Retirement?
Originally posted to ydnar.vox.com in December 2007.
Sometime before Flickr and Twitter scratched my lazy itch, I used to blog. Whole paragraphs! Structured sentences, posts with conclusions and enclosures! Double entendre! Exclamation points!
Retirement’s been mostly a drag, just kidding. Yesterday I woke up to the sounds of my parents’ neighbors dogs barking. Apparently they’re redoing the kitchen and they’d given the kids a Wii for Christmas. All Wii and no wee, ah nevermind. Poor pups. My newly slashed thumb was stitched up, and I managed to gimp along with just one opposable digit.
Parents had an epic holiday party, with the whole congregation and a large part of the caucasian, largely older, largely richer than you crowd came by for a drink of pinot gris (and not chardonnay, as my unscientific testing proved). I took photos, poured wine & Diet Coke and generally played the good PK (that’s Preachers Kid). Dad was a good host, and Mom made sure stuff happened. I’ve never seen them cook more food consumed so quickly. Where lesser mortals would have catered the whole sum bitch, they made. Everything. From. Scratch.
Can I just say that phylo-wrapped white asparagus is basically crack?
Met some interesting folk including a Baltimore inner-city school teacher and an elderly gent who’d lived the entirety of his life in Cambridge Maryland. He kept asking me if I was applying to move back. I wasn’t quite sure if he was fucking with me or not.
Apres party, Mom and I took off to head back to Alexandria, Virginia. She works 5 days out of every 2 weeks at the hospital in the ICU. It was good to kick it with the moms. We got stuck in traffic on the Chesapeake bay bridge, drove by Annapolis and circled half the beltway back to Old Town.
Met up with an old friend Dennis at his place of business, and he gave me a CD of his noise/ambient including a remix of a track I’d made a decade ago. It sounds like he just slowed it down 75% and added noise, but my now unsophisticated ears aren’t attenuated to the sounds of ambient like they used to be. Maybe if it was sped up and covered by a singer-songwriter.
Afterwards, I ran into the Korean crew, drinking & smoking in one of the Old Town locals, and my resident BFF Dabysan dropped in. We made to another bar, and watched (some of us Sang) karaoke amidst the Virginia-legal cloud of tobacco. Technically it was day six without a smoke, but it didn’t feel like it this morning.
This morning I had a cup of my old favorite, Misha’s. Harrar Americano, short cup, less water pls thx. Ran into Misha, Andrea, Joel, Sang, Dabysan and a few other folk. The place hasn’t changed much in the 2.5 years I’ve been absent, except for a coat of paint and a new logo on the cups. And onesies for sale.
Today was an epic battle against the internet gnomes, rain, designing, photographing and drinking more coffee. It’s almost midnight here on the east coast, and the rain’s let up. Time for something new, like fomenting plans for flights across the globe. There are 5 tabs open to Expedia, one to Vox and one to Twitter. This place is closing in 6 minutes, and I’ve got an itch to scratch.