War

I'll get to that in a second.

I was able make it through Thanksgiving with my bum tooth, although eating was an ordeal at times. My sister came down from college and we went to go see the penultimate Harry Potter movie, an experience that cemented my conviction that seeing movies in movie theaters is for shit: It costs a million dollars, and we sat through a good twenty minutes of previews before they started showing us the wrong fucking movie. Despite the ensuing boos and mutterings, it took a while for the projectionist to catch on. "Is anyone up there sober?!" hollered a shrill, wannabe voice-of-the-people, audibly virginal and entitled. Of course they're sober, I thought. They just don't care. And then we had to sit through another twenty minutes of previews, before the right movie started. And the right movie turned out to be kind of a drag. Some kids have to hit a locket with a magical sword, and then there's some kind of important cape and a magic wand, and a CGI foreskin dies on a beach.

White people problems.

We had Thanksgiving dinner at my parents' friend George's beautiful house on the west side. I made this season's inaugural Winter Fruits Pie. That thing is always a crowd-pleaser, and it's so easy to sling together. I used real cranberries this time, which I think was a marked improvement over Craisins. My dad made his signature pumpkin and berry pies, going the distance by weaving a lattice crust. I've got about zero interest in tracing my family's "roots," but I'll infer that "my people" like to bake.

And then it was time to get my tooth pulled. We woke up early on Monday and trained it up to 10th St. On my way into the office, passing the front desk of Stewart House, I had a flash of memory: going up to visit Bill, watch Ed and His Dead Mother, smoke a clandestine cigarette out his bedroom window; the since-retired doorman, Robbie (?), calling out to me, "Hey, Nine-Inch, how you doing?" -- a reference to my then-favorite t-shirt. I thought about ducking the appointment but didn't.

We checked in, parted ways. The staff led me off to the room with chair, and Dr. Carness came in and started making the preparations to put me under. I made an awkward comment about their using drug that killed Michael Jackson, but it didn't matter. "In about five seconds, you're going to start feeling a little drunk," Dr. Carness said, after inserting the IV into the back of my hand. I did start to feel a little drunk. I remember looking up at the light fixture, which was a pretty conventional, high school-cafeteria rectangular dealie with a pattern of vertical lines on it. The lines started to move like the texture of an asphalt road observed from the window of a car in motion. A pleasant feeling, like starting out in the early morning on a road trip with friends, stole over me. "Here we go," I thought, and promptly fell asleep. And then I woke up a little while later, still feeling very pleasant. Maybe ten years ago I'd had some minor surgery done that required a general anesthetic, and waking up from that was no fun -- I was cold, had trouble breathing. This wasn't anything like that. I felt warm and fuzzy and good -- so good that I wanted to tell everyone. I took out my phone and tried to send Nina a text message but couldn't muster the cognitive stamina to make it work; put it back; took it out again; put it back again. I took it out a third time and sent exuberant, barely coherent text messages to Bill and Katie. When Nina was eventually allowed to come back to see me, I made a show of checking to see if the anesthesia did, in fact, cause priapism as a side-effect. It took me a while to find my sea legs, but once I did I paid the bill (personally thanking the reception staff for showing me "such a great time") and we hobbled off to find a cab. My recollection is fuzzy, but I'm told I gave a running a commentary all the way home on what a beautiful day it was, ignoring our cabbie's shitty, aggressive driving and the fact that almost took us to the wrong address.

They'd given me tooth in a little manila envelope, and I took it out once we got home. The picture above shows it considerably cleaned-up. It was a nasty thing, all covered in scabs, two of the roots twined together. My mouth wasn't a pretty sight, either, but I tried not to think about it or look at the gross stuff soaking through the gauze pads I was biting on. Nina made me some soup, and we watched the first movie in the Red Riding trilogy, but I was still too high to make head or tail of it. After that we went up to the Neergaard on 7th Ave. to pick up my antibiotics and vicodin. I sat in a little chair off to the side of the pharmacist's counter and drunkenly examined the fine print on the sides of the boxes for enema bags and bedpans, while Nina dutifully asked the pharmacist's assistant whether it'd be safe to break up the pills so I could swallow them more easily.

"How old is he?" asked the guy.

"Twenty nine," she said.

The pharmacist's assistant rolled his eyes. It turned out we weren't allowed to break the amoxicillin, but, home again, I was able to get it down with some concentration and a few cups of water. Then we watched Teeth, which I thought was apropos. It had a promising beginning, but turned out to be sort of disappointingly flip, squandering a pretty, uh, juicy premise without really exploring the attendant themes as deeply as they deserve.

Okay, enough about that.

Bel Argosy's plan for world domination takes several steps forward: We've been joined by a friend of Bill's, a guy named Beau who's going to help out on some lead guitar parts. Billy's also booked our first two shows, one at a loft party in Bushwick with the band MiniBoone headlining, the other a low-key Tuesday night show at the venerable Cake Shop! We're continuing our twice-a-week rehearsal regimen, but we've relegated Ultra Sound to a position of last resort: it's expensive; the amps suck and the sound is often disappointingly muddy; and the process of settling our account at the end, in that sixth floor purgatory with the other bands -- paunchy, out-of-state failures with too-long hair and way-receded hairlines, squabbling over who owes who that extra five bucks -- is starting to feel like some awful memento mori. There but for the grace of God go... well, whatever. We will go there. Just not to Ultra Sound, if we can help it. (They do have okay drum kits, though.)

So I started looking for alternate accommodations, and ultimately found a place over on the lower east side, a two studio setup on 2nd Ave. called 6/8 Studios that's essentially in the basement of an Indian restaurant. It's run by a slightly eccentric woman who calls herself "Mrs. Barnes," and who looks eerily familiar, at least to me and Billy. She's weirdly security-conscious: You're not allowed to show up more than five minutes before your scheduled time, she has to have met you or someone in your band before, cameras everywhere, etc. But her equipment is in great shape, the two subterranean studios are clean and cozy, with warm lighting and non-depressing wood paneling -- they make me imagine Nirvana recording Nevermind -- and she's very knowledgeable and helpful. And it's probably the best deal I've come across, money-wise.

She came by to talk to us as we were packing up after the first time we played there. "How would you describe your music?" she asked.

"Oh, I don't know," Billy said. "Rock and roll? Indie rock? What would you call it?"

She thought for a second. "Young... guy... music," she said. "You know, I've heard this kind of music over and over and over again. There are guys who come into my studios, grown men, with children. They come in here, they play their music for an hour, and then they say 'Okay, enough.'" We weren't sure what to make of that, but we thought it was pretty funny.