Another weird weather day. Up earlier than usual and out later than that, I was intending to do some busking. It was quite cool out and there were plenty of dark clouds threatening rain. I ran some errands including a stop at Solid Threads, a T-Shirt shop in Hoboken. Rand and Lisa got me a Jersey Fresh T-Shirt for my birthday and it seemed to be a size too small. I had a gift receipt which allowed for a hassle free transaction. There were other shirts I could have chosen from but I stuck with the original Jersey fresh plan.

From there I walked up First Street and walked over to the river. No buskers around, all quiet on the waterfront. I sat and read the Village Voice since I had nothing else to read. There was an interesting article about Fracking and how big business is doing whatever it wants, including fucking up the environment with polluted water and land. And then there is the nasty problem of natural gas being released through water lines, so if you turn on your faucet and no water comes out but gas does a simple spark can blow your house as well as your neighborhood to bits.

Why they don’t research solar power or wind power is beyond me. An inexhaustible supply is there ready to be used. It’s clean and would provide a lot of jobs, but instead we just concentrate on getting more oil from the ground and polluting the air with emissions. This is where a mash up of The Road Warrior and Koyaanisqatsi would make a lot of sense. Living on the top floor of a five story building I can tell you, there is a lot of wind out there. And some of you reading this can probably say there is a lot of wind here.

Back indoors I was surprised to see a friend from Murdoch daze on Facebook. Ulysses Sankitts, my old friend who saved my ass a few times has made it online. I will never forget the first time I met Ulysses, I started working for Murdoch Magazines a day before him. A friend from Maxwells was getting married that weekend and I was asked to DJ. Alas I had no equipment and the wedding day was just a few days away. I didn’t know what to do but I did know Ulysses and his brother Tony were also DJ’s.

So I asked this relative stranger if I could borrow his equipment, I would even give him my fee in exchange for the use of his turntables and PA. To my delight (and surprise) he said yes. That Sunday Ulysses and Tony arrived and delivered their gear and even set it up since I didn’t not know how to do that. It must have been 1987 since I remember playing Prince’s ‘It’ a few times at the reception. Twenty five years ago and here we are friends again thanks to Facebook.

We always were friends though, it’s not like I never saw him again. We became good friends, I crashed at his house out in Queens, partied with him at several clubs and he made a few appearances at parties that I had thrown, including the infamous basement party that must have had fifty people there, with party crashers. He seemed to get a kick out of my friends as did his brother Tony. Anyway he seemed just as happy to find me on Facebook as I was to find him. That Queens posse of Excer, Ray, Pedro and Ulysses is still around. Tony unfortunately passed away early in the century.

It wasn’t all grey…