What A Thing To Say

I went down to Coney Island for the hot dog eating thing on the 4th. For the first time in my history of attendance, it was overcast and raining, a hard drizzle. The sky and water were the color of an operating table. Despite the gloomy weather, the intersection of Stillwell and Surf was packed as usual, the assembled multitudes decked out in cheap transparent ponchos and hoisting their umbrellas to form a sort of canopy. This created some convenient shelter but made it impossible to see the stage, so watched the proceedings on the truck-mounted LCD, eerily bright under cloud cover. George Shea said something about America from his cherry-picker.

The big drama this year: Sonya Thomas failed to eat her age in HDBs, falling way short at 27 of the new Women's champ, Miki Sudo, who ate 34. That happened right before I got down there. In the Men's division, Matt Stonie came shockingly close to out-eating Joey Chestnut. At one point, about half-way through the ten minutes, he was even ahead by three or so hot dogs, something I've never seen before. He listened to music on headphones and bopped around as he ate, which is something some of the eaters do to sort of compact the contents of their stomachs. At around the 40-HDB mark, Joey Chestnut rallied and crushed Stonie. He ate 61 hot dogs to win the thing, and he got engaged to his lady friend right after. None of the other eaters came close, not even Eater X. "Badlands" Booker must compete because he likes hot dogs.

I got back on the train as soon as the contest was decided. I studied the back of each house we passed between 18th Ave. and 86th St., the cable wires, its little yard; feeling covetous and peevishly disenfranchised. If I lived there, I thought. If that house were mine. Guys in their boxers and undershirts went in and out of the houses, shutting up patio umbrellas and hoisting bags of trash.

I turned thirty-three, reluctantly.

My birthday was on Tuesday, and Nina took me out to eat at Samudra, a vegetarian Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights. It was raining heavily by the time I got to Roosevelt Ave., and I stood in the alcove of the exit for some time as a tried to get my bearings. There are shops and kiosks built into landings of the stairwell and selling hair oils and cassette tapes. I jetted out northwest down Broadway, which turned out to be way wrong, and got soaked in the storm. At length I found the place, Nina standing hopefully in the doorway; my jeans pressed to my thighs with large ovals of wetness. The restaurant seemed to me to be decked out like a blonde wood railway car; the walls were divided into panels by ribs that sprouted buttresses holding up a high shelf. The storefront's neon sign was hooked up to a powerstrip paint-glued onto the wall. There was one other couple, a white woman and a South Asian man, who seemed to be having a fight. They barely said anything to each other. The staff hung out by the kitchen, playing games on their phones. We ordered some masala dosas, which arrived huge, shiny-smooth, cylindrical; and some curries, including an okra thing that was very good. (Bhindi Masala?) It was all very good. We had hot masala tea out of metal cups.

After dinner we hopped a cab and headed south to Nitehawk where we caught the 10:00 screening of Obvious Child, which was the funniest, most charming thing I've seen all year, not least of because of Jenny Slate's performance. Richard Kind at his least solicitous since he was building a mentaculus. We drank beers in the dark and held hands. The theater retains its ability to make you feel like you're getting away with something. When we got home, Nina revealed what was quite possibly the biggest pie I've ever seen, filled with several quarts of blueberries and spice. She'd made the crust herself, rotating the butter in and out of the freezer to keep it solid during the substantial heat of the afternoon. It was an object to be reckoned with: Huge, sandy-colored, shining with brushed-on egg white and sugar crystals.

The picture doesn't do it justics. And it was very, very good. We had to cut it into twelfths to tame it.

She'd bought me gifts, too: A pajama suit, top and bottom, like I've wanted for the wintertime so I'd be truly able to get into Old Man Mode; a gift certificate for cooking classes at The Brooklyn Kitchen; and two pairs of Happy Feet socks with colorful designs on them. (Fancy socks might be my new jam? Looking for one.) She was beyond generous.

I don't deserve it. I don't.

New Shoes

Despite adding the schedule to my calendar, I don't go to the summer movies in Bryant Park much. The series epitomizes the filled-to-capacity victim-of-its-own-successitude that sucks all the fun out of everything that happens in Manhattan. But I'd never seen Blazing Saddles, and I happened to get out of work at just around the right time, which almost never happens any more these days.

I found a spot toward the back of the southern edge of the park, next to a Dutch elm-diseased tree growing in the sandy dirt and cobblestones; next to a fancy coffee kiosk being shut down for the evening by its teenaged staff. A drunk sitting in a folding chair in front of the tree bellowed "faggot!" at me. He was surrounded by garbage of various sorts. I inched back around the tree to stay out of his line of sight, and stood there with my messenger bag nestled between my feet. The movie was engrossing and angry and great. Now I see what all the fuss is about. That scene where the old woman brings Bart the pie: Is there a better depiction of Americans' ability (desire) to compartmentalize their thinking on race? It's really... anarchic, too. Having seen that fight on the film lot, I feel like I "get" the Rip Taylor set pieces that close out each Jackass movie. I read about Cleavon Little when I got home. It doesn't seem like he got a fair shake.

I had two missions the Saturday of 4Knots, which fell the weekend before my birthday. One was to see Mac DeMarco and maybe Speedy Ortiz. The other was to buy new shoes. I left the house wearing my decaying burnt-orange Chucks, which I'd bought at a previous 4Knots, having taken refuge from the noise of The Black Angels in the not-yet-destroyed mall of Pier 17. Those shoes survived the years of the kick drum and two rounds of extermination for chinches; but they were beginning to disintegrate, the sides flaring open, a hole dug in the heel by my heel. I flapped them out to the Seaport, where Nina and I found the festival spilling onto Fulton Street, which the festival organizers had covered with an astroturf "lawn." The lawn was itself covered with turfed-out hipsters. It smelled like weed. There were KIND bar wrappers and empty, miniature bottled waters everywhere. We spent a few minutes in front of the smaller stage where Dead Stars were wrapping up their set. They sounded good: Bright, catchy hooks; a strong beat; and fast-paced songs. The band seemed a little amused, like, what are we doing here.

Those Darlins were on the main stage when we got there. The area in front of the main stage was packed. Everybody was eating fancy street cart food and drinking sodas and throwing the garbage in the trash barrel next to where we were standing. An old Chinese woman elbowed her way through the crowd and dug around in the trash for recyclable items. Mac DeMarco went on next. All of my young-dude co-workers are into him - "He's so weird" - and I thought he'd sound like Kurt Vile or Ty Segall or some other au courant young outsider. But he doesn't. His songs are weird, but I found them to be lugubrious and incoherent. The show just didn't, like, rock. I think that's enough, I said. I didn't need to hear Dinosaur Jr., who were the big deal headliners this year. (I wonder if they played Feel The Pain.) Nina and I left the Seaport, making a pit stop at the Starbucks on Water Street so Nina could pee. It grew suddenly cold. Trash blew through the air.

We walked up through Chinatown to Grand Street, and Nina steered me into a Miz Mooz. Beau arrived, having wrapped an afternoon of recording with The Robot Princess at their studio in Union Square. The selection of Chucks was kind of limited, but I saw a pair of high-top navy blue ones that really spoke to me. High-tops could be a cool look, I thought. The salesperson checked the basement and reported that the store was out of my size. "Can you hang around for fifteen minutes?" he asked. "We have a warehouse a couple of blocks away." We waited. The store was bright and clean, with light-colored hard-wood floors. A lot of the storefronts in SoHo are like that; I wonder if they used to be galleries or studios. When the shoes arrived, I put them on and asked the young woman at the register if she could toss my gross, old ones. "Don't talk about them like that," she said. "Those shoes kept your feet dry for three years. You should say goodbye to them."

"Should I kiss them goodbye?" I asked.

"You don't have to kiss them," she said.

We walked down to Canal Street and took the train back to Brooklyn. We had dinner at Sheep Station with Tom and Jill and Hanlon. Everybody's moving out of the big apartment on Lincoln Place at the end of the summer so that Jay, the guy who owns the building, can renovate it. They're being scattered to the four winds. (Or maybe the two winds.) The talk turned again and again to the pain of apartment hunting in New York City. The disappointing reality of a promising Craigslist posting. The unctuous perfidy of real estate brokers. A shame-faced encounter with a fellow apartment hunter worse off than yourself. Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Ditmas. Nice places to live, all, but why does it feel like a fight to get in?

Hoogies

Nina's cousin Michael got married, and we took the bus out to Philadelphia to visit. We caught the Bolt bus on Friday out on 12th Ave. by the Javits Center, the gray concrete baking in the late afternoon soon. The sun set during the journey, and it was dark when we pulled into 30th St. Weird: Downtown Philadelpia is a ghost town, to its discredit. Market St. is all office towers, nobody inside except maybe a security guard at the front desk playing smartphone.

We'd booked a room in the wedding block at the Sonesta, a modern-looking hotel that was apparently beginning to re-open after a renovation. Some of the floors and amenities were still off-limits, and the elevators all had plaster-dusted cardboard on the floor, but the outdoor swimming pool was open! We could see it out our windows, many floors below. At Nina's urging ("Do all the things"), we ventured down to check it out in the pre-noon hours the following morning. The pool was on top of an intermediate floor of the hotel so that we could look out over sunlit roofs of downtown Philadelphia on one side, the black obelisk of the rest of the hotel towering over us on the other. Nina waded up and down the shallow end of the pool. I mostly just put my feet in. It was very quiet, and we were almost the only people we could see; occasionally we would catch a glimpse of a painter or contractor doing something in a room on one of the sealed-off floors. Sparrows hopped around. The bride and groom are both public transit enthusiasts, and the "goody bag" they'd left for us at the front desk included sufficient SEPTA tokens to get us around for the weekend (along with an admonition to donate them to a less fortunate Philadelphian if we couldn't use them). The wedding was at the Old First Reformed Unitarian Church on 4th and Race. Nina and her brother and I took the Market-Frankford line from the City Hall stop near the hotel to 5th St. It was a Quaker service, meaning that the official proceedings were short, but there were a whole lot of benedictions from the witnesses. Friendly nerds, most all of them.

I spent the whole weekend straining my ears to catch a fragment of Jon Wurster's Philly Boy Roy accent but came up dry until Sunday morning, when I was walking through an alley back to the hotel after an unsuccessful breakfast forage. An old woman and her adult son were walking ahead of me, and I overheard that distinct, peculiar way of speaking: "Did you talk to him last week?" "No, I'm going to call him on Tewsday."

We stopped off at the Mütter Museum on our way to the bus station. I'd heard a lot about the place. My mom and my sister had visited on a road trip many years ago and came back thoroughly titillated. Nina is the prowd owner of their 1993 wall calendar, which lives in a pile of prestige items (hardcover book of battlefield photography; Clash On Broadway boxed set) on our coffee table's lower shelf. So I was expecting an intimidating physical presence, but the Museum is about the size and external demeanor of a Brooklyn Public Library branch -- not the huge central one with the gold-leaf Masonic symbology around the entrance, but one of the Park Slope branches, say, tidy brick with a lawn that no one's bothered to sweep free of dead leaves. Inside, the collection is mostly localized to a single large, split-level room, which is filled with glass-paned wooden display cabinets jammed with specimens -- mostly skeletal -- of human morphological non-conformism, some with an explanation or some description of provenance, others with a simple typewritten slip of paper, yellowed with age, giving only the date of the donation. The presentation is very neutral and mid-century scientific. The cabinets are packed shoulder to shoulder with one another, and each one runs floor to ceiling. In another room on the first floor there's an exhibit on battlefield medicine in the Civil War. There's a booth you can step into to see what you would look like as an amputee. A large stairwell takes you down to the lower tier of the main collection, where there's more stuff, grouped anatomically: Eyes, noses, spines, genitals.

A cabinet at one end of the first floor displayed the personal effects and photos of the late Dr. Mütter himself, who was handsome -- nothing of the "Innsmouth look" you might have reasonably expected -- and died young, in his forties. In a back room of the ground floor there was a similar display noting the recent passing of the Museum's director, Gretchen Worden. She was 56 years old. It made me feel sad, and brought the most disturbing aspect of the collection into focus. The specimens of people who seemed like they'd been dealt a rough hand by birth or by accident, and for whom contemporary medicine could / would do nothing: The skeleton of the dwarf prostitute who'd gotten pregnant with a fetus too big to deliver; the model (it better be a model) of the enormous colon possessed by the Human Windbag, a circus performer who pretty much filled up with shit and died. It reminded me of the hero's final question from The Sirens Of Titan: Why are we created only to suffer and die?

This turned into more of a downer than I wanted it to. Good things are in the offing. Nina got us tickets to see Ana Tijoux in July. Watch this and tell me she can't spit.

We ferried out to the St. Andrew's vicarage in Saltaire to visit Billy and Sarah and Baby Charlie last weekend. It was a bright, hot day, and the gang gathered at the house (Kim, Chris, Jessie, others) was itching to run out to the beach. I'd neglected to pack swim trunks, either by accident or subconscious motive. I felt self-conscious about my bald head and mugwump-like physique, and I wished I could have stayed in a protective and concealing tent like Baby Charlie, who was sporting a bright yellow bathing costume like one of the original X-Men's. But Billy graciously lent me a pair of his own trunks, and Nina and Chris coaxed me into the cold blue water, and it was actually a lot of fun. We bobbed in the deep parts, and splashed around until the afternoon change in the tides drew the waves up higher and stronger than we could handle. In the evening we rode the vicarage house bikes out to Surf's Out for some food. While we waited for Billy and Sarah to show up with the stroller, we elbowed our way into the crowd listening to the band playing in the restaurant's outdoor space. They were Rich Mahogany, five or six swollen middle-aged dudes, red-faced and sharing a glans-like appearance. To their credit, the crowd was dense with ladies, and from the ambient chatter it sounded like many of them had traveled to the island just for this show. (The Cravin' Band had opened the evening; double-header!) We walked away from the noise, out to the pier, where we found a tiny boutique selling beach towels and doo-dads. They were selling "throwing snaps," too, and we bought a couple of boxes to arm Chris for an evening's entertainment.

On the ferry ride back, we were packed cheek-to-jowl with drunk, middle-aged Rich Mahogany fans -- some of whom had been fighting in the restaurant bathroom -- leaning this way and that as the boat pitched in the darkness. It was a Boschian vision of hell, but not a very bad one.

White People Ruin Everything

We went out to Bushwick Open Studios so I could see my friend and former Rebel Monkey colleague Joe Wierenga. He and his friends were showing a series of life drawings, many of which they'd done at 3rd Ward before the owners took the money and ran. Joe's drawings were great, especially the way he renders light and contrast with a watercolor wash. And becase their show was at their apartment building, a very strange, not-quite-condo building affectionately called The Glass Cube; we got to see the apartment he shares with his lady friend and with Elvis The Cat King. Two big rooms, the bedroom illuminated by a fishtank and the lamp over his drafting table. It was lucky that we'd stopped by on Saturday, he said. They were cutting back their participation to just that day because he and his show-mates had gotten wind that their landlord was going to stop by on Sunday, and their art show was strictly unapproved by management. Apparently the landlord was coming by to inspect a small bit of graffiti that had been stencil-sprayed onto the sidewalk outside the building and which read "Build Communities Not Condos." The landlord was very upset about this, Joe said, though it wasn't clear whether it was the medium or the sentiment that was most distressing. Wow, though. They're listening! Streets are saying things.

We left Joe's place and stopped at a few more points of interest on the elaborately-designed (and printed and collated) brochure, mostly in warehouse-to-studio-building conversions. There was some good stuff: hyper-realist paintings of falcons; pleasing geometric arrangements of colored lines. A lot of the studios were already closed for the day, though, and so we mostly just poked around the graffitied stairwells of the warehouses, watched people people lugging supplies up and down in freight elevators. "Who pays for this?" Nina murmured as we looked out a dirty window over the spray of studio buildings and nascent condo developments. I thought she was asking who pays for all these art students to rent studios in chic warehouses. (Their parents?) But she clarified, "No, I mean, who buys this art? Who would buy this?" Which is close to but not actually the same question when you think about it.

The next weekend we went out to Sunset Park to catch a series of short films called "Trapped In The Machine" on the roof of Industry City. We'd tried (and failed) to get inside there a few times, back before it became, like, ground zero for "makers" in South Brooklyn. This time we walked right in and for our fifteen bucks got to poke around the closed-up ground floor with all its upscale canteens and faux-social realist murals before humping it up the six or so stories to the roof. It was beautiful up there, though I was needlessly mean to Nina when she wanted to take arty digital camera photos of the skyline and the electrical transformers erupting from a cage on a cordoned-off part. But it was because I'd just noticed how many other attendees (including myself) were doing the same thing: Oohing and ahhing over the remnants of the industrial landscape and, by virtue of their presence, at their own dominion over it for the purpose of an evening's entertainment.

Still, it was an undeniably pleasant place to watch a movie. The wind was cold for June, so Nina hopped on my lap and we shared a sweatshirt. The films were weird and fun, ranging from bonkers (a guy cuts his own head off and fucks his neck; "too rapey," muttered Nina) to dramatic (a victim of a hit-and-run mistakes it for an alien abudction) to strangely sweet (a guy's friend dies while they're in Mexico and he parties with the coffin). Afterwards, everyone was invited down to the courtyard for cocktails compliments of Bulleit and New Amsterdam Vodka. The courtyard was an immaculate sanded wood and gravel pit affair, with fairy lights strung through the thin branches of a half-dozen just-planted trees. Imagine a fancy hotel's roof deck at street level. Or, like, the place a luxury car would pull up at the end of a commercial to show how spontaenous and bohemian its rich dude owner is. Hard to imagine a factory dude eating lunch out there, but hey I'm obviously not a factory dude.

More art: After stopping off at the post-baptismal brunch for Billy and Sarah's new baby in Brooklyn Heights, Chris and Andre and Nina and I walked down to Pier 6 to goggle at the horror of Smorgasburg, and Nina and I hopped the ferry to Governor's Island to see what was going on at Figment this year. What we saw: A tree draped with transparent plastic cups. A kind of igloo made of knotted plastic bags. An adult hippie and a pre-teen (soon-to-be) hippie gave us expensively-printed fliers for an erotic dance performance in which all the pieces were puns on fruit. We walked out to the southwestern end of the island, off limits last year so that the skeleton of a Navy dormitory could be demolished. It's full of beachgrass now, and there's a playground with a big sanded wood climbing structure. Nina climbed on it. A giant telephone handset hanging from a telephone pole-sized mount. The best thing I saw was a gallery of art-photography holograms in one of the wood-frame houses. Tony Bennett was featured, as was the Pope. Something about the presentation, luminous green images floating out from the plaster walls in the abandoned rooms, made me want to stay there weaving back and forth in front of the phony depth of the pictures. I even considered owning one, even if they're just one step beyond (or behind) black velvet portraiture. Plus, they had one of a toilet.

I mentioned, I think, that my family friend Jonah, whom I'm pretty sure I tutored on long division when he and I were both in short pants, is the new guitar player for only-band-that-matters Titus Andronicus. After I'd gushed about the band on the way home from that Thanksgiving, my mom had asked me to bring her along the next time they played a show in NYC. That turned out to not be for a while, but as soon as I saw them on the market, I snapped up four tickets to their Northside show at Warsaw on Thursday. Eagulls was Titus' immediate opener, and they were just going on when Beau and my mom and dad and I had met up at the venue at 9 o'clock. The main dude was less drunk than when Nina and I saw them at CMJ, and Warsaw is a bigger, better fit for their pummeling sound. The bass-first way their songs are arranged, it's hard not to think of Joy Division, and George Mitchell has a queasy, Ian Curtis look to him, though his vocals are plaintive enough to veer into Robert Smith territory. I got Żywiecs for me and my dad and a coke for Beau. After Eagulls' set, the old folks (Jonah's mom Heather had arrived as well) went up to the balcony -- which I'd always thought was a VIP section -- and Nina and Beau and I got a couple of plates of pierogies in the merch area.

Titus Andronicus took the stage right as we finished eating, and we hurried to find our places in the crowd. They opened with Fear And Loathing In Mahwah, NJ, to the great excitement of the crowd. Patrick's voice sounded painfully husky, like it did when he was on the radio while he was working on Local Business. Maybe that's just what he sounds like when they've got an album in progress. And they played several songs from their promised double-CD rock opera, and they were all as fast and punchy as the best stuff on their last record. And there was plenty of conversation from the stage, starting with a characteristic (though undeniably correct) exhortation from Patrick to respect the bodies and physical space of our fellow audience members. When an obnoxious -- if exuberant -- crowd-surfer made it onto the stage and accidentally stepped on Julian's pedal board, Stax gave him a reprimand between songs. And he extended his opprobrium to include the slam-dancing multitudes in the pit. "I used to be like you," he said, on the topic of dancin' around and going up. But now, he warned further surfers seeking his recognition, "I don't admire it. I abhor it." (They were undeterred.) "Back when I lived in this neighborhood," he said, introducing In A Big City, "I used to dream of playing at this place. We opened a show here once" (I was there!) "but we were never the headliners. I don't live in Greenpoint any more. I moved to Ridgewood, Queens." He looked up from tuning his guitar. "Don't come to Ridgewood," he said.

The thing the blogs are talking about is that they played a full cover of Closing Time, which I guess they sometimes tease the crowd with during tuning breaks. But people were cheering and the tuning went on for a while, and before to long we were all, "I know who I want to take me home..." There was also a cover of Jumpin' Jack Flash, dedicated to Patrick's mom, who was in the audience. They finished, as they often do, with all sixteen minutes of The Battle of Hampton Roads. He ended the set with a gathering, excruciating wall of noise created by his delay pedal. The end. After the show we waited outside the venue while Heather made the rounds of the green room. It had started to rain a little by the time she came out, and Jonah appeared a moment later, followed by P-Stax himself. I gushed and and thanked him and shook his hand, and so did Nina despite ostensibly being on his Twitter shit list. He hand-fed Jonah some chunks of a muffin he'd bought. A thing I've learned: If you stick with it long enough, you get to meet your idols. (And so does your mom.) He wandered off towards the deli. "I saw you," Jonah said. "You were up front the whole time." Isn't that what every fan wants to hear? I saw you, wild-eyed, balding, overdressed and sweaty, reaching for the peformers on the stage. That was me!

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.

That Ain't A Skyline It's A Cemetery

I am trying to get ready for calendar season. We went to a Sunday night "tooth fairy" benefit show at Shea Stadium. They were raising money for somebody to get dental work done, I guess? I was there for The So So Glos, and to show myself that going out a Sunday night is still okay.

The first band was called Krill, which is a pretty funny name for a bunch of delicate-looking young white dudes. Name notwithstanding, they were pretty good -- yelped, plaintive singing over trebly guitar -- although they committed the venial sin of not introducing or outtroducing themselves. They didn't say much of anything at all, in fact.

Juan Waters was up next. He's small; got a neat haircut, dresses conservatively in a collared shirt and sweater. Behind him, someone had erected a kind of stand-up canvas painting of a luchador that had fairy lights exed across it, and fairy lights spelling out "N. A. P.," which, I think, now that I look it up on the Internet, stands for North American Poetry, the name of his new album. The lights flashed in time to his strumming. There was also a caged utility light attached to a stand in front of him and angled up at his chin as he perched on a stool, giving him the appearance of a camp counselor at a campfire. Aside from that, the stage was dark, and he was the only performer. His songs are on the long side, and his vocals are a mix of talk-singing and his earnest -- if not always pitch-perfect -- tenor. The songs are up-tempo but also sad and meditative. He's a bit snaggle-toothed, such that his face has a mournful caste. "It's a shame," he sang, toward the end of his set, "that everybody wants to look the same."

In between sets, Patrick Stickles was DJing, looking gaunt, not quite clean-shaven but not quite William Tecumseh Sherman, either. He played some Clash, I think, and a song off the forthcoming Titus Andronicus album. Later, he took the microphone and came down from the engineering booth, soliloquizing as he walked around the half-empty room. "I moved to this city to follow my dreams of becoming a rock star," he said to no one in particular. "But now that I'm here, nothing is real and everything is bullshit." I agree. It's worth saying. Eric Harm was working the bar. Nina and I stepped outside for some air. It smelled sweet on the balcony, whiffs of maple syrup drifting from the north or maybe from Newtown Creek to the east. We watched the bouncers frisking people outside the shitty club right across the street. There's a furniture store next door to the club, and sometimes some old guys that work there sit in front of it and talk. Sometimes they start a little fire in an oil drum and cook things on it. No one was there that night.

The So So Glos took the stage a bit after 11. Adam Reich was subbing in for Elkin, who was absent from the lineup. I'd wanted to watch them, but I was pooped and apprehensive about getting to work on time the next morning, so we only stayed for a couple of songs. "It's up to all of us to keep this place safe," Alex Levine said as the band was tuning up, explaining that people live and work at the Stadium. "This is a fragile thing. It's a..." They launched into "House of Glass." They sounded great, as usual. We discarded our beer cans, did bathroom. They started to play "Diss Town," one of my "best faves" from Blowout, but it was bed time, and I wrenched myself away. Stax was pacing in the stairwell as we left. "Good night," I said. He looked understandably confused.

Kitty update.

When Mer and I adopted Kitty back in 2003 (?), we were the first people we knew to adopt a pet, and, believe it or not, it felt kind of bold -- maybe even transgressive -- to make a fifteen year (median) commitment to a five-year-old cat with a scabby tummy and a dirty bottom. Kitty was a conversation piece, especially when she'd eat a cockroach or throw up mouse parts into the Elizabethan collar we were making her wear for some reason or another. But so is Prez, now, and Bug, and Sam and Sasha. Everybody has a cat. What are the accessories and events that provide real emphasis to the hours of our lives? People get married and have babies. People get new jobs or phones. I bought a new laptop that inexplicably has a touchscreen.

So what of Kitty? The Rase sometimes emails to make sure Kitty's not dead. She's not dead. But she's visibly old. She smells more like the litter box more often, and her meowing is louder and more frequent. I took her to Animal Kind, where they diagnosed her with hypertheroidism. Treating it will make her kidney disease worse. Otherwise, they said, she's in pretty good shape for a fifteen-year-old cat. Nina's begun a habituation regimen of picking her up, holding her 'til she reaches peak fussiness, then returning her to earth and rewarding her with a bit of dehydrated chicken treat. Me, I just superman her up and down the length of the apartment, which she tolerates surprisingly well. One day I'll probably have to have her put down. Right before that happens, though, we're going to feed her as much fish as she wants.

GNU Soap

LibrePlanet can be hit or miss. Last year's didn't make enough of an impression on me that I felt like online-journaling about it. Nonetheless, the appeal of eight-plus uninterrupted hours with an Emacs window and the gentle rattle of the Acela was more than enough reason to wake up at 5 AM on a Saturday and lurch my way to Penn Station, creaking and dyspeptic, to board a 7 AM train. Out the window the landscape looked dead and wet, like it'd been frozen in an ice sheet that had only just retreated. But I was in good spirits. I snuggled into my seat, hooked up all my electrical bits and put on that Titus Andronicus album about wanting to leave Boston. Almost immediately I fixed a bug in one of my programs that had been driving me crazy for two weeks. For once, the Acela Wi-Fi was fast and reliable. What a nice morning!

The tunnel connecting the railyards at South Station to the T lines was closed. Outside on the street it was cold and a bit rainy. The sky was steely gray. The conference was back at the Stata Center this year, a few blocks from the Kendall Square stop on the T. I've made this journey so many times in such a similar way on so little sleep that at this point that I get the solipsistic feeling that the tiny part of Boston I pass through is a small extension to the local geography of my life (subway, office, home, Brooklyn) or maybe like a folded-up dimension within my personal universe.

I said my yearly hello to Jeanne when I got to the Stata Center and ducked into a classroom in time to catch Brad Kuhn's talk about the future of copyleft, which included a fairly dour assessment of the state of GPL adoption. Non-copyleft permissive licenses are gaining ground, both because of political apathy on the part of software developers, he claimed, but also because of enthusiasm for technology that is already non-copyleft. As an example, he pointed out that Clang is rapidly displacing GCC. He spoke to the general culture of expediency concommitant with the boom in startups, and cited a representative quote from Tom Preston-Werner of Github about how the GPL is inconvenient compared to the Apache license. Kuhn suggested that you have to do whatever you can to destroy your political enemies, and so pointed out the despicable shit that guy pulled on Julie Ann Horvath. I agree. Fuck that guy. The talk left me feeling bummed out but agitated. What to do!

Next, I went to a panel called "Beyond the Women In Tech Talk," which was both about going beyond outreach to women to draw in people who belong to more and different groups under-represented in the Free Software movement, and about getting beyond the tone of the typical women-in-tech panel ("How can we be more welcoming? We're already being as welcoming as we can possibly be!"). The moderators were ginger coons, who edits and publishes Libre Graphics Magazine; Sara Hendren, who researches assistive technologies; Marina Zhurakhinskaya, who does community outreach for the GNOME Foundation; and Kÿra, whom I'd met when we were both tabling for the FSF at HOPE. They opened things up with a well-observed comment by Kÿra that the focus on inclusiveness and joining isn't necessarily constructive. Communities of historically oppressed people don't want to be swept up in a political movement that looks like a lot of straight white guys doing straight white guy behaviors. You gotta let the Queer South Indian Student Computing Group have its own meetings and leave 'em alone. This seemed like a difficult point for the white dudes in the room to grasp; there were some polite attempts to renegotiate the point. A few people got up and left. But another audience member made what I thought was a very good point, which was that people from ethnic, economic, and cultural backgrounds other than your own are not going to be like you. And if you want them to usefully contribute their labor to your project, she said, you need to spend time with them and actually get to know them. She wondered whether the average white cis male Free Software project developer is actually prepared to do this. I thought about it. I don't know! I'll admit it: It's difficult to get out there and understand people.

I ate lunch alone at Clover, a vegan food co-op that looks like an Apple Store and which has a few locations around Cambridge.

Eben Moglen gave the afternoon keynote. He was wearing an uncharacteristically bold suit and tie combo, and seemed to be feeling pretty good. He was anticipating a satisfactory ruling in an upcoming Supreme Court case, Alice Corp. vs. CLS Bank. Like many of the other speakers, he made some observations about the rise of government surveillance, and how practically every mobile computing device can be subverted to spy on its user on behalf of state security agencies like the NSA. (At this, RMS piped up from the front row: "Perhaps we should make stickers that say 'Intel Inside.'") He ended with the somewhat perplexing assurance that "You have always had the finest legal representation in the world on the subjects of our mutual concern, and while I live, you always will." True, he's got a crack team, but they don't have a ton of competition doing what they do. Someone asked about the Freedom Box. Moglen estimated that the project had lost about a year's worth of progress because wildfires in Colorado had burned down the home of one of the lead engineers, taking some important prototypes and designs with it.

RMS was up next. "I'm a pessimist by nature," was the first thing he said. There were some knowing chuckles from the audience. "I've been expecting defeat since I started this movement in 1983. But surrender isn't an option, because that means immediate defeat. So the only thing I can do is fight." It was maybe the most inspiring thing I think I've ever heard him say. He went on to suggest that the Free Software folks had better get started preparing for an inevitable Political Action Committee assault in the event of a victory on patents; and to suggest that there should be laws preventing the sale of mobile computing devices that can't be jail-broken. "We used to think that people who were willing to make sacrifices for their freedom were heroes," he said as he was wrapping up. But now we're unwilling to sacrifice the smallest amount of comfort. "I don't know if I could sacrifice my life," he said. "But I can give up some convenience. Any adult can do that." He announced the Free Software awards: One to Matthew Garrett, for his work on implementing UEFI SecureBoot for Free operating systems; the other to the GNOME Foundation's Outreach Program for Women. Garrett spoke movingly of his experience growing up in an isolated town in Northern Ireland and learning to write software by reading code off a burned CD of Free Software programs.

The "social event" for the evening was nearby, at The Asgard. Outside of a handful of staff and old-timers, I don't really know anybody at these events, so I had to pound a few beers before I felt comfortable talking to anybody. Deb paired me up with Alex Oliva, the head of the FSF Latin America, and I assaulted him with questions about GCC development and the difficulties of launching an activist group in a market saturated with activist groups. I spoke to Emily Lippold Cheney, who's interested in the intersection of Free Software and co-operatives of various kinds. I spent a good 45 minutes talking to a trio of developers from Tiki, who were not offended at all when I confused their project with TWiki. "Happens all the time," said the main dude. After that I lurched back to Kendall Sq. and my hotel room, singing songs to myself. I walked past Building 41, bits of large machines visible through its dirty windows. At the hotel, after changing into my jammies, I stood for a minute in the part of the room where the two floor-to-ceiling windows form a seamless corner. It felt a little like I was hovering over the muddy construction site below. (If I'd shelled out an extra hondo for a room on the other side of the building, it would have been the Charles River.) Then I called Nina and bellowed drunkenly at her for an hour, sprawled over the unnecessary upholstered couch next to the enormous bed. I slept fitfully, having dreams of missing trains and conference sessions.

I got up at 8:30 or so, washed and dressed while listening to MSNBC's coverage of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, and then checked out of my room. When I got to the Stata Center, Jacob Applebaum was well into his morning keynote address, delivered via a gstreamer video feed from his base of operations in Berlin, where he remains in self-imposed exile. His talk focused naturally on the tactics of the surveillance state uncovered by Edward Snowden, and he made an argument for the importance of making anonymizing services and personal security software more usable for non-technical users. He showed off some of the aparatus that he uses to ensure his privacy (mostly network communication pipelines based on Tor) and described the acid test that he uses to decide whether he can trust a reporter (no NSA secrets for you if you can't figure out how to use GnuPG). He ended his talk with, "And I hope to meet some of you again someday in real life, but if not, remember... it was murder!" He hung up the video connection, but his face stayed frozen on the big projector screen in front of all of us.

I sat in on an assortment of talks for the rest of the day. The speakers were engaging. I liked hearing Máirín Duffy's explanation of how she redesigned GNU Mailman; Matthew Garrett described the architecture of SecureBoot and showed how secure firmware implementations conflate physical presence with ownership. Nothing really riled me up like the talks from the day before, but I got some good programming done. I had to leave in the middle of Karen Sandler's closing keynote, in which she stressed the importance of making Free Software ideals personal. "We can't all be cyborg lawyers," she said. (She is one.)

It was time to go. I took the T back to South Station and got myself onto the 6:40 train right as they were closing the doors. I found myself a seat in the quiet car. A woman got on at Providence and sat down next to me, fiddling with her phone. Out the window, the sun set, turning the western sky a bright pink color. I thought about getting the woman's attention so she could see it as well, but instead I just hunkered down with my devices and typed.

Hump!

My grandfather -- my mother's father -- passed away at the end of February. That's it for me: no more grandfathers. Nina and I flew out to San Francisco to help out with family things and to attend the funeral. I took Friday off work. On the plane, we played trivia with my sister on the little seatback computer, but then we just watched a lot of movies. Do the movie people know how much of their audience is using the movie to wait out something terrible? (Air travel; a visit with relatives; somebody dying) I watched This Is The End and laughed out loud at the part where Danny McBride yells that he's going to jizz everywhere. I also watched Hobbit! Part 2, which was a real snooze.

San Francisco is weird. Why do people want to live there? (I mean, I know why, but.) True, I guess I only visit in winter, when the city is damp and cold and the doorways and windows of the buildings are dark. But even in the summertime the place still has to seem a bit like a dingy bodega, dim around the edges like a David Fincher movie playing 24/7. It seems like a good place for hippies or junkies to run aground. So I guess I don't know what the draw is for young rich people. (I mean, I do.) I like riding the bus at night when we're there, though, because it's dirty and everybody on it looks like they're on the way to art school. Like being inside a Love and Rockets comic.

My mom and her brothers had arranged a little get-together and my grandparents' palatial apartment on Russian Hill overlooking the city. Like all old people, my grandparents have a piano and a bunch of dried plants and empty birdcages. We set out pretzels and things, and then I suggested that Nina and I go buy beers. It was a little weird, buying Pacifico for my family, but almost every adult likes beer and I wanted to get out of the house for a few minutes. It was easier after people started drinking. One of my uncles' ex-girlfriends talked to us about being a ham radio operator; his current girlfriend talked to us about being a park ranger in Yellowstone. My grandmother didn't seem to know who I was, but I didn't try very hard to make myself known to her, either. We left around 10 o'clock. It started raining hard on the way to Randy's house. We took the bus and then the muni and then Randy picked us up on Noriega St., pulling up alongside us in the dark on Noriega St. in his red Honda Civic or whatever it is.

The funeral was the next morning at the First Unitarian Church in Cathedral Hill. My mom and her brothers gave little speeches they'd prepared. My mom repeated his last words: "Take care, and have fun." My step-cousins from Mendocino spoke gratefully of how my grandfather had given a lot of his time to help them get into grad school, even though they weren't blood relatives. Some color on a guy I didn't know very well. Afterwards there was a small reception in an adjacent room. I stuffed my face with sandwiches and talked to some of my grandfather's co-workers from the engineering firm he founded. "The last time I saw him," one of them said, "was at the office Christmas party a few years ago. He wasn't working there any more but he wanted to stop by and say a few words to the company. He tried to tell them how important it was to support veterans returning from war and how important the VA system is, but his voice was so quiet that I don't think anyone could understand him." Another woman, upon hearing that I'm a professional computer guy, wanted to know what I thought of the wave of intense gentrification crashing against the Bay Area. (This was right around the time a protester had barfed on the Yahoo bus.) Did I support the behavior of these companies and their employees, she wanted to know. For the record, babies, I do not.

After the reception, Nina and I walked south down Franklin St. and eventually west to Mission Dolores Park. We stopped at a coffee shop in the Haight and drank cappucinos while leafing through a newspaper called Bay Woof, which was all about having a dog in San Francisco. Dog massage, dog therapists, dog psychics. Crazy! That evening, we had dinner with Randy and Danica at Pancho Villa in the Mission -- the only place in San Francisco where anyone seemed poor or unhappy -- and stood on line in front of the Roxie to see Hump!, the traveling amateur pornography film festival curated by Dan Savage. The performers are truly amateurs, and so there was a lot of process in place to protect their identities and privacy, and there's only one copy of each piece of footage. Dan Savage gave a somewhat sanctimonious explanation of what the theater staff would do to any cell phones they saw removed from their holsters. (They would take them away and break them!) Then they started the show. The movies with straight people were alright, I guess, but they were for the most part unimaginative and self-involved. I think my favorite short of the evening was "Tuff Titties," about a couple of auto mechanics that get it on in a junkyard, but it was pretty hard not to like the stop-motion animation short about centaur fucking, which was called "Mythical Proportions."

The movies were over at around midnight. We got back in the car and drove to San Mateo, where we got frozen yogurt from a flourescently lit place called Nubi in a mostly-shuttered strip mall. You squirt out the flavor you want from a row of casks and levers on the wall of the place, and then they put whatever toppings you want on it. We drove home and ate our froyos in front of the TV in Randy and Danica's apartment, watching Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. I fell asleep for most of it, but I managed to keep my eyes open for the part where Pee-Wee meets Large Marge: "And when they finally pulled the driver's body from the twisted, burning wreck, it looked like... this!" I've been covering my eyes for that bit since I was little, but this time I looked. It's bad, but it's not that bad.

Red Zinger

We got invited to Jay's Superb Owl party, and I fixed in my mind that I would make an enchilada casserole -- vegetarian, mind you -- to compete with something called the Porkestra that we were told was going to go down. I have an embellished memory of similar enchilada dish that my old colleague Mike Jurney made for a party at Joel's house many, many years ago, a layered preparation with alternating strata of tortillas, chicken, cheese, and green chiles. I've been trying to reproduce it ever since I first tried it in, like, 2005.

I found this recipe, which was irresistible to me and my particular fetishes: Unorthodox components; lots of them; a claim to cultural authenticity. I went out to Sunset Park the morning-of to collect ingredients. It was 10 AM, and there was a spectacular pile of vomit in front of the benches on the southbound platform at Union St. The first stop I made was at the Key Food, which looked dirtier than I remembered and kind of visually desaturated. (I'd worried that I'd feel that way after moving back to Park Slope.) Store manager who looks like a dissipated Boy Scout. Weird guy talking to himself in the produce aisle who turned out to work there. There's a section of one aisle devoted to Mexican spices and dried herbs packaged in very small quantities: Chamomile flowers, yerba buena, various thistle-like things. There was one small package of hibiscus flowers there, labeled flor de jamaica, far too small an amount to account for the two cups called for by the recipe, but at least I knew I was on the right track. I found the rest of it a block away at "Sam" Grocery, the dusty Mexican provisions store on the corner of 43rd St. Practically the entire back wall of the shop was given over to pillow-sized bags of dried hibiscus.

I treated myself to a celebratory tornillo from Angel's.

The enchiladas came out well, though I realized after getting them into the oven just how obsessed I'd been with their successful execution. Hibiscus flowers are pretty good. I don't know if I'd describe them as "meaty," the way the recipe does, but they're good. Imagine eating the contents of a Red Zinger tea bag. There were also turnips, grated carrots, and enchilada sauce made from canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. That stuff is hell of spicy, in case you'd ever seen it at the grocery story and wondered.

For Nina's birthday, we returned to the Museum Of Natural History. This time we visited the Hall Of Minerals, gray-carpeted gymnasium of, I should hope, every Manhattan childhood. I made her watch the short movie about gold that plays in a loop in the little room right to the left of where they keep the the Star of India. She said she'd never seen this movie, but I've seen it dozens of times. I know what the narrator's voice sounds like and what all the musical cues are, and I can picture the nugget sitting submerged in a riverbed that serves as the movie's unifying visual motif. It's funny to think of it playing over and over again day after day. The young geologist who gets interviewed in one part is middle aged now. The middle-aged economist who gets interviewed in another part is probably dead. And there's the part where they show you what it would look like if all the gold in the world were molded into an enormous cube and placed at one end of a football field, the stands empty, the sounds of the game played over the loudspeakers from an audio tape.

On our way out, we walked through the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians. The "human being" exhibits have never held my interest as a kid, but now that I'm older I've become more curious about them, in part because of how resistant to change their curation seems to be. Same atlatls, same silly putty-colored mannequins year after year. And here is one of the few remaining mysteries of my adult life: I have a vivid memory of walking through one of the Indians halls as a kid and peering down at one of the waist-high, glass-topped display cases that contain cutaway views of longhouses and other structures. Inside the longhouse, I remember seeing a tiny model of a firepit and cooking utensils, and that the model firepit had a light underneath it so that it glowed red and yellow. I wind up walking through one of the Indians halls (how many are there -- three?) whenever I come to the museum, and I always check for the glowing fire. I've never been able to find it. Did it really exist? Is it like the issue of Astounding magazine that Philip K. Dick knew he shouldn't find?

The museum was closing at 6, but our dinner reservation wasn't until 7:30. We decided to walk through the Park to the train. I slipped on the ice at one point and landed hard on a bony part of my leg. Am I getting old? We rounded a corner near the southeastern edge of the Park and came upon Trump (nee Wollman) Rink (ugh). Babies, it isn't easy for me to ignore the mental alarms that go off when I think about slipping off schedule, but I could tell Nina was looking down wistfully at the turning wheel of skaters. Hey, I said. We have a few minutes. What if we just went skating? A few isolated flakes were falling when we left the museum, but by the time we laced up our skates and got out on the ice, the air was full of glittering snow. We went around and around with the other skaters, feeling the skates negotiate with our ankles as we took the curves. The rink staff dudes darted here and there through the slowly turning wheel of skaters, sometimes stopping to flirt with teenage girls windmilling their arms and clomping their skates. I re-learned how to kind of flip around real fast (make a T with your skates) and even managed to skate backwards for a little while (not sure how that works). The snow fell all around us and mixed with the powder carved out of the ice by our skates. It was charming and fun.

We ate dinner at Kin Shop. Their deal is that they serve fancy Thai street food. Nina ordered a kind of duck curry thing that you could roll up in a piece of roti. It was really good.

The final stop on the birthday express was at the Regal Union Square, where we sat for the 10:30 show of Inside Llewyn Davis. It was beautiful but made me feel like shit. The predicament of Mr. Davis -- cursed to be a salesman for a product that nobody wants to buy -- was very distressing for me to contemplate. I mean, that's what I am, right? I hope that's what it feels like for everyone. I don't think I'll ever really know. But I left the theater humming Dink's Song: Fare thee well, O Honey, fare thee well.

Sledding

Let it not be said that our snow-prayers were not granted.

Our New Years' Eve plans weren't fully baked by the time we struck out for the first party of the evening in Crown Heights. Mark and Lisa had just had a literal baby, but they went forward nonetheless with their party plans. We visited them in their new apartment in Crown Heights, and found the place decked out with various pickled Russian delicacies, along with several "salads" from Elza Fancy Food. Mark had warned us that Puck, their two-and-a-half-stone tomcat, had taken the birth of the baby hard. I'd laughed at Mark's description, but when we got there the cat was indeed moping on an office chair and staring at itself in the mirror. Nina cradled their new baby like a very delicate hero sandwich. I tried to distract Puck from his existential crisis, tickling him and cooing at him until he took a swing at me.

Our next stop was at Emma and Jay's in Downtown Brooklyn, where we watched the ball drop and rewind in Times Square several times over, using the DVR to broker our experience of the event. We left Emma's a bit after 1 AM, and I was still hoping that there'd be adventure in store. But Rubulad had been ruled out -- too racist this year -- and everything else we'd seen on the Nonsense List was heavily, heavily DJ-based. (Some kind of techno lock-in at The Bell House? Ugh.) The New Years' Eve landscape was barren, like when every rock band leaves the city for Texas during SXSW. So instead I made Nina come to Canal Bar and drink a whiskey with me at 2 AM, like Homer in that episode of The Simpsons where he out-eats the buffet.

The next morning we tried to re-create the pleasant exercise of last year's New Year's Day with breakfast at Abilene. They were out of fried pickles, though, and Nina's breakfast burrito had three hairs in it, which she removed and deposited on a napkin. She eyed them mournfully as she dismantled the remainder of her breakfast.

A few days later, the microwave broke, spontaneously arcing during an innocuous attempt to defrost an Amy's burrito. (Nina diagnosed a faulty waveguide cover.)

We got the first snow of the year on Friday afternoon. I was afraid it would be gone or trampled slushy before we could get out in it, but it held frozen through the next day, and so we were able to go sledding on Saturday afternoon. I went down to the basement to retrieve the big blue sled we'd bought around this time last year, dusting off the sprinkling of wood shavings that had accumulated on it (termites?) all the while keeping an eye out for rats or spiders amidst the filth and rubble, and ducking preemptively so as not to bonk myself on the iron underpinnings of the building.

We entered the Park at Third St. and headed towards the bright crest of the hill on the eastern side of the park where we could see a whole lot of fellow sledders practicing their sport. A group of kids called out to us at the base of the hill, asking if we'd share our sled. There were three of them, and as we talked to them it became clear that they had come to the Park looking to get some fun out of discarded sleds -- quite a reasonable proposition, although they'd come up empty so far, their best haul being an upscale laminated foam wedge with the lamination all scraped off so that it balked when you tried to make it slide across the snow. This had clearly been a major setback for their evening. We all traded off on taking turns down the hill in our big plastic dish, one by one and sometimes two by two, me riding piggy-back on Nina's hips. The kid who was in the middle by height and age had a fixed, dissatisfied look on his face and a generally dysphoric affect. He was the one who'd found the broken sled, and he was obviously disappointed, though he continued to strategize. "My plan," he told me as we surveyed the landscape from the top of the hill, "is to wait until some of these people leave their sled for a few minutes to use the bathroom, and then I'm gonna take it. They're going to be like, oh no, where's our sled?"

It occurred to me that this was an opportunity for me to shape the values of the next generation. "Won't they be upset that their sled is gone?" I suggested.

He didn't seem to hear me. "They'll be like, where's our sled?" he repeated. There was a pause. "Wait," he said. "Is that stealing?"

The center of Long Meadow actually stays pretty dark even when the lamps around the perimeter are on. So after you slide down the hill, your inertia carries you out into an enveloping blue-gray darkness from which you must trudge back towards the light and your friends. An irritatingly polite and cooperative Park Slope family had staked out a spot next to us. They included a tow-headed pair of eerily simpatico siblings, each armed with a vintage wooden sled with red metal runners and steering handles. (Flexible Flyers, maybe?) They were willing to let the boys try their fancy sleds but first they had to finish their own competition. "One, two, go!" yelled the girl, and they both took off down the hill, throwing their sleds down in front of them as they made practiced, fluid transitions from a run to a face-first descent into the meadow. At length we came to the final challenge, a small makeshift jump made of snow at the base of the slope. Nina made the first attempt, whooping as she got airborne. I took the next turn, making feeble yelps as I caromed off the snow-submerged curb and enduring a pelvis-thumping landing off the ramp. Nonetheless, I think I was legitimately flying for about a second and a half.

"Come on, man," said, the oldest boy said, exhorting his friends to follow us. "She did it." (Gesturing at Nina.) "And she's a girl! What's the matter -- You scared?"

"I'm not scared," said the middle one with the sour face. "My stomach hurts. Feels like I'm going to throw up."

Convenient, I thought. But Nina was laid low by a stomach thing a few days later, so maybe that was no subterfuge.

Afterwards, we ate dinner at The Olive Vine, stashing our snow- and dirt-encrusted sled at the front by the register. Our host seated us in the back, in the "heated bedouin tent" they'd created by draping carpets over a metal scaffold and filling the enclosure with electric space heaters. It was very comfy, and even though I'd forgotten to wrap plastic bags around my socks, thus allowing snow to spill in over the tops of my Doc Martens, my feet were soon dry. There was a clear plastic tarp at the back of the tent through which you could see the back yard of the musical school or whatever that building is to the west, full of withered bushes and frost-emaciated creeping vines. The yard was blanketed with untouched snow, but the heat of the tent had melted it around the perimeter. The mexican chocolate place next door is gone; the Thai fusion place is gone. The Olive Vine's menu doesn't change. I ordered the same zataar-and-zucchini pizza I've been ordering since 2003, back when the place was where you would take your parents to show them that you were doing okay and that you were gonna make it as an adult.

Best Of 2013

Sound cue: Drumroll playing in the void of interstellar space.

Best thing on basic cable: Being Human (USA)
Best movie I saw in a theater: Gimme The Loot
Best movie I saw not in a theater: O Lucky Man!
Best book I read: In The First Circle; runner-up: Tinkers
Best album I played drums on: Let's Hear It For Bel Argosy, Bel Argosy
Best album I didn't play drums on: Blowout!, The So So Glos
Best new talk show on WFMU: Why Oh Why, with Andrea Silenzi
Best show I went to: The Dickies at Knitting Factory, Oct. 31st
Best video game I played: Dead Space
Best brunch: Buttermilk Channel
Best worst movie: Private Resort
Best vegetarian lunch special, Murray Hill: Tiffin Wallah
Best vegetarian Bánh Mi, Park Slope: Vegetarian chicken, Banhmigos
Best cruelty-free calorie-delivery mechanism: Vegan cowboy cookies
Best snack: Pretzel Crisps, aka Bagel Chips

I bought a Christmas tree about a week and a half before Christmas, traveling out to Sunset Park to the place I'd gone on 38th St. last year. It was very cold, and the air was misted and prickly with snow-dust. I told the guy the size of tree I was looking for, and he showed me one of the display models sitting on a spike in front of the lot, a heavy dressing of snow on its branches. It looked about right, and I told him so, and he wrapped it up for me to haul home on the train. That part was easier this time, though when I got the thing down the stairs onto the subway platform, my hands and fingers burned so badly from the cold that I thought there was something really wrong with them. I got it to Union St. and up to our apartment, and Nina and I fastened it to the plastic stand. Only then did I notice that it had a big sparse section on one side, like a bite taken out. It drank up the first pourings of water, but the needles stayed dry and crumbly. We duly wrapped the tree with fairy lights and clipped the "Christmas birds" to it, but it positively barfed needles onto the floor while we did so, and the whole thing seemed (even more than usual) like a hollow exercise. I felt embarrassed, and started counting the days until we could mulch the thing.

My dad suggested that all he really wanted for Christmas was for someone else to cook all the food on the day, so my sister enlisted me to help plan and prepare a suitable feast. I would have gone all vegetarian, because it's so much easier to cook, but she was set on doing some form of lamb dish. I'm glad she pushed for it because it came out really well, and got me out to witness the spectacle of the newly-opened Gowanus Whole Foods on 3rd St. Here is the menu we designed, for posterity and for readers who want to attempt it themselves:

• Hummus
• Roasted Brussels sprouts with fish sauce and Thai chiles
• Red quinoa and roasted butternut squash salad
• Roast leg of lamb with mint, garlic, and lima bean purée
• Cranberry sage pie

On Christmas Eve, Nina made ready to go visit her family in Pennsylvania, and I walked around the neighborhood trying to scoop up a few last-minute gifts. I bought us a sandwich to share at City Sub, but after I wolfed my half I felt ill, so I warned her off eating hers. I had to say goodbye to her from the toilet. I was almost recovered by the time my sister came over that evening to help me cook. We shopped for ingredients and prepared the salad and pie. She also helped me finalize one of my presents for Nina, a t-shirt ">screen-printed with the logo for Cacaolat, which she'd told me she admired when we saw it in Barcelona. We made three shirts, and they all came out good, but each one has different imperfections. That's just the way it works. That night, Jill and Emma and Jay came over and after some debate, we decided to watch Zapped! starring a young Scott Baio and, weirdly enough, the guy who went on to play Buddy on Charles In Charge. Baio plays a high school chemistry nerd who accidentally invents a tonic that gives him telekinetic powers by mixing weed and beer. He uses his powers to take girls' clothes off. It's like they filmed a Johnny Ryan comic strip. At midnight, it was Jay's birthday. We did shots.

Nina and I went on another date the weekend before New Year's Eve. First we saw the tail end of a Liquor Store show at Glasslands. They were characteristically gross / great, and I got to see the new light installation above the stage. It's made of PVC fitted with color-changing LEDs, and it looks like stiff, white fingers of coral reaching down from the ceiling. After that we got a drink at Iona, which Nina drunkenly insisted was "the best bar," on account of its varied seating environments (window, booth, back yard) and its focus on beer and whiskey. Then it was time for the midnight movie at Nitehawk, a series of "naughty" 35mm shorts curated by, like, a guy who restores naughty 35mm shorts. We ordered tall-boy PBRs and tater tots. The clips included some very explicit trailers for the movies:

• Nude in a White Car
• Sexual Freedom in Denmark
• Sex Freaks
• Torture Dungeon

Were they really naughty? It was definitely more penetrative sex than I've seen in a movie theater since, I guess, the Wesleyan Film Series. It occurred to me that suggesting it to Nina as a fun date was a pretty Travis Bickle kind of move. I think some of the best clips in the series, though, were the least naughty -- the guy had collected some film ads that I guess would be shown before a film feature that were pitching dance-hall parties you could go to on New Year's Eve. So many venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn that just don't exist any more. There was also a strange, long-form travel ad encouraging viewers to "Come To Poland." It'd been produced in the 50's by a Polish hospitality company called Orbis, and it featured a Slavic-looking couple enjoying the period charms of an unspecified Polish city as described by an English voice-over. Outdoor cafes! Hotels with elevators! Our host tried to make more hay than was warranted over the otherness on screen.

The last big thing we did in 2013 was see Patti Smith play a show at Webster Hall. This is a thing she does every year, and it's one of those things that New York magazine is always telling you should be on your bucket list. I hadn't done it yet because it's expensive and the tickets sell out crazy quick -- and because I wasn't sure what to expect. I was worried that she'd be some kind of mumbling ersatz gypsy like Bob Dylan. But I figured we should go, you know, just to see, and it turned out that she's amazing on stage. She's got such a steady, confident voice -- deeper, even, than the voices of the dudes in her band. (In two-part harmonies, her male keyboardist always took the upper part.) She moves quickly and deliberately around the stage; she takes easy control of the audience, addressing them with a balance of punk contempt and genuine warmth. "Oh, I just get so flustered when a handsome boy talks to me," she sneered in the direction of an audience member who kept calling her name. "Now shut the fuck up." She opened her set with a cover of "Heroin," and sang it without undue reverence. What followed was a mix of her famous early songs, stuff from her recent albums, and more covers. "This next song is the number one song of 2013," she said. Oh man, I thought. Patti Smith does Miley Cyrus? But no, she sang "Stay" by Rihanna, which was also quite good. It being her birthday and all, her kids came up on stage with a cake and gave her a gift of "bee socks," which somehow support the protection of honeybee colonies. She played "Because The Night" and dedicated it to Fred Smith. She played "Perfect Day" and dedicated it to Lou Reed. It was really great.

When the show was over, we went to go find Patrice, whose birthday, like Patti's, was that evening. She'd been celebrating at a karaoke joint on 17th St., but by the time we we got there it was just some office dudes hollering their way through "Wrecking Ball."

Blue Morpho

I spent Thanksgiving with the Browns. My mom lured me there with an email telling me that Jonah had been invited to join Titus Andronicus. (She scooped BrooklynVegan and the band's own Twitter!) I tried not to slobber to him about his new band, but could not restrain myself. Some inside baseball: On their most recent tour, they rented a U-Haul hitch for their equipment; consequently there was enough room in the van for every member to have his own sleepin' row.

Bel Argosy played a show at Muchmore's, which turned out to be kind of a pleasant place to spend an evening. Beau and I met up early to pick up some equipment from the shared MiniBoone / Robot Princess practice space on Meserole. We found Doug inside, the place decorated with Christmas lights and smelling faintly sulfurous. He was working on putting words to a melody he'd written. We tied an amp to a hand truck. I grabbed Peter's cymbal bag, since we'd arranged that I'd use his stuff. My anxiety about punctuality and continued inability to keep my North Brooklyn geography straight got us to Muchmore's way early, so I sat the bar with Zain and Sam, and Beau ran back to Meserole to return some superfluous gear. Muchmore's is actually a pretty comfy joint. The washing machines in the room behind the bar are for community use -- show up with your laundry, drink a beer and take in a show. Sam had a cold and kept trying to get the bartender to make him a hot toddy, but the place has no license for hard liquor, so the best she could do was a coffee-and-wine, which was no problem for him. Our set was pretty good, though the floor tom collapsed in the middle of one song, and we only played for, like, fifteen minutes. Robot Princess sounds very good and precise and rehearsed; Beau and Dan play synchronized lead lines that sound like candy.

Nina's mom's been working as a docent at The Museum of Natural History, and she got us tickets to see the butterfly exhibit, so that's what we did on Saturday. The Museum admits visitors to the butterfly garden in waves, and there was some time to kill before the next "intake" period, so we took a walk through the Hall of North American Mammals. I've loved those dioramas for as long as can remember, and I've taken pains to avoid learning the floor plan of the Museum, so whenever I go I'm surprised at where I wind up. I looked into the mouth of the bison. I found a small finch hanging upside-down from a tree branch over a stream. The seam between the painted backdrop and the set dressing in the foreground -- the hand-placed blades of a grass, a frozen acrylic river -- is my favorite part. That seam is transportive, hyper-real. The dioramas don't have doors. How do they clean the animals and touch up the paint? I wondered. We turned a corner and found a wall-mounted TV playing a short documentary about how they do those things. (So, yeah, they take out the windows and enter through the front.)

The butterfly enclosure was a kind free-standing greenhouse inside an unused room off the museum's main entrance on Central Park West. It had "airlocks" at both the entrance and exits, to make sure you neither introduced a harmful indigenous critter to the butterfly jungle nor left with a butterfly clinging to your scarf. Inside, it was very warm and humid. For the butterflies what preferred it, there were feeding stations with sections of rotting oranges. There were several dozen different kinds of butterflies in the room, the smallest about the size of a guitar pick, the largest about the size and shape of a diagonal half-sandwich. Of these big ones, we were told, the majority were of the Morpho family. With their wings folded together, they looked unremarkable, like large moths or bits of faded newsprint. But when they spread their wings flat, they revealed a unreal, glittery blue on their dorsal side. An attentive docent showed us how to attract and handle the butterflies, how they'd mash their proboscii against things to taste them, that when two butterflies of the same species perched on a branch and overlapped their wings it meant they were mating. A young woman, wearing the official Museum orage, brought in a kind of mesh duffle bag that she explained was full of newly-hatched butterflies. "They're not very good at flying yet," she said, "so be careful not to step on them." She was right: The butterflies that they shook out of the bag took to the air only hesitatantly. Some of them waddled around on the floor flexing their wings in very deliberate way. We waited motionless for minutes on end in various hopeful locations near the stinky orange piles, hoping for a chance landing on our clothes or outstretched hands. At the other side of the enclosure, one of the docents was kneeling on the floor with a large butterfly clinging to her eyebrow and explaining loudly to a shocked toddler that it was alright. ("It doesn't hurt! It doesn't hurt!") Right as we were about to give up, a large Blue Morpho alit on the tassel of my scarf. It had a big, hairy thorax, a little grotesque, really, but man -- those wings!

At around 6, the museum staff started herding people out, so we left, walking down the big stairs and across the street into Central Park. We headed down to the lake, which had a thick, dull surface layer of slush that looked deceptively solid. There's fencing that runs most of the perimeter, and at various intervals there were signs warning you not to step onto the ice. Next to each sign was mounted a red, telescoping ladder, which you could presumably extend from the shore to someone who'd made a bad choice and fallen in. There are several small gazebo-like structures along the edge of the lake -- little huts, really, with two small benches facing each other inside. One side of each hut seemed to open right onto the lake, like that Edward Hopper painting. I dipped the toe of my boot into the slush to see if it went straight down. It did, but Nina pulled me away. We walked around to the other side of the lake to The Loeb Boathouse, to see if we could sit by the fire and get drunk, but they were closed for a private event.

Instead, we exited the Park on the eastern side, and walked down 5th Ave. to 59th St., where we stopped briefly. at F.A.O. Schwartz. The place was swarming with frenzied children, but there were also several adult couples buying action figures and various doo-dads for themselves. We walked through aisles of pricey candy (fifteen bucks for a grotesquely huge Reese's Peanut Butter Cup); stuffed animals the size of a twin bed; a not-quite-tall-enough guy in Spider-Man spandex, posing for pictures; Lego everything. Everywhere the accumulating clutter of life and western capitalism. There was a wing of the store where you could buy high-end baby dolls, only you had to go through an "adoption interview" to acquire one. I thought we could go through the phony process and then trepan our candidate doll with a power tool in front of the other shoppers, as a bit of creepy performance art. We left empty-handed, although I found myself coveting a make-your-own-geode kit.

Further down 5th Ave., we stepped inside St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Nina lit a candle for her father. Afterwards, she stopped at a street vendor's cart and bought us a bag of roasted chestnuts, so hot that they singed the brown paper black as we held them. For some reason, the chestnuts seemed like an intimate thing to buy from a stranger. The fur between the shell and the, uh, nut-meat. The softness of the meat itself. We walked past the holiday window displays at Lord & Taylor. The theme seemed tob gilded age New York, with cardboard flats printed with lithographs of wealthy shoppers enjoying the pleasures of the department store while being serenaded by Negro ragtime musicians. The flats would kind of wiggle, but the animation was minimal, and the whole thing was ugly and tone-deaf. We took the train downtown. Two crustpunks were riding the train with a dog. They split up at Union Square, the girl disembarking with the reluctant dog, the guy staying on the train alone.

I don't know. That's all.

Doggy Doo

Nina and I went to Target the week before Halloween, ostensibly to see if they had a Mag-Safe 2 adapter for my new work laptop, but actually so that I could buy a big thing of Halloween candy. The adapter was not forthcoming, but I was able to talk my way into bringing home a four-pound bag of fun-size candy: Snicker, peanut butter Snicker, M&Ms, Skittle. A little kid threw up on the floor in one of the aisles over by the pharmacy, but a guy with a mop was summoned and quickly cleaned it up. It was a good day for Target; people were on top of their shit and everything was humming.

I left work a little early on the 31st, which for me means 5 o'clock. I wanted to make sure I'd be home in time for the dog Halloween costume contest that was scheduled to take place in front of my building at 5:30. Have I said much about The Yuppy Puppy? Probably not, sidebar: We live above a doggy day care place. We moved into this building around the same time they did. Our building shares a wall with an identical (also styrofoam) building to the east, as well as a concrete "back yard" and a small shed. The Y.P. occupies the ground floor on both sides; before that, there was a hair salon and a garage, unused. Danielle, who runs the place, keeps five of her own dogs on the premises as a kind of seed population, including a huge, un-cut mastiff named Floyd and a weird little Boston terrier with one eye named Batman. The neighborhood kids have recognized that she can't say no to a sick or wounded animal of any species, and have started dragging various strays and almost-roadkill into the store. As such, the ground floor is now also home to three cats and a couple of pigeons that Danielle feeds with a bottle. I go in there sometimes to get cat litter (World's Best!), which she keeps in stock mostly for me, I think, and to see what all is happening with the zoo.

Whenever I look out our rear window, I see dogs snoozing or sniffing around (plus a whole lot of dog turds). They do sometimes bark in the morning, earlier than I wish they would, and the barking is often accompanied by the sound of Danielle loudly chastising the dogs for barking. ("Batman, no!!") But I've learned to kind of filter it out and / or accept it as useful punctuation in the continuum of my life. Nina might tell you different, though. And Stacy, the woman who briefly lived downstairs from us had a small meltdown when The Yuppy Puppy moved in. She's a writer (of middlebrow non-fiction) and was understandably concerned about the potential for daytime noise. While we were moving in, she invited us into her apartment and showed us how she'd used the half-bedroom area we were planning to turn into an office for Nina, our apartment layouts being mostly identical. There was some soft acoustic guitar percolating in from the second-floor apartment in the next building over. "I call this the hell corner," she said. She moved out a week before The Yuppy Puppy opened, having unsuccessfully attempted to convince the post office not to deliver their mail. Should I feel bad for her? She was an unremitting buzz-kill, and so much the better if she got metaphorically paved over in this deal. Our new downstairs neighbor is a sweet guy whom we almost never see or hear. Nina thinks he's a computer person, like me. I guess I hadn't Livejournaled about any of this yet, because of all the Sturm und Drang which accompanied our moving out of our old apartment. I was afraid this place wouldn't work out, but, you know, so far so good.

We could hear the dogs starting to gather as soon as I got home. Nina grabbed her camera and we went down to the twilight street, where the costumed dogs and their owners awaited judgment. There was a dog dressed up like a hot dog. There was a dog dressed up like a fairy. There was a beautiful brown dog with light-colored eyes named Beetlejuice, wearing a kind of 3-D skeleton costume. And there was a pit bull dressed up like a king, with a velvet cape and a floppy, plush crown. The dogs milled around, sniffing each other politely. At about a quarter to seven, Danielle had them line up and conducted the judging by a sort of applause meter. The winner was the pit bull king. I'm not sure what the prize was. A gift certificate, maybe? The pit bull's owner posed with it for a picture. Beetlejuice grabbed a complimentary squeaky toy in his jaws and ran to the end of his leash lest it be taken from him.

We went back upstairs and got dressed to party: I had tickets to see The Dickies making a highly unusual east coast appearance at The Knitting Factory. We made our way to the G train, me carrying the opened sack of fun-size candy like the spoils of a cartoon bank robbery. I was hoping that a drunk or a kid would see it and ask for some, but nobody did. The best I could do was trade a fun-size Snickers for a little bag of fruit gummies from the guy behind the counter at the bodega across from the venue on Metropolitan Ave. It was about eight o'clock, and we were just hanging out in front of the place, trying to display the bag of candy suggestively and waiting for Chris and Billy to show up. Billy was first, then Chris, telling me he told me that he'd be late, so what did I expect. And then with some surprise, we realized that Stan Lee was leaning up against the wall next to us, playing with his phone. "Stan," I hissed. "You want some candy?" "Bengals minus three," he said to his phone. "Whaddya mean you can't cover that?" He came over and dug around in the bag. "Are you a Bengals fan?" asked Billy. "Sure," said Stan. "Although two of my Bengals died this year. Sad. My Bengal cats, I mean. The football team is good, too. But the Dolphins have the best logo in the NFL. Dolphin wearing a football helmet -- how can you beat that?"

Stan went inside to help Little Dave Teague with something. We went inside and sat down at a table in the bar area, which, with its soundproof window onto the performance space, makes me think of an observation bunker for a nuclear test site. We ate Halloween candy from the bag and drank beer. I recognized the lead singer of Wyldlife at a nearby table. I don't know if they were secretly opening or if he's just a fan. Stan came into the room looking like he didn't know which table in the cafeteria was his. To our surprise and delight, he came over and sat down next to us. Billy and Chris and I peppered him with questions. Did he remember the time the band snuck 15-year-old Billy and Chris into a 21-and-over show at Life (now le poisson rouge)? No, but he remembered the show. ("That was a strange place to play a punk show.") Did he remember opening for Misfits at Club Exit (now Terminal 5)? Sort of. Did he remember playing a New Year's Eve show with The Kowalskis at Southpaw (now some kind of day care) in 2008? Maybe. Did he remember Coney Island High (owned in its time by Kitty Kowalski)? Yes! "That was a great place," he said. He showed us pictures from his Instagram on his phone of a show they played at Rob Zombie's haunted house in L.A., which, unsurprisingly, seemed to be decorated half with scary, grimy stuff, and half with doodles from a pot-smoking teenager's composition book.

He asked if there were any songs in particular we wanted to hear. Oh wow. "I'm OK You're OK," I said without thinking.

"No," said Billy. "That's, like, one of their hits."

"Okay," I said. "How about, Welcome To The Diamond Mine?"

"Yeah." said Chris. "Or what's that song from Dawn Of The Dickies? Infidel Zombie!"

"Can't do that one," said Stan. "No saxophone since Bob died."

We spent a while trying to stump him with songs he didn't remember. The best we could do was Canyon, a song that Chris found on a very early live bootleg while he was working at KSPC. "Wow," said Stan. He didn't think they knew how to play that one. He talked about which of their records had the worst covert art: All of the live albums and Idjit Savant. "Are you guys writing new songs?" we wanted to know. "I've got a ton of new stuff in a box in my closet," he said, but they didn't have plans to record a new album any time soon. It wasn't clear whether he thought the demand wasn't there or whether the band's inertia was too great. "This is really just a hobby," he said, although he spoke with obvious pride about the promo they were doing for the 25th anniversary of Killer Klowns From Outer Space. Billy geeked out over guitars with him. His signature yellow Spider-Man was in the shop with a cracked headstock, so he'd flown out east with a newer rig, a Jackson Flying V that'd been custom-built for him by a friendly luthier.

When we saw the opening act winding down their set, he left to go get ready. Lingering at the bar, we almost missed The Dickies starting, but made it into the room in time to hear Stan and Dave shredding their way through the main riff in the theme from Killer Klowns, a perverted take on Entrance of the Gladiators. Leonard came out wearing a lycra ghost mask and a long-sleeve t-shirt with a picture of a suit and tie on it; a sort of dickey, if you will. The band sounds as good as or better than ever: the synchronized piercing guitar, the perfect-pitch helium vocals. Leonard's fierce little face like a spitting-mad cat's. He sticks his middle finger in his ear, does that same little kicky-leg dance. I find that I've seen them so many times now that I know exactly how he'll move on stage, from the way to he snaps his towel at the guitar amp to the way he chokes that grimy plush penis during the bridge of If Stuart Could Talk. But man are they great. They plowed through one perfect song after another, a real Ramones set, and though the pit was sparse, Billy and I danced ourselves soaking wet -- like, actual soak: The back of my sweatshirt was saturated.

Billy snagged the actual set list by begging it off of their new bass player, a hulking dude who looks like a life-sized action figure, but here's an approximaton of what they played:

• Killer Klowns From Outer Space
• Welcome To The Diamond Mine
• I'm OK, You're OK
• Paranoid
• I Got It At The Store
• Give It Back
• Doggy Doo
• I'm Stan
• Manny Moe & Jack
• She's A Hunchback
• Rosemary
• See My Way
• Going Homo
• You Drive Me Ape (You Big Gorilla)
• Attack Of The Molemen
• Gigantor
• If Stuart Could Talk
• Rondo In A Major (Midget's Revenge)
• Banana Splits

Billy and Chris took the L back to Manhattan together, but Nina and I headed across the street to Mariella Pizzaria [sic], our go-to for sweaty, post-show pizza even though they pretty much always run out of pizza by the time we get there. They're one of those places that makes unconventional pizzas -- like, in addition to the regular combinations of cheese and marinara and, like, broccoli, there'll be a "pizza" that's just bread and chicken and thick brown barbecue sauce. A dude we'd seen in the crowd at the show was holding forth on the glory days of apartment squatting on the Lower East Side. His friend broke away for a moment to say hi. "That was the best version of 'Manny Moe & Jack' I've ever heard," he said. My voice was shot from screaming and I was exhausted. "Amazing show," I croaked. Someone else came in and tried to order a slice of plain, but there was no plain to be had, only barbecue. He left empty-handed.