Monday, December 22, 2025
Winter has arrived officially, and all the autumn lovers are silent. Darlene Love sings Marshmallow World. Well, sang actually. Now I am playing Scritti Politti, ‘White Bread Black Beer’.
It’s been a good weekend. Mike came over on Saturday, and it’s been good. He returns to his crib tomorrow. We sat around and talked, Bill, Mike & me on Saturday. Good talk, though, about what I couldn’t remember right now. More than likely, it was about theater and plays, and show business.
Sunday had Bill sitting at home while Mike and I walked around Hoboken. We looked at plants and went to the 503 Social Club, which had an art exhibit with various artists in Hoboken and some musicians playing. It was brief, and then we walked up past Frank Sinatra’s birthplace to the really big supermarket.
We came home, had some frozen pizza, and watched One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson. Bill and I watched, Mike was preoccupied with his phone. That used to bother us, but it doesn’t anymore. Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, with a great supporting cast. I can see why it made the top spot for a few film critics end of the year poll.
Mike got Bill and me nice Christmas cards with handwritten notes in them. Heartfelt and touching, they hang on the door to the apartment in place of a wreath. Bill was off on the road for a day trip, and Mike and I headed into the city. We are planning on going to Garfield on Thursday for Christmas dinner with Elaine. Very much the same as Thanksgiving, only this time Brady won’t be there.
Brady was a dog that was given to my niece Corinne by her ex-boyfriend. They split up, and she got the dog. Corinne moved to Colorado and was going to take Brady with he,r but her father, my brother Frank, talked her out of it since he had become so attached to Brady.
Frank and Brady were pals until Frank died, and then Brady became Elaine’s responsibility. Elaine did well, taking excellent care of Brady up until yesterday, Sunday. Brady was 98 in human years, and his kidneys were not functioning. Elaine knew what had to be done and scheduled it for today, but things took a turn on Sunday, so Brady shed his mortal coil on the first day of winter.
Elaine is understandably sad, and perhaps having company over this week might help lift her spirits or distract her from them.
So I bought a gift for my grand niece, Shelby, and picked it up with Mike. We picked up lunch, which we ate in my office. I didn’t have to be there and didn’t expect to see anyone. But Jimmy Chile was i,n and we exchanged holiday greetings before heading out once again in the cold.
There has been a plan to have Mike here for New Year’s, but tonight he talked with his beloved, who said he was going to try to fly here during those days. Mike has little faith in it actually happening, but knowing it might be a possibility gave me the blues. That Irish thing, where you have had a great time and all it takes, in this case, was a remote suggestion to sadden me.
And I recognize the bullshit since Mike is not mine, I do like having him here, as does Bil,l and in my mind palace plans were made and suddenly shaken up by something that could very well not happen. I do love Mike, but I am not in love with him.
google gemini rewrite as a James Baldwin essay
It is Monday, the twenty-second of December, and the year—with all its peculiar weight—is drawing to a close. Winter has made its official entry, and with it, the easy sentimentality of the autumn lovers has been silenced. There is a cold clarity now. One might reach for Darlene Love, for that “Marshmallow World” which suggests a sweetness we rarely find in the pavement, but I have moved on to Scritti Politti. White Bread Black Beer. It is a sound that understands the tension between the common and the refined.
The weekend possessed that rare, quiet grace. Mike arrived on Saturday. There is something in the presence of a friend that anchors a room, and for a while, the walls of the apartment seemed to hold a more generous light. Bill, Mike, and I sat together—the old trinity—and we talked. If you asked me now to transcribe the particulars of that evening, I could not do it. But I suspect we were speaking of the theater, of the stage, of that strange, desperate business of “show.” We were speaking, I think, of how one must perform oneself in a world that is always looking for a simpler version of the truth.
On Sunday, Bill remained within the sanctuary of the home while Mike and I braved the Hoboken air. We looked at plants—living things trying to endure the season—and wandered into the 503 Social Club. There was art on the walls and music in the air, a brief, bright collision of local souls. We walked past the place where Sinatra first drew breath, a monument to a certain kind of American myth, and finally reached the cathedral of the supermarket.
We ended the day with frozen pizza and the flickering shadows of the screen. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Bill and I were caught in the grip of the thing, while Mike remained tethered to his phone. There was a time when such a digital distance would have sparked a fire in me, an indignation at the intrusion of the machine into the human ritual. But one learns. One accepts the ways in which people shield themselves. DiCaprio and Penn were up there, doing the heavy work of mirrors, and I understood then why the critics had hailed it. It is a film that looks at the struggle, and we are all, in our way, tired of the fight.
Mike left us cards. Handwritten notes. In a world of cold glass and plastic, the touch of a pen on paper is a revolutionary act. They hang on our door now, taking the place of a wreath. They are our greenery, our sign of life.
But death, as it always does, has found its way into the season. We are planning for Christmas dinner in Garfield with Elaine, a mirror of our Thanksgiving, yet the table will be lighter, and the house quieter. Brady is gone.
He was a dog, yes, but to speak of him as “only” a dog is to misunderstand the geography of the human heart. He was a gift from a ghost of a relationship, passed from my niece Corinne to my brother Frank. Frank and that creature—they became a singular entity. When Frank left us, the dog became the living bridge to his memory, and Elaine took up that mantle with a devotion that was nothing short of holy. But the kidneys fail; the body betrays the spirit. Brady was ninety-eight in the years of his own kind. He chose the first day of winter to shed his mortal coil. Elaine is left with the silence, and we will go to her, hoping that our presence might act as a brief dam against the tide of her grief.
I went into the city with Mike to find a gift for my grand-niece, Shelby. We sat in my office to eat—a space that should have been empty—but Jimmy Chile was there. We exchanged the ritual greetings of the season, two men acknowledging the cold before stepping back out into it.
And now, the “Irish thing” has descended. There had been a plan—a quiet, selfish architecture of the mind—that Mike would remain with us through the New Year. But tonight, a phone call from his beloved changed the air. A possibility was raised—a flight, a reunion—and though Mike trusts it little, the mere suggestion was enough to bring on the blues.
It is a particular kind of melancholy, is it not? To have had a magnificent time and then, at the first hint of its ending, to feel the structure of one’s joy collapse. I recognize the “bullshit” of it, as we say. Mike does not belong to me. He is his own man, a free agent in a world that demands we own nothing. I love him, but I am not in love with him; yet, in the palace of my mind, I had already furnished the coming days with his presence. To have those plans shaken by a phantom possibility is to be reminded of the fragility of all our arrangements.
We seek warmth, we find it, and then we tremble when the door is left ajar.