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Get Out again
Friday, March 31 2017
It was a dreary, raining morning, so Gretchen decided it should be a decaf morning as well. For those who don't know, decaf is an indication of festiveness one notch up from normal. The next notch up beyond that is actual coffee, the kind containing caffeine. Easy, cowboy! Not this morning. Gretchen had made plans to make a run to the dump this morning, and I hoped those plans were now canceled due to the rain. Silly me! After we were done drinking the coffee, she started dragging stuff out to the car in the rain. So I pitched in, boxing up the chaos of old circuit boards and metal scraps (most of it parts of old hard drives and failed and semi-failed computer motherboards) in the garage. We managed to fill both of our cars, and even got rid of the old ripped-up mosquito tent (which I tied to the roof of the Subaru). Once at the Hurley transfer station, I parked next to the big dumpster where all the scrap metal goes, since I had a lot of that. Next I dumped all the circuit boards and old CRT-based Sony monitor into the smaller hopper marked "electronics." All that stuff can get dumped off at the transfer station for free. Meanwhile the dogs were roaming around and getting in trouble (as usual) despite the rain.
Back at the house, I took advantage of all the water running off the roof to clean out several of the recycling cans and also a couple buckets from the laboratory that I'd used as electroplating tubs. They'd had a good half inch sludge layer of suspicious powders and salt that I'd bagged up and put in the trash. As for what remained, the solution to the pollution (such as it was) was dilution.
After a fairly uneventful (but, by the standards of this week, productive) day, Gretchen and I headed off to the Hudson Valley Mall to watch Get Out a second time. Also joining us were Jeff & Alana, Sarah the Vegan, and Nancy (with the exception of Nancy, none of the others had seen it). I'd brought a partially-full glass flask of gin to add to the festivities of the evening.
With a movie with so many hinted-at plot points that are gradually revealed, watching it again is full of delicious "oh, that's what he's referring to" moments. For example, at the party where our hero (the black protagonist) is introduced to all the friends of his white girlfriend's family, the wordless facial expressions made by the girlfriend have much more meaning, particularly when it appears she is trying to shut down the excitement of a flirty woman (and her husband, who happens to be in a wheelchair and receiving oxygen) as they check out the protagonist. There's also a scene where the one black man at the party (other than the protagonist) is seen in the distance talking to friends. He raises his hands and spins around, an act that no longer means what it seemed to the first time we'd seen the movie.
After the movie, the six of us stood in the theatre hallway in front of the women's room discussing Get Out, synthesizing other cultural references both direct (a recent Terry Gross interview of Jordan Peele) and the plots of other movies (Being John Malkovich and The Stepford Wives).
Eventually I grew tired of standing there in the hallway, so I suggested we go somewhere else, perhaps a bar or a place where one can get food. We couldn't think of any good place to go nearby until I suggested Ninety Nine Restaurant, that chain bar in front of Home Depot less 2000 feet away. Gretchen and Sarah didn't want to go, but Nancy said she'd drive me home. That was how the four of us (Jeff, Alana, Nancy, and me) ended up at the bar in 99. I'd only been there once before, while waiting endlessly for a car to be worked on at Mavis Discount Tire (a place we no longer patronize). The atmosphere is about what you would expect for a chain pub out on the motor mile. It's full of big screens showing teams of people (men mostly) engaged in sport, while (at least on this Friday night) lots of overweight 20 and 30 somethings (nearly all of them white) tuck into big sandwiches and sip light beer. Sports jerseys and sweat pants are appropriate attire. We all ordered various beers (a Rebel IPA for me, thank you) and found that at Ninety Nine, one gets two for the price of one (at least at this hour, which was something like 10:00pm). At the kind of bars we normally go to, there is nothing like that. Concerned that she would have to drive, Nancy only ordered fries. And they would've been good fries too, except I think we happened to get them in a phase of the evening when the deep fryer could've used an oil change. We had a merry time there at the bar, and it didn't much matter that the place had an inherently low-information vibe. When Alana said she could see herself coming back here, I agreed, saying, "we bring our own vibe."
Out in the parking lot, the rain that had been falling on and off all day had now turned into little balls of ice. They weren't sticking, but it was the sort of thing that makes Nancy nervous (she is probably the biggest worrier in our social group, and that takes some doing). But she soldiered on, driving us back to Hurley and then up Dug Hill Road. As we climbed in elevation, the little balls seemed to be sticking to the roadway more and more, and by the time we got to my driveway at the top, the road was a sheet of white. But it was thin, and Nancy's Subaru tires were able to break through and find purchase. She wondered if she should keep going up Dug Hill Road and go home the long way, but I convinced her that if she took it slow, she'd be just fine going down the hill. And indeed she was (as revealed by an email she sent some time later).
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