So Thanksgiving was pretty good. The past couple of years I’ve skipped going home to Massachusetts (since I’m there for Christmas anyway), but this year I drove up with my brother for a few days of family fun. There was a great deal of excellent food, as you might expect, and it was as always good to get away from both the city and the almighty Internets for a bit. I even made progress on the ever-changing stack of unread books that lives in my apartment. And on our way back to New York, we made a pilgrimage to Trader Joe’s - one without the sort of lines that could consume the entirety of a human life.
As it happens, today is Chris’s birthday. So those of you who know him should go ahead and drop him an email - I strongly encourage you all to refer to him as "Old Man Brown" whenever possible. "Crazy Old Man Brown" is also acceptable. (As in: "That there ball went into Crazy Old Man Brown’s back yard! Run, Timmy!")
I’m not sick anymore, or at least I’m mostly not sick. I still have that horrible cough, the sort that crops up whenever I laugh or breathe in sharply. The kind that’s embarrassingly loud in a bar or movie theatre, and which prompts people to tell me I really ought to quit smoking - always great to hear when you don’t smoke.
But things aren’t all bad. Chris’s birthday is rapidly approaching, and I decided to give him his present early as I’m bad at keeping secrets and he’s bad at not opening boxes in November. I got him an Xbox 360 with appropriate accessories and just a couple games to start with - Knights of the Old Republic (since we skipped the original Xbox altogether and he’s never played it) and Gears of War. I’ll let you know how we like them.
I also cut off almost all my hair on Tuesday, which is always extremely satisfying. It had gotten quite long, probably halfway down my back or even longer, which is something I was fond of in high school but is ultimately a huge pain in the ass. I just do not have the patience to deal with it and take care of it. I end up tying it back all the time, which sort of defeats the purpose of having long hair to begin with. So I cut it off. Or, more accurately, I paid a nice old Italian man to do it for me at Astor Place Hair. I don’t have a current picture, but it’s a great deal like this. The front’s a big longer and I’ve parted it on the side, but it’s the same sort of shape.
I got the chance to show off my new hair when I went out drinking with friends last night at what turned out to be the strangest bar I know of in Manhattan. It’s tucked right smack dab in the middle of the Upper East Side - one of those places that has nothing more than a sign and a door at street level. You have to go up three flights of stairs to even get to the bar itself, which is a long and very narrow space. And then the whole establishment looks like it was transplanted from another town altogether - it’s a dive bar, but it’s nothing like your standard New York City dive bar. Aluminum pie plates full of popcorn, a pair of very independent bar kittens, and remarkably cheap beer all contribute to an atmosphere that is utterly without pretense - maybe that’s what’s so puzzling about it. But the beer is good as well as cheap and the view through the single enormous window overlooking the street is very striking at night, so what more could you ask for?
Anyhow, that’s all I’ve got for you right now. I’m still having trouble accepting the fact that Thanksgiving is next week, but I suppose I’ll come to terms with it eventually.
Yeah, I’m still sick. You remember last week, when I thought I was sick? That was nothing. That was a case of the sniffles, this is the motherfucking Black Death. It includes (but is not limited to) one of those coughs that makes strangers look at you with concern and then edge slowly away. All in all it’s reminiscient of BronchitisFest ‘05 but I’m still holding out hope that it’s just a bad cold.
Anyhow, my life for the moment is reduced to sleeping, commuting, working, and more sleeping. And by sleeping, of course, I really mean "trying to sleep," as I keep coughing myself awake every twenty minutes or so. I’ve tried the usual round of hot tea, honey, cough syrup, NyQuil, and even dark chocolate - as people keep telling me cocoa is supposed to work as a cough suppressant. Admittedly I have no real objections to eating dark chocolate in the name of science. I already like my chocolate extremely dark and slightly bitter - just like my soul! But what I would like even more is to stop coughing long enough to get some sleep.
And just in case you’re one of those people who falls asleep as soon as their head hits the pillow, I’d like you to remember that ceiling cat is always watching:
<CowboyNeal> there’s this light fixture in my basement that is unfinished yet
<CowboyNeal> and every time I look up at the fixture, I expect to see ceiling cat looking down at me
<CowboyNeal> watching me masturbate
<Kharhl> ew. we just learned where CBN goes to jerk off.
<CowboyNeal> well, the place that ceiling cat can see
<CowboyNeal> there’s others with more privacy, sure
<CowboyNeal> like hemos’ office
<CowboyNeal> hemos: you touch your mouse today?
<CowboyNeal> when people go home for the day that means it’s time to rub my junk on all their stuff
<hemos> I have put my mouse in my mouth already
<hemos> twice.
I’ve been blessed this week with an yet another cold - it first manifested on Sunday as a sore throat, but since then it’s basically been all sinuses all the time. In light of this, our Halloween was pretty sedate. We butchered some pumpkins when I got home from work on Tuesday night (pictures forthcoming) and then set up camp on the couch to munch Halloween Peeps and freshly toasted pumpkin seeds while watching Bela Lugosi do his thing. I have had worse Halloweens, illness aside.
This morning I was walking to work and saw a man crouched over one of the grates in the sidewalk, dangling something on a long string down into it. I have seen this man before (though I’m not sure I’ve mentioned him) so I paused to have a cigarette and observe his work. What’s on the string is a magnet, and he dangles it down through the grate while looking around with a flashlight until he finds something of interest. If the object turns out not to be magnetic, he pulls up the string again and coats the magnet in peanut butter from a jar he keeps in his coat pocket before dropping it back down. This morning he did this several times before he was finally victorious - the peanut-buttery magnet came up with a ring attached. Whether the ring was valuable in any way, I can’t say, but you have to give the guy points for creativity.
