Weekly round-up:
On Friday, my college friend Elysia, who's now working at our upstate-New York alma mater, and my friend Jason, from New York City, came to Philadelphia to visit Jenna and I before we leave. I met Jason after work on Friday to see Tragedy downtown. We went to Trader Joe's with his friends and ran into Tony Pointless. Lots of stage-diving, which is a neat trick when the stage is 18 inches off the floor. A drunk guy kept collapsing into the pit and getting stepped on, so, in a surprising display of solidarity, a bunch of dudes lifted him up and crowd-surfed him to the back of the crowd. Somehow I ended up getting stuck with him draped over my shoulders, so I propped him up against a pillar and left. I'm pretty sure he soiled himself. Tragedy played two covers for the encore - "Holocaust," by Crisis and Blitz' "Never Surrender." Veri tuff.
Elysia and Jenna were at a gay club, so we headed there afterwards. I've never been to a club before, nor a gay bar. A guy kept taking off Jason's glasses and trying them on, or putting them back on Jason's face askew. Totally weird night. It was awesome seeing Elysia and Jason, both really fantastic people.
Saw the Liberty Bell and the Edgar Allen Poe house on Sunday with Elysia. The Edgar Allen Poe house is probably the worst museum ever. It's basically a very small house with unfurnished rooms and walls flaking probably lead-based paint, with very little in the way of exposition. The shelves in the rooms were strewn with newspaper clippings, crappy art, and Poe poems on un-laminated printer paper. Some of the clippings seemed connected in only the most tangential way to Poe - a story from a few years ago on the reality-TV-wannabes who claimed their kid had gotten swept away on a weather balloon, for instance, which, if I were to guess, is supposed to tie into the Poe "Balloon Hoax" story. But it's a stretch. The kitchen shelves contained nothing but a frankly terrifying stuffed orangutan and a half-full jar of molasses.
On Tuesday, I got the Professor to rap for me. He tried several freestyles, each of which touched on his mother being a prostitute and shopping at the smack shack. The Professor, whose real name is Tim, is a regular character/nuisance around Rittenhouse Square, distinguishable by a curious, round face, big glasses, and a predilection for ill-fitting suits. He used to have a bunch of Einstein hair, but he's trimmed it down, for the hot weather, maybe. The Professor describes himself as a photojournalist, and indeed, he has the rumpled, perma-drunk gonzo look nailed down quite flat. You could easily imagine him wearing a fedora with a press pass stuck into the band. I don't think he's homeless, nor obviously mentally ill, although his claim that he works for the New York Times is dubious at best, and he delights in telling customers that they're getting cancer from their plastic cups (before asking to borrow their cell phones). After his rap he tried to convince me that the Russian army was going to stage a coup in the United States under the guise of an extraterrestrial attack, at the behest of the Rockefellers.
There are lawmakers right now discussing, as a legitimate political issue, whether or not it's okay to force doctors to stick a probe in a woman's vagina for no medical reason other than to shame her for trying to control her own body. Why do people buy into power-behind-the-throne theories when the king is already getting away with murder? Real life is scarier than conspiracy theories.
Last night, taking the trash out, I tried awkwardly to whistle, then yell to gain the attention of some friends of mine. I did not succeed. Moments later a trash bag lurched off the side of the can and exploded on the road. It took upwards of twelve seconds to pick up the trash, which was irritating, but not as irritating as finding part of a coffee stirrer, carried down my arm on a rivulet of sticky coffee-dairy-sugar trash juice, stuck to my armpit. Everything sucks.
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