is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Septa, Sake, Syrah.
Septa, Sake, Syrah.
It takes about three hours, on three trains (not counting the NY subway), to get from my house in Haverford to Linda�s house in Manhattan. And it only costs $35 roundtrip if you take SEPTA and NJTransit instead of Amtrak (which is more like $120 roundtrip!). Linda had a date Friday night, so I showed up at her place, dropped off my stuff, and then went out to meet Strauss, who is in town from Berlin (where he has, for some years now, been doing his best to be expatriotic). For some reason we went to a German restaurant. We had tasty beer and rib-sticking food. Then, after walking around for awhile, we went to a basement Sake bar.
On the way to the bar we walked by a liquor store and noticed a display of thematic liquor decanters, including a special Thanksgiving Jim Beam in the form of a turkey and an eagle. You would get at the liquor by screwing the turkey�s head off. Literally. The two birds were perched on some brown mass of dirt and sticks, looking at each other. Eagle had its beak open and his tongue was hanging out a bit. It was strange. Strauss said, �Look, the eagle has a tongue. [pause] What is he trying to do?� I said, �The eagle wants to tongue-kiss the turkey. He is saying, [exaggerated bad French accent] �I may look like an American Eagle, but really I�m French!��
At the Sake bar we were faced with a lot of hipsters and a five-page menu of possible Sake choices. I wanted chilled sake. In fact I really wanted the sake that LG and I had consumed on one of our dates. Said sake was chilled, and good, and smooth, and surprising. It produced a pleasant kind of drunkenness (you know how different liquors and even types of liquors impart different modes or styles or feelings of drunkenness?). However I could not recall what the sake LG and I had consumed was called. So I decided I would just order at random, the only principle of ordering being to stick with names I would not forget. So I chose Waketake, since it sounds like walkie talkie. (Laugh if you must, but note that I remember the name.) The menu was divided into sakes refined at different levels. I choose a cheaper sake from amongst the most expensive group and Strauss chose a mid-range sake from amongst the most inexpensive group. Waketake ended up being a good choice. It did remind me of the stuff I�d had that night with LG�. however I suspect that most of what was good about that night had little to do with the sake. I didn�t like Strauss�s choice at all, but he preferred his to mine, so we both chose well.
Strauss is funny. We had a good time joking and catching up and drinking too much. If you�re one of those who knows him, I�ll report that he looks the same, sounds the same, has new stories, and the stories still make me laugh really hard. The only thing new about him is that he�s wearing HUGE eyeglasses now. It adds to the comic-character look he sometimes has. (Back when Heidi and I first met Strauss, we were in San Francisco. Heidi walked up to him at a party and said, �Hey, aren�t you the guy who eats at that place sometimes?� Classic Heidi. His reply was what came to be classic Strauss. �No. No, sometimes I don�t eat at that place.� Or something like that. Anyway, we became friends and then he moved to New York a month later, so the friendship consisted of lots of emailing punctuated by drunken walks around the East Village whenever I ended up in NYC. When I first started bringing him to events with other NYC friends of mine, I would say, �hey, I invited Strauss,� and people would be all, �who�s that?� and Wendy would always describe him as �Jill�s friend who looks like Trotsky.� And everyone would nod and go, �Oh yeah. That guy.�)
Strauss is an ironic-pessimistic endless fountain of secular Jewish humor and sardonic world commentary. Our baseline dispositions tend in opposite directions. And yet this is what I found in my notes section for diary entries when I woke up Saturday morning: �Strauss never lets me default to any of my worst selves.� It�s true. Even when it comes to joking, there�s a rigor to his conversational requirements. It�s a good thing.
Here�s a picture of Strauss and I from back when we first met. 
When I finally got back to Linda�s guest room I found that she had remembered to leave Bucky out for me! No, Bucky is not a stuffed animal. Bucky is a buckwheat pillow that is the only non-feather pillow in the house. I�m not down with down due to my allergies. In my drunkenness I declared aloud, �Aw! Linda remembered Bucky!� Then I fell asleep for four hours only to wake up with a terrible headache. I blame Strauss!
On Saturday I had lunch with Yoktan. For four hours. We talked about philosophy and what makes life worth living. Yes, that�s really what we talked about. For a long time. I espoused my theory of friendships being families for those who don�t follow the usual path to family-formation. We ate at Angelika Kitchen, and since we had eaten at a health food restaurant, of course we had to go get pastries afterward. I had a yummy custardy cake with raspberries on top, and he had a cranberry almond tart. At some point the conversation shifted to talking about love, and he jokingly made some comment about how I should find a nice Jewish boy and I laughed and said, �Ha, if I found a nice Jewish boy who wanted to marry me, his parents would be SO BUMMED. I�m a tattooed heathen!� He laughed in an eruptive kind of way. He pointed at one of my tattoos, �Isn�t that some kind of pagan sign!?� I replied, �Hey, this is Carthaginian, which is not so strange to you and yours.� Carthago est Tunisia, one homeland to Y. Then we talked about backpacking and what is good about taking one�s friends out of the city sometimes. He told a story about a mountain he tried to make Wendy climb in Morocco.
Yoktan and I once spent an evening walking all around the bustling restaurant-and-bar streets of Donostia (San Sebastian), Spain, in the rain (and yet far from the plains), holding the bare frame of an umbrella over ourselves as if it were keeping us dry. Yoktan is the one who gave me the original version of the hose-clamp ring I wear on my pinky finger.
Here�s a picture of Yoktan and I when we first met, about five years before we ended up in Spain at the same time.
At some point Yoktan had to return to his new apartment and continue to peel 100 years worth of paint off of what will someday be once-again ornate woodwork. So I went back to Linda�s and took a nap, then woke up, got dressed, and she and I went over to Trip�s house for a wine party. It was Syrah night, so the entrance fee was a bottle. I brought one of my favorite wines, the Qupe Syrah.
Trip�s party was fun, and full of fabulous food, and I talked to lots of people who work behind the scenes for filmmakers (Trip is a scenic artist for film sets). I ran into some people I hadn�t seen for some time, including Damien, who I hadn�t seen for twenty years.
No one made the Que Syrah Syrah joke. No one at all.
Here is a very funny photo of Trip and I (and some others) back when Trip (in the hat) and I just met. Remember, it was the 80s.
Sunday morning I had been hoping to get Jeremy to have brunch with me and Linda, but we couldn�t sync our schedules so I ate some more food with Strauss. We ate at Old Devil Moon, and it was PERFECT. My scrambled eggs were fluffy and neither over- nor undercooked, my home fries were tasty and oniony and mushy but not formless. My biscuit was fluffy and HUGE, and it came with an amazing blackberry jam that, on its own, tasted like blackberry PIE. My coca-cola was entirely flat, which made me sad, but I got an Iced Tea instead which was yummy and LOVELY. When I got the waitress� attention I said, �Um, excuse me, this coke is totally flat. Could I maybe get an Iced Tea instead?� Then I made fun of myself for using such a female form of asking the question. �Um, could I MAYBE get an Iced Tea, if it isn�t any trouble, and you don�t think I�m fat? I�ve done nothing wrong, but I�m sorry!� Strauss insisted that he knew what I meant but that my statement had not been so bad. So for the rest of the meal he and I would test out statements in exaggerated versions of either male or female voices, and that kept us perhaps more entertained than it ought to have.
In other news, Linda is keeping all the hair that falls off of her head in a shoe box. She is going to collect it for a year to see how much is being lost. I saw the box that contains what she has so far this morning. I had two reactions at once. 1) Wow. Art project. Cool looking. Strange. 2) CRAZY! CRAZY! Ha. We laughed. She is Linda!
I just spent 20 minutes looking for an excellent photo I have of Linda from back in the day, and I could not find it, dammit. Then I thought I�d settle for two other photos I know I have of Linda, and I couldn�t find those either! So, even though I found three out of four photos I had in mind while writing this, I can�t help but admit that the photo filing system I devised last summer is imperfect!
If you live in New York and you have not yet seen me since my latest arrival on the east coast(ish), believe me, you will soon.
However.
This Friday I go to San Francisco for nine days (it will be fall break here at Haverford). Evany, Marco and Caroleen are waiting to see Serenity with me on Saturday night. We are all VERY EXCITED.
12:03 a.m. - October 04, 2005
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
