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.