Oh My God Whatever Etc.

Saturday we were talking about getting old and it's funny because we're not but these conversations are the conversations had until it's finally true.

Saturday's idee fixe (and the idee fixe of most Saturdays) on aging came out of spending time with an old friend who is getting married in three weeks. Spending time with people who are appropriately in love for each other brings a balance to the world. This means that there are equally sunny and breezy 80 degree days possible in the middle of July, where the day starts with overpriced brunch with the couple that never lets you feel like the third hand, turns into hookah and limeade, a walk through Manhattan to a dissection of humanity (and rice pudding) in SoHo, they leave and I go to Washington Square Park and encounter live music by a five piece band of international musicians safely away from the shirtless exhibitionists by the fountain.

I split ten dollars between tipping the band and losing miserably to a homeless chess master at the southwest corner of the block where Bobby Fischer used to play. I walk toward home and I stop to take a picture of a family from Spain that wanted a shot with the semi-distant Empire State Building sprouting from the top of their arms.

And then it pauses with me vacillating on a hammock between reading and slumber, air and stillness. I think about the mistakes that I made years ago and then think about ones made recently and I think about what I'm going to learn from it. I think about the two weeks notice I put in at work the day before and plan my roadtrip home to Houston to retire my car, plan my next month in France, plan grad school and plan the next five years of life. I ponder my failing eyesight (and that I'm getting old) and wonder whether my new glasses make me look like too much of a hipster.

I sleep and read again and other friends arrive and we grill steaks and drink too much beer and play cards and more people come over and we listen to bad music and talk about growing old and then go out to the bars. First, we fill up each of the three flasks I've collected because we're too cheap to pay for drinks at the bars where girls we'd want to meet would ever be. We walk and sweat and plot, the night unravels as it does, two of the original three of us end up vomiting from oversaturation (I won't say which two except that one was definitely me) at varied points in the evening.

I wake sick on Sunday and run three miles and feel worse and meet a visiting friend from high school and we go to the Guggenheim where for $15 you can see the most uninspired shit to be purchased and christened art (seriously, at least 15 pieces listed as "untitled", one of which was five standard florescent lights in a half-circle on the floor). We walk through Central Park and meet another friend from home and eventually join a fourth friend from our high school circle at a kosher pizza place in Times Square where we see that after a year he is still happily married and religious and they pray after the meal while the rest of us digress about all topics sexual and misogynistic. I go home to do laundry and almost remembered to buy milk.