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authenticity and grunge
Saturday, July 9 2016
After a leisurely morning with a french press of coffee (have of the grounds were decaf; we'd run out of Zanzibar), I assembled what I needed and drove over to the brick mansion. The biggest item on today's punchlist was the installation of another air conditioner in the attic apartment (#3). Gretchen had bought it yesterday for $75 from a woman in Hurley she'd found on Craigslist, and it was a monster. I got it up to the door at the bottom of the final flight of stairs to the attic apartment. I knocked on that door and then had one of its residents help me get it up that final narrow run of stairs. I soon realized I would need to build something on the roof to rest it on; there was no way it could stick out of the window we intended to place it in without it immediately falling. First though, there was the issue of the bed atop the raised platform in the middle of the room that one of the tenants was using as his bedroom. It needed some slats to keep the bed from collapsing, and I'd brought some with me. Of course, I had to cut these to size. I asked the more taciturn of the tenants if I could just cut them with my powersaw there, and instead of saying, "sure, go ahead!" he said, "It's up to you." I soon interpreted this as a passive way of him saying he'd prefer that I not. In any case, I'd totally forgotten about the fire escape, which was the best place to do the cutting. I went on to make a crude little three-legged stool for the air conditioner to lean on, though the stuff I'd brought to block the rest of the sliding window was insufficient for the task at hand. While I was doing these things, the woman from #2 knocked on the door and came up the stairs wearing only her bathrobe just to tell the boys (the sum of whose ages is probably less than hers) that they could easily remove their doors, thereby making it easier to move in their stuff. That was a little weird.
The woman in #2 was no longer wearing her bathrobe when I showed up to fix her sink, which was both blocked and leaking. I took it apart and hosed it out in the yard, and when I reassembled it, it performed perfectly. That was an easy fix!
I got a plank and some Gorilla Tape at Herzogs and then returned to finish the air conditioning installation.
This evening Gretchen and I returned to Saugerties in the rain and went for a second week in a row to Rock Da Casbah. The rain made it less busy, and there was no live music, though this didn't seem to speed up the service any more. We knew what we liked from the week before, so I just ordered a bowl of chili and that pasta & tempeh dish again. Gretchen also got the pasta & tempeh, but with a salad. The beer selection there isn't great, so I got two different mixed drinks, both of which I rather liked.
I made the mistake of telling Gretchen how often I take stimulants
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and she seemed a bit alarmed by what a drug addict I've become. She wondered if perhaps stimulants had become too much of a crutch for my job and my life. I explained that they really help me with my focus on days when I have complicated debugging or programming tasks, and that they help me almost completely overcome my considerable social anxieties. I pointed out that she has no social anxieties and would never understand how liberating it feels to be able to take a drug and not be troubled by them. I added that she takes Celexa for her depression, and it's sort of the same thing. "But I need Celexa to function," she pointed out. It was a valid point, but to me it seemed that my occasional use of stimulants are to my occasional problems of focus or anxiety as Gretchen's daily ingestion of Celexa is to her debilitating depression.
During our entire meal, the only music that played was early 90s rock (that is: Audioslave, Stone Temple Pilots, Dinosaur Jr., Blind Melon, the Gin Blossoms, and perhaps a few others). Grethen wondered how it was that a band like Stone Temple Pilots can sounds so good their vocals, but any band trying to imitate that sound comes across as phony and terrible. I said that maybe this was because what made grunge unique was raw sincerity, which came as a huge break from the braggadocio of late-80s hair metal. Once you take away that sincerity, you really don't have much left.
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