By Beauty Damned

Amazing Gates

I am so full. Blaaw...ate too much.

Going to Central Park tomorrow to see "The Gates." I have to give Mayor Bloomberg credit for welcoming this installation, since it's been said that it wasn't until he took such a great interest that the plans of these two crazy artists were finally allowed to go through. I am so excited to go and see it tomorrow. I'm going to skate through the gates with Kathleen and Robert and whoever else wants to come. It's going to be beautiful.

Rob's friend Joe came for dinner tonight and he's helping Rob put together my new entertainment center. I rarely buy furniture, but this was an absolute necessity. The DVD/VHS collection is all over the place. Playstation, DVD player and cable box on the floor. I'm really excited about the new unit. It's pretty hot. It's wood, but it's painted silver, which works well with the general decor in my living room. It has cute little doors on it with diamond shaped glass windows and cylandrical legs. It's amazing what one fun new piece of furniture or a little addition to the decor does to make your environment feel cozier to live in. I'm just happy that the guys are putting it together and I don't have to have any part in the assembly process.

I'm ready for a nap. We stayed up way too late last night. Rob treated his friend and I to drinks and dinner in the Bronx. It was lovely until the waiter came to refill my glass and I managed to knock Robert's entire 12 oz. drink into my lap. I was absolutely soaked. Thank god the bathroom had hand dryers. I stood in there pushing the button over and over and over again until I was dry enough to walk out in to the freezing cold without catching pneumonia. Sometimes I am a disaster. Such a klutz, it's not even funny. For someone who had aspirations of being a ballerina when I was younger, I'm sure not the most graceful person. General coordination, I have. Grace, not so much.

We visited with Rob's friend's son. A sweet little kid who has come over to my place to visit us before. He's four. And out of control. But too cute for words. When I walked into the apartment he emerged, all two feet of him, his head and body cloaked and wrapped tightly in a sheet. He moaned and staggered about for about sixty full seconds before crashing headfirst into a little Spongebob Squarepants tent that was set up in the middle of the living room floor. I couldn't help but laugh my ass off. It was one of the most comedic things I've ever witnessed. By the end of the night I had donned a pair of gigantic green Incredible Hulk gloves that make a crashing sound when you touch them to anything so you feel suuuper tough when you put them on and start smacking them together like a boxer. This little kid had a pair of big plastic swords which he crossed at the beginning of our duel like a miniature night, but then he would spastically attack once the battle had begun, ending it all by just chucking the swords at me from a couple feet away. I need a pair of those Hulk gloves of my very own. I fell in love with them. I would come home and put those on whenever I have a bad day and I really think that just smashing them against the wall a few times would be productive.

We drove home to Brooklyn. Rob plugged his MP3 player into the tape deck and we enjoyed several feel-good songs. Sometimes it feels so satisfying to just be a passenger in a vehicle and stare out the window and daydream. The city seemed dark last night. Driving out of the Bronx, I couldn't help but feel a little unnerved by the landscape. Massive projects look kind of ominous at night, the way the buildings are lined up. Huge sections where it looks like one gigantic building but it's really a bunch of buildings all clustered, replicas of eachother. I contemplated what New York City would look like in ruins. If it were just devestated like Pompeii. Smashed. I tried to picture what it will look like a few thousand years from now and a hundred thousand years after that. But it was all too vast for me to wrap my mind around. We have tried so hard to defy the earth with concrete and buildings and machinery. That is man's way of having control over something that can't possibly be controlled. But this is the way that we have learned to survive. By building huge cities. I saw it being wiped out. It was a morbid thought but there was something comforting about knowing that this world was here long before I got here and it will be here long after we're all gone, and history will carry on.

I can't wait for tomorrow. I feel like it's Christmas. To the Gates!