Toothbrushlessly

Friday after music school I stopped by Sidebar for a Peroni with R and J, and met Spank and JB there too. L came over to the Nunnery later and we talked and walked down to Fellini's for drinks. We walked some more, circling the neighborhood, and then returned here for

1. more drinks; and
2. L's first full viewing of Solaris, The NNRY's Good Times Movie of the Month.

L was gone and returned again before I woke up this morning, and when I did we were three: me, L, and L's dog Cupid, a miniature dachshund. Brunch at the famous Carroll Street Cafe before driving headlong into the north Georgia mountains to hike the DeSoto Falls trail:























Dinner in Dahlonega at the Crimson Moon Cafe, which I can recommend. We were fortunate to hear some of the evening's musical entertainment, a very good bluegrass ensemble called Michael Cleveland and Flamekeeper.

We spontaneously and toothbrushlessly decided to stay the night somewhere in the mountains and after a few phone calls were able to locate a place which welcomed pets: a good house with two bedrooms/two baths, secluded, and with a river running through the backyard:















Being excited at having more than five tv channels to choose from, I watched 10 rounds of Mike Tyson's loss of the heavyweight championship to Buster Douglas. I had seen this fight once before, years ago, up Mission Hill back in 1990, on the night it originally took place.* Buster Douglas was and he remains the only person I've seen Mike Tyson fight.**

The house was cozy and well furnished, in an Abraham Lincoln sort of way. There were books everywhere. The two bedside table books*** were Chicken Soup for the Couple's Soul and 301 Random Acts of Kindness.****

Loud thunderstorm overnight, prompting thoughts about death and dying.

Showered this morning and brushed none of my teeth before taking my sitting in the backyard down by the river, now silty from the rain...


















Spoke to my Mother, my dear sister Karyn, and my cheerful and healthy wonder-niece, Sarah. Sarah made my favorite family-recipe french toast this morning for Mother's Day, three pieces of which I've been promised are to be stuffed posthaste into the nearest empty Tupperware container and express mailed down to me here in Bedlam.

A quick visit to Target for new flip flops for L and a few doggy things for Cupid.

Back to Dahlonega for brunch at the becoming-famous Crimson Moon Cafe. Or not quite brunch, since we were a little late, but lunch plus a friendly game of scrabble (scrunch?), before bookstore browsing, ice cream eating, and then finally heading back to the ATL. Good times.

And now, teeth clean at last, there's heavy weather currently outside the Nunnery. The air is beautiful and clear, but with the low, fast moving clouds and winds at maybe 35 mph, it feels more like late October than May.


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* I remember that in the days immediately following the fight Tyson tried to make the case that it shouldn't've been stopped, that he had been lucid at the count of 10 and able to continue.

The argument he made in defense of his lucidity was that he was engaged in the purposeful activity of trying to put his mouthpiece back in (it had sailed out of his mouth when Iron Mike went down (for the first time in his professional career) following the flurry of blows, five or six of them, that Buster had just brought forth).

But how coherent is to be wasting time crawling around on canvas trying to pick up a mouthpiece with a boxing glove when you're going to lose your title if you aren't standing on your feet in the next seven seconds?

Boxing is probably the sport where you can least afford to lose focus, even for a second. I myself make a point of playing basketball every 22 years or so (just to keep my mad game skillz intact), so I think I'm qualified to suggest that all sports, all real sports, are just elaborations of boxing.

** Things like this occur every so often. For instance, once when I was about eight years old I saw a movie about a boy who stows away on a spaceship, but something happened and I wasn't able to finish watching it. A few years later I turned a tv on and there it was, the same movie, picking up at the same place where we - it and I - had left off with each other years before. Dreams are like that too, recurring in patterns that feel like more than coincidence, but it's still hard to know what they mean.

*** There were magazines beside the bed too. Redbook was the only one I picked up. It had an article on female multiple orgasms written, apparently, for alien beings who, while they must look anatomically very much like ordinary men and women, nevertheless sadly have no personal experience of human intimacy and have gleaned all their ideas about sex exclusively from Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

**** One of the 301 random acts of kindness (and I have to disagree already, because reading a book to gather ideas and then implementing those ideas within the fabric of your daily life isn't a good example of something that's random) was:

Tell a woman who is trying on an article of clothing that it looks good on her.

Really? Wait. Even if it doesn't? The only way this qualifies as kindness is if the woman's personality were so unstable that it would actually be a good idea to adopt the bizarre and tedious general policy of lying to her. But people like that are rarer than the authors of self help books seem to think. If you were to tell a normal (ahem) woman that something looks good on her when it doesn't, you've done her a disservice. Plus now you're an accomplice to a fashion offense.

Another recommended act of kindness: Use coasters.

Um, okay. So wait, kindness is the same as social etiquette? (After reading this, proper use of coasters became a minor theme for the weekend.) Hey - you know, come to think of it, the acts of kindness suggested by this book do seem pretty random after all.