Buns Of Earth

I have joined an athletic organization! Once a week for the best several months, Jill and I and sometimes Ted and once even Katharine have been running the Prospect Park loop. Rewind: There's been a minor obsession within my little group of friends with the word "buns" ever since Greg stayed over at Lincoln Place for the marathon last November and muttered "ah, fudge my buns" over a frustrating loss at a game of Blokus. Everyone has been using it in different ways. Noun. Transitive verb. Intransitive verb. Depending on how you say it sounds either like a cutesy affectation or a poor translation of much rougher language, like how the Spanish is written in For Whom The Bell Tolls. It's glossolalia, a sound that infects your mind and sounds better the more you say it, hare hare krishna.

At any rate, our club is called "Runs Buns."

Nina has asked to designate a day of the week on my calendar in which I don't say "buns" to her. I don't know which day that will be. Maybe Sunday, because Saturday is when we've been going running.

Nina and I went to that part of Williamsburg right under the Williamsburg Bridge on Saturday to catch Shilpa Ray at Baby's All Right. A lot of apartment complexes with real small windows and bars across them on every story. I'd never been to Baby's before. It's kind of like a glammed-up Maxwell's: A restaurant in the front and a performance space in the back, which has a kind old New York ballroom feel to it, along with a fancy lighting installation on the wall behind the stage that enables complex and dazzling effects. Triptides was on stage when we got there. We listened to a few songs and then decided we'd rather get something to eat. The food at that place is funny: luxury bar food. I had a grilled cheese sandwich with bean sprouts in it.

Perfect timing: Shilpa Ray was getting set up on stage by the time we paid up and went back to the back room. "Somebody get me some fuckin' booze!" she yelled, laughing a moment later, maybe taken aback at the vehemence of her own demand. Or I don't know, I've never had a conversation with her. But somebody hastily complied. She's got what looks like another full turnover of her band. She didn't introduce them this time, I don't think, no Happy Hookers or Good-luck Girls they. But she played a great set as always, laded with songs from her not-quite-released (?) EP. It's less, uh, punk and screamy, I guess, which, I won't lie, is counter to my preference (and she's so good at it) but the sour, sad hooks still really get into your brain and stay there. Stand-out songs for me: "Posted By Anonymous," "Nocturnal Emissions" (I helped crowd-fund the video!) and "Lessons From Lorena." The guy in the booth put some pretty boss dynamics on the lighting. And of course she played "Erotolepsy" at the end. I found out the next day on Brooklyn Vegan that she'd somehow lost her boots between finishing her set and packing up for the night.

In the middle of the night after we got home, Nina got sick to her stomach off something. The next night I woke up sweating and nauseated, a feeling that intensified when I went to the bathroom to piss. I had to abort mid-stream or else I was pretty sure I'd puke. I sat on the edge of the bed in the blue morning dark, holding my head in my hands and surveying the northern face of President St. across the Yuppy Puppy's courtyard. A day or so after that, Kitty went on a tear of throwing up and doing diarrhea, spitting up slimy pools of watery stuff all over the kitchen floor. She stopped eating and drinking water, too, except when coaxed with a teaspoon, and she looked deflated and generally miserable. At Nina's urging I took her back to Animal Kind on Thursday morning, where they x-rayed and squeezed her in strategic places, tentatively diagnosing her with pancreatitis and sending me home with a half dozen syringes of oral-suspension cat opioids that I'm supposed to squirt under her tongue. We've been feeding her Gerber 2nd Foods, which are these, like, meat purées that you give kids that can't quite chew flank steak yet: Chicken in Gravy; Turkey in Gravy; Ham in Ham Gravy. We feed them to her with a spoon, and she seems pretty psyched about the whole process, but they've gotta be a temporary food, since they don't have any taurine and they've got a bit too much protein for her kidneys.

We decided to give ourselves a night off from waving pureed ham in front of Kitty's face on Wednesday to see Janelle Monáe at Celebrate Brooklyn with Eve. We set out for the Park a little late, and when we saw a steady flow of people heading north on Prospect Park West, it looked like we'd missed the main event. I thought maybe we should turn around, but Eve wanted to check out what was left (and maybe fall back to The Owl Farm if necessary), so we entered the Park at 3rd St. and climbed over the tree-rooted dirt hill by that tucked-away playground (abandoned at this hour), emerging onto the western drive. It turned out the departing multitudes must have despaired at gaining entry to the fenced-in area directly in front of the bandshell -- where, apparently, DiBlasio & Family were seated -- but the show was definitely still going on.

We were way in the back outside the fence, but we could see some of the action on the stage. Janelle Monáe was wearing a blinding white suit and kind of pirouetting across the stage. Too far away to see her spaceman hair-do. We got there in time to see the last half hour of her set; or maybe it was just a crazy long encore. The songs weren't familiar to me, but they had spirit and playfulness, and man can she sing; that bright soprano voice! And she (or her lead guitar player, too hard to tell from where we were) can shred, too. Even now that I'm a bit older and the idea of paying a little money to get a seat at these things no longer seems totally unreasonable -- or even like something you should do if you can to keep the whole thing going -- I like doing summer business this way. To me, that is sort of the essence of these events. You huddle at the periphery, with your moveable feast (flask, loosie) and crane your neck to see what all the fuss is about.