So, we're out here at my Mother's place in Quogue this week. Peg and I packed up the kids and boarded a Saturday morning Jitney (under normal circumstances, I would absolutely never suggest boarding a Jitney with two kids under the age of 5, but surprisingly, they both handled it pretty well). Being that I'm not due back at the office until a week from today, our plans are quite vague as to when we're heading back into the city. In the interim, we're simply enjoying the quiet of the country. And quiet it is.
There isn't a great deal to do in Quogue in December. Sure, the beach is pretty and whatnot, but it's generally too cold to do much. I've gone on a few misty walks (and taken some lovely pictures along the way). The kids have been busily making a mess of my mother's home. In recent years, however, I seem to have developed an acute allergy to something in this house. It could be dust or it could be mold, but there are certain rooms I just cannot spend a great deal of time in, lest I start sneezing and wheezing. It's not much fun.
To stave this off, I volunteer for a lot of missions. Oh, we need milk? I'll hop in the car and go get some. We need to take trash to the dump? I'll handle it. We need more wine? I'll got pick some up. Mercifully, my mother replaced the dead battery in the crappy Ford Taurus, so I've had a car to zip around in. Not sure what I'd have done without it.
Today was no exception. After a morning in the nearby playground with some friends of ours, we fed the kids lunch and put them down for their naps. I then volunteered to go out and pick up some groceries in nearby Westhampton for this evening's dinner. I hopped back in the car and fired up the radio. I have a set of old compact discs in the car, but I've become bored with most of them, so am now going back to WRCN's steady force-feeding of 'classic rock.' WRCN is endearingly adamant about not playing anything that was recorded after, say, 1982, so there's a whole lot of Pat Benatar, Asia, Billy Squier, Bob Seger and J. Geils Band. It cab be entertaining in (very) small doses.
I've owned this album in virtually every conceivable format in the twenty-four years since I initially heard it. The Velvets' seminal debut album was first introduced to me by a fellow Denison University freshman named Jay in 1985. After we'd bonded over a mutual love of The Clash and Dead Kennedys, Jay turned me onto some further-flung fare like the Discipline-era King Crimson, Funhouse by the Stooges and his personal favorites, New York City's own Velvet Underground. They were dark, scary, rude, abrasive, strange, dangerous and impeccably cool. I instantly fell in love with them. And I've loved them ever since.
So, while yes, I already own this album on compact disc, I couldn't say no to a nine dollar bargain to relieve my ears from WRCN's middle-of-the-road menu. Back in the car, I slipped the disc into the player and deceptively spritely bells of "Sunday Morning" filled the car, followed immediately by the pounding, urgent punch of "Waiting for the Man." By the time "Venus in Furs" came on, I'd instinctively slipped on my black Ray-Bans as I rolled my Mom's crappy car through the streets of Westhampton. Sure, there is something deeply incongruous about cranking a song by sneery junkies about whips, bondage and sexual depravity while cruising through the leafy country lanes of a posh Hampton enclave (let alone while on a mission to buy broccoli, milk and potatoes), but damn if it didn't sound great.
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