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Sunday, May. 26, 2002 / 12:30 p.m. ~Desultory Conversation Amidst a Background of Hazy Jazz and Bossa Nova Beats~ I went into the bathroom a little while ago, to sit on the toilet, and in came running both cats, both of them, to be with me. I instantly thought of Aimee's entry from last week, and her three (three, right?) cats doing the same thing. Of course Norma doesn't like to share my affection with Gladys, so she left, Gladys stayed a bit, then they were both gone. Could've been my chiding that sent them away. They love weekends. They can follow me all around, surround me, sit on me, sleep with me. Gladys and I both woke so early this morning, before 6:00, and neither of us could get back to sleep for quite some time. We lay spooning until we drifted off once again. But it was really hard. Why? My mind just went blank. Scary, that seldom happens. I had things to write about and for one brief moment it was all lost, like when you're new to Diaryland and you find out how easy it is to lose an entire entry if you key into this blank window and hit the wrong keys, or something. My credit card company finally resolved the weird charge I'd questioned. Oh yeah, it took them a couple months, or more, but turns out the charge for $25.90, for FOOD, in Salem, VA, was actually me ordering Tony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour online, from the Food Network web site. I need to write these things down. Dammit. I felt so stupid looking at the detailed record of that transaction, reading about how the charge would be incurred after all, along with any finance charges. So what? Now they're going to charge me finance charges for the time it took them to research it??? Fuck me. Seeing Mark again after all this time, almost two years, was great. Like we hadn't really not seen each other. Nothing had changed. It didn't feel different, it felt familiar. We had fun, we've always had fun, that was always the main point. Fun. Companionship. Since it was so hot (how could everyone have complained so loudly last week about it being COLD?!), no, so FUCKING hot, we took his car, the nice car with the cold A/C, and he let me commandeer the CD player, illustrating how Moby has changed since his first CD, "Everything is Wrong", with its headbanging "What Love", how now he is mellow and introspective with songs like "Another Woman" on "18". Yes, I took over, without asking. "Now listen to this.... can you believe THIS is Moby?" "See how on his new album he sounds like THIS?" Could I be any more Moby-d out? Can't help it. A blanket from the back of my car, and everyone should really have a blanket in the back of her car, and we head to the train station to take the train one stop so we don't have to find parking near the Park. I am so wise. Was it a good idea to pay $3.50 a piece, round trip, to save the hassle of looking for street parking? Well, I thought so, what do I know?! As soon as we park, the on-call Mark gets paged to call some Customer and help her with whatever problem she's having with the web site, or whatever. And he was so pissed! Tee hee. But really, the getting there was nothing, and once we were there, the 25th Annual Jazz Festival, presented by GENERAL MOTORS, well, there were people, a real mixed crowd, lots of black, lots of white, not much in between, but I really like a mix, I feel so much more comfortable when a crowd is mixed, and there was art, some tents with stuff for sale, and at one African art tent I saw a print I HAD to have, so I bought it, even though Mark didn't get it at all. That's okay, it was for me. $15. Not bad. Set up the blanket on the grass, and all was well. Joshua Redman, tenor saxophonist, and his "combo", keyboardist, drummer, bass player, nice. Very nice. Like really, really nice. Outside, in the Park, in an area where I don't believe they've ever held shows before. I could be wrong, I haven't gone in years, so yeah, maybe it's just me, but it was in a good spot this time. And, because it was sponsored by GENERAL MOTORS, the sound system was good, and a bit LOUD, so that EVERYONE could hear, but it was LOUD, and we could barely hear ourselves talk! Sure, we should've been listening, right? We were, but it was background to "desultory" conversation. Sure, I had to look it up too when Mark wrote it to me, g'head. No wait, here it is: "progressing aimlessly; disconnected; haphazard". It was. Our conversation. All over the place. Fun. And the people around us, with their incense burning, their citronella candles, their Costco chairs with the cup holders attached, all the wine and beer in bottles, after I'd read no glass was allowed, us with our bottle of water a piece. The one woman, with the all-over tan, the artificial tan, but the nice tan, with the tube top and the thong showing above her pants line, I couldn't stop looking at it, and when she turned she had a homely face, no chin, she was compensating, and doing it rather well, the blond hair, the purple thong, the green striped tube top over the all-over tan, that wonderful shade of brownish white on a Caucasian. The dogs and people and children, the one man holding his newborn, dancing to the music as he cradled her/him, we couldn't tell with the baby in yellow, that beautiful little baby with eyes just barely open, and then the haze..... Incense, marijuana, cigars, hibachi grills, smoke, smoke, haze, haze, it hung in the stagnant air, and I joked that they needed to turn on the ceiling fans, or we needed to step outside for some air, but we WERE outside. The moon rose on the horizon, red at first, then turning to white, a Full Sagittarius Moon, and Mark joked the moon deserved a "shout out" from the stage, and when Bebel Gilberto came out she did just that, "Have you seen the Moon?!", yeah, the Moon, let's hear it for the Moon!!! Whoo!!!! Between Joshua Redman and Bebel Gilberto the large video screen, the one for the people in back who could hear just fine, but couldn't see the stage, but couldn't see the screen because it was blocked by the sound tower in the center of the crowd by the stage, that screen, played commercials. I'm not kidding. COMMERCIALS. Not just for GENERAL MOTORS vehicles, but for KFC!!! Fucking KFC. Just like home, commercials. I said, "If I wanted to watch commercials on TV I'd have stayed home!" and began to get really mad, shouting "Corporate America SUCKS!" and clever things like that. Mark tolerates me really well, and we realized it's because when I lose it like that I usually have a valid reason. I was right. It was getting really dark and we were all lit up by this fucking HUGE video screen, with fucking Jason Alexander telling us that KFC's chicken is better than than a McD's hamburger, in so many words. What the fuck?! I had never been to an outdoor concert with so much advertising and it was enough to make me want to scream and hurl objects, and maybe even leave, but we stayed, trying to breathe amidst the increasing layer of human-produced haze. Talking, laughing, conversing in our desultory way. The announcer could barely say her name, called her by her famous father's name, "And next up is Joao Gilberto, no, his daughter, Babay Gilberto", no you idiot, it's Bebel! "And now everybody welcome, from Brazil, Bebel Gilberto!", yea, finally. She was not as loud as Joshua Redman, and she should've been. Bossa Nova, baby, she was good. Mmmmmm..... Mark doesn't dance, so we didn't dance, and it was annoying that people danced in front of us so we couldn't see if we wanted to, and because they couldn't dance. The woman could only move her whole torso from side to side, could not shake her hips at all, it was freaky. I joked that I was going to stand up and teach her, but we decided that might not be good. And then when the music got really sexy and shimmy-inducing, the couples started kissing as they danced, and then when the music got really dance-y some Deadhead guys (lots of white guys with dreadlocks, lots of dreadlocks period, some were the longest I'd ever seen, on a black guy those were) started jumping up and down and clapping wildly and it was all very entertaining as Mark and I talked, looked at the moon's progress in rising up into the sky, the woman with no ability to move her hips, and commented on the increasing "moistness" of our blanket spread out on the clover. It was fun. Really. I'd do it again. Er, no, not tonight, there's more today and tonight, but I can't handle the absurd and overbearing presence of the corporate sponsorship. I've never seen anything quite like it. Yes, sure, I'm thrilled it's free, but I'm not going to an outdoor show to see commercials shown up on a giant video monitor, with the volume cranked so I'm forced to hear it. And ads for the city, with the voiceover by our new Mayor, and an ad for the fucking festival I'm attending, replete with video shot that very day! HUH?! We listened to Dolly Parton on the way back, and I sang along a bit, not wanting to obscure her beautiful voice too much. I lent the CD to Mark and he lent me his Tenacious D and They Might Be Giants, so I have new music to listen to. And now? Well. I want to go see "The Piano Teacher". And I have cleaning to do, and laundry, and "GL"s on tape, and stuff, you know, but I'm not sure what direction to go in, not yet, and that's perfect, just the way I like it. Oh yeah, I gave in and shaved my legs yesterday. Such a bizarre process. They look pretty good, and I felt comfortable wearing shorts in public, but while it was still light, as Mark and I sat on my blanket in the clover, amidst the incense and citronella candles and marijuana and haze and jazz.... mmmm.... JAZZ..... I looked down at my legs and saw that I had missed fairly large areas of hair behind my knees! I've never done that before. I sat for a bit with my little pocket knife he gave me long ago, the one with the scissors on it, cutting off some of the longer hairs, horrified that someone might have walked along behind me commenting to herself, "Look! She missed a HUGE area of hair behind her knees when she was shaving!"..... well, only mildly horrified, as in not really horrified at all, but still, it was funny. Cost of the War in Iraq
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