A cold rain is going to fall Feb. 3, 2024
Back again.
I have huge gaps in this journal because I still reserve more
sensitive material to handwritten notebooks. While I might scan and post them
eventually, I’m still uncomfortable transcribing them.
It may take a decade for me to feel free enough to do so, by
which time I might have passed off this mortal coil and not have to worry about
it.
This depressing though it inspired by the host of doctors’
appointments I have scheduled over the next month and the fact that once again
I have come down with a cold and had to sleep for 36 hours straight just to
restore my energy levels.
Thursday, I paid a visit to our new digs in Hoboken, where I
got to interact with the other reporters, all of whom are required to be there
at last three days a week.
I’m the old man in the crowd by decades and hate the idea.
I’ve never felt comfortable standing out too much from the
crowd, even though I want my writing and other artistic aspects to do so.
Because I could not get access to my checking account last Sunday
at the Secaucus branch, I strolled up to Washington Street to check the ATM
there, before making my way back to the light rail station for the trip home.
I mostly work at home, which is a bit distracting since I
tend to drift off to my own creations rather than concentrating on the work I
get paid to do.
This has always been a balancing act between what I do for
myself and what I do to make a living. It was much easier when I worked at a baker
or a truck driver or sat in a Fotomat booth when the distinction was clearer
between the two. But as a writer, making my living often drains my personal creativity,
especially on weeks like this when I am ill, and I have to sleep for a while to
build up energy enough to sit at a computer and work.
My walk in the rain the other day may have contributed to my
current condition, rather than the leukemia that I supposedly have.
I hate driving these days, and so require some walking, and expending
energy to get to where I need to go.
Some of the other reporters tend to cover events remotely,
and I do that to some degree as well – for instance the Bayonne Board of
Education meeting last week, which lasted all of 18 minutes and a two minute workshop,
and basically did not provide much in the way of story material. Even driving, I
would have spent 45 minutes getting there and 45 minutes getting back for no
reason.
But it is important to get to other meetings just so that
people get used to seeing my face.
Bayonne is not the same Bayonne I covered 20 years ago, but
rather a jersey City light, where the old and poor are being disposed to make
way for what one leader once called “the walking wallets.”
Too many luxury buildings and too few units of affordable housing,
leaving very little space for those who aren’t walking wallets.
Working part time these days (which is sort of dishonest
since I put in as many hours as I previously did), I could not afford the rents
being charged, even in those units considered more affordable. This makes me
ashamed at how much I complained when my rent in Passaic jumped from $80 a
month to $125, and I still look back at fondness at the $100 per month I paid at
the rooming house in Montclair. I suspect previous generations suffered similar
sticker shock.
It's no wonder there are so many homeless, and how people
might reject minimum wage jobs when no matter how many hours they put in, they
can’t make ends meet.
Life gets more complicated with each passing generation.
While I complain about how complicated our lives our with people constantly
being brainwashed by their smart phones, I suppose radio and TV had the same
impact on those who came before me with George Orwell accurately portraying them
as mind control.
I truly admire those people I see reading real books on the
train, as if they are the new resistance movement against indoctrination, even
though I’m sure a previous few are reading real books on their smart phones as
well.
Some, of course, are likely students at universities, who
are being subjected to much more aggressive manipulation, and will eventually
become our future leaders – a scary thought and depressing, making me almost
grateful for my current cold that keeps me away from all these instruments of
electronic eavesdropping.
Oh well, upward and onward as they say.
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