The dream of Tuesday morning. I’m with Harpy and we’re downtown, a version of downtown that I had visited before: newsstands and magazine stores which are few and far between these days. I was going to some sort of reunion and Harpy was accompanying me up to a point, then he was going to split.

While in the altered downtown I was at a newsstand, talking to the guy behind the counter, and asked if he had Gauloises. To my surprise, he did and found a box. He was selling me 3 out of 6 packs of Gauloises at a buck a piece. I wanted to buy the whole box of 6 but realized I had nothing to carry the 6 packs with and bought 3.

Then we were at a bar where Harpy knew some of the people and I was antsy, wanting to go to the reunion. Leaving the bar I was in a part of Lodi that I really hadn’t been to in over 40 years. Then the alarm went off. I did ask Harpy why he dropped off of the social media and he gave some vague answer that he never really left, just wasn’t posting, only lurking.

Bill came home last night and was quite a zombie. Barely comprehensible. Within 5 minutes he was driving me crazy and 20 minutes after that he was off to bed where he was unable to stay asleep claiming to be over-tired which is a thing.

A few hours later. Bill is awake and bus driving me insane. I once again gathered my steps walking through Hoboken. I hoped that Bill would accompany me but opted to stay home, having been away from the couch for 5 days. And it was cold out.

As I posted in the video yesterday, if you keep moving and have a place to go to, you should be alright. The sad part is, not everyone has a place to go to. And in the cold of winter that is difficult.

Last night I downloaded Spalding Gray’s ‘Swimming to Cambodia’. I tried to cast it to the TV for Bill and I to watch but it was not in sync and though the time difference was just a few seconds I found it maddening and could not deal with it.

Bill stepped up and hooked up the DVD player. To do that he had to unplug the Apple TV thing behind the TV. We rarely watch Apple TV, I think the only show we watched was Ted Lasso which was excellent and I could not find anything that was so enjoyable to watch, despite recommendations from family and friends.

Spalding Gray was an inspiration for what I have planned for a 2025 project. My first contact with Spalding was seeing his posters in the subway in the 1980s for Swimming to Cambodia, Terrors of Pleasure, and a few other pieces that were being performed at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.

I saw a few of them then, at least the ones I mentioned. My enthusiasm carried into my barbacking days at Maxwell’s and had a few co-workers and friends see some of the shows with me. Things were less expensive then, and seeing a show a few times was affordable. My brother Frank and I saw Swimming to Cambodia at the Performing Garage, but not the filmed performance by Jonathan Demme.

I crossed paths with Spalding two times after that. Once when I was working at a bookstore in Soho where Spalding was doing a reading and the other time when Spalding was at a preview screening of Monster in a Box. Both times my eyes locked with Spalding and it was somewhat intense. I never spoke to him though.

A few years later when Bill and I were starting out, we went to see Spalding at PS 122. It was a few years after Spalding was in a terrible accident in Ireland and was severely injured. He was not the same Spalding Gray that I saw and crossed paths with in the past. He was a ghost of his former self. I had a clue since I read an article about him in a magazine shortly before the PS 122 appearance.

Bill didn’t know and a few audience members didn’t know either. One woman seated next to us asked if we knew what happened and I explained the magazine article. The woman said she felt so sad for him that she wanted to go up to him and hug him. It ended tragically for Spalding sometime after that and I would rather not get into it since it still affects me to this day.

But Spalding Gray was an inspiration to me, one that I hope to honor with whatever I plan to do with the video blog going down the line. Watching Swimming to Cambodia this afternoon was fun and still inspiring. It would not be the same but his influence and concerts will carry forth I hope.

They tell me it’s a Monday. And by they I mean no one in particular.

Mike split this morning. We had a good time together. He was off to work before 7 AM and I was up to see him off. He’s a good kid. The friendship is similar to the friendship I had with Juan.
Younger than me, a breath of fresh air and with a point of view I would never have considered.

Bill is on his way home so my time alone is merely a matter of hours, but how those hours lengthen when I have no one around. I suppose it’s always been like this, and not just for me but a lot of people I reckon. Bill had some setbacks in his scheduling all out of his control but he did what he had to do and so he is on his way home.

Here are two dreams from this morning after Mike descended the stairs to the real world.
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In one I was with Harpy and Farfetched Lois and a few other people from the past at a party which may have been at Fire Island. I wouldn’t know for sure since I have never been to Fire Island. It was a gay event and I was entertaining people, playing a guitar as the party got bigger and bigger and bigger. I had an encounter with a Gimp who was similar to the one portrayed in Pulp Fiction. He came up upon me and I smacked him away which got him mad but he really couldn’t do much of anything being all tied up in his Gimp gear.

Another dream was me trying to connect with Julio to go to a funeral somewhere in the Bronx and he was being awfully kind and I was trying to make his life easier by telling him that I would make my way there on my own. I don’t know who I was looking for near the Grove Street Path station, was it William or Juan? The second dream ended when I was trying to walk around the block while putting on socks that were falling apart in my hand.

Soon after those dreams, I was thinking about the former job and thinking I’d never get back to sleep when I wound up going back to sleep. It was a good sleep and welcomed very much. This afternoon was a stroll around Hoboken, gathering steps. Not as many steps as I would have liked but what could I do?

I will gather some more steps as I go downstairs to help Bill with his luggage. His luggage is quite heavy as Bill is prepared for whatever might happen while en route. I make the same old joke about Bill taking his rock collection, his safe, and a baby grand piano. It’s an old joke and I never said it was a funny joke.

Bill said once he gets here he’ll be going right to bed, so exhausted he is. I can’t fault him for that. I would rather have Bill 20 feet away than 295 miles away which is where he’s been.

Today might be the first day in weeks where I didn’t wear thermals,
I also recorded some videos…