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summery night in November
Friday, November 6 2015
I had a meeting at Outdated with on Lightroom webapp client, but before I left for that, I painted this small (three by four inch) painting of a jellyfish.
For some reason, parking was especially bad in Uptown Kingston, and the situation was only made worse by a two or three cop cars haphazardly parked (lights a'flashin') at the corner of John and Fair Streets in front of that restaurant at the top of a set of curved steps. The police were investigating a rusted-out old pickup truck with a tarp concealing the contents of its bed. Was it full of dead babies? Who could say, but in the end I was forced to park at the top of the Hannaford parking lot, where there is always free parking a third of a mile from Outdated. I was running late, but so too was my client, and we arrived at Outdated at the same time. Before we could conduct any business, he told me that he'd just learned that his father, who had been a headmaster at a Protestant New England boarding school, had failed to report incidents of teachers inappropriately touching students. And now, 35 or more years later, there is a lawsuit. I wondered what the statute of limitations had to say about such a crime of omission; it seemed unlikely that failure to report would be the sort of crime for which there would be no statute of limitations. From there, as I drank my coffee and we ate our sandwiches, our discussion moved on to whether or not a Lightroom webapp could be supported by advertising alone and whether Instagram had plugins. Later we talked about Marco Rubio's credit cards and Hillary Clinton's email server and which was likely to be a bigger political liability. While we sat there, I learned that Ben Carson's story about being offered a "full scholarship" to West Point had just been exposed as a gross exaggeration (if not a fabrication).
The day was so warm and gorgeous that I was comfortable walking around in a teeshirt. And I was driving around with the windows down (causing bags to fly around in circles throughout the car).
This evening Gretchen and I went over to Eva & Sandor's new house on Chestnut Hill Road (not far from Susan and David's place). Eva and Sandor had been living on Maverick Road, but when that house proved too problematic to repair, they bought a new house and have plans to AirBnB (yes, that's a verb) the old one. This new place looks somewhat Japanese, with an open floor plan and an X-Y-symmetrical system of exposed beams. The upstairs is gorgeous, but the basement was ugly and unworkable, so it is in the process of being gut-remodeled in the hopes that some day Sandor's aging parents can be moved in (I wanted a tour of that space too, so Sandor took me down there and showed me around).
I'd brought over my Ahmed Mohamed clock for show & tell, Gretchen had brought brownies, and Eva had prepared a multi-dish Indian meal, though Gretchen didn't stay long after the meal. Tonight she would be dog-sitting over at Susan & David's place, and it was close enough for her to just walk there in the summery night. Meanwhile, I had to sober up from the beer and the marijuana before I could make the drive back to Hurley. That took about an hour; meanwhile we watched Bill Maher and Al Jazeera on the massive screen in the living room. Eva pointed how Maher has cleverly disguised his age by maintaining the color of his hair in the just-starting-to-go-grey-but-still-could-be-blonde phase, though, "You can always tell by looking at the neck." At some point Eva brought out some catnip for the house's four cats, and they went nuts. Her catnip looks a lot better than the stuff I buy. It's all buds, whereas mine is just catnip leaves, in other words schwag (the original definition).
I probably should have been a little more sober (that is, less stoned) for the drive home. Still, it was great to drive the backroads at night in early November in a teeshirt with the windows down. I don't know what would have gone down had I been pulled over with that suspicious-looking Ahmed Mohamed clock (fully aglow as it ran on a battery) on the back seat, particularly if they nabbed me driving past the Ashokan Reservoir.
Back at the house, I kept hitting the various buttons on my Ahmed Mohamed clock to fire different pre-recorded sounds. As I did so, I realized it wouldn't be difficult to emulate a Mellotron with an Arduino, a WTV020SD (temperamental though they are; perhaps that temperamentalness would make the emulation more accurate) and a piano-style keyboard. (I don't think their keyboards are any more velocity-sensitive than those of a pipe organ.)
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