A Drunkard's Dream If I Ever Did See One

So I just got back from a really great weekend on Cape Cod at Katharine's dad's "cottage" in Wellfleet, untanned but mosquito-bitten as all get-out, certainly not quite ready to face the office. We (me, Nina, Katharine, and Ted) left Thursday night after an awful, hectic day, which I should probably say something about first:

I failed my road test.

I am willing to accept most of the blame for this -- the fault of mine in any endeavor that I'm most ready to acknowledge is that I'm pretty fucking careless. When something's not fun or exciting, I tend to just sort of slop through it, even when I'm really trying to pay attention and be careful. It's fucking pathological. So I'm pretty sure that's why I got the following marks on the test:

• Poor judgement in traffic
• Fails to anticipate the actions of: Other

...even though I have no fucking idea what either of those mean. But that stuff only came after I'd already failed (i.e., gotten more than 30 points) for the following reasons:

• Unable to park properly (I hit the curb)
• Fails to adequately observe / use caution (I didn't check my passenger-side mirror when pulling over for a three-point turn)

That last one, which cost me 15 points, I totally blame on Lester, who, I swear to Christ, never once fucking mentioned that fucking mirror to me. I was also in an unfamiliar (shitty) car, since I'd registered for the test through the DMV instead of through the school, and Lester wasn't available. Instead, I got Mr. Hester, who was basically a nice guy, if a bit taciturn. He seemed kind of surprised at how bad I was, and snorted derisively when I told him Lester'd never gone through that with me (which might not be true, but I'm pretty sure it is). "Lester!" he said. "Man, you got to check your mirrors!"

So I was pretty disconsolate after I finished my 10 minutes, not least of all because the inspector, who was a real nice guy, had reassured me at the beginning of the test, "Don't worry -- this test is really just for beginners, to make sure you are safe enough to be practicing on the road to be a better driver unsupervised." And the cost of scheduling 3 more 90-minute lessons didn't make me feel any better, either. But I didn't have time to fret over that too much, because I also had to run to Nina's place to help Aanie move some IKEA furniture that we'd purchased the week before over to her place and then head up to my shrink and then get back to Brooklyn to help Nina get stuff together for the trip. We just barely made the 7:38 train to New Haven (Nina used all of her powers of haste to get us from the Time Sq. shuttle to gate 107 at Grand Central in under 4 minutes) where Ted and Katharine met us with the car that they'd picked up from Ted's parents' place.

We stopped at a deserted 24-hour Stop & Shop that smelled like a rabbit cage and loaded up with supplies. Ted, rogue that he is, stole two barrel-like containers of Poland Spring.

Day One: After blueberry pancakes, bacon, and eggs aux gruyere, we went to the beach at Newcomb Hollow. The water was too cold to swim in, though we waded a bit, and played with this brown seaweed that looked and felt disturbingly like hair. Nina and I took a walk and began a collection of pretty stones from along the shoreline that turned out to be kind of dull once they dried off. After that, we drove over to the bay and ate fried clams at the place we went last year that serves Moose Trax. Nobody ordered Moose Trax, but we all stuffed ourselves, and the place gave me a free iced tea by accident. A bit later, we made Ted-burgers -- well, Ted made them, and everyone else ate them.

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And then we got plastered listening to The Rocket and went for a walk, at substantially the same hour (late) and to the same location (Duck Pond) that everyone went last year, but it was about 40 degrees warmer this time. We sang along the way and brought a candle, which we planted in the sand by the pond and lit before going skinny-dipping, which is something I hadn't done since sprouting hair on my back. The water, or, at least, the sand, was surprisingly warm, and Ted and Katharine swam pretty far out -- halfway across to the pond towards this house with visibly lighted windows on the opposite shore. To my dismay, when I went to go join them I discovered that I'm not quite as strong a swimmer as I used to be. But there were tadpoles swimming around our thighs the whole time; pretty delightful. After a while, we headed back to the house and drank more, and everyone got sick but nobody threw up. The sun was way up by the time I fell asleep for real.

Day Two: In the morning, we swung by Gull Pond and rented a canoe for an hour, sufficiently overcoming our lingering nausea to make it around the perimeter of the two adjoining little ponds. Rowing is hard, and Katharine is fairly terrified of lilypads, it turns out.

In the evening, we headed down to Falmouth to see a reading of a new Adam Rapp play called "Essential Self-Defense" that Ted is trying to get produced by Edge. Paul Sparks and the two fat dudes from Living Room in Africa were in it, and everyone was pretty good, but the play itself was, I don't know, a little too silly? It was a lot of fun, though, and I think it'll be way more intelligible in its final staging.

At around 1:30 AM, we tried to hit up The Beachcomber (it would've been my first time), but even though it was packed with Massholes, the guy at the door said the place was closed. Oh, well.

Day Three: Went on a nature walk through this swamp next to an old Marconi telegraph station that's part of the National Seashore. The swamp itself was totally beautiful -- mossy lumps of earth rising out of this eerie red brine (colored by decaying leaves, we think?), and sporting strange, deciduous beach trees. About halfway in, though, I looked at Nina's back and realized she had, no kidding, about 10 mosquitos on her shirt attempting to drink her, and so did pretty much everyone else. I think we all kept admirably calm -- nobody (read: me) spazzed out -- but we were smacking ourselves and each other at regular intervals, leaving sheaves of dead and dying Culicidae in our wake.

After that, sadly, it was time to head home. We made a pit stop at Bruce & Betsy's to drop off the car when we got to Woodbridge, and they fed us homemade pork fajitas while we drank wine and clucked over their cat who'd lost a chunk of her face in a fight, and then got on the Metro-North back to ol' Jew Island. It was around midnight when I got home, cradling a carton of orange juice, my take from the spoils of uneaten food from the weekend.

Overall, a great vacation!

Got in to work Monday to find my desk covered with a fine dusting of copper and plaster. The orthodox jews who engineered the air conditioning system for our machine room are drilling and installing this water-cooling system right above my desk and Joel's.

Those Buzzcocks tickets I bought haven't come yet, or, more likely, they did come, in one of those shitty, nondescript Ticketmaster envelopes, and I or somebody else in the building threw them out / took 'em. I'm gonna go through my paper recycling this evening, but the show is tomorrow! Oh nos.

This morning Nina and I counted our respective mosquito bites: I've literally got about 50; she's got 25ish.