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drive-time radio
Tuesday, April 23 2019
This morning I didn't take Hurley Avenue to Sawkill, hoping that perhaps all the filming for the Mark Ruffalo television show had wrapped up early. But it hadn't, and I was forced off US 209 into the Sawkill detour. It definitely would've been easier had I done what I'd done yesterday. When I'm in the Subaru, I listen to whatever MP3s are on the SD card that is in the cheap Chinese stereo. But when I'm in the Prius, I listen instead to the radio. Often it's the local pop station, 98.5 the Cat (WCTW). Their morning zoo is the not-terrible Bob & Sheri In the Morning, a nationally-syndicated program, interspersed with Fox New's radio news syndication, local weather, local traffic, and occasional songs from the current playlist (God I hate "Girls Like You" by Maroon 5). The traffic seems targeted to the region between Kingston and Albany, without any reports from US 209 but with reports from the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, the Catskill-Hudson Bridge, the Thruway, and the Taconic Parkway. Since there is almost never any problem with traffic in this region, there's almost never anything interesting in these news reports. I've been deliberately avoiding national news since getting back from Costa Rica to the point where I change the station even when it's just crappy Fox News Radio. But I am interested in local news, which is usually just a list of local crimes, fires, and accidents. The crimes are usually drug-related, though occasionally there's a burglary or a hit-and-run traffic accident. I never used to have any interest in such stories at all and I wonder if my interest in them now is age-related.
I had a fairly relaxing day at work, as nearly all the work that can be done on my Electron app has been done. At noon, just to take advantage of yet another perfect Spring day, I got in the Prius and drove up US 9 north of the main intersection in Red Hook, since I didn't have much of a sense of what is up there. I quickly found a CVS drug store. I've always liked drug stores, since they often have the things that don't fit neatly into the categories of other stores. When I was a pre-teen, for example, I used to spend most of my meager pre-teen income at the People's Drug at the Staunton Plaza (back before it became the Staunton Mall). I would buy things like model aircraft carriers (they came with little airplanes!) and office supplies (compasses and those three-sided rulers!), Kids that age are all animists, and their fertile imaginations can imbue a plastic aircraft carrier and its airplanes with a complete backstory scaled down such that Folly Mills Creek is a major arm of the ocean.
The Red Hook CVS is a little confusing in that it doesn't actually face the street. There's a door in the front, but it opens to a long corridor that takes you to the back of the store, which is its actual front. I walked up and down the aisles getting a sense of what could be bought there, though I didn't really have anything specific I wanted to buy except maybe corn chips. When I found they sold boxes similar to the kind Ahmed Mohamed used to house his infamous clock, I found myself compelled to buy one that had more the shape of a index card box (even if it was a bit overpriced).
On the drive home this afternoon, I was pleased that the filming for that Mark Ruffalo television show had ended early again. I suspect it had been scheduled for these particular two days in late April because they lie within the most beautiful time of the year here in the Hudson Valley. All the trees that produce flowers are flowering, and the leaves are small, light green, and absolutely pristine. Some people prefer the Fall, with its shrinking days and the loud colors of dying leaves set afire by a Sun that always seems to be in your eyes. Not me.
This evening, I wanted to buy myself a night of drinking, so I painted a small painting of a collared aracari toucan based on a photo I'd taken during the month in Costa Rica. Here is the result of that:
The painting.
The double-flipped version, mixed with the photograph I worked from. Interestingly, in repainting it, I see I actually reduced some of the absurdities of proportion caused by foreshortening in the photograph.
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