Night walking

(On dial-up, if you can believe it. No pics this week. Everybody now: Fuck earthlink, fuck verizon!)

I left the party at two in the morning. From Ditmas Park West (that’s what The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn calls it), it took an hour and twenty minutes to walk home, with two brief stops. Why not? I was awake, I was lonely (stand-up-and-drink parties do that to me), and solvitur ambulando, as Augustine said. It was quiet through the night-manicured lawns of greater Flatbush. That stuff about the city that never sleeps? Bosh. The long blocks of Westminister Rd. are framed by big trees and bigger homes, not at all the “Brooklyn” most people carry around in their mental maps. In Prospect Park South, with its Anglo-Saxon grid (Stratford, Argyle, Rugby…), the homes are even more enormous, and in the dark you can’t see that they’re held together with a wing and a prayer (a.k.a. another mortgage). Neoclassical, Colonial, Queen Anne, Tudor, eclecto-Palladian. Then I rambled along the long southwestern edge of Prospect Park, listening to the green lungs slumber. The strangest sight of the night? Two guys barbequing on 13th St. in Park Slope at 2:45am: they were sitting on folding chairs on the sidewalk staring at their smoking hibachi. Maybe they were working on a twelve-hour brisket…. Nearby, the 14th Regiment Armory was lit up inside, so I could see portions of the nearly block-long interior, magic gone utterly to waste. I descended from the heights of the Slope and crossed over the valley of the great greasy green Gowanus on the Third Street Bridge. By then, I really had to pee. Thank god it’s an industrial zoning…

On Smith Street (o, those poor bastards living above all those bars) a couple stopped me and asked me the way to Lincoln Place. I was disconcerted; where was that again? He looked like Thurston Howell 3rd, but younger, and she… I’m afraid I stared hard into the hot sardonic aura of her eyes. Anyway, they wanted the Slope, and I suggested that the half hour walk across the Gowanus might not be a good idea for such tenderfeet. She concurred, displaying her heels. (Rolling my eyes here, but not at the time; gentleman, scholar, etc.) Then she said, Wait a minute, I just realized you’re wearing a skirt. Indeed. Have I neglected to mention I walked across Brooklyn in my kilt? Yeah, what’s up with that, asked Thurston. The breeze, I said.

When I got home, I showered and leapt into bed and couldn’t fall asleep. It might have been those chocolate covered espresso beans I munched during Jamaica Bay bioblitz fourteen hours earlier – since I’m largely caffeine free, it doesn’t take much. But mostly, I was riled over the party. I’d talked to Very Interesting Women and yet, typically, neglected to do any work, like glancing for wedding rings (doh!), securing telephone numbers, scouting the Mostest/Hostess, and whatever it is else that’s necessary for the Great Game I’ve never known how to play.