2004-07-19 - 3:14 a.m.

Friday night I watched the Sox win a great game. One of those beautiful ball games of which I�d think only slightly less fond had the Sox not won.

Saturday the Roommate and her little sister and I marched up Highland to the Art Beat festival in Davis. Traffic wasn�t allowed in the square, and I really love walking down the middle of the street, folks milling about. We got our artsomerville tattoos and watched the Mittens in the sun. A little kid had a toy plastic guitar, and was fixated on the guitarist, playing when he played, pausing when he wasn�t.

I found a table selling art for five bucks a pop. The guy must have made a fortune, but the important part was that real people got to buy real art as made by a real artist for five real bucks each, and the price went down when the quantity went up. He had stuff designed to appeal to lots of different people--kittys, martini glasses, and images of Van Gogh, Marylyn Monroe, and the Beatles, glued onto wood/cardboard backing (I don�t know it�s name; think clipboards), with a little paint around the edges to �frame� the images. The Roommate�s little sister got the lyrics to Imagine and something else, and I got four: Boris and Natasha, the latin lady that wears the fruit hat (I�m really sorry that I forgot her name), a really nice shot of a young Dylan with his guitar, and the junior senator from New York when she was younger--a yearbook photo? Twelve bucks. No need for a frame--there�s wire in the back of the board, holes punched in both horizontal ends. And they look good together on my wall, where I put them up the day I got them, in contrast to other pieces of frame-awaiting art the Roommate or I have purchased. This guy wasn�t Andy Warhol. But he had some genuinely good stuff which people could actually buy and I�d like to see more of that.

There was a ton of interactive stuff for kids, which was great, and there was some great food too. Perhaps the extra people in the area drove a ton of girls out of Diesel, and, my sleeves rolled up, they seemed to like my tattoo (I go from zero to one on the meaningful glance scale when my tattoo is visible). There were also a bunch of people riding bikes in a taped off area. It took me watching a little to figure it out--they were part of some sort of commune?, or something (if the word choice is offensive, I apologize)--all ages, some wacky family riding crazy looking bikes, playing wacky games while riding them. It was really, really, really fun to watch. When they tried to take each other out and one succeeded, they hugged afterward.

I passed by the give me a dollar and I�ll give you a compliment booth a couple of times to see which person was most on his or her game. When I decided it was my turn, I gave three bucks to get the Somerville Arts Council dog tag as well, and I got four compliments to go along with it. Apparently, I�m very fit, my hair-beard combo works for me, and I forgot the other two. That was fun.

We played a game on the walk home--the Roommate, her little sister, and I tried to go �round the alphabet finding words starting with the needed letter. We did get to Z, and just in time.

The little one got picked up, and then the exhausted Roommate and I spent the rest of our Saturday trying to figure out what to do with the time we were losing. We wisely decided to get as drunk as possible over the course of whatever time it took us to do it, and wound up watching the Sox at Devlin�s, but they were losing at an increasingly more evident pace as fifteen meatheads piled in, acting like meatheads, so we left and wound ourselves down at home. (One highlight from the meatheads concerning Toast, a new-ish club in Union, which they were discussing. One meathead contended that it was a gay bar, and the second said, no, they had a gay night. The first said they have a gay night, it�s a gay bar. Period.. Classy.)

This morning was supposed to be a do nothing big because the weather�s crappy kind of day, but the weather was awesome so we left the apartment pretty late and with a shoddy and malleable plan, and got some food at Bukowski�s (in Inman). I feel right now like this just happened and that there�s still plenty left to do--Sundays are weird like that. We hit the kitsch store and I got a good fancy-mixed-drink book, which upon further perusal could wind up, if I followed the script for a walk through, costing me tens of hours and thousands of dollars tracking down pretty bottles. Then to the nice kitsch store that used to be on Beacon, and then to Harvard, where we toured Crate and Barrel and acted like yuppies even though I was wearing a tank top, red pit hair exposed to the I can�t really afford Williams-Sonoma but I look down on folks who shop at Target crowd whenever I had to reach for something high up. I want nice doubles glasses, and the best ones, it turns out, were in the cheapo section. Lesson? Never freak out before you buy something--look around. Maybe those nice glasses are at the one close to my work and I can get them there. Maybe I have to go to Harvard and get them there. It�s okay. It�s a chain. They�ll have them or something close.

We watched the Sox win at Charlie�s. I smoked a butt outside and sat on the doorstep of the avant-garde record store, closed for the day, still plenty of sun left but in the T-minus and counting stage, and staring at the pretty brick that made up the sidewalk, raised presumably by the tree roots underneath, each brick bordered by the kind of grassy weed that borders the kind of brick that they use for sidewalk, and I thought that it was beautiful, and I didn�t feel so bad that Sunday was T-minus half over and counting.

After the Sox won, we poked around at Urban�s basement, and both of us got good deals.

At Davis, we rented Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. After dinner, we put Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World in the ol� VCR, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World turned out to be a pretty good movie.

Russel Crowe did a good job portraying a master and commander of the far side of the world--I�d go as far as saying that he delivered a masterful performance, and was in complete command of his acting skills, and that the setting, namely, the far side of the world, really helped Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World to be a great film. I�d recommend Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World to just about anyone.