You Wear Awesome Things

Tainted by the approbation of the vile Jakob Lodwick (whom I won't link for all the tea in China). (And, let's face it, the fact that she works for French American Apparel.) Still next-level.

The Track

Slim is going to make his fortune in gold futures. We have decided to purchase a thoroughbred racehorse and name it Cuckold Robbins. We are going out tomorrow night to celebrate the decision to do so.

Incidentally, I cut my finger pretty badly last night in an incident involving an avocado pit, my new Samurai-sword-technology chef's knife, and my own stupidity.

I was very prepared to sew the wound shut myself, and resigned to going to the hospital if I had to, but Slim administered some first-aid after rushing home from a session with a friend's band, and said it would be okay. (Apparently his arrangement did aid in transforming what had been "a plodding stoner nightmare" into, um, some other kind of song.)

flashback

Someone asked me to find the following, which is from the late, unlamented sadiegazette, a chronicle of my time in Paris.

The personages are me and Moishe, formerly known as David.

The Chosen
On Saturday, following a festive tea at Le Loir Dans La Théière, David suggested, as we were all in the Jewish Quarter, that we attend Shabbat services. I was amenable, and accordingly found myself the only woman in a kitchen/storeroom, observing an Orthodox service from behind a curtain. As everything was in Yiddish and Hebrew, I was rather out of my depth (despite the fact that I'd respectfully dawned my béret), and the book I had in my bag, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, hardly seemed appropriate. David managed to slip me a French Talmud after a few minutes, which kept me busy for a while. I'd always thought being behind a curtain would be sort of like a harem, where you could watch all the goings-on unobserved. In fact, I had very poor visibility and had rather a dull time of it.

It was much worse, though, when they bid me come out into the synogogue and sit by myself at a table across the room while all the men ate a Dairy dinner (I was still full from the cake I'd et earlier.) Uncomfortable as this was, however, it was better than David's position, facing a white-bearded rabbi. What's more, I found a book of Torah commentary with English translations and happened to open it to the point where they give injunctions against witches (you shall not suffer them to live, incidentally) and bestiality (an abomination.)"

On the Town with The Petite Sophisticate

Saturday night, went with Maeve and Slim to see an irony-free double act on the Lower East Side. The first performer was a friend of Slim's from college who now goes by "Adrian Lunar" and is very mysterious and romantic and into muses. Slim made the major faux pas of addressing him as "Jerry" and there was a moment's shocked silence.

Slim kept producing this graph of gold prices over the last twenty years from his pocket and making people look at it. Adrian Lunar was not very interested in it.

The place was packed with what Maeve accurately described as "douches and whores." Of the lame gentlemen who approached us (Slim was, per usual, somewhere else, hobnobbing with various people from Wesleyan), one was wearing tie-dye, one had his hair in a bun, one farted vigorously, and another used the opener, "Nice glasses. But," (turning to Maeve) "you're not half-stepping either!"

"Slim's surrounded by sluts," said Maeve at one point. "He seems to know them all!" He did.

Afterwards, the two of them wanted to go for a drink back in Brooklyn. I didn't, so I formed a plan in the cab.

"I'm making a run for it," I told Maeve in an undertone as we pulled to a stop. I leapt from the cab and into the subway, and barely managed to swipe my MetroCard before Slim clattered down the stairs. Of course, then the 'G' took about twenty minutes to arrive, so I was easily discovered behind a pillar.

Anyway, it turns out everyone, but everyone, was at the bar: Charlie, Moishe, Maxine, etc. Maeve said she went to get a drink and felt something rubbing against the fur of her sleeve. "And of course," she told me the next day,"when I turned around, it was GK4."

"Oh, it's you." he said. "In that case, I can do it openly."

Speaking of grandfathers, I recommend checking out the Fiddler on the Roof component of The Jews of New York online for the brief moment at exactly 7.33 minutes into the segment in which Rabbi Haskel Besser sings a snippet of "If I Were a Rich Man."

Slim and I watched it Friday; he'd asked me to sit with him until the markets closed, as he was recovering from a case of brain fever. Because he'd been up for four days straight, he fell asleep about eight, and I followed not an hour later.

His roommates got home around two a.m. and proceeded to make a racket, clearly audible through the paper-thin walls. There was a shouted exchange in which they asserted that it was too cold to hang out downstairs; insults were exchanged; Slim then marched in and said something like "Sadie's very tired and she can't sleep! She has to work tomorrow!" which is as good a way as I know to make everyone hate you, but I wasn't wearing any pants, so I couldn't really correct the impression.

Truth is, I'd already been awoken by a phone call from GK4, who was in the process of walking out of a play during its second intermission, to his parents' displeasure. "I could tell a kid was about to be molested and this wise old Indian was about to show the extent of his powers, and I had to get out of there," he explained.

The Bad Times

Prior to his suicide, my maternal grandfather was totally obsessed with a vague apocolyptic happening called The Bad Times which were perpetually around the corner and which govered his decisions to build seven sheds on his half-acre property (for the family to live in), add a deep freeze of game to the house, melt down various metals into ingots, buy numerous plots of worthless land in Arkansas, and never open a bank account. "When the Bad Times come, they'll be eating each other," he'd say gloomily. I've long thought that the failure of the Bad Times to materialize hastened his demise.

Slim is very much a man after my grandfather's heart, down to his affection for man-made diamonds and apocalyptic scenarios. He has instructed me to lay in the following:

-Large sack rice
-Various dried beans
-Powdered milk
-Bottled water
-Camp stove
-Canned tuna

(He wants to join the CostCo in order to acquired the provisions in sufficient quantity.)

He also gifted me, in addition to my knife, with a book called Wilderness Know-How.