Futile Horn

08.19.2003 - 11:38 pm (give my regards to pr0k chops)

Whew, I'm back. Well, I didn't really go anywhere, but I had decided to think of the last two weeks as vacation to loosen the miserly lining of my pockets a bit. Not enough for me to spend $10 for a frisbee, but enough to visit my share of this city’s restaurants and cafes. The adventure was made a lot more fun by Maegan’s company, who is possibly the only person I know who might enjoy taking 100 block jaunts in the rain through the city with me.

The only real downer was the power going out on Thursday. It wasn’t all bad because Marcello was supposed to have his going away dinner that night, so we stopped by to wish him well, and we can coffee and fruit under the vine canopy in his backyard with his family and an old roommate of his. But it was a hot day, and wandering around by candlelight was only fun for an hour to two. I somehow convinced Maegan to walk at least a half mile by moonlight in search for a store selling Little Debbie’s cream pies. Why any deli would be open at three in the morning to sell cream pies by candlelight, I’ve no idea, but we went. The power can back at dawn a few blocks away, but it was out in my part of the neighborhood approximately a full day. I tried everything to get the power back on: complaining to the neighbors, eating pizza, taking a walk, using the Jedi mind trick, but in the end, only taking a long nap restored the juice.

Friday I don’t think the trains were running, but by Saturday you could buy a “I survived the blackout of 2003” T-shirt in Manhattan. How uncreative. You’d think they could say at the very least something like “I was in the dark August, 14, 2003” or something crude and mean along the lines of “Yipes, I think the chick I slept with on August 14th was wearing a saddle.”

I am no longer in the employment of some bar or other in Rockland County. They waited until 5 in the morning on my last night to tell me they didn’t need to come in the next weekend. They made me chip butties in consolation, but I still don’t think it was right.

If all were right in the world, right now I’d be drunk on my living room floor, watching a foreign and/or children’s movie, and playing Scrabble.

Last night I saw The Neverending Story for the first time in several years and I think I appreciated the approach to the Southern Oracle for the first time. The first gate zaps you with thunderbolts from sphinxes’ eyes if you don’t feel your own self worth, and the second is just a mirror that shows you as you truly are. I thought to myself that I think I could handle the second gate because I have meditated on and more or less come to accept every ugly blemish of body, mind and soul. For whatever I might have missed, I’ve had enough terrible dreams revealing some unspeakable truth about myself, and I’ve become somewhat accustomed to the shock. That being said, I would probably have trouble with the first gate. When I thought about what I would need to be able to get through the first gate, I imagined that the person I had become would no longer be able to make it through the second. And so it struck me that the setup was fairly ingenious and that nothing less than a hero could ever make it through both gates.

That’s fairly interesting to me because I’ve spent a fair bit of time reflecting on modern conceptions of ‘hero’. I’ve even written a somewhat long short story exploring the subject, if anyone were to care.

Either coffee or tea will be needed. I’ll go out for a bit.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn