So I am off early to classes today, and perhaps to enjoy some Caribbean food in Flatbush, though I am still feeling a little sick, though not under the weather, which is so bright and clear and sharp. Things with Joephet are at an odd pass, perhaps. I am generally bored, or rather sick, and I have been reliving the glories of Alan Moore’s From Hell. I really need to get my comics collection organized: my productivity has ground to a slow and sickly halt, and I miss how Bessie is not around to read my blog and email me her comments, as I’m too HTML-dumb to include them myself.

So I lost the previous version of this post, which I was writing when I had just gotten back from Bessie’s in Connecticut–Glorious (which is what I said before too, cuz it’s true), laid back, no rush, no schedule, outdoorsy, historical and quaint, but just perfect weather and a river that is much more pleasant where there is no danger of actually drowning, even if the twelve-year-old who saved your life last time too is still around to throw you a rope again if necessary. So floating in the river on an inflatable (inner tube), happily browning (like Elizabeth Barrett, only more so), and occasionally stretched out Christ-figure-like like Gatsby at three in the afternoon. Bessie is the ideal hostess, and I have a newfound appreciation for perfect gins-and-tonics (I love the idea of that pluralization, especially given how it should be “standersby” or “passersby”), though inebriation is dangerous (Someone: “Yeah, half of Yale is gay.” me, unintentionally, talking literally about bodies, not other dichotomies: “Is that the top half or the bottom half?”) when you are in a crowd of similarly educated fofolks where it’s possible to end up in extended disputes over whether a marsupial pouch is actually an orifice (of course it’s not: it’s not internal).

So charades was great, even if classed. Abstract nouns/ideas (“integrity”, “continuity”) and crude sexual slang are very effective, as are sundry organelles. We actually devised a sign for “abstract noun/idea” which is wiggling your fingers on both hands above your head. It’s also extremely frustrating to get as close to “Trinidad & Tobago” as “Trinity & Toboggan” and then run out of time. Ya can’t win ‘em all. And pancakes are delightfully acceptable carbs.

Ah, Bessie. Maybe I’m a little tipsy on slightly watered-down Maker’s Mark, but she really is the “best girl in the world.”

Oh, yes: I got a letter (which is pretty morbidifying in its own way) from the organ bank recently. So it turns out that if the teaching and leftism don’t work out I can always be an eye-banker….

Uhhh…. So things with Joephet have settled down admirably, away from the previous untoward expectations and back toward a sort of close friendship, or as close as it can be at this relatively early stage, where my seniority is at least an order of magnitude less than that of any of his other friends. It’s just more balanced and realistic, and hopefully sustainable. Certainly not the arrangement I would have expected to be possible, but I guess you can’t be too pre-fixed in your ideas. For those yet curious as to what this actually means, I am not yet getting a haircut or shaving.

Off to Middle Haddam this weekend to see Bessie, alongside Alric and some other second-order acquaintances. I will be bringing modal logic, and just need to be away from the city for a bit, get going, see a river, and not come quite as close to drowning this time, perhaps.

The thing is I really need to get cracking on this comic strip: there is such quality material to be done, but it is somehow difficult for me to sit down without deadlines or an audience.

Last night another drunkenly beautiful carouse at the Beer Garden around the corner from my house, the stagger home always the most brilliant stretch in all Astoria, vaguely residentio-commercial, but in a non-threatening way, with the TriBoro bridge always suddenly looming, luminous in the distance. This time with Bessie–that frankness sipped by sipped, and after a day of hanging out, toying more and more with the possibility of going to law school as being a more effective way of reaching strangers, more effective than this current teaching business, which reaches only no-longer-strangers, but can’t yet shover the system further where it needs to go–after a year, I’m still idealistic (though, as the old phrase goes, “certainly not wide-eyed”), but it’s unclear how long that can last in the face of unsympathetic changes to the system and an economy that’s less and less friendly (more an issue for my students than for me, me with my iron-rice-bowl, as the phrase goes). The only issue is a matter of usefulness–I feel useful now, but to wait three years after the two I plan to spend still teaching before being greatly more useful is a strange thing. But I won’t be covering any rich ass… Too early to tell, I’m probably just heady on the enthusiasm Bessie always brings, and vaguely dissatisfied with my current idleness. I guess I’ve been thinking back to that time I went and helped my brother out with his legal-type troubles with the school administration. It was then, more than ever, that I somehow felt indispensable, and as if I was actually bringing to bear all the math, philosophy, and prose that had, until then, merely been disconnected elements. And we kicked some major whitey ass. That was just a defensive action, though. Time to get more offensive…

Speaking of offensive, though my Spanish spelling is poor, I am often reminded of the idiom, “fumando como un chino en kiebra,” which means, roughly, “smoking like a bankrupt chinaman.” That’s me.