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smells and sights up Uptown Kingston
Saturday, October 8 2011
I slept unusually badly last night due to lower back pains that would not go away until I finally gave in and swallowed 400 mg of ibuprofen at some point this morning. Then I was able to sleep easily.
It was a beautiful warm sunny day, the kind one doesn't get too many of at this time of year. I used it to plan for the sort of weather that is almost unimaginable on such days, the kind that might throw a tree down onto our house. The likeliest candidate tree for such a disaster is the large White Pine just north of the house, which suffers from a badly rotted base after having been banged up during our house's construction (remember this whenever you hire a bulldozer). I've already installed one cable to keep the tree from falling southeastward (in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene, that cable is probably why the tree is still standing), and I've been planning to install another cable to keep the tree from falling southwestward (which, given prevailing winds, is less likely, though anything can happen in a hurricane). So today I found myself way up there on a ladder about 25 feet above the ground trying to drill a hole all the way through the tree. I've learned that you cannot anchor a cable in a pine unless the anchor goes all the way through the tree and ends with a big washer on the far side of the tree. (Six inches of threaded bolt into an oak is sufficient, however.) I was using an 120 volt power drill and a 3/4 inch spade bit on an extension, but the going was slow because I'd decided to make the hole as high as I could reach and so I couldn't press my body behind the bit to force it into the wood.
At some point I remembered that there was an enormous White Faced Hornet nest about ten feet away from where I was working (the same one I'd seen grimly weathering the winds of Irene). Ten feet is usually not a safe distance from this aggressive species, and though they were being quite active, they ignored me. Their nest is an impressive globular structure about the size of a five gallon bucket. Any damage it sustained in the tropical storm has long been repaired. As with any empire, theirs is greatest just before collapse, which (for them) will come with the first hard frost of November.
We'd had our car guy down on Hurley Mountain Road look at the brake lines on our Honda Civic, one of which had developed a slow leak. We wanted to know if he could do some special magic such as a hose bypass to fix the problem, and today we got our answer: our brake lines were too fucked up to fix. Basically our car had met its end, whimpery though it was. Fortunately, though, it just so happened that one of Gretchen's friends in the animal rights scene had a car for sale that would be an affordable replacement. It was dinged-up 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid, and if we were willing to pay anything more than Honda's trade-in offer ($6500), he'd take it. So Gretchen fired off an email to him saying that indeed we would take it.
This evening we picked up Ray and Nancy at their house with the idea of having a cocktail at an appealing new bar called The Stockade in Uptown Kingston and then going to our favorite Indian restaurant nearby.
First we had to stop in the Kingston Plaza so Nancy could get cash and Ray could get wine. Ray and Gretchen also went into the dollar store for dollar store pretzels, not that I can really imagine eating anything from a place that smells so bad. While doing these things, they happened upon a very Kingstonesque tableau: a young woman in a tank top who had nonchalantly unsheathed both her breasts so as to offer one to her suckling infant.
When we got to the Stockade, the place was full of people, a large fraction of which were 20-or-30-something women stuffed into tiny and at times shimmery dresses. The place would have been awesome save for one problem: the entire place reeked of bathroom chemicals, something that, ten years ago, a fog of cigarette smoke would have easily concealed.
As we were walking out, we ran across another friend, and Gretchen fulfilled her social obligations by talking to the guy for several long minutes as I contemplated the void in my digestive system. After that was done, we headed towards the restaurant, but unfortunately I was with people who were in the mood to be distracted and do things like duck into irrelevant restaurants to look at their menus or, I don't know, check the prices displayed in the window of a real estate office. This weekend is the annual O+ festival, where artists trade their creations for medical care, and art was plastered up in places one normally doesn't see it. When Gretchen and Ray stopped to look at some of this, I'd had it. "Hey guys, can we look at this art later? I have low blood sugar and can we just go to the restaurant?"
At the Indian restaurant, all of us except Nancy decided to get the buffet, which looked surprisingly good. Gretchen ended up being delighted by the buffet, but I found the food salty and uninspired. Ray had uncorked a bottle of $6 Protocolo and I found it sublime. We should get a case of that.
Dinner conversation kept coming around to either diarrhea or puke, and we might have been talking about these things a bit too loudly. Periodically Nancy would think her water had been contaminated with Windex, but no, that's what the employees in the Indian Restaurant use to clean the tables. They have no sense that the smell of Windex is unpleasant when one is trying to eat.
After dinner, we walked all around Uptown, which was hopping with various O+ activities. One of these was a "gong bath," where dozens of people lay in a room while someone banged on a gong.
As we walked around, we'd been marveling at the new canopies, which are mostly complete. These canopies replace a set originally installed in the 1970s and were paid for partly by Obama's stimulus package. While they have their detractors, they protect people from the rain and snow and they do provide a little architecture unity to the heart of the Uptown business district. We were were witness to the antics of one of the canopies' many detractors at the corner of Front and Wall Streets, where a seemingly-intoxicated older middle aged woman was climbing into her car. "Disgusting!" she shouted, pointing to the canopies. "It's disgusting!" She looked at me for agreement, but I didn't yet know what she was talking about. "These roofs! It looks like Walmart!" she shouted. I smiled politely and shrugged my shoulders. Gretchen wondered if she'd ever actually seen a Walmart. Perhaps she'd just been airlifted in from the Ukraine.
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