Today is Sunday, October 13, 2024. One latest example of how unfit Donald Dump is to be president is the recent revelation in a new book by former Watergate journalist Bob Woodward entitled War that the former insurrectionist sent hard-to-obtain COVID test kits to the murderous Russian dictator all during the pandemic. This when Americans couldn’t get their hands on the hard-to-get test kits and when people were dying of the coronavirus. Can anyone believe this shit? That a former “president,” but I use the term lightly here, sent this nation’s test kits to the murderous tyrant of the Ukrainian war that is now going on for almost three years. How could this not be perceived as the ultimate game changer in which the Orange Turd now loses the election? But this will be mentioned for a little while and then fade into the ether like every other unethical, lawless action this man has engaged in all during his presidency and even beyond. There was also this little nugget in Woodward’s book, which was that Dump met with Putin several times when he was a private citizen after he vacated the White House. Isn’t there a law against this on the books? What the hell could this convicted felon be talking about with the murderous, germaphobic Putin when he wasn’t even president then? He probably thought he still was “the president” in his deluded mind, I would say. The Harris-Walz campaign must seize on this treachery in creating more ads highlighting this betrayal to let the American people know what their former president did during a global health emergency.

I don’t think I mentioned that to avoid the tension of the presidential race during the home stretch that we’re entering this month where everything is going to be intensified and made ugly, Elliot and I are going to southern Italy for about two weeks on Wednesday, October 16, through October 29. Though we will be back to personally vote on November 5. This was the original trip we were going to take during the pandemic that we had to cancel. So we’re doing it now then. I truly hope we will have the result we so desperately need after November 5.

Get this, folks, the repugnican candidate just insulted the city of Detroit while making a speech there!! How stupid is that? I’ve already seen the new ad slamming Donald Dump for his vile comments made to Detroiters at the Detroit Economic Club. He made this ignorant assertion that “America will look like Detroit if Kamala Harris wins the presidency” or something like that. What shit is this? Does the guy not know he was talking in Detroit, not in Massachusetts? I can’t believe that people in the audience didn’t just boo him for several minutes after he made these rude comments! Not only is the remark wrong, it’s patently racist, but that’s nothing coming from his filthy mouth!

Anyway, I hope we’ll be way over this guy in just a few weeks’ time.

Today I drove to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to look for more baseball caps (since I lost my most recent pink one) and to have brunch at Juliette. Elliot was fine staying home. This time the traffic going into Brooklyn was a little better than usual and I was able to find a parking spot on North 6th Street, near Bedford Avenue. I went first to Juliette, where I was ushered into the garden area for a table. My blueberry pancake was, sadly, not on the menu, so I ordered the stuffed banana French toast.

From Juliette, I walked to my hat vendor on Bedford Avenue. I was surprised he recognized me; we bantered for a little while before I chose two caps: one pink and the other green all for the princely sum of $15. He wanted to sell me three for $20, but I declined his offer.

After this, I visited two bookstores: Spoonbill & Sugartown Books on Bedford and then, Book Thug Nation, where I miraculously came across the book I started to read for my gay men’s reading club, The Lookback Window, in paperback. It was mysteriously sharing space with mystery books. When I saw it, I immediately grabbed it and brought it to the saleswoman’s attention; she had no idea why it was placed on the mystery shelf. She had no idea what the book was about either. So I proffered that I’m reading it right now for a reading club. I mentioned that I had a hardcover copy of it from the library which I can now return. I can now take this more portable copy of the book with me to Italy this week. So my encounter in this store with the book I have to read this month could be called bashert, the Yiddish word for “fate.”

Now I wanted to sit in McCarren Park since the weather was quite decent on this almost-mid-October day. However, when I drove around it, somebody put up these orange cones on the perimeter of the park discouraging parking there for whatever reason, so I just drove home.

Going home, there was not too much traffic either, so I got home before 3, I believe. We were going to meet our friend/neighbor “Diane” at 4:45 to go to Dirty Pierre’s, located at 13 Station Square.

Before long, it was time to go downstairs to meet Diane. We walked to the bistro and made our way upstairs to a table in the middle of the room. We were there for their juicy burgers, so we all ordered a bistro burger. As an appetizer, I asked for the French onion soup. I ordered Swiss cheese with mine and Elliot preferred grilled shallots with his. We all had French fries with our burgers. As a side dish, we ordered onion rings.

We asked Diane to come back with us to the apartment where I boiled water for tea and served Elliot’s honey cake. Diane sat in the living room for about 90 minutes and then left for the night. Atticus actually came up to her once as she was sitting on the couch. He sniffed her out and then walked away. Maybe he was smelling the hamburger on her.

Oh, I forgot to mention something about my review of His Three Daughters last night, and it is this: that Elliot correctly identified where the film was shot, mainly on Grand Street, on the Lower East Side, where he grew up. There is a fleeting scene when the youngest daughter, Rachel, is outside smoking a joint and you see a sign that says “Grand Street,” thus proving Elliot’s original hypothesis. At first, we thought the filmmakers were filming these interiors in Queens, but once we saw the train overhead and the Williamsburg Bridge in the distance, it had to be Manhattan. Actually, the film was shot at the Hillman Coop, located at 530 Grand Street. How many of you can so easily identify where a film is shot here in New York? I’m never good at doing this, except once when Elliot and I saw a 2007 film starring Ethan Hawke and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman entitled Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a crime thriller, in which one outside setting is continually used in the picture: Queens’ very own Bay Terrace Shopping Center, where the two brothers, played by Hoffman and Hawke have a family jewelry store that they decide to rob because they’re desperately in need of cash. The fictitious jewelry store was just yards away from Ben’s Deli, which is seen in some of the shots. When I saw this in the theater for the first time, I must have yelled out, “I know where this is!” I was that excited. To think we get excited over so many little things like this.

Have a good week, folks.

And so it went!