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So I smoked a joint for the first time

And got my vaccine – all in the same weekend

Dropped the boy off with my in-laws last week so they could spend some time with him, both of them having gotten the vaccine. It also meant that I could catch up on a whole buncha things.

While there, I had some fish and seafood, neither of which were a good idea due to the gout but I did it anyway.

Arriving home, I literally hit the gym every opportunity I could.

I also had been trying to get the vaccine myself and ended up getting one last minute at 11AM for 2PM a few blocks from BrightBea’s place.

I contemplated dropping her a line but decided against it (again). It was a one hour 45 minute trip from my pad to there.

Because it was in the middle of nowhere, I took my scooter but the cop at the front of the hospital told me I couldn’t bring it in. Not knowing what else to do, I convinced the guy running the coffee cart outside to watch it for me for 10 bucks.

Him: I’m leaving in exactly 30 minutes, at 2:45. You need to be here by then.
Me: I’ll try my best, thanks!

You can see the cart behind me in this picture below.

I dashed upstairs and ended up being the first in line. Immediately after I checked in – about 5 minutes – I turned around to see that the line was easily 10-15 deep after me. So, I lucked out.

The nurse was sweet but chatty. I just wanted to get going. At 2:37:

Her: You’re all set.
Me: Great, I gotta run downstairs.
Her: No, honey, you gotta sit for 15 minutes.

I explained to her my situation and she sighed.

Her: Can you stay until 2:40? Three minutes.
Me: You got a deal, lady.

At exactly 2:40, I ran downstairs and made it just in time.

Him: Hello, my friend! Congratulations on your shot!

Felt pretty good afterward so I hit up my kali class after teaching a quick private. Pez, Panda, Shawn, and Iron Chef all came to my Friday kali class and I saw three out of the four of them the very next day for jits.

While there, I ended up chatting with my buddy Miller, who always gives me good parenting advice, as well as Jay, who got a promotion.

Later on, met up with Chad, MJ, Pez, and IronChef for drinks around the way and made some new acquaintances.

Her: Mary. And my brother’s name is Logan, too.
Me: He must be pretty cool. Not that I am but I’m hoping to grow into the name.

Also spoke to a tall blonde wearing a red leather jacket in the bar.

Me: Have you ever heard of aposematism?.
Her: I’m sorry, what?

On the way back, we remarked how interesting it was that marijuana was now legal in NYC.

I’d had cannabis  in my recent past – after Alison got sick – but I never actually smoked a joint before.

Her: I have one if you want.
Me: Sure, but I have to go first or after you. Because of cooties. (she laughs) I don’t know where the guys have been.
Him: You don’t know where she’s been!
Me: Fair, but, given the right circumstances, it’s within the realm of possibility that I end up making out with one woman or another. Not you, of course, just women in general…

Afterward, we headed back to mine where we attempted to play some Exploding Kittens but ended up talking for hours instead.

Him: I respect how the three of you seem to talk to people you don’t know.
Me: (shrugging) I just assume they want to talk to me.

After a bit, we all ended up on a topic that’s relatively private so I’ll end that story here.

Didn’t sleep very well that night. As I said, I never smoked a joint before in my life and the things I was thinking and feeling were unsettling.

I apologize to Alison a lot when I’m by my lonely. For failing her.

It was a rough night and I’ll leave it at that as well.

It was my first joint but I feel like I’ve been drunk for three years and fifteen days.

Location: saying hi on 77th and Amsterdam
Mood: busy
Music: Why does it hurt (Spotify)
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Aposematism

Red and Yellow

Me: I think you’re off starting next Monday
Him: I’m off starting this Monday, papa.
Me: Well…that’s suboptimal.

Thought the boy’s Spring break began April 5th. I was incorrect.

Annnnd…shitballs. Here’s Pez watching the kiddo because I was in a pinch.

Her: You have the cutest kid!
Me: Thank you – you’re the best!

Earlier this week, I did some legal work that beat 96% odds.

Him: You did good work, Logan.
Me: No, I didn’t do good work. I won with 4% odds, that’s not good; that’s fucking fantastic. I did fucking fantastic work. They weren’t ready for me.

Because the kid was off, we went up to Connecticut to see a buddy of mine so the boy could have a playdate with his daughter.

While I was there, I took a picture of myself looking very out of place in my usual red leather jacket and the woods.

I always had this bright yellow/orange jacket – that picture below was taken by the Green-Eyed Schoolteacher back in 2007 – but when Alison got first got pregnant in 2011, I had my tailor make me a bright red leather jacket as a celebration.

It took a few months to get to me and, by then, we already lost that child. That was the start of our hell, which only ended six years later when she died. It was complete bullshit.

I never wore it while she was here and only rarely wore the other jacket during that whole time. Instead, I wore my beat up dark red leather jacket – that’s me when I was in Prague twenty-five years ago – and my other rando stuff.

I told a buddy of mine that most of the world lives an unexamined life. If anything, I examine the world around me a little too closely.

Why do I think the way I do?
Why do I dress the way I do?
Why does this matter to me?
What does this mean?

When Alison died, I wore only black for the first six months. I wore only black because I saw only black.

And then I realized that I had to reenter the world, as much as I didn’t want to. But after that, I put on my red leather jacket and wore it out for the first time. It’s pretty much my daily driver now, although I do break out the yellow/orange jacket on occasion.

There’s this thing called “aposematism,” which comes from the Greek ἀπό apo “away” and σῆμα sēma “sign.”

Aposematism, then, is “a sign to stay away.”

Basically, dangerous things are often brightly coloured, with the most dangerous things either red or yellow/orange against black.

      • Black Widow (red against black)
      • Yellowjacket (yellow/orange against black)
      • Murder Hornets (yellow/orange against black)
      • Monarch butterflies (orange against black)
      • Pitohui (red against black)
      • Poison Dart Frogs (blue, red, and/or black)

Just to name a few.

I wear bright red and yellow against black because I’m a lawyer with two decades of experience that teaches knife fighting in his spare time.

There are other reasons but that’s all I wanna share right now.

Most people, subconsciously, get that a guy doesn’t wear a bright yellow/orange or red leather jacket unless he can.

Although not everyone uses the sense god gave them. On the way to one Scenic Fights shoot, I had this conversation:

Him: You want to start some shit?
Me: I think I do, homie.

Subtlety only gets you so far sometimes.

Although, to be fair, I also paid extra to have a paisley print put into the red jacket and artwork to line my yellow/orange one.

I thought it made them look prettier. 

Location: home
Mood: pretty
Music: Ooh-ooh-ooh, that’s my violet (Spotify)

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Fate shuffles the cards and we play

The Illusion of Choice

Him: Why does everyone go away?
Me: Sometimes they have to, sometimes they want to. If we miss them, it means that they mattered to us. That’s not a bad thing, kiddo.

The boy’s sad because a number of people in his life have exited his venn diagram. Some temporarily, some more permanent.

It hurts me to see him hurt but I try my best to acknowledge his feelings as much as a 47-year-old-man-who’s-seen-a-ton-of-shit can vis-a-vis a five year old.

Alison’s sickness and death rocked me. For years, I prided myself on being dispassionately aloof to the workings of the world – in it but unaffected by it.

But when she got sick, I was a raw, open wound. I felt everything. The years before she got sick, while she was sick, and after she died, I lost all sense of self.

My career, my friends, my hobbies, my life goals, even my own sense of self-worth and pride. It all disappeared.

Poof.

Love does that to people. It’s neither a bad thing, nor a good thing, it’s just the cost of love. You surrender to love, because that’s its price.

I want to say that I’ve gotten better these past few years, but that wouldn’t be true. It’s more accurate to say that I’ve gotten better bit-by-little-bit.

One thing that I used to believe with all my heart was that there’s luck and there’s fate. They are not the same but they both can’t be affected by us.

I always believed that there are things in our lives that we think we can control but we can’t. When Alison and my dad got sick, I wanted to believe that we had a chance.

In the end, we only have the illusion of choice, and some things were never meant to be as we hoped them to be – oftentimes, there’s just luck and fate.

In the Dark Knight, the Joker puts a gun in Two-Face’s hand. Two-Face then takes out his double-sided coin and tells him that if he flips it and the scarred side pops up, the Joker dies, if the unscarred side comes up, the Joker lives.

Two-Face thinks that chance will determine the Joker’s fate but he was tricked all along.

You see, the Joker had a his finger on the hammer. He was controlling the outcome no matter what.

Two-Face only had the illusion of choice. Just like us, oftentimes.

I drove myself starkers all these years thinking I could change things I had no control over. The joke was on us.

Him: (nods) I’m still sad.
Me: It’s ok to be sad. Papa’s sad all the time. Fate shuffles the cards and we play.
Him: What does that mean?
Me: I’ll explain it more when you get older. How about some ice cream?

If there’s one thing that I want to teach the boy, it’s to play the hell out of the cards he’s dealt.

It’s one of a million things I need to do with him before I have to go.

I watch a lotta comic book movies.

Location: home
Mood: thoughtful
Music: I wipe my feelings off (Spotify)

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Memories of a chocolate teapot

Seeing the world but once

Me: What’s wrong?
Him: Annie doesn’t want to play with me. Can we go?
Me: OK, let’s go to another playground.

I’ve noticed something interesting about the kids that my son is closest to – they’re all hapas like him.

Dunno if this is some subconscious thing or because there are so many hapas running around the Upper West Side.

This lady named Louise Glueck once said, “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”

I couldn’t agree with that statement more. I think that, by the time we’re 14 or so, we know the broad contours of what we like and we don’t like.

For example, there was this little girl named Christine that I used to hang out with all the time growing up. We were both maybe six or seven, way before any real rational emotion was possible, but all I knew was that I loved hanging out with her.

She was blond with coloured eyes. Just like Alison.

I tell my friends to always be careful that they aren’t controlled by their 14 year-old impulses. But sometimes, you can’t help it – I’m no different.

In any case, the way I look at it, I have nine years to shape this kid’s perception of the world and I feel I’m already running outta time.

As much as possible, I try to have him the see the world for what it is – both the good and the bad – rather than what someone else wants him to see, what’s for sale.

The things he values now, he’ll value the rest of his life so I try for him to value things that are innately valuable. Those things that cannot be taken from you, like skills and kindness.

Because, in some way, we’re all prisoners of our 14 year-old selves.

Him: Isn’t that cool?
Me: It’s about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Him: (laughing) What does that mean?
Me: Think about it, kid. It’ll come to you.

Then again, he may just be fine.

After all, he’s not just my kid, he’s Alison’s too. And maybe he won’t be quite as lonely as I was, growing up.

Me: Are you ok that Annie didn’t want to play with you?
Him: (nodding) I’ll meet someone else. (later) This is Sandy, papa, she lives on West 74th.
Me: (laughing) Hello Sandy who lives on West 74th. Why don’t you two play and I’ll watch your scooters?

Location: earlier today, watching some scooters by some stone elephants
Mood: hopeful
Music: All you got to do is blink your eyes and the years go by like that (Spotify)
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Inchoate Manslaughter notwithstanding

That’s a no

My brother came to town for a visit. He’s helped so many people in the world that his schedule was jam-packed cause everyone wanted to see him.

But, he stayed by me for a little while and it was good spending time with him and the boy.

Me: Uncle wants Thai food.
Boy: (confused) It’s food that’s tied?
Me: (nodding) Yes.

One benefit of having people around is that they can hear the kid speak so they know I’m not making up his peculiar little mannerisms.

For example, he was sitting on my friend KT’s lap when this happened:

Me: Do you want corned beef and cabbage for dinner?
Him: That’s a no.
Me: (to KT) OMG, I’m so glad you heard that.

Because my brother was here, plus my foot was feeling much better, I decided to head to gym early Saturday morning. My buddy Sean picked me up and off we went.

While there, I tried to be as careful as possible. But, during one exchange, this younger, and pretty tough, guy ended up taking the top position.

On the bottom, I did something called head-scissors that’s one of those moves that are generally though of as low-percentage in terms of getting a win – although Mouse managed to get a legit tap on Chad with them once – but I was really just trying to use it to get this guy off of me.

On the plus side, it worked.

On the negative side, after I got him off me, he started convulsing and his lips were blue.

Me: Holy fuckballs!

Now, Sean’s an EMT, which is good because it turns out that I’m absolute rubbish in a crisis. For example, I sat this guy up, exactly what I shouldn’tve done.

Sean: I got this.
Me: Good, cause I definitely don’t.

I’ve never put anyone out before, although I’ve gone out maybe twice?

It was probably the scariest thing that’s happened to me since I thought I was going to die during COVID.

I honestly thought I killed, or at least horribly injured someone. But he came to and was actually in better spirits than me.

Chad: (to the guy) Are you ok?
Him: I think so.
Me: Jesus, I’m not.

Ended up trying to break people’s legs for the remainder of class, which – trust me – was a lot less scary.

As a bonus, saw two of my buddies – Iron Chef and Robinson – get promotions. All-in-all, it was great day at the gym, inchoate manslaughter, not withstanding.

When I got back, my brother and I headed out to see my mom. It was a bit convoluted because I didn’t have the boy’s booster seat nor his heavy jacket so I had to scramble to make due.

The three of us – me, the kid, and my brother – eventually took the train to see them.

It was the first time in over a year that I gave my mom a hug. That’s nuts.

Me: Come here, lemme give you another hug.
Her: We just hugged!
Me: I’ll take another.

I’ve been thinking a lot of where I was last year at this time. To say that it was lonely is a massive understatement: There was no one in my building besides me. My son was away. I had no one at all but myself.

I’ll admit, a year later, that I thought some seriously dark thoughts during this time.

In some way, getting COVID was a good thing for my mental state. When I honestly thought I was going to die, I realized that I didn’t want to.

I remember thinking, in my fevered dreams, of something I heard once from a fella named Charles Perrow: “It is normal for us to die, but we only do it once.“

And I decided that I didn’t wanna use my one chance right then and there. I wanted to see the boy again.

Which is good, cause life’s worth living just to hear this kid talk.

Me: What else can you do there?
Him: (thinking) I can see my girlfriend in Brightview.
Me: I didn’t realize you have a girlfriend in Brightview.
Him: (shrugging) I do.
Me: (laughing) Charmer like you? I believe it.

Location: midday, around Oceanic Boil
Mood: exhausted
Music: If you ask me how I’m doing, I say “I’m alright” (Spotify)
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Snyder’s Justice League is about family

You should watch it

I was never a true fan of Zack Snyder’s version of the Man of Steel but I did think he had his moments.

But, after the fanboy disappointment that was the theatrical release of The Justice League, I figured what Zack had in mind had to be better.

So, I’ve been quietly waiting all this time for the Snyder cut of the film and I saw it this past Friday.

It was amazing. The whole time I was watching it, I kept saying exactly that: This is amazing.

My brother was at my place while Chad and I watched it and this is essentially how we looked for four hours.

Him: This is amazing.
Me: (five minutes later) This is amazing.

It’s supposed to be 90% different than the theatrical release and I gotta say, that number is accurate: It’s a completely different film.

Snyder left the production after the suicide of his daughter Autumn, which is such a horrible thing to even contemplate that I wish I could just gloss that fact over and not think about it.

But that’s impossible. Her death, forced her parents – Snyder’s wife was heavily involved in the film as well – to just bail.

And I get it. When Alison died, nothing mattered. I had zero capacity to do anything beyond merely function, drink, and womanize.

Still, at some point, we either get on with living or we get on with dying.

I did the former and so did Snyder.

These pics are all from when I went to ComicCon back in 2017.

Interestingly, the film is as much about family as it is about superheroes.

      • The Flash is trying to save his father.
      • Cyborg is trying to forgive his father and deal with the loss of his mother.
      • Aquaman is trying to know his mother and see his father.
      • Wonder Woman is trying make up for leaving her mother.
      • Superman is trying to live up to the aspirations of both sets of parents, biological and adopted.
      • And Batman…well, he’s all about his parents.

For all the amazing special effects and the thrill of seeing my childhood heroes in a worthy live-action film, it had a far more heart than I was expecting.

Honestly, it’s worth four hours of your time if you haven’t seen it.

I saw it on the night that I normally go to kali but, because of the gout, I could only stay for half-an-hour.

It’s a shame, because my buddy Panda stopped by. He, and another buddy, Thor, both have gout and they told me the same thing: I needed to drink copious amounts of water.

So I did that, and the next day, felt markedly better.

So good, in fact, that I went to roll in Brooklyn, which ended up being both a good idea and a terrible idea, terrible because I thought I almost killed someone.

But that’s a story for tomorrow.

Location: earlier today, baking for the kid
Mood: thoughtful
Music: Sometimes I think this world’s too much, all the hurt, all the hate (Spotify)
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Adjusting to the world

Oh, and I have gout

Well, I’ve hit a new middle-aged milestone: I have gout.

Essentially, for almost every meal, I have cabbage, avocados, or spinach and beef, lamb, or sardines every single day.

In fact, I just made the ABFF and the kids some corned beef and cabbage for St. Patty’s this AM.

Never really thought much of this until I woke up in ridonk pain at 4PM the other day.

I needed to see a doc but I wasn’t comfortable bringing the kid to the medemerge – which I saw exactly a year earlier and got COVID.

Not knowing what else to do, I gave Chad a ring.

Him: I’m already on my way.

Now that’s a friend.

On that note, here he is breaking down Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

I hobbled to the doctor’s and, after a buncha questions, x-rays, and whatnot, gout was the conclusion.

Oddly, the reason for it may have more to do with my intermittent fasting per a video my buddy Aric sent me.

All in all, it was not a great day.

The few days before that weren’t any great shakes either.

Me: You did what?!
Son: Are you mad?
Me: I don’t think the word “mad” fully captures the range of emotions I’m feeling right now, boy.

Some people think I push the kid too hard; others, not hard enough. I figure that this means I’m probably doing ok. But we do have these types of convos:

Him: I don’t need to know how to do that, you’ll do it for me.
Me: For now. But you need to learn how to do it yourself.
Him: Why?
Me: People are valued for their skills; the more skills you have, the more valuable you are. The less skills you have, the less valuable the world considers you.

If being a parent has taught me anything, it’s a profound respect for my own parents.

I realize now, how difficult it must have been for them as two very young foreigners (20something and 30something) in a foreign land raising three children while being immigrant poor.

I have one kid and live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and I still feel like I’m struggling.

Yet it’s still some of the most interesting work I’ve ever done. It forces me to question whether or not I truly understand the world as it is.

Him: Why is fire hot?
Me: I never thought about it. Let’s look it up.

On a deeper level, what I see lacking the most in the world is critical thinking, which is analyzing a given set of facts and making sense of them.

The pitfalls are:

    • Poor data
    • Poor analysis
    • Poor conclusions
      • Poor actions based on the conclusion

I see people mess up at least one, sometimes all four, at least once a day.

And the biggest problem with people is that they think that the world adjusts to their level of skill, rather than the adjusting their level of skill to the world.

My parents wanted us to get accolades – A+s and Ivy Leagues – and I get that. But what I want for the boy is much more modest, I want him to have general life skills coupled with an ability to critically think.

The most unsuccessful, lonely people, are those that expect certain things of the world and are angry that the world doesn’t match their expectations.

I get that, more than most.

But, at the end of the day, the world doesn’t care what we want or hope, only how we respond to it.

Him: Why do I have to learn this?
Me: Because the world doesn’t adjust to your level of skill. So you have to do it the other way around. 

Location: earlier today, by the ABFF’s
Mood: discomforted
Music: I’m the same kid – so why’s the mirror say I’m not? (Spotify)
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A Lucky Gold Star

Things change

I met up with my SIL in Hoboken with the kid for dinner. I wanted to go to Benny Tudinos.

Her: Why do you want to go there? There are so many better options!
Me: I thought the kid might like it.

Alison brought me there years ago, after I told her about Koronet Pizza here in the UWS – a place known for having absurdly large pizza slices.

She then told me to meet her in Hoboken where she brought me to Benny’s, which has something similar.

Walking there was the longest time I spent in Alison’s part of Hoboken since she died.

It was surreal and sad, and I’ll leave it at that.

In any case, I told the kid that the pizza was bigger than him and he was (somewhat) impressed when he saw it.

Her: (to him) Is it good?
Me: It’s pizza, of course it’s good to him.
Boy: (nods enthusiastically while eating)

I ordered a pitcher of sangria for us but she could only have a glass because she was driving so I finished the rest.

Ended up crashing early that night because of all the alcohol while the boy stayed over with her.

Just as well; it got me ready for Daylight Savings.

The next night, the buddy that I told you about in this entry was in my nabe and stopped by for dinner.

Me: Do you remember the two of us meeting?
Him: (thinking) I’m sorry, I don’t.
Me: (laughing) That’s fine. Mouse remembered the other guy I was with when we met and not me. That’s kinda how I like it – to blend into the background and not be seen unless I wanna be seen.
Him: Well, you accomplished that with both of us then!

When I was a kid, the thing I wanted the most of all was a ColecoVision. Similarly, my sister wanted their other insanely popular toy, the Cabbage Patch Kid.

We didn’t have much money so we got neither – but that’s neither here nor there.

When I got older, I found out that they were called Coleco because they were once the Connecticut Leather Company.

In a similar vein, when I was working for a Fortune 500 company, my boss gave me two jewels to manage: Samsung and LG. At they time, they were big but not the behemoths they are now.

When I went to the meeting with LG, I called them Lucky Goldstar a few times because that was their original name and what I knew them as, as a kid.

That’s when one of them stopped me in mid-sales pitch to tell me:

Him: We’re just LG. We stopped being Lucky Goldstar years ago. Please stop calling us that.

I was…mortified.

Eventually, everything got smoothed out but that and the ColecoVision story stayed with me all these years decades because it reminds me that things and people are more complex than we think and that reinvention is a lot more common than we think as well.

My buddy lost some friends because he’s changing and they don’t like that but that’s what people and things do.

When I was Hoboken, I wasn’t sure what bothered me more: The things that didn’t change and were exactly like they was when Alison and I were there or the things that had changed so very much.

The boy’s growing up quickly. He’s outgrown most of the clothes that I feel I just got for him.

And while I was writing this entry, Gio hit me up; he’s selling his apartment and moving upstate for more space for his family.

I was his attorney for that purchase, which happened way back in 2013. Seems like yesterday.

Everything keep changing on me but I have to remember that it’s usually good for them that they change, even though I want some things to stay the same.

I wish so many things stayed the same. Then again, I wish for a lotta things.

Him: When will I be a teenager?
Me: I suppose when you’re thirteen. That’s eight years from now.
Him: That’s a long time from now.
Me: Tomorrow always comes a day too soon. For now, just stay my little boy, ok?
Him: Ok, papa. (thinking) Eight years…wow…

Location: freezing on West 70th today
Mood: nostalgic
Music: the winds are always changing, and the clouds are rearranging (Spotify)
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We can breathe together

How’d it all go?

That post I wrote about years about about the grief button remains the truest thing about grief I know.

This past weekend was busy, tiring, and fun. Oh, so much fun.

Chad, who’s normally pretty funny, was messing up the shoot for everyone because he was just full-on hilarious.

Me: (to the director) You gotta leave if you can’t stop laughing.
Him: (though tears) I gotta, yeah. I gotta.

Hopefully, some of the insanely funny things he said will come across the videos.

And Mouse and I have been getting along better than we have in a while. Plus the kid’s been adorbs.

All-in-all, I’ve been doing pretty well. That is, until I did my taxes.

You see, Alison did our taxes because she was a math whiz. And when she got sick, I did them, as best I could. Been doing them ever since.

I just finished them up before our weekend shoot when I remembered that our tax software was linked up to Alison’s email addy so I signed in and…nuthin.

Evidently, Yahoo erases ALL YOUR FUCKING EMAIL if you don’t log on for a while. Which I didn’t. She had that email since she was a kid.

Everything that made her life hers, digitally, was there. Because she lived before texts and FB but after email so the bulk of her digital life – as it were – was on that.

Gone.

That gutted me.

But then I spoke to her mother and we both agreed that, because I never read her emails in the four years since she left, I never would have. And I have no business reading it because those were for her and not for the kid or me.

That brought me some peace. Still, it was a rough day/night.

Then today – the very next day – I got a phone call from my very last client that I did work for back in 2015 before Alison went into the hospital.

Him: I had a question I wanted to ask you so I hope you don’t mind my calling. Hey, how’d it all go your first child? Boy or girl? How’s momma?
Me: … I’m…outside right now him, actually. Can I call you back?
Him: (confused) Oh, sure. Sure. We’ll catch up later.

And it’s like I stepped on the grief button and just stood on it. Grief-stricken.

It hit me all at once. I remembered.

I remembered Alison telling me to take that one last gig because we would both be busy raising the kid for the first 60 days and we’d need the money.

Little did we know just how fucked up the first 60 548 days of the kid’s life would be.

My uncle, my other uncle, Nick, Kirk, my dad, Fouad, Luciano, I remembered them all at once today, vis-a-vis Alison. And it was too much to bear.

For just a moment, I felt the awful emptiness that I felt after Alison left.

I stood there with the most insane impostor syndrome feeling you could imagine.

The fuck are you doing, Logan? You’re not a dad, you can barely raise a houseplant. And you’re trying to raise a kid without her? Are you mad?

So, I just crumpled into the same park bench that Alison and I walked by a million times but never sat at because we never had a kid that needed watching on that goddamn park bench.

Him: Papa, papa, can I…wait, what happened?
Me: I…I hit something and it hurts. So, I had to sit down.
Him: Was it your foot? (I nod) I’m sorry it hurts.
Me: (deep breath) Thanks, kid. You go play. Papa needs to just breathe through it.
Him: I’ll stay with you. We can breathe together! (starts breathing deeply)
Me: OK. Thank you.

Location: Back in the basement of my brain, again
Mood: like the song below
Music: Shit, you’re a mess, you’re a mess, good God, you’re a mess (Spotify)
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Another shooting weekend, Pt 2

…or More Naked Chad

By the time Mouse arrived on the first night to pick up Chad and me in her whip, everyone’s throats were sore because Chad was intent on making us break down laughing.

Unfortunately/fortunately, he succeeded.

Me: (wiping eyes) OMG, I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard. How did you manage to keep a straight face for so long?
Chad: I was just focused on trying to make the rest of you break and also where I was going with everything.

Mouse dropped off Chad at his pad and then came back with me up the FDR Drive.

Her: You look exhausted, you should go to sleep.
Me: OK, but after we catch the last WandaVision.

Without giving away the ending, it involved the Paradox of the Ship of Thesus that I told you about almost a decade ago.

Had a pretty fitful sleep because I was still wired from shoot and the second day was most of my vids, but it didn’t matter, I was up early the very next day.

Me: Wait, did you clean up the entire apartment while I was sleeping?
Mouse: Mebe.
Me: Man, you are the best.

I picked up the car and drove while she navigated. We headed back to Chinatown where we met Chad at the exact same place and got more of the same, except three servings instead of two.

This pic was from the previous day – was too beat to remember to take new ones.

We didn’t eat there, though, and dashed off to the set so we could inhale everything and then just get right to work.

Above are just some of the really cool weapons I got to work with on the shoot.

Mouse only stayed long enough to eat a bit before leaving because she was off to a ski trip. It’s just as well…

Me: Again, why are you always naked, Chad?
Him: It’s what we do for Scenic Fights, Logan.

Despite not leaving until well after 7PM the night before and showing up early the second day, because we were laughing so much with many of the scenes, I had to call up the sitter to ask if I could stay a bit longer.

Her: It’s fine. I expected you to run late.
Me: Oh yeah, I forgot that your father was a film director.

This was a weirder shoot than normal. Which is saying a lot.

Chad and I just took the train home and we split up at 14th Street.

Like always, I was alone on the train but I didn’t care – I just wanted to see my kid.

Son: (hearing me enter) Papa’s home, papa’s home!
Me: I am but I gotta fix our internet, run out to get some milk, and fix someone’s toilet upstairs.
Him: (disappointed) Will I see you before I go to bed?
Me: You will, I promise. We’ll sit and watch Sesame Street together, ok?
Him: OK! See you soon!

Location: today, home, trying to figure out why I’m sore all over
Mood: sore all over
Music: half of the time it’s a gun fight; the other half, we’re taking off clothes (Spotify)
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