Punchums

Winter has been dry, the weather alternating between periods of eerie warmth and icy cold. This is the cold and sleepy time of the year. It's the dead time, when the cost of all the business of the past year is brought to bear. I'm feeling sluggish and drained these days. Nina's been quite sick -- fever, etc. -- and the world just seems like it doesn't wanna get out of bed.

Nina and I went to brunch last weekend at Stone Park Cafe. We've been eating a lot of weekend restaurant brunches these past several weeks, often at Juventino, sometimes across the street from it at Perch, sometimes a few blocks north at Bogota. I guess it's kind of an expensive habit, but as expensive habits go, well, it's not really that expensive. Stone Park is usually thronged with dopey Park Slope yuppie types -- you can tell exactly how busy it is inside by how many people wearing sunglasses and pastel-colored fleece are lurking around the entrance waiting to be called in for a table. Sunday was bitterly cold, though, and so we were able to sneak in after a mere ten-minute wait. We ordered Bloody Marys with our food, and they came with oversize caper berries in them instead of olives, each berry packed full of crunchy little seeds like some kind of extra-terrestrial shipping container. Nina had the bluefish cakes. I think I had a "chef omelette." It was pretty good, but I don't think there's any brunch that's worth waiting on line for. Waiting on line at restaurants is horse shit.

After brunch we resolved to go to the grocery store, heading up to 6th Ave. in the hopes of presenting less of ourselves to the freezing wind. It worked, at least until we got to 9th St. and had to turn right, at which point we felt the icy sting of a powerful westerly wind. Or rather, I felt it -- Nina, ever practical, had deployed her full-length down coat, which afforded her its rich and downy protection. I was wearing my dumb leather jacket-and-jeans combination, no hat, no gloves, which was useless at this temperature. I begged for a pit stop at the CVS to warm up and wipe my nose.

We made it to C-Town, though, and wove drunkenly up and down the aisles, plucking stock off the shelves according to habit. Our take-away: D'Anjou pears (4); Gala apples (4); an orange Holland pepper (why not); Stoned Wheat Thins crackers; Arnold Health Nut sandwich bread; Nature Valley granola bars (peanut butter flavor); a jar of pickled beets; Celestial Seasonings tea bags (Sleepytime); Krasdale peanut butter (chunky); 3M Dobie scrubbing sponge; Friskies Special Diet Beef & Liver Entrée (8 cans); Bachman hard pretzels; Desert Pepper salsa (spicy black bean flavor); Green & Black's chocolate (1 bar) (peanut with sea salt flavor, a reward for running errands); Pete & Gerry's cage-free organic eggs (half dozen); Breakstone unsalted butter (2 bars); Morningstar Farms "Chik Patties" (1 box); Morningstar Farms Spicy Black Bean veggie burgers (1 box); Amy's Organic burritos: bean and cheese (2), Especial (2), black bean (2); Krasdale frozen peas; Krasdale swiss cheese. We considered buying, but did not buy: Expensive, exotically-sourced strawberries and blueberries; a live lobster, as always.

It was still freezing on the way back from the grocery store. We passed a vendor selling knit caps off a folding table outside the Brooklyn Wholesale storefront. I bought one for five bucks and put it on my head, which stopped my monk dime (okay, sand-dollar) from stinging. I still needed gloves to help me get the groceries home, and Nina stopped us at Save On Fifth. I'd bought a tiny little barbecue grill there many years ago for ten dollars. The cold had sapped my will, but not enough so that I wasn't capable of making a fuss over the which exact pair of gloves to buy. "Too bulky," I told Nina when she suggested a pair of big padded work gloves. "Those are lady gloves!" I said about another pair. Finally, the security guard, overhearing all this from his white particle-board cubicle by the door, admonished me, "Come on, man. Just do what she says!" So I did.

There is a new beer technique I need to explain. I learned it from Evan on New Year's Eve, as we were sitting around his apartment in Williamsburg. He got a can of Tecate from the bag of them we'd bought at the gas station, and instead of bending the tab up and over to open the can, he raised one knuckle and punched down on the perforated tab area on the top of the can several times until it tore, spraying a bit of beer but opening the can enough to drink. He said he'd learned the trick growing up as a bad kid in Wisconsin. I tried it on a can myself, and, lo and behold, after punching and swearing a bit, it popped open! I love this trick, because, unlike, say, opening a beer bottle with a cigarette lighter, it requires no special knowledge or particular dexterity. You just have to be willing to punch a metal can seven to ten times, harder than seems reasonable to punch an object that you are holding, and quickly enough that the can opens before your hand starts to hurt too much to keep punching. You may often hit the raised lip at the edge of the can a bunch of times by accident, which really hurts. That's just part of the deal. You may also wind up tearing your knuckles open and getting blood on things, which is just, you know, icing.

Oh, so I think we should call Tecates "punchums" from now on. Let's see if that takes off.

Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner

I handed the reins of New Years Eve proper over to Nina, who responds to a challenge to celebrate with actual ambition instead of with annoyance, like I do. I spent part of the day up at the Practice Hole 2.0 participating in the awarding of The 2011 Argosies and working on a new song with the band. Then I rode the train downtown with Chris and Beau. Chris followed me to Park Slope, and we copped a drink at The Gate while we waited for Nina to put the finishing touches on her appearance. Despite their having shelled out for signage announcing all-night activities (noisemakers, complimentary champagne at midnight!), the place was pretty much deserted at 9 PM with the exception of a few guys playing cards in a corner and a single couple in a booth squirming around on top of each other -- really doing everything short of intercourse. We had a couple of drinks, which got me pretty drunk, and then hit the road. After that I steered us towards Canal Bar, which turned out to be every bit as wonderful as I'd hoped it would be. We drank beers. The guy gave us popcorn.

Nina was ready to start her night at this point and met us outside. Chris departed to North Brooklyn and Nina and I hopped a cab to Prospect Heights, where we slipped in the door of a huge building where a friend-of-a-friend of ours was DJing a party in one of the penthouse apartments. The place was thronged with revelers, each of whom seemed to be at least five years younger than us and have their own personal fifth of whiskey. We met Winnie and Evan outside on the little roof patio, and watched the fireworks going off above Prospect Park to mark the actual rolling over of the year. Still trying to get a handle on my level of drunkenness, I wolfed an empty hot dog bun. Some wags found a way to get onto the roof proper, one level above us, and launched a bunch of Roman candles directly over our heads. I got a hot spark in my eye -- lot of people probably did -- but it was dazzling and worth it to be that close to an actual exploding firework.

Soon after that we hit the road again, clown-carring our way to Williamsburg where we sat in Evan's apartment drinking gas station beer. Drunk girls collapsed on chairs and sofas and were variously led away to cars or other apartments. The crowd winnowed itself down to a handful of people and "Mickey," a vaguely mouse-shaped accumulation of colored cotton balls purchased from a homeless guy and mounted as a bust on top of some motion-sensitive electric motors that would make it pop-and-lock in a truly creepy way. Ray (aka Dramus from our tabletop adventures earlier this year) showed up, an unexpected delight! We partied up and took to the basement, our goal to spelunk our way into the abandoned G train station Evan's assured us lurks behind a boarded-up door down there. Ray was wielding a broom handle for wrangling spider webs, and there were a fuck ton of those -- I would have balked, babies, if I hadn't been so lifted. There was also a creepy storage room with a crucifix, some doll parts, and, no kidding, a wedding dress wrapped around a pipe joint. Maybe on account of it being 3 AM, no one had the stones to venture through the magic door, so we returned to the surface and took to the streets in search of food.

Every venue on Metropolitan was packed, and the waits were horrendous, so Nina and I split and shared a cab with a stranger, a very drunk girl who berated the poor cabbie into turning up Hot 97 to deafening levels and then ranted about how environmental studies should be "integrated into... into ev'ry... fuckin' class in school." She bailed at 8th Ave. and Carroll, wordlessly pressing five bucks into Nina's hand before bolting out of the car and running down the night street.

Hello, 2012!