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varieties of real world Tetris and meta-Tetris
Sunday, October 13 2002
The rain slowly wound down to a few spitting drops this morning as I walked Sally in the Vale of Cashmere. Interestingly, I came upon an unexpectedly large number of cruising gay men while I was there. Usually they're not out in force until the afternoon, even on sunny days, but I guess they'd been putting off their cruising for several days while the rain fell, and now that it was abating they had to hit the woods and make up for lost time.
I continued cleaning the truck's floor mats today, not having realized how much sand they still contained. I noticed something interesting as I did this. The driver's side mat was worn much more severely than the passenger's side mat. In one place on the driver's mat, a hole had actually been worn all the way through, whereas the passenger's side mat didn't appear to be worn at all. To me, this indicated that the truck had almost entirely been driven without passengers. This seemed to imply loneliness on the part of its former owner, not unexpected given his unattractiveness and transparent misogyny. This led me to wonder if perhaps relative wear on floor mats could be used by forensic scientists to gauge the objective "loner status" of any particular investigative subject.
The closing for the house in Hurley is on Tuesday, and the plan is to leave for upstate the night before with our vehicles as heavily-laden with possessions as possible. This meant that I spent the afternoon figuring out how much stuff would fit in the bed of my truck, doing a sort of three dimensional application of skills developed playing Tetris. In a kind of meta-Tetris, I was also juggling other tasks at the same time: fixing water damage under one of the apartment's radiators and then making a last-minute computer-fixing house call (the carpentry was itself a variety of Tetris, albeit the kind where you are allowed to sand, saw, and chisel the pieces as they fall).
In the evening, Gretchen and I went over to Ray and Nancy's house for a dinner prepared by Ray. Also in attendance was Nancy's sister Linda, Linda's boyfriend Adam, and that pathologically-single swing-dancing chick Amy. Over wine and pesto-flavored pasta, the conversation quickly turned to the singleness of some of our friends, many of whom (being from different groups), do not know each other. It was natural, then, for us to propose various matches between them. Gretchen, who is a particularly enthusiastic matchmaker, took the lead, making the necessary phone calls to hook up David the Rabbi with a single Jewish girl whom Ray and Nancy knew. (David only dates Jewish girls; indeed, he admits to having very few non-Jewish friends.) From amongst Ray and Nancy's single male friends, a match was also found for Mary Purdy, who recently broke up "for good" with her boyfriend John.
Later on, Ray was giving away shirts that he no longer wanted, and I decided to take a couple featuring narrow horizontal stripes. There were a few shirts that nobody wanted, so Ray put a black one on his big black Labrador mutt Suzy, and I put a white one on Sally. Cavorting around and wagging their tails dressed in their shirts, the dogs looked utterly ridiculous. We were laughing so hard that we felt a little guilty about the fun we were having at their expense. Then, as if to kick things up a notch, Sally climbed up on Suzy's back and started humping.
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