Suffering a bit of blogger’s block, I’m afraid, otherwise I’d tell you about laying down on a flatbed scanner to get an old-lady bone density test to see if last years bone breaking bonanza had anything to do with osteoporosis. (One of a million potential side effects from diabetes.) I haven’t gotten the results yet, but if it turns out that my bones are brittle, I may have to reconsider getting back on the horse. We’ll see. In the meantime, physical therapy has been kicking my ass with one pound weights.

Speaking of diabetes, this Valentine’s Day will be my 30 year anniversary with the disease. Not quite sure how to celebrate. Perhaps with a giant piece of cake.

I also wanted to write about not one, but two accordion players on the subway platforms. The first, a young woman at the Bedford Avenue stop in Brooklyn was playing the song Deborah sang in the demo I posted last week. It was a funny coincidence, but not as much of a coincidence as seeing a second accordion player when I got off the train at Untion Square in Manhattan. The players were both equally talented as far as I could tell, but the skinny guy in Union Square had the woman beat by a mile in terms of showmanship. He was wearing a knight’s helmet made of cardboard and painted silver, with just a small slit for his eyes. He sat in a chair, rocking-out with angular movements, kicking his legs as if he was being mildly shocked now and then while playing the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Truly awesome.

Hm. Maybe I’m beginning coming through my blogger’s block after all. I guess it’s true:

Ain’t nothin’ to it but to do it.

Deborah has quite a number of juicy stories from her illustrious past that she keeps tucked away in her back pocket. Only when the planets are perfectly aligned does she take them out and share them with me. If I get greedy and ask for too many details, or ask her to repeat a particularly interesting part of the story, she clams up. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she says.

And it’s not just the scandalous stories she likes to keep hidden. For instance, we’d been living together for three years or more before I found out about a three song demo that she recorded while living in Los Angeles in the mid-nineties.

“Do you have a copy of it somewhere?”

Deborah moved around a lot in her youth, often under less than ideal circumstances, and she hasn’t always been able to hang onto things.

“Somewhere,” she said.

“Let’s find it, I want to hear it.”

“No.”

“Aw, c’mon.”

“It’s embarrassing.”

When I finally convinced her to let me hear it, I immediately asked if I could post a song or two.

“I knew you were going to ask me that,” she said.

A year or two later, and here we are:

Aside from a few things I can’t talk about, and a few things I don’t want to talk about, there’s not much to say. I have a little money in the bank, my arm is nearly healed, and I have a job lined up for February. Things are good. No drama.

Which is probably why no one has been reading this blog lately. That, and the fact that everyone is busy on Facebook. I read a book once called “Written in my Soul — Conversations With Rock’s Greatest Songwriters” which, as the title suggests, is a series of interviews with songwriters about their “craft.” In it, both Elvis Costello and Tom Petty (others, too, I’m sure, but I can’t remember who) admitted to intentionally fucking up their personal lives, and the lives of those around them, in order to have things to write about — poking the muse in order to squeeze out a little inspiration. It might be worth it if you’re pumping out million dollar songs, but not really worth it for a blog so, as I said, not much to write about.

There’s always fiction.

It’s certainly not enough to retire on, not enough to even take a year off to travel the world, but it was enough to throw the teller for a loop.

“Where did you get this?” he said, after turning the check over several times.

“It’s an insurance settlement from a motorcycle accident. I got it from the insurance company.”

He turned the check over several more times, punched a few keys on his computer terminal, held it up and showed it to the teller next to him, picked up the phone and punched a few numbers on the keypad, then stood up and said “Wait here a minute,” and walked away.

He came from behind the glass and walked to an information kiosk where he was joined by several other tellers, all dressed in blue T-shirts for “Customer Appreciation Day.” They formed a circle around the check and looked it over. One of them sat down and entered some information into a computer.

As I stood around waiting, feeling like a criminal, I was approached by another young man in a blue T-shirt, “Here,” he said, handing me a 69 cent pen with the bank’s logo printed on its side. “It’s customer appreciation day.”

“Thanks,” I said, “I’ve been a customer for over twenty years. I was wondering when I’d get a pen.”

The first teller came over and apologized for taking so long, but said they weren’t sure how to verify the check. “Have you ever gotten one of these before?” he said.

“No,” I said. “I wish.”

“That’s the problem. Wait here,” he said, and then rejoined the gaggle of tellers to continue their investigation.

Finally the teller returned to his seat behind the glass, processed the check and handed me a receipt. “Here you go. Have a nice day.”

As I started to leave, two blue-shirts called me over, “Sir, excuse me, sir.”

Now what

“We were just looking at your account and noticed you’re not enrolled in our debit card reward program. It’s absolutely free. You earn points every time you use your debit card to make purchases. You can then use those rewards to buy all kinds of things. It’s free. Would you like to sign up. It only takes a minute.”

“Sure, fine.”

Afterwards they handed me a bag of junk: another pen, a water bottle, a keychain.

“Thanks.”

Now, if I spend a couple of thousand dollars with my debit card, I can get a free basketball!

With the check safely in the bank, I headed home. “How do you like my motorcycle now?” I said to Deborah, when I showed her the deposit receipt.

“Next time you might not be so lucky,” she said.

Every year I make the same mistake. I bring a bunch of camera gear to the International Motorcycle Show at the Javitz Center and wind up taking two pictures before remembering how impossible it is for me to take a good picture there.

“Da problem wit comin’ to dis place is dat I wind up spendin’ money like wa-tuh,” said a square-shaped biker in stone washed jeans and a leather vest that laced up the sides. I didn’t see the front of his T-shirt, but it’s a safe bet it had Harley Davidson written on it somewhere, to match the black and orange bandana on his head. He had a chain wallet, too, of course. He was carrying a big plastic shopping bag filled with who knows what. There was so much crap for sale at the show, it could’ve been almost anything. One of the booths, under a banner that simply said, “Interesting Items” had tables overflowing with the kind of knickknacks you’d see on Boy Scout camping checklist: scissors, tweezers, magnifying glasses, and so on. The guy with the bag was walking with two other similarly dressed weekend warriors, each with a bottle of Bud in one hand and a goody bag in the other.

Saying no thanks to the booth attendants trying to give you a free samle of this or that, was exhausting. “How’d you like me to clean your glasses for free?” one of them asked.

“No thanks.”

“It fills in the scratches, too, let me show you.”

“No.”

A woman asked me what shoe size I wore. “Aw, that’s an old wives tale,” I said.

A stroke of genius by the event organizers placed The Christian Motorcyclists Association’s booth next to to Satan’s Cycles, though neither was doing much business.

My bike is on display at the NYCVinMoto booth. “I used to have one of those,” the old timers never cease to say when they see it. “Except mine…” and they go on to describe a completely different motorcycle.

Despite all the mountains of crap for sale, I only bought one thing: a NYC VinMoto T-shirt to replace the one that the nurse cut off of me in the ER when I broke my arm.

I also took a free bumper sticker from the Motorcycle Safety Foundation booth. They were giving away two with essentially the same message. “One said “Look out for us please,” and the other a more direct. “Cars Kill People.” (Or something like that.)

Jason tried to hand me the one that said “Cars Kill People” but I told it was a little too in your face.

“You wouldn’t want people to be reminded that cars kill people or anything,” was Jason’s sarcastic reply. “Sure, just let the drivers continue to think their cars are big, safe, innocent bubbles.”

“Yeah, I get it, but I’d feel like a real asshole if I ever hit someone with that sticker on my bumper.”

I returned to the show with Deborah and I may or may not have more to say about it later. We’ll see.

Deborah kicked me out of the apartment — convinced me I needed to get out of the house not just for my sake, but for hers as well. She’s the private type, likes to curl up with a book or her knitting or hold secret meetings with her cats. “I need some alone time,” she said over brunch.

I’d been going stir crazy and complaining to myself about it for weeks, but it took a push to get me off my ass. “Okay,” I said and sat quietly, trying to think of where to go and what to do.

“Don’t make me feel guilty,” she said. “You know I need to be alone sometimes.”

“I know. I’m not trying to make you feel guilty, I’m just trying to think of where to go.”

“Go to a museum or something.”

It was Saturday, and I knew any museum I went to would be jam packed with tourists, but at least it was an idea, more that I’d been able to come up with on my own. “Maybe,” I said.

I got off the subway at Union Square, planning to transfer to an uptown train, but I’d left in such a hurry that I forgot to take a piss first and was struck by the sudden urge. Places to piss in New York City are few and far between but I knew that Barnes and Nobel on Union Square had a public toilet, so I got out of the subway station and made a pit stop there.

As I stood at the urinal, a guy walked in complaining about the heat. It was cold outside, but not as cold as it had been and apparently he was over dressed. He pulled off the bag he was carrying over his shoulder and put it next to the sink, then took off his heavyweight red coat and piled it there, too. Then he proceeded to peel off three layers of shirt at once until he was bare-chested. “So hot, so hot,” he kept saying. “too hot for me. I’m strong.”

You have to be careful where you look when you’re standing at a urinal, but I caught a quick glance at his reflection in the mirror. His black, sweaty hair was shooting out in all directions and his belly looked like a giant coconut.

“I’m a Paradisiac,” he said, to no one in particular. “When it comes to being Paradisiac and the Paradisiac way of living, I’m a real Paradisiac.”

I had no idea what a “Paradisiac” was. Did it refer to a country? A religion? A cult? A psychological disorder? I got the sense that he would’ve been happy to explain it to me. How bad did I want to know?

I flushed the toilet, and passed him on my way to the sink as he struggled to peel apart his shirts. The stench cleared my sinuses and made my eyes water.

“When it comes to Paradisiac and the whole Paradisiac way of life, I’m a true Paradisiac. It goes with the Paradisiac music and everything.”

Once I left the bathroom, I wrote down “Paradisiac” on a scrap of paper so I could look it up when I got home. (I did, but I’m still not sure what he was talking about.)

I caught an uptown 6 train to 86th Street and walked to the Cooper Hewitt Museum to check out an exhibit called Design USA: Contemporary Innovation. It was boring. For one thing, I don’t need to go to a museum to a see an iPod. I love the museum itself, though, but it was hot and crowded and I didn’t stay long.

I walked past The Guggenheim, The Whitney, The Met — but it felt too good to be outside so I just kept walking, wandering in and out of Central Park, stopping on a bench here and there, watching the joggers, listening to tourists from Germany, France and New Jersey.

Standing at the edge of the park, overlooking the petting zoo, a couple came and stood next to me. A stunning young model maybe 20 years old, in a chic gray trench coat arm in arm with her older man friend — late fifties, I would guess — equally well dressed, gray and balding with an ample belly. A walking Woody Allen movie. The girl giggled and pointed at the children down below who were petting the llamas and sheep while the guy, hard-pressed to muster enthusiasm for livestock, watched his girlfriend, instead.

When I reached the south end of the park, I followed the perimeter west to Columbus Circle, then headed south again and kept walking. Walking and walking, and walking, wee wee wee, like the little piggy, all the way home. Exhausting. Exhilarating.

“Honey, I’m home. Did you miss me?”