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The hopeful pessimist

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Fats Domino I’m Walking

Disappointment reigns today. Actually, it started taking root last night didn’t really have much to say to Bill. He seemed greatly annoyed the previous night with our discussion and his firm decision that we would never get together like that again.

And I, with just a hint of Pollyanna, was hanging onto hope, and perhaps it would, but it will not. Mike said he would leave if it happened to him, but I’m not leaving cuz I have nowhere to go, and neither does Bill, so we’re basically stuck together. Yes, there’s love, but I guess it’s more of a platonic love.

I am not going out to look for something. If I want something, I will save up my money and pay for it. I’ve done that in the past, and I will do it again. The price of being a selfish lover. A sex worker will do what you want them to do.

Mike is going on a cruise with his beloved in March? April? He’s very excited about it, whereas I feel like going on a cruise would be hell to be stuck with these people that I may or may not like. Bill can go, and I do not have to. Perhaps the way to do things going forward is to do them alone.

I don’t know, I really can’t say right now, but it is a remote possibility. Oh, Mike has been telling me that he lubbs me, which is the love language that he speaks to his beloved with. I’m trying to get him to stop doing that.

It is certainly true that my life was easier without sex, and then Mike came and showed me that I could have fun, and that didn’t last, and now I’m left holding the bag, so to speak, it’s not even a nice bag; it’s very disappointing, it’s bad.

At this point, I have to say I am grateful that they are both functionally illiterate, meaning they don’t read this here blog.

And I have mentioned to Bill and brought up to Mike that my feelings are transitory, basically, I might feel some way at 6:00 p.m., at 6:15 I might feel something different, so nothing is set in stone, especially when it comes to feeling, my feelings.

And they don’t read this anyway.

And wholly unrelated news, I am at the main fruit stand today, and it’s not so bad. Yesterday I messed up on an email, sent it to the wrong person, and expected to get chewed out about it, which is still a possibility with these passive aggressive fruit pickers.

It’s busy; there are some bold-faced names passing through. And some of those names will be at the smaller fruit stand with me tomorrow.

Friday morning, there is a meeting at the main food stand, which also has the capability for an on-camera meeting. Yancey is organizing it, and I asked him if I was needed to be there, and he said he would prefer it.

Now my hours are generally 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. but they do Friday and the timesheet goes in on Thursday and since tomorrow is Thursday the timesheet for the week will also go in but I’m not going to show up on Friday until the meeting giving myself another hour and make my life that much sweeter or at least that’s how it looks on paper.

So it’s all a big mess. And I suppose it’s mostly my own doing. Bill loves me. I love Bill.
Is it the same type of love? I really can’t say. I can say I am disappointed in the Christmas gift that he gave me. And I think my disappointment was noticeable. Mike remarked on it, and Bill didn’t.

It’s a device that will turn on should we lose power in the apartment. It’s for the computer, and the last time we had a power outage like that was probably 14 years ago. So basically, he has given me a gift that we hope not to use.

Did he use his imagination? Perhaps he did. Perhaps he has a limited imagination. I used my imagination to get Bill a few shirts. He seemed to like them. I got Mike a few shirts, which he gave to his beloved, which shows me I will never get him a gift again.

Yancey just introduced me to a young man named Derek Strawberry. Yancey usually tells people about my working in the music studios and the recording industry back in the day.
I regale them with my story of being at 6 West 57th Street and having a smoke when a kid came up to me, asked me how we could get his cassette into the record label.

It was then I had a moment and told him that the record industry was on its way out. I was struck by a premonition, perhaps a Cassandra-like thing, but I told him that soon he’ll be able to do this all on his own on a laptop distributed himself, etc., etc. For a twist, I tell people about that the young man was Kanye West, which makes them flip out.

The hopeful pessimist

A lot of water has passed underneath that burning bridge

221 Hillman Drive

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I slept so well Thursday night into Friday morning that I woke up thinking it was Saturday. A very good night’s sleep, I would have preferred another hour or two, but that’s not how it goes these days, and I guess I’m fine with that. Bill is on the road, Mike is at his crib in Jersey City, and things are back to relative normalcy.

I sit at my desk in Manhattan on 5th Avenue listening to the story of Jamaican music. I recall buying this for Julio back in the day when it came out. He was buying one for me, and I was going to buy one for him, but Richard Gere beat us to it. He was buying a copy for Cindy Crawford, to whom he was married at the time. This was all in the basement of Tower Records on West 4th Street and Broadway in the 90s.

It was a nice morning, and then at noon, when I got my lunch hour, and turned out to be raining, so my wandering around the area was somewhat curtailed. I walked down West 19th Street past where the Magickal Childe store used to be. It is now a store specializing in vinyl records. I went with Laszlo Papp in the early ’80s.

Laszlo was into things that created a shock value. Laszlo and I worked together at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich back then. My mother remembered working with him before I started working with him, telling me that he was such a good boy and left work on a Friday looking like such a good boy and coming back on Monday morning looking like he was a member of The Sex Pistols.

Laszlo and I were born on September 12th, so we had that in common as well as liking a lot of the new music that was happening at the time, punk and New Wave, or what is now known as postpunk. He was somewhat of an influence on me, so much so that I quit a job because he sort of mocked me for still having that job.

In hindsight, was it a mistake? I don’t know. It wasn’t a good move at the time, but it set me on a path that I am still on to this day, 41 years later, hahaha. I used to give lots of money to Lazlo to buy 45s for me when he went into the city to buy records for himself.

He got tired of doing that and suggested that I go along with him, so I did, which opened up a whole new world for me, a child and product of 1970s suburbia. I did have some adventures with Laszlo, some good, some bad. He still tolerated my naivete or innocence, which, to his credit, did me good.

The last time I saw Laszlo, he was smoking an El Rey de Mundo cigar on Astor Place. I walked up to him and said hello, complimented him on the cigar, and he gave me another cigar of his own, which is good manners for cigar smokers. I have searched for him online, and he doesn’t have much of an online presence or anything with regard to social media.

Laszlo really enjoyed hardcore punk, which is where we diverged musically. I’ve often wondered how he’s doing, he was a few years older than me, so he probably still is. It was awfully nice of him to let me tag along on his New York City adventures.
I am currently taking an online course in sexual harassment…apparently, I’ve been doing it wrong.