Pepper of the Earth – The Home Office Record & Mostly Daily Gazette

It was my birthday last week, on the 10th. I turned a record age, by which I mean 45, which is the middle seat in the phonograph triad — 33, 45, 78. As STIFF Records once noted, if you were born in ‘33, you’ll be 45 in ‘78. When I was a kid I had a little song I used to sing when I put on records: thirty-three, forty-five, se-ven-ty-eight, in a sweet private lilt. And now, recto-verso, here I am.

It is, frankly, a dreadful morning, mired there at the end of the thing that never actually started, and in the middle of it she sends the sort of chirpy empty email — Happy birthday! Hope your day is wonderful! — that you’d send to a co-worker you shared a floor with but wouldn’t recognize in blue jeans on the street. To someone hardly worth noticing. Which, now I look back on the whole year-long arc of it, is who I guess I was.

In retrospect I’m glad she does it, thoughtless as it is. It’s the sort of thing that drains blood out of your heart. My head throbs two times, three, so completely that it makes a sound in my ears. Tears spill out in a sudden run, so fast and so unprepared that they leave no tracks on my cheeks — drops in a straight line from my eyes to my lap. I guess it’s sort of an earthquake thing. Everything soft inside breaks all at once, and it is over in seconds. And that is that.

So I start over. Again. Maybe that’s what a birthday is for.

She does me the mercy of violence fairly early, so when I go stomping out of the house looking for a bridge to jump off of there is still plenty of day left. I have a rooftop photo shoot to do, and when that’s done I walk through the Lower East Side and SoHo taking pictures — steering clear of bridges, just in case. A lot of good photography gets done, which should probably tell me something.

Come evening I meet up with Autumn for a movie. Autumn has been in her own share of battlefields lately, as in “Love is A,” and she’s been lending me her camo and body armor (you have to picture us both crouching sidelong against the dug-out wall of a WWI-era mud trench, eyes sharp under steel helmets wound with vine, smeared faces lit by the twin red points of matched cigarettes; it rains, of course. There is a trace of acid smell in the air, beyond the fulvous smell of wet earth and clay.

Linus: You blocked yours on chat yet?
Autumn: Mmm-hmmm. You?
Linus: Yep. Did it today.
Autumn: Good.
Linus: Kind of sucks.
Autumn: Better this way.
Linus: We talked all the time. I mean … I mean, it was, look, I–
Autumn: Stop it.
Linus: Right. Right. You’re right. Pass the ammo.

And overhead, a shell detonates, scattering shrapnel).

We catch Hard Candy at the Angelika — a switch from our usual monster movies, and one I really enjoy — and then head out for Just One Drink, because we’re both at work the next day. Somewhere around the third glass of Just One Drink I have a little how-much-I-liked-her moment, and Autumn, who has been holding it in all night, explodes.

“Linus,” she says. “Linus. I HATE THIS GIRL. Everything you have told me about her, everything, says that she is an insane manipulative bitch who can only relate to people she controls, and she has fucked with you for the last year because she liked it and because you were willing to take it, and because that’s what she does. You are lucky that this didn’t work out, because she would have destroyed you completely, because she is an insane fucking manipulative bitch.”

After which there is some silence.

Half an hour ago I’m sprawled on the bed half-dressed, in the corduroy arms of an instant sleep that came on so fast and so weary that it could not be denied. I was mucking around at my desk when the gravity hit. In moments I am asleep, so quickly there is no time to find a comfortable position. Instead I spread out like a double arrowhead, like a Blair Witch stick man figure, face down.

I’m a peaceful sleeper. When I won’t sleep I usually know it, so I can just get up and not waste time shifting and tossing. Normally I fade off a little slowly but in comfort, which sucks a bit because if you snore I’ll hear it. I’ll wake up in the same position. I steal the covers at the start of the night, but if I haven’t got ‘em by the time I hit REM then you’re safe until morning (when I will reclaim whatever you may have snatched while I was out). And I don’t have bad dreams; or if I do, for the most part I don’t bother remembering them.

There are two — I know there have been others, actually, but the others fade fast, pulling in their holes behind them, traceless.

One is from my young childhood, a memory that feels original, almost preverbal. There isn’t much of it left, just the glimpse of preschool inconstant immediate logic and a snatch of image more like a child’s drawing than like a dream. The land is dark, a featureless clumpy purple-brown sprawl, the color of closed eyes. It buzzes, or it’s a brown that might buzz, or it buzzes in the eyes. It is as flat and as deep as construction paper. Across the land drift bright pastel shapes of wolves. The wolves are identical, boxy with jagged jaws snouting out of 2-D bodies under a V — or is it an M? — of crude triangle ears. Their bodies don’t articulate, they aren’t animated. They are like shadow puppets, drifting relentlessly from left to right. There is nothing to stop them, and they bay from their frozen pastel-neon mouths. There is a pink one, a yellow one, and one brown one that is hard to see against the flat land. The brown one pulses as it moves. I think I woke up screaming. I was probably five.

The other is from my late 20’s. I am subletting on Edgar Allen Poe Street on the Upper West Side, and have just broken up with Roberta after a stay in Iowa. While I am out in Ames with her I find spoor of what she hid well during our summer together in the City — her pathological lying, her doctrinal inability to say the words “I’m sorry,” her alcoholism, her grotesque infidelities, which lead back inexorably to more pathological lies, etc. etc. ad naus. There is no point fighting it through in the frigid Iowa winter, so we wait until landing back in New York to strip it all down and have it all out.

The next day, back up at EAPoe, I wake sweaty and sputtering from a black afternoon nap and a twister dream with two dark images and, so far as I remember, no narrative, and no narrative necessary. There is a shabby and badly hung wooden door, beyond which a long stairway stretches down into deep earth. And a room of people who tear off their mask faces and are lizards beneath, flat-eyed, with scaled lips drawn thinly over small remorseless teeth.

Between these two points, a quarter century of blank nights, or of delicious imaginings: cities strung with dark bridges and mysterious cascading water, long journeys, magic connections. Tiny skipping-stone narratives of happy life, long beloved days, a rambling house which is all my homes joined into one, with still and dusty train tracks in the basement — a terminal, not a station — and attics and hallways full of cupboards, drawers, and passage. The ziggurat pyramid city, water rushing down from the peak; you and I, digging in the garden planting music instead of flowers. Once I cycled down a coast road strobed with cliffside mountain tunnels and rode the elevator high into a tower building to watch turtles flock down the river and fetch up in colonies on the far side of the delta.

Tonight the dream isn’t good or bad. It’s paralyzing. I’ve come in midway along the story and I’m catching up. It’s a small party, at your house, but you are not there. I am waiting for you. There is a child there, a little girl, in distress. She needs to pee. She needs to walk but cannot move. She needs to speak but has nothing simple to say, and she is too uncertain for small talk; her parents are there, but they are not.

I know I need to wake up, but I am trapped here — I am a guest, not an architect. The child grapples, snatches, as if drowning. I’ve never been between sleep and waking this way, reeling in line and yanking as if to pull myself up out of a current. Her arms are on me, dragging back in ways that are as deliberate as they are panicked, and she is behind me now, or not precisely behind but backed off a step in a direction that I can’t see. Her flailing is a mauling now, directed and full of purpose, and I can hear her breath sucking in, fast and wet. Her arms are ropy and pliant, muscular but without anchor, and you mean to keep me here, in this indistinct gasping place.

In which a man dies, a broken heart does not mend, lovely women are photographed, and beautiful music is heard. If you do not see these colors, the trouble may be in your set.

The first thing I see as we drive into Minneapolis is a dead man.

All through this weekend I am rubbed raw, stripped open, adrift and disoriented after a sudden tangle with a kind of godhead membrane that drifted across my life over the last year, like a caul, hemming in the great grand world until all that was left was a single pair of incomparable eyes, lips of exquisite expression, an uncertain heart trembling with gifts afeared of giving. A mind as boundless and as softly, quietly creative as sun on clouds; a woman extraordinary, whose warm shadow fell over me with such breathless speed that I thought — uh, sorry, did I write that out loud?

Anyway, I am sodden with love, unrequited unmet love, and after she spots the damp little footprints it turns out that she is from Venus and I am from Brooklyn, and here I am in Minneapolis, and I don’t really want to live any more, and there’s a dead guy lying the parking lot in a pool of blood draining from a head that doesn’t seem all the way there. We’re driving past, and we don’t stop, and I think to myself, “Wow,” as one does when there’s a dead man lying there in a pool of blood. We’re almost past already. My helpful brain offers this up: “That,” it whispers, “is a dead guy. So why don’t you maybe quit whining for an hour or two?”

We’re in town for a CD release show by Coach Said Not To, a delightful band I spotted this year at the SXSW Music Conference of a happy Wednesday night. Seth has more airline miles than Route 66 has land inches at this point, so we’re here at the bottom of an avalanche of earlier flying, larking around and enjoying the Lutherans. Every third building is a church; when we make a crack to someone we’ve met about ministers, she easily answers, “Well my father was in the Church.” We don’t ask which one.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in a storm; the world is furious and there isn’t any peace. This is why I’m looking for portent in places I’d otherwise look to for plot and atmosphere. I’m trying to understand. I’m looking for familiar landmarks, for some magical-thinking hint that this is where I should be now, and that it’s not all just a dreadful mistake. Tuttle/Buttle. That sort of thing. And now this: after all the years of life in New York, I come to Minneapolis to see my first corpse. Surely around the next corner there will be a dead horse I can beat, or a very shy fellow with bite marks on him?

CSNT does a glorious show that is ecstatic, fun, and full of everything a show should hold. The recording doesn’t hold the same confabulation, but how could it? I am mesmerized, grinning, moved. The next day we meet the band at the Claes Oldenburg Spoon & Cherry for a quick photo shoot among the cheeky sculptures of the garden, under a sun that has other places to be but spares a glance for us as we whirl past.

In the end? Like so many eyes, hers see outward only; she is blind to herself. “I’m shallow,” she tells me, the other day. She seems to believe it. I am speechless, stunned. It makes me so sad. It makes me want to turn off the lights. In his strange sci-fi arguable masterpiece Dhalgren, Samuel Delaney imagined a gang of wastrels who wear hologram projectors as gang colors, and to blur their identities. Each sees the hologram animal totem of the others, but none sees his or her own; it is against their code to tell. Each a mystery to the self, an avatar to the rest. It makes me think of that.

Because I am in love it makes me want to touch her. To show her what I see there. There are secrets in my hands, I want to tell her. You are in my hands. Find your shape with them. You missed something before — you missed something so beautiful in the dark. Let’s find it now.

Whitehall Street on the 4/5 subway line clears quickly after the lawyers’ late rush, and that suits me fine; I work a red-shifted day, and I like my trains over and done with. Tonight I have this fantasy that I’ll make it up to Beast Buy before it closes, a fantasy largely due to the reality that I have not looked at a clock in the last hour or so. I’m still cherishing the notion that the big hand is near the 12 and the little hand is near the 8, which has me a good 270° out of whack. Which is what I’ll feel like when I find out what time it is actually.

Reality: Um, Linus?
Linus: Hello — you look so familiar. Have we met?
Reality: whack whack whack

There’s a pretty young thing across from me in the train, raven-haired and skittish with that “I’m not really a pretty young thing, go back to your reading” air. I’ve been ruminating through Middlemarch at the agonizing pace that comes along with a 10-minute commute, so I set to it. Mr. Bulstrode agrees to write the good letter vouching for young Fred’s character after all, which is a relief all around, and about this point the train pulls in to the Brooklyn Bridge station.

I change for the local, as does the pretty young thing (raven-haired). We match steps over to the local track and peer out into the dark distance, as one does, and as we do, PYT(r-h) turns to face me and turns out to be Sharon, a friend I haven’t seen in years.

Sharon was an oddball singer who performed, under the name Ms. La Nive, largely without instrumentation — think Diamanda Galas minus the piano, and hella cute. She was fairly alarming for the uninitiated, since she peppered her shows with a bramble of utterly insane characters who would prove the confluent similarities between dinosaurs and omelettes, say, or would attempt rakish and catastrophic things with the alphabet. She tended to the massively under-rehearsed, which made her too-rare shows a sort of distaff Andy Kaufman experience. You either got her or didn’t, and there was very little middle ground. Her songs, when not ludicrous, were spectacular and deep.

I fell for her completely one night at the Sidewalk Cafe when she did an aria (I don’t recall which one) entirely in karaoke cat language. Pressed play on her CD boombox, and sang a full extended piece with “meow meow meow” as the only words. Now, that’s good. What was visionary was that she pointedly promised a special guest performer, who would join her as a featured vocalist later in the piece, and who would be performing this evening in a foreign language. When the guest vocal solo arrived, she took out a stuffed dog and held him up to the microphone as if he were singing, bouncing him up and down in time, and then kept on going “meow meow meow” for him as well. Foreign language, see. It was amazing. Or perhaps you had to be there.

The last time I saw her show, she did her set dressed entirely in bubble-wrap. This is not nearly as sexy as a guy might hope — she used a lot of layers — but it’s not something you see every day. We weren’t allowed to pop the bubbles, sadly enough.

I haven’t seen Sharon since a few weeks after 9/11. No one much felt like doing anything but drinking and crying at that point, which made the bars desperate and miserable places, but since if we didn’t go out to have fun the terrorists would win, sometimes we did. The two of us sat through an evening at Sidewalk feeling stricken, and then went walking in that loud way you do when it’s late late late and your heart is a little broken. I bought her ice cream and we ate it in the window of Gracefully on Avenue A, and that night I didn’t cry until I got home.

Miss Saturn, in nefarious scarlet, at The Delancey

Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 13:21:59 -0500 (EST)
From: Linus
To: Pierre, Seth, M., Blind C.
Subject: Last Night

So I completed Day Two of my Three Days With Saturn shoot for New York Cool –
last night Jenny performed at The Delancey (which is a pretty cool place, I had
never been) as part of the Byte party, a fetish S&M-lite kind of thing.

I’ve been to one or two of these sorts of parties over the years, usually with
Chuck, and while I’m not interested in the sexuality of it the vibe is usually
pretty relaxed and fun. So I watched a lovely girl in a lacy angel outfit with
excellent feather wings chat with friends while a guy wearing leash and collar
licked her ankles until she got annoyed, and then she stood on him, sticking
the spike heels of her Scotty-style clear plastic platforms in his mouth and
making him lick the soles. He seemed pretty happy about it, and after she
ground her feet on his nipples for a bit — posing for beaming pictures all the
while — he scampered off into the corner and cowered with a big happy smile.

Two compact hot girls dressed as elves got elaborately tied up in the doorway
of the “dungeon” room, their wrists tied behind their heads and their upper
bodies bound in baroque complications; there were cameras everywhere, so I
demurely did not shoot any of the action. One huge guy, probably 6′4″ or
better, hugely muscled but going a bit soft, wore Marilyn Manson light
blue/white contacts, a leather thong, and nothing else. He had three-inch
black fingernails. A girl in leather halter top and fishnets enthusiastically
shredded her fishnets, bit by bit. Lots of spike hair, random leather. Very
laid back.

It was Mistress Harlequin’s birthday and there was cake promised for later, and
I’m sure the cake would have been an outrageous hoot, but it’s not like I know
who Mistress Harlequin is, or anything, so I left that part alone.

I got all inspired at home when I noted that Miss Persia at the door would pass
judgment on all patrons, and that if you came in or qualified as “leather,
latex, creative goths . cyberpunks. cyberdrags . material girls.
fashionistas… alternative sexiness…… and anyone who can leave their
inhibitions at home!” it was only $5, up to $7 if you at least wore all black,
and $10 if you came in “drab.” You know what lengths I’ll go to to save five
bucks, so I ransacked the closet.

I came up with my old faux-leather plastic pants (the PVC shirt fits a little
snug, it, uh, must have shrunk, so I left that aside), which are falling apart
but still hold together, a leather vest, and a black silk shirt. Miss Persia
asked me to open my jacket when I got there, surveyed the goods, and welcomed
me in at the insider price, which left me inordinately pleased.

Jenny and Selina were set to go on around 12:30, and they pretty much did. One
number each. The crowd seemed curious about the performance but didn’t get it
– Jenny did “Personal Jesus,” with a few new tricks on top, Selina did “Little
Red Corvette” — and if I hadn’t been there to whoop and holler I think they
wouldn’t have had much applause. People had a different agenda.

Since faux-leather plastic pants don’t count if no one sees them, I went up to
Rockwood for a final Chocolate Stout before heading home; Ken didn’t notice
my outfit so I had to point it out.

The pants don’t breathe, of course, but they are plenty warm.

Ciao – L.

The main quality of last night was three simple hard-to-forget letters: hot. That’s hot, H-O-T, hold the L Baltimore, not hottie or hott or HOTS, just hot. H. O. T. Goddam it was hot. This was hot like all of a sudden you realize you’ve been in the steam room longer than you thought and your eyes are starting to melt. Drippy, sodden, slicky, squicky, sticky. Hot. It was downright caloric.

Because I was screwing around too much at the office I stayed late to finish up stuff I should have finished earlier (Bad Linus! Bad, Naughty Linus! Wrist => Slap), which left me late to Michal the Girl’s CD release show at Rockwood Music Hall. Michal the Girl hints: girl, named Michal, pronounced Mike’ll, and a delightful creature. Don’t worry about the rest, it’s one of those sins-of-the-parents deals. “Hey! I know! Let’s give her a boy’s name, but spell it differently! What a cool idea! And turn on that lava lamp while you’re up.”

Michal has always been clever, spiky, and tuneful. Her new music embraces space instead of trying to fill it, and draws you in like a hazy murmuring day by the ocean — full of motion, forward and back. She’s got a big strong voice and not long ago she largely kept it leashed and heeling. Now she’s found her pride of stride, and my half of the set feels like the business end, with not a step out of place.

I love the Lascivious Biddies, and if you’ve seen them then you do too. In MusicDish this past spring I described them this way: “Poised somewhere between Rockapella and the cast of 42nd Street, plus keys and strings, Lee Ann and Amanda and Deidre and Saskia mix urban grit, urbane wit and girl’s-gotta-do cocktail dress style into a show that leaves us grinning wide with incendiary sophisticated glee.”

It’s all as true as ever, even crammed in close on the small Rockwood stage. That’s Saskia pictured above with her double bass in a moment from last night; click through and explore around for a few more Biddy shots on my Flickr stream. Everything the Biddies do is charm-packed and pulled off with cheeky style, except for the bits that are flat-out breathtaking. When their set is over, a giddy air of camaraderie hangs gently in the summer bloom.

At d.b.a. The Contingent holds court, and the Beer Grab-Bag (well, grab-bottle would be more like it) cooler is set up on the back bar: you get to fish around in there among the odds and sods from their basement bins for $3.00 a go with no peeking, or, well, no scrutiny but if you’re picky, and I am, they sometimes let a fellow take the occasional glance. I spy with my little eye a Dogfish Head label of some sort. Dogfish Head, out of Rehoboth Beach, DE, is one of the finest small breweries in America, and since I’ve basically never met a Dogfish beer I didn’t like I hook it out and squint it up to the light.

It’s not just a beer — it’s a Dogfish WorldWide Stout, a limited-edition dark roasty beer brewed, as the label says, “with a ridiculous amount of barley.” It’s hard to find, it’s glorious, it’s the strongest beer in the world (ranging from 18% to 23% alcohol, year to year), and it’s not the cheapest 12-ounce bottle on the block. But it is tonight.

Sean, who knows my beer habits from years on both sides of the bar, laughs. “That’s like drinking four pints, that is,” he says, as I set to on my prize. Later he’ll dare me to finish a half of Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Barleywine, which is fortuitously on tap (Christmas in July, you know), to wash down the WorldWide Stout. It’s an outrageously bad idea.

So what do I win?

I’ve been a fan of The Jess from the first time I clapped eyes on her quick, funny, busy blog, Blind Cavefish. She’s a writer with a unique voice, one that carries far and sweeps particularly wide. Plus we have similar tastes in Really Bad Monster Movies and a fantastically unhealthy tolerance for Great Zombie Flicks, which we devour avidly. If she didn’t like to sit in the back of the theatre instead of down row 3, I’d have proposed by now. (I’m not unreasonable. Row 5 could work for me as well.)

Last night the ongoing WYSIWYG Talent Show reading series, which has been outing blinking bloggers since Valentine’s Day of 2004, took on Summer Camp as its theme. Jess was one of the performers.

Now, Jess will insist that she’s paralyzed by crowds, likely to drape herself with lucky herbs or suck down feline quaaludes or mix red wine with gin fizzes and the like before staggering up under stage lights. When push comes to shove she turns out to be not a trooper, but a natural: easy and funny and charming, with a smile that comes quick and dazzling under theatre lights and a great story to tell.

Overall a terrific show, with Jess positioned between an outrageously funny riff on masturbation, dirty songs, and clueless puppy love by Jonny Goldstein and an equally outrageously funny Cukoo’s Nest story by Susie Felber of being the lone unhandicapped girl at a Special Needs camp (when Mom said “special,” you see, she didn’t mean special special, she just meant “special.” You can see how this could come about).

Round the corner we rolled after the show to sample the new neighborhood beer bar, Hop Devil, where suddenly it was midnight. Hoegaarden was the beer of choice in general, and I stuck with St. Bernardus Abt and Moinette — yummy — and managed to persuade a curious Roxy to plunge her sorrows into a plucky glass of Saison du Pont, which she handled very well and, I think, only regretted slightly, in a “who is this strange man and why is he making me drink strange beer” way.

Then there was pizza — because how could we not? — and a we-been-drinkin’ cab back to the hood with Curly. This morning came on quick and firm. “You,” it said. “You there. Out the bed. Prepare to be boarded.”

“…If it didn’t ‘ave an ‘ole in it, it wouldn’t be a ‘oop, would it?” (That’ll separate the casual Monty Python gigglers from the true Monty Python geeks, that will.)

If it’s the second Monday of the month then this must be the crazed take-no-prisoners hoopy off-color burlesque love-fest that is Miss Saturn’s Hulapalooza. It’s a giddy night, after a weekend that plunged off the rails for many — something in the air, or the aftermath of something in the news perhaps — and leave it to Miss Saturn to grab hold of abstracted distraction and turn it into a beautiful lunacy.

This ain’t the crispest show on the block, but it is the funnest. In among the widely appreciated costume malfunctions, the occasional hula hoop soars into the crowd. We whoop it back. Volunteers charge up for the Hoop Factor interludes, in which the goal is to keep the thing airborne for 30 seconds while still qualifying for a spanking from Miss Saturn. Because of course you must be punished for dropping the hoop, if you drop the hoop. So when in doubt, you drop the hoop. It’s a bit like letting the Wookie win. Some things you just can’t question. In any event, the evening titters on, and pandemonium rules.

“Work the pickup,” Miss Saturn advises one rapt contestant as she leans over to pick up an errant hoop. She’s bent over double, and she glances at the audience from between her legs. “Work … the … pickup.” She wiggles; we roar. “Hey!” she protests. “That wasn’t loud enough!” We oblige.

Pinkie Special makes her hooping debut to a fanfare of happy support, and Miss Saturn (no Hulapalooza Pepper entry is complete without a Miss Saturn picture) treats us all to chills, frills, and much much more. Groovehoops guy Malcolm the Spinning Ball of Light is mesmerizing, with and without hooping partner Bec; Malcolm is pictured above both because we normally only ever have pictures of girls and we might lose our massive Title IX Blogger Grants if we don’t give equal time, and also because, as Miss Saturn puts it: “Wow! What a package!”

(Bec is also mesmerizing with and without her hooping partner Malcolm, for those of you in the bleachers. But those pictures didn’t really come out except for the ones that came out too much, so.)

As midnight comes and goes, Miss Saturn grills a Hoop Factor volunteer from the audience. He’s some sort of Reverend, or perhaps the correct term is “ahem Reverend.” He’s vague on the details. “But wait,” she says, consternation clear on her face. “Does that mean you are celibate?” He explains that he is celibate, but not chaste. “So you just fool around,” she muses, even more puzzled. He explains that he goes all the way, but won’t get married, which is exactly what every single woman I know is busy complaining about without even dealing with religious vows.

“Ah,” says Miss Saturn, who is wise in this way. “Ah.” Reverend Mark, Reverend Mark, please come to the white courtesy dictionary.

I am none of the bodies, airborne or paddling, pictured above: I’m the one stationed on top of the boat and behind the camera, where the Hudson River is not.

Sunday’s sail on the Ventura is splendid in every way. Sunday is the kind of day that promises heat the way autumn promises winter; you can feel the stuff trembling in the air, wavering behind the trees, turning over in the cover of mute buildings. The call of the harbor is easy to answer — “Yes! Yes! Take me, take me!” — and we are at capacity on the dock, abuzz on board the boat.

Sky Captain laid in a handy stock of Aventinus, a dark and gorgeous wheat doppel-bock that turns lethal in relentless sun. Fortunately, I’m a professional, and kids don’t try this at home. Aventinus comes in creamy and layered, lively in the mouth with a forward wash of caramel and a thin raspberry trail in the finish. So does the next one. The one after that comes in like maybe you should turn off your cell phone. Otherwise you might go making 11 minute 42 second phone calls to cute girls you should probably leave alone after belting those in the sun and chasing with a pomegranate slushy margarita.

Oops. Well, what can I say. It’s summer.

The trick to swimming in the Hudson is to watch your tides, and Captain Pat has this game down. New York Harbor is a huge estuary basin, which means that it is actually an extension of the ocean that has powerful tides and mingles salt water with fresh. The tidal pulse runs 150 miles up the river, nearly half of the way along its full length. What this means if you’re not a naturalist is that right after high tide, down by the mouth of the harbor, the water around the boat is pretty much ocean water, which hardly ever dissolves the skin off your bones right before your eyes or turns anyone into The Toxic Avenger. So in you go.

I’m not much of a swimmer and the current is perky, so I stay aboard to, you know, man the guns and flog the loblolly boys and that. When I go swimming in deep water it’s more a matter of concerted not-drowning than easy enjoyment. But I’ll take my plunge on the next trip anyway, as I do every year. Taking those few panicked strokes in the Hudson River, anchored off Liberty State Park between Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, gives a guy some decent bragging rights.

Note to self about pomegranate slushy margaritas: yuk. What were you thinking?

EDIT: An under-appreciated feature of this blog, by the way, is our “Last Year” tag in the right menu column — clicking that will bring you to whatever was happening around now in the summer of 2004. Sometimes this is not very interesting, but often it’s fun. Today the link is to this post, which does a pretty fair job of catching up to what last year felt like. This year’s summerhead is like last year’s summerhead, but with a five in it. And that changes the flavor.

What with the good fireworks on the Fourth and the bad news from London, last week thumped my blogging schedule around. This entry was nearly ready to post the day bombs disrupted London’s workaday commute; it was not appropriate for that morning. This past weekend will henceforth be known as The Time of Catastrophic Fun, and I didn’t have a composed moment to get going on it. Thus: here it is today.

Last year on July 2nd, we Peppers remembered Marlon Brando, who had just broken on through to the other side. This year I found out that July 2nd is also the day Amelia Earhart disappeared, and the day that Ernest Hemingway shot himself before breakfast.

There’s something wrong with July 2nd. I’d stay away from it, if I were you.

In keeping, July 2nd was my designated beach day but despite the best efforts of forecasters all through New York the clouds refused to budge. So I took my problem to the United Nations (by which we mean I went down to Lobo for a long brunch and settled in to read Master and Commander over a back garden margarita) and then came home to stare at some writing in the computer, trying to make it do what I wanted it to do.

Writing in the computer = 1, Linus = 0 in overtime. And the United Nations suggested that I try going on July 3rd, which doesn’t seem to be such a daffy date.

In the two years since I last made it to the beach the price went up (now $17.00 for round-trip accommodations on the packed packed Long Island Rail Road, including Beach Pass) and the schedule changed, so my speedy arrival at Flatbush just in time for the old 11:04 left me rather late for the new 10:48 instead. A change in Jamaica and I’m in a train with no seats left and a smoochy can’t-keep-their-hands-off couple to my right, which I wouldn’t mention but it’s been a while since my hands had someone they couldn’t keep off and, you know, get a room. But they’re blinded with happiness and I’m kinda sorta in love myself lately, at least on the inside of my head, so I do my best not to kick them.

Long Beach is crowded but not packed, and the day is simply glorious. I finish the Sunday Times crossword and launch into the twisty reachy choreography where I try to put sunscreen on the part of my back that I can’t reach without dislocating my arms. This doesn’t really work — this never really works — so I’ll spend the rest of the week with a red Bachelor Stripe tingling away under my clothes. Because I’m a guy, see, and when you’re a guy skin cancer is preferable to asking for help. Actually I put some on at home before I left, so I’m only lightly radioactive this time.

After the Sunscreen Dance I make blanket-watch friends with the girls next door; we take turns Keeping An Eye On The Stuff and going into the water, which is warmish and brisk with waves and absolutely green with choppy bits of seaweed. It’s like swimming in salad, and it feels great. I take a picture of a seagull flying against the sun, and because I’m kinda sorta in love myself lately at least on the inside of my head I think about soaring into white heat and setting fire to the wings that hold you in the air. Each stroke as much an end as a beginning. Does empty paper love the pen? Does it love the match?

I call the photo Icarus. And I do my best not to kick myself.

Dealbreaker Typo Dep’t, or Links I Never Followed: “Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin Navel Series: Master and Commander…” Captain Jack’s got an outie, pass it on.