Random II.

I just returned from a quick holiday/birthday visit with my parents. I took 4 trains. Each way.

I have always been fascinated by mass transportation. Trains, planes, boats, etc. Good thing, too, since I don't have a car. It has become almost a challenge for me to attempt to get to places via mass transit. Granted, the time frame is double that of someone with a Point-A-to-Point-B car, but I am happy knowing that I can go just about anywhere without one, even though it may take me all day to do so. For example, I once walked 400 feet from my front door to a bus stop and ended up on Nantucket Island. Pretty cool.

While I was visiting the parents at Point Pleasant, my mother broke some very UNpleasant news to me. A little background: since I can remember, we rented houses for a few weeks every summer on the boardwalk in Point Pleasant. These weeks invariably coincided with my birthday, which fell squarely in the middle of our summer fun. My parents did wonderful things for me: dinners, a custom airbrushed sweatshirt from the local airbrush artist (who was tyrannized by idiots wanting palm tree-sunset license plates and little Fido plates and so forth) featuring an exploding head, and most wonderful of all, special morning birthday breakfasts starring about a dozen Hoffman's honey-glazed donuts, delivered via my father in a simple white box tied with a red-and-white string. They were about my favorite food in the universe. The fact that I could only get them once a year no doubt added to the allure. And now the bad news: Hoffman's Donuts is no longer. Old Man Hoffman got old, the building owner wanted to sell the joint, and with no one to take over the business, Mr. Hoffman chose retirement. And so. After more than 25 years of sticky fingers and honey glaze sweetness, I shed a tear for Hoffman's Donuts. Sucks. Really sucks.

I hate change. Well, that kind of change, anyway.

My parents have a new boat neighbor. He's from Staten Island and he owns 75 garbage trucks and a hundred thousand dollar car and a girlfriend with a deep tan and fake boobs who reads Star Magazine. Their old neighbor was a guy who was married and brought his girlfriend down along with some buddies and got totally wasted every weekend and at one point waved a finger at my mother and said, "What happens on A Dock, stays on A Dock." A classy bunch, these boaters.

I am pretty happy right now. Lots going on. Lots of amazing things on the horizon. It's the kind of change I like. Résumés going out Wednesday. Web site up Wednesday as well. Finally. Other good stuff, too. Really, really good stuff.

Khan is totally adorable. I'm not just saying that because I'm his mommy. No. He's really cute. He missed me while I was gone and has been trying very hard to stay in my lap while I've been typing all this. Lap cat.

I walked around today, about eight miles in all. Did a few quick laps on the boardwalk and then some after-pizza calorie expending down to the park. It was lovely. I got sunburned.

And now, I'm completely exhausted. As my consciousness dwindles in front of the TV, I see a commercial. It seems pretty important. The well-dressed and well-spoken but serious young woman is telling me that the next 60 seconds are so important that I'm not going to want to miss a word of what she has to tell me. The background looks very official-looking. I'm thinking it's going to be something about how there are millions dying in Darfur, or how hundreds of thousands have perished in a bullshit war, or some other atrocity that might require my immediate attention, as she has stated she needed. No. It's none of these. She goes on to tell me that my cable company hasn't been straight with me. No. They have not been making the strides in HD programming that they'd have me believe. But DirecTv offers over a 150 channels of HD, over three times that of cable! Holy shit!

Fire.

Plato wrote that "necessity is the mother of invention." Not only does necessity inspire invention, but I would add that it also ignites progress as a whole (invention being one of its properties). I am finding that it is necessary to be a responsible individual, and not having any sort of stable income prohibits me from certain aspects of this. There are fees associated with progress.

Some things are of necessity. Other things are of desire.

For me, desire comes in the form of a 1250 square foot loft in Jersey City, complete with sealed concrete floors, a slop sink, a beautiful kitchen, a nice (but small) bathroom, and a huge (HUGE!) rooftop deck that one could easily imagine having lots of summer BBQ parties on.

Karl and I went this week to look at the dream: the converted warehouse loft apartment. It was a dream I've had since I was in high school, no doubt inspired by the ridiculous portrayal of artists in the 70's and 80's on the big screen, all living in impossibly large loft apartments that were apparently very cheap. I wanted this life. I even wrote it in as a quote beneath my senior picture: "... to live in a renovated warehouse in NYC..," or something like that.

Now, as an adult, I've all but given up on this dream. NYC real estate costs are unimaginably prohibitive, and in the brief period I lived in Manhattan, I discovered that real estate wasn't the only thing that was ludicrously overpriced. Everything from salad to cable emptied my pockets pretty quickly. Even the old stand-by college meal of ramen noodles and watered-down OJ couldn't sustain me. NYC kicked my ass. I moved back to NJ. To Hoboken.

My dream was over. Or so it seemed. While I've been accepting of my 250 square foot lifestyle, I knew it wouldn't be long before I'd make a move again. I love to cook. I love to entertain. I love big, open, sunlit spaces. These are things that aren't really possible in my little apartment.

And then one day, doing the usual googling and musing, I found it. The dream. Sure, it's in Jersey City, but it comes with a view of the Empire State Building, reminding one exactly where one is. I told K about it and he suggested we go and take a look-see. And we did.

Open sun-lit spaces. 14 foot ceilings. Huge "entertaining" kitchen. I walked into that kitchen and my mind's eye cut to me preparing meals, cooking foods I love to cook but haven't been able to in over a year. The breakfast bar became a window to a future of cheese platters and fruit and wine glasses. The roof deck was enormous. I saw a future of lots of people lounging around through many summer evenings. I could see all of it. The future. In there. The things that would turn away the usual renovated loft apartment seeker were huge virtues to both me and K: the concrete floors, the unfinished ceilings, the lack of room division, the slop sink. And, as K noted, it was lovely to discover that a place like this exists! Fixed up in only the ways I'd want it to be (kitchen, bath), the space is raw, open, and full of possibility.

And now, the fire under my ass, once fueled by necessity, is now being intensified by desire. If you get an invitation to a house-warming in about six months or so, don't be surprised!

Sport.

Mother's Day. Visited Mom and hung out with Dad, Nana, Brother, Sister and assorted others who stopped in to say hello. Before dinner (Dad made red wine pasta: pasta cooked in entire pot of boiling red wine with spices and other yummies), we all decided to have a walk on the Appalachian Trail.

The AT runs behind our house through a protected marshland and has been, where previously inaccessible, painstakingly constructed into a serpentine 1.5 mile boardwalk that meanders lazily through cattails and tall marsh grasses. There are benches that dot the length of the walk, where one can sit and enjoy the glorious natural surroundings. It is quite literally a breath of fresh air for this city girl, whose only experiences with nature include dodging dog poop, killing occasional waterbugs, planning attacks on the platoons of ants that invade my apartment whenever it rains and strolling along the waterfront, whose trees and parks are copiously obscured by the view across the river.

While we were walking, we encountered a woodpecker, turtles, watersnakes, a muscrat and all sorts of birds I didn't know the names for. It was all so deliciously invigorating.

My mother stopped to chat with a fellow she had apparently seen a few times before. She said hello, and then: "Well, you seem to be doing a lot better today. The last time I saw you, you weren't doing so well." He said yes, smiled, and we all continued on our way. She elaborated on the man's despondency and revealed this fun little tale:

Many locals walk this section of the AT on a regular basis, my mother and this man being two of them. In addition to the above wildlife, they have been witness to some sensational sightings. Bears are a common spectacle, hawks, herons, someone reported seeing a cougar; I was fortunate enought to see a bobcat. At least I think it was a bobcat. My mother, along with this man and some others, would periodically catch sight of a spectacular buck, who apparently liked to hang out in the small crags above the trail.

One fine morning, as my mother was readying herself for school, she heard a rally of gunshots coming from the woods behind the house, in the general vicinity of where that majestic animal had been spotted. She ran out and started yelling at the top of her lungs: "STOP IT, YOU PIGS!!!"

They didn't stop it.

Later that afternoon, she walked down to the AT to find the grisly evidence of that morning: the entire length of the boardwalk was painted in the buck's thick blood, undoubtedly where the hunters had dragged it from the woods. Bits of entrails and other assortments of gore were littered along the horrific track of blood, indicating that not only was this animal hunted and killed, but as my mother suspected (considering the number of shots she heard), was in fact, and quite literally, blown to bits. It was not a pleasant discovery. Many of the people who had been fortunate enough to witness this creature in the wild were crying, including the man who seemed "much better today."

It seemed beyond sport. Why hunting is actually considered a sport is beyond me and only solidifies my belief that most of us are primitive, sadistic bastards who revel in destruction. (Case in point: we elected a president whose legacy will be the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and this fact doesn't seem to be setting off any urgent alarms among us.)

Back to the buck. This killing was not sport. Ignoring the fact that they were hunting a few hundred yards from a residential neighborhood, they would never have been there in the first place had they not previously known exactly where to go. The act was not only cruel butchery, but was obviously committed by a bunch of milquetoasts who were incapable of the actual sport aspect of hunting.

I hope they all get drunk and shoot themselves in places that really hurt. Or at the very least, die, so there might be a few less witless assholes on this planet.