Do your parents know that you're Ramones?
We went inland for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch's birthday this year, arriving shortly before sunset at Lexington's Paint Mine. We had been intrigued by the name on a map of local trails; it turned out to be a naturally exposed deposit of ochre just inside the lip of a wood which under snow-crusts looked very little different from any other outcropping among the pines and the stark birches, its rustier tinge perhaps an illusion of the scratchy, horizon-steeped light ashlyme once memorably described as a seventies sun. Behind us the sky was solid blue as sea-ice with the white chip of a waxing moon over the industrial green and barn-red pylons of the high-tension lines that sang all the way down the ravine where we crunched over frozen grasses and the ice-scars of older footprints, the sunset scalloping the wires above our heads. It looked empty and waiting, a ghost story for Christmas. There was a boardwalk in the wood, the grey leaf-bubbled pane of a stream frozen beneath it. There were dry stone walls and trunks as bare as if they had been felled lying in frost-tangled geometries.
To be fair, I have had the ITV Casting the Runes (1979) on my mind lately.
I wished I had brought my camera just for the light, but also for Rob and the woods.
We hiked back up to the parking lot and did not continue, this time, over the ridge of the hill to the abandoned muskrat ponds.
We drove home in an after-sunset the color of sloe gin; for dinner we collected massaman curry and khao soi salmon from Love at First Bite and watched Allan Arkush's Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979), which is distinguishable as a predecessor to Get Crazy (1983) just by the subtitles that misspell themselves off the sides of the screen and the giant mouse that conscientiously brings its own ear protection to the Ramones concert. My present to Rob this year was a cocktail strainer, which was less in the way of bartending paraphernalia than I had hoped to furnish him with, but Berman's this afternoon had been rather thoroughly locusted by the holidays; we left mostly with vermouth and bitters and soft drinks and later in the night he made me a Bronx Revised out of Eddie Muller's Noir Bar (2023), which we revised further into something that could be enjoyed without ice cubes. He has started calling his botanical gin and elderflower tonic the Garden Path. I had some kind of allergic-asthmatic attack all night and have not slept since some distressing hour of yesterday, but my poem "Hagstone" has been accepted by Not One of Us; it was written to a prompt from Ashlyme and incorporates something of the M. R. James tradition of old things generally being a bad idea. Next year, maybe the sea.
spatch's birthday this year, arriving shortly before sunset at Lexington's Paint Mine. We had been intrigued by the name on a map of local trails; it turned out to be a naturally exposed deposit of ochre just inside the lip of a wood which under snow-crusts looked very little different from any other outcropping among the pines and the stark birches, its rustier tinge perhaps an illusion of the scratchy, horizon-steeped light ashlyme once memorably described as a seventies sun. Behind us the sky was solid blue as sea-ice with the white chip of a waxing moon over the industrial green and barn-red pylons of the high-tension lines that sang all the way down the ravine where we crunched over frozen grasses and the ice-scars of older footprints, the sunset scalloping the wires above our heads. It looked empty and waiting, a ghost story for Christmas. There was a boardwalk in the wood, the grey leaf-bubbled pane of a stream frozen beneath it. There were dry stone walls and trunks as bare as if they had been felled lying in frost-tangled geometries.
To be fair, I have had the ITV Casting the Runes (1979) on my mind lately.
I wished I had brought my camera just for the light, but also for Rob and the woods.
We hiked back up to the parking lot and did not continue, this time, over the ridge of the hill to the abandoned muskrat ponds.
We drove home in an after-sunset the color of sloe gin; for dinner we collected massaman curry and khao soi salmon from Love at First Bite and watched Allan Arkush's Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979), which is distinguishable as a predecessor to Get Crazy (1983) just by the subtitles that misspell themselves off the sides of the screen and the giant mouse that conscientiously brings its own ear protection to the Ramones concert. My present to Rob this year was a cocktail strainer, which was less in the way of bartending paraphernalia than I had hoped to furnish him with, but Berman's this afternoon had been rather thoroughly locusted by the holidays; we left mostly with vermouth and bitters and soft drinks and later in the night he made me a Bronx Revised out of Eddie Muller's Noir Bar (2023), which we revised further into something that could be enjoyed without ice cubes. He has started calling his botanical gin and elderflower tonic the Garden Path. I had some kind of allergic-asthmatic attack all night and have not slept since some distressing hour of yesterday, but my poem "Hagstone" has been accepted by Not One of Us; it was written to a prompt from Ashlyme and incorporates something of the M. R. James tradition of old things generally being a bad idea. Next year, maybe the sea.
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&Hearts; ♥ ♥
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Thank you! It was, actually, a really nice time.
*hugs*
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Thank you. Working very seriously on it.
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Sovay you were exactly EXACTLY in my neck of the woods; we might even have crossed paths, as we were walking around that time of day and even talked about the overhead giants (though actually our walk didn't take us underneath them--but it could have--I love walking with them).... Nope nope nope--different power giants. Still: The hills, the light.(You can click through to see it bigger, but you get the idea.)
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That is exactly the same kind of light. That's beautiful.
("In all our valleys the light is the same. And it's the light that matters." —Elizabeth Goudge, The Valley of Song (1951).)
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I haven’t yet watched Rock 'n’ Roll High School all the way through; but at university a boy that I had a crush on described the lab-rat-exposed-to-the-Ramones scene to me in some detail (which was part of the reason I had a crush on him).
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Lovely!
I haven’t yet watched Rock 'n’ Roll High School all the way through; but at university a boy that I had a crush on described the lab-rat-exposed-to-the-Ramones scene to me in some detail (which was part of the reason I had a crush on him).
I loved its musical scenes, admired its evolving weirdness, and cracked up in the first five minutes when the high school football hero who is secretly an enormous dork who can't talk to girls was seen reading the exact same 1978 Bantam paperback of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsinger I grew up on. It reminded me a lot of Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (1956) in its combination of cartooniness and actually picking up on the music of the time—part of the joke is that an entire high school would be screaming and swooning for the Ramones, but it is an incredible concert film of them.
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Also, hah, I'm hit by a wave of nostalgia now, I saw The Ramones at Nightclub 9:30 in Washington DC sometime in the early-to-mid 80s.
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Nice! I have just been drinking elderflower tonic water on its own, since I like it.
Also, hah, I'm hit by a wave of nostalgia now, I saw The Ramones at Nightclub 9:30 in Washington DC sometime in the early-to-mid 80s.
I hope they were as wonderful as that sounds.
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I'm glad you had a nice celebration. I saw Rock'n'Roll High School in a theater when it came out. The following summer I saw it as a midnight movie at least two or three times with my high school friends.
I hope you're having a better time with breathing and sleeping!
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Thank you! Not One of Us has more poetry than fiction for the upcoming issue, in case you have fiction lying around.
I'm glad you had a nice celebration. I saw Rock'n'Roll High School in a theater when it came out. The following summer I saw it as a midnight movie at least two or three times with my high school friends.
That sounds like a perfect way to see it.
I hope you're having a better time with breathing and sleeping!
I did in fact sleep last night! Then I spent almost the entire afternoon in a car because the doctor's appointment to which I drove my mother as part of handing the car back to her ran an hour and a half late and while I used the extra time to run errands, it was a lot of car.
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Nice! Reminds me of arriving at my sister's on Christmas Day, "I'm opening white wine, mixed forests fruits and sloe gin" she says. "That'll be an interesting combination," I told her, assuming she meant three separate bottles, but no, it was all in one bottle - Marks and Spencers 'Let it Sloe Fizz', which did indeed make a nicely interesting change from Bucks Fizz.
Boo!
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Thank you! I had been walking through snow and pine trees; I was very happy.
Reminds me of arriving at my sister's on Christmas Day, "I'm opening white wine, mixed forests fruits and sloe gin" she says. "That'll be an interesting combination," I told her, assuming she meant three separate bottles, but no, it was all in one bottle - Marks and Spencers 'Let it Sloe Fizz', which did indeed make a nicely interesting change from Bucks Fizz.
Whoa. I'm glad it was good? (I would just have drunk the sloe gin.)
Boo!
I slept last night without explosion!
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It was very drinkable, quite a light drink, in the same way as bucks fizz, but much more complex tastes, which I presume was the sloe gin - I'm not sure I've ever had sloe gin on its own, but definitely interested in trying it now!
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I clicked through your restaurant link, I always do, and ended up sitting here yelling, "Ginger fish! Taro cake! All the noodles!" As usual, I was so amazed by the amount and variety of seafood on offer. Because the sea is right there.
I hope you get to it for Rob's birthday next year.
P.
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It was the nicest time I've had in weeks.
I clicked through your restaurant link, I always do, and ended up sitting here yelling, "Ginger fish! Taro cake! All the noodles!"
I am personally a huge fan of the khao tom mad, which is coconut-milk sticky rice steamed around plantain so pink the first time I ordered it, I thought it was pulled pork. (It is not, but it is a reasonably savory dessert, and especially now that I can no longer get the sticky fish rice from Dakzen, I love it.)
I hope you get to it for Rob's birthday next year.
Thank you.
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Nine
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Thank you! I would like that a lot.
*hugs*
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beams at you
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*hugs*