TAMIRoffal

A few weeks ago I wrote about the muggling of my daughter’s Geocache in the Frenchtown woods. Since then I’ve been returning to the cache site on a regular basis for what might be called maintenance—replacing the soggy cache log with a brand new memo pad, replacing some of the older items with new CD-Rs or paperbacks, and so on. I thought last weekend’s trip would probably be my last visit to the Geocache till Spring, but the weather was so gorgeous today (after 4 or 5 straight days of grayness and drizzle) that I could not resist heading through the woods again. This time it was the path I was maintaining. I brought a set of pruning shears—the big-ass ones, with the crescent blade, and as I walked along the path I trimmed the projecting branches and any sticker bush that seemed to be getting feisty. There were quite a few of them. The soggy weather has had the kind of effect on the local sticker bushes that radioactive meteorites have on the local flora and fauna in H. P. Lovecraft stories. Still, the pruning shears and I were equal to the task.

When I got to the end of the path, where the Geocache is secreted, I saw half a dozen deer in the creek. A couple were drinking and the others seemed to be watching them drink. They saw me but took no notice. When I was done checking the cache (it hadn’t been disturbed since last week) I started back down the path, and then for no particular reason I can recall I decided to go a different route. I’d noticed another path running more or less parallel to mine, a few yards down the slope and closer to the stream. I bushwhacked my way towards it and followed it for a while. It swung out along the creek bank for a while and then curved back into the woods, and it was much more overgrown than the one I’d just left. But I had my shears, so I started clipping my way back to the Frenchtown Park. Sometimes it was pretty slow going. The stick bushes and vines occasionally plugged up the pathway so completely I wasn’t always sure I was still on the path. But I persevered.

When I’d clipped and whacked my way through about 50 yards of overgrown path, I heard some clumping behind me. About 30 yards back the deer were following me. Once I turned around they didn’t come any closer, but they didn’t retreat, either. I chopped and clipped some more. When I’d cleared another 40 or 50 yards, the deer advanced again, and once again they waited while I opened up the next segment of the path. I had the impression they were a little bit impatient now, but it was just an impression. Eventually I came to a clearing with some picnic tables and a stone cooking pit and from here on the path was relatively clear. The deer kept coming, maintaining their 30 yard distance and stopping whenever I had to pause for more than a couple of seconds to clear some thorny impediment.

Finally I came to the wooden suspension bridge that connected the woods to the Frenchtown Park and I crossed. I waited on the other side. The deer reached the end of the path and looked at the bridge for quite a while before they decided, nah, don’t wanna mess with that, and made their way through some underbrush back to the creek. They didn’t say anything but I’m sure they thought I pulled a fast one on them.

Tropic Thunder, which I caught on the big screen when it was released last year, is reasonably funny (it’s not 8 dollars worth of funny, though) (And I had some issues with the 4 dollar popcorn, too), and mostly worth seeing because of Robert Downey Jr.’s balls-out performance. But it’s an order of magnitude funnier and considerably better on DVD with the commentary track activated, again largely because of Downey. He’s playing an Australian method actor who is playing a black American GI in a Vietnam War potboiler and he refuses to break character when the cameras stop. “How long are you gonna keep this shit up?” asks one of his co-stars, and he replies, “I don’ break character till th’ DVD commentary is done.” Well, he actually does deliver his DVD commentary in character, and it’s hilarious, all the more impressive for its being clearly extemporized. If Tropic Thunder is two and a half or three stars, Tropic Thunder with the commentary track on is a solid four (out of five; I mean it’s not that great).
 

My daughter, who is 25 years old, said she needed some help with her Halloween costume. She was going to the party as a cow and had therefore purchased a cow costume, a fairly top of the line one too, with an udder that fired a jet of water from one of the teats when you squeezed a rubber bulb. (This is an upright cow). Sounds like you have this covered, I said. No, she said, I want to go as a zombie cannibal cow. I really tried to beg off for a couple of days but in the end I caved. The fact is I knew how to design zombie cannibal cow make-up and she knew that I knew how to do it.

“I can’t do anything for you if I can’t get some liquid latex,” I told her. “We get that, the sky is the limit, zombie-cannibal-cow wise. We don’t, I advise you to go as a standard cow. You should keep it as simple as possible.” She assured me that we could get liquid latex at one of the Halloween shops on Rt. 46. So I drove 50 miles and we went shopping.

 

I just found out that Amazon is currently providing the Philip Glass Orange Mountain Music Sampler as a FREE DOWNLOAD . It took me a long time to warm up to his music but eventually I did. 21 tracks here. A lot of his film music, a song from  “The Witches of Venice,” a lot of music for solo piano, and as befits a sampler, you’ve got considerably more variety here than you’ll find on any of his standard releases. There’s even one of the goofy remixes from the “Glass Cuts” remix album.

Last week a crazy friend of mine downloaded an old Jack Cole comic and printed the frigging thing up and gave me a copy, which I read in the bathroom over the course of a weekend and can not imagine ever reading again, so I sealed it in plastic and on Sunday I lit out for the Geocache that Emma and I set up a few months ago in Frenchtown. My plan was to stick the faux-collector’s item in the ammo box. It takes about 15 minutes to get from the Frenchtown Park to the Geocache, but it’s a very pleasant walk through the woods. Because of Yesterday’s rain the footing was a little dodgier than I would have liked. About 20 yards from my destination I came upon an empty ziplock bag on the path. All the items in the Geocache were in such bags. I scooped this one up and shortly found the ammo box sitting open, in the middle of the path, a few feet from its erstwhile hiding place. The contents were also in the middle of the path, and I’m happy to report that these ziplock bags really are water tight; all the books and CDs were fine. The DVDs had been removed, I assume by whoever stumbled upon the Geocache. One bag was open, the one containing the log, which was a memo pad. You’re supposed to write your name and the date of discovery on it. This was waterlogged and unusable now. I put everything back in the box, added the comic, fixed the box (they hadn’t understood how the hinge worked and removed the lid to get inside), and put the Geocache back where it belonged.

The box was clearly discovered by a Muggle. That’s what Geocachers call non-Geocachers, borrowing it from Harry Potter. I don’t recall Harry using ‘muggle’ as a verb, but the Geocachers certainly do. It certainly sounds like a verb, and I hear overtones of ‘muddle’ and ‘fug’ and ‘mugger,’ all of which seem apropos of what happened to this particular Geocache. I’m going to have to keep a closer watch on it (i.e., visit it more often) to see if the muggling is repeated.

Beginning tomorrow. I’m going back, with a new memo pad.

Yesterday (Saturday, that is) my daughter hosted her 7^th annual “We Still Believe You Winona” Winona Ryder Film Festival, the first one to be held in her Little Falls, NJ apartment. She had an invitation posted on her Facebook page and I RSVPed “maybe.” This set off what I believe the kids call a ‘shit storm.’ “You are not coming! You do not believe!” she told me. Well, she had me there. Of course if no one was going to be admitted to the festival unless they believed—believed that Winona was telling the truth lo these many years ago when she told the cops she was not shoplifting but researching a movie role, that is—attendance was apt to be a leetle bit light. I thought but did not say.

She phoned me on the morning of the fest and told me I could, after all, stop by if I really wanted to, leaving ‘and pay for the pizzas’ unspoken but understood. I considered it but it would have meant a 70 mile car ride in the pounding rain to see three not-precisely-top-of-the-line Winona movies and then drive back home so I didn’t, although I did phone a couple of times for updates. I considered live blogging the party I wasn’t attending, too, but it just seemed like too much work. I blame it all on the rain, which hasn’t really been non-stop for the part 120 days. Not quite.

Turns out there was a mutiny half way through the second Winona movie, which was unspeakably bad, and the guests insisted on changing it to a Denise Richards Festival.

Um.

If only the weather on Saturday had been as incredibly gorgeous as the weather on Sunday I would have been able to report on the ad hoc Denise Richards Festival first hand.

Guy pulls into the Milford Market parking lot, where I’m putting some groceries in my trunk. Guy is talking on his cell phone and driving with one hand. He’s a loud guy: “YEAH! I’M NOT GONNA PUT UP WITH THAT BULLSHIT! YOU TELL KASABIAN FORGET IT…” He notices that the parking lot is pretty full, and the other end is blocked off for the moment because the Coca-cola truck is off loading. So the guy, still on the cell phone, still totally focused on Kasabian, throws his car in reverse even though it’s a one-way parking lot. He barely misses mowing down four or five people, and the cars behind him have to swerve and dodge to keep from getting creamed. “YOU KNOW WHAT, TERRY? IF KASABIAN WAS SO GODDAMN SMART HE WOULDN’T BE WORKING THE GODDAMN LOBSTER SHIFT, WOULD HE?” People are diving for cover as he backs into the street without so much as pausing, although to be fair pausing wouldn’t have made much difference since he couldn’t have possibly seen the traffic he was backing into. Car horns, screams, screeching breaks, but miraculously there’s no accident. “I’M SORRY TERRY, I MISSED THAT, SOME FUCKIN’ ASSHOLE WAS LEANING ON HIS HORN!” [Out the window, to the guy leaning on his horn]: “HEY ASSHOLE—THERE’S A LAW ABOUT THAT!” Then he put the car into drive and set off in search of new adventures.

Yesterday I finished the first draft of a story, which came in at just under 19,000 words. That’s very close to the upper limit of what you can submit with a straight face to just about any money-paying fiction-publishing market. I’m going to do some serious cutting before I send it out. I’m letting it marinate on the hard drive for a week or so before I even look at it again.

I finished the story, which is really a collaboration even though I wrote the whole thing  (for reasons I’ll explain shortly),  and then to celebrate I drove to the Burger King, Lotte Lenya and Kid Creole and the Coconuts blasting all the way. I had a Whopper Junior for dinner. I read The Perfect Egg and Other Secrets by Aldo Buzzi between chomps. One of the unfortunate things about the way I’m wired (one of the many unfortunate things, I should say) is that when I am writing full time I have trouble doing any serious reading. (By ‘serious’ I mean ‘for pleasure.’ Which is not quite the same thing as ‘for diversion.’) Buzzi just died a few days ago and I was completely ignorant of him and his books until I read Patrick Kurp’s excellent essay on the occasion of Buzzi’s 99^th birthday, just a couple of months ago. Some of his books turned out to be available very cheaply on Amazon (I got two for shipping plus pennies) (The out-of-print ones will run you some bucks, though). He turned out to be very much to my taste, a writer who can make me laugh four or five times a page without ever cracking a joke. The Perfect Egg is a little book of little essays, mostly related to food. The book is full of recipes (most of them likely impossible to realize for one reason or another), and peppered with odd bits of learning that suggest an autodidact, which I suppose he was, despite a university education and a career as an architect, and later as a film editor. I’d like to think I am the first person to read this book at a Burger King, but I’m probably not. Then I came home, paid some bills, and decided to take tomorrow, which is to say Wednesday, off.
 

The town council was voting on a Wolf-Dog Ordinance. The local wolf-dog hybrids keep getting out, despite an eight-foot fence, and the neighbors are up in arms. Well, some neighbors. A lot of neighbors love the wolf-dogs. During the most recent escape the wolf-dogs (or one of them) (or maybe one of the local coyotes) went totally Jeffrey Dahmer on a local cat, but otherwise they just tend to romp around for a few days and then go home. “Everybody wants a night on the town now and then, even wolf-dogs,” as a gentleman in the parking lot before the meeting put it.

I wasn’t able to park in the parking lot, as it turned out; I tried pulling into a space I saw but a cop told me the spaces left were for council members only. “I, uh, am a council member,” I said. But apparently the actual council members were known to the officer, as, apparently, was I. “Jesus, you’re an asshole, Grimshaw. Just park on the goddamn street, would ya?”

The meeting was so crowded you had to sign up to speak during the public hearing on the wolf-dog ordinance. It was standing room only. There was somebody on the council named “Mr. Peabody,” and a life time of Rocky and Bullwinkle shows forced me to bite the heel of my hand every time his name was mentioned.

The first time the wolf dogs got out it was because a tree fell on the fence, and then a neighbor backed his truck into the fence or something. The most recent break seems to have been the result of someone lifting the gate off its hinges. To my astonishment, the wolf-dog owner’s lawyer more or less conceded that the dogs might well have done this themselves. This suggested ‘opposable thumbs’ to me, which in turn suggested ‘werewolves,’ but I kept my peace. They haven’t tried to break into the llama farm down the road on any of their excursions, which amazes me, although now that I think of what it’s like being downwind of the llamas, I guess it shouldn’t. Anyway, the proposed ordinance would effectively outlaw the wolf-dogs, on the grounds that there is no ‘efficacious’ rabies vaccine approved for wolf-dog hybrids, although the local vet testified that this is a total load and that the rabies shots approved for dogs works fine on wolf dogs on account of they are dogs (as are wolves). The word ‘efficacious’ was used several dozen times in the course of the evening. I don’t think it was pronounced the same way twice. (Favorite pronunciation: Ee-FEE-ka-kus, which manages to sound vaguely scatological twice in the course of four syllables. It means ‘has an effect.’ I would think a ‘non-efficacious’ rabies vaccine wouldn’t be a vaccine at all, so you could just leave the ‘efficacious’ out entirely, but that’s just me.)

I am by nature sympathetic to wolves and wolf-dogs, and My Eyes Glaze Over when I am asked to think of the children. As it happened my eyes glazed over a lot more than I would have imagined, given that the pro-wolf-dog forces out numbered the anti-wolf-dog forces by about 3-1. Wolf-dog hybrids are gentle, even timid gave think of the children a real run for its money, MEGO-wise. As did punish the deed, not the breed. I believe more than 50 people spoke. High points: “Didn’t you watch Jurassic Park? I realize the situation isn’t exactly the same, but…” “These dogs, and they are dogs, do not bite. I have two year old grand children, three year old grand children, they just plop on top of these so-called wolf-dogs and the dogs just lick them. It’s those little crap dogs that bite! Your poodles, your Chihuahuas, that’s what you have to look out for!” Et cetera. The wolf-dogs, who look like huskies to me, got a lot of character references. None from cats, though. As I said, I’m a fan of the wolf-dogs but then it wasn’t my cat they had for lunch.

In the end the council, painfully aware that they could not vote for or against the ordinance without royally honking off a substantial number of citizens less than a month before the election, voted to table the ordinance until the closed November meeting by which time a *cough* compromise of some sort might be reached.

Cough cough.

Well, it turns out that the ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus Rex also has those ridiculous tiny arms and hands, although since Grandpa Rex was about 5 feet tall they weren’t quite as ridiculous. But really—what was the point of those things? “RRRROOOAAR! I’m the King of the Dinosaurs! But before I devour that herd of brontosauruses, would you open this jar for me?”

[NOTE: Spellcheck says ‘brontosauruses’ is legit. Who knew?]

One of my regular stops on The Internet is Terry Teachout’s ABOUT LAST NIGHT . Terry is the drama critic for The Wall Street Journal so there’s a lot of stuff about that (hence the title of the blog), but during the past year, year and a half he’s steadily blogged about writing the libretto of an opera (based on the Somerset Maugham story “The Letter” and the Bette Davis movie based on it) (he and composer Paul Moravic refer to it as an Opera Noir) which had a successful premier a few months ago—and he was simultaneously seeing his Louis Armstrong biography through the press. (I can totally relate, as I am currently writing this post while at the same time I am playing “Mafia Wars” on Facebook).

But it’s not all operas and Louis Armstrong bios. Sometimes he just posts things like this, which starts off by alerting us to the new “Dragnet” stamps the post office will be offering, moves into an appreciation of the B&W 1950’s Dragnet series (he gives a couple of paragraphs from an essay he wrote on the subject, but the whole thing is worth reading), and he includes a link to the opening scene of an episode from 1952 on YouTube starring Lee Marvin. I watched the ten minute clip and then went to YouTube to watch the rest of the episode.

That episode is really the raison d’être of this post. There’s no dazzling camera work, no flashy editing; the direction is so static that the thing doesn’t seem to have been directed at all. It really borders on the avant garde. The acting is low-key to the point where it barely registers as acting; and it’s absolutely riveting. It’s like watching William H. May or Joe Montegna in a David Mamet play. In a way it’s fearless; you couldn’t make something like this today and hope to get it on the air. Everyone would be terrified that the audience would start clicking the remote to find a Project Runway episode or a Mets game during one of those long, long close ups of Lee Marvin where he’s just repeating ‘It’s got nothing to do with me’ in a monotone.

To my chagrin I must agree with the General Consensus: the Beatle remasters sound frickin’ amazing. All I’ve heard are a few mp3’s, ripped for me by kind friends, but they are dazzling. The mp3’s—and  bear in mind that mp3 compression results in a loss of 2/3rds of the audio information at the highest bit rates — not only sound better than my CDs, they sound roughly 600 times better. They are unbelievable on my piece-of-shit speakers. If you want some idea of the difference in sound, check out the review by this gentleman. You can hear the difference even in this little YouTube video. In my (expert) opinion, the orgasm he appears to experience when the new improved version of “Drive My Car” plays is the real thing.  On equipment that retails for more than the price of a Tuesday lunch special at Perkins, the remasters would probably melt my brain.

I’m chagrined because I kind of don’t care.

‘Mercurial’ is one of my favorite words, or at any rate it would be if it meant what I wanted it to mean, and if it were spelled the way I want it to be spelled. It was one of the words that I read long before I ever heard it spoken aloud, and my eye resolved it as ‘mercurical,’ and my eye and my ear both want that hard, second ‘c’ in there. I suppose it has to do with a long childhood acquaintance with Mercurochrome, a topical antiseptic much beloved of moms in my neighborhood. Mercurochrome was bright red and when it was applied to a scraped elbow or knee, the wound actually looked bloodier than it had before. America went down the toilet for good in 1998 when Mercurochrome was banned because of its mercury content, but I digress.
 

The bakery where I worked for 22 years closed last year, or rather moved its baking operations to New England. The store front has remained open and now the bread is trucked in, although the girls who work behind the counter continue to bake muffins and other goodies on the premises; and also continue to apply my employee discount when I stop in for bagels, or need a chocolate cake for a party. I like that.

Last week there was some action upstairs, in the mixing room where I used to work. The fixtures and assorted items were tossed out of the door and into a huge dumpster. (There is a great door-to-nowhere on the east side of the mixing room that was a never ending source of delight, allowing for much more entertaining raw dough fights with passing pedestrians than a mere window would permit). And I noticed that the letters on the awning had been removed, so the name of the bakery was no longer apparent unless you looked very closely and saw where the sun had bleached the outlines of the letters into the fabric. These, I felt, were ominous developments, although I’m not sure why I felt that way. Well, if the bakery shut down completely my (ex) employee discount was out the window, but I think my unease went beyond that.

This week, I went forth to find that brown paper bags had been taped to the inside of the store front windows and big, carefully printed and artfully placed letters spelling out TEMPORARILY CLOSED were displayed on the outside. A small sign on the door

announced that ‘Café Au Le Pont’ would was remodeling a tad but would be up and running again in early October. Again?

It was signed by the ‘Café Au Le Pont staff,’ who were the same girls who’d been manning the storefront at the bakery. Did they buy it? Did somebody else buy it? Did the old owners just change the name? Will my ex-employee discount continue forever? Does this new French-ifed name with its stupid little hickeys over the ‘e’s mean Goodbye Muffins, Hello Croissants? (Well, they already make croissants. Does it mean Goodbye Muffins?)

Without all this bakery-thought bouncing around in my head I probably would not have purchased the bread machine at the rummage sale a couple of days ago ($3). But I did, and today the Maiden Loaf emerged from it. The bread machine was equipped with several recipes but except for a sunflower honey bread that wasn’t in the cards none of them seemed interesting so I winged it with an ad hoc white bread. VERDICT: Not horrible. Because it makes rectangular loaves the mixing blade does not scrape all the loose flour from the far ends, but that just means in the future I must premix things a little bit. No disgusting undertaste. Didn’t rise as much as I’d anticipated, although I used considerably more yeast than the included recipes suggested to me that I should. Huh.

Over at Omnivoracious, Matthew Cheney conducts a great interview of Samuel R. Delany on the occasion of a new edition of Delany’s Jewel Hinged Jaw, a collection of essays I read to pieces, literally, when I lived on East Tenth Street in the East Village mumble mumble years ago and was trying to figure out how to write.

The interview contains lots of stuff like this:

I quickly learned that reading fiction produced in me two highly distinct pleasures. One was the pleasure of story. But far more intense was an extremely vivid, all-but-transcendentally intense experience from some of the words themselves. One I still recall—yes, from the opening pages of Ulysses—was Joyce’s description of Buck Mulligan’s hair like pale, grained oak...and suddenly Mulligan, fleshy, jovial, course, and blond, was momentarily in my third-floor bedroom with me in Harlem on 7th Avenue at 132 Street.

It was amazing!

Another came from the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, in his story “Granny Won’t Knit,” I believe, where a young boy experiences a moment of sadness, and Sturgeon wrote something like, “A hand rose up inside his head and scratched down the inside of his face, making his eyes water,” and my own face got chills as my own eyes teared.

I found language doing this in Lawrence Durrell’s Justine and the other three novels of the Alexandria Quartet. I found it doing this in James Agee’s A Death in the Family and in science fiction writer Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. I found it in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse and The Waves; and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Spillway stories; Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica and In Hazard; and Nabokov's Lolita.

I noticed, too, that I found almost none of this in novels translated from other languages, even when the introductions suggested that, in the original, this is precisely what made the books great. Now why was that...?

If you like that you should probably head over to the interview itself right now and read the whole thing.

Mowing the grass I heard a crazy bird. The people next door have some cockatoos in the backyard—they leave the cage open and the cockatoos fly around but rarely leave the yard. Actually they don’t leave the cages open that much any more because they’ve got some puppies now and the puppies go berserk when the birds are flying around. The bird I was hearing was remarkably loud (I was hearing it over the noise of the lawnmower, after all) and not like the cockatoos. It was really nuts. It was a seven note bird song, definitely a bird song, no question in my mind, but kind of goofy, like something you’d expect from a bird in a Warner Brothers cartoon. EE-aw-CAW!-CAW!-ee-WAAAAAH-kah. I looked around for the bird. Nothing. But it was clearly reacting to the way I was mowing. When I made a sharp turn around the rain spout, it went ballistic; when I made a wide turn around the beech-nut tree, it was pretty calm. After a while I realized it was only singing when I made a turn. I cleaned some twigs out of the left wheel well. That, I’m sorry to say, disappeared the bird. I wasn’t happy about that. We had totally bonded.

Two or three weeks earlier on the same lawn, while I was emptying grass clippings into a container, a guy in a Volvo pulled up to the curb and asked me in very bad Spanish if I knew where Rahway Avenue was. I directed him to it in pretty good Spanish. He asked me politely (“Por favor”) to slow down, please. So I repeated the directions in English. “Gracias,” he said, and drove off.

My neighbor Laurie asked if I might get a dead cat out of her window well. Her husband and teenage girls (any one of whom would presumably jump at the chance to do this) were in Chicago. I said sure. She said she understood if I happened to be squeamish about this sort of thing. I said actually I spent a summer black bagging bodies and photographing autopsies for the Passaic County I.D. Bureau.[1] She said Oh.

The cat in question was a quasi-feral cat she’d been feeding for a while and it got on well with the other cats on the property, including the puma-colored barn cat and the 18 year old white cat with the caterpillar fuzz, but over the past couple of days it had been behaving oddly. She thought it might be ill, and called the vet. The vet told her to catch it if she could and bring it in for testing.

The catching part was going to be easy now.

It had curled itself up in the window well, under a garden faucet. I put on my gloves and lifted it by the tail. It retained the curl, like a plaster cast of a sleeping cat. The smell wasn’t too bad yet but it would be before long. I put it in a big trash bag I’d brought and sealed it off a couple of times, then Laurie brought out three more bags. Her bags were white and translucent, which made me glad I’d brought my opaque black one. I asked where she wanted me to bury the cat and she said no, she was going to put it in the refrigerator and bring it to Suzanne the vet tomorrow (this being Sunday).

“You know what?” I said. “Don’t put the dead cat in your refrigerator.” To my amazement she gave me an argument about this. I said really, you can’t put a rotting animal in the refrigerator with your food. She said well, YOU put rotting animals in your refrigerator with your food. I said my rotting animals were government inspected. Plus, I pointed out, nothing in my refrigerator had spent 6 or 8 hours curing in a damp window well on a hot August morning.

Meanwhile the other cats wandered over and started batting the bagged cat around. Just a cursory whack now and then, and when they were satisfied it wasn’t going to whack back they seemed to lose interest. I said call Suzanne and see if she still wants to test the cat. Odds are she’s going to tell you to just chuck it. Finally (I had to mention “flies”) Laurie agreed to call Suzanne and NOT put the cat in the refrigerator. I was very relieved. She gave me two frozen veggie hot dog things, like a hot dog with a bun baked around it. You heat it up and dip it in your favorite condiment. I haven’t tried this out yet.

Last night I emailed to see where the cat had ended up, half expecting a ‘would you mind coming over here and, you know, digging an itty-bitty hole?’ type answer. But she had gone to Walmart, bought a cheap cooler, put the cat on ice, brought it to the vet the next day, and—surprise! The cat tested positive for rabies.

She thanked me for talking her out of storing the rotting rabid cat carcass in the fridge.

De nada.

(And yes, the other cats are up to date with their shots)

The Andy Warhol Birthday Celebration didn’t go precisely as anticipated. 24 hours before it got rolling I hadn’t even heard about it, but Paul Proch told me RoByn Thompson the world famous body artist would get us into it for free. It was going to be packed with celebs. At the Gershwin Hotel.

Me: The what?

Paul: It’s next to the Museum of Sex.

Me: The what?

Paul: Stop that.

So I called RoByn to get the details, but she was kind of out of it because she’d hit her head on the garage door and was holding a bag of frozen peas to her head. But she confirmed that she was going and we’d be able to get in free and hobnob with the celebs. We made vague plans to meet and have dinner before going to the party, and I called Paul to further coordinate. I asked Paul if he knew anything about the dress code. He asked me what I was wearing. Well, I said, I’m thinking my red sneakers and a white jacket. He said that would be fine. What I didn’t realize until several hours later was that he thought it was so fine he was going to also wear red sneakers and a white jacket. This meant that it was very easy to spot him at the party. It also meant that the other people at the party thought we were BOTH waiters and kept asking us to get them drinks.
 

I try to take a walk every night unless the weather makes it absurd and I try to time it for dusk. I like sunsets and God knows the Delaware River Valley frames them spectacularly, but it’s really all about the garages. I pass a lot of open garages during my walk. An open garage at twilight, after dinner, early evening... They’re all (nearly all) lit by a single bulb, often dangling and unencumbered by any sort of fixture. Sometimes there’s a secondary light source provided by a high intensity lamp clamped to a work bench, or a portable TV (black & white!) tuned to the third inning of a Phillies game (Mets down two runs of course) (goddamn it). Most of them have dart boards. Many of them contain exercise equipment— abandoned, I think, most of it, although now and then I’ll see the plates on the barbell in the rack over the bench have been changed.

The car culture I grew up with seems to have mostly vanished. When I was a kid, a walk like this would turn up half a dozen garages with teenagers working on 15 year old Chevys, customizing the chrome, rebuilding the transmission, meticulously painting shitty flames on the doors. No more; now and then a geezer in a wife beater three sizes too small is draining some dirty 30 weight into a pan. Otherwise, nada. Of course the radio music of my youth was conducive to changing spark plugs and replacing the alternator. ALL the radio music: Steve Wilhorsky worked on his Mustang with the dial set to a station that frequently played a tune I that later learned was “So What” by Miles Davis, and the Stiles brothers souped up their car to WABC, when it was the biggest top 40 station in the tri-state area, which meant, among other things, that you would hear the number one song of the week twice an hour. I think every song that charted between 1955 and 1972 makes sense to me as the sound track to car repairs. Since then, not so much.

In one garage I pass there’s a Marshall amp. There’s been a beer can sitting on it for about a week. Sometimes when I pass by the amp lights are on, and sometimes not. Maybe the beer can is an ash tray? And do I really live in a town where you can leave an amplifier unattended for hours at a time, in plain view of the road? I guess I do, although I’m relieved the kid has not checked to see if this applies to guitars as well.

Inexplicable: a sopping wet petty coat draped over a saw horse. A paint brush sitting in a can of blue paint for 3 weeks now.

And then there’s the litter box under a ping-pong table, and ripe it is, and I am 50 feet away, in the open air. And yet, there is a game in progress! The stench must be over powering in there. Perhaps it serves as an animal repellant—in the course of my walk I inevitably cross paths with deer and ground hogs, and with skunks and raccoons if I’m out late enough.

Other smells from other garages: Turpentine. Marinara sauce. Pot. Detergent. Vomit. Popcorn.

I have an umbrella with a different species of dog on every panel, or facet, or whatever you call the different sections of the umbrella. Usually when I go out with the dog umbrella nobody says anything, but today two different women complimented me on my dog umbrella. One of them had a little girl in tow, and I could see where a mom might be happy that she lives in a town where grown men walk around with dog umbrellas, but the other lady was just walking out of the grocery store and saw fit to holler, “I love your umbrella!” at me, across the street. This has never happened before. I’m not sure what was up today. Maybe because it was only drizzling. I guess I tend to employ the dog umbrella—any umbrella—in ferocious downpours, as a rule. If it’s just a little drizzly, as it was this morning, I’m okay with getting damp. Neither of the women I encountered this morning had their umbrellas unfurled. In a downpour maybe people are too busy keeping dry to holler about how much they love your dog umbrella. There’s probably a very important rule of life I could extract from this experience if I was just a tiny bit smarter.

As a special bonus, after the cut, an old column I wrote about my dog umbrella. With a special bonus WOLF URINE anecdote!