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I always promise my friends I won’t put up unflattering pictures, and unfortunately, I don’t like how any of my pictures from Saturday came out. So here is a picture of where Adrienne’s son Josh lives. It’s this little building, tucked at the end of an alley. Do you see that tiny gray door at the center right of the picture? Josh and his roommates live in there. If you walked by you’d wonder, ‘do people live in there?’

But it’s the best building. It has such a wonderful hidden feel and it’s great inside. I’d love to live there. It’s like something out of the book A Winter’s Tale. In the book, Mark Helprin (the author) describes how people in New York at the turn of the century occupied every nook and cranny.

I’ve typed in the part I thought of below. Josh’s isn’t quite like this, but seeing his building made me think of it. Helprin is talking about two girls, called spielers, who take this guy home. First, they have to travel to get there. It’s like an exaggeration of getting out to Brooklyn from Manhattan.

“It took them three hours to get there. They crossed several small rivers and five streams. They wound down a hundred crooked alleys that looked like opera sets. They passed over great bridges, through commercial squares where men ate fire and meat was roasted on swords, and by half a dozen wide doors that led far into smoky factories that pounded like hearts …” It goes on.

Then they kinda get to the spot, but the girls live “… not in the tenements themselves but within the hidden square they formed. They went through a dark whitewashed tunnel and discovered a vast concealed court surround by perhaps a hundred buildings. In the center was a broken garden not yet revived by spring, except for a dense growth of weeds. At it’s edge, dwarfed by the tenements, was a little shack. The spielers lived not in the shack but in it’s basement. They descended through a cellar door and found a small dark room with a tiny window near the ceiling …” And it goes on.

It’s a great book, one of my favorites, although at the same time, too something. The author is embarrassed by it now, I’ve read.

I had such a great time seeing my friends, and I love their kids and their kid’s friends, and their relatives and their new husbands. Okay, there was only one new husband but he was great! (Hi, Charlie!)

I swear this macro function turns every cat into a supermodel. Or … maybe … my cats are the most gorgeous cats in the whole wide UNIVERSE. (This is what I tell them.)

I keep meaning to say, I have to turn off the comments section on every post after a week or so, because it eventually starts filling up with spam comments for sex with hookers in the UK. So, I’m sorry if you try to comment and can’t.

Today I’m going out to Brooklyn to see friends I have known since junior freaking high school. Who have sons who are long out of junior freaking high school. Hey, Chris and Adrienne both have two sons. Have I noticed the perfect symmetry of that before? And I have two male cats! (Yeah, yeah, I’m the losah. I KNOW.) Chris is the one who just got married on New Years Eve. And I posted a picture of a slightly drunken Adrienne at my wedding a few months back.

Hopefully I will be back with embarrassing pictures of everyone tomorrow.

Picture missing! Where it went I know not!

Regardless of the fact that I have walked down Bleecker Street pretty much every day of my entire adult life, I learned from someone here in the comments section that Bleecker Street has a “c” in it. Who knew?? (I can’t remember who it was and I can’t find it now, I’m sorry, or I would totally give you credit for enlightening me! You knew!)

This is an original advertisement for the recently deceased Gian-Carlo Menotti’s opera The Saint of Bleecker Street which proves the spelling. But I checked a street sign when I went out and sure, enough, it’s BleeCker.

Meanwhile, in my life, this poltergeist chapter is still kicking butt, and I’m thinking I will not make a drumming gig tonight. I’m in an all-percussion band called the Manhattan Samba Group. But what can I say, I like to stay in at night.

Oh god. Just kill me now, I suppose.

These nice men were cleaning the steps at the Met yesterday so we wouldn’t slip and break our necks.

The show that my friend wanted to see was Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s, and it was the better show. It was amazing, but horrifying. It leaves on the 19th, so get there now if you want to see it. The paintings of prostitutes were overwhelmingly, disturbingly sad. It’s such a terrible roll of the dice, what you get in your one shot at life. You’re born — and what are the odds of even being born, it must be incalculable — and you’re plopped down in midst of this one moment of history and circumstances that bring you to what was portrayed in these paintings, and then you die. That’s it. No second chances.

Unless you are convinced by the research of Ian Stevenson, who I just learned died on February 8th. I wanted to interview him last year, but he was already too ill. Stevenson did research in reincarnation, and I’m not familiar with that work, but I have some stuff bookmarked and I hope to include a brief over-view in my book.

Rest in peace, Dr. Stevenson. And come back soon, if that is, in fact, possible.

This oven came from the apartment next door to me, which had been empty for decades. The story goes, a young cop who was killed in the line of duty had lived there with his wife and baby daughter in the 50’s. When he was killed his wife took their baby and left and never came back, leaving the furniture and a lot of their possessions behind. They continued to pay rent, though, so the apartment stayed empty.

I moved in next door around 1981 or 1982, I forget. One night there was a radiator leak in the apartment and the super had to break in to fix it. I was home so I went inside with him. At least part of the story was true. It was like going back in time. There was old furniture there that had been sitting unused for decades. Wallpaper was peeling off the walls in great big chunks. A desk full of someone’s papers sat dusty and cobweb-y.

And there was also this stove, which I thought was beautiful. The super said I could have it and it now sits in my bedroom. This picture doesn’t do it justice, it really is a lovely thing.

Which was a long lead in to this website. Michael who reads this blog sent it to me. It’s called the Baby Boomer Death Counter. Good freaking lord. Prepare yourselves fellow boomers.

Someday someone else will have my beautiful stove. They will tell their own story about how they came to own it. Maybe they will talk about how they got it from the cat lady’s apartment on the top floor. (Except, technically, I am NOT a cat lady. Two cats do not count as “cat lady,” right??)

WAIT. Have I told the stove story before? Am I repeating myself?? Has it come to this?? (Forgive me.)