I feel I gotta write. Sort of like that CCR song, but this isn't a mix tape, and I gotta write, not move, though I feel that too, sometimes.
It has become somewhat cold this past week and I like it. I can enjoy a steaming hot shower again, and curl up in bed against the chill, cold at first but then toasty by morning. And when I have to run to the bathroom in the middle of the night (I have the bladder of a drunken 94 year old), when I get back Liz's skin is like some kind of wonderfully soft glowing ember, the very definition of warm.
It's also nice to break out the cool weather clothes. I've been wearing jeans for the past few days, finally hanging up my zip-off pants, them having served me well these past months. Also began wearing my hiking boots and big cozy sweatshirts. It's a good time to be unemployed.
Our anniversary was swell. Friday we rode into town on the train, dropped our stuff at the Millennium Broadway hotel (ooh la la), and headed to dinner at Tanti Bacci (a thousand kisses), the little Italian restaurant where we had our first date. The funny thing about our first date is that Liz was trying to let me down easy. She didn't want it to be a date, as such, she was just trying to be nice and tell me to forget it. She wasn't interested, or so she thought. I set her straight, though, and here we are. So our anniversary will always be a celebration of the night I convinced her. Should we ever marry, of course, we'd have a new one and probably stop bothering with the first date anniversary, but perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself.
After dinner we did a little shopping, then grabbed a cab across town to see Blue Man Group. Good stuff, those guys are fun. My main feeling after the show was that considering all the smart creative and funny people I know, not to mention our lives of relative leisure, we should really be doing something interesting like an avant-garde theater group. All this 9-ta-5-in' is bullshit. It ain't for us, man, we're different. We're special. We ride the short bus. No, not that kind of special. We ride the long bus. No, I don't know, we ride trains. The point is, and has been, that I would like to be more actively pursuing something, anything.
After the show we ran around in the rain trying to find some wine (surprisingly difficult around Times Square), and went back to the hotel. Watched some porn on pay-per-view and... whoops, scratch that.
Saturday night we came back to the city to see Pork Tornado at the Bowery Ballroom. I ended up chatting with a biker looking guy named Sean at the bar downstairs for most of the evening, missing much of the show, but I had a good time. We seemed to click in a certain way, and it was fun talking to someone with such a different outward persona than mine, but to realize how much we had in common. He was heavily tattooed, bald with a big biker beard and hollow tubes in his earlobes wide enough to throw M&Ms through. Peanut. We threw back some whiskeys and messed with the frat boys on the other side of the bar, trying to guess their names by yelling names at random to see if they'd respond. The bouncer asked us to stop.
I was fairly sloshed on the way home, Liz regrets not having a tape recorder and I'm damn glad she didn't.
Sunday Kris and Patti came out and we barbequed under a steel gray sky. We had tried to cancel the barbeque but it fell through (the cancellation) so we had it anyway (the barbeque) only smaller. It was fun, I learned about leash aggression. We watched some baseball, so much baseball, and then True Romance.
Radio from Space. Liz and I installed Sirius Satellite Radio in the Badunk today, and so far it works. Turned it on, cranked it up and we're jamming from orbit. Here's the rationalization: We learned as we traveled to Maine and Nova Scotia this summer (mini-site coming soon!! I swear!) that the regular radio is a two-toned, two-headed beast. On the one head, it's very nice to have a variety of music playing, to not know what's coming on next, and to find stuff you've never heard before. On the other head, if you're moving, you're lucky to get half an hour of good reception from a station, and even luckier if 28 minutes of that half hour aren't ear-splitting, madness inducing, homicidal rage inspiring commercials. And then there's the "variety" generally exhibited on the radio; none. They're all owned by the same company these days anyway (fuck Clear Channel), and their play lists are market-researched, focus-grouped, middle-of-the-road, uninteresting crap. This new toy solves nearly all of those problems. 60 channels of commercial free music and 40 channels of news, sports, comedy, &c. They have NPR and PRI (This American Life sold Liz on the idea in a half a jiff), and the music is very diverse. An entire Bluegrass channel!! Our musical horizons are bursting with anticipation.
The Civil War really sucked, huh?
