Doing Absolutely Nothing

Other than a little bit of writing, I did nothing this weekend. Well — that’s not true. I took some walks, just to keep myself from feeling like I spent the weekend melting into goo. I had a fascinating Central Park experience in which I marveled once again at the way you can follow a series of wide, gracefully curved paths, feeling like you’re just meandering, and then you can be spontaneously delivered to a spot not far from where you started, as if the park has been perfectly constructed to exist only as a series of walks that will eventually take you home, unless you want something else. I was sure that I had headed generally south and generally east, and I was sure that I needed to turn back generally north and generally west, but then I looked around, and the path I was on was about to merge with the one I came in on. They say that when you think you’re moving randomly through a maze, you’re almost always just turning in the direction of your dominant hand, and this feels like that, a little. You think you’re just wandering, but you get yourself home, which is an odd and very New York sort of thing.

The other remarkable but dangerous discovery of the weekend was S’MAC, where they make custom macaroni and cheese. And they deliver. I was originally supposed to get together with Joe R tonight, but he bailed, so it was just me and some mac and cheese. In order to meet the delivery minimum, I tried two kinds, each of which came in a seemingly normal-sized serving pan, each of which I ate about a quarter of. I tried the four-cheese, which was divine, but even better was the buffalo chicken. I know it seems like that would not be good, but it is ridiculously delicious. Get it with bleu cheese! Oh, lordy. I had to eat it in a very modest amount, because I felt incredibly guilty with every bite. You can tell it’s absolute recreational food — insane to eat more than, like, once a year.

But man, oh man, it is delicious. If I had to live off of one food, and there were no health consequences, there’s a possibility that at the moment, I would select buffalo chicken macaroni and cheese.

You know, when I told you to check out the NPR SXSW coverage, I was doing it out of a combination of loyalty and expectation, but it really did turn out wonderfully. The blog was just bloggy enough without being too bloggy, and if you’ve read any of the blogs that wrote, like, thirty words about each of a hundred bands in the last week, you know exactly what I mean. Not everything deserves a mention, and I think they did a good job of keeping it to the stuff about which there was something significant to say. I do remain shocked at the yearly reports on the horrible sound at a startling percentage of the venues. Is it that unpredictable and/or difficult? I mean, I suppose it is, but…I remain shocked.

But so much of this weekend, when I wasn’t walking in Central Park, eating mac and cheese, or listening to Stephen introduce Yo La Tengo in front of a thousand people at the Austin Music Hall, I was doing nothing. I lay around with my head on a pillow and watched TV. I scribbled ideas in a notebook for things I might write someday. I watched some bad TV, but also some great TV. I watched Inside Man with Denzel Washington. I woke up too early, like always, except this time, I made myself go back to sleep, and the result was my first good sequence of eight-hours-of-sleep nights in…certainly many months, and maybe years. I got up to get coffee; I came home to have an English muffin. I really liked SNL, then fell asleep after Weekend Update.

It was relaxing. It was genuinely, truly, honestly relaxing. I tend to clench my teeth; I tend to ball up my fists; I tend to bounce my knee; I tend to fiddle with things. I did a lot less of this. It was a weekend of breathing, and I could not have enjoyed it more.