sorabji

Does shit stink?

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:10:45 GMT

I have not seen it myself yet but that picture of the amazing stained glass probably does no justice to how much I love the thing. I finally found it after first spotting it in February 2006. It was not exactly tormenting me but I spent 6 or 7 hours trying to find it again.

That stained glass is unusual for Calvary because the door to the mausoleum that houses it is completely without glass. So you can see the stained glass inside (and get photos of it) without reflections of your wrist or mouth in the door.

And the stained glass piece seems to be in immaculate condition. That would be unusual to begin with(the glass is about 100 years old) but it is made more remarkable by the arm's reach within which this beautiful stained glass work sits.

Anyway. I am sunburned from today's cemetery trip. I have been restless these days, and the last few days I wandered off into directionless walks just like the old days.

Remembering a conversation from the other night, in which the three of us sought out new universal truths, universal answers to obvious questions.

The most obvious specimen from the genre of answering obvious questions with universal truths: "Does a bear shit in the woods?" While a bear, an individual bear, is not *constantly* shitting in the woods, the answer to the question is always yes. A bear is always shitting in the woods. Somewhere, dear reader, somewhere in the woods -- as the sun sets, as the beer pours, as the twig is bent -- somewhere a bear shits onto the surface of our shared earth, our shared earth.

We entertained other possibles answers. Is Hitler evil? Well, not if you, y'know, worship Hitler. I argued against "Does shit stink?" Shit, I argued, does not always stink. I thought vegetarians' shit never stunk? No no no, Mark, you should eat some asparagus and report back.

"Is the pope Catholic?" seemed like a slam dunk. While there may have been popes who could be proven to have been (by technicality or political motivations) non-Catholic I think it is universally safe to say that at any given moment in time the pope is Catholic.

"Three strikes and you're out?" Instantly shot down. First of all, you can foul tip the ball and the catcher can drop it, giving you a chance to beat the throw to first base. This happens all the time, with many pitchers on the books as having scored 4 strikeouts in an inning. But even metaphorically there is no universal substance to the three-strikes rule.

And the conversation went on and on.

It was nice.

Sewers

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:47:02 GMT

I spent much of the day standing on sewer grates, looking for examples of artistry in the placement of paint splotches on the openings to the sewers.

Somewhere in the New York City bureaucracy is a job in which someone drops splotches of paint on the sewers. The splotches indicate that the sewer has been treated for West Nile Virus. A city employee, committing mosquito genocide, drops an insecticide bomb into the sewer, and records the gesture with a couple of paint splotches.

I do not know what (if anything) the colors represent. Lately the paint splotches seem to be white. The artistry comes from the paint splotches dropped on top of already existing paint splotches. Large green spots, topped by smaller, centered red spots, look like bug-eyed cartoon drawings.

Other splotches look artistic on other merits. Sometimes the dripping paint that oozes down the curb forms an elegant passage, dried in mid-ooze. Other times I swear the people who placed these paint stains were trying to say something, to who I do not know, but today I took receipt of the message for future interpretation.

It's a photo essay I've wanted to do for a long time. Maybe it's a little overly precise but I think the series of photos of these paint droppinigs will reveal something.

I am passing through an anti-zeitgeist phase. For most of my days I just touch the surface of understanding things. Lately I find myself looking beneath.

I think it has something to do with this project of learning the Well-Tempered Clavier. This is complex music whose meaning reaches far beyond the notes on the page or the sound of the music.

Many of these pieces have been in my hands since high school, but I never really knew them. I never felt worthy of them, nor do I feel worthy of Bach's other great keyboard pieces.

Long story short (hah) I am getting through to the meaning of this music, and the intellectual rigors required to so are perhaps drifting into other pursuiits.

I see failure, though. I do not think I can memorize this series. And I do not think that I can be free with the Well-tempered Clavier until I can play it in its entirety from memory. Today I can not get through one single piece from memory. Most of the fugues I can not even get through the first entry of the counter-subject from memory without crashing.

I did not approach this project with failure in mind, and it is far too early to resign. But this weekend I had a glimmer of failure in this pursuit.

I began learning the fugues in the way Bach's students learned them: I started copying them out by hand. From the first minutes spent copying the D-Sharp Minior Fugue from Book II I felt the difference in understanding. I felt a different experience.

That is where I am this day with the WTC project. Hah, I remember feeling so clever when I moved to New York and spotted those subway station signs directing passengers to the WTC.

Dreamspaces

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:37:33 GMT

Well, I just found a lengthy bit of mental droo that I thought I sent three or four days ago, but I guess not. Now the sequence of my accounts is wrenched awhack.

And none are concerned.

I am at a new old bar in my neighborhood. It's "new old" because it's the same place as before, just renovated.

I find it strange to inhabit a space after it has changed. The change here was not so radical, but memory tells me that the table at which I sit now is on the spot where karaoke stars used to sing their songs. To my right is a row of tables, a space that used to host a dank room with a pool table.

This new place now has televisions everywere. There are two to my right, one to the upper left, and seven or eight to the left. A couple of large wall mirrors create an illusion of even more televisions. You could close your eyes in this place and still see televisions.

The payphones and the ATM are gone.

A hipster pub near here closed down a few years ago. Eventually that small, dark bar was replaced by a huge, brilliantly lit grocery store. It has been a few years since the bar closed, and over a year since the grocery store opened, but when I shop for pork chops therr I still see the things that filled that space when it was the hipster pub. I still see the bar and the bartenders moving through the space where the cash registers and the cashiers sit today. I look to the ceiling, so brightly lit today, and see the barely visible exposed innards of the building as I saw them when the bar was open.

It can be like looking at someone you thought you knew, or someone you once knew, only to find that person dismissed.

I had a dream last night Sam C. died. Sam is someone I went to school with from early grade school through high school graduation. We were never really friends, and we do not keep in touch.

By "not exactly" I mean that his name (and the names of others) surfaces in my e-mail once in a while when there is activity on an e-mail list for alumni from my high school graduating class.

His name rises up along with a few dozen names of people I knew in school. Sam is among a dozen or so from that high school class who I knew from the 3rd grade.

It seems odd that Sam would rise up in my dreamlands, but there he was, not rising up at all but instead fallen down dead of congestive heart failure at 40.

In the dream he had owned a sandwich shop. The sandwich place did not open that day on account of his death.

I looked through the glass doors of the sandwich place. No one was there. I imagined him behind the counter with the white chef's cap on his bald head. I remembered his huge, butt-like nose.

I turned around and found that the sandwich place was in a mall in Tampa. I stopped to talk to some people about Sam's passing. After talking to said people I found that one of them had stolen my camera. I could not figure out which of the people had taken my camera, but I did not care. Cameras, like all electronics, are disposable junk, so I dismissed the loss of the camera with plans to get a new (better) one.

That is how I woke up: planning a trip to B&H Photo to get a Canon G9 to replace my point and shoot lost in the morning's dream. I was planning that trip to B&H until I remembered that Sam had died.

Or had he?

I looked up Sam's name on the Internet newsfeeds and found no death notice. I found nothing on the blogs, nothing on Usenet, nothing in my e-mails.

I do not know Sam at al any more so it made no sense to pursue this with a phone call or an e-mail, or with anything more than that paper-thin surface of knowledge known as a search of the Internet.

I never fully woke up today, so it is not until now, 10:30pm, that I write this out and alert myself to the fact that Sam is (probably) alive and well.

Dreams can last a long, long time. If you do not sit down and talk to yourself about your dreams they can linger forever, like underwear on the flagpole, twisting in the winds.

Breezes

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:34:58 GMT

The other day I paid rent on my parking space. It has been one month since I got the treasured reserved parking spot in a driveway on my street.

Having that reserved spot has fundamentally changed the pace of my life. It has not changed my life -- no one thing can ever do that -- but it has changed the paces of these weeks.

I had thought that I would use the car a lot more, knowing that I have a place to park any time of day that I return. Instead I let the car sit there, gathering pollen blobs and other detritus from the large tree that looms.

The payment of the rent on the space took an amusing turn, though I didn't thinnk it was funny at the time. I called the woman who rented me the space. We agreed to meet at my car in 5 minutes. I got there first, and started the car engine. A man appeared, and knocked on my car window. He gestured at me to give him the money, which was visible in my hand. I did not know who he was. I say "You don't look like Susan." All the while he is gesturing at me to just give hime the money.

I call Susan, who laughs and says that's her husband. He and I laugh about it as he takes the money and says "Thanks for the money, I'm going to the bar!"

Maybe it's not as funny as I thought, but it seemed high-larious at the time. I imagined I was being mugged by someone who somehow knew I would be sitting there with 200 dollars cash.

The arrangement for me to park there is so informal that it's a little weird. No contract, no papers, no nothing but 200 bucks cash per month and a parcel of land on which to store my vehicle. I don't live there so I guess there is no reason for the property owner to deal with me any more than to get the damn money.

I feel boring. My words today shall hum with the boredom that is me.

I walked all over the place yesterday, directionless, like the old days. I don't do so much aimless wandering these days. Not as much time. I walked up Northern Boulevard then over to Sunnyside, and back again. No point to the journey, which covered only familiar ground.

Someone was having a garage sale. I saw the sign and expected the garage to be at someone's house or apartment building, but the garage was one of a few dozen garages in a large building that contained nothing but garages. A long row of garages, originally intended for cars, but now mostly used for storage. I do not know, but I imagine this is the case because cars and SUVs have gotten large enough that many of them do not fit into the garages built 30 years ago, nor do they fit between the narrow alleys and driveways that lie between buildings.

Heartburn sucks. For much of today I felt like I was on fire inside and out. I forgot to take the Prilosec two days ago. I noted no ill effects for this, so I thought I'd try going two days without. Bad idea. Bile and acids, brewing in the cauldron of my lower digestive tubes, seem only to be deferred by the work of these Proton Pump Inhibitors. The heartburn now is far worse than the heartburn before I started taking Prilosec. I never used to feel like I would burst into flames. Then I started taking Prilosec.

I should check in with the doctor about all this. I do not want another tube-down-the-throat procedure, though one could have far worse things to confront.

Can the acid and bile just be drained? Poke a hole in my side and pour it out? Use it as a bean dip substitute? Sell it for hundreds of dollars a fluid ounce.

Today was a good day for my new web server. One of those social bookmark type sites linked to something, sending a firehose of unexpected (and, frankly, unwanted) traffic to a part of my site run by software which is the likeliest of any softwtare I use to collapse under heavy volume.

There was no collapse. There was not even a slowdown, as far as I could tell.

This new web server is a bit over the top for one single web site. I may add others later, but for now the specs on this one box are similar to the specs on the boxes we used at cnn.com. CNN, of course, had dozens of load balanced servers, while I have just the one, but it's still a little ludicrous to have this much horsepower waiting to run only one domain.

Whatever. It passed a test today.

As announced, as promised, this is boring. My life hums with this today. Serene breezes of tranquil boredom.

Cablage

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:37:07 GMT

Today I found myself organizing my audio cables. Hanging from a shoe rack inside a closet I had what must have been 500 feet of audio cables and adapters.

The audio cables rack got out of control. On top of the various audio cables I piled on USB and printer cables, electrical cords, Mardi Gras beads, telephone wires, and baseball caps. They hung there like tangled dreadlocks. When I needed a cable from the knotty mass I had to reverse-tangle (which is distinct from untangle) the thing. When I opened the closet the mass of cables would heave forward, then flop back against the door, making a dumb thud.

I forgot until today that I originally organized all my audio cables in this fashion during the first weekend after September 11, 2001. I have since heard that a lot of people reacted in that way, finding some busy work to make themselves feel like they had control over something.

At the time the organization made some sense. One type of cable was here, another there, the adapters were all over there, etc. It stopped making sense a couple of years ago, when the maass became too interjumbled to be useable.

That was my afternoon.

On my face

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:00:51 GMT

We-hell-el, this is getting out of hand. Another partly futile meeting at the bank. I got some stuff done, but only the easy stuff.

This co-trustee nonsense is just getting out of control. Out of rule. The terms of my father's trust (I thought) stated that the co-trustee I appoint has no authority to access or dictate what happens with the funds in this account.

Well, the paperwork the bank wants my co-trustee and me to to sign clearly states that in their eyes the co-trustee has full and equal access to these funds.

As much as I trust my friend (and co-trustee) I simply do not feel like asking him to sign something that appears to grant him full access to my account.

I find it hard to believe the bank is disconnected from the legal language of trusts, but I am also starting to question my attorneys and the language of this 800 page tome that my father left for me to unravel.

I also have eczema on my face. Mmmm, that's gotta be tasty.

I am at an open-air pub filled with members of the local cement and concrete union. My routine in dealing with this estate stuff has been to hit the watering hole as soon as possible.

I ordered a couple of books from Amazon yesterday, making the sour discovery that I had to pay New York state sales tax on that purchase. I had heard about that on the radio but did not think of it at purchase time.

Jeff Bezos, for a bigass entrepreneur executive, speaks like an uneasy college kid. He uttered "um" and "like" and "y'know" many times over during the 12-second sound bite I heard of him saying that Amazon would take this New York state tax thing to the Supreme Court.

I was milling around Rockefeller Center yesterday when some young girls approached me. They asked if I was a New York state resident (which I guess I am) and, if so, would I be willing to talk about how I feel about the fact the New York state has the highest property taxes in America.

I honestly thought these girls, who looked to be about 19, were engaged in a high school or college project for their Social Studies or Communications class.

One of them asked "Are you willing to talk to us?"

I said something like "Idunno, who are you?" They ignored that question as I hunted through the name tags they wore like necklaces. I saw the letters "MSNBC" and the NBC peacock logo and figured ah, whatever. I guess they ignored my question with the assumption that the NBC logo on their name tags would placate and encourage even the most skeptical souls.

The girl in charge held an NBC-branded microphone up to my face and repeated the property tax question.

I had no answer, really. I rent, and am happy to do so, so the high property taxes in New York don't mean much to me. I tried to think of something to help them in their person-on-the-street assignment but I had nothing.

I looked at them looking at me and thought damn, that's a lot of make-up.

Walking away I articulated (in my mind, which is where all the action is) a more thorough answer -- buying real estate in southern New York (including NYC) is far more expensive than renting and financially not worth the investment, as I seem to have found in my (admittedly ambivalent) research into buying property here in the city, and ownership is way over-rated -- but there was no reason to go back and find these kids again just to fill their news blurb.

Plus, I have eczema on my face. No way would a blemished face like this be approved for use on the MSNBC channel -- a channel which I thought had ceased to exist.

This is an interesting place to sit. Windows wide open, the peoples walk past and the car horns bleat at them. I like this. There goes a big-breasted girl with a couple of bottles of wine (baaaybay!). Now someone goes outside to smoke, though he might as well be across the table from me since his smoke is blowing through the open window and into my face. There goes a girl with giant triangle ear rings. There goes a bearded dude with bigger boobs than the girl with the wine. Here comes a guy clutching a balloon.

The Strooms

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:36:06 GMT

Sitting at a place called Pig & Whistle in midtown. 47th Street. No reaeson to come here today save for restlessness.

There is a large painting on the wall. It is a satire of The Last Supper, in which Marilyn Monroe is where Jesus would be, and James Dean is to her left. Elvis is at the table, too, as are several other celebrities.

The sign pointing to the restrooms is partly obscured, making it look like a sign pointing to the STROOMS. The Strooms sounds like an elemental plain from Dungeons and Dragons. Or is it a digestive disorder? Man I got the strooms real bad.

Seeing as the sign to the STROOMS points downward I imagine The Strooms is an underground night club at which only the most bestest celebrities socialize.

Take a memo.

Re: Strooms

That way we get use of the decapitated first letters of restrooms. That's the trick. See, I'm always thinking.

Count, or recount?

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:27:53 GMT

A problem I have with this project of learning the Well Tempereed Cllavier is that I do not know anyone who cares. No one in my immediate life would have any desire to sit and listen to that stuff.

I play for my neighbors. Occasionally I turn my camera on and broadcast over one of those webcam broadcast networks. That is usually fun.

But mostly this is a solitary pursuit.

My life is haunted by screen names and chat room handles. Most of the people who pass through my life are people I will never see, and who I would not recognize if they sat right next to me.

It may be a self-fulfillilng aspect of my personality. Someone once described me as "keeping the world at a safe distance." Appropriately enough I never knew that person, nor did she know me.

At any rate, the journey through the WTC has consumed most of my past 10 days. I know of nothing else in my life that feels so satisfying as playing the fugues from those volumes. Sunday in particular, after 6 or 7 hours at the piano with that stuff, I left the apartment feeling serene. Something was passing through me, like air through the tips of my fingers.

When I start memorizing these pages is when I will start to feel free. That is when I can stop learning and starting knowing, when I can stop accumulating and start understanding.

Memorizing fugues is hard. For me, at least. I think it has to be done, though. The further I get in to this music the more apparent it becomes that I must memorize it to comprehend and suitably recount.

But there is a dilemma. There in the last word of the previous paragraph. Why am I recounting the works of others? Why am I repeating and recycling? I am a creative person, not re-creative . For whatever creative input a pianist might bring to the works of others that pianist is an interpreter, not a creator. A performer is a critic, even, if that is possible -- one who makes the work of others understandable and through whose point of view the work is known.

What I have started to see in Bach these last few months -- where he differs from other great composers -- is the lack of ego. Music of Beethoven, Chopin & Stravinsky ultimately belongs to the personality and (not to get too lofty but) the greater glory of the composer. With Bach the deeper I go the more I feel that his music exists for the greater glory of something beyond the composer, and beyond the music itself.

And it feels good. It feels good to play the stuff. It's niiiiice.

....

For some reason the last few postings I sent to this place disappeared. That is no great loss, but the only thing I can think of is that the cron pipes the script to /dev/null. But it's always done that. For as long as I've been posting to these screens from this Treo I remain almost completely ignorant about how the scripts that run it work. That is not my usual way of working, but it is just kinda the way it happened when I started doing this.

I was, coincidentally, looking Last night at other ways of doing this, and I am also looking at trading this Treo for something else. At the Samsung showroom at the Time-Warner Center the other day I saw the Samsung Broadband PDA, as well as their strange Ultra-Mobile PC platters. Those things are strange. Too big to be truly ultra mobile and too small to be much more than a novelty.

I think the future of ultra mobile PC or otherwise functional devices is in foldable screenspace. A device the size of a Treo or other cell phone/PDA should connect to a foldable LCD screen that opens up to a usable size.

....

Deluxe

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:01:49 GMT

At the Bel-Aire Diner, awaiting a French Toast Deluxe platter. Breakfast at 2pm -- how cool is that? Who, I ask, *who* is the coolest? I know I know, thank you thank you, no need to articulate the obvious response.

In all the years of coming to this diner I think I only sat on this side of the place once.

....

Aha, the French Toast Platter came out so quickly I had no time to elaborate on that previous (and fascinatingly portentous) thought.

I am surprised that the platter was out and on my table so fast. It was virtually immediate. This was a *platter* for crying out loud. Wait, no, it's a Deluxe. Either way, when I step into a diner and order a French Toast Extravaganza I expect a little more attention than that.

I expect that when the order reaches the kitchen the crew gathers around, amazed that anyone would order the Deluxe. Ooooh, they mutter. "Big time. So he wants sausage, bacon, *and* ham?" Someone else chimes in "He wants eggs, too. Holy shit." Someone else, struck dumb with awe, meekly adds "Scrambled. He wants the eggs scrambled." A tear forms in his left eye.

Someone in charge gets the job started, advising the shell-shocked crew to always be ready to make a Deluxe, in the kitchen as in life. "This is what you signed up for! This is why we're here! This is why we live!" The kitchen staff unites in a shout of "HOORAY!"

They commence to bake a fresh loaf of bread. They knead the dough, they fire up an unused oven, preparing brand new bread for my Platter. It is a *Deluxe Platter* not some run-of-the-mill French Toast Basic served so many times.

I expect the kitchen crew to slaughter a hog and prepare my bacon, sausage, and ham from the still-pumping innards of that freshly murdered beast. I expect the sryup to be ... Well, I don't know how they make syrup, but why should I know these things? *I* ordered the Deluxe. In so doing I delegate the responsibilities of creation. I expect that its creation should take several hours,including team meetings, focus groups, video replays.

Instead, my Platter was here and in my face within 3 or 4 minutes. For as quickly as it was prepared it's a good thing I did not go out for a walk. Based on my expectations I might have placed the order then gone out walking for a few hours, leaving enough time for my Platter to be fully prepared.

....

It is a couple of days later. I am still pretty steamed about that Deluxe thing. I mean when I order a Deluxe Platter I have certain expectations. I assume that the work that goes into the deluxe is beyond the scope of the kitchen staff's everyday routine.

You know what i'm starting to think? I think they had that French Toast just lying around. The sausage, too. And the bacon! That is so bogus. See if I go Deluxe again. What's the use? Why bother trying to do something special?

What

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:52:10 GMT

Outside 207 East 61st St. I just heard a guy say "That's a nice tattoo except that she's 90."

Infinite Hive

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:25:20 GMT

At the Bel-Aire Diner, trying to figure out what is going on outside. A bunch of people are laughing, fooling around, having fun (I guess) but I can only see their heads. They are throwing punches at people who are beneath my field of view. I am at the window, they are 5 or 6 feet to my right, and I can not see the people against the wall. Sort of strange. Thumping sounds of bodies being thrown against the wall, big smiles on the faces of the people throwing those bodies.

Hot summer day. Almost hot. 80 degrees is not quite hot. 80 degrees wants to be hot. Garrison Keillor (back when I used to listen to that gasbag) once described hot in the perfect. But you had to hear him say it. He said "It was sooo ... Hot." it was like Hemingway's "The wine was delicious" sentence (I don't think that's the exact sentence, but I can't remember it at this time) -- regarded by some as the most perfect English language sentence ever. Ever! Keillor is a masterful story teller but his stories are snide and condescending to their characters. I gave up on him long ago.

....

Later in the day. I'm going to lease a new dedicated server tomorrow, adding to my web empire. You'd think I was making a living at this or something. I've been on my current single server for 5 years, and I've finally run out of room. Storage, that is.

An acquaintance of mine once quipped: "Bandwidth expands to fit the waste available." That line comes from the early days of the WWW, no graphics or flickr.com where one image -- one single piece of content -- consumes more bandwidth than a message board thread 5,000-posts. The quip, which was called a"law," is no less true today then it was when it originated. 900 baud modems gave way to 1200 baud. 2400 to 9600, then 14.4, then blistering hot 28.8 baud modems that made graphical web browsing possible for non-academics and non-government peoples at home.

As the bandwidth expanded so did the waste. The detritus, the sophomoric dithering, the new genre of Infinite Content.

Bandwidth expands. I think we will see quantum physics theories come to life as bandwidth expands to allow food and medical supplies to be sent via E-mail to Internet-enabled cell phones and fax machines in famine stricken regions of the world, of the universe.

My point here being that as I add capacity to my little web universe that capacity is promptly consumed. That is the way of all technology things, I think. It is the Robert Moses school of capacity planning. Moses just added roads and roads and roads to New York thinking increased capacity would reduce traffic jams. But more roads just invited more cars, more traffic, and more roads.

It took me 5 years and 20 web sites to fill the current 80gb drive. My next box will be 500gb and I bet I will fill it much sooner than 5 years from now.

blahblahblah, details details details. logistics. All this technical machinatia reminds me how detached people seem to be from this connection they have with the world. It is like there is nothing back there, like nothing exists between the damp light of the computer screen and the content that appears there. Sometimes I wish something could send a tic through The Network, jolting everyone connected at that instant, alerting them that they are not alone.

Something like that happened to me once, in high school. A jolting tic. I dialed a phone number and, for 1 full second I heard hundreds of voices, thousands of words. To call it a hive of sound would undercut its fury. It was a hive of hives, a maelstrom of overlapping communication, a sickening rat hole of human mouths moving at once.

Somehow hundreds of telephone lines had been patched together into my phone. These were, I imagined, the voices of everyone in my neighborhood using the telephone at that moment. In that 1 second I heard laughter, snorts, lip spittle, the word "Yellow" sung melodiously, and a sublingual, thunderous all-at-once roar like a sitcom laugh track but ghastlier.

And then the second passed. That one second burned into my mind like the image of a thousand rats crawling over each other in a sewer hole, subsuming a carcass.

That sound is the sound of the Internet, even the remotest corner of the Internet is a frantic hive of communicatia.

....

Now it is night time.

I am at a pub overhearing a guy ask a British woman how much of New York she has seen. Statue of Liiberty? Riverside Park? Staten Island Ferry? She has been there, done that, and she has anecdotes for each visit to prove it. Something about a gynecologist on Staten Island... Niiiiice.

Hah, someone at the other end of the bar just yelled NIIIIIIICE.

Speaking of which, I should see a dentist.

The word "Balladeer" just crossed the television. I was used in a couch commercial. I did not see the couch, I saw the command to "Ball a Deer" and I objected. Vigorously.

You're not a pianist

Thu, 29 May 2008 21:14:51 GMT

At The Irish Pub on 7th Avenue and 50-something Street. A conversation with the bartender reveals that this place has always been called The Irish Pub. "Always" meaning that it might have been called something else 50 years ago, or before the current collective memory of the place.

This is the place I thought had been called The Slaughtered something. Lamb? Sheep? The Slaughtered Elephant Pub?

The bartender says people still come in asking about Mulligan's, which was an old school pub a half block away. Mulligan's has been gone for 15 years but people still come asking about it.

This place is surprisingly low key for midtown. As I walked over here I was virtually subsumed by a mass of tourists. Well dressed, all of them, it was a procession of well over 100 individuals who seemed nervous about their conspicuousness. The conspicuity of their numbers.

Snipers on their lunch break see this mass of people and think "No one will notice if I lop off just one of them."

That's when the carcasses start piling up in the streets. The mass of tourists thinks its flock has lost something, but none can define what, or who. The casualties are all from the rear of the crowd -- the ass of the mass.

I remember a friend describing Las Vegas as "all of America laid out to dry." Midtown is something similar, but I'm not sure what. America at Sunday School? America at its college graduation? I don't know, but it is not New York.

This is one of the first midtown pubs I ever entered. I never frequented pubs until 2002 or 2003, so I must have passed through here with the corporates after work, probably in 1996 or later.

One of my earliest midtown pub memories is from a place called Faces and Names, near this place. It's called Faces and Names because the bar hires an illustrator to come and draw the faces of the customers. The artist either sells the drawings to the customers or they get put on the wall of the place. The walls are covered with these illustrations, which also bear the names of the illustrated.

I was a that pub on a weekend afternoon -- probably a Sunday -- when I told the bartender that I was a classical pianist. The bartender mentioned this to the other customer at the bar -- a fat drunk woman in her mid to late 50s who could only scream where simply speaking would suffice.

I CAN TELL IF YOU'RE A PIANIST. I CAN TELL IF YOU'RE A PIANIST. I HAVE A QUESTION. ANSWER THIS QUESTION.

She was pointing at me, yelling. I wouldn't recognize it until years later but she was retarded drunk. I had never been around that sort of thing, so I just took her to be an obnoxious loudmouth, fully in control of her sense.

now, of course, I know a drunk when I see one. But that's another story.

Her question, the answer to which would determine whether or not I was really a pianist, was:

WHAT'S THE FIRST NOTE OF CHOPIN'S POLONAISE?

She didn't say which Polonaise but I assumed she meant the 6th, which is one of Chopin's most over-played piano pieces.

In answering the question I struck the counter with my hands as if I was playing the opening notes of that Polonaise.

"E-Flat," I announced. "Two E-Flat octaves."

Before I finished that second sentence she was already ripping me a new one.

YOU'RE NOT A PIANIST. YOU'RE NOT A PIANIST. THE FIRST NOTE OF CHOPIN'S POLONAISE IS F!

She then commenced to sing the main theme from Chopin's 6th Polonaise. That main theme does indeed start on F-natural, but it's not "the first note" of the Polonaise.

She sang and sang and sang the Chopin Polonaise in the stupid, spittled way that drunk people sing. I would not recognize her for what she was -- an all-day daytime drunk -- until years later. Until then I could only be a bit irritated at her accusing me of not being a pianist.

Value

Tue, 27 May 2008 02:30:54 GMT

At the corner of 23rd avenue and 29th street, sitting at an outdoor table at a place called The Coffee Pot. Windy. Warm. Gusty, even. The coffee is served in a styrofoam cup with one of these marvels of engineering known as the sipper. Such a complex contraption. I can not describe it, nor will I attempt, though a thorough description would be a challenging writing exercise.

This morning I learned about Ro. Ro is an invented language of the a priori category. I want to make myself useful to someone in this world so I plan to transcribe that language's 25-page dictionary into text. The dictionaries were printed in the early 20th century, and all known copies are deterioratIng or completely disintegrated. Scanned copies exist, though.

If I wanted to make myself truly valued by the cult of Ro I might make a translation script, allowing for easy translation from English to Ro. Yes, there is value in that there Ro, and if I am about nothing else on earth I am all about value.

....

It is later in the day. Night time. I am at my new regular bar feeling comfortable and tolerated.

I spent part of the afternoon transcribing the first half of the Dictionary of Ro. I spotted a few favorite words in there, though at the moment I can not remember them. Transcribing gibberish-sounding words is entertaining in its way. I demonstratively pronounce words like KAVOBEB and JIBJUB, then type them out before they slip from my mind. The definitions are all regular English words, but it is easier to mis-spell those words than the gibberish-esque stuff.

Interestingly, the core group of Ro speakers was based in West Virginia. For what I know of that state it might be possible that pockets of Ro speakers still exist, unaware of other languages.

I friend from high school studied languages and linguisitics in college. He had a way of spewing fake Japanese and fake Polish and fake Italian. You had to hear it, I guess, but he knew enough of the innards of those languages that he could sound like he was talking the language without knowing any of the vocabulary.

I think of him once in a while when I have the urge to insert "Huntish plowboard tob deeb fipple" into an otherwise coherent conversation, then return to normal English language nonsense leaving the other party thinking they mis-heard me or were otherwise confused.

That friend from high school -- the "cunning linguist," as he liked to call himself -- is the only person I know who saw my room 317 at the Parc Lincoln Hotel. He has also seen my present apartment, and one of the ones in between. Most people I know have never visited my current apartment, and I they probably never will. Because this is me.

Holding court

Tue, 20 May 2008 02:14:13 GMT

Sitting in the kitchen. Underwear, grey t-shirt, white socks. The table holds this writing contraption, two stacks of paper, and a NEW YORK NEW YORK coffee mug that sprung a leak years ago. It finds use now as a paperweight for one of those stacks of paper.

This table also holds, ridiculously, a 2.62 oz. thing of McCormick' Hot Shot Black and Red Pepper.

I do not sit at this table as much as I imagined I would when I set it up in here. It shakes a bit under even the slightest activity, which makes writing onto those papers a , slipping, skidding adventure.

This is, of course, the table at which my family and I played board games and card games. As such the memories of this table are not altogether pleasing, but I guess my memory is selective at times.

I am laying low these days. These are the first days in months that I have not gone out to some place for some level of human contact. The other night was ridiculous. I went to one place, as soon as I walked in people were buying me drinks, buying me drinks, buying me drinks. I wasn't laying attention to how many I had, but I felt OK when I left that place and went to another. It was the same thing at that place. For some reason anywhere I went people were buying me drinks, buying me drinks.

It was a suicidal quantity of booze. I spent the next day feeling like a toxic sponge, with no let-up in the misery from waking up at 11am to going back to sleep 12-13 hours later.

There are, it turns out, a lot of productive things I can do in that condition. Mainly I play piano. Somehow that part of the brain gets a pass and functions just fine. I practiced from Bach's Well Tempered Clavier for much of the day.

I removed the Hot Shot thing of pepper to a less conspicuous place. The table, those blank pages, those things are my mental desert for the night's wanderings.

I got the expected mail from my mother today. I was amused to see that she used two 37¢ stamps to mail a small letter. Those stamps, of that denomination, must be several years old by now, since the standard postage rate went up to 42¢ very recently.

I had a strange encounter with a postal delivery guy a few weeks ago. I went to a corner mailbox intending to drop some envelopes in. A delivery guy was at the box, taking mail from it and placing it into his bag for delivery.

Somehow I could tell from the look in his face that, as he saw me coming, that he waas happy to see me. He welcomed this opportunuity to interact with a postal customer,and to demonstrate his expertise.

Without asking he took the enveloppes from my hand. One of them, rather heavy, had I-don't- know-how-many stamps on it. He looked at it and weighed it. He weighed in the trustworthy, scientific manner of holding it up in the air. Holding the envelope he calculated the postage liability, assessing the job I did preparing this envelope for delivery, and preparing his evaluation of how delivery-ready this package was.

It passed. He approved. The same thing happened with another similarly sized envelope. Several seconds of weighing the thing, studying it, checking for openings or tears. Then, congratulatory glances my way as he approved this envelope for delivery.

Success.

Then came the third envelope. The smallest of the three, it contained a three page document. Three pieces of paper, plus the envelope. Doing my own calculations I estimated that a single Forever Stamp would be sufficient for such a standard size letter.

The delivery guy disagreed. He looked at me and frowned, saying "ooooooh, this needs more postage. I can't take this." I expressed some disbelief, though I found his charade charming enough that I did not want to intrude on his opportunity to hold court. I sensed he seldom had this opportunity to give customers feedback, and I further sensed that he craved this interaction. I gathered that he was fed up with the half-ass job his customers do of sealing envelopes poorly, not applying enough postage, leaving the Plus-4 numbers off the zip codes, and other sins of the postal life.

He insisted that 41¢ was insufficient postage for a three page letter. An elderly man looked at me and said "What can you do?" I think he added "He's the boss."

I ended up paying 82¢ to mail a three page letter. I went home, found another stamp, and placed it on the envelope. I thought about putting 10 or 12 stamps on this envelope, to show this delivery guy how seriously I took his scoldings. I imagined that the act of overpaying for delivery of my letter might appease the failings of his many other customers who irked him so.

It was ludicrous, but I suppose most of us are prone to foisting our expertise onto others when the setting seems to call for it.

It reminded me of the insane round of questioning I got from one of the clerks at the Rockefeller Center station. Someone addressed a certified letter to me in a way that put my father's name first on the envelope. I was listed as Trustee of his estate, but the estate was listed first, leaving my name on the second line of the address. The clerk implied that I could go to jail for this, then asked me, among other things, "Where's your father now?" I responded "Who cares where is, he's dead." She considered that an insufficient reply, then she barked out other random questions, meaningless to the situation, and obvious grasps for authority.

The questions suddenly stopped. She either realized she was wrong and let me have the letter, or she honestly believed she had just spared me criminal charges.

I read that Elvis, toward the end of his life, was in the studio recording virtually 24 hours a day. Why? Because it was the only place in his life where he felt he had any control.

I these these postal clerks were in that frame, seeking control over something -- anything -- in their lives.

This table shakes even as I type onto this little thing. I try to type lightly enough to prevent the shaking. Rattling.

suddenly

Fri, 16 May 2008 02:22:11 GMT

I walked today, and I ran some, too. I wanted to walk from here to Rockefeller Center but I didn't think I had the time. So I ran.

It's about a mile to the bridge, about a mile and a half to cross the bridge, and a mile and a half or two miles from the bridge to my 181 at Rockefeller Center.

It's all about the 181.

Ah, so I went looking for the bar on 7th Avenue, the bar I thought was named the Slaughtered Lamb. It was never called the Slaughtered Lamb (that's a recent-college-graduates bar on 4th Streret). I don't remember what it used to be called but now it's called The Irish Bar. Occasionally I have overwhelming desires to be at that place, but those desires vanish as quickly as they rise.

I used to go to that place when I worked in midtown. I don't know if that helps explain the fetishistic compulsions.

Whatever the explanation (I am sure it is a deep, profoundlypsychological explanation that explores the numbed muscles of my unconscious) I wanted to be there today to watch the Yankees/Rays game. No luck. They had soccer on every screen. Football, rather. Fütball.

The place looked different from how I remember. Cleaner. It smelled like a hotel lobby.

Jimmy's Corner On 44th Street is likely the only place of its kind in midtown. Genuine. Earthy. The Wakamba Lounge is another favorite. Of mine.

I went to Patelson Music Store and purchased blank music paper. 64 double-sided pages of blank orchestra score. This month I reached the end of some blank paper books I've been writing into since high school. Today's masterworks intermingle with adolescent yawps.

I recently found myself writing comments (comments like this) into a book that had stuff I'd written when I was 13 or 14.

Someday all my books will be filled. All the blank books I bought at the mall in grade school will retire, exhausted and weathered from the vigorous lifetime.

I remember stocking up on those blank books. I bought them with righteous, expectant goals of starting a story on page one and finishing on the last page. Perfect fit. Then, the sequel. Pick up the next book, fill it to perfection, move on.

Piles of books, empty, would be filled (to my perfection). Or my heavings. Turgid ramblings. Piles of turgidity.

Speaking of which, I am in a place that is loud. Too loud for me to think straight, crooked, or upways. Disjointed thoughts.

When noise mistracts me I remember, with some regret, making fun of a substitute bus driver in grade school. He begged us to be quiet, saying that he was having trouble seeing the road. I loudly asked, how hard can it be to see through all that noise? There was hearty laughter all around from the other kids in my class who thought me hie-larious. Eventually I would learn that noise really can obscure one's vision, via the volume-hammered inability to concentrate or focus.

I got recognized last night. RECK-A-NIZED. It is unfair to suddenly be with someone who thinks they know a lot about me while I (suddenly) know nothing about them. (Suddenly) we are best friends. I am starting to resent all the invisible people in my life.

I need a haircut.

O!

Thu, 15 May 2008 01:55:05 GMT

These last few days seem to disappear. I get into a habit of writing about my fascinating existences, a habit more accurately dubbed a fetish for its unhealthy ineptitude. These days that writing is on paper, not on screens. I mostly write about the previous night's dreams and whatever asssociations that inspires. Some days my hand can not write fast enough, other days it just wheezes along, making shit up as it goes.

This week the afternoon arrives and then the sun sets and I am still scrabbling for something constructive to accomplish. Too much to do? Or not enough direction? I don't know.

I wish I could have had that bank account set up today. The more I think about it, though, the more I see that it was doomed from the get-go (or "git-go", as I like to hear that expression) simply for lack of rapport with the banker, not to mention his unabashed ignorance of these type of funds. I am too fragile in my approach to this stuff to take much conflict, and stubborn, corporate ignorance is a form of conflict I can't much handle.

At least it lets me appreciate how everyone I've dealt with in these matters has, up until now, been more or less competent. Except for me, of course. Actually the old-guy stock broker was way out of his league with this stuff, and uninformed about the complexities of the trust that my dad actually left -- versus the relatively simple trust he drew up in 2002.

Anyway... Who the fuck cares.

I did stock up on pork chops today, per earlier declaration to that effect. Pork chops and sardines. Man I hate sardines. It's like taking medicine -- it's nasty to me when the tails are still on the fishes. It's like I'm eating a still-living thing, and the fishes seem to flip and flap their tails as I take them down. Then they swim into my innards and form schools, clogging my body with sardinular activity.

These days I cut the tails off before placing the sardine portions on a tasty Triscuit©.

Even the word "sardine" has a dour, frowning aura about it.

I eat that stuff for the sake of my eyes. My macularly degenerative eyes. I almost said "for the sake of the children."

O I hate the burps. Sardine burps. A dismal, unhappy taste.

These days I spell "oh" O, when "oh" is used as an "OH!" expletive sort of thing. I think O, naked as it is, is more expressive of shock and surprise than Oh. It evokes the shape of the mouth as it exclaims the sound of O, and the bugging out of the eyes.

A friend in high school once said that in addition to being the 15th letter of the alphabet O is sometimes (rarely) defined as a woman's vagina. I took his word for it but to this day have not looked that up for myself.

O!

Back in the day I used to amuse myself by calling voicemail systems and dialing extension 5000000000.

I would listen to the automated voicemail voice says "extension 5 Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh ... " is not available. I imagined she (the voice) was being whipped and tortured as she yelled OH! in response.

To keep the abuse going all I had to do was dial extensions in the octillion range.

Imagining a German nazi dick-tator scenario I would throw a nine into the mix, imagining the woman being whipped and paddled interrupting her OHs with NEIN (German for NO).

NEIN! OH! OH! OH! OH! NEIN! OH! OH! OH! OH! OH! OH! NEIN! OH!

That was extension 90000900000090, by the way. That extension did not answer.

Hookers and drunks

Tue, 13 May 2008 01:32:01 GMT

Today makes me realize how good I feel when my mother feels well. For most of the past several years she has not been well, and she makes no attempt to disguise the facts. For that reason conversations with her have been major downers, and that's putting it mildly.

Yesterday was different. All the wit and humor were there, and we could have talked all day. To be honest it caught me off guard. Recent conversations trailed off into exhaustion for her. I expected more of the same from recent years, but yesterdaay we joked about how only her hand got tired from holding the phone so long.

What I thought would be the big event of the phone call, then, ended up being kind of a dud. A footnote. I carved out some money to pay off her enormous medical bills. I thought that would make her happy, and I think it did.

I felt weird talking like a moneyman, saying things like "I can make that bill disappear." I didn't say it with any flourish or energy. It was barely even audible.

I had t follow it with "If you want me to..." From previous conversations it made some sense to imagine she might refuse or be contrary about it.

I could have done this sooner. I did not fully realize that until last week. But that's no bother now, and it makes virtually no difference. None, in fact.

So today I had all this positive energy. Not because of that money matter but because of everything else. We talked about piano music for so long. I sometimes forget how much piano music means to her, and how much she was a part of my years learning the repertoire. Some of those things that sound cliché on Mother's Day cards end up being true for me. She is a foundation.

....

The last time I was at this pub I typed into this keyboard something that I eventually sent up to this place on the Internet. I stopped writing because of the hookers. They sorta cornered me but I got out, noting their bemused smirks. Chagrined. If I had taken a half second longer to squeeze past they would have said I must be gay. I could see that comment coming in the fat one's eyes, and I am certain it came after I left.

And to think I actually felt interesting that day. The sobering reality is that I am only interesting to hookers and drunks.

....

Watching the Yankees game at a quiet, sparsely populated puB. Correction: I am watching the Rays game. Tampa Bay has a damn good team this year, I've been saying so since spring training. And tonight they are proving their mettle by schooling the Yankees on pitching and smallball style of play. The Rays have swept both Boston and Seattle, and I think they can sweep the A-Rod-less/Posada-less/starting pitcher-less Yankees as well.

....

I was going to go to a lower east side poetry event tonight but the time got away from me. Before I knew it I was still sitting at my desk while the readings began.

Straight poetry readings are a mixed bag anyway. I like the variety show format, where anything goes. Poet followed by classical violinist followed by armpit musician followed by Abraham Lincoln imitator followed by master juggler. *Master* juggler. Jaster muggler.

Mind over mother

Mon, 12 May 2008 03:50:20 GMT

Talking to my mother today and rediscovering why I feel like a child. She feels the same. It must be in the genes, this self-contained ping-pong match of children's thinks.

Atop all things I am most proud of the ways I make her laugh. I have always been proud of the giggle fits and chortles I draw from her. Some nights I laugh myself to sleep at things she laughed at 25 years ago. Man o man the garbage bag murder makes me laugh to sickness before I can even finish typing this sentence.

Her mind is strong, where the rest of her is not. Her laugh is hearty where the rest of her is not.

And, just like a girl, she ended the conversation by saying she wanted to talk again, to talk more.

Maybe it is love

Sun, 11 May 2008 02:53:43 GMT

I feel like I had an interesting day. It felt interesting before, during, and after. It is slipping away from my memories already, like the dreams I had last night.

I dreamed that I woke up in the middle of the night in the house I grew up in in Tampa. I stepped from my bedroom into the hall to turn off the light in the hallway.

As I reached for the light switch the light turned off. By itself.

Looking down the darkness of the stairwell I heard a voice say something like "You don't need to worry about turning off the light."

This was presented as a good thing. The tone of the voice suggested that modern technology knew when the light should be turned on or off.

Advanced!

I tried to turn the light on, though, and the automated system turned it right back off. Twice, thrice, I don't know how many times. I batted the light switch to the on position over and over, but the automated thing kept turning it off.

I stopped. Looking down the stairwell again I heard a gentle cackling. It diid not say the words but it communicated to me that it was in charge of the lights in the stairwell outside the bedroom in which I grew up.

I screamed, trying to silence the stupid thing that was doing this. I thought if I screamed and bounced around in the stairwell it would get scared and leave, turning the lights on as it left the house.

That is when I woke up. Screaming with that sublingual, pigeon-like gobbling of waking up from a nightmare (but not bouncing off the walls).

I did have an interesting day. I imagined talking to someone about it, but everyone I know is busy.

I will share the day's tremors with my stack of Mead filler paper.

Sitting in a bar by myself. No one here knows me, though the bartenders occasionally try to get my chit-chat going on. That is nice of them, though I feel inadequate. My voice is not loud enough to be heard over the AC/DC song on the jukebox, and even if it was loud enought o be heard conversations with me usually require that I complete 2 or more sentences.

Otherwise I give up.

As I just did.

Boo hoo.

Ah, the song just switched from AC/DC to The Band, The Weight. Good song.

Often lately I wake up from my dreams thinking "I need to change my life." It would not take much. Move to another street. Find another bar. Issue press releases announcing my days as interesting as today. Get a Dux bed (spelled D-U-X). Throw away my thousands of Time Inc. magazines. Throw away the Ascot-Chang shirt I bought and never wore. Throw away everything, then buy it back cheap.

I actually do know a few people here. Conversations from months ago, mostly forgotten. This is the place where the fat bald 60-something dentist holds court with another beautiful 20-something babe every single time I see him here.

To his credit, though, he seems to be sucking face with the same girl tonight as the last time I saw him here a month or so back. Maybe it is love.

I know that is what it is.

Qob

Wed, 07 May 2008 01:58:50 GMT

Today was out. Outside. Outland. Confluence of random energies singled into quarters of my minds.

Junkle droof. Blurrfish. Oushtart. Bläsh kull grommund dreskin qiffle. Muttle fluz, müttle fluz.

Muttle fluz.

Napper livruq drabbim porf.

Ikkliuc joz wull frangowl nopplé, shohegac picc puvaxid qob.

Qob! Qob!

Napper livruq qob!

Clouzog horp yik sqaag hust, koob bilsk fuzk gilleftroub crefqit fenstishrem pungoovbosh hukt spreem.

Hauvid wakkis ploq hish nummvört jicq, miggop vunt spoy crouxpun vizod brobbax.

Qob! Qob!

Napper livruq qob!

Uqown plish jub dreeplon basjevoon yabblez toosh pabb qob.

Ivijubboq fuh braasq lik gippizk jabbok richkub nazzib theppuc kliz nipcoz qob.

Off-line

Sat, 03 May 2008 04:40:17 GMT

Sitting cross-legged on my kitchen floor. Window open, the cold, bored, complaining spring air blows over my feet and some other of me.

Sitting at the table to record today's fabulations.

Pen. Paper. Good times.

Going to talk to myself.

What's

Thu, 01 May 2008 18:25:05 GMT

Going on around here. There is, literally, a police officer on every single street corner.

I didn't do anything.

Maybe it's Sean Bell related.

My friend M. was in town a few weeks back. We were walking up Broadway. As a black guy who'd been living in rural Pennsylvania for a few years he said "Man it's nice to walk down the street without worrying about dudes in pickups coming at me with baseball bats."

We laughed. A full but nervous laugh.

800-955-9060

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:46:36 GMT

i am starting to think that the mysterious phone numbers showing up on people's phones across america are somehow connected to the myriad of web sites that solicit stories and comments on the numbers. i mean, when a strange number shows up on my phone i sometimes look it up on a search engine, and it can be interesting to land in these mental cages in which others have arrived, looking for answers to paranoid mysteries.

last week i received a call from my bank telling me to call them at 1-800-955-9060 to verify recent credit card activity. i decided against calling that number. it is not the number which appears on the back of my credit card, and a web search for that number led to various confusing pit stops at which others posted contradictory accounts of who owns that number and what happens if you call it.

i called the chase # on my card, and it turns out they put a hold on my card after they declined a perfectly legitimate charge. they said they did this because new york state (where i live) is apparently having an identity theft epidemic. well, that's what the woman i spoke with said.

to be honest it sounded like a sales call for chase's identity theft protection service, which toward the end of the call was pitched to me -- for only $7 a month.

the bank, it seems, is arbitrarily declining purchases. in this case they declined a purchase with a company i've done business with on a regular basis for well over 10 years. it is hard to spot anything suspicious about that transaction. this was a routine charge placed on my card by an internet service provider.

even though i am suspicious of the motives behind my banks recent communication, and even though i already have identity theft protection, i may consider the services my bank offers. it seems they would be able to fix problems more quickly than third parties.

The pope did it

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:11:04 GMT

Sitting at a table in Rockefeller Center, near the in-dismantlement skating rink. I guess the pope is going to stop by at St. Patrick's Cathedral across the street, or maybe the throngs of media gathered there chose the spot just because it's St. Patrick's. The irony is that the pope is passing me by and I'm on my way to a bar. A three-level Irish bar. I'm not sure why that's ironic, because I've never quite understood the meaning of that word, but its use is rarely questioned.

A strange thing has been going on with one of the tires on my car. A few months ago the cap disappeared from my rear passenger side tire. No big deal, though I was slightly puzzled by how it could have popped off without the rest of the tire being compromised.

Well, I noticed a couple of days ago that the cap on that tire is back. Someone appears to have "borrowed" it and returned it to my tire sometime in the last couple of weeks.

An odd prank, probably harmless -- unless GPS-enabled explosives were placed inside my tire, programmed to explode as I drive near the Indian point nuclear power plant.

Maybe in a week the borrower will mail me a pack of photographs showing the tire cap on a journey around the world. There's my tire cap at the Grand Canyon, there it is at the Eiffel Tower, and there it is at the Taj Mahal.

Maybe the pope did it.

....

I checked my 181 today looking for the books (mostly poetry) I ordered last week. Only two books are here. Complete Wallace Stevens poems and "Lithium for Medea," by Kate Braverman.

Pawny

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:37:54 GMT

Sitting at the Bel Aire Diner. This place always makes me feel like I am somewhere else. Another city, another state. Glendale, in Queens, has a similar effect.

The Elfers Effect is what I call it. My high school friends and I discovered the town of Elfers, Florida, during a long, directionless drive outside of Tampa. With no maps or other guidance we did not know where we were going or what lay ahead.

A sign announcing the town of Elfers appeared in the cloudy windshield, and we were enchanted by the place. It looked like something out of "A Wrinkle in Time," its perfect streets and orderly model homes.

But really the spell was cast by the randomness of the find, by the unexpected appearance of a pristine town on our road to nowhere.

In the time it took to type the above paragraphs the entire wait staff at the Bel Aire Diner stopped to tell me that this fold out keyboard is "awesome." They are still buzzing about it behind my back. Gosh, maybe they're right. Maybe my gear is awesome, and maybe I am, too!

....

It is later. I am at home, in the kitchen. This keyboard sensation is now on top of a pile of paper I found downstairs. Remembering how I used to value free paper, I decided to take the stack of Mead brand paper and fill every page, probably 250-300 sheets, with whatever moves from this mind through the OptiFlow rolloer pen (Staples brand) that I further agreed to use until it dries out. I want to do the same with the other 5 OptiFlow pens I bought a few weeks ago. Just want to fill pages and empty pens. Oh yeah.

....

Some time ago I had a long conversation with a friend. Unlike many such conversations, he let me talk. I got a little excitable about it, mentally hyperventilating even, as I felt myself get to a breathless state of talking like I would not have the opportunity to do so again in the near future.

That was then. Maybe 4 or 5 months ago.

I saw him a coupple of weeks ago and you know what he asked me? "How's your father doing?" This after the aforementioned conversation which included a detailed account of exactly how my father is doing right now, and the cemetery where he is doing it.

I do not expect people to remember anything I say -- I am not exactly the most interesting person to begin with -- but it did seem like a few months time would not have erased that particularly significant story from his mind. But it left his mind the way my father left us, proving to me once again that the people you drink with are the people you drink with.

That reminds me of a caller I used to listen to on the Apology line. In the 60s she did drugs like water. In mentioning this she also added, in passing, that in the 60s "the people you did drugs with were the people you did drugs with." She said it with a laugh, her comments directed toward another drug-user on Apology. That comment made an impression on me, and I've applied it to other contexts ever since, probably giving it more mileage than it deserves.

It seemed sobering to me. I had imagined drug use as a communal thing among friends, but her comment made it sound more solitary, with the company of others a safety measure more than anything else. I start to feel the same about drinking. The company of others is a façade disguising a profoundly solitary pursuit.

in response to my friend's question I said "He's in a better place than this, pal," though I don't think he heard me.

....

Reading Sylvia Plath. She uses one of my favorite new words (new to me) when she says "Lady, your room is lousy with flowers." That's from "Leaving Early" written in 1960.

Something I did not remember from earlier passes through Plath was how methodical she was about keeping and cataloguing her poems. How often did she re-read these things? If I were here I wouold re-read them often, beause they are tremendously entertaining. The language just bursts with color and succinct evocations.

Last night I dreamed about Sylvia Plath, but she looked more like Emily Dickinson in my dream.

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A dream of last week featured Drew Carey hosting an event at Grand Central Station. Some British tourists walked by, one of them saying "Drew Carey is a pawny comedian."

Pawny. I was excited to remember this word. My dreams are filled with dream-only words which make sense while they are in use but which evaporate from my mind the moment my eyes open. They arer nonsense words, like the secret language of infant siblings, which makae sense only in the extra-linguistic realm of dreams.

The tourist meant that Drew Carey was a minor comedian, which is nonsense, but I assumed he meant that Carey is not well-known in the U.K.

"Pawny," I deduced, meant pawn-like, a reference to the smallest, most easily sacrificed piece on the chess board.

My sister and I had a secret language when we were little kids. The only phrases I remember now are "no curia, bullsnitch" (which meant something like "no shit, Sherlock") and "finchal heinchal." Pronounced "fine-chull hine-chull," "finchal heinchal" meant "Finally! At long last!"

We also had a mutual nightmare about a witch that l ived in the attic.. She was called the Mish Mosh, and she had one huge front tooth. She died when she looked to the floor and the giant tooth killed her, slicing her through the chest. Man, I can still see that hag's face looking at me through the ceiling door that led to the attic. She would open the door from the attic side and announce in a gravelly, dead lady voice "Mmm, I am the Mish Mosh..."

mmmm...

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Man, this day will began, proceeds, and will end up as an utter waste. I am restless and tired. I did manage to finish off a piano piece this morning. I am trying for something new with melody, knowing of course that nothing is ever new.