The holiday season is now in full swing. The only real event where we have a lot of people over at our house is our holiday party so this is almost a house warming event for the Newton house. Sarah has managed to co-ordinate the party thus far but I have been involved doing things like purchasing and carrying in a Christmas tree on Saturday. Madeline was very happy to see a Christmas tree and quickly proceeded to place ornaments onto the bottom branches. Eli the cat then proceeded to knock the ornaments off of the tree. Our tree this year is fatter than last year so the beads didn’t make it around. Since I am Jewish I don’t have a big set of ornaments but we have decided it makes sense to place some dreidels, menorahs, and gelt decorations into the mix on the tree to represent multiple cultures. My other contribution was to go out on a wine cellar stocking expedition with Dave F. to purchase a case and a half of wine at the various wine establishments. We learned the important point that the 15-20% discount when purchasing a case or more at each store still applies if you purchase the case with a friend and split it on two credit cards. So it pays, from a discount standpoint, to shop together for wine. Thus far I have successfully avoided all post Thanksgiving trips to the dreaded holiday mall parking lot. Given how pre-occupied I’ve been with work it will be an interesting question as to whether I’ll have the time to paint Madeline’s new room, the one she’ll be moved to when the new baby arrives, before this holiday party or not. If I start tonight or tomorrow I should be able to pull it off but after Wednesday it will be impossible to do two coats of paint.

The new go-to-sleep routine with Madeline has become for Sarah to rock Madeline in the dark while I pull a chair in and talk with Sarah about life until Madeline goes to sleep. It has been a good way to actually talk with Sarah about life rather than our standard running around chasing tasks or sitting watching DVDs. But Sarah did go out to dinner tonight and Madeline tried to revolt when I went to put her to bed. The various activities prior to sleep including taking 3000 licks on a tootsie roll pop before I needed to bite into it for her to get her to finish it, reading books and watching a baby Einstein video in bed, a trip downstairs for an orange juice, then rocking with her while screaming that she wanted mommy until a few minutes later she suddenly and inexplicably instantly fell asleep.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Thursday night I went out to see Sweet Wednesday play at TT The Bears. A good crew of people appeared for the event including Hattie, who I went to eat a pre-show dinner with at Koreana. Stephanie, James, Robert, Falkoff, and some of Dave’s friends appeared at the show as well. The music was a great set with another rockin’ version of Madeline, sweet as cherry wine, and Wherever You Go to finish it off.

After the music was over it was only about 10:30 and Robert heard rumbling under the folk/rock scene at TTs. So he talked me into investigating the source of the rumbling sounds. At the Middle East next door we asked what was happening at the top of the stairs to the downstairs zone. The music appeared to be on a break below and mostly from what we could see from the view from the top of the stairs the crowd was a large group of people with black dyed hair, black lipstick, and who would likely sun burn under fluorescent light. But we were faced with the major obstacle of a cover charge of $15 per person just to see the bands downstairs and explore the goth/metal scene. The nice woman wearing black and white striped Beteljus stockings suggested that we check out the upstairs area since their cover charge was lower and some interesting bands were playing up there including the speed metal band - Random Acts of Violence.

So Robert and I crossed over to the entrance to the upstairs zone. I was making a fuss about needing earplugs but Robert was insistent that we could purchase them at the bar once inside of the speed metal concert. Robert fronted the $9 cover charge for me and we were inside the small upstairs at the Middle East room with a stamp on our hands allowing us free access to leave and return whenever we wanted.

On stage was a band that is the real thing for speed metal. If anyone has never seen a real death wish hate spewing speed metal band play live before it really is a treat to the senses. The whole time I watched them I found it very hard to suppress a giggle because they looked so much like a comedy troupe trying to do a bad impression of a crazed but musically misguided group of devil worshippers.

The band was comprised of three tattooed dudes with their shirts off. They covered the metal basics of lead guitar, bass guitar, and drums. The lead had a shaved head with short black hair. He got his neck all tensed up and made some unintelligible sounds that sounded like a horror movie villain voice. “ROAAG JHARRA GGODGE GROOK AAAARAFFF”. Meanwhile the fans stood in the front row with their long hair either in fuzzy blond, Napoleon Dynamite style fuzz dos or long black greasy hair bobbing up and down in a full metal thrash while forcing their hands into the air doing the devil’s hand signal. It was some real head banging activity going on while the guitar kept going “deedle deedle deedle twid tweedle” and the singer kept yelling in his dark deep voice “GROK OG CHO ROZ CRAWWWTCH”. While speed metal isn’t melodic it could be classified as a percussive use of the guitar. I found it easy to fit in with the crowd provided I took people’s lead for when to put my hand in the air with the devil’s symbol and thrashed at the right point during each song.

The room had a vending area in the back where they were selling a collection of CDs on a rack from bands that covered the genre that we were listening to. I could have spent a few hours reading through the names of the albums and bands for pure humor value. The albums had names like Leukorrhea, Drown All Retarded Babies, Necromantic, and Dehumanizer along the sides. Most of what I saw aren’t available in the angry speed metal section at cdbaby but it can give you some idea of the type of music that is for sale at this vending station. My guess is that there is a dark sense of humor at play with the Speed Metal crew where they compete for the most offensive song lyrics, titles, and band names.

Since I didn’t want to look too conspicuous or commit myself to purchasing a copy of the Dead Body Fuckers latest opus by spending a long time with the CDs I decided to move onwards to the t-shirt vendors. In the background with nobody selling it was a T-shirt of a ball gagged and bound bleeding naked woman who appeared to have been stabbed in many ways with some illegible text behind it. It would have made a good workout shirt but I worried about the resulting riot that might occur if I ever wore it to anything other than an event like the one I was at. The folks peddling t-shirts had some more innocuous shirts as well. There were two vendors representing two of the bands playing. The first one had a shirt that was a screen print of the bands name on it written in a very artistic fashion shaped like a spider or bat bug squiggled to a lightning edge. It was completely illegible. I mentioned this to the vendor because her illegible shirt would be $10 while the person next to her had a shirt with a nice impact font in front of some eyeballs shooting rays at skulls that was completely readable for only $8. If I were to purchase a shirt at a speed metal concert I would want people to be able to read the words “Corpsicopia” clearly. I promised to return with my decision once the vendors started to vie for my attention and Robert and I left to return to TTs to report back on our experience.

Lisa and Dave were still there and the band taking the stage included DJ Swan and her male counterpart. DJ Swan is a very attractive six foot tall blond woman who plays a Macintosh computer connected to a keyboard by turning knobs and dancing in high heeled shoes. Her partner has a tightly cropped, George Michael style, beard and he riffs at an electric guitar that looked a few sizes smaller than the average one while singing. I pondered the possible off stage relationship between these two people after enjoying the performance with the knobs and tried to explain to Dave and Lisa what we had experienced in the upstairs venue before deciding that we had to take a look at another speed metal band.

On returning to the upstairs area we found a new band taking the stage. They looked like high school students or recent graduates from high school. They looked like the kind of angry kids at school who were likely to get into fights or be mean bullies. Their friends and mothers were in the crowd which seemed to like them and know them personally. The lead singer was probably named Davidson since the crowd kept calling out his name. He made announcements explaining the songs including the first tune that was “about a coroner who falls in love with a woman ---- BUT SHE’S DEAD!!!!”… begin speed metal and ranting screams into the microphone “ACK OOPP GRAAAH BRAAAP”. His last song was an old tune but a good one “about a robot who takes over the world and kills everyone… GRAAAP BRRRAA GRRRAGGG CRA FUUCK”. The bass player was doing a good job of the speed metal intense crouch but he seemed annoyed by the lack of a full commitment by the crowd. He mentioned after the first song that the bass was too soft so it would be good to turn the bass up in the monitor. After the second song he chastised the crowd by saying – “God – I feel like I’m bombing out here. You guys have to do some more head banging.” The nerdy guy with thick glasses in the front row took him seriously and started thrashing as did the bald, potential skinhead next to him.

Robert and I took a break from the metal again to return to TTs. At this point we were generally enjoying the idea of mixing between two worlds through a cover charge as if we were in a movie where time travel was possible and you could get warped between the planet of the lizard people and back to the love planet at any time. After pondering whether DJ Swan and her cohort were romantically involved we played a second game of pool and I lost to Robert by sinking the 8 ball.

Our cue had come to return to the death metal. On the way in I congratulated Davidson and the bass player on having done good work as they were out hanging out with fans having a smoke. The band was taking their time getting the stage together and looked like a bunch of Jewish guys from the burbs with long hair, big beards, and a punk attitude. The bass guitarist had rolled-up the sleeves of his long sleeve shirt to show off his tattoos. One of them was written in large block Hebrew letters. The lead guitarist had a large hand print tattoo in the style of an orc branded by the hand of Saron. This band identified themselves more with the orcs than with the band of hobbits when they watched the Lord of the Rings. So we watched them thrash their hair and head bang through a song before it was clear that we had to follow our inspiration and sample some alternative styles of music throughout the square.

Our next stop was Zazu where the Hats and Heads were playing. They were a British sounding group making riffs that reminded me of The Beatles. Robert had thought from outside looking through the window that they might be an all girl band but they only had one girl in their band. Their last song was “Take off your slippers” which was catchy enough for us to sing along to. Among the fine sights at Zazu was the bartender. She was a demure looking blond woman with dainty steel balls pierced into each of her cheeks. She looked like the girl next door but with an attitude. The Hats and Heads finished playing and as they went over to Robert and me we realized from their group that they were all communists because they were dressed in communist military jackets or were wearing communist styled hats. Central Square is in Cambridge!

Hats and Heads were followed by a two man band taking forever to set-up. The lead singer looked promising to Robert because his clothing was far too small including floods shorts and a long sleeve shirt that only covered half of his wrists. But after announcing that the rest of the band was missing today and that they would make up for it we were disappointed by the attempt.

We moved outwards next door at the ground level Middle East to find a small party of about twenty dancing in the front by the small stage. What they lacked in volume of people they made up for with enthusiasm for Latin dancing. The band playing was four roving Latino dudes singing along using wireless microphones in Spanish in front of a drumbeat generated by an automated machine. Seeing enthusiastic dancing I dove into the rolling crowd with my best solo Latino style dancing with a little death metal dancing mixed in. Two very skinny girls were dancing in a wild grinding salsa style with their friends. One of the singers was a Roberto Benini looking dude trying to encourage dancing and sporting a sign to recruit folks for a bigger event some other night. The benefit the singers had from the small stage and wireless microphones was that they mostly were in the crowd singing while encouraging people to dance. One short, under five-foot tall college freshman with two friends wandered past. She was caught by the roving DJs and got into dancing. She went outside and when she returned she decided she wanted to grind her ass for 10 minutes with the darker Dominican looking guy wearing David Ortiz style sunglasses. Her friends stood outside smoking and then returned to take a few memorable digital photos of the event. The Dominican guy had a happy smurk on his face as he was singing and pressed into the wall by her as though to say – “This is why I do this!” Robert had disappeared to the bar but I didn’t notice it while dancing in the group. He had moved away apparently because a not so desirable woman had been inspired by the teenager to try to grind with him in a similar fashion. So I was just hanging out on my own for a while before sitting down.

When Robert returned from the bar we concurred that it was time to move onwards to a new genre. I was hoping for some blues or jazz but the nearest thing to the Middle East was the Drums and Bass playing at Phoenix Lounge. The bouncer wanted $5 per person but we just let him know that we were migratory drinkers and weren’t likely to pay it. Then he offered $5 for two people but finally he just let us in for free because we didn’t seem like we were going to pay another cover. On the dance floor we were in the typical trance, electronica, music scene. Two short Asian girls with pig tails dancing at break neck speed in the pattern similar to the video game Dance Dance Revolution. A blond woman, and there always seems to be one at every electronic dance rave style DJ situation, was moving in a jump suit standing at the front ramping-up as though she was in the first five minutes in a well timed Jane Fonda workout. An older man was keeping-up with the Asian girls to the Dance Dance Revolution style motions and a smooth looking guy doing a highly organized trance dance of his own. Is there a school for this stuff? Behind the DJ they had a projector playing low grade CGI animations including cheap King Kong and a robot graphics flashing in the background that transitioned into 80’s video games hashed along with screen saver style graphic that synched with the music. Robert said “I’ll bet this is a lot more fun on ecstasy.” Before we moved on again.

At last we went on a final last ditch search for brass. I wanted to head out to Wally’s in Boston but we settled for the Cantab Lounge because it was contiguous with our route. For a Thursday night the Cantab had an all white brass blues band, except for the drummer, singing songs like Mustang Sally. The woman that Robert had fled from at the Middle East salsa Dominican singer location was grinding with the lead singer. We left because they took a break to play a great song for couples to cuddle to and headed to our cars on foot.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If fraternities were to need a universal symbol for a sign the symbol would be the red plastic cup made by the Solo corporation. On Friday night some friends and I went out for a DOMC outing and we began the evening with the red cups filled to the brim with 75% vodka, 24% cranberry juice, and 1% crappy Limeade from Minutemaid. Upon bumping into our first friend for the evening at the St. Paul C line T stop she remarked “Where are you going’ with those red cups?”. Since we hadn’t planned a destination, just a journey we asked her opinion of where we should look for fun on a late winter Saturday night. Her suggestion based on the plastic cups was that we would fit in fine at a fraternity party. We considered the frat party route but changed course in favor of meeting up down at the Rattlesnake.

The T ride over was one of the new Kinki trains filled with drunk 14 year old girls. Quite a treat. But we then continued our journey through town. RF had a hankering for the Lennox where we debated who the singers were for the song “I would walk 500 miles…etc.” It turned out that it was the Proclaimers, two twins and not Midnight Oil. But we did manage to get a round of Guinness in. Then it was onwards to Central Square for a visit to the Cantab Lounge to see Little Joe Cook. I’m not sure if Little Joe Cook is the same guy who has been playing at the Cantab Lounge for as long as I can remember. I wonder if he is like Darrin from Bewitched or the Dr. from Dr. Who, replaceable by a new Little Joe Cook at any time provided he keeps yammering about his cheeseburgah’s and hamburgah’s and belting out James Brown tunes late into the evening. We made friends with a bunch of ladies who were taking photos of each other kissing. They were class of ’95 which in my state of mind made me think we had some kinship of common high school graduating class years until I realized that I didn’t graduate in the high school class of ’95 – I graduated in the college class of 1995. It’s tough getting older. We did some dancing and I took some pictures along with our friends. When I gave them the camera to look through they scrolled through the pictures including the ones of Madeline and Sarah at which point I let them know that the pretty baby in the pictures was mine. That made it much easier to dance since nobody had any false illusions of who anyone was. Out of nowhere came Lena, Sarah’s friend from work. She was out with some friends so we did some dancing as well and got a nice crazy picture.

We had to get some pizza a few doors down and I explored the streets while others were acquiring the pizza. On the streets I got into a nice conversation with someone standing in front of a supermarket shopping cart about the oddity of the bank advertisers on the cart. After a minute or so of conversing about the cart advertiser someone ran at top speed, grabbed the cart, and took off down the street. That was my cue to go get the pizza. After the pizza we took a tour of China town, had a nine dollar beer, and then ate some late night Korean food. A group of guys next to us were trying to explain that you could order “cold tea” and they would give you liquor. The genious – How could I live so long without knowing that. DK was falling asleep and kept apologizing for his lameness. We went home at about 3 AM and it put a dent in my regular routine of working out every Sunday.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In my reading of Fear and Loathing in America my interest in Hunter’s letters increased significantly as he approached the dates that covered writing and publishing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. F&L in America gives plenty of references to Hunter doing plenty of interesting drugs including his firm stance that a part of his candidacy for Sheriff of Aspen was that he would continue to do mescaline on a regular basis. But the volume of mind-altering substances referred to in F&L in Las Vegas was incredible. On the back of the Las Vegas book it summarizes the basic premise that a gonzo journalist and his lawyer had a crazy adventure in Vegas that the average traveler out on a bender could only look at with awe as a religious achievement to bent living:

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…. Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge…”

When I first met Sarah two weeks after we had met I had a business meeting in California that took me through Las Vegas on a flight where I met her for some fun in Vegas. We sat by the pool at the Excalibur, sipping drinks and listening to the dim sound of the repetitive Disney style musac in the background, and I read F&L in Las Vegas to Sarah using my best impression of Johnny Depp in the movie who was probably doing his best impression of Hunter himself.

At night we went out to Nephrotite’s lounge in the Luxor tower and drank until about 2 am although we were having trouble getting drunk because of the extra oxygen pumped into the air to keep people from falling asleep while gambling. We left Vegas on a Sunday night skipping our original flight because we were busy playing black jack and drinking free booze on the floor of the MGM Grand which we learned was originally designed to resemble the emerald palace from the Wizard of Oz complete with the yellow markings on the rugs guiding drunken gamblers to the tables to represent the yellow brick road.

I don’t owe the Fear and Loathing book anything with regards to having a continued long term relationship with Sarah. But it is something like a favorite song that I can get a little sentimental about to remember the care free and more wild state of mind I was in when we first met. It's only buddy in the first books that Sarah and I read is Tom Robbin's 'Still Life With Woodpecker, "yumm", that I loaned Sarah because she is a red head.

While Hunter’s Vegas story as a whole smells of hyperbole, and Hunter helps because his style is always hyperbolic – like when he thought the only way to get rid of a girl was to feed her to the lizards in the desert - the amazing thing to learn in F&L in America is that by his own admission: Thompson wasn’t on drugs while working on F&L in Las Vegas.

He wrote in a letter to his publisher – “The only thing that vaguely alarmed me about your letter was your statement to wit: ‘You know it was absolutely clear to me reading Las Vegas that you were not on drugs…’ This is true, but what alarms me is that Vegas I was very conscious attempt to simulate a drug freak out – which is always difficult, but in reading over I still find it depressingly close to the truth I was trying to create.”

So while this isn’t as big of a discovery as the guy who dragged Oprah through the muck with a thousand little pieces I did find it interesting that Hunter, one of the more interesting authors, generally wrote sober even if he did get twisted from time to time.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So far this week I have been suffering from the wrath of drinking too much wine. I think I have some form of flu that has kept me hankering for liquids more than solids to ease the pain of swallowing. Maybe it was the airplane, but I think that the people at The Wine Gallery are to blame. On Saturday night I went to grab a couple of bottles of wine to drink with Sarah and Matt B. and discovered the new automated wine tasting jukebox. They give you a smart card with 12 credits on it to select the wines you would like to taste. The card unlocks sets of eight wines and when you select a wine it deducts credits depending on the quality of the selection. The bottles are all attached to sippers that look like the type of stuff used to make complex automated chemical synthesis like DNA oligos for PCR. The sipper sucks down an ounce or so of wine and releases it into your glass with a bubble at the end. I have gotten better at estimating an ounce from feeding Madeline from the bottle, NOT a wine bottle though.

So I used 11 out of the 12 credits on my card by not deigning to drink the 1 credit wine. I then proceeded to purchase four bottles of wine, two of which I had tasted, and the other two in an attempt to meet Sarah’s request for a Castlerock Chianti. When I arrived home it was time to make dinner with Matt and Sarah. He had brought asparagus and porterhouse steaks. This is when I discovered that we don’t have our own supply of tin foil. Every time someone comes over they look at us cross-eyed because we don’t have our own tin foil. Matt actually brought his own tin foil. I also discovered once again how crappy our oven is. When we turned on the broiler the burners at the top were mainly useful for putting out flames. Since the pilot lights and the electric clicker built into the stove don’t work I was using the bic long tailgating lighter. The lighter kept going out whenever it approached the burner and then after letting the burner build some gas the burner formed what looked something like a blue version of the horsehead nebulae and then died out. Later once the steaks and asparagus had been cooked the broiler decided that it would make it nearly impossible for me to turn the knob so I spent five minutes wondering whether I would have to shut the gas off on the stove.

To cope with this gas problem and because we were hanging out with a more professional drinker than myself we drank three bottles of wine between the three of us in less than four hours. This wouldn’t be too impressive, or the cause of this awful sore throat if Sarah wasn’t breast-feeding and only drinking a glass of wine. So I may have drank somewhere between one and two bottles of wine on my own and I was plenty lucid as we were chatting about whether Dick had ever posted a blog about his travels. Apparently he did but I still don’t have the URL for it.

So I was just getting over my Saturday night hangover and Madeline care taking activities on Sunday morning when I went to Foxboro to watch the Patriots try to trounce the Saints. I do feel empathy for the folks who were made homeless by the hurricane but I didn’t feel any pity or empathy for the Saints. I just wanted to see the Patriots get a clear and decisive win. That didn’t happen although the Pats were winning and in control until they worked hard to let the Saints nearly tie the game on the last play after having been up by three scores (two touchdowns and a field goal). We had a beer at the game and then a burger at the Funway. I couldn’t really drink my beer at the Funway as we watched the Bengals and the Colts play. The Colts look very difficult to beat this year. Hopefully we can meet them again in the playoffs and ruin their hopes for a Superbowl again. The Superbowl is nice but beating the Colts is like beating the Yankees. It means more than the Superbowl itself to me because I know them so well as the enemy.

So when I got home we had another little meat and drinking party. This time it was to crack open the 1996 champagne that we had gotten for our wedding from Jeff and Meredith and were waiting to drink all summer. Jeff and M had brought a thick stack of filets from Whole Foods that once again were cooked in the broiler from hell along with the leftover asparagus that we hadn’t cooked on Saturday night. We drank the champagne, two bottles of white wine, and two bottles of red wine. The steak was a great cut and I ate mine about as close to raw as you can before risking death.

So I awoke on Monday morning feeling like crap and still feel like crap despite drinking lots of fluids, OJ, earl grey tea, hot chocolate, coconut milk soup from the Thai place, whatever. I just feel like someone took some sandpaper to my throat. I did manage to buy Earl Grey tea, which Ami noted we never have, and tin foil at the Stop and Shop last night!

Posted by Melody at 02:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night the Newton crew including Falkoff, DK, and Hillary went out to Central Square along with Sarah and me. Sarah and I had taken most of Saturday to recover from going out drinking late on Friday night to Kenmore square. Sarah wasn’t actually drinking but she gets tired from being pregnant so she was about as useless in the morning as I was hung over. We had managed to get out of bed just in time to make breakfast for twenty minutes when the doula buzzed the door early at 11:45 so I had to leave the omelet half cooked on the stove to get dressed to look presentable.

We then proceeded to talk about how in the hospital I was really the only person who could tell the nurses that I didn’t want the newborn baby on the warmer and could demonstrate this by ripping my shirt off when she was born and starting to hold her close to my body. Once again today was a long sex education class. While munching on our bacon and eggs Sarah and I learned things like that the baby is unlikely to turn from head-down to breach now that it is only 8 weeks away. The head is too heavy for them to flip and they are living in a room that keeps getting smaller as they get bigger. We also got to thinking about petossin, the induction drug that Sarah’s OB wanted to give her to make sure that the OB could be there for the delivery, and decided it was a wacko idea to give her a drug that would cause massive contractions intentionally when we knew that the anesthesiologist had already given her the news that she wasn’t going to have an epidural due to abnormal clotting factors.

The doula showed us a 30 minute movie showing various women having contractions until they delivered while jump-cutting cycling from one woman to the next. Her general description of labor to us was that it feels like being stoned. You have words in your head but you can't articulate them. Since we happened to have Kinsey sitting around with a Saturday due date we watched that in the later afternoon and learned all about the sex lives of sex researchers from the 50s and 60s. Kinsey let us know that it is quite normal for people to have extra-marital sex given the results of the survey and that people had gotten into all sorts of emotional troubles when they started wife swapping at the research headquarters.

The meal at Central Kitchen was fantastic. We split 5 appetizers, 3 main dishes, 2 desserts, drinks, and a bottle of wine among 5 people for a total of $220. Afterwards we walked up the stairs to “The Enormous Room”, a bar with cushions for seats with little back support. It was too loud there to talk easily but we couldn’t retract our drink order fast enough to leave. The waitress talked me into a pomegranate margarita. While we were sitting in some seats on the side I was soaking in the scene. The crowd included some of the typical beautiful people out on a Saturday night showing off their cleavage and Armani shirts. One woman was standing by herself wearing a top that tied closed in the front with a wide gap where the strings tied across and wasn’t wearing a bra. So the shirt gave a good look at her neck, breasts, and stomach down the middle.

She was standing alone and looking for something to do or someone to talk to her. I was thinking that if I wasn’t with Sarah that I would likely ponder ways to hit on her but instead I just pondered that I wasn’t going to because I had a good excuse. I was at a bar with high school friends and my pregnant wife. Sarah and I were commenting on how ridiculous the outfit was including her stripper like shoes. She kept looking over at us and we were afraid she had heard our remarks. Finally she walked over and asked Sarah when she was due.

The woman with the tied shirt asked Sarah when she was due and then proceeded to stick around giving Falkoff a nice view while explaining that she was a mid-wife working on Cape Cod. We then got a long repeat of the discussion with the doula in the afternoon and the woman, despite looking 20 years old, proceeded to tell us that she had two children aged 6 and 9, that tonight she had gone out on the town for once in a long while, and that she had been married for 10 years. She had come to Central square thinking there was something happening at Man Ray, which she learned had recently closed for good, after having done some shopping at Hubba-Hubba. She wore white because she heard there was a "white" party at The Enormous Room that turned out to be on Sunday night.

I kept wondering what was going on with a very attractive married woman going out alone on a Saturday night to a club dressed like she wanted to be picked-up for a one night stand and talking about her family while shaking a box of cigarettes. DK didn’t believe a word of what she was saying and was whispering in my ear about her being a compulsive liar. Sarah was getting annoyed about talking about pregnancy. I was asking her questions about how to feel the dilation of a cervix with odd hand gestures. Falkoff was just sitting back and enjoying the view. Among the theories whispered between DK and myself regarding why one of the beautiful people was at our bench area was that she was a lesbian with a fetish for pregnant women. I was quite happy and proud that Sarah was the most attractive person in the bar - even attracting a beautiful sexily dressed woman to come and talk with us. Plus we haven't been out to a bar and chatting with strangers in a long time so it held some excitement just to talk to a strange stranger.

But since it was loud and Sarah didn’t look too pleased we unhinged from her to move to a quieter venue.

When we got to The Field it was even louder than at The Enormous Room but we got to do a play by play on the compulsive liar mid-wife lesbian woman. Falkoff was angry with DK for having pulled us away and I thought the whole scene was one of the more funny things we had encountered in a while. Sarah and I had a chat about how we should have been a team and taken her home together but Sarah didn’t feel too into an adventure with 4 weeks to go before she delivers. We had to get out of The Field because it was so loud that we were worried about deafness and then Falkoff drove us all home in the his father’s new Passat station wagon. Sarah wanted the Passat station wagon by the time we got home.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Summer is blurring away fast. I’ve been living on the fast forward button for a week now. Every day there was something leading to the next thing and onwards.

On Thursday night we went out to the Parrish Café to meet with a crew of people to celebrate Canadians in America day. It was a beautiful night but also too busy of a night so we had to wait for a few hours to get a table outside. I decided to go on a mission to the Rattlesnake across the street to ask about their upstairs patio. The bouncer at the door decided to give me a hard time because I was wearing a red construction paper maple leaf on my chest. Once past him I found the line to go upstairs. The bouncer in front of that door was useless and being a jerk. I asked him how long he thought the wait would be and he told me he didn’t know but I could look at the line and figure it out for myself. I then let him know that his job is partially to answer questions and that it was a reasonable question. Based on his experience, he had admitted to working that door for five years, I asked him, could he estimate how long it would take for the line to pass through to upstairs. He told me no. So I told him that it was fine. I didn’t need to buy beer from their establishment if they didn’t want to be helpful. The next time it is a crummy night and empty at the Rattlesnake I’ll be going anywhere but there.

Sarah and I drove back from work on Friday and then to Olive’s for a fantastic dinner with Hattie, Jose, Matt, and Kate. Kate’s friend Meredith is a chef there, actually an apprentice chef who used to be an intern who works the pasta station. Meredith sent over a sampler of pasta after we had our appetizers including some pasta with truffle oil. I don’t know what is in truffle oil but I am surprised that nobody has made it into a narcotic. I was then far too full to eat my short rib until the next morning but did make room for the assortments of desserts that Meredith sent out after the meal. Kate has been going to art classes where they ask her to draw with non-traditional media. This boils down to decorating with beard shavings, drawing with celery, or making a picture out of the sharp end of thumbtacks. It sounded fun but won’t help in my quest to be a better digital artist.

At the wedding on Saturday afternoon I was looking forwards to a long day of meeting and greeting strangers playing the role of new but unfamiliar to everyone husband. I didn’t know anyone there but Sarah since it was her college roommate’s wedding. We got lucky and sat next to some fun people at our assigned table. I chatted for hours with an animator who worked on the movies Ice Age, The Polarbear Express, and Robots. His job was to move the models like a puppeteer to create the sequences to look realistic. He answered all of my questions about when they do the sound, how they inspire the actions. For example, in a board room scene with Ratchet, the actor pounded his hand down on the table when he delivered the line. The animator saw the tape of this and edited the motion to mirror what the actor had done. He wasn’t a big fan of how they did the Polarbear Express with the motion capture stuff because for him it wasn’t really animating. They were just trying to fix the jerky strange movements from what they had captured. Another wedding highlight was the fountain of chocolate. A company in Waltham rents out a chocolate fondue fountain where they send an attractive college student to help you dip an assortment of items including marshmallows, strawberries, pretzels, whatever into the chocolate. We drove from the wedding to the Marshfield house at 11:30 after trying to dance to some music that we weren’t very fond of. Sarah was feeling a bit self conscious about being pregnant. I kept looking at the little girls dressed in their formal wedding dresses dancing with their fathers and cousins and thought to myself. When I have my little daughter I’ll be dancing with her whenever I can.

In the morning when we awoke in Marshfield we decided it would be easiest to go to town for breakfast. We found a nice place that had a deck overlooking the water and an all you can eat buffet. After that we went back with our bellies full and made a full assault on cleaning the swimming pool. The pool was murky and had leaves at the bottom and flies floating on the surface of the water. The pump didn’t seem to be clearing most of it. Mom went after the flies from the edge and I figured out, while in the murky water, how to set-up the water vacuum attachment. Even that wasn’t working too well so I checked out the big hole in the bottom of the pool where the water gets sucked through and it was clogged by leaves and twigs. So I did some little dives to clear it and that started to move things along. The pool should eventually filter itself through but it needs to be able to pump the water through the bottom to get all the organic material that settles to the bottom. I think that next time we go the pool will be very clean.

Lisa and Dave came out to Marshfield as well. It was Big Papi Day, F-Day, however you need to put it. We were there because of dad. Lisa was learning some Dylan songs from Dave. Sarah and I put the bed together in our designated room. From our construction method of using a drill to screw in and strip the 40 wood screws holding the slats together I think the bed will need to be disassembled using karate. Mom and dad were discussing whether to take the architects advice and put the kitchen where the living room is or to go with their instinct and leave the kitchen where it was. Sarah was working on an eval using my laptop that needed to print on our dysfunctional printer this morning.

A barn swallow had moved back into the porch so mom wasn’t allowing people to walk out the back door to disturb the barn swallow and her four babies. The swallow was moving back and forth into the woods every thirty seconds to return with a new live insect for her children. Mothers work hard to keep their children alive. Dad made some tasty margaritas in the blender with fresh limes.

We grabbed some BK on the drive back to Brookline and then hurried over to the MilkyWay in JP to watch Faith Sollaway’s latest schlock Opera – The F-Word. We arrived about twenty minutes early and given that Sarah and I weren’t the core audience segment, lesbians, we were mainly just sitting in our seats trying to look as normal as possible in a room packed with women wearing shirts like the one that said “Dykes against Bush”. I was surprised by the wide variety of lesbians in the room and thought it would be interesting to perform a anthropological study on the whole society of lesbians in JP to understand the culture. All cultures are formed out of a common bond and a need to band together to protect that bond. In the case of lesbians it is a sexual preference.

This means that their rituals like going to the Milky Way to see a Schlock Opera are bound to focus on this common bond. The show delivered on this promise. During the introduction to the musical faith did a little audience participation where she asked “Only the lesbians” to sing the line from the song then she asked “Just that guy in the corner” to sing. They also had some choice visits to the sexy OB/GYN office where the female doctor was asking questions normally delivered in a professional manner with cruder terminology. The schlock included some funny bits about repressed Jewish memories of uncle Hyman and some cruel angry Chasid telling a little girl that she would never get gimmel on the dreidel. We exchanged gifts for dad’s day after the show as the crowd was dying down.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Wednesday night I met with an influential potential business partner and Aaron in Concord over dinner by the bar. It was unfortunate that I had to skip out on my Improv group practice for this occasion but it was a case where prioritization worked out. The guy was the number two person at a start-up in California with venture financing and their CEO was on the cover of Newsweek last month. At dinner Aaron and I learned all sorts of interesting stuff about our potential business partner. He was an eccentric man including a stint in military school as a child, then becoming an Olympic jujitsu fighter in Korea, getting shot in the gall bladder as a paramedic, working as a recruiter for Cisco stock per hire when Cisco had 35 employees, owned a fight gear clothing company, and finally became a good buddy of the venture community by rescuing some failing start-ups. He also would go crazy if he didn't work 20 hours a day, said "GOT IT" whenever he understood something and loved the restaurant we went to in Concord because to him it was the Cheers of Chinese restaurants.

Upon arriving the partner was drinking a fruity looking beverage in a tall blue Chinese restaurant mug with a naked woman embedded in the side of the mug. I asked him what it was called and he called it a "One of these". This was the name that had been given to it by Paul the bartender, a tall Asian man with large Elvis sideburns who had created the drink for my new friend the partner eleven years ago when the partner was just a kid. The partner used to come in with the most beautiful woman he had ever met but they then moved to California and she had stumbled into a Less than Zero situation before marrying a biker. The partner was now married to a Dolche-Gabana Japanese model who he couldn't love any more and is now living atop Pacific Heights in San Francisco. He only was attracted to Asian women and spoke fluent Japanese. At one point he picked-up his Treo phone and answered is "Moshi Moshi" because the ring was the one for a Japanese country code call. It turned out to be an engineer for his company working in Japan who didn't speak much Japanese. He was sending his kindergarten age kid to a fancy school that cost $30,000 a year and the partner thought the kid would be getting the same education back in Concord. That's why I got in touch with the partner. I filled out a form and despite there being a lot of forms being filled-out on the web site, mine came with a 781 area code. So I guess I won the lottery?

I decided that I had to try the unique concoction in the girly glass so I ordered a "One of These" as well. The "One of These" was a potent drink and despite it being a unique concoction for the partner it was very similar to a Scorpion bowl in an embarrassing Chinese restaurant mug. Aaron arrived and soon we were all drinking these beverages and chatting away about the adventures of the partner, who he knew in common with Aaron. We did talk enough about business for me to get that the partner felt we had a good shot at success but that we should raise some money to execute faster. "GOT IT".

Paul, the bartender who has the Elvis sideburns, is an amateur singer. The partner had taken his Dolce-Gabana Japanese wife to this restaurant and Paul had sung for her and she had cried for three days. We had gotten there at 5PM but by about 7PM we had already imbibed two "One's of these" and were ordering dinner including a the partner special and an Earl special. Earl was the guy that the partner brought to the restaurant when he owned a landscaping company in the area eleven years ago and was cutting his teeth in business. Earl's claim to fame, other than the aforementioned Earl special was that he could drink 48 beers at a sitting. Now this is quite impossible and he would likely die. Earl's secret was that he would drink them and would throw-up in the middle of the drinking multiple times in a Romanesque vomitorium style. Both of these dishes were off the menu and had been created those 11 years ago when both the partner and Paul the bartender were just starting out and the restaurant had just opened. The Earl special was a seafood dish with scallops and shrimp in a viscous sauce with vegetables including mushrooms and chinese broccoli. The partner special was a fried chicken dish also with vegetables in a viscous sauce.

When the third "One of These" arrived the glass was changed from the blue naked woman to a flesh colored Fu-Man-Chu bearded guy mug. The drink itself was getting stronger and Aaron dropped off drinking, his 50 years experience kicking in. We were chatting a bit with some executives at a table next to ours and it was fun to see the partner talking to an executive who had never heard of their company. That was when I learned about the Newsweek article. The partner convinced Paul the bartender to serenade a woman drinking at the bar and he sang what seemed to be an Elvis song with a great southern twang to his voice. Around 9PM Aaron brought the leftovers home to his kids and the partner and I moved to the bar.

We chatted a bit more about life and getting married. I could tell we weren't birds of a feather because he thought he would slit his wrists or jump off a bridge without working for 20 hours a day and wasn't that involved in his home life. I gave Sarah some glowing marks for having her head where mine was and us both wanting to chill out and enjoy being parents a bit. After the fourth "One of These" it was 10PM and time for the restaurant to shut down for the evening so we parted ways. Paul gave the obligatory warning to drive home safely and I walked out to my car smelling like I had just raided a liquor cabinet. My calculations were that I had four drinks in five hours so I was probably not so drunk to drive but might be close enough to play it very safe.

So as I started to drive home I felt nice a paranoid that I was going to get pulled over by the local police out hunting for DUI cases to throw in jail. Because of this I switched to the slow lane on Rt. 2, which was the only route I could figure would lead me home. Being in the slow lane is an interesting experience because you see more police in the slow lane. They hide in the bushes, pass you in the fast lane, and generally make a very good appearance when someone is up late and night and praying to not get pulled over. One of the police cars that looked like an SUV drove in front of me and then pulled himself over to the side to form what looked like a speed trap. I sighed a good sigh of relief because if he wasn't there when I passed then he probably wasn't looking to catch me speeding or swaying like a snake on the road or whatever else I might have been doing to alert someone that it might be fun to make me blow into a DUI tester or walk a straight line while touching my nose. I don't think I can do that sober. But the same police car appeared behind me only thirty seconds later with lights flashing to pull me over.

I have seen the show Cops many times and I always wondered why any criminal when pulled over by the police for an unknown reason, except for Timothy McVeigh, would get out of their car and run as fast as they could into the woods of Lincoln. The answer was suddenly clear to me as I was pulled over, not for speeding, with alcohol coming out of my sweating pores. Adrenaline! I don't often get shocked with an extreme dose of adrenaline but this was a case of pure fight or flight super-high. I was ready to pop someone in the face, run away from the saber tooth tiger, do whatever it took to get out of that situation as fast as possible. My life could be ruined. This was going to be the most embarrassing incident of my young and foolish life. There goes the presidential nomination. I had just been thinking about how I could try to run for president as an atheist and I could at least say that I didn't have DUI charges like George W., wasn't a coke addict, and after eight days of marriage, hadn't proved to be a serial adulterer. Granted all of those traits actually qualify you for the presidency so I shouldn't have been worried. Now here I am, my own deep throat admitting everything anyways.

So I fumbled my license out of my wallet and tossed the wallet into the seat beside me, grabbed the registration from the glove compartment and greeted the officer when he arrived at my rolled down window with a smile while trying hard to hold my breath and control my breathing. This would be easy if my heart rate wasn't around 205 from the adrenaline but most people appear a bit fidgety when they get pulled over so I may not have seemed that off to the officer. At the window of the car he asked me a question and I was sure it would be "Sir, have you been drinking this evening". But somehow those words had morphed through an act of science fiction into "Sir, do you know that you have a broken tail light?". I answered "Yes." He wanted to know how long I knew it was broken and I said that it had been about a month. He then let me know that I should get it fixed as soon as possible and then turned back to his vehicle to write me either a ticket or a warning.

The return to your vehicle for a cop with this mystery ticket or game show warning is always an interesting experience as the driver. It is basically a horror game show. Will you get a ticket that will effect your insurance premiums permanently or a warning that will make you want to hug the officer? In my case I still wasn't sure whether I was being observed for signs of drunkenness so I was just sitting on top of the brick underneath me that had been extruded from my anus and was staring into the mirror trying to see what the officer was doing. The new jumbo LEDs that have been installed into emergency vehicles are very compact and very bright. They are bright enough on a dark new moon evening to cause significant temporary blind spots in your vision. So as I looked back in the mirror my field of vision was slowly turning into a fun, 60's fantasy world of lights and colors no matter what direction I looked in. My cell phone rang and I decided to ignore it, knowing that it was probably Sarah, my pregnant wife, wondering when I would be home. I didn't pick it up figuring that the police probably think of calls by waiting pulled over drivers to be calls for the gang to ambush the officer or spot legal consultation suggesting guilt. I considered closing my eyes to avoid the blindness and pondered how I would drive off blind and potentially DUI in front of the officer if he did let me go and imagined ending-up in the blinking ditch twenty feet in front of the car.

When he returned to the car I smiled again as he gave me the "warning" for the broken taillight. I nodded and gave a guttural OK to continue my policy of not breathing on the officer. Finally he turned back to his car and I pulled out in front of him. Cops love to follow you for about a minute while you drive the speed limit and then pull off ahead of you approaching the speed that a Delorean uses to go back in time. He did this and when he sped into the distance I called Sarah back.

I gave her the scoop on the situation and she offered to come out to pick me up but instead I decided that I was fine driving but totally freaked out by the experience. So I held Sarah on the line as I was driving home, recounted the story, and let her know about the two hundred cops that seemed to be out on the empty roads leading all the way home on Route 2 including two motorcycle cops who kept stopping at lights next to me for three straight red lights. I was happy to catch the red lights for a change and one of the lights freed me from my motorcade of unrequested police escorts. I just dragged myself through memorial drive, storough drive, comm. ave., and Saint Paul Street, until a breathed a heavy sigh of relief upon arriving in the driveway of a private property at which point I yelled into the phone to Sarah that I was free. She was probably home rubbing her belly the whole time wondering why she was on the other end of the line of the late Hunter S. Thompson reincarnating himself in me for some fear and loathing on the way home from Concord on a Wednesday night.

She welcomed me home and let me know that I smelled like I had raided a liquor cabinet before we went to sleep.

Posted by Dan Housman at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)