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Showing posts from July, 2018

Separate Paths

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And so it all ends with the click of a mouse. I’ve unfriended people on Facebook many times in the past. It usually happens when some twit I’ve never met in the real world says something monumentally stupid or incredibly rude and I ask myself “why in the four-alarm freaking hell am I keeping this asshole in my life?” Then I press the button and make them disappear. It can be a very satisfying experience. There are few things more fruitless than a Facebook pissing contest and, having weathered more than a few of these online fiascos, I am looking to find better things to do with my time. But my most recent unfriending was quite different from the usual routine. And much more painful. This person was a former best friend of mine who cut himself out of my life for reasons I still haven’t quite figured out. We met about 20 years ago at a job in Manhattan and we just hit it off. My friend--I’ll call him Phil--was a great guy with a fabulous sense of humor. We started hanging ou...

Say the Secret Word

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Mary Klinge didn’t waste any time. “I know your password,” she told me in recent email. “More to the point, I know your secret and I have evidence of this.” Ms.Klinge, which I suspect is a fake name, caught me flatfooted by mentioning one of my old passwords. I’ve been the victim of identity theft so this opening line was a bit disturbing. Things got even creepier as Mary went on to explain that she had setup “a malware on the adult video clips (porno) and you visited this web site to experience fun (you know what I mean).” No, I don’t know what you mean. I don’t go look at adult video clips (porno) so maybe Mary means somebody else. Then she said she had set a webcam in my computer and gathered all my contacts. Now that’s just mean. She wrote that she put in much more time than she should have investigating “into your life and created a two-screen video.” “The 1st part shows the video you had been viewing and 2nd part displays the recording from your cam (it’s you doin...

Stray Cat Strut

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“A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.”—Groucho Marx Okay, so what the hell is happening on 93rd Street? Ever since I was liberated from my post-surgery leg braces, I’ve been walking about two miles nearly every day. In the last few weeks I’ve been slowly getting back to the gym with 30-minute cardio workouts and some basic weight training exercises, but the long walks around my neighborhood in Bay Ridge are still a major part of my recovery. On Saturdays I sometimes deviate from my usual route to cut over a few blocks to a local fruit and vegetable store to pick up my weekly supply of healthy stuff. Now for the last two weeks I’ve been walking up Oliver Street off Shore Road and heading up 93rd Street. And that’s where everything goes to hell—literally—because when I get to the block between Marine Avenue and Ridge Boulevard I keep running into black cats. I know the old bit about black cat’s crossing your path is a ridiculous supers...

Out of the Park

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It all comes down to teamwork. I’ve been working with this fabulous writing class for the last of couple of years now and today I joined my classmates for a reading of our various works in progress. The class is coordinated by our teacher, the fabulous Rosemary Moore, and the reading was held at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The place has a history that dates back to the Dutch settlers and was a major site during the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776. Rosemary had asked us all for a short bio to read when she introduced us and I emailed her one of my favorites: “ Rob Lenihan is a writer and journalist who was born in Brooklyn the same year the Dodgers left. He hopes the two events were not related ." I usually get some laughs on that one and today was no exception. And I needed all the humor I could muster because I was scared to Hell and back as my mind cranked out a whole host of disaster scenarios. What if my piece was too long? What if it was too short? W...

In the Crosshairs

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Now we can add five more names to the list. Last week’s mass shooting at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis continues the apparently endless stream of gun violence that has gripped this terribly misguided nation. I’ve worked at small newspapers, so this latest attack is particularly disturbing. I think of the newsrooms in Pennsylvania and Connecticut where I used to ply my trade and see how easily it would’ve been for some gun-toting lunatic to walk in and start shooting. Yes, the shooter had a personal beef with the newspaper, but we can’t ignore the fact that Trump—I refuse to call him president—has declared the press “the enemy of the people,” that he has repeatedly labeled any unflattering story as “fake news” and encouraged the crowds at his vanity hoedowns to jeer at reporters. I’ve covered many seminars about corruption in the business world and one phrase that I’ve heard repeatedly was “tone at the top”—meaning how the behavior of a company's leaders can have a majo...