|
|
|
upstate with Adderall
Tuesday, August 5 2003
John, my housemate during my Los Angeles phase, drove in from Vermont this morning for a visit. As usual for John, he'd been repeatedly pushing back the time of his arrival (starting from some time yesterday). Since I'd last seen him some weeks ago, he'd sold his Saab and bought a white 1997 VW Golf, a car he is already interested in selling.
It was John's vacation, and he insisted that it be suitably vacationlike. We immediately commenced drinking beer and popping blue generic Adderall attention deficit disorder medication.
[REDACTED]
This afternoon John and I went with Gretchen to the C@tskill Animal S@nctuary to help her drop off the cargo of musty tag sale items taking up room in our vehicles. We brought both dogs along, though Eleanor wasn't especially well-behaved with respect to Rambo the Enormous Sheep.
[REDACTED]
Over in Kingston, the three of us had a light lunch at La Pupuseria, a place that has quickly become a mandatory destination for our out-of-town guests. As usual, we were the only customers there.
After that I showed John P & T Surplus in the Rondout. As usual, the things available there were a mix of the familiar supplies that no customers ever deplete alongside the ephermera that make visiting the place such a potentially exciting experience. Today's ephermera included cheap $5 imported Chinese machetes, the kind used by the Viet Kong to hack their way through the jungle. I'd tried to find a machete at Lowes without success, so I bought one without hesitation and commenced to testing it on the vegetation outside. Meanwhile John had noted the arrival of an attractive young woman in a floral sundress. Her presence rekindled his interest in P & T long enough for him to discover that she was planning for some sort of hippie-dippie Eurorail vacation, information which caused his attention to shift elsewhere.
Back at the house, Gretchen was amazed to discover how effortlessly an Eleanor Roosevelt biography was holding her attention. Like us, she'd taken some recreational Adderall and was discovering that a brain in a frying pan is sometimes more useful than one still imprisoned within its shell.
The three of us eventually regrouped in our house's green-carpeted main floor office. There we talked for some time about John's various business plans. One was an idea for becoming a go-between for colleges and prospective students and another was a generalized information system for, well, pyramid schemes. The details of these plans were complex and would have been hard to keep straight in a normal mind, but our attentions were keenly focused, and paying attention was more of a pleasure than an ordeal.
Our appetites had been ruined by the Adderall, but we went out to the Hurley Mountain Inn anyway on the chance of running into our friend Toni. Toni is sixty some years old, but in most other respects he has a lot in common with John. He wasn't at the Hurley Mountain Inn when we first arrived, so Gretchen went to his house (a few blocks away) and left a note on his door. Eventually he showed up, as he always does on Tuesday nights, even ones such as tonight when it's too rainy to play tennis with his buddies.
Over a dinner comprised entirely of beers, John and Toni bonded on such subjects as nookie, noci, and fly fishing.
Back at the house, Gretchen was absorbed in a WNBA game when John's hunger finally hit him. So I suggested we drive to Woodstock to see if we could scare up anything to eat. It had been raining all day, and Dug Hill Road had become treacherous with fog. This made for slow going, even though John was doing the driving. When we finally got to Woodstock, everything was closed except for the bar Legends and a few gas stations. So our dinner consisted of gas station food, eaten road-trip style out in the muggy night. On the way back home John actually managed to make himself motion-sick (to the point of puking) from his own driving, something I've been told is impossible.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?030805 feedback
previous | next |
