Nil by Mouth

Notes From Summer

It’s funny, in the middle of breezy walks home in Brooklyn, I’m finding myself missing Paris just a little bit. No one is surprised except for me. I honestly couldn’t see myself missing it when i was there. But i had plenty of time to take good hard looks around just in case. Sometimes i think i can predict the moments that i’ll later feel nostalgia for. To preempt it, or to moderate it maybe, when i recognize potential nostalgia moments in the making i try to look really really hard at what’s around me. Try to take big gulps of the scene. It never really works though. The pieces of memory that linger in my brain are always a haphazard jumble of things i’d never think twice about at the time. I tried once to sear the image of a certain boy sleeping next to me. He was sleeping soundly, and the room was a nice shade of sunrise, and all those other little things that set the mood were all perfect. It occurred to me that i’d probably want to conjure that morning up later so i tried to memorize everything about it. But now when i try to pull up the scene the thing i remember is all the effort i made looking. I remember clearly taking note of how his arms were resting, but i couldn’t picture it now at all. Instead i remember the toys in the shop window that day.

Anyway, i tried to catalogue the view west from the bridge over the Seine near my apartment on one of my last walks home. Can’t remember a thing from that day, but it was a route i walked often, so i can piece together things from other days. I remember this one certain feeling. The feeling after having walked around for a long enough time for my legs to be tired, collapsing in one of those plastic woven outdoor cafe chairs for coffee or wine. That wasn’t bad. I can’t decide if i miss my obsessive introspectiveness from that time. There’s definitely an introspective shaped hole in my psyche these days. But i can’t say it’s taking away from the overall Neille Global Happiness Quotient.

The Quotient is helped by being in an-ACed office today, one of the hottest soupiest stickiest days of the summer. Yesterday we tried to flee to the movies but it seemed like everything was sold out – obviously everyone had the same idea. We rented Far Away, So Close which took enormous amounts of concentration and a pause to brew a pot of coffee to keep the troops awake. In any case i have a real fondness for Peter Falk which i can’t explain at all. I also saw him on that IFC show, Dinner For Five, last week which only solidified this. Ordinarily my gut reaction to actors when supposedly “not acting” acting is blech. I think it’s their constant need to be the center of attention. But Dinner fir Five is fun because putting five attention-needers together isn’t annoying like one attention-needer, it’s all kinds of entertaining. Last week Peter Falk called Vince Vaughn a camera hog like 5 times, and lemme tell ya, Vince wasn’t taking it as a joke. Funny funny.

Speaking of camera hogs, much fun and a few good pictures at the Mermaid Parade on Saturday. I wasn’t in it, but darleen and i and a guy who was somewhere between Billy Bob Thornton and Hunter S. Thompson filled the role of obnoxious announcers on our little patch of parade route on the boardwalk. There’s nothing like screeching, “Yaaaaaayyy squids!” and then the giant squid turning back around to calmly explain, “No, we’re sea anemone.” And then in unison screaming, “Yaaaaaaayyy sea anemone!” And then screaming “Yaaaaayyy sea enema!” all day after that. Still laughing about that. The best thing about the mermaid parade, apart from all the sparkly stuff, is that you don’t really know where the parade ends and the crowd begins, though i hate to say the crowd on Surf avenue always seems harder to deal with than the year before. That or i’m getting more curmudgeonly than the year before. I did curse the ice cream truck music as it neared the 45 minute mark parked under my bedroom window the other day. That’s a bad sign.

• Jun 24