anti-epilepsy

there's lots of ice cream shops in potsdam. a sign on the way in says, "potsdam - educational and cultural capital of northern new york."

it was saturday night. the marine, and the polish beatboxing death metal guitar playing DJ guy went back to brooklyn earlier in the afternoon, spooked by car trouble and the prospect of losing their jobs. potsdam was celebrating the fourth of july this weekend, and we went out down to the lake, someone our hosts knew had a house with a dock right on the lake, close to the beach where the fireworks would be going off. there was a barbecue earlier that we missed, i picked at chips, and ate the last hotdogs. "gotta get as much free calories at other people's houses and possible!" i told my friends.

when the fireworks went off and everyone was saying ohh and ahh, i tried to get people to sing the national anthem, or i would say, "U-S-A! U-S-A!" and, omitting the first syllable to be enunciated, would shout "-MERICA!" i said, "viva la mexico!" and a couple in front of me laughed, they were probably thinking "who is this guy?" and said as much. my rasta friend, who i'll call Leo henceforth, tried to introduce me to a girl, and wouldn't tell me what her deal was except that she was weird, but she never came back out. my polish photographer brooklyn friend, who i'll call Darious now, he was talking to the man of the house, who was in a motorized chair, they were talking about photography, i guess the guy in the chair was a high speed photographer, but started out on a journalism beat, trying to beat the cops to the scene of an event he said, to get the picture, and later doing sports stunt photography with his wife. and a stint doing what he called "grins and grips" which i guess is like shaking hands and kissing babies kinda stuff, honorifics and political speeches and so forth. he was enthused, to be talking about his work with some young outsiders, and made vulgar comments about how attractive his wife was.

we left the party as it was dying down. we went back to the house of the painter girl we were staying with, who i'll call jill now. jill's got a boyfriend that i'll conveniently call jack, and jack's cousin was coming over to meet up with us for the evening. she showed up with another guy, and they brought beer and were glad to get out of the car, it was already late. we went over to a party at a collegey sort of house where they had a neon nintendo logo sign in the living room, and a big cardboard cut out of mario from super mario brothers. tom goes to the mayor, an adult swim cartoon from cartoon network, was playing on DVD when we got there. not a lot of people around at the moment, the few that were, they were playing a drinking game that involves trying to throw quarters in your opponents' cups of beer. we put the TV on the video game machine, nintendo wii, and i got to play some virtual bowling with the wireless motion sensing controller. i signed up for the beer quarters game tournament because i'd never tried it before but i guess you're supposed to furnish your own beer for it, and we didn't have any, so we had to walk down to the convenience store to get some. me and jill and leo and jack's cousin's traveling partner walked down, and the other guy and jill bought some packs of beer, and i got a pack of pall mall cigarettes, and a couple slices of pizza because leo told me that it was the best in town, it was gas station convenience store pizza, but he swore by it i guess. he liked to take the new yorkers up here from the city and bring them to this place and make them try the pizza. he's spent a lot of time up here off and on, i guess they've been coming up to jill's cabin for something like a couple years now maybe. the other guy who bought yelled at me for not buying any when he saw that i had money in my wallet, after i said i didn't have any, (which was a lie i guess) and i told him i needed all i got for my trip. "i'm on a months long road trip!" i told him, but i guess the notion of needing to make due with less for a longer trip that most would undergo was lost on him, drunkenly. i walked outside with leo and stood in the rain, we ate our pizza. went back to the party and got to play the drinking game with the throwing of quarters. i lost badly.

half of our crew was already passed out in darrius's van so we made our way home. it'd been raining off and on all weekend. everybody went to sleep in their different places, i read some more of Another Roadside Attraction and got some sleep.

the next day, sunday, we watched movies, and jill cooked for us. jambalaya, it was good. we went out into the town in the van, went to different coffeeshops to use wireless internet. i wrote email to my brother back in albuquerque. we went to go see a girl we know that they call ginger cause she's a red head, who was working at a coffee shop down the street from the movie theater in town, she was alone in the store, and said she'd make us smoothies if we helped her close the place, so i grabbed a brown and swept out the front of the store. she made us drinks and we sat around looking for wireless signals on the streets, in the alleys.

we went back home that night, last night, fairly early. i played music earlier in the day, from my collection of mp3s that i like, and later that night too, for hours. making playlists. an older guy that these friends of mine knew came over and commiserated over the state of his life and 50, his pessimism was a great inspiration to me. i love seeing older people who are cynical, and neurotic, it gives me hope that being a cynic doesn't have to kill you when you're young, like i am.

it was a lazy sunday, but i did get to talk to my friends in pittsburgh and set a date for me to meet up with them in new york city, later this month, over the last weekend. i just had to make sure, with my friends that i'm up here upstate with, that we're going to be getting down there in the first place. i also discovered that there were a couple open mics coming up this week in town, one on tuesday at the coffee shop and one on wednesday under a gazebo in a park.

everyone went to sleep pretty early, i stayed up and talked with dar and leo the rasta lion. we watched a bit of a dvd burn of the final fantasy video game series movie adaptation "advent children" but it kept freezing because the disc was dirty and finally everyone went to bed.

i woke up on the couch this morning. other people were buzzing, i went into a bed to get some more rest, around noon thirty everyone was up, i'd been having weird dreams about children trying to kill me and doing public relations for evil space aliens. jack and jill were cooking big fat pancakes for everyone.

jack had cut his hand something awful at the nintendo house we'd went to on saturday night, bouncing on a trampoline. he hit his hand against a sharp corner on the roof and his thumb has a huge cut in it now. still he nimbly managed to repair a bike tire and cook the breakfast and do lots of things, which speaks to how handy he is when he isn't injured.

after breakfast, bacon and eggs and the pancakes, i spent time remastering the vocals in one of my songs, "the perfect parner (in crime)" - the song i've been selling in cd/book zine format, the one i want to print more copies out of for these open mics i've been working on. i evened out the levels on the vocals and brought them up in the mix so they don't sound all drowned out. i'll post it to the webpage here when i post this entry.

i played it, after i finished it, on the stereo, and jack liked it, said he'd listen to it on repeat all the time in his car, and was singing the chorus as we walked down the path to the river to take a swim. he lent me some trunks. when we got down there, dar and leo were just getting out of the water to have a smoke break, and were eagerly encouraging me to step in. it was shallow, the river bed was made of giant slabs of rock slippery with algae. and it was really cold. it was getting hot out, the sun was warming everything up more than the whole time i'd been here. but the water was cold, and i didn't want to submerge myself. i screamed like a girl when i went in. the girls walking from the house down the path heard me screaming like a girl. i went in a couple times and that was enough for me. earlier dar had thrown me and leo and his own clothes into the washing machine, no dryer, and i was thinking about them, and getting hungry, when i told everyone i was going back up to get a sandwich and put the clothes on the line. it might rain but whatever, jill says "it'll be like that fresh rain scent stuff they put in the air fresheners" or something to that effect.

everyone comes back to the house, talking about what to do about dinner, thinking maybe making some pizza at home. jack has this massive prescription bottle of pills they found and he wants to know if they're muscle relaxants so he can take them for his messed up hand and i said we could look them up online if we get in to town, so we go, and get coffees together, with our laptops, so we could look up the pills, and i could check my email and write this update to my webpage. the pills turned out to be the no fun kind, anti epilepsy meds that make you nauseous.