Me: He’s so dumb. Talking to him is like having a conversation with a goldfish that can tawk. Her: OMG your Queens just came out! Me: Dammit!
My Queens accent has come out twice with the Firecracker and she’s astute enough to catch it when it does.
To paraphrase Amy Ryan – who came from Flushing, Queens, same as me – from The Office: You can take the boy outta Queens…
One of the things that the Firecracker and I have been doing is digging through the dozens of board games up in here that I’ve literally never played.
They were either rando gifts or items that old tenants left in my building, and I was loathe to throw out.
Her: Wait, you own this and have never played it? How long have you had it? Me: (thinking) Jesus Christ, like 25 years?
Case-in-point, The Firecracker pulled out a board game of Yahtzee the other day that I probably had since the 90s and yet never played.
Not once.
So, she and I did just that.
We both managed to roll some pretty insane things, such that our first round was pretty impressive.
It was all downhill from there.
Exciting times here in Casa Lo.
Me: I think we should never play this again, we’re never gonna top these rolls. Her: (nodding) This is very true. No one is gonna believe us that you just rolled a full house. Me: (shaking head) Nope.
It’s not Miami, or the Bahamas, or a nice cruise but it’s something.
Me: (seeing a pic of the Firecracker) You were so young back then! Her: Yup – now look at me. I’m with a very old Chinese man. Me: Well, I wouldn’t say very old. Her: Right. Because you’re not doing back exercises eight times a day and buying orthopedic butt supports? Me: … Her: Yeah…
The Firecracker was kind enough to surprise me with a back brace the other day for my crap back.
Gone from rolling around and fighting 20-somethings to sitting in cushioned chairs wherever I go and wearing a back brace.
On that note, I’ve also started seeing a chiropractor to add to my stable of doctors, physical therapists, and general clinicians.
Oddly, the first thing I thought of when I got the brace was the presidency and both Trump and JFK.
The assassin that missed Trump missed ending his life by perhaps an inch in several directions.
Between when the gunman pulled the trigger and when the bullet hit, enough time had passed that Trump shifted his head just enough to be merely grazed.
Contrast that with JFK, who was killed on the killer’s second bullet.
This is meaningful because the first bullet shoulda caused JFK to fall forward, as it did his companion John Connally, but it didn’t.
Always find it so interesting that so much of life for the world writ large hinges on these rando choices we all make.
Then again, I should probably think longer about some of the choices I make.
Her: (cleaning and dancing about when I enter the room) How are you feeling? Me: Eh, ok, I guess. (pausing) What are you doing? Her: My sexy cleaning dance. Me: Oh, when’s it gonna start? Her: God, you’re so rude!
I should probably think longer about some of the choices I make.
Don’t think I’ve ever lost my cool and was happy about the results. If I can give the kid anything, hopefully, it’s a better sense of being calm and calculated.
To this end, I personally have been re-reading (ok, skimming) Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and also other stoic books here and there in the hopes that all this anger at the injustice of Alison and my dad’s suffering and deaths somehow becomes more manageable.
It’s a daily struggle, I have to admit.
One really sweet thing that we’ve been doing here at Casa Lo is to have regular board game nights with the kids.
It’s a small and silly thing but one that I appreciate greatly because children – at this age and younger – learn so much in competition and games.
Forgot to take pics, so I took the pic from this old entry in 2011 with Alison at Paul’s old pad.
We’ve been playing a few card games as well as board games, particularly what we call The Bean Game – addictively fun – and Settlers of Catan.
Both boys are pretty competitive but, because my son is younger, he’s still dealing with the emotions that come with winning and losing.
One night, recently, the kid had a particularly bad night and lost his cool, so I brought him to his room to have a chat with him.
I think I want what every good parent wants: For one’s children to be better than they are.
Hope I have enough time here to accomplish that.
After all, if we’re being honest here, it’s really the main reason I’m here.
Me: What’s the obligation of a champion, boy? Him: To act like a champion. Me:…at all times. Don’t forget that last part: At all times. Him: But you lose your temper too, papa! Me: I’m aware. I’m working on that. And that’s kinda my point: You can be better than me. And I want you to be better than me. Listen, if you act like a musician, with enough practice, you’ll be one. If you act like a BJJ player, you’ll be one. And if you act like a champion, you’ll be one. But you have to do it at all times. There’s no such thing as a parttime champion.
Considering that today was Halloween, have you ever had a “banana-flavoured,” candy and thought, “This tastes kinda like a banana but not really?”
There’s a reason for that.
Not a banana plant but I thought it looked nice. From this entry.
Years ago, I had some friends over and we were playing Scattergories and the category was: Birds that begin with the letter “G.”
Him: What the hell’s a “Great Auk?” Me: It’s a large, flightless, extinct bird. Him: You can’t just put “Great” in front of a bird and say it starts with, “G!” Me: OK Google, what’s a Great Auk? Machine: According to Wikipedia, “The great auk is a species of flightless alcid that became extinct in the mid-19th century. It was the only modern species in the genus Pinguinus.” Him: OK, stop, stop. Just take it.
Remember that line: “…the onlymodern species in the genus Pinguinus.”
I’d meant to write an entry about that, but it slipped my mind.
Now, the Great Auk was a true penguin – it looked like this:
By Mike Pennington, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13812423
I know what you’re thinking, “They kinda look like penguins.”
But that’s the opposite of the truth – the things we call penguins kinda look like them, the real penguins.
Those birds, the real penguins, completely died/were killed off some time in 1844.
A decade previously, around 1831, people started calling flightless birds in the Southern Hemisphere – far from the Northern Atlantic where the Great Auk was found – “penguins” because they kinda looked like the Great Auk.
But they weren’t actually penguins at all – again, the Great Auk was the “onlymodern species in the genus Pinguinus.”
Always found that so interesting: The birds we all call “penguins,” aren’t actually “penguins” at all but a completely different animal that we all assume are penguins now.
By Zwifree – I personally took this picture in my kitchen after buying approximately 30 Gros Michel Bananas.Previously published: I put it on my Facebook, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70354204
Somewhat related, my parents (and probably yours as well) grew up with a banana that was the Gos Michel banana but those went commercially extinct by about the 1960s.
In their place was the Cavendish banana, which I, and probably you, grew up on.
The Cavendish tasted a lot different from the bananas they grew up on, the Big Mike.
And that’s why a lotta banana-flavoured things don’t taste exactly like a banana to us – because those flavours were developed to imitate the original Gros Michel and not the Cavendish.
On a completely unrelated point, the election is happening soon.
Growing up, I spent most of my young adult life voting Republican because I was always fiscally conservative whilst being socially liberal.
What I’m seeing these days is a complete takeover of what I grew up with.
The compassionate conservative, which I prided myself being, has been taken over completely by a woman-hating, “Christian,” anti-choice, subtlety racist, and otherwise hateful group that seems to be wholly different from what was once called the Republican party.
Just like the Greak Auk, and the Big Mike, I think that the current GOP has taken over so completely that no one remembers that the Republican party used to be substantially different and something wholly unrelated is now known as the Republican Party.
Location: a former Masonic temple
Mood: irritated but fulla carbs so, not terrible
Music: Hey, Marianna, you gotta no banana? (Spotify) Subscribe! Like this post? Tell someone about it by clicking a button below.
Even now, they’re pretty rare because people just got used to going without.
However, the rats in NYC may change alla that.
See, Mayor Adams is convinced that the garbage – fulla food – laying around for hours overnight in plastic bags is helping the insane surge in rats in NYC.
I think he may be onto something.
One of his major plans are to deal with the obscene garbage situation in the city by:
Standardizing garbage cans for everyone in the whole city – so everyone has to get cans that look like the ones below with a lid on them.
Making everyone separate out their compostable materials.
He’d never done one before but was game to tackle it.
Unfortunately, my sink was easily 40 years old, so the drain was rusted tight.
Took us two hours just to be able to remove it, which we did with a specialized tool.
Him: Man, once we had the right tool, it came right out. Me: I remember my buddy Buckley telling me once that nothing’s ever an issue if you have the right tool.
Since this was the first time he’d ever installed one, lots of things went wrong.
Like this arm was the wrong size and leaked everywhere.
Wally planned to be here to paint and install it for about four-to-five hours but ended up staying 10 hours and had to return two days later to finally fix everything.
BUT, I have a garbage disposal now in NYC!
I think I’m gonna start running tours to show it off with a reasonable $5 admission ticket.
I’ll let you know when I roll that out.
In the meanwhile, here’s a quick time-lapse video I shot of it in action.
It’s 1.25 horsepower, which is about 5X the power of an average garbage disposal, so it chews through most anything but I’m just using fruit peels and eggshells to keep the gross factor to a minimum.
If you don’t have one, definitely consider installing one!
Location: a NYC pad WITH garbage disposal and freshly painted doors and gates
Mood: accomplished
Music: I will try to fix you (Spotify) Subscribe! Like this post? Tell someone about it by clicking a button below.
Her: Well, there’s shampoo, conditioner, leave-in conditioner, pre-heat treatment spray, anti-UV spray, dry shampoo, hair oil, mousse, and hairspray. Me: I have a single bar of soap.
I’m pretty obsessed with cancer, for obvious reasons.
Don’t know what is leading to this huge rise in cancer cases in our lives but I gotta think it’s a combination of lifestyle and environment.
And for men, a report just came out this week that by 2050, the cancer rates will double. That’s insane.
It’s tough not going off the deep end on this kinda stuff, but one thing I try to do is check my household products against The Environmental Working Group’s website.
Since Alison and my dad died, pretty much the main soap that I use in the house is Dr. Bronner’s Castile soap, which are so safe that they’ve all earned EWG’s coveted “verified” rating – their rating system is basically from 1-10, where 1 and 2 are super safe and 10 is decidedly not.
I try not to get anything above a 2 in the house where ever feasible but EWG’s “verified” rating is essentially a 0, meaning it has absolutely nuthin of concern.
Unfortunately, Dr. Bronner’s bar soaps are like $4.50 or so, which is 3X the price of a normal bar of soap and I take up to three showers a day in the summer if I’m hitting the gym.
Still, it’s a small price to pay for safety.
Having said that, I was searching for something else when I found out that Irish Spring Icy Blast is – somehow – a 1 on the EWG rating chart and costs exactly the same as any other mass-market soap, about $0.66 a bar.
I do note that it seems to contain titanium dioxide, which I’m not a fan of, but that’s pretty much it.
So, while I still have Dr. Bronner’s pretty much everywhere here, I’ve been showering with the Irish Spring for the past month, which has been pretty nice, I gotta say.
Her: You smell great! Me: Don’t I?! Her: (rolling eyes) Sohumble, Logan Lo. Me: The humblest, even.
Location: W 63rd, picking up a white printer for the kid
Mood: irritated
Music: They say it’s our fate and we’re too late, I know (Spotify) Subscribe!
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But he had a quote on the topic that I’ve always liked that seems appropriate to this situation: The time is always right to do the right thing.
As we walked home, the kid talked to me about it all.
Him: They were really loud and scary. Why did you thank her? Me: Because she did the right thing in the end. Yes, she should have been quieter and yes, she shouldn’t have vaped in the first place. But when someone recognizes they did something wrong and try to fix what they did, you have to give them credit for that. Him: She was still really loud and scary. Me: (nodding) Yes. But she was trying to do the right thing in the end. And we always hope that, even if it takes a long time, ultimately, people do the right thing. Maybe next time, she’ll be even better.
That pretty much says it all; evidently, if a wife gets cancer a husband is six times more likely to leave than the other way around.
Put another way, if a husband gets sick, the wife is six times more likely to stay and help while the husband is six times more likely to peace out if the wife gets sick.
What. The. Fuck.
That made me so mad that I couldn’t sleep. The inequity of it all.
I stayed for one reason alone, which was that she was my wife. We were a team. Sickness and in health and all that shit. That was the deal. And I knew, in my heart-of-hearts, that she would have done the exact same for me.
She would never have left me.
And it never once occurred to me to leave her. How could I? She needed me. Plus, she was my wife, and I loved her.
Full stop.
I’ve seen this firsthand.
Have a scumbag relative that cheated on his wife and divorced her while she had cancer.
I have zero to do with him and plan on having zero to do with him ever again.
And Newt Gingrich divorced his first wife Jackie when she had uterine cancer and his third wife Callista after she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
All this to say nuthin of Trump and his multiple marriages, rapes, and affairs.
Party of family values, folks.
What a fucking joke.
Think the reason this whole thing bothered me so much is that I knew how much Alison suffered with her cancer and the thought that someone out there in Alison’s situation has to deal with her same horror AND also have to deal with the pain of being tossed like a piece of garbage by the person she pledged her life to makes my blood boil.
Yet another reason why I think the less I have to do with people, the better.
I didn’t know Shannon at all but, man, no one deserves having to deal with the hassle and heartbreak of a divorce while facing death.
For some 18 months, I’d been trying to get a triple date lined up with Bryson and his wife, The Frenchman and his wife, and me and the Firecracker.
Bryson and the Frenchman were friends first, with the Frenchman being a white belt in BJJ when Bryson was a purple belt.
But, because life gets in the way, Bryson’s now a brown belt (4th level) but the Frenchman’s a black belt (5th level) and I’m still – laughably after over 20 years on-and-off – a blue (2nd level).
Like I said, life gets in the way.
Only found out through social media that they knew each other and, after we got together last time around, we’d been trying to do it again with no luck.
This past week, we’d finally arranged something – or so we thought.
Bryson: Hey guys I did not read the calendar right. We are [away next week after all]. We can do this Thursday or Friday. Me: I’m putting this on your list. Frenchman: Argh…that’s July 4th…sorry got a plan already. Me: Is tomorrow out? Bryson: We can do tomorrow. Frenchman: Tomorrow 6:30-7pm would be the earliest. Me: Wait, that works for us as well. 7PM tomorrow? Frenchman: Oh, wow it’s happening.
So, after months of trying to plan something, we just randomly decided to meet up around the Frenchman’s pad within 24 hours.
The Firecracker suggested Bohemian Spirit as she knows I like Slavic food and the other fellas were game so off we went.
The Firecracker and I got there first.
Me: Oh man, this place is super cute. Her: I figured you’d want to be able to take pics. Me: (later, to waitress) Hey, do the chairs on the wall/ceiling mean something? Waitress: (laughing) It means my boss was bored during COVID.
But, since everyone’s so chill, we all fell into a really easy conversation pretty quickly.
The food was killer to boot.
Me: Did you know that about 30% – or something – of people don’t have an internal monologue? Frenchman: Wait, what does that mean? You have conversations with yourselves? Firecracker: What? You don’t? Me: You don’t talk to yourself?! Nikki: I don’t talk to myself either. Me: Whoa, is that 30%? Firecracker: Your math is off. Me: Asians are not known for their math skills.
Turns out that the Frenchman – and possibly Nikki but she was sitting farther from me – don’t have internal monologues.
Evidently, he thinks in images and concepts but doesn’t actually have a conversation with himself.
This was a pretty hot-button topic for us to end out the night but that’s more their story than mine, so I’ll stop here.
The Firecracker and I were stupid full, and she suggested that we walk home from the Upper East Side to the Upper West Side.
Her: It’s just like a mile. We can do that easy. Me: Fine, but you’ll have to protect me if someone attacks us.
Can’t remember the last time that I walked across the park at night.
It was nice.
Actually, the whole evening was nice.
I’d do it again. Although, hopefully, earlier than 18 months.
Case-in-point, The Firecracker pulled out a board game of Yahtzee the other day that I probably had since the 90s and yet never played.
