AD's Journal 2024

  I had to catch up with all the stuff I’ve been putting off, such as updating my ezpass (they are going to crack    down on toll cheaters) as well as make appointments with my various doctors. It scares me that I have so many doctors I have to make appointments with, including my primary who is holding my prescriptions hostage in order to get me to come in and see him. The blood doctor for my leukemia already had an appointment scheduled, I just forgot what the date was. As terrifying as the word leukemia sounds, I apparently have contracted a curable kind, four shots that make the whole matter go away. Unfortunately, I have to show symptoms before he’ll treat it, and some people do not show symptoms for decades – which at my age means I’ll likely be dead of something incurable before I have to worry about this. Non the less, he has me coming in for regular blood tests to gauge my progress. My urologist is the biggest pain in the ass (figuratively and literally) ...

      It is gray outside, but not raining, something of a change after four days of steady drizzle. It’s even warm enough to stroll in the rain, as I did during my odyssey two days ago, though it didn’t quite feel the same way as when I did so when younger. Too much hyperbola when it comes to everything, a massive amount of noise being generated by people who talk more than they think, but think they know what they are talking about. It’s pointless to argue with braindead zombies, people who ache to be important, to have something important to say, when they aren’t and don’t. Went to the Wick in East Rutherford last night for dinner. This was never my hang out, but many people I later associated with hung out there, including Susan, the woman I dated in college, and John Telson, who had had worked with at the cosmetic company and the wine imports company. I had lunch with him at the Wick back in 2002, a year or so before he passed away, one of those amazing ...

   Made the trek to our Hoboken office, a short walk from the light rail station. I missed one of my co-workers but found the other diligently typing away after the boss had instructed him and others to show up there at least three days a week. I stopped off on my way to several meetings, trying to work out the logistics of getting places primarily using the light rail. Getting to Journal Square from where I live is always an issue since most of the buses only go to 30th street coming from and going to New York City. There are buses that go all the way up to where I am, but they are infrequent. So, I have been walking from where I live to catch the buses at 30 h Street for the long ride south. The office is located in a part of Hoboken not far from a slanted road up the hill – behind Christ Hospital and ending behind Dickinson High, a bit of a trek, and yet not much different from the trip to 30th Street. I misread the weather and overdressed. As a result, I wa...

    I still can’t believe we’re 24 years into a new century. Growing up, I always believed the year 2000 spelled the absolute end of life, or at least, we would wake up in a world completely different from the one we lived in at the time. In some cases, this came to pass – although in an ugly Orwellian way – as we still struggle to get off the face of the planet, and yet carry around in our pockets the fundamental tool for brainwashing – the cell phone. Rarely in my travels, do I encounter anyone without one. On the train, people stare down into their small screens to get their share of propaganda – almost all main stream media doing its best to make Orwell’s 1984 a reality. No wonder Facebook and other social media censor those who would provide an alternative vision of the world. We are being fed what they want us to believe, and they take offense when we refuse to be indoctrinated, calling people with alternative views evil or cultist or worse. It is no wond...

  Technically, it’s been four years to the day that Paulie passed away, even though at the time, we didn’t learn about it until a few days later. I suppose over that time I should have gotten over his passing, and yet, he was such a huge part of my life, especially my youth, I can’t quite believe he is gone. I had hoped to find his burial site or where his ashes had been scattered in order to visit the location in time for his anniversary, but alas, I have received no news of it, and may have to wait for his fifth anniversary instead. His immorality, however, is not where he is buried, but how we remember him. Since he has no kids (that he was aware of), he must rely on the memory of nephews and their descendants, although I doubt they will see him as anything more than eccentric, rather than how he influenced many of us, who might not have pursued arts and music had we not met him. We went up to the old cottage on Lake Hopatcong a few weeks ago, but it was the old libr...

  The snow came long enough to deposit its mess on the streets and sidewalks before fading away to rain, rain then turning to ice as night came. I had to drive up to the school to drop off and pick up my wife because the landscape was too treacherous to tackle even for the short five block walk there and back. She falls on dry surfaces and much more often when the ground is slick. In these towns, the streets are so narrow traveling them – especially after inclement weather – is like perpetually reliving the trench scene from Star Wars, parked cars filling both sides of even the one-way streets, leaving this narrow gap between them to travel by. The cold tends to bring silence to our part of the world as people hunker down in warm apartments rather than taking to the streets. So, this makes the trip even for these few blocks somewhat eerie, as if humanity has ceased to exist, but all that we have built and all that operates to bring us comfort remain, lighted stores, flash...

      We got our first legitimate snow storm after nearly two years. This is not the first time we went through several years with rain instead of snow, but whackos are painting it as significant because they need to keep harping on the illusion of climate change. As we speak, the weather people (apparently not satisfied with the two to four inches we got) are selling us on another snow storm we can expect to hit on Thursday. When it rains it pours, as the old cliché goes. For some reason, I don’t quite feel the usual pang of delight at the first snow storm, perhaps because so many people are using this to sell agendas I don’t agree with. I look out the front window at the street and the people spreading salt on their walks because the accumulation is too little to shovel. The city’s salt spreaders have come down our street several times already, even though the salt from its earlier passings hasn’t vanished and the snow has not accumulated on the asphalt, o...

  They predict snow again for tomorrow – one to three inches possible. This is something more significant than the dusting we had as our only snow storm so far of the season. We bought extra salt ahead of the first storm and since we had no need of it (or even a shovel for that matter) we are ready to deal with the impact, as were all those other fools who panicked over the previous storm and stocked up on provisions for a month which they never got to use (not even all the toilet paper). We are finally experiencing winter as we have in the past. It is cold. Fortunately, we bought a bag to keep our take out meals warm and used it for the take out Chinese food we buy each Sunday evening. Many people get theirs delivered. We make the trip there and back, a place just up 48th Street from Park Avenue. The owners have gotten used to our routine, although it briefly changed in the aftermath of COVID. For some reason we stopped getting take out for a while or made the trip to th...

    They still have up their Christmas decorations on the new and supposedly improved Exchange Place pier, a fact we noticed when making our trip to Five Guys last night for our usual Friday Night dinner date. That part of the planet has changed dramatically over the last two decades. Although still haunting, less like the ghost town it used to be now that they have constructed new residential towers along Hudson Street, trying to turn the historic business district into a neighborhood, and failing in the same way the Newport section fails, where a string of intimidating tall buildings and a street so wide it takes a helicopter to get across. Exchange Place is really the old Paulus Hook, that place Europeans first settled in back when Hamilton thought to create a financial district, while eyeing my hometown of Paterson for industry. The business buildings and hotels line the waterfront like a barrier reef, impossible to ignore, unfriendly despite the historic pier ov...

    I had a choice of ways to take to get to Journal Square yesterday. I could have taken the light rail to Exchange Place and then the Path, or I could have done what I usually do, walk out of JFK Boulevard, and then walk down to 30th Street to catch the puddle jumper coming out of Manhattan. There are buses that come all the way up to where I live, only they run so infrequently, I can’t count on them coming or going. Still, I chose the second and as I walked down, kept looking over my shoulder to see if the bus was coming with the possibility of saving myself many steps, and a   long wait at the bus stop near the old Aldi’s. When I saw the bus, I was half way between stops. I started to run to get to the next stop before the bus did. I waved frantically at the bus as it passed, and I don’t think the bus driver would have waited for me had not some woman, waiting for a different bus, flagged her down, allowing me – breathless – to reach the door before the ...

      It appears I might have been wrong about closing the door to her Facebook site or it may have had nothing to do with me or what I’m posting. I’m always jumping to conclusions when things change, and the sudden removal of items from the page, leaving only innocuous postings from last summer, I feared the worst. She had been hitting on my site heavily leading up to the change, and some of the journal items I posted were a bit provocative, although not anywhere near as provocative as those posted much earlier. Among those things removed was a close up photo of her face, dragging me back to those she used to post back in 2012, which also stirred me, as this one also did. The assumption may have been wrong since this morning, she posted a similar photo which may or may not have been in reaction to my shutting down my postings for a day. On top of that, when I resumed posting, my site got a hit immediately, although I can’t tell if it was her or not. This cat and mouse st...

   I passed through Newport Mall yesterday to and from Bayonne, glancing up at the Sears sign and feeling intense regret. The news came earlier this week that this – the last Sears store in New Jersey – will be closing in the spring, one more icon fading into history. For years, Sears was the workingman’s store, a place where you could go to buy clothing, tools, even tires for your car. Such places became center pieces in many of the big cities such as Newark and Hackensack. I don’t remember one being in Paterson. But when Willowbrook Mall opened in 1969, the Sears became an anchor store there, and it was a place I took my car for repair. The closing of these kinds of stores is nothing new. Two Guys began closing some of its stores in the 1970s, and in some cases, these were far more local icons that Sears. Korvettes went out of business in the early 1980s, after having taken over a number of Two Guys locations, including the one in Totowa where Hank and I used t...

   It appears as if she panicked again and shut down access to her social media account as she did in the distant past. It is difficult to say why after so many months, but it is a typical behavior as in the past, and a bad sign over all. As a result, I shut down posting my old journals which I have been doing for more than two years, figuring something I did or said in them caused this reaction. Since this coincides with her perusing my site over the last couple of days – at least ten maybe more hits on my pages – she clearly is concerned. Otherwise, she would have left her social media untouched. She may have done this on advice from someone else (there is always someone in the background), the best choice for me is to suspend everything until I get a much clearer sign that she wants me to continue posting. The journal itself has reached the point just prior to her leaving her PR job. But many of the older poetry journal items are just getting to the point when...

  I had planned to take the train to a meeting in Bayonne last night, but when the schools suspended after hour programs, I decided maybe the meeting might get cancelled as well, and the last thing I wanted to do was wade through the storm waters to arrive at City Hall to find the doors locked and the security guy telling me to go home. So, I got to sit home and listen as the wind howled outside, and the rain swept across our quiet street, drenching anything and anybody who dared to make the trek out of doors. Fortunately, the internet remained up and running since I’m in season six of the X-Files, a tribute to my best friend, Paulie, who passed away four years ago this month. He always claimed there was truth hidden in each episode, part of his particular variety of insanity which has since become mainstream – hell, this week, a professor from Havard went on a rant about space aliens, proving once again how degraded our education system as become, following up on the heels...

  When she closes her door, I close mine. I don't need a telegraph to get that she's upset. I'm too good at pushing buttons I don't know I'm pushing until way too late, and putting my finger in the dike after I'm already neck deep -- if not in quick sand this time, then just as scary, and so I stop, peer out the peep hole in my door to see if and when it is safe to open up again, if ever, not able to take back what's already posted, but halt the flow until she or someone else tells me its ok to wade out into the water again.   2024 journal menu email to Al Sullivan