AD's Journal 2024

  It’s an election to remember, much like the one that took place twelve years ago, only this one may be more significant as one generation surrenders the reins of power to the next, and we have to accept it, regardless of how ill-equipped we believe the new generation is. Until this point, our generation managed to control the levers of power, or even as that faded, were influential in deciding who would. But we are at the end of an era, a time when our influence hasn’t merely faded, but has evaporated, and we must accept that the next group will operate the world without our being able to have a say in the matter. We may not have seen such a change as this for more than a century, in my great great grandfather’s time when the last of the dutch and English influence made way for the arrival of new immigrants from such places as Italy, Germany and elsewhere, and the world was carved up to fit their needs, as the Dutch and others slowly faded away into dust. For me, personal...

  My best friend Pauly would be having a field day with the current reports about outer space had he survived beyond 2020. He didn’t die of COVID, but a quick-striking heart attack, most likely caused by years of cannabis use. He was always up on the latest bit of space gossip, which explained his fascination with X-Files, chem trails, Area 51 and such. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been getting reports of a comet that is not acting like a comet and some believe may be an alien space craft, and a skull like structure on the surface of Mars. Scientists are telling us that an asteroid is going to hit the moon, perhaps as early as the early 2030s, which will cause havoc on earth and could destroy most of our satellites. This may explain why we (whomever we is – this government or that – have been trying to relocate other asteroids using high explosives. If all this sounds a bit far fetched, a Chicken Little kind of fairy tale, I fully understand. We have moved beyond re...

 We got just a bit of snow today, a flurry that dusted the roof of the shed in our back yard, and left bits of white on the still-green remnants of grass. Snow is a four letter word, and yet, I’m still nostalgic about it, as we stagger into the Christmas season and I still have fond memories of a time when the holidays meant something, people still in my life that made it special. This is also Veterans Day with all the associated events I’m still scrambling to cover, with the head of the local VFW still asking me for a picture of me when I was in service, which I am reluctant to give him since I spent so little time there. I’m still shocked at the promotion I got when I left, and the medal they awarded me because my service came during a time of war. I’m not like my ancestors – Robert and William – who fought in wars at the start of the last century, one in the Army, one in the Navy, both meeting up oddly enough on a battle field in Mexico at one point, an unexpected reunion ...

   The cold came with a bang this week after we got remnants of a massive hurricane over Jamaca. Not frigid, not yet, but with enough of a bite that I’m forced to put on layers of clothing. This is always a nostalgic time of year, after Halloween and headed into the holiday season, when I start reminiscing about family and friends, all mostly gone. Worse is the fear that the world is changing drastically, and that we are seeing the next generation take charge after so many decades of having the baby boomers in control of it all, not by our outstanding philosophy so much as by the sheer weight of numbers. Now as we fade, a less populous generation takes charge, filled with all of the misguided notions we somehow managed to abandon. We have no way to know if these kids who are so infatuated with socialism will survive to learn from their mistakes the way we have or will they do inreparable harm to the world as we know it, turning it all in shitshow from which something...

   Got Puffin’s ashes back from the vet yesterday when I brought one of our outside cats in for surgery. Puffin was fading for a few weeks before she became to weak to fight my getting her treatment, though even after she savagely bit my hand as I tried to get her into the carrier, she was already on death’s door, one last act of defiance before accepting fate. She did not have a happy life, even though she was part of the last batch of outside kittens we managed to collect while still living in our old house, and because we had run out of names after having fostered so many feral cats, she, her sister and her brother took on the names of Muffin, Puffin and Onion. Muffin was a long haired tiger colored cat, who outgoing personality managed to get him adopted right away, while Puffin, a short haired tiger cat and her sister, Onion, a black cat, were so unsociable they would not come out of hiding except for meals, barely socializing with our long time cats, except Ginger ...

   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 ...

  “It’s all or nothing,” my childhood friend once told me in describing how he gambles, at the race track, in Atlantic City casinos, or for that matter, life itself. “Why hold back when you really have nothing to lose.” By this he meant if he couldn’t get what he wanted, couldn’t win the jackpot, then he’s already lost and keeping something in reserve seemed stupid to him. Sop was the idea of settling for something less than what he wanted in the first place. “What’s the point?” he told me. “If you don’t go for it all; you won’t get it all. I asked him what if he ended up getting nothing at the end of the game. He just shrugged. “We’re all going to end up in the same place eventually,” he said. “Then it won’t matter if you’ve won or lost, rich or poor. Part of the fun is knowing you might break out at any moment, get something you want, and if you lose it again, who cares? At least, you tried, and maybe got it once, on your own terms.” How all this panned out for him ...

  My one-time best friend and co-editor of our underground literary magazine from back in the 1980s once claimed some artists do not come into their own until after the age of 40 (or 50), while others get their glory while young, often dying young or burning out later. He might have come up with this theory because he had plunged into his 30s and still had not yet made a dent in the literary world, despite betting accolades throughout his early life, teachers in elementary school singing his praises, teachers in high school claiming he would become the next great poet. Despite my skepticism, he may be right about some of it. Some people simply find happiness later in life that had eluded them when they were young. Perhaps the joy is greater for having been forced to wait for it for so long. I would not know since I’ve not achieved greatness when young or when old. I miss the struggle from back when I assumed I would achieve something, those days when I lived in a cold water...

We’re between storms – if that’s what we’ve been getting, snow turning to rain, followed by a chill. Someone filed a complaint about my backup Facebook account, causing them to shut it down for a whole day while they investigated whether or not I violated community standards (whatever that means). Since that site only has four followers and I use it only if I have an issue with my main account (I lost access to my original main account), it puzzles me as to who would want to complain and cause such havoc. (I suspect I know but it’s pointless to go on about it here) Not a problem since the investigation proved nothing wrong. Took a stroll down Bergenline Avenue this morning after sending off my stories for work, narrow sidewalk, thick with people, but hardly the same place Hank and I used to visit during its dirty heyday of the 1970s, no more strip clubs, no Transfer Station, no band Blondie. Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show also started out here, the guitarist of which has si...

More snow turned to rain, which is just fine with me, even if it spoils Friday’s Magical Mystery Tour to Point Pleasant. I know it sounds stupid to go to a shore town in winter, but summer trips are worse. Point Pleasant has a lot of history for me, especially when my uncle moved there and became the manager of a marina there in 1977. But our gang made a couple of trips there prior to that, especially after I bought the 1960 Chevy Impala in 1975 and Pauly convinced me to visit our friend, Alf, who was managing some bungalows there, and had invited a girl we all knew years earlier from Little Falls. Naturally, Pauly absconded with the girl, locking Alf out of his own room for a little monkey business. Normally, our Friday trips take us west or north, but with the snow, we dare not risk a trip in either direction until spring. Most likely, we’ll be heading up to Woodstock once the weather gets better to visit some abandoned hotel we read about. Until then, we’ll go to closer ...

   I found the old email in my files and sent a message even though I knew the man who owned it died more than a decade ago. It was more than a shock that I got a message back, not from him, of course (that being too much of a chore even for the internet), but from his second wife (second exwife I should say) who has retained it and his facebook page all this time. He was one of my childhood buddies, who I had attended elementary school with, gone to scout camp with, and with whom I had worked in the theater as an usher, teaching him how to pick up girls. His mother hated me, and eventually threw me out of their house when she came back from work early to find I had gotten him drunk. In scouts, we had done weekend camping trips together where I also taught him all the wrong things, drinking and such. We attended different high schools but he often came over to my house to hang out (drinking and if we could find girls other things). I lost touch with him after I w...

  Tomorrow is my ex-wife’s birthday. She already held her party over the weekend, inviting all her closest friends. She said she wanted to see them all since she’s not sure she’ll get to see them again if she waits. I guess there’s logic in this. But then, any one of us could go at any moment, from getting run over by old age or a Mack truck. Unfortunately, we’ve reached an age when – if newspapers still existed – we’d be perusing the obits to look for familiar names – or as the old joke says to make sure our names aren’t there. Birthdays have always been important to her, even back when we were teens, and marked significant moments in time, such as when we were out in Hollywood, and later while in New York waiting for the birth of our daughter. She always expected presents, regardless of how impoverished we were, although this year, she gave all her friends presents instead, nothing fancy, just a token of her gratitude for still having them in her life. I wasn’t in...

  It’s been a bad two weeks. My home computer, which has been going blue screen for weeks, finally bit the dust. Luck alone allowed me to off load the files on the hard drive before the computer ceased booting up at all. But I lost programing. Worse, I lost access to several key websites, including my original Facebook. I managed to get another computer and have been reassembling the web stuff, some of which may well be lost forever. Perhaps more troubling are the medical issues. Even though I was scheduled for my yearly physical in March, my primary doctor decided to hold my prescriptions hostage until I saw him, which I did finally on Monday. He was concerned about my blood pressure which has been problematic in the past. When I got there, my weight had moderately increased, but the medication kept the blood pressure in check. The blood test, however, showed a jump in my cholesterol levels – too much cheese and red meat. He recommended a low-fat high protein diet....

    The Dylan movie still haunts me. Maybe it's because I always wanted to be him, or to live the life he lived. As with the Beatles, his music made up the sound track of my life. I didn't like his first album, but then, I suspected, neither did he. But Free Wheelin knocked me over. I was 13 years old, living in my grand parent's house, not yet knowing that I already had history with Dylan since my mother was in Graystone Park during Dylan's visits to Woody Gutheri – and it is possible I passed him during many visits to see my mother without knowing it. When I heard Dylan's music I convinced myself that I might someday become a folk singer, and tried my best to learn the songs on Free wheelin on my uncle's jumbo Guild guitar. In those days and up until the early 1970s, no coffee house performer could avoid doing Dylan's music – or for that matter many of the other performers that once made up the heart of the Greenwich Village scene in the 1950...

  The snow came later than expected, yet ended sooner with less accumulation than many of the masters of our universe predicted. Still, we got the deep chill, freezing the remnants so that where we failed to shovel turned into ice. The storm did not stop me from the sunday night ritual of chinese food, a place called Yummy on 48 the Street a block up from Broadway – which we frequented even during the year of COVID. That was early in the storm. But the panic had already set into the populas. On saturday, hundreds of people crowded the shopright, leaving long lines as they stocked up for the end of the world. Sundday, midday, the panic was worse as the first flakes struck, a bumper car ride might have reflected the kind of mania people displayed wheeling their catts down narrow ailses. But by evening, when I took my keep-warm bag with me, the streets were mostly emply of cars and pedestrians, and I strolled over the gradually covered sidewalks to the shop, and then back, feelin...

 

   Perhaps it was Paulie's last joke from beyond the grave I had planned to spend the day the library he directed while I waited for my kitten to get neutered   I'd even checked the library website to make certain of the hours then after dropping the kitten off I killed time revisiting the old library building and the island where Paulie had lived finally after going the wrong direction in search of the new library building I also briefly went to the old library building where Paulie had started his career and then took pictures The police sign above the downstairs door had faded since they had also moved the police headquarters to a new building elsewhere in town I also briefly paused near the bar where Hank Paulie and I had gotten drunk back in the 1970s well in search of a house where Rick lived on the lake and where Paulie would eventually move into well he was director and of course it would have the ominous name of 13 Willow Lane Although the amusement...

   I can't recall exactly the last time I came here before 2010 for sure since the library was still a library then this aside from our magical mystery tour last year when we paid this part of the planet a visit though Paulie with long gone by then Back the last time I came here, when Paulie was still alive, he was still director though he no longer lived in the house on the lake We came for Memorial Day at the firehouse in 2002 when he, John and Garrick played and then again two years later for the picnic outdoors with a full band -- that later played the gig at the grasshopper in cedar Grove before the band broke up again for the last time as it turned out This building, the old library,   when it's still served as the town's library, also served as a police station in a town that has since outgrown the old library and old police station, still small when Pauly moved to this neck of the woods in 1985 A tiny building that at the time with Police department on t...