Planet Unfitness

I'm not one of those people who finds working out some sort of odious chore.  I try to go as often as I can, and Planet Fitness offers a pretty good deal for me - there is one a block from my apartment in Inwood, and another one at Duffield near where I work.  For twenty bucks a month, I can't complain.  Oh, no, wait - I CAN complain - because for the second time, today I had to walk the fuck out of there because the music was loud enough to interfere with the instrumentation of low-flying aircraft.

I'm not a person who's opposed to loud music.  I have a friend who I sometimes call the human tuning fork because he's as sensitive to noise as a person possibly can be.  I'm not in that category, although I do have a good ear if I do say so myself.  But there is a point at which a person has to say ambient music is turned up too loud to be comfortable.  In my gym, that would be so loud that a person can't hear their iPod through their headphones even when it's cranked up to the maximum and they're at risk of a seizure.

Usually I don't have this problem at the gym, but the first time it happened I was blithely told by the gym staff that they had obliged a customer who was working out by turning the music up "so he could get really pumped!"  Indeed.  Wanting to be collegial, I went upstairs, got on the elliptical machine, and, sure enough, could not hear my iPod no matter what bleeding volume I turned it up to.  I finally whipped out my cell phone, called the downstairs from the upstairs, and screamed into the phone "I'm upstairs on one of your elliptical machines - tell me you don't think this is too loud!" and then I held it up and let them listen for a second.  When I got back on the phone, they agreed to lower the fucking volume.  Case closed, or so I thought.

Today I get in there looking for my usual workout, and I hear Annie Lennox.  So far so good.  But I hear her from outside the front doors, which is not so good.  I go upstairs and find that, yes, the volume is so loud that I can't hear my own tunes.  When I go downstairs to the counter, the 19 year old running the place tells me that she doesn't have the authority to turn the music down and, anyway, there is a "standard setting" that they're told to put the music at.  I told her this was funny, since I work out there five times a week and it's almost never that loud.  She quickly explains that, well, they keep it lower than normal.  Oh, why is that I wonder?  Because people fucking COMPLAIN perhaps?  I asked the chick when someone with authority over the radio is planning to come in, and she says she is the only one there.  So, apparently, she has the authority to lock and unlock the place, and monitor the safety of patrons on three commercial floors, but has no dominion over the all-important tunage.

To the rancid tones of the ubiquitous Coldplay, I walked out.  I was pissed that I had to walk out, pissed at myself for not working out, and pissed enough and depressed enough to just go back home and spend the rest of the day watching movies and sleeping.  I watched the Atom Egoyan movie "Chloe" with Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, and the (also ubiquitous) Amanda Seyfried.  Worth watching I would say, as are most of Egoyan's films.  He's the only filmmaker deeply invested in the human emotional landscape.  We're never going to see a 3D movie from Atom Egoyan.

I also watched an animated film called "The Secret of Kells" which was really beautiful and well done, and didn't get wide release here because, well, it wasn't in 3D.  You know, if we're raising a whole generation of kids watching 3D, I wonder if it will make it even harder to get them to listen to adults - in addition to screaming at them to clean their rooms, their parents are going to have to swing their crooked fingers in and out of their kids' personal space and nearly poke them in the eye to get their attention.

Anyway, besides fucking around writing in this blog, I did fire off a nasty note to the folks at Planet Noise Pollution asking them to check the OSHA rules on decibel levels in the workplace.  Ambient music should be just that - the definition of ambient is "surrounding" - it doesn't mean overwhelming, distracting, or fucking balls-out annoying.  And speaking of my upstairs neighbor, she's been out all day and doesn't seem to be home even now, so perhaps I'll take advantage of the relative peace and go back to sleep.  I have to get ready for an upcoming week of work - talk about fucking annoying.  And if I go to Planet Fitness tomorrow and the music is still outrageously loud, perhaps I'll get 3D on somebody's ass.

St. John the Divine - Back to My Favorite Cathedral

Is it pretentious to have a favorite cathedral?  Probably, as I didn't have one growing up in suburban New Jersey.  We had malls, not cathedrals, although malls are religious mecca for people who shop at Forever 21 and Spencer Gifts.  In our home town mall there was a store someone very unfortunately decided to call "Little Elegance", and that's precisely what it had.  Plastic flowers did abound.  But New York city, particularly my 'hood, is not devoid of stores with silly names.  In Washington Heights, there is a store called "Everything Stationery" - which, of course, my first glance told me was "Everything Stationary" and I envisioned walking in there and seeing everything, including the humans, glued to the floor.

Anyway, I finished the latest draft of my play earlier than I expected to this week, and was faced with some actual time to myself, so I thought I'd go grab some late lunch at 1018 and then hang around the cathedral at St. John the Divine in the hour or so I had before it closed.  I hadn't been down to SJTD in a while, and wanted to check in, light a candle in the poet's corner (more pretentiousness, right?  Can you be a girl and still be a wanker?) and take some pictures with my newly repaired digital camera.  Imagine my delight at finding this very cool and creepy video art installation set up in a tent in one of the chapels there.  It was fascinating - I took a little video clip.  It made up for the fact that SJTD has no air conditioning - at least not during regular weekday hours.  I can't imagine the priests and deacons running around in full drag with no AC and 91 degrees out.  They're not exactly the Cistercians.  I tried to upload the video in here but am having a bit of trouble.

The heat is really getting to people, too.  There was some dork on 42nd and 9th trying to navigate his mini cooper past a traffic cop who, like most traffic cops, was creating more of a problem than he was solving.  Anyway, he was motioning for this guy to drive against the light - why they do this I have no idea - and the guy refused.  So the cop kept waving him ahead and waving him ahead until he finally relented and? nearly got clipped by a bus.  So the guy screams "Fuck you!" to the cop at the top of his lungs.

My friend Aash has been in L.A. the past couple of months, and she asked me if people in this hood are still acting like knuckleheads - chicken bones in the lobby, loud music cranked out of cars they can't afford etc. - I assured her that things here are the same.  In L.A. apparently everyone is pretty fairly civilized.  She says she will miss it when she comes back here.  I have to say, I live in this 'hood for one very basic reason - cheap rent.  If I had to worry about the behavior up here, you know I'd be in trouble. I wish I could afford to live near the Cathedral, but alas...

Alas.  Pretentious again.

Somebody's Butt-print

There are a lot of things about this neighborhood that I find a little less than normal.  But this morning I actually saw something I hadn't seen before in nearly 24 years of living here.  Somebody left an ass-print on our glass front door.

The logistics of doing this vulgar thing must have been a little complicated - the glass part of our front door is about six feet off the ground, so it not only means that someone had to drop their drawers in my lobby, it also means that someone ELSE had to spray paint their butt, and then lift them up and stick them, cheeks out, up ONTO the door.

Weirdly, I looked for a picture on google images to illustrate the concept of "ass print" and found too many to count.  This one, aside from the color choice (ours was yellow) pretty much says it all.  I would have taken a picture of our own objet d'art, but the battery on my Canon just died.

Seeing all of these butt pix made me realize how little imagination human beings have.  From the invention of the Xerox machine all the way back through the Renaissance, the human response to the question "what is art and, yet, funny?" was "butt cheeks!"  It makes me wonder why archaeologists haven't unearthed the imprint of some Egyptian tomb-worker's bare booty, done up in burnt ochre, right up on the wall with the hieroglyphics.

Speaking of butts, just came back from the Planet Fitness up the street from me.  I'm still steadily losing weight, but not really fast enough to get me back in normal-sized clothes before the end of the summer.  I only seem to drop about four pounds a month, and for someone who's as overweight as I am, that's really kind of glacier speed.  But I have to keep telling myself this is just the way I have to take care of my health now, and there's no return to the telly-booze-pizza life that almost put me in the hospital.  Gotta keep trying.

I was going to go out and get the new Jules Pfeiffer book.  Almost done reading the Joe Papp biography "Free for All" which is totally amazing - my favorite format for a biography nowadays, which is the David Hajdu method of gathering interviews and then editing like a madman.  This one was written by a guy named Kenneth Turan, and it's a fascinating look at the work of a fascinating man.  As I say, I was GOING to go out and get this book, but the skies are darkening and we're supposed to get a huge thunderstorm.  This is unfortunate for a couple of reasons, but most unfortunate because it's 3 PM, there's no food in the house, I'm starving - and I always feel TERRIBLE if I ask a delivery guy to come out in the rain and bring me something.  I guess Jules Pfeiffer and food will have to wait.

So since I've already put in some hours this morning on rewrites, and already gone to the gym,  I'm going to be putting my butt-print on the sofa for a little while, waiting for the rain to come and go.

Great Fire burning

I can't believe the last time I wrote in this blog it was snowing - and not just snowing but a huge blizzard.  Today it was 96 fucking degrees out, and I had to alternate running errands and going to the gym with just staying home and having a lie down.  Thank God the air conditioner has been holding up, or I would have been completely freaking out.

They've just opened a new restaurant and a new wine bar, both on Dyckman street, in the past few weeks.  I checked out the restaurant, "Papacitos", and was pleasantly surprised.  I read online that the service was crappy and the food just run of the mill, but the food was actually pretty good.  Not a lot of healthy choices, but once I'd scraped the "Oaxaca Cheese" - (I didn't know Oaxaca was known for its cheese) off of the grilled corn on the cob, the chicken mole was moist and fab, and the guacamole was absolutely perfect in my opinion.

Guacamole is the perfect food if you're on a diet - as long as you don't eat it with corn chips.  I know that sounds weird, but that's the way I live my life lately.  If you just dive into the guac with a fork, it's just as nice, and all the fat is the good (monosaturated) kind.  Unlike the vile over-spiced mole at chains like Chipotle, this was perfectly spiced, cut with just enough lemon, and full of red onions and tomatoes.  And mole sauce is just as legal - there's no fat in it at all, just a load of flavor, and it goes great with chicken of course.

When it's this hot, eating is the last thing I want to do, and when I don't feel like eating it's newsworthy, trust me.  The hood is very much a ghost town, and I love that about July 4th weekend.  I can get into any restaurant I want to go to, the stores aren't crowded (unless you're stupid enough to go to Macy's which is always tourist central), and even the movie theaters are empty.  Unfortunately, this is probably the worst weekend for movies I've ever seen in my life.  We have the requisite selection of kiddy movies, all now in 3D.  Pass.  Then we have the latest Twilight movie, which provides the perfect combination of execrable dialogue, paper-thin characters, and the horrid grey-wash cinematography that seems so in and hip these days.  And let's not forget Robert Pattinson, the romantic hero character who's dark, poetic, troubled, and virtually humorless - he'll be fucking up an entire new generation of young women by fixating their burgeoning libidoes on the emotionally unavailable young men in their lives.  Great.  Thanks Stephanie Whats-her-face.  They should send her their therapy bills.

And then there's "Cyrus", which stars the guy I think of as "The other fat guy."  Please.

I was thinking of bagging the gym this morning in favor of walking down the West Side Highway - but then I checked the temperature and, at 7 AM, it was already almost 80 degrees.  Forget that.  Air-conditioned gym for me.  I've lost two pounds this week, which is great - except, with temps in the 90's for the rest of the week, it's probably all water.  Oh well.  I'll take what I can get.

An Inconvenient Snow

Snowploughs were out unburying Inwood again after an even more annoying snowstorm than the last one.  It snowed for something like 36 hours, and though the streets are clear for cars and taxis, the sides of the streets, as you can see here, are clogged with snowdrifts.  Each corner has it's own man-made lake of coffee-colored sludge - all of New York turned into a giant dirt Slurpee.

Just the same, the trees look pretty covered in snow, so I took this shot standing on the corner of Dyckman and looking down Broadway toward Fort Tryon Park.

I've been pretty pre-occupied with getting my knee better after surgery, so I haven't been doing a lot of writing, but I'm please with myself today for getting through four hours of work on "Knock", the new play I'm working on.  As is usual with me, I've written the first 20 or so pages, and the last 20 or so pages, and now I'm working on graduating and balancing the tension in between so that it becomes a cohesive draft.  Which makes picking through this middle section like picking through Manhattan after a blizzard in a pair of cheap sneakers.

I heard about some guy that got killed yesterday walking through Central Park.  He was hit by a huge tree branch that collapsed under the weight of all this snow.  The first thing I thought was "Oh, well, I guess when it's your time to go it's your time to go"  And then the second thing I thought was that the Earth was trying to kill us.  Finally.  Seriously.  Think about it.

Killer whales at Sea World are not just suddenly eating their trainers - we recently discover that they've actually made a habit out of it.  Trees are attacking passers-by.  Haiti, Chicago, and Chile each has an earthquake, D.C. gets four feet of snow, and 15 countries are, as of this morning, on alert for a tsunami.  I think the Earth may just be sick of our shit.  Any second now they are going to discover that the Earth has started rotating in the opposite direction and flung everybody in Australia into the Pacific.

And why is the Earth trying to kill us?  Republicans.  The Earth has been watching the Republicans on CNN saying stupid shit like "If it's global WARMING then why is there so much SNOW?" and the Earth has been sitting back going "Holy Christ, they STILL don't get it!  I thought they were getting it when I saw that Gore guy get the Oscar, but they STILL don't GET IT!  I am SO going to VOLCANO their asses.  AAAARRRRRGHHHHHH!"  Cue the ride of the Valkyrie while the Earth blows molten lava all over the Southern half of the United States.

One of the things I do dislike about getting this much snow on weekends is I can't easily get out to the West Side highway to take a long walk.  Last weekend I was able to get through four miles, and follow it with 40 minutes on the treadmill at home the next day, but I kind of rocked my knee too much, and my physical therapist gave me a little shit for it.  I've revised my regimen so that I'm just doing the 40 minutes at a time (the four miles usually takes me over two hours) and watching Battlestar Galactica on the portable DVD player.

Maybe that's why I'm feeling kind of apocalyptic lately.  Between Battlestar Galactica, Caprica (which I Lo-Ooooove) and the lack of sunny skies, I've been quite a crab-ass.  Lucky I got to see Robby last night because he always makes me laugh.

When I got home last night, I discovered something in my front courtyard that I've never seen before - for those of you who are wondering what an apartment-sized snowman looks like, here you go.

I'm not sure who's responsible for el Frostinito, but in the 23 years I've lived here it is an original idea, so thanks, whoever you are.  It certainly is cute.

Another good thing about NYC when it snows is that it's really not all that cold.  I don't know what I'd do if I lived somewhere like Minnesota, where it's 20 below all through March.  Or in Maine, where my buddy Wanny lives.  She loves Maine, and it really is, as she puts it, "seductive in the Summer' - but in the winter you have to be really into the snowsports and the cold.  Luckily, her kids were all born in Maine or Michigan, so the cold doesn't seem to bother them in the slightest, and her husband is a Coloradan.  Me, I'm a klutz, so better the dirt Slurpee on the corner then a patch of ice that's going to take me and my endoskeleton down hard and nasty.  Bring on 40 degrees or more, for God's sakes - it's almost Easter.

I'm going to jump on the treadmill now and get my walk in - when we last left Battlestar Galactica, Captain Adama had just completed the hyperjump from the middle of the Cylon Battle and announced the colonies sojourn to Earth.  I'm hoping when they find it in the last DVD it won't be covered with molten lava, cockroaches, and dead Republicans.  That would suck.

Snowbombed

This is what it looked like outside of my fire escape at around noon today.  

Yesterday I walked into work, oblivious to whatever the news had to offer as I like to start my mornings quiet - no tv, no news, no music, just get dressed and get the hell out the door - and I took it with a grain when my co-workers told me I'd be smart to stay home today because we were going to get SNOWBOMBED.  Well, as we all know, we got snowbombed and I worked from home today and am  now going stir-crazy from being stuck in my squalid apartment for 25 hours and counting.

When I got home last night I stopped by the Park View and grabbed some dinner, because I hate going grocery shopping on an empty stomach.  I also knew that since I don't cook food in this apartment, it would probably be my last hot meal for a day or two.  Since we were expecting today's snow event, I figured I'd stock up on some supplies.  Most normal people were buying milk, bread, eggs, normal stuff. I came home with my version of supplies, which was Skaansen pickled herring in sour cream and onions, black olives, fruit cocktail, tunafish, Mug diet root beer, and a couple of cans of LeSeur peas which are good because they don't taste like regular peas.  Nothing works better to combat a case of cabin fever than a good jar of pickled herring in sour cream and onions.  Okay, nothing works to combat a case of cabin fever.  Sleeping, maybe.

Since I screwed up my knee, running around in the snow, particularly since I don't own a pair of boots, would be incredibly stupid of me.  So until the sun comes out again, I'll be working from right here - day job by day, messing around online at night.

My friend Robby told me that when he arrived home this evening he saw that the pub on the corner was filled to bursting with happy, snowy drunkards.  One of them decided to show his whimsical side and lie down in the street to make a snow angel.  Unfortunately, he was in the bus lane.  His drunkard friends barely got him slid over to the gutter before he was happy, snowy roadkill.

I really wish I could ring up the Garden Cafe and ask them to deliver some dinner, but I would feel like it would be incredibly bad karma to expect some poor delivery guy to come out in a foot and a half of snow just to bring me a seared tuna wrap and some field greens.  And besides, I'd have to tip the guy a ton, and I'm not feeling all that generous right now.

I was actually just in the Cafe on Sunday with my friend Aina, who was over from Ireland this week.  Say "hello" to Aine:

She was only over for a little while to take a course out in Jersey in cranio-sacral massage, and now she's back in Dublin, where I hope she's tucked up beside a nice roaring fire with a blanket around her and a hot whiskey.  I really miss her a lot since she's moved back over there.  She's a great one for an "auld chat", as she says, and she's always having adventures.

I'm hoping to get over to Dublin to visit with her in the spring.  Another reason to be a bit tight with money for once in my life - I need a real vacation soon.  Two weeks to just hack around and have some fun.

It's easy to dream about spring when you're under a pile of snow up here.  I can hear the ho upstairs yelling at her four year old grandson right  now.  The kid is hyperactive at the best of times, and when he's stuck inside four walls on a snowy day he's your worst nightmare.  For the past hour he's been basically tear-assing around the apartment like a demented goose while his grandmother tries to grab him, hold him down, and force feed him some Nyquil to get him to go to bed.   I've said it before and I'll say it again right here and right now - if she'd just gotten her silly ho daughter some birth control pills...

This weekend coming up is Valentine's Day, and this year's celebration is going to be just as exciting and heartwarming as last year's was - last year, of course, I was battling the flu, a broken computer, and my Mom's obsession with Lifetime Television for (Elderly) Women.  This year I plan a whirlwind weekend doing Mom's taxes.  It's also time to trim down the four rose bushes in her back yard so they won't grow like totem poles this summer, and make home made broth and soups for her so that she doesn't have to cook as much.

Yeah, okay, I don't mean to sound pathetic.  I would love to tell you that me and my Insignificant Other are planning something cheesy and fabulous, but everyone who knows me knows I'm a bad liar so I won't even front.  And I've never been the kind of woman that men buy flowers and cards for anyway.  On the rare occasion I've been given a gift I generally just feel like a deer in headlights and start speculating about ulterior motives.   The nicest thing a guy ever bought me was the perfect accompaniment to a dinner I was cooking for him - he brought me a "bouquet" of broccoli.  Quite an adorable fellow, that Dan Jetter.  But we weren't dating, we were just hanging around together. I hope he's married to someone who appreciates him.  And who appreciates broccoli, of course.

It is ever-so-slightly disappointing not to have someone buying me flowers, though.  (The picture on the right is the window of the flower shop up on B'way, north of 207th)  I do love flowers, and I'm glad I can grow them out in Jersey at Mom's because I may never have a house with a yard for myself.  I buy other people flowers for their birthdays because I love choosing them - choosing the arrangements and the blooms and colors.  I love the scent of flowers, too, but I can't grow hyacinth or lily-of-the-valley in Mom's yard anymore because she can't stand the "reek" she says.  Honestly.  Lily-of-the-valley reek?  Mom likes daisies.  They don't assert themselves with vulgar things like scent or wild colors - they just look pretty and cute and kind of sit there brightening up the side of the road as other people race by.  She would have liked me to be a daisy, I think.  She would have liked all three of us sisters to be daisies.  My older sister is a rhododendron - brightly hued and round and impossible to ignore.  My younger sister is a tulip, I think.  Always appropriate in any situation.  Always welcome.

It's been snowing now for fourteen hours, and the part of me that's desperate to get the hell out of the house is now fighting with the part of me that is already in flannel pj's and wondering what's on tv tonight.  Perhaps the world will roust itself out of hibernation tomorrow, go to work, and I'll be able to get a seat at the Park View for a nice, early breakfast.  I'll take a picture of the Christmas tree, which they've inexplicably left up in the median between Dyckman street and the entrance to the Henry Hudson.  What the hell did the Groundhog say again?  Six more weeks?  Jesus.

Cherry Pie and Liverwurst

Recovery from surgery is a very weird thing.  Even if it's a minor surgery, like mine was, you still lose blood and you still have this weird full-body assault to recover from having to do with being put under.  So apparently what you need is sour cherry pie.  Which I just had a little while ago at the Park View.  I didn't go out of the house to get and eat cherry pie, but that's just what kind of happened.

I actually went out of the house to get liverwurst.  There are a couple of reasons you go out of the house at 9 PM on a Saturday to get liverwurst. Since I'm not pregnant, and I'm not German, then I must have iron poor blood resulting from recent surgery.  Thank God I like liverwurst, or I would have been wasting my time.  And the reason I know I have iron poor blood?  Dr. Oz.  Very helpful, that Dr. Oz.

I like watching Dr. Oz because he's always snuggling on fat ladies and making them squeal.  He's a pleasant change from Dr. Phil, who looks like a child molester.  Also, he's very earthy, is Dr. Oz.  If some lady asks what she can do about her excessively smelly feet, he gets down on the floor, takes her shoes off, and smells them.  I'm pretty sure that's how he ended up bonding with Oprah.  Anyway, I'm watching Dr. Oz and this chick is saying how her mother's anemic, so Dr. Oz does his usual Dr. Oz thing and starts pinching on this chick's mother's face to see if she's anemic for real and, duh, she is.  How can he tell?  Her lower eyelids are pink instead of red.  As I normally do when I watch Dr. Oz, I file this away in my brain for future reference.

Then last night I'm out with Robby and Julio watching "Newsical" (http://www.newsicalthemusical.net/Newsical/HOME.html) which, by the way, I totally recommend, it's really funny, and as I'm sitting there doing absolutely nothing, sitting in the dark, watching Newsical, I get really woozy.  Later on when I saw myself in the bathroom mirror at the Galaxy, I looked like Gary Oldman in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula.  Almost fell asleep in the cab on the way home, which is not like me after diner food and caffeine.

This morning I felt better so I started running some errands and realized that woozy was kind of what I was going to be dealing with until further notice.  That's probably because I had this very weird trifecta of blood loss this week - surgery on Monday, bleeding hemorrhoids on Wednesday from the vicodin on Tuesday, and my period on Thursday that I wasn't expecting until Saturday.  So how anemic was I, if I was, in fact, anemic?  I made it home and did the Dr. Oz turn your lower eyelids inside-out test.  My lower eyelids were actually neither red NOR pink.  They were, and still kind of are, the exact color of a manila folder.  I had some really ancient One-A-Day multiple vitamins that happened to have some iron in them, so I took a couple of those.  Then I took a nap hoping that I would feel better when I woke up.  Then, when I woke up, it was nighttime.

I fucking hate when this happens.  I need a weekend nap, and I take one, and then a lazy afternoon suddenly becomes a pitch-black evening where I'm wide awake, yet I'm too tired to do anything much.  And then the craving hit me - I could use some liverwurst.  Liverwurst has iron in it.  Lots of iron in it.  Iron poor blood needs iron in it.  Gotta get to the Fine Fare and score some liverwurst.

In the dark, Inwood looks a lot like a Dominican version of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks."  Especially in the bitter cold, when there are few people milling around.  You have the supermarket, Patrick's Bar, and Albert's Mofongo House which is, according to the Village Voice, the best mofongo in the city, if you like mofongo.  But I didn't need mofongo, nor did I need the "Free Hookah" that Albert's was advertising which I pray to God is not another famous Inwood misspelling.  No.  I needed some liverwurst.  Until I got out in the fresh air where I hadn't been for six or eight hours, and then I decided I needed to sit in the Park View and maybe have some dessert and tea.  Warm sour cherry pie, cold strawberry ice cream, hot tea and the last bitter cold night in January - as I sat and wrote in my journal I felt, for just a little while, like I was in that painting, one of life's loners collecting her thoughts - instead of an anemic loser who's alone on Saturday night shopping for liverwurst.

Came home with a half-pound of the liverwurst, some pickled herring in sour cream, and some candy corn.  I'm not going to eat the candy corn.  Nobody eats candy corn.  I kind of bought it because I like the colors.  And then I lay down on the couch for a while and yapped with Kelvin, who was coming out of the gym in Teaneck.

It's 18 degrees out there right now in the hood, and I wonder what's happening out there on Broadway while I sit in here in my overheated one-bedroom trying to decide if "The Hangover" is actually worth watching, or if I should just download "Inglourious Basterds" and watch that again.  Everybody I know is probably asleep.  Brenda is asleep in London, Ange is asleep in L.A., Wan and the kids are asleep up in Maine.  Aine's probably asleep in the air, coming in from Dublin in a few hours time.

I'm starting to feel the woozy thing again, despite having scarfed a couple of slices of the old l.w.  Time to stretch out on the couch, grab the remote, and maybe just surf for a while.  Tomorrow might be sunny.

Support Your Local Everything

To the left here, you see a picture of Town Drug and Surgical, which is a local pharmacy near my house and which did me a SOLID yesterday, so I'm giving them a plug here on the blog.  You see, I had surgery on my knee on Monday, which I'll talk about in a bit. But as you can imagine, getting around when you live in a third floor walkup and you've just had your knee surgically invaded is kind of difficult.  So I was talking to my Mom and complaining that the doctor only said I could continue taking vicodin (horrorshow - nice high and pain relief, trashes your digestive system because, hello, it's fucking MORPHINE) or take Tylenol.  All I had was Motrin, which was verboten.  So Mom says why don't I call the pharmacy and ask if they deliver.  Well, hell, Duane Reade?  Rite Aid?  Where they buy toilet paper in mega-bulk and pay their pharmacists ten bucks an hour?  Give me a break.  That's for nice, friendly, suburban drug stores.  This is the big, bad city where you can just tough it out in your apartment sore-knee girl who can't get up the stairs.

Well, Mom was right, as I hate to admit.  There are still family drug stores up here peppered in among the nail salons and the bodegas and the 99-cent stores, and Town sent over a very nice young man to my apartment with generic Tylenol and generic Band-Aids and I was very impressed.  They'll be getting my business from now on.

Ironically, in working from home this week, I was able to hear a lecture given on Our Global Community by this guy named David Korten on MNN.  He was talking about the Institutions of Empire and how our local supply chains have been surreptitiously (and not so surreptitiously) cut by huge chains like Wal-Mart and Rite-Aid, and we delay restoring them at our own peril.

Lots to think about when you're not feeling well - what happens if our community supply chains never come back, and we suffer some sort of natural disaster?  Pictures of Haiti have shown us that it's not only hell on earth trying to get food and water, but the little things that we all would miss terribly, like an aspirin, toilet paper, a prescription for an antibiotic or antiseptic to clean out a wound, would be virtually impossible to find if we were to suffer a catastrophic weather event.

David Korten pointed out in this lecture that in the early part of the 20th century, catastrophic natural disasters on average were running around 41 per year.  In the past three years, our world has suffered an average of 350 weather-related natural disasters per year.  Okay, we could perhaps allow for a margin of error owing to incomplete reporting, but 350 last year?  And the year before?  Even the President's State of the Union Address garnered a laugh last night when he mentioned that there were still people running around thinking Global Warming is a myth created by scientists to get grant money.  So if something were to happen here?  What would we all do?

Inwood is actually the highest point in Manhattan, so if there was a sudden flood I might be okay.  If I had water stored.  The water supply would be cut off.  So it would be about walking to Jersey via the GW bridge.  You remember that post-flu scene in "The Stand" with Gary Sinese.  Like that.  Hurricane? Not all that likely up here - they tend to come up, but they weaken into a heavy rain and just kind of take out the West Side Highway.  Earthquake?  Nope.  Insane snowfalls?  Yeah, they happen for sure.  But Korten's whole point is that if one part of the globe suffers, we all eventually suffer.  The supply chains for just about everything criss-cross the planet so intricately that for us to continue to let corporations act like anti-social psychotics is the great shame of our human race.  I'm going to add links to Yes Magazine on this site ( yesmagazine.org ) and to a site called The Great Turning ( thegreatturning.net ) so you can check out Korten's writing on the subject.  I wish I could find that powerpoint presentation on there - I'm going to look harder.

By supporting small businesses like the nice folks at Town, I'm doing a very, very small bit for keeping local community supply chains alive, though they're not necessarily all that healthy.  Restaurants in Manhattan have caught the "local ingredients" bug, but for them it's more a trend than a committment - if I can be cynical for a second, it probably means that buying Cabot cheese is more cost-effective than buying imported French fromage.  Their hearts are in the right place - but if we don't insist that all restaurants try to do this, it will go the way of "adding heat" to food or using weird plates to make your food look trendy.

Mt. Sinai Hospital, Madison Avenue (very swanky)

My local hospital is actually Columbia Presbyterian, but my other local hospital, and thank the Universe again I live in Manhattan, is Mt. Sinai.  My doc referred me to his own knee surgeon to take care of the meniscus (or meniscuses, as it turns out.  meniscii?) that I tore up, and they all practice out of Mt. Sinai.

I was only mildly nervous about having surgery - they were going to put me under general anesthesia, because I've got mild sleep apnea and tend to stop breathing if somebody puts me on my back to go to sleep.  That was fine as far as I was concerned.  The check-in process was kind of cool - they have you fill out a couple of forms and then they give you one of those electronic beeper-toys that they use at Red Lobster to let you know your table's ready.  Okay, before the teasing starts, MOM loves Red Lobster so we end up going there when I'm out in the 'burbs.  Then we both go home and check each other's blood pressure because of the tons of salt they use when they cook up that mess.

Anyway, after they check you in, they take you back in these little private rooms where they check your vitals and put your clothes and your stuff into a big ziplock, and walk you backstage (well, what the hell do you call it in a hospital?  Backstage seems to fit...) and you lay down and wait for the anesthesiologists to come and put a needle in your arm and wheel you into the OR.  Since Mt. Sinai is a teaching hospital, there were a couple of real youngsters on the team.  Brooke, my anesthesia resident, looked exactly like Kristen Chenoweth, and kept up a steady stream of bright, bubbly chatter which normally I would have beaten the shit out of her for, but she was holding a needle so I held myself back. Then the surgical resident came over with Brookie's boss, and he looked really nice and really, really guilty.  There was this look in his big, brown eyes that said "They're going to be yanking you around like a pork shoulder in there, so I'd like to apologize in advance".  His name was Al.  He seemed nice.

I actually had a dream under some portion of the anesthesia, and Brooke later told me this was unusual.  It was a very mundane dream - just thinking about how soon Robby would be able to come and pick me up - but I didn't think people had dreams when they were drugged, so that struck me as odd.  People ask you questions when you're coming out of that stuff, and it's kind of cool because your brain and your mouth are functioning well enough to ANSWER them, but you can't open your eyes or feel the rest of your body yet, and the whole conversation sounds like it's happening in the next room.

The chick who had to train me to use the crutches was another perky blonde.  Apparently, Mt. Sinai is knee deep in schicksas.  The thing about crutches is that you probably blow out more muscles trying to use them than you blew out hurting yourself in the first place.  And, later, when I got back home to my one-bedroom apartment, they were not only a total liability but a potential cause of death and dismemberment, so I chucked them and just steadied myself on the furniture.  Later I realized I had also trashed my abs because my doc had said something about "going up the stair on your tush" but, of course, there was no mention of the strategy of actually getting back up off the floor again.  Hilarity ensued.

Poor Robby had to help me get back home.  He was a rock star getting my fat ass up the stairs, but the worst part for him was the actual cab ride up to the hood, because he gets carsick in taxicabs.  In fact, about six minutes into the ride, when Mr. Singh was driving two-footed through start-and-stop traffic, I basically had to shout that he had to try a little harder for a smooth ride, because first my friend was going to throw up, and then I was going to throw up when I saw him throw up, and Mr. Singh was going to have a back seat full of ralph.

Now that I've had the experience of being treated in a well-run and upscale hospital, it makes me really sad that my Mom's doctors practice out of Jersey, because she's got a lot more wrong with her, being 76, than I've got at 47, and I'd love to have her get over her New-York-o-phobia and agree to come if anything else goes wrong with her.  But Mt. Sinai has money poured into it from all over the place, and in this country we're all pretty much at the mercy of the money pourers.  St. Vincent's Hospital down in the village is downscaling as we speak, and the people who live in that area aren't going to be afforded the opportunity to support their local hospital - because the hospital owes money to TD Bank and several others, and that bank (which, by the way, works very hard to make itself appear like a "neighborhood bank") has decided that getting it's money is more important than allowing a hospital to run.  The tiny hospital that were some of the first responders during the AIDS crisis in the 1980's.  The tiny hospital that overflowed with people seeking treatment for trauma after 9/11.  Gone.  Why?  Because it couldn't turn a profit.  Or what a hospital recognizes as a profit, which is a minimal loss.  Ironically, St. Vincent's is the only Catholic hospital left in NYC, so one wonders why the Pope isn't coughing up some dough.  Maybe he's too busy apologizing for those Hitler Youth rallies he went to as a kid.

My knee is feeling much better, by the way.  I was able to pop up and down the stairs today, only three days after surgery.  I hope I will continue, as I get better and back up to speed, about where the things I consume come from - how far away they are made, and whether or not small shops will experience a renaissance, as President Obama promises, or whether they will continue to disappear - even from Inwood.  We derive meaning in our lives from the relationships we have.  Corporations are trying their best to destroy the sources of meaning in our lives.  Do we have an alternative, therefore, to the hospital corporation?  Gotta grill Kelvin on this one - he works for a healthcare-related not-for-profit.  And Joann of course - she works in a hosp-corp in Maine.  I need to get some insights.

Behold, the Giant Chicken of Doom

As promised, here is another one of the giant animals on top of my local supermarket.  I am featuring the giant chicken today in honor of the Democratic party, who have yet again shown themselves to be absolute giant chickens when it comes to corporate personhood. 

As the President was busy trying to prop up that overconfident idiot Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, the Bush-packed Supreme Court was rubbing it’s hands with glee.  It had just ruled allowing corporations – yes, those entities with billions of dollars at their disposal that pollute our environment, manufacture lethal products, and fire their employees thousands at a time to boost their stock prices - to pour unlimited monies into campaigning for political candidates that tow their own corporate line.

In order to create a warm, fuzzy image for corporations to use to convince the generally anesthetized public to go along with their agenda, each corporation will be creating their own cartoon mascot and series of public relations spots.  I have managed to put my hands on the copy that’s going to be used for a very large oil refining concern.  Imagine the following in voice-over:

“Hey, there, folks.  Slick Seagull, here, with an important message for you from Polypropyl Industries.  You know, up here by the coast, we really love kayaking, fishing, and flying our kites on the beach.  But there’s one more thing that folks around here really love, and that’s industry, because without industry, we don’t have jobs.  And without jobs, we don’t have money to buy kites or kayaks or bait for our lines much less the poles to fish with.  Polypropyl industries wants to help our community by building a brand new factory that will employ hundreds and hundreds of people.  And what does Polypropyl do?  They make strategic entry into our landscape, extract ore by the ton nice and easy without harming a single animal or human, and then use completely safe chemicals to blast the ore into itty bitty pieces from which we extract natural gas.  The process is completely safe for the environment, leaves behind a minimum amount of hazardous toxic waste, and doesn’t cause cancer hardly at all!  So if you want to help your community, and help Polypropyl Industries, make sure that you get out to the polls on Tuesday and vote for a really great guy who loves kayaking and fishing and flying kites just like you!  Bill McWhiteguy!  A vote for Bill is a vote for families, jobs, and the ocean.  Caw!  Caw!”

I was listening to Dennis Kucinich last night talking about what can be done to make sure that corporations, which already wield too much power in this country, don’t completely run roughshod over democracy.  Well, actually he didn’t say anything about what could be done – he was just whining that it should be.  Oh, that isn’t the same thing?  Damn.  Democrats are good at whining, the same way Republicans are good at bullying and willful ignorance.  They remind you more of an abusive marriage than a government, really.

Currently, corporations behave like bratty children – they don’t pay for anything (their fair share of taxes), they make huge messes (using their profits to simply pay fines for ruining the environment instead of spending to take precautions and not pollute in the first place) and blame all the bad things they do on their imaginary friend (the stockholders want us to do these things!).  In the Reagan era rush to deregulate industries of all sorts, based on the now debunked theory that markets will just naturally regulate themselves by magic, corporations achieved a personhood – the granting of rights to a corporation normally only given to individuals.

If you want to know more about corporate personhood, and how this country was royally screwed over by it, nevermind continues to be so, check out Thom Hartmann's book "Unequal Protection:  The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights" http://www.amazon.com/Unequal-Protection-Corporate-Dominance-Rights/dp/1605095710/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264190492&sr=1-1

So – is anyone going to draft legislation to revoke or even remediate this corporate personhood and protect the individuals who, after all, are supposed to be the ones actually in charge of the government?  Probably not.  Barney Frank, bless his heart, is trying to impose additional rules through the Finance committee that will ameliorate this outstandingly evil decision.  I love Barney Frank, and I hope he's successful in at least helping to curtail this, but nothing I've hoped for in the past 12 months for America has come to pass, and I'm getting pretty exhausted.  Hope and Change.  Yeah, right.  Well, I've lost hope, and my opinions have changed.

Okay, I'm being really glib about this, but it's not fucking funny folks - it's really not.  This is not the United Corporations of America.  This country was never intended to be a collection of corporate fiefdoms ruled over by corporate boards and CEOs as if this is a fucking Shakespeare play and they're the dukes of Gloucester and York and Bedford.  In the past 12 months I have gone from being fantastically relieved that Bush was gone, to cautiously optimistic about President Obama, to completely betrayed by the escalation of wars, the continuing of torture, and the utter lack of spine, to what I feel right now which is righteously bloody furious that the Goldman Sachsians surrounding the President right now have him completely bamboozled.  No mean feat for a guy who ran the Harvard Law Review.  Okay, maybe he's complicit.  Even if he isn't, he's smart enough for everyone to THINK he's complicit.  Either way, it all sucks.

I know I promised you that this blog would have mostly to do with the bizarre stuff up here in my neighborhood, so I thought I'd get a picture of this odd little bit of sculpture.

This artwork is actually plastered up on the wall of the Park View Restaurant on Dyckman Street.  The family that owns the place also owns the Garden Cafe up on Broadway, and they used to own another diner across the street that is now a Bank of America/McDonald's combo.  Instead of the requisite pictures of Greece and puppies enjoying spaghetti dinners, these guys decided to get their Mom - yep, it's their Mom - to put her face in a bucket of alginate and let them create a sculpture of her re-envisioned as a Greek goddess.  I always think of her as the goddess Anhedonia, because she always seems so depressed to me.  It's also odd when their actual Mom is running around in the diner, because she's this little old lady and dresses more like an ex-nun than a Greek goddess.  I have to give both of these restaurants a shoutout, though, because I eat in both of them all the time.  The food is inexpensive, nicely done, and both places are pretty comfortable, although with the Park View forget getting a seat for brunch on the weekends because there's always a huge line.  And, of course, it's also packed whenever "Law and Order" descend on us for location shooting, because the tecchies would rather eat in there and pay than eat the usual boring chow off the catering truck.

Okay, seriously?  I'm still mad about the corporate thing.  I've been mad for days.  I have no idea what to do about it, but I'm mad.  I could write letters to Chuck Schumer I guess.  I wish I could do something other than write letters.  Maybe I'll write to Tom Hartmann - he might have an idea or two.

Hey, I Didn't Know There Was A Submarine Out Here...

Near the Intrepid, out on the West Side Highway

My friend Kelvin and I went for a walk today, and we happened to pass by the Intrepid Air and Space Museum.  Kel lives in Jersey so is very car-centric; he'd driven the West Side Highway thousands of times and had apparently never noticed that there was a submarine stuck in the water.  So I took a picture.  I also took a picture of Kel.  He was having a good hair day, in my opinion.

Between my bum leg and the lack of more submarine-like nifty things to take pictures of, we decided to get off the highway and go have something to eat.  I went and bought this digital camera the other day because I wanted to start showing off the bizarre things I run across in my daily life.

Kelvin is not bizarre, of course.  But other things around here certainly make you scratch your head in wonder.

The camera is an itty-bitty Canon, and with the memory card and case it cost me around 190 bucks.  The best part about it, though, is that it's easy to use.  I don't have to focus the thing.  I didn't even have to read the manual to upload the pictures. Now of course the rest of the world is not thinking this is so miraculous because eight year olds have digital cameras these days - on their iPhones - which they use while texting and twittering.  But I just haven't had a need before this to take pictures of much of anything, so I'm excited.

This next shot is of something adorably bizarre - the grocery store in my 'hood has a cow on top of it.  It actually has a cow, another cow, and an enormous chicken.  Below please find the right-most cow.

I

I don't buy a lot of cow in this particular supermarket, because, unlike my bourgeois supermarket in the burbs, these folks don't find it always necessary to put the cuts of meat into nice little plastic sleeves.  They prefer a more earthy approach to their meats - they just slice up the carcasses and toss the meat into huge, messy piles behind dividers in a huge glass case.  Mounds of meat.  Mini meat-mountains.  I'm no longer a vegetarian, but the last thing I'm going to be doing is buying meat that somebody had to reach into a heap for.

The EPA actually ended up visiting this particular market about a year ago.  Apparently, instead of disposing of the detritus from the meat mountains in a respectable manner, someone in the meat department just decided to dump the reeking, rotting pile of offal into the sewer system near the Dyckman Street M100 bus stop.  So the guys in space suits had to come and treat the stuff like it was radioactive waste.  The smell of death lingered for a good day and a half.  It basically smelled like someone had taken their very large family on a road trip from Phoenix to New York in a Winnebago and then decided to dump the contents of their traveling toilet into the city streets.  Funny how these things don't happen to people that live on Park Avenue.

But then, people on Park Avenue don't have huge, groovy cows on top of their supermarkets.

Meniscus Be The Place

Yeah, I do kinda wish this was my leg.  Skinny, eh?  Believe it or not, I finally get back to the gym, finally start taking long walks along the Hudson River, finally start getting my body back to a point where it might have a chance of being healthy and...

I fucked up my meniscus.  No, not that - that's a kaslapis - the meniscus is a very taughtly wound set of muscle and cartilage that keeps your knee from flying off in two separate directions.  Most people find out they have one of these by twisting the shit out of it.  Which is what I did rather recently.  I'd been overusing my left knee pretty badly, but a combination of motrin and rest was allowing me to keep to my exercise regimen and I just thought I would live with it.  Right before Christmas, I was trekking through the snow to get some groceries to bring back to Mom's, and I must have slipped a bit, caught myself, and caught my meniscus and ripped it.  Even then, a week's rest seemed to do it a lot of good.

Then last Saturday I go and have coffee with a friend of mine up at the Hungarian and on the long walk that followed I managed to cripple myself.  (No, the picture isn't of US - I'm about as far from blonde and thin as you can get, and he's a big honkin' Irish dude)  So the exercise regimen has given way to doctor's visits, orthopedist visits, and my very first MRI.  All I can say about the MRI, if you've never had one, is that my mother was completely right to be nervous about getting into that thing.  First of all, I only had to go in feet-first and up to my nose, and it was pretty restrictive - seeing as how she had to go in head-first, and for longer than I did, it's no wonder she needed the Valium.  I went through it fine, but for the horrendous noise that makes you think you're inside a NYC garbage truck.  Who would have thought that a machine that runs on magnets could be that ridiculously noisy?  They even give you earplugs so that it doesn't bug the crap out of you.  The only moment of panic I had was when that little voice in my head asked, around 15 minutes in, whispered "Wow - what if there's a fire?"

So I've been limping around for about a week, and it's not a lot of fun.  I feel really sorry for Hugh Laurie now, having to limp through every episode of "House."  I never realized how messed up all of your other muscles get when you limp, because they're trying to compensate and make sure that you don't fall over on your face.  His back must be a mess.  Then again, Hugh Laurie's rich - he probably has a masseuse on set when shooting's over.  All I've got is some sofa cushions and the aforementioned bottle of motrin.  But, lucky me, this isn't permanent.  Some arthroscopic surgery is in my future, crutches for a day or two, but then it will be over.  I've got to see the doctor on Thursday so he can interpret the MRI for me and then tell me if I need surgery (probably) and what exactly it will entail (pain, annoyance, co-payments).  Thank God I have health insurance.

Hugh Laurie isn't the only actor that's been asked to limp through a role.  E.R. star Laura Innes had to use a crutch for 10 years on the show and ended up damaging her lower spine as a result.  I remember seeing the Lieutenant of Inishmore a couple of years ago, and there was an actor who, for eight shows a week, had to spend a good 15 minutes suspended upside down pretending to let another actor torture him.  It makes me wonder why there isn't a special Tony award for the actor who went through the most physical annoyance during the course of a theatrical engagement.  This is one of the reasons I really like actors - they're so often game for just about anything.

Writers are the last people you would see having a performance-related injury, but so I do.  And the performance was walking down the street minding my own business.  My next injury, I suppose, will be sustained sitting behind my desk, typing, and having my ass accidentally tie itself into a knot.  I don't know why I'm surprised by any of this.  I'm just fucking getting old.  When I was 25 I could get both of my ankles behind my head.  Now, at 47, I can cross my legs, sneeze, and throw my back out.

The doc said I can try walking along the river tomorrow as long as I don't walk to hard, or for too long.  Will see how it goes.

My Own Boring-Ass Life

I've lived up here in this 'hood for over 20 years now, and of course there are some good things about it and some bad things. And the good and the bad things are usually pretty absurd and funny things. So this is the place where I can write about them with a certain degree of impunity.

I won't be writing about my job or my career in here, the job being for a high-profile financial institution, and the career being as a playwright and screenwriter, because the people with whom I work do not like having their names bandied about. Frankly, I'm not really of a mood to bandy anyway. The job is rather dull, and the writing, if it becomes worth talking about, will be talked about by others and not me, so there's no point in wasting virtual ink in here.

But this 'hood? My Manhattan address? The place even most Manhattanites don't know is here? It's a trip, I promise. The names will be changed to protect the indigenous.