We all love the song “The Weight” by The Band. It’s #41 on Rolling Stone’s Greatest Songs of All Time, and makes my personal Top Ten List. I first wrote about it in 2010 and have thought about it often since then. I still have no idea what it means. But after what seemed like an eternity staying in place with Covid, and in an effort to ignore...

Dudeism, Dudes! The new religion that’s not exactly sweeping the country, but could be the perfect theology for these troubled times. Actually, it’s not that new: it was formed in 2005 by journalist Oliver Benjamin, inspired by the cult movie, The Big Lebowski, featuring The Dude, AKA Jeff Bridges. I just learned about it now from a feature on TV about a NYC...

HEAR YE! HEAR YE! THE FOLLOWING IS AN IMPORTANT PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT: “I’m Not Talking.” This will come as a shock to those who know me, to say the least, and may raise the related question: Will you stop blogging too? Hell, no. I’ll blog away blithely (blithely blog away?) in order to clarify that initial comment. And I do have some serious ”’splainin”...

  I used to think about Covid the way Woody Allen did about death: I thought they’d make an exception in my case.Well, I don’t have any medical data on the Woodman, but I know what happened to me: No exception was made. I got Covid.Yes, folks, I was visited by the whole megillah: sore throat, runny nose, headache, and oh, you know. My brother called on Facetime...

As in: I am obsessed with it these days. Aren’t you? Some of you may want to stop reading after I tell you that no, I haven’t actually gained the standard Covid 15.  I get it. Good bye and good luck. But for those of you who stick around, let me tell you that I am constantly aware of what to eat, when to eat it, how to get it, how to prepare it, and how to...

I had a Zoom session the other day, a phrase the likes of me has never uttered until this surreal situation took over our lives and turned everything on its head. But you know that. What I wanted to tell you concerns a comment made by one of the participants in that Zoom session, sponsored by a group I belong to for retired professionals, to the effect that she’s...

Are you sick of hanging around the house during this pandemic looking like, as my mother used to say, the Wreck of the Hesperus? And no, I never knew what that meant, but I got the gist: I was a mess. As I have been recently, during these daunting days of isolation.  Many of my clothes require dry cleaning (must remedy that in the future), and many cleaners are...

Who says I can’t clean my apartment? Who says that my attempts at housekeeping are doomed to failure? Who says that my domestic adventures are closer to I Love Lucy than The Donna Reed Show ? Well, me, for one. And my cleaning lady, for another. Who happens to be—by one of those coincidences Freud tells us don’t exist—named Lucy. She is now self-isolating in...