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rainy-day dog boredom
Sunday, May 12 2002Today was a rainy day of teevee watching. Rainy days make people and their pets restless and easily-bored in ways that sunny days don't, even if one's habit is to spend sunny days indoors. This is something that Karen Carpenter touched upon in the famous pop song "Rainy Days and Mondays" (by Paul Williams and Roger Nichols). The worst rhyme in that song is "town" with "clown," which reminds me of the worst rhyme in the Elton John song "Don't Go Breaking My Heart," where "down" is rhymed with "clown." These offences are mild in comparison to the routine rhyming of "fire" with "desire" in songs sung by modern boy bands.
Gretchen, Nancy, Ray, and I had dinner together in the more restaurant-like half of La Taqueria (on Park Slope's 7th Avenue). We'd never eaten there before and it was worth if only for the fact that we weren't under as much pressure when giving the waitress our orders (as opposed to rehearsing and clearly shouting instructions to the overworked burrito assemblers, the physics of whose fast-moving hands can only be explained using quantum physics).
The artwork in the sit-down dining room makes for unusual restaurant scenery; a Goodyear Blimp floats above hyper-hued social-realist peasants in one while Aztec statues wriggle in muted-palette tromp d'oeil reliefs in another. The servings in this section of the restaurant are noticeably larger than in the cafeteria-style part; at the end of the meal I had to carry half of my burrito home with me.
I found that, with their regular triangular fluting, the salt and pepper shakers meshed together like conical gears in some sort of 19th Century factory equipment. I ran a plastic straw between them and it emerged with a pattern of regular creases. Later I melted the ends and middle of the straw in a candle flame. These are typical of the mini-experiments I perform after I finish eating in a restaurant.
Nancy had dropped her and Ray's dog Suzy off at our house, and in their boredom (and in our absence), Suzy and Sally had succeeded in devouring half of a huge rawhide bone which had remained intact since Sally's birthday on April 9th. This had taken them only an hour, and should give some sense of the depths of their rainy-day boredom.
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