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Saw a listing for a music festival in Hurleyville, so I decided to drive up there.
I was picturing bluegrass. Crafts fair! Cute little town in the Catskills.
But Hurleyville is a complete dump, and the music was out-of-tune Joni Mitchell covers. (I may be the only person in the U.S. who does not think Joni Mitchell is a great national treasure, but I decidedly do not.)
The crafts were kinda weird, too:
The drive was the memorable part of the escapade. I drove straight up 52 to get there and straight down 44/55 to get back. Up/up/up and then down/down/down the Shawangunks. An extremely steep route, almost dreamlike in its terrifying grade.
Back down in the Wallkill Valley, I could see the thunderstorm I’d narrowly missed in the Catskills and then watched as it descended upon New Paltz. That was interesting. The Valley—both meteorologically & politically—is a world apart from New Paltz and yet only 10 miles away!
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About a year ago, The New York Times published an article about Wallkill.
The article is not particularly informative—though it did give me two leads on meeting people, a Wallkill beautification group, and the local Democratic party, both of which have upcoming meetings that I dutifully scrawled down in my calendar—but the comments were pretty incendiary, all from snotty New York City folk, pooh-poohing the locals’ lifestyle choices. Honestly, can you blame Wallkill folk for embracing Trump when New York Times readers are so dismissive & condescending?
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Other than that, I Remunerated, went vox with Ichabod, and talked to Iggy, who has returned for another week of tenancy but is in no hurry to pick up his kids.
“Your cucumbers went crazy,” I said. “I tried to stake them to the trellis with pipe cleaners, but the plant is growing so fast, it is toppling the trellis. Also, I have been feeding the chickens tasty tortilla bits, so now the black one lets me pet her. Other than that, relatively little happened—”
“Relatively little?” asked Iggy. “So what happened?”
“My, you are a literal thinker,” I said.
He considered this for a second and then laughed. “Yes, I am a literal thinker.”
This observation seemed to raise my stock in the Iggy-verse because then he began telling me all about a British woman he’d met at some sort of GenX rave this weekend, held near Farmer Yasgur’s old dairy farm up Bethel way.
This woman had an absolute fixation on casinos and had, for some reason, fingered Iggy as the perp most likely to respond to her wiles. He had elected Friday night to come back to Wallkill (at 2 o’clock in the morning), and at 7 a.m., she began texting him, Take me to the casino…
“Was she gorgeous?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I mean, she wasn’t bad. She was in her 40s.”
“And somehow, she decided you were the one most likely to respond to her seductive overtures.”
“I know, right?”
He went back to the rave yesterday morning & didn’t return last night.
The writer in me is tempted to deduce something from this, but the economist sez, Insufficient data.
###
I will say one thing: Iggy is a very different kind of housemate than L!
Not better. Not worse. Just different.
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Date: 2024-07-22 01:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-22 12:17 pm (UTC)