Monday, May. 27, 2002 - 11:00 a.m.
It's Memorial Day. I'm at home. I have no plans to go anywhere or do anything. The thing that sucks about Monday holidays is the fact that since I normally have the day off anyway, it's like any other Monday, but more crowded.
My body is still punishing me from Saturday. I left the apartment at 10:30 in the morning after letting the cleaning lady in and headed off to Brooklyn Heights to do some banking. From there I wandered down Court Street though Cobble Hill and into Carroll Gardens. I hadn't been in Carroll Gardens in what must be years. At least it seems like years. It's pretty much the way I left it: the same restaurants (including the chinese place called Me and My Eggroll, which has always made me laugh), the same shops, the creepy Italian social club.
From Carroll Gardens, I walked to Park Slope, where I was planning on attending a picnic in the afternoon. My walk took my though the industrial wasteland in between, full of parking lots for fleets of Verizon and Con Edison vans and warehouses storing god knows what. I also had to cross the Gowanus Canal, an industrial sludge stream which flows (just barely) from New York Harbor into Brooklyn. There were several people painting pictures of the canal, which made me laugh, because there's no way to make a pretty picture out of it.
Got to the picnic, which was a going away party for friends who are heading to DC for the summer. There were quite a few people there, most a whom I didn't know (quickly becoming the story of my life). There was plenty of food and a Swedish game that was somewhere between horseshoes and bocce and a kite shaped like a plane that just didn't want to fly. We kicked around the soccer ball for a while, and then played kickball, whcih quickly became more of a pursuit of obligation than one of entertainment.
We headed to someone's house near the park, where people played cards and drank beer and I burned my hand trying to flip a burger. After a few hours we headed to a party in Red Hook. I should have gone home since I had to get up on Sunday at 7am, but I stayed out until 1:30 or so. It was pretty uneventful. I was already exhausted. At one point I was trying to climb out the window of the apartment onto a roof deck and this girl wouldn't get her butt out of the way. She shouted, "You know you love my sweet ghetto ass!" at me. Or something like that.
Got up Sunday morning at 7 and took a bus to West Orange. Drove a van from West Orange back to Brooklyn. Did a show. Made my sunburn worse. Drove back to West Orange. Took a bus and a train back to New York. Got home at 9 and fell asleep.
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