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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   two meals in New Paltz
Monday, January 2 2017
After getting out of bed at a reasonable hour and feeding all the critters (even crusty old Sylvia), I went to start the woodstove, which was almost room temperature and had no wood remaining from the night before. I thought it would be a good time to remove the ashes. They'd been accumulating since August 3rd. Last year I'd been measuring the amount of wood burned and hoping to develop a correlation between ashes removed and wood burned. But that exercise had only revealed a puzzling fact: there isn't much of a correlation between wood burned and ashes produced. Not unexpectedly, given that it represents nearly half of a heating season, today's cleanout was a big one, producing five gallons of ashes weighing 21 pounds. It contained a number of crusty layers, where ashes had (by some mechanism) bonded together to form a loose crumbly material.

I had the day off and originally the plan was to maybe drive up to Albany for the day. But when Gretchen suggested going to New Paltz instead, I was more enthusiastic, since the prospect of spending two of today's precious daylight hours in a car wasn't really what I had in mind. First, though, we had the drudgery of landlord tasks to attend to. The problematic woman living in the second floor of the Brick Mansion had sent a snotty email unapologetically saying she would only have half her rent for us today, and Gretchen wanted to knock on her door and find out what was up. Then there was another issue of the sort we hadn't fully anticipated. The renters of a crappy house behind the brick mansion had taken to throwing bagels and chicken bones over the fence. And then last week one of them had backed his car into that fence and then driven away, leaving a hole for us to have to deal with.
When we arrived at the Brick Mansion, I went to take some pictures, but it turned out that my fancy new Nikon camera, which had been attached to a charging cable all night, was not charged. (Who designs this shit?) The damage amounted to seven broken pickets and a broken cross-beam, all of it clearly stoved-in from the direction of the miscreant house.
We went to that house and looked at it sitting there in its shabby shade of yellow. Neither of us were eager to knock on its door. So we walked down its driveway to look at the fence from the other side. Nobody was parked in either of the house's two parking spaces, so it seemed nobody was home anyway. Gretchen took a couple more pictures with her phone, and then an old white lady from a house located somehow behind the miscreant house came out on her porch and asked if she could help us. The old lady's house was at the end of the driveway that passed along the broken fence and she evidently shared its right-of-way with the micreants; as she soon explained, her house sits in the middle of the block and that driveway is her only way out. The miscreant house had actually been built in her house's front yard. The old lady explained she and her husband had been living in their house for fifty years and didn't know much about the people in the miscreant house other than that "they're black." That sort of thing is to be expected from an old white person, but it still came as a bit of a shock; we're not used to casual racism delivered without at least some ironic intent.
As we were walking back around the corner to the Brick Mansion, we heard a crazy noise and turned around to see a skinny teenager burst out of the miscreant house sing-shouting loudly to whatever was on his headphones. He didn't seem like the sort of person who could be reasoned with about chicken bones or broken fences, so we chuckled at the absurdity and kept walking. And then we decided not to deal with the tenant in 2 either; now Gretchen was thinking it best to deal with her entirely in writing so there could be a record. As for the miscreant house, Gretchen had decided it made the most sense to deal with whoever owns that house. The realtor who had sold us the Brick Mansion knew the woman who had bought it; she was apparently a Brooklyn resident who'd paid something like $160,000 for it sight-unseen. Over the phone, our realtor suggested we file a police report about the fence damage as part of the hassle of collecting from the miscreant's landlord. Later, when Gretchen called the Kingston police department to perhaps begin that process, the woman on the phone sounded frazzled from all the shit she was dealing with. (Kingston seems like a particularly tricky city to police.) The woman was polite, but she obviously didn't think a report about a broken fence was a high priority, and neither, for that matter, did Gretchen.
Meanwhile, Gretchen had gone to the landlord mailbox to retrieve the rent checks to find that not only had the tenant in 2 paid only half her rent, but the tenant in 1L hadn't paid anything at all. These days Gretchen maintains a uniformly-negative attitude about our decision to buy a multifamily rental property, and today she was particularly so. But, as I pointed out, most of the physical issues with the house are relatively minor. And issues with the tenants probably reflect the hurry we were in to get the house rented. "With a little tuning," I said, "the house could be a lot easier to manage."
With our confrontational chores deferred, I drove us to New Paltz and we went directly to the new vegan café called Commissary there in the heart of the village. It's operated by Lagusta, who has been running a fashionably retro-themed chocolate store in New Paltz for years now. Commissary has the same vibe, with lots of mid-century electric blue. It's a fairly big place with a wildly inefficient use of interior space. Gretchen ordered me a socialist sliding-scale soup special, a breakfast soup that requires several pages of recipe instructions (and several days of stewing and simmering) to properly prepare; we paid the full $6. Additionally, Gretchen ordered a bowl of beans & greens and a loaf of tofu that had been hollowed-out and stuffed with savory greens. She also had a chai tea that was about as flavorful as that sort of thing gets, and I had a damn good cup of coffee. Both were served in cups that appeared to have been commissioned especially for this café. They were bisqueware on the outside and were glazed in that trademark electric blue just as a semi-hidden note near the base.
The most intriguing thing about Commissary is the Mitzvah Wall near the counter. One can purchase a menu item as a "mitzvah" for someone matching a description (either specific or vague) and post it to the wall. And if you think you match a mitzvah description, you can take it down and redeem it for whatever was purchased. An example: To anyone who went to Bonnaroo 4 years in a row! You're Family! A COLD Brew on tap!" The Mitzvah Wall is one of those great ideas that leaves you wishing you'd thought of it first.
Most of the other customers appeared to be female college students, though there was a young man who came in with a friendly tawny-colored pit-mix named Ducky who took an immediate shine to us.


The Mitzvah Wall in Commissary. Click for a wider view featuring a young woman with a non-vegan jacket.

From Commissary, we walked through downtown out in the direction of the Thruway. But we cut left at the street the bus station was on in hopes of randomly dropping in on our old college friend Kristen. (We often talk about doing this when we're in New Paltz, but we never do.) It had been years since we last saw Kristen outside of Facebook, and we didn't even know if she was home. But Gretchen remembered where she lived. As we neared her house, Gretchen got a call from our tenant in 1L. At least she was apologetic about her slowness in paying the rent, and she even offered she'd be paying the $25 late fee. She wasn't excited, however, about the prospect of being being a witness for the damage inflicted on the house's fence; she didn't want to have any trouble with the miscreants.
Kristen drove up as we neared her house and waved us into her house while Gretchen continued talking to our tenant. It turned out that Kristen just happened to be free; her two daughters were off at the movies, and her husband and stepson were painting someone's house. When we finally got to catching up, we soon got stuck in a long tiresome vortex about the ethics of zoos (evidently Kristen has used a discussion of this subject as a teaching tool). I much preferred the wacky stories that define my idea of Kristen and her place as something of a New Paltz institution (for me at least). The best of these stories was the one about the guy who randomly showed up sleeping on their couch not once but twice, insisting he was in the house of a friend. But that friend lives in Kingston! Evidently he'd been unaware of what town he was in.
The best part of our conversation was the part where Kristen detailed what it's like raising a 16 year African kid in America. Racist cops are everywhere, and she told a story of how a little traffic stop involving the teenage children of some of her African friends had resulted in some of them being taken out of their car and patted down for, well, probably marijuana. This might sound like a small thing, but their car had been part of a convoy of many cars coming back from Kingston after a high school football game, and lots of classmates and friends saw the pat-down as they passed, the sort of thing that can be mortifying for a teenager.
It was almost dark as we left Kristen to finally get to her laundry chores. Gretchen and I proceeded to Huckleberry (the newish warm, cozy bar that we like) and went in to get a drink. I had a glass of strong double IPA and Gretchen got some sort of cider beverage. I hadn't had that much food at Commissary, and I was ready for another meal. Everybody was eating burgers and fries, and they looked delicious. So we put in an order for a single veggie burger with fries. But the guy behind the bar kept coming out and telling us about little things in our dish that weren't vegan. Most could be replaced, but when he said the bun had egg in it and did we want to have a lettuce wrap instead, I couldn't compromise my vision that much. "The bun is fine!" I declared. And Gretchen, perhaps taken aback by my approval of something containing egg, agreed. But whatever, the amount of egg in hamburger bun is trivial. They probably contain more rat shit, and I don't want to eat that either. I did not regret this decision in the least; those fries were fucking delicious, as was the burger, which even came with avocado (which Gretchen had to remove from the small part she ate). Gretchen, who has been a bit adrift of late career-wise noted that if Huckleberry served vegan food, it would be the kind of place she'd enjoy working. She likes bars, but not "drunks' bars," which she would find depressing. The key, I suggested, to operating a bar avoided by drunks is fancy drinks, higher prices, and a youngish clientele. And while all the people around us were at least 15 years younger than us, it's not even that Huckleberry seems to be striving for a particularly young ambience; today, for example, the music consisted entirely of alternative rock from the 1990s, as if we'd shown up in that "room" of "San Junipero." It ranged from Pavement to Sonic Youth to Fugazi. There wasn't even any 90s hip-hop in the mix.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?170102

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