Flaming Pablum

5 Things I'm Thankful For

With the strangest Thanksgiving in recent memory looming, it was a tense day here at Chez Pablum. The kids were bickering about invasions of their respective spaces during Zoom classes. I was on edge in the dining room with several important work projects pending, and playing a frenetic game of beat the clock. I regret to say that at certain points, voices were raised — and not for the purposes of extolling each others’ merits.

But, with the overriding themes of Turkey Day in mind — those being gratitude, family, humility and generosity, not gluttony, sloth and football — I thought it would be prudent to take a moment to reflect on the things I am indeed thankful for this year.

(5) I am very thankful for my network for friends who’ve kept in touch, kept me laughing and kept me arguably sane in the past several months. Whether online, on the phone or over a couple of socially distanced beverages, their counsel, good cheer and friendship has meant the world to me.

(4) I’m very thankful that while we’ve both been crazy busy, my wife and I have remained gainfully employed during this whole experience. We know some folks who haven’t been as fortunate in that capacity, and we genuinely thank our lucky goddamn stars that we’re still working and earning.

(3) Despite my grumblings at the top of this post about how we’re all getting on each others’ nerves, I feel entirely grateful to have been able to spend so much time with my family throughout this whole experience. Being that both of my kids are teenagers now, this would normally be an era wherein they’d be going well out of their way to spend as little time with their annoying parents as possible. Periodic lack of elbow-room notwithstanding, it’s been a lovely period of familial solidarity. I’m also crazy lucky to have the single greatest spouse in the world who puts up with my big-mouthed neuroses and abject idiocy.

(2) I am very grateful that no one in our immediate family has taken ill or worse during this period. I have a few friends who were infected a few months back, and another writer pal of mine who was just diagnosed with a positive. By all accounts, it’s a harrowing ride, and I am very thankful the bug hasn’t paid any of us a visit, as yet. That could all change of course, but so far, so good.

….but most of all, I am thankful that….

(1) DONALD TRUMP LOST THE ELECTION AND WILL SHORTLY BE VACATING THE WHITE HOUSE — POSSIBLY IN HANDCUFFS — ALONG WITH HIS SHITTY FAMILY AND HIS ABJECTLY FATUOUS ADMINISTRATION. IT’S OVER. HE LOST.

But back on the slightly less provocative subject of this coming Thanksgiving, my family and I will simply be celebrating this one at home here in the city. I will be on mashed-potato detail, being that it requires more blunt-force physical maintenance over nuanced culinary finesse.

My friend Dana posted the below on social media earlier this week, and I think it hits all the right notes.

Be safe. Be smarter and have a happy Thanksgiving.

So, I’m going to flip the Thanksgiving narrative, starting now…

...I am thrilled to eat Thanksgiving dinner with my immediate household this year.

We are going to cook the hell out of the meal.

We are going to get dressed up.

We are going to meet up with our families on Zoom.

We are going to talk about gratitude and all that feel-good Thanksgiving crap.

We are going to drink plenty.

We are going to play awesome music that makes us want to sing, and we will sing.

We are going to meet up with our friends on Zoom and play Cards Against Humanity and drink some more if we want.

We are going to eat dessert, and plenty of it.

We are going to go outside and look at the sky, howl at the moon, light a fire and think of all the people we love, looking at this same night sky on this same night.

We are going to shine thanks into every cell of our bodies, and out from there, impossible as it might seem.

We are going to celebrate like we don’t spend every hour of every day in the same household.

We are not going to regret, be sorry, apologize, be upset because we can’t do what we usually do.

We are going to thank the Hell out of this Thanksgiving.

That’s my declaration of Thanksgiving.

So, suck it, COVID. Suck it, 2020.

Thanks, But No Thanks ... giving

As Turkey Day looms, the CDC bluntly suggested that no one should travel this particular holiday. Is that a bummer? Certainly, but think about it. We essentially cancelled Halloween, right? No one went — or no one should have went — to parties, parades or trick or treating. It sucked, but it’s what had to happen. Thanksgiving? Same deal. Yeah, it’s no fun, but have your turkey at home and tell Aunt Jean you’ll see her next year. It’s not that complicated, nor is it really that much of a sacrifice.

But, no. If the last nine months have demonstrated anything, it’s that a vast swath of the American populace is stupid, obstinate, arrogant and weak, and determined to fuck it up for the rest of us. It’s poised to make the outbreak after Sturgis seem like a damp fart.

I, of course, would love to blithely assert that we here in New York have it all figured out, but of course we don’t. The infection rate is climbing here, too, which is wholly dispiriting. Schools are reverting back to all-remote learning plans and some small businesses already struggling to keep up with the changing topography are just throwing in the towel entirely. Restaurants across town that have been building, re-building and customizing their sidewalk sheds with heat lamps are feeling the two-pronged pinch of earlier closing-time mandates and the inevitable patron-scaring power of the winter chill, which will put the kibosh on just about any al-fresco dining scenario. When that option is curtailed, there will be more places shuttering for good.

Sure, there is good news on the vaccine front, but effective distribution of same will still take time. And with lame-duck Donald doing pretty much everything he can to sabotage any proactive attempts by the rightfully incoming administration to address the problem Trump has long neglected, downplayed and flat-out abandoned — at the expense of thousands of American lives, let’s remember — the prospects of “rounding the curve” any time soon are not exactly within reach. We still have a ways to go.

Bottom line: Things fucking suck. And they suck because lots of people didn’t listen. They should be listening now. But, some still won’t.

Stay home this Thanksgiving. Cook your own turkey and have a Zoom call with your far-flung relatives. That doesn’t mean you’re “living in fear,” it means you’re demonstrating compassionate consideration for your loved ones.

And wear a fucking mask.

Reason & Wrath Over Right-Wing Rotten

It’s the morning after this year’s frankly anemic and depressing Halloween (no trick or treating, no parades, no parties, etc.), and I found myself up at what was going be 8:00 am but turned into 7:00 am due to Daylight Savings. As such, I decided to go for an early-AM walk.

Standing at my front door, I did something of a mental coin-toss and decided to head east, serpentining my way through quiet East Village streets until I reached Avenue C, and then meandering back. While detritus from the last night’s muted festivities were indeed evident, comparatively speaking it might has well have been any other Saturday night. St. Marks Place, meanwhile, is looking its most anarchic in a long time, between hastily assembled al-fresco-dining sheds, shuttered age-old businesses like Gem Spa and Khyber Pass and a robust array of blithely-strewn garbage. I happened to glance up the stoop at the doorway of Search & Destroy as I was heading back west, and noticed a small detail.

I honestly don’t know how often they formally redecorate their exterior, if ever, but only scant weeks ago, in the porthole-like window in the center of their door had been Ray Stevenson’s iconic photograph of Johnny Rotten, glaring with signature punk insouciance under the legend “FUCK YOU, CORONA.”

A little under a month later, however, Johnny’s gone, replaced by the similarly over-rhapsodized mug of his late comrade, Sid Vicious.

I know, I know … big friggin' whoop.

But, I couldn’t help wondering. Might this be in response to John Lydon’s recent espousals of Trump that I’ve been repeatedly wringing my hands about?

I have a couple of regular readers who sounded off mightily on this point, incredulous that, in my last two posts on the subject, I was allegedly treating Lydon/Rotten’s latest stream of half-baked humbug  -- especially his quips arguably diminishing the impact of COVID-19 -- with kid gloves and not asserting the same burnt bridge policy I applied to, say, Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine after he asserted from a stage somewhere to a baying audience that Obama orchestrated the mass shootings during his administration as an excuse to ramp up gun control. Deal-breaking comments, to be sure.

With Lydon, it’s just more complicated. Beyond the seemingly obvious irony and neck-snapping reversals of the guy who penned “Anarchy In The UK” suddenly chugalugging the Kool-Aid of a “law & order”-fixated administration Hell-bent on lining the pockets of the corporate elite, amplifying racial divide, overturning basic human rights, disenfranchising immigrants, manifesting a draconian overhaul of our Supreme Court and basically dismantling our democracy, I’m just wondering if John’s own once-razor-sharp powers of cognition are in decline. I’m just having a very hard time reconciling his lapses in judgement.

Actually, the real reason for this post is that quite recently, I stumbled upon an outtake from my friend Drew Stone’s excellent film, “Who The Fuck Is That Guy?,” an absolutely amazing documentary about storied A&R exec Michael Alago. It is fucking required viewing. In any case, given Alago’s longtime association with John Lydon, Stone sought him out as a contributor fo the film. Lydon — always with something to say — happily obliged with typical aplomb.

In the clip below, however, Stone got Lydon talking about his tenure living over on the western fringes of Chelsea in New York City in the 80s — a topic near and dear to this blog’s heart. He also takes some enjoyable potshots at NYU and Rudy Giuliani.

Listening to the lucid and reasonable John Lydon here reinforces my stated suspicions above, although that’s ultimately all just projection. Who knows what’s a wind-up anymore?

Anyway, enjoy. To be continued.

Goodnight, Mark

If you live, work or spend any amount of time on University Place between 8th and 9th Streets, you’ve invariably heard him. “One penny, ma’am? No one should be hungry.”

Perched on a milk crate behind a large water-cooler bottle upended to accommodate donations, Mark sat for a succession of years outside of the neighborhood Gristede's, chanting his gentle-but-sonorous plea like the verses of an unending song. A large man with rounded shoulders and kind eyes, Mark would bless each and every person who stopped to put change or bills in his bottle, visibly thankful for every cent he received. A neighborhood fixture for at least a decade, Mark was unbothered by shifts in the weather, only retiring when the damp turned into prohibitive precipitation. Where he went when he wasn’t in that exact spot and how (or if) he distributed his ensuing funds remains a mystery not unlike what happened to Al (aka “Rocky”) who used to sit a block to the north. But he bothered no one. He accosted no one. He badgered no one. Every time I dropped money in Mark's bottle, he asked how my kids were — whom he’d seen grow from tiny tots into teenagers. Always a kind word and a gentle, lilting laugh ….and then back into his mantra. “One penny? No one should be hungry.”

This morning, I popped out to Gristede’s to buy some milk for my coffee, and in Mark’s place was a humble collection of flowers and some notes. Evidently, Mark passed away yesterday, although the reasons and specifics of his demise are unknown.

Rest easy, Mark, wherever you are.

Hipster Hiraeth

Weirdly or perhaps fittingly, Brooklyn started becoming a “hip” thing right as I was exiting that whole realm.

After years of being a beery and sneery Manhattan rock pig, prone to darkening the doors of any number of seedy bars and irresponsibly loud live-music venues in the East Village and Lower East Side, I found myself suddenly married and siring children just as things were kicking off on the other side of the East River.

Prior to all that, I’d certainly been to Williamsburg — where friends in pre-hipster bands like EBN and Cop Shoot Cop had decamped in the name of affordability — but it seemed more like Belfast during the Troubles than the future site of any burgeoning, Pabst Blue Ribbon-fueled subculture. By the time the Mrs. and I had moved from East 12th to East 9th and were picking out baby gear, the great sea change of relevance was well underway, and apart from very occasional sorties across the river to check out the new scene, I was very much not a part of it.

If my previous missives poo-poohing Lizzie Goodman’s sprawling “Meet Me In the Bathroom” didn’t already amplify same, I was largely okay with all that. I’d had my time and my era, and while I didn’t think quite as much of the new bands and the new scene — let alone their somewhat cloying cultural touchstones and sartorial/tonsorial trappings — there was undeniably some amazing music that was spawned from it all. But while it was happening, I really wasn’t there. I was more likely to be found rocking one toddler or another to sleep or blearily wandering the aisles of Buy Buy Baby in a slumber-deprived stupor quite unlike the ones I’d cultivated at Max Fish, The Pyramid or CBGB just scant years prior.

Here in the apocalyptic epoch-eclipse of 2020, meanwhile, Hipster Brooklyn has summarily fallen prey to a neck-snappingly steep level of gentrification, albeit in a seemingly more accelerated manner than what happened here in Manhattan, although that may just be my biased projection. And much as with Jesse Malin’s bars and clubs still strategically positioned around the East Village, while some holdout venues and ventures remain peppered around Williamsburg and Greenpoint, the hipsters are basically all gone.

In turn, that has led to the requisite advent of nostalgia, a word I am certainly no stranger to. And while it seems like only weeks ago to oldsters like myself that McCarren Pool was a cool concert venue or that the first Grizzly Bear album came out, there is now a groundswell of longing by former participants for the bona fide brand of Brooklyn cool that once thrived over there. I call it …. Hipster Hiraeth.

Case in point is this weepy article that came out in Inside Hook yesterday, Dubbed “Remembering the Early-Aughts Hipster Bars That Built Williamsburg As We Know it,” it’s a slavishly detailed run-down of since-vanished concerns that allegedly defined the core of Hipster Brooklyn, and I cannot say I knowingly entered into any of them apart from having a fleeting couple of beers at Enid’s with erstwhile Killing Joke drummer Big Paul Ferguson back in 2004. Beyond that desperate bit of name-dropping, I cannot begin to add anything to this article as it pertains to a world and an era I just wasn’t privy to. Why is that? Because I’m old.

While it’s certainly weird to find oneself steeped in nostalgia, a quandary I frequently weep about here, it’s even weirder to watch younger individuals start to come to grips with it. As someone smart, famous and sadly dead once sagely sang, hey look out, you rock’n’rollers — pretty soon now, you’re gonna get older.

In any case, below is a fleeting snippet of the Hipster Brooklyn I remember best….

53

Today, I turn the ignominious age of 53. It’s not a number I know what to do with. There are things I feel I should have accomplished by now that I haven’t, critical boxes that should have been checked by now that remain unchecked and practices I still partake in that I invariably shouldn’t. I am not pleased by any of these facts.

That all said, viewed through the prism of COVID-19-scarred 2020, I have absolutely no complaints. For the past eight months or so, I have been able to spend way more time with my children than normal circumstances would have ever allowed. As both kids are now firmly into their teens, they’re at an age that would traditionally have them scrambling away from the company of their parents with all stealth. This has been our silver lining.

The kids are both in school … kinda (hybridized in-person/remote learning models), the wife and I are both working, and everyone’s health has been a-okay thus far.

Again, no complaints.

Since it is my birthday, though, I am going to fill out this silly survey purloined from the bowels of the interweb…

My favorite food is: There are many, all depending on mood and circumstance, but I’ll go with a perennial favorite: Prime Rib.

My favorite sport is: I abhor professional sports with a white-hot vengeance, but I did enjoy pitching for the TIME Magazine Softball team for 12 years.

The best show on TV is: Right now, I’m quite enjoying “Ozark” and I want “Succession” to come back.

The coolest person in the world is: I’m the last person qualified to answer that.

My best subject in school is: Art.

I’m really awesome at: Abusing adverbs.

If I could change my name, it would be: … really confusing for all parties concerned.

My favorite color is: Purple.

When I grow up I want to be: …able to walk outside without having to wear a mask.

My parents are too strict about: I only have one left, these days, and she’s more “particular” than “strict.”

My favorite song is: “Eighties” by Killing Joke

My favorite book is: “Please Kill Me” by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain

When we stop for a treat, I get this: Sausage McMuffin with Egg

4 words that describe me are: Opinionated. Laborious. Volatile. Insufferable.

When I was little, I used to: … be less tall.

My favorite scripture story is: The ones with Satan in them.

My favorite primary/church song is: “If It Was Broken, You’d Be Screaming” by the Happy Flowers.

My favorite game is: “Tomb Raider”

My favorite season is: I am not partial to only one.

The best snack ever is: …probably not good for me, at this stage.

My favorite superhero is: Ghost Rider

The food that makes me want to barf is: I am not fond of Feta cheese.

The car I would love to drive when I turn 16 is: I did not have a license at 16, I am ashamed to say.

My best friends are: … not fond of having their relationships subjected to hiearchy and quantification.

The cutest girl/boy I know is: My children Charlotte and Oliver.

The most memorable day this year was: March 12, the day we were dispatched to work from home.

If I had one wish it would be: To have stopped COVID-19 before it was ever unleashed on the world.

The best thing that has happened to me this year is: Spending an otherwise inordinate amount of time with my kids.

One thing I want to learn to do this year is: Achieve effective regime change and impose overdue justice on the clown car of evildoers that is the Trump Administration.

The thing that scares me the most is: Four more years of Trump.

One thing I need to work on is: Just one?

If I could go anywhere it would be: Until the virus is gone, I have no real desires to travel.

The most important lesson I’ve learned this year is: Too many of my fellow Americans are irretrievably stupid, stubborn and arrogant.

If I could meet one person from history it would be: I’d prefer to look to the future.

The Lore of The `Core: Searching Out The NYHC Symbol

I have no recollection of where I first spotted the New York hardcore logo (above, in case you’re unfamiliar, as rendered in blinding neon at Vinnie Stigma and Jimmy G’s tattoo shop on the Lower East Side), but it was invariably on a flyer for one show or another. While not quite as cryptic as other logos like, say, Black Flag’s bars or, later, Missing Foundation’s upended cocktail glass, it was an immediately arresting symbol that neatly encapsulated the scene and the subculture. In short order, not only was I spotting it everywhere, but I was summarily scrawling it everywhere. It usually prompted blank looks from the layperson — but if you knew, you knew.

Over time, the symbol took on a strange life of its own. As punks and hardcore kids turned into hardcore adults and started infiltrating the halls of industry, the symbol — or, more accurately, appropriated mutations thereof — started suddenly popping up incongruously in places not normally associated with hardcore. Gradually, variations of the the original NYHC logo became ostensibly “cool" shorthand for concerns looking to create certain impressions. As time went on, the original meaning and associations behind the symbol got lost in translation. I’ve spotted variations of the logo all over the place, and when I point out its origin, too often I’m met with stares as blank the ones I got back in the early 80’s. Much as with that Misfits Crimson Ghost image I spotted using to advertise a friggin' pilates class (read that tragic tale in the preamble to this post), the appropriators no longer bother to investigate where they’re getting their iconography from.

I think the most striking example of this I found was out in Quogue. A leafy, affluent enclave of Suffolk County where my mom lives, this sub-Hampton has never exactly been a hotbed of hardcore. My skulking around the town as a pointedly tennis-shunning teenager in a KRAUT t-shirt did little to change that. But about a year back, I was in a local chic boutique out there, looking for a birthday gift for the wife, when I spotted a t-shirt that pretty much knocked me out of my Chuck Taylor’s. I ended up buying it for my daughter, who wore it regularly for a while, blithely unaware and frankly uncaring of the symbol's antiquated roots in New York City punk rock.

In any case, my friend Drew Stone just posted another great installment in his ongoing video series that traces the roots of the symbol. If, like me, you spent large swathes of your youth evangelizing this insignia on every available surface with a sharpie, you should check it out.

Back ... Again ... To The Mill

Some of you might remember an entry from 2015, spurred from an original post in 2010, about The Mill at Burlington House, a curious midtown attraction from the 70’s I’d wrongly remembered from my childhood as “Burlington Mills.” It had become one of those intangible memories I was on a quest to find verification of. When I learned of my naming error, I did some feverish googling and found out more about the place, as detailed in that post from 2015.

Well, on a lark, I did some further searching this past weekend and actually found a video of the thing. See that below.

What’s striking about the video is how, well, …. dull the thing seems. I mean, I realize thrills were few and far between in the mid-70s, but I can’t imagine why these kids (or me, at the time for that matter) was so captivated by the thing.

Anyway, ya can’t go home again. But you can now go back to the Mill, thanks to YouTube….

No More Time For Looking Back

The last time I posted the picture up top — an artful shot of the interior of Rocks in Your Head, a former, beloved record shop on Prince Street in SoHo, purloined from the wilds of Flickr, if memory serves — was January 2012, and it accompanied yet another entry of mine that weepily lamented the passage of time. Over the course of the last fifteen years, this blog has been largely defined by posts like that — sepia-toned homages to the Manhattan of my youth, a veritable lost continent peppered with places like Rocks In Your Head that were otherwise extinguished by gentrification, spiraling rents, shifting cultural sensibilities, the sickly convenience of new technology or a potently unwieldy combination of all of the above. This blog has frequently acted as one long fist-shake at the tirelessly amorphous topography of this urban environment, where sentimentality is for the weak and significance is perilously relative.

I wish I could recall the specific luminary in question, but I remember reading an interview with a certain woman— it was someone along the lines of Deborah Harry, Tina Weymouth or even Lydia Lunch — and the question was posed to her, “When did Downtown die?” I’m leaning towards it being Debbie Harry, but her immediate response was September 11th. If I recall correctly, she didn’t mean to suggest that the Downtown Manhattan of 2001 just prior to that event was as thriving and multifaceted a bohemian wonderland as it had been in the 70’s and 80’s, but rather that the seismic upheaval brought on by the horrific rigors of that fateful day firmly bookended the end of an era. The fanciful bubble had been popped in the most jarring of ways by the outside world, and there was never going to be any return to those days.

Whomever she was, she wasn’t wrong. While that transformation was already underway, New York City changed dramatically in the wake of 9/11, “bouncing back” in a trajectory that leaned very heavily in favor of monied exclusivity. In the past nineteen years, the city has gone onto become way more prohibitively costly, largely at the expense of all semblance of its former character, to say nothing of vast swathes of its former residents. Apologists will cite Heraclitis’ mantra that change is the only constant, but even a passive observer would concede that the metamorphosis of New York City since 2001 has been sharp, and vertically steep.

As the new city emerged — one feverishly pockmarked by chains and big box retailers and increasingly less by longstanding mom’n’pops — blogs like mine and far more scrupulous, focussed and studious ones like Jeremiah Moss’s Vanishing Downtown and EV Grieve (to name my favorite two) appeared to document the carnage. While my blog is inexorably entwined rather narrowly with my own personal experiences and recollections, those two — and others -- presented wider vistas as to the ensuing effects on whole neighborhoods. I may have been preoccupied with vanishing record stores, punk bars and live music venues, but they were scrutinizing the tolls taken on the city’s fragile cultural ecosystem writ large.

After a while, the more brazenly nostalgic aspects of these types of endeavors made them easier to diminish. Reverently sipping Gem Spa egg creams in our authentic CBGB t-shirts, we were just stubborn, aging die-hards pining for the fabled "bad old days" and failing to appreciate the amenities of the new iteration of New York City. Of course we don’t want the old site of Bleecker Bob’s to become a frozen yogurt emporium. Of course we don’t think 14th Street should become a new tech hub. Of course we are offended by the notion of a newly bespoke Chelsea Hotel. Of course the reimagining of Chumley’s as a chic, tony bistro pisses us off. Etc. Etc.

Then, as if someone hit the smart bomb button in a giant game of “Defender,” the pandemic arrived.

Age-old speakeasy bar? Fuck you, you’re closed. Newly minted nouvelle Indian bistro? Fuck you, you’re closed. Niche curio shop for left-of-center gift ideas? Fuck you, you’re closed. Neighborhood institution helmed by third generation of proud proprietors? Fuck you, you are closed.

Like September 11th before it, the historical impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has rendered such provincial concerns moot and mute in a manner no scale of gentrification could ever match. Sure, lots of places are still hanging on, but the rulebook has been torched and businesses of all stripes are frantically trying to innovate on the fly and improvise a tenuous way forward.

Here in the throes — again, notice I didn’t say wake? This isn’t over yet — of the COVID-19 era (or the Trumpandemic, as I was calling it), virtually every New Yorker is now a brazen nostalgist, albeit of a possibly shallower calibration. While I may continue to sigh wistfully while passing the former site of a comic-book shop from my distant childhood that is now a cell-phone emporium, your average mask-wearer on the street is now nostalgic for just seven months ago, when he or she could walk out of their pricey condo and get a friggin’ boba tea and a new vape pen without worrying about contracting a viably lethal respiratory infection. No one has time to look back. We must all collectively look forward and figure out a future.

As a result, my usual, old habit of floridly ruminating ad nauseam about the New York City of my particular yesteryear feels less relevant than ever — which is saying something. Because, honestly, who could really give a rolling rat fuck about a favorite lost dive-bar I used to get drunk in back in 1989 when approximately 150 bars and restaurants here have permanently closed since March 1, 2020?

But, you know what they say about old habits. They die hard.

Walking home from a quick visit to my temporarily dormant office yesterday afternoon, I passed by the former site of Rocks in Your Head on Prince street, the record shop pictured at the top of this post, which closed in 2006. In the wake of the departure of Rocks in Your Head, the basement-space in question played host to a real estate agency, a concern that set up a rabbit-warren of office cubicles where racks and racks of rarefied LPs used to be. Evidently, said agency also recently fell prey to the conditions of COVID-19, and the space is now entirely vacant. I could not help peering in and capturing the photo below from roughly the same vantage point as the photo above.

Throw your support behind you favorite aspects and local businesses of New York City old and new, and may we all get through this.

Poll Pandemica

I spotted this survey on social media, and decided to take a whack at it...

Do you regularly wear a mask when you’re out of the house?
Absolutely, although I didn’t *start* wearing a mask until the first week of April. Prior to that, the messaging was mixed, and things were still developing. First we were told not to bother, and that they wouldn’t make a difference. Then we were told to leave them for the medical professionals. That made sense. Then there was sort of a “smoke’em if ya got’em” directive, but by that point, masks were still hard to come by. By April, it seemed prudent. Been sporting one ever since.

How many times a day do you wash your hands now?
More times than can be quantified, but I still need to remind myself to do it.

What do you feel when you see someone out and about without a mask?
Incredulousness, followed by abject contempt.

Have you cheated at all? (be honest)
I have attended at least one small gathering indoors wherein people felt relaxed enough to go maskless, although social distancing was still largely observed.  This was months back, and no one contracted anything, as far as anyone knows. 

Do you know anyone who has been infected?
Yes, I know a few folks who suffered through it — and suffered is indeed the word, based on their testimonials. This was no cakewalk. 

Do you know anyone who has died as the result of COVID-19?
Not as yet, thank God.

Have you dined al-fresco at a restaurant as yet? How was it?
We have. Depends on where you go, really. Some eateries have really embraced the concept with aplomb and really make it work.

Have you gotten a haircut in the last six months?
I caved and had one at the end of July. I work a mask, as did the haircutter. I need another one already.

Have you been to a dentist in the last six months?
Nope, and I’m starting to suspect that I need to. Not sure how I feel about that.

What was the last big gathering in close quarters you attended?
I went to see a band at a fairly intimate venue in the East Village in February — the fittingly named End of Hope at Niagara’s.

New York City is planning to open up indoor restaurant dining (with conditions) by the end of the month. How do you feel about eating indoors at restaurants again?
The mandatory conditions don’t especially sound like they lend themselves to a lot of fun. I will wait and see.

If you’re a parent, in what capacity are your kids back in school, and how are you feeling about it?
They’re both on hybridized in-person/remote-learning plans. We are wary but cautiously optimistic. Of course, with one cough or sneeze, it could all collapse like a house of cards.

What activity are you missing the most?
I know I’m supposed to say “live music” or “bars” or “eating out with friends” or something like that, but honestly, just being able to walk around without wearing the mask seems awfully dreamy, at this point. That said, I do miss going to some of my favorite bars, restaurants and hearing live music. Can’t imagine when the latter will happen again.

Do you think a vaccine is imminent?
I hear a lot of reports from every perspective, but I am haunted by a question a friend of mine posited: “How’s that AIDS vaccine comin’?"

Do you believe in herd immunity? 
Not being a scientist, my beliefs one way or the other have no real veracity. I suppose I believe it could happen, but as I dimly understand it, it would require a vastly greater percentage of people to be infected (and, summarily, to die) before it could transpire. Doesn’t sound especially promising.

Do you trust Dr. Fauci?
More than the others.

Do you trust Dr. Birx?
She’s a Trump toadie, so no.

Do you trust Dr. Atlas?
Not at all.

Do you trust the media?
Having worked in the media for most of my professional career, I am obviously biased in its favor. But media is not a single entity. There are good bits and bad bits. I consume information from a reasonable selection of media, apart from outlets like Fox and Breitbart, which is all just laughably pro-Trump propaganda bullshit.

Do you trust Donald Trump?
BAHAHAHAHAhAHAHAHAHA. Surely, you jest. Fuck that guy and all who follow and support him. The blood is all on his hands. 

What are your expectations for the next few months?
Regrettably, more of same. There is no plan, thus there is no end in sight.