I Have A Few Bones To Pick
There are many bones I want to pick this morning, the first being that I haven’t lost interest in what Katie Holmes is wearing post-divorce yet, and I’m resentful that I had to search for her name to find new pictures of her wearing a weird orange tunic on the Daily Mail website this morning.
The second is that all of my friends are talking about Bastille Day like it’s Cinco De Mayo. “What are you doing for Bastille Day this weekend?” a few people have asked me.
“Fucking Bastille Day? What do you even do on Bastille Day?” I ask them in my head. In person, I’m like, “Oooo, fun!!” Because I like them.
My rage at the recent popularity of the event came to a boil the other night in Williamsburg, when I rode my bike to Caleb’s studio. Just as I was turning onto the street where it was located, I happened upon a block strung with those Christmas lights you see all around Little Italy during the holiday season. “Is this fucking ironic or something?” I said to myself. “Fucking Williamsburg.”
My eyesight is really bad these days, especially in the dark, so it took me a few seconds to realize that I had stumbled upon a street fair. My sugar finding honing device is on the fritz, so I had to squint my eyes to see if there were any zeppole stands. As I did so, I thought I spotted a miniature Eiffel Tower in the distance.
“DO NOT EVEN TELL ME THIS IS A BASTILLE DAY FUCKING STREET FAIR,” I screamed in my own head. Then I composed a diatribe on my iPhone that began with, “You know you’re a society in decline when you start celebrating random holidays just to have something to do.”
Later in the evening, Caleb and I passed by the street fair again on the way to where he had parked the car. “Can you believe this Bastille Day street fair?’ I asked him.
“What are you talking about?”
“This is a Bastille Day street fair,” I said, pointing at the Christmas lights.
“Those are the Italian flag colors,” he said. “This is an Italian street fair.”
“You can’t see the mini-Eiffel Tower in the distance?” I asked him.
“That’s a crane,” he said.
“Ugh, I fucking hate Williamsburg,” I said.
“I love Bastille Day, though,” Caleb said. “You get to drink rose and eat mussels.”
“Ugh,” I groaned, and then stopped talking to him for at least five minutes.
My third bone is that this morning, Caleb and I were talking about having sex in the ocean. “I wouldn’t do it because I don’t want you to get microbes up there,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” I asked him.
“There are a lot of microbes in the ocean, and I wouldn’t want them to make you sick,” he said.
“The microbes would get up there whether we had sex or not,” I told him. “Vaginas are open holes.”
“They don’t get sealed up when you go in the water?” Caleb asked.
Caleb is 38 years old.
My final bone is that the Brooklyn Bridge Park Pool is absolutely fucking disgusting, and I am even more disappointed in it than I am in Brooklyn Crab for having disgusting food.
Now, I was so excited about the Brooklyn Bridge pool because I thought it was going to be airplane hangar size, and located on one of the many piers that are under construction on the water. I wasn’t even looking in the opposite direction—towards the BQE—when I would search for it on my runs every morning.
Then, when it opened, I realized that the rinky dink piece of shit colored shipping container structure next to the highway, and I felt very fooled by the city of New York, Mayor Bloomberg, the Daily News, my own imagination, and the fucking organic garden that seems to be sprouting up next to the shipping containers, to which I thought they belonged.
I kept fluffing myself up to go there, however, and yesterday, I finally did, with my friend AJ.
We arrived around 4:40, and got arm bands to enter the pool at 5pm. For a while, we sat on beach chairs in the little sand area they have next to the pool, which is actually very nice. Starting next week, they will be serving beers there from 6—11pm. Get it.
Then, at 5pm, we walked up to the gate, only to be told that we had to go shower off before getting in the water. The shower turned out to be cold, communal, and disgusting.
The pool was marked by a sign that something like, “No urine, fecal matter, blowing your nose, or throwing up” in the pool. The water was warm, and full of exactly 60 people, many of them splashing children who, on more than one occasion, almost kicked me in the face.
AJ and I sat in one tiny corner on the farside, away from the entrance, with our arms close to our body to protect us from the riff-raff. Almost as soon as I entered the pool, I picked off a long, white, curly piece of hair that had drifted onto my arm, detritus from the 4pm crew.
After 20 minutes, we finally looked down at the water, which was murky. “Let’s get out of here,” AJ said.
We practically sprinted over to where we had left our bags.
To allay our nerves, we rode our bikes a short distance to Bark hotdogs. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again, but Bark hotdogs is the best place to spend a summer evening in the city. Located on the rooftop of a beach volleyball facility, the terrace is wide, the taps serve six different types of SweetWater beer, the food is delicious, the breeze from the ocean cools off the heat, and there is a completely unobstructed view of the New York Harbor. People are allowed to bring their dogs, and unfortunately, their children. On the upside, they play old school hip-hop, Beyonce, and, on one happy occasion, the “Thong Song.”
As the sun disappeared behind a cloud wall, we watched the New York harbor fill up with sailboats returning to shore for the evening.
“I hope no one discovers this place,” I said, as the picnic tables filled up.
“I think they already have,” AJ said.
“Should we come here for Bastille Day?” I said to no one. “They have rose.”