Author Archives: johnozed

About johnozed

I'm 50+ years old, 210-ish#, 6'2", reddish blonde, blue eyes with glasses (and without) masculine, funny, relatively intelligent, enjoy the company of assorted friends and family especially sordid friends and family. I love music, reading, writing, conversing, laughing, going to films, shows, concerts and smoking cigars. And I also enjoy looking nice in a suit and tie. Looking more like Lewis Lapham than Tom Wolfe. I'm sure there is more, but we'll just have to find out when I write about it. In a lifetime relationship with partner Bill Vila.

Big Yellow Taxi

6 Replies

Last night nothing special once again, though seeing Julio and Stine and Alexander was special indeed. After that it was all pretty boring. I edited the titles of tracks on some cd’s that Annemarie sent me last year. That was a painstaking labor of love, trying to figure out what was what since they all couldn’t be by Benny Goodman.

I watched Carole King who is a nice Jewish lady from Brooklyn. Oy. She’s a love that one. Then it was The Who live in London 1977. The concert where they got two clips for the movie, The Kids Are Alright- Baba O’Reilly and Won’t Get Fooled Again.

The rest of the show was ok. When they started doing Eddie Cochran’s Summertime Blues (which for some reason people think the Who’s version is great, I think it’s leaden and plodding) I threw in a DVD of The Specials called Too Much Too Young. A nice collection of video clips and some live footage but over all the narration was dreadful. Flat boring and monotonous.

It was like the filmmaker/Narrator Brian Zabawski was reading something off wikipedia and didn’t read the words. Properly. Gets an E for Effort though, especially since I never went about making a Specials DVD of my own.

After that some SNL repeat with Tina Fey then off to bed for me. Bill was at his mother’s so I had the big ass bed all for my big ass. Slept really well, woke up went out, got papers and bagels. After breakfast I sat by the computer and was reading the Daily News, the Voice of the People section, also known as the Letters to the Editor.

I usually enjoy it and as I read I noticed a letter from Hoboken, with a name that was awfully familiar. What are the odds, I thought, of someone having the exact same name as me? Then I realized that I had sent a letter to the editor courtesy of MoveOn.org the other day and today they published it. Ha!

Not the first time the Daily News published a letter of mine. I think this was the third time. They never publish my letters regarding cars running red lights though. The New York Post also published a letter a few years ago about the smoking ban in bars, which if I recall was also published in the Daily News. I thought it was pretty funny. Bill was thrilled when I texted him about it.

cut n’ paste
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/letters/index.html

Today was a beautiful day especially after the deluge of yesterday. I got some new bike shorts and gloves the other day and it was a nice enough day to take a spin around Hoboken. Rode up to 16th Street and looked around. Summer vacation is over for most if not all residents of Hoboken since there was no parking anywhere.

Rode down Sinatra Drive on the Hudson River and forgot all about the Italian feast. Today’s the last day. Procession through town, big heavy of the Madonna, fireworks and feast bombs. I missed all that. Apparently they stopped right in front of my building.

I rode past my old apartments in Hoboken. 1st Street and Park avenue, the mosquito infested illegal loft where I lasted about a month after donating a gallon of blood to the mosquitoes, leaving my loft mates high and dry but not in the lurch since I found 2 other people (Doug and Kate) to take my space.

1st and Park. It DID NOT look like this in 1984.

Then I rode by 201 Madison Street which was my first ‘real’ apartment. Lived with Jet for a while. I think I was there for about 2 years, moving out when the rent hit the outrageous rate of $500.00.
201 Madison

Back view- top 2 windows on right. My kitchen

From there I went to 1124 Willow Ave. The basement apartment. Had a few wild parties there and it was also the party center after McSwells closed at night sometimes. I lived there with Jimmy Lee and then eventually Barbara Granite who turned out to be a little off in the head. I lived there from 1986-1989 or so. It was a hovel. Thought I would live there forever, though I think that with most every place I move to.


Never had a door with a lock on it then….nor bars on the windows

But Barbara Granite moved out and I couldn’t find a roommate so I moved in with Kevin Craughn on Madison Street, across from where I originally lived. I don’t remember too much, it was 1990. That was a hovel too, only on the top floor. Kevin and I barely got along but it ended on a good note relatively speaking.
216 Madison Street

Definitely DID NOT look like his then

I moved out of there and into 710 Jefferson which was a nightmare. I had to be interviewed by the landlord in order to be a roommate. Barry’s roommate actually. He was on tour somewhere when I moved in and I had very little furniture, sleeping on a piece of foam.
710 Jefferson Street

the building in the middle

All the while Zed had been with me through most of these apartments, except for the loft. He had the run of the place most times, except when I lived with Kevin. Kevin’s cats intimidated Zed so much that he rarely came out from under my dresser for most of the year. Then when I lived at Barry’s place, Zed peed on his futon which Barry brought up soon after my mother’s funeral. I apologized but I obviously had other more important things in my life at that time.

I didn’t like living in that building. The landlady and her family were on the first two floors of the building and always kept an eye open on who was coming in and out through the door being slightly open on their apartments. After that I moved back to Lodi to live with my father for a few months despite a lot of people warning me not to.
Jane Street, last house on the right

From there it was to Weehawken with William where we had a love/hate relationship for 11 years. Then back to Hoboken where I am at now. Zed didn’t make it to Hoboken, he passed away when I was living in Weehawken. I buried him in the backyard there, which has probably been torn up and paved over.

And I didn’t miss the procession of the Italians and the Madonna. They just passed by.

Locomotion

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Ugh. So muggy out. And constant rain rain rain. It’s actually tropical storm Hannah which so far killed over 100 people in Haiti. Today was also the day that the B-52’s were doing a free show in Cranford NJ.

The original flyer said that in case of rain the show would be moved to Kean University where my niece Corrinne goes to school, but checking the website today, the promoters stated they they have taken provisions and the stage will be weather proofed and the show will go on as scheduled, outside.

It’s just as well that we didn’t go, Bill and I had planned to go with Chaz, because the rain has been steady and sometimes blowing sideways and it promised to be muddy and not much fun. Last night Bill and I hung out.

Bill was rather subdued. He was told at work that he will probably have to change his schedule. Right now he’s flexible as a part timer working 37 hours a week. But their not happy with that and want him to go full time.

That would close the window that he currently has which allows him to go on interviews and go sees for his acting career as well as allowing him to run down to his mother’s apartment should something go wrong. So he was understandably bummed.

All I could do was suggest that he try to forget about it for now, get a good nights sleep and see how he feels about it tomorrow. Some advice that I should probably heed. He listened and went to bed after a few laughs courtesy of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

I stayed up and watched Bill Maher who had Dan Savage on so that was pretty good. Michael Steele is not the same Michael Steele from the Bangles. The one on Bill Maher’s show last night was a real jerk. Of course he towed the republican line until it became so much static.

Slept like a log last night, Bill was up and working on a script when I got out of bed. Went out and ran errands, needed some more Stevia and got the bagels and the papers. Then proceeded to watch the rain come falling down.

Just got back from visiting Julio and Stine and Alexander two floors down. Haven’t seen the peanut in over a month and he’s now 15 pound and 25 inches. And quite active too. He can now focus and he’s always looking around.

And he can turn over by himself now, and can also support his head on his own. Still adorable, quite the little man. Gurgle and goo goo is his vocabulary so far, and if he’s anything like Julio, he’ll never shut up. But the space monkey is adorable and everything is good physically with him.

Right now Carole King is on Public Television. She’s nice. I met her at Right Track, where I wrote about last night. How can anyone not like Carole King? If only for the songs that she’s written.

Well thats about it now. Too sticky and hummus here.

Late addition:
from John Ridley/Huffington Post
cut n’ paste
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-ridley/the-guide-to-the-conserva_b_124368.html