present tension

A horrible thought just struck me. Maybe there is no point in trying to modernize this lovely blog. Maybe it should never move beyond its Abu Gharib-era beginnings.

I have found two new homes for this thing. The first was at pt.nbnm.net, the next was at presenttension.net. Both were using advanced, space-age, jet-pack, hexochlorophene-fueled late-model WordPress frameworks.

But now I wonder: isn’t the primitiveness of early blogware itself a thingie to be preserved? Why not trash the whole NASA confabulation at presenttension.net, and move the low-tech beauty of this baby over there?

I’ll wait a few days to decide.

Most of the fun stuff has been hidden away or moved to Present Tension’s new location. As there are few WordPress 1.2.2 blogs still standing, we will keep a token sampling of this award-winning journal available for your delight. At least for another few months.

That’s the important thing. That’s what all primitive people really want to know about you.

They get to the point where they’ve figured out that you’re either male or female (even though they they can’t see either a penis gourd or pendulous dugs), and they know your approximate age (somewhere between adolescence and total decrepitude). Now they’re happily puffing away on your Philip Morris Commanders (king-size, unfiltered, good for jungle bugs) and they’re ready to move into the small-talk stage of your acquaintanceship.

And here it is. “Hey you! You got chillun? How many chillun?”

Go ahead and tell them. Anything you like. One kid, six kids, sixteen kids. It’s not like the little savages are going to write down your children’s birthdays so they can send them something nice (just imagine!). No, they’re just being innocently nosy. It’s something they ask of all strangers, and no one’s ever smacked them down for this rudeness so they keep on asking.

Sometimes the questions get detailed—"You have a boy? How old? Is he warrior? You have girl—how much you sell her for?” It is always best to be prepared for this. Along with the Philip Morris Commanders in the left side pocket of your photo-vest, bring a fact sheet about your kids. Maybe even some fuzzy snapshots.

My own prepared script goes basically like this. “Oh yes I have four children. Two girls, two boys. Between five and fifteen. Evenly spaced. Their names are Mary, Joan, John, and Robert. They live with their other parent, as I am usually away on business. The boys play baseball [a game formerly very popular in America] and the girls do ballet [this is a kind of theater-dance some people do in my country]. Who is oldest? Oh, that would be John. Then Mary. Then…”

Even a savage has limited attention for this sort of thing, and by this point my new friend is probably waving and nodding and inviting me into his hut to look at the shrunken heads.

Monday night I was flying to JFK from Heathrow and exhausted my reading material before we passed Newfoundland. I found Caddyshack listed on the in-flight movie menu, but everytime I looked for it on the assigned channel I got a mid-80s Molly Ringwald turkey instead. And I’d already seen the Narnia movie and the documentary about the German submarine. So I idly scrolled through the channels and came to rest at I Love Lucy.
It was an old episode. No, I mean really old, one of the early ones from the first (1951-52) season…Lucy and Ricky (and Fred and Ethel) as the broadest of broad comic characters, before they got backstory and nuance and visited Hollywood and Europe.
In fact, it was THE classic episode, the first one that pops into your mind, the one where the men and women “switch jobs.” They don’t literally switch jobs (Ricky was the only character who had real employment anyway), rather they switch breadwinner-homemaker roles. Ricky and Fred cook in the kitchen while Lucy and Ethel get assembly-line jobs in a candy factory. I’d seen this a million times–well, a dozen–but this time was utterly fascinated by all the details and subtexts and social propaganda.
1. The appliances in the Ricardos’ kitchen are bright and obtrusive. They aren’t just mute background furniture (like the succession of Macintosh computers you see in Jerry Seinfeld’s place). There’s a matched washer-dryer pair, and neither looks ever to have been used. There’s the distinct air of a TV commercial for Maytag or RCA Whirlpool. Message: “If your kitchen doesn’t look like this, well for heaven’s sake make it so. You can buy them now, you know. War production’s been over for six or seven years.”
2. Elsewhere there’s a real postwar look to the whole thing. Everybody’s fifteen or twenty pounds overweight, and they’re all over-upholstered. Wide lapels, big shoulders and skirts. Showing off one’s bounty, you know. Now that the war’s over we can do that.
3. The effects of war on social roles are much in evidence. A man wears a suit and brings home the bacon, a woman wears frilly clothes and hangs out at home. Anything else is eccentric and laughable.
4. Women getting jobs means putting on waitress uniforms (like Mildred Pierce) and working on an assembly line (like Rosie the Riveter). Roz Russell career girls? Never heard of ‘em. If Ethel and Lucy got decent jobs, that would undercut the premise of the humor, which is that women in the workplace are pitiable fish out of water.

Today the Associated Press posted this photograph, without explanatory comment, on its website. If it truly is a photo of President Bush as he looked (say) thirty years ago, then his years of drink and drugs took much more of a toll than anyone has hitherto suspected.

Last Labor Day weekend I was up at five in the morning and noticed that some oddballs—advertising boffins, I supposed—were blocking off the street outside and setting up a series of double beds in the middle of Sixth Avenue and photographing them from a high rolling platform. Just now I follow a link to The Daily Telegraph’s site and find an animated GIF ad for British Airways that shows the image I’ve long been awaiting. I notice they’ve taken their six or so beds and Photoshopped them into a longer parade.

(Correction, please. It was not merely Photoshop. They painstakingly moved all six of the beds down the avenue and reshot them in position. Why the hell would you do that, when the cityscape light was changing every few minutes anyway, so that none of the shadows would exactly match and you’d have to retouch each tier of beds anyway? The photo retoucher has his reasons. See here for his description.)

A vile and mean-streaky harridan whom we used to call the Sausage Lady has published a “memoir” (quotations here suggesting a high degree of self-aggrandizing fictionalization) that tells how she was abused and victimized when she was a fat ugly little whelp. She keeps popping up in my occasional political cartoons, including this throwaway from 2003. Oh, yes—she’s the one with the bag of mail.

Postscript, May 2008. Not long after writing the above, I learned that the Sausage Lady was dead. Yes, even as her Fat Girl made her a bestselling author in her 60s, she was wasting away with many different forms of cancer (including pineapple cancer, which Harold liked best). Well lots of us get cancer from time to time, so there’s no gloating here. However, there was a time when I called upon the mischevious sprites of the world to fill her with tumors, and this was the first thing I thought of when I heard she was dead. This was about 15 years ago. Sausage Lady and some friends of hers were waging a campaign of horrific pranks at my expense. Everything from harassing phone calls to anonymous smears to physical threats. I hadn’t done anything against them, other than occasionally complain or fight back (feebly), though at long last I did engage an attorney to send threatening folderol to Sausage Lady’s employer. More decisive action was called for, I felt. So I built a Devil Doll of the Sausage Lady, shaped it out of Sculpey and froze it upside down in the fridge. Then I tied a miniature noose about its neck and hung it from the arched entrance to my kitchen. Finally I took it out into the alley and smashed it on the cobblestones. I put pieces into an envelope and addressed it to Sausage Lady, along with an anonymous note saying how sorry we all were to hear she was dying of colonic cancer.

First, the travelogue.

For most of the last three hundred years Randall’s Island has served as an outbuilding to Manhattan, providing the distasteful municipal functions we associate with islands in the East River and Hellgate: potter’s fields, poorhouses and workhouses, insane asylums, disease quarantines, reform schools, prisons.

Currently the island is a city park, host to summer concerts, Cirque du Soleil marquees, and negro schoolchildren from Harlem who come to taste the wild swampwater. It’s recently been provided with a rubberized running track and a steel-and-concrete viewing stand that proclaims itself Icahn Stadium. I presume Icahn is none other than Carl Icahn, the leveraged-buyout sleazeball who liquidated TWA some years back.

Today I made my first visit, via borrowed schoolbus, for an 8am NYRR race. The running course, which circled the island and ended on the running track, was “flat and fast,” according to the NYRR webpage.

Fair enough. There were a couple of small hills, but nothing like the 8% grade we had in Prospect Park during last Saturday’s half-marathon. I finished in under 24 minutes, net, with an astounding pace of 7:42.

This is about one minute faster than my pace in the half-marathon, and tempts me to make a stab at extrapolating my average pace in the upcoming Paris Marathon. I drop one full avg-pace-minute per ten miles, therefore my average pace for 26.2 miles will be about ten minutes per mile, meaning a net marathon time of 4 hours 22 minutes. I shall endeavoure to improve.

Saturday, March 19th: Feast of St. Joseph, the swallows come back to Capistrano and I run the Brooklyn Half-Marathon.

I finished 376th of 1374 women (1462nd of 3325 overall, 11 for my age and sex), but those statistics lie. I saw thousands pass me by in the last five miles.

By then my attention was mainly focused on keeping continent. Irritable Bowel Syndrome, or maybe just indigestion from bad eating (see below) has struck again. Imagine me running three miles on the Coney Island Boardwalk, then six miles up Ocean Parkway (a thoroughfare I’d never seen before, but which was exactly as I’d imagined), finally up Park Circle and into Prospect Park, all the while looking for a porta-potty (or Royal Flush, to use the concession’s actual name).

Funny how few people are noticeably ill at these events. Though I did see a girl with the dry heaves, just before the Park Circle turnoff.

In 1999, on a relay race in New Hampshire, I ate Olestra-laced potato chips and got a severe case of trots. There I was, running through the center of Laconia, NH at 2 in the morning, hoping desperately to reach the finish before I soiled myself. Today’s race was nearly that bad. Not coicidentally, I ate potato chips yesterday, too, though they did not have Olestra. Also ate assorted sushi and some cheese. And a big chocolate-chip cookie and bowl of hot chocolate with cube-shaped marshmallow at the City Bakery on 18th Street. That’s my diverse diet, folks. I shall be more careful in the two or three days leading up to the Paris Marathon, and subsist entirely on yoghurt, fruit, and modest amounts of soup and pasta.

So farewell then, George Kennan. Seems to me I’ve been hearing your obituary in my dreams for about ten days. How delightful to read in the Times that you were a gloomy, complicated and morose person, who despaired of conveying fine nuance in a world of political hackery. Whenever I thought of a foreign-service career for myself, you were always there in my mind as one of the Big Names. Somebody who’d hung around for decades—from the first delegation to the Soviet Hell in the early thirties, to an active career as an elder sage that ended only with his death at 101. I suppose now I shall have to think seriously about that graduate education in global whatsit and foreign relations. The baton passes.

Can I switch from being a pack-a-week smoker to being a (temporary) nonsmoker? This would be just to help my wind a little over the next few weeks. Devil’s Advocate arguments arise: I didn’t smoke at all 15 years ago–well, hardly ever–and I didn’t run any better. In fact I ran rather worse, consistently. And there is no conclusive proof of long-term damage from light cigarette smoking.

Furthermore there is the moral argument. By keeping my Smoker’s Union Card active, I am helping to fight the good fight against the neo-Stalinist gang who endeavor to persuade us that pedophilia, miscegenation, and frottage parties on the town green are all perfectly fine; but people who enjoy traditional and moderate pleasures must be hounded like criminals.

So while I may shelve the minor pleasures for a little while–a useful discipline, in these last days of Lent–I don’t really see the point of doing it forever. I don’t propose to look down the long corridor of eternity and see nothing but No Smoking signs.

Yesterday I decided to run a leisurely 8-mile fartlek, mostly around the reservoir. This did not come off as planned. The reservoir track was soggy with slush and mud. So I took a series of alternate routes, on the paved road and horse trails, pausing after ninety minutes to pick up my number from NYRRC on 89th Street. Then back to the park and another leisurely two miles, then back home. Felt great. I calculated I’d run somewhere between 12 and 13 miles in the course of two hours. But alas! It was too wearing on me, and when I ran the Pfizer 4-mile race today I clocked a shabby 8:05 pace. Which I would have thought quite wonderful a few weeks ago, but now I realize I was made for better things. In spite of running gently and stretching afterwards, I was just too stiff to make a full-out effort. And I was stiff in places I’d never been stiff before—upper thighs and glutes. What is this all about?

Shortly before I go to swim and shower at the gym, Harry phones up from Chicago. He’s on his Sprint mobile phone. He barks through a tincan in a windtunnel for three minutes, then disappears, phones back. I tell him to phone me on the landline. He says he can’t because he’s outside, and he doesn’t have long-distance on his regular phone and it’s cheaper for him to call on the cell. I don’t quite follow. The connection fogs out again. Finally, third time around, I explain that I meant he should phone me on my landline.

Harry is one of those people who like to talk on the phone, and like most of that ilk, he likes to say the same thing over and over, which makes it doubly difficult for me because I don’t like to talk on the phone and I have a low boredom threshold. He keeps telling me how wonderful Chicago is and how glad he is he’s there, because he could find an affordable place to live, which he never could in New York. (Subtext: New York will not dote on me and I don’t have the money or connections to live there, so pooh on New York.)
Harry is now in his early 50s, but he got frozen into the mindset of a 20-something actor/waiter of the Nixon/Ford/Carter era. I could give you a laundry list of examples of this attitude, but then I’d be halfway into a novel. Suffice it to say that he sneers and carps at young people—I guess that would be anyone under 40—especially young gay men, who are far less cool and brilliant than Harry’s young peers were thirty years ago.

Harry’s been an offstage presence in my life since I was a kid. I first heard of him 32 years ago from a crazy girl from Chicago, daughter of a Sun-Times editor, who’d been in the nuthouse with him in Evanston, circa 1971. Harry’s story, in brief, was that he was very messed up. He and his younger sister went through a series of foster homes when small children, finally becoming adopted by a well-to-do childless couple in their forties. Harry worked as a child model and commercial actor, playing teenagers till he was about 25. Then he found he could earn oodles of money as a waiter and maitre d’, and that discovery shaped the next fifteen years of his life. Some people become accountants and lawyers, some turn to crime, others work in restaurants.

In the 80s Harry was a part-owner of a restaurant near South Street Seaport. Somehow his investment came to grief, so he parted ways with his partners and used his remaining capital to start a gay bookstore in Ft. Lauderdale. This failed and he went bankrupt. He then went to Vietnam and Bangkok to promote himself as a restaurant consultant. He was right in time for the economic downturn of ‘98-99. He wound up teaching English in Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City.

He’d come armed with a presentation binder filled with encomia from restaurant associates, as well as headshots of himself as a young man when he appeared in ads for Strawbridge & Clothier and Seven-Up. The headshots greatly impressed the boys in old Sai-Gon, who made the intended inference that Harry was a bigtime American movie actor. Thus Harry, who likes oriental boys, had a grand old time in the Far East. But then there were visa and legal problems, and he washed up again on American shores, where he begged his semi-wealthy parents for a small stipend that would enable him to reestablish himself as an expert in the wine and food trade.

It was around this time, the year 2000, that I finally encountered Harry in the flesh. He’d taken a share in a nasty hi-rise apartment in Flushing, living with a half-Jewish woman many years his senior. The flatmate tried to seduce him sexually, then turned on him, finally calling the cops and accusing him of having beaten her up. Harry got hauled off to the pokey and spent the next six months in a horrendous legal maze, dividing his time between attending court-ordered Anger Management classes and asking his parents for enough money to pay for two hair-weave pieces. (His signature blond thatch had started going thin after 35.)

That whole year, 2000, was a hellacious time for poor Harry. Fortune kept tossing him nuggets that turned into fools’ gold. Dorothy Sarnoff, the public-speaking guru, flattered him and encouraged him to write a book and set up a successor business to her own. But then it turned out Dorothy was senile and apparently was under the impression that Harry was her nephew. Suddenly she wouldn’t see him anymore, because (he said) either her mind briefly cleared and she realized the mistaken identity, or maybe she’d found out he’d been arrested for beating up an old woman. Other promising jobs and prospects would pop up, then suddenly be withdrawn. Still an undischarged bankrupt from his Florida days, Harry now decided he was unemployable because his arrest and bankruptcy kept showing up on his records. Toward the end of the year, when he was still attending Anger Management sessions, he got a few months’ work demonstrating recipes at an upscale grocery chain in Manhattan. He lived in a room in the Greenpoint YMCA.

Finally, in early 2001, he cadged enough money from his parents to move back to Vietnam.

Last time I saw him he was back in Manhattan for a few days, preparing for a move to Ecuador, again as a teacher of English. Oh boy, I thought.

Now he’s back in America because he never finished his BA, and he needs a minimal degree to continue in his TOEFL career.

He’s the only person who’s had a career as chequered and scary as mine. But my life has not been as bleak. I’d like to keep it that way.

And today, Sunday morn, I showed up for the preposterously named Coogan’s Salsa Blues & Shamrocks 5K in Washington Heights, the 553rd finisher out of 2160. Pace time was 7:55, which is unremarkable in the great scheme of things, but a Personal Best for me. This pace will be impossible to approach in the Brooklyn Half-Marathon on the 19th, where my goal is simply to keep it under nine minutes, or about 1 hr 50 minutes. I really must quit smoking in the next few days. The Paris Marathon is one month away.

As usual, the first mile seemed to go on for fifteen minutes. Bagpipers, steel drums, and mulatto girls in cheerleader outfits appeared at odd intervals, serenading us and cheering us on. The course was mostly a straightaway with two or three long hills: up Fort Washington Avenue, then into Fort Tryon Park for a half mile and the turnaround. I sped up when passing the 3-mile sign, determined to stay under an 8-minute pace this time.
My tummy is acting up. I have just eaten chunks of chorizo after returning from the gym where I Jacuzzi’d and swam a few laps.

Moki clips out Thomas Friedman’s column and gives it to me. It is better than usual, this time framing the Bush administration’s opposition to the EU’s sale of arms to Red China. The problem is not arms sale per se, Friedman explains, but rather that the EU countries aren’t selling arms to each other. And they don’t sell arms to each other because they are protected by America’s defense umbrella, which used to protect them from the Soviet Union and now defends them from dangerous countries in the Middle East. Furthermore, the main reason they’re selling military hardware to Red China is that they really hope to sell more Airbuses, which the Chinese will be more inclined to buy if war materiel is part of the package.

What a bunch of greedy no-goods! Don’t they realize the Western World is being besieged by Moslem terrorists? Why can’t they be more like us and take all their foreign policy and defense directives from Tel Aviv, the way we do?

I keep eight or ten blogs, mainly for experimental purposes. Their content is often diary entries. This is purely a matter of convenience. It is is easier to crank out a few lines of personal musings than to lay in “Lorem ipset"; moreover the diary leaves a little flag about my mood and activities during the last update.

Diaries, not coincidentally, were the main purpose of weblogs when they first sprang out of the slagheap seven or eight years ago. But many blogs today are really e-zines, created to promote one’s business or hobbies or social interests. Nothing wrong with that, but when you open your diary to the public, it ceases to be useful as a diary. You can’t be honest in it anymore. You must leave out your notes on personal hygiene and bathroom habits, avoid divulging any opinion that would upset the bien-pensants and the mattoids, and softpedal your criticisms of others, lest they become hurt or cross.

It is not just a matter of being tactful. You have to LIE. And lying is sooo tedious.

The NYRR Snowflake 4-mile run, split up into men’s and women’s races, was this morning. I treated it casually. It didn’t bother me when everybody was passing me for the last mile and a half. This included a tall girl in an ungainly straw sombrero decorated with small toothpick models of The Gates. ‘Great hat!’ I heard when she was a few paces behind, and ‘great hat!’ again when she was twenty paces ahead. This sort of attention would turn my stomach. Maybe if you ask for attention you can deal with it. All I know is it distresses me mightily when goofballs stand by the side of the road, give the thumbs-up sign, and bellow, ‘All right! Looking good!’
After all that, my pace was 8:01 or a net of 32:07.
In other words, if I’d just goosed it a bit for the last quarter-mile, I could have broken the 8-minute barrier again, with room to spare.

To lunch with KP and Sylvia at Seppi’s. Seppi’s now offers their famous Alsatian tarte flambée rolled up with meat or fish, served with fries and soup and salad and bacon. I did not see the bacon, but I was very full. Sylvia had a regular tarte flambée, followed by a hot chocolate torte. I snapped a picture of her with my miniature Air France digital. We talked a bit of blogs. ‘Oh Sylvia,’ said I,’you ought to have a blog.’ She may be interested. A schoolmate was wearing a cap that said Blogger, and didn’t know what it was.

Then to The Container Store with Moki. Moki is in a refurbishing mood, and dreams of redoing the apartment with wire shelves and brackets. ‘No standards!’ I tell him. I’ve had lots more experience with wiry things and molly bolts than he has. Cleverly organized closets look really swell in the store, but they don’t work unless they’re made of solid materials. Moki plans to buy me a tall wiry mesh-drawer unit to keep my clothes in. That is a Margot classic. I’ve kept my clothes in things like that most of my life. Someday someone will give me a Biedermeier chest.

Back home I do a quick Google for Paris Marathon attendees and find Meg Hourihan. She’s not only doing the Paris, she’ll be running with me in the Brooklyn Half-Marathon on March 19th. I dropped her a note. I’d come across her site before. She is, coicidentally enough, the creator of Blogger, and quite famous in that little world. The New Yorker did a story on her a few years ago. If she writes back I’ll have a new friend in Paris for a few days, though I can’t imagine what we’d talk about.

I began this long, four-day weekend yesterday (Sat the 19th) by sending Rosie Evitt an email. Visiting from Herefordshire but we hadn’t connected since a short phone conversation a few weeks ago. Something abstracted about her…as though she’s five years away from diagnosis. I gave Rosie my mobile number but she didn’t ring back, not yesterday anyhow. Today she phoned up on the landline. It looks as though I have dodged a bullet, won’t have to do much entertaining or putting her up at Keith’s.

Just after noon, met Keith and Sylvia at the Boathouse in the Park. Chilly day, made bitter and snappy by bright sun and strong winds. They’d gone to see The Gates, and I insisted I snapping photos of them, so Sylvia would have some shots for the album. The Boathouse being crowded—some celeb there, Woody Allen?—we moseyed to Third Avenue where we found J.G. Melon also crowded. Then up the block where there is a clutch of Italian and French bistros. And so lunch or brunch at Le Bistro Steak or whatever it was called. Then back to the Park because I hadn’t taken any photos yet. More delay: the battery was down on my Leica. Walked down to Carlyle Photo. Finally, success; 15 or 20 frames. Walked back down to the Boathouse where K went to the men’s room. Through the Park and to Henri Bendel, where I went to the ladies’ room. M1 bus to 8th St. I lost a glove. K bought me a new $5 pair of red Thinsulates from an African vendor at 8th and University. Path train to Hoboken (Sylvia to JC). Frozen Monkey Cafe for a half-hour. I phoned the Petite Powerhouse, who was on her way to the fluff ‘n’ fold and suffering from strep. We’d pencilled in a possible get-together that afternoon, but didn’t follow up. Still it was good to talk.

Then down the street to the Symposia Bookstore to see Andrew Hook, colleague of Tim Lees and newly published novelist. Friendly enough fellow but the packaging of this softcover book is wretched. Perfect binding, laminated cover. The sort of thing a smalltime fringe publisher gets printed up when shopping for offset printing and lowballing the production (1000 copies for $1000! You supply the CD-ROM, we do the rest!). The title of the book is offputting too, Moon Beaver, but then it turns out this comes from a solicitors’ firm called Moon Beever in England (or ‘in the UK’ as Andrew puts it) which turns my opinion right around. Afterwards we repaired to a Greek place up the street (three venues in three hours, all a stone’s throw from each other!) where K and I stayed too long. Andrew’s publisher, Olga, is a small Russian woman, disturbingly exothalmic and I fear not long for this world. I sat across from her and got used to the bulging eyes after a little bit. Her husband, Jim Galvin, reminds me of the Vincent D’Onofrio character in The Salton Sea (in his bulk and gentle movements, not because he’s mad as a hatter or has a plastic nose or any of that). He has had a career as a scene-shifter, a movie grip, and best boy. Currently gives tours of NYC, according to his ordered-on-the-internet business card.

Three vodka gimlets last night with Woodley, Helfenstein, and Michael Mitchell at Ivy’s. I am paying for it today.

We were having a postmortem about the massive bloodletting at work yesterday. Several of my favorites got the axe, and they are better off as a result. At least they should be. Kurt and I packed up Mr. Quyyum’s belongings in four large file boxes and a couple of smaller ones.

At Ivy’s I told Michael the tale of my criminal summons and upcoming arraignment, while Helfenstein baited me with carping comments. He’s heard the story before and treats it as a load of baloney.

Why are Bobo and I at loggerheads so often? Woodley has begun to notice this. I told him it’s because Bobo and I have each come to realize that the other has feet of clay.

Also asked Mitchell if he knew anything about mercenaries. He ought to. What was he learning to fly helicopters in South Africa for? I told him I needed information for the next (and very short, I hope) novel, ‘Mead Takes Command,’ a Waughish swindle of errors, partly set in Rhodesia in the 1970s. Mitchell told me to read Soldier of Fortune. Great. Thanks Michael. Good 1970s magazine. Never would have thought of it myself.

A beefy but genteel old Schweizer, gen. Franz, sat at my left at the bar, and chatted airily with me in French and German. My French and German felt very un-fluent, which was strange because I was slightly drunk. An odd experience…very much like being in a foreign country, alone, and ready to go home with anyone, just to ease my loneliness. Philip Diani, the Paris architect, nearly had his way with me a couple of times back in 2002 when I was in just this situation.

Went to bed at ten, woke before two with a yowling case of sinusitis. Gobbled codeine with ibuprofen or paracetamol for the next six hours, till I staggered into work wearing dark glasses and feeling like a thick wad of cotton wool.

Lay in bed reading Sisley Huddleston’s ‘France: The Tragic Years’ from 2 to 6am. It’s okay…I know the cast of characters well enough, so my eyes don’t totally glaze over. But the author is so dilatory– too many words, too few concrete images–I can imagine the book would be very hard going for the average person.

I reinstalled it using a prefix pt_ to the db table. It installed perfectly, but with none of my old posts (though it did have the Nixon graphic from my Kubrick tweak).

Since this destroyed my original site, I have delete the experimental one and reuploaded the original one, which does not have the pt_ prefix. I’ll just leave this in its present folder, and create a new subdirectory when I install a new wordpress blog.

Right now this one is in gallerynews/americanbystander. The next one, WordPress 1.5, may be in breederbullies/po or wherever.

Feb 15th and the famous 1.5 beta is officially released (as opposed to being available from nightlies, je suppose). I experiment, trying to create new db/site. Error message: are you sure … exists?

Several possibilities…
For multiple blogs you need to prefix the db table name. I commented in my prefix but did not actually add it. So blog one works but I can’t add others?
Or maybe that’s not the problem. Maybe it’s the db name?
Or a beta bug.
Or what I need to do is a complete upgrade of old version to new 1.5. Then just follow instructions for making multiple sites.

I’ll do it just till I need glasses.