Sloth, Maybe?

During my daily walk along the aqueduct trail passing through Yonkers, I saw a deer just before my vision reached its vanishing point. It was standing perfectly still with its limbs extended.  It was ready to dash away at any moment, or perhaps it was preparing to defend itself. I wondered:  Do deer defend themselves with their hooves?  I remembered seeing a video many years ago of a stag raining a flurry of blows from its hooves from a hapless hunter.  Of course, my memory could have been playing tricks on me. I could tell it saw me, but it didn't dart away. I narrowed my vision and I thought I saw a faun standing next to it.  Was the parent a doe?  A stag?  Was it prepared to fight for its offspring? Could it smell me?  Did it detect some pheromone my body was secreting? I decided to turn around and walk back the way I came.  At least, I would walk a part of the way and then return to where I stood.  By then, I reasoned, the deer and h...

  When Suze and I first came to the Wellmont Theater at Montclair, NJ in 2018, it was to see industrial legends Ministry.  We were far to the left of the audience seats and well into the back, but we could still make out "Uncle Al" Jourgenson.  The man had so many piercings he looked like a Cenobite from the Hellraiser films.  We managed to get a lift from our longtime buddies Dom Manfredi and Kate Dervin.  While the ladies were on their best behavior, Dom and I had regressed into two eight year olds kicking each other in the ass and laughing as we drove and then walked to the Wellmont. Fast forward to May of 2022.  Suze and I hopped five trains and walked a mile to get to the MC Hotel in Montclair.  I grumbled that we would never do that again, as I have an irrational hatred of the NYC subway and NJ Transit (Well, maybe not totally irrational).  That weekend's attraction was The Alan Parsons Project, who are way on the opposite side of the genre...

1850 House - Summer, 2014 We arrived at Rosendale yesterday at 3pm on the nose to settle into the 1850 House Inn and Tavern.  We went through the usual ritual of picking up our room key in the absence of our host.  At present, we are the only living inhabitants of the Inn.  I think I speak on Susan's behalf as well as mine that we are aboard some Marie Celeste or Flying Dutchman wandering from sea to sea.  There is no helmsman, just us, the ghost passengers, as we move in and out of the fog. Or at least we did until Kyle, the inn's host, greeted us in the lounge.  We have met Kyle before during our previous visits to the 1850 House.  He is always good natured and he is always willing to swap stories with us when we settle in for a winter's afternoon that looks like the dead of night on these short December days. Kyle told us that he - at my insistence in a previous visit - sat through all twenty three films of Marvel's so-called Infinity Saga.  From Ro...