Last night I went to a tek lintowe show if you can believe it. I brought my girlfriend Serena, my girlfriends friend Wyatt, my friend Jaren, my friend Ed, my friend Jaren's new friend Katya that is a girl but also a romantic interest. My review of the lineup is as follow: first band was okay, second band was good, third band was okay. There were a few problems with the show, the primary of which being that it clearly had not been really planned. I imagine that part of the problem was that it was organized by 20-year olds.
That is not to say that they did a bad job or even that there is something wrong with being 20. There are a whole host of things that are awesome about 20 year olds. What they lack in foresight and ability to delay gratification they make up for in general randomness and an ever-present impulse to create. I'm generalizing of course but being a kid is cool generally speaking. And the show had all of those things I just listed but it just felt too haphazard to be truly good.
Anyways, this blog post is actually about last Saturday Feb 25, 2024. I write this while hungover on Sat Mar 2, 2024. I just smoked a little bit of a dab pen. My girlfriend Serena and her roommate Grace also smoked the dab pen. A bit more than me. I suspect that they are actually high. Me, I am just lightly high.
Nursing homes are especially strange in the city. From the outside you don't see a lot of action and even if you live near one you rarely ever get to develop a sense of what life is like inside of one. Even the nice/bougie ones have this bunker-like quality. And when they are in the city it amplifies all of the strangeness because it has to try that much harder to keep itself somehow separate from the world outside.
My grandma and grandpa spent their final years in a nursing home in White Plains. My grandma, Nan, as my brothers and I called her, took us out frequently to go shopping for clothes and skateboards and video games. Just classic boy bull-crap. And we loved her for it. My grandpa, Fred, did not do this but would peacefully preside over Saturday night dinners with the extended family at various Italian restaurants across the tri-state area. My grandma experienced cognitive decline before she entered the nursing home so I think she was only half-aware that she was in a nursing home. My grandpa was of sound mind the entire time he was in there, though perhaps luckily he died maybe a year after he entered the nursing home at the end of 2019, right before lockdown.
I did not visit my grandparents often at the nursing home. I don't think that they necessarily expected me to necessarily but I still feel guilty about it. Similar situation to that with Hilke. I want to take care of everyone (really every being, animals included) but the reality of life is that if you want your own you can't. We don't have the social infrastructure to make this happen. And I only just recently got good enough at taking care of myself to even consider taking care of someone or something else.
Serena and I set off from her apartment at around 1pm on Sat Feb 24, 2024. It was sunny. But it was that winter sort of sun where it sort of glazes everything and has a nice blunted quality. We were in good spirits and had plans to head to a bar we like called The Adirondack. We both like the Windsor Terrace of Sobro (south Brooklyn). I actually looked a couple of apartments there a year-and-a-half ago but found that it was both pricey and inconvenient. But now I live in the Upper West Side which is similarly pricey and inconvenient (at least in terms of access to Brooklyn where all of my friends and my gf live).
Our journey to the Adirondack took us past Eastern Parkway then along the eastern border of Prospect Park. Eastern parkway was designed to satisfy the needs of residents of first-class housing developments. In New York if you hear the word "Parkway" it generally means there are rich people nearby. As Serena would say, it is wealthy-coded. When you walk along it it certainly has a "grand" feel to it. The tiles are hexagonal if I remember correctly. Hexagons are cool because they are closer to circular than pentagons or rectangles or triangles. A circle has an infinite number of sides I guess. Actually, no it doesn't I looked it up. But unofficially and for the sake of the blog it does.
On the subject of mathA vector is an object that has both magnitude (its length) and direction. A zero vector is a vector of magnitude 0 that simultaneously points in all directions and no directions. If you stand in one place long enough and allow yourself to be present you too can be like the zero vector: projecting out in all directions without really doing anything at all. Sorry bear with me you motha-fricka. I went daydrinking with my girl, her roommate Grace, and Grace's friend Luke.
Old people like to walk, they like to go to diners, they like to read. If an old person likes to do something then thats a pretty good indicator it is a peaceful undertaking that is worthwhile. Unless it is racist or otherwise intolerant, etc.
I'm going to pivot right here. To the subject of the Grubhub Army ©. Actually no I'm not. I wrote that 1 week ago and seeing as it was appx. 168 hours since I had that idea it is no longer fully formed in my head. Why am I leaving this portion in here, I'm not sure. It's my damn blog mothafricka!
This morning I was listening to this guy talking to his computer. That is what we all seem to like to do these days... Anyways, he was talking about how in one potential future of ours we will be living in a Water World style place where people are confined to cities in bubbles. The people that survive are those that made it to the bunkers in time. In this imagined future one of these cities will belong to the Mormons who form a collectivist, Cyber Utah. Of these new cities it will be the most functional one. The other cities will be debauched and aimless, filled with people who have long since given up on working together. Technological gluttons who feel no pleasure but are still yet possessed by a single-minded pursuit of it.
Now why is that you may wonder? Why would Mormons be so successful in a world of diminishing resources? Because they can function collectively. They work together and are therefore able to accomplish things that seem impossible to the rest of us. Think Mitt Romney and Orrin Hatch or the $100 billion dollar "clandestine hedgefund". Or think of the missionaries wondering around Queens looking especially out of place. I am not saying Mormonism is the way. There are plenty of issues with it and I myself am not interested in joining the religion. However, I am saying that there are some things we can learn from the Mormons.
We all need a framework around which we can construct our lives. Religion as we know it, though outdated, does still offer that. And interestingly, Mormonism, a relatively young religion, does a better job than most at accomplishing that for our present-day than most of the older ones. It teaches you self-mastery and discpline and how to commit yourself to the wellbeing of others.
As I was walking around Central Park today I had a related thought. My older brother got me into dance music around 2012. So 13 years ago. I was taken aback by how soulful some of it could be while still sounding electronic and by the modern emotions it could conjure with its alien sounds. The music was big in Europe but didn't have the same traction in America save some of America's major metropolitan areas (New York, Detroit, Chicago). In order to fully appreciate the music you need to experience it in a club dancing with lots of other people doing the same. To be honest, I have not done much clubbing but I have enjoyed it when I have and I've done it enough to appreciate the music in that way.
Anyways, I'd always wondered why dance music has never fully taken off in America. I know that EDM is popular but I think that's a separate thing because it lacks soul and emotional content and really just satisfies a sort of indulgent desire that isn't particularly good for you. As I was walking today though it struck me that Americans don't know what it means to enjoy something communally. We are "atomized" as they say, and dance music is very much a communal music that requires a desire to be a part of lurching, throbbing, mass of people. This desire is inherent in all humans but we have had it beaten out of us by a cultural virus of narcissism and a blunt-force individualism.
Dance music is repetitive. It is stripped of the flourish of elaborate arrangement or song-parts. If it has vocals they are often short and open-ended more often-than-not guiding but not defining the song in which they are embedded. It demands a patience and participation from the listener, asking you to give to it as it gives to you. To be fully realized it needs the participation of you and those around you. All of this is to say that listening to it by yourself on headphones ony our morning commute to your job as a product manager at Asana is not going to be a particularly satisfying experience. It is an ego-less music in a way that Americans find confounding. If you choose to listen to dance music you will learn a lot about yourself but it doesn't allow you to imagine yourself as the protagonist in any story. It is not the mirror you examine your face in as you apply the 17th step in your Korean skincare regime.
Anyways rant done. Here are some more pictures.
I am finishing this up on Sunday at 5:33 pm. Serena is skiing out West with her girlfriends. I miss her but I'm happy that she's enjoying herself. She's earned it, that's for sure. I will probably eat an early dinner, clean up really quickly, then go skate at Riverside skate park.
Signing off, Will : ).