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Spoke on the phone tonight with old friends Phil and Catalina for the first time in twelve years.
We lived together, the three of us (and others) at Hampshire and amicably lost track of each others' whereabouts when I moved to the Catskills where I lived for three or four months after I graduated. This was mid-winter Catskills in a small cabin near Tennanah Lake in a town called Acidalia on the outskirts of the state park, and it was cold. So cold in fact, that there was only one other person who lived in the town through that winter. To get water for drinking or bathing I had to thaw the spigot on the well using a can of Sterno every morning, a process that took at least a half-hour. The water itself was impossibly cold, and required an effort of will to bathe in.
I know this is probably not where Acidalia got its name from, but sometimes the Romans referred to Venus, goddess of Love and Beauty, as "Venus Acidalia". Apparently this was either
1. because she was said to have bathed in the well at Acidalius, or
2. because of a connection with the Greek word acides, meaning troubles or woes.
Now, given a choice between Beauty Bathing at a Well and Trouble, you'd think you'd have an easy time of it. But experience tells us that the "choice" is closer to trouble and beauty, not trouble or beauty, doesn't it?
Phil and Catalina got married on Long Island back in '95 while I was still at Hampshire and I was in attendance at their wedding. Phil was one of the few people I could talk to about math. He was a natural, a wunderkind, able to effortlessly understand things I had to struggle sometimes for days or weeks to grasp. I was the only person officially studying math at Hampshire at the time, but he was studying physics and there was some good overlap there.
There were lots of memories made in those days when we all lived together, and Phil and I touched on some of them over the phone. He reminded me of a girl, K, whose, um, "services" I won for a month in a single hand of five card draw. Heh. I had forgotten about that. Good times, good times. We also reminisced about a Tequila Night which spiraled in its widening gyre pleasantly and decidedly out of control. Two of our other roommates, L & S played important roles that night as well. There exist three or four Polaroids from that night as documentary evidence for future historians.
Catalina is pregnant with their third child right now, and "ready to pop" as she put it. Phil and I discovered we both have "Incomplete Hampshire Thesis" dreams. You know, where your Division III thesis (which you'd typically spend a year preparing) is due in a few days and you haven't even decided on a topic yet? Yeah... I thought I was the only one who had those.
We talked about me visiting them in Brooklyn sometime this summer. But I've got the Nether-Nether-Lands on the brain right now.
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And speaking of dreams, I've been hosting nightmares the past four nights, one of which involved a tornado. I never dreamed about tornadoes until after I moved to the South. Must be something in the collective unconscious down here. But these dreams aren't all about weather - they're varied, and some of them are truly frightening. I don't usually have nightmares. My subconscious (such as it is) and I are usually on pretty good terms, or at least we agree to disagree, but something's rocking the boat these days and our precarious accord may need to be revisited.
I need a vacation.
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Notes:
Papercuts and hand sanitizer don't go.
Houses don't clean themselves, even in springtime.
25-40% of people I meet don't listen during conversation.
Drinking caffeine before a morning sitting increases your alertness, but it also increases the strength of whatever it is you're wrestling with.
Miles Davis was on a roll between 1965 and 69.
Listening to Aphex Twin, Selected Ambient Works, Vol 2.
