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girliest beer
Wednesday, February 11 2015
This evening I drove over to Susan and David's place because David had an old Apple Cinema Display that I thought would be good for a computer animation kiosk for which I am providing technological assistance. On the way over, I thought it would be amusing to buy David the girliest sixpack of beer I could find at Hurley Ridge Market. He likes girlie beers, though I didn't know where the limits of that fondness lay. I ended up buying something called Redd's Strawberry Ale, which, I later discovered, tastes exactly like the kisses of an eleven year old girl (no, I don't actually know anything about those).
Amusingly, David had said nothing at all to Susan about me coming over, and nobody had bothered to straighten up their house. Susan was surprised to see me, but immediately started making hummus while David made a fire in the woodstove insert. In addition to their dogs Olive & Darla, David and Susan were dogsitting Deborah's dog Allou, but he was acting weird in some subtle way that I couldn't see and it was freaking Olive out. She'd begun to shiver the way Eleanor does when she's anxious about thunder, gunfire, or a half-dozen other things that have begun troubling her in her old age. Eventually Susan got out the ThunderShirt, an invention by autistic slaughterhouse whisperer Temple Grandin that supposedly induces calm by applying pressure all the way around the ribcage. The introduction of the ThunderShirt initiated a whole conversation about Temple Grandin and how uneasy her life's work make us all feel. As I put it, had she been in Germany in the early 1940s, she would have happily made the concentration camps an even more orderly place to die than they already were. As for the ThunderShirt (which did seem to help Olive calm down), I thought it would be a great outdoor jacket for Eleanor because, unlike all the other dog jackets I've seen, it covers the belly. Pit Bulls have naked bellies, and not covering them comes across to me as dog-jacket malpractice.
Mercifully, I didn't have to drink any of that Strawberry "Ale"; David had an extra Dogfish Head some-number-of-minutes in his refrigerator. David transitioned from Strawberry Ale to Modelo Especial before it was completely finished, and I remarked that I also like Mexican beers. We decided that Mexican beers is represented by the narrow patch of overlap in our beer Venn Diagram.
At some point, Susan brought out a MacBook and had me watch a couple compilations of "Thug Life" animal clips, each showing animals doing various bad-ass things like stealing food, shoplifting, flinging objects at humans, or attacking someone or something unexpected. After every instant of "thug life," hip hop music would crank up on the soundtrack, and sometimes sunglasses or dollar-sign gold necklaces would appear on the animal in question. It was hilarious.
Before I left with the Cinema Display and Gretchen's cake box (now missing the wire latch holding it together), Susan and David showed me Susan's new studio, which is ready for her to move into. It has a bathroom with a tiled floor, beautiful old floors that David had just finished sanding, and perfect white walls completely full of spray foam. We also went to look at the studio's basement, which is completely unfinished but which holds much potential. If a bit more of its bluestone floor were to be dug away, it would have enough headroom for, among many other things, local unknown punk rock bands to have shows (I used to know the then-seventeen-year-old drummer of one in Woodstock called the Defenestrators).
As with the latch on Gretchen's cake box, the power brick for the Cinema Display had gone missing, but once I was home I managed to cobble together a replacement. I had an old MacBook power supply with a bad plug that had been given to me by Penny (the human, not the dog) back before Gretchen's 40th birthday falling out with Penny and David, and it turned out that it produced precisely the 24 volts I needed. The Cinema Display has a gorgeous picture, though its resolution is only 1680 by 1050 pixels.
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