|
|
|
no furniture even remotely Victorian
Saturday, June 4 2016
As I sat on the toilet at Susan & David's place this morning, I learned that boxing legend Muhammad Ali had died. This would be the inspiration for what I thought was a clever meme I would make later in the day.
I left Susan & David's place relatively early, stopping at Hurley Ridge Market on the way home for a big 64 oz jar of canned grapefruit, two hundred-count boxes of Red Rose tea, and a cup of coffee for the road. Back home, Gretchen had already left to spend the day tabling for the Ethical Choices Program at the Albany Vegfest. I took Ramona and Neville for a walk, though I later learned they'd already had one. The forest is full of those big black Calosoma beetles that scurry across the trail as I approach. They're an exotic predator introduced to control Gypsy Moths, but even in their inflated numbers they are overwhelmed.
Today was the day of the village-wide yardsale in Hurley, and Gretchen wanted me to go with Sarah the Vegan, Nancy, and Kate to look for Victorian furniture suitable for use in the public spaces of that brick mansion we are buying. When I finally reached Nancy, she was already walking around with the other women down near the Hurley library. I poured a boozy drink into my travel mug and drove down to meet them.
We visited a fair number of sales there in the central stone house district of Hurley, but I didn't see anything I wanted to buy, and there was no furniture even remotely Victorian for sale. Perhaps there had been, but it was already afternoon and the sales had been pretty well picked-over.
We all went back to Nancy's place, where Ray was preparing a lunch of oily pasta with asparagus and mushrooms. It was little early in the day for me to have drunk as much booze as I had, and by now the only beverage I really wanted was water, although Ray got me a Miller Lite just because. A lot of my conversation with everyone today was about my new job. At this point I've decided I really like it, particularly in its post-Meerkat incarnation. I have a lot of responsibility, but nobody (not even people on the IT team) really knows what I do all day. I love that in a job. Periodically I show glimmers of brilliance as I build out something recognizable, and then I disappear into the woodwork for days at a time.
Gretchen and I hadn't known how late she'd be getting home tonight, so we'd arranged for me to spend the second night dogsitting at Susan & David's place. I left for that chore a little after Gretchen returned from Albany.
On the way to Susan & David's, I stopped for the second time today at Hurley Ridge Market, this time to buy a vegan Amy's frozen pizza, some hummus, a delicious form of MSG-rich corn chip, and a big (~20 oz) beer (I was actually in the mood for an Imperial Stout, but it's still 2003 in this area with regard to that form of beer, so I had to settle for a big IPA). I was drinking kratom tea in my travel mug, and that buzz dominated my experience tonight. It put me just shy of euphoric as I went through the workmanlike task of downloading the many things Gretchen had requested me to get from Bittorrent. Meanwhile, I watched YouTube clips from a fairly contemporary tour of Justin Hawyward, in which he played mostly golden-age material from the late 60s and early 70s. It was great; nothing had been diminished by time or the fact that he was working with only two other musicians (and without a proper drumset). Disturbingly, though, I heard him tell the same story over and over again at different venues as introductions for different songs. The story was about how, with success, his band (the Moody Blues) started developing internal rivalries and conflicts. It sounded confessional the first time I heard it, but by the third or fourth retelling, I began to worry about the integrity of Hayward's neurons. Big, famous (and wealthy) bands, as they stumble into their dotage, tend to accumulate additional musicians around themselves to lessen their on-stage burdens. I remember being dismayed to see dozens of extra (and unfamiliar) musicians doing most of the work in a post-Roger-Waters performance by "Pink Floyd" in Cleveland in 1987. Similarly, in their old age, the Moody Blues became a hopelessly bloated organization, touring with whole orchestras and even adding a second drummer (presumably because Græm Edge could no longer do it all by himself). So it was great to see Justin Hayward doing his old material with so little assistance. Indeed, the most moving performance that I saw him do tonight was Nights in White Satin on just a twelve string guitar, no synth or mellotron at all. In the past he'd said the song required what Mike Pinder had added with the mellotron, but it's completely solid without it.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160604 feedback
previous | next |
