Touch Me I'm Sick

Spring: bursting out all over. This is the kind of weather, I feel like, that you really have a duty to pay attention to, because the niceness of it, the temperature of the air, the flowers blooming, etc., kind of tricks your brain into thinking that the universe is a pleasant place to live in. That is to say, you start to feel like spring weather is the new baseline, when, in fact, it really isn't at all -- it's actually about as good as it gets. That two or three week period in October / November when it's starting to get kind of cold but it's still not freezing, that's the fucking baseline for weather. So what I do is when I'm walking down 4th Ave. to the D train in the morning, I try to think to myself, "Gee, you know, this is actually pretty great."

Except not for the past three days, because I've had this motherfucker of a cold that (I think) I got from Nina. It's one of those sinus / face viruses where you're just completely incapacitated with discomfort, and you can't even really think anything coherent. I got up on Saturday morning and tried to kick off my usual weekend round of FFXII, but I couldn't even really make the screen come into focus. All I could do was sit on the couch and think, "Wow, how do I even feel this bad?"

Some solace was derived from the tender ministrations of Nina, who was very understanding; and from Lost Pig, which all of you must play, preferrably in an 80x24 console window. And I suppose I should also recommend, albeit reluctantly, Urban Dead, in which I've been dutifully spending my daily "Action Points." Come visit me! I'm Picabo Street. Remember her? Yeah, she's a zombie now.

In the depths of this funk -- and on a drizzly Friday to boot -- I hit up Tom's 27th birthday party at P.J. Hanley's. Not to toot my own horn, but I totally knocked the present ball out of the park: I emailed Jonathan Pryce-lookalike (and Facebook friend to me, as of April 2nd) Ken Freedman, to see if there was any way I could get my hands on any remaining pieces of the neat, rare WFMU swag they'd given away in past years during marathon pledge drives. It turned out there was, and I netted for Tom:

• Some WFMU bumper stickers that say "I listen to Seven Second Delay and I vote!"
• A SSD t-shirt
• A DVD of the Seven Second Delay movie, "Dead Air," written by WFMU host and Monk writer Tom Scharpling

I'm feeling a bit better now, though, that I've got progressed to the point of expelling webs of yellow-green custard from the raw upper channels of my nose.

Tom got a bunch of us tickets to see The Kids In The Hall the weekend before last. He's always been a bigger fan of The Kids than me, but they pretty much never tour, so I couldn't really pass it up. They were playing at the "Nokia Theater" in Times Square, which turned out to be a real shit-show -- $10 drinks, disconcertingly low ceilings, and this laughable little "museum" of old Nokia phones. The actual theater part of the place was fine, though, and they had monitors set up and an attentive camera guy who kept them zoomed in on the important parts of the action. Although The Kids are quite a bit older than they were the last time they were working, the material's still pretty fresh (insofar as it's still about blowjobs and drinking) -- but boy did they get wrinkly. It's a sad state of affairs when Kevin MacDonald is "the pretty one." And Dave Foley's face is kind of caving in, Shane MacGowan-style.

So, I laughed a good laugh, but I should say that the central problem I have with their comedy was still there -- it's just kind of too busy. There are a half dozen concepts in execution in any given sketch, and a lot of them are sort of red herrings, distractions. Case in point: Bruce McCullough and Dave Foley had a bit near the end of the show where Bruce played a character called Superdrunk, in which, you know, there's a guy who gets drunk and has super powers. Fair enough. But Mark McKinney's in it, too, and he's playing an assortment of villains that Superdrunk goes up against, but he plays them all sort of super laconic or bored or tired or something, and I'm getting all worked up trying to figure out what that has to do with the central concept of how Superdrunk's behavior sort of walks the line between loutishness and heroism and I'm coming up empty.

I'm not complaining complaining, though. It was ill. Plus, at the end, Mark McKinney brought out the I'm-crushing-your-head guy, who took the rest of The Kids to task for failures in their performance and their careers -- Scott Thompson got called out for doing yet another 15-minute-long Buddy Cole monologue, of which he was totes guilty. What the shit is up with that bit anyway.

The day before, Nina and I had hit up Eve's passover seder, which was, as it is every year, about as nice as a Jewish holiday can get. She'd updated the haggadah with new poetry, pictures, and bleeding heart propaganda, and she'd doled out recipes for delicious foods that people brought in (my assignment was carrot tzimmes, which actually turned out pretty well, despite my putting in way too much water to start with).

I meant to mention this earlier, but: Los de 680 are facing diaspora. The company that owns the building has sold it to a developer (or some such), and the place is destined for condos. As such, Tom, Ted, KT, Jude, and Jerry have to move out by the end of May. They've mostly got plans -- Tom and Ted moving in with their lady friends; Jude emigrating to Mexico, Jill to Staten Island -- but the whole thing seems tragic nonetheless. Look, I don't even live there, but I've come to count on the existence of that address like a comfortable sofa, no matter how stultifyingly hot it got in the winter or how much black mold was doubtless seeping out of Tom's bedroom. They've been throwing these sort of countdown barbecues -- one a month -- until the day they're scattered to the winds.

I'm staying positive, though. Google Calendar says I've got a bitchen summer coming up... at the office.