5-16-08 Mutt and Jeff

Rainy night, but Katie's friends from her last tour are in town, and we agree it's a good idea to see people, even if it is gross out. We end up at a bar near Union Square, where it is dark, small, and crowded with loud college kids drinking and wearing wigs(!). Eventually, folks show up, including six foot five inch John, and his five foot nothing girlfriend. I lean over to Katie, saying, "Holy shit, is that how we look?"

3-30-08 Detoxing the Jedi Way

As an experiment (and sort of a goof) a friend of mine purchased a set of "Kinoki" pads after seeing the commercial on TV. They are these pads that one wears on one's feet while sleeping that are supposedly able to draw toxins out and "detoxify" a person, and after he wore them last night, they indeed were filthy black and smelled vaguely (strongly) of barbecue sauce.

We joked that he might be gaining Jedi powers as a result of his dalliance with detoxification, to the point where he might be able to lift an x-wing out of a swamp, to which he replied, "Man, I'm gonna be so powerful, I'll be able to lift the swamp out of the x-wing."

"In fact," he continued, "George Lucas was gonna name the character Obi Wan Kinoki, but he didn't want to give away the Jedi secret."

Starting Again and Saying Goodbye

I walked through the Kew (Kew Gardens) for the last time tonight. It has been my experience that when a particular time or place is "done" with you, or you, it, there are very clear signs, coincidences, portents.

I walked down the back road by the railroad track in the late afternoon sun (thank God the days are getting longer again, winter gradually loosening its grip), saying good-bye to my favorite trees, to the place where the cat always sat, to the place where I had to kill that squirrel, and suddenly there was my old neighborhood friend Supreet, who greeted me with amazement. We shared affectionate farewells and he only allowed me to leave after extracting a promise that I would write.

1-4-08 Asian Pub rules

Went out with some of Katie's new friends from her tour at a place near Cooper Union called Asian Pub, where the drinks and the food were ridiculously cheap, and the pop music cheesy. We talked about music and gossiped about people they knew that I didn't really know but felt like I knew since I'd heard so much about them over the last two months. As the night progressed and the drinks flowed more freely so did our words, and the conversation ranged over religion and politics to the time I used to be a muslim, and I wondered if these neat new people I met would remember in the morning how well we connected.

Katie and I roared back to Brooklyn on the Q, listening to the theme-song from "Snakes on a Plane" and amusing our fellow passengers with our interpretive dance moves and lip-syncing prowess.