It’s New Year’s day, but the baby doesn’t know that, so he started his 6:30 a.m. yodeling right on time. I went to a games party last night at my friend Melissa’s; she made a special cocktail, something with gin, I dunno. Fran and I have been pretty health-kicky lately, all herbal tea and yoga and mindfulness, so the gin thingy, maybe there was champagne at midnight too, kind of blindsided me. I woke up this morning feeling like something was profoundly wrong with my corporeal self, like maybe my teeth were stuck to the outside of my head.
Also, one thing that’s fun at 6:30 on New Year’s day is to realize you’re out of diapers and so haul a 25-pound chortling baby down the stairs and out to the CVS. On the street I saw: a gal, maybe mid-twenties, still in her party clothes, standing in the middle of Court Street trying to hail a cab. I felt a little sorry for her—the shoes had dig-into-your-tender-foot-flesh straps and she herself had the look of a woman who doesn’t smoke but nonetheless had enjoyed maybe seventy cigarettes the night before. So. For a moment I felt sorry for her, but then I realized that she would be going to bed and could sleep as long as she wanted until the gin thingys wore off, and then she could fix herself a grilled cheese and drink a coke and read the Sunday paper, totally undisturbed. So then I felt sorry for me. See Single Girl, Married Girl.
Another thing that took me by surprise, being out in the world at a friend’s house that has a TV, was just how grotesque TV has become. There was a cadaver wearing a Dick Clark costume, and then was Jenny McCarthy wearing a Jenny-McCarthy-twenty-years-ago costume and kissing an actor hired to play a cop. The film is too bright and crisp (is this hi-def?), and then, don’t get me started, there’s Justin Beiber, who looks and sounds like a mod robot programmed to imitate Michael Jackson circa Jackson Five…the whole thing reminded me of European theater traditions in which grotesquely malformed characters ape the aristocracy. The most normal-looking person on the show was Carlos Santana, which is saying something.
Am I getting off track? Perhaps I am. Anyway, this is what happens when we slow down so substantially on the CFP. We hope to do more songs in the very near future—we depend on the kindness of rhythm guitarists to come over and hold down the music, as Fran can’t play right now, so that’s delayed our progress considerably.
