Grey day

March 12th, 2026 The warm, sunny weather that brought New Yorkers- people, dogs and squirrels- out dashing around for the past couple of days gave way to an intense thunderstorm last night. Amid the flashes of lightning and pouring rain, I went into the second bedroom to fill up April and Sapphire’s bowls and heard a loud dripping sound. Searching the room, I spotted drip marks and followed them up to a crack in the ceiling, with big drops welling and then falling, pulled down by their own weight. I put a pan under the drip to catch the water and went to bed. Even as I gathered Smokey - who has been clingy since his outdoor adventure - into my arms I was thinking, now the roof is leaking. One more fucking thing. The next day is so damp and persistently grey that I feel like I have woken up in London. My joints- knees, shoulders, wrists and hands- hurt so much I wish I could spend the day like Smokey, who curls up so close to the heater than sometimes the room smells like hot- but not singed- fur. I pulled up the hood of my Abolish ICE sweatshirt and headed for the lower east side. Heading up Chrystie St , I was wondering if there is anything more depressing than the tattered ghosts of plastic bags stuck in naked winter trees. At the corner of Rivington St, a street sign reads “Harry Wieder Way”. I knew Harry Wieder, he was a member of ACT UP, as well as a variety of other LGBTQ and disability causes. A dwarf, he was about 4 ft. tall and walked with forearm crutches. He was killed in 2010 on the Lower East Side by a taxi that didn’t see him. He was 57. Next to the sign is the large brick building that used to be Rivington House, an AIDS hospice during the bad years. When it finally closed, a lot of controversy ensued as corporate interests tried to get their hands on the building which had been earmarked for community use. Eventually Mt. Sinai renovated the building, turning it into a mental health center and moving all the inpatient psych and detox beds from Beth Israel there before closing the hospital. The building also has a much-needed partial hospitalization program, and a combined primary care/mental health clinic. My primary doc is the Medical Director of his Mt Sinai location, and he was invited, along with the other site directors, to tour the new mental health facility before it opened. He emailed me enthusiastically, “they take your insurance!!!” He had been trying to find a psychiatrist to refer me to for more than a year at that point, since we both knew that the medication I had been taking for twenty years had stopped working. The psychiatrists at Rivington St. are residents, working in the clinic as part of their training. My first one was a kind young woman, who said, upon hearing how many cats I had, “you are living the dream.” She decided to specialize in pediatrics, so she spent one year in the adult clinic and then moved on to finish her training with kids. The current one is an adult specialist, so she has spent almost two years in the adult clinic, and will be done in June. She identifies as queer, and we talk about how Mt Sinai- despite signs everywhere saying they respect people’s genders – has stopped offering trans care to minors because of pressure from Trump. She shakes her head. “I don’t even know what to say.” She tells me about how a large portion of the clinic patients have been suddenly cut off because Anthem and Mt. Sinai haven’t been able to come to terms, so now Mt Sinai is out of network. She says she’s heading to San Diego next. “It’s beautiful,” I tell her. “My dad’s best friend got out of the Navy after WWII and just stayed put. He worked for the utility company and then came out once he retired. He said ‘I just stepped off the sidewalk and into the Pride Parade.’ When Dad got to the point that I had to bring him to visit because he couldn’t travel on his own, his friend kept pointing out the gay cruising spots in Balboa Park to me.” “What do you think about the medication?” she asks me. I shrug. “You can’t medicate the world,” I say, and she gets it. “Things just keep falling on my head,” I tell her about the burst pipe, Saucy’s death, Smokey getting lost, the roof leak, probably forgetting a few. She asks me about suicide and I feel like we’ve stepped onto a frozen lake and have to move carefully to keep from crashing through. I genuinely like her, and admire the courage she has to wear short sleeves to work with self injury scars covering both arms, and I think she knows me well enough not to panic. But on the other hand, she has an attending who doesn’t know me, and the clinic has protocols and I remember from my own training days that they tend to be very risk averse and I don’t want to get into a chaotic situation, so I don’t lie, but I limit what I tell her. Walking back out into the rain, I think about how counterproductive this system is that forces you to be guarded with the people who are supposed to be helping you.