Hello! I’m waiting to get an oil change and terri is back at her folks hving what she calls her “morning constitutional”. She means showering and having breakfast and doing back stretches. I think it sounds vague and euphemistic, and also like something Margaret Dumont would have in a Marx brothers movie

This McSweeney’s bit is an instant classic.

Polonius says Hamlet’s crazy … crazy in love!

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.

Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

I honestly got too distracted with the new toy this evening to post a full update of the rest of the weekend goodness at Summit Springs. So, while I have few words, I do have some video.

John and Sonya’s tomatoes are first, awesome (we were lucky enough to come home with a pint of yellow cherry tomatoes that were sooo good), and second, under siege by tomato hornworms.

So, here’s John capturing one in a plastic container:

The hens, however, enjoy the worms:

So it turns out that my iPhone did come last week, it’s just been sitting in the
FedEx facility in South Boston. I’m typing this on the Wordpress app from a train somewhere under Cambridge. Trying to get used to this keyboard… It’s very odd. I feel a little “Jane! Get me off this crazy thing” with all the typos I’m making.

Still, it beats the pants off the Treos were using at work, which we used mainly because they did ActiveSync with the Exchange server. Which the new new iPhones do. And they’re cheaper. And they aren’t going to make people miserable like the Treos did.

Sorry for the pointless commercial but this really is going to make my work life much better.

Terri and I are up in Poland, Maine, with our gracious hosts at Summit Springs Farm. Everybody else has gone to bed hours ago, but I have not quite been able to get to sleep. Everyone else is beat, not just because some of us are a) farmers b) got up at the crack of dawn to set up at the Bridgeton, ME farmers’ market, but also because c) there was sort of a disturbing incident at 4:00am, which I probably should not go into in detail, beyond assuring you that it did not involve us or our hosts, and as far as we could tell the sherrif had the matter as well under control as possible. Nonetheless, by the time our part in the event was over, everybody needed to decompress a bit, and poor John had to get up in 30 minutes to get to the farmer’s market.

Beyond that, though, we are having a lovely visit. After we got up, had breakfast, and got a tour of the farm from Sonya, we headed over to the farmer’s market to meet up with John. By the time we got back, it was 2:30 and the farmers needed to nap. Terri and I took a drive around the nearby towns and I picked up some interesting books, including one called Arithmetic for Printers which I suspect is going to be useful. Sonya made us an unbelievably delicious korma for dinner tonight, and I’m looking forward to a breakfast tomorrow from eggs that were laid by the chickens today.

I love this kind of the way I love the “Here is my 300 square foot apartment” type showrooms at Ikea.

I’m sorry to see the Manny of up until 3 weeks ago go.

I’m not sorry to see the jackass of the last couple of weeks go. [if you care about these things, you must watch Eck bitching about Manny]

Still, I wish it hadn’t come to this. There’s going to be a big hole in watching a Red Sox games now; Manny era, watching the Sox come up to bat, there was always this Magic knowing Manny was in the lineup. As much as I have loved Papi and Varitek and Nomar and many others through the years of my Sox fandom, when Manny was in the lineup, there was always this magic when Manny stepped up to the plate that is now just gone.

I already apologized on Facebook to all my Pirates peeps for getting Jason Bay. Gar. Is this what it feels like to be a Yankees fan?

I can’t decide if Christopher Hitchens’ article in Vanity Fair in which he willingly submits to being waterboarded in order to help him decide if it’s torture or not qualifies him to be considered like one of those spunky courageous first-person journalists of yore like Orwell or if it’s just an audition for Jackass: Celebrity Journalist edition. I’m guessing a little of both, leaning toward the latter. Because while it certainly shows a little more guts than many of his milquetoast bretheren, there are actually a lot of fairly courageous journalists actually covering the war at real, great personal danger. And it’s ultimately sort of a pointless stunt: maybe Hitchens personally wasn’t sure waterboarding was torture, but honestly, I don’t even think the Bush administration lawyers really believe deep in their hearts that it isn’t.

Saw this in Harvard Square station the other day, and, call me crazy, thought it was odd that an airline’s ad would compare their airplane to a roller coaster.

The Good Soldier Schweik— I bought a copy at a used bookstore on our recent trip to Virginia/DC, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s sort of a World War I classic that’s fallen off the radar about a Czech soldier who’s basically an idiot who not so stupidly manages to avoid ever making it into combat. SchweikThe novel starts in Prague, and weirdly, the humor reminded me of Kafka, and there’s probably a thesis in comparing Schweik and K. from The Castle; where K. employs all the intelligence at his disposal in struggling against a vast, almost metaphysical bureaucracy to gain admittence to the caslte, Schweik uses his idiotic blank grin and the deep incompetence of the Austrian army bureaucracy to constantly frustrate their efforts to get him to the front. Seems like it’s often called an anti-war novel, and the novel does preach at times, but Schweik’s honest idiocy seems impervious to all kinds of cant, and he seems like as basic and original a comedic character as Don Quixote. It ends abruptly when the author died of TB.

The Last Tycoon— We got this in our great plundering of Terri’s parents’ book and record collection last weekend and I blew through it in a couple of evenings. It’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final novel (which ends abruptly when the author died of a heart attack) about a movie tycoon. Seems patterned after any number of film tycoons, but the one that comes to mind most to me is Irving Thalberg. It’s pretty uneven at times, and you suspect that it would have been seriously rewritten and cleaned up a lot once it was finished. But that in itself is part of the charm; the edition I read had author’s notes and outlines of what Fitzgerald expected to happen, so you get the interesting task of finishing the novel for yourself, as well as an interesting vivisection of a novel in progress. The main character Stahr is a workaholic producer who, while driven into the future out of dissatisfaction with his past a la Gatsby, seems to genuinely love his work, and the scenes where he is prodding his writers and directors to work creatively are alone unlike anything I’ve read elsewhere and are themselves worth the price of admission.

I Will Soon Be Invincible by Austin Grossman — a friend recommended this novel about superheroes and supervillains that are all too human. I liked it a lot (I blew through it it last night and this morning), but if you’ve seen The Incredibles, imagine it as novel, make it slightly moodier and less cartoony, and you’ve got the idea.

So, NESN is playing a “Manny being Manny” marathon. Currently, they’re playing the big 2005 game against the Twins on the day of the trade deadline. This is probably one of my all-time favorite Sox games. Manny was supposedly going to be traded in some complex 3-team deal, and was not in the starting lineup. The crowd was aware of this. The trade deadline was 4pm. In the 8th inning, the game was tied 3-3. 4pm came and went. David Ortiz was intentionally walked, and Manny came in as a pinch hitter. The crowd goes crazy as soon as they see him step out of the dugout. He hits a little base hit and Edgar Renteria scores. The crowd goes double-crazy.

“Manny being Manny” had been a phrase that up until that point people used semi-derisively– sure, he’s a great slugger, but you can’t always depend on him, say, knowing what inning it is, or how many outs there are, or to not disappear into the green monster to take a wee wee or chat on his cell phone. Those little antics were just “Manny being Manny”.

But after this game, Manny’s talking to Eric Frede about not being traded, and he says “this is the place for me… it’s Manny being Manny, man”. And it’s just brilliant. There’s nothing more “Manny being Manny” as Manny saying “Manny being Manny”. Because you don’t know if he really quite gets that it’s used semi-derisively, or if he does and he doesn’t care, or— and this is my favored interpretation— somewhere on the odd planet that Manny lives on, which the rest of planet Earth can see only with the most powerful telescopes, he has heard the term, and, he interpreted this as a compliment. Regardless of why he said it, the fact that he said it instantly turned the whole thing on its head. Planet Manny and Planet Earth’s orbits came a little closer, because from that point on, it was no longer semi-derisive, it was simply descriptive.

Also, watching that game now, I forgot how weird it was: it was an early game featuring Jon Papelbon. Curt Shilling came out of the bullpen as the closer. And Kevin Millar was wearing black under his eyes, and it streaked like he was in Kiss.

We drove to Saratoga Springs last Friday, the 4th of July, to spend the long weekend with my brother, sister-in-law, and niece. Simon and Frances are teaching at the ballet school that they’ve been teaching at for the past few years. Saratoga is a good vacation town too, and Terri also went to school at Skidmore, so we have gone there several times with no ballet involved.

Not long after we got there, we went to the school’s 4th of July picnic at one of the several B&Bs they rent out for the students. At the sight– and overwhelming sound– of a hundred 10 through 17-year-old girls running around, Terri asked me “So, was this what it was always like when you guys growing up?”

I said, “Yeah, basically, except imagine that Simon was also a teenager, and all the girls were yelling ‘Simon! Simon! Simon!’”

It was good to see Roberto– I haven’t seen him in I don’t know how many years, and I’d never met his wife (it’s their ballet school). I also saw a couple of people I knew from back in the day, including little Stevie, who I have literally not seen in 15 years, and who now is not so little, is not so “Stevie” and who is now hot stuff at NYCB.

Not long after we got there, Simon was accosted by a bunch of his students, and we basically never got near him again.

Terri said, as we watched the girls take each others pictures with him, “So, basically, what you’re telling me is, nothing’s really changed.”

Pretty much.

So this was our big brand-name rock show of the year. Terri instigated it (I kind of peaked with Devo sometime in high school), but I figured what the hey.

Tom Tom Club opened. I wasn’t really a fan of their music back in the day and I’m still not. But I really enjoyed their set; they were really pretty solid, and they had a ton of energy and they were just a great dance band. And now that I have gotten a little more of a taste for the NYC post-punk scene, I kind of get their context a little more– they easily could have showed up in Downtown 81 alongside James White and The Blacks or Kid Creole and the Cocoanuts. It was also much harder back when the Talking Heads were still in operation to see them as their own thing, but that is a little more obvious to me now. And the very afro-beat / world music sound of the last Talking Heads record seems less of a David Byrne tangent.

Devo was pretty faithful to their schtick– no big deviations in their stage show from the DVD we have of their 1980 stage show. Pretty similar set list, too. Their yellow hazmat suits are a little wider. But the spirit was still intact, and they had people up and dancing from the start. Some of the little films that they projected were clearly vintage Devo, but seemed like they might have been re-dubbed. And for the last song, Boojie Boy came out wearing some kind of frock and a pink baseball cap with a rhinestone skull-and-crossbones on it; during his nonsensical diatrabe I could sense the mood in the place was patient, but there was just a touch of “um, maybe you could take that stupid mask off and play Whip It again?”, but I think it was probably my favorite part of the set. And you know, it really is something to see the little film of them from 1981 in their Duty Now for the Future outfits with the wind in their hair, projected 30 feet high, with the Devo Corporate Anthem playing, with a few thousand other people in a place called the “Bank of America Pavillion” drinking a fluorescent green “margarita” from a slushee machine on a summer night. Mmmmm. Devolution.

There were teams, and I was on one of them. Nobody in the scavenger hunt were originally from the planet we were on. We weren’t scavenging for stuff, it was for clues to some puzzle. But the puzzle wasn’t just some made up game, we were really supposed to figure something out that would help people everywhere.

This clue was in a ruined mansion near a lake. It was night. Everything was dirty and grubby inside and it smelled woody and earthen. The wooden fixtures were getting eaten by termites and decomposing into dirt. The lighting was bad, maybe there were candles, and we had flashlights. On the second floor there was a Vandercook cylinder press under a dusty tarp in one room. Other teams were racing past. We lifted up the tarp– other people had been there before us– and I started to read the clue spelled out in the type. There was one interpretation of the clue that the words seemed to suggest. but I could tell there was a trick there: I could see that there was some arrangement of other letters, mostly “C”s near the bottom that, along with the words, made some kind of design, but it was hard to see. I realized I should just go to my printing studio and get some ink and actually run the press and we would see something the other teams hadn’t seen.

I ran outside to get on my bike to go to my studio (which was still in Somerville, which apparently was on this planet). It was dawn outside, and hilly, and it smelled like Pennsylvania, and I think it was.

Speaking of Facebook, I just roundaboutly got found by a really good friend who I knew when I was in high school, who I sort of thought I’d never hear from again. I guess maybe that’s not quite true, we always seemed to run into each other at unlikely times and places. So I sort of thought we would just run into each other walking down the street in Boston or in an airport in DC or something. Back in the day, we lived maybe an hour and a half away from each other and went to different high schools, but we always seemed to run into each other in the city in the least likely places at the least likely times. Like the time that my friend Greg and I went into Pittsburgh to see a play; we saw her walking down the street on the way there, and she came with us. Meeting up was often that haphazard, but we were pretty close, we had long phone conversations and I think we went to her homecoming dance together as a pretext to go the the Rocky Horror Picture Show afterward.

Anyway, the last time I saw her was just after college in the weeks before I moved to Boston and she moved to DC, when we drank Mickey’s Big Mouths on her parents’ porch late into the night, and talked about Big Life Transitions and such. After that, we maybe emailed a couple of times. And then even the occasional “I’m still alive” messages stopped maybe five years ago. While I said earlier that I always thought we’d run into each other again, in truth, I’ve been a little concerned about the silence.

I am definitely a little surprised at some of the facts I’ve been able to pick up. But it’s good; she looks happy. Anyway, I’m very curious to see if she’ll actually get in touch with me again; I really hope so, but I’m also just glad to know she’s still out there.

I guess this kind of thing is not that noteworthy; I find people and people find me all the time. I just am really happy about this one.