This song means a lot to me. Dino did this as the last cut on his album entitled "DINO" that was released in 1972. I loved this whole album as a Place junior high schooler. Dino also did quite a few other Kris songs. And Kris and Rita Coolidge were also on the season premiere of the ninth and final season of the Dean Martin Show in 1973.

I don't know who else covered this song but Dean's must be the definitive version.


Kris Kristofferson

I never had no regrets, boys;
Not for nothing I've done.
I owed the devil some debts, boys,
Paid them all up but one.
And I don't even regret the living
That I'll be leaving behind.
I've gotten weary of searching
For something I couldn't find.

I'm going down to the shade
By the river one more time,
And feel the breeze on my face before I die.
I'm gonna leave whatever's left of my luck to the losers,
Then bend me down and kiss the world goodbye.

Come to lucky-in-lovin'
I never had no complaints.
They never said I was evil,
But then, I wasn't no saint.
I'm just a river that rolled forever
And never got to the sea.
I ain't blaming nobody;
I had it coming to me.

I'm going down to the shade
By the river one more time,
And feel the breeze on my face before I die.
I'm gonna leave whatever's left
Of my luck to the losers,
Then bend me down, and kiss the world goodbye.

.....So, it was with a mixture of trepidation and the anticipatory bloodlust of a hatchet job that I went to the Museum of Television and Radio to see "The Rat Pack Captured," a 90-minute version of a recently discovered 1965 kinescope of a benefit concert by Frank, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., hosted by Johnny Carson -- allegedly the only known video recording of an entire Rat Pack performance.

The evening is opened by a startlingly young Johnny, at that time only three years on the air, who explains a bit about the Dismas House of St. Louis, a facility for ex-offenders for which this event is a benefit.

And then comes Dean Martin. I brace myself, having never liked his boozy persona. He is a caricature of dissipation; shiny-faced, eyes lowered to half-mast, beatifically stoned. But boy, is he adorable. Imagine my surprise that I come to you now as a prophet of the Church of Dino.

Dean Martin sings like an angel. And this came upon me in a blinding flash of light: In the same way that, despite the seemingly extemporaneous ease with which Fred Astaire danced, we all know he rehearsed doggedly, I realized Dean isn't really a drunk asshole! Actually, there's nothing assoholic at all about his drunk act.

Unlike with his former partner and icon of the French, Jerry Lewis, you're not waiting for the vicious undercurrent. Dino smiles in a vaguely surprised, ain't-this-nifty way throughout his set, as if the music pouring out of him was not of his doing at all. Something else he shares with Astaire is a vocabulary of the tiniest physical gestures. While singing "King of the Road," that pre-hippie '60s anthem to barefoot, boho insouciance, he gives it a nice little gender-fuck by punctuating a riff with a lock of the torso, a cant of the head, his wrist a relaxed teapot handle, and singing, "Queen of the Road." At a time when gay-baiting humor relied on the wide swish and the hostile mince with the unspoken promise of ultimately kicking someone's faggot ass, Dean, for just an instant, makes a surprisingly sympathetic and counterintuitively convincing bottom. I sit there, homo that I am, charmed and unoffended.

By the time he finishes his set and brings home "You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You," he does so with such a touching sincerity that I am thinking to myself, "Yes, Dean. So true, so true. I am nobody."

Sammy, on the other hand, is a wraith of pure energy, a pipe cleaner man in a tuxedo, with his hair plastered against his head like an LP. He is also so immediately sweet and unctuous, so afflicted with the inability to refer to anyone without the Homeric moniker "My dear friend," that I almost sank into a diabetic coma. This is pure telethon Sammy -- the sycophancy ripe for parody. But it's just opening artifice. Who knows, perhaps in 1965, in front of an entirely white audience, this ritual self-declawing was required of any black entertainer. It is when he sings that the façade drops away. He is being played as surely as any other instrument up on stage. It is a miraculous, intimate, personal act. He is still, for want of a better expression, Mr. Entertainment, but the music moves through him.
It had been so long since I'd actually heard Sammy that I'd forgotten the depths of his talent, and it is profound. His version of "One For My Baby" alone, which contains uncanny imitations of Billy Eckstine, Mel Torme and Nat King Cole -- all dead on and not remotely obsequious -- would almost be enough to justify an entire career. When he demonstrates the latest dances -- the Mashed Potato, the Frug, the Pony -- for the glaringly unhip crowd, he is not unaware of their innate campiness, the dopey names, the prescribed, vaguely bogus looseness. But he does them so beautifully and with such graceful abandon that you're reminded of how marvelously sexy and free it must have seemed to be able to dance like that alone. If partnered dancing was a metaphor for love, watching Sammy shake his little can while doing the Swim must have seemed like a national exhortation to go jack off.
And, finally, the Chairman of the Board, who is, at least as far as "The Rat Pack Captured" is concerned, the least compelling of the three. "Your hoodlum singer," says Johnny. True indeed. Sinatra is no longer the beauty he was and his face has taken on a leathern, thuggish quality, which is not relieved by a surfeit of smiling for the audience. There is a Great Star Reserve in evidence, however justified, that I find simply threatening. Dino and Sammy, as it turns out, had not yet done enough to soften me toward Vegas-Heyday-Frank. Even his own goofiness -- miming shooting craps way too many times on "Luck Be a Lady," substituting "St. Louis" for "Chicago" on "My Kind of Town" to the point where even a St. Louis native would scream "enough" -- merely make him seem more unimaginative than human.

And yet, as my sister says, "They don't call him Beethoven for nothing." He is still Frank Sinatra. Even if he phoned it in, it would be worth it.

But none of the three do phone it in. These guys are all about talent. Transcendent talent. The ancient Greeks got it right; talent this prodigious becomes a moral virtue. So that by the time they spend the last half-hour of the concert breaking themselves up in their not terribly funny, mildly punch-drunk, highly exclusionary frat-boy way, it seems entirely earned and materially different from the annoying rough-housing that goes on of a Saturday night on Park Avenue South.
It is only this last part of "The Rat Pack Captured" that I associate with the new Swinger culture. The unrelenting irony with which Rat Pack culture has been adopted entirely ignores precisely why these guys were allowed to behave the way they did. Because they were some of the greatest interpreters of the American Popular Song that have ever lived.
Moreover, they only behaved that way some of the time. There has been an effacement of the historical record. "The Rat Pack Captured" is, in the end, a benefit for a halfway house for ex-cons, as they used to affectionately be called. What mainstream white entertainer today, other than Susan Sarandon, say, would take up such a cause? Sinatra was a progressive long before he became a Reagan Regular. Even the original founder of the Rat Pack, Humphrey Bogart, was a vocal opponent to McCarthy and a supporter of the Hollywood Ten.
Facts all lost in the Rat Pack Revival. The recuperated aspects of that time, the drinking, the smoking, the wardrobe, are not only the least important as regards the Sinatra signature style, but they are also the very attributes that resonate of a time and a world that was far less hospitable, kind or gentle. It's all a bit like going to Beyreuth and coming out an anti-Semite instead of an opera queen.

June 13, 1997

We've got Pavarotti at Central Park copying to DVD in the other room. Just following the Highwaymen at Central Park. Very nice. Pavarotti's concert is on the order of Simon and Garfunkel huge crowd at Central Park. Beautiful. Amongst the things worth living for are Pavarotti and Cash, with Dino firmly in the lead.

A few newly discovered work-related documents are posted below. Names have been changed to protect the innocent. I suspect the whole department--Sammy, Frank and the rest--got a similiar letter. I re-type these partly because I miss just ever so much all that typing I did at times during those times I worked, even drunkenly. Actually, I was never drunk. Just Pleasantly buzzed, enough to put up with the work. Some of my best pre-bids were conducted while pleasantly buzzed. But I had become weary of the whole enterprise, the deception, et al. Apparently, there was the odd occasion or two when I wasn't an unrepentent screw-up. The very odd occasion. (What a joy listening to Pavarotti is).


July 8, 1998 LETTER OF APPRECIATION

Mr. Dean Martin
Senior Buyer
Purchasing Division

Dear Mr. Martin:

Please accept my sincere appreciation for the extraordinary efforts
you put forth on behalf of the Mayor's Office of Education and
Advocacy in assisting to set up the City's Headstart program.

Working against a grant deadline of June 30, 1998, you were
necessarily required to set aside other work in order in order to
assure best efforts could be made to accomodate the
requirement to establish encumbrances against grant funding
prior to the expiration of the same. In most cases, requisitions
for the needs of the agency did not arrive until two or three
days prior to the deadline. In some cases, requisitions arrived on the day
of the deadline.

The Purchasing Division is often called upon to perform "miracles" for
user agencies. This was one of those instances where you performed
above and beyond what is normally expected.

I thank you for your efforts.

Sincerely,

Mack Gray
Deputy Manager of General Services--Purchasing



November 30, 1987

I regret having to inform you by this official notification that you will be laid off effective January 1, 1988....

Sincerely,

Leo Perelman
Deputy Manager of General Services for Purchasing

Memory Lane.....

Memorial Day. Bolder Boulder. I ran in the second race, held in 82? Only 4,000 participants and the race finished at Boulder High. I think I broke 50 minutes. Won a pair of running shorts in a drawing by Frank Shorter. Now it's 30 or 40,000 runners. Obscene. Kris spent the night. We watched a couple movies she brought over and some Larry Sanders episodes that I was copying.

Found the tape of Dave Letterman's last two shows on NBC from 1993. Michelle Shocked, Shandling. The finale had a great performance from Springsteen doing "Glory Days". Great stuff. Then Springsteen's drummer became Conan's band leader. Nice continuity.

So much to go through. Vegas coming up very soon. Buckley and Adler from a Firing Line in 1993 copying in the other room. Fascinating. Buckley is still going strong at 82.

This is all I really wanted to do--just watch stuff I've recorded. Over and over. Too bad I blew a few too many tens of thousands to give me a happy comfort zone. O, well. Gambling losses is a justifiable reason for offing oneself. So is losing a job. Even though I technically walked away, I can't deceive myself on that one. Alea Iacta Est (or, Iacta Alea Est). Days were numbered since I couldn't cut it anymore.

Cultivated Taste

A review of The Georgics of Virgil: Bilingual Edition, translated by David Ferryand Virgil's Georgics, translated by Janet Lembke
By Bruce S. ThorntonPosted April 5, 2007 This article appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of the Claremont Review of Books. Click here to send a comment.
"The best poem of the best poet," said John Dryden of Virgil's Georgics. Montaigne praised the Roman poet's four books on farming as "the most accomplished work of poetry." Such estimations would strike even literate people today as hyperbolic or puzzling, given the obscurity of Virgil's masterpiece and its seemingly tedious subject matter. The conceit of plain poetic speech popularized by the Romantics, the ignorance of farming and country life typical of most moderns, and the decline in knowledge of classical literature all leave most people, even the tiny minority of poetry readers, incapable of appreciating the brilliance of the Georgics and its place in Greco-Roman and European literature. We live in a much different world from the one in which William Pitt, orating against slavery in the House of Commons, quoted from the first Georgic—in Latin.
The reduction of the Georgics to a literary curiosity is a shame. Virgil's themes, hardly limited to agriculture, address themselves to the timeless concerns of civilization, politics, and the human condition. And he writes with a virtuosity of poetic craftsmanship rare in any age, but especially so these days, when poetry has been reduced to virtual prose obsessed with private sensibilities, or postmodern word-puzzles destined to be deciphered by graduate students. The Georgics' fulfillment of what Virgil's colleague Horace deemed poetry's duty to "delight" and "instruct" explains the high opinion the poem enjoyed from the Renaissance down to the early 19th century. Despite that long eminence, however, the Georgics could not "survive the disruption of leisured elegance by the Sturm und Drang, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Romantic Movement," as L.P. Wilkinson puts it in the introduction to his own excellent translation of the Georgics.
To translate the Georgics, we will see, is a difficult task, and we should be grateful to have two new versions. Janet Lembke and David Ferry are both veteran translators, though Ferry has more experience with Latin. Lembke writes about the natural world and has previously translated Aeschylus's Persians and The Suppliants and Euripides' Electra and Hecuba. Ferry is a poet who has translated Gilgamesh. His Georgics joins his earlier successes in translating Virgil's Eclogues and Horace's Odes and Epistles. Taken just as translations, both Lembke and Ferry have served Virgil well. Both communicate with fluidity and grace most of the literal meaning of the poem and much of its poetry, which is no small thing in a translation.
* * *
Virgil's seamless melding of poetic craft with complex philosophical ideas accounts for the difficulty a reader experiences in using any translation. Poetic artistry is always difficult to duplicate in another language, but Virgil's is particularly intricate and sophisticated. He reportedly spent seven years writing these verses, and presented them to Octavian himself in 29 B.C. Like all the great poets of the late Roman Republic, the so-called neoterics, Virgil was influenced by Hellenistic Greek aesthetic canons that put a high value on "learning" and "polish," the display of craftsmanship through a sophisticated interplay of meter, allusion, literary references, wordplay, imagery, and sound. For example, line 8 of the first Georgic celebrates the agricultural deities by whose generosity (in Ferry's translation)

Chaoniam pingui glandem mutavit arista.

The earth exchanged the acorns fallen
from oak trees
for ripening ears of grain.

Virgil assumes his reader will know that eating acorns is a motif of the golden age—that time before agriculture and technology first described by the Greek poet Hesiod. Thus he introduces here one of his major themes, that humans are humans because of arts like agriculture, the application of skill and thought to the raw material of a nature indifferent to human survival. Virgil strengthens the reference to the golden age by making this line syntactically a "golden line," a hexameter comprising two nouns, two adjectives, and a verb, a typical display of polish for Roman neoteric poets. Finally, the adjective "Chaonian" refers to Dodona, a Greek city that had an oracle to Zeus. Virgil delicately suggests that just as the golden age of Saturn must give way to Jupiter's iron age of work for mankind to reach its full potential, so too must Greece (and Greek literature) yield to Rome, a theme he elaborates in the Aeneid.
Or consider the multi-layered effect of Virgil's adjective improbus in these (once) famous lines:

labor omnia vicit
improbus, et duris urgens in rebus egestas

and everything
was toil, relentless toil, urged on by need (Ferry)

Relentless work conquered
all difficulties—work and urgent need
when times were hard (Lembke)

Most translators, like Ferry and Lembke, go with "relentless." This choice, while a good one, necessarily misses other, more negative meanings in Latin: "shameless," "immoderate," "flagrant," even "greedy." Such connotations suggest that the need to survive is indifferent to the more refined protocols of civilization. And let's not forget the sly reference Virgil makes here to his own earlier tenth Eclogue, in which a lovesick poet says omnia vincit Amor, "Love conquers all things." The self-reference is illuminating, for the need to control passion, and the destructive consequences of failing to do so, are one of the Georgics's major themes.
* * *
As for the philosophical ideas, they are among man's weightiest: the possibilities of creating cultural and political order, indeed human identity itself, in a world riven by the forces of nature and the fierce passions of men. This process often exacts a tragic cost, and depends on the willingness of men to labor grimly and violently at checking the chaos inherent in themselves and in the cosmos. Virgil's characteristic genius can be seen in the way the Georgics, like his later masterpiece the Aeneid, raise these problems and examine them from numerous perspectives, at times optimistic about the possibilities of civilized order, at other times philosophical about this order's necessary transience.
Despite the manifest difficulty, both translators, as I say, serve Virgil well. Ferry seems more frequently to find effects in English that capture Virgil's artistry. For example, in his description of water running in a ditch Virgil uses the marvelous phrase "raucum murmur," the vowels and the "m's" suggesting the sound of the water, an effect Ferry duplicates with his "muttering guttural sound of the water." This is much more effective than Lembke's "hoarse white noise," particularly since "white noise" has connotations in English inappropriate for describing water in a pre-modern ditch. But there's not much to criticize in either translation.
Success at translating an intellectually and poetically sophisticated poem like the Georgics depends on how well the general reader is helped not only to appreciate Virgil's artistry, but also to understand his ideas. This means that a thorough introduction, along with copious notes, should accompany the translation so that the reader is "instructed" as well as "delighted." In this regard, both editions leave much to be desired. They do cover the usual biographical and historical issues, though Lembke is better at discussing the influence of Hellenistic poetry on Virgil's craft, and the importance of the Epicurean didactic poet Lucretius on Virgil's poetics and themes. Ferry directs the reader to Richard F. Thomas's excellent Cambridge University Press commentary for more information on these matters, but readers would have benefited in both introductions from a more detailed discussion of Virgil's poetics. Particularly glaring is the failure to address the structure and characteristics of the epyllion in Book 4, the story of how the mythic agricultural hero Aristaeus lost and recovered his bees. More than a "mini-epic," as Lembke's note has it, the epyllion was the genre in which the protocols of neoteric poetics were most on display, and discussing this genre would have provided an opportunity to illustrate Virgil's poetic principles. Moreover, the relationship of this story to the rest of the Georgics is a continuing critical problem, which itself testifies to the poet's sophisticated architectonics.
When it comes to the ideas at the heart of the poem, Lembke is positively misleading, and Ferry, while correctly identifying the work's theme, does not elaborate enough to help the reader understand Virgil's larger meaning. Lembke makes several statements that muddle Virgil's theme. For example, when she writes that Virgil "passionately advocated caring without cease for the land and for the crops and animals it sustained," and that his message is that "only at our gravest peril do we fail to husband the resources on which our lives depend," she makes Virgil sound like a modern romantic environmentalist eager to restore a lost harmony with nature. This obscures something the Georgics clearly asserts, that the human relationship with nature is necessarily exploitive and violent—a point Virgil emphasizes by repeatedly comparing farming to war and the farmer's implements to the weapons of war. Nature is brutally indifferent to human flourishing, and only our uniquely human, crafty minds, and virtues like self-control and hard work, allow us to survive. Any beauty and order in nature, apart from the divine celestial bodies, is the consequence of human alteration and skill, as in the Italian farms and towns Virgil famously celebrates in Book 2. In fact, the Georgics offer a corrective to many of our own ecological delusions, in which we idealize nature and demonize civilization.
Lembke comes closer to the mark when she says that "an underlying thesis of the Georgics is that agriculture is the underpinning of civilization and the existence of civil communities." Yet she doesn't go on and elaborate this point and its significance for Virgil's political philosophy, but instead veers off into a confusing discussion of the golden age myth Virgil so brilliantly manipulates in the Georgics. She seems to miss Virgil's intent altogether when she writes: "In his nostalgia for the lost golden age, Virgil shows an intuitive grasp of the havoc wrought in human life by urbanization and warfare." Virgil indulges no such nostalgia for the golden age, a time when humans lived little better than animals feeding dumbly off the earth. That's why Jupiter ended the golden age, nec torpere gravi passus sua regna veterno: "Forbidding the world he rules to slumber in ease" (Ferry). Humans in the golden age are only potentially human; they require a harsh world to sharpen their wits and so realize their full potential, which, as Socrates says in the Phaedrus, can happen only in cities with sophisticated culture. But the tragic cost of this development includes suffering and hardship, death and disorder; the price we have to pay for human grandeur.
* * *
Ferry gets closer to this important theme when he writes that the Georgics celebrate "human accomplishment in the difficult circumstances of the way things are" and notes the pride the poem takes in humanity's "precarious successes." He is also better at identifying the correspondence between nature's destructive forces and those of human nature, a point Virgil makes by describing nature in human terms and vice versa, as in the description in Book 3 of the two bulls fighting over a cow:
dulcibus illa quidem inlecebris, et saepe superbos
cornibus inter se subigit decernere amantis.

And she, with her sweet allurements...
excites two ardent suitors
to fight it out in battle with their horns. (Ferry)

The personification of the bulls in a phrase like superbos amantis (literally, "proud lovers") suggests the eternal human conflict sown by sexual passion, the confluence of violence and sexuality, which Virgil himself will explore through Dido and Lavinia in the Aeneid. And Book 4's discussion of bees is rife with implications for human society and political virtue, as well as civic disorder and war. But we need much more discussion of these ideas, and the explanatory notes need to be more thorough, if the reader is to take from the poem the philosophical riches it contains.
A didactic poem like the Georgics, taking up as it does serious philosophical ideas while lacking an accessible story and characters, cannot reach a modern reader on the basis of a translation alone, no matter how faithful or beautiful. I suppose we should be grateful that publishers will spend the money on new translations of one of the West's most spectacular poetic achievements, and both translators deserve praise for their work. But their publishers should be chastised for failing to ensure that these new translations were attended by adequate introductions and notes, so that readers might experience the full brilliance of Virgil's poem—and the translators' achievement.

Funny, I remember that movie at the Chez Artiste.....Guess we're going to drink at work until fired...How prescient! But it took three more years of fun and boozing and buying. Anonymousbuyer does have some interesting memories that, fortunately, he can still bring up.

March 15, 2004, Mon, 12:10…..Yukon and a shooter of….oh, the memory is going….wait, I’ve got it: Weller. Sex with M 4 times from Sat 2:30ish through Sun 2:30ish at her place. 4 orgasms in 24 hours has to be a record for me. Went out with J on Friday night to foreign flick at Chez Artiste. Omar Sharif. Only problem was that I was drinking steadily all day and on the light rail to meet her, etc. Slept through the movie for the most part. She drove me home and that was that. Although she did show me her rented house and I got a taste of her parsley. That image will last quite a while, if not my entire life, if J goes not much farther. . It’s now very predictable. JO’d also Sun night and Mon. morn. Again, more records in mixed orgasm category! J seemed to be normal today. No sense she knew I was drinking, etc. I’ll ask her for a walk or to hang out or something and see if she’s up for it. Guess we might have to choose. But then maybe not. Guess we are gonna drink at work until fired. I’m just not willing to work for the City, I guess. Who knows?……

Only six hundred leaps a year out of thirty-some thousand successful suicides--mostly men of course. That would be the way to go. Anyone can blow their brains out or take a bottle of pills. Takes guts and courage to leap like my brother did. Someone told me to take a flying leap and I did. One should experience a fall of a hundred feet without a net before one dies. Right. Six hundred for the entire country. One for every 500 thousand. Means only, what, seven or eight in Colorado. The stigma of suicide. Nobody talks about it for precisely that reason. But brothers leaping from the same building--that would be impressive. Has that even happened before. Probably. But we would be in select company. So much stuff to go through at the house. I'm just weary of it. Why can't someone check out? Who's to force an individual to endure a life that's been always devoid of pleasure? Question: But do we blow the last of the roll first? Sister is hopeless. Give her a grand to blow. My uncle(s) can take care of my mother. I've worked myself into a frenzy over nothing all these years......

Up late again. Now copying a show on suicide that Jimbo had given to me many years ago. Some show from HBO, I think. It quotes Camus at the beginning, to the effect that there is only one compelling philosophical question--that of suicide. Very true. 30,000 a year. Only 600 by jumping, though. Folks think that method is higher, probably because it's the only method that garners any media coverage. Men outnumber women four to one in suicides.

"Anyway, it strikes me as absurd and rather obscene, this whole cosmetic and medical industry based on lust for youth, age-fear, death-terror. Who the hell wants to live forever? Most of us, apparently; but it's idiotic. After all, there is such a thing as life saturation: the point when everything is pure effort and total repetition."---Truman Capote, Self Portrait, 1972

In sorting through my books I've discovered some interesting stuff. The above quote is from a Capote collection of mostly previous pieces. This came out before the chapters from "Answered Prayers" appeared in Esquire and made him person non grata among his 'swans'. I've also been reading a little from Whittaker Chambers' "Witness" and another related history of Hiss-Chambers entitled "Seeds of Treason". Worth revisiting. To think that I was hassling Sender Garlin in the UMC back in 1986 over his pipe smoking! The very same Sender Garlin who playing a key role as Chambers became a Communist. Chambers talks, at the end of his life, of a certain weariness.

Am I too young to feel weary, to feel that life is now just pure effort and repetition? That's what I felt at the City: Everything had been done. Bids consolidated, contracts executed. Good results, even if the process was not always entirely according to Hoyle. Nothing interesting left to accomplish. I guess that's also a reflection of my increasing depression. I had always had a certain amount of freedom and leeway in working. Then, suddenly, the whole office was engulfed in supervisors, both of whom are decidedly mediocre. One is hard worker but the other is just a reliable slug. Good gals, though. And that little purchasing department is now so overstaffed it boggles the mind. Just imagine all the makework stuff that is necessary to justify those FTEs. They spent hundreds of man-hours meeting on developing a "strategic plan". If there is one it's a well kept secret. And those idiotic meetings on "cost savings" that accomplished nothing. And, now, the next big thing is "strategic sourcing".

November 5, 2003—10:30 am---Took another sip of the rye. I will alternate old overholt with old charter. Keep it “old”. Ten so far this morning. 1A went down in flames. To the victor..the spoils. All that one can do is drink and maybe, then, finally, get me out of here. Word is that Carmen came through surgery very well. Moving toes, talking. Hope she ends up back here eventually. Work is more important than we ever imagine. Diary of a City Worker.
11:15, ah, another sip. As I work a routine fucking requisition. 11:45, ah, another sip. If only the atrium crossover was 5 floors instead of 4. Four has too high a risk of surviving a jump. There would be a nice crowd down there today, something going on.

...sipping vodka on a beautiful Thursday morning...just finished up copying my Orson Welles tapes to DVD. I think Macbeth is the last of the Welles stuff. No, wait, forgot "The Third Man".

Piece of crap City. 311 is a bunch of idiots sitting around two flat screens a piece. Takes f$cking GS six weeks to get my final accounting. Then they have to send it on the Auditor to jack off on it. Once you're out, you're out, I guess. Downloading Saytajit Ray CD onto I-tunes. Finally have some help with mother from Human Services. Too little too late, I fear. Or, better later than never....

Had a dream when I fell back asleep at 8:30. Tom Bonner was there. I was imaging that I could be back with the City. Then, later, I came back downtown with booze. Story of my life: Mr. Booze. So it goes.....

Ah, the copying of vhs tapes to dvd continues apace. Should be done with the Dino stuff in a day or two. As I write this I'm copying Cannonball Run 2 in the other room. Underated movie. Abe Vigoda and the actor that played Frankie Pentangeli in Godfather 2. Giving books away and will be down to several dozen vhs tapes by the end of the week. May just throw a bunch out with the trash service on Friday. Dino is in fine shape in this sequel. 1984. Then the apple of his eye crashed in 1987 and it was over. Maybe when my brother jumped in 1997 it was, effectively, over for me as well. Oh, well......

It's important to have a purpose in life. Copying Dino stuff from VHS onto DVD provides just enough purpose for the time being. We copied the Friar's dinner from 1959. Then "Some Came Running". Then "Bells are Ringing". And, now, we are copying a 1062 TV special with Judy Garland, Dino and Frank onto the last 60 minutes or so left on the DVD. She opened with Just In Time, which Dino happened to sing in Bells. Important to get rid of tapes, they are cluttering up things. Maybe another week.