I cough into my shoulder.
I sneeze into my shoulder.
I watch as the dates marked on my calendar
for something exciting
pass me by.

I’m thankful that I celebrated my
birthday just before people started
taking COVID-19 seriously,
so I got to hear the sound of Miguel Zenon’s sax,
taste a last frozen margherita,
and blast… R.E.M. one last time.

On one particular March morning I rolled out of bed in South Brooklyn, and I have to be honest, I think I had a slight headache.

What was the cause of this ailment? Was it COVID-19, or the glass of whiskey I had last night?

Actually, I think it was caffeine withdrawl. Definitely, caffeine withdrawl.

Luckily, the cure was at hand, despite self-quarantine. I only had three pounds of coffee and no one to drink it with. Things were gonna be fine.

So, Coffee

Sometimes, the distance between being a novice about something, and becoming something of a snob about it is a relatively short road. I believe I transitioned from stirring instant coffee granules in a cup of cold milk with a fork to doing fancy pour-over with a scale in… about a year’s time. Is this an improvement? My palate seems to think so… Well, there’s less weird chemicals at least.

My headache-addled state this morning is ironic, because I avoided drinking coffee for quite a long time.

In my childhood, I looked down on people who required their caffeine dose in order to start their day, becoming dependent on a substance that offered no escape from rote daily routine. However, I did really like the smell of coffee.

I avoided drinking coffee (whilst being quite partial to tea) until I was three-quarters of the way through undergrad.

I started with the most ritualistic gateway drug of all.

This site seeks to answer one question and one question alone: “Where is Steve?”

The answer: I’m in New York City.

So, how did I come to this place, what are my thoughts and feelings about it? How long can I continue to tease thus? To answer these questions, I henceforth christen this the first in a series of posts tentatively entitled “NYC Days.” And get started we will!

As Coronavirus rears its ugly head, I thought it would be important for me to finally get around to focusing on the important things in life. By which, I of course meant the Eurovision 2020 song competition.

For those of you not in the know, Eurovision is a song competition designed to help foster a sense of “European Community.” Each country sends one artist to perform one song, and people in each country get to vote on which of the other countries’ songs they most preferred.

The songs vary in quality and style, but they can basically be described as pop, mainly dance pop (yay!) or ballads (eh!). (Oh, look, I’m outing my prejudices right here.)

Perhaps one of the most prominent artists that Eurovision can really be thanked for bringing to widespread attention is ABBA. So good on them for that…

So without any further ado, here are my thoughts on all entrants.

This post will inevitably fit somewhere into a series of posts on NYC life, but it’s neither the beginning nor ending of this series, which has a couple of nice drafts in progress.

Also, I have no basis for giving serious medical advice, so please listen to sources like the CDC etc.

Hurrah! We have reached the time in which I write the inevitable post about Coronavirus: the latest and greatest in ultimate excuses to avoid visiting elderly family members! And also, a seriously quickly spreading plague. And a lot of memes about hand washing.

Love in the Time of the Coronavirus, a mega thread. If you see an attractive person in a cafe, do not approach them. Instead, go home, wash your hands, and write a sad, yearning poem.

— Maurice Carlos Ruffin (@MauriceRuffin) March 9, 2020

If I had written this post a week ago, I probably would have said something about the low fatality rate, and the lack of any need to be concerned. But, I am not someone who is as at risk as others. I can easily avoid putting myself in too much danger and lower the likelihood that I inadvertently spread the disease by working from home and doing a bit more hunkering down than I’d prefer to do.

The answer then to the title of this blog is that I’m at home with some pierogies, whiskey and coffee, but I still plan to go to Wednesday night karaoke.. just with the microphone being held farther away from my face…

This is a conversation I witnessed last night. Normal blog content will resume soon; I have about 4 posts in progress but my photos are currently on harddrives quite a few miles away.

A couple scream at each other across the tracks at 34th St-Herald Sq.

“Where are you!?!”

“I’m down heeere!!”

“Why the fuck are you on the uptown side? You’re supposed to be on the fucking downtown side.”

“I am on the fucking downtown side!! …oh”

“where the fuck are you!?!”

Maybe this is weird post. Then again, maybe not.

It is at least a weird title. (But at least not as weird as my draft title. Believe me!)

Obviously, my intention is for this to be sorta sorta like a travel blog, with information that would be useful for someone visiting a city or something along those lines, except it’s also supposed to be a weird hybrid of that content with a diary.

And the thing is:

Important things don’t just happen when you’re travelling. They happen just easily, if not more easily when you’re at home.