Chronology of Last Weekend: Part One

Friday Afternoon: Long Instant Message argument with girl I am seeing, now to be named Gloria, after the character in the Sopranos. Gloria reaches the conclusion that I am ruining her life and her heart forever and shares with this me at length.

Immediately work, on a whim, I head to a place I see on the Nonsense New York Mailing List, The Art-4-All Party & Auction on the Lower East Side, a benefit for children's art auctions. I half-heartedly paint a mural and envy others who can draw a whale and make it seem both spontaneous and gorgeously contained. Then I go get very quickly drunk at the bar upstairs. To my surprise, I win the raffle auction ad get first choice of the paintings, and chose a gorgeous abstract piece, seen here:

It looks to me like a cross between an x-ray of teeth and a post-apocaylptic western landscape. I am congratualted by the others, who joke that they may mug me on the way out. Artist is not present, and his name is unreadable from the back. I give my business card to the organizer, who promises to send me the artist's info very soon. To this date, I have not received it.
8:30 PM: Make it to the pharmacy just in time to pick up my prescription. Receive a call from Gloria, answer curtly. Gloria wonders why I'm mad at her now, and I opine that it seems fairly fucking obvious to me, and hang up. Get my prescription.

10:00 PM: Head to bed early, in view of long commute and project on Saturday.

9:45 AM After an hour long subway ride, I arrive at Prospect Park (inexplicably the general weekend subway confusion that has screwed over dozens of my weekend plans actually works to my advantage and I take the F direct from my house to the park). There I join my New York Cares team for the annual clean up of the park, which turns out to involves dozens of other groups. I end up with a grizzled park volunteer, who knows Prospect up and down, a Americorps member who runs an after school program (to my surprise, I learn that Bush killed Americorps but then revived it- anyone with more information on the current status of the project, drop me a line or leave a comment), and several others in cleaning muck that has been blocking the drains for well over two years, according to the grizzled volunteer. We find a dead rat, a very peacefully posed dead frog, and about 300 pounds of some of the foulest smelling muck you've ever encountered, and shovel them into wheelbarrows, and dump them behind some trees in the park, where we are assured they will naturally decompose. A good deal of muck ends up on my jeans and the odor pervades me. After the event, I perform a sociological experiment on the f train on teh way home, and find out that pretty much everyone will set next to me as long the train is crowded enough.

Late Afternoon: I decide to attend the Billionaire's for Bush ball, less for any real sympathy or amusement with the satirical cause (it strikes me as the ultimate in preaching to the converted and a useless bit of street theater up there with giant puppets,) but more as a party to go to alone. Alone seems to be the theme of the weekend, I want to ditch all my normal associations and just involve myself with others. I ignore most messages from Gloria, and have a brief phone fight with her when I say that I'm not spending the night with her. I go and buy a tuxedo because they are on sale for 60 bucks and I figure I might have some other use for one- also I buy a hat at an Army Navy Store that is the closest I can find to a top hat. I get a briefcase that I bought earlier in the afternoon from a garage sale (I actually went to two separate garage sales in two different boroughs during my trip home, but this entry has to wrap up sometime.) By 10 PM, I've finished everything and dressed up and ready to go.

10 PM: Leave for Billionaire's Bally, which is exactly as I expected it to be. If you break out into spontaneous peals of laughter over Thomas Nash cartoons, it would be a real hoot for you. There is a very cool Eastern European band upstairs, and I spend most of the night dancing there. At some point, I sit down and surf the web on my Treo, only to spot someone else doing the same. He says "I guess this really is the Billionaire's Ball."

I had planned to go to another party afterwords, a moustache theme party: anyone with a fake moustache gets in free (the party organizers go to great lengths to explain how it is not a gay party, and neither are they.) Since I already have the moustache as part of my goatee, I decide to bring a razor along with me, and offer to shave it off for admission- my hair grows at a wildman rate, and I would have the full goatee back in a week. The razor that I packed in the briefcase is the newly released Gillette Mach Power, which uses an aaa battery to massage the face as you shave and to thus force hairs up or something. Unfortunately, the razor goes on when the briefcase is pressed against. In addition, I find that have closed the briefcase, I can't open it again- I never got the combination from the garage sale. I briefly ponder what would happen if a random party goer came across an unattended, vibrating briefcase at a political fund raiser. So I dance with the briefcase, which proves slightly easier than dancing with the cane I brought as a prop. I don't drink any liquor, since I realize that my new medication scheme is making me an incredibly cheap drunk.

Sunday 2 AM: I decide to leave the party, and am tired, but somehow still walk from Chelsea to Union Square in order to catch a different subway than the one I came in on. Along the way, I stop to sit down and get a ginger ale at a bar. It turns out to be a very karaoke bar that is hosting a really bitchy bachelorette party, and group karaoke that is being mangled to the point that I can't tell what the song is. There is a long discussion next to me on the double entendre inherent in "I'm down on my knees, I wanna take you there" in Madonna's Like a Prayer, which I thought barely qualified as a single entendre. In the middle of this, I develop a spontaneous nosebleed all over the bar. No reason has been found on that yet, but I apply a lot of ice, stop the bleeding, clean up and go home.


At home, I realize I left my bright red bow tie at the karaoke bar.

Alright, I'll write about Sunday a little later- right now I'm going to watch more of State of Play. h

I had an incredibly busy weekend that I've been taunting and annoying
people with for the last four days, and I do really want to write it down,
since most of my weekends involve sitting in squalor waiting for Alias to
start, but I fear I spent too long on the charms of Mary Lynn Raskub (she's
also weirdly appealing in Punch Drunk Love), so it will have to wait until
later this evening.

Woman of the Year

After a season or so of events that have pretty much cancelled each other
out, at 9 PM, we're in for the season finale of 24. I haven't had much use
for the show except for the last 5 or 6 episodes, where it's returned to
the virus on the loose plot that it appeared to be starting at the
beginning of the season, before Mexico, before the baby, before elaborate
triple crosses, a somewhat half-hearted attempt to get us intersted in the
fate of a health care bill, three separate attempts to blackmail the
president, which he somehow foiled despite being the dumbest commander in
chief on either side of the fictional divide. All these plots just fizzled
out, or were revealed to be tricks or something, and at the end of the
season, the only thing that's definitively happened is that the show's two
Love to Hate female characters, Penny Johnson Jerald as the President's
ex-wife and Sarah Clarke as the scheming ex-agent Nina Myers were finally
brought to their maker. Their betrayals were such a joy in the first
season-particularly Jerald, whose whiny, self-justifying Lady MacBeth
character was such a revelation after years of watching her play the
supportive wife or secretary, that suddenly you realized she'd been (kinda)
wasted playing straight man to Garry Shandling and Rip Torn. And Nina's
coat turning in the first season, while completely nonsensical set up up
clearly that the show was not going to spare anyone in the end- her blandly
competent look shifted so subtly into ruthlessness that you could kinda
piece it together into something plausible. But two years later (or five,
in the show's timeline), it was clear that the writers had no idea what to
do but trot them out for ever more cacklingly evil appearances, to the
point that Sherry was nagging men to their death and Nina was taking a room
of trained agents with a cut throat and a handcuffed arm.

What this season did introduce, in its sole redeeming feature, was Mary
Lynn Raskub as Chloe, the CTU expert in something or another technical.
Whiny, socially inappropriate, and generally resentful, she was the only
person among the glamorously disshevelled spies at the Counter Terrorism
Unit who seemed like she worked in a real office. When something bad
happened to a loved one of an agent, as happens every 55 minutes or so on
the show (never have I been more glad that my childhood suspicions that my
parents were spies turned out to be false), she'd always be the one to
offer too blunt condolences like "I'm sorry your husband got shot in the
neck" or "Are you talking to your sister that's dying of the virus?" and
then whine about being misappreciated. I fear in an hour she'll be revealed
to be a secret Serbian terrorist bringing down CTU from within or die a
noble death, drawing tears from the people who've been snapping at her all
day, but she's definitely my sole remaining interest in another season.

Things I learned secondhand tonight

• Air America really is failing, letting go of its top heavy staff, and
  desperate to scrounge up new financing.
  
  
• David Mamet really does talk that way.