AD's Journal 2024

   What happened exactly Friday night, I’m at a loss to explain. The impact, pushing me deeper into depression, was obvious, in particular the silence – like a horrible storm cloud hanging over me – by Pauly and the band members, suggested their fear to say anything about it. How does someone describe disaster: the end of a band that had barely gotten started. The first moments came well before we got to the club, when Pauly, back the house he lived in up on the mountain, held up several vests, asking me to choose which one was best. “The first half of the night I’ll wear a sweater,” he said, unveiling his white wool sweater with a six-inch blue line down each side.   “Then, when things really get cooking, I’ll need one of these.” By which he meant once of two vests, one made of corduroy, though both had silk backing. I picked this one since it seem better fit with Pauly’s persona. Unlike other members of the band, Pauly tended to dress conservative from p...

    “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans,” says a paraphrase of a John Lennon song, who stole the saying from a poet whose name I have forgotten. This is never so true as to the events going on with the federal government these days as the new administration makes massive cuts to funding of not-for-profits and other organizations. Just when you think life is secure, when you have all your ducks in a row (as the old cliché goes), something mucks up the works (another cliché) and you end up scrambling to put your life back together, but don’t quite yet know how.   Although correct in theory, the idea of reducing the work force has an unexpected impact on the people involved. People make plans; they assume they can get on with their lives securely. They believe that if they had put enough time into their careers, they will be rewarded, and perhaps get on pursuing their own interest, dreams they had since childhood for the first time poss...

   Puffin’s dead. She was one of three kittens we brought in at our old house in Jersey City. So standoffish, we could not get her adopted the way we did her overly affection brother Muffin. A tiger striped short-haired domestic, she remained unaffectionate towards humans right up to the point when we were forced to put her down yesterday. She liked cats more than humans in particular our eldest cat, Ginger, who she cuddled up to frequently. She was not particularly close to her sister, Onion, although there were times when she got Onion wrapped up in her plots against us. They had their own secret language and when we heard them talking together, we had to watch out. Puffin did not have a happy life. We managed to get her into a vet as a young kitten for her initial shots, but could not catch her to get her fixed, which became a problem when we brought in Junior, who we found abandoned on the street a block away from our current house. While we got Junior his ...