At Odds With Himself

We have cooked every single meal home now for at least seven or eight weeks now.  I don’t mind.  But the girls have had it.  They asked and I was happy to agree.  But you’d better ask you mom as well if she’s cool with us driving up to the neighboring town and getting some take out from our favorite Japanese place in the area: Soy.  The owner is a lovely peer-aged Japanese woman who moved up from the LES in Manhattan.  I hope she’s been doing ok despite the epidemic.

Ride up, it was BTS.  We heard “Cipher Part One” comes on the mix, as we head out of New Paltz.  There are at least three other Cipher-parts that I know of.  It’s early in their oeuvre.  RM raps hard.  It’s early.  He has something to prove.  Jay Hope follows. Well . . . His growl and his grit seem aspirational and at odds with his over-sized smile.  Suga is my little one’s favorite, her “bias” along with “V.”  Suga cops the little daemon vibe in a manner ultimately . . . convincing.   Sure, he breaths in rather heavily after each line, and doesn’t have the vocal depth of RM, but the man from Daegu has his own thing.  Lyrically it’s tough at the top.  He’s often at odds with himself.

We park.  They go in.  The lady inside is very nice.  I suspect she will remember my younger daughter.   Perhaps not.  It would be good for her if she was in fact busy.  Soy makes family style food rather than the requisite: ‘all-things-Japanese’ food prepared by Filipinos and Chinese in most places that suggest they serve “Japanese” food around here.  They return to the car, in a flash.  I’m surprised the food is ready so fast, but of course it is. My turn for tunes and a BTS song called “Whatever” if I’d read correctly, has made me think, of course, of Nirvana.

Driving out of Rosendale, up the steep incline on 208, passed the fairgrounds we are listening to “Serve the Servants” and I am trying to explain to my daughters who don’t seem to have ever heard of Nirvana that it was playing the year I met their mother.  Indeed.  I share a birth year with Kurt Cobain and absolutely adored “In Utero” the year it came out and was, perhaps like many, like it was with Amy Winehouse, gut-punched saddened to learn of Kurt’s suicide later, in the spring of that year.  I tried to convey the point to my daughters that this album was a follow up to one that had been extraordinarily popular and there was great pressure to sell out, but when I first heard this, I explained, I marveled at how aggressive and confrontational it was.  Searching for a way to explain, I try to suggest that his growingly came deep from within his diaphragm in a way not unlike John Lennon.

Thursday, 5/15/20