This is this this is, is this this?




Bad poetry, bad cold, snot pouring forth.




Song on the jukebox is "Year of the Cat" which is an old favorite from my late-night radio days in Tampa. Ah, here's that great saxophone solo.




I think this is the first song ever played on the new Magic 96 in Tampa. That first song might also have been Wildfire. Whatever the song I remember feeling proud or somehow on the leading edge of radio knowledge in Tampa the night 96 KIX FM switched to MAGIC 96. I think the format and playlists of the new station were very similar to the old but I felt like I was at the forefront of radio in Tampa for having been listening at the moment the station channged its format.




One thing about radio that seems to be unchanged since that 1980s Magic 96 midnight is that stations change format abruptly. The DJs rarely know they are soon to be fired and audiences are rudely surprised.




A story I tell often -- and which surprisingly receives a fair amount of disbelief -- is that my sister and I were watching TV at the exact moment MTV first came on the air. I guess "on the air" is a misnomore for a cable channel, but we were looking right at that channel the moment it changed from static to a test pattern to the Buggles singing "Video Killed the Radio Star".




I got things done today but I can't remember what. This, that, here, there. Tired and achey from this stupid cold. I don't get colds. Not now, not ever. Last night's sleep was crazy. Insane and crazy, to evoke a Paul Zindel line from one of his adolsecent novels I read as a teen. I had a long and rambling dream about moving in to a 3 bedroom apartment with as yet unknown roommates. I had first dibs and was choosing my room. None of the rooms had doors.




I have had nearly identical dreams in the near past. In one dream I am choosing from rooms in a palatial house in a rural area. In another dream I am choosing from rooms in a glamorous 5 room suite in an overpriced residential hotel. In all these dreams the rooms get bigger and bigger as I see each next one, and the dream ends with me deciding if I want the biggest room or a smaller one.




Most times I can tell what my dreams mean but with these I do not know.

Why did the Time-Warner cable guy go so far out of his way to tell me there was a Q-Tip floating in my toilet?

Read about ants today, and how they communincate via pheromones and how a collective consciousness forms among them, this consciousness designed to support the inadaquecies of the individual ants.




It was cool, and not altogether new to me, but I hadn't read about it in a long while, and not since reading some of the Julian Jaynes attempts at defining human consciousness as something of a meta phenomenon. The description of ants' collective consciousness evoked Jaynes, whose influence (I'm told) is surprisingly marginal.




So then I ventured out onto that big old Internet and found a video of some scientists who poured cement down the top of a giant anthill. 10 tons of cement to fill the colony's network of tunnels and chambers. They let the cement solidify and then they excavated the structure. The resulting cement sculpture was a masterpiece, better seen than described.




....




Today my project waas to find quiet, tourist-free, secluded places in midtown Manhattan where one could read or work or do whatever. I found 2 such spots, one right on Broadway and another nearby. I read about the ants at the place on Broadway.

Got some air today. I went out to Calvary so as not to waste the Spring-like weather. I spotted a couple of markers I had never noticed before, near the site of an infant's grave that became the focus of my energies for a couple of days last year.




There is a stone marker at Calvary that summarizes the Calvary Ash Tree Project. 12 Ash Trees were planted at the cemetery 6 months after 9/11 as a symbol of growth and renewal. The trees were planted near the spot where cemetery workers gathered to watch the Twin Towers burn and then collapse. There were plenty of other places on the grounds that might have afforded a clearer view of the Towers but this happened to be the spot where the groundskeepers and others were when it happened, and that was why the Ash Trees were planted there.




Today I noticed that right across the street from the Ash Trees were burial sites of two New York Firefighters who died that day. Compared to other 9/11 graves I've seen these were extravagent. One had an original poem engraved on it, another had a likeness of the deceased engraved on the stone. The markers seemed to be in a place of honor, situated as they were directly across the roadway from the Ash Trees marker and in the same line of view to the World Trade Center that the cemetery workers had that day.




I have probably seen 40 or 50 graves and monuments for those who died on 9/11. Most of them were at Maple Grove Cemetery, others at St. Michael's. I know one at New Calvary but had never seen nor did I expect to see any at Old Calvary -- especially single-occupancy graves like these. Old Calvary had been sold out for generations until newer graves were built only in the last year or so.




The 9/11 graves I'd seen so far were all pretty modest, though the one at New Calvary was fairly hefty in size. Many of the markers were just markers, meaning there was no burial because the bodies were never recovered. I remember spotting a columbarium niche for a young person who died that day. It was interesting because I had never seen a columbarium until then and I was very much enjoying looking at the urns and other mementos. When I got to this particular niche I saw a decoration that indicated he had evidently died at the Trade Center. I looked for his cremation urn and saw none. His burial, I realized, was in one of those giant clouds of smoke.




I know I have told that story a hundred times but I thought of it today when comparing these relatively opulent markers to those of others who died that day. There must be a story there.




....




I think I might go for the laproscopic surgery to fix my GERD. The procedure does not make me nervous, but the potential financial expense does. I have insurance but it seems to be threaded so that I would pay as much as possible for overnight hospital stays. Were I to get the treatment for macular degeneration, on the other hand, the $6000 dosages would only cost me $50 co-pay for the specialist's office visit.




I considered the surgery late last year but figured it was not so pressing, but yesterday might have changed my mind. I forgot to take an Omeprazole (generic name for Prilosec) in the morning and I had a tune melt with swiss cheese for lunch. I spent the rest of the day feeling like I was on fire -- cheese in particular seems to rip my innards a new sphincter if I fail to pop an Omeprazole ahead of time.




....




I was in Tampa last week to see my mother, sister, brother-in-law, and nephew, as well as an old high school friend. I was not especially looking forward to the visit but it went well enough.




I am expecting delivery this week of a box full of stuff I found in my childhood bedroom. There is, in faact, a mountain of boxes in that room, but I found a few of the exact things I was looking for and sent them here. Specifically I found some high school literary magazines in which some of my stories and awful poetry were published, and some other hand-written detritus from my yawling youth. I left 3 full boxes of similar crap and over a dozen other boxes full of books and even crappier crap. Some day I'll get a road trip partner to help me drive it all here.

I guess I haven't used this keyboard in a while. It was buried so deep in my coat pocket I had to work to get it out. It was under a wad of napkins, some business cards, and some glossy postcard-size flyers for places I've been through lately.




And pens. For some reason that pocket was stuffed with pens. Red, blue, black, and green. These are pens I bought in a moment of imagining I would make good on my lifelong goal of transcribing Bach's Wall-Tempered Clavier. That project would require a multi-colored array of pens, for to distinguish the individual voices of the fugues.




I quickly came to the conclusion that Bach's fugal writing is not the best vehicle for learning how to write fugues. That is not a new or unique insight. A certain type of musicologist has long complained that Bach never wrote a perfect fugue, and that the physical dexterity and spiritual riches Bach felt lived in contrpuntal music resulted in music whose structural freedoms made fundamental theoretical study almost pointless.




So for me to continue the transcription project would be for the purposes of servitude and worship. Maybe "worship" is too strong a word, but transcribing anyone's music for purposes other than familiarizing yourself with it comes close to servitude and evokes images of monks transcribing the Bible with calligraphy pens and being forced to start from the beginning if, at page 3,982, they forget to capitalize the G in God.




....




I am at a dive bar, seats filled entirely by old men and people like me on their way to becoming sad old men sitting alone at bars.




Nothing much has been happening lately. I noticed a sharp pain in my chest a few weeks ago and have lately noticed it again. It wouldn't seem serious enough to be angina, but I've been so lazy lately that some evils could be blubbering up from these innards.




I read once that Horowitz did not like eating in public restaurants because music was usually played at such places. Music -- especially live music -- disturbed his innards. I don't know how severe that condition was (he was evidently able to deal with it enough to eat at public places as often as anyone might) but I have experienced the same thing. There is a certain turning of the gut that accompanies my experience of music and great oratory, as well as most creative efforts. Not to be crude (who, me?) but taking a dump can have the effect of vacating (hah) my creative energies and ideas. There is something about tension (or accumulation) in my lower tracts that seems to be connected to creative energies.




Accumulation. Man, I just can not talk about shitting without everything sounding like a pun of some sort.




Someone here is doing crossword puzzles, writing answers into a giant book of puzzles. Coincidental to the above ruminations on my turgid innards I find that the very sight of an crossword puzzle grid stirs something in my gut the same way I imagine Horowitz's gut spun when hearing a string quartet play over his steak dinner. I experience similar sensationis of anticipation and hunger when I see a blank piece of paper or a blank page in a notebook. The seemingly infinite possibilities lingering in the platform of a blank surface has astonished me since childhood.




Daggumit, I have to take a dump.




....





Hokay, it's an hour or so later and II am still at the sad old man bar. The real old timers have gone home (or wherever) and it's just me and another middle-aged loser on our shared path to oblivion.




The police appear to be raiding the bar across the street. Siren lights flail fear into this place as the guns and clubs are wielded at the other place.




I knew a kid in grade school who claimed he could identify sirens. He claimed he could identify a Berlin siren from hearing it for a split second, and after 3 or 4 seconds he claimed he could tell you what type of crisis to which the police car or ambulance was headed.




I never quizzed him on this, but his claims of siren prodigy occasionally surface in my obviously idle mind. I imagine the Siren Master at work, reclining, smoking a pipe, casually but authoratatively telling the tale behind a range of seemingly cacophonous siren sound samples.




"It's a Tokyo ambulance headed to the home of an elderly nun who tripped over a power strip."




"It's a Detroit police car, There was a disturbance at one of the chopshops."




"Do you hear that dull dripping noise in that siren? That's an Israeli police cab responding to a possible terrorist attack."




One siren sound provokes a stern frown and sadness from the siren prodigy.




"That one's coming for me."

As I explained at great length in a long and unexpected email to a friend last week, it takes me a long time to understand things. The importance of connections made years ago and how those connections light up today, sometimes I just don't get it. The same is true of the way things work. I may be pure zeitgeist, never understanding or attempting to understand the mechanics of daily life. So many words I know of but can not define, words that huddle in my mind waiting to be used but which would appear out of order, out of meaning, as I wantonly plug them in to sentences and paragraphs, or blast together whole stories using only those words.




I re-read a bunch of John Ashbery poetry yesterday and today, remembering the ease with which he summons and then herds incongruities into a new reality. Pancakes talking to horses ridden by bottles of scotch, oh my!




I have been writing a lot of things lately. Most of it self-serving gnashing at my mental cud but once in a while a distinct and meaningful memory surfaces. So much of college I thought was forgotten can in fact rise up from the flab of memory. They say that muscle has memory, but does not memory have muscle, too?




I arrived at the notion of forgetfulness as an expression of hate. I may not understand hate, though. I have hated nothing since my 5th Grade teacher, and even that was a contrived attempt at being like certain other kids. Hate is a poison, usually expressed in diluted ways. Peeves are, I think, our most pathetic form of hate. Grammar peeves, in particular, are among the feeblest attempts at expressing intellectual superiority and Judge Judy-like hatefulness.




But all out removal of someone from memory seems like hate. If I think of certain events and times in college, for instance, I will remove from the narrative references to situations which made me a fool. If someone else tells a story involving a person who destroyed me I will skip that person's name as if it was never uttered. I will not ignore it or pretend I didn't hear it. It will genuinely not arrive in my mind.




That long and unexpected e-mail was to the sister of Keri, who died 12 years ago this month. I am poor at keeping track of anniversaries, and do not commit the memory of such things to computers or PDAs.




....




I have to stop talking about this because I am in a public place and it is making me weepy to think about that again. Public weeping is not allowed.




....




I dreamed about eating a Big Mac, and the Big Mac tasted like dirt. Biting into it caused it to disintegrate, and earthworms and those tiny German cockroaches rushed from the collapsing tower of Frankenfood concoction. I have not eaten fast food from a chain restaurant since 1995, with the exception of a burger at Hardee's in 2002. I thought Hardee's was more like an Applebee's or some place that could reasonably be considered a notch or two above McDonald's or Burger King. I was wrong and man that was a nasty burger.




Of course I poison myself in other ways, but my innards will not tolerate some things and, as my dream indicated, a Big Mac is one of them.




What am I talking about?

Strange dreams last night in which my brain was connected to my web sites, but faulty connections and vagaries of the Internet caused much of the text to look like dots on the Amsler Grid (The Amsler Grid is the pattern used for Macular Degeneration tests, and if you're seeing splotches and empty space on that grid like I do then it tends to mean you have a troubled macula).




I could barely disengage from the dream, which evolved from a hotel conference room. Sitting in that conference room I decided to go get something from my hotel room, but when I got to my room I discovered I had left my room key back in the conference room. I cursed at this discovery, and my curses were picked up by NYPD surveillance microphones and I was quickly detained for questioning.




The cops, staring at me bug-eyed, explained that it was a new spin on the "broken windows" theory of fighting crime. Instead of waiting for windows to be broken they instead mine public spaces for profanity, asssuming that we who curse are on our way to breaking windows and from there the inexorable path is carved to serial murder and coke-fueled terrorist rampages.




I explained that I was only trying to get into my room, but lacking a room key or other proof that this was my hotel room they escorted me from the building and placed me on a bus. The bus was very long and mostly empty save for 3 children and a payphone inside a glass cabinet. The children somehow managed to make $8.98 worth of calls from the payphone withouut having to pay for the calls, and we all got a laugh out of that.




The dream rambles on from there but now that I'm awake I find it conceivable that law enforcement could reach that level of bottom-feeding in the name of preventing crime.

An e-mail from a friend yesterday reminded me of a lingering memory of Leslie, who commit suicide last year.




I and several other web people of the time were invited to be a part of a project which seemed intriguing on the surface but in which I quickly lost interest. I was always skeptical of it but had nothing to lose in seeing what it was about. The organizer invited people who he described as the most original and artistic people on the web at the time, and Leslie was not one of them.




I remember how she winced when I told her I was in this project. When I heard that she had killed herself I started mining my memory for signals, for indications of her discontent, and there were many but that little incident came to mind first. She did not articulate any anger about the matter, but she didn't have to. I recognized it. I think one must be a pretty unhappy individual to let nonsense like that eat away at you, and I would know because I know how it feels to let these petty poisons rot and how perposterous it looks to anyone not inside your head.




I walked to my 181 today to get "2666" by Roberto Balaño and a set of DVDs by a director whose name I forget right now but who was recommended by a friend. And I finally got a copy of "The Last Great Necessity," a book about the transformation of cemeteries in America from places of memory to businesses and places to be avoided. The memory of humans is largely consigned to museums and libraries, but it was not always like this. Or so the book summaries say.




My vision has been playing games with me all day. I should give the retinal guy a call, but it's only been a couple of months and I'm supposed to wait a year before seeing him again, and of course there is this pesky holiday coming on. He said to call if conditions seem to get worse quickly (because my type of macular degeneration is known to accelerate very quickly) but I can't decide if conditions really are worse or if I'm just imagining it. Blindness would be bad but I could cope. I would go apeshit if I went deaf.




That e-mail correspondence which reminded me of Leslie further reminds me that I rarely respond to e-mail any more. It feels like labor to communicate with people via e-mail and typing, and it always has, but I seem to consign myself to a world in which substantive communication is most often left to typing.




I woke up screaming from a dream yesterday. In this dream I stepped into my living room and saw that my computer was gone. Stolen. To scream over something like that probably sounds neurotic or work-aholic (I am neither) but if that computer and external drives disappeared my livelihood would essentially vanish with it. I have some offsite backup but not enough, and rebuilding from a metaphorical lightning strike would take weeks and full restoration would be impossible.




But after I woke up and assured myself no burglary had happened I thought about that dream. The table, with the computer and monitors gone, looked nice. I liked it like that. I imagined what I might do if all this IV-level access to the Internet was yanked away, and the possibilities seemed tantalizing. It seems like I am trapped in this lifestyle, a self-sentenced prisoner.

For some reason am thinking of a joke I heard a year or so ago, the source of this joke I can not remember.




Q: What's the difference between a pop musician and a jazz musician?




A: A pop musician plays 3 chords for 1,000 people, a jazz musician plays 1,000 chords for 3 people.




I must have thought of that today while listening to Coltrane almost play some standards.




I registered my car in NY state today, and got my first ever NY state license plates. Whoopee. I was C662 at the Herald Square DMV, and I was in and out of there in about 40 minutes. The seats, which I remember from when II had to transfer the title of the car to me earlier this year, are like church pews. The individual behind the counter who processed my paperwork exhibited a withering disdain for all comers, so II did not take his superior attitude too seriously.




That sort of thing used to bother me, and it still does in the case of knowledgeable people who hog their knowledge like greedy misers, dispensing it only when the opportunity to do so can be accompanied by cynical condescension.




On the other hand II guess it could be said that all questions are stuupid these days, since the answer to virtually any question is to Google it, this approach confirming the role of information aggregators as market movers and even cultural commentators and spokespeople (hah, I almost said spookspeople... This keyboard keeps wanting to repeat letters.).




Being aloof about one's knowledge can, in most circumstances, come with the risk that your knowledgge can easily be gained aby someone else. Your ideas can be re-purposed, and today's infinite bandwidth offers the perfect platform on which everything can become cliché. I think that anything that can be digitized can and will inevitably become cliché.




I believe that human consciousness will, in my lifetime, become a digital product, capable of being uploaded to a P2P network and subject to arbitrary growth and development in a yet-to-be-developed network environment in which data moves about like the chaos of atoms colliding in the air. I think that the network of the brain and the nervous system (and thus of human consciousness) will be found to be replicatable, and a bridge between this inferior vessel of the body and the substance of our consciousness will be built.




But I'm just talking on instinct. I have no inside information on what the cloners are doing to transmute consciousness into a P2P Or other type of network petri dish resource. Though I do imagine that this new life form will start itself as what we now call a virus.




....




So an





....




That was interesting. As I started typing "So anway" up there I got a tap on the shoulder from an old friend who saw me here and said hi. I was unawaree she had moved to Massachusetts to live with her new husband on a farm. Cows, horses, chickens, roosters, and hogs. And a llama.




I think the last time I saw Susan was here at this place a year or so ago. I also think I was sitting here on this spot when I saw her throuugh the glass next to me. There is a glass separator between this seat and the seats to my right, and she was there with some other people. I should find what I said about that near-encounter (we did not speak that night as we did tonight) because I seem to remember having thoughts about it.




Thoughts. What does that mean? What are those.




I am reaching that age where any and all of my potential "interests" are getting married or becoming otherwise inaccessible. I've seen or heard from 3 or 4 women ini the last few months who have footnotes in my mind attached to them. Footnotes saying something, not necessarily articulatel, like "there's one who got away."




Or is it I who got away? Not likely. I'm the permanently single man sitting here at the bar pecking into his cell phone contemplating or at least imagineering (coincidental to this monologue) an affair with a woman who is not legally married but might as well be. I did something like that in the late 1990s. A married woman came to my apartment morning after early morning. She initiated every single encounter, and I thought it was just sex, and that the anchor of her marriage removed any possibility for emotional rupture.




Was I ever wrong.




But I don't want to talk about that. I am all about my new license plates. The first three letters are EKW. I sometimes walk the streets of New York engaging in my favorite road trip game of imagining what the 3-letter bits on license plates might mean in the context of a personals ad. SWF =, of course, single white female. CBL = Christian Black Lady? hey, why not. So my random 3 letters, EKW, with the demanding K and E, might be better suitied to generalities and not personals ads.



Esoteric Kitty Whiskers.




Electric Kitchen Widget.




Energizing Kellogg's Wheaties.




Exotic Krakatoa Watcher





Egyptian Killing Wagon.




Yes, that is it. My Lincoln Town Car is an Egyptian Killing Wagon. That is perfectly appropriate. If ever there was a case of someone whose car did not match their personality I think my Lincoln Town Car and me would be it. So why not turn said Town Car into an exotic and invincible talisman, capable of murderous road trips in and only in Egypt?

I never thought of Bruce Springsteen as having a beautiful voice. So I was just bowled over by a track of him doing Thunder Road in 1975. Wow. Leave it to Usenet to continue to make me aware of things I never knew existed. I have always liked Springsteen. Hearing his songs as a kid in Tampa I imagined that life in New Jersey and New York had more filth and vitality than the quiet suburb I was in, and I think that bit of projection has proven itself to be accurate.




As for Bruce I simply never thought of him as a great singer. But, well, wow, that 1975 concert changes my mind about that. Full voice rock star opera singer back in the day.




Tears roll from my eyes on occasion, virtually always in private. It happened today as I heard that familiar song sung in a way I never imagined it. It happns sometimes when I think about Hank Aaron's record-breaking home run. Certain stories from friends and acquaintances about their experiences on September 11, 2001, have that effect.




Here I am at a pub on Broadway. I have not been out so much lately, and these are the places where I most often type into this Treo with this conversation-piece keyboard.




I followed the World Series with some interest, hoping the Rays could win it but remembering how skeptical I am of the "World Series" to begin with. I think pennant races are where it's at. A season-ending matchup between teams that have likely never faced each other somehow does not make sense to me. I have also become skeptical of the sport in general for the irrational amount of money the players get paid when compared to their value to society. If ever you need something to demonstrate how little money is worth you just look to professional sports.




I redisicovered my love of Ben Katchor and Charles Schulz this week. Schulz through the 1950s was just so funny. Katchor's "Julius Knipl" character reminds me a lot of myself.




I renewed a subscription to New York Review of Books and with the first issue found an interesting write-up of the letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. In a book of correspondence between great writers her complaints about the insignificant prattle of great writers in their letters made me laugh.




My financial interests have taken quite a hit the last few weeks. I do not make a lot of money largely because I have no desire to make a lot of money. I know how to do that -- how to make money -- but I do not care to have much more than I need. Wealth makes me feel conspicuous, as I found during my stone-skip path through corporate. Making a lot of money made me feel like an asshole.




I am pretty well diversified, it turns out. Cash, trusts, real estate, and even gold and a mountain of quarters and dimes would likely get me through most any financial apocalypse. My situation is not perilous but a certain amount of walking-around money could evaporate if I don't do something about it.




I followed the economy-at-the-abyss story with some interest. It became quickly evident that virtually no one understood what the hell was happening, and those who did understand sounded foreign with their talk of credit swaps and esoteric "instruments." Now banks are being nationalized and much of the concentrated wealth has vanished, but I think this is just a blip. Just a blip in America's traditionally disproportionate allocation of wealth. Greed will prevail. Greed is the answer. Greed will find a way to return the majority of money to a fraction of 1% of the population. While I have typed these words I think $5000 has passed me by. Some of it passed in the buses and taxis that drove past outside. Some of it is "in the air," blowing around at my feet, at my achey shins. I see some of it in the faces gaping at the televisions here. Everything is opportunity to make money in America.




Working at a computer has become draining. My eyes are *bad* and getting worse, not aided by these ghastly new glasses I got a couple of months ago. They are ghastly in function, not appearance. Most of my time at a computer is spent looking away from it, a routine I've consciously adopted to save my eyes from any more strain than is necessary.




I remember a line from Leonard Cohen: "I ache in the places where I used to play." I am only 40 but fading vision and a curious feeling of weakness in my shins has me imagining my self on the brink of collapse. I walked to midtown today, over the 7000+ foot 59th Street Bridge, feeling for the first third of the trek Over the bridge that my legs were going to crack at the shins. I had the same feeling a few weeks ago, standing in line at Panera. My shins throbbed.




This is not an arbitrary or imagined sensation. Four or five months ago I slammed my right shin into a metal bar that was meant for use as a footrest for people sitting on a barstool at a tall table. The place was dark and I just did not see the metal bar there. I was not drunk at all. It was nothing like that, though I read wth some interest today that Elizabeth Bishop had numerous injury-producing falls while drunk out of her life. Reading that on the subway today I thought "Wow, I never knew she was a drunk. Nice."