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May 30 1998, Saturday

     

T

oday was the one during which Nancy and Brian were to leave for their travels. It was occupied with much packing and preparation, things that I would have condensed into a spontaneous five minute frenzy (only to realize down the road the various things I had forgotten).

The only really interesting thing that happened today was a little bike ride that Nancy and I took into Bethesda. We both rode mountain bikes, and we traveled well together. I feared she'd either leave me in the dust or exhaust me as I tried to keep up; she did neither. Despite my dysfunctional lifestyle I guess I'm in better shape than I'd thought.

Nancy and I ended up on Bethesda Avenue, in hopes of encountering the not-usually-elusive Mayor thereof. Either he was out on one of his junkets, or he was attending to matters behind closed doors somewhere. These are all things mayors must do, so we weren't upset. We ordered bagels at Bethesda Bagels. Bethesda Bagels is substantially more chaotic and crazy than the bagel-customer science one encounters at Charlottesville's Bodos Bagels. At Bethesda Bagels, the person who takes your money is also the person who fixes your bagel. In the case today of Nancy and myself, this person was a big black woman with fierce striped black and green nails. When you order a cream cheese bagel at Bethesda Bagels, you really get the cream cheese. They see fit to completely fill the bagel's hole with the stuff.

We sat out on Bethesda Avenue eating our bagels and doing our best to watch people. Not much was going on, except a very thin, darkly tanned woman dressed entirely in black kept walking up and down the Avenue, responding occasionally to beeper outbursts. Nancy suggested that perhaps this was a masseuse awaiting calls from customers, if you know what I mean. When she vanished, we figured she was off at a hotel somewhere giving "a massage."

This is not to say that Bethesda Avenue looks like a scene of debauchery and craziness. It does not. It isn't especially thick with humanity, and what humanity there is looks to be of the conventional white upper-middle class DC kind. I'm reserving judgment for now, though.

There weren't even very many birds. Nancy tried to encourage one little female English Sparrow with bits of her bagel. For awhile this faux sparrow was the only bird in sight, but eventually a male English Sparrow showed up as well. I took to calling them Scully and Mulder until yet another male materialized.

I bought a half gallon of vodka from the liquor store across Bethesda Avenue. It cost less than ten dollars, an impossibly low price for such quantities of alcohol purchased in Virginia.

N

ancy and Brian left for Vermont (their first destination) in the late afternoon. So now I'm officially a house sitter. I've been making web pages and sipping vodkatea (and such) ever since. One of the cats, the black and white one with the notched ear, likes to lie at my feet as I work.

Okay, so it's "will of instinct." Lyrics are about how they sound to individuals every bit as much as what they are in written form. Otherwise we could all just be content with printed lyric sheets and save lots of money by not buying recorded music.
I asked around on Diary-L (the online journal mailing list) to see which of Nancy's videotapes I should watch, and most people said The Professional. The music I'm listening to right now is Nirvana's Nevermind. I haven't heard the whole thing in awhile and, you know, there's a reason it's considered the watershed album of the 90s. Polly says her back hurts, she's just as bored as me. She caught me off my guard. It amazes me the wit of instinct.

Speaking of which, there's a big empty iron cage out on the front porch with all the familiar toys I recall seeing in Wilbur the Cockatiel's cage (also now empty). Brian's bird died a few months ago.

     
 

one year ago
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