Mac vs PC. I am on a Mac about 8 hours a day, then when I go home, I try to do Mac things on my PC. It’s frustrating, but not the end of the world. It’s been a very quiet Friday at the Manhattan Fruit Stand.

Listening to the Cocteau Twins on the Mac. Memories of other people, sometimes other people’s memories. Stan Bogdansky, Jet Watley mainly. Been over a decade since I last saw Stan and Jet’s been gone for almost 40 years. Away longer that he was alive.

I have a Zoom call at 1:30 PM so I have eaten my lunch much earlier than usual. There are a few flirty guys here and then there is Marcus who is more flinty than flirty. He warms up later in the day when I see him for less than five minutes, and he heads back to his desk in the bowels of the fuit stand.

I just came across the proposal from January 2025 regarding the podcast video show that I was planning. Sort of like Spalding Gray or at least inspired by him. Bill and Mike were going to be involved; Jim Mastro was going to charge me $50 for use of the 503 Social Club space.

Then I had gotten a job and that has fallen by the wayside, though it does float to the surface every now & then. I suppose it can happen again, just need the proper timing and planning. Mike’s not working but that does not mean he would be available.

And Bill’s schedule is literally and figuratively all over the place. I don’t know what his schedule is this weekend and I am not sure if Bill knows either.

It is certainly a slow Friday, but then again, they are almost always slow, work days that is. I’ve been going to bed at a decent hour and walking up before the alarm clocks and winding up at the fruit stand about a half hour than I need to be.

It goes unnoticed and that is fine with me since I do not do anything until 8:00 AM since I don’t start getting paid until 8:00 AM.

I mentioned that I followed Marcus’ advice the other day and sent an email to my counselor regarding the gaffe I made the other day. It was mainly to cover my ass since Marcus felt Yancy was going to email the counselor himself.

Whether or not he did is unknown to me and I should not have been surprised by the fact that my counselor was in the corner of Yancy and suggested I do what Yancy had suggested. I guess my email was just to get my side of the story out there before Yancy and now we see how that went. Awkward.

And in 21 minutes, the Zoom call with representatives of the company that placed me at the fruit stand. All about my goals and how to achieve them. And you know, I am all about achieving goals.

I showed up on time for the Zoom call. No one else did. It seems the host when moving the date from Good Friday to today did not notice (ahem) that the time had changed from 1:30 to 1:00 PM.

They rescheduled for next Friday. We shall see about that.

Thursday. Day of 8:30 meetings Not so bad, I usually say what I need to say after Marcus speaks his piece. I try to put a humorous slant on my take; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I have found jokes about men in vans with candy near school yards are not as funny in the morning as they could be at night.

It’s what they call Friday eve, which is nice enough though not quite there. Bill was on the road, and Mike was incommunicado, which takes him off the favored nations list and relegates him to ordinary. After a year, there are still some aspects which are a bit off-putting.

Yesterday he spoke of his idea, to rent a car which Bill would drive, and a road trip to Atlantic City. A visit to a casino, a $10.00 limit on slot machine gambling, and all that. I do not want to go to Atlantic City and tried to get that point across. Mike insisted, but I know that all I have to do is tell Bill that I do not want to go to Atlantic City and we will not.

Plus, after Mike’s behavior on my birthday trip to Long Branch, on my birthday could sway Bill in the direction of not wanting to do anything beach-related with Mike. Mike was a fucking sourpuss and made no effort to be fun or wish me a happy birthday, so there’s that whole ‘Fuck you, Mike’.

I mentioned Sandy Hook, Asbury Park, and Ocean Grove, which flew right over Mike’s head. It’s his idea, but it’s our wheels, and you can’t have one without the other. Bill and I have been discussing Ocean Grove this summer, which we did not do last year. Neither one of us has heard anything from Ocean View Inn, so perhaps we need to take the initiative.

I just sent off a short email saying hello and a rather clumsy inquiry. We shall see how it works out.

And Annemarie is coming for 10 days at the end of June until July 3. I have to accumulate the time to take off since the agency does not give personal time off, but rather that personal time off needs to be earned. The next holiday is Memorial Day at the end of May which seems far off but as one goes through life, it sometimes feels sped up.

I just read a short article about 2 young ISIS-inspired wannabe terrorists who were going to attempt to injure or kill dozens during a protest by Gracie Mansion. Let’s face it, these young people are deadly and foolish, and this is just the beginning. We are probably going to see more of this behavior as life goes on. Foolish young people, mainly men, are plotting to do things to injure or kill people.

Not all of them will be caught and their nefarious actions will occur. People will be injured or killed because of a foolish ideology, much like the young and foolish ideology that I once had for the IRA. A different time, a different world, but with the same ignorance.

The awfulness of TD Bank and their antisocial tellers. TD Bank has a new campaign about real talk. The teller I dealt with was barely communicating. Chit chat was not her thing. I had just gotten a $20.00 bill from the ATM and wanted to get a ten, a five and five singles.

I gave the masked teller the $20 and my debit card which was handed back to me with the instructions to put it in the keypad and enter my PIN. As this was going on I asked the masked teller how things were going in Toronto.

She was confused as I explained TD stands for Toronto Dominion and I was just trying some chit chat, like humans that used to bank in the 20th century used to do.

Overall it was an unpleasant experience and a reminder of why I rarely visit the TD Bank tellers or whatever they call themselves nowadays.

Afrika Bambaatta, 67