There Have Been Two Thousand and Twenty FIVE of These???
Everything's closed on January First but in another way everything is OPEN, man.
Hello HOFFSTACK readers —
I’m thrilled so many people signed up, on New Year’s Eve no less, to join this project. My goal is to keep you so entertained that you’ll freak out when some material is behind a paywall. (Luckily it’s super easy to upgrade to a full subscription.)
It’s still “early days” as the English say, so let me clarify what you’ve signed up for.
Many mornings an email will greet you with a recommended song—the HOFFSTACK PLAYLIST—an old chestnut, or something you’ve never heard before. My wife will be thrilled that someone else gets to hear about who filled in on drums on this track and why it is significant. All I’ve ever really wanted to be was a freeform radio DJ, so this is the closest I’ll come to that.
HOFFSTACK IN THE STACKS is going to be bi-weekly, I hope. Just picture me romping around the five boroughs, sneaking dried apricots into the library. The New York, Queens, and Brooklyn library systems are a window to everything in this city, and they are also the last good free thing we’ve got. I’ve got a bit of a formula in mind for how these dispatches will work, and I love how Megan Levens’s illustration up above came out—particularly the wee avatar for The Bronx, my Star Trek t-shirt, and Pizza Rat.
But today is New Year’s Day and I’ve always been fond of the “New Year’s Resolution.” Specific, manageable, approachable resolutions.
I won’t waste time with “I will stop gossiping about people” or “I shall only eat vegetables” because I’m sure I’ll break both of those before I find the period on this sentence. (Oh, snap, I didn’t have to diss that guy/chomp that bacon so hard!!)
My resolution for 2025 is simple: I shall floss my teeth every day. And not just because Frank Zappa sang a song about the concept.
I have pretty good teeth. For a gent my age, I’ve had few problems. But my most recent visit to the dentist was a little bit of a disaster.
Well, actually, it was only partially a disaster. The receptionist there is terrific and she laughs at all my jokes. The dentist is also a nice guy but I don’t know his name. (I have him in my phone as Dr. Dentist. I don’t know why I did this.) I’ve only seen him a few times and quite frankly I only joined his practice because his office was about 17 seconds away on foot from my old apartment. I don’t even know what the guy looks like. Whenever I see him he’s upside down, standing next to a blinding light with a shield over his face to protect from spit.
My old dentist was awesome. I loved her. I kinda forget her name, too, but I bet if I thought really hard about it I would remember. It was an Italian name. Dr. Claudia Spagnalli or something. Her offices were on Washington Square Park and in the reception area she carried Departures magazine, and one time I was waiting my turn when I had a piece about the movie Isle of Dogs in the front of the book. I was sure to leave it open to that page once I was called in.
Dr. Spagnalli (not her name) got married and moved to Westchester and I guess retired. I was her last patient as an unmarried woman. It was a Friday at 5:45 pm and she was like “well, this is it, tomorrow’s the big day!” Honestly, this does sound like the build-up to a roaring “reader, it happened to me” encounter, doesn’t it? I mean, she already had her fingers in my mouth.
But like I say, she vanished so I found a new Dentist literally in my backyard. I could look from my old apartment’s bedroom and see the back of this guy’s office. Then the pandemic happened and, well, I dunno, I didn’t go to the dentist too much.
My teeth are basically fine but my recent visit was a bit of a disaster. He had to go in there with the water hose, then the pirate hook, then when that wasn’t enough, he had to get out what looked like a corkscrew. I thought Dr. Dentist was gonna need to put his foot up on the chair for leverage to get at whatever chunk he was tearing out.
Unpleasant!
I asked why this was such an ordeal and, backlit like Nosferatu, Dr. Dentist was blunt: you don’t floss.
And it’s true. I don’t floss. I brush! Oh, how I brush. (Turns out I brush too hard, but that’s another issue.) My wife says I use too much toothpaste, too. “Only a pea!” I squash through a tube in no time. And I use blue Listerine. Love that stuff. Several times a day with the blue Listerine. (Not actual Listerine brand, of course, because why spend, but the giant double pack from Costco, I’m not making Listerine money—Kirkland only!) But I gotta floss. I gotta floss to avoid another nightmare in the chair like I just experienced.
Dental floss is a disaster. I can’t get that stuff to work. All it does is hurt my fingers. I don’t even know what dental tape is. That stuff is a disaster. But I bought a doohickey with replaceable (i.e. bad for the environment) plastic bow-type things you snap in and they actually work for me. They came via Amazon from China. I’m awful.
Anyway, that’s my resolution. Not to read the collected works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, not to train for a marathon, not to volunteer at a soup kitchen (I should do that, though; why don’t I do that?), and not to learn Mandarin on duolingo. My resolution is to start doing something I should have been doing since I was nine years old.