Over my _nesting weekend_ Diane and I took a long bike ride down Ocean Avenue to Brighton Beach boardwalk. It was a cool afternoon and the bike trail down to the boardwalk ensures your ass don’t get run over too easy.

Needless to say we bought some borsht an spent sometime enjoying the uncrowded beach scenery before getting on our bikes and heading back toward the slope. It was then that I came to two very important revelations.

# I didn’t bring my camera and I really should have. The people on Brighton Beach are really interesting to look at.
# After Biking you will sometimes crave things you might not, ordinarily, crave.

“There’s that little Italian place I want to take you to.”
“Oh, they make egg creams. Let’s stop and have an egg cream/”
“I don’t know sweetie, that sign looks like it’s been here for 30 years and this restaurant turns out is a pizza parlor.”
“uncle louie Gs has egg creams let’s go there instead.”

I really can’t say I remember much about egg creams, nor do I fully understand my want of one, but let me assure you that Uncle Louie G may know how to make them but the 14 year old girls behind the counter don’t.

“Does this taste sweet to you?”
“This is going to keep me for the next 72 hours.”
“This isn’t just sweet it’s like that sweet you can only get from lots and lots of corn syrup.”
“Did they have corn syrup in the 50’s?”
“I really don’t know.”

To save you from a nasty case of tooth decay and also to preserve in my memory the correct mixture here is the “original” recipe from “Fox’s U-bet Chocolate syrup.”:http://www.foxs-syrups.com/egg_cream.html

The Original Brooklyn Egg-Cream

Take a tall, chilled, straight-sided, 8oz. glass
Spoon 1 inch of U-bet Chocolate syrup into glass
Add 1 inch whole milk
Tilt the glass and spray seltzer (from a pressurized cylinder only) off a spoon, to make a big chocolate head

Anybody have a seltzer spritzer I can borrow?

It’s important to nest. To occasionally do nothing in order to to grasp one’s position in one’s life. To catch up on all the little things that you have overlooked because of the furious pace of your furious pace. It’s the thin line between burn out and underachiever that has been keeping me going the last few months. Spending my time slacking off and then, realizing approaching deadlines, burning the candle at both ends to get the work done. This is my problem.

I cannot seem to reach an equilibrium at work or at play. I see my friends every other month and spend the rest of my time secretly hiding from everybody, because it all seems like too much. Endless clutter of life’s obligations that I have been embracing or avoiding. Is this what it feels like to become a hermit? The “Spruce Goose,”:http://www.boeing.com/news/feature/sprucegoose/ Howard Hues’s airplane which eventually drove him mad, is beginning to make sense to me.

It’s time to stay at home. Pepper, Diane, and I have a date together where we play Peppers favorite game, _family on the bed._

Hope is on the horizon for all us nay-sayers who don’t believe the republican propaganda about projections of Bush winning this election. Say hello to our side — “Vote Drives Gain Avid Attention of Youth in ’04.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/15/politics/campaign/15youth.html?pagewanted=2 I’m not going to stop giving up hope until this thing is over. Take that GOP. We have youth on our side and no matter what the rich white men in power say, we are going to stand our ground until they all dry up.

We got mad bling up in this bia-tch.

I’m not sure if it was the onion I cutting for lunch, but I was moved to tears after reading the article “Whatever It Takes”:http://www.oriononline.org/pages/os/media/ThoughtsInitiative.html which appeared in the New York Times today. It reminded me of convictions, where they are and why I have them.

In the simplest of terms.