Observations

  Get home tired. Cat has puked on sheet. Get out another sheet. Prepare for battle. Pep talk, you can do this without Kate S, look this sheet has stripes, surely they go top to bottom. Start trying to put in sheet. Tug one way, then the other way. Marley plops herself down like a paperweight then gets mad at my tugging and starts taking swipes when I get close. Sheet seems to be defective. I wonder if it shrank in the wash. Then I think, what if this is not the sheet where the stripes go top to bottom. What if that sheet was a different house or two decades ago? What if this sheet goes side to side? I know this sheet came from Target. I plug in my phone, wait for it to power up, go to the Target website, see the sheets with horizontal stripes. Remove Marley, turn the sheet around. Success! But now I am full of sheet fighting adrenaline and I don’t know how I am going to sleep.

       I was in the basement feeding the cats before I left for work when the phone rang, and I heard my grandfather’s voice on the answering machine. Afraid that something had happened to my grandmother who was battling breast cancer, I ran up the stairs and grabbed the phone just as it rang again. "They bombed the World Trade Center," said my grandfather, who had seen it on television in Kansas. "Grandpa," I said, perplexed,  "that happened in 1993."   I was a senior in high school then, staring out the south-facing window of Stuyvesant’s brand new building on Chambers Street with a clear view of the Towers. I was one of many students who walked back to Brooklyn over the bridge that day because there was no subway service.'[;;;;;;        "No," Grandpa said,  "two planes hit the towers." As soon as I hung up the phone and sat down, it rang again and it was my close friend Collin calling from Hawaii where he had just seen it on the ...

  There was a long delay for the MRI yesterday and I was getting hungry, so I was kind of grouchy when I followed the yellow footprints down the hall to the glass doors of the MRI 1 waiting area.   Through the doors, the waiting area was deserted except for a very young woman in the crimson scrubs of a home attendant sprawled on a chair with her phone, clearly waiting.  She didn’t look up when I sat down next to her, but when a muscular, tattooed young man in the uniform of the hospital’s janitorial service showed up and started gathering trash bags and piling them on his cart, her phone was forgotten.  She started admiring his tattoos, and he told her he was planning to do some on his legs.  “They’re nice,” she said.  “The colors are good.”  “I get them all at once,” he said “I don’t go back and forth.”  He wasn’t just talking about tattoos, he was showing her he had the money for them. I couldn’t hear everything onc...

     Although I never learned to ride a bike myself, the bike safety is an issue close to my heart because my Dad rode his everywhere.     He started after being drafted for World War II.     He showed up for his physical and an old army doctor looked at his legs, specifically his knees – which turned inward – and asked him if he could run.     Dad said no since he had already broken his leg when a gym teacher forced him to run in high school, and was removed from the military.     Before he left, the doctor told him to get a bike to help keep his knees in shape.     It was not as common back then, but Dad biked everywhere.          He commuted to his job at Benjamin Franklin High School by bike, cutting diagonally through Central Park, entering at the southwest corner and exiting at the northeast.     I don’t know if bike fatalities were less frequent back then, or if Mom and I just had ...

       I was sitting at a round table next to Andy Humm, co-hosting Gay USA when we got a viewer complaint relayed to us from someone who thought that Dolly Parton’s death the day before should be the top story.     Andy asked me what I thought and I said that the machete attack on a trans man who was at home with his spouse and kids seemed more of priority to me.     Andy agreed, pointing out that anyone who wanted Dolly coverage could find it everywhere, so we left it in its spot later in the show. I am probably the last person you would have expected to listen to a podcast called Dolly Parton’s America, never mind all 9 parts of it. But the fact that I listen to Radiolab, a science podcast, while I clean would likely be less of a surprise. That’s what brought me to Dolly Parton’s America. Jad Abumrad, who is part of Radiolab, produced it and in 2019 Radiolab aired the first part of it. Despite being a New Yorker, I am familiar with country musi...

  There are as many approaches to spending time in a jail cell after being arrested for civil disobedience as there are people, but there are some common patterns.     There are high-energy activists who keep chanting and even stomping even in the holding cells, not my favorite because the vibrations and sound reverberate through the whole cellblock.     There are antsy activists who stay in motion, even some who climb the bars.     There are new activist who might be anxious, hovering close to more experienced folks asking a lot of questions.     Then there are high drama activists, who spend the whole time going on about their medical needs and what might happen if we are held long enough that they miss a medication.     At the extreme end of this are those that wind up getting carted off to the ER, because that is the only way to get access to medication while in police custody, unless you somehow smuggle it in, which I have also...