Friday Night and I Ain’t Got Nobody
May 29, 2009 § Leave a comment
I haven’t posted in so long it feels peculiar. I’m not sure I want to. But it’s like a closed window and I miss the fresh air.
I’m waiting for Charles to arrive and his plane is delayed 2+ hours so I’m restless. I’m cooking Bolognese sauce, mostly because I like how long it takes. It’s the only kind of kitchen pleasure I can have in my closet apartment, to cook something slowly so the aromas penetrate, so I can sit in my bedroom writing and know the sauce simmers, reminding me someone is coming.
That sounds pathetic, but that’s how it is when I work hard. I shut myself into the novel all day, and then once freed of it, feel like a naked grub. No, not really. I’m wearing my green lounging around dress so I’m not naked (though a bit grubby). It’s just Friday night in the Village and I can feel the excitement, hear the traffic, anticipate the swarms of revelers about to descend on the hopeful bars.
Cocktails, strappy shoes, seafood, perfume, jazz, first dates, pick-ups, girls’ night out, powerful New York couples dining quietly…me and Fitzroy smelling my sauce cook, this dopey cat who has been offered 4 kinds of food and refused them all. After awhile he starts growling and acting like I’m going to hit him whenever I move. One’s early life can cast such a shadow…
The wine I bought for the sauce is elderly, edging into brown, and tastes like sherry. I had two sips and have a headache. It will probably taste fine cooked with beef and veal and peppers and tomatoes. I’m going to stew rhubarb as my sister did over the weekend, serve it to Charles over Haagen Dazs passionfruit ice cream.
***
It’s been interesting to notice how the idea that thought cannot exist without emotion—something scientists started saying several years ago, and many of us knew from the time we started thinking about thinking—has now caught on in a big way, making it into columns by David Brooks and Nicholas Kristof, among many others. So now it’s boring. I hope computers become self-conscious in my lifetime, or else Jesus (or Athena or Thor, Isis, Quetzalcoatl, I don’t care) comes back. Our collective human brain is starting to feel like Port Authority, circa 1985. A dirty sameness, wormlike buses going in and out, the usual predators and their unsuspecting prey watched over by drunken schizophrenics.
By the way, WS park is really looking lovely. Check it out, New Yorkers. The rest of you—I have an apartment I’ll trade if you live anywhere interesting, and like cats…
From Overheard in New York (overheardinnewyork.com)
Suit to man with cat on his head: Why is there a cat on your head?
Man with cat on his head: Why isn’t there a cat on your head, douchebag?
–Union Square
Mostly in the Afternoon 
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