Tag: Robert Mitchum

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What It Is: 5/24/10

What I’m reading: Fly Fishing with Darth Vader and Bartleby the Scrivener

What I’m listening to: High Violet, by The National

What I’m watching: The Night of the Hunter, which was a) my first Robert Mitchum flick, and b) All That. Also, caught up on Parks & Rec and 30 Rock, and watched the first third of Dark City.

What I’m drinking: Bluecoat and Q-Tonic

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Not hiking on Sunday, as we were expecting rain. Which never arrived. Maybe we should get ’em an arts & crafts project, it being summer vacation time and all.

Where I’m going: Nowhere!

What I’m happy about: Getting together with my pal Jon-Eric and his wife Monika on Sunday evening at Aozora in Montclair, NJ to celebrate his 40th birthday with the, um, time-honored tradition of Chilean sea bass.

What I’m sad about: That the weather was so bad last Tuesday that I couldn’t get into NYC for an alumni seminar on Bartleby. I would have preferred to! (but seriously, it was one of those rain-and-wind episodes that turns into a 2-hour drive just to get into the city)

What I’m worried about: Getting those last two FDA speakers locked in for my conference in September. After a long delay, my contact at FDA HQ finally got back to me on Sunday. His e-mail mentioned that I should “fill out the attachment,” but the e-mail contained no attachment. Sigh.

What I’m pondering: When I’ll get around to wearing these. (They were on sale, and they only had my size.)

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What It Is: 4/26/10

What I’m reading: Baby, I Don’t Care, Weathercraft, and the new Esquire.

What I’m listening to: Songs from Venice Beach, Songs You Know by Heart, Special Beat Service, A Friend of a Friend, and Signals.

What I’m watching: Animal House (which I haven’t watched in a million years and remains one of my all-time faves), Deadliest Catch, and the current HBO triumvirate of Treme, The Ricky Gervais Show, and The Life & Times of Tim.

What I’m drinking: Citadelle & Q-Tonic.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Spending a few days with my dogless pals Sharon & Doug. They didn’t embarrass themselves or us too badly. That said, Ru climbed up on their sofa once, and Otis was obsessed with their parakeets, forcing my pals to relocate the birds to the garage. Sigh.

Where I’m going: One-day jaunt to Philadelphia this week, then Chicago & Toronto next week.

What I’m happy about: Having such a nice time wandering around NYC last Saturday.

What I’m sad about: That so many neighborhoods in NYC remind me being in a mall back in NJ.

What I’m worried about: Not much in specific. I’d been pretty worried about getting the May issue done in time, but got a lot of work done on Sunday to put that goal in reach.

What I’m pondering: Whether I’ll have time & motivation to write a series of short- or medium-length posts this week on a variety of subjects.

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You, Sir, Are Bad-Ass: Baby, I Don’t Care

Courtesy of The Impossible Cool, let’s end this week with a dose of Bad-Ass:

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Robert Mitchum.

Whose biography, Baby, I Don’t Care, I just bought on my Kindle. And who would sneer at me and then kick my ass for having such a device.

Every man should have at least one Robert Mitchum moment in his life. Here’s mine.

I was at a New Year’s party in NYC in 2003, a few sheets to the wind, kindasorta getting over some heartbreak, when I bumped into a cute, tall, redhead who’d drunkenly flirted with me at a party a few weeks earlier. We resumed our flirtation and got to smooching a little. Then she looked up into my eyes and drunktiredhorny said, “Take me home.”

And I looked at her, smiled, and said, “Baby, I ain’t got a home.”*

That’s my Robert Mitchum moment. She reconnected with her friends, who led her outside a little later. Two days after, I met the woman I’m gonna spend the rest of my life with.

* As far as that night went, it was true. I wasn’t driving back to NJ in that condition, and wasn’t gonna bring her back to my friends’ sofa with me.