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I’m a two-bit Midas!
I hate, hate, hate having coins jingling around in my pocket, so I’ve been dumping all my change in piles at home and at work. On Thursday, I collected it all in a Gatorade bottle and dumped it — slightly sticky — into a nearby CoinStar machine. I asked for estimates before I left. Guesses ranged from $30.00 (Zachary Thacher) to $268.00 (a [My employer] creative director on the elevator.) The count turned out to be:

• 6 golden dollars from the post office stamp machine,
  
• 289 quarters,
  
• 172 dimes,
  
• 130 nickels, and
  
• 175 pennies, for a total of
  
• ——
  
• $103.70, of which I got about $94.00, since CoinStar takes a cut.
  

The closest guesser was Kate (at $92.00), but she says she has an advantage because she’s used to dealing with the piles of coins I leave around. Hey, big spender!

Gina Rules My Street

When I got up this morning to go to the gym, a Meg Ryan movie had taken over my block. Orange cones, flatbed trucks, and blonde production assistants with headset radios filled the streets. Store fronts had been transformed overnight (Hipster bag merchant Soho Togs had been turned into “Maven Electronics” in the eight hours since I came home last night.) Thirty-foot squares of aluminized canvas, stretched across the street, altered the course of the sun itself.

Plus, Thursday morning is methadone morning at the Department of Health and Human Services office next to my building, so the sidewalks were jammed with a mixture of union carpenters, movie extras, and oddly-dressed people shouting to each other across the street and rooting interminably in their bags for no clear reason.

Ruling calmly in the midst of all this chaos was my super, Gina Ceccala, old-guard Little Italy resident and capo of my block. Gina was sweeping the cups away from under the craft service table, making sure that the cones didn’t block the trash pickup, keeping an eye on the Thursday morning vestibule-lurkers, and probably helping direct the movie. Gina is a full-service super in every sense of the word; when I get a package, it’s waiting for me on my desk —inside my apartment! Gina knows all about my Murphy bed, knows how it works, knows how to take it down — she figured all this out when she let the exterminator into my place. I’m sure she knows what’s in my DVD player (blush.) She’s the unquestioned ruler of my block, keeping chaos, disorder, and the celestial-body-manipulating forces of Universal Studios at bay.

Rural Delivery, Raratonga

Saturday is Alumni day at Westtown school, the Quaker school outside of Philadelphia where I went for 11 years (and boarded the last three.) I spent an hour last night reading alumni updates in the school’s quarterly magazine. The letters are arranged by class year. Reading all the letters, from the class of 1918 to the class of 2002, is like looking at the tilted slabs of sedimentary rock you sometimes see by the side of the highway. Each sedimentary layer, each generation’s similar preposessions, boasts, and concerns, is revealed to clear view.

Kate’s dad recently had his 40th high school reunion; he told me that he enjoyed it because “the race is run, everyone knows what they did, and it’s time to relax.” Boy, that’s sure not the case for twenty and thirty year olds. The alumni reports surrounding the class of 1989 are full of successful people elbowing to the front of the line. Except the head of the line at a Quaker school is “I’m happy, fulfilled, and I have an interesting, important job that doesn’t pollute the atmosphere or get people killed. And I own a house.”

I’ve condensed each sedimentary alumni layer into one sentence, somewhat cynically:


• Graduation to 5th reunion: “I went to Costa Rica this summer. Liberal arts college sure is hard!”
  
• 5th-10th reunions: “I got accepted to the PhD program at [graduate school x]. I’ve taken a job teaching at [prep school y]. Come and visit me!”
  
• 10th-20th reunions: “I finished my residency program at [prestigious medical school z], am marrying my sweetheart [alpha], and am moving into a beautiful house on six acres in [beautiful state beta.] I just had two beautiful kids.”
  
• 20th-30th reunions: “My book on [small animals | peace and justice] has just come out. Also, I won my battle with [debilatating disease], I’m going back to graduate school, and am starting a new career as an aromatherapist.”
  
• 30th-40th reunions: “My grandchild was born in [faraway state.]”
  
• 50th-70th reunions: “I’m moving to the Quaker retirement community at Longwood.”
  
• 70th reunion+: Obituaries.
  

I don’t know why I feel bitter when I look at the 10-20 year letters. Is it because everyone only writes in with good news? It makes me feel tired, like I should nudge the treadmill a little faster. I find myself wanting to repeat what I did in college; write in saying that I’ve joined the Air Force, become a test pilot, have grown a handlebar mustache, and can be reached at a forwarding address in Raratonga. What the letters really make me want to do is lose forty pounds before going to the reunion next Saturday. It’s petty, but there you have it. Ugh.

I had a great weekend — I cleaned out old storage, and retrieved my banjo, the silver firefighter’s coat that goes with the Ultimate Water Gun, and my grandfather’s steel foot locker, which is hand-lettered “Lt. Col. John R. Young, HQ 324th fighter group”, and is just about my most prized possession. Also the heaviest. Kate and I took more ballroom dancing lessons with Martin Kunc, a Chechoslovakian emigre who is teaching me not only the steps (which I kind of know), but also the sawtooth pattern used to navigate around a ballroom floor (something I’ve never learned.) We went canoeing on the Brandywine and saw a couple of creepy guys with baseball hats and mullets sitting motionless way back in the woods, watching the groups go by. I think they were looking for topless canoeists. I started whistling Dueling Banjos to piss them off, then promptly grounded the canoe. G-r-r-r-r-r-e-a-t, really smart. But we lived through the experience. Then I went for a motorcycle ride with Kate’s dad, and cracked 60 MPH for the first time. Sixty feels a *lot* faster on two wheels than on four. And that was my weekend. I came back to the city and embarked on my latest adventure, installing RedHat Linux 7.1 on my desktop box!

I Walk a Day in Uncle Duke’s Shoes

I made a big mistake yesterday, when I was standing in the breakfast line at the deli counter. Every New York deli has a wire stand from which dangles dozens of packets of herbal and vitamin supplements. “Herbal zip!” “Buzz’s Bombers!” “NATURAL Super MEN’S PACK FOUR!” I was always mildly curious about them, especially since, every now and then, you read about some herbal supplement or other that has been banned by the FDA. Damn, too late to check out Phen-fen! Too late to check out Ephedra!

So, in a spirit of adventure, I purchased the “NATURAL Super MEN’S PACK FOUR”, pictured on the left, and took all three gel pills and all six vitamin capsules. A lot of normal stuff was there — Vitamin E, Beta Carotene, Lecithin. Some more iffy ingredients, too — bee pollen, a big dose of Ginseng, Chromium Picolinate. Then there was the “Male Potency” pill: “A comprehensize combination of natural herbs designed to work synergistically with each other to give optimum results.” Uh… okay, great! Down the hatch. Herbal synergy, here I come!

Forty minutes later, I suddenly feel like I’ve caught a bad cold and downed eight cups of coffee, simultaneously. I crouched in my pod for an hour, my eyes bugging out of my head, chewing on my knuckle, butterflies fluttering around my sweaty, addled brow. That was probably the most damn unproductive day of my LIFE. After a long morning, long lunch, and long afternoon feeling like I was swimming through a fizzy bucket of sandy mineral water, I came down about four. Whew!

When in a vitamin store the other day, I overheard the guy behind the counter talking to a customer: “Now, when you take these the first few times, you’ll feel kind of weird, until you realize that weird feeling is actually normal, and how you should feel all the time.” Dear God, I hope not!

My Goal This Summer

After reading all about my new hero, Robert Fulton, I’ve decided that I have a new sartorial goal this summer. To wit, I wish to:

1. Find and purchase a new, top-quality pith helmet.
   
2. Find a location/setting/event where I can wear the pith helmet. This event must be such that the pith helmet must not look out of place. In fact, I’d be really happy if I could find a place where I’d look funny if I weren’t wearing the pith helmet.
   

Your suggestions are welcome. First of all, where does one find pith helmets? The East side somewhere, I bet. And where do potty expatriates hang out? Lepidoptery meetings? Gatherings of the Hash House Harriers?

Ad Aspera, Per Astra

Yesterday was a bee-oo-tiful day in Manhattan, and I sent an evite out to lots of people to go have dinner outdoors somewhere. Noone could go except my friend Jovan, who’s a hair and makeup artist with a small poodle named Mac that she carries around in a tote bag. Jovan showed up in full fashion-victim mode, with new Gucci sandals that were cutting her feet to ribbons.

In a reverse of Spring’s upward budding process, we hobbled from the roof patio of the Metro hotel (on the left), which has an incredible view of the Empire State building, to a tiny sake bar buried three stories underground (on the right.) The sake comes in a box; you take a pinch of salt from a dish and place it on the corner of the box before taking a sip. The salt is three bucks.

God’s in His heaven, and all’s right with the world (except for dogs)

I just got back from a fantastic weekend. I totally blew off Small Arms Firing School and rented a red Ford Taurus instead, went down to Philly, picked up Kate on a moment’s notice, drove to the Poconos, got a fireplace/jacuzzi suite at the “Stoudsmoor Country Inne”, stumbled onto Latin night at a local roadhouse and watched some incredible dancing, drove back to Philly, rode my motorcycle in the sunshine^*, saw Spy Kids, drove back this morning, visited the dentist for a cleaning before work and got a clean bill of health, and now am back at my desk to plan a big job that I’m interested in with a budget that’s large enough! The sun is out and everyone’s in a good mood. Even the building engineer’s Escalade (see below) isn’t shouting at the bike messengers as they whiz by.

^* Every ride in West Chester is like a trip through the Motorcycle Safety School’s “List of Hazards” in the handbook. This time it was a fluffy white dog who ran out from its yard in a frenzy of shrill exclamations. I had to turn around in the cul-de-sac at the end of the street, giving the dog a rematch. I did what the manual says when dealing with dogs — you slow down and let the dog get almost alongside you — and the dog’s barking reached an orgiastic crescendo. “Bark, bark bark! Oh, my GOD, I’m actually going to CATCH THIS THING! BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK!” Then you twist on the throttle and, with a Japanese roar, dash away the sterling cup of victory. The reason, I’m sure, is to make sure that the dog won’t get in front of you — but it’s a cruel, cruel thing to do.

“…Like the fake muscles on Batman’s suit!”

In an age of colossal SUVs, the most colossal of them all is parked in front of my building every morning. It’s a Cadillac Canyonero, er, I mean a Cadillac Escalade, and it looks like two of the Griswold’s station wagons from National Lampoon’s Vacation stacked on top of each other and covered in white plastic.

It’s got blue flashing LEDs in each of its four halogen headlight mounts, a gold-plated trailer hitch, and a Bronx-accented voice that comes from under the hood — “This car is protected by OnStar. Back…Up.” That curt message, combined with the New York State Fraternal Order of Police anti-ticket medallion on the dashboard, gives this ridiculous car an air of mystery. Each morning, the car is surrounded by bike messengers and delivery boys who crouch down to look at the flashing lights and rest a hand on the bumper to hear the voice. I can’t wait to see the owner.

If they’re nekkid, it must be alternative theater

My friend Michelle Stern has a theater company in DUMBO (the area in Brooklyn between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges.) The company is called GAle GAtes et al., for the grandmother of Michelle’s partner Michael Counts. They had an opening for their new show entitled So Long Ago I Can’t Remember last night, and I plunked down a donation to go to the gala. This is the fourth or fifth show that I’ve seen Michael Counts direct. In his shows, the audience tends to move through the environment, rather than remaining stationary. Common themes are intricate soundscapes, lots of references to classical literature, things that are illuminated from inside in clever ways, increasing amounts of nudity, and incredibly cool sets that move in unexpected ways. For example, at one point in the show, the back wall of the theater falls towards the audience with a crash and a rush of wind, revealing a space three times the size behind it. Behind that is another space, and another and another. The audience keeps penetrating deeper into the space — sometimes standing in inches of sand, sometimes on a wooden bridge over water. For a play loosely based on Dante’s Inferno, it was really effective.

There’s no doubt in your mind, when you’re watching, that it’s alternative theater (here’s a review of Michael’s last show.) My experience is usually long periods of “huh?” punctuated by moments of “oh, WOW!” At three hours, that’s a lot of alternativity. Quite frankly, though, all the nudity doesn’t hurt a bit.