Blog

  • Try Again Tomorrow (Unedited)

    I took the dog to the groomer, and that threw off my entire day.

    I mean it was scheduled. In my calendar, so I knew it was coming. The end result, other that the dog having a very nice “puppy cut,” is that I got nothing dome that I wanted to get done.

    Normally I blog in the morning, but I didn’t get around to it until 6pm today. I didn’t do any journaling, and the sketchbook is just a hope at this point – maybe even a wish.

    But the groomer. Walking the dog twenty blocks to drop her off is what really did it. I know lots of people take their dogs on the subway now, and it doesn’t bother me. But I can’t do it. Only because if another dog got in the car, my dog would go apeshit. That and she’s take a dump on the train. (She once took a huge dump while I was in line at an ATM. That was a good day…) So I have to walk her, and I really don’t mind. I do like our neighborhood.

    Also, this is the closest groomer to our apartment, just in case anyone is wondering…

    Which I know no one is…

    That extra forty blocks really took it outta me. Zapped my energy, and the only thing I kept turning over in my mind was that Lauren Boebert was kicked out of a touring performance of the musical of Beetlejuice in Denver because she was being rowdy and using a vape.

    Ahh…

    Try again tomorrow…

  • Short Story Review: “On the Agenda” by Lore Segal

    (The short story “On the Agenda” by Lore Segal appeared in the September 18th, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio

    “On the Agenda” by Lore Segal is an interesting exercise. I read it twice, enjoyed it both times, but I’m still wondering about the ending. Each time I read it, and I can’t put my finger on why, or where the example is in the story, but I kept thinking about French Absurdist one-act theatre. (I was a theatre major, I read a lot of their works.) Something about this story seemed to parallel that. This story isn’t blatantly absurdist. It does have a foot in reality, but there is something off, which works.

    The story is about ladies who lunch, but not the Sondheim “ladies.” The story of these ladies is broken up into sections; the first being “JANUARY: THE FORGETTING OLYMPICS,” which also happens to be an agenda item for the meeting of the ladies. What if forgetting was an Olympic sport? And the ladies give examples of their forgetting, comparing, and expanding this idea. At this point, the story could be about aging. But with the next section “MARCH: NEXT TO GODLINESS” and “JUNE: FUNK” we are given examples of the ladies friendship, and how they are dealing with their forgetting. And again, it all feels purposefully off center, ever so slightly. But when the final section comes along, “NOVEMBER: NO MORE TRAINS” which is broken up into three sections, with the last being the one I questioned the most – It’s a single paragraph with no dialogue, which is different and shorter than all other sections of the whole story. This paragraph thuds the story to a close, help with a rhetorical last question “For now?”

    From the way the story started with that absurdist feeling I had while reading, I never was expecting this to be a story that would wrap up cleanly, or even conclusively for that matter.  But that last paragraph is completely and radically different from the rest of the story – what was the point? Then I remembered the French Absurdists, who sometimes made the point of not having a point, and just ending things.

    Or it’s about death?

    I’m going with death.

  • Twenty-Two Years

    It’s been twenty-two years.

    The day reminds me that there is a divide; what was before, and what came after.

    I never knew the City that was before. I only got the know the City that was after.

    The “post” world.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Hearing, Tottenham’s Start, and If I Drop 10 Pounds…

    (But that is another story…)

    I can admit that I have a hypochondriac streak. If I feel even slightly off, I assume I’m getting sick. And if I’m sick, then I’m clearly going to die. Recently, a new “symptom” has developed, which may not portend my impending demise; I’m having trouble hearing people. I first noticed this with my kid, though I was skeptical as she does make an art form out of mumbling. But now, when my wife speaks to me from across the apartment, it sounds muffled. Normally, I would blame them, but as I get older, I fear Occam’s Razor is swinging more towards me than not. Yet another body part I need to have checked.

    So… Tottenham Hotspur haven’t lost a match yet. Sure, the toughest game they had was against a weakened United, and their first real test will be against Arsenal on September 24th, BUT until then… I’m going to enjoy the fact that they are undefeated!

    … I can button up this one awesome sports coat I have with leather patches on the elbows.

  • Everyone’s Back at It

    Today was the first day of school in New York City. Well, for the public schools anyway. But it was also, officially, no fooling this time, the end of Summer for everybody; as somehow, magically it seems, everyone returned to the City over night, and they all decided that they needed to use public transit this morning. There was such a dramatic change in the number of people on the subway this morning, that even my daughter was like, Where did all these people come from?

    The Cycle begins again, I said.

    I got a blank stare from the kid.

    Everyone is back from vacation and has to go to work and school. Then I added, The City’s full again.

    It’s true, the City has all its people back, and from what I observed this morning, most people didn’t have a good time on vacation, because their attitudes were rather piss poor. I mean, this Cycle seems to really have brought out the bad and gruff attitudes in New Yorkers.

    This is my sixteenth Post-Labor Day return, and I am still impressed by it. See, it’s an event that annually happens in NYC, but no one talks about it. People talk about the City emptying out for the Summer, but no one mentions the inevitable return. (If we talk of the yen, should we not talk of the yang?) I find it odd that, as a city, NYC seems to love to point out its annual traditions and cycles, marking the changing of seasons and time, yet The Return (I’m coining it) is a verboten topic of discussion.

    Maybe it’s a tad depressing to talk about the end of Summer.

    Or it might be more basic than that…

    No one wants to go back to work.