Bentley Bear

I've basically finished painting my new apartment. That I painted at all may come as a surprise to those of you who have locked horns with me over my admittedly perverse inclination towards plain white walls, but I figured that, you know, this is the first apartment I've moved into entirely on my own and I'm going to make some bold choices. So the Saturday before last I went down to Home Depot with Eve and Nina, and we got paint. I picked a yellowy-green color called Pear for the living room, [in retrospect what seems to be a pretty garish] bright orange called fuckin' Bird Of Paradise for the kitchen and bathroom, and a soft blue color called Little Pond for my bedroom. The next morning my parents came down to see the new place and they helped tape and paint the living room, as did Eve and Nina. It came out great! Pear: Highly recommended for all the dark, cave-like rooms in your house.

The living room's pretty big, so it took about three hours for us to paint the whole thing, and when we were done I took my parents out to Matamoros for tacos. It was one of my more humiliating Matamoros experiences: Since everyone was having tacos, I tried to collate the entire order and tried to read it in English to our waitress -- who I believed spoke English for some reason I can't remember now -- but she didn't understand and went to go get the new guy who speaks English fluently (and manages the place, I think), to whom I read our list half in Spanish and half in English, because he was obviously kind of disgusted by my pronunciation. Eve, sitting directly across from me during this fiasco, flushed visibly. But it ended up okay, because the tacos were off the fucking chain as usual and Nina got a guanabana milkshake that was kind of a revelation.

The rest of the painting I did pretty much solo, and it kind of sucked -- I was sore and praying for it to be, you know, over, the entire time, but I got the kitchen painted and then, by last Friday, my bedroom, though I made a lot of mistakes and there are some fairly visible unpainted spots. And, you know, now it's over.

What else did I do that weekend? Nina and Eve and I attempted to attend this Lightning Bolt show in a weird little room above a garage in Bushwick but were turned away because it was "sold out" -- even though the venue was mostly empty from what we could see. According to some of Eve's friends who were able to gain entry, we didn't miss much, other than the lead singer puking on some of the audience. Instead, we wandered and trained over to Barcade and played games for a while. I discovered that the original Galaga (which they have as part of this three-way Galaga emulator) is way more brutal than the one at Clean Rite and that I don't really like it -- or most old arcade games, for that matter. They're too hard! Eve introduced Nina to this (what I think is an) unplayably frustrating game called Crystal Castles.

Last Thursday I stopped by 471 12th in order to, as bidden, clean the bathroom and the stove and the fridge and sweep the floors and ugh argh bleagh. I guess John didn't think I was gonna do it, though, because he'd changed the locks on the apartment door. Luckily, sort of, the new tenants were moving a few things in at the very moment I showed up and were gracious enough to let me in. All the excess junk had been cleared out and the floors with freshly and beautifully polyurethaned. The stove was still filthy, but the new people told me I was off the hook, since he was going to get a maid service to come in and do it. Two downsides, though -- the screws on my old air conditioner were too stripped for me to remove it from the window, and, more importantly, my Galaga tile mosaic that I'd stashed in the kitchen cupboard for safe-keeping was missing. I'd wanted to cement it to one of the chimney columns on the roof (bought cement and grout and everything), but John'd installed a fire alarm thing on the door to the roof the week before I tried to put it up. I hope, at least, one of the painters took a liking to it and kept it.

On Saturday Nina and I did the First Saturday thing at the Brooklyn Museum. I hadn't been for a while, but, as part of my do-everything-possible-this-summer agenda (accompanied by my overstuffed and overambitious Google calendar: HTML and Google Calendar format) I thought I should start doin' it again. First, though, we got some shit at Target and wound up meeting, improbably and awkwardly meeting with the new 12th St. tenants, who did not want to recognize me for some reason. (Maybe they found the dogporn archive?! That's enough to put anyone off their lunch.) I got some t-shirts and then we met up with Eve and some of her friends from work to watch a POV documentary about factory workers in Tijuana, and then spent some time hanging out in the ballroom watching people square dance. I found a large and ornate earring on the ground that must've fallen out of someone's ear -- it was a metal hoop with a bunch of fine threads kind of threaded in and out of the center. I held it up in the air for a little while in the hopes that its owner would recognize it, but she didn't.

Yesterday Ted and Tom and Nina and I drove out to the Red Hook ball fields for some Mexican food. I'd first noticed the food stands a few years ago while driving with Lester but wasn't really keyed in to what an institution they are until recently. The lines are pretty long but we optimized by getting buttery-cheesey-spicy corn, limeade, and raw coconut (which is inedible, as far as I'm concerned -- it's like eating wood! Everyone else was homphed it with gusto, but I had to spit mine out) while we waited for the main event, these delicious and enormous overstuffed taco-like food items called quesohuaraches -- bean paste-stuffed fried tortillas filled with cheese and carne enchilada and other things. Then Nina and I watched this problematic all-day TLC special on this morbid obesity-treatment facility in the city. It was like 12 hours of naughty fat people sneaking food into their rooms and being hoisted around on cranes.

Tonight: Trivia Night with Emma et al. at the Greenwich Treehouse. The first time she and I went, we were full of smug anticipation of victory but ended up losing. With zero points. Better luck this time? Also, The Horrors are playing.