Guitar Bar | johnozed

OK, back to the present day. The past few weeks have been quite stressful for me. Job loss, staying home climbing the walls, planes and helicopters crashing nearby.

Plus my people skills have been non-existent. Going to the supermarket would leave me enraged. Crossing the street was a matter of life or death with me tempting fate.

Not that I was trying to get hit by a car, but rather looking for trouble as a pedestrian yelling at and sometimes smacking the trunk of a car as it rolled through a stop sign.

The sort of thing that occasionally winds up with someone getting shot and since I do not own a gun, the person who might get shot would be me.

I discussed this with Casey Chasm who is fleeing Hoboken with the missus at the end of the month since Hoboken is so bleedin’ expensive. He’s been unemployed longer than I’ve been and went through similar feelings.

He recommended a prescription for Xanax. I’ve used Xanax back in the day, usually from Susan Sled’s pillbox hat. Didn’t do much for me 19 years ago, but it was for recreational purposes then, and foolishly so.

Now I had an actual reason.

Casey suggested seeing his doctor and since the doctor I used a few years ago has quite a flaky schedule I called up Casey’s MD and got an appointment for the same day.

So following Casey’s well timed advice I went and had an EKG, and some lung capacity tests and they were fine. Of course the discussion about quitting cigarettes came up and it will be discussed further once I get my blood work done next week.

I do like the doctor though, and his staff were very nice as well. So after picking up the prescription, I took one. The recommended dosage was 2 a day, but 1 was enough. Plus it was late afternoon. Within about 20 minutes, things started to get warm, edginess fading.

Ran into the funniest girl alive, Meghan and her daughter Ruby. All very pleasant, even more pleasant than usual. And I still had a sense of humor. Walked around with Meghan and Ruby, saw Jim at the Guitar Bar where Jim was putting stuff in the car for the Guitar Bar Summer Camp show at the Frozen Monkey Cafe.

Jim & Ruby drove up there, Meghan and I walked up. I was feeling generally pretty good and Meghan was feeling pretty much the same way.

I decided not to stay to watch the kids playing whatever it is they were going to play. A few weeks ago all I needed to hear was the opening notes to Sweet Child of Mine by Guns & Roses to get me out of there.

I opted to go to the supermarket to see if my murderous rage was suppressed enough. On the way there I talked on the phone to my sister in law Elaine since my new doctor asked me for info on my brother Frank’s stroke in 2007.

Got the info and headed into the store which was crowded and staffed with the usual belligerent people. This time it didn’t bother me. It didn’t bother me either when on the express line someone ahead of me had 20 items instead of the limit of 15.

Had a light supper when I came home, a few hours later, a walk around Hoboken once again with Julio. And that was pleasant, none of the weight of the world on my shoulders.

I know that weight is still there but not crushing me like it’s been lately.

I could have used a Xanax the other night when I went to the Yankee game with Bill. That didn’t go as well as I had hoped.

I was pretty much miserable and Bill had a feeling that was going to happen. Overall that was a bad night. Sitting in the bleachers with no back support, my neck was stiff and I was wearing an older pair of glasses that I thought looked better but with a weaker prescription, I couldn’t focus on much at all.

Bill enjoyed himself despite me. And it made for an uncomfortable ride home.

I can be quite an asshole sometimes. Hopefully now I’ll have a better grip on that.

Today I’m going into Greg Stevens office to do some coconut work, then heading across town to see the play that Bill has been stage managing the past few weeks.

I think this weekend or early next week, I’ll have a return trip to Lodi, a family friend passed away this morning. Back to the social milieu of wakes and funerals.

Bill & his friend Kirk

Just got back from a visit to McSwells where I had dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Paterson, as well as Meghan Taylor Mastro and the daughters Lily (mine) and Ruby (Jim’s). Almost wasn’t able to pull it off.

You see I was at work and as the day crawled along I just started feeling bad. Not ill necessarily, but more like feeling blue. I left the office around 1:30, no one was in really and the feeling in the office was ‘so what?’

So I walked across town, enjoying a Padron, listening to Girl Talk and still enjoying it. I left two voice mails for Bill and a text message but he didn’t get those until I was home, putting the kibosh on meeting up with him for a few minutes outside his building. Plus it was too cold to socialize outside.

I was home for a little while when I heard from Meghan. She was coming to Hoboken with Lily and Ruby and the Paterson’s. The Paterson’s are actually Ann Boyles and her husband Pat Paterson.

I explained how I was feeling and said I would try to make it after I took a much-needed nap. The nap definitely did the trick, deep sleep for almost two hours. Cleared my head of whatever malaise was troubling me.

It was almost interrupted by phone calls but I wisely shut the ringer on the phone off. It was dark when I woke up and mere moments after awakening, Meghan called telling me that she and the girls were walking up to McSwells to get some food.

I had to stop by the library to pick up Philip Norman’s biography of John Lennon and Sarah Vowell’s new book, The Wordy Shipmates. Quite timely since I finished the New Yorker already, finished Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine a couple of weeks ago, and though I took Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, about Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet out of the library I’m not as interested in it as I was when I first ordered it.

After trying not to break my neck on the unshoveled ice I made it to McSwells where Yo La Tengo where eating dinner before their third Hanukah show. Ann met me at the door since she saw me on the sidewalk walking by.

She still looks as adorable as ever and still the same Ann Boyles I knew way back when, still funny to be around. Pat Paterson, her husband is a really nice guy who I might have met before when he worked for Dreams So Real and Guadalcanal Diary among others back in the day.

Despite the last time I ate at McSwells I gambled again and ordered a burger, which was fine. Ann didn’t have problems with her burger but I think Meghan and Lily and Ruby had issues with their orders, as did Pat with the flavorless fish and chips.

After dinner we did a quick walk by the river, around where Maxwell House used to stand. They’re all condos now, no more big neon sign with a coffee cup, and no more ‘good till the last drop’.

Got some great pictures of everyone, the only who was missing was Jim who was minding the Guitar Bar. We walked back down Washington Street, Pat finding some thrown away stilts that he did a credible job of walking on for a couple of feet.

Alas, I had to head home and write this, they continued to collect Jim from the Guitar Bar and head back out to Glen Ridge. It looks like I will be going out to visit on Saturday and it seems quite possible that Bill will join me, so Ann will finally get to meet the man in my life, as I just met hers.

So here’s to Ann and Pat and Meghan, Lily & Ruby, and of course, Jim. Cheers!

And I said hello to Ann Boyles on behalf of bhikkhu and Harpy. She responded in kind.

There were some fairly large pics here, but not any more.
I’m still using Bill’s Mac and can’t figure out how to rotate certain pics. If you know how, please feel free to fix them and send them back to me so I will repost them. Can’t seem to use xnview on the Mac you see. Made everything easier….

well actually I went to my PC and loaded the pics onto a flash drive after ediiting on xnview on my PC….