Civicless we still stand, a state which necessitated some creative transportation today and yesterday - Beck unfortunately made some drives to Natick as a result. Hopefully we will fix this soon, but we'll see.
So yesterday Beck drove me in to Walnut, where I shuttled kids to and fro all afternoon; malls, art stores, dance stores, you name it. Took quite a while, and the only thing I learned from the day was that the term cacophony, long thought to be a superlative in the "boisterous noise" genre, has been WAY overmatched by the new entry, "12 ballerinas screeching with joy on their way to the mall." Seriously, the grating effect was something like Sonic Youth channeled through a midi player where the synthesizer effect is "breaking glass." Very experimental. Very loud. Very not as good as Daydream Nation. On a multitude of fronts.
With the taxi servicing done, Beck picked me up en route to B.U. / Brookline area, where we picked up our friend Shimon. Shimon recently made the incredibly wise decision to cut his hair, resulting in the following rather jarring before and after set:
Something of a Weird-Al to Garfunkel type transition if you ask me. What the hell, I've got 5 gigs here:
Hmmmm, doesn't really work with the balding, though. How about:
Awwww... nice. And Shimon would probably identify more readily with Bobby Z than with Arty G. So there you have it. All of these things pale, natch, to the following transformation, which I could not hope to describe:
It is, perhaps, times like these in which I appreciate the commonness of my name.Anyways, Shimon, nay, "Shimmer," is doing well, about to complete his PhD in Comp Sci / Artificial Intelligence with a subspecialty in something like "Teaching Robots to Play Soccer." We had a great time tonight; hit that miscellaneous bar in Coolidge corner that confusingly and non-correlatingly names all its dishes after sports stars, Boston-bred or otherwise. Beers later, we hit JP Licks for a nightcap. It is was sweet to enjoy the Coolidge pedestrian scenery while chomping down our unnatural cow products. Seriously, it was great seeing Shimon - always a fascinating dude. This is the guy, it should be mentioned, with whom I conducted Beatles class our freshman year at Rice. We were awesome, if slightly born 30 years too late. Shimon is computer conferencing all week in Beantown; hopefully we will catch him again.
So we drove home, or rather Beck drove home as I fell asleep to the soothing tones of homophobic country music. And all of you dying to protest and/or point out the oxymoron there, I remember between my fadings in and out hearing a lyric along the lines of "where I'm from we like our girls to sing soprano."
Today, I caught the commuter rail in to Natick, returned some books to the library, took a tour of the new and improved route to Logan airport and then ran some more errands with various members of the Nut community. Fun times, to be sure, but I am itching to get back to teaching and something vaguely more meaningful. Or maybe less meaningless.
Beck picked me up and cook an awesome white bean, italian sausage and pasta dinner. We ate out on the porch and envied our neighbor's swimming pool, causing congressmen to lament the moral compass of this fine nation. You know, what with the coveting of our neighbor's swimming pool (Leviticus 2006:1) and all. It's hot as, well, the hell we're doomed to going to for coveting our neighbor's pool these days in the greater Boston area. 95 and humid, and nary a built-in AC unit in view. Or maybe our upstairs neighbors have one. Man, I really want their AC. Wait, did it just get hotter in here?
S'all I got. Oh, except to throw out that I ran 6.5 miles before my quads gave out yesterday morning. The plan is now to keep on keepin' on like a Shimon that flew until I make a comeback performance this week. FTR, I think I hit maybe roughly 19 miles last week. Hooray for me. I'm going to try to keep this up. All this knee and heel and shoulder and Swoops and Squirrels business is making me feel a tad pudgy, so game is officially on.
That's all I got. posts look bigger with pics. More reviews tomorrow. Oh, and possibly something new from Beck's little corner of the world...
No comments:
Post a Comment