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Pisces Party
Saturday, March 15 1997
Sad thing to say today: Nature doesn't give a damn how much I suffer when die. What is at issue in the grand design is what fraction of the next generation contains copies of my genes.
I had a dream about having to carry a frisky little kitten with me to my Saturday shift. But I kept forgetting things I needed (food mostly) and so kept having to go back to my house. When I looked at my watch for the last time, I was already a half hour late. I wondered what Bn would say.
But then I woke up.
At Comet, Bn, Jim Hoff the Webmaster and I all shot the shit about office politics. It was loads of fun. I also got some email from Doug Lawson, who wasn't even too ticked off about my gratuitous search engine hit-interdiction schemes. He expressed the desire for the Blue Penny Quarterly and Blue Moon Review to live in peace. That was cool enough for me, so I took down my sneaky little hit-interdiction pages. I bear him no ill-will, after all.
It was Saturday. By now you know the deal...I work on Friday's entry and periodically upload the latest version throughout my 9am-5pm shift while coping with a hangover and customer phone calls. But the hangover wasn't too bad today.
I walked through the sunny but brisk air to Plan 9 and bought a used CD, The Pixies' Doolittle, 1989, for a rather inflated $8. It isn't even my favourite Pixies album. But it does have "This Monkey's Gone to Heaven" which is a wonderful little surreal anthem. The Pixies are so popular with everyone I know that it will be handy to be able to break out this CD whenever a diverse group of people is hanging out in my room. Truth be known, the main reason I bought the CD was for the liner notes, which come in a thick little booklet and feature lots of beautiful colour photographs of grungy little assemblages of the sort my housemate Elizabeth would appreciate.
I killed a rather large amount of time at my house watching somewhat disturbing video from last night, playing my three string guitar, and watching the Simpsons (the one that details the creation of Maggie, the youngest Simpson). Deya came by at some point while I was waiting for Bn (a Pisces) to arrive to take me to the "Pisces Party" celebrating the birth of Lauren Hoffman's younger sister Lily. We three ended up going to the Pisces party together in Bn's noisy little car. Effectively he was a traitor Pisces smuggling two Aquarians into a Pisces party. But, as I pointed out later, where would fish be without us water bearers?
As we drove, it was difficult for Bn and I to keep from discussing work. We have a lot to discuss on the issue, and we can't really discuss it with our other friends. So we find ourselves talking about it despite our best intentions. We know we're boring the others, but it's as if we can't help it.
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...as well as quite a few of the familiar Higher Grounds cool-people scene...
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Lauren Hoffman (a Pisces) lives in a nice big house somewhere to the east of Charlottesville. We arrived at about 9:30pm, and there weren't a whole lot of people there. But there were some familiar faces: Theresa's sister Angela (a fellow Aquarius) and Emily Tisdale (local actress-about-town and Pisces), as well as quite a few of the familiar Higher Grounds cool-people scene, more of whom arrived with every passing moment.
The party was not had cheaply. Here are indications that it was a lavish affair:
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| Emily Tisdale and some children on the dance floor. |
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| The party scene. Deya is second from the left. The bleached blond guy is named Peter; he's a Higher Grounds regular. The girl he's talking to is Lauren Hoffman. |
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| Deya blows soap bubbles off the balcony down to the dance floor. In the background are balloon representations of bubbles rising to a watery surface. |
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| Lily, the birthday girl, dancing. |
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The food was provided by caterers from the C&O, one of the more expensive restaurants in Charlottesville. Especially good were the sesame noodles and chicken pieces finger food.
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Music was played live by a fairly large Calypso-esque band from Richmond. They were mostly black men dressed all in white. The drummer seemed to be the band leader and I liked the way he played. It was not my kind of music, but it was conducive to dancing. I didn't dance, but I had my video camera and I videotaped lots of other people, especially Emily Tisdale and the birthday girl, Lauren's younger sister Lily, working it out on the dance floor.
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The vino came in small bottles with very unfamiliar printing on the labels. It came in a variety of flavours, but none of it reminded me of Carlo Rossi Paisano.
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Out on the porch a wide variety of beers could be found in great tubs of ice. There was everything from Budweiser to Pete's Wicked Ale.
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The decorations were extensive in the main balcony-equipped center room. The walls were covered with tin foil (or something similar that appeared to be even shinier) and fine silvery streamer material. Two chicken-wire and paper maché fish faced off above the milling crowd, strings of silver helium-filled balloons playing the role of bubbles wriggling upward to the ceiling.
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When the cake finally came out, it was decorated with a huge illustration of a fish and (supposedly) designs in caviar. Fish eggy-weggs. In contrast to my congenital aversion to hens' eggs, I eat fish eggs without reservation. I missed out on the champagne, which I heard was exquisite.
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An older bearded gentleman could be seen during the course of the entire party with a very serious expression on his face as he maneuvered among the partiers, snapping pictures with his souped-up camera. He never once took so much as a sip of vino. I think he was a professional photographer who had been specifically paid to photo-document the event.
Some of the people who showed up later included Savitri Durkee, her boyfriend Anselm, Raphæl (a Pisces; he didn't bring his Leo girlfriend Ana and his infant Gemini child Nemo), as well as a variety of people whose faces I know but whose names elude me. Such people always know my name though.
The balcony above the dance floor served as an indoor smoking room. Since that seemed to be where the "action" was, even Deya and myself, non-smokers, were to be found up there for periods of time. There were a fairly large number of little kids present, and there was a period of amusing intergenerational play involving young adults in the balcony pushing the streamers from balloons to within reach of the children on the dance floor. The children would then haul the balloons down and we would smack at them. Soon the children were taunting us by yanking the balloons out of range before we could smack them. In some cases I attached little heavy objects like pens to the balloons so that they fell to the floor, in complete violation of expectations.
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Like many boys in her high school, he is impressed by Leticia's courage to stick out as she does, and he entertains fantasies of "getting to know her."
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I talked to John Tisdale, Emily Tisdale's younger teenage brother. He'd seen me on the Downtown Mall once in one of my more intoxicated moments, lying on my back upon the bricks shouting about how "Teenage America" should arise in revolution. I had left an indelible and not entirely negative impression. We got to talking about goths somehow, and I made the remark that there probably weren't any "true goths." (That's a meaningless statement, okay I know.) John responded that he did know of one true goth, but that she wasn't from this country. He went on to describe Leticia the Brazilian Girl. Like many boys in her high school, he is impressed by Leticia's courage to stick out as she does, and he entertains fantasies of "getting to know her." But she remains perennially aloof from her classmates. When our conversation ended he was anxious for me to tell Leticia that I'd been talking with him.
Other little conversations I had were brief and related to my poetry delivered at the Downtown Artspace a week ago. The reviews that I hear of my performance are all very positive. But I wonder what people really thing. I must have appeared very decadent to the assembled on that day. I recall little of the event, after all.
Well, Bn was not enjoying himself. Being a particularly reclusive and dreamy Pisces (unlike the other more social Pisces there), he wanted to go. So Deya and I left with him. This was a good thing actually, since I was not yet drunk enough to create a spectacle or otherwise make a fool of myself. You know how bad I can get; recall the Jehu End of the World Party of December 1995.
We three: Bn, Deya and I, hung out in my room and smoked pot. That was what Bn had been missing at the Pisces party. Under the pleasant influence of THC we had a wonderful long and varied conversation that went over lots more than just the Internet, computers, and our fragile employment.
Monster Boy and Leticia arrived at 2am; they'd been working at the C&O. Monster Boy selected a few of my CDs to play, and when he played Hole's Live Through This, Leticia objected and went into a pout that lasted until the CD was over. She finds Courtney Love's voice to be "annoying." Then Leticia put in her Cure tape. Love for the Cure formed a common ground between Bn, Monster Boy and Leticia, and so now they had something to talk about to the exclusion of me. But I still found the conversation interesting.
I eventually started to drift off to sleep and that's when everyone left.
Go see what Bn had to say about this day.
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