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IPAs in the pigeon cage Saturday, August 21 2010
To help me with my workload, today I took my usual study-aid dose of 90 milligrams of pseudoephedrine. I did so in the early afternoon, which meant that, under my self-imposed alcohol rules, I wouldn't have a chance to mellow its effects with alcohol for hours. In the end it made me a bit too buzzy to get much done. If anything, I actually felt sleepier than normal. So I went to take a nap, and though I was able to sleep, it was not my usual sleep experience. My body felt strongly aware of everything that was touching it. I can't say whether this felt good or bad. That's the thing about pseudoephedrine: it's not that it makes me feel good, it mostly just makes me feel different.
Meanwhile Gretchen had gone to the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary to help out with a music benefit there. Sean Lennon (the son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono) would be performing with a band called Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger. I'd heard one of their songs on WKZE (on the recent drive down to the prison) and really liked it, but I felt like I had too much work to do to justify attending a festive rock concert. But at around 5:00pm Gretchen called saying that I should come, that I could get in for free, and that they even had a keg of IPA. That was pretty tempting.
So eventually I did drive out to Willow. Unusually for us, we'd left the dogs at home. By the time I arrived, all the music was over with and the woman at the gate wasn't paying much attention to whether or not people had paid. I found Gretchen in the back working the drinks concession, which was housed in a spherical polyhedral structure that I knew had once been an enormous pigeon cage. I had a cup of the IPA, but it wasn't really to my liking. Deborah had a sip and agreed: it was all bitter finish and not enough body.
Then a bunch of reasonably-vegan pizzas arrived from Catskill Mountain Pizza. You could tell where they had come from because the cubes of cheese had not all fully melted. The crowd had mostly left and this was mostly for the staff, though there were a few hip young stragglers, particularly out by the bonfire, which, having been fed dry logs of White Pine, was now a raging inferno. (The depth and low gradient of this heat proved to be a problem later when people tried to make s'mores; to get close enough to toast them, they themselves had to be in an environment hot enough to roast the meat of which they themselves consisted.)
At some point I knew enough to transition from beer to water (though I'd also made a brief foray into two different kinds of wine). By the time Gretchen was ready to go, I felt I was sober enough to drive. This was important, because we'd both have to drive. Technically, my driving was perfectly fine. I pointed the car in the right direction, didn't swerve, and obeyed all the various traffic laws. But I still made a number of dumb decisions, trying (for example) to cut across Ohayo Mountain on the wrong sidestreet and then getting lost in a warren of little dirt roads. I also made a similar mistake trying to cut over to Millstream Road at the wrong place. The idea here was to avoid driving through downtown Woodstock, where cops tend to be hypervigilant. In the end I was able to make it to Millstream Road and home from there. I even finished off the half-bottle of Yuengling I'd begun on the drive out to Willow. Man, there is nothing more acrid than a warm bottle of Yuengling.
Later I discovered someone had put a handmade DVD under my windshield wiper blades. It was the movie Gasland, a documentary indicting the process of natural gas mining known as fracking. Fracking leads to poisoned water tables and such absurdities as tapwater that can burst into flames (see the trailer). Supposedly Sean Lennon is a big opponent of fracking, so he and his people must have gone through the parking lot leafletting cars with these DVDs.
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