My goodness, it’s been awhile. I admit, I kind of enjoyed my sabbatical but now that I no longer have the excuse of being occupied with unpacking all our belongings (a process which still isn’t finished, by the way — it’s nice how austere our living room looks without books on the bookshelves*) I guess I should write something. Comin’ at ya big dick style!**

Yeah, we moved again. I don’t think I mentioned that. Yes, we moved further into Queens and are now paying *more* than we did in LIC, but now we have a yard and the most beautiful, brand-new bathroom you’ve ever seen.*** It’s also not a soporific 80 degrees all winter. In fact, we have a high-tech thermostat with four different settings! Incroyable!

And, not to brag, but we now have four (equally sketchy) laundromats within a block of us.

It wasn’t all so bad in our old place (our neighbor had it worse — at one point she had a bee infestation) but it was, you know, a crumbling prewar apartment complex maintained by a shambolic former death metal drummer.

I have two Savannah anecdotes to share, both of which came up this week for unrelated reasons.

Pinkie Masters [sic] is The Greatest Bar in Savannah and possibly the southeast United States. (Murph’s would be a close second, but it’s changed hands since we first went there and the jukebox is one of those electronic abominations and there’s no more talk of spoons players. The pool table with the bullet holes remains. Also, another runner up is Jim Collins, another bar in Savannah, but that closed eons ago.) Anyhow, there was a totally unsubstantiated rumor (related to me as fact by one of the bartenders, as I recall) that during some renovations, contractors discovered a human skeleton buried underneath the concrete in the bathroom. As you know, I have exemplary investigative skills — if you want to find out the dirt on someone, give me 24 hours and I’ll tell you what color their toothbrush is — but I’ve researched the hell out of this story and I have found squadoosh. So it’s almost certainly apocryphal. Anyone who knows otherwise, please feel free to email me.

So this week I came across a WSAV news story about Obama visiting Savannah earlier this year:

A lot of politicos hung out at Pinkie’s in its heyday, particularly democrats — there’s a plaque on the bar where Jimmy Carter stood in 1978 — so naturally everyone at Pinkie’s wanted Obama to come by during his visit. I don’t think it happened. (I’m sure he’d have felt really welcome, what with the Dixie flag above the bar and all. It would have been nice to see that come down before the end of the 20th century — or the Carter administration, for fuck’s sake, but shit in one hand and wish in the other, I guess.)

I saw a number of famous people in Pinkie’s. It sucked when a film shoot rolled into town, because it meant you couldn’t get a seat at the bar. I met a number of (quasi) celebrities. I had a conversation with Jude Law one night. He seemed like an idiot, although to me everyone seems like an idiot.

My favorite Savannah celebrity encounter didn’t take place in Pinkie’s, though. This was the mid-90s, when ironic t-shirts were beginning to become wildly popular, and I was wearing an AWESOME gray t-shirt emblazoned with It’s Miller Time! in red letters. I was walking up the stairs of the downtown post office and this little guy was coming down the stairs, and he pointed at me and said, “It’s Miller Time?” And I’m thinking, this guy looks familiar. And so I said the only thing I could think of, which was, “Yeah, and I’m late!” And we smiled at each other and then I realized Holy shit, it’s Miller from Repo Man! And then *he* realized that *I* realized and he smiled and winked at me.

Miller, of course, is the best character in Repo Man:

So that’s it. THE END.

Oh wait. Since I have no idea how much time will pass before my *next* dispatch, I give you this: BEES!!!. [NB: I did not create this masterpiece -- my office mate did. ENYOY!]

*However I trust no one whose living room lacks books, because it’s generally a condition concomitant with specially designed shoe closets and ironed hair.
**And in this instance, “big dick style” means “totally rambling, unedited, and trailing off at the end.”
***In a Queens rental apartment. After enduring nearly seven years of what I will charitably term “substandard” bathrooms, N and I decided that we’re not students and as people firmly situated in our mid 30s, we deserve a tub that we are not afraid to sit down in. My only real complaints are that the toilet a) is a little tall and b) has a square base, which makes me far more likely to stub my toe on it in the middle of the night. Still, it beats black mold.