Housekeeping
Please, just gimme’ one more day off. I’m just not ready for Monday.
See, as the weekend goes, Fridays are an immediate goner. They’re like Thursdays. You’re totally shredded and just wanna’ watch TV and have some Lean Cuisine, except you can sleep in Saturday morning. But I never sleep in anymore. Maybe it’s part of growing older. Maybe it’s part of having lots of windows. Whatever. Friday was an goner, and quick.
I co-produced a Jeff Jacobson recording with Casey Shea. Which was fun. And made me realize all the more what a saint Kevin Anthony is for engineering my last two records. ‘Cuz all I wanted to be doing — depsite what a big fan I am of Jeff’s music, especially the song we were recording — was recording and writing new stuff of my own, or at least our own. It requires all kinds of patience to be an engineer, patience I’m not sure I possess. And it requires all kinds of diplomacy, diplomacy I’m not sure I possess.
Saturday was a loss. I recorded something new (and mediocre). And watched “I Heart Huckabees.” And took a nap. And bam! Saturday was gone. Or nearly so. ‘Cuz at 10:00 I set out for Hoboken, which from the UWS is a solid hour commute. I could probably swim it as quickly. It was Mancini’s birthday, and his lovely wife, and Goldner and Rach and Heather and all sorts of celebrities were there. I was tired. I was low energy. I was bad company.
I had Good Laugh Number One of the weekend this morning at around 2:38 a.m. I was watching “Wonder Showzen” on MTV2 which is wrong and hilarious simultaniously. This kid is at a horce racing track interviewing people and he says to this old man, “Want me to do an impersonation of you?” And the old man says, “Ok.” And the little kid says, “Gamble, gamble, gamble … DIE!” I laughed and laughed. Then I went to bed.
The Second Good Laugh was more sustained, and more wholesome. It was really more of an extended smile. I rode up to the Little Red Lighthouse below the GWB with Chris and Ethan. And as always, Ethan was a trip, and a joy. The kid just cracks me up with everything that he does. He finds drinking out of a water bottle hilarious. He’s like a magnet to mud puddles. The whole ride back he was singing to himself. Genius.
So yeah, that’s this morning. I ran into a few neighbors (Joe and Dana and Megan and Jordan), and wandered around the 79th Street Flea Market ( I saw a really cool antique tin star that was, like, 3′ x 3′ but, of course, said to myself, ‘I’ll buy it if it’s still here next week’). Then I began a modest spring cleaning that primarily involved sweeping my bedroom, doing three loads of laundry, and sorting through my 94 white Gap tshirts and converting the yellower ones to rags, punctuated by reading on the roof deck and eating the two remaining food stuffs in my fridge (Boca Burger with Ken’s Italian Dressing).
I had dinner with Chris, Jen, Ethan, my mom, my cousin Roxane and her two kids Nora and Liam. At 5:00 p.m. I don’t think I said two words the entire meal. I didn’t have to. Heck, I couldn’t. It was like being in the center of a cyclone: all crayons and spilled water and toy trucks flying off the table and spaghetti everywhere. It was a riot. I had a ball. And when I turned onto 80th Street after dinner, I saw a crescent moon setting over the brownstones and actually said out loud, “Ho. Lee. Shit. That’s beautiful.”
And just then, I began to feel quasi-normal again, like, perhaps, one should feel on a Saturday afternoon or something. But alas, time’s up, game over. The house may be in order, but the noggin’s throbbing from the prospect of gettin’ my work week on again. Oh well.
