Collecting

I am a collector. I have the bug -- just not the space and the money. And the thing about collectors is that we all understand each other, no matter what it is we collect. My friend Jannah's husband collects lanterns -- camping lanterns, train lanterns, road-work lanterns -- and I totally get it, even though lanterns are not my thing. My uncle collects Chinese cookbooks.

My first good collection was postcards, and unfortunately they are gone, lost in the Great Storage Loss a few years back. (We put a bunch of stuff that couldn't fit into this small apartment into storage, which we really couldn't afford, and eventually got behind in payment and lost some 80 cartons of belongings.) I used to buy postcards at antique stores and flea markets, and especially liked the ones with beautiful buildings, from New York State, and from Florida. When I lived in Binghamton, I used to lunch at an upscale bar called the Beaugart, and often chatted there with an older guy who had a disability, a withered arm. I must have mentioned that I collected postcards, and he said he had a shoebox full of cards that his brother brought back from World War II. He gave them to me; they were amazing. This was in the late 70s.

My next good collection shaped up in the mid-late 80s, and that was baseball cards. I quit cocaine in 1986, and without a cocaine habit, I felt so rich that I used to go to a baseball card shop out in Brooklyn (had a crush on the owner, too) and spend about $75 every couple of weeks. I liked to save favorite players and was starting to buy some older cards from the 50s. The collection, filling about four looseleafs, sat unattended for a long time, and was also lost in the Great Storage Loss.

In the mid-90s, I caught a collecting interest from V.: bottle caps. (V., as you may recall, is a close friend I split with a couple of years ago. He was kind of my other significant other.) I had known that he collected bottle caps, but hadn't really seen any. In the mid-90s, he came back from an antique shop with a big haul, and I finally "got" the extreme beauty and design sensibility of bottle caps. By this time, there was eBay. There was also an association of American collectors who had a weekend meeting/sale/swap every year, and I went to them with V. for several years. This collection did *not* go into storage but is now dormant. It's hard to spend money on things that don't do anything, at this point. V. is a lot more well-off than I am and lives in a much larger space, so he collects all kinds of things.

During the bottle cap collecting phase, I also got into soda and beer labels. I was online and saw a posting of amazing South American beverage labels for sale. I e-mailed the guy and offered him a flat price for the lot. My cap collection is mostly American sodas before 1972 (corked-lined caps rather than plastic), but my labels have a lot of non-American and beer labels, and are in a few looseleafs. The big expense with those, oddly enough, are the pages to keep them in, which are the pricey ones that stamp collectors use.

Now I have a cheap collection that I adore: fruit stickers. I have a little blank notebook and put in one of every sticker I get on fruit, whether bananas, plums, apples, mangoes, or whatever. I like to eat fruit so it costs nothing.

eBay is deadly for people who have the collecting bug. I found roller rink labels on it which I wanted so badly to start collecting. Roller rinks used to give out labels to stick on your skate case! I used to save the pictures on my computer before the last crash. I would collect them if I had more money. Also fountain pens. Back in the pre-email days, when I actually wrote letters and a journal, I used to use a fountain pen pretty exclusively. I liked a Pelikan but also have a couple of nice Mont Blancs.

Went to the dentist today for my last fitting, I think, for the first two bridges. (The third will wait a while until the area where he pulled a tooth some weeks back mends a bit more.) If I'm lucky, the three bridges and a crown for one molar should be my last big dental work for a while.

very gloomy day

Even though the days are warming and Daylight Savings Time starts this weekend, I am feeling glum. I keep dreaming about vacations, new neighborhoods, new apartments, new jobs, college campuses, concerts, new boyfriends, and having a trim figure for which I can buy a lot of clothes. All of these good things in the dreams tend to get hampered by transportation difficulties: no car, no driver, no bus schedule, missing trains and planes, odd subway changes, and the like.

The dental saga continues. My dentist is very precise about fitting bridges so yesterday he took off my temps, did a fitting on the permanents, and replaced the temps. I like the bridges but almost cried when he removed the temp from my lower center: the teeth on either side of the missing tooth were filed down to ugly nubs to accommodate the bridge. But an implant would have been way too expensive. As it is, the two bridges will cost a total of $2,400, which I'm told is a good price (two three-tooth bridges). The dentist is a nice, oldish Syrian Jew (lots of them in this neighborhood). Barry always comes with me and the dentist likes that, tells me I have a good husband. The dentist has asked several times if we keep kosher and keep the Sabbath and so on. He wears a yarmulke. I guess he figures it's a waste for such a nice Jewish couple not to be more observant. I have always refrained from telling him that Barry's love affair with pork would be problem number one.

On Monday, we're supposed to go to a Dan Lynch's alumni memorial tribute gig for Karola Herry. Dan Lynch's was a blues bar where many of us, including yours truly, hung out and played for many years, until its closing in 1996 or 97. It was a really divey place, more so as the years went on, but some really excellent musicians passed through there, like The Holmes Brothers and Bill Perry and Larry Johnson and Jon Paris and Popa Chubby. (If any of you are blues fans, yes, I know or knew all of them.) Karola was a manager and bartender there, a big sunny German woman well-liked by most. Not me, though. I had a boyfriend for about a year who was a performer at Lynch's, and I later found that Karola was sleeping with him whenever she felt like it, and making no secret of it. The boyfriend did fess up and apologize (they'd been involved on and off for many years), but she never did. Anyway, she ended up selling real estate in Florida and recently died at 65.

There was a Lynch's alumni Haiti benefit about a month back but I wasn't up to going; Barry did. I will probably go Monday because there are a lot of people I want to see, not because I had any great love for Karola. Of course, the ex-boyfriend in question wasn't at the last gig but will be at this one...I think it's about 13 years since I saw him last. He was the last guy I was serious about before Barry -- I also thought he was serious about me, which I think he was at times, but it sure wasn't anything like 100%.

The Lynch alumni, like so many groups, came together on Facebook. I am supposed to go to a party with my high school graduating class next month; also a Facebook thing. It's kind of hard to escape these days. With a lot of the old friends, a few messages was enough. Others seem to interest me more than I interest them.

I think I have two people following this blog via Blogger but I keep getting SiteMeter reports that no one is reading this. That's OK -- it's mostly for me anyway.

Singing to the Dentist

I think officially no one is reading this blog. I got a SiteMeter account and it came up all zeroes yesterday. I used to do a very sexually explicit blog on Xanga (it was also anonymous), and that sure got read.

I'm a lot distracted these days schmoozing with old school buds and never-were-buds on Facebook. Maybe I should spend more time writing. And I've definitely got to get those old school buddies to check this out.

Something is getting weird at the magazine for which I write, Blues Revue. Apparently the editor quit and some people haven't been paid in 2 years and there's going to be a committee instead of one editor and it may or may not include the former editor from whom I parted badly in the 90s. But hey, this go-round, I've had a nice live review in print (Chuck Berry at B.B. King's), plus a bunch of CD reviews, and got my name on the masthead, since the editor was actually a fan of mine from the 90s. Gee! Apparently I reviewed an album favorably and the musician became his absolute favorite. I will never be a top-notch music critic because I simply missed out on too much listening; this owed to many years without a stereo, many years listening to nothing but old-time stringband music and Jelly Roll Morton, etc. But I'm a fine reviewer because I can organize information and write it pretty well. I can write a CD review in about two hours flat, including listening to the CD. Anyway, I will not be happy if I have to leave the magazine, but I don't want to work with this guy again, mainly because he lied to me a lot, and lying somehow pushes buttons extra-hard for me.

Jeffrey Frederick did a song called "Singing to the Dentist" which Jill Gross sang. (What a voice on that woman!) The pertinent lyric is: "I was singing to the dentist for the bill, said all I really wanted was some of those little pills, that you gave my momma for her root canal." A couple of weeks ago, my Bad Tooth acted up and started to hurt. This has been my Bad Tooth for about 20 years. The tooth itself has already been root-canaled, but there's been a low-grade abcess underneath the sucker for a long, long time. Without being too gross, if I pressed a little spot with my tongue or a fingertip, a tiny bit of pus oozed out, and that kept the thing sufficiently drained. It did get clogged up about 15 years ago, and I went to NYU Dental Clinic, where the student who worked on me seemed majorly grossed out that the abcess was draining into my "oral cavity," as the professor called it. They reopened it and gave me antibiotics and a rinse. No problem. In fact, every time I got antibiotics for a little bronchitis or whatever, the tooth improved.

My dentist x-rayed it and made a lot of tsk-tsk noises, which is a good way, by the way, to identify old Jewish men. They all make that noise. My darling late father-in-law actually used to say, "Phew!", like a comic strip. Back to my tooth -- there was a big, obvious pocket around the root. Dr. Kadaa said that I should see an oral surgeon, to see if he could (sorry) cut a gum flap and clear the infection (I almost have to be anaesthetized to think about it!). If not, he, Dr. Kadaa, can pull the tooth, and then make a bridge for that one (which is the lower left front) and the lower left molar I'm already missing. (I'm only missing one tooth now, soon two, not too bad.) Then Dr. Kadaa wrote me a course of Zithromax (antibiotic) and 20 Tylenol with codeine. (The pain meds are sort of the lollypop for adults.)

I have to be careful around drugs-of-abuse, but painkillers have never been a problem for me. I would never seek them out, but I'll be darned happy to take them when they are prescribed for me. And I basically take them as prescribed, though I will occasionally take the next dose sooner than I'm supposed to. So I saw the oral surgeon today, he said the tooth's not worth saving, and he wrote me a course of Zithromax and 24 Tylenol with codeine with one refill. Plus both Dr. Kadaa and the oral surgeon were very kind to us concerning the price of consultation and an x-ray -- I think each one charged only $40. Kadaa is always low-priced. I once listened with amazement during an appointment as he hondled with a disposables (gloves, masks, etc) salesperson to get the price he wanted. (Today's Yiddish lesson: hondle is to haggle with great skill). It was all that "Can you do a little better for me on the tray covers?" And that's why you pay $650 for a root canal there, because he pinches pennies. Don't know what the work I need will cost but I hope it's equally reasonable.

sorry for the wait

It's been a while since I posted, which I guess is not the best way to develop a readership. Still, everything seems so difficult lately. I was depressed all summer, and went right into those sad short days of winter.

I've been having trouble for several days with my bad tooth, one which has had a low-grade abcess under it for many years, and which was root-canaled about eight years ago. The abcess generally drains itself, and only once about fifteen years ago did I have a problem with it, where it stopped draining and swelled and hurt. Got some antibiotics and a mouth rinse and was fine until now. And any time I've had to take antibiotics for something else, it's helped the abcess. Well, I gotta go see an oral surgeon next month to see if he can dissect the gum and clean the thing out, or if it has to be pulled. (Not the worst thing in the world if it has to be pulled: there's a missing molar on the bottom left and I can get a bridge made.)

We are very lucky to have found a cheap dentist nearly. Our downstairs neighbor recommended him. Dr. Kadaa charges only $650 for a root canal, which is about what you pay at NYU Dental Clinic minus all of the waiting and being treated by a student. Dr. Kadaa rocks.

And though I've been using ibuprofin for the pain, which was been considerable, he offered to write me script for Tylenol and codeine; Barry said yes for me. I didn't want to seem to eager, but the truth is that I love that stuff when I need it.

I heard from an old friend on Facebook, who told me the usual about himself: hometown, profession, number of wives and kids, and added, "And you?" Me? I am one of the greatest underachievers on the face of this earth. I have parlayed a 168 IQ and an expensive education into nothing. I can't drive a car; I don't own property. I had a great two-and-a-half year career in public radio and TV (in an upstate city, not here), and a great two-year career in publishing. Other than that, I had a lot of shit jobs, the cheap ones that paid my way through NYU and the pricier ones in private industry where I learned both about insane bosses and about the ways in which my mental illness makes me a terrible employee.

I'm thinking more and more, lately, about actually writing a novel or memoir, and was encouraged to do so by a former history teacher. My best professors at NYU would probably say the same thing.

I wish -- gotta say it -- that a certain person I worked with in my publishing job, who held a high position in the Transcendental Meditation world, had made good on his offer of free TM training for my husband and me, or even just me. (He wasn't someone from my company, but someone who worked with one of my authors.) I have a feeling it would have done me a lot of good in the past months. I hate how much medication I have to take for things like cholesterol and high blood pressure and diabetes; I hate how much I have to take for my mental health, and it doesn't exactly work right. I'm OK with the medication model for mental health at this point, though I was raised a Freudian and think a lot of Jungian thoughts. But they don't even know exactly how and why the meds work so they're just throwing stuff at us and seeing what sticks. I'd like to see how much of this stuff I'd really need if I meditated twice a day.

Did I mention it was 4 degrees out today when I went to see the cheap dentist? 4 degrees and windy. My husband announced that we were taking a car service. He has been so wonderful to me that I truly can't complain about a thing...except that I'm not sure if I can get any better until he's back to work. I may be too tired to explain this now.