Automobiles, Automobiles, Automobiles (and The Cult)

A very un-Dave weekend, but I survived and had a pretty damned good time, despite all the traffic: Saturday morning, I drove my Kia Sportage forty minutes through typical New Jersey traffic to Zman's house-- there's no good way to get there from Highland Park-- and then after listening to a few tales of Zwife's driving misadventures, we got into Zman's Alfa Romeo and headed up to Hopkinton-- home of Gormley and also the town where the Boston Marathon starts-- but we had to wade into epic traffic on the Hutchinson or the Cross Bronx or the Merritt-- who the fuck knows the difference between those roads?-- so we stopped for lunch at Zuppardi's Apizza in West Haven, which was delicious-- and then fought through a bunch more traffic on the way to Gormley's lovely abode, in the piney, fern gullied, rock-walled suburbs of Hopkinton-- and then we took a walk through the hood, where we did NOT encounter a beach ball (fucking AI is destroying reality) and then got ready to head to the show, which was in Boston city center, at the Orpheum-- and Gormley's wife drove us in, through even more traffic (thanks Liz!) and we hopped out at a traffic light and then I had to chase down the car because I left my phone charging in the backseat . . . I caught up to Liz as she was turning right, knocked on the window, jumped in and grabbed my phone, and then jumped out of the car before anyone could even beep at her-- a random middle-aged white dude was impressed by my alacrity and he said, "nice move!" and I held up my phone and told him "my ticket to the show is on here!" and he said, "Are you going to see The Cult?" and I said, "Yes I am!" and then we went to jm Curley's for drinks and food and then walked to the Orpheum for the show-- the opening act was a noisy duo called The Patriarchy-- but the lead singer was a lady . . . ironic!-- and then The Cult came out as The Death Cult, the goth-punk band that preceded The Cult-- and Ian Astbury was in some sort of Native American dress-robe and they played all the old stuff from Dreamtime and before (e.g. "Gods Zoo") and then the curtain went down, we restocked our beer, and then The Cult came out as The Cult and played all the old favorites, from "Wildflower" to "She Sells Sanctuary"-- I especially enjoyed a stripped-down double time version of "Fire Woman" . . . I guess they were like: we're required to play this but we're going to do it quickly . . . anyway, it was a great show, the band seemed especially energized and invigorated playing the old goth-punk stuff-- Billy Duffy had to actually pay attention to what he was doing instead of cranking out the power chords and the drummer, John Tempesta, is exceptional and really laid down those culturally appropriated tribal beats-- I did have to tell the guy in front of me to lower his phone-- he seemed to think he was filming a documentary-- but once I said something, he stopped holding it up without any conflict-- and in general, the crowd was very pleasant-- it was essentially a convention of burly middle-aged white males, a few still sporting long hair but most bald or balding-- and everyone looked like they were trouble thirty years ago but had since more-or-less assimilated into normal society-- it made me think of how long a history I have with this band-- I first saw them on the Electric tour in July of 1987 at the Felt Forum-- so 38 years ago-- it was an insane show-- they opened with "Bad Fun" and the moshing was actually violent and Ian got stuck on top of a amplifier at one point and roadies had to help him down . . . there's not many bands that I saw in high school that are still touring (The Who are probably the only other band that fits into this category, although I think they are done now) and then after the show we went back to jm Curley's for a nightcap and caught a ride back to Hopkinton (thanks for arranging that ride, Gormley!) where I finished the leftover pizza and hit the sack and then Zman and I got on the road early and hauled it back to Jersey-- that's more car-time than I prefer to do but I chewed some gum and enjoyed the good craik (as they say in Scotland) and Zman's flawless driving and now I'm home andd getting ready for school tomorrow . . . a whirlwind weekend.

Sandy Hook, The Mule Barn, Idioms, Lanternflies, Always Sunny . . .

My wife and I had no school on Tuesday (because of Rosh Hashanah) and so we drove our bikes to Sandy Hook and rode the multi-use trail through the old yellow brick army barracks (some of which have been renovated into beachfront rentals) and to the various beaches (one of which is clothing optional, we did not opt to stop) and finally to the new bar/restaurant, The Mule Barn-- which has a lovely patio, but we elected to have a beer indoors because it was hot as fuck out-- the Mule Barn is a great joint, on the water, all the way out on the end of the hook and it serves a variety of New Jersey beers (and apparently the food is good as well) and while we were there, my wife-- who is a mix-master of idioms-- described someone as "loud in the crowd" but then she did not possess the second half of this phrase she invented-- she wanted to say that this person is "loud in the crowd" but shy in smaller groups . . . so I enlisted AI to come up with a rhyming second half but the best it could muster was "loud in the crowd but a mouse in the house" and "loud in the crowd but a bore when it's four"-- I odn't think those are lexical masterpieces-- and then we drove back over the bridge to the Atlantic Highlands for lunch and a beer at The Proving Grounds, where we were swarmed by lanternflies-- I thought those things pretty much died out in New Jersey but apparently they all migrated to the beach to enjoy the waterfront views-- so though our food was great, we beat a hasty retreat once we finished and headed back to our lantern-fly-free but very humid hometown and I walked to New Brunswick with the guys and we went back to Harvest Moon for shitty beer-- why?-- and we sat outside in the humidity--why?-- but I did get to meet up with my son Alex, who had just gotten out of class and he walked back to Highland Park with us, to my friend's house and had a beer with us-- and then we watched two very funny episodes of Always Sunny in Philadelphia: "Mac and Dennis Become EMTs" and "The Gang Goes to a Dog Track"-- highly recommended . . . a fabulous day off from work.

Harvest Moon: Making Fairly Shitty Beer for Nearly Thirty Years

For the first time in a long time, I went to Harvest Moon last night for a few beers with the guys, and I was duly impressed: the Firehouse Red tasted bland and fuzzy; the Fuller Moon IPA left something to be desired in the way of hoppiness, crispness, and flavor; and the Dunluce Castle Stout, while drinkable and not as disappointing as the other beers, was not notable in any particular way . . . it's fairly amazing-- this microbrewery, which has been operating in New Brunswick since 1996, has consistently made lame and lousy tasting beer for three decades, yet they keep plugging along, while more interesting pubs have withered and died-- but you'd think they'd figure out how to make better beer by now.

Meta-Debate Tempered by Alcohol

You don't want to go down this road with your wife: arguing about who is more argumentative (although the Bradley Beach bar crawl with the Dom and Michelle Moccio is mollifying the debate-- we went to The Little Dog Brewery (Gretchen is the first female brewmaster/brewery owner in New Jersey and she is very nice and knowledgeable and her beer is amazing) and Wheelhouse Distilling (a cute young newly married couple-- a fireman and an accountant-- own this with another couple . . . best mixed drink I've had in a long time: in-house spicy watermelon mixer and their bourbon-- delicious) and then we went to the Bradley Brew Project and I drank a very hazy pale ale called "Unicorn Girls."

A Tough Predicament to Resolve in 30 Minutes

When I went for my early morning swim in the ocean today, I certainly thought about the tragic demise of Malcolm-Jamal Warner—  he was one of the good ones from my generation, and born the same year as me and a native of New Jersey to boot— so when I swam out past the breakers, I pondered the fact that I was one riptide away from eternity— and Sunday night, I certainly thought about his TV dad — Bill Cosby— when I was out at the with my son and I forgot to watch his beer when he went to the bathroom and when he got back and found it, unguarded, he said: “Dad, I could have been roofied!”

Let Freedom Explode Loudly All Night

Most of my post-Independence Day was triumphant and celebratory: I returned to full force on the pickleball court, despite my sketchy hamstring and I celebrated my recovery with some beer and tequila at my friend's pool . . . but this celebration was interrupted by a phone call from Ian-- he found our dog panting and shaking in the bathroom and thought she was very sick, so I drove home to check her out but she was simply hiding from the bombs-- there's been fireworks goign off for days and she's losing her mind because of this-- she's getting more anxious about loud noises and she gets older-- and so am I -- last night I woke with a start and asked my wife who was knocking at our bedroom door, which is a scary thing to ask someone who is currently dreaming-- but it was just more fucking fireworks . . . maybe we should celebrate Independence Day with voter registration or a historical reenactment of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence . . . something less loud and more dog-friendly.

Severed (from the Humidity)

My wife and I visited Bell Works in Holmdel today-- the mixed-use facility built within the old Bell Labs building and the site where some of the show Severance was filmed-- and while we were not severed from our consciousness when we entered the vast and beautifully designed indoor space, we were severed from the disgusting humid weather . . . the air-conditioning in the massive atrium is top-notch (and there were people doing laps and walking dogs in there, enjoying the cool air) and on the way home we stopped at the Source Brewery for a beer and Delicious Orchards for some bread and cheese, a decent way to kill a very hot and muggy Sunday afternoon.

Stream of Consciousness

My buddy Whitney just arrived, so I figured I'd give him a crack at the sentence, so I asked him for something quotable to write, and he said, "Let me think about that while I urinate"-- but then he did come through with some interesting information a bit later: he taught me to pour a Guiness out of the can and into the cold mug quickly, not slowly and then the head dissipates-- a method unlike how you pour any other kind of beer.

Later Children, See You in the Fourth Quarter

Ahh . . . Spring Break . . . finally . . . and so I am drinking a beer, listening to Stereolab (very calming) and writing in peace-- my wife is napping on the couch-- and I am unwinding from a chaotic day with the youth: I started the day at morning basketball and we only had nine and then Frank, one of the older guys (but not as old as me!) went down with a calf cramp and so we played four-on-four full court until exhaustion, and then by the time I got out of the shower the first bell had already rung so I hustled (as fast as I could) to first period-- and I must say that THAT Creative Class is lovely and we read aloud the riddle poems that the kids wrote, guessed, and did a food metaphor fill-in and everything was fairly mellow-- but by my second 82-minute period, the kids were starting to feel it, they knew the end was nigh . . . so I read the end of We Have Always Lived in the Castle to my sophomores and then they made horror skits and enacted them-- and they had to have a couple of classic horror tropes in the skits plus some sort of get out/stay-in debate (lesson plan straight from my podcast!) and while they were loud and nuts, they actually got the skits written and performed them-- mainly because class is endless-- and then my last Creative Class was bananas, a lot of weird bickering and overly energetic teenagers-- and I can't express enough how much I hate block scheduling because 82-minutes is WAY TOO FUCKING LONG to have a class right before Spring Break (or basically any time at all) but I survived and someday I will retire and miss this?

Bar Stool Sporting Spectating Spectacular

Yesterday afternoon, my son Alex and I took the train into the city to have a beer and some food at a sports bar (he just turned 21!) and then go to the Knicks/Wizards game-- so we watched NCAA basketball on the train and then more college hoops while we ate and drank at Goldie's Tavern, a spacious place with good food and drink close enough to Madison Square Garden-- Goldie's was full of Knicks fans and a couple of beautiful people-- a dude who looked like he was right off The Bachelor and his date, who was a young Jennifer Connelly look-alike-- and then we walked over to the game, but we had some trouble finding our seats, which were in section 219 . . . but we were in row BS6 . . . which did not seem to exist . . . and then we learned we had Bar Stool seats, right on level with the concession stands-- with a temporary wall behind you and a nice little bar for your beer in front of you . . . and these tickets were pretty cheap, considering, probably because the Wizards are lousy (although Jordan Poole was fun to watch) and March Madness was happening-- but anyway, these seats totally spoiled me and I don't know if I could ever sit anywhere else-- there's no one in front of you or behind you, you have space on your side and can swivel, you can stand any time you like, you don't have to put your beer on the floor, and -- if there's a close college game you want to keep tabs on, you can rest your phone on the little wall above your personal "bar" . . . I guess the secret is out about these seats, to some extent, but if you can ever nab them, they make for a comfortable, non-claustrophobic game experience-- you don't have to rub elbows with the masses or ever stand up to let someone through and you have easy access to both the concession stands and the bathroom . . . pretty sweet.

Triumph at Triumph

Yesterday was the first Saturday in a while that my wife and I were both healthy, so we took the train to Princeton (with Connell . . . it was the first time he ever rode the Dinky!) and first we stopped for an espresso martini and some snacks at the Dinky Bar and then went to the new Triumph Brewery location in Palmer Square-- inside the old Princeton Post office, an astounding renovation of a spacious 1930s building-- and I am pleased to report that both the beer and the food are excellent-- I liked both their IPAs and their dry stout, Connell doggedly stuck to a hand-pumped amber Celtic ale, and my wife had the pilsener and a delicious pear martini; as a bonus, they have live jazz every Friday and Saturday from 5-8 PM in the lounge . . . there are two bars, one in the basement-- it has a ratskeller vibe and there are plenty of TVs tuned into sports-- and then the upper bar amidst the restaurant seating, and that's where you can see and hear the jazz . . . anyway, this is a great spot-- nothing quite like it in the area, I don't think-- and taking the train to Princeton is much faster than driving (and driving home last night would have been treacherous-- we had to walk to the train station through a bizarre icy slush that stuck to your boots, while being constantly pelted with freezing rain-- and the walk up the hill back to Highland Park was like trudging through frozen wet sand . . . really weird).

Unintentionally Dry January (But Not Sand Island Dry)

I was determined NOT to do "Dry January" for two very good reasons—

1)I’m already a moderate drinker 

2) January is so dark, cold, and dreary that a little alcohol helps me get through without going full Jack Torrance

but this January wasn’t fated to be a wet one for me-- two weeks ago I came down with a stomach virus, then my wife caught the flu, and just as she recovered I got a mild case of COVID, so aside from a couple of parties and our outing to see Louie C.K., I barely touched beer, wine, or spirits-- but I'm not complaining because I just read Matthew Pearl’s new book, Save Our Souls: The True Story of a Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder, and my January—despite its lack of alcohol and abundance of sickness—was a walk in the park compared to what the Walker family endured after their sharking boat shipwrecked on a spit of sand in the North Pacific (Midway Atoll), where they survived for eighteen months on seabirds, seabird eggs, the occasional fish, a bag of moldy rice that washed ashore, and an unlucky turtle—but no beer or tobacco; Pearl’s book is a gripping account of the shipwreck and the surrounding murder and mystery, including the presence of a nutjob named Hans, who was already living in a hut on Sand Island when the Walkers and their crew washed ashore-- and the book gets quite complicated with intrigue, it's not a tale like Swiss Family Robinson or Gilligan's Island, mainly because of the sinister first mate and his past crimes and new alliances, and honestly, after reading this, I'm astounded that anyone in the 19th century would willingly board an ocean-going vessel, given the abundant threats of shipwrecks, piracy, opium smuggling, scurvy, sharks, insurance fraud, blackbirding, and mutiny-- Pearl’s book is an astounding tale of survival, persistence, and malevolent maritime machinations and if you're looking to feel better about your landlocked piece of property, read it.

The (Derivative) Art of the Tribute Band (Name)

Last night we saw two tribute bands: Big Foot County (The Grateful Dead) and Run, Rabbit Run (Pink Floyd) at the Kefi Ballroom, the venue that was once the nightclub Perle and has now been refashioned into an excellent live music venue-- something New Brunswick desperately needed once the Court Tavern shut down-- and the sound was superb, the beer was cold, and there were free samples of Timeless marijuana products (you could suck a cloud of vape out of a weird electronic genie bottle with your very own plastic straw . . . because of the strobe lighting, this seemed like something out of Bladerunner) but more interesting than all that is the art of naming your tribute band. . . I like the direction these bands went -- a random lyric-- as opposed to "punny" names like Proxy Music, The Rolling Clones, The Faux Fighters, and Deft Leppard-- those are groaners (although there is a one-man Def Leppard cover band that goes by "Jeff Leppard"-- that's pretty boss) but, for no good reason, I'm slightly more open to all-female tribute band puns, e.g. "Hell's Belles" and "Lez Zeppelin" and "ZZ Topless" but I still think something that takes a moment of thought, like The Crystal Ship (The Doors) or The Rocket Queens (Guns N' Roses) is more hip than a pun (but, of course, tribute bands are not very hip at all-- which begs the questions: when do you give up on your dream of being a famous, unique, and creative musician and dedicate yourself to playing one band's songs? is it when every time your band plays a particular artist, everyone goes nuts and you realize that you sound like them more than you sound like yourself? that's quite an artistic identity conundrum) and I can see the more obscure method of naming your tribute band as a fun bar game-- you say a hypothetical tribute band name and everyone tries to unravel the origin . . . if I were to say "The Lobster Telephones" you'd need to figure out that this is a hypothetical Cult cover band, the name pulled from a lyric in the song "Aphrodisiac Jacket" or if I were to say "The Sandy Crustaceans" then you'd have to surmise that this is a hypothetical Pixies cover band, the name culled from "Wave of Mutilation"-- it's not a game for the faint of heart-- and I should end this rambling discussion with the silliest tribute band name of all-time: Scrantonicity . . . Kevin's Police tribute band in The Office.

Costco: Hyper-Capitalist Crucible

I made my triumphant return to 6:30 AM basketball this morning-- my pulled rib muscle feels much better and once again I can launch (chuck?) my patented long-range-high-arcing-randomly accurate three-pointer-- and I even dribbled the ball a few times, wending my way around the court; soon after, I had to wend my way through the halls, to get to my class to teach, dodging and weaving the masses while carrying my gym bag-- no easy task-- but all of this was light work compared to the swerving and weaving I did driving to Costco and the much more aggressive shopping cart pushing maneuvers I performed inside Costco-- I left work early to run this errand and thought things would be relatively mellow on a Tuesday afternoon but making my way through the traffic on the Route 1 jughandle was something out of Mad Max-- everyone was out roaming around burning fossil fuels and everyone sucks at driving once I arrived there was no respite: the Costco parking lot and warehouse were equally insane . . . just a moronic wasteland of people and cars and shopping carts-- and I am a fast walker and a fast cart-pusher, I've got places to go and things to do, but everyone else inside Costco always seems to be puttering along, browsing cheap cargo pants and remaindered books or stalled out and scrolling on their phone, their enormous Costco cart blocking the aisle-- it's infuriating, especially once I've grabbed the frozen salmon and shrimp, because then I want to get the fuck out as soon as possible, before the seafood defrosts, and I will lay waste to anyone in my path-- young, old, romantically entwined, bickering, whatever-- get the fuck out of my way!-- and then, once you get to the front, you've got to choose a line . . . and you'd better choose carefully . . . you need to evaluate the cashier, evaluate the carts, evaluate the idiots pushing the carts-- but I made it out alive and relatively quickly (though, to my chagrin, I left the dog crate in the back of the car, and I had bought both paper towels AND toilet paper, plus a case of wine and several cases of beer, so I had to put the beer and wine inside the dog crate so I would have enough room for the rest of the stuff in the back seat) and then I got to decompress at acupuncture and erase the stress from all this manic hyper-capitalistic behavior (and now I'm drinking some Conehead beer that I bought at a steep discount-- the irony! . . . I'm using the very stuff I bought in the stressful crucible of Costco to relax because I got stressed out going to Costco).

Super Tuesday

Big day: woke up early; voted for Harris instead of Stein . . . because my wife threatened me-- possibly felony? . . . then went to the gym-- and while I can lift weights, my pulled rib muscle still hurts, especially when I sneeze-- and it hasn't rained in 47 days, so I'm sneezing a lot-- terrible coincidence of a particular muscle pull and an oddball fall weather pattern-- is there a word for unserendipitous? . . . then we headed to Havre de Grace (no one can pronounce it) and wandered through the Graw Alley Art Park, which is full of murals illustrating Havre de Grace's history-- including a depiction of a tawdry and bygone local brothel from the early 1900s-- The Red Onion-- excellent stuff, every town should have a large and colorful tribute to a brothel-- then we had a delicious and cheap seafood lunch at the outdoor Promenade Grill; then stopped at a rest stop so Cat could get some coffee but the millennial Asian couple in front of her were taking so long reading the menu that she stormed out; then made our way through some traffic to Annapolis; got slightly lost in the narrow winding roads of Maryland's capitol city, finally unloaded at our AirBnB, then drove to Eastport and found some free parking and drank some delicious beer-- including a prickly pear jalapeno lager-- at Forward Brewing; and now we're heading out on the town-- and maybe we'll try to stay up and see who wins this stupid election.

Mistook!

Yesterday afternoon (or yesternight, as Shakespeare would have it) we went to the Grant Avenue Block Party and I played some cornhole and drank some beers and then it got too dark to play cornhole and I was getting kind of tired so I walked over to my wife, who was in a circle of women under the canopy, embroiled in a conversation, to check and see if I should grab another beer or if she was ready to go and I slid my arm around her, familiarly-- or perhaps even a step past familiarly, as this was my wife-- and then the two of us realized that this was NOT my wife, this was my wife's doppelganger . . . or certainly her doppelganger in this particular instance, in this particular lighting-- and while I was very embarrassed to have sidled up to this lady-- who I do know in passing from soccer and other town stuff-- and put my arm around her, in my defense, she was wearing the same white tank top as my wife; she has the same toned, tan, and freckled left arm as my wife; she was wearing similar glasses to my wife; she has blonde hair like my wife; she was gesticulating in an animated fashion, as my wife is wont to do; and from the angle I approached, she really looked like my wife . . . enough so that I went and found my wife and positioned her in the same spot, next to this woman, so that I could convince myself (and the other people who saw this awkward encounter) that it was a logical mistake and we all agreed that the resemblance was uncanny (and if you enjoy this theme, this recent incident complements this absurd moment of mistaken identity at the gym, from over a decade ago, quite nicely).

He Said "Less"

These pictures from a Fall Break 1991 road trip surfaced on a text thread the other day and they reminded me of a world that no longer exists: Jason, Cliff,  Whitney and I made our way north from William and Mary, visiting folks in Richmond, Baltimore, and Hoboken-- and this was before cell phones, when you could lost, like actually lose the group (as Jason did in Baltimore) and after spending a night at my house in North Brunswick, drinking in the basement and playing pinball, we decided to venture to the Big Apple-- and my memories of all this are a little hazy, but we were David Letterman fans and so we went to the NBC building at Rockefeller Center, walked in unobstructed, wandered about until we found the Letterman Show offices, and then asked his secretary if we could meet "Dave", because we were big fans-- but she informed us that it was Friday and he wasn't taping and then this incredibly nice lady from the pre-9/11 era-- instead of having us arrested or getting som security guards to toss us out on our ears-- instead she offered us tickets to the Phil Donahue Show, which was about to tape and we took her up on her generous offer and the next thing we knew we were being ushered into Donahue's Studio for an episode about a high school football player that got caught drinking beer at a picnic and was suspended for the entire season-- I had lost my voice from consuming so much alcohol the nights before and so I couldn't speak my mind but my buddy Whitney commented on the situation and then my college roommate Jason "reiterated" what a few other people said and concluded his moment with Phil with the remark "during high school lacrosse season, I drank less" and Phil Donahue waited a beat and then quipped, "he said 'less'" and the crowd laughed and laughed . . . and when the episode concluded and they were trying to usher us all to the elevator and back downstairs, we stole away from the group and went exploring and soon enough, serendipitously enough, we stumbled on Letterman's studio-- empty because he wasn't filming-- and Cliff and Whitney snapped a couple of incriminating pictures of us on the Letterman set . . . evidence of time not-so-long-ago when the world, even NBC Studios in NYC, was less locked-down, less secure, less surveilled, and far more spontaneous and fun.

Please Don't Sit So Close to Me

A well-deserved Happy Hour for the gang today at B2 Bistro-- I was proud that I survived the First Long Week, which included Back to School Night and Friday AM Basketball-- but, as usual, I was the first to arrive at the bar (because I RUN out of my class to my car when that final bell rings, to beat the traffic, even if I'm in mid-conversation with a student) and when I arrived one side of the bar was completely empty so I sat near the corner overlooking the lake, thinking the late arrivals would fill in around the bend of the bar but then an older couple came in and I watched them walk all way down my side of the bar, past all the empty seats, and the little oldish lady said to her husband, with a fantastic Jersey accent, "I want to be able to see the wataa" and then she wedged herself into the seat right next to me, like with her elbow touching mine-- and at first I thought I might stick it out, for principle's sake-- just fucking sit there next to her-- show her who was boss-- how dare she bully a lone man with a beer doing the crossword like this?-- but that sentiment lasted two minutes and then I acknowledged defeat and moved over a seat . . . I have NEVER had someone sit so close to me when there were other available seats but these two seemed like regulars, so perhaps I was in her seat.

Hot Town, Summer in the City

My wife and I went into "town" yesterday, which is how Tom Buchanan refers to New York City in The Great Gatsby, and both the hot and humid pathetic fallacy in Gatsby and The Lovin' Spoonful certainly came to mind-- though the weather yesterday was even worse than both works of art imagined-- we certainly got dirty and gritty, walking from the train station to our hotel to store our backpack (The Gallivant . . . the first room we were assigned was already occupied-- luckily the guests were out of the room and not in flagrante delicto when we stormed in; the second room had a broken floor unit AC and was broiling, but the third room had a window AC and was quite chilly-- third time was a charm) and then we continued walking around, through throngs of people, clouds of humidity, and wafting billows of strange odors-- we went to lunch at Bonsaii Tapas and Wine Bar-- delicious-- and then we trekked up to the Museum of Arts and Design and enjoyed their exhibits and AC and then we went and checked in at The Gallivant-- a long process involving three elevator trips-- and then we showered off the grit and grime, read for a few minutes, and then headed back out-- we needed to get to the Beacon Theater, which was uptown, Central Park West, and it was still steamy outside, so after getting caffeinated at Tiny Dancer coffee-- which was located underground, in a little warren of shops near the subway station (including See No Evil Pizza, which is rumored to be fantastic) and then we walked a bit and stopped at a bar, Tanner Smith's on 55th Street-- but it was loud as fuck, so we had a beer and then walked on, and we ended up at Ella Social, another tapas bar-- and we just caught the tail end of Happy Hour-- they took away the Happy Hour menus just after we sat down, so we lucked out and were able to get an order in, and then we sat there for a while and ordered various delicious tapas and then we went to the show: the opening band, Woods, had a great sound-- psychedelic alt country?-- but the singer couldn't quite pull off what he was going for (Jeff Mangum? Mark Coyne?) so it was more enjoyable when they got deep into instrumental and then Katie Crutchfield and her band Waxahatchee took the stage-- and Katie Crutchfield really took over the show: she has the best voice I've ever heard in person . . . I felt like I was seeing Alabama's version of Celine Dion or something-- and my wife and I could really see, because we were in the second row in the balcony and the three people in front of us were SO SHORT -- score!-- they were like five foot nothing, so we had an unobstrcuted view-- more on this tomorrow-- anyway, Crutchfield played almost every song from her new album, Tiger's Blood, which is fantastic and a couple of songs from St. Cloud, but none of her older straight ahead rock stuff or the indie stuff that sounds like Liz Phair-- she's really doing the alt-country thing full tilt-- a great show and her voice is awe-inspiring (and I think her bass player also does some amazing backing vocals as well) and then when we got out of the Beacon, at 11:30 PM, it was still very fucking hot-- unlike the Lovin' Spoonful song-- and we started walking back to the hotel and I suggested an Uber but my wife said it wouldn't take that long-- which was NOT true . . . it took so long that I had to stop for a slice of pizza-- but we finally made it back to The Gallivant-- over 12 miles of walking in the hot hot city-- even though were trying to keep things concentrated-- but the Big Apple is a very big fucking apple-- and then we got a nice breakfast and caught the train back to New Brunswick-- which was free! as was the train to the city . . . all Jersey Transit trains are free this week, for some reason, so they are quite packed . . . but now we're home again and the house is in one piece and the Appliance Doctor just fixed our stove door and the weather has improved and become seasonable and calm, but I must say, there's nothing like the overstimulus of Manhattan, especially on a hot day when everyone is out on the streets instead of in their apartments.

Thirty Years Ago

Damp and dank and dreary today, so instead of coming up with something new, I'll post an excerpt written by my buddy Whitney, from a news report of what was going on in our lives thirty years ago, in 1994: 

File Under: things you don't need explained to you. 30 years is quite a long time. Like, really long. A generation-plus for humans. The lifetime of a koi. And yet, it was just yesterday in my brain.

So what were you doing 30 years ago today? Summer of 1994?

I know what a couple of you were doing.

Dave was in the Garden State -- in grad school or maybe just having finished. Living in a converted whorehouse on Route 18 in New Brunswick with some reptiles that scared me and some of his old buddies... who also scared me at times. His old mates played in a band and occasionally let the Idiots jam with them for a minute or two at a time. They threw all their spare change into a big bucket every day for a year and then threw a major rager with the take. Dave read a lot of books, especially for a 24-year-old, and he drank a beer called Artic Ice. It was a Coors product misspelled badly, but Dave liked the ABV and it only had 11.5 ounces, which he said cut out the half-ounce of backwash. He also lived with a guy who took his bride's surname, but I think you would have, too. Dave also worked tirelessly to murder a monitor lizard that they should have named Rasputin. 1994 for Dave: it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.

for the rest of the updates (downdates?) on the gang, follow the link and enjoy . . . and thanks for the nostalgia Whit, I forgot about my "Artic Ice half ounce backwash theory" but I still think it holds water.