Love at a Reasonable Price

[NYC Journal]

NYC Journal #17 — Sunday, 5/18/2020 — Sunbathing Cure Days 4 & 5

It’s getting desperate. Yesterday he felt terrible. Lungs papery and soggy. Swimming in phlegm. Exhausted like a slaughtered calf.

I think, however, I understand what’s gone wrong. He’s living beyond his powers. It isn’t just caffeinated tea that has too much caffeine for him; two consecutive days of two pots of one decaf black and one decaf green tea bag poured over ice all day long is also enough to destroy his rest reserves.

Accordingly, we limited the decaf tea to a half a pot yesterday morning, he slept from 10PM to 11AM, and is now drinking only Breathe Easy tea, headlined by fennel, fennel having been suggested to him in a dream. Suggested by whom? By Joseph and the very same archangel that told Joseph he should actually stay with Mary, love her forever, dance with her to the end of time, and build her a little castle in the rolling dusty hills where the air’s so bright clear dry and safe. So we KNOW fennel’s a good tip.

We can’t say much about what happened yesterday. The memory chips were destroyed in a terrible fire that ravaged the Lower 48, sparing only the wisest and most humid areas. But we do know this much: about the right amount of sunbathing was performed at about the right amount of time and no water washed off the vitamin D as it lounged about on his earthly flesh.

Today we told him: don’t get up until you feel good and rested; then we let him have a little breakfast; take a shower; and go lay out in the regular place.

No one cared. Not the 30ish tattooed couple, masks down, leaning against each other across the way. Not the trio of 30ish girls, two on a step (dark haired caucasion?; light skinned african american with poofy curls?), the other leaning against another step (fair skin, long blond hair) at an angle, almost the proscribed six feet away. All with masks down, smiling in the sun. The two on the step in light breezy cotton; with even a midriff catchable. The one kitty corner in slacks (or jeans?), a jacket and otherwise dressed for a slightly colder day. All of them thin, not short, with tall white teeth, happy to be outside.

No one cared. A pale young Orthodox family set up camp right next to him. Over his ipod he would sometimes hear and tilting up his head he would sometimes see the tiny boy and slightly older girl, in Sunday best (he in little trousers, a nice shirt ?and dark sweater?; she in a poofy-pleated white dress and an open yellow sweater). The Mrs lay down in the grass a few feet from him, her blue denim dress down well past her knees. The Mr first parked the sporty black stroller and then chased after the kids when they wandered out of their mother’s purview. He wore a white dress shirt, black slacks, white prayer tassels; and our observer did not crane his neck at the right moment and in the right way to see the yarmulke, but we are confident it was there.

Something that’s a little bit too bad: the same people most likely to skip wearing a mask on the subway are also the most likely to walk around spitting as they loudly sing or rap along to their headphones, or while laughing hysterically at something watched on their phone or merely recollected or imagined.

But is all this sunbathing working? We understand that insufficient sleep and one too many chicken burritos laid him low yesterday, but now that the vitamin D’s had five days to seep in and reorganize his health, shouldn’t he be blooming like a flower, rather than shaking like a leaf?

Hmmm. Well, he feels pretty good today, just a little tender and delicate and fading into the day like desert sands tripping over each other and disappearing into the swirling desert winds. His temperature’s not been above 98.6F in a couple months. All we’ve got to do is flush out this lingering weakness in his lungs and sometimes overtaking his shoulders, swooping off with him like a diving hawk on a scurrying mouse. So maybe: give the sunbathing cure the benefit of the doubt: let it run its course: we’ve got tomorrow yet, and then it’s rainy for a week; so let’s keep him away from caffeine and generally deescalated, and assess at the end of the workweek.

Authors: Bartleby, John, Amble
Copyright: AM Watson

A Note on Our Standards of Accuracy: We just make everything up, though sometimes something reminds us of something or seems to somehow connect to an event we somehow perhaps observed outside of pure daydream. Hard to say.

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NYC Journal #16 — Friday, 5/16/2020 — Sunbathing Cure Days 2 & 3

You can sunbathe in the little ledge running along the US Bankruptcy Court on Cadman Plaza — about three feet up from the Johnson Street sidewalk. Well, before the street slopes down, taking the sidewalk with it. On Thursday no one seems to notice. On Friday a tallish stoutish woman in a green coat will call the police and two men with blond crew cuts and pale faces reddening in the sudden bright warmth will walk over to you. They will wear short-sleeved uniform shirts stretched taut over bullet proof vests, and, from a few feet away, one of them will look over towards you and say, “Are you OK?” You’ll take down the hand covering your eyes and lower the one holding your ipod out to one side, turn your head and squint over in their direction. “Yeah, just sunbathing.” Then they’ll walk over to the 50ish black woman and say something, presumably about how you’re sunbathing rather than dying, and she’ll say, “Oh! OK! … Sorry.” And they’ll say it’s no problem. Because there’s a couple cops every hundred feet in New York City, so it really is no problem to have them check out the occasional shirtless man in fancy gray thin-fabric, smooth-flowing dress-slacks a little worn and faded, lying with his hand cupped over his eyes and nose, in a sunny little nook along the bottom of a federal building. Maybe you’re normally not allowed to do that, now that I think about it. It is a federal building. Anyway, I hope it’s OK because there’s no easy way otherwise and it is very important that you continue this sunbathing cure. Already on Day 3, you’re feeling much improved, even if today you were very tired from not quite sleeping enough and had to stomp around the office moaning about how sleepy you were and how delicate your system is, that the slightest little error in diet will so disturb your sleep that the next day you’re a veritable zombie although you do truck on and carry on your duties and do the Queen proud and so on.

Why is the sunbathing working so well? Because it was the end of winter and your vitamin D stores were depleted. I can feel the sogginess evaporating out from your lungs. And your step’s got that spring that we’d so missed.

Question: Do mid-May Covid-19 sunbathing cures only work for people whose ancestors lived far from the equator? Because maybe people with ancestors from places that are always sunny don’t store up vitamin D for half the year and then, like a camel sucking on its hump, live off it for the other half.

Question: Do Covid-19 sunbathing cures only work for clinically insane people, deranged enough for psychosomatic improvement to translate into actual physical improvement? Deranged into one’s very bones?

Another Couple Details:

Yesterday a tall homeless man in a long green coat. 50ish. Slacks and coat and sweatshirt clean and unwrinkled. Broad shouldered and robust, with a bit of a paunch. Soft brown skin, soft features in a long oval head, a mild countenance. A well-groomed beard. At first glance you might think, “college professor, gazing off dreamily, contemplating math, poetry, economic theories, whatever it was that caught his fancy three decades ago and has woven itself completely into the fabric of his life.” But then you notice the black sneakers have been so beaten down at the back as to become slippers, and that a big chunk of the back of each foot is showing and that his feet are terribly chapped, so chapped and worn that they’ve become yellow and flaky all over. And then for no apparent reason he starts kicking determinedly at a tiny scrap of plastic — a little scrap from a clear (but tinged tan) plastic bag. Supporting himself with the subway pole, over and over he kicks at and misses this little scrap of sheer plastic.

Yesterday we learned that to buy a thermometer at the local drug store you ring the bell, which has no effect, and then you knock on the glass door, which brings over the young woman, who asks what you need, and who then brings you a couple inadequate vitamin Cs and a couple adequate thermometers for you to choose from. Do they take credit cards? Of course! She takes it back to the register, runs the card, and brings you the receipt and the thermometer all wrapped up together in the tiniest cutest little pharmacy-themed plastic bag.

Today we learned that at this one place by the 2/3 & 4/5 Franklin stop, the table shoved up at the front and the square metal stool between the table and the wall are not there to encourage you to climb over the stool, but rather to stop all forward momentum and speak out your order in a loud voice so the girl behind the register can hear you from a dozen or so feet away. Why do you keep ordering chicken burritos? It’s becoming weird. It’s becoming a problem. It’s becoming suspicious. If they hadn’t been so prompt with the burrito we would’ve also learned how to say in Spanish: Attention delivery people, unless customer’s request otherwise, you are required to bring the food to their apartment door, if we learn from a customer that you’re leaving food anywhere else, you will be banned.

A Few Sunbathing Tips:

Do Not Take a Shower! First of all, you need the sun-activated oils to loll around on your skin filling you up gradually with Vitamin D. Second of all, then you’re getting the harmful radiation without the protective Vitamin D oil, which is foolhardy. Third off all, people take too many showers in this culture. [Also: you should never use soap except where grime and odor build up. Otherwise you’re destroying the balance of your skin for nobody’s sake but the advertisers’.]

10 minutes a side and no more and you really should build up to the 10 minutes unless you absolutely cannot wait because the Covid-19 won’t quite leave your bones even though you haven’t had a fever or anything like that in let’s say six or seven weeks. But as a general rule, you should just do like five minutes a side the first few times and then build up to ten minutes a side. Of course it depends on your skin type. So this advice is only really relevant to our test case.

Drink Green Tea. To fight against the sun’s damages. If you can’t handle caffeine, maybe decaf. If you can’t handle how boring green tea is, consider one green and one black bag in a little pot that you pour over ice all morning long. How delicious, invigorating, and downright interesting that would be!

Health Warning: This is a literary blog! Don’t take it’s health advice seriously! Well, you could think about it. You could use it as a starting point for some internet research. But don’t act like this is a health blog when it’s clearly a literary blog, or at least would be if it’s authors could pull it together and become real men of letters instead of just real men of self indulgence.

Authors: Bartleby, John, Amble.
Copyright: AM Watson

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NYC Journal #15 — Sunbathing Cure Day 1 — Wednesday, May 13, 2020

If you get over it, but it isn’t quite gone. If it’s settled into your bones and keeps crawling back up to the fore. So you get all zapped all through and your lungs are spongy by the end of the day. You’re fine. You’ve not had a fever in six weeks. But you can’t quite shake it.

Unless

Unless you sunbathe ten minutes a side until you’ve gotten a nice light tan. Then it will be leached out of your bones and you’ll be fine.

[Also there’s the vitamin D. Vitamin D levels appear to play role in COVID-19 mortality rates]

If it is 55F and breezy, wear long johns under your khakis. Roll up the sleeves of your snap-button yellow plaid Westernwear shirt and head out.

I tell you who is annoying, is the shirtless guy lying on the museum amphitheater steps when your little kid wants to run around on those steps. This little boy is a tiny toddly two or three. He leans over the bottom marble step, which is wider than the concrete steps. It is also higher instead of lower than the step behind it. It isn’t really a step so much as a bench. The light brown little boy is quite a bit paler than his mother or aunt or babysitter or friend — let’s call her his “guardian”, but has her curly locks exploding up and over. “Not there! Over here! You can do the same thing over here.”

The annoying sunbathing man is not watching. His face is covered by his hands. He is whispering, “I need to get well, I need to get well, I need to get well” over and over as he, prone on the lowest concrete step, stripped to his waist, twists ever so slightly towards the sun, which is tilted thirty degrees to his left side and ten degrees behind his feet.

The guardian is an attractive young woman, tall and thin, with a long face with a wide forehead and curving a little to a sharp chin. A soft brown, with dark curls up and over and tumbling down. In stretchy black running pants and a maroon athletic top. And white running shoes. She could go running, but she has to keep an eye on the small denim-clad boy totter-step running everywhere.

This man sunbathes exactly ten minutes per side. This man is not here for pleasure. This man is taking his medicine.

What kind of a father not only lets his eight year old son skateboard without a helmet, but shoots movies of him ollying off of curving marble steps while kick-flip-spinning the board, and over and over again failing to land the trick and so sprawling forward on the cool white sidewalk by the entrance to the Brooklyn Art Museum? I don’t know, but the boy has long blond curling hair tumbling out his black baseball (but not of a team) cap, and the dad doesn’t (although the cap’s similar). The boy’s camouflage pants are not baggy like his dad’s tan ones. And the boy has on only a black T-shirt where the dad has an unzippered black sweatshirt over his black T-shirt. The dad sits on the sidewalk to try and get a better angle.

The sunbather by now has put his shirt back on and is watching from the other set of steps. Presently he’ll head to the second scheduled activity of his work-from-home lunch break: purchasing a chicken burrito.

What has happened in his life that makes him only want chicken burritos? What about everything else the world has to offer?

It’s so sunny out! Has the vitamin D helped? Is he cured? He feels better. He feels quite good. He thinks, “If only I could do this three days in a row! Then I’d be at full-health and wouldn’t need to tread so gingerly, stopping always to catch my reflection in storefronts, checking for signs of melancholy and fatigue.”

Today’s black bean, chicken, lettuce, tomato, sour cream, cheese, rice, and guacamole burrito comes from Guatemala. (“add avocado”; “OK”; pause with cogitating eyes and then: “it comes with avocado — with guacamole”; “Oh, OK, great”; “OK, OK”, but then a worry lingers in brow: “you want the rest, right? Bean … “) Well, the small restaurant, all windows and light, has a Guatemalan and travel pictures of Guatemala (a gray Mayan pyramid; a colorful tour bus roaring down the road, wild heaps of green on all sides).

“What is ‘Cantinflas’?” The 20ish girl and 40something man say he’s a Mexican actor. And the man motions towards another man across the room, facing out one of the windows into the sunshine.

The man who’d been facing out the window swivels around to face the man who’d ordered a chicken burrito and had thought perhaps “Cantinflas” was some kind of a pun on “cantina” (because the poster showed a skinny mustached man drunken into a knock-kneed stupor, beer bottle clutched in one hand).

Heavy cheeks darkly stubbled. Somber bloodhound eyes. Fixes the burrito-buyer with a serious steady look (head bent a little forward, so that eyes have to roll up a little in their creased brow): “He was a comedian. A Mexican comedian.” “Oh!” “You remember Charlie Chaplin?” “uh, yeah, uh huh” “He said Cantinflas was the funniest person he’d ever seen — and he didn’t even speak Spanish! That’s how funny, how comedic he was. He’s like … what would be a good comparison?” “Charlie Chaplin?” “No, … I’d put him higher than that. I”d say more like the Marx Brothers and The Stooges. Let’s put them in a category.”

The man with the open blue sweatshirt, his back to the sun-streaming window, liked Robin Williams, though Richard Pryor was greater: “His comedy was more natural; it came out of his life. Williams was all over the place — he was cocaine without even taking it!” This last comment made with pauses, head tilts, and eye scrunches that conveyed, “yeah: he did take cocaine; but he didn’t need cocaine to fly so fast”.

Cantinflas died in the 90s, and you know what he said at that time? What he said was wrong with the world? That it’d forgotten how to laugh, that we’d forgotten how to laugh. That was his thing.

But then recently. It comes out. It comes out that he wasn’t that character. He was more serious; but he made other people laugh.

That happens a lot, actually.

Yeah, take, take Robin Williams: perfect example — hilarious; but he kills himself; he had a dark side.

Yeah.

[It should be noted that, though neither of the conversants brought it up and perhaps didn’t know or at least didn’t know exactly enough to venture mentioning, Robin Williams had a devastating neurological condition called Lew Body Disease. His widow wrote a moving account of its impact on their lives here: The terrorist inside my husband’s brain.]

Author: Walkalong Walt
Editor: BW/AW
Copyright: AMW

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Jump to:

Proofreading/Editing Samples

Translation Samples

Writing Samples

Advertising Pure Love

Six ads for Pure Love: A Study of the Six Principles of Persuasion.
A long ad for Pure Love / Essay about the inherent evil of advertising
PureLoveShop.com is a website dedicated to selling Pure Love.
We’ve posted a Pure Love advertising campaign a year for the last three years:
Summer 2020 PL Campaign (abandoned to focus on politics; we hope to return soon)
Pure Love for Sale (from 2019)
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Politics

NYC Journal – Politics

A few specific samples:

Supporting Biden is a Moral Imperative is a researched political opinion essay.

A Fun New War is a charming essay about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Very lyrical.

Trump Push-Poll / A Lesson in Disinformation. We break down a tiny piece of Trump’s disinformation campaign, highlighting the psychological tricks it employs, and demonstrating the inaccuracy of its claims.

The US is a Shared Culture: The culture of prizing fairness and equality under the rule of law.

Representative Democracy is a Spiritual Good. Political philosophy, ending with a discussion of how voters should respond to Trump.

Most if not all those essays are Something Deeperist works.

Something Deeperism

We have a philosophy. We call it Something Deeperism.
We’ve made an Institute.
These essays are pretty readable: A Shared Something Deeperism and Duties of a Republican’s Citizenry (both are political philosophy). Why Something Deeperism? Simple! It’s not self-defeating, but it’s rivals are! makes the philosophical case for adopting Something Deeperism as one’s personal worldview. It also argues that everyone is already a Something Deeperist.

[There’s a great deal of Something Deeperism in First Essays (on the !Buy the Books! tab). But it’s not all Something Deeperism. Almost all the essays linked to in The Something Deeperism Institute are in both First Essays and A Readable Reader]

Poetry

We’ve collected many of our poems at Bartleby’s Poetry Corner.
This one turned out well: America.
Here’s an example of the Nostalgia Sonnets: To Greg’s Dad.
How to Write a Sonnet is as advertised, and includes several examples.

NYC Journal

We collect moments in the NYC Journal. Example: NYC Journal #9 – First Nice Day. No one’s really reading them, but we’re still trying to do one a week or so. Just, you know, an activity.

We have not made a lot of progress with our Short Story Game. Here’s a response story to Joyce’s “The Sisters” (in Dubliners): Another Cotter Story.

We did translations of and response stories to three Kafka stories.
Die Wale is the response story to Die Sorge des Hausvaters / Worry of a Family Man.

Years ago we wrote some science articles for FT Exploring. They’re the ones attributed to AM Watson. Here’s the Definition of Life.

A Little more from Pure Love Shop:
Pure Love Shop sells Pure Love. Here’s a commercial that claims Pure Love is Even Better than Classy Sneakers.
The site has many funny and engaging features, like Descriptions & Usage, and a lot of advertisements and other writings.

Our books are available on the !Buy Our Books! tab on this website. Right now we’re pushing Superhero Novella and A Readable Reader because we think they’re both good, fun, readable, and worthwhile.

Translation Samples

We did translations of and response stories to three Kafka stories.

Everything on this site is copyrighted by Andrew Mackenzie Watson.

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NYC Journal #14 — Sunday, May 10, 2020 — Exhausted

I worked on a short story this morning. Didn’t amount to much.

I went sunbathing on the museum “steps”. A cold wind blew. Two short, lithely shapely 20-something girlfriends with dark hair tumbling over their bent-forward faces, wearing dark colored sweatshirts and black tights or I guess yoga pants, sat leaning towards one another, haunches on a white concrete “step”. Then the one was lying with her head on the other’s thigh. These “steps” are two-foot wide concrete walls with three-foot wide spaces of green grass between them. They go up like steps. I think there’s maybe five of them and they go up and up; the round amphitheater-seating in front of the glassed-in museum entrance ends in a five feet tall concrete wall. Well, five feet tall on the side closest to Washington Avenue. On the other side it’s just a foot tall; the ground is also sloping, so in some areas the amphitheater is cut into the ground and in other places it has to be added onto the ground. Maybe. Maybe it’s something like that. Maybe the two girls were just friends.

Grocery shopping with butterflies and unease all through me. Listening at that point to Lana del Rey’s breakout album. Buying necessities, mask on since that’s the rule when you’re inside / you just have to / no exceptions. Not that I want to be exceptional.

Home. Two pieces of toast with pretend butter. And an apple. Call and wish everybody happiness for their respective special day. So sleepy. Have to lay down. It’s still like that. Still caught by that fatigue. Still have not quite shaken it from my bones. I’ll be strong and moving around in the early day but then by late afternoon I’m tugged down down down into drowsy annihilation, accompanied by soggy, scrapey lungs. Not every day, but pretty often.

Did the Celts in Britain perform human sacrifice? Seems like they did. Was it Christianity that healed the mainland and island Celts of this evil habit? What keeps humans from evil? Sometimes one thing will keep people from evil and then also lead people to evil; but of course it is not the same part of that one thing; aware clear honest loving kindness keeps people from evil; everything else is more susceptible to being co-opted by the meanies, the givemes, the showoffs, the scaredmes, and all those other falter-fail flinches running through us all.

Why did Elizabeth and Walter Bates (in DH Lawrence’s “Odor of Chrysanthemums”) get married in the first place? Once I heard a talk from a Buddhist teacher about what made a life happy or not. He’d met many people who dreamed of getting in relationships and many who dreamed of getting out of them; and so he concluded that relationship status could not be key to happiness. Maybe not; but perhaps it’s like we all sense: a happy relationship is a great thing; just not the easiest thing to obtain or to keep.

Now there’s no more point.
All the things I’ve said and done end only in a vague sleepiness.
I cannot bear to read the news, let alone react helpfully.
My work as a salt shoveler is futile, but doable, and whatever — ’cause I have to pay rent.
What is it I’m supposed to be doing?

What are the things they are posting on Facebook?
I can’t bear to click on the links.
I can’t take another word.

I am tired and don’t feel wise or strong enough to make any useful impact.
Yesterday I had a chicken burrito and that tasted good, but since then I think I’ve fallen asleep in my kayak, which has drifted into white water, which I notice but sleepily; I refuse to acknowledge the situation; I am too tired to believe I’ve got a little diamond-shaped boat cinched around my waist, bobbing and skidding over fast frothing water and mean little stones who jut proudly up here and there.

I did some pull-ups and some dips this morning.
But I did not clean my apartment.

I have awoken from my nap to do some writing but I don’t want to write and I don’t care anymore.
I just want money and to sneak away with a nice young woman and for the world to get better for everyone, but without me having to intervene or participate or even say anything.
Because I don’t have good ideas; I have only a wooden listlessness, with sunken head like a vulture on the road.

Just give me much more money so I can stop fussing over concerns not my own.
Of course, what concern is my own?
I’m tired and have no further insight into the matter of my life.

What was so great about that chicken burrito?
It was kind and juicy and salty and filling and it promised to never leave me.
But it has left me.
And not three pasture-raised eggs with cabbage and potatoes for breakfast, nor two pieces of toast with fake butter and a large round very crisp apple for lunch, nor glass after glass of decaf iced tea can fill the void it has left.
No, I see now that I am forever alone. Even if I got another chicken burrito from the same restaurant prepared by the same team and carried home and eaten at the same table with the same side of spinach, red onion, and cherry tomatoes — even then it would not be the same burrito, and now I’m aware of the falseness of their promises, so any initial rush of contentment would be laced with and ultimately overwhelmed and dragged down by the same uneasy jittery creaking discontent that mars my current reflections.

Every Sunday afternoon the death of hope floats in a heavy nauseous oozy shame.
I didn’t use the time well enough; now this empty task is coming for me and will swallow me up for five days. I had some freedom; a little time to figure out how to point my ship in a better direction; but I squandered that time, and the indifferent currents have come, as they promised they would, to carry me again into the boring stressful no-saved-money fray.
I have failed.
Probably my goals are not laudable enough.
Certainly my means are inadequate.
Clearly my vision is too much consumed in my own reflection.
I reach down and stroke the brown water with a gentle backhand, rippling my face, which I’d sought to caress, but could only disturb.
Never mind, then; never mind, never mind anyways.

And then, though your system forbids eating after 3pm and it is now almost 7pm, you find yourself in the fridge, first for a carrot with miso, innocuous enough and not really a broken vow; but then a couple pieces of bread with fake butter and then you realize that you must cook this steak and have a steak salad with red onions, white mushrooms, and cherry tomatoes. And after the salad, it occurs to you that you must have an orange. And you feel yourself snapping out of the desolation, and you suspect again that a month of 1,000ish calories a day and minimal animal products (the result of both your combining a dwindling food supply with a general lack of appetite) has left you a little anemic. And so again it seems that you are just a device for dramatizing and amplifying little bodily pleasures and pains. Your philosophy merely an afterthought to your mood, itself nothing but the side effect of your metabolic functions. At least a worm knows that it’s nothing but eat and flinch. But of course this reductionism is another oversimplification. The orange helped pound the iron in. Because of the vitamin C.

Author: Wild Bill Hiccup
Editor: AW/BW
Copyright: AMW

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Is it perhaps Mother’s Day on Sunday, May 10, 2020?
Are you perhaps neither a mother, nor a parent, nor a woman, but yet you have a birthday on Sunday, May 10,2020?
Are you perhaps a mother with a birthday not on May 10,2020, but within some such several days on either side of this date?
If you could answer “Yes” to any of these, even if it’s only because lying comes naturally and easily for you, then this post is for you, if you’ll have it.

[Probably best to at least skim over the expanse before clicking on links. There’s many links to choose from.]

In the Garden of Eden, sometime directly before the Great Fall, young families with flowery bonnets and summer dresses, neatly pressed slacks and button-up white collared shirts with pearl cuff-links went strolling, enjoying fresh air, bright blooming buds, and a pleasant, drifty, carefree ignorance of Good and Evil.

Those halcyon days are perhaps lost, but here’s something:
Garden tours for the mind to wander through, beautiful garden mindwalks to relax it’s uneasy fidgeting and fumbling about with the heavy certainty that it actually does matter what we say and do:

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is not the very greatest botanic garden in the world, but it’s pretty great and it is my botanic garden; so it gets the first mention. On that link you can take a long stroll through the Cherry Esplanade, or hang out a half an hour at the Sakura Matsuri festival of our forgotten youth, when strangers gathered together in large groups for shared endeavors without medical-grade masks or gloves, sometimes even putting their arms around each other for giggly group photos in costumes and with music in the background.

This article in The Spaces links to virtual tours of gardens from around the world (France, Italy, England, Hawaii, DC, Buffalo (yeah, Buffalo, NY), Brazil).

The United States Garden in DC has a couple google-maps-style self-directed tours, as well as videos of a great orchid show they once held and their famous cherry trees. At the bottom of the page is historical photos from the gardens.

There’s more and more of these that can be found by any but the most busted-down search engines, so we’ll just mention one more here: Dutch Flower Gardens.

Sometimes when concerned by the world and one’s place in it, with one’s faith in humans — including oneself and one’s own ways and means — shaken, it helps to watch flash mobs on Youtube.

Like this version of Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds sung on morning commutes around the world.

The Library of Congress belongs to everyone, and is a great repository of every free thing. Music, Books, Films, and so on.

Old Time Radio is now also free and there it is, up for anyone to peruse. Take a historical tour of the evil of advertising with Old Commercials (for a long ad for Pure Love that doubles as a long essay on the inherent evil of marketing, see Love for Sale? on this site). Or remember The Shadow? All kinds of stuff.

There’s so many free books at Project Gutenberg! Like, for example, and I don’t know if this is a good choice for Mother’s Day, but just as an example, here’s an Anthology of Stories About the Devil.

Why did Edward, Earl of Derby, believe in 1860-something that he needed to improve upon Pope’s Illiad with his own version? Because, you see, “admirable as it is, Pope’s Iliad can hardly be said to be Homer’s Iliad; and there may be some who, having lost the familiarity with the original language which they once possessed, may, if I have at all succeeded in my attempt, have recalled to their minds a faint echo of the strains which delighted their earlier days, and may recognize some slight trace of the original perfume.” So that’s why!

Can a human justify the way’s of God to humans? Maybe, maybe not. But at least Milton gave it a shot.

And so many books for so many occasions, doubtless including Mother’s Day. OK, well here’s something: A Mother’s Year Book: every day of the year has a quote from a famous author about babies.

OK, wait, wait, wait! Here’s a murder mystery by Dorothy Sayers, and here’s a bunch of books by Jane Austen.

Or, well, here’s this strange children’s book by the adamant Hillaire Belloc Cautionary Tales for Children, consisting of poems, each of which features the death of a child who broke this or that important rule. Or you could try GK Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown if you were in the mood for a gentler and better-written Catholic fiction.

Anyway, readers are invited to search the site.

And what about this?
Travel & Leisure has collected twelve online Museum Tours, and Good Housekeeping has a very long list of Museum & Zoo Tours. That’s something! Journeys for the mind. A passport for exploration and growth.

Wait! There’s also the Public Domain Review, which collects, organizes, and engages with the so many works now in the giant public domain, from which anyone can draw.

Oh, I’m sorry, you only like public domain Golden Age comic books? I didn’t realize; but that’s Cool.

There are so many people in the world and have been for so many years, and their collective activities add up, and before too long you have the internet, overflowing with the most diverse and wondrous ideas developed in the most diverse and wondrous ways. Strange, strange indeed! But not all bad.

Another good flash mob song is An Die Freude from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.
I don’t know how it is that so many Japanese seem to be able to sing it in the original.

You can study the English and German side by side here.
Or not, you know, whatever you want to do with that.

Compilation & Notes: B. Willard / A. Whistletown
Original material copyrighted by AM Watson

[NYC Journal]

NYC Journal #13 – Saturday, 5/9/2020 – Proto-Normalcy

It was in the high thirties last night, with a gray tumbling wind. Unseasonably cold for NYC. A little before noon, his laundry in a lumpy white cotton bag clutched to his chest, wearing long underwear under his khakis, a long-sleeved T-shirt over his regular T-shirt and under a thick orange sweater, itself under a puffy red vest of tent material and otherwise crying “suburban outdoorsman”, he set out under through the cold, windy, bright sunny air.

In the low forties then, and windy. The laundromat is large boxy and blue gray with a TV over the snack machine that faces the round picnic table whose metal-mesh top is coated in a rubbery blue plastic. A woman sat at the table, facing the TV, but with head bowed (long dark brown hair gushing out the back) over her telephone screen. On the TV chorus girls danced with knowing smiles and then they showed the picture of a 60ish year old man grinning quietly to himself, sipping from a big round beer mug, enjoying the show. Then the credits roll and that image is dropped down to the lower half of the screen while, lest the audience consider any activity other than movie-watching at this channel right now and forever, a new film starts. The short woman with the round acorn-brown face, her usual subtle smile covered in a blue medical mask, but her distantly-focused eyes testifying to a continuation of this standard mien, approaches. She looks cozy and with a touch of penguin in her lime green zip-up sweatshirt. “Picking up?”

Now the TV has a bunch of old white guys playing cards in a home or some other non-gaming-house. One guy is rambling about the intricacies of the game. Another guy says, “well if that’s the case” and puts all his chips in the center of the table.

“Dropping off”, says the guy in the red vest, his hair now short and upon close inspection clearly cut by its owner, standing in a poorly lit bathroom, hacking here and there with scissors and so leaving the back unduly ruffled, and with, here he must’ve used a razor, a big square patch missing from behind one ear. This man wears a white coffeefilter-style mask and his paleness is a little undermined by a touch of inveterate peach and the lightest beginnings of suntan.

$17! That’s quite a bit. But he knew it would be a lot. And the scale says 15lbs, which confirms that it is a lot. He takes the waxy yellow ticket, thanking her.

This is one of the few laundromats in this area with a parking lot. He can’t think of another one in his neighborhood with a parking lot. The many machines were mostly idle; a few people stood by their laundry. He crossed the emptyish lot in front of the laundromat and then crossed sidewalk, street, sidewalk, and, pausing at the sign “Dear Customers, Beginning March 11, we will no longer have dining service. We will continue to provide pick-up and delivery services …”, pushed the metal handle to open the glass door.

He’d eaten inside once a year or two ago. He’d actually forgotten to pay the bill and was walking out when a waitress had stopped him with a look of annoyed suspicion. He really had forgotten (or so he still believes), but he could think of no reason why they should be so sure and the incident had embarrassed him; for that reason, and/or simply because he doesn’t eat out much anyway, he’d not been back. Now a single row of the small square wooden tables remained, pushed up against the long window on the left hand side of the door. Directly across, the remaining tables and all the chairs were stacked up together against that far wall. In the center of the room sat a large black motorcycle, leaning proudly on its silver kickstand, it’s chrome handlebars at low T pointing towards the wide hardwood planks.

The sombreros on the wall, the knick-knacks (example: a large doll with an undecorated body but a Mexican wrestler’s mask reclines in a breadloaf-sized play green cradle) in the window sills, and the Day of the Dead designs cut out of bright-colored papers strung along chords near the ceiling — all this remained as before.

Alcohol was displayed on the wooden counter in front of the registrar and the enclosed kitchen. The white wine bottle had $24! on a cut-out cardboard star. The rosé was $17. The bottled beers had no price tags. “Why would you spend $24 for this take-out wine when you can walk five minutes to the liquor store and get the same wine for $12?”, he thought to himself. But he hoped for the establishment’s sake that some customers would choose to go along with such a crazily foolish proposition.

The guys working behind the counter are always tan and have thick dark hair under ballcaps. About his height (so kind of short) and speaking Spanish to one another while he waited beside the motorcycle, dancing around to the Spanish-language music, occasionally stopping to watch, on one of the two giant-screen TVs on either side of the entrance door, the replay of a Barcelona player get heroically close to scoring a goal.

“Ebenezer”, said one of the 30ish year olds. Evenezer approached the counter, but the other was still at a counter behind the register, and had his back half-turned towards Ebenezer. “Ebenezer, do you want hot sauce or utensils.” “Yes, hot sauce! … what was the other thing?” “Any utensils?” “No! No utensils!” “OK, here you go, Ebenezer.” Ebenezer paused as he put his bare hand on the ridge formed by the stapled top of a brown paper bag containing a square aluminum tin holding a burrito and sealed with a plastic lid (and a few packets of hot pepper sauce). “Thank you” he said, his face determinedly directed towards the other, younger man. “Sure, so problem”, said the other, with a slightly disconcerted, or perhaps merely contemplative lilt carrying the ends of the words up a little higher and holding them there a little longer than pleasant business exchanges generally require.

And so he walked home, still in the cold windy sunshine. A woman the shade of a medium-dark chocolate with long black braids trailing walked ahead, bent to one side by the weight of her long wide canvas grocery bag. She wore a long coat but between her skimpy red canvas sneaker flats, low white socks and green sweatpant pedal pushers, a not-insignificant portion of her bare calves were exposed to the chilly air. She stopped a moment, leaned her weight on her planted left leg, and, right foot turned out with toes on the sidewalk, rested the bag on her raised right heel. He thought of stopping to help.

But she had on plastic gloves and a mask and he had no gloves and had already put his mask back in his free hand and he wanted to hurry home before the cold swirling winds stole his (chicken, rice, black beans, lettuce, tomatoes, pico de gallo) burrito’s warmth. And anyway, that kind of random helpfulness isn’t really done, and was therefore liable to disorientate her; plus she was taller than him and not scrawny — would the mere masculinity of his muscles make for a real improvement?

And so, as if to formally and decidedly declare his decision to sail on by, he accelerated past her, out of the shadow of a large apartment building, into the street, heading towards the sunny-side sidewalk, excited for lunch.

Life is back to normal in New York City. Kind of. Well, we’ve been doing what we’re now doing for a while, which makes it a kind of normal.

Author: Johnny Nnd Spoeott, with AB Cee IV
Editorial Negligence: B. Willard, with A. Whistletown
Copyright: AM Watson

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[NYC Journal]

NYC Journal — Saturday, 5/2/2020 — The Grouch

I think he must not have slept well enough, because he sure was grouchy.

He seemed OK sunbathing on one of the two feet wide gleaming white steps in between three feet wide rows of healthy wind-brushed grass. But that’s only because no one was opposing. He was not being tempted. The walkers and runners, sitters and chatters in their varying degrees of dressedness [slacks and T-shirts, running shorts and a long sleeved T-shirt, a pale old Orthodox whitebeard with the full flowing black cloak and an oval beaver hat (tucked in on all sides like an envelope — not the tall round ceremonial ones; I’m not even sure it was beaver — it was a light, golden brown, soft, I don’t know what that animal was)] gave him no resistance. And so it is that we often fool ourselves into imaging we’re spiritually/emotionally/intellectually/morally sound, when in fact what we are is sheltered from the weather.

It was a little confusing. The tall sightly and saggily begutted sandy-haired (maybe?, complexion pale, but too rough to count as pasty) guy with a bag over his shoulder and one item in his long right hand was standing directly behind one register’s lane, but way back in the aisle. And so our grouch thought, “OK, that’s his lane; I’ll take this one.” Although he also thought, “what’s going on here? Is he meaning to wait for all possible lanes in that one lane way back in the aisle?”

Then both aisles opened up almost at once, but the one he’d chosen opened up a moment earlier, and the taller paler gentleman leaned, with the can or jar or bottle or whatever it was aiming at the aisle that the man with the furrowed brow (remember: no lips or noses are seen in this zone of reduced bodily expression) had staked as his own. Confused and annoyed, the grouch stepped back and made a hesitant “this way is open” gesture with his left hand, while scrunching his eyes further forward and his brow further up, so as to communicate, “I guess! I guess that’s what you want. And I guess that’s OK.”

The other guy gave a quick wet-dog shake of his head and said, “yeah!”, still wiggling his head at the other’s rudeness as he sailed by into the first open aisle, which had always been his.

And then it turns out that the cloth bag on the tall guy’s round shoulder had always been full of groceries, and now they would one by one go onto the black conveyor belt.

So then there’s a young woman there in the line that the tall man left behind. Short and round in her gray sweats. Dark hair long and perhaps pony tailed. With many items for purchase. “I was waiting over there” the grouch, brow still furrowed in annoyance and eyes still large in mystification, says to her.

“Yeah, but the line’s here”, she replies. “Whatever dudes!” he says with a petulant flip-up of his left hand, the same hand still smarting from ceding place to the tall ungainly person (I guess that’s why he pluralized “dude”? Not clear). So he goes and stands behind her, strongly suspecting, though not being sure and certainly having no proof, that he’d been waiting at least half a minute longer than her.

In the next moment she was sliding up to the next open register in the store (the one directly in front of them as they stood in what had turned out to be the unlabeled but somehow sanctified “official line for all registers”). “Ola mi amor!” and she begins prattling in Spanish to the indulgently semi-smiling clerk.

The grumpy short man twitched his hidden nose as he thought, “She’s playing it up! Getting all chummy with their shared native-level Spanish, well aware that in all likelihood I should’ve had that spot with that clerk, y quieres encontrar si no puedo hablar espanol??”, which final taunt he had to admit was maybe not exactly what he meant to say, and it if was, it was probably not the best way to say it. “And do you want to discover if I don’t speak Spanish”?? What??

Oh but The Grump’s grumping began earlier, didn’t it?

Because hadn’t this Saturday morning his boss shoved five minutes worth of his own (the boss’s) work on him!; or at least, shouldn’t the chain of command have gone from Subordinate to Boss to Grump, rather than from Subordinate to Boss to Boss telling Subordinate to tell The Grump, and so therefore, contrary to established usage, from Subordinate to Grump? And had not that irregular chain of command necessitated that he, who was not about to be found to one side of regulation, call up his Boss and, with a terse and pointed tongue, request permission to execute the obvious and standard response to the subordinate’s problem?

Yes! That all happened, but No!, that’s not the issue! The trouble is not the loss of five minutes, or Boss’s (REPEATED!) failure to follow the correct protocol; the trouble is that he then wasted thirty minutes complaining to the fresh light-filled spring air about the incident.

And that was long before the grocery line; it happened on the walk to the museum where he was going to sunbathe on the wide steps amphitheatering around the front of the englassed lobby entrance area.

Hmmm.

The man originally occupying the register that our difficult hero had thought he could be next in line for did not wear a mask. He was a tall, medium-build, muscular young black man with hair flying off at all angles. The hair was dreaded? It was not clear to the observer, though he did notice black sweats or tracks, low riding, revealing underwear, perhaps lime green or aqua or a related shade; and a white close-fitting T-shirt but of a heavy quality, like a polo or adidas or some kind of fancy athletic-wear. Perhaps 30, with a long face and heavy square jaw, thanking the clerk with a quiet smile while tipping three dollar bills into the plastic delicounter container.

“He’s not wearing a mask! Is that allowed? No, that’s not allowed. It is a violation of state law. Why isn’t he wearing a mask? How did he get away with it? Is that a tip or a bribe? Is he cooler than me because he’s calmly defying the law? How to play this? Should I silently stew and disapprove of him and thus risk being even less cool? Or should I silently admire his bravado, and thus risk indulging in irresponsible (albeit secret and private) showmanship? Ripping my mask off and shouting out about how now I’m just as cool if not cooler is out of the question. It would take too long to explain the background considerations to the dozen or so people in this storefront area, many of whom are probably not even aware there’s a young maskless man in our presence. ‘Who was that maskless man?’, but that by way of a side-joke.
What is it he says to her? Does he apologize and say the dog ate his mask? Or does he chit chat as if there’s no pandemic and no signs on all public buildings, including this one, about the mandatory wearing of masks? And how does she hand him his full bag of groceries? Is it pushed forward a little quick and annoyed?”

The man was grouchy and snarly and a little embarrassing for humanity. I don’t think he got enough sleep last night. He calls to mind an anecdote a young father once told him about his 4 year old son Octavius (or whatever the kid’s name was) and his pal , also 4 years old.

The pal’s parents were always holding up Octavius as a model of behavior; if only their son could comport himself as well! But you see, said the father, his son was in bed and sleeping before 8PM every night, whereas his son’s pal stayed up way too late every night watching TV; and, indeed, on those occasions when the young Octavius awoke inadequately rested, he too was cross, irascible, unmanageable. “We’ve tried to tell them, but …”

4 year olds, 40 year olds, everyone but the most dedicated of mystics (who live on prayer, water, and a thousand calories a day high in their quiet mountain abbeys) need sleep.

What about the fair haired pale kid of about the same height and medium-low build as our slightly more Mediterranean protagonist? The one with the giant bandana hanging down to his chest. He asked where the line was and The Grouch said it was behind him and that he himself had once stood where he (the Great Bandana) was presently doing and had ended up losing a spot over it. [This was, by the way, not the first time he’d mentioned the tragedy. He had also said (before the era of Bandana) to the air and perhaps loud enough to win the backward glance of the gray-sweats woman unloading groceries in what could’ve been his spot, “I was probably in line before her. Well, there it is.”] Bandana, apparently well-rested, eyes smiling, chipperly replied: “well, the main thing is we know you’re next.”

But was the two of them knowing that Grouch was next in line for all registers really enough to maintain order and stability? Grouch didn’t want to know what would happen when Bandana and the person who’d lined up behind the Grouch had to navigate the next open register; and so he was careful to not look back after (finally!) taking possession of a register (it was like a five minute wait, actually).

Did the sour, spiritually-damaging if not outright damning mood of the story’s hero in any way color the telling of the story? For example, did the tall guy actually have a gut? And aren’t there more flattering ways to just as accurately describe his complexion? But what was this tall antagonist wearing? Tan slacks and a short sleeve button-up plaid shirt? I don’t think so. I don’t think we know what he was wearing. And did his head really keep wobbling as he passed Grouch? The only clear image left to us is the right hand tilted up (but still holding a big juice or something like that) as part of a chest-out, head cocked back and right shrug of “WTF???” towards The Grouch on the left. There might or might not have also been an accompanying sound, something like the “yeah!” we originally recorded.

You know what? Let’s just say this: None of this really happened. No real human souls were damaged by the spreading of one soul’s unrested peevishness. It’s just a story about the sort of thing that could very well have happened in Brooklyn today, if somebody got out of the wrong side of the bed and kept right on going out the door and into the world, contaminating it with not the covid-19 virus (which the Grump’s already put in his five weeks of lying around with soggy lungs for) but with something arguably worse: anger and discontent.

Author: Roger Peevishpunk Dodger, with a few careful suggestions from Johnny Onduh Spott
Editors: BW/AW
Copyright: AM Watson

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[NYC Journal]

Hey there! Can I interest you in an ebook?

If so, write us at Editor@PureLoveShop.com, and let me know if you’d like a Kindle/Mobi or Nook/Epub file, and if you’d prefer to try “A Readable Reader” or “Superhero Novella with A Web Sampler”.

What’s the difference between “A Readable Reader” and “Superhero Novella with A Web Sampler”? The former is a collection of stories, essays, commercials, poems and reportings selected from First Loves, First Essays, PureLoveShop.com, From-Bartleby.com, and the vault; the latter’s a novella about superheros trying to figure out a way to stop crime at it’s evil roots, followed by selections from PureLoveShop.com, From-Bartleby.com, and LanguagesAndLiterature.com.

We’ll also send you a short questionnaire that you can fill out if you’d be so kind.
We’re not entirely sure that these books have demographics, but if they do, we’d like to find them, so we can try to reach this potential audience.
Right now we have no audience at all, which pains us.

[Obviously, our demographic should be anyone who feels the Hurt loud and spreading, but feels the Joy even within the Hurt — feels the Joy winning even there.

But that’s everybody, and it seems unlikely that everybody will like our books, even if we’d hit our stride and told it like it is at an angle that can’t be denied and so slips in, but that then snags from the inside like a harpoon and doesn’t leave, instead worming its way deeper and deeper until reaching the heart, which it duly pops, spilling black blood, releasing the life-demons in a torrent of warm exhaustion. And it’s doubtful we achieved that with these books.

So we thought, well, maybe, for example:
People who like philosophical ideas in their fiction, and who have an interest in nonliteral spiritual paths, and who like taking walks.]

If you would prefer to just buy a copy of one or both books, that’s cool too.
See Buy Our Books! for links to various formats.

Tables of contents are below our signatures,

B. Willard
A. Whistletown

Superhero Novella
“metaphysical pulp”
Disclaimer
Novella Preface
Pt 1: Introducing the Players
Pt 2: Furthering the Old and Making New Acquaintances
Pt 3: The Story Unfolds, Blossoms Even
Pt 4: The Tale Unwinds and Slips Down the Rusty-Bar Sewer Drain
That’s the End of that Book
Optional Addendums to Pt 1; Optional Addendum to Pt 4
Novella Afterword
About the Cover
A Web Sampler (broken down by site)

A Readable Reader
“oh please please please be readable!”
Disclaimer; Preface
Part 1: From “First Loves”: Introduction to “First Loves”; A Couple Decides Whether or Not to Drink; Love Engineer; John of Charles, A Something Deeperist Prayer
Part 2: A Little More Love: Love Castle; Love Freighter; Internal Memo; Love Dust; A Love Maker Speaks
Part 3: A Few Ads: A Couple Pure Love Ads; Ad for the “Objectively Cute” Baby Onesie (featuring Soren Kierkegaard and Regina Olsen)
Part 4: Standard Frame Story: The Pitch; Chapter 1 of “Diary of an Adamant Seducer”
Part 5: From “First Essays”: Pure Love Give-Away; The Things We Long For; The Law; Buddhist Marriage Counselor; A Fun New War; Introductory Ode to the Invincible Anti-Weapon
Part 6: Pure Love Mogul: Days 1-3, Pure Love Audit [This section is an alternative, or perhaps additive, frame story — it is Bartleby and Amble tending the Pure Love General Store in the Wild West, and then Pure Love auditors invading the piece of their grand brick PL industrial campus.]
Part 7: A Dozen Poems [I won’t list them all here]
Part 8: NYC Journal (first-hand accounts of life in NYC): Two Homeless Men; The Man Who Gives Out Flowers; NYC Journal #1 – Limited Visibility
Part 8.25: About the Cover
Part 8.5: A Mini-End
Part 9: Something Deeperism from “First Essays” (tucked away at the end here, so you can skip it if need be): Plato & Bartleby Exchange Texts, A Something Deeperist Writes an Otherist; A Simpler Shared Something Deeperism: In a Republic; Freedom of Will
Part 10: A Long Advertisement for Pure Love / Essay on the evils of marketing
The End
A Couple Appendices

Everything on this site is copyrighted by Andrew Mackenzie Watson

[NYC Journal]

NYC Journal #11 – Tuesday 4/28/2020 – Bust

Recollection accuracy: OKish, not so sure of descriptions of individual people:

You can be lying on your bed, writing about the subway ride the other day, when the 40ish milk-chocolate-skinned, thimble-nosed lady with the softly runny lumpy androgeny in sweats and a red satin doo-rag (no mask!) nodded her head and, with a slight smile playing on her waxy face lip-synced the smooth-flowing, quick-cascading rap as it rolled out of cylindrical speakers hanging around her neck. Every so often affirming her appreciation of the music by sucking her cheeks and lips in a little, rolling her head a neck a tad down, and tapping her chest with her the bottom edge of a palm, thumb and first two fingers pointing out. And about the 40ish paper-pale Jewish guy who (like the rest of us on the sparsely populated train) wore his (white filter) mask. With a muscular lank build and broad head, he focused with all his might on a thick leatherbound book of original-language scriptures. One black pin-striped leg crossed over another. Black yamaka fastened to trim dark hair with barrettes. Clean shaven. With white prayer tassels flanking his thighs.

You can be lying in bed, trying to recall how it was the other day, when people are stomping on the roof or the fire escape or somewhere running and crashing around.

And voices. Voices talking; voices yelling; voices. You can ignore if for a full minute, thinking this too shall pass. But then maybe you have to get up and see what’s going on. And then maybe you see five or six uniformed policemen climbing on the fire escape of a nearby building, making their way onto a low roof that serves as a patio for your downstairs neighbors. They are big burly men, made burlier with bullet-proof vests. Wearing white masks over their nose/mouth/chin areas. With powerful flashlights peering into the yard on the other side of the roof.

Talking and yelling to each other, and then they lose interest in the yard and start walking towards the window/door that leads to your downstairs’ neighbors apartment; then one is commanding, “pass through! pass through!”; and then one is saying to the conscripted hosts, “is there a way you can let us down into there?” as they all five or maybe six of them file into the second floor apartment.

In hindsight, that passing through seems a little gratuitous. Since they must’ve ended up walking down a long narrow flight of stairs and out the front door onto the street where other cops were probably already waiting, as by then they had the place surrounded. And then into the shuttered commercial space whose only entrance is a streetside door. But as it was happening I guess they didn’t know where the suspects were or what was really going on and time was of the essence; hence someone yelling, “pass through! pass through!” and the others obeying.

There were many more than six police officers involved in this endeavor. Several white police suburbans and a police car and several police vans double parked on two streets. And in the street walked and dashed and waved and moved many policemen and a few policewomen. Of the five or six guys on the roof, I think maybe two were black and three white. Maybe. It was dark and chilly out. They all had big shoulders.

Everyone said the guy looking down from the upstairs window looked scrawny and ineffectual, and his hair was a fright, but that was just empty talk and I don’t see why they had to say anything about him anyway when he was just minding his own business until the thumping began, making his own business seem out of touch with his surroundings.

I tell you that they kept filling up police vans! Each van seems to only hold four 20ish year old black men, so that was part of the problem. The young men / old boys in handcuffs were different sizes and wore different clothes. Like the tall and broad-backed young man in light green coat with funnel hood, or the medium-sized guy in gray sweats, or the narrow-waisted dude in a red-armed leather jacket. Lots of flat-brimmed ballcaps.

Policemen and suspects wore facial masks, usually white coffee-filters. At least one policeman wore a black fabric mask. One tall broad muscular square faced tan-skinned cop with ears that stick out did not wear a mask but (circle-)motioned the paddy wagon forward while looking back towards the next line of suspects and then opening his wide mouth with big white teeth to say something to somebody. I think the cops filled three or four vans with suspects.

A tall white cop with a heavy slab gut jogged windedly a little ways down the sidewalk and then petered out into a walk. Nearby, a shorter medium-muscled square-faced Asian cop spoke to someone standing inside the small apartment building that the cops had originally climbed up.

The suspect in the fuzzy brown faux-lightbrown-poodle-coat was a young woman, I think. She also had a flat-brimmed ballcap over her poofy crinkly hair that was somehow rounded, perhaps into two side ponytails, although memory doesn’t quite serve.

In addition to like a dozen uniformed cops, there were many plainclothes cops too. From a distance, you couldn’t really tell the difference between the plainclothes cops holding the suspects and the suspects except that the former held the latter while handcuffs kept the latter from holding anything. All cops had black guns on one side of their hips and yellow tasers on the other side. Sometimes they would pat a suspect down through his coat and pants.

Before handcuffed suspects began lining up next to paddy wagons, the cops were running around, climbing fire escapes, trundling across roofs, talking and yelling sharp and quick. Tension permeated the cool slightly-ruffling night air. But once the rows of cuffed young men started forming, all was calm and neither suspect nor police seemed worried. The main question of the evening had been answered; now there was nothing to do but allow the answer to carry you into prison or through the rest of your shift, depending on your role.

What had been going on in that former juice, coffee, healthy salads, and snacks shop?? They kept coming out of the entrance in cuffs. It was orderly and relaxed by then. A surfeit of cops, both in uniforms and plainclothes with flat-brimmed ballcaps and loose-fitting sweatshirts and jeans stood around, holding some part of the perimeter while watching, or just watching. One big plainclothes cop gave a low-five-into-a-handsclasp to a big uniformed cop.

That uniformed guy was the one who you’d spoken to. He answered your query with, “it’s being investigated now” and then, after you said, “oh, so you don’t know what’s going on yet?”, he (35? still young enough to have all the sharp edges on his anvil- or drillbit-face; Italian? white, but not winter-pale, dark hair) said “No!, it’s not that; it’s being classified; I don’t want to classify it wrong, and then you spread it all over the place and it’s wrong.” Then you said, “There’s like eight cop trucks here; it’ll be in the paper” and he gave an up-nick with wrinkled pout, “there you go! read it there!”, at which point the conversation was over and the night air felt cold on your naked toes.

Bullet-proof vests make everyone seem bigger and boxier, more like tanks. And they do make their wearer a tiny bit more like a tank.

Now I ask what all this amounts to? Who were these young people? What were they up to? Why was the heavy purr of a police chopper required? That was a police chopper, wasn’t it? Very loud and choppy and whirring and there from five minutes after the thumping began to about when the last vanloads were leaving. When a police chopper pants over the scene, you know it’s serious, or you at least you know someone with authority had decided at some point that it might turn out to be serious.

How much money did tonight’s intervention cost? A dozen uniformed police; another half dozen plainsclothes; several vans, several suburbans, a cop car, a chopper with pilot and fuel and safety precautions. I don’t have a calculator with me, but it sounds like a lot of money.

Some day we’ll all die, and all our flesh and all our feelings and all our ideas will evaporate. And we’ll be left only with the Light that watched it all from the inside bleeding out. And the more the Light has become our feeling and thinking, acting and presence, the more what we next become will resemble what we now are — for only those aspects of a human that are imbued with the Light is Love can pass through into the afterlife. In the time after time, there is no race, no gender, no nationality, no politics, no religion, no philosophy — nothing but the glow of kind resolve and the giggle of compassionate joyful sharing fun.

This, at any rate, is what everyone with any sense says happens after death.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

A 6’3″, broad but sloping shoulders light skinned African American cop, large egg-shape head shaved and that same basic shape reflected in his muscular-but-spreading physique. Hands on his belt. Standing six or seven feet from the open door but facing your way, while another stocky, though not so tall, cop faces more towards whatever’s behind the black partition wall.

“Helloo??” asks the tall cop with a tone that says, “and what exactly are you doing poking your head into this police matter?”

You say, “Oh! Hi. Can you tell me what’s going on here? Yesterday you were all here, running around, surrounding the place, arresting people. And the door’s broken. And now you’re here again.” His mouth and nose twitch while his eyes grow. Like he’s about to say something but then no, that’s not quite the thing to say.

“I guess it’s a secret”, you offer. This settles his face with visible relief. He gives a little upnick of the chin, “it’s an active investigation”. But you don’t hear it the first time and say, “What?” He gives another chin upnick, but this time holding his head and chin out to more loudly and more sonically focused on you and repeats, “it’s an active investigation”.

The cop last night had upnicked his chin too, but with more swagger and bravado, wincing his lips a little and throwing his chest out a tad much. This cop is nicer. His full cheeks remain relaxed. And there’s the tiniest trace of a smile on his lips when he delivers the official line.

“OK, well, have a good day.”

“You too!”

– – – – – – – – – – – –

Could you find an article about the bust?
No I couldn’t, but I did find this Facebook Post from the 77th Precinct’s Facebook Page:

On Tuesday night our Anti-Crime Officers responded to a suspected Burglary in the vicinity of Wyrd Street and Weird Avenue in Farflung Fields and discovered an illegal social club operating out of a closed deli. Once inside, a large group was observed and three firearms, cocaine, gambling devices, and approximately $57,000 was recovered. Four persons were arrested and numerous summonsed. Exceptional job by all involved who continue to protect our community. #FlattenTheCurve

So they raided a speakeasy. The thing is that you don’t know what you’re getting into when you’re the police. Criminals don’t send invitations with what to bring and when to RSVP by. And if you don’t come with enough force, you risk more resistance and thus more casualties all around. I guess that’s how it is. And, of course, if three people with guns do decide to start shooting, terrible bloody mayhem ensues. And, then again, $57,000 is a startling lot of money for ten kids in an abandoned storefront.

At any rate, that’s what the social club bust turned up, though they’d originally sought not an illegal social club, but a burglary, because, I guess, someone had seen or heard something from that abandoned “deli”.

The commercial space was not, most recently at least, occupied by a deli; but, as we’ve mentioned, by a juice bar / coffee shop / snack shop. Although, anymore, the line between a place with all these offerings and a deli is perhaps a little fuzzy, as a deli could conceivably also offer them all. Point taken: but this place had no deli counter! It sold no cold cuts and no deli sandwiches!

The posters in the not-deli’s papered-over windows have for some time advertised lectures on wrongful incarcerations.

Last year on at least a few Sundays during football season a stout African American man with a chef’s apron grilled outside, and there were posters up that you could come in and watch the game. Why didn’t you ever do that? You never do anything that might get in the way of you talking to yourself — that’s your problem.

Author: Johnny Onduh Spawt
Eyewitness Editors: Bartleby Willard and Amble Whistletown
Copyright: AM Watson

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