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wick phase
Thursday, November 8 2001
I was working hard at the task of building a pubtool most of the day, but at around 8pm I broke off for the evening and Gretchen and I celebrated the one year anniversary of her breakup with her old girlfriend Barbara. The anniversary had technically been yesterday, but we hadn't had time to celebrate. I popped open a bottle of pink champagne. It was kind of nasty; I guess it was old or something.
After we'd drunk it all, Gretchen and I walked down to the restaurant called Two Boots to join up with a celebration of Anna Hepler's 32nd birthday. Anna Hepler, in case you don't recall, is one of Gretchen's old chums from Oberlin who now lives as a starving artist in Queens. For this special occasion, Gretchen had baked a lemon poppy seed cake with lemon sauce and raspberries. It came pre-defined in the shape of a round sand castle with seven or eight regularly-spaced turrets. These turrets proved useful when we later divided the cake. First, though, we all overindulged on pizza and a large order of calamari. There were nine of us in total (Anna being the only person I knew besides Gretchen). The others had already devoured two large pizzas, and I was astounded by how quickly they dove into the calamari and then helped us eat a third pizza. The calamari was tough, rubbery flesh, none of that wussy melt-in-your-mouth baby food that non-calamari purists wish was the calamari norm.
It turns out that Anna knows our old friend A1ex Gu1dbeck from Oberlin and had even lived near him in the San Francisco. All of Liz Phair's White Chocolate Space Egg played on the Two Boots stereo while we were there, and Anna claimed that one of Liz's songs from her first album had actually been about Alex. When I last talked to Alex (having run across him randomly while visiting the East Village back in 1994), he'd told me of his aborted sexual encounter with Liz and had made the claim that she'd made a reference to him during an interview she gave Spin Magazine.
As we headed away from the restaurant, someone tried to make an analogy between a candle and a human life. But then someone else asked for the analog of a candle's extinguished-but-smoking-wick phase in a human life. There was none, at least none that we could think of.
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