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like lumpy dark clouds on the western horizon
Sunday, July 2 2017
While sipping from a mug of kratom tea, I spent much of the afternoon trying to hack my way through building out a complicated feature of my reporting system, the interactive form feature that I'd worked on in Mexico back in February. I'd managed to get it to the point where a user could append an infinite number of a particular dropdown to a form, all with different items selected, and the system could remember all this as a default for a future re-running of the form. What I'd been working on since is a feature allowing a user to append a whole chunk of form items multiple times. The complexity of this feature required some way to fit all the form input names of this hierarchical structure into a flat namespace and then to put all the values received from the form into a nested data structure and then somehow pour those values into some sort of templated SQL statement. There would also have to be some way to reconstruct the form based on the saved data structure. I'd already solved a number of problems, including the flat form namespace issue and building a data structure from the submission of complicated forms. Today I finally got to the point where I was needed to load values from the data structure into a SQL template, and at that point I realized (while in the shower, actually) that I needed to break apart one recursive function into two. I'd been trying to build the SQL while loading the form data into a data structure, but this inevitably created nothing but race conditions. The data structure would have to be built first and then the SQL template could be fleshed out.
That shower was so I could look less like a homeless guy for a party I would be attending this evening with Gretchen in Germantown (north of Tivoli on the east bank of the Hudson). Gretchen had been working all day at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock, and (to speed things along), she would be meeting me at "the Blowjob Spot," that scruffy park & ride at the intersection of Route 32 and Route 199 (41.977016N, 73.971386W). On the drive over, I drank a beer from a bottle. But at the Blowjob Spot itself, I tranferred the beer to an old Stewart's coffee cup (hopefully one I hadn't peed in) so I could walk around in the parking area amid the large-raindrop-drizzle drinking my beer without the risk of trouble.
When Gretchen picked me up, she had me delete a Facebook post I'd made comparing the new Rhinebeck falafel place favorably to its more established Indian-restaurant neighbor. The falafel people understandably don't want bad blood in the neighborhood, particularly on a post on a super-connector's social media presence.
The party was hosted by a gay couple who are prominent in the local animal rights scene. It was at a fancy house in a great west-facing field with a gorgeous view of the entire lumpy mass of the Catskills, which sat like an unmoving purplish-blue cloud on the western horizon. Like the house, the party was fancy, with a staff of young people doing things like serving drinks and directing traffic to two different parking areas. Soon after entering the party, we latched on to Michæl, the gloomy-humored lawyer who (in recent years) launched a very successful vegan cheese company. He was one of the few people there I knew, along with Mariann (formerly of Mariann and Jasmin), who has a house only a little ways down the street there in Germantown. Also present was the new director of a local farm animal sanctuary who almost rented out unit #2 in the brick mansion. Rain had been falling intermittently, but it eventually drove the guests (there were something like 70) into the recently-remodeled house, where a buffet of vegan food had been prepared. My favorites were a quinoa-with-tofu thing, a corn & beans quasi-succotash, and some mildly-spicy green beans. I did not try the watermelon with sauteed onions, though that new director of that farm animal sanctuary did. Conversation at our table (which included, at various times, all the people mentioned so far and also a lesbian couple from South America) eventually landed on Donald J. Trump, but there's little reason for rehashing all the obvious things that were said. I predicted Jared Kushner would be going to jail and also postulated that Trump would be every bit as bad as Adolf Hitler if he were given Hitler's powers. Now that I think of it, he might even be worse. Michæl, a Jewish man from South Africa, agreed.
After searching the huge house for a bathroom (I found one in a very fancy master bedroom suite upstairs), the Germantown fireworks began. The rain had mercifully stopped by this point or otherwise the fireworks (which had originally been scheduled for yesterday) might've been postponed again. As with Donald J. Trump, there's little about fireworks that needs to be discussed, other than, perhaps, their impact on dogs. There were only a few dogs present, and all but one of them were decided non-doggish-looking purebred terriers. They'd all been rescued, of course, but that didn't make them any more attractive to my purebred-averse prejudices. The non-purebred was a black Sally-style male named Tuxedo. I never really got a chance to do anything but stroke his tail. Oh right, and they all seemed to handle the fireworks okay, although one of the undoglike terriers seemed to require a lot of stroking.
After the party, we went briefly back to Mariann's house so I could meet her dog Rose. Rose was super happy to see us and became surprisingly lively (the word my father used to use is "yarfy") for a 14 year old pit bull. She lay between us on the couch, occasionally surprising us with a wet lick in the face.
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