bye bye Punch Buggy - Tuesday July 31 2001

Today is the 5th anniversary of my online journal compulsion. It's also the 1st anniversary of my breakup with Bathtubgirl. We've come a long way, osprey.

I came home sort of late from work mostly to hand over the Punch Buggy Rust to my former housemate John. That thing has been deterioriating rapidly since I drove it across the country and I don't want the headache of owning a car in New York City anymore. For his part, John has a place to park it in Hoboken and a burning desire to fix it up.

As I was passing the Grand Army Arch entrance of Prospect Park I saw Gretchen and John across the street talking to a cyclist. It turned out that this cyclist was someone John had known in College, a guy whose girlfriend had once had an affair with John back in the weird old college days. John had recognized the guy from a great distance across the park because of his distinctive gait.

We three had dinner together in the back patio of a Thai place down on 7th Avenue in Park Slope. Ordered the super-spicy noodles and was amazed that Gretchen was able to pick them from my plate and eat them. Normally spiciness protects my plates about as effectively as the presence of meat. All meal long John was on comic roll, telling about these developers in India who are working on the code for the venture John's brother-in-law is spearheading. John can do a perfect Indian accent and he immediately went into it, turning discussion of the code into this little monologue about nuclear bomb plans and being concerned about them possibly falling into the hands of the Pakistanis. It was hilarious.

When I turned the Punch Buggy Rust over to John, it decided to misbehave in all the ways it knows how except for the bad starter issue. The acclerator stuck and it was impossible to shift it into 1st (and pretty hard to shift it into second), so John had to start his drive back to Hoboken in 2nd. I was happy to get that damn thing out of my life as it put-putted away down 8th Avenue, but I was a little concerned about whether or not John would make it.