Overall, it was a good weekend. Bill came home late or early in the morning around 3:30 on Saturday. Mike was around Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and that was fun. Mike enjoys hearing Bill’s stories, perhaps a bit more than I do. Then again, I have heard them before.

I did have to drag Mike to the really big supermarket on Saturday, and I have to say the really big supermarket is a bit of a sad situation since the wonderful Arti is no longer there and perhaps back in India by now. She is greatly missed; her smiling face and her wonderful personality have been replaced by the cold and indifferent self-checkout.

I took a few photographs of Mike smoking a cigar for his online admirers, and he took a few photographs of me smoking a cigar, mainly for my fat cigar dad down in Texas, and also for one or two Facebook groups. We have discovered a channel on cable that shows nothing but Saturday Night Live clips over the past 50 years, so that was fun. And it was also a rabbit hole that had a few laughs in it.

Bill had slept for a good part of the day, and when he awoke, we watched Ghost Dog. I saw it when it came out with Ro Da 25 years ago. Bill had seen it then as well, and Mike had seen it. Still a very good movie, perhaps one of Jim Jarmusch’s best. It was fun watching a movie filmed in Jersey City. I’m trying to identify landmarks 25 years later, landmarks that more than likely do not exist anymore.

It is a Monday morning in Manhattan. I am a block away from Union Square, where everything is cozy and comfortable. I do enjoy the team that I’m working with, and they seem to enjoy working with me..

Working on a Mac it’s easier than I remembered, considering I’m a PC kind of guy.
Back in the day when I was working for Wolff Olins, it seemed to be more of a struggle to work on a Mac, but nowadays, almost 20 years later, it’s not much of a hardship after all.

Sunday was Mother’s Day, and it was a beautiful day, 75 and Sunny. Out of the three of us, Mike, Bill, and I, Mike is the only one with both parents alive. We wandered around Hoboken in the afternoon for a couple of hours, lots of people out and about. It was Mother’s Day after all, and all the mothers were able to roam around, free-range style.

Bill and Mike went to the smaller supermarket, and I sat on the stoop smoking a cigar, talking to Annemarie. All in all, it was a good day and considering that there was not the usual back to work apprehension on Sunday, I really can’t complain. Once again I am dictating this into my phone, not sitting at my computer and typing since I don’t really have much time to do that and this is a whole lot easier, warts and all.

A few hours later, lunch time walking around 5th Avenue, 18th Street, that’s across 20th Street…I’ve been tempted to send emails to companies that turned me down, thanking them for turning me down. Then I realize it’s best to leave the past in the past.

The past is some place that I visit perhaps too often…for example, I was just thinking of a job that I had 40 plus years ago, I had to deliver law books to the Statler Hilton on 33rd Street. There are several hundred books, and no one to assist me in moving books through a crowded sidewalk is the first time I learned that no one was going to help me.

There were no strangers around to help me, and to be honest, I probably wouldn’t be helping strangers either. It was an eye-opener of a job, and like I said, it was over 40 years ago. That company I worked for is gone.

Separate dreams where I fought with Bill, Bob Huff, Rand, and my brother Brian. Not violent dreams but I found all four of them to be most uncooperative in four individual scenes of dreams.

Rolling through the Christopher Street path station I always hope to see a ghost from over 30 years ago. Mexican ghost in leather fringe jacket that I would sometimes make out with 33 years ago.

4:15 pm. The time that Harcourt Brace Jovanovich would be getting out on a Friday afternoon. I can still see the queue lined up to punch out at the time clock. Another world, a lifetime ago. I reckon some of those former coworkers are long gone. I looked some up a while ago.

I think of Bob Costic. He was a few years younger than me. He was sexy and had a nice bulge. We would smoke cigarettes and stare at each other. He smoked Parliaments, I smoked Marlboro. Despite his rubbing his crotch, nothing ever came of it. I never made any overtures. It went on for a few weeks, then it petered out.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich was my first job. I’ve written about it before and thought I would write a few entries about my employment history, but was derailed by Harpy and his beer-fueled criticism that it was boring and no one would want to read it. I trusted Harpy’s opinion and I let it get the better of me. I haven’t seen Harpy in years and he no longer participated in social media, considering it to be too narcissistic.

So with that unknown friend of Bill W absent from this stage in the game, perhaps I will pick up the mantle and start my CV stories anew. Sometimes people see me as aloof and not caring about what people say, but Harpy was proof that ain’t necessarily so.

It happened with the lupine fellow who played bass in a band named Antietam. One night in the 80s, I got an LP of South African music. I was jamming along to it by myself and having a good time doing that. I worked with the lupine fellow, and the next day I mentioned what a good time I had jamming.

Mr Punk Rock or Jazz Queer (as some fine woman from Athens GA called him) told me that there was o way I cold have sounded good jamming to a South Africa record since those guys played for years and I certainly hadn’t. It was a wounding remark that curtailed any further jamming, and I never looked at the lupine fellow the same way again.

Some mutual friends were angry with the lupine fellow, and others were surprised that I allowed him into my head like that.

Now it’s Friday evening. Mike is on the couch looking at his phone, Prince is playing live, 1986, the Parade tour, and Mexican food has been ordered to be delivered.

The laundry is done and now the 48 hour drying process begins. It had been raining all day and now it has stopped. Bill is on the road, expected to be home later on tonight. Or he may be coming home tomorrow. It’s up to him I reckon and whatever extenuating circumstances that might surround him.