Reunion Bound

There's a saying that friends help friends move, good friends help friends move bodies. In the case of my great and good friend, my old college roommate The Bronson from Wisconsin, well let's just say that I will be picking him up from LaGuardia Airport this morning and the two of us will brave I-95 on Memorial Day weekend to travel to the Prestigious Bastion of Prestige where we met.

The best thing about reunion is the fact that a single, silly line will reduce everybody to paroxysms of laughter because we share a common store of inside jokes, of shared experiences. For instance, I can greet my freshman roommate with the question "Hey, dude, what the fuck?" and he will be rolling on the floor- it was the common greeting of an ultra-rich foreign-born suitemate who attended a New England boarding school and was taught a very idiosyncratic version of the vernacular.

It's amazing how the years can just drop off, and everybody becomes a goofy teenager for a glorious weekend.

Might Be a Sparse Posting Schedule

Busy, busy, busy! The next few days will be extremely busy ones. Tomorrow, I have to drive to JFK Airport to pick up one of my college roommates, who is flying east for reunion. I won't be able to attend the reunion, because one of our biggest fundraising events is taking place this weekend, and my department is overextended as it is. There's a slight chance I might be able to hoof it to the "Prestigious Bastion of Prestige" for a couple of hours on Saturday night, but that's iffy. I'll try to post now and again, but I'll be running around like Henry Hill at the end of Goodfellas.

Regarding my roommate, the following lines apply to him:

Get on your knees, like you were in a chapel, son.
Give respect to the homeboy from Appleton.
He'll run you through the cycles, like he was a washer,
The Bronson from Wisconsin, out of Menasha.

Yeah, he's that awesome... always has been.

Tripping, By Which I Mean Road-Tripping

Last month, I headed up to my own particular Prestigious Bastion of Prestige for a reunion. A friend of mine who grew up not far from the PBoP jokingly asked me if I could take him as a date, so he could check out this place which is practically in his backyard. After assuring him that I loved him, albeit platonically, I let him know that it would cost a few hundred dollars, and he'd be confronted by a bunch of nostalgic drunks who'd be sharing decades-old jokes. For example, all the the Bronson from Wisconsin (whose birthday is today, high five Base!) has to say to reduce me to gales of laughter is "COOT!" Of course, the proper response is, "GREBE!"

We decided that a summer road-trip would be the best way for me to introduce him to the arcana of the place... and there's a lot of weird stuff to point out. For myself, reunion was a time to hang out with friends, lectures and tourism took a back seat to joking about waterfowl and old reminiscences, I really didn't do any 'touristy' stuff, besides visiting the museum, where I worked as an assistant to the head of anthropological collections. I'll be road-tripping as Virgil leading a local Dante through the circles of, certainly not hell, but a place that probably looms larger in his imagination than mine, because I know it as an insider. What was a nearby mystery for him was home for me for four really amazing years, pretty good for the 'First Circle'.

It'll be interesting returning as a combination tourist/tour guide, playing Virgil in a setting in which I read Virgil.

Meteors and Me

This morning, in the wee hours, I found a comfortable spot outside and settled down for a while with mah preshus kittehs by my side, so I could take in the Perseid meteor shower. I was not disappointed- besides seeing about a half-dozen ephemeral "shooting stars", I saw three impressive meteors, including the most spectacular meteor I've ever seen, a vivid "fireball" which left a luminous trail that lingered in my vision for a few seconds.

My technique for viewing the sky involved keeping my eyes relatively unfocused, so I could take in a good portion of the sky to the northeast, a sort of thousand-parsec stare, if you will. Being able to recline is not a bad thing, though I didn't do that this morning.

I've always been fascinated by meteors, ever since I first saw the meteorite collection at the Hayden Planetarium- the Willamette Meteorite is a personal favorite, it even looks otherworldly.

In the course of a 1993 cross-country road trip, my college roommates and I visited the Meteor Crater site in northern Arizona. After a bit of hemming-and-hawing about how it was a bit off the beaten track, we decided that, in the context of a road trip that encompassed thousands of miles, a side trip of a couple of hundred miles would be trivial. Besides, The Bronson from Wisconsin is the son of a professor of physics and astrophysics, so he would have kicked himself if he had blown an opportunity to see a crater he'd read about as a child. While I have no desire to visit Arizona in these current Jan Brewer/Joe Arpaio days, I am glad that I "got my licks in" when the country was still sane.

Yeah, I like meteors, I'd even say that my favorite story by Uncle Howard is about a meteor, a story that got a horror/comedy treatment in the Stephen King/George Romero collaboration Creepshow, which was adapted as a graphic novel:





Yeah, I like meteors alright, but I'd make sure I steered clear of meteor shit.

The Nostalgia Trip

Yesterday, I picked one of my college roommates up at JFK airport, and braved the godawful traffic on the roads of Queens- the Van Wyck was so congested, I turned exited at Hillside Boulevard and hit the Clearview, which was almost devoid of traffic.

We hit the City of Y______ around eleven A.M. and, after my roommate settled into his temporary lodgings ("big ups" to my great landlord for letting my friend stay in one of the apartments merely on my recommendation), hit the pub. It's amazing how you fall into old familiar patterns, repeating old inside jokes, talking about mutual acquaintances... the years just disappear. We spent hours drinking diry big pints, then went to my favorite Thai restaurant for dinner. Unfortunately, I had to take a breather to get ready for a graveyard shift (this being a huge event weekend, we had to juggle the schedule around so our understaffed department can handle the crush). When I get home, I'll drop my roommate off at the train station so he can head up to reunion. I hope to catch one of the big events on Saturday night, after a long day of dealing with the public. Gotta continue the nostalgia trip.

It's been a month of nostalgia- hanging out with my brother Vincenzo's classmates in Virginia two weeks ago, hanging out with the "Bronson from Wisconsin" yesterday. Like I said, I'm going to try my damnedest to continue it.

Best exchange of the day?

"I've become a bit of an eccentric in the last couple of years."
"Dude, you've always been an eccentric!"