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the drug of contentment
Saturday, March 16 2002
I felt as if I was on some sort of pleasant drug for most of the day. This was the drug of contentment, the result of successfully bullying through a series of difficult mental challenges and succeeding. My Flash-based chat system, a pipedream only a weak ago, was working nearly as fluidly as AOL Instant Messenger, and everyone who saw it seemed to agree that it wasn't a trivial accomplishment.
cheap price of entertainment
You'd think the wild, wiggling, wanna-bes
Would fan out in their watery destiny
So that one might chance a stand,
A Polynesian on some scrap of Woman.
But they cling to each other and
Quitting en masse on the leg of this man
Saying "Not this time, not me"
I find them still with me
When I reach to address an itch.
Such is the price of entertainment.
In the evening, Gretchen, Debra and I walked Sally down to Ray and Nancy's apartment on 7th Avenue to join them in celebrating Nancy's 35th birthday. Ray and Nancy are popular people and their place was packed with people. There were also three dogs there even before Sally showed up.
All this computer work I've been doing, particularly the often-maddeningly-fruitless hours of debugging, has taken a bit of a toll on the social aspect of my personality. It's not just that my social skills have atrophied, but when I spend all day staring at lines of code in various states of frustration, the petty social banter of an adult birthday party seems strangely - almost comically - irrelevant. For a time I hung out by the finger food table wolfing down crackers and Gouda cheese while chatting with Debra. She's an accomplished poet, but tonight she wasn't trying especially, casually reciting a mock prayer that went like so:
God is great, so is Buddha
Thank you, Lord, for this Gouda.
Later I wandered into the living room just as Ray was giving some pointers to a very attractive, very young woman holding an expensive camera. One of the dogs present was a huge Labrador/Rottweiler hybrid and he immediately zeroed in on this photographer girl as the hottest thing in the room, and went and lay down next to her, placing his head in the warmest part of her lap as Ray gave pointers about various aspects of basic photography. Meanwhile Nancy had given me a teaspoon of Pop RocksTM and the tiny explosions taking place in my mouth were taking me straight back to the '80s. Are Pop RocksTM a gateway drug? Have they ever been banned? When exactly did Gateway 2000 stop using the "2000" in their name?
Later Gretchen regaled a small group of people with the not-always-pleasant details of the sluttiest phase of her life, a period which stretched from her breakup with her girlfriend Barbara in November, 2000 until the day I moved in with her in July, 2001.
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