I knew I was planning on going to Princeton University to take a couple of pictures of the buildings used on the show House and I saw some very redneck t-shirts and hats at Spencer’s in the Salmon Run, so I picked up a “redneck ensemble” to wear when I visited the campus.
I enjoyed having my still-fairly-new-and-a-novelty iPod hooked to my car stereo. I listened to the Luthor Wright and the Wrongs album Rebuilding the Wall, which is an extremely amusing countrified version of the Pink Floyd album (“that one looks squeamish, and there’s a raccoon! Who let all this wildlife into the room?”) Then I listened to Neil Young’s After the Goldrush album.
My energy levels flagged a bit toward suppertime, so I got a Monster energy drink, put on White Zombie (and my redneck hat) and got the rest of the way there. Paula had a friend over, and we hung out.
Saturday we went to the beach and sunned ourselves, then went to Princeton and toured around there, took pictures and narrowly missed watching Thank You For Smoking, a movie based on a book I enjoyed and didn’t think anyone would know, let alone make into a movie, and then we picked up N, newly in from New York, to hang out more.
Princeton has an awful lot of young guys dressed like businessmen on their weekend off, and each seemed accompanied by a matching guy, or a ludicrously hot girl in an extremely short “skirt.” The ugliness of the guy’s horizontally striped golf shirts and other pastel, middle-aged stuff always seemed to be balanced perfectly proportionately by the hotness of outfits worn by the girls with them. After returning to P’s, sitting on the roof, drinking wine and talking about the future of the Christian Church and stuff like that, we called it a night.
Sunday we walked along the river, then went back almost all the way to Princeton to walk around by the canal, then went to New Brunswick NJ for tacos in an authentic Mexican joint (I like Horchata, which is a kind of cinnamony rice milk drink over ice). For the evening, we watched an episode of House and the Classic Albums Dark Side Of The Moon documentary while I made chicken egg fu yung (the “boneless, skinless chicken thighs” I’d bought were actually chicken breasts with the bone still in), then went to sleep at a decent hour. I’d offered to drive N back to Pennsylvania on my way back to Canada (which should only be three additional hours) so we turned in relatively early.
The next day P went to work and N and I walked to the train station to pick up N’s brother M, who was coming along for the Pennsylvania trip. The car battery turned out to be dead and we had no way to contact P.
P’s room mate (who I’d never met, but recognized from a picture) arrived back just in time to give my car battery a boost and send us on our way. Foolishly, we allowed N to navigate for a while until we were nicely lost for over an hour, then we bought a map and M took over.
We ended up being held up in traffic just over the Pennsylvania border due to what turned out to be construction and also a bad accident involving a pair of tractor trailers which had smashed right through a concrete median barricade and lit on fire. We got 15 miles in 4 hours, adding approximately 3 hours to the extra 3 hours I’d gotten myself into, on top of the 7.5 hours I had ahead of me to get back home anyway.
During the time spent watching construction work and arguing as to the gender of the revolting person in the car in front of us, we listened to the ‘Pod some more, covering some of my old songs, Led Zeppelin (put on to appease the lads, who like the LZ quite a bit) and then we really enjoyed Johnny Cash’s Live From Folsom Prison a great deal, as we’d all seen “Walk the Line” a few months back.
I got the lads dropped in Pennsylvania by suppertime and headed back to Canada between 6 and 7pm. By midnight, I was wilting badly, so I took an hour’s nap in my car at a rest stop, drank another Monster energy drink and put The Cars on loudly and got home in time for an hour and half’s sleep before going in to school to teach.
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