I just saw Eddie Love on the street. That’s not his real name and I don’t know what his real name is. His DJ name is Eddie Love though. We’ve been in the same universe of Hoboken and actually 20 years ago we were cordial to each other. We never competed with each other as DJ’s. He spun at the Beat n’ Path and I was spinning at McSwells.

Nowadays we pass each other on the street and neither one of us has anything to say to the other. It’s just something interesting. I could have seen his real name since I last saw him the night I was helping to register voters. But I just couldn’t be arsed.

He was friends with Maurice Menares back in the day. Everyone was friends with Maurice. He was such a charmer and still is probably. Last I heard he was managing the Beastie Boys store in Los Angeles. I last saw Maurice when Julio and I went to see Beck at Radio City.

He was doing something for Beck and was great to see him. He’s such a sweetheart. So if he Googles himself, Maurice Menares is a sweetheart.

Right now I’m in a Facebook chat with my niece Hillary. She’s Brian and Karen’s eldest daughter, smart and pretty and she just made the honor roll. Right now I’m trying to convince her that if she ever runs out of things to read, she can always write.

She hates writing though. I can’t ever imagine hating writing. I’ve been doing it all my life. I have journals from past years scattered throughout the apartment. Some embarrassing stuff. Some written while sober, some written while high or drunk.

A lot of friends knew I wrote and felt I was a good writer despite never having read anything that I had written. And so when gifts were given to me they were generally blank books and I have a few of those. I always found blank books intimidating. A keyboard on a typewriter or a computer, I always found them more welcoming.

I once got a good grade in grammar school for an interview that I completely made up. It was with a barber friend of my father’s and it was a last minute, Sunday night homework assignment. I wound up writing about how his customers would talk to him, almost like he was a psychiatrist. Totally bogus yet I aced it.

Another writing task was quite inadvertent. It was Junior year of high school, the dreaded Algebra final. I struggled all year long and I was poised to fail the final. Letters I can handle, numbers I can manage mostly, but putting letters and numbers together just scrambled my brain. If y equals 99 and x equals 1/8 what is the answer?

Things like that would cause a meltdown. And I faced the Algebra final exam and it was all like that. All I felt I could do was to write an essay.

I just wrote about how I never understood this and I probably never will and I swore that I would never apply the lessons Sister Reginald taught in real life. And I also mentioned that summer school would achieve nothing, that my parents would more than likely kill me and that she was a good teacher, that it was just that I was a poor student.

I passed, or rather Sister Reginald let me pass. Social promotion- I benefited!