Bronx Reunion

 It was the kind of conversation you can only have with someone who's known you a long time, a college roommate, for instance...

"You sound like you just got up, you been sleeping all day?"

"Not all day, I worked until 7AM, but I just woke up."

"What's your address?"

"MUMBLE MUMBLE, Yonkers, NY."

"Google maps says you're a thirteen minute drive from here, I'm in Van Cortlandt Park for a soccer clinic for my daughter."

"The soccer fields are on the west side of the park, along Broadway..."

"I'm in front of a bar named Tortoise and Hare."

"That's across from the Tortoise and Hare."

"What?"

"You'll find out when you cross the street."

"You coming down?"

"Yeah, I just have to shower."

"You shower at all this year?"

"Yeah, I made sure to scrub away 2020 yesterday."

"Text me when you leave the house."

I met up with Herm, one of my college roommates in front of, you guessed it, the Tortoise and Hare statue along Broadway in Van Cortlandt Park, one of the jewels in the NYC parks system.  It had been a while since I'd seen him.  In the early days of the pandemic, he and his wife were alarmed at how people in their Upper West Side neighborhood seemed not to be treating the outbreak seriously, so they rented a bungalow in the Catskills, about a two hours drive from the city.  They loaded up and hunkered down to ride out the perilous preliminary plague period.

He's had a rough year.  His father, whose dry wit was always welcome at various functions and gatherings, recently passed away at the age of 86 from natural causes... my Mom is going to be really upset at the news.  His mother needed a hip replacement, and post-surgery went to a rehabilitation facility where she was isolated from other patients, but was visited by a revolving cast of various doctors, nurses, rehab specialists, and nursing attendants... she contract a case of COVID-19, but it was relatively mild, a lingering cough for a few weeks, which she recovered from.

Herm then had the family tested- his wife tested positive, and he figured that he had surely been exposed... He had a form of asthma which tends to resolve itself when sufferers are in the twenties, but can recur when one hits their forties, and his form of COVID manifested in asthmatic symptoms, necessitating a steroid inhaler.  His kids are okay, but he lamented the fact that his son had to have a private bar mitzvah, sans party, and had missed out on a lot of the social life connected to his last year of middle school, when next September, many of his school chums will be parting ways when enrolled in high school. His daughter is doing well, she was no worse for wear on the soccer field for two hours.  His brother and his wife and kids also had mild cases of the virus.

The conversation, of course, started out with a talk of the pandemic (obviously, considering his own experience) and inevitably turned political, as pandemic talk must.  A major topic was the fact that the death toll has been drastically downplayed, and the millions of people suffering post-'recovery' impairments don't even seem to be discussed at all.  Of course, our discussion was peppered with old in-jokes dating back to our teen years, so it wasn't all doom and gloom.  When five o'clock rolled around, and the sun had set behind the Palisades, across the Hudson River, it had seemed as if we'd only been talking for a few minutes... at the end of the conversation, we were talking about how the novel Dune really wasn't as good as the setting in which it took place.

I joked yesterday that my New Year's resolution was to party more, but I think I should have used the word 'socialize' instead.  We didn't end up throwing back pints at the Tortoise and Hare, across from the Tortoise and Hare, we just hung out for an hour and a half shooting the breeze.  It has been a while since I've done that with someone who isn't an immediate neighbor, co-worker, or fellow volunteer (while our little sports program lasted in the fall).  Hopefully, the home stretch is is sight, so these mundane-but-crucial klatschen can return in force.

Cautiously Optimistic About 2021

 I figure that the mood for 2021 is cautious optimism, or perhaps optimistic caution.  We're not out of the soup regarding the pandemic, especially given the shoddy rollout of the vaccine.  I suspect that it will be summer by the time I personally receive the vaccine (both inoculations if I'm lucky, one if not).  In the meantime, it'll be the same basic routine of distancing and masking...

I'm not one for making New Year's resolutions, but this year I'm making an exception, albeit this resolution is contingent on society returning to some semblance of normality- if we get a handle on this pandemic, and life can resume, I am going to party my ass off.  After a year of living like a hermit, I will make sure I appreciate family, friends, and neighbors more.  I will renew my habit of going to museums with a newfound enthusiasm (I haven't been to Manhattan since March).  I will make it a habit to eat more diverse foods again, when the store shelves are properly stocked- I can't remember the last time I bought a jicama, for example.  I resolve to attend more concerts, I took seeing live music performances for granted in the 'before times'.

All this, of course, depends on a competent government coming into power, and a competent citizenry taking the steps to handle the crisis.  Social unrest is still a thing, the plague is still a thing- it's going to be a rough month, to be sure, but I think we can make it... I have to hold on to this cautious optimism, or is that optimistic caution?

Here's hoping for a better 2021 for all of my readers.

Glad to See an End to 2020

 I cannot lie, this year was terrible, and it lasted for a couple of centuries.  Spring seemed to drag on forever, with shortages of certain items at the supermarket, and my tendency was to squirrel away a package of beans and a package of some sort of grain product every time I went grocery shopping.  I ate a lot of beans this year.

I've been one of the lucky people, my job duties have been diminished in no way, and my wages were unaffected.  I can't say the same for most of my co-workers... the seasonal part-timers who form the bulk of our workforce were on furlough for most of the year, though we had a truncated season with a couple of outdoor events to placate our big fans who purchased annual memberships for this non-starter of a year.

Regarding the actual pandemic, I lost two friends to the disease, while two other friends of mine had it and recovered after a couple of weeks of suffering.  One friend related to me his call to an ambulance service when he had a temperature of 104, and was told not to even bother calling again unless he was having difficulty breathing.  I've been lucky, all things told- I spent the last week of February and the first week of March taking the subway quite a bit, though I haven't been to Manhattan since March.

Yeah, I'm glad to be able to put this interminable year behind me, as I'm sure many people are.  I hope everybody reading this has a safe and healthy 2021.  It'll  be rough going for a couple of more months, but at least there seems to be an end to this crisis in sight.

Stumbling in the Home Stretch

 Predictably, the Trump Maladministration is screwing up the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.  In the home stretch of the race against the pandemic, the response teams are stumbling, mainly due to a failure to prepare for the vaccination effort.  The federal government has neglected to put an infrastructure in place, so the individual states will have to work to create it.

So far, only two million (out of a potential twenty million) individuals have been vaccinated, and with the slow pace of vaccination, doses might expire before they can be administered.  A competent administration would have rolled out the military to speed the distribution of the vaccine, much like Governor Cuomo rolled out the NY National Guard to help the pandemic response efforts in the early New Rochelle hotspot.  That would be a better use of the military than asking them to arrange a coup would be.  With the current glacial pace of vaccination, it will take about ten years for herd immunity to be achieved... and I thought 2021 would mark a genuine change in this shitshow.

Just in Time for 2020's End: A New Horror

 Great, with only a couple of days left in this terrible year, we hear news that the new, more contagious strain of COVID-19 has appeared in the 'States.  This strain of COVID-19 is thought to be 70% more contagious than the old novel coronavirus.  Of course, if it's been discovered in a patient in Colorado with no travel history, it's been here for longer than we suspected.  Appallingly, the Trump Maladministration has not mandated COVID screening for travelers from the UK.  It almost seems like Trump and his minions are pro-pandemic.  

The real horror here is that this new plot twist in the 2020 disaster narrative comes just when there seems to be hope for a resolution of the plague.  If we could just hold out another six months, we could put this pandemic behind us... 2020 gets the last laugh, though, and another post-holiday spike seems inevitable, with an even worse version of the pathogen.

As pessimistic as I am, I didn't have this on my '2020 Bingo Card'.

2020 Music Retrospective Part Two

 For part two of my 2020 music retrospective, I figured I'd showcase two young musical acts which I've been kind of obsessed with over the second half of the year.

The first of these acts is Boston-based band Sweeping Promises, who sound as if they've plundered their parents' record collections for all of their circa-1979 post-punk albums.  Listening to Sweeping Promises, I hear a blend of Joy Division, Kleenex, The Slits, maybe a hint of Gang of Four.  The band has a spare sound buoyed by vocalist Lira Mondal's sweet vocals.  I'm partial to groovy bass lines punctuated by jagged, staccato guitar licks, synth noodling, and bubblegum vocals- so this is right up my alley.  Out Again, the first song I heard by the band, immediately grabbed my attention, but I believe my favorite song by them is Hunger for a Way Out, which is a perfect description of my feelings about this terrible year:

 

My post-election theme song is Rot, by Allegra Krieger.  I dig her voice, and I like the crunchy guitar song of the track, but it's the lyrics which have me obsessed, as they describe the situation of the current Occupant of the White House perfectly:

Give a little, take a lot
And live out your days like some sanctified parasite
And when your empire begins to rot
Return to the earth without a question without a fight 

He's not really fighting, just allowing his increasingly deluded surrogates appear to do so in order to extend the scam.   Here's the song for your listening pleasure:

 

With the pandemic, live music has been dealt a blow, and I sincerely hope that young artists such as the acts I've highlighted in this post can hunker down until we get this thing behind us, and have a successful 2021.  Being cooped up at home, good music is one of the necessities of life, and I hope we are able to repay the artists that kept us entertained in this hard time once the world restarts.

2020 Music Retrospective Part One

This being the end of the year, I figured I'd put out a brief music retrospective for the year.  I also decided that I'd split it into two parts to reflect the developing zeitgeist of the year, and I am choosing two songs by old stalwarts to begin.

Perhaps the signature song of March and April was the April 2020 release Living in a Ghost Town by The Rolling Stones.  Lyrically, it captures the pandemic year mood perfectly:

YOU CAN LOOK FOR ME BUT I CAN’T BE FOUND 

YOU CAN SEARCH FOR ME I HAD TO GO UNDERGROUND 

LIFE WAS SO BEAUTIFUL THEN WE ALL GOT LOCKED DOWN

 FEEL A LIKE GHOST LIVING IN A GHOST TOWN

Yeah, Mick, you said it... you summed up 2020 in less than four minutes:

 

The other song by an old stalwart that I chose is Got to be Tough by Bastard faves Toots and the Maytals, which references the social injustice that the Black Lives Matter movement was founded to shed light on.  It's also a good prescription for living in a year in which everything was terrible:

 

This song takes on an uncommon poignancy given that Toots succumbed to COVID-19 in September.  This combination warning and pep talk was his last gift to the world.

The topicality of these songs are a perfect illustration of the ability of clever artists to continue to release relevant material while old enough to collect social security checks... the Stones and the Maytals released music as up-to-date as cable news headlines, and provided solid grooves while doing so.  These songs aren't happy by any stretch of the imagination, but they possessed the sort of dourness which manages to be uplifting.