I am at a shithole dive bar, a familiar place to which I have retreated tonight after a day of near-productivity. It felt good around 6:30pm to have something going on.

I talked to my mother this afternoon. I told her about that wacky breathing problem from a couple of weeks ago, and other things.

I am thinking about poetry tonight, not for having read any recently but for having purchased a stack of complete and collected works of several American poets. I do not know why I read poetry or what I expect to find therein, but one of my great disappointments with NYC has been the poetry scene. It’s been dead for a long time, with poetry events usually merging into standup comedy shows and other improvisational theater.

My mother asked if I still go out to the cemeteries, and I said yes, adding that I’ve been thinking about going up to Valhalla, NY, to see the massve graveyard up there. She laughed at how the town is named Valhalla.

I was thinking today about how petty people can be when it comes to money. Someone I talked to said she had no sympathy for anyone who lost money to Bernard Madoff, saying that it is hard to have any sympathy for people with a lot of money. It is a simple but exquisitely petty retort to the moneyed class, ruled by the assumption that having money makes you an asshole and that anyone with money should summarily have it plucked away. This has little real connection to the MMMadoff business, in which investors put widely varied quantities of money into what they thought was a pretty conservative investment. Madoff was not running crazy hedge funds that spit out 40% returns by robbing selective Peter to pay selective Paul.

Anyway, I find the pettiness directed at those who lost money to Madoff to be base and irritating. I can’t say yet if I think it is a strain of greed — that extravagence which, as I’ve said before, will always prevail for as long as there is an America. No, I don’t think it’s greed, but I think I don’t know what it is that underlines the de facto disdain heaped upon those who have more money than others.

This topicality passed through the conversation with my mother today, in which I iterated the fact that I have no desire to make a lot of money — a sentiment I’ve maintained since high school.

My mother freaked me out a bit when she asked me, demonstratively, if I was OK, and if I was doing well. I am doing well, but the question is gave me pause because it is one of the last things my father asked me before leaving us a couple of weeks after we spoke. That question from him has haunted me because he had never asked me that before. He didn’t care. He never gave a shit how I was doing and would never think to ask how I was or if I was well. I think he felt that such a question was part of the ritual of suicide.

Wow, here in this shithole dive bar I am overhearing talk between two people who both say they lost a lot of money to Madoff.