AD's Journal 2024

  (posted from my phone)   perhaps I always suspected if I did not know that she had a substance abuse problem she had all the classic signs although I thought when I met her she had already overcome most of them specially the rumors of cocaine the problem is that at the end of her time in our little county she was associated with some of the most provocative Mobsters apparently and where Mobsters go so this abusive of substance a recent post saying that she is now 3 years clean says a lot about her determination to make a new life for herself although what surprises me is I thought she had overcome these issues back in 2016 rather than 2021 her move out of the county to Manhattan and a prestigious job on Union square seem to be extreme positive sign that she had turned her life around now from our latest post it is clear she's still struggled and wasn't until she made her Way South where she managed to pull the pieces together into some sort of positive mosaic ...

    so we found some bears in Bear mountain.   they just happen to be in a zoo, animals rescued who could no longer survive in the wild . They mingled with other answers we found there this was our first trip to Bear mountain as opposed to all of those previous trips through it to some other destination mostly in the past to Woodstock or Kingston we discovered route 9W during the previous trip North not with any destination though we did get within 28 mi of Kingston before we decided to turn back then got lost but during this trip we saw magnificent vistas of the Hudson River we needed to return to for closer inspection this time we drove until we saw the signs for Bear mountain State Park and piloted up through a road that climbed away from the river, a severe disappointment as was the collection of buildings and huge lawns we eventually encountered, not to mention the $10 charge to park when we paid in made our way past the building with the merry-go-round...

It was that dream between waking and sleep that comes just before the real waking, the memory of which lingers on beyond dawn, haunting, physical, realer than real, heavy endowed with all those feelings that the brain filters out during ordinary consciousness. She wasn’t in the dream per se, at least, not the she I’m talking about. She doesn’t look like the she in the dream, the she from back then, blonde, not brunette, shorter than the memory person, yet with the same intense stare and deep, dark, mysterious eyes, And because this dream she was with someone else, I naturally got jealous. She wasn’t in the dream from the start. The dream began in The Bronx of all places, in an apartment filled with the contemporary version of hippies, and I was there with my guitars and my music, and my cameras, playing a bit before they raised serious questions about whether or not I liked Elvis, and when I said, I did, they accused him of being racist and asked us to leave. I struggled to f...

  I don’t at all Recall a time When I felt Your hands on me, The stroke of Your fingers On my flesh, The taste of Your tongue In my mouth, I don’t at all Recall a time When those fingers Soothed me, One slow stroke After another, Until I replied, I can still feel it, If not quite remember it, The tenderness, Seated side by side With everything Either of us might Ever want, Within easy reach, The slow, steady Progress of My forefinger and thumb Popping off Button after button On your blouse, Until they fall out Into the palms Of my hands, To caress, To pinch the tips of, Where I feel you Touch me, If only I could Recall it all, Maybe do it all Again.   2024 journal menu email to Al Sullivan

   I sit on a stoop of a building that used to be a convent, next to what used to be a Catholic school, across from a church that is soon to be demolished to make way for still more luxury housing, bulldozers already pointed in its direction from a lot of rubble that used to be two family houses. This world changing the way it did when my great great grandfather came from Italy to destroy the Dutch farms to pave the way for the Italian immigrants flooding into old Lodi to work in the mills, he and his sons helping to establish churches that would accommodate these families, and to build one family box houses where they could live. From then until recently, all seemed the same, the dreams of people who wanted a car in each garage and a chicken in each pot, and a piece of the American Dream that including a home of their own. Even back in Lodi, the bulldozer roll over the ruins of those dreams like Nazi tanks, destroying more than just buildings, but also a way of life, ...

   She hurt herself dismounting, a tragedy she caught on video, haunting images of pain that go beyond the physical discomfort. Whatever goes on in her life, this served as her refuge, a place she can return to where the outside world does not intrude, and on this day   (after things went well for her last time) disaster struck, a moment when she nearly fell out of the saddle then on top of this ,her coming down too hard on an already injured leg, forcing her trainer to bring over something so she could sit on, to wait for the pain to subside long enough for her to hobble to her car for the depressing ride home. The silhouette of her seated and the pain so potent, I could almost feel what she felt though the deeper injury comes to that part of her that wonders what she did to have fate do this to her, and drawing back slightly -- will she be able to climb back into the saddle again. Is the injury that bad? Will she be brave enough to chance it again. Can she end...

   It feels weird I’ve spent the last two years spilling my guts out about someone I have not seen in over a decade and am not likely to ever seen again. There is no communication, no texts, no emails, no phone calls, no comments on my blog or my Facebook page. So, I have no clue as to what this person thinks about my journal from back then. While I know she reads some of it, maybe all of it, I don’t know who else is. I don’t know if my comments from a decade ago and my assumptions are only pissing her off all the more, or if she wants me to cease. This is a bigger vacuum than back in the day when I thought I could detect a comment or two installed in her poetry (this may be pure fantasy) and believed we had some poetic conversation – not all positive, but not all negative either. I’m coming to a point in posting old journals where I had intended to stop, at that point a decade ago when I last saw her. I didn’t stop writing about her after her departure, and some...