Rant #3,169: Tiny Bubbles

During this rough patch in my life, and with the weather seemingly in the 90s each and every day, sometimes I go a little overboard in what I am drinking, but I do try to keep it on some level of sanity by imbibing as much water as I can.

Some days, I admittedly drown myself in soda, preferably Coca-Cola.

I love the drink, and since the pandemic and since I supposedly had COVID, I have found that my appreciation for the beverage is even greater, because I can actually taste what I am pouring down my throat as good as, or better, than ever.

I cannot explain it, but over the past many months since I supposedly had the ailment—for less than a day, maybe 12 hours, and yes, I think I was misdiagnosed—I have a keener set of taste buds when it comes to certain foods and drinks, and I can actually taste Coca-Cola at a higher level.

Some people lost their sense of taste when they contracted the coronavirus … me, if I even had it, it made my sense of taste even keener.

Go figure …

But back to water …

I actually hate to drink water, unless it is frozen or as cold as it can possibly be.

Otherwise, it does absolutely nothing for me, other than properly hydrate my body.

If I am going to drink water, I prefer seltzer, which is basically carbonated water.

I have always enjoyed seltzer.

As a kid, we used to have the REAL seltzer delivered—the one in those old fashioned thick bottles where you had to posh a metal plunger to get the seltzer out of the bottle—and that product was just so good to my taste buds as the bubbles hit my tongue.

Although a couple of companies still produce that type of seltzer, they are few and far between, and the delivery is very expensive.

(And yes, they use those old fashioned thick glass bottles, too.)

So instead of the REAL thing, I drink the much more accessible and admittedly cheaper and not as good Poland Spring seltzer.

It is an OK substitute for the REAL thing.

Poland Spring water is the best available anyway, so using that water and having it carbonated is a plus.

The carbonation doesn’t last as long as the REAL thing, and it doesn’t hit your taste buds with the same thump as that type of seltzer does each and every time.

You probably can’t make a real egg cream—I hope you know what that is—with the Poland Primo seltzer.

Those negatives aside, it is better than any other seltzer on the market right now in my opinion, so that is my water/seltzer of choice.

And I do not like the flavored seltzers at all.

The flavor tastes totally artificial, and there is a bad after taste with those flavored seltzers, so I just stick with the unflavored one—

And I notice that many other people seem to feel the same way I do, as each and every time I go to the supermarket to buy more Poland Spring seltzer, the flavored seltzers are plentiful and just sitting there ready to be taken, but you have to really search for the unflavored variety, which probably sells at a faster rate than its flavored counterparts.

I mean, if you want orange or grape-flavored seltzer, you might as well buy orange and grape-favored soda, because I think you are defeating the purpose of buying a water drink if it is flavored, kind of kidding yourself into thinking that you are helping yourself when you really aren’t.

I will always prefer soda as a beverage—and Coca-Cola specifically—in particular during the summer.

But I know that you do not hydrate yourself when you drink soda, and I have had a couple of incidents in my life where I wasn’t hydrated and the after effects were not good.

Just this past Friday into Saturday, I had too much soda in my seystem, and until I fully hydrated myself with water, I felt a step behind myself.

Once I was hydrated, I was fine,and later in the day, I could even have some soda mixed in.

So if I have to drink water, it has to be seltzer, period.

(I just love those tiny bubbles!)

Rant #3,168: Bend Me. Shape Me

Whether we remember our dreams or not, we all are dreamers.

We all have dreams each night, but we probably don’t remember much of them.

I don’t, either, but I know that I dream a lot, and lately, with all that has been going on in my life, I have been having an increasing amount of dreams that I do remember.

Most of them are bad dreams, or nightmares, but this one from last night I can’t particularly figure out.

Was it a good dream or a bad dream?

I am leaning toward the former, but I can’t put any context at all to the dream, so honestly, I really don’t know if what I dreamt was good or bad, or even somewhere in between.

Here is the dream as I remember it, and I probably don’t remember it all, so this is a kind of a highlight reel of my dream:

I don’t know what age I was or what stage of my life I was in, but somehow, I became a member of the 1960s pop rock band from Chicago called the American Breed, which was one of the first interracial rock bands of the era.

Just as background, the band charted five singles on the Billboard Hot 100 during 1967 and 1968, the biggest being “Bend Me, Shape Me,” written by Scott English and Larry Weiss, which hit #5 in 1968.

They continued on into the very early 1970s, and then the band broke up, with a couple of the members forming the band Rufus, later adding Chaka Khan to the band, so there is a definite link from “Bend Me, Shape Me” to “Tell Me Something Good,” whether anyone wants to acknowledge it or not.

Anyway, I somehow joined the American Breed, but I did not play an instrument, so I was on background vocals.

I was now a member of this band, and I was walking outside of somewhere, and two people asked me for an autograph, which I gave them—

And that is all I remember about the dream.

I have no idea what the dream means, if anything … I am as perplexed as you are about this.

I have a lot of American Breed records, both LPs and 45s, but I was not consciously thinking about them yesterday, or recently, and honestly, I haven’t heard any of their music that I can recall any time recently on the radio or among the music I listen to that I have digitized.

Here are the lyrics of “Band Me, Shake Me” … maybe they will provide a clue:

“You are all the woman I need,
and baby you know it
You can make this beggar a king,
a clown, or a poet

I'll give you all that I own.
You got me standing in line
Out in the cold,
pay me some mind.

Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me,
Long as you love me, it's all right
Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me,
You got the power to turn on the light.

Everybody tells me I'm wrong
to want you so badly,
But there's a force driving me on,
I follow it gladly.

So let them laugh I don't care,
'Cause I got nothing to hide,
All that I want is you by my side

Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me,
Long as you love me, it's all right
Bend me, shape me
Anyway you want me,
You got the power to turn on the light.”

I can’t find anything in those lyrics to point me in a direction of what the dream meant.

Maybe the title “Band Me, Shape Me,” as it is, defines what that dream meant.

I mean, during the past several months, I have been “bent” and “shaped” every which way due to everything going on in my life and in my family’s life, so maybe that is a clue to what the dream meant.

But to me, that only skims the surface of why I had that dream.

Why did I specifically join the American Breed, and what about that autograph?

Any thoughts?

Rant #3,167: Shine On

My wife went to the doctor yesterday to check out how her head injury is progressing, and I am happy to say that while she isn’t over the mountain yet, she is high enough up that we can finally see the other side.

She was given pretty much a 98-percent bill of health, and while she still cannot do some things and has to have some restrictions on other things, the worst appears to be over …

At least physically, but now the real fun begins.

This is a workman’s compensation case, and anyone who has been through that process knows that these cases are not easy to settle, and can take many months—or years—to come to a conclusion.

My wife’s case has its first hearing tomorrow, and we already are pretty sure that little will be settled during that hearing, as the other side has taken umbrage about my wife’s injury and what they feel they are liable for.

Without getting into specifics, they are dragging this on because they can, and that is their right to do so—

Which means there is little we can do about it … play the game the right way and see where our chips fall.

There is no way out of it, and these cases can go on and on and on without a conclusion for a long, long time.

My wife is even being prevented from going to physical therapy because the other side is arguing the case, so this dragging on of the case is really just a lot of lip service and mind games, and most importantly, it is preventing my wife from getting the full care that she needs to get back to where she was before the accident.

But really, the workman’s comp system does not add that into the equation, so while my wife is healing naturally, perhaps if she was able to take physical therapy, she would reach the top level of health quicker.

There is really nothing we can do about all of this beyond what we have already done: get a lawyer, play the game, and hope for the best.

I knew that this was going to be a struggle from the get go.

When my wife called me all those weeks ago to tell me what happened, I rushed to the hospital and was given workman’s comp paperwork that had to be given to her employer.

I went to her place of work, asked for the manager, and he took the paperwork—but not one time in the few minutes I was there did he ask me about how my wife—his employee—was doing.

It was as if I was simply the courier bringing over some paperwork about something I knew nothing about, and left the building when it was delivered.

(There, you see, I do, in fact, have courier experience!)

Anyway, to not ask how your injured employee was doing--one that was injured at your own establishment—was kind of harsh, and really rubbed me the wrong way.

It is said that employees are just numbers to the employer, and this kind of behavior backed that up big time.

So whatever the case, it all leads up to the same thing: that my wife was injured at work and the other side does not want to pony up all the insurance money due her.

And they are fighting it tooth and nail, and we are fighting back.

Happily, through it all, my wife is getting better by the day, but this nonsense is still weighing heavily on her head.

We just have to go with the facts, and hopefully, this case will work itself out.

But again, I have heard of such cases going on for years until a conclusion is finally reached, so we are prepared for this first hearing to be nothing more than the first of many hearings.

In spite of it all, my wife is much improved from this injury, and I guess that is the real light at the end of this tunnel—

And it is shining brightly, maybe not at full level, but it continues to shine on.

Rant #3,166: Pipe Dream

Another sleepness night …

Too much on my mind right now to sleep, although I did sleep for about five-and-a-half hours before I got up like this, so it isn’t like I didn’t get to sleep at all, no, no, no.

But I am up now at 3:30 a.m., so I figured that I might as well write the first Rant of the week, and it goes back to something that I did late last week on Friday afternoon.

What I did was what I wanted to for a long time, but hesitated doing because I knew that it would lead nowhere. (Spoiler Alert.)

I actually went to the headquarters of Newsday, our local newspaper here on Long Island, and with my resume in hand, sought to go directly to the headquarters of the place that I could fill one of the numerous jobs that they have been advertising as “open” for the past several months.

On almost a daily basis, they have run this large ad inside their newspaper, with about a dozen jobs at a time that they claim are unfilled.

You can send them a resume directly, or go through a site that they use to apply for these jobs, and I have sent them my resume numerous times over the past number of months, and also applied on the site that they direct applicants to.

I haven’t heard anything … and I have applied for both editorial jobs—they have many open—and non-editorial jobs—like a courier--but the only time I have heard from them is when I send a follow-up email to whatever job that I have applied for, and then they send me a form letter telling me that they have passed on me, and “good luck in your job search.”

Now, I darn well know why they are passing on me; it is quite obvious that my age gets in the way, and they refuse to hire anyone who is my age for these jobs, even though the editorial ones I fit like a glove with my experience.

But go prove it.

So, since my son works right around the corner from where Newsday is based, in Melville, New York, I figured that it might be interesting to actually visit Newsday on my way to pick my son up fron work, and see what happens.

So that is what I did … and now I really know, even though I cannot prove it without a shadow of a doubt, that they are not hiring me for any open posting, even the courier position, and the reason is quite obvious.

I got there with resume in hand, walked in, and a guard at the desk stopped me, and I told him why I was there.

He called into Human Resources, and told me to wait in the seating area for someone to come down to meet me.

He then came from behind his desk and spoke with me, first about the weather, but then we got down to the gist of my visit.

“What job are you looking for?” he asked me.

“Well, I have applied for every editorial job that has been offered, and I have not gotten a response, so maybe it is time to move on from that type of job … I already have a freelance job, where I write and edit, so all I am looking for is a part-time job … maybe the courier job would be right for me.”

“Listen, I see how old your are, You are in your 60s, I would say. I see your resume, your background is in editorial. Don’t ever give up on that … don’t go for other things if this is what your background is in.

“Sir, I applied for all of their editorial openings … they do not want me. I already do editorial with my freelance job, so I thought maybe it is time to try something different.”

“How old do you think I am? I am 71, worked for the police department my whole life, retired, went into this because I need something to do … I don’t need their benefits, but I stayed with what I know best. You should too.”

As the conversation ended, this big, burly guy, probably in his 40s, came down to meet me, and I knew that he was not from Human Resources.

“I am from security, What are you here for?” he asked me, and I told him exactly what I told the guard.

“What experience do you have as a courier?” he asked me.

“I don’t have any, but I have over 50 years experience as a driver … I can even drive my own car if necessary.”

“No good … you need experience as a courier.”

I didn’t know that a courier had any job attributes other than being able to take parcels from point A to point B, but I guess in Newsday’s mind, having never done that, I don’t qualify for that position.

As I saw that that direction was going down the tubes, I pivoted, and did exactly what the guard told me to do.

“Look at my resume … I could fill any one of the open editorial positions … the editorial assistant would be perfect for me … .”

As the security person moved away from me, I said to him:

“I was even covered by Newsday in a story a year and a half ago or so … look my name up … I was interviewed by—“

I told the guy the reporter who interviewed me, and this employee of Newsday had no idea who I was referring to.

“Don’t know the name,” he said to me.

“He is the business editor,” I said. “You must know who he is—“

“Look, I will take your resume,” he said to me as he was now fully engaged to get back to his duties, “but never come back here again unless you are called for an interview.”

So it was quite clear why this security person was sent down to meet with me, rather then a Human Resources employee—they thought they had a security problem in me, and they sent this big, burly guy down to meet with me to make sure there wasn’t a problem.

I got up to leave, and the guard said to me, ”Good luck in your job search,” which I guess is the standard line at Newsday when they don’t want anything to do with you.

Later that day, I received an email telling me the usual nonsense, “good luck in your job search,” related to the courier job, so you can bet that my resume never got to Human Resources or to their editorial department.

So I took one step forward but was pushed two steps back, and I still am sitting here with just my freelance job, which I guess is better than nothing but much less than someone like myself deserves.

However, the guard was right … stay with my background, because in theory, I have a better chance getting a job in that area than another area, even if that thinking is probably a pipe dream at this point in time.

Nearly four years since my last and probably final full-time job, I have had it up to here with news reports about how the job market is so much better now than it ever was.

What about me?

I was put out to pasture at age 62 and a half, and now at age 66, I am done like an overcooked minute steak.

And I know why, which makes the whole situation even more difficult to bear.

Rant #3,165: Truckin'

Yippee!

It’s Friday, so the weekend is coming up once we get done with today.

Yucky!

I have to get my allergy shots today, which means that I have to travel miles and miles to get them, rather than get them pretty much right around the corner like I used to be able to get them before I was forced into retirement and had to take a different health plan than what I had when I was working.

Yes, one thing does lead to another, and my five-mile (maybe that much) trip has now become a 40-mile (at least) one, all because the doctor who oversees my allergy shots—who I saw for about 45 seconds a few weeks ago, the first time I met with him in several years—does not carry my health insurance, and evidently has no intention to do so.

I thought things were supposed to be easier in retirement … but for me, everything has gotten more difficult, and I do mean much more difficult, and even getting allergy shots is now a chore.

I have been getting these shots regularly, without any even brief respite, since I was 15 years old, so I have been getting them without a measurable break for the past 51 years.

The funny thing is that I first started getting them during the summer of 1972, so today might just be my 51st anniversary—to the day--of getting them.

I should have known that over the years, this was not going to be an easy process.

Right aft the get-go, I had to take the old “staple gun” test to determine that I needed the shots, and that old test left my arms in such bad shape that during the summer of 1972, I was probably the only person in New York State who wore long sleeves to cover the damage all throughout the months of July, August and probably into September.

My arms—and in particular, my left arm—looked like I had been injecting heroin, and it was embarrassing.

And then when that was over and it was determined that I needed the shots, I went to my regular doctor back in Queens—a doctor we had used since I was a toddler--and he told me that it was silly to cone all the way back to Queens to get my monthly shots—since my father was working, my mother didn’t drive and it was taking two or three buses one way to get to his office—and that I should find a doctor nearer to where I now lived to get my monthly doses.

So based on what he said, right down the road from us, my mother found a kindly, old allergy doctor—“old” to me back then was maybe in your 50s—and he administered my second set of shots, and I subsequently made an appointment to come back the nest month for two more shots—

The problem was that during the month between my second set of shots and what were to be my third set of shots, this kindly, old doctor decided that he had had enough with life, and killed himself.

I hope that I was not the cause of his fatal decision.

Then we found another doctor, who became my regular GP, to give me my monthly shots, and he gave them to me for literally decades.

His practice was right down the block, and in my pre-driving days, I either walked there or rode my cycle there.

This doctor had absolutely no beside demeanor, but he was an excellent doctor, and I used him until he abruptly retired in the 1990s or early 200s or so.

Then I used the doctor who bought his practice, a younger doctor with a young family in tow.

Coming here from India, he was a nice guy, had great bedside manner, and even used his wife as his receptionist, so it was a real family thing, and my son and wife later used him, too.

Then a few years into his time there, he started to act very oddly, painting the walls of the office with garish colors and talking about types of medicine that I had never heard of, and berating me with all his findings and calculations and all of this information on a regular basis.

It got so bad that I swore I was going to find another doctor, and while in the waiting room, I found that I was not the only one uncomfortable with his actions, and that a lot of his patients felt the same way that I did.

And then, one morning, the top story on all the news shows was that a doctor on Long Island had been arrested for giving our various medicines—opioids—to underage patients, with the story becoming even larger when it was divulged that he was the official doctor for the sports teams of nearby Massapequa High School, and had been doling out these drugs—including oxycodon—to student athletes for years.

He was caught red-handed on a video doing just that to a young-looking, undercover police officer posing as a teen looking for a quick fix, and he was summarily arrested.

It later came out that he was abusing these drugs himself, so it now all added up.

He was sent to jail, served his time—I found out that his license to practice medicine was curiously never revoked during his time in prison, as I could not get my medical records from him, or so the then-Nassau County District Attorney Office told me--and he was never heard from again in these parts.

I am pretty sure that he went back to India, with or without his family.

That led me to find another place to dispense the shots to me, and I found a medical office just about 2.5 miles away from my house, where a nurse would give me my shots each month.

This was the office which I used until the debacle of retirement forced me to drive nearly to the Queens border to get these monthly shots.

What a long, strange trip it has been, and continues to be as I will soon enter my fourth year—third official year—of forced retirement, or semi-retirement.

I will be getting my shots later this morning, but what I really need is a shot of something else to fully get my arms around all of this, and try to make sense of a senseless situation …

And to try to understand the bigger picture, of why my retirement has been such a compete and total disaster, and with absolutely no light at the end of the abyss.

Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.

Rant #3,164: Bad

So it happens again … and again … and again.

Jimmy Cordero of the New York Yankees was suspended for the remainder of the 2023 baseball season due to domestic violence.

This is just a terrible thing, and although the details of what exactly Cordero did to be given such a suspension have not yet been released, he had to have done something pretty bad for him to be suspended.

Cordero is the 18th payer suspended for domestic violence since 1997, and the third player with Yankees connections to be banned from the sport for what he did.

Aroldis Chapman was not a Yankee when he did what he did to his girlfriend, but the Yankees later dealt for him, knowing about his past.

Domingo German was a member of the team when he lost his mind and took it out on his then-girlfriend at a charity event in 2020, and he lost 81 games because of his stupidity.

The two later married, so I guess German and his wife put this heinous episode behind them.

And now we have Cordero, whose problems evidently flew completely under the radar with his Yankees teammates, if you believe what they say, and yes, what goes on behind closed doors sometimes doesn’t get out to anyone other than the participants.

This type of behavior is just so out of bounds … and on the higher profile plane that professional athletes reside on, while it is as wrong as if your next door neighbor participates in this type of behavior, few will know about it; when actors and singers and political people and professional athletes start throwing punches and slaps and what have you at another person—a person they supposedly have feelings for--it makes it to the grand stage, that everyone knows about it.

And that is what is going to now happen to Cordero, who is going to have to complete several tasks that MLB will require him to take before he is reinstated, with all of these tasks related to healing and understanding that what he did was not only wrong, but wrong, wrong, wrong.

Domestic violence goes on in every city and town in America, and it seems that each case that makes the news share only one thing, and that is rage from one partner to another.

Each case is seemingly so different, to a level and degree of who the participants were and what they did leading up to what eventually happened … and then, what exactly happened.

As an example, the highest profile baseball-related domestic violence case thus far has been that of Trevor Bauer, the former Cy Young Award winner, who was originally suspended for more than 300 games—later reduced to about 200 games—when word came out that he had violently assaulted his partner more than once during a series of sexual encounters.

While Bauer’s suspension is over, no team in MLB wants to have anything to do with the pitcher, and I believe he is playing overseas now … and that leads me to another point.

Violence against your partner is never right, and it is never right whether you are in the United States or elsewhere around the world.

But it does appear that other parts of the world do not look at domestic violence as seriously as we do in this country, and Bauer getting a job somewhere else in spite of his behavior—a behavior that, by the way, he was never fully convicted of here in the U.S., where much of what he did was eventually considered to be consensual—demonstrates the inconsistencies about how such acts are handled both here and around the world.

And that leads me to the next thing I have to say, which is something that will be controversial.

Of the 18 players who have been suspended by MLB for domestic violence episodes, 13 of them—72 percent—are of Hispanic origin—including Cordero--with almost all of them born overseas.

That is an important fact, and again, I do believe it can be attributed to different social norms overseas as opposed to here.

We take domestic violence very seriously in the United States, but although I do believe the world is changing and moving slowly to our thinking on this, I don’t think the movement has been fast enough.

This type of heinous behavior has been tolerated for too long elsewhere—just like it was tolerated too long here--and I think MLB will not be doing its full duty to watch over this behavior of its players if it does not acknowledge that Hispanic players are more apt to participate in these horrible acts that others—the evidence proves it.

I realize that MLB has a tough job on its hands if it actually acknowledges this, because the presence of Hispanic players in today’s game is enormous … and labeling one group more apt to do this is putting a mark on all Hispanic players, which of course is wrong.

But MLB has not done its full job in policing its players against PED use, and again, the preponderance of players found to use these drugs in recent times after the so-called “PED era” is from Hispanic players, who can buy many of the PEDs in their own home countries right over the counter.

MLB, and baseball’s Hispanic community, must address this problem, and unless the two factions do so, whatever progress it makes will be dulled because the actual facts are not being addressed.

MLB does not want to offend a large segment of its players by doing this—whether for domestic violence or for PEDs—but the time has come to do so.

As for Cordero, I hope he gets the help that he needs, I hope his family also gets the help it needs to heal … but MLB needs to be more realistic, too, about this problem, because it evidently is not going away so quickly.

Rant #3,163: Good

So how was yoiur Independence Day?

Mine was quiet, yet uplifting at the same time.

With all that has been going on with my family and I, the weekend and the holiday was just what I, personally, really needed.

Among the highlights leading me to believe that July is going to be much better than June was that I received my new computer printer in the mail, hooked it up … and one, two, three, I have a printer again!

I cannot tell you how much I missed a printer for the week or so that I did not have one.

Now, my computer feels whole again.

And then—land sakes alive—I actually went into our backyard pool yesterday!

As regular readers of this blog know, our backyard pool has been a source of major consternation the past two years, but it is finally ready to swim in, and for me, it is ready to relax in.

And that is just what I did yesterday morning.

During the late morning, it was so hot and humid, and being that it was July 4, it was time to try out the pool.

I went in there and it felt nice.

And I just sat there for about an hour, just soaking it all in.

No, my other problems have not just faded away into the mist, but at least for an hour, I was able to just relax.

I have to admit that it was a fun thing to do, just sitting in the pool with the radio on and taking it all in.

And when I went under the water, even for just a few seconds, I really took it all in.

With everything going on, this might be my family’s final swims in our pool, so each time in there is going to be memorable, and I hope yesterday is just one of many chances we get to enjoy the pool … even if we only sit there in the water and do not much of anything.

The afternoon was fine, too, as the clouds moved in, but brought little rain to our neck of the woods.

I watched baseball on TV, the Yankees versus the Orioles, and it turned out well for my favorite team, as they won the game 8-4.

It was a nice way to spend three hours or so, but that was pretty much that for the day.

We did not barbecue yesterday as I had hoped we would.

With the threatening skies, it was not worth the work to get it going, so we ate indoors as we normally would.

I kind of missed that part of the day, but you can’t have everything, and I, personally, got a lot out of the day yesterday, so I really cannot complain.

But it is back to the trenches today.

I have to work, I have to take my son back and forth to work, and I have to take care of my mother, who has her attendant coming a little bit later today.

My mother experienced a lot of aches and pains yesterday throughout the day, and she slept most of the day, well into the evening, and as I write this entry, she continues to sleep.

I have some other things to do today as we revert back to normal after the holiday, and I am hoping she has a good day.

At this point, I don’t know if her having a “good” day is even possible, but it should be as carefree as it can be for her.

And for my family and I, maybe we can get into the pool again, if only for an hour or so.

The water is so soothing, and maybe that will allow us to have our own “good” day.

With all that is going on, is that still possible?

I honestly do not know, but I am willing to do what I need to do to find out.