2001-02-21 - 16:19:33

I'm getting a little disillusioned with my job. Maybe this is healthy; the honeymoon, which was prolonged because of long lazy days with nuthin' to do, is definitely over. So we'll chalk it up to delayed adjustment. Can I call existential pangs symptoms of "adjustment" after five months? I hope so. Because that's what I'm doing.

That's one reason this past Presidents Day weekend was so amazing: a Monday where I didn't have to work. Simple. Beautiful. The other reason is that I just assumed I'd have to work Presidents Day until I checked the company calendar about a week before. If I had known further in advance, my anticipation of the three-day weekend would have been so intense as to infuse the actual day off with performance anxiety. Not a pretty sight.

So how did I spend this unforeseen eight- or nine-hour windfall? Laundry and an aimless trip to the beach. No, it wasn't warm. But the sun, everywhere the sun. (I initially tried being clever in that description but gave up and decided to be Hemingway instead.)

I took some good digital pictures of attack dogs that guard the rides at Coney Island. This one pup must have been really lonely during the winter, because it acted like it hadn't seen a human in months when I walked by -- baring its teeth, banging the fence, and screaming bloody murder.

The dog in the next fenced-in area seemed to take a liking to me, offering me its bone through the bottom of the fence. I promptly threw it back over the barbed wire...right at the burly German Shepherd's front paws. This dog also seemed to defend me against the other dog, telling it in dog language to shut up the hell up for chrissake whenever the angry dog started berating me.

After Coney Island sufficiently bored me, I took the next train a couple stops to Brighton Beach. I wrote some memoirs and walked around and gawked at all the Cyrillic text over storefronts. I found Russian beer that is eight percent alcohol (about double the standard content) and sells for $1.49 a pint. It didn't taste too bad -- much better than Steel Reserve (aka America's scariest beer).

Brighton Beach fits a lot of old ramshackle shoebox houses into tight little winding blocks. It also houses a huge new condo development right on the ocean -- units start at $185K.

When it got dark I rode the train up to Queens and Jenny fed us excellent homemade tofu and sushi meal. A-1 best happy dinner!

Oh, oh: last night I had a weird dream about my mom having an alligator as a pet and my brother and I taking it to a Holiday Inn pool/recreation area and trying to pass it off as a dachshund. I think we had a sweater on it to confuse our fellow hotel guests. At one point the gator went crazy, pulling us all around on its leash. But on land, we could handle it. The alligator was strong, but not fast enough to drag us around.

When we let it swim in the pool (again, on its leash), that was a different story. The damn thing was whipping us around like a speedboat pulling infant waterskiers. Eventually, we enlisted Joe for help in the pool, and with our strength combined, we once again subdued the wily gator. Ah, the domesticated alligator.

Something else in the dream had me buying a little box of pot. Not a bag, a box. But when I got it, I had no vessel. So I lit the cardboard bottom of the box and sucked widemouth-style through the opening at the top. Better than smoking out of a beer can, I figure.