2003-05-30 - 3:36 p.m.
Had a great time with Lee. His was welcome company, and a chance - for a little while - to relive college.
Ya gotta understand. Lee and I were sort of hyperintelligent versions of Beavis and Butthead in college. Consciously so. We'd stand around muttering to each other and occasionally breaking into air guitar riffs. Of course, we'd say stuff that the cartoon duo could barely fathom.
Me: "So, like… is desensitization essential to survival in the post-modernist era, or what?"
Lee: "Heh-heh, heh… Post-modernism sucks! Heh-heh, heh… I hate stuff that sucks!"
Then we'd break into some weird Zappa riff. You get the idea. He once compared Sarah Lawrence College to the Xavier Institute: "The other refuge for teenage mutants in Westchester County". He was a skinny guy with ginger hair in college; some of the hair is gone, and he's spent the last three years bodybuilding and studying krav maga, but the humor is still there. J got the best joke of the weekend, though; the Professor started banging the table with her hand at one point, and J began shouting "Attica! Attica!" That became the running gag for the whole weekend.
We carted him all over town: to the Zoo, to the Arch, to Soulard Market on a Saturday morning (unfortunately Professor Funk wasn't there), over to Alton, to the Delmar Loop, and we still didn't see half of all that here is to see. We ate Imo's pizza, which he enjoyed, although the sight of cracker-thin pizza cut into squares was something of a shock, and Ted Drewes' Frozen Custard, the likes of which are not to be found in New York, and of course St. Louis-style barbecue, in which the meat is simmered in the sauce after smoking. Messy, tasty fun. He enjoyed being shown around, delighted in the Zoo, especially the new Penguin exhibit. Mostly we talked: movies, music, books, life, the whichness of what and how to unscrew the inscrutable, well larded with our interlocking zaniness. It was more refreshing than a week in Cancun.
I don't know if we'll be able to get to New York any time soon, but he plans on coming back to St. Louis.
I can't wait.
