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Cinco de Mayo at the Bear Cantina
Monday, May 5 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
It was a rainy Cinco de Mayo in the workplace, and I spent most of it stuck in something of a ChatGPT consultation loop as I tried to get Cypress end-to-end testing working in an Azure DevOps pipeline. By the end of the day, I was pulled into some other project that had the possibility of saving me from sisyphean chore.
It was still raining when I got home to Hurley Mountain, where a box containing an air conditioner was partly-sheltered by the eaves. It had come from eBay after my attempt to get such an air conditioner from AliExpress had failed.
I drove to Woodstock at 5:00pm, arriving behind the bookstore just in time to catch Gretchen as she was getting into the Bolt so that I could ride with her to our dinner date in Bearsville. Gretchen had arranged with our friends Lynn and Gregg to have dinner at the Bear Cantina, unaware that it was Cinco de Mayo. When I'd told her this, she'd made a reservation. But that turned out not to be necessary, as there didn't seem to be any more people than usual on a Monday night in celebration of the Mexican defeat of a Napoleonic army back in 1862. The Bear Cantina, though, had a bunch of specials in honor of the day, some of which greatly reduced the prices of our usual dishes (Impossible enchiladas for me). They were also giving out free shots of tequila. Gretchen and I arrived early and our waiter gave us two shots even though Gretchen didn't want one, and I added both to my margarita, which ended up being noticeably stronger as a result.
Our dinner conversation was mostly Gretchen talking about how the New York Department of Corrections finally busting her for carrying on an inappropriate correspondence with a prisoner at the prison in Woodbourne. Then she had to tell the whole story of her relationship with the prison system, starting with her being the site coordinator at Eastern Correctional Facility for the Bard Prison Initiative. Later in the meal, after we'd all eaten our food and when I typically start getting bored, the conversation shifted to a discussion of some novel I will never read, and at this point Gretchen picked up on how bored I was. (I was amusing myself by creating a partial vacuum between the palms of my hands by inhaling the air between them.)
We also talked some about cults at some point, including the Falun Gong, the one who published that newspaper Gretchen had to settle on for reading material that night she couldn't sleep recently when we spent the night in a Manhattan hotel. The Falun Gong have reactionary views and quirky, distinctly Chinese views about health and nutrition. One of their beliefs is that plants shaped like body parts are good for those body parts, an idea that had us joking that if one ate cucumbers it would turn one's brain into a penis.
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