It's never going to be warm again. Eleven days from to the spring equinox, and it's 21 degrees when I left my Brooklyn apartment this morning. Over the next ten days, it's only supposed to break 50 degrees once, and that's on the 16th, when it will supposedly be a balmy 51 degrees. I hate this. It's so unpleasant.
It was too cold this weekend to enjoy much. Friday night, had a little dinner at a french place in Ft. Greene. It was called A Table, and was billed as a relatively simple dining experience, with long wooden tables a la a cafeteria or dining hall. Fine by me. It also was supposed to be bare-bones french cuisine at a modest price, but ended up costing me and Miss Charming Melodee a hefty hunka change. I've eaten far better meals for far cheaper. Though I will say, the french sure do know how to cook a steak. There are few things I enjoy more than chewing on a mouthful of semi-bloody steak, followed by a generous amount of red wine. Though all in all, it was a very pleasant night. After a while it was just nice to sit there and drink wine and talk. I've been surprised, actually, at how much we still have to talk about. New subjects and stories come up all the time, which is pretty remarkable given the amount of time we spend together. Anyway, I wanted to check out the neighborhood a bit, as a prospective place to move, but it was too damn cold. I saw MCM's old apt. which looked nice from the outside, but besides that little else could be done and we got the hell out of there.
On Saturday night, I met up with Jed and Jen in the West Village. On the way there, I made the dreaded G train to J-M-Z transfer for the second week in a row. After boarding the train, I felt particularly lucky to be in a car with almost no one else in it, so I thought I could sit for the ride into Manhattan. Before boarding, I noticed a homeless man lying back on one of the bench seats, scratching his leg. At first I thought he was scratching at a dirty white sock, but it turned out to be his dirty white leg. This was particularly disturbing since the man was black. Just scratching away at his shingley, cracking white skin. So then I notice everyone on the train's at the opposite side from this guy, and the few people there have their scarfs or shirts or sleeves over their faces. So I took a whiff, and even though I was sick and totally stuffed up I got a good sampling of the odor this gut was producing, which was pretty much what I would imagine what it would smell like if one were to do nothing but crap one's pants for three straight days. So everyone boarding the train got with the program pretty quickly, and made a beeline for the door to the next train car, which was, not surprisingly, quite full.
Finally found Jen and Jed on Bleeker Street. Jen was in search of records, which ended up being fruitless. We did, however, stop at Peanut Butter and Co., the peanut butter sandwich restaurant on Sullivan St. That ended up being quite fruit-full, in the form of a pb&j. ha. Then we took the crowded-as-a-muthfucka A train uptown. It was a digusting sea of humanity. There was a guy next to jed who insisted on monopolizing the pole so no one else could grab it. He was an old punk rocker, or trying to be, with craters all over his face, black sunglasses, and poofy/spikey dyed black hair. Jen described him as, I think, a Lou Reed/ Mick Jagger love child. I would also throw in a generous amount of Iggy Pop. Anyway, he was singing aloud to his music, the Rolling Stones' "Miss You," I think Jen said. Anyway, there was poor subway etiquette all around, and felt obligated to ram into the unconscientious assholes standing by the door who wouldn't get off the train to let other people off.
Anyway, the reason for our midtown jaunt was to catch Matt's improv group. This was the first of the performance I've been to of his. The theatre space was above a peep show place, so that added a nice surreal effect to the evening. But nothing could match the jaw-dropping absurdity that was the terribleness of the second group to perform. When they first came out, one of them shouted "This is our first-performance ever! woo!" And we're thinking fucking great. Later, most people said she was easily the best of the group, but I thought that was like saying the Washington Generals are the best team the Globetrotters play. It felt like this was their first performance because they had all just met outside and decided to put on a show. Right now, I can think of few non-life-threatening things worse than bad improv comedy. I would rather sit through just about anything else. I have no idea how long they were on, but it was too long. I was sure at one point that it was only actually five minutes, and that the sheer awkwardness/embarrassment/humorlessness of it all was making it seem ten times as long. For a second I thought that Matt's group, who went on last, had paid these people to come out and humiliate themselves to make them look better.
Matt's group was easily the best of the three. And I'm not just saying that. Easily the most cohesive of the groups. The first group had its moments, but there were also some awkward silences. They did hot a pretty hot mama though, which carried them a bit further. I was pretty annoyed that I had to fork over then bucks for that second group though.On Sunday, I stayed in bed until past one I think. Miss CM managed to run several errand in Manhattan and return to Brooklyn before I was even awake. I'd had several bad dreams, and when that's the case I usually like to go to sleep in an attempt to dream better dreams and thus purge my subconscious of any further unpleasantness. Though this has yet to work. However, we did have a very pleasant brunch at Enid's, down Manhattan Ave. This was the first brunch I'd had there, but I'd long heard good things about it. The food wasn't great, though pleasant, but the setting was very nice. A bright, sunny day, coffee, french toast, bacon, and Palace Music's Viva Last Blues on the stereo. I wish more indie-rock bars had weekend brunches.
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