September 30th, 2001.  Sunday
 
 

    Good old Jen from DC came to town this weekend.  Definitely an interesting time.  The weird thing when she comes up is that I usually hang out with her and her friends, and go places I'd never gone before and do things I never do.  It's almost like I'm the visitor.  Anyway, the evening on friday started with a Wilco concert at Town Hall in Manhattan.  The show was really long. The band Elf Power opened up, which was a pleasant surprise.  Wilco played for about two hours.  For the first half hour, they seemed really bored and out of it. Maybe it was because the show was a seated affair, so there was just no activity in the crowd.  Anyway, I'd had a sizable drink before meeting with Geoff, Caryn, Susan, and Geoff's girlfriend and friend, and by the end of the show I was just really tired.  Bet I made plans to meet Jen and her friend Betsy at Great Lakes.  So i got there around midnight, and found them sitting right by the front.  No major appearance changes.  Except a tattoo on Jen's wrist.   Then her brother and his sizable posse showed up.  Then, as we were sitting there, a group of people walked in that I recognized for some reason. After a few seconds, I realized it was Elf Power, the same band I'd seen in Manhattan.  That was pretty weird.  So I said a brief "Hi, liked the show," went to the bathroom, and then we left.  We walked down to where Jen and Betsy had left their stuff, and then took a cab back to my place.

    As I feared, I was woken much earlier than I'd hoped to be on Saturday.  There was a potato pot luck picnic up in Prospect Park that afternoon, which I guess was the centerpiece of the weekend.  So she had to go shopping and cook her potato dishes.  She made this really weird "candy."  It consisted of mashed potatoes and powered sugar, sprinkled with coconut, and rolled into little balls.  then melted chocolate was poured over them. I guess they were pretty tasty and sweet, but the fact that potato was the main ingredient still kind of grossed me out.  In general, the potato pot luck was really enjoyable. A very interesting event.  It was all vegan too.  Definitely not someplace I'd ever imagine myself.  But everyone was pretty friendly, all the food was pretty good, and there were enough interesting things going on to keep it fun.  Except for the frigid weather.  It's just gotten balls-out cold in a hurry.  Anyway, the climax of the event was the potato sack races.  I didn't participate, but Jen, Betsy, and Jen's friend Libby, who met us at the park, all raced.  Poorly.  Sure, I can't really judge them since I didn't even hop in the potato sacks, but it wasn't pretty.

    So after that, we came back to my apartment, Jen took a nap, I had some coffee, and Libby and Betsy got some beer and made coffee with some whiskey.  Then we headed out to the East Village, where Betsy was meeting her ex-fiance, i think for the first time since he's been her ex-fiance.  It's weird enough to be old enough that my friends are getting married, but in some way it's even weirder to be old enough that people you know have ex-fiances.  Anyway, long story short, the restauarant was, in general, pretty fucking unpleasant. The food itself was good.  But everything else was terrible enough to make me swear off Indian restaurants for the foreseable future.  Long story long-  First of all, the place was lit with these terrible red lights, and endless dangling light-up chili peppers. and the walls were covered with these weird reflective red sheets, like something you might've stuck on your bike when you were six.  Then, it was so fucking stuffy in there, and just a little warm. So they had the cieling fan on like 5000 rpm.  So it didn't make the heat situation any better. It just started giving me windburn.  At one point, Jen excused herself to the bathroom and yarfed.  I told her she shouldn't have let those strange dogs touch kiss her on the lips.  Disgusting. there were like 15 dogs at the picnic. I didn't even touch one. Who knows where they've been. I don't even like shaking hands with people. You think I'm going to touch some stranger's strange dog, then eat and stick my hand in my mouth or eye or ear or bellybutton? Uh uh.  I did feel guilty about bringing this up, especially after the second time she through up, at a nice little bar on 3rd street called the Edge.  Jen was kind enough, however, to corroborate a story I'm fond of telling about how we met.  I'm still not comfortable with the "online" answer. that is to say, I'm not comfortable with the truth.  So when people ask how we know eachother or how we met, I usually just say "Oh, I used to live in DC."  Which isn't a lie.  I just never met Jen while I lived in DC.  This guy Matt who we were out with wasn't satisfied with that though, so i got to use my story that I forgot to use on Libby the first time we met, which was that we met at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in DC, under the Spirit of St. Louis, and struck up a conversation about our favorite trans-Atlantic flights.  I'm glad Jen went along with the story, but at the same time I felt a little guilty lying to a seemingly friendly stranger.

    Anyhow, after a few drinks at the Edge, and a few rounds of "I hate feeling like shit," and "Why do we do this to ourselves?" Jen just had to go.  Which I didn't mind at all, since I wasn't feeling too ship-shape myself.  No more Indian restaurants.  I felt bad about leaving though, since at that point Jed and Matt had just arrived in Manhattan. I'd asked them if they wanted to meet us out, so they sort of came into the city because of me. So I felt pretty bad about telling that them I was going to take Jen back. I suppose I could've just given Jen my keys and put her in car, but that seemed like a dick-ish thing to do.  Anyway, I was sort of nauseated so Jen, Jed, and I piled into a cab and came back to Brooklyn.  Since Jen was all pooped and vomitous, I gave her my bed and I slept on the futon.  It's the first time in the two years I've owned it that I've ever slept on that thing. I've never even taken a nap on it.  By contrast, I think Jed logs more unconscious hours on the futon than on his bed.  But it was pretty comfortable.  After all the troops bedded down for the night, I stayed up till about 4 am watching A Clockwork Orange.  I'd never seen the whole movie before. I'd seen the beginng and middle parts a dozen times, but never the end. So I resolved to watch the whole thing this time.  And I was satisfied with the ending.  Anyway, I had all sorts of ultraviolent dreams last night. But it was more along the line of vigilantism.  I saw some guy getting beat up, at a baseball game I think, so naturally there were metal baseball bats everywhere, so I picked one up and started beating up the other guys.  With the slim, handle side of the bat, not the meaty part. I didn't want to do any real damage.  Even compassionate in my dreams.  Anyway, again I woke up much earlier than I'd hoped. Jen, having for all intents not eaten all day, was super hungry, so I showered and we went down to the Purity Diner. I'd had a hankering for waffles for a few days, so I got a big ol waffle and bacon.  I buttered the bacon, something I haven't done in years. and it was oh so good. But by the time I'd taken a few bites of Jen's scrambled eggs with cheese, I really wanted to puke.  But I managed to hold it back.  Jen found some nice items of clothing on the walk back here.  People do that a lot here, instead of just throwing things out. They just leave them in a box by the stoop, and anyone is free to take what they want.  Anyway, an hour or two later, Betsy arrived. By now it was really cold and raining.  She relaxed on the couch for a while and drank tea, while Jen quickly got addicted to Snood on my computer.  It's an epidemic. My mom is now also addicted to Snood. And the worst part about Jen wanting to play Snood was that I couldn't play while she was playing.  And then they left to catch the 5:15 bus at Port Authority.  Overall, a pleasant visit.  it was certainly interesting.  I don't have any female friends like Jen at all.  So it's interesting to hang out with her and her friends.  Though at times, it's a bit weird.  And sort of emasculating in a way.  I'm glad she came up though.  But for some reason, everytime she's here, she brings really shitty weather with her. Today was the worst day I can remember. Just cold and drizzly all day.  It's gone from air-conditioner weather to space heater weather in a week.  It's nutty.  I was supposed to go to Staten Island today with a bunch of people from my Parks job, but cancelled on that.  I knew last night there was no way I'd get  my ass to the ferry by noon.  And I was much happier standing behind Jen and telling her how to play snood than standing in the cold rain on a boat going to the least of New York's five boroughs.

    On a trivial note, I saw a new bug last night.  It'd been a while since I'd actually seen a new kind of bug that I've never seen before.  Do you notice things like that?  I didn't really until I saw this spider last night. It was postively horrifiying. Usually I don't like to kill spiders, but this thing was just terrifiying. It was about the size of the old big dollar coins, and blood red but sort of translucent. I've never seen anything like it.  In a minute, I'll go online and look for pcictures of it, even though I don't want to because I'm just going to lie in bed and imagine hundreds of them in my room. Clumsy spiders, that fall off the ceiling. Probably poisonous too.  Anyway, lucky for me the spider was on a newspaper, so i just flushed it. I wasn't sure how fast it could move, so I had to be quick. I'm quick.

    Well, after twenty minutes of looking at and reading about spiders, I've got a serious case of the willies. Great. And I still haven't identified the one I saw.  Now I'll try to sleep.

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