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ugly runs deep in Paramus, New Jersey
Saturday, March 10 2018
Late this morning, Gretchen drove into Uptown to meet with our friend Chrissy, the one with the beautiful Victoran house. Recently her life has completely fallen apart after her husband impulsively flew off to North Carolina to be with some other woman, and Gretchen wanted to see Chrissy and give her some things before she (Chrissy) set off on the road with Chongo the Wonder Dog for the next month or so to see the country and try to get some control back over her own life. Meanwhile, I made the usual coffee (decaf this time, since Gretchen has been having trouble sleeping) and crumpets. But Gretchen was gone so long that things were getting cold by the time she returned. When she returned, I'd been dicking around with a heavily-branded Facebook camera app that attempts (like SnapChat) to put virtual objects in three dimensional space. One of these was a robin-sized velociraptor that menaced me for a time from the kitchen compost bowl.
By this afternoon, Gretchen and I were feeling much recovered from our Janet-related mourning, and so Gretchen hatched a plan for another possible outing. Ongoing breakage in our kitchen has led to too few salad plates for us to entertain guests, and, after much research, Gretchen had found suitable replacements at Crate & Barrel. Visiting the nearest Crate & Barrel would require a drive to Paramus, New Jersey (that especially hideous part of that hideous state that the Adirondack Trailways goes through on its way to Port Authority). Normally Paramus is something one drives through and never a destination, though we occasionally stop at the Trader Joes located along Route 17. To get there would require more than an hour of driving and push aside anything else I'd had plans of doing today. But for whatever reason, I was actually up for the adventure, especially since it would allow us to dine at some completely random new place. So Gretchen immediately began researching the vegan dining possibilities.
For the past few days, I've had a sore spot in the top left of the back of my mouth, about a half inch towards the center of my mouth's dome from the left top wisdom tooth (near a small duct that might be one of the fovea palatinae). Today it started feeling a bit like a nascent sore throat, and I felt a bit run-down and that I was on the verge of producing copious amounts nasal snot, as one does when one has the common cold. I almost never get colds any more, but there's no reason to think I am impervious to them. This feeling had me craving spicy Indian food. I suspect that, more than veganism, increased intake of spicy foods is the reason for my avoidance of most infectious respiratory diseases, since it is harder for viruses to fight their way up stream against the increased nasal runniness that I get when I eat peppery food. I should also mention that my ass was causing me a certain kind of familiar trouble, requiring hydrocortisone oinment after a particularly caustic visit to the toilet.
A little over an hour later, we were at the Crate & Barrel, having made the necessary left across Route 17 the New Jersey way, that is, beginning with a right followed by about a mile of additional and not-especially-intuitive driving. (Before Google Maps, this was essentially impossible; I've written in the past about the frustration of getting lost in New Jersey just trying to get to something visible across a Jersey barrier.)
The sales force is a bit too helpful in a Crate & Barrel. But once we found the dish section and figured out what we wanted (salad dishes that had been slightly mangled to keep them from looking like robot-stamped perfection), there was a very helpful queeny guy to get us what we needed. Since we have such a problem with breakage and mismatched sets from different phases of our life, we decided to get 15 salad plates, all identical in shape but in three different colors (goldenrod, robin's egg blue, and a dark grey). The plan is to keep some back in the back to replace plates when they break or get too badly chipped. While there, we also got a couple large metal plates (made of galvanized steel) for use as injera plates or frying pan covers. We also looked at other kitchen equipment to see if there had been some invention that we didn't know we needed. But no impulse buys spoke to us.
By now, I was feeling a bit worse, like perhaps my cold was coming on fast. I'd driven us down to Paramus, and now it was Gretchen's job to drive us to dinner, which would be at an Indian restaurant named Mantra. Getting there required a series of jags through the neighborhoods beyond the nationwide franchises and Jersey barriers of Route 17. We passed through amazingly ugly neighborhoods, featuring mismatched oversized houses with poorly-scaled details (such as two-story columns holding up a high pediment over a uselessly-shallow front porch). These unfortunate design decisions looked to be either those of the nouveau riche or people from countries with very different tastes and cultures. At one point I noticed a synagogue with Korean writing on the sign in front of it; perhaps that was a clue.
Mantra was located in an aging mall next to what appeared to be an empty space that had once housed one of the mall's anchor stores. The place had just opened before we arrived, so at first we had the nearly undivided attention of our waitress. The soup was partially constructed in our bowl right in front of us, and same with the chaat (though the waitress jokingly said that she would do it some feet away so things wouldn't be awkward). We also ordered fancy drinks. My first was a Goan martini and then later I had a "tamarind margarita." For entrees we had the mushroom saag and a tandori tofu. Back when I used to eat chicken, I never liked tandori chicken. But the tandori tofu was excellent and unusual. Unfortunately, there must've been some screwup in the kitchen because that tandori tofu took a terribly long time to come to our table. One of the waitstaff tried to explain it away to Gretchen with an obvious lie, but our waitress owned up to it being a fuckup and gave us her employee discount. By the time we left, the big dining room was absolutely full and there were people waiting for our table. While most of the diners were caucasians like ourselves, there were a fair number of actual Indian diners too, suggesting the place has real respect among people familiar with Indian cuisine.
Gretchen had also wanted to see a movie, but the times meant we would have to wait around in Paramus. A better idea was to drive back to Kingston, which would get us there in time to catch the 8:30 viewing of Black Panther. Gretchen had already seen (and loved) Black Panther and I wanted to see it to, more as a cultural experience than anything else. I had reservations about it being a superhero movie given that I have no interest in superheroes or the comic books they come from. But Gretchen assured me it worked as a movie. So there we were at the cineplex at the (also dying) Hudson Valley Mall watching the tale of Wakanda, the futuristic African country hidden somehow behind a high-tech invisibility cloak. There was a lot about Black Panther that was innovative and positive. It was great to see a fictional society where women kick as much ass as men and where a white guy is not going to be the one who fixes anything. That said, Black Panther was tiresome for me. The endless stylized combat, particularly between the "good" Black Panther and the bad one (an Americanized Wakandan named "Killmonger") was too much like watching somebody else playing a video game (and not even on a computer with an especially good frame rate). The violence had been completely stripped of gore and consequence, probably so the movie could be marketed to children. And, in keeping with what must've been the initial target demographic, there was essentially no sexual content whatsoever. It was missing precisely the things I expected a superhero movie to be missing, and it confirmed in my mind my aversion to the genre. Perhaps Black Panther is doing good in the world, but I should've just stuck with reading a synopsis of it on the web.
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