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golden age of television
Sunday, April 21 2013
Last night I had an excellent night of sleep because of my decision to sleep in the greenhouse upstairs
[REDACTED]. It had been chilly in there when I went to bed, so I'd had to run the heater, and it was still running when I woke up late this morning in that sun-drenched space. The great thing about the greenhouse upstairs is that if you sleep there, there is a good chance no cats or dogs will join you and either wake you up with their neediness or restrict your ability to get comfortable. Stripey is the only cat who seems to know how to get into the greenhouse through its pet door, but if he doesn't see me leave the house, he won't follow me down there. As for the dogs, they're even less likely to join me.
It was a chilly morning, so to get the living room up to a reasonable temperature for Sunday morning coffee, I stoked a raging cardboard fire. Our houseguest Joseph (who actually prefers to be called Joe) had decided to stay here this weekend, and eventually he took a walk in the nearby forest, the first time he'd done that since moving into our basement.
Despite the sun, it was too cold to lie around outside, so Gretchen spent some hours down in the greenhouse. At this time of year, the daytime environment down there is actually less mentally-restorative than it is in the short days of winter, when the sun hangs low in the south. In late April, the sun is so high that it can only illuminate the wide ledge of the south-facing glass, which (in the upstairs) stands vertically plumb. So, while the sun can easily heat the greenhouse upstairs against the diminished outdoor chill of springtime, its rays cannot reach the futon where, in earlier months, we like to bask in them.
This evening Gretchen and I drove up to Palinville (northwest of Saugerties) to attend a 50th birthday party for our friend Amy (whom we know via the New York vegan/animal rights scene). The party was being held at the weekend retreat (an actual multi-generational compound) belonging to her friends. Not many people came to tonight's event, but most of them were people I know well: Jenny & Doug, Chris & Kirsty, and a few others I know from occasional parties in Willow. There were also some people I had never met who turned out to be either entertaining or interesting. I often get bored when the scene is too rich with animal rights people, but this was more of hard-partying group, so I ended up having a good time. At one point I got in a discussion with Kirsty and a few others about television. Kirsty was going on and on about all the shows she likes to watch, concluding that she wasn't embarrassed to admit how much she liked to watch television. I agreed, saying, "we're living through a golden age of teevee." It's true; compare what we have now to what existed in the 1990s. In another conversation, Jenny was talking about how much she was enjoying her recent discovery of transcendental meditation. Evidently she'd joined a TM group which extracts a one-time fee from initiates on a sliding scale. She'd had to pay $1000. "Compared to Scientology, that's cheap!" I exclaimed.
As for food, the party had been catered by New World Home Cooking and featured their famous seitan wings as well as seitan "parmesan." Some strong marijuana (belated 4-20!) had initially dulled my appetite, but after the munchies kicked in, I found myself using my bare hands to stuff my face with that seitan parmesan even though it had gone quite cold.
I was sober enough to drive us home after the party, and once at my computer, I immediately began slurping episode 4 of Game of Thrones via Bittorrent. And then I watched it. By this point I was drinking booze from the laboratory liquor cabinet. It was a great episode, perhaps the greatest. Now for the spoilers, motherfuckers. The big scene, or course, came when Danny (the albino queen of dragons) traded the biggest of her three dragons for an 8000-man army of castrated slaves. Then, moments later, she had her new army kill all the slave masters and sicked her dragon on its new master. (In the cite>Game of Thrones universe, dragons are mostly formidable for the flames they shoot from their mouths.)
I tried not to drink quite as much as I had the day before yesterday, but it was hard not to refill my glass. Eventually I went to sleep down in the greenhouse.
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