This post was written at Twisted Fiddler, 9 First Street, Troy; Rob bartending. Old Fashioned with Jameson for a base; 7:40 p.m., Tuesday, April 16th, 2024. 

I wasn’t going to drink tonight, let alone go to a bar. I have been sick as hell for four days. So sick I did something I haven’t done…well, ever. Go to the doctor of my own volition as an adult for something other than a physical or a broken bone. But being sick ruined my weekend and yesterday I could hardly sit up and I figured I’d try and get some meds like everybody else does when they’re sick. Got me some prednisone, which is a steroid, so I should be pretty huge by the weekend…

I wasn’t going to drink or go to a bar, even though it was so warm and sunny outside. I’d started to feel kind of better by mid afternoon and took the garbage out and talked to the contractors next door who are putting a new porch on my neighbor’s front house. While I was out there I took the boat cover off of my boat, because it was sitting there with lakes of water in the depressions where rain had settled. It was sunny so I used the bilge pump to get the water out of the places where the bulkheads prevented the rain from reaching the boat hole and draining out. The bilge pump couldn’t get the bottom inch out, so I used a towel to soak and wring and then I went back inside for a meeting while the boat air-dried.

Something about the sun hitting my skin for the first time in weeks, outside of a few stray beams as I walk from the parking meter to the office, made me feel more healthy. So I opened my house windows, and made a point of going outside as much as I could between meetings in the afternoon. I was home sick, after all, and I felt I had a duty to do whatever it takes to get healthy so I can go to work tomorrow, even if that includes going outside into sunlight today.

I wasn’t going to have a drink or go to the bar, or work on my boat, today. I got 9 straight hours of sleep last night and I think it helped my lung infection tremendously. So I figured I would take daytime Mucinex every four hours today and at 7 I would take the nighttime pill and then sleep for like 12 hours and wake up feeling like 23 million bucks (that’s the old expression “a million bucks” adjusted for inflation).

But then I saw how the bulkheads were keeping the rainwater from reaching the boat hole (yes, that is what it is called) and figured I could spend a few minutes unscrewing some flat-head screws original to the 1959 hull and knocking a few tacks out that were keeping some bashed and broken bulk heads in place, and get the bow of the boat cleared of smashed timber, down to the very ribs and slats and keel.

Since I plan on creating sleeping quarters at the bow of the boat, this, ladies and gentlemen, will essentially be my bedroom, tada!

A bit of a difference from the halcyon days of last September:

At least I have pictures. That’s one thing I learned from the secondhand books on small engine repair over the years: they always say to take pictures at every step so you have a reference when you put things back together. In fact, my 1982 Mercury Outboard Manual recommends drawing sketches or taking Polaroids!

A lot of these pieces won’t be usable because they’re smashed and have gotten wet now. But I will be able to use them as patterns to sketch onto new plywood which I can then cut, stain and poly as replacements. It’s kind of nifty, to me, to see all the different pieces. I’ve been keeping a little notebook about the pieces in the hope that I can match them up when it comes to finishing work.

It was just some piddlin’-around work, so that I would get some sunshine, so that I would feel better, so that I can be a good worker tomorrow. I wasn’t planning on having a drink today, and certainly not going to a bar.

But then I got a call from Calliber Collision in Colonie that my Jeep was fully repaired and ready to pick up. It has been wrecked since the same tree that fell on my boat fell on it on January 10th.

That’s 96 days in the shop. If I shed a tear for every day she was away, I could sing this song by ? and the Mysterians.

It was a beautiful afternoon, even if I was trying not to cough in the Uber, and there was a certain unavoidable excitement at finally going to pick up the Jeep I have been paying Chrysler Capital $636 a month to drive even though I don’t have it in my possession (I’ll never lease again). So when the driver, Suren, started making conversation, even though there was a slight language barrier, I was eager to join.

“It is a nice day, yes?”

“Yes, very nice day.”

“A nice day, funny day. Ha, I always say that when it is a nice day, it is a funny day, too.”

I thought: he means ‘funny’ in the sense of ‘amusing’ as in ‘entertaining’ as in when you learn something interesting and you say ‘That’s funny!’ even though it’s not funny, it is just that you have made a new connection between two things, which is amusing, which is a nice feeling, which is why he associates ‘nice’ with ‘funny.’

“I’m going to pick up my Jeep, I haven’t had it since January, a tree fell on it.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

I could tell he did not understand so I said, “I’m happy to get it back.”

“What happened, you said?”

“A tree fell on my Jeep and I’m going to get it back.”

“What is ‘Atreefle’—-oh! ‘A tree fell’… oh man! Sorry to hear!”

“Yes it has been since January.”

“Well, that is OK.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah I mean, I always say, when things happen…I don’t know if you believe in a higher power. I am not a religious person. I am agnostic. But I believe in a higher power and for things when they happen, that it is OK…”

I was waiting for him to say “For a reason” which is a term I don’t like. I think we make our own fortune and when we mess up or something bad happens fortuitously it just stinks and you have to make the best of it and that is what Virtue is… but who am I to argue with an Uber driver so confident in his beliefs on a sunny afternoon?

“…You know? Like things happen, so that happened, so maybe you were not doing something you would have been doing that would have been worse. I say thank you for teaching me with money, it could be worse.”

I could not agree with the driver more on that, but I’d never heard it described that way: “teaching me with money.” He meant that the Jeep was going to cost me $500 and my lost lease payments, but I could have been in the Jeep when the tree fell on it, or my cats could have been on the Jeep and they could have been killed, or the tree might not have fallen and I then I drove it off a bridge the next day, and so on—money is replaceable. So if there was a higher power that would be a way to train me, or something. I don’t believe in higher teaching powers since I graduated high school but I think losing money is a good way to abstract a lesson from a fortuitous occurrence, compared to losing fingers or loved ones or losing a greater amount of money. As somebody that lost about $10,000 worth of stuff in an apartment fire, much of it heirlooms, still, I think to myself “I have memories of those things, I didn’t lose my life or get permanently scarred, and neither did my friends or neighbors or pets. Think how psychologically terrible THAT would be.”

I like speaking with people whose first language is not English. It forces the interlocutors to convey their meaning through analogies and metaphors because they don’t always have a shared vocabulary.

“I don’t let things like that get me to anger,” the driver said. “I say that, you can choose your path. Whether it is a tree fall, or, maybe someone is unfaithful and you are mad at the man, you understand it, you don’t get off at that station.”

Immediately, I added that expression, “Don’t get off at that station” to my repertoire. What a great image: you’re whistling along, some jerk is being a jerk…don’t get off at that station, man! Keep whistling along.

Anyhow I was feeling nice, about to pick up my Jeep on this nice day, but I was still thinking about just going home, when the guy told me he is a saxophone player, that he has a love of music, and that he loves funk and jazz, and plays out as often as possible.

“Where do you play?” I asked.

“I play at, it is a place called 518 Craft, and at Twisted Fiddler…”

“I was going to ask about Twisted Fiddler! I’ve been there Tuesday nights. I think I remember you.”

Suren asked if I played any instruments. I told him I play a few, poorly, and that I only learned that you could learn music as an adult. As a kid we didn’t have musical instruments or books in our house; no one in my family played or sang or read music. I thought it was like color blindness and you either had a music gene or did not. But in a philosophy class a professor had made a passing comment about how “It’s like music, you now, everything is mathematically proportional” and I had no idea what he was talking about. So I started teaching myself…

[Not to be too meta, but as I am typing this blog post, I just heard a table of people yell “Sir, Sir!” And another man went behind me and then there was laughter and there is now animated conversation between four seated people and the man who is walking around, and now hugging people at another table, and they are talking about taking shots, and they are all laughing, and that person is Suren, my Uber driver.]

Anyway I wasn’t going to drink today or go to a bar, but I felt it was quite a coincidence that today is a Tuesday, and I would normally go to Twisted Fiddler except that I was feeling sick, but I wasn’t feeling that sick anymore, and now it was a beautiful day, and I have been writing blog posts at bars, especially when those bars have jazz, and Twisted Fiddler has jazz on Tuesdays, and now Suren my Uber driver was talking about playing jazz tonight at Twisted Fiddler…I mean come on, this is like some Leslie Nielsen movie when a character asks for a sign from God and then literally passes a billboard that says “Go To The Jazz Bar Tonight — God.”

Anyhow, I picked up my Jeep from Eric at Caliber Collision in Colonie, and she looks fab. I haven’t had Bluetooth in 96 days but she picked up my phone as soon as I turned her on. My Jeep didn’t have a name before today, but like my old Ford Taurus which was almost totaled by a $1200 repair in 2018 (until the mechanic said he could Jerry-rig a fix for $98) I said I would name my Jeep based on the first name of the artist singing the first song that came on the radio when I picked her up from the shop.

I think “Everything Happens for a Reason” was pretty apropos even though I hate that expression. Suren would agree, of course. But either way, I guess my Jeep’s name is Bill.

Let’s say Billie… as in Billie Holiday. That was my first cat, Sheba’s, favorite singer.