Tying off the threads

friends in hats
Originally uploaded by pwilnyc.

When we moved to Baltimore from New York City 4 years ago, I was a little tentative about certain things. I last lived here from 1988 through 1995 - from the age of 23 until I was almost 30 - and those were, er, sort of fast times. I went out a lot, I dated a lot, I drank a lot, I knew everyone, I lived WAY downtown, I hated my job, and I ran a coffee house on the side.

Kind of one of the reasons that I left was that I could no longer go into a bar or restaurant without running into someone I used to date or employ. Another reason was that a lot of people started using heroin, and that was seriously unpleasant.

Apparently St. Louis, Missouri is like that too.

So when I came "home" in 2002 I wasn't over-excited about revisiting my old hangouts. There were people in this town who I kind of winced about.

I do run into people from way-back, without seeking them out. Sometimes it's great, sometimes not. But there's no avoiding it. It's not a small world, I always say, but it surely is a small town.

• Martha across the street is not only the sister of the trumpet player in Mambo Combo, one of the bands I used to like, she used to date one of my regulars at the coffee house, AND she's my distant cousin.
  
• A couple of our new friends used to be friends with the boy who lived in our house. Upon entry, Loren said, "I know this house - I used to do drugs in your basement!"
  
• Bob's boss Eric is a friend of the All Mighty Senators, whose shows were a real highlight of those bad old days.
  
• When I went to get my new tattoo, the guy with the needle was the guy who years ago had dicked over my dear friend the massage therapist.
  
• We ran into one of the parents from the Big Man's school one evening out in White Marsh, about to go on stage... and when I saw the rest of the band assemble, I realized Darius was guesting with Rumba Club, with my neighbor's brother sitting in on trumpet and Craig Considine, from the Senators, on trombone.
  

So Monday, picking up the Big Man from his first day at kindergarten, I see Landis, the front man for the Senators. His little boy goes to the same school. Of course. He introduced me to his son's mom, K, and when I squinted and said, "No wait, I know you..." Landis told us he could swear he has a picture of her and me sitting together on the hood of Phil Minion's art car.

I almost remember that.

Pipiks in late summer

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Spectacular hijinks!

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More of what we've been up to lately.

This photo (below) is in the funny-glasses slideshow above, but I think it deserves to be regarded at greater leisure.


Uncle Miles was born to wear the funny glasses
Originally uploaded by pwilnyc.

You can't take a bad picture of Bob's sister Jane's husband, Miles, who is a sound engineer, very sharp except for the way he can't seem to stop breaking his collarbone. I have another good picture of him holding some marigolds. For a guy with plastic glasses and a large beard, he's very photogenic.

School boys, boy scouts, and doomed ducks

This weekend we drove to Cleveland to bury Bob's mom's ashes. She died in May. She was a crack-up, a game gal if I ever met one. The first time I met her, I was unaware of the awe with which she was regarded. Her daughters wouldn't smoke in front of her and all her sons- and daughters-in-law called her Mom. So what do I do? I sit down next to her, light up, and call her Frances.

I was therefore always surprised that she accepted me and even seemed to like me, the tattooed atheist who married her baby boy. But she did, and I liked her back.

While we were out there, we dealt with some of the mechanics of distributing and disposing of her stuff. Bob has nine brothers and sisters, and they were cute, trying to get the story straight about objects that had been handed down and around.

Anyway, they asked me to take a look at the books. To make sure there wasn't some priceless rare volume tucked among the copies of The Mill on the Floss and The Song of Bernadette. There were some seriously old primers, late 1800's, and a couple weird books (Ghetto Tragedies I'd like to know more about), but it was all in fairly poor condition, and I was happy to tell them that the books "only" had sentimental value.


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Here are a few pages from the fourth edition of the Boy Scout Handbook. This edition was the first one with a separate handbook for scout leaders. If we'd had one of those, it would be worth about $750. But we didn't.


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This one tells its own story but remains a mystery. I couldn't find School boys Abroad and At Home on bookfinder.com nor on eBay. I'll look it up in FirstSearch when I get to work. Published in 1867, it was given as a gift to John McCormick in 1870 as a reward for his singing.


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This is a first reader from 1877. The illustrations are very very good - I know a little about illustrations of animals because I used to spend time with the rare books at AMNH. Love the cat chomping the rat - but that wouldn't have been a shocking sight to the young readers of this book. Also the hawk carrying away the ducky. I bet those kids didn't forget the word 'duck' any time soon!

Anyone got nineteen large to spare?

Because this might make me feel a lot better. Stolen from sweetney.

Big Man goes to school

first day of kindergarten
Originally uploaded by pwilnyc.

I don't have much to say here.

He's so excited and he'll do so great. And I'm such a mess!

I saw the tough guy who lives nearby with the coffee roasting place and all the tattoos this morning - he was taking his daughter, she's starting kindergarten with Big Man - who is getting way too fucking big, that's what I have to say! He can be a serious pain in the ass but I'm going to miss him so much! Seven hours a day, can you imagine that? for an almost-five-year-old? I hope he likes his lunch, it's totally lame.

Anyway, I saw Thomas the tough guy this morning after he dropped off his daughter and I told him what a mess I was and he showed me he was wearing sunglasses so nobody would see him cry.

This has been hands-down the most stressful thing that's happened since he was born. Between WHERE he should go (public = scary, private = expensive) and IF he should go: his birthday is Sept 1, the cut-off day - "Child must be 5 on or before Sept 1" so he's THE YOUNGEST in the whole school. He's totally smart enough but whether he's emotionally ready... and SEVEN hours?

into the maw of Education

He's never been to preschool - he's gone almost 5 years with no grownup to judge him besides me and Bob. From here on out, there will always be someone he has to perform for, you know? There will always be a teacher or a boss.

But I've been working with the school since before it opened last year - a charter school with lottery entry, we totally lucked out that he got in - so we know the principal and the founder and his teacher and plenty of other parents, and he's seen his classroom before, and it's beautiful and great.

He loves his backpack too, we've made a big deal out of all the school supplies, and he wrote his name on his art smock and I embroidered over it... I should probably be grateful that I can take a shower any time I want now (when they're both here I can leave them unsupervised for exactly 4.5 minutes, so by the time I'm rinsing the conditioner out of my hair Mr. Three has found some reason to be screaming).


he'll do fine

I'm not one of those people who sniffle, "Just yesterday he was a little baby," let me tell you - just yesterday he was chanting "Mine! Mine! Mine!" over some piece of crap with his brother in the car and I wanted to pull over and flee.

But thank god I still have Mr. Three here to hug and kiss.

Will rule the world one day

8-16-06- 100
Originally uploaded by pwilnyc.

Mr. Three has a little joke he says when he wants something at the table, usually cheese.
"May I have some cheese, please? But not on my knees, that would make me sneeze!"
Pretty clever for three, a bit icky-precious if you're not his actual parent.

Tonight he wanted a snack.
"May I have some peanuts? But not on my knee-nuts..."
Didn't make it to whatever he would say next, snee-nuts I guess, because Bob and I were laughing so hard. Extra peanuts for him.

Special to the Monday night crowd

composition with bunny and Elmo
Originally uploaded by pwilnyc.

Also noted: Holding hands with Lefty with one hand, keeping tabs on Mr. Johnson with the other.

The "G" stands for Gentlemen's: What "Gentlemen" stands for is up for grabs

Well the kids and I listened to Appetite for Destruction this morning, the Guns 'n' Roses album, the epitome of rock n roll circa 1987. Perhaps the epitome of rock n roll period. Ok perhaps not. But it hit the kids like a dozen cupcakes with sprinkles. They literally bounced off the walls and furniture. Seriously, it was like Nell getting a Snickers bar for the first time.

I was prompted to delve deep into the iPod and find this sweet-sixteen-year-old album by a very weird article on Axl Rose in GQ ("GQ?" you ask... "Clive Owen," I reply, and you nod sagely).

GQ is very weird overall. There was a spread (and I do mean spread) on men's underwear featuring a mostly naked woman reaching into the male model's shorts. There were also many many many photographs of rippling abs. Bob, seeing the word "football" on the cover, picked the thing up looking for the football article, and instead found a half-dozen pictures of an expressionless Reggie Bush putting on and taking off sweaters so that each shot exposed his torso. He leafed past the beefcake looking for the article and there was none. There was an actual interview with Troy Polamalu, but the writer was so distracted by Polamalu's hair and lifestyle that he all but failed to mention that Polamalu is apparently an athletic polymath.

The guy writing about Axl Rose seems as conflicted as the entire magazine. He admires Axl's virtuoso voice; he reminds us that Axl looked like a sexy girl when he was 20 years old; he says that Axl's "package is huge. Only reporting."; and he says that the way Axl dances, especially in the video for "Patience," which I thought was just a blown kiss short of nauseating, is "lovely, I'm sorry."

It seems like, at GQ, it's all about "not gay! oh no, not gay!" If you want to report that Axl has a big penis, that's fine by me; if your visual taste allows you to admire that snaky dance thing that Axl used to do, I don't give a powdered-milk fuck. But all the disclaimers and apologies - who exactly is he apologizing to? His editor? "Sorry I'm sounding a little GAY here, but no homosexual on earth would admit to liking Guns N Roses so I'm ok right?"

The style columnist however doesn't remotely get a pass, especially once he's admitted that he uses an anti-aging night cream. We are assured that he didn't BUY it or anything, his wife gives him her surplus - "some Patricia Wexler pink goop". Mentioning the brand means he gets a crate of the stuff as a thank-you, but if he'd called it by its name, "Skin Regenerating Serum," which he can certainly read, it's on the jar right under "patricia wexler, M.D." well then he would have been a fag.

There's even a sidebar in the etiquette column: "How to deal with gay people." WE'RE NOT GAY, DAMMIT!!!

UPDATE: I CANNOT get "Sweet Child of Mine" out of my head now. That album is fucking genius.

Bringing out the dead

This is an old story, a Brooklyn story.

One St. Patrick's Day my friend Tod came with his friend Van to Brooklyn. St. Patrick's Day in Brooklyn is like an uglier Mardi Gras. Hence, many bars packed with fratty preps and swaying, drunken idiots ensued. Van, who wrote for the Baltimore City Paper, knew New York pretty well, and as we roamed Brooklyn in search of less-crowded bar we were joined by various friends.

By the time we're at an ancient dive on Atlantic Ave, surrounded by kitsch and miserabilia, I'm talking to an apparent speed freak named Joe that I don't know HOW Van knows.

So Joe hears I work for Mosby, the medical publishing company, and he tells me he's an ambulance driver. My division published all the non-doctor and non-nurse textbooks - we worked a lot with EMTs, which is what you call ambulance drivers these days. "Great," I think, most of those guys are egotistical pricks. What's more, he's written a novel. "Terrific," I think, every one of these guys thinks he has a novel in him, and I have to hear about most of them.

I start to say that Mosby never touches fiction, and he says oh no, he has an agent and a book deal and everything.

I relax, let him tell me about the book (tragedy, dissonance, exhaustion). He's a nice guy, funny, cranked a little too tightly but that goes with the job. He insisted on calling himself an "ambulance driver," which I liked. It's less accurate, but conveys more urgency and purpose than "EMT" or even "paramedic." We all get all hammered and have a weird day.

• Saw a guy running down a side street with a two by four.
• 50 feet later, saw a guy sitting on the curb holding his bleeding head.
• Met a crowd of sanitation workers who treated Joe like a king once they heard he was an EMT.
• A very small Ecuadoran or possibly Peruvian man threatened Tod's life over his sweater.
  

All things being equal, I sort of forgot about the book.

Months later, I see this paperback on a table at the megabookstore on Union Square. A stray synapse fired and I flipped the book to see if there was an author photo. Sure enough, Joe Connelly, Van's friend.


I read the book. I enjoyed the book. It's a balls-ass book, not as preoccupied with le romance as the movie is.

In the book, the protagonist tells us of his dream job. He would be a consultant for the movies and TV. "E.R." drove the protagonist wild. I know comparatively little about emergency medicine, but it used to drive me wild too. "You don't shock asystole!" I used to growl, outraged.

So on a later edition of the book, I saw that it was "Soon to be a major motion picture! Directed by Martin Scorsese!" and in smaller print, Joe Connelly was to be hired as the movie's technical consultant.

Any story that ends with the protagonist climbing out of the ambulance under his own power is by definition a happy one.