slip in & out of a protestant church like that even if I could pull myself together on a Sunday morning to go. A guest would be the event of the day. The Russian Orthodox Church around the corner is beautiful, dim & inviting on late afternoons when the old priest leaves the doors open & the icon wall at the front is faintly in view. He wouldn't mind me sitting inside for awhile. But I'm usually headed to or from the supermarket. Don't need to wait for a Mass. Catholic Churches are open when they're open, & the attitude is that you have your own reasons for being there. A Catholic may just be stopping by to light a candle, say a prayer, & meditate for a few minutes. Larger historical Catholic churches are interesting because some people are quietly walking around enjoying the art & ambience while others are actively engaged in a spiritual practice; there might be a Mass or novena.

Labels: religion

Later:
Librarian: You owe $2.20 fine on this book.
Me: I renewed it online.
Librarian: We advise patrons not to renew online.
Me: At 10 PM your website doesn't advise me that.
(I paid the fine. In fact, the website had let me renew a book that was already overdue. It was a pretty good novel. )
DVDs are $1.50 for two day rental, $2 per day overdue fine. Noncompetitive.

Xtras: Plastic drop cloth; four Woodland Wreath scented candles; cheap TV antenna; Frozen french toast.

Beautiful day & shrink is not in today & available for a "walk in." Said he's in Monday. He used to be in Fridays & out of office Mondays, I'm sure of it. I should have toughed it out & gone yesterday. So that changes the downtown journey. If I held up well on the way back I was stopping by main library & then buying a cheap pair of jeans. Instead, do a swing through branch library, dollar stores, & supermarket & I can stay close to home over weekend.

Last night, Hideki Matsui out guessed wily Pedro Martinez, got hold of a breaking ball nearly in the dirt & lifted it over the right field wall. The Japanese World Series broadcasters must have gone nuts. Pedro shook it off. It was, after all, an unhittable fair ball pitch for 95% of hitters. Johnny Damon, a good hitter oft tempted by those, would've whiffed it on six inches of empty air & spun completely around.

Labels: baseball, Elizabeth NJ, what I'm reading

I've been slacking. Ought to have hauled my butt cross town this afternoon via taxi & waited as long as necessary to see shrink for ten minutes, hand him some forms to fill out, receive Ambien refill. But I got up late, made a slow start & then a big mess, cellphone battery was signaling low & since the phone proved its value last week I should always have it with me now. Bathing is time-consuming. Had to do a load of laundry while the machine was available. I know the heavy lifting begins next week.

I so need to gain some weight that I'm almost compelled to eat a packaged 99 cent glazed honey bun from 7/11. High in fat & calories, low in anything good, incredibly tasty dunked in hot coffee & reduced to a gooey, dripping, finger-licking mess of dough. I got through 1/2 of it, 295 calories. Stick some granola & raisins on it, price it $3 as an energy bar.

Ken Burns' National Parks documentary is a yawn. Peter Coyote's somnolent narration; the predictably melancholy "rustic" music; mostly lacking in suspense & nearly devoid of the wonderment & ecstatic emotions the scenery inspires; the obligatory nods to revisionist history; the expected digressions into peculiar side stories. The subject itself wasn't desperately in need of an epic, PBS historical telling. In the past few months, I've seen two other excellent documentaries on national parks; one on the linking of the western parks by improved roads, spurred by wealthy tourists with cars; the other on the design of national park buildings, both drawing on Ken Burns style.

Labels: Elizabeth NJ, home furnishings, TV

Wayward manatee Ilya is rescued near Linden oil refinery, flown back to Florida

A wayward manatee is headed back to Florida aboard a transport jet after being rescued from murky waters near a Linden oil refinery.

Ilya was loaded aboard a plane that took off from Atlantic City International Airport for an undisclosed military base this morning.

The sea cow was pulled from a creek at a Linden oil refinery Monday and recuperated at the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine.

Federal wildlife authorities kept the rescue a secret, fearing a crush of media and well-wishers could stress the manatee.

Surprising because of the journey the animal had to make to reach here, although they have been known to wander this far north. It's late October, not late August. There's a lot of wild beauty & wildlife in Jersey's "brownfield" marshes & estuaries, but I don't recall a manatee ever becoming lost in them. Some of the creeks are quite safe & sheltering, there's no boat traffic & human access is difficult. Arthur Kill, the waterway between Jersey & Staten Island, is busy with tugs & barges.

Labels: in the news, nature, New Jersey

Wanted to walk to CVS for a few items, three very long blocks, so took it slowly. They wouldn't refill my Ambien, & i didn't get straight whether or not they would call the doctor for approval. I can't even get through to the guy on the phone, & I have to see him soon anyway. But they did print out some necessary records I have to submit, & I had gotten that deadline extended earlier. Decided to walk on to Pathmark, pushed on by a combination of essentials & cravings. As I left the store, I knew I was exercising more than I ought to have permitted myself today. Chatted with my sister on the phone (A few of you will be surprised & glad to hear that). She has laryngitis & expects to recover enough by Sunday to hit a high note in choir. As a Reform Church protestant, there is no Saint to whom she can appeal - it's Saint Cecilia, I keep a portrait of her on the wall here, playing harmonium as an angel holds the music. I take a more ecumenical view of early saints.

I must get to the library.

Labels: Elizabeth NJ, music, religion, shopping

I'll watch & enjoy this series. I'm not certain if I care who wins. Leaning toward The Phillies. For me, it isn't the matchup arranged by Beelzelbub as claimed by Mets Heads. That would've been Boston vs. Rockies.

The sentimental, media, & Fox Sports fantasy was Yankees-Dodgers, who haven't met since 1981.

What we have this year are the two best teams.

I grew up in a non-fanatical Yankee home, the sort of white, middle class family where the Yankees were the default team because they always won & so made few emotional demands. This was before they entered the wilderness that led to the Zoo teams of the 70's. Those teams were not worth the absurd, angry emotions they generated, so I walked away, over to Shea, as I became more of a baseball fan. Jersey was & still is, a two market sports state. Used to be defined approximately by the original 201 & 609 area codes. 609 South Jersey was The Phillies (& Eagles & Flyers). TV & radio broadcast most clearly from Philadelphia (You could pick up Yankee radio games almost everywhere on the Jersey shore), The big newspapers were delivered fresh from Philly & the Atlantic City Press emphasized Philly teams. From Long Beach Island south, the proportion of vacationers from Pennsy went way up. But you found Phillies fans as far north as Asbury Park.

So a Yankees-Phillies series is a Jersey Turnpike (& Parkway) series. It's hard for me to blame the Phillies for late season collapses when The Mets blew their own chances & the Phils just happened to be there, next in line. I like a lot of the Phillies players, though they insult The Mets. My favorite Yankee is an aging samurai-for-hire with bad knees & a beautiful swing named Hideki Matsui. He'll probably be looking for another team after this season.

I admit I'm not the type of hardcore Mets fan unable to watch or follow this Series in any shape or form.

Labels: baseball, jersey shore, sports

Gina brought her laptop to the hospital but was unable to pull in a wifi connection. So much for blogging from there. If I'd had a netbook, I would've stashed it in the hospital safe. A blackberry or expensive cellphone would've been taped to my arm. I was in four locations, & taken once to the basement for ultrasound tests. Every location had its own cast of characters, many just passing through to take blood pressure, empty garbage, sweep up, drop off & pick up food trays. The proportion of personal trustworthiness is probably about the same in every hospital, city or suburb. I jokingly asked Gina to bring in her best lap cat, a thin long-hair named Meanie (this mature kitty takes an unexpected swipe once in awhile), & Gina said she could have walked past security with her cat carrier. The celebrity scandal tabloid disappeared but the Daily News remained.

Labels: cats, Elizabeth NJ

Had to. Gray, rainy, quiet. Things I could be dealing with, but sleeping, then getting clean, a good shave after a week, eating, puttering, reading, watching TV, going to sleep at an earlier hour, seemed like the essential projects & I'd do phone calls & etc. on Wednesday. Visiting Nurse left a message, service becomes available when you live alone. I wondered at Trinitas pushing them over other similar services in competitive market for the insurance dollar. Some of their services are very basic, just a brief visit every few days until you get back into routine. My apt needs a thorough cleaning; it is dirty. I also have to explain that much of this clutter is bachelor mess, some is the landlord's fault (hasn't fixed the ceiling in the other room), & some is how I like my lifestyle - common for writers, artists, musicians, DJs, etc. but just mess to anyone unaccustomed to it. I'm the kind of person you're more likely to encounter in Jersey City & Brooklyn.

I remember a photo of composer John Zorn's small apt. He had thousands of records on shelves & scattered around, assorted musical instruments & sound & recording equipment, & a mattress in the middle of it all. He was indifferent to any other amenities.

The contrast is that I always have a supply of laundried clothes, & I'm personally clean when I go out into public. I hand washed two pairs of boxer shorts before I went to bed last night. There's a man in a basement apt here who is literally stinking up the hallways. There's probably no legal way of preventing it. I don't know if he has a medical problem or just doesn't care.

I do not like the new My Yahoo daily comics content box. Comics are displayed even smaller, & they dropped Ted Rall.

That was a pricey one hour. A little before midnight I realized a simple piece of apparatus I wore home from the hospital wasn't working correctly. I called the hospital emergency number, described the simple problem that could not wait until morning, was informed I'd have to go to the emergency room. Oy.

Called cab, 10 minute ride at most at night, went to ER (the section set up as a walk in clinic, wasn't crowded), filled out a little triage slip, was looked at like I was a moron. But a nurse, Filipino man, came out of his office & took me right away, measured my blood pressure for umpteeth time today, also was sort of disbelieving - until I showed him. Turned out the day nurse on 8th floor, a distracted young guy who - in my observation of him today - was not very experienced or a good manager & prioritizer of his time (serious combo of weaknesses for a floor nurse) had installed it wrong. It was fixed in ten minutes. Leaving, I encountered a familiar homeless woman hanging out in waiting room for the night, chatted with her about how I also can feel like a piece of crap only to have people seem to agree with that self-estimation, gave her a few bucks, called a taxi, friendly Hispanic driver who'd seen me give the woman some money (she tried to hit me up for more of course), mildly admonished me for being too generous. I said she was only panhandler in town who ever asked me for coffee & donut money & then proceeded to buy coffee & a donut with it. He had good music on his cab radio, Marvin Gaye "What's going on?". So I gave him a decent tip. Was back home in an hour. It could have been a long night. Shouldn't have happened, but worth the money.

Labels: Elizabeth NJ, religion

How does what ought to have been a three night hospital stay become 6 nearly 7 nights & what sent me there still isn't taken care of to the basic degree I was hoping for?

Then they wanted to put me out the door at 8 pm tonight, I was fighting to stay until morning, could have, but thank heavens for Gina & Glen driving over in the Big Man's Crown Victoria (great ride), rescuing me, & taking me around to CVS & Pathmark on some essential errands.

Labels: Elizabeth NJ, Mahalo

Labels: New Jersey, postcard

at last. That was a miserable weekend.

I have to put the anger down. Thank you Edie, Joe from The Burg, Rosemother, Carrie, Barbara, Gail, & Sara Rain, Sheron, Jeff, Gina, & some of you late night online wanderers for reminding me of what you value. I'm a lot of words, contradictions, & too prideful to reach out. The joy I find in words is not just for me. Or the peculiar postcards, or the music. I studied & set out to be an avant garde kind of artist (& there is something about blogging, just like free form radio, that can be a daring art just for being the form it's in). But I wanted to be understood, too.

I recall a short piece I wrote for a community newspaper, nothing deep, just heartfelt, about Italian immigrants that was read by the sons & daughters of those immigrants. & later went to an Italian-American picnic - the real deal, with the bocce court - where it had been widely read by the folks there, & I was treated like a local celebrity. I was brought beer & maybe the best grilled sausage I ever had, offered a seat, even some politicians shook my hand. There's the guy wrote the article everyone liked. Me, protestant Anglo-Irish guy, only saying something those people always need to hear. & I thought, this is what a poet is supposed to do, too. Joe, my friend & editor, had reached out to me to put those sentiments into words & I had succeeded, he was so proud of me. I was an honorary Italian. Which is an honor you get to keep in your heart.

Labels: about writing, Elizabeth NJ