It is Friday and I have slept very well. I am back at work prosthetic devices in my mouth fully intact. Listening to Kiri Te Kanawa and Maria Callas singing arias from operas.
I look forward to sleeping in tomorrow and by sleeping in I mean sleeping until 9:00 a.m. . It’s going to be another hot scorching day today and I am going to smoke a real cigar rather than a mini cigar since I’m all out of mini cigars and I bought a real cigar at the cigar shop by Grove Street Jersey City yesterday.
When I went to the dental lab to have my prosthetic mended they told me that it would be ready at 5:30 and I should probably just go back to Hoboken and that was not going to happen. So I went to the cigar shop Sky Tobacco they called themselves and bought a digger and sat in the lounge and just chilled out.
Then I’m talking to a guy named Nick Massi Jr whose father played bass in the Four Seasons. It was a good time spent with another cigar smoker. And talking to Nick there’s another gent next to him who is headed off to work at MSG and I mentioned that a friend of mine was applying for a job there (Mike). I took it as a good sign that’s something might happen to Mike since the Jeff Bezos company jerked him around for almost a month and then dropped him, so fuck Jeff Bezos.
I came home last night to find most if not all of the recordings on our DVR were no longer there
That was quite annoying and we lost quite a bit. I don’t know what happened and I don’t think it’s possible to get those recordings back. I mentioned it to Bill in passing before I went to bed last night.
And he’s somewhere in North Hudson county getting his Real ID which can be a challenging venture to begin with. I did it a few years ago and by the skin of my teeth I was able to get a Real ID. PSE&G lists my apartment as being on the south whereas my landlord lists the apartment as being on the left so there is a discrepancy between the two and I had to explain that to the worker behind the counter at the DMV.
So the trip to Garfield tomorrow is not to be so I’ll be staying local. I have enough heart points to do whatever it is I need to do and I know what I need to do and that’s going to that new dispensary at 15th Street and I’ll go there before I go to the really big grocery store.
Hand of Fate by The Rolling Stones just appeared in my head followed by Bennie and the Jets by Elton John.
It is 95° outside on a Friday afternoon in the summer and it feels like 106°. Of course I picked this as the day to smoke a real cigar rather than the mini cigars. If you want to dance, you got to pay the piper right? Right?
Hoboken trains were greatly delayed and so I took the Path to Newpost and walked home from there in the heat.
a Gemini AI rewrite ala Mark Twain
I’ll be obliged to try my hand at this bit of a yarn, though I daresay I’ll not be mistaken for Mr. Twain himself. One must simply do one’s best with the tools at hand, and that’s a fact. Here is your story, as I reckon it might be told by that old raconteur.
***
A man of my acquaintance, who shall remain nameless lest he take offense at being made into a character, found himself awake on a Friday morn, feeling as right as a new dollar bill. His slumbers had been deep and undisturbed, a genuine feat of nature in these bustling times, and his teeth, or rather, the cunning contraptions that stood in for them, were all in good order. As he went about his morning, the air was filled with the divine warblings of two of opera’s most celebrated lasses, Kiri Te Kanawa and Maria Callas. Their arias danced about his ears, a most civilized way to start a day, indeed.
His mind, however, was already wandering to the sweet promise of the morrow. He planned to “sleep in,” a phrase which, in his lexicon, meant the ungodly hour of 9 in the morning—a time when many a rooster has already finished his second crow. The day itself was a scorcher, the kind that makes a man feel as though he’s been dropped into a baker’s oven. He’d planned to enjoy a proper cigar, a thick, honest-to-goodness stogie, not those measly little fella’s he usually puffed on. The reason for this grand indulgence was simple: he had run out of the small ones. And so, the previous day, he’d gone to a tobacco shop by Grove Street in Jersey City to procure a new one.
This trip to the cigar shop had been a bit of an adventure. He’d gone to the dental lab to have his prosthetic contraption mended, and the fella behind the counter told him it wouldn’t be ready until half past five. He was advised to make his way back to Hoboken and wait, a suggestion my friend took about as seriously as a politician’s promise. Instead, he took himself to a place that called itself Sky Tobacco, bought a cigar they called a “digger,” and settled into their lounge. There he passed the time in the company of a fellow named Nick Massi Jr., a man whose own father, as it turns out, had played the bass for none other than the Four Seasons. They chewed the fat like two old friends, swapping tales over a smoky haze. A third gent was there, too, headed off to work at a certain Madison Square Garden. My friend, ever the optimist, mentioned his pal Mike was gunning for a job there and took it as a sign of good fortune. A fine sign, indeed, especially after that Bezos fella and his big company had yanked Mike’s chain for near a month and then left him in the lurch. My friend used some colorful language to describe Mr. Bezos, the kind I’ll not repeat here, but you can imagine it had a good deal of fire and brimstone in it.
He returned to his home that night to find a calamity had struck. His DVR, that little box of magic that holds all a man’s favorite shows, had gone and wiped itself clean. All his recorded programs, every last one of them, were gone. He found it a damned nuisance and lamented the loss of so many fine stories. He mentioned it to his partner, Bill, before turning in for the night, a man who was, at that very moment, off on his own challenging errand: securing a Real ID. This particular task is a bureaucratic nightmare, a gauntlet of paperwork and nitpicking that my friend had himself navigated a few years prior by the skin of his teeth. The trouble was that his gas company said his apartment was on the “south,” while his landlord insisted it was on the “left.” It took a great deal of explaining to a skeptical clerk to get the matter sorted.
Given all this, the planned trip to Garfield on the morrow was abandoned in favor of staying local. He had enough “heart points”—some new-fangled notion that I am still trying to get my head around—to do what he needed to do. What he needed to do, as it turned out, was visit a new-fangled dispensary at 15th Street before making his way to the big grocery store.
The heat outside, I’m told, was enough to fry an egg on a stone. Ninety-five degrees it was, but it felt hotter than the hinges of hell, a proper 106. And of course, this was the very day he’d chosen to enjoy a full-sized cigar. But as the old saying goes, if you want to dance, you must pay the piper. And so he would, puffing away in the sweltering afternoon.
To top it all off, the trains were all in a muddle, so he had to take the Path to a place called Newport and walk the rest of the way home through that same infernal heat. A man’s life, you see, is never without its little trials and tribulations, but I reckon it’s all part of the grand comedy we call existence.