|
|
|
reading on a rainy day in Bearsville
Saturday, July 20 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
This morning I came down after everyone else was up and made a french press of coffee that I drank by myself. The four of us sat out on the east deck for a bit chatting about this and that. When Gretchen mentioned perhaps exapanding our real estate empire to Rochester, Griffin said he had heard great things about the queer community there. He also agreed with Gretchen's thoughts about the importance of abundant water resources (which Rochester has). He compared it favorably to the situation with New York City, which depends on a pacified population in the Catskills not attacking the water infrastructure. The moment the rubes in the hinterland seize the dams and the tunnels and tell New York, as Gerald Ford once did, to "drop dead," it's game over and New York City becomes uninhabitable. "That could happen as soon as the next Trump administration," I agreed.
Gretchen took our guests on a walk with Charlotte (Neville didn't go) up the Farm Road and back. Gretchen later reported that Griffin and Rebecca are not among the few people in our lives who are happy and at ease out in nature. This makes a certain amount of sense given what Griffin had said earlier about feeling depressed when outside of a city and away from other people. Like Gretchen, he's a misanthrope. But he wants those people around so he can hate them.
I decided to join Gretchen, Griffin, and Rebecca when they all drove to Woodstock in preparation for a reading that would be happening in Bearsville. Before that, though, we dined in the outdoor part of the Garden Café, where we all got coffee drinks and I had bowl of the tomato-chickpea soup and the vegetable quesadillas. Rebecca and Griffin both had Beyond Burgers, which come festooned with enough mushrooms to make them a bit sloppy to eat. It turned out Rebecca is a professional job recruiter who is trying to staff up a dental software startup, so I told her I'd be sending her my resume. For much of our lunch, Griffin talked about his work as a psychotherapist. One technique he told us about that isn't fully understood is to have patients alternate movements or sensations back and forth between their hands of feet while considering something. Somehow this leads to breakthroughs that are otherwise impossible. One theory is that it might open up pathways for signals to travel back and forth between the two hemispheres of the brain, which can become a bit isolated despite the corpus callosum.
After lunch, we briefly went to the Golden Notebook before driving out to Bearsville for the reading (also arranged by the Golden Notebook, but held in an icecream shop due to space limitations). On the roster this afternoon were five readers, including Gretchen (the only poet) and Griffin. The turnout was not great, with mostly just the five readers there and a few of their friends. But then a few others showed up, including Gretchen's friend Lisa P. and a couple new neighbors Gretchen has been friendly with.
Readings for most people, particularly me, are always a bit unbearable. The books being read from are rarely of much interest and the readers read from them far too long. That was particularly true for two of the readers, one of whom read a very long section of her book with fifteen sections, all of them basically complaints about how the sick are regarded by the well. After she'd gone through ten, I thought it might be over, but at eleven Gretchen and I started shooting each other increasingly dismayed glances. As always, Gretchen did an amazing job when her time came to read her poetry, though truth be told, even she went a bit long. Griffin was the last reader, which was good because by that time I was pretty worn out. But he was funny and his reading was interesting as he painted an autobiographical picture of the girl he once was. Meanwhile, there was a downpour happening outside and I kept suffering from pangs of acid reflux, as I'd eaten a bit too much at the Garden.
After the reading, Griffin and Rebecca headed off with Rebecca's friend Diedre, leaving Gretchen and me to have the rest of the day to ourselves. Gretchen immediately resumed a binge of a show I'd downloaded for her (The Morning Show) and I went down to the greenhouse so I could take a nap without having to hear the television.
I awoke later in the evening and spent stayed up fairly late processing my recent trip to Virginia in the way that I do. As I did so, my technology kept doing maddening things. My Android phone kept stalling when I tried to download photos from it, eventually forcing me to extract the SD card from it to read them directly. I was muttering and cursing the whole time, because it seemed like some setting had flipped, perhaps due to a software update I would've denied had I been asked. Later though, when I tried connecting with a different cable, I had no problem downloading the photos. So maybe the problem had been a hardware one.
Another issue was the Godaddy, the host of my Asecular.com website. I fucking hate Godaddy, but I'm kind of stuck with them due to the effort of moving the site elsewhere. But today the hosting was extremely unreliable, with pages rendering as
...only to recover after a few attempted reloads. I went to the Godaddy site to raise a stink, but they've made doing so just difficult enough that it's sort of impossible to do, at least in any way that a human will ever see.
Gretchen reading in Bearsville this afternoon.
Click to enlarge.
Griffin reading.
Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240720 feedback
previous | next |
