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decidedly orgy-free environment
Saturday, September 15 2007
This afternoon Penny and David were back up for the weekend at their boxy modernist house in Marbletown, surveying the progress of the ongoing glass and siding replacement job. As usual, there were scraps of wood scattered throughout their yard and tools covering every surface. Penny took advantage of the situation, though, commandeering an enormous shopvac to clean up the place. She even vaccuumed sawdust out of the lawn. She's a graphic designer and can't abide visual clutter, even of the temporary sort.
Independently I'd been using a shopvac outdoors once again to slurp dirt and rock chips out of a hole into which I was about to set the third of the posts for my new woodshed. When I had the post tied plumb with ropes and set in concrete, I took the dogs and went to visit Penny and David. The big mission today was to pick up three large panes of insulated glass, which Penny and David had managed to salvage for me in their ongoing glass replacement project. These were heavy panes of plate glass, possibly (though not certainly) with blown seals. They each had dimensions of 46 by 76 inches and my plan was to use them in some extravagant solar or greenhouse project. The problem, though, was transporting them home. Each pane weighed over 100 pounds, and their dimensions rendered them too large to transport in the Honda Civic. David has a Land Cruiser, but its back area was too short and its roof was intimidatingly high. So David tried calling some locals whom he thought might have pickup trucks, but he couldn't raise anyone. So we decided to make a go at stacking the panes on top of the Land Cruiser. We worked slowly, inserting blankets between the panes, and loading them proved unexpectedly easy. The working technique was to get one end up on the roof and then just slide the whole thing up. When they were all stacked, I spent a good twenty minutes lashing them down with three separate ropes. I also used bits of cardboard to keep the sharp edges of the glass from cutting into the ropes.
As we worked, Penny and David's friend Donna (with whom I hung out at the last Rosendale Street Festival) arrived. Gradually a series of plans for the evening were floated and then abandoned. One of these was to see a Susan Vega show in Poughkeepsie. I said I'd go but I'm happy to say that this was one of the abandoned plans.
Once I had the panes of glass all tied down, David and I made a run back to my place to drop them off. Not knowing what else to do with them, we laid them out in the yard.
Meanwhile
Gretchen was spending the day with our neighbor Andrea up in Saratoga at some sort of vegetarian festival. But she would be coming home soon, and my being out would afford her some precious alone time in our house.
By now an autumnal chill had settled into Marbletown and the woodstove in the boxy modernist house had been lit. We sat around it drinking various alcoholic beverages and continued hatching plans for the evening. We seemed to be crippled by a leadership vacuum, a vacuum that Gretchen normally occupies whenever I'm out socializing. Meanwhile Penny and Donna were using a long stylus to poke at a stack of perforated cards that served as a primitive computer for the identification of North American trees.
Someone called Marion's in Woodstock, because that's always a fun place to go, but they didn't have any live music tonight. So somehow we coalesced around the idea of hitting that Mexican place in Uptown Kingston.
But that place was closed and looked like it might be out of business. So we ended up at the Armadillo, the Rondout's overpriced southwestern/Mexican hot spot. We sat out in the patio area, which on this chilly evening was being heated by gas heaters. There we drank margaritas and dined on burritos.
Donna had been talking about how she wanted to "act out" and "misbehave" tonight, but by this point she was wondering openly if there might be any orgies happening anywhere. This became a running joke for the evening, with Donna briefly earning the nickname "orgy." We even considered maybe going to that nasty titty bar down on Route 32 South (when it comes to orgies, Donna doesn't have any particular gender preference). In the end though, the only other stop we made was at the Hurley Mountain Inn, where we played a rousing game of pool in a decidedly orgy-free environment. At the Hurley Mountain Inn, even the children look like Republicans.
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