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Vyvanse & marijuana-fueled conversations
Monday, July 4 2016
The boyfriend of Susan the German Translator went for a run this morning up and down Dug Hill Road, the way some city people do when they come to visit. Such people never want to run on forest trails. They want asphalt and the occasional reassuring whoosh of a passing car. They also do a lot of stretching. There's probably a sound medical reason for such stretching, though the only stretching I have ever done has been the sort one does reflexively, usually after waking up in the morning. Meanwhile Gretchen and Susan walked the dogs in the forest. Later we ate a light breakfast of muffins, toast, and coffee out on the deck. Towards the end of that experience, I repotted a number of plants out there, including a dwarf sunflower Sarah the Vegan had given us to help us remember Eleanor by. (It wasn't working; that sunflower didn't remind me of Eleanor in the slightest.)
Susan and Richard left a little after noon, and I took a 50 milligram dose of Vyvanse in hopes of getting some non-dayjob computer work done. I did a little for my old Los Angeles-based clients, the ones who paid me so irregularly that I was forced to get a fulltime job.
At 3pm, the plan was to go over to Eva & Sandor's place for another of their barbecues. We'd wanted to bring Neville as well, but, yet again, the dogs happened to be on an adventure in the forest at the time. So we went to the party dog-free and were the first to arrive. As always, there ended up being a ridiculous bounty of food. There was a tub full of beer bottles, though a lot of it was from the Red Hook brewery, which has few quality brews (their IPA is particularly terrible). At some point I decided to drive home and get the dogs, a much more substantial round trip than the one from Ray & Nancy's house. I stopped on the way home at the Hurley Ridge Market (which was open despite it being July 4th) so I could get myself some beers to drive with (in this case Lagunitas Little Sumpin' Sumpin').
[REDACTED]
I brought both dogs to Eva & Sandor's place with the understanding that they'd mostly be outdoors. There happened to be a bit of a stinging insect crisis underway in the back of the house where we were eating our barbecue. It turned out that there was a paper wasp nest inside the bluestone wall, and something had agitated the wasps, causing them to sting Sandor and someone else. It wasn't long before Ramona was stung too. Normally paper wasps are docile and can be safely ignored, so it was strange that they were being so hostile. (Such behavior would've been more normal from a Yellow Jacket hornet, a species that might also nest in a bluestone wall.)
I had a number of good Vyvanse & marijuana-fueled conversations with various others at the party including Kurt, a guy with a German accent who has some sort of animal-rescue farm up near Catskill. He and I talked building construction techniques and alternative aggregates for use in concrete. Later I talked to Eva & Sandor's plumber, who mostly just works for the rich and famous of Woodstock. I talked solar energy and plumbing with him, and at some point he made the claim that he never solders pipe any more.
Gretchen and I were the last to leave the party. My last drink there was a Redhook porter, which didn't taste anything like a porter to me.
Back at the house, it wasn't long before something very odd happened. Some mid-sized bird with a light-colored belly and perhaps a greyish back began repeatedly attacking the laboratory windows. In the past I've seen birds do this, but it was in the daytime when the darkness inside a building made the windows into mirrors and the bird thought it was attacking another bird. In this case, with the laboratory all lit up, the bird wouldn't have seen a reflection. Was it desperately trying to escape something like an owl? I'll never know.
The song I've been listening to over & over of late is "Lesser Demons" by a band called Male Gaze. A lot of what they do sounds like retro-Joy-Division/Interpol type material. But the guitars are warmer, more insistent, and make for billowy walls of sound with often-delightful dissonance.
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