Dear Diary: Guilty Giggling
Proof that I am an unbridled hedonist glared forth today in the wake of a comment posted at Facebook. I won’t multiply my sin by repeating it here; nor, however, will I beat my breast or rend my garments. When I told a few old friends what I’d done, their dark, low laughter — more throat-clearing hum than actual risication — made me sure that I’d been bad. But it took hours to stop giggling.
I say that I’m a hedonist because the pleasure of making a sharp, possibly ridiculing comment floods my body with pleasure faster than the strongest drug or the most delicious food. “Brain candy” understates the rush.
Which isn’t to say that anybody would necessarily find what I said to be funny. My friends found it funny because I have been teaching them how to laugh for upwards of thirty years.
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I had plenty of time to ponder the possibility that E— will never speak to me again (not that he was the victim of my arguably snarky comment; but he is a generous friend) because I was out and about for most of the afternoon, running errands and listening to music on the Nano. For most of last year, I listened to Teach Yourself language courses on the Nano whenever I took a walk or ran errands, but I’ve moved out of phase with that degree of industry, possibly because I am finding enough to keep me busy right here at The Daily Blague. The virtue of ambulatory language labs, though, is that they still the refrain to which I’m so vulnerable (with reason! some might say), mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.Â
It’s not that I’m a bad person. I’m just a hedonist whose besetting vice happens to be zingers. D’you know that line from “Bosom Buddies,” in Mame, where Vera Charles guesses Mame’s age to be “somewhere between forty — and death”? I’ve said things just like that, many times. Just ask Fossil Darling. Considering the way I treat Fossil, it’s no wonder that I have to count my friends in multiples of √-1. It’s true! It’s all about i!
In any case, after feeling rather awful for a few hours on Sunday afternoon, I was determined to avoid the rawer displays of bad weather that have bedeviled New York so far this week. This prudence kept me indoors on Monday and yesterday. I’d have gone out today if the San Andreas Fault had opened up along 86th Street while a record blizzard promptly filled up the chasm with snow. Enough with the indoor lighting!
My first round of errands: Perry Process (84th/Lex), Morning Calm Gallery (83rd/First), Yorkshire Wines and Spirits (85th/First), Hybrid Florist (86th/First).
The second round: Crawford Doyle Library (90th/Madison), Feldman’s Housewares (92nd/Madison), William Greenberg (82nd/Madison), Crawford Doyle Books (82nd/Madison, but the block south of 82nd).
The third round: Gristede’s (across the street).
It’s true: a gifted flow-charter would have worked Perry Process into the second round of errands. But I wasn’t sure that I’d have the stamina for a second round when I started out.
At Feldman’s, I bought the Yodeling Pickle. I have wanted the Yodeling Pickle since I first saw it at Feldman’s more than two months ago. Yes, it’s ridiculous, frivolous, unnecessary, and a piece of junk (a “gag gift”) that I will throw away in disgust at some point in the future. But right now, I have to have the Yodeling Pickle, a plastic zucchini-sized object that, when pressed in the right way, emits authentic yodeling. You can tell that it’s authentic because sounds strange. Not funny-strange, either; not “gag gift” strange. It reminds me of the complaint that I once heard a rich woman make about the blue milk at her country farm— too well skimmed. Don’t ask me why.
In my modest, hedonist way, I was a good neighbor twice this afternoon. The second time was at Feldman’s, where I bought the Yodeling Pickle. “I almost bought this at Amazon a couple of times,” I said to the gent behind the counter, “but I said to myself, ‘No, I’ve got to buy it at Feldman’s, because that’s where I saw it’.” (Regular readers will remember the honor system that sent me down to NoLIta for my first copy of Netherland.)
The earlier occasion of my good-neighborliness occurred at Morning Calm. I’m not sure that I wasn’t set up, because a small framed picture that was Just My Sort of Thing was propped up on the worktable when I walked in. I wasn’t expected today, but I was expected; I’d had a raft of stuff reframed, as part of my new use-it-or-lose-it art policy. (“Hang it or dang it” might be a better way of putting it.) So I had stuff to pick up.
(No, of course I wasn’t set up — how I do flatter myself!)
It turned out that a customer was having to move — out. Fire sale. The print, a small but not miniature representation of King Eude of France (he ruled in the Tenth Century, and any likeness would necessarily be completely conjectural), dated from the Eighteenth Century (that wasn’t bogus). In short, a perfect item for my walls: a genuine fake! I wished the seller good luck, and I was told that my wishes would be passed on.