We had a snowstorm on Friday, 2/8/13, and it was great. I stayed in, listening to the plows run up and down my hill, clanking and scraping, their chained wheels grinding and chunking. Few things relax me as much. The hypnotic ballet of snow trucks. Or ballad. They worked all night long, and they worked on me.
What I like most about all night snow storms is the first look outside the next morning. What happened out there? Will there be 5 feet of snow? 15 fucking feet!!!? The quantity is rarely enough, but the quality can make up for it. When the morning after is bright blue and sunny and the snow is perfectly white and all the cars are buried completely, it’s a spectacular thing.
Here’s a pic from my phone on my walk up to the gym on Saturday morning:
As predicted, the rain is here today, Monday. Fuck this Monday. It’s in the process of removing all evidence that the spectacular thing had occurred, and after only a mere two days.
Saturday night I was in Chinatown at a friend’s place for Chinese New Year. I helped cook for about three hours, learning many things that I doubt I’ll remember as it was all so complicated. I’m not sure how anyone would be able to reproduce any of it without following directions in books, but my friend’s mom was able to do it all from memory. Maybe 12 dishes? Here’s the near final spread, with my friend’s younger brother and dog in the background:
He’s a highly renown drummer and breakdancer in Manhattan.
It was all extremely good, and at around 11:30p we left for the Neighborhood Association, mostly a club house for elderly Chinese gangsters, to watch lions and old men drumming and banging things, like sticks and blocks and cymbals and cheering loudly, beginning indoors and then spilling out into the streets of Chinatown, parading around. Most of the group was wasted out of their minds on rice liquor. I was probably the only sober one there, having started my two months of no drinking nine days earlier.
The thing about setting a rule like that for yourself is that there can be no exceptions or the whole thing is meaningless. “No drinking” is crystal clear. And that’s how I feel right now.
That night was great but super cold and I headed back up and home on the D train by 1a, feeling like I had taken a trip away from things, at least for a bit, and all of that was nice.
Busy day today but training is at the end and it’s all I’m thinking about. I was also thinking about my ex earlier and missing her, and then about when I was growing up and my best friend and I would go out into the deep woods behind his house and make luge tracks for our sleds and stay out there until dark. Sometimes I miss people. Sometimes I miss the woods. It can be hard to know which one pulls harder, or if it’s in unison, or in the same direction.
