inverted patriotica - Friday December 06 2002

There Gretchen and I were at Mid Hudson Credit Union's main office in Kingston (or is that really Ulster?), applying for what was to be the first joint checking account for either of us. I was also applying for my own personal bank account, not that I have any way to get money into it or anything. The woman who was handling our paperwork was being unnecessarily bitchy, as all Mid Hudson Credit Union employees seem to be. They're real sticklers for policy and the law, and the latest law they're being sticklers about is the excretable USA-PATRIOT Act. Under its terrorist identity de-cloaking provisions, we're now expected to provide solid evidence of residency before being given an account. We'd already been rejected once before because I had no way of proving that I actually live in Hurley (I'm still using a Virginia driver's license). The woman processing our papers, however, was being bitchy in other ways, mostly towards Gretchen, particularly when Gretchen mention how other banks had handled such issues as the fact that some people write me checks using "Gus" instead of "Karl." "We have to do things our way," the woman shot back, all snippy, as she went out to consult with colleagues. The moment she was gone, Gretchen said, "What a bitch!" She then drew my attention to how claustrophobic and depressing the woman's office was. It had pastel pink walls and a corporate-style suspended ceiling featuring several rectangular grills, one of which issuing cloying seasonal tunes at low volume. A large dreary filing cabinet had several drawers, each labeled with variations of the phrase "deceased claims." A completely unnecessary and noticeably faded dull earth tone hotel-style landscape painting hung on the wall, and there were a few headache-inducing overly-folksy Christmas decorations featuring snowmen who looked like smiling pears. "It looks exactly like the office of an overweight middle aged woman," Gretchen moaned. She hadn't yet noticed the cardboard box of files from 1990 on the floor. The brand name of the box was "R-Kive." When I pointed this out, Gretchen whimpered said, "Why'd you have to show me that?" Due to her fondness for the look and feel of formal English, she hates the use of letters as phonetic substitutes for syllables and is particularly unnerved by the use of "K" in places where the word would normally have a "C" or "CH."
When the bitchy woman came back, it was as if she was a different person. Suddenly she was being outgoing, nice, and above all, helpful. Perhaps she'd overheard Gretchen talking about what a bitch she was being, though it's doubtful she would have been so pleasant had she overheard the comment about how her office looks exactly like that of an overweight middle aged woman.
After a run to Lowes we drove into downtown Kingston and had lunch at an El Salvadorian restaurant on Broadway called Pupuseria. We walked in and found ourselves to be the only customers. We sat in the back dining room, not far from a low stage. Our waitress couldn't speak any English, so she had another employee handle most of our ordering (though I'm sure we probably could have mustered enough Spanish to handle things on our own; I took two years of Spanish in high school after all). For a moment it felt as if we actually were in El Salvador. Even when we were in Paris we had no difficulty speaking English with the waiters, but here in Kingston, NY, our waitress couldn't speak enough English to handle our order. Looking around the restaurant, it was clear that this was an El Salvadorian restaurant specifically for El Salvadorians. It wasn't trying to be anything for gringos. There were a few El Salvadorian posters on the wall, but the decorations were sparse. Unlike, say, Mexican restaurants, whose walls groan with Mexican artifacts displayed in an effort to prove authenticity, this place just looked foreign. Most of the paint in the dining room was gloss green, broken here and there by various wide-swathed wood grain intrusions. One never sees this sort of color scheme used in America; it's what one sees when one actually goes south of the border. As we looked around the dining room, we could see that most of the details were related to the business of dancing. There was a disco ball over the low stage and various small black boxes along the ceiling, presumably designed to produce functional light shows. Amusingly, all the no smoking and lavatory signs were entirely in English. The most interesting detail of the entire room was the patriotic American flag sticker beneath the Visa and Mastercard sticker on the windowed door to the dining room. Believe it or not, it was actually upside down! Now, don't try to tell me it was this was entirely through accident. If that had been the case, someone would have seen to it that it was righted. Amazingly, though, the staff and clientele of the place seemed to be comfortable having it that way.
As for the food, it was cheap and excellent, and despite the meat-heavy menu, Gretchen had no difficulty putting together a vegetarian meal. We'll be sure to come back every time we want the most authentic El Salvadorian experience in the Catskills.
Our last stop in Kingston was at a carpet store recommended by Darren the Sheetrock Wizard. The place was a dingy poorly-lit festival of chaos, the floor strewn with poinsettia bouquets being prepared for the season and a headache-inducing riot of dimestore antiques. The guy we'd come to see wasn't there but his mother was, and though she tried to be helpful, she clearly knew absolutely nothing about her son's carpet business, or even where exactly the light switches were in his cluttered show room.

As Darren was about to leave this evening, he got to talking with Gretchen and me about dogs. It turned out that he has a pit bull. "Sometimes I take him to fight this German Shepherd," he began. Gretchen was horrified. She'd heard of people fighting pit bulls, but she'd never actually knowingly talked to one of them. She didn't want to hear any more, lodging her protest and then sticking her fingers in her ears and singing "la la la" when it seemed Darren was going to finish the story he'd begun. Darren is from a rather different culture than either of us and Gretchen's reaction had him confused. "But they want to fight," he protested. Later tonight, Gretchen rehashed her dismay with, "Darren is backwards," she said, adding, "he had no idea what you meant when you talked about MSG earlier. And then he fights pit bulls!" "He's ghetto," I corrected. "He's really ghetto." For a white boy, Darren is about as ghetto as they come.

Over the past few days, I've found myself having to deal with ever-increasing amounts of scrap drywall. Though some of this can be used for odd places requiring small or odd-shaped pieces, scraps tend to form many times faster than they can be allocated. Eventually the surplus scraps must be carted away or else we'd drown in them. Though they'd all fit somewhere in the garage, they'd eventually start getting in the way even in that vast space. My first solution was to put them out on one of the decks, but then I suddenly had a much better idea. Why not just deposit them in the walls, particularly the walls between rooms which would otherwise be empty? There the scrap drywall would at least serve a purpose, deadening sound. So for the past few days I've been cutting the scraps to fit between the 2 X 6 studs in the wall separating the master bedroom suite from the rec room. Somewhere in the future I see the rec room as being the place where people hang out and watch teevee, and ideally it would be acoustically isolated from the adjacent bedroom. This new use for drywall has actually made it possible for me to keep the demand for drywall scraps higher than the supply.

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